Episode 16 Find My Pint

[Music]

Hello and welcome to The Brew and Byte Show Episode 16 Find My Pint, sponsored by the London Mac user group.

I’m your host Craig and coming up on the show we have not one but three wonderful guests

from a videographer, YouTuber, rocket scientist and an app developer and digital forensic expert

as well as being a CEO. We also have a look at the rumoured air tags and what are their possible uses.

Who’s next in line for CEO of the Big Apple and not forgetting our feature this week,

Apple and Entertainment. But first up, let’s say hello to the panel.

Nice to see a bigger panel than usual on the podcast this evening.

And next up we’ll say hello to Tina. How are you?

I’m well but a bit anxious because as the relative Mac newbie,

I’m going to feel really ignorant. But I’m just going to go with flow and just accept that.

And Martin, how are you? Our backup king.

Hi, good evening. Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine.

Brilliant. Thank you. And tonight we have an amazing amount of skill sets tonight.

First up, we’ll say hello to our YouTuber, which is Mark Ellis. How are you?

I’m very well. Thank you, Craig. How are you?

Too bad. Thank you. Geared up for this evening?

Yeah, I’m particularly geared up for the opening of the pubs and the gym. Very excited about that.

Have you got your alarm clock set ready for the morning?

Yeah. It’s which one you go to first, isn’t it? The pub or the gym? And which order you do it in?

I’m going to get confused. I haven’t done it for so long. I’m going to get confused which one to do

first. Can you say this is the first time you’ve pre-ordered a pint?

Probably not these days, to be fair. We will also say hello to this evening,

to our security expert and CEO which is Aidan Fitzpatrick. How are you? I’m good, I’m great,

thank you, thanks for having me. You know what they say, can’t complain, mustn’t grumble. I might

still do though, but good to be here. And we’ll also say hello to not only our Mac expert but also

a rocket scientist. Let’s say hello to Christian Boyce. How are you? Fine, good, thanks for having

me, I’m looking forward to this. Before we get started, it would be great if you could each tell

us something about your background or how you first got involved with Apple.

My very, very first experience with Mac, very briefly, was when I did some work experience

at a local newspaper and I wanted to become a journalist and sat down for about 10 minutes

with these real journalists and they all said, “Don’t get into journalism. It’s the lowest

paid job ever. You’ll never enjoy it.” And that genuinely put me off journalism for life.

But at the same time, I did spot that they had Apple Macs. It was the first time I’d

ever seen them. I couldn’t tell you what they were. They would have been, I don’t want to

show my age now, but they were pretty, yeah, we were talking probably early 90s.

My proper first experience of a Mac was actually at school when I was doing my A levels and

it was the old G3 or G4, one of the two.

I’ll just remember, like I said, I wrote this mystical thing that God knows how the school

afforded it.

I have absolutely no idea, but I had two of them and they were kind of hidden away in

this little vault in the library.

It was just one of those, that first kind of magical experience of something which was

I had this mystique about it.

But yeah, I had to really think back to when that time was,

get nostalgic about it.

So that was my first, I mean, that was, again,

that was kind of late, well, mid to late 90s.

So relatively not that long ago, I suppose, really.

• I saw my first Mac in 1985.

I was at the University of Texas going to grad school,

master’s degree in engineering and structural engineering.

And they had PCs with black screens and green writing on them

sitting on top of the beige box.

And I just pretty much graduated from using punch cards

to using terminals that sort of virtually

did the punch cards.

And now I saw these two things.

Next to that PC was a Mac.

I think it was a 512 Mac, so it was the so-called Fat Mac,

second version of the Mac.

I took to it instantly.

I mean, I thought, this PC thing, yuck.

I mean, I didn’t–

yes, it was in color, but the color was all green.

There was only one color.

It’s green.

The Mac was black writing on a white sheet of paper

and I had stuff to write and I thought I’d get this thing

and it was just a perfect fit.

I bought one a little while later.

I won a little bit of money in a scholarship contest

and I blew it all and more to buy a Mac Plus,

which is actually in my closet right here.

I could show you.

It’s got the names inside of the case and the whole thing.

So it’s, yeah, that’s a long time back.

Yeah, I really, I thought that this was a computer

that was made for people that already had work to do

and didn’t want to do computer stuff.

They just wanted to do the work they already had

and have this thing help them do it.

• Well, I suppose as an engineer, I played with them,

but I didn’t really embrace them.

You know, I was on the Commodore, I was on the Amiga,

I was on the PC, and I was generally using platforms

that I was building for.

So I spent a lot of my career on Linux.

And as a CTO, I was quite distrustful of Macs.

I’ve got to admit, they weren’t really Unix.

I wasn’t really sure what was going on.

But it was the phone that got me over because I had the Motorola Razr and I had Blackberry’s

and I combined the two.

And I’d really sort of, you know, I remember when Windows NT4 came out, I remember thinking

that was fantastic.

And I remember thinking there was a parallel with Windows CE or Wince, as it was unfortunately

called, which was early 2000s.

And so I did a lot of stuff where I was playing around building things for Wince because I

I thought something was, it just didn’t work.

And it didn’t matter how many different devices you got running

when none of them quite worked.

So I got one of the first iPhones as I’m sure everyone else here had.

You know, that was really the start of my software company.

I built a product for that first iPhone after I lost my data.

And lo and behold, people wanted to buy that for the Mac.

So I had to build it for the Mac.

So I had to have a Mac.

It just sort of went from there, really.

That’s awesome.

And that actually leads quite nicely onto my first question

of what does your day job involve?

Good Lord. Well, in my case, I run a software company called Reincubate, and we build products

that help people make the most of their Apple equipment, essentially. So we started off with

a product called iPhone Backup Extractor, which does sort of what you might expect. It helps you

recover data that’s been lost or deleted, and that runs on Windows, it runs on Macs. At the moment,

we’re putting a lot of energy into building a product called Camo, which essentially lets you

use an iOS device as a very high quality webcam on your PC or Mac. So essentially the cameras

in an iOS device are much better than any webcam on the market. If you want pro video,

as you guys know, you probably want the DSLR or you want an iPhone. And I’ve recently set up a small

fund to invest in tech. I am slightly over employed. I think you’re the expert I should ask

about managing my time because you’re doing so many things there. I’ll ask somebody who doesn’t

never commit.

And thank you. And next we’ll say the same question to Mark.

By day I’m a content marketer, my own little marketing business, which is little because

it’s just me really. But I suppose the thing that you guys are interested in, probably

the audience are interested in is the channel that I run. So about this time last year,

I decided to finally start my YouTube channel, which I wanted to do for a long time and all

the usual excuses of not doing it. Things happened last year, a bit more time on the

hands and I went for it basically. And I think I started properly making videos in August.

So I’ve been going for about nine months properly really and time I’ve somehow built nearly

12,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Weirdly enough, I didn’t start off really with the idea of doing purely a tech channel.

The idea originally was actually to do kind of productivity advice and freelancing advice

and all that sort of stuff. I started off doing that, but then I did a headphone review,

which got thousands of views and thought, I’ll just do this. This seems a little bit

easier. And I haven’t looked back since, to be honest. And I think a lot of it was fortuitous

timing really, because obviously then the M1 chip was announced and I’ve had some, well,

thankfully, some pretty good success with the views on that as well. It’s been a wild ride,

definitely. A bit humbling and all the rest of it, but it’s, yeah, it’s great. And that’s pretty

much what I do. I mean, go back to what Aidan was saying about overcommitting yourself. I’m

always doing that. Why start work at six o’clock in the morning and finish it, God knows what time.

but I love it. I wouldn’t change it for the world really.

That’s awesome. And if I can ask Christian, our rocket expert over there.

Well, that was a long time ago. I’ve been full time helping people get more out of their Apple

stuff, whether it’s a Mac or an iPhone since 1991. So when my rocket science job went away in ’91,

I just, I was already helping people. So, you know, where Aidan is making the tools to help people

get more out of their stuff. I’m helping them learn how to do it. So a lot of times there’s stuff,

well every time, there are things in software that people don’t know how to use. And even if

they think they know how to use something, the odds are they probably don’t. There’s probably a

lot of stuff I can show them that will help them. And so I support small to medium businesses and

sometimes really big ones to teach people how to do more, get more out of out of their time that

that they spend with their Macs and their iPhones.

On occasion, I do some things that are not really teachable.

Generally, I prefer to teach so that people

can do their own things after I’m gone.

But on occasion, if something is too complex,

they just want it done.

So in that case, I’ll use Apple scripts,

and I’ll write an Apple script for somebody

to do something very complicated.

I’ll do things for newspapers, job

that used to take a couple hours, laying out

cartoons in the comics page with crossword puzzles and things.

It used to take more than an hour.

Now it takes eight seconds.

So I do those two things.

That’s awesome and I’m sure as the panel will tell you,

I’m very much into automation.

So I shall be asking you some of the tech geeky questions,

I’m sure.

(upbeat music)

This week has been extremely busy with something new

each and every day in different categories.

But most importantly,

we had the announcement of the WWDC event.

And yet again, we are to see a virtual event.

Well, I think they made such a success of it last year.

I think they learnt the way to do that now.

But I think last year’s show was a very well-produced

and professional-looking show.

I think they are experts at that.

I think this will be the way forward for them.

And certainly with all the travel restrictions

and hotel restrictions and everything else

that’s going on at the moment,

it could be the death knell of major shows like this.

I think if they can prove this is the way to go,

if they can have an interactive audience section in it somehow.

I think you’ll find that many companies will start looking at this as the future

for these kind of live events.

Also, Apple have broken it down now.

It’s not one big event announcing all.

They just tend to show the general guidelines and then use almost an event per month

to show off their latest bits.

Obviously, from a PR point of view, it keeps them in the spotlight all the time,

which is obviously what’s good for them.

And as we know, the press love talking about Apple,

good or bad.

So if they can have these little mini events,

they just generate so much PR from it.

It’s quite a cunning plan they’ve got in action now.

• I was gonna say I miss it.

(laughs)

I don’t know if that will wear off

when you’re getting fleeced for a hotel in San Jose.

But yeah, I miss the Arduana.

I miss seeing the engineers.

It’s such a fun event.

Last year, it was surprisingly effective and efficient in terms of talking with Apple engineers.

We got two or three sessions, which surprised me where we got to talk with the team and

ask them a bunch of questions.

I didn’t think we’d manage to pull that off.

I thought there’d be too much demand.

But yeah, it would be nice to get back out there for some face time for sure.

Talking from, I suppose, the sorts of things I’m interested in, like the production values,

I think I’ve not watched the Google events.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of them, but, um, and Facebook, et cetera.

But I think it’s largely kind of accepted that Apple are probably leading

the way already with the production value of their remote events.

And that’s one thing I love about it.

But I think like Aidan says that the challenge is mixing that with the

sessions, particularly at WWDC, where you have developers who want to get in

front of the guys at Apple and, um, and ask questions, which I know you can do

that remotely, but it’s nothing like doing it in person, I’m sure personally,

it would be, it would be nice to see some kind of hybrid event where,

I think the keynotes do benefit from this new polished pre-recorded format personally.

I’m not a big fan of the onstage events. I think since Steve Jobs sadly departed us,

they feel very engineered, which they have to be because they don’t have anyone like him anymore,

who was just a natural. I think there’s different viewpoints depending on how likely you were to

physically attend. So it’s unlikely that I’m ever going to go to WWDC in person. Therefore, for me,

the experience is going to be different to a developer who would actually go there. So it’s

slick and less likely to see someone that’s an engineer and is a rubbish presenter stumble over

their words and occasionally they want to do a demonstration and it wouldn’t quite work. I quite

like that. I mean I was a teacher so that always makes me laugh when things go wrong but it is

slicker and what’s also interesting with them is they’re trying to portray their company values.

So they’ve got lots of different groups represented. They’ve got women, people of

colour, they’ve got people that may have physical difficulties and it’s just more thought out and

just slicker in regards to that. If I ever get the chance to go physically though, I may feel

differently. Christian, are you booking your ticket ready for next year’s event? Well, you know, that

That wasn’t really an event that was right for me because I wasn’t developing things.

I waited for someone else to do it and then I would learn it and teach it.

There’s a couple things about what they’re doing now which I really like.

For starters, my understanding is it’s free.

It used to be sort of a gold rush that you needed to sign up right away and it would

sell out.

It used to sell out in a week and then it was in two days and it was in two seconds.

More people get to see it and that’s all.

All that’s good.

All that’s good.

In fact, someone like me who would never spend the money to go because it’s not quite my

area.

Of course, I used to have Macworld Expo, which was more like something that I would go to.

And I did.

I went to all, there were 25 of them I never missed.

And when they ended, I miss it.

I still miss it.

It’s a long, that’s a long time ago and I still miss it.

A chance to see people face to face.

And I, I was listening about, I think Mark was saying about the hybrid event.

I’m kind of hoping that they keep doing what they’re doing, but have a separate event that’s

a chance to to get together face to face. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in June.

From a video perspective and being a photographer here, I just really like the transition work

between each of the different cast members that were demonstrating it. I do like the idea of maybe

a hybrid version. I know there’s been some conversation around, do they just make the

keynote available online and then the developer side of things is kept as an event. I really

like events. I really enjoy working with people and I see it as the kind of comic book fan or

MCM event where people dress up, they make a big thing about it. I don’t think Apple want to lose

that atmosphere but who knows. I also think that maybe Apple quite like the control over it.

It’s a bit too controlled for my liking because the thing which I liked about the original setup

was you could really tell that the product had been released. They were physically holding it

and they could actually demonstrate it and the making of the mistakes actually proved it was

there. They don’t actually have to prove anything is genuine because it could be production

problems but they can make it look computer generated. There was that whole discussion of

was that really Apple’s computer lab and then people dissecting the computer lab and saying

what was in this and this is how it all worked. And it went off on this whole magic tangent of

what’s inside Apple and then they’re all about what were the trees in the background and what

what they were wearing and is that really decanting?

And I thought, okay, that was fun for a couple of days,

but then you’re getting away from what it was really about.

And ultimately, half of all the good ideas come

from the people who you’re meeting,

because it’s quite nice to see that it’s not so posh,

it’s not so nice, it’s something quite different.

And in the era of deep fakes and fake news,

seeing something physical proved that it really was there.

And it felt a bit like watching a movie at times.

I mean, yes, I can agree why you want

to have a free online WWDC, so it goes across the wide audience.

That makes sense.

But you still need to have development camps.

And what would be nice is if they did it so that you could

have one for Europe, one for America, maybe one for Asia.

So they would break it down into regional hubs.

And that would then make it even more accessible.

Because if we’re not going to get into the era of flying,

then that would be quite fun, wouldn’t it?

You could then take out the whole of Excel and then have that as being like the London

Hub or Birmingham Marina or something like that.

You could have quite a sort of interesting series and then there’ll be slightly different

days apart.

Yeah, I think just picking up on something that Alistair said there, that this whole thing

that Apple are smart with this, where people start digging into everything that’s going

on in the background, like you say, their secret lab, which isn’t their secret lab at

all.

It’s just a stage set.

But what worries me about that, as fun as that is, Apple do have a tendency to play

on that quite a bit like they do with their invites and all that sort of stuff. The invites

generally mean nothing, but they know that people spend hours pouring over what that

little light in the background is or the circle means. The worry with that, I suppose, is

that they get a bit too involved in that and the whole production becomes more about that

stuff. Going back to what even I was saying earlier about the production values and as

you were saying yourself, Craig, the transitions, it’s just stunning what they’re doing with it.

The one thing that I miss is all the mass media coverage where there’s all these live chat feeds

and discussions going on and hundreds of notifications going off on your phone or the

famous iconic picture where everybody’s sitting in their auditorium with the glow of their Mac as

they’re rushing to put their information online. Can I ask a question? What does the panel think

will be the big announcement at this year’s WWD? What’s going to be the wow factor? I’ve just got

a second XDR so I think they’re going to announce an iMac that’s a fraction of the price of the

screen is just as good. I feel it in my bones. I’m a Thunderbolt display fan, so come on,

I want a more modern version. Whereas I’m waiting. That’s all hardware guys. What do you think about

the software? Are we going to see the usual incremental increases? I can’t really think

what they’re going to do to any of the operating systems. They do feel fairly polished. For example,

I’ve stopped getting excited about the iPhone. I’ll put my hands up and say that it’s still the

the best phone I’ve ever used. At the minute I’m doing a bit of a test. I probably get

kicked off this podcast in a second, but I’ve got a Pixel 4a here, which I’ve been using

for a month. The problem is that they need to do something to excite me about it, but

I don’t know what they need to do. So I’m not going to sit here and suggest I’ve got

all the answers. I don’t think we’ll see hardware at WWDC personally. I think we’re going to

see something probably potentially this month as a hardware only event. But yeah, I just

don’t know. Hopefully other people on this show can tell me what I should get excited

about because I’m struggling to be honest.

I think that there might be more excitement, not this year, but next year’s, once lots

of the range has gone over to new chips.

I think when most of the range has gone over, then I think they might surprise us.

I think we’ll go probably see a big privacy field.

So we may get some big privacy announcement or Apple says we’re now joining up with the

European Union, the British, we’re joining up with a whole range of different privacy

centers just like they normally do with the health data and they say these are the companies we’re

working with this is what we’re doing to secure your data because that’s a big new thing if they

were the first company to do that then you’ll suddenly get a lot of the big regulators will

back off apple and then that will become a big new thing and apple suddenly goes into that field

i’m curious uh ipad os to catch up because they do they still talk about ipad os or is it ios

again now because it felt like it got a bit left behind with iOS 14 because it

doesn’t have that library of apps and it doesn’t really properly do widgets

you’ve got that thing on the left-hand side I have an iPad Pro and pencil and I

love it and I keep thinking oh well why can’t I get these things off my home

screen into a library like I don’t use widgets on the iPhone I don’t I don’t

really have a use for them but it feels like both of those features fit the iPad

better. I’m into my my Mac recycle process. Three years is the kind of limit I’ve got a

a 2018 MacBook Pro that needs upgrading. I’ve been debating whether to go for a new

top of the range MacBook Pro is going to be about four, four and a half grand. Hopefully there’ll

be some kind of iMac Pro version of the M1 chip maybe with a M1X chip in it or something like

that which will be the the top end of the iMac range. I think you might struggle to spend that

on the Macbook Pro now. I mean the i9 was about four grand but we’ve bought a lot of M1 Macbook

Airs and M1 Macbook Pros. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what you do with the spec. It’s

about 800 pounds without that and whether you get the Macbook Air that’s 800 pounds before that or

whether you get the Macbook Pro and soup it up, it’s the same speed. It’s the difference between

seven and eight cores. The most powerful Mac really is 800 pounds now. I think that’s a legacy

thing going back to my earliest days with Mac was in them days you did you bought a Mac you spec’d

up to top spec and it would last you that much longer. I’m doing this on a 2014 MacBook Pro.

This is one of the reasons I am still waiting and I want it to go but it does virtually everything I

want. I have a horrible feeling that Apple’s going to damage all of our wallets in one go and they’re

going to update the entire product line. They kind of did that last year just before Christmas with

the whole iPhone and iPad launch. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. Let’s see what Mark says.

Yeah, I think it is. It’s both exciting, but quite nerve wracking as well. Because you just,

I think it was a Christian that said that there’s a lot of stuff around the corner, clearly. It

does feel like we’re going to see a new iMac very, very soon. Definitely a new iMac, which I’m very,

very interested in. And then you’ve got the MacBook Pro redesign, which we keep hearing about,

whether or not that’s going to be the 14 inch initially or 16. They might do both, who knows.

And then whatever they do with the iPads as well. And then we’ve got AirTags, all this stuff.

You mentioned the famous tag word there. I don’t know if any of you saw the news this week,

but Apple have now introduced the developer support for Find Me. So we’re all used to

Find My iPhone. But what is coming next? Do any of you have any thoughts on this one?

Were they meant to be released last year, but they had a problem with the battery life on them,

from what I read? I also wonder. Now it’s been opened up to more developers that they thought

they could make more money on the licensing aspect of it. Do you remember the “made for iPod” or “made

for iPhone” sticker that used to be stuck on all the boxes? I’m sure Christian came across that at

some point. If I find my iPhone and find my Mac, it works great. If you’ve lost something, if you’ve

had to use it, it’s fantastic. I mean, I’ve had people call me when they’ve lost something. They

don’t know how it works, but they know what their Apple ID is and I’m able to find their stuff on

my machine using their credentials. I don’t have to do, you don’t have to do two-factor

authentication to do the find my right. So I found an iPhone that was left behind in

an Uber driving down the street and I say, where is it? And I said, it’s, it’s at Wilshire

Boulevard and first street. Then no, second street. No, third street because it was still,

they left it in the, in the car. I found all kinds of stuff. I found my dad lost his, his

phone. He thought it was stolen, got shipped to the laundry. And so I was able to find

I found a laptop that was stolen that the guy, the thief had stopped at a hookah shop

to go have a smoke after stealing this thing.

And so I could find the car on the street and they send the police and big boyfriend

came too and they, anyway, they caught it.

They got their stuff back.

It’s fantastic.

So if it works with other things, I say, great.

So long as, you know, if there’s a tag that goes on your keys, great.

If there’s, I mean, put one on your dog, put one on everything you can think of.

But the fact that they’re opening it up to other people is great because if all those

things kind of talk to each other, it creates a network that makes it easier to find things,

how to pinpoint them more precisely.

So I think it’s fantastic what they’re doing.

The idea that you could just attach these tags to anyone and track their movements.

You know, there’s some serious questions to be asked there.

I’m not suggesting that’s how easy it would be.

Apple and how important this stuff is to them, the morality of all this sort of stuff. I

wouldn’t be surprised if the reason these tags haven’t come out yet isn’t so much down

to the battery performance or that kind of stuff. It’s probably because they’re struggling

with the story.

The first thing that will happen, particularly with the Daily Mail in this country, next

day is that you’ll see headlines, “Apple has released tags that you can attach to children.”

And basically, yeah, they’ve got to get that story right.

I don’t know if you saw this may or may not be true.

I can’t remember where I read it, but I have a feeling that Apple have built something

into the system that actually stops you from being tracked.

It actually recognizes that if another device is signed in with a different Apple ID or

with that person.

So if I put a tag on my grandma and she was carrying her iPhone, it would actually recognize

that they’re both different Apple IDs and stop tracking them.

I think it’s the perfect answer.

If we want to be able to track down Android users,

you can circumvent that quite easily.

I mean, I think there are a couple of reasons

why it’s easier for Apple to let somebody else

ship this stuff first.

So I think it’s not much of a surprise

that they shipped the kind of underlying mechanism

to do this last year, and it looked fantastic,

and now they’ve opened up the API.

It’s kind of hard to predict.

I think there are a lot of bad actors out there,

a lot of people who want to do very naughty things,

And I’m sure Apple have spent a lot of time thinking about that.

But why not let some other people just kind of build some things and see what happens first?

I think one of the things I was looking at, the possibility that the tags could be recharged from your phone,

that you could hold the phone onto the tab for a short while to recharge it,

would go a long way to solving that kind of battery issues that they have.

Or my particular favorite tape measure, which always seems to end up in a roof somewhere.

So yeah, I’d be quite keen on some of the uses of tags for that.

I’m going to go around the panel and ask what would be one or possibly two things

that you would put a tag on.

And I think for me, it would have to be

lens caps for camera lenses, nightmare at losing those or misplacing them somewhere.

And the other one I would love to see is it built into more bicycles.

hate the fact that you come out of a building and your bike is gone. It’d be one of my biggest

frustrations. I’m sure this is one thing they could fix. From my perspective, it would be

stuff I carry around in my rucksack because I’m a field engineer. So I go around fixing

various things. And so the amount of cables and hard drives and other stuff, which has cost me a

fortune to buy, and it’s all for all the different components that Apple make. I definitely will want

to put one on my bag so if someone steals it or I forget it I can track down where it is. But the

other one which I thought would be very useful not for myself but for some of my clients is to have

hearing aids because the amount of times they can find one hearing aid but they can’t find the other

one and that would be quite useful it’s those sort of things so they put it in a case or it drops

out their pocket where does it go and it’s simple little things like that which I thought would be

or a nice little feature. I think I’d put them on my suitcase for when I’m traveling because they

don’t get lost very often but it’s reassuring to know where it is, especially when changing planes,

you know that your bag made it. That’s nice. I think I’d put one in the car because I mean,

I know where the car is when I’m in it but you know if it is stolen it would be fantastic to

to know where it was. So I know there’s services you know, out here they have low jack, I don’t

know what they call it where you are, but pay a service, they mount something to your

car and it will alert you. Well, you can check on it and find out where it is. But if it’s

just a little tag, put one under the seat, know where my car is. Oh, in fact, then I

can help find it when I park and I forget where it is too, so that would be useful.

Even if it’s not really stolen, I just forgot where it is.

This kind of technology could be hardwired into things like TVs and stuff like that.

So if they are stolen, then the next time that TV is turned on, it can broadcast where

it is, what it’s doing.

It could easily be hardwired into a lot of electrical products.

What would concern me is if you have tags attached, the thieves are going to have a

scanner or something to find that tag and rip it off.

You come back to where your car was and find the remains of the tile on the floor.

But if it’s hardwired into the base of the system like carplay or something like that,

or the main control unit of the car, it’s a lot harder to stop that from working.

So I think there’s a lot of potential of what they’re thinking of doing, riding on the backs

of others to make the system, as they like to say, usually say, it just works.

I don’t get the Apple tag and I think it’s going to be a bit of a surprise because I

I think everything that I would tag should be

or has been replaced.

So your wallet has been replaced by your phone.

Your car’s probably got carplay and should have it built in.

Your headphones should have it built in now

’cause they’re AirPods.

The Apple TV remote doesn’t have it built in,

but obviously should have it built in.

To my mind, HomeKit is broken.

I have embraced HomeKit

and I have these stupid Hue light switches

that don’t properly work in every room.

The tag should have a little friction-powered button

and the U1 chip and when you press the tag that’s on your purse and it should turn the

lights on or off in the room that the tag’s in. So it should replace your keys, it should

replace your light switches, Apple are going to be replacing your glasses. So I just think

anything that you could lose should already have this in. I just don’t know what is left

to put the tag on.

I’ve really pared down the stuff I carry around anyway. I totally get, like as Craig says,

being a photographer, videographer, the lens cap thing and memory cards and stuff, I’m

always misplacing them. But everything else that kind of matters to me, the only thing

really is genuinely joking apart probably as a dog because they don’t come with built-in

air tags. Perhaps they will do it some stage. But that’s only because if I’m honest, he

does this thing where he literally just seems to disappear in our house. We can’t find him

for about an hour. I just want to know where he goes because that’d be interesting. He’s

perhaps going to Narnia or something. It’d be nice to know where he is. It’d be nice

to know if they’ll be waterproof, for example, because you can put them in your drink, find

my pint, which one of yours is at the bar when you get back to the bar. But yeah, I’m

struggling. I can probably tell. I’m struggling to know where…

a brand new app there ready for agent to make find my pint there we go you heard it here

for I want to commission them I think mark it would be it would be fantastic you put

your phone you press find my tag and it suddenly scoots off like it did in the movies and shows

you Narnia you know it’s three light years away or something like that thinking how’d

the dog get there for crying out there I also think there’s somebody else that would want

that this week after Tim Cook accidentally said, “I don’t think I’m going to be here

after 10 years,” or has the news networks hyped that? Come on, someone’s got to retire

at some point. That’s my view.

I think 10 years is just a long time, isn’t it? Anyway, I think it’s a decade, isn’t it?

Is he 60 now? I’ve got that right.

60 now, yeah.

60, yeah. I mean, he’s going to be 70 in 10 years time, obviously. And yeah, I wasn’t

surprised by that at all. And he kind of is a classic quote where he said it and then

probably realized that it’s going to be picked on and then pointed out that that’s a long

time. I just thought on that interview, I listened to it earlier, I thought he just

sounded really tired and fed up. That’s the one thing that came across to me. I think

that’s quite telling really. I think he, we were talking before the show, weren’t we,

about the Facebook questions he was being pelted with and he’s just a bit fed up with

all that stuff really. And Apple has been through, and obviously he’ll see the majority

this being the main man, a lot of these court cases and suing and stuff. It must be tiring,

that kind of thing. But that was the main thing that came across to me. He just sounded like a

pretty worn out guy. Well, I’ve got a lot of time for Tim. He’s done a cracking job, I think,

and he deserves a break. I’m not sure who would come next. I think the anti-monopoly stuff seems

a bit unfair because there are a couple of different fronts to it. But no one apart from Apple

has built an app store that’s safe.

They’re the only app store ever to be safe.

I mean, they’re not even as safe as they could be,

but compared to everything else,

the Play Store is a very dodgy place to be.

And I think Apple,

irrespective of what they do with privacy,

where they put users first

and they’re doing entirely the right thing,

I think they’re gonna come under attack for that app store.

And I think that recent finding in discovery

about what they said about iMessage

and why they’re not making it available,

I think Apple are unfortunately going to get hurt, both in the US and in Europe,

anti-competitive stuff. And I think it is going to be to the detriment of everyone,

of all of Apple’s users. And I think Tim is not looking forward to that.

I’m going to ask Christian this. We’re obviously the British side of things,

but what’s the American view of this?

I think the privacy thing is something that people get an idea that, oh my gosh, we gave it all away.

We had no idea how much information we were giving out about ourselves.

And that not only were we giving it out, but it was being sold.

It was being used.

On the one hand, they’re willing to give away their information to get free services

like Facebook or even Gmail.

But they’re not willing to have someone else make the money off of them.

They want to if someone’s going to make money, it should be them.

The big curtain’s been opened and people see what’s going on now.

and they’re finding out that their credit card statement was full of information that was being sold.

And there’s all these companies that nobody’s ever heard of that are quietly working away buying and selling this information.

I think that’s just starting to sort of bubble up.

It’s been going on obviously for a long time, but people weren’t aware of it.

And all of a sudden, I think they are. I don’t think it’s enough of like, it’s like a wave that’s building.

So that wave is about to crash, but it’s getting bigger and bigger.

I’m going to ask what is the developer’s point of view on the privacy aspect?

As I know, 14.5 has a lot of changes for a developer.

I think it’s great. The more the merrier. I think Apple are doing a good job with these protections.

I mean, there’s been a bit of noise on Twitter about them not all being enforced,

because to an extent, you can say what you like, and then it’s up to Apple or someone else to take

take your app apart and catch you out.

And it would be nice if that wasn’t the case.

And they’ve done a lot in terms of,

there was that change last year where Instagram

can no longer see your entire photo library

and you can kind of select what you can expose it to.

I think these things are fundamental and critical.

And I think Apple is on absolutely the right path.

And as a developer in a space where we’re getting data

from Apple devices and working with Apple hardware

quite closely, these things can be unhelpful and deeply frustrating to us.

So, you know, with our app at the moment where we’re working with video on iOS devices and

putting that on Mac OS, we’re dealing with APIs that are old or unhelpful.

And sometimes, you know, privacy aspects can get in the way of that because it’s easier

for Apple to sometimes just prevent something or come up with a cumbersome mechanism than

it is for them to come up with a nice way that kind of clearly explains a trade-off.

So for example, we’ve got this, at the moment an iPhone app can only access your iPhone’s camera

if it’s on the foreground of that device. And there are very many good reasons for that because

you don’t want an app running in the background that can spy on you, right? Totally makes sense.

But if you want to let the iPhone work as a webcam and be able to run something else on it

at the same time, that would be kind of handy.

And for what Apple will feel is an edge case in that way,

they’re probably not gonna put in a privacy

and permission mechanism for a specific app.

But that sort of thing would help us.

• I think one thing that shocked me was that,

you know you get the thing now, you go to a site,

it says, do you wish to accept all our cookies

and click through, and then say, okay,

essentials performance.

And then there’s one about marketing.

You know, we can make sure you only get the ads

that we think you really wanna see.

and say, “Tick.” If you open that up, the number of firms in that, I think the one I counted,

there was 287 separate companies who wanted access to that information about what your

sales were. And I think that’s what’s driven this. As you say, initially, we were happy to share.

We thought we’d just share in a few little bits and pieces here and there, maybe with Google or

whatever. Obviously, as Tina said, we were getting free software and free use. But when you look at

Now the number of firms that are involved in the analytics coming off that phone and your information and site you visit, it’s like all these things, it’s gone too far.

And I think this is why people are now starting to say, hang on, it’s time for it to come back.

The other thing I wanted to question was about Tim Cook.

What has he done for the last 10 years?

It’s not really been a busy period for Apple the last 10 years.

Jobs and Intel and new chips and everything else.

I think he’s done a fantastic job considering he was a supply chain manager.

That’s where he came from.

Um, so yeah, fair play to the guy.

If he, if he thinks his time has come to step back or become chairman or, or a

slightly not day to day hands on roll, then I, like all I can do is applaud the guy.

I think taking over from Steve, the way he had to was just a phenomenal achievement.

I don’t know many others who would have got it, but then the question is,

who’s going to replace him?

Are we going to get Bezos or are we going to get Musk or are we going to get, um,

maybe even, Mark, who knows who’s going to take over Apple? My goodness, there’s a program we could

have a discussion about. But surely any business that’s reasonable has succession planning.

That’s, you know, they should be talking about, God forbid, but Tim Cook could be hit by a bus

tomorrow. They should have a plan. And I want to go back to this idea about people being locked into

Apple because of messages, iMessage. Since when has it become a problem where if you have a great

product that you’re meant to say, well actually we’ve got a great product but we need to make it

slightly worse because it makes it easier for our competitors. I mean iMessage, I do like it,

you know, it took me a while because I was a bit dim to realise the different colours meant things,

but once I got it, I got it and I like the fact that actually it’s all integrated because some

I talked to someone years ago about WWDC and they said, “What’s the new thing?”

And I said, “Closer integration of all of the Apple products.”

Well, that’s one of the reasons I’m in the ecosystem and I’m a victim, obviously, but

everything works together. So, you know, sometimes if someone sends me a text message,

it might go on my watch, it might go on my phone, it might go on my Mac, so it gets a bit irritating.

often it’s really useful. They’ve just made it work for me. Well, they shouldn’t be punished for

that. You know, if I was that fast, I could get Pixel 4a. You’re right, Tina. And the first time

you copy something into the clipboard on your iPhone and then just turn around to your Mac and

go paste and that appears on the notes that you’re writing or it that to me was, I remember the first

time I saw that I thought wow what a feature and it’s something that just, obviously they’ve got

control of the software, they’ve got control of the hardware, it’s easy for them to do. But I’ve

never managed to successfully link an Android phone with my PC, with my Mac and all the other

bits and pieces. It’s much more complex. So yeah, I chicken out, I stay in the Apple ecosystem.

So Christian, who do you think is going to be the next CEO?

I can’t see them going outside the family.

I think they need someone who understands it

that what was wrong with Scully.

He didn’t understand.

Of course, he wasn’t smart enough either.

He didn’t know the business,

but he also, he just thought he could sell anything

and run any company, but you need somebody who gets it.

And the people they’ve got,

they’ve got plenty of people to choose from

who’ve been there a long time, who really fit in well.

I would personally, I’d vote for Jeff Williams myself.

That would be, I think, a really smooth transition.

Very understated guy, but he’s been there a long time

and knows a lot.

• That was my second guess,

because he’s currently the chief operating officer

and he’s slowly coming into a few more press offices.

He also worked for IBM.

• One thing that was interesting about Tim Cook

is everybody said he’s not Steve Jobs

and he’s not, and he didn’t try to be.

You know, he is Tim Cook,

and he was good at being Tim Cook,

and it’s really different.

He never turned into the mesmerizing presence on stage

that Jobs is, and I don’t think that’s something

that wouldn’t have been him.

And I think Jeff Williams is good at being himself.

He’s not flashy.

I think Craig Federici maybe likes an audience

more than some of the other guys.

That’s not to say he wouldn’t be good at it,

but I do think that the temperament

that Jeff Williams exhibits,

I mean, for me to say that from here, as if I can tell,

I think he’s, I think it would be terrific.

• I saw him on one of the other after shows

and he looked quite sort of ready for CEO type material.

Don’t forget what they said in the past

that Tim Cook has actually made Apple very profitable.

What he said in an interview in the first year he came out

was my job was just to make sure that everyone else

does their job effectively and I’m to take the back seat.

I’m not meant to be in the limelight.

I’m just here to make sure we work.

I thought that was quite a nice idea.

He didn’t want to be the big Steve Jobs.

He just wanted to be the guy who introduces everyone else

and lets everyone talk.

And under Tim Cook, we’ve actually

had some very interesting people coming out and talking.

So we’ve had some of the engineers,

some of the people from the environmental agency of Apple,

some of the other areas which you’d never ever hear of,

which they’re talking about.

So I mean, he’s done quite an interesting style of talking.

• I’m not sure whether he ever did want to be CEO.

I don’t think that was what he wanted to do.

He was very good in the background,

managing everything else, keeping it all running

so that Steve could be as flamboyant as he wanted to be.

Apple could be as innovative as they wanted to be.

So he was thrust into the role

and I think he did a fairly good job.

Steve always wanted to dominate the stage.

Tim wants to get off it as quick as possible.

Yeah, I think he balances it quite well.

I said jokingly, what has he done over the last 10 years?

He’s taken after the biggest company in the world.

I think it’s a different thing running a fledgling business, so keeping one going when you’ve

got the product, but you need to make sure that you keep the market, when you’re not

the little guy anymore and people aren’t, you know, it’s not trendy to get it because

it’s a niche product.

When you become more mainstream, keeping success is more difficult.

You’ve got to also remember as well, Apple is almost like unlike any other company in

the world.

They’re almost a cult, aren’t they?

There’s things about Apple that you just don’t find or see in other companies.

This week when we were trying to come up with different ideas for the show, we had a growing

list, but one thing that we seem to have forgotten is how we’re going to keep entertained.

We’ve spent so much time at home and now we’re going back into work scenario for most.

Fingers crossed normality is coming along the way.

So we thought, why not let’s look at how we keep entertained with Apple devices, whether

that’s Apple Fitness, as Tina is demonstrating, or the Apple TV.

I don’t know which one of the panel would like to start this one off.

I’ll say something about Apple TV because I’ve had quite an experience of that recently

where I wrote an article on Medium, which was basically titled, Why Apple Should Cancel

the Apple TV.

And I think it had, to date, it’s had about 80 comments. And I think two of them agree

with me to the point where I had to write a follow-up article to say, fair enough. I’ve

screwed up a bit here. I kind of started off by saying the last time I’ve used an Apple

TV, I use it briefly last year. The last time I had probably had one connected to my TV

long term was a long time ago. And then I borrowed my parents. I lost that. So I’ve

got two Apple TVs somewhere. I don’t know where they are. But my point was I just don’t,

when it comes to entertainment, that box has a very weird place, I think, in Apple’s product

up. TV Plus makes total sense. I think it’s a great service. The reason I used the TV last year

was because we watched The Morning Show, which was fantastic. I think it will take a while to get

their library built up. There’s not going to be a Netflix overnight, obviously. So I’ve got no

problem with any of that at all. But I think when it comes to the hardware involved, it just seems

a bit pointless to me, but I do seem to be in the minority. So it was very interesting just to see

that I think a lot of people have got a really solid use case for that Apple TV box. But I’m

more interested personally in the service in terms of what they’re doing with the programming

and the original features and that kind of stuff.

I think a lot of people don’t like the Apple TV or don’t love it, but it’s probably one of my

favorite Apple products. It is the only way I consume media other than on the iOS device.

We’ve got two Apple TVs and they’re both connected to televisions that have no other form of signal,

so it’s the only thing we can see. And yeah, I haven’t really got into their programming.

I like Ted Lasso, but that’s literally the only thing I’ve watched on it.

But when I think about Apple and entertainment, I just, you know, they’re trying to become a subscription business and that’s growing quickly, but it’s growing quickly because it’s small.

You can grow anything small.

As with my comment about the tags and all the things I want them to do, when I think of Apple and entertainment, I just see potential because so many things don’t work.

We have six HomePods.

None of them work.

You can’t reliably play the Apple TV through the HomePods.

The handoff doesn’t work.

If you then have Siri on her own, she doesn’t work because she’s been connected to the Apple TV.

Doesn’t work properly with the home kit lights all the time.

You say stop and she plays a song called “Stop” or you say “Start” or “Turn on” and she plays a song called “Turn on”.

You know, I’ve got Apple TV and I just don’t understand it.

Spotify has bad UX, but Apple Music is impenetrable on the Mac, on the Apple TV, on iOS.

So there’s so much huge potential.

I bought another Kindle recently. I buy a lot of books on iBook, but I want an e-ink

screen. There are so many things Apple could do to get better at entertainment. It feels

like they’ve only just scratched the surface. I think it’s really exciting.

That’s interesting. You mentioned e-books. I have a completely different opinion to an

e-book. I can’t get on with them. I don’t like the way the page refreshes. That’s frustrating.

and well, this may be the photographer and design student coming out of me,

but I really like to have really glossy,

colored pictures and pages that I can physically touch.

I think iBooks has got it a bit better in that sense.

But do you read anything like a newspaper in e-book format?

Yes, I exist on stuff like that.

I haven’t bought a book or a paper or anything like that in years now.

All my books I read on the iBook.

For me, it just saves us such a amount of space,

bookshelf space and stuff like that.

I just and you know, I bought books I’ve got down there 20 years ago.

I use news and news plus on the screen.

Yeah, for me, the the medium of newspapers,

magazines and books is all done on the screen now.

I just find it I can I can start reading on my iPhone if I’m stuck on a tube.

I can use my iPad when I’m sitting at home.

I do like the Apple TV.

I’ve got one right up.

It’s great for showing content from your phone or from your iPad.

You are right.

We talk about the way Apple integrate the things like, you know, Final Cut Pro with

preview, with keynote and stuff like that, but they haven’t quite got the entertainment

side of it right.

We were talking about what would you like to see at WWDC?

I’d like to see them get Siri right.

Siri still is not quite there.

It’s really interesting.

So I have got an Apple TV and the only time I really use it is if I’ve got friends around

and I want to show them something like photos.

Yeah, and we could all crowd around my MacBook, but that would be a bit sad.

So I’d show it on the telly, but it’s just a bit tortuous.

And I want to like it more than I do.

And I have to say, Kindles, I’ve got a paper-white Kindle, and it is easy to read in the same

way as a book.

And I love my books.

Don’t get me wrong.

Is it Dead Tree Books?

They call them.

DTB.

So I have a Kindle because I go on holiday.

And there are things about, like, the battery life’s amazing.

Whereas if I was reading on a plane on my iPad, I’m not sure if I used my iPad for

however many hours, if it was a long flight, whether it would still be there at the end.

Whereas I know my Kindle would.

I think how people consume media is changing.

iPlayer, for instance, is amazing.

Why would you watch a program on the TV on BBC One, unless it was BBC Two, when you can

watch it any time you like?

So I think it’s going to be the battle of the subscriptions, isn’t it?

Because you can see with Britbox, you can do it all four for catch-up telly if you pay

the money, you don’t have to have adverts. I think we’re at a time when lots of different players are

in the market and this is like the VHS, Betamax thing all over again. How many of them are going

to be standing, still standing, still selling a service in five years time? A discussion we had at

home recently was how important is the television license? When was the last time you actually

physically sat and watched a program live on TV? I think especially in the pandemic, it’s all become

about being able to pick and choose when and where you want to watch. However, I would say

as someone who believes in public broadcasting, I would say the license should stay there,

but it might need to change. I’m intrigued. So the others don’t know this, but Christian sent me this

great email about music setup that he uses. And if he could tell us a bit more about it,

I’m really enthusiastic to find out how this works. If I were to first of all know that no matter what

what I tell you here, I would do it differently today

because the technology that’s here today

is quite a bit different.

So one thing that’s here today that wasn’t,

well, it’s not quite here today anymore is iTunes.

So when I started this little music project,

there was no such thing as iTunes yet.

So, and there was of course, you know, Spotify

or Apple Music or anything like that.

So these are the days where if you had a big system,

you had maybe a five disc CD changer

and you could put your music on CDs and it could sort of carousel around.

And then I outgrew that.

So I bought a Sony 300 disc changer,

and the problem with that was you have to have kind of a book

to know which disc is in which slot.

So fortunately, somebody made this box called the Slinky.

And the Slinky box is actually the S-Link,

is something that was built into Sony changers.

the E, I don’t know what that was, but anyhow, what you do is you buy a program that had

a look something like iTunes, you could make playlists, and you could do this on your computer

and then run a serial cable to the Slinky, then the Slinky connected to the 300-disc

Sony Changer, and now you can make playlists that would drive that carousel around to whichever

disc it needed to be in and play whichever tracking unit it’s.

So you stuffed all your discs in that Changer and you made your playlists and you were done.

And that has been running on an original Bondi Blue iMac since, I don’t know, since when the Bondi Blue iMac was almost new.

And System 9.2, so not even an OS X.

I also have a, behind me here, there’s a remote control that is connected with USB to that same iMac.

And it has, all it has on it is one little light to send things to, it’s aimed at the

stereo.

And the remote control is in software.

So basically, it was also all Apple scriptable.

So I have Apple scripts that fire off at different times of different days.

So on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, back when I would go to the gym, this music

would play at 6 a.m.

It would be the Rocky soundtrack without the songs I didn’t like.

Okay.

And I’d go to the gym.

At night time, it plays thunderstorm recordings, sort of drown out some of the city noise.

That has worked by itself for, I don’t know, it’s probably 20 years.

Whenever before MP3 was invented, before iTunes.

That’s my fancy setup and it just keeps working and so I’m not looking to change it.

It’s playing through the house through real speakers, the big kind, not the little Bluetooth

thing that you buy these days.

These days you would have iTunes or Apple Music or Spotify streaming to some Bluetooth

box and you’d be done.

But this was really fun to put together.

And they did it and here it is.

I would love something like that.

I had all of my MP3s, maybe about 60,000, I had them on Google Play Music.

Well, you know, it uploaded them and it meant with the Google Play app I could play my MP3s

on an iPhone, on a Mac, on a computer anywhere.

I didn’t have to store them anywhere.

And now that that’s been shut down,

they’ve let me download my MP3s,

but it doesn’t seem like anything these days works with them.

Like I could get a device and put it on it,

but that won’t let my iPhone play it

when I’m on the other side of town.

If I have them on the Mac,

Spotify can see them as a local library,

but not stream them.

You can upload them into Apple, Apple Music,

but if you ever change regions like I did once,

it will just delete them all.

So it deleted a lot of live recordings I had,

which I’ve now lost.

You can put them in YouTube Music,

but that’s got ads and you can’t,

it doesn’t really work.

So I tried copying into iCloud.

And if you ever copy a lot of files onto an iCloud drive,

it always loses, loads them and deletes them.

So that doesn’t work either.

It doesn’t seem to be any way to do what you’ve got,

but on the internet.

• Unless someone walks in here and takes my CD changer.

I’ve got the music.

That’s the nice thing.

I really feel like I have it.

There’s this sort of feeling of permanence there,

you know, that takes up a lot of space,

a bunch of big black boxes over there that,

you know, with amplifiers and things,

boy, I’ve really got those things, you know.

I know some people who ripped all their CDs

and then threw the CDs away.

They thought, well, we’ve got the MP3.

• I think this sort of stuff is really important though,

because, so thinking, going what Aidan was saying

about copying stuff to iCloud,

years ago when they first released,

I think it was called ArtTunes Match,

I had an absolute nightmare with this.

I had a huge music collection.

turned on iTunes match, which I think you paid for. It was a subscription service.

It uploaded everything all seemed to be fine, but then it had this bug in it,

which was really well hidden by Apple in terms of if you went on their Apple

forums, the support forums, it was flooded with these things,

but they really dampened it down.

And what it did basically was retain all your music,

but it swapped around the album art. So I’d be playing, you know,

Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon,

and it would have like Kylie Minogue cover on it. And I can’t deal with that.

that’s just not the only kind of music, but probably do.

But I just couldn’t deal with that.

But as a result of that,

I completely lost confidence with it

because there was no fix.

You know, they talked about releasing updates to iTunes

that was supposed to fix it

and it made it a little bit better.

But essentially my entire music library

was completely trashed.

As Christian’s saying,

if you’ve got something in your house that is physical,

it’s got nothing to do with Apple,

it’s got nothing to do with a hard drive really

or anything like that.

It’s just there.

It’s you feel far safer with that.

And I’ve even gone back to buying vinyl.

I’ve really got back into vinyl recently.

I’ve just started buying some stuff from Beatport

in terms of MP3s that I can keep and put

on a separate hard drive and not put anywhere else,

not put in Apple’s hands.

I think this takes us back to the whole thing with Apple

and when I look to the topic of the show

about what do you do with your Apple products

to use for entertainment, I don’t.

I’ve already mentioned the Apple TV, which I don’t use.

I really can’t think of anything else.

I’ve recently switched to Spotify for streaming

because they have better playlists

and I just prefer the user experience.

Yeah, I don’t trust Apple with this sort of stuff,

afraid that that’s my big problem with it. As far as I’m concerned I use my iPhone for listening

to podcasts and to Apple music and I deliberately buy iPhones which are big enough to contain all

of my Apple music and I won’t subscribe to Apple music because if I own the music why should I have

to pay to listen to my own music? I just think it’s kind of productive. Sorry I have everything

set up and I have playlists and stuff and I have iTunes match so I can have it across my different

Macs. As far as viewing stuff, I will sit in front of my computer to watch certain things which I have on my Mac, but I’m slightly odd one out.

I use a PlayStation to talk to my Samsung television because my Samsung television occasionally would decide to go and update itself, which you can’t stop because I’ve tried.

and then it will disconnect all the streaming services or install its own applications which

inserts trailers and you can’t get rid of it and it installs it on channel 4000 which is infuriating

so I find I use a Sony PlayStation 4 to watch and view stuff and I have my Apple description

on the PlayStation. Now what I also do is I’m very much like you I have everything on CD and DVD

because the thing that annoys me the most is when you go on to some of the streaming services,

they edit the content or they chop it out. So I’ve watched films and go, hang on,

you’ve chopped off that scene or it’s 10 minutes shorter or the ending is different or the colouring

is different. And that’s not how it originally was. But I think the iPod was excellent. The

original ones, I still have iPod classics for listening to stuff when I go travelling.

I will have a Kindle and I will be very interested to see what we get maybe two years time because

if privacy is coming into a big scheme of things how would you change it better? There was a very

interesting article on The Guardian this week all about what are we doing to escape the echo chamber

if we’re now listening to music which has been adjusted to us so that’s your Spotify and others

If we’re now going onto Netflix, which carefully chooses what we watch, we’re not actually discovering anything new.

We’re just reinforcing the same idea.

And I think Apple have the opportunity to bring in other suppliers and become the independent.

But that’s the only way I can see it going forward.

It’s interesting in listening to everybody’s way of how they effectively consume entertainment.

We all use Apple devices to consume it, but the majority kind of says it’s not Apple that’s creating it or providing it.

We’ve got Spotify.

We’ve got physical disks.

We’ve got Plex.

We’ve got Netflix.

Well, I was just going to say, I think also it might have something to do with the ethos of Apple.

If I remember rightly, Steve Jobs was, I think, terrified of Apple being bought.

Hence, they developed up the huge cash reserves that they had to make it almost impossible

for other companies to come in and buy them out.

But I think they also see the demise of companies who were niche.

If you think of Nokia and you think of BlackBerry’s, they dominated the market, didn’t they?

They were the market and all of a sudden, they’re nothing.

I think Apple have that.

So they see the big boys, Amazon and Facebook and people like that, and they want to be

in that market.

So they’ve diversed into all these different things and entertainment and subscriptions

obviously the model forward for cash flow.

But at the moment, as I said, I think we’ve been discussing here, they’re not quite on

the money yet with that whole system, the whole ecosystem of entertainment.

I was going to add some things about Plex.

How many people actually know what Plex is?

Well it’s basically rodeo and Netflix.

So you basically say, here’s the software that you’ve run on your Mac and you put your

music on your computer and then it will automatically do all the conversions so I can have it in

NKV, AVI, MOV, MP3, MP4 and then I can watch it on my TV, my iPhone, my Android device

and it does all the conversions for me and it puts the library together, it puts all

the data in and it’s easy for me to view and it doesn’t cost me anything.

As far as I was concerned it was a great way just to watch data because what I use it for

is being able to view it between me and someone else. So I have relatives that live in other

parts of the country and I wanted to show them something and they can watch it.

I’m going to challenge Alistair with something as he is our technical expert.

Has he come across the name Don Melton? Heard of it.

Does any of the panel know who this gentleman’s name is?

The name rings a bell, I can’t think why. He was the lead for the development of Safari

and he is also technically one of the fathers of WebKit. He has some interesting and intriguing

ways of dealing with video content. So this may also help Mark in terms of how he stores his data.

So what Don Milton has actually done, he has written a GitHub project for standardizing

video content and how it’s stored. And if you’re a Plex user, it comes highly recommended. Also,

he makes very technical information very easy to understand in terms of what you want to do with it

or how you want to consume it. The thing with this in particular is that it actually improves how other

software works. So I’m sure if you’re a Mac user you’ve come across the app Handbrake at some point

for copying information onto your machine. This is actually an add-on or a plugging as such that

allows it to transcribe video in a much better sizable format and I wasn’t familiar with this.

Somebody else gave me this as a tip but it also if you’re consuming lots of DVDs so in terms of a

box set which may be nine DVDs it improves the speed of handbrake by 70 percent so it’s certainly

worth a look and and Alistair will love this one for sure is that you can have more control over the

audio tracks. So I’m sure at some point some of us have watched a movie and the subtitles are

missing when someone starts talking in Korean or Russian. And what this actually does, it enables

you to manage the audio track as a separate file. So for the Adobe edition users out there, I’m sure

you get a little info file when you’re editing a track. It works on a similar basis. I’ve set

Alistair a challenge now to redo his whole Plex collection I know. I got fed up of not being able

to watch certain films I own. Certain TV series which are not available on streaming services but

I own the DVDs, old or out of date versions of shows or TV films which I liked having copies of.

Or you might want to watch something in a different language. I wanted to watch

Wong Kar-Wah films, which are incredibly hard to find. So I got 2046 in the mood for love

and films like that or the early Akira Kurosawa films. You have to buy them on DVD because he

never released them to any of the streaming services. It was very useful because when I

travel, I leave my computer on and I can watch it when I’m on my iPhone when I’m traveling.

So it comes in quite useful.

Yeah, I just think we’re probably demonstrating that this is a challenge that is probably never

going to be solved properly because there’s so many different use cases. I think like Plex,

I dabbled with Plex years ago and it’s really cool actually, but it requires a lot of effort to get

set up and I’m a bit too lazy for that. Whereas other people won’t be and they’ll make the most

of it like you guys are. And equally, some people just want a button they press on their TV and they

get the latest shows. And the biggest issue with all of this stuff is that it’s kind of surrounded

by boardroom battles between cable TV services in the UK sky. And then you’ve got the likes of Apple,

you’ve got Disney, you’ve got Netflix, they’re never going to fully get on with each other.

They’ve all got their own prerogatives and they’ve all got their own bottom lines they want to sort

out. Yeah, I think TV is a mess, to be honest, but I think it’s always going to be a mess.

It’s the one thing, going back to the Apple TV, the reason I haven’t got one plugged into my TV

is because it has to have a really good reason to be plugged into my TV. It’s just another box. It’s

another remote, terrible remote from the sounds of it. I think most people, it’s that coveted

thing, isn’t it, in the living room, the thing that’s above or below you, wherever you connect

it to your TV. Everyone wants that, but they all want it. They won’t work together to get it together.

I’m going to ask my final question on entertainment. As Christian doesn’t really use his Macs and

things for entertainment, what would you like to see Apple do that might convince you to

entertain more using Apple devices? I don’t think it’s really a matter of

what Apple’s done or not done. For me, it’s a matter of my nature is to be more of a doer

and a creator than a consumer.

And so nothing wrong with consuming.

I mean, I do watch a few sporting events,

you know, American football, soccer, too.

I watch on my iPad, which is fantastic,

because here it is.

It changes the way you watch things.

I mean, it used to be you had to arrange your living

room around the TV.

That’s how you set up the chairs.

And then you kind of arrange your life around the show

when it’s on, if you want to get something to eat,

you’re gonna miss some of the game.

So you wait, you wait till it’s halftime and you go.

But with your iPad, if you’re watching the game

on your iPad, you take this with you into the kitchen,

make your sandwich while you’re still watching the game.

So I do a lot of that.

I do watch things on the iPad,

but I take it with me while I’m doing other things,

while I’m cooking dinner,

or I’m putting things away from the laundry.

So in that way, it doesn’t really quite feel

like I’m doing sitting down in the home theater kind of situation.

But this works for me.

That’s all.

You know, Apple’s meeting my needs for the time I have for that kind of thing.

But I really enjoy podcasts.

I’m going to be subscribing to this one.

I also, I actually do like reading the newspaper.

I read the New York Times on my iPad.

And what I like about it is, of course, the portability again, but also that I can touch

words and look them up. There’s some words I don’t know what a word means. There’s an

instant definition. I find that very handy. I still like books in a bookshelf, but I think

those days are a generation, maybe the last generation, that’s going to like books in

a bookshelf. I don’t know. I think Apple’s doing okay for me. I don’t like the Apple

TV remote, I’ll give you that. I wish someone would make a remote control that didn’t have

numbers on it but instead had the call letters of the station I want to watch

like if it’s HBO I want to type in HBO I don’t want to look at my sheet and find

out that that’s channel 4122 someone fix that for me and I’m all set then maybe

I’ll buy another I’ll buy a TV and I’ll watch it because you know that this that

last the last 10 feet of this thing is between your remote control and TV that’s

a number you got to put in some sort of code number it’s like it’s like DNS it’s

It’s like exactly like a DNS system where you have to know the address of the station,

whereas all the advertising, everything tells you it’s on ESPN2 or it’s on HBO something

until you get to your remote and then it’s on some number that you have to know.

So somebody fixes that.

If Apple fixes that, I will buy a big TV and I will plug in an Apple TV and I will watch

that rascal.

If I can give you some advice guys, use your Apple phone.

act as a remote for your Apple TV and you can type in exactly what you want straight away. You’re

not trying to press buttons, it moves around the screen easy, so much easier and it’s all you know

it’s always beside you. You’re asking what do I want Apple to do? Quite similarly I want them to

buy Sony, Disney, HBO and the BBC outright and then we’ll have all the content we need and no

more problems. This is the part of the show where we answer your tech questions and try and help out

our listeners and our question from Carlo. Hi this isn’t really a tech question but I’d love to hear

your thoughts on this subject. Do you think Apple will release an iPhone without a port and if so,

when? I think they might do, but I think it’s complicated and I think the anti-monopoly stuff

will weigh heavily on that because if you can only back up your phone to iCloud, whether or not

there’s enough free storage, losing the ability to back your phone up over a cable will be unhelpful.

And I think I’ve been building software to back up iPhones and work with iPhone backups for 10 years

And one of the things that isn’t lost on us is Wi-Fi connectivity with Apple services

doesn’t really work tremendously well.

If you’ve ever tried to do Wi-Fi local backups in iTunes, so not a backup to iCloud, but

a local iTunes Wi-Fi backup, it relies on Bonjour and a bunch of other services.

And if, like most people, you have a network which has 5 gigahertz and 2.4 gigahertz channels

under the same SSID, if your Mac or your iPhone are on a different channel, it just won’t

work and you won’t know why it doesn’t work but it won’t work and there’s probably no way you can

fix it unless you split your 5 and 2.4 gigahertz network. So short of Apple really fixing their

iTunes Wi-Fi support, which I can’t imagine is a priority, I think they would struggle to drop the

port soon. I agree with you on that. I don’t think we’ll see it soon, even maybe two or three

generations down the line. They’ve also got too much money invested in extra cables for when they

break third party supplier licenses. And to be honest, lots more things are now starting to be

connected to our iPads or iPhones. I think the USB-C port that came on the iPad Pro made a massive

difference. I think we will see a portless iPhone, but not quite yet for the reasons others have

mentioned. What I’d love to see them do instead is just give the iPhone USB-C and do the same

thing with the AirPods Max. The fact that the AirPods Max didn’t come with USB-C baffles me.

It’s the most frustrating thing. Everything on my desk connects via USB-C from my iPad,

funny enough, to my keyboard, to my battery charge for my cameras. The only two things that don’t

are the iPhone and the AirPods Max. And it’s genuinely annoying. It’s frustrating. Like Craig

said, when they introduced USB-C on the iPad, I think even at the event they had people in the

front row cheering, people who worked for Apple. I know why they’re not doing it. They’ve got,

like others have said, they’ve got a lot of time invested, a lot of things invested in

Lightning connections. They’re big enough to put that to one side. I think and just go for it. Give us USB C

I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Unfortunately

I think I think the iPhone is gonna go straight from lightning to being portless at some stage

Probably in the next couple of years. I would have thought I know the reason why we won’t get rid of the cables for some time

It’s for for two good reasons one if you’ve ever had to support

iPhones especially with people who are not the most tech literate and the Wi-Fi is not working or you’re in an area where Wi-Fi

can’t work because you’re in a house with really thick walls and

and you’re having to convert to something,

you have to fall back to cable

because the only thing that will work.

The other thing I’ve come across

is from a security point of view.

A lot of companies will not allow you to work

with Bluetooth turned on walking down the street.

They will say, “Company policy,

you have to turn Bluetooth off, Wi-Fi off.

When walking down the street,

you have to be on a cabled connection.”

If you do not stay on the cable connection,

you stand the liability of your call being intercepted

because the encryption system overdose systems

is not strong enough.

Another reason I have to use cable

is because if I’m on Bluetooth all the time,

the batteries run down faster

because it’s running two radios,

one for the cellular connection

and one for the Bluetooth connection.

So unless Apple either gets amazingly good at encryption

or B, gets brilliant on the battery life,

they’re gonna have to continue to use battery

because if you’re on a long phone call

or you’re recording something like a video,

You have to have some way of putting the electricity in at a very high rate and you can’t do that wirelessly as we’ve discovered with the air power pads.

It didn’t work. So that’s why you go stay with cables for quite some time.

There is an argument which says that if ever that thing moves to USB-C and someone buys out USB-C chip or the license, then the whole thing goes down.

So I think Apple has to stay on lightning in case there’s a problem with Broadcom suddenly

gets bought out or whoever is producing that chip at the time. So I think they’re trying to stay

independent so that they don’t end up with just two manufacturers making one connector.

Can I just throw in here something Craig to think about? I think there’s a trick here that

they may be thinking about the MagSafe. The MagSafe could easily be used as a cable replacement

and they could also transfer data as well as power. And if that could then have a USB-C plug on it,

a lightning plug, a three-pin English plug, whatever you want on it, and connect it to the

back of the phone, it could act as a data transfer without any use of Wi-Fi or wireless. It would

also mean that you can recharge your AirPods, and I presume iPads and everything else will eventually

have MagSafe chargers on the back of them. And I think MagSafe could be a way of Apple getting

around the problem of one being able to get rid of the port which they’ve been trying to do if they

put a magsafe with a usb plug on it it gets around that problem as well so i think there’s a potential

there for them to use magsafe you are saying there alistair about power if you’re using it as a video

source if you’re on the magsafe with a 20 watt charger the phone will continue to run even in a

filming mode a question from Anita hi guys i recently bought a shiny m1 mac mini and now

I’m looking to sell my old MacBook Air. I’ve reset the Air and to clear all the

information off in order to sell it but now it’s asking me to enter the disk

password. Help! I don’t ever recall setting a password. How can I override this?

Well the person with that problem should try a password that they used as their

admin password. I mean the odds are there’s a chance that they use the

same password to encrypt the disk as they did for one of their users. If it’s

If there’s only one user, use that.

And if there’s more than one, try them all.

Remember, you could have firmware resets.

If you’re using FireVault, you could reset it with iCloud turned on.

Yeah, they used to also provide like a unique code.

That’s right.

You had some– if you forgot your password,

you probably forgot where you put that too.

You need air tags for that.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

The last question, I think I can help with this one

because I had trouble with it too.

So Gavin wrote in saying that he recently subscribed to Apple One

and over the lockdown, like many of us, including myself, has put on a few pounds because we’re

sitting at home and he wanted to give Apple Fitness a go. However, he couldn’t get his

Apple Watch to pair with the TV. So this one is not as obvious as you think. Also comes

down to making sure that every single device is up to date. You’ve got to have 14.4 minimum

on the TV as well as the phone and 7.2 on the watch. But the hidden secret behind it is to make

sure that you’ve got the hub facilities of the Apple TV turned on otherwise it will not pair.

I don’t know why Apple have done that or what the decision behind that was but by default why does

it also not turn on when you open Fitness Plus app? It would save a lot more headaches. Sadly,

we’ve come to the end of our show for another week and we have to say goodbye and we thank you very

much for all our wonderful guests and the time that they’ve given up this evening and first up

we’ll say thank you very much to Mark. No thank you for having me on Craig I’ve really enjoyed it

and yeah just very quickly I suppose if anyone wants to see me kind of getting more infuriated

about USBC and the Apple TV probably the easiest way of doing that is to head to my website which

which is marcellusreviews.com.

And you can find my channel there

and my medium blog and my main blog, et cetera.

And yeah, it’s probably the best way to get hold of me.

• That’s brilliant.

And if you want to figure out

how he got such great audio quality throughout the podcast,

there’s certainly a great video to watch

involving some foam panels, which I also have here.

• Yeah, and I think like I’ve demonstrated in that video,

it’s behind the scenes in YouTube channels like mine

is an absolute mess.

It’s not too bad today actually, but yeah.

This room is normally covered in foam panels,

just placed everywhere, and pillows and things on the floor

that you can’t say, just try and deaden the sound.

• And we’ll also say thank you to Mr. Fitzpatrick.

Thank you very much.

• Well, thank you for having me, Craig,

and Alisa, Martin, Tina,

and also loved to meet you, Mark and Christian.

Yeah, I mean, if you wanna follow along,

I’m on Twitter @afit, A-F-I-T,

and you know, the app that we built, Camo,

for using your iOS devices as a high quality webcam.

You can find it by Googling for ‘Kama’ or searching on the App Store for ‘Kama’.

It will come up. Pay me on Twitter. It would be nice to hear from you if you enjoyed it. Thank you.

Brilliant. I can also highly recommend the app. I’ve been using it for a while now.

Thank you very much. I’m now going to put my DSLR away in the cupboard. It’s certainly replaced

that. No more power leads and cables running all over the place. And we’ll say thank you

to our rocket expert and our musical storage expert. Now I’m intrigued. I want to go out and

play my CDs now. I’m going to say thanks to Christian for joining us this evening.

Well, if you want to know more about what I do, my website is ChristianVoice.com. That’s B-O-Y-C-E,

like Rolls Royce without the money. My website has more than 500 tutorials on it. It’s all about

how to do things with your Mac or your iPhone. Most of them are things you read. There are,

I think 17 or 18 recordings of courses I gave during pandemic lockdown time, roughly one

hour each. Those videos are available there too. Glad to have you come and look. I wrote

all that stuff down so it didn’t take you 30 years to learn it like it took me.

That’s awesome. Thank you. And as always, we’ll say thank you to our usual suspects.

We’ll say thank you to Alistair, the Plex expert in the corner over there.

Thanks, Craig. It’s been a fascinating chat this evening. We’ve learnt a lot and I hope our audience have enjoyed it.

Brilliant. Thank you. And thank you very much to the backup king.

Thank you, Craig. It’s very interesting. Thanks to our three guests that came along tonight.

Very interesting meeting you and listening to all your stuff.

It’s given me plenty to do over the next few weeks looking at your website.

So I appreciate that. And thanks to my colleagues.

And we’ll also say thank you very much to Tina, our fitness expert, with all of her

counting her steps as she’s been recording there. Thank you for this evening.

It’s been fascinating tonight. I feel a little less lonely because it turns out I’m not the

only person that finds Apple TV a bit. So that’s good. I thought it was just me, but apparently

not. So yeah, that’s good. I’m not in a minority of one and that’s always a good feeling. Maybe one

day they’ll sell it to me and I’ll be there. But it’s been really interesting to hear different

viewpoints. Brilliant, thank you. And as always thank you very much for listening

and until next week thank you and goodbye.

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