Hi and welcome back to the Brew and Btye podcast episode 18, the iPad form follows function.
I’m your host Craig and if this is the first time you’re joining us, welcome.
And if you’re a long time listener, thanks for your support. Over the next hour, we discuss all
the recent software updates from Apple and why they’re important, as well as why a new Apple
watch may be useful for diabetic sufferers and our feature as we delve into the best use for an iPad,
as well as having time to answer your tech questions. Let’s join the conversation.
Let’s firstly say hello to Alistair. How are you this evening?
I’m good. How’s everyone?
Good, thank you. And next up, we’ll say hello to Tina. How are you?
A happy and relieved person who’s back with her phone. So that’s good.
There’s also a new shiny piece of tech I think you’re hiding away there in the corner.
I’ve got one of the Yen One Macbook S. So that’s good fun.
Our first convert.
I’ve given in.
And we’ll also say hello to Martin. Did he order a purple iPhone?
Ah, good evening, Craig. No, I didn’t. I know purple is my color, but I’ve got my iPhone red.
so that’ll do me for a while. I’m still looking, it’s the Mac Mini I’ve decided the route to go
for me. I want to refresh my monitors so I decided that would be the best route.
Yeah, in terms of value for money that makes sense for sure.
I think so, yeah. If you look at the specs, spec for spec, the iMac and the Mac Mini,
the only major difference I can see is two extra ports on the iMac and a 24-inch monitor.
Are you going to go for the current lineup or are you hanging on in the hope that there’s going to
to be a super Mac Mini with a M1X or whatever it’s going to be called.
The problem with all kit, as you know, the day you buy it, the following day you can
buy something faster and cheaper. So I’ve gone beyond thinking like that. Now I’ve got
a 2018 MacBook Pro, which is struggling. I’m doing a lot of work on Photoshop and the last
few shows I’ve done, it’s really struggled. It’s taken a long time to render. I suppose
in reality it’s not a long time but what I’ve seen the M1s capable of I think that would
be my next upgrade. That’s a very good point because this week’s first bit of news is that
we finally have some idea of a shipping date for some of the new items that were released
and that we believe they’re coming on the 21st. Always believe John Lewis, they’ll never
knowingly lie to you or be undissolved or whatever their thing is.
They were also the people that accidentally leaked that date, I think, on their homepage
and the actual date was also found in the code of Apple’s own website. If you actually
viewed the source code of the site, it had the 21st mentioned as the shipping date.
Is that for all the pre-orders? If you’re looking to go out and place an order tonight,
I suppose you’ll be looking at several weeks after that.
Yes, some of the most popular models are almost at the end of June, I think the 30th of June.
An interesting comment, I don’t know if you came across this, was somebody told me today that the
UK has the longest shipping dates of all the other countries. And I wondered if anyone had any ideas
why that may be. Has it… is it anything to do with shipping through Europe? Because that’s no more…
I’m not going to mention the B word, but that’s no more complicated than it used to be.
Rumour has it it’s about a two-week difference, so we’ve got a longer wait for us Brits.
Isn’t there a large distribution centre in, is it Netherlands or Belgium as well as in Cork?
The kit that I’ve had and bought online usually has come from the Netherlands as the posting or
the forwarding point for items I’ve bought. My understanding originally was that Apple
for previous launches used to prioritize the UK for phones first because we were one of the highest
percentage of phones being sold because we have five networks which sell the iPhone when America
at the time only had two. So they used to prioritize us as being the highest selling phone. So this was
around I think iPhone 7 time and I’m not sure if that’s changed but it could be that if the
kit is coming in it’s going to countries which would need it first. The only ones I can think
of which would be in that category would be Italy or France because if you’re coming in
for the Mediterranean you go to Italy then you go to France first. Greece has not got a big
apple presence. If you look at the lineup of the people who are in the list when apple will say
and it will be available in these countries we’re sort of in the first category and it tends to be
us, Ireland, and then it goes France, Germany, Belgium, and the rest of the continent.
I wonder if there’ll be another issue with the colours again. Do you remember when the
iMac came out in a range of five colours? Apple insisted that all the producers had to buy a certain
number of the not so popular colours. They couldn’t just pick and choose the green or the blue if that
was what people were ordering. They had to take… Now we’ve got seven colours in the new iMac range.
are they going to have to ship all seven colors or have they already decided which is going to be the
more popular? I presume that when they ship them from the manufacturing point they all come out in
as Alastair’s favorite term the Goldilocks format and then at the distribution center there’s a
stream taken away for actual conversion to individual orders or if you’ve put in a special
requirement for additional memory or storage and that they’re taken out at that point.
So the distribution cycle now with seven colors must make it harder as well.
I think they do some form of judgment over what is likely to be popular because obviously having
just done an order and I did click and collect which I have to say thank you Stratford Express
was very safe, but I obviously got a popular model. So they’ve already had 20 years of working out
which color devices people like, so we only have to look back at the iPhone 5c when that came out
in color and they found out which colors work best in which countries and it transpired that,
what was it, the color which was least picked up, I think was the yellow one, and then they said
certain countries had a real colour which they consider their national colour and so
they discovered that certain colours were setting up in certain countries. So it wouldn’t
surprise me at all if certain countries pick up certain colours but other ones don’t. So
they would have already pre-selected certain countries to get it. If I remember correctly
when the iMac version B came out, which is the colour ones, the orange and the red were
the highest demand, but the ones that most people got given were green and purple because
they were the ones that people didn’t want. And the one which was the hardest to get out
of all of them, can you remember? There was one called Blue Labrador and Blue Labrador
was the one with the daisies on it. It was impossible to order. You had to have, it was
a limited edition and they were only, I think, 100,000 produced. And you had to know someone
or we had to put a pre-request in the day they were announced at the Apple event.
Because we tried to order one for our university because it had a particular upgraded spec.
We were told they already sold out.
The other piece of news this week is the security aspect and privacy subject
fell when we saw the release of 14.5.
Have any of you noticed any difference since you’ve installed it on anything?
Music’s changed slightly. It gave me a whole list of things that it’s slightly different on there.
But I haven’t actually seen any difference but it’s told me it’s put a few new features in.
Because they also released 14.5.1 which if you haven’t got it I’d recommend that you did because
there were a number of security issues. One being a flaw in WebKit which is actually the mechanism
that’s built onto Safari. So that’s an important one. I don’t know if Alistair’s got some more.
It’s good to see that Apple’s bug bounty program is working because they announce it and then
Apple released a fix. I think it’s what 30 days after?
This time was really quick. It might even be a record in that that’s the quickest
next update that they’ve pushed out just seven days after the previous one.
I think the fastest one previously was two hours and that was something like OS 8 or something.
The other exciting thing is did any of you download 14.6? So the beta we’ve seen one rather
unusual add-on so now you can actually apply an emoji image to the name of your air tag instead
of it just being a name. So if you’ve had an emoji engraved on your AirTag you can now match it in the
software because that feature is not currently available. There was also some issues around the
privacy settings. I don’t know, did any of you see the privacy option grayed out on any of your
devices? People were finding it difficult to turn off the app tracking. That has been changed. If
you haven’t looked, it’s worth having a look because it’s not evident that it may not have
being active on your phone so pop into settings to see if it’s in there and it should by default be
turned on with a little green icon but if it is greyed out it’s worth trying to reset that because
you may not even find that you can turn it on and off it’s actually a bug that’s been greyed out
quite a number of customers have seen that hopefully 14.6 that’s coming at some point in
in the future resolves that for a lot of people. The other big change is how we actually get
iOS updates. So now you can actually download a software update over the mobile phone network,
which was never an option before. And if you see an update pop up in the settings, you
can choose to install now or delay it until you’ve gone and connected to a wifi network.
I must admit the upgrade cycle for most products seems to work relatively well.
It does it automatically a night.
The phone tells me it’s going to update when it’s in a power supply.
My watch says, okay, next time it’s connected at 50%, it will connect through the phone to do its update.
So that background process, automatic updates, seems to work for me relatively well.
I can’t say I’ve had too many issues about problems afterwards.
And I think, especially with the amount of software piracy that’s going on and spam and
everything else, I think staying automatically updated to me makes sense.
I know some people don’t like to have the updates.
And I can’t recall a time when an update actually did any real harm to any of the machines.
I was working a couple of minor issues with compatibility with third-party product.
But normally, as the old saying goes, it just works.
interesting isn’t it because you’ve got the whole thing at the moment with Epic and Apple arguing
in court and I think one of the things that concerns me is whether or not we lose the ability
with the sandboxing because as someone who doesn’t, I don’t do anything you know I used to be a teacher
so I always had students that said that they could hack my phone so that I could do other stuff
that wasn’t allowed and I was always, “Well, wouldn’t some lose some?” Maybe I don’t have that
much control, but because of the sandboxing, I at least feel like my phone is mostly safe.
So I’m happy to stay within the ecosystem because although I’ve given up some control,
I’ve gained a lot more safety. And what is interesting will be what things like Facebook
do because I think in America they’re looking at something like 94% of people have opted out of tracking.
That’s actually a really good point. This kind of goes off topic, but in talking with other podcast
producers and some other software developers, they are coming up against a revenue stream issue in
that they’ve actually lost money from advertising agencies because the information is no longer
are going to be there. They can’t physically target a customer as such as they could before.
So it’s kind of now we’re seeing what’s going to go potentially the other way in terms of
investment into the industry. But that’s a whole other topic. That’s not an easy one
to answer in five minutes. But the one exciting thing is we now have an official WWDC countdown.
And can Martin tell us how many days are left on Apple’s countdown until the big day?
We were talking about the actual image that you see is, I’m sure, to take on Craig’s
loving picture as he gazed into his Apple laptop as he opened it up at the show.
Here we see, it’s obviously not an emoji of Craig for the reach, but there is a lot of
love in those eyes looking, staring into that screen.
We have 28 days, 21 hours, 17 minutes, and 24, 23, 22 seconds to go.
I’m very much hoping that we will be having one of our Elmug special events on the night to have a look at the show as it happens and then have a chat and a discussion about the major features of it afterwards.
So watch out on the website and on our stand by for our members and all those other people listening for details of that special Elmug event night.
Now, are we going to discuss the rumour mill? So this big rumour for this week was, is the Apple
Watch going to receive a glucose monitoring feature? Reason being is that supposedly Apple
have made lots of investments in a UK startup company that has a significant relationship with
blood sugar monitoring functions and will we see it before 2022?
As a diabetes sufferer, I have to do the stick test a couple of times a day to monitor my levels.
There are systems out there you can buy now, which are like stick-on patches,
which will monitor the glucose levels on an instant basis. But some of them can be quite expensive,
they’re 35, 40 pounds a month for a month’s kit. The fact that you could have a watt that could
keep an eye on that would be for me an absolute first reason to buy the new phone and update.
And I think that the fact that you’ve got a mobile tracking system, again, I suppose that the app will not only warn you if there’s a problem, but if you happen to go into shock and have passed out, if the phone can then issue a warning or bleep or telephone an emergency number, there’s all manner of exciting items that that would open up.
they can crack the accuracy, that would be amazing because diabetes in this country is a big deal.
And if you don’t keep your glucose levels steady, there are so many things that come from that.
And with an aging population, it would be a big deal, really. I do think accuracy is the
key though, because I’ll be honest, sometimes I know I’m unfit, but I look at my heart rate
according to my watch and I’m thinking it’s not beating that fast. You know, I know I’m on the
foot but my chest would actually be coming out of my chest if it was that bad. If it is that
super accurate I could look at it and say okay am I going to go up to the bar now and have that
extra pint of Guinness or not? It could be, you know, extremely useful. The other one which will
be interesting which they’ve already sort of highlighted and I’m not sure if anyone’s looked
at the technicality of this but most of these rely on you being hydrated. So if you’re in a warmer
climate you’ll dehydrate quicker. One of the apps may say you need to hydrate before
we can give you an accurate representation. You may find that people will have to drink
more water as a result of it because it says we can’t give an accurate reading at the
moment. Please drink a glass of water, then check in five minutes and we’ll be able to
confirm it. The way in which it sends electricity through your body, if you’re dehydrated,
a wrong reading or false positive and so it may in some respects extend some people’s lives because
they’re pushing out the toxins. So this may be a whole new range of things which may be happening
as a result. What could shorten their lives because it’d be Martin thinking hydration equals Guinness.
This made me think of a really rubbish app I think I first bought when I first got an icon,
you know, you could get, was it a pint of beer and pretend to drink it. We all bought that one along
with the candle. Do you remember we all bought the candle, the burning candle, so we had a little
little night light of a candle burning. Yes, I remember that well. Innocent days. Okay,
who has still got either of those two apps on their phone? I haven’t, but I didn’t take it off. I just
think that it just was never upgraded and therefore it’s one of those apps that can’t be, can’t, you
operate on the latest system.
Okay, let’s move on to our main topic, which for once is something different to a Mac, or is it even closer to a Mac, as you may think now, is the subject of the iPad. And Apple is well known for its industrial design, does form really follow function? My quiz question to the panel tonight will be, does anybody know when the first iPad was released?
Well, because the first iPhone was 2007, so I’d say 2010, I’d say.
2014, I’d say.
Alistair is closest.
It was the 3rd of April 2010.
But we thought we would talk about that tonight because if you did see Apple’s big pile of cash,
you may have also spotted that just in iPad sales, it was worth 7.8 billion US dollars,
which is actually up 79% on the previous year.
I know maybe the pandemic has a lot to answer for in terms of our use of tech
and what we’re doing from home, but that’s quite an astounding figure to jump by.
My first question of this evening was people’s first experiences of their iPads,
and most importantly, has your use of your iPad changed since you first got it?
I’ll take a stab at that one. When I first had the first iPad I had was an iPad Pro,
the original one. And I think like most, I used it for watching stuff, doing mail,
the kind of stuff that you could easily do, touching the screen, tapping the screen. But
as the machine has got better and the apps have improved, I don’t use my laptop as much out and
about as I used to. And I use my iPad for doing things, creative things now, where one of my,
I’m going to pre-empt your favorite app question here. I use an app like Magic Plan,
which I use for site surveys. The big thing for me now with that is I can use that to measure a room,
and then I can use that and download that to my main 3D drawing program. The use of the pencil
there on the iPad is brilliant, that you can alter and adapt and change things. Literally,
you’re working almost like a piece of paper. So that has changed in how much I actually use an iPad
for now, not just doing emails and watching some YouTube or a film.
And the new one I’d like to upgrade because it has the LiDAR sensor on it.
And in that case, all I have to do now with this Magic Plan app
is that I just literally stand in the middle of the room
and I can work my way round and it will measure each wall
and do the whole basic outline of the building that I want
straight into the system, which is hugely time consuming.
And when you’re going around trying to measure every individual
nook and cranny to be able to do that. And again, with the iPad, you can use your camera,
you can take photographs of details. So for me, it’s an incredibly useful tool out on site where
I do a lot of my work. Perfect. So for me, my example, I would say that it’s completely changed
in that, yes, I did have the original iPad when it first came out. And at that point, an app store
didn’t exist, so we couldn’t install any other extra apps. I also think how I use the actual iPad
has changed. So maybe generations one to three it was more of an entertainment like consumer device
in that I would watch lots of TV or I would surf the internet on it. But now we’ve got the iPad Pro
range and they’re getting far more advanced. I think a lot of that is down to the software
more than anything. I don’t know about you but I seem to find that now the apps that I’ve got
installed on the iPad mirror the ones that are on the Mac and they’re even more closer than they
they were before. I don’t think I would have ever had Photoshop or Procreate or a form
of drawing program as you mentioned there, Martin. I think a lot of the progress has
been made from the software side of things. I don’t know if Alistair has a similar opinion
or not.
From what I’ve seen that some of the apps you can now get are quite specialized, especially
the drawing apps. I agree with Martin that the camera side has really picked up since
the very first iPads came out, my iPad is still an iPad 3, so I have it pretty much
as a sort of just looking at films or checking the internet or carrying something around
to look at photos with. So it was like a picture frame. Because what I found is I ended up
carrying most of the stuff I needed on my iPhone. So my iPhone is turned into a sort
of a smaller iPad so I do a lot on that. But then again I do travel with a MacBook Pro
pretty much all the time so I’m always with a bigger device when I’m traveling. But what
I have noticed is everyone from using the iPad as their only camera and you’ll see it
when you go to some historic monuments and you see someone going around with an iPad
when you realize that the iPad they’re using is nothing better than an iPad 2 because it’s
got square edges and you think hang on that’s iPad 2. Then the other thing I’ve
noticed is that some people have it as the only computer they use. Everything is
on the iPad and they have completely sold off all their computers and this is
their sole device. So it was quite impressive how much things have changed.
So I’ve got an iPad Pro from 2018. I’m not getting the most out of it because I’m
still at the I consume things on it rather than use it to create. So I watch
things, I read things. I’ve got a little bit more sophisticated so there are some
books for instance that I might buy Kindle and I’ll read it on my iPad
because it’s got colour. The irony is the thing it did save my bacon during the
first lockdown because an Apple pencil and PowerPoint and Teams meant that I
I was actually using it to teach online. So I can see a time that I might move to using an iPad,
especially when you start getting the power because it could be your only computer with a keyboard
and they sort the connectivity out for me. It could probably be it.
I find that I’m in the kind of quandary because two of the bits of software I use extensively,
Archicad and Final Cut Pro are not available on the iPad. So that’s why I have the laptop to do
that kind of work. So the upgrade process I’m going through this year will be to upgrade the
laptop. But I think now that the iPad Pro is to the extent of power and availability of programs,
the other than the two programs I don’t need on the iPad, that could replace all my other
computing needs, especially with the Magic Keyboard, everything else. It is in effect
the mini-laptop. How long will it be before iOS and Mac OS merge? So we have one operating system.
So there’s some interesting ideas on that. One of the problems one of my clients faces is that they
have at any given time anywhere between 50 and 150 tabs open in any browser, whether that be Safari
or whether that be Firefox.
And the biggest problem you have is when you have all those tabs open,
it just eats away at all your memory.
And Time Machine has a hard time trying to keep up with it.
And effectively, it’s what an iPad is excellent at.
But looking at a small screen compared to a 24-inch iMac,
there is a big difference.
But there are a number of excellent systems for saving memory
and saving power on an iPad.
And it wouldn’t surprise me if we have a sort of integration system
whereby you could offload or hand over, you know,
I would like this these tabs to be put in status
and then you just drag it over to the iPad in the iPad axis,
almost like a mini hard drive and holds them for you.
And then you slide them back again, a bit like a more advanced version of handoff.
and that way you’re not trying to get the iPad and the iMac to be the same device.
They’re both excellent at doing different systems.
My question was going to be, is the iPad better and if so why?
What, than a MacBook or a?
Than a standard mobile device in terms of it being maybe a MacBook, maybe a MacBook Pro
or even is it a desktop replacement?
For me, one of the things I like about a laptop is typing. And I suppose, and I prefer that at the
moment on a laptop, you could ask, is that because I haven’t got a keyboard for my iPad?
I have my, we’re talking now, my MacBook Pro is up on a stand,
help with airflow and I use a wireless keyboard. I can also use that with my iPad if I need to,
or I have the fold up iPad, keypad as well. I think the difference was when I got my iPad,
I had an early MacBook Pro which only had three hours of battery life, whereas the iPad Pro would
go all day on one charge. So you could sling it down on the chair beside you, on the couch,
wherever you were working, pick it up, turn it on, do it, put it away. The MacBook Pro at the time
didn’t have that facility. I know the new ones now, they last all day. So that was why I got the iPad
because it gave me that flexibility that not having to constantly keep the MacBook Pro charged up or
run out of charge at crucial times with it. Otherwise you have to carry other charges and
battery packs and all that kind of stuff. So the iPad from that point of view, all day life,
was very useful. You could just pick it up, off you go. I also think that in coming back to the
portability aspect of it, is that this is something where the internet is always on. It’s not like a
MacBook that you have to go and find a Wi-Fi connection. If you’ve got a 3G or even a 5G
iPad, you can always have some form of connection back to the internet. So if you need to pull a
piece of data off of iCloud, it’s going to be there. It’s less hassle. That’s my argument of
potentially why it could be better, especially if you’re in a job where you’re mobile all the time.
Well, I surprised you. I never got the cellular version. I always got the Wi-Fi version because
with my iPhone, it was easy to tether it to the iPhone and use it that way. So I didn’t
see the need to have a separate second account just for the iPad because invariably, you know,
my phone was with me. Again, going back to when the iPads came out, the phones were smaller,
you couldn’t really do big spreadsheets on them, and if the phones weren’t as
capable as they are today. That leads nicely onto one other major feature that might make the iPad
better is in terms of maintenance. So our tech expert Alistair may pick me up on this one, but
I think iPads are far easier to manage and look after because there’s no failure of butterfly
keyboards, there’s no necessarily major speaker problems in terms of spilling water over the top
of your MacBook Pro, there’s just a much lower failure rate in terms of the technology that’s
in it. But I’m sure Alistair’s going to argue his case on this one. The main difference you would have
is the iPad has got no fan so you would say okay up until the M series chips that was a big issue
because Intel required fans to keep them cool and up until very recently you like to have a laptop
because you could change the hard drive or you could change the gram you could upgrade it so it
was still cost effective but now with everything being all on one chip and the whole motherboard
unobtrusive, it does pose that question of what can you do with your Mac versus your laptop. But
the main thing I would say is that with a laptop when you travel you’ve got it covered. The top of
the screen covers the keyboard and the screen. With an iPad it’s open so you would have to buy
a case to cover the screen. A second one is that the vast majority of iPads I see stay in people’s
homes occasionally see them traveling but I see a dam site more people especially in airports
or going around the place dealing with that what they do carry with them is their phone
and their Kindle it’s going to be a difference of what people are familiar with I know a lot of
people use the iPads as a secondary device or to play a particular type of music or to to watch
something because it’s got better color to your picture or it’s lighter for traveling on holiday
with or they watch it for when they’re going on the long haul plane. That makes sense.
But if you’re looking at a multitasking device and someone has given you a USB stick with your
files on it with your Mac or with your iPad, you’ll have to convert it. But the software
at the moment is still holding up the iPad because the amount of times I go onto websites
and I and I’m loading on my phone and it won’t work and I have to go onto a computer because
the website is old-fashioned and doesn’t recognize the iPads today. So from a purely technical point
of view until they resolve a number of software issues or hardware issues we’ll always go have
problems. But we get the gap is closing I would admit that. Is it a generational thing do you think
guys? Are older people like ourselves more used to laptops, keyboards, that kind of form factor?
Whereas a lot of younger people who have grown up with touchscreens who are not familiar with
old-fashioned clackety keyboards. They haven’t got that inbuilt muscle memory about using an
old-fashioned typewriter. The younger people are more used to using touchscreens, flat screens,
and that kind of usage than people who’ve, you know, I’ve been using keyboards for what,
50 odd years now. And it’s almost built into me that I like a good solid keyboard that responds
to me tapping and typing, I do find the touchscreen a little bit more difficult to use.
It’s really interesting isn’t it, because I can remember we had a meeting and we was talking to
a member who was really excited about the idea that you could use scribble and write words in
Google for instance in a search, you know, you could use it on Safari and do searches. I did it
once just because I could and then I went back to just typing in it and that’s on an iPad because
I’m just it just just felt unnatural. Should I accept the fact that I’m not younging with it
and I’m still clinging on desperately so forget that. Right I think I find inputting data easier
with a keyboard. How about you Craig you’re obviously younger than that. That’s actually
a really good question so if I know I’ve got a lot to write I will sit at a keyboard but I may sit
at a keyboard that’s attached to an iPad? Yeah, what I’m saying, do you actually use the keyboard
on the iPad? Do you use the glass touchscreen for typing? That I find, it slows me down, I don’t
feel as comfortable using it. I’d rather, that’s why I’ve got the keyboard cover for the iPad,
I tend to use that all the time. I said I just, I don’t feel as comfortable typing onto a glass
screen as I do to a keyboard. See now, I would type a lot on my iPhone because of the size of it,
and yes maybe my fat thumbs type everything but I wouldn’t use an iPad screen to type with.
It’s interesting I would go back to a keyboard in that respect. I was just thinking about this when
I’ve traveled to other parts of the world whereby phone technology is like hugely popular. So when
I was going around Japan I didn’t actually see that many people carrying iPads or you’d see them
carrying phones all the time. They’re very common and very easy to get hold of, but they’re
a complete different range of phones than we have here.
But the main thing is that their keyboards are Western keyboards and a Japanese keyboard
is over 200 keys. Most of it is either done by speech, so you send something like a voice
message or you learn to type Western or you send pictures, which is where the emoji comes
from. It’s a sort of cultural difference as well. One of the things I noticed was that
laptops are still big. I went to the Apple store in Tokyo and laptops are still very popular there
because it’s the formal thinking of it. When you have a laptop, it’s a serious option. With a phone,
it’s something you carry with you. It’s the convenience. I remember reading, “Stop trying
to get every device to cater for every single individual. Some people prefer to have a device
which has just turn it on and it works.
You’re moving into an area there, we have to do workplace assessments for people working
in offices and there an iPad is totally or was totally inappropriate. You can’t get the
screen at the right height. It doesn’t work in that. If you’re going to be sitting at
a PC for eight hours in a day, an iPad or a plate or a tablet or anything like is a
very difficult concept to work into workplace assessment for safe seating
and safe use. So that’s why so many people still have the old-fashioned PC
on their desk because that can be configured and made to work. And also in
some situations the other issue about iPads is they’re personal devices and
sometimes users aren’t personal devices, they’re devices that lots of different
people use and so you have accounts and you sign into your account.
Ooh, there’s the multi-user question coming right there.
Yeah, and so at the moment, iPads, multi-user is an interesting area.
I think the biggest problem though is if you’re trying to lay stuff out,
if you are, let’s say you’re writing a document and you’ve got the first draft
and the second draft side by side on the computer, you can arrange them
right naturally, right, then you can do it. But as soon as you put that keyboard on,
you’ve lost some of your screen size and so then you have to go to an external keyboard,
which you have as part of your case, in order to get that screen space back so you could do
side-by-side comparison. And the other factor is that if you look at it, you’re comparing a
12 inch iPad or 9 inch iPads to a 24 inch monitor and over time your eyes will no matter what you
try it’s very hard try to look at that small screen even though it’s got great resolution
whereas a big monitor at the right height is just easier to read off. I think you’ve very
much you’ve hit the nail on the head there Alastair in in the fact that the iPad is a portable
computer, whereas your Mac Mini or your iMac or whatever isn’t. And I think they do, they’re
designed and aimed at two totally different markets. There is some crossover between them,
and yes, you can use an iPad as a iMac in a lot of situations, but there’s benefits to either one.
But my concern is how close is the iPad getting to a laptop? That’s where the real discussion
arises, is it going to replace a laptop? Are we going to lose the MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs?
I reckon you’ll always have the MacBook Pros but the MacBook Airs could disappear and the MacBooks
could disappear because if you look at it they’re very competitive at the moment on price. Whereas
if we go on the the old Steve Jobs model of have the Pro line and the consumer line you could do
that but what they discovered and the thing it’s keeping it alive from what I understand is two
areas. One, in America there’s this system whereby schools have to give a
computer to their pupils going through the year in order to comply with this
online computer thing which is a big thing in America. They tried doing it
with iPads but they can’t get all the book formats to appear on iPads because
Apple only has iBooks, whereas you need to go onto certain websites and read
books or if it’s not Pearson it’s another group and try to look at it
that way. The second thing is that the corporate use like to have the ability to lock out certain
actions from your computer. They have the administrator account and the one which they
give the person who’s now got that computer account. And when someone moves the apartment,
they take off the profile and give it to someone else. With an iPad, you have to wipe everything
and put it back on again. It’s not that simple. The other thing we’ve discovered is would
the iPad disappear completely and would we just end up with a merged iPad iPhone? So
that’s always been a discussion as well.
From a technical standpoint, the only thing that’s really stopping the iPad becoming
a full integrated solution of its own and discounting MacBooks and MacBook Pros is the
fact that you cannot have more than one audio interface, which is an absolute nightmare.
If you’re doing anything with audio, you have to have a secondary device that’s actually
physically recording audio. A MacBook Pro can happily do it but an iPad doesn’t have a chance.
I think they’ll bring iOS closer to Mac OS and eventually they will. I think there’ll be a
hybrid of the two so that apps that run on either an iMac can run on an iPad. I know they’re getting
towards it now, a lot of the apps are transferable but the operating system I think will at some
point merge having what they’ve got now five different operating systems I think is going
down surprises me for Apple because they don’t like that kind of diverse occasion. They prefer
things to be simple one on straight on with you know OS 10 for example. So I think there is an
issue there that especially now with the A14 chip being so similar to the M1 chip and I don’t think
I think that divergence will disappear in the next round. I think we won’t see you know the M1X or
or the M2 will also power the phones.
- So has anyone used the Microsoft equivalent?
So Microsoft Surface is the same operating system
as you have on the, so it’s Windows 10,
and then you’ve got the Windows 10 Surface laptops,
and then you’ve got the Windows 10,
which you can put on there when you use Windows machines.
The problem is it didn’t work on the phone.
The member Windows phones were around for a long time,
and a lot of people liked them
because it was very simple and it worked very well,
but it was a very different animal from the Surface.
They were very different.
They were two separate operating system,
but based upon the same idea.
The vast majority of the public couldn’t get on
with Windows phones and Surfaces are still very good machines.
They’re excellent.
They go around and people have them.
But what do you see in the coffee shops?
What do you see in the films?
What do you see generally going around the high street?
You don’t see Microsoft Surfaces.
Services are normally for business users who want something small, elegant and powerful,
which runs Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
Fine, that’s excellent.
But the biggest problem they ran up against was internal memory because they never put
good enough, the original ones didn’t have big enough memory in them, if you remember.
You mentioned earlier on Alastair that a Surface, you can have an admin account on it, which
businesses like.
And that’s the big difference between that and iPad Pro.
all the reasons you said about security access for companies, they want to make sure they know what
you’re putting on that machine. So a Surface Pro can have an admin account on it to lock out the
chances you put in some nefarious software on it. Well, I’ve got one question to ask you all. Do you
think we’re overthinking this? And actually the business market is not relevant for the iPad and
it should the iPad should only really be catering for the consumer market and the new M series MacBook
airs are for the business side.
I think the iPad Pro is targeted at the designer market, isn’t it?
Apple loved the high-end marketing of architects using it and designers using it, fashion designers,
all those sort of people.
If you look at the adverts they do, they’re not too many builders in there and there’s
not too many people who look after accounts.
There’s still no good accounting software for the Mac.
It’s never been an area they’ve targeted at all.
Because it’s too boring.
not sort of stylized nice sort of people they want using their iPads. Yeah from a creativity
standpoint you’re definitely right on that one for sure because even I think now the amount of
drawing apps or in particular I think back now when I was taught in a design school Wacom tablets
were a huge thing. This is before the days where you could physically see what you’re drawing on
the actual surface of it but now they’re getting replaced by iPads and iPad Pros and it’s when you
start looking at industry pieces of software. So I did an update recently on Procreate and the
interesting thing on Procreate’s main page of their website is that this app is used by Disney,
this app is used by LucasArts. All of their creation content is coming from an iPad. It’s
not a Wacom drawing tablet as such anymore. It’s completely changed the market.
Well, look at trying to do, if you’re trying to do work in Photoshop or any of the photo
manipulation apps, using a pencil on an iPad as opposed to a mouse on a big screen is so much
easier. It’s much more creative, I think, if you’re using a pencil. Like you mentioned,
Tina, what I’m doing out and about on sites and stuff like that, the advantage of having a pencil
to be able to make a note or an annotation on the screen for a drawing that I’ve just put in.
and I come across, oh there’s a pipe in here that I need to remember. Being able to add that with a
pencil very quickly is so much easier. Or even taking a picture of something, I can take a picture
of a particular issue, corner, project, whatever I want to do and now I can write on the screen with
my pencil, draw an arrow to it and make notes for myself that when I’m back in the office, oh yeah,
I remember that gas pipe sticking out of the wall. Brilliant, that for me works so well, being able
to tie the drawing, the photograph and it made me a quick scribble, no, it’s just invaluable.
Oh, that’s going to throw in the question is if you had to choose one iPad app, what would it be?
What would you say is your favourite?
I use an app called Magic Blank, which for me is absolutely brilliant. It helps me with all my
survey work from creating the actual model that we’re going to be working on to making photographs,
to making notes, to typing in bits and pieces. I can link it, it’s secured over the internet.
So if I lost the pad on the way back to the office, all that work I’ve done is still stored on the cloud
and I can just download it when I get back to my machine. I could import all that information into
my big flashy Archicad package. Yeah, that app is brilliant. And for that app, Martin, does it work
in terms of having layers and does major programs like Photoshop pick up those? Surprisingly, there
is a 3D element to the latest version of the house now. I’ve got 3D, but that gets much more difficult
importing into the 3D you’ve got to have exactly the right format to do that in.
As for photos, no they’re not layered so it doesn’t help in that sense but the resolution
of the camera is still pretty good that you could take that in the Photoshop and start working on it
if you needed to. I feel bad now because Martin’s done something really clever and mine’s not going
to be clever at all and I’ve been thinking about it. Messenger and the reason I like messenger is
hard as it is to believe I have friends who don’t have iPads or iPhones and yep and I still speak
to them. Messages cross platforms. And okay, I’ve got friends that don’t use Facebook for
various reasons, so then I use Teams. But it just means that I can see and speak to friends.
I can remember that was like the big excitement when they talked about what was going to happen
in the future, apart from the fact that they said that people were only going to work two days a
week because there wouldn’t be enough work for everyone. I do a full week. I’m still disappointed.
and paperless office, that was the other one. But video calls, video calls are just like,
when you stop to think about it, amazing, especially in this last year. The idea that you
can see people, talk to people. A messenger for me means that they don’t have to have an iPhone.
I still prefer FaceTime, I’ll be honest, but Messenger is pretty good for people that are on
Facebook, but I want to speak to, so like that. Alistair, do you have a favourite?
So this one’s going to sound a bit peculiar, but a lot of the people I teach iPads to and the app
which they get the iPad for is mail. It’s their only way they send and receive mail because it’s
something they can carry around with them. And the only thing I ever get asked for is how can I use
mail more effectively or what does this mean or how do I send an attachment with this or how can I
use it and it may sound really simplistic but if all you really want is a device that sends email
or just receives email an iPad is brilliant because you don’t need any additional software
to read the attachments. One of your relatives has sent you a document you can read it and you
can go thank you for it you don’t have to reply to it and if you need to do anything it just works
you know click on this link to open up zoom what zoom well if you click on that link it will show
you. It’s such a simple app but it works so well that people don’t realize how clever it is.
I struggled when I came up with this question of being able to pinpoint one particular app.
I really like JumpTestTop which allows you to remotely control and log in to other machines.
That’s really useful if you’re out and about but I think the winning function is yet again
something that’s built into the OS which is the share sheet. I use that so much. So when I describe
the share sheet it’s actually the technical term for the little square icon with an arrow at the
bottom that you press every time you want to bookmark a page in Safari or you want to share a
photograph to someone. But the interesting thing is that you can customize that so much more in the
OS and when you think about it how much you use that throughout the day is quite staggering.
So you’ll take a photo and you’ll press share sheet to send to a contact or you’ll write a note
and you want to share it. There are some very little clever little interactions that people
have put on there as well. So for people that use drafts you can share to drafts so you can
make a note or you can share a URL link directly into messages like Tina was saying.
My favorite one has to be some of the customizable ones so it’s almost like having shortcuts.
So you can remove the XF data out of an image or you can select all the text on the page and
convert it to HTML or Markdown and it’s literally all these functions all in one tiny little grid
and the list goes on, I will happily share some in the show notes, the ones that I use.
But I probably hit that maybe two, three hundred times a day doing different things.
I think after what we said, it really is down to the use that you want to. I think,
yes, initially it was a consumer-only device. You mostly used it just to look at stuff. But
over the course of time, I’ve used it much more and I think it will, I think it’s got to a point
now it can replace my MacBook Pro for 80% of the work I do. I was just looking through my apps
on the dock and how many of those are iPad or iOS apps and it’s almost all of them.
This is the point of the show where we answer our listeners tech questions. By all means you’re
happy for us to be emailed in with your tech questions or you can even leave us a voice message
which the link can be found in the show’s description on all iOS or Apple Podcasts apps
as well as many other third parties. Our first question today is, I wish to share a password
using AirDrop. Is AirDrop safe? We would first say that if you’re on a private network,
which is say your home network and you’re sharing it from one computer to the other,
The chances are the only people on that network is yourself and anyone else in your family, so thus it would be safe.
Whereas if you were using the Wi-Fi in Starbucks and you’re sending it to your phone, to your computer or to your colleague,
anyone inside Starbucks could catch that signal and intercept it, is a possibility.
So what we would say is if it’s on a private network, you’re probably secure.
But if it’s on a public Wi-Fi network, no.
Does AirDrop use encryption like WhatsApp?
I.e. no, from what I understand it’s not of the same level.
I know it has a basic form of encryption, but it’s not the pre-forward encryption
which WhatsApp have, which means you can’t do a replay attack.
Because WhatsApp currently follows the Signal Protocol, which is a much tougher security
system.
At the moment, it’s going to be tricky to answer that one completely because Apple are quite careful at not revealing the answers.
Lots of work has been done in trying to understand how it actually communicates with other devices.
And I think that’s part of the breakdown in its security aspect of that.
So we, as with everything, you can’t be 100%.
The next question is, how do I mute my Mac startup chime?
And I was thinking about this when I first read it,
why would I want to do that?
And to be honest, the only suggestion I come across
was that maybe you’re in a lecture hall
and you turned up late and you didn’t want the embarrassment
of the machine booting up.
That might be a reason why,
or if you’re in a recording environment,
but I don’t see why you’d want to do that.
- So effectively, all we can think of is,
A you’re in an environment which is noise sensitive, so if you turn on the noise it
would cause problems.
Second one, you’re in an environment which prohibits branding, so by turning the bong
on it is branding and thus it breaks your legal requirements inside the building, which
I have come across in one instance.
What I would say is it would probably be a terminal command which you would change in
single user mode, which would get into the firmware which would adjust it.
When they were coders who were changing the firmware to make the computer go “bong” when they didn’t go “bong”,
they found that certain operating systems would be more effective than others and Big Sur being the most difficult.
So effectively, you could change the updates and then Apple could release the firmware and it could eradicate that system.
So you’ve got to be very careful about changing anything at the firmware level.
Second of all, you don’t know what you might deactivate in the process of doing so.
So I would say yes, there are stuff out there, but it’s going to be tricky.
And the last question came from Ellen and she put, I do a lot of written work on the Mac
and I often end up with multiple copies of documents and I tend to lose track of them.
Is there a way to compare them or to make sure that I have the right file?
This is a bit of a tricky one.
I think a lot of this comes down to whichever writing app you’re using.
may be able to give some more detailed advice. The only two options that I could find in this
in thinking about the programs I use is that when you write in drafts it creates a version number
and you can physically revert back to a version or you can put them side by side so there is a
form of comparison. And the only other app that I can think of that does it better or in more detail
is BB_EDIT and BB_EDIT actually has a function that’s called find Differences and you can compare
the two windows. So if you open up two text documents it will actually highlight where the
differences are. The only thing I could think of was you do an MD5 hash and compare the two hashes
and that will tell you if the file is identical but that won’t tell you which one is newer than
any other. It just compares them to see if it’s a duplicate. Where in the past I would say,
you know in Finder you have the ability to say in a spotlight search, which is the one which you see
when you open up a Finder window and on the right hand side, that you can type into and say I’m
looking for a file with this name and then you can say I’m looking for date opened or date modified.
So show me all files which are date modified or of this size and then you can do a comparison.
You can see, okay, this one was open at 1024, this one was open at 1025 and I can compare
the difference but there isn’t a lot out there to compare. I mean there was in pages and text edit,
if you go up to that little tiny triangle you can see all the different versions and you could go
back because they’re both saved in the cloud. You can see different versions of it but that
won’t tell you which is the newer version because this is a tricky thing. You can see which file is
the same size, you can see which files were opened latest and newest, but it won’t tell you what the
contents of the document is because you need a human to read the context and this is now where
we’re going to AI software where it’s understanding the contextual content of the text to compare
over to and say well this one is actually newer or this one has been checked for spelling.
I’m intrigued that’s opened a can of worms in one in a go away and find the answer to this one.
So sadly we’ve come to the end of yet another episode of the Bruin By It Show and we’ll say
thank you to Martin this evening. Thank you very much. Thank you very much guys.
Oh it’s nice to talk to you and talk to our listeners.
And thank you to Tina.
Night all, all the best, hope you’re having a good time wherever you are.
And thank you to Alistair.
It was always fun meeting up with you guys so goodbye.
If you’ve enjoyed the show we would love for you to follow or subscribe depending on your podcast
player of choice. We also love to hear your feedback and as always we release a new episode
every other Monday. Until then, thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
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