iPhone 8 Apple 2017

Hardware and technical stuff
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No, I don’t see it as a problem, exactly. In my case, there are enough questions about how I would like things with the X that coupled with the price is making it a pass for me. I think whatever the high-end version of a phone in 3 years I will get

Long aside about ATP:.

In ATP, the combination of the hosts I feel is its strong point. Seemingly by accident (no pun intended), they have managed to balance out and counter a lot negatives from the other hosts.

Casey is indeed the voice of the every day user. And I agree with him on the Watch. Marco would have shit himself his his ISP said, “give me $10/month for every WIFI device you hook to the router” which is basically what the cell providers are doing. Casey also gets that a lot of what they winge about is first world problems of a large magnitude. Casey bridges John and Marco with corporate, “real job” experience.

That said, I love John to pieces. He and I are from the same area (Boston), and he has a lot of New England frugal sensibilities. I have no idea what their take home is each month from ATP. I know that they gross about 12k per episode, but I don’t know much hosting charges are, or if they give Marco a bigger cut for editing. But is is clear that John is that version of the lotto winner who still drives the beat up car. I love that while he has a household full of shit in his attic, he put off getting an iPhone for forever. Also, he has a lifetime in corporate America, and does a good job at countering Marcos’ “I don’t get why companies don’t just do X”. John explains that yes, it makes zero sense why companies do this, but yep, they do, and probably because of Y. John also has a well-documented pedantic side that reminds me of a co-worker. I think John’s wife deserves a medal. That said, being somewhat overly critical myself, I enjoy listening to the master in action.

Marco is an interesting one.The money he received from Tumblr’s sale to Yahoo has made him incredibly comfortably-well off. He is the poster child for what would you do for work if you have a massive financial cushion to fall back on. What I find them talking about recently was “the beach house” which near as I can tell is on Fire Island in New York. I don’t know if he upped and bought it, or the family took a summer-long rental. He mentioned having an LG Retina Monitor at the beach house. He is, however, a great developer and it has been interesting to see his transition from just a developer, to a businessman, to a designer, and a combination. He still handles direct criticism poorly (see, the Samantha Bielfield affair, and the ad blocker app affair), but I have found at least on the podcast for him to be very open about what business models have and have not worked, as well as just struggles with indie development. I’m not a programmer, but I also enjoy Under the Radar. What I love is one personality trait which is the “Marco self-depreciating chuckle” Usually deployed when he admits he bought a 15" MacBook Pro, sold it two weeks later, bought a 13" MacBook Pro, sold it when he realized it didn’t fit his needs, and then bought another 15" MacBook Pro anyway.

The discussions are fun. I just wish they could record a short episode.

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I’m actually shocked that it’s the price the US carriers seem to have settled on. Here in Canada, the launch carrier, Bell, is offering it for $5/month CAD with the first 3 months free if you’re already a Bell subscriber. My brother, who bought a series 2 watch 13 days before the announcement, and is already on Bell immediately returned his non-cellular and ordered a series 3 cellular right afterward. $5/month is the right price to basically clone a number and share data with a limited data-use device,.

And as for ATP: I sometimes find Casey just a little bit too agreeable and uncritical, but I suppose that does balance out John’s lovable curmudgeon. Hmm, if they really gross $12K / episode * 4 episodes a month, and 12 months a year that’s about $144K each per year before any income taxes, and assuming they divide things equally. I suspect they do divide things evenly, because even though Marco does the edit, he also has the most non-jobby job free time. They also sell T-shirts once a year, so they probably even do better than that. It’s pretty impressive, really.

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Their ad rates are 4K per ad, 3 per episode. That said. I can’t imagine thieir hosting costs are cheap. I’m curious if they run it like a business and just draw a salary per week. That way if they have a down week, or ran a special for an ad read that is lower money for a longer run, they each bring home the same amount.

I thought I remember Marco mentioning the hosting costs could be thousands of dollars per episode.

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I haven’t gone deep into the matter, but I know there are tons of free solutions for hosting podcasts. Google Play will do it, as will Soundcloud. Whether they scale to their level of success or start asking for money, that I don’t know.

S3 is 4 cents per gigabyte transfer costs, so even assuming huge podcasts recorded at high bitrate reaching 100MB per episode, that’s only $400 for a whopping 100k downloads. ATP has 115k subscribers, and most of them probably don’t download every single episode.

Back in like 1998 I paid $3k/month for two servers to host websites with pretty small page sizes. But it’s 2017, hosting just doesn’t cost a lot these days.

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Hosting has been a fundamental part of all of Marco’s businesses from the beginning (Tumblr, Instapaper, Overcast) so I suspect he knows how to get it as cheap as it can possibly get. I think they do have a large audience with a lot of downloads, so yeah, it’s not going to be “cheap” but certainly as cheap as it can be! Thanks to your post I googled the Samantha Bielfield affair and it seems he handled it pretty well to me. I agree the ad blocker thing was a bit of a fiasco, but everyone makes mistakes! Marco’s are just a lot more public than most people. In reality, he could have just kept quiet and sold a ton of that ad blocker, but he realized he didn’t feel comfortable and yanked it. I admire the difficult decision, even as I think that he’s not very self-reflective.

Loving the ATP discussion digression! Most people reading this thread are probably listeners, so it still feels relevant. And turning it back to the thread, I think they’re right that as a 6+ user and “mikewasright” Plus size support, I won’t be fully satisfied with the X. I’m just willing to go “backward” in the short term, to have what I think is going to be the best phone Apple has ever made. Eventually I will get a true iPhone X+ when it’s available. For now, I’ll get by.

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I think most of the subscribers do. I subscribe to a ton of podcasts, and ATP and Cortex are the only two I listen to every one of. However, Overcast just downloads all of them anyway and I delete the ones I don’t want.

In terms of the Samantha episode, it was a poor showing. Let’s forget the ultimate end of the reveal of the individual. “She” posted a long post called praising Overcast 2, but calling into question the patronage model Marco was doing then. Marco’s stance was “well, anyone can do this.” While correct, few devs have Marco’s visibility and the fall back of the Yahoo Money (the ATP money was also mentioned). The Usual Suspects, as the Gruber. Snell, etc. crowd all circled the wagons and cited how unfair it was that Marco was being picked on. Marco didn’t back from his stance that “any dev could see success at this” Ironically, not even Marco could, since he changed the business model anyway. The whole Samantha episode ended up in a truly bizarre fashion that I won’t go into here.

Also, the Ad Blocker episode reeked of “Ads are bad!! KILL the Ads!.. oh, fuck, my friends make money from ads, and I do an ad read 3 times a week… this doesn’t look good.”

But back to the + club. Their comments did remind me what I liked the plus size. I cant wait for Myke go “err… I dunno about this.” He did start backpedaling on Connected this week with “Well, all I meant by the Plus Club was the Plus was the best phone FOR ME! And, er, now this expensive new one I want with a smaller screen is the best one for me! MYKEWASRIGHT again!”

Edit on hosting costs: a few episodes go, Marco mentioned that someone was trying to pitch him on a plan that was low cost, flat rate plan. Marco said something that ATP’s bandwidth costs would kill that model. WHich also makes sense. The average ATP episode is like two of a normal podcast.

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~$400/month paying full price at S3. No biggie.

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True (in terms of length) but also true that Marco goes out of his way to get the sound quality as good as he can in as little space as possible. Isn’t that why he’s on and on about Apple supporting VBR in their audio playback APIs or something? It’s blurry now.

And I suspect Myke (and I) are going to be less than satisfied with the X, but given the tradeoffs between 8+ and X, I’m still going to pick X. I’m just glad battery life is the same between the two. That’s the deal breaker for me, right there. And the main reason I’m in the Plus Club.

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I don’t know why I assumed the Qt3 crowd was so PC-centric overall that there wouldn’t be other ATP fans here. I love the podcast too for all the reasons you guys already covered about the dynamics between the hosts. Just wanted to chime in as another fan.

Also quite enjoyed Marco reversing course this week on just about everything he said about bicycles earlier.

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The Marco Waffle and the Marco Flip Flop are two of my favorite ATP regular occurances.

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The bike flip flop has been epic for someone who was quite into bikes and spent quite of bit of money them. I have been screaming at Marco the last few weeks, but he finally came to his senses this week.

More on topic, picked up some AirPods today. So great. No outside apps or trying to remove charge port covers, they really do just work. They don’t sound amazing, but good enough for my uses.

Now just $69 dollars more this winter for the wireless charging case…

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I must be missing something here, playing around w ios11 on an iPhone 7 Plus…

Is there no way to choose the Bluetooth or WiFi connection with force touch or something? You STILL have to go to settings WiFi, or settings Bluetooth, to choose the specific device or network for the connection?

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It is there but not obvious.

Go to control center, then find the music / now playing widget. In the corner there is a fan icon, press it and then you can pick the device.

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2.5 hours to update to watchos4 on my series 0. looks like i need a series 3.

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I went and pre-ordered an 8+. This will be my first Apple device of any kind.

So at least it’ll all be new and interesting, maybe.

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Shout if you’ve got questions, we’ve got information and opinions!

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I’m going from a Galaxy S5 to the 8+ so it’ll at least be new to me. They tried pushing me to the S8 but I kind of just wanted to try an iPhone.

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I think you’re going to be pretty happy, especially with the camera and its supporting software features.

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So far I’m really digging iOS 11 on my iPad Pro (12.9” original version) and my iPhone 6.

My iPhone 6 performance seemed like it took a nose-dive about six months ago, and I was puzzled because I couldn’t tie it to any specific update. It wasn’t right after any iOS point releases, certainly wasn’t back when I updated to iOS 10. But it had me worried for the worst, that if it was already chugging on 10, 11 would kill it.

In fact, fingers-crossed, I’ve found 11 to be an improvement. I think it’s mostly due to some tweaks to animations and transitions. I doubt there’s much—if anything—in the way of actual performance optimizations. But from fearing things actually getting worse, a perception of slight improvement is exciting!

On the iPad, I have no idea how you’re supposed to learn some of the new multi-tasking gestures on your own. There’s a lot of room for improvement in education and more intuitive feedback to get you going. But once I started to get the hang of it, I really liked it.

Viticci’s massive “review” has been very helpful in that regard. https://www.macstories.net/stories/ios-11-the-macstories-review/17/#content

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My 6S Plus seems to be a bit slower after installing iOS 11. This is sad. Input delays and longer load times all over the place.