Gadgetory

well Apple finally cops to slowing down your old iPhones and offers up cheaper battery replacements is this an adequate response in light of the lack of disclosure and we're also going to crack open the pocket now mailbag and answer your top questions we've got a lot to talk about it's a comfy pre New Year's broadcast so make sure you're charged and ready for episode two eight five of the pocket now weekly recorded December 29th at noon pacific time this weekly podcast is where we dissect and discuss those gadgets that make our lives mobile smartphones tablets and wearables it's all the stuff you wished existed when you were a kid and by this point in your holiday vacation you were starting to realize just how much time you had wasted lounging around i'm juan carlos back now senior editor at pocketnow.com joined as always by plucky podcast producer mr. jules Wong on the east coast has gone buddy boy well I just got back from a huge high school reunion five years so if you're talking about how old you are right now yeah to flu definitely feeling all those ears just rack up you guys you guys did a five-year high school reunion that's very ambitious and well I mean we have a pretty ambitious class leader because she went to Harvard she basically just gathered all the people up and said hey that's the Paulding in this function room and serve the exact same kind of food that we had during prom I'm not sure if it's like the standard fare or to have you know penny with the marinara sauce and chicken tenders for prom and these oh that's terrible we didn't know our prom was like just basically the same as homecoming you went and ate at a restaurant and then came to dance I mean this time around we had an open bar that's that's improvement yeah that's definitely that's definitely progress he fir for us my graduating class was so not on the ball that we missed our 10-year reunion and did an eleven year reunion that's how not paying attention to anything and how not ambitious my graduating class was perfect that's fine with me and just avoid all the people you really didn't talk to at high school that's and then you'll see see them for like five seconds and then it's like hey and then I saw the photos of everyone who was there and like you know what none of my friends from high school would have been there I would have been like the ostracized kid again his own table to sort of looking at everyone else it would have been really sad believe it or not the popular kids are like you know the people who found their their circles they they sort of felt the same about this whole thing then peeps just somehow managed to cobble together 50 people to get into that function room so it's really well done five year five year high school reunion not just relying on the Facebook's and the Twitter's to keep track of people I'm kids every year and we just got that news report that like thousands of pounds of avocado just like got torched in some truck accidents so I don't know what you mean eating with the price of our guy rocketing so the other half of it is gonna be goat cheese so that's there though that we're doing to know another reason to be mad at Texas yeah it's 40,000 pounds of avocado you know what we're not going to be talking about for the rest of this podcast is wacky news about food I think we've got some technicals all right well if that's the case then you want to just dig into our big story I mean we had a light week at pocket now and just you know trying to take the holidays for as they are just being cool and chill and all that but apparently Apple could keep its cool with this whole debacle it's not any new good controversy any meaty controversy that you should have in this space you have to have it with Apple and it's talking about batteries it's talking about processors it's talking about these issues where our people have been finding their iphone slowing down there the app lunchtimes not coming up as they used to be especially when we get on the year mark two years and it was only last week that Apple admitted to slowing down the top processing speeds for its older iPhones so that would be the iPhone 6s six there plus models and the iPhone se I think first wave back in February with iOS 10 point 2.1 and more recently with eleven point two we included the iPhone 7 devices with that so all that happening and they're saying they're finally saying sorry is what I do with my Canadian accent sorry sorry we apologize to any Canadians who may or may not be listening I stole a Canadian yeah and the did it yesterday with this whole convoluted message I guess because there was the way that they termed their apology we know that feel disappointed from what we did and newly apologize so I mean you should apologize that you should have not been transparent about this practice in the first place but I mean that's a that's enough story that we can dig into later on the share in any case they're offering free but not free battery place ins but whatever yeah that was another thing that got people lit up is that they're not offering free battery replacements $79 to $29 and this will only start from late January and last through the year of 2018 so I mean there was talk if I remember correctly back when the iOS Templar 2 thing was happening there was a there was this whole thing about ambient air getting into the manufacturing process which was causing that rates to not properly deliver and take charge and that caused a sudden shutdowns and there were rumors back then that Apple would be doing a free battery replacement program and then so it was just that little update that never mentioned anything about battery like processor throttling or anything like that and there was this little arc this little this little drama I guess you could say mmm the the whole disclosed pure process because as far as we know Apple has only told us about the their policy this week and Renee Richie from I more you know through a whole bunch of dissecting on Twitter with you know fans talking about this issue when it first popped up a couple weeks ago he said that Apple did in depth briefings on it almost a year ago explaining how battery age including prematurely which was being done to prevent spikes and shutdowns etc tech press knew that's the insinuation that he's putting out there and as far as my research goes and as far as anyone elses does it's the Apple statement on the issue was that II it was only the supposed to stop these random shutdowns from happening it didn't mention anything about performing and it didn't mention anything people like mark Berman of Bloomberg said you know hey where are these briefings like were we invited to them and we had a whole bunch of people mobile syrup SlashGear wired Wall Street Journal Washington Post all say about these briefings so and we you know later on you know it turns out that I think Seth Weintraub of nine to five I was like said that though they were actually internal briefings too so well and also it's it's if I really feel cuz anything Apple does makes news and it's talked about and is rumored and speculated and leaked and pushed and pumped that if the the tone of those conversations and of those media briefs were of the same level that we're seeing today I think we would have seen more traction on those news pieces back then I doubt very much that the tone of those conversations was in illustrating the same type of situation that we're talking about today it reeks a lot you remember when we were going through and tenha gate on the iPhone 4 and Apple put out those really helpful videos to show how all phones can face antenna degradation depending on how you're holding it sort of reinforcing the well don't hold your phone that way if you feel there's a problem with the antenna and I just remember I think it was a Motorola or maybe it was a Nexus and the video they show has this guy with like the biggest gorilla hands I had ever seen like like wrapping all the way around the top of a phone and to show that the little antenna bars would go down if if you just walk around holding your phone like this you can have the same kind of antenna degradation as if you just lightly tap an iPhone 4 right so I think that they had their points covered and that that issue was addressed properly across across the industry all phones slow down so at Apple we make sure all phones slowed so I mean so there's that part of it and which is just you know the scale of you know the the ways that they distort things just to you know have this narrative of yeah everybody does it and apples no different and also we're exceptional in how we manage our phones across the lifespan of the product so the response here one I I don't know about you but did you feel that the the explanation in the article actually helped this problem because I feel a big problem is a problem of disclosure do you think that their explanation actually served to educate the public or do you think that that was more if we throw a whole bunch of information out there about how chemical batteries degrade over time that that will help obfuscate our actions or our lack of or our inaction improperly disclosing this to our customers I mean there will be the people that accept this and then there will always be the people that tear these things apart and they might have grounds here Apple has been sitting on this information for a long time is not directly related the all this information to the problem at hand which is slower there's slowdowns and whatnot for the past however long it was and you know not letting those consumers know that they were taking these actions too you know fraud alone I feel like like this explanation of how batteries degrade makes sense as a blog post in sort of a general discussion forum I don't feel it was adequate to properly describe the actions that Apple was taking on your phone that they were purposely engaging in a throttling maneuver like I lack the words I'm it's a holiday brain a bite yeah but but that this was inadequate what it was that Apple was really doing to your phone how the consumer was not being properly notified that this is what they were doing and that these actions seemed to come at those yearly intervals where consumers were likely starting to shop a new phone anyway and had there been properly proper disclosure I feel that there would have been a not insignificant number of consumers who would have opted for the ninety dollar battery replacement over buying a whole new phone and that's been one of the common threads on the the replies that I've been getting personally on Twitter people who are also upset like I've got an iPhone 5s why isn't my phone on the list of devices for a less expensive battery replacement just goes one of the passages here first and foremost we have never and would never do anything to intentionally show in the life of any Apple product or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades like you know the fancy term for planned obsolescence and we've seen these reports of you know these benchmarks being run on iPhone you know v 5s not been here the fours and what not about you know the same behavior going on the same kind of deterioration that has been fest up to that and as far as you know Apple's concerned at this point they already have enough of a brouhaha to handle and I think their wording there is very telling we are not purposely degrading in an effort to encourage new sales because they are purposely degrading and it just so happens that these life cycles of products on their own come at these yearly intervals it's me it's it makes me cynical because I don't believe that everyone at Apple is working in lockstep is some kind of grand conspiracy to mess up your phone and get you to buy the new one mustache twirl muhahaha but look at look at their behavior on things like the iPhone 5 the iPhone 5 had documents battery problems Apple did not address the battery problems on the iPhone 5 until just weeks before the launch of the iPhone 6 well where's your don't with the iPhone 6 back then reality of the the circumstance of you know the product cycle and what is being you know the intentions and oh I should probably just get a new iPhone instead I mean the new ones already out in exactly because you know right at that time someone was likely already shopping a new phone so why would I spend this time to deal with a warranty issue and go into an Apple store and swap this phone out and back up my dad I could just get a new phone and it's gonna be on contract cuz that's when we were still doing two-year contracts so because of actions like that in the past and where every major generation of iPhone has had some kind of issue that the S version fixes it does make me more cynical as to Apple's reply here and especially in light of well it's a cheaper battery replacement I understand you couldn't do this for free probably but I also want to say a sophomore he wants we enable a toggle that allows people to use the full power of their phone again even if it means a detriment to battery life now that's where we'll see does Apple actually keep such a small battery on the smaller iPhone with like practically no buffer that it will become a problem because the the chipsets and Apple phones are very powerful they're usually a whole generation ahead of Qualcomm hardware those a-series processors are great but on the smaller iPhone they have such tiny batteries is there no buffer for that known expected degradation where the power draw from the CPU can actually cause the phone to shut off and that's what I'm curious to see can they actually enable the full power of this phone or is this gimped by design because of the size that they want the iPhone to come at and then also the idea of planned obsolescence the timeframe for which they want you to upgrade to a newer phone I suppose was that they do have the ability to enable full-powered you know override because they have this smart intelligent battery technology just like any other oh yeah should have that Liana says hey you know let's read the age of the battery oh it's this game but but I want to see you know because we know that the the amount of juice that you can pump out of a two-year old battery does degrade over time too and we know that on the smaller iPhone Apple puts in the bare minimum battery capacity to help you make it through a day and so after say two years of that battery starting to wear down you're having to charge it every day you're maybe down to like 80% of its original capacity is it still we're talking about monthly probably drive the the CPU because it's not round the battery you'll see that often reboot yeah every you know it's those freak you know there's peak events where sometimes they need that like the flash on a camera that typically needs a reservoir power or a sudden burst of power and that may you know trigger where those events I'm just saying for example but in terms of being modeling specs around capacity of a battery I mean Apple continues Ezra wanted to continue to be doing this with rumored true depth camera face ID and such permits going on into the 2019 phone iPhones and they're planning on extending their battery cell technology to a to cell unit there's a whole bunch of complicating factors as we go into the future to see what kind of you know processing that they do and whether or not people tell you know Apple tells people about them about that because if there's a way that one cell could be used instead of the other and like you won't have to deal with having to replace batteries all the time and I mean there is a chance for Apple to come out of this with you know a better you know a clean slate or a better sleep than they had before just from you know actually innovating yeah I this this is this is where I think the smartphone industry in general is facing some growing pains you use a phrase I'm just picking on this phrase specifically because of my idea on smartphones plateauing but actually innovating you know I think we're in a very iterative climate for all smartphone manufacturers where we're seeing some cool design changes we're seeing things like different aspect ratio screens marginal bumps to camera quality you know some nice bumps to processing power but I'm not seeing that kind of revolutionary exciting evolution of these products it's usually like little touches here little touches there and refinement and I think that's kind of where we're at and Apple Apple stands to be hurt by this most of all if if they can't keep convincing consumers emotionally that jumping on to the newest iPhone is is the lifestyle upgrade that they need and it's things like this you know when it comes out that they're degrading performance over time right around the time that you'd be upgrading your phone trying to push that upgrade it's sort of a double whammy to the emotional identity the lifestyle identity of a brand like Apple well so I'm wondering why now why do I might choose now to have all this put out and why do I even respond to it when this has been an ongoing controversy for years when this could have been stemmed off this could have been you know this controversy could have been prevented by just explicitly stating that's you know you're slowing it down for this benefit of pain that we could have bypassed here and I'm not sure where Apple finds the a way out of this just biting it in late December 2017 well I you know it's it just takes a while for any idea I mean if we're talking about like viral videos and memes this is what's happening with Apple right now it takes it takes time for that critical mass to hit and so anecdotally there's always been that idea new software slows down your older phone your battery degrades over time your phone just wears out heat kills electronics especially if your phone's like being used for a lot of gaming it's running it really hot and so we have all of this fog of conversation that's very anecdotal very colloquial very conversational and it took just a couple key elements cuz who was it that put out the article initially about actually testing the performance of iPhones over time it wasn't be G give me a second here I think that was was Geekbench but private labs yeah but but when we actually saw some kind of procedural method for testing this claim and so it took a while even from then for that conversation to reach some sort of jumping-off point and because of that whole fog that actually served as kindling you know all of these people that had these sort of notions about their phone slowing down are gonna be attuned to someone making a claim about actual interference on their device and it's coming at the perfect time just in general with stories about people who are concerned about apps using the microphone on your phone to listen in on your conversations companies that are intercepting web traffic at the ISP level to feed you ads and try and get you to upgrade your modem this is all in the zeitgeist right now so a major manufacturer interfering with your device without disclosing what they're doing that's a trigger point right now so you add that to the general perception of your phone slowing down how expensive these phones are getting you know thousand-dollar smartphones were in that now you mash all of that together give it just a little time to kind of smolder and then it sets off ablaze and that's where we're seeing I think the response right now I think now was the time because of all of those factors coming together like they did well I mean other factors for sure definitely you know cling on and add weight to the situation but I've seen many different a you know in an empirical not empirical but you know statistical you know breakdowns of this whole thing over and over again and along with you know the reddit threads and the Twitter outrage and it's like I mean d2l did all those other things really took things over just that just by being themselves no not not just by being themselves but what I what I mean is I think it's just the combination of a series of events that leads to Apple being in the wrong place at the wrong time for this to be a story they could control and thought that there were 20 possible conspiracies yeah well and we're ready for it you know like politics is crazy right now science discussion is kind of crazy right now consumer electronics chat is kind of crazy right now and now is the right time for this kindling to actually ignite and this is the wrong time for Apple to think that they could control that part of the narrative a year ago apparently they were able to now now this story has gotten out of their control and we can always see how companies do a terrible job of replying to these types of issues again if they have just disclosed this property to consumers and given them some stupid toggle switch you know a what do you call a placebo button varied in their settings the FCC daren't leave the Pacific open because that itself would be dissected over and over again well but that's just it is like again the disclosure on this is what kills companies this this is when they when they put mechanics like this operating in the background and then those mechanics are discovered it looks 10 times worse than if they had just told you up front and you could have been annoyed about it but look at how many times especially for iPhone users they're annoyed by something but yeah they'll still buy the next one winner yeah I don't think that would have been a sales depressant as opposed to taking your chance in court for 999 billion dollars whatever there's in class actions are going for these days so yeah it's so I guess at this point there's nothing we can do but look forward batter paid replacements have free is the data spate like I always ten point two point one they promised that there would be a little indicator that said that the battery started would need replacing in which case I mean what if there was that indicator why didn't that show up or why well like wasn't more reporting being done on that kind of thing where and where does that lie in conjunction with the throttling practices here well I mean that's that's kind of its kind of difficult to unpack until we see what Apple sets the thresholds at you know if a phone is six months old and then it starts to show battery degradation and the phone is egging you on to go and get your battery replaced that's gonna be a very frustrating situation for people who have thousand-dollar phones so so it I don't know that we'll be able to comment on that until we see what their actual solution resembles in real-world views but you know I'm already planning some probably by the end of 2018 I'll throw my iphone se out and get the batteries swapped out because I love that little phone I'll be curious to see if a future iOS update starts telling me oh hey dude your tiny little phone needs a new battery what's that what what that's going to resemble is is gonna make a huge difference to me in whether or not it's a useful feature or if it's another annoying cynical thing that Apple can try and convince us to spend yet even more money on their products yeah so so there's that they're gonna introduce a new interface a new and improved interface for battery health as well and other than the the replace do you think the timeframe of the replacement program any bit wrong here or like is God in any aspect I mean not not on its face I I just would have preferred something that was a more open-ended policy given the nature of their transgression III really feel for people because I know there is a not in second insignificant number of people still on the iPhone 5 and 5s and leaving them out was to me kind of a kind of a crappy thing to do alright so there's all that um I'm wondering at this point how much pain loss of war like useful worth in an iPhone and loss of productivity as a result these defend these plaintiffs claim and you know if a judge will be swayed by this I mean what's your take on the legal argument here oh I think there is there is a significant legal argument to be made again all they needed to do was say that this was a mechanic that operated on your phone and they wouldn't have had any problems I don't think there would have been any grounds for legal action the fact that this was excluded excuse me from any kind of TOS I think now you do have an argument to be made it's just whether or not you can face down Apple's lawyers or you can convince them that enough people are pissed off that they'll just settle to get it out of the news cycle as quickly as possible that we're I don't think they can do that though our when we start looking at the differences in trade and regulation especially throughout Europe it's the the French the the lawsuit that's going on in France right now that I think is very compelling as to how this is going to be treated throughout the EU and right now Apple isn't a very popular company in the EU B of things like tax dodging so any opportunity that those regulators have in sticking it to Apple I think they're gonna take those opportunities and run with them as hard as they can which is going to tie up Apple's legal team for a significant amount of time as they sort of have to deal out different penalties and different solutions for different markets your if they have two different two different Devils here it's tax evasion and privacy which splits Apple between the rest of the company is because if you can't have one you have to have another we're not a little port with using the PN weekly hash tag besides having bigger batteries Android phones are using higher core count big little configuration since forever if your cores running at medium are more energy efficient than one or two turbo power the Apple a series is starting to do this they I don't think they used to prior to like the a seven or eight now they're they have more cores and they're splitting it between I think it's a two and four kind of performance and of medium thing going on there but in any case I just wanted as a policy within itself of just being able to limit the processing power if you know if need be policy for Android Oh Ian's that to maybe a dot or something like that or at least provide the option to you I mean and I try the logistics on be for that it was it was in um it was an Android land because you know this is something that Google only recently started tackling to I would say with with nuga some of the advanced power management settings but manufacturers would put on their own low-power modes you know extended runtime modes and then ultra-low power I mean Samsung really made a lot of noise about their two-stage you know you could kind of reduce stuff and keep things from running in the background and then if you were down to like your last 10 percent will shut everything off on this phone and try to keep your battery lat lasting as long as possible and we uh yeah but that's not a practical way to use phone on a daily basis if you're using what there was there especially like galaxy s2 and galaxy s3 era where anything that you would do to kind of restrict the functionality of the device we would customize and do it ourselves and so especially getting into like the s4 era I used to run my phone in low-power mode for most of the day just because you know LTE was such a new tech and if you caught you were you were stuck between different towers or you're cycling and switching from 3G to 4G now your battery would just get wrecked and so you know there were times where I would manually activate that just to make sure that my phone would last the day and I would use it that way throughout the day so there are have already been ideas of this kind of user management I mean not exactly the same I'm using this as an analogy to what we're expecting Apple to do in terms of just reactivating full performance on an iPhone but it's not something that's a totally alien or a totally foreign concept to the smartphone market it's just something that Apple used to convince their customers you didn't have to worry about we managed the performance of your phone so you can just touch square get app now I think iOS users are confronted with the notion of some kind of oil change like maintenance as their phones age and this is something that they've been sold on that they didn't have to do but if you want the to really maximize the investment of an iPhone it's something you now need to pay attention to yeah PN weekly from Andrew Wallace with Apple's recent battery throttling issues I hope that OMS more early and start offering battery replacements for older devices for feed to some extent third-party services may be able to do that your local repair shop for example Peter Hayden in response to that it would look great to offer this service by guess Oh Liam's probably don't like the supercycle they don't like super size and I therefore like a weather front so if they were to just put out something like this it would cause like a peak of that service and therefore I guess they will come here find some new rather than repair all their phones I think again the novelty may be produced with the new product I mean because like you and we've seen the shattered glass replacement yeah so I mean something like that I think will actually be taken advantage of very very little because you think about for the generations you know add a fan of the show Kyle Ruggles photographer up in North he you know he was actually tweeting with me about just you know hey remember the v20 had a removable battery was like the last premium phone of its era that still had that ability and you know I doubt very many people really took advantage of features like that so if a company were to come out and say hey we're doing a low-cost battery replacement program for older phones there could be a noticeable effect on sales of newer phones but I seriously doubt it will actually tank you know a company's forecast and if anything else will just serve to reinforce why a customer should do business with that company and then they'll just go off and buy the new phone instead of getting the battery replacement anyway I mean right now no again makes a good point how many two-year old phones still get updates on Android and they and as far as we know Motorola and HTC don't explicitly put down their processors so yeah they both publicly display claims they do not engage in throttling and and of course the reply to that is just well in Android land how about we focus on instead of thumb you know beating our chests and patting ourselves on the back for not throttling phones maybe we should be a bit more attentive to things like updating older phones so they can remain competitive at a time where privacy and security issues are key among a lot a lot of consumers you know even just getting bug fixes and security patches how many two-year old phones still get updates on Android how many 18-month old phones are still getting you no actual software attention so I mean I wouldn't be for users are you happy well and and again that moto was acting like they were being so magnanimous yeah it's our mistake so we're gonna do the Moto G for plus because we said so and it was like yeah because we said so if we don't do it now we'll get sued but that's not like that's not holding your own company to any kind of standard that's just cya man because I don't even expect a two year old Android phone to keep getting major operating system updates but but how many security threats there are out there to not be delivering security patches and bugs it's anything they don't make enough clear you know a clear guideline for that because again bringing up Motorola they say that the mid-range err phones are only guaranteed a one year window for OS updates and that was something that was new to us so is the public perception this is a from and Rousseff slack using the PN weekly hash tag people need to hold Apple accountable if Samsung or HTC did this everyone would be flipping out we can't keep letting Apple get free passes to do whatever they want and and this is this is the thing I'll be curious to see we're in the era of the thousand dollar phone I do get some people grumbling about some of the the issues and bugs on the iPhone 10 that iOS 11 still hasn't been completely cleaned out of some issues regarding the performance of that phone and now we get this type of disclosure from Apple that they engaged in a non disclosed throttling program supposedly for consumer benefit is this something that will resonate enough that someone who was planning on buying an iPhone decides that they're not gonna buy a new iPhone and I doubt that that's the case there is no competition for the iPhone if I'm if I'm mad at Sony I can go and buy a ZTE or Huawei or a Samsung or an HTC or any other number of device if I'm if I'm mad at one Android manufacturer I can go spend my money somewhere else I can vote with my wallet and not have to leave my ecosystem if I'm mad at Apple I'm kind of stuck that's it no I don't expect that a lot of people are gonna switch ecosystems just because there was a problem and we've seen this consistently iPhone 4 antenna gate iPhone 5 battery problems iPhone 6 bendgate and sales have still been growing sales have still been climbing and Apple has probably the top of customer retention of any manufacturer out there yeah I mean they're still raising up those conversion rates from Android so that's uh you know if anything the competition right there was gonna be a little bit too Apple sided but in a few moments we will be talking about potential changes in competition on the tail end of this whole net neutrality repeal what the FCC did we're gonna rehash this thing one more time for 2017 but not before we give a little shout-out to our sponsor yes and this week's episode of the PocketNow weekly is brought to you by oopsy this sponsor could not have picked a better time to sponsor this podcast that was up C up C I've been saying oopsie I apologize tremendously if I've been saying this wrong but up C actually makes sense to I say oopsy though because this year is the first year in working tech in many years that I've actually damaged the review devices did you know that many retailers mark up warranties on the items they sell B to anyway we're gonna take that all over again did you know that many retailers mark up warranties on the items you buy anywhere from one to five hundred percent in fact most people don't realize it's where most big-box retailers make a majority of their profits meanwhile you have no idea what's covered by your warranty and you know that receipt is going to wind up in a shoe box in your closet never to be again thankfully there's a better way started by a guy who learned the ins and outs of the warranty industry and was tired of consumers getting screwed at the register oopsey sells you up to 70% on what oopsy saves you up to 70% on warranties versus traditional retailers so you know exactly what's covered before you buy better yet oopsey will save all your warranties and receipts in one convenient place you can even use oopsy to protect the items you buy including holiday gifts weeks after you buy them now that's actually a pretty big deal because my wife was actually considering holding on to the pixel too until a bunch of other things went wrong with that phone but one of the things that turned her off was we couldn't transfer the phone and reappear warranty the only solution Google had was to return the phone wait for the refund which took weeks and then rebuy the phone adding the warranty at the time of purchase and so she instead went with a huawei p10 head on over to poopsie calm that's ups.com and use the promo code pocket now for 10% off your first purchase that's oopsy calm promo code pocket now and with the free oopsy app you can purchase coverage access your account information and start the claims process all with the push of a button from your phone oopsie comm pocket now promo code 10% off your first purchase and we thank them for supporting the pocket now weekly we do indeed and with that out of the way I think it's time that we get into our monthly mailbag summit at segments monthly a mailbag segment and as always you can yeah you can send your email send your questions that we'll get to you at the end of the month using the email address I was about to say hashtag gain weekly but that's not what we do we do have a couple tweets using the PM weekly hashtag and I'm gonna throw into the mailbag - yeah indeed so podcast at pocketnow.com we would love to see an old fashioned few paragraphs about what gets your gears grinding and what not so definitely send this send a thought or two you along to us we'll definitely read it and we start off this episode with a little thing about snitch parody in competition from Kristen Lindsey hi guys do you think the repeal of net neutrality will resolve we take that from the top again just like you hi guys do you think the repeal of net neutrality will result in more competition for ISPs and that the consumer might actually benefit from it it seems logical that some providers might want to offer better packages at lower rates to increase their business Thanks so what do you think Jules do you think there's the potential for increased competition that's the groundwork of things but when we get into what these ISPs they're actually doing they're gobbling up lots of media companies and they're bundling backs into what they're offering because if they can be the producer as well as the distributor and they already have the infrastructure for that that's amazing and they can you know they can kind of get synergies from that so I in terms of offering just basic service I don't you know they will have less of a motivation to do that just from the fact that they can always you know build upon it and bring these packages and get margins so there's always that but but it's not just because you know you can't just say more competition results in you know lower prices always because we're seeing this right now in the cellular industry in the US with Sprint and t-mobile walking away from merger and we would have seen a vastly better Network on both ends where both have generally been disparaged by many tests across several years and this would have put them in line with its 18 teams risin this would have put them in line in terms of subscriber numbers as well and instead well Softbank decided to walk away and keep ownership of Sprint and now what they're trying to do at Sprint's is just cut back on the promos and start investing in their network again and they're facing plenty of challenges in that process they have bond maturities that they need need to pay up soon and 5g is going to take at least a couple of years to you know trickle down and get to the towers and already 18t Verizon and t-mobile have plans for next year so yeah it's it's a they're facing a challenge and they're keeping prices there they're playing on keeping prices up Sprint has been the cut-rate provider for cellular for a long time they've been you know pushing it down $85 for unlimited 7060 at one point fifty and now they're kind of going I got the bit and that has always allowed carriers to play around in lower Rangers than they usually have you know if you know $100 a service bundle package maybe we can drop that down to 90 or 80 Verizon did that with its unlimited plan they had they started out with an $80 plan just after the vitriol of t-mobile of John Ledyard you know just you know calling them out they finally caved which is a good which was a good thing and now we're also seeing t-mobile which has all started to compete in prices they've started you know bundling up these services from third parties like Netflix and and Google Wi-Fi they didn't efflux and then sprinted Hulu was that the partnership that they did yes sprit did Hulu because who need their I mean they're trying so their sprint is like their tagline should be well bless them they're trying their hearts as they say in the south so I mean getting like they're keeping the line on prices because at the you know at some point they have to start reinvesting in their network yeah where are their analysts are saying that's T&T and Verizon might you know just start a you know going back up as well so where especially as we show the fact this is going to be a tough one yeah so Krista the the reason why I'm skeptical that we'll see an increasing competition we did not have net neutrality as an actual regulatory as regulatory leverage until 2015 I feel that we can look to the wire the the ISP and wireless industry prior to 2015 so I'm from 2004 to 2014 and see if we can detect any trends and the trends that I think a lot of us would see would be instead of trying to actually compete for customer dollars most Internet service providers engaged in policy that allowed them to either merge acquire or to cordon off neighborhoods to prevent competition I think the LA market is an excellent example of that where we're served by several large ISPs but none of them compete directly so if you're in an 18 t u-verse area you cannot get Time Warner Cable or now its spectrum they I live in it's been able to the zip code yeah well and it's very much like germ gerrymandering a district politically you just carve up these areas and that will prevent you from actually needing to compete on service instead you have a de facto monopoly over that area and that's the practice that we saw these companies in gay net neutrality really won't address competition on the ground directly like that if the Internet is regulated like a service or like electricity or like water like a resource like that eventually we could make the argument that you know if it's a utility then we can loosen up on some of the restrictions for things like telephone pole access or how we dig trenches to run fibre to home things like that but that's not really the first wave of what net neutrality is going to address title 2 regulation really I don't think we'll have a near term effect on that kind of policy ultimately I would prefer a free market solution but deregulating at the top right now with the way that the United States has carved up into different media districts and very few areas have any kind of real competition I think it's something like 18 percent of the country is still unserved by any solution and 20 percent of the market is served by only one cable or Internet solution so almost 40% of the United States has zero or one company that they can do business with to get on to the Internet and so ultimately what what I'm looking at for competition if we really want to improve competition I actually do very much agree with the libertarian idea that there is too much regulation net neutrality isn't the regulation we should be afraid of um if you know title 2 regulation is what gave us competition in the telephone space and was you know how we leveraged divestiture breaking up mom paw Bell if you if you're on Sprint t-mobile or Verizon they wouldn't exist if we hadn't broken up 18 T and that was through government regulation and so ultimately the regulations that we need to start chipping away at are the state and city regulations that prevent competition I think Colorado is an excellent example of of communities banned together banding together to start trying to offer municipal taxpayer-funded God banned because major corporations weren't getting it done it you need to start lobbying to let Google Fiber into your neighborhoods because the only time we've seen cable companies and AT&T really start fighting and competing on service and price are in areas where another outlet is already offering fiber and so if we start from the bottom up eventually we'll get to a point where we won't be as afraid of net neutrality style violations but if we just deregulate the industry from the top down then the major players in this market who are already winners in this market will have free reign to craft whatever policy they want and they're not accountable to the people they're only accountable to their shareholders because if anything private and people in general just resent publicly owned stuff and would never want to use it but they end up using anyway some benefit benefiting it off of it sort of like how China knew somehow was able to get a fiber network laid out just because so if you're a patriot you should care about this the Chattanooga story is amazing because one of the things that helped get their municipal broadband initiative off the ground was a great apartment of energy it was Tom Brady at arm on Tom Brady he's just slinging fiber all over all over Chattanooga know the thing that's exciting about Chattanooga was part of the grant that helped build that network was was footed by the Department of Energy because they were looking at fibre broadband networks being the backbone of a new power grid for the United States the United States energy grid is so old and is so decrepit that if a foreign interest were to knock out I think something like six or seven processing nodes that that sort of join parts of the network together you could leave half of the country without power for weeks that's how precarious the situation has become and the main tool at our disposal is fibre to home where we would be able to intelligently control the of power at a granular level from home to to power node and and that to me is really the exciting part of trying to move forward with municipal funded broadband is because through the power company now we have this as a legit resource as as a legit utility for something that we all depend on and then I feel companies can compete on top of that if a company can compete better than your power company do business with them but I think the bare minimum standard should be broadband delivered through the same resource that power comes from so that way we can actually improve on our aging infrastructure yeah and if you want to learn more about this a further reading I would suggest Ted couples that lights out good book on that topic so you have one tweet from Joel GJ just asking a question that I think is worth following up on a hashtag P and weekly then there's the factor of the power of the FTC to go against these bad business practices and the reason why I feel the FTC is inadequate is because the FTC can't set policy like the FCC can and as long as a company discloses its business practices the FTC can't go after them for violating so as long as it's only real and as long as the company discloses we will throttle Netflix and they put that in the Terms of Service the FTC has no regulatory power that business is doing business by the terms of the service agreement whereas the FCC actually will have regulatory power over the industry to craft policy and look at what potential consumer abuses can come that aren't just disclosures in your Terms of Service the FTC isn't necessarily a bad play but it's woefully inadequate to address the actual regulatory abuses that we see today and we've seen since 2004 so there you go I understand that you also have a couple of other tweets that the hashtag and so one of the things I want to expand on a little bit last week we talked about potential YouTube competitors and Andrew Wallace I think we mentioned it during the broadcast but I saved it because I wanted to see if we could expand on the conversation a little bit more hashtag peon weekly how could Amazon have a different monetization strategy from YouTube and be successful in serving smaller content creator V videos aka the million dollar question had he make money with these videos on the internet and do battle against an entity like like YouTube mmm I would say subsidize it I think it's one of the things that you have to eat you have to be willing to make profits elsewhere just to support something that has that improves your position as you know were these good person companies that stands up for consumers when you know what consumers want and their rights and just you know it's sort of like how a lot of TV networks used to you know news was a loss making for them and they subsidize that with successful ratings and dramas and other primetime programming so yes I think for maybe the first time in in our history as being co-producers on this podcast I am completely in agreement with you like literally 100% my answer to that was don't worry about trying to make an Amazon tube successful and monetized as its own separate entity but tie that into the affiliates program that Amazon already offers and use that as a loss leader so that people can go consume video on Amazon they'll still get ad revenue from whatever they put on those videos but then it becomes a secondary benefit where people are giving Amazon information their viewing habits and Amazon can target those people with better products and services on the back end I mean I know you're not 503 see a 503 seed company but it's like you you have the if you have the Board of Directors support and you have the mission for it then go do it and somewhere along the while lying you'll be able to justify that in the bounce books so oh really so uh this this one comes from I'm so gonna butcher this lag Nate this last name from Diego a bus by Li III was just sort of posting some random news on my personal Twitter account and one of the stories that I found very disappointing over this last week was a LastPass the Android LastPass Authenticator app apparently has this hugely open security flaw that is easily replicatable where if even if you don't put in your password you can kind of get around it just by pushing settings and then push more information and then you can get through on the backend and apparently this this was a situation that had been going on for some time the person who discovered the flaw reached out to LastPass directly didn't hear anything from them and I think after a week with no action taken published his own blog post on a hacker site hacker noon dot-com and so Diego dropped us the comment upset that only after threats of disclosure did LastPass decide to take action on this again disclosure seems to be the big problem with a lot of companies I don't know about you Jules but if you had a security app on your phone and they got out ahead of a security threat notified you told you what the threat was don't you think you would have more faith in that app would you want to do the disclosing yeah exactly or do you want this discovered by someone who's not gonna disclose the security threat and just exploit the security threat on device yeah so and the story becomes 50 million accounts have been compromised because of this data breach that that's a way worse story then the headline LastPass discovers security flaw in Authenticator app yeah very disappointed and and you know we were just seeing progress Android Oh opening up support for these types of security apps and password managers and stuff and like this is a bad look for a company in my opinion where they're not getting ahead of their own problems and ahead of their own PR for something I mean we've regarded these sorts of security authentication programs is like it like a next frontier that we're not you know we don't have to remember passwords anymore and that this would be the ultimate security safeguard looking to be this way because it falls down to every you know the least common denominator which is not fixing things constantly total cos that if you're not looking for a problem someone else will yeah well I not not to plug my other podcast but the book that we read this month was little brother by Cory Doctorow he's I think he's an editor over at Boeing Boeing still but he writes a lot about these types of issues like security and privacy and copyright and in that book there's this this line like the best security of security out in the open if you think you can hide how your security works then all someone's gonna do is break it keep it quiet and then exploit the flaw in your security the best thing is you know sort of sunlight is the best disinfectant and so hopefully LastPass gets their acting gear there cuz they're a pretty well respected name for this type of solution they better well alright so so I got a tweet here from Russell Santos what do you think about how we're doing segments I we've kind of backed off real audio reviews real camera reviews but this comes from at Rachel's dad since we are living amidst a dongle Revolution house here's an idea for a new video how about you use one phone and compare different universal dongles Google has well an essential has one razor and then you can also compare them against no-name dongles like this and he he links like another five dollar USB see audio dongle what do you think tolls is that something that people are really clamoring for is more others a man at least one video on this and I'm not you know a little glib there but I'm not joking because Google has always made the case for us BC spec adherence and hey you know it's been the thing I'm doing that it has a dongle that can work with any USB C port and frankly speaking if everyone just followed a damn spec and you know not you know customize their ports to be you know I I don't even think Thunderbolt 3 should be a thing if anything that should be the standard USB C spec I know it there would be more cost to it but you know if if we're talking about a universal standard why not just making Thunderbolt 3 by any case cuz you know I want that I want that bad but I wonder is there a way to do or mobile Thunderbolt I always kind of felt like you needed that full front-end pci bus infrastructure to have like full support for thunderbolt like that's why you SBC USB 3 I should say is is easier to implement in mobile devices yeah I should be clear USB you know I'm wondering at the 3.1 spec is now then well there's a whole bunch of yeah that that complicates things but in general we're in the aching growing pain stage I think this is a series that would be good for at least a few videos I I'll have to see what we confront because buying them shouldn't be a problem I think we're talking about like $50 worth of pretty much so I'll take that first pin I'll see if I can pull that out and um the the last tweet that I want to want to get you with the PN weekly hash tag this this is a I'm gonna put you on the spot here Jules 2017 pretty good year for phones we're getting excited for next year's phone this is coming from Alberto 9 3 2 4 quick question if you had to use a phone from 2016 as your daily driver which one and then I have a follow-up question right after that what for well for if we were to set this for the next year I would say the HTC 10 and what phone from 2015 would you use I I was I was about to swear here and I would bet I'll tell you to flip off let's see freak freak cuz that's that's the Snapdragon 810 year and I just don't wanted that and what was that that was the iPhone 6s it was it was a better year for the iPhone 6s than for Android so I guess I would go with an iPhone 6s okay so my answers last year 2016 phone I would use the LG v20 I just go back to my LG v20 which got a lot of use last year already and my answer for 2015 would be to skip all of them and go back to a Galaxy Note 4 ooh back to a 2014 phone instead of using any phones from 2015 that would be my answer I mean you're you're kind of cheating but I mean that is I guess that's still an acceptable answer that it'd be I'd accepted and then just to wrap us all up on this mailbag and I want to thank everyone who submitted questions and tweeted us with the p-n weekly hash tag this is from at fat produce friend of the show Andrew Wallace end of the year exclamation point what are your dream phones for the end of 2017 well Renato Renato writes the Nokia 3310 coordinate orgy so that's his dream phone what what what a you're on a pixel two-man isn't that your dream phone for 2017 I'm on a canal - and where the Freak is my essential phone there it is why wouldn't you pick up the essential I saw you I saw you uh posted a photo of that uh was it last week yeah I think it was last week up in New Hampshire and I wanted to take advantage of Sprint's $145 thing going on but it was just such a hard time to get it through I sprint said it would ship by December 20 and then they pushed me back to January 3rd and I was like nope so I bought it I bought for Best mobile for $480 and now I am paint and when that well now I have this on the credit card and also the rest of the v20 that I still have technically on the line for Sprint so yeah hurry for me hooray for you I don't know I'm I'm kind of torn this was this was a good year for phones but I still kind of feel like no one has made the perfect one phone the LGV 30 gets stupid close I still very much enjoy the combination of V 30 and huawei mate just like last year it was V 20 and mate 9 this year the two phones I kind of pick up the most or the V 30 and the the May 10 but there's still these little things like when we flew to Albuquerque for Thanksgiving it was all about my where is it it's over here is all about my little xperia I loved traveling with this phone when I was out at a Eva was all about my blackberry keen one just knowing I would have you know crazy long battery life ai ai ai I kind of want to mash up look like I need to smush all these phones into one that's the advantage well because you're using it for different you know purposes they're traveling with them or whatnot and then you you have the data count one for your you know photoshoots so I think that's uh you know it's one of the advantages of being in the position that you are just really you know text I think and also totally acknowledging my use is completely atypical how people normally use their phones for what you have and maybe just maybe we'll be able to get our hands on that main 10 Pro at CES in more than a week away yeah that's uh maybe just maybe those fingers close paper crossed well folks I think we're gonna put a pin in it this episode of the pocket now weekly has come and gone the show is over but the conversation continues on Twitter where Jules is at point Jules and I'm humbly at some gadget guy again this is our end of the month mailbag episode so I want to thank all the people that sent us questions to podcast at pocketnow.com and using the pn weekly hashtag we do collect all of those so that we can do a listener roundup episode at the end of the month pocket now is around the web Twitter Instagram Facebook Google+ YouTube and our home sites pocketnow.com and yes pocketnow.com for Spanish speakers shows like this cannot exist without your support sharing the weekly with your friends who love mobile technology those retweets matter and by dropping reviews anywhere you can review podcasts once again we want to thank this week's sponsor oopsy or UPSI depending what most is reading the copy definitely check out oopsy calm and use pocket now as your promo code to start really taking a taking advantage and keeping track of all of your warranties but ultimately there wouldn't be a show if it weren't for our listeners and subscribers who have kept us on the air since 2012 the pocket net weekly will be back next week with all kinds of delicious technology goodness so make sure you tune back in