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keep an eye on Patreon posts for more. I'm your host, John Chidjie, and today I'm joined once
again by Vic Hudson. How's it going Vic?
I'm doing well, John. How are you?
I'm doing fine, man. I'm doing fine. Welcome to 2023. It's great to be here. Oh my goodness. Well, I want to talk a bit about the evolution of the Apple Watch in this episode. But before we get to that topic, there are a couple of things. Normally, I want to stay focused on one topic in Pragmatic because that's just, you know, part of the thing. But
The stuff going on in the land of Twitter that I feel like I just want to just quickly pick your brains about.
I know that there's been a lot said and done recently, but have you come across the, shall we say, unceremonious termination of some of the third party clients on Twitter?
I have.
So has this affected- I mean, first of all, were you still using Twitter?
Well, as much as I ever did.
Well.
I'm not as attentive to the social medias as I should be.
Oh, well, no, never say that in terms of should or could maybe could be.
But I mean, honestly, I was still using Tweetbot both on my
desktop and on my mobile devices, my iPad, iPhone.
You know, all that sort of stuff. Right.
And I you know, because people would DM me, people would @mention me
and I get the notification and I go and I respond.
And I accepted the fact that you don't get real time notifications
using the- Using Tweetbot.
There's like a five minute delay before you get them.
That's fine. I didn't care. It's not about real time comms.
If people wanted real time communicate with me, I would have given them my iMessage or my
phone number. But anyway.
But yeah, I went to open up just to check for that.
And lo and behold, it said we cannot authenticate.
And I'm like, that is most perplexing.
How is it that you cannot, how is it that you cannot authenticate, sir?
And so I tried my engineered network Twitter account and it gave the same error.
I'm like, this is equally perplexing, doubly so perhaps.
Anyway, so knowing that the chief person in charge now is a ruthless businessman.
Yeah.
after about approximately, I'd say maybe 60 seconds of being perplexed,
I was no longer perplexed. And I'm like, well, it was fun while it lasted.
And I quote, it's fun. But I mean, like, that was it.
So, I knew it was inevitable, it was going to happen.
And this was building for years.
And they threatened in the past when they tweaked the APIs.
That was, if I remember correctly, that was one of the things that triggered off the whole
app.net thing.
- That is correct.
- So I kind of knew that this was.
- However, it should be pointed out that like,
they really disabled a lot of functionality for the APIs
and it's really been lagging behind, you know,
the official app and features and stuff for a long time.
But most of that stuff that the people using third party
apps didn't want anyway.
But these guys Twitterific and Tweetbot
and all the big players,
They were still within the agreement because like nobody ever said anything about completely terminating the API.
They just put some limits on it.
You know, you can only have so many tokens and so many subscribers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And to my knowledge, everybody was still playing within those those those terms.
I think that when this initially happened, there was no word from Twitter for days.
And there was not for days until there was one little tweet that said, we're going to start enforcing our blah, blah, blah.
And that, of course, that tweet, I
yeah, it's I think it's pretty clearly BS that, you
know, by enforcing those rules, they weren't breaking those rules.
So that's, you know, just BS.
But I mean, should we be grateful that they posted anything?
Because it really makes no difference in the end.
You don't tell people after the fact, oh, I'm sorry, I just shot you in the
head, like a week later.
Yeah, sorry about that. Right.
I'm just going to, you know, like shoot you.
Oh, sorry, I wasn't supposed to give you a warning.
Maybe that would have been better thing to do.
But in any case, all this does to me is reiterate
the right- the change of course, the change of direction that Tapbots, for example, have
been working on Ivory for Mastodon.
And whilst I tried desperately several times to get into their beta program,
I was unsuccessful, I think mainly because of my location in the world,
because the servers, when they posted, the propagation
delay was such that you couldn't get it quickly enough.
And- By the time you could get through it was full.
Yes. So, I mean, Paul Haddad sent a
a screen recording just as an animated GIF.
And he said, so this just happened.
And he was releasing like a thousand spots.
Yeah. And then you basically saw a little timer start.
You see that? And it ran for something like 11 seconds and then they're all gone.
Thousand slots, 11 seconds.
Yeah. So, to say that there is a pent up demand
for a professionally created, crafted, whatever you want to call it, app
from experienced developers that have worked with this sort of a system. I think that there is-
that's an understatement. There is an enormous demand for it. And I mean no disrespect, of course,
to all of the developers that have been developing clients for the Fediverse for years, because,
you know, there's a Mastodon one that, you know, was developed on part of the Mastodon project, but
it's not the best. Most people don't really like it that much. I mean, I've used it from time to
time just to have a play and it's not really that great. I've been using Toot!
and I quite enjoy that. It's very whimsical, feels very appley in its
whimsiness. I quite enjoy it simply because of that.
That plus it works nicely with Pleroma. There's no issues there. Yeah. But I've also been using
Metatext and Metatext has been pretty good as well, even though currently it's
I think it's become less supportive of light, less updated.
I think there was an update not too terribly long ago for meditation.
Yeah, there was. I think it had been stagnant for a while.
And then the influx of people, someone's picked up the project to run with it.
That's cool. But all I do.
Yeah, I think that's what happened.
Don't quote me. But I do know that that ivory,
I sorry, I do know that they are pushing very hard to get something out
in like, I'm not going to say January, but maybe February.
They're trying to get something out, even if it's like a very early, like pre-beta build or
something for people to buy, because they need income.
Well, I suspect that at that point they'll make it free.
I'm not so sure.
I maybe they will.
Well, the thing that I saw was that they were going to open it.
They were going to go ahead and put it in the App Store as an early alpha, which if they use
that terminology, they could have some trouble with App Store review.
So we'll see how they get around that.
And maybe they just will avoid using that terminology within the app store
and just put it on their website or in their social profiles or whatever.
But I saw a thing because they were really discouraged that, you know,
all the test flight spots are full and I don't think they can add any more if they want to.
I think they've literally maxed it out.
Now that maxed it. Yeah. Yeah.
But if you're going to put something out there
and you're going to call it like an early alpha, I don't personally myself,
I wouldn't feel right charging people money for that.
But I guess then again, once you create the SKU in the app store,
if you give it away for free, then the people that go ahead and get it then,
I guess they're always going to have the app.
But they could probably, you know, I wasn't a tweet bot.
Isn't it on a subscription model now?
It has been for quite a while.
Yes, and I'm happy to pay.
So what they could probably do is go ahead and put it out for free.
And then when they're like officially ready,
then they can throw up a subscription for, you know, pro features or whatever.
Yeah, I suspect I'll do something like that. So it'll probably get listed for free.
There'll be an in-app purchase. There'll be some crippling in it in order to encourage you to say,
oh, look, you know, you know, throw us a tip or whatever else.
We'll unlock a couple extra features. And then when it comes out, it'll become a regular pricing model.
Right. But people are so thirsty for a professionally crafted app, you know, and it's like,
it's- It is so nice.
Have you got it, have you?
I do. I feel guilty about it right now listening to you talk about it, because I got it and I'm not
paying it a ton of attention.
And I feel terrible about that because you actually would really use it and you can't get it.
It is very nice.
It's so nice that it actually makes me wish I had been using TweetBot when I cared about Twitter.
So, okay, here's the thing.
I'm no- I don't have false expectations regarding
ivory in the state that it's in today, if it's pre-alpha, you know, like- I don't know what
stuff is still not working, but I was- At some point not that long ago, things like profile
editing wasn't working, follow accounts aren't working, the whole bunch of stuff that doesn't
work. Yeah. I don't care about that. All I care about is, hey, is this going to work with Pleroma?
Because I've been running Pleroma now for nearly four years, and it is such a- Well, to be honest,
it's a really great self, like it's great for self-hosted,
like a single user instance.
And it is so much more performant than Mastodon.
So you don't need a VPS that's so heavy.
Although I have started to run into some of the walls as I've gotten more and more
followers. So I am going to have to do something about that longer term.
But for the moment, the problem is simple.
And that is that Pleroma does in fact follow the Mastodon API.
API, but it is not entirely 100% to the letter.
So, there's a couple of little quirky things that it does that are subtly different.
So, it doesn't take much to tweak it to support it.
But some of the other apps, like, for example, I've got something like, I don't know, maybe 15 or 16
different Mastodon clients that I've tried.
And at the moment of those, only four of them actually work reliably with Pleroma.
And it's not because Pleroma is defective or anything.
It's just because, yeah, those developers are focused on the,
on the Macedon.
So, I mean, honestly, I think it can't come soon enough
'cause it's things like, here's the thing.
And I said before, I don't want to be disrespectful
of existing developers, but I mean, the problem is that,
so the developer of Toot!
is staunchly against quote tweeting.
And I listened back to an episode of Bubble Sort,
you know, over the holidays where I...
Yeah, we discussed that.
Where we discussed this. And I said, yes, it does support, quote, tweeting, you
know, tooting, posting, whatever.
And at the time, what I had neglected to mention is the fact that
there is a fork of Pleroma that supports it, and there was
a client that supported it, but it was a hack.
It wasn't native, quote, tweeting.
And so, I sort of- When I said that, it was a bit off the cuff and I probably should have done more research on that.
And Macedon definitely doesn't support it.
Right. And so, there are developers like developer of Toot!
And he is steadfastly against doing quote tweeting.
Right. Which I think is a ridiculous stance because I don't think quote
tweeting is an actual issue.
People ascribe it as being a negative design pattern,
and it's not, it's a time saver.
I mean, if people are going to be an arsehole to you, they're going to be an arsehole to you.
That's it. They'll just reply and say to your comment, you know, like
someone says something inflammatory and I'll respond if I'm going to be an arsehole and I'll say,
I think that you are a such and such because you said something inflammatory to which I disagree.
If they quote tweet you or not, they're still going to do it.
Yeah. So, to say that one design pattern leads to another is BS.
Yeah. What actually causes it.
So, the algorithmic timeline is what actually leads to it, because the algorithm is
designed to boost content that other people have also liked or retweeted.
Right. And so, the more inflammatory it is, the more it gets amplified.
And there is no- Not- That same effect is nowhere near as prevalent on
on Mastodon, sorry, the Fediverse, because the Fediverse is a
pseudo chronological timeline. And I say pseudo chronological because
if you think about it, if you've got a server and that
server is getting hammered because it's just had there's been a popular post on it, there can be
delays of five minutes, ten minutes for the propagation of posts from their
server to yours. So, the timestamp that you get is the timestamp that you're like,
the order that shows up in your time is when your server received it right it doesn't go back to the original
time of the post necessarily and reorder it so I don't miss that's in real it's just it's a side effect of
having a distributed system right I get that because you know it would take things time to propagate and stuff
but isn't there the like the original post date is that that metadata is transferred with
everything isn't it well of course of course and there are some clients that will try to do that but just just
keep in mind that not every server is time synchronised and you've got-
- Yeah, that's true.
- Yeah, and so you've got this problem where you can't guarantee.
So, that's the- There's lots of little fine details.
When you start pulling that thread, you realise that the Fediverse is not-
It's not perfectly chronological, but it's not interfered with by an algorithm.
So, it's only interfered with by, shall we say, random clock drift and propagation delays.
So, it's not like it's intentional and it certainly isn't going to amplify anything.
Anyway. - No, they'd have to like routinely invalidate the cache or something or just
routinely re-sort. - Yeah. - I don't- - Well, here's the other thing that really annoys me is that
I've had multiple developers that have been- Because I follow the developers
of the applications that I like. - Yeah. - And I like to see their @ mentions.
So, when they respond to someone, I want to say, oh yeah. So, this person asked them for this feature, which is
auto timeline loading. And so, the developer goes back to this
particular person and says, I get this request all the time. And I'm like,
maybe that means you should probably take it more seriously. And he says,
I don't want to hammer their server with a bunch of unnecessary requests.
When you reach the point in the timeline where there's a gap, just tap load more.
How hard is that? Question mark. And I'm probably, I'm probably mangling
his response and maybe sounding a little bit mean or a bit harsher than it should have- than maybe it was
meant. But irrespective, it's like what Tweetbot did is-
and I'm pretty sure Twitter did the same thing- is that as you were scrolling down and you're approaching
the next point in the timeline, if there was a gap, it would go back and fetch it before it reached you at
the rate you were scrolling.
Right. And so, you know, but in some cases where there was a gap, you could
still tap if there was still a gap there by the time you think you got to it.
But most of the time when I got to that point in TweetBot, I'd already loaded it before I even had a chance to tap it.
Yeah. See, it's little things like this that's the difference between a well-polished
app and an excuse.
Right. And there's lots of clients out there for the Fediverse that are quite
fine, but they're not as good.
Yeah. I don't even know, like, I'm not even 100%
certain if it's fair to say an excuse.
I mean, I will definitely agree with you that little things like that are what makes an
app very well polished, makes it cherished, loved, and adored and all that good stuff.
When you're working on an app like most of these Mastodon apps, to my knowledge, Ivory
is the first one being tackled by a big studio.
And when I say big studio, there's still a lot.
To my knowledge, like three or four people maybe, something like that.
Yeah, some of that.
But a lot of the Mastodon and Fediverse apps to this point, most of them are like a single
dude or at best a couple of dudes.
Exactly.
They have to prioritize and judge what they can tackle and stuff.
It's fair for him to say why is it such a big deal to have to tap load more, but when
users are used to features from the big polished apps, it definitely makes your app look a
a little bit second rate, which, you know, we all have decisions and tradeoffs that we have to make when we're working on these projects.
But, you know, sometimes, you know, it might be a big hassle for a one man show to try and implement that feature,
but it could really pay off that time spent doing it.
Exactly. It's just hard for him to justify.
And Timeline Sync is the other one that really has pissed me off for years.
But none of the developers will do it. And they're like, oh, well, the mechanism that was built into
Mastodon doesn't really work that reliably, so we're just not going to bother.
It's like Tweetbot and Twitterific both came up with their own independent system for syncing it.
And I think they switched over to syncing via iCloud Drive at some point as well.
But the point is that these cross-platform apps can't use iCloud Drive.
Right. So, they'd need a third party system like Tweetmarker, which they don't want to build.
So, they just said, well, who cares?
Right. So, it's like- it's decisions like that that really have annoyed me.
And it's like I've waited and I've waited and I've waited. It's not like I haven't had angry blog posts and
gone ranting about this all the time.
It's something that I've been sitting on for five years.
I want to sit on for another five years.
But then Ivory comes along.
Twitter's falling apart.
Well, at least from a tech geek point of view, it's falling apart.
And honestly, I'm like, thank God someone's actually going to do this.
And it's funny, you know, because some of these- Some of the developers of the traditional
Fediverse apps have actually reacted very negatively to Ivory, because they're so like saying,
you know, like all this hype for another app.
We've been here for years.
You know, what makes you so special?
And it's like, do you know what makes them special?
It's all the other stuff that you have been refusing to do.
Have you used the app?
And you had years to do it.
So, here's the thing, right?
I ultimately love Toot! I used it for probably three years.
I've paid for, I've thrown tips at it.
I've like, I've spent a decent amount of money supporting that app because I love it.
And I still do, even though I'm now switched to Metatext and there is no such mechanism in Metatext for that.
Yeah. I still am very, you know, I'm still very grateful that that app exists.
I hope it continues to exist, but the truth is that there are better apps coming
thanks to Twitter burning, basically.
So anyway, circling back, the whole third party client
thing, inevitable. It's not surprising to me at all.
It's also not surprising to me the way that Twitter went about it, because their new
leadership is- People are going on hating on
Elon Musk, right? Let's be clear.
Elon Musk is a ruthless businessman, okay.
He doesn't care about- I feel like that's kind of generous.
Well, he doesn't care about how you feel.
He doesn't care about the developers that helped to build Twitter.
He's looking at Twitter as it stands today.
And he's like, right, this is a business.
What's costing me money?
These ones here are skirting, you know, ads, so we get our ad revenue from them.
Doesn't matter if they're a small drop in the bucket.
It's a matter of principle. If you're hitting the API X number of times, you just get
cut off. Thanks for coming. It's my platform. If I don't want to share it, I won't.
It's that simple. It's a simple business decision. He just does not care.
And in the grand scheme of things, geeks need to realise that it actually will not affect
Twitter. If you stop using it, it won't.
It won't. It's not going to affect the fortunes of Twitter.
Believe me, he'll burn Twitter for through different reasons than cutting off the API
to third party clients.
Well, that's just going to be one of many logs on the fire that burned Twitter down.
Well, that is exactly.
Yes. Good way of putting it.
Yeah. And just another thing I just want to get off my chest while we're on the subject about
Elon Musk. There are people that are saying, you know what, I can't drive a
Tesla anymore, you know, because Elon Musk is such a pain in the butt or I don't like him
anymore. Yeah.
Marco's been lamenting about wanting to sell his.
Marco's not the only one.
There's actually quite a few people that I've heard they're saying, like, and I follow Tesla
forums and so on, and some people saying, no, I just can't deal with this clown anymore.
There's other electric cars in the market that'll do as good a job.
I don't want to support this guy anymore.
Right. And you do realise that your, you know, emotional
gesture will change absolutely nothing in the grand calculus of anything.
It's like, if you like the car, drive it.
If you don't, sell it and get one you like driving.
Yeah. It's like, do you make a decision about whether or not you're going to buy or sell a Kia
based on who the CEO of Kia is, or Hyundai, or Hyundai, or-
Or like, pick a brand.
So, like, seriously, this is how grown-ups make decisions is-
Right.
Well, there's this guy that works at the company, and I don't like him, so we're just not going to support that company.
It's like, I don't understand.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's not rational.
And-
It's not rational, it's just emotional.
It's human nature.
Well, they really don't like this guy.
They don't like what he's doing.
They don't like what the world is learning about him through the way he's handling the whole Twitter thing.
And it just I agree with you 100%.
It's not rational at all.
It's not necessarily even logical.
And then, like you said, they're not really going to hurt Tesla, although I think their stock is down a little bit right now.
Well, that's not going to hurt Tesla either, because in the end.
No, it's not.
But it's just, you know, people vote with their wallets and they vote with their hearts.
And right now they're not feeling much in their heart for Elon Musk.
Well, I prefer to look at it like this.
If people really have an issue with Elon Musk, I should get on Twitter, tell him that he's a jerk,
have their account banned, problem solved.
Anyway. All right.
Let's- - That about sums it up.
Yep. Let's move on, shall we?
And yes, and for the record, my love hate relationship for Elon Musk has been sliding more towards
hate than to love in recent times, if you hadn't figured that out.
But that's OK. Yeah. All right.
Brief mention of the- There was a new Mac
mini, an M2 Mac mini and a MacBook Pro,
I believe, was released this week.
They turned our computers into dirt, John.
They did not. I have an M2 MacBook Air.
Thank you very much. And whilst my Mac studio is looking very cautiously sideways at the new Mac
mini. If you look at the cost per spec, like if I match specs
with my, obviously the M1 is not as fast as the M2, but if you
look at every other spec, it's almost, it's a little bit
cheaper, the Mac mini, but it's not that much cheaper. And if I
were to look at the thermal headroom that's available on
this beautiful Mac studio, I'm not actually annoyed. I thought,
oh, great, I could have gotten away with a Mac mini now, but
But no, I could have technically wanted to drive the three 4K screens that I've got,
but I'm not having buyers remorse as a result of this release.
No, I think you're going to be fine with your Mac Studio.
And I'm really fine with my M1 Macs MacBook Pro.
So I don't know.
That's just it's my thing.
I always say they turn their machines into dirt.
It's more ingest than anything.
They're a pretty decent spec bump and a speed bump, but honestly, they're a speed bump.
I'm not really lusting after a new MacBook Pro because mine is still the greatest machine
I've ever had, and I think it's going to continue to be that way for a long time.
And I don't feel like the difference from M1 to M2, it's nothing compared to the difference
from Intel to M1.
Oh, for sure.
So, I think our machines are going to hold their weight for a long time.
I absolutely agree and I think that the testament to how successful the M1 is as a system on a chip is evidenced by the fact that it's in practically every Mac and that they stuck with it for what, two and a half years?
iPads now too.
And iPads, yeah true.
So it's a pretty solid design.
Yeah.
It hasn't been any major issues associated with it as far as I can tell.
So I mean honestly yeah no I agree I'm not worried it's more the buyers remorse sort of thing I can you buy a computer and then six months later another one comes out they could have done the same job for less money and you like.
If only I'd waited blah blah blah what my lamenting with my trash can Mac Pro for example.
But anyway that's ok so yeah my Mac studio is perfectly happy.
I'm still waiting on that to arrive so I can see.
Keep whiten.
All right.
I didn't have anything else to add on that.
I just wanted to point out.
Can we just take a moment to recognize and marvel in awe at the fact that all this M1
and M2 goodness that we have is all due to the iPhone?
Had they not spent so many years trying to make that thing extremely powerful and extremely
power efficient in a very constrained environment. We may have never gotten these M1 Macs and M2
Macs. And I just think that to me is pretty amazing and remarkable. And it's just,
who would have ever thought that, you know, the Mac would be experiencing such a renaissance
from work that they did for the iPhone? Yeah, well, that is true. It is a good point.
And Apple's investment in the ARM architecture, in part due
to that situation.
I mean, clearly it's taken a long time to pay off.
And I just want to add, though, that it's not just that for me.
It's also the fact that Intel dragged their heels for so many years and struggled.
That is a big factor, too.
Yeah. And I feel like those two things, like Intel pushed Apple down this
road. And I suspect that there'll be people at Intel that are kicking
themselves for the fact that they did not give that.
Yeah. They didn't push hard enough to evolve and move forward with
their designs seriously enough.
They thought they had the market cornered and now they've lost a massive slice of it.
There's only one Mac left now that still has an Intel chip in
it, and that's the Mac Pro from 2019.
Right. Well, and I think it's actually it's a double layered kick in the crotch because Scott told me a little while back we were having pretty much the same discussion, you know, and he said that Intel actually at one point owned the technology that arm was based on and they didn't think it was going anywhere.
So they sold it off.
Yeah, actually, I did know that.
And not only that, they well, what's the expression?
They doubled down on their complex
instruction set code, CISC processes.
They doubled down wrong.
Well, they did. I mean, don't worry.
It worked well for them for a long time.
Yeah. A very long time.
And I think another thing that ARM is
benefiting from is programming languages and development that allows lots of
parallel, you know, pressing, processing and
and getting all of that multi-threaded programming
to work cohesively so you can distribute load
across CPUs and so on.
So I mean, a lot of that stuff as well
has enabled that to work because,
you know, you kind of had two choices, right?
Either you went for a highly powerful single core,
you know, with a complex instruction set,
or you went with ARM,
which is, you know, reduced instruction set code.
And the thing with risk processes is that
they can do less than a single instruction,
but they can execute it very, very quickly.
So anyway, swings and roundabouts.
- And then you throw a bunch of cores in there and you provide a good mix of, you know,
efficiency cores and power cores.
And you can really spread out some workload and make a phenomenal machine.
- Indeed. Although I still wanted the more powerful cores.
I want every single one to be super powerful.
I don't want these lazy ass, boring cores off in the corner there just saying, you know.
- Yeah, but then my MacBook Pro wouldn't have the phenomenal battery life that it has.
- Well, that's great for your laptop, man.
I'm talking about my Mac studio. It's like, come on, I don't need efficiency cords in this puppy.
Come on. Anyhow.
All right. It's plugged into the wall, man.
Let it run. Exactly.
Yes. God, it's a beautiful machine.
All right. We should probably go on to the main topic at this point, which is about
Apple Watches and Apple Watch Evolution.
And this is particularly important to
me and to you personally, because of our recent purchases, but we'll get to that at the end.
Okay. And I realised when I was doing the prep for this episode that I was thinking, look, there's a
bunch of different ways that we could slice this, you know, and there's lots of specs and
details and technical things to dive into.
But what I wanted to do was I wanted to stick with what I
think are the fundamental, shall we say, steps in the
design evolution of the watch.
Okay. So, first of all, we've got to do the history lesson because this is pragmatic and that's
part of the thing. So, our model is to over time with dates.
All right. And we'll pause for each of them and we'll do hands up as to
which of them you or I have owned along the journey.
Okay. Just for fun.
All right. Yeah.
That was a close one.
Yeah, I know. I nearly said it.
Okay, so the original Apple Watch, which we came to refer to,
some people call it the beta watch, some people call it the series zero in any case.
I like this, you really- Yeah, I like series zero better too.
24th of April 2015 was when that was released.
So, I'm going to put my hand up and say I had a series zero.
It was a aluminium version.
It was not a stainless steel.
I'm pretty sure you had one.
Oh, 42mm too.
I'm gonna put... I'm gonna see your had a series zero and I'm going to raise you to still have that series zero.
Does that thing even still...
Although... well, the face is currently popped off of it due to battery swelling.
Oh man.
I think... I'm pretty sure Clay replaced a battery in one once himself.
And I want to get with him one day and find out where he got his battery.
Probably I fix it, I would imagine.
Yeah, probably.
But I think I want to fix it just to keep it in operational order.
OK. I love that watch.
So what kind of watch is it?
It's just a space grey, black, aluminum one.
OK. Sport watch.
So it's a sport as well. So it's a A-minimum as well.
And it was 44 millimeters, 42 millimeters, sorry?
Yeah, that was the large size at the time.
It was the large size at the time.
All right. Yeah.
Moving on. So, they did a bizarro thing, which they've never done since,
but- And I still don't understand why they did it, but they released both the series one and a
series two on the same day, which was the 16th of September in 2016.
So, that was about a year and a half, not quite later.
And yeah, so they released two watches at the same time.
And series one was, shall we say, cheaper
and had less, if I remember correctly, I'm trying to remember exactly where it was slightly deficient, but in any case, I got-
It had the same system on the chip, so it got the speed boost of the series
two, but it did not have, I think, the GPS and stuff like that integrated into it that the series two brought.
Yeah, it was something like that.
I've blocked it out of my memory because I bought the series two.
So, and when I got my series two, that was when I decided, yep, I'm doing stainless.
So, I got myself a stainless steel Series 2 Apple Watch and
it was beautiful. I loved it.
Yeah. Did you get a one or a two?
I sat out on the Series 1 and 2.
I was still just rocking my Zero.
Nice. All right.
Series 3 was about a year later on the 22nd of September 2017,
which I once again, like an idiot-
Oh, wow. This has got cellular in it now, I think, if I remember correctly.
the series three. Yes, that is the one that brought cellular.
So, I got that one with cellular and I promptly sold my series two to help pay the
price difference because it was only a year old.
So, I actually got a reasonable amount of money for it.
And did you have a series three?
I did get a series three, and that was the start of my multi watch lifestyle.
I hung onto my zero and used it for a while.
The series three was charging.
I also bought the cellular model because I thought that was going to be a pretty big game
changing. Cool. And I had no regrets. I really enjoyed it.
I still have that watch.
Wow. No, I don't have that watch.
My son has that watch.
Oh, OK. Fair enough.
It's still in service, but I don't have it in my possession.
Very good. All right.
So the Series 4 came out on the 21st of September 2018.
I did not actually get a Series 4.
I actually hung on to my Series 3 because at that point I figured I'm not doing this two
years in a row. I just can't justify it.
Right.
I think you also skipped series four, didn't you?
I did skip the series four, yes.
So, then we move on to the series five.
So, I did briefly own a series five
watch that was on the 20th of September 2019 that was released.
So, I briefly owned one, but there was a financial situation
and I needed money quickly, so I had to sell it and I went without a watch
for, well, probably about nine months, eight months, nine months.
Yeah, pretty rough time for me personally.
I'm so sorry.
I know it was tragic, but it was fine.
I mean, it wasn't that old.
So I actually got most of my money back.
So it wasn't like I lost a lot of money on it.
But yeah, sometimes things happen in life and you got to make sacrifices.
And that was one that I made.
This is true. It was the right call at the time.
Did you get a series five?
Mm hmm.
I did get a series five.
Mm hmm.
That was the, if I'm not mistaken, no the Series 4 was the one that made the screen
slightly bigger wasn't it? I believe so, yes. We're going to get to that in a minute.
Yeah, yeah, but I sat out the Series 4 because like you said, you know, doing these every year
is just like a lot of people do it, good on them, I'm happy for them. I can't personally justify
buying a new watch every single year, so I sat out the Series 4, but I did upgrade to the Series 5
And that watch is actually still in service.
That's my secondary watch that I use while my current watch is charging.
Cool. And it's still a really good watch.
I honestly didn't have any complaints about that watch or its performance until I got my current watch and then it made it dirt.
Oh, dear. All right.
Okay. So, the next year, 18th of September 2020.
So, now we are into COVID because, of course, everything has to be measured against where we were in the COVID pandemic,
Which technically, by the way, as of time of recording is still technically not over, but never mind that.
Series 6 and SE, the first generation SE anyway, were released that
year. And at that point, I invested in one of those.
And that was my- That was the 44mm, again,
stainless steel, because I am a creature of habit and I did not get an
SE. And at that point, my Series 3 by this point had been headed down to my
oldest son who still uses it today, and it still works today, and the battery just makes it through the day,
although it had a swollen battery, had the battery replaced for free.
Thank you, Apple. So did you end up getting a six or an SE?
I did not. I sat out the six.
All right. Very good.
If I remember correctly, it wasn't a very significant upgrade from the five, and I think I was just perfectly content with the five.
And like I said, I wasn't going to buy one every year.
Yes, exactly.
Very good.
Series 7, 15th of October, 2021.
So we're getting closer to today.
And the Series 7, I think the big selling point
was the bigger screen.
- Right.
- And it was now a 45 millimeter,
would have been what I could have gotten,
but you know, having just spent money
on a nice stainless steel Series 6, it was still fine.
I let that one be.
Did you?
- Yeah.
I actually passed on the Series 7.
I was very tempted by the 7,
and I really liked the looks of the 7,
and I really wanted that display, you know,
'cause that had the edge to edge
and the fancy design watch faces
to like really show off that curve around the bezel.
And it was really nice, but I was also at that time,
you know, I was going through laptops
like they were going out of style
because I bought the first generation 16 inch laptop
and then they put out the M1 laptops and that made mine dirt.
And so I traded in, well, my money was tied up in laptops.
Let's just say that.
So I sat out the seven.
- Sure.
All right. So, finally, we are at current day, which is series 8, the SE, second edition and the
Ultra. And that was the 16th of September 2022, thereabouts.
Yes. So, that's where we are today.
Now, we're going to stop what we bought there just for a second.
Okay. So, one of the things that all of these watches have more or less in common, every single
release, there was a sport like model that had a Minium as the case
material and had an ion glass for the
watch face. And generally, the back was made out of ceramic, it goes against
the skin. You know, bands are not really- I don't want to talk about bands too much in this
episode, but you know, I've done- I did a whole episode with Marco about watch bands back in
2016. If you really want to listen back to it, there'll be a link in the show notes.
But one of the things that was really interesting in this period, because I had a Hermes-
Oh, sorry, Hermes for most of that time, I think.
And then, like, they've had like the- - the SE is really effectively like a sport.
Nike is effectively a sport.
The stainless steel has always been the super posh version, but then they had this other one called the edition.
And the thing about the edition is that it was one of those weird ones that's come and gone and come and gone.
And they've really tried a bunch of different stuff.
So, first of all, the Series Zero edition was famously available in 18 karat gold, which is like yellow or rose gold.
I believe it also had an 18k price tag, if I'm not mistaken.
It did, yes.
So, I kind of wonder what the battery warranty on that was when you spent 18 large on a watch.
But anyhow.
Oh, man.
Could you imagine having that thing in the face popping off of it, dude, as well?
Man, you'd be pissed, wouldn't you?
You'd be like, wow.
I think that thing that- I think that was honestly, you know, people could talk about Butterfly Keyboards all
they want to, but I think that this was like the gold edition watch, I think, was the
epitome and the peak of Johnny Ive excess.
Yeah, just a bit.
I mean, they looked beautiful in the renders.
I never saw one in the real world.
And no, and I think they only sold like two and a half thousand globally.
I'm surprised they sold that many.
But in any case the series to replace the gold with a ceramic a white ceramic which when I when I saw the photos and I saw one in the store as well actually.
It wasn't quite a pure white and it looked it was a lot like a bit of an off white ceramic which frankly I didn't actually like the look of I thought it just did it looks.
I thought it looked kind of sharp.
Yeah, it was glossy, yeah, but it just-
Yeah.
I just, for some reason, it just didn't strike me as being, like, it didn't feel or look
like that, I was going to say additiony, you know, like posh,
you know, like if I'm paying-
Well, and it also, it brought the price down, I think the addition came in at
eleven hundred when they went to ceramic, is that right?
Something like that, it was a few hundred dollars more than the stainless steel, so it was wasn't too much more, it made it more affordable, but at the same time, I'm like,
I preferred the look of the stainless steel, which is why I never got one, because I could have stretched and got one if I wanted to,
but I chose not to.
They did add the grey in the ceramic, though, in the series three.
And then something strange happened.
They didn't release one with the series four.
So, everyone's like, oh, no, the addition's gone.
And Apple's like, oh, no, just kidding.
In series five, they brought it back, but it was made out of the ceramic, the white ceramic only, and titanium this time.
Yeah. So if I remember correctly, titanium was the first, the edition was the first titanium that they tried in a watch.
I think so, yeah. I think you're correct. Yeah. And it's always been available in titanium in either a natural titanium finish or a space black finish.
And they did the same thing for the six and the seven.
And then they did another series four trick so that for the series eight year, there is no longer an edition watch.
And I think this time it might be permanent. Yeah.
So let's just go through like the-
I think that the edition gets supplanted by the Ultra.
Well, sure.
And we'll talk about that.
That's my personal opinion.
I know.
I would agree with that.
So, but I'll tell you why in a minute.
So looking at the different materials that they've used for building Apple
watches over the years, they had gold.
It was very brief and very expensive and very much waste of time.
Stainless steel.
You've got aluminium, ceramic and of course, titanium.
So, the most recent material that they've actually trialled is titanium
and I feel like titanium is
more expensive than stainless steel. Some people don't like the look,
but you can't argue with its strength to weight ratio. It's quite
light compared to something like stainless steel. Right. All right. Now, let's talk about the evolution
of the styles. And by styles, I'm talking about like effectively
the sizing and the sizing is a bit odd.
And I find the sizing odd because we start out with 38 millimetre and 42 millimetres.
That's like- So that was kind of, you know, like essentially a measure of the screen
size, not precisely, not pixels exactly.
It was all very roughly, roughly.
And of course, the funny part of it all is that irrespective of what they do with the screen,
thankfully, they kept the lug sizes the same.
So if you bought a 42 millimetre or large size watch band,
that that band will still fit in a Apple Watch Ultra,
despite the fact that the Ultra clocks in at 49 millimetres.
So, yeah.
And I think that's fantastic because I actually do-
That is fantastic.
I actually do have watch bands that I got from my original watch that is still in the house.
Right. And I think every step along the way, a lot of people like such as yourself
that had invested in those collections, you know, every year when
it's Apple watch time, everybody's just waiting to see that they finally changed that lug size in their case.
Their band collection is useless now.
But, you know, uncharacteristically in Apple fashion, they actually have kept that
consistent and it's continued on.
Exactly. And you're right, you hold your breath at the keynote.
And even after the keynote, if it's not obvious, you're still holding your breath a little bit.
You know, like, please don't obsolete my watch bands because I've got a problem with watch bands,
which has not improved, which we'll get to.
Oh boy. I know. Alright. So, talking about this sizing then. So, effectively if you were to look at the Apple Watch as just like a watch from the outside, what does it actually look like?
And what it actually looks like is series 0, 1, 2 and 3 are all effectively the same original size and design.
More or less, a little bit thicker, a little bit thinner, subtle variations on the colour of the dot or circle on the dial on your digital crayon, I should say.
You know, it's like effectively unchanged.
All right. You had the two sizes.
When we got to this-
Especially with the zero, one and two, you had to look, I don't know if you could actually look at those and identify a different, which model was which.
Well, considering that the one-
The three brought the red ring on the crown if you had the cellular model.
So that one kind of stood out at a glance.
You could tell it was different.
But well, in fairness to the one and two, they came out in the same year.
So the difference between zero and the one slash two is
only one year.
But yeah, you're right.
That's true. Unless you really knew what to look for, you couldn't tell the difference.
And so when it came to the four, five and six, we started to see, OK, time for some thinner
bezels, we're going to go for a different size screen and they are up to the 38
millimeter to a 40 millimeter and the 42 millimeter to a 44 millimeter screen.
Thankfully, lug still fit, two thumbs up, thank you, Alex.
But that larger screen meant they could do different, you know, different
watch faces and some of them had more complications and they could have more
information on screens.
So, that was good.
And then we go to the seven and eight. At that point, they went to a larger screen again and bumped it up
another millimetre. So, the 40 millimetre became 41 and the 44 millimetre became 45.
And then, of course, came the Ultra, which is a larger screen again, and we'll get to the percentages
in a second. And it is now 49 millimetres, which is a much bigger
jump. And it is a big chunky watch or chonky, as my kids prefer to call it.
Chonky.
Chonky. Yeah, it's like chunky, but with an O.
I don't actually understand why, but they just say, yeah, dad, that watch is chonky.
I'm like, yeah, totes amazeballs.
Or what's the- I don't even know what it's supposed to be saying anymore.
You know, yes, my children, I agree with your slang.
It is good. And I am now old.
Okay. Yes.
I was getting ready to say you're aging yourself out here, John.
Totally, 100%.
Yeah, it's funny, actually, I was in a bit of a sidetrack.
I was in a meeting late last year and we had some young digital
software developers in the room, like we're talking like early 20s or whatever.
Whippersnappers.
Whippersnappers, yeah, whatever else.
And I said to the other older engineers in the room or whatever, I
said, yeah, yeah, we got to yeet, you know.
And the guy said, yeah, let's go.
And then the older people look at me saying, what?
What did you just say?
And I looked at the young guy across the room and I was saying, pick the guy that's got teenage kids.
And the guy said, I knew what you meant.
I said, I know you know, but the older ones don't know.
Anyway. So, yeah, hanging out with my teenage sons has prepared me for the Whippersnapper generation.
There you go. After that, I'm screwed, though.
In ten years, I will have no idea once again.
Okay, moving on.
Or rather, back to-.
That's okay. They won't anymore either.
Yeah, true.
That's right, my then 30 year old son will say, Dad, these young kids, they talk strange.
I'll be like, yeah, they certainly do, son.
That is most troublesome.
Anyhow, moving on.
All right. Another little statistic that I wanted to dig up, and I only say this because I
find it to be interesting insofar as how much space do you need on an Apple Watch?
You know, like for storage.
I mean, I know there's the RAM thing, but I'm more interested in the solid state storage because I like putting my
podcasts on there. I like having music that I don't have to stream.
Pop in the airpods, go and do some mowing around the yard, use the mowing meter app, have a great
time. You know what I mean?
Oh, boy. And you see, you got this-
You got this solid state storage on your watch.
And I thought, you know, I know that now it's 32 gig, but I thought it'd been 32 gig
for a few years. So, I dug through the history and what I didn't realise
is that the Series 0, 1, 2 and 3 all had 8GB of storage,
except the LTE model, which I remember had 16GB.
Yeah. They then kept 16GB for the Series 4 and then from 5 onwards,
it's always been 32GB, even the Ultra.
So, I feel like they've kind of settled on that amount.
I suspect the reason that they did is partly because of the iOS
updates. And I think people are putting, you know,
I was going to say more apps, but bigger apps perhaps on the watch.
But some of that storage is clearly for-
I don't- Hang on, let me rephrase that.
I don't know how long it's going to be before they go to 64 gig of storage on the watch,
but it feels to me like that seems to be their happy spot, because I mean,
series five to now-
They seem comfortable at 32.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been three years, three and a half roughly.
They've been doing that now.
So maybe they'll bump it next time, maybe the time after.
But it's- Anyway, but I find these days I don't run out of space.
So I go and I'll- So before I go and, you know, do mowing or go for a run or whatever, which is
okay, mowing is more likely than me going for a run, just saying.
But still, you know, I'll load it up with like four or five episodes of whatever
I'm listening to, and it's never an issue.
There's always plenty of space, which is fine.
So anyway. So about battery life.
So, I know that this has been a tenuous thing, but
even though the battery has increased in size, and that's partly because the screens have gotten
bigger, brighter and have more battery drain, and there's always on to contend with as well,
but they still target an 18 hour, so-called all day
battery life. I just want to message Apple, if you're listening,
all day is 24 hours, okay?
It's that's 24 hours is an all day battery life.
Okay. 18 hours is not all day.
Okay. I'm still alive in that intervening six hours.
I mean, I may be asleep, but hey, at least we hope I'm asleep.
Yeah, but I mean, you should be sleep tracking, right?
Exactly right. And I can't do that if there's no charge in my watch.
Anyway. So there you go, Apple, pay attention.
But the good news is that the Ultra-
This is why I always have two.
Well, just good for you.
So, at this point in time, the Ultra is now officially double that.
So, and that's standard without any power saving trickery or
anything like that.
I typically see more than double that.
Yes, indeed.
All right. So, a few more figures.
One of the things that when I was looking into whether or not I get an Apple Watch Ultra was how much heavier is it?
It's obviously bigger 49 millimetres, although it's made out of titanium and I'm used to a stainless steel series
6 42 millimetres. So what was the difference?
So for me, I was going from 47.1 grams to 61.3 grams.
There's no escaping it.
It's bigger. The battery's bigger.
It's just a bigger watch.
So, yeah, it's not surprising it weighs about an extra, that's an extra 14.2 grams.
So fine.
Okay. It's heavier.
That is so true.
and you can feel that when you're wearing it, that's for sure, but never mind.
And the other dimension that I would look at was the thickness.
So 10.7mm for the stainless, Series 6 stainless steel,
up to 14.4mm for the Ultra.
So yes, I do actually bang it on more things because I'm, you know...
Yeah, me too.
It's inevitable.
Twice the brightness in terms of nits.
No, not the things that suck the blood out of your scalp. No, this is the brightness,
nits. I'm just saying. Not the parasites.
Hey, I've got four kids, man. I'm acquainted with nits. What can I tell you?
But yes, thankfully, the kids have learned.
Don't share hats at school, kids.
That's right. Anyhow.
There you go.
I know. It's good words of advice.
All right. You're making my head itch.
One of the great things about having no hair is that you don't have to worry about nits.
Anyway. All right.
Screen. So the screen itself is on the- This is now the Ultra to the Series 8 comparison.
So I thought, let's compare like if you got a Series 8, would you get Series 8 or would you get Ultra?
OK, so and all this is going somewhere.
Just, you know, trust me.
So 410 by 502 pixels versus 396 by 484 pixels.
So it turns out the Ultra has 7.4% more pixels.
OK, that's great.
Than the Series 8. 7.4%
more pixels. Yeah, which is yeah.
And they're much brighter pixels, too.
So that should count for double.
But anyway, whatever. They're glorious.
They are glorious indeed.
The thing that's interesting, though, is if you look at the percentages and I realize that we're talking
about, you know, like if you count pixels and then you look at the square
millimeter display area, it tells the other piece of the story.
So, yes, it has more pixels, but are they bigger or smaller pixels?
So, an 1185 square millimeter display on the Ultra versus an 1143 square
millimeter on the Series 8.
So, that is only 3.6 percent bigger.
So, all in all, it's got more pixels, but in a slightly
smaller area or higher pixel density, which therefore higher
pixels, sorry, a smaller pixel size. It's only very slight. So
it therefore should be ever so marginally sharper. So it's
brighter, sharper, and more pixels than the Series 8.
Right.
As I said before, double in the battery life 18 to 36 hours. And
if you go into super low power mode, which is not interesting
to me personally, but you can get 60 hours have not actually
achieved that.
I haven't tried it either.
No.
I don't, it's not really interesting to me either.
I mean, you're going to, it doesn't it turn off and disable many of the things that make
the watch worth having.
And I can routinely push this thing to 46 hours.
I mean, not routinely, that's not the right word.
On occasion, I will push this thing to 46 hours, probably maybe once a week if that
often.
But sometimes it's just nice to know that if I don't feel like being bothered to charge
it, I could just wait another day and charge it tomorrow night instead.
And like I said, I usually routinely get, when that on those events, those occurrences,
I can push it to about 46 hours.
And then it's honestly still got usually somewhere around 10 or 15% left.
But I need time to charge it before I go to bed, you know, so, because I can't get that
third day out of it.
But it's a total game changer in the watch.
- Oh, definitely.
It puts it into a completely different class in terms of what Apple's provided for, I don't
since 2015. The next thing though about the Ultra, and this is now all things that the Ultra's got
that the Series 8 doesn't, and what makes it a different watch. So this is an interesting one
that I wanted to dig into a little bit more technically on, not too much but a little bit.
So they mentioned that it also supports L5 GPS as well as the standard L1 GPS that's available
on all the other watches. So, it also has, you know, this the usual like Glonass, Galileo,
QZSS and Beidou, which is the, if I remember correctly, is the Chinese one. So, all these
different global positioning systems from different countries, different constellations and so on and
so forth. But L5 is interesting because L5 is considered to be one of the next generation
or what do they call it? Modernised GPS. So, a little bit of, you know, interesting information.
So, L1, L2, L5. Don't know what happened to three and four. Okay. L1 operates at 1575.42 megahertz,
which is a wavelength of 190 millimetres. So, that's the existing original GPS that the US
military launched like 20, 30 years ago. They call L1 CA or course acquisition.
At least that's the bit that's available to us mere mortals, the public that are non-military.
Right. So, course acquisition also has things like, you know, GPS clock and all that sort of stuff.
So, it's all like atomic clock and you can derive a clock, you know, signal from everything. And the
accuracy on that is pretty good. But what they do- what the watch does is the same kind of trick as
as the phone does is it'll do assist, so-called assisted GPS.
So it'll get a rough fix on your location
based on cell towers or wifi towers, what have you,
or wifi nodes that are known.
And it'll then correlate down
to a more accurate reading based on that.
One of the problems with 190 millimeter wavelengths,
well, I mean, anything that's measured
around the 150 millimeter or getting up to,
that sort of a size in terms of wavelength
is it doesn't travel very well through solid objects.
- Yeah.
- So the longer the wavelength or the lower the frequency,
'cause V equals F lambda means that you're going to get
far better transmissibility through things like,
well, office buildings.
So if you're, you know, going and trying to find someone
with a standard L1 GPS, that's in a busy built up area,
they're probably not gonna see too many satellites
and you're not gonna get very much signal
through the building.
They need an open area to be found, which is not always practical.
Well, and you don't even have to be inside the building.
You could be like in the valley between a street with skyscrapers on each
side and down on the street level, you're not getting a lot either.
Exactly right. And I've been in that situation all the time.
When you're in downtown, it's like my wife will sort of like say, oh, I was just seeing where you
were on Find My Friends, and it turns out you're in the middle of the Brisbane River.
And I'm like, well, I can assure you that I am not in the middle of the Brisbane River.
- But that's the problem is that it can't--
- I just felt like a swim.
- Yeah, as much as I love Brisbane.
Have you seen the Brisbane River?
It's tidal and it ain't--
- I have not.
- It is a little bit on the murky side, shall we say?
Anyhow, that's fine.
Right, so L2, it's also relatively new,
but it has a frequency of 1,227.6 megahertz,
or yeah, just, I don't know why they wanna refer things
to megahertz, it's most people just call it 1.2 gigs,
4.2 gigahertz, but anyway, 244 millimeter wavelength.
So getting better.
L5 is the lowest frequency and hence largest bandwidth yet.
That's 1,176.5 megahertz.
That's got 255 millimeter wavelength.
So that's significantly more.
That's something like, what is that?
65 millimeters of additional wavelength,
which means it's gonna transmit just that much better
in urban environments.
But it's not just that, it's also the,
it uses its quadrature data,
it's over the carrier and it's a CDMA signal.
Yes, so carrier division multiple access,
which means it uses a combination of code division,
usually using a series of,
so you got Walsh codes
and a whole bunch of other different codes
that what they do is they'll actually encode it
such that each of those signals is unique.
You do cross correlation to pull out the signal
you're looking for, blah, blah, blah.
Technology has been around for a long time,
again, developed by the military
and refined by Qualcomm and patented by Qualcomm
in the public space, which they pretty much owned.
Anything that has anything to do with that
for quite a while and made them very rich,
which is a shame really,
'cause I don't really like Qualcomm as a company,
but that's probably just my Nortel rage
from 25 years ago still showing through,
but nevermind, it's fine.
Okay, but yes, so this is considered to be modernized GPS
and sometimes in the GPS biz,
they call it the third civil signal, L5.
The original satellites will start getting launched
in 2010 as a proof, and we are now up,
they've been gradually launched over the last decade
and a bit, they're now up to 17 satellites
as of time of recording, and by 2027,
they plan to have 24 in total.
Clearly, they're not launching on SpaceX
because they would have had them all up by now.
Maybe they've got cashflow problems
or parts supply problems, who knows?
But in any case, it is still usable today,
although it does not have as good a coverage
as it will when there's 24.
But they'll have spares in the constellation,
so, you know, to account for failures.
So I imagine it's still,
it's probably close to its best resolution
that you're gonna get.
The other thing that's interesting,
the channel bandwidth on that is 12.5 megahertz.
So it's a reasonable bandwidth,
but it's also, and most importantly,
double the power that's transmitted.
So L1 and L2 is relatively far, it's half the power.
So this is essentially double.
So that also will help getting through built up areas
and dense foliage, for example.
And in terms of testing the accuracy of it,
well, this afternoon when I was doing the mowing,
I had my watch on listening to some ATP
as I sometimes am known to do.
And I was tracking my workout
because I knew it would track my GPS position with my Apple Watch Ultra.
And you can actually see the individual lines that I
mowed down to, I guess, the accuracy.
You can actually see the parts.
And I'll take a screenshot of it and put that in the show notes.
Nice. Pretty impressive, huh?
It is. So I actually had a prototype for mowing
meter that never actually saw the light of day that was doing this with the phone.
Nice.
And that's pretty accurate.
It's pretty good.
So.
All right.
So successful test, I would say.
So, yeah, that L5 makes a difference.
What's happening in this one corner of the yard here?
There's one very erratic, very long path out all by itself.
That is where I ran out.
So if you trace back from the red dot where I stopped it, that's right next to the deck.
So, if you follow that line back, I was going to-
That's when you made your beeline back to the garage.
Yeah, basically.
And then I stopped tracking the workout.
So, yeah.
And you can make out the driveway because if you look on the larger zoom in, you can
see essentially the front driveway is the long rectangular blank area where I didn't
mow because it's bitumen or tarmac, as you may say.
And then the extension off to the right before you go to the shed is the other long rectangular
piece and the light gray section is the front of the house.
Okay.
There you go.
All right.
Nice.
I thought so.
All right.
So the other thing-
Can even see where you were moving at a good clip and where you were kind of dragging along.
Yeah, I know.
The dragging parts are usually where I'm turning the mower, right?
Anyway, because it's a push mower, okay?
Because none of this ride on stuff.
Well, interestingly, you had a lot more spunk at the start.
Yes, indeed.
As you get over closer to the red dot end of the spectrum, you were slowing down pretty good.
Oh, I was.
All right. So, the next thing is the action button, which is the other big difference,
because none of the other watches have this extra button. So, previously you had the power button,
then you had the digital crown, which you could push in as a button. Now, on the other side,
you also have the bright orange flat oval shaped button. And at the moment, the action button can
be configured to do a multiple range of different things. So, it's the first really configurable
button that we've had in the watch. Yes. So, the current list as it stands today, and this is
purely a software thing, is well, obviously you can, well not obviously, but you can actually
disable it because it can be annoying sometimes because I keep bumping it accidentally. But it
can also be a light, it can do the alert sound, which is loud, but nowhere near as loud as I
thought it was going to be. Stopwatch, it can set waypoints or backtrack, you can enable dive mode,
You can enable a workout and you can select which workout by pressing it multiple times.
And you can assign it a shortcut, which is pretty much any shortcut you like. So,
you could argue you could make it anything you really wanted, but there's a limit to what the
shortcuts can do on the watch. So, yes and no. Great.
I have mine originally set to light. I then tried workouts, realized that that sucked and
went back to light again. What do you use your action button for?
Yeah, that's- Mine's the flashlight of all those things, it was the most useful to me.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Very bright, very, very bright.
It's a nice flashlight.
Yeah. All right.
Now, here's the next thing that's interesting about this watch, the Ultra Watch Ultra over the others, and that is
how much water it can withstand in terms of depth.
Because the thing I found interesting is you've got to dig into the fine print to do the real
apples to apples comparison, because all they say in the bold
print is it can withstand up to 40 metres, which is 130 feet of depth in water for
diving to EN 13319.
And I'm like, okay, I'm not a diver, okay.
And I didn't consider that as necessarily a plus because I intend to become a
diver at some point. So, I did a little bit of digging, not too much, into that
particular standard. So, it's actually a
DIN standard, European standard.
And that particular standard is specifically for diving
accessories, depth gauges and combined depth and time measuring devices.
So, that whole 40 metre of depth thing is specific to diving.
And of course, the whole point of it is that if you
want to install the Oceanic Plus app, it'll become a fully featured dive
computer, according to, you know, according to their marketing
blurb, different people that are divers who have done
reviews, in other words, not me, have said that as a dive computer
goes, it's probably bare minimum, it's probably good
enough, but would they say fully featured?
They would not.
So, there are better dive computers out there than this thing.
But then again, you know, you also have to pay a subscription
plan for Oceanic Plus to work.
So, not only do you need the watch, but you also need the subscription
plan, which is over and above and not part of any of the existing subscriptions.
Like, it's not part of Apple One or anything else.
Yeah. So, I mean, I can kind of see why they do it, but I don't know.
If I was an avid diver, I guess you'd be just like, yeah, it's a no brainer, maybe.
But then again, if you're a diver already, would you be ditching your dive computer for this watch?
Probably not. Right.
But anyway, it's interesting.
So I was saying, sorry, I'm getting-
Well, for somebody that might recreationally dive, you know, like once a year they take a diving vacation or something,
I think it'd probably be suitable.
But if you're like a, quote, diver, you probably want a little more.
Yeah. Truth.
Anyway, so I go a bit sidetracked there on the whole dive computer thing, I thought that was rather interesting because if you look at the fine print, the true apples for apples comparison isn't the 40 meter depth because if you look at the series 8, series 8 says, oh, this is good down to 50 meters and you're like, hang on a minute,
You're telling me that the series 8 can do 50 metres and the Ultra can only do 40?
And it's like, oh no, it's a different standard.
So it's 50 metres to ISO standard 22.810 from 2010.
Yeah. Now this particular standard has nothing to do with diving at all.
It's actually a watch specific standard.
So it actually is a standard for measuring the water resistance of a watch.
So in other words, it's a horology standard.
It's not a-
- Right. - It's not, yeah,
but it is an international standard.
So I guess there's that, it's not just European.
- It's how long it's gonna survive
if dropped in the bottom of a pool, right?
- Yeah, exactly.
And so if you dig through the fine print of the Ultra,
so the Series 8, good to 50 meters ISO, 22, 8, 10,
the Ultra is good to double that, 100 meters.
So yeah. - Nice.
- So if the far more likely circumstance
is that for some reason that is unexplained, I will
accidentally drop it in the ocean at a depth of up to
100 metres. And then somehow, without diving, I will
recover said watch from the bottom and it will be fine.
So, that is the only use case I can think of where that will be an
advantage. Okay.
So, probably never.
I'd be interested in seeing how you pull off that recovery.
and would have to employ someone to do it for me, I don't know. And I know so much about
diving I can't even tell you the safest depth a human could dive. You'd think I would have
researched that, but I don't intend to drop my watch whilst I'm out over the ocean, over
that water that deep. Even though I have been on a cruise, I did not dangle my watch over
the side for inexplicable reasons and can't imagine why I would. And frankly, the only
way the watch is going to get to the bottom if it's attached to me while I sink to the
bottom, which is something I'm also trying to avoid.
Yes. Moving on.
I think I don't think you're going to wear it.
I don't I don't think this thing's quite good enough to take you down to find Rose's diamond.
No, indeed, it isn't.
Good Titanic reference.
Moving on. Yes.
OK. The Ultra also, unlike the others, has dual speakers.
They are 40 percent louder than the Series 8.
So they are actually quite loud.
It's pretty loud.
Yes. So, all the previous models, as far as I can
tell, only had a single speaker.
And I know there was more than one hole, but they were still driven by a single speaker.
But here's the real game changer for me in this particular watch.
And you may think all this stuff up now is really awesome.
And, yeah, sure, that's enough to get it.
I have tried making phone calls on my Apple Watches over the years.
I thought it was cool, a little bit Dick Tracy, you know what I mean?
Like, super, super cool.
And being out and about and making call on your watch when you don't have your phone anywhere near
you. I even tried working, you know, if you remember many years ago, I went phone-less.
I did an episode about it, in fact.
I do recall that.
Yeah. And when I was making phone calls, I tried using the speaker that was in the-
because it was a Series 3 at the time, it had a single microphone and I tried making calls.
And even in quiet environments, it was horrifically bad.
And so, it was essentially, you know what, it works if you've got it paired to
AirPods. You know, that was usable.
Right. But any other way, it was unusable.
Slightest bit of wind.
Yeah, they can't hear you, you can't hear them.
It was just an all around bad experience.
It was a horrible experience.
And so, slightest bit of wind and like my, you know, obviously
I speak to my wife a lot when I'm making phone calls.
I, you know, hers is my, unsurprisingly, my most commonly called number for
obvious reasons. And it's like, well, I would call her on my watch from time to
time. And one of her triggers is wind noise.
There's something about wind noise for her.
It's kind of like fingernails on a chalkboard kind of thing.
And she cannot stand it.
So, she will get to that point where she says, if you can't, like, cut that wind noise
out, I am going to hang up on you because I just can't listen to that noise.
I can't even hear you properly.
And anyhow. All right.
Yeah. And so this particular Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Ultra has
three microphones and they use, you know, beam forming techniques,
but they also specifically have wind noise mitigation so
that I have trialled even in...
Well, it wasn't... I wasn't standing in the middle of a hurricane, cyclone or typhoon.
choose your word for the same thing, or a tornado or a twister or a willy
willy, which frankly is actually what is referred to in Australia for
those that live out west.
But anyway, dust devils.
Here in Kentucky, we just say nadir's coming.
Oh, nadir's coming.
Nice. Very good.
Nadir's coming. Very good, Vic.
So, an excessive amount of wind was not blowing when I did this test, but I can
confirm that even though the wind was blowing and in an older watch it would have had wind
noise, there was nothing on the ultra, according to the listener.
Nice. So it is transformative when you are outside and
trying to make a call, you can actually hear the other person, and they can actually hear you.
And when I asked this particular person, admittedly, it was not my wife, because I don't think my wife would
survive me testing that.
I had to test it with someone else first to make sure it was safe before I tried it.
Good call.
Yeah. Good call. Yeah, I know.
right. It's yeah, been with someone for 20 years, you get to know these things.
When to push and when to not.
Anyhow, it's fine.
Sometimes they are your go-to guinea pig, sometimes not so much.
Sometimes your life is worth more than that.
So, yes, indeed.
Yes.
OK, so the other person basically said it literally sounded like I was talking on my iPhone.
It was that good. So, I'm blown away by that particular
feature. So, anyway.
So, all of this is to say, I believe that if you look at the Apple Watch from a design perspective,
and I said, what are its goals as a watch?
The goals that it's had up until the Ultra have been, it's a very consistent form factor.
It looks very much the same.
Every single version from the Series 0 up to the Series 8, they all are quite obviously,
clearly the same design, the same rounded square when you look at it front on, the same
flat screen but glass curvature around the edge. Maybe that curvature varied and how
close and thick or thin the bezel was has varied, but by external appearances, it was
very difficult to tell the difference between them from any reasonable distance. And it
was a design language. So, the Ultra's design language is fundamentally
different because it's- It is- It holds some of that shape, but it's got
a crown guard and it also has a raised titanium edge around
the screen. So, the screen is actually encased in that edge, that raised edge of titanium to protect
the screen. And it gives it a much more prominent look.
It is very chonky, as my kids like to say, and it is quite
clearly not a traditional Apple Watch, not even
close. You would look at this and you would think it was done by a different manufacturer.
If you didn't know it was an Apple Watch, you would say that looks like a Samsung or whatever else,
right? I don't know if I'd go that far.
Well, maybe not a Samsung, but you know what I mean?
It's definitely not an Apple Watch, right?
But when you look at this thing, I believe that this is the first
in a fork for the Apple Watch, which I hope is a
design that they're going to continue with, because I think it's great.
I think it is really-
Yeah, I agree.
And so, the other thing that they've done with the Ultra is that they've given it all of
these additional features that make it far more useful out in the real world.
And you don't have to be hiking to use a lot of them, you know.
It's like they pictured the Ultra with people doing, like, moderate sports all the way up to
extreme sports, like, oh, yeah, when you're on a two day long hike.
And I'm like, you know, I can make phone calls just out in the backyard that
are now possible on this watch that were previously not possible.
I'm not going to go on a two day hike.
I'm not that fit for one thing, and I'm not that crazy for another thing.
All my hats off to people that do really multi-day hiking.
That's commitment, respect.
But I'm not doing that.
Thank you very much. Anyhow, point is, you don't have to be doing those extreme sports to get
use out of all of those sorts of features. I don't have to be a diver to be-
feel a sense of comfort in knowing that if my watch does fall to the bottom of a very deep
pool or the ocean down to not too bad of a depth, it could be there for a week and I
could still recover it and it'd be fine.
Right.
Like that kind of waterproofness gives you that waterproofness.
Oh, my goodness. Water resistance and water protection at
depth gives you that confidence, you know.
So.
Yes.
And all in all, I see it as being the most
transformative Apple Watch since the Series Zero was released.
I think it's more transformative than any other version that's ever been released.
I would agree. And I'll actually double down on it and say that, like to me,
that when I look at this watch, I look at it and I think, you know, the Apple Watch has finally arrived.
Yeah. I think the problem with the original
Apple Watch. And I mean, okay.
When I- I know that Tim Cook has said publicly that the Apple Watch was a
product that they weren't entirely sure where it was going to go,
but when they saw how much people were using it more for fitness than for
sharing heartbeats and stuff like that, they're like, let's do some more
like fitness related stuff and see where this goes.
And then when they saw how much so many people were using it for health and fitness tracking,
they're like, right, this is what this is.
Yeah. But then again, you look at the gold Apple Watch, you know, you look
at the ceramic Apple Watch and then you look at the Hermes
watch, which I think its days are numbered, by the way, in my opinion, because of
this line of thinking.
Yeah. It's like the idea of having a luxury version of the watch
and even the stainless steel version which I've loved so much to date and I still love,
I think it's a beautiful design, but the truth is that that's not what people are using these
watches for. Right. Well, I think they just, they're having a hard time letting go of the idea
that they can make it, you know, the health tracking device that it is and they still really,
really want it to be fashionably respected in the real watch world. And I think that they're
hopefully slowly but surely learning that that's just they're not going to really it's not a
competitor in that space. The people that are interested in that space are interested in the
watches that inhabit that space. They're not interested in the Apple Watch. It's a very,
very nice, very practical utility item, but it is not a luxury fashion item.
No. And I guess my problem when I was debating if I
hung on to my Series 6, which, by the way, I still have for the
moment, it is I am looking to sell it.
Multi watch lifestyle for the win.
No, I just I don't I don't think so.
I'm struggling with like, if I can't get a decent amount of money for it, do I just
hang on to it and make it a hand-me-down for my kids.
Because I did that with a Series 3 and that's been very helpful.
Yeah.
So, I am thinking about if I can't sell it, I'll probably will just hand me down.
But I don't think I can justify going to a 2-Watch lifestyle.
I did actually try it for a week and I found myself just not using it.
So, you know, because it's like I can quickly charge the Ultra and wear
it overnight for sleep tracking.
And it's actually-
- Mine is, my series five is worn for like the hour or whatever it takes,
you know, to charge the ultra.
And that's about it.
- Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I will admit wearing the ultra for sleep tracking, I have actually clocked
myself in the side of my face with it.
And it did wake me up because it was, yeah, it was quite a sharp edge on it relative to what I was used to.
- Ouch.
- Just the once.
But I've only used it for sleep tracking like four or five times in the last month that I've had it.
So I actually... Okay. So I got mine in mid-December, quite literally the 16th of December.
So I've only had it just over a month of time of recording.
Yeah. And when I bought it, I got the medium to large size
black grey trail loop, and I knew it was the one I wanted.
It was, of course, not initially available for a few months when it first came out.
But this watch band, I honestly don't know what they've done with the materials,
But this thing feels so comfortable.
It is a soft-
It's got a nice sort of very gentle, faint furriness to the outside and the inside of it.
It just feels super comfortable on my skin.
I suspect it'll suffer the same problem as my Velcro-
Don't call it Velcro-
Sport loop vans.
I think they call it a hook and loop.
Hook and loop. Yeah, great.
Hook and loop. Don't call it Velcro.
Anyway, insofar as I think it's going to absorb my
sweaty, sweat smell and eventually will become less than palatable,
shall we say, to wear.
And you will smell me coming probably, I don't know.
So, I'm going to try and...
Yeah, but I've gotten better at washing that one out.
And then eventually the band eventually did wear out at the loop point with the
with the lug. So, I ended up throwing that one out.
It lasted me about two and a half years, though.
I wore it almost every day.
It was my favourite watch band.
This is now my favourite watch band.
Anyway, but I also decided to invest in the Midnight Ocean
Band, which, you know-
That's the one I have.
I know. And you remember how I sort of may have been not so
complimentary about that particular band?
I think on Bubble Sword, I used the word, I have that band that
you're trash talking about.
I think that is how you phrased it.
But the thing that's interesting is that I actually went and I tried it on and I sort of
stood in the store just wearing it and running my fingers over it, and I realised that the
holes in it that we- that they put in there clearly so that they can put the retaining
clip in and you can adjust where the retaining clip goes, that they
actually make it much softer than you would think.
Yes.
And so, wearing this is actually still quite comfortable.
And because it is adjustable...
I think I made that point.
And because it is adjustable, I decided, look, I've got an Apple Watch Ultra,
I want to get another Ultra band.
And so, I got that band, and that's a waterproof band.
I can take that in the swimming pool.
And when I was out doing the mowing, for example, I would wear that band, so I'm not absorbing
sweat into this one so much.
Right. Yeah.
And honestly, the only other one, which is, of course, the Alpine Loop band,
I tried it on in store and I just, I don't know how to describe it.
I didn't like it. It felt so imprecise and sloppy and
it was either too tight or too loose.
I think it looks pretty.
I think it looks pretty, but man, that thing just looks like it's going to get really cruddy looking very quick.
Well, when I was in the store, my son was with me, my oldest son was with me, and he's looking at
me trying on this Alpine loop.
This is only a couple of weeks ago, actually, it was in early January, and I was debating if I get it or not.
And he's like, are you seriously going to get that band?
And he told me from his opinion all the things that were wrong with it, like it's not a very precise
fit. It looks almost like a bit like a NATO band,
sort of, but not in a good way.
And he kind of talked me out of it, and I'm glad he did, because I think in the end, I just really
didn't like it. I was trying to justify liking it.
And I'm like, oh, then I'll have all three, you know, Ultra Botch bands.
And it's like, yeah, but I'm never going to wear it.
So why would I buy it? So I just-
That was it. I spent my money on something else.
Right. So I've wanted to work now for the first three weeks of the year.
And I've rocked it most days with my good old 42 millimetre stainless steel link bracelet,
which I have now had for nearly seven years, six years, six years, six years.
Nice.
And that link bracelet is still going strong. I got in there and I pulled apart every single one
of the... Because they're all easy to remove, all little segments. And I've cleaned them all out
with a fine brush and everything, and, you know, made them all nice and polished up. And it looks,
I wouldn't say good as new, but it still looks great.
And the two-
Every single segment?
Every single segment that comes apart anyway.
Okay.
But the one thing that's interesting about it is that you can tell the difference between the titanium,
which is obviously a brushed natural titanium and the stainless steel.
But because the stainless steel has been, you know, like scratched and marked up a bit,
it's not as shiny as it was when I first got it.
And so that actually works, it's less obvious.
So unless you're really looking.
Yeah. Well, you sent Clay and I a picture of it, and I thought it looked pretty good together.
It does. It does.
It looks pretty good. And that's what I've done.
But I tell you what, it is- You put the stainless steel link bracelet on plus the
ultra. This thing is- It's hefty.
You can feel it. Like when you're walking, you-
I would imagine.
You need to burn more calories on the left arm than the right because you're moving the watch and the
bandwidth. It's like you're working out with those little half kilo weight things, man.
Anyway. The Apple Watch curl.
The Apple Watch curls. You got it.
Exactly. That's why I'm more ripped on my left hand side, see.
Anyhow. Oh, my.
Yeah, right.
Okay. You believe that, you'll believe anything.
That's probably a disturbing picture for listeners.
My apologies. I didn't mean that like that.
Anyhow.
But the thing is, it's not really a going out watch insofar as it's not like a dress watch.
Like the old one, you could put on a nice watch face and a nice band.
I don't know. I think it looks pretty nice.
Well, I think it's a little bit too big and sporty to really pass as a dress watch.
But having said that, you know, I'm like I'm just an engineer that works in an office building.
I'm not wearing a suit.
I'm not wearing, you know, like a collar and tie.
Yeah. So does it need to be?
And I guess the answer is how many how often do I actually go up dressed to the nines, so to speak?
and have to wear a dress watch. I'm sorry, I don't even have a dress watch that works anymore.
Like, I have one, but the battery's long dead. And I have been lusting after a Longines,
you know, Grandmaster Collection watch, but that's a three and a half thousand dollar proposition.
And I've got ten thousand other things that are more useful that I need before that. So,
it's going to be a while. So, you know what I mean? It's like, what do I need a dress watch for?
And so, you know, I've just come to get used to this thing quite
quickly, and its advantages far outweigh the fact that it doesn't look-
Like, it's probably two or three percent less dressy, and
that's it. That's the only downside of this thing.
Everything else is a plus side.
So, yeah, tell me a bit about yours.
Did you just apply a number percentage to its
dressiness?
I totally did. And I have no numeric-.
Hey, all right, look, it's midnight my time.
I love you, man.
It is midnight my time, thank you very much.
All right. So, yeah, I did apply a percentage that I pulled completely out of my butt to
describe this dressiness of something.
Sure. I was just wondering what the scale was.
The scale is from one to- I don't know.
It's a random number.
All right. So, tell me a bit about yours and your wearing experience.
So, you've just got the Midnight Ocean band, same as me.
Yeah. I just the one that it came with in my true fashion.
I don't- Scott says I'm boring.
I wouldn't mind to have a few different bands, but honestly, I would see the changing
and fiddling with swapping them out and stuff more of a nuisance than anything, I think.
I like the Midnight Ocean band.
I've been a fan of it since I got it.
It's the nicest floral lastomer band that I've ever had. Yeah, so I'm pretty happy and content with it
I think it looks nice on the watch
So I'm just rocking that I may get
There was a couple of bands that I looked at and considered getting we talked about them on bubble sword
I may get one one day
But for now, I think I'm just content with this the way it is
I got mine back in a September when it was still pretty new not brand spanking new but still pretty new
Yeah, I'm more or less this I didn't want to order it and have to wait for it
So I just kind of watch the Apple Store the local Apple Store like a hawk through the the Apple Store app just to see
When they might have it in stock and I could you know buy it for a curbside pickup or whatever
And that's what I ended up doing. But I just I really love having this watch. I it's the nicest watch
I've had you know ever cuz like I'm not a nice watch watch person
But it's definitely the nicest Apple watch and just the nicest watch in general that I've ever had. I really enjoy it
need to
log a few more workouts for clay than I have been but
It's just I really enjoy it
I like the nice large screen size
Which is really helpful since I don't wear my reading glasses quite as often as I so it should
And honestly, I think it's time that those graduate from reading glasses to just regular bifocals or something
Anyway, so the extra display resolution is a little bit nice. It's a little scales things up bigger easier to see
I've actually gone pretty grown pretty fond of the flashlight on the button on the side
Yeah, although a couple of times you got it. You got to be careful because it's I think that this particular watch
It's easier to accidentally call 911 than on previous models
And now this happened to me twice. I'm ashamed to admit
And I just hang it
I just hang it up real quick as soon as it starts and and hope that I haven't caused a problem or
That somebody that actually needed to make a real call didn't get through in that few seconds
I don't know. I feel really bad about it, but it's just I don't know something about it
It's easier and I think it's because the chunkiness and like when you go to push that action button
Your natural instinct is to brace the other side with your other finger, you know
And I think that's how it happens, but I like the bigger crown. I like the I like the crown guard on it
I I like I'm actually a big fan of the titanium ring around the screen in
Large part just because I think that like, you know, it's finally something fresh and different for the Apple watch
They've you know made some subtle differences that you highlighted throughout its iterative lifecycle
But I think it's just nice to finally have something new, and I've gotten pretty used to the size and the weight.
I'm not wearing a stainless steel band or anything, so it's pretty manageable for me.
I wouldn't say I'm doing the Apple Watch curl or anything.
And do you realize...
I'm just really pleased with it.
Do you realize you just previously in the last minute called it chonky?
So there you go.
Words catching on already.
It's in your brain now.
There you go.
Yeah, we're starting a trend.
We are.
Kind of chonky.
Damn straight.
So what.
But I just I really like it.
Yeah, I love this thing.
Having said that, you know, I can understand why people will not get it if you want to truly.
Yeah, it does.
It makes it makes me sad that it's the most expensive model because I think a lot of people would really enjoy, you know, the benefits that come from the ultra.
And I will say this, if you're already looking at stainless anyway, definitely consider stepping up to the ultra because you're not looking at a big price gap there.
No, definitely not. Yeah.
There is one downside with my band collection that I
found since having the Ultra, though, and the problem is that-
What's that? Any of the solo loops that have stretched a bit with time,
they really aren't standing up to the extra weight.
It's like they flop around on my wrist too much, and particularly bad is my
woven nylon solo loop.
So, originally I had a size six band.
It was nice and tight and it was pretty good.
I wore it for nearly a year and a half, thereabouts, and it gradually
stretched to probably close to a 6.5 or maybe even a 7.
And it was getting a little bit loose-ish on my wrist
on with the series six on it.
But when I put the extra weight, the extra 14 grams, whatever it is, of
the Ultra and it just flopped around everywhere. It was unwearable. Yeah, you
really do want to keep this watch kind of snug because it will walk all
over your wrist if you don't. Yeah, the other one that the the fluoroelastomer,
the white size 6 solo loop which hasn't stretched. I don't wear it. I didn't wear it
anywhere near as much. It actually has the opposite problem because the lug
positioning is such that it just feels that little bit tighter.
And so it was already tight, and now it's just that little bit
tighter. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to get
the Ocean Band is because it is adjustable. So with the Ultra,
I've sort of turned my back on the solo loops. I feel like
they, yeah, one is now a little bit too loose, and then the
other one is simply just a little bit too tight. So that was an
interesting find but look you know hey it's fine. I do have my stainless steel
link bracelet I can add and remove links it fits perfectly and even if it gets a
little bit loose if I lose weight or you know hopefully not gain
weight but I can always add or remove links from that and I have still got
spares so I can do that easily and which is another reason I love that band.
And I also have the adjustable, I've got a black nylon band,
one of the older bands you can't buy anymore.
And obviously that's adjustable,
that works fine, it's a standard buckle.
So, you know, all the other bands are fine,
but yeah, the solo loop experiment,
I think is more or less over, but that's okay.
All right, did you have anything else
that you want to add about the watch
and so on before we wrap this up?
- I think the only other thing I would add
like what I said, you know, about being sad that it was the most expensive model because I think a
lot of people would enjoy it. I really look forward to some of the benefits of this watch trickling
down in future models of Apple watches. That battery life is such a game changer. It is so
nice. And I don't know that they'll ever be able to achieve the battery life that they have on this
one in the smaller sized watches, but I would think that they could port some of it into the
larger sized one? I don't know. Yeah I think possibly that that might be something that they
do. I feel like... And I think that the other models could benefit from an action button too.
Yeah that's what I was going to say. I don't know if that's going to stay forever a permanent
ultra only feature but I think all the watches in general could probably benefit from an action
button and that seems pretty reasonably doable in the other forms. Yeah that's true. I get the
The other- What I was going to say about this watch is that I feel like
the Apple Watch Ultra is the Apple Watch that Apple
decided that it is the Apple- It is the embodiment of what they finally
realised the Apple Watch really was being used for, which is for
fitness tracking and for, you know, sports and
activities. It's like that- Prior to that, there was
confusion as to whether or not that's what it would be used for.
And they went down the path of, you know, small, lightweight, aluminium,
this is what you need. But it's like-
But no, it's not, because your watches get beaten up and you don't want that.
Yeah, there's definitely a trade off there.
Like one of the reasons that I actually ended up with the Ultra is because, you know, all of my
watches prior to this one, they were always the aluminum sport watch.
And honestly, I never really dinged up the aluminum too badly, but man, the crystal, the glass,
it always took a beating. And I'm tired of the micro-fine scratches and stuff. So I was already
kind of leaning towards stainless steel anyway, just because I wanted to get the sapphire display
that would hopefully be more scratch resistant. And then once they announced the Ultra and you
look at the price point and the fact that it's like, depending on what watch you're looking at,
know, it's only like 50 bucks more and you add in all the rest of the battery
life and the larger display size and the titanium.
And to me, that's a no brainer.
Yeah, I agree.
It is absolutely a no brainer.
So this is also my justification to myself as to why I got one.
But I mean, in the end, I do believe that this is the watch that Apple
have been wanting to make once they figured out what the biggest market for their
watch is. Yeah. And ultimately, a lot of people seem to agree
because I'm seeing more and more of these out in the wild. And I
know from stuff that Marco has said in different forums, that
a large percentage of his listeners that have Apple
watches have Apple Watch Ultras. Yeah. So I think that it's
probably will come as no surprise to people that have
been using the watch for a while that have even the slightest
interest in doing more than just checking the time on it.
Yeah, I think the ultra is the way of the future. And I think
that we'll see a more focus on that. And there'll be more ultra
options in the future as well. I just be the one model.
That'd be nice.
Alrighty. Well, if you want to talk more about this, you can
reach me on the Fediverse at chigi@engineered.space or the
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If you'd like to get in touch with Vic, what's the best way for them to get in touch
with you mate?
That would probably be... I hesitate to plug the Twitters anymore.
You'll notice that there are no Twitters in the outro of this show anymore.
Yeah. Just look for me on the Fediverse.
I've got a vickhudson1@fediverse.cu,
but I think I'm actually in the process of transitioning to vickhudson1@app.net.
The naming of the app...
Of the app dot dot net was questionable, right?
Right.
That's okay.
Anyway.
Because they wrote out, I guess they probably couldn't get the real app dot net.
That should sell.
So, they- I like to entertain myself by saying app dot dot net.
But that is actually the way it is.
It's just as one dot is the word dot and the other dot is an actual dot.
So, maybe we should, instead of saying dot net, we should say stop net.
You know, as in like full stop, like they used to do in telegram days.
So, you know. Yeah, but that's not as fun as saying app dot net.
Well, app dot stop net. Oh, my God.
OK, excellent.
Well, you know what? App dot dot net.
All right. App dot dot dot.
Did it a da da da.
A special thank you.
Oh, now you're in Morse code.
A special thank you to all of our supporters.
Big thank you to everyone for listening.
And as always, it's a pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
It's always a pleasure having you back on the show. Thanks for coming on Vic.
Thank you for having me John. It's always a pleasure.
And it is quarter past midnight my time. There you go.
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