What to Expect from Apple's October iPad Announcement

By Sarah Kingsbury Wed, 10/24/2018

In the 95th episode, Donna, David, and Sarah delve into everything we’re expecting from Apple’s October 30 event in Brooklyn, New York. Tune in to hear the latest iPad, MacBook, AirPod, and AirPower rumors ahead of the big announcement day. Sign up for our live podcast following the event.

Click here to listen and subscribe. If you like what you hear, be sure to leave a review. And remember to tune in every other week to hear our editors share with you the latest Apple news, best apps, iPhone tricks, and coolest accessories.

This episode was brought to you by Tablift, the only stand that allows you to use your tablet hands free while sitting on the couch, on a recliner, or even in bed. This makes Tablift ideal for watching movies and videos, reading, making video calls, playing games, and more.

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Episode 95 Transcript:

Donna Cleveland: Hi and welcome to episode 95 of The iPhone Life Podcast. I'm Donna Cleveland, editor and chief at iPhone Life.

David Averbach: I'm David Averbach, CEO and publisher.

Sarah Kingsbury: And I'm Sarah Kingsbury, senior web editor.

Donna Cleveland: This week we are going to talk to you about what to expect from Apple's event which is being held next Tuesday, October 30th and it's being held in Brooklyn. Usually these events are at 10:00 a.m. Western time, this time it's Eastern time. 10:00 a.m. next Tuesday Eastern time and we're gonna be holding a live podcast next week as well just following the event, going over everything that was announced and helping you decide which of the products you want to buy that Apple just announced so go to iphonelife.com/podcast to register for that. We'll have a link in our blog post for this episode.

Donna Cleveland: We're gonna get into shortly everything that you should expect from Apple's event next week. Spoiler, we're gonna get some iPads and Macs.

David Averbach: God no spoilers, Donna.

Donna Cleveland: We'll get into more in a little bit. First I want to tell you about our sponsor, or David is gonna tell you about our sponsor, Tablift.

David Averbach: Whether you're planning to get a new iPad or you own an iPad already one of the accessories you need to get is Tablift. If you're watching the video, I'm gonna hold it up and you can see basically what it is is it positions your iPad so that you can view it from a reclined angle 'cause most of what you're doing with your iPad, although Sarah I think is the exception 'cause she often works from her iPad but most of the time at least for me I spend browsing the web, watching a movie, doing things like that and what you want is you want to be able to view your iPad from a reclined angle and in particular, if you're all the way reclined, if you're lying in bed you want the tablet to be kind of angled towards you which is a very difficult angle to get for most cases and that's where Tablift comes in.

David Averbach: It's one of the most popular iPad accessories on Amazon, it's really successful. I use it, I love it and so make sure you check it out.

Donna Cleveland: Can I just add what I love about Tablift?

David Averbach: Yes.

Donna Cleveland: I like to recline and lie on my side and there's no such thing as a tablet stand that can accommodate that except for Tablift and that's very important to me.

David Averbach: It's really convenient, yeah. So go to iPhonelife.com/podcast we'll have a link to it or if you go to Amazon and you can just search Tablift, T-A-B-L-I-F-T.

Donna Cleveland: Next up we want to tell you about our daily tip newsletter. If you go to iphonelife.com/dailytips you can sign up to learn something cool you can do with your phone in just one minute every day. Each episode we also share with you one of our favorite tips of the week. This week my favorite tip is how to tailor notifications from your lock screen. I think I've mentioned on the podcast before that my favorite feature of iOS 12 is the fact that you can tailor your notifications, well it's grouped notifications and this is part of that feature.

David Averbach: Group notifications is the best.

Donna Cleveland: So with iOS 12 now you see stacks of notifications from different apps and different groupings on your screen and if you don't like some of the notifications that are showing up or you don't need them, instead of having to go to your settings app and navigate to it there you can just swipe left right on that notification, tap 'manage' and then you can have an option to deliver quietly or you can go in and find more in depth settings but deliver quietly is really the one I want to talk about because most of the time when I'm seeing notifications and I don't need them it's the fact ... the situation is that I don't need as many notifications from that app. Say a news app is bombarding me with breaking news all day, deliver quietly will allow them to show up in my notifications center but it won't show them up on my lock screen. So I found that to be really useful.

Sarah Kingsbury: I use it all the time actually because I've talked about this group thread I'm in that's really active. Sometimes I want to get all those notifications and sometimes I don't.

David Averbach: The Pokemon Go thread?

Sarah Kingsbury: Yes thank you for mentioning-

David Averbach: Okay just checking. I just wanted to make sure that the thread we were talking about here, yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Thanks for mentioning. During work hours I just swipe left on that giant stack of notifications and like to have it delivered quietly and then later, on the weekend or something I might go find the notifications and swipe left and have them sent right to my lock screen and that makes it ... I wish you could just really set timers and stuff for these things. There's not nearly as many notification customization things as I would like, like I'm already complaining about this awesome new feature. So yeah, I find it super handy.

David Averbach: It's funny 'cause I love this feature but I never use the quiet part of it. What I love is it was just a little bit too inconvenient for me to go into the notification center to turn off notifications for apps that I didn't want to receive notifications for, and so I ended just leaving them, whereas now because I can do it from my lock screen, a notification comes up from an app that I don't want to receive it for and I just turn it off altogether from that lock screen. But for me it's like if I don't want it pop up on my lock screen, I generally don't want it clogging up my notification center at all, so I sort of that middle ground of it delivers quietly. To me, it's like if I'm gonna deliver it quietly I might as well ... I must not care and might as well not do it at all.

Sarah Kingsbury: That's interesting.

Donna Cleveland: That's interesting. Yeah 'cause for me that's not the case so much because for things like news or podcasts I like to have, to be able to go, with my own timing go in and look at those things in notification center so I do use it at some point. But if you want to try deliver quietly and you change your mind, when you go into notification center and see that there you can swipe left again and go back to deliver prominently or you can go turn it off altogether. You can always try it out and go back if you don't like it.

Sarah Kingsbury: One complaint I've heard is that you can't just completely disable this feature of grouping notifications, you can only turn it off app by app. I really like it but if you're one of the people who doesn't what I would recommend is going into settings and notification and for the apps you get the most notifications from, for me that's really only about five, you can just choose to turn that setting off for those ones you get the most and then as you get notifications for other apps, then at the time you could turn that off so that you don't have to spend an hour going through every single app.

Donna Cleveland: That's a good tip.

David Averbach: I feel like, I love this feature. I feel like-

Sarah Kingsbury: That's fine, David.

David Averbach: Do that with caution 'cause so many times I see this where Facebook will change a feature and everyone will complain and then a year later they'll change it again and people will be like, "Oh I loved it the way it was," that they actually complained about it a year earlier. So make sure you're not just getting annoyed with a feature that you haven't gotten used to and you really, truly care about this 'cause it's so convenient. I don't know how anybody wouldn't love it.

Sarah Kingsbury: Not everyone's just like you, David.

David Averbach: I know but they should be.

Donna Cleveland: All right so that's our daily tip for the week. Iphonelife.com/dailytips is where you can go to sign up to get this free newsletter. Next up I want to tell you about our premium subscription, iPhone Life Insider. This is our premium educational service. It's a monthly membership and along with this membership you get a video version of our daily tips, you get in depth video guides including our most recent iOS 12 guide, which I put together.

David Averbach: And it's amazing.

Donna Cleveland: And you get a digital subscription to the magazine. We just came out with our winter 2018 buyers guide so you'll want to get in on that as well as our full archive of past issues. You get an extended version of this podcast. We share a special segment at the end and we also cut out all the ads so you don't have any interruptions and you also get Ask An Editor, that's our final feature which I was just leading into now where you can ask our group of experts any kind of tech problem that comes up and we'll help lead you through it. Sarah is the person who is answering most of our Ask An Editor questions.

Donna Cleveland: Each episode we like to share one question that an Insider asked and how Sarah helped them work through it.

David Averbach: Real though before we get into our question of the week. If you've been listening to this podcast awhile you've probably heard us promote Insider a lot, if you're kind of wondering what it is and want to learn more about it, Donna and I did a walk through of the entire program where we kind of give a sneak peek inside. Take a look at the website, take a look at all the features and walk you through everything. We'll link to it so if you're listening to this you can go to iphonelife.com/podcast and you can watch a walk through. It's just about half an hour and it just shows you a more in depth view of what this program is and what it's about so you can check that out.

Sarah Kingsbury: This week I heard from an Insider who wrote, "I'm doing a presentation using my iPhone and an Epson projector. I would like to play the sound through a Bluetooth connected speaker but when I plug my iPhone into the projector it plays the sound through the projector rather than the Bluetooth speaker. Is there a way to work around this?" Yes there is, yay.

David Averbach: Oh good.

Sarah Kingsbury: It's really actually super convenient to change the audio output on your iPhone. You can do it in control center, on an iPhone X or later you would swipe down from the upper right corner of your iPhone and on an earlier phone you'd swipe up from the bottom and then at the top right there should be the audio tile, which is basically now playing and so you press that, long press it to expand it and there will be a little streaming icon and if you tap that you'll see all of the different options for where you can send your audio and if you have the Bluetooth speaker connected you can tap on that. If you don't see it you might have to go into your Bluetooth settings and make sure your phone's connected to the Bluetooth speaker and I'm happy to report that this worked for him.

David Averbach: Oh good.

Donna Cleveland: Awesome.

Sarah Kingsbury: I like it when I hear back from the Insiders. I'm always like, "Please let me know how it goes," 'cause I want to know if it worked and if it didn't I want to help you figure it out so that was really nice to her that.

Donna Cleveland: That's awesome, yeah to know that your advice worked out.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: As we said go to iphonelife.com/insider or if you want to get more of an idea of what Insider is watch our walk through by going to iphonelife.com/podcast go to this episode blog post and we'll have a link there for you.

Donna Cleveland: Last episode we talked a lot about reading on your iPhone and how different people's preferences for that. Do you like Audible? Do you like Kindle? Or do you not like reading on your iPhone and you prefer paperbacks, so that was our question on the week and I wanted to share some answers 'cause I thought some of our listener feedback 'cause we got a lot.

David Averbach: We got a lot and thank you guys. We love reading them. We read them all even if we don't get a chance to read it on the air so we wanna make sure you guys felt heard. We loved hearing from all you guys.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. So is this one, because we got so many responses I made some bullet points of over arching themes 'cause we couldn't read them all out but a lot of people agreed with us that for non fiction, that you would prefer to read a hard copy or an eBook so you can see the diagrams and charts and things like that. I think Sarah, you were the one who was saying that, right? That you prefer not to use Audible for something like that?

Sarah Kingsbury: Well, David was saying that because of charts. The non fiction I read doesn't generally have as many charts but I do find it easier to take my time and go back and forth between different sections in a hard copy.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, so there's that then Audible, a couple of readers wrote in saying they use Audible for fiction. I understand that back in the day when it was books on tape when you were doing a long road trip, I feel like that's really nice for a mystery or some other sort of fiction title. I actually have used Audible for some non fiction recently but I can see where the listeners were coming from with this. A lot of people wrote in kind of sentimental things about hard copy books, how they love the feeling of the book, the tactile-

Sarah Kingsbury: The smell.

Donna Cleveland: Turning of the pages, the smell and all of that. What one listener was saying that even with all of that they've switched mostly to the iPhone just because you can control the text size which is awesome. A lot of times with books it's hard to see. It's self lit so you don't have to worry about turning on a light on the side. There are things that just make it more convenient and it's in your pocket at all times so you don't have to ... you'll always have it with you basically 'cause most of us are addicted to our iPhone's.

Sarah Kingsbury: I always had such a struggle pre eBooks trying to carry all the books that I had to have with me at all times.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, and I wanted to read one of the emails. "I haven't actually read a book in years. Before there was Audible I checked out books on tape then CDs from the local library. The main reason I prefer audio books is that I can listen to them on my way to and from work and during my lunch breaks. Doing that I can get through a 10 or 12 hour book in just a couple of weeks. Another reason I prefer audio books is that in order for me to read and comprehend anything I need near total silence or I find myself having to reread passages repeatedly. It was so bad that when I had to read books for high school I had to wear ear plugs and over the ear headphones. Somehow I'm able to easily concentrate while listening to audio books."

Donna Cleveland: I found this one interesting because I kind of have the opposite experience, actually where with audio books I'll have to sometimes rewind 'cause I'll be cooking or something listening to an audio book and I'll be like wait a second, did I comprehend anything from this last chapter? I better go back.

Sarah Kingsbury: It seems like it depends on how you process information best because when I'm reading I can't hear things but if I'm listing to something I can't do anything else 'cause I really have to focus on listening.

David Averbach: I will say a couple thoughts, first of all you guys inspired me. I'm reading a non fiction book on Audible and I switched it to 1.25. I can't remember whose suggestion that was.

Donna Cleveland: Oh 1.25 speed?

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: I think that was me.

David Averbach: It's surprisingly tolerable. So I learned something from that and I enjoy being able to listen to a little quicker. Also one thing though, I'm, as noted from the last episode very firmly in the Kindle Paperwhite camp but you can't share very easily with the Kindle Paperwhite. They sort of have a few sharing settings but a hard copy book you can lend to somebody so easily and there's something really nice about that but the back lighting for me is really what does it and the portability.

Sarah Kingsbury: But you know bad hard copy books you can throw them out the window or against the wall.

David Averbach: Yeah so, so many things.

Sarah Kingsbury: And it's important.

Donna Cleveland: All right so now let's talk about the Apple event happening next Tuesday. As we said at the beginning of the episode this event is occurring next Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time, that's October 30th and it's being held in Brooklyn which is interesting.

David Averbach: I think that's the first time they've ever held it in New York as far as I know.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, It has been since I've been working here at least for the past five years.

Sarah Kingsbury: It's interesting because when they had their spring iPad announcement they did it at a school in what's it, Chicago?

David Averbach: I think it was Chicago, yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: So that's interesting it's like they're trying to put it in the context of how it would be used.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah maybe because at least the invitations were kind of artistic looking, like this new iPads, definitely think of New York there are a lot of creative people.

David Averbach: I feel like part of it is too they're just trying to brand themselves as Apple not just being a California company but they have offices all over the world now so I think they're trying to kind of brand themselves in that way but who knows.

Donna Cleveland: Interesting. Yeah. So let's talk about the invitation. One of our feature writers, [Camlin 00:16:05] was speculating about what the invitation meant. Different media companies got ones that look different, it was the Apple logo with different kind of artistic designs and what did it say? Do you remember? I can look it up, what the wording on the invitation if you don't.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah I don't remember.

Donna Cleveland: There was speculation ... I mean a lot of the different media sites were saying that we're probably gonna be getting ... seeing different creative tools for the iPad 'cause already iPad Pro is great for drawing with the Apple Pencil and so there's sort of speculation.

Sarah Kingsbury: Apple's always promoted the iPad Pro with emphasis on the graphic design potential.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

David Averbach: We've heard someone rumors that the Apple Pencil will be ... that they'll be updating the Apple Pencil, I could definitely see a paintbrush or-

Donna Cleveland: There's more in the making that's the, that's [crosstalk 00:17:00] invitation said, there's more in the making.

David Averbach: I feel like they used to drop really serious hints in their ... in there ...

Sarah Kingsbury: [crosstalk 00:17:07] like they're phoning it there?

David Averbach: Yeah, I feel like they're phoning it in. I feel like they try to be clever but then at the end of the day it's like, usually has nothing to do with anything. So I'm resisting-

Donna Cleveland: [crosstalk 00:17:19] something kind of cute.

David Averbach: the urge of reading too far into this. It's probably gonna be like iPad is for makers, the end.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah so that's what invitations ... you know maybe these clues mean something, maybe they'll show someone of the cool new iPad Pro features with Adobe App or something I don't know. But let's talk about the iPad rumors.

David Averbach: Yes.

Donna Cleveland: So that's probably the main meat of the event. So what I've been reading there's gonna be two new iPads, they're gonna copy the design of the iPhone X lines and have Face ID, edge to edge displays, not OLED displays though and no Home button.

Sarah Kingsbury: One interesting thing about that is there's a rumor that you'll be able to use Face ID in horizontal and landscape mode which is exciting and that there won't be a notch like there is in the iPhone because there's enough space for the two def camera in the larger iPad so that's exciting to have an iPad Pro that could do that.

David Averbach: Both of those things would be cool. I mean for an iPad I feel like you have to be able to use Face ID in landscape because so many people have landscape as their primary mode of using their tablet.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah that would be very annoying if you had it in a keyboard for instance and you had to switch it to unlock it.

David Averbach: Yeah, that could be really annoying.

Donna Cleveland: So yeah that makes sense to me. The display sizes that I was reading about were 11 inches and 12.9 inches which would support that they be similar in size to the current two iPad Pro sizes but just a larger screen.

David Averbach: Well-

Donna Cleveland: 'cause for instance there's the 10.5 inch display right now so the 11 inch one would probably be in the same form factor.

David Averbach: The rumor that I heard which is I think a little bit different than that is that the 12 inch tablet is going to have a smaller ... it's gonna have the same size screen but a smaller form factor.

Donna Cleveland: Oh okay.

David Averbach: And that the 10 and a half inch screen is then gonna have the same form factor but it'll be edge to edge display which will make it 11 inches. So it's like the ... and that makes sense to me because the 12 and a half inch tablet, it's huge.

Donna Cleveland: It's so massive.

David Averbach: It's like-

Donna Cleveland: They can't make it any bigger, you're right.

David Averbach: Not only can they not make it bigger but-

Donna Cleveland: [crosstalk 00:19:36]

David Averbach: It's limiting. The size of that device I would imagine is limiting its sales, limiting its portability. The whole point of a tablet is to be portable and so shrinking that down makes sense whereas the iPad 10 and a half inch, it's kind of the traditional iPads size and shape and it makes sense, I think people like that shape fine.

Donna Cleveland: So for the smaller one, we're saying that right now the iPad Pro has a 10 and a half inch display, this one will be 11 inch display in the same form factor. But the bigger one they're not gonna make it any bigger.

David Averbach: Yes, yes. They're not gonna make ... well they're shrinking the form factor-

Donna Cleveland: The form factor.

David Averbach: And the screen size will remain the same, yes.

Donna Cleveland: Okay, cool, yeah that makes sense to me.

Sarah Kingsbury: That makes sense, yeah.

David Averbach: One of the things that people are pretty heartbroken about is the rumors are that they're gonna discontinue the iPad Mini. So we'll have to see about that.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I know we've had so many die hard iPad Mini fans over the years.

David Averbach: But if you have a XS Max, that's pretty comparable size to a Mini, obviously especially with the screen size 'cause it's now edge to edge display.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, although it does have some of the iPad navigation features [crosstalk 00:20:43]

David Averbach: Yeah and it's really expensive as opposed to Mini which is very cheap.

Donna Cleveland: Right, exactly.

David Averbach: So there's a lot of trade offs, Apple's juggling them.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah for sure. So other things I've read about it, USB-C. The rumors seem to be pretty strong for that which would, it would mean that the new MacBook Pro line and the new iPad Pro's would be charged the same way 'cause the MacBook Pro switched over to USB-C. How do you like USB-C? You have that on your ...

David Averbach: On my Ma ... I like it. I know a lot of people ... I love on the old Macs, the magnetic charger 'cause it could snap off which gave me a lot of peace of mind but in general, USBs fine. I do have an adapter that I have to use for some things that have the normal USB but in general I think it's a move in the right direction. It's smaller than a traditional USB and it's also reversible so you can plug it in either direction-

Donna Cleveland: Yeah I agree.

David Averbach: You don't sit there and fiddle with it.

Donna Cleveland: I hate fiddling with that.

David Averbach: Yeah, I hate that.

Donna Cleveland: [crosstalk 00:21:37] USB.

David Averbach: I'm really entertained by this 'cause I know that whatever Apple does will cause a controversy but I think that in the end, like if you fast forward five years from now, I would bet a lot of money that all Apple devices will be USB-C and lightenings kind of gonna go the way of their original dock cable solution. But, Apple took so much grief when they switched to the lightening that I'm sure they're pretty reluctant to switch it and they took so much grief when they switched and got rid of the-

Donna Cleveland: Headphone jack.

David Averbach: Headphone jack that is like Apple just can't win these fights but I think it is the right move. I think it makes sense to start with the iPad because the Mac line already has USB-C, people don't dock the iPad as much so I think they'll be less annoyed about it. We all have a lot of devices to dock, our phones, so I'm pro USB-C but we'll see.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I'm personally, I don't think that they should have gotten rid of the headphone jack. That just seemed too soon, I miss it a lot of times but the USB-C I think makes more sense if because a lot of Android phones use USB-C too so there's a lot of appeal to having it be universal, similarly to now with wireless charging all using the same wireless charging technology, that's really nice.

David Averbach: Yeah absolutely.

Sarah Kingsbury: I'm so against proprietary charging solutions.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, so that us use chi.

Sarah Kingsbury: When it comes to headphones, when it comes to fitness bands, any company that has a proprietary charging cable or little plug in, I will ... if I even bother to review I will dock it significantly in terms of my evaluation of it because it's so inconvenient and it's an extra expense if you lose it or it breaks. It's just ridiculous.

David Averbach: Well and really the fact with Apple and Android have different charging solutions is really a hassle 'cause any time you're in an airport or you're some place where you wanna use somebody else's charger whether it's a public or you wanna borrow it, it's like there's this weird split and when I'm traveling I have to carry a USB-C, a micro USB for my Kindle, and a lightening cable and it's driving me crazy so, having one yeah.

Donna Cleveland: To be fair most accessories use micro USB.

David Averbach: But that's-

Donna Cleveland: Most of them are not using USB-C.

David Averbach: But I think they're moving in that direction. I think that's a legacy issue more so than what will be. I will say though, regarding the headphone jack, because you can ... a lot of people don't know this, you can listen to music by plugging a headphone into your lightening cable, assuming it's compatible or you have the little widget.

Donna Cleveland: But they don't include that little-

David Averbach: They stopped including it.

Donna Cleveland: Dongle thing in the iPhone package.

David Averbach: But, heres the point I'm coming to, if Apple switches to USB-C, most headphone manufacturers will likely switch to USB-C as well because then they'll support Android and iPhone 'cause a lot of Android manufacturers followed suit once a took that much heat for it, they were okay doing it so they followed suit and got rid of the headphone jack and so I think this is actually moving us back towards being able to have wired headphones but we'll see.

Sarah Kingsbury: I'd really like that.

David Averbach: That would be nice.

Donna Cleveland: Apple Pencil, I thought ... I don't know much about the Apple Pencil but Sarah, can you tell us about that? Rumors?

Sarah Kingsbury: Well the rumors are there will be a new Apple Pencil which seeing the event invitations kind of made me think yeah, there will be. There is a lot of rumors out there from not being able to draw on a not touch sensitive surface and say send what you're drawing to your Mac or whatever.

David Averbach: Oh that'd be cool.

Sarah Kingsbury: I think that might be a ways off but two rumors that I thought were really interesting would be one, that it would pair via proximity ...

Donna Cleveland: That'd be really cool.

Sarah Kingsbury: Kind of like the AirPods do which I hate the plugging the lightening thing into the iPads lightening port. It's so dumb.

Donna Cleveland: Like you've got the Apple Pencil just sticking out the side of your iPad, yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Well that's why in my iPad case article in the buyers guide I actually included a dock for your Apple Pencil because it's so awkward to use when your Apple Pencils charging. The only good thing is it charges quickly so you don't have to be awkward for too long. But also that it would be magnetic so it would actually ... you could clip it onto, attach it to your iPad magnetically-

Donna Cleveland: That'd be nice.

Sarah Kingsbury: So you don't have to be super paranoid about losing this $100 thing that's just gonna roll around.

David Averbach: That would be really nice.

Donna Cleveland: That would be really nice, I [crosstalk 00:26:18] that.

David Averbach: Do you use your pencil a lot? I feel like I would never use it.

Sarah Kingsbury: I do the mark up PDFs and things.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah I remember you saying you were surprised by how much you use it for work?

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah if I'm doing any kind of markup, I kind of do want to explore more doing some art with it. I haven't done any drawing on an iPad before so that would be interesting.

Donna Cleveland: That'd be really cool. Sarah's a really good artist.

Sarah Kingsbury: No.

Donna Cleveland: She is, she is. All right let's talk about Macs.

David Averbach: Yeah, so we don't cover a lot of Macs so we'll kind of cover this a little bit briefly. The rumors I'm hearing are a few different Mac releases. The first one is an updated ... I'm so used to iPads.

Donna Cleveland: An updated iPad.

David Averbach: An updated iPad. An updated MacBook Air. Now I've complained about this in previous podcasts. The MacBook is actually thinner and lighter than the MacBook Air and so the naming doesn't make sense in general. My girlfriend bought a MacBook and so I did a lot of research comparing, contrasting MacBook's and MacBook Airs and it's really confusing and Apple kind of has butchered their lineup in my opinion. So hopefully they'll get this right. The rumors are it'll be a retina display which is about time for MacBook Air. I'm assuming it'll be thinner and lighter although that remains to be seen and it'll be cheaper. The rumors are it'll be less than a thousand dollars which will be really nice so I think-

Donna Cleveland: 'Cause the current ones like $1,300 or something?

David Averbach: Yeah so I think it should be a really nice addition to Apple's lineup. Hopefully Apple will do a good job clarifying why someone should buy a MacBook versus a MacBook Air versus a MacBook Pro, 'cause it's confusing.

Donna Cleveland: Well what I was reading though was that the Air won't be part of the name.

David Averbach: Oh okay so they might just discontinue it.

Donna Cleveland: That they might just discontinuing MacBook Air line so the MacBook's ... now when you get a MacBook it would just be expected that it be that thin, light version.

David Averbach: Oh okay.

Sarah Kingsbury: So are they simplifying it to two, the MacBook and the MacBook Pro basically?

David Averbach: I think they should do that.

Donna Cleveland: [crosstalk 00:28:22] Pro [crosstalk 00:28:23] they for sure continue to have but we're not expecting any MacBook [crosstalk 00:28:26]

David Averbach: No ...

Sarah Kingsbury: Now didn't they release on in the summer, yeah?

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, the MacBook Pro line was just updated.

David Averbach: Yeah so they updated the MacBook Pro line this summer. They didn't have an event but they updated, in my opinion those were pretty significant updates.

Donna Cleveland: Were you pissed, David 'cause it was like right after you bought a MacBook Pro?

David Averbach: I was annoyed 'cause I just bought one and I really wanted more than 16 gigabytes of RAM which they didn't offer at the time.

Sarah Kingsbury: You might have been able if you bought it close enough to the release you might have been able to exchange it?

David Averbach: No it had been like pretty close to a year.

Donna Cleveland: It had been six months or a year.

David Averbach: Yeah, it was just the perfectly wrong time but anyway. That's my burden to bear. I would be very happy if they disc-

Donna Cleveland: Poor David.

David Averbach: I know, life's hard. If they discontinued the MacBook Air I think that would make a lot of sense, save a lot of confusion. The other computer that we're hearing rumors about is the Mac Mini which Apple hasn't updated in four years. It's kind of Apple's entry level desktop computer. It's just the computer, it doesn't come with a keyboard, a mouse, or a screen so you have to kind of get your own. We actually have one that we use in the office and we have to connected to our TV so we use it in the conference room. But they're gonna update that, presumably give it better specs and the rumor is there's gonna be two versions. Right now there's just the entry level but the rumor is there'll be a pro version of this as well so we'll kind of wait and see what specs that gets and what the price points are but it's been due for an update. I think it's a pretty good solution for people especially because-

Donna Cleveland: We've got a couple Mac Mini's in the office.

David Averbach: Yeah well Apple's hardware tends to be pretty expensive and so you can usually get a keyboard, a mouse, and a nice screen for less than Apple charges.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah go to some other third party, yeah.

David Averbach: Yeah it's a nice way to have ... it's kind of the affordable way to have a Mac computer in a lot of situations 'cause it's about $500 for the based level Mac Mini.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah that's a good point. So we're not expecting to get AirPods or the Airpower mat.

David Averbach: Yeah boo.

Donna Cleveland: But I think that we might get details about those two things. About when we're going to get them, it sounds like we're not gonna get AirPods two until early 2019 but it's gonna be a significant update. It should have 'Hey Siri' support so you can activate it hands free. It's expected to be water resistant, have noise cancellation potentially. That one, it was unclear whether we'll get that or not. Wireless charging for the case itself.

David Averbach: Oh that's great.

Donna Cleveland: That seems pretty likely and it'll be probably a little more expensive. The AirPower mat, that maybe we would get but that should, that ... the Airpower mat will charge all of your iOS devices on one mat which seems pretty cool.

David Averbach: It is cool, I don't know why they're struggling to come out with this product. It seems like there's so many chi wireless chargers out there that I don't know why Apple can't pull this off.

Donna Cleveland: Maybe they want to wait until have the AirPods though that works with it and then the Apple Watch is a little more complicated 'cause it has to charge the Apple Watch which right now I've tried this, tested this out to see 'cause I'd read some things online that made it sound like maybe you could two wireless charges to-

David Averbach: You can't.

Donna Cleveland: Charge your Apple Watch, you can't.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah I've heard that Apple is-

Donna Cleveland: Or for the later series ones, sorry.

David Averbach: Gotcha.

Sarah Kingsbury: I've heard Apple is struggling to kind of manage all the different types of device that you might put on this one ...

Donna Cleveland: Mat.

Sarah Kingsbury: Charging mat and-

David Averbach: That makes sense.

Sarah Kingsbury: That makes sense.

Donna Cleveland: But yeah back to convenience of charging, how cool would be if you could just throw on your stuff on mats and have it charge. I would love that.

David Averbach: It would be great. I will say, and this is ... I haven't heard any rumors about this so this is purely my speculation. I think that the iPad will be announced but will not be available for a while. The reason why I think that is because typically if Apple has a device that's gonna be available very soon ... bless you, Sarah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Excuse me.

David Averbach: Typically if Apple has a device that's gonna be available very soon after the announcement, we see a lot more leaks about the actual form factors 'cause they have to be producing this stuff in China and it's really hard to keep it all under wraps so often what they'll do if they have an exciting new product is they'll announce it before they start the manufacturing process which reduces the chance of leaks which is what we're kind of seeing now where we've heard a lot of details about it but I haven't seen any leaked form factors at all. So that's purely speculation but I'm gonna guess it'll come out in mid December right before the holidays.

Sarah Kingsbury: I would bet Apple wants to get that holiday rush.

David Averbach: Yeah but they messed that up with the HomePod.

Sarah Kingsbury: [crosstalk 00:32:57]

Donna Cleveland: [crosstalk 00:32:57]

David Averbach: So they will mess it up sometimes.

Sarah Kingsbury: I think they didn't plan to mess it up.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: I agree with you, I think they're just ... they know people are starting to think what big purchases they might make in the holiday season and so they want to make sure they're on people's lists.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: So the last thing that we are expecting Apple might tell us about are some iOS 12 features that we didn't get when the iPhone's released. Namely group FaceTime. FaceTime is now supposed to work with up to 32 people but Apple delayed the roll out of that feature so maybe we'll hear about when we're gonna get that. Another is dual SIM support from carriers.

Sarah Kingsbury: Right, apparently on Apple's side everything's already in place for that but I guess there needs to be some sort of carrier readiness that will hopefully come with iOS 12.1.

Donna Cleveland: Do some of the carriers support it yet or do you know?

Sarah Kingsbury: Not from what I read. To be honest I didn't research this too hard.

Donna Cleveland: Oh okay. Real time adjustable bokeh effect or bouquet, I can't remember it. That's the depth of field effect with the new iPhone.

David Averbach: Will that only work with the new iPhone? I've been wondering this.

Donna Cleveland: I think so.

David Averbach: 'Cause I'm excited for that and I didn't get the new iPhone.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, how does that work again?

Sarah Kingsbury: So this might make you change your mind?

Donna Cleveland: Could you explain a little bit?

David Averbach: This will not make me change my mind. Basically how it works is right now with the portrait mode, you set it to portrait mode and it just automatically does the depth of field for you. In a traditional SLR or DSLR camera you can adjust the depth of field so you can adjust how much of the background shows up or doesn't show up and so you can have it be a really tight depth of field where only your subject matter shows up and everything else is blurred or you can have it be some things in the background show up and so what this feature will let you do is it let's you do that in post production which is really cool. So you have to put it in portrait mode, you take the photo, and then you can later adjust the depth of field to have it either be ... control how much of the background shows up.

Donna Cleveland: Cool. So that, we may get some updates on AirPods and these other software features but unfortunately it doesn't look like we'll probably actually get those products. Probably are just gonna be seeing iPads and Macs but that's really exciting. We were really bummed out with the September event, David and I especially have our eye on the new iPad so we're really excited about the possibility of actually being able to get one.

David Averbach: Yeah the reason I did not-

Donna Cleveland: Before the end of 2018.

David Averbach: The main reason I did not update my iPhone X is ... well first of all if you read my article I didn't recommend people do that 'cause I don't think the upgrade is that substantial but second of all, I'm really excited for the new iPad and I am saving my budget to get this new iPad.

Donna Cleveland: So this wraps up episode 95 of The iPhone Life Podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in and make sure to register for our live podcast next week. That means I don't think I explained this fully, that means that you get to ask us questions live as we go through the event and help you decide which of the new devices are worth your dollars and so we'll be ... you can participate. It's really cool event, we've had a lot of fun with it before so go to iphonelife.com/podcast click on the blog post for this episode and you'll see a link there to register for the live workshop post Apple event. We'll see you guys next week.

David Averbach: Thanks everyone.

Sarah Kingsbury: Thanks everyone.

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