Tom is out of town, and there was an Apple Special Event Wednesday, so Ray and Sean get to talk about Apple without Tom’s skeptical cynicism.

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THE RUN DOWN

Apple Watch

Tim Cook opened Wednesday’s announcement by touting the huge success of the Apple Watch, and then didn’t tell us any real numbers, and then touted the new Watch OS 2. There wasn’t much to talk about here, other than there are now 10,000 apps on the Apple Watch.

Apple also figured out that people who don’t have $10,000 to spare still like the color gold. Apple announced two new finishes: gold and rose gold in annonized aluminium. They also announced new leather watch straps from Hermes and a new Product Red model.

Apple TV

Apple also announced their first update to the Apple TV since 2012 at the event. The 4th generation Apple TV will feature major hardware and software updates, a new remote, new apps, and something called Siri (not sure what that is).

While the Apple TV box mostly looks the same as the old one from the outside (besides being a tad bit taller), the inside contains a lot of the same hardware as the iPhone 6 so it looks like it will be much faster than the previous generation.

It will need this extra speed for all of the new apps that are coming from the new Apple TV App Store. For the first time in the device?s history, Apple is letting developers create apps for the Apple TV and what they?re calling the new ?TV OS? operating system. They said these will include universal apps that will work and sync across devices. They made a particularly big deal about games on the Apple TV.

And it looks like those games will utilize a lot of the features of the new Apple TV remote. The new design includes a glass touch surface across the top that you?ll be able to swipe left and right, and up and down, to navigate menus and control game characters and the like. The remote also has a built-in gyroscope and accelerometer.

The biggest thing about the remote, though, is the Siri button.

Yes, in a greatly anticipated move, Apple has added Siri to Apple TV. Press that button, and you?ll be able to ask Siri to search for content across platforms like Netflix, Hulu and iTunes. You can even get really specific – the demo included a search for ?the episode of Modern Family with Edward Norton? that resulted in Siri pulling up the exact episode of that show in which the actor guest starred.

You?ll also be able to use Siri to search for information while watching content without pausing. A Siri special bar will pop up at the bottom of the screen with the results, which you can then swipe up for more details.

There was no release date for the new Apple TV, but Apple did reveal some prices. A 64 gigabyte version will be 199 dollars, a 32 gig one will be 149 dollars.

iPad Pro

The biggest news of the event (see what I did there?) was the iPad Pro. Coming in with a 12.9″ display, it is the biggest iOS device ever made. There were rumors forever that there would be a pro version of the iPad, and that it would have OS X, the operating system that runs Mac computers. Not surprising, that rumor turned out to be a dud.

Apple announced two accessories for the iPad Pro: the Smart Keyboard and ? the Apple Pencil.

I can tell you everything you need to know about the Smart Keyboard in five words: it’s not a Surface Keyboard. It looks pretty much exactly like a Surface Keyboard. It connects to the iPad very similarly to a Surface Keyboard. It’s a little more expensive than a Surface Keyboard at $169 instead of the Surface Pro Keyboard’s $129.99

Then there’s the Apple Pencil. It’s magical, it’s revolutionary? it’s a freakin’ stylus. Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave. Again, Apple Pencil, $99, Surface Pen, $49. #imjustsayin

In all seriousness though, Apple has a habit of “inventing” products that have been around forever, only to make them worlds better than the ones that are already out there on the market. The Apple Pencil does look really incredible, for a stylus.  It detects pressure and angle so it gives you a lot of variation. It’s supposed to last for 12 hours between charges, and it charges by plugging into the lighting connection on the iPad. Time will tell if it lives up to the hype.

Just like the original iPad announcement though, there was not a lot of “Wow this is amazing!” moments in the iPad Pro announcement. It does have a four speaker stereo sound system. So, that should help with how awful sound always is on every tablet device. The huge screen boasts 2732-by-2048 pixels across its 12.9 inches on the diagonal, and it’s the fastest, most powerful Apple product that runs iOS. In fact, Apple claims it is faster than 90% of portable PCs. So, there’s that.

iPhone 6S and 6S Plus

No surprise, Apple announced the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. Since we are on the “S” cycle, there wasn’t much new in the outward facing hardware department.

Other than the addition of a new rose gold finish, one of the biggest change was the addition of 3D Touch. This is one of the hardest features to explain. Basically, instead of just tapping, dragging and double tapping, you can tap deeper. And, if you tap deeper, on some menu items you’ll find additional options.

3D Touch is going to be the least used feature of the iPhone 6S.

Another big change to the iPhone 6Ses was the camera. The iPhone 6S has a 12 megapixel camera and can shoot 4K video.

The front-facing camera, known as the FaceTime camera, also got an upgrade. The FaceTime Camera is now a 5 megapixel camera, and it can shoot video in 1080. Also, the FaceTime camera now has TrueTone Flash, by using the screen as a flash bulb. Instead of adding LEDs to the front of the phone, Apple engineered the screen to flash brighter.

And, now you can have moving pictures! with sound! Apple is calling them: Live Photos. when you are looking at a picture that was taken with the Live Photo option turned on, you’ll be able to pressed the photo and it will start moving. Basically, it captures seconds before the photo was taken and afterward so you can be more in the moment. These are not movies according to Apple.

iPhone Upgrade Program

But, I hope you can afford to pay for a new iPhone with cash, because AT&T is the only carrier left that sells iPhones on a two-year contract.

But, Apple did announce a new payment plan to buy an iPhone. Starting at $27 a month, you can buy an iPhone directly from Apple. This works out to 24 payments, so starting out at a total of $649, the same price as buying an iPhone outright.

This would be great, if you could theoretically get a lower priced service plan from the carriers, but we really haven’t seen much of a difference in prices since Sprint and Verizon announced that they were no longer selling iPhones at the two-year contract price.

One Republic Apologizes

And finally, Apple, as it often does, closed out the announcement with a performance from a big name band. Fortunately this time they did not also force feed a new album into our phones. One Republic played a few ditties. They also apologized for all the times you’ve had to listen to “Good Life” while you were shopping at Whole Foods.

Anyone who’s ever owned an iPod knows that stainless steel scratches.

This week, Google launched a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO). The new phone service uses Sprint, T0Mobile and Wi-Fi, but it only has one phone, the Nexus 6. There’s a few Apple Watch ‘scandals’ ramping up: tattoo-gate, scratch-gate and tap-gate. Microsoft has a new “edge”ier web browser, a man shoots up his Dell and the robots are coming to steal your car.

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THIS WEEK’S RUN DOWN

You can now embed playable MS-DOS games inside tweets

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive added roughly 2,400 MS-DOS games to their digital archive that are playable through your web browser on their site, Archive.org. But if you?re too scared to leave Twitter to check this out, never fear. The folks at Wired discovered this week that you can embed the games inside of tweets and play them right from those tweets.

So, you can now get your Oregon Trail, Sim City or Wolfenstein 3D fix from Twitter. Or, you can try out other classic games like the adaptation of the 1991 Hulk Hogan cinematic masterpiece Suburban Commando (just kidding, you should never do that).

Google announces cellular data network, which is actually two networks.

Google has officially announced its long-rumored cellular data network: its name is ProjectFi. As anticipated it is an MVNO network, which means that Google is ?renting? time on someone else?s network like many other small cellular companies. The differences is that Google is renting not from one other network, but two: Sprint & T-mobile, as well as WiFi. When you are on a ProjectFi connection your phone will seamlessly switch to whichever one of those networks is strongest. ProjectFi?s offers a very straightforward billing structure which will be appealing to some. It also will let you ?bank? unused minutes each month. And it offers promises of more innovations to come. The catch? Right now it is only offered for a single phone: the Nexus 6, and there is no LTE high speed service.

Robot car movers

The robots are coming to steal your car, or just move it out of the way. Gizmodo shared a story that researchers in Europe have created AVERT, the Autonomous Vehicle Emergency Recovery Tool. It is a system of robots that look like something out of Battle Bots. They are flat pieces of steel with rotors on the ends of them. Eight of them work together to pick up your cars tires and wheel it away. They only lift the car about an inch off the ground, but that’s all they need to move it out of the way. The idea is that the robots can easily move a car parked in a tight spot if there is a bomb in a nearby car. They could also be used to move an illegally parked car or a car that is blocking emergency services. Or, when the robots become sentient, they will likely start a car robbing career.

Man puts 8 bullets in his Dell desktop, tells police it was worth the ticket.

Police say that at 7 PM on a Monday, Lucas Hinch, the owner of a homeopathic herb store in Colorado Springs, Colorado, took his Dell XPS 410 out into an alley behind the store and unloaded eight bullets into it with a 9mm pistol. Hinch was ticketed for discharging a gun within city limits.

Lynch told the Los Angeles Times, which interviewed him, that the machine kept giving him the blue screen of death and that he had ?had enough.? He said that the shooting was ?definitely premeditated? and that he had no regrets. He reportedly told officers he did not know he was breaking the law in discharging his weapon.

Microsoft unveils Edge browser

During the opening keynote of their Microsoft Build developers conference this week, Microsoft unveiled the successor to their Internet Explorer browser (which they recently announced was ending).

The new browser, now called Edge (formerly Project Spartan), is said to be faster and more modern and will be a universal app across all Windows devices. Features will include, among others, extensions like you find for Chrome and Firefox, integration of Microsoft?s Cortana virtual assistant to help you search for things, reading mode (which removes everything from a page except for the text), and an annotation tool (which lets you draw on a webpage, take a picture of it and share that picture).

The new browser will not be in the initial release of Windows 10 this year, but will be included in a later update. Windows 10 will be shipped with Internet Explorer 11 for legacy compatibility, so you will have one last chance to use everyone?s favorite browser before it goes softly into that good night.

Tired of remember your passwords? Try swallowing them instead?

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Paypal?s global head of developer advocacy, Jonathan Leblanc, said that passwords might soon be available as ?embeddable, injectable and ingestible devices.? Mr. Leblanc said that in the near future thin silicon chips might be embedded under our skin or capsules might detect glucose levels to verify that someone is who they say they are.

The Wall Street Journal notes, “Mr. Leblanc admits that there’s still a ways to go before cultural norms catch up with ingestible and injectable ID devices.”

Google files patent for laptop with no spacebar.

Google already kicked the CAPS-LOCK key to the curb with its Chromebooks and now it appears it may be preparing to do the same thing to the spacebar. In a patent filed this week the company outlines a design where the spacebar is replaced by an extended trackpad. Sensors would determine whether the user wants the top of the trackpad to be treated as a spacebar or a mouse. Google told Quartz, who broke the story, that some patents get turned into products and some don?t, so only time will tell whether we will see a spacebar-free Chromebook.

Apple Watch – Tattoo-gate

Reports are coming in on Twitter and Reddit that people with tattoos on their wrists may have difficulty using their new Apple watches. iMore.com looked into it and confirmed the reports. The heart sensor detects pulse by flashing an LED light on your skin and senses the reflection. The problem is when you have a tattoo the reflection is distorted by the ink. Your mileage may vary, but for some folks it is really annoying. The Apple Watch uses the heart sensor to detect if you are wearing the watch, so when it doesn’t sense your heart rate, it forces you to re-enter your pin number.

Apple Watch – Scratch-gate

If you don’t like scratches, you probably shouldn’t get the stainless steel Apple watch. A lot of folks are reporting on social media that their steel Apple watches are already scratched up. 9to5Mac.com has an easy fix. Just buff it, like every other stainless steel watch in existence. Or, get the aluminum model, which is actually harder than the steel version.

Apple Watch – Tap-gate

Now for the first, actual, real problem with the Apple watch. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has found a major defect in the taptic engine in the watches. The taptic engine is the feature that causes the watch to vibrate or tap the wearer. It was a pretty groundbreaking feature because it models sounds so a tweet “feels” like a tweet, and a tap feels like a tap. Two companies built the taptic engines, but one of the suppliers has produced faulty engines. The Verge says that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber received an Apple Watch that had a taptic engine that didn’t work.

OUTRO

If you have a suggestion, or just have a comment for the show. Give us a call and leave us a voicemail, 1-888-972-9868 or you can send us an email to feedback@deemable.com.

And, don’t forget to help us to decide what stories we talk about on the show, go to our subreddit page and submit a story, and vote other stories up or down. deemable.com/reddit will take you there

I’m Ray Hollister, I’m Tom Braun, I’m Sean Birch and this is Deemable Tech. Thanks for listening.

Hey folks! We are not doing a normal podcast this week because of One Spark. Fortunately, there wasn’t much news in the tech world this week anyway. Basically everyone is sitting on their hands waiting for the Apple Watch to come out. But, if you have a Mac or an iOS device, Ray does have some news for you that you’ll want to hear, especially if you have an iPhone on Sprint. Enjoy this incredibly short, “all Ray” episode of Deemable Tech.

What happens when you realize you skipped an episode number? Just keep on rollin. This week on Deemable Tech we are talking about… the Apple big announcement. Apple finally announced all the details on the Apple Watch. Apple also announced a new MacBook, ResearchKit and HBO Now.

An incoming call notification on the Apple Watch Edition. Image credit: Apple

This Week’s Run Down

Macbook

Apple announced a new laptop, called…the MacBook.

It’s thinner than the MacBook Air, but it is also less powerful than the MacBook Air and has less battery life than the MacBook Air, and it’s more expensive than the MacBook Air. So, it’s basically, just like the MacBook Air was to the original MacBook when the MacBook Air came out.

It has a 480p FaceTime Camera, but it does have a retina display though, which gives it an advantage over the MacBook Air.

The craziest part is that, except for the headphone jack, the new MacBook only has one port, USB-C. Everything goes through the USB-C port – power, display, thumb drives, accessories, everything. To do almost anything you will have to buy an adapter, which costs $79 a piece.

As a result a lot of people will not be buying this laptop, especially DJs.

The new MacBook is available in silver, Space Grey and… gold, for some reason.

The new MacBook has a new trackpad called a “Force Touch” trackpad. It does not have a physical button, but it is pressure sensitive, and gives haptic feedback when you click it. The Force Touch trackpad opens up new ways to interact with the computer such as “Gradually add pressure to the trackpad to vary the speed with which you fast-forward through a QuickTime movie or zoom in on a location in Maps.”

Apple TV – HBO Now

Apple also announced a partnership with HBO to bring unbundled HBO to cable-cutters. For $14.99 a month you can watch Game of Thrones without a cable subscription, but only on an iOS device. HBO Now is available on iPhone, iPad and the Apple TV.

ResearchKit

In one of the most surprising announcements, Apple revealed ResearchKit. ResearchKit is an open source software development kit that medical researchers can use to easily create apps for studies. The idea is that these apps will utilize the sensors in iPhones to “track movement, take measurements and record information – functions that are perfect for medical studies.” iPhone owners would be able to download these apps to participate in research and provide information regardless of where they are. Since iPhones are the most widely used smartphones, it is hoped that this will lead to larger sample sizes and more frequent data, thus creating a truer representation of the population.

Apple Watch

Preorders started on the 10th.

The watch will go on sale for reals on April 24th.

Three Versions

There are a whole bunch of combinations of watch bands and cases. Way too many to describe them all. If I did, I am pretty sure Tom would kill me.

Apple Watch Sport

• Aluminum Silver or Aluminum Space Gray Case
• Fluoroelastomer watch band
• $349 and $399

Apple Watch

• Stainless Steel Case or Stainless Steel Space Gray Case
• Fluoroelastomer ($549/$599), Classic Leather Buckle ($649/$699), Modern Leather Buckle (38mm $749), Leather Loop (Smartcase-esque – 42mm $699), Milanese Loop ($649/$699), Steel Link Bracelet ($949/$999), Space Black Steel Link ($1,049/$1,099)
• $549 up to $1099

Apple Watch Edition

• 18K Gold
• Priced from “Geez Louise” to “Hoo boy!”
  • Otherwise known as $10,000 to $17,000

Mashable – My Apple Watch Nightmare