 Hello, this is Matt Darnell with Comptail.Cloud. That's Comptail.Cloud is up in the sky. Here joined as always by Greg Jackson. I want to thank you for coming. Thank you. And I want to give you a chance here to talk about this transformation. You're like a butterfly out of the cocoon. What brought about the blue hair? So, for those that know. Can we zoom in on the hair? I don't know if we're able to zoom, but it's a pretty shade of blue. Yeah, it's a nice shade, right? It's a nice shade. Yeah, it matches my sunglasses, actually. It does. So my son and I, my son's autistic, so one of the things that we like to do is we like to do LED lights. We like to get very bright colors, and I'm trying to help him with all kinds of, just being fun and not being the same, because he likes to, everything has to be the same with him. So sometimes we have fun, and this is one of the ways. There you go. So he did it to you? No, we do it together. That'd be fun. We do it together. I'd like to do it to you, and you can do it, yeah, kind of. Yeah, it would be all over my face. That's great. No, it was, and I know how disappointed you were that I didn't notice, but my wife's... I didn't put enough in. No, I mean, my wife has learned to tell me before she gets a haircut that she's getting a haircut, so that I do notice. Now's the time where you say, hey, nice haircut. It looks great. It looks great, yeah, honey, because she's got, you know, I got my haircut a few days ago. You haven't said anything, and, oh, I have a mean to say something. So now she tells me, you know, I'm going to give him a haircut now. I'm going to get a haircut. Tomorrow I'm getting a haircut. That's great. Yeah, she's learning how to deal with guys like me. Yeah. Okay, so again, this is Matt and Greg. We're going to be talking about Apple products, and last week we covered the iPhone, iPad. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. Close that discussion up, and then talk about probably even more confusing the Apple desktop products. But before we do that, we're going to get into some current events here, and this was something I saw, that they're working on a UF or USB-C, and USB-C for those folks is that one there. It's kind of like a long gated oval, where there's going to be authentication, meaning that it's going to be able, your device, it's going to have to report more and have passwords in it, almost like a DRM, a rights management. And it's supposed to help when you have a power supply that might be malicious, because literally you can put an injection payload in a power supply, because a lot of people, these new Apple laptops and a lot of laptops only have one port, the USB-C. That's power, that's communication, so it's got to be able to do communicate and power. And really, you can have the payload in the power supply. You can have a payload, you have a USB drive you buy from Costco, you don't know, a malicious employee either at Costco or where the manufacturer was, opened it up, put some kind of malware on there. So it's to stop those kind of things from happening. And my fear is that's going to make it even harder for third-party people to come out with inexpensive peripherals. That's right. And that's, we talked last thing about Apple, I had trouble charging my iPad, because we have one Lightning cable in the whole office and even in my house, I only have one, I take back and forth when I want to charge this. As opposed to I've got- It's proportionally with how many devices we have that are Apple. Absolutely, no, I have how many USB-C, I have how many micro, how many USB, even the old, was it B-style, there's A and B for the printers and that. So yeah, so if this comes about, I mean those $5 USB-C cables will cease to exist. You'll have to buy, do you want to charge a Samsung phone? You've got to buy a $25 monster cable branded Samsung cable. So this kind of stuff, well I think their intentions might be in the right place. You know that the manufacturers are thinking, all right, that's another way that we're going to be able to make some money. Sounds like toner for printers. Absolutely, you want to have that. And a lot of people don't know, here's a pro tip for you, Costco will replace the inkjet ink. So you just take your ink cartridges, they sell new ones as well, but in the photo area you can take your inkjet and they have the machines to refill them. A lot of people don't know that they will actually do that for you and it works very, very well. So I haven't had an inkjet printer in a while, but last time I did I got them, we would always refill them there at Costco and it's maybe 20% of what a new cartridge is and have that kind of thing. So, pro tip for you there. All right, now this was something I thought was really interesting that I'm looking at putting on my kid's phone. Literally what is this called? It's called the less phone launcher, I apologize, that will load those. Shouldn't that be like the more phone? More phone. And less smart. I mean that's the issue that a lot of these phones have is that they're not being used as a phone anymore. That's a secondary thing. Right. That's right. Emails number two. Right, exactly. So it should be the more phone. Because now I'm going to use it for the more phone. And you can disable the phone part of it, right, so it's just really simple. So this is almost things for something that just quite can't get the smart phone, you just have three options on the front and you can change what they do based on time of day. Like I'm thinking with my kids, in the morning, you know, before school, I maybe give them a clock, you know, what maybe, you know, messages, but no Instagram, no Facebook, kids don't do Facebook. I mean, it's all, you know, it's funny. I don't know if it's the same in your household, but they used to do Snapchat and they used to do, you know, back in the day Facebook, but that's all gone. Everything is Instagram now. And doesn't Facebook own Instagram? Yeah. Yeah. So everything, it's all Insta, this, Insta that, like with this girlfriend, he'll just like put the phone up on the thing and they'll just have it running. It's interesting when you look at how Facebook's branching out because they're getting like Instagram, the WhatsApp, and they're losing some of the, that must be it. They're losing their younger crowd and they're going, okay, just get the apps that the younger people are getting, collect the information and that helps us tie everyone together. And it is amazing that if they can do that with Instagram, is, do you and I, you know, being middle-aged need a different set of features than someone that's 15? Yeah. I mean, I mean, is it the emojis are different? Yeah. I mean, like, how is, how would you define Facebook different from Instagram? Like Facebook, you talk and you can do your friends and you can do, like, I don't know how they're fundamentally different, you know, they, the only thing I can say is it's two apps. You have Facebook and Messenger, whereas with Instagram, it seems like it's one app. But it used to be that with Facebook. Within the Facebook mobile app, you would do the instant messaging and the video calling. But for some reason, they wanted to pull that out. Now there's the separate app, Messenger, and that's where you can do video calling. You can do group calling. Or private. Yeah. Yeah. But, but it's, I see, I don't really know. I do talk with you. What's different about Instagram? You know, what can you do different? I don't know what that is. I know, but now Facebook has the picture markups like they used to do with Snapchat, you know, you can make yourself look like a Disney character or Batman or Batman and do that there. So it's interesting how, and I think that means that, you know, we're not, we're not, we left the target group, you know, that big chunk, you know, we have the expendable income, but, you know, we spend a little wiser. That's how Excalibur and Vegas became, what they became is they needed a place to stick the kids and keep them busy. But they knew that kids don't have money. So they had the target, the adults, to drip the money down to the kids. To the kids, yeah. So I think that's kind of what you're saying is we're out of the market. We have the expendable income. But if we can get the kids to get the income for us, that's what we'll do. And your Facebook has news and so, I mean, I think it does skew older and like, you know, get in the MySpace. Why did MySpace fail? You know, I know MySpace is still banned like it and that kind of a thing, but it just got nichy. Now, I think Facebook is going to be the same thing. It's going to get real nichy. And I don't think my kid is ever going to get a Facebook account. Just like you and me, you know, buying copies of the New York Times, you know, hard copies. Some people, they love that. My wife even still, I make fun of her, but she loves that paper. She loves to read the paper, touch it and hold it and feel it like e-book. No, she wants to hold the book, you know, and we all know that that's going away. I mean, one of the years from now, books are going to be, wow, a real live book, you know, have that type of thing. But at one time, it was four books, right? And then, you know, it was an honor and they're very, very expensive. Do you remember when people used to come to your house selling encyclopedias? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. That's what Dad reminded me of when you said, you know, there were only a few books in your house and you accumulated them, you treasured them and a sales guy would come around. This is how you find out, right? And then I remember we had, you know, it was like 19 volumes or something and then every year, they would come back and sell you like an update book. There'd be 1983, 1984, 1985, you know, to go on after that. But yeah, like when Wikipedia first came out, you know, the online encyclopedia, everybody made fun of it because you could write whatever you wanted, nobody checked. But I tell you, you start a new article now, it is scrutinized. I mean, there are people that they want their references, they'll do all those kind of things. So there's a less phone launcher here that is good for you get three choices, you just pick one, you pick the other, and then they can change. So after school, we can do Instagram or that type of thing. But I thought that was, I think that's amazing that you have a thousand dollar phone and you intentionally limit what it can do, you know, and have that. So some people do that with their employees. What is that? They have a, you know, Rockstar employee and they just have one, do one thing. I've interviewed some people, they seem like really bright people. I asked them, you know, what they knew about, I asked, you know, they were in IT and they were skilled and I'd say, well, what do you do? I manage Antivirus. Great, what do you, you know, what does that look like? Well, I make sure all the DAT files are updated. I'm like, what a waste. Like that was their job in the corporate environment to just make sure the 10,000 devices that they were managing had all the updated DAT files and I just was like, wow, that's just too bad. Yeah, it's an important job. You have to do something like that. But yeah, no. Can we automate that? I mean, there should be a tool to tell me, you know, did they go desktop to desktop checking? There's a remote. Okay. Ten thousand, that'd be a lot of walking. Right. I mean, by the end of the year, you're done and then you go back to the first one again. Makes total sense to me. Okay. So one thing I want to talk about here was these are some things that I was really trying to make a list of what can you do on an Android phone that you cannot do on an iPhone and vice versa. I can tell you. Okay. You can do what you want with an Android. You can do what you want. What does that mean? Well, you know, iPhones got this. They do a really good job of just compartmentalizing their approval process. Their stuff is, you know, it works and I appreciate that. But you can't be creative. You can't do what you want. You can't install, you know, apps that haven't been vetted correctly. But I can, it's, you know, to me, it's the same thing between a PC and a Mac. It's interesting that you said the word you chose there was you can't be creative. Because a lot of people would say. That's the market. It's for the creatives, right? You don't want to have that. So it's interesting. So when you say creative, you don't mean like. Technologically creative. Yeah, as opposed to art and making a video and doing a picture or do that kind of stuff, you know, and to a lot of, and that is that important to a lot of people? I mean, you and I are tech guys, right? So we want to turn the knobs. I want control and have that kind of, but yeah. So, but there are some, some, I think some real neat things here that, you know, we have that, like the number one with a bullet is the headphones jack. You know, I, it's a matter of time. You know, like I remember when the first Mac came out, they didn't have a floppy drive and I'll have to see your arm. And that was hard. I mean, that was back when they had the, the iMac was the tube TV and real deep and then had that, but now you think floppy drive. Wow, that was visionary, right? To have that because USB was coming up and had that. But, but we're saying when you only have one port and it's, and that's the one you use for your headphones, it's like they're trying to sell the earphones, you know, the earbuds they have there, you know, to me, a lot of it is move on with technology. Those things are hot too. And they say that the reason they do so well is because the cable alone. So I visited a customer. We were having her connect her, I, what are they called the headphones called? Earpods, earbuds. Yeah. And she wanted to connect it to one of the phones that we were installing. And we were talking. She says, you know, I just couldn't deal with, she said she was reluctant to buy the iPhone or earbuds and because they were always falling out of her ear. And I remember my other friend that just got a pair of those said that it's the cable that dangles and gets plugged into the phone that yanks the earphones out. I thought that was very interesting. So it's to your advantage to not have cables. It's not, I mean, it's probably not, I don't know how secure it is, but they said they'll actually stay in your ear more, more securely when there's no cable, you know, whip in and pull in and tug in and secure. You didn't mean like encryption between. I didn't mean. Okay. Yeah. So there's physically secure how well to stay in your ear. Right. And to me, that's just any Bluetooth device that has that kind of thing. So real quick, another couple of things, like with like an Android feature that I played with that you and I talked about. I didn't know with an Android, you could stream sound to two different Bluetooth devices. Yeah, you mentioned that. Did you get to work? I did. How do you like it? Kind of cool. I don't have a use for it, but if I did, that's kind of neat. And I do things like schedule a text message, which is kind of manini, but I think the biggest thing with it is the Apple ecosystem and how tightly together it's woven. Meaning I'm in my photos and it's easy to move that over to an email to have it in the cloud. And I'm reading a book on my iPad and I open up my iPhone. I go to the same page and all those kind of things. But I think the hard part about that is you don't need one company to do all that anymore. That the ecosystems like I have no problem if I use Microsoft One Drive, which I do, and I use Outlook and I've got Facebook and I've got that they talk together well enough that I don't think you need that one overarching company that forces, that programs in integration from screen captures and that kind of thing. So I think 10 years ago, that was a really big deal because nothing talked and have that kind of thing. So I think that the value of the ecosystem is definitely going away. OK. So again, this is Matt Darnall and Greg Jackson here on Supporting Your Tech. I want to thank you for watching us here on Think Tech Hawaii. We'll see you in 60 seconds. Aloha. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. So we do. Hey, Aloha, and welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii Studios. I'm Andrew Lang, the host of Security Matters Hawaii. I'm airing here every Tuesday at 10 a.m. Hawaii time. And I'm trying to bring this community information, security information specifically, that will help you live a safer life, help keep our community safer, and help keep our businesses safer. So join me because Security Matters. Aloha. Aloha. Welcome back here, Think Tech Hawaii. So now we're going to talk about some of the Apple desktops. And I'm natively not an Apple guy, and you're not an Apple guy. But we will look at this. And actually, I spent a lot of time looking at things and having that. But did this website, or if you're looking to buy anything Apple, this is definitely a good website to go. Everything we're going to talk about makes sense. But this buyersguide.macrumors.com. And so let's go ahead and open this up. And another site as well. So this one here, when you're going to compare iPhone models, this site here, apple.com, slash iPhone, slash compare, is really great. Because what you're able to do is line up the different, like I said, I want to look at an 8 plus. And what are the difference between the 7 plus? So I can go ahead and look at what all the different colors do they have for that. And then look at the specs of each one. Like for instance, I can see that, OK, the 5.8, that the display size, the camera, it's going to tell me what kind of chip they've got. As you can imagine, the A higher is better. A12 is better than 8, 810. So it gives me all that information, the size, the weight. I can change this to maybe to the XR and put down here in my 6 here. So it shows me all the colors that's available, screen size. So intuitively, I would think XS is bigger than XR. I mean, have that kind of thing. But we can see here that. Is an XS extra small? I don't think so. It's in XS. In XS, right? And here we've got, it tells us the screen size and how that. And then from here, it tells how do we unlock things, the processors. So it's really a great way to line them up. And you would say, OK, it's basically, I think you'd look at what you have. You'd put up there. And then compared to the other ones. I don't know if any of the manufacturer, Samsung or anybody that has this kind of a great way to bring everything together there on one place. For the prices, you would expect them to have something like this. I mean, you've got Huawei, you've got Samsung. Those two guys, they should really be doing stuff like this. You would think so. And with Samsung, the hard part with that, and it's even a little bit with the Apple stuff, that when you buy a Samsung phone from Verizon and you buy the same hardware from T-Mobile, the experience is very different. They have their own skin that they put on there. But you don't have that with the Apple products, which is nice to have that there. All right, so now let's go to our buyer's guide. So once I come down here, we've got some iPhone, iPad. We're going to switch over to the Mac section here. And this, this buy, don't buy. I think you should look at it, but you need to take it with a grain of sand. Like when I look at the laptops, I've got the MacBook here, I've got the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro. When that first came out, I would say MacBook. I think a lot of people say MacBook. Did you ever say that? No. It's a MacBook. I thought they were going to sell them at McDonald's. Yeah, where's the arches? Yeah, so here we've got, so we've got MacBook, don't buy MacBook Air, it's buy now, and the Pro is neutral. And how they make that decision is based on what news has come out about that model, as well as how long it's been out there. So if I click on the MacBook here, that's going to tell me MacBook update soon. Then over here, it talks about all the rumors and the date that the rumors came out. And I can see that this one has been out for 605 days since it was last refreshed. And the average refresh is, you know, $390 for. This is interesting. Yeah. The hard part about the Apple products when picking what to buy is the revisions come so slowly, relative to a peak like Dell. A new processor comes out. I mean, Dell is up. Ram goes from 2400 megahertz or gig, whatever it is. That's 2666, right? And then you have those incremental bumps. So when Apple might put one every 18 months, there'll be 15 different Dell revisions of the same type of hardware here. So this lets me know that if I buy this right now, it's 605. That's like almost two years old technology. So what you're saying is make sure when you give a Christmas gift of an old version that they don't have access to this website. Exactly. But on the other hand, if you need it, because the MacBook is the most inexpensive one. And the new one is always going to be newer. The new one is always going to have better specs. But it's one of those things that unless there's a physical change, if you put me in front of one, the new one and the old one, unless I'm running benchmarks, as long as they're both comparable SSDs or spinning, hard drive speed, they're going to be the same. So I can look here and see that that's updates soon. Then I might go, if I go back up to the top here, I can look at, say, the MacBook Air buy now. So that means it was just updated. So the average time between updates is 443 days. We can see that there's a pretty good track record there. There have been seven releases of it. And it was only released 93 days ago. When you say average data was updated, that means a physically new device was updated? Or the OS? The internals were changed. OK. So the details. They bumped the RAM speed. They went from 5,400 RPM to 7,200 to flash, to something like that, or the processor. Because Intel's constantly doing new processors. So it's generally going to be the processor. The amount could be like the last one came standard with four gigabytes of RAM. The new one might come standard with six or eight. And those kind of revisions, very rarely when they do a big, physical change on that, it would be another product out of that. So this tells us that. So here you can see the second one here was 819 days. So there was one was released. It was released in March 2015. And you had to wait till June of 2017 to get the next release of that. So I've looked at some of these iPads before, and they're not that easy to determine what generation they are. How do you, I mean, have you seen that before? Where it's got to be second gen. I mean, does this site talk about that stuff? Yeah. And with that, and the biggest difference, again, from one generation to the next, I've never seen, for a comparable price point, I've never seen a revolutionary upgrade. It's always evolutionary. And the biggest thing with all these devices that you want to look at one generation to the next is the input. Is there, how many ports are there on this device? Like I talked about, I have a lightning issue. If this was USB-C, the current, this is one generation old iPad. The new iPads have USB-C built in. I got a million of those connectors around the house. All our phones are USB-C, but lightning, I have trouble with. So that's true on the desktop as well. Like a lot of people, I thought, in my mind, the coolest thing about the Apple laptops was the MagSafe connector. It would just attach with a magnet. I love that thing. When you kicked it, it just came right off. And they got rid of it, right? Yeah, for that single USB port. If there was anything that was going to get me to buy an Apple laptop, it would have been that. You'd have that there. And so you're able to tell what they have. And then so this is a great site to go to. So if it says don't buy, I would do a little more research and look at that. Like the Mac Pro, why does it say don't buy? Let me look there. And I can see, wow, look at that. It's been, last time, it's 1,800 days. That's five, six years. I mean, in computer technology terms, that is several lifetimes to have that there. So this is certainly, and it says update in 2019. And it's out there. So the only time you would buy something like this, where it says don't buy coming out, is where you absolutely have no other option. And there are other options. Or you had something and you had 45,000 peripherals. And they would only work with this because of the eSATA or this. And none of the newer products have those kind of ports. Or you need spare parts. So this is an example of where this goes. Cause you go to the Apple store, oh, look, it's bright and shiny. It looks brand new, you know. And the average user, it's got an i7 in there. Wow, it's an i7 from six years ago. So this is an example of when it says don't buy, that really means don't buy that, unless you absolutely have a very, very good, good reason. The neutral, the neutral one tier, like iMac Pro. So this was, this is kind of hard because it's still on its first revision. There's no history of how long the previous revisions were out. But we can see here, it was released in December 2017. So just know that that's the age of the technology that you're buying. And for most people, that's okay. Two years ago is the same as today. As long as we're talking about similar hard drive, they're both spinning media versus, there's a big difference between spinning media and an SSD or even just RAM chips, you're having that type of thing. So definitely this buyer's guide, dotmacrumers is a great site to go to. They cover all of the Apple products there. Did all this research benefit you? Did you get a device? No, no, I was just, that's one of the most frequent questions I get. Which Mac should I get? Which Mac should I get? And when should I buy it? Should I wait? Because people think all around Christmas time there's gonna be a new one and have that. So this is a site that I go to frequently to say, well, let's look at, you probably should be, you're more in the MacBook price range, but based on the MacBook Air just got released. And then you can look at it has less RAM and but more storage or vice versa and have that type of thing. So it's good, I'll let them know that. Thanks a lot. You're welcome, thank you. So again, this is Matt Darnell, Greg Jackson with comptel.cloud with supporting your tech here on Think Tech Hawaii, Aloha.