Category Archives: Apple Watch

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Apple Watch, Episodes, Google, Instagram, iOS 10, iPhone, iPhone 7, Samsung, Verily, WatchOS

Episode 62 – Verily Overview, iPhone Reviews Review

Our News Roundup this week covers the ongoing fallout from the Samsung Galaxy Note7 battery problems; the story that Amazon is going to be experimenting with a 30-hour work week for some of its employees; and the expansion of comment filtering functionality to all users by Instagram. We discuss each of these topics for a few minutes and talk about the context and implications. We’ll likely do a Question of the Week next week on consumer product recalls using the Note7 recall as a jumping-off point.

Our Question of the Week this week is “What is Verily and what does it do?” This question builds on a piece Jan wrote for Techpinions Insiders contrasting Alphabet and Apple’s approaches to the healthcare space, with Verily being Alphabet’s Life Sciences subsidiary (formerly Google Life Sciences). We talk through what Verily is, who runs it, what it’s intended to accomplish, its internal projects and its partnerships with other organizations, and lastly how it’s perceived within the broader life sciences community. It’s a fascinating business and we both learned a lot from doing this segment.

Our third segment is a discussion of the reviews for the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch Series 2, which will be available for sale on Friday, as well as a brief discussion of iOS and watchOS 3, which were released to the general public this week.

Our Weekly Pick is a TV show recommendation from Aaron.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

Apple, Apple Music, Apple Watch, Episodes, Events, Headphone jack, iPhone, iPhone 7

Episode 61 – Apple September 2016 Event Review

This week’s episode is entirely taken up with a discussion of Apple’s September 2016 iPhone and Apple Watch event. Jan attended in person and Aaron watched remotely, and we recorded this discussion a couple of hours after the conclusion of the event while Jan was still in San Francisco.

We talked about the event in the order in which it unfolded, with the first 10 minutes of our discussion devoted to Tim Cook’s various up-front “Updates” and then an in-depth discussion of the Apple Watch Series 2 and iPhone 7.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

Apple, Apple Watch, Episodes, EU, Events, Facebook, iPhone, iPhone 7, News

Episode 60 – Social Media Insights, Apple Event Preview

In our News Roundup this week, we talk about the EU’s action against Apple with regard to its Irish tax arrangements; Facebook’s firing of the editors who used to handle its Trending Topics section, and the somewhat predictable results; and the news from the first day of German tech trade show IFA, which kicked off on Wednesday.

Our Question of the Week this week is a little different, in that instead of asking each other questions as we usually do, we’ve brought a guest on. Alison Faulkner is the creator of the Alison Show, who’s an event producer, a writer and an Instagram and social media personality. We had Alison on because she knows far more about social media and making money on social media than either of us do (she has over 80,000 Instagram followers and 15,000 YouTube subscribers, among other things). Aaron interviewed Alison – who happens to be a neighbor of his – and asked her about what she does, how she does it, and the business of social media.

Our third segment is a preview of Apple’s event next week, at which it’s expected to unveil the iPhone 7 and Apple Watch 2. We round up the various rumors and reports of what will be announced, add our own predictions, and talk about the importance of how Apple positions some of the expected changes, including the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack, new cameras, and more.
Lastly, we wrap up with a Weekly Pick, which is a movie recommendation from Jan.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

  • Jan’s post on Apple and the EU from Tuesday
  • Alison Faulkner’s website, the Alison Show, where you can find a link to her YouTube channel, her Instagram account, as well as her writing and other online activities
  • Jan’s Weekly Pick was the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity, which is a true story about Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The movie is available to buy and rent on iTunes, Amazon, and all the usual places where you’d rent and buy movies (affiliate links).

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

AOL, Apple, Apple Watch, AT&T, Books, Episodes, Ethics, iPhone, iPhone 7, Jet.com, Mac, Mobile gaming, Nintendo, Verizon, Wal-Mart, Yahoo

Episode 57 – Business Ethics, Verizon-Yahoo Acquisition

We’re back to our usual format this week, with a News Roundup, Question of the Week, and a third topic, as well as a Weekly Pick. In our News Roundup, we cover what’s been happening with Nintendo’s share price recently, this week’s reports about Apple devices due in the fall, and the acquisition of Jet.com by Wal-Mart. Our Question of the Week this week is a little unusual in that it’s focused on a new book of which Aaron is a co-author, on the subject of business ethics. We talk about the book but also about ethics in business more generally, and some tech-specific examples, as well as discussing why we should be ethical in the first place. Our third topic is the recently announced acquisition of the core Yahoo internet business by Verizon, which had previously acquired AOL. This week’s Weekly Pick is a movie recommendation from Jan.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

  • Aaron’s book is the Business Ethics Field Guide, and you can learn more about it and buy a copy at the book’s website (it should be on Amazon within the next week or so too)
  • Relating to the Verizon-Yahoo discussion:
  • Jan’s Weekly Pick was the movie Concussion, with Will Smith, which you can find on iTunes and Amazon (affiliate links), among other places.

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

Apple, Apple Watch, BlackBerry, Cars, Comcast, Episodes, Health, iPhone, iPhone 7, Netflix, Sensors, Tesla

Episode 54 – Apple Watch Sensors, Tesla Crash

Our News Roundup this week covers three topics: BlackBerry killing off its Classic device (though refuting reports that it’s killing the BlackBerry 10 OS); Comcast and Netflix reaching a deal to put Netflix on Comcast set top boxes; and a report that the new iPhone will start at 32GB rather than 16GB of onboard storage. As usual, we discuss the ins and outs and implications of each of these stories in the opening segment.

Our second segment is our Question of the Week, which this time is “What new health sensors should we expect in Apple Watch 2 this fall?” and by implication is also about how the health and fitness aspects of other smartwatches might evolve in the coming months and years. Although Aaron’s initial response is simply “not much”, the rest of the conversation focuses on the challenges of trying to gather health and fitness data from the wrist, the potential for Apple-made and third-party extensions to the Apple Watch (and iPhone), and the potential for doing more behavioral analysis with the sensors and other features already in these devices.

Our third segment is a discussion of the recently-released news about a fatal crash involving a Tesla with the Autopilot mode engaged, and the fallout from that news in recent days. Though we discuss the details of the crash briefly, we spend more time on the broader implications for the development of autonomous vehicles and the challenges of convincing people to trust these technologies. We wrap up the episode with our Weekly Pick, which this time around is a movie recommendation from Jan.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

Apple, Apple Watch, Earnings, Episodes, iPad, iPhone, Mac

Episode 44 – Apple March 2016 Quarter Earnings

For the next few weeks, we’re going to be messing with our usual format as Aaron will be traveling. This week, the only topic was Apple’s earnings for the March quarter. The first twenty minutes or so are mostly Aaron, who had just a brief window before heading to the airport, and the second twenty minutes are just Jan sharing his take on the earnings report and riffing off his two posts on the blog this week. Aaron also explains at the beginning why he’s heading off to Ghana for two and a half weeks.

Over the next couple of weeks, while Aaron is away, Jan will be having conversations with guests instead, so the format will be different from usual, but we’ll still have an episode for you each week.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

Amazon, Apple, Apple Watch, Bots, Corporate Venture Capital, CVC, Developers, Episodes, Facebook, iPad Pro, Venture Capital

Episode 42 – Evaluating Corporate VC, Facebook F8

Our News Roundup this week featured the following topics:

  • Amazon’s new Kindle Oasis
  • KGI Securities’ downbeat Apple Watch forecast for 2016
  • Hands on with the iPad Pro.

Our Question of the Week is: “What is corporate venture capital and is it worth doing?” Aaron talks us through this subset of the world of VC, where corporations such as Google and Intel engage in venture funding of startups, based on research by David Benson (Aaron’s brother in law) and others. We discuss  CVC’s reputation for being “dumb money”, what it’s intended to achieve, the risks associated with it, and ultimately whether it’s worthwhile or not for the companies that do it.

Our third topic is Facebook’s F8 developer conference and the major announcements made there, including a major new focus on chat bots in Facebook Messenger, a Live Video API, a 360 degree camera rig, and other announcements. We talk about the potential for bots in general and our experience with the first bots to be released on the platform and also about Facebook’s broad ambitions to connect the world.

As ever, we wrapped up with a Weekly Pick, this week an app recommendation from Jan.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.


We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

Apple, Apple Watch, Episodes, Events, iPad, iPad Pro, iPhone, iPhone SE

Episode 39 – Apple’s March 2016 Event

This episode of the podcast is a slight departure from our usual pattern. We dispensed with our News Roundup, Question of the Week, and Weekly Pick segments and simply spent the whole episode talking about today’s Apple event in Cupertino. Jan was at the event, and so we recorded with Jan sitting in a car just outside 1 Infinite Loop – as such, apologies for any audio issues this time around. We covered the content of the event pretty much in order, with a discussion up front of the three non-product-related topics: privacy and security, the environment, and health; followed by discussions of the Apple Watch News, iPhone SE, and iPad Pro. We’ll be back to our usual structure (and a broader range of topics beyond Apple)  in next week’s episode.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

Android, Apple, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Earnings, Episodes, FCC, Google, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Smartphones, Wireless

Episode 31 – News Roundup, Apple Earnings

This week, we once again did our brief news roundup on several topic items, but then we spent the bulk of the time on Apple’s fiscal Q1 2016 earnings, which came out earlier this week (and skipped our Question of the Week and Weekly Pick features).

Our news roundup covered three items: the FCC’s move to open up the cable set-top box market, the disclosure of what are purported to be Google’s revenues from Android as part of the Oracle-Google court case, and insights from the earnings of the US wireless carriers.

In our discussion of Apple’s earnings, we covered the iPhone and guidance for the March quarter, what’s going on with iPhone growth and when it’s likely to turn around again. We talked about the significant foreign exchange impact Apple has been facing, and the fact that it’s been forced to talk about it now that its growth has slowed dramatically. We discussed Apple Watch sales briefly, talked about China and India specifically, and also discussed the iPad, Mac, and the potential for new products in 2017. Lastly, we also covered Apple’s new emphasis on its Services business and the power of its installed base (something Jan wrote about this week on the Beyond Devices blog).

As ever, you’ll find links to related content and various ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded SoundCloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also now have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.

2016, App Store, Apple, Apple Pay, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Episodes, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Jeff Williams, Mac, Management, Phil Schiller, Predictions, Smart home, Swift

Episode 27 – News Roundup, 2016 Predictions

For our final episode of the year, we decided to focus on our predictions for 2016. We kick off the episode with a review of three news items from the past few days: the Apple management changes announced on Thursday, December 17th; the recent Morgan Stanley report calling for lower iPhone sales; and the open-sourcing of Swift and the related interview of Craig Federighi by John Gruber. Following a roughly 15-minute roundup of these news items, we spend the rest of the time discussing our predictions for 2016, starting with our predictions for Apple’s various product lines, and then broadening out to cover other industry trends and companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft. We hope you enjoy this last episode of 2015 – we’ll be taking a break for the weeks of Christmas and the New Year, and will be back the week of CES, which Jan will be attending January 4-7. Enjoy the holidays and we’ll see you in January!

As ever, the SoundCloud player is embedded below, and under that you can find a list of links relating to this week’s episode along with links to other formats for the episode.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also now have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

As ever, you can also find the podcast on iTunes, in the Overcast app, or your own favorite podcast app. Here is the RSS feed for the podcast if you want to add it manually to your app of choice.

Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

  • Apple’s press release about the executive changes
  • An article covering the Morgan Stanley iPhone estimates
  • Apple’s press release about open-sourcing Swift
  • Craig Federighi’s interview on John Gruber’s Talk Show podcast, and the transcript of the conversation
  • Episode 2 of the Beyond Devices Podcast, in which we first discussed the open-sourcing of Swift and talked about many of the same topics covered by the Federighi interview.

Please leave us a comment or get in touch via Twitter to give us feedback. We’d love to hear from you. Also, we’d love it if you would leave a review of the podcast on iTunes.