Oct. 20, 2020

Episode 15 - iPhone Serial Killer

The Wolf AND The Shepherd discuss the products and businesses that the iPhone and other smartphones have killed since it's takeover in 2007. It's now hard for math teachers to tell you that you won't always have a calculator in your pocket.

Has the invention of the iPhone, and other smart phones caused serious harm to business. How many times do you check your iPhone each day since you do not have to rely on all of the other products that you used to look at?

In this episode of the podcast, we delve into those.

Transcript

welcome to this episode of the wolf and

the shepherd today we're going to talk

about the iphone and before you say oh

i've read enough articles about the

iphone no we're not going to talk about

the iphone

and as far as what you can do with it

and blah blah we're going to talk about

the iphone as far as it being a

serial killer this device

truly has went through and just

slaughtered so many other industries

and even though myself and my co-host we

both have iphones we

swear by them uh we tell people

constantly oh you don't have an iphone

i'm sorry you must have

wronged somebody in a prior life and

that's why you're not carrying an iphone

things like that i mean we swear by

iphones we love iphones

but the kind of saga

behind the iphone and what it has done

is actually interesting when you kind of

delve deep into it so

where exactly did that

iphone where did the iphone start out

well the first iphone was actually

released back in 2007 on june 29th

i remember at the time i watched a clip

of the launch and and of course by the

way we're talking about the steve jobs

days yeah yeah right i mean he's still

live yeah he's wearing his black

turtleneck and

not taking a shower and all that good

stuff and introducing this phone

can you hear those police sirens outside

yeah

i i think they are sending people on

there because they think maybe we're

talking bad about

the iphone right okay and we're not

talking bad about the iphone

so so please apple stop stop sending

the police to try to get us we're not

talking bad about it

we just said we both have iphones so so

this is not

disparaging at all yeah now i remember

back when it came out and i watched the

clip

and i can't remember if it was on

youtube or whether i watched it um

on a blog but i watched it and to be

honest i wasn't that impressed

and i think the reason i wasn't

impressed was because

i just couldn't see that i would use the

functionality it had when you know i

could

if i really had to do something that

urgent i could you know take my

sorry my laptop with me oh no i'll see

see look what happened you just started

to say my ipad yeah i didn't do that

and that's that's what they've done to

us right that's what they've done but i

see where you were getting that

you said well i can use my computer for

this but

that's what that's what they did we just

didn't know they were doing that to us

so long ago yeah of saying you can do

all this stuff

yeah with a phone with a phone

yeah i mean i i i can honestly say

i remember when i was trying to explain

when i got my first iphone that

it's not a phone it's not really a phone

it's a computer that has an application

that will make phone calls

right that's honestly what it is yeah

and

it was easier for them to market it as a

phone yeah

yeah let's be honest exactly and um

so anyway yeah i didn't seem too

impressed with it when it

was first announced um but

the day of epiphany came actually

when i was uh i was at a soccer game and

remember i used to coach soccer in north

texas for almost 20 years

and my manager on my 97

1997 girls team um

pulled out an iphone and i was kind of

looking at her using it

and at the time i remember i had a

blackberry pearl with one of those

little tracker balls

oh yeah and the only game you could play

on it was um like i think

snake and brick breaker those were the

only two games

right and that you know central ball

after about

two months would wear out yeah you had

to pop the ball out and clean the ball

yeah actually go buy a new one because

it would wear out

and yeah it was terrible yeah and it was

i think um because it was quite a small

phone

i think it still had where you had to

hit the button like

four times to get to a certain level so

you really

it really used to make you work for

sending a text sure

you know but you're also talking about

back in the day when

texting yeah was kind of in its infancy

i mean you could send a text message

even from a flip phone

but you were sending very short text

messages i mean you were still picking

up the phone calling somebody

you were not texting like we do nowadays

where most people don't even talk on the

phone it's just text messaging back and

forth

yeah so yeah so after i after i first

saw

her my manager used this iphone

i was watching her and i was looking at

my phone

and i went through a brief period of

self-hatred

um and then i think within about three

months i bought

bought myself an iphone and then i you

know upgraded

pretty much every year up until

the iphone 6 and i stuck with that one

for about four or five years until

recently uh

i got the iphone 8 because i still like

that physical bezel

on there yeah um i know when you make

fun of me because i i've got the one

without the bezel yeah

and all that but you know i i

trust it it it's been a good phone yeah

so i i'm i'm still good with that that

physical button yeah now the iphone 12

um it's actually going to be released

october 23rd uh this month 2020.

now you know the first iphone for the

basic four gig model

was 499 which even at that time

i mean it was it was a lot of money

13 years ago that was a lot of money to

splash on a phone that was

big money for a phone yeah big money for

a phone yeah

but you know the new iphone 12 the basic

model is going to be

7.99 and the top model is going to be

1099. wow could you ever imagine i mean

even

as iphone pro prices went up

that there'd be a phone pretty much

eleven hundred dollars

i i would like to say that's a used car

right

it's a terrible used car but it's still

a used car

so you can either have a brand new phone

or a terrible used car

and until apple

figures out a way to turn their phone

into a car to take you from point a to

point b

they haven't figured that out yet but

let's not hold our breath too long

because apple

might be able to figure out a way to do

that right yeah you look at spending

that kind of money and you say well

i could buy a motorcycle or i could buy

a crappy used car or something for a

thousand bucks

versus having a phone in my pocket yeah

yeah and um all i mean the prices of uh

iphones explain you know this next point

about the although the iphone only has

about 39

share of the smartphone ownership market

in the united states

it actually has over 90 percent of

profit in the market because

you know they make a lot more money per

model then

you know well that's competitive that

makes sense i mean it you

you got a lot of smartphones out there

right now

and it's pretty much do you have an

iphone

or do you have something other than an

iphone nobody says

do you have a blah blah phone

they either say do you have an iphone or

oh you don't well what kind of phone do

you have

that that's what people look at in

and that's that's what's crazy is what

apple was

able to do with this smartphone market

and say

you know here is no matter you know if

you're an

android fan and you say oh we've had

this forever and blah blah blah

and we're not going to get into the

security and all that

junk because we're not that kind of

podcast right yeah

but there is that thought behind you

either have an iphone

or you don't have an iphone right it's

there's no

either or it's iphone or not an iphone

and that's what's crazy about this and

there's there's an amazing amount of

snobbery still

um there didn't used to be quite so much

um

snobbery kind of after the iphone craze

kind of settled down

but now it's kind of um made a

resurgence with these high end models

where people you know can now boast hey

i'm spending 1100

on a phone you know it's like instagram

billionaires and

millionaires and stuff but um

when the when the first iphone came out

uh

you know the profitability i think was

pretty good and this was before the app

store was developed now the app store

when the introduction of that came in is

what

changed the phone not necessarily the

hardware

but the utilization of that hardware

through the software and the new apis

and the operating system and stuff and

made the phone do a lot more stuff

than it could before using the hardware

that it had on it

right yeah because there were always

things that were out there that had

basically what you would call

pre-installed applications

and then you couldn't expand it at all

you know yeah here's what this will do

and beyond that you know that's

it if if you're gonna do something else

well you're gonna have to figure out a

way around it but

this is what this device will do you had

uh the palm pilots that were out you had

sony client

i had one of those you had all these

other devices but everything was

pre-installed it was proprietary you

couldn't expand it you couldn't change

it

this is what this device will do and

like you said then

the iphone came out and they didn't

immediately have the app store

but they knew that they had everything

built as a solid foundation

to let people go in there and customize

this thing

yeah yeah now okay let's play guessing

game

oh oh i you know i love i love playing

the guessing game because i always guess

wrong so

mainly because it's mainly because we've

stuck so far uh

during our podcast of asking questions

which

absolutely nobody but an expert in the

field would actually have any idea

right what the answer might be even

close to so i like the way that we

always set it up

fair and balanced like that anyway so

how many iphones do you think have been

sold

worldwide since the initial launch wow

13 years ago just over 13 years right

and of course we're in 2020 right now

yeah uh

and you said what 2007 was the first

launch of the iphone so how many iphones

have been sold

in the last 13 years and we're talking

about worldwide

i'm gonna go with

300 million

really

[Laughter]

so i know that was a terrible guess

right um

take back that application your wife put

in for the prices right because you're

wasting your time

i i i would never make that i mean

milk should still cost like 70 cents a

gallon right now

i don't know what anything costs yeah so

it's when you guess eight dollars for

the washing machine and you buy a combo

hey i'm an old soul right i mean things

should still be

cheap so obviously i'm way off right so

so anyway there's

actually been over 2.2 billion

iphone sold wow 2.2

billion iphones that have been sold yeah

that's crazy

i mean can you imagine if you owned

iphone

and you just said for every one of these

sold i make a dollar

yeah you'd have 2.2 billion dollars that

that's ridiculous that is crazy if you

think about it that way

yeah to put it in um

a very poor example if you travel to

china

and gave everybody an iphone that's so

many iphones

well that that's actually i think

meaning there's a lot of there's

billions of chinese people

well and so of course you're saying

there's been

2.2 billion iphones out there and of

course

we know that of those 2.2

billion iphones out there they're not

all active

right now yeah so i'm gonna guess maybe

1.2 billion of those iphones are

probably sitting in people's drawers

right or or their five six seven year

old kid or using it

as as some kind of gaming device and i

can imagine them taking those 1.2

billion iphones to gamestop

and saying what will you give me for

this it'd be like 26 bucks yeah

yeah something like that yeah willem oh

here's your second question in 2017

it was estimated that what percentage of

u.s

teams had an iphone what percentage of

u.s 2017. remember this is three years

ago

wow okay going to be higher now i'm

gonna

guess 40

no 78 78

do 78 of adults have

iphones well actually um by the

way well actually by the end of 2019

they published some pretty up-to-date

stats

and 96 of 18

through 29 year olds had a smartphone of

some description

sure a smartphone i get that yeah 92

of 30 through 49 year olds

had a smartphone wow 79

of 50 through 64 year olds had a

smartphone

okay and lastly 53

of 65 plus had a smartphone

so that's a pretty substantial

shock of the population who owns

smartphones

but that smartphone not not iphone

but smartphone you know just like my

my father and my mother and we've talked

about them on the podcast before my

father's 82

my mother's 79 and i'm sorry my father's

84 and my

mother's 79 they both have iphones and

they didn't want iphones until i showed

them what an iphone can do

and now they have iphones and i think

they're on

their third iphone they have the uh

the generation 10 iphone uh

one of my favorite things about

my father with his iphone is

even though he has access to the

internet

he still goes old school with trying to

figure

stuff out right so he's on my cell phone

plan he's on my cell phone bill

and all of a sudden i saw my cell phone

bill jump up by five dollars

like five bucks you know why why is this

up five bucks so start digging into my

build trying to figure out

what happened well my father had made

two calls to directory assistance

the old school 4-1-1 oh wow and they

charged two dollars and 50 cents for

that

so i had to sit my dad down i said you

called directory assistance to look up a

phone number

right and he said well yeah i was trying

to figure out how to

find the phone number so i just picked

up the phone and called directory

assistance because it

talks to the internet and tells me what

the phone number is i said

dad you realize you can literally just

ask the phone

hey siri what's the phone number for

this

and it will tell you for free

said well i didn't know that how does it

know

what everybody's phone number is and i

said well

that's the internet dad so please stop

calling directory assistance oh wow

yeah now um as you mentioned right at

the beginning of the episode

uh we entitled this iphone

serial killer and this is basically

because

not not the iphone just by itself but

you know including the samsung models

and other smartphones

smart smartphones that you know they

have largely disrupted

or destroyed helped destroy some of the

most traditional markets we had for

decades in terms of technology but also

you know analog um certain analog

activities which

you know been practiced for hundreds of

years oh smartphones

um and obviously with the high number of

you know iphone ownership especially

among generations of teams

as they've come through um

you know the iphone has probably done

more than anybody

you know to help kind of crush or change

or remodel these industries and so

um today i just wanted to go through a

few of these things which the iphone

um with the help of its you know

competitors has actually helped change

the industry or destroy the industry

and i just want you to kind of you know

input along with my input about whether

you prefer

the new method of doing it on your phone

or you prefer

the traditional method yeah no let's go

down this list

this kind of sounds interesting so so

yeah what what

has the serial killer iphone destroyed

well first and foremost and especially

now

as opposed to maybe five or six years

ago when the quality wasn't as good uh

digital cameras and

video cameras because now with i think

the new

iphone i'm not sure what it is i mean

it's a minimum of 12 megapixels because

think the last one so i think it's even

more than that now i didn't look up what

the new ones got but obviously

um you know with that amount of

zoom and that amount of megapixels and

you know they've made the aperture wider

that you know i unless you're a hardcore

photographer right yeah yeah unless

you're a real photographer out there

right yeah

but i i've owned

really good cameras in my life i've

owned digital cameras

i've owned you know normal film cameras

and the true photographer they're always

going to say the film cameras are the

best it's kind of like me with music

i love listening to music on vinyl i get

that

analog part but let's leave that out

right

so i've had digital cameras i had a

sony digital camera one of the first

ones they brought out

it was great and and walked all the way

up

had a nikon dlsr

camera that took great pictures but

once i got uh into maybe my third or

fourth iphone

i realized that the pictures that this

thing took

was just as good as that camera yeah and

you had to remember to bring the camera

with you

but you always have your phone with you

so it kind of

killed the camera it was like the video

camera you know i remember when i was

younger and i played soccer my dad was

standing on the sidelines with the video

camera filming the soccer games and

everything

now it's easy to just pull your phone

out of your pocket

and you know my iphone your iphone will

film in 4k

if you want it to yeah and then you turn

around you can go home

and you can cast it to your tv and watch

what you just recorded in 4k

and it's all right there in your pocket

so

you you went from all these cameras

where

you know you had uh the eight millimeter

in

high eight and then he had vhs cameras

then he had the vhsc

so he had the little tape and it popped

out and you had to put it in the little

adapter to put it in the vcr

and you know if you're above

20 years or below 20 years old you don't

even know what these things are right

right but these are the things that we

used to have to carry around

and then you had the batteries and all

the other adapters now it's all in the

phone

and it pretty much killed that

just normal home industry of photography

and videography because you can do it

just as good on your

phone as having all these other devices

so

why have those anymore nobody does yeah

everybody just threw them away yeah well

you see i i never had a great digital

camera or

well i never actually had a digital

video camera i actually had an analog a

vhs

one and not the c not the compact tapes

the ones with the full size ones

and this thing was so heavy you needed

like a gurney to kind of move it around

um but i was i think i was actually

giving it

and uh i had to do a little bit of

fixing with some stuff on it and i mean

it worked pretty well um but i didn't

really have a use for it because

anything which i wanted to film i wasn't

carrying that thing

you know more than about 20 yards you

know to do anything with it and

with cameras with the camera i think the

best

resolution i had on a digital camera um

because i wasn't really into photography

much anyway i mean

boys when you have to carry around a

camera you're not really kind of

right and into much i mean girls unless

you're always trying to capture a

picture of spider-man yeah something

like that yeah what are the chances of

that i mean

yeah repeatedly unless you are a

spider-man right

that's preposterous um but anyway yeah

the best resolution i had was

600 by 400 pixels and i mean the picture

if you were standing further than about

four or five feet away

you couldn't tell who it was in that

picture it looked like um

i don't know if any anybody listening

has seen the movie white noise

where the kind of spirits start coming

through the static on the tv

so it's kind of basically like the

outline of a person but that's all you

can tell or even like um

in the original poltergeist movie when

she's looking at the static on the tv

and those faces kind of appear

yeah that's how that's how my digital

camera was and so for about

i want to say maybe eight years yeah but

this because this was before 2000 for

eight years i didn't actually have a

camera of any time whatsoever

until i got the blackberry pearl and

that

resolution i think was barely much of a

knock-up from my previous digital camera

the only advantage being was the screen

on the peril was only about two sizes of

a

postage stamp so it didn't really cause

much of an issue right

in of course even in the infancy even

the flip phones they used to have

cameras on them

right and you could take a picture on

there but the screen was so small

that you would look at it and you say oh

that's a pretty good picture but then if

you actually

had to look at the picture on a

normal size kind of a postcard

you know piece of paper to look at the

picture it was all pixelated and it was

nasty yeah

now we have all the filters and

everything that make these pictures look

so great and you can take

you know 200 pictures of yourself

it versus the old school rolls of 24

exposures in film then you had to wait

an hour and go to the one hour film and

of course that was

even an advance in technology to be able

to get your pictures back in an hour you

used to

had to wait like two or three days and

really want to be

serious about that picture you took

nowadays i mean we can

snap pictures like crazy my daughter

who is uh 17 years old if you look on

her phone there's a folder in her phone

that is called

selfies and there's 3 000 pictures in

her selfies folder that are just

pictures of

her or her and her friends that she's

taking pictures of herself

i don't think i've even taken 3 000

pictures total in my entire life

and she's had a phone for three or four

years and already has that amount and

that doesn't

include the one she's deleted right

because she didn't think those were good

enough

so we're probably talking about thirty

thousand pictures

i mean so so you have that but going

back to what you were saying about the

video camera i remember our first vcr

that we had growing up my brother used

to work for a company called the

associates

and i honestly don't remember too much

about what that company did but

they they did something with

repossessions and

and all this stuff and we ended up with

a

console television and a vcr

that was curtis mathis brand

and curtis mathis has been out of

business forever

but our first vcr was a curtis mathis

vcr and it was not one piece of

equipment

it was two there were two pieces of

equipment that

sat on top of that console television

and the one that actually had the

recorder

was separate and it had hooks on the

side of it

so you could put a strap on it and hook

a

wire into that vcr

to plug into a camera so the camera

itself didn't have the tape in it

you had to carry around the actual

recorder on your hip as you were

recording film and i remember my dad

making movies off of that camera that he

would rent

because we didn't actually have the

camera but he could

rent the camera that plugged into the

half

of the vcr that we had just to be able

to make movies

well does it and imagine now where we're

at

you you don't even think about things

like that so

so the iphone serial killer

it it killed all of that stuff yeah i

mean it

i i know i have a bunch of vhs tapes you

probably have a bunch

a lot of people listening probably has a

bunch

it would be probably hard to even find a

vcr anymore to plug those in and

and look at it because most of it's been

digitized unless it's

obviously your home movies or something

like that and you'd struggle to even

look at that so

there's one of there's one of the uh

industries that the iphone killed um the

next one

and i was very grateful for this one was

it killed maps go

or the road atlas oh so i had a friend

growing up

that his dad had memorized

basically every street in the dfw

metroplex

and honestly knew it by the mapsco grid

so you would go buy these maps go

binders

and you would say well my business

is in the dfw maps go 27f

and so you would flip to page 27 and you

would look at grid square

f and you would say oh okay here it is

and so my friend and i would say hey we

want to go here

we would ask his dad and he would say oh

it's uh this road over here

if you look at the maps go it's on

page 34 and i think it's either grid

square

g or h and you'll find it and

i also remember my dad buying a maps go

every year and that's how you found

everything

and you memorized streets you knew what

your major highways were

it you didn't rely on gps you didn't

rely on plugging in

data you never said hey where you at oh

i'm at this address

you know here's this and you plug it

into your maps program on your iphone

you had to give directions you had to

say okay well

hop on this highway take this exit go

down two lights

turn left and do all this now you just

say

i'm gonna drop a pin here's where i'm at

you drop that into your maps

and you can go right to where you're at

yeah crazy yeah now i remember

um back in i think it was 2002

specifically i had a lot of um soccer

games where i had to travel quite a

distance to

and i was still using you know maps go

at the time

and how i used to have to do the

navigation because i didn't know the dfw

area that well

was that i would write down on a sheet

of paper from my house

every single turning yeah and so i would

have to look out for every single

turning but that was easier than

obviously following the map in the book

and having to read and

do stuff at the same time um and i

remember once

it was an evening soccer game and the

location was about an hour

and a half away and um

i got there okay it's still daylight

when i got there i think it's like about

eight o'clock game kicked off and

dark at the end you know the floodlights

had come on

and so i was driving home

and i i'd always used to do the

instructions in reverse

rather than me having to look at the

first set and reverse them while i was

driving

so anyway i'm driving in the dark and it

starts raining and it starts raining

quite heavily

and so i'm finding it really hard to

like read the road signs

and i miss i think like

one major one about four turns in and i

ended up

going three hours too

far west past where i lived i mean

that's how i

got messed up so now i mean i was

delighted i mean obviously we had gps's

before

sure you know but with the iphone i mean

yeah i mean that changed everything in

terms of you know being able to oh and

absolutely just find yourself i mean

even walking you know even going on

trails now and everything i mean if

you've got an iphone you can get it

i mean you know as long as you've got a

data signal and if you're smart

say with something like google maps

you'll download a specific

area anyway and that refreshes every

month so that way if you lose the phone

signal because you're always still going

to have the gps signal

you can actually find yourself on a map

whereas if you're using purely data and

you haven't downloaded a map

then you're going to be in trouble if

you don't have any uh i

remember my dad was in the tower

business

and latitude and longitude is a big deal

in the tower business

and one of the tower company sent

us a sony gps

receiver to our house for us to try out

it cost 2500

and it was about the size of

maybe like three iphones if you stacked

them up together

had a big weight you had to screw into

the back of it

you had to calibrate it it had to

capture the gps satellites

and i remember walking from the front

door of the house to the mailbox

to try to test the distance that we

walked back and forth and the accuracy

was terrible

yeah but we would look at it and say

how great of a device is this that

there's going to be something that

happens and he still has it by the way

in his closet and i'm sure some museum

or

something like that would probably sell

out yeah i would probably love to have

it

yeah but i was saying that there is

definitely

some people that are going to take this

technology

and apply it to true navigation

later on nowadays you can like i

said before put a pin in something and

say here's where i'm

at not only here's the address i'm at

but

i'm standing in this part of this

person's front yard

right now and the accuracy is so

ridiculous

it's amazing the way that technology has

just transformed what we do yeah and

certainly through the apis

you know the operating system updates

and the addition of you know more and

more apps in the app store

you know the um using the gps has come

into a

good use in terms of if you walk into a

store and you've got that app installed

and it

comes up with all the coupons right

available and you know what discount

there is today no i go to

i go to sam's right now and and my

phone knows i'm at sam's and says oh hey

you're at sam's and

i'm thinking well that's kind of creepy

but at the same time

i realized well yeah that's why i have

this phone so it knows i'm at sam's and

knows i'm going to do some shopping yeah

so it's trying to help me out

yes that's good um

i think one thing in terms of navigation

i don't necessarily think the iphone has

helped

kill just because i think fans of this

item are probably so

hardcore that still stick with the

original and that's the compass

ah yeah so yeah the iphone does have

a compass and i think

anyone that has a compass

is not relying on their iphone for a

compass right

and anybody that's probably tried to use

the compass on an iphone

honestly probably didn't know how to use

the compass to begin with right

so maybe they didn't kill the compass

industry right but let's be honest

how much money is the compass industry

actually making

right they they might have heard it a

little bit but they didn't kill it right

they didn't quite kill it yeah right

but but i was thinking like i don't also

quite understand the point of the

compass function on the iphone um

oh i totally i totally mean less unless

like i said you have no

data signal but then

what uses a compass really most of the

time without a map

anyway and you wouldn't normally be

carrying a map because you'd have your

iphone which has got the maps on it uh

but

it's because they can it's because they

can

they're showing you they're saying ah

look what we can do

it's because we can right and and that's

why it's on there

right i mean there there's so many

things it does that

you don't really have a practical use

right but they're just

kind of saying hey we can do this yeah

because we can

yeah now one um heavy heavy casualty

was the handheld gaming systems now

the only the only um kind of company

which seemed to have weathered the storm

and this is because they have a lot of

fans even some of the younger ones who

are very

um gung-ho about always purchasing

nintendo stuff and so you know the

nintendo handhelds

they still have a pretty successful

range even the nintendo switch

yeah and and maybe you could argue the

sony psp

a little bit of that yeah that's kind of

died i think i'm not sure anybody

manufactures

a lot of it has because it mobile gaming

and all that it's never going to be the

same

as pc gaming or console gaming yeah

but it it definitely has hurt yeah

industries that i mean you never see

anything like the old school

you you can't even really call them

mobile games but i remember i had a

a football game a long time ago that was

just

dashes on a screen and you would play

this game

or like pocket simon or or things like

that

so yeah those are long long dead

if you're gonna mobile game yeah you you

can either

use your phone or or maybe in nintendo's

doing well they're they're trying to say

hey we're gonna have this device and of

course

what do they do they say well we can

detach the controllers you can plug this

into the tv and have a true

console experience so it's a hybrid

yeah so i'm going to go 50 50 on that

one yeah i'm going to go 50 50. well i

mean the thing is

it used to be the rule used to be with

consoles and handhelds that

you would lose money actually with the

consoles and the handhelds when you sold

them so

say with like the newest xbox if it's

500

for the base model for the series x it

probably cost

microsoft 600 for that now i'm not just

talking in terms of

parts but in terms of all the money

which was spent in r d in development

that they actually take a loss up to

that point of the console

and where companies traditionally make

up this money is through the software

right so obviously they license well it

it's the grocery store model yeah so if

you go in the grocery store right now

and you go buy milk eggs and bread

if you and this is true today if you go

to the grocery store today and all you

buy is milk eggs and bread

you walk out of there it costs the

grocery store money

yeah everything they're selling you cost

them

more than what they sell it to you for

it's called a loss leader

because they want you to go in and buy

milk eggs and bread but they also want

to sell you all this other stuff that

they make higher margins on

but they know you need milk eggs and

bread

and maybe butter or whatever you know

pick your poison

right your staples they're going to lose

money on

they want you to buy the candy bar

at the checkout line that's a dollar

that they paid

15 cents for that that's why they bury

milk eggs and bread at the back of the

store so they make you pass by

everything else so it totally makes

sense why even the console companies say

we got to get you the console so you can

buy the other products

is and that's where we're going to make

money yeah now i can understand with

consoles

because you know that's a sitting down

more of a relaxing experience

and certainly now with digital downloads

since they came out it's made life a lot

easier that you don't have to go to

somewhere like gamestop or wherever and

buy the game you can get the download

and then easy it's easy to transfer

across

you know you upgrade your xbox or you

don't have to worry about

you know where did i put the disc right

i scratched the disc

did you know the cat get out and you

keep on the disc

did one of the kids get mad that

somebody else was playing the disc so

they hid it

in a plant in the house and now nobody

can find it

absolutely so that goes to what i don't

understand about the handheld model

is that you know i don't think there's

any handheld

gaming devices at the moment that have a

screen

bigger than an iphone screen a regular

iphone screen let's

let alone a plus and so what i'm saying

in terms of that

you know and the graphics obviously

aren't going to be any better than the

60 frame per second retina

screen but you have to remember these

games these handheld games take

cartridges or desks

and they cost upwards of 20 or 30

dollars

whereas you can go onto the itunes store

find a copycat type game in every

popular game there's at least

a dozen or so copycats of it and

probably get one of these games for free

or for 99 cents rather than paying 20 or

30 dollars for a cartridge

and so and also you haven't by the way

you're going to lose that cartridge

because they're small

yeah and there's an infinite well not

infinite but you didn't know what i mean

in terms of games playable

you know off the itunes store off the

app store whereas

cartridges i mean really at 20 or 30

bucks a game

i mean how many of those cartridges are

you gonna end up actually buying i mean

you better

really kind of love that game and let's

be honest i think you're trying to be a

little bit nicer i think it's more like

40 or 50 bucks

yeah for some of those games well i was

thinking about uh second-hand prices

if you went to someone's game yeah

because there's no point buying

cartridges brand new

when you can buy a second-hand version

of it you know unless you're desperate

for the new release yeah

so there there's another casualty of the

iphone machine

uh what else have they destroyed uh

ironically enough mp3 players

right up including the ipod itself which

is the best mp3 player of all

but the iphone actually managed to

destroy the ipod

that is true yeah it's kind of a self

casualty i mean i

i had an ipod before i had

my iphone in fact i had an ipod

and then i ended up having you know

blackberry and

everything else before i ended up with

an iphone

and the iphone itself

i i remember when the what was it called

the ipod

touch yeah came out which basically

looked just like an iphone but they said

oh

but it's not an iphone it's an ipod

touch

so it will do everything an iphone will

do

but you can't put a sim card in it and

it can't make phone calls

and they tried to get that to take hold

for i don't know what it was

like a year or two but it actually could

take phone calls if you downloaded it

well it's like text free and did voice

over

wi-fi yeah but you had to be on wi-fi

yeah you couldn't be anywhere

yeah you know so so it it it did

a pretty good job and in fact my kids

had the ipod touch

in fact my parents bought it for him

from apple

and actually had engravings on the back

saying you know from grandma and grandpa

and put their names on them and that

lasted

you know a few years and then they had

the iphones

because it it's ironic how

iphone created this technology and then

killed some of the other technology they

were famous for creating because

i've had several mp3 players i had

minidisc mp3 players from sony

and then you know years ago i was a big

sony fan if it was

sony that's what i bought i was big mini

disc fan

all that good stuff and then all of a

sudden all that stuff

started dying out because apple was

taking it over and they were saying that

look our stuff's

so much simpler just buy into us

you know it's easier to use and

so i did and all that stuff kind of

disappeared and it killed off

all of these other technologies like

we're talking about so

yeah it ironically

apple had the better mp3 player

and they killed it themselves to get

everybody else to go to the iphone

now didn't you mention that um i think

it was uh

the ipod is where the term podcast

actually came from or what

actually it is because when when the

first

ipods came out they determined that

it was a good idea to go ahead

and let people broadcast stuff over the

internet through

rss feeds and let people download this

stuff whenever they plug their

ipod in and bring stuff into their ipod

so they could listen to it

and of course the old-school ipods

were not connected to the internet all

the time they didn't have wi-fi you had

to plug them in

you had to dump mp3 files to it or

whatever but you could subscribe to

podcasts

and once you plugged in your ipod

you had your subscription to podcasts

and it would dump all of the new

episodes of the podcast

onto your ipod and

as much as a lot of podcasters

hate apple pod

casting comes from the ipod

and that's that's what we're sitting

here doing and it's kind of ironic that

you and i both we have apple products

and so we're apple fans but there's

all these other networks out there that

have

podcasts that say we're against the

apple machine

but they're still using their name yeah

for

podcasts that's where that comes from

yeah

now the next one i wanted to touch on

very briefly was alarm clocks

now i've always hated traditional alarm

clocks i've bought some novelty ones

before which have played

you know a tune or something and but

it's one of those

where you know you really get bored of

that same tune and

i think your brain gets used to it and

ends up kind of blocking it out and

after a while it stops being effective

and it all the other effective type of

alarm noises

you know i i always just get pretty

angry when i was woken up behind

the clock and my first reaction when i

heard either like that

screeching kind of beeping or whatever

it was were like the alarm clock was

just saying get up you loser go to work

you know why you gotta have to go to

work

because you're a loser you suck go to

work yeah because you don't have a

youtube channel where you're unwrapping

toys and you get

30 million views a day and you're eight

years old so yeah

go to work loser yeah no i totally get

that but

at the same time we got rid of our alarm

clock

years ago and uh we use our phones for

alarms and for a while

i i had always loved the first track

off of the smashing pumpkins

melancholian name

sadness the actual track called

melancholy and the infinite

sadness tonight yeah and it was

yeah just before that song and that's

what i would wake up to

then i read an article and that article

said

do not wake up to a song that you

actually

like because you'll start to hate it

and i truly started to hate that song

after i used that song as a

alarm tone for a while it's like my boy

right now jake

he loves waking up to

uh system of down chop suey right you

know it's

wake up grab a brush put a little makeup

he thinks it's funny

yeah now all of a sudden he's saying

well i hate that song

yeah like well yeah you attribute that

to the fact that you're waking up

right and now you start to hate that

song

so it's almost better to play a song

that you

absolutely hate so then when you hear

that song

go off on your alarm and you say oh

i hate that and you want to shut it off

immediately because

even with melancholy and the infinite

sadness i could hit the snooze button

and i would listen to it three or four

more times

and then i got to maybe three more times

then maybe two more times then finally i

had to go back to a

default alert tone because i hated

hearing that

and i actually had to take it off of my

spotify playlist

because i loved that song but now i

can't stand to hear it

and i convince myself that i just i

don't want to hear that song anymore

so if you have something in your alarms

right now

that you like i suggest you pick

something you

absolutely hate yeah and that's what you

want

to wake you up in the morning yeah well

um do you think that theory works in

reverse

so if you play a song which at the

moment you hate

but you play it before you're gonna eat

a nice meal or before you get to go to

bed

and stuff do you think eventually you'll

associate that song with nice things so

you'll actually start liking the song

you know i i think that might work for

some people it wouldn't work for me

right yeah there there are certain songs

or

or certain tv shows or whatever you can

put them in front of me as

much as you want i'm still not gonna

like them right

i i would rather put something in front

of me that just makes me want to

shut it off so i don't hear it again

yeah versus something that maybe i'm

going to be

tricked psychologically into actually

liking

yeah um so yeah i i've

you know not used an alarm clock since

you know i had the option on a phone and

i think even the phone i had before

the um before the blackberry peril i

think i had a nokia one and there was an

alarm on that

and so i used to use that um and the

good thing about it is obviously

the phone can be a little bit more an

easy reach unless you particularly want

to sleep with the

clock you know but one of one of the

things i wanted

to move on to and a very very obvious

one is calculators

oh yeah i mean there was always that

speech that every math teacher always

gave in high school

or even middle school that said well you

have to learn this

because you're not always going to have

a calculator with you

now we all do every one of us do

and even if you are to the point to

where you don't understand the way your

smartphone works but you had

somebody to teach you about siri or hey

google or something like that

you can still ask them and they're gonna

solve the math for you

in fact uh not to just boost up iphone

but

then they had that new deal with measure

that came out

where you can take the pictures and do

the materials

and it comes up with the area and the

circumference and

all of that so so we basically said

well yes we have all this math knowledge

out there

but it's all available to everybody

right now

you've got a calculator you've got

access to the internet

why do we even care and and we have

entered that

point in society where we

literally all have a calculator in our

pocket

right now yeah now i remember actually

um

a few teachers given that you won't

always have a calculator on your speech

and i was an absolute nerd at the time

and i bought one of those casio

uh calculator watches oh i remember that

so every time the teacher used to say

that i

just used to hold my wrist in the air

and tap the front of my watch so

everybody behind me could see

i had a friend in high school that that

had i i

don't know if it was a casio but he had

a

a watch that was analog on the face

but then you grabbed a hold of the face

and flipped it up and

underneath had a digital calculator oh

right here

yeah i kind of stole one of those yeah

he was a little bit hoity-toity i mean

you know he had a little bit more money

but he still had the ability to have a

calculator on him the whole time but you

know the funny thing is

despite the fact i think i had that

watch for maybe about three years

um but then i decided i might want a

girlfriend so i got rid of it

um i think i only ever used that

calculator maybe

six times across oh yeah i mean well i i

remember the movie

uh singles uh i don't know if this was

big in the uk or not

but uh in the movie singles they

were going out to a club and the guy was

talking about how he had this

watch and it could hold 20 phone numbers

and it was a calculator watch so it had

a memory function that could

store phone numbers and he said i'm

going to fill this

up with phone numbers and at the end of

you know their night out or whatever he

said i've got

20 phone numbers in this watch and we're

talking about early 90s right

this is when in fact in that movie now

did he have to use one of those little

pens so there's no stars

oh no he was just tapping on him i had a

friend who had one the buttons on it was

so small it had the on the side of it

it had this little kind of pull out pen

which he then extended and you had to

use that too yeah

[ __ ] you also got to remember the

people that were wearing those watches

probably had little fingers so it wasn't

that big of a deal

you mean like midgets um or witches or

gingers

well i think we can probably do some

study on how many midgets

uh find the iphone plus models two

difficulties

because they're sure but we don't

progress but anyway yeah um

but but going on to their ed i'm i'm

sure

and not to jump ahead on you but kind of

uh

storing phone numbers i mean the the

roll adapter

that's got to be on your list right yeah

i i remember remember

years ago memorizing my friend's phone

numbers

i mean i i had everybody's phone number

memorized

and i'm not trying to tap myself but a

lot of people either had it memorized

or they had some kind of card i had a

friend in high school that had a card he

kept in his wallet that had people's

phone numbers written on it

now i mean you give me your phone number

i don't even bother trying to memorize

it i just put it in my phone yeah

it so if i get locked up in jail if they

take my phone away from me

and you're my one phone call i probably

won't know it because i've stored it in

my phone because yeah i don't have to

memorize it anymore

and so it's taken away from actually

trying to learn

things because we're so enamored and

attached to our phones and we say okay

here's how i get a hold of you that's

all we worry about

right you know yeah

um another one where i think

it really has pretty much eliminated the

industry is dictionaries and

encyclopedias

oh so i don't know if this was a big

thing in the uk

but i remember growing up we would go to

the grocery store

and you know you you'd buy the groceries

and they always had

version or not version but uh

and not chapter but basically like

number one

of the encyclopedia right and if you

came back

every week you could get the next one

right and you could eventually get the

whole collection of

encyclopedias yeah and if you had a

full collection of encyclopedias at your

house that was amazing

yeah i mean just to have

a full collection of one through 26 of

the encyclopedias

that was amazing then yeah then it went

to cd-roms you

you would buy a computer and then you'd

get the encyclopedia on maybe two

cd-roms and say

well all those books that we used to

have to wait

and and spend like four dollars a week

to try to collect the whole set of books

now we have them on two cd

roms yeah i mean it and i know

this is before my time i don't know

about you

and what happened in the uk but i do

remember hearing

stories about the door-to-door

encyclopedia oh yes

yeah we i never saw one and

did you ever see one i didn't see one

but i mean they definitely existed

uh i think i don't know what the product

was over here but the main product when

it came out on cd what i think was

called a

encyclopedia britannica yeah oh yeah

that was big over yeah and

uh there there were two there was

britannica and there was

world book right encyclopedia i don't

know if y'all had that over there or not

yeah and i mean along with um you know

libraries

you know it's certainly unless you're

after

perhaps some microfiche of some old

newspaper

you know the majority of the books in

the library now are pretty redundant

just simply in terms of you know how

quickly you can switch to different

articles from different books

on a browser on your phone as opposed to

skipping actually physically through a

book

through multiple books and then trying

to find what it is you want you know i

mean

it's so much quicker as well on a phone

it's not just more convenient

well and of course on the phone because

it's internet based

you can click on certain things on those

articles and it's going to take you to

something else on the internet

where the encyclopedia might say

oh see this article and this is

you're reading book 20 and you got to go

to but 12

to cross-reference it right now it's all

like you say from a phone or even back

then in a

cd yeah it it killed the door-to-door

encyclopedia salesman

and now it's killed the encyclopedia

yeah deal and then of course you got

wikipedia now

which is basically saying well we want

to be the online encyclopedia but we let

everybody else come in here and edit

everything and

now it's mistrusted but once again

another rabbit hole yeah maybe we go

down

one other time but uh so there's another

one that the

smartphone the iphone killed yeah and a

lot along with that closely related

uh books magazines newspapers i mean i

know

a lot of people still like you know

books for traditional

yeah yeah smell those pens

some people are like that were

newspapers but i think that's a dying

breed it is and with magazines i think

the predominant market by a long long

way now is um

you know female magazines you know

housekeeping magazines because males you

know that used to buy

maybe some of the keep fit magazines or

some of the

you know uh auto car maintenance but

it's so much easier now

to look at something you know which you

want to know through youtube

or online and you know that goes for

exercise cars or anything most of the

kind of traditional male

preferential activities whereas women i

think

still kind of like that magazine that

kind of open

you know physical cookbook right stuff

but for the most part it's

falls forced you know a lot of

newspapers and magazines

online so they can still be accessed

with a subscription so this can still

make money

so they've had to adjust to the iphone

technology rather than

you know the other way around yeah

yeah yeah absolutely i mean it the this

smartphone

and not to get too deep into something

like a tablet like an ipad or a kindle

or the

barnes and noble nook or whatever that's

kind of

started to kill bucks i mean you're

you're always going to have your purists

that want to read a book they

they want to sit there they want to

smell that smell of a book

especially old bucks you know they want

to go to an old bookstore and grab an

old book and

and do that but that's a very small

piece of the population right

somebody hears about a book that's came

out they want to say

oh i like that book they want to click a

button on their phone

in 10 seconds they have that book then

they can start reading it and now we've

gotten

even so much more lazy to where now you

can have the audible version

and somebody's going to read it to you

right because somebody didn't have the

time to read it

they want somebody to read it to them

yeah but more power to them

i mean it that's why we have to use

technology to

to go ahead and push forward and

yeah i don't have any problem with

somebody reading me a book yeah

and nothing wrong with that sure yeah

um one which i think is quite

controversial because

although i think smartphones contributed

to the demise i think it was more

the birth of internet radio which led to

this and this is basically traditional

radio

as in a physical item uh basically dying

out

when you have the choice of having your

smartphone and obviously buying a decent

pair of speakers bluetooth speakers you

can do exactly the same thing

as you could with the radio except you

can play stuff you know you like all the

time and skip channels a lot easier and

yeah you know it

it kind of it kind of killed that it it

killed that medium of

buying that entertainment media

i mean it it really hurt that industry

but it also opened

up the avenue

for people that wanted to

present stuff out there that they didn't

have the ability

before because they had to have that

intermediary

they had to have a gatekeeper that said

this is what we want you to listen to

and kind of goes with podcasts you know

podcasts now

people can choose what they want to hear

what they want to listen to

and i think it's a great thing that

we've

kind of opened that up to say hey

you want to listen to this great we're

not going to force you to listen to this

but we hope you'll listen to this

and everybody's happy right

everybody has that freedom of choice

that before it was the illusion of

choice

because somebody somewhere as a

gatekeeper was saying

here's the things you get to choose from

now there's truly

all kinds of choice out there yeah and

um

i know we pretty much could go on um for

hours with this list of everything so

i'm just going to skip over these next

ones

um voice recorders landlines

pay phones flashlights calendars

watches wall clocks photo albums

even something as simple as a trip to

the bank

pages beepers board and card games

post-its reminder notes pedometers

so i mean there's obviously a whole

bunch of stuff and that's by no means an

ultimate list um that was just a small

section i got

um through the research so you know the

iphone has helped to disrupt

or destroy a lot of traditional

industries

um but i think the industry which has

actually affected more than

anything else and forcing it um to

undergo evolution is probably the music

industry oh i totally agree

that the music industry has probably

been hit the hardest

with the advent of the iphone and

even maybe you could argue before

the advent of the iphone with the mp3

file

and music sharing and burning cds

because they were the original

gatekeepers they

were saying these bands over here

are the ones we want you to hear because

we can make money off these guys

versus what we have now

where you can be an artist

in the record company or the record

label or whatever you want to call them

you can be an artist not have one of

those

make a living off that and there aren't

a r

people that are going to make money and

there's not some big

tower in los angeles or new york or

whatever that are putting all this out

and they're trying to figure out what to

do

and i feel bad for them i i mean i

really do because

because there is no gatekeeper there's a

lot of crap that gets out there sure

let's be honest yeah i mean

so so now what we've done is we've said

well let's

let the general public

sift through everything and find what's

good right

versus the gatekeeper that used to sit

out there

and sift through what was good and tell

you what to listen to

sure and and that's been one of the

biggest

hits and and it's the same with the

books with vanity publishing yeah

uh you used to if you if you were going

to put a book out you had to have a

publisher

now you've got to sift through all that

to try to find out what the good book is

and all that and so we we punted that

back to the consumer yeah and we've told

the consumer

it's your responsibility to figure out

what should what you want to listen to

what you want to read

but it's a double-edged sword because at

the same time

it's very easy to put stuff out

that you say is true that's not true

and so that same consumer can say well

this is news and this is true

this is this this is science and it's

really not

and it's very hard to determine

what's true and what's false sure yeah

there's

sites like the onion and babylon b which

do fantastic writing i mean

just absolutely fantastic writing

but if you don't know that it's

satirical in nature

you might say well this is a news source

yeah

and they say this is true and somebody

shares it

and all of a sudden a snowball effect

happens because it looks like a

legitimate news source

or you know if you look at somebody like

weird al

yankovic and all he does is parody songs

but they're popular and you're like well

this is popular music

and these things he's saying

is what americans like to listen to we

could confuse

everyone so the loss of the gatekeepers

maybe that is the true

serial killer victim of the iphone

is the gatekeeper yeah and

actually this just reminds me of of a

joke

we were talking earlier about the

snobbery behind

owning an iphone and it kind of dropped

off but now it's

come back a little bit with the high

price of the newer models

and i remember reading this comment from

a guy

who was in the dating pool and he was on

match.com and a few of these other ones

he harmony or whatever

did his name start with an e and it ends

with a rick

uh no oh this is okay but um

we love you eric if you're listening

yeah we're trying not to make

which we try not to make that obvious

but he followed by rick kind of you know

but anyway um so he was on various

stadium websites

and every now and then he'd get you know

chatting on the online chat

with these girls and be like oh yeah i'd

like to take this further or meet up

and you know i'm guessing in dating

websites that's like two or three texts

not like 24. um but um

so we'd get the numbers and it texts

them

and uh when he got a text back if it was

a green

text he said the first thought which

came into his head was

i bet she's probably got six kids from

four different dads

yep can't afford an iphone because it's

not blue

and everybody looks at that now i i mean

i

i cringe and and like we said at the

beginning of this

we both have iphones so if if i get a

text from somebody and it's green

i'm like you cheap

so and so you know so you don't have an

iphone

you can't imessage me you can't airdrop

something yeah

yeah and it and it's terrible that we've

created that

kind of uh what did you call it earlier

kind of

did just that

i i i honestly don't even know what to

call it but

but this kind of subculture of iphone

users that

if you don't see that blue on the text

message

you almost look at it like a

fake news source it you know it's like

oh this came in green

this isn't as good of a text as it would

be

if it came in as blue and i almost hate

to

see this i hate to get into a group text

where everything's not blue if there's

somebody that doesn't have an iphone

and then it turns into a true text

message or

sms thing and now it's all green i'm

like

i don't really want to respond to this

as much it it

kind of sucks i mean it really does kind

of suck but

that's the mindset that apple has put us

in

now well really yeah well i really hope

that some future ios update they do

actually

if it has to come through green they can

at least tell us it came through on a

samsung or something

because that's a little bit different

you know that's kind of equivalent model

and technology and almost equivalent

price wise and i mean they're pretty

much neck and neck in terms of

innovation

yeah but you know what you know they'll

never do that

they will never do that i i i would i

see where you're going

and that would make a lot of sense it's

like at least you're sending this

a reasonable put a google pixel because

can you imagine trying to find somebody

else who owned a google pixel it'll be

easier

um to be a furry in 1980 and find

another fairy without help of the

internet

yeah absolutely and with all that said

thanks for tuning in to this episode of

the wolf and the shepherd we're glad you

joined us

please share this with your friends we

appreciate all your support and we look

forward to talking to you next time