 It's become pretty predictable now. Every September, usually earlier rather than later, Apple announces a new iPhone of some sort, and for three years in a row now, the day of Apple's event has marked a measurable downturn in viewership on our channel, because we typically don't talk about it. So you know what? F*** it. Let's talk about the new iPhone XS, which confoundingly is not in fact a tiny iPhone. And the YouTube analytics that have driven me to drop everything that I'm doing and do that, instead of playing with this much more exciting 48 port 10 gigabit network switch, which I've been actually having a lot of fun with. And today's video is brought to you by Optima. Optima's B-Sport 3 wireless headphones feature 10 hour battery life, and an IP55 water resistance rating. Learn more at the link in the video description. Okay, here we go. So the new Apple Watch Series 4 has a curved screen, haptic feedback on the crown, louder speakers, a better processor, some new health features including ECG capabilities. That's actually pretty sick. And it is thinner than ever before. The iPhone XS is made of stainless steel and gold, silver and space gray with IP68 water resistance, and very durable glass. It's got a 5.8 inch OLED 2436 by 1125 display with HDR and a place for someone took a bite out of it. And it is faster than ever with gigabit class LTE and their new 7 nanometer 6 core A12 Bionic SoC that boasts 50% better GPU performance and a much faster neural engine for AI and machine learning stuff. It's got up to 512 gigs of storage, better battery than the iPhone X, dual SIM support with both eSIM and physical cards, so it looks like Apple is finally taking India seriously. How did that take so long? And it now both plays and records stereo sound, which is pretty sweet. The XS Max is all that stuff I just said, but bigger and pricier with a 6.5 inch display apparently justifying it being the most expensive mainstream smartphone ever at $1,100 to start. And that's it. Oh, except one more thing. This. Apple, we know there's a notch. Just own it. You guys know that this picture, your first promo image, makes the phone look like an all-screen design when it isn't. Which, wait, no, that wasn't the one more thing. Sorry. The iPhone XR. It's aluminum instead of steel with lots of colorful designs. It's got a smaller screen, also notched, and I guess they're all in on that now. And the screen is LCD rather than OLED, which is somehow a selling point that gets a sexy new name, liquid retina. Okay, then. It's got the same A12 Bionic chip. It is still water resistant, although only IP67, and it's got the same face ID system as the XS and the XS Max. So, basically, there are a couple key takeaways for this one. One, the home button is not coming back. And two, anyone holding out from the 5C or the SE for a decent value phone from Apple is getting one heck of an upgrade there, spending a little more for it. It's still $750. But even with the cost-down haptic touch versus 3D touch and the single rear camera, it actually really looks like you aren't giving up much. Okay, then. Everybody happy? We covered the iPhone XS. Now, let's talk about why I bothered to do all of that and what Google has to do with any of this. Now, I want to get this out of the way first, because it's important. To be very clear, I'm not upset about this situation because I hate the iPhone or something. I wasn't a huge fan of the X, but I named one of them, I think it was the 6S, my smartphone of the year when it came out. We just generally don't do this kind of content for anything on this channel. And I've gone back and forth on it a lot of times over the years. It's possible I'll change my position again, but I've always just kind of had it gnawing at the back of my mind that summarizing a press conference is a convenient little helping hand. For anyone who doesn't have two hours to listen to Apple talk about how many facial muscles they can track for an emojis now. But other than that, it's basically marketing for Apple. Because until I actually have my hands on the device, and I don't mean the kind of structured hands-on you get at these events, but actual time spent with it as my daily driver, I often end up feeling like I don't have a ton to contribute to the conversation, because literally every tech publication in the world is chomping at the bit to publish their spin on what is essentially all the same information. Whatever Apple, or for that matter, Samsung or whoever, said during their keynote. Making me even more hesitant about this type of content is my personal opinion that video really isn't the best medium for a bullet point summary of information. I mean, I personally can skim a written article much faster than I can skip through a video, even with YouTube's, very helpful by the way, live previews of the navigation bar. So then, onto the actual meat of this video. The way that Google's algorithm basically forces content creators to jump onto the bandwagon when a topic trends hard enough. At the beginning of this video, I alluded to the dips in viewership that we've seen right around Apple's September keynote for the last few years. So let's take a closer look at that now. The 2015 and 2016 impacts are pretty obvious even to the untrained eye. The day after the Apple keynote marks a multi-week low in LTT viewership. But then 2017 is a bit of a trickier one and requires a deeper dive into the analytics. There's no obvious crater here. But it was actually last year that we finally felt that we had confirmation of this pattern. So the morning of September 12th, Apple made their announcement. That day, a few hours later, after a short experimental stream commentating the event, we launched a video looking at a budget $60 CPU compared to a $600 one. And that video performed pretty well. 650,000 views in the first couple days was pretty good for us at that time. Then we followed up that video with three reasons not to buy a $400 laptop. A video that killed it for us. 850,000 views in the first couple days at that time was great and would usually result in a noticeable uplift for the channel. One that didn't come for, should you upgrade to Ryzen? The video that came out the next day. So here's what was happening. Like I'm not suggesting that YouTube wasn't delivering our videos to sub boxes or that they were making some kind of intentional effort to undermine us because Google like really really loves the iPhone so much or whatever. The answer is way less tinfoil hatty than that and actually more interesting. So think about your own experience watching videos on YouTube. If you watch one stupid tractor video, all of a sudden your home page and watch next is full of videos about farming. Well, it's the same thing. Now in the tech niche, we don't generally deal with events that are relevant to pretty much every human with a pulse very often. So we're usually sheltered from this. Smartphones are about the most mainstream tech thing that there is. And you know, you could say well, what about Android? Even though Android holds significantly more market share than iOS, there's no individual model of device that sells anything like a hot iPhone. And while a diehard Apple fan would have no need to know anything about or how to operate some Android handset, pretty much every Android user probably at least knows someone with an iPhone and needs to know at least a little bit about it. Even if it's just to put together an argument to make to their friends for why they shouldn't buy it or whatever. So that's the Apple effect. Everyone needs to know about it. So that's what happens every September. You guys all watch one freaking iPhone video and then because everyone is making one, YouTube spams your feed with more iPhone content and you either watch it, shifting your algorithmic weighting from techie to iPhone-y or you get sick of it and you turn off YouTube altogether for a few days. And you can actually see the effect right here in the 2017 data. Search, channel pages, and suggested videos all look normal. But browse features absolutely tanks from the 12th to the 15th, finally fully recovering on the 17th when our keyboard with no actual keys video went semi-viral and got picked up hard by the algorithm after the iPhone dust had settled. So I hope this video was enlightening, interesting, entertaining. Something for both those of you who wanted a convenient summary of the new iPhones and for those of you wondering why the heck everyone in your sub box felt compelled to make an iPhone video today. I'm gonna go back and play with my network switch. After I tell you about Mastrop. Mastrop's control keyboard, it's got it all. It's constructed with a solid CNC aluminum frame with a built-in switch plate to make it stable and extremely durable. It's fully programmable with RGB lighting and QMK firmware, which makes it much easier to program giving you more control. It's got onboard memory to keep your profile on your keyboard and at checkout you can choose between Cherry MX, Kiwa, and Halo switches, which of course will affect the price depending on your choice. But if you ever did want to change your switches out in the future, you can actually hot swap them out making this keyboard truly your own without needing to know how to solder. So pick it up today on Mastrop at the link below for a limited time only. Thanks for watching. This video sucked. You know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now I can go. Oh, I didn't have it. Sorry.