Your First Mistake Phone
Marco:
I just said in the last show how I had finally broken a phone.
Marco:
I finally broke the back of my iPhone 16 Pro.
Marco:
I did.
Marco:
I decided to go against Casey's recommendation and order myself an express replacement through AppleCare.
Casey:
I mean, it's great if you're willing to spend the extra money, which I think in retrospect, I probably still would have done it.
Casey:
I just felt a little bit hoodwinked by my own ignorance.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it did work out pretty well for me.
Casey:
So how did it work out for you?
Marco:
Out of curiosity, how smooth was the process of getting the express replacement for you?
Casey:
I thought it was fairly straightforward.
Casey:
How fast did it come?
Casey:
A day or two.
Casey:
I think it was maybe two days at most.
Casey:
I don't think it was very long at all.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
Yeah, that's not the experience I had.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
When it came, how easy was it to send the old one back?
Casey:
I'm pretty sure I just put it in the exact same box and then dropped it off at like a UPS store or FedEx store or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Because they included like a shipping label and they even included the tape with which to reseal the box.
Casey:
Like genuinely, my experience was really good as long as you can get over the fact that it was not as cheap as it could have otherwise been had I gone into the store.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
You seem deeply dissatisfied.
Marco:
Well, I ordered mine on the Friday.
Marco:
It said estimated, you know, one to two business days.
Marco:
I'm like, wait, maybe I'll have it like Tuesday.
Marco:
By the following like Thursday, I'm like, hey, I don't have it yet.
Marco:
And the online tracking status page still hasn't it still says it hasn't even shipped yet.
Casey:
No, if I recall correctly, I did it late ish in the day.
Casey:
I'm going to make this up on like a Wednesday.
Casey:
And I think midday Thursday it shipped.
Casey:
And I think I got the package, you know, like like you said, like two business days later, something like that.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly, but it was something along those lines.
Marco:
Yeah, that's that's how it says it's supposed to go.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it did.
Marco:
That's what it did.
Marco:
Roughly.
Marco:
Mine hadn't shipped for a week.
Marco:
And so I messaged support saying, hey, you know, can you give me an update on this?
Marco:
Like, what am I looking at here?
Marco:
And after a lot of chatting, because like now Apple like support chat is very defended by AI chatbot walls.
Casey:
I mean, they all are, but yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
But you really have to bust through a lot of AI support bot walls before you can get an actual bot person talking to you.
Marco:
Anyway, after a week they hadn't sent it, after I message support, all of a sudden it gets sent the following day, I get it.
Marco:
So I get it.
Marco:
And at this point, it still says it hasn't even been shipped on the status page, but a box shows up with an AI.
Marco:
I'm like, okay, great.
Marco:
And you're right, it had a little piece of tape to send the phone back.
Marco:
It did not, however, have a return shipping label.
Marco:
Now, I've done trade-ins before with Apple.
Marco:
I know the trick of like, oh, you peel off the top label and below it is the return label.
Marco:
And that was not the case here.
Marco:
It was like a single-layer sticker label.
Marco:
There was nothing below it.
Marco:
There was no return label.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right.
Marco:
Go back to Apple support.
Marco:
The chat is useless and won't get me anywhere.
Marco:
I finally call them, sitting on hold, 40 minutes.
Marco:
After all that time, they finally like, well, I don't know what happened, but here, we'll dispatch you a new one, and you should get it by email within the hour.
Marco:
Okay, bye.
Marco:
Never shows up by email.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I know you did, but can you just state, can you just state plainly that you checked all the spams?
Casey:
Of course I did.
Casey:
All the saves.
Casey:
If you don't say that, you know, somebody's going to be like, wow, didn't you check your spam folder?
John:
Also, when a support person says they're emailing you something, you might as well stay on the line until you get the email.
John:
That tends to keep them honest.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And they sent me an email confirmation that even told me the tracking number on the label.
Marco:
But there was no label.
Marco:
They said, oh, it'll come in a separate email.
Marco:
I never did.
Marco:
So the next day, I have to call them again.
Marco:
So then I have to call them again.
Marco:
And finally, they dispatch another one.
Marco:
Then I get that actual FedEx label email.
Marco:
So I now have FedEx box ready to go.
Marco:
I've packed it all up.
Marco:
And then about an hour ago, I get an email saying my replacement has shipped.
Marco:
What?
John:
Nice.
John:
It's pretty fun.
Marco:
I'm like, I don't know what's going on.
Marco:
Like, I... Needless to say, Express Replacement was not Express, and I've now had to spend, like, over... Probably over two hours of total time dealing with it.
Marco:
And it's like, this is not at all a convenience.
Marco:
Meanwhile, like...
Marco:
When I went to the Apple store to pick up my new iPhone, I did some logistics there and the people in the store are awesome.
Marco:
I've never had a bad staff experience at the Apple store.
Marco:
Like even when I do what I think is a little bit ridiculous, like trading in three phones for one, they handle it with grace.
Marco:
Like the people in the stores are awesome and
Marco:
dealing with the mailing part of this has been horrendous.
Marco:
So like, okay, I'm just, I'll just go to the store next time.
Casey:
So I recommend everyone go to the store.
Casey:
I mean, I, I will say that my experience was vanilla in the best possible way.
Casey:
It shipped the following day after I made the request, it arrived a couple of days later.
Casey:
I shipped mine back, you know, just boom, bye.
Casey:
Everything was fine.
Casey:
And, and yeah, again, I, I was, I,
Casey:
Hood-winged by my own ignorance because I didn't realize it was considerably more expensive than going into the store.
Casey:
And so because of that, I probably would have just gone to the store.
Casey:
That being said, I would generally recommend it.
Casey:
I think you had a uniquely crummy experience, and I know everyone is firing off emails about how, no, no, no, Marco's experience was not unique because this happened to me and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
I mean, whatever.
Casey:
But in my personal experience, if you're willing to spend the extra money, I think it was convenient and did work well as long as you don't win the nasty lottery that Marco seems to have won.
Marco:
And we'll see how this ends.
Marco:
Like, because, you know, once I mail this phone back, are they going to know that they have it?
Marco:
Are they going to charge me $1,000?
Marco:
I have no idea.
John:
Or is another phone on its way to you?
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Well, the email, it said, like, old serial number, so-and-so, new serial number, and it was blank.
Marco:
And I'm like, okay.
Uh...
Marco:
So something has gone badly.
Marco:
This seems fraught.
Marco:
Anyway, the good news is Express Replacement went great for Casey, terribly for me.
Marco:
But AppleCare 1, though it went terribly for John, I decided to do it for myself with all this new stuff, and it's worked great for me because I'm not touching my Macs with it.
Marco:
I'm only doing phone.
Marco:
And actually, I did do I did do one Mac, but it's one that only my account is on.
Marco:
So phone, travel, laptop.
Marco:
And I believe that's it so far.
Marco:
And it's still cheaper than what they already were.
Marco:
And it's great.
John:
Watch your email.
Marco:
Yeah, I will.
Casey:
Let me tell you, I had a great experience last week, and that's because I went to Memphis, Tennessee to go visit St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
And I did that because we recorded the podcast-a-thon.
Casey:
It is already over, but you can replay all 11 and three-quarters hours of it on YouTube.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I strongly recommend if you have 11 and three-quarters hours to kill to give it a shot.
Casey:
I thought we did a great job this year.
Casey:
It was myself.
Marco:
And let's be honest.
Marco:
If you listen to this show, you probably have some time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You're very right.
Casey:
It was myself, Mike and Jason from Upgrade, Kathy Campbell, Brad Doughty and Stephen Hackett.
Casey:
And I hope I'm not forgetting anyone I should have been counting, but I don't think I am.
Casey:
Anyways, if I forgot you, I'm sorry.
Casey:
But all of us, all six of us, we did basically 12 hour live telethon on YouTube at St.
Casey:
Jude's campus in Memphis.
Casey:
And we had a really great time.
Casey:
We raised a little over $100,000 in that 12 hours or something like that.
Casey:
which I'm extremely excited for and I am extremely thankful for.
Casey:
So if you tuned in even for just a moment, thank you.
Casey:
As we sit here, as I record on the evening of Wednesday, the 24th, for the entire month, we have raised $522,836.
Casey:
I think we can do better.
Casey:
I challenge all of us and you to do better.
Casey:
I think we absolutely can.
Casey:
And so how do you help us raise more money?
Casey:
You go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and you throw a few bucks our way.
Casey:
We've talked about the Marco Offset.
Casey:
I'm not going to belabor it because at this point you should have already paid it, but
Casey:
If you bought a bunch of new technology over the last week or two and are feeling a little guilty about your rampant consumerism, you can offset that rampant consumerism by going to themarcooffset.com and calculate how much we recommend that you donate to offset your rampant consumerism.
Casey:
I will just say we have another story for maybe next week that will tell about the importance of St.
Casey:
Jude, but I will tell you that...
Casey:
When I was there, I got to see a couple of things I had not seen previously, including the Domino's Village, Domino's as in Domino's Pizza, and they donate an absolutely astonishing amount of money to St.
Casey:
Jude, and I'm very thankful for it.
Casey:
And they have sponsored or fundraised or done something to get the Domino's Village named after them.
Casey:
So what is the Domino's Village?
Casey:
It is housing.
Casey:
It is semi-permanent housing for families that are getting treatment at St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
So, you know, if you have a child that is getting treated, they will fly you and the child into Memphis.
Casey:
They will put you up in Memphis, potentially at the Domino's Village, which has one, two and three bedroom apartments.
Casey:
We got to tour it and it is incredible.
Casey:
And the thought that they put into this place is phenomenal.
Casey:
And I've been beating this drum for a while.
Casey:
And I have a blog post that I haven't posted yet that talks about this as well.
Casey:
But one of the things that's so incredible about St.
Casey:
Jude is how much they really give a crap from top to bottom inside now.
Casey:
And an example of this is at the Domino's Village.
Casey:
This is where, you know, you and your family and potentially your sick child siblings, if necessary, can all stay and live in Memphis for however long it takes to get this life-saving treatment for the ill child.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
As St.
Casey:
Jude has gone through the years and has had families not graduate, that's not really the word I'm looking for, but move on from St.
Casey:
Jude because their children are either maintaining or hopefully cured from their illness, they will still ask the parents of these children and the children as well, like, hey, what could have made your experience better?
Casey:
And this is a great example of them just really caring.
Casey:
And one of the things that parents and families have said is, hey, you know, for some cancers, for some illnesses, you have to get like a pill or an injection at like three in the morning.
Casey:
And even if you're staying on campus, it's not super convenient to have to trudge across campus to go to a nurse to get the injection, to get the pill, whatever.
Casey:
It would be so much nicer if we could just do that in the building in which we're sleeping.
Casey:
And so I'll give you one guess what's in Domino's Village.
Casey:
They have like a nurse's station.
Casey:
I'm sure they have a different name for it, where you can at any hour of any day get whatever life-saving medication you need.
Casey:
So if you're into things like this, if you are into getting rid of childhood cancer, if you're into giving these sick kids more tomorrows,
Casey:
And I certainly am.
Casey:
And I know that you two are as well.
Casey:
Go to stju.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E.org slash ATP.
Casey:
Please throw whatever money you can their way.
Casey:
Just because we have big, huge mega donors, which we are so very thankful for, that doesn't mean that your 10 bucks isn't useful, isn't worthwhile, isn't interesting, isn't great.
Casey:
So please, please, please go to stju.org slash ATP.
Casey:
John, did you want to mention any new top donors?
Yeah.
John:
we don't have any new top donors but i do want to recommend people check out the podcast on if only just by scrubbing around looking for the parts with casey when he does embarrassing stuff it's highly entertaining if you enjoy this like these things are more entertaining when you know the people who are there and obviously we know most of the people who are in this podcast but you're listening to the show you probably know casey do you want to see him doing embarrassing things do you want to see him uh playing uh game shows and stuff check it out there's
John:
tons of good content there uh yes you can just treat it as entertainment but if you happen to watch some of the uh inspirational videos between and maybe donate a few bucks that's the purpose of the podcastathon uh you can donate it anytime not just uh when it was airing live so please do check out that link
Casey:
I think ATP can give Relay, because we're part of the same community here, we can give Relay that heave to get us to at least $600,000.
Casey:
I'd like to see even more.
Casey:
And thank you, by the way, to Captain America, Stephen Rogers, for donating $10,000.
Casey:
I don't know if that's via ATP or just in general.
John:
He's not affiliated with ATP.
John:
I looked it up, unfortunately.
Casey:
Still, Captain America is into it, so why aren't you?
Casey:
Go to stu.org.atp.
Casey:
I have possibly the most important follow-up that's ever reached the Accidental Tech podcast.
Casey:
I have sports ball follow-up.
Casey:
And I wanted to let everyone know that I had brought up a couple of times that the colors of the iPhone 17 Pro, the blue, the orange, and the kind of white-ish, right?
Casey:
What's the third color?
Casey:
There's blue, orange, and the one nobody cares about.
Casey:
Silver.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
The blue and orange in particular, everyone says, oh, it must be because of Tim Cook.
Casey:
Well, it's not because of Tim Cook.
Casey:
And it must be because of Auburn.
Casey:
Because Tim Cook went to Auburn for...
Casey:
If I'm not mistaken, Auburn's colors are blue and orange.
Casey:
And I kept saying, well, what about UVA?
Casey:
What about UVA?
Casey:
And Tony Sita, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm so sorry, Tony.
Casey:
We've communicated so many times.
Casey:
I have no idea how to pronounce your surname, but here we are.
Casey:
Tony pointed me to a link, which is admittedly the UVA magazine.
Casey:
So, I mean, I will concede to consider the source, but it reads as follows.
Casey:
An 1887 University of Virginia graduate, George Petrie, was the organizer and coach of Auburn's first football team in 1892.
Casey:
In honor of UVA, Petrie chose orange and blue as Auburn's official colors.
Casey:
His contributions to Auburn didn't end there.
Casey:
Petrie was the founder of the school's history department, graduate school, and athletics department, as well as the author of the Auburn Creed.
Casey:
There you go, kids.
Casey:
They are UVA's colors.
Casey:
Boom!
Casey:
How about that?
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
We got something wrong because 9to5Mac got something wrong and we just parroted it.
Casey:
We said last week that as far as we understood, which was true, that the iPhone 17 Pro fast charging requires the new dynamic power adapter that Apple's selling that has that new trick USB power delivery thing where it'll do like
Casey:
tenths of a watt or amp or whatever i forget the details now but we thought that was absolutely required uh in order to make it what maybe it was volts uh in order to make it work whatever it was a tenth of a something and so anyway uh 95 mac has since updated that's their very same article and it reads as follows an earlier version of this story said apple's new dynamic power adapter was the only way to charge the iphone 17 as fast as possible this is not true you can use any power adapter that is 40 watts or faster it doesn't need to be apple branded we regret the error
Casey:
And so do we.
Casey:
And I guess we can do some iPhone Air follow-up.
Casey:
John, tell me, why are people buying the Air or the 15-inch MacBook Air?
John:
Yeah, last episode, we talked a lot, particularly Marco talked a lot about his doubts about how appealing the iPhone Air would be as compared to the other phones in the lineup.
John:
And we also strayed off into thinking about the 15-inch MacBook Air, which we've talked about in the past, and the Plus phones and stuff like that.
Marco:
And a 13 inch iPad Air, all these like all these products that have the pattern of like the bigger screen size that used to be only for a pro model.
Marco:
Then they make a kind of mid to low tier model that has also the big screen size.
John:
Right.
John:
And we talked about when those products were introduced on the show, all of a sudden, this is a great idea.
John:
It fills an obvious hole in the lineup.
John:
Why should you be forced to get the most expensive product if all you want is the big screen?
John:
You don't care about the other features, yada, yada.
John:
And then again, Marco had doubts about the iPhone Air.
John:
What we got in response to that segment was tons and tons of people sending us email, writing us messages online saying, here's why I'm getting the iPhone Air.
John:
Here's why I like the 15-inch MacBook Air.
John:
Here's why these people like the 15-inch MacBook Air.
John:
Uh, and I'm here to say that we agree with all of you.
John:
There are great reasons to buy all these products, which is why we think they make a lot of sense.
John:
Even the iPhone air.
John:
The question is, and the point of the segment was, will these products sell well enough for Apple to be satisfied?
John:
Doesn't mean they're bad products.
John:
Like literally millions of people will buy all of these products.
John:
That sounds like, well, it's a success.
John:
Millions of people are buying them.
John:
Yeah, but how many millions?
John:
And so in the big numbers in the Apple ecosystem, our point with those segments last week was not that there's no reason to buy an iPhone Air or 15-inch MacBook Air or 13-inch iPad Pro or whatever.
John:
There's plenty of reasons to buy all those products.
John:
They have a set of features that appeal to a lot of people.
John:
Is it enough, people?
John:
Just look what happened to the mini phones.
John:
So there's tons of reasons to buy the mini phones.
John:
People love them.
John:
People love them so much that they were sad when Apple stopped selling them.
John:
And why did Apple stop selling them?
John:
They didn't sell enough.
John:
Same thing with the Plus phones.
John:
A lot of people like those, but not enough people.
John:
So here are the iPhone Air.
John:
And our fear is not that the iPhone Air is a bad product that no one should ever buy.
John:
Our fear is that not enough people will find it appealing enough to buy.
John:
And maybe it will have a difficult life continuing on.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
This is only the first week or so that these phones have been out.
John:
We don't know what the future holds.
John:
But that was our point.
John:
So thank you for everybody.
John:
you're sending in your reasons why you love these products.
John:
I see the reasons as completely valid.
John:
In particular, I think the 15-inch MacBook Air is an amazing thing.
John:
And we'll talk about the iPhone Air in a little bit with our experiences with it.
John:
But yeah, just because you love a product and think it's great doesn't mean that it will have a bright future at Apple.
John:
See also the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Oh, the sadness of the weeks you said that.
Marco:
Indeed.
Marco:
It's killing me.
Casey:
You know, you're going to have to move on.
John:
2024 is running out.
John:
Remember the whole, I'm going to buy a new computer in 2024.
John:
I just want to see what they do with the Mac Pro.
John:
Anyway, moving on.
Marco:
How's that going?
Marco:
Terribly.
Casey:
How's that working out for you?
Casey:
All right, let's talk about Bendgate.
Casey:
Bendgate 2025 edition.
Casey:
Apple, via Tom's Guide, has provided a video.
Casey:
We will link to both the Tom's Guide article and a direct link to the video in the show notes.
Casey:
This is showing Apple's test harness for testing the iPhone Air.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
Holy cow, this thing becomes concave, convex.
Casey:
I can never tell them apart.
Casey:
Doesn't matter.
Casey:
It becomes a arc and springs right back to where it started.
Casey:
It is very, very impressive.
John:
This is something all the press got to see, apparently, or much of the press got to see at the phone introduction event.
John:
Apple essentially took the press back into a room and said, here's our bend test robot.
John:
And it's like this rig.
John:
You'll see you can see it in the in the movie.
John:
It's like a rig with these two little pressure points that press on the back of the phone while it's suspended from its ends.
John:
And the phone bends and they showed it applying 130 pounds of pressure and then releasing that pressure and having the phone spring back to be entirely flat.
John:
I think they must have done something where they took the phone off the bend ring and said, see, look, put it on the table.
John:
It's totally flat.
John:
It's not, you know, doesn't retain any of the bend.
John:
That was the other impressive thing that Apple did to try to convince the press that this thing does not bend.
John:
But I think the real convinced, I said, well, we got to wait till the YouTube people get hold of this.
John:
The real convinced, I think, was JerryRigEverything, which I believe is the premier destroyer of Apple things on YouTube.
John:
At least he's the one I'm the most aware of.
John:
On his channel, you know, he's going to break everything, okay?
John:
But what he did as part of all the various tests for the iPhone Air was he did the typical test where you put it in your hands and you try to bend it.
John:
Unlike the press people who were caught by surprise and had a phone thrown at them by Jaws and said, here, try to bend this.
John:
Jerry Rigg is an expert phone bender.
John:
This is what he does.
John:
On his channel, he takes phones and bends them until they break.
John:
It's a thing.
John:
He's a big, strong man who literally bends phones for a living.
John:
He could not bend an iPhone Air in such a way that it maintained a bend.
John:
Forget about breaking it in half or cracking it.
John:
With his two hands holding the phone in the air, no putting on the edge of a table, no putting it over your knee, no stepping on it, just two hands on the phone in the air.
John:
He could not bend this phone in such a way that it retained a bend.
John:
You could make it like do an arc, but as soon as he released the pressure, it went back to completely flat.
John:
So the iPhone Air 100% passes the hands trying to bend test.
John:
And like Marco said last time, surely Apple knew this, which is why they could throw this phone to people and say, here, try to bend it.
John:
So the throwing was the dangerous part because it does break if you drop it.
John:
But anyway, the glass cracks.
John:
If he can't bend this thing, there's no way people caught by the press.
John:
We're going to bend this just by bending in the air.
John:
So amazing.
John:
iPhone Air.
John:
Do not worry about bendability if you're trying to bend it, which you shouldn't be doing with your hands in the air.
John:
Then, of course, JerryRig everything being the channel that destroys Apple hardware.
John:
It's time to pull out the machinery.
John:
So he got his machine assisted bend test with like a force meter on it and like a two inch like PVC cylinder or something pressing on the middle of the phone with the ends pressed up against something.
John:
And it withstood 215 pounds of pressure before it cracked.
Casey:
Absolutely bananas.
John:
And the back of the phone cracked, but the screen did not.
John:
The screen was still on at this point.
John:
So yes, obviously you can break it in half, but do you think you can apply 250 pounds of pressure directly to the center of the phone while keeping the end still?
John:
I don't think you can.
John:
Not without some mechanical advantages or some mechanical health.
John:
So if you're worried about anything with the iPhone Air, worry about the back glass shattering if it slips out of your pocket, if you miss your pocket like Marco did and drop it on your driveway.
John:
That will happen.
John:
The glass will still crack.
John:
But bending?
John:
i would say do not worry about it because i i'm trying to think about a scenario where how much would you have to weigh and what scenario would you have to be in where you would put this in your back pocket and sit on it and put a bend in it it seems very sturdy that's a test that nobody did but i it again it's not just like oh well what if i'm 215 pounds this is 250 pounds of pressure pressed precisely in the center of the phone with the ends being held still by steel beams so it doesn't bend very easily
Marco:
in summary yeah and i believe somebody somebody posted the comparison to the iphone 6 which was the one that famously did fairly easily bend especially the 6 plus you just blow on that one yeah i believe that was like less than half of the force um required for this so that they've made it very good the iphone 6 you could easily do with your hands anybody could bend it with their hands yeah
Marco:
Yeah, good.
Marco:
I mean, look, this is like, you know, this is one of those things where like Apple really never acknowledged that, you know, the iPhone 6 was bendable.
Marco:
But you can tell that this was definitely like, hey, just so you all know, we know you think this is going to be bendable like that old iPhone was.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
Look how great it is.
Marco:
Like this was this was very good, you know, design and marketing by Apple about the bendability of the air.
Marco:
Because as soon as you see the arrow, the very first thing you think is, oh, is it fragile?
Marco:
And that's why Apple has been extremely strongly marketing the fact that it is not as fragile as it looks.
John:
Oh, and the test that he did in addition to the million other ways he abused these things, he has the little scratchy little metal sticks of different hardness levels that go through like one through nine or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the new ceramic coating, the second version of the ceramic coating, whatever thing is on on all the iPhones, it goes one number higher than the previous coating.
John:
So it is, in fact, a better, more scratch resistant coating.
John:
In other words, I think it was like the number six or number seven that would have scratched the iPhone 16 does not leave a mark on this phone.
John:
You have to go up to one level of hardness higher.
John:
So that scratch coating is also not BS.
John:
It's real.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm super duper impressed by all of this.
Casey:
And so, so was Jerry rig everything.
Casey:
Apparently they, he seemed very, very into it.
Casey:
John, tell me about the battery life.
Casey:
There's been a lot of tests done.
Casey:
We have a couple of YouTube videos.
Casey:
We'll link Tom's guide talked about it.
Casey:
What, what, what's your conclusion here?
John:
Battery life testing is difficult.
John:
I mean, we just got done talking about Apple changing their methodology and having the numbers change.
John:
The numbers change just because they change the methodology.
John:
What is a good methodology?
John:
What is quote unquote typical usage doing something like playing video or whatever is really not exercising the entire phone and it's not realistic.
John:
People don't just play a video all day long.
John:
what is representative battery life testing and the difficulty of doing this i had to do this when i was doing battery testing like doing a laptop review as far as technique or whatever i made my own tests but i don't think my tests were any better or worse than anyone else's i was just guessing everyone's just saying i think this is what a typical day looks like load a web page copy a file do this like you just try to come up with something that looks like this is what it would be like if i was using it
John:
Do I throw compiling software in there?
John:
Like, how do you make representative usage?
John:
And so if you look at all the different reviews that are online that tested the battery life of the iPhone Air, trying to answer the question everyone wants to know, hey, how bad is the battery life on the iPhone Air?
John:
Because it's got a smaller battery than the other phones.
John:
widely varying results.
John:
I've picked three sets of results here to try to give you some ranges, but I don't even know if these are representative.
John:
I saw numbers that were all over the place, and it's mostly down to, I think, the different tests that these people run.
John:
What do they think?
John:
What is in their test?
John:
What are they doing in the test?
John:
Are they playing a 3D game the entire time?
John:
Are they playing a 3D game half the time?
John:
Are they loading web pages?
John:
Are they playing audio?
John:
Are they playing video?
John:
What is the mixture of activities?
John:
So anyway, let's start with Mr. Who's the Boss, which is a fairly big YouTuber who seems to know he's done.
John:
On his test in the iPhone Air, the battery life for the iPhone Air was 30% less than the 17, 25% less than the 16, 32% less than the 17 Pro, and 43% less than the Pro Max.
John:
One thing all the tests have in common is that the iPhone Air has the lowest battery life of the new iPhones that were introduced.
John:
Makes sense.
John:
It's got the smallest battery.
John:
It's got the A19 Pro.
John:
These, I think, are the worst results I saw.
John:
So like, how much worse is this than the plain iPhone 17?
John:
30% less is pretty significant.
Marco:
Although, like, if you look at the phone, I think you would assume it would have like half the battery life.
Marco:
Like, even in these worst case, the worst case scenario here is actually not that bad compared to like what you would expect by looking at and picking up the phone.
John:
Yeah, but that's what people are trying to say.
John:
Like, what is how big?
John:
How big a factor is it?
John:
All right.
John:
So the next one is from the tech chap.
John:
In his test, he got only 3% less than the iPhone 17, 11% less than the Pro and 15% less than the Pro Max.
John:
And in fact, also in his testing, the iPhone 17 Pro lasted 1% longer than the 16 Pro Max.
John:
just emphasizing how big the battery, how good the battery life is on the 17 Pro.
John:
Coming close to matching the Pro Max from the previous generation is pretty good.
John:
But anyway, 3% less than the 17, that's just basically like a wash, like that the Air basically has the same battery life as the 17.
John:
And a few testers came up with numbers that were similar to that.
John:
And the 17, by the way, he didn't test against the 16, but the 17 has better battery life than the 16.
John:
So in that case, these people were saying, hey, the Air has better battery life than the plain iPhone 16.
John:
Again, Mr. Who's the Boss didn't find that, but some people did.
John:
And then Tom's Guide had the Air at 6% less than the 17 and 33% less than the 17 Pro Max.
John:
So it's kind of all over the map, but it seems like if you get an iPhone Air, it's conceivable that it could have for you, for your usage, if you have light usage, the same battery life as if you got a plane 17.
John:
On the other hand, if you're doing whatever the heck Mr. Who's the Boss was doing, you're going to have maybe 20 or 30% less.
John:
I wish we could nail it down more than this to tell you how much worse is the battery, but it seems really variable, which makes sense for current SoCs because they're so good at power management that
John:
They're going to shut off or clock down the parts that they aren't using.
John:
And certain parts can use a lot of energy all of a sudden.
John:
Right.
John:
And so it depends on if you're like tickling those parts and getting them to burn up energy versus not doing it.
John:
So your mileage may vary, but I would say, you know, it does have a smaller battery than the other phones.
John:
It does have an A19 Pro with one GPU disabled.
John:
but it seems like especially when you get it new i think it will be fine for everybody after three years maybe it will be a little bit weak but considering how battery life has gone up over the years on the iphone compared to like i don't know like an iphone 12 or something i think the air will be fine you know the difficult thing for the air is that its sibling phones are so good right the the pro and pro max have
John:
ridiculously good battery life.
John:
17, you know, whatever, it's fine.
John:
But anyway, that's the choice you have.
John:
Do you want the skinny iPhone Air?
John:
Don't worry about it bending.
John:
If you can handle the battery in the single camera, this could be the phone for you.
John:
Tell me about the speaker then, please.
John:
Steve Troughton Smith chiming in to say that the iPhone Air speaker is so much louder than his 12 Pro Max speaker that he had to double check his EU volume limit settings.
John:
It must be double the volume of his 12 Pro Max at its loudest, he said.
John:
Now, comparing it to a 12, again, that's not, you know,
John:
Apple, that's a pretty old phone, but apparently the Air, even though it's just got that one speaker, it's still pretty loud.
Casey:
You know, in one of the Max Tech videos that we're going to bring up, Max Tech, or what's the guy's name?
Casey:
I always forget his actual name.
John:
Is it not Max?
Casey:
No, it isn't.
John:
No, there's Vadim and the other guy.
Casey:
Yeah, Vadim.
Casey:
I think Vadim.
Casey:
Anyways, he was saying that he really, really finds it important, the quality of the speakers in the iPhone, which to me, that is like very low on the list of things that I consider.
Casey:
But I guess to Vadim, it was very important.
Casey:
He was saying that the iPhone Air speaker, speaker, not speakers, is freaking terrible and like tinny as anything, which is exactly what you would expect for the record.
Marco:
I have some thoughts on that that will come up later.
Casey:
Oh, all right.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
So anyway, speaking of Max Tech, Max Tech did some heat related testing and it sure seems like the what you call the not thermocouple, the the vapor chamber, whatever it's called.
Casey:
That seems to be doing some stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So he's got like a heat sensing camera that shows hotter areas as white and cooler areas as blue or black with like shades of red and orange in between.
John:
And one of the tests you can see that turned over an air and a pro to the backside of the phone.
John:
And boy, you can see where the SoC is in the air, because it's glowing white.
John:
When you look at the Pro, which has the same SoC that's even hotter, actually, because it's got all the GPU cores enabled, instead of there being a bright glowing white spot surrounded by orange and red, the whole back of the phone is like yellow.
John:
that's the vapor chamber at work that's the aluminum at work it's taking that heat from the soc and it's spreading it over a much much bigger area like in this picture like the bottom of the iphone air is still like a cool like reddish purple color but the uh the 17 pro is yellow like all the way across check out the video to see the difference uh if you want a visual representation of what the vapor chamber
John:
And the aluminum body will do for you.
Casey:
Indeed, it is very impressive.
Casey:
And then we have a bunch of teardowns, starting with iFixit.
Casey:
It turns out that our assertion from last episode, which we were parroting, I think, other people, but here again, I mean, we said it.
Casey:
Our assertion was that the entire logic board is in the camera bump.
Casey:
And it turns out that's actually untrue.
Casey:
It appears that the A19 Pro is in the camera bump or under the camera bump, but everything else is actually hanging out below.
John:
Yep, it's like a T-shaped logic board.
John:
So the A19 Pro is in the camera bump, but the whole rest of the logic board is below it.
John:
And speaking of the iPhone Air, iFixit also tore down the iPhone Air MagSafe battery pack.
John:
And inside that battery pack,
John:
is the exact same battery as in the iphone air like literally the exact like you can swap it into an iphone air that's a nice touch you open it up you're like like what they did they swapped it in there's like why is the battery shaped like this because it's it's not like rectangular it's shaped to fit into the iphone air with all the little you know uh bends and curves on it and stuff like that it's literally the exact same battery so if you get that battery pack no you're not doubling your battery life because you're losing like 35 percent of it to heat loss because it's uh you know the inductive coil or whatever but it is literally the exact same battery which is
John:
Interesting.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Let's see, what else do they have?
Casey:
The weight, the mass distribution, they have a pie chart of what is taking up all the weight in the iPhone Air.
Casey:
I love those.
Casey:
This is such a dorky thing, and I am so here for it.
Casey:
The battery, of course, is 27.5%, the enclosure, 19-ish percent, back glass, another 19 or so, display, 18%, and then basically everything else.
John:
I'm shocked by the huge pie wedge taken up by the back glass.
John:
I'm not the enclosure and the back glass are basically the same.
John:
Like the entire enclosure, the entire, like the, you know, the, the titanium frame and everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The titanium frame weighs as much as the back glass.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Glass is heavy.
John:
Yep.
John:
And the, the enclosure and the back glass combined are more than the battery, but not by too much.
John:
And the display, you know, that makes sense.
John:
That's a lot, but yeah, check out that distribution.
Yeah.
John:
spending a lot of weight on that back glass and and that's a thing that can break too and it doesn't conduct heat well like i do wonder uh how much well i don't know maybe the back glass contributes to the non-bendability of it because it has like high tensile strength or whatever like when you're bending it you're trying to essentially stretch out the glass i don't know i don't know if the glasses um if they couldn't have replaced the glass with some other material that might have been lighter but they're spending a lot of weight on it
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about the iPhone Air thickness and camera bumps, please.
John:
This Reddit post is just for Marco.
John:
It shows the outline of some recent phones showing how the camera bump has gotten bigger while the phones have gotten thinner, kind of.
John:
I thought the most interesting thing was to see the iPhone 6, which you all remember is that bendy but also very, very thin phone.
John:
The iPhone 6 was significantly thicker than the iPhone Air.
John:
Not counting the camera bump, obviously, but if you look at the iPhone 6, the iPhone 6's thickness, excluding its tiny camera bump, the iPhone 6's thickness extends into the iPhone Air's camera bump.
John:
So like maybe a quarter of the iPhone Air's camera bump, you can spend that quarter and still be the same thickness as the iPhone 6.
John:
And obviously the 17 Pro's camera bump is huge, but I just thought this was a fun graphic that somebody did with line art that I'm assuming is accurate.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes that shows the iPhone 5, 6, Air, and 17 Pro all in silhouette.
Casey:
Ian asks, what do you think is more likely to happen first with super thin phones?
Casey:
No port or port in the camera plateau?
Casey:
That would be so gross, but I do, I'm picking up what Ian is putting down.
Casey:
I think they would go no port, but I don't feel super strongly about that.
John:
The problem with the port in the camera plateau is, you know, the charging port going from the top instead of the bottom.
John:
We assume that the camera plateau will always be at the top.
John:
It would be weird at the bottom.
John:
But I think it would really invalidate a lot of sort of dock type things.
John:
But maybe Apple doesn't care about that.
John:
It could work.
John:
It could work if they've got a bump and they've got a place to put it.
John:
There's always the possibility of just making a charging bump.
John:
Camera bump on the top, charging bump on the bottom.
John:
We'll see.
John:
I think...
John:
But just having the thickness of the phone be the thickness of a USB-C port is probably going to be fine.
John:
I mean, if you look at the thinnest Android foldable phones, essentially each half is the thickness of a USB-C port, or one half will be just big enough to have a USB-C with a piece of metal above and below it, and that's it.
John:
That's, and if you do that and you have two halves that are that size, you get a phone that is reasonable thickness for today.
John:
If that reasonable thickness for today becomes unreasonable in 10 years, then you can't see the no ports or it's a charging bump.
John:
I'm not sure they would put it in the camera bump, but we'll see.
Marco:
I think to be so thin that you couldn't fit a USB-C port, I think looking at the Air, you'd probably have at least another half millimeter you could shave off the thickness and still fit the port just fine.
Marco:
If you hold an iPhone Air, which I'll get to later, if you hold an iPhone Air, you almost feel like
Marco:
It's probably not necessary to get anything other than this really or at least to get much thinner than this because you start to run into like actual ergonomic challenges holding a phone like that or using a phone like that.
Marco:
It's actually not that desirable to get thinner.
John:
That's why I was talking about folding phones, because what if that's just half the thickness, right?
John:
When you unfold it, you know, I guess you could do a thing.
John:
This would be fun.
John:
Some Android phone maker will probably try it, where you can't plug a USB-C plug into it when it's unfolded.
John:
Only when you fold it together does the USB-C port come together.
John:
That would be difficult because of the way
John:
USB-C.
John:
It has like a tongue inside the port, so you couldn't really do this, but someone could try it.
John:
But like I said, I forget what the name of this phone is, but I saw one very thin phone.
John:
It really was, you can't make this any thinner and have USB-C in it because it was as thin as you can make it and still pick a USB-C port.
John:
And two of those together
John:
is still reasonable thing is but i get what you're saying like this is what i said when we were talking about the on my blog post about the thin iMac there is kind of like an uncomfortable valley between barely thick enough to hold the usbc port which as you said may be weird in terms of this feels too thin then there's sort of like uh this no good area as you get thinner but then you cross a threshold and you get to the sort of credit card thickness which is not particularly ergonomic to hold perhaps
John:
But it starts to become like unbreakable because if you drop a credit card, it flutters to the ground and lands softly and is not going to break when it hits the ground.
John:
And that would be an advantage for the phone.
John:
On the other hand, who wants to hold something as skinny as a credit card in your hand?
John:
It would be like, you know, even if you're round over the edges, it would be weird.
John:
Anyway, well, we've got a long way to go before we get there.
Marco:
The speaker would really suck.
John:
Yeah, we've got a long way to go before we get there.
John:
I'd love for someone to get a credit card thick phone and put a pop socket on the back.
John:
That would be great.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's also – because it's so sleek against your body, I think personally it's flattering even though I'm not like the skinniest guy in the world.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's talk iPhone 17 Pro and let's start with teardowns.
Casey:
REWA's technology's teardown, REWA technology.
Casey:
They commented many times about how there's a lot of screws in this phone and that they were saying this in a complimentary way because that means there's a lot less adhesive.
John:
yeah that's part of the advantage of uh making the thing out of a block of aluminum machining it if you look at uh in the video they show the sort of the the chassis of the 17 pro versus the chassis of the 16 pro and obviously the 17 pro because of the giant camera plateau that's all aluminum and there are tons of places to put screws that are machined into the aluminum on the 16 pro there's nothing there because the 16 pro basically has like a the wrap around kind of the shell around the outside but the front and back are separate pieces that come off
John:
So they took advantage on the Pro of the fact that, hey, that entire camera bump, that's solid aluminum.
John:
We can put screw, whatever they call it, the little screw holes all over that thing.
John:
And so so many more components are screwed in on the 17 Pro than they were on the 16 simply because it's easy to find places to screw them in.
Marco:
Yeah, it's much easier to service and that's much better for longevity.
John:
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there, though.
John:
Check out this video if you want to see what's inside these phones.
John:
There's so many things.
John:
There's so many tiny little things, so many delicate, tiny things.
John:
Be very careful.
John:
Uh, and also their teardown was showing like, so the, the logic board and that's again, it's the logic board is horizontal, just like it does in the air.
John:
It's near the top.
John:
Uh, but it has almost nothing in the bump area.
John:
There's so much camera crap and other things up there that, you know, obviously the front facing camera, I think that one of the speaker or some other component is up there.
John:
Uh, but the logic board in the 17 pro is almost entirely below the bump with only a little tiny part of it sticking up into the bump area.
Casey:
Uh, tell me about accessibility from the front versus the back, please.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The, the, the REWA tech people basically just said, just treat this phone as only being accessible from the back or from the front.
John:
You can get in through the back.
John:
Like there's that big, there's a big cutout in the aluminum.
John:
There's a big, you know, there you could, there's a way in, but there's like a black sheet of something or other on there.
John:
And I'm assuming you'd have to like peel that out and unglue it.
John:
And they, they basically consider this a phone that is only accessible from the front, which is a disadvantage of this unibody design.
John:
But,
John:
you know, there's trade-offs.
John:
And then they also took a look at the vapor chamber as well.
John:
If you want to see what that looks like inside there, it's pretty cool.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to a video that explains what vapor chambers are, how they work and how they're built.
John:
And they can show one of the factories making them.
John:
And it looks exactly like the one that you see in the iPhone.
John:
And in tons of other Android phones before this, it's a pretty cool video if you're curious about how they work.
John:
But basically, there's just water in there and it evaporates from the heat and then condenses and gets wicked back up to begin the journey again.
John:
It's like a little miniature water cycle inside your phone.
Marco:
It's kind of awesome.
Marco:
Like I really enjoy I watched that video.
Marco:
I really enjoyed it.
John:
Yeah, they're so delicate.
John:
I love watching people tear them down and they're just like, because you can destroy them by essentially just squishing them or piercing them in any way.
John:
Like they're very, as you can, they're very thin.
John:
That's the whole magic.
John:
They're very, very thin and very, very delicate.
John:
And they have to pull a vacuum inside them.
John:
So as soon as it's pierced in any way, it becomes entirely useless.
John:
And it's just amazing.
John:
They can make something that precisely in that small that can maintain a vacuum.
John:
It's one of the things I talk about in the video.
John:
How do you, how do you pull a vacuum?
John:
How do you pull the air out of something that thin with not having it collapse on itself without having it just, well, it's like, you know, if you put a bag on your mouth and breathe in, the bag just collapses on itself and the two walls of the bag just touch each other.
John:
How do you not do that with something that's this thin?
John:
And the answer is tons and tons of tiny little divots that act as little like standoffs, like the little plastic table in your pizza box to keep the box from touching the pizza.
Yeah.
John:
It's pretty cool stuff.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Going to Max Text Teardown.
Casey:
They talk about the speakers, as we previously mentioned.
Casey:
And they said, well, they talked about the speakers in the air, but we're now talking about the Pro.
Casey:
And they said the speakers on the 17 Pro Max are a lot louder than the 16 Pro Max.
John:
It's interesting that they have a loudness delta year over year in the Max phones.
John:
I think they're making a concerted effort to make them louder.
John:
How good they sound, who knows?
John:
But making them louder, just got to serve all those people who are on speakerphone walking down the street.
Casey:
Yeah, not good.
Casey:
And then as we already talked about, the heat is indeed more evenly spread.
John:
Yeah, and this is compared to a 16 Pro.
John:
So in the 16 Pro, guess where the SoC is?
John:
Well, I can see it.
John:
There's the big white spot right there.
John:
And then the 17 Pro, it's much harder to pinpoint.
John:
It's more of an even distribution of heat.
Casey:
All right, let's talk scratches.
Casey:
There's been already a bit of a scratch gate, if you will.
Casey:
There's talk that the iPhone 17 Pro, people that have gone to the store have noticed a lot of scratches, particularly on the blue Pro and the black Air.
Casey:
Reading from Bloomberg, the deep blue variants of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max exhibited scuffs after just a few hours of being on display.
Casey:
Bloomberg News found from visits to Apple stores in New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London.
Casey:
The black air also showed itself to be prone to scratching, the reporters observed.
Casey:
In addition, Apple's magnetic MagSafe charger can leave a visible circular mark on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro models Bloomberg found.
John:
Yeah, MacRumors had a bunch more pictures of them.
John:
We had a couple of people write in to say that they saw the same thing and send in pictures of the phones that they saw in the store.
John:
But here's JerryRigEverything coming in to say, look, he is the expert damager of phones.
John:
And in particular, he does scratch them up and everything.
John:
And what he says, and I'm inclined to believe him, is that
John:
The anodized surface on the aluminum on these phones is tough enough that if you try to scratch it, which he did with his various scratch hardness tools or whatever, you can leave a mark, but that mark just brushes off.
John:
Like that white dust that all these marks essentially will just brush.
John:
He demonstrates it in the video.
John:
He scratches it up and he's like, well, this looks like it's damaged.
John:
But then he just takes his finger and goes, rub, rub, rub, and it just wipes off.
John:
Like he called it dust or something.
John:
I don't know if it's dust from the scratching implant or whatever, but supposedly it just rubs off.
John:
everywhere except the edge of the camera bump.
John:
Apple made a very sharp edge of the camera bump.
John:
Anybody who has ever painted something like painted your house knows that if you have a very sharp corner on where two walls meet and you try to paint it, getting paint to stay there is very difficult.
John:
Paint wants to peel off the very sharp corner, which is why they have various things that will let you round over that corner.
John:
In the world of anodizing aluminum, there are international standards for how rounded over a surface has to be to keep an anodized finish on it of a given thickness.
John:
And Apple has not paid attention to those.
John:
They made the corners of the camera bump very sharp.
John:
And so the anodization on those corners will come off the phone, will flake off.
John:
If you take that thing that you were scratching on the surface of the thing, the left mark so you could just brush it off and it was fine, take that same exact thing, nick it on the edge of the camera bump, and that will take a piece of that anodization away.
John:
off the phone and it will never come back you can look at it under a microscope and you can see ah this used to be dark blue but now i can see there's a little divot and there's shiny aluminum so it will get nicked up around the camera rump if you care about that the only thing i haven't seen conclusive uh testing on is the ceramic shield don't call it glass back panel on the pro which also gets scratched up i'm not sure if that also buffs out but
John:
Uh, I went to an Apple store and I saw these phones and they looked like the ones in these pictures, but I saw that before I saw the Jerry everything video.
John:
So I didn't try to buff them out.
John:
The other thing is the mag safe, like ring, it looks like a coffee ring kind of, I'm assuming that will also rub out.
John:
If you care about it, you see this in a lot of cases, like if, uh,
John:
the phone itself, but also any case you put on your phone.
John:
Very often, if you use MagSafe a lot, you will see sort of the imprint indentation or a mark from the MagSafe puck on the back of your phone.
John:
That just seems unavoidable if you keep pressing a circular thing to the back of your phone, but
John:
These are this is on the actual aluminum back of or the actual glass back, for example, of the iPhone Air to see that thing there.
John:
I'm assuming that will rub out, but I don't know.
John:
But anyway, these phones are not impervious to marks, especially the dark ones, because if you get a mark on the dark one, if you get all the way down to the aluminum, the aluminum is shiny silver and the dark blue finish contrasts highly with that.
John:
So if you want to show the least of scratches, get the silver iPhone Pro, I guess, and the white iPhone Air.
Marco:
I did see Apple gave a statement to some news outlet, I forget which one, earlier today saying that this was a result of material transfer from the chargers they use in the store and that they would just clean right off.
Marco:
So basically what Apple was saying is that like the quote scratches you're seeing are not scratches in the iPhones.
Marco:
They are rubbed off scuffs of metal or whatever from the chargers.
Marco:
That's their official position on it.
John:
Yeah, and that's what Jerry Rigg was saying.
John:
He said, like, anodized finishes on aluminum are so hard, there's no way that, like, when he was rubbing his tools on it, you'd see these terrible scratches, like, oh, you've destroyed it.
John:
But then he literally rubs it off with his finger and said, no, what you're seeing is what came off the tool, not what came off the phone.
Marco:
Yeah, like, if you're scratching with your fingernail, like, you're seeing your fingernail, basically.
John:
Yeah, but here's the thing, though.
John:
All that said, the bottom line is, if you scratch things against the back of this phone, it will leave marks that you will see with your eyes.
John:
So if your complaint is, I don't want ugly marks on my phone,
John:
and you use this phone without a case, it may have ugly marks on it.
John:
The fact that those marks will rub out is only a comfort to you if you routinely clean the back of your phone to get rid of the marks.
John:
And like I said, around the edges of the camera bump, that will actually take off the anodization because the corner is too sharp.
John:
They didn't round it over enough.
Marco:
And also, if you are concerned about how noticeable scratches will be on your aluminum devices, the best thing you can do is get silver ones.
Marco:
Because if you scratch silver aluminum and you expose silver underneath it, it's a lot less noticeable than if you have a dark, bold color and you scratch that and you see the silver peeking out.
Marco:
So if that's a concern for you, I suggest maybe just getting the silver one to begin with.
John:
And same thing with the white air for like if the MagSafe pucks are leaving like white dust, you're not going to see it on the white air as much.
Casey:
I can tell you that I got a blue iPhone 17 Pro.
Casey:
And sure enough, I have a little baby mark on the ridge of the camera plateau, exactly as Jerry Rigg described in that, you know, there's a little teeny tiny mark of silver.
Casey:
The rest of it looks pristine, looks brand new.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, I did it.
Casey:
I'm not arguing that I didn't do it, but I
Casey:
um i don't know how it happened but yeah it's right on the corner off the corner it's fine it's just right on the corner there to be honest and maybe i'm just convincing myself to make myself feel better i actually do feel like it's kind of a lovely little patina there um if it was like you know a scratch clear across the entire aluminum back or like on the mesa or plateau rather i think i would be less enthusiastic about it but i kind of like that it's got a little patina there if you will
Casey:
I don't have that same admiration for screen-related scratches, but this one doesn't really bother me, but it absolutely is a thing, and it's right on the corner, just like Jerry Rigg everything said.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Talk to me about iPhone sales.
Casey:
Apparently, the information, as summarized by MacRumors, said that Apple's increasing production of the standard iPhone 17 due to unexpected demand for the device.
Casey:
following a strong pre-order weekend apple told two suppliers to increase the daily iphone 17 output by at least 30 percent apple allocated 25 of its iphone 17 production to the standard model 10 to the air and 65 to the pro and pro max as those are typically apple's best-selling devices
John:
Yeah, this is all from the information, which is paywalled, but I'm assuming they have good sources here.
John:
And I was just really interested to see what Apple allocates on like launch weekend.
John:
Obviously, launch weekend for the phones is not representative of their lifetime sales.
John:
It's all the early adopters, all the tech enthusiasts, all the people who even know the new iPhones are coming out.
John:
But I was surprised to see such a huge bias towards the Pro.
John:
And then the percentages are, again...
John:
25% for the plane 17, 65 for the pro, and only 10 for the air.
John:
So Apple's confidence in the air more or less matches Marco's confidence in the air, which is, it'll be okay.
John:
Some people will want it, but it is by far less than half of the next nearest one.
John:
It's only 10% of the ones they're allocating.
John:
And the 17 selling well doesn't surprise me because as we said in the earlier shows and the event show that we did,
John:
17 is a great phone like it just it has caught up to the pro in so many ways that people care but it's just a really good all-around even though it doesn't have 12 gigs of ram but other than that right it's a really good all and usb 2 it's a really good all-around phone so it doesn't surprise me that they had to up their percentage but again 25 for 17 10 for the air and 65 for the pro and pro max because people who want iphones on iphone day want the best most expensive ones and that's the pro and pro max
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, Faisal writes, a while back, we heard about Apple being able to update new iPhones in their boxes at Apple stores and then didn't hear anything again.
Casey:
Is it actually live?
Casey:
Is it working?
Casey:
The day one patch for the new iPhones reminded me of this and how Apple supposedly was able to update phones while they're in storage.
Marco:
My guess is the volume was just absurd to try to do that.
Marco:
When you go to an Apple store and you see how many iPhones they're selling on launch day, the idea that they would be sitting back there with the big pizza box updaters that update the phones in the boxes, I just don't think they could keep up the volume on a launch day.
Marco:
I'm sure months from now, that's probably going to be happening, but I think it's unrealistic for the launch.
John:
Yeah, these boxes do exist.
John:
They are real.
John:
They are being used, but it doesn't make the update go any faster.
John:
If you've ever updated your phone, you know how long it takes.
John:
So multiply that by however many phones.
John:
And the pizza box things can host, I don't know, like a dozen, two dozen phones at the same time.
John:
But they're selling so many phones during launch weekend that the Presto pizza box OS updater things are absolutely a non-factor.
John:
on launch day probably in launch week because there's just there's so many phones flying through that store there is no time to sit each one in the pizza box and get it updated but but yeah they're real we had some follow-up about it a while ago where they have it for phones i believe they also have new ones coming out for max uh but it's not not a factor on launch day
Marco:
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Casey:
So let's start with some actual topics, and let's begin by answering the question we should have answered last week.
Casey:
How do you set up a new iPhone?
Casey:
And a lot of people have asked this, and my personal experience with this was use a cable, always use a cable.
Casey:
And the reason I did that is because it was like the more modern version of doing an iTunes backup.
Casey:
And the guidance years ago was that if you do it encrypted, and that's the key, an encrypted backup to your computer, which you can still do in Finder now,
Casey:
That will save all your Wi-Fi passwords.
Casey:
It'll save basically as much as possible.
Casey:
And then you can do the restore onto the new phone once it arrives.
Casey:
And so you can back up your phone maybe the morning of delivery, if you will, and then restore the new phone from that backup.
Casey:
And that was the guidance for years.
Casey:
And then they started being able to do the whole thing without involving your computer at all.
Casey:
And for a long time, what I decided to do for the last two or three years was use a Thunderbolt cable between the two phones.
Casey:
Now, this becomes dodgy because then one phone's trying to charge the other and you need to get power into the source phone or maybe into both phones.
Casey:
And so that's a little squirrely, but you can use MagSafe and get around it.
Casey:
And that's what I did for this phone.
Casey:
But before I get derailed in my tale of whoa, what is your guys' approach and what do you recommend?
Marco:
That's what I used to do.
Marco:
I used to do the backup to the computer with the encryption thing.
Marco:
iCloud Keychain made that a lot less necessary because, again, to do the computer encrypted backup used to be the only way to transfer keychain entries.
Marco:
So that would be things like your logins and passwords.
Marco:
But once iCloud Keychain launched and became well supported by everything, that now includes your passwords that are stored in Keychain.
Marco:
Now, not all passwords.
Marco:
Apps can set basically like their storage class for if you have a password stored in an app in Keychain, you can say like this should persist between boots.
Marco:
This should be only after unlock.
Marco:
And you can say this should basically be included in backups or not.
Marco:
um and many apps don't slack i'm looking directly at you like slack is the worst any app that you have to log in every time you change your iphone that is those are that's a choice those apps make they can choose to not suck and they don't brief sidebar on slack slack yeah okay so it doesn't store your password stuff the worst thing about slack
John:
it doesn't even store all the slacks that you're in and the order they are in in the sidebar now granted i'm in a lot of slacks you don't have to store the password just at least keep my slacks make me fine make me log into every single one of them don't make me remember what they all were yeah every social network app every you know the banks like everything anyway um so all that said
Marco:
I just use iCloud now.
Marco:
And the reason why is because I have had the phone to phone, like the direct transfer thing.
Marco:
I've had that thing fail a lot, Casey.
Marco:
I've had that fail frequently.
Marco:
It just failed for us this weekend when I did Tiff's phone because we did hers that way.
Marco:
It failed.
Marco:
I always do mine with the option of like, you know, I have the phone paired to set it up.
Marco:
with the other phone.
Marco:
But then when it asks you, like, do you want to do iCloud or direct transfer?
Marco:
I pick iCloud now because it works a lot better for me in practice.
Marco:
That being said, there are some things that never transfer.
Marco:
I've never once had it properly passed the Apple Watch to the new phone, ever.
Marco:
Is it even supposed to do that?
Marco:
Yes.
John:
I've never seen that at work either.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It even says it's going to do it for you.
Marco:
And I've heard of other people, the HDMI CEC unicorns.
Marco:
Somebody out there is having this work for them.
Marco:
I've never seen it work.
Marco:
It works for me.
Casey:
Oh, there you go.
Casey:
It works for me.
Casey:
That was about the only thing that works for me.
John:
I don't have a watch.
John:
My wife does.
John:
I literally never worked for her.
Marco:
yeah exactly in the same way like i've never seen a watch transfer a cellular plan to another watch either like that also oh god that's yeah that's asking a lot yeah exactly but but it works for casey so i didn't even know it was supposed to work honestly i just always assume it won't be paired and sure enough it isn't yeah they ostensibly they added that i think like three or four years ago and and i i've it's never worked for me not even once um that being said also before we get to your tale of all i because i don't have any well mine worked fine uh you know for the most part however
Marco:
Since I forget which iPhone it was, it's been a while now, Apple started a while back trying to, I think, maybe boost their initial battery perceptions of the iPhone by this annoying behavior that whenever a new iPhone has not been set up and migrated all your stuff over to it yet, the screen turns off after effectively three seconds.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so, and there's a lot of steps in the process where you have to like, all right, hit a thing and then you see a spinner for a while while something activates against some server somewhere and the phone just keeps turning off the screen and then you, oh, wake it up again to see where, because you have to check to see, is it waiting for me for the next step?
Marco:
So you have to keep waking up the phone and this is before any stage where you can actually go in and change the sleep setting because you don't have access to settings yet.
Yeah.
John:
the process is so user hostile and tedious because you have to keep waking up the stupid phone because the screen keeps going to sleep after two seconds you basically have to babysit it and be because like there's i i only set up phones like once a year either i'm setting up my wife's or i'm setting up mine there's just no way to remember all the steps and they change from year to year anyway to answer the question can i leave now
John:
and come back and it will be done yeah because there is a step that takes like hours in the middle and you right but you can't leave you have to it's going to ask you something else later it's going to say okay now what about this okay now what about this okay now 45 minutes now what about this okay 30 minutes now what about this and you're like you can never leave you just have to constantly be checking how's it doing how's it doing how's it doing and
John:
It is way too... I understand there's a lot of steps in the process, but they really need to have some kind of messaging that says, now you can go away.
John:
And when you come back, it will either still be going or it will be done.
John:
We require nothing else of you.
John:
But I don't even know if there is that step because there are just so many phases.
John:
And my advice to answer the question, how should we set up the phone...
John:
As you can see, people have varying experiences.
John:
Some people have lots of success with one way, less success with another.
John:
I started to have less success with the iTunes backup slash finder backup way.
John:
So I switched to the device to device transfer, but wireless.
John:
And the reason I was doing it wireless was because I was transferring mostly from...
John:
phones that had usb2 speed connections to phones that don't and usb2 speeds are slower than wi-fi so i was doing the wireless device to device transfer that is still sort of my go-to default i would say to characterize them the icloud one is probably the one that has the highest success rate but i think it is also has the lowest fidelity in terms of what it will copy and
John:
The Finder, I'm not sure if the Finder copy or the device-to-device with or without the wire are tied in fidelity.
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
Assuming that you encrypt.
Casey:
Assuming you encrypt, then I think they're tied.
John:
So I would say the Finder one has lost its dominance.
John:
Using your Mac has lost its dominance as the highest fidelity in terms of we will keep the most stuff.
John:
So I would say, if you want to do it with your computer, fine.
John:
Hopefully you have a fast wired connection on your phone.
John:
But...
John:
my default and i think the default that apple pushes you towards is device to device wireless uh you don't you can keep phones plugged into power the whole time you don't have to do the thing whether you have mag safe on the back plus the cord and stuff you don't have to have a cord you don't have to know oh does this phone have a slow connection or fast connection oh i need a lightning to usbc connector device to device wireless is kind of the default but i do feel like icloud is going to have the highest success rate it's not going to be as fast it's not going to be as high fidelity uh
John:
But it will slowly trickle stuff over iCloud, assuming you have a good backup.
John:
So like there used to be a good answer.
John:
Was that easier back in the years when we could say do an encrypted iTunes backup?
John:
Just do it.
John:
That's the number one thing.
John:
Because the other ones were so low fidelity in terms of like they would leave so much of your crap behind.
John:
But that's not the case anymore.
John:
Now the fidelity of all of them is similar.
John:
So yeah, I would say do device device wireless as your first choice.
John:
And if you have bad luck with that, iCloud is second choice.
Casey:
The problem with device to device transfer of any kind, wired, not wired, whatever, the problem with that is you're losing both devices for anywhere between 15 minutes and literally three hours.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
That's why I tell everyone in my family, hey, if you're going to get a new phone, just assume you're not going to have any phones for four hours.
Marco:
But honestly, and this is why I like the iCloud option, because the iCloud option minimizes the time that both phones are out of commission.
Marco:
It very much does.
Marco:
The new phone still has a lot to download, but you can at least start using stuff.
John:
Oh, and by the way, I think we are still in the phase.
John:
This is only a relevance to maybe us and other developers, but are we still in the phase where no matter what you do, your test flight apps will not make it to the new phone?
John:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Test flight apps do not make it, period.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Which, like, Apple owns TestFlight.
John:
It's not a third-party app anymore.
John:
I don't know why they can't... I guess they don't care.
John:
Like, who cares?
John:
Yeah, they don't care.
John:
You know, there's only a few million developers.
John:
Who cares?
Marco:
They have a large to-do list that is above that.
John:
If you are a developer, take screenshots of your home screens because you'll forget where that TestFlight app was.
Casey:
Or just, you know, refer back to the old phone if at all possible.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
And do not erase...
John:
They'll say, okay, my new phone is set up.
John:
Now I can wipe my old phone.
John:
They prompt you for that.
John:
Especially if you do device-device transfer, when you're done, on the old phone, they'll say, great, you got your new phone set up.
John:
Do you want to erase this one?
John:
Pay attention.
John:
Don't get, like, prompt fatigue.
John:
You do not want to erase your old phone as soon as you set up the new one.
John:
Wait a week.
John:
Find out what you're missing.
Marco:
By the way, speaking of prompt fatigue...
Marco:
There are many steps to go through now after a migration or after a new install.
Marco:
I wrote it down because I was like, as I'm going through this, and for reasons I'll get to later, I went through it a lot.
Marco:
You have to go through location services, Apple ID, Apple Pay.
Marco:
Okay, those seem reasonable.
Okay.
John:
But then before you move on at Apple Pay, Apple Pay is not one step.
John:
Let's say you have five credit cards in Apple Pay.
John:
You need to enter the little three digit code for five credit cards.
John:
Then you need to wait for your phone to connect to whatever stupid server that is run by whatever card you're trying to use and hope that thing responds and decide, oh, I'm just going to do set up later.
John:
Am I going to remember to do this one card set up?
John:
Just getting through the Apple Pay part can be incredibly.
John:
And you've got to have all your cards on you unless you've memorized all your three digit codes.
John:
Just that one step frustrates me to no end, because I do want all the cards, and sometimes the servers don't respond, but then you skip it, but then you forget that you skipped it until you're trying to pay with it in a store, and you realize, oh, I never finished the setup.
John:
Anyway, go on.
Marco:
Yeah, but even that, I feel like those things, I can see why those are required.
Marco:
Okay, but then...
Marco:
Apple intelligence.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Why do I need to turn this on?
Marco:
It says, like, it's ready, and the only option is next or whatever.
Marco:
You can't not turn it on, so it's just advertising to you.
Marco:
Then it says, you want to summarize notifications?
Marco:
Do you want priority notifications?
Marco:
These are three different screens.
Marco:
Then the camera control thing, which, interestingly enough, the default state is no swipey actions, which is pretty clear that that's where they're going.
Marco:
Okay, good.
Marco:
Visual intelligence.
Marco:
After that, explaining to you how to use visual intelligence.
Marco:
Again, this is just promos.
Marco:
The action button.
Marco:
Four screens of Siri.
Marco:
Emergency SOS.
Marco:
Welcome.
Marco:
Then a liquid glass show off and a liquid glass tour.
Marco:
Which is itself like four screens.
John:
The four screens of Siri, I believe, do not ask you to do anything, right?
John:
No.
John:
They're just telling you about Siri.
John:
They're not saying, like, they're just, sometimes they make you say things like, hey, Siri, what's the weather?
John:
These are tutorial, this is like the tutorial level in a video game.
Marco:
where it's just like we want to teach you how to use your phone you're like come on come on just get me to the game yeah come on yeah like this like this this is showing the kind of thing that we used to like make fun of companies like microsoft for back in the day was like when you could kind of see like the org chart coming out of the products in user hostile ways it's like oh every one of these departments wants their own promo screen in the setup and the problem is what we're seeing is like it feels like every division has their own pet projects that are spamming the user here
Marco:
without considering the substantially ever-growing burden of this entire experience for a brand-new iPhone setup and for the customer.
Marco:
The customer going through this, it just feels like we're just going through the motions, and we're like, yeah, come on.
Marco:
Why is this so many screens?
Marco:
And it's really...
Marco:
It has reached a point where it is beyond ridiculous now.
Marco:
It's just a slog.
Marco:
And that's the last thing you want when you're a customer setting up your new phone.
Marco:
This is supposed to be a happy, awesome time.
Marco:
You're excited.
Marco:
The last thing you want is to feel like it's a slog.
Marco:
And there's enough steps involving setting up a new phone that are kind of just technically or realistically required.
Marco:
Things like logins and activations.
Marco:
I understand that part.
Marco:
All this other crap on top of it is not actually necessary.
Marco:
This is just like promos and BS from Apple.
Marco:
They shouldn't be adding to the burden.
Marco:
They should be trying to get you into the experience of using the phone faster, as fast as they possibly can, because that's what you're there for.
Marco:
And instead, they're just loading on more and more stuff, thinking each one of these pebbles is not going to break our backs, but it's too much.
John:
I think they did have a year where they said, we simplified the setup process.
John:
And then they added the first one of those things, which I think might have been the action button or maybe it was Siri.
John:
And then they had the second one.
John:
Then they had the third one.
John:
Like when they streamlined the process, we're like, wow, setup is so good now.
John:
And then like the next year, it's like, all right, well, you have some new feature.
John:
It's fine to put that one new feature to have some flashy screen because it's just one new feature on top of the thing.
John:
But like you said, fast forward a few years and now everybody has one of those things.
John:
I think the thing I would suggest that maybe you get past the MBAs at Apple is at the very least,
John:
When doing a phone-to-phone transfer or an iCloud backup restore or something...
John:
Figure out what OS the old phone was running.
John:
I feel like this information is available during any kind of phone transfer or even an iCloud backup.
John:
And do not show me anything that's already on my old phone.
John:
If my old phone had Apple intelligence, never show me those screens.
John:
I know what it is.
John:
I set up the old phone somehow.
John:
I was presented with this.
John:
Like, in other words, don't show me things I already know.
John:
Camera control?
John:
Does my old phone have a camera control?
John:
Don't show the camera control stuff.
John:
Assume I know what it is.
John:
Assume that I've used the old phone for some period of time.
John:
You don't need to show me anything that was on the old phone.
John:
And that would save so much time because so many people are setting up a new phone to replace an old iPhone.
John:
Now, if you're replacing an iPhone 10 or something with an iPhone 17, by all means, show me visual intelligence and show me because you don't know about these features.
John:
You never had them on your phone.
John:
Like tutorial levels serve a purpose.
John:
You're not going to get them to stop them.
John:
But I would say A, streamline them and B, do not show things that were already on the old phone because that just doesn't make any sense.
Marco:
Yeah, they need another one of those big, you know, the big flushes like they did.
Marco:
Like, you know, you got to flush those toilet again.
Marco:
It's full.
John:
Wow.
John:
Or like even better would be only to show the essential steps during setup and then on essentially like first launch into Springboard through the tutorial on our face.
Marco:
No, they already do enough.
Marco:
They already spam us enough with enough dialogues and red dots.
John:
Separate the tutorial stuff from the stuff that's essential.
John:
And when the tutorial stuff comes out, have a thing that says skip all and never show again.
John:
one button gets rid of all because you know what you're dismissing is not something you need to set up because you did the necessary setup things before you got to springboard but once you get to springboard throw the tutorial in our face and have us say nope don't want to see any of this crap even the new stuff that i don't know about and just have it never appear again that would that would be my second choice first one just don't show me stuff those in the old phone second one separate essential from non-essential and make the non-essential dismissible en masse with a single button press
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So before I tell my tale of woe, I have one additional question about this.
Casey:
So, Marco, to the best that you can recall, and I know this is very unscientific, when you did the iCloud transfer, so it took roughly how long from the start of that to you being able to at least use and interact with your new phone?
Marco:
Which new phone?
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
Take your pick.
Casey:
I don't care.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Well, I will say that I bought two new phones.
Marco:
I bought the 17 Pro and I traded in three old test phones for one new iPhone Air to be an iPhone Air test phone.
Marco:
So I have an iPhone Air and an iPhone 17 Pro.
Marco:
And I first transferred everything to the iPhone Air because I wanted to actually transfer to it, make it my phone, move into it and live with it for a little while, which is exactly what I did.
Marco:
I will say I later transferred everything to the 17 Pro, and I spent some time with that as well, so I could talk about both of them.
Marco:
The process to go to the iPhone Air took substantially longer.
Marco:
In both cases, I did the same iCloud transfer.
Marco:
The iPhone Air was substantially longer in large part because that day one software update on the iPhone Air took almost 20 minutes.
Marco:
Gracious.
Marco:
On the iPhone Pro, when I did it later, that one took about two or three minutes.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Thermal throttling.
John:
I mean, maybe, but was the Air on launch day and the Pro not on launch day?
Marco:
They were both on launch.
Marco:
Well, I didn't set up the Pro launch day.
Marco:
However, the part of the process that took so long was, quote, preparing update.
Marco:
Not getting the update, not downloading the update.
Marco:
It's preparing update.
Marco:
Now, my understanding, I think the preparing update step of an Apple software update, I think it's basically like decompressing it or whatever.
Marco:
I think it's like a local operation on the phone, I think.
Marco:
I could be wrong, but the iPhone Air took a very long time on preparing update that the iPhone Pro did not.
Marco:
And it was very warm during that time.
John:
My wife's 17 Pro took forever on preparing update on lunch day.
Marco:
So I don't know.
John:
I don't know what it's doing.
Marco:
I could be wrong.
Marco:
I will say it was very warm and it took almost 20 minutes to do the update.
Marco:
And the Pro done like a day later did it in like three minutes.
Marco:
It flew right through it.
Casey:
Yeah, I did errands earlier today, and it did not take three minutes.
Casey:
It took a fair bit of time.
Casey:
All right, so I think we got distracted.
Casey:
So ballpark, in summary, it was about how long from start transfer to I can interact with either the Pro or the Air?
Marco:
The Air was over an hour.
Marco:
The Pro was about an hour, I think.
Casey:
And then subsequent to that hour being up, so you've waited an hour-ish, give or take, roughly the same for both, and you're doing this iCloud restore, and then the phone says, okay, I'm still doing a bunch of junk in the background, but you can at least use me now.
Casey:
was everything there were some things there were wi-fi passwords there were photos there were logins there or in were apps there or was it basically useless even though officially strictly speaking you could interact with it most things were and now both of them i ran overnights um but but not like completely like you know i started using them a little bit and like before i went to bed just to check to make sure everything was there or everything had worked um
Marco:
And it was fine.
Marco:
Both transfers went very well overall, with a pretty big exception that when I did the second one from Air to Pro, I lost all my Safari tabs.
Marco:
And I'm a little annoyed about that.
Marco:
But otherwise, everything else went fine.
Marco:
You know, passwords.
Marco:
Passwords were, you know, things like Wi-Fi passwords.
Marco:
Yeah, of course I had those.
Marco:
I believe that's iCloud Keychain.
Marco:
Everything that seems to be in iCloud Keychain, that all seemed to be just totally fine.
Marco:
The only things I lost with each transfer are things, as mentioned earlier, that I lose with every transfer, like Slack or Ivory logins.
John:
Give me my timings on my thing.
John:
Like I said, I always tell people four hours, even though that's a conservative estimate.
John:
And part of the reason is I've just been on a streak, as you know, from listening to past users of the show.
John:
I got a new phone, whether it's mine or my wife's or whoever's, and set it up.
John:
It takes a couple of hours to do the transfer.
John:
uh but the phone number never transfers that's never gonna work and so you always have to call verizon on iphone day and this year we had to do it again and so factor in i didn't have that problem either i know you never do and i always do and guess what we did again because it said you want to transfer the number to this new phone and i said yeah totally transferred it's like sorry you need to contact global one i'm like okay global one what what
Marco:
See, that step also, that step works for me with AT&T every time, no problem.
John:
Yeah, so in this case, our suspect is we're Verizon customers.
John:
We are not Global One customers, but my wife has traveled to overseas and has gotten various overseas eSIM slash, I don't know if you get physical SIM, probably just, yeah, just eSIMs.
John:
And apparently, if you have ever used one of those things, the transfer process flips out and says, oh, talk to Global One.
John:
It's like, I don't care about the Global One thing.
John:
Maybe we had deleted the overseas eSIMs before we had done the transfer, we would have said.
John:
But we didn't think of it.
John:
It's always something.
John:
This year, that's what it was.
John:
We had to call Verizon.
John:
And I forgot.
John:
If you listen to the older episodes, you're like, didn't you learn last time that there's a web page of Verizon where you can do this transfer yourself?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think I did learn that and then I forgot it.
John:
And then I remembered it again after we'd already been on the phone with Verizon.
John:
So factor that into the setup time.
John:
That's why I say four hours.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So the reason I ask is because I feel like in my personal experience in years past, and I haven't done this for at least a couple of years.
Casey:
And iCloud backup doesn't bring that much back in.
Casey:
And I think that that information that I just stated as fact, I think that's outdated.
Casey:
I don't think that's true anymore.
Casey:
Like Marco said, you know, Wi-Fi passwords are now coming in.
Casey:
A lot of this stuff is coming in.
Casey:
And even if photos don't come in, you know, like as in they're not, the originals aren't on the device.
Casey:
If you use iCloud Photo Library as I do, I would almost argue that's a benefit, you know, in that it will now recache only the stuff you've used recently.
Casey:
Nevertheless, um...
Casey:
I'm in Memphis, Tennessee.
Casey:
I've just spent 12 hours doing the podcast-a-thon.
Casey:
I am on something like five or six hours sleep.
Casey:
It's now Saturday.
Casey:
We wake up.
Casey:
We go to the Memphis Tigers football game where it was approximately 17 billion degrees.
Casey:
We lasted through the first half and then bailed, went and got some incredible barbecue at Central Barbecue, which I loved.
Casey:
I'd been a couple times before.
Casey:
And we had all colluded in a happy way to do a 6.30 p.m.
Casey:
pickup at the Saddle Creek store in Germantown, Tennessee.
Casey:
We go at about 6.30, give or take a little bit.
Casey:
And I got my new AirPods Pro.
Casey:
I got Aaron's orange iPhone 17 Pro.
Casey:
I got my blue iPhone 17 Pro.
Casey:
Very quickly, to go on a tangent and interrupt myself, this blue is way more purple than blue in my eyes.
Casey:
I don't dislike it, but...
Casey:
In most light, I view this as more purple than blue, which is a little bit disappointing.
Casey:
I really wanted like a true to form blue.
Casey:
That being said, Erin freaking loves her orange phone in a way that she has not ever really been enthusiastic about any of the phone colors she's had before, even pink, which is probably her favorite color.
Casey:
Um, but she really, really likes the orange phone.
Casey:
And she said to me, and I'm quoting the orange is really cool.
Casey:
I think I want a clear case, which is again, not something she's ever been into.
Casey:
Um, I've only held her phone briefly.
Casey:
Uh, but the orange is very, very, very good.
Casey:
And I'm really glad that Apple did an honestly bold color.
Casey:
So anyway, so it's six, six 30 ish, maybe seven o'clock by the time we are on our way back to the hotel.
Casey:
And I am, and I have, I have a decision to make.
Casey:
It is 7 o'clock p.m.
Casey:
I have a 3.45 a.m.
Casey:
wake up for a 4.30 departure for a 6.30 flight to get back home.
Casey:
I am a strong believer in online electronic boarding passes.
Casey:
I've already received one on my old phone.
Casey:
I really don't want to travel with the old phone.
Casey:
I want to travel with the new hotness.
Casey:
And I had had, because why not, man?
John:
I want to have the new thing.
John:
Did you hear me in your ear saying, do you have four hours to spend on it right now or do you not have four hours?
Casey:
I didn't, but I thought to myself, it's fine.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
Because here's the thing.
Casey:
I brought with me in the car.
Casey:
On the way back from the Apple store, I immediately opened the phone and I brought with me a USB-C, I think it's a Belkin Mophie, I forget what it is, but one of those 3D rectangle battery packs that John Voorhees loves.
Casey:
I forget the model if you actually care, ask me about it.
Casey:
But anyways...
Casey:
Aren't all battery packs 3D rectangles?
Casey:
You know what I'm saying?
Casey:
They're like not cylinders, but like a round rack cylinder, if you will.
Casey:
I'm doing a terrible job describing it.
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking of.
Casey:
I'm doing a poor job describing it.
Marco:
Oh, like a candy bar form factor kind of?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Not a candy bar.
Casey:
That's my whole point.
Casey:
It's more of like a square that's been extruded upwards.
Casey:
Anyways.
Marco:
Like an airport extreme?
Casey:
Yes, actually, yeah.
Casey:
So I have that.
Casey:
I have my, I believe it's Mophie, three-in-one travel charger, which is MagSafe and charges really fast.
Casey:
The second edition charges quite quickly.
Casey:
And I have a Apple...
Casey:
Thunderbolt.
Casey:
I think it's Thunderbolt three or four.
Casey:
I don't recall now, but it's maybe, uh, two ish feet long.
Casey:
So like two thirds of a meter.
Casey:
Um, this thing cost me $11 million when I bought it.
Casey:
It's seriously like a $70 cable or something like that.
Casey:
And actually while we were there at the Apple store, Mike impulse bought, I think a one and a half meter Thunderbolt five.
Casey:
five cable, maybe it was four, for literally $150 or thereabouts.
Casey:
It was absurd.
Casey:
This is an Apple cable.
Casey:
Cable transfers are not this good.
Casey:
This is the problem, Marco.
Casey:
I had convinced myself, and this is 100% my fault.
Casey:
I'm not trying to blame anyone but myself.
Casey:
Only the guy in the mirror is at fault here.
Casey:
I had somehow convinced myself that these things support Thunderbolt.
Casey:
And these things have immensely fast transfer speeds.
Casey:
The pros specifically.
Marco:
Isn't it just USB 3 at best?
Marco:
I don't think the phones have ever supported Thunderbolt.
Casey:
This is my question.
Casey:
The iPads do.
Casey:
I think I have convinced myself of something that is patently untrue.
Casey:
I am owning that top to bottom inside now.
Casey:
But I thought to myself, all right, this has got to be the year.
Casey:
I have a half terabyte phone of which maybe two thirds is full or something like that.
Casey:
And I think a lot of that is just photos that can be, you know, they're cast photos.
Casey:
I'm not trying to keep my whole photo library on the phone.
Casey:
This has got to be fast.
Casey:
It's got to be.
Casey:
So I get in the car and I'm in the passenger seat.
Casey:
I'm riding shotgun and I start the transfer.
Casey:
And I do this from phone to phone in the middle of the car with no Wi-Fi available.
Casey:
And only one of these devices can get on the Internet.
Casey:
I do that, and it asks me, do you want to do the cellular transfer?
Casey:
Hell yeah, I do.
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
This is going to be great.
Casey:
And so I immediately transfer my cell plan from the old phone to the new phone.
John:
You did this in a moving car, and I can never successfully do it from my house.
John:
While traveling, by the way.
Marco:
And what, eight hours before a flight?
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
I can't do that mental math without distracting myself.
Casey:
Okay, great.
Casey:
This is so many good ideas.
Casey:
Yeah, this is just a litany of excellent ideas, like I said.
John:
And by the way, you know, you just got through saying like how you were probably mistaken about the transfer speeds of the wired connections on phones because you were misremembering about the iPads, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But I just want to throw this out there.
John:
you're not even going to be able to saturate the USB 3.0 whatever speeds of the phone when transferring thousands and thousands of tiny files.
John:
When creating thousands and thousands of tiny files.
John:
Because you will get swamped by the file I.O.
John:
You will not saturate that bus unless you're transferring large individual files.
John:
Like just the SSD speed and the file system speed alone will kill you on that.
John:
Like you can see it yourself.
John:
Like even just in your house on your 2.5 gigabit per second Ethernet connection,
John:
copy a 20 gig file from one Mac to another, and then copy 2 million 1k files.
John:
You'll get slaughtered on the file system IO alone.
John:
That I feel like is what is going to cause your phone setup to be slow because every application is a bundle of tiny little files.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I mean, again, looking back on it, I think that this was a litany of poor assumptions and even poorer decision making.
Casey:
But here we were.
Casey:
So in the interest of telling the story, oh, and I should also interrupt myself and say, well, no, I'll get there, actually.
Casey:
I'll get there.
Casey:
So I'm in the car.
Casey:
I'm with Mike and Jason.
Casey:
Stephen had gone back to his house.
Casey:
So I'm with Mike and Jason and Jill from St.
Casey:
Jude, who was kind enough to travel to bring us to and from.
Casey:
and I'm doing this transfer, and it's going.
Casey:
It's not going quickly.
Casey:
It's quoting two or maybe three hours, but it's going.
Casey:
We get to the lobby of the hotel.
Casey:
It's a very trendy, very, not fancy in the traditional way, but fancy in the, like, you know, look at me.
Casey:
I'm hip and with it.
Casey:
That's a reference, John.
Casey:
Anyways, so we get to the hotel lobby, and Erin is there because she did not go with us for this adventure with Brad and Kathy, and I think that was it.
Casey:
Uh, and they basically said, Hey, let's all have a drink together before we all go our separate ways.
Casey:
I say, okay, sure.
Casey:
And I'm still allowing this transfer to happen.
Casey:
I should note that while this hotel was very nice and I liked it quite a bit, the wifi at the hotel was hilariously bad.
Casey:
hilariously bad Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Now, how could you have possibly known ahead of time that hotel Wi-Fi would be not amazing?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And what really chaps my bottom is that I always will go and, I was going to say rent, but borrow a hotspot from one of two different counties' local libraries because there's reciprocity in the whole rigmarole.
Casey:
And for this one trip, for some reason, I didn't do that.
Casey:
I don't know what I was thinking.
Casey:
I guess I wasn't thinking, but I didn't do that.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And now, granted, cellular Wi-Fi is still not stellar, but I guarantee it's a heck of a lot more stable than the crappy hotel Wi-Fi was.
Casey:
So we're all sitting around.
Casey:
It's Jason, me, Mike, Aaron, Kathy, Brad.
Casey:
And I think that's it.
Casey:
We're all sitting around and we're watching my transfer happening.
Casey:
And all everyone there is making so much fun of me and deservedly so.
Casey:
What are you doing?
Casey:
Why would you do this?
Casey:
Why can't you be an adult?
Casey:
Why aren't you patient?
Casey:
You will be home.
Casey:
You will be in your house in like 16 hours where this will be so much less stressful and so much easier.
Casey:
Why did you not do that?
Casey:
In all logic, every ounce of logic on the planet says that's exactly correct because it is, but I'm me and I'm impatient and I wanted my new toy.
Marco:
How well did it go?
Casey:
So as we're sitting at the bar, all of a sudden the wired, you know, direct phone to phone transfer fails.
Casey:
And I have a red triangle on one of the phones, and it says, this didn't work.
Casey:
Okay, now I'm in a bit of a pickle, because the old phone is still the old phone, and it has the boarding pass and all that, except it now has no internet whatsoever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Because the cellular, like a dummy, I moved over to the new phone.
Casey:
This is not good.
Casey:
At this point, everyone around me is basically in hysterics.
Casey:
And Mike and Jason have this unbelievable glee.
Casey:
Their eyes are shining.
Casey:
It's eight o'clock at night or thereabouts.
Casey:
Their eyes are like lighthouses because they know not only can they tell this story, but
Casey:
on Upgrade.
Casey:
But their recording Upgrade, what was at the time, tomorrow, which as I sit here now, was four days ago.
Casey:
And they look at me dead in the eyes and they say to me, we're going to tell this story and we're going to do it before you can.
Casey:
We're going to
Casey:
tell it on our podcast before you can and this is going to be delicious and they're basically like cackling if i could do an evil laugh i would do so i'm not capable of such things they are beside themselves with excitement and sure enough if you listen to uh the latest episode of upgrade number 582 first chance to make one impression you will hear their retelling of the story which i am very disappointed to say
Casey:
It's pretty accurate, actually.
Casey:
I'm a little sad about that.
Marco:
I feel like, by the way, I feel like this now settles the debt of us stealing Ask Upgrade from them.
Casey:
I think that's true, actually.
Casey:
I think that's fair.
Casey:
See, I took one for the team, for you two.
Casey:
I took one for the team.
Casey:
You're welcome.
Casey:
So, at this point, I realize, okay, this is not good.
Casey:
So I decide to, if I recall correctly, I should have taken notes, but I was in such a tizzy.
Casey:
Geez, I wonder why.
Casey:
I believe at this point I did the direct transfer.
Casey:
I'm sorry, the Wi-Fi direct peer-to-peer transfer.
Casey:
So I'm not using a cable anymore.
Casey:
I plug both of the phones into the wall and I let it run overnight.
Casey:
At 1.15-ish or thereabouts, I woke up and was like, oh my God, what's happening with the phones?
Casey:
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
Casey:
Did you sleep at all?
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
I went, I was passed out at like nine, but at about one 15, I woke up and was like, well, I'm done because now I'm stressing out about the phones again.
Casey:
And so, uh, I tossed and turned until basically three 30 when we, or no three 45, I think it was when we needed to get up to catch the four 30 car.
Casey:
Uh, but that being said, everything did transfer except, except, uh,
Casey:
And curiously, my entire iMessage history disappeared from the new phone.
Casey:
It was on the old one.
Casey:
Disappeared from the new phone, which was annoying, but fine.
Casey:
And I'm going to come back to this in a second.
Casey:
It didn't disappear from the new phone.
Casey:
It was just never on the new phone.
Casey:
Okay, sorry.
Casey:
Yes, yes, that is fair.
Casey:
And I'm going to come back around to this in just a second.
Casey:
But this, at first, I was like, oh, that's a bummer.
Casey:
Like, I mean, there's times I'll refer back to old messages, but in the grand scheme of things, it's probably fine.
Casey:
And then I realized, oh, oh, no, this isn't going to work because I'm in a handful of group chats.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's an immense number, but enough.
Casey:
And most of these group chats have images that represent the group chat.
Casey:
You know what I'm saying?
Casey:
Like the icons or whatever.
Casey:
that have been stable for years, which means I basically have the mental equivalent of muscle memory.
Casey:
I guess mental memory, whatever, memory, memory.
Casey:
I have some sort of memory where I cannot find these frigging group chats unless they have the particular icons I'm used to, and I'm screwed.
Casey:
And so at that point, I realized, all right, I'm going to get home with this the way it is, but I'm going to have to handle this differently.
Casey:
So as an aside to this tale of woe, which is not done yet,
Casey:
Do you guys use iMessage in iCloud or whatever the heck it's called?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Because I don't.
Marco:
Why don't you?
Marco:
Why not?
Marco:
Well, because... I guess we just got him to use iCloud Photo Library.
John:
I was just going to say, well, that's not going to be a problem because, of course, he uses messages in iCloud and it'll just eventually sync.
John:
Sometimes it takes a long time, but, you know.
Casey:
So I don't for two reasons.
Casey:
Number one is uniquely me, which is that I don't know if you two have ever exchanged a message with me, but I tend to lean heavily on GIFs and other pieces of media and
Casey:
And over time, that adds up.
Casey:
And so I think I have something like 100 gigs of messages on my phone right now.
Casey:
And I don't necessarily want to take up 100 gigs of my iCloud account with my stupid GIFs.
Casey:
Like, as much as I love my GIFs, I don't think I need 100 gigs of the same five GIFs or whatever rolling around in iCloud.
Casey:
And the other reason was, I believe, and I'm probably going to get the details wrong, but if you use Messages in iCloud, Apple does have an encryption key to it.
Casey:
And even though I really genuinely have nothing to hide, that just kind of creeps me out.
Casey:
And it creeps me out that I'm also making a decision on your behalf, you, Marco, you, John, who might text me or iMessage me, that whatever you send me, Apple could see.
Casey:
Now, do they care about me?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Would they ever bother?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
But it's something that could happen.
Casey:
And so I've always been a little scared of it, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should just go ahead and start using it.
Casey:
You should.
Marco:
Yes, you should.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
All right, so that's all that.
Casey:
So I get home and I decide, all right, this is not going to work.
Casey:
I know what I'm going to do.
Casey:
I'm going to do a backup from the old phone.
Casey:
And then I'm going to do a restore to the new phone.
Casey:
I'm going to do a whole new restore.
Casey:
I'm going to do this from home where everything is calm.
Casey:
And by the way, I made it home.
Casey:
No problem.
Casey:
Everything worked great except my iMessage, you know, snafu.
Casey:
And so everything will be fine.
Casey:
So I take a backup of the phone, and then I have a brainwave.
Casey:
And I think, oh, you know what I should do just to make this easier and safer since I'm messing about with everything now?
Casey:
I should unpair my watch from the new phone and get it prepared for when I re-restore.
Casey:
What I didn't think about, though, is that I now have rings from that day and I have some other stuff that I had accumulated that day that never got backed up when I made the most recent backup because the most recent backup was from the old phone, which was no longer paired to the watch.
Casey:
I'm such an idiot in summary, but here we are.
Casey:
And so I did my backup.
Casey:
I did my restore.
Casey:
And I also thought to myself, you know what?
Casey:
Maybe the Thunderbolt 4 cable that I'm using that cost me $11 billion, maybe that was the issue.
Casey:
So I took the Thunderbolt 5 cable from my brand new CalDigit TS5 Plus, and I used that directly plugged into my laptop to do the restore.
Casey:
Do you want to guess if it made any difference with regard to speed?
Casey:
No, it did not.
John:
Of course not.
John:
Just to give stats on this, your new phone has 10 gigabits per second out of that port.
John:
Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are 40.
John:
Thunderbolt 5 is 80 up to 120.
John:
So no, putting a faster than 40 gigabits per second thing into your 10 gigabit per second port is not going to help you.
Casey:
Yeah, so this was a disaster through and through.
Casey:
But I did the update or the restore, and my iMessage stuff came back.
Casey:
Everything was good to go.
Casey:
And so now, I think for me, I think, and I can't decide what's the right answers, but I'm starting to wonder if I do this again, if I do the old-school...
Casey:
back to, I almost said iTunes, but do a backup to Finder and then restore from Finder.
Casey:
I'm really wondering if maybe I'll do that next time.
Casey:
I got a noodle on it.
Casey:
But the right answer is probably what Marco said, just use iCloud.
Casey:
Yes, it's so much more reliable.
John:
But you can only use iCloud if you do messages on iCloud because otherwise your messages are never coming back on that phone.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I got a lot to think about.
Casey:
But anyways, so I did all that.
Casey:
It restored just great.
Casey:
I got the watch repaired.
Casey:
But then I realized, oh, no.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
My rings for the day are gone.
Casey:
And I'm not above adjusting the rings on a day.
Casey:
You know, you can now do like bring your ring back for one day.
Casey:
But I've got some streaks to maintain.
Casey:
And I really try to be honest about it.
Casey:
I really, really do.
Casey:
And so for several hours, whatever background magical process that you can, of course, not just kick off by hand.
Casey:
You have to wait for Apple to decide.
Casey:
Now it's the time to do it.
Casey:
And for many hours, like five hours, it didn't ever recompute the status of my rings.
Casey:
But I'm happy to say that eventually it did.
Casey:
And all is well.
Casey:
So I have a monthly FaceTime with our dear friend underscore David Smith, and I'm retelling the story.
Casey:
I want to say it's like yesterday, the day before.
Casey:
I guess it was yesterday.
Casey:
And I'm telling him about this, and he says, you know what you should do?
Casey:
Because you have the situation where you want to do a wire transfer, but you want it at the highest speed possible and you want to provide power, here's what you do.
Casey:
Disconnect your computer from the CalDigit when you do Aaron's phone.
Casey:
Plug Aaron's phone into the CalDigit as like the source, or I'm sorry, the old phone into the CalDigit as like the source.
Casey:
Use your other Thunderbolt cable also into the CalDigit as the target and see if that works any better.
Casey:
let me tell you do you want to guess how much better that worked made no difference whatsoever zero difference you cannot saturate that 10 gigabytes per second when you're transferring millions of tiny files anyway only when you're transferring a few large files will you saturate it you're lucky it made zero difference whatsoever i'm a disaster this is all waste so i guess the official atp guidance for the future which i will forget so it's all it's on you guys to remind me you folks to remind me in the future
Casey:
I think the official ATP guidance is turn on messages in iCloud and just do a damn iCloud back over there.
Casey:
iCloud restore and just be done.
John:
I still say device to device should be your default.
John:
iCloud is the second fallback.
John:
But, you know, it depends on what you've had success with in the past.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so Marco, tell me about your iPhone 17 Air.
Marco:
Okay, it's not... No, iPhone Air.
Casey:
No, I'm sorry, not iPhone 17 Air.
Marco:
There you go.
Marco:
Saved us from a lot of angry people.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Easy peasy, yeah.
Marco:
All right, so I first moved in to the iPhone Air.
Marco:
It feels incredibly light for its size.
Casey:
Let me just quickly interject.
Casey:
I did briefly hold one in the Apple store when I was picking up my phones.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
It feels incredible.
Casey:
It is incredible how good that feels in hand.
Casey:
Now, yes, it is big, but it's so thin and so light.
Casey:
And oh, my God, I want it so badly.
Marco:
It's almost like when I – so in order to get the iPhone Air, I actually – I ended up paying like 50 bucks for it because I had test phones that I traded in to get it.
Marco:
As part of my pile of test phones I brought in, one of them had a case where I had popped the case off of it so they could process the trade-in.
Marco:
And holding the empty phone case for my – it was a 14+.
Marco:
The empty case for that.
Marco:
And then I picked up the Air.
Marco:
I'm like, this feels very similar to –
Marco:
It's incredible.
John:
I have a dissenting opinion on the feel of the air.
John:
I did also visit an Apple store to check out the new phones.
John:
And here's the things that I was surprised by feeling the air.
John:
Not for very long, obviously, but just, you know, playing with it on the table.
John:
It was nicer looking in person than I thought it would be.
John:
And I already liked how it looked, but I felt like the ugly camera thing at the top didn't bother me as much, especially on the white phone, because it kind of blends in.
John:
Which of the whites?
John:
Yeah, and it looks real good.
John:
But also what I realized is just how much I hate big phones.
John:
Yes.
John:
Although this phone was light and it felt very thin, all I could think was this phone feels too big.
John:
And I know it's like, how is the iPhone Air too big?
John:
It's not too big thickness wise.
John:
It's too big for me personally with wise.
John:
So all I could think of was this phone was like, oh man, can you give me this phone in an iPhone 14?
John:
Let's say, cause that's my favorite size.
John:
Probably not the 17 is a little bit bigger, but you know, like, like the normal non-Mac size, not the areas in between the Macs and the pro, right?
John:
So give me the, the, like the, the, the normal pro size, maybe a little bit smaller.
John:
But this thin, and with three cameras on it, someday in the future, that's going to be an amazing phone.
John:
But I can say right now, for the air, despite me really liking how it looks and it being nicer in person than I thought, it's just too darn wide for me.
Marco:
John, you are spoiling my review.
Marco:
I'm so mad.
Marco:
But you've used big phones, though.
John:
I thought you were against them.
Marco:
Well, no, I've never been into the plus and max.
Marco:
Anyway, so let's go back to a second.
Marco:
I'm going to go over this plus a little more.
Marco:
All right, so let's first start with color.
Marco:
I got the blue one.
Marco:
No, I didn't.
Marco:
I got one of the white ones.
Marco:
What do you mean blue?
Marco:
There's no blue one.
Marco:
This phone is available in black and three whites.
Marco:
They're all white.
Marco:
Like, nothing about this looks blue at all.
Marco:
If I didn't know I bought the blue and see on the box that it said blue, I would never have guessed this was blue.
Marco:
This does not come in colors.
Marco:
It comes in black, white, white, and white.
Marco:
It's comical.
Marco:
Wait, is there a white one?
John:
Yes, there really is.
John:
Okay, so maybe I was holding a white one and maybe I wasn't, but there is, in fact, a white one.
John:
There's no way to know.
Marco:
even when you see them side by side in the store you can barely even tell like it's comical these are the most homeopathic colors i've ever seen in apple's lineup it is comical like there's there is no blue in this blue so anyway it does you know it feels very you know thin light it's it feels like shocking however
Marco:
You were right, John.
Marco:
This is not a thin Pro.
Marco:
This is a thin Max phone.
Marco:
It is noticeably bigger in length and width, noticeably bigger than the mid-sized Pro and base 17 lines.
Marco:
It also, it behaves like them software-wise.
Marco:
If you ever used a Plus or a Max phone, if you turn the phone in landscape, a lot of apps will give you kind of an iPad-style sidebar layout.
Marco:
This phone does that.
Marco:
Even Apple's software considers this a Plus or a Max phone.
Marco:
If you're coming from an iPhone mini thinking that you might want an Air, I don't think you do.
Marco:
I think that's going to be a big jump in hand size.
Marco:
And for me, I actually have found that the ergonomics of it are not a great fit for me.
Marco:
And it comes down to some of those little differences about it being a bigger phone than the pros.
Marco:
One of the simple things is the sleep-wake button is a little bit too high for me to hit comfortably with my regular way I hold a phone.
Marco:
Also, the exceptional thinness of it
Marco:
I find actually makes the ergonomics of using the phone a little bit worse in some ways.
Marco:
And this is what I was saying earlier about, like, I don't think I would want a phone to be any thinner than this.
Marco:
And you start running into, like, usability challenges.
Marco:
So there's a couple things.
Marco:
So number one, the combination of the thinness and also the very thin screen bezels that modern phones have...
Marco:
caused me to actually have a lot of accidental input on the touchscreen around the edges as I would just handle the phone.
Marco:
More than the pros do.
Marco:
Like, you know, I've been using my phone without a case for a while or using, at best, one of those leather magnetic backs that just is the back only and no sides.
Marco:
So I'm used to staying away from the sides holding this phone.
Marco:
And I should clarify, I was using the Air without a case.
Marco:
And also without its battery pack, just the regular, the phone by itself.
Marco:
it is actually it's so thin that it is hard for me to operate without causing error input on the sides of the screen it's also because it's so thin it's harder to pick up off a table like it's little things like that um it also if you lay down on a surface because it has that giant camera on one end but nothing on the other end really it wobbles a lot more than the other phones on a flat surface um
Marco:
And so all these things, like the way it handles by being so big and so thin, it even like when you put it in your pants pocket, it's nice that it's super light.
Marco:
But even just the additional size of it made me feel like I was putting like a dinner plate in my pocket.
Marco:
Like it's a big phone.
Marco:
This is not, again, this is not a thin Pro.
Marco:
This is a thin plus or max, really.
Marco:
It's closer to that in feel.
Marco:
I think if I were to use this phone long term,
Marco:
I think I would want a case for it to just to improve the physical handling of it.
Marco:
But that would also very much defeat the purpose of the air.
Marco:
So the ergonomics alone, I decided after about one day, like, I don't think I'm going to stick with this phone, but I was curious to try anyway.
Marco:
As for the other aspects, the battery, I didn't get enough chance to try it.
Marco:
It seemed fine to me.
Marco:
I'm sure it's not amazing, not awful.
Marco:
We saw the test earlier.
Marco:
It's it seems like it's actually not as bad as people thought.
Marco:
It's not going to be great.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
Camera and speaker.
Marco:
The speaker volume, as discussed earlier, is not as bad as I expected.
Marco:
The 17 Pro speaker, though, is way, way louder.
Marco:
But the volume out of the air speaker is not bad.
Marco:
It does have a bit of a like a rattling to it.
Marco:
Like if you if you turn it up all the way and like oftentimes I will be listening to podcasts out loud when I'm doing something like, you know, I'll have like the phone on the counter when I'm doing something in the kitchen or I'll prop it up like on a shelf.
Marco:
And if I'm taking a shower, I want to listen to podcasts like stuff like that.
Marco:
When you crank up the speaker that loud in the air, it's very rattly and tinny.
Marco:
You hear little bit of distortions at the very top of the volume range, almost as if you had a little speck of dust in there or something.
Marco:
But also just the tone of it, it sounds like a very small speaker.
Marco:
It sounds like the way phone speakers used to sound before they got less crappy.
Marco:
Modern iPhone Pro speakers, and even the base iPhone speakers, like modern iPhone speakers in other models...
Marco:
sound remarkably good for how small they are the air does not the air sounds like a tiny crappy old style phone speaker it does not sound good at all unless do you think marco had like a broken one or something lots of reviews have said essentially the same thing they said basically the air speaker gets really really loud but if you put it at max volume
John:
basically there's like distortion of some kind and you have to back it off a little bit so even when it's backed off it is still louder than people expected it to be but max volume becomes less usable due to these issues yeah it's very tinny and harsh and generally it's an unpleasant speaker um
Marco:
cameras uh well camera um i did again only a day but i missed macro focus distance you know you get macro focus distance from the wide angle lens i missed i mean the ultra wide i missed that um i did try a test of like let me try to read that tiny stupid gray on gray text on the apple power adapters to see like what wattage's power adapter is i did try that test with this phone and the other phones i had
Marco:
And it was good enough that I could digital zoom, I could pinch in, and I could read small, like tiny little text on things using the regular camera on the air.
Marco:
So that's fine.
Marco:
But generally speaking, like macro distance stuff, it's much nicer to have the macro lens.
Marco:
And I did miss the telephoto reach, even in just one day.
Marco:
And then when I later went to the Pro, I've been taking photos of the Pro the last couple days, and it's like, oh, wow, I'm so glad I have this reach with the telephotos.
Marco:
So
Marco:
generally i i do miss that camera a lot um let's talk about heat the air does seem to overheat and thermal throttle itself very easily and very frequently i mentioned earlier how long that preparing update took that and it was really warm the whole time so it could have been that it could have been something else um if you look at benchmarks of the 17 of the air
Marco:
The benchmarks often show the air being a little bit slower than the 17 and 17 Pro in certain tests.
Marco:
My guess is that it's throttling during benchmarking.
Marco:
And it seems very likely because doing almost anything to it, if you feel that camera bump, it's warm.
Marco:
Now, you won't know if you're holding the phone using it regularly.
Marco:
You might not realize this because the heat doesn't travel down to the middle of the phone.
Marco:
Like the heat stays up in that camera mesa or camera plateau area.
Marco:
In some ways, that's nice in the sense that it's not heating up your hand uncomfortably, but it also makes it hard to dissipate the heat.
Marco:
So for instance, my MagSafe fans that I have, they don't work on the air.
Marco:
They don't do anything because they're cooling the MagSafe area, but the MagSafe area doesn't get hot in the first place.
Marco:
The heat doesn't get there.
Marco:
It's all in the camera plateau.
Marco:
You need a camera bump fan.
John:
yeah i know and speaking of throttling on these phones the people who've done the tests on them like all the phones throttle all of them thermal throttle but what interestingly what they found when doing like air versus pro tests obviously the pros come out ahead uh but looking at like the graph of how they throttle what happens is that like they a lot of these benchmarks would give like a stability score of like how even is like the frame rate in this game or whatever you know the this benchmark and the air would get a really high stability score is what would happen in the air is it would
John:
start off real high immediately throttle way way way way down and then stay at that way way way down for the whole thing so i had really good stability because it maintained its really low thing the whole time but then on the pro it would start really high go fall off a cliff after the first you know 30 seconds or something when it starts with thermal throttle and then for the next 10 minutes it would slowly get slower
John:
It was like a slow downward graph.
John:
And like it never got as low as like the air did or maybe you met it at the end after like 30 minutes when it got heat soaked.
John:
But that's the magic of the vapor chamber.
John:
Like all these phones are going to throttle on like a really high like CPU, GPU benchmark type thing.
John:
Like they'll run really fast for a short period of time.
John:
Then they will throttle.
John:
The question is what happens after that?
John:
Do they after that initial drop down?
John:
the the pro is able to dissipate the heat for longer and it takes a longer time to essentially heat soak the whole phone because the heat is traveling down the whole phone dissipating into the aluminum dissipating into the air and so it slowly gets slower and the air is like as soon as i have to throttle it all super slow for the whole time that's it this is nowhere for the heat to go i guess
Marco:
Yeah, and that's the problem.
Marco:
The Air's thermal design, it just doesn't move the heat anywhere.
Marco:
It just keeps it right where it is, like in the top.
Marco:
And so it just has nowhere to go thermally.
Marco:
So my time with the Air, I think it makes a really good case for the base iPhone 17.
Marco:
Because what I ended up ultimately wanting after using the Air, I'm like, oh, you know, there's some goodness here.
Marco:
I wish the phone was not as big, and I wish it was a little bit thicker to have a few fewer trade-offs, but keep a similar light weight.
Marco:
And that's very close to the regular iPhone 17.
Marco:
What I'm describing is basically the iPhone 17.
John:
That's the ultra-wide camera, too.
Marco:
Yeah, you get the ultra-wide camera, you get fewer trade-offs, really.
Marco:
So I found myself appreciating that the Air is an interesting experiment, but the thing is, there's so many trade-offs.
Marco:
And you hear a lot of the reviewers saying, this is the obvious path of the future.
Marco:
I hope it's not.
Marco:
Because what that would be like is like saying that the 12-inch MacBook was the obvious path of the future.
Marco:
It wasn't.
Marco:
And thank God for that.
Marco:
Because I hope the future is more like what we have now in the present.
Marco:
A lineup that has different products that serve different needs.
Marco:
The MacBook Air is not the only MacBook.
Marco:
Hopefully the iPhone Air will not be the only iPhone in the future.
Marco:
And we will all be better off continuing to have different product lines optimized for different needs.
Marco:
The iPhone Air has a role.
Marco:
It's like a two-door sports car.
Marco:
This is like a fun, totally impractical and unjustifiable on paper choice.
Marco:
But some people will just look at it or pick it up and they will fall in love with it and they will buy it as a consciously irrational purchase for love.
Marco:
And that's OK.
Marco:
But keep in mind that when you hear reviewers saying that this is a great phone, they're saying this because they're testing it for a week.
Marco:
they're not buying a phone to keep for years and live with it every single day for years.
Marco:
And you can't quickly and easily switch between multiple phones all the time.
Marco:
You can't be like, oh, I'm going to take out my day phone, night phone, because switching phones with phone numbers and data transfers, it's a pain in the butt.
Marco:
So when you pick a phone...
Marco:
You're making a much bigger commitment than just, I'm going to review this for a week.
Marco:
You're saying, I'm going to have this same phone for one, two, three, four years, and you need that phone to serve you in as many circumstances as possible for as long as possible.
Marco:
The Air is not going to be that phone for most people.
Marco:
And you might go into it saying, you know what?
Marco:
I love it so much.
Marco:
I'm going to choose those trade-offs anyway.
Marco:
But make sure that you know what you're getting into and make sure that you really love it enough to accept all the trade-offs.
Marco:
And I just don't.
Marco:
I went back to the 17 Pro, you know, after one day.
Marco:
And the Pro feels like home to me.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
The Pro, I'll just give some quick impressions here because I know we're running long and you guys want to talk about the Pro too.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
The Pro is the safe purchase.
Marco:
It is the phone that everything I was just saying, like you make all those trade-offs with the Air and you're like, well, if it's in this situation, it's not going to be great.
Marco:
If it's in that situation, it's not going to be great.
Marco:
The Pro is the phone that I know I can have in any situation, and I will never regret the choice I made.
Marco:
I will never have the Pro in something, oh, I wish it would charge faster, but it's overheating, or I really wanted that wide camera or that telephoto camera or whatever it is.
Marco:
The Pro will always handle what I want it to do.
Marco:
It has the familiar size and shape and ergonomics.
Marco:
My hand knows how to handle the Pro.
Marco:
Yes, it is substantially thicker and heavier than the Pro and a little bit thicker and heavier than the outgoing one.
Marco:
But after my experience with the Air, I more willingly accept the Pro's size and weight because I want the utility that it offers.
Marco:
And I've come to now appreciate better that utility.
Marco:
The sides are curved again, and everything has kind of a little bit more slippery finish than the previous phones, which makes it a little bit less pleasant to use without a case for me.
Marco:
It's a little bit harder to hold and feel secure in my grip.
Marco:
I ordered the Nomad leather back for it, which I expect I will probably end up liking a lot, like I did on the 16 Pro.
Marco:
The new thermals have been great for me.
Marco:
I didn't even need my MagSafe coolers during setup.
Marco:
It never got that hot.
Marco:
New cameras seem very good, I think.
Marco:
You know, it's a little early.
Marco:
I've only been using them for a couple of days.
Marco:
A little early to say, but I think the new cameras are very, very good.
Marco:
The telephoto, the 4X is a much better range reach than the 5X.
Marco:
The 8X digital cropping on that is surprisingly decent.
Marco:
It's nowhere near the quality of the 1X lens, but it is less of a sacrifice than it was in the previous generations.
Marco:
That telephoto lens is always a tradeoff.
Marco:
It's always a sacrifice in optical quality, but it's better this year than it has been.
John:
I took two test photos of this cause I wanted to test the same thing as my wife's pro phone.
John:
And I tested the 16 pro five X, which is my phone versus the 17 pro eight X. And obviously the five X, that's an optical five X on the 16 pro and the eight X it's a sensor crop of the optically four X lens.
John:
And I stood, I was a worst case scenario phone.
John:
I was indoors.
John:
It's dim lighting.
John:
I stood a pretty far distance away from a wall, took a picture of like my wife's diploma on the wall.
John:
And you know, you'll see a link to the picture in the notes.
John:
I was shocked at how much better the 8X, which is, again, not optical 8X.
John:
It's an optical 4X lens cropped to 8X.
John:
How much better that was than the 16 Pro 5X.
John:
And, you know, if you if you looked at the teardowns and see the difference in the size of the sensor on the 5X versus the 8X lens, you know, oh, this makes sense now.
John:
But even just looking at the sensor size, it's still pretty shocking.
John:
I took this picture several times.
John:
Like, is this wrong?
John:
Is it out of focus?
John:
Are the settings wrong?
John:
Like I said, this is the worst case scenario.
John:
It's dim lighting.
John:
It's indoors.
John:
But the noise was out of control.
John:
And the 8X just looks so much better.
John:
So, you know, obviously, like I said, it's nothing compared to the 1X.
John:
But I was thoroughly impressed with the 17 Pros 4X optical 8X sensor crop lens.
John:
And I can't wait to have a camera like it on my phone next year.
Casey:
A couple of quick notes about this image.
Casey:
I have problems here.
Casey:
Number one, I forgot that Tina went to bad tech.
Casey:
She could have gone to Virginia Tech, but she went to Georgia Tech.
Casey:
I'm very disappointed.
Casey:
Number two, I'm even more disappointed with you because you know how so many people, I feel like we just went through this recently, how so many people can see curly quotes and straight quotes just drive them crazy.
Casey:
I don't have the problem.
Casey:
Straight quotes don't bother me at all.
Casey:
You know what bothers me?
Casey:
An actual letter X instead of the multiplication sign drives me batty.
John:
You're going to have to live with it because the multiplication symbol in lots of fonts looks weird.
John:
Sorry.
Casey:
It drives me batty and I'm disappointed in you.
Casey:
I am disappointed in you.
Casey:
I thought you would have handled this better.
Casey:
But here we are.
John:
You fought me on the curly quotes in the titles and you're complaining about the X versus multiplication sign.
John:
I'm telling you, the multiplication sign is weird in so many different fonts.
John:
I just don't trust it.
Marco:
Yeah, anyway, the telephoto lens is a nice upgrade, and I'm happy to have it.
Marco:
Again, it is still an optical compromise, but it is substantially less compromised than the previous ones have been.
Marco:
So that's great.
Casey:
Before we move off cameras, the selfie camera.
Casey:
I don't take a tremendous amount of selfies, but a lot of times, you know, I am a religious, if you will, day one user.
Casey:
I think they're a former sponsor, but I use day one all the time.
Casey:
I try to make sure I make at least one entry of what I've done every single day.
Casey:
And oftentimes that involves a picture of like the family or family and friends eating.
Casey:
And I will typically do that with the selfie camera and I'll just hold it up high and try to get everyone in the shot.
Casey:
And I've gotten pretty good at that over the years because I do it semi-often, but
Casey:
The images in years past, up until this phone, have always been pretty bad.
Casey:
Like, they're serviceable.
Casey:
They're not unusable, but they're not great.
Casey:
And we went, I am happy to report my long national nightmare is over.
Casey:
Instead of the nearest Shake Shack now being, or instead of it being like 15 to 20 minutes away, it's like 10 minutes away.
Casey:
And I'm very excited about this because a new one opened.
Casey:
And I took a selfie of myself and some friends that were all out to eat and the family.
Casey:
And this selfie picture looks incredible compared to the way the old ones looked.
Casey:
So I am really excited about that camera as well.
Marco:
Yeah, and I haven't had a lot of chances with it.
Marco:
I literally have taken one selfie since I got the phone.
Marco:
But yeah, it does look like a pretty big upgrade.
Marco:
Otherwise, battery life, again, I've only had it for a few days.
Marco:
It seems good so far.
Marco:
The orange.
Marco:
It's a good orange.
Marco:
Yeah, it is.
Marco:
I'm really happy with it.
Marco:
It is a bold color choice.
Marco:
And, you know, I did think, like, I wonder if I'm going to be this happy with this, you know, every day of the at least year I'm going to have this phone.
Marco:
But I think, yes, I think I am.
Marco:
And I'm ready for this.
Marco:
I do worry a little bit about scratches over time.
Marco:
But again, like,
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I buy my phones to use them, not to preserve them forever.
Marco:
So, like, I will take whatever happens to it, you know, scratch-wise.
Marco:
It does, especially the orange, it does draw a decent amount of attention.
Marco:
But I think that's – and I don't love that kind of attention.
Marco:
But I expect that's only because this is, like, the first week it's out.
Marco:
And I'm sure –
Marco:
There will be so many of these out in the wild by next week that I'm sure that over the coming weeks, this will no longer be a noteworthy visual thing that people will ask me about.
Marco:
But that is something – if you try to be discreet out in the world, this is not the phone to get or at least get the silver or blue one.
Marco:
But otherwise, I'm very happy with it.
John:
One thing I noticed about the orange at the store was that the, so that the orange bat, the, you know, the orange cases, the anodized orange aluminum, and then there's the back panel that is glass or ceramic shield, whatever.
John:
And if you put the camera or the phone flat on the table screen down and look at it from directly above,
John:
the back panel matches the orange of the anodized aluminum very very well it's not obviously it's two different materials it's glass whatever and aluminum and they look different the aluminum is more like metal flakes sparkly in car parlance or whatever and the and the glass back is not but the colors are matched as well as you could hope to match them kind of like those old things that used to calibrate your tv and like make this green thing match the green background right yep but but the second you look not dead on at the back yep
John:
That glass panel is no longer the same color as the case, and they can't help it because it's just the way the light glints off the materials.
John:
Now, that's not bad.
John:
It looks kind of like a creamsicle, but basically the back panel gets lighter the more you tilt it.
John:
It's so much so that at certain angles, the back panel looks practically white next to the orange case.
John:
So be aware of that.
John:
Go to the store and check these out.
John:
It's not that the back panel gets lighter when you tilt it.
John:
It's the aluminum gets darker.
Marco:
or whatever's happening the the contrast between them increases dramatically which is really interesting because it's so clear that they color match them exactly dead on and not exactly not dead on yeah and i think and maybe this like having the having the the glass ish inset maybe that kind of shows why they didn't make bold colors of the previous designs of phones because it doesn't work that well on that on that kind of material yeah
Marco:
didn't they do like one really deep red glass back phone I think they can do dark colored glass they just didn't want to well maybe anyway very very happy with the orange and I do think like so I have my Nomad leather back I have it for my 16 Pro which is now in a box waiting to go back to Apple and I tried putting it on the 17 Pro by just cutting off the top of the back
Marco:
oh my god like where like you know just right below the mag save i just cut it across so it's and now it's like a flat cut across the top so it can fit below the camera mesa and it doesn't quite fit because the actual like too much of the leather back hangs off the bottom of the phone because the alignment of the circle has actually moved down on the phone back um but i have been using it that way for a few days to see how it feels and it feels great
Marco:
So once I get my real one is scheduled to arrive early next week, so I'll have a report on how much I enjoy the new leatherbacks.
Marco:
But I think this is going to be a nice combo.
Marco:
And certainly I think the phone looks cool with the black leatherback.
Marco:
I originally had to order the brown, but I decided to go black because...
Marco:
The reality is that the iPhone is black and orange already because the screen is black and the camera lenses on the back are black.
Marco:
So it's already black and orange.
Marco:
So you might think brown would go better with orange, but I think in practice, I think black is going to also be a really nice option.
John:
I don't think brown goes better with orange.
John:
I think you need a neutral color with that orange.
Marco:
Probably, yeah, because that's the other thing.
Marco:
Orange...
Marco:
Having a bright color like this, it's actually going to be fairly challenging to pair a lot of accessories with it.
Marco:
And I think it's one of the things you kind of have to see things in real life to know how they work together.
Marco:
And even though brown is just desaturated orange, it could be challenging to pair those.
Marco:
So anyway, good luck with that.
Marco:
But yeah, that's it.
Marco:
That's all I got for the Pro so far.
Marco:
Love the Pro.
Marco:
The Air, I find it so disappointing I might actually return it.
John:
A couple of comments in the air.
John:
One thing to note about it, as both you noted and I noted, we're not big phone people.
John:
So the thing about the phone feeling too wide for us, we just don't like big phones, period.
John:
So if you like big phones, that may be a plus for you and not a minus.
John:
I know a lot of people do like big phones, and so there's that.
John:
Second thing is, why is the air so big?
John:
Why do they make it big?
John:
I would love to see the math on this of someone who actually knows these numbers, but I would imagine that the back of the envelope math says that
John:
Every, you know, every little bit that you make the phone wider gives you enough additional battery that it makes up for the new pixels you have to light up.
John:
Because I think the screen technology, especially the ones that drop down to one hertz with like modern OLEDs are such that the bigger you make that phone, the better the battery life.
John:
Like, in other words, you don't you don't the battery outruns the screen.
John:
And so to get acceptable battery life, which seems like the air has acceptable battery life out of the air, you kind of have to make it essentially this size, because if you made it smaller, yes, you're having a smaller screen, but you're also getting much less battery.
John:
And now you're sacrificing battery life because the screen you sacrifice doesn't make up for the battery that you sacrificed.
John:
And so I think when people say this is the future of the phone, I hope what they're envisioning, well, two things.
John:
I hope what they're envisioning is, hey, wouldn't it be great if the
John:
something with 17 pro features and 17 pro battery life was as thin as the air, but not as wide for the people who don't like big phones.
John:
Uh, that's, that would be cool.
John:
Um, you know, in terms of like hitting the screen with the, uh, the fleshy parts of your hands overlapping, since most people use cases, I imagine it's not that much of an issue, but honestly, I have that issue with phones in cases sometimes.
John:
So I'm not sure what the solution is there to bring back bezels.
John:
We'll see if we ever end up with that thing.
John:
And by the way, the rumor is that the 20th anniversary phone is going to have screens that wrap around the edges.
John:
So they're going to have to do some kind of like, you know, advanced touch rejection like they do with like palm rejection on the the I think they still already have that in iOS anyway.
John:
I'm not sure how it's tuned these days, but there is code that rejects your touches if it thinks they're accidental touches both on iPads and iPhones, I believe.
John:
So hopefully they work on that.
John:
And the other thing, obviously, that everyone's talking about, which is true, and we kind of alluded to before, talking about making the thing thin enough for the USB-C port, when Apple comes up with their foldable phone, all the lessons they learned about how to make thin things with the Air will be used there.
John:
And people are like, oh, the folding phone's going to be two Airs put together.
John:
Geez, I hope not, because modern folding phones are thinner than the Air in the two halves, because you have two whole halves to get together.
John:
And like...
John:
I mean, if Apple's first folding phone is the thickness of two Airs put together, that's going to be a pretty thick folding phone when it comes out next year.
John:
So I hope the two halves of the folding phone are each thinner than the Air, or at least one of them is thinner.
John:
I don't know if they would make it asymmetrical or not, but keep that in mind.
John:
But yeah, so like I think the Air is an important design experiment.
John:
It will work for a lot of people.
John:
Oh, and the other thing is so many people when, you know, I've talked to in the real world and seen other people interviewed about them, they don't ever change cameras on their phone.
John:
they just use what they think what you know maybe they don't realize pinch to zoom yeah then maybe they don't realize that they're switching to macro when they go up close and they're like oh i never change cameras like they never tap like the 2x 4x 8x thing they always just use 1x but even if you just use 1x when you put the camera real close it switches for you in its default mode to the macro thing which is using the ultra wide um but anyway i think a lot of people will be satisfied and happy with the air but it is a compromise and these are the compromises and keep that in mind and and i think what you said about it feeling
John:
weird to have something that thin i don't think the air is at the threshold where it's too thin and it feels uncomfortable i still think for both of us most of the issue is the width i really do think if i had something the size of a 16 or a 17 that was that thin i would enjoy it but please do go to the store and try it and see how it feels i mean i and i get the falling in love with the thing because when i was there i had no interest in this phone it it was more attractive to me in person kind of like a two-seat sports car was more attractive to me in person um
John:
then logic would dictate and then how I thought I would like it because it is very pretty and it does feel very cool.
John:
Yeah, I did like it, but I also would not buy it.
John:
If you do return it, you should get a 17 as a test device because it's a really good phone.
Marco:
Yeah, because honestly, I think the question remains, and I think we'll see this over the coming year and what happens, how many more errors do they end up making in the line?
Marco:
Does it stick around?
Marco:
Does it go away?
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't think we know yet how willing are people to buy a phone for love that suffers in the practical side of things.
Marco:
You see that in certain products, people are more willing than others.
Marco:
But I think the nature of phones is such that the sacrifices that you have to make for the air are things that people do seemingly care a lot about, namely battery life and camera.
Marco:
Those are things that people do like a lot about their phones.
Marco:
And typically it seems like phone sales are often driven by those very strongly.
John:
Well, I think the biggest factor is whether the consumer, whether the consumer that is considering the phone has been burned before in their life buying a phone for love.
John:
Right.
John:
If there, if you're only an iPhone customer, maybe you bought a 13 mini because you just loved it.
John:
But then the battery life was terrible and it spoiled you.
John:
But like, but if you've only been an iPhone customer and you've only bought the mainline phones, maybe you've never bought a phone because of like, you just love how it looks.
John:
Maybe this will be your first.
John:
I think when you get it, then you may say, oh, actually it wasn't worth it for the sacrifice in battery life or I missed the camera or whatever.
John:
And that will change your opinion going forward.
John:
I just wonder how many people in the market for iPhones have never been burned by a phone that they bought because they thought it looked real cool.
John:
and if there's enough of them the air would be a first a great first phone to learn about those compromises because if you just buy mainstream phones like you know the people who are like they become like um like people who live through the depression who are like saving string and stuff like that they're like give me the phone that's the size of brick because i know that i need all the battery in the world i need a battery pack i need a my phone just needs to be a gigantic huge brick-like battery because their entire history with phones is
John:
My phone is out of battery.
John:
My phone is out of battery.
John:
And so they just, they get in this mindset where they need massive battery.
John:
Those people are never going to look at the air.
John:
They just look at it and they say, nope, not a brick, not enough battery.
John:
I don't care how it works.
John:
I don't care if it's magic.
John:
I'm not even going to look at it, right?
John:
But if you've never been burned and you see this beautiful phone and you don't know
John:
whether or not you're going to be disappointed with one camera.
John:
You don't know whether the battery life is going to be.
John:
You're going to buy that as your first mistake phone, your first, like, you know, the phone you bought, you know, impulsively bought.
John:
And presumably Apple knows this.
John:
Again, looking at the numbers on launch week, 10% of the allocation of what they were manufacturing were errors.
John:
But that's lunch week.
John:
So this phone is going to have to, once the early adopters clear out and regular people start wandering into the store and looking at the phones on the table over the course of the next year, how many of them will be lured over by the beautiful air?
John:
And how many of them will go to it and say, I've been there before.
John:
I got burned by that.
John:
I dated a musician once.
John:
i already did that once never sorry musicians i'm trying to think of an example it's hard not to hard not to insult somebody but like have you been burned before because you always you should do it once you should date a musician at least once you feel better musicians i'm trying to get you on dates here uh okay they don't need they seem like they don't need the help yeah because you even you you bought you bought a mini right marco yes i used a mini for a whole year you've been burned once before i wouldn't say i didn't feel burned by it i should say but you wouldn't buy one again though
Marco:
no i i we had our time together and i don't regret it right and now you get the air you're like oh i know this feeling no thanks yeah yeah i mean the mini was i think the mini was great for its time i believe the mini preceded the pro and i went up i went back up for the proness of the pro uh but and i i got the 12 mini i didn't get the 13 minutes i believe the 13 was the first pro i think i've lost track anyway um
Marco:
Yeah, but I think with the Air, the trade-offs with the Air are significantly more extreme than they were with the Mini.
Marco:
And I think the love will also be significantly more extreme.
Marco:
So I think we will see people in non-trivial numbers buying the Air because they just love it so much.
John:
especially if it becomes like an influencer thing like as you know like a fancy tote bag or like because it does have that not just the fashion in terms like oh it doesn't it comes in boring colors right but it is very shiny it is a shiny attractive sort of luxury looking object i can't predict whether it's going to like catch on and all the big influencers are going to be like well of course i have my bedazzled iphone air because everybody does like that could happen with the air but all it's going to do is lure more people into making their first uh mistake
John:
again i'm not saying it's a mistake the air is a good like like it's at the top of the show i'm not saying there's no reason to buy an air there's tons of reasons to buy an air like it's just a question of whether enough people are going to be happy enough with it to make it sustained because apple has had real problems with this part of the lineup with all of its products putting out products that we all think make perfect sense and have you know are great for certain people but apple gives up on them
John:
And I'm not, I'm not saying Apple's right.
John:
I'm saying Apple's probably wrong.
John:
They shouldn't go.
John:
I think they should still make the plus phones, but they just, the numbers don't bear out.
John:
They said we can't, it's not worth it to us to sell X million phones.
John:
It needs to be, you know, three X million phones.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
A couple additional thoughts about the 17 pro.
Casey:
I really do like this phone a lot.
Casey:
I really like the cameras.
Casey:
I already talked about the selfie camera.
Casey:
I like that.
Casey:
Maybe I'm bananas, but I feel like the sides are a little bit more rounded than, than they were last year.
John:
The sides are still flat.
Casey:
it's not like an iphone 6 but the the uh the rounded corners have a higher radius than they used to yes exactly and i actually think that makes quite a bit of difference in the the the how pleasurable the hand i like it yeah i do too um i have had a couple of weird issues and one of them very well both of them could be my fault and i've jumped on enough swords this episode that i don't think these are my fault but they might be
Casey:
First of all, I have a CarPlay, wireless CarPlay dongle that I've used for many, many years, probably almost eight years now or something like that.
Casey:
There are many newer versions of the same dongle made by the same people.
Casey:
I think it's CarLinkIt or something like that.
Casey:
I will probably forget to put a link in the show notes, but it's something like that.
Casey:
And anyways, I've been using it for years.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I don't know if the dongle is upset or what's going on, but I feel like, or I can tell you, it's not I feel like, the 17 Pro frequently loses the connection to the dongle.
Casey:
Now, again, it's not first party.
Casey:
It's its own weird hack, but it's been a consistently working hack with every other phone I've had.
Casey:
And I know that some people have been seeing other Wi-Fi-related issues that have nothing to do with CarPlay.
Casey:
So I wonder if maybe this is something that's wrong with the phone or perhaps wrong with the software.
Casey:
Um, I'm going to, I'll probably end up using this as an excuse to get a vastly newer and presumably upgraded, um, wireless CarPlay dongle, but we'll see what happens.
Casey:
Uh, but if you have similar issues and especially if you have a fix, let me know on like Mastodon or something.
Casey:
Additionally, uh, if I were to go and look at the phone right now, I have John Syracuse, a red badge over settings, and it says renew Apple care coverage.
Casey:
If I tap on that, it's giving me the chance to – every AppleCare plan provides one-stop service for Apple – I can choose AppleCare 1 at $19.99 a month, or I can choose AppleCare Plus with Theft and Lost from $13.99 a month, and then I can elect to do $13.99 a month or $139.99 a year until canceled.
Casey:
This shouldn't be interesting or news, except that during the purchase process, I already purchased the $140 package for one year of AppleCare+.
Casey:
So what is going on?
Casey:
I've been emailed the proof of coverage thing that they give you.
Casey:
What is happening?
Casey:
Why am I getting prompted to do this?
Marco:
I don't understand.
Marco:
I would get that email like the day after saying like, that didn't go through.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
When the phone arrives, do it on the phone.
Marco:
And so this time I just – I didn't even try.
Marco:
I just did it on the phone when the phone arrived and it worked fine.
Casey:
So that's what I should do for next year.
Casey:
However, I'm almost positive I have already been dinged the $140 on my credit card for this service.
Casey:
And I have the proof of coverage.
Casey:
So I don't know what's going on here, but it's not making me confident at all.
John:
Just dismiss that and go to Settings General, AppleCare, and warranty, and you should see your phone listed in the list of covered products.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Slow down.
Casey:
Settings General.
Casey:
Let's do this live.
Casey:
AppleCare and warranty.
John:
Wait for the spinner.
Casey:
Thinking, thinking, thinking.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
This device, KC Phone 17, AppleCare Plus with theft and loss.
John:
There you go.
John:
You got it.
Casey:
So what the what?
John:
That's just bad.
John:
You know, they don't have, they're not checking for that before I show you a thing, but you can hit the like dismiss and don't show me this again.
John:
There, there is a button for that.
John:
It should make the badge go away if you're lucky.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's try that and see what happens.
Casey:
Well, thank you, John.
Casey:
I appreciate it.
Casey:
But yeah, very, very frustrating.
Casey:
More frustrating is the CarPlay thing.
John:
which could be the dongle i mean it is possible it's the dongle yeah like i said there have been reports of uh issues with the iphone 17s with the new n1 chip with doing wi-fi in particular car play stuff but they're still kind of scattered my life 17 pro hasn't had any issues yet but who knows it could be an issue with the n1 it could be issue with drivers it could be issue with the ios uh 26 itself we'll find out
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we're running really long and sorry, not sorry, but also on the list of things that we will discuss, but we're going to have to save it for next week.
Casey:
Tech woven cases, silicon cases, potentially iPhone 17 regular AirPods Pro 3.
Casey:
I was able to use those on a flight literally the day after I got them, less than 24 hours after I got them.
Casey:
maybe even less than 12 anyway.
Casey:
So I have thoughts about that.
Casey:
Uh, I was 26.
Casey:
Uh, when I was at St.
Casey:
Jude, I asked a bunch of regular humans instead of nerds, what they thought.
Casey:
So I have some reports about that.
Casey:
Also, Aaron finally got upgraded, uh, today when she got her new phone.
Casey:
So, uh, she has some thoughts as well.
Casey:
So we'll talk about all that.
Casey:
We, we do desire to talk about it, but we're trying to have a less than seven hour show.
Casey:
So we'll talk about that all next week.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Delete Me, 1Password, and Skims.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
Marco:
This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Anthropics' $1.5 billion book piracy settlement.
Marco:
So tune in to hear that.
Marco:
You can become a member for a lot less money than that.
Marco:
atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
We'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh it was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C
Marco:
So I have to do a quick ode to a device that I think...
Marco:
Most people who are computer nerds would be surprised to hear that I would do an ode to suction device.
Marco:
It is a printer.
Casey:
Oh, is it the brother printer that everyone and their mother has?
John:
No, it's the one that Marco has said wonderful things about for years, but he can say wonderful things about it again because not everyone has heard those shows.
Marco:
The giant one?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The giant one.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I will just go over quickly.
Marco:
The giant printer is the HP Color LaserJet M553.
Marco:
I was inspired to get this printer nine years ago, I believe, or nine or ten years ago.
Marco:
Okay, I've been a laser printer person for a very long time because laser printers are just awesome for everything except photos.
Marco:
but everything else they're amazing at.
Marco:
And since good photo printers are amazing at photos, but terrible for everything else, including text or return labels or anything else that people tend to print.
Marco:
I love having honestly one of each.
Marco:
I have a photo inkjet and I have a big laser printer.
Marco:
The problem with laser printers, generally speaking, like home laser printers, they've gotten very cheap and all right over the years.
Marco:
But they are just all right, typically.
Marco:
They are oftentimes very slow to get started, like on that first page out.
Marco:
They're a little bit slow on that because they have to like warm up and just start the entire world before you get that first page out.
Marco:
And their toner cartridges, while they're better than home inkjet printers, those toners are still pretty small and you still have to replace them a lot.
Marco:
And they're a little bit finicky with some of that stuff.
Marco:
So anyway, I bought this giant HP M553.
Marco:
I got it on sale at some point in the past, like almost a decade ago.
Marco:
And it's like a computer lab printer.
Marco:
And what is so satisfying about a giant pro-business laser printer like this is that you can hit print at your desk.
Marco:
And when you stand up and walk over to the printer, it's there waiting for you.
Marco:
It's done.
Marco:
They're so fast.
Marco:
And I had this printer for almost a decade, and I have never changed a toner cartridge.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Because the cartridges for one of these, the printer when I bought it was like $600, which was on sale.
Marco:
I think they're usually closer to $1,000 in this kind of capability range.
Marco:
Um, but the toners for them are like 200 to $300 each.
Marco:
And as you know, the black and then the three colors.
Marco:
So to buy a whole set of toner for this printer would have been like a grand.
Marco:
Um, so it like it's, it's substantial, but those also are made to print like, you know, two or 3000 pages.
Marco:
And I just, I never went through them all.
Marco:
Um, and so this printer has been amazing.
Marco:
However,
Marco:
This printer has been moving with me throughout all the logistics of changing houses over the last couple of years.
Marco:
We had some apartments in the middle where we stayed briefly or like a rental house that we had to move into briefly while things were getting renovated.
Marco:
This printer has moved around a lot.
Marco:
And in the last year, it started getting a little bit flaky.
Marco:
certain times like you'd send certain print jobs to it and it would just crash and reboot and not print it and sometimes you like like certain pdfs would be like it just you would never get it to print you'd have to like print it to a different pdf and like it was a whole thing then we started getting some parts going a little bit bad on it like there's some giant transfer belt that runs through the whole printer and if things go wrong there you start getting like giant streaks across the pages you're printing and i tried taking it out and cleaning it
Marco:
And eventually it was, it was, it became apparent I needed a new one of those.
Marco:
That's like $400.
Marco:
And then I ran out of yellow toner and that's $250.
Marco:
And I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
With all this stuff, I think it's time that I replaced this printer after 10, almost 10 years and,
Marco:
It had one bad year at the end.
Marco:
I'm like, that's really good.
Marco:
So I feel like I got my money's worth, especially considering how much I moved it around.
Marco:
It should have broken long ago, and it didn't.
Marco:
I look around the printer landscape, and I look at what's available now, and you start doing the math.
Marco:
Okay, this has this toner cartridges, and that's rated for this many pages, and you divide it out.
Marco:
Like, what are you paying per page?
Marco:
You start looking around,
Marco:
Not a lot else out there makes a lot of sense to get.
Marco:
Almost everything on the market was, for my purposes, worse than what I bought almost a decade ago.
Marco:
And if you look at HP's current lineup...
Marco:
Almost every entry in that current lineup is worse.
Marco:
Bigger, plasticier, smaller cartridges that cost more money.
Marco:
And then you see that they seem to have replaced my M553 from a decade ago with the M554, which is almost the identical printer.
Marco:
There is almost nothing different about it at all.
Marco:
They upgraded some of the internals.
Marco:
They upgraded the screen.
Marco:
But it looks almost identical.
Marco:
And in fact, because of my good experience with the 553, the 554 is the one I bought for the restaurant this spring.
Marco:
Because we needed one there and we print a lot of stuff at the restaurant.
Marco:
From menus to just other invoices.
Marco:
We print a lot of stuff at the restaurant.
Marco:
And so I bought the 554 for that, and it is perfect.
Marco:
It's everything I wanted it to be because it's just a slightly modernized 553 to the point where even like the extra paper tray that you can buy for the bottom of it, it's the same tray between the two printers.
Marco:
Like that's how little they have changed.
Marco:
And so I got myself that for home.
Marco:
I have replaced the 553 with its exact clone, basically.
Marco:
And I think it's remarkable that I had a printer for almost 10 years that I liked so much that I just bought basically the same one again.
Marco:
There is no, I've never had an experience with a printer that good any other time in my entire computing life, nor have I heard of anyone else ever having one.
Marco:
No one loves their printer that much, but I'm telling you, if you get this printer, you will.
Marco:
Incredible.
John:
So that's my experience, except I usually have to go on eBay because they don't have, they don't make the thing anymore.
John:
It's nice that they still make it.
John:
I guess they probably make printers for a longer period of time because there's just not much innovation in that space, except for how to screw you out of more money by making you subscribe to ink or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And to be clear, and this printer was like $900.
Marco:
Now, granted, you know, I bought the first one for like six something.
Marco:
That was almost 10 years ago.
Marco:
There's some inflation.
Marco:
That one was on sale.
Marco:
This one wasn't.
Marco:
But also like when I'm looking at like, you know, putting in six or seven hundred dollars worth of parts to the old one or I can get a new one with brand new full toners for nine hundred.
Marco:
It's like, yeah, that's actually, and if I can expect to get that decent of a service life out of it, that's great.
Marco:
And I ran the numbers too.
Marco:
If I bought one of their newer models that's a smaller volume rated printer, what do I get toner-wise with that?
Marco:
And basically what it comes down to is the moment you have to buy another toner cartridge for any other alternative out there, you'll come out ahead just having bought this one in the first place.
John:
yeah i mean i replaced my dehumidifier with the exact same model because i couldn't find a better one i just replaced my toaster with the exact same model because i know i couldn't find a better one uh i would keep buying these stupid mice on ebay because they don't make it anymore but if they did i'd be buying new ones uh i'm very familiar with this phenomenon i mean i
John:
When I look to get a new printer, I talked about this on that show when I was discussing my new printer.
John:
I would love to get something like yours.
John:
I just don't have the space for it.
John:
And my wife demands a scanner as part of it, too, which makes, you know, so anyway, I've got an Epson EgoTank thing with...
John:
a scanner on top and you know we print so rarely that i don't mind how terrible the printing is and we use the scanner probably more often than that but yeah maybe when i get a bigger place someday or have more room or take over one of the kids rooms someday i'll get one of these big printers because i do wish i could have a big like business style laser printer even if it's just black and white but
John:
Not there yet, but I'm glad they still make your model.
John:
I mean, or the one number higher.
John:
I think more companies should do that.
John:
When you have a product that works well and there's nothing really to change in the space, why not just keep making it?
John:
Microsoft slash Incase.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm glad you're happy and I'm glad you could find a new old printer.