An Unclean Mouse
John:
But an unclean mouse is funnier and makes people wait longer.
Marco:
When you started out with it was going to be a mouse update, I was not expecting that it was going to be that good of an after show.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's very true.
Marco:
That was so much better than I expected.
Casey:
All right, let's do some pre-show.
Casey:
Hey, you know what?
Casey:
It is still September, which means it is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
And even though Relay FM and all of you have absolutely done a phenomenal job of raising money for St.
Casey:
Jude...
Casey:
There's always more that can be done.
Casey:
There's always more.
Casey:
We are insatiable.
Casey:
Just like rampant consumerism, we are insatiable.
Casey:
So, hey, if you think that it would be crummy for any child to die because of cancer, which I think the three of us pretty much do, you should go to stjude.org.
Casey:
And you should kick in a little bit of money.
Casey:
And I will ask Marco in just a moment to repeat his plea, given what week we are in this month.
Casey:
But in general, it would be a great thing to do, especially if you're American where our health care system is utterly broken, to please donate a little bit of money.
Casey:
Any amount of money is perfectly OK.
Casey:
Because you know why?
Casey:
Cancer kills more children under the age of 14 than any other disease.
Casey:
Doctors from all 50 states and around the world, hello, non-Americans, refer their patients to St.
Casey:
Jude because they have the world's best survival rates for some of the most aggressive childhood cancers.
Casey:
St.
Casey:
Jude provides thousands of free consultations for doctors treating children worldwide.
Casey:
So, hey, again, non-Americans, this affects you too, including kids in your community.
Casey:
So, stjude.org slash ATP, if you please.
Casey:
Marco, why is this the best possible week to donate to St.
Casey:
Jude?
Casey:
Could you remind me, please?
Marco:
Well, if you out there, listener, have just ordered a new iPhone and for reasons I've ordered four, but I don't.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Spoiler alert.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
OK, so I ordered a brief diversion.
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
Lock it up.
Casey:
Lock it up.
Casey:
Concentrate on St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
That's more important.
Casey:
And then I promise you we will dig into this later.
Marco:
Okay, so listener, if you've ordered between zero and four iPhones, I urge you to take whatever you paid for, say, the sales tax, or the case, or the AppleCare, or if you're generous, all of those.
Marco:
duplicate that amount and give that to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
Because what you've said, by spending that on sales tax or a case or whatever, what you've said is, this amount of money I can do without.
Marco:
I didn't even think about it really when planning this purchase.
Marco:
I looked at Apple's price, it said $8.99 or whatever, and I'm like, that's what I'm going to pay, even though at the end of the day you're walking out of there like $1,200 later.
Marco:
Whatever that margin is that you can kind of just spend without too much of a hit to you,
Marco:
Give that to St.
Marco:
Jude if you can.
Marco:
And I know not everyone's going to have this.
Marco:
I know not everyone has that much to spare.
Marco:
But I also know a lot of you do.
Marco:
A lot of you out there are fortunate enough to have that much to spare.
Marco:
So take what you can and give it to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
And this will, I promise you, absolve you of your consumerism guilt of having just bought between zero and four iPhones.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So please, listeners, go out there.
Marco:
Spend this money.
Marco:
Give this money to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
It is the best thing you can do.
Marco:
As we mentioned before, they also accept cryptocurrency, and it's way better to give them cryptocurrency than hold on to it yourself because they can turn it into real money.
Marco:
That can do things.
Marco:
We're going to hear about this.
Marco:
They can turn it into real money that is much more environmentally friendly and useful and that can actually help research and treat cancer.
Marco:
That's much better than whatever it's doing in your BitWallet or whatever.
Marco:
So whether it's cryptocurrency or whether it's your iPhone tax and case and AppleCare or whatever else, please donate to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
It is a fantastic cause and it makes such a difference in people's lives.
Marco:
Way more of a difference than that iPhone is going to make for you.
Marco:
So please donate if you can.
Casey:
Yeah, absolutely.
Casey:
And we should say at the time of recording, the fine, fine, fine folks at 1Password are still the top donors.
Casey:
I have dispatched some stickers to the 1Password folks.
Casey:
I know some of them have been received, so I know they were very happy about that.
Marco:
Did you have to give them 475 stickers or whatever?
Casey:
No, I did not.
Casey:
I did not.
Casey:
But they are leading the charge at nearly $27,000.
Casey:
But hey, you know what?
Casey:
It's still September.
Casey:
Even though the podcast-a-thon was last week, which, by the way, you should go watch the video.
Casey:
It was excellent.
Casey:
But even though that's already done, it is still September.
Casey:
It's still Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
It's not like childhood cancer just disappears in October, y'all.
Casey:
It's still there.
Casey:
So please, anyone who is willing and interested...
Casey:
Hey, if you have $26,922.05, you could be the top donor.
Casey:
It's a small, small, I can't even say it with a straight face.
Casey:
It's a small price to pay, but I will send you stickers if you so desire.
Casey:
So please, stjude.org slash ATP, if you please.
Casey:
And speaking of 1Password, I should note that, hey, if you are somewhat internet-friendly with the founders of 1Password, you can get some bugs fixed real fast.
Casey:
So I complained very gently about how I couldn't drag documents onto the dock icon, and that's either already fixed or coming soon.
Casey:
I complained about the shaky, you know, the, oh, your password was wrong shake, and that's been fixed.
Casey:
So I'm feeling real good about this all of a sudden.
Casey:
1Password 8 is working great now, which is very exciting.
Marco:
It would be kind of funny, like, if after all this, you know,
Marco:
kerfuffle about electron and everything it would be kind of funny if one password ends up being like the nicest electron app and like all other electron apps will use that as an example of like hey you know what it's not so bad to use electron because look what look at what they could do like if they actually just end up making a really good app it is possible it's just 500 megabytes and uses all your ram
Casey:
Small price to pay.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
No, it's not.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
I'm trying to be nice.
Casey:
That was sarcasm.
Casey:
I'm trying to be nice.
Marco:
I don't think he was serious.
Casey:
No, I know.
Casey:
I'm trying to be nice here.
Marco:
That's the one.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I know that with a lot of care and attention, you can make an Electron app that usability-wise is fine.
Marco:
I wouldn't necessarily even say great, but you can get to the point where it's fine and nobody cares.
Marco:
But what they do care about is how incredibly heavy they still are in startup time, memory usage, and disk space.
Marco:
Those three are way worse than native apps most of the time.
Marco:
It makes me sad that as a nerd...
Marco:
I actually still care about the size of my app.
Marco:
My app is well under 10 megs, depending on how the app thinning process has gone on your phone or whatever.
Marco:
Usually it's like five megs or less or something.
Marco:
It depends on how it's happening.
Marco:
But I love having a small app.
Marco:
I value that.
Marco:
My customers occasionally notice, and when they do, they value it.
Marco:
And it's so nice to know, even though you're going to be downloading multiple gigs of podcast with my app probably, that at least the app itself is only like 10 megs.
Marco:
And I take pride in that.
Marco:
And there are people who notice.
Marco:
And I also take pride in the fact that if you really are low on space, or if you have a small device, like small disk space device, that I'm not going to be making your problem much worse.
Marco:
It seems like every app out there feels the need, or feels rather, not the need, but feels like it's an acceptable compromise.
Marco:
to take 300 banks of space on your phone or your Mac or whatever.
Marco:
And that, to me, that sucks.
Marco:
That is greedy and unnecessary and sloppy.
Marco:
And honestly, unprofessional.
Marco:
And I wish that the electrons of the world and the people who use it would prioritize that a little bit more.
Marco:
And one thing that I think would be...
Marco:
One way to do this would be have a subset of Electron that doesn't use Chromium or Chrome, whatever the rendering blob is in the backend.
Marco:
Have one that uses the native renderer on the platform it's running on.
Marco:
So WebKit on Apple platforms, whatever the Microsoft thing is on Microsoft platforms.
John:
Now you're going to get all the people who are going to say, well, we can't because WebKit doesn't implement all of the progressive web application APIs that we need for Electron.
Marco:
I get that, but they could make a wrapper API slash app.
Marco:
Electron is not just a web browser.
Marco:
It is a wrapper SDK, whatever.
Marco:
So they could move that up the stack.
Marco:
They could actually have a much lighter weight core rendering engine
Marco:
And still use web technology to make the app and just have a little bit more of a shim layer on top of it.
Marco:
And I think the benefit to that would pay off greatly.
Marco:
And so I hope that kind of thing takes off because it looks like – look, we're all going to be talking about this forever.
Marco:
But it looks like using web technologies to make one code base for multiple platform native apps is here to stay and is going to be an increasing part of our world going forward.
Marco:
So if that's going to be here to stay, we might as well make better ones because Electron is garbage.
Marco:
And I respect the efforts of people like 1Password who are trying to do a good job with it.
Marco:
And I know Slack has put a lot of work into this as well.
Marco:
I respect these companies that they're taking this massive pile of crap and doing something good with it.
Marco:
But I also – I hope that we're also putting as an industry –
Marco:
An equal or greater amount of effort into reducing the size of that pile of crap they have to deal with in the first place.
Marco:
And so hopefully that moves forward.
Marco:
Anyway, that's end rant.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
We got a URL in the chat from one of the OnePassword folks.
John:
That's T-A-U-R-I dot studio.
John:
And apparently it's the slogan on the website is build.
John:
Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web front end.
John:
So maybe that is like a WebKit powered thing that you're thinking about.
John:
Cool.
John:
One password folks seem enthusiastic about it.
John:
You know, when you mentioned like application size, I'm of two minds about that.
John:
On the one hand, I do the whole thing like of, you know, when I was a kid, I could get a candy for a nickel.
John:
Like that immediately comes to mind when you talk about my applications are small.
John:
They're, you know, Overcast is under 10 megabytes.
John:
And I think...
John:
I have the operating system, my applications, and my documents on a single 400K floppy disk.
John:
The whole OS, the whole thing, plus Mac Paint, plus all my Mac Paint documents.
John:
400 kilobytes.
John:
But yeah, different times.
John:
But on the other side, in the modern era...
John:
Um, of all the sins of Electron disk space, I feel like is, uh, the lowest on the Mac just because yes, it's, it's kind of ridiculous that it's 259 megabytes for one password.
John:
Right.
John:
But in the grand scheme of things, that is such a spec on even the smallest, uh,
John:
hard drive or SSD or whatever because people don't install 10,000 applications and for something like 1Password where it is like this isn't just a random application this is like an essential application that I use every day all the time
John:
paying 250 megs even though yes we know from a technical perspective it is wasteful but paying that price for it is the least of people's concerns ram much worse because there is much less ram and and ram there's tons of contention for right because you could run all sorts of stuff and they all want ram and they're all you know and you never quite have enough of it whereas again you're not going to install
John:
a whole jillion applications or if you're going to fill your ssd it's going to be with like media files and movies and one of those is four gigabytes your stupid 250 megabyte application is a drop in the bucket um so i think ram is a bigger deal and then of course cpu cpu is perhaps the biggest deal because that burns your battery that makes your computer feel slower right so in addressing the sins of electron i would probably tackle them cpu first memory second and disc a distant third but i agree that they all need to be addressed because it is kind of silly
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You know, payment processing is not an easy thing to do without Stripe.
Marco:
I suggest you look into it.
Marco:
You'll see.
Marco:
It's not easy to do.
Marco:
And with Stripe, you can accept all sorts of purchases and products and services and
Marco:
all backed by different payment methods that they take care of for you.
Marco:
So if there is some kind of weird verification thing that some payment method all of a sudden requires you to bounce between some redirect or give some kind of verification code to them, Stripe is the expert in that area.
Marco:
They will handle all that for you, and you don't have to.
Marco:
So you can use their higher-level building blocks and avoid all that messiness.
Marco:
This is why I've used them for so long and for so many products.
Marco:
I've been so happy as a developer.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Stripe for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Speaking of things from big donors, one of the side perks of being the biggest donor even but for a moment is that I will be much more likely to include your feedback in a future episode.
Casey:
And this is from the anonymous troll, self-declared anonymous troll from...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It was one of the first big donations subsequent to the ATP donations.
Casey:
This was with regard to the satellite capabilities that were coming in the iPhone 13 but never landed, which clearly means they abandoned ship.
Casey:
It was not a rumor at all, right?
Casey:
Because they would never get that wrong.
Casey:
But anyways...
Casey:
I was lamenting on ATP a few weeks back, I guess it was before the event, that, hey, the satellite phone I used many years ago, the antenna was massive.
Casey:
The phone was massive and the antenna was massive.
Casey:
And the anonymous troll pointed out, hey, there's these things that you can get that are...
Casey:
It's basically sat phones for consumers and even more than that, kind of like pagers, if you will.
Casey:
So there's this thing called the Garmin inReach.
Casey:
And if you look at it, there's still a big fat antenna by iPhone standards.
Casey:
But compared to what I was envisioning, it is way tiny, super duper tiny, the antenna specifically.
Casey:
The rest of the device is about the size you would expect.
Casey:
But what's cool about this is you can send emails and text messages and whatnot basically anywhere in the world.
Casey:
And I was looking into it just out of curiosity, and you can get a one-and-done month service for $15, which I don't think is terrible.
Casey:
I didn't write it down here in the show notes, but I did love that they were saying something like, when you send an email, it can take up to two minutes to actually connect and send.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Which, I mean, granted, it's dialing freaking space.
Casey:
But at the same time, I thought that was quite funny.
Casey:
It uses the Iridium satellite network.
Casey:
And actually, a friend of mine, who Marco has met many years ago, is in a tangential telecommunications space to satellite stuff.
Casey:
And I was discussing with him that there are apparently several different satellite networks.
Casey:
that do this sort of thing.
Casey:
The one that Garmin uses is Iridium, which is 485 miles up.
Casey:
And I just thought this was a delightful fun fact.
Casey:
And I believe I'm reading from Wikipedia here.
Casey:
I didn't cite the source.
Casey:
That was my own fault.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
But anyways, due to the shape of the original Iridium satellite's reflective antennas, the first generation satellites focused sunlight on a small area of the Earth's surface in an incidental manner.
Casey:
This resulted in a phenomenon called Iridium flares, whereby the satellite momentarily appeared as one of the brightest objects in the night sky and could be seen even during
John:
daylight oh god i just think that's the wildest story i think that's so well it's not delightful but so delightful at least it wasn't like you know starting fires like a big magnifying glass on the earth like right if it was do you think they would tell you probably not probably like well they can't prove that it was us so just tell them there's a light flare
Casey:
Anyway, I just thought that was super interesting.
Casey:
And again, it's not really relevant in terms of the iPhone, or at least not this year anyways.
Casey:
But I was impressed how small the device, again, compared to what I was envisioning and especially the antenna was.
Casey:
So I thought that was cool.
Casey:
So every once in a while, I will read something in the show notes that I know nobody can see, but I assure you it's there, and it will make me literally laugh out loud.
Casey:
And I was looking through the show notes earlier today as I try to remember to do to kind of get myself prepared for what we're going to talk about.
Casey:
And there's a section of follow-up, and this entire episode is likely to be follow-up.
Casey:
It's John's favorite episode.
Casey:
But anyway, the section of follow-up is labeled iPhone, and the first bullet is as follows.
Casey:
Thick iPhone is thick.
Casey:
T-H-I-C-C.
Casey:
And the best part about this is I'm pretty sure this was John Syracuse's work.
Casey:
So, John, was it you that wrote T-H-I-C-C?
Casey:
Because that is the most delightful thing I've seen in a while.
Marco:
It was me.
Marco:
Can I ask you something first of all?
Marco:
When did the two of you first learn that word?
Marco:
I don't know, a year or two ago?
Casey:
Yeah, many years ago.
Casey:
Not many years ago for me.
Marco:
Yeah, mine was like, I can tell you exactly when it was.
Marco:
It was 2019 at WVDC.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
I don't want to say why because it's not nice, but that's when I learned the word.
Marco:
But I'm wondering, do you consider the word thick with two Cs, if somebody called you that, is that a compliment?
John:
Sure, I'd take it as a compliment.
John:
Why not?
John:
It's all kind of, it's kind of thing you can decide.
John:
You can decide whether you think that's a compliment.
John:
I'm going to say yes.
John:
I don't think anyone would ever call me that, but if they did, I would try to take it as a compliment.
John:
You of all people, absolutely not.
Marco:
No, I don't think you'd ever get that, John.
Marco:
This is never going to be a problem you're going to have.
John:
I mean, I think they would just call me thick as in thick in the head, and I wouldn't take that as a compliment, but it's kind of hard to know how they're spelling it when they say it out loud.
Casey:
Anyway, I love so much that you wrote thick iPhone is thick.
Casey:
It makes me so happy.
John:
John, tell me about this.
John:
Thus begins the avalanche of fallout because we did the Apple event show the same day as the event, and so there's a lot of things we didn't know, and now we know them, and soon you will know them too.
John:
So the thickness of the phone.
John:
We talked about the camera bump and the little plateau, the little camera mesa and all the other fretting about that.
John:
A bunch of people have some good science in this now.
John:
So we'll start with Ryan Jones, who did a tweet with a graph of all iPhones from the original on that shows...
John:
the thickness of the phone body, the thickness of the rear camera plateau, and the thickness of the rear camera turret, right?
John:
In different colors in a stacked bar graph.
John:
So like the first three phones, it's just blue for the phone body because there was no camera bump, right?
John:
And then you get up to the 6, and that's the first one with a bump, but it doesn't have a Mesa or a plateau.
John:
It just has the turret, right?
John:
And by the time you get up to the 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, there's blue for the body,
John:
red for the plateau and then pinkish for the camera turret so you get to see the overall thickness of the thickest part and also how much of each phone's thickness is made up by the plateau and the turret or whatever really gives a good perspective on the phone you can see how dramatically the phones got skinnier down to the
John:
basically the five um and then they slowly got thicker and then they started to get thicker in increments and they got thicker and thicker and they're still you know there was a couple little dips here it's but anyway it's good check out the the graph we'll put the link in the show notes and mark will probably make it the chapter bottom line is that the if you if measured at the thickest point which is of course the camera the 13 pro and 13 pro max are the thickest iphones since the five basically um
John:
No, wait, actually more than that.
John:
Thickest iPhone since the 3G, I think.
John:
Yeah, that's a big camera bump.
John:
None of us have our phones yet, right?
Casey:
No, no.
John:
As a matter of fact, no.
Casey:
No, don't even.
Casey:
I would really love to just be in Louisville, Kentucky right now because both our phones, spoiler alert, both our phones are now sitting in Louisville as with probably most Americans' iPhones.
Casey:
And I really wish I could just kind of saunter on down there and be like, hey guys, you want to help me out?
Casey:
But no, none of us have our phones, not until, in my case, probably late Friday.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, well, you probably won't get yours until after the weekend, right?
Marco:
I'm mostly going to get mine after it arrives on a boat on Saturday.
Marco:
Oh, okay, there you go.
Marco:
But yeah.
Marco:
I do think, though, do you think, I mean, having none of us actually handle these phones yet, do you think this is a worthy trade-off?
Marco:
Do you think it's worth making the phone thicker, however many C's you spell that with?
Marco:
Ha ha ha!
Marco:
For the camera, even though the phone body itself is not super thick.
Marco:
But for the camera to continue to get larger and protrude out, do you think it's worth it?
Marco:
Because I got to say, I do.
Marco:
To me, this is like... I mean, again, not having handled these yet, I think this is...
Marco:
absolutely worth it and even though this one has gotten so much thicker that even in a case people like the reviewers who have apple's cases the even in a case it doesn't sit flat on a surface anymore like because the lenses protrude so far it's not even close yeah we knew that was going to be the case the only chance it had was that the bump was going to be so big that it itself would be a stabilizing factor like for example imagine the camera bump went the full width of the phone
John:
then it would lay stable, not flat, but it would lay stable at least.
John:
This isn't quite wide enough to do that either from reports.
Marco:
Yeah, but still, like I'm very happy to see, you know, when it comes to camera lens and optics and sensor size and everything else,
Marco:
It really is limited by how much physical size you're willing to give something, and depth is one of the key limits, like, when you're dealing with these optics.
Marco:
That's why, you know, a lot of Android phones that have, like, these super zoom things, they have to use a periscope kind of arrangement to, like, turn the optics to the side to just achieve more depth, to get, you know, longer zooms and everything.
Marco:
For this, like...
Marco:
Apple's not doing that yet, if ever, but they're achieving more depth, larger, wider apertures, larger sensors.
Marco:
And to do that, you need size, as simple as that.
Marco:
And so Apple could have said, well, in order to preserve our ultra-thin, ultra-light design language for our products, we're just not going to make the cameras bigger beyond a certain limit because they would stick out too far.
Marco:
And instead, they're not saying that.
Marco:
Instead, they're saying, you know what?
Marco:
No, the camera is so important to people and to us and to the sales of these devices that we are going to let it stick out even to a somewhat ridiculous level, you know, where it's almost doubling the thickness of the phone at this point.
Marco:
But it's like, you know, we're...
Marco:
We're going to let the camera stick out to a ridiculous level because it's that important.
Marco:
And even though it violates our principles of like perfect physical design in certain ways, this is important enough to break those expectations.
Marco:
And so frankly, I am happy that Apple makes that decision.
Marco:
Like in this case...
Marco:
If you want a thinner, lighter, shallower depth phone in general that doesn't have as much of a camera mount and sticking out of the back of it, you can get the non-pro ones.
Marco:
There's two options for you.
Marco:
They're both great.
Marco:
And if you want the best camera ever, well, you're going to have to spend some depth.
Marco:
And they give you that option.
Marco:
And that's great, too.
Marco:
And I'm really happy to see that that's an option.
Marco:
While I'm ranting about this, by the way, I want to do some quick follow-up.
Marco:
I had a little bit further down, but I'll move it up here.
Marco:
we got a number of people writing in to school us on lens optics.
Marco:
We had said things in the event episode about how the apertures have gotten bigger in certain places, they've gotten smaller in others, and I was using that as a measure of quality, image quality.
Marco:
And a number of people wrote in to tell me all sorts of stuff, and let me tell you,
Marco:
About half of you are comically wrong.
Marco:
It's very easy to learn a little bit about optics and about lenses because you bought an SLR once and you think you understand everything.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I've been there.
Marco:
My understanding of this is only slightly higher than you in certain areas, you half of these people out there.
Marco:
And I'll let you self-select and decide which half you're in.
Marco:
But I don't know that much about it either.
Marco:
What I do know, though...
Marco:
is that optical quality has a lot to do with how much light you let in.
Marco:
And so, while, yes, it is possible to have very high quality, say, f2.8 lenses, as, honestly, almost every professional working photographer...
Marco:
is almost always shooting a lens that is no faster than f2.8, because it's almost always a 24-70 or a 70-200.
Marco:
Almost all pro photographers are using those two lenses most of the time.
Marco:
So obviously I know that it is possible to have high-quality lenses that are f2.8.
Marco:
I also know that both the F numbers and the equivalent optics and the equivalent background blur amounts also change with sensor size.
Marco:
That's why if you compare what f2.8 looks like on a full-frame camera, if you compare it up to what that looks like on a medium format, or if you compare it down to what looks like on a crop sensor or down to, say, a phone, they all look different because that number is not the only number that matters.
Marco:
That number is actually derived from other numbers, and it all matters.
Marco:
All these numbers mean things, and so...
Marco:
If you think this is going to work on the phone numbers, the way it works on your SLR, I'm sorry, but it doesn't.
Marco:
It's a whole different scene here.
Marco:
And then it's also different because the way optical quality is achieved, we're not maximizing all 12 megapixels most of the time.
Marco:
These lenses do not resolve that sharply, I would imagine, ever, let alone most of the time.
Marco:
And if they did, they would probably require a ton of light to do so.
Marco:
So there's also all sorts of software processing that's going on here.
Marco:
And the way you give that software processing more to work with is by giving it more light and by having bigger sensor pixels and everything else.
Marco:
So this is a very complicated issue.
Marco:
But when I said the f2.8 lens, the f2.8 aperture of the 77mm equivalent 3x optical lens on the Pro, when I'm expressing concern about that not being a ton of light coming in,
Marco:
That concern is warranted, and I guarantee you when we see those images, we will see, and I think the reviews do somewhat back this up, we will see that in medium to low light, you're not going to get what you really want out of that 3X lens.
Marco:
That being said...
Marco:
I am really looking forward to having it anyway because that's a lot of reach.
Marco:
And based on both the reviews and common sense, when you give it a good amount of light, it looks great.
Marco:
So it's going to be great.
Marco:
But do a little research before you make assumptions about SLR camera lens equivalents, especially in regard to aperture because it does not work the same way.
Marco:
But more light coming in is better.
Marco:
And so the f2.8 equivalent 3x lens is not going to produce as good images as that 1x lens with its, whatever it is, f1.6 and whatever it is, I forgot.
Marco:
But it's not going to be as good as that because it's not letting in nearly as much light and you're going to have to do a lot more ISO hiking to get acceptable shutter speeds, you know, for stopping motion.
Marco:
Like, it's going to be a whole thing.
Marco:
As you know, SLR people...
Marco:
as you know you have to really crank up the iso and then do some do more noise reduction uh to capture stuff with uh very with smaller apertures so anyway all that is to say it's complicated and the 3x lens is not going to be as good as you think necessarily but it's still going to be great to have it i'm looking forward to it
John:
To drive that point home, I just put a picture in both the chat and our Slack if you want to take a look at it.
John:
This is a picture where you will see, I think, what most people recognize as background blur.
John:
This photograph was taken at f2.8 on an APS-C size sensor.
John:
It's not even a full frame sensor.
John:
Try taking a picture at f2.8 with your iPhone when you get it.
John:
You will not get these results.
John:
no and this also i mean this looks like it's awfully um i mean to get that amount of separation i have 2.8 i'm gonna eyeball this and just say it's probably something like a 90 millimeter equivalent maybe yeah very close very close um it is i think if i'm reading the metadata in the glass app correctly it is uh 62 millimeters but that's on aps-c so it's 93 millimeters full frame yes
Casey:
That's very impressive.
Casey:
Just a quick aside related to this.
Casey:
I think we might have brought this up on the show a couple of months back, but there's an individual whose name I will absolutely butcher and I will not even try to pronounce it.
Casey:
But this person has written or created some really phenomenal interactive animated web pages.
Casey:
One is about cameras and lenses and how they work and so on.
Casey:
And another is about the internal combustion engine.
Casey:
Both of these are very, very long and involved and fascinating.
Casey:
fascinating and well worth your time so if you want to learn more about how cameras and lenses work or internal combustion engines we'll put links in the show notes because they are very very very well done
John:
We need to talk more about phone thickness, because believe it or not, we're not even done with that first item.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Well, and actually, to answer Marco's question, which was, you know.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Marco:
I haven't answered his question, too.
Marco:
Go ahead.
Marco:
I'm the chief derailleur-in-chief.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We're never going to get through this episode.
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
Casey:
Anyways, your question was, you know, basically, is this increased thickness worth it, specifically with regard to the camera?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, I was thinking about it as you were talking, and early on, when anyone would agree that iPhone cameras were improving but were not great.
Casey:
You know, this is—I couldn't put my finger on exactly when I feel like they moved from garbage to at least passable.
Casey:
And then from passable to good, I would say, has only been in the last two, maybe four years tops.
Casey:
But anyway— When did they add autofocus?
Marco:
Was that like the iPhone 4 or 4S?
Marco:
I don't recall.
Casey:
i would say that was a huge jump yeah i mean it's been better every year but certainly you know you look at early instagram pictures with granted you know instagram butchered them in its own ways but even the source of an instagram picture of that era you know a 3g 3gs etc they were not great photographs but anyways uh in my personal opinion they they're iphone photos are pretty darn good they're not perfect but they're pretty darn good especially if you're not trying to do something super computational like portrait mode or whatever
Casey:
Anyway, so with that in mind, now that the camera or cameras, I guess I should say, are very, very, very good, I think it is worth the increased thickness.
Casey:
I am okay with my thick boy iPhone if it's for either battery life, actually, it's another thing, battery life or for improved camera, I don't know, fidelity, quality, whatever.
Casey:
if it was thicker for other silly reasons, like, I don't know, just to make up a BS idea, like what if they, what if the Taptic Engine was like super thick and they said, well, screw it.
Casey:
We really want this super fancy Taptic Engine.
Casey:
Now we got to make everything big too.
Casey:
That would not be worth it to me.
Casey:
That juice is not worth the squeeze.
Casey:
But if you tell me I got to make this camera plateau with, I love camera turret as well, the plateau with the turrets on top,
Casey:
And you know, again, not having handled these, I think that juice is worth the squeeze.
Casey:
I think that is worth it to me because as much as I do love having what I call a big camera, which is actually not that big a camera, I do love having it, but it's unwieldy and I don't have it with me all the time.
Casey:
And we've made this point a zillion times on this show and we're not the only ones to make it, but you know...
Casey:
Having an iPhone or any phone that shoots decent pictures in your pocket always is amazing if you have pets, if you have kids, or if you just like documenting your life even without either of those things.
Casey:
So yeah, I think it's absolutely worth it, especially these days when the cameras are getting so darn good.
Casey:
John, what's your two cents?
John:
so i agree that it's worth it for the line of cameras they put out this year because it separates the pro from the regular and it like marco said if you don't like that big lump you have a choice the other one that is in most other ways just as good a phone has a slimmer camera and still the slimmer camera is also better than it was last year like the one x camera is you know has a higher a bigger aperture right so and they have sensor shift and all that right so it's great for this lineup they made the right choice um
John:
As I said in the last show, again, still never having handled these phones.
John:
My wife's phone is on the way.
John:
She got the 13 Pro.
John:
I think their problem, Apple's problem, they have two problems here.
John:
One is I think they are at the natural end of the design of putting the cameras in the upper left corner of the phone.
John:
They need to revisit that, especially on the 13 Pro.
John:
The camera plateau is more than half the width of the phone.
John:
It is no longer in the corner in any sense.
John:
It is just it is on the back of the phone.
John:
That's true.
John:
And it's not centered.
John:
That's true.
John:
But it's not really in the corner.
John:
So they need to revisit that.
John:
And the second problem they have is if they follow a typical Apple pattern of passing this down the line, this big giant plateau starts to become
John:
a problem when it filters down and you no longer have a slim camera choice.
John:
And to that end, Marco briefly alluded to this when we were talking about this before, the rumors are that the iPhone 14 will go with an internal periscoped system.
John:
They're not going to make it any thicker.
John:
If you need to get thicker than this, we need to do a periscope.
John:
And people are wondering what that looks like, like a periscope on a submarine where you're looking into this little tube and then there's a tube vertically and then it goes out the top.
John:
Imagine that big vertical tube in a submarine periscope is laying down inside your phone.
John:
It's to be able to get more distance between the sensor and the place where the light comes in.
John:
And rather than getting more distance by making this plateau taller and taller, they get distance by laying it down and using a series of mirrors inside the phone.
John:
Who knows?
John:
We're year out.
John:
Are year out rumors worth anything?
John:
It's hard enough to get the rumors when you're, you know, six months out.
John:
But for what it's worth, the year out rumors about the iPhone 14 show it with a flat back.
John:
And the only way you're going to get a flat back on the phone, on the top end Apple phone, is if they do Periscope stuff.
John:
Because it's not like they're going to say, oh, we changed our mind.
John:
We're going back to crappy cameras.
John:
Like, they're not going to do that.
John:
So that's a possibility in terms of where do they go from here?
John:
They've maxed out the plateau.
John:
But I think the problem is, like...
John:
If that happens, like, okay, and then the iPhone 14 Pro has a flat back and they're all periscope lenses, I don't want to see this giant lump wandering down the line and just becoming like, because I don't want it to feel like punishment to get the cheaper phone.
John:
Like, oh, I get the cheaper phone and it's got this giant ugly camera bump.
John:
The new ones have better cameras and they're flat on the back, right?
John:
Because getting the current 13 non-pro doesn't feel like a punishment because it's got a good camera.
John:
It's better than last year's camera in a bunch of important ways.
John:
And it's slimmer.
John:
So it's a compromise that makes more sense to me.
John:
And by the way, the final bit in here, Adrian Weckler had a photograph.
John:
I'm not sure if he took this photo or if it's from Apple's website, but it shows, I think, what is this?
John:
The 13 Pro versus the 12 Pro side by side.
John:
And you can see that, of course, yes, the 13 Pro camera monitor is bigger than 12 Pro.
John:
We knew that already.
John:
But also the 13 Pro itself, the body is a little bit thicker as well.
John:
That's true of almost all the phones this year.
John:
They're marginally thicker.
John:
The body part is marginally thicker than the other ones.
John:
And that's a move that I can get behind because it gives you more room for more battery, maybe more room for that 120 hertz screen.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Whatever they need more room for, by all means, yes, please, take the extra half a millimeter.
John:
Nobody will notice.
John:
Nobody will care.
John:
And yes, the phone gets a little bit heavier or whatever, but the battery life is well worth it.
John:
So to answer Mark's question again, yeah, totally worth it this year, but I worry about the future.
John:
And I really do hope that they...
John:
come up with some kind of solution.
John:
It doesn't have to be Periscope.
John:
They could decide the solution is instead of having a camera lump, we'll have a camera top half of the phone, which like I said, lots of Android phones do that right now.
John:
And I think that's perfectly fine too.
John:
Like where your phone will have a thick half and a thin half.
John:
That will lay flat, not flat, but that will lay stably on a table and it gives you even more room to work with.
John:
Who knows what they could do with all that space.
John:
So I say go for it.
Casey:
Moving right along, the folks at Halide, I think that's how you pronounce it.
Casey:
I might have that wrong.
Casey:
But anyways, it's a really good third-party camera app.
Casey:
They put together an evolution of the iPhone camera bumps on Twitter, which we will link to, which was very well done and unsurprisingly very thoughtfully designed.
Casey:
And it's worth taking a look at.
Casey:
I thought it was pretty cool.
John:
Yeah, it's like a monochrome line art that I assume is to scale, showing the evolution of the camera.
John:
Because the iPhone 6 was the first one to have a camera that stuck out from the phone at all in any way.
John:
And you could see how it went from one little thing sticking out to two, to two vertically, to a giant square, to a giant square that looked like a stove.
John:
And like, you know, you can see.
John:
Yeah, things are getting, you know, you're getting more and more circles because the LiDAR sensor is there and the flash is on the little plateau.
John:
Yeah.
Ooh.
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:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, moving right along and away from the cameras, Jeff Hackworth writes, As expected, the iPhone 13 devices have the same screen sizes and safe areas as the equivalently named iPhone 12.
Casey:
The notch is narrower and a tiny bit taller, but the safe areas were far enough away for the safe areas to remain unchanged.
Casey:
So the safe areas, this is parts of the screen that Apple says, hey, you probably don't want to put stuff there because it's up, you know, in the horns, if you will, or generally areas where you don't want to put your user interface, but you can do it if you really, really want to.
Casey:
And we had not just the three of us, but in general, you know, the people had wondered, well, are the safe areas going to be different, which would cause, you know, developers to potentially have to rejigger their user interfaces.
Casey:
And according to Jeff, no, that is not the case.
Casey:
And there are some images in the tweet, which we will put in the show notes.
Marco:
Yeah, and to be clear, the system frameworks, the system navigation bars and everything, they all automatically stay out of the safe areas.
Marco:
And so this would actually only be a problem if you would really heavily customize an interface or an interface controller to manually avoid the safe areas and had hard-coded their values instead of just calling the system and saying, whatever the top safe area inset is, move the bar down this amount or add this much padding or whatever.
Marco:
And not only do most apps not do that, but it's really easy to, you know, to code that correctly.
Marco:
It's like to do it the wrong way is actually more work.
Marco:
So most apps will have no problems whatsoever and you won't even notice.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Robert Spivak writes,
Casey:
corollary to your reality check on hollywood and indie films being shot on the iphone it's not one guy with an iphone running around it's an entire expensive film crew with as many as 10 20 or even 50 or more iphones and they solve the file they solve the problems of file transfer speed in downtime using brute force throw money at the problem get more phones
John:
Yeah, that's a typical, you know, movie production way to do it.
John:
Like, oh, it takes long to get everything on the phone.
John:
What are we going to do?
John:
50 phones and a bunch of people.
John:
Done.
John:
Yes, it will take hours to get the footage off, but we have an intern for that and another intern for another one.
John:
Just bring me a new, bring me a fresh iPhone, a fresh one terabyte iPhone.
John:
The cost of that is nothing compared to the cost of like one, you know, red camera.
John:
Um, the, the, the thing about ProRes being like, oh, it doesn't seem like it's a worthwhile thing as a learning tool.
John:
That totally makes sense.
John:
Like, you know, what if you want to learn about color grading?
John:
What's the cheapest way you can do that?
John:
Now, one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to do it is actually with an iPhone.
John:
Um, you do have to use Apple's native editing, uh, apps because I don't think third party ones know about this whole, uh,
John:
Well, I guess the ProRes is fine.
John:
They don't know about the depth thing, which I would argue that you shouldn't bother trying to learn if you're into serious filmmaking because it's not really relevant.
John:
But yeah, for colleague writing, the fact that you've got a little tiny thing that can shoot ProRes is kind of cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Battery sizes are going up.
Casey:
We've made a few mentions of this already.
Casey:
And the Verge had a really nice chart with, you know, the new phone, what the capacity is, what its direct predecessor was, and then what the increase in percent increase were.
Casey:
So the 13 mini went up 9 percent, 13 went up 15 percent, the 13 Pro 11 percent, 13 Pro Max 18.5 percent.
Casey:
Hoo boy.
John:
Those are some big batteries.
John:
I mean, we're starting to see the results now, like the reviews coming out.
John:
But the battery increases are no joke.
John:
And in particular, I wish I'd pulled this stat.
John:
I didn't get a chance to do it.
John:
Gruber had it in his review.
John:
On the Pro phones, the 13 Pro and Pro Max that have the high refresh displays, they support ProMotion.
John:
Um, when promotion, well, when 120 Hertz came to Android phones, very often there was an option to turn it off because it could really drain your battery if you left on 120 Hertz all the time.
John:
Right.
John:
And so like, oh, these pro phones, uh, they've got a hundred and a Hertz cause it's a pro feature, but boy, I'm worried about battery life.
John:
Well, as we discussed last time, it's yes, they go up to 120 hertz, but they also have variable refresh rate, which can save you a lot of energy.
John:
And the place where that shows up in dramatic fashion is if you are, let's say, sitting on public transportation or a plane flight or something, watching a movie on your iPhone.
John:
Movies, most movies, unless you're Peter Jackson, are at 24 or 30 frames per second.
John:
And when you're watching a movie with a frame rate like that, the Pro phones will refresh the screen 30 times a second instead of 60 or 120 or whatever.
John:
Whereas if you watch it on the non-Pro phone without ProMotion, they're at 60 hertz all the time.
John:
So every single frame is being refreshed onto the display twice pointlessly because there's only 30 frames per second in the movie, but your phone is like 60, 60, you know, doing 60 frames per second.
John:
And so the difference, hopefully Casey has looked it up by now, the difference in...
John:
streaming video view time for the 13 pro against the 12 pro is dramatic i think it might be double or close to double it almost doubled it almost doubled your so if you're watching it's like how how many hours of movies can i watch on this plane fly on my phone before my batteries drain almost doubling for an 11 battery size increase how do they do that
John:
Don't refresh the screen so much.
John:
Because when you're watching video, that's basically all you're doing.
John:
It's like decompressing the video and even doing the networking is nothing for the A15 system on a chip.
John:
It's not even, it's like ho-hum.
John:
It's like yawning, right?
John:
Because they've got hardware decoders for the codecs that are supported.
John:
It's extremely battery efficient.
John:
The most expensive thing that you're doing is running the screen and presumably playing audio.
John:
And given that they're basically, they can probably, it probably takes straightforwardly half the energy to refresh at 30 frames per second instead of 60.
John:
And everything else is a rounding error.
John:
So if you're worried, I want to get the pro phone, it's got all those cool features, but it isn't going to take a hit in battery life.
John:
It's the opposite.
John:
If you pay more for the pro phone,
John:
Depending on what you're doing, you may get dramatically better battery life if you're really taking advantage of the screen refresh.
John:
And as we said last week, the same goes for if you're just looking at a web page and not scrolling.
John:
It's refreshing at 10 hertz instead of 60.
John:
That's a big battery savings.
Casey:
Yeah, so reading from Gruber's review, the 13 Mini went from 10 hours to 13.
Casey:
The 13 went from 11 to 15.
Casey:
But here we go, buckle up.
Casey:
The 13 Pro from 11 hours on the 12 Pro to 20 hours on the 13 Pro.
Casey:
And then the Pro Max...
Casey:
goes from 12 hours on the 12 Pro Max to 25 hours on the 13 Pro Max.
Casey:
So you could sit there, hypothetically, streaming Netflix or what have you for 25 hours on one charge of your battery.
John:
Which is double what you could do with last year's phone.
Marco:
As long as you weren't using the built-in speakers, because that's a huge drain.
Marco:
Yes.
John:
Physically moving air really kills your battery.
John:
Physically moving photons also kills your battery, apparently.
Marco:
I feel like this is one of those areas where as technology goes on it's harder to give useful battery life estimates because it becomes increasingly about picking up little efficiencies here and there and therefore the battery life of something becomes much more dependent on what you're doing it'd be one thing if you were trying to measure the battery life of a game gear well it's 10 minutes whatever it is if you're lucky
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Ten minutes, there goes six AA batteries.
Marco:
Was it six or eight?
John:
Atari Lynx was similar in battery life, counted in seconds.
Casey:
I mean, why would anyone use Sega hardware?
Casey:
It was all garbage.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
moving on uh so like you know back then like you know things were simpler you know processors were always running at a fixed clock speed and they were it was like you know whatever you were doing like the screen was always using the same amount of power no matter what it was displaying you know like stuff like that and now we've picked up all these efficiencies as technology has gotten better and more complicated and so now like you know when you look at something like video playback well that depends on a lot of things
Marco:
is the codec being hardware accelerated.
Marco:
That matters.
Marco:
Part of the A15 changes over the A14 is they've added some more hardware acceleration for video.
Marco:
Now, I don't know enough to know what that's for.
Marco:
Some of it's probably for ProRes, but what if some of it is for AV1 or whatever other codecs people are starting to use that are not H264, H265, then if Apple can hardware accelerate that, then that'll improve the efficiency and therefore battery life of
Marco:
you know whatever new services or non-apple services might be using that kind of stuff um that maybe it'll help with youtube maybe it'll help with zoom you know who knows um so there's that kind of efficiency you know hardware acceleration then it's all right well is it now do we have you know a lower frame rate than 60 hertz to display then on the profile on the 13 pros now you can clock down the screen and save some refresh uh some screen refresh uh power there
Marco:
Also, these are OLED screens.
Marco:
So if it's showing dark content versus light content, you're going to save some power there.
Marco:
It's so dependent.
Marco:
And also now with the new promotion stuff, the screen is refreshing in other apps based on not only how much is changing on screen, but also how often you are touching the screen.
Marco:
Because when you're touching the screen, it has to ramp up the refresh rate to track your finger faster and have smooth motion if you're scrolling through a list.
Marco:
So again, it's going to depend even more now on...
Marco:
How much are you touching the screen?
Marco:
What are you watching?
Marco:
Are you watching, you know, things that are constantly moving like video or are you watching, you know, a scrolling, you know, text or fixed image view, in which case it can have more opportunities to save power.
Marco:
So we're moving, you know, just further down this road of the battery life is going to be increasingly kind of like, you know, shrug emoji.
Marco:
Just, well, just try it and see how it goes for you because it's going to depend so much on what you're doing.
Marco:
And this is only increasing over time.
John:
Another thing people in chat room pointed out is I'm not sure if the iPhone 13 Pro has this, but I'm going to assume it does.
John:
The LTPO screens, low temperature, polychristian silicon screen.
John:
My question is, okay, the 13 Pro has it.
John:
Does the 13 have it too or no?
Marco:
As far as we know, no.
Marco:
That seems to be like the difference between like whether something can have promotion or not is whether it has the LPTO OLEDs.
John:
So anyway, if it's only in the pro phones, that is another sort of blanket across the board power savings because one of the advantages of LTPOs is it takes less power to run the backplane behind the screen or whatever.
John:
So yeah, just...
John:
i it's i feel like it's a it makes sense to me when the more expensive fancier phone has better things in it like i don't know that sounds ridiculous but like but yeah if you pay more you get the fancier screen and you get more battery life and you get 120 hertz like yeah it it is a much it is easier to explain what you're getting with the 13 pro versus the 13 than it was with the 12 pro versus the 12
Marco:
I would also say I will disagree with something John said 15 hours ago at the beginning of this topic, which was you said that the gains on the batteries were substantial.
Marco:
And I would say, honestly, the mini only going up 9%.
Marco:
I don't think it's enough.
John:
But like you just said, it depends on what you're doing.
John:
If you're watching movies on a plane, it's huge.
John:
If, yeah, if you're just browsing the web, oh, it's, you know, single digit percent.
John:
But in terms of absolute time, Apple's estimates are like you get like one extra hour on the mini or something.
John:
And it's like web browsing test.
John:
One extra hour.
John:
That's significant.
Marco:
It is, but I think if the Mini's battery life was not enough for you before, it's unlikely that this is going to make a difference.
John:
I'm mostly just setting aside the Mini because nobody buys the phone and you're not even buying it again this year.
John:
But for the big phones, you get an extra two hours or something or an extra 1.8.
John:
Even just one extra hour on a phone.
John:
It really makes a big difference in terms of making it like if you're – the difference between running out and having an extra hour, if you're anywhere close to making it through the day, is a huge difference.
John:
And I think my 12 Pro battery life is great.
John:
Granted, I don't really go anywhere, but I think it's great.
John:
But when my phone is approaching zero, if I'm out doing something –
John:
If at that moment I said, what would you give for one extra hour?
John:
I would say, yes, I would pay for a new phone for that.
John:
So if you're getting a half an hour or 15 minutes or whatever, but if you're getting double for watching Netflix plus an extra hour in your average day or an extra 1.5 hours or whatever, I think it's pretty significant.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And for the record, if the mini was offered with the pro camera system, I probably still would have gotten it.
John:
That would be hilariously lopsided.
Marco:
It would go across the entire back, like just the whole width of the back.
John:
It would be 75% of the width.
John:
That's what's so awkward about their design.
John:
It's like you're not in the corner anymore.
John:
Nobody puts these cameras in a corner.
Marco:
I finally get the reference.
John:
Hey, it's a good movie, isn't it?
John:
You carried a watermelon.
Casey:
it's a decent movie i don't love it as much a decent movie it's decent you're such a i i've only seen it like once i've only seen it once and i actually i think marco's right it's fine well you're both wrong it's an amazing movie oh god can we i was just arguing with snell about real genius earlier tonight so we can move on uh hey john do you want to run through this like uh specs gobbledygook that's in the show notes
John:
yep sure um this is still an open question i didn't get any kind of confirmation of it because phones still aren't quite in people's hands or whatever but there were some things that i saw early on where someone's speculating the 13 pros clocked higher than the 13 in terms of megahertz on the system on a chip uh don't know well i guess we'll revisit that if anyone knows for sure let us know but of course probably by next week people will turn the thing open and let us know for sure
John:
um one thing we do know is same as last year the 13 has four gigs of ram and the 13 pro has six it's exactly the same as it was with the 12 12 pro um so another thing you get on the pro is more ram which is nice um apparently they come with dual e-sims now which is important for people who want to be able to
John:
Not deal with a physical SIM and have two eSIM thingies active.
John:
Given the messed up situation with carriers in the U.S., I'm not even sure if I can use the eSIM, but I do like the idea of going to eSIMs.
John:
Having a SIM card slot at all on the phones when we have this eSIM technology seems to me to be barbaric.
Casey:
Oh, disagree.
Casey:
That's carriers for you.
Casey:
Hard disagree.
Casey:
Hard to disagree, because one of the things that I love about just moving a SIM from one phone to another is that, generally speaking, I can A, handle it myself, B, not have to rely on the carrier at all, and C, don't get charged the completely stupid $25 to $50 upgrade fee every single year or every other year or what have you.
John:
But you're just complaining about carriers there.
John:
Like, technologically speaking, there's no reason any of that has to be true.
John:
It is true.
John:
I agree with you because carriers are evil and stupid.
John:
But, like, I want to live in a future where I don't have to have the little magic plastic thingy with the metal things on it and a tiny little slot and a tiny little paperclip tool that comes with all of our phones.
John:
And so I really do hope that...
John:
We get over this hurdle and eventually kind of like back when, you know, all our phones were locked and everything.
John:
It took a long time for us to get over that BS.
John:
That was entirely carrier manufactured BS.
John:
That's the type of stuff we can overcome with policy changes over time.
John:
And or like even just something as simple for the old folks of having our phone numbers be portable.
John:
That didn't used to be a thing, young kids.
John:
It just became a thing because people complained, right?
John:
So carrier BS, telecom carrier BS can, with many, many decades, eventually be overcome.
John:
And having the technology in place to say, you know what?
John:
We don't need your little plastic card anymore.
John:
Just change your policies so they're not stupid and we'll just do everything in eSims and everything will be automatic.
John:
So we're not living there yet, but I'm glad to see that dual eSims are supported.
John:
And for people who live in the more civilized world, I think dual eSims will already be a convenience for them.
John:
um let's see uh so lots of the reviews that are coming out now have pointed out that the on the 13 pro the switching from the 1x camera to the macro lens when you're like going really really close to something is kind of jarring like you look in the viewfinder and the phone will automatically say i know you you have the 1x camera selected but i'm going to stop using that camera and i'm going to switch to what is it the ultra wide that does macro yes i'm going to switch to the ultra wide and put it in macro mode
John:
So it switches cameras on you without you knowing and without the UI reflecting that.
John:
And what you see through the viewfinder goes through this jarring transition where it's like, oh, now you're looking through a different camera and like the background jumps and it looks weird.
John:
We'll put a link to a YouTube video so you can see it in action.
John:
But almost everybody who's reviewed the camera has said, that's kind of weird.
John:
and it doesn't make for a pleasant experience and it basically reframes your shot a little bit too while you're zooming in and you can't control it like it changes uh to the macro lens when it thinks there's a thing too close to it um so that's kind of crappy but already based on all these reviews apple has said officially that they are going to release a software update that lets you enable or disable this auto switching so if you don't like the auto switching and you just want to control which camera it uses yourself you can turn that off and i think i probably will turn it off because if i want a macro shot i know i want a macro shot i will
Marco:
you know enable it or go to the macro camera or whatever um i don't like it trying to switch for me yeah i think it depends for me on like you know what is the behavior so if you know assuming that the uh ultra wide lens is always capable of focusing down to two centimeters which is great like if it's always able to do that and you know just if you get close enough it does it
Marco:
then if you have to switch over to the ultra-wide to have that close focus capability, that would be kind of nice.
Marco:
Because, you know, I saw the video clips of the people who show, like, you know, what happens when it jumps over.
Marco:
And it is, I would say, it's inelegant.
Marco:
And so if they can, in the future, do it without that kind of jump, great.
Marco:
If, you know, if this is what we have to live with to get macro...
Marco:
Again, it's inelegant, but I'll live with it because macro focusing distances are very, very close.
Marco:
It isn't just if you want to take a picture of a butterfly or whatever.
Marco:
It's also very useful in everyday situations.
Marco:
Scanning QR codes or magnifying text, taking the picture of the label on the back of your Wi-Fi router so you can then go type in the password somewhere.
Marco:
There's all sorts of useful little times like that where having closer focusing distance will be very helpful and
John:
and so if i have to tolerate the little jump yeah it's inelegant but i'll take it because the utility is worth it but if there's ways to avoid that even better yeah i think that having it auto switch by default is probably the correct default because people won't know about it otherwise um i'm what i'm mostly worried about is uh like oh my my finger accidentally goes in front of the phone and it thinks something is thing macro range and switches like sort of false starts or or sort of uh uh
John:
gear hunting and automatic transmission parlance where you're like you're right at the edge of the distance and it's like a macro 1x macro 1x like it needs to be worked out a little bit um and we'll have to see once we get the phones if if the uh if the auto switching uh is easy to trip up like by accidentally having something pass in front of the lens and switch you to the macro which will just be a mess
Marco:
We'll see you next time.
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Casey:
All right, tell me about A15 performance.
John:
This is a big question.
John:
The first one we have in the follow-up here is in a very early article from TechMeme.
John:
It's linking to a semi-analysis substack that says, here's a quote from the thing, Apple, in a first, reported no CPU gains for the A15, likely because of the engineer's exodus to companies like Nuvia and Rivios.
John:
So this is a whole big story about
John:
how Apple has this huge brain drain in their chip design staff.
John:
Like 100 people have left Apple's chip design place to go work at other places or run their own startups, which is a thing that has happened.
John:
They've lost a lot of people because once you're extremely experienced and know what you're doing, the temptation to start your own company and do your own thing is very real.
John:
And that's, you know, that's Apple's challenge to overcome.
John:
But apparently Apple has lost a lot of good people to that.
John:
But the other part of the thing of saying Apple in a first has reported no CPU gains.
John:
Well, Apple didn't really, as we talked about last week, didn't really say much specifically about the A15.
John:
They just compared it to chips that are way slower than it.
John:
And then we tried to do back of the envelope math to figure out how much faster the A15 is than the A14.
John:
But this was the first story of like no CPU gains, right?
John:
Now that people have them, reviewers have them, and they've been testing them a little bit, we have some numbers.
John:
So here's Ben Bajaran.
John:
He has a big article about it, the A15 performance.
John:
You can read about it.
John:
He has some graphs.
John:
One of them shows for the past five years, Apple has had an average of 19% GPU gains year over year.
John:
But for the A15, Apple has increased GPU performance by 52%.
John:
So normally it's like a 20% increase and this year it's 50%.
John:
And it's no surprise why.
John:
extra GPU core.
John:
Like, GPUs are embarrassingly parallel.
John:
If you want to make them go faster, you add more GPU.
John:
Like, it's very easy to add more GPU.
John:
And so they, it's not many more cores, but a four core GPU, and they went to a five core.
John:
But hey, big bump.
John:
But on top of that, the A15 GPU also has new features.
John:
It has an increased core count, which I just said.
John:
It has increased F32 math rate per core, lossy renderable textures that save memory and storage bandwidth, support for sparse depth and stencil textures, and a new SIMD shuffle and fill instructions.
John:
This is from Gokhan Avkarogulari, who gave me all this information about the GPU.
John:
And Apple itself has a tech talk.
John:
uh video like they put out these little videos they're kind of like miniature wwc videos they have a tech talk called metal advances in a15 bionic that goes over a lot of these features so not only does the a15 have another gpu car going from four to five if you get the pro phones although the non-pro ones have five two one is just broken um
John:
But GPU performance is basically a double the normal year-over-year increase for GPUs on the iPhone.
John:
So that's all good news.
John:
But what about CPU?
John:
So what Jason Snell says is, while the last four processor upgrades have averaged a 20% speed boost in single-core performance, on my scorecard, the A15 is only about 11% faster than the A14.
John:
And multi-core performance, the speed gains are even more meager, about 4% compared to average gains of around 22% every year for the past three years.
John:
So the A15, much faster and better and bigger GPU, you know, a very big GPU increase.
John:
Single core, 11%, 10%, but still not zero.
John:
And then multi-core, only about 4% because it has the same number of CPU cores.
John:
So the A15 cores, the A15 is better than the A14.
John:
A lot in GPU, not so much in CPU, but still it is better.
John:
So the original tech meme story of no CPU gains, not true at all, right?
John:
If you want to see that in a graphical form, Mac Rumors has a story about it.
John:
And there is a graph from, who is this from?
John:
This is Ben Bajaran's graph, I think, showing single core percentage increase over time, starting with the iPhone 5S.
John:
uh and plus a little line graph showing you like what the percentage increase is and yeah this is a little bit of a down year but in the overall graph you can see their system on chips are still getting better uh and the final bit here uh from our friend dhh at uh base camp um he did a tweet this afternoon the fastest single core performance for javascript in any computer at any price is drum roll please
John:
the $499 iPad mini with an A15.
John:
Now, why is that?
John:
We just got done saying, oh, the A15 is only 10% faster than the A14.
John:
Yeah, but the A14 was really fast.
John:
The iPad, this is in one particular JavaScript benchmark, you know, setting aside how representative this is.
John:
Obviously, DHH cares about it because Basecamp has a web app and they have like web apps like the Hey Email app and everything.
John:
So they care about JavaScript performance and apparently they care about this one benchmark.
John:
And in this one benchmark,
John:
If you look at the number three fastest computer is the MacBook M1 using Chrome.
John:
The number two, iPhone 13 Pro.
John:
And the number one device, iPad mini A15.
John:
And this is not a list of Apple devices.
John:
This is a list of like, at any price, any computer thing that you can buy.
John:
Single core JavaScript performance.
John:
If you go down, I forget where it is.
John:
It's like, how many items is this?
John:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
John:
Around item 16 or 17 is the first Android phone with a score of 84.
John:
The iPad mini has a score of 245.
John:
um so yeah the ipad mini is the fastest single core javascript performance device you can buy at any price from anybody it's faster than the m1 macbooks certainly faster than all the intel ones if you look down there are some intel ones i guess in the top 10 the imac 3.8 i7 has a score of 150 again ipad mini 245 so is the a15 a good chip yeah it's pretty good are the a15 cores good they seem pretty good if there's an m2 and it uses a15 cores that will be a good thing for everybody
Casey:
Yeah, it's been interesting seeing more so right after the event, all the kerfuffle about, oh, Apple didn't make any improvements.
Casey:
What are they doing here?
Casey:
I hear the idea behind that, but I can't help but wonder, you know, if you look at...
Casey:
All the departures that have supposedly happened from their chip team.
Casey:
And then on top of that, we're still waiting for what I would call the real MacBook Pros and for potentially an iMac Pro and a bunch of other Mac hardware.
Casey:
And if it really is the same team now, which I have to assume it is...
Casey:
What if they just kind of cruised on the A15 and they really dedicated all of their time on whatever is coming up for the MacBook Pro that I'm going to insta-buy?
Casey:
And obviously, I won't know.
Casey:
I can't know until we see what happens.
Casey:
And I will never know if they're related events or not.
Casey:
But if I were to wager a guess, I think what's happening is that they're just trying to put out the biggest fire, which is getting chips for their forthcoming MacBook Pros.
John:
It's hard to know how they're prioritizing things internally.
John:
But I think the explanation for the A15's performance delta of the A14 is as simple as saying that they knew the A15 would be manufactured in the same process as the A14.
John:
And when you're on the same process, when you don't have a shrink, when your transistors don't get any smaller,
John:
you are very limited, especially in a phone, to what you can do.
John:
Because like, you know, the bottom line is you have a power envelope and if you're at the same process size, it's kind of the same power envelope.
John:
So it's like, okay, do exactly what you did with the A14, but do it faster, but use the same amount of power or less.
John:
And you're like, well, if I have a shrink, I can do that.
John:
That's the whole point of shrinks.
John:
But if I don't have a shrink, so like if I could have done that, I wouldn't think I would have done it on the A14.
John:
So it's very difficult to eke out extra performance.
John:
Not impossible because you can see here they're doing it, but it's very difficult to eke out those huge, you know, oh, 30% faster this year, 20% faster in single core performance without also having a shrink.
John:
So why is the A15 only, you know, 10% faster in single core than the A14?
John:
Cause it's also on five nanometer and you know, what else are you going to do while staying within that power?
John:
But as I was trying to emphasize with the iPad mini thing, like why is the iPad mini on top?
John:
Maybe it's clock tire, maybe it thermal throttles less.
John:
Like the iPad mini is obviously a friendly or thermal environment than the phone just cause it's so much bigger and there's so much room for heat to dissipate and everything like that.
John:
And you know, it's not that much fast in the iPad for some of the scores are 245 for the iPad mini and 238 for the iPhone 13 pro.
John:
right but the point is 10 faster than an a14 is phenomenal is the right it's it's not like oh it's only 10 fast yeah it's 10 faster intel chips if they got 10 faster year over year we used to celebrate because it was so rare so i you know i'm not disappointed in the a15 performance of anything i'm excited about the possibility of having a15 cores in an m2 in like next year's macbook air redesign that we talked about a few shows back
John:
we shall see and then finally photographic styles john we didn't mention it all last week it's the thing where you can say like i like my photos to be contrasty or i want them to be cool or warm or you know it's kind of like applying a bunch of different settings to all the photos you take which is a nice touch because iphones take iphone pictures like the it's very pervasive in the apple world if you take a picture with your phone i see this all the time because i use apple you know i have an iphone and i also use apple photos
John:
um if you take a picture with your iphone and then you load that picture up in apple photos and you click on the little like magic wand thing that says just make my picture look nice apple and it's an iphone picture it says it does what fonzie does in front of the mirror and happy days neither one of you knows this reference there you go hey what fonzie does in the intro to happy days is he goes he goes up to the mirror in the bathroom um and he's got his his black plastic comb out of his back pocket and he goes and puts his
John:
puts his two hands up to, he goes and puts his two hands up to his hair, his greasy hair, to like, I'm going to comb it with this black, my black plastic comb.
John:
And he goes about to comb it and he looks in the mirror and he says, ah, you know what?
John:
I already look great.
John:
Hey, and he doesn't comb it.
John:
That's exactly what Apple Photos does.
John:
When it's easy, you took a photo on an iPhone, it's like,
John:
Adjust your picture.
John:
Hey, it's already great.
John:
It doesn't do anything.
John:
It doesn't change anything.
John:
Because whatever adjustment that little magic thing was going to do, your iPhone already did.
John:
Your iPhone is very opinionated on how it interprets the incredible mess of noise that comes off the sensors from these cameras.
John:
And that opinion has been like the way iPhone pictures look.
John:
And photographic styles finally lets people have some say in that and say...
John:
I don't like the way they look.
John:
I think they're too cool and I wish they were warmer.
John:
I think they're too warm and I wish they were cooler.
John:
I think they're too low contrast and I wish they were higher.
John:
I'm not sure how flexible this feature is, but literally doing anything to sort of be able to change like across the board how your pictures look
John:
I think is a good idea.
John:
And I saw that picture, the thing I thought of Tiff because Tiff has her own personal photographic style.
John:
If you've seen a lot of her photography, you can pick it out.
John:
Tiff does that manually because it's the Tiff style, right?
John:
I don't think photographic styles can match the Tiff style.
John:
I don't think there's any chance in hell it could do what she wants to do to the pictures.
John:
But in that vein of having a personal style of how you want your pictures to look and
John:
it's great that the phone is starting to go in that direction for people who don't have Tiff's photo retouching skills, or maybe don't, maybe don't even know what their taste is, but having three or four settings that they can flip through and say, Oh, I like this.
John:
And they just turn that on.
John:
And from that point on, all their pictures are slightly warmer and they're just happier with their, their cameras.
John:
I think this is a good idea.
Marco:
yeah me too i am all for this feature like i i think this is great because i remember it was only a you know a month or two ago when we had friends visit and i talked on the show about how like one of them is a really good photographer and was using her own camera like a standalone camera and that i i noticed that the way it just rendered colors and contrast was just different than the iphone and it was
Marco:
In addition to being a really nice camera, it was also just refreshing to see a different balance of choices there being made by that camera.
Marco:
It was a refreshing change of pace from my photo library, which is almost 100% iPhone pictures.
Marco:
They stood out, and it was cool and nice.
Marco:
And so to be able to tweak this for yourself and for your own photos...
Marco:
Just a little bit.
Marco:
I wouldn't go too severe with any of the adjustments here, but to be able to just tweak things slightly for your own preferences and to be able to change them over time or change them for different settings, I like that.
Marco:
I really like that.
Marco:
So this, I feel like, can reduce the amount of sameness among what everyone sees and does and produces.
Marco:
And that's always a welcome change, in my opinion.
Marco:
One of the...
Marco:
uh downsides of apple making such great products and and taking over so much of you know certain industries or certain demographics or or at least at least you know everyone we know at least one of the downsides of that is that everyone has the same stuff everyone has the same like you know silverish computer with the apple logo and the black keyboard and
Marco:
Everyone has the same three or four models of iPhone.
Marco:
That's pretty much what everybody has.
Marco:
They all look similar.
Marco:
They're all similar colors.
Marco:
They all do similar things.
Marco:
And they're all great.
Marco:
Everyone's wearing the same watch.
Marco:
They're all great, but a little individuality would be nice.
Marco:
When things are that successful and that ubiquitous, it's nice to be able to have individuality in some way.
Marco:
This is why I'm always pushing for them to have more colors in the products, more custom watch faces.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
Just individuality is always a good thing to have.
Marco:
And as their stuff has taken over and gotten so popular, individuality has often suffered just by nature.
Marco:
So something like this where, okay, now everyone isn't shooting the exact same iPhone pictures.
Marco:
Everyone's pictures can look a little bit different and still be good, not look wrong or not look over-processed.
Marco:
They can still be good just making different choices, having different priorities, having different looks.
Marco:
That I very much welcome.
Casey:
I heart agree on that.
Casey:
And I think that's why widgets were and remain so popular is because it is, granted, it's not the same kind of individuality you're talking about in that it's not externally visible in the same way, but it's customizing your software life to be more for you.
Casey:
So, yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
Last episode, we were speculating that the physical wallet that you can attach magnetically to your iPhone, that it has some sort of find my technology.
Casey:
And we figured, oh, what happens is when you disconnect it from your phone, your phone reports into the mothership that, oh, I was at such and such a location when it gets disconnected.
Casey:
And Snell writes that the new iPhone 13 wallet has an NFC chip inside to enable its find where detached from my phone feature.
Casey:
Turns out you can use this feature with the iPhone 12 models.
Casey:
The magic is in the NFC chip, not the phone.
Casey:
And that was news to me.
Casey:
And that's pretty cool.
John:
Yep, he's got a whole article about it giving more detail than just this tweet.
John:
But yeah, it's just an NFC thing.
John:
I will reiterate my anger that the solution to the problem of a wallet that keeps falling off your phone is to make it easier to find after it gets lost rather than saying maybe we shouldn't have a wallet that magnetically connects to the back of our phone.
John:
Although on that front, some of the people who have the new phones and the new wallet, I'm not sure how they have them already.
John:
Maybe they're reviewers.
John:
But anyway, there are some reports that everything is stronger.
John:
There are stronger magnets in the phone and in the wallet, and it is harder to detach than it was.
John:
Is it harder to detach than a wallet case, though?
John:
I still don't think that's a great product.
Casey:
uh for what it's worth our cases arrived yesterday i believe i haven't opened either of them i actually think i'm going to return the apple leather case that i bought oh we should probably say what we purchased i guess we kind of obliquely did what we didn't we never got to marco's uh whole situation so maybe we can slot that in in a moment but i bought a uh 256 gig uh what is it sierra blue iphone 13 pro aaron got a 256 gig uh whatever the silver is is that not champagne what's the silver this year
Casey:
uh starlight or whatever was it yeah there you go thank you uh got one of those um she's got the i forget the official term but basically a light pink silicone case uh silicon silicone i always get it wrong uh like i said silicone thank you and then uh i ordered the apple black leather case but i don't know if i'm gonna actually even open it i'm i've
Casey:
I've tried at the recommendation of Paul Cathasis.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
It's a shoot.
Casey:
I don't have it in front of me.
Casey:
The stalling for time nudient, which is a very funny word.
Casey:
Uh, N U D I E N T case.
Casey:
I have not received it yet and probably won't for another week or two, but I'm going to try that because it comes in a vaguely similar.
Casey:
One of the options is a vaguely similar, similar blue to the Sierra blue.
Casey:
John, you mentioned what Tina's getting.
Casey:
Can you repeat that for me, please?
John:
She got a Sierra blue, uh, 13 pro two 56.
Uh,
John:
And she ordered two cases because she likes to have different styles.
John:
Unfortunately, she ordered two iPhone 13 cases, so those had to be returned.
John:
Whoopsies.
John:
Be careful when you're ordering.
John:
She showed them to me and said, these are the wrong cases, aren't they?
John:
I said, they sure are.
John:
So then she reordered.
John:
I believe they're both...
John:
I don't remember.
John:
I think they're both silicone.
John:
She was picking based on color.
John:
Whichever ones had the two case colors she wanted, she got two of those.
John:
And we also got the little battery, the Apple stick-on battery pack thing, which I told her she would be disappointed in.
John:
And she listens to ATP.
John:
Oh, it's not that bad.
John:
because you don't understand that the battery she has now it's gargantuan it is bigger and it doesn't come off and i was trying to say remember that episode it's not like you're gonna be able to take this battery pack slap it on the back of your phone for five minutes and get a bunch of charge and then take it off it's gonna be on there all the time and it's smaller than your current battery so be prepared to be disappointed but she's gonna try it so that's what she's got i mean she could just stop poking manning all the time that would also be a solution yeah
John:
she was angry about apple is another thing i think i think we mentioned on the show this stupid policy that apple has um she ordered all this stuff all at once in like one big pre-order thing but then of course she had to return the 213 cases so she just went to the physical store to return the 15 cases about they're like oh you can't return that until your entire order has arrived right like that like you can't return it at a physical store because the phone hasn't gotten there yet so we can't do it because the order hasn't got so
John:
She ended up like she had to leave the store without giving them back the cases and then get like a shipping label from Apple and send.
John:
It was annoying.
John:
Like they have that policy of like the the they address.
John:
Maybe it was someone who wrote into us saying they address your order as an entire thing.
John:
And it's not like you can piecemeal mess with individual parts of it, especially if some of it hasn't arrived.
John:
So that was a little bit annoying.
John:
She came back from the Apple store kind of angry about that.
John:
But anyway, that understandably.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
All right, Marco.
Casey:
How did you end up with between zero and four iPhones?
Casey:
What is happening over there?
Marco:
It isn't that interesting of a story.
Marco:
So basically, iPhone ordering time is during the time that I have to drop my kid off at school.
Marco:
And so I dropped him off.
Marco:
I went outside.
Marco:
And before I could get home, it turned 8 o'clock.
Marco:
So I just stopped in front of the school.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
and took out my phone and just and i had and and you know tip was at home doing you know work stuff so i didn't want to disturb her so i was tasked with the you know the annual commitment of ordering two phones you know the big phone for her and the little bit less big phone for me right so i opened up my phone at the right time and the pre-approvals are just not there because oh well it's
John:
They were hard to find.
John:
When my wife was trying to do her order, she handed me her phone and she launched the Apple Store app.
John:
She handed me her phone and said, where the heck are my orders?
John:
And I was like, tap.
John:
And I found them.
John:
I actually don't even remember where they were, but it's not obvious.
Casey:
I think they were supposed to show up in the landing page, but that was only, I think, after the pre-orders had opened.
Casey:
And of course, because Apple stinks at web services, it didn't really work for a lot of people, including me, if I remember right.
Casey:
And you had to go... I'm doing this off the top of my head.
Casey:
You had to go into the store app, and then one of the tabs at the bottom will end up putting your profile as a button in the upper right-hand corner, like a picture of your profile or whatever.
Casey:
And if you drill into that...
Casey:
Then like you scroll a ways and you can finally find your stupid pre pre-orders.
Casey:
You would think they would put it front and center since obviously time is of the essence.
Casey:
Obviously they're trying to get you to spend money.
Casey:
The information architects at Apple, I would love to have a sit down with them over a lot of alcohol because, oh my gosh.
John:
That's not an information architecture problem.
John:
I think it's probably like a, why does nothing work on the store on launch day?
John:
Because like,
John:
you know everything is all slammed and so i bet it wasn't supposed to work that way but in practice it did and i had to furiously tap around on the app before i could rematerialize her pre-order oh and by the way speaking of speaking of the pre-order thing just to remind everyone that dtk discount that i have that i fought to get back oh yeah didn't even try to use it with this because i have no idea what that would mess with the pre-order it's like i'll get to that okay here we go
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I'm standing in front of the school just trying to order things on my phone through the Apple Store app.
Marco:
Because I know, like, first of all, I'm trying to order an iPhone Pro and an iPhone Pro Max at lunchtime.
Marco:
And we both wanted the new blue color.
Marco:
And I knew, like, odds are if something's going to sell out first, it's going to be that blue Max followed by the blue Pro.
Marco:
Like, those are going to be the ones that sell out first.
Marco:
So I was rushing.
Marco:
I'm like, all right, you know what?
Marco:
My pre-orders aren't even here.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
I'll just go through and order new.
Marco:
So first order mine because, hey, you know, order is privilege.
Marco:
So first order mine.
Marco:
And again, like we're not talking about multi-item carts here.
Marco:
No case.
Marco:
Just like order the phone.
Marco:
Boom, boom, boom.
Marco:
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Go.
Marco:
Oh, God, I forgot to agree to the terms.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
Agree to the terms.
Marco:
Go.
Marco:
OK.
Marco:
Oh, Apple Pay failed.
Marco:
Try again.
Marco:
OK, it works.
Marco:
OK, now go back.
Marco:
Order tips again.
Marco:
Start over.
Marco:
Throw the fork away.
Marco:
Just, you know, do everything again.
Marco:
Tap, tap, tap, yes.
Marco:
Now I want the Macs, whatever else.
Marco:
Now in that rush, I was able to get two phones with day one delivery.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
So, all right.
Marco:
Get on my bike, ride home.
Marco:
After I'm home, now I'm like, all right.
Marco:
What I actually want is not two, you know, fresh phones that have no idea about AT&T and everything else.
Marco:
What I want is for one of those, Tiff's phone, to be a trade-in to replace her existing one.
Marco:
So now it's like, all right, now I got my definite day one orders in.
Marco:
Now that I'm home, you know, 10 minutes later, let me try...
Marco:
Can I place a second order with Tiff's phone that's like a, you know, replace this phone on my account kind of order so the trade-in is easier to deal with?
Marco:
And then I can cancel the first order.
Marco:
So that goes through, but there's a weird... And again, even 10 minutes later, surprisingly, the Max, in the nice blue color, was still available for day one delivery.
Marco:
So great, okay, lucked out.
Marco:
So from Tiff's phone, we placed a second order that's going to be like the one that we hopefully keep.
Marco:
Great, okay, but...
Marco:
got the trading got everything set up properly on her phone through her apple store app okay i don't want to cancel the first order until like 24 hours from now just to make sure this actually is gonna go through then i thought well look at my luck i actually have apple gift cards to spend and my phone now like 15 20 minutes later my phone is still available for day one delivery
Marco:
oh my gosh so i went and created a new order for my phone as well using my dtk discount because i figure this is clearly so i went went to my macbook air like you know doing it all like in the computer way like through the web store which is totally different than the app back end so i'm like all right so i use my dtk discount to order myself a phone and got five hundred dollars off that's fantastic you know so
Marco:
Now I have four orders, but I didn't want to cancel those first two until the next morning.
Marco:
This is last Friday.
Marco:
I knew it was a few days away from shipping.
Marco:
It should be fine.
Marco:
Well, these orders went almost immediately into the preparing to ship status, and
Marco:
And you can't cancel phones in the preparing to ship status.
John:
And by the way, I would remind you that you also can't cancel or shouldn't cancel that phone that you use the DTK discount for because then you will lose the discount.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So I'm not going to cancel that one regardless, but I can't anyway because they all went almost immediately into preparing for ship.
Marco:
You can't cancel that without contacting support.
Marco:
So I contact the web support and everything.
Marco:
And it's, you know, well, we can try to put in requests, but we really are just initiating returns.
Marco:
So you might actually receive these and then you have to immediately return them or they might catch the return in the shipping process and just never ship in the first place.
Marco:
So I still have four orders total.
Marco:
All of Vixier preparing to ship and all of Vixier delivers Friday.
John:
Yeah, don't get those mixed up when they arrive at your house because it may not be obvious which one of your phones is the one that has DTK.
John:
And again, I will emphasize you do not want to return the reward.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
From your horror story, I heard that.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, so I know hopefully I'll be receiving exactly two phones and it will work itself out.
Marco:
But if not, it will be some logistics.
Marco:
But anyway...
John:
I didn't use my DTK discount for two reasons.
John:
One is I didn't know how to do it from the app, which is where we have that stage pre-order.
John:
That's why you did it on the web, I imagine, because the whole DTK discount is this weird thing, and they want you to go to URL and add a thing to cart.
John:
Maybe you can do it from the app, but I didn't want to risk it in the rush.
John:
And the second thing is, because this is my wife's phone, she ordered it from her existing phone that it's replacing, just like you did with TIFFs, just because it makes everything more convenient.
John:
but the code thing i'm like is that tied to my apple id is that tied to my developer account too many questions and we do have she's going to get a watch too so we're going to use it with the watch because i am going to buy the watch quote unquote for her you know i'll buy it through my apple id because the watch doesn't really matter you can anyone can buy the watch it's not screwed up by carrier crap so i do still plan to use the dtk thing it is still burning a hole in my pocket but i'm going to use it very carefully and deliberately and currently the plan is to use it on a watch
Marco:
I will also echo Casey's complaint about the leather case this year.
Marco:
So normally, okay, I've been caseless, casey-less for my Mini because it's wonderful, and I love the aluminum sides and the tacky glass back of the non-pro phone.
John:
You love dropping it on the ground, we know.
Marco:
Only a couple times.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
So, you know, but this time I'm like, all right, you know, I'm getting a bigger phone now.
Marco:
It has the fingerprint sides and the slippery back because pro, I guess.
Marco:
So, all right, I might as well go back to the land of cases.
Marco:
And when I use cases, my favorite cases have always been the Apple leather cases.
Marco:
I wish I liked the silicone because silicone cases are more practical.
Marco:
So much better colors.
Casey:
So much better colors and cheaper.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Way better colors.
Marco:
I'll get to that.
Marco:
10 bucks cheaper, 20 bucks cheaper.
Marco:
I live in a place with a lot of water and surfaces that are always wet.
Marco:
Having leather cases, I always will develop spots on the leather from this one time I set it down on a drop of water on a wet counter or something like that.
Marco:
Then it stains it forever or whatever.
Marco:
I would like the more practical material of silicone.
Marco:
The only problem is
Marco:
I hate having the silicone case go in and out of jeans pockets because it just it catches and it pulls the whole pocket liner out.
Marco:
Like it's just not a good.
Marco:
But this time I look at the colors that are available for my for my blue phone and the case colors Apple offers for the leather case this year are tan, gray, green and two shades of purple.
Marco:
so bad there's no blue like what so i guess blue is a popular enough color to offer the only like reasonable color of your pro phone that's not like a shade of black or white that's blue but not popular enough to offer a blue leather case
Marco:
so ridiculous and of course you know previous years cases won't fit it so i i don't so i ordered the so i i can't bear any of these leather colors i ordered the silicone like whatever the bird blue was it looks pretty good but i don't i don't i'm gonna try silicone to see if i can get used to it but i'm not hopeful
Casey:
I'm curious.
Casey:
I'm very curious to hear how that goes for you, because I agree wholeheartedly that the silicone cases are much better colors.
Casey:
They're much cheaper.
Casey:
I think they don't feel quite as heavy, but not in a physical sense.
Casey:
Like,
Casey:
I don't know, they just feel more slimming, but it's just, I don't know, they're not for me, generally speaking, for all the reasons that you enumerated.
Casey:
So I'm curious to see how my Nudiant case turns out.
Casey:
Again, I think I'm not going to get it for another week or two or something like that, so I'm briefly going to be caseless, caseless, which, if it's anything like my 11 Pro, means I will shatter the back before I actually get the case that I've ordered for it.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I have AppleCare, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Casey:
But yeah, I wish they had...
John:
better options for the leather cases and that they were cheaper yeah but i i also ordered the nudie in case by the way no lip at the bottom of your third-party case uh no it completely encapsulates the bottom which means it's not a john circus approved case that's the main reason to buy a third-party one is you don't have to deal with that although the fact that it does cover everything i know it seems weird that like they sell this blue phone and don't have a blue case but honestly if you put any of those leather cases on the phone you basically don't see the color of the phone anymore
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And that's the thing is I want to show off the color of the phone.
Casey:
And yes, I am aware that clear cases exist.
Casey:
But any of the clear cases I've ever seen are always like gross, icky plastic.
John:
No, it's like that clear keyboard.
John:
Do you remember the Apple keyboard that was clear on the bottom?
Marco:
Yeah, the breadcrumb keyboard.
John:
Not good.
John:
Not good.
John:
And it happens with phone cases too.
Marco:
You're right that, yes, only the camera mountain really shrines through, so that's all you really see.
Marco:
But one thing I love about Apple's website is that when you look at their case pages, they show you a picture of every color of phone that's available for it.
Marco:
So you can see how every color will look in whatever color case you're looking at.
Marco:
Pick the blue phone and go to the different colors and tell me, do any of those colors look good on the blue phone?
Marco:
I'm going to go with no.
Marco:
I don't think literally any of the iPhone 13 Pro leather cases look good on blue.
Marco:
The only one that looks remotely good, I think, is the midnight, which is the gray with a slight bluish tint, but it's basically gray.
Marco:
That's what I ordered.
Marco:
I don't want it.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, if I'm going to order one, that's the one I'm probably going to get.
Marco:
But, like, I don't want a gray phone.
Marco:
Like, I want a blue phone.
Marco:
And to John's point, whatever color case you get does basically become the color of your phone with the exception of the camera mountain.
Marco:
So, like...
Marco:
i don't want a beige green gray or purple or purple phone i want a blue phone and why this is it's so ridiculous yep so anyway i've also i'm also going to explore the third party market i i did order one of those nudian cases thanks paul and uh we'll see you know i'll see what we can find but what's probably going to happen is we're going to have like four different cases none of which i love yep but go with my zero to four phones
John:
yeah it's a shame because is the apple silicon cases in all other ways like because i bought remember of my on my 12 pro i bought the apple silicon case for it to begin with i loved it everything about it was great except of course didn't it had the lip on the bottom and i wanted to try it say maybe it's not a deal breaker for me i tried it for a while it turns out it was a deal breaker i got a third party case by the way people who are asking my third party case is still holding up fine it was incredibly cheap um a bunch of people asked me for the link it's been in past show notes or whatever but uh
John:
Yeah, I'm happy with it so far.
John:
It's just annoying to have to find a third-party case.
John:
I think I bought like three third-party cases before I landed on this one.
John:
Yours was the SENA case, S-E-N-A, right?
John:
No, mine is the Olexar something or other.
John:
It was incredibly cheap.
John:
I'll find the link for the show notes again.
John:
But yeah, the Apple Silicon case is like for, you know, setting aside the grippiness thing, which is its own factor.
John:
I know that's, if that's your deal killer, then that's what it is.
John:
But like,
John:
the fit and finish the fact that the buttons line up the buttons are even with each other things you that you don't really think about until you buy a third party case and realize wait a second this thing doesn't fit right or one button sticks out more than the other or it's crooked or it feels weird doesn't happen with the apple cases the apple cases in general are really good uh so that's why it pains me when they have the lip and in marco's case it pains him that they don't have the colors that he likes
Casey:
All right, so we've got iPad stuff to discuss.
Casey:
Neil Hughes writes, you mentioned that the 2021 low-end iPad has started using a lightning to USB-C cable, i.e.
Casey:
USB-C at the power brick end.
Casey:
A member of my family got the previous generation iPad here in the UK, and that also had this cable.
Casey:
So the switch must have happened at least a year ago.
Casey:
That is news to me.
Casey:
I did not know that.
John:
Or it could just be in the UK.
John:
They have wacky stuff over there.
Casey:
I mean, have you seen the size of their ridiculous plugs?
Casey:
Please don't at me.
Casey:
Please don't at me.
Casey:
I know they're safe or whatever.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
They're ridiculous.
John:
Oh, they're safe and ridiculous.
Casey:
They're safe and ridiculous.
John:
And deadly when they're on the floor face up.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Can you imagine that?
Casey:
Ready?
Casey:
We're going to really tick off all the UK people.
Casey:
That would be almost as bad as stepping on Legos.
Marco:
Wow.
John:
Is that a UK thing, the pedantry about Lego bricks and whatever?
Casey:
I hear it vehemently from UK people.
John:
No, you don't.
John:
You hear it vehemently, but that's fine.
Casey:
Well, fine.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I'm not even going to go there.
Casey:
But anyways, anytime I've ever been corrected about Legos, it's always been from someone from the UK.
Casey:
anyway is the the uk that's like not europe right oh my god i'm such a jerk anyway moving on so the ipad mini uh does not support the mill what is it millimeter wave is that right the the millimeter wave 5g stuff uh which is news to me i did not know that either
Casey:
So this is the, I guess it's sort of kind of, it's not Wi-Fi, but it's of a similar distance of coverage as like a Wi-Fi base station, but it is preposterously, absurdly, ridiculously fast.
Casey:
And apparently the iPad mini doesn't support it.
John:
and this next item about the ipad mini i'm not sure this is earlier than the previous item about the benchmarks i'm not sure how to square it with the benchmarks according to this mac rumors story here um both the a13 and the ipad mini are equipped with a15 but benchmark results reveal that the chip is down clocked to 2.9 gigahertz in the ipad mini compared to 3.2 gigahertz and all the iphone 13 models
John:
conceivably that could still be true and the benchmark difference is due to thermal throttling but as we just saw running that javascript benchmark the ipad mini is the tops in the entire world also beating the iphone so clock speed stuff we've got to wait for this these phone these devices to be out in more people's hands and for the particular techie reviewers to look at the clock speed and see how it changes over time and running benchmarks and all that other stuff so i'm not sure what to make of this but you know apple could
Marco:
help us here by giving specs uh like the clock speed and some obscure web page but apple doesn't bother so we have to figure it out ourselves eventually yeah again this is an area where it's complicated you know like because it's so much about thermals and different different thermal states and charge levels and charge states and and you know whatever gigahertz rating is reported on a benchmark for a processor that does not officially report its speed like in its model name is
Marco:
That's just whatever speed it was running at right then.
Marco:
But they change speeds.
Marco:
They go up and down frequently.
Marco:
They're constantly fluctuating to optimize for power and heat needs and everything else.
Marco:
So I wouldn't put any weight into whatever Geekbench reports for one particular run of the benchmark because you could run the benchmark twice in a row and get two different clock speeds.
Casey:
Quick aside, I was preparing the next section of the show notes, and I was typing golf swing ampersand tennis serve speed.
Casey:
Do you want to guess what I typed instead of an ampersand?
John:
Why did you write the word and?
John:
What do you have against the word and?
John:
I was watching Why the Last Man and the Monkey's Name Ampersand, and every time I see it, I think of you.
Casey:
Oh, thank you.
Casey:
That makes me oh so happy.
Casey:
So yeah, the Apple Watch Series 7.
Casey:
Actually, let me give you a clean edit there.
Casey:
The Apple Watch Series 7, it is apparently going to track and I guess report golf swing speed ampersand tennis serve speed.
John:
This was in the event.
John:
in the event video and we just didn't get a chance to talk about it.
John:
And I think we should because, so here's the deal.
John:
I don't know much about golf, so I'm not gonna comment on that, right?
John:
But I do know a lot about tennis.
John:
And here's the thing with trying to register tennis serve speed with a thing that's on your wrist.
John:
It's going to be a wild guess because the way tennis serves, the way serving in tennis works, especially when you're trying to serve fast, is it's all about the wrist snap.
John:
And the wrist snap is to get the head of the racket.
John:
moving as fast as possible and the racket is like a lever because you're holding one end of it and the head is way out there at the other end so if you move your hand this much the very very tip of the racket or the head of the racket moves more because it's the end of a stick essentially right that's what makes your serve go fast
John:
But your watch is attached to your wrist, not the head of the racket.
John:
So how the hell do you know how fast the racket head was moving by measuring what happens on your wrist?
John:
You can't.
John:
You just have to do some sort of multiplier.
John:
I'm like, well, most amateur tennis players have a crappy wrist snap and their racket head speed is X percent faster than their actual wrist speed.
John:
Therefore, this is how fast your syrup was.
John:
Sorry.
John:
No, I don't see this as...
John:
It's not the fault of the watch.
John:
It's just because it's attached to your wrist.
John:
And it's not even attached to your hand.
John:
At least your hand moves in relation to your wrist.
John:
It's attached to your wrist.
John:
When I say you snap your wrist, it really means that your hand, which is at the end of your wrist, is the thing that snaps forward.
John:
But your watch isn't on that part.
John:
So I don't understand how that could possibly work.
John:
Unless you're a really bad tennis server and you do not snap your wrist, but you totally should.
John:
You have to pronate.
John:
have to pronate if you're not pronating when you're serving you're either a senior citizen or you're not serving very fast so work on your tennis serve speed but don't expect the watch type i think in terms of golf swing i feel like we need to have tiff on to say so what about golf is the speed that your wrist moves uh directly translatable to the speed that you hit a golf ball i don't know because i don't know how wrists work in relation to golf but in tennis i give this a big thumbs down
Marco:
Being an expert in neither thing or sports ever, I would expect golf to be a little bit easier to measure because aren't your hands generally in a straighter alignment as you're striking the ball?
John:
I believe so.
John:
I don't know.
John:
What I do know is that golf clubs are a long stick and that the part that hits the ball is at the end, that your hands are at the other end.
John:
And so I think there has to be some kind of lever action there.
John:
And so I don't think there is a direct linear relationship between the speed of your wrist and the rack up at the end of the golf club.
John:
But for all I know, it is a more predictable relationship.
John:
So Tiff was excited about this feature when she saw it in the video.
John:
I think she tweeted about it.
John:
So I mean, I think it's her duty for the show to have to go out to a driving range that has actual like radar measurement or something.
John:
and try it with the new Apple Watch or new watchOS or whatever and see if you get readings that are remotely meaningful.
Casey:
The Apple Watch Series 7, as per Mac rumors, includes faster charging, which we knew, claiming that it can charge to 80% in just 45 minutes and that 8 minutes of fast charging will provide sufficient battery life for 8 hours of sleep trapping, which I believe we also knew.
Casey:
To support the new fast charging, Apple will be offering a new 1-meter USB-C magnetic fast charging cable.
John:
Now, what does that mean?
John:
Does that mean you get these new fast charging speeds with the new cable?
John:
Or is it, oh, you got a new cable, but it's like, I don't understand this.
John:
It's a Mac rumor story.
John:
I can't tell if they have any information or they're just trying to say how it comes with the cable.
Marco:
Right, because as I mentioned, Apple has sold a USB-C Apple Watch cable for some time.
Marco:
I believe it's a third of a meter or half a meter.
Marco:
And it was used to charge your Apple Watch from your USB-C only MacBook Pro since 2016.
Marco:
They've sold this for a while.
Marco:
Does that cable do it too?
Marco:
Or just the new one?
Marco:
Who knows?
Casey:
And additionally for MacRumors, on the connectivity front, the Series 7 includes the same Bluetooth 5.0 protocol as the Series 6.
Casey:
But unlike the Series 6, the new Apple Watch Series 7 also has built-in support for Baidu, China's satellite navigation system.
John:
So these are like the small differences in the Apple Watch.
John:
And here comes the big one that we speculated about last week.
John:
Oh, they didn't say anything about the system on a chip in the Apple Watch Series 7.
John:
What do you think it might be?
John:
And then Marco was saying, well, it might not be the big upgrade.
John:
And I said, well, what if it is literally the same system on a chip as the Series 6?
John:
And then Marco
John:
said oh yeah they did that they've done that before they did in the series one and two and they did that between the four and five and so according to whatever these are part numbers or cpu identifies as identifiers as posted by steve troughton smith his tweet says there is a reason apple didn't talk about the apple watch series 7 cpu this year and that's because it's exactly the same as last year series 6 in fact it doesn't even get a new model number it is effectively just a
John:
And he says same as series one and two and four and five.
John:
Right.
John:
So we just went through a bunch of things that like the watch series seven does have different internals because it's got these different radio frequency band for China satellite thing.
John:
It's got faster charging and, you know, different charging characteristics.
John:
And it's probably got a bunch of other stuff in there that's different, too.
John:
But as far as we can tell right now, the actual system on a chip, plus or minus the storage and maybe even the RAM, but the actual system on a chip is reporting the same part number as far as we can tell.
John:
Again, until people have these watches, we don't know for sure, and they're coming, what is it, later this fall or whatever, so we don't even know when they're here.
Marco:
December 20th.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All signs are currently pointing to the Series 7 having the same system on a chip in terms of CPU, GPU, or all that other stuff as the Series 6.
Marco:
When you first hear this, it's kind of a bummer in the sense that it does seem like the Series 7 is actually a very minor update.
Marco:
And honestly, I think I'm going to buy it just because I want to know what those screens look like.
Marco:
And I can kind of excuse that from a development perspective of I do develop Apple Watch stuff.
Marco:
And so I kind of need to know how my complications and interfaces look.
John:
Plus, you want to measure your golf swing.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
All the golfing I do all the time.
Marco:
This does seem like it's a very minor update.
Marco:
And I almost wonder, like, you know, we've all obviously been complaining about how the Series 3 is still around and at the exact same price.
Marco:
And the SE that was introduced last year did not fall in price at all.
Marco:
And so it's like there's actually kind of not much movement at all on the watch this year.
Marco:
With the exception of, yeah, they made the screen different and better and it charges faster.
Marco:
But it seems like there's basically nothing else about the Series 7.
Marco:
And so I kind of wonder if maybe all these things are related that maybe they just couldn't get the next generation of watch hardware.
Marco:
It just didn't make it for this year.
Marco:
you know that that's what it seems like and and maybe that's why they couldn't drop the prices on the series 3 or se either maybe it's all related maybe like they expected to make a certain amount of progress in the watch hardware you know in the guts the internals and they just didn't make it and that's it well
John:
Well, I just point to the process size again.
John:
It's the same process size, I think, as the Series 6.
John:
And within, especially on the watch, within the same process size, what are you going to do?
John:
Do the same thing you did last time, but make it better and faster?
John:
It's really hard.
John:
The power envelope of the watch is so demanding.
John:
It's like, we already did this.
John:
We made the Series 6.
John:
It's the best 5-nanometer watch chip that we can make.
John:
If you say, can you make another 5-nanometer watch chip for next year's watch?
John:
It's like...
John:
What do you think we're going to do?
John:
If we had thought of something, we would have done it last year.
John:
It's very difficult.
John:
On the phone, you can afford to say, well, we'll add another GPU core.
John:
We'll put a bigger battery.
John:
All those things are basically off the table with the watch.
John:
Like, there's not much room in there for a bigger battery without physically changing the size of the watch.
John:
It's not like you're going to add a GPU core.
John:
It's not like you're going to clock it higher.
John:
Like, it's just so constrained that it does not shock me that...
John:
without a process shrink you may find yourself in a situation where your best bet is to leave the system on a chip which marco you said last week was seemed like it was fast enough to leave that alone and improve the watch in areas that people will actually feel because would someone feel a 10 single core cpu increase from a serene 7 system on a chip
John:
No, but will they feel, oh, I can charge for a full eight hours after sitting eight minutes on the charger?
John:
Yeah, because that'll let people do sleep tracking and stuff, right?
John:
And charging to 80% in 45 minutes, those are changes people will notice.
John:
So I think Apple did the right thing.
John:
And the screen thing, oh, the only difference is the screen.
John:
That's one of the biggest changes in a watch in years.
John:
the the fact like i said that the screen really fills the entire watch face and it gives you more data and more information display for the same physical size watch plus potentially a thicker crystal for more durability those are all good changes right i don't i don't think that you know this is the reason my wife was getting another watch you will be able to tell if you put it next to a six you'll say oh the seven has a bigger screen but it's the same size thumbs up and it's also brighter the always on screen is brighter like
John:
Everything about it is better.
John:
The fact that the system on a chip hasn't changed or like the overall shape hasn't changed are two things that I think most people who have a watch don't care about.
John:
They don't care how fast system on a chip is.
John:
They just care about the attributes of the thing.
John:
Charging display, you know, functionality and all those things are essentially improved.
John:
So I still think this is a pretty good watch and I'm actually excited to see what the screen looks like and what the new watch faces look like.
John:
Given the, you know, more area and more pixels to work with.
Marco:
So I actually looked up some real time follow up.
Marco:
I actually looked up because I remember there was one other time when the watch didn't really upgrade the CPU between generations.
Marco:
And I looked up which one it was.
Marco:
And I was right last week.
Marco:
It was the series four and series five.
Marco:
They use the same processor.
Marco:
The Series 5 did add a compass, but the actual computing part of the processor is, as far as we can tell, the same.
Marco:
So it's interesting, then, that Series 4 and 5, that's one processor.
Marco:
Now Series 6 and 7, that's the next processor.
Marco:
Maybe they're just on a two-year cycle for this, and maybe that's fine.
Marco:
Because as John was just saying, the...
Marco:
When the watch was earlier, I would say until that Series 4 and 5 processor, it was so ungodly slow to do pretty much anything.
Marco:
It was brutal as a developer and not that much better as a user.
Marco:
Ever since that Series 4 and 5 processor, things have been more tolerable.
Marco:
They've been pretty much fine as a user, and as developers, it's been getting a lot better.
Marco:
As I mentioned last week, most of the time that I'm waiting for the watch to do something as a developer, usually it doesn't seem to be processor-throttled things.
Marco:
That's not the bottleneck.
Marco:
There's other bottlenecks, but it doesn't seem to be the processor speed.
Marco:
So if they're on a two-year cycle here, this might not have been anything going wrong.
Marco:
This might have just been what they plan to do all along, that Series 6 and 7 are going to use the same chip, and maybe Series 8 and 9 will use the next chip.
Marco:
Maybe there's a two-year cycle for chips now for the watch, and that's basically fine.
John:
Yeah, I mean, Series 8 is not going to do probably anything with it unless it's a shrink, which is going to be like the three nanometer processes coming along.
John:
But you're kind of...
John:
With the watch, you're really beholden to transistor shrinks because otherwise, again, unless you're going to decide to make different trade-offs and make it slower or redistribute your transistors to be more GPU and less CPU or vice versa, you're just moving things around.
John:
Your power envelope is the same.
John:
To actually get any appreciable increase in performance, you need to have a shrink because then you can...
Marco:
have more transistors for the same power budget yeah i mean really the the only reason why this really hasn't come up before on the watch is that the series four to five also you know the cpu didn't change in that transition but the series five was one that added the always on screen and that dramatically improves what it's like to wear the apple watch and so there was something else to motivate upgrades for people who were really itching to see like what's what are they gonna change we're gonna change whereas this year
Marco:
a little bit faster charging and a bigger, brighter screen.
John:
I think the bigger, brighter screen is a big feature.
John:
I may be able to see it in person to see who it is, but that is one of the most attractive things to me because it's like finally getting rid of all those borders and just saying, now I can use the whole thing for watch faces.
John:
Maybe it doesn't make a difference.
John:
Maybe you get one extra complication.
John:
Maybe you don't care.
John:
Maybe you have a sparse watch face and it makes no difference, but it just feels better to me to finally say, okay,
John:
now that we have a quote-unquote true edge-to-edge display whatever you want to say i mean you still don't have that but it's it's close enough now that you can say fine especially with the big especially with the curved display where it's like well you're you know because of the curve that's already kind of warping at the edges anyway so it's as big as you could reasonably put in this design and once you go to flat then you can maybe eke out another millimeter or two on the sides but
John:
Anyway, we'll see.
John:
My wife's going to get one.
John:
I'll look at it and see how it is.
Marco:
Yeah, that's kind of how I am about it, too.
Marco:
I'm not super excited about the watch this year, but maybe it's because I haven't seen the screen yet.
Marco:
Maybe when you see it in person, it's amazing.
Marco:
And that's why I feel like I have to get it for design purposes and for tech curiosity purposes.
John:
Yeah, maybe get four of them.
Marco:
I'll get between zero and four.
Casey:
sounds like a plan all right and then finally for this week uh ios 15 is not going to be a compulsory upgrade and apparently apple has committed to continuing to provide security updates for ios 14 for at least a pretty good time so this is interesting i noticed this one i upgraded all my devices i was 15 which by the way i did and it has been fine everybody in case you're scared of ios 15 it's fine
John:
um when i upgraded i went to do you know software update and a little thing spun and it was like you know your os is up to date 14.8 i'm like oh i guess like i gotta wait for the cdn to refresh because i was doing it a fresh on monday but then i looked down lower on the screen at the very bottom of the screen on my phone there was a thing that said oh and by the way ios 15 also also exists are you interested in that
John:
And boy, what a change.
John:
What a change from the old way that Apple used to do things, which was like a new iOS is out.
John:
Everybody has to upgrade now.
John:
In fact, we're going to do it while you sleep.
John:
You have no choice.
John:
Get the new OS, which always struck me as a very courageous, let's say, and Phil Scheller's big strategy, especially when the point O's weren't that big.
John:
But like.
John:
But here, and I was like, oh, this is an interesting UI change.
John:
Maybe a reaction to people complaining about being forced to upgrade because it literally puts the text at the top of the main center part of the screen that says you are using iOS 14.8, which is the latest version.
John:
Like it's not beating around the bush.
John:
If you just glance that screen and read the text, you'd be like, oh, I'm up to date.
John:
I've got the latest OS.
John:
I'm fine.
John:
How many people would even notice that at the literal bottom of the screen, there's a tiny, skinny little banner, way smaller than anything ever advertising Apple Music or Apple TV Plus?
John:
Yeah.
John:
that says oh ios 15 in case you're interested you can get that um so yeah i'm excited to see apple changing their stance on this and it's it's ironic that they did it this year in which 15.0 seems to be incredibly solid like i haven't had a single problem or complaint other than my airpods still doing this stupid connecting thing but it was doing that with 14.82 so i don't know what the hell to blame here
Marco:
But other than that... Auto-switching.
Marco:
Blame auto-switching.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Turn off auto-switching.
Marco:
It fixes AirPods.
John:
But then I use auto... Every time I use auto-switching now, I think of Marco and saying, Marco wants me to turn this off.
John:
Why would I do that?
John:
I love auto-switching.
Marco:
Good.
Marco:
You should.
Marco:
I should infect your brain.
Marco:
It doesn't work.
Marco:
It causes bugs.
Marco:
Just turn it off.
John:
It does.
John:
I'm just saying I use auto-switching.
John:
Every time I successfully auto-switch, which happens a lot, I say, look at that.
John:
I didn't have to do anything and auto-switch.
John:
This is why I have this feature enabled.
John:
Anyway...
John:
It's getting paid.
John:
iOS 15 seems to be really solid for me, but this year they seem to be not pushing it.
John:
And I wonder if it's going to be the type of thing like after a month or two or six months, will they switch that policy and make that screen more prominently suggest to you that perhaps 14.8 isn't the latest and greatest version?
John:
Because it isn't.
John:
15.0 is out now, but it says you're all up to date, which is not technically true, but...
John:
Anyway, I applaud this new policy.
John:
I applaud the new UI being less pushy about this, but I do think eventually Apple has to stop telling people that 14.x is all up to date because it's not.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Stripe, Sanity.io, and Jamf Now.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at adp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental
John:
I gotta talk about my bad mouse pad again.
Casey:
What?
John:
Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
John:
Alright, so here's the problem.
John:
I was thinking about this.
John:
Why does this keep coming up?
John:
And it's like the boring practical realities of the physical world.
John:
When I was talking about my debugging last time, I was like, oh, I got this mouse pad.
John:
I thought it was the mouse pad.
John:
But then it turns out it must be the cable.
John:
And I tried a bunch of different cables.
John:
And it's like doing the experiment, like as a programmer, you, God, I really hope, as most working programmers eventually learn to become good at debugging.
John:
Some don't.
John:
And I know sometimes I work with those people and I tear my hair off.
John:
But I would think most of the good ones, you learn what debugging is, right?
John:
But the problem in the physical world, in particular in the case of the mouse, is like, but the physical world stinks and there's no undo button and you can't copy and paste.
John:
And so in the example of my mouse,
John:
I use my mouse in wired mode for a variety of reasons discussed in the past, but I do.
John:
And the wire is routed underneath my desks and I have these little fasteners that make a little channel for it and the long, skinny, you know, very thin mouse cord USB thing snakes up through the little channels and goes around the desk and comes out a little hole in the desk and goes into the hub and everything is all arranged just so.
John:
And if I want to do the real debugging that I know I should be doing, I have to
John:
rip rip all that out right because you have to eliminate variables you have to test your theories like is it the cable is it because the cable is routed here is it because the cable is kinked is because the cable is touching a metal thing like you have to do that if you really want to do an apples to apples comparison and eliminate variables you have to start ripping apart the physical world i'm like i don't want to crawl under my desk and do that i don't want to take that i don't want to disconnect those fasteners
John:
I don't want to remove that little piece of tape.
John:
Everything is set up the way I want it.
John:
So I didn't.
John:
I wouldn't.
John:
I would do as much testing as I could without tearing stuff apart.
John:
And so I was doing not a great job of debugging.
John:
Last time, I thought I had determined that it was the wire because I tried a shorter wire, and the shorter USB cable worked, but the longer one didn't.
John:
I took out the longer one, the new one from the attic, and tried that, and that one worked fine.
John:
But just there were too many variables.
John:
And so after...
John:
we had that last show where i talked about it i had to do more testing because it was still annoying me and so i finally did the thing another physical world thing i finally went up to the attic it opened up my brand new replacement mouse because i had a backup mouse for this one right i opened it up break break the seal open that package take out the back of the brand new backup replacement mouse and i said with this in hand i can finally do a variable eliminating test which is
John:
unplug my mouse from the cable, put it aside, take the brand new mouse and plug it right back into that same cable.
John:
So now the only variable that's changing is the mouse.
John:
So now I can finally test, is it something wonky with the mouse?
John:
And the answer is yes, something wonky with the mouse.
John:
Because when I plug the brand new mouse into that setup, everything's fine.
John:
Unplug it, plug the old mouse back in,
John:
unresponsive, jumpy mess.
John:
So all that testing that it, yes, it's true that if you take the quote unquote broken mouse and connect it to a shorter cable or connect it directly to the Mac or do all sorts of other things, yes, it also works in those scenarios, but I don't care about those scenarios.
John:
That's not how I use my mouse.
John:
This test determines, look, this model of mouse, of which I have two copies right here, exactly the same, should work in this scenario and does work in this scenario with this new one I just brought from my attic.
John:
But this old one that I've been using since 2019 or whatever doesn't work.
John:
So I'm like, finally.
John:
All right, that's it.
John:
This mouse, bad mouse.
John:
The mouse is bad.
John:
The mouse pad is not bad.
John:
The cord is not bad.
John:
The hub is not bad.
John:
The Mac is not bad.
John:
The mouse is bad.
John:
Uh, so then I had to embark on a, a process that let me appreciate.
John:
I mean, I guess, you know, we complain about Apple on the show, but, uh, having to deal with companies other than Apple going in with your Apple expectations really lets you appreciate Apple.
John:
Right.
John:
I just talked about returning stuff.
John:
I just got, you know, my wife was complaining that she couldn't return a partially ordered thing, but that's kind of like an edge case in general.
John:
If you have an Apple product and you want to return it,
John:
or it breaks and you want to get warranty repair, that's a straightforward process.
John:
You call somebody, say you had an Apple mouse and it stopped working and it was under warranty.
John:
You just call Apple and be like, I got a mouse, came with my computer, still under warranty, mouse doesn't work.
John:
And they're like, okay, we'll replace that for you.
John:
Return it to us, bring it in, do a cross-shipping thing.
John:
Lots of different options, right?
John:
So easy.
John:
What if you have a Microsoft mouse and you want to do the same thing?
John:
I didn't even know where to begin.
John:
So I go to the Microsoft website where, you know, you can buy these things and try to find somewhere on that website that says like warranty repair support.
John:
As hard as it is to find things at apple.com, I found it much harder to find things on the Microsoft side.
John:
Eventually I found some series of links that led me down some tunnel of like
John:
Trying to send me to support articles or make me talk to tech chat.
John:
I'm like, no, just it's warranty repair.
John:
I have broken hardware.
John:
I want you to give me new hardware because it's still under warranty or whatever.
John:
Or tell me it's not under warranty.
John:
Either way, that's what I want to do.
John:
And it was like, is your product a Surface Book, a Surface Studio Pro or other?
John:
I'm like, what?
John:
Like the whole process thought I had some kind of surface product.
John:
And it's like, well, it's a Microsoft precision mouse, but it's like, have you heard of this Microsoft?
John:
This is your product.
John:
And their website had no idea that this product existed or didn't know anything about it.
John:
And so I eventually fight my way through to some God forsaken chat thing where I'm talking with a human who's talking with 800 other people at the same time and sending me canned responses.
John:
And I'm like,
John:
got a mouse like i have everything ready i can tell you the serial number i can tell when i bought it uh you know i can tell you how old it is like you know tell you what's wrong with it and they required so much information and supporting evidence to process this claim you would think i was trying to return like you know a hundred thousand dollar car a mac pro yeah no apple would take this mac pro back with way less hassle they'd be like oh your mac pro doesn't work doesn't turn on sure send it back it's in wonder warranty we'll but you know like
John:
They wanted me to have my original receipt, the date that I bought it, a photo of the mouse top and bottom, a video of the mouse not working.
Casey:
No.
John:
A video of them.
John:
I have never in my life had to record video to demonstrate a problem for any product repair.
John:
This is a mouse, people.
John:
This is a sub $100 mouse.
Marco:
Isn't this like well under?
Marco:
Isn't this like a $40 mouse or something like that?
John:
we're not even it's like it's 90 or whatever something like that okay but still like is it worth someone's time at microsoft to review this holy yeah i was like are you kidding me and so they say this in the chat they're like if this is me after going through like here's what i did here's what i did to debug like i'm you know doing the chat thing of like look before you even ask any questions let me tell you what i went through and prove to you with a series of statements that presumably you'll believe that the mouse has problems right and what i said i started off with them i said look
John:
I have an identical brand new just opened today mouse right out of the box of the exact same model.
John:
And I told them, if I unplug this mouse and plug the other one in, it works.
John:
And then I swap them and it doesn't work.
John:
And they're like, thank you for doing that.
John:
That really narrows down the problem.
John:
Like, oh yes, it definitely does.
John:
I just didn't want to have to have some BS story of like, are you sure your mouse doesn't work?
John:
Have you tried rebooting?
John:
Have you installed new drivers in Windows?
John:
I'm like, I'm not using Windows.
Yeah.
John:
They were on board with the fact that, like, I quickly got them on board with the idea that this mouse is broken.
John:
Like, this is the ultimate test.
John:
It's literally the same mouse, just in the same scenario, just plug in and plug, right?
John:
But then they said, okay, all you need to do is then this huge bullet list of things, including recording a video.
John:
And then they throw this out.
John:
I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.
John:
I'm like, whatever, I'm going to do this.
John:
I'm getting, they're taking the stupid mouse back.
John:
Right.
John:
I get like, you know, two iPhone photographs into like taking pictures of my mouse.
John:
So the top and the bottom.
John:
And the person says, are you still there?
John:
like how long do you think the average person takes to compile this evidence is there someone doing this faster than me is there something i was i was doing the thing you know the thing where you can do a photo capture on your mac with your phone you know that feature continuity camera i believe it's called yeah i wasn't even doing air dropping it to myself i was doing in the most efficient way possible i'm on the second picture and they're like are you still there are you are you doing it i'm like
John:
You've got to be kidding me.
John:
Give me five minutes to record a freaking video of my... And so I had to get a video.
John:
I'm holding the camera with one hand, and I have to make sure the mouse is in the shot, and I have to make sure my giant Pro Display XDR is in the shot, and that you can see the cursor, and I have to narrate and say, see, this is the new mouse.
John:
Watch as I move my hand right to left, the cursor moves right to left, and then cut, disconnect mouse, put the old one.
John:
Here's the old mouse.
John:
See how I move the mouse right to left, but see how the cursor doesn't move or moves...
John:
Only a little tiny bit.
John:
That's the bad mouse.
John:
Anyway, eventually.
John:
And then, you know, send me a shipping label and I shipped the old mouse back and they eventually replaced it.
John:
And today I got the replacement.
John:
I'm kind of speaking of sending things.
John:
I'll put this in the Slack channel.
John:
Anyway, they sent it back in a box.
John:
It's big enough to hold like a record player.
John:
Like that's how big the box was.
John:
Huge, huge box.
John:
Inside that box, of course, was a smaller box because we all know how this goes, right?
John:
Inside the box was a smaller box about the size of a mouse box.
John:
Inside the smaller box was a bunch of bubble wrap
John:
with no tape or fasteners of any kind, just a bunch of bubble wrap, and then loosely nestled in that bunch of bubble wrap, a bear mouse.
John:
A bear mouse.
John:
What?
John:
That was absolutely not new.
John:
It was dirty and scuffed, and I'm like, is this somebody else's mouse?
John:
Did I get somebody else's mouse?
Casey:
You absolutely did.
John:
The first thing I looked was, did I get my own mouse back?
John:
And I compared the serial numbers, and no, they did not send me my own mouse back.
John:
But it is in worse condition than the mouse I sent them.
John:
in terms of like dirt and scuff or scuff marks or whatever and i was kind of grossed out i did test it i did disconnect this mouse and put it in and it works but i said you know what i don't want to use the skeevy like someone else has used this mouse mouse so i put that one in the attic and i'm just using the new one for now
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
Because when you get something replaced from Apple, like we've talked about this before on the show, they basically say if you get a refurb, essentially everything you touch is brand new, the case is brand new, like everything is brand new, or at the very least they clean it.
John:
This mouse was not clean.
John:
This is an unclean mouse.
John:
Like you would not look at this.
John:
You would look at this and you would think the person who uses this eats like potato chips while they use their computer, right?
John:
It had scuffs and like watermarks and like just...
John:
yeah it was yucky so if i you know if it's still my backup mouse and if i ever need to use it i'll have to like give it like a thorough cleaning you know with some kind of like computer cleaner stuff because i just don't even want to touch it but microsoft come on i make i make you a video and have the bring up all this paperwork and do all this stuff and you give me all this big hassle and take a long time for me to ship a thing back and i get a dirty mouse in return
John:
Not great.
John:
Oh, and by the way, by the way, one more thing.
John:
When you do this process of sending your thing, the person gets off the phone with you and says, okay, we'll email you a shipping label.
John:
I get the email with the shipping label instructions and it's like in big, scary, bold text.
John:
Make sure the serial number on your return
John:
matches the serial number of the product you're returning otherwise we will not process your return i was like well guess what you stupid customer support person never even asked me what my serial number was so how the hell is it going to match and i look at my little shipping label email and it has a serial number listed what serial number is it i don't even know it's not even in the same form as my serial number but it says yeah your return is for item serial number seven five like where did you get
John:
the number from I never gave you a serial number and it doesn't even look like the serial I mean it did the return anyway but it's like their whole return process was like so you're returning a Surface Book Pro right like no I'm not stop trying to tell me I'm returning a like terrible process so much worse than Apple
Marco:
So my theory, which I think is backed up by almost everything you've said, is that you are the first person who has ever tried to return a mouse to Microsoft.
John:
Where did the dirty mouse come from?
John:
Someone else's mouse.
Casey:
Their office.
Casey:
They went to somewhere in Redmond.
Marco:
The reason why the person didn't know how long it would take you to capture these videos and pictures is because literally no one, like they were just following a script and literally they've never done this before.
John:
Everyone bails at that point.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, but like I bet the support person, you might be the first time they've ever had to deal with this.
Marco:
Because most people would not go through this amount of ridiculousness for a flaky $90 mouse.
Marco:
They would just think, well, I guess my mouse died after a long time of use, and they would replace it with whatever they could find.
John:
It wasn't that long.
John:
How long was it?
John:
Less than a year.
John:
I mean, yeah, I got it with my Mac Pro, right?
John:
So whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's not great.
Marco:
But this has to be something that they don't deal with very often.
Marco:
And it seems like every part of this was just like, eh, whatever, figure something out, like on their end.
John:
Someone in the chat asked if the serial number on the return matches the serial number of the mouse that you sent to me.
John:
No, no, it does not.
John:
It's not even in the same form.
John:
It doesn't even have the same number of digits.
John:
Like it's their return system is so that through this website is so tailored to like six products that they think you're going to return.
John:
None of which are this mouse.
Marco:
this is one of those things too like i i haven't dealt with microsoft directly like this but uh i i know you know from other manufacturers and everything this is one of those areas that apple does pretty well like at warranty repair and replacement returns are super easy from the web store or the in-person store and like this is one of those areas like
Marco:
Google has always been pretty poor at this.
Marco:
Whenever Google has tried to make their own phones, one of the areas that they usually fall down with the Pixel phones is Google's infrastructure for customer support and retail support is generally pretty terrible.
Marco:
I feel like Apple doesn't get enough credit for how good they are at all that stuff.
Marco:
If you're comparing phones and you see some feature checklist, usually one of the things that is not on those checklists that compare, oh, this time Google's out innovating Apple or whatever, usually those checklists don't contain like, all right, when I have a problem, how easy is it to deal with?
Marco:
And Apple's pretty good at that, and a lot of these other companies really aren't.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the sad thing is it's just a policy choice.
John:
Like, just take people's word for it.
John:
When they say their thing is broken, yeah, a lot of time they're going to be wrong and they're going to send you back a perfectly working device.
John:
Just deal with that.
John:
Eat it, sell it as refurb, right?
John:
Like, Apple basically, for the most part, if you have a broken thing and they say, oh, well, why do you think it's broken?
John:
And you explain to them, they're like, okay, great.
John:
Well, we'll get you a new one of those.
John:
Like, again, if it's under warranty or whatever, like, they don't spend time, like,
John:
There's no incentive for anyone involved in this process to give you a hard time or to ask for video evidence or to spend an extra hour on the phone with you to say, are you sure it's broken?
John:
Maybe it's just your cable.
John:
And that means that Apple, like I said, I'm sure gets a bunch of crap returned to them as quote unquote broken that is perfectly fine.
John:
But Apple knows that the right thing to do is like...
John:
Just take it.
John:
Just take their perfectly good working returns.
John:
It is much better for everyone involved to get that person off the phone and happy and satisfied and just let them return their perfectly good working device because they didn't realize that they had an on switch or something like.
John:
Just do that.
John:
Uh, and Microsoft does not understand that or whatever company they have, they're doing support doesn't understand that.
John:
Apparently they're incentivized to not like Marcus said, to not let anyone ever return anything to put as many hurdles in front of them as possible.
John:
And even though I came fully prepared with like, look, I have the ultimate test that none of your customers ever, because I think I am the first person to say, you know how I know it's broken.
John:
Cause I bought a second one.
Yeah.
John:
and that one works and this one doesn't and the only thing i changed was the mouse everything else the cable the hub i just unplug that one plug this one in it's perfect test right and so like okay well yeah and i really don't think other people buy the second mouse to do that so maybe that's only the only reason i got through that first part of the thing and they pulled out the big guns after that and had me make a video
John:
I should have bought myself a ring light so I could have good lighting on the video.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
Someone in Microsoft has this video of my angry voice saying, see how I'm moving the mouse back and forth?
John:
See how the cursor is not moving?