Reach Is the Next Frontier
Casey:
This is a historic event and episode today because we are recording episode 400 of your Accidental Tech podcast.
Casey:
But that's not even what's the most impressive thing about this episode.
Casey:
I'm sure there was another time, but to the best of my recollection, I cannot recall a time that I have looked at the show notes and it says followed hyphen up colon and then there's a bullet
John:
How many times do we have to go over this chat room?
John:
Would you like to inform Casey whether or not we have follow up on episodes where there are Apple events?
John:
Does anyone in the chat room know?
Casey:
No, but oh, no, no, no.
Casey:
I know how the rules work.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I understand.
Casey:
Do you though?
Casey:
Do you?
John:
Because every time we have on these episodes, you're like, oh my God, we're not going to have follow ups.
John:
I can't handle it.
Casey:
No, because usually you have, well, somebody probably you, has a list of follow up items that we choose to ignore.
Marco:
Is there any doubt that it's John?
Marco:
You said probably you?
Marco:
It's not me.
John:
Well, somebody deleted them all, and that wasn't me.
Casey:
Well, I deleted all the ones that we'd already done, or at least that's what I thought I did.
John:
That's what you thought you did.
John:
Now we come to it.
John:
All right, so the revelation that Casey has at the start of this program is, look, if before the show starts, I delete all the follow-up, we have empty follow-ups.
Casey:
Wait, that's the secret?
Casey:
I could have done this for 399 episodes?
Casey:
That's all it takes?
John:
Google Docs never forgets.
John:
I'm going to bring up the history pane later and pull it out.
John:
But it's not relevant to this episode because it's an Apple event episode.
John:
Isn't follow-up always something we've already done, by definition?
John:
Don't get confused here, Marco.
John:
Have we done the follow-up?
John:
It's meta-follow-up.
Casey:
Oh my god.
Casey:
I would like to complain right up front so I can be happy for the rest of the episode.
Casey:
Can we do that?
Casey:
Is that okay?
Marco:
You can complain even faster thanks to Verizon's new 5G broadband ultra-wide brand network.
Casey:
Marco, it's like we planned it.
Casey:
What a flawlessly executed perfect segue.
Casey:
Oh my God, what was going on with that Verizon tie-in?
Casey:
Oh my God.
John:
So I know you two are upset about it.
John:
Can you explain to me why, though?
John:
Other than just saying, oh, Verizon, like, expound on that.
John:
Elaborate.
John:
Why is it upsetting that Apple would talk about Verizon?
Casey:
I think it was just not very classy, which is a very, like, snobby thing of me to say, and I recognize that.
Casey:
But my perception, why is it snobby?
Casey:
Why is it not classy?
Yeah.
Casey:
Because they're shilling for another company, another company that's only relevant to America, which I am the king of forgetting that there are other countries in the world.
Casey:
But even I know.
John:
I was going to say, US-centricness doesn't seem like something you're averse to.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
I agree with you.
John:
So they're shilling for another company.
John:
Do you think that Verizon paid them to do it and they're keeping it a secret?
Marco:
I don't think it's that simple.
Marco:
So my best guess is...
Marco:
is that this is part of a much bigger co-marketing deal between the two companies.
Marco:
Because the thing is, what a lot of people outside of the US don't realize is quite how much power over what phones get sold the Verizon stores in the US have.
Marco:
Like, I know so many people, you know, usually not, you know, nerds.
Marco:
Most nerds switched to AT&T to get the iPhone before it was on Verizon.
Marco:
So, you know, the nerds are on their own.
Marco:
They do what they want.
Marco:
They go to whatever care they need to to get whatever phone they want.
Marco:
But for all the non-nerds out there,
Marco:
I know so many non-nerds and especially family members and stuff like that who don't follow tech with any kind of enthusiasm.
Marco:
Where the way they get a new phone is every few years they go to a Verizon store and they get whatever they can get a good deal on.
Casey:
Is that still true today though?
Casey:
I don't know if that's true.
Marco:
Yes, it still is true today.
Marco:
And so what I think has happened here is...
Marco:
is I think Apple recognized that a big chunk of their US sales could go up if they had a really good deal with Verizon.
Marco:
Because one of the ways that Android took off in the US early on, and one of the ways it's still pretty important, is that carriers always were really good with having deals between the carrier and an Android handset maker, usually Samsung.
Marco:
And this is one of the reasons why Samsung really has such a dominant market share.
Marco:
Because Samsung plays the sales game really well with the retail channel because they would have things like give bonuses to the salespeople who sold the most Samsung cell phones in the carrier stores.
Marco:
There's all sorts of deals like that, like marketing deals and commission deals.
Marco:
And it's all kind of a little bit skeezy, but that's how it works.
Marco:
And so the reality is the carriers have a large...
Marco:
say on what phones are pushed on people and what phone people actually buy because they can they can control things like price incentives one of the biggest ways android got big early on was these like you know buy one phone get one free kind of things the carriers would do there's all sorts of stuff like that and so my theory here is that in order to improve u.s market share
Marco:
and to kind of put a bigger dent in Android here than usual, I think Apple and Verizon made some kind of deal where Verizon's going to be pushing the phones even more heavily.
Marco:
And they already have a special price thing, which we'll get to later, although AT&T matched that as well, you know, for however that works out.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I'm guessing this is part of a much bigger thing.
Marco:
I don't think there was some flat fee that Verizon paid Apple to be part of this event.
Marco:
That's too simple, and frankly, that wouldn't be enough money to matter to either company.
Marco:
I think it's much more likely that this is about a deal that's going to be like, over the whole next year, Verizon is going to extra hard push the iPhone onto their customers, because that is worth a lot to Apple.
Marco:
And clearly...
Marco:
But Verizon must be giving Apple something that's worth a lot to them.
Casey:
Yeah, that's well put, actually.
Casey:
I'm glad you said it that way.
Casey:
That's really well put because your theory is the best theory I've heard so far, other than just money changing hands.
Casey:
But yeah, it definitely seems like Apple was willing to make a trade for something.
Casey:
And something big.
Casey:
And something big, exactly.
Casey:
And I don't know what that is, and your theory, like I said, is the best I've heard, but it just felt weird.
Casey:
I don't mean to cut you off, and I do want to go back to John's question in a second, but what else did you have to say about that, Marco?
Marco:
Well, I mean, I have a lot to say about 5G as a whole, which we'll get to later.
Marco:
But yeah, it just felt really gross.
Marco:
I'm with you on that.
Marco:
It seemed, and I tweeted to this, it seems like it's beneath Apple.
Marco:
It seems kind of...
Marco:
like a, like a cheap move, almost like a sellout move, but it's like, why does Apple need to sell out to anyone?
Marco:
And it's just, it seemed like this was a Verizon commercial that happened to also have some new iPhones in it.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
And to come back to John's question, like, why was it gross?
Casey:
Why was it not classy?
Casey:
So it would not have been terribly surprising to me to have Apple say, oh, and, you know, this 5G works really well with Verizon.
Casey:
And it would have been only slightly surprising to me to say, oh, and here's their CEO and he's going to talk for too long.
Casey:
And that still would have been weird, but okay, that's fine, I guess.
Casey:
But when it got really gross and really weird to me was the forced, repeated mentions.
Casey:
And I can't cite a specific example offhand, but like, oh, it's going to be so easy to play whatever this Fortnite clone is.
Casey:
It'll be so easy to play...
Casey:
you know, whatever, whatever game on your new Verizon 5G iPhone.
Casey:
And it's just like, what?
Casey:
No, no, stop it with that.
Casey:
That's not Apple.
Casey:
Apple's supposed to be the classy one that doesn't put the stupid like AT&T or singular logo on the phone.
Casey:
They're supposed to be the good ones.
Casey:
And this just feels icky.
Casey:
Like I just, it really, really felt gross to me.
Casey:
So John, am I bananas or do you agree?
John:
I mean, I'm not sure if the two of you are aware, but the iPhone doesn't work without a cell network.
John:
So an Apple doesn't have one of those.
John:
They were thinking of doing one.
John:
They were thinking of being one of those MVNO, whatever things, but they didn't.
John:
So you kind of need a cell service plan unless you just want to use it as a really expensive iPod touch.
John:
Like I don't.
John:
I'm not super interested in hearing the Verizon CEO, but there are always boring parts of a keynote, right?
John:
But I don't think it was classless or gross, the fact that Apple makes deals with carriers to promote their phones.
John:
They always have, they always will, and they should.
John:
The only place where I would get concerned about it is if it starts to affect the products they sell.
John:
And there's a slippery slope argument to say, well, they have this, starts with this, and the next thing you know, it's filled with Verizon crapware.
John:
Well, you know, if that happens, then I'll be mad about that.
John:
But I'm not mad or disgusted by the fact that Apple is selling a phone, one of the important new features of which is, hey, it's capable of 5G, and then has carrier partners say, 5G, guess what?
John:
That's pointless without a 5G network.
John:
And we have one of those, and we had a partnership.
John:
I mean, we've all seen, like, I'm very often fooled over the past several years by an ad that I think is an Apple ad, but it doesn't quite look right, and I realize it's actually an 18TS.
John:
I mean, there is a, you know, symbiotic relationship between the carriers and the phone makers.
John:
And yes, the phone makers compete for the love and favor of the carrier, all the stuff that Marco described, right?
John:
But as long as that doesn't affect the product that Apple's selling, and so far it hasn't, with the possible exception of Apple putting that 5GE in the little status bar.
John:
But, you know, it's one letter.
John:
It's not a big deal.
John:
But other than that, there's not crapware filling my phone.
John:
I don't have to – I no longer have to enter a two-year contract to get a reasonable deal on a phone.
John:
Phones are all unlocked from Apple, right?
John:
So things are going in the opposite direction of gross.
John:
I don't find Verizon and the 5G and the pushing of 5G and the pushing of Verizon to be gross at all.
John:
I would be sad if I was AT&T that I wasn't in the keynote and didn't get my thing promoted like that or –
John:
sprint or t-mobile and we'll get to the price differences there too but that's just how you know how this market works there are carriers and there are phone makers and this is the relationship between them and i don't i don't like i don't see a class distinction like i'm carriers not my favorite companies in the world either and there should you know we should have more competition in the u.s than we do but
John:
it's not like i hate verizon so much that i can't bear to see apple mention its name on stage when they're introducing their 5g phone so i mean i guess you know whatever if it bothers you it bothers you it didn't bother me personally um and until and unless something changes in the product experience that i think is sort of impinging on and this you know there is an argument made here that the whole services revenue push and apple's uh
John:
willingness to potentially compromise the user experience in favor of their own revenue could eventually lead to that.
John:
Again, there is a slippery slope argument there that you might be able to get some traction on based on the accumulation of recent evidence.
John:
But for this particular phone, with the possible exception of the $30 that we'll get to a little bit later, I don't think it's that big of a deal.
John:
Unfortunately, in the U.S., for the carriers, there's definitely a tiered system.
John:
There's the big ones, and then there's the also-rans.
John:
And the also-rans...
John:
at various times have done ridiculous things to get any kind of traction and at other times have kind of gotten screwed over by the big carriers which is like it's happening this time around but i don't you know i don't know i i didn't find it gross or classless i just found it boring kind of like the game demos well and again i think the the repetition is where it went from boring and annoying to genuinely distasteful to me
Marco:
When it's part of the original iPhone announcement with AT&T on stage, that's one thing.
Marco:
And if they would have done something like that, where there was a segment where the Verizon person came out, if that's all it was, and then there wasn't any other mention of Verizon anywhere else, that would be one thing.
Marco:
But what made it feel weird was that it leaked out.
Marco:
It leaked out of its little segment, and it was spread throughout the whole presentation.
Marco:
And so it was kind of like having a Verizon logo stuck on the phone.
Marco:
like it kind of had that feel of like this is a commercial for verizon and apple not like it's not like having the logo on the phone if you don't see the keynote you don't hear any of this stuff it doesn't affect the product it affect the presentation you can say i didn't i didn't like that verizon wasn't corralled to its segment i got mentioned elsewhere but all right fine it's like it's the presentation equivalent of having having a verizon logo on the phone you know like like because it it was it bled out from its borders and
John:
They must have some kind of deal with Verizon for this thing.
John:
And that's part of the deal is they get more mentions in the keynote.
John:
It's not the end of the world.
Marco:
Like, what did it do to you?
Marco:
There were multiple elements here that felt gross.
Marco:
It was the fact that Verizon was mentioned outside of their little slot at all, plus the little pricing trick they're pulling, plus the fact that it kind of sold 5G benefits as Verizon only benefits in some of its implications and wording.
John:
I mean, I still don't quite understand why that's gross.
John:
That sounds like advertising.
John:
And yes, there was obviously a partnership deal.
John:
That happens all the time.
John:
What about all those times back in the good old days when Epic would be on stage showing us some knight in armor swiping at a dragon 20 times?
John:
Are they trying to say that the only games you can buy for this phone are from Epic?
John:
They made me sound like all gaming is this Epic game.
John:
It's an advertising part.
John:
Anyway, whatever.
Marco:
And I would expect it from a Verizon ad.
Marco:
It makes sense for a Verizon ad to try to sell 5G benefits as Verizon benefits.
Marco:
It doesn't make sense for an Apple ad to try to sell 5G benefits as Verizon benefits.
John:
But that's the partnership we were just talking about.
John:
Money changed hands, I'm sure.
John:
It's not like Apple's doing this out of the goodness of their heart, right?
John:
There's some kind of deal.
John:
But that's the business they're in.
Casey:
Well, it really chapped my bottom, which is why I wanted to get it off my chest, because the rest of the presentation and the stuff that was said, I thought was really, really good.
Casey:
And as per tradition, I'm going to try to go in timeline order, and then we will get about two sentences in and we will abandon ship.
Casey:
We started with the HomePod Mini, which I don't have any HomePods in the house.
Casey:
I am too cheap to buy a big HomePod.
Casey:
This one, the price at $99, that was surprising to me.
Casey:
And it seems like it's a decent product.
Casey:
I still don't think I have a place in my life for it because we have a couple of Amazon tubes and that seems to work just fine for us.
Casey:
And yes, I'm aware of privacy implications and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I'm not interested in having that conversation right now.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
home pod mini looked good and in direct contrast to me uh whining and moaning about the verizon 5g that appears everywhere uh i thought the set for the home pod mini demonstration was super cool and i liked the way they like went into what was his name was bob i think they like went from tim and like into the shrunken room that's of course it's obviously full size but like they made it look like the room was shrunken to show the the
Casey:
the HomePod Mini and all that.
Casey:
I thought this was very well done.
Casey:
And I really thought they handled the introduction well, even though I'm not entirely sure that product is for me.
John:
I think it all depends on how this thing sounds like they'll show you all the little thing and the speakers and so on and so forth.
John:
But the market that it's competing in has little tiny things that you talk to that are also speakers that are way cheaper than ninety nine dollars.
John:
Right.
John:
And so I think, you know, the three hundred fifty dollar HomePod had to justify its price somehow and kind of fail to do that.
John:
The $99 one also has to justify its price because you can get a little thing to talk to for way less money.
John:
So this better – what benefit does this have that one of those little Alexa – I'm sorry, everybody.
John:
One of those little Amazon Echo puck things has that, you know –
John:
the advantage they sold was, well, this sounds better.
John:
It probably does sound better in one of those pucks, because those pucks sound awful, right?
John:
But does it sound, you know, 80 bucks better, or whatever the price difference is?
John:
That's the question.
John:
The other thing is...
John:
As far as I can tell, this HomePod mini has exactly the same feature set as the big HomePod, plus or minus the software update that's coming soon for the big HomePod to make it have all the features they described here.
John:
So they kind of introduced this little product, which is a cheaper, smaller HomePod.
John:
At the same time, they told you about a bunch of software updates that are coming to all HomePods, but they sold them as features of just the mini because they're not on the big one quite yet.
John:
So we can talk about the software features in a little bit, but in general, there's feature parity between the two of them.
John:
The thing that worries me about this Mini, and one of the things I talked about is that it has an S5 chip in it, which is, you know, the watch chip, which is, it's a fairly fast, you know, it's not, there's no slouch.
John:
I forget which core it is.
John:
Is it like the A10 cores in the S5?
John:
I forget.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So it's got CPU power, but one of the complaints about the whole HomePod line is it's not too quick.
John:
And I mean that in both the time and sort of smarts.
John:
It takes a while to answer me, and sometimes the answer is not satisfactory.
John:
And an S5 does not give me much confidence that this Mini is going to improve on the responsiveness of its bigger brethren, right?
John:
You know, I understand cost controls, and you don't want to use a big expensive chip, and so on and so forth.
John:
And honestly, why should you need...
John:
A big, expensive, like, why do I need a HomePod with an A14?
John:
Isn't that a massive overkill?
John:
Yes, that absolutely is massive overkill, but I'm still faced with the issue that my $300-something giant HomePod does not answer me correctly or quickly a lot of the time.
John:
I just ask it to turn the lights on and off most of the time.
John:
And, you know, I give it a couple seconds, and then I go over and ask my other puck to do it.
John:
I have the Google one, the Amazon one, and the Apple one, and they can all do this job.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And for whatever reason, I always give the Apple one for a shot, mostly because it can hear me from really far away.
John:
But sometimes it's like, wait a moment or your lights aren't responding or it's like just.
John:
And so now there's this little one that's cheaper, certainly not any faster.
John:
And if the benefit was, you know, that big expensive one that you love, now you can have that experience all over your house for only $99.
John:
I'd be like, yay.
John:
But what they're promoting to me is, you know, that mediocre experience you have with your $350 one?
John:
Now you can have that same mediocre experience for $99.
John:
And that's not attractive to me.
John:
And none of the hardware features that they showed made me think that this little one is going to improve in any of the areas that my big one is currently failing.
Marco:
I've used HomePods for about as long as you have, or the same, and I really love them as speakers.
Marco:
They are really amazing speakers.
Marco:
It is very hard to find anything anywhere near that price range that sounds as good.
Marco:
The microphones in them, as you said, are the best.
Marco:
Compared to every other voice thing I've ever tried, the HomePod hears me better.
Marco:
from further away and with more ambient noise.
Marco:
It's especially clear in kitchens where I have found the Amazon Echo family of products has a really hard time hearing me when there's any kind of white noise source, like a kitchen vent fan going or water running or something.
Marco:
White noise seems to really hurt the ability for echoes to hear me.
Marco:
whereas home pods you can basically whisper from across the room with the oven fan going and it's fine like it'll still pick you up just fine but it's slower every single time like in good conditions and in bad conditions the home pod is just too slow to respond and then when it does respond as you said it is often less intelligent of a response and
Marco:
And it frequently will mishear you.
Marco:
It'll think you hailed it.
Marco:
And it'll go, hmm, from across the room when you weren't talking to it.
Marco:
Or it'll start talking back to you when you weren't talking to it.
Marco:
And what they showed with the HomePod Mini might be impressive.
Marco:
But anybody who has tried a HomePod before or owns a HomePod or who has even read reviews of the HomePod to hear all these problems with them,
Marco:
they didn't really answer whether any of those things are fixed.
Marco:
Because the HomePod is already by far the best sounding smart speaker.
Marco:
And by far the best hearing smart speaker.
Marco:
Not even close to other ones.
Marco:
Like, I have old Echos, new Echos.
Marco:
I currently have a pair of the Sonos One things that is supposed to be competitive with HomePods with audio quality.
Marco:
And it's totally not.
Marco:
HomePods are way better.
Marco:
These things all allegedly are as smart or as good sounding.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
The Alexa ecosystem is way smarter and way faster and way more consistent to respond to voice commands.
Marco:
And the Siri ecosystem sounds way better and hears you way better, but is way stupider and slower and less consistent with the responses.
Marco:
And so, during this entire presentation of the HomePod Mini, I kept thinking, like, I don't really want to believe.
Marco:
They're selling this wonderful situation here, but we all know that Siri is still Siri.
Marco:
It's hard to tell if they know that.
Marco:
It's hard to tell the way they sell Siri.
Marco:
kind of makes it seem like they don't know how mediocre it is.
Marco:
And I'm sure this is just PR and everything.
Marco:
I hope this is just PR.
Marco:
But do they really not know?
Marco:
Do any of the higher-ups that Apple use in Amazon Echo?
Marco:
I'm guessing the answer is no.
Marco:
And I think that should change.
Marco:
I would call upon...
Marco:
Whoever leads the HomePod project and then every person above them in the chain of command should spend a few months with an Amazon Echo in their house and using that as their primary kitchen cooking thing.
Marco:
I mean, they're Apple executives.
Marco:
I don't know if they have time to cook, but if somebody in their house does, somehow get them to use these devices.
Marco:
Because it seems like
Marco:
They are off in their own little world, you know, little like Apple, you know, white world, I guess, where like they think their stuff works the best because in some areas of the company that's true.
Marco:
And even for the HomePod, it does sound the best and it does hear you the best.
Marco:
So it is the best in certain areas.
Marco:
But it doesn't seem like they realize how mediocre and inconsistent Siri is compared to its competitors.
Marco:
And until they can fix that, no hardware is going to save this product line.
Marco:
Now, that being said, looking at the HomePod Mini, like just on specs alone, seeing like the type of speaker drivers it has, how they are arranged and, you know, the design of them and comparing that to the performance of the big HomePod.
Marco:
This thing for a hundred bucks is probably going to be very competitive against the, I guess it's like the newest Echo, which is now a ball, but it's not the little ball.
Marco:
That's the new Echo Dot.
Marco:
Now it's a big ball.
Yeah.
Marco:
But price-wise, this is the same price as the big ball.
Marco:
The little ball is $60.
Marco:
The big ball is $100.
Marco:
And the various small Echoes fluctuate between like $30 and $60 depending on various specials and things.
Marco:
But if they're competing against those with quality and everything, they're going to lose because they're so much cheaper.
Marco:
I'm guessing they're trying to compete with the mid-sized Echo family.
Marco:
Not even the Echo Studio, which is the more HomePod-looking one, which is, I think, $200?
Marco:
Oh, it's, yeah, $200.
Marco:
If they compete well against the mid-sized Echo, then they're going to be priced exactly like it, and that'll be great, and then people will compare it only on Siri, where they will lose.
Marco:
But if they compare it on audio quality, they'll probably win.
Marco:
I hope that the HomePod as a product line continues to grow and get actually competitive.
Marco:
When the first one came out, the price was just ridiculous for what it was.
Marco:
Again, not for sound quality, but for being a smart speaker.
Marco:
It was way out of the market.
Marco:
and this new one this is this is a decent price a hundred bucks that's a good price if it's a good product if it's if it's anywhere near as good as the big one was by the way i say this is past tense i don't know if they're ever going to update the big one again i kind of hope that any benefits that come down the road i hope they do and i hope if the speed of the local processor is indeed a pretty significant limiting factor in the responsiveness of the device they need to upgrade that yeah
Marco:
But honestly, I bet it isn't.
Marco:
I bet this is mostly a Siri problem, like a cloud service problem of why it's so much slower and why it's less consistent and why it's stupider.
Marco:
I don't think the CPU on the device is likely to be a major factor there.
Marco:
But anyway, this presentation looked really great, but it didn't answer the key questions that we all have.
Marco:
Will this actually be better than the original HomePod at Siri?
Yeah.
Marco:
Will it have fewer false ailings?
Marco:
Has Siri really gotten better?
Marco:
In the presentation, they gave this whole thing about how great Siri is, but if you paid careful attention to the wording, they didn't actually announce any changes to Siri overall today.
Marco:
It was all over the last three years.
Marco:
You've been getting better all the time.
Marco:
They did announce a couple new features.
Marco:
The What's My Update I thought was cool.
Marco:
The Intercom could be cool.
Marco:
But none of it was like the Siri service itself is better or the Siri service itself is faster.
Marco:
Like it was just like we're always making it better.
Marco:
So this might be great.
Marco:
It might be a game changer in some way.
Marco:
But I'm guessing it won't be.
Marco:
I'm guessing we still have to wait for Siri to get better.
Marco:
And it seems like we're just waiting forever for that.
John:
There's one hardware thing they touted in this was the U1.
John:
So you can hand off the audio to the thing because it knows where you are because you've got a phone with a U1 and the thing's got a U1.
John:
So that would be a cool experience if it worked well.
John:
That's actually a use case that I find a barrier in all of my various smart speakers.
John:
If I'm listening to something on my phone, say I'm listening on my AirPods, my phone is just sitting somewhere.
John:
and I want it to suddenly come out over the speakers, I really have to think to make that happen.
John:
Whatever device I can use, whether I want it to happen on the HomePod, or like, okay, well, I can go into the little pull-down thing and pick it and send the output there, right?
John:
Or if I wanted to go in something else, I can select that as an output.
John:
Like, I would like to be able to just speak into the air and say, please take over playing the audio that's currently playing on my phone, and the U1 handoff thing sort of promises that experience, if it actually works.
John:
And maybe getting to your point of like, what's the, why is Siri not quick, right?
John:
It's not quick in terms of wits based on, you know, the Siri service being stupid and answering the wrong question.
John:
But it's not, oh, there it is.
John:
But it's not quick based on response time, probably because of the server, but handoff should happen all locally.
John:
So the server shouldn't be a factor.
John:
So if they can get that working, maybe that works a little bit better.
John:
But anyway, that's one small hardware innovation.
John:
The intercom thing, like this is where it kind of bothers me that –
John:
that the HomePod in general, like it doesn't have like a UI.
John:
Obviously on it, it doesn't have much of a UI.
John:
It's got like the touch buttons and everything like that.
John:
But sort of how features like Intercom make me wish there was like some big control panel, not just a setting screen somewhere buried in one of my iOS devices, but like a place that you could go, a screen that you could pull up that's like, this is the control panel slash dashboard for your HomePod.
John:
And features like Intercom, you can personalize, say, should this interrupt my wife's AirPods when she's cooking one of Intercom to everybody?
John:
or should it only interrupt the kids right and like during what times and like just all those little picky features like that that for a new feature like this from apple the the the settings for it are probably going to be fairly thin and i just don't feel like there's a place to go to deal with all the home pod stuff um i did like that apple is trying to push the idea of the home pods as uh
John:
as HomeKit hubs, because that is an important function they serve, because they're on all the time, they're plugged in all the time, and they're in your home, so it's ideal for that.
John:
But I feel like that the idea that you need or want a HomeKit hub for a HomeKit house is kind of techie, and most people don't really think about it in that way.
John:
Like, you can use your Apple TV or HomeKit hub, I think you can use any of your devices, but of course your devices come and go.
John:
And if you're trying to sort of live the HomeKit lifestyle, this is just...
John:
One more sort of sad reminder of how strategically maybe unwise it was for Apple to get out of the Wi-Fi router business.
John:
Because, you know, if you're going down that path of I'm going to have a smart home and HomeKit and things that listen to me and so on and so forth...
John:
And you're going to buy this expensive thing and stick them all around your house.
John:
Like, that's Wi-Fi mesh networking, right?
John:
You're already buying a bunch of these little turds with CPUs in them and spreading them over your house.
John:
And they already have to be on Wi-Fi.
John:
Just, you know, maybe Apple will come back to it someday.
John:
But I feel like that is a...
John:
potentially a missing piece now amazon and google don't do that either for the most part i don't think either one of them have a product that is also a wi-fi hub it just seems like a thing that apple could do that would make this product more attractive kind of like well i'm just going to get the apple wi-fi for my house and by the way every one of those wi-fi things is also a little smart speaker home pod thing that i can talk to right i keep thinking about the fact that i've purchased two google homes a big one and a small one and google has given me two of them for free because i because i pay for their cloud storage right
John:
Apple doesn't do that.
John:
Apple's not giving me any of these little balls for free, despite the fact that I've also paid for their maximum amount of cloud stuff and will pay for Apple One.
John:
That's not the kind of business Apple runs.
John:
But the fact that Google devices are slowly outnumbering everything else in my house is purely attributable to Google giving me their cheapest little puck thing.
John:
And you know what?
John:
When the HomePod doesn't hear me to turn on the lights, the next one I go to is that cheap little puck.
John:
And why do I do that?
John:
Because it's right in the same room.
John:
It's right there next to the lights.
John:
So...
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think I actually officially have Google Home devices because I have Nest cameras.
Marco:
And they made some change about a year ago where, like, you can just now turn on a Nest camera's ability to be a Google ball.
Marco:
Because they have microphones and speakers in them.
Marco:
Because you can do, like, that talk-through thing.
John:
I didn't turn that on, though.
Marco:
I didn't either, but I technically have three of those.
Marco:
They're shoving them into everything.
Marco:
And Amazon, too.
Marco:
Amazon, to their credit, they have so much hardware that can be an Amazon Alexa-powered thing.
Marco:
And it isn't just their hardware.
Marco:
They've also...
Marco:
enabled other people to build that in to the point where i think i think i have at least one tv that has it built in as well as god knows what else i mean my printer probably has it built in at this point like there's so much there's so much stuff that has amazon alexa or the google assistant or both built in that you know it's they're just kind of everywhere they're just shoving it
Marco:
any place they possibly can to really make it ubiquitous for as many people as possible.
Marco:
And Apple is just never going to compete in that particular arena.
Marco:
Where they do compete is everyone has iPhones.
Marco:
So they use that to their advantage.
Marco:
If you have an iPhone, and you have an Apple Watch, and you have iPads, and you have Macs, then we're going to have that everywhere.
Marco:
And I think it's smart for Apple to build on that, to have something like Intercom to build on that.
Marco:
But that assumes, or that requires...
Marco:
that their home smart speaker situation get a lot better than where it is today.
Marco:
So if the HomePod Mini succeeds and they actually end up selling a bunch of them, then great.
Marco:
Then they will have a really competitive ecosystem against what I think now is going mostly to Amazon for a lot of their customers.
Marco:
But that's a big if.
Marco:
And I think that still depends a lot on Siri being way faster and way more consistent and way smarter than it is today.
Marco:
And Apple has seemed to not be able to nail that ever throughout Siri's entire lifespan so far.
Marco:
Which is now, I mean, Siri launched with the iPhone 4S.
Marco:
So that's a long time ago now.
Marco:
And it should be better than it is.
Marco:
For how long, you know, they even said, like, Siri was the first voice assistant.
Marco:
Like, yes.
Marco:
Or, you know, whatever qualifications they put in that, that was true.
Marco:
The Echo came out a few years later, and it just iterated way faster and got way better than Siri very quickly.
Marco:
Whatever ability Apple has to get a fire lit under their butts to achieve great things, you know, they get that ability sometimes, and they focus it in great ways, usually.
John:
that effort has seemingly never been focused on siri and i wish it would be because so much could get so much better if it was yeah they also mentioned the carplay integration that was one of their only apple moments was like hey we have a thing in the car we've got your phone we've got your ipads we've got your computers and we've got these home speakers and it can all be integrated so you can intercom and someone who's in the car pull up the driveway can hear it i forget what the demo was but like all that integration makes a lot of sense i think it's
John:
good for apple to be building on that the u1 thing the handoff because they've got the chip in your phone they've got the chip in there that all makes sense it's held back by by the serious stuff that we talked about i think it's still held back by the pricing because apple doesn't have a 30 on sale thing that you can put in there and you know i think that the only way you're going to get people sort of on board to this thing and sort of an ambient way is you have to have enough benefits to
John:
to get them over the line to overcome your weakness, right?
John:
I feel like the series smartness and speed is their weakness, but you can overcome that if you can say, well, they're cheap and they come up with a bunch of other cool features.
John:
And, you know, Apple getting third party music services is trying to eliminate another weakness.
John:
So they didn't announce Spotify, but there are future announcements coming.
John:
So we should assume that they're working on something with Spotify.
John:
Just get rid of the reasons why people don't want one of these.
John:
Reducing the price really gets rid of a big one.
John:
they seemingly can't get rid of siri being dumb and slow so get rid of some other stuff make this a little bit cheaper make a really really cheap version bring back the wi-fi thing just get it in people's house whether they want it or not amazon prime style and then they can build up from there with uh services that i think especially local only services that that avoid their server apparent server side weaknesses they get a situation where you know
John:
So without you even realizing it, pretty soon your whole house is wired with Apple stuff.
John:
And one of the big advantages they can lean on, and then they did talk about it in this presentation too, is the privacy angle.
John:
Having a bunch of Google and Amazon stuff in my house makes me feel less good than having Apple stuff because in general I think they're better on privacy and...
John:
Their business doesn't depend nearly as heavily on collecting information about me and selling targeted ads and yada yada.
John:
So I'd rather have a house full of Apple things instead of a house full of free Google things they're giving me or a house full of Amazon pucks, right?
John:
There are strengths that Apple can lean on.
John:
It just, and they're tipping that seesaw away from, you know, they're eliminating some of their weaknesses or they're mitigating some of their weaknesses and they're trying to lean more heavily on the strengths.
John:
So this is, even though it sounds like we're down in the iPod mini,
John:
HomePod mini.
John:
Every aspect of this product is some important thing that Apple needed to do.
John:
I think what we're saying is they still have farther to go.
Marco:
The only way forward that they would actually do, Apple is never going to be the cheap, everywhere, ubiquitous version of anything.
Marco:
If Apple is going to succeed in this market, they're never going to take that path.
Marco:
They're never going to be – they're never going to have like Siri in everything.
Marco:
Here's a $25 Siri puck for your car.
Marco:
Like they're never going to do that.
Marco:
That's not their style at all, and they aren't good at it even if they wanted to, but they wouldn't.
Marco:
The only other path forward for that is, I think, if they're not going to be the cheapest, which they never are, then they should be the best, which they often are.
Marco:
That's their way out of this.
Marco:
Their way to have this market work at all is to become the best.
Marco:
The challenge is that being the best in this particular market requires them to be the best at something that is a big data, serious machine learning, AI-powered web service, basically.
Marco:
And that's not something they have been great at.
Marco:
And that's an entire category of skills that Apple has consistently shown that they can get like 75% of the way there and then they just kind of stall.
Marco:
They plateau.
Marco:
They're never able to get as good at that kind of thing as other technology giants.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I don't think you have, like, this is the kind of thing, like, if you would have asked me before the Echo came out, like, which company was going to have the best one of these things, I would have said Google, no question, because it's like, it's right in their wheelhouse to have the best voice assistant for all sorts of reasons.
Marco:
Data, machine learning, talent, AI talent, and just having the massive, you know, web of data at their disposal, like...
Marco:
This is obviously the kind of thing that Google would be really great at.
Marco:
I would never in a million years have guessed that Amazon would have been able to build that talent and build that service in only a couple of years.
Marco:
They built it very quickly.
Marco:
They built this entire thing from nothing.
Marco:
the entire Alexa service to a point that it was really competitive and that it was better than Siri in many, many ways and it was way more consistent and way faster and everything.
Marco:
Amazon just did that.
Marco:
They just built that from nothing in a very short time without having a massive history of that kind of talent in their company the way Google has.
Marco:
So if Amazon could do it, Apple can too.
Marco:
It's just an issue of they seem to have just not done it for whatever reason.
Marco:
But it isn't that they can't.
Marco:
It's that they seemingly won't or just haven't.
Marco:
And that's more concerning to me.
Marco:
But again, hopefully at some point they will get that wake up call.
Marco:
Siri's not good enough and they have to fix it and they have to actually prioritize it and give it resources and make it, you know, just make it happen.
Marco:
Direct their attention towards making Siri that not only good enough, make it the best, make it better than all the other ones.
Marco:
That's how Apple is going to win any category they try to play in.
Marco:
And if they're not willing to do that, they're going to lose.
John:
uh google i think is still the smartest but i think what amazon was smart about doing was for the basic functionality make sure they're you know make sure we are fast and responsive and work in the 80 case and i think apple apple's grand vision has always been more like google's and that we're going to be super intelligent and do everything that's like if i had to give some advice to siri team i would say narrow your focus
John:
Just turn the lights on as fast as Alexa does.
John:
Just try that.
John:
Pick a few criteria.
John:
Stop thinking about how you're going to parse this complex grammatical sentence to integrate these seven devices and yada yada for some cool demo and just say, let's get the basics right.
John:
Because Amazon started with the basics and expanded outward without ever losing the basics.
John:
And I still think Amazon is more sort of...
John:
brain-dead straightforward than Google, Google actually does try to be like, just say a bunch of stuff and we'll figure it out.
John:
Because honestly, once they get into text, they have their entire businesses built around just figuring out what the heck people are trying to ask for, right?
John:
So I think you're never going to catch Google in that area, probably.
John:
They have more data, they have more expertise, they have more experience.
John:
But to be losing to Amazon in the how fast can I get the lights to turn off, that's just embarrassing.
John:
So fix that first.
John:
And fix basic things like
John:
your uptime and the responsiveness of your servers and, you know, all that stuff before thinking about the more complicated scenarios and the sort of, you know, understanding what people say in complex ways.
John:
Cause that's, that's where the, you know, the, the real, the next bend in this curve is going to be, as I always talk about this, being able to have a conversation with one of these things and to clarify and correct the,
John:
And they show demos of that all the time, but in real life, it never feels natural.
John:
You feel like, I could explain this to a toddler, but I can't get you, Cylinder, to understand what I would like you to do next, and that's frustrating.
John:
So whoever gets over that next is going to have a big advantage.
John:
But for now, we just want to play a song, turn off the lights, whatever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I did think the CarPlay demo was really cool.
Casey:
Like if you ask where the nearest hardware store is and then you go and use your phone in your car with CarPlay, one of the destinations it will offer is that store that was found a little while ago, which was really neat.
John:
I remember watching that demo.
John:
I think it was Target or whatever.
John:
I'm like, look, I forget what kind of store it was.
John:
And I'm like, I have five of those stores and I know you're going to pick the wrong one.
John:
You're going to pick the one that's closest or you're going to pick the one.
John:
And that gets me into the exact situation I was just talking about.
John:
When I get into my car and I think it has directions to target, but it's the wrong target because I don't want to go to that one because it's a madhouse at this hour.
John:
What can I do or say to correct the situation?
John:
I can't say, hey, dingus, know the other target because only Google would understand that.
John:
There's no way in hell that Apple's dingus is going to do anything useful than that.
John:
And now you're just faced with this thing of like, again, maybe not a toddler, but another human, you could say, oh, I see what you did there.
John:
It's nice that you set up my directions to go to the place, but actually there are several of those places that live near us.
John:
And by the way, I always go to this one.
John:
And so stop recommending that one because parking is a nightmare.
John:
I never go to that one.
John:
I always go to this one.
John:
And with all these cylinders, you just can't convey that.
John:
You just can't.
John:
There's nothing you can say to the air.
John:
There's no secret settings panel that you can probably find.
John:
And it's just that kind of helpfulness becomes frustrating because now you have to cancel navigation.
John:
Make sure you don't start blindly following it because it's taking you to the wrong one.
John:
Or maybe like, look, I know where all the targets are.
John:
Don't try to be helpful.
John:
Don't give me speaking directions to target that I've gone to a thousand times.
John:
I know how to get there.
John:
So...
John:
I'm derailing against these intelligent cylinders in general.
John:
I think it makes for a good demo, and it's a good idea, and Apple should integrate their stuff, but their specific instance just triggered in me.
John:
I can see how that would fall down in my scenario with the particular store they picked, and I don't think my situation is uncommon.
Marco:
You'd be lucky if they picked the closest one.
Marco:
Pick one in London.
Marco:
Yeah, that would be like directions to Target Avenue in Pennsylvania.
Marco:
And like, well, for some reason, Target is 300 miles away.
John:
I had one of those today.
John:
Today, I was coming home from a place.
John:
I took my, dropping my kid off at a place that I hadn't been before and I used the directions, right?
John:
And on the way back, like I always have Google and Apple and I,
John:
i run them against each other it's my thing that i do um and on the way back i said okay okay apple maps now is your time to shine and i can tell you to get there there were there were many routes that i could go and i picked one i picked the fastest one it was like 21 minutes right on the way back i say okay you know directions to home which is like this is in your wheelhouse siri i know you can do this right you know where i live you can give me those directions it's really easy to do um
John:
And it gave me a route.
John:
And it was, interestingly, it was a different route than I'd taken there.
John:
But I'm like, fine, you know, traffic patterns change, time of day makes sense.
John:
And the time estimate was an hour and 45 minutes.
John:
I'm like, what?
John:
So I canceled it and I did it again.
John:
I manually typed in my home address and I said, give me directions to there for my current location in this parking lot.
John:
And it said, yep, an hour and 45 minutes.
John:
I'm like, no, no Apple Maps.
John:
That's not, that's not right.
John:
And so I went to Google and it told me 21 minutes and I got home in like 21 minutes.
Yeah.
John:
What the hell?
John:
And no, it wasn't sending me to the wrong place.
John:
It was sending me to my house.
John:
I looked on the map like, yep, that's my house.
John:
That's where I live.
John:
Yep, that's where I am now.
John:
Stuff like that does not instill confidence.
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Casey:
All right, let's move on to iPhones.
Casey:
We start with the iPhone 12, which is like the iPhone 11, 6.1 inches, but all of the new iPhones.
Casey:
Hey, did you hear they get Verizon 5G?
Marco:
Yeah, actually, 5G was the first feature announced before they showed any of the phones.
John:
that's true like that was if you're going to keynote order 5g was more important than the iphone which is so weird to me i mean 5g is not particularly important this year but for future proofing these phones which some of which will surely be in the lineup for years and years 5g is pretty important agreed and i'm also talking about how we're going to make it not destroy your battery i think is also important to point out
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I think 5G, the problem is that it's being grossly oversold for what it actually is today.
Marco:
I know part of this is just Verizon being Verizon, a cell carrier selling their network, claiming the benefits of things that are not due to the cell network technology.
Marco:
But it just seems like
Marco:
both Verizon and Apple pushed 5G way past what it can actually deliver, like in what they're hyping it up.
Marco:
And in the future, once we have widespread 5G coverage, I'm sure it'll be great.
Marco:
Anytime the cell phone radio technology changes,
Marco:
It is better afterwards.
Marco:
It is a better world.
Marco:
Things do get better.
Marco:
But it takes a while to get there, and it's a transition.
Marco:
And then once we get there, the actual problems that most people have...
Marco:
are still kind of the same because of the fundamental physics and economics problems of cell phone coverage.
Marco:
I don't know a lot of people who are looking at their LTE phone today and saying, wow, I wish I could do XYZ, but I can't because the radio technology is too slow.
Marco:
like that's that's not a problem that i don't think i know anybody who has every person i know with a cell phone if they could ask for a way for their network to get better it would be two things it would be either or both give me better coverage in whatever area i don't have good coverage in or in my house or in a building or whatever so it's coverage issues or
Marco:
or data caps on plans that yeah we'd love to use our phones to download at a gigabit per second but we do that for a few minutes and we've used up our plan for the month or even if we have a quote unlimited plan we will hit the throttling limit when our speeds get dropped down to like you know 128k because we hit some threshold of gigabytes on our quote unlimited plan so all like the things that that we are being sold on 5g like oh you'll be able to
Marco:
Stream all this video and do this.
Marco:
Yeah, we can stream video now at great quality if we have good coverage and if we're willing to burn a bunch of gigs of data.
Marco:
But we usually don't have the coverage that we want in many places and we don't have that many gigs of data to burn on our plans.
Marco:
There are aspects of 5G that I'm sure, you know, they talk a lot about improvements in dense areas and stuff like that.
Marco:
And that will be nice once it's widespread.
Marco:
And eventually, long term, if 5G technology allows them to deliver faster speeds and faster transfer and more transfer for less money on their end, then maybe our plans will get a little bit better.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
Let's not go crazy.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But at root, this is solving a problem that is not the biggest problem most people have.
Marco:
And the problems that we have of not great coverage in lots of places and of not really unlimited data and having to kind of conserve our mobile data still in certain places in certain ways, those problems are still here.
Marco:
And they don't seem like they're going away anytime soon.
Marco:
And so what we really have here is some wonderful hype about a bunch of stuff, some of which might someday come true, some of which will probably come true, but maybe not for a few years, and some of which has nothing to do with 5G.
Marco:
Some of the benefits they were touting
Marco:
doctors will be able to save lives because they are able to use to view the scan of we or whatever it's like yeah we can do that already on LTE like very well actually they were saying it would download faster so you wait seconds to get the big image instead of minutes like there was it made sense in context yeah but like the speed like LTE is very fast when it has good coverage and when you have a good plan
Marco:
It's very fast already.
Marco:
We're way past diminishing returns on a lot of the stuff that people do on their phones.
Marco:
And so, again, this will be nice, but I think it was oversold.
Marco:
It was kind of like when... I don't know how many of our listeners will remember...
Marco:
And John, I don't know if you were even paying attention to the Intel ads in the mid to late 90s, but when Intel released MMX, this was their multimedia instruction set, they had this huge ad campaign that strongly implied or maybe even outright said that MMX made the internet faster for you.
Marco:
Because that was the time when everybody was getting internet access and Intel wanted to sell its new chips.
Marco:
And so they said, they had ads to the effect that MMX just made the internet faster on your computer.
Marco:
And I'm sure that was based on some kind of claim where like, well, web browsers have to run certain things that, you know, to decode images.
Marco:
Maybe they can use some of the MMX instructions and maybe images will decode faster.
Marco:
Maybe web pages might render, you know, 10% faster if you have one of these chips or something.
Marco:
It was probably based on some kind of technicality like that.
Marco:
But what most people thought when they saw the ads was, oh, wow, this CPU is going to make my internet connection faster.
Marco:
And the real problem that made the internet so slow back then was we were all using modems.
Marco:
Yeah, MMX might have improved things, but there was this other massive problem in the way that was way more of a factor.
Marco:
And I feel like this is kind of like the inverse of that.
Marco:
We're really selling and bragging about this faster network technology.
Marco:
And while that is relevant, it is a factor, and maybe in the future it'll be more of a factor, today it's not that much of a factor.
Marco:
And today we have much bigger other problems with our cell phone data plans and coverage and everything else that...
Marco:
This isn't going to really change in the near term.
Marco:
So I hope it changes in the long term.
Marco:
And I don't know enough about the details of 5G's capabilities to know, like, are they going to be able to cover further?
Marco:
Are they going to penetrate mountains and buildings better?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
You know, are they going to drop the price on our plans?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
Are they going to make more unlimited plans that are actually unlimited?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
So there's all these massive problems in the areas that are holding back how and when and how quickly we use our cellular data.
Marco:
5G might eventually make some of them better, but it's making seemingly none of them better today.
John:
Well, just like the other thing, I thought with your complaining about Verizon, I thought they're selling a 5G was mostly accurate.
John:
Like they didn't promote it in things that it won't help with.
John:
They promoted the few areas where it would.
John:
That's why they were showing the doctor with the scans, because it's not
John:
like you're downloading an image of a brain those documents are humongous and they're the type of document that at max ideal lte speeds might take a minute to download and now they're saying it will take seconds in those same ideal conditions if you're on 5g if you're going to sell the benefit of your faster connection you have to find a use case where it actually matters
John:
They found one.
John:
Giant medical images.
John:
Is it a common use case?
John:
Are you a doctor?
John:
Do you care?
John:
No, but that's why they sold it.
John:
Similarly, low latency for gaming.
John:
How many people are playing Twitch games on their phones?
John:
I don't know, but if you're going to try to find, well, does anyone care about latency of the cell network?
John:
well, I suppose if someone was playing a game that required, like a network game that required really little latency, okay, that's our thing that will sell.
John:
Like, I didn't think it was overblown because the scenarios they were selling were so targeted at the specific strengths.
John:
That's why they didn't sell, oh, it will penetrate mountains because it won't.
John:
It's not better at that, right?
John:
In fact, you know, this is the main, the root problem of 5G is that its main improvements are in use cases, like they said in the thing, dense population, stadiums,
John:
you know, essentially short range, but your problem is there's just too many darn people, right?
John:
And so that's what they sold.
John:
Now, I don't think that's particularly compelling for all the reasons you said, because those aren't the problems people have, but that is what they sold in the show.
John:
They sold in the keynote the strengths of 5G, which are not particularly compelling to most people, but I thought they were accurate.
John:
And I thought they were uncharacteristically underselling it by instead of saying up to, you know, 3.5 gigabits,
John:
They said 3.5 gigabits in ideal conditions, which sounds worse.
John:
If you just say up to, which is totally the Apple move, you just say up to, it's like, well, you get anything between zero and that, which is true, but misleading.
John:
But if they say, here's what you get in ideal conditions, everybody looks at that and says, oh, well, who's ever in ideal conditions?
John:
Certainly not me.
John:
And so they dismiss it, right?
John:
So anyway, I...
John:
It didn't bother me.
John:
5G is a problem to sell just based on the technology.
John:
But, I mean, we're all glad these phones have it, right?
John:
And I'm particularly glad that Apple at least says, we have to try this out to see how it affects, but says they're doing something to control battery drain because...
John:
In most cases, you probably don't even want to try 5G.
John:
Like, that's what that segment was about.
John:
It's like, look, don't even bother.
John:
Like, if you have a use case where you don't think you need it, you're not the doctor downloading the one gigabyte brain scan, just don't even try to get on 5G.
John:
Just stay on LTE.
John:
If LTE signal is strong and that's all you need for doing whatever the phone is doing now, like checking email or something, just stay on that.
John:
right as opposed to a phone that's going to stubbornly say no i'm going to be on 5g all the time because 5g is one bigger g than 4g therefore i'm going to constantly be on 5g and destroy your battery i'm glad the phones won't do that i hope that feature works as advertised because that's the phone recognizing all the stuff you were saying marco is like is this a problem you need to solve well if you're playing league of legends or you're downloading the brain scan fine we'll kick up to 5g but the rest of the time you don't have to change anything the phone will just go in lte and everything will be fine that's that's how i hope it works we don't have these phones yet but
John:
I'm glad that was their pitch because that part appealed to me.
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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Thank you so much to Bombas for improving the world two socks at a time and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so let's talk about phones.
Casey:
The iPhone 12 and 12 mini were kind of lumped together.
Casey:
The 12 is the successor to the non-pro iPhone 11.
Casey:
It is a 6.1-inch screen, but it is 11% thinner, 15% smaller, 16% lighter.
Casey:
And it has an OLED display now, which is really cool because the iPhone 11 non-pro did not.
Casey:
And it has considerably more pixels, if I understood this right, 460 pixels per inch, which is a surprise.
Casey:
I didn't expect to see that happen.
Marco:
Yeah, well, that's kind of interesting, though.
Marco:
Sorry to interrupt here.
Marco:
No, no, go ahead.
Marco:
So it does have more pixels because the move to OLED, they made it 3x retina instead of 2x retina that the previous LCD was.
Marco:
But actually, our friend Steve Trouton-Smith was poking through the simulators, and I verified all this earlier today.
Marco:
The previous 6.1-inch line, that would be the XR and the 11, the base 11, that had the same resolution in points as the iPhone whatever max.
Marco:
It had 414 points across at 3x.
Marco:
The 6.1s up till now had 414 at 2x.
Marco:
It basically took the screen real estate of the Macs and shrunk it down so it just looked smaller.
Marco:
But you still had the same system layout as the Macs.
Marco:
The new ones are 3x density with the OLED panels.
Marco:
And what Apple has done with almost all of the OLEDs to date...
Marco:
They actually made everything bigger, basically.
Marco:
They would use the same screen real estate from previously what was a smaller phone when they moved to OLED.
Marco:
And so, for instance, the iPhone X and XS and 11 Pro, they have the same 375 point width as the old 678 series did.
Marco:
You wouldn't get more text on screen or more width of images on screen at default settings.
Marco:
Everything was just a little bit bigger.
Marco:
And what they've done with the new 6.1-inch line, the 12 and also the 12 Pro, they now both match at 390 wide at 3X.
Marco:
So this is great if you were accustomed to the 11 Pro or the 10 or the 10S.
Marco:
But if you're accustomed to the XR or the base 11, you're actually going to have less screen real estate now at the same size.
Marco:
And everything will just look a little bit bigger.
Marco:
It is interesting that they went this direction with it.
Marco:
But otherwise, it is very nice that it went OLED.
Marco:
All of the current models now, all the 12s, have OLED screens.
Marco:
And they're all 3X density.
Marco:
Although the mini has an asterisk on it that we'll get to later.
Yeah.
John:
Although I think this is a theme of the of this year's iPhones and it's a theme that I like, which is uniformity across all of the products that Apple fields.
John:
So they all get OLEDs.
John:
They all get, you know, it's the whatever they're using XDR on it.
John:
Like they're all HDR capable.
John:
Like the screens are, you know, again, with the caveat that we're going to get to in the mini in a second.
John:
they didn't they didn't downscale everything for the cheaper phone so we're going to talk about this in a lot of the features and we're starting from the cheaper phones which is the 12 but i it's it makes somewhat of a problem in their line and i think we'll get to that a little bit later too which is like okay well then how are you how are you charging me 200 more for this and how do you actually differentiate them but i love the fact that
John:
Essentially, they have one set of hardware for making phones and they don't deny it to you if you get the cheapest one.
John:
So now the cheapest one doesn't have just a good screen like it always had.
John:
It has the best screen because it's the same screen as the other more expensive one.
Marco:
um as far as we know like i don't i don't think there's actually any difference in quality in the specs that they said you know um there is one small difference um besides the the asterisk that we'll get to in a minute um the non-pro screens max out at 625 nits of brightness the pro screens are 800 in general the uniformity of of the the hardware features of these products is uh
John:
Something that makes me feel less bad about recommending the quote-unquote lesser phones because they're really good and they have good stuff in them.
John:
I think, what is the other one?
John:
True Tone is the other thing they all got.
John:
They all get the ceramic shield, whatever, latest Gorilla Glass 4X drop thing.
John:
That's not just on the high-end phone.
John:
It's on all of them.
John:
Correct.
Casey:
Oh, John, John, don't forget, you get great 5G service with Verizon.
Ha ha ha!
John:
we already mentioned that 5g across the whole line imagine if they had the iphone 5g was just the expensive one but the other ones still stayed with 4g because you know if you want 5g you got to step up to the pro no they all get it of all sizes which may actually be let's get to the mini right so the mini the mini is the phone that has the most compromises because it's mini um it's it's in the 12 family it's smaller um
John:
We talked about this before it was announced.
John:
Smaller phones have smaller batteries.
John:
They also have smaller screens, but that's really this phone's as far as we know, because they don't tell you lots of specs.
John:
As far as we know, this phone's only saving grace when it comes to battery power is that the screen is smaller.
John:
It's got the same system on the chip.
John:
It's got 5G.
John:
It's got all the same stuff inside it.
John:
The only place it can save on power is either by being clocked lower or having less RAM, but we don't know about those yet.
John:
And Apple sure wasn't telling us.
Marco:
We have the RAM from Xcode stuff.
John:
oh that's good is it is it less or the same um the mini and the 12 both have four gigs and the pro and max have six gigs yeah so it has the same amount of i'm comparing it to the 12 because it's the only we've talked about 12 and 12 mini right the only place the 12 mini saves battery power is by having a smaller screen and maybe having a lower clock cpu
John:
But the battery is way smaller.
John:
And so when we think about, hey, everybody gets 5G.
John:
The last thing that I want destroying my battery on the mini is even well-intentioned attempts to hop up to 5G to do something.
John:
Like, I hope that you can disable 5G on the mini because battery life is the big question mark on the small.
John:
I know everyone loves small phones.
John:
Maybe Marcos can get this one.
John:
We'll talk about it in a little bit.
John:
But small phones have smaller batteries.
John:
uh and nobody likes it when their battery runs out so i really hope that the mini is doing as much as it can hardware wise to make that small battery last acceptably long because the 12 is sitting there right next to it with a much bigger battery and a slightly bigger screen and i feel like the 12's battery life has got to be way better but margo you can talk about the the the visual compromise on the mini screen
Marco:
Yeah, so this is the asterisk, that all the phones now have 3X OLED screens, and they all display at 3X with their relative point sizes, except the iPhone 12 mini.
Marco:
It does have a 3X pixel screen, and it does have OLED.
Marco:
And it's, you know, it has, you know, you mentioned the cool new glass, the super hard glass.
Marco:
I'm very curious to see how that is in practice.
Marco:
I have high hopes because they push it so hard.
Marco:
And I hope in addition to drop performance, I hope it's also very scratch resistant, as Casey mentioned last week and on the Relay crossover show this week.
Marco:
Um, ultimately the, the weird thing about the 12 mini screen is that it takes the same point resolution, the same screen space resolution as the 10 and the 10 S and the 11 pro.
Marco:
And it shrinks that down.
Marco:
It's three 75 points across the,
Marco:
And it displays that scaled down back to the size that it was.
Marco:
Now, I actually took out my phones for comparison here.
Marco:
I have a few phones with me here.
Marco:
I have my 11 Pro.
Marco:
I also have my old trusty Jet Black iPhone 7.
Marco:
I never had an 8.
Marco:
So I have an iPhone 7, Jet Black, feels great.
Marco:
And I have my old trusty iPhone SE, the first-gen iPhone SE that's based on the 5S.
Marco:
And just for a size comparison here, I noticed instantly when I went from the 11 Pro,
Marco:
back down to the 7 size, which is the same 375 point width across screen layout-wise, everything seems a little small.
Marco:
because it's smaller because again when they went to the 10 line they just kind of blew everything up they made everything a little bit bigger screen space wise what they what they're doing now is undoing that change only for the mini so the mini is going to it's going to appear like the content on it will also appear mini basically like everything's going to look a little bit smaller
Marco:
That's going to be really interesting to use in practice.
Marco:
Like now that we've gotten accustomed to the bigger phones, anybody who steps back down to the mini size, who's been using like the 10 size until now, that's going to be a noticeable change that you're going to have the same width.
Marco:
You're going to fit the same words per line in default settings, but everything will just be smaller.
Marco:
And, of course, I'm sure a lot of people will just crank the font size up one or two notches to make up for that.
Marco:
Then you'll have, obviously, less space.
Marco:
But I think it's an interesting choice to have that be not a narrower logical layout size, but to just shrink what was the mainstream mid-range size in the Pro line, at least, and then what was the only size in the 678, not kind of the Plus, like that line.
Marco:
That is now the width of the mini, logically.
Marco:
The number of pixels on the screen is not actually enough to display that resolution at 3x.
Marco:
It's close.
Marco:
To do that resolution at 3x, you need 1125 across.
Marco:
The Pixel is 1080.
Marco:
So they have to shrink it by like, what is it, like 9% or something?
Marco:
So they have to scale it down.
Marco:
So as far as I can tell, what we know so far, the Mini appears to be running in a scaling mode all the time.
Marco:
And this is something that we haven't seen since the 6, 7, and 8 Plus line.
Marco:
So we'll see if that actually makes a difference with noticeable visual quality.
Marco:
I'm guessing for most people it probably won't be noticeable because once you go to 3x Retina,
Marco:
Some blurriness in pixels here and there becomes very easily forgiven and very hard to notice.
Marco:
I personally don't have any ability to see individual pixels.
Marco:
And if I mess up when I'm drawing something in my app and I fall on a half pixel or third of a pixel boundary or quarter pixel boundary on some line I'm drawing, I can't tell on a 3x phone.
Marco:
So maybe this won't be noticeable to most people.
Marco:
But if you're super picky about sharpness and visual quality, the Mini might not work for you.
Casey:
Yeah, I think we should explore before we leave this topic, you know, before we leave the phones, what we're all intending to buy, if anything.
Casey:
But, you know, I glossed over earlier, and I think, John, you had mentioned this.
Casey:
These do have flat sides, which I...
John:
cannot be more excited about i am super excited to have the spiritual like you said john like iphone 5 ish uh flat-sided uh feel and look iphone 4 ish i know everyone loves the 5 and they keep talking about the 5 but the 4 was the one that came out with the flat side you're right 4 is the best looking phone this is the love child between them because it's flat sides like the floor but no ice cream sandwich because the 5 was just a
Marco:
rounded rectangle solid it didn't have a part that was sort of like raised on the back and front disagree the best part the best one so far was the five series i know you disagree just you're wrong but anyway like for reasons that we can't get back today like like one of the one of the main reasons it was so great is that it didn't have a glass back so not only was it more durable it was way lighter
Marco:
And one thing, I am so excited about the Mini, personally.
Marco:
We'll get to that once we get into what we're buying.
Marco:
But what's interesting about the Mini is, like, size and weight-wise, it is not just like the 6, 7, and 8.
Marco:
It's significantly smaller and lighter than them.
Marco:
It is not quite, but almost as small and light as the 5 Series.
Marco:
And that's really exciting to me, because...
Marco:
you know i've wanted a light phone a small light phone ever since last summer when i when i carried just my se for a while my first gen se and i i've realized like quite how heavy and big the 11 pro and 10 10s are and so i and i've wanted to go back for a while but you know you couldn't get a good phone that was that size if you wanted like high-end stuff but
Marco:
And what's great about this is that now you can.
Marco:
With that one exception of the screen scaling thing and the sizing of elements on screen, which we'll see how that plays out in practice.
Marco:
With that exception, you're not really giving up anything else.
Marco:
And that's awesome.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm really, really excited about the flat sides.
Casey:
I really like the colors across all of the iPhones 12.
Casey:
I think that the five that are offered on the 12 and 12 mini are all really, really good.
Casey:
It's white, black, blue, and it's described as green, but it's kind of like a minty green and red, a product red.
Casey:
The blue in particular, I love.
Casey:
And I also like it a lot, the Pacific blue on the 12 Pro, which we'll get to in a minute.
Casey:
But I love that the colors are here on the 12 and 12 mini.
Casey:
And I know we spoke about this already, but I really want to reiterate, and we kind of talked about this on Fusion, the Relay Crossover Show.
Casey:
It is extremely cool to me that there are definitely choices to be made between each of these different kinds of phone devices.
Casey:
But for the most part, there aren't that many compromises.
Casey:
There are certainly some, but there's not that many.
Casey:
And I am really, really pleased to see Apple just let all of them rip at the same time, asterisk,
Casey:
So they're all just here together.
Casey:
And it's really, to some degree, I'm slightly oversimplifying, but to some degree, it's here is what you want.
Casey:
How many slices of pizza do you want?
Casey:
Do you want one slice of pizza, which is the mini?
Casey:
Do you want two slices of pizza, which is the 12?
Casey:
Do you want three, which is the 12 Pro?
Casey:
Or do you want the entire pie, which is the 12 Pro Max?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I just think that's so great that there are so few compromises across the line.
Casey:
And I am really pleased that Apple was able to do this, especially in a year where I'm sure all of this was extremely, extremely difficult.
John:
And this also plays into their sort of, you know, economies of scale.
John:
And we haven't even talked about this, but I'm about to now.
John:
This iPhone 12 has the A14.
John:
And so does the Pro, and so does the Pro Max.
John:
Like, their new line of phones, their entire range of the new phones they introduced this year, all have the A14.
John:
And again, they don't tell us clock speeds, and they don't tell us RAM.
John:
Apparently there is a RAM difference.
John:
Is there a clock speed difference?
John:
We don't know.
John:
Maybe we'll find out.
John:
But in general, it's easier for them to just say, look, we're just going to make a bunch of A14s.
John:
And we don't have to guess how many of the 12s versus 12 flows we're going to make.
John:
Just make a bunch of A14s.
John:
And they're all going to be in all of our phones.
John:
And so it's really easy to recommend someone get the 12 as opposed to the 12 Pro.
John:
In fact, that's what most people should get because it has all the things.
John:
And yes, there are minor weaknesses that we'll get to that you may or may not care about.
John:
Most people probably don't.
John:
But the price difference is big.
John:
And you get, you know, it's a future-proof phone.
John:
It's got a big battery.
John:
It's got a good CPU.
John:
And Apple, you know, so the last time we were talking about what does high speed mean?
John:
Oh, we wish it would mean max, but of course it didn't.
John:
Is it just going to be 5G?
John:
Yeah, it was just 5G.
John:
In fact, I expected them to talk way more about the A14, but they didn't.
John:
The A14 had already been announced in the new iPad Air.
John:
And they really didn't go much farther into it this time.
John:
They didn't have a whole suite of benchmarks.
John:
They just had a couple of like, oh, it's the fastest SOC in the market, which is true.
John:
And it stomps all over the Android SOCs, which is true.
John:
But they really weren't interested in charts and graphs or anything like that.
John:
But something I was thinking about...
John:
with what they did say about the A14 in both presentations.
John:
Apple has done this for several years now.
John:
I got to thinking because I've been looking at similar slides in the game console world because we're in a new game console generation.
John:
When they show you the floor plan of the chip,
John:
in apple's pictures it's kind of like a virtualized line diagram and it shows a little square and they show you all the different things they i think maybe started doing this with like the m5 or i don't remember when they started doing it like different regions they want to show off here's our new neural engine right and it's this little rectangle in the chip and it's over here right so i'll put this in the chat room and i'll put these in the
John:
They probably won't be in the show.
John:
Mark will probably make them chapter.
John:
But anyway, take a look at this is the Xbox Series X system on a chip, because these days game consoles also do system on a chip, which means CPU and GPU all on one chip because we have lots of transistors and it's much more expensive to make them separate and you can get lots of benefits of putting them together.
John:
So if you look at this Xbox Series X system on a chip, with the labeled regions of this floor plan, you say, boy, whoever made this cares a lot about GPU because most of the area of the chip is taken up with GPU.
John:
Now, in general, on the floor plan on a chip, area equals money.
John:
it's not linear because it's trickier to make different kinds of logic certain kinds of more regular logic like memory or even maybe more regular things like gpu are easier to make without errors than the more intricate parts of cpus and but in general you have a certain kind of size of a silicon wafer and the smaller you can make the features the more things you can fit on there the more transistors right the bigger you make your chip the more expensive it is and once you have a given area
John:
The amount of area you dedicate on that chip to a particular function reflects how much value you put on it.
John:
So a game console using looks like more than half of its area for GPU makes sense, right?
John:
You look at the CPU cores and they're like practically the same size as the IO and memory interface, maybe even smaller, right?
John:
those cute little cpus you think of them running the show it's like no it's all about gpu right because we can just you can gpu can use all available area because you just add more execution units because there's always more pixels to be running through parallel in a thing right and so with this in mind with the idea that the floor plan of your chip expresses the sort of philosophy and values of uh
John:
the product it's going into like what's important in a game console it's gpu let's consider the floor plan of the a14 which apple has shown many times now it's not a real floor plan as in like a view through a microscope with false colored little regions or whatever but i'm assuming it is in the ballpark of reality right i don't think apple's showing us their exact chip design but i i'm this entire section is predicated on the idea that apple's just not totally making it up right
John:
it is kind of suspicious that it breaks into what looks like four neat regions so if you're looking at it now they've highlighted these different areas of the chip like the chip is a square the system on a chip is a square and the upper left quadrant is apple's six core cpu and you can see all six regions you can see the four efficiency cores in the bottom and the two big power cores right there's your six cores apparently some part of the chip is taken up with a giant a14 and apple logo i'm pretty sure that's not accurate um
John:
right maybe that's a bunch of io stuff in behind there right so one quarter of the chip is for the cpu six cores of the cpu that's one quarter of the chip more or less one quarter of the chip and this is a phone chip is for the gpu a four core gpu right so we've used up half of the area so far in cpu and gpu
John:
Half of the chip is less.
John:
What is in that other half of the chip?
John:
If we've used half of the area for CPU and GPU, what else could it be?
John:
One quarter of the chip is the neural engine in the A14.
John:
It's the same size as the GPU core and probably bigger than the CPU core.
John:
just the neural engine right that lets you know like you know when apple's dedicating one quarter of it's extremely expensive gonna make a million of these stick them in every single phone it lets you know what apple values and in practice what is it that makes the phone a good phone all that stuff they talk about with the the camera that we're gonna you know discuss later all the stuff that they've done the face id the recognition all that stuff
John:
Neural engine.
John:
It's bigger than the CPU.
John:
It's probably the same size as the GPU.
John:
And then finally, the final quarter of the chip, which I didn't label all of, half of the final quarter of the chip is image signal processor, which is different than the neural engines.
John:
That's just like for the camera to do its magic and also other image processing stuff.
John:
And I'm assuming IO is the remainder of the area there.
John:
But this division of labor is very different than the division of labor on...
John:
general purpose personal computers from the past couple of decades is different than game consoles in fact it may be unique for phones and it may be unique to apple's phones to dedicate an entire quarter of your system on a chip to the neural engine shows how important apple thinks that thing is to the functionality of the phone and honestly i think they're right like if you look at what the phone does and how it does it and how it's able to do it
John:
And dedicating nearly half your chip to neural engine plus image signal processor reflects the fact that, yeah, we call it a phone, but most people use it as a very fancy camera.
John:
And then, oh, by the way, you've got a CPU so you can do the internet stuff.
John:
And then there's the GPU so you can play some games on your phone, right?
John:
it's it's really amazing to think about it like if if these current trends continue i do wonder if you know five phones from now if we look at the floor plan and it will look like the xbox system on a chip floor plan only instead of gpu being the giant area it's just like neural engine and then in the corner it's like cpu gpu it's just it's all it's like right out of a terminator movie it's all neural engine and some ancillary other functions to to do io and control the screen
John:
pretty fascinating anyway i'm i'm excited that this chip i think i'm more excited about the the a14 than most people are mostly because it's going to be the foundation of the mac chips and you can imagine looking at this floor plan and say okay but what if i told you you could have twice as much area for cpu and four times as much area for gpu then maybe we can shrink that neural engine back down to its proper proper proportion and dedicate way more transistors to cpu and gpu which i think is more important on a say desktop computer than it is on a phone
John:
But yeah, this is this is the chip they all get.
John:
And I think it's looking pretty good.
John:
If you're disappointed by only a high single digit percent performance increase, then take a look at Intel's line and you'll feel a lot better.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so let's talk about iPhone 12 Pro.
Casey:
This was mostly bliss for me and then just a little bit of utter, utter despair.
Casey:
So the 12 Pro is much like the 11 Pro.
Casey:
It has the three camera system, which has been improved.
Casey:
It has the standard wide lens.
Casey:
It has a, I believe it's a larger aperture ultra wide.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Did I get that right?
Marco:
uh yeah i think yeah it's i i hate these terms can we just say the 0.5x camera the 1x camera on the 2x camera that's fair okay yeah so so the the point the 0.5x camera got better they didn't i don't think they were very clear on how it got better but the camera people at places like halide seem to think that it is at least significantly sharper so that's nice
Marco:
um the the one x camera on the non-max pro has a uh faster lens it's in more light uh f1.6 up from f1.8 so that's good um so that's it'll be better in low light just for that reason alone um
Marco:
The 2X camera on the regular Pro seems to be, I think, unchanged, or at least not significantly changed.
Marco:
The Max has two other changes.
Marco:
The Max has the 1X camera, in addition to having that faster lens, also has a larger sensor.
Marco:
And that allows it to capture more light, which is better for low-light pictures for lots of reasons.
Marco:
And not just a little bit bigger sensor.
John:
Yeah.
John:
47% bigger sensor.
John:
It's much bigger.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So a much bigger 1X camera sensor.
Marco:
The 1X camera also has a better version of image stabilization.
Marco:
It shifts the sensor around instead of shifting one of the lens elements around, which lets it basically respond faster and everything.
Marco:
So it's better stabilization, bigger sensor.
Marco:
all that adds up to way better low light performance and then the 2x camera on the max is now a 2.5x and it has an actual it actually has a less bright lens it goes from f 2.0 to f 2.2 so that i think is going to be a mixed blessing in practice um
Marco:
One of the problems that the 2X cameras have always had, ever since the very first one in, what was it?
Marco:
Was it the 6S Max or Plus?
Casey:
Oh, I thought it was the 7, but I'm not confident I'm right about that.
Marco:
Eh, maybe.
Marco:
Anyway, whenever the 2X camera is bad, there's always been significantly worse optical quality, usually having a tighter aperture lens, than the 1X camera.
Marco:
And the result of this has been usually pretty obvious in use, that
Marco:
the pictures that you take with a 2x camera usually have worse noise, worse color, worse contrast.
Marco:
They're usually just not as nice looking, especially in low light.
Marco:
And it's to the point where in low light, the system knows this.
Marco:
And so in low light, oftentimes, even if you have the 2x selected as your focal length in the camera app, oftentimes the iOS image processor will actually use the 1x camera
Marco:
and just crop in in the middle because it knows that in that below a certain light level that's actually going to be better results for you than actually using the 2x camera because it has such worse light performance and so what they're what they're doing here with the max by scooting it a little bit further in it's now a 2.5x zoom
Marco:
But because it has that less bright lens from 2.0 to 2.2, I think it might exacerbate that problem of your 2x photos not looking very good.
Marco:
And this is actually part of the reason why, like in practice, I don't use my 2x camera very much.
Marco:
Whenever I want to capture something really great that's a little far away, I'll try to just get closer to it.
Marco:
And I'll try to use the 1X camera anyway because the 1X pictures always look better.
Marco:
And I think this is probably going to make this an even bigger difference because not only did they make the 2X camera worse, but then they made the 1X camera so much better on the Max, but with the new sensor and everything.
Marco:
So I think it's actually going to be a pretty substantial difference in quality between those two cameras.
Marco:
And so in practice, I bet Max owners won't actually use that 2.5X camera very often.
Casey:
It's interesting to hear you say this, and you're not the only person who said, oh, I never really used the 2X.
Casey:
I feel like I use my 2X quite a bit because I'm trying to catch like a small child running away or something like that, which arguably means I should be on the 1X.
Casey:
But my point is just that I really, really, and I'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit here, I really like the idea of the 12 mini.
Casey:
And not having held one, of course, it just seems like that would be such an unbelievably great set of compromises.
Casey:
But I really don't want to lose out on the three-camera system.
Casey:
And I think I feel more strongly that I do not want to lose out on the three-camera system than I do that I want a smaller phone.
Casey:
Because really, I want both.
Casey:
And in a perfect world, I would have a 12 Mini that has all three cameras.
Casey:
And if the 12 Mini did have all three camera lenses...
Casey:
I don't think I would be waffling at all.
Casey:
I think that's absolutely what I would get.
Casey:
But because I don't want to give up the telephoto, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I don't use it as much as I think I do, but I feel like I do.
Casey:
And so because of that, I think what I plan to buy is a 12 Pro.
Casey:
Now, on the flip side of that, however, I really do want the best camera I can get on my iPhone, and I am not looking forward to the smugness of everyone, particularly Mr. Mike Hurley, when he gets his 12 Pro Max, and the 1X photos are just phenomenal, particularly in low-light situations.
Casey:
I'm going to be super jealous.
John:
Well, I don't know if you're going to have to worry about too much smugness, because we've had many years where the big phone has had the better camera, and it's been better, but it's not
John:
It's not so much better that you should have this terrible feeling of FOMO.
John:
The 2X lens issue, this is something we didn't talk about too much when we were talking about the pros and cons of having a big camera.
John:
Reach is the next frontier for phone cameras.
John:
There's a bunch of phone cameras out that have actual optical zoom because they do a periscope thing where there's lens elements that move relative to each other, but they move inside the camera body.
John:
They don't stick out of it.
John:
right or inside the phone body they don't stick out of it right the reason we have all these stupid cameras in the back is because none of them are zoom lenses they are all fixed focal length and it is what it is and like they we use smarts to switch between them there was all the rumors about oh the the the big new iphone's gonna have a 5x optical zoom range it's like yeah from the widest lens to the most zoomed in right that's a 5x range 0.5 to 2.5 right but it's in three big steps right
John:
And if you want it in between, it's all computer smarts.
John:
Right.
John:
And reach is kind of I'm going to say it's a last frontier, but is the next logical step that phone cameras have to have?
John:
Because back when we were in normal times, when you're in the audience of your kids assembly and they're all up there singing their little song and their chorus or playing their instrument and you're in row 17 and you want a picture of a kid, guess what?
John:
You're not getting one with your phone.
John:
because it's just going to look like a bunch of blurred kids and you just want your kid and you're not even be able to identify your kid in the dimly lit uh you know cafetorium or assembly area or wherever they are similarly if you're watching a soccer game and your kid's out there running for them they're going to score a goal and you're going to try to get whether it's a video or a photo of your kid it's going to look like a speck in the distance because of where you're sitting and they're on the opposite side of the field so you
John:
Just do not have reach.
John:
And we've been trying to get reach by adding more and more cameras to the back of our phones.
John:
And I feel like the 2.5 X on this is to try to give you just that little bit more reach.
John:
And in, you know, in adequate lighting scenarios where you're in bright sunlight, you don't care about like, oh, it's not as fast.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
Like you're in bright sunlight.
John:
You want the reach.
John:
In situations where you're in a dimly lit place, then it's exactly the same tradeoff mark I was talking about.
John:
It's probably going to use the 1x camera because that's what's important in that scenario.
John:
But 2.5x is not a lot of reach.
John:
I know when they say 5x optical zoom, that's from the super wide one to this, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
you're not going to be snagging a shot of your kid kicking the winning goal from the opposite side of the field.
John:
You're going to get a picture of the entire team.
John:
Somewhere in there is your kid kicking, but you're not going to get your kid kicking.
John:
And yes, you could just run to get closer, but sometimes you can't get any closer.
John:
Again, if you're in the big assembly at school, you've got the seat that you got.
John:
And maybe you could run it on the side of the field, but if it's a big soccer field and they're in the middle of the field and you're on the sideline, there's no getting around that distance.
John:
So we're still working on that in the phone world.
John:
I feel like it's I don't know if it's inevitable because I've never used one of these telescoping optical ones in the Android world.
John:
Right.
John:
But if that is at all viable, eventually, probably on the big phone first, Apple is going to have to eat that internal space cost and say, oh,
John:
Maybe they've already done it.
John:
If you took all three of these lenses and then replaced them with one fixed focal length, really good lens, and then one internal periscope optical zoom lens, would that take up more or less room than the current giant cluster of things?
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
But, you know...
John:
it i don't begrudge the big phone to have a better camera because it's just got more room in there for stuff how much more room does the sensor shift take how much more room does the little thing take probably not that much more but hey the phone that has more room is that one and it's bigger and it's more expensive by all means differentiated but and that's like the 2.5x i feel like is them saying and also if you just want a little bit more reach the big phone will give you that too
John:
But the next step we need to move to is not just a little bit more reach, but like, can I take a picture of my kid playing their instrument up on stage in the school assembly?
John:
Or do I have to get the entire group?
John:
And that is going to be a big upgrade.
John:
We can't really get there with like megapixel expansion and cropping.
John:
Like, I think we just have to get there with optics.
John:
Again, I say this based on I've never actually used one of those Periscope Zoom phones.
John:
So maybe they're terrible.
John:
Maybe the technology simply cannot solve this problem for us for reasons that I don't yet know.
John:
but it's a problem that needs to be solved.
John:
So until and unless we get to the point where I think I've talked about a couple of years back in the show where the entire back of your phone is a gigantic sensor.
John:
Forget about full frame.
John:
It's the whole back of your phone.
John:
Incredible light gathering of ability.
John:
It's a light field camera and we can crop down and refocus until we get there.
John:
We're going to have to have some kind of zoom situation where we can actually get closer to subjects that are far away and capture them with some reasonable amount of light.
John:
It's a hard problem to solve in a phone, but I feel like that's where we have to go.
John:
In the meantime, the trade-offs between the Max and the Pro, like I feel what you're saying, Casey, about needing the telephoto, but I also totally feel what Marco is saying and that 2X camera.
John:
It's never as good.
John:
Like I do not, I don't want to use it.
John:
I will always use my feet if I can.
John:
And when I can't use my feet, I feel like I can't use my phone.
John:
So I don't know, you can make your choice based on not having that third camera.
John:
I think if you really love the small size or you just want to save a bunch of money, it kind of like saves you from being tempted to use the worst 2X camera, right?
John:
And making your phone worse and basically just saying, look, if I can't zoom with my feet, if I can't get closer to this subject, just this is not a phone photo that I can take.
John:
And then you'll just pull out your big camera that you bought because you followed my advice and put on a nice long lens and snag that awesome action shot of your kid kicking the winning goal.
Marco:
yeah because like i i also whenever i you know i've had a 2x lens now you know for what three phones you know i never got the the giant phones but ever since they put it on the 10 forward i've had it and i do use it sometimes but usually again like you know usually i'm i'm pushed away from it for the quality loss but also like when i do need more reach and
Marco:
it's never enough.
Marco:
Like you were saying, John, like that is true.
Marco:
That is true.
Marco:
I do frequently want more reach from my phone and I hit two X and I'm like, Oh, that's it.
John:
The main, the main thing I use two X for is to crop out more of the background when I'm taking photos of my house.
John:
So people can't see what a message is.
John:
Like it's not, it's not to get closer to the subject.
John:
It's like, I want a cute picture of my dog, but I don't want all the, my daughter's crap that she left in the floor in the shot.
John:
So two X and now I've cropped it to closer to just the dog.
John:
But that's basically it.
Casey:
So the 12 Pros also add LiDAR for the first time on an Apple phone.
Casey:
When this was demonstrated on the iPads, and I do not have an iPad with LiDAR.
Casey:
I have a 2018 iPad Pro.
Casey:
When this was demonstrated on the iPads, it was one of those like, oh...
Casey:
cool sort of things for me.
Casey:
But one of the things that they said with regard to the phone was that, oh, this will help with autofocus, which I did think was cool.
Casey:
And I don't know if we'll see, I don't know if we'll be able to tell one way or the other, but if we do see that, you know, autofocus is faster and or better, I can't say that I typically have a problem with that on my phone, but more is better.
Casey:
So that sounds good to me.
Casey:
Um, and then additionally, the pros, I believe it's only the pros get pro raw, which is a whole new situation.
Casey:
And I think that Marco, you're probably best off of the three of us to describe what this means.
Marco:
I actually don't know that much about it yet.
Marco:
You are right.
Marco:
It is a pro exclusive feature, even though it appears to be only a software difference.
Marco:
Like it appears that this is not due to whatever hardware differences they have.
Marco:
It might be.
Marco:
be related to the RAM difference but probably not it's probably just software differentiation but anyway the idea here is there's been a raw API access to the cameras for a while now for at least a few years worth of hardware there's been like raw access for apps to use and apps like Halide and other like advanced camera apps do use it to great effect but this is the first time Apple is actually like
Marco:
offering a raw capture format you'll be able to go into the camera app preferences from the way I understand this and turn on some checkbox that saves your pictures as this new pro raw format and then you can import those into Lightroom or whatever and do whatever you want with them and apps will be able to access that as well
Marco:
and that is it's interesting it for high-end uses if you're trying to use and this is true of any raw capture for the iphone but if you're trying to use the camera hardware but have more control over some of the effects it bakes into the pictures under normal circumstances like things like noise reduction which is a big one
Marco:
um and other stuff like just white balance and and various things like that various color balances um dynamic range stuff like that a lot of that gets stripped away when you save it as a jpeg or or a heath because it has to like bake in a certain degree of all those things to make the image look right um raw in all forms the idea is you just save whatever the sensor data was and
Marco:
And you let apps after the fact make adjustments that are oftentimes able to be done losslessly.
Marco:
Things like white balance.
Marco:
You're not baking that into the file.
Marco:
You're just interpreting the raw data differently.
Marco:
So you're able to make a lot of adjustments in the lossless domain.
Marco:
Or do things with different degrees of things like smoothing and stuff like that than what they might do automatically.
Marco:
To be able to achieve editing photos and having more control over the way your photos are edited by the system without a lot of quality loss.
Marco:
Or being able to pull more out of them than what the built-in processing of the phone would have done on its own with your own custom adjustments and things.
Marco:
So it's very nice if you're a pro photographer to have RAW.
Marco:
I always shoot RAW whenever I'm using a big camera, even though it's very rare these days, as we talked about last week.
Marco:
But I always shoot RAW because I love the ability to adjust things losslessly afterwards.
Marco:
The downside is usually that the files are way bigger.
Marco:
and way slower to work with, with whatever software you're using.
Marco:
And that's probably going to be the case here.
Marco:
So this is the kind of thing that I would not recommend most people leave on.
Marco:
If you get a Pro, I wouldn't recommend it.
Marco:
And it's something that, frankly, I don't think I would use.
Marco:
Because as much as I used to be super into all this camera nerdery stuff, and I used to think I would edit my pictures a lot...
Marco:
I just don't do it anymore.
Marco:
And anything that would add to my burden of taking pictures or of having some kind of workflow to do afterwards, I know would not be good for me.
Marco:
And so I'm actually not going to use this feature as far as I can tell right now.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
For people who are super camera enthusiasts and who are already the kind of people who today are using apps like Halide or other third-party apps to really process your pictures and do a lot of post-processing and editing on them, this could be really great for those people.
Marco:
I'm just not one of them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I have a lot of questions about this pro raw stuff.
John:
Like one of the big selling points is of it is kind of, as you said, like in phone cameras and all cameras, obviously the raw sensor data is pretty garbagey and then it gets processed and you get a photo out of it.
John:
But that nowhere is that more true than camera phones because, uh,
John:
The sensors are so small, the lenses are so tiny, everything is so noisy.
John:
And the iPhone in particular, its prowess is that computational photography, that the neural engine, its GPU, the image signal processor, all that stuff is, you know, three quarters of the chip is working to take that ridiculous sensor data that looks like how could you ever get a useful picture out of this and work their magic to give you a really, really good picture.
John:
um but of course if you go to raw of just like brain dead raw it's like well but what about all the stuff the phone was going to do for me the whole reason i bought this iphone is it does all this stuff this computational photography you're just giving me the sensor data this is no good to me i can't process it manually like the phone does because it does a bunch of stuff and i don't know about right so
John:
Pro-raw, it's like, okay, well, we know you want the benefits of raw as in we won't bake in these changes.
John:
We won't actually change the colors of the pixels of your images.
John:
We'll have the raw sensor data and then we'll just add lossless modifications.
John:
Like many image processing programs have done this over the years, right?
John:
Where if you change your mind about that adjustment, you can readjust it.
John:
Think of it as like a layer cake.
John:
You've got the raw sensor data at the bottom and on top of it, you've got adjustment layers like in Photoshop, right?
John:
And you can change your mind about the adjustment layers and enable and disable them and so on and so forth.
John:
So what we want out of this pro raw is what I would want is phone, do all the awesome stuff you normally do, but do it all in essentially Photoshop adjustment layers on top of this image.
John:
So give me the raw sensor data and then give me every single adjustment you would do.
John:
Now, I don't know if Apple's pro raw does that.
John:
Think of things like deep fusion, HDR, taking pictures with multiple lenses and combining them.
John:
all that stuff is all of that put in sort of an adjustment layer or is it only sensor data plus denoising white balance you know curves like all is it just the straightforward things or is there a layer for deep fusion is there a layer for portrait mode is there a layer for hdr where they show me the three three different exposures they took each as raws you know what i mean that is an open question to me that i don't know how deep down that rabbit hole they go because
John:
I think as soon as you start giving up any of the cool things the phone does for you, it has a high potential to make your photos look worse because the phone is doing so much work.
John:
And that's why you pay the big bucks.
John:
And that's why that's half the reason this system on a chip in there does all these things is to make your photos look better.
John:
And I don't want it to not do that.
John:
i would want it to do that and then on top of that give me a little bit more adjustability later at the expense of massively larger you know file sizes or something so i'm i'm dubious about it being worthwhile except in very specific circumstances to use the pro raw not just because of the massive file size but also because i wonder how much i'm giving up
John:
right if i'm not giving up anything great then file size is the only thing you have to worry about but i i have to think you're giving up something right you're giving maybe even if it's just you're giving up the intelligence choice to use hdr right or you're giving up the deep fusion or like whatever one of those things you're good i don't want to give up any of them because the phone needs all of them to make good photos right so it's cool and i like the idea behind it i really hope it is as cool as i think but i suspect that it is more limited at least in this first iteration
Casey:
Yeah, we'll see.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
One of the things that I had feared in the rumors leading up to the event, obviously, from what I gather, everything leaked like the morning of and I didn't pay attention to it because I wanted to be surprised.
Casey:
But the rumors had said, you know, these these phones are going to get a little bigger.
Casey:
And I was really, really, I mean, scared is dramatic, but for lack of a better word, scared about that, because I really feel like my 11 Pro is as big as I would ever want my phone to be.
Casey:
I am just not in on the max slash plus club.
Casey:
It's not for me.
Casey:
And obviously, again, I haven't held any of these new ones yet, but I did on the Apple Store app, the compare your phone thing where you can compare the one that's in your hand to one of the other ones.
Casey:
And I was looking at this and between the 12 Pro and my 11 Pro, the differences look to be really basically negligible.
Casey:
I mean, there are some differences for sure in, you know, every dimension is a little bit different and a little bit bigger with the exception of depth.
Casey:
But nevertheless, these differences are like a couple of millimeters in any given direction.
Casey:
So I would suspect I'll probably be able to notice, but I would also suspect that much like the notch, it will disappear to me within the span of a week or two.
Casey:
And I'm really relieved by that because I was really genuinely worried that this was just going to feel like a monster in my hand.
Casey:
And maybe it will, but...
Casey:
I'm not expecting it to, and I'm really, really excited about that.
Casey:
And it seems like the decreased bezel size and the flattened sides are really going to make a difference.
Casey:
And have I mentioned how excited I am about flat sides?
John:
Here are the actual numbers, by the way, because I was worried about exactly the same thing.
John:
2.7 millimeters wider, which you will be able to notice.
John:
Basically, if you put...
John:
If you took all the cases off and you put your current 11 Pro and just sat it on top of the table on top of a 12 Pro, you'd see the 12 Pro sticking out from both the left and the right side for sure.
John:
Not by a lot, but you'd be able to see it, right?
John:
And you'd be able to feel it.
John:
Height, 0.1 millimeter.
John:
You're not going to notice that.
Casey:
Oh, you got your height and width confused.
Casey:
The height is 144 to 146.7.
Casey:
Oh, did I reverse it?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And then the width is, just as you described for height, 0.1 millimeter.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, but yeah, the 2.7 dimension you're going to notice.
John:
Apparently that's height and not width.
John:
You're going to notice that and you're going to feel it.
John:
The width, 0.1, you probably won't notice.
John:
The depth, 0.7, thinner, you probably won't notice.
John:
The weight, one gram, you definitely won't notice, right?
John:
So I'm relieved too, because despite the fact that I will, you know, if you stack them on top of each other and feel it, you'll notice...
John:
It's close enough that I'm just going to forget about it, right?
John:
Because once you get rid of the other phone and you're just using this phone, it's going to feel like the same size.
John:
Now, the flat sides, I know everyone likes them because there's potential that it makes it easier to grip without the case.
John:
Again, we don't know how slippery these are yet because we haven't held them.
John:
It kind of depends on what the glass feels like and what, you know, there's lots of factors that go on here.
John:
But I do feel like kind of like the MacBook Air's wedge shape and the old iBooks kind of rounded things that curves on the current line of phones are slimming.
John:
I feel like the curves are slimming, right?
John:
Because it makes you think that the actual width is the width when the curve is done and that is pulled in.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So I don't know if even though this phone is more or less the same size, if it's not going to feel a little bit chunkier, right?
John:
Does that make sense?
John:
It does.
John:
It's not going to be thicker.
John:
It's literally going to be thinner, right?
John:
But will it feel...
John:
Will it feel bulkier?
John:
On the other hand, will it feel so good that you don't need a case, in which case it will feel much skinnier because you don't have a case around it?
John:
So these are questions that can only be asked by holding it in our hands, and we do not have these phones in our hands, nor probably will we, because I assume we're all just going to order them as soon as we can and then just cross our fingers.
John:
But many questions remain about the squared-off sides.
John:
But the question of the size, at least, dimensionally, is relief for me and Casey anyway.
John:
very much so uh have i mentioned that the 12 pro also gets excellent 5g service from verizon it's never going to stop being funny nope speaking of 5g i do wonder about that i did i did actually think because i haven't really you know who cares about 5g right but then i thought you know what i'm one of those people who has crappy signal and even though 5g is not supposed to bring any sort of signal i mean you know it's better at shorter ranges i'm thinking but you know
John:
for all i know maybe someone put up a bunch of 5g things in in sort of inconspicuous places that are actually near me and maybe actually will have better signal i mean this is all fantasizing maybe actually will have better 5g signal mass i just don't know it yet because i don't have any 5g devices so even though i get you know one or two bars on lte if i'm lucky maybe i'll get better in 5g so we'll see
John:
uh are there any other major differences in the 12 pro that we haven't discussed i think we basically covered there's the video recording so they do it does hdr video recording which people some people have been saying like oh nobody cares about that hdr is the most important change in video since high definition
John:
It is not a thing that nobody notices or cares about, especially when taking videos in the real world where the dynamic range of the bright sun and shadow is tremendously bigger than any of our devices can catch, right?
John:
So any increase in dynamic range from SDR, you know, the non-HDR or whatever, is good and people will notice.
John:
No, and people don't know or care what Dolby Vision is and they don't know or care that, oh, isn't it amazing how you can adjust the video and the Dolby Vision metadata will update and you can do it all on your phone.
John:
Who cares?
John:
but they will notice that HDR video is better than non-HDR video, especially if the actual scene has higher dynamic range than current phones can capture.
John:
So I think this is actually an important picture.
John:
When you take a scenic video of a sunset on your vacation, it will look better in ways that every single person can notice in HDR.
John:
if the screen can display because it's got whatever the 1200 nits uh hdr thing if you have a television with good hdr support it will look better there the problem that comes in with like oh well one of that when i shared this with somebody over the internet well you know instagram doesn't know anything about hdr i don't think and you know so there's
John:
a gap there but i feel like for your personal enjoyment on your actual phone and your ipad and your television assuming they all support hdr recording video in particular in hdr is a very important feature and i'm glad to see it happen on the phone the fact that it's dolby vision and yada yada it's cool and everything like that but i just i just feel like hdr video recording plus a screen that can show it in a more reasonable way like 1200 nits i think is reasonable hdr is an important advancement for apple's phones
Casey:
Yeah, that's a good point.
John:
And yes, I'm going to say more important than 120 frames per second, which we haven't mentioned and I don't think either one of us really care that much about.
John:
It should come eventually, but I want 0% of my battery life spent on 120 hertz on my phone.
Marco:
I'm sorry, right?
John:
It is better.
John:
We will.
John:
We should get it eventually.
John:
We will get it eventually, I hope, but...
John:
I want to give up basically nothing for it.
Casey:
Yeah, I actually completely agree with you.
Casey:
I have it on my iPad, and I'm sure if you twisted my arm, I could tell the difference between the two, but I don't feel like I notice it very often, except perhaps when I'm using the pencil on the iPad.
Casey:
I don't think this is something I long for.
Casey:
I know a friend of the show, Mike Curley, is not happy about this, but I'm right there with you, John.
Casey:
I do not want to trade pretty much anything in favor of increased refresh rate.
John:
I mean, and that said, like, if they just give it with a toggle switch and you can turn it on if you want and turn it off if you don't, then that solves the problem.
John:
The rumors were that we missed 120 hertz just because, like, screen hardware difficulties related to COVID or whatever.
John:
Like, it's coming.
John:
We'll get it eventually.
John:
It's disappointing that it's not here this year.
John:
I understand that.
John:
But for me personally...
John:
I'm not interested in trading anything for it.
John:
So if they just put in a switch and let me do, you know, 60 hertz max, variable refresh rate, blah, blah, blah, I'll be very excited next year when the phones have that.
John:
But I'm personally not disappointed that the current phones have it.
John:
I'm much more excited about HDR video recording than I am disappointed about 120 hertz.
Marco:
I love 120 hertz on the iPad line.
Marco:
It's wonderful there.
Marco:
Then when I go to my iPhone, I don't miss it.
Marco:
I love it when I'm using it, but then when I don't have it, I don't notice its absence.
Marco:
I will say the HDR video thing, John, is significant.
Marco:
And it's a little hard to tell whether they have improved the regular video capture or not.
Marco:
I remember back when I think it was the XS first added HDR video interpolation where it would basically shoot video at 60 frames a second.
Marco:
But if you had it set to 30 frames a second saving, it would use that to basically do automatic exposure bracketing, where every frame it would shoot a high exposure one and a low exposure one, and then merge them together in real time to give you the higher definition video recording than what the sensor could natively capture.
Marco:
And at some point, I think in the 11, they made that available also at 60 frames a second.
Marco:
Now, if you go to the comparison page, the tech spec comparison page, they call that extended dynamic range for video, and it's up to 60 frames a second on all these models, 11, 12, and 12 Pro.
Marco:
HDR, though, with Dolby Vision, which is the new thing,
Marco:
On the 12 Pro, that goes up to 60 frames a second.
Marco:
On the 12 Mini and 12 Regular, it only goes up to 30 frames a second.
Marco:
So that is one difference.
Marco:
If you want HDR video recording, the 12 and Mini can only do 30 frames a second, and the Pros can do 60.
Marco:
This, again, seems like it's probably software differentiation only.
Marco:
I don't think, again, besides the possible use of RAM, I don't think there'd be any hardware reason why this has to be this way.
Marco:
But again, this is yet another thing where, like, they want people who are using the iPhone as a pro camera, like a really pro camera, they want them buying the iPhone Pros.
Marco:
And, you know, I don't blame them.
Marco:
That makes sense.
Marco:
Even though this is probably going to screw me this year because I think I am probably going to go mini.
Casey:
Oh, don't tell me this because I want you to go pro.
Casey:
So this way, if you love the Mini, I don't want to know.
Casey:
I just don't want to know.
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure I'm going to love the Mini, to be honest.
Marco:
So I do plan to do it.
Marco:
My current plan as we stand today is to get the Mini.
Marco:
But I am a little unsure...
Marco:
How I'm going to feel about the size.
Marco:
I'm a little concerned about adjusting to the narrower phone for keyboard accuracy.
Marco:
I know that's just usually just like a temporary adjustment period.
Marco:
And I'm a little concerned about just like having everything be so tiny on screen and whether that will actually be comfortable in use or not.
Marco:
I'm not really concerned about losing the 2X camera.
Marco:
That I think I'll be fine with.
Marco:
I'm not happy about this video limitation because I would have loved to shoot everything in HDR.
Marco:
But again, the regular auto exposure bracketing dynamic range thing they've been doing for the last few phones, that is great for me.
Marco:
So I don't know that I necessarily need... Like, will the HDR Dolby Vision thing, is that...
Marco:
actually capturing more dynamic range or is it just saving it with more precision you know they're talking about the 10-bit hdr like that's something i don't need i don't need the precision i'm not i'm not taking these into final cut and editing them and making a professional thing i'm just watching on my phone and so if the actual dynamic range is not different at all or only minimally different between these two modes um
Marco:
then I'm not missing anything because I would never turn on the Dolby Vision thing because I'm not a video editor.
Marco:
I don't need that.
Marco:
But if I'm going to be missing out on lots of dynamic range by not using that, I will kind of regret that.
John:
No, you do want the Dolby Vision thing on it.
John:
It has nothing to do with whether you're going to be a video editor or whatever.
John:
It's more metadata about the range of values in the scene that changes over time, right?
John:
So you want that even if you just never adjust it because it helps give you a better moving picture over a period of time with different areas having dynamic, you know,
John:
brighter parts and darker parts and all that stuff so you you do want that and i'm i'm i have the same question about why is there a half of why does it do half the frame rate in the quote unquote lesser things like i feel like this is the downside of the uniformity of the hardware is that apple is
John:
does have to come up with some reason why you're going to be charged a couple hundred bucks more for the Pro.
John:
And yeah, it's got one extra camera on the back, but it's like, is that $200 difference?
John:
And so I feel like they're potentially differentiating with software, which feels bad.
John:
It feels bad to know that you have a phone that could do a thing and people get all upset about it, but it feels really good for them all to have the A14 and for them all to have all the good screen.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So...
John:
Like, the only alternative would be compress Apple's line price-wise and have the difference in price between the lowest end, you know, the 12 and the 12 Pro be much smaller than it is, either by making the 12 more expensive or making the 12 Pro less expensive.
John:
And both of those things are probably worse for Apple's sales, revenue, profit, blah, blah, blah.
John:
So I kind of understand what they're doing.
John:
Oh, I guess stainless steel.
John:
I don't know if we didn't mention that.
John:
The Pro has stainless steel instead of aluminum, which...
John:
It may not even be an upgrade if it's heavier.
John:
I don't even know.
John:
I didn't look at the weight differences.
John:
But this is the narrowest gap, I think, ever between the quote-unquote cheap phone and the top of the line that there has ever been in terms of things that you can explain to regular people.
John:
And I think it's good that that's true.
John:
But the areas where they chose to differentiate, them being software only...
John:
just really doesn't feel good to tech nerds regular people don't need to know like they'll just accept oh it does half frame rate well it's not the pro one they won't get to yeah but why why does it do half the frame rate it's got the same system on a chip like at presumably at the same clock speed ram's not an issue like what's i don't understand it i don't i don't understand either maybe we'll we'll discover what the answer is but it could just be plain old differentiation and that's kind of a shame that that gets us we didn't talk about this with the mini but right
John:
The Mini, the reason Marco has any angst whatsoever about the, or most of Marco's angst about the Mini, is the fact that it's not the phone that the Mini disciples really want, which is just as good as the high-end phone, but smaller.
John:
And Apple just stubbornly refuses to make that phone, for reasons that make some kind of sense, because, you know, smaller, and it's the size-based pricing of, like, Mac software sells more because Mac screens are bigger.
John:
Like, well, it's smaller, shouldn't it cost less?
John:
You know, so...
John:
And like if they made one that was the 12 Pro Mini, that would make this contingent of people a lot happier.
John:
It's got all the cameras on it.
John:
It's got all the things.
John:
There's no limitations, yada, yada.
John:
It's still Marco would be worried about the screen being smaller and the keyboard being weird.
John:
But other than that, it's a no compromises mini.
John:
This is a Compromises Mini.
John:
It's the Mini 12.
John:
It's not the Pro Mini 12, right?
John:
So you should be glad you got something that was Mini, but that's the problem.
John:
If you want a smaller size, there is no option.
John:
There is no M2 competition.
John:
There's just a plain old 2 Series.
John:
And no, sorry, we don't make a fast version of that car.
Marco:
Yeah, and to whatever degree that a lot of these limitations on the smaller products are physics.
Marco:
They just can't fit as much in them.
Marco:
I understand that completely.
Marco:
It does kind of hurt, though, when that's not the reason.
Marco:
When the reason is just segmentation and price, it's like, yeah, you know what...
Marco:
Apple has always made smaller equals low-end, bigger equals high-end.
Marco:
And people who want high-end stuff in a small product usually have no option.
Marco:
And as much as I want to complain about that in this case, the differences between the Mini and the Pro Max...
Marco:
are so relatively few and many of them relatively unimportant to most people that as much as I want to complain that the mini doesn't have all the best features available in some kind of like pro mini I think it's still going to be
Marco:
so damn close in day to day use like in feature parody and everything that I don't think it really matters here for most people most of the time you know it hurts when people like me and Casey want the best stuff but we also want small phones like it does hurt that we can't get the best stuff at any price in a small phone
Marco:
but i bet day to day we won't even know like in the same way that like you know the vast majority of days i don't use my 2x camera so when i lose the 2x camera by making this move i i'm probably going to regret it like maybe once a month when i'll want to hit that 2x button and realize oh i'm just getting digital zoom now this is crappy um but it's you know if even that often like it might even be less than that once i remember how crappy the 2x cameras always are
John:
Apple's been burned a couple of times.
John:
I wonder if this is sort of, you know, institutional DNA of making the small expensive product.
John:
The G4 cube was the small expensive product.
John:
Didn't do too well.
John:
The trash can Mac pro, the small, it's like basically the Mac pro mini didn't do too well.
Casey:
There may be other examples out there.
Casey:
Like the Mac book.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The 12 inch Mac book.
John:
That wasn't really a pro.
John:
That was a compromised slow machine.
Marco:
It wasn't trying to take, it had like semi pro features.
Yeah.
John:
that's not an example of what I was talking about I was thinking of like no compromises but small size like the only thing you compromise is on size but it's got to be as fast as the big ones so that you know the trash can Mac Pro or the G4 Cube even though they weren't exactly as fast but anyway for the 12 mini I think that's the right choice like in general I feel like most people are going to buy the non-pro phones just because they're cheaper and so if you're going to have any kind of size differentiation put it in the phones that most people buy and then let the weird pro people
Casey:
buy the pro things and be excited by their extra camera and their stainless steel all right so a couple of grab bag things and then i'd like to discuss what john and i plan to do um we didn't mention that the 64 gig phones are gone so it's starting at 128 gigs which is excellent so we have 128 256 and 512 uh that's only for the pro oh is that right oh i'm sorry the 12 and mini are 64 128 256 the pro is 128 256 512
John:
And I think that's, you know, Apple doing anything with storage is good and doubling it for the quote unquote same price, which we'll get to in a second.
John:
Asterisk.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Helps.
John:
Helps a little bit there.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And so speaking of pricing, Apple saving the environment again and passing the savings on to Verizon with their 5G service.
Casey:
No, they are saving the environment insofar as they are not including the little brick in the iPhone box anymore.
Casey:
They're also not including headphones in the box anymore.
Casey:
I don't think I have any particular problem with this.
Casey:
I find it ever so slightly gross that they're painting it as exclusively environmental when clearly it's helping their bottom line.
Casey:
But I mean, whatever, I'll roll with it.
Casey:
Also, interestingly, it's a USB-C to lightning cable in the box, not a USB, whatever the traditional one is to lightning.
Casey:
Thank you to lightning, which in and of itself, I think is an improvement for most people until I realized after a while that, wait, all of these 80 gazillion bricks, wall warts, whatever you want to call them that everyone has, those are all USB-A.
Casey:
And granted, they all came with lightning cables and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But you're telling us that we all have a bazillion of these bricks, and yet you're giving us a cable that doesn't work with any of those bricks.
John:
Yeah, but we don't want them to keep shipping A cables.
John:
They need to be the change they want to see in the world, which is USB-C everywhere.
John:
So yeah, ship the cable.
John:
The weird thing about it, though, is if you walk into an Apple store or order online or whatever, and you just get an iPhone and it's your first Apple product—
John:
you can't charge it unless you already have something.
John:
The USB-C is like, oh, well, just plug it into your Mac.
John:
It's like, what Mac?
John:
I don't have a Mac.
John:
And you probably don't have a PC with USB.
John:
It used to be that you could just buy an iPhone and have nothing else in the house except for a power outlet and you were fine.
John:
You could plug it in, you could get on the cell network, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Now you do... I wonder if...
John:
People in Apple stores will ask people, oh, and by the way, do you have something that you're going to be able to charge this with?
John:
Because if you don't, that's a problem.
John:
They shouldn't let you walk out of the store without buying a little, you know, USB-C charging turd thing for $29 or whatever.
John:
it's only 19 now you literally can't charge your phone unless you plug it in somewhere it doesn't plug into the wall it's got just got usbc on the end right so i this this changed to sort of more decontenting i mean there was a time when i think iphones came with a dock in the box or was that just ipods no i thought they did i think the very first iphone might have come with a dock
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, iPods came with like an inline remote for the headphones and a dock and they just slowly been removing the amount of stuff from the dock and honestly in the box.
John:
And honestly, I think that's the right thing to do for a variety of reasons.
John:
I just wish the pricing reflected it more.
John:
I don't think the pricing doesn't reflect it at all because you do get double the storage on the Pro ones.
John:
So there's a little bit of a trade off there where it's like, OK, well, you've more than made up for the for the price of the brick with that storage thing on the Pro specifically.
John:
And also,
John:
We don't know, like, is the A14 more expensive to manufacture on this new five nanometer process?
John:
And we're reading, like, the cost tradeoffs are not clear when the decontenting comes along with a new model, right?
John:
Because you don't know what the cost of these phones would be if they didn't do that.
John:
We're just assuming that's like, oh, Apple just gets all of that as profit, but it's probably not true.
John:
Whereas if they were selling the iPhone 11 Pro and then midway through the year took out the adapters but kept the price the same, then we could just say that Apple is just taking all of that money.
John:
whatever but anyway i think it's a simplification and a correct reasonable simplification to stop giving everybody a million different headphones and million different plugs and let people buy it in pieces i think it would be smarter for them to sell watches in pieces they are in separate boxes and now they're learning how to do returns separately like a la carte buying of the components is a more consumer friendly and and yes also environmentally friendly approach and so i applaud that even if we do feel like we're kind of you know
John:
getting a few bucks pulled out of our pockets especially on the low-end phones but you know progress right and the other thing you have to do is like over time inflation is a thing too like you can't you know i think about this when everyone talks about 60 video games for years and years it's like well 60 is not what it used to be in 1998 right you said let's just keep the price the same but it's actually less now because of the magic of inflation but anyway i'm i'm not super mad about this i do worry a little bit about where people can plug in their brand new phone to charge it
Casey:
Yep, I agree.
Casey:
Speaking of money, something very peculiar has happened this year with regard to the cost of the iPhones, which we were alluding to earlier but never actually spoke about.
Casey:
For, I believe, the 12 and 12 Mini, if you were to buy one...
Casey:
outright so a sim free model it's thirty dollars more than the price it would be if you buy a sim included model from verizon or at&t additionally sprint and t-mobile here in the states also thirty dollars more than it would be from verizon or at&t which is extremely peculiar and i don't really know why that's the case but
John:
it's their preferred partner program it's basically just you know this is the the the rich gets richer and you know whatever a business relationship there is between apple and these various carriers some of them have a worse deal and then money gets passed on to you and like who knows like i mean this goes it falls into the same category as like being charged activation fees for quote-unquote new lines everything having to do with telecom companies is just a mess of fees and it's
John:
disappointing and annoying and confusing, but almost anything having to do with telecom billing, uh, that's true of, and that is also true of, you know, phones.
John:
I mean, again, I still think back to the bad old days of contracts and all that stuff.
John:
And I, I think the current world where essentially, uh,
John:
all your phones are unlocked for the most part, except for the AT&T one?
Casey:
No, that's almost it.
Casey:
If I recall correctly, because I was just looking at this the other day, if you buy a subsidized AT&T phone, then it is locked, but literally everything else is not locked.
John:
So in general, this trend is going in the right direction, but weird carrier-related charges and fees are still a thing.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We also didn't mention MagSafe, which I'm actually kind of excited about.
Casey:
So I think I might have like blanked during this part of the presentation, perhaps because I was reflecting on 5G from Verizon.
Casey:
But it keeps on giving, keeps on giving.
Casey:
um so it i guess that it's a couple of things all rolled into one right so it's improved faster wireless charging so it's like you know chi plus plus but it also is that the phone if i understand this right the phone itself has a magnet within it that you can use to attach like cases and wallets and things to the phone do i have that right yes
John:
Yeah, that's what Apple's cases do.
John:
In fact, like if you think about a phone with flat sides, how would you put a case on it?
John:
Like in general, like our existing phones or whatever, 11 or whatever you have in my 10s, the case goes on by sort of wrapping around the front and that's how it stays on.
John:
Like it's all, you know, you have to sort of wedge the phone in there and then the case wraps around the front and that's why the phone doesn't fall out of it.
John:
With flat sides, in order to keep the phone in the case, you'd need a case that came up along those flat sides and then turned over the front surface a little bit.
John:
It'd have to be like a lip, right?
John:
And those little lips are always kind of annoying.
John:
And my impression, not having seen or felt one of these in person, is that these magnetically attaching cases...
John:
either don't have a lip at all or can get away with having less of a lip because the thing that is keeping the phone inside the case is that giant ring of magnets that's embedded in the phone and a corresponding ring of either magnets or magnetic material in the case.
John:
And so they stick together.
John:
And so you don't need as big a lip, right?
John:
The other thing they promoted is like, okay, once you've got a bunch of magnets embedded in the back of your phone, yes, you can use it to align to your charger better and that alignment can give you more power.
John:
I think these chargers, where they say they were like 15 watts as opposed to the first Qi chargers, which were 7.5 on the iPhone 10 or whatever.
John:
When did the first Qi charging come out?
John:
Something like that.
John:
8 and 10.
John:
Yeah, so that's good.
John:
The other thing you can do with magnets on the back of your phone is attach other things.
John:
Like they mentioned a dashboard mount for your car.
John:
Instead of having one of those like the claw machines where you put your phone in and it goes snap shut like a bear trap and your phone is trapped in this little thing.
John:
Like basically mechanical friction based grippy thing to hold your car in the phone mount.
John:
Now you can have a magnetic phone mount.
John:
Yeah.
John:
you can have pop sockets that attach to the back instead of marring your phone with some super sticky, you know, adhesive thing or whatever.
John:
You can have a magnetic pop socket, right?
John:
All these things sound super cool to me, but the presentation wasn't over before I started to think about, by the way, one of the other ones they have is like a wallet thing where you can put credit cards in.
John:
The little wallet attaches to the magnet in the back.
John:
What I was thinking is like,
John:
How powerful are these magnets?
John:
You're going to do a car mount with it?
John:
If I go over, you know, if I go through a Boston pothole that has already bent one of my rims on my car, is my magnetically attached phone going to stay?
John:
That's got to be some upgrade.
John:
powerful ring of magnets, right?
John:
It's going to hold the case on.
John:
Is that, is that enough to hold the case on it?
John:
Maybe it has no lip at all.
John:
Just the magnets are enough to keep my phone in that case.
John:
Or if I, you know, wave my arm because I lose my balance or something and I don't drop my phone, but I was just holding onto the case.
John:
Does the phone go flying out of it?
John:
And the final thing is that I thought of when I saw the wallet is like one thing I frequently do with my phone now is I put it in my pocket in my new Pouch 3 lifestyle.
John:
And then I put my wallet in that same pocket.
John:
And my wallet is full of credit cards.
John:
Do I want a bunch of credit cards saying laying smack up against a magnet that is powerful enough to keep my car in a car mount that is powerful enough to hold a pop socket?
John:
So when people use pop sockets, like it's between their fingers or whatever, and they're just holding the pop socket, they're relying on the fact that the pop socket is securely fastened to the phone.
John:
They're not holding the phone.
John:
The whole point of the pop socket is it gives you like a handle for your phone.
John:
So these magnets have to be very strong.
John:
I do not want any kind of card with a mag stripe anywhere near those magnets.
John:
And if you get a case like these cases that you get that attach magnetically, the cases themselves convey either have their own magnets or like they don't, you know, it doesn't shield your credit, you know, credit cards in your pocket along with it from the magnets in your phone because the cases themselves have secondary magnets so you can still use it to align with the Qi charger or whatever.
John:
So...
John:
I'm a little bit worried about exactly how magnetic my phone is going to be because with the uniformity of the line, they all have this.
John:
This is not just a pro feature.
John:
They all have these magnetic things and it seems super cool.
John:
And it's essentially a variant of what I was talking about last show about like, what can you do when you get rid of the port where you can have semi proprietary charging stuff that also supports Qi, but also has magnetically attaching little manta ray things, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I swear to you I had not read any of these rumors.
John:
I swear to you I had no idea.
John:
In fact, the thing I envisioned in my head was slightly different than what they did here.
John:
But they literally brought back MagSafe because it doesn't make any sense, honestly, because it's not quite the same thing.
John:
But, you know, that's what they had in their brand name bin.
John:
And so there we go.
John:
Like I said, hell, bring back MagSafe.
John:
And they did with about the same amount of reasoning.
John:
It's about magnets, right?
John:
But I am of two minds about these magnets.
John:
Are these magnets strong enough to do the jobs they're being asked to do?
John:
And are these magnets weak enough to not destroy all my credit cards?
Marco:
So I have multiple issues with this.
Marco:
First of all, most credit cards are not using magnetic stripes anymore in most places.
Marco:
It's there as a legacy thing.
Marco:
Oh, that's right.
Marco:
I didn't think about that.
John:
hotel room keys is one of the things that again i know we're not going to hotels now but hotel room keys it's going to take a while before they're all updated to do chip things and being locked out of your hotel room is worse than not being able to buy something in the store yeah although in all fairness hotel room keys seem to wipe themselves if you breathe on them wrong like that's what i'm saying like it's already a hostile environment and i'm gonna put my oh you give him a hotel key i stood and put it into my pocket up it's dead
John:
yeah um secondarily uh uh some people in the chat are saying that apparently the wallet thing shields the cards that are inside of it i don't i didn't even know that was possible for magnetism but yes i i had heard through various people that there is shielding in the wallet thing which makes sense because they know it's going to have credit cards so my question is right shielded how is my first question and second question is that's all well and good for the cards that are in my special wallet but what if i just literally put my actual wallet in the pocket with my super magnet phone
Marco:
So this brings up number three.
Marco:
Actually, I know one of the ways that watches are anti-magnetic to keep their movements from becoming magnetized.
Marco:
One of the ways they do that is by encasing the movement in a soft iron cage.
Marco:
I don't know what that means or how that works, but that's a thing.
Marco:
So maybe they're doing the same kind of principle here for shielding.
Marco:
If so, that actually can work.
Marco:
But my final question here is, you put your phone in the same pocket as your wallet?
Marco:
Right?
Right.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Yeah, why would I not do that?
Marco:
Because you have multiple pockets and that makes one pocket really big and heavy and stick out really far.
John:
No, not my pants pocket, my coat pocket.
Casey:
Why is your wallet not in your pants pocket?
John:
It depends on what season it is.
John:
If it's coat season, I have big coat pockets.
John:
I put it there.
John:
well if you had a wallet that was less than 13 inches thick you wouldn't have such a problem my wallet has slimmed down a little bit but no yeah but because here's why because my keys go in my left pocket and there's no way i'm putting the keys in the same pocket as the phone or my wallet keys and wallet can share a pocket nothing a phone gets its own pocket no i don't want my wallet being my wallet being damaged by my pointy keys
Casey:
Your wallet is being damaged by all the shit that's inside of it.
John:
Are you kidding me?
John:
It's not being damaged.
John:
I've had this wallet since I was a teenager.
John:
Obviously, it's not being damaged by anything.
John:
You've had the same wallet since you were a teenager?
John:
Yep.
John:
We're learning so many things today.
John:
You've seen it.
John:
It's a nice wallet.
John:
It was 30 years ago.
John:
It's a black leather wallet.
John:
Are you going to complain about my wallet?
John:
I mean, it's a little thick.
John:
It's a little thick.
John:
It's been slimming down.
John:
And you know when people lose a lot of weight, but their skin doesn't catch up with it, right?
John:
That's what my wallet looks like now.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
It's a great wallet.
Marco:
Yeah, it sounds great.
Marco:
It's a good thing you're not having any keys touch it.
John:
It's still pretty good.
John:
Anyway, I've been trying to also slim down on the number of credit cards I have in there to try to, you know, like...
John:
you know anyway yes it goes in the same uh because it's they're both soft kind of flat things that the phone goes screen against my body and the nice and the nice felt pocket and the wallet goes outside of that oh my god all right so moving on so marco you said you planned sitting here now you plan to get a mini but you didn't tell us what color you think you're going to get
Marco:
This... I'm actually... So one thing we haven't mentioned, at least I don't think so, is that the Mini and Max are shipping three weeks later and ordering three weeks later than the 6.1 inch models, the 12 and the 12 Pro.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I'm torn.
Marco:
I think I want the red, but the pictures have been a little inconsistent as to whether the red is more of like a salmon kind of color or whether it's more of like a deep red.
Marco:
If it's a deep red, I want it.
Marco:
If it's salmon color, I don't.
Marco:
I think it's a deep red because whenever you do product reds, they're pretty consistent.
John:
If you've seen any of the existing product red phones, this looks a lot like it in the pictures.
Yeah.
Marco:
yeah and that's why I think it's gonna be great and if so I want that one my fallback is probably the white because I'm still in like a light color kind of mood I'm at the beach man I can't have a black phone so you're gonna are you gonna get a case with this
Marco:
My plan is no.
Marco:
I want to see how it is without a case.
Marco:
It does appear from the pictures that they've pulled the same finishing trick as with the 11 series, where the pros have brushed glass backs, but the non-pros have polished glass backs.
Marco:
And as I mentioned last week, polished glass, for me, causes increased grip.
Marco:
Whereas the brushed makes it a little more slippery.
Marco:
And so I think the combination of the straight sides, the polished glass back, and the smaller size should result in a much better handhold ability without a case.
Marco:
So we will see how this works out in practice.
Marco:
I hope it works out that well because I would love to not have a case.
Marco:
And if...
Marco:
it ends up that the size is wrong for me for whatever reason.
Marco:
I'm hoping to be able to use whatever bigger phone I would get instead, probably the 11 Pro or the 12 Pro.
Marco:
I'm hoping to be able to use that without a case as well, but that's more optimistic given how poorly I use the existing 11 Pro without a case.
Marco:
But if I stick with my plan of getting the Mini, I do plan to go caseless.
Marco:
What about you, Caseless?
Casey:
Quick aside, the leather cases are not available right now, which is the case I used to use up until the 11 Pro, and I'm a little bummed out that they're not available, at least at launch time.
Marco:
Yeah, but they're apparently coming around that mid-November timescale.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
For me, I think it's been made plain already.
Casey:
I'm going to be getting, or I'm hoping to get, barring a pre-order catastrophe, a 12 Pro in the Pacific Blue.
Casey:
I love the Midnight Green that I have currently.
Casey:
Even though, I mean, I like green, but I'm not the world's biggest green fan.
Casey:
I think that Midnight Green is excellent.
Casey:
uh this specific blue i mean blue is my favorite color which is you know a very boring choice i suppose but um i love this blue i think it looks phenomenal from what i can tell i am really looking forward to it so i'm going to be getting a 256 gig uh because my current phone is 256 and it's like half full so that hopefully should be fine a 256 12 pro in midnight blue is the plan and
Casey:
Um, I don't, I never used to get AppleCare.
Casey:
I did get AppleCare on the 11 Pro, which was clutch because if you recall, I shattered the back of it literally the day I got it.
Casey:
Um, I'm currently thinking that I'll probably go AppleCare again because I'm probably going to try to go, you know, caseless, caseless.
Casey:
Uh, but we'll see, we'll see where I land on that in the 11th hour.
Casey:
Oh, and a quick aside, we are continuing with the East Coast friendly 8 a.m.
Casey:
or pre-order time, which I am extremely thankful for.
Casey:
We are not paying the price of the 3 a.m.
Casey:
pre-orders that we did for like five years running.
Casey:
John, what are your plans?
Casey:
Because it is a John Syracuse a year.
Casey:
What are you doing?
Yeah.
John:
uh i'm getting the 12 pro because the size is you know within within parameters um i continue to be disappointed by the top of the line phone's lack of cool colors you know i guess the blue this year instead of the midnight green or whatever but i you know all the other options are not great i also continue to be thwarted by the marrying of metal materials with colors right so i
John:
This happened a bunch of different phones, but my current thing that I want with this one is I like the stainless steel, but I like stainless steel to just be the plain old silver stainless steel.
John:
But if you want that, you got to get white because it's the only one with plain old stainless steel on it.
John:
You can't get like a blackish one with that stainless steel, right?
John:
And I don't really think I particularly like the white one.
John:
Now, that is only relevant if I think I'm going to use it without a case.
John:
And as you noted, Casey, the leather case is not shipping yet.
John:
So practically speaking, assuming these things are shipped and arrive at times that are proportional to their release, I will have this phone without a case for a while because I do want the leather case.
John:
I've used it for the past several phones and I like them.
John:
So I'm going to get the phone.
John:
use it without a case for a little while because my case hasn't come yet and then put the leather thing on it so the model i'm probably going to get though is i don't like the gold i like the silver and if i had it in a case i would never see the white except for the gigantic square that pokes out the back of the case so i'm going to do what i always do which is sounds boring and it is kind of boring but you know it's it's the option that i find the least objectionable which is the graphite phone and a black leather case and it will
John:
That's how I rolled for years and years and years.
John:
Yeah, nice.
John:
And honestly, I like that.
John:
On my current phone, I like that look.
John:
Like, my current iPhone XS is whatever the darkest black one was.
John:
In a black leather case, it's a black monolith.
John:
The camera that pokes out the back is also black.
John:
It's a good look.
John:
I like it.
John:
I didn't compromise to get this.
John:
I always like the shiny metal, but when I see the shiny metal just sticking out the bottom of a leather case, it's a little bit jarring.
John:
So it's like, you know, what I would really want is the magical ability to use this foam without a case and have one with stainless steel surround with a black back.
John:
But that doesn't exist, so I'm going all graphite and leather.
Casey:
I think that makes sense.
John:
And 256, I did the same exact thing.
John:
I looked up my storage and I'm about 50% storage.
John:
So if I got a 128, my phone would be immediately full.
John:
So I've got to go 256.
Casey:
Marco, what's your plan in that department?
Casey:
256?
Marco:
I'm usually hovering around 128 gigs of used storage.
Marco:
And you know what?
Marco:
Getting a new phone every year, it's a wonderful luxury.
Marco:
What else is luxury is never having to worry about disk space on your phone.
Marco:
And so I figure if I'm going to do the ridiculous luxury thing for getting a new phone that I don't really need, I might as well spend the extra, what is it, 100 bucks to make sure that I never see a disk space warning.
Marco:
That's worth it to me.
John:
Yeah, I completely agree.
John:
Grandpa Marco is so weird.
John:
He always says disk space on his phone.
John:
What is he talking about?
John:
Where are the disks?
John:
Do they mean the cameras?
John:
What's a phone?
Casey:
All right, we don't have time for a full-on Ask ATP, but I cannot resist one question from Lou Piper who writes, is John going to get the new Apple sleeve case to protect his iPhone?
John:
See, pouch, if you look it up, I don't think most people would think that it's the same thing as a sleeve because the sleeve is like stiff.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Right.
John:
Like the phone, like when the phone is not in the sleeve, you can still kind of see where the phone would go.
John:
Whereas when the phone is not in a pouch, you could wad it up into a ball and it doesn't hold the shape or whatever.
John:
So that that case does not.
John:
appeal to me in any way whatsoever it's not a pouch right it is a sleeve or you know other kind of case although i think tiff had the the most underappreciated uh joke of the entire keynote uh live tweeting when she made a joke that neither one of you got about uh the sleeve case the imposter joke yes i got it
John:
Oh, have you played that?
Marco:
It's happening in my house.
Marco:
Of course.
John:
I've heard I heard on the we just did an episode about The Last of Us and Tiff said you didn't want to be in the room when she was playing that.
Marco:
No, that game was disturbing.
Marco:
But the imposter game around us, above us, whatever that's among us.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, I thought that was but it does look a lot like that.
John:
So I'm not going to use that sleeve case.
John:
I've never been into sleeves.
John:
That sleeve is not a pouch.
John:
And remember, I'm mostly off Twitter.
John:
Not really.
John:
I'm mostly off the pouch lifestyle.
John:
We'll see how this goes.
John:
New phone.
John:
It'll fit in my existing pouch so I don't need to get a new pouch.
John:
Yeah, new pouch.
John:
Who this?
John:
I'm going to continue to try to be pouchless in these weird COVID times.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Apple, Verizon, and the 5G network.
Casey:
Well done.
Marco:
Also, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Bombas.
Marco:
And thanks to our members.
Marco:
If you want to be a member, you can join even faster with the new Verizon 5G network at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And thanks, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
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.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
I can't believe you put me in a position to defend Verizon.
Casey:
Why are you doing this?
Casey:
You brought this on yourself.
John:
No, you brought this.
John:
I hope you two get a ton of feedback of people saying the 5G stuff wasn't that bad.
John:
But honestly, it did not bother me.
John:
It did not bother me like it apparently bothered you.
John:
It just didn't.
John:
I have all the things to be mad about.
Casey:
5G.
Casey:
So gross.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So like, I don't know, a couple of months ago, and I don't remember how this came up.
John:
No, we don't have time for this.
John:
We're just going to have to save a 401.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
No, we're doing it now.
Casey:
Show's too long.
Casey:
This is episode 400.
Casey:
It's important.
Casey:
It's important.
Casey:
You got to do it now.
Casey:
You got to do it now.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So as I was saying,
Casey:
A couple of months ago, we were talking about, oh, episode 400 is coming up.
Casey:
And as it turns out, it was timed with an Apple event.
Casey:
So thank you, Apple.
Casey:
But John had indicated to the two of us that he wanted to spend a little time talking about why ATP is worth it.
Casey:
And I'm not entirely clear where you're going with this, John, but I'm really excited to hear about it.
Casey:
So, John, why is ATP worth it?
Casey:
Not ATP membership specifically, just ATP in general.
John:
Uh, I'm continuing to send a protest because I think this episode is already too long.
Casey:
It has been noted.
John:
It has been noted.
John:
Second thing is that my plan for, and we, I think this was like a year or a year or more ago.
John:
It was like, Oh, we're going to, we're coming up an episode or whatever.
John:
But it's like, we never do anything for our milestone episodes.
John:
And it's true.
John:
We don't really do anything for a milestone.
John:
It just happens that 400 land on an Apple event, which is nice or not so nice depending on how long the stupid episode goes.
John:
Now we're adding more after show stuff to it.
John:
Um,
John:
But what I thought is like, you know what?
John:
We should do something for one of our milestone episodes to celebrate the fact that, you know, the show is still going or whatever.
John:
And so here we are in episode 400.
John:
And what I wanted to do every couple hundred episodes is...
John:
And this is just me personally.
John:
You know, Marco Casey can have no idea about any of this and can do whatever they want related to it or nothing related to it.
John:
This is just my thing.
John:
You said, like, why is ATP worth it or whatever, which makes it sound like it's a monetary thing.
John:
It wasn't.
John:
This is all conceived before we even had membership.
John:
It's...
John:
Basically, what do I hope people get from listening to ATP, which can be turned to say, why should somebody listen to ATP?
John:
Like, you know what I mean?
John:
And it's going to sound like an ad pitch, but really it's like, from my perspective, what do I think I'm doing here?
John:
like what what am i trying to accomplish what like what do i think this this show is producing and i think that at episode 400 which is an arbitrary milestone but it's been a lot of years and it's a good time to reflect on that and maybe if you know we'll see if there's a huge mismatch between what i hope i'm what what i'm hoping to give to people listening and what they're actually getting but
John:
Here we are, episode 400.
Marco:
We do occasionally get emails from people who say that they use our show as part of their sleep timer routine, that they fall asleep to it.
Marco:
And I think, I don't think they're saying it to be mean.
Marco:
I think it's actually a compliment.
Marco:
No, I don't think so.
Marco:
But it's definitely one of those, like, mixed compliments.
Marco:
Like, is that a compliment?
John:
It's going to give them weird dreams, though, for sure.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, maybe that's what you want.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, Casey uses it for the same purpose, as we learned in a couple of shows ago, where I kept saying,
John:
why is it that turning off the lights helps he's like it's getting me ready for sleep it's like you don't want to be sleepy during the show so why are you trying to make yourself as sleepy as possible when we're recording the podcast so you're closer to complete sleep when the podcast ends that means during the show you're getting closer and closer to sleep and we don't want that
John:
do you not want that i think you might want that anyway this is that is not one of the things so here what do people get from what do i hope me personally not marco not casey they can have our own answers so like i said no answer at all what do i hope people get from listening to atp it's i've got three things this is like a keynote slide here and they're kind of in priority order but anyway the number one thing that i hope people get from listening atp i don't think most people would guess
John:
window management tips no but you're close entertainment entertainment which is like well what do you mean you like that's your number one thing you you want to give people entertainment that's nothing to do with tech that has nothing to do with anything why do you why are you trying to you know entertainment is the most important thing that i hope this podcast provides now granted it's a weird kind of entertainment that appeals to only people who are tech nerds and into tech stuff right
John:
But everything else that I'm going to talk about, the other two things, none of that matters if people aren't motivated to keep listening.
John:
And most people are not motivated enough by that other stuff to keep listening without it being entertaining.
John:
So the number one thing I hope I am delivering on the show that we collectively are delivering to listeners is entertaining you.
John:
And like I said, it's a weird kind of entertainment.
John:
We're not telling jokes.
John:
It's not a song and dance or whatever.
John:
It's us talking about a particular set of topics in what we hope, what I hope is an entertaining way.
John:
Number two.
John:
This is the easy one.
John:
Information.
John:
Obviously, listening to a tech show should result in you knowing more about tech than someone who doesn't listen to a tech show, especially a tech show that's so long.
John:
There's lots of information here, right?
John:
And the main effect in people's lives I wanted to have is when something dramatic happens in the regions, the things that we talk about.
John:
Oh, hey, did you hear they're changing the processors in Macs?
John:
And when you hear that from your friend because they saw it on CNN or whatever, or they found out when they went into an Apple store and someone tried to start asking them questions about Intel and they didn't know what they were talking about.
John:
Oh, Macs have new processors now.
John:
It's the same ones they have on the phone.
John:
By the time you hear that from someone in the outside world, if you're an ATP listener, you've been hearing about our max for like three years, four years, right?
John:
You've heard about it so much that you're sick of the topic, right?
John:
You've heard it from every angle.
John:
You've heard about like the pros and cons and if it's feasible and what the tradeoffs might be and what the timing might be and just on and on and on.
John:
You are more informed about this particular subject area than somebody who doesn't listen to the show.
John:
Similarly for things like the Mac Pro or like the whole problem with Apple and its Pro Macs.
John:
Like, you know, arguably the show was founded on the problem of the Pro Mac.
John:
Remember the original logo with the cheese grater Mac Pro with the new label because they had introduced a quote unquote new Mac Pro that wasn't really that new.
John:
And we're like, what's the deal with this?
John:
Are they still making professional Macs or whatever?
John:
That seems weird and, you know, not of very sort of narrow interest.
John:
But fast forward a handful of years and the biggest company in the world is having this important roundtable meeting to describe how they're changing the direction of the company to address essentially the same problem that we had identified in the founding of the show.
John:
If you listen to the show, this is not a surprise to you.
John:
What is this Mac roundtable about?
John:
Who cares about Pro Max?
John:
What?
John:
Again, you would have heard about it, you know, for literal years from many different angles.
John:
You will be informed, more informed than if you didn't listen to the show about all sorts of things that are going on in the tech industry.
John:
And the final one is probably the most touchy-feely, maybe after entertainment, is Insight.
John:
So there's being entertaining in whatever way that we manage to be entertaining.
John:
I'm glad that people find any part of entertaining, but I'm trying.
John:
There's the information, which is easy to convey.
John:
You can get that from anywhere.
John:
You can read a website.
John:
You can read a tech magazine.
John:
You can just follow people on Twitter.
John:
You get information other ways.
John:
What do we have to offer besides just that information being spewed out and rehashing and just talking about news of the day is insight.
John:
What does some hardware or software feature mean for the future of the user experience?
John:
How is the industry landscape changing?
John:
How does change in one tech sector affect some other tech sector?
John:
You know, what does Silicon Fab achievements have to do with what you end up being able to buy in the store?
John:
The gaming market versus app store, streaming services versus Apple TV versus Apple TV Plus, right?
John:
Changes to the core operating system and the features they affect.
John:
Yes, that includes file systems, right?
John:
New security features, new languages and APIs, like insight that we can provide because of who we are and our experience and what we know.
John:
We're software developers.
John:
We've, you know, some of us have sold software for a long time.
John:
We've worked in the industry.
John:
We know people in the industry.
John:
We can not just tell you here's the information, but here is some insight about it.
John:
What does this mean?
John:
What does this technology or this change or this news story actually going to, what is it going to change in the world or in my life today and in the future?
John:
So that's it.
John:
Three things.
John:
that I hope I'm delivering with ATP, that I hope we are collectively delivering entertainment, information, and insight.
John:
If the three of you think we're delivering like something entirely different, then maybe we're working at cross purposes.
John:
But this is what I think that we are providing to people over 400 episodes or trying to anyway.
Casey:
No, I think that that's completely reasonable, and I think I agree with all of it.
Casey:
And I think as possibly the most touchy-feely of the three of us, I think it is important to recognize how incredibly lucky the three of us are that we have an excuse to talk to our good friends once a week, and then we can actually make money off of that, which is super cool.
Casey:
And I mean, think about where...
Casey:
all of us were on February 7th, 2013, as we record seven years, eight months and seven days ago.
Casey:
Like that is a long time.
Casey:
And, and we have put out an episode of ATP every single week for seven years, eight months and seven days.
Casey:
And that's something that's extremely important to us.
Casey:
And it's something that I think that we are extraordinarily lucky to be able to do.
Casey:
And the fact that anyone listens to us, especially at this point in the 17-hour-long episode...
Casey:
It is incredible to me that anyone listens to all three of us.
Casey:
And we are so incredibly lucky to any of you who listen, whether or not you're a member, whether or not you have purchased anything from any of our advertisers.
Casey:
We're just extremely lucky to have you.
Casey:
And I hope that we're growing as people over this time, the three of us.
Casey:
I mean, certainly when I started recording this with you two fine gentlemen, I was not yet an iOS developer.
Casey:
I was not yet a dad.
Casey:
Um, I, it was, I was a different human being seven years ago.
Casey:
And I don't mean that in a bad way at all.
Casey:
It's just, I was in a very different place in life.
Casey:
Um, and now, you know, I'm, I'm much, much, much closer to 40 than I am 30.
Casey:
And, and in 2013, what was I 30?
Casey:
And then I was not even 31 yet.
Casey:
Um, I was just shy of 31 at that point.
Casey:
So it has been quite a journey.
Casey:
And I agree with what you said, John.
Casey:
And I just wanted to take this one quick moment to say thank you to anyone who has ever listened to us, who continues to listen to us.
Casey:
It has genuinely been one of the great honors and pleasures of my life to be a part of this with the two of you fine gentlemen.
Casey:
And I pinch myself regularly because I cannot believe this is my life.
Casey:
So thank you to all of you, to the two of you and to all of you.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I like the reason I wanted to talk about this is like, like, what do I hope people get from it is not to toot our own horn, although episode 400 is some way of celebrating at the very least our longevity, as they say in the recent incomparable celebration episode quantity.
John:
we definitely have quite we didn't miss one week in the first year i believe that somehow doing a scheduling snafu we had a skipped week but other than that one we did i don't think so yeah i don't think we did the very very first month go look at the gaps between episodes like one two three and four there's like a two-week gap in one of them oh well that okay so that doesn't count asterisk yeah because we didn't really we didn't really embrace it until like march or april thank you very much yeah and episode one was like a half episode because it was like an after show of neutral
John:
Mm hmm.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But we've done 52 episodes a year.
John:
Right.
John:
So we've done quantity.
John:
But like I'm not trying to say it's like this is how awesome we are.
John:
I'm saying this is what I personally am trying to do.
John:
And it sounds like Casey is more or less on the same page.
John:
It's like this is what we are trying to do.
John:
To the extent that we are able to succeed enough to get people to continue to listen to the show, we are all eternally grateful.
John:
But that's what we're trying to do, right?
John:
And I don't know who this is for.
John:
Maybe it's just for me to say out loud or maybe it's just for me to express what I'm always thinking when I'm trying to do this or just to explain it.
John:
And maybe it's just to hear from people to say, that's not what I'm getting from your show at all.
John:
I just, it helps my iguana go to sleep.
John:
Like, I don't even know.
John:
Like, well, honestly, whatever value you're getting out of it, thank you.
John:
Thank you for listening.
John:
That's great.
John:
But here, when I'm doing the show, I'm trying to entertain, inform, and provide some measure of insight.
Marco:
You know, the way I listen to podcasts, you know, I've been a heavy podcast listener since before we did the show for years beforehand.
Marco:
And there's always been two kinds of podcasts with me.
Marco:
There's the kind of...
Marco:
bigger mass market shows that you listen to for either like news value or for, you know, quote storytelling.
Marco:
And this would be, you know, the big popular, like public radio style shows, some, you know, some of the, the very first big podcasts like this American life, you know, that kind of stuff.
Marco:
Um, and, and, or, or, you know, shows that are very focused on news, things like the daily or like a lot of the slate shows, you know, like news shows.
Um,
Marco:
And those I listen to a little bit of.
Marco:
I listen to almost none of them because what I really am into with podcasts is the other world of podcasts.
Marco:
That's not primarily information-driven.
Marco:
It's primarily people-driven.
Marco:
And when I listen to most of the shows I listen to,
Marco:
Many of them are the shows that many of the listeners listen to, like John Gruber's show.
Marco:
The shows I listen to are usually about the people on them.
Marco:
There is so much more about the people than about the topics they're talking about.
Marco:
And so in John's categorization, that would be the entertainment side of things being number one.
Marco:
To me, that is number one.
Marco:
But it goes beyond just entertainment.
Marco:
It isn't just like, you know, comedy hour.
Marco:
It's like, no, these are people who I consider my friends.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Some of them are my actual friends in real life.
Marco:
Many of them aren't.
Marco:
And I just feel like – I just feel this great human connection to them because I get to know them.
Marco:
And I tell people who want to know about podcasting or who want to start a podcast, they're looking to grow their audience or they just want to know how it works.
Marco:
I always tell them that the subject matter –
Marco:
is usually what gets people in the door.
Marco:
But what keeps people there is the people.
Marco:
And the host of the show, the chemistry they have with each other, their personalities they show off to the world.
Marco:
I listen to...
Marco:
Merlin Mann and John Roderick talk more than I talk to most of my friends.
Marco:
I talk to the two of you guys and to the 100,000 people listening in the audience indirectly more than I talk to my own mother or my sister.
Marco:
And it's crazy to me to think that, but podcasting is so much about people, and it's about that connection you feel to the hosts.
Marco:
It's about how much you enjoy having them talk to each other and talking to you.
Marco:
And so to have this show go for this long and to have succeeded so much so far –
Marco:
And with more to go like this, to be clear, we're not ending the show.
Marco:
We're just celebrating 400.
John:
No one was thinking that until you said it.
John:
Why did you have to do that?
Marco:
Well, it's hard.
Marco:
Now I'm worried, man.
Marco:
It's hard to talk about this kind of stuff without it sounding like it's an ending.
John:
At the end, we go 400 more.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, but then when we get to 800, everyone's going to be like, is this it?
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Then we do 800 more.
Marco:
You said eight years ago.
John:
It's a very easy sequence.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, point is, I'm really honored and thankful for our audience that you...
Marco:
you seem to really like us because otherwise you wouldn't listen to the show just for the information because while we have some information, you know, we, we also BS a lot and we, we, we will, we, it's funny.
Marco:
Like we, we will occasionally get an email from somebody who is like, you should stick to tech.
Marco:
Why did you talk about this thing for 10 minutes?
Marco:
And,
Marco:
And whenever I get one of those emails, again, this isn't frequent.
Marco:
I think we've driven most of the people away by now.
Marco:
But whenever I get one, I think like, have you ever heard the show?
Marco:
Like, how far have you made it?
Marco:
Like, I often think like, is this person, is this their very first episode they've heard that they're not complaining that we don't just take the tech?
Marco:
Because it has to be.
Marco:
Because like, anybody who wants us to just be an information dump,
Marco:
You're going to be disappointed pretty quickly because that isn't what we do.
Marco:
We do some segments that are information-filled, surrounded by a bunch of BS that almost goofing around with each other.
John:
We're calling it entertainment now, Margo, not BS.
Marco:
Right, yes.
Marco:
Thanks.
Marco:
But the point is our show is –
Marco:
A lot more than just the information.
Marco:
It always has been and it always will be.
Marco:
And people who want just pure information, there's a lot of other tech shows that will give you that.
Marco:
You don't need us for that.
Marco:
And you probably shouldn't use just us for that.
Marco:
You come here for us.
Marco:
And for that, I am eternally grateful because it's such an honor that so many people want to listen to hours of us BSing with each other.
Marco:
That's fantastic.
Marco:
And I'm just so happy about that.
Marco:
And I'm very thankful for that.