Tickle Rock You
Marco:
it is one of the biggest shows of the year the show where we talk about iphones that we don't know that much about yet but we kind of know everything about but it's god it's such a weird time of the of the season it's really gonna save a lot of time for next week's show because we'll cover everything this week and then next week we'll say you know what we said last week yeah that happened
Marco:
or at least like much of that or most of that or you know we didn't so the inevitability of iphone season and prediction season is that due to the massive scale of the iphone the supply chain leaks like crazy and there is basically nothing they can reasonably do to keep most of the physical details of the new iphones from leaking ahead of time and so going into
Marco:
The iPhone event.
Marco:
Typically, we know with reasonable certainty most of the physical things that will be announced.
Marco:
Physical changes like, you know, there's going to be a different size phone or what kind of materials they're using, oftentimes even what colors they're going to be launching, because that kind of stuff tends to leak.
Marco:
But then a lot of times we'll be surprised by something.
Marco:
And oftentimes, first of all, we're always surprised by names because they're always way worse than we think they're going to be.
Marco:
We're always surprised by software features and some of the software features of things like the camera that's usually surprising in some way.
Casey:
Well, I think the canonical example of everything you're describing is the thing that we forgot to mention last week, which we'll talk about again later, but the dynamic island.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Like, I think that because we knew that there was some sort of cutout kind of situation, but nobody was 100% sure what the physical stuff would look like.
Casey:
We had a pretty good notion.
Casey:
But the whole software story, I don't think anyone had a freaking clue what that was going to be.
Casey:
And certainly nobody knew what the god awful name Dynamic Island was going to be.
Casey:
It's not that bad of a name.
Casey:
I was going to say, I was going to say, to be honest, it's actually grown on me.
Casey:
But at the time, I remember hating it.
Casey:
No, hasn't grown on me.
Marco:
They've had many worse names.
Marco:
But anyway, software tends to surprise us, and that's always fun.
Marco:
And then the other products that are less big than the iPhone, like the Apple Watch.
Marco:
The Apple Watch is probably going to be updated tomorrow, and we really haven't heard that much about it.
Marco:
We have a couple of vague rumored notions, but nothing nearly as concrete as we tend to get about the iPhones.
Marco:
So there are usually surprising things in these events, even though we go in kind of knowing...
Marco:
what they're going to show us for the most part in hardware, at least.
Casey:
And, you know, maybe it's the old man in me coming out, which at this point is basically all of me, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
But I feel like some of the fun for me as I've watched Apple for longer and longer is seeing how they spin things.
Casey:
You know, like, how are they going?
Casey:
I was listening to Upgrade earlier today, so this is Fresh in Mind.
Casey:
But, like, how are they going to spin the
Casey:
the periscope camera like are they going to use the term periscope are they going to say well of course they're going to say it's the greatest thing ever but you know like what is the approach that they take about this when they talk about if they talk about three nanometer how does that happen are we going down to the chip lab or are we making a passing reference to the fact that it's a new chip technology and that's all we get you know I think the meta observation is what I find most interesting these days in no small part because all the real observations we've already got and we'll talk about in a little bit
Casey:
All right, we should start off the show properly, though, and we should do that in the month of September by talking about St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
We are all members of Relay FM in the sense that we have shows on Relay FM, and even if we didn't have shows on Relay FM, we would still be behind this cause because it's a darn good one.
Casey:
So what is St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital?
Casey:
You've probably heard it before.
Casey:
You're going to hear it for the rest of September.
Casey:
And I don't care if you don't like it.
Casey:
We shouldn't even let you skip chapters.
Casey:
If such a thing were possible, we wouldn't let you skip.
Casey:
But nevertheless, St.
Casey:
Jude is a research hospital.
Casey:
Their mission is to basically self-destruct.
Casey:
And by that I mean they will continue until no child dies of childhood cancer.
Casey:
And if we ever get to that point, then they're done.
Casey:
Their mission's accomplished.
Casey:
And not in the ridiculous George Bush way, in the actual way.
Casey:
So St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital, wow, that's a mouthful.
Casey:
They are very well deserving of donations, and we are asking you to donate to them.
Casey:
You can go to stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E-E dot org slash ATP, and you can send them some of your money.
Casey:
And given that this is iPhone time, I will defer to Marco at this very moment to talk about Marco.
Casey:
How could you kind of figure out a gauge for what you should donate to St.
Casey:
Jude, which again is at S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So here's how I'm going to challenge you this time.
Marco:
So in the past, I've said things like whatever you might spend on like an add-on purchase of your iPhone, like maybe a case or at the higher end, maybe like AppleCare or something else.
Marco:
I'm going to make this more concrete and a little more ambitious.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Right now, the official list price of the iPhone 14 Pro is, quote, starting at $999 in the U.S.,
Marco:
So here's what I want you to do.
Marco:
When the new iPhones are announced, whatever the family is that you're going to purchase, either the iPhone 15 or the iPhone 15 Pro or whatever you're going to call it, like the Max or the Ultra, whatever the big one is, look at the base list price for that model.
Marco:
And I'm going to say the 14 Pro is the base list price also for the Pro Max, okay?
Marco:
So suppose we've heard rumors of a price increase.
Marco:
Suppose the 14 or the 15 Pro starts at $1,199.
Marco:
If that is the starting price, I want you to look at your receipt when you order your iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max.
Marco:
And whatever the difference is between that $1,199 or whatever the base price is and what your total actually is, that difference is your minimum St.
Marco:
Jude donation.
Casey:
Oh, I like this.
Casey:
I like this a lot.
Marco:
So if you maybe upgrade from the Pro to the Pro Max or the Ultra or whatever, if you upgrade the storage, if you add on AppleCare, if you add on a case, whatever your order total is for the iPhone order, the difference between that total and the starting price of the family that you selected, Pro or non-Pro, that is your minimum donation.
Marco:
And even if you get the base model, there's still tax, right?
Marco:
Oh, totally.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
There are sales tax.
Marco:
You probably are going to get a case or something.
Marco:
You're probably going to get AppleCare.
Marco:
Maybe that's billed per month.
Marco:
Maybe it's $12 a month or $8 a month or whatever.
Marco:
The great thing is you can just multiply that by 12 because we're going to say the same thing next year.
Marco:
So multiply that by 12, and that's your price for your AppleCare if you do monthly billing.
Marco:
So you can do the math.
Marco:
You're all smart people who listen to the show.
Marco:
So that's my challenge to you.
Marco:
If you are at all financially able to do this, and fortunately many of our listeners are lucky enough to be able to do this, that's your minimum, and feel free to exceed it.
Marco:
Indeed.
Casey:
So yeah, here's the thing.
Casey:
If you only have $10 or $20 to spare, even though I completely agree with Marco's whole mathematics over here, if you only have $10 or $20, don't feel bad.
Casey:
Don't feel bad at all.
Casey:
That's $10 or $20 that St.
Casey:
Jude didn't have before you donated.
Casey:
$10 or $20 is great.
Casey:
The offset, we got to come up with a catchy name for this.
Casey:
We'll have to workshop that.
Casey:
But the Marco offset, that's even better.
Casey:
But no matter what, anything helps.
Casey:
Anything helps.
Casey:
And, you know, why St.
Casey:
Jude?
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
Before St.
Casey:
Jude was opened in 1962, childhood cancer was basically considered terminal.
Casey:
It was incurable.
Casey:
There was nothing you can do about it.
Casey:
Now, thanks in no small part to treatments developed at St.
Casey:
Jude, the overhaul childhood cancer survival rate went from 20% to more than 80% since St.
Casey:
Jude opened in 1962.
Casey:
But of course, there's still way more work to be done.
Casey:
I mean, pediatric cancer is a leading cause of death by disease amongst U.S.
Casey:
children ages 14 and younger.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
I'm...
Casey:
pretty sure that we can all agree regardless of our political affiliation that every kid deserves a chance to live their life and so if you can scrounge together five bucks ten bucks or even better the marco offset of several hundred dollars and send it to st jude.org sdjud.org slash atp we'd really appreciate it now john we have some breaking news since last episode we have a new top of the leaderboard that is topped atp can you tell me about this please
John:
Yeah, I didn't spend a very long time at the very top of the leaderboard.
John:
This happened shortly after last week's episode, which is great.
John:
Guillaume Morin coming in at $7,500.
John:
He's taken the number one spot and has had it since last week when he donated.
John:
So if anyone wants to come for that title, he's up there waiting.
John:
1Password, any other big companies that want to donate.
John:
And by the way, speaking of companies, the thing we forgot to mention last time,
John:
Uh, if you work for an employer that does charity matching for your donation, make sure you take advantage of that.
John:
You will make your employer give the amount that you gave.
John:
So you can basically double your own donation.
John:
I think there is like a charity match search tool on the, uh, the donation website, but you can just, you know, also just go to your work intranet and find like the charity match thing.
John:
It will explain how to do it.
John:
It's usually not complicated and it will literally double your donation up to whatever the limit of your company is.
John:
If you work at a really good company, they won't have a limit.
John:
So whatever you give, uh,
John:
They will also pay the same amount.
John:
So please look for that company match.
John:
And if you already did your donation, you can usually retroactively do the match.
John:
Just get your receipt.
John:
And that's what the procedure usually is, is some sort of thing where it's like, just show us what you donated and prove that you donated.
John:
And then your company will donate it as well.
John:
So please do that.
John:
Please look for that charity match at your company if you work for a company that does that.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And as a final note, I forgot to mention also last week, the same offer from the last several years applies.
Casey:
This is literally the only time that ATP stickers are for sale.
Casey:
That's the great news.
Casey:
Bad news is they now cost $7,501.
Casey:
If you are the top donor, including you, Guillaume.
Casey:
Guillaume?
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Guillaume.
Casey:
Guillaume.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
I'll get there.
Casey:
If you would like a handful of ATP stickers, please reach out to me.
Casey:
You can find my contact information on the internet.
Casey:
I promise.
Casey:
Reach out to me and I will dispatch your stickers to anywhere that the U.S.
Casey:
Postal Service will service.
Casey:
And that sounds like I mean just America.
Casey:
I don't.
Casey:
I can send it to almost any country anywhere.
Casey:
And I am happy to swallow that cost.
Casey:
So please feel free to reach out.
Casey:
If you spend even but a moment at the top of the leaderboard, you are eligible for stickers.
Casey:
So please, please, please reach out to us.
Casey:
And no matter what, again, I love the idea of the Marco offset.
Casey:
I think it's now a thing.
Casey:
We've made it a thing.
Casey:
Fetch has happened.
Casey:
I love the idea of the Marco offset, but don't let us shame you and make you think that even 10 or 20 bucks isn't enough.
Casey:
Whatever you can spare, please.
Casey:
S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP.
John:
And by the way, we know Guillaume is doing it to knock me off leaderboard because his comment was ATP.
John:
And we see a lot of comments like they show the comments on leaderboard.
John:
A lot of people are putting ATP in the comments.
John:
We haven't actually asked anyone to do that, but we do love seeing the ATP community contributing to this fund drive.
John:
Even if you just assumed it was only the people who wrote something about ATP in the comments, it's a lot of people.
John:
So we're very proud of our audience and thankful that you're helping us reach our goal this year.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
We got some very fascinating, and I don't say that with any sort of sarcasm, very fascinating feedback with regard to the iPhone 14 Pro quote-unquote 2X camera versus John's preferred strategy of cropping a 1X photo from the 1X lens.
Casey:
John, would you like me to cover this or would you prefer to?
John:
You can read the anonymous feedback and I will explain it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anonymous writes, if you know you want a zoomed in frame, you should always zoom in during capture rather than take a 1x photo and then crop later.
Casey:
In recent phone generations, Apple does a bunch of ML work underneath to fuse multiple frames together during capture to result in a much cleaner processed result.
Casey:
Multi-frame fusion happens every time, so that's deep fusion, to improve detail or noise regardless of zoom range.
Casey:
But there's an additional phase in the fusion pipeline that doesn't upscale to 12 megapixels if it's in the digital zoom range.
Casey:
So John, translate this for us, please.
John:
all right so i did get a lot of feedback about this and i think a lot of people who gave feedback were a little bit confused by the thing that apple does with their with the iphone 14 pro camera it's a 48 megapixel sensor but they bin the pixels together so they take every group of four pixels and consider that as one pixel to get a 12 megapixel image from it and you can also tell the camera don't do that just give me the all 48 megapixels right but by default if you don't change your settings it will take those little sets of four pixels and count them as one pixel right
John:
All of that has nothing to do with this.
John:
Yes, you can make that choice, but that's orthogonal to this entire issue.
John:
Lots of people were confused and said, oh, you should definitely, you know, not crop it because then you're not getting the pixels or whatever.
John:
Like, it's like taking a, you know, a crop photo sensor picture on a quote unquote real camera.
John:
Light is hitting the entire sensor.
John:
But when you're doing anything that's zoomed in, like, say, using 2x, it's just not going to give you the pixels that hit the part of the sensor that's around the edges.
John:
It's just going to give you the middle part that's equivalent to the quote unquote 2x zoom.
John:
And given that, that's why I was saying, like, well, why am I even bothering?
John:
Like...
John:
If I'm not getting those pixels that are around the edges anyway, why don't I just take the entire sensor image and I can crop it myself later?
Marco:
Well, do you shoot the full 48 megapixel raw image?
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
No, it does.
John:
No, whatever you choose to do, whatever you choose to do, light is still hitting the same region of the sensor.
John:
You can tell the sensor, hey, when light hits that region, bend your pixels into sets of four or don't bend your pixels into sets of four.
John:
But bottom line is you're getting the readout from what hit the center portion of the sensor.
John:
Right.
John:
And whether you crop it later or now, the same pixels are exposed to light.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's not the issue because that's why I was confused about this.
John:
And I went back and forth with this person to clarify what the actual deal is.
John:
Here's the deal has nothing to do with which pixels are being exposed or whether they're binned or anything like that.
John:
The reason you want to let the camera like, you know, do the cropping for you is because the camera has access to information that you do not.
John:
When you crop later, when you crop later,
John:
what you're doing is taking you know the picture that it took and throwing away the outer pixels right what you're missing is what the camera has during exposure which is all of those frames that are used where they say that we do a bunch of ml work underneath to fuse multiple frames together those multiple frames are gone by the time you capture the 1x picture you can't get them back they've already done their work to produce the 1x picture right
John:
The step they're talking about is like, okay, well, when you do a 2x thing, they're going to upscale it to 12 megapixels.
John:
And again, I said, well, I can just upscale it myself to 12 megapixels later.
John:
What am I missing?
John:
And what you're missing is those multiple frames.
John:
They have already done their work on the 1x picture.
John:
But when the camera takes a 2x picture, it knows that it's going to have to scale up to 12 megapixels to try to give you like a normal size capture.
John:
So it uses all those multiple frames and fuses them together during the upscaling process from like the crop thing to be 12 full megapixels or whatever.
John:
And that's why you don't crop later because you don't have – no matter what image editing program you use, you use Lightroom, you use Photoshop or whatever, you do not have access to those multiple frames that are fused together.
John:
You just have the result of that work and you can't reverse that back out because some data has been lost.
John:
So that's why you always use a digital zoom and take the picture that way.
Marco:
It's like the onion in your sauce.
Marco:
You don't have access to it.
Marco:
Once the sauce is served, the onion is discarded.
Marco:
It has done its job.
Ah.
John:
uh not sure that analogy quite works but anyway uh yeah i hope that because that was and like i said the reason i went back and forth with it is i was like but can i do all that after the fact and it's like no we don't we don't give you those multiple frames like we give you the result of them being baked in but you can't unbake it get the frames back and rerun the same algorithm we do and by the way it's not just at 2x like this thing says it's every time it's at a you know a zoom range that essentially doesn't fill the entire sensor it doesn't take the all the pixels from the entire sensor they upscale that
John:
to make it look like a 12 megapixel or whatever picture that had lit up the entire sensor.
John:
But when they do that upscaling, they're doing it with multiple frames.
Marco:
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Casey:
We made a terrible mistake.
Casey:
I don't think we did.
Casey:
Well, I think we did.
Casey:
Oh, let's see.
Casey:
Hot takes and coming.
Casey:
Hot takes and coming.
Casey:
So last week we did the exit interviews, which is genuinely one of my favorite segments that we do on the show.
Casey:
And we did the exit interview for the iPhone 14 Pro.
Casey:
And all three of us forgot to talk about the Dynamic Island.
Casey:
And a lot of people took that to mean, and understandably so, I would have as well.
Casey:
Well, does that mean the Dynamic Island sucks then?
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I will start by saying, no, I don't think it does at all.
Casey:
I think it's underused.
Casey:
I can't say that I personally see it used that often, but I think that's in part for a couple of reasons.
Casey:
My favorite tools that I've used with the Dynamic Island is the absolutely great app Flighty.
Casey:
Uh, by in part friend of the show, Ryan Jones.
Casey:
And also, oh shoot, it's the thing that Gruber recommended.
Casey:
And I knew I was going to forget to look this up before the show.
Casey:
It's a sports alerts, which is visually not great, but the app is not great visually, but it does an absolutely phenomenal job of putting sports ball related things in the dynamic island.
Casey:
Uh,
Casey:
I am not a person that uses a ton of timers.
Casey:
That's another great example, though.
Casey:
For music playback and stuff, I like seeing what's going on in Dynamic Island, but I don't interact with it that often.
Casey:
But when the Dynamic Island is in use, which I will concede is not as often as I would like, it is, to my eyes, really, really great.
Casey:
Marco, let's have you jump in before John can tell me all the reasons I'm wrong.
Marco:
so i probably should we probably should have mentioned this like when people wrote in why didn't you mention the dynamic island i'm like i thought oh no i we you know we made a mistake um but it the dynamic island so far in you know in this year where it has only been available for one year and only on the pro phones so only a subset of the product line which we'll get to later but
Marco:
It has been a good version one of this software concept, but in practice, I have found relatively few apps have been using it very well.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
And that's the biggest downside to it is there isn't that much software support.
Marco:
See also live activities, which is related to them on the software side.
Marco:
They're very similar.
Marco:
But the live activities also, we haven't seen a ton of software adoption for those yet because those are also reasonably young.
Marco:
I think this will be a bigger deal down the road, but in my year so far of using the iPhone 14 Pro with the Dynamic Island, I haven't had it really make a big impact in my life.
Marco:
It's a little nicety.
Marco:
It's not a big deal.
Marco:
It's a very nice, small deal.
Marco:
And maybe in the future it might become a bigger deal as more adoption happens to the software and as Apple refines how it works with different hardware and everything.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
But it's a nice feature, but it doesn't steal the show.
Marco:
And if you're still holding on to a phone that doesn't have the dynamic island and feeling like you're really missing out, you're not.
Marco:
It'll be nice when you get a new phone.
Marco:
That'll be a nice little thing that...
Marco:
oh, look, now I have this.
Marco:
I haven't had it yet.
Marco:
But that alone is not a massive reason to upgrade, in my opinion.
Marco:
So that's why I didn't really feel it worth mentioning.
Marco:
Also, I forgot.
John:
So there's two aspects of Dynamic Allen and our discussion of it.
John:
So the first is, this is not the first time Apple has taken a chunk out of the screen.
John:
The notch was the first time they did that.
John:
And I believe in our exit interview after the first notch phone, we did talk about it because the thing with the notch was,
John:
Uh, is this a thing that's going to bother us?
John:
Because just looking at the phone, it's like, oh, they just chopped away a bunch of pixels on our screen.
John:
Is that going to be annoying?
John:
And our answer at the end of that year was, no, you just, you don't even notice it.
John:
You get the phone and it's just, you immediately acclimate to it and the notch never bothers you again.
John:
um in that aspect the dynamic island is the same way i mean it moved the whole it moved the part that doesn't have pixels down a little bit on the screen uh would we care that you could see a stripe of little pixels above or whatever the answer is no you get the phone you just like the notch you just forget about it so in that respect it doesn't really uh
John:
require any commentary because we'd already gone through this once before essentially like They chop up some pixels and we know that basically it's the thing that doesn't really bother you Second aspect is what I talked about when they first announced this and I still think it's true The notch is making lemonade out of lemons Apple doesn't want to have a gigantic area of the screen that is entirely black because it has no pixels They currently have to do that for technological reasons to support their other features But they absolutely do not want to do it
John:
But they have to.
John:
So how can they get something good out of this?
John:
And that's what everyone was oohing and aahing about.
John:
They're like, oh, Dynamic Island's so clever.
John:
Look what they did because it's OLED and every pixel is lit up individually.
John:
We can do all sorts of stuff that makes it look like the island grows and shrinks when in reality there is a portion of it that's never going to be lit up and it's always going to be jet black and we can make it look like it's growing, but of course we can't really shrink it past that.
John:
So they do all sorts of UI stuff there.
John:
But as I said when it came out,
John:
If Apple had a completely light up screen, I really doubt they would choose to make a 100 percent black UI element so prominent on the top of their phones because it just doesn't fit with the aesthetic.
John:
Even in dark mode, they tend not to do 100 percent black stuff everywhere.
John:
But they had to do it that way because they have a hole in their screen.
John:
Right.
John:
And kind of like the notch, which started off big and got smaller.
John:
If and when Apple can get rid of this and not have a region of their screen be black, they will.
John:
But until then, they're making the best of a bad situation.
John:
And they did it in a clever way, and it's worthy of oohing and aahing about, you know, aren't those UI designers clever and isn't this a nice case of whimsy and stuff or whatever?
John:
But the bottom line is...
John:
It's you don't notice it like it's not a thing that you notice.
John:
And then the final thing, I guess there's three items here.
John:
The final thing is most of the things that are beneficial about the dynamic island have nothing to do with it being dynamic or an island and everything to do with, hey, iOS could choose to have a part of the interface that allows other applications to display information.
John:
even when they're not the front most application that's the feature that people like about the dynamic island has nothing to do with the fact that it's a black lozenge and whimsically glides away and grows and shrinks it has to do with the fact that oh there's a little place where i can see sports scores even when i'm not in the sports score app and you can have that feature without the dynamic island and i think if and when the dynamic island finally goes away and the screen is fully pixels and apple finally arrives at that dream scenario the
John:
They should keep some kind of global user interface element at the top of the phone using the exact same APIs where apps can display stuff and where you can switch to navigation quickly by tapping there and all the things that we love about the dynamic ion.
John:
And if I had to say anything about it, I would say those features, you will like those if you get a phone with a dynamic ion.
John:
I wish those features were on phones that didn't have a dynamic on, but they're not.
John:
But eventually all phones will probably have that.
John:
And at some point, hopefully in the future, they will stop having to cut out a region of their screen, or at least that region will get smaller and smaller.
John:
So I don't mind not mentioning it, but for completeness sake, I think I just reiterated everything that I said when it launched.
John:
So what I should have said is, hey, all the things that I said about the dynamic element at launched, I found them to still be true a year later.
Casey:
All right, with regard to TCL Roku TVs and connecting them to the internet to update them.
Marco:
By the way, have we not decided that this is better to be pronounced as Tickle?
Marco:
It is not better.
John:
I think it's better.
Casey:
I can get behind that.
John:
TCL, sorry.
John:
Tickle is taken by the language.
John:
The television company is TCL.
John:
Tickle TVs sound so much more fun.
Casey:
yeah i i'm i'm team marco on this one so tickle roku tv updates that just sounds like a mouthful my word anyway you're gonna start saying rock you again too that's more fun television updates but no one will know what we're talking about it doesn't matter it's fun they'll figure it out uh-huh the tickle rock you television updates so pierre luke gag day right oh come on you got to work on your french pronunciation gagne
Casey:
Gagne writes, I bought a Tickle Rock U television specifically because it doesn't, hi, this is Casey, because it doesn't require going online to update it.
Casey:
And Pierre-Luc writes, there's a link, how to use USB to update the software on your unconnected Rock U television.
Casey:
And we'll put a link to this in the show notes.
Casey:
Apparently you can do it via USB, which is pretty cool.
John:
Download a file, stick it on a thumb drive, shove it in the TV.
John:
I mean, if that's why you're buying this TV, that must mean you really care about privacy.
John:
If you really care about privacy, don't buy a TCL Roku TV.
Casey:
I think you mean a tickle Roku.
John:
Not the most privacy-preserving television software stack.
John:
It tickles your privacy.
Casey:
Oh, Lordy.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Apple Park and garbage cans.
Casey:
I know this is from a few weeks ago.
Casey:
It's been on the list for a while.
Casey:
We got a lot of conflicting feedback about this, so I don't know since the darn Apple Park spaceship whatever is so darn big.
Casey:
Maybe it worked different in different zip codes or whatever.
Casey:
But Anonymous writes, regarding the ugly gray Rubbermaid garbage cans, either your source was misled or they had a different experience than I have had.
Casey:
There are indeed little trash cans outside each individual office.
Casey:
They have been there as long as I've been at Apple Park, and I was there before the glass walls had safety stickers.
Casey:
Gosh, remember that?
Casey:
Either this source was one of the very first people to move into the building, or they are repeating an exaggerated retelling of how these Rubbermaids came to be.
Casey:
Engineers are sometimes told to leave certain types of trash, usually corrugated cardboard, outside of their offices for special pickup.
Casey:
So perhaps that's the origin of their piles of trash story.
Casey:
The real design versus practicality story about Apple Park trash canes has to do with the cafeteria.
Casey:
Apple Park features seemingly custom-designed outdoor trash receptacles, each capable of fitting one, two, or three buckets, compostable, recyclable, and landfill.
Casey:
When choosing how to deploy these bins near outdoor dining areas, the designers primarily use the two-wide design, meaning that each dining area is missing one of the three bins, usually garbage.
Casey:
I do not know the rationale for this choice, but the two-wide design does have the best proportions, so make of that what you will.
Casey:
Given this, employees will often not have the needed bin close at hand and may end up walking clear across the cafeteria to toss their garbage in the correct receptacle.
Casey:
The fact that these employees largely do take these detours throws the quote little piles quote story into question.
John:
I like this one feedback because it said, you know, I'm not sure my experience at Apple Park was a little bit different.
John:
Here's some stuff.
John:
And by the way, the real problem is, and it was another story about garbage cans.
John:
Like, there's enough, I mean, because everyone had their own, like, you know, story about misdesign in Apple Park or whatever.
John:
Even this one made mention of the stickers and the glass walls that people were running into.
John:
But this is like, no, the real Apple Park garbage can story is this.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's just there's it kind of amazes me that there is enough sort of like, you know, again, aspirational design choices that are very aspirational about human nature that end up not working that well in practice.
John:
And we have multiple ones just about garbage cans.
Marco:
I will say, though, I've been lucky enough to have a couple of meals in the Apple Park cafeteria.
Marco:
And my favorite thing about those trash cans is that the icons on them are SF symbols.
Casey:
Of course they are.
Marco:
Apple spent all that money to have them drawn.
Marco:
You might as well use them.
Marco:
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Casey:
It is time as we sit here on, what day is it?
Casey:
It's the 6th of September.
Casey:
Wednesday, the 6th of September.
Casey:
On the 12th is when we are hearing about the new iPhones.
Casey:
And so we need to do our event preview.
Casey:
And somebody, John, has done a tremendous amount of research, which selfishly I appreciate, but unselfishly you should not be doing.
Casey:
But here we are.
John:
It's the new era.
John:
It's the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Come on.
Casey:
That is a song I have not heard in a long time.
Casey:
Anyways, we should talk about stuff.
Casey:
So let's talk about iPhones.
Casey:
And let's start with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
Casey:
John, do you want to go through this?
Casey:
Would you like me to quarterback and wait for one of you to jump in?
John:
I can go through it.
John:
So one of the things, I put all these details in here, partly because I'm kind of imagining that when the event happens next week, we can just go through the same thing and just X out the ones that turned out not to be true.
John:
And can you say, what were the sources of all this information?
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
So obviously the event hasn't happened yet.
John:
Everything you're seeing here is just an amalgamation of rumors, right?
John:
And like Marco said at the top of the show, when you're going to make hundreds of millions of something, you can't keep it a secret.
John:
You can't keep the physical reality of this thing a secret, right?
John:
So so much stuff about the physical reality of these devices leaks and year over year.
John:
most of it ended up being right.
John:
I will emphasize when something is more questionable, but for the most part, I'm just going to read these as like, this is what the consensus of the rumor mill is.
John:
And there's a high probability that it's going to be true unless otherwise noted by me in these notes where I put a question mark after something.
John:
So let's begin with the a 17 at three nanometers.
John:
Uh, yeah, it's a new SOC.
John:
Uh, it'll be a three nanometers.
John:
Uh, the, the supposed, um,
John:
What does that give us?
John:
The sort of back of the envelope boost you might see here.
John:
They're saying 15% speed improvement, 70% logic density increase, and 30% power reduction.
John:
Those are super fuzzy numbers, but the bottom line is when they do a shrink, you get lots of good things.
John:
Either you get more speed or you get less power at the same speed, your thing gets smaller, and you use less power.
John:
That's great.
John:
That's what we expected, and it's nice to have a shrink.
John:
Spec-wise, the rumor is that the CPU has same number of efficiency cores, but one more GPU core.
John:
So same number of efficiency and power cores, but just one more GPU core.
John:
The A16 was a 5-core GPU, and the A17 is supposedly a 6-core GPU.
John:
And there is a vague rumor that maybe the GPU cores are redesigned, but that's hard to nail down.
John:
The rumors about the CPU cores is that the performance cores might max out at 3.7 gigahertz, where previously there were 3.46 gigahertz.
John:
Again, those numbers are the type of things that are going to be hard to pin down because that's the type of thing you can, you know, they can change over time.
John:
So...
John:
That's the SoC we're looking at.
John:
And obviously the A17 will be an important chip because the cores that are in that thing will eventually be, you know, will be used in the M3 and, you know, across the line, right?
John:
The iPhone leads the way.
John:
It's going to be the first one that gets a three nanometer chip.
John:
And the work done for the A17 will be reused everywhere that Apple always reuses the stuff they do.
John:
with their phone chips.
John:
There's also supposedly a bunch of updated support chips, which is like the chips that are not the SoC.
John:
If you look inside an iPhone and that tiny little, you know, logic board that's in there, there's the SoC, which takes up most of the room and like the RAM and stuff.
John:
But there's a bunch of other chips in there too.
John:
And those chips don't use...
John:
The super expensive TSMC process or whatever.
John:
So, like, for example, the display driver chip apparently is currently fabbed at 40 nanometers.
John:
That's four zero.
John:
So the SOC is at three.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Because you're not going to spend lots of money to make, you know, the display driver chip at three nanometers.
John:
Like, what are you saving?
John:
It's such a tiny little thing anyway, and it uses very little power.
John:
And you want to save money, right?
John:
But that chip is supposedly going from 40 nanometers down to 28.
John:
Right.
John:
uh in in the new uh things and i'm not sure if this is just on the pro or also on the non-pro but the rumor was about the pro the ultra wideband chip is going from 16 nanometers to seven at least that's within shooting distance of what the soc is but all that adds up to less power for support chips which is good for battery life um and
John:
Apple does this from time to time, but as you can see, they're not in a super big hurry to like, oh, everything that's in the phone is going to be 3 nanometers.
John:
No, that's never the way it is.
John:
The SoC is the big, important, power-hungry thing is 3 nanometers.
John:
The other chips are less so.
John:
And this is, like Casey was saying at the beginning of the show,
John:
It'll be interesting to see if Apple mentions literally anything about this because they do this all the time.
John:
And I don't think they've ever really mentioned it before.
John:
Right.
John:
But practically speaking, this is the way you save battery power.
John:
Like you make everything use less power.
John:
When when Apple changes the screen to use less power, they brag about it.
John:
They don't really brag about the fact that the ultra wideband chip went from 16 nanometers to seven.
John:
We'll see if they do this time.
John:
uh the wi-fi is being upgraded to wi-fi 6e where previously was wi-fi 6 uh the big one that we've talked about before usbc instead of lightning i thought this was this is so so like everybody knows this there's actually an existing google pixel ad that is running right now we will put a youtube link for it the google pixel ad makes fun of the upcoming iphone for having usbc
John:
Like it has two little talking iPhones in a spa.
John:
And the iPhone says like, well, just wait.
John:
The new version of me is going to be announced soon.
John:
There's something coming and you'll never guess what it is.
John:
And he's like, is it USB-C?
John:
Something like that.
Casey:
You'll never guess what it is.
Casey:
USB-C in me soon.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Because, like, this is how, you know, I've seen on Mastodon people who, like, don't follow these rumors saying, oh, my God, the new iPhone's going to be, like, it's getting out into the mainstream.
John:
Like, the new iPhone's going to be USB-C.
John:
We've known that for ages.
John:
The rumor mill has known that for ages.
John:
Google had literally had time to make an ad of making fun of it.
John:
everybody knows this is happening so you know that's that's the that's a new low i feel like in uh in iphone leaks when apple's competitors are not even speculating about it but just like flat out assuming it's true and making fun of it um the rumor for the 15 pro max is that you will be able to get thunderbolt speeds which is 40 gigabits per second
John:
from that port so you can actually get those giant video files off in a reasonable amount of time which is great but of course to do that you'll need a thunderbolt cable which will not be included because apple isn't included anything with these phones anymore and thunderbolt cables are expensive but don't worry apple will sell you one uh what that cable will be able to run apple's probably going to sell one that's about two and a half feet long it supports of course usb 4 gen 2
John:
120 watts of power something in that range for power delivery and possibly have 4k 60 hertz video monitoring capability so like you could be filming something on your iphone and connect this this thunderbolt cable to a monitor so you can see in real time on an external 4k display what your camera is seeing as a kind of a monitor we'll see if they talk about or brag about that but yeah finally a port on your phone that can carry lots of data and you'll get to buy an expensive cable to do it
Marco:
And by the way, on that front, a lot of nerds are like, they're probably just going to put in a USB 2.0 cable because they're cheap.
Marco:
And that's not really the only reason.
Marco:
So if you look at most Apple USB-C cables that are out there in the world, usually it's like the ones that come with iPads or the ones that come with MacBooks.
Marco:
And they almost all are USB 2.0.
Marco:
I don't even know if Apple's ever made a USB 3 USB-C cable.
Marco:
um they certainly made thunderbolt cables and that's anyway that's a whole mess but um almost all the apple cables those nice thin beautiful white cables are usb2 and the reason why is very obvious if you compare them to an actual usb3 or thunderbolt cable they're much thicker and less flexible and usually shorter and
Marco:
the thunderbolt to be clear the thunderbolt cables are much thicker and shorter and less flexible yeah because there's way more wires in there the connectors are usually larger because there's little chips in the connectors um and so the by by keeping the the like main charging cables that people use by keeping those usb 2.0 speeds it allows them to make them much thinner and more flexible and yes they're cheaper as well but that also has all these other benefits and personally i love those dumb little apple white usb 2 cables because
Marco:
they're great charging cables as far as i can tell those little skinny cables support 100 watt power delivery so like it'll support any power delivery needs that i have in my house and they're they're so great to pack on trips they're so they're so great in so many ways and and that's largely because they are so skinny and flexible and easy to carry around so i think that makes a lot of sense especially because the vast majority of people like what's what is the cable that comes with your phone for
Marco:
It's to charge the phone.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
That's what almost anybody uses their cable for.
Marco:
Almost no one is using the cable to transfer large amounts of data to or from their phone.
Marco:
So it makes sense for the very few people that will use this port's amazing speeds.
Marco:
It makes sense for them to have to buy a special cable to do that since the trade-offs to make that everybody's cable are not good enough.
John:
and thunderbolt cables are expensive like obviously apples are extra expensive but even if you just go to mono price like they're just expensive because they have chips in them and they're complicated and you know they're they they have to be made to fairly exacting standards to carry that bandwidth and the chips in the ends cost money so they it would add so much to the price of the phone it would be a very bad it's not like it would oh it's five dollars extra no it wouldn't be five dollars extra it would be like probably twenty dollars additional cost to apple and that's huge when you're talking about
John:
you know hundreds of millions of phones um the the iphone pro and just the pro i guess is supposedly going to be smaller than the non-pro iphone 15 the difference isn't going to be huge but if you take a 15 and a 15 pro put them on top of each other the pro will be 0.02 inches shorter 0.05 inches less wide and 0.01 inches less deep the width and height difference is mostly due to thinner bezels on the screen you may
John:
not care about this but there's a subset of the smartphone buying or at least smartphone reviewing world that's obsessed with how big is the little tiny black border that doesn't have pixels in it on the front of my phone for me it's it's already so small that i'd no longer notice it but just fyi the iphone 15 pro will have the thinnest bezels ever on any phone and they'll probably brag about it and it's a little bit silly but you know that does let you pull in the edges of the phone because you you know that those bezels are just not wasted space but like
John:
If you can reduce them, you can reduce the size of the phone.
John:
So the 15 Pro will be smaller than the 15 in those dimensions for that reason.
John:
Why will it be less deep, like less thick?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe they've got some other savings that they're going to talk about.
John:
As for what the materials are, titanium frame instead of being stainless steel on the Pro phone.
John:
Marco hates his phone being too heavy.
John:
Titanium will be lighter than stainless steel, but it will not be as light as aluminum, probably.
John:
When we talk about how light things are, the same...
John:
I guess the same volume of titanium is heavier than the same volume of aluminum, but titanium is stronger, so you can use less of it than you do aluminum for the same strength.
John:
So I'm not sure Apple will do this trade-off, but...
John:
Let's leave it to the rumor mill.
John:
The rumor mill has the weight of these phones down to the gram.
John:
How?
John:
So supposedly the iPhone 15 Pro is 191 grams, whereas the 14 Pro was 206.
John:
So it saved 15 grams.
Marco:
By the way, for reference, the non-Pro 14 is 172 grams.
Marco:
So basically this is saying it's going to take it roughly halfway between the current Pro and non-Pro.
John:
Yep, and the Pro Max is going to be 19 grams lighter.
John:
It's going to be 221, and the old one was 240 grams.
John:
So they get lighter, but not as light as they would be if they used aluminum.
John:
And as for the titanium frame, in the invitation to this event, it said the word Wanderlust, which is a play on words of Wanderlust, and the Apple logo is made of little tiny gray grains of sand, which...
John:
If you don't know what the rumors are about how they're going to use titanium, it may not make too much sense to you.
John:
But what the rumor is of how they manufacture the titanium frame on this new phone and how they do it on the Apple Watch Ultra and everything is instead of the old method where you get a solid block of material and then you take a bunch of tools and you carve it out.
John:
So you sort of carve out the little, you know, the shape of the watch case or whatever with a series of drills.
John:
and other things like these little computer controlled milling machines and then that waste material gets like melted down and reused or whatever the new method that the rumor is that they're using this new method which is basically 3d printing with metal so you take a bunch of metal powder that looks a lot like the gray sandy things in this apple logo and i don't know what the technology is it's probably something to do with heat or whatever but they you know in the same way a 3d printer sort of melts little bits of plastic and builds up a material from in layers you can do that with metal too and
John:
And this is a manufacturing process that has become more and more popular in many different industries.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes to a, I don't know how to pronounce his name.
John:
It's Zinger, C-Z-I-N-G-E-R, the Zinger 21C hypercar.
John:
One of the things they tout about this, this is a few-year-old hypercar, is that a lot of the parts of this car are essentially 3D printed with metal.
John:
And you may be like, well, who cares?
John:
I don't care how they make it, whether they carve it out of metal or whether they sort of 3D print it by taking metal dust and laying it down later.
John:
What do I care?
John:
There's a big difference in the manufacturing tradeoffs.
John:
When you carve something out of a block of metal.
John:
It's actually a pretty complicated process.
John:
Apple's super duper good at it because they've been doing it for years and years, but you have to get like a high speed precision moving spinning tool with a cutting blade into all those nooks and crannies so you can carve out the shape that you want.
John:
And that is non-trivial.
John:
When when it's not like it's not like, you know, you just say, OK, well, here's what the watch has to look like.
John:
OK, CNC machine, make this shape.
John:
You have to sort of define the toolpaths and make sure the giant bulky tool thing doesn't bang into the edge when it's carving out one particular little thing.
John:
You have to say, how many passes am I going to take in which direction to reduce the amount of burrs you make and everything?
John:
It is a complicated process and it has limitations.
John:
And of course, you're, you know, cutting away half of the material that you then have to melt down and reuse.
John:
3d printing with metal works kind of like 3d printing with plastic or resin or other things where you're just laying down the material that you want to use in exactly where you want to use it and the big thing about 3d printing stuff is when you want to make a change like oh we made this thing like for the car we made this suspension arm but it turns out there's a weak part in it we think we need to bulk this up in this area making a new version of that
John:
There are limitations for 3D printing too.
John:
They're different than they are for CNC milling, but it's much easier to say, oh, here's a new revision.
John:
Just print me another one that's different.
John:
Whereas if you say, okay, well, we've changed our mind.
John:
Here's a new model for the watch.
John:
Maybe you have to change the tool paths.
John:
Maybe you have to change entirely how you're carving out because you made a change that is no longer compatible with how you were carving out before because it just won't work for like which part you're milling out at which time or whatever.
John:
So it is way easier to make changes.
John:
And the second thing is the shapes that are available to you because you are sort of 3D printing it
John:
it's a much wider range of possibilities.
John:
So if you look at this hypercar and you look at like the suspension carriers, if you don't know what like suspension components look like in a regular car, they look fairly mechanical.
John:
It's like a bunch of kind of like, you know, little struts and arms and I-beams and...
John:
spans of metal and flangers and stuff like that, you look at those same things in this car and they look like bones.
John:
They look like a pelvis bone on like a mammal, right?
John:
Because they ask the computer, hey, here are the loads.
John:
Here's the load from the wheel.
John:
Here's the load from the suspension moving up and down.
John:
Here are where all the pivot points are.
John:
Make me the thing that can handle those loads to some degree of tolerance, but uses the least amount of material and is the lightest weight.
John:
And the computer figures out what that should look like.
John:
And unsurprisingly, perhaps, it ends up looking a lot like a bone.
John:
And it's all kind of organic and blobby and, you know, gets thin and gets thicker in all the ways that it needs to to use the least amount of material for the, you know, the thing they want it to do.
John:
Now, I'm not sure if Apple's going to brag about any of that, but that is the promise of this technology that you can make even more interesting shapes.
John:
You can use less material and have lower weight, but get the same or better strength.
John:
by making shapes that it wouldn't occur to you to make if your main tool is like a milling machine that cuts straight lines and things.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So, I don't know.
John:
We didn't do it last show, but this is the part of the year where we read way too much into an image in an Apple invitation.
John:
But I have to think that at some point they're going to have to talk about 3D printing titanium powder into really cool shapes.
John:
Maybe they're just doing it for the watch.
John:
Honestly, I don't even know if they're already doing that for the Apple Watch Ultra.
John:
They might be.
John:
But the watch is the perfect place to test it out because it's small.
John:
Maybe they did it on the little phone, like the band around the phone.
John:
And again, people are like, so what?
John:
It's a metal strip on the outside of my phone.
John:
Do I care that it was 3D printed?
John:
It's not a very complicated shape.
John:
But I am excited about this technology, if not this year, then for the future, because it does hold the promise to be super interesting for future Apple products.
Casey:
Yeah, it is fascinating.
Casey:
This is all news to me.
Casey:
I didn't realize you could basically 3D print metal, like you were saying.
Casey:
That is surprising, and I had no idea.
John:
And there are other trade-offs.
John:
Obviously, it's not the same as a solid piece of metal.
John:
Everything has different trade-offs, but the different set of trade-offs opens up new possibilities.
John:
Oh, and speaking of possibilities, what is the other possibility opened up by having a titanium band?
John:
The possibility of having less visible fingerprints than stainless steel.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I know this really bothers a lot of people, but shiny stainless steel.
John:
Yeah, it shows fingerprints a lot.
John:
And the rumor is that this titanium band will be more of a brushed finish and that will show fingerprints less.
John:
They'll still be there.
John:
You just won't be able to see them as easily.
John:
Oh, and they're going to have a slightly more curved edge.
John:
It's still flat on the sides, but a little bit more of a curve on the top and the bottom edge.
Marco:
you know i i mean when they say oh it's a new phone design regular people are really gonna have to squint this because they're they're rounded rectangles with flat edges right it's it's gonna be really hard to tell i mean i i think i think people are going to honestly i i think it'll be interesting you know i think people will have a big problem with the usbc change because everyone's gonna have to rebuy their all their cables and everything and so i i think like non-nerds are gonna really complain about that a lot
Marco:
And I think it will look new, but not super new.
Marco:
And so I think the people who you can never please are like, why isn't this a newer design?
Marco:
They say that every single year, even when it is a new design.
Marco:
Those people are going to complain about it not looking different enough.
Marco:
So I think they're actually kind of in for a bit of a challenging environment in terms of non-nerd public perception of these models.
Marco:
Through no fault of their own, it seems like they are actually rumored to be making some pretty substantial physical upgrades.
Marco:
And I think the USBC, from our point of view as nerds, is a huge upgrade for most of us in most ways.
Marco:
But I think it'll be interesting to see the non-nerd reaction here.
Marco:
And I think they have a bit of work to do.
Marco:
I think they're going to be faced with a bit of a challenge.
Marco:
And with Apple seemingly famously failing to read the room a lot of times in recent years, I wonder if they know that.
Marco:
I wonder if they are prepared for that kind of backlash for mostly superficial things that might be stronger this year than usual.
Marco:
Even though from a nerd's point of view, these all sound like great upgrades.
John:
They have a couple tools in their pocket that we'll get to in a little bit.
John:
We're still in the physical changes part here.
Marco:
Oh, and by the way, before we leave the physical things, I wanted to mention for the slightly smaller screen bezels that we're getting possibly with the 15 Pro.
Marco:
Smallest ever.
Marco:
Smallest in the world, Michael.
Marco:
So, okay, this is a stupid hot take, despite everything I just said.
Marco:
But I don't want this.
Marco:
Like, I really, maybe, look, we'll see what happens when we get it.
Marco:
This doesn't sound good to me because already the phone is very hard to handle without creating touch input.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
And if they shrink those bezels down even further, that problem becomes worse.
Marco:
You know, there's a reason why on the iPad the screen doesn't go all the way to the edge.
Marco:
Not yet, anyway.
Marco:
And but look, they they have the technology to make the iPad bezels thinner.
John:
They can get closer than they do.
John:
But they I mean, the bezels used to be huge on the iPad.
John:
Do you remember that?
John:
Of course.
John:
They were like an inch and a half.
John:
And obviously they're way, way smaller now.
John:
But yes, they could make them thinner and they choose not to on the iPad.
Marco:
Right, and I think part of the reason, I mean, obviously cost is always challenging there, but I think part of the reason, too, on the iPad is that you need to hold it somewhere, and so that kind of makes sense.
Marco:
On the phone, obviously, I think case usage on the phone is probably way higher as a percentage than the iPad.
Marco:
I think on the phone, it's probably nearly 100%, whereas the iPad, it's probably well under half, at least if you don't count Apple's Folios, which are barely cases.
Marco:
But
Marco:
On the phone, I worry about that bezel being shrunk.
Marco:
I think that will make things worse for both case and non-case users.
Marco:
Because case users, the case will have less area to grip onto the phone without masking out part of the screen from being possible to easily touch.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
They're just going to mask out part of the screen.
John:
They do not care.
John:
Existing cases mask out part of the screen even with the existing bezels.
Marco:
But that's going to be a problem, right?
Marco:
And then secondly, then people who use it without a case, which I've actually, I've been trying going caseless for about the last month or so, just kind of to get used to it more.
Marco:
And since my phone's already super scratched up on the screen for the sand that is not in my pockets, I figured what do I have to lose?
Marco:
So I have my wonderful fingerprinty stainless steel base.
Marco:
that I can't wait to get rid of.
Marco:
But going caseless, the problem of like there being no safe area to hold on the edge is actually a little bit magnified because you don't have the rim of a case to rest your finger on.
Marco:
So you're resting your finger around the physical edge of the phone.
Marco:
And if those bezels get even thinner,
Marco:
First of all, I don't think the current ones look bad, and I don't think that would be that big of an upgrade in how it looks day-to-day, but I also don't think it would be easier to use in any way.
Marco:
I see that as kind of a competition among gadget reviewers, but I don't think any regular people are asking for this, and I think it would actually make our lives worse.
John:
Well, I mean, it's the naked robotic core theory.
John:
Like, you can always add bezel by having a thicker case that is offset by more, but you can't remove it.
John:
So give us, you know, Apple wants to give us the naked robotic core, and it has nothing on it that it doesn't need to have on it, and you can add to it whatever you want.
John:
um and honestly like the bezels are smaller than they were but they're already so small the difference is like a millimeter or less than a millimeter and you know it's it's bragging rights and maybe they'll brag about it but already on the 14 pro with a case on it i very frequently have the annoying experience that i'm when i'm watching something like usually like i'm watching like a video in landscape and somehow some fat fleshy part of one of my fingers is
John:
finds its way onto the screen like I don't even feel it it's like I didn't even realize I touched it but all of a sudden the video like skips forward or the overlay comes down or something terrible happens I'm like I didn't wait oh some part of my hand must have touched the phone and to be clear listeners John is not a thick man
Casey:
No, certainly not.
John:
No, but I have old flabby skin, but I don't know.
John:
It's amazing.
John:
It amazes me that it happens.
John:
But here's the thing.
John:
The solution is not, oh, put thicker bezels on it.
John:
I think the solution, other than getting a case that is offset by more, is what the iPad bragged about doing and still tries to do, but the iPhone seems to do very poorly, although I think it also has this feature, which is what they call touch rejection, palm rejection, finger rejection, where the OS tries to figure out, does that seem like an accidental touch or an intentional touch?
John:
I believe the iPhone already does this, and so does the iPad.
John:
It's just a question of how good is it at figuring out what is accidental?
John:
And maybe it's something in the recent OS update or something that rejects my touches less intelligently, because I feel like it should know, like when I'm watching a video and holding it in landscape,
John:
And there's this vague, squishy touch to the upper right corner of the screen that's just like the palm of my hand or something or part of my finger.
John:
So I'm not worried about the smaller bezels causing a problem with that, and I do think it's in line with the naked robotic core thing.
John:
I do think it is a little bit silly.
John:
I don't have any complaints about the bezels, but if you can make the phone smaller...
John:
That's a naked robotic win, right?
John:
Because now if you really want the bigger size, if you really want the bigger size, just get a thicker case to put on it.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
We'll see if they mention it at all other than in passing or if they do brag about it as much as, you know, a certain segment of the reviewing population seems to be excited about it.
John:
But one thing that's not getting smaller, the thing that I hate, the stupid camera bump.
John:
I still think they need to revisit that design.
John:
I think it is outgrown.
John:
It is like a grotesquerie of itself there.
John:
Every other phone has found some other way to incorporate all of that, you know, because they have to have the cameras.
John:
Like, what's the reason we buy these?
John:
Yeah, you have big cameras to take up a lot of room.
John:
But they're still sticking with a design that was based on the idea that the cameras would be in the corner of the phone.
John:
They've long since taken up more than half the width of the phone.
John:
And now they're protruding even farther.
John:
And nothing about the cameras on the 15 Pro or Pro Max is going to change that.
John:
The bump is going to be even bigger.
John:
I'm kind of annoyed by it.
John:
Not just the fact that it's a bump.
John:
I would feel better if it was full width.
John:
So many other phones do that in the Android world.
John:
Just make it full width.
John:
So it's not like a wobbly, you know, corner on a table or whatever.
John:
Obviously, it's so big now that it doesn't really wobble that much anymore.
John:
But like, just go whole hog.
John:
Just make it full width.
John:
Just rearrange the lenses.
John:
Do something.
John:
But no, they're going to be in the same arrangement.
John:
The bump is even bigger.
John:
Whatever.
John:
We'll deal with it.
John:
The other physical change that, you know, we talked about ages ago is the action button where once there was a little switch for the ring silence switch, whatever the hell Apple calls it.
John:
that you dig your little fingernail in there and you move that switch back and forth that switch is gone and in its place is an action button which is just you know a rare thing for apple adding a new button uh and it will be you know configurable in the os to do all sorts of different things or whatever but just a plain old push button and by the way below it as we discussed months ago
John:
Just plain old volume buttons, one button for up and one button for down.
John:
The rumor was that they were going to make a single button that didn't move.
John:
It was like, you know, haptic and blah, blah, blah.
John:
That plan apparently got scrapped according to the rumor mill and it would just be plain old volume up and volume down buttons.
John:
But there will be an action button above it that you'll be able to configure to do stuff.
John:
And I think that's pretty cool.
Marco:
Yeah, this sounds like a really good kind of like, you know, it'll probably mostly be used by nerds, let's be honest, in terms of like changing from the defaults.
Marco:
But that's a really good nerd feature.
Marco:
What do you think the default will be?
Marco:
I think the default will be mute, just like, you know, to match what everyone has already grown accustomed to.
Marco:
But I think what many people will change it to will be things like launch a particular camera app or launch the iOS camera or maybe flashlight, you know, things like maybe one of the if you use accessibility zoom frequently or stuff like that.
Marco:
Like, I think I think it will be very frequently used by kind of the iOS power user community.
Marco:
And I think if I had to guess, the most common non-default setting people would choose will be to launch the camera app.
John:
Well, I mean, the nerds will have it connected to a shortcut probably.
John:
Yeah.
John:
God knows what they'll do.
John:
Yep.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So on the Pro Max only, the rumor is that's where we get our periscope camera.
John:
And supposedly it is a 3X to 6X optical zoom with the periscope camera.
John:
Obviously, the Pro Max has more room inside it for all these lenses that will be laying lengthwise inside the case.
John:
uh i just don't think there's physically room for that to be in the 15 pro i don't think they're just trying to do it for market segmentation we'll see when they show us like the cutaway of how big it is but all of the mock-up cutaways make me think yeah there's not room for that in the non-max phone it's just it's physically large um so yeah maybe casey will be getting a giant phone because he's just got to have that sweet sweet uh 3x 6x optical zoom i have to say though
John:
I think in Apple's very first periscope camera, the optical quality at either 3X or 6X or anything in between is not going to be great.
Marco:
No, because it's already not great with the 3X lens that's laid out in the conventional way.
Marco:
I don't know anything about the details of how this is laid out, but I would assume...
Marco:
that it would be probably a compromise in sensor size if you're laying it out that direction.
Marco:
What you're getting is more room for the optics and more reach optically.
Marco:
And that has its uses.
Marco:
That's going to be really great in certain situations.
Marco:
But I'm guessing the light-gathering ability of those sensors is going to be...
Marco:
I'm guessing a very small sensor and, you know, very low sensitivity relative to the other ones.
John:
No, the sensor will be big.
John:
I think the sensor is still flat.
John:
There's like a prism that projects it down into it.
John:
Oh, it flips it back around?
John:
Yeah, but the problem is just like any kind of zoom lens, when you're going through lots of lens elements and you're zooming in a lot, the maximum aperture is not going to be...
Marco:
Yeah, it's like, I'm sure it's going to be, you know, obviously things don't match equivalently between different sensor sizes, but I'm guessing, you know, in like full frame terms, it's going to be like F8, probably like minimum or maximum, whatever.
Marco:
So, yeah, I'm guessing that's going to be awesome in well-lit situations, but I would not expect that to be useful in low light.
Marco:
Okay.
John:
I mean, I don't know how awesome it will be.
John:
Here's the thing.
John:
It's going to be better than digital zoom because that's what it's competing with because no iPhone has anything past 3x and this will go up to 6x real like non not.
John:
You know, when we say digital zoom, we say, well, just take the picture.
John:
That's what we're talking before.
John:
Just take the picture that you got on the sensor and just zoom those existing pixels.
John:
But the 6x will say, no, I can project a 6x picture onto the sensor.
John:
Right.
John:
So that is actual optical zoom.
John:
not a digital enhancement and no iphone has ever had that reach and i think the reach that is the feature it's not going to be the quality of the pictures it's gonna be the fact that you can even do that when you're trying to get you know your kid at the elementary school assembly and you're five rows back and you want to get your kids so you can actually recognize their face and it doesn't look like an oil painting of a bunch of kids you know uh yeah 6x that's going to be a big improvement over what it was before and the 3x camera was bad especially in low light and the 6x camera is also going to be bad in low light but it's
John:
better than 3x you will you will get more reach you can get more shots than you maybe it was an outdoor assembly in bright sunlight you'll get a decent picture but you know they're going to talk about it and they're going to brag about it and uh i do like the direction of making the cameras better um i just do wonder what it will take for that to trickle down to a phone that's not gargantuan
John:
Speaking of that little gigantic sensor bump area thing on the back of your phone, supposedly they improved the LiDAR scanner back there as well, which, I mean, if you haven't used one of those home design apps that lets you scan your room or whatever, maybe you don't care about the improved LiDAR sensor.
John:
There is a very vague – again, this is software-based rumor, so you've got to take a lot of grains of salt.
John:
This is a very vague rumor about –
John:
the new phones having the ability to capture spatial photos for vision pro like that you would take a photo and i don't know we use multiple lenses and the lidar sensor to make it like a depth map or who knows then again anything software based you really have to just say that could just be someone's fantasy but uh but the improved lidar scanner that's a hardware thing so that's probably real but it may just be a matter of you know that part getting better over time so of course they're going to use the better sensor you know whatever
John:
base storage uh on the pro phones is going to be 256 instead of 128 which is what it was previously uh and the the top tier storage you can get for how much flash is going to be two terabytes up from one terabyte uh that's going to cost you a pretty penny uh and the ram is going to be eight gigabytes as opposed to the 14 pro and pro max where it was six gigabytes uh
John:
um the base storage going up let's see when we get to the price uh that's not magic they're just going to charge you more which is kind of sucky uh because you know the base storage should go up at the same price but that's not the apple way so we'll deal with that oh at least i'll be i'll be happy with the base model because that's i always get 256 there you go
John:
Well, again, it's like on the Mac Pro where they just cut off the base model, right?
John:
That's pretty much what they're doing here.
John:
So the battery, there was a bunch of rumors about the battery being substantially better because they were going to use stacked technologies, diagram, it's in the show notes, I don't know, or in the notes that I'm looking at that may or may not be in the actual thing, but it's from various rumor websites.
John:
The idea is that if you look at a battery in cross section, it's like a big rectangle, but inside there is like a jelly roll of battery crap.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, and the jelly roll on the edges is rounded.
John:
And so all that space in the corners where like the jelly roll is rounded, but the container is rectangular, there's wasted space in the corners.
John:
So stack battery technology is it goes back and forth like a snake, you know, left, right, left, right, left, right.
John:
And it fills in the rectangle more evenly without wasting space in the corners like the jelly roll version would.
John:
And so like, and this is what's going to allow us to essentially have more battery in the same area on the new phones.
John:
But then the rumor was, nevermind, that didn't work out for this year.
John:
It's going to be next year.
John:
Take that.
John:
We'll find out.
John:
Right.
John:
But then we have the actual rumors of the batteries, which of course leak like crazy.
John:
Here is the exact milliamp hours of the Pro and Pro Max battery.
John:
The iPhone 15 Pro, 3,650 milliamp hours.
John:
iPhone 15 Pro Max, 4,862 milliamp hours.
John:
And here is the improvement.
John:
That is 12% larger than the 14 Pro on the Pro phone and 11% larger than the 14 Pro Max.
John:
So these are both double digit increases, 12 and 11% over last year.
John:
is that because they're using stacking technology or are they just bigger batteries we don't know but those are the milliamp hour numbers like down down to the you know these are exact specs it'll be very easy to check these when the phones come out i'll be interested to see that they nail this exactly but anyway bigger batteries
John:
essentially 10 bigger batteries that's good and remember everything else we said the soc is going to use less power the support chips are using less power the screen i think is basically the same as it was uh and bigger batteries so that all bodes well oh and speaking of things that kill battery another question mark item is 8k video recording presumably the soc could handle it and now you have thunderbolt so you could actually get an 8k video off there in some reasonable amount of time
John:
maybe they'll do it honestly i don't know how much value there is in 8k video recording are there a lot of 8k video workflows that people are using with iphones with as opposed to their you know giant red cameras or whatever we'll see uh it would be a good bragging right interesting thing and i believe the hardware will be capable of it so i guess it's kind of a question of whether apple wants to do that or not
Marco:
Wait, what's the resolution?
Marco:
Do we have enough megapixels for that?
Marco:
I don't think we do.
John:
I think so.
Marco:
Oh, maybe if you go from 48.
John:
The 48 megapixel thing?
Marco:
Yeah, but the 48 has such an asterisk on it, though.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
That's a little pushing it, I think.
John:
We'll see.
John:
It's of questionable value, I feel like, both because of the 48 megapixel sensor and also because those are big files.
John:
Regardless of Thunderbolt, I guess you can get the 2TB one.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I feel like if you're getting a 2TB iPhone to run 8K video, just get a real camera.
John:
I'm crying out loud.
John:
Charging.
John:
So wired charging is going to go up to 35 watts, where previously it was 20 to 25 watts.
John:
MagSafe charging is supposedly going to go to 20 watts, where previously it was 15.
John:
And it will support Qi2 charging.
John:
Qi1 was limited to 7.5 watts, and Qi2 will go up to 15 watts.
John:
now to be clear so i don't know i've only read brief bits here and there do i understand correctly that chi 2 is basically magsafe it doesn't seem like it from the watts because magsafe is supposedly going to go up to 20 watts but chi 2 is stuck down at 15 so they don't seem like magsafe seems to have something extra to it if these rumors are to be believed we'll see
John:
um but anyway just it will have chi2 so if you buy chi2 charging accessories the the pro and pro max will support it the colors are the same old exciting colors that you can imagine the pro phone having how about these deep blue space black titanium gray and silver no gold this year bluish gray dark gray medium gray light gray yeah pretty much yeah so in our document i have a picture of them these are the actual phones this is not a mock-up like this is wait
Marco:
These are the real camera bumps and everything?
Marco:
Yeah, these are the phones.
Marco:
God, man, the leaks are nuts.
John:
I know.
John:
These are bananas.
John:
But anyway, look at the colors.
John:
Aren't you blown away by these pro colors?
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I don't understand why they have to be so boring.
Marco:
Man, that gray one looks good, but how about that gray one?
John:
They have black, gray, and silver.
John:
And let me tell you, the black one is not black.
John:
So they basically have three different kinds of gray.
John:
Even the blue one, ugh.
Marco:
This looks like car colors.
Marco:
It does, yeah.
Marco:
Your car's available in dark gray, medium gray, light gray, and bluish gray.
John:
Yeah, the colors of the Pro phones are not getting exciting this year.
John:
That is the headline.
John:
Those are awful.
John:
I mean, again, these pictures could be wrong.
John:
And also, as we know, colors look very different in different light.
John:
So we'll see when these things come out.
John:
Here's the exciting part, though.
John:
We mentioned the cables that come with these things.
John:
Color match charging cables.
John:
Two things about them.
John:
One, they're going to be braided.
John:
So if you've gotten, what things come with braided cables now?
John:
I think I have a braided cable that connects my monitor.
John:
All the pro stuff comes with it.
John:
Yeah, and I think some other accessories that Apple sells these days come with braided cables.
John:
But anyway, it's like kind of a woven fabric-y thing instead of rubber or plastic over the sheath of the cable.
John:
It makes it less like, you know, when you get a cable, Apple does a good job of this because they wrap them in circles.
John:
But if you get like a cable for a cheap accessory out of a box and it's like wrapped back and forth with like a twisty tie around it, right?
John:
And it's kinked and you take it out and it doesn't straighten out.
John:
It's still got all the kinks of how it was in the box.
John:
That's because the outside of these cables are made of plastic or rubbery plastic type stuff.
John:
And they hold those kinks.
John:
Braided cables do not hold the kinks.
John:
They're more supple.
John:
When you unwind them, they just unwind and lay flat.
John:
It's just a nicer experience.
John:
People also think they're more durable.
John:
I'm not so sure about that because fabric, you know, woven casings do wear away from friction and stuff, but whatever.
John:
People like them better.
John:
They feel nicer.
John:
And it's kind of a fad.
John:
And the color matching is the thing that Apple is doing.
John:
If you buy a deep blue iPhone or a space black iPhone or whatever, you'll get a cable that is color matched to your phone.
John:
It may be hard to tell with the pro phone, but they are doing that.
John:
And it's a nice, you know, nice addition.
John:
And the cables are supposedly going to be a little bit longer than they were.
John:
last year.
John:
Not a huge amount longer, but a little bit, which is nice.
Casey:
So a couple things here.
Casey:
First of all, I adore the braided cables.
Casey:
I'm really being genuine when I say that.
Casey:
I really think they feel great.
Casey:
They seem to me like they're more durable.
Casey:
That may not be true, but they seem like it.
Casey:
I love their braided cables.
Casey:
Secondly,
Casey:
Can you imagine if they just chose one color and we all just kind of assumed they were color matched?
Casey:
But because these grays are so damn close to each other, can you imagine if they just shipped one?
Casey:
Told us it was color matched, but in reality, it's just all the same damn gray.
Marco:
Would we actually be able to tell the difference?
Marco:
Maybe all the leaks for the cables are just the same color and different lighting.
Casey:
Right, right?
John:
Yeah, it's going to be difficult if you have two cables in the house, like one is deep blue and one of them is space black.
John:
To be able to tell them apart, it's like trying to tell, is this Thai navy or black?
John:
Is this titanium gray or silver?
John:
And then finally, price increase.
John:
Yeah, maybe $100 to $200 more than last year.
John:
Almost entirely attributable to the fact that they took out the base storage.
John:
And of course, flash prices don't go down year over year.
John:
Why would they be able to put more storage at the same price?
John:
No, certainly not.
John:
Anyway, in case you were wondering if the price of the Pro phones would keep going up, yep.
John:
And related to that, there are some rumors swirling.
John:
Again, this is not a hardware thing, so you never know how this is going to go.
John:
Rumors swirling about ultra branding for the phone.
John:
Maybe these won't be called the 15 Pro and Pro Max.
John:
Maybe one of them will be the 15 Ultra.
John:
Obviously, Apple uses the ultra branding on their SoC and on the watch now.
John:
Is this the time for the ultra branding to come to the phone to give them an excuse to charge even more money for the one with the periscope camera?
John:
This is not something that can leak.
John:
It's in marketing.
John:
This stuff pretty much never leaks.
John:
So this could just be idle speculation, but it's a thing to watch for.
John:
Do they end up calling anything ultra or not?
Marco:
I mean, I'm going to say it makes sense.
Marco:
I mean, obviously, as I said earlier, it's a fool's errand to try to predict Apple's product naming schemes because they never make sense.
Marco:
We justify them retroactively once we hear the names, but guessing Apple's names is extraordinarily difficult and almost never works.
Marco:
But this would make sense.
Marco:
The term Pro Max is a mouthful, and it's kind of a ridiculous term.
Marco:
I think it would make a lot of sense to just call the phones the regular and then Pro and Ultra.
Marco:
so the ultra would just be the big one that's how i would do it if i was gonna do this i would say iphone 15 iphone 15 pro and iphone 15 ultra and that would just be the new name replacing the name pro max but you're you're forgetting about the plus
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
That's so bad.
Marco:
I have one right here.
Marco:
I'm the only one who bought one.
John:
There are not dozens.
John:
There's one of us.
John:
There is one.
John:
Yeah, we never know what they're going to do with naming, but I agree that Pro Max is a mouthful, and also it's...
John:
It's like they made it worse for themselves, as they always do, because there's SOCs that have Pro and Max suffixes, but never together.
John:
There is like the M2 Pro and the M2 Max, but there is no M2 Pro Max.
John:
And of course, M-A-X sounds like M-A-C-S.
John:
It's a real mess.
John:
Pro Max just needs to go.
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
Like, that's why I like the fact that it's the iPhone 14 and the 14 Plus, because the Plus is the bigger version of the 14.
John:
So I don't know what they're going to do with Ultra or if they do anything with it.
John:
We'll see.
John:
Speaking of the 15 and the Plus, that's the next set of rumors here.
John:
So the iPhone 15 and the Plus, the rumor is they will make an iPhone 15 Plus, which will just be the bigger version of the iPhone 15.
John:
They're sticking to the thing where the 15 doesn't have the A17 in it.
John:
It has last year's SoC.
John:
It has an A16 in it to save Apple money.
John:
So those brief years we had where the pro and non-pro phones have the same SoC, it doesn't look like they're coming back anytime soon.
John:
but the good thing is that the iphone 15 and the 15 plus will have the dynamic island which means you'll be able to see sports scores and uh stuff like that when you're using another app um it will have usbc just like the pro but no thunderbolt is the rumor the rumor is the non-pro phones will have a usbc port but you get what do you get usb 2.0 speeds is the rumor and
John:
This may be difficult to suss out from hardware, but just to remind everybody, USB 2.0 is 480 megabits.
John:
That is 1.2% as fast as Thunderbolt.
John:
Thunderbolt is 40 gigabits.
Marco:
In all fairness, as stated earlier, most people just use the port for charging.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
So for the non-pro phone to be limited to the same speed that to date every single iPhone has always been limited to, I think that's reasonable.
John:
I don't think it is because they could put USB 3 in there.
John:
It would still be a thin cable.
John:
It would still be a cheap cable.
John:
Just give us USB 3 speeds, USB 2.0 speeds in 2023 on a phone that's going to cost as much as the iPhone 15 is inexcusable, I feel like.
John:
But, you know, whatever.
John:
People won't notice.
John:
I don't think it'll actually be an issue.
John:
I just think from a technical perspective, it is...
John:
As shameful as their RAM prices.
Marco:
Well, and, you know, it's almost certainly like, you know, they don't really need to do this.
Marco:
It's definitely for market segmentation.
Marco:
But I would rather, like, there are features that are currently on the Pro phones that I would love to see in the non-Pro phones.
Marco:
And if they have to do stuff like this to give us those better features that more people will benefit from, like display enhancements, that's fine.
Marco:
I would take this trade off.
Marco:
You know, this is a good segmentation.
Marco:
Anyone who's going to be using it as a Pro camera, they want to be buying the Pro versions.
Marco:
And generally, those people do buy the Pro versions.
John:
i think this is fine uh but sometimes people need to get videos off the phone even when they're not using pro stuff but anyway we'll see if they ever change that but like the usb 2.0 speeds like and eventually this is going to be one of those embarrassing things that apple needs to change maybe not this year they'll get away with it this year probably they'll spin it because everyone will mostly be distracted by the shape of the port but
Marco:
But again, to put us in perspective, this is literally the speed of every iPhone that's been released to date.
Marco:
It's not like they're making it slower.
Marco:
It's the speed that all iPhones have always been.
John:
But people have to wait for videos to come off their phones.
John:
Yeah, but no one does that anymore.
John:
Anyway, we'll have the 48 megapixel camera.
John:
Basically, if you want to think of what is the iPhone 15 non-pro going to be like, it's going to be a lot like a iPhone 14 Pro, slightly decontented and different.
John:
So it'll have the 48 megapixel 1X camera sensor.
John:
Although interestingly, the rumor is that this 48 megapixel sensor will be smaller than the 15 Pros 48 megapixel one X camera sensor.
John:
So maybe they're using the one from the 14 Pro and the 15 and then the 15 Pro gets a new sensor that's slightly bigger.
John:
We'll see if they talk about that.
John:
Still no promotion on the 15, which some people are really angry about.
John:
But honestly, if you want to do like intentional segmentation, regular people don't notice 120 hertz.
John:
Honestly, like again, like USB 2.0 speeds, it will eventually be embarrassing, but it has a way longer runway before it becomes embarrassing that it's 60 hertz.
John:
USB 2.0 speeds are super old.
John:
60 hertz versus 120.
John:
120 just came out on phones like a couple of years ago.
John:
So I think they have a little bit longer to keep that as a segmentation issue.
Marco:
One thing that, as far as I can tell, there have been no rumors on either way is whether the non-Pro 15 will have an always-on screen.
Marco:
Have we heard anything about that?
John:
No, because I feel like it's going to have physically, I think, basically the same screen hardware as the 14 Pro, but that type of choice is the thing that Apple could basically do in software to segment, so I don't think anyone's been willing to say or not.
John:
I think it could, obviously, because if you look at the guts of the 15, it's like the guts of the 14 Pro, and it has an always-on screen.
Marco:
See, I'm going to guess no, because whatever type of OLED they used that got us ProMotion, maybe that type is required for them to do Always On in the same way that they've been doing it.
John:
It's going to have that type.
John:
Like, the screen will be the same screen as in the 14 Pro.
John:
Oh, but with ProMotion just disabled in software?
Yeah.
John:
super motion is a display driver issue it's not just okay right and i feel like it can't do 120 hertz i think it could do always on screen but i think that's going to end up being a software like product segmentation choice because all the rumors about the screens even even on the uh the 15 pro the rumor is the screen is essentially the same screen as the 14 pro like there's no screen update rumors it's like it's basically the same screen it's a great maximum
John:
Yeah, same maximum brightness.
John:
You know, there's no real complaints about the screen, you know, other than they'll have thinner bezels on the Pro.
Marco:
I hope they do always on.
Marco:
I'm not holding my breath on it, but I hope they do.
Marco:
Because again, for the same thing I was saying earlier about the Dynamic Island being limited to only the Pro phones for only one year kind of hurts software adoption.
Marco:
there's a lot of cool software capabilities that you get with an always on screen.
Marco:
Not only do you get standby mode, standby works on the phones that don't have always on, but it sucks.
Marco:
Like if you're going to use standby, you really want an always on screen.
Marco:
And that's a cool feature that I, that I would love to have more apps invest in and more of the software ecosystem invest in that and everything.
Marco:
So I'm hoping that they bring always on to the non-pro phone this year for mostly for standby, but also just because it just makes it a better product for a lot of people.
Marco:
So I'm hoping for that, but,
Marco:
I don't know how, I don't think it's very likely.
John:
Well, it could definitely support it because the battery in these things, here we have the exact milliamp numbers, for the 15, 3877, that is 15% bigger than it was in the 14 non-Pro.
John:
And it is also 5.8% bigger than the 15 Pro's battery.
John:
So the 15 will have a bigger battery than the 15 Pro, presumably because the 15 Pro has more space taken up by camera crap, right?
John:
Because remember, the regular 15 just has two cameras and it's way small, like that whole gigantic mound is way smaller.
John:
bigger battery, and this has the A16 in it, which is not 3 nanometers.
John:
Remember, it's going to be quote-unquote 4 nanometers, which I think is just an enhanced version of the 5 nanometer.
John:
It's the A16.
John:
It's the processor that's in the 14 Pro now, right?
John:
So I'm not sure how this is going to work out, because
John:
The 15 Pro has a three nanometer SoC, which is going to probably end up using less power.
John:
But then the 15 has a bigger battery.
John:
Maybe it'll be a wash.
John:
We'll see.
John:
And then the 15 Plus will have a 4,912 milliamp hour battery, which is 12% larger than the 14 Plus and 1% larger than the 15 Pro Max.
John:
Wow.
John:
15 pro max got a big battery i feel like that's still going to be the battery champ because remember it's got the better soc uh and you know a similar size battery charging same type of deal supposedly 35 watts charging where previously was 20 to 25 mag safe might still be 20 watts uh and it'll have chi2 charging at 15 watts instead of 7.5 and then the colors
John:
might have some actual colors here so this is a picture of the colors the colors are supposedly black yellow the product red thing blue purple starlight and again no gold and in this picture the black actually looks black on the iphone 15 not you know space gray or whatever yeah the the non-pro black usually does really look black
Marco:
And, you know, non-pro, if they use the word white, it usually does look white, although they've been using, they've been doing starlight in recent years.
Marco:
Is this, is that the yellow?
Marco:
That looks like, that looks like almost nothing.
John:
Yeah, I think that's the yellow.
John:
Again, these pictures are taken with questionable white balance.
John:
We don't know if these are final things.
John:
We don't know.
John:
These are, you know, leaks from inside factories.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, we may or may not put these in there.
John:
But anyway, these are the things that are leaking.
John:
Obviously, the color names themselves other than product red are probably not going to be what they're called.
Marco:
And I hope this is an underrepresentation of these colors because this looks so boring and so bland.
John:
I mean, it could be 100%.
John:
It could just be 100% wrong.
John:
I hope so.
John:
I'm sure these are real physical devices, but I think they do lots of different color tests.
Marco:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
So I have the yellow 14 Plus here.
Marco:
The yellow that they ship mid-cycle with the 14 series is very pale.
Marco:
When you look at the back, it's a very pale yellow.
Marco:
But this picture of the alleged new phones, the one that corresponds to yellow looks like starlight.
John:
it just looks like white with bad white balance yeah exactly oh i hope this is wrong we'll see um but here the color match charging cables i've seen i didn't put them in here but i've seen pictures of the color match charging cables and they look way more interesting this is what i was thinking of the imax the imax have color match braided cables right because if you buy the purple imac you get the the m1 imax you get the color match cable that's what they're doing if you've seen the new imax the m1 imax new
John:
The M1 iMacs, how their cables look, that's what the cables to these phones look like, especially the non-pro ones, because they will have white-like ends, but then the braided part will be color-matched to your phone.
John:
So if you get a red phone, it'll be a red braided cable with a white end on it, very much like the M1 iMacs.
John:
And that, I think...
John:
It's, you know, we were talking about how people can't tell the difference between these phones or they look the same.
John:
Maybe the corners are curved.
John:
Those stupid cables are probably going to be the most important feature of this phone that's going to make people happy with regular people happy with their purchase because they're not going to buy the pro phone because who buys that?
John:
It's too expensive.
John:
They're going to get the red version of this.
John:
It's going to come with a red cable, and people are going to love it.
John:
They're going to love it because it's braided, and most people don't have experience with braided cables, and every iPhone has not come with them before, and it's going to match the color of the phone, and people are going to go bananas.
John:
I think this is the number one feature of the phone.
John:
It's so dumb, but that's the level we're at.
John:
These phones basically do everything everybody needs.
John:
Sometimes you need to get a new phone.
John:
Sometimes your old one is old.
John:
Sometimes it's broken.
John:
Sometimes the battery's bad.
John:
Sometimes you drop it into a lake.
John:
And when you get a new one, you want to be excited about it.
John:
And you're like, what can this new phone do?
John:
Does it feel faster than my old phone?
John:
This one comes with a cable that matches the color of my phone.
John:
People are going to eat it up.
Marco:
I hope so.
Marco:
I mean, I think one factor here to be aware of, I think it's nice to kind of shine a light on or put a hat on the fact that, yes, it's a different cable, and Apple is wise to kind of own that and have, all right, color match cables.
Marco:
Not only is this cable going to be a different plug on the end, it's going to look different, and even though the benefit to most people is
Marco:
is not going to be clear to them we're going to make this look like an upgrade so at least visibly it's an upgrade that's exciting it's more exciting than just a plain old white cable that's come with your iphone forever yes the and and you'll be able to tell it apart which will be great like as you're learning that this is a new connector you'll be able to tell it apart you'll see instantly which which is the cable for your new iphone
Marco:
The problem is that most people do not buy Apple cables.
Marco:
Most people, you have the cable that comes with your phone, which you use until the end frays off and it stops working or the pin blackens or whatever.
Marco:
And then when you have to buy another cable sometime, you get whatever's cheap from Amazon or a drugstore or whatever.
Marco:
And no one buys Apple cables.
John:
But third parties are going to see this and they're going to sell you color match, like cheaper quality color match cables for the new iPhones because it's an opportunity for them to sell more cables.
Marco:
I hope so.
Marco:
But I think we nerds, especially like in the Apple commentosphere, tend to...
Marco:
tend to assume that more people will use OEM accessories than actually do.
Marco:
When I'm out in the world, how often do you even see an Apple power brick?
Marco:
Now that the phones don't come with Apple power bricks anymore, how often do you see an Apple power brick for a phone out in the world?
Marco:
For me, it's almost never.
Marco:
And I see a lot of people, because of my location in a vacation town, we have a lot of people who come here and use their phone all day on the beach and then go to a restaurant for dinner or whatever.
Marco:
And they're like, can I plug in my phone somewhere?
Marco:
My phone died.
Marco:
And I love the phrase, my phone died, because it takes no ownership for the situation.
Marco:
It's like my child starved.
Marco:
That's interesting.
Marco:
Isn't some part of that on you?
Marco:
But anyway, so my phone died and they plug in their phone like to the like to a booth somewhere like.
Marco:
And so I see a lot of like, you know, regular people's iPhone charging setups.
Marco:
And yeah, a lot of frayed cables and zero Apple power bricks, like none.
Marco:
They're all rando third party Amazon power bricks.
John:
Well, hopefully with the fraying cable, they're doing better with that over time.
John:
Historically, Apple has not done well with strain relief or materials.
John:
And when they took whatever that harmful chemical is they took out of their plastics, the cables got even worse for a while before they kind of figured out how to hit break even again.
John:
Hopefully, the braided cables will do better.
John:
But I buy third-party cables for my kids because in their rooms, they all want to have their phones on their beds and they don't manage their batteries well.
John:
So they're often using their phone plugged in.
John:
So I have these...
John:
gigantic six foot long braided anchor cables.
John:
And they come in colors.
John:
You know, I get red ones, black ones, silver ones, pink ones, right?
John:
But none of those colors have anything to do with their phones.
John:
With these color match cables, I think anchor on those other companies, those third party companies that sell these really long cables or, you know, third party cables.
John:
are going to see a business opportunity to say let's not you know because how does anchor pick the colors for their cable so like oh i guess people might like a red one i guess we should make a black one right now they know exactly what colors they need to make buy this thing to match your new phone that will be attractive to customers and they don't care what color their cables are like but we'll just make you know that we'll make it so they match apple's cables and of course everybody gets by a whole lot of gray thread you're gonna need light gray medium gray dark gray blue gray pink gray yellow gray and black gray
John:
that's for the pro phones but like again i gotta find the picture of what the cables look like but the cables look more exciting than the phones and every one of these iphones will come in the box with one of these color match braided cables like that's the whole thing the one in the box will be color matched to the phone that you buy and so i think that will give people a taste for it and if they don't care then they don't care they'll just buy another white cable when they buy a third-party one but
John:
uh i you know the action button obviously is going to be exciting getting that dynamic island if you didn't have it before is exciting maybe the periscope camera but those color match cables like these are the these are the things that are going to stand out the most physically speaking before we get to whatever the heck apple is going to promote about these phones on the software and feature side
Marco:
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John:
That's a lot.
John:
That's a lot.
John:
Yeah, there is going to be more, though.
John:
You've got the Apple Watch Series 9, which I don't know if Marco's going to buy this one, but the rumors are it looks the same as the Series 8, which looked the same as the Series 7, so get ready for that.
Marco:
The rumors are vague.
Marco:
I mean, we'll see.
Marco:
It sounds like there's a new SoC.
Marco:
Finally.
Marco:
Finally.
Marco:
That would be a significant upgrade, but are they going to have my wonderful brushed titanium again, which they didn't have with the Series 8?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
Nothing has indicated that.
Marco:
That's going to actually impact a lot, because a watch, for me, is...
Marco:
Partly functional and partly jewelry.
Marco:
And I really like the way the titanium series seven and previous looks.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
And I, and honestly, I really do not like the look of the Apple watch aluminum.
Marco:
I, I know I understand a lot of people like it.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
Good for you.
Marco:
It, to me, it's not for me.
Marco:
And so I love before, before the titanium, I always wore the polished steel and that's very nice too.
Marco:
But titanium in my opinion is even better.
Marco:
And I miss it.
Marco:
Again, I buy everything.
Marco:
I didn't buy a Series 8 because of that.
Marco:
If the Series 9 is a lot better, maybe I'll jump to it and give up my titanium, but I hope they don't make me make that choice.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
It sounds like...
John:
that's not in the cards and so you know maybe look my series 7 still works fine so maybe i'll just not buy the watch this year too well i mean this would be the year to buy it because it actually is going to be a new soc when we say the previous socs were the same we don't mean that like they were like revised on a different thing they were like literally the same fabbed at the different at the same size this one is going to be fabbed the rumor is at five nanometers not at three
John:
which is kind of weird that like they wouldn't try to do the watch things at three because you'd think the watch soc would be the easiest thing to fab because it's the smallest so they'll you know the least things can go wrong because they're so tiny but it's going to be five nanometers instead of three again i think like why not three isn't the watch the most power sensitive i think it just comes down to economics maybe yeah i think price is very sensitive with the watch yeah and and you know the phone is obviously a more important product
Marco:
And possibly just yields to like, you know, the the the three nanometer capacity at TSMC like, you know, rumors are that Apple has purchased their entire capacity for like a year at least.
Marco:
And, you know, they're going to be using it for all the iPhones, because as you said, well, sorry, for all the iPhone pros.
Marco:
which is a high-volume product, obviously the highest-profile product and very high volumes.
Marco:
Then once the M3 series of Mac chips comes out, probably not that far from now, maybe it'll come out next spring or summer with a new MacBook Air or something like that, that's going to probably use 3nm as well.
Marco:
So even more of that capacity with even bigger chips that will have even lower yields.
Marco:
So maybe it's just like, look, we don't want to move the watch to this yet because it doesn't need it.
Marco:
I mean, it's been fairly fine in terms of the market while not having an SOC update in three years.
John:
So I think part of it might be that the SOC is actually not the biggest source of power drain in the watch.
John:
Obviously, it is when you're doing heavy work, but from minute to minute, I imagine the screen wins, maybe?
Marco:
I would assume so.
Marco:
As I've said before, with the watch, what I'm looking for as both a watch user, but especially as a watch app developer, what I'm looking for is more ability to use CPU time because it is extremely restrictive in what it lets apps do and for how long and when.
Marco:
And it's all in the name of power consumption savings because with the watch, it's extremely power constrained.
Marco:
So if they make the watch SOC more efficient and then that allows them to lift some of those limits on what developers can do with our apps.
Marco:
That would actually be a substantial update for users of those apps and users of the watch, therefore.
Marco:
So that would be really interesting.
Marco:
But that's like a big, you know, if they do this and this and this kind of chain of events that so far to date, they've basically never done those things.
Marco:
So, again, I hope for things like that, but I don't expect them.
John:
I don't know how reliable this rumor that the S9 is going to be 5 nanometer is, though.
John:
Maybe it is going to be 3.
John:
Maybe there'll be quote-unquote 4, which is like the improved 5.
John:
We'll see if they even mention it.
John:
The other question about the S9 is, will it just be an S8 fabbed on a smaller process?
John:
Which is, you know, it's not simple to do that.
John:
That is some work.
John:
Or will it actually be, oh, actually we've revised things.
John:
The cores are a little different.
John:
Maybe there's a different count of cores.
John:
Like, will...
John:
To the extent that they tell us anything about this new SoC, will we be able to determine that, like, they didn't just shrink it.
John:
It actually is slightly different in some way, you know.
John:
They don't go into that much technical detail, but we'll find out eventually.
John:
The other rumors for this are there'll be a new color that's kind of pinkish,
John:
And that it will come in a smaller box, which, you know, that should just be a perennial rumor.
John:
Has Apple ever made a bigger box for one of its products?
John:
The boxes just get smaller because the economics are good.
John:
You can fit more in a shipping container and there's less waste.
John:
So the boxes keep getting... I think the iPhone box also got a little bit smaller, but anyway.
Marco:
I love, like, there's so little rumored information about the Apple Watch Series 9, probably because there's so little change about the Apple Watch Series 9, that the box made the top list.
Yeah.
John:
And then we have the Apple Watch Ultra, which the big thing here is black titanium finish.
John:
And it actually looks pretty cool in the leaked pictures.
John:
Obviously, we'll also have the new S9 SoC in there.
John:
I don't know.
John:
The pictures seem to show that the action button was still going to be orange.
John:
and you know i guess that works with black too but uh people who wanted a black version and i think i didn't dig too far into these i think that might be the only rumor like basically an s9 and it also comes in black now which is fine but like no radical changes to the ultra no big surprise it's not it's a brand new product basically all right prediction time i'm i'm really curious
Marco:
How will they name updates to the Apple Watch Ultra?
Marco:
I was thinking maybe they would just never change the name.
Marco:
This is just the Apple Watch Ultra?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Just like iPad Pro.
John:
Exactly.
John:
It's like the iPad Pro or the Mac Pro.
John:
It doesn't change the name.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I was thinking maybe they would say like Apple Watch Series 9 Ultra or Ultra 2.
Marco:
But the more I thought about it, the more I think they're just going to keep calling it Ultra.
Marco:
And I don't expect them to keep old Ultras around as the cheaper option.
John:
No, because they're not going to be that much cheaper.
John:
The only difference is S9 versus S8 is according to the rumors, right?
John:
If even that.
Marco:
I mean, even the S9 has, like, barely been rumored to exist.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, you know, Ultra is having a black finish.
John:
That'll be a big hit.
John:
Related to both the watches and the phone is this rumor has been running around for a while now.
John:
They're like, oh, it seems like Apple's not making a leather case for the new iPhones.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then maybe they're going to make like vegan leather.
John:
Like this is a big trend in the car industry to have interiors that they call them vegan leather as a marketing way to say fake leather.
John:
It's supposed to look and feel kind of like leather, but it's not leather.
John:
It's entirely non-animal based.
John:
And that rumor extends to the watch bands.
John:
They make a bunch of leather watch bands and they're like, well, they cannot make leather watch bands too.
John:
There's rumors that the Hermes leather bands are being offered for 90% off to Apple employees.
John:
And Hermes, their big thing is fancy leather.
John:
So if Apple's getting out of the leather case and leather watchtrap business...
John:
Maybe that means the relationship with Hermes is over.
John:
We'll see how that goes.
Marco:
Honestly, I kind of hope so for lots of reasons.
Marco:
I mean, so, okay, first of all, going away from leather, I think makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
Apple is so environmentally conscious and socially progressive in so many other ways that...
Marco:
it has seemed odd that they still produced and sold so much animal leather.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like it didn't fit with their image.
Marco:
And we mentioned this in past years as well.
Marco:
And especially recently, it just seemed like every year that went by, they were still making leather.
Marco:
It kind of seems like, hmm, is that... Are they really wanting to be making that?
Marco:
Does that really make sense for them?
Marco:
And so this is good, because...
Marco:
Leather alternatives have gotten really good in lots of ways.
John:
Partly thanks to the car industry that has a great interest in having something that is less expensive than leather, but that they can charge the same amount for.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And watch bands, like...
Marco:
So admittedly, leather is really nice, but there are also a lot of alternatives and phone cases too.
Marco:
And if you still want a leather phone case and Apple won't sell you one, there's lots of other brands that will.
Marco:
And as you know, they've gotten pretty good.
Marco:
We've talked about it on the show before.
Marco:
Third-party leather phone cases have actually gotten pretty good.
Marco:
So we don't necessarily need Apple to be doing it.
Marco:
And from a different perspective on the Hermes front,
Marco:
I kind of want that partnership to end because Hermes controls the best shade of orange.
Marco:
The Apple Watch, what I presume is a weird toe-stepping avoidance situation.
Marco:
They had this Hermes partnership with the watch from many years ago.
Marco:
And meanwhile, Apple has occasionally launched orange watch bands and orange phone cases and things like that.
Marco:
And Hermes is sitting there squatting on the best shade of orange.
Marco:
And I assume the reason why Apple's orange shades have traditionally been pretty far from Hermes orange is to avoid stepping on those toes.
Marco:
Or maybe they were contractually prohibited from getting too close to it in certain areas.
Marco:
Well, then they launched the Apple Watch Ultra.
Marco:
And the shade of orange that goes with the Apple Watch Ultra that they already sell in those cloth strap things for the Apple Watch Ultra is extremely close to Hermes Orange.
Marco:
It's very close.
Marco:
And Hermes Orange does look the best.
Marco:
with the ultra and it's orange action button and, and even the regular Apple watches like, and, and they, they even had like, I got one on eBay for some absurd price, um, but it was still way less than it actually cost.
Marco:
Um, or when you buy an Hermes watch, apparently it comes with an orange sport band that only is like, it's an exclusive Hermes sport band that comes with Hermes, Apple watches, like not even advertised as coming with it.
Marco:
It just happens to come in the box with them.
Um,
Marco:
And people sell these on eBay.
Marco:
And so it was more than a regular sport band, but a lot less than an Hermes watch.
Marco:
And so I got one of these because I'm like, man, it's such a great orange.
Marco:
And it turns out, yes, it's wonderful.
Marco:
And I'm afraid to ever wear it because it costs more than a regular sport band.
Marco:
I don't want to mess it up.
Marco:
But like then when you compare that, like you can look back at Apple's history of other sport bands that they've made in orange like shades.
Marco:
And they're all terrible.
Marco:
They're all like these like weird, like pastel-y kind of candy, salmon-y oranges.
Marco:
And I've gone done that rabbit hole by going to eBay sellers.
Marco:
They're selling the old colors and like, oh, how about like, you know, vivid orange or, you know, melon orange or whatever, like all these old color names.
Marco:
And people, collectors will like line them up and take photos trying to show you the different shade of orange.
Marco:
And the Hermes one is always the best.
Marco:
So what I'm hoping is if the Apple Hermes partnership ends because they don't want to use leather anymore, which is great for lots of other reasons, as mentioned, I'm hoping that also allows them to start using better shades of orange in their other in their watch bands, basically.
Marco:
And maybe, you know, phone cases as well, because I think that I think there's a lot of opportunity there for really great oranges that they currently seem to shy away from for whatever reason that might be that partnership.
John:
Yeah, I don't know about the Hermes thing because I do think Apple does like to fleece the ultra-rich by selling them super expensive stuff.
John:
And they always discount the Hermes stuff when they're trying to clear inventory before new stuff comes.
John:
So it could be going away or it could just be replaced by new Hermes stuff.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
But the rumor that what Apple is going to replace their leather iPhone case with...
John:
is that it's supposedly going to be fine woven twill, T-W-I-L-L, which supposedly the branding that they would use in this, again, how would they possibly know the branding?
John:
So take this with much grains of salt.
John:
Well, if they have the box.
John:
Well, is fine woven, capital F, capital W, all one word.
John:
And again, you can see pictures of this case.
John:
It is like woven textile and kind of like a crosshatch diamond pattern.
John:
It looks a little bit like suede.
John:
Uh, people who have seen it and felt it think maybe it's not that water resistant, kind of like suede is not that water resistant.
John:
And also the rumor is that case might be about a hundred dollars.
John:
So is this, if there, if there is no leather, is this the replacement for it or is this just an addition and they are still going to sell leather?
John:
Uh,
John:
It looked interesting.
John:
It looked like a case I would like to feel because I'm all for new case designs.
John:
It did look like it would be comfortable and grippy.
John:
It doesn't look anything like leather.
John:
It looks a little bit like suede, but it's kind of like the back looks like woven texture, but then the sides look kind of more plasticky.
John:
It's strange.
John:
So again, this is a rumor.
John:
This is a real physical case that people have shown.
John:
Is that a third party case?
John:
Is that a real thing that Apple's going to ship?
John:
Watch for fine woven twill.
John:
Yeah.
John:
however they spin that and they're also super vague rumors about potentially future watches having woven bands to replace leather bands again the watch stuff is way sketchier in terms of rumor reliability than the phone stuff because the no more leather iphone case from apple thing has been pretty strong for a long time now i think people are just extrapolating from that but this fine woven thing i saw a video of someone handling it today and even if that's a third-party case
John:
I would be interested in going to an Apple store and seeing what that feels like because it looked kind of interesting.
Marco:
Honestly, this looks really like – I'm looking through the rumor pictures now.
Marco:
Some of them look horrendous.
Marco:
Some of them look decent.
Marco:
What I would hope this product is, first of all, again, if they're replacing leather, in my opinion, good.
Marco:
It's time.
Marco:
What I hope for this product is they already make the silicone cases.
Marco:
And silicone cases are wonderful for durability, for water resistance, for like for the phone, not for the case flakes off eventually.
John:
The case loses its skin eventually.
Marco:
Eventually, yeah.
Marco:
But, you know, for like water resistance, impact resistance, like a grip, it feels great.
Marco:
The problem is the grip is too good and it makes it hard to put it in pockets and stuff.
Marco:
And then leather cases are kind of a nice, happy medium in terms of grip.
Marco:
But they, you know, first of all, require animals, which is, again, not great.
Marco:
And then they also have no water resistance really whatsoever.
Marco:
Like the water does not do kind things to leather.
Marco:
And so ideally, if they can somehow solve the need of leather cases from Apple, which is something that looks nicer than silicone, like looks a little bit more upmarket,
Marco:
um and is easier to put into a pocket and you know easier than silicone to put in a pocket and costs even more money costs even more money than leather did which is key for apple right well so it's it's a premium upsell for them and saint jude everybody um and then also and then also like if they can get water resistance in there too hey that this could be a huge upgrade and we'll we'll see i i i have faith because apple's
Marco:
You know, ever since they launched the watch and really started making really great iPhone cases as well, their textile game has been very good.
Marco:
They make really great materials for watch bands and phone cases.
Marco:
So I'm optimistic.
Marco:
I think if they have tackled this, they've probably done it with good reason and they've probably done a good job.
Marco:
So I'm actually very much looking forward to this.
John:
Of course, this kind of fabric texture, you know, it'll grow great with.
John:
your color match braided cable on your phone so you get the case that matches the cable that matches the phone all from apple and like the texture of a match the color i'm sure will be an exact match you know what i mean like if this is true there is obvious synergy for them to really go whole hog
John:
Again, kind of like they did with the M1 iMac, where everything is color-matched.
John:
The keyboard, the mouse, the cables, the front, the back.
John:
That is a thing, and I think it is a successful look, and I encourage it.
John:
The final bit here, wrapping up, is other vague rumors.
John:
AirPods cases with USB-C connectors instead of Lightning.
John:
Hope so.
John:
Again, we talked about it last show.
John:
Every single product that Apple has with Lightning, I think they should eventually change to USB-C.
John:
They're not all going to be announced tomorrow, but I really hope they don't drag this out for five years and we're all...
John:
talking about on this show what's the last standing apple lightning accessory that they're still selling like we were for like the last can i guess the mouse it'll be the mouse i guarantee probably we'll see but anyway the airpods cases are actually rumored that they might just say you know by the way from this point forward if you buy airpods nothing about them has changed but you'll get a case that has a usbc connector on instead of lightning which would be nice
John:
There are vague rumors about iPad Mini 7 going to an A16 from A15 and iPad Air 6 going from M1 to M2, but those seem pretty... A, pretty boring, and B, iPad... I was shocked to find out the current iPad Air uses the M1.
John:
Is the iPad Air going to go to the M2 before the Pro goes to the M3?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, those are...
John:
And then obviously question mark stuff that we haven't thought of or whatever, but we're really tailing off here.
John:
I feel like as always, it's going to be the iPhone event with some watch stuff and then, you know, maybe talk about accessories and stuff like that.
Marco:
Yeah, I wouldn't expect to hear anything about the iPads yet.
Marco:
I think that's a separate event.
Marco:
iPad and Mac some other time, you know?
John:
Yeah, there's not even any rumors of Mac stuff.
John:
And obviously the next Mac thing we're going to see is still going to be all about M3 or whatever the first model to get that is.
John:
I'm sure the rumor mill already knows, but I did not compile that for this.
John:
Yeah, so I'm interested to see, like, this is the most detailed that the rumor mill has been on every single spec.
John:
The weight in grams, the power capacity of the battery down to the milliamp hour.
John:
Yeah.
John:
the dimensions down to fractions of an inch about every single thing so we'll see i will see how well they did uh even if some of these details are off like i mean people have the physical phones in their hands and they show videos of them and like we know what they're going to be they're going to look like iphones but uh it's that time of year so stay tuned next week
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Collide, and Squarespace.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you after the iPhone event next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse, it's accidental, they did it in
Casey:
So Marco, I am relieved because we heard, we've gotten word that Rivian is canning their ugliest paint option.
Marco:
Hello, everyone has sent this to me.
Casey:
It sent it to us, sir.
Casey:
It's not just you.
Casey:
Sent it to us.
Casey:
And so I'm excited because should I be in the unfortunate scenario that, well, let me rephrase.
Casey:
Should I be in the scenario that I see a Rivian on the road?
Casey:
I am going to be ever less likely to be in the unfortunate scenario of seeing a yellow Rivian on the road.
Casey:
Does this influence the purchase you made like two years ago that still hasn't come due yet?
Marco:
Well, here, look at our Slack real quick.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Casey:
All right, so I am looking at a building.
Casey:
It is a very, very dark brick or dark painted brick.
Casey:
It says Rivian in the upper left-hand corner.
Casey:
There are a couple of Teslas in front of it.
Casey:
There looks to be a blue Land Rover Land Cruiser.
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Casey:
A blue thing that Marco once owned, I'm assuming, right on the right-hand edge of the frame.
Casey:
And a obnoxious, just truly look at me, look at me.
Casey:
I have confidence problems.
Casey:
Look at me.
Casey:
Yellow Rivian SUV with actually very good looking wheels directly in the center of the frame.
Casey:
Congratulations, Marco.
Casey:
It looks like you just got yourself a car.
Marco:
Well, I got myself an SUV.
Marco:
Whatever.
Marco:
It's not a car.
Marco:
All right, so here's what happened.
Marco:
I reserved a yellow Rivian.
Marco:
I was sitting on the reservation list for a very long time.
John:
When did you reserve it?
John:
Did you actually look up the date?
Marco:
No, I don't have it offhand.
Marco:
It was multiple years ago, right?
Marco:
I think like a year and a half, something like that.
Marco:
A year and a half.
Marco:
So I reserved a yellow one, and the date kept getting pushed back as they were scaling up and everything.
Marco:
A couple of weeks ago...
Marco:
I was given access with my reservation to the R1 shop.
Marco:
And what this is, is basically once your reservation gets close within, I don't know how to determine like how close, but like mine was about six months away.
Marco:
So once your reservation gets close, they give you access to the R1 shop.
Marco:
And this is basically like a real time updated inventory list of like extra ravines they have that they made.
Marco:
And you can go and you can search and just refresh the page a few times a day.
Marco:
And you can see like, oh, here's one that's like either my exact configuration or it's kind of close to my exact configuration.
Marco:
And why don't I just grab that one?
Marco:
And if you if you're fast enough and you see the combination you want or one close enough, you can grab it and you can basically jump the line.
Marco:
And I don't know why, I don't know how they get there.
Marco:
Maybe it's like reservations that people put in and then canceled or whatever.
Marco:
But however it was, I got access to the Rivian shop.
Marco:
And my reservation was originally scheduled for, or was most recently scheduled for something like this coming January, I think, or January to April, something like that.
Marco:
um and rivian announced uh a few days ago or last week whenever that they are discontinuing yellow as a color because it was the least popular and they discontinued a couple other like you know low volume options as they're trying to streamline their production they're discontinuing it as of like next week or two weeks from now so any anything that wasn't produced by then they were emailing everybody saying sorry you got to choose different options
John:
And that, by the way, that kind of stinks.
John:
Like if you reserve this thing a year and a half ago, you picked out exactly the thing you wanted.
John:
You're like, I'm going to get one.
John:
I preordered it on day one.
John:
I'm getting a yellow one.
John:
And then a year and a half passes and they say, yeah, I know you preordered a yellow one.
John:
You're not getting a yellow one because we don't want to make yellow.
John:
That's that's kind of sucky.
John:
But, you know, that's the brakes of being a new car company.
John:
The other thing related to our previous discussion is they're also discontinuing the vegan leather interior.
John:
So they're not getting rid of leather.
John:
They're getting rid of their fake leather, because I guess most people are buying the real leather and not the vegan leather.
Marco:
I think there were some asterisks on that, actually.
Marco:
Their Reddit went crazy and did some research.
Marco:
I think the leather thing is actually just like a shift or something.
Marco:
But anyway, the big thing is they're definitely discontinuing yellow and the shiny off-road wheels and a couple other things.
Marco:
Are these the shiny off-road wheels in the picture?
Marco:
No, these are the black off-road wheels.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So it just so happened that a couple of weeks ago, a little after I had access to the R1 shop, I'd go and refresh the page every so often.
Marco:
There was usually no SUVs at all and there were no yellow ones.
Marco:
But this one day I happened to look and there were some yellow ones and one was really close to what I wanted.
Marco:
It had my second choice wheels.
Marco:
And I thought, you know, I like these also.
Marco:
Yeah, I like these wheels.
Marco:
I'm going to be impatient.
Marco:
Why should I wait for my perfect configuration six months from now when I could be impatient now?
Marco:
And I felt really bad doing it.
Marco:
I didn't tell anybody.
Marco:
I'm just like, yeah, I'm just going to do it.
Marco:
And I just jumped on it.
Marco:
Well, wait a second.
Marco:
Do you still get your pre-order price?
John:
Yes.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, then that's not bad.
John:
I was mostly silently judging you for spending a huge amount of extra money.
John:
People know when you pre-ordered it, you like locked in like a good price.
John:
And since Marco pre-ordered it, the price has gone up and up.
John:
So if you go to a Rivian dealer now and try to buy his same car, you're going to pay a lot more than he paid.
John:
And so I'm like, that's great.
John:
You had the pre-order.
John:
You got it.
John:
You got it.
John:
But you got the pre-order price.
John:
You just did.
Marco:
didn't get exactly the options you wanted and the only difference is it's my second choice wheels and it is fine you know and so anyway so i jumped on it thinking i was making like you know a rash decision and then the news comes like literally right after i'm scheduled to pick it up initially the news comes they're canceling the color i'm like oh my god what luck so we've all been sitting on this knowledge for weeks as everyone on the internet has been telling us you know they canceled yellow you know they canceled yellow
Marco:
not only did we know that we also knew that marco had gotten his yellow one before they canceled the yellow but we couldn't talk about well slow down though slow down though that's not entirely accurate yeah i i had i had placed the order with the r1 shop and therefore like confirmed you know they assigned me a vin and i got to sign all the paperwork online and get get the insurance lined up and all that other stuff but i didn't actually have the car yeah but i i
Marco:
i i felt like you had got it in under the wire like i assumed that the car that you had selected that they said was yellow was a real car that you would eventually get and you can continue your story and see how that turned out yeah so anyway um the the process of of getting a rivian from this point um i found a little interesting i'll go quickly through it basically you do a bunch of online forms and i i was going to trade in the lamb river defender that i've been driving which i i mostly liked i i'm going to give it a
Marco:
in a minute um mostly like the defender uh but i was going to trade it in and so that that complicates the process you got to like send in all these pictures of it and have them give you a quote and all this other stuff um and uh anyway that process was weird and buggy like a lot of times the the web ui would ask me for the same thing three different days in a row and
Marco:
Like I had to, I must've had to send them a picture of the, of the land rivers license plate, I think five different times.
Marco:
Cause it would ask for these things and then it would say, all right, it's got accepted.
Marco:
And the next day it'd be like, all right, you have one more task license plate picture.
Marco:
I just, I just gave you that.
Marco:
What happened?
Marco:
Very, very reassuring.
Marco:
Yeah, so very kind of lossy paperwork submission process.
Marco:
I will say anytime a human was involved, they assign you a person called a guide.
Marco:
That's basically your agent there that's working on your case to get you your car.
Marco:
Anytime a person was involved...
Marco:
From the guides, the people at the pickup center, the people are great.
Marco:
The systems are still very young.
Marco:
So if you can get a person to look at something, they have been fantastic, nice, patient, capable.
Marco:
They've been wonderful.
Marco:
My guide, Maggie, if anybody is there, my guide was fantastic.
Marco:
She had to deal with a whole bunch of crap from my insurance company, and she did it without complaining at all or even breaking a sweat, and it was remarkable.
Marco:
The amount of crap she had to deal with, and she did it, and it was great.
Marco:
So shout outs to Guide Maggie over there and shout outs to Rivian people in general who everyone I talk to has been wonderful.
Marco:
But yeah, they're still a young brand and there's still a lot of like, you know, bumps in the road with the paperwork process.
John:
Did you mention in one of our slacks that like part of the crap that you're dealing with is the stuff that car dealers normally deal with on your behalf, like transferring insurance and everything?
Marco:
Yeah, like usually when you buy a car in New York, and I think in most places in the US, usually you basically tell them your insurance agent's phone number and they call and they work it out.
Marco:
And you pay like a few hundred dollars to a thousand dollars usually to the dealer for like documentation fees.
Marco:
And it sounds like BS, but now I know what that money's for because I had to do some of it myself because Riviera doesn't set up to do it yet.
Marco:
And it was, yeah, it's worth it to have the dealers do it.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
got all the paperwork in, I was about to pick it up, and I get a message saying there was an issue with my car upon delivery to the pickup center, so it's being delayed indefinitely, and I'm like, oh, no.
Marco:
And I looked up on the Reddit, and all the people are like, well, that happened to me, and it was weeks.
Marco:
It happened to me, and they had to assign me a whole new car.
Marco:
It happened to me, and people have all these theories of what those things could be.
Marco:
I was thinking, is it just some panel misaligned or something got scuffed or something?
Casey:
Well, that doesn't stop Tesla.
John:
I know.
John:
I mean, Tesla also does these checks and I think also holds them back.
John:
But this is never reassuring, kind of like the having to submit the license plate thing.
John:
Like you would hope that when a car comes off the assembly line, unless it gets into an accident in transport, that it's good.
John:
It left the factory.
John:
It's got all the wheels on it as fast.
John:
four wheels not three not two not five just you know all the mirrors are in there every panel is the correct color uh they all line up the doors open and close right but when you're a brand new car manufacturer you find out very quickly making cars is very difficult especially if you want them all to be consistent and you want to be able to make them affordably and quickly but also with high quality and like we you know the other car makers spent decades figuring out how to do this and if you're starting from zero it can be hard so
John:
at the very least, the thing they can do with these fairly expensive, low-volume brands like Rivian and Lucid is, okay, we know we're not that great at making cars.
John:
Before we put a car into a customer's hands, at the very, very last minute, can someone just go around the car and make sure there's not a giant gash from transport or the door seals line up right?
John:
And maybe Tesla does a crappier job of this because there's so many stories about people getting a Tesla, driving it home, and finding pieces of their car falling off and stuff like that.
John:
But
John:
With them not telling you what the problem is, like, did they forget a wheel or is there a tiny, tiny nick from transport on the fender?
John:
It could be anything in between those things.
John:
And that's where you get the horror stories of they needed to, like, replace my suspension and I need to wait a month and whatever.
John:
Or from like, oh, they just needed to buff out a scratch or something.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Do you know at this point?
John:
Well, I mean, I guess you have a picture of it.
John:
Do you know what the supposed problem was with your car?
Marco:
I don't, because it was resolved in possibly the best way, which is a few days later, they said, we've assigned you a new car.
Marco:
Here's a different VIN.
Marco:
Update the insurance.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
And you can pick it up on Tuesday or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Also another yellow one.
Marco:
That is key.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And with the same configuration.
Marco:
So I'm like, I don't know how the logistics of that worked out.
John:
How many of these yellow cars they have?
John:
Is there a secret cache of yellow cars with the wrong wheels?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
don't know but anyway they uh so i was given a new pickup date like you know about a week later total and so it was it was resolved so great so i picked it up yesterday so i i just got it and uh before and first of all by the way
Marco:
the pickup process could also it's very it's very beta in the sense that the brooklyn service center where i picked it up is again staffed by very nice very capable people it is in a terrible location so it's it's like deep in brooklyn which is a very long drive from center central long island it's deep in brooklyn
Marco:
and it's it's in like a warehouse district like there's just warehouses everywhere it's nowhere near a highway it like the the process of getting there involved like get off a highway and then drive four miles in just stop and go traffic lights in brooklyn which takes like 45 minutes and and you get there there's no signage of like where do you park
Marco:
Where do you go?
Marco:
And it's Brooklyn.
Marco:
There's not massive space everywhere.
Marco:
So, like, there's not just tons of extra space you can just park your car and, like, stroll on in across the lawn.
Marco:
Like, that doesn't exist.
Marco:
This is a concrete jungle in Brooklyn's warehouse district, and you have to... Like, so I...
Marco:
I ended up driving around the whole block looking, how do I even enter this property?
Marco:
Where do I park my car?
Marco:
It would have been easier if you had maybe a smaller car.
Marco:
The property is covered in Rivian, so I'm like, I don't think I'm supposed to park here.
Marco:
This is clearly their inventory.
Marco:
I ended up pulling into a gate and parking in clearly the wrong spot, and I'm just going to walk in and ask them where I'm supposed to park it.
Marco:
So then comes the point, how do I get in the building?
Marco:
I'm walking around this whole block-sized building, walking around trying to figure out how the heck do I get in?
Marco:
Eventually, I find a guy who's parking Rivians, and I ask, and he tells me, oh, go around here.
Marco:
I go around to what he says.
Marco:
The door is locked.
Casey:
Oh, neat.
Marco:
This is one o'clock in the afternoon.
Marco:
I'm like, okay.
Marco:
And there's like one of those like, you know, touchscreen buzzer things next to it.
Marco:
And, you know, I ended up pressing like all three buttons because they have names like, you know, front, left and upper or whatever.
Marco:
And it's like, I don't know what I'm supposed to be.
Marco:
Eventually, I found one that responded with a beep after a while and the door unlocked.
Marco:
Okay, great.
Marco:
Once you get in, it's perfectly fine.
Marco:
Again, delightful people, nice little waiting area.
Marco:
It was great, but this could not be in a worse location.
John:
Did you see a giant yellow R1S sitting there?
John:
Could you tell where your car was?
John:
I sure did.
John:
I feel like it would stand out.
Marco:
Yes, because as I was walking through the lot, I got to see what I think is every current Rivian color because they had tons of them.
Marco:
So I spent a minute kind of looking around, evaluating.
Marco:
So on that, by the way, I will say, before I get to the yellow,
Marco:
I'm glad I didn't go with the blue.
Marco:
The blue was my first... When I initially made the reservation, I initially said blue.
Marco:
I found the blue in person to look a little brighter than I like and also fairly flat.
Marco:
Most of their paints, like Tesla, most of their paints don't have those metallic flecks of shine.
Marco:
They're very flat colors.
Marco:
And I found the blue to look a little too flat for me.
Marco:
The yellow is also flat, but I think it works because of what it is.
Marco:
I'll get to more of that later.
Marco:
I was very impressed in person seeing the Canyon Red and the El Cap Granite, which is their dark gray.
Marco:
Those are both metallic flaked, and they're both very, very nice in person.
Marco:
The Canyon Red has a little hint of orange in it, and that really is very nice.
Marco:
I think those would be...
Marco:
probably tied for my number two choice of color if i had to get a different color than yellow i think canyon red might be the one but the el cap granite el cap granite it's it's a very nice dark gray it goes very well with the yellow accents that all rivians have it is though still a gray so it's a little bit boring but it's a very nice boring but yeah if i was going to go for interesting i'd go canyon red if i didn't get yellow
Casey:
Yeah, my recollection from when I was at the Rivian dealership or whatever you call it, service center here, was, yeah, the Granite and the Canyon Red were both very, very good.
Casey:
Also, I should concede I've been staring at the stupid yellow for the last 20 minutes that you've been talking.
Casey:
I still think yellow cars are an abomination, but...
Casey:
It doesn't look that bad in this shot.
Casey:
If you're going to go yellow, which I still think is a big f***ing mistake, if you're going to do it, this ain't so bad.
John:
Isn't that interesting?
John:
I don't know.
John:
So I've seen a bunch of these calls in real life, including the yellow.
John:
I recently did see an R1S in yellow, and the yellow continues to be baffling to me in person, and Marco can talk about that more in a bit.
Casey:
I will.
John:
The one in my neighborhood is white.
John:
And I have to say, I really like that color on this car.
John:
I think it just works for the sort of boxy, stormtrooper-y nature of this.
John:
The black and white, especially with the stupid black wheels that I hate.
John:
The black and white.
John:
White really works.
John:
The yellow is also a really good color, but I'm just so confused by the color.
John:
Don't worry.
Marco:
I have help for you.
Marco:
I'll get there.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So first, let me go back and give a quick exit interview to my Land Rover Defender.
Marco:
um overall the defender is a very nice vehicle um i found it i've driven it now for a little over a year uh it is very easy to drive and a very comfortable ride it's a very like for for an off-road like when you compare it to like the wrangler the forerunner the fj cruise like all these like other offers that i have experience with as an off-roader it is extremely comfortable um
Marco:
Very, very nice as an off-roader.
Marco:
It's even comfortable enough for long road trips.
Marco:
The suspension is really soft.
Marco:
The steering is super light.
Marco:
It's very smooth and easy to operate.
Marco:
Very nice.
Marco:
I really enjoyed the storage aspect.
Marco:
and the various utility affordances in the cabin.
Marco:
It has a lot of places you can grab.
Marco:
It has a lot of compartments, places to store stuff.
Marco:
There's USB ports everywhere.
Marco:
And even the cup holders, everything's rubberized, so nothing scoots around when you're going on bumpy stuff.
Marco:
It's a very well-designed car for utility.
John:
If you like it, then you should have put a watch on it.
Yeah.
Marco:
It's a reference, Casey.
Casey:
Yes, it's a Beyonce song.
Casey:
I'm just helping you out.
Casey:
I knew it was a song.
Casey:
I couldn't tell you it was Beyonce.
Marco:
Anyway, so Defender, it was a great off-roader.
Marco:
CarPlay has proven to be nice, but with asterisks.
Marco:
As discussed previously, I didn't like the lag with the wireless CarPlay, but the wired is inconvenient and depended on a wire that would occasionally flake out, so that was not fun.
Marco:
Land Rover also being pure gas and being a giant SUV gets comically bad gas mileage, which I never liked.
Marco:
Little things, the automatic wipers were not good.
Marco:
To date, I have yet to be in a vehicle where I like the automatic wipers.
Marco:
I'm always left wishing for cars that only have automatic settings, I'm always left wishing for just give me an old intermittent setting that I can adjust a little intermittent interval on because it's always better.
Marco:
The Land Rover also had a surprisingly bad climate control system for a vehicle of its stature.
Marco:
The fan speed would never be right.
Marco:
It was clunky to control.
Marco:
Didn't like that.
Marco:
That's part of their brand tradition.
Marco:
right they really you know the unreliable electronics was their like brand signature and when they said well like we can't have the thing shorting out all the time but can we just make the the climate control crappy they're like yeah that that still is on brand for us it was it was reliably mediocre um the what was unreliable was the sunroof which i had to get repaired and and that i was afraid to use it after that um and the sound system was shockingly bad for like for a vehicle of that stature and other quality areas the sound system sounded horrendous i don't know why
Marco:
they want to upsell you on the more expensive one yeah i guess but and anyway um and and that kind of hurt in other areas too i had to when i got it i got it during the time and it was very hard to get cars and i like i had gotten the driving permit for the sand so i i had i wanted to get this vehicle as discussed previously um and so i i had to get there was one used one that they had that i could get for any reasonable amount of time at any reasonable cost so i got it
Marco:
But it didn't have some of the upscale features that the higher end models would.
Marco:
It didn't have the fancy seats.
Marco:
I really missed seat position memory.
Marco:
I really missed that.
Marco:
Anytime I put it through a car wash or get it serviced or have anybody else like my wife drive it, I would lose my seat position.
Marco:
And it would take me like weeks to get it right again.
John:
Welcome to my world.
Marco:
I really missed that.
Marco:
It didn't have radar cruise, and I really missed that as well, adaptive cruise, when I was on long highway drives.
Marco:
Of course, it didn't have any kind of auto steer thing on the highway either.
Marco:
I missed that as well.
Marco:
Coming from Tesla for a few years before that, I really missed being able to turn on the climate remotely.
Marco:
Now, Land Rover has this.
Marco:
But only if the car has been started within the last few days.
Marco:
So my typical use of like I'm going off on the ferry going back to my car that I haven't touched for two weeks and I want it to not be a thousand degrees in the car.
Marco:
That didn't work.
Marco:
And then also it didn't have anything like dog mode.
Marco:
This is a wonderful feature that Tesla had.
Marco:
If you, if you have a pet in the car and you're like going into go get, you know, lunch at a rest stop for 20 minutes, you could leave the climate control running and,
Marco:
with just tapping like two buttons on the screen.
Marco:
So it didn't involve the app.
Marco:
So you didn't need to like be in an area with cell coverage that the car would pick up the app signals from.
Marco:
You could just tap the screen and get out and walk away.
Marco:
And then it would keep the AC on or the heat on.
Marco:
And it would show in big print on the screen, like dog mode with a happy wagging dog.
Marco:
You know, it's 75 degrees in here, whatever.
Marco:
Like it would show you right there.
Marco:
So other people walking by wouldn't think you were killing your dog and break your windows.
Marco:
So it's a great feature.
Marco:
Land Rover didn't have that.
Marco:
They only had their very limited remote climate system that only worked for 30 minutes.
Marco:
And it was only if you only through the app and only if you started the car recently.
Marco:
I very much missed that because we take road trips all the time as a family.
Marco:
And not having dog mode, I really dramatically miss that.
Marco:
And as far as I know, the only EVs that seem to offer this, I did a quick bit of research.
Marco:
I think the only EVs that offer anything like dog mode are Tesla and Rivian.
Marco:
I don't think anyone else does.
Marco:
If any other EVs do, I'd love to know.
Marco:
It didn't seem like...
Marco:
the BMW iX, or any other BMW, or the Polestar.
Marco:
I looked at a whole bunch looking to see if anybody had this feature, and I don't think they did.
Marco:
Anyway, that was the Defender.
Marco:
It was a great car with some limitations and annoyances, but otherwise a great car.
Marco:
I was very happy with it.
Marco:
If they made a pure electric Defender,
Marco:
I would probably have gotten that with some of the advanced options, like the nice seats and everything.
Marco:
But that doesn't exist yet, as far as I know.
Marco:
Anyway, the Rivian.
Marco:
Let's talk about the yellow.
Marco:
I got news for you.
Marco:
It is a really good yellow.
Casey:
A man that spends obscene amounts of money on a car painted yellow likes the yellow.
Casey:
You don't say.
Marco:
Well, it was a risk because really I saw like one on the highway coming to the direction for two seconds a couple of weeks ago.
Marco:
And that was the only one I'd ever seen in person.
Marco:
So it's a risk for sure because yellow can go wrong.
Marco:
And the online configurator makes it look almost like a champagne, like a light brown.
Marco:
And I wouldn't have been so into that.
Marco:
But yellow can be very tricky.
Marco:
Now, John, you've expressed...
Marco:
a desire to know what this yellow is.
Marco:
So, earlier today, I took some photos.
Marco:
Now, this was during, like, sundown, basically, so it's not the best light.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I took some photos of some reference objects so that you can compare.
Marco:
So I've laid out... I'll make this a chapter art.
Marco:
I've laid out on the hood of my car... There's a play date.
Marco:
That's amazing.
Marco:
Various yellow reference objects.
Casey:
So I have... You parked next to a bus.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
That's amazing.
Casey:
You know, this god-awful yellow, well, it's not that, this god-awful color for a car, this might have been worth it just for this moment right now.
John:
That school bus one, that's what I'm saying, because I saw it, it was going in the opposite direction.
John:
I saw it go by, and this school bus picture, that's what it looked like when it was going, but it was 1 p.m.
John:
It was a sunny day, sun overhead, no clouds, 1 p.m., and it looked like that, kind of like goldy, and this really highlights how it is not school bus orange or yellow.
Marco:
I was hoping that my gold hypercritical shirt would have arrived in time for this picture, but sadly, it has not yet arrived.
Marco:
It's definitely not that color.
John:
The play date is a big help here, too.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
Let me go through the objects.
John:
This color gold looks different in different light.
John:
It really does.
John:
It's not two different colors, right?
John:
Because this is the same car we're seeing in all these pictures.
John:
Did you take these with your iPhone?
John:
Yes.
John:
Because now it's auto white balancing and doing all sorts of weird crap.
John:
Well, but you have reference objects now.
Marco:
I understand, but you know.
Marco:
So anyway, so the reference objects in this picture are a yellow HomePod, the banana yellow ATP shirt that we most recently sold, the current yellow iPhone 14, and...
Marco:
A yellow caution tape strip that I cut from a construction site.
Marco:
The yellow box of the Purdy brand of paintbrush.
Marco:
They're yellow.
Marco:
The Amazon Basics AA batteries, because they're like kind of an orangey yellow, the Amazon Basics batteries.
Marco:
A Playdate by Panic.
Marco:
And finally, a DeWalt battery to show DeWalt yellow, because I feel like there's like...
Marco:
Many people in our audience will probably have either a DeWalt battery or caution tape or yellow Amazon basics batteries or a play date like between all these things you might have one of these in your house.
Marco:
So I would say just for reference like seeing them it's a little harder to see in the picture but in person.
Marco:
The Playdate is too yellow compared to the car.
Marco:
Yeah, it's brighter.
Marco:
The banana shirt and the iPhone are nowhere close.
Marco:
The yellow HomePod and actually the Amazon Basics batteries look the closest in person.
Marco:
Really?
John:
Well, in the pictures, the Amazon Basics batteries look way more orange than the yellow car.
Marco:
So in person, they're slightly... So what I like about this yellow is that it has a healthy amount of orange mixed in.
Marco:
and i think you need that to make a good yellow for a car and i think it it they so far they seem to have struck a very good balance of getting like it doesn't look orange it looks like a yellow car but it has a little bit of orange mixed in and it's really nice so far i like the color a lot it is i was afraid it would be like too tame and it's not but it's also it also doesn't look like outrageously weird or cheap or anything that it's a very nice yellow and
John:
this looks like these look like two different cars if you that picture where you're at the river and the school bus picture those look like two different cars this is the problem with this yellow it is a chameleon because next to the rivian thing like there that's a great yellow i love that color and then i look next to the school bus and i say no no what happened it's not it's the same car
Marco:
Yeah, it's crazy.
Marco:
It's very difficult to accurately photograph.
Marco:
But in person, it looks very good.
Marco:
That's all I can tell you.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, again, I have such a horrible aversion to yellow automobiles.
Casey:
If you're going to do it, which you shouldn't, but if you're going to do it, I think this works well.
Casey:
Similarly, I don't care for black wheels.
Casey:
I think it was the year after my car, the wheels that I eventually got, we had this whole conversation like a year ago now, that I replaced the English Town wheels on my car that I hated and got Pretoria's, which are the ones that I preferred.
Casey:
The year after I bought my car, you could get a blacked out version of the Pretoria's.
Casey:
And I didn't like that either.
Casey:
Even though the Pretorias are some of my favorite wheels on any car I've ever seen, I hated the blacked-out version.
Casey:
In this car, the combination of the yellow calipers, the blacked-out wheels, the pretty well-tinted rear windows on the car, and this chameleon yellow...
Casey:
As a yellow automobile goes, this is one of the better that I've seen based on this handful of pictures.
Casey:
A yellow is still a terrible choice for an automobile, but if you're going to commit, this ain't bad.
Marco:
So some first impressions after a day and a half of driving, including driving on the beach.
Marco:
I drove it back to the beach tonight.
Casey:
Oh, nice.
Marco:
So I have one sand trip in it so far.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I think it's faster than my Tesla.
Marco:
I always got the middle configuration for Tesla because I wanted the maximum range.
Marco:
I never had the super performance ones, but I think it's faster.
Marco:
It's ridiculous.
Marco:
As long as you don't turn.
Marco:
Honestly, the handling is very good.
Marco:
Look, it doesn't handle like a low-slung sports car.
Marco:
It handles more like the Defender did because it's a giant SUV.
Marco:
But for what it is, it handles surprisingly well.
Marco:
It's very, very nice.
Marco:
One thing that I still have to get used to
Marco:
it's kind of jumpy.
Marco:
The way it responds to throttle and it has so much power available to it that you have to be very gentle with your foot and if you let up with your foot very slightly.
Marco:
I've been used to driving gas for all this time and with a gas engine, especially with a Land Rover, you let up and it eventually considers coming to a stop.
Marco:
It's a very smooth in and out of power.
Marco:
With this, it's very jumpy.
Marco:
It responds very
Marco:
like a little too quickly to taking your foot off the pedal can you adjust the region you can but in regular driver mode you only have standard or high and i have it i try both and it's not that different honestly um but it's it it's a little aggressive i would like to i would like to see that be a little bit smoother or at least have a setting to make a little bit smoother did you change the drive mode like you don't really do different throttle curves for like sport mode and whatever
Marco:
This is this was in like the all purpose mode.
Marco:
I didn't try sports.
Marco:
I figured that would make the problem worse.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it will make it worse.
Marco:
But there might be like a comfort mode or something.
Marco:
I don't know what the drive modes are.
Marco:
Yeah, it's I didn't see anything like that, but I'll play with it more as I have it.
John:
And maybe it's just I have to get used to it, you know, like because you're used to driving a giant gas vehicle that does not respond instantly to throttle input.
John:
So maybe you just get used to EVs again.
Marco:
Yeah, like the Defender is, like, not only does it not respond instantly, it has massive turbo lag.
Marco:
So the Defender, like, if you want to go fast, you step on it, and then it submits a request to Britain, and then, you know, it comes back eventually that, you know, oh, oh, you want to go fast?
Marco:
Here you go.
Marco:
Anyway, so back to the Rivian.
Marco:
The regen braking is, even on the regular standard mode, is substantially more aggressive than it is on Tesla.
Marco:
and it is very much um encouraging you to do one pedal driving and that's actually it's actually fairly nice as you get used to it um again it's going to take me a while to be able to operate this car smoothly but it is nice to have that much regen available so quickly in terms of like not having to use the brakes almost ever and one really nice feature i don't know how common this is on evs i don't think tesla did this at least um
Marco:
Not only will it regen brake all the way to a stop, but if you regen brake all the way to a stop, it engages the hill hold.
Marco:
So it won't roll back, which is really nice.
Marco:
It's just like a really nice kind of EV luxury feature.
Marco:
Because many cars have hill hold now.
John:
Tesla doesn't do that?
Marco:
Does it literally roll backwards like a manual car?
Marco:
If you have not touched the brake, I believe so.
Marco:
I'm saying if you let the regen brake come to a stop without ever touching the physical brake, the Rivian will engage the hill hold, which is really nice.
Marco:
Anyway, visibility is better than the Land Rover by a lot.
Marco:
They have more glass.
Marco:
It's easier to see.
Marco:
Overall, much better visibility than the Land Rover and way better than the FJ Cruiser.
Marco:
Great cameras, great top-down, like, bird's-eye kind of view.
Marco:
Very big, high-resolution images.
Marco:
They're fantastic.
Marco:
I finally have ventilated seats, which I haven't had in a very long... I think the only car I ever had that had those was the M5.
Marco:
They don't have a butt massager on this one, but... But anyway, yeah.
Marco:
Finally, air-conditioned seats.
Marco:
That's fantastic.
Marco:
The capacity that you have for storage in this thing is ridiculous.
Marco:
The frunk alone, just the frunk, I can fit all of my towing gear, tow ropes, shackles, massive quantities of giant huge towing stuff, safety gear, battery gear, all of that, the charger, and four MaxTrax traction boards all fit in the frunk.
Marco:
That's amazing.
Marco:
And then, of course, the back is even bigger.
Marco:
You know, it's a similar overall dimensions, like in terms of footprint on the road as the Land Rover, but it doesn't have a spare tire.
Marco:
So the car is just longer to use that space.
Marco:
So you have you have not only a third row of seats, which will be occasionally useful to us.
Marco:
But when those seats are folded down, you just have massive storage capacity.
Marco:
And then there's no spare tire by default.
Marco:
So you can lift up the bottom of the trunk floor and go down under where the spare tire would go and just use that as even more storage.
Marco:
This thing is a massive storage boat.
Marco:
You can fit so much stuff in this vehicle.
Marco:
The key situation is really nice.
Marco:
Land Rover, like most modern cars, has a giant key fob that you must carry with you.
Marco:
This huge brick that takes up your entire pocket and sticks out.
Marco:
The Rivian, it has a key fob.
Marco:
It looks kind of like a padlock almost.
Marco:
It's like a carabiner with buttons in the bottom.
Marco:
Anyway, so it has a key fob.
Marco:
It comes with one.
Marco:
It also comes with two RFID kind of cards.
Marco:
So I can just keep that in my wallet and I'm set.
Marco:
And also, you can pair up to four phones to be phone keys for it.
Marco:
And so far in my experience, they all work really well.
Marco:
They work from surprisingly long distances away.
Marco:
It seems awesome so far.
Marco:
And like all good EVs, you don't have to start it or unlock it or lock it.
Marco:
You walk up to it and it unlocks.
Marco:
You get in and start hitting things and it turns on and goes.
Marco:
When you're done, you simply put it in park and open the door and leave and it will turn itself off and lock itself.
Marco:
Love it.
Marco:
It's so nice.
Marco:
I missed these features so much.
Marco:
The sound system is really good.
Marco:
It's way better than the Land Rover.
Marco:
Even noticeably better than the last Tesla I had.
Marco:
Very, very good sound system.
Marco:
clear loud you know great great mid-range guitars like it's really of course i listen to fish it's really good um it is so nice to have dog mode and seat memory back i have both those things now and i i've only had the car for like two seconds love it um radar cruise and auto steer
Marco:
Uh, so it has, it has radar crews.
Marco:
It seems wonderful so far.
Marco:
It seems really nice.
Marco:
Very smooth.
Marco:
Um, auto steer is not as good as Tesla's.
Marco:
And, and when I mean, when I say auto steer, I'm talking about what Tesla calls autopilot, but like what used to be the only kind of autopilot.
Marco:
So nothing that would be considered like, you know, real self-driving.
Marco:
But it's basically a combination of radar cruise control and keeping you in the center of the lane on a highway.
Marco:
So it will steer for you while keeping you in the center of a lane.
Marco:
If anything spooks it, it will beep like crazy and disengage.
Marco:
So you have to pay attention.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It seems relatively comparable to Tesla's so far, but it disengages more aggressively.
Marco:
So if, for instance, there's a merge coming up for the lanes that you're in that it doesn't really know what to do, it will alert you, merge coming up ahead, and then it'll beep and turn off.
Marco:
Or if it has any trouble whatsoever seeing the lines on the road to mark where the lanes are, it will also freak out and turn off.
John:
So it's useless in Massachusetts then.
John:
Because there are no lines that are on our roads that are not just barely visible, about to disappear completely.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I'm guessing the auto steer is going to be overall, I'm going to kind of miss Tesla's, but it's way better than not having it at all because of my situation with the Land Rover.
Marco:
The only thing, one little tweak I would love to make for that is when you've hit the brake or canceled it temporarily, when you go to resume the cruise control,
Marco:
What most cars will do is go back to the last set speed that you had used.
Marco:
What Rivian does is it always resumes at the current speed.
Marco:
So if you disengage it to slow down a bunch, then you re-engage it.
Marco:
It's going to re-engage at 15 miles an hour.
Marco:
And then you have to raise it all the way back up to 65.
Marco:
So it's kind of clunky.
Marco:
But that's a software thing that I hope they can tweak over time.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Now, the short hit list.
Marco:
There is nowhere to put sunglasses.
Marco:
What is wrong with these EV companies?
Marco:
Tesla and Rivian both have nowhere to put sunglasses.
Marco:
What is the most common accessory people use while driving a car?
Marco:
Well, it's probably a phone.
Marco:
We'll get to that in a second.
Marco:
Secondly, it's probably sunglasses.
Marco:
Like, oh my God.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
There's nowhere to put – why?
John:
On the Model X, they don't have a place because it's just one giant sweep of glass from the front to the back.
John:
But, yeah, I don't know what the excuse is for the Rivian.
John:
You've got a roof and a headliner.
John:
You can put a little sunglass thing right there.
Marco:
And, like, you know, it's shallow.
Marco:
Like, they probably don't have the whole depth to have a recessed compartment.
Marco:
But give me, like, a clip or something.
Marco:
Like, geez.
Marco:
Anyway, nowhere to put sunglass.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
One of the interesting design decisions of the Rivian is – and I presume this is to maximize frunk space –
Marco:
There's no glove box, which is overall fine.
Marco:
I can put the car registration and the insurance card and the flashlight in the door.
Marco:
I can put the paperwork for the car and stuff somewhere else, but it's kind of odd.
Marco:
I wish they had a glove box because that's just kind of...
John:
i think it's pretty terrible for an assault on a car this big it's so huge in there that the dashboard is so large and so straight flat and it's like surely there's room for a shallow glove box of some kind and they just don't give it to you and it's not because it would intrude into frunk space if you look at how they take apart this dashboard there's stuff back there but not so much that it's infeasible that they could have given you a small glove box without intruding into the frunk space i hope they
John:
upgrade that it kind of you know it smells a little bit like you know preemptive decontenting well we don't have to give them a glove box there's so much storage elsewhere they don't want a glove box but people get into the habit of expecting there to be a little door there in front of the passenger yeah and just in general the
Marco:
There is not enough console storage in this car.
Marco:
Again, there's a huge amount of space in the car, which is overall a good thing.
Marco:
This can fit tons of luggage and groceries and crap like that, but there is not nearly enough small compartment storage for the driver and passenger on the front.
Marco:
You need more there.
Marco:
Nowhere on the dash is there even a USB or 12-volt plug.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, the only power available on the front, besides the Qi charger that kind of sucks and the third-party things that I'm going to try out to make that better, the only power available on the front at all seems to be the two USB-C ports that are in the armrest compartment, which is itself kind of the only enclosed storage in the front of the vehicle, besides this little tiny thing behind your knees on the seat that can hold basically nothing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Again, they kind of learned the wrong lesson from early Tesla, where the first Model S had this giant open dashboard with no storage, and people had to kind of hack various things in.
Marco:
People were doing the same thing with Rivian for the same reason.
Marco:
There's not enough storage.
Marco:
I understand that it looks cool and minimal and modern, but it's a lot less useful.
Marco:
So I hope they...
Marco:
change that in future versions and in the meantime i'm buying all sorts of weird accessories from all sorts of weird you know car hackers and amazon makers and 3d printed dividers and stuff like that to try to solve that and i'll report back in the future um i really want carplay i i do miss it it is not perfect but i do miss it um it has built in alexa which this was new to me in a car context and
John:
Because Amazon is a or Bezos is an investor in Rivian.
John:
I forget.
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And they have all the Amazon vans and stuff.
Marco:
So, yeah, it can do a lot, but it's it's a little creepy.
Marco:
I don't love that.
Marco:
And also, most cars that don't have CarPlay, if your if your phone is connected via Bluetooth, usually there's like a button on the steering wheel or something that's a voice control button.
Marco:
And maybe it triggers the car's built in crappy one.
Marco:
But usually if you hold it down, it'll trigger Siri via Bluetooth.
Marco:
rivian has no such function there there seem there is no current way as far as i can find with both internet research and poking around on the car even if you disable alexa completely it will not have any way for you to engage siri on your phone uh that's connected via bluetooth so that that kind of sucks that's again software software can get there i really want carplay and if not i really at least want to be able to trigger siri easily via bluetooth um
Marco:
The Bluetooth stack seems to be fairly decent as Bluetooth stacks go.
Marco:
It has moderate latency.
Marco:
It shows a track list somehow when playing from the music app, so I've got to figure out how to hack that with Overcast.
Marco:
But otherwise, there's a nitpick list here.
Marco:
I hope they get to some of these things.
Marco:
I think based on what the various interviews of the CEO and stuff like that, I don't know how likely CarPlay is, but I think they would do it before Tesla would.
Marco:
So I really, really want CarPlay.
Marco:
And we'll see what happens there.
Marco:
And I see no reason not to offer it.
Marco:
I tried their built-in nav.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's not as good as CarPlay.
Marco:
I tried their built-in Bluetooth.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's not as good as CarPlay.
Marco:
Just add CarPlay for God's sake.
Marco:
Now that I went from CarPlay to not having CarPlay, it feels like a downgrade in those areas.
Marco:
How many Rivian buyers will be coming from a car that has CarPlay?
Marco:
Not 100%, but not zero.
Marco:
And that number is probably going up over time.
Marco:
So I would strongly caution them if they want people to be happy with their Rivian purchases, and if they want repeat customers, and if they want people to even consider them more than they might otherwise, you got to have CarPlay.
Marco:
It's table stakes.
Marco:
You got to add it.
John:
And remember, you're coming from a car with probably crappy, feeble, you know, CPU, GPU power powering the CarPlay display into the Rivian, which presumably has way more power in terms of like, you know, computing capacity to power all those big screens for its own proprietary OS.
John:
CarPlay will surely be faster, better in Rivian if they did support it on that hardware.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So anyway, all right.
Marco:
Now, the only other thing I'll talk about tonight is beach driving.
Marco:
Got to the checkpoint.
Marco:
It was time to air down my tires.
Marco:
Overall, it went well.
Marco:
The only thing I missed, so the Rivian helpfully does have a tire pressure display mode for the left part of your gauge cluster area.
Marco:
So you can, just like the Land Rover, you can put that up there and leave it there, which is nice.
Marco:
One thing I really missed, though, is that on the Defender,
Marco:
And the tire pressure monitor seemed to be real time.
Marco:
So as I'm airing down the tires, I could check my work with what does the car think the pressure is.
Marco:
I've never seen another vehicle that offered that.
Marco:
I don't know enough about the components to know what that is.
Marco:
But it was real time tire pressure update.
Marco:
So literally as the car is parked, as I'm changing the air pressure, it would display it on the dash.
John:
the rivian does not do that the rivian is more like the tesla and other cars i've driven where you have to like drive for a while before it will update those numbers that's because the the cheaper ones do like what my honda does which is they're using a rotation of the wheel to tell you the pressure basically how by how squishes it right and so you have to rotate the wheel to get that where it sounds like the land rover had actual pressure sensors
Marco:
It must have, yeah.
Marco:
And that was a very nice feature for an off-roader, where you are frequently changing the tire pressure intentionally, as opposed to with most cars, you pump it up a couple times a year at the gas station, and then you just move on.
Marco:
But with an off-roader, you really want that sometimes.
Marco:
So it's not it's not a huge problem in the sense that, you know, I still I use I use my rapid tire deflator, the the valve pulling type.
Marco:
And it's amazing.
Marco:
And I was able to deflate all four tires really quickly.
Marco:
But I the result could have been more precise if I had that.
Marco:
So anyway, I would like to see that otherwise fine.
Marco:
Going off-road, I put it into the sand mode.
Marco:
It was totally easy and fine to change modes.
Marco:
It didn't give me any hard time about it.
Marco:
It was very, very nice.
Marco:
And then I get on the beach, and what I had done is I had raised it to the highest ground clearance it offers, which is 15 inches of ground clearance, which is ridiculous for a vehicle this size.
Marco:
That's pretty much unheard of for a medium-sized SUV.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
When you're driving on loose sand, which this is, you don't want to feel like you're getting stuck.
Marco:
And what getting stuck feels like is slowing down and not being able to push faster.
Marco:
That's what getting stuck feels like.
Marco:
I was limited in that high mode to 19 miles an hour.
Marco:
and this usually on this stretch of beach i usually go about 25 so it felt a little so and it turns out this is actually like it's a software limit like when you are at the highest ground clearance setting of 15 inches it limits you to 19 miles an hour and it told me that on the screen which is a tiny print so it took me a lot to figure it out and notice it but it felt like i was getting stuck i couldn't go faster and
Marco:
So it was a little bit of a bad feel, but I'm like, all right.
Marco:
Then I lowered it down to standard height, which is still 11 1⁄2 inches, which is, I believe, the highest setting of the Defender or in the ballpark of it.
Marco:
So I just drove the rest of the way at standard 11 1⁄2 inches and went 25 miles an hour-ish like I always do, and it was amazing.
Marco:
Like, the Land Rover...
Marco:
For all of its, you know, wonderfulness off-road, that car did not have a ton of power.
Marco:
And the aforementioned turbo lag made it harder to use.
Marco:
And that was the base engine, the four-cylinder turbo.
Marco:
The Rivian, the things I was able to do, like, you know, when you're driving in a deep sand track, like, you know, other trucks drive in the beaks and they carve out this, you know, the two big tire tracks.
Marco:
And sometimes people get weird and they, they like turn in a weird way with the track or the track kind of gets sloppy as people cross over.
Marco:
And sometimes you have to change which track you're in.
Marco:
There'll be a bunch running in parallel from different vehicles that are driven there.
Marco:
And you might want to like jump over to the next one.
Marco:
The traction and power required to do this is very difficult because you're basically asking your car, you're currently driving on packed sand.
Marco:
Now turn into basically a huge thick berm of extremely loose sand and somehow jump out of the track you're in into the next one.
Marco:
With Land Rover, I had to wait for a good moment and then basically floor it and get myself on top of the track and then kind of settle into the one next to it.
Marco:
The Rivian has so much power instantly from zero that I was basically just able to drive right over it like it was nothing.
Marco:
Like it just... Oh, I'm just... I was able to go basically wherever I wanted to go on the beach.
Marco:
It was...
Marco:
incredible the the amount of power and traction that i had and i should say i went down to about 25 psi on the tires um i i i wasn't i'm not sure yet like how low i can go without running weird risks with this vehicle because it's a pretty heavy vehicle so i didn't want to go lower than 25 um it was amazing
Marco:
challenging parts of the route before in the Defender.
Marco:
And again, the Defender was a great off-roader.
Marco:
But things that were challenging in the Defender were a lot less challenging in the Rivian.
Marco:
It was just able to go.
Marco:
Once I figured out that speed limit and went to the different ground clearance, it was incredible.
Marco:
So we'll see how it goes throughout this year of driving.
Marco:
But so far, I am extremely impressed with its ability as an off-roader.
John:
and uh we'll see how it goes the magic of having one motor per wheel yeah like you know there's no differentials there's no locking there's no modes of like you know complete complete independent control of power going to all four wheels they actually rolled out a new powertrain in the ravines now which is just two motors so one for the front wheels one for the back wheels which
John:
is uh less expensive and gets uh more range and so on and so forth but yeah for for the ultimate and off-road having independent control of all four weeks is great and i think that 19 mile an hour mode i think that's like when you're climbing over boulders at a 45 degree angle it's not when you're going on flat sand i feel like the 11 inch uh ground clearance from your land rover is adequate
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, yeah, like I would love to do 15 inch, you know, and be able to go maybe 25 or 30 at max, but, you know, whatever.
Marco:
And you know why they're stopping you from doing that?
Marco:
I don't want you to roll this thing.
Marco:
Yeah, but do you think an extra three inches?
Marco:
I figured it was more about like efficiency.
Marco:
It's five inches or four inches.
John:
Four inches.
John:
Yeah.
John:
No, these things want to roll.
John:
Don't roll.
John:
Rolling is bad.
John:
Oh, you know.
Marco:
I would also, I would assume like because the weight is also low in an EV, like it's probably a much lower risk.
John:
Exactly.
John:
I agree, but it's also a very big and tall car.
Casey:
They have 15 inches of ground clearance.
Casey:
Don't listen to John.
Casey:
John doesn't believe in anything that has more than six centimeters of ground clearance.
John:
You have to watch these videos of how easy it is to roll these things on pavement.
Right.
Casey:
John, when's the last time you spent more than 10 minutes driving something that was not a sedan?
John:
You know, rental cars.
John:
You ever try to get a rental car that actually is a sedan?
John:
Actually, yeah, that's very difficult.
John:
It's very difficult.
John:
But anyway, I agree, though, that the battery is really should be keeping this thing from like basically ever rolling.
John:
But I mean, that limit is there for a reason.
John:
So, well, frankly, I mean, it has enough power.
Marco:
You know, if you want it to roll, you probably could.
John:
Oh, you absolutely can.
John:
But.
John:
But I wonder if 19 miles an hour is conservative because I feel like, okay, let me go 30.
John:
I still won't roll, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, this thing so far, it's amazing.
Marco:
And again, there are things that I would tweak about it, obviously.
Marco:
CarPlay and storage should be the biggest two.
Marco:
But otherwise, this thing's amazing.
Marco:
And CarPlay you can fix with software updates and storage I can fix with weird plastic from Amazon.
Marco:
So let's hope for those software updates and see how it goes over time.
Marco:
But my initial day one and a half impressions are very positive so far.