Next Year, Which Is Now
Casey:
If I guarantee, if I absolutely guarantee that I'm getting a case, presumably some sort of leather case, probably the Apple one.
Marco:
Oh, for the love of God, still get AppleCare.
Casey:
Okay, that's where I was driving.
John:
What are you doing?
John:
I believe in your ability to break it into a case.
John:
Yes.
Casey:
I never used to get AppleCare until I started going caseless.
Casey:
Then AppleCare was my case.
John:
You're getting old and clumsy.
Casey:
Getting?
Casey:
Getting old?
Casey:
Getting clumsy?
Casey:
Are you kidding?
Casey:
I've been there for years.
No.
Casey:
All right, so we have a lot to talk about, and we should dive right in.
Casey:
As per John Syracuse's rules, we are not going to do any follow-up this week, so we're going to have a pile of it next week, I guarantee you.
Casey:
However, we need to talk about something far more important even than follow-up, and I think I have the approval of Mr. John Syracuse to say that.
Casey:
We need to talk about St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
Hey, guess what?
Casey:
It's September...
Casey:
And September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
And because of that, we are joining RelayFM.
Casey:
Since we are RelayFM, we're part of RelayFM.
Casey:
We're doing this with RelayFM.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
Anyway, RelayFM and us are trying to raise money for St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
And Relay set a goal of, if memory serves, $333,000 and 33 cents, I think, because it was the third year that we slash they are doing this.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
Thanks to a couple of people in particular, we have surpassed that goal, and the new goal is not $400,000.
Casey:
John, how much is the new goal?
Casey:
You put me on the spot.
John:
It's $400,001.
Casey:
That's correct, as it should be.
Casey:
Am I right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, so I wanted to call out a few different things and a few different people.
Casey:
First of all, James Neal was the brief, astonishingly brief, leading donor with $21,001.
Casey:
So thank you, James.
Casey:
And James has already written in and has said, you know what?
Casey:
I'm doing this for the kids.
Casey:
I don't need stickers.
Casey:
You can take your stickers and show.
Casey:
No, he didn't say that.
Casey:
But James was very kind and said, don't worry about the stickers.
Casey:
Just happy to do something nice for St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
And then breaking news, earlier today, we were getting extremely close.
Casey:
to hitting the goal of $333,333.
Casey:
And then a group of people, it sounds like it's an app that I would enjoy.
Casey:
It's called, let me look this up.
Casey:
Ah, 1Password.
Casey:
A group of people that work on an app called 1Password.
Casey:
It sounds like it's good.
Casey:
I should check it out sometime.
Casey:
They donated $26,922.04.
Casey:
Holy jamoles.
Casey:
So, the team at 1Password.
Casey:
It turns out that you absolutely can, by my love, and it costs you the small amount of $26,922.04.
Casey:
So, hey, thank you to Dave Teer and the rest of the 1Password folks.
Casey:
I, we, everyone really appreciates it.
Casey:
And if I'm not mistaken, it was their donation that put us over the original goal, such that the new goal is $400,001.
Casey:
Now, here's the thing.
Casey:
If you donate enough money to be on the leaderboard, I will allow you to break rules.
Casey:
And neither of the two of them know that this is happening.
Casey:
So prepare yourselves, gentlemen.
Casey:
This is a iPhone event day, so we do not have follow-up.
Casey:
However, Gus the Dog, previous champion, wrote in about a week ago.
Casey:
And Gus the Dog also shooed the stickers and said, no, no, don't worry about it.
Casey:
Thanks, but no thanks.
Casey:
But Gus has requested something.
Casey:
And since Gus was briefly the leader, Gus gets to screw up the show for this event.
Casey:
And Gus says, please just let Marco know on the next show that as someone born and raised on Long Island, I can confirm John is correct.
Casey:
Fire Island is part of Long Island.
Casey:
So Gus the Dog, thank you for your feedback.
John:
I love these high donors.
Casey:
I bet you do.
Casey:
I bet you do.
Marco:
So I've actually, I've been doing more surveying on that point, even though we're not doing follow up, just a very quick thing.
Marco:
I have found more people who said it is part of Long Island, but it's still significantly a minority.
Marco:
I would say it's at least three quarters of people I've asked so far say it is not the same or not part of it.
Marco:
Whereas one quarter about seem to say that it is.
John:
Well, it's a good thing facts aren't determined by polling.
Casey:
All right, we do have some other follow-up, including from other brief leaders slash champions, but I will save that for another day.
Casey:
We should move right along and talk a little more about what you can do to help St.
Casey:
Jude and the Children's Research Hospital there.
Casey:
Hey, you can donate money.
Casey:
You can donate your money.
Casey:
It does not have to be the absolutely ridiculous sum of $26,122.04.
Casey:
It can be...
Casey:
Just a few bucks.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
So if you want to help out kids who have cancer and who doesn't, then go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP.
Casey:
Because, hey, guess what?
Casey:
Cancer sucks.
Casey:
Childhood cancer sucks like a lot.
Casey:
So let's try to fix it.
Casey:
Let's do what we can.
Casey:
St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital is not going to stop until it has cured or until we have cured childhood cancer.
Casey:
They're doing everything they can to do that.
Casey:
Doctors from all 50 states and around the world refer their patients to St.
Casey:
Jude because they have the world's best survival rates for some of the most aggressive childhood cancers.
Casey:
St.
Casey:
Jude also provides thousands of pre-consultations for doctors treating children worldwide, including kids in your community, even non-Americans.
Casey:
So, hey, guess what?
Casey:
If you have a few bucks to scrape together, please, stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash A-T-P, please throw a few dollars their way.
Casey:
It is almost Marco's turn to do the hard sell.
Casey:
However, John has pointed out to me in the past a couple of things worth noting.
Casey:
Hey, your employer might match your donation.
Casey:
And if they do...
Casey:
Please email Stephen Hackett at an address that I don't remember off the top of my head.
Casey:
I believe it's Stephen at RelayFM.
Casey:
That's P-H-S-T-E-P-H-E-N at RelayFM, I think is correct.
Casey:
Anyways, email Stephen.
Casey:
Say, hey, my employer matched with such and such amount, and that will contribute to our goal, which is excellent.
Casey:
And not to poke the crypto bear, which is our favorite thing to do these days, but hey, you can even donate crypto.
Casey:
I don't think it counts toward our goal, but you can donate cryptocurrency.
Casey:
So if you feel guilty about destroying the planet, which you probably should, you can offset that guilt by saving children.
Casey:
It's a win-win.
Casey:
And I'm not going to announce the URL because it's kind of long, but you'll have to look it up.
Casey:
But something has to say it can be done.
Marco:
We'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
We'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
Marco, would you mind, please, giving the hard sell on this, the day of iPhones?
Marco:
So first of all, to reiterate, the only thing that is sensible to do with cryptocurrency is donate to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
You should just give it all to them and then you can be absolved of whatever emotional weight you have of destroying the earth with your cryptocurrency.
Marco:
Yes, I know about proof of stake or whatever.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
So anyway, the real reason you should give to St.
Marco:
Jude, even if you don't have cryptocurrency, is that Apple event season is upon us.
Marco:
The Apple event was today.
Marco:
We'll get to that in a moment.
Marco:
At risk, you all out there, at risk of spending large amounts of money with Apple in the next few days or weeks.
Marco:
And if you don't do it at this event, there's probably another event coming sometime soon where you might have something there you're going to blow a bunch of money on.
Marco:
And so sometime soon, listeners, you're going to feel the need or the want to blow a bunch of money on Apple stuff.
Marco:
And when you do that, we've seen what these things cost.
Marco:
They have 38% profit or whatever margins.
Marco:
There's a lot of money going towards Apple.
Marco:
Take some of that money that you're going to give to them and divert it to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
So that's up to you what that could be.
Marco:
It could be something like, hey, I'm going to buy a $1,000 iPhone something max or whatever.
Marco:
Then
Marco:
maybe kick a hundred bucks to St.
Marco:
Jude, maybe 200 bucks to St.
Marco:
Jude, whatever you can do.
Marco:
If you can't do that much, give them 30 bucks, give them 20 bucks, whatever you can give, give them what you can.
Marco:
And it really makes a big difference.
Marco:
And it will absolve you of your guilt of just rampant, shameless consumerism that we are all about to celebrate by talking about how we're going to spend, like, you know, how we're going to buy a new thousand dollar phone to replace our old thousand dollar phone because the camera is a lot better, you know, or whatever.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
We're all going to do this.
Marco:
And even for those of you out there who are more reasonable with your budgeting and purchase decisions, give what you can to St.
Marco:
Jude because it's a really good organization.
Marco:
This is a really good, just a fantastic cause that really makes a huge difference in people's lives.
Marco:
And it's hard to find a better place to put your money than St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
So give what you can and may you be absolved of your consumer guilt by doing so.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we want to talk about Fire Island or should we talk about the event?
Casey:
I don't want to start another fight.
Marco:
Well, first, I think we should begin by just having a video of us just like, you know, just a whole bunch of like beautiful people in beautiful places that have nothing to do with our podcast.
Marco:
I just just here's here's how we feel.
Marco:
And then we should come out and say, we made this video to show you how excited we are.
Marco:
We really love this place.
Marco:
This is this is how excited we are.
Marco:
Look at how excited we are.
John:
Maybe we can make like a satellite phone call from the desert.
Casey:
I liked that theory.
John:
That was my guess when Tim Cook tweeted a picture of like someone off in the middle.
John:
We're coming from a new location.
John:
Turns out the new location was California.
Casey:
Can we have a little special treat for the bootleg people, if you don't mind?
Casey:
Because please don't put this in the show.
Casey:
Please don't put this in the show.
Casey:
I will swear.
Marco:
How much editing do you think I'm going to do tonight, Casey?
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm just going to bite my tongue.
Casey:
I was going to complain and moan about how obsessed with California Californians are, but I'll just leave it at that.
Marco:
No, California is a beautiful place.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
Whenever I visit there, I'm so envious of just how, because New York is a pretty damn beautiful place too, but California really is something else.
Marco:
It's really amazing.
Marco:
The reasons why I don't live in California have nothing to do with its beauty or its climate or anything like that.
Marco:
Those things are all great.
Marco:
And if it weren't for all the passive aggression, I think it would be
Marco:
a lot nicer.
John:
Marco prefers aggressive aggression from New York.
John:
Yeah, I do.
Marco:
That's what's great about New York.
John:
Hard agree.
Marco:
Yeah, in New York, everyone just tells you what they think at all times to a fault.
Marco:
And, you know, if somebody doesn't like you, it will be very clear to you.
Marco:
In California, that's not how things are done.
Marco:
And also in New York, the humor is very dry and sarcastic.
Marco:
If you bring dry, sarcastic humor to California,
Marco:
they just think you're a jerk.
Marco:
Like they don't get it.
Marco:
And they think you're a jerk, but you won't be able to tell they think you're a jerk because they won't even tell you directly because they're very passive aggressive there.
Marco:
But I do love a lot of people in California and some of them are very, very nice.
Marco:
But yeah, it's not a good cultural fit for me.
Casey:
the funny thing to me about california is that it is hilariously preposterously absurdly unreasonably expensive to live in a place that is doing everything it can to fall off the continental united states to go to light itself up in flames and then completely die because it has no water it i mean it is a beautiful place it is a
Casey:
But it is hilarious to me how proud Californians are of California.
Casey:
The only people that I know that are more proud of their state are Texans.
Casey:
And there's a lot more guns there, so I don't want to offend them.
Casey:
So I'm just going to leave it at that.
Casey:
But yeah, this was a celebration of California as everything Apple is.
Casey:
And so after my eyes rolled right the hell out of my head, I picked them up, put them back in my noggin, and then I could continue watching the presentation.
Casey:
We did a little bit on Apple TV+, which was fine, whatever.
Marco:
It is so – I just got this strange feeling seeing Tim Cook, this tech company executive, basically becoming for a few minutes a TV executive and having to promote a TV lineup.
Marco:
It just was weird.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
you know, you're accustomed to, you know, TV people doing TV stuff.
Marco:
You know, you see, you know, the head of NBC or whatever, you know, here's our great fall lineup and all this in prime time.
Marco:
And it just felt weird to me to see like Apple, like a tech company doing that.
Marco:
Does that seem weird or is everyone just kind of used to that now?
John:
Well, I mean, I feel like a tech company is running video streaming services.
John:
Arguably, Netflix has always kind of been a tech company because they, I mean, even when they were mailing us DVDs.
John:
But Amazon certainly qualifies and they have a streaming service.
John:
And I feel like,
John:
you know, that's just sort of par for the course that, you know, uh, large tech companies who want service revenue eventually get a video streaming service and then, uh, and then they eventually realize they need original content because people won't give them their other content once they realize they're making money off of it.
John:
And so this is just where we find ourselves.
John:
And it may be weird for us because like you said, like,
John:
The head of NBC, does any kid listening to this know or care what the head of NBC has to say about anything?
John:
No, it's all streaming these days.
John:
So I think this is just the world we live in, that, yeah, tech companies have streaming services because streaming services were originally a tech innovation, even though they are rapidly becoming commonplace.
John:
And those companies that have them realize that they want that money.
John:
They got to get that original content and then you got to promote it.
John:
So...
John:
i guess it's strange especially if you're an apple fan thinking like apple from the 80s is going to be pitching a bunch of like high budget high polished tv shows but it just seemed pretty normal to me like i would i would just soon leave that out of my uh product announcement keynotes but you know apple's gonna do what apple's gonna do and how they they showed icards for like three different events in a row too
Casey:
I mean, it does look like there's some pretty good programming coming.
Casey:
I don't feel like I have enough time in the day for all the stuff I want to watch as is, but there are definitely things like the Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, is that right, thing looks pretty good.
Casey:
The Jon Stewart thing looks pretty good.
Casey:
I like the first season of The Morning Show.
Casey:
I'll watch the second season of that.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
i know there's good stuff coming but um but we really should move along and talk about the ipad the uh the no qualifications just straight up ipad got updated to a two-year-old processor and it still has from a three-year-old processor we it still has traditional touch id but it got better cameras including center stage which is the thing where it pans and tilts and zooms and what can i can
John:
Can I just say how, like, just painful it is that the least expensive iPad has center stage, but it's still too fancy for the Mac to have.
John:
Yeah, that's very true.
Marco:
Well, and they also didn't give it to the iPhone for whatever that's worth.
Marco:
And we'll get to that.
John:
But I mean, maybe it's because of the anger.
John:
I was feeling bad about the fact that like, you know, eight bajillion dollar Mac Pro doesn't even come with a camera.
John:
But anyway, even if you put a camera on it and it's a 4K camera, oh no, center stage for you, sorry.
John:
But I was thinking for like, you know, for most Macs that are just MacBooks or whatever, that maybe the camera is not high quality enough for them to crop out of it.
John:
It's like what they do with center stage is it's a really wide angle camera, but they just show you a crop of that and they just move around.
John:
It's pan and scan.
John:
They just move around where the crop is in the frame
John:
And maybe the cameras are so bad and so low resolution on Macs that if they tried to do that, it would just look like a blurry Vaseline-y mess.
John:
But I hope Macs catch up with this.
John:
I'm glad it's on this iPad.
John:
Don't get me wrong.
John:
And this iPad continues to lag by what?
John:
The same constant amount?
John:
Like I said, it was an A12 last year.
John:
Now it's an A13.
John:
It lags by, you know, two numbers.
John:
The current chip is an A15.
John:
This one has an A13.
John:
And as we talked about in last week's show, that's a good chip for a cheap iPad.
John:
You know, it's a shame that this is the last iPad on the old design and it's the last iPad with lightning and all that and has the first generation pencil and all that other stuff.
John:
But hopefully, unlike a product that we will discuss later in the show, I'm sure next year, maybe this design will finally go away and we'll have a clean, uniform iPad lineup all with USB-C.
John:
But in the meantime, it's still a good iPad.
Marco:
Yeah, because like, you know, this, I mean, first of all, I do think the timing is kind of funny that they released this right after the school year starts, because I think the largest consumer of the cheapest iPad is probably schools.
Marco:
And so the schools probably just bought a ton of the outgoing model.
John:
Well, but if they keep this cadence, they'll buy a ton of this model for next school year.
John:
And then right after they buy them, a new one will come out.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
But anyway, I feel like this iPad does a lot kind of under the radar.
Marco:
This one is the one that people buy.
Marco:
Schools, businesses, I think mostly schools just buy this in massive quantities.
Marco:
If you need an inexpensive iPad for some reason...
Marco:
whether it's for children or for casual users, business users, installation-type things like Square Terminal, cash registers and restaurants.
Marco:
There's all sorts of things where you just kind of need an iPad.
Marco:
It doesn't need to be very high-end in any way.
Marco:
You just kind of want it to be inexpensive and have the basic features covered pretty well.
Marco:
And so I think whatever the lowest-end iPad is, they always sell a ton of them.
Marco:
So this is an important model in the sense that it's very widespread, and
Marco:
you know, it's, it's by far like, you know, the, the cheapest way into this kind of stuff, but it's also really boring from our point of view as like a tech podcast.
Marco:
Like there's not much to say about it.
John:
I think Casey put in the notes here.
John:
I didn't notice this USB-C power adapter.
John:
So the iPad, the iPad doesn't have USB-C on it, but I assume it comes with a cable that has lightning on one end.
John:
I think that's right.
John:
USB-C on the other and that USB-C plugs into the power brick.
John:
So the iPad kind of got USB-C, but not in a way you really care about.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
No, certainly not.
Casey:
And yeah, they made very brief mention of the fact that it has a USB-C power adapter.
Casey:
And I was like, oh, oh, oh, USB-C.
Casey:
Oh, wait, but that's the original Apple Pencil.
Casey:
So it's got to be lightning.
Casey:
And so it's exactly what you said, John, that it's got to be, you know, a lightning to USB-C cable in there.
Casey:
To go back quickly a half step, Declan last year, you know, was remote for kindergarten the entire year.
Casey:
He was using a school-provided iPad, and guess what?
Casey:
It was iPad 7th generation, 32 gigs, and it was full pretty much the moment he was issued it.
Casey:
But nevertheless, that is, like you guys were both saying, it is definitely the school kid iPad.
Casey:
And, I mean, it does look nice, and it's a nice upgrade.
Casey:
It's still old tech, but it's reasonably cheap.
Casey:
It's $330 for us for 64 gigs or $300 if you're an education buyer.
Casey:
So order today, available next week.
Marco:
And that is twice as much storage as before.
Marco:
You said, you know, the 32 was the standard before.
Marco:
Now it's 64.
Marco:
So that's a nice little upgrade.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, iPad Mini, coming back from sleep.
Casey:
I wouldn't say the dead, but coming back from a slumber, perhaps.
Casey:
It's, quote, their biggest upgrade ever, quote.
Casey:
You know, I used to be a very big iPad Mini apologist.
Casey:
I used to love my iPad Minis, iPads Mini, whatever.
Casey:
I still have a couple, one of which is in use as a kid iPad.
Casey:
I don't think it's really for me anymore because I really do like having the iPad Pro and particularly having a keyboard that I can use easily with the iPad Pro.
Casey:
But that being said, holy crap, this thing looks awesome.
Casey:
So it has the flat sides that I really, really enjoy.
Casey:
And we're going to talk about that some more later.
Casey:
It has an A15, which I didn't say out loud during the keynote, but it does.
Casey:
It supports the pencil too.
Casey:
And I noticed it was very funny that the pencil appears to be just a touch less tall than the iPad is itself.
Casey:
The iPad and the pencil are very nearly the same height, which I thought was quite funny.
Casey:
It comes in purple, pink, starlight, space gray, and apparently no silver.
Casey:
An 8.3 inch display with wide color true tone.
Casey:
They made mention of it being extremely anti-reflective, which I thought was interesting.
Casey:
And 500 nits, which probably doesn't mean much right now, but will mean a little something in comparison later on.
Casey:
It does have the power button touch ID.
Casey:
This is in contrast to the iPad that has the traditional home button touch ID.
Casey:
This one is USB-C.
Casey:
It has 12 megapixel front and rear cameras, including a rear camera with two-tone flash, the 12 megapixel front camera center stage, a new speaker system with stereo, which they specifically said stereo in landscape, which I guess makes sense if they're on what I would consider the top and bottom if you're holding it in portrait, but I thought that was an interesting comment.
Casey:
Also available for order right now.
Casey:
Yeah, you can order right now and it will be available next week.
Marco:
Yeah, this is awesome.
Marco:
So our kid uses an iPad mini as his primary computer device most of the time.
Marco:
And because people on Twitter blew by that everyone's like, why are you upgrading the iPad mini so much?
Marco:
And the reason is the iPad mini for a long time has been a low-end device.
Marco:
And as many nerds like us have said, from the iPad and the iPhone and even the Mac lineup, sometimes the small thing needs to be low-end for whatever reason.
Marco:
Maybe the high-performance hardware can't fit in the smaller enclosure of something.
Marco:
But there's also a lot of people who want a smaller thing in the product line, but who also want it to be good.
Marco:
You know, like sometimes the small thing is the low end thing most of the time.
Marco:
But it's also nice when there's a small thing that has higher end options or higher end performance in some way.
Marco:
And the iPad mini for forever has been just kind of, you know, it's always been middle of the road hardware, not super, you know, great in any real respect, oftentimes lagging behind by a year or two and not updated very frequently.
Marco:
And it went through a time about three, four years ago when we all thought it was dead forever.
Marco:
But the good thing is then they finally updated it, and they've actually kept it updated now.
Marco:
This is continuing a pretty good pattern.
Marco:
I think the last one is updated about two and a half years ago.
Marco:
So this is not bad to have this one be here now.
Marco:
As for the design and everything, what they basically did is made it a tiny iPad Air.
Marco:
Although it's actually better than the iPad Air because it has an A15 and the iPad Air has an A14.
Marco:
So they've upgraded it just more recently.
Marco:
But otherwise, it's basically a mini iPad Air, which the iPad Air is basically a thinned down iPad Pro.
Marco:
And so this actually has really good capabilities.
Marco:
And this is way higher end than I would have guessed.
Marco:
I never would have guessed.
Marco:
that they would have put the new high-end chip, the A15, in the iPad mini update.
John:
You should have listened to last week's episode, because that was one of the ideas of like, why is Apple making such a big initial order to the A15, of the A15 chip from their chip supplier?
John:
Maybe they just needed to order a bunch to get a low price, but the other possibility was like, maybe they're putting an A15 into more stuff.
John:
Now, I don't know how many the iPad mini sells.
John:
Maybe it's a drop in the bucket compared to the iPhone.
John:
But that was an open question based on the rumors.
John:
Was it going to be A14 or A15?
John:
And they did the weird thing in this presentation where they're like, the new CPU is 40% more than such and such and GPU is X% more than whatever.
John:
But they never said what chip was in it.
John:
And as soon as they didn't say, I immediately thought it's got to be an A15 because if it was an A14, they would just say.
John:
Now, them not saying because it's an A15 is dumb, in my opinion, because...
John:
20 minutes later they're going to quote unquote unveil the a15 with the new iphones like we know it's going to be in the new iphones you just increment the number every year it's not rocket science they should have just said it was an a15 and you'll hear more about that chip later yeah it's not like it's it's not like it's unprecedented they've done it before where a couple of times in the past the some other device other than the iphone has rolled out the new system on a chip usually an ipad uh before the phone
John:
But anyway, it's an A15.
John:
And so, yeah, some of those extra A15s that they ordered or whatever are going into iPads.
John:
And if you are interested in an iPad mini, this is when you buy.
John:
Because it's not going to be updated to an A16 next year.
John:
I'm pretty much guaranteeing you that, right?
John:
Unless they've really changed how they're doing the mini.
John:
So at this moment, this mini is an amazing machine.
John:
And it's priced like a one.
John:
It's expensive.
John:
It starts at $499 or whatever.
John:
But...
John:
It is, like Marco said, it's not even a mini iPad Air.
John:
It's better than a mini iPad Air.
John:
It's not quite a mini Pro, but it's kind of in between those two things.
John:
So this is a great little machine.
John:
And if you are a fan of this, this is the time to buy.
John:
Just buy it now and be happy with your purchase for the next few years before the next one comes out.
Marco:
Yeah, it's a fantastic looking thing.
Marco:
Don't tell them, we're probably going to get Adam one for Christmas.
Marco:
But the only thing is, they made it more expensive as well.
Marco:
Even the iPad mini, every iPad, once you spec it up, you're going to be near $1,000 probably, and this is no different.
Marco:
This is like, if you actually want...
Marco:
256 gig model and maybe if you want cellular like that's that's gonna be like seven or eight hundred dollars because now it starts at 500 which i think is a hundred more than before um but it i think given that they're giving it high-end hardware now i think that's reasonable um you know we'll see when it actually gets here uh you know i'll let you know after christmas sometime but but it it looks like a pretty awesome upgrade and
Marco:
If you would have said, you know, the iPad Mini is rumored to get an update, what do you think would be in it?
Marco:
I wouldn't have guessed it would be this high end.
Marco:
And I wouldn't have even guessed it would have gotten the iPad Air design.
Marco:
I would have thought it would have been basically just like the cheap iPad, but smaller.
Marco:
And it's not.
Marco:
They made it a pretty nice, like at least mid-range, if not somewhat high-end product.
Marco:
And that's great.
John:
I wish I knew how many of these things they sold because I do wonder if the choice to go with an A15 was more of an economies of scale choice than anything else.
John:
I'm just like, let's not complicate it.
John:
Let's not, you know, like, let's just put all, let's make the biggest order of A15s that we can.
John:
And we know this, we don't update this product that often.
John:
So it's just simpler.
John:
Let's just go with A15 everywhere.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because it doesn't need it.
John:
No one is dying for an A15.
John:
If it's had an A14, it would still be a great machine.
John:
But lo and behold, it gets the A15 because they've just got a lot of them.
John:
And it's a great chip.
John:
And it's a great chip for an iPad of this size.
John:
Like, you don't need, like, an X variant to have, you know, a huge GPU for all the pixels that it's pushing.
John:
It's the beauty of the mini, right?
John:
Small size, small display.
John:
You can think of it as a really, really big iPhone 13 if you want to.
John:
Only, I guess, without the phone part.
John:
But...
John:
just having kind of like the M1 being in everything you know being in the top end iPad and also all of the ARM Macs it's just nice to have one chip and to use it everywhere and if your chip is really good like the A15 is and like the M1 is go for it and everyone who gets that in any of their products think of the M1
John:
If you have one of those Macs or if you have the iPad, everybody's happy with that chip.
John:
No one feels like, oh, I got this $900, $199 MacBook Air, but it's got a stupid iPad chip in it.
John:
And on the flip side, no one gets the iPad Pro and says, oh, it's got this stupid Mac chip in it.
John:
Everybody likes it.
John:
They make good silicon.
John:
Buy their products.
Casey:
You know, the chat room pointed out a little while ago, and I did not notice during the presentation, the volume buttons are now at the top.
Casey:
They're the same, like, plane as the Touch ID button.
Marco:
Oh, you're right.
Casey:
I did not notice that.
Casey:
I think it's because the pencil takes up the entire side of the darn thing.
John:
Oh, yeah, I see it.
John:
The two little... Yeah, I think you're right.
John:
It's got to be the pencil.
Casey:
I did not notice that.
John:
I think that's reasonable for the mini, like especially if you're using it in landscape mode.
John:
That's the whole mystery of the iPad.
John:
And I think the ones that I was going to say the ones with face ID, but this one doesn't have face ID, but it looks like it might, but it doesn't.
John:
The ones that don't have a home button on the front of it,
John:
there's less of a sort of hardware opinion about what is the correct orientation ignoring the logo on the back which is going to be covered by a case or whatever anyway um so in that scenario having like you say oh they're on the top but really they're on the side if you constantly use it in landscape it's very confusing product but anyway i think it's fine i think it's a perfectly reasonable compromise um for the pencil because i think the pencil is great and you definitely want the one that sticks to the side because it's so much better than that stupid lightning harpoon thing
Marco:
Oh, Harpoon was generous.
Marco:
No, that was more like the really excited pencil.
John:
Unicorn horn, narwhal.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Narwhal's good, yeah.
Marco:
That's much better.
Marco:
One thing I thought was really funny, though, about the iPad Mini is that they have the Face ID iPad generation design here, as you mentioned with Face ID, but the rounded screen corners, the edge-to-edge screen in quotes, but the
Marco:
the the margins like the bezels around the screen seem to be about the same thickness as on on all the large ipads so when they shrink it down to this small screen size it looks proportionally like a much thicker bezel and i love they they kept saying this beautiful edge to edge screen and you look at this thing and it's so not edge to edge like it and i think it looks good but i wouldn't have used that
John:
that terminology over and over again while showing it on screen and it's clear like i think we're going to look at this in 10 years and we're going to laugh at how thick this bezel is i mean i maybe but like i i kind of feel like that that the bezel serves a purpose on an ipad as a place for your fingers to go when you grip it and even though even though like i don't know if apple agrees with that because they may just be like we don't care we're bringing the screen all to the edge as soon as we can because that's an aptly thing to do but uh if you you know
John:
If you believe in the idea of having some amount of place to grip it, that part should scale with the size of our fingers, not with the size of the screen.
John:
So keeping it the same size.
John:
Now, they probably kept it the same size just, again, because economies of scale and, you know, similarities of parts and manufacturing and so on and so forth.
John:
And maybe it will bring it all to the edge.
John:
But we said the same thing when they brought in, remember, from like the original iPad that had like an inch and a half around all sides to grab it?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That was arguably much better for gripping, but it was a lot of wasted space.
John:
And when they went to this design, it was like, oh, there's so much less room to grip, and we have to add, you know, machine learning finger rejection so your thumb.
John:
Remember that whole thing when they went to the, you know, so it knows that your thumb, that you're not trying to press the button on the side of the screen, that you're just grabbing it.
John:
Like, it causes problems, but I think...
John:
going all the way edge to edge will not necessarily make a better iPad.
John:
If anything, it will just make people start buying cases and they'll grab by the case part.
John:
I guess that's the, uh, the, you know, the path of naked robotic core, but I'm, I'm kind of, I kind of like the idea, especially if this is going to be an iPad that a kid might use that, that you still have some sort of non-screen safe area on the edges to grab the thing.
Casey:
This looks really good.
Casey:
It's one of those things where I'm glad this exists, even though it isn't for me.
Casey:
And I feel kind of similar about the iPhone mini, which we'll get to in a second.
Casey:
But I'm glad that there is more than just big and huge things.
Casey:
for iPads.
Casey:
I'm glad that there's something small and, and I have a couple of friends that, um, one is a professional pilot and a couple that are going to get their private pilot's license and they're losing their minds over having a small iPad that's modern because I guess, you know, in the, in the context of a cockpit that it's really, really convenient to have an iPad for various different things, but nevertheless to have one that's huge is a real pain.
Casey:
So they're really super duper excited about this and I I'm excited too.
John:
speaking of the iphone mini i do wonder uh if apple is will eventually start going towards the idea of an ipad mini pro right because the iphone mini is not the iphone mini pro it is not a miniature version of the pro ipads it's a miniature version of the non-pro pro iphones miniature version of the non-pro iphones right and so i was thinking of that for someone using it in a cockpit one of the attributes of the pro ipads is they have this super duper very bright mini led screen it's like more than twice as bright as this thing and
John:
And if you're going to use it in a sunny cockpit of an airplane, you'd probably want a screen that's brighter than this one.
John:
But you can't get it because they don't sell a Pro Mini with that type of thing.
John:
Presumably Apple knows what the market for this looks like.
John:
But, yeah, this has got an A15 in it, but a 500 in it screen.
John:
But the good pencil, but, you know, not ProMotion.
John:
It's kind of – it's a little bit better than the iPad Air.
John:
But they're close now.
John:
They've got the same design, the top-end chip.
John:
You could add another $100 or so to this and come up with an iPad Mini Pro.
John:
That would actually be pretty cool.
John:
But probably for the same reason they don't make an iPhone Mini Pro.
John:
There's just not enough demand for it.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But I think that tension continues to exist in Apple's line where they will diversify.
John:
in both size and features, but there's always a little pocket where they say, you know what, we're not making a pro and non-pro variant of what usually ends up being the small one, just because we think we're diversified enough.
John:
If you really want the small size, you're going to deal with compromises.
John:
Otherwise, we have a good spread.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Moving on, Apple Watch.
Casey:
We had a little bit of discussion about watchOS 8, and I thought a new announcement, but maybe we knew this and I missed it.
Casey:
But they're adding a cycling workout and fall detection, including better support, better algorithmic support for e-bikes and, you know, how many calories you're burning when you're using an e-bike.
Casey:
They're going to have memories and the photos app on watchOS 8, which is great.
Casey:
But what we all care about, of course, is Apple Watch Series 7.
Casey:
I know, Marco, you were celebrating that they don't have the flat sides.
Casey:
I still like the flat sides.
Marco:
Oh, thank God they didn't do the flat sides.
John:
I just want to point out, but up to this point, our rumors that we went through last show were pretty much dead on for everything that was announced, but here things went off the rails.
John:
Or onto the rails, if you're Marco.
Marco:
Yeah, I think actually, besides the screen size increase, I don't think any of the other rumors about the Apple Watch came true.
Marco:
They were talking about possibly having more sensors.
Marco:
They were talking about, obviously, the flat-sided design.
Marco:
And meanwhile, it looks like we have no new sensors.
Marco:
We don't have a flat-sided design, thank God.
Marco:
And then the things that were the other things that were changed, like the faster charging, you know, differently kind of bulkier MagSafe thing, possibly.
Marco:
No one talked about that at all.
Marco:
Like that was not rumored.
Marco:
None of that stuff.
Marco:
But anyway, oh, oh, and the production delay was rumored.
Marco:
So that's the thing.
Marco:
These aren't coming out till fall.
John:
Yeah, before you get to the design of this thing, did they ever mention what chip is in it?
John:
I searched the website and I scripted the video.
Marco:
So here's the thing.
Marco:
This is kind of a theme of this whole event.
Marco:
They only very briefly talked about the A15.
Marco:
Almost every comparison they did when talking about the A15 was not comparing it against the A14.
Marco:
It was comparing it either against like a two-year-old model of something else that uses like the A12 or something, or they were saying it's X percent faster than the leading competition, which is like, you know, in the Android world.
Marco:
So what I'm guessing here, I'm guessing the A15 is not a massive upgrade from the A14.
Marco:
Now, that being said, these are still amazingly fast chips.
Marco:
There's tons of headroom, but this doesn't seem like it's a year where the chip is taking a massive jump.
Marco:
And if it's not taking a massive jump on the main A-series chip for the phone and iPad, I think a lot of that same core design is probably shared with other products, like whatever the Mac chip is going to be this year, and possibly the watch CPUs.
Marco:
And so
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if this is kind of a battery life gaining year all around, if they just improve efficiency in a lot of areas and don't necessarily spend a lot of that budget on performance.
John:
Well, the question is, does this have a different chip than the Series 6?
John:
Or does it have exactly the same chip as the Series 6?
John:
Oh, that's interesting.
Marco:
You know, that wouldn't surprise me.
Marco:
They've done that before, where they've repeated the same chip in two watch models, I believe.
Marco:
And not the Series 1 and 2, which were actually the same year.
Marco:
But I believe, didn't the 3, or no, I think the 4 to 5 didn't change the chip or something like that?
Marco:
I believe they've done that before.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
But anyway, yeah, that wouldn't surprise me.
Marco:
But honestly, I'm shocked that I'm saying this.
Marco:
but the series six watch has been fast enough for me it's the first time an apple watch has ever been fast enough for me it's the first time where like the cpu speed of the watch does not appear to be holding me back for the most part now what i'm doing development other things hold me back like the wireless debugging too soon too soon marco we'll get to that some other day but
Marco:
But it doesn't seem like... In the past, the watch's own processor being so incredibly low power has really slowed me down in development.
Marco:
But the Series 6, it finally doesn't seem to be doing that.
Marco:
I'm able to do all sorts of stuff with SwiftUI and the interface that I think might be slow, and then I try it, and it's just not.
Marco:
So anyway, I don't think the watch necessarily needs a faster CPU.
Marco:
What the watch always needs, always, always, always, is more efficiency.
Marco:
Not just to extend its own battery life.
Marco:
Sometimes it needs that.
Marco:
But what it mostly needs it for is, in my opinion, to enable apps to do more.
Marco:
Everything you do on the Apple Watch as a developer is heavily throttled by the system.
Marco:
You have such incredibly low limits.
Marco:
Like if you use more than a certain percentage of the CPU for a couple of seconds, it just kills your app.
Marco:
Like you're just out.
Marco:
There are so many limitations on like what you can do with complications and with app backgrounding and stuff that like you just get no time to do anything or it'll only let you update the complication, you know, 20 times in an hour or whatever.
Marco:
You know, there's there's certain there's all these limits all over the place.
Marco:
to you know to to ensure like they can get through the day power wise and anything that the watch can do to improve efficiency might lead to some of those limits getting lifted and so from a developer's point of view and from all of you as a user point of view that's kind of what you should want because that changes what watch stuff can do so we'll see what happens but if they didn't improve performance that's not necessarily a bad thing in this particular generation
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I was reasonably excited for the Series 7, and I currently have a Series 6 because I'm a blatant consumer and believe in blatant consumerism when it comes to this stuff.
Casey:
But I love my Series 6.
Casey:
I like it a lot.
Casey:
I agree with what you were saying about speed, as long as you're not doing development.
Casey:
Pardon me while I go fetal.
Casey:
But nevertheless, my battery life is still not stupendous, as I was whining about last episode.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
for battery life alone, I was, I was interested in maybe getting a series seven.
Casey:
I am still interested, but there's nothing about it.
Casey:
That's making me go, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh yes.
Casey:
That's what I want in my life.
Casey:
And so what are the things that they're trying to hang their hat on?
Casey:
Uh, they're trying to hang their hat on the new screen.
Casey:
Uh, it's still a little bit bulbous for lack of a better word.
Casey:
It's not the flat sides that I maintain look cool, even though Marco is disgusted by them.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
The screen is 20% bigger than the Series 6, 50% bigger than the Series 3.
Casey:
God help us.
Casey:
We're going to talk about that in a minute.
Casey:
It has a less than 2mm border.
Casey:
It's 40% thinner than the Series 6.
Casey:
It has a wraparound effect on the... Wait, hold on.
Marco:
The watch is not 40% thinner.
Marco:
I think the screen...
Marco:
Yes, like the cover glass, the cover crystal is thinner.
Marco:
The watch looks like it's actually about the same.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
And I think they said something about the charging thing, wart, whatever, that's part of the watch.
Casey:
I think they said it's actually a smidge bigger.
Marco:
Blob is the official term, the charging blob.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
The charging blob, TM, is actually a little bit bigger, I think.
Casey:
Check my work on that.
Casey:
I might be wrong.
Casey:
But anyways, the screen has a wraparound effect on the display edges, which makes it look like the display is going, like, curving a little bit, even though it isn't.
John:
I didn't understand that.
John:
Like, so, obviously, this is not the flat design.
John:
This is the same design as all the other ARPA watches.
John:
And they did the same thing they have done every year where there's been a quote-unquote redesign, which is...
John:
Technically speaking, in car parlance, every panel is different.
John:
Every body panel is different.
John:
But practically speaking, it still looks like a 911, right?
John:
Like it's the same watch, right?
John:
It is the same look, but it is different.
John:
But part of that is the glass on the top of it.
John:
Like if you look at it from the side, you can see the glass because the glass itself has a little bit of a dome on it.
John:
Now, the difference between – and that has been true, I think, for all the watches.
John:
Like if you looked at it in a profile, you could see –
John:
the dome of the glass or the crystal or whatever.
John:
But in the past, what that has meant is, okay, there's that little dome, but the only part of that that we light up, if you look at it head on, is the flat part.
John:
And in this watch, it seems like they're trying to say, we don't just light up the flat part, we also light up the parts that curve towards the edges.
I...
Casey:
I don't think that's true.
Casey:
So we're recording the night of the keynote and we don't have all our facts straight.
Casey:
You could say that this episode is a little bit accidental.
Casey:
But I believe what they said was that because of the way the display – or excuse me, not the display.
Casey:
Because of the way the like –
Casey:
crystal at the top is it refracts and again that term might be wrong i might be using that incorrectly but it refracts a little bit of the light such that it appears that it's being lit up on the like curved portion but it is not in actuality being lit up there it's just a basically an optical illusion that was what i took from it i think it has to be lit up there because if you look at it head-on you'll see there's like the the amount that's not lit up when you look at it head-on
John:
in which case there's no sort of looking from the side refraction going, you're just looking at top view, the amount that's not lit up is too thin to encompass the entire radius, it seems to me.
John:
Again, not having seen it in person, it's hard to tell in the pictures, but it seems to me that even the screen itself could continue to be a flat plane that lights up, but because that flat plane...
John:
goes, I don't know.
John:
I mean, they also say it's closer to the glass too, so it couldn't be like, you know.
Marco:
Well, so here's what I think is going on.
Marco:
First of all, what we said a minute ago about it being 40% thinner is not right, or at least the way I interpreted that.
Marco:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Marco:
The thickness of the cover glass slash sapphire, which they call the crystal because that's the watch term, but it's either glass or sapphire depending on the model.
Marco:
The thickness of that
Marco:
like as in like the height of it off the case is not only not thinner it's actually thicker they even brag about how it's actually thicker to make it stronger now i think i don't think it's sticking up as far i think the way it got thicker is by going down towards the screen but what's 40 thinner is the the width of the bezel around the screen so like if you're looking at it head-on like the margin around the screen that is what's 40 thinner
Marco:
the crystal itself is not thinner, and in fact has apparently grown downwards to basically reduce the distance between the screen and the glass.
Marco:
Now, what Casey is saying about the way it refracts around the side is probably right.
Marco:
Watches do this.
Marco:
There's actually not that many of them, but if you know about the
Marco:
is it Ressence or Ressence?
Marco:
It's this high-end oil-filled watch brand.
Marco:
Not all of them are oil-filled, but their high-end model is.
Marco:
There's also, throughout time, there's been a few other watches in the watch world that have oil-filled cases.
Marco:
I actually own one by Sin.
Marco:
It's actually this wonderful old diving watch.
Marco:
And what's interesting about oil-filled watch cases is that there is, the way the oil in the middle of the case refracts light is different than the way air gaps do between the dial and the crystal.
Marco:
And it basically does this.
Marco:
It looks just like this.
Marco:
The side view on the Apple Watch page with the oily-looking screen.
Marco:
Basically, if you look at it at an angle, it looks like, in the case of the actual watch, the dial on the hands, or in the case of the Apple Watch, the screen contents, it looks like it is painted on the surface of the glass as opposed to being on a screen that's a couple of millimeters below it.
Marco:
What I'm guessing they've done here is that they did make the crystal bigger, thicker.
Marco:
They put it down towards the screen and eliminated the gap between the screen and the crystal, most likely.
Marco:
That would probably create this same effect when paired with a crystal with the right shape, which it looks like they have done.
Marco:
So I'm guessing that this will, from the side, I think it actually will look like this.
Marco:
It will look like it goes almost edge to edge.
Marco:
Now, the watch face they've chosen to show this off, the one with the warping numbers around the side, which honestly I think is hideous, but it does show off the effect well.
Marco:
I think they've obviously designed this watch face to...
Marco:
not go all the way to the edge.
Marco:
It goes all the way to the edge of the screen, but this face is designed with a black margin around the numbers as a design element that happens to coincide with the edge of the screen.
Marco:
So it makes it look even better than it is, but I still think it's going to look pretty awesome, and it's going to probably have much, much better visibility at deep angles.
Marco:
And if they've done this trick that I think they might have done, it should, for whatever it's worth, also make it more visible underwater.
John:
So my question is, if the screen continues to be a flat plane and it goes as far to the edge as Apple's pictures make it seem like it goes, does that mean the screen, the light up part is farther away from the surface of the crystal as well?
John:
Because again, if you have like a dome shape and you have a flat piece, you can't push that flat piece against the dome shape unless you start curving the edges of it, right?
Marco:
Well, the bottom of the crystal is presumably flat.
Marco:
Like the inside part of the crystal is flat.
John:
so it's like the crystal is filled like it's it is a dome shape but it is completely solid glass or sapphire or whatever and it has a flat bottom and that's what the screen is shoved up against most likely yes all right that that makes more sense like i don't i've never actually like cracked one of these open or seen the iFixx thing where they actually like saw the thing in half and say show me
John:
where the light-up part is because i'm still just envisioning it as like a flat screen but then like a you know a hollow dome that's on top of it if it's if it is a solid thing with a flat bottom this makes way more sense and yes then it totally is refracting to the side or whatever but then when you would head on but i mean the main point is someone had a good
John:
tweet about this i just grabbed the image and put it in our show it's uh i guess i'll grab the the twitter link as well um saying that the series three which we will get to in a moment now looks like a css error on apple's website because you see that you see the series six which looks like an apple watch with a big black border around it you see the series seven which is like an apple watch with no border and you see the series three which is like an apple watch and unfortunately someone put this rectangular photo in the
John:
And it doesn't look correct.
John:
It doesn't look right.
John:
And really, I think this screen is the most important aspect of the Series 7 as far as I'm concerned, just because it finally gets to the point where I feel like you've filled the watch face with screen.
John:
And maybe you're like, I didn't feel cramped.
John:
I don't need more complications.
John:
I didn't need to see more data.
John:
Even if you don't care about any of those things, I think just aesthetically speaking and sort of like Johnny Ive, like essence of the product speaking.
John:
Now it finally looks like what I would imagine they wanted it to look like from the beginning.
John:
If you remember the original Apple watch designs, all the watch faces intentionally like essentially had black bodies to them.
John:
So you couldn't see that terrible edge.
John:
Like you wouldn't see, oh, I have a rounded rectangle with a non-rounded rectangle inset far into the middle of it.
John:
But if you just make everything in the background black because it's OLED, you don't notice that.
John:
But as soon as they got the rounded corners, they said, we're going to light up the whole screen.
John:
And now finally, when you light up the whole screen, you essentially light up, again, judging by Apple's marketing pictures, the whole surface of the watch.
John:
And there, I think, you've essentially achieved what you want.
John:
And now you can vary the size of that and everything, and you're not, like, burning any space on...
John:
you know, empty black area on the watch.
John:
And we'll have to see one in person to see if this refracting effect is weird or whatever, but I really like this design.
John:
I think I'm kind of with Marco, I don't really care about what watches look like, but I'm kind of glad that they stuck with the 911 design and just like, look, it looks like an Apple watch.
John:
It is slightly refined.
John:
It is better in a bunch of ways, but it is still the iconic design.
John:
Um, if, and when they come out with a new design that sort of radically changes from this, uh, you know, I think it will be, I'll be happy when it happens, but one more year of this design is perfectly fine with me as I think this watch looks really good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I honestly, like I don't, I have yet to think of, I mean, look, I'm not an industrial designer by any means, but I have yet to think of how they could give the watch straight sides and have it look better than what they are, what they have already accomplished with the curved sides.
John:
If it was half the thickness, it would look cool with flat sides for sure.
Marco:
Maybe, yeah.
Marco:
It would be possible.
Marco:
But also keep in mind, the entire strap ecosystem has all been designed with this curved blobby look.
John:
Yeah, I mean, obviously half the thickness is not going to be next year.
John:
It'll be many years in the future.
John:
But if they stick with this iconic design, it's fine.
John:
But speaking of straps, that's another advantage of this design.
John:
As far as I'm aware...
Marco:
you can still use all the existing bands that's right watches yeah because they said like it said they basically they barely changed the exterior dimensions um so the exterior dimensions are effectively the same according to them we'll see how it plays out in practice um one other thing worth noting um silver as a as a case color is gone like except unless you go steel but like the silver aluminum that used to be kind of like the default color of an apple watch i totally missed that
John:
Just like the iPad mini, no silver in the mini, no silver in the watch.
Marco:
Yes, like the low end products no longer have silver.
John:
So what color is this?
John:
I'm looking at the picture and like, you know, there's black, something that looks like silver probably isn't called silver.
John:
No, that's blue.
Marco:
It's starlight is the closest thing, which is like a very light gold.
John:
starlight isn't it seems like it's the new space gray and that there's a thing called starlight that is a different color in every product that has that color but it all kind of looks grayish like this starlight looks a lot like silver yeah but it's like it's like it's silver with like a little bit of pink and copper blended in like it's really it looks like true tone kind of went wrong and from silver and it's
John:
It's like a lot of these things are like really testing your color receptors.
John:
I don't know.
John:
This is something they tend not to do.
John:
They just, you know, for they give you a colorblindness test, especially if you're a boy in school or whatever, getting your eyes tested.
John:
You know, they want to make because the colorblindness is more prevalent in boys than girls.
John:
And so they give you this test, can you tell the difference between red and green or whatever, what numbers is it?
John:
But what they don't do is, can you tell like this mild fuchsia from this slightly more purpley fuchsia?
John:
Like no one ever cares about those nuances.
John:
And no, I don't want to get into, do you see the same green as I do?
John:
But like subtle variations in color, I think Apple's color choices with these things like starlight are getting to the point where there's probably large sections of the population that literally can't tell starlight from silver.
Marco:
Yeah, probably, but I think it's interesting.
Marco:
I mean, because they've had these same colors, the kind of basic silver, space gray, whatever that means each year.
Marco:
They've had these basic colors for a long time.
Marco:
And the fact that they've thrown silver out with the low-end products this year, like the same thing, the iPhone 13 and 13 mini do not offer silver.
Marco:
The Pro line does, but the 13 and 13 mini do not.
Marco:
And neither does the Apple Watch Series 7 in aluminum or the iPad Mini.
Marco:
I think that's very interesting.
Marco:
And one thing I do like about these new colors, though, across all these products, is that they seem to have made them more bold, especially like the red is much more red and bold.
John:
More saturated, you mean, right?
Marco:
Yeah, more saturated and a little bit darker, which I think is nice because the design over the last couple of years has been pretty pastel.
Marco:
I finally at some point recently saw the new iMacs in person in an Apple store.
Marco:
And I was surprised how incredibly pastel they all were.
Marco:
And I honestly didn't think any of the colors would be right for me if I was buying one.
John:
Well, the front of the iMacs are pastel, but the back, they went bold like these watches.
John:
Like the back of the blue iMac is not powder blue.
John:
It is deep blue like this watch.
John:
Same thing with the back of the red one, the back of the orange one.
John:
The fronts are all very pale and pastel, which I think was sort of intentional to not...
Marco:
be distracting but i think the the imax like in total surface area the imax are also bold colors just not on the side that you look at fair enough uh but yeah ultimately like the the colors in general look pretty good uh and the aluminum this year um and i think am i correct that the titanium and steel colors did not change with this generation
John:
Yeah, I'm just looking at them in the keynote where they have a lineup of five watches in the keynote with various colors.
John:
I almost feel like Apple is sort of on its way, but not quite willing to embrace the everything's an automotive analogy, the car thing.
John:
So everyone knows when you buy a car.
John:
rarely do you buy a car and get to choose a color like purple or pink right they all have stupid names like starlight right they're all called even the white is not called white it's called like you know pearl opalescent pearl white or some whatever there's always some fancy name for any color uh and so we've got space gray which is a fanciful name we've got starlight and we got pink and purple why why not call why don't you call pink and purple or something too
Marco:
Oh, interestingly, by the way, the watch does not come in space gray anymore either.
Marco:
It comes in midnight, which looks like a very dark grayish blue.
Marco:
So it's close, like midnight and starlight are close to space gray and silver, but they're subtly not.
Marco:
Midnight is darker than any space gray has ever been for sure.
Marco:
Well, in the pictures.
Marco:
It's hard to tell.
Marco:
But they also offer something just called Blue, which is significantly lighter looking than last year's Blue Series 6.
Marco:
So we'll see how this goes.
Marco:
We might have to see these in person.
John:
And by the way, red ring on the – what is it called?
John:
The digital crown?
John:
It's red on all of them.
Marco:
Oh, that's interesting.
Marco:
Even the non-cellular ones?
John:
Oh, I don't know.
John:
I'm just saying like the blue one has a red ring.
John:
The silver slash starlight one has a red ring.
John:
The navy slash midnight one has a red ring.
Casey:
I would guess the product shots are just all indicating cellular like Marco was alluding to.
John:
I know, but it's just not color coordinated, I feel like.
Marco:
And I know they have to have a ring there.
Marco:
It doesn't have to be red, but they have to have a ring to electrically separate the middle of the crown, which is used for the heart sensing, and the outside of the crown.
Marco:
And so it has to be electrically non-conductive boundary between those two.
Marco:
But I do kind of think the red ring does not look good anymore.
Marco:
With most of the colors that they offer, I think that should just be black on everything now.
Marco:
I think the red doesn't look good.
John:
It looks good on the silver one, I think.
John:
occasionally but like if the color is neutral if the watch color is neutral the red accent looks good if the watch itself has a color like the blue one the red seems like it's competing and the red one they no longer sell a neutral colored watch they do the star starlight i feel like is neutral i don't think so we'll see how it looks in person i can't tell and i'm looking at my true tone screen here and at night with weird yellow lighting i don't know what it's doing to these colors yet we definitely have to see these in person but anyway this this is not new the red ring thing has been i think it was the same for previous generations as well
Casey:
all right so a couple other things to mention with regard to the watch uh first of all it is available later this fall uh which we don't know anything more than that uh additionally they they touted all day battery life which i can tell you on my series six is not really freaking true but whatever uh 33 faster charging and i i might have these wrong this happened very quickly and i was trying to take notes so so again check my math on this
Casey:
But I believe they said it would go from 0% charge to 80% in 45 minutes.
Casey:
And it was something like eight minutes was enough to do sleep tracking or something like that.
Marco:
Yeah, it was eight minutes of charging for eight hours of sleep tracking.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
And it has apparently a USB-C charger.
Marco:
Which, by the way, Apple has already sold USB-C Apple Watch chargers for a long time.
Marco:
They were these little short ones for traveling, which has actually been great.
Marco:
But no one ever knew about them or bought them.
Marco:
But this is presumably a USB power delivery charger, which is probably going to be faster wattage.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And so I don't know.
Casey:
It was unclear to me if the puck portion was different.
Casey:
I thought they implied that it was.
Casey:
But again, maybe I got that wrong.
Casey:
So it'll charge faster, which is nice.
Casey:
I mean, I wouldn't say that I personally feel like it charges too slowly in the Series 6, but certainly faster charging is better, especially if you're trying to do sleep tracking.
Casey:
They said they're going to have a lot of new colors for existing bands.
Casey:
They did explicitly say that it will be compatible with existing bands.
Casey:
And hey, guess what?
Casey:
Marco, great news.
Casey:
If you're looking for a watch that's super cheap, your favorite, the Series 3, is only $200.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
How is this still a thing?
John:
I mean, I know we're about to complain about the Series 3, but the SE is still the same too, right?
Marco:
Yeah, that's the thing.
Marco:
Last year, when the Series 3, which was super old last year, when they dropped that price to $189, and they introduced the SE at $279 last year, everybody said, okay, well, it sucks that we have to have the Series 3 for one more year, but at least next year, which is now...
Marco:
They'll drop the Series 3 finally, and then they'll drop the price of the SE from $279 to $199.
Marco:
Well, guess what happened this year?
Marco:
Nothing.
Marco:
They kept the Series 3 at $199, and they kept the SE at $279.
Marco:
No change.
John:
To be clear, this is not like the iPhone SE where there was a new phone called iPhone SE that was better than the old one called iPhone SE.
John:
Isn't that what they did in the phone?
John:
Right.
Marco:
And the Apple Watch SE is basically a Series 5 minus the always-on screen.
Marco:
Like hardware-wise, it's effectively that.
Marco:
It's like a lower end.
Marco:
Oh, and I think minus the EKG support as well.
Marco:
So it's effectively like a feature-cut Series 5 to make it more like the Series 4 but with the Series 5 guts.
Marco:
So it's not – the SE is a totally fine watch.
Marco:
But there's no reason – like the SE was seemingly built to be inexpensive.
Marco:
So –
Marco:
Obviously, the long-term plan, I hope, is to do exactly what we expected to happen today, which was drop it to $200 and get rid of the three and call it a day and keep it in line for a while.
Marco:
But that didn't happen today for unknown and unclear reasons.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Marco:
And the Series 3, the reason why we're upset, it's not because like, oh, we're making fun of old things.
Marco:
It's because the Series 3 is not a good product in 2021.
Marco:
It also wasn't a good product in 2020.
Marco:
It was a fine product when it came out in 2017 or something, 2018.
Marco:
When it came out, it was fine.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The Series 3 now is very difficult for both Apple and developers to support.
Marco:
If you remember, there were a lot of changes from 3 to 4.
Marco:
3 to 4 is when they changed to the new industrial design with the more rounded corners, the more edge-to-edge screen, and that added a whole bunch of watch face changes that were made possible by it having a much faster 64-bit processor and much more RAM and much more storage space.
Marco:
The Apple Watch Series 3 experience of ownership today is terrible.
Marco:
Apple Watch Series 3 owners, you have to unload your watch to do a software update because there's not enough space on a Series 3 to download and install a software update.
Marco:
That's how bad the experience is.
Marco:
The Series 3, it cannot use any of the modern watch faces.
Marco:
It cannot use color complications.
Marco:
Anything that includes the word infograph on its watch face is not available on that watch.
Marco:
There's not enough RAM to do anything.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
The 38 millimeter size, the entry level size, which personally, a separate discussion is like Apple hasn't made a watch that size since then.
Marco:
And so for people who need or want a smaller watch, the 40 millimeter one that's existed since then is good.
Marco:
That's the one I wear, but it's certainly bigger.
Marco:
And so there is, you know, they made everything bigger and never really refilled a small one.
Marco:
But anyway,
Marco:
As a developer, supporting that screen size is very, very hard because it's way smaller, way more cramped than the 40mm watch screen space-wise because not only did the watch itself get bigger when it went from 38 to 40, but the screen margin got way smaller.
Marco:
And so you get a way bigger screen with the 40mm Series 4, 5, and 6 NSE than you do with the Series 3.
Marco:
So keeping around the Series 3 is not just like...
Marco:
oh, the next one up is 20% faster.
Marco:
The jump from 3 to 4 was a huge jump in both hardware specs of just CPU and RAM, as well as the practical effect of having to try to support that old version in UI design, in apps, and for Apple with the OS.
Marco:
And so the fact that they're selling it now still means that watchOS 8 not only couldn't drop it because they were selling it last year, but this also means that watchOS 9 next year probably can't drop support for the Series 3 either.
Marco:
And neither can any of us who run apps for it.
Marco:
And that sucks for both Apple and all developers out there.
Marco:
And frankly, everyone who buys one of these watches today, because it's a terrible product to be buying new in 2021.
Marco:
If you still have a Series 3 and it still works for you, great.
Marco:
But to be buying it new in 2021 and to expect it to be an okay experience two or three years from now, let alone even just now, I think it's setting people up for failure and for crappy experiences and a crappy opinion of Apple.
Marco:
And that's...
Marco:
This is a product that's so old and so low-end by today's standards, they shouldn't be selling it at all.
Marco:
And if they can't sell the Apple Watch SE for a cheaper price, I think they should still stop selling the Series 3 because it is not a good product to be selling right now.
Casey:
You know, I agree with basically everything you said, but I would hope and I would guess that if they're still going to sell this seemingly ancient watch, that hopefully they would do something on their end to make the experience less crummy.
Casey:
Like maybe they would do some optimizations in the OS to make it faster.
Casey:
Maybe they would make the OS smaller so you don't have to unload everything on your watch in order to do a software update.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Again, I'm not really arguing with anything you're saying.
Casey:
I can only hope and assume that there has been work put in to make it better.
Casey:
But who really knows?
Casey:
I wouldn't assume that.
John:
They're not working on old products like that.
John:
What I would pitch for the people listening to this is the SE is only $80 more.
John:
Right.
John:
So just buy a knockoff band from Amazon for way less money than Apple charges and save money for an extra month and just get the SE.
John:
It's like a Marco's already out one.
John:
It's so much better product than the Series 3 and the prices are close enough that you should just wait a little longer, get a cheap band from Amazon and get the SE instead.
Marco:
yeah because not only is it so much better in lots of ways it will also last longer because it doesn't have such ancient hardware like for 80 bucks more you get i think two or three year old better hardware than like it's it's a pretty big jump in hardware specs and it's way nicer to use because it's so much faster and has the has the more modern screen supports all the more modern watch faces and complications and everything else so it's it's just so much better in all those ways plus it will last you longer in software support and performance
Casey:
All right, well, I'm sorry, everyone, about Series 3, but, you know, here we are.
Casey:
They did a little bit with Jay Blahnik with regard to Fitness Plus.
Casey:
I've been using Fitness Plus a fair bit over the last few months, and I really like it a lot.
Casey:
It's certainly not for everyone, but I quite like it.
Casey:
It's joining 15 new countries later this fall.
Casey:
They will continue to do workouts only in English, or at least that's what they implied, but they will subtitle in six languages.
Casey:
There will be new Pilates workouts, new guided meditations, and
Casey:
There will be workouts to, quote, get you ready for snow season, quote.
Casey:
And then they did something which was probably the smarter thing to do, but it is not what I wanted them to do.
Casey:
They are now going to do group workouts.
Casey:
And they specifically said it is powered by SharePlay, which is delayed.
Casey:
But they said you can work out with up to 32 people at once.
Casey:
And
Casey:
do this remotely unfortunately they made no mention of doing anything where it's anything like i want to do which is aaron and i working out on the same tv you know on doing the same workout at the same time on the same tv that's what i want to do uh and they don't seem to care about that they want you to buy your own ipad or television or phone or what have you buy a second apple tv a second television it's like having two xboxes in the house and playing halo
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So I still think this is neat.
Casey:
And I know a lot of people that don't do Apple Fitness Plus workouts, but do like other kinds of workouts like Beachbody workouts while simultaneously on Zoom or Teams or what have you to like cheer each other on and so on and so forth.
Casey:
That's not personally for me, but I know a lot of people that do it.
Casey:
And so I think this is a very good idea.
Casey:
I think it's a it's a clever use of share play.
Casey:
Unfortunately, it doesn't fix the problem that I have.
Casey:
But, you know, you can't win them all.
Marco:
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Casey:
At about 1.35, so about 35 minutes into the show, we got the iPhone.
Casey:
And this is presented by Kai Andrantz.
Casey:
So we start with the iPhone 13.
Casey:
It has a smaller notch with the front-facing camera mounted way to the left.
Casey:
And according to Twitter, although the notch is not as wide, it may be taller, question mark?
John:
It's hard to tell from the photo.
John:
Someone needs to find, like, whatever the specs are they give.
John:
the case makers or screen protector makers, whatever it's plausible.
John:
If it is taller, it's taller by a very, very tiny amount.
John:
Maybe the fraction of a millimeter is just interesting.
John:
Um, if it actually, if they did actually end up making it taller, it doesn't really make that much of a difference though.
Marco:
I didn't notice it being taller when I ran the Xcode simulator right before the show.
Marco:
I did notice it being narrower, like you can see more in the status bar area, but I don't think it's meaningfully, if any, taller.
John:
I was kind of surprised that they mentioned that it was narrower in the keynote because it's the type of thing that Apple sometimes just doesn't mention.
John:
I just assume you'll notice because they don't want to draw attention to the notch, but they did.
John:
They said, hey, it's a narrower notch.
John:
Isn't that great?
John:
I'm like, yeah.
Casey:
That's cool.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
The colors on this, I'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit.
Casey:
The colors, I'm really digging on the colors.
Casey:
They have a nice like, what is it?
Casey:
Like a rose goldy pinky one.
Casey:
The blue, I don't remember the actual terms for the colors, but the blue looks really, really nice.
Casey:
Is it just blue?
Marco:
It's called pink, blue, midnight and starlight, just like last time it says space green, silver, midnight and starlight.
Marco:
So yeah, pink, blue, midnight starlight and product red.
Casey:
And wow, is that product red.
Casey:
Really freaking red.
Marco:
That red looks awesome.
Casey:
It does look good.
Casey:
I'm being told from Jelly that it's Sierra Blue.
Casey:
Was that the Pro that was Sierra Blue, actually?
Casey:
Only the Pro is being called Sierra Blue.
Casey:
Okay, okay.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
The regular, like, Mini and 13 are just being called Blue.
Casey:
Gotcha.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
For some reason.
Casey:
Anyways.
Casey:
I don't know why.
Casey:
The two lenses on the camera are diagonal instead of vertically oriented.
John:
Which I think looks better.
John:
One question about the camera thing, we'll talk more about this with the pros, is the little plateau that they're on bigger and do they stick out more overall from the phone?
Marco:
I couldn't quite tell with the non-Pro models.
Marco:
Certainly, we'll get to the Pro later, but when they showed the Pro, they leaned way into how giant the camera plateau is.
Marco:
They're like, look, this is just going to be what we're talking about the whole time.
Marco:
The way they shot it with the video, almost like it was a mountain that they were approaching.
Marco:
I think the camera area on these phones is going to look massive on pretty much all of them.
Marco:
especially the pros.
Marco:
And I think they're just, they're just leaning way into that and just saying, yeah, you know what, that, you know, this is, this is why we're all here, isn't it?
Marco:
Like you don't care that we made the CPU faster.
Marco:
You don't care that we have new colors.
Marco:
You care about the camera, right?
Marco:
Well, here, we're going to give you the camera really, really big.
John:
I mean, you would have thought from the intro video where they're like doing CG flybys of the phone.
John:
And again, this is more true of the Pro.
John:
You would have thought that they were introducing a new camera because it was like all the flybys were flying around the camera.
John:
It's like, oh, and by the way, there's a phone attached to this camera.
John:
I mean, isn't that kind of the case?
John:
Yes.
John:
A little bit.
John:
The camera is super important, but I mean, mostly because we already know.
John:
Especially this year.
Marco:
It seems like this year also, most of the improvements this year to the iPhone seem to be camera improvements.
Marco:
It seems like the improvements to the rest of the product line are not nearly as significant.
John:
They're harder to demo.
John:
We'll get to ProMotion in a little bit for the pros, but you can't really demo that in a 30 frame per second video on the web.
John:
Speaking of the small notch, I'm looking at the video where they actually show a screen protector.
John:
They're trying to say, oh, and whatever the...
John:
what do they call the thing on top of the screen do they call it a crystal whatever the protective layer oh shoot the ceramic shield i believe so they show that sort of like landing on the phone but it looks a lot like a screen protector does and you'll notice in the ceramic shield there's a little cut out for the earpiece speaker that as you mentioned in the last show is shoved way to the top so that is that is apparently where the speaker is it is very close to the top of this phone and so i would
John:
And part of the reason I'm asking about the camera bump is I was saying last week, oh, be careful if you buy a case that has a lip over it because the lip might partially cover that speaker and it's very easy to accidentally blunt the sound from these tiny speakers if you cover any part of them, right?
John:
But if the camera plateau on the back
John:
is different in any way, you know, like if it's larger or smaller or positioned differently, that means you're not going to be sharing cases with the 12.
John:
And so presumably if you have a dedicated 13 case, hopefully the case manufacturers were smart enough not to cover the speaker.
Casey:
One would hope.
Casey:
So sticking with the 13 non-pro, there's also an iPhone 13 mini, which appears, as far as I know, to be identical other than size to the 13, which is great.
Casey:
They specifically said the competition is still playing catch-up from two years ago with regard to the A15.
Casey:
And speaking of the A15, this was presented by Hope Giles, six core, two high performance for efficiency, a four core GPU, a 16 core neural engine, which will roll 15.8 trillion operations per second.
Casey:
And then it has two times the system cache.
Casey:
Now, my memory stinks, but wasn't one of the things we decided about, maybe it was the M1, maybe it was the A14, was that part of the reason it was so damn fast is because it had a tremendous amount of system cache?
Casey:
Or am I making that up?
Marco:
No, that's correct.
Marco:
I think it depends also what level.
Marco:
Is this L2?
Marco:
Is this L3?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But most of the people who know more about this stuff, who've analyzed what makes the M1 so fast, having a lot of cache on chip, a lot of the performance has been attributed to that.
Marco:
So if they're doubling one of the caches on the chip, that's a pretty significant thing.
John:
Well, they got more cores.
John:
The main thing that makes these 8-chip series chips fast is they can get data instructions from memory very efficiently because it's high bandwidth, and they can dispatch a bunch of them simultaneously.
John:
I forget how wide the dispatch unit is, but it was like,
John:
wider than Intel chips, because for Intel chips with x86 going more than, I forget what the number is, I'm sorry, I'm getting this wrong, maybe it's like six decoders or something, there's no point in me getting more of them just because of the dependencies and the variable instruction size, whereas Apple's A series chips and the M series chips
John:
can get tons of data and instructions and send them all through the cores at once.
John:
Like it can keep the engine fed because usually what slows down chips is not like, oh, this chip isn't fast enough to do a computation.
John:
There's nothing for it to do.
John:
I'm an adder.
John:
I'm ready to add two numbers together.
John:
Who's got two numbers for me to add?
John:
And it's like, ah, sorry, there's not that many instructions that we can pull and decode and shove down into you.
John:
So you're starved a little bit because we've got a data dependency and, you know,
John:
reorder buffers and all that other stuff so having apple's architecture and its instruction set and everything is tailored to be able to essentially get more stuff if you think of like meat going through a grinding machine they can get more stuff in there and just send it through and so you've got more cores and that's not you know it's not 40 cores but six is more you know six is more than they had last year right you need to keep them fed and if you want to keep them fed more cores also means an increase in the amount of cash now what they said it's two times the amount of cash which is
John:
way larger increase than the increase in the core count but the core count alone probably means that you want to have more cash just so uh your you know your extra cores aren't fighting for cash space with the you know with the core same number of courses you had last year so um the the 815 and also i saw a lot of stuff
John:
rumors about the A15 and thermal throttling and everything.
John:
And, you know, every one of these phone chips thermal throttle because they're in a phone and there's no fan and they get hot playing games and so on and so forth.
John:
But as we get higher and higher end chips, unless we have, you know, and this is a shrink, right?
John:
So last year was seven nanometers, right?
John:
And this is five.
Marco:
I think the A14 and the M1 were also five.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe they're also five.
Marco:
Yeah, I first heard that, but I think on confirmation, I think that it's actually not a shrink.
John:
Well, anyway, when you have something like this where you're cranking up the core count, you can't just run all those all the time because heat alone is going to be a problem.
John:
So the name of the game is always you have these facilities available for you for burst performance, but then you chill back out and you go on your efficiency course and stuff like that.
John:
And so this...
John:
this a15 is probably capable of draining a battery faster which is why these phones have bigger batteries like actually physically bigger batteries um which you know will hopefully give us you know we'll talk about the battery life plans in a little bit but if you cranked up everything on these like you played a game that used all the gpu cars and all the cpu cars they will produce a huge amount of heat and suck down a huge amount of power um but if you're not playing a game
John:
that horsepower is there just waiting for you in tiny little bursts.
John:
But most of the time to be able to make it through the day, you're not even close to tapping into them.
John:
That's also where the caching comes in handy.
John:
It's like, oh, just we have data, a data set that can fit in cache and we will nibble away at it with our efficiency cores and everything will be chill.
John:
But by the way, we do actually have to put a physically larger battery in these things because if we do crank up all the machinery we put in them, we will eat power.
John:
So you'll be doomed.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I think
John:
it's kind of weird what they do with the we keep calling the s generation but like where they don't change the outside case it's more or less looks the same you know even if the camera bumps change slightly but they do change the internals and apple made this point in the presentation it's not like they took the internals and like mildly tweak them if you look at what's inside this phone it really doesn't have any bearing on what was inside the previous phone right it's a new motherboard it's a new battery it's a new camera system like it's
John:
Inside is all new stuff.
John:
On the outside, I know it looks the same, but inside it might as well be an entirely different phone.
John:
So don't just think of this as like, oh, it's just like the, it's just like the 12, but a little bit better.
John:
I mean, that's kind of true, but it's not like they took the 12 and like replace one small component.
John:
This is an all new phone on the inside.
John:
It's just that on the outside, it looks the same.
John:
So, and I'll also say like the 13, like the 12,
John:
this is the this is the phone to get right if you don't care about the pro features which you honestly you probably shouldn't despite what apple said in their market materials like it's then a little bit and despite what we're going to talk about in just a second um the 13 it has the the matte finish aluminum that's a lot of people like better than the finish on the pro ones i think it's slightly lighter and
Marco:
it has the same system on the chip as the the supposed pro one it has one fewer camera so like if that matters to you it doesn't have the same system on chip as the pro and the pro one has more gpu cores it has the pro has five and the mini and 13 have have four so it's not a huge difference
John:
I wonder if that's a, you know, it has five, but one of them is dead or whatever.
John:
Probably.
John:
But anyway, like, that won't make a difference in your life.
John:
I promise you.
John:
Like, this thing, this change they made with the 12, basically making the 12, you know...
John:
not feel like a step down from the 12 pro is so smart and this these phones are so good uh i you know i if i was getting on which i'm not i you know i i would get the pro because i'm silly right but i'm so glad this phone exists and i'm so glad that this is the one without any qualifiers it's just iphone 13 if you want to start and you get the iphone 13 you will come away with a really good phone um i'm i'm very happy with this product this year
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Some real-time follow-up, by the way.
Marco:
The A14 was also 5 nanometers, just like the A15.
Marco:
And the A14 was also two performance cores and four efficiency cores.
Marco:
So generally, it doesn't – oh, and it was also four cores of a GPU.
Marco:
So same as this, except for the pro phones.
John:
Oh, I thought they had added cores.
Marco:
No, they didn't.
Marco:
So the basic metrics of the iPhone or the A15 processor of like how many cores it has, what process it's manufactured on, those are all matching still from the A14.
Marco:
So I'm sure it is better.
Marco:
But again, I think this...
Marco:
further supports that this might not be that much of a processor jump this year it might be you know possibly like single digit percentage faster in certain things you know maybe like you know 10 or 15 percent at best in certain things but we're not talking about a massive thing here now they did the you know the the non cpu parts of the system on a chip they did a whole bunch of stuff there with like video encoders and decoders and stuff like that this is the neural engine the 16 core neural engine is that an increasing course maybe
Marco:
No, it's not.
Marco:
16 cores in the A14.
Marco:
So, I mean, the cores are probably different, but I don't know if they're that different.
John:
This definitely explains the battery life claims later because, yeah, they did put a bigger battery in there, but if they were, sorry, so that's, so forget about all that stuff with the more cores.
John:
It's just plain old they put a bigger battery in the thing.
Marco:
Yeah, it seems like they've done some stuff, obviously.
Marco:
We'll see as we get these things in our hands eventually and people do some testing, we'll see what's actually better about it relative to the A14.
Marco:
But I would expect this is a very small year for the chip and a big year in other areas like the camera.
Marco:
But the chip is not a reason to buy these phones right now.
John:
So I do wonder if the M2, sorry to talk about Mac stuff, but if the M2 is going to use A15 cores, how much of a difference it will make?
John:
Like, how much of an upgrade over the M1 will the M2 be if it also has the same amount of cores as the M1?
John:
In other words, if you just take the M1, more or less the same core counts everywhere, but upgrade them to the A15 versions of those cores, would it be a big upgrade?
John:
Or maybe the M2 is on a different path?
John:
We don't know.
John:
The M2 is not a real thing that exists yet, but...
John:
I'm going to be very interested to see the benchmarks.
John:
You mentioned before that Apple was always comparing to their competitors or the three-year-old chip that's in the cheap iPad or whatever.
John:
And we dismissed that as like, oh, it's not interesting for you to compare the competitors.
John:
But it's only because we all know that competitors suck compared to Apple's chips.
John:
It's a quote-unquote unfair, uninformative comparison.
John:
It's like, yeah, but...
John:
non-apple chips suck that's not telling me anything what i want to know is how much faster are you than the previous best apple thing and if that number is not big enough i'm going to be disappointed or whatever but um you know the a15 is not a slow chip presumably it is faster than the a14 uh even if all of the components have the same number of counts uh
John:
percentage wise kind of with marco that i would be shocked if anything is more than 15 faster even in artificial benchmarks but that's that's honestly plenty um what people want from their phone is i is not like i wish the cpu was faster it's they wanted the battery lasts longer and it seems like they've solved that problem by including a bigger battery
Casey:
It seems so.
Casey:
Now, we should talk about the 13 camera, not the Pro, but the 13 camera.
Casey:
The wide camera, which is their, like, standard camera, is, quote, the biggest sensor we've ever put in our dual camera system, quote.
Casey:
It allows 50% more light.
Casey:
It's f1.6.
Casey:
It has the sensor shift stabilization that was coming off the 12 Max.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And it was unclear to me which lenses on which phones have this stabilization, but at least the wide or standard camera on the 13 definitely does.
Casey:
The ultra-wide, they said it's going to be a lot better.
Casey:
And then they introduced cinematic mode for video.
Casey:
Which, I don't know, I'm happy to do a chief summarizer in chief summary of this.
Casey:
But if you guys got a better read on this, on the technical details of this, I'm happy to step aside and let you handle it.
John:
Yeah, I think from what I've been able to surmise, it's what we talked about in the rumors last episode.
John:
Like, oh, imagine portrait mode.
John:
But instead of it being done for photograph, done for video.
John:
And it seems similar to that, right?
John:
So it is apparently capturing depth information along with the video.
John:
And then once you have that depth information, you can, after the fact, after you've recorded the video, decide which things you want it to blur because it understands what is in front of what because it has depth information.
John:
And the stuff that they show, they show like the rack focus and, you know, focusing on different things, right?
John:
Obviously, you can do that while you're recording, but then even you can change it after the fact.
John:
But it's not...
John:
It's not like focusing like you would by twisting a lens or whatever.
John:
It is doing the portrait mode blur business where because it understands the depth of the photo, the depth of the video in some way, it can blur.
John:
And it has the same, I would assume, exactly the same weaknesses, although maybe better for year over year.
John:
in terms of finding the edges of the hair and ears and, you know, the little triangle between your elbow and your body when you put your hands on your hips and all the problems that portrait mode has had of trying to figure stuff out.
John:
Presumably powered by LiDAR now.
John:
Well, not LiDAR on these ones, I guess, but on the Pro it has LiDAR.
John:
um but like i mean it gets better every year at not blurring off people's ears and stuff but still i don't expect miracles out of this and the final thing that i was kind of disappointed to hear is although it makes sense you know previously we're doing portrait mode you take a picture and it does the depth information and you know blurs and so on and so forth now it's got to do that in video isn't that so much harder it is uh and that is probably why at least on the 13 i know i think on the 13 pro as well
John:
This thing, cinematic mode, is limited to 1080p, 30 frames per second.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a bummer.
John:
It's on the iPhone 13 Pro specs page.
John:
That's it, right?
John:
So no 4K, no 120 frames per second, nothing like that.
John:
And it's presumably because that's the rate at which it can, you know, handle gathering the depth information, right?
John:
Because...
John:
I mean, I guess it needs to render it in frame as well.
John:
I'm not sure what the limiting factor is, whether it's we can't collect that information at more than 30 frames a second or we can't render in real time the effect that we need to.
John:
We can't do the blur in real time based on the depth information.
John:
But anyway, that's a pretty big limitation that shows that this feature is really pushing the limits of the tech they have in these in these phones.
Marco:
Yeah, and honestly, the example they showed, I think it looks weird.
Marco:
Is it just me?
Marco:
Even the one that they showed before they said, and we actually shot that video that you just saw with it.
Marco:
Even that, when the focus changes from something in the foreground to something in the background,
Marco:
The way it changes looks weird to me.
Marco:
It looks both too fast of a change and it looks like it kind of passes the point where it should go and then kind of pops back.
John:
I think it's kind of doing that on a purpose to make it seem like a human is twisting a lens or being a focus puller.
John:
I think a focus puller wouldn't screw that up.
John:
But a regular non-professional human twisting the lens of a camera to manually change focus, it's very easy to overshoot and then come back a little bit.
John:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
But yeah, it looks more like focus hunting, like when a camera is doing contrast.
Marco:
No, that's what they call it when cameras do contrast autofocus and like it like passes the optimal point and backs off back to the optimal point.
Marco:
It looked like that.
Marco:
And so it not only did it look weird, but even like, like even the rate at which it was changing, it looked like a mistake, not like, and it looked unnatural.
Marco:
Like, I don't know.
Marco:
To me, like maybe I'm just picky about this kind of stuff because I don't even, look, I don't know anything about video.
Marco:
I've never pulled focus, whatever that means.
Marco:
I don't like, I don't know anything about making videos, but I know when something looks right and doesn't look right and it didn't look right to me.
Marco:
Even beyond blurring off people's hair.
John:
Yeah, it's not quite the same as optical focusing, although they do the best they can with the depth information.
John:
If you notice the scene they did, it was like people in kind of like a dark mansion indoors, which the sort of darkish background probably hides the sins of the edge finding algorithm.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like it's like when you do special effects and you make it all dark because if it was a sunny day, you'd see how bad your CG is back in the day.
John:
Yeah.
John:
um so i i think they're doing the best they can with the the stuff that's available to them but yeah i with the hunting like they tried to show like look our phone will figure out like oh when you hold the thing up really close to the camera it will focus on that and when you put it down it will focus on the thing behind it that's a thing that
John:
quote-unquote real cameras like youtubers use or whatever like the the new the the what is it the a7s3 or i don't get the stupid yeah i think so yeah anyway um that's a feature of those cameras but those cameras are actually changing focus as in a big you know thing with glass and it is twisting and changing right that's what it's actually doing but it does it in response to
John:
hey if i hold up this product outstretched in my arm my youtuber camera will focus on it but then when i put the part back down on the on the table it will focus on my face again that's what the iphone is doing only it's not changing focus it is just blurring stuff out based on depth information that it's gathering which is a neat trick but still not quite what people want out of their cameras and and i guess we'll this isn't this isn't the thing where they had katherine katherine bigelow come out right so i guess we'll talk about that later but
John:
um but anyway it's cool that it can do this at all and improved cameras are appreciated and the iphone does shoot really good video but i think you know bringing portrait mode to video i have the same sort of position on it as i have on portrait mode which is it's not a feature that i find interesting but i'm not in the majority because i see a lot of people use portrait mode for like all their pictures and they love it so i think you know people are not as picky as marco and i
Casey:
I think it looks interesting.
Casey:
I don't know if I would use it very often, especially because I would want the higher fidelity video, but I think it's cool, and presumably next year we will get the higher fidelity video, but we'll see.
Casey:
Like I said, battery life is better.
Casey:
The Mini gets one and a half more hours, supposedly.
Casey:
The 13 gets two and a half more hours.
Casey:
It uses smart data like this year's phones, or I'm sorry, the 2020 edition phones do, so it'll only use LTE when 5G isn't necessary.
Casey:
They made a point of, hey, this uses MagSafe including a new leather wallet that includes Find My.
Casey:
So when it slides off because it's only connected by magnets, then you can find it, which I thought was quite funny.
John:
This is not the solution to the problem with this product.
John:
Oh, we have a wallet product that connects to the back of your phone with a magnet.
John:
And guess what?
John:
It's pretty easy to knock it off.
John:
No one wants to lose their wallet.
John:
How can we solve this problem?
John:
Let's think, everybody.
John:
What can we do?
John:
Okay.
John:
Oh, I know.
John:
Let's put a thing in it that lets people find it after you... No!
John:
Make it so it doesn't get lost.
John:
You know how it won't get lost?
John:
If you make an actual wallet case that wraps around your entire phone.
John:
Do lots of people who have wallet cases for their phone constantly say, Oh no, the wallet case fell off my phone again and I lost my wallet.
John:
No, it never falls off.
John:
It's like they're on there like a death grip.
John:
It's a pain to get your phone out of them because it wraps around the edges of the entire phone and it becomes...
John:
this wallet product like it amazes me that someone had this meeting is like i know how we can solve this we've got these amazing what is it what are those things called that you find your bike with marco i've already forgotten air tag air tags all right we've got this amazing air tag tech what if you put an air tag in our overpriced magnetic wallet thing that way when it when it accidentally falls off people might find it no no apple stop leave it like what are they what are they doing over there oh god this hurts me to think about
Casey:
It's interesting.
Casey:
And it can't be an AirTag because there's no battery spot.
John:
Whatever they're doing, whatever technology they're doing, that's not the solution.
John:
Like making it easier to find out after I lose it.
John:
I don't want to lose it.
John:
I don't want it to fall off the back of my phone.
John:
It's a bad product.
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
So 13 mini, $699, $13, $799.
Casey:
They said that you can get up to $700 off if you trade in a, quote, qualifying, quote, iPhone.
Casey:
They doubled the default storage capacity from 64 gigs to 128, which is great.
Casey:
And you can get a half terabyte, which is pretty cool.
John:
And you forgot to mention the 5G.
John:
More bands in more places.
John:
This is as close as we got to any kind of mild confirmation of the idea that if there are bands that used to be used for satellite communication that were reallocated to 5G and that those new modems can use them.
John:
I don't know if that's related to this, but they did say more bands.
John:
And importantly, they didn't say anything about satellites.
John:
So in case you're wondering if the new iPhones have any satellite stuff, they do not.
John:
Yeah, they probably would have mentioned that.
Casey:
I would think so.
Casey:
iPhone 13 Pro.
Casey:
This is what I'm going to be getting, I think, because I, again, believe in rampant consumerism.
Casey:
So there are three cameras, just like before.
John:
Before you get to that, do the weight stuff, because now it's the time to talk about weights.
Casey:
Oh, OK.
John:
They're all slightly heavier than last year.
John:
exactly like and not not just the pros but they're all a little bit heavier and i assume that's like bigger battery and battery is pretty dense and heavy part of it i don't i don't know where the weight is now in the grand scheme of things we're talking like you know 10 20 grams right but they are getting heavier and the previous year's phones weren't particularly light like they feel big and dense it's the type of thing that once you get the phone and it becomes your phone you just get used to it you don't notice it anymore but you
John:
if you do this every year if you have like a 10 15 gram increase every year eventually you have some kind of problems i don't think they're in the problem zone yet but just fyi these are a tiny little bit heavier across the board all the phones like the the 13 is about 10 grams heavier than the 12 was the 13 pro is about like 13 14 grams heavier than the 12 pro was like that's that's the range these things are in so you know that that and then i guess we can talk about the camera bump which is the next thing that is
John:
Not heavier, but larger on the 13 Pro.
Casey:
Yeah, so the cameras... Oh, actually, we should also talk about colors very quickly.
Casey:
We've got Sierra Blue, as previously mentioned, which I think looks freaking good.
Casey:
It's a very, very light blue.
Casey:
I really like the midnight blue of my 12 Pro, but I think this looks excellent as well.
Casey:
So Sierra Blue, silver gold, and graphite.
Casey:
And I actually think the graphite looks pretty good, too.
Casey:
It's a lighter gray than one of the space grays or blacks or whatever, the black du jour.
John:
Not that you'll ever see it, Casey, because you're going to have a case on this.
Casey:
You are damn right I'm going to have a case on this.
John:
You can get a clear case, I guess.
Casey:
Although, actually, that said, forgive me, I forget who it was in the chat, but somebody in the chat was pointing out that with AppleCare+, if you purchase it today or later, so this is no good for my AppleCare+, that I purchased a year ago, but if you purchase AppleCare+, today or later, a back glass replacement is $30 instead of $100.
Casey:
which is news to me that is pretty good and it's making me wonder if i should go caseless caseless again but we'll argue about that another time because 30 bucks is not that bad but i think especially when their cases are like 50 60 70 bucks but whatever i think you're right that i think i will go i will put a case on this because i'm trying to learn from my mistakes of two consecutive years i should add but anyway uh the sierra blue looks darn good which i unfortunately will never see
Marco:
It does look really good.
Marco:
I'm curious with the Sierra blue.
Marco:
If you recall, the way Jaws was describing, he mentioned that there's special ceramic particles that are in just the Sierra blue color.
Marco:
There's something special about that coating.
Marco:
or paint or whatever it is like there's something special about that that is different from the others in its makeup besides just the color that it is so i'm curious if it will actually look noticeably different or if it just looks like a light blue case i'm also curious you know one one of the major downsides of last year's pro line was just how incredibly fingerprinty those those steel case bands would get and on the dark blue phone you saw every single fingerprint that ever touched that thing
Marco:
So maybe by making the blue lighter and by putting magic particles in the finish or something, maybe that makes it less fingerprinty.
Casey:
That's very good, magic particles.
Casey:
I like that.
Casey:
Actually, before we get to the camera, I keep trying to bring up the cameras, but before we get there, I should also note that we have the finally arrival of...
Casey:
the high frame rate display.
Casey:
We get a 120 hertz ProMotion display.
Casey:
This is something that I personally have not felt like I'm missing out on.
Casey:
I don't even feel like I noticed it that much my iPad Pro, truth be told, but maybe I'm just not discerning enough.
Casey:
One way or another, I think it's great to have it.
Casey:
I wonder and hope that the variable refresh rate that certainly comes from these displays, if maybe that helps with efficiency and battery life, because they were saying, you know, hey, when we don't need 60 hertz, which is a default on older phones,
Casey:
we'll just refresh it, you know, 10 Hertz or whatever the case may be.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The 10 was the minimum instead of the watch.
John:
The watch does what one Hertz.
Casey:
I believe that's right.
John:
It's interesting.
John:
I mean, obviously we didn't get the always on screen on these phones either.
John:
So maybe 10 Hertz is sufficient, but it's interesting.
John:
They didn't crank it all the way down to one.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm sure there's some electrical reason for that.
Marco:
But I mean, I'm sure it's going, you know, like everything else with weird OLED power saving tricks, it's going to probably depend a lot on what you are doing on the phone.
Marco:
Like this might save a lot if you if you like, you know, just have the phone sitting on a table with the screen on that you like left it on for a while.
John:
You're just like reading Twitter when you're not scrolling.
John:
That's 10 hertz.
Marco:
that's true yeah you know yeah because like you know you might think like oh i'm constantly touching my phone but you you know you probably like scroll it and then stop for even even you're stopping for a quarter second yeah as far as the computer is concerned it's like like you know billions of cpu cycles and dozens or hundreds of uh potential screen refreshes while you read that one tweet so
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
I mean, that's like an overcast.
Marco:
That's how smart speed works.
Marco:
It doesn't work by cutting out long pauses only.
Marco:
It cuts out all the pauses or reduces them proportionally.
Marco:
But even small pauses in the middle of words might be long enough for it to trim them down a little bit.
Marco:
And you don't realize how much it actually saves because you don't think of words as having silences inside of them, but they do.
Marco:
And similar to this, like, you know, I think you're right, John, like as you're scrolling through something, you know, you scroll, stop, scroll, stop, scroll, stop.
Marco:
And all those stops, you can save time there.
Marco:
You can save frames there and all that will add up, you know, probably not to massive battery gains, but some battery gain.
Marco:
I did want to mention the screens on both the Pro and the regular iPhone 13 have gotten significantly brighter.
Marco:
The Max brightness is up.
Marco:
They're both up to, let's see, the 13 and Mini are up to, I believe, 800 nits sustained brightness.
Marco:
And the Max and the regular Pro are up to 1,000 nits sustained brightness.
Marco:
And then they each can peak up to 1,200 for HDR stuff.
John:
For HDR, mm-hmm.
John:
I've actually occasionally watch television shows on my phone just because I'm downstairs and too lazy to go get the iPad or whatever.
John:
It's a really good screen.
John:
It's OLED.
John:
It's got good blacks.
John:
And if the show you're watching is HDR, it shows off pretty well.
John:
So make that even better.
John:
Like, yeah, this is a good screen.
Casey:
All right, the camera system.
Casey:
It is the biggest camera advancement ever, supposedly.
Casey:
It's the biggest camera ever.
John:
Yeah, I mean, speaking of you going caseless, I don't know how this thing is going to sit on the table without a case.
John:
Because if you look at it from the profile, and they showed it in the keynote...
John:
So there's a little plateau that is like, oh, it's like the back glass of your phone puckers up a little bit, right?
John:
So that's the plateau.
John:
Then on top of the plateau, you've got the silver disks that define the cameras.
John:
Then poking out of the silver disks, you have the black disks.
John:
And all of those things, the plateau, it looks like the silver and the black, they're all slightly bigger than they used to be.
John:
And so you add them all together and you get...
John:
A mighty camera bump, which makes me think like I saw a YouTube video like iPhone 14 rumors and like, oh, flush cameras in the back of the iPhone 14.
John:
Like, really?
John:
We're going to go from the biggest camera bump that we've ever had on an iPhone in one generation to flat?
John:
Maybe.
John:
I mean, hey, it's a generational leap.
John:
Like, that's what we do.
John:
But anyway.
John:
This is a big camera bump.
John:
And it affects not just how this phone would feel if you put it on a table without a case on it, right?
John:
But it also affects the cases that are designed for this because they also have to have an even bigger and more prominent lip if they want when you put it down on the table for the case to contact the table and not the lenses of your cameras, right?
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, and gone are the days where like the thickness of the case would be sufficient to like, to make the bottom surface of the phone flat.
John:
Like, I suppose you can still do that, but that would be a pretty thick case.
John:
Like, again, look at this in the keynote in profile.
John:
I guess I should have done some, like, millimeter measurement to figure, like, what percentage of the thickness of the body of the phone is the camera bump?
John:
It looks like more than half, right?
John:
It is very big.
John:
And I think, honestly, this is the correct tradeoff for this device because people love to take pictures with their phone.
John:
And if you can make this camera better, by all means, make it thicker.
John:
I'm just saying that this is...
John:
I feel like it's more of an issue in the, not in the thickness of the design, but when you look at the phone from the back, it looks to me like the actual size of the rounded rectangle that contains the three camera lenses is also bigger than it was.
John:
It looks like it, yeah.
John:
At this point, it is more than half, like it's,
John:
it's starting to look disproportionate.
John:
It's starting to look kind of like that idea that you're gonna put the cameras in the upper left corner of the phone.
John:
It's not in the upper left corner anymore.
John:
It's just taking over the whole top of the phone.
John:
And so it's like, maybe should we center this?
John:
Should we think about not doing them in like a triangle design?
John:
Should they be in a line?
John:
Should we just take up the whole top third of the phone?
John:
I'm really interested to see what the next, like the iPhone 14, the next physical design of the phone does, because I think we have exhausted
John:
this design of reserve the corner of the back of the phone for the camera it has outgrown the corner it is now it's taking over it's like all those parody shots where they show like 100 little cameras on the back of the phone um and again i don't think that's the wrong decision lots of other phones from other manufacturers do this they essentially dedicate the entire top half or a third of the the thing or they have a big line of cameras that go horizontally vertically like
John:
This is a problem that every smartphone manufacturer is facing.
John:
Apple is just not quite ready to face the music.
John:
So they have put out what I think is a little bit, a little bit of an unbalanced design for the pro phone.
John:
And that like the bump is a little bit too thick for this design.
John:
And the plateau is a little bit too big.
John:
And the cases make it look a little bit unbalanced.
John:
I'm sure no one will really care about this because all people care about is that it takes better pictures.
John:
And this thing looks like it does.
John:
I just think we are at the end of this evolutionary stage and it's time to try something else next year.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't disagree.
Casey:
However, I am really excited about this new camera system.
Casey:
I am really stoked for the 3X optical zoom telephoto.
Casey:
I think that's going to be great.
Casey:
If there's anywhere that I feel like my iPhone really falls down is if I'm not close to my subject.
Casey:
And especially when you have kids or dogs or whatever –
Casey:
Oftentimes you can't or can't quickly or conveniently get close to your subject.
Casey:
And so to have a telephoto at all is really helpful for me anyway.
Casey:
And to have a 3x optical, I think is going to be great.
Casey:
So I'm really excited about that.
Casey:
Before I move on, Marco, thoughts on the telephoto?
Marco:
As somebody who has not had a more than 1x lens for the last year, I do miss the telephoto.
Marco:
I have the same issue.
Marco:
The limit of whether I can use my iPhone to reasonably get a shot usually is not, do I have enough megapixels?
Marco:
Usually the limit is, do I have enough reach optically?
Marco:
That is by far... Literally this morning...
Marco:
I wanted to take a picture of there was a cool-looking sailboat off in the distance on the water, and I was pretty far from it.
Marco:
And I tried getting a picture of my iPhone, and you just couldn't see it.
Marco:
I had to bust out the Sony with its 90mm lens and take a picture that way.
Marco:
The 3X lens on this is 77mm equivalent.
Marco:
That's pretty great.
Marco:
The only thing that gives me significant pause here is that...
Marco:
In the past, the telephoto lenses for the cameras have been substantially less light gathering.
Marco:
They've had much higher F numbers, and they gather less light, and therefore their pictures have tended to be duller and more noisy or more blurry after processing because they need to amp up the ISO in order to get enough light in there.
Marco:
Um, and this has gotten worse in this respect, the telephoto, uh, you know, so the, uh, the other cameras have all gotten like universally better.
Marco:
Like they've been, they've been great.
Marco:
Awesome.
Marco:
Um, the two X lens of most of them though, is a little bit of a different story.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
um the the 2x so the the wide like the quote 1x i'm just gonna i'm not gonna use their stupid terms of wide being 1x all right so the 1x camera last year it was f1.6 uh on the pro line and this year it's f1.5 that's good that's more light the lower number means more light coming in more light coming in means it can have less noise better colors etc okay good um
Marco:
The telephoto in the 12 Pro was f2.0.
Marco:
That's the 2x on the 12 Pro.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Marco:
The 12 Pro Max had that 2.5x camera, and that went from f2.0 on the 2x to f2.2 for the 2.5x.
Marco:
So the 2.5x camera was actually a little bit worse of a lens in terms of how much light it let in, but it was zoomed in more.
Marco:
The new 3x cameras are f2.8.
Marco:
That's from f2.2 to f2.8.
Marco:
It's a big jump.
Marco:
So what this means is that the telephoto camera, I think 2.0 to 2.8, I think is one stop or maybe one and a half stop.
Marco:
Anyway, what that means is that the 3x lens lets in substantially less light than last year's 2x or 2.5x cameras did.
Marco:
And so what that's likely to yield is significantly duller pictures.
Marco:
You're not going to be able to use that lens in low light very well.
Marco:
What the iPhone cameras have always done ever since there was more than one lens is in low light, because the 1X camera always had the best optics, in low light, even if you'd zoom into 2X, it would kick back and actually use the 1X camera and just digital crop out the middle and make that your 2X picture.
Marco:
I expect that to be the case here as well, not only because it can't even use the 3X camera unless you are actually zoomed into 3X so that you have more of a gap between the two, but also the 3X camera is so optically much worse than the 1X camera.
Marco:
It's a bigger gap this year in terms of how good those two are relative to each other than there's ever been.
John:
Well, the 3X one, though, like you made it sound like you're going to have duller pictures, but like if you're a sailboat example, if it's a sunny day, don't worry about it.
John:
It will be fine.
John:
Like F2.8 on a bright, sunny day of taking a picture of a sailboat out on the water, you're going to be fine.
John:
It's once you're indoors or not even night, just indoors, like with just indoor lighting or in like a dimly lit restaurant or, of course, anything at night.
John:
uh yeah you're probably going to be hurting and it will fall back to the 1x lens but for the applications that i imagine people need optical zoom like it's not in a crowded bar at night where you need the 3x zoom probably right it's going to be oh my kid is far away from me on the soccer field or something or i want to get a picture of that bird in the tree or that sailboat on the water in those scenarios you probably have adequate light i think this is the right trade-off and this is generally true of most like zoom lenses for quote-unquote real cameras
John:
They gather less light, right?
John:
So you have, you know, some, you know, 750 millimeter lens.
John:
It's not going to be f1.2 probably, right?
John:
It's, you know, you're going to lose light just for the lens elements alone.
John:
It can be the size of a car.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So...
Marco:
uh so i think like despite going down in the light gathering ability i think it is well worth that trade-off for 3x optical zoom i think you're probably right but i do think like for people who get this phone which i might be one of them we'll see but you know if for people who get this phone oh interesting i think the i think
Marco:
the lower quality of the lens on the 3X will be noticeable during the lifetime of you having this phone.
Marco:
It might not be noticeable all the time, just like the 2X camera often isn't noticeable, but that will be noticeable sometimes, and that is something worth pointing out.
Marco:
That being said, they've done so many other optical upgrades on this camera system that I'm sure Casey's about to cover, but basically...
Marco:
I'm very excited about this camera system.
Marco:
And even though the 3X camera is f2.8, which scares the crap out of me in terms of what that means for noise, I think the utility alone of that would be pretty great.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
No argument here.
Casey:
And so the ultra wide lens, which is the one that is shared with the 13, but it's not the standard lens.
Casey:
This is like the, what do they call it?
Marco:
One half X. The 0.5 X lens.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Uh, F 1.8.
Casey:
And it now supports macro photography at a minimum distance of two centimeters, which is really cool.
Casey:
That's great.
Uh,
Casey:
Yeah, I'm really interested.
Casey:
I don't feel like that's something I would desire to do often, but it's certainly something I would want to do from time to time, and I really like.
John:
You need it when taking pictures of labels or using the magnifier thing or whatever.
John:
It's like when you want to take a picture of a serial number on the bottom of a mouse, let's say.
John:
Maybe we'll talk about that next week.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
And you see your phone focus on things.
John:
Like, oh, I can't.
John:
It's all blurry or whatever.
Marco:
No, that's just doing cinema mode.
John:
Yeah, having something that's actually capable of focusing at macro type distances of two centimeters solves that problem.
John:
And I really hope that the phone defaults to the ultra wide when it realizes you're trying to take a picture of something that close because that's exactly what this is great for.
Casey:
So that's F1.8, which is pretty freaking big in my personal opinion.
Casey:
But then the wide or 1X lens, F1.5, which is to my eyes, and Marco, correct me when you're ready, but that is impressive.
Casey:
I mean, I'm looking at, I happen to have my quote unquote big camera here, which admittedly is not the fanciest camera in the world, but I have a pretty nice prime lens on it right now.
Casey:
And it goes up to F1.4.
Casey:
And this lens was like an $800 lens or something like that.
Casey:
So here it is, the 1X lens on the iPhone 13 Pro.
Casey:
F1.5, not bad.
Marco:
Yeah, well, to be fair, it's not directly comparable.
Marco:
When sensor sizes are different, the optics of this are, like, the way it works is different depending on the sensor size, and it's, like, it's less impressive to have.
Marco:
to have a 1.6 aperture on a tiny when your sensor is the smaller than your pinky nail yeah exactly uh it's still it's this is still a good thing but it's it's best to compare it relative to itself like relative to previous iphones not to big cameras that have much bigger sensors and bigger optics and everything else um but this is good you know the the um the 12 line the one x camera had a 1.6 aperture
Marco:
And now we have 1.5, so we're a little bit better.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
And I think, is this, let me just double check here.
Marco:
Is this actually, yeah.
Marco:
So this only applies to the Pro phones.
Marco:
So last year, the camera systems between the non-Pro and Pro phones were much more similar than they are this year, with the exception, you know, it didn't have the big one, the big...
Marco:
2.5X slash 2X1 last year, and that there was only sensor shift stabilization on the Max.
Marco:
But this year, the difference between the 13 and 13 Mini and the 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max is a much bigger difference in camera.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why I'm probably going to go Pro this year, because the camera difference here is huge, and noticeably and noteworthily...
Marco:
There's no difference in the camera system this year between the Max and the midsize Pro.
Marco:
There's no difference in the phones at all, it seems, except the size of the screen and battery.
Marco:
Everything else about the Max versus the regular Pro is the same this year.
Casey:
The way God intended.
Casey:
This is my favorite kind of year, when I don't have to have a choice between an absurdly oversized phone that has the 2.5x camera or what have you,
Casey:
and the phone that's still probably too big but at least manageable i genuinely am so happy when the among the flagship models anyway when the standard and humongous sizes are equivalent which has happened once or twice in the past but often the ridiculously oversized phone will get some you know new often camera related technology that makes me jealous but i just can't bring myself to get the ridiculously oversized phone so i'm really happy
John:
Last year it was, what, sensor shift in the 2.5X?
John:
Correct.
John:
That's the max?
John:
Correct, yep.
John:
And so this year, sensor shift made it all the way down to the 13, which is nice.
Marco:
Yes, the 1X camera has sensor shift now on all the phones.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Which is great.
Marco:
One major change... So last year, the...
Marco:
Pro... Actually, I think just the Pro Max had a larger sensor that had larger pixels, and that's great for light gathering.
Marco:
You want that.
Marco:
Larger pixels means more light hits each one, and so it's a similar thing as having more light coming through the lens.
Marco:
It helps you have lower ISOs, lets you get faster, sharper shots with better contrast and less noise.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So this year, the larger sensor that was in the 12 Pro Max last year now is in all the 1X cameras, which
Marco:
But the Pro cameras only this year, now their sensor got even bigger.
Marco:
So the big sensor from last year that's now on the non-Pro models is 1.7 micrometer, I believe is the unit.
Marco:
The little U thing, that's micrometer, right?
Casey:
Most people pronounce it micrometer, I believe, but yes.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, okay.
Marco:
Affluent.
Casey:
Do I have that right?
Casey:
No, now I'm doubting myself.
Casey:
Maybe I'm wrong.
Marco:
Micrometer is a thing you use to measure.
Casey:
That's why I was doubting myself.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
See, I take it all back.
John:
I don't know how to say metric terms.
Marco:
I'm just going to say um, because it looks like somebody just kind of drooled off the end of the U. Anyway, so...
Marco:
So last year it was 1.7 pixels, and this year it's 1.9 on the Pro models.
Marco:
So the pixels got even bigger, which means the sensor got even bigger, and this is great news for image quality.
Marco:
Again, more light hitting the pixels makes better pictures.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
this is great.
Marco:
Actually, I shouldn't say pixels.
Marco:
They're, they're, I don't think they're actually pixels.
Marco:
Are they like the, the sensor sites anyway, light buckets, whatever they are.
Marco:
They're, they're, they're like making those bigger and making the, so the sensor is bigger.
Marco:
The lens, the lens aperture is wider open.
Marco:
Like you get more light in the stability.
Marco:
The stabilization is better on all of them.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
This is a massive camera upgrade.
Marco:
And then to throw in a 3X lens, whew, this is very tempting.
Marco:
And this, the camera is what is, right now, my current plan is to go Pro, even though I've loved the mini size so much this past year.
Marco:
Physically, I just love the size.
Marco:
I love the weight.
Marco:
But that's a huge camera upgrade.
Marco:
And the fact that I don't have to go all the way to the max, that I can get that huge camera upgrade in the midsize Pro, that's what I'm going to go for.
Casey:
Yep, yep.
Casey:
I think for me, I'm looking to get a 13 Pro in that Sierra Blue, whatever it's called.
Casey:
It looks so good to me.
Casey:
We should very quickly mention, again, an hour and a half more battery life than the 12 Pro, two and a half hours more battery life than the 12 Pro Max, longest ever on an iPhone, or so they claim.
Casey:
Starting at $1,000 for the 12 Pro, $1,100 for the Pro Max, up to $1,000 off with trade-in in certain cases.
Casey:
They have a one terabyte storage option, which is not for me, but I do think is interesting.
Casey:
Pre-order on Friday, which I've confirmed is at a reasonable hour.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Thank you so much that it's 8 a.m.
Casey:
Eastern time.
Casey:
which is, as we all know, the one true time zone.
Casey:
And then it will be shipping on the 24th of September.
Casey:
Additionally, the 12 Pro is retired.
Casey:
It is no longer available at this time.
John:
So that one terabyte option is important for the thing that you skipped over here, which is...
John:
The part where they trotted out big-time Hollywood directors to show how you can make movie-quality footage with these iPhones and how great it is that they're so small and you can put the camera anywhere and so on and so forth.
John:
And they also will now shoot ProRes, which is Apple's...
John:
is it uncompressed it's very large it's less compressed let's say i'm not sure if it's uncompressed but anyway it takes up more room i don't think anything shoots uncompressed video of anything ever because it's so it's so massive but prores i believe is lightly compressed and the files are massive yeah prores takes up a lot of room and so they touted they said what did they say faster file system i think they said in the thing
John:
which they i'm assuming what they really mean is a faster file io as in whatever the system on a chip connection it has to the flash storage now has higher bandwidth lower latency basically to be able to keep up with recording pro res it did they say it could do 120 4k 120 frames per second pro res i forget no maybe it was 4k 60 no it says here pro res video recording up to 4k 30 all right anyway
John:
The point is, that's a huge amount of data.
John:
And so they need to make sure you can actually write that data to the storage fast enough.
John:
And also, if you're going to be, you know, recording in that format, now suddenly the one terabyte phone starts to make some sense.
John:
With the caveat that, okay, you've got a one terabyte phone, and you're able to record ProRes, and I don't know what the math is of like how many minutes of ProRes equals how many gigabytes of video, but you could fill that phone pretty easily and, you know,
John:
shooting a movie or whatever how are you supposed to get that one terabyte of video off of that phone through the lightning connector at usb 2.0 speeds because i didn't see anything in the presentation that told me it would be fast there's some faster connection it's not usbc there's not thunderbolt i guess you could use wi-fi maybe 5g is your fastest option to get that hey casey how good is uh image capture these days with
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
I only use image capture for deletion on certain stuff.
Casey:
I use photos to import.
Casey:
It's a mess.
John:
Would AirDrop be the fastest?
John:
That's exactly what I'm saying.
John:
Is 5G faster than Wi-Fi 6?
Marco:
like if you're by a millimeter wave station thing well but airdrop doesn't use uh wi-fi in infrastructure mode doesn't it make a temporary peer-to-peer connection so it like at the distances the airdrop would be working it's probably very fast like it probably maxes out whatever that version of wi-fi is but then again like how long does it take to airdrop well like you know 800 gigs worth of video like will it give up in the middle it's
John:
What I'm saying is that, you know, so they brought out these big name Hollywood directors to show that, you know, this phone is great and you can do all this stuff with focus and we can make these little fun scenes or whatever.
John:
It's just a promotional thing.
John:
But that said, people have made entire feature films only with iPhones many years ago.
John:
I think Steven Soderbergh did an entire movie, which I watched, and it was fine.
John:
And you would never have known the entire movie was made with an iPhone if someone hadn't told you that conceit.
John:
Now, it's not going to, you know, this was many years ago, so it didn't look close to as good as this footage they're showing here.
John:
But it was fine for like an indie movie that you're watching, right?
John:
So the idea that the iPhone is good enough to shoot a movie with is true.
John:
It's been done, right?
John:
But I'm not sure that they're...
John:
demonstration of saying like now finally with these new features in the iphone 13 pro the ability to record pro res and you know the various video effects this somehow changes the equation for using an iphone to shoot movies it's it's exactly as possible as it has always been this does not change the game and this
John:
phone you know it's great iPhones have always been great for shooting video and it continues to be but it's not it is not a better professional tool I think the biggest weakness that it has is how do you get you know what's the IO right how do you you know it's got a terabyte you know it can record ProRes but not at the maximum resolution and speed that it can shoot the other things it's got a lot of storage but you can't get the data on and off of it so this is
John:
This promotion I felt like was slightly misguided and maybe misrepresenting is like now suddenly the iPhone is an amazing professional tool.
John:
It's as good as it's ever been.
John:
It's a great phone for recording video, but it doesn't, it doesn't make it, if you weren't previously considering an iPhone for shooting your movie or whatever,
John:
Nothing about this phone should make you change your mind.
Casey:
Nevertheless, I'm excited.
Casey:
I really honestly am.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
And don't shoot your home movies in ProRes, please.
John:
Like, you don't want that or need it.
Marco:
So Quinn Nelson's in the chat, and he's saying that the one terabyte phone, so a terabyte, if you're shooting 4K 30 ProRes, only holds about four hours of video in a terabyte.
John:
Yeah.
John:
good grief and then how long will it take you to get that off yeah so don't don't yeah don't shoot pro res don't shoot your kids you honestly you probably like depending on what you want aesthetically speaking i my suggestion would be that higher frame rates will serve you better uh so yeah uh pick it pick a reasonable codec and go up to at least 60 frames per second and see how that goes for you
Marco:
There's a funny little note here on the spec page that ProRes video recording up to 4K30, but if you buy the smallest phone, the 128 gig, they won't even let you shoot 4K30.
Marco:
They'll only let you shoot 1080p.
John:
In ProRes.
Marco:
In other formats, you can do whatever you want, but in ProRes because it's so big.
John:
And the thing is, like these we're talking about this now.
John:
Right.
John:
But fast forward five, 10 years, kind of like we've done with audio, the hardware will eventually catch up to both the standards that we use for media and human perception.
John:
Right.
John:
That happened a little while ago with audio where there's no longer any demand for we've talked about some shows for.
John:
higher res audio formats outside of very narrow interest groups, let's say.
John:
But John, I can hear the copper-coated Ethernet cable differences in my DAC.
John:
It's like, you know, I'm not even saying that we have the current correct compromise in terms of bit rates of the audio that we listen to because we probably don't and Bluetooth could be better and so on and so forth.
John:
But we've definitely passed the point where
John:
you know definitely have diminishing returns right video that's not true video uh you know televisions just recently made the switch to 4k it's plausible that televisions just to try to sell more of them will make a switch to 8k in the future especially as screens get cheaper at larger sizes 8k might come worthwhile um as those standards advance so too are all a technology advance right now our phones can't do 120 frames per second 4k pro res right um
John:
But eventually, not even a very infinite timeline, 10, 15, 20 years, video will probably taper off because within the normal household, even if your entire wall is a screen, 16K is probably plenty for that, right?
John:
And eventually your smartphone, assuming Moore's Law keeps going for just a little bit longer, Moore's Law, your smartphone will be able to shoot 16K, 240 frames per second, HDR, you know, with depth data captured or whatever.
John:
after that happens and storage keeps going up and up like you get to a point where like audio it's like oh you know i wish i had a bigger phone so i could have more music most people don't think that because these phones are so huge and most people don't have 700 000 song collections right uh
John:
We'll get there with video someday, but today is not that day.
John:
Today is the day when Apple won't even let you shoot pros at high frame rate because the storage isn't enough, right?
John:
But I don't want people to think this is going to be an eternal chase.
John:
You know, our visual system is only so good.
John:
There's only so much we can discern, kind of like retina screens where, you know,
John:
3x retina i can't wait until we have 20x retina no that's pointless it's useless we can't see it right we've we've got the pixels almost small enough i think and now it's just a matter of making them use less power making them be brighter and darker with you know true blacks and all that other stuff but no one is still chasing like i would like a 7 000 dpi screen it's pointless like and not just for old people like us but children like anybody nobody's human the human visual system is not that good so
John:
The people who are alive today, I think, will eventually live to see audio and video standards and limits and performance sort of catch up to what humans find useful, and then we will shift our technology efforts to other things.
John:
Maybe we'll shift it to AR or VR or something like that or whatever.
John:
But that's what I thought about looking at this, like the phone can shoot ProRes, that like...
John:
Right now, you're... Is it Red?
John:
Is that the camera company that makes those really expensive cameras?
John:
Yep.
John:
And there's like the Arri Alexa or whatever.
John:
You have these cameras that cost as much as a car, and they can do amazing things.
John:
Then you have the phones, which can do amazing things for a phone, but still not the same.
John:
And eventually, not that those things will converge, but eventually the difference between them won't be that one of them can capture at higher resolution or higher frame rate.
John:
The difference will be more about the quality of what it captures, maybe.
Casey:
uh and much less about uh you know the the specs the the frame rate and the size of the pixels so before we kind of wrap i i was thinking about the presentation and it was good like i i don't think any about anything about it was particularly remarkable to me i don't think any of the products released have me over the moon which is fine that's not necessarily a bad thing
Casey:
But it occurred to me, I don't know if anyone else feels this way, and I wonder if you guys feel this way.
Casey:
It definitely felt like an S year to me.
Casey:
It felt like, yeah, we've spec-bumped everything.
Casey:
It's better.
Casey:
It's definitely better.
Casey:
But I don't think that there was anything revolutionary, which is fine.
Casey:
That's okay.
Casey:
It doesn't have to be revolutionary every year.
Casey:
But I was a little surprised, and I almost feel like if I were...
Casey:
If I were in charge of naming these things, not necessarily because I'm trying to sell them, but because I'm trying to accurately represent what they are, I feel like this is definitely a 12 Pro S or what have you, which is a terrible name, if I'm honest.
Casey:
But you know what I mean?
Casey:
I don't feel like these are...
Casey:
dramatically different phones than what we got last year i particularly in the pro line it's a spec bump which is fine i'm not complaining but i don't know it's just nothing nothing about the presentation was except i guess the i the ipad mini come to think of it but other than that nothing about the nothing about the presentation other than the ipad mini was particularly like knock your socks off do you guys have that feeling as well let's start with marco or am i just being a curmudgeon
Marco:
No, I was even just thinking, as you were starting the segment, what would I say is the biggest jump?
Marco:
And I would say it's the cameras and the phones.
Marco:
But the phones taken as a whole, I think you're right.
Marco:
It is kind of, quote, an S-year.
Marco:
I know that's kind of a term that people throw around in a derogatory manner, but...
Marco:
But I think it's kind of a fairly low S-Ear even.
Marco:
Normally, what an S-Ear typically means is the outside of the phone looks the same, but it gets major upgrades on the inside.
Marco:
That's usually what happens there.
Marco:
I don't even know if this got major upgrades on the inside necessarily.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
Maybe the screens are amazing.
Marco:
You can't tell with a high frame rate screen how much that's going to affect you by watching a video presentation about it.
Marco:
You're not going to know how it looks and feels in real life.
Marco:
It's possible once we get these phones that the screens really are incredible.
Marco:
But again, you're only going to get that difference on the Pro line.
Marco:
If you're not looking to buy a Pro phone, I think it's actually a pretty small year for you.
Marco:
If you're looking at the Mini or the 13 regular, I think it's not a big deal, I think, for those phones.
Marco:
And if I was not going to probably jump to the Pro...
Marco:
I wouldn't be that excited about this upgrade from the 12 mini to the 13 mini.
Marco:
But that being said, again, most people don't buy phones every year.
Marco:
Only jerks like us do.
Marco:
And only two of us even.
Marco:
So I think for most people, you hear the same thing from all the tech podcasts.
Marco:
Well, certain things were a small upgrade this year, but it's a big upgrade from the phone you have that's two or three or four years old.
Marco:
And that's how most people buy phones.
Marco:
so it makes sense that you know this isn't it's not that big of a deal when it's not like a big jump year but overall this isn't a big jump year i think for the phone or the watch the watch even seems smaller you know like it as like you know how much it matters the watch seems like an even more minor upgrade update than uh
Marco:
than the phone but you know and part of this might be you know apple's putting on a good face but they're coming out of a global pandemic that really disrupted everybody's work and they're in the middle of a severe like chip and part shortage in the industry like i think the reason why they bought so many a15s i actually disagree with john i don't think it's because they're putting the a15 in a bunch of things i think it's related to the chip shortage and they just had to like place a big order to you know handle that or navigate that in a responsible way but
Marco:
Apple's trying to pretend like all this stuff isn't going on and trying to keep up the same product release cycle.
Marco:
Most companies, I think, would possibly not be able to release a phone at the same time this year as they do every other year because things are so disrupted in the supply chain and everything else.
Marco:
But Apple did.
Marco:
But maybe they had to cut some stuff because they couldn't get it done in time.
Marco:
through all the stuff we've been going through so i think that there that could be part of why this is kind of a minor year um and for everyone else out there like who is you know kind of like meh about a lot of this stuff well good for you if you're if none of this stuff is really that important to you you can save some money this year and not buy it
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Casey:
I have to respectfully disagree with you.
Casey:
If you really are disappointed with the offerings this year, but you really want to have a similarly sized hole in your pocket, let me direct you first to stjude.org.atp and subsequent to that, atp.fm.join, both of which would help you feel better and put that hole in your pocket that you so desperately yearn for.
Marco:
agreed and yeah use create a hole in your pocket to reduce the hole in casey's pocket um but you know so like overall like this it looks like it's a pretty minor year but these are also really mature and kind of expensive product lines and so you know in the same way that most mac upgrades year to year are not that big like you know whatever macbook pro they release one year when you look at the one they released the year after it's
Marco:
it's usually not that different.
Marco:
It's, you know, maybe five or 10% faster and has a couple of little like, you know, nip and tuck kind of upgrades here and there.
Marco:
Like, Oh, we've got to make this a little bit better.
Marco:
Maybe like the speakers or the microphone are a little bit better or something like that.
Marco:
Like it's that kind of upgrade, you know, for most Macs iPads have now gotten similarly, you know, with the exception of like the mini, but like, you know, you look at the high end iPads, the iPad pro has not changed that much in four years.
Marco:
It's been,
Marco:
you know i think we're reaching maturity points on these products and they're getting higher in price over time and so it's natural to have longer upgrade cycles for pretty much everybody and so when we have one of these years where it's not that impressive uh overall like there are certain things about this that are very impressive but like the product as a whole it's not like a massive like oh my god everyone has to go out and upgrade right now
Marco:
But I think that's okay, and I think it's inevitable.
Marco:
So overall, to answer the actual question you asked, I think the iPad mini is the most exciting upgrade compared to what it's replacing, which is funny because it's probably, of all the products they announced today, probably the least used one.
Marco:
It's probably the one that the fewest people buy out of all these.
Marco:
But I think the camera system on the Pro phones in particular
Marco:
is probably the coolest and most impactful upgrade to the most people.
Marco:
So that, I think, again, even though it's not that big of a deal, like in other specs of the way things were upgraded or not upgraded, I think that new camera system is going to be quite something.
Marco:
So I'm very much looking forward to that.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
John?
John:
I already defended the S-Ear stuff before, basically saying like, yeah, it's the same case on the outside, but like literally everything inside it is different.
John:
Totally different system on a chip that's better in all ways, granted not by a lot, but still better.
John:
A bigger battery, a totally different camera.
John:
I mean, maybe the Taptic engine is the same, right?
John:
But like, that's usually why the S-Ears get a bad rap, because people can just see what's on the outside and what's on the inside.
John:
Like, I wouldn't characterize it as a spec bump.
John:
A spec bump would be a faster A14 or more RAM on an A14.
John:
This is just all new inside, and it's better in all respects, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The only thing that gives me pause this year in terms of an S year is what I would normally want out of an S year is everything like that the non-S year was, but everything is better, right?
John:
So it's a new system on a chip that's better.
John:
It's a new camera that's better, right?
John:
There's more battery life.
John:
It has a bigger battery, right?
John:
Everything about it is like...
John:
You know, 5G is a good example.
John:
It was the first 5G phone last year.
John:
This year we can still have 5G, but be less battery hungry and less heat, you know, because we have better 5G modems this year.
John:
That's what you want out of an S. And the one thing that is disappointing from an S-year perspective this year is...
John:
ironically enough the camera simply because it's so much physically bigger and that doesn't strike me as an s-year thing an s-year thing would be camera stays the same size and gets better or camera actually shrinks and becomes slimmer or becomes flush and gets better it's like oh last year we had to have such a big camera for this quality camera well this year we made the bump smaller and the camera is a little bit better too they didn't do that they were in the opposite direction which is maximum increase in camera but
John:
It's just, I mean, again, I haven't seen one of these in person.
John:
I don't know what it's going to be like with the cases, but it just looks, it looks a little bit awkward to me.
John:
And that is not something that I associate with an S year.
John:
I associate an S year with a refinement of all the features that we had last year.
John:
It's like, what I would expect is the non S year to have a gargantuan camera and the S year finally figured out how to make that camera not quite as gargantuan while still giving you some quality improvement.
John:
And it seems like they went the other way.
John:
Whereas the, uh, the 12 pro camera, uh,
John:
It was better than the predecessor, but not... I feel like this is a bigger leap camera-wise, right?
John:
So I think the camera is out of step with the S stuff.
John:
This is all predicated on my notion that the notch is going to... Not the notch.
John:
That the camera bump is actually going to be big enough to be bothersome.
John:
Maybe I'm totally wrong about that, and a few millimeters doesn't make a difference when we get...
John:
these phones and physical hands we'll find out but that's the only thing that gives me pause but other than that i generally like the the s years like i'm the cycle i'm on now is i get like the first of the new form factor right so i got the first flat-sided phone and i'm skipping this year next year presumably i'll get the first of whatever the next design is
John:
And in some ways, it's exciting.
John:
You're going to get the first of the new thing.
John:
But in other ways, I feel like, oh, but this is going to be the one with the most compromises of this design.
John:
It's like getting the iPhone X. It's the first one with Face ID and everything.
John:
But they're going to refine that design and improve a lot about it in the subsequent generations.
John:
The first flat-sided one has the 5G modem that kills your battery.
John:
And maybe it'll be better in the next generation.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
But this year, I'm actually kind of glad that I don't...
John:
I have camera phobia.
John:
I'm afraid of a camera that's that big and that awkward on the thing.
John:
I love the pictures that it takes and my wife is going to get this phone so I will have it in the house and be able to take pictures with it and I'll be back into that mode that I'm so used to which is essentially every other year if we're somewhere and I want to take a picture
John:
I almost feel like I need to ask my wife to borrow her phone because why don't I use the best camera that we have with us?
John:
We both have our iPhones.
John:
I could take it on mine, but mine is, oh, it's a year old now and your camera will take it better.
John:
But, you know, I'm kind of glad that my camera won't be smaller and that my phone with a case on it sits flat on the table.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Mack Weldon, and Linode.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you 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.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because 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, you
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-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech Podcast.
Casey:
So long.
Marco:
So in previous years, we have, I came up with the idea a couple years back of doing like an exit interview of the outgoing phone right before it's replaced.
Marco:
So we should have done it last week.
Marco:
And frankly, we just forgot.
Marco:
And I remembered like during the edit of the show, like the next morning, I'm like, ah, crap, we forgot to do the exit interview for the iPhone 12.
Marco:
So we decided to shove it here in the after show.
Marco:
So we're going to give the iPhone 12 its exit interview after we've already hired its replacement, which is kind of unfair in certain ways.
Marco:
But I'm curious, you know, how are we feeling about our outbound iPhone 12s?
Casey:
You know, I think I covered this accidentally a little bit last episode and in some this episode.
Casey:
I really like my 12 Pro.
Casey:
I think it's been a great phone.
Casey:
I love the midnight blue.
Casey:
I think it's a great look.
Casey:
Going caseless on it, as has been covered many, many times, was a complete mistake and I deeply regret it.
Casey:
I do have AppleCare Plus on it, but still, I shouldn't have done that.
Casey:
I don't mind the fingerprinty sides that you had mentioned earlier this episode.
Casey:
They are fingerprinty.
Casey:
I'm not denying that.
Casey:
But it's never really bothered me like it seems to have bothered you.
Casey:
The cameras are great.
Casey:
The screen I maintain.
Casey:
And again, this is probably user error, at least in part.
Casey:
but the the screen has been scratched smithereens i feel like i've been saying this last couple years and hey look what the common denominator is hi uh but the screen i would wish was not so scratchy uh and i've wished the back was a little more durable but by and large it's a really great phone it doesn't feel slow to me at this point
Casey:
Um, I, I personally don't have a problem with face ID.
Casey:
That's probably because I am an Apple watch user.
Casey:
So even if I have a mask on the watch, you know, 80%, 80 to 90% of the time will unlock for me.
Casey:
Um, I, I really do like this phone quite a lot.
Casey:
The notch is obviously old news.
Casey:
Hey, getting smaller is great, but I don't have, I don't find that the notch is bothersome at this point.
Um,
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I never really experienced 5G because I'm on an old enough AT&T plan that they're jerks and won't give it to me, which is part of the reason why I think I might be switching to Verizon soon, but that's a discussion for another night.
Casey:
I like this phone a lot.
Casey:
It's one of my favorites.
Casey:
I love the flat sides, even though the 11 was arguably a little more comfortable in hand aesthetically.
Casey:
I freaking love the look of these flat sides.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I wish it was USB-C, just like I wish the 13 was USB-C, just for consistency's sake.
Casey:
But by and large, I really, really, really like this phone.
Casey:
I really think it's a great phone.
Marco:
Yeah, I largely feel the same.
Marco:
I don't have a lot of problems with my 12 Mini.
Marco:
The ones I do have, I think, are inherent to the Mini's size.
Marco:
You know, I really wish I had the telephoto camera, in retrospect.
Marco:
Like, I do...
Marco:
I do miss that.
Marco:
It's not like an absolute deal killer, but I do miss it.
Marco:
And I also wish the battery life was better.
Marco:
I have improved the battery life a little bit by disabling 5G by some recommendations from people.
Marco:
It has helped a little bit, not a ton.
Marco:
I don't, I don't know how much of a benefit it really honestly has.
Marco:
It could just be, you know, placebo or coincidence.
Marco:
So I,
Marco:
ultimately what i want for my next phone is a more reach on the camera system and a bigger battery and and that's why i think i'm going pro this year because i'll be getting that but otherwise i i actually have not had problems with the screen scratching i have dropped it a couple times on concrete and then has scratched the aluminum edge uh on the corners here and there um but otherwise and that's you know that's my fault obviously
Marco:
Otherwise, it has held up very well.
Marco:
I haven't had any of the deep screen-scratching problems that other people have had sometimes.
Marco:
And feature-wise, it's fast, and it's fine.
Marco:
If you bought an iPhone 12 or 12 mini last year,
Marco:
and you don't really want to upgrade, I don't think you're missing much by not upgrading.
Marco:
I think the 12 Mini and the 12 are still, and the 12 Pro, I think those are still great phones by today's standards, and they're going to continue to be great for a while.
Marco:
So if you dropped a whole bunch of money on one last year, I don't think you need to upgrade.
Marco:
I really don't.
Marco:
Upgrading here is only for jerks like us who just want the latest and greatest all the time and are willing to set money on fire.
Casey:
But otherwise... Excuse me, it's for my work.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
That's what we all say.
Marco:
You notice how all podcasters say, I have to get this new thing so I can talk about it on the show.
Marco:
And then how much do we talk about it?
Marco:
Like five minutes?
Marco:
We don't have to get it.
Marco:
It's a wonderful excuse we all use to get the new shiny thing.
Marco:
None of us have to get it for our work.
Marco:
That's never a thing that any of us have.
Marco:
Because we talk about stuff we don't have all the time.
Marco:
So, like, obviously we don't need to get these things for our work.
Marco:
I needed to get the Mac Pro for my work.
John:
I think we can all agree on that.
Marco:
You needed to get the Mac Pro for, like, karmic justice.
John:
I talked about it for more than five minutes.
John:
I talked about it for ten years.
John:
Oh, gosh.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
You know, that's... Yeah.
Marco:
But, like, you...
Marco:
you could have and we have and did talk about it without buying it or before you bought it like you know it's we don't need to buy these things to talk about them we buy them because we like to and we can and that's our joy in life other people buy expensive sweaters we buy phones every year like that's just that's what we do people buy expensive sweaters i thought you're gonna say watches it was right there but i guess sweaters too
Marco:
Yeah, people spend slash waste their money in all sorts of garbage.
Marco:
So we do it on phones every year.
Marco:
That's what we do.
Marco:
And if you don't like it, well, you know, I'm sorry.
John:
So the 12 Pro that I've got, I mean, I've already talked about it.
John:
I like that it has a way better camera than my two-year-old phone.
John:
What did I replace it with?
John:
The XS, I guess?
John:
Yeah, XS.
John:
This is the phone that got me off the pouch.
John:
I do not use a pouch anymore.
John:
I have a pouch that fits this, and I was using it, well, this plus COVID, I think, really, because I wasn't leaving the house ever, and I only used the pouch when I left the house.
John:
And eventually the pouch like just found its way like into deep storage.
John:
And then I would leave the house and not have the pouch and just I'm off the pouch.
John:
So this is not I just put it directly in my pocket, you know, screen side facing my body as as you do.
John:
And it's been fine.
John:
And I understand the scratchiness.
John:
I believe that the screen probably shows I'm going to say this.
John:
The 12 Pro screen shows light scratches maybe more than some previous phones, but I personally don't have anything discernible except for maybe one super light.
John:
No, I can't even see it anymore.
John:
Maybe it was not a really scratch.
John:
Maybe it was just some schmutz or something, but like.
John:
My thing is pretty pristine.
John:
Obviously I take a very careful with my phone or whatever, but this is no pouch.
John:
I'm just putting it in pockets and if there's any grit in those pockets, right?
John:
So I don't know what Casey's doing other than just dropping his phone constantly and putting in bags with sand and shaking it up.
John:
Um, how'd you know?
John:
Um,
John:
So I'm willing to believe that this surface, like, essentially scratches more easily, but I think the kinds of scratches we're talking about here are essentially cosmetic, and you can mostly only see them when the screen is off or black, and that they're not the type of thing that you would feel with your finger that constitute actual damage.
John:
So I don't... I'm not...
John:
What I can say is for me, whatever trade-off Apple has been making with this phone, which I have dropped onto the floor multiple times, granted it's been a wooden floor and sometimes a carpeted floor, but I have dropped it.
John:
So whatever compromise they made in terms of scratchability versus breakability or whatever, I'm happy with the compromise of this phone.
John:
One thing I'm not happy, and I'm happy with the flat sides, but one thing I'm not happy with was their move to cases that cover the bottom lip because I think that's just a terrible idea in a phone that you swipe up from the bottom to unlock.
John:
So I had to go on that little hunt that we talked about earlier in the year to find a non-Apple case, non-Apple case that I liked that had the lip on the bottom, which probably means that, you know, next year when I get my new phone again, I'm going to have to go on that same saga for the iPhone 14 because Apple will continue to sell cases that don't have the thing open on the bottom.
John:
having owned this phone for about a year with the opening on the bottom it's been fine nothing's wrong with it it's not like the bottom gets damaged or whatever and i like it so much better than i have the apple silicon case that had the lip i like it so much better swiping up from the bottom with no lip there um
John:
Battery life has been fine.
John:
Again, I don't really leave the house that much, but it's a big step up from the XS.
John:
So overall, this is one of my favorite phones that I've had.
John:
The previous phone that I think that I had as much affection for is this one is the 7, because I felt like the 7 was kind of the pinnacle of that.
John:
design the kind of lojenige shaped thing the last touch id phone the seven was just really perfected that form and this is the first iteration of this flat-sided thing and i think it did pretty well with the you know setting aside those caveats so i've been happy with it i think it's great and like i said i'm kind of glad that i don't have to have the stress over oh do i desperately want the the the 13 pro camera but i'm afraid of the size of the bump and like i don't have any of that stress because i'm just going to stick with my
John:
12 Pro and let my wife get that camera and she doesn't care about the bump because, well, what I have to worry about for her is she doesn't care about the bump because she constantly uses a battery case because her phone is just a Pokemon Go console and Pokemon Go destroys your battery.
John:
So her phone is useless without a giant battery case.
John:
Ah, but the 13 Pro does not have a giant battery case from Apple.
John:
It has that stupid stick-on thing which has...
John:
Not enough battery capacity to withstand the Pokemoning that she will do.
John:
So I think she's probably going to have to end up buying a third party iPhone 13 Pro battery case, which will make her phone even more gargantuan.
John:
And maybe once you have that thing on it, the size of the camera bump is the least of your concerns because it's just a gigantic heavy bar of soap.
John:
So she'll probably be fine with it and like it.
John:
And I will steal it from her to take pictures with that really awesome camera system.
John:
But I am happy to wait for the 14 now.