Not a Saturated Year
John:
Okay.
John:
Everything...
Marco:
I was in a bad internet situation for the last few days until last night.
Marco:
I had to go to Westchester because we're selling that house.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of crap I have to do.
Marco:
You know, Tiff and I have been very busy with that instead of reading your Slack messages.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
you know it's not just john i needed input from you too sir so i i'm team john on this issue even though i do sympathize and i feel bad for your situation we need something more powerful than at marco or at here or i know seriously all right so here's what happened i arrived in westchester normally before i before i go there it's a couple hours drive so normally when i like right before i leave i open up nest i turn the air conditioning on so it's cool when i get there
Marco:
And Nest was like all disconnected.
Marco:
Everything was offline.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, that's I probably have to go, you know, reboot something or maybe, you know, maybe like the painters who were there accidentally unplugged my router or something.
Marco:
God knows what.
Marco:
So I get to my tester and I'm looking around and I unplug the router, plug it back in everything.
Marco:
I'm like, that's weird.
Marco:
And then I noticed that most of the lights on my fiber optic, the Fios terminal, most of the lights are off.
Marco:
The pattern that it explains that something along the lines of like something like, you know, low whatever nanometer, which is the light, you know, the light wavelength for the fiber optic light is like low whatever nanometer strength.
Marco:
That's weird.
Marco:
And I walk outside.
Marco:
I see coiled up in my garden is my fiber optic cable.
Marco:
That's not good.
Marco:
That's not good at all.
Marco:
The next day, so I'm like, well, something has cut my fiber optic line from the telephone pole.
Marco:
So that's going to be a problem.
Marco:
Meanwhile, I knew I was going to have to watch the iPhone event at this house the following afternoon.
Marco:
So this launched this whole series of, okay, I'm trying to, do my neighbors have Wi-Fi?
Marco:
No, I can't reach anything.
Marco:
I don't even know them that well anymore.
Marco:
I couldn't go anywhere else to watch the live stream because the whole reason I was there was to be in the house when things were happening.
Marco:
Painters were coming, landscape.
Marco:
I had to be there to answer questions, to direct people, to show them what we wanted to do.
Marco:
So I couldn't leave the house.
Marco:
My cell strength was not good, but it worked.
Marco:
The whole next day, trying to get work done over the tethering and everything.
Marco:
15 minutes before the iPhone event is scheduled to begin, I get a text message.
Marco:
Hi, it's AT&T.
Marco:
You've used 75% of your tethering data for the month.
Marco:
If you exceed this limit, we will slow it down to 128 kilobits per second.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
Right before the iPhone event?
I can't.
Casey:
So you would be watching the iPhone event like it's real player in 1997.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, I watched it on YouTube so I could control the quality and I dropped it down to like 720p thinking like that.
John:
I wondered why you were watching it on YouTube.
John:
I saw you posted a message about Mastodon.
John:
I'm like, is Marco watching this on YouTube?
John:
And I didn't put two or two together.
Marco:
Yeah, because I'm like, I don't want the Apple stream to automatically adjust to a higher bit rate and slaughter my bandwidth before they've even gotten through the retail update or whatever it's going to be.
Marco:
So that's how I watch this.
Marco:
And it was just, I got through it.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
I didn't exceed the cap.
Marco:
Literally...
Marco:
As they're talking about the iPhone Pro Max camera change, this huge update that I want to hear all the details about, that's when the Verizon guy arrived and has questions for me.
Casey:
Of course.
Marco:
No!
Marco:
Anyway, I got through it.
Marco:
I was able to watch it.
Marco:
Earlier today, I was able to go back and re-watch that section.
Marco:
So now I know what they actually did with the camera.
Marco:
But that's how I watched the stream this year.
Marco:
Hopefully, the two of you had better experiences.
Casey:
We should quickly take a moment and once again ask you to open your hearts, your minds, and most importantly, your wallets for St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
I'm going to try to make this brief because we have a lot to talk about, and I'd like to go to bed before literally tomorrow.
Casey:
But St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital, it is an unbelievable organization.
Casey:
That's goal is to eliminate death from childhood cancer and really eliminate childhood cancer if they can.
Casey:
They do a phenomenal job of trying to do this and do it not only for America, where everything is broken, most especially healthcare, but do it around the world.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
They actually have partnered with the World Health Organization and launched the Global Platform for Access to Childhood Cancer Medicine.
Casey:
And this program aims to provide free chemotherapy medicines for the next few years to as many as 120,000 children around the world with cancer.
Casey:
Again, not just America, around the world.
Casey:
This is just now starting, so not much has happened yet, to be completely honest, but you can look on their website at global.stjude.org and check it out.
Casey:
And this is the sort of thing that St.
Casey:
Jude does.
Casey:
Their mission is to make sure...
Casey:
Like I said, no children will die of cancer.
Casey:
And those families that are treated by St.
Casey:
Jude, they will get flown in if necessary.
Casey:
They will be put up if necessary.
Casey:
Their children will be treated if necessary, which presumably it is.
Casey:
And they will do this without receiving a bill.
Casey:
It is really, really phenomenal and incredible.
Casey:
And I could belabor this for hours, but we have a lot to talk about.
Casey:
So I'll just say that if there's ever an organization that I personally think is worth your money, and I think I speak for these two fine gentlemen that I'm on the show with, that we think is worth your money, it's St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
So how do you open up your wallet and donate?
Casey:
You go to stjude.org.
Casey:
You fill out a little form, you send them some money, and then if possible, you go through the little wizard to see if your company will match the money that you send, because that would be super excellent.
Casey:
And you help RelayFM pass their $2.5 million lifetime goal.
Casey:
But I would love to see us get to like half a million bucks for this year alone.
Casey:
And we're currently sitting at about half that.
Casey:
So you can do it.
Casey:
And very quickly, a couple of new top donors.
Casey:
Rob, otherwise known as Nitro230, donated $7,800.
Casey:
I'm very pleased to say I've lost track of who I have and have not sent stickers to.
Casey:
So Rob, please feel free to reach out if you have not received stickers yet.
Casey:
rob mentioned atp and the marco offset which we'll talk about a little more in a minute and then my friend daniel nelson decided to do his own campaign which is something you can do as well this was new last year they continued it this year so even if you don't have a lot of money to spare you can start your own mini campaign as a part of the bigger broader relay campaign and raise money that way and daniel started his own campaign and then donated eight thousand dollars
Casey:
to his campaign.
Casey:
So you don't see that on the main website.
Casey:
It's kind of sequestered off in his little campaign page.
Casey:
But we see it.
Casey:
We know it.
Casey:
We saw it.
Casey:
I've already dispatched stickers to Daniel.
Casey:
So $8,000 is the current leader, as far as we are aware.
Casey:
Now, Marco, you came up with what I think either you or I coined the Marco Offset.
Casey:
It might have been you.
Casey:
And this is my new favorite thing from this year.
Casey:
So can you tell me about the Marco Offset, please?
Casey:
And this is more relevant today than ever before.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So in case you're wondering, how much should I donate to St.
Marco:
Jude?
Marco:
I mean, the answer is as much as you can.
Marco:
But, you know, if you want something more concrete, you know, we've said in the past you should cure your consumerism and all the guilt that you feel by buying new iPhones and Apple Watches and everything else this week or next week.
Marco:
You should, you know, cure that guilt by applying...
Marco:
some reasonable amount of money to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
Now, in the past, I've said, whatever you might spend on a case or AppleCare or whatever, give that to St.
Marco:
Jude as a minimum.
Marco:
That's a good bar for a minimum.
Marco:
This year, I went a little bit more concrete and a little bit further.
Marco:
This is the Marco Offset.
Marco:
The base price of the iPhone family that you are purchasing...
Marco:
Subtract that from the total of the receipt when you purchase the iPhone.
Marco:
If you do monthly AppleCare, multiply it by the number of months you expect to use this phone.
Marco:
And so what you should have, by family, I mean, like, you know, the iPhone 15 Pro starts at $999.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So if you get a Pro Max 256, that's $1,200 plus some tax and everything, plus maybe a case, AppleCare, whatever else, you might be at like $1,400.
Marco:
So that would be $400.
Marco:
That's your Marco Offset.
Marco:
From the base of the Pro family, which is $9,999, whatever the difference above that is that you actually spend on the phone, that's your baseline donation to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
Go in peace.
Marco:
Use this formula to set your minimum donation.
Marco:
Help out a wonderful cause.
Marco:
It really means a lot, really a huge amount to a lot of people.
Marco:
It's a fantastic cause, and they really use the money well, and it's pretty hard to find a better use than this.
Marco:
So stju.org slash ATP.
Marco:
Use the Marco Offset.
Marco:
And in fact, how might you calculate the Marco Offset?
Casey:
You know, it's funny you ask that because that's a lot of arithmetic, and I'm terrible at mental math.
Marco:
I know, so crafting 1,000 is really hard.
Casey:
It's really difficult.
Casey:
So Bebeck, B-B-E-C-H on Macedon.social, has spearheaded, completely of their own volition, themarcooffset.com.
Casey:
And this is a very, very bare-bones, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way.
Casey:
It's just there's not a lot to it, and that's excellent.
Casey:
There's a very bare-bones website that says, hey, what model did you choose, 15 or 15 Pro?
Casey:
Tell me what your receipt was, say, I don't know, $1,459 or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
What is your monthly AppleCare, if applicable?
Casey:
And it will tell you your minimum donation.
Casey:
And I am in full support of not only the Marco Offset, but the marcooffset.com.
Casey:
It gets my official okie-dokie.
Casey:
John, anything you'd like to add?
John:
Got a lot of stuff to get to.
John:
Got to get moving.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
In that case, stju.org slash ATP.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we had the iPhone event, which occasionally had other things mentioned too.
Casey:
We start, and I will try to make this very quick, with an intro video where basically you are reminded that if you don't have Apple devices, you will die.
Casey:
That being said, I actually... Wow, hard.
Casey:
No, I say that in jest.
Casey:
Truth be told, I actually very much like the video and I thought it was very good.
Casey:
I thought it was handled well.
Casey:
I didn't care for a year or two ago when we like revisited a faux like crash site with the person that was in the crash.
John:
Yeah, that was in poor taste.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
this was way way better i as much as i snark i really did like it i thought it was good um we immediately declare that it's apple watch and iphone day and then we briefly talk about the mac we briefly talk about the vision pro long enough to say we are on track to ship early next year and then we get into the apple watch so is there anything you guys would like to add about the intro and then if not let's talk apple watch
John:
I do think that it's interesting that these intro videos about how the Apple Watch is going to save your life.
John:
Like, yeah, it's fine.
John:
OK, but like it's kind of Marco jokingly mentioned Apple retail update, which used to be a thing that they would begin their events like I'll tell you how retail is doing because they were in the process of like expanding their stores and so on and so forth.
John:
now to have multiple events talking about the apple watch saving your life i guess this is the apple watch event uh you know addition to the iphone event but it just seems to me odd that this is what they're emphasizing so much like the iphone is their most important product and i guess the watch is maybe growing faster or whatever but the message seems to be everyone knows you have to have a phone so whatever but you might not yet be convinced that you need to have an apple watch and let me tell you why you do you do
John:
So I give them a pass on this one, but if it's maybe six years in a row or six events in a row where the intro video is about how the Apple Watch can save your life, I'm going to start asking questions.
Casey:
Marco, any other preliminary thoughts?
Marco:
No, I thought the birthdays video, it was a nice, clever way to do it, to see here's all the birthdays these people got to have because their lives were saved.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
As much as it's easy to become jaded about these videos being a little over-the-top and a little heavy-handed and a little too long and a little too cheesy, all of which is true, it is fair for them to tout this because these really are significant life-saving features for some people.
Marco:
They're not...
Marco:
overly tooting their horn in this area it's not unreasonable for them to you know celebrate these victories here because yeah their products actually did that so it's significant you know their products do a lot of things in the world and and you know not all of them are good but a lot of them are good and these are this is like it's pretty hard to to get better than like i was i had some horrible medical thing or a car crash something and my phone saved my life or my watch saved my life or both like that's pretty great yeah
John:
but they don't say the phone save your life like i think the iphones probably save way more lives than than the watches because people call 911 from their phones when something bad happens but they don't talk about that it's just a watch and and i don't i don't begrudge them doing it i think this video is really good and well done and tasteful and just much better than the let's let's uh you know as case let's let's look at this fake car crash or no fake fake plane crash or whatever from past years but i wonder why it's always but it's not always i think it's what
John:
Two times in a row now.
John:
Like it's their intro video to the event where they introduce the newest version of their biggest product, which is the iPhone, not the watch.
John:
And so I'm just noting it.
John:
And I think if they do a third time and a fourth time, it's going to
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's saying something about something.
John:
Right now, it's just a coincidence.
John:
They took a second run at doing that type of ad, and that's great.
John:
But I think they can do the same kind of ad about phones because, again, anytime something bad happens, oh, call 911, and we all have our phones, so we do that.
John:
And if you're an iPhone owner, you're calling 911.
John:
I know it's not as dramatic as like, oh, the watch called it for you or whatever, but hey.
Marco:
Part of the sales pitch for the Apple Watch in particular is this might really save your life or might have a significant health benefit to you at some point.
John:
Without your participation because it knows when you've fallen down and aren't moving.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Things like the fall detection, the heart monitoring stuff.
Marco:
A lot of that stuff, that is watch-specific.
Marco:
And you don't need to explain to people why they should buy a phone.
Marco:
They're going to buy a phone no matter what.
Marco:
Not everyone buys an Apple Watch.
Marco:
And so part of the...
Marco:
sales pitch of the apple watch event is trying to remind people on a regular basis here's a really big reason why you might want to buy an apple watch or why you might want to upgrade your old apple watch or you know stuff like if you have an apple watch se that doesn't have some of the more advanced heart stuff here's why you might want to get a better apple watch or if you have a really old apple watch it doesn't have all this stuff here's why you might want a new one like that that's all part of this process you're making it sound like an ad marco yeah
Marco:
But again, I don't want to take away from the fact that they actually are making things that do save people's lives.
Marco:
That is not a small thing.
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:
They even have a read later function.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Apple Watch Series 9 starts at $400, introduced by Jeff Williams in concert with a couple of other people.
Casey:
Deirdre Koldbeck introduces the SIP, which we had heard about in the past, but they never actually explained what that acronym was.
Casey:
And I had to look it up to remind myself.
Casey:
It is system in package.
John:
Apparently, they introduced that term with the original Apple Watch.
Casey:
I believe that they did.
Casey:
I just completely forgot about it.
John:
A lot of people are asking, you know, so what is the difference between SOC, system on a chip, and SIP, system in package?
John:
I don't actually know, but my guess based on how Apple uses the terms is that if you look at like the logic board for a phone, you'll see the SOC, like, you know, A17 or whatever, like sitting there.
John:
But you also see tons of other chips on that circuit board.
John:
You know, all the other support chips that we've talked about before and little capacitors and resistors and all, you know, tons of stuff is on there.
John:
The modem chip, all the things, right?
John:
if you look inside an apple watch you don't see that what you see is basically one thing and that is the sip system in package and underneath there there are individual components or whatever but i think there's just a single package in the same way that the soc is a single package or like you know the the m2 chip or whatever is a single package but it has multiple things inside the package uh so system in packages in the apple watch every
John:
you know, logic computing part of this thing is inside the SIP.
John:
There is no like, oh, here's the S9 and here's its support chip and here's its second support chip and here's this thing or whatever.
John:
That's all in one package.
John:
That's my guess.
John:
If someone from Apple knows better than about what Apple itself means when they say system package, please tell us.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So the new S9, 30% faster, 4-core neural engine, which is a 2X improvement, 18-hour, quote-unquote, all-day battery life, allegedly.
Casey:
64-gig storage used to be 32.
Casey:
Thank God.
Casey:
Serial requests are now processed on device.
Casey:
Thank God.
John:
Mark, you said, thank God about the 64-gig storage.
John:
I've heard a lot of people saying, why does the phone need even 32 gigs, let alone 64?
John:
So why are you excited about doubling storage size?
Marco:
What the Apple Watch does the worst is download media files.
Marco:
So whether that's syncing music playlists over or having Overcast download your podcasts or whatever, like it is really rough for that because it is so hard to transfer stuff to the watch at any kind of speed with all their power management stuff, forcing everything over Bluetooth most of the time.
Marco:
So the more storage they have, the more stuff can be downloaded when it has an opportunity.
Marco:
And therefore, the less likely it is that you're going to go out for a run and see, oh, my playlist was deleted.
Marco:
I have to redownload it.
Marco:
I'm not running for the next 40 minutes or running with a crappier playlist.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
that that kind of thing like it is it is nice the more stories they can give the watch uh the less often you will run into that problem because you're basically increasing like the cache size of all the automatic downloaders in it uh does that does things get deleted like by the system without the participation of the apps just to like purge space or whatever aggressively so yes
John:
So that is another question a lot of people had.
John:
Why do I care how much storage my watch has?
John:
And I guess the answer is developers don't actually have precise control over when their stuff gets deleted.
John:
So the more space there is, the less likely you are going to run afoul of the thing that wanders through the watch periodically and purges stuff from storage.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Now let's talk also about that on-device Siri.
Marco:
That's a big deal.
Marco:
The Apple Watch, again, it's such a power-constrained device that oftentimes it has suffered from very slow performance.
Marco:
And Siri on the watch in particular has been pretty slow relative to the phone most of the Apple Watch's life, including even up to the Series 8 and Ultra from last year.
Marco:
So with the S9, they are substantially improving the CPU performance just flat out.
Marco:
So that's great on its own.
Marco:
Then they're adding a lot more neural engine capacity, which has allowed them to move Siri requests onto device, at least, you know, not all Siri requests, but many Siri requests, things like start an indoor workout, like that kind of stuff.
Marco:
is going to be way faster now.
Marco:
Timer requests, common things you would ask your watch to do.
Marco:
That's going to be way faster.
Marco:
And it needed it.
Marco:
That stuff was often so slow that even though I would have my watch on, I would take my phone out of my pocket and do it on my phone because I knew it would be faster.
Marco:
So this is a big deal.
Marco:
What I'm also really curious to see here is they mentioned, and it's in the docs, that they now have revved the heart rate sensor.
Marco:
The new optical heart rate sensor.
Marco:
They haven't really described, at least unless I missed it, they didn't really describe why that's better.
Marco:
But they did say that machine learning algorithms are now involved in the processing of its input.
Marco:
So what I'm hoping this will result in is more accurate heart rate readings during workouts.
Marco:
Because that's one area where the Apple Watch has always been a little hit or miss.
Marco:
It depends a lot on...
Marco:
your workout and your strap and what kind of condition it's in and you know how tight it is around your wrist and you know maybe like certain conditions of your skin or your arm hair or whatever else you know your sweat level like it would vary so much it still varies so much with even even last year's apple washes like you'll be in the middle of a workout you look down at your heart rate and it'll be like the dimmed out you know processing thing because they don't actually know it right at that moment or whatever
Marco:
Or you'll have weird gaps in it.
Marco:
So I'm hoping that the new processing pipeline for its input combined with the new sensor, I think there's a pretty good chance that will improve the heart rate monitoring of the watch.
Marco:
And if that is true, that's also a pretty substantial upgrade.
John:
And that's kind of what the S9 thing is about.
John:
This is a new watch processor for the first time in forever, a new SIP.
John:
It's not just the old one renamed.
John:
And yes, it's got a faster GPU, but it seems from what they said in the presentation, the main architectural difference, significant architectural difference, is twice as much neural engine stuff.
John:
So it's a four-core neural engine, which I guess is twice what it was before.
John:
And all these features we're talking about, you know, local on-device Siri incorporating the neural engine into the heart monitoring or whatever, is we could use a little bit more grunt from the neural engine to do this type of stuff.
John:
Now, I'm not sure that all these features or any of them actually are confined to the Series 9 because it has the double neural engine thing, but surely they will be faster and better on the S9 if they are not exclusive to it.
Casey:
Moving on, the Series 9 has a second-gen ultra-wideband chip.
Casey:
Not a U2, John.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
Yeah, what would we call that chip?
Marco:
I guess I can't figure out.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
The first chip was called a U1.
Marco:
What should we call its successor?
Marco:
How about second-generation ultra-wideband chip?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
That's a professional courtesy not extended to the Beatles record label.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Or the BMW vehicles.
Casey:
Yeah, also true.
Casey:
So the Series 9 has a second-gen ultra-wideband chip.
Casey:
It includes precision finding for your iPhone in the same spirit as an AirTag.
Casey:
So you have your watch on your person, obviously.
Casey:
You don't know where your phone is.
Casey:
Well, with the Series 9, and I think this might also require the new iPhones as well, but one way or another...
Casey:
You can actually do that like, all right, twist to the left, nope, to the right, 10 feet away, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, there it is.
Casey:
And so you can actually find your iPhone that way, which is very cool.
Casey:
It also knows when you're near a HomePod and it will throw up media suggestions or it will put up a now playing screen on your watch if you're near a HomePod, which is neat.
Casey:
Also, 2,000 nits, two times the brightness that it used to be, but can also go down to just one nit if you're in the movies, for example, or your partner's sleeping, which I thought was very cool.
Casey:
They announced a new feature, Double Tap, which is very reminiscent of the Vision Pro.
Casey:
You can, on your watch hand, you can take your thumb and forefinger and tap them together twice, and that will activate the default button that's on screen.
Casey:
So Alex Gouillot from Mac Stories.
Casey:
Apple says the gesture is enabled by the S9 neural engine processing, accelerometer, gyroscope, and optical heart sensor data through a new machine learning algorithm.
Casey:
Our friend Stephen Hackett says, tapping your index finger and thumb together will trigger whatever the default button on the screen is at any time, assuming that you are looking at a first-party watchOS app.
Casey:
I was told, says Stephen, directly that there's not an API for third-party developers to integrate this into their app beyond use with notifications.
Casey:
Once you're in a third-party app, there's no double-tap support, at least for now.
Casey:
Good day, sir.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I would expect that to change probably in like, you know, 10.1.
Marco:
Like, I'm guessing in a week or two, we're going to get watchOS beta 10.1 along with iOS beta 17.1, like all that stuff.
Marco:
And I'm sure there'll be something in there.
John:
Yeah, and people are asking in the chat room how this is different from the accessibility feature.
John:
This feature came from accessibility.
John:
Like, that's where the origins of this, but it's sort of, you know...
John:
like we just talk about what what makes something an accessibility feature there is not a clear line as you would think especially as you start to use those features it's just a feature of your devices some of them are in the accessibility section some of them are not but as you get older you will find yourself using more and more features inside that accessibility thing and this feature is yes it's an accessibility feature but everyone wants things to be accessible would you like a new different way to access features sometimes
John:
You know, you can't be, it's more difficult for you to use your other hand to use the watch or do something else.
John:
Sometimes putting your fingers together twice is the most, you know, convenient thing to do.
John:
And so why wouldn't this be, I'm going to say like turbocharged, but like they made this feature better.
John:
And it is now graduated to be a feature that is in the keynote.
John:
It's the same feature.
John:
It's just better.
John:
And, you know, as the Mac Stories thing said, it's using the, you know, you would think it would be using the accelerometer and gyroscope, but it's also using the optical heart sensor and, of course, the neural engine and the S9 to try to figure out when did you actually do the gesture versus when are you just picking up your mug off of the table, right?
John:
So hopefully they get this right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Apparently, it doesn't have to be your pointer finger and your thumb.
John:
It could be your middle finger and your thumb or whatever.
John:
But I'm sure they've trained it to be pointer finger and thumb.
John:
Anyway, I love features like this.
John:
I hope it really does work as well, as they say.
John:
And it definitely obviously has uses that are relevant to the Vision Pro and so on.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And listening to Jason Snell on Upgrade, he spoke about it, said, if memory serves, he said it took a little more force for it to register.
Casey:
Like he had to kind of train himself a little bit.
Casey:
But once he got his head around it, he said it was pretty darn reliable.
Casey:
And Gruber on Dithering said, you know, it doesn't have to be your pointer finger, but also said it worked very, very well.
Casey:
uh five colors i believe uh pink starlight silver midnight and product red uh stainless in gold silver or graphite sorry marco no titanium apparently it's going to be used elsewhere spoiler alert it's a it's a shame i the you know the more i look at this the more i think you know the the titanium apple watch edition
Marco:
um it it didn't sell well as evidenced by how difficult it was for me to get one on ebay last year uh but but i don't think they're holding back titanium from the series 9 out of you know capacity needs i think it just didn't sell well enough and they would rather you know keep keep the ultra being like the only titanium one for you know so it's like a combination of like insufficient sales and market segmentation like they want people to buy the ultra as the high-end apple watch because there's no more there's no more apple watch branded as edition at all anymore
Marco:
There are the Hermes ones that are more expensive because of their bands and I guess their custom face.
Marco:
But this is a choice, not like, oh, we don't have enough titanium to supply this very low volume product.
John:
Presumably titanium would cost more as well.
John:
So it's kind of an economic thing.
John:
We don't sell a lot of them.
John:
And because we have to charge more to maintain our margins because titanium is more expensive, we sell even fewer.
John:
So it really just prices itself out of the regular iPhone market.
Marco:
well but you mean the apple watch my guy but like i i think you know the the ultra mostly disproves the idea that it's about price because the ultra is not that much more money than the steel series 9 and it's a lot more titanium than you would use on a steel series 9 it is finished differently but it's you know anyway i think it's just like they didn't sell enough and they decided all right we're just gonna make this the material of the ultra exclusively in the watch domain
John:
How much, what was the price premium when they did have a titanium regular?
Marco:
I think it was like $1,100 or something.
Marco:
It was a lot because it was marketed as addition.
Marco:
I think the steel was like $600 or $700 to start, something like that.
John:
I didn't know it was that much more, but yeah, it wouldn't be that much more, but presumably it would be at least $100 more.
John:
And if it's just not popular, you know, well, again, I don't know if they can conclude from that because, hey, it wasn't popular when it was sold with a huge markup.
John:
Imagine that.
Casey:
Who would have thunk it?
Casey:
Never know.
Casey:
Could come back in any case.
Casey:
Uh, so yeah, so that's the Apple watch series nine.
Casey:
I mean, I think it's a nice upgrade, particularly if you're a year or two back, we're the list families on series eight and there's nothing to me that makes me say, Oh, this is it.
Casey:
I got to get one.
John:
Um, and so I know we'll probably, we'll probably talk about what we all ordered at the end, but I will spoil for you the opinion of the Apple watch where in our family, uh, because it was up in the air of like, uh,
John:
you know i think i should get a new watch this year i don't you know it's my wife she i think she got a new watch last year she's like i just get it for the hell of a whatever you know like do i really need one i told her all it's not going to look any different the colors are probably going to be similar maybe you'll get new bands or whatever um but she immediately said i want this one can you guess why
Marco:
I noticed one feature that I don't think they even spoke about, but it was on the slide, was called advanced cycle tracking.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, I noticed that, too.
Marco:
I'm glad you called it out.
Marco:
I saw it on the slide, and I'm like, I don't remember them saying anything about that.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
It was mentioned a little bit in the video, but no, that's not the reason.
John:
The reason she wants it?
Casey:
Double tap.
Casey:
Really?
John:
She thought it looked really cool to be able to put your fingers together and activate stuff on the watch.
John:
That was it.
John:
That sold her.
John:
She's getting a new watch.
Casey:
Well, that's cool.
Casey:
That's exciting.
Casey:
Do you know what she's going to buy?
John:
She already ordered it.
John:
We'll talk about it at the end.
Casey:
Okay, fair enough.
Casey:
Then there was the Mother Nature video with Octavia Spencer.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Do I have the name right there?
Casey:
I'm going to put it out there.
Casey:
It was too long.
Casey:
I think we can all agree it was too long.
Casey:
I liked it, though.
Casey:
I thought it was pretty funny.
Casey:
I thought it was good.
Marco:
I didn't even think it was too long.
Marco:
This video was absolutely too long.
Marco:
And I think humor in an Apple keynote, especially the iPhone keynote, this has a worldwide audience.
Marco:
It's very high profile and super corporate.
Marco:
So it's difficult to work in humor in a way that the corporation will find acceptable to be in their video and that their worldwide audience across many different countries and languages and cultures will not find offensive and will kind of get.
Marco:
So that's a very, very challenging thing to do.
Marco:
And that's why they should usually try to stay away from humor or keep it very subtle and light.
Marco:
In this case, they went for something.
Marco:
And I think one of my favorite takes on this was John Gruber on Dithering mentioned that
Marco:
This was kind of a way for them to not only spin their stuff in a good way, which is good, which we'll get to in a second, but to also be able to do things like kind of make fun of other companies' lack of doing some of these environmental initiatives without it just being a bolded list that they're reading off a slide.
Marco:
Because any kind of environmental progress stuff like this, it's very hard to make it not dry necessarily.
Marco:
In the middle of a presentation, when you're in the middle of hearing about new products, it kind of slows down the momentum to say, oh, by the way, we are reducing our water usage and shipping things differently and getting rid of plastic packaging.
Marco:
Everyone's like, tell me about the phone!
Marco:
And they're talking about the environment.
Marco:
That is super important stuff.
Marco:
And they're doing what seems to be really impressive work in that area.
Marco:
It seems like experts in the area, in the environmental field, seem to be pretty impressed with what they're doing as well.
Marco:
So it isn't just all marketing BS.
Marco:
So what they're doing is very impressive and important and significant and worth mentioning.
Marco:
But it's really hard to express that in an event like this in a way that's not really dry.
Marco:
So they made this video.
Marco:
I think it was a fine concept.
Marco:
It was a little overwrought.
Marco:
It was a little too cutesy, and it was a little too full of itself, and it seems like it really needed to be edited down to about two-thirds of its length.
Marco:
But it did what it was supposed to do, which is...
Marco:
It got us all to see what they're doing in environmental initiatives.
Marco:
And again, these are pretty significant initiatives.
Marco:
So I like what they're doing.
Marco:
I think it's very important.
Marco:
A lot of the stuff they had mentioned before and I had just forgotten about.
Marco:
I didn't realize they were actually branding this like Apple 2030.
Marco:
Is that what they're calling it?
Casey:
Yeah, I don't think that that was ever even implied.
John:
That's a new branding.
John:
That's a new branding and logo for this year.
Casey:
But it's definitely a thing.
Casey:
I mean, based on this presentation, it's a thing.
Marco:
And I think that's smart.
Marco:
Like, I think it's smart to say, we're going to give this a name, a very clear name with a very clear goal that's not that far off.
Marco:
And we're going to set really aggressive goals.
Marco:
And we're going to tell you all the time, here's how we're doing for Apple 2030.
Marco:
Here's the next step.
Marco:
That's all good stuff.
Marco:
So I did not enjoy this video, but I see why they did it, and I think it could have been done better, but oh well, they did it, they're doing good work in the environment, and if this video is how they had to explain it to us, fine.
John:
I think this is one of the best videos that they've made for multiple reasons, right?
John:
So first of all, I think whoever they got to direct this, and you don't think about these videos having directors, but they do.
John:
Whoever directed this, I give them kudos because they extracted better-than-usual performances from people who are not actors.
John:
Yep.
John:
I mean, you know, these Apple executives, they're not actors.
John:
No one in these things are actors except for Octavia Spencer and, you know, maybe a couple other people.
John:
Like...
John:
They did not take the first take.
John:
They made Tim stay there until he could give an acceptable line reading.
John:
Not an amazing Oscar-worthy line reading, but just like don't let him get away with just, I am Tim Cook reading off a slide.
John:
He did okay.
John:
Everyone did okay.
John:
You could tell what their lines were supposed to be and what they were supposed to be feeling when they read them or whatever.
John:
So there's that.
John:
So I feel like the bar has been raised.
John:
It is a low bar.
John:
It was very low before, and now it is slightly higher than it was.
John:
So kudos to the person who directed this.
Marco:
do we know for sure that tim cook is actually not an actor like maybe maybe he's a he's a wild and crazy guy in real life yeah maybe he's like super like bombastic and animated in real life and what we see is a character he's playing you know in in public somehow i don't think that's the case having seen him before he was the ceo sitting on a little stool sheepishly next to steve jobs and uh
John:
He was in the role already.
John:
He was living it.
John:
He's a method actor, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The second thing that I think the most important thing about this video that I really, really loved is it wasn't satirical, but it was...
John:
it was incisive and biting with respect to companies like Apple and Apple itself, because they, the most important point in this video was when they had the mother nature, you know, Octavia Spencer playing mother nature or whatever, uh,
John:
call bs on apple saying the things that it always says because that's the part about these things apple says we're doing this and we're doing that and we're gonna reduce our emissions by this and we're doing these offsets by that or whatever and so they had the apple people say that like they always do and they had mother nature call bs on it like the one of the ones that were saying like oh we're gonna do x y and z it's like oh sure you're gonna do x y and z but uh you're gonna have it done in 50 years when everybody who is in this room who is
John:
came up with this initiative is all retired that is such a thing in like the you know sort of the greenwashing of these big companies they say we're planning to do this by you know you know 2030 or whatever and it's like everybody who comes up with that plan they're all going to be on their yachts they're all going to be retired they all will have left ever and the new management will come in they'll be bought by private equity and they'll slash all these plans and it will never actually happen like everyone loves to make these plans about we're going to be super duper green and
John:
You know, at some point in the distant future that I won't have to worry about because my options will have vested and I'll be out of here.
John:
That happens so much.
John:
And it's very easy to see everything that Apple does through that same lens.
John:
And so they called it out in this video.
John:
They said, I know if you know about this stuff, you're watching this video and you're like, yeah, yeah, I'm sure, you know, eggplant emoji, whatever.
John:
Like, you know, I'm...
John:
Whatever you say, I know you're just saying all this BS.
John:
It means nothing.
John:
And then they chose that point to say, no, this thing that we just said, we're actually doing this particular part of it like now, like this year with this actual product, which that's good marketing to to emphasize how you are different than the other companies that are just saying this stuff.
John:
that Apple's actually doing it.
John:
Now, of course, their initiative calls Apple 2030 and Tim Cook will be gone by then.
John:
So there is some truth to that, which I think is why it was also, you know, talk about courage, brave of them to call out their own BS because they're setting themselves up to be, you know, later when all these people leave and the 2030 initiative doesn't come through.
John:
We're like, see,
John:
they call themselves out and it ended up being true.
John:
But I give them kudos for having the guts to do that.
John:
And I think it was entertaining enough to make me more interested than usual into their progress on these things.
John:
I essentially trust that they're going to do it.
John:
And I give them huge props for actually doing it because I really don't think the ROI for them.
John:
And, you know, Tim says, if you don't like the ROI, get out of the stock.
John:
Um,
John:
I don't think the ROI comes out positive on this.
John:
I was like, oh, they get marketing stuff and people love Apple because they do it.
John:
That's not why they're doing it.
John:
They're doing it because they think it's the right thing to do.
John:
And it is a cost center for the most part.
John:
No one is buying an Apple watch because it comes in a slightly smaller box.
John:
but it does come in a slightly smaller box and they keep working on that because they think it's the right thing to do with the environment.
John:
And yes, it costs them less than shipping and so on and so forth.
John:
Like there is some synergy there, but in general, like getting rid of all the harmful chemicals, getting the lead out of the solder, that's a pain in the butt for them because the materials that are worse for the environment –
John:
are easier to use and make better products with less effort.
John:
And so they put in the work and effort and time and money to figure out how to make acceptable products with no lead in their solder, how to make acceptable cables without the chemicals they used to use in the plastic.
John:
And sometimes it takes them a while to figure it out.
John:
So I give huge props to this entire effort because I think it is just any other company would say, this is a thorn in my side.
John:
Why did we ever promise to do this?
John:
It costs so much money, so much time, and I'm not seeing increased sales based on it.
John:
So why are we doing this?
John:
And like I said, I think they're doing it because it's the right thing to do.
John:
And I think this video calling out themselves and other companies for saying they're doing this stuff and not actually following through was a good instance, an actual instance of Apple's courage.
Casey:
No, I thought it was good.
Casey:
I thought Tim did a phenomenal job.
Casey:
But yeah, one other thing which I thought was fascinating was, you know, them saying that they are going to transport a lot more products by ocean rather than air.
Casey:
And apparently that's a 95% savings, which is bud Anna's.
John:
Not a savings in money, by the way.
John:
95% savings in, what is it, emissions or carbon emissions.
Marco:
I would assume it's also a lot cheaper.
Marco:
But the big risk there is that makes them have to control supply and demand with more latency in the process.
Marco:
Air shipping is super fast.
Marco:
Ship shipping takes weeks.
Marco:
So they have to know how many they're going to need more weeks ahead of time.
Marco:
And that adds more risk that they will either overshoot or undershoot the number they need to hit.
Marco:
And then they might have...
Marco:
Shortages or gluts of supply.
John:
It's a good thing they've got Tim Cook running the company.
John:
That's his thing.
Marco:
And that's largely what Tim Cook brought to the company early on and probably still today was that operational efficiency of really nailing their inventory and stock management so that they wouldn't have a whole bunch of inventory sitting around doing nothing or they wouldn't have giant shortages all the time.
Marco:
So this is more challenging.
Marco:
That's like this.
Marco:
That's again, it's one of the reasons why this is hard stuff to do, because the the more efficient option from their point of view for high priced products where the where the actual cost of the shipping is less significant is to just airship everything and have shorter turnaround times and less inventory sitting around in process.
Marco:
And that's not what they're doing.
Casey:
So then we get Lisa Jackson talking a little more about environmental initiatives, which this... I actually really like Lisa Jackson a lot, but I felt like a lot of this was redundant or seemed redundant.
Casey:
But the interesting piece was they're going to take the estimated amount of electricity that an average Series 9 Apple Watch consumes for charging and whatnot, and they're going to be investing in renewable energy projects to offset...
Casey:
All of them.
Casey:
So all of the Series 9 Apple Watches, they will offset the charging cost, if you will, in terms of carbon emissions by investing in renewable energy projects.
Casey:
That is so freaking cool.
Casey:
And then it got better.
Casey:
The Series 9 packaging is 100% fiber-based and more compact.
Casey:
We already talked about how it's 25% more watches per trip, more shipping via the ocean.
Casey:
And then they said the Apple Watch Series 9 is the first Apple carbon-neutral product.
Casey:
When...
John:
you buy an aluminum one and pair it with a sport loop uh they say that this is completely carbon neutral everything about it top to bottom inside and out carbon neutral which i think is unreal and that's just incredibly just a giant pain to do because when they say that i'm assuming they're talking about the entire chain of people that contribute to making this thing so there's companies that make the different parts and those parts get shipped to a factory where they're then assembled then the finished thing is shipped somewhere else like that whole process it
John:
getting the aluminum, the recycled aluminum, getting all the little chips manufactured, transporting it all, assembly.
John:
I think that's what Apple means by saying a carbon neutral product, not just like, oh, the energy we use to make one Apple Watch in the final assembly factory, you know, we offset that, therefore it's neutral.
Marco:
No, it's end-to-end.
Marco:
It's the entire supply chain involved.
John:
And that is just such a pain because even when you're as big as Apple, getting your suppliers not only to comply with your exacting standards about the parts and give you the price you want and, oh, by the way, now you have to either be carbon neutral yourself or we have to offset it by paying money for the energy that you use.
John:
It's not easy to do.
John:
And the fact that they're even attempting this is they're setting a great example is what they're doing.
John:
That's actual actual leadership.
Marco:
Well, I think to me, like the most the most impactful statement during all this was in the summary when Tim came back to say, by 2030, all of our products will have a net zero carbon impact.
Marco:
that's huge like because when you look at what's involved to do this for the watch as you mentioned that's a that's a huge undertaking and only the watch with a certain style and a certain band right and and that's that's one of their simpler products like they say by 2030 all of their products will have a net zero carbon impact does that include things like the mac pro like that well they won't still be making a mac pro in 2030 yeah that's true
John:
Well, maybe we might be in an upcycle and they'll actually be selling one of those and it'll be just a gigantic beast.
Marco:
But still, when you think about the amount of power, the phone is probably the hardest in terms of just there being so many of them out there in the world.
Marco:
But the amount of power that some of these devices use, even as efficient as they are, and over the lifetime of that device, my God, that's a substantial thing.
John:
I think they might just be talking about the manufacturing chain until you buy it.
John:
After that, you're on your own.
John:
With the exception of them offsetting the charging of the Apple Watches, I don't think they're saying they're going to offset the power usage of all the devices they sell after 2030.
John:
I think it's just like the manufacturing of it.
Marco:
They specifically called out the charging as part of the Apple Watch.
Marco:
They're estimating how much power all the Apple Watches will use and counting that in.
Marco:
So are they going to estimate all the power all the Macs will use?
John:
No, I don't think so.
John:
I think it's just basically the process by which we make all of our products will be carbon neutral.
John:
I think they meant what I think.
John:
We'll find out in 2030, I guess, because they did confuse things with the Apple Watch charging thing.
John:
So we'll see.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, we will find out, like you said.
Casey:
Plus, I wouldn't worry about the Mac Pro because in 2030, there will be literally one of them and it will be sitting in your house.
John:
We have to consult the star charts, though, because it goes in cycles, right?
John:
Boom and bust.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
We might be in a boom cycle by then.
Casey:
I doubt that.
Casey:
And even still, there will be one and it will be in your house.
Casey:
It's okay.
Marco:
But look, even if they ignore the Mac for this, which they won't, he said all of our products, but even if they ignore the Mac, the phone, what an undertaking that will be.
Marco:
Think about every iPhone being net zero carbon impact in only six years or seven.
Marco:
That's not very long from now.
John:
I said 2030, Marco.
John:
That's in like 20 years.
Casey:
Yeah, that's how it is.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
They also said they will no longer be using leather in any new Apple products, which includes the Hermes, Hermes, however you pronounce it, stuff.
Casey:
Hermes, thanks.
Casey:
Yeah, that.
Marco:
Well, let's be honest.
Marco:
It's French.
Marco:
There is no correct pronunciation.
Casey:
I am not going to approach that with a 30-foot pole.
Casey:
But nevertheless, that company that makes the fancy leather stuff apparently will be doing four new styles of band, none of which are leather, including the first ever knitted band.
Casey:
This is where they also introduce their fine woven stuff, which from what limited stuff I'd read about it, it sounds like it's very suede-ish.
Casey:
And that's about all I've heard in terms of feedback on it from people who have seen it or used it or whatever.
Casey:
Um, we also found out, uh, that, but not, I guess it wasn't mentioned here, but at some point in the event video, I swear that they mentioned that you can charge your Apple watch from an iPhone 15, um, which is kind of cool.
Casey:
And then like Marco had pointed out earlier, there's the advanced cycle tracking, uh, which we, which we saw in the little like slide.
Casey:
Oh, blobs.
Casey:
Uh, but they didn't actually call out.
John:
I don't think the leather thing.
John:
So a lot of people are going to snark at this and say, uh,
John:
So you replace leather thing with like something that's made of plastic.
John:
How is that better?
John:
Many people will tell you that leather is actually fine because we're killing the cows anywhere from meat and leather is a byproduct.
John:
So leather actually doesn't have any kind of harmful impact.
John:
The problem with all of these things is...
John:
If you Google for this and try to figure out, well, what's the truth?
John:
What do people have to say?
John:
You will find lots of things from the leather industry and lots of things from people that don't want any animals ever to be harmed.
John:
And so both of those sides of the coin have their own agenda, and neither is particularly unbiased in terms of how they're going to present themselves.
John:
The evidence, figuring out the environmental impact of anything is extremely difficult because very often there are blind spots where you'll say, well, that doesn't count.
John:
I'm not going to count that towards this, but I'm going to count it over here and this because it seems weird over here.
John:
Right.
John:
You know what?
John:
How much time, energy, carbon output, chemical pollution, whatever.
John:
contributes to the full life cycle of a cow and you know setting aside the moral things about killing things uh and getting the leather and tanning the leather and chipping it and so on and so forth versus whatever they imagine to be the worst thing possible like these uh the fine woven things are made from plastic grocery bags or whatever they think and then you come up with a comparison it ends up looking bad i don't actually know is leather the world's most harmful thing or not i do know that like
John:
the the uh what apple is trying to do here is have less environmental impact are they succeeding i think the fine woven stuff is at least partially like 60 recycled textile or something like that so it's not that you know they're not replacing leather with something that is 100 non-biodegradable it'll be on earth for 10 000 years but they're also not replacing it with something that is as biodegradable as leather as far as i know so i
John:
I feel like the jury's still out on the environmental impact of this, but it's a thing that they're doing.
John:
And I think it is.
John:
I mean, the main argument I've seen on the side of getting rid of leather is that even if you concede, which I don't think is actually true, but even if you were conceived for the sake of argument, if leather was, you know.
John:
doesn't no cow has ever no not a single extra cow is killed to get leather because it's all byproduct of the meat industry which isn't actually true but if you even if you can see that that's true what you're doing is making it slightly more profitable to kill cows which will probably result in slightly more cows being killed so
John:
do with that what you will i mean i'm not a vegetarian i eat meat i have leather case on my iphone right now i'm just trying to you know apple didn't lean on this too hard but i feel like there's been a lot of churn on this amongst people watching it because people are very angry that apple's trying to appear that they're doing a good thing and everyone is saying they're not actually doing a good thing in fact they're doing a bad thing they're doing a thing
John:
And I haven't seen the fine woven case yet.
John:
And like I said, I have leather case on my phone, but I'm willing to give the fine woven one a try.
John:
The main problem, of course, with all Apple cases is they continue to cover the bottom of the phone.
John:
So that's a separate issue.
Casey:
Oh, I had no idea that you were perturbed by that.
John:
Yeah, they can use less material.
John:
Whatever the material is, you can use less of it.
John:
Just omit the part on the bottom.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to seeing the fine woven stuff.
Marco:
And for whatever reason, you can't order it.
Marco:
The fine woven magnetic link band for the Apple Watch, you can order everything else with the Apple Watch, but not that band or any watch with it.
Marco:
So I don't know why.
Marco:
I don't know when that's coming.
Marco:
But I hope I can get it soon because it looks good.
Marco:
And any kind of environmental judgment you're going to try to make about how good or bad leather is...
Marco:
It's not good.
Marco:
Cows themselves are pretty horrific for the environment in the amounts that we raise and kill them.
Marco:
That's pretty awful.
Marco:
And if you care about the environment, one of the best things you can do is reduce the number of cows that we keep creating.
Marco:
And there's many ways to do that.
Marco:
Beef is the biggest one, but you can also...
Marco:
stop buying leather like that helps a little bit um also the leather doesn't fall off the cow and instantly become a watch band like there's a lot of steps in between those things that also have their own impact when so anyway think about that when calculating things but it doesn't matter this is the right move for apple to do no part of a consumer goods producing company is going to be
Marco:
great for the environment, but they're trying to reduce their impact.
Marco:
And the overall, you know, switch away from a cow-based product is probably going to make it easier to reduce their impact.
Marco:
And I don't think you can totally brush off the concerns of people who don't want to kill animals.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
Not everyone feels that way, but a lot of people do.
Marco:
That's a pretty substantial market that doesn't want to buy things from dead animals.
Marco:
So, you know, that's that's also, you know, I think this is the time for them to do this.
Marco:
I'm glad they're doing this.
Marco:
And I look forward to the final woven stuff.
Marco:
It looks pretty good from the looks.
Marco:
And everyone says it feels pretty decent.
Marco:
Who was at the event?
Marco:
I look forward to getting my hands on one.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apple Watch Ultra 2, still at $799.
Casey:
This was introduced by Daniela Duchamp, I guess.
Casey:
Basically, it's 64 gigs, 3,000 nits instead of 2,000, the brightest display Apple has ever created.
Casey:
Has a new watch face called Modular Ultra, which uses the lateral edges of the display to show stuff.
Casey:
Night mode activates automatically based on ambient light sensor.
Casey:
Same basic battery life.
Casey:
The Ultra 2 with alpine loop or trail loop are carbon neutral and no dark titanium.
Casey:
And that's basically it.
Casey:
That's the whole thing.
Marco:
Yeah, it's kind of funny.
Marco:
So first of all, the Ultra is a great product.
Marco:
Ultra 2 seems like it's also a great product.
Marco:
So, you know, go ahead and buy one.
Marco:
I think it's interesting with the whole dark titanium rumor.
Marco:
The Apple Watch seems to be the Apple product that...
Marco:
always has the most wrong rumors about its physical design.
Marco:
Every year, there are rumors about Apple Watch physical design changes, and every year, for the most part, they don't happen.
Marco:
I don't know why we always buy into it.
Marco:
Whoever is leaking that crap about the Apple Watch every single year has a horrendous track record.
Marco:
But anyway, yeah, someday they're going to do a dark titanium one and they'll sell a bunch of them.
Marco:
In the meantime, they didn't.
Marco:
Oh, well, the ultra was a huge hit last year.
Marco:
It's going to continue to be a huge hit this year.
Marco:
And when sales start to sag, they'll release the black one and then the sales will boost back up again.
Marco:
So good, good, good product.
Marco:
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Casey:
for sponsoring our show then we get on to the iphone 15 with cayenne drance uh it's getting the dynamic island 1600 nits is i guess the standard but it can kind of flex up to 2000 nits which is twice the iphone 14 uh it doesn't appear to be always on display and you think you think they would have said it in the keynote if it did
John:
yeah it does not have always on or 120 hertz the always on display question last week i was like well it might just be a software thing and a display driver thing because the display driver has to drive it at that thing apparently you need to have one of these new ltpo or is it low something some process by which they make the display that is also an essential part of the always on display and apparently that manufacturing process has to happen in a special factory that can do those type of displays and it costs more money
John:
And so it probably can't do always on display.
John:
That is the extra color that has been added to this since the keynote.
John:
And they didn't say it did, so I'm assuming it doesn't.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
It's got 6.1, 6.7 inches as before.
Casey:
They did make brief mention of a contoured edge, which will reemerge in the iPhone 15 Pro.
Casey:
And initial reports I've heard is that it's actually really nice to hold.
Casey:
They use color infused glass with, quote unquote, metallic ions to get a series of colors that also seems to be mixed response.
Casey:
I actually really like them.
Casey:
They are muted and they're very pastel, but I thought they were good.
Marco:
That's one way to put it.
Marco:
I think, you know how like all the different jokes about how to make a martini and like how little vermouth should be in a martini?
Casey:
Yeah, you should just wave the vermouth near the glass and that's sufficient.
Marco:
I feel like that's how Apple treats color in this year's iPhone 15.
Marco:
Some dye was waved nearby when this was being made.
Marco:
That's the whole thing.
John:
It's not dye.
John:
I feel like this desaturated nature may be part of the process, this whole color-infused glass with metallic ions.
John:
I don't know this to be the case, but it, you know, it could be that this is as saturated as they can get them with this process.
John:
The advantage of this process is that essentially the color is in the material, not laid on it or laid under it, but within the material.
John:
And they could do the neat thing where they kind of like, you know,
John:
the the gigantic camera bump not as gigantic on the 15 but the camera bump is also infused with that same color right and because it's thicker the color is deeper there because there's more material i don't know i have to wait for someone to crack one of these things open and look at it edge on or whatever but i'm willing to mostly give them a pass on the colors this year on the 15 because at least they tried to make them look a little different and i mean i guess maybe the black one uh shows that they can do some kind of saturation but i think it looks pretty good i think the pink one looks good in this kind of powdery color very much so the you know like
John:
This is not a saturated year, but there still is the full black one and the other ones look pretty cute.
John:
We can play more about colors when we get to the Pro.
Casey:
Oh, will we ever.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Ceramic shield front glass.
Casey:
It gets the 48 megapixel main camera.
John:
Do we know for a fact if this is the one from the 14 Pro?
John:
The sensor on this is from the 14 Pro?
Casey:
I don't think we know for a fact.
John:
Everyone just keeps assuming in the articles, they're like, I guess it's the one from the 14 Pro.
John:
Because we know that the 15 Pro doesn't have the same sensor as the 15.
John:
It's a new sensor in the 15 Pro.
John:
But my question is, so this one is smaller, but is it exactly the same as the one last year?
John:
I don't actually know.
John:
It seems like it has matching specs.
John:
I mean, I don't know.
John:
Yeah, it does.
John:
But the specs they give you are anyway.
John:
It will be interesting to see if that's actually the case, because that actually has some consequences when we talk about the Pro later about what Apple's doing with their phones.
Marco:
And keep in mind, also, the camera and its processor are so paired together, and the iPhone 15 does have the A16 from last year's Pro, so it would make sense to bring over the same camera sensor, too.
Marco:
It's probably the same.
John:
although speaking of that so the next item the case is going to get to here is uh so this is if this really is the same camera the same sensor a16 same everything they've found a way to get a little more oomph out of that because the new feature that they touted for this is that uh you can take a picture where it does the pixel binning where it takes every all four groups of four pixels and combines them into like one bigger pixel but
John:
but it will also take the full 48 megapixel frame and combine them so previously what the 14 pro could do with the same soc and same presumably same camera was you could take a 48 megapixel sensor where it used every single pixel individually or you can take a 12 megapixel photo where it it binned all the pixel sensor sets of four and that makes perfect sense since you could bin or not bin this thing when you take a picture
John:
It bins and not bins and combines them to make a 24 megapixel picture.
John:
So it's not just taking the bin pixels.
John:
It's not just taking the unbinned pixels.
John:
It's combining them to make a picture that is higher resolution because it uses that presumably uses the 48 megapixel picture to give like that fine detail.
John:
But then it uses the color to sort of cancel out the noise from the individual tinier pixels.
John:
So bottom line is you get pictures with twice as many megapixels that presumably are
John:
look better and have more detail than you could before.
John:
And my question is, if they could do this, is this just a software thing?
John:
Or is there some kind of image signal processor thing that they couldn't have done last year?
John:
I'm assuming it's just a software thing.
John:
But if so, they're doing more work per photo because they didn't do this before.
John:
I do wonder if it's going to change sort of the readout speed of like how fast you can take pictures to do this.
John:
uh but it's a it's one of the rare times i can remember seeing like when the non-pro camera ends up getting camera features that weren't on the pro camera that had the same hardware well it's only been in recent years that they've had this kind of off by one thing with the chips in the non-pro phones
Marco:
yeah yeah first of all to answer your question i think it's got to be software because this doesn't have like you know the the better stuff of the a17 do you think it's going to be slower then i don't know i i will we'll have to find out it might it might not be noticeably slower but we'll find out i mean the a17 as a processor is not massively faster than the a16 was so you know we'll get there but you know i i think they can do it and and just have it be software differentiation
Casey:
So in any case, they did also make mention, as we had been talking about recently, that they said, quote, using the middle 12 megapixels of the 48 megapixel sensor.
John:
So I thought that for the 2X camera, a little bit of a quick follow up on that.
John:
I've learned since last episode when we talked about this tomorrow, because people are super duper obsessed with the idea that if you use the 12, the center 12 megapixels for the 2X camera, you don't need to do any upscaling.
John:
If you're using the Apple camera app and you use the 2x, like the virtual lens, the 2x lens, which is really just the 1x lens, but the middle portion, it will try to use unbinned middle 12 megapixels from the sensor if it can.
John:
But if there is not sufficient light, it will bin them.
John:
And you have no control over this.
John:
And so when it bins them, it's going to upscale.
John:
And not only do you have no control over this, but it changes as Apple changes their algorithms and whatever.
John:
So it's not a setting that you can control, and you don't even know whether it's doing it.
John:
So it's, as always, things are always more complicated than you think.
John:
But they, you know, Apple says something like this, and you're like, oh, I guess it must always use unbidden pixels.
John:
As of the 14 Pro, that was not the case.
John:
Maybe it's true of the 15?
John:
We'll find out.
John:
But yeah, and you can't really tell after the fact too, because it always gives you a 12 megapixel sensor, whether that's 12 unbidden pixels that it used for that,
John:
Or it's, well, I can't do the math, but like what, four megapixels of bin pixels?
Casey:
I don't know, something like that.
Casey:
Then we brought up Miriam, I believe, Hashemi, and they were talking about the, you know, camera's so great, this and that and the other thing.
Casey:
But then the bomb that dropped that I thought was freaking cool is that apparently portrait mode is still a thing.
Casey:
But you don't have to use it because it will use machine learning to just figure out, is this the sort of thing where portrait mode would be applicable?
Casey:
And it will capture the depth data.
Casey:
Like, what was that feature in video that none of us ever used?
Casey:
Cinematic mode.
Casey:
It'll capture the depth data.
Casey:
Good summary.
Casey:
And then, I mean, I call it like I see it.
Casey:
Capture the depth data.
Casey:
You're not wrong.
Casey:
Put that in like a sidecar on the HEIF or HEIC or whatever the file it is, and it will let you in the Photos app go back later and adjust what's in focus and adjust the focal depth of that image.
Casey:
This looks so cool if it actually works.
Casey:
And they also added dogs and cats get portrait mode too, which I think is already kind of sort of there.
Casey:
But anyway, they specifically called it out.
Casey:
So you can do this focus and depth control in post.
Casey:
And that is so freaking cool.
Casey:
And I am so freaking excited for this.
Casey:
Genuinely, I think this is amazing.
John:
i mean if you like fake blur sure i sure do i know if some people like it that's good i mean it's kind of interesting like kind of like when they added live uh photos it's on by default like just everybody gets it this will hopefully be less dangerous than that but i do wonder if it will let me either turn it off or i can get rid of the depth data if i don't want it because definitely i mean not that it's taking up too much room but a it's capturing depth data which means it's spraying everybody with the little depth sensor thing which i don't you know it's
John:
Hurting your battery life and maybe making your photos take longer to be captured.
John:
I don't need all that data.
John:
I'm not going to use it.
John:
So we'll see what iOS 17.
John:
We'll see what kind of controls iOS 17 provides for this feature.
Casey:
You know, why do you got to be such a bummer?
Casey:
I'm excited for this.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
Everyone else can enjoy it.
John:
I just want a little bit more control over whether people get sprayed with LIDAR every time I take a picture of them.
Marco:
uh who cares what do you have lidar sensitive you have wi-fi sensitivity too no i'm saying it's like it uses a little bit of battery life and it takes a little bit of extra storage per picture it's the same reason i don't have live pictures on because i don't need that extra data for every photo it adds up oh god i forgot this about you first of all you should have live pictures on second of all i would expect the battery impact of the little blink of lidar is probably far less than the massive image processing pipeline that's going on anytime you have the camera app open oh
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, it's kind of like the speaker.
John:
Once you start interacting with the real world, it takes a surprising amount of energy instead of just being in your little fake world of ones and zeros where you can just get a lower power chip and you can do the same math with less power.
Casey:
John, just bask in your wrongness quietly while I continue.
Casey:
This gets the A16 bionic that was bionic.
Marco:
We don't have time in this episode for John to be wrong.
Casey:
That was introduced to the iPhone 14 Pro.
Casey:
Then they talked about connectivity.
Casey:
It gets your U2 chip, which includes three times further connections.
Casey:
And this, I thought, was freaking cool.
Casey:
Again, no sarcasm.
Casey:
You can do Find My Friends if both people have one of the second-gen ultra-wideband chips, but you can do it between phones.
Casey:
So if you're on different sides of a store or maybe you're at an amusement park and you got separated or chose to be separated for a minute...
Casey:
you can use this thing to do a AirTag style, no twist to the right, a little bit more, a little bit more.
Casey:
Okay, stop now, walk, walk, walk, 10 feet, nine feet, eight feet, et cetera.
Casey:
I genuinely am excited for this.
Casey:
I think this is going to be awesome.
Casey:
And I think it's a great idea.
Casey:
And then they reiterated voice isolation and audio calls.
Casey:
They also announced roadside assistance via satellite.
Casey:
So they said, hey, if you have a medical emergency in your middle of nowhere, well, we can help you out.
Casey:
But what if you don't have a medical emergency?
Casey:
You have a car emergency.
Casey:
And I don't know, maybe that's a very American thing, but here we are.
Casey:
So they said, hey, we'll do roadside assistance via satellite.
Casey:
Same basic idea.
Casey:
You tap through a wizard.
Casey:
Then they send some text messages through freaking space.
Casey:
And they said this is launching in the U.S.
Casey:
with AAA, which is our American Automobile Association.
Casey:
There's something very similar in the U.K.
Casey:
I forget what it's called.
Casey:
It might be AA.
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
I hope that's it.
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
No, it's not that one, actually.
Casey:
Now that I think about it, maybe not.
Casey:
But anyways, the point is it is free for AAA members to receive service as part of your membership.
Casey:
And then you can pay for it if you're not a AAA member.
John:
satellite services remain free for two years and then we started talking about wired capabilities but before i get there any thoughts on the wireless capabilities it's all cool stuff yep i dig it when i saw the thing oh free for two years whatever i said how much time do i have left or my wife i guess i know it's my fault like how much is there like a timer that's going to tell me like when my satellite free satellite presumably they'll try to upsell me and say hey your free thing is going to run out i guess i'll find out in a year huh
Marco:
Well, and they haven't really announced yet, like, what happens when that runs out?
Marco:
Do you just lose that ability or do you have to pay for it?
Marco:
They haven't said anything on that yet and it won't run out for anybody for at least one more year.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And then they have wired capabilities and they announced...
Casey:
USB-C, baby.
Casey:
It's real.
Casey:
It's happening.
Casey:
What's the GIF?
Casey:
I forget what the American politician was, but it is happening.
Casey:
And I'm excited.
Casey:
You know, it's funny because I was thinking about this, and I Qi charge basically all the time.
Casey:
About the only time I plug in, there's two times that I think of that I typically plug in.
Casey:
Number one is at my desk when I'm debugging on device.
Casey:
And number two is when I am running really low on battery and need to top up.
Casey:
And we have one of the, like...
Casey:
I don't know if it isn't an iPad charger, which whatever the Apple USB-C charger is that's not, you know, the big square, the one that's like a rectangular power brick or iPhone brick.
Casey:
Well, anyways, we have that with a USB-C to lightning cable down in the living room.
Casey:
And so if I ever need to top up quickly, that's the one that does the like 10, 15, 20, whatever it is, watt charging.
Casey:
And that's really nice.
Casey:
But otherwise, like nightly, I Qi charge.
Casey:
When I'm traveling, I Qi charge.
Casey:
But that being said, the thought of never having to worry about whether or not I have a lightning cable nearby, I am in.
Casey:
I am all in.
Casey:
And I travel with probably too many USB-C cables because all of the laptops and iPads and whatnots that I have around me.
Casey:
I am so excited to not have to think about lightning anymore.
Casey:
Not that it's a burden.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say it's a burden.
Casey:
I'm just excited.
Casey:
And this makes me happy.
Casey:
So here we are.
Casey:
It is real USB-C in the iPhone.
John:
i'm so happy so apple kind of undersold this like they didn't uh this is definitely the type of thing where i don't know what people don't want to hear that if steve job is still around but if steve job was still around he would have announced this because it's one of those things that is going to have a lot of impact it's probably the headlining feature for regular people about what's new about the iphones this year usbc well but they don't see it as a positive though
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
Well, that's why you get out the big guns and have somebody say, let me explain to you why.
John:
I know you're probably thinking, oh, no, this is bad, but let me explain to you why it's actually good.
John:
But they didn't do that.
John:
They basically just said, the person who's doing the iPhone 15 announcement, this is just going to be another segment of the iPhone 15.
John:
And yeah, they did save it to the end, but whatever.
John:
But they didn't have someone higher up in the org chart come out to say, let me explain to you why we're courageous for removing the headphone jack or whatever, like that type of thing.
John:
It was just part of the presentation.
John:
And they did.
John:
didn't really they tried to basically say here it is here's what it is and moved on real quick like i i don't haven't looked this up yet but like no color match cables that as far as we know yeah the room mill had a lot of bad rumors this year yeah i mean maybe someone will still be selling color match cables but apple is not including them in the box and if they are going to sell them they didn't even talk about it or emphasize it so whoa slow down slow down i my understanding is there are cables power cables in the box but not color matched ones
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
I just want to make sure we're clear here.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
So that's what I'm saying.
John:
It's not a thing that they emphasize.
John:
Wait, are we sure that they aren't color-matched and we just can't tell the difference?
John:
That's what I'm saying, because no one has these boxes yet.
John:
But if they didn't mention it, you'd think they would have mentioned it, at least just noted it.
Casey:
They also didn't show any color-matched cables in the video, including the times where they were clearly plugging in a USB-C cable.
John:
Yeah, they just showed white cables.
John:
Right.
John:
So I don't.
Casey:
So we don't know definitively to your point.
John:
But either way, they did is not a thing that they emphasize.
John:
And the reason people thought they were going to have it and emphasize that it's a way to put lipstick on this pig to say, you know, if you're upset about this, let's distract you with cool colors, which is why I thought it was going to be such a big important part of this thing.
John:
But it's not an important part of it's not part of it.
John:
And so it seems like it's not part of it.
John:
you know and and that that goes that goes to their approach their approach was let's not spend a long time essentially making excuses for ourselves right and say why are we doing this blah blah they just said here it is it's the same connector you know and love and all our other products and now it's on phones and we think it's great anyway moving on so that's the approach they took
Marco:
Well, but I think it was right in the sense that, you know, they know this is going to be crap news for most people.
Marco:
And most of the advantages of it, most people won't care about the, you know, like the faster data speeds and, you know, different.
John:
Well, not everywhere.
John:
The convenience of not having to have extra cables like trying to sell that is like a potential thing.
Marco:
And they did sell it as, now you can use the same cables across all of our products, except for the Apple Watch.
Marco:
And the keyboard and the mouse.
Marco:
Yeah, well, we'll get there.
Marco:
And the AirPods Max.
Marco:
That is the benefit to regular people, though.
Marco:
You can use the same cable.
John:
But they don't see that as a benefit, because they're going to say, I have a bunch of cables already, and now I can't use these anymore.
John:
So you telling me that I can use these other cables that are already in use for my other devices doesn't help me.
John:
right they don't see that the future thing i'm like well don't you see in the future you know it'll be more uniform we all see that but like it's it's a tough sell so they didn't really touch that they just said the same great port we have all these products now is on the phone isn't that great anyway moving on no i i think again first of all i think this is going to go over poorly with a lot of people it already has i already had people in my life asking me like they changed the port again like yeah again oh oh that's right time was 11 years ago yeah it's like yeah it's like yesterday
Casey:
I meant to bring this up.
Casey:
This is completely relevant.
Casey:
So after we recorded last, I was talking to Aaron.
Casey:
We were sitting around when the kids were in bed just chit-chatting.
Casey:
And I'd mentioned that, oh, the new iPhone is going to have USB-C and we won't need lightning anymore.
Casey:
And she looks over at me, wait, what?
Casey:
But we have like a thousand lightning cables.
Casey:
I was like, yeah, but we also use USB-C for everything.
Casey:
But we've got like a thousand lightning cables.
John:
That's what I was saying, that they don't see the like the future, the clean future of just having one connector is of no interest to them.
John:
All they see is the present with lightning cables everywhere.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And it's not that Erin is unintelligent or anything like that.
Casey:
It's just that her thought is, you know, it's wasteful to get rid of them, which to some degree she's right.
Casey:
And so anyway, it was just funny to me that after we had talked about it, it was literally like Thursday.
Casey:
I think we recorded on Wednesday.
Casey:
It was Thursday or something like that, that we had this conversation.
John:
think i think people will probably get over it a little bit quicker than they did with a 30 pin to lighting just because so many people do wireless stuff now and and so many people already have usbc nobody had a lightning cable when lightning was introduced like people have 30 pin stuff but zero people had lightning cables well a lot more people who are buying iphones already have usbc cables they know what a usbc cable is and they already own some and yet sucks that they also already own a million lightning cables or whatever but i think it'll be better this time like and also the people like you casey who do wireless charging most of the time like it's
John:
There are many mitigating factors to make this transition less painful.
John:
The aggravating factor is there are so many more iPhones in the world and therefore so many more iPhone users than they were 11 years ago.
John:
So that is not in Apple's favor, but I think they kind of like having all those customers.
John:
So what are you going to do?
Casey:
real-time follow-up if you go to the iphone 15 pro which i know we're not talking about the pro but the pro specs page you scroll all the way down what's in the box uh iphone with ios 17 usbc charge cable one meter and documentation and the picture they show the charge cable is clearly a standard white charge cable again not definitive but it sure seems like it's probably not color matched yeah they would have mentioned it they had to like when they did the imax they totally mentioned the fact that everything on that thing is color matched right and they did not say it about these phones so i'm gonna say no
Marco:
And it's very possible that the leaked picture of the color-matched cables, those could have been future iMac peripheral cables.
Marco:
It could be anything.
Marco:
But anyway, I will say before we leave USB-C, a little PSA to think about.
Marco:
All of those iPhone people who don't have USB-C stuff yet suddenly need it.
Marco:
A couple days ago, I went on Amazon and I bought a bunch of USB-C cables and I bought a few extras of my favorite chargers because it wouldn't surprise me if there's like a sales blitz and all these things and they might be hard to get for a little while because you think about the number of people who are about to need USB-C gear and...
Marco:
is very high they sell a lot of iphones well the good thing is everybody in the industry knew this was happening so i hope all these companies have ramped up their production on usbc cables i would hope but i i would i would suggest if you are thinking about maybe getting more usbc gear i would suggest getting that now rather than seeing if you can get it in a couple of months
Casey:
Yep, I agree.
Casey:
That reminds me that I had in my Amazon cart a couple of USB A to C cables for the purpose of CarPlay, and I have to send that through probably immediately.
Casey:
So yeah, so then they announced a new AirPods Pro second gen with USB-C case, which in the event, they made it sound like, oh, it's the exact same thing, but the case is now USB-C.
Casey:
Except that apparently that's not true.
Casey:
We found out through a few places.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes to Six Colors where they talked about this.
Casey:
Apparently it's actually a slightly reworked set of AirPods Pro that have, if memory serves, let me read this excerpt that I think John has helpfully put in.
Casey:
The AirPods Pro are actually a slightly newer model.
Casey:
Apple cites a new IP54 rating for earbuds and case, adding additional dust resistance, as well as a new lossless audio with ultra-low latency specifically for use with the Apple Vision Pro, a feature that does not appear to be coming to the existing second-generation AirPods Pro.
Casey:
That really bums me out, given that I, just like a month ago, bought a set of second-gen AirPods Pro.
Casey:
But what are you going to do?
John:
And the fact is they'd also don't, they haven't really renamed this product.
John:
It's still called AirPods pro second gen.
John:
It's just AirPods pro second gen with USB C case, which I guess they've done before where they've had laptops with like, I don't remember like bronze keyboard.
John:
That's not really one of the model specifiers, but at various times they've, uh, they've added more words, uh,
Marco:
to the end of their product to further narrow it down to a specific sub model and those sub models have been different in weird ways so here it is airpods pro second gen with usbc case yeah it's kind of like it's like the 2.5 gen but i was kind of disappointed by this too because like when you know in in the past when uh the the original airpods the case was not chi compatible and
Marco:
And then a little while into its lifetime, they updated the case to have wireless Qi charging, and they let you buy that case separately for something like $70.
Marco:
So you didn't have to replace your entire set of AirPods to get the cool new case charging method.
Marco:
You could just buy into it if you wanted to for less.
Marco:
I was kind of assuming they would do the same thing here, and it looks like they didn't.
John:
i mean they might still do it eventually but they're not they don't have it now like i don't even though the airpods themselves are updated i don't see any reason that they couldn't sell the case separately because the case is not part of this new lossless audio ultra low latency blah blah vision like the case isn't contributing to that so it seems like they could sell the case separately and maybe they will eventually but maybe not at launch we'll see
Marco:
i mean they also just might be figuring like you know the for for the vision pro this what's going to be a very low volume at first product that's going to quote start at thirty five hundred dollars they might figure who cares if people have to buy new airpods to use it that's that's that's going to be a drop in the bucket relative to the cost of that product they also updated the earpods if you're wondering what earpods are it's like
John:
What used to come with the phones was a little set of wired headphones, and those wired headphones used to have a headphone jack on them, but then the headphone jack went away, so those wired headphones had a lightning plug on the end of them, and then that went away because they don't put those with phones anymore.
John:
But anyway, you can still get it, and now they're going to have one of those with USB-C on it.
John:
It's so weird to me in the house.
John:
Occasionally, I find one of those wired pairs, and it's like, a set of headphones with lightning on the end?
John:
Oh, yeah, a phone.
John:
Anyway, now they're going to have USB-C ones if you want them.
Marco:
See, this is why I'm one of the many reasons why I'm so excited to be going to USBC is like I have so many weird little lightning things.
Marco:
You know, there's like lightning dongles.
Marco:
And a lot of times, like, for instance, the wired headphone dongle.
Marco:
I have two different ones that I carry in my travel bag, one with USBC for modern iPads and the other one with lightning for modern phones in case I need a headphone out, which sometimes I do.
Marco:
This is going to be so nice to just have one of those things.
Marco:
Again, looking at other USB-C features, there are so many weird little peripherals, like those little card readers that Apple sells for the camera connection kit.
Marco:
So many things like that.
Marco:
General little adapters, little peripherals that before I would generally need two of in my library here or while traveling.
Marco:
And now it'll be able to be done with just one.
Marco:
That's really nice.
Marco:
Not to mention, we'll get to the Pro with being able to have more advanced stuff, but not to mention it can probably supply more power because it has to as part of the USB spec.
Marco:
And so that will enable a lot more peripheral types to be more easily used or used at all.
Marco:
It's going to be really nice for so many reasons.
Marco:
I'm very, very happy to see this.
Casey:
And that's a perfect segue to them announcing that the AirPods Pro 2nd Gen and the Apple Watch apparently can be charged from the phone.
Casey:
I guess if you have a USB-C Apple Watch cable or a USB-C to USB-C, you can charge the new AirPods Pro v2.5 or an Apple Watch, which is kind of neat.
Casey:
And like we said, the case is not available separately, which is a bummer.
Casey:
Then this is where they started talking about the fine woven stuff, which I think we've already talked about.
Casey:
And then we finally get to the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
Casey:
Come to daddy.
Casey:
This is going to be titanium.
Casey:
This is going to be titanium, at least in parts.
Casey:
And they said it's the most premium material we've ever used in an iPhone enclosure.
Casey:
John, my understanding is that you have some things you'd like to get off your chest.
Casey:
What's going on?
John:
So last episode, we were talking about the invitation to this event that showed like titanium powder.
John:
And we started talking all about 3D printing titanium and the new things that that kind of process makes possible and the possibility that Apple might manufacture one or more of its products using 3D printing of titanium.
John:
if apple is doing that they didn't say anything about it which does not seem like apple so i'm gonna say they're not doing that uh we got so much feedback between last episode on this one from people who know about 3d printing metals and titanium in particular about uh the pros and cons of this technique and the various different kinds of titanium 3d printing that exists and which one apple may or may not use uh but
John:
Given the fact that Apple did not mention anything about 3D printing metal, which seems to indicate that they're not doing it, I have chosen a winner from all the feedback that we have.
John:
And that winner is Dave.
John:
Here's what Dave, this is a little bit long, but I think here's what Dave had to say about 3D printing.
John:
I think it is the winner because it is the best explanation of why Apple in particular did not mention
John:
uh decide to build their iphones or apple watch ultras or whatever by 3d printing titanium at least not yet so here's what dave says john was speculating that the marketing graphics for the apple event indicated they may be using 3d metal printing for the titanium pro phones he's not wrong that machining titanium sucks but i have a good bit of acknowledge about the current state of metal additive manufacturing am that's what all the people in the know call this it's additive manufacturing as opposed to subtractive where you start with the big block of metal and you subtract stuff additive is you add stuff anyway that's
John:
That's what it's called, AM.
John:
And Dave continues, I find the idea of Apple being able to implement this technology to be highly improbable.
John:
This is mainly because AM is exceptionally good at making low-volume, highly intricate parts and exceptionally bad at any other context.
John:
The AM process is slow and inherently energy inefficient.
John:
John's example of the Zinger hypercar is a perfect example of where a metal AM is ideally suited.
John:
Very low volume, Zinger is only making 80 of these hypercars, and where weight slash complexity have a large tradeoff advantages.
John:
Apple's iPhone chassis could not be further from this reality.
John:
It's very simple in structural design, but even the Pro phones will require hundreds of millions of units.
John:
The closest thing that I am aware of in Metal AM that is considered large production is the GE fuel injector nozzle.
John:
Here's a news article we'll put in the show notes, noting the GE took three years to go from 30,000 units to 100,000 units.
John:
GE bought the leading metal additive manufacturing machine company because they could not buy enough machines to accomplish a task otherwise.
John:
They have a whole factory full of metal AM printers printing day and night, and they make 70K parts in three years of just of this one part.
John:
Apple needs several orders of magnitude more AM machines, which simply don't exist just to keep up with production.
John:
Dave finishes, happy to have Apple prove me wrong.
John:
Having met some of the material scientists, I would not be shocked if they proved me wrong.
John:
But I personally don't see from here how metal AM will ever be used in large volume production.
John:
Near as I can tell, physics and economics don't make sense.
John:
Production rate is just one of many challenges that I would see for Apple here.
John:
Dimensional tolerances, surface finish, defect mitigation, especially for anodizing and dyeing.
John:
And then he finishes, feel free to trash this feedback once I've proven wildly wrong on Tuesday.
John:
Well, Dave, you were not wrong.
John:
You were 100% right, and you win the feedback lottery.
John:
Not lottery, the feedback contest.
John:
So all this, as Dave says, this is the current state.
John:
And Apple, if anyone is going to do something like this, it's Apple.
John:
The same was true of CNC, you know, the computer controlled milling machine manufacturing until Apple dumped literally billions of dollars into it.
John:
And all suddenly you can make things out of solid blocks of aluminum at mass scale.
John:
Apple did that.
John:
And the question was, is Apple going to do that for 3D printing metal?
John:
And the answer is not this year.
John:
And so for people in the know in the industry, it's
John:
It's really cool, has lots of advantage.
John:
You can do really cool stuff with it.
John:
But apparently what you cannot do in 2023 is make hundreds of millions of iPhones with it.
John:
Or probably not even the whatever millions of watches, right?
John:
So watch this space to see if Apple makes a move in this direction.
John:
But today, it is not a thing that makes sense.
Casey:
These are the lightest Pro models ever.
Casey:
187 grams for the 15 Pro, which is 4 grams lighter than the rumor, 19 grams lighter than the 14 Pro.
Casey:
Pro Max is exactly as rumor, 221 grams, which is 19 grams.
Casey:
Again, lighter than the 14 Pro Max.
John:
Interesting that they're exactly the same difference.
John:
So the Pro and the Pro Max both got 19 grams lighter, which is a coincidence.
John:
It seems really weird.
Casey:
It does, but here we are.
Casey:
And then Jason wrote that, as someone who uses an iPhone 14 Pro every day, I instantly noticed how different the iPhone 15 Pro feels in my hand.
Casey:
It's a combination of factors.
Casey:
First, the phone is noticeably lighter.
Casey:
This is not a minor quirky quote, I suppose, if you ate it, you'd grudgingly admit it's a few grams lighter quote sort of thing.
Casey:
It's very clearly noticeable thanks to the combined titanium and aluminum design.
Casey:
It doesn't feel flimsy, mind you.
Casey:
It's very solid but quite lighter.
Casey:
And we also, I don't know if you guys had a chance to see this, but Dr. Drang put up a really great post about the physics behind why it may seem a bit lighter.
Casey:
And it's all about like moments and things I've long since forgotten about physics from when I was in engineering school.
John:
That's just saying having the weight of the edge.
John:
Like if the part that got lighter is on the edge, the part on the edge is going to contribute the most to the feeling of inertia as you rotate the thing in your hand.
John:
So that could account for the fact.
John:
Although he did start off in saying...
John:
It could be that just 19 grams, even though it doesn't seem a lot, people's hands are actually pretty sensitive and you can notice 19 grams.
John:
And I think that is actually the most straightforward explanation.
John:
But yeah, there's also a moment of inertia and having weighted the perimeter and so on and so forth.
John:
But yeah, they feel lighter.
John:
So we'll see when we get to the Marco test, because we know he's, despite all the working out he does, he cannot lift the current generation of phones.
Marco:
No, it just, it's stuck on my desk all the time.
Marco:
I put it in my pocket, my pants fall down, like it just, it's too heavy.
John:
They should have made the perimeter of the phone out of tungsten.
Marco:
Yeah, that'd be awesome.
Marco:
Even heavier.
Casey:
All right, so it has the thinnest borders ever, and they reduce the dimensions, the exterior dimensions, without affecting the screen size, which is pretty cool.
John:
Oh, yeah, one thing, one correction from last week.
John:
I was puzzling over, like, why is it that the ProPhone got thinner?
John:
than the non-pro one uh the problem was i was reading my own notes wrong i had the absolute value of the differences between the the the pro and non-pro it turns out that the pro phone is actually a little bit thicker not a little bit thinner than the non-pro phone so all is right with the world the pro phone is smaller in width and height but a little tiny bit thicker that's not counting the gargantuan uh camera bump
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
The materials, this was Isabelle Yang, it's grade five titanium, which apparently is a known thing.
Casey:
I don't know anything about this stuff, but it's a thing.
Casey:
It's titanium on the outside, bonded to aluminum on the inside, which is really cool.
Casey:
Yeah, that, can we stop on that for a second?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
I'd like to, so I did some research earlier trying to figure out for the previous pro phones that use stainless steel bands, do they use stainless steel inside somewhere too?
Marco:
And I couldn't, I looked at like old teardowns and everything, and I couldn't find any evidence of that.
John:
No, they don't.
John:
I think they had aluminum frame.
John:
Well, no, actually, here's the thing.
John:
So Casey's about to talk about this, but I will preempt him.
John:
No, that's fine.
John:
The big thing about the 15 Pro that they touted, and I think they talked about it in the 15, is that it uses the iPhone 14...
John:
design right so the i not the 14 pro but the 14 so we'll put a link in the show notes to like the structural repairability to kind of design and i fix it tear down of the 14 with the 14 they changed it so you can remove both the front and the back of the phone so it's like there's like a middle structural element that everything hangs off of and the front components hang off the front of it and the back components hang off the back so depending if you want to get at the front stuff like the screen or the back stuff like the battery you choose which side of the phone to open
John:
previously that wasn't the case previously apple has said well you open this one from the back or you open it from the front in most recent years you've only been able to do one or the other and whichever one they chose it sucks for the components that are on the other side you know if they chose to open the front you got to dig through the whole phone to get to the batteries in the back or whatever so that design in the 14 with like a mid-frame uh
John:
that's what they did for all of the 15s so the 15s are all now more repairable because they use that middle frame thing so if you're asking about the stainless steel one did it use that design it didn't even have a mid frame it was it was still the one where you have to i think open it up from the front i forget which whether it's the front or the back so
John:
that they this is interesting because apple essentially pioneered a new way of building phones and they pioneered it with the 14 not the 14 pro historically with the pro phones apple has been less interested in repairability because basically they may only make those phones for one year and because they're more expensive and because they're fancier and because they're on the cutting edge it kind of makes sense but this year not so this year the 15 pro and i think also the 15
John:
get the mid-frame design so they can open up the front and the back, which makes repairs easier, take less time, presumably cheaper, less risky.
John:
But it does require them to have that mid-frame that is bonded to the outer frame.
John:
And on the Pro, it is a titanium, you know, outer frame band with aluminum bonded to it.
John:
Dr. Durang actually talks about that in his article.
John:
That whole big thing they said of how it's bonded together, they make them hot and they squish them against each other.
John:
Hey, that's bonding.
John:
It's welding.
John:
It's basically welding, but they didn't want to say welding.
Marco:
No, and that's good, too.
Marco:
Like, you know, you wouldn't want titanium all the way through because not only would it be needlessly expensive, but aluminum is lighter than titanium.
Marco:
Like titanium is a great material.
Marco:
It's very light.
Marco:
But aluminum is lighter, as you can see with the watches.
John:
Aluminum is lighter.
John:
Again, aluminum is lighter for the same volume.
John:
It's not lighter for the same strength.
John:
And so if aluminum can give you the strength you need without being, you know, if you don't need the extra strength of titanium, then you can go with aluminum.
Marco:
Yeah, so in this case, the more about a phone's metal content that they can make out of aluminum, the better in terms of overall weight of it in most cases.
Marco:
So that's great.
Marco:
I'm really happy to see that the move to titanium here, first of all, I think, colors aside, which we'll get to in a minute, colors aside, I think it looks fantastic in all the pictures and hands-on stuff I've seen so far.
Marco:
It seems to look fantastic.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I love the fact that they took everything about the titanium watch that they don't make anymore.
Marco:
The nice brushed finish and everything.
Marco:
Not that I'm grumpy.
Marco:
Now, you know, I won't have it on my watch anymore, but at least I'll have it on my phone.
Marco:
That'll be nice until I scratch the crap out of it.
Marco:
But, you know, it probably scratched the phone less than the watch.
Marco:
So that'll be great.
Marco:
And I like that they've actually seemingly put a decent amount of effort into weight reduction here.
Marco:
Because for the last couple of years, you know, a lot of us have been saying, myself included, like,
Marco:
look, I love the mid-sized Pro phone, but man, is it heavy.
Marco:
And it seems like they also finally thought that and have put in some substantial work into making it noticeably lighter.
Marco:
And so I'm very much looking forward to this phone.
Marco:
You know, I was really...
Marco:
I was tempted, and I'll get to this later with what I chose to buy, but before the event, I was kind of thinking I might get the non-pro phone this year because the non-pro ones are so light and they feel so good in the hand.
John:
And they're still lighter.
John:
The 15 is still lighter than the 15 Pro.
Marco:
Yes, but the difference is like cut in half or something.
Marco:
It's a substantial reduction in the difference between the non-pro and the pro in terms of weight.
Marco:
So anyway, I'm very happy to see all this, and it looks really good, and I can't wait to get my hands on one.
Marco:
so let's talk about the colors apparently they're pvd coated which i guess is not the same as what they did with the tie book um no it is not that was painted the pvd coating they did on the the watches right the watch in the watch band yeah any watch that is black that is not aluminum so you know the steel the the um and the titanium i guess those two so those two have always as far as i know have always the steel is always in pvd to make black steel um i believe the gold steel is also pvd um and yeah and the titanium
Marco:
pbd is a very durable coating it's it it generally it depends on kind of how it's done and what you're bonding to it but like like the black steel watch stuff having having the the carbon dlc coating on there which dlc and pbd i think are similar forgive me people who know these are very durable coatings much more durable than paint um and and usually even more durable than anodization i think
Casey:
So there are four colors.
Casey:
There's light gray, not-so-light gray, dark gray, and blue gray.
Marco:
Don't forget, there's natural gray, which looks pretty light, and there's light gray, which also looks pretty light.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Officially, the colors are black, white, blue, and natural.
Casey:
Like, it's not that they're bad.
Casey:
Like, as colors, I wouldn't say that these are bad colors, but there's basically three flavors of gray and blue.
Casey:
It's just like cars.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
Can we not have a little bit of flavor?
Marco:
Also, by the way, the blue, by all accounts, is basically the same as the MacBook Air blue.
Marco:
So it's almost black.
Marco:
Barely blue, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it's a very dark blue that will look black in most lighting.
Marco:
So this is quite a selection.
Marco:
I'm really glad they went to titanium for the frame.
Marco:
that's good the titanium frame is going to look awesome most of the time i bet the like the back glass and it's a good thing most people use cases i was even thinking too like you know my own phones i almost never see the back because i'm not one of those monsters who puts a phone screen down on a surface so you know because i don't want it to scratch hopefully this will be better how's that working out for you
Marco:
yeah so like you know i my phone is always face up it's either it's either like in my pocket or it's face up on something or it's facing me in the car in my pocket with the sand or it's face up right right right so like i really should complain less about the colors of the back because i never see the back of my phone i always but i see the sides all the time
John:
i mean but it's still so here's the thing here's the thing you are increasingly seeing the color of the back of the phone because that stupid camera just keeps taking up more and more areas so i know a lot of it's taken up with the lenses which are basically black but you do see the color of your phone a large square of it poking through even when you're wearing a case which i mean we'll get to what we bought in a little bit but like that one of the things that argues for potentially getting a neutral color not to clash with your you know colorful cases if you if you plan on getting colorful cases yeah
John:
As usual, it's disappointing that Apple doesn't think Pro means bright colors.
John:
They should be dissuaded of that notion.
John:
They should try making a Pro phone in colors.
John:
I think people would like it, but that year is not this year.
Marco:
Well, they have, they grace us with like one Pro color per year.
John:
If you can call it a color, it's always like,
Marco:
Yes, it's always basically like the very muted, dark, grayish version of that color.
Marco:
And in this case, that color is very dark blue.
Marco:
That is basically black and pretty grayish.
Marco:
So you have light gray, medium gray, dark gray, and bluish gray.
Marco:
It's a tough decision this year, really.
Marco:
Which of the many grays do you go for?
Marco:
and the black isn't even as black as the 15 right no and and even like if you look at the comparator the white also looks less white than the 15 and the 14 pro but the 14 pro is actually fair i have it here it's actually fairly it's i mean i would call it silver and they to be fair they do call it silver um it you know white and silver are different it depends on the light angle how different they look
Marco:
But the 14 Pro Silver really is fairly neutral, close to white.
Marco:
I think as close to white as they've ever made a Pro phone.
Marco:
And yeah, the 15 Pro looks like it's much closer to dishwater.
Marco:
So, oh God, what a selection.
Marco:
I'm glad the bands look nice.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I'm a little bummed, but here we are.
Casey:
This is the same as it ever was.
Casey:
It's a pro-phone year with boring colors.
Casey:
All right, then we did get the action button.
Casey:
This is real.
Casey:
They had a little bit of a courage moment when they said they are reinventing the experience.
Casey:
All right, pump the brakes there, guys, but that's okay.
John:
It's a button, guys.
Casey:
Let's chill out.
Casey:
Let's chill out a little bit.
Casey:
But you press and hold to confirm intent.
Casey:
I was talking to a local friend who I won't call out their name, but they were...
Casey:
very grumpy about the fact that you have to press and hold and can't just like double tap or whatever um but i saw a couple of videos of this i don't remember where i saw it to be honest with you so i can't link it in the show notes but it looked like it was pretty fast so i don't i don't know i think this will probably be okay
John:
I mean, the good thing is it's a software thing, so they could change that, but it is an interesting choice because it's like, oh, well, we don't want you to accidentally hit it.
John:
Well, what about every other gigantic button on the phone that we're constantly accidentally hitting, taking screenshots and accidentally turning the volume up and down?
John:
What about those buttons?
John:
You don't have to hold them down, but suddenly you add one tiny button, and this one is such a special button that you can't make it do its stuff.
John:
It puts a thing on the screen when you press it.
John:
It says, hold a little bit longer.
John:
You can do it.
John:
It's like just...
John:
I mean, I understand why they did it because it's like, well, use this button for something you really don't want to accidentally do.
John:
Like, you really don't want to accidentally take your phone off sound.
John:
Like, I get that too, but I also really don't want to accidentally turn my volume way up so the next time I hit play, it blasts my eardrums out.
John:
I also don't really want to accidentally take a screenshot.
John:
Like, I understand the reasoning.
John:
I'm not too grumpy about it because, like, whatever, but...
John:
it's a very interesting choice that they decided to do.
John:
And it's kind of like one of those, it's a historically informed choice because historically this has been the ring silent thing.
John:
And by default, as Marco predicted, it is the ring silent thing, but maybe they can get over that history when we've gone through a few generations of this.
John:
And most people have decided that they want to use it for camera or whatever.
Marco:
I'm actually very concerned about how often accidental input will happen.
Marco:
You know, because all the time, I will accidentally hit the volume buttons on my phone when it's in my pocket.
Marco:
So for instance, if I'm like leaning up against something while working on something, like a lot of times, because a lot of times I'm listening to a podcast while it's happening, so I'll realize, whoa!
Marco:
That's blasting my ears out.
John:
I hit the volume buttons in my pocket on purpose all the time.
John:
I'm really good at it.
John:
I'm really good at knowing where there's volume buttons because I don't have the AirPods that you can like swipe the volume up and down or whatever.
John:
And so that's a feature for me.
John:
And, you know, so but but yeah, accidentally.
John:
But like I said, there's those buttons, volume buttons and the power buttons.
John:
They're huge and they only take they're not.
John:
You don't have to hold them down.
John:
That one little tap will do it.
Marco:
Well, regardless, you know, this is going this is changing from a switch that was very hard to hit accidentally.
Marco:
And especially, again, most people use cases.
Marco:
And with most cases, that switch, they would just cut out a little hole and it would basically be recessed then compared to the outer boundary of the case.
John:
It's a great little lint collecting belly button.
Marco:
yes whereas volume buttons were always you know repeated by the case so that they would they would you know butt out so in most people's lives using phone cases around their phones it's going to be now it's going to be way easier to accidentally hit this compared to the old switch because presumably most iphone 15 pro cases will have their own you know button in front of the action button now maybe that would be such
John:
it would be such an f you for the cases to have like the the you know second set of buttons translating for the volume and power but still leave a cut out for the action button you got to shove your fingernail in there to press it maybe that's a feature for some people you know like maybe making it harder to press is good there are iphone cases that do that with the volume and the power too by the way they have cutouts for them like that's a style of case so you know whatever but i'm assuming they will translate it out but yeah but anyway this this button doesn't just do ringer silent you can configure it
Casey:
Yep, that's true.
Casey:
And that's extremely cool.
Casey:
You can configure it to do all sorts of stuff.
Casey:
You can start voice memo, launch camera, which sitting here now is probably what I'm going to choose.
Casey:
You can activate a particular accessibility feature.
Casey:
You can activate a particular focus mode.
Casey:
I don't think you can choose, like, it's always the one focus mode.
Casey:
Like, you always enable do not disturb.
Casey:
You always enable work or what have you.
Casey:
But still, that's cool.
Casey:
But more interesting than anything else, I think, is that you can activate.
Casey:
Oh, and flashlight as well.
Casey:
But more interesting than anything else is shortcut.
Casey:
You can run a shortcut.
Casey:
And that means you can do.
John:
And not just run a shortcut.
John:
I saw I think Underscore was saying it's not just that you can run like the nomenclature is like a workflow.
John:
You go to the shortcuts app and you make a workflow that does a bunch of steps or whatever.
John:
I think he was saying that if your app vends a shortcut, like if Overcast has a shortcut functionality to like start playing or do something or whatever, that it can directly call that rather than running a workflow that invokes.
John:
I don't know what the technical difference between those two things are.
John:
Maybe it's just less overhead or there's less indirection.
John:
But apparently it can directly run app shortcuts and not just run a workflow that you make in the shortcuts app.
Marco:
Well, I think the advantage... I haven't played with this yet, of course, but I think the advantage there is an app shortcut does not require running the shortcuts app in any context at all.
Marco:
An app shortcut is basically like a fancy intent, and so you can... That button could basically...
Marco:
trigger my app directly or you know any whatever apps it could it could it could kind of open that app in the background directly as opposed to having to run a shortcut like and people have seen like a lot of these you know home screen customization things people are doing are based on replacing icons of apps with shortcuts that just run the app and so the result is like you hit the icon you know you hit your fancy custom icon for instagram and for a split second you see a shortcuts window and then it kicks over i think i got rid of that i think
John:
I think I read of that about a year ago where when you launch apps, it doesn't like shortcuts still does run in the background.
John:
But when you're just doing an app launch, it doesn't do the thing where you briefly see the shortcut.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They tweaked it over time.
Marco:
But like an app intent or app shortcut in theory would not require shortcuts to do any of its action.
Marco:
So that's that's why that would be a good thing.
John:
The way you customize this button, by the way, is one of these interfaces that if anybody else did it, you'd be like, what are you doing?
John:
It's just a setting.
John:
It's a picker.
John:
The human interface guidelines say give them a picker, and what you can pick from is all the things we just read.
John:
Launch camera, activate accessibility features, shortcut, focus mode, blah, blah.
John:
What interfaces does this have?
John:
Something you've...
John:
It is not a standard control, let's say.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to a movie.
John:
I think it's an Apple thing where you can see it happening.
John:
It is a full screen thing where it shows you a zoomed in, essentially video of the side of the phone, zoomed in so you can see that tiny action button, like filling your phone screen.
John:
And then you swipe from side to side and an overlay of functionality comes and overlays itself onto the action button.
John:
And the phone also like rotates, like this 3D model of the phone, like rotates and stuff.
John:
it's so over the top just like and it fills the entire screen this is not like you go into settings and it's like one little row or a picker or something it is a full screen high fidelity 3d graphical experience it's just i mean i mean i guess the team had fun doing this but like and it is a fun little bit a bit of whimsy but i do have to wonder okay so how long does this ui stay like this and when does it just become a picker
Marco:
So I think this is actually justifiable for two reasons.
Marco:
Number one, this is a headlining feature of the phone.
Marco:
They wanted to show it off in the event.
Marco:
So I think they built this UI in part for the event.
Marco:
And number two, no one's going to know what the action button is.
Marco:
So if they have a setting somewhere that says, what do you want the action button to do?
Marco:
They're going to be like, what the heck's the action button?
Marco:
This shows them.
John:
I do wonder, though, when people when people see this UI, will they be able to read the fact that this is trying to show them a button on the side of their phone?
John:
I do wonder how people who don't already know will interpret what's on because it's really zoomed in and people will be like, I just thought it was a design or something like do you realize what it's trying?
John:
Especially since it colors the action button like red or whatever, and it's not red on the side of your phone.
John:
So I'm not sure how successful the UI is going.
John:
It's a fun little bit of whimsy.
John:
I don't think it's going to be a big problem.
John:
It's just fascinating to see.
John:
Like you said, Marco, if you're a headlining feature, you get wide latitude to do fun stuff, essentially.
John:
And I think this UI is fun.
John:
I just think it's not potentially something that will be here in 10 years.
Casey:
And then we start talking about the A17 Bionic.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
The A17 Pro.
John:
Thank God they changed the name.
John:
So my mind is reeling when they say A17 Pro.
John:
First, my mind is like, wait a second.
John:
Have they all been called Pro in the Pro Zones?
John:
No, no, they haven't.
John:
What the hell is going on?
John:
And then I'm like, okay, as I tooted.
John:
So I guess the A17 Max is coming soon, then the A17 Ultra, then Apple will cancel the A17 Extreme.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, here's what I think this is.
Marco:
So first of all, I'm glad they got rid of the Suffolk bionic because that was well past its time.
John:
We had all just been ignoring it for years.
Marco:
No one would use those terms.
Marco:
But here's the thing.
Marco:
There's been some speculation in this area.
Marco:
Here's my pet theory.
Marco:
This is going to sound a little ridiculous, but bear with me.
Marco:
They're not going to put a processor called A17 Pro in next year's non-pro iPhones.
Marco:
Now, from my limited understanding of semiconductor manufacturing, again, I don't know much about this, but this is a 3nm chip.
Marco:
Next year's non-pro phone, I don't think they would put in a 5nm chip.
Marco:
Because I think, from my understanding of this, you can't just take a design and scale it down in Photoshop 75% and say, alright, this 5nm design, we're going to shrink it down and it'll work on 3nm.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
My understanding is that when you change the process of manufacturing, that some of the design work that you do has to be different as a result of just how some things in that process work.
Marco:
So I don't see them having, like, a version of the A17 that is built across two different process nodes.
Marco:
I think the A17 will always be three nanometers.
Marco:
All versions of it are all things that use this, you know, this base building block.
Marco:
So my theory is, you know, when you look at the A17 Pro that they were showing off and, you know, all the various parts of the chip...
Marco:
They don't claim to be binning it in any way.
Marco:
My theory is they are binning it and they're just banking all the binned chips and that next year's non-pro iPhone, its chip will be called the A17.
Marco:
And it will be binned A17 Pros that might have like a GPU core malfunctioning or a neural engine core malfunctioning.
Marco:
And so maybe it'll have like five GPU cores and whatever number of neural engine GPU cores.
Marco:
And maybe it will have, you know, if you look at the silicon diagram that they always show off, there's a decent amount of space on that die dedicated to features that the non-pro phones don't need.
Marco:
There's the USB controller we're going to get to in a minute.
Marco:
That's a big block on that die.
John:
Please let them use that one on next year's phones.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
But there's the ProRes encoder.
Marco:
The non-pro phones don't need that.
Marco:
There's certain parts of that display controller that's optimized for the LPTO display.
Marco:
Maybe the non-pro phones don't need that.
Marco:
And by the way, those diagrams they have, those are not to scale.
John:
Right, but they're at least in the ballpark.
John:
Yeah, but anyway, this is the theory for the A17 Pro.
John:
I also agree with it, and it is the most obvious thing, is that they're going to, like you said, use a... It's going to be an A17 without the... As soon as they put something with Pro, like we said with a Vision Pro, as soon as they put the Pro on something, that means there's going to be a non-Pro.
John:
And what would a non-Pro be?
John:
It's an A17 with not all the parts working, which is interesting because if you look at the M chips, that's not what they do on the M chips.
John:
You can buy an M2 Pro
John:
with and without all the parts working.
John:
You can buy an M1 Max with and without all the parts working.
John:
They didn't take that approach with the M series.
John:
They sell the same chip and the suffix basically tells you how much stuff you get.
John:
You get more stuff on a Max, you get more stuff on a Pro.
John:
It's just a question of how much of that stuff works.
John:
And so there's no naming differentiation on the ones with stuff working.
John:
But on the iPhone, they're going to take a different approach, it seems.
John:
And you're going to get an A17 next year that is going to have some of the stuff not working.
John:
And which stuff, if I had to predict, GPU core is an easy one.
John:
They love doing that one.
John:
And apparently this GPU is new and fancy or whatever.
John:
So that's definitely a part they could have problems.
John:
But any other functional parts of chips, like CPU cores, efficiency cores, power cores, or any of the supporting stuff, USB, ProRes, or whatever, I really hope they're not binning based on that.
John:
They could.
John:
It's a thing they could do.
John:
but they haven't done it so far.
John:
Everything they've ever been so far has only been GPU cores and CPU cores, right?
John:
Have they ever been on anything else?
Marco:
Yeah, and there aren't really enough CPU cores in the iPhone chips to really bin based on that.
Marco:
The efficiency cores are pretty tiny, and the performance cores, there's only two of them, so I don't think they're going to cut those.
Marco:
I think it's going to be GPU cores probably only, and maybe they'll just disable some of those, or not use some of those other controllers, but
Marco:
And I think the reason this makes sense is three nanometer technology to make this capacity to make this is just coming online.
Marco:
Apple has reportedly bought all of TSMC's three nanometer capacity for probably at least a year.
Marco:
And so what they must be having to do to make this work.
Marco:
So the iPhone is a massive product.
Marco:
They need super high yields.
Marco:
They can take this whole year.
Marco:
banking all those dud chips for next year's more mass market model phone but this year the mass market phone is using older technology because that saves the yield there the mac m3 chips are rumored to use three nanometer as well but the volumes that macs do compared to iphones it's probably a drop in the bucket
Marco:
So that's probably not like a massive thing, but like the two different iPhone families, those are massive each.
Marco:
So I think this is going to allow them to save three nanometer capacity while they don't have so much of it this first year.
Marco:
And then next year they will be able to use all of it.
Marco:
Plus if I don't, I mean, I don't think chips go bad.
Marco:
So if they have some way to like,
John:
save all the ones this year that have a bad gpu core and use them for next year's phones that could be a way to really maximize this weird situation with this you know this brand new cutting edge fab with these low yields yeah just don't start them in the rados lost arca warehouse you really want to keep track of what you did did we make a bunch of a17s with missing gpu core last year didn't anyone know where those are are they in the back room they got to be here somewhere can you check they're at craig's house right they're really small so it's easy to misplace them
Casey:
All right, so we haven't really made it past the name.
Casey:
So what is A17 Pro?
Casey:
It's a breakthrough new GPU in the chip.
Casey:
There's the industry's first 3 nanometer, which I think we kind of glanced off a minute ago.
Casey:
10% faster performance cores.
Casey:
The efficiency cores are faster.
Casey:
That's all we know.
Casey:
The 16-core neural engine is up to two times faster.
Casey:
And then, Marco, I believe you made passing reference to this USB controller for USB 3 in 10 gigabits per second, which is not in the A16.
Casey:
Thus, the iPhone 15 gets USB 2.0 speeds.
John:
wow yeah i mean this would be easy to predict based on so here's the thing when they when they planned on making the a16 they did not put a usb 3 controller in it right and they could add another chip to the logic board and you know but they didn't do that so the a16 is what it is they did not add an additional extra chip to have it and so it just has usb 2.0 because that's what the the phones that with the a16 had in them
John:
uh and as for the a17 pro it's got usb 3 it does not have thunderbolt it is not 40 gigabits per second it is 10 which is great that is way better than 480 megabits which is the other step down uh the disappointing thing in addition to the lack of color match cables although as we noted last show would you even notice on the pro phones
John:
is that your iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max does not come with a USB 3 cable, which would not have to be super expensive or really thick like a Thunderbolt cable.
John:
Oh, it's fine.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It doesn't come with a USB 3.
John:
It's way thicker than a USB 2 cable.
John:
USB 3 cables are not that expensive.
John:
And I feel like this is another decontenting thing where...
John:
It's not about e-waste.
John:
It's not about saving, you know, USB 3 cables.
John:
It's not a Thunderbolt cable, right?
John:
But they didn't do it.
John:
So you're right, it will be fine.
John:
But it does annoy me that they charge so much money for these phones and find a way to save every little penny.
John:
And it's like, come on, a USB 3 cable?
John:
Is that breaking the bank?
John:
it's more it's there's more to it it's thicker it's heavier there's more environmental cost is it thicker is it thicker really yes it is three cables it's like a two and a half feet long i honestly like just buy a third party usb3 cable and a usb2 cable that are two and a half feet long and tell me you can tell which is which without plugging them into something and testing
Casey:
No, I really think you can.
Casey:
We need to move on, but very briefly, the charging cable that Apple provides, like the USB-C, like iPad charging cable... Oh, it's glorious.
Casey:
It's astonishingly thin, and that's, I think, in part, this is what Marco was saying, in part because it doesn't have to do much.
Casey:
It has to carry power and a little bit of data, whereas an average USB-C cable is... It's not thick, but it is noticeably thicker than the iPad charging cable is, so...
Casey:
I think you're both right.
Casey:
I think it would have been much better if there was a USB 3 cable in the box for a professional phone, but I'm not completely disgruntled that it's not there.
John:
If I had to pick, I would pick color matching over the USB 3 cable for sure.
Casey:
Honestly, I would probably do that too.
John:
But we get neither, so there you go.
Casey:
The GPU has six cores and it's 20% faster.
Casey:
They were very excited about this GPU.
John:
Yeah, this is the rumored GPU core overhaul, which supposedly was actually planned for the M2, but they couldn't do it in time for the M2, so they just used the previous cores they had.
John:
So yes, they are very excited about these new GPU cores, which are a little bit later than planned, but apparently are very good.
John:
I mean, they did that thing where they tout the gaming performance.
John:
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
I'm excited to see these GPU cores in the M3, right?
John:
Because, you know,
John:
Yeah.
John:
Let's see.
John:
Let's see when you got some more of them and get a little more grunt.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So there are six cores, 20 percent faster, and they have ray tracing, which they're very, very excited about.
Casey:
And some sort of thing that's working in concert with the neural engine to get metal FX upscaling, which they were also very excited about.
John:
Metal FX upscaling is not new, but they're just bragging about how this does it even better.
John:
This is part of a suite of technologies, just like the ray tracing thing and the Metal Hex upscaling.
John:
These are two things that have been coming through the gaming industry over the past several years to make games better.
John:
So the ray tracing is not full ray tracing.
John:
It is just, oh, some things in your game might be ray traced.
John:
And so we have some hardware that can...
John:
make that faster we know you can't retrace your whole game because it would slow to a crawl but just retrace certain things to make it look better and then the upscaling is like oh we know you don't have a two thousand dollar video card but you still want your game to run at 4k what if we intelligently upscale it so basically your game renders at a lower resolution rather than just you know sort of upscaling it the way like a graphics pro i can't say the way graphics program upscales because now graphics programs do a upscaling too but anyway that
John:
Instead of just upscaling the way an old graphics program would do by just interpolating the pixels to be larger, it uses information about the previous frame, the next frame, and what is actually in the frame to sort of intelligently upscale so you can essentially run your game at, quote, 4K.
John:
And it looks better than it would if it was upscaled to 4K.
John:
but not as good if it was actually 4K and the game was rendering 4K.
John:
And this is very popular because it massively increases your frame rate.
John:
And it's one of those things where it's like, can I really tell the difference between real 4K and 1080 intelligently up scared to 4K?
John:
And if you can't tell,
John:
take the extra frame rate and that's what a lot of people are doing so these features are very popular how popular metal effects upscaling will be on a phone i guess maybe you don't have as much gpu grunt so you might want to use it and maybe no one can tell but uh but yeah apple is keeping up with the joneses uh in terms of technologies underpinning their game platform
Casey:
So we got our game video, which I got a little power nap in, which was great.
Casey:
Not mentioned in the event video, there's a thread radio in the 15 Pro, which is pretty cool.
Casey:
And then we get to the camera system, and they have decided... And I'm an okay amateur photographer, but I think I am beyond my depth.
Casey:
But they have announced that there are effectively seven camera lenses in the 15 Pro.
Casey:
And obviously that's not a literal statement, but that's...
Casey:
That's what they're declaring.
John:
I would say three.
John:
I mean, you can keep cropping the sensor as many different ways as you want.
John:
Do those all count as separate cameras?
Casey:
Well, apparently, according to Apple, they do.
Casey:
Now, I'm not here to smear it.
Casey:
I'm actually very enthusiastic about this.
Casey:
And I think Mike had said it on upgrade, and I thought he made a very good point, that we all assumed that the 48 megapixel main sensor was going to, like, revolutionize iPhone photography.
Casey:
And I don't know if that's really been the case, but there's some definite changes here that might be caching the check that we wrote last year with this 48 megapixel sensor.
Casey:
So leaving aside the Pro Max for a minute, I guess I'll turn to Marco, but if you'd prefer, John, you can take it.
Casey:
But tell me about this sensor and these focal lengths and what's going on here, please.
Marco:
Alright, so the sensor is larger.
Marco:
Not a ton larger.
Marco:
I think it's like 20% larger or something.
Marco:
So that's good.
Marco:
That helps.
Marco:
That means more light capture, better photos, less noise.
Marco:
That's wonderful.
Marco:
Same megapixel, so all the pixels are a little bit bigger.
Marco:
They're pulling a few tricks here.
Marco:
We'll get to the 24 megapixel thing in a second because that's more complicated, but the gist of the different lenses is, you know, last year they offered like a 1X and a 2X preset that both used the 1X camera, as discussed earlier, that the 2X was kind of just like a center crop of the sensor, and it would process a little bit differently, but that was the gist of it.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, the...
Marco:
three different focal lengths, 24, 28, and 35 millimeter equivalents for the 1X sensor that you can pick are basically doing that same thing.
Marco:
The 24 seems to be, that's the native frame of it.
Marco:
And then you can just kind of crop in by default on those two lengths.
Marco:
And those are, from a photography point of view, those are like classic photography prime lens lengths, especially like 35.
Marco:
It's like a classic length that a lot of people would shoot
Marco:
all things in like a lot of cameras like a lot of fixed lens fancy cameras like some of the leica series the sony like little handheld ones a lot of those are fixed at 35 millimeters um the fuji x100 series like these are very popular uh focal lens for photographers so that's why they're they're they're saying this and kind of building this into the ui a little bit but
Marco:
uh as far as i can tell that's just those are just crop modes on the main sensor which is not necessarily a bad thing like i this past year with the 14 pro i have used the 2x crop mode a lot actually way more than i thought i would um and it's been fine it's been way better than any real 2x camera they ever shipped because they they have such a big sensor in this one um so it's it's been okay so i'm guessing these modes are going to be similarly decent um
Marco:
That being said, the way they are processing things now seems to be substantially different.
Marco:
So they're doing this kind of super resolution stuff.
Marco:
They mentioned a few times that the photonic engine, which is their processing pipeline, now seems to be processing the whole pipeline in 48 megapixel mode.
Marco:
Or something like that.
Marco:
They made a few statements that were in that ballpark.
Marco:
So it seems like they're doing a substantial processing and software upgrade in that pipeline to save the downscaling to the final resolution to later stages in the pipeline.
Marco:
That's what it seems like.
Marco:
John, do you know any more about that?
John:
I mean, the 24 megapixel thing is the same thing we discussed for the 15.
John:
This is the same feature came to the 15, which is that they are rather than giving you binned pixels and giving you a 12 megapixel image.
John:
They're binning, but they're also not binning.
John:
And like you said, part of the pipeline is they combine the binned and the non binned.
John:
to come up with a picture that is in between, because bend is 12 megapixels, non-bend is 48.
John:
So how do they get a 24 out of that?
John:
They take the detail from the 48 and the color and noise reduction from the 12, and they end up with a 24.
John:
And they're not going to tell you all the details of how they do it, but that's essentially the gist of it, is that they're able to get a higher resolution final image because they...
John:
They take contributions from more of the pixels.
John:
And by the way, the 48 megapixel is before.
John:
If you have a 14 pro or whatever, you could take the 48 megapixel pictures and they'd be raw pictures.
John:
So they're huge.
John:
They're way bigger than the compressed ones.
John:
And they're actually take a little bit longer to capture because you're writing more data because the readout is slower.
John:
I'm not sure what the lag is, but it is slower to take 48 megapixel raws like one after the other than it is to take JPEGs.
John:
So presumably on the 15 Pro, all that, that whole pipeline, the whole imaging pipeline is faster.
John:
And also you can capture 48 megapixel heath images, 48 megapixel compressed image.
John:
They don't have to be raw.
John:
So you can shoot in 48 megapixel all the time and not fill your phone with raw images.
John:
So you can get 48 megapixel heaths and then by default,
John:
you're getting 24 megapixel images, which are a combination of the binned pixels and the non-bind pixels from the 48 megapixel sensor.
John:
And then all the other focal lengths, yes, I believe they're all our crops.
John:
And that's basically just a UI enhancement, but it's a welcome one because you can pick your default.
John:
If you want to default to 28 millimeters, your 1X camera, like by default, will be 28 millimeters.
John:
And you can change it to 24 or 35 or whatever by, you know, using the UI and the camera, but you can pick what your default is.
John:
So your default doesn't have to be the plain 1X, which is presumably 24 millimeters.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So they've said larger sensors, as Marco mentioned.
Casey:
There's a new nanoscale coating to reduce lens flare, which I'm excited about.
Casey:
Better low light performance.
Casey:
Granted, I have a several at this point year old big camera.
Casey:
It's an Olympus Micro Four Thirds.
Casey:
Not the world's best low light camera to begin with.
Casey:
But for the last few years, the iPhone has been so much better indoors than my Olympus.
Casey:
And I expect it to only be better slash worse, depending on your perspective now.
Casey:
The
Casey:
The Pro phone gets a 3x telephoto camera, which is a 77 millimeter focal length.
Casey:
The Pro Max, however, doesn't have a periscope, mind you, but it has a 5x or 120 millimeter focal length, 12 megapixel f2.8 camera lens or camera system with 100% focus pixels.
Casey:
And the optical image stabilization moves in three dimensions with up to 10,000 micro adjustments per second.
Casey:
And it does all this not by periscope, mind you, but a tetraprism design.
Casey:
And they showed a little image in the event where basically it ping-pongs the image through this prism.
Casey:
So I think they said it made four stops or something like that prior to hitting the sensor.
Casey:
And that gives a 5x optical zoom.
Marco:
Yeah, and to be clear, when the rumors were all about 6x or when they say 6x total, they're talking about the difference between 0.5x and 5x.
Marco:
That is a range of 6x.
Casey:
I didn't even think about that.
Marco:
And one thing that I got totally wrong in my perception of what this was going to be based on all the rumor stuff, I was thinking it would be a zoom lens, meaning that it would be variable focal length, that it would cover the range from 3x to 6x.
Marco:
But in fact, it is a 5X Prime, which is better.
Marco:
Optically speaking, the metrics are about as good seeming, a little bit better sensor size, but generally about as good seeming as the 3X camera has been on the Pro, which is...
Marco:
not great uh but it's there and i think that's what this is going to be like optically speaking and you know with when talking about things like noise performance and everything low light performance this is going to be significantly downgraded from the 1x lens because the 1x lens has a much larger sensor and and you know simpler optics and stuff like that so like the 1x is probably going to be way better optically just in the same way that it's been better than better than the 3x camera
Marco:
but 5x is a pretty good reach like you know it's 120 millimeter equivalent that's pretty good that's not going to get you you know that's not that's not like one of those super telephotos like we were talking about a few months back it's nowhere near that kind of length but it is substantially more zoomed in than the 3x was you know about twice the distance you know as the 3x so that's pretty good uh
Marco:
One thing that's going to be a little potentially weird is that there's now a huge gap between the 1x coverage and 5x.
Marco:
Like before, you know, you had the 3x to fill that.
Marco:
You had the 2x crop mode.
Marco:
I guess you're going to have to use a lot of digital zoom on the 1x sensor if you want, say, a 4x perspective or a 3.5x perspective.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's going to be fairly compromised.
Marco:
But in exchange, you get 5X worth of maximum reach, which, you know, the way I use the 3X camera on my 14 Pro is kind of utilitarian.
Marco:
You know, there's not every picture I take is a piece of art.
Marco:
A lot of the pictures I take on my phone are serving some kind of function.
Marco:
You know, help me see this thing.
Marco:
Help me remember this thing.
Marco:
Help me communicate this thing to someone else.
Marco:
And those are all very different from needing super high optics and framing everything perfectly with cinematic perspectives and everything.
Marco:
And I think that's a lot of what people use their cell phone cameras for is that kind of functional photography, not nice photography.
Marco:
And from that point of view,
Marco:
The 3X and the 5X cameras are perfectly fine optically.
Marco:
Again, you're not going to win any awards.
Marco:
Your picture's going to look like crap if you zoom in.
Marco:
But you got the reeks.
Marco:
You got the shot so that you can communicate this thing to somebody or capture this thing or save this thing to remember it later.
Marco:
and so from that point of view the 5x perspective is going to be extremely nice and welcome to pro max users this is not enough to make me want the pro max because it's still too big for my hands and my pockets and that'll really pull my pants down uh don't forget very heavy yeah yeah but yes i couldn't i couldn't lift it up um but uh but for people who are already pro max users uh
Marco:
I think this is going to be an awesome upgrade and it's going to allow them to get things that would have been harder or worse before.
Marco:
So, you know, good, good for them.
Marco:
And I really am envious of the three dimensional image stabilizer.
Marco:
That is really cool.
Marco:
I wish my one X lens had that because that would enable even better performance out of an already great camera.
Marco:
Maybe down the road, maybe we'll get something like that.
Marco:
But anyway, pretty cool.
John:
A lot of people are asking, how is this not a periscope lens?
John:
It looks like the light goes in, then turns and goes down and then turns again.
John:
Seems like a periscope.
John:
So the rumors were that it would be a periscope style lens where light goes in, hits a prism, starts traveling the length of your phone or the width of your phone.
John:
So now the light is traveling sideways inside your phone instead of directly into it.
John:
goes through a series of lens elements, hits another prism, and then goes down into the sensor.
John:
And that's kind of what this does.
John:
But the difference is, in a true periscope lens that people are thinking of, there are lens elements stacked inside your camera lengthwise.
John:
So if you look at the back of your camera now, you see a bunch of circles.
John:
Those are lens elements, right?
John:
The orientation those are in, rotate them 90 degrees so you're looking at them edgewise.
John:
There would be lens elements edgewise inside your camera stacked like that, that the light would pass through.
John:
Not only that, but the idea was that, hey, one or more of those lens elements would move, like mechanically move, like when you twist on an actual real big camera lens and it moves the lens elements to be different distances from each other.
John:
That changes the focal length.
John:
there are existing cameras that do that.
John:
In fact, I'll put a link in the show notes to, I think, what the first one, the first big name one that did this, which was the Sony Xperia 114, 1 IV.
John:
Anyway, one Roman numeral four.
John:
I don't think maybe it wasn't the first, but it was one of the, one of the first ones that popularized this.
John:
And it came out in September of 2022.
John:
So almost a year ago.
John:
Um,
John:
And it has a bunch of lens elements that are stacked edgewise inside the thing.
John:
It actually has a sensor that is also edgewise.
John:
Like it doesn't have another prism.
John:
So the sensor lays down.
John:
So it's a little bit different than the rumors of this thing.
John:
But it, as far as I've been able to tell, has an actual moving lens element.
John:
Now, the weird thing about the Sony is, okay, so lens element moves to change the focal length, but it moves and it has two positions all the way to one side and all the way to the other.
John:
So it only has two focal lengths.
John:
It's not like how you can smoothly zoom between, you know, 20 millimeters and 70.
John:
No.
John:
it only hit like basically digitally moves you can go i forget what the range is but it was like you know 70 millimeter to 85 or whatever it was and those are your only choices nothing in between right so this apple camera is not a quote unquote zoom lens because it never changes focal length the focal length is always the same and it does not have any moving lens elements and from apple's little diagram that they showed it
John:
All of its lens elements are, you know, flat like a pancake when you look at the back of the camera.
John:
There are no lens elements stacked sideways.
John:
There are prisms stacked sideways to kind of get the light over to where the sensor is because the sensor is like not directly behind the camera, but it's over a little bit.
John:
So the prisms pass light through there, but it doesn't look like in their diagram that there are even any fixed lens elements, let alone any moving ones.
John:
So no, this is not a periscope camera.
John:
No, it is not a quote unquote zoom lens because it never changes focal length.
John:
It is...
John:
a fancy longer focal length prime lens that gives you 120 millimeter equivalent.
John:
And I share Marco's pessimism about the quality of this versus the 1x lens, but that's always the case with zoom lenses.
John:
To get one that has anything approaching the quality, not a zoom lens, but more zoomed in lenses, right?
John:
To get anything approaching that quality, you need a bigger and bigger assembly because
John:
putting more lens elements to magnify things that makes you lose light and that is the case in this as well but we'll have to see when people start testing this um i also agree with marco that having to go from 1x to 5x with nothing in between is going to be rough but honestly if those 5x pictures i really hope the 5x pictures look better than the 3x you know in terms of like light gathering noise sharpness all that and this is throwing a lot of technology at the 3x lens did not have
John:
a 3D optical image stabilization thing.
John:
The 3X lens did not have a sensor that was this big.
John:
So I hope it will be better than the 3X, but boy, when you take a picture with the 1X and then take it with the 5X and pixel peep them, it might be kind of grim.
John:
And then the other interesting thing about this UI-wise is apparently when you're using the 5X lens, the camera app will show you like a thumbnail using the 1X camera, kind of like the Navigator in Photoshop, if you're familiar with that.
John:
They have like a little outline, like you are seeing this portion,
John:
But really, the whole picture is like this, and that's to make it so people don't get lost because the 5X is so zoomed in, they might have trouble finding their subject.
John:
And if you haven't used a real camera, this is a good example.
John:
If you've ever used a telescope and tried to look at the moon with the telescope, you will find out really quickly how hard it is to aim at something in the sky with a very zoomed in lens.
John:
You're like, oh, just point the telescope at the moon.
John:
All right, that's the moon.
John:
You look in, you see blackness.
John:
You're like, but I'm pointing at the moon.
John:
Is the moon?
John:
And then you move it and you're like blackness.
John:
And you move it again, blackness, right?
John:
Being zoomed in, it's actually kind of hard to find your subject.
John:
So Apple is helping here by showing you, using one of the other cameras to show you a wider view to basically let you know you are here.
Marco:
Yeah, which is super clever.
Marco:
I love that idea.
Marco:
And I know Samsung did it first.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
Super clever.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So the ultra-wide, very briefly, anti-reflective coating, better night mode, f2.2.
Casey:
And they briefly spoke again about macro photography and how amazing it is.
Casey:
So that means that the focal lengths available, your quote-unquote seven lenses are macro, 13mm, 24, 28, 35, 48, and 120mm if you have a pro lens.
John:
max but you can also pinch and zoom for many many other virtual lenses between that because let's be honest there are a certain number of lenses and a certain number of senses and a certain number of pixels and everything else between that is a quote-unquote virtual lens that is using some subset of the sensor to give you an image
Casey:
Then, as we already discussed, much faster transfer speeds.
Casey:
You can now record ProRes video directly to an external storage drive, which means you can also do 4K60.
Casey:
They talked about log encoding.
Casey:
I don't know what that means, but apparently it's good.
Casey:
It's important for video people.
John:
It gives you more dynamic range.
John:
It's kind of like, if you think of it as being like, well, it's not really like RAW, but you know how you can get more out of images if you capture in RAW because you can see what the sensor saw and maybe recover things from the shadows that you couldn't get otherwise?
John:
Log encoding is a way of doing video editing.
John:
where you can recover more dynamic range from the final thing.
John:
If you look at log encoded video, it looks like garbage, but that's because you haven't actually done the process of recovering the dynamic range from it yet.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
They also have ACES Academy Color Encoding System, which apparently is a big deal for video.
Casey:
Uh, spatial, spatial video capture using the main and ultra wide cameras that will be available later this year.
Marco:
This is massive.
Marco:
I mean, this is like for, you know, cause when, when the vision pro was, uh, you know, announced and shown and they showed off the cool, you know, the, the, the, the creepy dad birthday thing that everybody hated, but I liked that, you know, capturing the kid's birthday.
Marco:
Like, you know, the,
Marco:
We talked so much about this is going to be amazing for Vision Pro, this wonderful feature of being able to capture 3D lifelike moments and replay them later.
Marco:
That's amazing.
Marco:
From that moment, everyone was speculating, someday, some future iPhone will be able to capture those photos and videos in 3D.
Marco:
Didn't think it would be like two months later, but here we are.
Marco:
And so it's interesting.
Marco:
It's Pro only, and I think the reason why it's Pro only is because of the arrangement of the cameras on the camera bump.
Marco:
And it's using, as you mentioned, it's using the One X and the Ultra Wide because they're next to each other and they're in line with each other when the phone is held sideways.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
And what is surprising to me is that that's far enough apart to make it work.
John:
But I don't think it is.
John:
Like, that's the thing.
John:
Like, first thing, they're not uniform.
John:
The two cameras are different.
Marco:
Yeah, presumably it is using a center crop on the one or on the wide to make it equivalent to the one X.
John:
But there's actually some advantages to them not being the same because maybe the ultra-wide can contribute some stuff to the final thing.
John:
But it's not ideal, right?
John:
Because in the Vision Pro, for example, they don't have a 1X and an ultra-wide.
John:
It's two identical cameras, I would assume.
John:
And the second thing is they're not too close together.
John:
It'll work.
John:
It's better than one camera.
John:
But they're not as far apart as they...
John:
could be and they're not as far apart as human eyes bottom line right so it will it will be better than flat video but the video 3d video taken with the vision pro will be better still because those cameras are spaced more reasonably so good first attempt and i think part of the reason why people said oh someday we'll take it on the iphone people were envisioning kind of like a nintendo ds an iphone with two cameras that are about as far apart as your eyes and iphones are big enough to do that
John:
but that's not this camera this this camera is just you know they're right next to each other and they're doing the best they can with it so it's way better than nothing and you got to start where you are and where we are is we have cameras that look like this now so let's start with that but i do think and hope that you will that either either they will spread these apart over the years or that everyone will have vision pros and it won't matter because we'll all be taking it with our creepy dead headsets
Marco:
But you know, the best spatial camera is the spatial camera you have with you.
Marco:
And you'll always have your iPhone with you.
John:
We'll always be wearing our, for two hours anyway, we'll be wearing our phones everywhere.
Casey:
All right, so we get Wi-Fi 6E, which I briefly looked into, I think, before we recorded last episode.
Casey:
That is legitimately very fast, like bananas fast.
Casey:
I forget the numbers, but I want to say it was well over gigabit speeds, even in like real-world use, not just theoretical use, but real-world use.
Casey:
So that's cool.
Casey:
The Pro phones start from $1,000 for 128 gigs, same as last year.
Casey:
The Max phones sort of, kind of, are the same as last year.
Casey:
They start at $1,200 with 256 gigs, which, quote, matches last year's price with this level of storage.
Casey:
Basically, what they did was they canned the 128 gig model and are forcing you to do 256 or more.
Casey:
but the prices are the same.
Casey:
You can pre-order Friday, which, as you're listening to this, is probably within 24 to 48 hours, available on September 2nd, excuse me, the 22nd, the following Friday, which reminds me, TJ Loma wrote me, or wrote us an email to remind, maybe it was me, it doesn't matter, but anyways, to remind us
Casey:
Well, I can't tell you this because then you'll be ahead of me in line for the iPhone potentially.
Casey:
So you can listen to this later.
Casey:
But apparently what you can do is if you go through the Apple Store app on your phone, they've gotten over the years very good at like figuring out what it is you want and getting it all queued up and ready to go, which is old news.
Casey:
What they've done in the last year or two, though, which I'd forgotten about until TJ reminded me, is that one of the things you can do is at the last step of that process, you can optionally add an event to your calendar.
Casey:
Which seems perhaps kind of silly, but what that lets you do is, as part of that process, it will generate a URL, like an App Store URL, or excuse me, not an App Store, an Apple Store URL that's stored in the event.
Casey:
And you can tap that, and when you tap that, it goes right into the Apple Store app and pre-selects, like everything gets you right where you need to go immediately.
Casey:
so i would strongly recommend in this again tj pointed this out i would strongly recommend doing that to make it a better likelihood that you can get what you want on friday you're saving like two taps when you launch the apple store app you're pre-saved like hey i've got this phone ready to go like it's it's on it's above the fold i think yeah i mean it doesn't seem like it makes a big difference but it can make a big difference so i do recommend that
Casey:
Then finally, a couple other quick notes.
Casey:
iCloud Storage, you can now get 6 or 12 terabyte plans, which I'm super excited about.
Casey:
Not extremely good value for money.
Casey:
I don't know, John, you had some thoughts on this.
Casey:
But still, the fact that there's more than 2 terabytes, I'm good with, especially since I think I'm getting close on my 2 terabyte plan right now.
Casey:
So that's very exciting.
John:
iCloud storage tiers continue to start at 50 gigabytes, which is insulting for $1 per month.
John:
They keep doing that.
Marco:
But how much do you get for free?
Marco:
Five gigs, right?
Marco:
That's right.
Casey:
Which is deeply insulting.
Marco:
I think it was Jason.
Marco:
Somebody was saying that it's been that same amount since Steve Jobs was alive.
John:
Yeah, no, it hasn't changed.
John:
It's been that much for way too long.
John:
But for the ones that you pay for, setting aside the free one, which is obviously just there to get you to buy one of the pay ones, the dollar a month one, that works out to $20 per terabyte you're paying.
John:
Then you go up to the next tier and you're paying $15 per terabyte for 200 gigs.
John:
And then every single other plan above 200 gigabytes is...
John:
is $5 per terabyte.
John:
So the cost decrease, $20, $15, $5, $5, $5, $5, $5, $5, $5, $5, $5, $5, $5.
John:
And so these new tiers, $5 per terabyte.
John:
And to Apple's credit or whatever, Google's plans for 5 and 10 terabytes are also exactly $5 per terabyte, so $5.
John:
That is what the market is offering now.
John:
No matter how many terabytes you get, it's five per unless you get the cheapskate plans, and then we charge you 15 or 20 per if you're Apple.
John:
So I'm glad they have bigger storage tiers.
John:
Remember, they did also have a quote-unquote four-terabyte thing where you'd buy the two-terabyte plan, then you'd get Apple One and have a family thing, and then you could add two more on top of that.
John:
I forget what the pricing on that was, but I'm just going to guess it was $5 per terabyte extra.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, not in the event video.
Casey:
iOS 17 on Monday the 18th.
Casey:
Sonoma on, what is this?
Casey:
The 26th.
Casey:
I don't have a calendar.
Casey:
Whatever day of the week that is, the 26th.
Casey:
And it's apparently, one of you noted, I would assume, John, the first time a new macOS has been released in September since Mojave in 2018.
John:
Yeah, because for the longest time, I've been like, Mac OS will come out in October.
John:
But that's been annoying after.
John:
It's been annoying for Apple because so many of their features are sort of simultaneous on all platforms.
John:
And if you're not going to release the Mac thing until a month later, then everyone's like, oh, do I upgrade my notes database or my photo library or I can't use this feature?
John:
It's nicer for them to be closer together.
John:
So I'm glad they were able to get the releases within a week-ish of each other.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then finally, in humongous, just tremendous Apple energy, they have come up with a USB-C to lightning adapter.
Casey:
Fine, that makes sense.
Casey:
$30.
Casey:
$30 f***ing dollars.
John:
Does it come free in the box with the thing, like when they got rid of the headphone jack?
Casey:
Nope.
John:
Doubt it.
Nope.
Casey:
$30 for USB-C to Lightning.
Casey:
Just bananas.
Casey:
Just absolutely bananas.
John:
Related to that, like, as much as Apple charges, it's kind of one of those situations that we've talked about in the past where, like, I wish Apple had just made a USB hub because it's so hard to find one that's not crappy.
John:
So I was briefly thinking, you know what?
John:
You know, we have a bunch of cables hanging around, but a lot of our charging, like...
John:
brick thingies has still have usba connectors on it and we don't have a lot of usba to usbc cables we have a lot of usbc to usbc cables but not a lot of a to c so like i should just get an like a an a to c adapter just for charging not for data transfer or just an a to c adapter how big could that be it's a little it's like an a port on one side and just like no cable no wire just like an a and a c in one little thing and if you go on amazon you'll find a million of these things and all of them will burn your house down apparently
John:
and it's like is there one of these that doesn't melt the connectors that you put in it just one no there's none there's zero then you're looking does apple make one because if apple makes one i'll pay you the 30 and then eventually you just go up and say you know just get an a to c cable you can buy it from a reputable company it'll be fine so it just annoys me like this whole market like that's not a useful pro i don't want an adapter that's ever going to melt my cables like i just know right and so now i have to instead
John:
I have to buy a cable from a reputable company.
John:
And the reputable companies don't make the adapters.
John:
And maybe the adapter is just a bad idea and no one should ever make them.
John:
But just word of warning, if you want A to C, buy an A to C cable from a reputable company.
John:
Don't bother with those little adapters.
Marco:
Or just like look in your cabinet because everyone has A to C cables.
Marco:
They come with everything.
John:
Right.
John:
no but now that apple's been shipping c to c for a long time so if you're constantly buying oh yeah apple doesn't make one but like if you buy any any like rando amazon gadget that is powered by usbc chances are in the box is a usb a to c cable yeah you guys are all talking about lightning and usbc and the uniformity of your life and i continue to be i'm not going to say beset but a little bit beset by uh micro usb devices which are my cameras you got to get new cameras just for that reason alone that's it i think it's they're very expensive
Marco:
It's time.
John:
And I like my cameras.
John:
I like everything about them except for that connector and the doors on one of them.
Casey:
Also, we should quickly point out Stephen Robles put up a video in the last, I don't know, 24, 48 hours where he had noticed that apparently Apple has killed the MagSafe Duo, which is the first party version of that Mophie thing that I really like.
Casey:
And my actually genuinely beloved MagSafe battery pack, which if you recall, YouTube basically said not it when this came out on buying one.
Casey:
And I bought it for a hundred frigging dollars.
Casey:
And I thought it was just going to be a waste of a hundred bucks.
Casey:
And I did it just because, you know, we should talk about it on the show and et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
it ends up that I actually really like that thing.
Casey:
Like, it is ridiculously expensive, but it's really nice, and it has great first-party integration.
Casey:
Who'd have thunk it?
Casey:
But they've killed both of them, and there are some theories.
Casey:
I don't remember if it was Steven talking about this.
Casey:
It might have been, or there are some other people who are saying that, well, these phones aren't certified as Qi version 2, and presumably they will be, and maybe they're just waiting for that to happen before they release, like, some new Qi 2.
John:
Yeah, that's in the video.
John:
Like, there's two things.
John:
One, a
John:
Apparently, supposedly, Qi2 will be able to have the same integration that the MagSafe thing has, like it's showing up in the battery meter or whatever.
John:
So I'll be interested to see if that's true, but that'll be great because there's going to be a ton of Qi2 stuff out there.
John:
Qi2 can charge as fast as MagSafe now.
John:
There's no, I don't think MagSafe got a boost to be ahead of it again.
John:
And it will be, you know, industry standard.
John:
And if there's iOS 17 integration, so you could actually see the battery level of your battery pack or whatever, that's going to be great.
John:
But yeah, Apple's accessories that used to have lightning, both of those things you described, the battery pack and the two-in-one charger thing, they both have lightning connectors.
John:
They did not get replaced with USB-C ones, but the lightning ones did go away.
John:
So are they going away because they're about to be replaced by USB-C one or
John:
Are they just going away because they're going away?
John:
Because once Chi 2 stuff comes out, Apple doesn't feel like they can try to make a battery pack because people will just buy Chi 2 ones.
John:
And like Apple's, if this is true about Chi 2 having OS integration, the one of the biggest advantages of buying an Apple battery thing that that OS integration goes away.
John:
So maybe Apple feels like they can't compete anymore, but we'll see.
John:
We will see.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
That's your event.
Casey:
So before we go, Marco, what are you buying?
Marco:
Definitely the 14, or sorry, geez, the 15 Pro for myself, 256.
Marco:
Tiff's getting the Pro Max, as she always does.
Marco:
What color?
Marco:
What color?
Marco:
I think I'm going to go the gray.
Marco:
And I don't mean that as a joke.
Marco:
The natural one where the back is just medium gray and the titanium looks kind of like titanium.
Marco:
I think that's what I'm going for.
Marco:
It's either going to be that or the light one, but probably the natural gray.
Marco:
I've also ordered a Series 9 Apple Watch.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Did you get the big Apple Watch this time or little watch?
Marco:
I got the big one that's not the Ultra.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Sorry.
Marco:
You are answering the question I was asking.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
You're answering the question I was asking.
Casey:
Okay, cool.
Casey:
John, what are you... You said Tina did buy a watch already.
Casey:
Is that correct?
John:
So she got a watch.
John:
She's getting the gold stainless because that's what she likes for appearances.
John:
I wish she didn't because it's so much more expensive.
John:
But nevertheless, there you have it.
John:
She's getting the small size...
John:
uh she's gotten a lot of these we were going through like we're gonna do some trade-ins or whatever because our one of our children is not accepting watch hand-me-downs anymore because she just doesn't want to wear watches anymore so like well fine we'll start trading these suckers in we'll get some money for them before they become worthless which happens so fast with the apple watch oh my god yeah so fast not much money for them either like the apple watches have horrendous trade-in values
John:
yes it's very bad but it's better than zero dollars anyway um but they're all they're all the small size whatever the 41 and honestly if i started wearing one again i was like oh you don't even have an apple watch like are you kidding i have my pick of apple watch i could just go grab last year's model at any time and it's the small one and i think that's the one i would prefer but anyway she's getting that uh she debated a lot about the bands we didn't talk about the uh
John:
the new what are they called the the sport bands the ones made of the plasticky whatever stuff uh the new ones they have have flecks of other color in them so instead of being solid color and that's being pitched as like oh those flecks those are ground up old watch bands like they're basically recycling them by grinding them up into a bunch of little aggregate material and then flecking those into the new bands
Marco:
for an aesthetic appearance but also to reuse old ones i'm not sure how much of that i'm misremembering or how much is true but they certainly do look yeah that is what they said i and i think those those look kind of cool i don't love any of the color pairings they've made though uh i like i think i think one thing that i would like a lot actually would be like a black and white one like a white band with like a bunch of black flex in it i think that would look really cool
John:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
John:
I mean, I think the problem is they can't get uniform colored flex because it's ground up random piles of watch bands.
John:
Oh, excuse me.
John:
Midnight flex then.
John:
Yeah.
John:
No, no, but like having all the flex be the same color is what I'm saying.
John:
I don't know if they're color sorting the flex, but...
John:
yeah but anyway uh she was considering that but i think she ended up picking one of the woven things or whatever um so she's getting that with cellular because she uses that and so that means there'll be a series eight that is now rotating into the uh hand-me-down pile um and she it's her year for the phone uh and so she did go max a couple of years i think she the
John:
I think the last time she got a big phone, she like dropped it and shattered it twice.
John:
And she blames that on it being big.
John:
I'm not sure if that's true, but evidence shown that she has not dropped it since going back to normal size phone.
John:
So she's getting a 15 pro, uh, and, uh, she's getting it in natural because I'm trying to make a, you make me feel like a natural woman thing, but I can't figure it out.
John:
The natural, there's such a smart move there, but it's like, this is the natural color of titanium.
John:
It's like, well, whether it is or isn't, that's what we're doing.
John:
And like in practice, it seems like the, you know, I would call it, uh,
John:
it's the medium gray right but it looks a little bit warm doesn't it seem like a little bit warm yeah like it's not you know there's a little bit of a reddish shift to it um and you know she she's going to use a case on it or whatever but this is part of her calculus was like uh you know you do see that camera showing through and she wanted to get like a like a mulberry colored one of the fine woven cases
John:
And if you're going to get colorful cases, she has purple cases, pink cases or whatever.
John:
It's nice to have a phone that's neutral.
John:
And I just said that this one is warm and not neutral, but I think it will go well.
John:
So she's getting natural titanium and we'll never see it because it'll be in a case.
John:
She also is getting the matching wallet thing.
John:
She's become a proponent of the magnetic wallet thingy as well.
John:
Oh, did they update those with fine woven?
John:
I didn't see those.
John:
Yeah, well, yeah, because she finds all the accessories and is like, oh, I get this.
Casey:
It matches.
John:
Yeah, so she's getting that, too.
John:
They're very expensive.
John:
And then also the battery that Casey bought, she bought that, too, and she likes it, but there's no new one for her to buy.
John:
So she, I guess, could keep using her old one and keep charging it with lightning.
John:
But yeah, that's...
Marco:
Well, first of all, I would expect that's going to come back at some point.
Marco:
They probably just aren't ready yet with it.
John:
No, but that's the question, though.
John:
Does Apple feel like they have nothing more to contribute here?
John:
Because if Qi 2 has OS integration, then why do you get the Apple one?
Marco:
No, well, I mean, they make lots of it.
Marco:
Like, other people make phone cases.
Marco:
You know, Apple still makes them, too.
John:
I know, but, like, the Apple usually has something to add, or they're not twice the price.
John:
Because, honestly, for, like, the milliwatt hours or whatever, the milliamp hours, it was so expensive.
Marco:
on paper you should never buy it but the reality is the reason people bought it and actually we have one floating around my house too the reason why is because they're nicer in certain ways like it's not it's not nicer from tech specs perspective it's nicer looking it's nicer feeling it's nice and small and it has the nice integration with the phone in different ways you know showing the battery level on the phone so the idea is that she too is going to have that too
John:
maybe but you know i'm guessing apple will make another one that we just it just isn't right yeah i mean i think they should because again if you just want to find a nice one it's not going to blow up in your pocket or whatever like you want to find a company that you think is doing good quality control that they're they're all going to be the same like i think they should make one oh no uh my wife wants to just message me to remind me that she also got the new airpods
John:
Which I feel like is a triumph of her holding off.
John:
She's always like, oh, my AirPods are being a little bit weird or whatever.
John:
I'm like, they're going to come out with Moons.
John:
And then when the 2s came out, she's like, ah, mine are probably fine.
John:
I'm like, all right, you can probably hold off a little bit longer.
John:
But now is the time to buy because it's really important for her to get them so they integrate the audio with the Vision Pro, right?
John:
Absolutely, yeah.
John:
She's getting that.
John:
Nice.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So for us, Erin is going to be getting a new 15 Pro of unknown color.
Casey:
I haven't had a chance to talk to her about it.
Casey:
I don't think she really cares that much since she is also immediately going to be putting it in a case.
Casey:
I don't I don't know what what because I think she'll probably tell me just choose because I don't care.
Casey:
And I honestly don't know what I'm going to choose for her.
Casey:
And I don't remember what size she has either in terms of capacity.
Casey:
I would think that she's probably on a 256, and I'll probably just do that again, but I'll look at her usage and whatnot.
Casey:
For me, I think it's time.
Casey:
I think I'm going to do the Max phone.
Casey:
I think I'm probably going to regret it.
Casey:
I think it's happening.
Casey:
Because I want that 5X.
Marco:
Hey, it'll be good for the show.
Marco:
When you get it and when you hate it, it'll be good for the show.
Casey:
That's exactly it.
Casey:
I am so not confident about this that I've been genuinely kicking around the idea of buying a third phone with the expectation that I might need to return the Max.
Casey:
And I would buy a second 15 Pro as my backup and then return whatever one I don't end up keeping.
Casey:
I don't currently plan to do that, but I strongly kicked around the idea.
John:
I mean, you can do that in serial instead of in parallel.
John:
I'm not sure you need to have them both going at the same time.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
But I plan to get a 15 Pro Max.
Casey:
Actually, as we were recording the most recent episode of Analog, which came out a few days ago, Mike kind of guilted and kind of encouraged me to get...
Casey:
a pop socket which i've also never had before so this is still in box because i'm just i'm not sure if i'm gonna need it or not why don't you get a keyboard case for your phone yeah right exactly um it's gonna be big enough i might as well so uh i have a pop socket in hand literally in my hand right now that i've not opened but i can if i think i'd need it um i'm going to get uh the blue what is the pacific blue fine woven case with it uh this is going to be a very expensive uh september between st jude and this
Casey:
But I am genuinely kind of excited or actually really excited to try the Max Phone, even though I do think they are preposterously oversized, even though I will always and forever make fun of Mike for his diehard love of the Max Phones and Plus Club before it.
Casey:
I'm excited to try it.
Casey:
And it wouldn't surprise me at all if I end up saying, nope, this ain't for me.
Casey:
And it goes back within the first couple of weeks.
Casey:
But I'm excited to give it a shot.
Casey:
And I'm really excited about the 5X camera.
Casey:
Again, who knows what will come?
Casey:
Maybe it'll end up that I don't like the camera and or I don't like the size of the phone.
Casey:
But I often use the 3X camera and I often wish it was more.
Casey:
I really, really wished it was 4X or 5X or 6X or what have you.
Casey:
And so I'm really looking forward to having a longer throw.
Casey:
That's probably not the right turn of phrase, but a longer throw camera on my phone.
Casey:
I'm really looking forward to it.
Casey:
And like Marco said, jokingly, but also not jokingly, it'll make for good content on the show, if nothing else, because neither Aaron nor I has ever gone plus or max club before.
Casey:
This is going to be great.
Casey:
This is your first one.
Marco:
How long before he breaks this?
Casey:
Well, that's why I've got the damn pop socket.
Marco:
I would maybe get AppleCare on that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't want to.
Casey:
You should.
Casey:
Maybe get some new pants, too.
Casey:
Well, the thing even is, is that the couple of phones that I had AppleCare on, I shattered.
Casey:
So my timing was excellent, but it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
Casey:
So in any case, that's the plan, and I will be ordering Friday morning, and hopefully I will enjoy what I've done, but we shall see.
Marco:
yes for reference i the the yellow uh 14 plus that i have here for testing uh i have occasionally tried let me put the 14 plus in my pocket and walk around the house for a couple hours with that as my phone i've never lasted more than an hour it like because it's just it's so big and it's lighter like it's substantially lighter you know being the the non-pro series it's just too big for me i can't do it but hey more power to those of you who can
Casey:
Well, and that's the thing.
Casey:
That's the thing is that I think if in a couple hours of use, I'm going to frigging hate it.
Casey:
But I hope, I hope that after, you know, a week or so, I'll have adjusted.
Casey:
But we'll see.
Casey:
Maybe this might be hilarious.
Marco:
And you will adjust, you know, but like you will adjust to a certain plateau.
John:
People can get used to anything, even torture.
Marco:
wow and uh a certain somebody from inside the syracuse household has just sent me a text saying i dropped my large phone less than two weeks after getting it get apple care uh she she has a very good point yeah you're gonna last two hours um and finally i will end with when i asked tiff what color phone she would like me to order for her on minute zero i showed her the pictures of the colors and she said those colors make me sad
Marco:
they do look like a rainy day they do so yeah so she still has not decided which color to get because she hates all of them and then i sent her the link to apple's cases because she gets you know she gets like a silicone case every year and her response to the case colors was blah
John:
She doesn't like mulberry?
John:
My wife is big on the mulberry.
John:
Loves it, if that's what it's called.
John:
Whatever that, like, burgundy.
John:
Yeah, the purple-ish.
Marco:
I think that's right.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
No, Tiff's not a purple person, unfortunately, because they've had some good purples in recent years, but yeah, anyway.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Collide and Clean Email.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody.
Marco:
Good luck with your ordering, and we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't
Casey:
all right let's do uh let's do something different for an after show marco do we have any sort of rivian updates that you would like to share i have the most important update possible which is follow up on what color is my car
John:
We keep trying to figure it out.
Casey:
I'm not sure where to go with this, but okay, tell me more.
Marco:
I have the most important follow-up that I can have on this.
Marco:
The most important reference object there is to refer to.
Marco:
Look in the slack.
Marco:
not sure the lighting is right to really capture it but yeah this is i mean so here's the thing about the t-shirt slow down slow down nobody knows what we're looking at this is why we don't do video so i i have a picture taken with my good camera john for your white balance concern i can tell i can tell uh a picture of the gold hypercritical t-shirt
Marco:
Sitting on top of my yellow Rivian hood right before it got very dirty in a rainstorm.
Marco:
So this is the last moment of its factory cleanness.
Marco:
This is how my car color compares to a hypercritical shirt.
Marco:
And actually, it compares fairly well.
Marco:
It's a very similar overall color.
Marco:
The car color is a little bit desaturated version and a little bit lighter than the shirt.
John:
It's got a little bit of brown, more brown in it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, again, your car is a chameleon.
John:
It changes color depending on what light it's in.
John:
But a lot of people are sending you pictures of these because like the gold shirts are arriving and that's like the sort of signature color.
John:
And one thing that I have learned, I mean, this is obvious if you think about it, but it's really highlighted when people show pictures is they show here's my five year old shirt and here's the replacement.
John:
that gold does not stay looking like that for five years, right?
John:
Kind of like your car, although hopefully your car holds up better than a t-shirt, but you put the thing through the wash for five years and it does not look that gold.
John:
So you should five years from now, if you still have that shirt and it hasn't been shredded or destroyed, put it on top of your car then and see if it changes because yeah, when you buy new clothing, especially brightly colored clothing, boy, it looks so bright when it's new, but,
John:
a few trips through the wash, especially if you're not particularly careful about, uh, washing your colors and keeping them bright, bright, bright, like in the, you know, detergent commercials that I just assume still run on television, but I never see.
John:
Uh, yeah, they fade.
John:
And I hope, I hope your car doesn't fade, but cars fade too.
John:
That's why I went, if you, you know, get an older car into an accident and have to get something repainted and they're like, we'll get the color right from the factory.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You usually don't want to do that because your car is no longer the color it was when it came from the factory, especially if it was a super duper bright color.
John:
Because colors fade over time.
Marco:
Like all of us.
John:
Yeah.