Distending My Wardrobe
Marco:
People who are not as nerdy as us might expect us to do something really special for episode number 450.
Casey:
Oh, is that what we're on?
John:
I didn't even realize.
John:
Well, I didn't even know it was 450.
John:
So now Casey and I have this new piece of information.
John:
Are we celebrating 50s now?
John:
I mean, we didn't even celebrate 400.
John:
no we we did make a big deal like 400 is where we actually talked about the show on the show for a little bit but but it wasn't like we did that at 100 i think we talked about it maybe 100 200 but 400 is a random thing um and i i feel like we did that discussion on 400 if you want to hear it go listen to episode 400 and now we don't need to do it again for another like another 400 episodes or something like certainly we're not going to celebrate 50s
John:
Oh, is that how it is?
Marco:
Is this kind of like your pasta shape thing where like, you know, you allowed one fun shape of the four?
Marco:
Is this, you know, are we allowed to have like, you know, only one celebratory episode per hundred or per 400?
John:
My pasta shape thing wasn't allowing one shape.
John:
I was saying if you have a limited collection, at least make one of them fun.
John:
But, you know, I don't have a limited collection of pasta.
John:
I have all the shapes.
Marco:
Just today, I picked up my second delivery of the Sporkful Cascatelli.
Marco:
My first order, when I didn't know how good it was, I got four boxes.
Marco:
But it's back-ordered months.
Marco:
So when I tried the first of the four boxes, I instantly knew, oh, this is not going to be enough.
Marco:
And so I ordered 16 more boxes and they arrived today.
Marco:
Oh my good grief.
Marco:
When you have to order pasta three months ahead of time, you got to figure, well, how many might I need and how many might I want to like, you know, give away to neighbors and friends to try, you know, it's, it's a whole pasta religion now.
Marco:
And I know, yes, I'm aware of the flying spaghetti monster.
Marco:
This is like a whole new, new pasta religion, even beyond that.
Marco:
So, although I think I'm actually an ordained minister of that one.
Marco:
I was for reasons, but anyway, that's it.
Marco:
We now have a new pasta religion and it is cascatelli and it is curly and delicious.
John:
We had a similar situation where we couldn't find one of our shapes.
John:
Like it was, I think this was like early in COVID when, you know, when some stuff you couldn't find in the stores and we were out of a particular shape.
John:
So we bought it from Amazon, but the only thing they had available was, you know, a giant box of like 20 individual boxes.
John:
We're like, you know, it's fine.
John:
We're still going through that.
John:
So pasta, you know, 20 boxes of pasta lasts longer than you might think on the end.
John:
Dried pasta tends not to go bad unless you have some serious climate and moisture control situations.
John:
But I will warn you that one thing that can happen, and I know this is having too much in the house for too long, is that you can get bugs, either bugs that go into it or bugs that are already in there that sort of...
John:
hatch and go through their life cycle oh no no i don't know what they are kind of like these little dry like you'll know you do it because you'll you won't notice you'll pour it you'll pour the pasta into the boiling water and then all of a sudden these little insect husks will float to the top of the water and that's how you know oh my god see i when you were started i thought you were gonna say mice which you can also get in boxes of dried pasta but wow you i think that you would notice though you notice that before you put in the boiling water i hope this was so much worse than i thought it was gonna be
Marco:
And when you're expecting mice to have something even worse is really quite something.
John:
No, the bugs aren't worse.
John:
I was trying to find it.
John:
I couldn't find it.
John:
Someone tweeted Halloween pasta shapes, like little ghosts and stuff.
John:
And then someone had a follow-up tweet to that calling it Spookatini, which I thought was nice.
Casey:
Very well done.
Casey:
Hey, you know, what's not spooky donating to St.
Casey:
Jude best transition ever.
Casey:
So, uh, Hey, this is, it is almost October, which means we're only going to do this, this one last time.
Casey:
Uh, that's a reference.
Casey:
So, uh, anyway, we are trying to raise money even, even still on the 29th of September, we are trying to raise money for St.
Casey:
Jude children's research hospital.
Casey:
Hey, guess what?
Casey:
Thanks to some incredible donations, which we'll get to in a second.
Casey:
We are, all of us, anyone who has donated, even a dollar, that includes you, all of us are sitting at $634,000.76.
Casey:
I am exceptionally proud.
Casey:
I think they started at like a third of a million and we have blown past a half and almost at two thirds of a million dollars.
Casey:
So I am extremely proud of all of us.
Casey:
But hey, you know, a lot of us just got new phones.
Casey:
We're going to talk about that a lot in a little bit.
Casey:
And if you want to feel better about your unbridled consumerism, now is a great time to go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and throw St.
Casey:
Jude a little bit of money because, hey, you know what?
Casey:
Cancer kills more kids under the age of 14 than any other disease.
Casey:
Doctors from all 50 states and around the world, non-Americans, refer their patients to St.
Casey:
Jude because they have the world's best survival rates for some of the most aggressive childhood cancers.
Casey:
st jude also provides thousands of free consultations for doctors treating children again worldwide not just americans worldwide including kids in your community so hey if you want to go to st jude.org slash atp or if you want to feel better about that crypto you've been holding on to which why wouldn't you st jude.org slash donate slash crypto.html these links will be in the show notes please feel free to donate marco would you like to add anything before we discuss our new top donor
Marco:
We know that many of you out there can't really afford a whole lot of extra expenditure.
Marco:
And that's cool.
Marco:
For you, you're absolved.
Marco:
For everyone else who can afford some extra expenditure here and there and is going around buying new Apple gear on a regular basis, we know you can spare a little bit.
Marco:
And so you feel free to absolve yourself of your consumerism guilt.
Marco:
We know you don't really recycle all of your iPhones.
Marco:
We know a lot of your electronics aren't really recyclable, and a lot of the recyclables that we put in recycling bins aren't really recyclable.
Marco:
You can avoid all of the guilt from all of that, for a short time at least, by donating to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
Give him $70.
Marco:
Give him $100.
Marco:
Give him $200.
Marco:
Whatever amount of money that you think is not just a drop in the bucket to you, but not so much that's going to hurt you and your family.
Marco:
Obviously, don't overspend yourself, but...
Marco:
Whatever you can give, please give it.
Marco:
If you can give more, that's fantastic.
Marco:
If you can't give that much, but you can give something, give something.
Marco:
Please.
Marco:
It's a fantastic cause.
Marco:
And as we spend probably the rest of this show celebrating our ridiculous consumerism, I hope you can join us in absolving our guilt by donating to St.
Marco:
Jude.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
I think one other thing to keep in mind for people who – it depends on what age you are and if you're in the tech industry, maybe you have a job and a burgeoning career that's giving you a decent income.
John:
But we all start out – most of us start out in a place where we don't have an awesome job and maybe we have school debt and all that other stuff.
John:
And I can say from experience that going from –
John:
someone who's supported by your parents maybe, then to someone who's just going through school and doesn't have a lot of money or maybe has student loans and stuff like that, to eventually, if you're in the tech sector, someone who's got a pretty good salary based on that education and being in the tech sector and you've got money coming in and everything like that, it's not easy to, it's easy to not notice that, hey, wait a second, I have money now, right?
John:
And one thing that's part of that is like, it's a thing that quote unquote rich people do.
John:
It's like, oh, every year we do charitable giving.
John:
But
John:
When you're a starving college student or, you know, otherwise don't have a lot of money, your annual charity budget is maybe not something that you think about because you're like, what annual charity budget?
John:
I'm just trying to pay my rent, right?
John:
But eventually, those of us that are lucky enough to get to a place in life with our lucrative tech jobs where we're not living paycheck to paycheck, it's time to, setting aside St.
John:
Jude, it's time to start thinking about
John:
What are my charitable contributions going to be for the year?
John:
Pick charities that you care about, right?
John:
Pick things that are close to your heart that you feel good about giving money to or whatever.
John:
And then every year do that.
John:
Maybe do it around tax time.
John:
Maybe do it, you know, around Christmas time.
John:
Maybe do it in September when really has their pledge drive.
John:
Whenever you want to do it, you should make it if you reach this level of financial security.
John:
You have to kind of make a conscious effort to say, oh, I'm one of those people that gives to charities now because I am not living paycheck to paycheck anymore.
John:
I do have a good tech job.
John:
I should every year give to the charities of my choice.
John:
And so even if you're not doing it in September, I'd encourage you to do it on an annual basis.
John:
And I encourage you to think about it.
John:
If you've never thought about it before and, you know, you're a few years into your tech career and you've got a bunch of money, but you never thought that about every year giving to charity.
John:
do it.
John:
It feels good.
John:
It's tax deductible if you care about that.
John:
And you just make a habit of it.
John:
And then you can change the charities from year to year or whatever.
John:
And then if you can work the Relay St.
John:
Jude fund drive into that, that's great too.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So finally, before we leave the subject for the very last time this year, we do have a new top donor.
Casey:
If you recall, our previous top donor was the fine folks at Agile Bits and 1Password, who donated $26,922.04.
Casey:
Someone who is apparently a super fan of Thoroughly Considered, which is a very good podcast on Real AFM with our friends Dan Provost and Tom Gerhart and Mike Hurley, while some super fan donated $26,922.04.
Casey:
Five cents.
Casey:
So, fine, fine listener.
Casey:
First of all, I respect the hustle.
Casey:
Second of all, if you would like stickers, please reach out.
Casey:
You know where to find me.
Casey:
Thank you so very much for doing that.
Casey:
Also, there was an honorable mention.
Casey:
There was someone who donated a tremendous, something like $17,000.
Casey:
171717.1.
Marco:
Yes, that's right.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
And this person, I don't recall if they wanted to be anonymous, so I don't want to name them just to be safe.
Casey:
But they did reach out to me.
Casey:
And for that sum of money, I am indeed awarding them with some stickers, even though they were not the top donor.
Casey:
So appeal to my good side, donate a bunch of money to a good cause, and maybe you'll get some really overpriced ATP stickers.
Casey:
So please feel free, stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
And that is the last you'll hear of this until about this time next year.
Casey:
But you can always donate.
Marco:
And finally, thank you to all of you who have.
Marco:
I mean, this is, I mean, you all out there really did an incredible showing this year.
Marco:
This was ridiculously good turnout.
Marco:
Amazing donations, amazing generosity from all of you.
Marco:
So thank you so much for doing this.
Marco:
We can now talk about ridiculous consumerism totally absolved of our guilt because of your generosity.
Marco:
Oh, and by the way, you might have saved a kid's life.
Marco:
That's really quite an impressive thing.
John:
Oh, P.S.
John:
Yeah, and we've been doing this, what, this is like the third year of the Relay Pledge Drive thing?
Casey:
Something like that.
John:
third or fourth and if you look at how much money was raised in year one versus how much was raised now i don't know the details of relay's business but i think the growth in people giving to saint jude during this pledge drive has far outstripped the growth of like people new people listening to this show so what it comes down to is more people who listen to these podcasts are responding during this pledge drive thing giving money so everyone should be proud of themselves because it is basically like this group of people who is slowly coming around to the idea of
John:
yeah, sure, I'll give a couple bucks, save some kids from cancer.
John:
And that's awesome.
John:
We should, you know, we thank you.
John:
And, you know, let's keep it up.
Casey:
Yep, very much so.
Casey:
All right, so let's do some follow up.
Casey:
We have a whole, just a smorgasbord of return related follow up.
Casey:
This is coming off of your excellent post show, John, from last episode with regard to your mouse.
Casey:
So do you want to run through this?
Casey:
Do you want me to?
Casey:
How would you like to handle this?
John:
You can do it until you trip over your tongue to a degree where you're knocked unconscious, then I'll take over.
Casey:
Sounds like a plan.
Casey:
Here we go.
Casey:
Great.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So John Halter writes, I deal with returning Surface Pro tablets to Microsoft regularly, mostly smashed screens and swollen or bulging batteries.
Casey:
Initially, I had to send a picture of the serial number and damage.
Casey:
Now they require a video showing the serial number and the damage in one continuous shot.
Casey:
Ridiculous.
John:
I like the idea that there has to be a continuous shot because they're afraid you're going to use editing tricks to somehow...
John:
swindle them into replacing your Surface Pro.
John:
So that's another Microsoft experience in line with the video that I was asked to make.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
John:
What a ridiculous thing.
Casey:
It's something else.
Casey:
I mean, what's going to happen?
Casey:
Like if you ship the thing to them, they're going to see that you're full of garbage and they just won't refund you, right?
John:
People just like to ship things back for fun.
John:
It's a recreational activity.
John:
I don't know, man.
John:
It just seems bananas to me.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
But anyway, Burned Kilga writes, I also went through the pleasure of returning an Xbox Elite Series 2 controller.
Casey:
Isn't that the one that Cotton Bureau bought for you?
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
That is the one that I have.
John:
And I mentioned when I reviewed it that a lot of people complain about reliability problems.
John:
So keep reading.
John:
It's like $300, right?
John:
Something like that.
John:
Yeah, it's very expensive.
Casey:
It is expensive.
Casey:
So Burned writes, they had to send me five replacement controllers.
Casey:
Oh, wait, Marco, you're jumping the gun here.
Casey:
And none of them weren't.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
Well done, Microsoft.
Casey:
Good work.
Casey:
Byrne continues, I was also sent bare naked objects in bubble wrap.
Casey:
Byrne says, I only buy Microsoft stuff at Amazon now and use their return system instead.
God.
John:
See, I did buy my mouse at Amazon, I think, so I wonder if I should have gone that route.
John:
Maybe I will next time.
Casey:
Yes, seriously.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right, continuing on.
Casey:
Damien Shaw writes, recently my Surface headphones headband snapped.
Casey:
The warranty said no physical damage, but I gave it a try.
Casey:
Customer support said actually they have a one-time exception on headband snapping and they'll replace it.
Casey:
Went through the same proof process as John, took a photo and video of it.
Casey:
After sending and waiting some time, they sent me my same headphones back saying they don't replace physical damage.
Casey:
Good job.
Casey:
I checked with customer service and they said that the replacement team made a mistake and just went through the process again.
Casey:
So I returned it for a second time and got it back a second time and then again a third time.
Casey:
Eventually in the fourth attempt, the support team just stopped emailing me and I never got a shipping label to send it back a fourth time.
Casey:
Also, these rather fragile headphones were shipped back to me in a large empty box with a single piece of unattached bubble wrap.
Casey:
Excellent work.
John:
Are we noticing a trend here?
John:
I like the idea that they're just sending the same pair of headphones back and forth and back and forth.
John:
My goodness.
Marco:
Also, for the record, headphones where the headband cracks or snaps, like usually like up like by the middle, like where the top of your head would be.
Marco:
That's a very common design flaw in headphones that use solid plastic headbands usually.
Marco:
That is almost never your fault as the customer.
Marco:
That is almost always a design defect or it just wore out usually prematurely for headphones that do that.
Marco:
So yeah, that's almost never your fault.
Marco:
That's almost always their fault.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
Christopher Dillon writes, Logitech made me record a video and provide a similar ridiculous quality of information.
Casey:
I think perhaps quantity was intended there.
Casey:
But anyway, to return a broken MX master, which has a very well-known but not officially recognized fault.
Casey:
So maybe this is standard procedure in the fancy mouse world.
Casey:
Ricky Wilson writes, I had to go through the exact same process with Google to return a non-functioning Google Home Mini.
Casey:
Long chat session, multiple photos, video of touch feature not working.
Casey:
Almost worth paying quadruple for an Apple HomePod Mini.
Casey:
It was bananas, writes Ricky.
John:
Almost, but not quite worthwhile.
John:
Almost, but not.
John:
So we started off with all these Microsoft stories and like, boy, Microsoft has bad return things that make you do all this honorous stuff.
John:
Now we've had a lot of tech in Google.
John:
I hope you're starting to see a trend here.
John:
Keep going.
Casey:
Cheryl Wild writes, on the remote for my new Apple TV 4K, the microphone button physically clicked, but most of the time didn't actually activate anything.
Casey:
Within two months, this button stopped working entirely.
Casey:
So I called Apple support to ask for the remote to be replaced under warranty.
Casey:
Long story short, I had to, oh my God, I can't even get through this because of what's about to be said.
Casey:
I had to provide them with a cyst diagnosis of 160 megs, mother of God, from the Apple TV, as well as a video of me using the defective remote to show how all the buttons were working except for the microphone button.
Casey:
These had to be uploaded to Apple for their engineers to evaluate before they would decide on a remedy.
Casey:
The inevitable conclusion came some days later, which was to do it in warranty replacement for the remote.
Casey:
You don't freaking say.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
Casey:
A cyst diagnosed.
John:
So I think what we've learned is that...
John:
apparently now that companies can assume that everybody has easy access to hardware that can take pictures and videos like they just assume that I suppose like what if you said oh I have nothing to take video with what we do but anyway apparently everybody's doing it now it's not just Microsoft Google Logitech Apple and of course Apple throws in the extra little knife of like oh and also a cyst diagnose from your Apple TV do you even know how to get a cyst diagnose in your Apple TV have fun with that this is a bad trend
John:
I just got through saying in the last show that all the returns I've done with Apple, I just say, hey, my thing's broken.
John:
And they say, OK, fine.
John:
And they send me the new thing.
John:
Or maybe they'll take me through one or two troubleshooting steps or whatever.
John:
But normally I preempt them on that because I've already done all the troubleshooting.
John:
I've never had Apple ask me for a video, but apparently now that's on the table.
John:
So I don't know what I'm going to do about this.
John:
Maybe it's just like, well, you know, what can you do?
John:
Time marches on.
John:
They prefer to have video.
John:
In the grand scheme of things, it's not that onerous, but I would implore anybody who makes decisions at a company about their return policies to, in cases where it makes financial sense, simply take people at their word for it.
John:
When they say their thing is broken, there's no moral hazard here.
John:
They're not recreationally calling you and returning items.
John:
That's not a fun thing to do.
John:
Nobody does that voluntarily accidentally.
John:
as some kind of scam or if there is some kind of scam angle, surely your video is not going to stop that scam angle.
John:
Just get your people off the phone sooner.
John:
You know, you don't have to pay people to be on the phone for an hour to go through all these troubleshooting things.
John:
You don't have to worry about debugging the problems.
John:
Well, I took the video, but I can't upload it and I can't find the file and it's taking too slow in my connection and it's in a codec that you can't read.
John:
And like that can't possibly be worthwhile.
John:
Just when they say their thing is broken, maybe troubleshoot a few seconds, let them describe the problem, write it down in their case file, and send them a shipping label.
John:
Stop with the videos, please.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
We have a iPad mini quickie.
Casey:
This is via Mike Bullock-Ziegler.
Casey:
Mike writes, it's new iPad mini day for me.
Casey:
It's great in everything the reviews say.
Casey:
But I didn't read about this feature anywhere, and I hadn't, Casey, I hadn't seen this either, although I think it has come out since I put this in the show notes.
Casey:
The volume buttons dynamically change based on orientation.
Casey:
For example, the volume button on top is always the volume up while holding it in landscape.
Casey:
I think that's pretty cool.
John:
Yeah, it's a little trick.
John:
I like that.
John:
Although given how much I fight with, like, iOS devices and their sort of hysteresis or whatever of, like, not accepting that I've rotated them.
John:
Because, you know, if you remember this from the original iPad, it used to be a lot more jumpy with the accelerometers.
John:
And now they have kind of a delay where it's like...
John:
I know you might accelerometer say you just might have changed orientation, but it was kind of like a quick jerky movement and maybe we won't rotate then.
John:
And it just, I don't like having to sort of do, it's like the little watch gesture.
John:
We had to wake it up before the always on screen or whatever.
John:
I don't like having to sort of intentionally do the thing to let the iPad know that I'm rotating it or the iPhone know that I'm rotating.
John:
I wish it would just rotate.
John:
And I worry that at least when, you know, for screen rotation, I could tell if it didn't happen.
John:
My phone is now sideways, but the YouTube video is not sideways anymore.
John:
No rotation lock isn't on.
John:
What I have to do is put it back vertical again and then rotate it sideways again.
John:
Ah, now I did it in a way that makes the algorithm happy that the accelerometer readings mean I really rotated it.
John:
But if that affects the volume buttons...
John:
and they don't notice that it was rotated, I suppose the screen would also reflect that.
John:
Or maybe it would.
John:
Maybe if they were both landscape and one was landscape one way and then one was landscape the other way.
John:
The volume buttons could be reversed and I wouldn't know until I started hitting one of them and that would make me feel like something was terribly wrong with my mind.
John:
But on paper, this sounds like a really cool feature.
John:
I just hope it works a little bit better than their screen rotation.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Now we have some stuff about tennis.
Casey:
So that's your neck of the woods, John.
John:
Yep.
John:
I was talking about the basic impossibility of a watch that is on your wrist being able to measure the speed that you are serving.
John:
But of course, they showed something like that in the keynote.
John:
Michael Gock wrote in to say that he looked at the keynote video and paused on that frame.
John:
And it turns out
John:
It's just the SwingVision app, which we will put a link to in the show notes.
John:
And the SwingVision app uses cameras viewing the entire court to measure the speed of the little dot moving through the camera frame.
John:
That's how it measures how fast you're serving.
John:
And then it just puts the result on your watch.
John:
So apparently the watch is not being used to measure your speed.
John:
The watch is being used to display the speed that was measured by a camera that was tracking the ball, which makes way more sense.
John:
We apologize for the confusion.
Casey:
All right, we got a really, really good tip that I will promptly forget, especially because it's only applicable a year from now.
Casey:
But this is with regard to fast pre-ordering from TJ Luoma.
Casey:
TJ writes, when I finished my pre-order, the last screen that said, come back tomorrow and finalize this, also had a link to add the event to your calendar.
Casey:
Now, you're probably thinking like I was, says TJ, but as I did, says Casey, that seems pointless.
Casey:
Why do I need a calendar reminder for something I already know when I'm going to do it?
Casey:
It's not like I'm going to forget.
Casey:
But TJ clicked the link anyway.
Casey:
And then I learned something, writes TJ.
Casey:
When you click that link, it downloads an ICS file for you to add that event to your calendar.
Casey:
And the event has a URL with the event details that is specific for your cart or pre-order.
Casey:
So when you click that link, it brings up exactly the page you need to finalize things.
Casey:
No clicking around needed.
Casey:
Using that link allowed me to finalize my order so fast that I was even able to use my Apple Card before the cartpocalypse happened.
Casey:
So this is, if you recall, we had said that, you know, in order to set up the pre-order, which I liked or the pre-pre-order, you needed to like get it back at pre-order time.
Casey:
That was a little bit confusing where it was and you had to like go digging in your profile or whatever to go find it.
Casey:
And so if you listen to TJ, you can get a URL out of that ICS calendar invite that you can download when you're done, which I thought was a very clever trick.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Moving on, with regard to eSIMS, I owe an apology as well.
Casey:
I had pooped on the idea of eSIMS last episode, maybe the one before, saying that, you know, I didn't think they were really worth it, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
It turns out my information is very old and very wrong.
Casey:
So Harrison Krebs was one who wrote in to correct me.
Casey:
Harrison writes, I wanted to add some eSIM feedback after this week's episode.
Casey:
A long-suffering AT&T customer here, I feel that.
Casey:
We have used eSIMs on iPhones since they came out on the XS.
Casey:
Initially, it was definitely a pain, but I'm happy to report that it's gotten much better, with iOS 15 especially.
Casey:
You used to have to go to a physical carrier store, scan a code, and have them basically approve it on their back end.
Casey:
And then all you had to do was call them and then read a bunch of numbers.
Casey:
Now all you need is your old physical SIM.
Casey:
Over the summer, I was having some issues.
Casey:
I got an AT&T SIM and popped it in there, and there was a convert to eSIM setting in cellular on the phone that basically converted my physical SIM to an eSIM, no carrier involvement.
Casey:
Along with this, when you get your new phone, your eSIM will automatically transfer no calling your carrier with no changes that you need to make on your end.
Casey:
It just works.
Casey:
I definitely understand the initial frustration with eSIMs, but I'm happy to report it's gotten much better, and this is my preferred way to deal with phones, especially the ability to transfer to your new phone without having any carrier input.
Casey:
And there is a KBase article, Hi Stephen Hackett, that we will link in the show notes.
Casey:
So I thought that was very good stuff.
John:
I have a little bit of, uh, stuff to add to that, but we'll, we'll talk about it when we talk about our setup experiences later.
Casey:
Sounds good.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Uh, tell me about raw formats for video.
Casey:
One of you.
John:
Uh, I think it was, I forget it was, I think it was Marco was saying that it's probably not any raw formats for video because like video is just so darn big.
John:
I said uncompressed.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Yes.
John:
Uncompressed, uncompressed raw formats.
John:
Um,
John:
apparently according to the feedback there are actually a few raw formats of video scene dng cine dng reds thing and even prores raw but prores non-raw is compressed and lossy so the implication is that these other things are not only raw but also uh non-lossy compressed like they might be compressed raw but they'd be losslessly compressed i don't know enough about the formats to know but when you get into these super high-end cameras that cost more than a car it doesn't surprise me that some of them might support uh
John:
losslessly compressed uh raw video yeah that that actually did surprise me because that's a lot of data like that's a a massive amount i mean they just charge you the money for the for the you know bazillion dollar memory cards that red uses their their magic memory cut you ever see that there's a whole youtube sub-genre of like cracking open the red uh like memory cards and seeing look it's just a samsung thing in there why does it cost 10 times it's not just like well you see on the outside it says red
Marco:
By the way, just for reference, I don't know exactly what pixel depth we're talking about here, but if you just do the math, just for what uncompressed video means, like truly uncompressed, lossless.
John:
Well, losslessly compressed, I think is the thing.
John:
Not uncompressed, but losslessly compressed, right?
Marco:
Well, okay, but we know what lossless compression typically averages, and it's not great.
Marco:
Usually most lossless schemes, obviously it depends on what the content is, but you're looking at usually about 50% compression, best case or best average case at least.
Marco:
So if you do the math, a 4K frame is 3840 by 2160.
Marco:
multiply those together now the only question is what's the what's the bit depth of each pixel if they're 24 bits which i don't know i know there's like 10 bit raw i don't know is that 10 bits per channel then it would be 30 bits i don't know but suppose it's 24 bits uh that at 60 frames a second is about 1.5 gigs per second
Marco:
And this is why there aren't a lot of uncompressed video formats.
Marco:
Because even if you have the space to record whatever duration you need to record at 1.5 gigs per second, it's fairly difficult to find hardware that can even write that much data at once on a sustained basis.
Marco:
And the ISP, I guess, wouldn't be processing it much.
Marco:
But like...
Marco:
There's a reason.
Marco:
Uncompressed video is so impractically massive that that's why almost nothing actually is dealing with truly uncompressed video or losslessly compressed video.
Marco:
Almost everything.
Marco:
ProRes, as you mentioned, is losslessly compressed in ways that, yeah, it leaves a lot of leeway for editing and everything.
Marco:
It's not super small, but it's not 1.5 gigs per second.
John:
I think, unless I'm just doing this off the top of my head, I might be confusing bits and bytes because of the capital B, lowercase b, but I believe the minimum specs for the SSD expansion on a PlayStation 5 is they have to be able to do 5 gigabytes per second sustained read performance.
John:
I know that's not the same, or maybe it's write performance.
John:
Anyway, what I'm saying is solid-state storage is surprisingly fast.
John:
And the PS4 has, like, a PCIe version 4.
John:
And, you know, like...
John:
I know a giga second sounds like a lot, but for a red camera that again costs more than a car, it's probably within the realm of possibility.
John:
You know, I don't, again, I don't know the details.
John:
There wasn't enough detail in this, in this feedback to know whether they mean, is it, is it, you know, lossy compressed or is it just less compressed or losslessly compressed or anything like that?
John:
But,
John:
Kind of like I said a couple of shows ago where the tech is slowly but surely catching up to our perception in video.
John:
It's got probably another few decades to go before it gets there, but it's getting pretty down close when a game console, a sub $1,000 game console has, you know, onboard SSD storage that's measured in gigs per second.
John:
and that you can buy it fairly for not too much money the expansion is an m.2 card for the for the ps5 and it's internal and everything and it needs to have a heat sink um and there are minimum specs and when you put one in there the playstation 5 will measure the performance of the thing you put in and will yell at you if it doesn't if it's not up to snuff um but for only you know a couple hundred bucks you can get another 500 gigs one terabyte of insanely fast storage in your game console so um i think with the red camera it's definitely in the realm of possibility
Marco:
Oh, speaking of things that will test the performance of the cards you put into them, I have a brief update on my home security camera situation.
Marco:
The Eufy cams that I said were pretty good.
Marco:
I had gotten the two-pack of the indoor cams, and I had placed both of them outdoors.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
and knowing that that would probably kill one of them eventually the second one was in was in a pretty good spot that it's it was fine but the the one that was in a more precarious location uh it turns out it did at one time finally rain sideways in just the right way to kill it um and i don't blame yuffie for that i put their indoor camera outdoors that's on me but i replaced it with one of their actually officially outdoor cameras and
John:
So are we done with this now?
John:
Because every time you put an indoor thing outdoors and it dies and we yell at you and you do it again and it dies and we yell at you, is this the end of this now or are you still going to buy indoor stuff and put it outdoor?
John:
Oh, it's going to keep happening.
John:
We'll see.
John:
No, but it seems like he's learned his lesson now and he's buying outdoor stuff.
John:
It was really cheap.
John:
But anyway, the other one still works.
John:
I put it under a wooden thing.
John:
I did.
Marco:
That's why it lasted through multiple storms.
Marco:
It just didn't last through all of them.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Almost a month it lasted.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
Anyway, so I replaced it with one of their outdoor cameras and it is substantially worse.
Marco:
All of the positive experiences I had with the indoor one
Marco:
I cannot say the same about the outdoor one.
Marco:
And so I don't want to, you know, slag on them too much because, you know, maybe I just have a bad model or maybe I have a dud or maybe my Wi-Fi doesn't reach it well enough.
Marco:
But like the indoor camera in the exact same location worked so much better until it didn't.
Marco:
But that was my fault again.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Anyway, all this is to say I am substantially disappointed by their outdoor camera offering that I've tried so far, and so I'm phasing that out and moving over to just more Logitech circle views for HomeKit, which has been working fine.
Marco:
The Logitech ones have been working great, so I'm sticking with them now.
John:
real-time follow-up on the playstation uh five memory thing uh they only give read performance which makes sense because most of the time you're just reading game data off of the thing so the right performance is unknown what the minimum spec is but the read performance is 5 500 megabytes per second capital b that is the minimum spec uh so obviously writing is much more difficult than reading uh but again with a red camera i believe it
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And our final piece of follow-up, we were talking a couple of weeks, maybe even a few weeks back about a dock auto-hide delay.
Casey:
And basically when we were shaming each other's docks and I said, you know, I liked auto-hide.
Casey:
And Danny Sang wrote in with some information with regard to how to decrease or, you know, all but kill the auto-hide delay.
Casey:
There's a link to a different website that we'll put in the show notes, but the short, short version is we will put also in the show notes the defaults right incantations you need in order to make that happen.
Casey:
So yeah.
Casey:
Check that out if you are interested in it.
John:
And you still didn't mention that we talked about this on the past show.
Casey:
We just didn't have the defaults write command.
John:
So now, if you wondered, what do I type into terminal to make the thing that was mentioned three shows ago happen, it will be in the show notes.
Casey:
Did I not just say we were talking about this?
Casey:
Am I having a stroke?
John:
Right, but you didn't say, and we also said during that segment, hey, because I asked you, did you decrease the delay on the animation?
John:
Because when you were saying you went to AutoHide, you said, no, I didn't decrease the delay on animation.
John:
And then I said, you know, you can decrease the delay.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
Sorry, Dad.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Thank you so much to Backblaze for keeping all my files safe and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Can we talk iPhones 13?
Casey:
Please.
Casey:
Is that okay?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do you want to start, John, or shall I?
John:
I'll start because I don't have much of a story.
John:
I just have one complaint.
John:
This is my wife's phone.
John:
It's not even mine.
John:
But I was helping with the setup thing.
John:
I decided to try to do the device-to-device transfer because Gerber is raving about it.
John:
I...
John:
I think I've done that in past phones.
John:
I generally do the iCloud one just because it gets you a working phone, a quote unquote working phone faster.
John:
Even as, you know, it used to be really bad where like you'd have applications on page two that are just like waiting days to download.
John:
But it's gotten so much better recently than I did the iCloud thing.
John:
all the time um but the promise of device to device was like it's almost as good as an itunes backup i didn't have to relog into slack and all my data was i was like all right well as long as my wife's willing to be without her phone for however many hours it's going to take to do this device to device transfer i could say the promise is that you won't have to log back into as much stuff um it obviously won't be perfect but she has less of a problem than i do on my phone
John:
recall last year when it was my year to get a new phone i had the whole hassle with the uh two-factor authentication stuff and apparently device to device transfer would have handled that better for me although i've actually got that problem solved by other means now because the apps that i use have been updated since then uh she doesn't use test flight apps as casey found out if you use test flight apps device to device transfer doesn't give a damn those aren't gonna be those aren't gonna be trying and you know you casey were saying why does my home screen look different it's like oh i'm missing five apps because they're all
Marco:
In all fairness, I don't think any of the new phone installation methods transfer test flight apps.
John:
Yeah, no, they never have.
John:
They've never been transferred.
John:
I'm just saying, like, this one also continues to not do that.
John:
And it makes some sense because those are managed by test flight.
John:
But, you know, Apple, that's part of Apple now.
John:
So I feel like they could, if they want it to be nice, get this on board.
John:
But it's an edge case.
John:
Who cares?
John:
But anyway, I did the device-to-device transfer.
John:
It does say, this is going to take a super long time.
John:
And it's annoying.
John:
This process is annoying because there are various points where there is a long wait and then it prompts you.
John:
and i like the type of thing where you go through a series of prompts in the beginning and then i can walk away for a few hours don't do that with device to device transfer especially since there's various phases where it's like i don't remember what it said but there's various phases where it sits there for a while thinking and then it wants you to confirm or do some other thing like 20 30 minutes later because it thinks that step is going to take three minutes but really if you have tons of stuff in your phone it might not but anyway
John:
Eventually, it gave me some reading of many hours.
John:
It didn't take that many hours, but it did take multiple hours.
John:
It was pretty slow.
John:
And when it was done, I think the phone more or less, you know, had all the stuff on it.
John:
So good success there.
John:
But I continue my streak and my wife's streak for I don't know how long.
John:
Every time we get a new phone, we have to call Verizon on the telephone.
John:
Why?
John:
Because the phone can't make phone calls when we're done, right?
John:
No matter how we do the thing like, hey, I am ordering the new phone on the phone that is replacing.
John:
And the Apple store knows that.
John:
And it's like, oh, do you want this new phone to replace the one that you're making the order on?
John:
And you say, yes, I believe it has worked for me at least once in the past, but recently not so much.
John:
So she did that with her phone.
John:
We did all the big setup.
John:
We got the phone out of the box, did all the thing.
John:
you know set it up did all that stuff um i think maybe if we physically moved the sim from one phone to the other this would have worked but my recollection is the time that it worked for me i didn't move the physical sim from one phone to the other but it was so long ago who knows but anyway we wanted to use the e-sim the aforementioned e-sim that casey was just saying all those nice things about um
John:
And so my wife said, I'd like to try the eSIM.
John:
Let's not move the physical SIM.
John:
Let's just see if we can get this to work.
John:
And the answer is no.
John:
It's just, you know, your phone can't make phone calls right now.
John:
And it was really confusing if you looked on it.
John:
It seemed to think you had a plan, but of course you couldn't make any calls and you couldn't do any cellular data.
John:
What was I supposed to do?
John:
I think I had the same question last year.
John:
Is there something I could do differently to successfully have a iPhone 13 Pro with an eSIM taking over for my wife's iPhone 11 Pro with a regular SIM?
John:
maybe i don't know but in the end of course we have to call verizon and if you ever wanted to call your cell phone carrier the worst day to do it is on iphone day because everybody's calling them and so we're on hold for we're on hold for so long that our like cordless phone what do they call them i guess they just call them phones
John:
And if anyone listening to still has a landline phone in their house, Oh my word.
John:
And that phone is, it used to be the landline phones were connected with a, with a cord to a thing that was mounted to a wall or sitting on a desk.
John:
Anyway, we have cordless phones in our house because we still do have a landline because our cell signal sucks.
John:
Um,
John:
And we were on hold so long that the battery died on our cordless phone just from sitting on the desk listening to the terrible, massively over compressed clipping, extremely high volume hold music Verizon.
John:
And then you eventually get someone on the phone and you talk to them and you explain the situation and they're like.
John:
sometimes they say oh that should have worked for you it's like yeah but it never does so that's just my disappointment it's still 2021 you buy a new iphone you try to do everything the right way and you still gotta spend an hour two hours on hold with verizon to get your phone working but once you did that they push whatever buttons they need to push on their end we did not have to move the sim now i believe my wife has an e-sim and it is working maybe the next time she upgrades her phone in two years it will work the way it's supposed to
Casey:
Godspeed.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I set up two phones.
Casey:
I set up both mine and Aaron's.
Casey:
For mine, I listened to Gruber and I did the device to device transfer.
Casey:
It did work.
Casey:
It took four feet ever.
Casey:
It was so slow.
Casey:
I don't know, maybe it was user error.
Casey:
I don't know what happened, but it was like easily two and a half, maybe three hours.
Casey:
I was quoted as two and alarmingly for anything over an hour, the bar on, I forget if it was the source of destination phone, I would assume the destination, but the bar was moving, but the time estimate just stayed at about two hours.
Casey:
I'm looking at the bar gaining like 10, 20, 30% in about two hours.
Casey:
It wasn't until it was under an hour that it's finally like, oh, oh, oh, oh, I can do this by minute now.
Casey:
Yeah, it'll be 57 minutes, 56 minutes, 55 minutes.
Casey:
Like, where the hell were you for the last hour and a half?
Casey:
So frustrating.
Casey:
But anyway, but it took forever.
Casey:
And I learned from that.
Casey:
And with Aaron's, I did a once iTunes Now Finder backup.
Casey:
And I still maintain, in my personal opinion, that's the right way to go.
Casey:
I know that's barbaric for most of you.
Casey:
I know you think that's silly.
Casey:
I know a lot of you don't have enough storage space to do that.
Casey:
But for those of us who do, I still think that's the best way to go.
Casey:
To be fair, I have not tried an iCloud backup in a long, long, long time or an iCloud-based restore.
Casey:
So maybe that's even better than a Finder backup.
Casey:
But the one I did for Aaron, I thought was way faster.
Casey:
And the advantage of doing it that way for me was that I could do the Finder backup the day before.
Casey:
And yeah, I might lose like a few hours worth of text messages or whatever, but it's not anything critical.
Casey:
And so I could do like the hour long Finder backup as long as you encrypt it, because otherwise you will lose all your logins.
Casey:
Your encrypted Finder backup, you do the night before, maybe the morning of, and then you do the restore later and it takes like an hour and lickety split, you're ready to rock.
Casey:
It is frustrating, although I understand it, that no matter what mechanism I chose, I always had to re-download all my apps, which was a real pain.
Casey:
But, you know, it's neither here nor there.
Casey:
But all in all, the upgrade process worked pretty well.
Casey:
I moved Sims, physical Sims, which is my preferred way of doing it thus far.
Casey:
Although after everyone's good words about eSims, I might
Casey:
try doing that in the future i don't know we'll see what happens uh but anyway i personally recommend to doing the finder backup if at all possible but that's just my two cents marco what did you do to get rid of your beloved mini and go to a big boy iphone or first how did you how did you what was your system for making sure that you were setting up the correct two phones that arrived
Marco:
Yeah, so yeah, all four arrived.
Marco:
The two that I was trying to cancel and send back, I was able to very easily because if you go on Apple's website and you go into like your orders, if you go to the invoice, like it'll say like, you know, view invoice, it'll tell you the serial number of the phone on the order.
Marco:
And on the outside of the box is a sticker that tells you the part number and serial number of the phone inside.
Marco:
So I was able to identify and return the two duplicate ordered phones without even opening them.
Marco:
Because I could just look at the serial number on the outside and compare it.
Marco:
So it was easy.
Marco:
It was done nice, you know, very high confidence that I had the right ones.
Marco:
Those are on their way back now.
Marco:
I hope and assume they will get there.
Marco:
So I unpacked the correct one.
Marco:
I did the phone-to-phone transfer, the official Gruber method.
Marco:
I had a similar experience as Casey where it did take a very long time, and it said it also gave the about two hours estimate.
Marco:
It ended up being a fairly accurate time estimate.
Marco:
It did take about two hours, but with the lack of granularity, I actually ended up – you know the little strip of paper that you have to tear across to open the box?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I ended up laying that strip on the screen of the phone at the tip of the progress bar so I could come back later and see has the progress bar moved past the strip of papers.
John:
See, if the iPhone had a cursor, you wouldn't have to do that.
John:
You could have used the tried and true method of putting the arrow cursor next to it.
John:
My device-to-device transfer was stuck on seven minutes remaining for about a half an hour.
John:
Oh, neat.
John:
That's always reassuring because it just said about seven minutes remaining and then I'd come back in 10 minutes.
John:
It would say about seven minutes remaining.
John:
I was like, hmm.
John:
It eventually completed.
Marco:
Well, you know, the two hardest problems in computer science, right?
Marco:
Cache and validation, naming things, counting, and progress bars.
Marco:
Anyway, so the rest of the process was fairly straightforward.
Marco:
It did complete it in about two hours.
Marco:
Nothing bad happened, really.
Marco:
It moved the watch over after I bugged it a few times, which was actually extra surprising because the watch had taken it upon itself to update itself to the 8.1 beta the day before.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, cool.
Marco:
I kept the phone from doing that.
John:
That's why I should throw in my thing here because I'd heard Gruber stories like, oh, and it offers to transfer your watch and you just say yes.
John:
And of course, you know, my wife has a watch and it did indeed say, hey, do you want to transfer your watch on the new phone?
John:
And we said yes.
John:
And it seemed like it worked until we hit the bug, which is that apparently there's a bug in iOS 15.
John:
that is i think fixed in the 15.1 beta that's out now uh where uh what is it using the watch to unlock so you can use yeah the masked face id unlock with the watch exactly there is a preference to enable that but on my wife's own and other people afflicted by this bug when you including me yeah when you put press that little switch to enable it it says uh unable to communicate with apple watch
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's so, so frustrating.
Casey:
And I got burned by that, by a device-to-device transfer.
Casey:
Well, I shouldn't say by a device-to-device transfer, but I did do a device-to-device transfer.
Casey:
I got burned.
Casey:
It sounds like Tina got burned in the same way from a device-to-device.
Casey:
Erin did not get burned by this, and she did a finder backup.
Casey:
I'm just going to throw that out there.
Casey:
Correlation is not causation, but...
John:
Hey, I'm not sure what the cause is because I've heard lots of people with different stories.
John:
But here's one thing I will say.
John:
And this is just general advice, especially on like, you know, if you get a new iPhone on day one or whatever.
John:
When you have problems like this and you find other people reporting them, it's difficult to know in the moment you're trying to set up your new toy or whatever.
John:
Did I mess something up?
John:
Is there some way I can get this to work?
John:
Or is this just, as it is in this case, just playing a bug with iOS 15 and there actually is no way to get it to work?
John:
It's so hard to know that.
John:
What I would suggest is, I know people get impatient, but wait a day or two.
John:
Live with the bug for a day or two.
John:
Because lots of people, if you look at all the Twitter threads and people discussing things on Reddit or whatever, they're like...
John:
I wiped my whole phone.
John:
I factory reset it.
John:
I did another backup to iTunes.
John:
I restored the phone.
John:
I wiped my watch and restored that.
John:
And like, you just think of how many hours people put into just like, because you know how long it takes to do this.
John:
If you just empty out your entire phone and erase everything and try to do backup.
John:
Sometimes it solved the problem for people.
John:
A lot of the times it didn't.
John:
You will be much happier not spending literal like, you know, seven hours of your life wiping and restoring, especially if you have an older watch and it takes forever, wiping and restoring watches and phones and repairing and unpairing and doing all the things only to find that after that seven hours of you just like babysitting these things and wiping and restoring them, you haven't solved your problem.
John:
then the next day you find this this you know uh support article article at apple says oh yeah our bad that's a bug we're gonna have to fix an updating release just wait like because you know i read all the things i'm like i'm not going to do that i'm not going to spend any more hours working on this in three days i will know whether this is a bug or whether this is just a you know a thing that i can work around somehow um and i'm now i'm just content to wait for 15.1 where this gets worked out but
John:
if because you will see people said i just erased everything in my house burn you know i burned down my whole house built a new life for myself and now my watch pairs correctly it's like okay i mean that might have worked for you i'm not going to do that though and i remember you not do it too because that process of backing up and restoring and factory resetting takes so long and is potentially error prone that's a good way for you to accidentally lose stuff if during the backup your mac dies or like
John:
You mess up somehow or you forgot there was some piece of data that you didn't realize wouldn't transfer and now it's gone forever.
John:
Chill.
John:
Wait a few days.
John:
Find out what the real deal is.
John:
Don't try to be a debugging hero and don't try like because you see one comment on Reddit that says, I just erased everything in my life and remarried and everything works now.
John:
Wow.
John:
Wait.
Casey:
Oh, my.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
So, hey, what colors did you guys all get?
Casey:
I don't recall what you said you had ordered, but I got a 256 gig iPhone 13 Pro in Sierra Blue and
Casey:
uh these the sierra blue is very light very very very light it is much lighter than i expected and in fact in most lighting i would say it actually looks more like a off color gray which sounds bad but i don't mean it that way but it looks like a kind of funky gray in a lot of light more than it does legitimately blue in sunlight it's legitimately blue um but i i do like it it's funny because i don't think i'm doing a good job of selling it at all
Casey:
I do like it, but it is not nearly as blue as perhaps I would have preferred in a perfect world.
Casey:
I like it.
Casey:
I don't absolutely love it, but I definitely like it.
Casey:
And I don't have any regrets about getting this particular color.
Casey:
John, what did Tina end up selecting?
John:
It's the same phone as you.
John:
And it's in a case that doesn't really matter.
John:
I was not surprised by what Sierra Blue looks like.
John:
It looked to me like I expected it to look in the pictures.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Maybe I expected to be able to see a little bit more blue in the band than I can see, but it doesn't really matter that much.
John:
I handle the phone a bit, you know, during the setup process and stuff like that.
John:
And following my iPhone case regime, which is essentially iPhone cases are put onto their phones only once and taken off only once.
John:
And the reason I do that is I'm worried about...
John:
the case fatiguing and getting loose you know what i mean um if it's taken off put on multiple times or i'm also worried about myself bending or breaking the phone because some of these cases are super tight so all that meant no case is going on this phone until we've resolved the whole carrier e-sim sim situation because the last thing you want to do is put the put the case on the phone and have to take it off and take out the sim put it back and go back you know so i handled it what i'm saying is i handled it without the case for a while to see what that was like
John:
and it what didn't feel that different remember i used my 12 pro value case for a while as well it felt very similar i didn't even really notice the weight i i felt like i kind of noticed the extra thickness a little tiny bit but it's hard to say because i'm so aware of the specs whether i would notice if i didn't know about all these things um
John:
did notice when the phone was sitting on the desk right in front of me uh and i would during the setup process there's a lot of you know time to do stuff and some prompts would come up and it would want me to type something on the on-screen keyboard and i'd try typing the on-screen keyboard and the thing would rock what felt like half a centimeter because the camera ball is so big like it doesn't just rock a little or just you know tag it's it's like
John:
boy you cannot type with the keyboard at the bottom like in portrait mode you cannot press any of those keys that are in the right half of the keyboard the whole phone goes it's very very uh unstable very sort of tippy by a big distance not a little distance right but i'm like okay well i'm not going to use another case so who cares what it's like now but just fyi if you think you're going to put your phone on the table and type on the keyboard when it's flat on the table
John:
You are not.
John:
All right.
John:
So anyway, eventually got into the case one time.
John:
Although my policy doesn't matter because my wife changes her case when she wants a different color.
John:
So I don't even know what I'm bothering to do.
John:
But anyway, did it for now.
John:
Put the Apple leather, purple Apple leather case on it.
John:
And I do find, as many people have reported, that my fingers find and hit the camera bump on the back of the case, which is something I do not notice on my 12 Pro because my 12 Pro with the case on is basically flush on the back.
John:
um but when i'm just using this phone i'll be like what is this on the back of the oh it's the camera bump like i will actually touch it and hit it with my fingers not it's not a big deal like it's not doesn't really interfere with it but it's it's something that never happens in my flat backed uh you know 12 pro with the case because the case flattens it out and it kind of makes me
John:
happy that I have the 12 Pro and not the 13 Pro, because I like the way the 12 Pro feels in my hand better.
John:
I don't like the camera, but I like the fact that it lays flat.
John:
In fact, the only feature, the physical feature that I'm jealous of about the 13 Pro is that they moved all the buttons down on the side slightly, something we didn't mention last show, I think.
John:
The power button and the volume buttons have moved down a bit.
John:
And I think that's a good move.
John:
I think they're not moved down a lot, but they're moved down a little bit.
John:
And I think it's a better position for them now.
John:
But other than that, physically speaking, I really am kind of glad I have my 12 Pro and don't have to deal with a giant camera bump.
John:
Of course, I would love to have those cameras, but we'll talk about that in a bit.
Casey:
All right, Marco, let's start with what color you got.
Casey:
And then if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to hear a little bit about what you think of the new size.
Marco:
Oh, I have opinions.
Marco:
You?
Marco:
I got the Blue Pro.
Marco:
I got the same phone you did.
Marco:
The 256 Blue non-Max Pro.
John:
We all got exactly the same phone this year.
John:
Same storage side and same color.
John:
Yep.
John:
I think that's the first time that's happened in the history of the show.
Marco:
I think it is, yeah.
Marco:
And I'm coming from a 12 Mini that I really, really liked.
Marco:
As I mentioned towards the end, the battery life was really kind of getting to me.
Marco:
But overall, other than that, I really liked it.
Marco:
And this 13 Pro...
Marco:
is a big, heavy phone.
Marco:
I know that this has become the default slash, quote, normal size.
Marco:
This is not a normal size.
Marco:
This is a Plus phone.
Marco:
When the 6 Plus first came out,
Marco:
And a lot of people tried it.
Marco:
I tried it.
Marco:
I bought one for testing.
Marco:
It was a really weird device for developers in certain ways.
Marco:
So I bought one for testing, and I took it as my only phone on a couple of trips and tried it for a week here and there.
Marco:
And every time I tried the Plus phone...
Marco:
I always thought, well, I like some of the benefits of this, but my God, is it big in my pocket?
Marco:
And it wasn't even heavy.
Marco:
Weight wasn't even its problem.
Marco:
It was just really big in the pocket, and that's really awkward.
Marco:
And I eventually tried it here and there, but I ended up always going back to the smaller size, the medium-sized phones.
Marco:
I had the X and the XS and the 11 Pro.
Marco:
Those were all near this size, and I had all those phones.
Marco:
And then when they released the 12, they made it a little bit bigger, and they made the sides flat, and the whole phone just got even bigger and even heavier.
Marco:
And I remember when I was leaving the large size and when I went to the Mini for last year, I said one of the big reasons why I was excited about the Mini was just how much lighter it was because these phones had gotten so heavy.
Marco:
And so big and that we had grown to just accept that like what used to be the outrageously large 6 Plus, that's now like the regular size that most people get.
Marco:
But now they're even heavier.
John:
Do you actually do a size comparison?
John:
Was the 6 Plus, like what dimension wise, was the 6 Plus wider, taller or, you know, the same as that?
John:
My recollection from...
John:
You know, I don't have one here.
John:
Is that the 12 Pro is still, in fact, not as tall and not as wide as the 6 Plus.
Marco:
I think you'd be surprised, but I don't have one here.
John:
I mean, the 6 Plus was way thinner, I think.
Marco:
It was thinner, and I think it was probably half the weight.
Marco:
And also bendier.
Marco:
Yeah, that was a bit of a problem.
Marco:
I didn't have that problem.
Marco:
I didn't use mine enough.
Marco:
But anyway, so the...
Casey:
this phone i'm what almost a week in to having it now and i'm still not used to the size and the weight it still feels giant and heavy in my pocket all right so quick interruption real-time follow-up iphone 6 plus 172 grams iphone 13 pro 204 grams all right not that much heavier it's heavier but it's not it's pretty it's noticeable
John:
What about the sizing?
John:
You didn't look up the dimensions?
Casey:
That's what I thought.
Casey:
Okay, well, I thought that was a more important one.
Casey:
All right, so dimension six plus.
Casey:
Height is 158 millimeters.
Casey:
Pro 13, 146 millimeters.
Casey:
So it is a little bit, the 13 is a little bit squatter.
Casey:
Width is about 78 millimeters versus about 71 millimeters.
Casey:
So again, a little bit thinner.
Casey:
depth is uh let's see seven millimeters versus it's 7.65 millimeters so it is a little bit deeper which i thought we knew but uh so a little bit thinner and it's not counting the camera mountain correct i believe that's right i'm just looking at wikipedia um but yeah so it's a little bit thinner a little less wide and a little bit shorter but a little bit deeper and certainly heavier than a six plus
Marco:
And part of why this feels so big to me is that I'm coming from the last year of using the 12 Mini.
Marco:
And the 12 Mini, when you go from Mini to this size, that is a much bigger jump, in my opinion, than going from the Pro to the Pro Max.
Marco:
Now, when I handle Tiff's phones, because Tiff has the Pro Max, when I handle that...
Marco:
But before, when I was using the 12 Mini every day, it felt almost ridiculous that these were two of the same product.
Marco:
It's like when you see a really tiny dog and a really massive dog standing next to each other, and you're like, how can this be the same animal?
Marco:
It was like that.
Marco:
Now, the Max doesn't seem like that big of a jump over what I have.
John:
Until you try to put it in your pocket, because I still maintain that the Max breaks through some kind of pocket barrier where it becomes like, this is not comfortable in any pocket.
John:
whereas I know the Mini obviously is way smaller and way more comfortable in more kinds of pockets, but I still find the 12 size and the 13 size to be pocketable, whereas the Max size now is sort of distending my wardrobe with its bulk.
John:
I don't have any... And my hand, for that matter, when I pick up a Max phone, I know what you're saying.
John:
I think you're right that if I gave you a Mini in your hand and then I gave you the Pro, it would feel like a bigger jump than the Pro to the Max, right?
John:
But...
John:
in terms of can i use this thing like in one hand with my thumb the max breaks is beyond my finger size like i just it's it becomes you know you're shimmying all over the place you just can't get to it whereas the the 12 pro and the 13 pro is within the realm of reason for my hand so i would still like in terms of size i would still say that the max is more uncomfortable for me going from the regular to the max is more uncomfortable to me than going in the other direction
Marco:
All right, that's fair.
John:
I mean, again, I haven't tried going to the Mac with the exception of just handling test phone here and there, so maybe I'm just... Try actually using it as your phone and carrying it around with you all day and try and use it one-handed when you're doing stuff and realize I can't reach anywhere on this phone.
John:
Yeah, probably.
Marco:
And I haven't really had that problem with this move.
Marco:
Like, certain things have been a little harder to reach, but...
Marco:
I was able to, you know, I rearranged like two icons on my home screen and it was fine.
Marco:
Like it hasn't been that big of a deal.
Marco:
So that part was fine because, you know, this is very close to the screen size that I used for whatever it was, three, four years.
Marco:
So overall, like the size to me, I am still not used to it.
Marco:
I don't know if I'm ever going to get used to it.
Marco:
It's just a big, heavy brick to me.
Marco:
And I think... And I'll get to what I like about the phone later.
Marco:
I think there are certain things about it that I'm willing to tolerate that big, heavy brickness for.
Marco:
But it's just such a big difference.
Marco:
And when I see the Mini line, and when I see that the Mini line is able to achieve 80% of what I like about this phone...
Marco:
in such a more pocketable and handleable size.
Marco:
I've never more wished for a pro mini.
Marco:
And I know there are challenges with that.
Marco:
Obviously, the battery is going to be the biggest one.
Marco:
You know, physically, it's just probably very hard to even fit something like the giant camera module.
Marco:
I mean, like I have my mini right here next to this.
Marco:
If you if you look at the mini, like you look at the backs of both phones,
Marco:
so you can see the camera modules it looks you would never say that the 12 mini next to the 13 pro with this little tiny two camera module versus this massive three camera you would never say this was a one year change you would think this is like the mini is the phone from five years ago and the pro is the phone from now because the camera module got so much bigger
Marco:
and so like i understand that it would be a heck of a challenge to try to fit that kind of camera module into the mini and i'm not saying that i that like i'm blaming them for not doing it i just wish they could do it and and hopefully over time maybe they'll be able to do stuff like that because i just love these cameras i'll get to that but
Marco:
my god this phone is a brick it's so big and heavy compared to this mini that has pretty much all the other features so wow i i just i hope over time you know i you know i don't jump at any chance to tell apple they should make their stuff thinner and lighter because that's usually usually comes with compromises i don't want but i really hope that
Marco:
This is not just like the new baseline that, oh, our phones are just always going to be this big and heavy if you want the good camera and the good battery life.
Marco:
Because it's really big and heavy.
Marco:
And I wonder, and this is an honest question.
Marco:
Okay, I swear I am not joking.
Marco:
Where am I supposed to put this phone?
Marco:
Am I supposed to put it in my pants?
Marco:
Steve Jobs was here.
Marco:
He would say, I'll tell you where you can put it.
Marco:
Yeah, because so, OK, I understand, you know, men in America don't usually carry like a handbag or anything like that.
Marco:
So we have to somehow carry the phone on our person somewhere.
Marco:
And I also understand that belt clips have been out of style since they existed.
Marco:
And so where am I supposed to put it?
John:
You can put it in your front pocket.
John:
It fits fine.
Marco:
It doesn't fit fine.
Marco:
When I put it in my front pocket, it doesn't stick out.
Marco:
No, it doesn't stick out or fall out.
Casey:
He's a little shorty person, Jonathan.
Marco:
yeah it doesn't stick out or fall out but as i'm walking it like swings over to the front of my leg maybe your pockets are too big no like not only does it no and you know i'm wearing like fairly snugly fitting i'm not like these aren't like big baggy pants these are these are stretch jeans so i mean excuse me performance pants let me reference the piece of clothing that all three of us probably own do you have the mac weldon shorts
John:
uh i have the exercise shorts the the soft ace ones and the uh the running ones i have the regular the regular mac weldon shorts have become my go-to shorts not just because they sponsor the show yes they're a sponsor the khaki ones like the but but also they're kind of a stretchy material i was just like the default shorts um but also because i found that my previous just like crappy like around the house summer like champion shorts from like costco or target or whatever you know i'm talking about like just sweat shorts kind of things
John:
those have the problem you're describing where the pockets are so big and the material is so loose that if i put a phone like this in and i walk at a brisk pace i feel the phone kind of slapping against my leg up and down the mac weldon shorts do not have that problem because i think the pockets are a little bit tighter and the material is stretchy um and also the other problem i had because i think i buy my clothes all too big was that my phone was stopped to pull down my shorts on that side of my body as i walked because of the weight of the weight of the phone
Marco:
You're talking about a different set of problems than what I have.
Marco:
First of all, if your phone is bouncing up and down, your shorts are too loose.
Marco:
You need different shorts.
John:
I mean, it's not like I'm getting tailor-made shorts.
John:
I get the size where the waistband is comfortable on me.
John:
It's like small, medium, and large, right?
John:
These are cheap.
John:
All I'm saying is the Mack Weldon shorts, I think,
John:
had a appreciable improvement in sort of keeping the phone close to my leg as i walk so i would recommend at least try i think you have to have a pair of these shorts we all have a pair of these shorts i can tell you i have the ace and i have the stratus but i think it sounds like you might be talking about the maverick texino or the radius i don't have i don't know all these names you're much more familiar with my i have exercise shorts from them i'm literally wearing them right now but of course i can't look at the tag and calm down calm down please try
Casey:
Just hold on.
Casey:
Just hold on.
Casey:
Do they have belt loops?
Casey:
Do your sweatshirts, whatever they are, have belt loops?
John:
They do not.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Are they more of a plasticky feeling or do they feel more like sweatpants?
John:
They have a drawstring.
John:
Does that help?
John:
They have a drawstring with little metal tips in the drawstrings?
John:
No.
Casey:
Is the drawstring mounted on the inside or the outside?
John:
Outside.
John:
So it's got to be the Ace, right?
Casey:
I think that's what I've been thinking this whole time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's the ACE sweatshirt, which is excellent by the way.
Marco:
That's, that's almost always, that's what I'm wearing when I'm doing a workout.
Marco:
Almost always.
John:
And all right, Bill, when you walk with those with your phone, with your now giant phone in your pocket, I think you will find that you have less of the problem of it swinging to the center.
Marco:
Well, OK, but so normally.
Marco:
So first of all, that's that's a more casual fit than I would normally walk around a lot in your fancy your fancy shorts.
Marco:
But also I'm wearing pants.
Marco:
And so anyway, I'm wearing jeans.
John:
You're wearing jeans.
John:
I think I find I have no problem with with the phone this size in my jeans front pocket.
Marco:
Yeah, shorts I find are more forgiving of large phones.
Marco:
They always have been because they have a baggy or more casual fit usually.
Marco:
But jeans and pans usually are a little bit more snug up top, at least if you eat too much pizza like I do.
Marco:
But it's –
Marco:
Normally, you know, you don't have as much looseness in your pants pockets.
Marco:
So anyway, so get me to the question.
Marco:
So I've always been a front pocket phone and wallet person.
Marco:
I never use my back pockets slash butt pockets.
Marco:
I never use this for anything because that's I don't want to break my back and I don't like the way it looks.
Marco:
And I would be afraid of it just falling out or me forgetting it's there.
Marco:
So nothing goes in the butt pockets.
John:
You don't want to mess up the line of your butt because people are checking you out from behind.
John:
You want them to get the full picture of what you've got to offer.
Marco:
Hey, I work out for a reason.
Marco:
So anyway.
Casey:
Well done.
Marco:
So yeah, my butt pockets are clear.
Marco:
So everything goes in front.
Marco:
Left is phone, right is wallet, and anything else.
Marco:
So I cannot find a pair of pants where this giant heavy phone doesn't migrate over to the front of my leg as I'm walking.
Marco:
And that both looks and feels bad.
John:
Where is it going?
John:
In jeans, pants?
John:
It's migrating?
John:
I've never had this problem.
Marco:
When I insert the phone into the pocket, I try to basically align it onto the side of my leg.
Marco:
The outer edge of my leg.
Marco:
But then as I walk, it scoots forward and migrates to the front of my leg.
Marco:
And that's not what I want.
John:
i mean it's kind of like merlin's jeans where you get like the outline of the phone where you can see the corners eventually and that shows where like the natural place that the phone settles because it's not like a smear there's like a clear place where the phone it i mean it has to do with the basically has to do with the shape of your body and you can see like oh those are those are my iphone 5 pants because you can see how big the how big the outline is
John:
Right.
John:
Well, so it's the shape of your leg and then the position and size of the pocket.
John:
And there is one place for the phone where it will find its most natural home.
John:
And I think if you're fighting against that, you either need different shaped legs or different pockets.
Marco:
Well, I also, by the way, I like the butt pocket isn't even an option because the phone doesn't fit in it without sticking out the top.
Marco:
Like, the phones are so big now.
Marco:
And I know, please, any women out there who are listening and you're like, oh, boo-hoo, because, like, I know it sticks out of all of your pockets.
Marco:
Like, we know.
John:
At least there are real pockets on your pants and not just, like, fake pockets that look like pockets but have nothing in them.
Marco:
I just – I want to know where –
Marco:
Am I supposed to be keeping my phone?
Marco:
Because it doesn't fit in the back pockets.
Marco:
It doesn't work well in the front pockets.
Marco:
And what else am I supposed to be doing?
Marco:
I mean, if I'm wearing a jacket, then it's easy.
Marco:
Put it in one of those chest pockets in the jacket that's really big.
Marco:
But I don't know what to do.
Marco:
I don't know where I'm supposed to be putting my phone.
John:
i mean i think you just put it in the front pocket of your jeans and whatever you say it's not working because you don't like it when it goes to the front but that's where it goes on everybody and i think we're all okay with it like i'm not sure what you're worried about with the phone going to the front i know you want it on this side but apparently that's not where that's not where the pockets are in your pants the pants pockets are on the front and so when you put the phone in the front pocket that the phone is in the front it's fine also i would recommend when in jacket weather
John:
I put my phone in the same jackets that my hand's going, you know, those pockets.
John:
What?
John:
Why?
John:
What?
John:
Because that's where my hands naturally are.
John:
And so if I want to get my phone out of my pocket, I put my hand in my pocket and there's the phone.
John:
I can take it out and I can put it right back in.
Casey:
But doesn't it fall out so incredibly easily?
John:
No.
Marco:
Yeah, those pockets are very shallow.
Marco:
They move a lot and your hands are taking up their space.
John:
Right.
John:
I mean, I can imagine they would fall out if you have, again, it has to do with where is the pocket positioned and like how is it facing and so on and so forth.
John:
Oh my goodness.
John:
Like my pockets in the jackets that I wear, the phone doesn't come out.
John:
A lot of my jacket pockets have zippers on them.
John:
So you can zip them up and then you know it's not going to fall out.
John:
But even ones that don't, I know what you mean.
John:
Like a lot of people have this problem with their pants pockets.
John:
They sit down and their phone goes like that ends up in the couch cushions or whatever.
John:
It really depends on how the pocket is how it's facing.
John:
I'm sure there's some tailor would know the difference between type of pockets, but you basically need like a ledge in the pocket.
John:
So if you put your hands in your pockets of your jacket,
John:
And there's no kind of ledge.
John:
Like if along the bottom of the jacket, this is a straight line out of your pocket.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Your phone's going to fall out and you're going to be a Casey and jump up to wash your car and crack your phone.
John:
But, uh, my coat pockets aren't like that.
John:
And I find it really convenient because I can always, then I always, I can put my hand on my phone.
John:
I can feel it when it vibrates.
John:
I can get it in and out really easy.
John:
Um, so that's my recommendation for, for whether when you have a jacket.
Marco:
Well, if anybody can tell me how to operate my pants, please let me know.
Um,
Casey:
So do you think the people from the UK are more offended by me justifiably snarking on their hilariously oversized plugs or by us saying pants a thousand times in the last 10 minutes?
John:
They're used to it.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So moving right along now that we've resolved that.
Casey:
Hey, I wanted to.
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
I wanted to give a quick shout out, if you will, to the Apple silicone case, which is something I never thought I would say for Aaron's phone.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
For Aaron's phone, she for years had the what I would call light pink is always has a different name, but a light pink silicone case has been the case for years.
Casey:
For the 12 Pro, they didn't offer it.
Casey:
And we were too slow on the uptake to get a different kind of case.
Casey:
And then she shattered her phone in the same style that I did in the span of the first week.
Casey:
This is her 12.
Casey:
So we, of course, neither of us are caseless Casey nor Aaron-less.
Casey:
And so she got the Apple silicone case.
Casey:
And I actually really like it a lot.
Casey:
I was very surprised.
Casey:
It is not nearly as...
Casey:
sticky is the right word tacky maybe is the right word yeah but it pulls your whole pocket lining out when you take it out of the pocket exactly i mean it's still more than i would necessarily want but it is at least in the realm of workable like in the past i would tell you there is no freaking way i could put one of those in my pant pockets or trouser pockets all the time i shouldn't capitulate to them i wouldn't put one of those in my pant pockets all the time we invented the language damn it
Casey:
It's English traditional versus English modern.
Casey:
So anyway, so yeah, so I wouldn't put one of these silicone cases in my pocket or if she asked me to and I did for a few minutes, I'd be like, oh God, give me 20 minutes to extract this thing.
Casey:
But the new one, again, it's only been a few days, so I haven't had a whole lot of experience and I haven't had jeans on and I can't even tell you how many months now.
Casey:
But
Casey:
So far, I've been very impressed with the silicone case.
Casey:
It feels really nice.
Casey:
It feels more fancy to me than the past ones did.
Casey:
The past ones felt kind of chintzy.
Casey:
I really, really, really like it a lot.
Casey:
I'm very surprised.
Casey:
And then today, both Marco and I, I believe, got our Nudiant cases.
Casey:
I think it's like a Nudiant Thin V3 or something like that.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
This is what Paul Kafasas had recommended.
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
I got mine in sky blue.
Casey:
I really like the color.
Casey:
It matches well with the phone's color in the humongous camera plateau.
Casey:
I like it a lot.
Casey:
The cutout for the lock button, I feel like... I wish it was a little bit...
Casey:
i don't know wider because i feel like the lock button is kind of buried within the cutout if that makes sense uh again a little bit that's true of the volume buttons but i find that less bothersome however overall i really like it and i've slapped my magsafe battery on there just to see how it feels and it's still just fine uh no particular problems there in this case was 35 dollars i will say however
Casey:
they use a very what is it uh what's the term for this like a dark tactic or something like that um they use a terrible mechanism by which if you go to check out the default shipping is like twenty dollars and it's ups like super fast or whatever uh if you can't if you would like you can change it to free shipping and it takes you know an additional few days this thing actually came direct from germany which i was very surprised to see but uh for 35 bucks i'm actually very impressed with it after about three hours of use marco thoughts on any cases that you may have gotten
Marco:
I still only have the Nudiant, the same one as you do.
Marco:
I got the darker blue color.
Marco:
But actually, it's a little too dark.
Marco:
I think you chose the better color.
Marco:
Mine's almost black.
Marco:
So if I'm sticking with this case, I might end up getting a lighter one.
Marco:
Because, yeah, I mean, for $35, it's really not that bad of a deal.
Marco:
But overall, I like the feeling of it.
Marco:
Because it's not silicone or leather.
Marco:
It's one of those just kind of like slimy.
John:
semi-tacky plastics i don't know it's vegan leather that's what they call it in uh car interiors now they call it vegan leather which i feel like is not maybe saying what they want it to be saying but it's not vegan leather it's like i mean i've felt a lot of things that are vegan leather i mean everything technically is vegan
Marco:
oh yeah i guess that's true but yeah no it's not it doesn't feel like a leather like it feels it feels like a like a matte plastic if that makes sense it's a good it's a good feeling overall i'm not super keen on the buttons because
Marco:
They use holes so that you can actually just use the buttons on the phone, which is nice because they didn't replace them with crappy button overlays, but it does make the buttons harder to press, and you have to press in a little bit, and I can't operate the silence switch with one hand anymore because it's slightly too recessed, so I have to hold the phone with one hand and use my fingernail on the other hand to go over and hit it.
Marco:
I don't love that, but...
Marco:
Overall, it's fine, but I've been using it without a case for the last few days until this came today.
Marco:
And so far, I'm liking it without a case because the case, you know, my main problem with this phone is that it's really big and heavy.
Marco:
And the case doesn't add an appreciable amount of weight, but it does add size and it makes it even bigger in my pocket.
Marco:
And it makes it even weirder in my pants situation because it is slightly grippy.
Marco:
in the pocket it does slightly pull the lining out of the pocket when i take it out the way i always complain about apple silicone case is doing and so it kind of makes the the pants situation worse uh whereas and it makes the holding situation a little bit worse in those ways like with the buttons so i don't i don't know if i'm gonna keep using cases i do have the apple silicone case on order uh i'm gonna try it's gonna be here probably probably by next show so i'll see how that goes but
Marco:
I'm not... I think for what this case is, the Nudiant case, for being an inexpensive, thin, kind of tacky, but not leather or silicone case, it's a pretty good version of that.
Marco:
But I don't know if that's even what I'm looking for anymore now that I've actually tried it.
Marco:
So I'll figure it out.
Marco:
But in the meantime, I think I'm still going caseless.
Marco:
And the way it rocks on every surface does bother me.
Marco:
It is ridiculous.
Marco:
The old one did that too, but not nearly to this degree.
Marco:
But
John:
i don't know i'll see i uh i haven't found the right solution yet do you find either one of you find your finger touching either the uh the giant the great wall around the case on the back or in marco's case the extra camera bump more than it did on your previous phones yep definitely touching the camera bump from time to time it's not it's not often but it i've definitely been like what the hell is oh that's the plateau whoopsies
Marco:
Yeah, I'm very often, because again, I hold my phone on my left hand because it comes out of my left pocket.
Marco:
And so I'm often, my index finger on my left hand is often resting on the edge of the bottom camera.
John:
I wonder if like, I mean, again, I think Apple's going to rethink this whole thing for the next phone and hopefully use those Periscope things.
John:
But even if not, I wonder if in this round of cases, one approach that maybe a third party could use or something is instead of making the, you know, the wall around the camera bump.
John:
to kind of do what people – what third-party cases have done with – or even Apple's cases have done with battery cases, which is essentially slope the sides to hide the lump, like make it a gradual transition to the lump instead of having it flat, flat, flat, and then a giant wall, right?
John:
So that there is just a – basically a lump.
John:
And so you would never –
John:
find yourself hitting anything protruding it would just be one smooth slope up to the full height of the camera lump and it would make your phone lopsidedly round on the back like a sort of a a bar of soap that had been used unevenly right but you do never you would never encounter something like protruding from your phone
Casey:
Yeah, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
It's worth noting very quickly that the MagSafe Duo, this is the like wallet-y thing.
John:
Or the $130 MagSafe Duo.
Casey:
That doesn't include a charger.
Casey:
Yep, that's right.
Casey:
The MagSafe Duo wallet-y thing that you're supposed to travel with, the camera plateau is so darn big that it is a little precarious when used on the MagSafe Duo.
Casey:
And Marques Brownlee did a very good Twitter video of this.
Casey:
It's like a minute and a half long.
Casey:
That's worth watching.
Casey:
It's quite funny.
Casey:
worth checking out.
John:
It doesn't lay flat.
John:
Like, basically, the phone doesn't lay... This is an inductive charging, you know, like, wireless charging thing that you're supposed to lay your phone down on, but the camera bump is so big that it extends into the area where the phone is expected to be laying flat so that you can see daylight underneath the phone because the phone is on an angle.
John:
It still charges.
John:
It still works, but...
John:
Like in general, the farther away the coil in your phone is from the coil in the charger, the less efficient the charging and the worse and the more heat.
John:
And so I don't like being able to see daylight between my phone and the inductive charging mat.
John:
But that's what you get for the big bump.
John:
And it's kind of a shame.
John:
Like, you know, obviously the coil doesn't extend under the camera bump on the back of the phone.
John:
It's just that the MagSafe Duo obviously is wider than the coil.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
As I was using this phone, the top speaker, so the thing that you would put your ear to in order to make a telephone call, it is like way up at the top of the screen area or at the top of the phone, and it just feels a little bit wrong.
Casey:
Like, not to the point that it's bothersome, but I have how many years of having an iPhone speaker at roughly the same location, regardless of the iPhone that it's within—
Casey:
And now I find that I have to pull the entire phone or place the entire phone like a little bit further down than I'm used to.
Casey:
You do not have to move the phone farther down.
Casey:
No, he's right.
Marco:
You totally do have to.
John:
It's like two millimeters difference.
Marco:
No, but it matters.
Marco:
When I answer a call, I have to like, at first I can't hear the person.
Marco:
I got to scoot it down slightly.
John:
Yep, yep.
John:
I swear to you.
John:
Are you moving it more than two millimeters down?
John:
I would say two to five.
John:
We can measure how far the speaker has moved.
John:
It has not moved that far.
Marco:
I'm telling you, it matters because now it's closer to the edge.
Marco:
If you're accustomed to how the phone feels in your ear relative to the edge of the phone, it's going to be slightly different.
John:
Exactly.
John:
It's going to be different by the amount the speaker moved.
John:
All I'm saying is it didn't actually move like a centimeter.
Casey:
It's a noticeable difference.
Casey:
I don't care how much it is.
Casey:
I don't care if it's a micron.
Casey:
I'm telling you, I can notice the difference.
Casey:
I'm serious.
Casey:
I can notice it.
John:
I mean, I do wonder if, especially Casey, you have a case on.
John:
I talked about this before.
John:
I was saying that like they did move the thing up there and there is the potential that the case could screw with the sound.
John:
Again, I'm assuming Apple's cases don't accidentally cover the speaker necessarily.
John:
But the case being so close to the speaker could change how the sound bounces around.
John:
And maybe that's why you're having to position more.
Casey:
That's a very, very good theory, except I haven't placed a phone call on my phone since I got a case on it literally four hours ago.
John:
And then Marco doesn't have a case on his.
Marco:
So, yeah, I mean, you know what?
Marco:
I know I took a call on it earlier with the case.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
I will say also, by the way, before before I forget.
Marco:
The speakers are great.
Marco:
It's a big... I don't know... Compared to the Mini, I bet.
Marco:
Yeah, but even people who are coming from the 12 Pro, the speakers are really good.
Marco:
They are both... I mean, compared to the Mini, at least, I can tell you directly comparison, they are both noticeably louder and also noticeably less distortion, like way clearer for podcast playback, at least.
Marco:
It's great.
Music
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Casey:
I would like to know what everyone thinks about promotion because, uh, promotion is Apple's, you know, 120 Hertz, fast refresh thing.
Casey:
And I have had it on my, and we have had it on our iPad pros since 2018, I believe.
Casey:
And when I got my 2018 iPad pro, which is still the most recent iPad in the house, I think I might've noticed maybe.
Casey:
When I picked up the iPhone 13 Pro, my socks flew off.
Casey:
Well, I wasn't wearing socks, but still, it was bananas to me how quickly I immediately noticed how fluid the animations look, how much better everything felt and looked and seemed.
Casey:
This ProMotion stuff, I am all in, and I don't want any phone that does not have it ever again.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm pretty sold as well.
Marco:
So unlike you, I did notice instantly on the 10.5 inch iPad Pro the first time we saw it.
Marco:
I still remember this day we were sitting at the old slow coffee shop in San Jose and a friend of ours who had a review unit was playing with it and I noticed it instantly like just like swiping through home screens.
Marco:
You see, oh my God, that looks incredible.
Marco:
But at the same time, all this time, whenever the topic of it coming to the iPhone came up, and people, especially people in the Android world, would often criticize iPhones for not having high refresh rate screens yet.
Marco:
And my position was always like, well, I'm sure it'll be great when we get it, but I don't need it.
Marco:
I don't notice its absence.
Marco:
And so when I've been on the phone in the past, I never noticed, oh, I wish the frame rate was faster.
Marco:
But now that I've seen it, oh my god, it's nice.
Marco:
It's so nice.
Marco:
I especially notice it because I don't know if I'm just misremembering, but I think that ever since we've moved to OLED, I think scrolling has been a little bit mushier.
Marco:
Scrolling text, it's been a little bit blurrier since we've moved to OLED.
Marco:
And now it's not.
Marco:
Not only is it not blurry now, now it looks better than it even did on LCDs.
Marco:
And I am just so happy with, you know, even, you know, obviously the animations when you come in and out of apps or you unlock the phone and your home screen bounces in, all that stuff looks fantastic.
Marco:
But I notice it most when I'm scrolling text.
Marco:
That to me is such a massive upgrade in visual quality and clarity that...
Marco:
Again, I didn't think this would be a big deal.
Marco:
It is a big deal.
Marco:
It's a really big deal.
Marco:
And that alone, if I was having any doubts about whether I made the wrong move going to the Pro phone and having this giant heavy brick floating to the front of my pants all the time, that alone answers it for me.
Marco:
Nope, this is the right move.
Marco:
And that, I think, is a good distinguishing feature for Apple to have to distinguish the Pro line from the non-Pro line.
Marco:
If they have to pick something and make it Pro only,
Marco:
This is a good one to pick because it's the kind of thing that most people don't care about or notice.
Marco:
But if you do care and you do notice, you will pay extra for this because it is very, very good.
Marco:
And so far, I have also been pretty impressed by the battery life.
Marco:
And I think that's related because as we were talking about last episode, promotion, you know, if you're doing a lot of motion...
Marco:
you could maybe use more battery life.
Marco:
But in most common usage, you might actually be using less battery power doing stuff with promotion enabled because it is dynamically ramping the frame rate down when you're not touching and moving the screen all the time.
Marco:
So far, the battery life has been great.
Marco:
And I think that might have something to do with promotion, of course.
Marco:
But even if it doesn't, wow, promotion is great.
Marco:
And it's way, way nicer of a thing than I expected it to be.
John:
It's a good time for me to continue to bang my limits of human perception drum and say, yeah, like promotion, you know, if we're finally getting to the point where we have frame rates where we get real diminishing returns, because you can tell 60 to 120.
John:
Could you tell 120 to 240?
John:
Maybe, but really, that's diminishing returns.
John:
And so it'll be great when variable refresh and at least 120 hertz max is on all devices everywhere for the reasons you just said, Marco.
John:
Like you can, like scrolling text, like...
John:
it's kind of like you just get used to the idea of well of course you can't read text when it's scrolling nobody can read text when it's scrolling and then you get 120 hertz screen like oh you actually can kind of read that when you just because the refresh rate was too slow before um that said my personal relationship with 120 hertz like because i've had it on my i've you know i've had pro with it and everything um it's kind of weird and i wonder i've been trying to figure out like why
John:
like i i like it and i prefer it and i will buy devices that have it and i want them all to have it eventually but i don't find it as like oh i can't go back again to the 60 hertz and i wonder why that is because again it's not like i can't see it but i think it's the way i interact with the screen and the best theory i have is like you know so i'm if you know me you know i get terribly motion sick and i have for my entire life and i've
John:
built up a lot of habits you know from my for my entire life essentially around what does it take not to get motion sick because i don't really like feeling nauseated it's a terrible feeling um does anybody like that feeling i i don't know but it's like it's like one of the if if you're afflicted with any condition that subjects you to that in places when normal people wouldn't be subjected to it it's just like it's just lurking you know just like at any moment you could be nauseated it's like no i don't like that anyway um it's it feels worse
John:
Um, to, to, to be vulnerable to that, like that, you don't have a protection at any moment.
John:
And the general theory, which I have subscribed to my whole life has been like, okay, well, if what your eyes see does not match what your inner ear feels, um,
John:
evolutionarily speaking like that you may have just eaten some berries that are poison and so it's a good idea for you to puke those up and the people who had that response had a slightly higher chance of passing on the genes than the people who didn't therefore we have a bunch of humans on the planet pretty much all the humans on the planet that if there is too big of a disconnect between what your inner ear feels your accelerometers that are inside your head and what your eyes see your brain uh thinks something is terribly wrong and makes you puke um and that actually turns out has a use
John:
Is a useful response as much as we hate it.
John:
Right.
John:
And essentially, as far as I'm aware, everyone with the functioning in your ear gets motion sick.
John:
It's just a question of when astronauts get motion sick.
John:
The people on the deadliest catch get motion sick.
John:
Everybody gets motion sick.
John:
But your threshold may be I have to be, you know, on one of those crab boats in Alaska for me to get sick.
John:
Or you could be like me where you go on a teacup ride at Disney World and you're terribly sick.
John:
And that's the other extreme, right?
John:
So the reason this is relevant to promotion is I think I have trained my brain for my entire life that once motion starts happening in front of me, disconnect the visual system and just be like, don't pay any attention to that motion.
John:
Just wait for the motion to stop and then look again.
John:
And what that means to me with promotion is that when I flick and scroll,
John:
I obviously no one is able to read it at 60 Hertz cause it gets too blurry, but my brain doesn't even try.
John:
When I flick and scroll, my brain says, ignore the motion on the screen, just sort of disconnect, focus behind the phone.
John:
Like, and it's not a thing I consciously do, but I think I don't even attempt to track the motion.
John:
It's kind of why when, remember when iOS 7 first came out and it was the reduced motion because there was all those animations, right?
John:
When iOS 7 first came out, I had to have reduced motion on because when I did anything like close an app, open an app, swipe back or whatever the hell was, hit the home button, you know, those animations were so like...
John:
I don't know, like they they they were so they had such high fidelity, they would say, we're going to take what's on the screen now and smoothly morph every single pixel of it to the new thing.
John:
Right.
John:
And when you launch an app, it's going to zoom and become the screen and go back.
John:
And my eyes would try to track those and it would make me feel sick because, of course, nothing my interior feels nothing.
John:
I'm sitting still, but I see all this motion as if I'm zooming into or out of things.
John:
So I had to turn on reduced motion.
John:
eventually you know you get the the face id phones or whatever i found that i didn't need to return reduce motion anymore because i had trained myself to not look at those animations to say yeah when you do stuff on your phone there's going to be animations but just disconnect the visual system for those you know fractions of a second like don't try to track it don't try to read what's happening don't don't try to do anything
John:
to keep track of the motion at all so on a phone with promotion despite the fact that everything is much more smooth scrolling or whatever if i don't make a conscious effort to look at and track the motion my brain says well 120 hertz means nothing to you because if anything's moving on the screen you're not i'm not going to show that to you until it stops moving and so it's a strange experience where i essentially notice promotion if i'm trying to notice it but if i'm not
John:
It just goes completely into the background, so much so that if you had told me like if you swapped out my 60 hertz phone for 120 hertz phone or vice versa and didn't tell me, I might not notice for days because I'm never looking at anything that's in motion.
John:
And it's really weird.
John:
Um, and so I don't know, maybe other people who get motion sick have the same, uh, thing, or maybe people, you know, you saw some YouTube videos of like, we showed the new iPhone to people and can they tell 120 Hertz at all?
John:
Do they notice it?
John:
Do they care?
John:
I think it does vary a lot from person to person.
John:
You watch terrible YouTube videos.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The final point I'm going to make, and this is related to the YouTube videos, um, is, um,
John:
despite the fact that i said i disconnect my brain and don't notice the motion i do think every apple device should be at least 120 hertz and that includes the mac guess what pcs have had a high refresh screen support for high refresh screens forever and max i think technically do too if you get a third-party monitor or whatever but the fact is the pro display xcr that i'm staring at is 60 hertz and all the mac laptops i believe are 60 hertz uh
John:
And there's no reason for that.
John:
If this little dinky phone can be 120 hertz, the new MacBook Pro should be 120 hertz with variable refresh rate, which will save them battery life too.
John:
So please, Apple, do that for us.
Marco:
Well, I mean, there are reasons.
Marco:
I hope they get there, but there are obviously technical challenges to this as well.
Marco:
Most of those PC high refresh rate screens are not super high resolution and dense.
Marco:
And most of them are also probably not having to fit...
John:
8k resolution over a thunderbolt cable yeah no i i you know obviously the protose xdr is an extreme example like you're not going to do 120 hertz at 6k and sorry 6k yeah yeah but but like for the laptops like i i feel like it's you know compare the screen of the big ipad with pro motion to most of apple laptops that is in striking distance i feel like we're on the cusp obviously the max get things much later max don't even have face id like where there is a time lag here
John:
But it is within the realm of technical possibility.
John:
And I really hope they go down that path, not just for gaming or things like that, but just because for the same reason, like I'm more likely to try to track a scroll thing if I'm like scrolling slowly on my Mac than I am to try to read something while I'm scrolling on my phone, just because everything's bigger on my Mac.
John:
Like I make the font size bigger, like the text is bigger.
John:
is conceivable that I can read text as it strolls, especially if it's scrolling not too fast, right?
John:
So I hope the Macs get all those benefits.
John:
And then, you know, the battery saving benefits of the variable refresh rate.
John:
I have this to our long list of things that we feel like the Mac should have.
John:
And again, like technically speaking, you know,
John:
They're all ARM.
John:
They're using the same system on a chip.
John:
Whatever stuff they did to the system on a chip, they talked about this in all various interviews.
John:
Oh, we have the system on a chip team work with the display team and they all work together to make sure that this, right, great.
John:
That's all the same crap that's in the Mac now, right?
John:
So there's no more excuses that, oh, we couldn't do with Intel or whatever.
John:
Please, please, Apple, high refresh rate Mac screens sometime in the next five years.
Casey:
So let's talk about cameras.
Casey:
I haven't had an in-depth deep dive into the cameras, so I can just tell you my initial experiences.
Casey:
I've played with macro mode a little bit.
Casey:
I really dig it.
Casey:
This is only going to take a second, and I'm happy, Marco, for you to dive in on all of it.
Casey:
Macro mode I like.
Casey:
I've only briefly played with it.
Casey:
Same with the cinematic thing with the focus pulling and all that.
Casey:
I played with it very briefly.
Casey:
Looks very cool.
Casey:
I'm not sure that either of these things are something I'm going to be doing a lot, but I really dig that they're part of the phone, particularly macro photography.
Casey:
I think that's going to be really nice.
Casey:
The telephoto camera.
Casey:
My initial impression was I love the 3X.
Casey:
My current impression is I like the 3X.
Casey:
I'm not sure where I'm going to land on this, but I suspect I'm going to land back on I love the 3X in that I like having more zoom.
Casey:
But when I'm mostly around the house and mostly, you know, not really leaving the house, the 3X is not a do or die sort of thing.
Casey:
But my initial impression is I would definitely choose 3 over 2, given the choice.
Casey:
Marco, take us on a deep dive of the camera stuff.
Marco:
I mean, look, I'm not a pro photographer, and I've only been shooting with this for less than a week, so I can't be incredibly thorough about it, but I can just say from the point of view of somebody who's fairly casual with it, it's amazing.
Marco:
These cameras are ridiculous.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Again, if you're coming from the 12 Pro Max, last year's Max phone had the sensor shift image stabilization and the larger sensor compared to the phones that preceded it and compared to the other 12 series phones.
Marco:
And so if you're coming from the 12 Pro Max, this is going to be a smaller upgrade.
Marco:
It's still going to be an upgrade because now you have that sensor shift thing on all the lenses and the sensor got even bigger and the lenses got even bigger and you have the macro, which I'll get to in a second.
Marco:
So it's a decent upgrade for 12 Pro Max users.
Marco:
It's a substantially bigger upgrade for everyone else who was the rest of the 12 series or any earlier phones.
Marco:
So having the larger sensor and having the, the wider open lenses, like, you know, the, the more light gathering lenses, it's a pretty good difference.
Marco:
You know, it's not, it's still not going to compete with full frame and, you know, big or even mirrorless cameras in terms of light gathering ability when paired with, you know, a good big glass lens.
Marco:
Like it's not going to compete with that for, you know, what it is capable of doing in, in ideal conditions and everything.
Marco:
But yeah,
Marco:
in the hands of an amateur and for something that's always with you it's amazing it's ridiculously good i will say on the the 3x lens i do appreciate the reach however my concerns about the 3x lens being only f 2.8 and and therefore having a lot less light gathering and of course it has you know the smaller sensor uh it doesn't have the big sensor of the 1x lens so the combination of all that the 3x lens yeah the pictures are are a lot more dull and noise processed um
Marco:
I expected that it's not this is not a low light lens.
Marco:
This is a daytime lens.
Marco:
And so for the purposes of having having all that reach in the daytime is great.
Marco:
But yeah, at night, you're not going to want to use that lens for anything or, you know, indoors or in low light.
Marco:
It's going to be limited usefulness.
Marco:
But the 1X lens is really good.
Marco:
I posted this picture of hops that I just took while sitting on a couch outside.
Marco:
And so it has good light.
Marco:
And I used the 1X lens and I just was close because he was sitting next to my legs.
Marco:
It looks like a portrait mode picture.
Marco:
But the hair is crisp and perfect because it's not portrait mode.
Marco:
It's just optics.
Marco:
It's just when you get close to your subject, even that relatively modest F1.5.
Marco:
I know F1.5 means a lot for full frame.
Marco:
It doesn't mean so much when your sensor is the size of your pinky nail or whatever.
Marco:
But
Marco:
f1.5 wide open on the 1x lens without portrait mode looks fantastic if you're if you can get close enough to your subject you can get really good optical background blur without any tricks and it looks good and doesn't blur people's ears or hair off so it's just it's great that i love the macro i have found to be a lot of fun and a lot of usefulness too
Marco:
Again, the macro is not using the best sensor.
Marco:
It's using the ultra-wide.
Marco:
And the ultra-wide has a smaller sensor, not as good optics as the 1X camera.
Marco:
But for utility and for fun value, it's great.
Marco:
And that's another thing that...
Marco:
that's a pretty good feature to have as a pro feature and if i were ever to think about going back to a smaller phone macro is one thing i would miss you know when i was first getting into photography uh you know back 15 or so years ago one of the first lenses i bought was a macro lens because i rented one once and it was so much fun and i was like i have to have one of these
Marco:
And because macro lenses, they're they're just fun.
Marco:
If you're looking for like a fun novel lens to get for your camera, rent a macro lens or buy a cheap one.
Marco:
They're just there.
Marco:
And they're not super easy to use because macro photography, you need a ton of light.
Marco:
Like before the zoom generation, the main buyers of ring lights were for macro photography.
Marco:
Because you just need a ton of light to capture stuff that close.
Marco:
Because you also, the way depth of field works, if you're shooting, say you're shooting at f2.8 or whatever, f2.8 for a subject that is an inch in front of you...
Marco:
It's going to have a lot less depth in focus than a subject that's 20 feet from you.
Marco:
The depth of your focus field, like how deep from you of a slice of the world is in focus, increases with distance.
Marco:
A macro lens, typically, if you're shooting on a real camera with a macro lens, if you're shooting an insect, something very close up, if you want anything beyond one hair on that insect to be in focus, you're probably shooting at f12, f16.
Marco:
You're really stepping it down because you're dealing with such distances that you need a ton of light.
Marco:
super macro pictures that you take with this with this lens they're going to have all those same challenges when you're very very close to your subject you need a ton of light and it needs to step it down a lot to get much of it in focus and so this is again going to be mostly an outdoor in sun kind of lens you're not going to have great macro results indoors most of the time
Marco:
But it's still useful.
Marco:
It's still good for scanning QR codes or taking the picture of the back of your wireless modem to get the tag on the back.
Marco:
It's good for stuff like that.
Marco:
And that's always going to be a great utility.
Marco:
But more importantly, the fun that I had when I first discovered macro lenses, now everyone's getting that because everyone who just bought the 13 Pro is like,
Marco:
oh my god look at this here's a picture of my eye really close or this bee in my backyard or whatever and it's it's just really cool and so that it's great to be able to share the fun of macro lenses with with more people but overall i am just really impressed with this camera system you know it wasn't bad before like by all means i love the 12 mini camera system as much as everything else but
Marco:
This one is even more versatile and it has even more features in terms of like I now have 3x reach, which is really nice sometimes.
Marco:
And I now have macro, which is really nice sometimes.
Marco:
Most importantly, to have the increased quality on the 1x lens, it's a lot better.
Marco:
It's not, you know, again, it's not going to replace, you know, a big camera for how good it can be.
Marco:
But for the camera that I always have with me that I'm taking 99.999% of my pictures with, it's just great.
Marco:
And I'm very, very happy with it.
Marco:
And that is why I'm carrying this giant brick of a phone in my pocket.
John:
i can't tell if this is an upgrade from the previous phones but uh my wife just took some video of my son running at a cross-country meet today and it was it was later in the day like it was getting to be dark right i knew she was there and i suggested to her to take video i had her change her video settings from whatever they were i think she had them on like 1080p from who knows how long but anyway i'm like you have a good phone now it's 4k 60 let's go um
John:
uh and try out try out her new phone and check some video and it was but i saw what the light was like i was i'm like oh it's so dark there's nothing's gonna come out and then i saw the video she took and it reminds me it reminds me of the first time i used one of marco's fancy cameras i think it was the original uh a7r it was the a7r2 r2 whatever your when i was over your house for the overcast party do you remember that that was the a7r2
John:
Like when you hand me that phone and like one of my kids was running through your kitchen and I just snapped a picture.
John:
And again, this is a camera with no flash on it.
John:
Right.
John:
This is a picture in my experience with taking photos like this is a picture that is not going to come out because you're inside.
John:
It's like, you know, you're in an indoor space.
John:
A kid is running by.
John:
It is not a sunny day.
John:
Right.
John:
This isn't going to come out.
John:
You're going to get a blur of your kid because there's just not enough light.
John:
And I just took a picture and then I looked at it and I was like, the whole picture was in focus.
John:
And I was like, how is that possible?
John:
How, how did that camera, like it was just an auto.
John:
It was just, I pointed at it.
John:
How is it possible that it was able, because it's just got a giant sensor and it gathered all that light.
John:
And it reminded me of, this is the thing that you say about the 5D Mark II as well, is like, this camera can see better in the dark than my eyeballs can.
John:
Because if I look when someone's running by like that, I don't see that much light.
John:
But then I take a picture and it's like, did someone bring a lighting rig in here and shine it on my child so I could take this picture?
John:
Because this picture is brighter than reality, because in many cases, especially old eyes.
John:
That sensor can gather more light than your eyeballs.
John:
I mean, my retina is not as big as a full frame sensor.
John:
I don't know about you.
John:
So, the video on this iPhone 13 Pro of my son running, it looked like they had brought in a lighting rig and, like, added extra light because...
John:
this video looks so much brighter than the outdoors look to my eyes at the time that this event was taking place, right?
John:
Everything is so bright.
John:
Now, part of that is like the brightness boosting thing where it does the HDR and it adds the extra brightness, but like,
John:
I don't know what to attribute this to.
John:
Is it the slightly larger sensor that is in this thing compared to the previous thing?
John:
But she has taken, and I've taken videos of my son running at various track meets before, and these videos look appreciably, noticeably brighter on a day that I know we were running at, like, you know, I don't know, 7 p.m.
John:
or something, and, you know, approaching October in New England, right?
John:
It was, like, dark out, and this thing looks like night vision.
John:
It's amazing, so...
John:
I've been very impressed with the cameras.
John:
I did take some macro shots today.
John:
I did find the switch disconcerting.
John:
And also, I don't know what this is attributable to, but when you switch into macro, the colors change too.
John:
I was taking pictures of flowers because, you know, why not?
John:
Let's take some macro photography of flowers.
John:
the color of the of the flowers in the picture would change and i don't like is it just different quote-unquote color signs different processing is the other one like is it less accurate because it's starting to get blurry and then it snaps into focus so i'm not sure what to attribute that to i haven't actually really dug into these pictures in detail but but yeah macro is definitely fun um and i enjoyed getting the phone really really close to a bunch of plants and insects and other things and i i can't wait to do more of that
Marco:
To be clear, unless your wife's previous phone was the Max, which it wasn't, right?
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
It was like the 11 Pro.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
So unless your previous phone was the 12 Pro Max, the sensor size increase is non-trivial.
Marco:
I believe it's something like twice the area as the previous One X camera was.
Marco:
And again, with the exception of the 12 Pro Max, which was, I think it's only, quote, only 50% more than the area of that one or something.
Marco:
But it's a large increase in sensor size.
Marco:
And again, we're still not talking about full frame or anywhere close to even a micro four thirds, you know, sensor size.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
With Apple's processing and everything, it's pretty great.
Marco:
And just as a relative point of comparison, it is a much larger sensor.
Marco:
That's a pretty big increase.
Marco:
The lens is bigger.
Marco:
You get a lot more light coming in also.
Marco:
That also helps.
Marco:
One thing I noticed too, I'm sitting here.
Marco:
I opened up this photo I was just talking about when I was referencing the Hops picture where I have the really good optical blur behind it.
Marco:
And it was taken in the morning.
Marco:
And so there's good sun out, and it's like outside on my deck.
Marco:
Viewing this picture on my Pro Display XDR, it's an HDR picture, of course, as any modern iPhone shoots.
Marco:
It just looks like I have a window to the outside world right now.
Yeah.
Marco:
It looks like all of the other, quote, white backgrounded windows that are on my screen right now look like dirty dishwater compared to the bright sunlight that's being shown in HDR in this little region of the screen over here.
Marco:
This picture is showing like...
Marco:
That's another thing where like, you know, I know that you can get you can shoot and create HDR pictures with other with, you know, full size cameras.
Marco:
It just takes more work, more time, usually some processing or at least much more talent than I have.
Marco:
And it's just so amazing to be able to shoot HDR stuff with the iPhone.
Marco:
And it's one of those things you don't quite appreciate when you start doing it until once you notice, like, oh, wow, that sunset.
Marco:
When I look at that sunset picture and the HDR fades in after a second, like, wow, that looks really cool.
Marco:
This camera is just so damn good for no effort whatsoever.
Marco:
And this is why my usage of full-size cameras has really faded out a lot over the last few years to where I'm basically not using them at all anymore.
Marco:
TIFF still uses them, but I'm really not.
Marco:
And I honestly don't miss them.
Marco:
Because these pictures are...
Marco:
Yeah, you know, they're not as megapixel-y as I can get with a big Sony or something.
Marco:
But again, just what you can get with no effort, with this thing that's always in your pocket, even though it shifts around to the front of your pants and feels weird and is heavy.
Marco:
But other than that...
Marco:
It's just – these pictures are amazing.
Marco:
And the video, as you said, John, video is amazing too.
Marco:
I haven't taken much of it yet, but I've – with previous last few years of phones, I've been blown away by how good the video was with them too.
Marco:
And so I imagine it's, of course, even better now, especially now that this is my first phone that can shoot HDR video.
Marco:
This can shoot Dolby Vision now.
Marco:
The 12 Mini couldn't.
Marco:
So –
Marco:
Oh, I'm so looking forward to just spending more time with this camera and just taking more pictures of my everyday life with this because it just looks so damn good.
Marco:
And just to have this in my pocket all the time is really something special.
Casey:
Yep, agreed.
Marco:
And you sure feel it.
Marco:
Oh, gosh.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Linode, Memberful, and Backblaze.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, 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, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
Okay, since we haven't done Ask ATP in a while, we are running long, obviously, but we thought we'd pluck out one and do it here in the post-show.
Casey:
Again.
Casey:
So Alex Merle writes, on an infinite timescale, do you expect the following three features to come to the iPhone?
Casey:
And if so, in what order do you expect them to arrive?
Casey:
Underscreen Touch ID, underscreen selfie camera, or underscreen speakers?
Casey:
Since we're talking about infinite timescale, John, let's start with you.
John:
Don't we already have underscreen speakers?
John:
No.
John:
Not the earpiece one, but I think... Don't the screens... Don't the speakers shake the screen to some degree as part of the way they transmit sound?
Marco:
No, this is not some weird TV.
Marco:
This is... These are phones.
Marco:
No, they don't do that.
John:
I'm saying practically speaking, I think...
John:
I'm going to say under screen speakers, I think we might already have.
John:
I mean, obviously, technically, the speakers are beneath the screen, physically speaking.
John:
But people think like, oh, but the sound, it's moving the air through those little holes in the bottom of your phone.
John:
Don't you see?
John:
It's not under the screen.
John:
But I do wonder if there is actual sound transmission up through the screen simply because the screen is literally on top of the speakers, even though they are, quote unquote, firing sideways.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, I'm maybe that's just gonna, I'm just gonna eliminate that one as saying, I'm not sure if we don't already have that.
John:
Um, the reason this is a good infinite timescale argument is like, you can pick any technology and be like under screen touch ID, uh, under screen selfie camera.
John:
It's like, well, of course we'll have them eventually, but that's not necessarily true.
John:
Lots of technologies, um,
John:
Like something else comes and replaces them.
John:
And so there is never a need to have them because it turns out during the whole time that that was a viable choice.
John:
Apple never did it.
John:
And then something way, way, way better came.
John:
And we just never had that thing.
John:
So that's what you have to think about for these things.
John:
And that's why, you know, the infinite timescale doesn't say, okay, we'll definitely get to all these things.
John:
it could be that face ID continues to evolve and be able to work with masks and, you know, see through clothing and scarves and ski goggles and just like get so good that it's like, why would you ever need touch ID?
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, the only use case would be like, I want to unlock it without having it facing my face or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
Or similar for underscreen selfie camera or whatever.
John:
Um, but I think, um,
John:
I think there is a reasonable chance that no vastly superior replacement exists for these technologies within the timeframe that Apple would consider implementing them, and also based on the rumors.
John:
So setting aside the speaker one, I expect underscreen touch ID to come before underscreen selfie cameras simply because...
John:
Face ID.
John:
Face ID needs a lot of crap that I think is harder to put under the screen than the camera, right?
John:
We've got this notch up there.
John:
The notch is shrinking but not going away.
John:
Assuming Face ID still needs all that crap to some degree.
John:
Why are you going to stick the selfie camera under the screen?
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
You still got a notch.
Casey:
Well, let's slow down, though.
Casey:
All we're talking about is the camera.
Casey:
We're not talking about the IR blaster.
John:
Right.
John:
But like, why would you go through that?
John:
Why would you go through the hassle of sticking the selfie camera under the screen and all the potential compromises that involves when you got to have a notch anyway for the IR sprayer or whatever the hell for the face ID?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's why I think underscreen touch ID will come first, if it comes at all.
John:
Now, all that said, I think there is a reasonable chance that unless Apple can get underscreen touch ID to work acceptably with security remotely comparable to non-underscreen touch ID...
John:
You know, if Apple can't do that, they're just not going to bring Touch ID back to these phones because Apple seems happy with Face ID.
John:
And obviously we know there are use cases where Touch ID is advantageous, but Apple's not going to bother doing it at all if it can at least match.
John:
the security and performance and so on and so forth and reliability of the previous touch ID.
John:
I know tons of Android phones have underscreen touch ID and everything like that or underscreen fingerprint readers, whatever.
John:
But in general, those manufacturers seem to care a lot less about the actual security of those things.
John:
Witness the various Android phones that used to be able to be fooled by like a printout of someone's face or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And so for Apple, I think there is a good chance that we never get underscreen touch ID.
John:
Right.
John:
And in terms of underscreen sensors of any kind, Apple would love to put everything under the screen to have no notch or whatever.
John:
I've said this when the notch first came out.
John:
Apple does not want the notch.
John:
Apple is embracing it because they must.
John:
And they want the features that the notch provides.
John:
But if given a choice to say, what if you could have Face ID but no notch?
John:
Yes, that's what Apple wants, right?
John:
They're, you know, setting aside all the branding of like, oh, I can tell it's an iPhone because when I see the outline, I see the little notch or whatever.
John:
Apple surely would love everything under the screen.
John:
But so far, again, I don't think there is a zero compromises way to get a selfie camera.
John:
The only thing that's in favor of the selfie camera is that Apple seems to care much, much less about the quality of the front facing camera than the back facing ones.
John:
I think we can all agree.
John:
And so maybe there'll be more willing to compromise on, uh, on the front facing camera just because they care less about it.
John:
So that's my thing.
John:
I'm saying I'm setting aside speakers.
John:
I think we kind of already have them by accident.
John:
Uh, touch ID before selfie camera, but, uh, there's a reasonable chance that you won't ever see a touch ID on a phone again.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Underscreen speakers, in the way Alex most likely means, where there are no more holes on the top and bottom of the phone that I assume it would vibrate the glass or something.
Marco:
With the exception of the Taptic Engine, which is basically a giant subwoofer, I don't think we're going to have screen-vibrating speaker technology in the phone.
Marco:
This technology does exist.
Marco:
It's in certain large TVs, but
Marco:
I don't think the physics of making it work at a phone size, especially for something as rigid as a modern iPhone, I don't think that would work well.
Marco:
It's not to say you couldn't make it make sound, but I think it would have a lot of trouble having anywhere near an even frequency response.
Marco:
It would probably have significant trouble with low frequencies.
Marco:
because you have to move the glass so much.
Marco:
It would be very hard to generate that much energy.
Marco:
And I think it would end up being a very large and power-intensive module in the phone to be able to do this, not to mention the fact that are you going to have two different speakers for stereo separation when you hold the phone in landscape like you have now?
Marco:
That, to me, just seems...
Marco:
It seems like that's not going to really be practical when you can just make tiny holes in the top and bottom edges of the phone and be fine.
John:
I do want to point out that on televisions, as you mentioned, lots of big TVs have this.
John:
On televisions, television manufacturer is obviously a different scenario.
John:
You have a way bigger piece of glass and you're plugged into the wall, so your power constraints aren't as big, but
John:
televisions have had impressively good sound quality using this exact technique with the giant canvas they have to work with so if you're thinking like oh that's got to have be a compromised sound at tv scale doesn't have to be like not only can they get good stereo separation because again it's a gigantic television there's literally feet between you know the sides of the television good you know like you know frequency response imaging like
John:
Again, it's built in speakers like don't expect miracles.
John:
Right.
John:
But as compared to the previous sort of traditional downward facing drivers that bounce sound off of your like entertainment center or whatever on, you know, it's shaking the glass to make sound from your televisions has come really, really far.
John:
So if you think this sounds bogus, go and, you know, go find one of the fancy TVs that has it and listen to it.
John:
It's pretty amazing.
John:
And the TVs are so big now that a lot of them have this feature, which I think is an anti feature, as I think I was before, where it's
John:
they will locate the sound to like the mouth of the person speaking on your giant 80 inch television or whatever that's how much control they have over shaking the glass so it will sound like the sound is coming from the mouth of the person who's speaking because they do image processing to identify the speaker and and put the sound there and then when the other person speaks they have the sound come there this would otherwise all just be center channel voice right but they are they located on the screen so if you're sitting really close to your 80 inch television that's shaking the glass you can hear
John:
different people speaking from the left and right of you, which is wacky.
John:
But yeah, I must agree with the market.
John:
When you get down to phone sizes and phone battery power envelopes, that becomes much more difficult.
John:
But I'd still maintain that that screen is shaking right now and it actually is contributing to the sound.
Marco:
I wonder also, like, you know, to achieve reasonable volume,
Marco:
Would it start to become unpleasant to hold because you'd be feeling more of the vibration in your hands as you're holding it like that?
Marco:
I think there's multiple reasons why that kind of thing would not work well for a phone.
Marco:
Um, but anyway, so, so I'm going to say under screen speakers.
Marco:
I'm going to say never, um, under screen selfie camera.
Marco:
I'm also going to say never.
Marco:
It's not that I don't think the tech can or will exist, um,
Marco:
But when you're dealing with cameras, you have to worry about, in this case, cameras for the purposes of capturing images, like for people to view and share and stuff.
Marco:
There would be some degree of light loss, I would expect, from having to shoot through a screen.
Marco:
that you probably wouldn't want to make that decision for a camera unless that was going to be the only thing.
Marco:
Like, if that would allow you to get rid of the notch completely, if that was the only camera there, you know, I was always saying that there's more things there, though.
Marco:
Like, you have multiple sensors and blasters and stuff in that notch area.
Marco:
And so it would only make sense to lose that much light from the selfie camera and therefore make it take worse pictures.
Marco:
if that was the last thing.
Marco:
And I just, I don't think we're going to be there anytime soon, if ever.
Marco:
So I'm going to say under-screen selfie camera, probably also never.
Marco:
And that leaves under-screen touch ID.
Marco:
I do think that under-screen Touch ID is probably possible.
Marco:
We're probably not even that far from it being practical to do.
Marco:
Touch ID does not need the camera to be as precise or as sensitive to light as the selfie camera does.
Marco:
So if you're talking about, well, can you shoot through a screen and spare a bit of light?
Marco:
Touch ID can, because it works in a different way.
John:
Touch ID is not a camera.
John:
It's not gathering light, right?
Marco:
I believe it was capacitive, but I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, whatever you'd be losing detail-wise or resolution-wise or whatever, strength-wise, from going through the screen, Touch ID can probably tolerate it long before a camera can.
Marco:
So I'm going to say that's actually going to be very possible, possibly even soon.
Marco:
But then the only question is, will Apple actually find it valuable enough to do that?
Marco:
You know, I'm sure there would be some compromises, as John was saying, like with security and things like that.
Marco:
On the other hand, there is an alternative.
Marco:
You know, there's the power button Touch ID thing with the iPads you're using.
Marco:
So that's an option they could put in the phone.
Marco:
But there's also huge...
Marco:
huge demand for them to use touch id on the phone and i think the people who demand touch id who who like the phones the way they used to be and don't want to move to face id still i think to please those people you'd probably have to do under screen as opposed to a power button touch id feature
John:
You think there's huge demand?
John:
Because I remember the senior citizen contingent for whom Touch ID doesn't work because they have old people fingerprints.
John:
I feel like that is a large constituency making Touch ID continue to not be viable.
John:
And masks are a big motivator for Touch ID, but then you've got watch unlocked, but not everyone has an Apple Watch.
John:
I think demand is definitely there.
John:
I don't necessarily think there have to be security compromises.
John:
I just think the feature won't be attractive to Apple unless they can reasonably match the performance of the previous one.
John:
Because...
John:
imagine they come out with under screen touch id and already they basically said face id has better security than touch id because it's more points of you know data or whatever i remember that whole you know pitch when they first came out with touch id and that continues to be true and so reintroducing touch id will be necessarily a step backwards in security but you don't want it to be a step backwards past even the old touch id so we have to get an under screen touch id that
John:
That is in the ballpark of the old touch ID, at least before Apple will even consider it.
John:
And then even then you get the old people finger problem.
John:
So power button, touch ID, underscreen touch ID, any kind of touch ID.
John:
I feel like face ID is.
John:
Despite people, some people who still want it, I think face ID is if you had to pick one, you know, all iPhones could have one of these two, but only one face ID is the one to have.
John:
It is the most it serves the needs of the most people, the best, which is why, you know, why no iPhones have touch ID.
John:
um obviously both is better than just one uh but i do wonder how big the demand is like once everyone finally upgrades to a touch id phone i've heard a lot of you know from my own kids like i don't want i want the one with the home button i don't want the face id that seems weird to me you don't hear it again after two months against again they're young people or whatever but uh once everyone gets used to face id i wonder how much demand there will be left for touch id
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think with masking and with not everyone wearing an Apple Watch, I think there is certainly a renewed demand for Touch ID.
Casey:
But the more I listen to the two of you and the more I think about it, the more I think the underscreen selfie camera on an infinite timescale, sure, but realistically, no.
Casey:
Underscreen Touch ID.
Casey:
I agree with what Marco said a minute ago.
Casey:
I think Apple would go a different direction, like the lock button, rather than going underscreen.
Casey:
So I don't think they would do it.
Casey:
Underscreen speakers, I think, are the most probable.
Casey:
But even still, I'm skeptical.
Casey:
The only reason I can see or that I can think of that I think Apple would be really interested in this is perhaps improved water resistance.
Casey:
But that doesn't seem to be a problem now.
Casey:
So I don't know what that really buys you.
Casey:
So honestly, I don't really see any of these happening.
Casey:
I mean, sure, on an infinite timescale.
Casey:
But realistically, I don't see any of them happening.
John:
But not necessarily, like I said, not necessarily an infinite timescale because like sometimes technology just passes by these things and they become anachronisms and we have better things that do equivalent jobs.
John:
Like arguably Touch ID could already find itself in that situation.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
This is what you were saying earlier.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So like I, you know, just, you know, if you're waiting around for one of these, it just be a result of the fact that it may never happen, but it won't matter because the reason it won't happen is because there literally is something better.