Living Is Pretty Important to Me
Casey:
Hey, everybody.
Casey:
It is still September.
Casey:
I know we have a lot to discuss, but it is still September.
Casey:
September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
And as always, or at least for the past several years, we here at ATP are working for slash with Relay to try to raise money to just defeat childhood cancer.
Casey:
And our charity of choice is St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital and
Casey:
So we're going to make this particular plug really quick because we have a lot to talk about.
Casey:
I would like to go to bed before three in the morning.
Casey:
But suffice to say, a lot of us may have already spent some money today.
Casey:
In fact, I might have done that.
Casey:
We'll talk about that at some point, I'm sure.
Casey:
But nevertheless, you might be spending a lot of money today.
Casey:
You might be doing it for something that you may not entirely need.
Casey:
If you have a couple extra dollars to send St.
Casey:
Jude's Way, I would strongly recommend it.
Casey:
So go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and please donate a few bucks.
Casey:
It can be five, it can be one, it can be 500, 5,000.
Casey:
Hell, if you have $5 million laying around that you want to give to St.
Casey:
Jude, all the more to you.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
And you will get all the stickers.
Casey:
I actually, breaking news, I have new stickers on the way.
Casey:
So I haven't exactly decided what the threshold is to earn you a sticker yet because I just haven't.
Casey:
But I guarantee that if you donate $5 million, I will give you $170 whatever dollars worth of stickers that are heading my way.
Casey:
So you can have all the ATP stickers you'd ever want.
Casey:
I think it was like 500 stickers.
Casey:
But anyway.
Casey:
If you donate less than $5 million, then we'll have to see.
Casey:
But I strongly encourage you, please and thank you, to donate to St.
Casey:
Jude at stjude.org.
Casey:
It is a very, very worthy cause.
Casey:
We have thrown our time, our energy, and our money behind it.
Casey:
We were doing something special, the three of us together, and we decided, okay, let's go ahead and do the donations, which was very kind of my two co-hosts because typically those jerks decide to do it when I'm in the midst of recording another podcast or generally not in the right headspace for filling out a very simple online form, which, by the way, does take Apple Pay.
Casey:
So no excuses, everyone.
Casey:
stjude.org.atp.
Casey:
Anyway, we were filling this out, and I was filling it out, and then I realized I needed to correct something, and I went back.
Casey:
And as we're filling this out, I'm laughing with Marco and John saying, oh, what are we going to do to make something funny this year?
Casey:
Because there was the asterisk year.
Casey:
That was two years ago, I think.
Casey:
And then last year, there was something funny with me donating a little bit more than everyone or something like that.
Casey:
I forget.
Casey:
I've already lost track.
Casey:
But it doesn't matter.
Casey:
There's always something goofy that happens every single year.
Casey:
And we couldn't come up with anything deliberate to happen.
Casey:
So Marco happened to fill out his donation first, and we agreed that we were all going to donate $7,000 apiece, as we spoke about last episode, so for a sum total of $21,000.
Casey:
And Marco filled his out on behalf of him and TIFF, and you had donated, what, $7,002?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
uh something like that yeah because i was like i'm gonna beat those guys because i'm like i'm like someone's gonna be a smart ass and give 7001 so i'm gonna do 7002 right i'm going to outsmart ass the smart asses and so marco almost succeeded in that but because i accidentally had to go back and fix something i thought to myself accidentally let's go with that we're gonna use we're gonna use that as the story
Casey:
So I decided to go back and, you know, fix whatever mistake I may or may not have made.
Casey:
And then, oh, I will open a private window and I will refresh stjude.org slash ATP, S-D-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP.
Casey:
And, oh, lo and behold, Tiff and Marco Armin, $7,002.
Casey:
Well, ha-ha!
Casey:
I will donate $7,003 because I'm a big jerk.
John:
And from this part of the story, you can learn that Casey is a cheater because the sort of unwritten agreement here is we're all going to donate and it was kind of like a game of chicken.
John:
We agreed on how much we're going to donate, but we also know and had discussed in the previous show.
John:
You know, like, oh, but sometimes someone gives a little bit more to try to be the top one.
John:
So the whole point was, let's all do it at the same time.
John:
And let's not look at what the other people don't.
Casey:
That was unsaid.
Casey:
That was unsaid.
Casey:
It was an unstated gentleman's agreement.
Casey:
And I'm not a gentleman.
Casey:
So I didn't agree.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, so I donate my $7,003, but in the time between Tiff and Marco Armin's $7,002 and Casey and Aaron Liss's $7,003, some turd decides to swoop in and donate $7,007 and ruin everything.
Casey:
So John Siracusa, you are, as we record right now, the leader, the champion at $7,007.
Casey:
Well done, you insufferable pain in my bottom.
John:
Johnny, I would love it.
John:
Look at the symmetry.
John:
Plus it's got 007 in there as well.
John:
I don't know how you can resist that.
John:
And so Marco and I played correctly.
John:
You cheated and you lost anyway.
John:
So you double lost this time.
John:
Better luck next year.
John:
Yep.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
But is it really a loss if we're just donating money to stjude.org slash ATP?
Casey:
If we're donating money to try to end childhood cancer, I think it's a win for everyone.
Marco:
So please.
Marco:
Everyone wins except Casey.
Casey:
Everyone wins except me, apparently.
Casey:
So yeah, please go and donate.
Casey:
I will say that at least for now, if you donate more than a one Mr. John Syracuse and you send me your receipt and call it to my attention by some mechanism, I will give you, I will send you at least one ATP sticker anywhere that the United States Postal Service will deliver.
Casey:
And that includes many, many, many countries.
Casey:
So please reach out if you want to donate more than $7,007.
Casey:
You can have the lamest and most expensive sticker in the world.
Casey:
If you so choose.
Casey:
So reach out if you so desire.
Casey:
But please, let's work with Relay and let's do what we can to raise money to end childhood cancer.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
Casey:
All right, big day.
Casey:
Big day.
Casey:
This is a long one.
Casey:
I didn't even catch the runtime, but it was long.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think it was deserved.
Marco:
At no point did I feel like it was dragging.
Casey:
Toward the end there, I'm not so sure I agree with you.
Marco:
Well, okay, maybe.
Marco:
But for the most part, I give them a lot of credit for that, that there were no boring services updates.
Casey:
That's true.
Marco:
No retail update.
Marco:
We haven't had one of those in a long time, actually, probably because this is not a great time for retail in general.
Marco:
But yeah, there was no big push for TV Plus or Fitness Plus or anything.
Marco:
They didn't even mention most of those things.
John:
They should have given us an update on their union busting.
John:
Oh, we're getting saucy.
John:
How are we trying to convince our retail employees not to unionize?
John:
Let's just give you a little update on that.
John:
See how it's going for us.
Casey:
Yeah, let's do that.
Casey:
Well, John is saucy today.
Casey:
I'm here for it.
Casey:
This is going to be a fun episode.
Casey:
So yeah, so I do agree with you there.
Casey:
There was the stuff about the scuba diving that was actually kind of interesting, so I'll give it a pass.
Casey:
But there was not like the five to ten minute game demo that none of the three of us anyway really care about.
Casey:
It was mostly relatively tight.
Casey:
By the end, I was like, okay, I'm going to need a hunk of cheese at the end of this maze.
Casey:
But nevertheless, for the most part, it wasn't too bad.
Casey:
And we started off, for all intents and purposes, with the Apple Watch and Jeff Williams introducing the Apple Watch Series 8.
Casey:
And this was done by Deirdre Kaldbeck, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And this looks good.
Casey:
I am a every two years on the watch kind of fellow.
Casey:
And so I'm on an Apple Watch Series 6.
Casey:
I have little teeny tiny wrists.
Casey:
So I have a 40 or 41 millimeter, whatever it is, the smaller of the Apple Watch Series 6s.
Casey:
And so I will be getting a Apple Watch Series 8.
Casey:
I did already order one for me and one for Aaron.
Casey:
I'm cutting right to the chase here.
Casey:
And I waited all of like 15 minutes and I'm already in the...
Casey:
first full week after the actual launch.
Casey:
Because there's coming out, what, a week from Friday, I believe?
Casey:
And I'm due after that, which is a little bit of a bummer.
Casey:
But, you know, what are you going to do?
Casey:
I'm getting ahead of myself.
Casey:
I'm putting myself over my skis.
Casey:
So Apple Watch Series 8, there's a new temperature sensor.
Casey:
And they went into a pretty long and I thought really great segment about their, to use their own words, commitment to women's health.
Casey:
And they were talking—this was Dr. Desai, I believe, was talking a lot about menstrual cycle tracking.
Casey:
As someone who has been—who has gone through some infertility problems, I can tell you that a lot of treatment for infertility starts with knowing—
Casey:
when the woman is in a very fertile time of her cycle.
Casey:
And you do that typically by using a very special thermometer.
Casey:
Well, maybe not very special, but a special thermometer that is a little bit more accurate.
Casey:
And you basically keep a pen and paper log.
Casey:
And I'm sure there's apps for that now, or maybe there even were when we were going through this.
Casey:
But that's what it boils down to.
Casey:
You wake up every morning, you take your temperature, and then you write it down, and then you discuss with your family doctor, your fertility doctor, or what have you.
Casey:
And now they're saying that there are a couple of temperature sensors in the watch that will basically automate this to some degree for you.
Casey:
And I am so excited.
Casey:
I mean, Aaron and I, as far as we know, we're done having children.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I am so excited that this is a thing and that they spent time on it and that this is important to Apple.
Casey:
And I really dig this as someone for whom this was a very big deal for a couple of years of our lives.
Casey:
This is super cool, and I'm really, really stoked about it.
Casey:
And I'm glad they spent the time on it and didn't just, like, hand wave it away and say, oh, yeah, if you're having problems, maybe this will help.
John:
Yeah, this is probably something that most people who have not ever tried to get pregnant don't know about.
John:
But, you know, we didn't have any fertility problems, but we did this too.
John:
That's just, you know, again, we were doing it the days before there were probably any apps.
John:
It was just taking your temperature with a little temperature when you wake up and writing it down.
John:
uh, that's the thing that you do.
John:
I thought they were pretty good with the, uh, they, they made some, they made some attempts to be inclusive with this when they talked about, you know, uh, like the, the tracking features are useful for the, I think they said something like people who ovulate, right?
John:
Because some women don't ovulate.
John:
So it's, you know, whether you're postmenopausal or whatever, they wanted to sort of like be accurate with their language.
John:
Um, but they, you know, they did one of the, I didn't write down what they said, but they, they,
John:
They basically were only talking about women and women aren't the only people who ovulate.
John:
And you would think that Apple, for all their inclusion and diversity, you know, efforts and everything, would be able to use more precise language in their presentation.
John:
It's something that most people don't notice unless you happen to be someone who is watching this who is not a woman who ovulates.
John:
And you're like, oh, I guess I'm excluded from this.
John:
Right.
John:
Not great.
John:
But, you know, maybe they'll do better next year.
Marco:
One thing I thought was kind of like a side little smile I got was to see that we've heard for a little while now in the rumor mill that this next generation of Apple Watch was going to have a thermometer of some sort.
Marco:
And we also heard that they were doing things that you can't really measure necessarily accurately exactly what your temperature is, but you could at least measure deltas and patterns over time, which is exactly what they're doing.
Marco:
and none of the rumors as far as i can recall mentioned this use case of like ovulation tracking and cycle deviation tracking like none of them as far as i know mentioned this everyone's like oh maybe they could use it for like you know fever detection or health or you know like you know viral infection detection stuff like that and i think that kind of shows like quite how young and male most of the rumor reporting i think is yeah
John:
Yeah, like, why else would you ever take your temperature?
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
Like, no one had, no one even considered this as an option.
John:
And some people are pointing out in the chat room, again, this is one of the disadvantages of doing our show the day of the keynote, because, like, for people who don't know way back when, we intentionally chose Wednesday.
John:
as the day we would record this show like, you know, seven or eight years ago when we started it because most Apple keynotes are on Tuesday and we wanted to be soon after the keynote, but give us time to digest it.
John:
But Labor Day kind of messed it up this year.
John:
So we're recording the day of the keynote.
John:
And one of the things of the many that I don't know because I haven't had time to get the precise thing is,
John:
Does the temperature sensor have any means to give you an absolute temperature value at any point?
John:
Does it give you a summary at the end of the day?
John:
Can you tell it, hey, take my temperature right now?
John:
Because they showed the ovulation thing, which is like deviations from baseline.
John:
It looked like it was a graph with the y-axis that was giving absolute values, but they didn't really lean on the whole...
Marco:
uh you know can i can i use this like the heart rate sensor you can do the what do you hear the ekg thing you can do that at any time you can trigger it and say it's going to run now and then i'm going to look at the result can you do that with a temperature sensor i mean it must be seen like whether there's whether there's an api for third-party apps to do it but apple the only feature they advertised was the retrospective ovulation notifications and the possible cycle deviation notifications that's it and and i'm guessing you know they don't want they probably don't want to
Marco:
Bill this as something that it's not going to be very good at.
Marco:
And so if they really don't have, you know, very precise temperature readings or, you know, absolute readings and they're really only doing relative stuff, it would make sense for them to keep it pretty low key.
Marco:
And those are the only features they mentioned using it.
Marco:
And so I think if it could be used for anything else, they probably would have said so.
Casey:
Yeah, and I'm looking at a screenshot that they had in the video, and it shows risk temperature.
Casey:
You know, average is plus 0.26 degrees Fahrenheit from baseline.
Casey:
And the chart, it does have a y-axis, but the center of it is baseline.
Casey:
And then the first thing is plus 2, then plus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Casey:
So there is some modicum of absolute—well, it's not absolute measurement, it's relative measurement—
Casey:
and they get absolute on what that relative measure difference is, if that makes sense.
Casey:
So it's plus two degrees off the baseline, but they are not specific about what the baseline is.
John:
Yeah, I do wonder if they just literally can't get an absolute value, because as we discussed last week, you know, when you take a temperature with a thermometer, it can go, you know, there are certain places in your body that are better than others.
John:
Mouth, pretty good.
John:
Butt for babies, pretty good.
John:
armpit forehead maybe wrist is probably not anywhere on that list so maybe the readings they get off people's wrists are just off by some unknown delta from the actual body temperature and they don't know what that delta is for each individual person depending on their body composition and everything right so they just have to basically say baseline relative right the absolute values may be nonsense the absolute values may be like 78 degrees or something like that doesn't relate to you know 98.6 or whatever
Marco:
I think it's also worth noting that it says kind of all over the UI, and they mentioned it in the presentation, this might require you to wear the watch to sleep to actually get an accurate measurement because it says it measures it during sleep.
John:
The other feature related to cycle tracking that they emphasized, in the typical Apple way of not wanting to...
John:
Not wanting to go directly head on to address the issue, but to sort of, if you know, you know, basically saying, hey, and just by the way, now that we're doing all this thing where we can do like, you know, cycle tracking and find out when you're ovulating and everything, that's all end to end encrypted.
John:
And even Apple doesn't have the encryption key to get it.
John:
So no one can even ask us to give you this information.
John:
It is secure.
John:
You own this data.
John:
Apple can't get to it even if we want to.
John:
And you'd be like, OK, well, I guess I mean, I guess that's good.
John:
But really, what they're trying to say is if you live in a state that doesn't allow abortion and someone tries to subpoena records to find out if you were, you know, trying to get an abortion and they want to put you in jail or something, Apple will not give them the data because we literally can't.
John:
Like that's what they're saying, but they're not going to say they're not going to they're not going to come right out and take that head on.
John:
But it was nice for them to spend some time emphasizing, you know, we don't have your data.
John:
Your data is yours and no one can make us give it to them.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I was that was I mean, you know, they were basically hitting over the head with that for good reason.
Marco:
Like that is something that is both that is very important and that many people don't know yet.
Marco:
And so it's good for them to like really hammer that home in the presentation.
Marco:
They clearly were doing it for that reason.
Marco:
And all of that is definitely worth applauding and screaming from the hilltops.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they and they made an extra effort to say, like, for even for the tech savvy crowd, because the tech savvy crowd may know, oh, if you do iCloud backups, your your messages are there and encrypted.
John:
Right.
John:
Unencrypted.
John:
And so that's how Apple can get subpoenas for iMessage stuff.
John:
They emphasize that even though we do iCloud syncing of your health data, we don't have the key for it, which is I feel like they still definitely need to fix that with messages.
John:
I'm not entirely sure why they haven't yet.
John:
I know we've discussed this in past shows, but they emphasize that's not the case with the health data.
Casey:
They added a new feature for, or several new features for safety, but in particular, they emphasized car crash detection.
Casey:
This was Ron Wang.
Casey:
Two new motion sensors, a high G-force accelerometer, which apparently can handle or read up to 256 Gs.
Casey:
And maybe I misunderstood, but they said something about how it samples 3,000 times a second.
Casey:
That seems like it.
Marco:
I believe, so there's two different sensor changes.
Marco:
So the gyroscope, which is improved and samples four times as quickly as the old one.
Marco:
And then also there's the high G-force accelerometer, which is different.
Marco:
It basically measures larger magnitudes of change than the old one could.
Marco:
So the combination of these two things is what allows them to still be super precise about small movements as you need to be with various iOS and watchOS features, but also be able to properly measure the huge impact of something like a car crash on
Marco:
that you know before it might have been the sensor might not have been precise enough or sample quickly enough or the you know the equivalent of dynamic range of like what's the smallest and largest force this can measure that range was probably too small before to measure something like a car crash accurately so now they've improved both these sensors in both the series 8 watches and they later mentioned it's also as part of the iphone 14 series has the exact same sensors with the exact same feature of this car crash detection
John:
yeah and although so this is kind of like the audio file lossless audio thing and all that um it's great that it can go out into 256 g's but your body cannot if you ever experience 100 g's you're pretty much dead like it's not just i feel with the human threshold for like and you're wondering like what's going to kill you it's your brain smashing into the inside of your skull that that pretty much does it and i
John:
I think around 50 G's is close to instant death.
John:
So they've got a lot of headroom on this.
John:
If your watch ever experiences 250 G's, don't worry about it.
John:
You're dead.
Casey:
If you're wearing it, you're dead.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So they also mentioned kind of off to the side.
Casey:
And then I think.
Casey:
They either came back to it later, maybe they said it right away, but they said there's also a barometer in the Apple Watch, which I believe is new.
Casey:
And they said, and I thought this was so clever and so cool, that the barometer is there in part at least to measure the shift in pressure that is consistent with an air pressure change from a deployed airbag.
Casey:
So the airbag goes off, air pressure in the car changes presumably relatively dramatically.
Casey:
And the barometer in the watch will detect that, which I just think is so cool.
Casey:
I mean, obviously I hope it never happens to me or anyone else, but it's cool that they've thought of that and that's what they're doing with it.
John:
On the GeForce tracking front, one more thing.
John:
Maybe you can use 256Gs because as someone just pointed out in the chat room, okay, so your body might be dead if it experiences that, but what if your phone is not on your body but is free-floating in the car?
John:
and it hits the windshield or something that you hopefully don't want to hit and you aren't hitting because you're hitting into the airbag or your seatbelt or whatever, I guess it's possible that your phone could experience 256Gs when it is not on your person.
Marco:
Yeah, and all this stuff, like the car crash feature, the theme that Apple kept hitting over and over again, especially with the watch, and a little bit later with the phone, but the watch was like, the number one theme was, this thing could save your life someday.
Marco:
They kept harping on that, and
Marco:
That would be really annoying if it wasn't true.
Marco:
But it actually, it's a reasonable thing to say.
Marco:
The Apple Watch has all these features.
Marco:
It has the fall detection.
Marco:
It has all the heart stuff, which is incredible.
Marco:
It has all this stuff for a reason that, yes, it sells watches, but
Marco:
It also legitimately is doing really great things for people's health, including having some pretty amazing emergency response stuff.
Marco:
And and between, you know, we'll get to the satellite stuff later with the phone.
Marco:
But like, you know, they really are harping on this for good reason that these are major selling features.
Marco:
And this is the kind of thing, you know.
Marco:
You might want it for yourself.
Marco:
Even if you don't care, you might want to buy it for someone else in your family.
Marco:
I mean, you know, maybe a kid or an older relative or a spouse or anybody who you might be like, you know, worried about, you know, not needing emergency services sometime or possibly falling or possibly having a heart problem.
Marco:
So they really made this case hard, but I actually think it was totally deserved that there's a lot of really good reasons to wear an Apple watch now.
Marco:
And every year they add more and more reasons.
Marco:
This is why I wear one almost every day, even though you know how much I love standard watches like regular mechanical fancy watches.
Marco:
I love them so much.
Marco:
but the apple watch gives me so much utility and including stuff like this that's really hard to argue against like yeah do i want to be protected you know from a lot of these various hazards do i want to have one more health meter monitoring me for different things yeah actually i do because living is pretty important to me and i'm now you know now that i'm like officially middle-aged like this
Marco:
All this stuff like this all matters.
Marco:
It matters a lot.
Marco:
And so this was a, you know, a very thickly spread theme of the show, but it was warranted.
Marco:
And I applaud all these efforts because they literally are saving lives.
Marco:
And, you know, I will call out Apple for all their BS when it happens.
Marco:
This is not BS.
Marco:
This is real.
Marco:
They really do save people's lives and meaningfully improve people's health with these kind of features and products.
Marco:
And they deserve to be committed for that.
John:
Yeah, I agree.
John:
I mean, I agree with what you said.
John:
Like, the safety features are important, and very often, like, the conversation I have with people with Apple Watches is trying to buy an Apple Watch for an older person who might fall and trying to convince them to wear it and everything.
John:
Like, those are real benefits.
John:
And charge it every day.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
But, yeah, I think there is... I think they might have...
John:
You know, this is obviously a question of taste.
John:
Right.
John:
And for me, I think they went over the line into a little bit too.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like it feels it feels wrong to have these people reliving and dramatizing their their traumatic experiences for the purpose of selling Apple Watches.
John:
even though like you said it is true they watched it save them and they agreed to be in these ads and stuff like that there's it's some somewhat distasteful so i feel like you know there there is a line and you can decide whether they went over it for you and maybe it's super convincing to people to like oh remember that girl with the plane we should get an apple watch but for me it was like too far
Casey:
The whole story about the dude falling in the trash compactor, that was something.
Casey:
I mean, I do mostly come down on the Marco side of this.
Casey:
I hear you, John, and I agree with both of you.
Casey:
But if I had to pick one of you, I'd say I do agree with Marco that it's important to show that the Apple Watch really can save you.
Casey:
But it is funny, especially watching Twitter as all this is happening, where basically everyone's saying, well, if you don't want to die, buy an Apple Watch.
Casey:
And this is going to come back even more when we talk about the new one, but the new new one.
Casey:
But anyway, anyway, I do think that this is important to talk about and I do think it's very cool.
Casey:
And I like that, you know, the Apple Watch seems to quite obviously be leaning really heavily into health and now safety.
Casey:
And I think that's a pretty good way to position the Apple Watch.
Casey:
Because as the triage center for your phone, which is one of the 17 ways they pitched it early on, I don't know if that's really that great a use case for the Apple Watch.
Casey:
But to keep you safe and to keep you healthy, those are two strong ways to use an Apple Watch.
Casey:
And I'm there with it.
Casey:
I agree.
Marco:
But also, though, I think the Apple Watch, if you look at what else has changed with the Series 8, it's a pretty short list.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, the differences between the Series 7 and Series 8 are very, very minimal.
Marco:
We don't know yet.
Marco:
It does have a new letter on the CPU, or a new number.
Marco:
It's now the S8 up from the S7, but the S7 was basically the same as the S6, and I think even the S5...
Marco:
so we don't know you know they didn't talk about the s8 like at all really so we they didn't even mention it until they mentioned the se um but it seems like the display seems unchanged from the series 7 which you know the series 7 was a display upgrade so that's you know they don't need to upgrade it every time but um it seems like the rest of the changes for the series 8 with the exception of the temperature sensors for the ovulation and cycle health notifications
Marco:
And the car crash detection, I think, are the only changes to the Series 8 from the Series 7.
Marco:
And so I'm actually skipping this generation for the first time ever because they got rid of my titanium, which I was just saying how awesome it was.
Casey:
Well, kind of.
Marco:
No, they got rid of it.
Marco:
We'll talk about the Ultra in a second, but that's a very different product.
Marco:
The titanium is gone from the regular Apple Watch Series 8.
Marco:
They did fix the weird color thing they made where in last year's lineup...
Marco:
you couldn't get silver aluminum.
Marco:
If you picked aluminum, which most people do, you had to pick either a color or that starlight, which is like a dishwater light gold kind of thing, like a slightly warm silver.
Marco:
This year, they fixed that.
Marco:
Regular, normal colored silver with no tint to it is back in the aluminum lineup.
Marco:
But anyway, other than those two features...
Marco:
Nothing else is really different, seemingly, about the Series 8.
Marco:
And so I think they have to start leaning on all this other stuff, lean on features that are actually software features that many of them have, or start promoting other things you can do with your Apple Watch, just because the rate of change in the Apple Watch hardware has slowed dramatically.
Marco:
The Series 7 wasn't that different from the Series 6, and now the Series 8 is not that different from the Series 7.
Marco:
And I think this is just, you know, this is a mature product, whatever it is there.
Marco:
They're not making major hardware gains recently and possibly anymore.
Marco:
So they have to start doing this, you know, more, you know, more kind of incremental features.
Marco:
The low hanging fruit's all gone and we're left with, you know, with higher hanging fruit being occasionally picked as opposed to major year over year upgrades like we used to get.
John:
Well, the SOC question is a big one.
John:
I even missed that they even incremented the number.
John:
And we don't know at this point, again, another disadvantage of recording day of, is the S8 different than the S7?
John:
We learned the S7 was basically the same as the S6.
John:
Maybe this is another year where they didn't change anything.
John:
But they should change it eventually.
John:
The possible answer to why they haven't is like, well, if they're already fabbing it on the best process they have,
John:
Why not, you know, the main thing that watch cares about is power consumption.
John:
So you're not going to get a lot of gains on power consumption until the next process node.
John:
So why not wait to three nanometer, right?
John:
But I read, I don't keep track of this, but I thought I read someone saying that the S7 was seven nanometers.
John:
It's not even five nanometers.
John:
And if that's true, and if this one also is not five nanometers, that's disappointing because...
John:
That's what you want out of each generation of watch.
John:
I don't think it needs to be faster.
John:
You don't need like more cores or more GPU cores or I don't need to benchmark the watch.
John:
Like once it gets past, once it can do everything it needs to do, it's fine.
John:
But what you care about is battery life and stepping up or down, depending on how, you know, stepping to a better process node, a smaller process node gives you power savings if you make the same chip on a smaller process.
John:
that's what they should be doing whenever they can and maybe whenever they can is only every three years because they use up all their good fab capacity on iphones or something where obviously it's much more important than the watch and maybe there's so many watches they just they can't like well can't you just do the watches on the good process too it's like no we don't have that capacity or whatever but it is kind of a shame so i think they need to continue to keep pace with the process advances even if they never make a tremendously faster soc
Marco:
Yeah, and again, as a constant owner of these watches and a developer with an app against them, I'm okay on speed.
Marco:
We don't really need more speed on the watch for most things.
Marco:
The biggest challenge to the watch software ecosystem, which impacts the users...
Marco:
is that we just aren't allowed to use much computational time or resources we have minimal background execution very very minimal background execution almost none we have you know very terrible data transfers because they they try to send everything through the phone over bluetooth and
Marco:
instead of wi-fi because bluetooth is cheaper battery wise and blue but it's much slower and less reliable and that's why it's you know hard for like podcast apps like mine to download episodes to the watch um and why even apple's own music app fails oftentimes to download much to it before you go after a run or something um
Marco:
the watch it needs more power headroom not to become faster but to become less incredibly aggressively stingy with the resources it already has like if if apps are able to use wi-fi more often or able to refresh in the background or refresh our complications more often that gives a much better experience on the watch that broadens the software capabilities that's the kind of stuff we need so
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
We should be pushing the hardware forward.
Marco:
And we'll see.
Marco:
Maybe the S8 has that.
Marco:
But they literally, unless I missed something, during the Series 8 reveal, they didn't mention the SOC at all.
Marco:
They only mentioned it in the Apple Watch SE2 reveal, where they said it has the S8 SIP from the Series 8.
Marco:
And that's the first time that was acknowledged at all.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell, they said nothing else about it.
John:
Isn't, like, the better GeForce sensor and accelerometer thing, isn't that also part of the SoC?
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
And because that's why, you know, moving on, I guess, now to the Apple Watch as the second generation, this is finally what has killed the Series 3.
Marco:
Thank God.
Marco:
I'm so glad as a developer to know that as soon as I can require watchOS 9...
Marco:
I will have no more need for the old style screen support for the old, you know, monochrome only complication situation.
Marco:
But that tiny little 38 millimeter screen that was on that old one.
Marco:
Oh, God, I'm so happy to be done with that.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that the Series 3 is very old and slow by today's standards.
Marco:
But anyway, and it was ugly.
Marco:
It's so thick and bulbous and that big red dot on the crown.
Marco:
Anyway, the Series 3 was a bad time.
Marco:
That time has finally ended after much too long.
Marco:
um apple watch se second generation now replaces it um which i believe they made something like 50 cheaper to enter than the previous one i was gonna ask that they were they kept saying it's cheaper it's cheaper it's cheaper but i couldn't remember remember how much the previous it's it's 250 i think the old one was 280 like it's not that much cheaper is that right the series 3 was 199 so i think they just got rid of that and just think oh well you know we'll have this 50 bucks more for a while which is fun again that's that's the right trade-off
Marco:
And we don't learn too much about the Apple Watch SE2 yet, except that it does have the S8, same as the Series 8.
Marco:
It does have the car crash detection and some of the heart stuff.
Marco:
It does not have the EKG level of heart features, but it does have, I believe, all the other stuff.
Marco:
it has you know car crash fall detection um and it it's as far as i know it probably doesn't have the always on screen because they didn't mention that um and that that would be still a differentiator and they also mentioned that the um the underside of it like that the back case of it is now a quote nylon composite material you know read plastic that's apologetically plastic yes
Marco:
um presumably again is a cost saving measure so they don't have to put like you know ceramic or or you know steel or anything down there um so that's you know more cost savings but again i think for for you know this this this watch's entire purpose is to hit a low price point and so to have a plastic back is is totally fine and acceptable to hit that price point that's that's that's i think a fair trade-off um
Marco:
That being said, this is the model of watch, the SE that my kid wears, and I don't see any reason to upgrade him necessarily because it seems like it's not that much improved from the old SE.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
Again, we do need to learn a lot more about whether the Series 8 or whether the S8 is a big deal or not, but it probably isn't.
Marco:
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Marco:
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John:
all right do you want to talk apple watch ultra then let's do it can you believe they named it that two points make a line uh this is the new trend we went through the pro era and we got some maxes mixed in but now we're in the era where the the best uh qualifier for a product name and an apple lineup is ultra at least until the mac pro comes and is called something else but yeah this is we got two ultras
Marco:
And I was so disappointed, too, because as Jeff Williams was attempting to show some personality, which he's not good at, in the introduction of this, and does anybody... Look, it's pretty clear that Jeff Williams is the hot spare for Tim Cook if anything happens to him.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
But like, could you pick two more boring people to lead this company?
Marco:
Like, really, for God's sakes, they are so dull.
John:
Tim is pretty animated.
John:
I think, Tim, I think it's just obviously it's their personality.
John:
But I feel like Tim does a pretty good job of being animated in his stand up things where he talks to the camera.
John:
Jeff Williams is more measured, but I think that's just his personality.
John:
I don't hold it against him.
Marco:
i think you gotta you gotta grade these people on a curve anyway so so but as as jeff williams introducing the he kept using the word explorer and i'm like man i hope they they should just call it the apple watch explorer that would be such a good name and then it comes out with apple watch ultra i'm like no no
John:
ultra is better than explore no it's not but i mean i don't think i don't think it suits it exactly but if this is the new trend in ultra as being the best non-ridiculous well i don't know if it is not ridiculous the best non-ridiculous qualifier so the mac pro thing whatever comes out will be called something ridiculous but nobody buys that but for the products that people buy ultra is the best but yeah well ultra has other problems like where they use it last time where there was already a product called max which was no longer the maximum
John:
Yeah, but you just got to know the Apple Speak, and Apple Speak Max is pretty darn good, but Ultra is the best.
Marco:
Anyway, so yeah, Apple Watch Ultra.
Marco:
This is where they put all the titanium.
Marco:
It's too bad because this is not a product for me, but...
Marco:
This is a product that... This category has existed for a while.
Marco:
I mentioned this last week that there's this category of high-end sport smartwatches.
Marco:
Garmin does very, very well in this category.
Marco:
They have a whole bunch that are around $1,000 in that price range.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And so, like, you know, it makes sense that Apple should compete in this area because obviously the Apple Watch, being a very, like, you know, fitness and activity-oriented product, should compete better against these other ones that were basically serving a higher-end version of that.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
so far like you know i have some friends who use these you know the big garmin you know kind of marathon or kind of watches and the apple watch really didn't compete well in that area it you know it didn't have the ruggedness it didn't have the battery life it didn't have and this is one area maybe i don't know if it does yet but it didn't have like as precise of heart rate measurements as some of these other ones did um and you know they mentioned gps that's that's actually very very good too
Marco:
But so this is a market that is proven to be a real market that is sizable and that Apple was not competing well in.
Marco:
And now they attacked it head on.
Marco:
And while this is not going to be a product for everybody, it's not supposed to be.
Marco:
You know, this is this is like the it's like the cyber truck.
Marco:
It's like that's a product for like a certain market.
Marco:
That market exists.
Marco:
It's not going to be everybody.
Marco:
But that being said, so so what they've done here is.
Marco:
I was, first of all, I was very pleasantly surprised that it was only $800 because compared to the other entrants in this market, that's very good.
John:
That's why I was saying where the Ultra is not the Mac Pro qualifier because they didn't price this as a $2,000 watch or anything like that.
John:
They didn't try to go for that super duper high end.
John:
It's priced like a top end Apple watch, but it's suited for a different purpose.
John:
It is not in a totally different price class.
Casey:
No, and I'm stunned by that.
Casey:
I fully expected this thing to be like $999, maybe even over $1,000.
Casey:
And I was very, very surprised that they kept it at $800, which is still a tremendous pile of money.
Casey:
Like, don't get me wrong.
Casey:
It's not that it's cheap.
Casey:
It's just that I expected Apple to take, and Apple always does, take every opportunity to be like, oh, well, this is very fancy, so we're going to have to charge you a lot of money.
Casey:
This is how this game is played.
Casey:
And they kind of didn't.
Casey:
I'm really surprised by it.
Marco:
Yeah, I was thinking $1,000 for sure.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
In general, I'm mixed about the look of this.
Casey:
I don't think it speaks to me personally.
Casey:
I could totally understand if you were more of a rugged human being than I am, if this would speak to you.
Casey:
God knows that this entire watch was built specifically for underscore.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think this is made for him personally I don't find the style that particularly appealing although I will say the bands are super cool like I really liked the orange one that had like the hook system maybe that would be terrible to use but I thought it was a really clever idea and it looked cool to me those are actually I've used similar straps for regular watches that have that kind of hook on system it works fine it's great
Marco:
I was very pleased to see the way they designed this product, not because I think it's attractive, because frankly, I don't, but because it is highly functional and serves the needs of its market, I think.
Marco:
For instance, the metal goes around the crystal.
Marco:
The crystal does not sit above the metal.
Marco:
This is important for a number of reasons.
Marco:
First of all, there's some pressure dynamics that could be in play here for deep diving, but also it just makes it more rugged if you're not hitting the side of the crystal on impact.
Marco:
Also, having the flat crystal makes it easier if you want to put an additional case on top of it, some kind of thing that wraps around it to protect it.
Marco:
It's much easier to put a screen protector on a flat surface than a curved one.
Marco:
Again, thoughtful design there.
Marco:
The giant crown guard around the digital crown.
Marco:
looks terrible but it works there's a reason why in the watch world tons of sport watches have had crown guards forever because in certain impacts if you like hit the watch on the side you could hit the crown and it could knock it right off or you could bend it or something and so those crown guards exist to protect the crown there's all sorts of that kind of thoughtfulness that goes into this even if you see on the underside of the apple watch ultra there are screws that hold the back on so
Marco:
The reason why probably is because the other way to construct the Apple Watch, which all the previous ones have done, is to glue the bottom on.
Marco:
And that is not super durable over a long time or in extreme conditions.
Marco:
And so this bottom is screwed in.
Marco:
And I guarantee you that was not the aesthetic choice that people would ideally make.
Marco:
But again, they looked at the needs of the market.
Marco:
And they said, hey, this market needs XYZ features and has XYZ priorities.
Marco:
And again, I can draw it right back to the new MacBook Pros, where the new MacBook Pros are objectively less attractive in certain ways than the old ones, but they are better fit to their market and their market's actual needs.
Marco:
That's what this watch is.
Marco:
It is not meant to be
Marco:
fashion statement for most people.
Marco:
Some people will wear it that way because they want to express certain things.
Marco:
But for the most part, this is a functional watch.
Marco:
And if you look at all the garments and everything that were in this market before, they're all equally functional.
Marco:
They're not attractive things.
Marco:
But they serve purposes for people.
Marco:
And and, you know, this is like this is like the giant SUV of watches.
Marco:
Some people will buy it and never take it off road for a moment of its life.
Marco:
But the people who want it, this is what they want and this is what they need.
Marco:
And and so it does seem like, you know, hardware, not even talking about the software features yet, but hardware alone.
Marco:
This is a watch designed for its users.
Marco:
And I really respect that.
John:
It's kind of a shame they couldn't make a smaller one.
John:
I mean, obviously, one of the big selling points is it has longer battery life.
John:
They claim 36 hours plus 60 hours in the low power mode that isn't released yet.
John:
There are many features.
John:
This is the new Apple way.
John:
They do a presentation and you have to just keep track of all the features that you're not going to be able to use on day one.
John:
But anyway, 60-hour thing is coming later.
Marco:
And by the way, that was – they kind of ham-fistedly expressed this in a few different ways for the presentation.
Marco:
So they first said 60 hours with, quote, a new battery optimization setting coming later this fall.
Marco:
They later mentioned a low-power workout setting for long marathons, which I think is separate than that.
Marco:
And then they also have the feature called low-power mode, which they announced during the Series 8 –
Marco:
but actually works on all the watches from Series 4 forward.
Marco:
So there's a few different things at play here.
Marco:
By the way, I love that they did low power mode.
Marco:
That's fantastic.
Marco:
Because the Apple Watch, as we've all probably seen at one time, it has an ultra low power mode where if the battery goes below whatever, 5%, whatever it is, 10%, whatever it is, it goes into the state where it basically is only a clock and only when you tap it.
Marco:
And the OS isn't even booted at that point.
Marco:
It's in this special low-power firmware kind of mode.
Marco:
Well, we now have something in between full functionality and that low-power mode, which is great.
Marco:
We have it on the Mac.
Marco:
We have it on the phone.
Marco:
for a while now and so i was actually very pleased that it still does most of what you need to watch to do it still does the emergency stuff like fall detection still does it still can do activity tracking you know steps and stuff like that the only thing it disables is the always on display um automatic workout detection and probably some like background refresh kind of stuff and and that's fine i'm that's a great trade-off and i'm very glad they added low power mode but yeah so it seems like there's low power mode
John:
and low power workout setting and the new battery optimization setting coming later this fall yeah the 60 hours thing i would imagine is aiming for like uh the set of the minimum set of features in this ultra low power mode this sort of like a preemptive ultra low power mode like you know you're going on vacation you're going to be in the mountains for three days set it to the 60 hour mode i imagine one of the things that's going to make the list is gps like that it will it
John:
basically be asleep all the time but it'll wake up at some decreased interval to say oh let me just check where you are gps and then go back to sleep again and i think gps maybe wouldn't make the list for the the other ultra low power modes but we'll see we don't actually know what the 60 hour thing is it was just promised but all this is to say that like since battery life is such an important part of this watch it makes sense that it's it's humongous right it makes sense as it's humongous from a fashion sense too because apparently these watches are big and chunky and it's kind of rugged or whatever
John:
But this thing being as big as it is, it basically eliminates itself from anybody buying it who has a very small wrist because at a certain point it becomes untenable to try to get – like it's wider than your wrist, right?
John:
The straps do not go out.
John:
The straps just immediately go in and that's –
John:
It's not great.
John:
And hey, if they can make it smaller, they probably would.
John:
But I bet there are a lot of people who would like this watch who have smaller wrists and just like, I have to wait until I can make it smaller.
John:
And how can they make it smaller?
John:
Three nanometer SoC, smaller battery, smaller size.
John:
Like, I think they'll get there eventually.
John:
But for this first one, your choices are giant or giant.
John:
That's it.
John:
There's one size that's huge.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I'm actually, I'm kind of surprised there is only one size.
Marco:
Maybe that's just a start.
Marco:
But yeah.
Marco:
And I think some of the hugeness is the additional metal that they're using.
Marco:
You know, like the reason why Apple glues stuff all over all their devices now is because it saves space and makes things more minimal and everything.
Marco:
Those screws and whatever they're screwing into, that takes space.
Marco:
All that thick titanium around the outside to make it more rugged, that takes space.
Marco:
If they have anything new in the band attachment slots for maybe these new, more rugged bands to stay on more securely in more extreme circumstances, that will take up space.
Marco:
All of these things take up space in the watch.
Marco:
To some degree, if you're going to have all that ruggedness and all those features, that is about the size it can be.
Marco:
A regular old G-Shock, even that... I've never actually owned a G-Shock, but I've looked at a couple and...
Marco:
And like a regular old G-Shock that is not even a smartwatch or is kind of barely smart.
Marco:
Those are usually like 48 millimeters.
Marco:
They're big because they have all that kind of padding resin around them to make that rugged case.
Marco:
So this is just a market where it's hard to make something super rugged and super functional and super small.
Marco:
I think, unfortunately, for the smaller wristed among us, and I include myself in this list, I wear the 41, but
Marco:
I think this is just not really a product for us if we care about how it looks on us.
Marco:
Now, that being said, if I was a mountain climber or an ultra marathonist, sure, I would buy this thing and just not give a crap how it looks.
Marco:
I've seen lots of watch nerds wearing giant Panerais that don't fit on their wrist at all, but that's just like they want that watch.
Marco:
Yeah, they want that watch and they don't care how it looks and they're wearing it proudly.
Marco:
And if that's you for the Apple Watch Ultra, go for it.
Marco:
No one's going to judge you.
Marco:
But I personally would judge myself too harshly if I wear it, and I also don't have any need for it.
Marco:
But again, if I had that need, I would go for it shamelessly.
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to ask you, I couldn't remember for the life of me what the name of the fancy watches are with the super huge like crown guards.
Casey:
And it's Panerai that I was thinking of.
Casey:
And I've said this many times on the show before, but I had a friend who used to live near me and he was really into Panerais.
Casey:
And everyone that I had seen was just freaking mammoth.
Casey:
And so just like you said, Marco, like if one has the confidence to wear a freaking mammoth watch, even on a teeny tiny wrist like mine, then power to you.
Casey:
I am not that person, and apparently Marco isn't either.
Casey:
And so I've always, I mean, leaving aside the fact that Panerais are obscenely expensive, I've always lusted after one, but I don't think I would ever actually wear one because I have such a tiny, tiny wrist.
Casey:
And here is a similar situation.
Casey:
So, you know, the regular, if you will, or the base model Apple Watch Series 8 is 41 millimeters.
Casey:
The larger of the regular Apple Watches is 45 millimeters, and this is 49, is that right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it's hard to compare it to regular watch sizes because most regular watches are round.
Marco:
And when you compare a round watch size to a square watch size, it's a different ballgame.
Marco:
You really can't compare them directly.
Marco:
You think you can.
Marco:
You think you can figure it out.
Marco:
You can't.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
Like, you know, I wear the 41 millimeter Apple watch, but that compares, I would say, pretty well to a maybe 39 to 40 millimeter round.
Marco:
You know, it's...
Marco:
it doesn't seem as big if i got a 41 millimeter round watch that looks bigger on my wrist than this does by by a decent amount um so you can't quite compare them directly also it matters like how the straps fall you know some watches including the regular apple watch you know the the strap comes out a bit before it starts curving downward because the angle of the strap slots is kind of is flat with the watch or it's almost flat but
Marco:
Whereas the Apple Watch Ultra, I keep thinking it's called the Apple Watch Explorer because that's what I want it to be called.
Marco:
The Apple Watch Ultra, it looks like the mounting points for the strap actually go down at a steeper angle.
Marco:
And it's made to be like, they know how big it is.
Marco:
And so they're making it a little bit more compatible with medium-sized to small wrists by having it curve a little bit more in a certain way.
Marco:
So they're doing what they can.
Marco:
It is still a very big watch.
Marco:
It's also a very thick watch.
Marco:
I didn't look at the measurements if they've given them, but you can tell from the side profile, this is a big thing.
Marco:
But again, for the people who are getting it for its features or for its lifestyle look, whatever is important to you, they don't care.
Marco:
They want it to be big or they don't mind that it's big because it's serving a function that they need.
John:
Well, there's more than just fashion involved, though, especially with something this big.
John:
And especially because the little whatever they're called, the little ears where the straps are, like whatever angle they happen to be at, I can't tell if they're steeper, but it's a fixed angle, right?
John:
There's no change.
John:
You can pick different band designs to help with that because some bands themselves stick out, whereas other ones have like basically a thing that goes in a slot and another thing that hooks into that.
John:
But the issue at the bottom of all this for a lot of people is
John:
it has nothing to do with fashion, it has to do with comfort.
John:
Like part of being outdoors and exercising with something, it has to be on your wrist in a secure and comfortable way.
John:
If it is rubbing or banging or bumping, A, it's not going to be comfortable and who wants that?
John:
And B, it's not going to do its job right because you need to have a certain, you need to sort of maintain enough contact in the right places to do the right thing.
John:
So in the end, like size can be a disqualifier, even if you don't care anything about the fashion.
John:
And speaking of fashion with the Panerai and everything and the whole crown guard business,
John:
The Panerai, I was trying to think of a car equivalent.
John:
It's so comically exaggerated for the purpose of fashion because with the crown guards the size they are on these big, chunky phones, the crown itself is also large to match the crown guard.
John:
So it's like, oh, Marco's explanation before of like, well, what if you hit the watch against something?
John:
If the crown is sticking out and you could bend it or break it and you'll damage your watch, so now you need a crown guard.
John:
And the Panerai says, okay, well, how about we have...
John:
gigantic crown guards but then of course we need a gigantic crown that's even more prone to being hit so let's make the crown guards even bigger and it's like doesn't make any sense no one's using those to rock climb anyway and they're just a comical exaggeration of what it should be but especially on the apple watch why does it have a crown at all well apple wanted to reference real watches and it's a it's an input control and yada yada but it has a touchscreen on it right and so here they are with their they could have made a different choice here and say oh well
John:
We don't want to have a vulnerable crown.
John:
So we'll seal the sucker up.
John:
No, no digital crown.
John:
But they can't because their whole S is based on it.
John:
Or they kind of like painted themselves into a skeuomorphic corner here by saying we're going to have a crown on it, which means that if we ever make a rugged one and we want to keep the crown, we have to put in a crown guard.
John:
And it's like you didn't need any of that.
John:
Like you could have just made it a touchscreen, but they didn't.
John:
So here we are with a crown guard.
John:
At least it's not comically exaggerated.
John:
Um,
John:
But they did extend the crown guard to be around the button, which then itself extends out.
John:
And that's a good idea because it's easier to press with gloves or whatever.
John:
But that leads to a lot of sort of design awkwardness.
John:
And that design awkwardness, I think, is part of the aesthetic.
John:
Part of the style of this type of watch is design awkwardness.
John:
It's like, you know, the stupid thing that I hate the...
John:
plastic uh wheel arch cladding on you know it started with like the subaru outback or whatever you take a regular car and the volvo's have another take a regular car and put plastic matte black plastic cladding around the wheel wells to show that it's rugged right and it's incredibly dumb it is a hundred percent a fashion thing and has real no real functional advantage other than now you're going to scratch up the plastic instead of scratching up the body it's like well yeah but i don't care if the plastic scratch up you do it looks ugly too anyway that's
John:
That's what I feel like this watch is doing.
John:
They had to put the crown guard there to sort of fit in with the other cool kids who are putting a guard on the crown.
John:
To give the Panera example, one way you can make your crown less vulnerable to being knocked into something, not on a digital watch, but on a regular watch, make the crown way smaller and lower profile.
John:
You only use it when you're winding it.
John:
It's not a big deal.
John:
And, you know, it's like, but no, we have to make the crown big.
John:
And here, obviously the crown is not for winding.
John:
So they have to make it big enough for you to use it with your finger.
John:
But it's just, I look at this watch and it's such a slightly confused device that, you know, is,
John:
constrained by all the watches that have ever come before it it's constrained by the apple watch that has come before it and it's also constrained by the fashion of its peers it has to look of a piece with them it has to look tough it has to look tactical it has to you know like it has to appeal to the watch nerds who knew before today what the words crown guard meant and so here we are um
John:
You know, the one good thing it has going for it, and this is something we discussed on past shows, is like, well, could Apple ever make a watch like this?
John:
Because most watches like this, you know, you want to do things with like, I want to, you know, do my splits when I'm doing a long race or, you know, like they'd have to have more buttons, right?
John:
More than just the wheel and the button.
John:
And hey, they added another button to this because it's a giant watch and they have room for it.
John:
And it's a programmable button or will be anyway.
John:
So apps can incorporate what that button does.
John:
That's a great idea, Apple.
John:
I bet some of your other watchers could also benefit from an additional button, but they're not quite ready to go there.
John:
I mean, Casio digital watches from my childhood had four buttons on them, maybe even five, although one of them you had to use.
John:
Blast for me.
John:
Right.
John:
And they didn't have a crown because they were digital watches.
John:
Anyway, I do think there is significant room for innovation in the watch space.
John:
And this weirdo watch shows that Apple is willing to go there a little bit.
John:
And I applaud that.
Marco:
Well, and first of all, some quick updates for those less nerdy in the watch world.
Marco:
Panerai does sell multiple watch families, some of which have the giant crown guard, some of which have no crown guard, and some of which go down to 38 millimeters, Casey.
Marco:
Anyway...
Casey:
Oh, don't tell me this.
Casey:
So as I'm listening to you, I'm browsing the Panerai site, and I love the look of these so much.
Casey:
But as soon as I start looking at prices, I'm immediately, you know, okay, I'm out.
Casey:
But out of curiosity, I was like, okay, let me scroll down on the Luminor series, which is what I consider to be quintessential Panerai.
Casey:
Maybe I'm dead wrong about that.
Casey:
But anyways, I scroll all the way down to the bottom.
Casey:
The Luminor Torbillion GMT.
Casey:
Oh, God, you're killing me.
Casey:
Wait, what is it?
Casey:
How am I supposed to pronounce it?
Casey:
No, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm ignorant.
Casey:
Tell me.
Casey:
Okay, so tell me.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
Well, it's a French word, so I'm probably going to butcher it, too, but it's closer to tourbillon than what you said.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Well, the Luminor T, GMT.
Casey:
Anyway, the point I'm driving at.
Marco:
Those are usually, what, $100,000?
Casey:
$180,000 for a friggin' watch.
Marco:
And by the way... Yeah, tourbillons are like the watch world's ridiculous crown jewel thing.
Marco:
Nobody wears this.
Casey:
Hold on, though.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Excluding sales tax.
Casey:
$180,000.
Casey:
They're so good-looking.
Casey:
This particular one is eh.
Casey:
But they're so good-looking.
Marco:
At most Panerais, you're going to be looking at $6,000 to $10,000, which is a lot.
Marco:
But anyway, that's what they are.
John:
And none of them will ever be bumped into any surface such that that crown guard does anything for you.
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
The crown guard is purely historical slash fashion.
Marco:
Anyway, so there's that.
Marco:
But also, you know, John, you mentioned, like, you know, why they still have the crown.
Marco:
They told you right there in the presentation, and you just said of yourself...
Marco:
when you're wearing gloves or if you're underwater.
Marco:
It's really nice to have non-tuck screen input methods on this device because as something that's based so much on activity uses, there are lots of cases where you either can't use a tuck screen or it's really inconvenient to use a tuck screen or it's imprecise to use a tuck screen.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Adding the action button, which is the coolest name they came up with for the next 20 minutes.
Marco:
And the fact that it's orange looks awesome.
Marco:
I love that.
Marco:
I wish they offered these orange accents in the other watches.
Marco:
Anyway, they're adding these things because when you're in a lot of these situations or activities that they want to sell this into...
Marco:
it sucks using a touch screen or you can't.
Marco:
So that's great.
John:
But there are other choices, but like the digital crown is because watches have little winders on it.
John:
Like that's why if you were faced with a blank sheet of paper and said, I need a watch that I can use with gloves on and it's going to have a touch screen, but you might not be able to do the touch screen.
John:
So many other solutions involving levers or like an up and down button or like a thing that you pull, like things that could be more resilient because this, I mean, the crown guard doesn't guard the whole crown.
John:
Parts of it are still sticking out so you can reach them with your fingers and that could catch on something.
John:
There are,
John:
better more durable solutions that involve like a lump that you could yank or pull or a small thing sticking out if you just wanted to have an up and down type thing but they are constrained by history and by their choice to use as interface element and truly this is a better interface element than any kind of lever or thing or whatever for most cases when you're not wearing gloves so i don't think it's necessarily the wrong choice but it is not a blank sheet of paper or
John:
Like, you know, I don't know anything about the competing Garmin things or whatever, but how many of them lean so heavily on the digital crown as the Apple one?
John:
I would imagine not as many.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else on the Ultra?
John:
Band compatibility, which some people were worried about from the rumors.
John:
It's not like there's special bands for the Ultra.
John:
It's the same bands that would fit the other big Apple watches.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Casey:
I don't think they stated that in the show.
John:
It's actually more complicated.
John:
than you would think, like I put this little screenshot from Apple's website, because they do have the smaller bands, like what it says is the 41mm bands work with the 38 and 40mm cases, the 45mm bands work with the 42, 44, and 49mm cases, but the solo loop and braided solo loop bands are only compatible with the SE, and the series are newer, and it's just, anyway...
John:
The point is, this does not introduce a new band category.
John:
Of course, it introduces many new bands, and you probably want one of these cool, rugged, outdoorsy ones.
John:
So that's a separate issue, but they continue to not break compatibility.
John:
So if you have way, way, way too much money invested in Apple Watch bands, as long as you are in the large size class, you can still reuse your stuff.
Marco:
Also, one thing that I hope the Apple Watch Ultra does is be the proven ground for technologies and improvements that then get filtered down to the lower-end models in the future.
Marco:
So, for instance, obviously, yeah, having another button would be great.
Marco:
I would love that.
Marco:
Having buttons, like one issue I face frequently is...
Marco:
If I'm wearing weightlifting gloves, they have this big flap, this Velcro thing that's right next to where my watch crown and sleep button are.
Marco:
And in certain wrist positions, it's easy for that glove to inadvertently depress that button.
Marco:
And so having some kind of light crown guarding around the regular Apple Watch buttons...
Marco:
I actually might use that, you know?
Marco:
Um, also the hardware features, they mentioned that they, that the, um, the Apple watch ultra has this new dual frequency GPS module where there's apparently a new GPS frequency called L five that I was not aware of.
Marco:
I'll look into it for next week's show.
Marco:
But, um,
Marco:
But they now use dual GPS frequencies, L1 and L5, plus, quote, custom algorithms to have much better GPS accuracy, especially in cities, than any other, quote, any other sport watch on the market.
Marco:
I don't know how it compares to what phones have.
Marco:
But that would be nice to see on everything that has GPS on our phones, on our watches.
Marco:
So again, maybe this can be the proving ground for new technologies the same way like, you know, halo cars are that for car makers.
Marco:
And then maybe some of this trickles down to the other models in the future.
John:
Another interesting thing, speaking of Halo stuff is, I mean, this is, I'm assuming straight out of the real watch world, intentionally or not.
John:
The whole fact that you can use it as a dive computer, right?
John:
And they partnered with that dive computer company.
John:
And like, you actually, you can use it as your wristwatch.
John:
It does all the things you need a dive wristwatch to do.
John:
And it's, you know, it can go down and really deep in the water, much deeper than any other watch.
John:
And it's got this application that gives you all the dive info that you need, which I didn't, you know, know anything about.
John:
How many people are going to ever dive with this watch?
John:
Very, very few, just like how many people are ever going to dive with a, you know, go in a submarine with their Submariner.
John:
Like it's you buy it not be, you know, yes, the people who are going to dive with it are going to then, you know, compare it against the competing diving watches.
John:
But there are so few people in the world who do that, relatively speaking, in terms of the number of total Apple watches sold.
John:
But other people like the idea that they have a watch that could that they could dive with another going to dive with it.
John:
It's like, you know, like the SUV that never goes off road.
John:
They just like the idea that it could in the same way that people would compare watches to like, you know, it's whatever the depth that it's good for.
John:
It's like, oh, how deep have you been?
John:
Well, I went in the low end of the pool of the hotel once.
John:
Right.
John:
It's just, it's not, it's aspirational.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's part of the message of this watch, you know, and you were watching it, uh, Margo, the thing you were making comments about how your life is not exciting enough for this watch.
John:
That's the whole point.
John:
They show the people running the ultra marathon, climbing the mountain, right.
John:
Diving under the sea, uh,
John:
you know a tiny tiny fraction of the people who buy this watch are ever going to do it but everybody who buys this watch likes the idea of those activities you know so even if they never don't kid themselves if they're ever going to do them it's just it's it's the same reason you know you'd buy like a fast car like you're ever going to drive fast you're ever going to go 200 200 miles power no you just like it because it's a cool thing that could go 200 miles an hour right and so this watch could go into the ocean could go up mount everest even if you never do
Marco:
And by the way, real-time follow-up, friend of the show Ryan Jones has reminded me that there's a pretty good reason why they didn't call this the Apple Watch Explorer.
Marco:
That there's a small watch company that already has been selling a model called Explorer for about 70 years called Rolex.
Marco:
So there might be a trademark issue there.
Marco:
So I'm guessing that Apple Watch Explorer can never be a model name.
John:
It's also a worse name.
Marco:
It's a much better name, but they can't use it.
John:
It's not an Apple-y name, right?
John:
Ultra, for all its warts, is...
John:
a modern Apple-y name.
John:
I mean, extreme would have been the obvious choice, right?
John:
Because they even talked about extreme sports or whatever, and that makes perfect sense to me.
John:
It looks like an extreme version of it, but I guess they didn't go with extreme either.
John:
What are you going to do?
John:
They would use that from the era where they did Quartz Extreme.
John:
Either one of you remember what that was?
Casey:
I'm aware of that as being a thing, but I think that was before my time.
John:
But that's far from the marketing department.
John:
I do wonder how much the marketing department gets involved in, like, here's what we're going to call this new framework or API.
John:
I guess they get involved at some point, but back in the Quartz Extreme days, who knows?
Music
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I really selfishly, completely selfishly, did not want to know anything about new AirPods today because I like my AirPods Pro and I don't want them to be old and busted pieces of garbage.
Casey:
And man, they are old and busted pieces of garbage now.
Marco:
I was going to say, that makes one of us who didn't want to hear about this because as my original week one AirPod Pros, the battery is not in great shape.
Marco:
And so I was really hoping about this.
Marco:
So to me, this was great news.
Marco:
And Tiff and I, because she also has early AirPod Pros and she's like, they barely work anymore.
Marco:
This definitely got the most excitement from our family to jump on this as soon as we can
Casey:
Yeah, no, I don't blame you.
Casey:
And again, I'm being selfish, and I'm mostly kidding.
Casey:
These look super cool.
Casey:
I love my AirPods Pro, the ones I have so much.
Casey:
And to just crank it up to 11, that's a reference, John.
Casey:
That just strikes me as these are going to be amazing.
Casey:
Now, I personally am going to attempt to hold out and not upgrade quite yet.
Casey:
uh because it seems pretty wasteful even though i'm i'm really digging on a lot of stuff they're talking about here so what are they talking about they're talking about new h2 chip with high bandwidth connectivity uh they have a new low distortion audio driver in custom amp and they they talked about personalized spatial audio which i did not think was unique to these is it i thought it's kind of not that's kind of an ios feature um
Marco:
Right, that's what I thought.
John:
Spatial audio is the feature, and lots of their products support spatial audio.
John:
And if the thing they were advertising doesn't have anything specific due to the AirPods, it was like, hey, you can hold your phone up to your ear.
John:
We talked about this before with iOS 16.
John:
You can hold your phone up to your ear, and the true-death camera will get a picture of your ear, and we'll try to give you a custom head-related transfer function that makes spatial audio sound...
John:
right according to the shape of your ears and you may be thinking well what does the shape of my ears have to do with anything the airpods pro go jammed into my little ear hole like there it doesn't the sound never even touches the outside of my ear ah but what they're trying to do is know what shape the outside of your ear is so they know what kind of sound to shove into your ear hole to fool into thinking that sound bounced off your weird shaped ear and everything right so that's that's the thing they're doing here and that i think is a basically a feature of iowa 16 but they wanted to show it here because it looks cool
Casey:
So active noise cancellation, which is what possibly my favorite... Well, no, I shouldn't say that.
Casey:
I love the AirPods Pro for two reasons.
Casey:
One, I genuinely think they sound way better.
Casey:
And number two, the active noise cancellation is so nice.
Casey:
And they are saying that in the new AirPods Pro 2, the ANC is twice as much noise canceled, which is super duper cool.
Casey:
They also have something... I think I'm skipping ahead a little bit.
Casey:
What do they call it?
Casey:
Adaptive transparency, I believe.
Casey:
Uh, where it will, let's say you want to be in transparency mode where you can hear things that are happening around you, but you don't want to hear a jackhammer that's right nearby.
Casey:
Well, they have this new thing called adaptive transparency where it samples at like 48,000 Hertz and it will try to make something like a jackhammer or a train or something like that.
Casey:
they will cancel just that out and leave everything else behind so you can hear it, which I think is super duper cool.
Casey:
They also said that they have large, medium, small, and now extra small tips if you have a particularly small ear hole, which is cool.
Casey:
Longer battery life.
Casey:
Another thing that I think is super neat, and I had to do something like this very recently.
Casey:
I had lost my AirPods Pro in the house.
Casey:
I knew for sure they were in the house because I had just used them like an hour or two ago, but I put them somewhere dumb.
Casey:
And I realized, wait a second, I think I might be able to do this on Find My.
Casey:
And I did, and not only that, but apparently the AirPods Pro have whatever, what is it, the ultra-wideband or something, what is the thing I'm thinking of where you can do like the homing beacon mode?
John:
The U1, the U1, Japan.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So anyway, so I was able to do that, and granted, it took me like a lap around the house before I got close enough to them for that thing to work.
Casey:
But then, you know, I could point my phone and twist around and it would say, no, it's to the right, to the left.
Casey:
Stop.
Casey:
OK, go straight ahead.
Casey:
You know, three feet, two feet, one feet.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
Well, that obviously still exists in the AirPods Pro 2.
Casey:
But what's even cooler is the case has a speaker on it, which is super awesome.
Casey:
So you can say, hey, I need you to play a sound.
Casey:
And the case is what plays the sound rather than the earbuds.
John:
And of course, the existing case have a speaker on it, too.
John:
I thought they just made the speaker louder.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Marco:
I believe it uses the speaker of the AirPods.
Casey:
That's what I thought.
Marco:
If the AirPods are in the case.
Marco:
Keep in mind, the AirPods Pros are fairly old by this point.
Marco:
They were designed before the Find My network was really a thing.
Marco:
And I think all this stuff that we can do with them, having them play a little chirping noise and everything, that was all kind of hacked on later, it seemed.
Marco:
And so this is the first time we're getting this product designed from the start to be part of this ecosystem.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So the speaker on the case can play noises, which I think is super awesome.
Casey:
You can use it with an Apple Watch charger, which in principle, I really like.
Casey:
I don't think that's something I expect to do really ever.
Casey:
Well, not that I've been planning on buying these right away.
Marco:
Anyway, that was a happy surprise, though.
Marco:
I'm actually very pleased to see like you can charge it with lightning, not USB-C yet, but we'll get there.
Marco:
or MagSafe or the Apple Watch Charger.
Marco:
Like, great.
Marco:
Finally, like, you know, they're starting to realize like, hey, you know what?
Marco:
Having these chargers like the Apple Watch Charger that can only do one thing is kind of annoying.
Marco:
And so, you know, as long as we're stuck with it, let's give it more uses.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Couldn't agree more.
Casey:
um then everyone noticed including me like something that looked almost like what what is the smart connector on the back of the ipad is that what i'm thinking of there was something on the side of the case and everyone was like what the hell is this well apparently you can get an optional loop that magnetically attaches to the case on the side of the case and that's what that little connector was uh not something for me but again i think that's cool that it's an option
Casey:
They're $250.
Casey:
You can order them, what, this coming Friday, available on or around the 23rd.
Casey:
They said you can do free engraving, you know, whatever, including Memoji, which not for me, but I think that's cool that they allow it.
Casey:
And I'm really digging these.
Casey:
If somebody wants to buy a pair for me, please feel free, but instead you should go to stjude.org.
Casey:
But nevertheless, if you had that much money, you can send them my way because I'm too cheap to buy ones to replace my nine-month-old ones that I love so much.
Casey:
But there was also something else that happened during this segment.
Casey:
John, I presume you were the first one to spot this of the three of us?
John:
No, I think I didn't spot it when I was too busy.
John:
Oh, Tiff spotted it.
John:
Yeah, a bunch of people spotted it at this point.
Casey:
I did not.
John:
In the background, while the person who was presenting the Apple Watch, while Marianne was walking around and going through the scenery and saying this Apple Watch, she comes out of a subway car and then the person who walks onto the subway car or standing on the platform as she goes by or whatever is a character from one of the
Marco:
uh apple tv plus shows the television show severance which is uh pretty cool you should check it out that was sort of a stealth promo for that show which would be slightly less stealth later in the program yeah one of the little detail that i that i that i took note of is that what they said um during airpods pro presentation was that they were quote our most popular airpods that surprised me oh i missed that i did not catch that at all
John:
So one of the features these have with the swipe for volume control, I thought when they were doing this part, I'm like, are they going to do it?
John:
Are they going to make them so you can tap them?
John:
But no, they didn't make them so you can tap them.
John:
But maybe they'll get there eventually.
John:
But anyway, the whole idea that you could rub your finger on the side of the little stem and change the volume is something we've been talking about since the very first AirPods.
John:
Because it's like, oh, these AirPods, but how do you change the volume on them, right?
John:
Oh, you have to, you can use Siri to do it or you'll do it on your phone or whatever.
John:
And they just never really tackled that problem.
John:
And now they're finally doing it.
John:
And lots of, when we were talking about lots of people would say, oh, that's, that would be a bad interface because it would be very awkward and difficult to do.
John:
Well, now we're going to find out because they added it and the stem is even shorter than it was in the, much shorter than it was on the original AirPods.
John:
Uh, and maybe it can be disabled if it's awkward or whatever, but we'll see how it goes.
John:
I imagine it's very conservative.
John:
So you don't accidentally like brush your hand against it and blow your eardrums out because you made the volume go too high.
John:
But I would, I would love this on a non, you know, on my non sealed AirPods, like whatever the AirPods, regular AirPods version four would love to try a volume control like that because very often I want to adjust the volume by some small amount, but I don't want to walk into the room and do it on my
John:
phone where the phone is and i don't want to have to try to make siri do it because it just never works for me and it stops so i totally endorse that feature i would also endorse the idea that you could tap it to stop and start i feel like there's got to be room in there for them to do this maybe when they eventually go stemless they'll do that
Casey:
Yeah, I can't believe I forgot to talk about that because the swipe for volume strikes me as so convenient.
Casey:
I agree with you that maybe it'll turn out not so great, but in principle anyway, before I've tried it, it strikes me as so awesome and such a great, great, great upgrade.
John:
One more thing about the high bandwidth connectivity that you mentioned before.
John:
They didn't really talk much about that after they just tossed it out there, right?
John:
And so what do they mean by that?
John:
As far as we've been able to determine based on public filings and stuff or whatever,
John:
It's just like a higher bandwidth mode of Bluetooth.
John:
It's not like ultra-wideband or anything as far as we know.
John:
Like the regular Bluetooth is 3 megabits, and then this is like a 4 and an 8 megabit mode, so considerably more bandwidth.
John:
But what do they use that bandwidth for?
John:
Again, they didn't attribute anything to that bandwidth.
John:
One thing that they can obviously use it for is that it extends battery life because when you're sending the compressed audio or whatever, you can spend less time sending it, right?
John:
Given the same size buffer that you're going to keep, right?
John:
So you can send and let it play and then send and let it play or whatever.
John:
And so that leaves more time for you to retransmit if it didn't get sent correctly the first time.
John:
And you're spending less of your time, less of your time sending and receiving again, given a fixed size buffer on either end of the thing.
John:
So some of the battery life benefit may be attributed to the high bandwidth.
John:
Another thing they talked about, which I feature, I wish I had this feature on my AirPods as well.
John:
Having,
John:
Two things.
John:
One, I think this is an iOS 16 thing.
John:
Maybe it does apply to the old AirPods.
John:
Having your AirPods connected to two things at once.
John:
So you could have your AirPods connected to your phone and your Mac at the same time.
John:
I don't think that's an AirPods Pro feature.
John:
I think it's just an iOS 16 feature.
John:
Am I correct about that?
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
But I mean, right now, they certainly can flip flop between different devices pretty easily if you so desire.
John:
No, but just having it connected to both at the same time.
John:
And the other one that they talked about, I think, in the context of the AirPods Pro was having multiple people's AirPods connected to a single device.
John:
So if you're watching something on a plane on your iPad and you want you to wear your AirPods and your wife to wear her AirPods and you both want to watch the movie at the same time,
John:
Does the extra bandwidth help with that?
John:
Is it totally orthogonal?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But these are all features that I think are great.
John:
And I think everyone has wanted for a long time.
John:
You still can't do that with the current ones, right?
John:
Like this is a new feature.
Marco:
Well, because it was weird.
Marco:
So Apple did their own like kind of, you know, share stuff to multiple Bluetooth headphones thing first.
Marco:
And then later on, that became part of the Bluetooth standard with the most modern audio standards and everything.
Marco:
So now other headphones can do that as well.
Marco:
But I don't know if they ever went back and replaced it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Oh, and I misspoke earlier, real-time follow-up.
Casey:
The lanyard, I thought, was magnetic.
Casey:
Looking at this again, it's not.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
I was going to say, it's just a hole.
Casey:
It's a hole that you put a string through.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Oh, these AirPods Pro, they look super awesome.
Casey:
And we'll see if I have the self-control not to buy some, but I haven't yet.
John:
Yeah, I want all these features, obviously, except for the ones I can't have like noise canceling because it doesn't make sense.
John:
I want all of them on the non-earhole AirPods ASAP.
Yeah.
Marco:
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Casey:
Finally, it is iPhone time.
Casey:
We start with the 14 and the 14 Plus.
Casey:
They are 6.1 inches and 6.7 inches, which is the same size as the 13 Pro, right?
Casey:
Or the 13 Pro and Pro Max.
Casey:
Am I right about that?
John:
I mean, yes, the screen sizes are the same, but as we'll get to in a little bit when we talk about the Pros, I'm not entirely sure that the phone size is down to the millimeter the same as the 13.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
Well, the screens have also gotten very slightly larger, but we're talking like a few pixels larger.
Marco:
It's not a big amount.
Marco:
The measurements of the Pro phones, their footprint has actually gotten very slightly bigger, but it's a very, very small difference.
John:
And I think they might have changed the radius on the curves, too.
John:
Someone had a screenshot of, like, the old phone versus the new phone going back and forth and made it look like that.
John:
Hard to tell.
John:
But it'll be interesting when people get these phones, like, lay a 14 on top of a 13.
John:
Lay a 14 Pro on top of a 13 Pro if you can figure out how to arrange the stupid camera things to see what the differences actually are.
John:
They're very, very, very close, it seems like, but not exact.
Casey:
yep so we got 14 14 plus in midnight starlight blue purple in product red well they specifically said the 14 plus is the best battery life ever on an iphone and i don't believe they corrected that for the 14 pro as far as i'm aware so uh that's cool it does have the a15 from the iphone 13 pro i think i got that right i hope so but with but with all the
John:
parts that work because i think if on the original well yeah that's why i say it from the iphone 13 pro because if you remember the iphone 13 you'd get one like one of the gpu cores didn't work i think it was like a five core gpu instead of a six and i think all the a15s in the iphone 14 will be all the parts working
Marco:
Yeah, I loved the way they did this.
Marco:
This is such a wonderful marketing BS kind of thing where they have this marketing problem where this is the first iPhone to not upgrade the chip from the one before it.
Marco:
And so instead of burying that and hoping nobody noticed, they attempted to turn it into a feature.
Yeah.
Marco:
I think unsuccessfully because none of us were fooled, but they attempted to spend a little bit of time talking about how this new... I love the line they said, quote, now we are bringing this proven pro-level performance to iPhone 14.
Marco:
Not saying that, you know, the iPhone 13, they're bringing the performance of the iPhone 13 Pro to the iPhone 14.
Marco:
Well, the iPhone 13 non-pro had like 85% of it or something.
Marco:
It's so...
John:
That's not the pro performance that they're bringing.
John:
They're not bringing the non-pro performance where one of your GPU cores doesn't work.
John:
And I think that's literally the only difference.
John:
The only difference was one GPU core didn't work and now all of them will.
Marco:
Yeah, as far as I know, that's the only difference.
Marco:
So, you know, quite a wonderful bit of marketing there from Apple attempting to spin this as something besides like, yeah, there's now just more difference between the pro and the non-pro.
John:
And speaking of battery life, I'm kind of surprised that they didn't make the connection between the removal of the sim, which we'll get to in a little bit, and the battery life, because that's got to be a factor, right?
John:
I mean, the sim takes up room, room that could be taken up, you know, that you can use to rearrange stuff to put more battery in.
John:
And I'm assuming they did that.
John:
We'll see when they tear them down.
John:
But I'm guessing that they spent some of that savings on a bigger battery.
Marco:
Yeah, presumably.
Marco:
And also, if they're using a similar size battery between the regular 14s and the 14 Pros, well, the 14 Pros have this much larger power demand of this new always-on screen thing.
Marco:
And so, of course, the Pros are going to get less battery life for the same size batteries as the non-Pros.
John:
And the A16 probably is more power-thirsty than the A15.
John:
Maybe.
Yeah.
Casey:
Alright, so there is a new camera.
Casey:
They started calling it the main camera, which is a change from the, what do they call it, the wide camera?
Marco:
Yeah, they used to call it wide.
Marco:
Thank God they made this change.
Casey:
Nobody understood what that was.
Marco:
Because once they started adding the ultra-wide, then it's okay.
Marco:
Well, if you say the wide camera, a lot of people are going to assume you mean the 0.5x1, not the 1x1.
Marco:
So now everywhere they have renamed the 1x1 to main camera.
Marco:
So whether they're talking about the main camera or later on when they get their fake 2X thing, they refer to the main lens.
Marco:
So it's all main, which is a much, much better name.
John:
Although it's kind of interesting that to this point, all of the diameter of the circles in the back of the phone have been uniform on a given phone, right?
John:
So the main camera is not from looking at the circle on the outside bigger than the non-main cameras, right?
John:
underneath the covers obviously the little the sensors and everything else and the mechanisms are different but they've kept the circles the same size and it's kind of a main camera is a better name but it's kind of academic in that uh the only place this manifests is in the ui and in the ui it's not called main it's called 1x you know 0.5x right right so
John:
it's if you ask someone if you showed them the back of their phone and said point to the main camera no one has any idea which one it is right how why would you know why would you care it's all in the ui and the ui is numbers not words
Casey:
So they did make mention briefly of the fact that 3 trillion, with a T, photos were taken with the iPhone in the last year, which I thought was bananas.
Casey:
But anyways, it is a 12 megapixel main camera, f1.5 with sensor shift optical image stabilization.
Casey:
Apparently a nearly 50% low light improvement.
Casey:
There's a 38% improvement in low light with the true depth camera.
Casey:
That's the front camera, if I'm not mistaken, an f1.9.
Casey:
It also has autofocus for the first time.
Casey:
Deep Fusion is now being applied earlier in the process on uncompressed images, so hopefully it'll make things look a lot better.
Casey:
They announced, and this is the beginning of really dodgy names, the Photonic Engine, which is an enhanced image pipeline to dramatically improve low-light photos and goes beyond what hardware alone can provide.
Casey:
which the name is a little meh.
Casey:
But nevertheless, they claim 2X low-light improvement on front and the ultra-wide cameras and a 2.5X improvement on the main camera.
Casey:
Additionally, they have a... For the video portion, they have action mode, which is a more advanced stabilization mode, and they have more overscan, so...
Casey:
I don't remember if they were doing this before or not, but my understanding is, and this is certainly how I believe the GoPro tends to work, is when you film, you're not using the entirety of the frame that the sensor is capturing.
Casey:
And that means as you're jostling the camera and thus the sensor around, you can, with software, move what portion of that frame is being saved to offset the motion of the physical device.
Casey:
And so they have more overscan, they have more movement correction...
Casey:
And they specifically said, without having to carry any extra gear, like a gimbal, which I've done from time to time, and I can assure you is not fun.
Casey:
So camera improvements, definitely camera improvements, not quite as monumental as the pros, which we'll get to in a minute.
Casey:
I am...
Casey:
It's tentatively very annoyed by the next thing they talked about, which is there is no SIM tray, except in a couple of countries.
Casey:
There is no SIM tray in the iPhone 14 line, including the pros.
Casey:
Instead, it is all eSIM all the time.
Casey:
And that in and of itself, I think, is probably good and probably an improvement.
Casey:
The thing I don't like, though, is that when I was on AT&T, and if you recall, I switched to Verizon recently so I can use my ultra-wideband park bench slash picnic table.
Marco:
Wait, is that on the Verizon 5G nationwide ultra-fast ultra-wideband ultra-everything network?
Casey:
Do you know what son of a gun it is?
Casey:
But anyway, with AT&T, I would take a physical SIM from phone to phone to phone to phone.
Casey:
And AT&T anyway would never charge me like $30 tax, you know, in order to switch phones because I was just moving a SIM.
Casey:
That's all I was doing.
Casey:
And they were none the wise.
Casey:
I mean, I think they literally did know that it was a different phone, but they never charged me for it.
Casey:
I don't know what Verizon would have or did do in the past, but I was planning on hoping that I was going to take my SIM out of my 13 Pro and move it into a 14 Pro.
Casey:
And I specifically, when I got the Verizon account, when I moved to Verizon, I was asked, do you want an eSIM?
Casey:
And I was like, no, no, no.
Casey:
I'll take a physical SIM, please, so I can move it into my next phone.
Casey:
And the guy I was talking to was like, are you sure?
Casey:
It's really nice to have a eSIM.
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
I'll take my physical SIM.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Marco:
They want their $30 fee for whatever they're going to do.
John:
Are you trying to imply that the carriers don't charge people a fee when they move a physical SIM?
John:
Because I feel like they would find a way to do that, too.
Casey:
Maybe AT&T didn't, but... I agree, but AT&T didn't.
Casey:
I think they are capable of charging, like any of these carriers, are capable of charging a fee.
Casey:
I have no doubt that they know that there are different devices connected, but...
Casey:
But AT&T never did.
Casey:
But that being said, this is like me not being excited about the AirPods Pro, right?
Casey:
For every other person on the planet, this is probably an improvement.
John:
Not every other, because a lot of people are complaining who do like international traveling.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
John:
In some countries, eSIM is not a supported thing with the various carriers.
John:
And it was nice to be able to have one or possibly two SIM slots where you could just, you know, get a SIM card and shuffle it to whatever country you're in.
John:
This is a growing pains thing, though.
John:
Like, ESAM is obviously the superior solution.
John:
It's silly that we have these little SIM cards.
John:
We have an electronic solution for it.
John:
But it's painful if the rest of the world has not caught up, whether that be companies having policies that are not as punitive in terms of charging your money to switch them or just simply not supporting an uncertain carrier.
John:
So I think we're in for a couple of years or potentially more in various countries of pain as –
John:
Apple essentially forces the world to come to terms with eSIMs because carriers do want iPhone customers on their network because iPhone customers, by buying an iPhone, have proven they have money.
John:
Carriers want that money.
John:
And so this will change over time.
John:
I'm glad the eSIM is coming, but I'm also a little bit wary of...
John:
what kind of cluster it's going to be during the transition to successfully get my phone activated and working.
John:
Hell, last time, I think even with my physical SIM card, I had trouble getting things up and going.
John:
There's nothing the carriers can't screw up.
John:
But eSIM, like from a tech perspective, it's better if only because you don't have to have a giant stupid slot in your phone taking up space that could be used for other things like battery.
John:
So I give it a thumbs up, even though it may be a pain.
Marco:
And keep in mind, like that slot also provides one more possible entry point for water.
Casey:
That's exactly what I was about to say.
Casey:
No, no, it's all good.
Casey:
And yeah, I was going to say the same thing.
Casey:
So in the grand scheme of things, as much as I'm whining about it right now, I do think it is for the best.
Casey:
I'm just very wary and I'm sure that I'm in for $60 worth of Verizon charges when I have them eSIM me or move my physical SIM to an eSIM and hopefully in a week, in a few days.
Casey:
Moving on, crash detection.
Casey:
The car crash thing is coming to the phone, which is kind of nice.
Casey:
Also, we finally figured out, and this is, in my opinion, a pretty rare occurrence, Far Out actually did relate to something that they talked about.
Casey:
Far Out being the tagline on the invite.
John:
The titles always relate to something.
John:
They just relate in a boring way that no one cares about after the fact.
John:
Yeah, wow.
Casey:
Nevertheless, new safety service, says Ashley Williams, as she was presenting.
Casey:
And I think this is super freaking cool.
Casey:
Whether or not I ever use it, I think the tech is so neat.
Casey:
So they said, hey, you know, you could be in the middle of nowhere and you might want to call for help.
Casey:
You know, you might want to call 911 if you're American or whatever the equivalent is in other countries.
Casey:
You might want to call somebody because you're hiking and you're by yourself and you broke your leg or something.
Casey:
So how do you do that if you don't have service?
Casey:
Well, it turns out there's a bunch of satellites up in the sky that you could hypothetically talk to.
Casey:
But, and I have seen, and I've talked about this in the past, I've seen a satellite phone before.
Casey:
Now, granted, this was many years ago now, but it was huge.
Casey:
The antenna was mammoth, and it was not fun.
Casey:
It was not fun to hold.
Casey:
So they said, well, what do we do?
Casey:
Well, they specifically said that you need to have the iPhone pointed at a satellite, but the satellite is so far away you can't see it, so what do you do?
Casey:
Well, apparently Apple figured out that they could show you kind of like the, you know, homing beacon thing with the AirPods case I was talking about earlier.
Casey:
They can show you where you need to point your phone and tell you, all right, little to the left, little to the right, little to the left.
Casey:
Stop.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Right there.
Casey:
Hold it right there.
Casey:
And we're going to send a text message to get you help.
Casey:
I think this is so cool.
Casey:
And they talked about how difficult it is to transmit data that far... I mean, obviously, to transmit data that far away.
Casey:
And they said they came up with a custom compression algorithm to reduce the size of these text messages by a factor of three.
Casey:
And they were very proud that it takes less than 15 seconds to send a message when you have a clear view of the sky, mind you.
Casey:
But it might be a couple of minutes if you have a really cloudy day or if you're under foliage or something like that.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
That's so ridiculous to me, but also so cool that it only takes 15 seconds to send a message to outer space.
John:
It takes me more than 15 seconds to send text messages to my children when I'm parked outside their high school, which is in a cell phone.
Casey:
I just think this is so cool.
Marco:
And this is also a case where it helps to know a Garmin product that already exists, to put this into context.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
So modern satellite phones are actually very small and very capable.
Marco:
And I know this in part because our friend Underscore told me about them last year, but also in part because the reason I never remembered it was that I live really close to New York City, and a major world nuclear power started a war.
Marco:
And I live on a remote island.
Marco:
And so I thought, hmm, it might be good to have some kind of backup satellite phone in case the one cell tower on our island doesn't work for some reason.
Casey:
Boy, so you got like an iridium phone or whatever it's called?
Marco:
So I got a Garmin InReach Mini 2.
Marco:
And this thing is so small.
Marco:
And this is what this is competing against.
Marco:
So by comparison, this is a device that...
Marco:
it doesn't even have its own like keyboard or anything it pairs to an app on your phone over bluetooth if you want to actually like type custom messages into it or upload contacts or whatever but the thing the main use it's for is just sending sos messages or sending like canned messages to your contacts and and the thing costs like 400 bucks basic service is like 12 bucks a month that's what you're looking at here
Marco:
And this thing, it is pretty small.
Marco:
I mean, it's like it's about the size of like two AirPods Pro cases plus a little nubby antenna that sticks up.
Marco:
And so that's what they're talking about.
Marco:
So the iPhone doesn't have this nubby antenna or the plastic enclosure around it or whatever else.
Marco:
And so this thing can connect to satellites within a very short time as long as you're, again, outside view of the sky.
Marco:
It can connect to satellites.
Marco:
It can send messages without having to do crazy weird compression stuff.
Marco:
It's custom.
Marco:
It just connects directly to them and can send whatever message you want it to send.
Marco:
And it doesn't take 15 seconds to send a message.
Marco:
But it is a dedicated device.
Marco:
And it has this little nub antenna that sticks out of it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
For the iPhone to be talking to probably the same satellites with the same service running them, probably, for the iPhone to do it without an external antenna and without being a dedicated device dedicated solely to this function... And without paying $12 a month, at least for the first two years.
Marco:
And without paying $12 a month for... Yeah, and then there's the big question mark of...
Marco:
Two years free with iPhone 14.
Marco:
Well, then what?
Marco:
Anyway, we'll find out that later.
Marco:
I'm sure they probably haven't worked it out yet.
Marco:
But anyway, so these dedicated devices exist and are small and modern.
Marco:
This has a USB-C charging input.
Marco:
It's a modern device.
Marco:
It already exists, and it's great.
Marco:
And if you pay more than the $12 a month, you can have much more capability on it, too.
Marco:
Unlimited messaging, all this other stuff.
Marco:
Stuff I don't need.
Marco:
But anyway, these devices already exist, and they seem to do fine in the market, and they seem to be pretty decent.
Marco:
Apple, though, is building in a admittedly much worse version, but it'll still do the basics of like get you help if you need it.
Marco:
They're building that into every iPhone and you don't have to activate service to do it.
Marco:
It's just built in and it'll just come with every iPhone 14.
Marco:
That's amazing because, you know, this is the kind of product that you hope to never need.
Marco:
And most people truly never need them.
Marco:
But there might be a time when you do.
Marco:
And if you didn't think ahead to buy one of these things and pay for its 12 bucks a month service forever, you wouldn't have this with you.
Marco:
Now, every iPhone owner with a 14 or greater phone will be able to do this.
Marco:
And so, again, think of like life saving options here.
Marco:
This is an incredible thing to have on every single iPhone over this generation forward.
Marco:
That's amazing.
Marco:
And even if it takes you 15 minutes to send your SOS message, that's still potentially really important and can make a pretty big difference in certain situations than not having any way at all to contact for help or having to walk a few miles to get cell service or whatever.
Marco:
This is a major deal.
Marco:
And so, yes, it is going to be very limited.
Marco:
You're not going to be browsing Instagram over this connection, as we discussed last week.
Marco:
It's not that kind of thing.
Marco:
But if you need help in a pinch, you can get it.
Marco:
And that's fantastic.
Marco:
And that's something that, you know, again, until Android phones catch up to this, that's a really big selling point for Apple.
Marco:
They're just...
Marco:
This is one more thing on the list of like, if you're worried at all about like emergency preparedness or, you know, certain risks, one more reason to stick with Apple.
Marco:
It's a smart move and it's a good move that will probably save lives.
John:
You know, based on your explanation of why you got that Garmin thing, I feel like you're not really embracing your life as a New Yorker because people raised, maybe this is a bygone era, but if you raised the New York metro area during the Cold War, part of the ethos was, well, we don't have to worry about nuclear war because if it starts, we're all dead.
John:
So it's like, don't worry about preparedness or I might need a satellite phone.
John:
Like, look at the map, people.
John:
Draw the big circles for more games.
John:
It's something we don't have to worry about.
John:
It's like, because we're just plain dead.
Marco:
No, but I did look at those circles.
Marco:
I went to, like, the nuke map site.
Marco:
This is a dark time.
Marco:
Like, I went to that and I, you know, you simulate, oh, what if, like, you know, the Tsar Bomba or whatever and...
Marco:
all these terrible outcomes and no it turns out like i'm not guaranteed dead um because i'm pretty far from the city here in westchester i'm screwed at west could be because of the direction of the wind in westchester i'm totally dead you're you're dead there too that's what i'm trying to tell you it'll be slightly worse for you you probably won't be instantly vaporized but you're dead it's like you know how hard it is to get on and off the island in the best of circumstances
John:
And as we established previously, you don't have a boat.
Casey:
No, but he has a driving permit now.
Casey:
That's all he needs.
Casey:
A driving permit and an overpriced truck.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think the island's traffic will defeat him in the best of times.
John:
New York Armageddon is not the best of times.
John:
You are not getting off the island that way.
John:
You are dead.
John:
But that's not to say you should have this phone, because the real reason this is a useful feature is not for that doomsday scenario, but hey, what if there's a hurricane, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
What if there's a flood?
John:
Those things are way more likely to happen, and unfortunately, with climate change, increasingly likely to be endangering all of us.
John:
And so I think this feature is well-timed to potentially save a few extra lives.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, and also, you know, and again, like one of the reasons why I was happy to get this is like, you know, my my family lives upstate in an area with no cell coverage and frequently we are driving to their house.
Marco:
And so we often are driving through rural areas with no cell coverage.
Marco:
If we had, say, a car accident or an emergency, it would be nice to be able to call somebody, to contact somebody for help outside of cell coverage.
Marco:
And like, you know, yeah, while our horrible nuclear war scenarios are hopefully much less likely to happen, people all the time are driving cars through areas of no cell coverage.
Marco:
That's a common everyday occurrence for tons of people.
Marco:
You know, for that kind of scenario, again, this is a major feature.
John:
I do wonder also what the deal was that with, you know, whatever company they're paying to do this for two years worth of service.
John:
Well, first of all, is it two years starting from today or is it two years starting from the time you buy your iPhone?
John:
That is not entirely clear to me.
John:
But anyway, it's, you know.
John:
It's not unlimited free forever.
John:
So there's some other shoe that may or may not drop in the future.
John:
Maybe they'll come back to you just now and say, oh, actually, it's free forever.
John:
But anyway, the feature that they put in there were like how we can press everything and how, you know, like there's essentially a wizard that you go through step by step that asks you the questions that someone on an emergency phone call would ask you.
John:
How many people are there?
John:
Is anybody injured?
John:
You know, like all those type of things.
John:
It's asking you those questions so it can compose a few very short to the point sentences that it will send in one message rather than the back and forth with the 16 minute route trade feed time where you're going, help, 15 seconds.
John:
Who are you?
John:
I'm so-and-so.
John:
How many people are there?
John:
Is anybody injured?
John:
Like that back and forth would take forever.
John:
So it goes through the wizard and it, you know, and it formed, it didn't show you what it forms, but presumably it forms a nice concise description.
John:
And my snarky tweet, which I think is real true things, email clients should have this feature.
John:
There's nothing worse than people who can't write an email and they send an email with one question.
John:
It's like back and forth and back and forth and back.
John:
Just say it all in one sentence.
John:
Here's who I am.
John:
Here's what I want.
John:
Here's all the information you're going to need.
John:
Here's what I'm looking for from you.
John:
It's like, well, if you don't know how to send an email, it's the new version of Apple Mail.
John:
We'll have a wizard that will guide you through the process of sending an email with all the relevant information so you don't have to go back and forth 50 times with a three hour turnaround time each time because everybody's not at their computers.
Marco:
It's the new Clippy.
Marco:
It looks like you're trying to invite somebody to an event.
Marco:
Have you clearly communicated where this event is?
Marco:
When it is?
Marco:
What is required?
John:
Who is invited?
John:
What you should bring with you?
John:
What is the dress code?
John:
What is the rain plan?
John:
Part of that is I do wonder if their deal is for some fixed amount or some maximum amount of data that will get sent.
John:
obviously you know people aren't going to be using this recreationally it doesn't have a use outside of the actual sos scenarios but apple has to do some math and say here's roughly the data that we expect to come from all the iphone users who buy these phones how many of them will ever need to use this when they use it how much data will it take so they do that math and say okay we think it's going to be x amount of data and we're going to pay you y amount of money and part of making that cheaper for apple to pay for everybody's service
John:
is to make everybody send as little as possible now maybe the garmin thing also massively compresses data when it sends it i don't know the deal but that this entire feature seems tuned to be efficient with people's time because time is of the essence when you're in an sos you know emergency type scenario but also efficient with data which probably helps apple's bottom line
Casey:
There's something else interesting that they talked about, and I didn't get a clear understanding of it, but they said, you know, it's free for the first two years, the text message wizard.
Casey:
It's available in November in the U.S.
Casey:
and Canada.
Casey:
But they also said that it can relay both text and audio, which I was very surprised by.
Casey:
And they specifically said relay, and they showed this diagram of your iPhone talking to a satellite, talking to a ground station that receives data from the satellite.
Casey:
Then it is connected to a relay center device.
Casey:
And then that's connected to emergency services.
Casey:
And I'm not entirely clear what this relay center is doing, but the implication that I got from it, at least my limited understanding so far, is that that's run by Apple.
Casey:
Like Apple is establishing these relay centers, or maybe it's just one big relay center somewhere, that's going to do this communication in between the emergency services and whatever satellite connection it is that's talking to the satellites to talk to you.
Marco:
Yeah, my interpretation of that is that there are certain areas of the world where Apple can or where the satellite company or whoever is running this emergency program can just send everything digitally like for dispatching emergency services.
Marco:
And there are certain areas where they can't do that and they have to like call 911 or call the local equivalent of that or whatever or call like a helicopter rescue company or whatever.
Marco:
And so it seems like they have – the Relay Center seems like it's a call center where it's like they get a request from somebody that cannot be dispatched digitally to the local services, and so they dispatch it by phone.
Casey:
I see.
Marco:
But I don't think audio is going from the person on the iPhone all the way to the satellite.
Marco:
I think they're clearly doing some kind of very, very low-bit text encoding, probably some –
Marco:
basically a fancy version of Huffman coding probably that they've worked out with these satellite providers.
Marco:
Like, all right, we're going to spend like seven bits to express this very common thing, you know, plus, you know, a couple of bytes for the location and that's it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All in all, I think this is super cool.
Casey:
You know, when it was spring break this past school year, so, you know, a few months ago now, me and Aaron and the kids, we went to the Shenandoah National Park and we went on some hikes.
Casey:
And for the most part,
Casey:
We were without cell coverage on these hikes.
Casey:
And granted, we were not doing anything particularly challenging, but you never know.
Casey:
You know, it's not called an accident because you did it on purpose.
Casey:
And so you never know what could happen.
Casey:
And to have something like this would be really, really, really cool.
Casey:
So I wouldn't... You know, one could call for help if you really needed it, even in a place that...
Casey:
That, you know, a lot of people go to, you know, Shenandoah National Park is not a like out in the middle of nowhere kind of place.
Casey:
It's just that mountain ranges are really hard to get good cell coverage on.
Casey:
And like if you're a skier, you know, I haven't been skiing in probably a decade, but I know that a lot of ski slopes, at least in my neck of the woods, the cell coverage is terrible.
Casey:
Again, mountains, hard, difficult.
Casey:
Sometimes they are a little bit in the middle of nowhere.
Casey:
And so if you're a skier or snowboarder or what have you, this could be really helpful.
Casey:
What if you're on a boat that's far away from the mainland?
Casey:
You're off the coast of the United States or, you know, Canada, and you're far enough away from the mainland, you don't have cell coverage.
Casey:
Again, that's not an entirely unrealistic thing.
Casey:
Like, regular people go hiking.
Casey:
Regular people go skiing.
Casey:
You know, this isn't just for the lunatic wearing the Apple Watch shirt.
Marco:
uh explorer and and you know going through the mojave desert this is for regular people too and so i'm i'm super into this i think this is great the only kind of odd thing about it is that it only is launching in the u.s and canada at first and they didn't give a timeline for the rest of the world i thought that was kind of interesting for a worldwide service uh or is it or is it not a worldwide service like are they only using certain satellites but i i don't know that that to me is a little bit odd
Casey:
Nonetheless, wrapping up for the 14, they did not raise prices, I don't believe.
Casey:
$800 for the 14 and $900 for the 14+.
Casey:
They never mentioned capacities, I don't believe, on any of these, other than to say that the 14 Pro can go up to a terabyte.
Casey:
But I don't think they ever mentioned, like...
Casey:
what the delineations are, what the base capacities are, anything like that.
Casey:
They did make mention that a lot of carriers do have deals where you can get a whole pile of money off, including up to $800 in the United States, apparently.
Casey:
Pre-orders this coming Friday at 8 a.m.
Casey:
Eastern.
Casey:
Thank you so very much.
Casey:
I really do not miss the 3 a.m.
Casey:
Eastern wake-ups.
Casey:
The 14 will be available on the 16th, so a week from Friday, and then the 14-plus not available until October 7th, which was a little surprising, but not that long from now.
Marco:
And also, as far as we know, besides like screen size and battery size, there appear to be no differences between the 14 and 14 Plus and also between the 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max.
Marco:
It seems like everything is the same between the two sizes of each respective family.
John:
Yep, that's a really good point.
John:
I should also point out what appears to be the exporting of boring Pro colors to the non-Pro line.
Marco:
Yeah, the colors this year, just like the watch, we have fewer options and they're more boring.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't dig that.
Casey:
that.
Casey:
I mean, and I'm also a little bummed because I did the, I'm going to get the actual names wrong, but like forest green two years ago, I did the midnight blue or whatever last year.
Casey:
Now, admittedly, I'm putting, or at least this year, I put my phone in a case and surprisingly, I didn't shatter it.
Casey:
Who'd have thunk it?
Casey:
But anyways, I'm putting these phones in cases anyway, but I don't know.
Casey:
I really like the green.
Casey:
I really like the blue.
Casey:
For me personally, the purple doesn't really do much for me, but obviously there are people who will say the opposite.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I wish there were more vibrant and more interesting colors for all of the phones.
Marco:
I will say the cases this year from Apple have really good orange colors.
Casey:
And they brought back the black leather case, which I've already ordered, actually.
Casey:
So I'm excited about that, too.
Casey:
So I guess we should just talk about the 14 Pro, and this is when JAWS came out.
Casey:
All of us knew that it was either going to be—what was it?
Casey:
John had called it a horizontal eye, which is actually a very good description—
Casey:
What was it?
Casey:
A hole punch and lozenge or whatever.
Casey:
There were several different ways to describe it.
Casey:
And then very recently, in the last month or so, we started hearing rumblings that, oh, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
Whether or not that's the actual sensor situation, it's just going to be one oval, one lozenge, one pill, whatever you would want to call it, that's going to be the sensor area.
Casey:
It's not going to have a circle, a little bit of screen, and then an oval.
Casey:
It's just going to be one big, long oval.
Casey:
And we all thought, OK, that's fine.
Casey:
You know, whatever.
John:
And also right just before the, you know, the latest breaking rumor was, oh, and by the way, it will be lozenge shaped.
John:
And also the those pixels that are in between that they're turning off to make the lozenge shape.
John:
They'll also use them to show stuff.
John:
because those are still screen pixels.
John:
And so they're taking advantage of OLEDs only lighting up the pixels that you need.
John:
And so they showed a bunch of screenshots of saying, hey, the little camera, the little light that comes on to show you that the camera is recording and that the microphone is on, they can put those in the part of screen, you know, between the dot on the eye and the stem on the eye.
John:
And so that's kind of the extent that the rumors got that like basically it's going to be lozenge shaped, but Apple is going to use the pixels there to display information.
John:
And I feel like if we had like two more days of rumors, we would have got the rest of this stuff too.
Casey:
Probably.
Casey:
Um, they showed a demo of this thing and how it's going to work.
Casey:
Holy freaking cow.
Casey:
It looks so cool.
Casey:
I am so flabbergasted that this is what they came up with.
Casey:
Cause I did not expect it to be anywhere near as cool as this.
Casey:
I don't even know how to describe it, but I would like to get out of the way because I'm really enthusiastic about this.
Casey:
Can I just please just take a moment and get out of the way?
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
I've only been in the Apple world since the iPod Nano, but that doesn't really count.
Casey:
I've only been in the Apple computing world since the polycarbonate MacBook.
Casey:
My first iPhone was an iPhone 3GS.
Casey:
I do not have the longevity that John has, or even Marco.
Casey:
Can you gentlemen find a worse name than Dynamic Island?
Casey:
Because holy freaking crap, I hate that name so much.
John:
Oh, it's a great name.
John:
Oh, I hate it.
John:
So when I wrote that tweet, I wrote the tweet about the name.
John:
And the first time I wrote the tweet, it was like, this is one of the worst names Apple has chosen in recent years.
John:
And that's saying something.
John:
But when I was typing it, I'm like, that's not really what I mean.
John:
I don't really mean worst.
John:
So I changed the word worst to strangest because I think that captures it.
John:
It's not an embarrassing name.
John:
It's not a bad name.
John:
But, boy, is it weird.
John:
Like if you're in a brainstorming meeting about what are we going to call this feature and then, you know,
John:
And to describe the feature, basically like the oval, you know, in addition to using the pixels that are between the oval, they also incorporate the oval into the UI.
John:
So the oval grows to show additional information.
John:
This answers the question that I asked last week, hey, what are they, what advantage does this oval has?
John:
Because it seems like it might have disadvantages in that it might extend lower in the screen.
John:
So what advantage does it have?
John:
And the advantage is that it's narrower than even the narrowest notch, which means that it has room to expand because Apple already has UI conventions for when the notch is wider, right?
John:
That's still in there.
John:
So you can make that lozenge wider and display stuff in it.
John:
And you can make a little piece of it pop off and have a little status information.
John:
It's like they've incorporated it into the UI.
John:
Like previously when elements would just come and be displayed on your screen, now if those elements themselves are rounded rectangles, they appear to expand
John:
out of the lozenge or whatever we keep calling it the lozenge but that's not what they call it they call it the dynamic island it's dynamic all right it's it's dynamic like it changes size and shape little pieces come off of it things animate into and out of it and i guess it's an island kind of but like it's you know it doesn't matter no one's ever going to call it the dynamic island but it's just it's one of those names that is too
John:
It's too generic.
John:
Neither of those words is connected in any way with a hardware feature or a software feature.
John:
Dynamic, there's no, like, for example, dock.
John:
Like, if they had used the word dock, it's like, well, we're very familiar with the idea that on a computer screen there can be something called a dock that is this region that is, like, stuck to a screen edge or whatever, right?
John:
But island is not a term of art in the computer world for a UI element that is not stuck to the edge.
John:
And dynamic is just whatever, changing, right?
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
In the grand scheme, it doesn't really matter, but Dynamic Island is one of the most deeply strange names that Apple has ever chosen for a feature.
John:
I don't like it.
Marco:
I actually like it because what they've shown, and we haven't really used this yet, we've just seen the marketing video basically, but what they've shown, it shows a couple of things that I think are really clever design.
Marco:
First of all,
Marco:
It's bouncy and it shows whimsy and it shows personality.
Marco:
And these are things that we have not been able to associate with the Alan Dye era of design yet.
Marco:
It's almost like Alan Dye found his personality finally.
Marco:
And look, you know how much I don't like his work on the Mac especially.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But I will give credit where due, this looks, again, we haven't used it yet, but it looks like really good design because it's taking this space that is basically a dead zone.
Marco:
You have these two sensors, you have a few pixels between them, and then you have the status bar around them.
Marco:
And you have this little gap above it that you can't do much with.
Marco:
And the status bar has been kind of crowded in recent years and has had a lot of stuff coming in and out of it as different versions of iOS add more and more features to it, as the world around it gets more complicated, and as the hardware around it changes to have more or less space for it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
what they've done here with the dynamic island which i'm not it that's i don't think it's as bad a name as you think it is what they've done here is they've taken a a hardware downside of well you have the hole in the screen now from these sensors right they've taken this hardware downside and they've turned it into a feature instead of a bug and they've given it personality and utility
Marco:
And they've integrated a lot of stuff into it that used to either be part of the control center screen or was kind of buried in different other parts of the status bar area or in different modes.
Marco:
And by the way, the whole live activity integration thing where developers don't have access to this yet, but the live activities API announced this summer, which is coming later this fall and some other update, probably 16.1.
Marco:
That is going to give us this kind of live widget thing for apps to use that
Marco:
And that's, and you know, the dynamic Island is going to be a place you can have a live activity running all the time.
Marco:
So it's almost like you're getting some of the benefits of split screen multitasking on a device that doesn't have room for it.
Marco:
And that's amazing.
Marco:
And so they, I actually really like this so far.
Marco:
The only downside, a few people on Twitter were pointing out that might be a downside is that the very top edge of your phone is the hardest part of your phone to reach.
Marco:
If you're using the phone one handed and
Marco:
so that that could be a bit of a downside but for the most part other than that this looks like it could be a huge home run i love that it's fun looking i love that it is taking a hardware downside and making a feature out of it and i love that the rumor mill had absolutely no idea this was coming because all they knew was the positioning of the sensors and not at all any of the software around it and the fact that it would even be shown as one unified thing until like two seconds ago
Marco:
So this I'm very excited about this.
Marco:
I think this is this could be one of those things that once you're accustomed to it, you're like and you have to like, you know, use someone else's maybe non pro phone or use an older phone.
Marco:
You're going to be like, oh, my God, I'm missing that.
Marco:
It's it's so bad without that.
Marco:
Why is your notch all black and bigger and stuck to the top?
Marco:
Like you're going to instantly get used to this and instantly take it for granted.
Marco:
And I think it has a lot of potential and I think it could be really cool.
John:
So the unanswered question still is, why isn't it stuck to the top, right?
John:
That's wasted space as far as I'm concerned.
John:
I know it looks better aesthetically, but there's no reason that the notch couldn't have done everything that this thing does.
John:
What we're essentially celebrating here is the ability to have more information in the status bar that has a third-party angle integration with it, and that the implementation of which has a little bit of whimsy with the blobs coming off and everything.
John:
the notch could have totally done that.
John:
The problem with the notch was it was already pretty wide, especially the first notch.
John:
So there's really not a lot of room for you to, you know, there was too much of it was not pixels, right?
John:
And so you really had limited ability to do that.
John:
And, you know, the second was that I guess no one had just thought of this.
John:
Like they were hesitant to put things in the status force.
John:
And then when they decided to do this, they knew they were going to do the hole punch and so on and so forth.
John:
They probably talked about this.
John:
Maybe there's a packaging reason why this can't be up at the top, but this, and I still haven't seen a good measurement in this, but like,
John:
We want more room for our content below the part where the notch or the lozenge is, right?
John:
And so those pixels above the lozenge are not particularly valuable to the user.
John:
They would be more valuable if they were on the other side of it, but then it wouldn't be a lozenge anymore.
John:
So I can't tell if this was done for aesthetic reasons, right?
John:
Because it does look nice to have a lozenge as opposed to something stuck to it.
John:
They could have just made it.
John:
Here's the new narrow dynamic notch, right?
John:
But then Apple never called it.
John:
Did they ever call it the notch?
Marco:
I forget what they called it.
Marco:
They called it the sensor housing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It had a bad name, right?
John:
So, you know, this is a culmination of a lot of good ideas, none of which I think are specifically tied to a thing that, you know, goes down.
John:
And the other thing about it is, like, when they get to the point where they don't have to have any of this crap, everything's underneath the screen, which they would love to go towards...
John:
it will still behoove them to essentially have a menu bar slash status bar that has all these dynamic features.
John:
But when they do that, it's not going to be down from the top.
John:
It'll be jammed right up into the top because when it's all screen, why would you leave that space?
John:
You're just burning pixels that are no good to anyone.
John:
So I really hope when they go full screen and everything's under the screen and however many years it takes to do that, that they continue all of these APIs, the live activities and everything, continue to let third-party developers put information in there.
John:
Because when that's all pixels, you'll be able to put so much more info.
John:
Because right now, you can't put anything in the parts that don't have pixels.
John:
Like the sensors are there.
John:
When that is all pixels, there'll be so much more room for essentially...
John:
user configurable always visible information at the top of your phone kind of in the same way where they you know made the menu bar bigger on the mac and that you know those pixels are like bonus pixels i think we should start thinking about the top part of our phones as bonus pixels at some point in the future when those are all our pixels but for now there's a giant hole in our phone and there's a bunch of pixels above that that i think are mostly there just to look nice which is kind of a shame
Marco:
But that's a legitimate use.
Marco:
If those pixels weren't there, I'm guessing, you speculated a few minutes ago, that chances are the housing is down from the top for a reason.
Marco:
I'm guessing whatever hoops they had to jump through to get the notch to be smaller, they still couldn't necessarily put everything as close to the edge to make it higher up.
John:
yeah and if that's the case i mean if that's the case it kind of i find it suspicious that the amount that had to be down is this perfect aesthetically pleasing amount but maybe they just couldn't get it to the top yeah and and maybe they edged it down a little bit because they couldn't get all the way to the top to make it look more aesthetically pleasing but
Marco:
you know, if you think about like the design of the dynamic island, you know, if the way they show it is like, you know, it has these skinny modes where it stays its regular height, but then, you know, something like a notification or the face ID, you know, little activity blob that it can, it expands,
Marco:
downward and and sometimes uh horizontally as well now if you think about if that was pinned to the top of the screen that would look really crappy it would not look right you just have to have a different animation like because when it's not it would have to it wouldn't be rounded on both sides it wouldn't just be the large and it's jammed up the top
John:
the edge would be the notch remember how excited they were about the curves on the notch they were like look at these look at these curves that we made for the notch this little s curve is like specially designed and we worked really hard on it they're so proud of that it would have to be a different animation but they could still animate like a lot of the things they've chosen to do like existing features now animate out of the lozenge i keep not calling that but tough luck existing features animate out of the lozenge
John:
There's no reason for them to animate out of the lozenge other than just uniformity and niceness.
John:
It's like, well, the lozenge is there and we're about to show a big black rounded rectangle at the top of your screen.
John:
Might as well animate it.
John:
It didn't animate out of lozenge before.
John:
Before it just came down from the top or appeared out of nowhere.
John:
Now that the lozenge is there, we can animate out of it.
John:
So if it wasn't a lozenge, but was instead a notch, it would animate out of the notch, but in a different way than animating out of the lozenge.
John:
Like maybe it would ooze out or I don't know.
John:
There's lots of things you can do.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm just, again, like Marco said several times, we haven't used this yet.
Casey:
Maybe it's garbage.
Casey:
But from the marketing video we saw, I think this looks so freaking cool.
Casey:
And I am so excited to try this.
Casey:
Other than that, there isn't that much until we get to the camera, though, right?
Casey:
And the camera, well, let's wait on the camera.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Let's talk about the A16.
Casey:
Seems like it's largely more of the same, or am I wrong about that?
Marco:
So it's a 4nm chip, which I think is... This is the first one, I believe.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
Marco:
Otherwise, it seems like a fairly incremental update.
Marco:
It still has the same core layout.
Marco:
They say performance cores are faster.
Marco:
They didn't say it by how much.
Marco:
And 20% lower power compared to A15.
Marco:
But then, again, they were playing a few little games with how they were expressing comparisons of performance here.
Marco:
Because they were like, well...
Marco:
Actually, you know, our chip from, you know, three years ago or whatever is better than the competition.
Marco:
And here's how much faster the A16 is than that or than the competition, not compared to last year's chip.
Marco:
So it sounds like it's not a huge improvement over the A15, but it's still, you know, in absolute terms, these are all great chips, Brent.
Marco:
But, you know, in relative terms, I think this is probably a pretty incremental update.
John:
When they were doing the core comparisons for power, if they weren't doing the whole SoC, I do have to wonder if, when we talk about the camera, the image processing that handles those 48 megapixels, maybe does that subvert the power usage gain from the power cores that are more efficient?
John:
Because I have a hard time believing that Apple wouldn't have spent basically all of the power budget on
John:
computational features especially with all the features that they are touting related to this camera and especially just with the pure amount of pixels that it's processing compared to even though it does pixel binning they made it a point to say that lots of their new steps in the photonic engine work on uncompressed data and work on all pixels and you know we'll get to the camera in a second and there are there is situations where they do have 48 megapixels and then they showed in the soc our new image engine and blah blah blah and i have to think that stuff
John:
is going to eat up some of their power budget.
Marco:
One thing they added that I think is new with the A16, they called out that there's a new section of it called the display engine.
Marco:
And they said this drives parts of the always-on display situation, as well as some, quote, advanced anti-aliasing for the dynamic island.
Marco:
So that's interesting.
Marco:
I'm not sure exactly.
Marco:
I mean, I know what anti-aliasing is.
Marco:
I'm not sure exactly what that all means relative to what the GPU was doing.
Marco:
But it seems like it might be some kind of additional GPU accelerator or maybe a lower power GPU they can keep active all the time.
John:
I mean, they did make a point of how proud they were of the anti-aliasing around the original notch, but I imagine that wasn't due to a second execution unit.
John:
But yeah, the always on screen and anything having to do with that, especially since things that can happen on the always on screen and maybe you can have animations out of the notch in that situation.
John:
You don't want to power up the GPU to make that happen, but you do need something to do all of the, you know, compositing and everything.
John:
So maybe the display engine handles those scenarios.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's most likely or some kind of like fancy display driver that is needed to do some of this stuff.
Marco:
But either way, it seems like it's like it's something that is probably lower power than having a GPU running all the time.
Casey:
And speaking of the display, I accidentally jumped right over that.
Casey:
So there's new pro display.
Casey:
Marco, you noted earlier that it is ever so slightly bigger than the 13 pro.
Casey:
But still, 6.1 and 6.7 inches, 460 points per inch.
Casey:
Thinner borders, peak HDR of 1,600 nits, which is the same as your hilariously overpriced monitors.
John:
Cheaper than a Panerai.
John:
That's true.
John:
It's also the same as the MacBook Pros.
Casey:
They also made mention, apparently there's 2,000 nits in sunshine for 14 freaking nanoseconds before it thermally throttles itself, I'm quite sure.
Casey:
But hey, at least for those 14 seconds, it'll be really freaking easy to see.
Marco:
Yeah, this was weird.
Marco:
It was like, all right, we have 1600 nit peak HDR brightness, which does not mean peak brightness in regular usage.
Marco:
and 2000 nits outdoors sometimes unspecified as to like when that can happen it only outdoors oh is that hdr only it or can that show my email at 2000 nits like i don't know the light sensor is activating that that's what i assume like when it senses that it's in full sunlight and if it's like the winter uh and then it will go up at 2000 nits
John:
uh so they did make mention i think in the plane 14 uh some uh cooling advances or something they didn't dive into that so i'm guessing there's no vapor chamber hiding in there but i believe they did actually make a mention of superior cooling we'll see how this works out the four nanometer chip might help um you know like maybe they've learned some lessons from the 13 in terms of uh cooling and
John:
But they didn't make any bold claims about the ability to withstand direct sunlight for longer or whatever.
John:
So we'll just have to get the units and see how it works.
Marco:
That being said, I mean, like I wouldn't rule out vapor chamber stuff yet until we have a teardown because that's exactly the kind of thing they would not really feel worth mentioning.
John:
It depends.
John:
Sometimes they do dive into that, but maybe there wouldn't be time to go into it.
John:
It seems like something they would brag about, but we'll see what's going on inside these things.
John:
Oh, and Casey said that the, you know, as Marco pointed out, the screen is slightly bigger.
John:
I just want to quantify that so people know, right?
John:
So the 13 Pro was 1170.
John:
These are pixels, right?
John:
1170 pixels wide.
John:
The new one is 1179.
John:
So you get
John:
nine additional pixels, right?
John:
So they're very close.
Casey:
Well, and then in height, it's also a little bit different too.
Marco:
Yeah, but we're talking like, you know, a few points.
Marco:
24 pixels or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, we're not talking much.
John:
But it is interesting that it is different.
John:
I mean, this kind of goes to show that when Apple is designing these things, it is like...
John:
I saw someone complain, oh, when are they going to ever change the phone?
John:
It's the same design.
John:
Kind of like how the watch is, quote-unquote, the same design, setting aside the Ultra that is just kind of this rounded thing on your wrist.
John:
It does change in subtle ways.
John:
The dimensions change, right?
John:
And when the dimensions change, the screens change.
John:
It does...
John:
move around a little bit and it all has to do with like everything that goes into this those big cameras whatever sensors they had to put in for the front facing thing the lack of a sim tray the size of the battery they want the motherboard the a16 like they they're not going to constrain themselves to say this has to be down to the millimeter the same size as the 13 pro and it's not it is close because they don't want to make a differently sized product but they're
John:
you know it's it's a it's a balance between all the things that has to go into this and so you end up with a screen that is not exactly the same size but it's almost and this is a different different screen it has higher peak brightness it has the cutout in it like there's probably constraints with that so i feel like every piece of this product is designed to come together uh to be a whole and yes it does look just like the other one because it's got flat sides and everything but
John:
It is itself like, you know, it's kind of like when the car manufacturers want to brag, like there's a new 911, right?
John:
That isn't like a new 911.
John:
It looks just like the old 911.
John:
It's like, well, how many parts are shared between the old 911 and the new 911?
John:
I would imagine that there are way fewer parts shared between the 14 Pro and the 13 Pro than between any two successive generations of 911s.
John:
Yes, even though it looks the same, the cameras are different, the SoC different, the motherboard is different, the screen is different.
John:
Even the band of stainless steel that's around the outside, where all the little antenna lines, I would imagine almost every part, maybe not the Taptic Engine, but almost every part in this thing is different.
John:
Even though you look at it and say, oh, it's the same phone.
John:
It's not really, it's just not outwardly different.
John:
And for people asking when are they going to come up with a...
John:
new phone we're still waiting for the periscope cameras which will flatten that back out uh maybe next year and the usbc port maybe next year yes we did i i you i realized just now as you were talking about this we totally skipped talking about the always on display which is a pretty major feature we talked about it we talked about it last week but i think the the modifier some i complained about is last because
John:
It's like, oh, it's going to be so limited.
John:
You can only put certain things on there and they're going to be monitor prone.
John:
People want to see a picture of their kids.
John:
And Apple's like, guess what?
John:
Picture of your kid.
John:
And we adjust it so the skin tone still look good.
John:
Like it's there.
John:
They're lighting up so many pixels.
John:
They're not lighting them up that much, but they're like, we're going to light up the whole back of the phone.
John:
You'll be able to see your entire wallpaper lock screen thing.
John:
And then on top of that,
John:
We'll put, you know, the time and other things like that.
John:
And I was very surprised by that, and I think that will make a lot of people happy.
Marco:
Yeah, that I would never, I mean, I didn't guess, I would never have guessed that they would have basically full color, full screen, always on, just lower brightness.
Marco:
And, you know, again, this kind of remains to be seen, like, how low brightness is it?
Marco:
And, you know, is there a meaningful difference in battery life, for instance, if you pick an all black wallpaper for your lock screen?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
probably but you know whether it matters to you is a different story or whether you know whether it's a large percentage of battery life is a different story we don't know that yet but um this that surprised me greatly and i'm and you know i'm i'm glad they did it in the sense that it will be overall more capable and more flexible this way um and yeah time will tell and you know whether whether you actually want to put a picture of a sunset or whatever on there or your kid's face or whatever but um i
Marco:
I will say I will kind of miss my weather face if I end up having to go for like a black background because I've been using the weather one all summer with iOS 16 betas and it's been fantastic.
Marco:
But I probably won't have the animated rain if it's in the dim mode.
John:
Do you get to pick a different picture?
John:
Is this like a yet another picture or does it have to be the same as your lock screen?
Casey:
i'll see if the simulator can do it keep going i'll see let me see hold down to custom and then while while marco's working on that marco you also realized that the phones keep getting heavier the 12 pro 189 grams the 13 pro 204 grams the 14 pro 206 grams only two more grams than the 13 pro but it'll be okay with the two grams come on
Marco:
By the way, it seems like there's not a second setting for like the dim wallpaper versus the locked wallpaper.
Marco:
It seems like it's the same setting.
John:
Yeah, the big jump from 189 to 204, you could notice that.
John:
Marco's not going to notice the two gram difference.
Marco:
No, it's still going to feel like a phone that's way heavier than I want it to be, but it's not yet.
Marco:
I'm not going to notice it being heavier than the 13.
John:
Certainly not getting lighter anyway.
Marco:
No, which is a shame.
Marco:
And we didn't even mention, you know, the Mini's gone, which...
Marco:
is i think a shame and i and as awesome as all these phones are they're all big and most of them are very heavy and and that's that's not great i i wish they would continue the small line and and we'll see what happens with the mini that's that discussion is for another day though
Casey:
Okay, let's talk camera.
Casey:
So the predictions are true, 48 megapixel.
Casey:
But generally speaking, they're doing the whole quad pixel, pixel binning thing that we talked about either last week, the week before.
Casey:
The sensor is 65% bigger.
Casey:
There's also a 2x telephoto option.
Casey:
You're welcome, Marco Arment.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
well asterisk asterisk so the way this works is it uses the middle 12 pixels of one of the cameras i didn't catch which one the main okay from the main camera to do a full size full resolution 2x photo um which is which is pretty neat and in practice we'll see if it's good it's still going to be better than the any 2x camera apple has ever shipped unfortunately
Marco:
i know that's that's so so yeah so there's good news and bad news the bad news is that not only is there still no 2x camera it's still 3x but also the 3x camera seems to have had no changes whatsoever to it at least in the hardware you know that it is getting the new improved um processing pipeline in the software um and but the the 3x hardware appears to be unchanged that's something that i've been thinking about looking at these cameras like the you got the you know the
John:
the main camera, the ultra wide, the, the three X, right?
John:
Why do our, why, why did we get to this point where cameras, you know, phones used to have, you know, zero, then one camera, but why do we have multiple cameras on the back of our phone?
John:
Well, it's because one camera can't do the job that we want the phones to do.
John:
So it's like we have, you know, an interchangeable lens camera, but instead of interchangeable lens, it's like three complete cameras.
John:
Cause they all have their own sensors behind them.
John:
Right.
And,
John:
It would be, and then when you do this, like, okay, you have a budget.
John:
Okay, well, where are we going to spend our money?
John:
Well, it makes sense to spend most of it on the main camera.
John:
It's 48 megapixels.
John:
Why does the 3X one not get better?
John:
Is there no better 3X camera?
John:
Well, there is, but there's a price that you have to try to aim for, right?
John:
You can't make every camera the best camera unless you're going to make a whole new class of phone that's like the iPhone Ultra.
John:
But ideally, what we would prefer is to just have one really good camera that can cover a reasonable range.
John:
uh you know 1x to 3x 0.5 to 3x that's a thing you could do pretty easily with with a real camera with a real lens but on the back of the phone not so much and i don't think the periscope camera is going to help with that at all i don't think you're going to see a mechanical moving element to doing optical zooms inside the thing at least not in the very first periscope camera it's mostly just going to help get rid of the bump but it is kind of
John:
an oddity of technology that the solution to the problem of camera versatility versatility and start smartphones was let's just keep adding more cameras and when you do that there's always going to be the favorite camera the main camera and then the lesser cameras and it really we're getting into a situation now where the main camera is so much better than for example the 3x camera
John:
that when it comes time to do 2x no one's asking the 3x camera to help you're like oh 3x camera you're so adorable you stay over there let the main camera handle it believable crop off half my pixels and i'll still take a better picture than you because you haven't changed since last year just sit there i know you've got a nice 3x obstacle thing you know you you can get that 3x you can do that extra reach but
John:
don't worry about 2x we'll handle it for you and then the ultra wide similar yes you have the glass that gives you the big fish eye view but we're not going to ask you to do anything you're just for big group shots ultra wide and you can do macro too i guess right it's such a weird situation such a weird technologically compromised situation that i hope i live long enough to see resolved into a situation where there's just one really good camera on the back of my phone uh we'll tune in 10 years and we'll revisit that fantasy yeah
Marco:
yeah and and the ultra wide uh did get optically better um it it actually and all of them actually have smaller uh apertures in absolute terms but they have bigger the ultra wide and the uh main have bigger sensors now so that kind of balances it out in some ways um but yeah so the the ultra wide now has a bigger sensor um
Marco:
And the ultra wide, I believe, oh no, they said the front camera has variable focus now, which I believe the front camera was always fixed focus before.
Marco:
Front cameras on 14 and 14 Pro are now variable focus, which should be, you know, that's usually a significant jump in quality.
Marco:
But yeah, so going back to the big camera, what will be interesting to see is like how much does this new quad pixel arrangement with the Bayer color filters, how much does this impact actual results that we get?
Marco:
It's probably – I would imagine the –
Marco:
larger total sensor size is probably going to be much more responsible for quality increases than the quad pixel arrangement and the quad pixel arrangement might only be very useful in like certain lighting conditions probably good lighting conditions so we'll see how much it actually matters i think ultimately though what it's doing is
Marco:
It's giving the camera system more options and more data so it can better adapt to different circumstances, different light levels and things like that, maybe different HDR needs, whatever it is.
Marco:
There's a lot of things you can do with having the quad bear arrangement with using the pixels a little bit differently depending on what you're shooting and what the conditions are.
Marco:
Ultimately, I don't expect this to be... If you're expecting this to compete with a 48 megapixel Sony A7R, it's not going to do that.
Marco:
It's a different thing.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
it will give really great results in all likelihood like fantastic results at 12 megapixels most of the time and yeah the 48 megapixels are available in pro raw for apps that use pro raw but that's i think going to be a fairly you know specialized audience of power users and photographers that most of us are never going to see that kind of resolution but we're going to see better quality 12 megapixel photos from this and
Marco:
That, I think, is very, very good for a year-over-year increase.
Marco:
The only other thing that I thought was interesting and gave me a little bit of pause is that they changed the focal length of the main camera.
Marco:
It's down to 24mm equivalent.
Marco:
And normally, I believe most recent iPhones and most iPhones ever have been closer to 28 millimeter focal length equivalent.
Marco:
So it's going to be very slightly wider zoomed out than it was before.
Marco:
And I don't think this is going to be a major thing that will massively impact anything.
Marco:
But I think you'll notice.
Marco:
I think people will notice like, oh, my field of view is a little bit wider than it was before.
Marco:
And so it's interesting.
John:
I think that might be a feature because I think that's a, you know, I know they call that camera the wide camera, but what are people taking pictures of with their iPhones?
John:
Groups of people is probably a very popular subject for photography.
John:
And you don't want to have to ever switch off that main camera if you can possibly help it.
John:
If you're as a group of people and you really have space constraints, yeah, you can go ultra wide.
John:
But if you've ever done that, you know that the people at the edge of that picture look all distorted, right?
John:
Because it's ultra wide.
John:
It's like a fisheye type thing.
John:
The people on the edges of the frame are not going to look the way they look in real life.
John:
So giving a little bit more of a wide angle in situations where you can walk back one or two steps without falling off a cliff, I think 24 is a reasonable...
Marco:
reasonable uh what do you call it focal length for for the main camera even though we may be used to 28 or whatever yeah so overall this i am extremely looking forward to this phone but but frankly i the the camera is almost incidental like of course i'm gonna get a better camera with a new phone i'm i'm actually most excited with this phone about the display and notch changes like that to me is what i really want to experience here like i i want to play with the
Marco:
always on display i want to play with the dynamic island uh like this is all stuff i'm very excited about and so i really give them credit that they were able to cram in all this other amazing stuff to this phone that in a year that the camera also got what appears to be a pretty major upgrade uh that it isn't even necessarily the thing that we talked about first like this and and that we're most excited about necessarily that's pretty awesome
John:
I'm still most excited about the camera like I actually am excited about the 48 megapixel raw thing just because I do tend to take pictures of quote unquote landscapes even if it's just around my neighborhood or whatever in very bright sunlight I would love to see what you can get out of this because that's like an ideal scenario you're
John:
outside it's super bright sun you can actually use those 48 megapixels it's kind of a shame that it seems like raw is the only way to do i mean i guess third-party camera apps can do whatever they want but it seemed like what they were saying is hey you want a 48 megapixel image out of the apple camera app you have to use pro raw right
John:
And obviously you need a lot of light, but I'm excited to try that.
John:
I'm kind of disappointed that the main camera is just leaving the other cameras in the dust because I do use the other cameras from time to time.
John:
And I hate knowing that I'm going to be stepping down that far in quality.
John:
And it's not the megapixels, it's the size of the sensor.
John:
Like again, if you look at the outside, it's three little, you know, stovetop burners, right?
John:
And the circles are all the same size.
John:
Remove those circles.
John:
If you could see the sensors under there, those cameras would look very different from each other, right?
John:
that the main camera sensor is much bigger than the other ones and that makes a big difference but yeah i'm mostly excited about the cameras i mean again i'm coming from an 11 pro so i've already been jealous of my wife's 13 pro and her camera and if i'm gonna suffer this gigantic camera mesa i want to get cool pictures out of it so i'm looking looking forward to that what i'm not looking forward to is being able to find a case that gives me a bare bottom on my 14 pro
Marco:
Yeah, the case situation, every year it resets because something changes dimensions slightly, and so I have to wait and see what's going to be my preferred clear or leather or silicone option.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I think I'm going to get the Apple clear case to start, but we'll see.
Marco:
I love the orange leather look, but, you know, leather is not super compatible with my lifestyle on this dynamic island, which involves a lot of water at various times.
John:
It's not just that the phones change from year to year.
John:
It's that for me, at least personally, I haven't been able to find a vendor that from year to year I can rely on to make a case ever since Apple started wrapping the bottom.
John:
Like it's Olexar.
John:
It's my preferred brand.
John:
I'm going to go see what they have.
John:
I don't know if they're even going to make a bare bottom case for the 14 Pro.
John:
So maybe I have to look for another one.
John:
Like I bought multiple cases for my 11 Pro.
John:
I'm going to end up probably buying multiple cases for this one unless like all XR literally has the same case, but in the 14 Pro.
John:
And Marco, you were like four cases for your last phone trying to find the one that you want.
John:
because you know we can't rely on oh every year i'm just going to buy the x brand case for my phone because i know from year to year it'll be the same even if you're like oh i'm an otterbox devotee i buy otterbox cases for all my kids because they're you know sturdy and they protect the phones from year to year one otterbox case to another they change the design in all sorts of ways ways that you know there's there's like no no brand loyalty no product loyalty no like if you find a good case for your current phone
John:
Don't assume that means that for your next phone, you'll be able to find anything like that case because that same vendor for the next phone may decide, oh, we've changed our mind and now it looks like this.
John:
It's kind of annoying.
Casey:
Finally, the 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max.
Casey:
Also no price changes, much to our surprise.
Casey:
$1,000 for the 14 Pro, $1,100 for the Pro Max.
Casey:
You pre-order this coming Friday, available a week from Friday.
Marco:
Honestly, that was a surprise to me.
Marco:
Everyone was saying they were going to raise prices by $100 or something.
Marco:
And modern Apple with a Pro phone that's being ever more separated from the non-Pro versions...
Marco:
I would have expected a price raise.
Marco:
I did expect a price raise.
Marco:
So the fact that the prices stay the same, I consider a win.
Marco:
I mean, I've heard it's kind of rough like in Europe where we have some currency fluctuation issues that are making their prices even more egregious than usual.
Marco:
But yeah, for us here in the US, it's been pretty good.
John:
Oh, and no 8K video, right?
Marco:
No, I think they definitely would have mentioned that if that was there.
John:
One of the rumors, they did make a chance to talk about that cinema mode thing.
John:
Oh, now you can do that cinema mode in 4K.
John:
Okay, all right.
John:
That's good.
Marco:
I'm glad they didn't lean too far into that whole thing because, yeah, as I was mentioning last week, I'm not a filmmaker and I think most people just want the regular features to work really well and that's what they do.
John:
Yeah, and speaking of the regular features working well on the camera and everything, this is the thing, like we went through the part of like, oh, you know, 2x better low light performance than the photonic engine or whatever.
John:
Apple itself never tries to quantify that, right?
John:
Even though it seems like they're quantifying it, oh, 2x, that's a quantity, right?
John:
It's not a qualitative measurement.
John:
We're not telling you it's like much cooler or awesome.
John:
We're saying it's twice and two is a number.
John:
But what does that mean?
John:
Like, what is your testing scenario?
John:
2x better low light performance.
John:
So it's like, okay, well, then given this image and this amount of light and this, they never do that.
John:
They never go through like, here's a test pattern.
John:
Here's a measured amount of light.
John:
They just don't do that, right?
John:
And in practice, when you look at like,
John:
competitive you know camera comparisons online here's the latest google pixel here's the latest iphone and they try to take identical pictures and identical lighting with the cameras all up on tripods and they do a lot of things and what you learn is they show those pictures to people it's subjective which one you know they unless you're doing a literal test pattern and you're measuring like the the values with like a pixel meter or whatever
John:
When you take pictures of real subjects, there's so much processing going on face detection, lighting up people's faces, HDR, like it's, you know, the camera understands in various ways what it's taking a picture of and they all do and they all use that information to process the pixels in a certain way.
John:
And so when they say twice as, you know, twice as good low light performance, does that mean if I took a picture with a 13 Pro and a picture with the 14 Pro of the same person in the same lighting, I would think one is twice as good as the other one?
John:
No, I might even think the 13 Pro looks better if I agree with its decisions that the computational engine made more than the other one.
John:
So that's why these camera comparisons are so tough, right?
John:
When...
John:
what you're looking at is does this picture look better than you to you than that one does and that is much harder to measure than anything sort of you know any sort of objective benchmark measurements and an apple like when they show off their cameras they never show test patterns they show people right they show landscapes they show beautiful pictures and i look at those beautiful pictures and like these are beautiful pictures but what is this going to mean in my life when i'm taking a picture of my dog walking in the woods or whatever
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
I'm really excited for the camera.
Casey:
I'm really excited for the lozenge, which I will never refer to as a stupid dynamic.
Marco:
I hate that name so much.
Casey:
I'm really excited for all of this.
Marco:
Isn't a volcano a dynamic island?
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
It is.
John:
Not all volcanoes are islands, though.
Casey:
That's also true.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
Anyways, oh, and iOS 16 released on Monday.
Casey:
And so that's pretty cool too.
Casey:
But yeah, this was a really impressive event.
Casey:
I already bought watches.
Casey:
I want to buy AirPods, but I'm resisting and I will be buying phones on Friday.
Casey:
Marco, what are you doing?
Marco:
um i'm gonna as far as i know right now i'm gonna skip the watch um okay first one ever uh and uh i'm going to uh get the 14 pro and airpods pro 2 i am so looking forward to both of those things what's tiffin for
John:
uh most likely 14 pro max and also airpods pro nice john you said tina's year this year right no it's my year oh i'm sorry that's right you said that earlier my bad so tina already ordered her uh her new watch um i think it's just gonna end up looking the same as her old watch but she likes the temperature sensor thing and the ovulation tracking or whatever so she's getting that again not that we're trying to have another kid but it's uh you know it's
John:
a useful thing i'm getting this phone when it is available i'm probably just going to get a boring black one with the same 256 gigs and all that other good stuff and then i'm going to begin my long journey of trying to find a case for it and trying not to break it while i look i may end up doing what i did last year which is buy an interim apple silicone case and then get annoyed by the lip and then eventually if all xr makes a 14 pro i'll get that one if not i'll try to find another one i'm not i'm not looking forward to that usually it's like oh i'm excited i'm getting a new phone but i'm like oh
John:
The case situation.
John:
I don't like that being an ordeal, but it's going to be an ordeal.
John:
But anyway, that's my plan.
Casey:
Yeah, I should revise my earlier statement.
Casey:
I plan to get either 256 or 512.
Casey:
I'm on the fence on that.
Casey:
And I will also be doing Space Black because I'm boring.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think you two are going to do?
Marco:
256 for me 512 for tiff and uh i'm doing i think the white or the you know the quote silver uh because i i frankly i don't like any of the colors um the purple i think is cool if if if purple's like your color um it did look a little bit dark and drab in some of the people's photos from the media area like it didn't look super vibrant um but it's it's not really my color to begin with and it just looks very dark to me so
Marco:
I'm going to say farewell to my light blue one I've had this past year and probably just get the white one, which will at least then broaden my case options because you can put that in anything and it will look fine.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
John, going back a half step, I should mention that one of the options for the last couple of years for AppleCare is...
Casey:
is to do $10 a month until you decide to cancel it.
Casey:
Like you can cancel it whenever you want.
Casey:
And something you might want to think about is rather than dropping 40 bucks or whatever on an Apple silicone case, you could just do AppleCare for like a month or two until you get a case that you like and then cancel it and you're out less than the cost of a temporary case.
John:
I always just get the two-year AppleCare because I'm on a two-year phone plan.
John:
So I prepay for two years.
John:
I want the AppleCare, if only as a way to prevent me from ever breaking my phone, which so far it's been working.
John:
So money well spent.
John:
The second I don't pay for that AppleCare, I'm breaking my phone.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, I'm really looking forward to it.
Casey:
I am looking forward to getting all of the toys.
Casey:
I am jealous of all the AirPods Pro that are happening, but I'm super stoked about my Series 8 that's coming.
Casey:
And hopefully all of you will have good luck with ordering your iPhone 14 or 14 Pros.
Casey:
And after you do that, or perhaps even before, stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
Now's a good time.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Memberful, and Collide.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now that the show is over, it's time to give to St.
John:
Jude's.
John:
They're funding research, curing diseases.
Marco:
Every year you get a new iPhone.
Casey:
Now think about the good you'll do when you're funding research for childhood diseases.
Casey:
Our friends at Relay organize this annually.
Casey:
It's time to do your part and give down
Casey:
Directly to S-T-J-U-D-E-C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N-S-R-E-S-E-A-R-H-C-H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L Be generous They fund the research They're curing diseases Fund the research The link is in the show notes now
John:
We have a brief moment to appreciate slash complain about exactly how much stuff leaked about this.
John:
Like, granted, a lot of it leaks in the last second, but we got the new watch design.
John:
We got all the features of the phone except for some of the Dynamic Island stuff.
John:
Like, the AirPods, most of that stuff leaked except for a couple of minor things.
John:
Like, there was no product that people didn't expect.
John:
It was just...
John:
the apple is just not like especially like with the cad files for the watch leaking yeah i don't understand the mechanism by which that information is going to leak but it doesn't leak until like the day before it's almost like someone that has the info and is holding it until like they think they're not going to be prosecuted because well it's the day before apple's not going to care right
John:
but boy like and i i thought about like i maybe i shouldn't look at the watch pictures because maybe i want to be surprised but i gave in to temptation just like marco did and we all looked at the pictures and they were accurate and there's the product like are we ever going to be surprised by anything other than a mac pro because no one leaks that because nobody cares
Marco:
I think it's high volume stuff, like the highest volume stuff, the iPhone.
Marco:
Hardware components tend to leak, especially displays tend to leak really early on.
Marco:
And so the rumor of there being a larger, rugged Apple Watch...
Marco:
that's like a two-year-old yeah it's like it's been there a while um you know we we knew a while ago all the different you know all the new sizes of the iphone 14 that there wouldn't be a mini that there would be a big regular one like all of that we we had such strong rumors on we knew the airpod pro with the speaker and the loop and the case and you know and the fact they were going to look basically the same design wise and higher bandwidth it's just yeah everything
Marco:
That's why I am more excited by the features that are not apparent from basic component leaks.
Marco:
So things like the dynamic volcano island, things like the satellite connectivity, which was like, you know, it was rumored that there was going to be satellite connectivity, maybe, but no one really knew.
John:
Right.
John:
But you can't tell that from the hardware because it's like, well, the hardware could already do it.
John:
You know, it's a business deal, business deal stuff and software features.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Apple is still doing a pretty good job of keeping under wraps.
John:
But I couldn't believe when the watch was like a day before.
John:
I thought they were going to make it.
John:
I'm like, oh, this rugged Apple watch hasn't leaked yet.
John:
But nope, there it was.