00:00:00 ◼ ► Maltz, good to see you. Good to see you, too. Let me address the elephant in the room. My personal note from Daring Fireball, it's a continuing situation, let's say that. And I have gotten literally, literally hundreds of emails from Daring Fireball readers wishing me well. And I love you all for it. And let me put it this way. Until several years ago, given the situation I'm in, and given the timing, September, iPhone season, iPhone reviews do,
00:00:29 ◼ ► I would have worked and I would have fit in dealing with the situation, situations, because there's two things, actually, on both sides of the family. And fit in dealing with the situations and supporting my family as best I could. And I think I've grown. I think it's proof that I have grown. And what I'm doing, even though it's iPhone season, Super Bowl, for what I do, I'm dealing with this stuff first.
00:01:03 ◼ ► So your hair looks great. You look good. And your hair looks fantastic. Your beard looks great. Thanks. Yeah. That's all. That's all that's there.
00:01:17 ◼ ► So normally, my first episode of the show in September is talking about my published iPhone, new iPhone reviews, and the new iPhone reviews are not out. So let's invert it and spend the show talking about the new iPhones before I've published a review. And I probably should have asked this before we started recording. But do you have one?
00:01:41 ◼ ► I do. I do. Fortunately, otherwise, I guess I'd just be off and you'd find somebody else real quick. But yeah, I got I got the base model 17. I got in. What is it? Sage? Is that what it's called? Yeah, I got the green one. Put it that way.
00:01:54 ◼ ► Serendipity. Because I've spent most of the month living day to day with the iPhone Air, which I still find very difficult not to call the iPhone 17 Air. And I just switched a few days ago to the iPhone 17 Pro.
00:02:20 ◼ ► Right? I guess that's a judgment call. But okay, sure. It's too big for me. That's for sure.
00:02:28 ◼ ► Oh, that's but we can cover three of them. And I think that's I think that's probably about the best we'll do use. And you say you rightly said iPhone Air, which made me realize I've been writing it wrong, because I've been writing iPhone 17 Air this entire time.
00:02:44 ◼ ► Well, let's start with that. But let me because I am sort of fitting this in between family obligations. Let's say let's just jump right to the first sponsor read and let me do this and thank our first sponsor of the show because I have a terrible habit of getting about an hour.
00:03:09 ◼ ► We are recording several days before the end of the month, though. So that's fine. You're ahead of the ball there.
00:03:15 ◼ ► There are times where I'll I'll think, well, I'll get the first sponsor read in early. And then I look at the clock and it says it's one colon. Oh, oh, something. And I'm like, oh, well, there's there's an hour.
00:03:30 ◼ ► We're skipping over baseball. So, yeah. Yeah. Oh, we got to skip the baseball. Yeah. All right. Let me thank our first sponsor. And it is our good friends at Century S E N T R Y.
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00:05:37 ◼ ► Sentry dot I O slash talk show. Yeah. So let's start with the air and let's just start with the name. Somebody apparently if you like poke around the code, you know how like ever since I think the original life, I think it might even date back to the iPod era.
00:05:54 ◼ ► There's like a model number that uses like a main number and not like software. It's like 26.0 and the model numbers for Apple devices use a comma instead of a point. Yeah. Yeah. And that the model number for the iPhone air is 18 comma four.
00:06:14 ◼ ► I don't think there's much to read into that, but I do wonder, I mean, combined with the fact that they didn't put a 17 in it, if it is a phone that might stay unchanged for two years.
00:06:28 ◼ ► Right. If it, if that's already in the works, you know, that the iPhone air as we know it today will stay for two years. I don't know.
00:06:39 ◼ ► Well, I guess there's also the possible, I mean, because German has talked about how the upcoming foldable iPhone seems to be probably maybe thinner, but two airs sort of stuck together.
00:06:50 ◼ ► Right. Do you think that there's a chance that this is just like, here's our first pass to the thin phone. Wait until next year when you see two thin phones.
00:06:58 ◼ ► I've seen his writing on that. I think I've seen other people speculate on that. I mean, it, it kind of made sense to me until I lived on it for the better part of a month day to day, including, you know, given my current situation, I'm actually doing more of my daily computing on the phone and less at a desk on my Mac than usual.
00:07:20 ◼ ► I always use the phone a lot when I'm trying to write a craft, my review and formulate my thoughts on a review. I don't think so. I think it's coincidental, you know, that they seemingly are coming out with a foldable next year.
00:07:32 ◼ ► It's a really good phone and it's just in and of itself. And, and once I started using it, I realized it doesn't make any sense that it would be like a stepping stone to a foldable.
00:07:45 ◼ ► Of course, Apple wants the phones to be thinner, right? They want everything to be thinner. They're obsessed with thinness in devices.
00:07:52 ◼ ► And they did it with the iPads, the iPad pros as well. So, yeah. And there's no reason to formulate it. I mean, if it was just a lab project to get to a foldable, to get to something thinner, there's no reason to do all the extra work.
00:08:06 ◼ ► Like 90% of the work would be to get to an in-lab prototype that's just a phone that's this thin, even if it doesn't fold. And then the other 90% of the work would be to make it go all the way to making it a product.
00:08:20 ◼ ► Why do all the extra work to do it unless they thought it was a compelling product in and of itself?
00:08:25 ◼ ► So I think it's sort of coincidental. I think, and I think that they've been inexorably moving towards being able to make super thin phones all along, you know?
00:08:38 ◼ ► Well, so the other thing that seems interesting is, so if that's, if the air is sticking around and possibly just being updated every couple of years, and then we're going to get a foldable next year and they're going to keep, what is it? The E?
00:08:52 ◼ ► Yeah, and they're going to maybe update that every couple of years too. They're moving to a position where they're going to have lots of different SKUs, lots of different models.
00:09:01 ◼ ► And that's interesting. I mean, that's a bit of a sort of a sea change because they've kind of chosen not to do that in the past.
00:09:11 ◼ ► And of course, they're not keeping the ones that I like, the small ones, but it's not the problem.
00:09:16 ◼ ► Do you think, though, the weird thing about it being called just the air and not the 17 air is that the E is the 16E and the rumor chain says there's going to be a 17E coming up in the same time frame, March, April.
00:09:32 ◼ ► And that next year, the non-pro phone, like the one that just the just plain iPhone 18 might come out at that time too, right?
00:09:41 ◼ ► They might hold an event supposedly next September where they only announce the 18 Pro and Pro Max, the foldable, and maybe a new air, but maybe not without the number.
00:09:55 ◼ ► I don't know. But that's what's weird. It's a little surprising that the new entry model, the 16E, gets a number.
00:10:08 ◼ ► So instead of moving to numbers across the board, they've just switched which ones they're going to have numbers on.
00:10:13 ◼ ► Right. Which is sort of one of the funnest parts about being an Apple pundit is that their naming schemes, as predictable as the company is in so many ways,
00:10:33 ◼ ► It is a little maddening, though, because I always have a hard time remembering when I got my iPad and which iPad I have,
00:10:51 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And even with the Macs where they haven't ever really numbered them, with the beginning of Apple Silicon,
00:11:04 ◼ ► Where it's like I have a MacBook Pro with an M1 Max, you know, and somebody else who has one with the M4 Max knows that it came,
00:11:16 ◼ ► Forgive me, John Syracuse, for the one model that is definitely not on an annual schedule.
00:11:33 ◼ ► I think there will be an updated Air next year, and I think that they're just being weird about not putting a number on it.
00:11:53 ◼ ► So the reason that it doesn't have a number on it is because it's just this glorious device that we're giving you.
00:12:00 ◼ ► I do think at a zoom out to the 10,000-foot level, I think it makes a lot of sense that they're expanding the SKUs and in, I think, fairly easy to understand ways, like who is this for, which we'll come back to.
00:12:31 ◼ ► You know, I've been saying for years that they should make a consumer-level one with a bigger screen.
00:12:37 ◼ ► Until very, very recently, you could get a MacBook Air in any size as long as you like 13.
00:12:43 ◼ ► So going to 15 for that is really nice to that if you want a 15-inch laptop, which 15-slash-16, if you don't have to spring for a model that starts at $2,500.
00:13:02 ◼ ► And they have the Mac Pro, which I do think once they get the Apple Silicon to a level where they can, you know, it's coming.
00:13:16 ◼ ► I think it's going to be like a spectacular or, okay, we made you wait a bunch of years, but holy shit, look at the specs on this thing, right?
00:13:44 ◼ ► Unlike, I mean, I think the iPad lineup has gotten better, but there was a period in there like a couple of years ago where it was very confusing as to which iPad was the one for you to buy.
00:14:12 ◼ ► But my point is simply that the lineup makes more sense and there's a temptation to say, well, they're doing what Apple did in the 90s by having too many confusing.
00:14:27 ◼ ► Yeah, they are increasing the number of different kinds of devices that they have, but they're doing it in a much more managed way and in a way that is not going to run into that problem where cheap ones are eating the market share of more expensive ones, which is how they got into trouble.
00:14:44 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, and just going back to living with the iPhone Air, the battery life was fine for me.
00:14:53 ◼ ► I mean, I was getting effectively the same level of battery life at the end of the day, using it from morning till night.
00:15:07 ◼ ► And I generally would hit that at some point in the evening, but never even came close to dropping below 20% any day that I've been using it.
00:15:19 ◼ ► Now, some of the days I was also testing the battery pack, the iPhone Air battery pack, I think is the name, but that's what I'll call it.
00:15:30 ◼ ► And I was trying to use it and trying to run it down without using it and didn't really need it.
00:15:43 ◼ ► I really thought, well, I'm definitely going to need that battery pack most days that I'm using this full time, especially with what's going on where I'm literally using it for all of my computing.
00:16:09 ◼ ► I mean, obviously for some people, and especially if you're shooting a lot of video or shooting a lot of photos or playing a lot of battery-draining games, you're clearly going to.
00:16:24 ◼ ► Which is a mention to the fact that they actually used the iPhone 17 Pros to shoot the most recent Friday Night Baseball.
00:16:44 ◼ ► Yeah, but pretty cool that they actually used iPhone 17 Pros to shoot live footage for a major league game.
00:16:51 ◼ ► Yeah, Jason Snell was saying that, I mean, he got a briefing from Apple, and he was like, oh, they're going to announce something about Friday Night Baseball, and it's probably something about them shooting on the iPhone.
00:17:02 ◼ ► And, yeah, the announcement's not that we're going to be shooting this Friday Night Baseball on the iPhone.
00:17:22 ◼ ► They just kind of dropped a very quiet little, like, at the end of the James Bond movies where it says, James Bond will return.
00:17:28 ◼ ► It was, like, at the very end of the event, and it just was just shot on iPhone, edited on a Mac or something like that.
00:17:35 ◼ ► And it was like, whoa, that looked like all the previous events that you guys were shooting on whatever fancy Hollywood cameras.
00:17:49 ◼ ► One thing that was new about shooting this month's event on iPhone, which, of course, they're going to do forever at this point.
00:18:03 ◼ ► So, they shot it using – this is the first time they did that with an iPhone event, where they shot it not with last year's Pro phones, but with this year's Pro phones, which were running –
00:18:16 ◼ ► obviously running beta versions of iOS 26 at the time, which is, again, kind of a flex.
00:18:23 ◼ ► Obviously, the other big technical tradeoff, though, comes down to – with the air, is exactly that point, though, the camera, right?
00:18:31 ◼ ► And I think that's – and just ever since it came out, I've just been asking as many normal people as I can, do you ever switch lenses in the camera app?
00:18:57 ◼ ► And they're a little sheepish about it because they've got this camera with the other lenses, and they want to – they kind of feel a little guilty about it.
00:19:09 ◼ ► And Amy, my wife, is definitely in that category, although she's, as you know, not sheepish about it.
00:19:16 ◼ ► But she shoots lots of photos, but she just takes out her iPhone, opens the camera app, frames it, and hits the button.
00:19:26 ◼ ► And Karen knows the Pro, and she – I don't think – I'm not even sure she knows she can't switch lenses, but she always wants the best camera, so she always gets the Pro.
00:19:39 ◼ ► Apple knows those numbers, right, from the people who opt into sharing whatever anonymized data with Apple, right?
00:19:47 ◼ ► Apple knows exactly – or they have a pretty good guess what the percentage is, that there are a lot of people who have been buying pro model phones and only ever using the 1X lens.
00:20:02 ◼ ► And that an awful lot of the engineering and thickness of the phones, of the pro phones, and the cost has gone into the other lenses that these people are never using.
00:20:17 ◼ ► So, they're willing to spend more to get a model that costs more than just the regular iPhone insert integer here, but they're not using the lenses.
00:20:36 ◼ ► Now that, you know, the embargo's over and I can freely show the phone to people, everybody who feels it is, whoa.
00:20:48 ◼ ► I mean, and again, going back to the iPad Pro, it was the kind of thing where just hearing about it and then seeing the keynote about it, it's like, oh, that looks interesting.
00:21:31 ◼ ► The telephoto in particular, I don't use it a lot, but I do use it enough that I would really, and I did occasionally miss it when I was using the Air, but I do use it.
00:21:51 ◼ ► And I haven't placed an order for my personal iPhone of the year yet, only because I'm literally torn and kind of need to spend some time trying the iPhone 17 Pro review unit I have before I make it.
00:22:08 ◼ ► And I'm probably, spoiler, I probably am going to buy the Pro, and everybody's going to be like, well, of course you were going to buy the Pro.
00:22:18 ◼ ► I am genuine, after a couple of weeks using the iPhone Air full time, I am genuinely tempted by it.
00:22:25 ◼ ► And it really makes a difference, especially now that it's getting cooler, that it's jean season.
00:22:42 ◼ ► Maybe I should get skinny jeans, though, because I'm pretty good at wearing jeans that have gone out of style.
00:23:02 ◼ ► You know, right now, even at the end of September, it's still fluctuating here between jeans and shorts weather.
00:23:09 ◼ ► The weight was a nice difference in shorts, but the thinness is a huge, huge, it's just way nicer in the front pants of a pair of jeans.
00:23:29 ◼ ► I mean, and I remember when I reviewed the 16E, whose camera I really was surprised by how much I liked.
00:23:39 ◼ ► I mean, I do, but the 2X is definitely the one thing that I think I covet from the Pro.
00:24:01 ◼ ► If you could only go to two lenses, you'd rather go have the regular and the telephoto.
00:24:16 ◼ ► The one thing you give up without having an ultrawide is macro, because the ultrawide has their super close focus.
00:24:22 ◼ ► Yeah, and, again, it's just, for some reason, I think I am always, like, I want to see that thing over there.
00:24:32 ◼ ► Yeah, I think of all the different things an iPhone camera can do, macro photography is the least used by me, personally.
00:24:42 ◼ ► There actually is, I mean, technically speaking, the 1X camera, I mean, the 1X camera on the iPhone Air, I'm not doing a camera review.
00:24:51 ◼ ► But it is clearly superior to the 16E, which I thought was, like, pretty good, like, surprisingly good, better than I thought it would be.
00:25:00 ◼ ► Because I thought, oh, to get the price that low, and it's the E model, it was surprisingly good.
00:25:35 ◼ ► And Apple, if you ask them, and if you get these review units, and you get briefings, and you ask them to, can you just tell me, like, which one, like, let's just talk 1X lenses.
00:25:55 ◼ ► There is one nice technical advantage, though, with the iPhone Air's 1X lens, where it is actually superior to the iPhone 17 Pros, all, I think, the last several years of Pros, which is focal distance.
00:26:15 ◼ ► And the great app Halide, I'll make a note, put it in the show notes, it's a camera app, has this great feature called technical readout.
00:26:24 ◼ ► And it gives you all, it's just, it's sort of like, like when you go to about this Mac and go, tell me all the, what is it about this Mac and more info, right?
00:26:34 ◼ ► And then it opens something that tells you all the technical details of system report of your Mac.
00:26:49 ◼ ► And the minimum focal distance of the 1X lens on the iPhone Air is only 15 centimeters.
00:27:12 ◼ ► As the 1X lens on the Pro models has gotten better over the years, the minimal focal distance has grown.
00:27:23 ◼ ► You have to hold it a little bit further away than you used to, just because of the optics of how cameras work.
00:27:32 ◼ ► Those extra five centimeters are way more interesting and useful to me than macro photography.
00:28:13 ◼ ► But why would you want to use it as the bedside charger for a phone that you can't use it as a battery pack for?
00:28:42 ◼ ► It definitely does not come close to fitting on any other phone the right way because of the camera plateaus as Apple has now officially decided to call them, which I'll go with.
00:29:16 ◼ ► I kind of see why they only made it for the air because it does, therefore, fit the air absolutely perfectly.
00:29:43 ◼ ► There's a lot of different companies out there that make battery attached MagSafe, quote, compatible battery packs for iPhones.
00:29:53 ◼ ► And I have the terrible habit of buying them all because I think this one, this will be the one that makes me that makes me like it better than the old lightning iPhone one.
00:30:10 ◼ ► And I think I've used them both enough that if they gave a battery health, it's probably, you know, it's not horrible, but I'm sure it's in the 80s.
00:30:24 ◼ ► I'm sure that the battery health on both of my battery packs, because, you know, they're years old.
00:30:43 ◼ ► But having bought a lot of third party ones, the Apple ones just I know they have the cool animation and there's the or they integrate with the battery widget better in ways that the third party ones don't.
00:31:01 ◼ ► So I maybe it's just really, really, really hard to do the magnet engineering and Apple does the extra work and the other companies don't.
00:31:11 ◼ ► It's like you can complain that the third parties don't get all these software integration features that Apple's first party battery packs get.
00:31:42 ◼ ► It's already it's only lunchtime and my phone is already down to 45 percent and I'm going to put my battery pack on and put it in my pocket.
00:31:53 ◼ ► And then you realize that it kind of rotated in your pocket and didn't didn't not charged.
00:32:05 ◼ ► And it's like the battery lost quite a bit of power and the phone only gained like five percent because it wasn't on right.
00:32:30 ◼ ► I mean, do you think that they mostly just made the battery pack for psychological reasons so that you because I mean, if you go back to I mean, so I'm just looking at I mean, even the so if you look at the video playback, the.
00:32:51 ◼ ► And it's just and it's probably the kind of thing where it's like, oh, but it doesn't have an you know, if someone goes into the store and they're like, yeah, doesn't have as much battery as the pro.
00:33:23 ◼ ► Battery pack fits absolutely perfectly within the confines of the battery of the bumper case.
00:33:39 ◼ ► And the margins of the battery pack around the back of the phone are exactly it is precise teamwork between the engineers who made the bumper case and the engineers who designed the battery pack.
00:33:54 ◼ ► The tolerances are just amazing, just perfect enough that you can still get the battery pack on and off.
00:34:00 ◼ ► And I like the bumper case more than any other case that Apple's have made ever since the iPhone for when they first made them with the famous antenna gate thing.
00:34:23 ◼ ► I kind of feel like it's cool to have a bumper case on this one to show off how thin it is.
00:34:30 ◼ ► But if the other phones are all thicker, don't they need bumper cases so they don't feel too fat?
00:34:44 ◼ ► I go caseless all the time anyway, but like the color on the bumper on the well, the frame, I guess, is edge is really nice and better than the back, I would say.
00:34:58 ◼ ► I mean, I really like the look of the bumper and I've had I had bumpers in the past that I think that that's such a great way to go.
00:35:13 ◼ ► Well, and talking about nice looking metal, the polished titanium on the sides of the air is extremely, I don't know, luxury coated.
00:35:36 ◼ ► I've always thought that the polished steel got a little slippery when my hands got sweaty and this doesn't seem to happen.
00:35:55 ◼ ► Fall always feels like a reset between back to school, busier routines and shorter days.
00:36:09 ◼ ► Their chef prepped, dietician approved meals make it easy to stay on track and enjoy something comforting and delicious no matter how hectic the season gets.
00:36:19 ◼ ► There's a whole bunch of these companies that sell meal kits where you can order meal kits and they've company, those companies, several of those companies have sponsored this show before.
00:36:30 ◼ ► And that's like where they send you a box with a bunch of ingredients and a recipe and exact portions.
00:36:37 ◼ ► And you use the recipe card to combine the ingredients and cook a dinner in 20 or 30 or 40 minutes or whatever it takes.
00:36:59 ◼ ► But if I were home alone, then it would be a dinner thing because that's about the level of my cooking skill.
00:37:21 ◼ ► And they've always had a wide variety, including premium seafood choices now like salmon and shrimp at no extra cost.
00:37:30 ◼ ► They have even more GLP one friendly meals for people who are on those medications and a new Mediterranean diet option.
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00:38:26 ◼ ► And so we got a bunch of Factor meals and that really helped because we, it's like we'd have dinner and then we didn't have any leftovers.
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00:39:55 ◼ ► Of course, I went from a black phone to, to this really nice green, which I think initially was the only thing that I was thinking, oh, it'd be fun to get it.
00:40:07 ◼ ► Hank, my son got the sort of teal one, the 16 last year, and I was the one that I liked the most, but I didn't want to both have the same color because that gets confusing around the house because we're both caseless.
00:40:22 ◼ ► Anyway, the thing that I don't like is I have that bug where it crashes with CarPlay, which I guess is a Wi-Fi related bug.
00:40:38 ◼ ► I have just like a head unit that I installed in my car, and it's not playing nice with that.
00:40:49 ◼ ► I probably will before this episode's out, but it seems like people have sort of attributed it down to the drivers for the N1 chip.
00:40:58 ◼ ► So hopefully it's just something that they can release a patch for, and it won't be a problem going forward.
00:41:24 ◼ ► But they slid it in at the place where it would have been 128 Pro, whatever the bottom line of the Pro line was.
00:41:30 ◼ ► They got rid of the bottom line of the Pro, and so you couldn't get the Pro at that price anymore.
00:41:41 ◼ ► So I'm on the upgrade program, and now I'm paying like a few bucks less every month than I was last year because I got the higher storage.
00:42:15 ◼ ► But they got rid of the iPhone Pro at 128, which was $999, and that's the starting point for the iPhone Air.
00:42:28 ◼ ► Even though they've added a phone, if you're just looking at hitting price points and having a model that starts every $200 spread or every $100 spread, it actually makes more sense to me.
00:42:43 ◼ ► And again, it does that thing where they've introduced a new SKU, but they've also rationalized the lineup to the point where it's not overlapping and it's not going to cause a lot of confusion.
00:43:08 ◼ ► You can't really see it in this light, but it's lighter on the back and it's a little darker.
00:43:16 ◼ ► I mean, I guess Sage is probably the best description of this green, but it's pretty cool.
00:43:35 ◼ ► It's a streak that ought to, if I couldn't justify it, quote unquote, professionally, I mean, it makes no sense.
00:43:42 ◼ ► But I've bought black every year and the only dilemma I've ever had was the iPhone 7, which had two blacks, jet black and matte black.
00:44:18 ◼ ► I think it was the iPhone 13, which sort of had what I would describe as a Boba Fettish.
00:44:28 ◼ ► Green, like a very dark green that, you know, and if you really look at Boba Fett, he wasn't a dark, that darker green.
00:44:37 ◼ ► I don't know, like the coolness vibe was very, like that would be the phone that Boba Fett, the iPhone Boba Fett would have bought.
00:44:48 ◼ ► But another way to to to assert my preference is I just buy the phone closest to black.
00:44:56 ◼ ► And so that whatever they call the new blue, there's some kind of fancy name for it is what I would buy.
00:45:03 ◼ ► And there have been years where, you know, I'm not emotionally attached to black as in and of itself.
00:45:15 ◼ ► My review unit is actually the orange that's in all the commercials, which is it really, really is a very fun, very distinctive orange.
00:45:26 ◼ ► I mean, I just sort of assumed when I heard that it was going to be orange, that it was going to be a really light, not very interesting orange.
00:45:45 ◼ ► And he's said for years that he might it doesn't really care about the cameras on the pro.
00:45:53 ◼ ► It's like his biggest pet peeve with every single anything Apple makes is that he doesn't he for several years.
00:46:00 ◼ ► He's thought it was like, I don't know, ethically wrong that they're not shipping a high high refresh screens on on these phones that started eight hundred dollars because he can really see it.
00:46:12 ◼ ► And I think I think it's very, very age related and partially related to the fact that even though any 52 year old probably doesn't have the vision they had when they were younger.
00:46:25 ◼ ► I think my vision is a little worse than most people compared to when they were younger, but my son really notices it.
00:46:32 ◼ ► You know, I think we all do a lot of scrolling on our phones and you can kind of notice it was scrolling.
00:46:40 ◼ ► Coming from a 16 was probably I mean, like if I had been upgrading every other year, it was much more noticeable.
00:46:55 ◼ ► I know, which, you know, I was a big mini fan and held on to my 13 for a while, but it's OK.
00:47:02 ◼ ► I mean, I was worried about going from and I should say I was worried about going from the 16 to this, but it's not noticeable at all.
00:47:09 ◼ ► I haven't found it to be noticeable at all because I guess it's a little bit more real estate.
00:47:15 ◼ ► It goes from a 6.1 inch screen to a 6.3 inch screen because of bezel stuff and also a tiny, just a tiny bit taller.
00:47:30 ◼ ► I mind a big device in my pocket is what I mind, which is, you know, which is another thing about the foldable hearing that it's basically two airs folding like a book together.
00:48:00 ◼ ► I think you'd get a better pocket experience if I can say that, if that's a thing, because I do have, I do have a pair of skinny jeans.
00:48:13 ◼ ► I do think that the other interesting thing about the air is that it only comes in one size and now the iPhone 17 only comes in one size too, right?
00:48:23 ◼ ► And the seven, the air is sort of, I forget the exact numbers, but I think the numbers, because I actually, you know, I'm in the very, very strange situation as a reviewer who has gotten review units of all of the phones.
00:48:39 ◼ ► And I can keep playing with them, not just for a few minutes in the store or in the hands-on area after the event, but I can kind of keep comparing them.
00:48:47 ◼ ► It effectively, the air feels like it's halfway between the regular size and the plus slash max size.
00:48:57 ◼ ► Like they've just decided it really does sort of, I mean, not to bring up the commercial that they had to yank the, the one where the, the big hydraulic press came down.
00:49:08 ◼ ► But it really does feel like they took an iPhone pro you can, or I guess more because it only has one camera lens, like a regular iPhone with titanium size and just kind of squished it a bit.
00:49:26 ◼ ► And then it, as, as they squished it, it grew a little to give you more area on this, on the screen.
00:49:37 ◼ ► I would probably be more tempted by the air if it were the area of the regular size phones.
00:50:03 ◼ ► And basically, I mean, they showed this, I thought very, very well in the keynote and explained it that the explanation for the edge to edge camera Mesa is on the air is they effectively put the computer up there.
00:50:24 ◼ ► Like the, the computer is up there and the rest of it is all the other stuff, batteries and well, mostly battery and antennas and whatever internal stuff goes into the e-sim and stuff.
00:50:52 ◼ ► It does have a little, I mean, I guess it's sort of, I don't know, for some reason it does look a little Star Wars-y for some reason.
00:51:10 ◼ ► I actually think one of the, the, the, one of the worst things about the Pro is I think that the triangle is aesthetically unpleasing.
00:51:20 ◼ ► It's not ugly, you know, and they've had the triangle because they've had three lenses on these things for a while and it's just more of a tool.
00:51:28 ◼ ► But I think aesthetically pleasing two lenses that are horizontally arranged, vertically arranged, vertically arranged, up and down are just, yeah.
00:51:41 ◼ ► It would be kind of cool to have a droid in Star Wars who had two eyes, but they were, they were vertically oriented.
00:51:50 ◼ ► What, I just watched Rogue One again recently, did like just this last week in late night downtime and I hadn't watched it in a few years and I'd watched the Andor series, which I didn't love season, you know, here's our, here's our baseball talk.
00:52:20 ◼ ► So what, what, did you not like the whole thing or did you just not like certain parts of it?
00:52:34 ◼ ► I mean, like, whatever the, the, I mean, spoiler, if you haven't seen the, the, I won't go into detail.
00:52:39 ◼ ► I would, I, I, I would say, I guess I, I found that the first half of the season dragged a little.
00:52:45 ◼ ► I would say, so yeah, my problem with it, I think is the first two episodes where it gets stuck in that planet.
00:52:51 ◼ ► And I understand the point is, okay, we have to show how badly the people on the, on the rebellion are getting along.
00:52:59 ◼ ► This isn't going to work unless, you know, you guys start cooperating and they're clearly not in a place where they can cooperate yet.
00:53:06 ◼ ► And part of that is, I think the whole arc of the season and, and goes through Rogue One because that's when Saw dies too.
00:53:15 ◼ ► That sort of helps solidify who's going to really lead this rebellion and who is in charge.
00:53:24 ◼ ► It was like, who are these dum-dums who can't like are terrible at their, at their job and are constantly arguing with each other and wasting our, our hero's time.
00:53:35 ◼ ► So that part, I think I didn't think worked quite as well as maybe they had hoped, but the, the, the, the parts that happen later, I think are so good that I really loved the whole season.
00:53:48 ◼ ► It's a solid thumbs up and a double thumbs up compared to a couple of their more recent series.
00:54:02 ◼ ► It, it just wasn't what I was behind all of my other Star Wars loving friends of our generation watching it.
00:54:07 ◼ ► and based on everything I was hearing, I was expecting to love it as much as I, well, yeah, and you, you, I didn't love it and I felt poisoned a little bit there.
00:54:19 ◼ ► But anyway, I rewatched rogue one, which everybody says you should do after you watch, even if you've seen rogue one, watch it again after watching and or season two.
00:54:33 ◼ ► Like, yeah, here's, here's a, here's a cinematic universe, or at least a part of this one where the writers and the show runners would direct, whatever you want to call it, really had their shit together on making this fit together.
00:54:49 ◼ ► And that they made this series after a movie was made and it makes the movie that, that was already out there even better.
00:54:59 ◼ ► Someone has done a cut of rogue one into three, like 45 minute episodes or whatever that are done in the style of and or.
00:55:10 ◼ ► The music is, is from the show rather than it being a sort of star Warsy type of music.
00:55:17 ◼ ► It's an interesting experiment, but I don't think, I think the movie is, is a, is more star Warsy than the show.
00:55:31 ◼ ► What got me started on this digression is that one of my frustrations, probably my single biggest frustration with season two is, and it's my own fault for expecting it.
00:55:45 ◼ ► So what led me there was looking at you, you, you saying, holding up to the camera here is we record your iPhone with the eyes up and his eyes don't go up and down, but he's a cool looking droid.
00:56:00 ◼ ► And he's, he's, he's, to me, that's the one thing that's been missing since the original trilogy with C-3PO and R2-D2 is a great droid character.
00:56:24 ◼ ► I mean, the, my, my one thing about season two was like, make sure that they do not kill B and they did not.
00:56:31 ◼ ► So that was, but I just expected that if they're going to do this backstory, it's like, well, let's see a lot more K2SO.
00:56:39 ◼ ► And I don't know what they were thinking, but again, spoiler, they introduce him late in the season.
00:56:44 ◼ ► Let's say, I just, I saw an interview with Tony Gilroy and he was, he was like, the problem with Kate is that he is so overpowered that you don't want your hero to have him too soon because then he can do almost anything.
00:57:05 ◼ ► And you can, and you can, you can have a droid suffer injuries and not emotionally hurt the, the audience all season long, watching the droids effectively be handicapped in a way that a human character would be.
00:57:20 ◼ ► So they could have done something like that to get out of the cheat mode and still had his personality there.
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01:00:54 ◼ ► Like if there was no air, I would say unequivocally, it is an upgrade over the previous few years of pro models.
01:01:04 ◼ ► I think the side to side camera plateau is both aesthetically pleasing and handhold pleasing, right?
01:01:24 ◼ ► And I'm, I don't know, looking backwards now that they've just said, screw it, we're going to put the plateau across the whole top of the phone.
01:01:35 ◼ ► Just the, I have here my year old iPhone 16 Pro, my personal one, and which has the biggest ever camera plateau before they went with the width.
01:01:48 ◼ ► And I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, yeah, if they were going to make the plateau this big, why not?
01:01:53 ◼ ► Just make it go across and put more stuff up there so you can put more stuff down there, right?
01:02:10 ◼ ► And yeah, I guess on the max models, that wasn't quite true, but it, it was, it's still, it was big enough.
01:02:24 ◼ ► And I'm not going to argue that it actually feels technically balanced more in my hand, but it looks more balanced.
01:02:32 ◼ ► And in terms of having a thing at the top that I can put my fingers on or, or use popsocket-y while gripping it, it does seem design-wise.
01:02:59 ◼ ► It just makes for something that you can rest your fingers on in different, different holds.
01:03:04 ◼ ► And, and doesn't, I guess it technically adds some weight because they've put more stuff up there.
01:03:12 ◼ ► Is that, that by adding the iPhone air to the lineup, they've allowed themselves to make the pro even more pro, like in a, not just pro means deluxe or costs more money, but actually more of a professional tool, right?
01:03:27 ◼ ► People have always said for years, well, I guess what, what many people want is to make it thicker to get rid of the camera sticking out at all.
01:03:37 ◼ ► It's just even, even it up with the cameras and they're, they're obviously not going that way.
01:03:46 ◼ ► It is, it's not, it's not like it's noticeably thicker than last year's 16 pro, but it is definitely a little thicker.
01:03:54 ◼ ► And with a bigger Mesa, it's clearly a significantly bigger volume or, or not significantly, but noticeably bigger volume.
01:04:05 ◼ ► It's, it's, it's, but it is, it just feels more serious, nerdy, whatever you want to describe it.
01:04:22 ◼ ► Well, I guess when my review comes out, it'll be thousands of words where here, whereas here on the podcast, I'm like, that's, that's it.
01:04:39 ◼ ► I kind of like this all metal back with, you know, there's like this glass cutout where the, what do they call it?
01:04:49 ◼ ► And it's the first time they've made a unibody frame for an iPhone, which I presume means it really is more rugged in a tool like way.
01:05:03 ◼ ► And rather than make the whole back glass, just sort of put this round rect of glass for charging to go through is it's the perfect shape for a battery pack.
01:05:20 ◼ ► It doesn't seem like that's, is that, do you think that's the kind of thing that they would introduce like in March or, or like November?
01:05:27 ◼ ► I think, I think whenever they've come out, cause they used to actually have battery cases, right?
01:05:33 ◼ ► Remember a couple of every, you know, it's like they're, they're Apple's relationship with their first brand or, or first party battery extenders for iPhones.
01:05:50 ◼ ► It's, we don't want to make something that extends the battery because it implies that we think you need a thing to extend the battery.
01:05:59 ◼ ► And on the other side, people are saying, yeah, but sometimes you need to extend the battery.
01:06:10 ◼ ► You're shooting a lot of videos or you forgot to charge your phone or whatever the case may be.
01:06:14 ◼ ► You're out in the woods, you're on vacation, you're traveling, you're on a 13 hour flight.
01:06:19 ◼ ► There's all sorts of situations where you through normal expected use of an iPhone, you run out and you need more because it's not bedtime.
01:06:37 ◼ ► And the first problem with a battery case is that they only fit one specific model from one year at a time.
01:07:00 ◼ ► Once they switched to the MagSafe pack with the lightning thing though, it's like they solved the problem of it only fitting one model.
01:07:26 ◼ ► And I guess presumably for use with the mini, the 12 mini especially really did need it.
01:07:39 ◼ ► In fact, I guarantee the iPhone 12 mini had the worst battery life of any post iPhone 10 phone.
01:08:18 ◼ ► So in a pinch, you could use it as like a desktop charger, but you couldn't put it in your phone.
01:08:45 ◼ ► And even on your phone, as we spoke about with the attractiveness of the vertical arrangement
01:09:19 ◼ ► But because it is a vertical arrangement, and I tried it in the hands-on area, and I tried
01:09:32 ◼ ► Long story short, and eventually I will publish my long story, it's a more pro iPhone pro.
01:09:44 ◼ ► I'll wait for the actual camera experts, and I'm sure some of them have actually already
01:09:49 ◼ ► published some of their looks and YouTube reviews, and I've just not quite caught up to them.
01:09:54 ◼ ► But even I can already tell that the new telephoto, the 4X lens that has an 8X mode that is the way that...
01:10:04 ◼ ► Just like the 1 and the 2X work on the main camera, where the 8X is just a sensor crop of the camera sensor.
01:10:14 ◼ ► And so, by being 48 megapixels on the sensor, actually bumping up the sensor size, they've enabled a sort of being able to get 2X out of it by just not doing double pixels to get the low noise.
01:11:22 ◼ ► It's like I tried living in that default mode of, hey, just switch at sunset, and it just switches automatically.
01:11:30 ◼ ► That's the default, and it seems, you know, I ran a poll a month ago, and it's clearly what a majority of, of, of overwhelming majority of, of, at least my followers do.
01:11:40 ◼ ► And I'd go to, like, the apps I know, like Mail and Messages, and I'm like, where is everything?
01:11:48 ◼ ► I just, like, if I get into bed and open it up and it just assaults me with, like, brightness, I hate that.
01:12:00 ◼ ► I mean, that's obviously more healthy, but I usually do Duolingo when I get into bed, so it's like I'm doing...
01:12:24 ◼ ► I am taking care, and again, to everybody out there who's written to me or wants to write me again, send them.
01:12:29 ◼ ► I cannot possibly respond to all of you and also continue doing any work at all, but I'm okay.
01:12:37 ◼ ► It's all going to be good, but my attention's going to remain diverted for just at least a few more weeks.