00:00:00 ◼ ► This is a historic event, an episode today, because we are recording episode 400 of your
00:00:07 ◼ ► Accidental Tech podcast. But that's not even what's the most impressive thing about this episode.
00:00:13 ◼ ► I'm sure there was another time, but to the best of my recollection, I cannot recall a time that I
00:00:20 ◼ ► have looked at the show notes and it says "follow hyphen up colon" and then there's a bullet and
00:00:28 ◼ ► nothing else. How many times do we have to go over this chat room? Would you like to inform Casey
00:00:32 ◼ ► whether or not we have follow-up on episodes where there are Apple events? I knew, does anyone in the
00:00:36 ◼ ► chat room know? No, but oh no no no, I know how the rules work. I know, I understand. Do you though?
00:00:41 ◼ ► Do you? Because every time we have one of these episodes you're like "oh my god we're not gonna have
00:00:45 ◼ ► follow-up, I can't handle it!" No, because usually you, you have, well somebody probably you, has a
00:00:50 ◼ ► list of follow-up items that we choose to ignore. Is there any doubt that it's John? You said
00:00:55 ◼ ► probably you? Like it's not me! Well somebody deleted them all and that wasn't me, so. Well
00:01:01 ◼ ► I deleted all the ones that we'd already done, or at least that's what I thought I did. Yeah,
00:01:04 ◼ ► that's what you thought you did. Now we get, come to it. All right, so the revelation that Casey has
00:01:08 ◼ ► at the start of this program is, look, if before the show starts I delete all the follow-up, we have
00:01:12 ◼ ► empty follow-ups. Wait, that's the secret? I could have done this for 399 episodes? That's all it
00:01:19 ◼ ► takes? Google Docs never forgets, I'm gonna bring up the history pain later and pull it out, but
00:01:23 ◼ ► it's not relevant to this episode because it's an Apple event episode. Isn't follow-up always
00:01:27 ◼ ► something we've already done, by definition? Don't get confused here, Marco. Have we done the follow-up?
00:01:34 ◼ ► It's meta follow-up. Oh my god. I would like to complain right up front so I can be happy for the
00:01:42 ◼ ► rest of the episode. Can we do that? Is that okay? You can complain even faster thanks to Verizon's
00:01:47 ◼ ► new 5G broadband ultra-wide brand network. Marco, it's like we planned it. What a flawlessly executed
00:01:54 ◼ ► perfect segue. Oh my god, what was going on with that Verizon tie-in? Oh my god. So I know you two
00:02:04 ◼ ► are upset about it. Can you explain to me why though, other than just saying, oh, Verizon, like,
00:02:09 ◼ ► expound on that. Elaborate. Why is it upsetting that Apple would talk about Verizon? I think it was
00:02:15 ◼ ► just not very classy, which is a very like snobby thing of me to say, and I recognize that, but
00:02:21 ◼ ► my perception, why is it snobby? Why is it not classy? Because they're shilling for another
00:02:27 ◼ ► company. Another company that's only relevant to America, which I am the king of forgetting that
00:02:32 ◼ ► there are other countries in the world, but even I know. I was like, US-centric-ness doesn't seem
00:02:37 ◼ ► like something you're averse to. Right, exactly. I agree with you. So they're shilling for another
00:02:41 ◼ ► company. Do you think that Verizon paid them to do it and they're keeping it a secret? I don't think
00:02:48 ◼ ► it's that simple. So my best guess is that this is part of a much bigger co-marketing deal between
00:02:56 ◼ ► the two companies, because the thing is, like, what a lot of people outside of the US don't realize
00:03:01 ◼ ► is quite how much power over what phones get sold the Verizon stores in the US have. Like,
00:03:10 ◼ ► I know so many people, usually not nerds. Most nerds switched to AT&T to get the iPhone before
00:03:16 ◼ ► it was on Verizon. So the nerds are on their own. They do what they want. They go to whatever care
00:03:21 ◼ ► they need to to get whatever phone they want. But for all the non-nerds out there, I know so many
00:03:27 ◼ ► non-nerds, and especially family members and stuff like that who don't follow tech with any kind of
00:03:32 ◼ ► enthusiasm, where the way they get a new phone is every few years, they go to a Verizon store,
00:03:40 ◼ ► and they get whatever they can get a good deal on. Is that still true today, though? I don't know if
00:03:45 ◼ ► that's true. Yes, it still is true today. And so what I think has happened here is I think Apple
00:03:52 ◼ ► recognized that a big chunk of their US sales could go up if they had a really good deal with
00:03:58 ◼ ► Verizon. Because one of the ways that Android took off in the US early on, and one of the ways
00:04:03 ◼ ► it's still pretty important, is that carriers always were really good with having deals between
00:04:11 ◼ ► the carrier and an Android handset maker, usually Samsung. This is one of the reasons why Samsung
00:04:16 ◼ ► really has such a dominant market share. Because Samsung plays the sales game really well with the
00:04:21 ◼ ► retail channel. Because they would have things like give bonuses to the sales people who sold
00:04:27 ◼ ► the most Samsung cell phones in the carrier stores. There's all sorts of deals like that,
00:04:32 ◼ ► like marketing deals and commission deals. And it's all a little bit skeezy, but that's how it
00:04:38 ◼ ► works. So the reality is the carriers have a large say on what phones are pushed on people and what
00:04:45 ◼ ► phones people actually buy, because they can control things like price incentives. One of the
00:04:49 ◼ ► biggest ways Android got big early on was these buy one phone, get one free kind of things the
00:04:54 ◼ ► carriers would do. There's all sorts of stuff like that. And so my theory here is that in order to
00:05:00 ◼ ► improve US market share, and to kind of put a bigger debt in Android here than usual, I think
00:05:06 ◼ ► Apple and Verizon made some kind of deal where Verizon is going to be pushing the phones even
00:05:10 ◼ ► more heavily. And they already have a special price thing, which we'll get to later. Although
00:05:15 ◼ ► AT&T matched that as well, you know, for however that works out. But I'm guessing this is part of
00:05:20 ◼ ► a much bigger thing. Like I don't think there were some like flat fee that Verizon paid Apple to be
00:05:26 ◼ ► part of this event. That's too simple. And frankly, that wouldn't be enough money to matter to either
00:05:31 ◼ ► company. I think it's much more likely that this is about like a deal that's going to be like over
00:05:38 ◼ ► the whole next year, Verizon is going to extra hard push the iPhone onto their customers,
00:05:45 ◼ ► because that is worth a lot to Apple. And clearly, Verizon must be giving Apple something that's
00:05:51 ◼ ► worth a lot to them. Because this is... Yeah, that's well put actually. No, I'm glad you said
00:05:57 ◼ ► it that way. That's really well put because I your theory is the best theory I've heard so far, other
00:06:02 ◼ ► than just money changing hands. But yeah, it definitely seems like Apple was willing to make
00:06:07 ◼ ► a trade for something and something big in something big. Exactly. And I don't know what
00:06:13 ◼ ► that is in your theory, like I said, is the best I've heard. But it just felt weird. I don't mean
00:06:18 ◼ ► to cut you off. And I do want to go back to John's question in a second. But what else did you have
00:06:22 ◼ ► to say about that, Marco? Well, I mean, I have a lot to say about 5G as a whole, which we'll get to
00:06:26 ◼ ► later. But yeah, just it just felt really gross. I'm with you on that. Like, it seemed and I tweeted
00:06:34 ◼ ► to this effect, like it seems like it's beneath Apple. It seems kind of like a like a cheap move,
00:06:40 ◼ ► almost like a sellout move. But it's like, why does Apple need to sell out to anyone? And it just
00:06:46 ◼ ► it seemed like this was a Verizon commercial that happened to also have some new iPhones in it.
00:06:56 ◼ ► not classy? So it is, it would not have been terribly surprising to me to have Apple say,
00:07:03 ◼ ► Oh, and you know, this 5G works really well with Verizon. And it would have been only slightly
00:07:07 ◼ ► surprising to me to say, oh, and here's their CEO and he's going to talk for too long. And like,
00:07:14 ◼ ► that still would have been weird, but OK, that's fine, I guess. But when it got really gross and
00:07:22 ◼ ► really weird to me was the forced repeated mentions. And I can't say a specific example
00:07:28 ◼ ► offhand, but like, oh, it's going to be so easy to play whatever this Fortnite clone is.
00:07:32 ◼ ► Yeah, it'll be so easy to play whatever whatever game on your new Verizon 5G iPhone. And it's just
00:07:38 ◼ ► like, what? No, no, stop it with that. It's not Apple. Apple supposed to be the classy one that
00:07:45 ◼ ► doesn't put this stupid like AT&T or singular logo on the phone. They're supposed to be the good
00:07:50 ◼ ► ones. And this just feels icky. Like I just it really, really felt gross to me. So John, am I
00:07:56 ◼ ► bananas or do you agree? I mean, I'm not sure if you're aware, but the iPhone doesn't work
00:08:02 ◼ ► without a cell network. So an Apple doesn't have one of those. They were thinking of doing one.
00:08:06 ◼ ► They were thinking of being one of those MVNO, whatever things, but they didn't. So you kind of
00:08:11 ◼ ► need a cell service plan unless you just want to use it as a really expensive iPod touch. Like,
00:08:17 ◼ ► I don't you know, I'm not super interested in hearing the Verizon CEO like, but there are
00:08:22 ◼ ► always boring parts of a keynote. Right. But I don't think it was classless or gross that the
00:08:33 ◼ ► they always will. And they should. The only place where I would get concerned about it is if it
00:08:38 ◼ ► starts to affect the products they sell. And there's a slippery slope argument to say, well,
00:08:43 ◼ ► they have this starts with this. And the next thing you know, it's filled with the Verizon
00:08:45 ◼ ► crapware. Well, you know, if that happens, then I'll be mad about that. But I'm not mad or
00:08:51 ◼ ► disgusted by the fact that Apple is selling a phone that one of the important new features of
00:08:55 ◼ ► which is hey, it's capable of 5g and then has carrier partners say 5g guess what that's pointless
00:09:01 ◼ ► without a 5g network and we have one of those and we had a partnership. I mean, we've all seen like
00:09:05 ◼ ► I'm very often fooled over the past several years by an ad that I think is an Apple ad,
00:09:08 ◼ ► but it doesn't quite look right. And I realized it's actually an AT&T ad. Right. I mean, there's
00:09:13 ◼ ► there is a, you know, symbiotic relationship between the carriers and the phone makers.
00:09:21 ◼ ► all the stuff that Marco described, right. But as long as that doesn't affect the product that
00:09:27 ◼ ► Apple's selling, and so far, it hasn't with the possible exception of Apple putting that 5g in
00:09:31 ◼ ► a little status bar, but you know, it's one letter, it's not a big deal. But other than that,
00:09:36 ◼ ► there's not crapware filling my phone, I don't have to, I no longer have to enter a two year
00:09:41 ◼ ► contract to get a reasonable deal on the phone phones are all unlocked from Apple, right. So
00:09:49 ◼ ► Verizon and the 5g and the pushing of 5g and the pushing of Verizon to be gross at all,
00:09:55 ◼ ► I would be sad if I was AT&T that I wasn't in the keynote and didn't get my thing promoted like that
00:09:59 ◼ ► or Sprint or T mobile and we'll get to the price differences there too. But that's just how you
00:10:05 ◼ ► know how this market works. There are carriers and there are phone makers. And this is the relationship
00:10:10 ◼ ► between them. And I don't I don't like, I don't see a class distinction. Like I don't carriers,
00:10:15 ◼ ► not my favorite companies in the world either. And there should, you know, we should have more
00:10:18 ◼ ► competition in the US than we do. But it's not like I hate Verizon so much that I can't
00:10:23 ◼ ► bear to see Apple mentioned its name on stage when they're introducing their 5g phone. So I mean,
00:10:28 ◼ ► I guess you know, whatever, if it bothers you, it bothers you, it didn't bother me personally.
00:10:31 ◼ ► And until and unless something changes in the product experience that I think is sort of
00:10:42 ◼ ► services revenue push and Apple's willingness to potentially compromise the user experience in
00:10:50 ◼ ► favor of their own revenue could eventually leave to that again, that's there is a slippery slope
00:10:54 ◼ ► argument there that you might be able to get some traction on based on the accumulation of recent
00:10:58 ◼ ► evidence. But for this particular phone, with the possible exception of the $30 that we'll get to a
00:11:03 ◼ ► little bit later, I don't think it's that big of a deal. Unfortunately, in the US, for the carriers,
00:11:07 ◼ ► there's definitely a tiered system, there's the big ones. And then there's the also rands and the
00:11:11 ◼ ► also rands at various times have done ridiculous things to get any kind of traction. And at other
00:11:17 ◼ ► times have kind of gotten screwed over by the big carriers, which is like it's happening this time
00:11:22 ◼ ► around. But I don't, you know, I don't know, I didn't find it gross or classless. I just found
00:11:27 ◼ ► it boring, kind of like the game demos. And again, I think the the repetition is where it went from
00:11:32 ◼ ► boring and annoying to genuinely distasteful to me, when it's when it's part of like, you know,
00:11:39 ◼ ► the the original iPhone announcement with AT&T on stage, that's one thing. And if they would have
00:11:43 ◼ ► done something like that, where like, there was a segment where the Verizon person came out, which,
00:11:47 ◼ ► you know, like, if that's all it was, and then there wasn't any other mention of Verizon anywhere
00:11:52 ◼ ► else, that would be one thing. But what made it feel weird was that it leaked out, like it leaked
00:11:57 ◼ ► out of its little segment, and it was spread throughout the whole presentation. And so it was
00:12:02 ◼ ► kind of like having a Verizon logo stuck on the phone. Like it kind of had that feel of like,
00:12:13 ◼ ► If you don't see the keynote, you don't hear any of this stuff. It doesn't affect the product,
00:12:17 ◼ ► it affect the presentation. You can say I didn't I didn't like that Verizon wasn't corralled to
00:12:21 ◼ ► its segment. They got mentioned elsewhere. But all right, fine. It's like it's the presentation
00:12:25 ◼ ► equivalent of having having a Verizon logo on the phone. I like like because it was it bled out from
00:12:30 ◼ ► its borders. They must have some kind of deal with Verizon for this thing. And that's part of the deal
00:12:35 ◼ ► is they get more mentions in the keynote. It's not the end of the world. Like, what did it do to you?
00:12:39 ◼ ► There were multiple elements here that felt gross. It was the fact that Verizon was mentioned outside
00:12:43 ◼ ► of their little slot at all, plus the little pricing trick they're pulling, plus the fact
00:12:49 ◼ ► that it kind of sold 5g benefits as Verizon only benefits in some of its implications and wording.
00:13:00 ◼ ► And yes, there was obviously a partnership deal that happens all the time. What about all those
00:13:04 ◼ ► times back in the good old days when Epic would be on stage showing us some knight in armor swiping
00:13:08 ◼ ► at a dragon 20 times? He's trying to say that the only games you can buy for this phone are from
00:13:12 ◼ ► Epic. They made me sound like all gaming is this epic game. Like, it's it's an advertising part.
00:13:17 ◼ ► Anyway, what I would expect it from Verizon ad, it makes sense for a Verizon ad to try to sell 5g
00:13:21 ◼ ► benefits as Verizon benefits. It doesn't make sense for an Apple ad to try to sell 5g benefits
00:13:27 ◼ ► as Verizon benefits. But that's the partnership you're just talking about the money changed hands,
00:13:31 ◼ ► I'm sure. Like, it's not like that Apple's doing this out of the goodness of their heart,
00:13:38 ◼ ► Well, it really chapped my bottom, which is why I wanted to get it off my chest because the rest of
00:13:42 ◼ ► the presentation and the stuff that was said, I thought was really, really good. And as per
00:13:46 ◼ ► tradition, I'm going to try to go in timeline order, and then we will get about two sentences
00:13:50 ◼ ► in and we will abandon ship. We started with the HomePod mini, which I don't have any HomePods in
00:13:57 ◼ ► the house. I am too cheap to buy a big HomePod. This one, the price of $99. That was surprising
00:14:07 ◼ ► to me. And it seems like it's a decent product. I still don't think I have a place in my life for it
00:14:12 ◼ ► because we have a couple of Amazon tubes. And that seems to work just fine for us. And yes, I'm aware
00:14:18 ◼ ► of privacy implications and so on and so forth. I'm not interested in having that conversation
00:14:21 ◼ ► right now. But HomePod mini looked good. And in direct contrast to me, whining and moaning about
00:14:27 ◼ ► the Verizon 5G that appears everywhere, I thought the set for the HomePod mini demonstration was
00:14:36 ◼ ► super cool. And I liked the way they went into, what was his name was Bob, I think they went from
00:14:41 ◼ ► Tim into the shrunken room. Of course, it's obviously full size, but they made it look like
00:14:47 ◼ ► the room was shrunken to show the HomePod mini and all that. I thought this was very well done.
00:14:52 ◼ ► And I really thought they handled the introduction well, even though I'm not entirely sure that
00:14:58 ◼ ► product is for me. I think it all depends on how this thing sounds like they'll show you all the
00:15:02 ◼ ► little thing and the speakers and so on and so forth. But the market that it's competing in
00:15:06 ◼ ► has little tiny things that you talk to that are also speakers that are way cheaper than $99.
00:15:13 ◼ ► Right. And so it I think, you know, the $350 HomePod had to justify its price somehow and
00:15:19 ◼ ► kind of fail to do that. The $99 one also has to justify its price. Because you can get a little
00:15:25 ◼ ► thing to talk to for way less money. So this better what benefit does this have that one of
00:15:28 ◼ ► those little Alexa, I'm sorry, everybody, one of those little Amazon Echo puck things has that,
00:15:35 ◼ ► you know, the advantage they sold was, well, this sounds better. It probably does sound better,
00:15:41 ◼ ► more or less pucks, because those pucks sound awful, right? But does it sound, you know,
00:15:46 ◼ ► 80 bucks better or whatever, whatever the price differences? That's the question. And yet the
00:15:50 ◼ ► other thing is, as far as I can tell, this HomePod mini has exactly the same feature set as the big
00:16:00 ◼ ► HomePod plus or minus the software update that's coming in coming soon for the big HomePod to make
00:16:06 ◼ ► it have all the features they described here. So they kind of introduce this little product,
00:16:09 ◼ ► which is a cheaper, smaller HomePod. At the same time, they told you about a bunch of software
00:16:13 ◼ ► updates that are coming to all HomePods, but they sold them as features of just the mini because
00:16:16 ◼ ► they're not on the big one quite yet. Right. So we can talk about software features in a little bit.
00:16:21 ◼ ► But in general, there's feature parity between the two of them. The thing that worries me about
00:16:26 ◼ ► this mini, and one of the things I talked about is that has an S5 chip in it, which is, you know,
00:16:31 ◼ ► the watch chip, which is, it's a fairly fast, you know, it's not, there's no slouch, what did I
00:16:37 ◼ ► forget which cord is like the A10 course in the S5. I forget. You know, so it's got CPU power,
00:16:43 ◼ ► but like the complaint, one of the complaints about the whole HomePod line is it's not too
00:16:50 ◼ ► quick. And I mean that in both the time and sort of, you know, smarts, right. It takes a while to
00:16:57 ◼ ► answer me. And sometimes the answer is not satisfactory. And an S5 does not give me much
00:17:05 ◼ ► confidence that this mini is going to improve on the responsiveness of its bigger brethren. Right.
00:17:12 ◼ ► You know, I understand cost controls and you don't want to use a big expensive chip and so on and so
00:17:16 ◼ ► forth. And what honestly, why should you need a big expensive, like, why do I need a HomePod
00:17:22 ◼ ► on the A14? Isn't that massive overkill? Yes, that absolutely should, is massive overkill, but
00:17:26 ◼ ► I'm still faced with the issue that my 300 and something dollar giant HomePod does not answer me
00:17:33 ◼ ► correctly or quickly a lot of the time. I just ask it to turn the lights on most of the time.
00:17:38 ◼ ► And, you know, I give it a couple of seconds and then I go over and ask my other puck to do it.
00:17:43 ◼ ► I have three, three, the Google one, the Amazon one and the Apple one, and they can all do this
00:17:47 ◼ ► job. And for whatever reason, I always give the Apple one first shot, mostly because it can hear
00:17:51 ◼ ► me from really far away. But sometimes it's like, wait a moment or your lights aren't responding,
00:17:57 ◼ ► or it's like, just. And so now there's this little one that's cheaper, certainly not any faster.
00:18:11 ◼ ► But that's what they're promoting to me is, you know, that mediocre experience you have with
00:18:15 ◼ ► your $350 one, now you can have that same mediocre experience for $99. And that's not attractive to
00:18:21 ◼ ► me. And none of the hardware features that they showed made me think that this little one is going
00:18:27 ◼ ► to improve in any of the areas that my big one is currently failing. I've used HomePods for about as
00:18:34 ◼ ► long as you have, or the same and I really love them as speakers. They are really amazing speakers.
00:18:47 ◼ ► The microphones in them, as you said, are the best, like compared to every other voice thing
00:18:53 ◼ ► I've ever tried. The HomePod hears me better from further away and with more ambient noise.
00:19:00 ◼ ► Like it's especially clear like in kitchens, where I have found the Amazon Echo family of products
00:19:05 ◼ ► has a really hard time hearing me when there's any kind of white noise source, like a kitchen
00:19:10 ◼ ► vent fan going or like water running or something like it. White noise seems to really hurt the
00:19:15 ◼ ► ability for echoes to hear me. Whereas HomePods, you can basically whisper from across the room
00:19:22 ◼ ► with the oven fan going and it's fine. Like it'll still pick you up just fine. But it's slower every
00:19:28 ◼ ► single time. Like in good conditions and in bad conditions, the HomePod is just too slow to
00:19:35 ◼ ► respond. And then when it does respond, as you said, it is often less intelligent of a response
00:19:41 ◼ ► and it frequently will mishear you. It'll think you hailed it and it'll go from across the room
00:19:49 ◼ ► when you weren't talking to it. Or it'll start talking back to you when you weren't talking to it.
00:19:54 ◼ ► And what they showed with the HomePod Mini might be impressive, but anybody who has tried a HomePod
00:20:02 ◼ ► before or owns a HomePod, or who has even read reviews of the HomePod to hear all these problems
00:20:07 ◼ ► with them, they didn't really answer whether any of those things are fixed. Because the HomePod is
00:20:13 ◼ ► already by far the best sounding smart speaker. And by far the best hearing smart speaker.
00:20:22 ◼ ► Not even close to other ones. Like I have old echoes, new echoes. I currently have a pair of
00:20:29 ◼ ► the Sonos One things that is supposed to be competitive with HomePods with audio quality.
00:20:34 ◼ ► And it's totally not. HomePods are way better. These things all allegedly are as smart or as
00:20:40 ◼ ► good sounding. It's not even close. The Alexa ecosystem is way smarter and way faster and way
00:20:47 ◼ ► more consistent to respond to voice commands. And the Siri ecosystem sounds way better and hears you
00:20:53 ◼ ► way better, but is way stupider and slower and less consistent with the responses. And so during this
00:20:59 ◼ ► entire presentation of the HomePod Mini, I kept thinking like, I don't really want to believe.
00:21:05 ◼ ► They're selling this wonderful situation here, but we all know that Siri is still Siri. It's hard to
00:21:12 ◼ ► tell if they know that. It's hard to tell the way they sell Siri kind of makes it seem like they
00:21:20 ◼ ► don't know how mediocre it is. And I'm sure this is just PR and everything. I hope this is just PR.
00:21:24 ◼ ► But do they really not know? Do any of the higher ups at Apple use an Amazon Echo? I'm guessing the
00:21:31 ◼ ► answer is no. And I think that should change. I would call upon whoever leads the HomePod project
00:21:39 ◼ ► and then every person above them in the chain of command should spend a few months with an
00:21:46 ◼ ► Amazon Echo in their house and using that as their primary like, you know, kitchen cooking thing.
00:21:51 ◼ ► And all that mean their Apple executives, I don't know if they have time to cook, but if somebody in
00:21:55 ◼ ► their house does like somehow like get them to use these devices because it seems like they are often
00:22:05 ◼ ► their own little world, you know, little like Apple, you know, white world, I guess, where like,
00:22:12 ◼ ► they think their stuff works the best because in some areas of the company, that's true.
00:22:16 ◼ ► And even for the HomePod, it does sound the best and it does hear you the best. So it is the best
00:22:23 ◼ ► in certain areas. But I don't it doesn't seem like they realize how mediocre and inconsistent Siri is
00:22:32 ◼ ► compared to its competitors. And until they can fix that, no hardware is going to save this product
00:22:40 ◼ ► line. Now that being said, looking at the HomePod mini, like just on specs alone, seeing like,
00:22:45 ◼ ► the type of speaker drivers it has, how they are arranged, and you know, the design of them and
00:22:51 ◼ ► comparing that to the performance of the big HomePod, this thing for 100 bucks is probably
00:22:57 ◼ ► going to be very competitive against the, I guess, it's like the newest Echo, which is now a ball,
00:23:05 ◼ ► but it's not the little ball, that's the new Echo Dot. Now it's a big ball. Price wise, this is the
00:23:11 ◼ ► same price as the big ball, the little ball is 60 bucks, the big ball is 100. The various small
00:23:16 ◼ ► echoes fluctuate between like 30 and $60, depending on you know, various specials and things. But
00:23:21 ◼ ► if they're competing against those with quality and everything, they're gonna lose because they're
00:23:27 ◼ ► so much cheaper. I'm guessing they're trying to compete with the mid sized Echo family,
00:23:32 ◼ ► not even the Echo Studio, which is the more HomePod looking one, which is, I think $200 or
00:23:40 ◼ ► oh it's yeah, $200. If they compete well against the mid sized Echo, then they're going to be
00:23:46 ◼ ► priced exactly like it and that'll be great. And then people will compare it only on Siri,
00:23:50 ◼ ► where they will lose. But if you if they compare it on audio quality, they'll probably win.
00:23:54 ◼ ► I hope that the HomePod as a product line continues to grow and get actually competitive.
00:24:01 ◼ ► When the first one came out, the price was just ridiculous for what it was. Again, not for sound
00:24:07 ◼ ► quality, but for being a smart speaker. It was a, you know, it was way out of the market. And this
00:24:13 ◼ ► new one, this is this is a decent price 100 bucks. That's a good price. If it's a good product, if
00:24:20 ◼ ► it's if it's anywhere near as good as the big one was. By the way, I say this is past tense. I don't
00:24:26 ◼ ► know if they're ever gonna update the big one again. I kind of hope that any benefits that come
00:24:30 ◼ ► down the road I hope they do and I hope if the speed of the local processor is indeed a pretty
00:24:36 ◼ ► significant limiting factor in the responsiveness of the device. They need to upgrade that. But
00:24:41 ◼ ► honestly, I bet it isn't. I bet this is mostly a Siri problem like a cloud a cloud service problem
00:24:48 ◼ ► of you know why it's so much slower and why it's less consistent and why it's stupider.
00:24:53 ◼ ► I don't think the CPU on the device is likely to be a major factor there. But anyway, this
00:24:58 ◼ ► presentation looked really great. But it didn't answer the key questions that we all have. Will
00:25:03 ◼ ► this actually be better than the original HomePod at the at Siri? Will it have fewer false halings?
00:25:11 ◼ ► You know, it is has really gotten better like in the presentation, they get this whole thing about
00:25:21 ◼ ► didn't actually announce any changes to Siri overall, like today, you know, like it was all
00:25:27 ◼ ► like over the last three years, you've been getting getting better all the time. They did announce a
00:25:32 ◼ ► couple new features the what's my update, I thought was cool. The intercom could be cool. But none of
00:25:38 ◼ ► it was like, the Siri service itself is better or the Siri service itself is faster. Like, it was
00:25:44 ◼ ► just like, we're always making it better. So it this might be great. It might be a game changer in
00:25:50 ◼ ► some way. But I'm guessing it won't be I'm guessing we still have to wait for Siri to get better. And
00:25:56 ◼ ► it seems like we're just waiting forever for that. There's one hardware thing that touted this was the
00:26:01 ◼ ► U1. So you can hand off to hand off the audio to the thing because it knows where you are, because
00:26:06 ◼ ► you got a phone with a U1 and things got a U1. So that's would be a cool experience if it worked
00:26:10 ◼ ► well. That's actually a use case that I find a barrier in all of my various smart speakers is
00:26:19 ◼ ► on my AirPods, my phone is just sitting somewhere, and I want it to suddenly come out over the
00:26:23 ◼ ► speakers. I really have to think to make that happen. Whatever device can use whether I want
00:26:28 ◼ ► it to happen on the HomePod or like, okay, well, I can go into the little pull down thing and pick
00:26:32 ◼ ► it and send the output there. Right. Or if I wanted to go on something else, I can select that as an
00:26:37 ◼ ► app. But like, I would like to be able to just speak into the air and say, please take over
00:26:42 ◼ ► playing the audio that's currently playing on my phone. And the U1 handoff thing sort of promises
00:26:46 ◼ ► that experience if it actually works. And maybe getting to your point of like, what, what's the
00:26:51 ◼ ► why is Siri not quick? Right? It's not quick in terms of wits based on, you know, the Siri
00:27:04 ◼ ► It's not quick based on response time, probably because of the server. But handoff should happen
00:27:14 ◼ ► all locally. So the server shouldn't be a factor. So if they can get that working, maybe that works
00:27:19 ◼ ► a little better. But anyway, that's, that's one small hardware, hardware innovation, the intercom
00:27:22 ◼ ► thing. Like this, this is where it kind of bothers me that, that the HomePod in general, like it
00:27:31 ◼ ► doesn't have like a UI, obviously on it, it doesn't have much of a UI, it's got like a touch buttons
00:27:35 ◼ ► and everything like that. But sort of how features like intercom make me wish there was like some big
00:27:41 ◼ ► control panel, not just a setting screen somewhere buried in one of my iOS devices, but like a place
00:27:45 ◼ ► that you could go a screen that you could pull up that's like this is the control panel slash
00:27:49 ◼ ► dashboard for your HomePod. And features like intercom you can personalize say, should this
00:27:55 ◼ ► interrupt my wife's AirPods when she's cooking when I intercom to everybody? Or should it only
00:27:59 ◼ ► interrupt the kids right and like during what times and like just all those little picky
00:28:04 ◼ ► features like that, that for a new feature like this from Apple, the the settings for it are
00:28:10 ◼ ► probably going to be fairly thin. And I just don't feel like there's a place to go to deal with
00:28:15 ◼ ► all the HomePod stuff. I did like that Apple is trying to push the idea of the HomePods as
00:28:22 ◼ ► as HomeKit hubs, because that is an important function they serve because they're on all the
00:28:26 ◼ ► time, they're plugged in all the time and they're in your home. So it's ideal for that. But I feel
00:28:31 ◼ ► like that the idea that you that you need or want a HomeKit hub for a HomeKit house is kind of techy
00:28:39 ◼ ► and most people don't really think about it in that way. Like you can use your Apple TV or HomeKit hub,
00:28:43 ◼ ► I think you can use any of your devices, but of course your devices come and go. And if you're
00:28:47 ◼ ► trying to sort of live the HomeKit lifestyle, this is just one more sort of sad reminder of how
00:28:55 ◼ ► strategically maybe unwise it was for Apple to get out of the Wi-Fi router business. Because,
00:29:03 ◼ ► you know, if you're if you're going down that path of I'm going to have a smart home and HomeKit and
00:29:09 ◼ ► things listen to me and so on and so forth and you're going to buy this expensive thing and
00:29:14 ◼ ► stick them all around your house, like this Wi-Fi mesh networking, right? You're already
00:29:18 ◼ ► buying a bunch of these little turds with CPUs in them and spreading them over your house and
00:29:22 ◼ ► they already have to be on Wi-Fi. Just, you know, maybe maybe Apple will come back to it someday,
00:29:27 ◼ ► but I feel like that is a potentially a missing piece. Now Amazon and Google don't do that either
00:29:31 ◼ ► for the most part. I don't think either one of them have a product that is also a Wi-Fi hub.
00:29:34 ◼ ► It just seems like a thing that Apple could do that would make this product more attractive.
00:29:38 ◼ ► Kind of like, well, I'm just going to get the Apple Wi-Fi from my house. And by the way,
00:29:42 ◼ ► every one of those Wi-Fi things is also a little smart speaker home pod thing that I can talk to.
00:29:46 ◼ ► Right? I keep thinking about the fact that I've purchased two Google homes, a big one and a small
00:29:51 ◼ ► one. And Google has given me two of them for free because I because I pay for their cloud storage.
00:29:56 ◼ ► Right? Apple doesn't do that. Apple's not giving me any of these little balls for free,
00:30:00 ◼ ► despite the fact that I've also paid for their maximum amount of cloud stuff and will pay for
00:30:04 ◼ ► Apple one. That's not the kind of business Apple runs. But the fact that Google devices are slowly
00:30:09 ◼ ► outnumbering everything else in my house is purely attributable to Google giving me their cheapest
00:30:14 ◼ ► little puck thing. And you know what, when the home pod doesn't hear me turn on the lights,
00:30:18 ◼ ► the next one I go to is that cheap little puck. And why do I do that? Because it's right in the
00:30:22 ◼ ► same room. It's right there next to the lights. So yeah, I mean, I think I actually officially
00:30:27 ◼ ► have Google home devices because I have Nest cameras. And they made some change about a year
00:30:34 ◼ ► ago where like, you can just now turn on a Nest cameras ability to be Google ball. Is it because
00:30:41 ◼ ► they have microphones and speakers in them? So because you can do like that talk through thing.
00:30:44 ◼ ► So like, I didn't either. But like, I technically have like three of them. It's like, they just
00:30:50 ◼ ► they're shoving them into everything and Amazon to you know, Amazon to their credit. They have so
00:30:56 ◼ ► much hardware that can be an Amazon, you know, Alexa powered thing. And it isn't just their
00:31:02 ◼ ► hardware. They've they've also enabled other people to build that into the point where I think
00:31:07 ◼ ► I think I have at least one TV that has it built in, as well as God knows what else. I mean,
00:31:14 ◼ ► my printer probably hasn't built in at this point. Like there's so much there's so much stuff that
00:31:19 ◼ ► has Amazon Alexa or the Google Assistant or both built in that, you know, it's they're just kind of
00:31:25 ◼ ► everywhere. They're just shoving it any place they possibly can to really make it ubiquitous for
00:31:30 ◼ ► as many people as possible. And Apple is just never going to compete in that particular arena.
00:31:36 ◼ ► Where they do compete is everyone has iPhones. So they use that to their advantage. Then if you have
00:31:42 ◼ ► an iPhone and you have an Apple Watch and you have iPads and you have Macs, then we're going to have
00:31:47 ◼ ► that everywhere. And I think it's smart for Apple to build on that to have something like intercom,
00:31:51 ◼ ► you know, it's building that but that assumes or that requires that their home smart speaker
00:31:57 ◼ ► situation get a lot better than where it is today. So if the HomePod mini succeeds, and they actually
00:32:03 ◼ ► end up selling a bunch of them, then great, then they will have a really competitive ecosystem
00:32:09 ◼ ► against what I think now is going mostly to Amazon for a lot of their customers. But that's a big if
00:32:14 ◼ ► and I think that still depends a lot on Siri being way faster and way more consistent and way smarter
00:32:22 ◼ ► than it is today. And Apple has seemed to not be able to nail that ever throughout series entire
00:32:29 ◼ ► lifespan so far, which is now I mean, Siri launched it with the iPhone four s. So that's that's a long
00:32:38 ◼ ► time ago now. And and it should be better than it is for how long you know, they even said like Siri
00:32:44 ◼ ► was the was the first voice assistant like yes, or that you know, whatever they whatever qualifications
00:32:47 ◼ ► they put in that that was true. The echo came out a few years later. And it just iterated way faster
00:32:53 ◼ ► and got way better than Siri very quickly. Whatever ability Apple has to get a fire lit under their
00:32:58 ◼ ► butts to achieve great things. You know, they get that ability sometimes and they focus it in great
00:33:03 ◼ ► ways. Usually, that effort has seemingly never been focused on Siri. And I wish it would be because
00:33:09 ◼ ► so much could get so much better if it was. Yeah, they also mentioned the carplay integration. That
00:33:14 ◼ ► was one of their only Apple moments was like, hey, we have a thing in the car, we've got your phone,
00:33:18 ◼ ► we've got your iPads, we've got your computers, and we've got these home speakers, and it can all
00:33:22 ◼ ► be integrated. So you can intercom and someone who's in the car pull up the driveway can hear it,
00:33:26 ◼ ► I forgot what the demo was. But like all that integration makes a lot of sense. I think it's
00:33:30 ◼ ► good for Apple to be building on that the U1 thing the handoff because they've got the chip in your
00:33:35 ◼ ► phone, they've got the chip in there. That all makes sense. It's held back by by the serious
00:33:39 ◼ ► stuff that we talked about. I think it's still held back by the pricing because Apple doesn't
00:33:42 ◼ ► have a $30 on sale thing that you can put in there. And, you know, I think that the only way
00:33:50 ◼ ► you're going to get people sort of on board to this thing and sort of an ambient way is you have
00:33:54 ◼ ► to have enough benefits to get them over the line to overcome your weakness, right? I feel like the
00:33:59 ◼ ► series smartness and speed is their weakness. But you can overcome that if you can say well,
00:34:04 ◼ ► they're cheap, and they come with a bunch of other cool features. And you know, Apple getting third
00:34:09 ◼ ► party music services is trying to eliminate another weakness. They didn't announce Spotify,
00:34:12 ◼ ► but there are future announcements coming. So we should assume that they're working on something
00:34:16 ◼ ► with Spotify, just get rid of the reasons why people don't want one of these reducing the price
00:34:20 ◼ ► really gets rid of a big one. They seemingly can't get rid of Siri being dumb and slow.
00:34:25 ◼ ► So get rid of some other stuff. Make this a little bit cheaper, make a really, really cheap version,
00:34:29 ◼ ► bring back the Wi Fi thing, just get it to people's house, whether they want it or not,
00:34:38 ◼ ► especially local only services that avoid their server, apparent server side weaknesses,
00:34:42 ◼ ► they get a situation where, you know, without you even realizing it, pretty soon, your whole house
00:34:49 ◼ ► is wired with Apple stuff. And one of the big advantages they can lean on, and then they did
00:34:52 ◼ ► talk about it in this presentation, too, is the privacy angle. Having a bunch of Google and
00:34:56 ◼ ► Amazon stuff in my house makes me feel less good than having Apple stuff. Because in general,
00:34:59 ◼ ► I think they're better on privacy. And their business doesn't depend as nearly as heavily
00:35:04 ◼ ► on collecting information about me and selling targeted ads and yada yada. So I'd rather have
00:35:08 ◼ ► a house full of Apple things instead of a house full of free Google things are going to be a
00:35:11 ◼ ► household of Amazon pucks, right, there are strengths that Apple can lean on. It just and
00:35:16 ◼ ► they're tipping that seesaw away from you know, they're they're eliminating some of the weaknesses
00:35:19 ◼ ► of their mitigating some of the weaknesses and they're trying to lean more heavily on the
00:35:22 ◼ ► strength. So this is even though it sounds like we're down the iPod mini, the HomePod mini,
00:35:27 ◼ ► every aspect of this product is in it is some important thing that Apple needed to do. Just
00:35:33 ◼ ► that I think what we're saying is they still have farther to go. The only way forward that they
00:35:38 ◼ ► would actually do Apple is never going to be the cheap everywhere ubiquitous version of anything.
00:35:44 ◼ ► If Apple is going to succeed in this market, they're never going to take that path. They're
00:35:48 ◼ ► never going to be they're never going to have like Siri in everything. Here's a you know, $25
00:35:53 ◼ ► Siri puck for your car like they're never going to do that. That's not their style at all. And they
00:35:58 ◼ ► aren't good at it even if they wanted to, but they wouldn't. The only other path forward for that is,
00:36:07 ◼ ► then they should be the best, which they often are. That's their their way out of this, like their
00:36:11 ◼ ► way to have this market work at all, is to become the best. The challenge is that being the best in
00:36:18 ◼ ► this particular market requires them to be the best at something that is like, you know, a like,
00:36:23 ◼ ► you know, big data, serious machine learning, AI powered web service, basically. And that's not
00:36:32 ◼ ► something they have been great at. And that's an entire category of skills that Apple has
00:36:38 ◼ ► consistently shown that they can get like, 75% of the way there, and then they just kind of stall
00:36:45 ◼ ► they plateau they're they're never able to get as good at that kind of thing as other technology
00:36:52 ◼ ► giants. And I don't think you have like, this is the kind of thing like, if you would have asked me
00:36:57 ◼ ► before the echo came out, like, which company was going to have the best one of these things,
00:37:00 ◼ ► I would have said Google, no question, because it's like, it's right in their wheelhouse to have
00:37:03 ◼ ► the best voice assistant, for all sorts of reasons, data, machine learning, talent, AI talent,
00:37:09 ◼ ► and just having the massive, you know, web of data at their disposal, like, this is obviously the
00:37:14 ◼ ► kind of thing that Google would be really great at. I would never in a million years have guessed
00:37:18 ◼ ► that Amazon would have been able to build that talent and build that service in only a couple
00:37:29 ◼ ► the entire Alexa service to a point that it was really competitive and that it was better than
00:37:38 ◼ ► Amazon just did that. They just built that from nothing in a very short time without having
00:37:42 ◼ ► a massive history of that kind of talent in their company the way Google does. So if Amazon could do
00:37:47 ◼ ► it, Apple can too. It's just an issue of they seem to have just not done it for whatever reason,
00:37:53 ◼ ► but it isn't that they can't. It's that they seemingly won't or just haven't. And that's more
00:37:58 ◼ ► concerning to me. But again, hopefully at some point, they will get that wake up call, Siri's
00:38:04 ◼ ► not good enough, and they have to fix it and they have to actually prioritize it and give it
00:38:08 ◼ ► resources and make it, you know, just make it happen, direct their attention towards making Siri
00:38:14 ◼ ► that not only good enough, make it the best, make it better than all the other ones. That's how
00:38:18 ◼ ► Apple is going to win any category they try to play in. And if they're not willing to do that,
00:38:21 ◼ ► they're going to lose. Google, I think is still the smartest. But I think what Amazon was smart
00:38:27 ◼ ► about doing was for the basic functionality, make sure we are fast and responsive and work in the
00:38:34 ◼ ► 80% case. And I think Apple's grand vision has always been more like Google's and that we're
00:38:40 ◼ ► going to be super intelligent and do everything. That's like, if I had to give some advice to Siri
00:38:45 ◼ ► team, I would say narrow your focus. Just turn the lights on as fast as Alexa does. Just try that.
00:38:50 ◼ ► Like pick a few criteria, like stop thinking about how you're going to parse this complex
00:38:54 ◼ ► grammatical sentence to integrate these seven devices and yada yada for some cool demo and just
00:38:58 ◼ ► say, let's get the basics right. Because Amazon started with the basics and expanded outward
00:39:04 ◼ ► without ever losing the basics. And I still think Amazon is more sort of brain dead straightforward
00:39:09 ◼ ► than Google. Google actually does try to be like, just say a bunch of stuff and we'll figure it out.
00:39:14 ◼ ► Because honestly, once they get into text, they have their entire businesses built around,
00:39:18 ◼ ► just figuring out what the heck people are trying to ask for. Right. So I think you're never going
00:39:26 ◼ ► they have more experience, but to be losing to Amazon in the, how fast can I get the lights
00:39:30 ◼ ► turned off? That's just, that's just embarrassing. So like fix that first before and, you know,
00:39:34 ◼ ► fix basic things like your uptime and the responsiveness of your servers and, you know,
00:39:40 ◼ ► all that stuff before thinking about the more complicated scenarios and the sort of, you know,
00:39:46 ◼ ► understanding what people say in complex ways. Cause that's, that's where the, you know, the,
00:39:50 ◼ ► the real, the next bend in this curve is going to be, as I always talk about this, being able
00:39:54 ◼ ► to have a conversation with one of these things and to clarify and correct. And they showed demos
00:40:00 ◼ ► of that all the time, but it's in real life. It's not, it never feels natural. You feel like I could
00:40:05 ◼ ► explain this to a toddler, but I can't get you cylinder to understand what I would like you to
00:40:09 ◼ ► do next. And that's frustrating. So whoever gets over that next is going to have a big advantage,
00:40:13 ◼ ► but for now we just want to play a song, turn off the lights, whatever. Yeah. I did think the
00:40:18 ◼ ► CarPlay demo was really cool. Like if you, um, ask where the nearest hardware store is, and then you
00:40:24 ◼ ► go and use your phone in your car with CarPlay, one of the destinations it will offer is that
00:40:30 ◼ ► store that was found a little while ago, which was really neat. I remember watching that demo. I
00:40:33 ◼ ► think it was target or whatever. I'm like, look, I forget what kind of store it was. And I'm like,
00:40:37 ◼ ► I have five of those stores and I know you're going to pick the wrong one. You're going to
00:40:41 ◼ ► pick the one that's closest or you're going to pick the one. And that gets me into the exact
00:40:45 ◼ ► situation. I was just talking about when I get into my car and I think it has directions to target,
00:40:49 ◼ ► but it's the wrong target. Cause I don't want to go to that one. Cause it's a mad house at this hour.
00:40:53 ◼ ► How, what can I do or say to correct the situation? I can't say, Hey, dingus know the other target
00:41:00 ◼ ► because only Google would understand that there's no way in hell that Apple's dingus is going to do
00:41:06 ◼ ► anything useful in that. And now you're just faced with this thing of like, again, maybe not a toddler,
00:41:11 ◼ ► but another human, you could say, Oh, I see what you did there. It's nice that you set up my
00:41:15 ◼ ► directions to go to the place that actually there are several of those places that live near us. And
00:41:18 ◼ ► by the way, I always go to this one. And so stop recommending that one because parking is a
00:41:23 ◼ ► nightmare. I never go to that one. I always go to this one and this for all these cylinders,
00:41:31 ◼ ► There's no secret settings panel that you can probably find. And it's just that kind of
00:41:35 ◼ ► helpfulness becomes frustrating because now you have to cancel navigation, make sure you don't
00:41:40 ◼ ► start blindly following it. Cause it's taking to the wrong one or maybe like, look, I know where
00:41:43 ◼ ► all the targets are. Don't try to be helpful. Don't give me speaking directions to target that
00:41:47 ◼ ► I've gone to a thousand times. I know how to get there. So I don't know. I'm just railing against
00:41:51 ◼ ► these intelligent cylinders in John general. I think it is, it makes for a good demo and it's
00:41:55 ◼ ► a good idea and Apple should integrate their stuff, but their specific instance just triggered
00:42:00 ◼ ► in me. Like I, I can see how that would fall down in, in my scenario with the particular store they
00:42:06 ◼ ► picked. And I don't think my situation is uncommon. You'd be lucky if they picked the closest one,
00:42:24 ◼ ► today I was coming home from a place. I took my, dropping my kid off at a place that I hadn't been
00:42:30 ◼ ► before. And I use the directions right. And on the way back, like I, I always have Google and Apple
00:42:34 ◼ ► and I, I run them against each other. It's my thing that I do. And on the way back, I said,
00:42:39 ◼ ► okay, okay, Apple maps. Now is your time to shine. And I can tell you to get there. There were,
00:42:43 ◼ ► there were many routes that I could go in and I picked one. I picked the fastest one. It was like
00:42:47 ◼ ► 21 minutes. Right. On the way back, I say, okay, you know, directions to home, which is like,
00:42:56 ◼ ► you can give me those directions. It's really easy to do. And it gave me a route and it was
00:43:01 ◼ ► interestingly, it was a different route than I'd taken there. I'm like, fine, you know,
00:43:04 ◼ ► traffic patterns change time of day. It makes sense. And the time estimate was an hour and
00:43:08 ◼ ► 45 minutes. I'm like, what? So I, I canceled it and I did it again. I manually typed in my home
00:43:14 ◼ ► address and I said, give me directions to there for my current location in this parking lot. And
00:43:17 ◼ ► it said, yep, an hour and 45 minutes. I'm like, no, no Apple maps. That's not, that's not right.
00:43:26 ◼ ► What the hell? And no, it wasn't sending me to the wrong place. It was sending me to my house. I
00:43:33 ◼ ► looked on the map like, yep, that's my house. That's where I live. Yep. That's where I am now.
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00:45:41 ◼ ► All right, let's move on to iPhones. We start with the iPhone 12, which is like the iPhone 11,
00:45:59 ◼ ► Yeah, actually 5G was the first feature announced before they showed any of the phones.
00:46:05 ◼ ► Like that was if you're going to keynote order, 5G was more important than the iPhone, apparently.
00:46:11 ◼ ► I mean, 5G is not particularly important this year, but for future proofing these phones,
00:46:15 ◼ ► which some of which will surely be in the lineup for years and years, 5G is pretty important.
00:46:25 ◼ ► Yes, I think 5G, the problem is that it's being grossly oversold for what it actually is today.
00:46:34 ◼ ► And the way, I know part of this is just Verizon being Verizon, a cell carrier selling their
00:46:41 ◼ ► network, claiming things that, claiming the benefits of things that are not due to their
00:46:47 ◼ ► cell network technology. But it just seems like both Verizon and Apple pushed 5G way past what it
00:46:58 ◼ ► can actually deliver, like in what they're hyping it up. And in the future, once we have
00:47:03 ◼ ► widespread 5G coverage, I'm sure it'll be great. Anytime the cell phone radio technology changes,
00:47:15 ◼ ► But it takes a while to get there and it's a transition. And then once we get there, the
00:47:21 ◼ ► actual problems that most people have are still kind of the same because of the fundamental,
00:47:27 ◼ ► you know, physics and economics problems of cell phone coverage. I don't know a lot of people
00:47:40 ◼ ► but I can't because the radio technology is too slow. Like that's not a problem that I don't think
00:47:47 ◼ ► I know anybody who has. Every person I know with a cell phone, if they could ask for a way for their
00:47:53 ◼ ► network to get better, it would be two things. It would be either or both, give me better coverage
00:47:59 ◼ ► in whatever area I don't have good coverage in or in my house or in a building or whatever.
00:48:05 ◼ ► So it's coverage issues or data caps on plans that, yeah, we'd love to use our phones to download
00:48:14 ◼ ► at a gigabit per second, but we do that for a few minutes and we've used up our plan for the month.
00:48:19 ◼ ► Or even if we have a quote unlimited plan, we will hit the throttling limit when our speeds get
00:48:25 ◼ ► dropped down to like, you know, 128 K because we hit some threshold of gigabytes on our quote
00:48:31 ◼ ► unlimited plan. So all the things that we are being sold on 5G, like, oh, you'll be able to
00:48:36 ◼ ► stream all this video and do all this, yeah, we can stream video now at great quality if we have
00:48:43 ◼ ► good coverage and if we're willing to burn a bunch of gigs of data. But we usually don't have the
00:48:50 ◼ ► coverage that we want in many places and we don't have that many gigs of data to burn on our plans.
00:49:00 ◼ ► dense areas and stuff like that and that will be nice once it's widespread. And eventually,
00:49:05 ◼ ► long term, if 5G technology allows them to deliver faster speeds and faster transfer and more
00:49:12 ◼ ► transfer for less money on their end, then maybe our plans will get a little bit better, maybe.
00:49:20 ◼ ► But at root, this is solving a problem that is not the biggest problem most people have
00:49:26 ◼ ► and the problems that we have of not great coverage in lots of places and of not really
00:49:33 ◼ ► unlimited data and, you know, having to kind of conserve our mobile data still in certain places,
00:49:39 ◼ ► in certain ways, those problems are still here and they don't seem like they're going away anytime
00:49:44 ◼ ► soon. And so what we really have here is some wonderful hype about a bunch of stuff, some of
00:49:50 ◼ ► which might someday come true, some of which will probably come true but, you know, maybe not for
00:49:55 ◼ ► a few years and some of which has nothing to do with 5G. Like, some of the benefits they were
00:50:01 ◼ ► touting, doctors will be able to save lives because they are able to view the scan of we or whatever.
00:50:11 ◼ ► - They were saying it would download faster so you could wait seconds to get the big image
00:50:25 ◼ ► We're way past diminishing returns on a lot of the stuff that people do on their phones.
00:50:30 ◼ ► And so, again, like, this will be nice but I think it was oversold. It was kind of like when,
00:50:35 ◼ ► I don't know if how many of our listeners will remember and John, I don't know if you were even
00:50:40 ◼ ► paying attention to the Intel ads in the mid to late 90s but when Intel released MMX, this was
00:50:49 ◼ ► their multimedia instruction set, they had this huge ad campaign that strongly implied or maybe
00:50:56 ◼ ► even outright said that MMX made the internet faster for you because that was the time when
00:51:01 ◼ ► everybody was getting internet access and Intel wanted to sell its new chips and so they said,
00:51:14 ◼ ► web browsers have to run certain things that, you know, to decode images, maybe they can use
00:51:19 ◼ ► some of the MMX instructions and maybe images will decode faster and maybe web pages might render,
00:51:23 ◼ ► you know, 10% faster if you have one of these chips or something. It was probably based in
00:51:26 ◼ ► some kind of technicality like that but what most people thought when they saw the ads was,
00:51:31 ◼ ► oh, wow, this CPU is going to make my internet connection faster. And the real problem that
00:51:38 ◼ ► made the internet so slow back then was we were all using modems. Yeah, MMX might have improved
00:51:42 ◼ ► things but there was this other massive problem in the way that was way more of a factor. And I feel
00:51:48 ◼ ► like this is kind of like the inverse of that. Like, we're really selling and bragging about
00:51:52 ◼ ► this faster network technology and while that is relevant, it is a factor and maybe in the future
00:52:00 ◼ ► will be more of a factor, today it's not that much of a factor. And today, like, we have much bigger
00:52:07 ◼ ► other problems with our cell phone data plans and coverage and everything else that this isn't going
00:52:14 ◼ ► to really change in the near term. So I hope it changes in the long term and I don't know enough
00:52:19 ◼ ► about the details of 5G's capabilities to know like, are they going to be able to cover further?
00:52:25 ◼ ► Are they going to penetrate mountains and buildings better? Probably not. You know, are they going to
00:52:30 ◼ ► drop the price on our plans? Probably not. Are they going to, you know, make more unlimited
00:52:34 ◼ ► plans that are actually unlimited? Probably not. So you know, there's all these massive problems in
00:52:40 ◼ ► the, you know, in the areas that are holding back how and when and how quickly we use our cellular
00:52:47 ◼ ► data. 5G might eventually make some of them better but it's making seemingly none of them better
00:52:53 ◼ ► today. Well, just like the other thing, I thought with your complaint about Verizon, I thought
00:53:00 ◼ ► their selling of 5G was mostly accurate. Like, they didn't promote it in things that it won't
00:53:05 ◼ ► help with. They promoted the few areas where it would. That's why they were showing the doctor
00:53:08 ◼ ► with the scans because it's not like you're downloading an image of a brain. Those documents
00:53:12 ◼ ► are humongous and they're the type of document that at max ideal LTE speeds might take a minute
00:53:17 ◼ ► to download and now they're saying it will take seconds in those same ideal conditions if you're
00:53:20 ◼ ► on 5G. If you're going to sell the benefit of your faster connection, you have to find a use case
00:53:25 ◼ ► where it actually matters. They found one. Giant medical images. Is it a common use case? Are you
00:53:30 ◼ ► a doctor? Do you care? No, but that's why they sold it. Similarly, low latency for gaming. How
00:53:35 ◼ ► many people are playing Twitch games on their phones? I don't know, but if you're going to try
00:53:38 ◼ ► to find, well, does anyone care about latency of the cell network? I suppose if someone was playing
00:53:44 ◼ ► a game that required, like a network game that required really low latency, okay, that's our
00:53:48 ◼ ► thing that we'll sell. Like, I didn't think it was overblown because the scenarios they were selling
00:53:52 ◼ ► were so targeted at the specific strengths. That's why they didn't sell, oh, it will penetrate
00:54:01 ◼ ► the root problem of 5G is that its main improvements are in use cases like they said in
00:54:07 ◼ ► the thing. Dense population, stadiums, essentially short range, but your problem is there's just too
00:54:14 ◼ ► many darn people, right? And so that's what they sold. Now, I don't think that's particularly
00:54:19 ◼ ► compelling for all the reasons you said, because those aren't the problems people have, but that
00:54:22 ◼ ► is what they sold in the show. They sold in the keynote the strengths of 5G, which are not
00:54:28 ◼ ► particularly compelling to most people, but I thought they were accurate. And I thought they
00:54:44 ◼ ► which is totally the Apple move, you just say up to, it's like, well, you get anything between zero
00:54:48 ◼ ► and that, which is true, but misleading. But if they say, here's what you get in ideal conditions,
00:54:53 ◼ ► everybody looks at that and says, oh, well, who's ever in ideal conditions? Certainly not me. And so
00:54:59 ◼ ► they dismiss it, right? So anyway, it didn't bother me. 5G is a problem to sell for just based on the
00:55:07 ◼ ► technology. But I mean, we're all glad these phones have it, right? And I'm particularly
00:55:12 ◼ ► glad that Apple at least says, we have to try this out to see how it affects, but says they're
00:55:17 ◼ ► doing something to control battery drain because in most cases you probably don't even want to try
00:55:24 ◼ ► 5G. Like that's what that second one was about. It's like, look, don't even bother. Like if you
00:55:27 ◼ ► have a use case where you don't think you need it, you're not the doctor downloading the one gigabyte
00:55:32 ◼ ► brain scan, just don't even try to get on 5G, just stay on LTE. If LTE signal is strong and that's
00:55:38 ◼ ► all you need for doing whatever the phone is doing now, like checking email or something, just stay on
00:55:42 ◼ ► that, right? As opposed to a phone that's going to stubbornly say, no, I'm going to be on 5G all
00:55:46 ◼ ► the time because 5G is one bigger G than 4G. Therefore I'm going to constantly be on 5G and
00:55:51 ◼ ► destroy your battery. I'm glad the phones won't do that. I hope that feature works as advertised
00:55:55 ◼ ► because that's the phone recognizing all the stuff you were saying, Marco is like, is this a problem
00:56:00 ◼ ► you need to solve? Well, if you're playing league of legends or you're downloading the brain scan,
00:56:04 ◼ ► fine, we'll kick up to 5G, but the rest of the time you don't have to change anything. The phone
00:56:07 ◼ ► will just go on LTE and everything will be fine. That's how I hope it works. We don't have these
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00:58:04 ◼ ► All right, so let's talk about phones. The iPhone 12 and 12 mini were kind of lumped together. The
00:58:09 ◼ ► 12 is the successor to the non-pro iPhone 11. It is a 6.1 inch screen, but it is 11% thinner,
00:58:17 ◼ ► 15% smaller, 16% lighter. And it has an OLED display now, which is really cool because the
00:58:24 ◼ ► iPhone 11 non-pro did not. And it has considerably more pixels if I understood this right,
00:58:38 ◼ ► So it does have more pixels because the move to OLED, they made it 3x retina instead of 2x
00:58:44 ◼ ► retina that the previous LCD was. But actually, our friend Steve Trout and Smith was poking
00:58:50 ◼ ► through the simulators and I verified all this earlier today. The previous 6.1 inch line,
00:59:03 ◼ ► as the iPhone whatever max. It had 414 points across at 3x. The 6.1s up till now had 414 at 2x.
00:59:14 ◼ ► It basically took the screen real estate of the max and shrunk it down so it just looked smaller.
00:59:21 ◼ ► But you still had the same system layout as the max. The new ones are 3x density with the OLED
00:59:28 ◼ ► panels and what Apple has done with almost all of the OLEDs to date, they actually made everything
00:59:35 ◼ ► bigger basically. They would use the same screen real estate from previously what was a smaller
00:59:46 ◼ ► they have the same 375 point width as the old 678 series did. You wouldn't get more text on screen
00:59:55 ◼ ► or more width of images on screen at default settings. Everything was just a little bit bigger.
00:59:59 ◼ ► And what they've done with the new 6.1 inch line, the 12 and also the 12 Pro, they now both match
01:00:11 ◼ ► at 390 wide at 3x. So this is great if you were accustomed to the 11 Pro or the 10 or the 10s.
01:00:20 ◼ ► But if you're accustomed to the 10R or the base 11, you're actually going to have less screen
01:00:26 ◼ ► real estate now at the same size and everything will just look a little bit bigger. It is
01:00:31 ◼ ► interesting that they went this direction with it. But otherwise, it is very nice that it went OLED.
01:00:36 ◼ ► All the current models now, all the 12s have OLED screens. And they're all 3x density. Although the
01:00:41 ◼ ► mini has an asterisk on it that we'll get to later. Yeah. Although I think this is a theme of this
01:00:46 ◼ ► year's iPhones. And it's a theme that I like, which is uniformity across all of the products
01:00:51 ◼ ► that Apple fields. So they all get OLEDs. They all get, you know, it's whatever they're using XDR on
01:00:57 ◼ ► it. Like they're all HDR capable, like the screens are, you know, again, with the caveat that we're
01:01:03 ◼ ► gonna get to in the mini in a second. They didn't, they didn't downscale everything for the cheaper
01:01:08 ◼ ► phones. So we're going to talk about this in a lot of the features. And we're starting from the
01:01:10 ◼ ► cheaper phones, which is the 12. But I, it's, it makes somewhat of a problem in their line. And I
01:01:15 ◼ ► think we'll get to that a little bit later, too, which is like, okay, well, then how are you, how
01:01:18 ◼ ► are you charging me $200 more for this? And how do you actually differentiate them, but I love the
01:01:22 ◼ ► fact that essentially, they have one set of hardware for making phones. And they don't deny
01:01:28 ◼ ► it to you if you get the cheapest one. So now the cheapest one doesn't have just a good screen like
01:01:34 ◼ ► it always had it has the best screen because it's the same screen as the other more expensive one.
01:01:40 ◼ ► As far as we know, like I don't I don't think there's actually any difference in quality and
01:01:45 ◼ ► the specs that they said, you know, there is one small difference. Besides the the asterisk that
01:01:50 ◼ ► we'll get to in a minute, the non pro screens max out at 625 nits of brightness, the pro
01:01:58 ◼ ► screens are 800. In general, the uniformity of the the hardware features of these products is
01:02:04 ◼ ► something that makes me feel less bad about recommending the quote unquote lesser phones
01:02:10 ◼ ► because they're really good and they have good stuff in them. I think what is the other one
01:02:14 ◼ ► true tone? The other thing we all got that they all get the ceramic, ceramic shield, whatever
01:02:20 ◼ ► latest gorilla grass glass Forex drop thing that's not just on the high end phone. It's on all of
01:02:25 ◼ ► them. Correct. Oh, john, john, don't forget, you get great 5g service with Verizon. We already
01:02:32 ◼ ► mentioned that 5g across the whole line. Imagine if they had the iPhone 5g was just the expensive
01:02:37 ◼ ► one, but the other ones still stayed with 4g. Because you know, if you want 5g, you got to step
01:02:41 ◼ ► up to the pro. No, they all get it of all sizes, which may actually be let's get to the mini,
01:02:47 ◼ ► right. So the mini, the mini is the phone that has the most compromises, because it's mini. It's
01:02:52 ◼ ► it's in the 12 family. It's smaller. We talked about this before it was announced. Smaller
01:02:58 ◼ ► phones have smaller batteries. They also have smaller screens. But that's really their this
01:03:04 ◼ ► phones as far as we know, because they don't tell you lots of specs. As far as we know, this phone's
01:03:08 ◼ ► only saving grace when it comes to battery power is that the screen is smaller. It's got the same
01:03:13 ◼ ► system on the chip. It's got 5g. It's got all the same stuff inside it. The only place it can save
01:03:19 ◼ ► on power is either by being clock lower or having less RAM. But we don't know about those yet.
01:03:24 ◼ ► And Apple sure wasn't telling us. We have the RAM from Xcode stuff. Oh, that's good. Is it is it
01:03:30 ◼ ► less or the same? The mini and the 12 both have four gigs. And the pro and max have six gigs.
01:03:37 ◼ ► Yeah, so it has the same amount of I'm comparing it to the 12 because it's the only we've talked
01:03:41 ◼ ► about 12 and 12 mini right? The only place the 12 mini saves battery power is by having a smaller
01:03:46 ◼ ► screen and maybe having a lower clock CPU. But the battery is way smaller. And so when we think about
01:03:51 ◼ ► hey, everybody gets 5g. The last thing that I want destroying my battery on the mini is even
01:03:58 ◼ ► well intentioned attempts to hop up to 5g to do something like I hope you can disable 5g on the
01:04:04 ◼ ► mini because battery life is the big question mark on the small I know everyone loves small phones.
01:04:10 ◼ ► Maybe Marcos can get this one. We'll talk about it in a little bit. But small phones have smaller
01:04:14 ◼ ► batteries. And nobody likes it when their battery runs out. So I really hope that the mini is doing
01:04:19 ◼ ► as much as it can hardware wise to make that small battery last acceptably long, because the 12 is
01:04:28 ◼ ► sitting there right next to it with a much bigger battery and a slightly bigger screen. And I feel
01:04:34 ◼ ► like the 12 battery life has got to be way better. But Marco, you can talk about the the visual
01:04:39 ◼ ► compromise on the mini screen. Yeah, so this is this is the asterisk that all the phones now have
01:04:44 ◼ ► three x OLED screens. And they all display, you know, at three x with their relative point sizes,
01:04:51 ◼ ► except the iPhone 12 mini. It does have a three x pixel screen. And it does have OLED. And it's,
01:05:00 ◼ ► you know, it has, you know, you mentioned the the cool new glass, the super hard glass. I'm
01:05:05 ◼ ► very curious to see how that is in practice. I have high hopes because they push it so hard.
01:05:09 ◼ ► And I hope in addition to drop performance, I hope it's also a very scratch resistant as
01:05:22 ◼ ► the the weird thing about the 12 mini screen is that it takes the same point resolution,
01:05:29 ◼ ► the same screen space resolution as the 10 and the 10 s and the 11 Pro. And it shrinks that down,
01:05:37 ◼ ► it's 375 points across. And it displays that scale down back to the size that it was now,
01:05:46 ◼ ► if I actually took out my phones for comparison here, I have a few phones with me here.
01:05:50 ◼ ► I have my 11 Pro. I also have my old trusty jet black iPhone seven, I never had an eight. So I
01:05:56 ◼ ► have an iPhone seven jet black feels great. And I have my old trusty iPhone SE the first gen iPhone
01:06:01 ◼ ► SE that's based on the five s. And just for a size comparison here, I noticed instantly when I went
01:06:07 ◼ ► from the 11 Pro back down to the seven size, which is the same 375 point with the cross,
01:06:16 ◼ ► you know, screen layout wise, everything seems a little small. Because it's smaller because,
01:06:23 ◼ ► again, when they went to the 10 line, they just kind of blew everything up, they made everything
01:06:28 ◼ ► a little bit bigger screen space wise. What they what they're doing now is undoing that change
01:06:34 ◼ ► only for the mini. So the mini is going to it's going to appear like the content on it will also
01:06:40 ◼ ► appear mini, basically, like, everything's gonna look a little bit smaller. That's going to be
01:06:46 ◼ ► really interesting to use in practice. And like now that we've gotten accustomed to the bigger
01:06:51 ◼ ► phones, anybody who steps back down to the mini size, who's been using like the 10 size until now,
01:06:57 ◼ ► that's going to be a noticeable change that you're going to have the same width, you're going to fit
01:07:02 ◼ ► the same words per line of default settings, but everything should be smaller. And of course,
01:07:06 ◼ ► I'm sure a lot of people will just crank the font size up one or two notches to make up for that,
01:07:09 ◼ ► then you'll have obviously less space. But I think it's an interesting choice that to have that be
01:07:16 ◼ ► not a narrower, logical layout size, but to just shrink the what was the mainstream mid range size
01:07:26 ◼ ► in the pro line, at least, and then what was the only size in like the 678, you know, not kind of
01:07:33 ◼ ► the plus like that line. That is now the the width of the mini. Logically, they are the number of
01:07:41 ◼ ► pixels on the screen is not actually enough to display that resolution at three x, it's close
01:07:50 ◼ ► to do that resolution for actually need 1125 across the pixel is 1080. So they have to shrink
01:08:01 ◼ ► as far as I can tell, so what we know so far, the mini appears to be running in a scaling mode
01:08:08 ◼ ► all the time. And this is something that we haven't seen since the 678 plus line. So we'll
01:08:18 ◼ ► see if that actually makes a difference with like noticeable visual quality. I'm guessing for most
01:08:25 ◼ ► people, it probably won't be noticeable because once you go to three x retina, some blurriness
01:08:31 ◼ ► and pixels here and there becomes very easily forgiven, and very hard to notice. I personally
01:08:37 ◼ ► don't have any ability to see individual pixels. And if I like, you know, if I mess up when I'm
01:08:43 ◼ ► drawing something in my app, and I like fall on a half pixel or third of a pixel boundary or quarter
01:08:48 ◼ ► pixel boundary on some line I'm drawing, I can't tell on a three x phone. So maybe this won't be
01:08:55 ◼ ► noticeable to most people. But if you're super picky about sharpness and visual quality, the
01:09:00 ◼ ► mini might not work for you. Yeah, I think we should explore before we leave this topic. You
01:09:06 ◼ ► know, before we leave the phones, what we're all intending to buy, if anything. But you know, I
01:09:11 ◼ ► glossed over earlier in I think, Jon, you had mentioned this, these do have flat sides, which I
01:09:17 ◼ ► cannot be more excited about. I am super excited to have the spiritual like you said, Jon, like
01:09:24 ◼ ► iPhone five ish, flat sided feel and look iPhone four ish. I know everyone loves the five and I
01:09:31 ◼ ► keep talking about the five but the four was the one that came out with the flat side. The four is
01:09:35 ◼ ► the best looking phone. This is the love child between them because it's flat sides like the
01:09:39 ◼ ► floor but no ice cream sandwich because the five was just a rounded rectangle solid. It didn't have
01:09:45 ◼ ► a part that was sort of like raised on the back and front. Disagree the best part the best one so
01:09:51 ◼ ► far was the five series. I know you disagree just you're wrong. But anyway, like for reasons that we
01:09:56 ◼ ► can't get back today, like like one of the one of the main reasons it was so great is that it didn't
01:10:00 ◼ ► have a glass back. So not only was it more durable, it was way lighter. And one thing I am so excited
01:10:06 ◼ ► about the mini personally, we'll get to that, you know, once we get into what we're buying.
01:10:09 ◼ ► But what's interesting about the mini is like, size and weight wise, it is not just like the six,
01:10:14 ◼ ► seven and eight. It's significantly smaller and lighter than them. It is not quite but almost as
01:10:21 ◼ ► small and light as the five series. And that's really exciting to me because, you know, I've
01:10:27 ◼ ► wanted a light phone, a small light phone ever since last summer when I when I carried just my
01:10:31 ◼ ► SE for a while, my first gen SE. And I realized like quite how heavy and big the 11 Pro and 10 10s
01:10:39 ◼ ► are. And so I wanted to go back for a while but you know, you couldn't get a good phone that was
01:10:44 ◼ ► that size if you wanted like high end stuff. And what's great about this is that now you can with
01:10:50 ◼ ► that one exception of the screen scaling thing and the sizing of elements on screen, which we'll see
01:10:56 ◼ ► how that plays out in practice with that exception. You're not really giving up anything else. And
01:11:01 ◼ ► that's awesome. Yeah, I'm, I'm really, really excited about the flat sides. I really like the
01:11:10 ◼ ► colors across all of the iPhones 12. I think that the five that are offered on the 12 and 12 mini
01:11:16 ◼ ► are all really, really good. It's white, black, blue, and it's described as green, but it's kind
01:11:21 ◼ ► of like a minty green and red product red. The blue in particular I love. And I also like it,
01:11:28 ◼ ► like it a lot of the Pacific blue on the 12 Pro, which we'll get to in a minute. But I love that
01:11:32 ◼ ► the colors are here on the 12 and 12 mini. And I know we spoke about this already, but I really
01:11:39 ◼ ► want to reiterate and we kind of talked about this on Fusion, the Relay Crossover show. It is
01:11:43 ◼ ► extremely cool to me that there are definitely choices to be made between each of these different
01:11:52 ◼ ► kinds of phone. But for the most part, there aren't that many compromises. There are certainly some,
01:12:00 ◼ ► but there's not that many. And I am really, really pleased to see Apple just let all of them rip at
01:12:08 ◼ ► the same time asterisk. So they're all just here together. And it's really to some degree, I'm
01:12:16 ◼ ► slightly oversimplifying, but to some degree it's here is what you want. How many slices of pizza do
01:12:22 ◼ ► you want? Do you want a one slice of pizza, which is the mini? Do you want two slices of pizza,
01:12:26 ◼ ► which is the 12? Do you want three, which is the 12 Pro? Or do you want the entire pie, which is
01:12:31 ◼ ► the 12 Pro Max? And I just think that's so great that there are so few compromises across the line.
01:12:38 ◼ ► And I'm really pleased that Apple was able to do this, especially in a year where I'm sure all of
01:12:47 ◼ ► you know, economies of scale. And we haven't even talked about this, but I'm about to now.
01:12:51 ◼ ► This iPhone 12 has the A14 and so does the Pro and so does the Pro Max. Like there is no,
01:12:59 ◼ ► their new line of phones, their entire range of the new phones they introduced this year,
01:13:04 ◼ ► all have the A14. And again, they don't tell us clock speeds and they don't tell us RAM.
01:13:09 ◼ ► Apparently there is a RAM difference. Is there a clock speed difference? We don't know. Maybe
01:13:12 ◼ ► we'll find out, but in general, it's easier for them to just say, look, we're just gonna make a
01:13:16 ◼ ► bunch of A14s and we don't have to guess how many of the 12s versus 12 flows we're going to make.
01:13:21 ◼ ► Just make a bunch of A14s. Then they're all going to be in all of our phones. And so it's really
01:13:25 ◼ ► easy to recommend someone get the 12 as opposed to the 12 Pro. In fact, that's what most people
01:13:31 ◼ ► should get because it has all the things. And yes, there are minor weaknesses that we'll get to that
01:13:36 ◼ ► you may or may not care about. Most people probably don't, but the price difference is big.
01:13:39 ◼ ► And you get, you know, it's a future-proof phone. It's got a big battery. It's got a good CPU. And
01:13:45 ◼ ► Apple, you know, so the last time we talked about what does high speed mean? Oh, we wish it would
01:13:48 ◼ ► mean max, but of course it didn't. Is it just going to be 5G? Yeah, it was just 5G. In fact,
01:13:55 ◼ ► I expected them to talk way more about the A14, but they didn't. The A14 had already been announced
01:14:00 ◼ ► in the new iPad Air and they really didn't go much farther into it this time. They didn't have
01:14:05 ◼ ► a whole suite of benchmarks. They just had a couple of like, oh, it's the fastest SOC in the
01:14:09 ◼ ► market, which is true. And it stomps all over the Android SOCs, which is true. But they really
01:14:15 ◼ ► weren't interested in charts and graphs or anything like that. But something I was thinking about
01:14:20 ◼ ► with what they did say about the A14 in both presentations is they, Apple has done this for
01:14:28 ◼ ► several years now. I got to thinking because I've been looking at similar slides in the game console
01:14:32 ◼ ► world, because we're a new game console generation, when they show you the floor plan of the chip,
01:14:38 ◼ ► it's in Apple's pictures, it's kind of like a virtualized line diagram and it shows a little
01:14:43 ◼ ► square and they show you all the different things. I think maybe they started doing this with like
01:14:47 ◼ ► the M5 or I don't remember when they started doing it, like different regions they want to show off.
01:14:52 ◼ ► Here's our new neural engine, right? And it's this little rectangle on the chip and it's over here,
01:14:56 ◼ ► right? So I'll put this in the chat room and I'll put these in the, they probably won't be in the
01:15:01 ◼ ► show. Mark will probably make them chapter. But anyway, take a look at, this is the Xbox Series X
01:15:08 ◼ ► system on a chip, because these days game consoles also do system on a chip, which means CPU and GPU
01:15:13 ◼ ► all on one chip, because we have lots of transistors and it's much more expensive to make
01:15:19 ◼ ► them separate and you can get lots of benefits of putting them together. So if you look at this,
01:15:23 ◼ ► Xbox Series X system on a chip with the labeled regions of this floor plan, you say, boy,
01:15:29 ◼ ► whoever made this cares a lot about GPU, because most of the area of the chip is taken up with
01:15:37 ◼ ► GPU. Now in general, on the floor plan on a chip area equals money. It's not linear because it's
01:15:46 ◼ ► trickier to make different kinds of logic, certain kinds of more regular logic like memory,
01:15:50 ◼ ► or even maybe more regular things like GPU are easier to make without errors than the more
01:15:54 ◼ ► intricate parts of CPUs. But in general, you have a certain kind of size of a silicon wafer,
01:15:59 ◼ ► and the smaller you can make the features, the more things you can fit on there, the more
01:16:03 ◼ ► transistors, right? The bigger you make your chip, the more expensive it is. And once you have a given
01:16:07 ◼ ► area, the amount of area you dedicate on that chip to a particular function reflects how much value
01:16:12 ◼ ► you put on it. So a game console using looks like more than half of its area for GPU makes sense,
01:16:18 ◼ ► right? You look at the CPU cores, and they're practically the same size as the IO and memory
01:16:23 ◼ ► interface, maybe even smaller, right? Those cute little CPUs, you think of them running the show,
01:16:28 ◼ ► it's like, no, it's all about GPU, right? Because GPU can use all available area because you just
01:16:33 ◼ ► add more execution units, because there's always more pixels to be running through parallel
01:16:36 ◼ ► anything, right? And so with this in mind, with the idea that the floor plan of your chip expresses
01:16:43 ◼ ► the sort of philosophy and values of the product it's going into, like what's important in a game
01:16:51 ◼ ► console, it's GPU, let's consider the floor plan of the A14, which Apple has shown many times. Now,
01:16:55 ◼ ► it's not a real floor plan as in like a view through a microscope with false colored little
01:17:00 ◼ ► regions or whatever, but I'm assuming it is in the ballpark of reality, right? I don't think Apple's
01:17:06 ◼ ► showing us their exact chip design, but I'm, this entire section is predicated on the idea that
01:17:13 ◼ ► Apple's just not totally making it up, right? It is kind of suspicious that it breaks into what
01:17:17 ◼ ► looks like four neat regions. So if you're looking at it now, they have highlighted these different
01:17:22 ◼ ► areas of the chip, like the chip is a square, the system on a chip is a square, and the upper left
01:17:26 ◼ ► quadrant is Apple's six core CPU. And you can see the little six regions, you can see the four
01:17:31 ◼ ► efficiency cores in the bottom and the two big power cores, right? There's your six cores.
01:17:36 ◼ ► Apparently some part of the chip is taken up with a giant A14 and Apple logo. I'm pretty sure that's
01:17:40 ◼ ► not accurate. Right? Maybe that's a bunch of IO stuff in behind there, right? So one quarter of
01:17:45 ◼ ► the chip is for the CPU. Six cores of the CPU, that's one quarter of the chip, more or less.
01:17:50 ◼ ► One quarter of the chip, and this is a phone chip, is for the GPU, a four core GPU, right? So we've
01:17:56 ◼ ► used up half of the area so far in CPU and GPU. Half of the chip is less. What is in that other
01:18:02 ◼ ► half of the chip? If we just, we've used half of the area for CPU and GPU, what else could it be?
01:18:07 ◼ ► One quarter of the chip is the neural engine in the A14. It's the same size as the GPU core and
01:18:14 ◼ ► probably bigger than the CPU core. Just the neural engine, right? That lets you know, like, you know,
01:18:23 ◼ ► when Apple's dedicating one quarter of it's extremely expensive, going to make a million
01:18:27 ◼ ► of these, stick them in every single phone, it lets you know what Apple values. And in practice,
01:18:32 ◼ ► what is it that makes the phone a good phone? All that stuff they talk about with the camera
01:18:36 ◼ ► that we're going to discuss later, all the stuff that they've done, the face ID, the recognition,
01:18:40 ◼ ► all that stuff. Neural engine, it's bigger than the CPU. It's probably the same size as the GPU.
01:18:49 ◼ ► half of the final quarter of the chip is image signal processor, which is different than the
01:18:53 ◼ ► neural engines. That's just like for the phone to do, for the camera to do its magic and also
01:18:58 ◼ ► other image processing stuff. And I'm assuming IO is the remainder of the area there. But
01:19:03 ◼ ► this division of labor is very different than the division of labor on general purpose,
01:19:14 ◼ ► In fact, it may be unique for phones and it may be unique to Apple's phones to dedicate an entire
01:19:20 ◼ ► quarter of your system on a chip to the neural engine shows how important Apple thinks that
01:19:26 ◼ ► thing is to the functionality of the phone. And honestly, I think they're right. Like if you look
01:19:30 ◼ ► at what the phone does and how it does it and how it's able to do it, dedicating nearly half your
01:19:35 ◼ ► chip to neural engine plus image signal processor reflects the fact that, yeah, we call it a phone,
01:19:40 ◼ ► but most people use it as a very fancy camera. And then, oh, by the way, you've got a CPU so you can
01:19:44 ◼ ► do the internet stuff. And then there's the GPU so you can play some games on your phone.
01:19:47 ◼ ► It's really amazing to think about it. And if these current trends continue, I do wonder if
01:19:56 ◼ ► five phones from now, if we look at the floor plan and it will look like the Xbox system on a chip
01:20:00 ◼ ► floor plan, only instead of GPU being the giant area, it's just like neural engine. And then in
01:20:04 ◼ ► the corner, it's like CPU GPU. It's just, it's all, it's like rather than a Terminator movie.
01:20:09 ◼ ► It's all neural engine and some ancillary other functions to do IO and control the screen.
01:20:14 ◼ ► Pretty fascinating. Anyway, I'm excited that this chip, I think I'm more excited about the
01:20:24 ◼ ► chips. And you can imagine looking at this floor plan and say, okay, but what if I told you,
01:20:28 ◼ ► you could have twice as much area for CPU and four times as much area for GPU, then maybe we
01:20:32 ◼ ► can shrink that neural engine back down to its proper, its proper proportion and dedicate way
01:20:37 ◼ ► more transistors to CPU and GPU, which I think is more important on a say desktop computer than it
01:20:44 ◼ ► is on a phone. But yeah, this is, this is the chip they all get. And I think it's looking pretty good.
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01:22:18 ◼ ► mostly bliss for me and then just a little bit of utter, utter despair. So the 12 Pro is much like
01:22:26 ◼ ► the 11 Pro. It has the three camera system, which has been improved. It has the standard wide lens.
01:22:33 ◼ ► It has a, I believe it's a larger aperture, ultra wide. Is that right? Did I get that right?
01:22:38 ◼ ► Uh, yeah, I think, yeah, it's, I hate these terms. Can we just say the 0.5 X camera, the 1x camera,
01:22:45 ◼ ► and the 2x camera? That's fair. Yeah. So, so the, the 0.5 X camera got better. They didn't,
01:22:53 ◼ ► I don't think they were very clear on how it got better, but the camera people at places like
01:23:14 ◼ ► up from F 1.8. So that's good. So that's, it it'll be better in low light just for that reason alone.
01:23:20 ◼ ► The 2x camera on the regular Pro seems to be, I think unchanged or at least not significantly
01:23:29 ◼ ► changed. The Max has two other changes. The Max has the, the 1x camera in addition to having
01:23:45 ◼ ► which is better for low light pictures for lots of reasons. And not just a little bit bigger sensor,
01:23:49 ◼ ► 47% bigger sensor. It's, it's much bigger. Yeah. So a much bigger 1x camera sensor. The 1x camera
01:23:57 ◼ ► also has a better version of image stabilization. It shifts the sensor around instead of shifting
01:24:02 ◼ ► one of the lens elements around, which lets it basically respond faster and everything. So it's
01:24:07 ◼ ► better stabilization, bigger sensor, all that adds up to way better low light performance.
01:24:12 ◼ ► And then the 2x camera on the Max is now a 2.5x and it has an actual, it actually has a
01:24:22 ◼ ► less bright lens. It goes from F 2.0 to F 2.2. So that I think is going to be a mixed blessing
01:24:30 ◼ ► in practice. One of the problems that the 2x cameras have always had ever since the very first
01:24:36 ◼ ► one in what was it? The, was it the 6s max or plus seven, but I'm not confident I'm right about that.
01:24:42 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe. Anyway, whenever the 2x cameras been added, there's always been a significantly worse
01:24:49 ◼ ► optical quality, usually with usually being in having a tighter aperture lens than the 1x camera.
01:24:57 ◼ ► And the result of this has been usually pretty obvious in use that the pictures that you take
01:25:04 ◼ ► with a 2x camera usually have worse noise, worse color, worse contrast. Like they're usually just
01:25:12 ◼ ► not as nice looking, especially in low light. And it's to the point where in low light,
01:25:16 ◼ ► the system knows this. And so in low light, oftentimes, even if you have the 2x selected
01:25:23 ◼ ► as your focal length in the camera app, oftentimes the iOS image processor will actually use the 1x
01:25:29 ◼ ► camera and just crop in in the middle, because it knows that in that below a certain light level,
01:25:36 ◼ ► that's actually going to be better results for you than actually using the 2x camera because it has
01:25:41 ◼ ► such worse light performance. And so what they're what they're doing here with the max by scooting
01:25:48 ◼ ► it a little bit further in, it's now a 2.5x zoom. But because it has that less bright lens
01:25:55 ◼ ► from 2.2 to two or from 2.2. I think it might exacerbate that problem of your 2x photos not
01:26:02 ◼ ► looking very good. And this is actually part of the reason why, like in practice, I don't use my
01:26:09 ◼ ► 2x camera very much whenever I want to capture something really great. That's a little far away,
01:26:13 ◼ ► I'll try to just get closer to it. And I'll try to use the 1x camera anyway, because the 1x pictures
01:26:18 ◼ ► always look better. And I think this is probably going to make this an even bigger difference,
01:26:23 ◼ ► because not only did they make the 2x camera worse, but then they made the 1x camera so much better
01:26:30 ◼ ► on the max, but with the new sensor and everything. So I think it's actually going to be a pretty
01:26:35 ◼ ► substantial difference in quality between those two cameras. And so in practice, I bet max owners
01:26:40 ◼ ► won't actually use that 2.5x camera very often. It's interesting to hear you say this, and you're
01:26:46 ◼ ► not the only person who said, "Oh, I never really use the 2x." I feel like I use my 2x quite a bit,
01:26:51 ◼ ► because I'm trying to catch like a small child running away or something like that, which
01:26:57 ◼ ► arguably means I should be on the 1x. But my point is just that I really, really, and I'm kind of
01:27:03 ◼ ► jumping ahead a little bit here, I really like the idea of the 12 mini. And not having held one,
01:27:10 ◼ ► of course, it just seems like that would be such an unbelievably great set of compromises.
01:27:17 ◼ ► But I really don't want to lose out on the three camera system. And I think I feel more strongly
01:27:23 ◼ ► that I do not want to lose out on the three camera system than I do that I want a smaller phone,
01:27:27 ◼ ► because really I want both. And in a perfect world, I would have a 12 mini that has all
01:27:35 ◼ ► three cameras. And if the 12 mini did have all three camera lenses, I don't think I would be
01:27:40 ◼ ► waffling at all. I think that's absolutely what I would get. But because I don't want to give up the
01:27:44 ◼ ► telephoto, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I don't use it as much as I think I do, but I feel like I do.
01:27:49 ◼ ► And so because of that, I think what I plan to buy is a 12 Pro. Now on the flip side of that,
01:27:58 ◼ ► however, I really do want the best camera I can get on my iPhone. And I am not looking forward
01:28:04 ◼ ► to the smugness of everyone, particularly Mr. Mike Hurley, when he gets his 12 Pro Max. And the 1x
01:28:13 ◼ ► photos are just phenomenal, particularly in low light situations. I'm going to be super jealous.
01:28:18 ◼ ► Well, I don't know if you're gonna have to worry about too much smugness, because like,
01:28:21 ◼ ► we've had many years where the big phone has had the better camera. And it's been better,
01:28:24 ◼ ► but it's not, it's not, you know, so much better that you should have this terrible feeling of
01:28:31 ◼ ► FOMO. Like this is it to the 2x lens issue, like this is something we didn't talk about too much
01:28:36 ◼ ► when we're talking about the pros and cons of having a big camera. Reach is one is the next
01:28:41 ◼ ► frontier for phone cameras. Like there's a bunch of phone cameras out that have actual optical zoom,
01:28:46 ◼ ► because they do like a periscope thing where like there's lens elements that move relative to each
01:28:50 ◼ ► other, but they move inside the camera body. They don't stick out of it, right? Or inside the phone
01:28:55 ◼ ► body, they don't stick out of it, right? The reason we have all these stupid cameras in the back is
01:28:59 ◼ ► because none of them are zoom lenses. They are all fixed focal length and it is what it is. We use
01:29:05 ◼ ► smarts to switch between them. There was all the rumors about, oh, the big new iPhone is going to
01:29:10 ◼ ► have a 5x optical zoom range. It's like, yeah, from the widest lens to the most zoomed in,
01:29:16 ◼ ► that's a 5x range. 0.5 to 2.5. Right. But it's in three big steps. And if you want it in between,
01:29:25 ◼ ► it's all computer smarts, right? And reach is kind of, I'm not gonna say it's the last frontier,
01:29:29 ◼ ► but is the next logical step that phone cameras have to have. Because back when we were in normal
01:29:34 ◼ ► times, when you're in the audience of your kids assembly and they're all up there singing their
01:29:38 ◼ ► little song and their chorus or playing their instrument and you're in row 17 and you want a
01:29:42 ◼ ► picture of your kid, guess what? You're not getting one with your phone because it's just
01:29:45 ◼ ► gonna look like a bunch of blurred kids and you just want your kid. And you're not even
01:29:50 ◼ ► able to identify your kid in the dimly lit, you know, cafeteria or assembly area or wherever they
01:29:57 ◼ ► are. Similarly, if you're watching a soccer game and your kid's out there running for it,
01:30:01 ◼ ► they're gonna score a goal and you're gonna try to get, whether it's a video or a photo of your kid,
01:30:05 ◼ ► it's gonna look like a speck in the distance because of where you're sitting and on the
01:30:08 ◼ ► opposite side of the field. So you just do not have reach. And we've been trying to get reach
01:30:13 ◼ ► by adding more and more cameras to the back of our phones. And I feel like the 2.5x on this
01:30:19 ◼ ► is to try to give you just that little bit more reach. And in, you know, inadequate lighting
01:30:25 ◼ ► scenarios where you're in bright sunlight, you don't care about like, oh, it's not as fast.
01:30:29 ◼ ► It doesn't matter. Like you're in bright sunlight, you want the reach. In situations where you're in
01:30:34 ◼ ► a dimly lit place, then it's exactly the same trade-off Mark was talking about. It's probably
01:30:37 ◼ ► gonna use the 1x camera because that's what's important in that scenario. But 2.5x is not a lot
01:30:43 ◼ ► of reach. I know when they say 5x optical zoom, that's from the super wide one to this, right?
01:30:48 ◼ ► You're not going to be snagging a shot of your, you know, kid kicking the winning goal from the
01:30:56 ◼ ► opposite side of the field. You're gonna get a picture of the entire team. Somewhere in there
01:31:01 ◼ ► is your kid kicking, but you're not gonna get your kid kicking. And yes, you could just run to
01:31:06 ◼ ► get closer, but sometimes you can't get any closer. Again, if you're in the big assembly at school,
01:31:13 ◼ ► but if it's a big soccer field, you're in there in the middle of the field and you're on the
01:31:16 ◼ ► sideline, there's no getting around that distance. So we're still working on that in the phone world.
01:31:22 ◼ ► I feel like it's, I don't know if it's inevitable because I've never used one of these telescoping
01:31:26 ◼ ► optical ones in like the Android world, right? But if that is at all viable, eventually,
01:31:33 ◼ ► probably on the big phone first, Apple is going to have to eat that internal space cost and say,
01:31:38 ◼ ► or maybe, maybe they've already done it. If you took all three of these lenses and then replaced
01:31:43 ◼ ► them with one fixed focal length, really good lens, and then one internal periscope optical
01:31:48 ◼ ► zoom lens, would that take up more or less room than the current giant cluster of things? I'm not
01:31:52 ◼ ► sure, but I, you know, it, I don't begrudge the big phone to have a better camera because it's
01:31:59 ◼ ► just got more room in there for stuff. How much more room does the sensor shift take? How much
01:32:03 ◼ ► more room does the little thing take? Probably not that much more, but hey, the phone that has
01:32:08 ◼ ► more room is that one and it's bigger and it's more expensive by all means differentiate it. But,
01:32:12 ◼ ► and that's like the 2.5X, I feel like is them saying, and also if you just want a little bit
01:32:18 ◼ ► more reach, the big phone will give you that too. But the next step we need to move to is not just
01:32:23 ◼ ► a little bit more reach, but like, can I take a picture of my kid playing their instrument up on
01:32:28 ◼ ► stage in the school assembly or do I have to get the entire group? And that's, that is going to be
01:32:33 ◼ ► a big upgrade. We, we can't really get there with like megapixel expansion and cropping. Like,
01:32:39 ◼ ► I think we just have to get there with optics. I mean, this, again, I say this based on, I've never
01:32:44 ◼ ► actually used one of those periscope zoom phones, so maybe they're terrible. Maybe that technology
01:32:48 ◼ ► simply cannot solve this problem for us for reasons that I don't yet know, but it's a problem
01:32:52 ◼ ► that needs to be solved. So until and unless we get to the point where I think I've talked about
01:32:56 ◼ ► a couple of years back in the show where the entire back of your phone is a gigantic sensor,
01:33:00 ◼ ► forget about full frame. It's the whole back of your phone, incredible light gathering ability.
01:33:04 ◼ ► It's a light field camera and we can crop down and refocus until we get there. We're going to have to
01:33:09 ◼ ► have some kind of zoom situation where we can actually get closer to subjects that are far away
01:33:16 ◼ ► and capture them with some reasonable amount of light. It's a hard problem to solve in a phone,
01:33:21 ◼ ► but I feel like that's where we have to go. In the meantime, the trade-offs between the Max and the
01:33:25 ◼ ► Pro, I feel what you're saying, Casey, about needing the telephoto, but I also totally feel
01:33:29 ◼ ► what Marco is saying in that 2x camera. It's never as good. I don't want to use it. I will always use
01:33:36 ◼ ► my feet if I can, and when I can't use my feet, I feel like I can't use my phone. So I don't know,
01:33:42 ◼ ► you can make your choice based on not having that third camera. I think if you really love the small
01:33:48 ◼ ► size or you just want to save a bunch of money, it kind of saves you from being tempted to use
01:33:59 ◼ ► if I can't zoom with my feet, if I can't get closer to this subject, just this is not a phone
01:34:04 ◼ ► photo that I can take." And then you'll just pull out your big camera that you bought because you
01:34:08 ◼ ► followed my advice and put on a nice long lens and snag that awesome action shot of your kid
01:34:15 ◼ ► kicking the winning goal. Yeah, because I also, whenever I've had a 2x lens now for, what, three
01:34:23 ◼ ► phones? I never got the giant phones, but ever since they put it on the 10 forward, I've had it.
01:34:27 ◼ ► I do use it sometimes, but usually, again, usually I'm pushed away from it for the quality loss,
01:34:35 ◼ ► but also when I do need more reach, it's never enough. Like what you were saying, John.
01:34:42 ◼ ► That is true. That is true. I do frequently want more reach from my phone, and I hit 2x,
01:34:48 ◼ ► and I'm like, "Oh, that's it?" The main thing I use 2x for is to crop out more of the background
01:34:54 ◼ ► when I'm taking photos of my house so people can't see what a message is. It's not to get closer to
01:34:59 ◼ ► the subject. It's like, "I want a cute picture of my dog, but I don't want all my daughter's crap
01:35:03 ◼ ► that she left in the floor in the shot." So 2x, and now I've cropped it to closer to just the dog.
01:35:07 ◼ ► But that's basically it. So the 12 Pros also add LiDAR for the first time on an Apple phone.
01:35:17 ◼ ► When this was demonstrated on the iPads, and I do not have an iPad with LiDAR. I have a 2018 iPad Pro.
01:35:23 ◼ ► When this was demonstrated on the iPads, it was one of those like, "Oh, cool," sort of things for
01:35:28 ◼ ► me. But one of the things that they said with regard to the phone was that, "Oh, this will help
01:35:33 ◼ ► with autofocus," which I did think was cool. And I don't know if we'll be able to tell one way or the
01:35:40 ◼ ► other, but if we do see that, you know, autofocus is faster and/or better, I can't say that I
01:35:47 ◼ ► typically have a problem with that on my phone, but more is better. So that sounds good to me.
01:35:51 ◼ ► And then additionally, the Pros, I believe it's only the Pros, get ProRAW, which is a whole new
01:35:59 ◼ ► situation. And I think that Marco, you're probably best off of the three of us to describe what this
01:36:04 ◼ ► means. I actually don't know that much about it yet. You are right. It is a Pro exclusive feature,
01:36:09 ◼ ► even though it appears to be only a software difference. Like, it appears that this is not
01:36:14 ◼ ► due to whatever hardware differences they have. It might be related to the RAM difference,
01:36:19 ◼ ► but probably not. It's probably just software differentiation. But anyway, the idea here is
01:36:33 ◼ ► worth of hardware. There's been like raw access for apps to use. And apps like Halide and other
01:36:37 ◼ ► like advanced camera apps do use it to great effect. But this is the first time Apple is
01:36:44 ◼ ► actually like offering a raw capture format. You'll be able to go into like the camera app
01:36:50 ◼ ► preferences from the way I understand this and just like and turn on some checkbox that like
01:36:54 ◼ ► saves your pictures as this new ProRAW format. And then you can import those into Lightroom or
01:37:01 ◼ ► whatever and do whatever you want with them. And, you know, other apps will be able to access that
01:37:06 ◼ ► as well. And that is it's interesting it for high end uses if you're trying to use and this is true
01:37:13 ◼ ► of any raw capture for the iPhone, but if you're trying to use the camera hardware, but have more
01:37:20 ◼ ► control over some of the effects it bakes into the pictures under normal circumstances, like things
01:37:25 ◼ ► like noise reduction, which is a big one, and other stuff like just white balance and various
01:37:31 ◼ ► things like that various color balances, dynamic ring, stuff like that. A lot of that gets stripped
01:37:36 ◼ ► away when you save it as a JPEG or a heaf because it has to like bake in a certain degree of all
01:37:43 ◼ ► those things to make the image look right. Raw in all forms, the idea is you just save whatever the
01:37:50 ◼ ► sensor data was. And you let apps after the fact make adjustments that are oftentimes able to be
01:37:57 ◼ ► done losslessly things like white balance, like you're not baking that into the file, you're just
01:38:01 ◼ ► interpreting the camera data, the raw data differently. So you're able to make a lot of
01:38:06 ◼ ► adjustments in the lossless domain, or do things in with different degrees of things like smoothing
01:38:14 ◼ ► and stuff like that, then what they might do automatically, to be able to achieve editing
01:38:20 ◼ ► photos and having more control over the way your photos are, are edited by the system, without a
01:38:26 ◼ ► lot of quality loss, or being able to like pull more out of them than what the built in processing
01:38:31 ◼ ► of the phone would have done on its own with your own like custom adjustments of things.
01:38:35 ◼ ► So it's very nice if you're a pro photographer to have raw I always shoot raw whenever I'm using a
01:38:42 ◼ ► big camera, even though it's very rare these days, as we talked about last week, but I always shoot
01:38:46 ◼ ► raw because I love the ability to adjust things losslessly afterwards. The downside is usually
01:38:51 ◼ ► that the files are way bigger, and way slower to work with with whatever software you're using.
01:39:02 ◼ ► I would not recommend most people leave on. If you if you get a pro, I wouldn't recommend it.
01:39:07 ◼ ► And it's something that frankly, I don't think I would use. Because as much as I used to be super
01:39:16 ◼ ► into all this, you know, camera nerdery stuff, and I used to think I would edit my pictures a lot.
01:39:22 ◼ ► I just don't do it anymore. And anything that would add to my burden of taking pictures or
01:39:29 ◼ ► of having some kind of workflow to do afterwards, I know would not be good for me. And so I'm
01:39:34 ◼ ► actually not going to use this feature as far as I can tell right now. But for people who are super
01:39:41 ◼ ► camera enthusiasts, and who who are already the kind of people who today are using apps like
01:39:48 ◼ ► Halide or other third party apps to like, really process your pictures and do a lot of post
01:39:53 ◼ ► processing and editing on them. This could be really great for those people. I'm just not one
01:39:57 ◼ ► of them. Yeah. I have a lot of questions about this pro raw stuff. Like one of the big selling
01:40:03 ◼ ► points of it is kind of as you said, like in phone camera and all cameras, obviously, the raw sensor
01:40:08 ◼ ► data is pretty garbagey. And then it gets processed and you get a photo out of it. But that nowhere is
01:40:13 ◼ ► that more true than camera phones, because they're, you know, the sensors are so small,
01:40:18 ◼ ► the lenses are so tiny, everything is so noisy. And the iPhone in particular, its prowess is the
01:40:24 ◼ ► computational photography that the neural engine, its GPU, the image signal processor, all that
01:40:29 ◼ ► stuff is, you know, three quarters of the chip is working to take that ridiculous sensor data that
01:40:35 ◼ ► looks like how could you ever get a useful picture out of this and work their magic to give you a
01:40:40 ◼ ► really, really good picture. But of course, if you go to raw of just like brain dead raw, it's like,
01:40:45 ◼ ► well, but what about all the stuff that phone was going to do for me? The whole reason I bought this
01:40:49 ◼ ► iPhone is it does all this stuff, this computational photography, you're just giving me the sensor data.
01:40:52 ◼ ► This is no good to me. I can't process it manually like the phone does, because it does a bunch of
01:40:56 ◼ ► stuff and I don't know about right. So pro raw, it's like, okay, well, we know you want the benefits
01:41:02 ◼ ► of raw eyes, and we won't bake in these changes, we won't actually change the colors of the pixels
01:41:06 ◼ ► of your image, we'll have the raw sensor data, and then we'll just add lossless modifications, like
01:41:10 ◼ ► many image processing programs have done this over the years, right? Where if you change your mind
01:41:15 ◼ ► about that adjustment, you can readjust it, think of it as like a layer cake, you've got the raw
01:41:19 ◼ ► sensor data at the bottom, and on top of it, you've got adjustment layers, like in Photoshop, right?
01:41:22 ◼ ► And you can change your mind about the adjustment layers and enable and disable them and so on and
01:41:25 ◼ ► so forth. So what we want out of this pro raw is, what I would want is phone, do all the awesome
01:41:33 ◼ ► stuff you normally do, but do it all and essentially Photoshop adjustment layers on top of
01:41:38 ◼ ► this image. So give me the raw sensor data, and then give me every single adjustment you would do.
01:41:42 ◼ ► Now, I don't know if Apple's pro raw does that. Think of things like deep fusion, HDR, taking
01:41:49 ◼ ► pictures with multiple lenses and combining them, all that stuff, is all of that put in sort of an
01:41:56 ◼ ► adjustment layer? Or is it only sensor data plus denoising white balance, you know, curves, like,
01:42:04 ◼ ► is it just the straightforward things? Or is there a layer for deep fusion? Is there a layer for
01:42:09 ◼ ► portrait mode? Is there a layer for HDR, where they show me the three different exposures they
01:42:14 ◼ ► took each as raws? You know what I mean? That is an open question to me that I don't know
01:42:18 ◼ ► how deep down that rabbit hole they go. Because I think as soon as you start giving up any of
01:42:25 ◼ ► the cool things the phone does for you, it has a high potential to make your photos look worse.
01:42:30 ◼ ► Because the phone is doing so much work, and that's why you pay the big bucks, and that's
01:42:35 ◼ ► why that's half the reason this system on a chip in there does all these things, is to make your
01:42:41 ◼ ► photos look better. And I don't want it to not do that. I would want it to do that, and then on top
01:42:47 ◼ ► of that, give me a little bit more adjustability later at the expense of massively larger,
01:42:56 ◼ ► except in very specific circumstances, to use the ProRAW, not just because of the massive file size,
01:43:04 ◼ ► but also because I wonder how much I'm giving up, right? If I'm not giving up anything, then great,
01:43:08 ◼ ► then file size is the only thing you have to worry about. But I have to think you're giving up
01:43:12 ◼ ► something, right? You're giving up, maybe even if it's just you're giving up the intelligence
01:43:16 ◼ ► choice to use HDR, right? Or you're giving up the Deep Fusion or like whatever one of those
01:43:21 ◼ ► things you're giving up. I don't want to give up any of them because the phone needs all of them
01:43:25 ◼ ► to make good photos, right? So it's cool, and I like the idea behind it. I really hope it is
01:43:30 ◼ ► as cool as I think, but I suspect that it is more limited, at least in this first iteration.
01:43:36 ◼ ► - Yeah, we'll see. Moving on, one of the things that I had feared in the rumors leading up to the
01:43:42 ◼ ► event, obviously from what I gather, everything leaked like the morning of, and I didn't pay
01:43:46 ◼ ► attention to it because I wanted to be surprised, but the rumors had said these phones are going to
01:43:51 ◼ ► get a little bigger, and I was really, really, I mean, scared is dramatic, but for lack of a
01:43:57 ◼ ► better word, scared about that because I really feel like my 11 Pro is as big as I would ever
01:44:02 ◼ ► want my phone to be. I am just not in on the Max/Plus Club. It's not for me. And obviously,
01:44:10 ◼ ► again, I haven't held any of these new ones yet, but I did on the Apple Store app, the compare your
01:44:15 ◼ ► phone thing where you can compare the one that's in your hand to one of the other ones. And I was
01:44:20 ◼ ► looking at this and between the 12 Pro and my 11 Pro, the differences look to be really basically
01:44:27 ◼ ► negligible. I mean, there are some differences for sure. Every dimension is a little bit different and
01:44:33 ◼ ► a little bit bigger with the exception of depth, but nevertheless, these differences are like a
01:44:39 ◼ ► couple of millimeters in any given direction. So I would suspect I'll probably be able to notice,
01:44:44 ◼ ► but I would also suspect that much like the notch, it will disappear to me within the span of a week
01:44:49 ◼ ► or two. And I'm really relieved by that because I was really genuinely worried that this was just
01:44:54 ◼ ► going to feel like a monster in my hand and maybe it will, but I'm not expecting it to. And I'm
01:45:00 ◼ ► really, really excited about that. And it seems like the decreased bezel size and the flattened
01:45:05 ◼ ► sides are really going to make a difference. And I have I mentioned how excited I am about flat
01:45:09 ◼ ► sides because I'm excited. Here are the actual numbers, by the way, because I was worried about
01:45:12 ◼ ► exactly the same thing, 2.7 millimeters wider, which you will be able to notice. Basically,
01:45:17 ◼ ► if you put your, if you took all the cases off and you put your current 11 Pro and just sat it on top
01:45:23 ◼ ► of the table on top of a 12 Pro, you'd see the 12 Pro sticking out from both the left and the right
01:45:27 ◼ ► side for sure. Not by a lot, but you'd be able to see it right. And you'd be able to feel it.
01:45:31 ◼ ► Height 0.1 millimeter. You're not going to notice that. Oh, you got your height and width confused.
01:45:36 ◼ ► The height is 144 to 146.7. Oh, did I reverse it? Yes. And then the width is just as you described
01:45:43 ◼ ► for height 0.1 millimeter. All right. Anyway, but yeah, the 2.7 dimension you're going to notice
01:45:48 ◼ ► apparently that's height and not a width. You're going to notice that and you're going to feel it.
01:45:51 ◼ ► The width 0.1, you probably won't notice the depth 0.7 thinner. You probably won't notice the weight
01:45:57 ◼ ► one gram. You definitely won't notice, right? So I'm relieved too, because despite the fact that
01:46:03 ◼ ► I will, you know, if you stack them on top of each other and feel it, you'll notice it's close enough
01:46:07 ◼ ► that I'm just going to forget about it. Right. Because once you get rid of the other phone and
01:46:11 ◼ ► you're just using this phone, it's going to feel like the same size. Now the flat sides, I know
01:46:17 ◼ ► everyone likes them because there's potential that it makes it easier to grip without the case. We,
01:46:20 ◼ ► again, we don't know how slippery these are yet because we haven't held them. It kind of depends
01:46:28 ◼ ► but I do feel like kind of like the MacBook Air's wedge shape and the old iBooks kind of rounded
01:46:36 ◼ ► things that curves on the current line of phones are slimming. I feel like the curves are slimming,
01:46:42 ◼ ► right? Because it makes you think that the actual width is the width when the curve is done and that
01:46:48 ◼ ► is pulled in. You know what I mean? So I don't know if even though this phone is more or less
01:46:54 ◼ ► the same size, if it's not going to feel a little bit chunkier. Right. Does that make sense? Like
01:47:00 ◼ ► not does it's not going to be thicker. Like it's literally going to be thinner. Right. And it's
01:47:03 ◼ ► going to be, but will it feel, will it feel bulkier on the other hand? Will it feel so good
01:47:09 ◼ ► that you don't need a case in which case it will feel much skinnier because you don't have a case
01:47:12 ◼ ► around it. So these are, these are questions that can only be asked by helping holding it in their
01:47:16 ◼ ► hands. And we do not have these phones in our hands, nor probably will we, cause I assume we're
01:47:21 ◼ ► all just going to order them as soon as we can and then just cross our fingers. But many questions
01:47:26 ◼ ► remain about the squared off sides. But at least the question of the size, at least dimensionally
01:47:31 ◼ ► is relief for me in case anyway. Very much so. Have I mentioned that the 12 Pro also gets
01:47:38 ◼ ► excellent 5g service from Verizon? It's never going to stop being funny. Nope. Speaking of 5g,
01:47:45 ◼ ► I do wonder about that. I did, I did actually think of it because I haven't really, you know,
01:47:49 ◼ ► who cares about 5g. Right. But then I thought, you know what? I'm one of those people who has
01:47:52 ◼ ► crappy signal. And even though 5g is not supposed to bring any sort of signal on me, you know,
01:47:57 ◼ ► it's better at shorter ranges. I'm thinking, but you know, for all I know, maybe someone put up
01:48:02 ◼ ► a bunch of 5g things in, in sort of inconspicuous places that are actually near me and maybe
01:48:08 ◼ ► actually will have better signal. I mean, this is all fantasizing. Maybe actually we'll have
01:48:12 ◼ ► better 5g signal mass. I just don't know it yet. Cause I don't have any 5g devices. So even though
01:48:16 ◼ ► I get, you know, one or two bars on LTE, if I'm lucky, maybe I'll get better in 5g. So we'll say,
01:48:22 ◼ ► are there any other major differences in the 12 Pro that we haven't discussed? I think we
01:48:37 ◼ ► HDR is the most important change in video since high definition. It is not a thing that nobody
01:48:44 ◼ ► notices or cares about, especially when taking videos in the real world where the dynamic range
01:48:48 ◼ ► of the bright sun and shadow is tremendously bigger than any of our devices can catch. Right?
01:48:54 ◼ ► So any increase in dynamic range from SDR, you know, the, you know, the non HDR or whatever
01:49:00 ◼ ► is good. And people will notice. No, and people don't know what care with Dolby vision is,
01:49:04 ◼ ► and they don't know or care that always in an amazing, how you can adjust the video and the
01:49:08 ◼ ► Dolby vision metadata will update. You can do it all on your phone who cares, but they will notice
01:49:20 ◼ ► dynamic range than current phones can capture. So I think this is actually an important picture.
01:49:25 ◼ ► When you take a scenic video of a sunset on your vacation, it will look better in ways that every
01:49:30 ◼ ► single person can notice in HDR. If the screen can display it, cause it's got whatever the 1200 nits
01:49:37 ◼ ► HDR thing. If you have a television with good HDR support, it will look better there. The problem
01:49:43 ◼ ► that comes in with like, Oh, well, one of that, when I shared this with somebody over the internet,
01:49:47 ◼ ► well, you know, Instagram doesn't know anything about HDR. I don't think. And you know, so there's
01:49:51 ◼ ► a gap there, but I feel like for your personal enjoyment on your actual phone and your iPad and
01:49:57 ◼ ► your television, assuming they all support HDR recording video in particular in HDR is a very
01:50:02 ◼ ► important feature. And I'm glad to see it happen on the phone. The fact that it's Dolby vision and
01:50:07 ◼ ► yada yada, it's cool and everything like that, but I just, I just feel like HDR video recording
01:50:12 ◼ ► plus a screen that can show it in a more reasonable way, like 1200 nits, I think is reasonable. HDR
01:50:18 ◼ ► is an important advancement for Apple's phones. Yeah. That's a good point. And yes, I'm going to
01:50:23 ◼ ► say more important than 120 frames per second. We haven't mentioned that. I don't think either
01:50:27 ◼ ► one of us really care that much about it should come eventually, but I want 0% of my battery life
01:50:32 ◼ ► spent on 120 Hertz on my phone. I'm sorry. It is better. We will. We should get it eventually. We
01:50:39 ◼ ► will get it eventually. I hope, but I want to give up basically nothing for it because I actually
01:50:45 ◼ ► completely agree with you. I have it on my iPad and I I'm sure if you twisted my arm, I could tell
01:50:50 ◼ ► the difference between the two, but I don't feel like I noticed it very often, except perhaps when
01:50:54 ◼ ► I'm using the pencil on the iPad. Um, I don't think this is something I long for. I know a
01:50:59 ◼ ► friend of the show, Mike Hurley is not happy about this, but I I'm right there with you,
01:51:09 ◼ ► I mean, and that said, like if they just give it with a toggle switch and you can turn it on,
01:51:12 ◼ ► if you want to turn it off, you don't, then that solves the problem. I, I, the rumors were that
01:51:16 ◼ ► we missed 120 or just because of like screen hardware difficulties related to COVID or whatever,
01:51:21 ◼ ► like it's coming. We'll get it eventually. It's disappointing that it's not here this year. I
01:51:24 ◼ ► understand that. But for me personally, I'm not interested in trading anything for it. So if they,
01:51:30 ◼ ► if they just put it in a switch and let me do, you know, 60 Hertz max variable refresh rate,
01:51:39 ◼ ► personally not disappointed that the current ones have it. I'm much more excited about HDR video
01:51:44 ◼ ► recording than I am disappointed about 120 Hertz. Yeah. See, I love 120 Hertz on the iPad line.
01:51:49 ◼ ► It's, it's wonderful there. Then when I go to my iPhone, I don't miss it. Like I love it when I'm
01:51:54 ◼ ► using it, but then when I don't have it, I'm like, I don't, I don't notice it's absence,
01:51:58 ◼ ► you know, I will say the, the HDR video thing, John is significant. The it's, and it's a little
01:52:06 ◼ ► hard to tell whether they have improved the regular video capture or not. I remember back
01:52:20 ◼ ► it would basically shoot video at 60 frames a second. But if you had it set to 30 frames a
01:52:25 ◼ ► second saving, it would use that to basically do automatic exposure bracketing where it would,
01:52:40 ◼ ► recording than what the sensor could natively capture. And at some point, I think in the 11,
01:52:45 ◼ ► they made it available also at 60 frames a second. Now, if you do, if you go to the comparison, uh,
01:52:53 ◼ ► page that the tech spec comparison page, they call that extended dynamic range for video.
01:52:58 ◼ ► And it's up to 60 frames a second on all these models, 11, 12 and 12 pro HDR though with Dolby
01:53:06 ◼ ► vision, which is the new thing on the 12 pro that goes up to 60 frames a second on the 12 mini and
01:53:13 ◼ ► 12 regular, it only goes up to 30 frames a second. So that, that is one difference that if you want
01:53:18 ◼ ► HDR video recording, the 12 and mini can only do 30 frames a second and the pros can do 60.
01:53:25 ◼ ► This again, seems like it's probably software differentiation only. I don't think again,
01:53:32 ◼ ► besides the possible use of Ram, I don't think there'd be any hardware reason why this has to
01:53:38 ◼ ► be this way. Um, but again, this is yet another thing where like they want people who are using
01:53:42 ◼ ► the iPhone as a pro camera, like a really pro camera. They want them buying the iPhone pros.
01:53:47 ◼ ► And you know, I don't blame them. That makes sense. Even though this is probably going to
01:53:51 ◼ ► screw me this year, uh, because I think I am probably going to go mini. Oh, don't tell me
01:53:56 ◼ ► this because I want you to go pro. So if you, so this way, if you'd love the mini, I don't want to
01:54:00 ◼ ► know. I just don't want to know. I, I'm not entirely sure I'm going to love the mini to
01:54:05 ◼ ► be honest. Like, so just, I do plan to do it. Like my current plan as we stand today is to get the
01:54:11 ◼ ► mini, but I am a little unsure how I'm going to feel about the size. I, I'm a little concerned
01:54:20 ◼ ► about adjusting to the narrower phone for keyboard accuracy. I don't know. That's just usually just
01:54:24 ◼ ► like a temporary adjustment period. Um, and I'm a little concerned about just like having everything
01:54:29 ◼ ► be so tiny on screen and whether that will actually be comfortable in use or not. I'm not
01:54:35 ◼ ► really concerned about losing the two X camera that I think I'll be fine with. I'm not happy about
01:54:42 ◼ ► this video limitation cause I would have loved to shoot everything in HDR. But again, the regular
01:54:48 ◼ ► like auto exposure bracketing dynamic range thing they've been doing for the last few phones.
01:54:53 ◼ ► That is great for me. So I don't know that I necessarily need like will the HDR Dolby vision
01:55:00 ◼ ► thing is that actually capturing more dynamic range or is it just saving it with more precision?
01:55:06 ◼ ► You know, the talking about like the 10 bit HDR, like that's something I don't need. I don't,
01:55:10 ◼ ► I don't need the precision. I'm not, I'm not taking these into final cut and editing them
01:55:14 ◼ ► and making a professional thing. I'm just watching them on my phone. And so if the actual dynamic
01:55:19 ◼ ► range is not different at all or only minimally different between these two modes, then I'm not
01:55:27 ◼ ► missing anything cause I would never turn on the Dolby vision thing because I don't, I'm not a
01:55:31 ◼ ► video editor. Like I don't, I don't need that. Um, but if it is, if I'm going to be missing out on
01:55:36 ◼ ► lots of dynamic range by not using that, I will kind of regret that. No, you do want the Dolby
01:55:43 ◼ ► vision thing on it. It has nothing to do with whether you're going to be a video editor or
01:55:45 ◼ ► whatever. It's, it's more metadata about the range of values in the scene that changes over time.
01:55:52 ◼ ► Right. So you want that even if you just never adjust it because it helps give you a better,
01:55:57 ◼ ► better moving picture over a period of time with different areas having dynamic, you know,
01:56:06 ◼ ► I have the same question about why is there a half of, why does it do half the frame rate and the
01:56:12 ◼ ► quote unquote lesser things? Like, I feel like this is the downside of the uniformity of the
01:56:17 ◼ ► hardware is that Apple is, does have to come up with some reason why you're going to be charged
01:56:23 ◼ ► a couple hundred bucks more for the pro and yeah, it's got one extra camera on the back,
01:56:33 ◼ ► differentiating with software, which feels bad. It feels bad to know that you have a phone that
01:56:38 ◼ ► could do a thing and people get all upset about it, but it feels really good for them all to have
01:56:43 ◼ ► the 14 for them all to have all the good screen. You know what I mean? So like the only alternative
01:56:48 ◼ ► would be compress Apple's line price-wise and have the difference in price between the lowest end,
01:56:56 ◼ ► you know, the 12 and the 12 pro be much smaller than it is either by making the 12 more expensive
01:57:01 ◼ ► or making the 12 pro less expensive. And both of those things are probably worse for Apple's
01:57:06 ◼ ► sales revenue, profit, blah, blah, blah. So I kind of understand what they're doing. Oh,
01:57:10 ◼ ► I guess stainless steel. I don't know if we didn't mention that the pro has stainless steel instead
01:57:14 ◼ ► of aluminum, which may not even be an upgrade if it's heavier. I don't even know. Like I didn't
01:57:18 ◼ ► look at the weight differences, but like this is the, the narrowest gap I think ever between the
01:57:24 ◼ ► quote unquote cheap phone and the top of the line that there has ever been in terms of things that
01:57:30 ◼ ► you can explain to regular people. And I think it's good that that's true, but the areas where
01:57:37 ◼ ► they chose to differentiate them being software only just really doesn't feel good to tech nerds.
01:57:43 ◼ ► Regular people don't need to know like they'll just accept, oh, it does half frame rate. Well,
01:57:47 ◼ ► it's not the pro one. They won't get to yeah, but why, why does it do half the frame rate?
01:57:51 ◼ ► It's got the same system on a chip, like presumably at the same clock speed Rams, not an issue. Like
01:57:57 ◼ ► what's I don't understand it. I don't, I don't understand it either. Maybe we'll, we'll discover
01:58:01 ◼ ► what the answer is, but it could just be plain old differentiation. And that's kind of a shame
01:58:05 ◼ ► that they get, we didn't talk about this with the mini, but right. The mini, the, the reason
01:58:09 ◼ ► Marco has any angst whatsoever about that, or most of our markers angst about the mini is the fact
01:58:14 ◼ ► that it's not the phone that the mini disciples really want, which is just as good as the high-end
01:58:21 ◼ ► phone, but smaller and Apple just stubbornly refuses to make that phone for reasons that
01:58:27 ◼ ► make some kind of sense. Cause you know, smaller and it's the size based pricing of like max
01:58:32 ◼ ► software sells more because max screens are bigger. Like, well, it's smaller. Shouldn't it
01:58:36 ◼ ► cost less, you know? So like if they made one that was the 12 pro mini, uh, that would make
01:58:44 ◼ ► this contingent of people a lot happier. It's got all the cameras on it. It's got all the things.
01:58:48 ◼ ► There's no limitations, yada, yada. It's still Marco be worried about the screen being smaller
01:58:51 ◼ ► and the keyboard being weird. But other than that, it's a no compromises mini. This is a compromise
01:58:56 ◼ ► as many it's the mini 12. It's not the pro mini 12, right? So she'd be glad you got something
01:59:02 ◼ ► that was mini, but that's, that's the problem. If you want a smaller size, there is no option
01:59:06 ◼ ► for the, there is no M2 competition. There's just the plain old two series and no, sorry,
01:59:13 ◼ ► we don't make a fast version of that car. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, to whatever degree that,
01:59:19 ◼ ► you know, a lot of these limitations on the smaller products are physics, you know, like they
01:59:24 ◼ ► just can't fit as much in them. And that's, I understand that completely. It does kind of hurt
01:59:29 ◼ ► though when that's not the reason, like when the reason is just segmentation and price, it's like,
01:59:35 ◼ ► yeah, you know what? Apple has always made, you know, smaller equals low end, bigger equals high
01:59:42 ◼ ► end. And people who want high end stuff in a small product usually have no option. And I really,
01:59:50 ◼ ► as much as I want to complain about that in this case, the differences between the mini and the pro
02:00:07 ◼ ► as much as I want to complain that the mini doesn't have all the best features available
02:00:11 ◼ ► in some kind of like pro mini, I think it's still going to be so damn close in day to day use,
02:00:18 ◼ ► like in, in feature parody and everything that I don't think it really matters here for, for,
02:00:22 ◼ ► for most people, most of the time, you know, it hurts when people like me and Casey want the best
02:00:28 ◼ ► stuff, but we also want small phones. Like it does hurt that we can't get the best stuff at any price
02:00:40 ◼ ► the vast majority of days I don't use my two X camera. So when I lose the two X camera by making
02:00:46 ◼ ► this move, I I'm probably going to regret it like maybe once a month when I'll, I'll want to hit
02:00:51 ◼ ► that two X button and realize, Oh, I'm just getting digital zoom now. This is crappy. But it's,
02:00:56 ◼ ► you know, if even that often, like it might even be less than that. Once I remember how crappy the
02:01:00 ◼ ► two X cameras always are. Yeah. Apple's been burned a couple of times. I wonder if this is sort of,
02:01:06 ◼ ► you know, institutional DNA of making the small expensive product. The G four cube was the small
02:01:11 ◼ ► expensive product. Didn't do too well. The trashcan Mac pro, the small, this is like basically the Mac
02:01:17 ◼ ► pro mini didn't do too well. There may be other examples out there like the MacBook. Yeah. The 12
02:01:22 ◼ ► inch MacBook. That wasn't really a pro. That was a compromise slow machine. It wasn't trying to take,
02:01:28 ◼ ► it had like semi-pro features. I don't, I, that's not an example of what I was talking about. I was
02:01:34 ◼ ► thinking of like, like no compromises, but small size. Like the only thing you compromise is on
02:01:38 ◼ ► size, but it's gotta be as fast as the big ones. So that then, you know, the trashcan Mac pro or the
02:01:42 ◼ ► G G four cube, even though they weren't exactly as fast, but anyway, I, I, for the, for the 12 mini,
02:01:47 ◼ ► I think that's the right choice. Like in general, I feel like most people are going to buy the non
02:01:52 ◼ ► pro phones just because they're cheaper. And so if you're going to have any kind of size
02:01:55 ◼ ► differentiation, put it in the phones that most people buy and then let the weird pro people
02:02:03 ◼ ► All right. So a couple of grab bag things, and then I'd like to discuss what John and I plan to
02:02:10 ◼ ► do. Um, we didn't mention that the 64 gig phones are gone. So it's starting at 128 gigs, which is
02:02:16 ◼ ► excellent. So we have 128 to 256 and five 12. Uh, that's only for the pro. Oh, is that right?
02:02:22 ◼ ► Oh, I'm sorry. The 12 and mini are 64, one 28, two 56. The pro is one 28, two 56, five 12.
02:02:28 ◼ ► Yeah. And I think that's, you know, Apple doing anything with storage is good and doubling it for
02:02:32 ◼ ► the quote unquote, same price, which we'll get to in a second. Uh, yeah. Helps helps a little bit.
02:02:38 ◼ ► Yeah. Right. And so speaking of pricing, uh, Apple saving the environment again and passing
02:02:44 ◼ ► the savings on to Verizon with their 5g service. Uh, no, they are, they are saving the environment.
02:02:51 ◼ ► Um, the, in so far as they are not including the little brick in the iPhone box anymore. They're
02:02:56 ◼ ► also not including headphones in the box anymore. I don't think I have any particular problem with
02:03:01 ◼ ► this. I am. I find it ever so slightly gross that they're painting. It is exclusively environmental
02:03:07 ◼ ► when clearly it's helping. Um, it's helping their bottom line, but I mean, whatever I'll roll with
02:03:13 ◼ ► it. Uh, also interestingly, it's a USB C, uh, to lightning cable in the box, not a USB, whatever
02:03:21 ◼ ► the traditional way is to lighten. Thank you to lightning, which in and of itself, I think is an
02:03:26 ◼ ► improvement for most people until I realized after a while that wait, all of these 80 gazillion,
02:03:34 ◼ ► uh, bricks, wall warts, whatever you want to call them that everyone has, those are all USB a.
02:03:38 ◼ ► And granted they all came with lightning cables and so on and so forth. But you're, you're telling
02:03:43 ◼ ► us that we all have a bazillion of these bricks and yet you're giving us a cable that doesn't work
02:03:47 ◼ ► to keep shipping a cables. Like they need to be, they need to be the change they want to see in the
02:03:52 ◼ ► world, which is USB C everywhere. So yeah, the weird thing about it though, is if you walk into
02:03:58 ◼ ► a, an Apple store or order online or wherever, and you just get an iPhone and it's your first Apple
02:04:02 ◼ ► product, you can't charge it unless you already have something like he's like the USB C is like,
02:04:07 ◼ ► Oh, well just plug it into your Mac. It's like, what Mac? I don't have a Mac. And you probably
02:04:10 ◼ ► don't have a PC with you. If you just like, it used to be that you could just buy an iPhone and
02:04:14 ◼ ► have like nothing else in the house, except for a power outlet. And you were fine. Like, you know,
02:04:17 ◼ ► you could plug it in, you can get on the cell network, blah, blah, blah. Now you do. Like, I
02:04:22 ◼ ► wonder if Apple people in Apple stores will ask people, Oh, and by the way, do you have something
02:04:27 ◼ ► that you're going to be able to charge this with? Because if you don't, that's a problem. They
02:04:31 ◼ ► shouldn't let you walk out of the store without buying a little, you know, USB C charge you turd
02:04:37 ◼ ► thing for $29 or whatever. It's only 19 now. You literally can't charge your phone unless you plug
02:04:43 ◼ ► it in somewhere. It doesn't plug into the wall. It's got just got USB C on the end. Right? So
02:04:47 ◼ ► I, this, this changed to sort of more decontenting. I mean, there was a time when I think iPhones came
02:04:53 ◼ ► with a dock in the box or was that just iPods? No, I thought they did. I think the very first
02:04:58 ◼ ► iPhone might've come with a dock. Yeah. Well, iPods came with like an inline remote for the
02:05:04 ◼ ► headphones and a dock, and they just slowly been removing the amount of stuff from the dock and
02:05:07 ◼ ► in the box. And honestly, I think that's the right thing to do for a variety of reasons. I just wish
02:05:13 ◼ ► the pricing reflected more. I don't think they were pricing doesn't reflect it at all because
02:05:18 ◼ ► you do get double the storage on the pro ones. So there's a little bit of a trade off there where
02:05:22 ◼ ► it's like, okay, well, you're, you've more than made up for the, for the price of the brick with
02:05:26 ◼ ► that storage thing on the pros specifically. And also we don't know like, is the a 14 more
02:05:36 ◼ ► the cost trade-offs are not clear when the, when the decontenting comes along with a new model,
02:05:41 ◼ ► right? Because you don't know what the cost of these phones would be if they didn't do that.
02:05:45 ◼ ► We're just assuming that's like, oh, Apple just gets all of that as profit, but it's probably not
02:05:49 ◼ ► true. Right. Whereas if they were selling like, you know, the iPhone 11 pro and then midway through
02:05:55 ◼ ► the year took out the, the adapters, but kept the price the same, then we could just say that,
02:05:59 ◼ ► you know, Apple is just taking all of that money or whatever. But anyway, I think it's a simplification
02:06:04 ◼ ► and a correct to reasonable simplification to stop giving everybody a million different headphones
02:06:08 ◼ ► and million different pro plugs and let people buy it in pieces. I think it would be smarter for
02:06:13 ◼ ► them to sell watches in pieces. They have in separate boxes and now they're learning how to
02:06:16 ◼ ► do return separately. Like a cart buying of the components is a more consumer friendly and, and,
02:06:22 ◼ ► and yes, also environmentally friendly approach. And so I applaud that even if we do feel like
02:06:27 ◼ ► we're kind of, you know, getting a few bucks pulled out of our pockets, especially on the
02:06:33 ◼ ► low end phones, but you know, the green progress, right. And the other thing you have to do is like
02:06:37 ◼ ► over time, inflation is a thing too. Like you can't, you know, I think about this when everyone
02:06:41 ◼ ► talks about $60 video games for years and years, it's like, well, $60 is not what it used to be
02:06:45 ◼ ► in 1998. Right. You said, let's just keep the price the same, but it's actually less now because
02:06:50 ◼ ► of the magic of inflation. But anyway, I'm, I'm not super mad about this. I do worry a little bit
02:06:56 ◼ ► about where people can plug in their brand new phone to charge it. Yep. I agree. Speaking of
02:07:02 ◼ ► money, something very peculiar has happened this year with regard to the costly iPhones,
02:07:06 ◼ ► which we were alluding to earlier, but never actually spoke about for, I believe the 12 and 12
02:07:12 ◼ ► mini, if you were to buy one outright, so a SIM free model, it's $30 more than the price it would
02:07:22 ◼ ► be if you buy a SIM included model from Verizon or AT&T additionally sprint and T-Mobile here in the
02:07:29 ◼ ► States, also $30 more than it would be from Verizon or AT&T, which is extremely peculiar. And I don't
02:07:35 ◼ ► really know why that's the case. It's their preferred partner program is basically, you know,
02:07:42 ◼ ► this is the, the, the rich gets richer and, you know, whatever business relationship there is
02:07:46 ◼ ► between Apple and these various carriers, some of them have a worse deal. Money gets passed on to
02:07:53 ◼ ► you and like, who knows? Like, I mean, it falls into the same category as like being charged
02:07:58 ◼ ► activation fees for quote unquote new lines and everything having to do with telecom companies is
02:08:03 ◼ ► just a mess of fees and it's disappointing and annoying and confusing, but almost anything having
02:08:09 ◼ ► to do with telecom billing that's true of, and that is also true of, you know, phones. I mean,
02:08:16 ◼ ► again, I still think back to the bad old days of contracts and all that stuff. And I think the
02:08:21 ◼ ► current world where essentially all your phones are unlocked for the most part, except what was
02:08:25 ◼ ► it? Except for the AT&T one, there was like, no, that's, that's almost it. If I recall correctly,
02:08:31 ◼ ► cause I was just looking at this the other day. If you buy a subsidized AT&T phone, then you,
02:08:38 ◼ ► then it is locked, but literally everything else is not locked. So in general, this trend is going
02:08:44 ◼ ► in the right direction, but weird carrier related charges and fees are still a thing. All right. We
02:08:51 ◼ ► also didn't mention MagSafe, which I'm actually kind of excited about. So I, I, I think I might
02:08:58 ◼ ► have like blanked during this, this part of the, the, the presentation, perhaps because I was
02:09:03 ◼ ► reflecting on 5G from Verizon. But it keeps on giving, keeps on giving. So it, it, I guess that
02:09:12 ◼ ► it's a couple of things all rolled into one, right? So it's improved faster wireless charging.
02:09:18 ◼ ► So it's like, you know, Qi plus plus, but it also is that the phone, if I understand this right,
02:09:24 ◼ ► the phone itself has a magnet within it that you can use to attach like cases and wallets and
02:09:31 ◼ ► things to the phone. Do I have that right? Yes. Yeah. That's what Apple's cases do. In fact,
02:09:39 ◼ ► in general, like our existing phones, whatever 11 or whatever you have, even my tennis,
02:09:45 ◼ ► the case goes on by sort of wrapping around the front and that's how it stays on. Like it's,
02:09:50 ◼ ► it's all, you know, you have to sort of wedge the phone in there and then the case wraps around the
02:09:55 ◼ ► front and that's why the phone doesn't fall out of it with flat sides. In order to keep the phone in
02:09:59 ◼ ► the case, you'd need a case that came up along those flat sides and then turned over the front
02:10:05 ◼ ► surface a little bit. It'd have to be like a lip, right? And those little lips are always kind of
02:10:09 ◼ ► annoying. And my impression not having seen anyone or felt one of these in person is that these
02:10:14 ◼ ► magnetically attaching cases either don't have a lip at all, or can get away with having less of
02:10:19 ◼ ► a lip because the thing that is keeping the phone inside the case is that giant ring of magnets
02:10:23 ◼ ► that's embedded in the phone and a corresponding ring of either magnets or, you know, magnetic
02:10:29 ◼ ► material in the case. And so they stick together and so you don't need as big a lip, right?
02:10:36 ◼ ► The other thing they promoted is like, okay, once you've got a bunch of magnets embedded in the back
02:10:39 ◼ ► of your phone, yes, you can use it to align to your charger better and that alignment can give
02:10:44 ◼ ► you more power. I think these chargers, where they say they were like 15 watts as opposed to the
02:10:49 ◼ ► first Qi chargers, which were 7.5 on what it was on the iPhone 10 or whatever, when did the first
02:10:54 ◼ ► Qi charging come out? Something like that. Eight and 10. Yeah. So, so that's good. The other thing
02:11:00 ◼ ► you can do with magnets on the back of your phone is attach other things like they mentioned a
02:11:05 ◼ ► dashboard mount for your car, instead of having one of those like the claw machines where you put
02:11:10 ◼ ► your phone in and it goes snapshot like a bear trap and your phone is trapped in this little
02:11:14 ◼ ► thing, like basically mechanical friction-based grippy thing to hold your car in the phone mount.
02:11:20 ◼ ► Now you can have a magnetic phone mount. You can have pop sockets that attach to the back instead
02:11:24 ◼ ► of marring your phone with some super sticky, you know, adhesive thing or whatever. You can have a
02:11:30 ◼ ► magnetic pop socket, right? All of these things sound super cool to me, but the presentation
02:11:36 ◼ ► wasn't over before I started to think about, oh, and by the way, one of the other ones they have
02:11:45 ◼ ► magnets in the back. But I was thinking is like, how powerful are these magnets? You're going to
02:11:51 ◼ ► do a car mount with it? If I go over, you know, if I go through a Boston pothole that has already
02:11:57 ◼ ► bent one of my rims on my car, is my magnetically attached phone going to stay? That's gotta be some
02:12:03 ◼ ► powerful ring of magnets, right? It's going to hold the case on? Is that enough to hold the case on?
02:12:09 ◼ ► Maybe it has no lip at all, just the magnets are enough to keep my phone in that case? Or if I,
02:12:14 ◼ ► you know, wave my arm because I lose my balance or something and I don't drop my phone, but I was
02:12:19 ◼ ► just holding onto the case, does the phone go flying out of it? And the final thing is that I
02:12:23 ◼ ► thought of when I saw the wallet is like, one of the things I frequently do with my phone now is I
02:12:27 ◼ ► put it in my pocket in my new pouch-free lifestyle, and then I put my wallet in that same pocket. And
02:12:32 ◼ ► my wallet is full of credit cards. Do I want a bunch of credit cards laying smack up against
02:12:39 ◼ ► a magnet that is powerful enough to keep my car in a car mount? That is powerful enough to hold
02:12:44 ◼ ► a pop socket? When people use pop sockets, like it's between their fingers or whatever,
02:12:48 ◼ ► and they're just holding the pop socket. They're relying on the fact that the pop socket is
02:12:52 ◼ ► securely fastened to the phone. They're not holding the phone. The whole point of the pop
02:12:55 ◼ ► socket is it gives you like a handle for your phone. So these magnets have to be very strong.
02:12:59 ◼ ► I do not want any kind of card with a mag stripe anywhere near those magnets. And if you get a case,
02:13:10 ◼ ► either have their own magnets or like they don't, you know, it doesn't shield your credit cards in
02:13:16 ◼ ► your pocket along with it from the magnets in your phone because the cases themselves have
02:13:21 ◼ ► secondary magnets. So you can still use it to align with the Qi charger or whatever. So I'm
02:13:27 ◼ ► a little bit worried about exactly how magnetic my phone is going to be because with the uniformity
02:13:32 ◼ ► of the line, they all have this. This is not just a pro feature. They all have these magnetic things
02:13:37 ◼ ► and it seems super cool. And it's essentially a variant of what I was talking about last show
02:13:42 ◼ ► about like, what can you do when you get rid of the port? Well, you can have semi-proprietary
02:13:46 ◼ ► charging stuff that also supports Qi, but also has magnetically attaching little manta ray things,
02:13:50 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah. I swear to you, I had not read any of these rumors if they had even been.
02:13:56 ◼ ► I swear to you, I have no idea. In fact, the thing I envisioned in my head was slightly different
02:13:59 ◼ ► than what they did here, but they literally brought back MagSafe because it doesn't make
02:14:03 ◼ ► any sense honestly, because it's not quite the same thing, but you know, that's what they had
02:14:06 ◼ ► in their brand name bin. And so there we go. Like I said, hell bring back MagSafe and they did with
02:14:11 ◼ ► the bell with about the same amount of reasoning. It's about magnets, right? But I am, I have two
02:14:16 ◼ ► minds about these magnets. Are these magnets strong enough to do the jobs they're being asked to do?
02:14:22 ◼ ► And are these magnets weak enough to not destroy all my credit cards? So I have multiple issues
02:14:27 ◼ ► with this. First of all, most credit cards are not using magnetic stripes anymore in most places.
02:14:41 ◼ ► terminals because they have to for lots of other reasons. You know, great. Hotel room keys is one
02:14:46 ◼ ► of the things that, again, I know we're not going to hotels now, but hotel room keys, it's going to
02:14:49 ◼ ► take a while before they're all updated to do chip things and being locked out of your hotel room is
02:14:55 ◼ ► worse than not being able to buy something in the store. Yeah. Although in all fairness,
02:14:58 ◼ ► hotel room keys seem to wipe themselves if you breathe on them wrong. That's what I'm saying.
02:15:03 ◼ ► It's already a hostile environment and I'm going to put my, oh, give him a hotel key, I said,
02:15:08 ◼ ► put it into my pocket up, it's dead. Yeah. Secondarily, some people in the chat are saying
02:15:13 ◼ ► that apparently the wallet thing shields the cards that are inside of it. I don't, I didn't even know
02:15:18 ◼ ► that was possible for magnetism, but cool. Yeah. So I had heard through various people that there
02:15:23 ◼ ► is shielding in the wallet thing, which makes sense because they know it's going to have credit
02:15:26 ◼ ► cards. So my question is shielded how is my first question. And second question is that's all well
02:15:32 ◼ ► and good for the cards that are in my special wallet, but what if I just literally put my actual
02:15:36 ◼ ► wallet in the pocket with my super magnet phone? Right. So this brings up number three. Actually,
02:15:41 ◼ ► I think they, so I know like one of the ways that watches are anti-magnetic for their, to keep their
02:15:46 ◼ ► movements from becoming magnetized. One of the ways to do that is by encasing the movement in a
02:15:50 ◼ ► soft iron cage. I don't know what that means or how that works, but that's a thing. So maybe they're
02:15:56 ◼ ► doing the same kind of principle here for shielding. So if so, that actually can work. But my, my final
02:16:01 ◼ ► question here is you put your phone in the same pocket as your wallet, right? Thank you. Yeah.
02:16:07 ◼ ► Why would I not, why would I not do that? Cause you have multiple pockets and that makes one
02:16:11 ◼ ► pocket really big and heavy and stick out really far. No, not my pants pocket, my coat pocket.
02:16:16 ◼ ► Why is your wallet not in your pants pocket? It depends on what season it is. If it's coat season,
02:16:20 ◼ ► I have big coat pockets. I put it there. Well, if you had a wallet that was less than 13 inches
02:16:24 ◼ ► thick, you wouldn't have such a problem. My wallet has slimmed down a little bit, but no, yeah, but
02:16:28 ◼ ► because here's why, cause my keys go in my left pocket and there's no way I'm putting the keys in
02:16:32 ◼ ► the same pocket as the phone or my wallet. Keys and wallets can share a pocket. Nothing. Phone
02:16:37 ◼ ► gets its own pocket. No, I don't want my wallet being my wallet being damaged by my pointy keys.
02:16:46 ◼ ► Stop being damaged. I've had this wallet since I was a teenager. Obviously it's not being damaged
02:16:51 ◼ ► by anything. You've had the same wallet since you were a teenager. Yep. We're learning so many
02:16:56 ◼ ► things today. You've seen it. It's a nice wallet. It was 30 years ago. It's a black leather wallet.
02:17:01 ◼ ► Are you going to complain about my wallet? I mean, it's a little thick. It's it's, it's been,
02:17:05 ◼ ► it's been slimming down and you know, when people lose a lot of weight, but like their skin doesn't
02:17:09 ◼ ► catch up with it. Right. That's what my wallet looks like. Oh yeah. It's great. It sounds great.
02:17:15 ◼ ► Yeah. It's a good thing. You're not having any keys touch it. It's still pretty good. Anyway,
02:17:19 ◼ ► I've, I've been, I've been trying to also slim down on the number of credit cards I have in there
02:17:23 ◼ ► to try to let you know, like, you know, anyway, yes, it goes in the same, uh, because it's,
02:17:28 ◼ ► they're both soft kind of flat things that the phone goes screen against my body and the nice,
02:17:33 ◼ ► and the nice felt pocket and the wallet goes outside of that. Oh my God. All right. So moving
02:17:39 ◼ ► on. So Marco, you said you plan to get sitting here now you plan to get a mini, but you didn't
02:17:43 ◼ ► tell us what color you think you're going to get this. I'm actually, so one thing we haven't
02:17:48 ◼ ► mentioned, uh, let's, I don't think so is that the mini and max are shipping three weeks later
02:17:55 ◼ ► and ordering three weeks later than the, uh, 6.1 inch models that the 12 and the 12 pro. Um, so
02:18:08 ◼ ► to whether the red is more of like a salmon kind of color or whether it's like a more of like a
02:18:13 ◼ ► deep red. If it's a deep red, I want it. If it's salmon color, I don't. Um, and I think,
02:18:20 ◼ ► I think it's a deep red because like whenever the new product reds, they're pretty consistent.
02:18:24 ◼ ► If you've seen any of the existing product red phones, this looks a lot like it in the pictures.
02:18:33 ◼ ► My, my fallback is probably the white. Um, because I, I'm still in like a light color kind of mood.
02:18:40 ◼ ► I'm at the beach, man. I can't get kind of a black phone. So you're gonna, are you gonna get a case
02:18:44 ◼ ► with this? My plan is no. Uh, I want to see how it is without a case. Um, it does appear from the
02:18:57 ◼ ► the pros have brushed glass backs, but the non pros have polished glass backs. And as I mentioned last
02:19:04 ◼ ► week, polished glass for me causes increased grip. Whereas the brushed makes it like a little more
02:19:10 ◼ ► slippery. And so I think the combination of the straight sides, the polished glass back
02:19:23 ◼ ► So we will see how this works out in practice. I hope it works out that well because I would
02:19:28 ◼ ► love to not have a case. And if it ends up that the size is wrong for me, for whatever reason,
02:19:35 ◼ ► I'm hoping to be able to use whatever bigger phone I would get instead, probably the 11 pro or 12 pro.
02:19:47 ◼ ► Given how poorly I use the existing, you know, 11 pro with that case. Um, so, but if I stick with
02:19:59 ◼ ► Uh, quick aside, the leather cases are not available right now, which is the case I used
02:20:04 ◼ ► to use up until the 11 pro and I'm a little bummed out that they're not available at least
02:20:09 ◼ ► at launch time. But they're, they're apparently coming around the same, like around that like
02:20:13 ◼ ► mid November timescale. Uh, for me, uh, I think it's been made plain already. I'm going to be
02:20:20 ◼ ► getting, or I'm hoping to get a barring a pre-order catastrophe, a 12 pro in the Pacific blue. I,
02:20:27 ◼ ► I love the midnight green that I have currently, even though, I mean, I like green, but I'm not the
02:20:31 ◼ ► world's biggest green fan. I think that midnight green is excellent. Uh, this Pacific blue,
02:20:36 ◼ ► I mean, blue is my favorite color, which is, you know, a very boring choice, I suppose. But, um,
02:20:42 ◼ ► I love this blue. I think it looks phenomenal from what I can tell. I am really looking forward to
02:20:47 ◼ ► it. So I'm going to be getting a 256 gig, uh, because my current phone is 256 and it's like
02:20:53 ◼ ► half full. So that's hopefully should be fine. A 256 12 pro in midnight blue is the plan. Um,
02:21:00 ◼ ► I don't, I never used to get Apple care. I did get Apple care on the 11 pro, which was clutch,
02:21:04 ◼ ► because if you recall, I shattered the back of it literally the day I got it. Um, I'm currently
02:21:09 ◼ ► thinking that I'll probably go Apple care again because I'm probably going to try to go, you know,
02:21:14 ◼ ► caseless Casey lists. Uh, but we'll see, we'll see where I land on that in the 11th hour. Oh,
02:21:20 ◼ ► and a quick aside, we are continuing with the East coast friendly 8m or pre-order time,
02:21:24 ◼ ► which I am extremely thankful for. We are not paying, not paying the price of the 3m pre-orders
02:21:30 ◼ ► that we did for like five years running. John, what is, what are your plans? Cause it is a John
02:21:34 ◼ ► Syracuse a year. What are you doing? Uh, I'm getting the 12 pro cause the size is, you know,
02:21:40 ◼ ► within, within parameters. Um, I continue to be disappointed by the top of the line phones,
02:21:47 ◼ ► lack of cool colors, you know, I guess the blue this year instead of the midnight green or
02:21:51 ◼ ► whatever, but I, you know, all the other options are not great. I also continue to be thwarted by
02:21:56 ◼ ► the marrying of metal materials with colors. Right. So I, this happened a bunch of different
02:22:06 ◼ ► but I like stainless steel to just be the plain old silver stainless steel. But if you want that,
02:22:10 ◼ ► you got to get white cause it's the only one with plain old stainless steel on it. You can't get
02:22:15 ◼ ► like a blackish one with the stainless steel. Right. And I don't really think I particularly
02:22:20 ◼ ► like the white one. Now that is only relevant if I think you're going to use it without a case.
02:22:24 ◼ ► And as you noted, Casey, uh, the leather case is not shipping yet. So practically speaking,
02:22:29 ◼ ► assuming these things are shipped and arrive, uh, at times that are proportional to their release,
02:22:35 ◼ ► I will have this phone without a case for a while, because I do want the leather case. I've used it
02:22:39 ◼ ► for the past several phones and I like them. So I'm going to get the phone, use it without a case
02:22:44 ◼ ► for a little while because my case doesn't come yet and then put the leather thing on it. So
02:22:48 ◼ ► the model I'm probably going to get though, is I don't like the gold. I like the silver. And if I
02:22:54 ◼ ► had it in a case, I would never see the white except for the gigantic square that pokes out
02:22:59 ◼ ► the back of the case. So I'm going to do what I always do, which is sounds boring and it is kind
02:23:06 ◼ ► of boring, but you know, it's, it's the option that I find the least objectionable, which is
02:23:10 ◼ ► the graphite phone and a black leather case. And it will, Hey, that's how I rolled for years and
02:23:15 ◼ ► years and years. And I honestly, I liked it on my current phone. I liked that look like I mind my
02:23:20 ◼ ► current iPhone 10 S is whatever the darkest black one was in a black leather case. It's a black
02:23:25 ◼ ► monolith. The camera that pokes out the back is also black. It's a good look. I like it. I didn't,
02:23:30 ◼ ► I didn't compromise to get this. I always liked the shiny metal, but when I see the shiny metal,
02:23:37 ◼ ► just sticking out the bottom of a leather case, it's a little bit jarring. So it's like,
02:23:41 ◼ ► you know, what I would really want is the magical ability to use this phone without a case and have
02:23:47 ◼ ► one with stainless steel, uh, surround with a black back, but that doesn't exist. So I'm going all
02:23:51 ◼ ► graphite and leather. I think that makes sense. And two 56, I did the same exact thing. I looked
02:23:56 ◼ ► up my storage and I'm about 50% storage. So if I got a one 28, my phone would be immediately full.
02:24:13 ◼ ► getting a new phone every year, it's a wonderful luxury. What else is luxury is never having to
02:24:18 ◼ ► worry about disc space on your phone. And so I figure if I'm going to do the ridiculous luxury
02:24:24 ◼ ► thing for getting a new phone that I don't really need, uh, I might as well spend the extra, what is
02:24:28 ◼ ► it? A hundred bucks to, uh, to make sure that I never see a disc space warning. That's, that's
02:24:33 ◼ ► worth it to me. Yep. Grandpa Marco is so weird. He always says disc space on his phone. What
02:24:42 ◼ ► All right. We don't have time for a full on ask ATP, but I cannot resist one question from Lou
02:24:50 ◼ ► Piper who writes, is John going to get the new Apple sleeve case to protect his iPhone?
02:24:54 ◼ ► See pouch. If you look it up, I don't think most people would think that it's the same thing as a
02:25:01 ◼ ► sleeve because the sleeve is like stiff. You know what I mean? Right? Like the phone, like when the
02:25:06 ◼ ► phone is not in the sleeve, you can still kind of see where the phone would go. Whereas when the
02:25:11 ◼ ► phone is not in a pouch, you could wad it up into a ball and it doesn't hold the shape or whatever.
02:25:15 ◼ ► So that, that case does not appeal to me in any way whatsoever. It's not a pouch, right? It is
02:25:23 ◼ ► a sleeve or, uh, you know, other kinds of case. Although I think Tiff had the, the most under
02:25:28 ◼ ► appreciated, uh, joke of the entire keynote, uh, live tweeting when she made a joke that neither
02:25:47 ◼ ► we just did an episode about the last of us and Tiff said, you didn't even want to be in the room
02:25:50 ◼ ► when she was playing that. No, that game was disturbing, but the imposter game around us,
02:25:55 ◼ ► above us, whatever that's among us. Yeah. Anyway, I thought that was really, but it does look a lot
02:26:00 ◼ ► like that. You know, so I'm not, I'm not going to use that sleeve case. I've never been into sleeves.
02:26:04 ◼ ► That sleeve is not a patch. And remember I am mostly, uh, I'm mostly off Twitter. Not really.
02:26:10 ◼ ► I'm mostly off the pouch lifestyle. We'll see. We'll see how this goes. New phone. It'll fit in
02:26:30 ◼ ► Also Squarespace express VPN and bomb us. And thanks to our members. If you want to be a member,
02:27:08 ◼ ► because it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
02:27:53 ◼ ► I can't believe you put me in a position to defend Verizon. Why are you doing this to me?
02:27:59 ◼ ► No, you brought this. I hope you too get a ton of feedback of people saying the 5g stuff wasn't that
02:28:04 ◼ ► bad, but honestly it did not bother me. It did not bother me like it apparently bothered you.
02:28:14 ◼ ► All right. So like, I don't know, a couple of months ago, and I don't remember how this came up.
02:28:27 ◼ ► It's important. You got to do it now. You got to do it now. All right. So as I was saying,
02:28:40 ◼ ► But John had indicated to the two of us that he wanted to spend a little time talking about why
02:28:45 ◼ ► ATP is worth it. And I'm not entirely clear where you're going with this, John, but I'm really
02:28:50 ◼ ► excited to hear about it. So John, why is ATP worth it? Not ATP membership specifically, just ATP in
02:28:55 ◼ ► general. I'm continuing this under protest because I think this episode is already too long.
02:29:04 ◼ ► I think this was like a year or more ago is like, oh, we're going to, we're coming up an episode,
02:29:09 ◼ ► whatever. But it's like, we never do anything for our milestone episodes. And it's true. We don't
02:29:13 ◼ ► really do anything for a milestone. It just happens that 400 landed an Apple event, which is nice.
02:29:17 ◼ ► Or not so nice, depending on how long the stupid episode goes, now that we're adding more after
02:29:21 ◼ ► show stuff to it. But what I thought is like, you know what, we should do something for one of our
02:29:27 ◼ ► milestone episodes to celebrate the fact that, you know, the show is still going or whatever.
02:29:33 ◼ ► And so here we are in episode 400. And what I wanted to do every couple hundred episodes is,
02:29:39 ◼ ► and this is just me personally, you know, Marco Casey can have no idea about any of this and can
02:29:44 ◼ ► do it, do whatever they want related to it or nothing related to it. This is just my thing.
02:29:48 ◼ ► You said it like, why is ATP worth it or whatever, which makes it sound like it's a monetary thing.
02:30:04 ◼ ► why should somebody listen to ATP? Like, you know what I mean? And it's going to sound like an ad
02:30:10 ◼ ► pitch, but really it's like, from my perspective, what do I think I'm doing here? Like, what am I
02:30:15 ◼ ► trying to accomplish? What, like, what do I think this, this show is producing? And I think that
02:30:21 ◼ ► at episode 400, which is an arbitrary milestone, but it's been a lot of years and it was a good
02:30:26 ◼ ► time to reflect on that. And maybe if, you know, we'll see if there's a huge mismatch between what
02:30:32 ◼ ► I hope I'm, what I'm hoping to give to people listening and what they're actually getting, but
02:30:36 ◼ ► here we are, episode 400. We do occasionally get emails from people who say that they use our show
02:30:41 ◼ ► as part of their sleep timer routine, that they fall asleep to it. And I think, I don't think
02:30:47 ◼ ► they're saying it to be me. I think it's actually a compliment, but it's definitely one of those
02:30:51 ◼ ► like mixed conflicts. Like, is that a compliment? It's going to give them weird dreams though,
02:30:56 ◼ ► for sure. I mean, maybe that's, maybe that's what you want. I don't know. I mean, Casey uses it for
02:31:02 ◼ ► the same purpose as we learned a couple of shows ago, where he kept saying, why is it that turning
02:31:07 ◼ ► off the lights helps? He's like, it's getting me ready for sleep. It's like, you don't want to be
02:31:12 ◼ ► sleepy during the show. So why are you trying to make yourself as sleepy as possible when we're
02:31:17 ◼ ► recording the podcast? So you're closer to complete sleep when the podcast ends. That means during the
02:31:23 ◼ ► show, you're getting closer and closer to sleep. And we don't want that. Do you not want that? I
02:31:28 ◼ ► think you might want that. Anyway, that is not one of the things. So here, what do people get from
02:31:34 ◼ ► the, what do I hope me personally, not Marco, not Casey, they can have her own answers. So like I
02:31:38 ◼ ► said, no answer at all. What do I hope people get from listening to ACP? It's got three things.
02:31:42 ◼ ► There's like a keynote slide here and they're kind of in priority order, but anyway, the number one
02:31:49 ◼ ► thing that I hope people get from listening to ATP, I don't think most people would guess window
02:31:55 ◼ ► management tips. No, but you're close entertainment, entertainment, which is like, well, what do you
02:32:03 ◼ ► mean? Like that's your number one thing. You want to give people entertainment. That's nothing to
02:32:07 ◼ ► do with tech. That has nothing to do with anything. Why do you, why are you trying to, you know,
02:32:12 ◼ ► entertainment is the most important thing that I hope this podcast provides. Now, granted,
02:32:17 ◼ ► it's a weird kind of entertainment that appeals to only people who are tech nerds and into tech
02:32:26 ◼ ► none of that matters if people aren't motivated to keep listening and most people are not motivated
02:32:31 ◼ ► enough by that other stuff to keep listening without it being entertaining. So the number
02:32:36 ◼ ► one thing I hope I am delivering on the show that we collectively are delivering to listeners
02:32:42 ◼ ► is entertaining you. And like I said, it's a weird kind of entertainment. We're not telling jokes.
02:32:46 ◼ ► It's not a song and dance or whatever. It's entertaining. It's us talking about a particular
02:32:51 ◼ ► set of topics in what we hope, what I hope is an entertaining way. Number two, this is the easy
02:32:58 ◼ ► one information. Obviously listening to a tech show should result in you knowing more about tech
02:33:05 ◼ ► than someone who doesn't listen to a tech show, especially a tech show. That's so long.
02:33:10 ◼ ► There's lots of information here. Right. And the main effect in people's lives I wanted to have is
02:33:16 ◼ ► when something dramatic happens in the regions, the things that we talk about. Oh, hey, did you
02:33:22 ◼ ► hear they're changing the processors in Macs? And when you hear that from your friend, because they
02:33:27 ◼ ► saw it on CNN or whatever, or they found out when they went into an Apple store and someone tried to
02:33:32 ◼ ► start asking them a question about Intel and they didn't know what they were talking about,
02:33:35 ◼ ► Macs have new processors now? It's the same ones they have on the phone. By the time you
02:33:40 ◼ ► hear that from someone in the outside world, if you're an ATP listener, you've been hearing about
02:33:44 ◼ ► our Macs for like three years, four years, right? You've heard about it so much that you're sick of
02:33:49 ◼ ► the topic, right? You've heard it from every angle. You've heard about like the pros and cons, and if
02:33:55 ◼ ► it's feasible and what the trade-offs might be and what the timing might be and just on and on and on.
02:34:00 ◼ ► You are more informed about this particular subject area than somebody who doesn't listen
02:34:05 ◼ ► to the show. Similarly for things like the Mac Pro or like the whole problem with Apple and its
02:34:10 ◼ ► Pro Macs. Arguably, the show was founded on the problem of the Pro Mac. Remember the original logo
02:34:16 ◼ ► with the cheese grater Mac Pro with the new label because they had introduced a "new Mac Pro" that
02:34:21 ◼ ► wasn't really that new. More like, what's the deal with this? Are they still making professional
02:34:25 ◼ ► Macs or whatever? That seems weird and not of a very sort of narrow interest, but fast forward
02:34:33 ◼ ► a handful of years and the biggest company in the world is having this important roundtable meeting
02:34:39 ◼ ► to describe how they're changing the direction of the company to address essentially the same
02:34:43 ◼ ► problem that we had identified in the founding of the show. If you listen to the show, this is not
02:34:48 ◼ ► a surprise to you. What is this Mac roundtable about? Who cares about Pro Macs? What? Again,
02:34:52 ◼ ► you would have heard about it, you know, for literal years from many different angles. You
02:34:58 ◼ ► will be informed, more informed than if you didn't listen to the show about all sorts of things that
02:35:04 ◼ ► are going on in the tech industry. And the final one is probably the most touchy-feely, maybe after
02:35:08 ◼ ► entertainment, is insight. So there's being entertaining in whatever way that we manage to
02:35:14 ◼ ► be entertaining. You know, I'm glad that people find any part of entertaining, but I'm trying,
02:35:18 ◼ ► right? There's the information, which is easy to convey. You can get that from anywhere. You can
02:35:23 ◼ ► read a website, you can, you know, read a tech magazine, you can just follow people on Twitter,
02:35:27 ◼ ► you get information other ways. What do we have to offer besides just that information being spewed
02:35:32 ◼ ► out and rehashing and, you know, just talking about news of the day is insight. What does some
02:35:38 ◼ ► hardware or software feature mean for the future of the user experience? How is the industry
02:35:43 ◼ ► landscape changing? How does change in one tech sector affect some other tech sector? You know,
02:35:49 ◼ ► what does Silicon Fab achievements have to do with what you end up being able to buy in the store?
02:35:54 ◼ ► The gaming market versus App Store, streaming services versus Apple TV versus Apple TV Plus,
02:35:59 ◼ ► right? Changes to the core operating system and the features they affect. Yes, that includes
02:36:03 ◼ ► file systems, right? New security features, new languages and APIs. Like, insight that we can
02:36:08 ◼ ► provide because of who we are and our experience and what we know. We're software developers,
02:36:13 ◼ ► we've, you know, some of us have sold software for a long time. We've worked in the industry,
02:36:18 ◼ ► we know people in the industry, we can not just tell you, "here's the information, but here is
02:36:22 ◼ ► some insight about it. What does this mean? What does this technology or this change or this news
02:36:27 ◼ ► story actually going to, what is it going to change in the world or in my life today and in the future?"
02:36:34 ◼ ► So that's it. Three things that I hope I'm delivering with ATP that I hope we are collectively
02:36:38 ◼ ► delivering. Entertainment, information and insight. If the three of you think we're delivering, like,
02:36:43 ◼ ► something entirely different, then maybe we're working at cross purposes. But this is what I
02:36:47 ◼ ► think that we are providing to people over 400 episodes or trying to anyway. No, I think that
02:36:55 ◼ ► that's completely reasonable and I think I agree with all of it. And I think as possibly the most
02:37:01 ◼ ► touchy-feely of the three of us, I think it is important to recognize how incredibly lucky the
02:37:06 ◼ ► three of us are that we have an excuse to talk to our good friends, you know, once a week and then
02:37:11 ◼ ► we can actually, you know, make money off of that, which is super cool. And I mean, think about where
02:37:17 ◼ ► all of us were on February 7th, 2013, as we record seven years, eight months and seven days ago.
02:37:25 ◼ ► Like that is a long time. And we have put out an episode of ATP every single week for seven years,
02:37:33 ◼ ► eight months and seven days. And that's something that's extremely important to us. And it's
02:37:38 ◼ ► something that I think that we are extraordinarily, extraordinarily lucky to be able to do. And the
02:37:50 ◼ ► it is incredible to me that anyone listens to all three of us. And we are so incredibly lucky to any
02:37:58 ◼ ► of you who listen, whether or not you're a member, whether or not you have purchased anything from
02:38:03 ◼ ► any of our advertisers, we're just extremely lucky to have you. And I hope that we're growing as
02:38:10 ◼ ► people over this time, the three of us. I mean, certainly when I started recording this with you
02:38:15 ◼ ► two fine gentlemen, I was not yet an iOS developer. I was not yet a dad. I was a different human being
02:38:24 ◼ ► seven years ago. And I don't mean that in a bad way at all. It's just, I was in a very different
02:38:28 ◼ ► place in life. And now, you know, I'm much, much, much closer to 40 than I am 30. And in 2013,
02:38:36 ◼ ► what was I 30? I was not even 31 yet. I was just shy of 31 at that point. So it has been quite
02:38:45 ◼ ► a journey. And I agree with what you said, Jon. And I just wanted to take this one quick moment to
02:38:50 ◼ ► say thank you to anyone who has ever listened to us, who continues to listen to us. It is genuinely
02:38:56 ◼ ► been one of the great honors and pleasures of my life to be a part of this with the two of you
02:39:00 ◼ ► fine gentlemen. And I pinch myself regularly because I cannot believe this is my life. So
02:39:07 ◼ ► thank you to all of you, to the two of you and to all of you. Yeah. And I like, the reason I wanted
02:39:12 ◼ ► to talk about this is like, what do I hope people get from it is not to toot our own horn, although
02:39:17 ◼ ► episode 400 is some way of celebrating at the very least our longevity as they say in the recent
02:39:23 ◼ ► incomparable celebration episode quantity. We definitely have quantity. We did miss one week
02:39:27 ◼ ► in the first year, I believe, somehow doing scheduling snafu we had a skipped week, but
02:39:31 ◼ ► wasn't that one we did? I don't think so. Yeah. I don't think we did. The very, very first month,
02:39:36 ◼ ► go look at the gaps between episodes like one, two, three, and four. There's like a two week gap
02:39:40 ◼ ► in one of them. Oh, well that, okay. So that doesn't count. Yeah. Cause we didn't really,
02:39:44 ◼ ► we didn't really embrace it until like March or April. Thank you very much. Yeah. And episode
02:39:47 ◼ ► one was like a half episode because it was like an after show of neutral. Yeah. But we've done 52
02:39:53 ◼ ► episodes a year, right? So we've done quantity, but like, I'm not trying to say like, this is
02:39:57 ◼ ► how awesome we are. I'm saying this is what I personally am trying to do. And it sounds like
02:40:02 ◼ ► Casey is more or less on the same page. It's like, this is what we are trying to do to the
02:40:07 ◼ ► extent that we are able to succeed enough to get people to continue to listen to the show.
02:40:12 ◼ ► We are all eternally grateful. Like, but, but that's, that's what we're trying to do. Right.
02:40:16 ◼ ► And I don't know who this is for. Maybe it's just for me to say out loud, or maybe it's just for me
02:40:20 ◼ ► to express what I'm always thinking when I'm trying to do this or just to explain. And maybe
02:40:25 ◼ ► it's just to hear from people to say, that's not what I'm getting from your show at all. I just,
02:40:28 ◼ ► it helps my iguana go to sleep. Like I don't even know, like, well, honestly, whatever value you're
02:40:33 ◼ ► getting out of it, thank you. Thank you for listening. That's great. But here, when I'm
02:40:42 ◼ ► You know, the way I listen to podcasts, you know, I've been a heavy podcast listener since before
02:40:48 ◼ ► we did the show for years beforehand. And, and there's always been two kinds of podcasts with me.
02:40:56 ◼ ► There's the kind of bigger mass market shows that you listen to for either like news value or for,
02:41:07 ◼ ► you know, quote, storytelling. And this would be, you know, the big popular, like public radio style
02:41:11 ◼ ► shows, some, you know, some of the very first big podcasts like This American Life, you know,
02:41:26 ◼ ► And those I listen to a little bit of, I listen to almost none of them because what I really am into
02:41:36 ◼ ► with podcasts is the other world of podcasts. That's not primarily information driven. It's
02:41:43 ◼ ► primarily people driven. And when I listen to most of the shows I listen to, many of them are the
02:41:50 ◼ ► shows that, you know, many of the listeners listen to, like, you know, John Gruber's show.
02:41:53 ◼ ► The shows I listen to are usually about the people on them. Like there is so much more about the
02:42:02 ◼ ► people than about the topics they're talking about. And so in John's categorization, that would be the
02:42:08 ◼ ► entertainment side of things being number one. To me, that is number one. And, but it goes beyond
02:42:13 ◼ ► just entertainment as it's like, it isn't just like, you know, comedy hour. It's like, no, these
02:42:18 ◼ ► are people who I consider my friends. And some of them are my actual friends in real life. Many of
02:42:25 ◼ ► them aren't. And I just feel like, I just feel this great human connection to them because I get
02:42:29 ◼ ► to know them. And, you know, I tell people who want to know about podcasting or who want to start a
02:42:34 ◼ ► podcast, they're looking at Gruber audience or they just want to know how it works. I always tell them
02:42:38 ◼ ► that like the subject matter is usually what gets people in the door. But what keeps people there
02:42:53 ◼ ► their personalities, they show off to the world. I listen to Merlin Mann and John Roderick talk
02:43:00 ◼ ► more than I talk to most of my friends. I talk to the two of you guys and to the 100,000 people
02:43:07 ◼ ► listening in the audience indirectly more than like I talk to like my own mother or my sister.
02:43:14 ◼ ► And it's crazy to me to think that, but like podcasting is so much about people and it's
02:43:21 ◼ ► about that connection you feel to the hosts. It's about how much you enjoy having them talk
02:43:25 ◼ ► to each other and talking to you. And so to have this show go for this long and to have succeeded
02:43:33 ◼ ► so much so far and with more to go like this, to be clear, we're not ending the show. We're just
02:43:41 ◼ ► celebrating 400. No one was thinking that until you said it. Why did you have to do that?
02:43:44 ◼ ► Well, it's hard to talk about this kind of stuff without it sounding like it's an ending.
02:43:58 ◼ ► Anyway, point is I'm really honored and thankful for our audience that you seem to really like us
02:44:10 ◼ ► while we have some information, we also BS a lot and we will occasionally get an email from
02:44:21 ◼ ► somebody who's like, you should stick to tech. Why did you talk about this thing for 10 minutes?
02:44:26 ◼ ► And whenever I get one of those emails, again, this isn't frequent. I think we've driven most
02:44:30 ◼ ► of those people away by now, but whenever I get one, I think like, have you ever heard the show?
02:44:36 ◼ ► How far have you made it? I often think like, is this person, is this their very first episode
02:44:42 ◼ ► they've heard that they're not complaining that we don't just stick to tech? Cause it has to be.
02:44:51 ◼ ► disappointed pretty quickly because that isn't what we do. We do some segments that are information
02:44:58 ◼ ► filled, surrounded by a bunch of BS that almost goofing around with each other or we're calling
02:45:04 ◼ ► it entertainment now, Margo, not BS. Right. Yes. Thanks. But like the point is like our show is
02:45:17 ◼ ► And people who want just pure information, there's a lot of other tech shows that'll give you that.