00:00:00 ◼ ► It is one of the biggest shows of the year. The show where we talk about iPhones that we don't know that much about yet, but we kind of know everything about, but it's, God, it's such a weird time of the season.
00:00:10 ◼ ► It's really going to save a lot of time for next week's show because we'll just cover everything this week and then next week we'll say, you know what we said last week? Yeah, that happened.
00:00:18 ◼ ► Or at least much of that or most of that or we didn't. So the inevitability of iPhone season and prediction season is that due to the massive scale of the iPhone, the supply chain leaks like crazy and there is basically nothing they can reasonably do to keep most of the physical details of the new iPhones from leaking ahead of time.
00:00:41 ◼ ► So going into the iPhone event, typically we know with reasonable certainty most of the physical things that will be announced. Physical changes like, you know, there's going to be a different size phone or different what kind of materials they're using.
00:00:57 ◼ ► Oftentimes even what colors they're going to be launching because that kind of stuff tends to leak.
00:01:01 ◼ ► But then a lot of times we'll be surprised by something and oftentimes, first of all, we're always surprised by names because they're always way worse than we think they're going to be. We're always surprised by like software features and some of the, you know, some of the software features of things like the camera that's usually surprising in some way.
00:01:20 ◼ ► I think the canonical example of everything you're describing is the thing that we forgot to mention last week, which we'll talk about again later, but the dynamic island. I think that because we knew that there was some sort of cut out kind of situation, but nobody was 100% sure what the physical stuff would look like. We had a pretty good notion.
00:01:36 ◼ ► But the whole software story, I don't think anyone had a freaking clue what that was going to be. And certainly nobody knew what the god awful name dynamic island was going to be. I was going to say, I was going to say, to be honest, it's actually grown on me. But at the time I remember hating it.
00:01:50 ◼ ► No, it hasn't grown on me. They've had many worse names. But anyway, so yeah, software tends to surprise us. And that's always fun. And then the other products that are less big than the iPhone, like the Apple Watch, you know, the Apple Watch is probably going to be updated tomorrow.
00:02:06 ◼ ► And we really haven't heard that much about it. You know, we have a couple of vague rumored notions, but not nothing nearly as concrete as we tend to get about the iPhones. So there are usually surprising things in these events, even though we go in kind of knowing what they're going to show us for the most part in hardware, at least.
00:02:25 ◼ ► And you know, maybe it's the old man in me coming out, which at this point is basically all of me, but that's neither here nor there. But I feel like some of the fun for me as I've watched Apple for longer and longer is seeing how they spin things.
00:02:39 ◼ ► You know, like, how are they going? I was listening to Upgrades earlier today, so this is fresh in mind. But like, how are they going to spin the periscope camera? Like, are they going to use the term periscope? Are they going to say, well, of course, they're going to say it's the greatest thing ever.
00:02:51 ◼ ► But you know, like, what is the approach that they take about this? When they talk about if they talk about three nanometer, how does that happen? Are we going down to the chip lab? Are we making a passing reference to the fact that it's a new chip technology and that's all we get?
00:03:04 ◼ ► You know, I think the meta observation is what I find most interesting these days, in no small part because all the real observations we've already got and we'll talk about in a little bit.
00:03:14 ◼ ► Alright, we should start off the show properly though, and we should do that in the month of September by talking about St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
00:03:23 ◼ ► We are all members of Real AFM in the sense that we have shows on Real AFM, and even if we didn't have shows on Real AFM, we would still be behind this cause because it's a darn good one.
00:03:32 ◼ ► So, what is St. Jude Children's Research Hospital? You've probably heard it before, you're going to hear it for the rest of September, and I don't care if you don't like it.
00:03:37 ◼ ► We shouldn't even let you skip chapters. If such a thing were possible, we wouldn't let you skip. Nevertheless, St. Jude is a research hospital.
00:03:44 ◼ ► Their mission is to basically self-destruct, and by that I mean they will continue until no child dies of childhood cancer.
00:03:52 ◼ ► If we ever get to that point, then they're done. Their mission is accomplished. Not in the ridiculous George Bush way, in the actual way.
00:03:59 ◼ ► So, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, wow, that's a mouthful, they are very well deserving of donations, and we are asking you to donate to them.
00:04:08 ◼ ► You can go to stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and you can send them some of your money.
00:04:15 ◼ ► And given that this is iPhone time, I will defer to Marco at this very moment to talk about Marco.
00:04:20 ◼ ► How could you kind of figure out a gauge for what you should donate to St. Jude, which again is that S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP?
00:04:30 ◼ ► So, in the past I've said things like, whatever you might spend on an add-on purchase of your iPhone,
00:04:35 ◼ ► like maybe a case, or at the higher end maybe AppleCare or something else, I'm going to make this more concrete and a little more ambitious.
00:04:42 ◼ ► Alright, right now, the official list price of the iPhone 14 Pro is "starting at $999 in the US."
00:04:51 ◼ ► So here's what I want you to do. When the new iPhones are announced, whatever the family is that you're going to purchase,
00:04:57 ◼ ► either the iPhone 15 or the iPhone 15 Pro or whatever you're going to call it, like the Max or the Ultra, whatever the big one is,
00:05:03 ◼ ► look at the base list price for that model. And I'm going to say the iPhone 14 Pro is the base list price also for the Pro Max.
00:05:13 ◼ ► Okay? So, suppose we've heard rumors of a price increase. Suppose the 15 Pro starts at $1,199.
00:05:21 ◼ ► If that is the starting price, I want you to look at your receipt when you order your iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max,
00:05:29 ◼ ► and whatever the difference is between that $1,199 or whatever the base price is, and what your total actually is,
00:05:43 ◼ ► So if you maybe upgrade from the Pro to the Pro Max or the Ultra or whatever, if you upgrade the storage,
00:05:49 ◼ ► if you add on AppleCare, if you add on a case, whatever your order total is for the iPhone order,
00:05:54 ◼ ► the difference between that total and the starting price of the family that you selected, Pro or non-Pro,
00:06:04 ◼ ► Oh, totally. Of course. There's sales tax. You probably are going to get a case or something.
00:06:14 ◼ ► The great thing is you can just multiply that by 12, because we're going to say the same thing next year.
00:06:20 ◼ ► So multiply that by 12, and that's your price for your AppleCare if you do monthly billing.
00:06:29 ◼ ► If you are at all financially able to do this, and fortunately many of our listeners are lucky enough to be able to do this,
00:07:10 ◼ ► Before St. Jude was opened in 1962, childhood cancer was basically considered terminal.
00:07:24 ◼ ► the overall childhood cancer survival rate went from 20% to more than 80% since St. Jude opened in 1962.
00:07:36 ◼ ► I mean, pediatric cancer is the leading cause of death by disease amongst U.S. children, ages 14 and younger.
00:07:40 ◼ ► And you know what? I'm pretty sure that we can all agree, regardless of our political affiliation,
00:07:48 ◼ ► And so if you can scrounge together $5, $10, or even better, the Marco offset of several hundred dollars
00:08:03 ◼ ► We have a new top of the leaderboard that is topped ATP. Can you tell me about this, please?
00:08:15 ◼ ► Guillaume Morin coming in at $7,500, has taken the number one spot and has had it since last week when he donated.
00:08:34 ◼ ► if you work for an employer that does charity matching for your donation, make sure you take advantage of that.
00:08:39 ◼ ► You will make your employer give the amount that you gave, so you can basically double your own donation.
00:08:49 ◼ ► but you can also just go to your work intranet and find the charity match thing that will explain how to do it.
00:08:54 ◼ ► It's usually not complicated, and it will literally double your donation up to whatever the limit of your company is.
00:08:59 ◼ ► If you work at a really good company, they won't have a limit, so whatever you give, they will also pay the same amount.
00:09:12 ◼ ► some sort of thing where it's like, just show us what you donated and prove that you donated,
00:09:17 ◼ ► So please do that. Please look for that charity match at your company if you work for a company that does that.
00:09:22 ◼ ► Yep. And as a final note, I forgot to mention also last week, the same offer from the last several years applies.
00:09:50 ◼ ► Reach out to me and I will dispatch your stickers to anywhere that the U.S. Postal Service will service,
00:10:03 ◼ ► If you spend even but a moment at the top of the leaderboard, you are eligible for stickers.
00:10:28 ◼ ► And by the way, we know Gia-me is doing it to knock me off leaderboard because his comment was ATP.
00:10:37 ◼ ► We haven't actually asked anyone to do that, but we do love seeing the ATP community contributing to this fund drive.
00:10:43 ◼ ► Even if you just assumed it was only the people who wrote something about ATP in the comments, it's a lot of people.
00:10:48 ◼ ► So we're very proud of our audience and thankful that you're helping us reach our goal this year.
00:11:20 ◼ ► you should always zoom in during capture rather than take a 1X photo and then crop later.
00:11:25 ◼ ► In recent phone generations, Apple does a bunch of ML work underneath to fuse multiple frames together during capture
00:11:35 ◼ ► Multi-frame fusion happens every time to improve detail or noise regardless of zoom range.
00:11:43 ◼ ► But there's an additional phase in the fusion pipeline that doesn't upscale to 12 megapixels if it's in the digital zoom range."
00:11:51 ◼ ► All right, so I did get a lot of feedback about this, and I think a lot of people who gave feedback were a little bit confused
00:11:59 ◼ ► It's a 48 megapixel sensor, but they bin the pixels together so they take every group of 4 pixels and consider that as 1 pixel to get a 12 megapixel image from it.
00:12:11 ◼ ► But by default, if you don't change your settings, it will take those little sets of 4 pixels and count them as 1 pixel.
00:12:23 ◼ ► Lots of people were confused and said, "Oh, you should definitely not crop it because then you're not getting the pixels or whatever."
00:12:34 ◼ ► Light is hitting the entire sensor, but when you're doing anything that's zoomed in, like say using 2x,
00:12:40 ◼ ► it's just not going to give you the pixels that hit the part of the sensor that's around the edges.
00:12:51 ◼ ► If I'm not getting those pixels that are around the edges anyway, why don't I just take the entire sensor image and I can crop it myself later?
00:13:04 ◼ ► No, whatever you choose to do, whatever you choose to do, light is still hitting the same region of the sensor.
00:13:10 ◼ ► You can tell the sensor, "Hey, when light hits that region, bin your pixels into sets of 4 or don't bin your pixels into sets of 4."
00:13:15 ◼ ► But bottom line is, you're getting the readout from what hit the center portion of the sensor.
00:13:34 ◼ ► It has nothing to do with which pixels are being exposed or whether they're binned or anything like that.
00:13:39 ◼ ► The reason you want to let the camera do the cropping for you is because the camera has access to information that you do not when you crop later.
00:13:47 ◼ ► When you crop later, what you're doing is taking the picture that it took and throwing away the outer pixels.
00:13:54 ◼ ► What you're missing is what the camera has during exposure, which is all of those frames that are used.
00:14:12 ◼ ► The step they're talking about is that when you do a 2x thing, they're going to upscale it to 12 megapixels.
00:14:23 ◼ ► They have already done their work on the 1x picture, but when the camera takes a 2x picture, it knows that it's going to have to scale up to 12 megapixels to try to give you a normal-sized capture.
00:14:33 ◼ ► So it uses all those multiple frames and fuses them together during the upscaling process from the crop thing to be 12 full megapixels or whatever.
00:14:44 ◼ ► No matter what image editing program you use, Lightroom, Photoshop, or whatever, you do not have access to those multiple frames that are fused together.
00:14:53 ◼ ► You just have the result of that work, and you can't reverse that back out because some data has been lost.
00:15:01 ◼ ► It's like the onion in your sauce. You don't have access to it. Once the sauce is served, the onion is discarded. It has done its job.
00:15:10 ◼ ► The reason I went back and forth with it is I was like, "Can't I do all of that after the fact?"
00:15:16 ◼ ► It's like, "No, we don't give you those multiple frames. We give you the result of them being baked in, but you can't unbake it, get the frames back, and rerun the same algorithm we do."
00:15:24 ◼ ► By the way, it's not just at 2x. This thing says every time it's at a zoom range, it essentially doesn't fill the entire sensor.
00:15:32 ◼ ► It doesn't take all the pixels from the entire sensor. They upscale that to make it look like a 12 megapixel or whatever picture that had lit up the entire sensor.
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00:17:54 ◼ ► So, last week, we did the exit interviews, which is genuinely one of my favorite segments that we do on the show.
00:18:00 ◼ ► And we did the exit interview for the iPhone 14 Pro, and all three of us forgot to talk about the Dynamic Island.
00:18:18 ◼ ► I can't say that I personally see it used that often, but I think that's in part for a couple of reasons.
00:18:24 ◼ ► My favorite tools that I've used with the Dynamic Island is the absolutely great app Flighty by, in part, friend of the show, Ryan Jones.
00:18:34 ◼ ► And also, oh shoot, it's the thing that Gruber recommended, and I knew I was going to forget to look this up before the show.
00:18:46 ◼ ► But it does an absolutely phenomenal job of putting sports ball-related things in the Dynamic Island.
00:18:55 ◼ ► For like music playback and stuff, I like seeing what's going on in the Dynamic Island, but I don't interact with it that often.
00:19:02 ◼ ► But when the Dynamic Island is in use, which I will concede is not as often as I would like, it is, to my eyes, really, really great.
00:19:19 ◼ ► Like, when people wrote in, "What inspiration is the Dynamic Island?" I thought, "Oh, no, we made a mistake."
00:19:24 ◼ ► But the Dynamic Island so far, in this year, where it has only been available for one year, and only on the Pro phones, so only a subset of the product line, which we'll get to later.
00:19:37 ◼ ► But it has been a good version one of the software concept, but in practice, I have found relatively few apps have been using it very well.
00:19:54 ◼ ► You know, see also Live Activities, which is related to them on the software side, they're very similar.
00:19:59 ◼ ► But the Live Activities also, we haven't seen a ton of software adoption for those yet, because those are also reasonably young.
00:20:07 ◼ ► And so, I think this will be a bigger deal down the road, but in my year so far of using the iPhone 14 Pro with the Dynamic Island, I haven't had it really make a big impact in my life.
00:20:26 ◼ ► And maybe in the future it might become a bigger deal as more adoption happens with software and as Apple refines, like, how it works, you know, with different hardware and everything.
00:20:39 ◼ ► And if you're still holding onto a phone that doesn't have the Dynamic Island and like, feeling like you're really missing out, you're not.
00:20:45 ◼ ► It'll be nice when you get a new phone, that'll be like a nice little thing that, "Oh look, now I have this."
00:20:50 ◼ ► You know, I haven't had it yet. But that alone is not a massive reason to upgrade in my opinion.
00:21:09 ◼ ► The Notch was the first time they did that. And I believe in our exit interview after the first Notch phone, we did talk about it.
00:21:19 ◼ ► Because just looking at the phone, it's like, "Oh, they just chopped away a bunch of pixels on our screen. Is that going to be annoying?"
00:21:24 ◼ ► And our answer at the end of that year was, "No, you just, you don't even notice it. You get the phone, and it's just, you immediately,
00:21:33 ◼ ► In that aspect, the Dynamic Island is the same way. I mean, it moved the whole, it moved the part that doesn't have pixels down a little bit on the screen.
00:21:41 ◼ ► Would we care that you could see a stripe of little pixels above or whatever? The answer is no.
00:21:48 ◼ ► So in that respect, it doesn't really require any commentary, because we'd already gone through this once before, essentially.
00:21:54 ◼ ► Like, they chop off some pixels, and we know that basically it's the thing that doesn't really bother you.
00:21:59 ◼ ► Second aspect is what I talked about when they first announced this, and I still think it's true.
00:22:03 ◼ ► The Notch is making lemonade out of lemons. Apple doesn't want to have a gigantic area of the screen that is entirely black because it has no pixels.
00:22:10 ◼ ► They currently have to do that for technological reasons to support their other features, but they absolutely do not want to do it.
00:22:20 ◼ ► And that's what everyone was oohing and aahing about. They're like, "Oh, dynamic island is so clever, look what they did because it's OLED and every pixel is lit up individually.
00:22:27 ◼ ► We can do all sorts of stuff that makes it look like the island grows and shrinks, when in reality there is a portion of it that's never going to be lit up and it's always going to be jet black, and we can make it look like it's growing, but of course we can't really shrink it past that."
00:22:37 ◼ ► So they do all sorts of UI stuff there, but as I said when it came out, if Apple had a completely light-up screen, I really doubt they would choose to make a 100% black UI element so prominent on the top of their phones.
00:22:49 ◼ ► Because it just doesn't fit with the aesthetic. Even in dark mode they tend not to do 100% black stuff everywhere.
00:22:59 ◼ ► And kind of like the notch, which started off big and got smaller, if and when Apple can get rid of this and not have a region of their screen be black, they will.
00:23:11 ◼ ► They did it in a clever way and it's worthy of oohing and aahing about, "Aren't those UI designers clever and isn't this a nice case of whimsy and stuff or whatever?"
00:23:24 ◼ ► And then the final thing, I guess there's three items here, the final thing is, most of the things that are beneficial about the dynamic island have nothing to do with it being dynamic or an island.
00:23:33 ◼ ► And everything to do with, hey, iOS could choose to have a part of the interface that allows other applications to display information even when they're not the front most application.
00:23:45 ◼ ► That's the feature that people like about the dynamic island. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's a black lozenge and whimsically glides away and grows and shrinks.
00:23:52 ◼ ► It has to do with the fact that, oh, there's a little place where I can see sports scores, even when I'm not in the sports score app.
00:24:00 ◼ ► And I think if and when the dynamic island finally goes away and the screen is fully pixels and Apple finally arrives at that dream scenario, they should keep some kind of global user interface element at the top of the phone using the exact same APIs where apps can display stuff and where you can switch to navigation quickly by tapping there at all the things that we love about the dynamic island.
00:24:19 ◼ ► And if I had to say anything about it, I would say those features, you will like those if you get a phone with the dynamic island.
00:24:25 ◼ ► I wish those features were on phones that didn't have a dynamic island, but they're not. But eventually all phones will probably have that.
00:24:31 ◼ ► And at some point, hopefully in the future, they will stop having to cut out a region of their screen, or at least that region will get smaller and smaller.
00:24:37 ◼ ► So I don't mind not mentioning it, but for completeness sake, I think I just reiterated everything that I said when it launched.
00:24:44 ◼ ► So what I should have said is, hey, all the things that I said about the dynamic island when it launched, I found them to still be true a year later.
00:24:50 ◼ ► Alright, with regard to TCL Roku TVs and connecting them to the internet to update them...
00:25:10 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm Team Marco on this one, so TCL Roku TV updates, that just sounds like a mouthful.
00:25:34 ◼ ► Gagné writes, "I bought a TCL Rock You television specifically because it doesn't require going online to update it."
00:25:43 ◼ ► And Pierre-Luc writes, there's a link, "How to use USB to update the software on your unconnected Rock You television."
00:25:58 ◼ ► I mean, if that's why you're buying this TV, that must mean you really care about privacy.
00:26:21 ◼ ► We've had a lot of conflicting feedback about this, so I don't know since the darn Apple Park spaceship whatever is so darn big.
00:26:31 ◼ ► But Anonymous writes, "Regarding the ugly gray Rubbermaid garbage cans, either your source was misled or they had a different experience than I have had."
00:26:38 ◼ ► There are indeed little trash cans outside each individual office. They have been there as long as I've been at Apple Park, and I was there before the glass walls had safety stickers. Gosh, remember that?
00:26:47 ◼ ► Either this source was one of the very first people to move into the building, or they were repeating an exaggerated retelling of how these Rubbermaids came to be.
00:26:54 ◼ ► Engineers are sometimes told to leave certain types of trash, usually corrugated cardboard, outside of their offices for special pickup.
00:27:04 ◼ ► The real design vs. practicality story about Apple Park trash cans has to do with cafeteria.
00:27:08 ◼ ► Apple Park features seemingly custom-designed outdoor trash receptacles, each capable of fitting one, two, or three buckets, compostable, recyclable, and landfill.
00:27:16 ◼ ► When choosing how to deploy these bins near outdoor dining areas, the designers primarily use the two-wide design, meaning that each dining area is missing one of the three bins, usually garbage.
00:27:26 ◼ ► I do not know the rationale for this choice, but the two-wide design does have the best proportions, so make of that what you will.
00:27:31 ◼ ► Given this, employees will often not have the needed bin close at hand, and may end up walking clear across the cafeteria to toss their garbage in the correct receptacle.
00:27:38 ◼ ► The fact that these employees largely do take these detours throws the "little piles" story into question.
00:27:44 ◼ ► I like this one feedback because it said, "You know, I'm not sure, my experience at Apple Park was a little bit different, here's some stuff."
00:27:55 ◼ ► Everyone had their own story about mis-design in Apple Park or whatever, even this one made mention of the stickers on the glass walls that people were running into.
00:28:08 ◼ ► It kind of amazes me that there is enough, again, design choices that are very aspirational about human nature that end up not working that well in practice, and we have multiple ones just about garbage cans.
00:28:23 ◼ ► I will say though, I've been lucky enough to have a couple of meals in the Apple Park cafeteria, and my favorite thing about those trash cans is that the icons on them are SF symbols.
00:28:34 ◼ ► Of course they are. Apple spent all that money to have them drawn, you might as well use them.
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00:30:33 ◼ ► It is time as we sit here on, what day is it? It's the 6th of September, Wednesday the 6th of September. On the 12th is when we are hearing about the new iPhones, and so we need to do our event preview.
00:30:47 ◼ ► And somebody, John, has done a tremendous amount of research, which selfishly I appreciate, but unselfishly you should not be doing, but here we are.
00:31:00 ◼ ► That is a song I have not heard in a long time. Anyways, we should talk about stuff, so let's talk about iPhones.
00:31:07 ◼ ► And let's start with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. John, do you want to go through this? Would you like me to quarterback and wait for one of you to jump in?
00:31:14 ◼ ► I can go through it. So one of the things, I put all these details in here partly because I'm kind of imagining that when the event happens next week, we can just go through the same thing and just X out the ones that turned out not to be true.
00:31:29 ◼ ► Oh, so here's the thing. So obviously the event hasn't happened yet. Everything you're seeing here is just an amalgamation of rumors, right?
00:31:36 ◼ ► And like Margo said at the top of the show, when you're going to make hundreds of millions of something, you can't keep it a secret. You can't keep the physical reality of this thing a secret.
00:31:44 ◼ ► So so much stuff about the physical reality of these devices leaks, and year over year, most of it ended up being right.
00:31:51 ◼ ► I will emphasize when something is more questionable, but for the most part, I'm just going to read these as like, this is what the consensus of the rumor mill is.
00:31:59 ◼ ► And there's a high probability that it's going to be true unless otherwise noted by me and these notes where I put a question mark after something.
00:32:05 ◼ ► So let's begin with the A17 at three nanometers. Yeah, it's a new SOC. It'll be at three nanometers.
00:32:13 ◼ ► The supposed, you know, what does that give us? The sort of back of the envelope boost you might see here. They're saying 15% speed improvement, 70% logic density increase and 30% power reduction.
00:32:25 ◼ ► Those are super fuzzy numbers. But the bottom line is when they do a shrink, you get lots of good things.
00:32:30 ◼ ► You get, you know, either you get more speed or you get less power at the same speed. Your thing gets smaller and you use less power. That's great.
00:32:37 ◼ ► And that's what we expected. And it's nice to have a shrink. Spec wise, the rumor is that the CPU has same number of efficiency cores, but two, one more.
00:32:49 ◼ ► Now, one more GPU core. All right. So same number of efficiency and power cores, but just one more GPU core.
00:32:55 ◼ ► The A16 was a five core GPU and the A17 is supposedly a six core GPU. And there is a vague rumor that maybe the GPU cores are redesigned, but that's hard to nail down.
00:33:06 ◼ ► The rumors about the CPU cores is that the performance cores might max out at 3.7 gigahertz, where previously they were 3.46 gigahertz.
00:33:14 ◼ ► Again, those numbers are the type of things that are going to be hard to pin down because that's the type of thing you can, you know, that can change over time.
00:33:20 ◼ ► So that's the SOC we're looking at. And obviously the A17 will be an important chip because the cores that are in that thing will eventually be, you know, will be used in the M3 and, you know, across the line.
00:33:33 ◼ ► Right. The iPhone leads the way. It's going to be the first one that gets a three nanometer chip.
00:33:37 ◼ ► And the work done for the A17 will be reused everywhere that Apple always reuses the stuff they do with the phone chips.
00:33:45 ◼ ► There's also supposedly a bunch of updated support chips, which is like the chips that are not the SOC.
00:33:50 ◼ ► If you look inside an iPhone and that tiny little, you know, logic board that's in there, there's the SOC, which takes up most of the room and like the RAM and stuff.
00:33:56 ◼ ► But there's a bunch of other chips in there too. And those chips don't use the super expensive TSMC process or whatever.
00:34:03 ◼ ► So like, for example, the display driver chip apparently is currently fabbed at 40 nanometers. That's four zero.
00:34:09 ◼ ► So the SOC is at three. Oh my God. Because you're not going to spend lots of money to make, you know, the display driver chip at three nanometers.
00:34:17 ◼ ► Like what are you saving? It's such a tiny little thing anyway, and it uses very little power and you want to save money.
00:34:23 ◼ ► Right. So but that chip is supposedly going from 40 nanometers down to 28 in the new things.
00:34:30 ◼ ► And I'm not sure if this is just on the pro or also on the non pro, but the rumor was about the pro.
00:34:36 ◼ ► The ultra wideband chip is going from 16 nanometers to seven. At least that's within shooting distance of what the SOC is.
00:34:47 ◼ ► And Apple does this from time to time. But as you can see, they're not in a super big hurry to like, oh, everything is in the phone is going to be three nanometers.
00:34:54 ◼ ► No, that's never the way it is. The SOC is the big important power hungry thing is three nanometers. The other chips are less so.
00:35:01 ◼ ► But this is like Casey was saying at the beginning of the show. It'll be interesting to see if Apple mentions literally anything about this, because they do this all the time.
00:35:09 ◼ ► And I don't think they've ever really mentioned it before. Right. But practically speaking, this is the way you save battery power.
00:35:16 ◼ ► Like you make everything use less power when when Apple changes the screen to use less power, they brag about it.
00:35:21 ◼ ► They don't really brag about the fact that the ultra wideband chip went from 16 nanometers to seven.
00:35:25 ◼ ► We'll see if they do this time. The Wi-Fi is being upgraded to Wi-Fi 6E, where it previously was Wi-Fi 6.
00:35:32 ◼ ► The big one that we talked about for USB-C instead of lightning. I thought this was this is so so like everybody knows this.
00:35:39 ◼ ► There's actually an existing Google pixel ad that is running right now. We will put a YouTube link for it.
00:35:44 ◼ ► The Google pixel ad makes fun of the upcoming iPhone for having USB-C. Like it has two little talking iPhones in a spa.
00:35:50 ◼ ► And the iPhone says like, well, just wait. The new version of me is going to be announced soon.
00:35:54 ◼ ► There's something coming and you'll you'll never guess what it is. And he's like, is it USB-C or something like that?
00:36:03 ◼ ► Like, oh, God. Because like this this is this is how I've seen on Mastodon people who like don't follow these rumors saying, oh, my God, the new iPhones going to be like it's getting out into the middle of the moon.
00:36:13 ◼ ► It's getting out into the mainstream like the new iPhones going to be USB-C. We've known that for ages. The rumor mill has known that for ages.
00:36:19 ◼ ► Google had a little we had time to make an ad of making fun of it. Everybody knows this is happening.
00:36:28 ◼ ► I feel like in an iPhone leaks when Apple's competitors are not even speculating about it, but just like flat out assuming it's true and making fun of it.
00:36:36 ◼ ► The rumor for the 15 Pro Max is that you will be able to get Thunderbolt speeds, which is 40 gigabits per second from that port.
00:36:43 ◼ ► So you can actually get those drive video files off in a reasonable amount of time, which is great.
00:36:47 ◼ ► But of course, to do that, you'll need a Thunderbolt cable, which will not be included because Apple's included anything with these phones anymore.
00:36:52 ◼ ► And Thunderbolt cables are expensive. But don't worry, Apple will sell you one. What that cable will be able to run.
00:37:00 ◼ ► It supports, of course, USB for Gen two, 120 watts of power or something in that range for power delivery and possibly have 4K 60 hertz video monitoring capability.
00:37:12 ◼ ► So like you could be filming something on your iPhone and connect this this Thunderbolt cable to a monitor so you can see in real time on an external 4K display what your camera is seeing as a kind of a monitor.
00:37:23 ◼ ► We'll talk about it or brag about that. But yeah, finally, a port on your phone that can carry lots of data and you'll get to buy an expensive cable to do it.
00:37:31 ◼ ► Well, and by the way, on that front, you know, we a lot of nerds are like they're they're probably just going to put in like a USB 2.0 cable because they're cheap.
00:37:39 ◼ ► And that's not really the only reason. Like so, you know, if you look at most most Apple USB C cables that are out there in the world, usually it's like the ones that come with iPads or the ones that come with MacBooks.
00:37:51 ◼ ► And they almost all are USB 2.0. I don't even know if Apple's ever made a USB 3 USB C cable.
00:38:07 ◼ ► And the reason why is very obvious. If you compare them to an actual USB 3 or Thunderbolt cable, they're much thicker and less flexible and usually shorter.
00:38:20 ◼ ► The Thunderbolt, to be clear, the Thunderbolt cables are much thicker and shorter and less flexible.
00:38:24 ◼ ► Yeah, because there's way more wires in there. The connectors are usually larger because there's little chips in the connectors.
00:38:29 ◼ ► And so the by by keeping the the like main charging cables that people use by keeping those USB 2.0 speeds, it allows them to make them much thinner and more flexible.
00:38:43 ◼ ► And personally, I love those dumb little Apple white USB 2.0 cables because they're great charging cables.
00:38:54 ◼ ► So it'll support any power delivery needs that I have in my house. And they're they're so great to pack on trips.
00:39:00 ◼ ► They're so they're so great in so many ways. And that's largely because they are so skinny and flexible and easy to carry around.
00:39:08 ◼ ► So I think that makes a lot of sense, especially because the vast majority of people like what's what is the cable that comes with your phone for?
00:39:15 ◼ ► It's to charge the phone. That's it. Like that's that's what almost anybody uses their cable for.
00:39:19 ◼ ► Almost no one is using the cable to transfer large amounts of data to or to or from their phone.
00:39:30 ◼ ► It makes sense for them to have to buy a special cable to do that, since the tradeoffs to make that everybody's cable are not good enough.
00:39:40 ◼ ► But even if you just go to Monoprice, like they're just expensive because they have chips in them and they're complicated.
00:39:44 ◼ ► And, you know, they're they have to be made to fairly exacting standards to carry that bandwidth.
00:39:49 ◼ ► And the chips in the ends cost money. So they it would add so much to the price of the phone.
00:39:54 ◼ ► It would be very bad. It's not like, oh, it's five dollars extra. No, it wouldn't be five dollars extra.
00:39:58 ◼ ► It would be like probably twenty dollars additional cost Apple. And that's huge when you're talking about, you know, hundreds of millions of phones.
00:40:04 ◼ ► The the iPhone Pro and just the pro, I guess, is supposedly going to be smaller than the non pro iPhone 15.
00:40:12 ◼ ► The difference isn't going to be huge. But if you take a 15 and a 15 pro, put them on top of each other.
00:40:16 ◼ ► The pro will be point zero two inches shorter, point zero five inches less wide and point zero one inches less deep.
00:40:29 ◼ ► You may not care about this, but there is a subset of the smartphone buying, at least smartphone reviewing world is obsessed with how big is the little tiny black border that doesn't have pixels in it on the front of my phone.
00:40:50 ◼ ► And they'll probably brag about it. And it's a little bit silly. But, you know, that does let you pull in the edges of the phone because, you know, that those bezels are just not wasted space.
00:40:58 ◼ ► But like if you can reduce them, you can reduce the size of the phone. So the 15 pro will be smaller than the 15 in those dimensions for that reason.
00:41:06 ◼ ► Why will it be less deep, like less thick? I don't know. Maybe they've got some other savings that they're going to talk about.
00:41:12 ◼ ► As for what the materials are, titanium frame instead of being stainless steel on the pro phone.
00:41:18 ◼ ► Marco hates his phone being too heavy. Titanium will be lighter than stainless steel, but it will not be as light as aluminum.
00:41:30 ◼ ► I guess the same the same volume of titanium is heavier than the same volume of aluminum, but titanium is stronger.
00:41:42 ◼ ► So I'm not sure how Apple will do this trade off, but let's leave it to the rumor mill.
00:41:51 ◼ ► So supposedly the iPhone 15 pro is 191 grams, whereas the 14 pro was 206 grams, so it saved 15 grams.
00:42:06 ◼ ► So basically this is saying it's going to take it roughly halfway between the current pro and non-pro.
00:42:12 ◼ ► The pro max is going to be 19 grams lighter, it's going to be 221 grams, and the old one was 240 grams.
00:42:24 ◼ ► As for the titanium frame, in the invitation to this event it said the word "Wonderlust", which is a play on words of wanderlust.
00:42:36 ◼ ► If you don't know what the rumors are about how they're going to use titanium, it may not make too much sense to you.
00:42:42 ◼ ► But what the rumor is of how they manufacture the titanium frame on this new phone and how they do it on the Apple watch ultra and everything,
00:42:51 ◼ ► is instead of the old method where you get a solid block of material and then you take a bunch of tools and you carve it out,
00:42:58 ◼ ► so you sort of carve out the little shape of the watch case or whatever with a series of drills and other things like these little computer controlled milling machines,
00:43:08 ◼ ► The rumor is that they're using this new method which is basically 3D printing with metal.
00:43:14 ◼ ► So you take a bunch of metal powder that looks a lot like the grey sandy things in this Apple logo,
00:43:19 ◼ ► and I don't know what the technology is, it probably has something to do with heat or whatever,
00:43:22 ◼ ► but in the same way a 3D printer sort of melts little bits of plastic and builds up a material in layers, you can do that with metal too.
00:43:31 ◼ ► And this is a manufacturing process that has become more and more popular in many different industries.
00:43:37 ◼ ► I'll put a link in the show notes to a, I don't know how to pronounce his name, it's Zinger CZINGER, the Zinger 21C hypercar.
00:43:44 ◼ ► One of the things they tout about this, this is a few year old hypercar, is that a lot of the parts of this car are essentially 3D printed with metal.
00:43:52 ◼ ► And you may be like, well who cares, I don't care how they make it, whether they carve it out of metal or whether they sort of 3D print it by taking metal dust
00:44:00 ◼ ► and laying it down later, what do I care? There's a big difference in the manufacturing trade-offs.
00:44:06 ◼ ► When you carve something out of a block of metal, it's actually a pretty complicated process.
00:44:13 ◼ ► but you have to get a high speed precision moving spinning tool with a cutting blade into all those nooks and crannies
00:44:25 ◼ ► It's not like you just say, okay, here's what the watch has to look like, okay CNC machine, make this shape.
00:44:31 ◼ ► You have to sort of define the toolpaths to make sure the giant bulky tool thing doesn't bang into the edge when it's carving out one particular little thing.
00:44:39 ◼ ► You have to say how many passes am I going to take, in which direction to reduce the amount of burrs you make and everything.
00:44:44 ◼ ► It is a complicated process and it has limitations and of course you're cutting away half of the material that you then have to melt down and reuse.
00:44:51 ◼ ► 3D printing with metal works kind of like 3D printing with plastic or resin or other things where you're just laying down the material that you want to use in exactly where you want to use it.
00:45:00 ◼ ► And the big thing about 3D printing stuff is when you want to make a change, like oh we made this thing for the car, we made this suspension arm, but it turns out there's a weak part in it.
00:45:09 ◼ ► We think we need to bulk this up in this area. Making a new version of that, there are limitations to 3D printing too.
00:45:16 ◼ ► They're different than they are for CNC milling, but it's much easier to say oh here's a new revision, just print me another one that's different.
00:45:22 ◼ ► Whereas if you say okay well we've changed our mind, here's a new model for the watch, maybe you have to change the toolpaths, maybe you have to change entirely how you're carving out because you made a change that is no longer compatible with how you were carving out before because it just won't work for like which part you're milling out at which time or whatever.
00:45:36 ◼ ► So it is way easier to make changes. The second thing is the shapes that are available to you because you're 3D printing it, it's a much wider range of possibilities.
00:45:46 ◼ ► So if you look at this hypercar and you look at the suspension carriers, if you don't know what suspension components look like in a regular car, they look fairly mechanical.
00:45:54 ◼ ► They look like a bunch of little struts and arms and eye beams and spans of metal and flanges and stuff like that.
00:46:01 ◼ ► You look at those same things in this car and they look like bones, they look like a pelvis bone on like a mammal, right?
00:46:07 ◼ ► Because they ask the computer hey here are the loads, here's the load from the wheel, here's the load from the suspension moving up and down, here are where all the pivot points are.
00:46:15 ◼ ► Make me the thing that can handle those loads to some degree of tolerance but uses the least amount of material and is the lightest weight.
00:46:23 ◼ ► And the computer figures out what that should look like and unsurprisingly perhaps it ends up looking a lot like a bone and it's all kind of organic and blobby and gets thin and gets thicker in all the ways that it needs to to use the least amount of material for the thing they want it to do.
00:46:40 ◼ ► Now I'm not sure if Apple's going to brag about any of that but that is the promise of this technology that you can make even more interesting shapes, you can use less material and have lower weight but get the same or better strength by making shapes that it wouldn't occur to you to make if your main tool is like a milling machine that cuts straight lines and things, you know what I mean?
00:47:01 ◼ ► So I don't know, we didn't do it last show but this is the part of the year where we read way too much into an image in an Apple invitation but I have to think that at some point they're going to have to talk about 3D printing titanium powder into really cool shapes.
00:47:20 ◼ ► Maybe they're just doing it for the watch, I don't even know if they're already doing that for the Apple Watch Ultra, they might be but the watch is the perfect place to test it out because it's small.
00:47:27 ◼ ► Maybe they did it on the little phone, like the band around the phone and again people are like so what it's a metal strip on the outside of my phone, do I care that it was 3D printed? It's not a very complicated shape.
00:47:37 ◼ ► But I am excited about this technology if not this year then for the future because it does hold the promise to be super interesting for future Apple products.
00:47:45 ◼ ► Yeah it is fascinating, this is all news to me. I didn't realize you could basically 3D print metal like you were saying, that is surprising and I had no idea.
00:47:54 ◼ ► And there are other trade-offs, obviously it's not the same as a solid piece of metal, everything has different trade-offs but the different set of trade-offs opens up new possibilities.
00:48:04 ◼ ► And speaking of possibilities, what is the other possibility opened up by having a titanium band? The possibility of having less visible fingerprints than stainless steel.
00:48:14 ◼ ► I know this really bothers a lot of people but shiny stainless steel, yeah it shows fingerprints a lot and the rumor is that this titanium band will be more of a brushed finish and that will show fingerprints less.
00:48:25 ◼ ► They'll still be there, you just won't be able to see them as easily. Oh and they're going to have a slightly more curved edge. It's still flat on the sides but a little bit more of a curve on the top and the bottom edge.
00:48:34 ◼ ► When they say it's a new phone design, regular people are really going to have to squint at this because they're rounded rectangles with flat edges.
00:48:45 ◼ ► I think people are going to, honestly I think it will be interesting, people will have a big problem with the USB-C change because everyone is going to have to rebuy all their cables and everything.
00:48:58 ◼ ► So I think non-nerds are going to really complain about that a lot. And I think it will look new but not super new.
00:49:08 ◼ ► So I think the people who you can never please are like "Why isn't this a newer design?" They say that every single year, even when it is a new design.
00:49:17 ◼ ► Those people are going to complain about it not looking different enough. So I think they're actually in for a bit of a challenging environment in terms of non-nerd public perception of these models.
00:49:30 ◼ ► Through no fault of their own, it seems like they are actually rumored to be making some pretty substantial physical upgrades and I think the USB-C from our point of view as nerds is a huge upgrade for most of us in most ways.
00:49:41 ◼ ► But I think it will be interesting to see the non-nerd reaction here and I think they have a bit of work to do.
00:49:48 ◼ ► I think they're going to be faced with a bit of a challenge. With Apple seemingly, famously failing to read the room a lot of times in recent years, I wonder if they know that.
00:49:59 ◼ ► I wonder if they are prepared for that kind of backlash for mostly superficial things that might be stronger this year than usual.
00:50:10 ◼ ► They have a couple of tools in their pocket that we'll get to in a little bit. We're still in the physical changes part here.
00:50:15 ◼ ► Oh, and by the way, before we leave the physical things, I wanted to mention for the slightly smaller screen bezels that we're getting possibly with the 15 Pro.
00:50:32 ◼ ► But I don't want this. Look, we'll see what happens when we get it. This doesn't sound good to me because already the phone is very hard to handle without creating touch input.
00:51:03 ◼ ► They could get closer than they do. But the bezels used to be huge on the iPad. Do you remember that?
00:51:17 ◼ ► Right. And I think part of the reason, I mean obviously cost is always challenging there.
00:51:25 ◼ ► And so that kind of makes sense. On the phone, obviously I think case usage on the phone is probably way higher as a percentage than the iPad.
00:51:35 ◼ ► I think on the phone it's probably nearly 100 percent. Whereas the iPad it's probably well under half.
00:51:45 ◼ ► But on the phone I worry about like that bezel being shrunk. I think that will make things worse for both case and non-case users.
00:51:56 ◼ ► Because case users, the case will have less area to like grip onto the phone without masking out part of the screen from being possible to easily touch.
00:52:13 ◼ ► And then secondly, people who use it without a case. I've been trying going caseless for about the last month or so.
00:52:19 ◼ ► Just kind of to get used to it more. Since my phone is already super scratched up on the screen for the sand that is not in my pockets.
00:52:27 ◼ ► So I have my wonderful fingerprint D stainless steel bands that I can't wait to get rid of.
00:52:33 ◼ ► But going caseless, the problem of there being no safe area to hold on the edge is actually a little bit magnified.
00:52:48 ◼ ► And if those bezels get even thinner, I don't think, first of all, I don't think the current ones look bad.
00:53:08 ◼ ► But I don't think any regular people are asking for this and I think it would actually make our lives worse.
00:53:16 ◼ ► You can always add bezel by having a thicker case that is offset by more, but you can't remove it.
00:53:21 ◼ ► So Apple wants to give us the naked robotic core and it has nothing on it that it doesn't need to have on it.
00:53:34 ◼ ► The difference is like a millimeter or less than a millimeter and it's bragging rights and maybe they'll brag about it.
00:53:39 ◼ ► But already on the 14 Pro with a case on it, I very frequently have the annoying experience that when I'm watching something,
00:53:49 ◼ ► usually I'm watching a video in landscape and somehow some fat fleshy part of one of my fingers finds its way onto the screen.
00:53:59 ◼ ► But all of a sudden the video skips forward or the overlay comes down or something terrible happens.
00:54:12 ◼ ► No, but I have old flabby skin. But I don't know. It's amazing. It amazes me that it happens.
00:54:21 ◼ ► I think the solution, other than getting a case that is offset by more, is what the iPad bragged about doing and still tries to do,
00:54:28 ◼ ► but the iPhone seems to do very poorly, although I think it also has this feature, which is what they call finger touch rejection, palm rejection, finger rejection,
00:54:35 ◼ ► where the OS tries to figure out, "Does that seem like an accidental touch or an intentional touch?"
00:54:47 ◼ ► And maybe it's something in the recent OS update or something that rejects my touches less intelligently,
00:54:54 ◼ ► because I feel like it should know when I'm watching a video and holding it in landscape
00:54:58 ◼ ► and there's this vague, squishy touch to the upper right corner of the screen that's just the palm of my hand or something or part of my finger.
00:55:05 ◼ ► I'm not worried about the smaller bezels causing a problem with that, and I do think it's in line with the Naked Robotic Core thing.
00:55:10 ◼ ► I do think it is a little bit silly. I don't have any complaints about the bezels, but if you can make the phone smaller, that's a Naked Robotic win, right?
00:55:18 ◼ ► Because now if you really want the bigger size, just get a thicker case to put on it. We'll see.
00:55:25 ◼ ► We'll see if they mention it at all other than in passing or if they do brag about it as much as a certain segment of the reviewing population seems to be excited about it.
00:55:33 ◼ ► But one thing that's not getting smaller, the thing that I hate, the stupid camera bump.
00:55:38 ◼ ► I still think they need to revisit that design. I think it is outgrown. It is like a grotesquery of itself.
00:55:49 ◼ ► They have to have the cameras. That's the reason we buy these. You have big cameras that take up a lot of room, but they're still sticking with the design that was based on the idea that the cameras would be in the corner of the phone.
00:55:59 ◼ ► They've long since taken up more than half the width of the phone, and now they're protruding even farther.
00:56:05 ◼ ► Nothing about the cameras on the 15 Pro or Pro Max is going to change that. The bump is going to be even bigger. I'm kind of annoyed by it.
00:56:13 ◼ ► Not just the fact that it's a bump. I would feel better if it was full width. So many other phones do that in the Android world. Just make it full width.
00:56:20 ◼ ► So it's not like a wobbly corner on a table or whatever. Obviously it's so big now that it doesn't really wobble that much anymore.
00:56:26 ◼ ► I was like, "Just go whole hog. Just make it full width. Just rearrange the lenses. Do something."
00:56:30 ◼ ► But no, they're going to be in the same arrangement. The bump is even bigger. Whatever. We'll deal with it.
00:56:36 ◼ ► The other physical change that we talked about ages ago is the action button, where once there was a little switch for the RingSilence switch, whatever the hell Apple calls it.
00:56:45 ◼ ► You dig your little fingernail in there and you move that switch back and forth. That switch is gone, and in its place is an action button, which is just a rare thing for Apple.
00:56:54 ◼ ► Adding a new button, and it will be configurable in the OS to do all sorts of different things or whatever.
00:56:59 ◼ ► Just a plain old push button. And by the way, below it, as we discussed months ago, just plain old volume buttons. One button for Apple, one button for down.
00:57:06 ◼ ► The rumor was that they were going to make a single button that didn't move. It was haptic and blah blah blah.
00:57:11 ◼ ► That plan apparently got scrapped according to the rumor mill and it would just be plain old volume up and volume down buttons.
00:57:16 ◼ ► But there will be an action button above it that you'll be able to configure to do stuff, and I think that's pretty cool.
00:57:21 ◼ ► Yeah, this sounds like a really good kind of like, it'll probably mostly be used by nerds, let's be honest, in terms of changing it from the defaults.
00:57:34 ◼ ► I think the default would be mute, just to match what everyone has already grown accustomed to.
00:57:39 ◼ ► But I think what many people will change it to will be things like launching a particular camera app or launching the iOS camera, or maybe flashlight.
00:57:47 ◼ ► Things like, if you use accessibility zoom frequently or stuff like that, I think it will be very frequently used by the iOS power user community.
00:57:57 ◼ ► And I think if I had to guess, the most common non-default setting people will choose will be to launch the camera app.
00:58:03 ◼ ► Well, I mean, the nerds will have a connection to a shortcut probably. God knows what they'll do.
00:58:08 ◼ ► On the Pro Max only, the rumor is that's where we get our periscope camera, and supposedly it is a 3x to 6x optical zoom with the periscope camera.
00:58:20 ◼ ► Obviously the Pro Max has more room inside it for all these lenses that will be laying lengthwise inside the case.
00:58:33 ◼ ► We'll see when they show us the cutaway of how big it is, but all of the mockup cutaways make me think, yeah, there's not room for that in the non-Max phone.
00:58:41 ◼ ► It's just physically large. So, yeah, maybe in case you'll be getting a giant phone because he's just got to have that sweet, sweet 3x, 6x optical zoom.
00:58:49 ◼ ► I have to say, though, I think in Apple's very first periscope camera, the optical quality at either 3x or 6x or anything in between is not going to be great.
00:58:58 ◼ ► No, because it's already not great with the 3x lens that's laid out in the conventional way.
00:59:03 ◼ ► I don't know anything about the details of how this is laid out, but I would assume that it would be probably a compromise in sensor size if you're laying it out that direction.
00:59:14 ◼ ► What you're getting is more room for the optics and more reach optically, and that has its uses.
00:59:21 ◼ ► That's going to be really great in certain situations, but I'm guessing the light-gathering ability of those sensors is going to be, I'm guessing, a very small sensor and very low sensitivity relative to the other ones.
00:59:33 ◼ ► No, the sensor will be big. I think the sensor is still flat. There's a prism that projects it down into it.
00:59:40 ◼ ► Yeah, but the problem is, just like any kind of zoom lens, when you're going through lots of lens elements and you're zooming in a lot, the maximum aperture is not going to be...
00:59:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be, obviously things don't match equivalently between different sensor sizes, but I'm guessing in full-frame terms it's going to be like f/8, probably minimum or maximum, whatever.
01:00:00 ◼ ► So, I'm guessing that's going to be awesome in well-lit situations, but I would not expect that to be useful in low light.
01:00:10 ◼ ► I don't know how awesome it will be. Here's the thing. It's going to be better than digital zoom, because that's what it's competing with. No iPhone has anything past 3x, and this will go up to 6x real.
01:00:18 ◼ ► When we say digital zoom, we say, "Just take the picture that you got on the sensor and just zoom those existing pixels."
01:00:35 ◼ ► And no iPhone has ever had that reach, and I think the reach, that is the feature. It's not going to be the quality of the pictures, it's going to be the fact that you can even do that.
01:00:42 ◼ ► When you're trying to get your kid at the elementary school assembly, and you're five rows back and you want to get your kid so you can actually recognize their face and it doesn't look like an oil painting of a bunch of kids, you know?
01:00:55 ◼ ► And the 3x camera was bad, especially in low light, and the 6x camera is also going to be bad in low light, but it's better than 3x. You will get more reach, you can get more shots than you can.
01:01:10 ◼ ► But they're going to talk about it, and they're going to brag about it, and I do like the direction of making the cameras better.
01:01:15 ◼ ► I just do wonder what it will take for that to trickle down to a phone that's not gargantuan.
01:01:20 ◼ ► Speaking of that little gigantic sensor bump area thing on the back of your phone, supposedly they improved the LiDAR scanner back there as well.
01:01:28 ◼ ► If you haven't used one of those home design apps that lets you scan your room or whatever, maybe you don't care about the improved LiDAR sensor.
01:01:35 ◼ ► There is a very vague, again this is software based rumor so you've got to take a lot of grains of salt, there's a very vague rumor about the new phones having the ability to capture spatial photos for Vision Pro.
01:01:45 ◼ ► Like that you would take a photo and use multiple lenses and a LiDAR sensor to make it a depth map.
01:01:50 ◼ ► Who knows, again anything software based you really have to say that could be someone's fantasy.
01:01:55 ◼ ► But the improved LiDAR scanner, that's a hardware thing so that's probably real, but it may just be a matter of that part getting better over time so of course they're going to use the better sensor.
01:02:04 ◼ ► Base storage on the Pro phones is going to be 256 instead of 128 which is what it was previously.
01:02:12 ◼ ► And the top tier storage you can get for how much flash is going to be 2TB up from 1TB, that's going to cost you a pretty penny.
01:02:27 ◼ ► The base storage going up, let's see if we can get to the price, that's not magic they're just going to charge you more, just kind of sucky.
01:02:34 ◼ ► Because the base storage should go up at the same price but that's not the Apple way so we'll deal with that.
01:02:43 ◼ ► There you go. Well again it's like on the Mac Pro where they just cut off the base model, that's pretty much what they're doing here.
01:02:51 ◼ ► So the battery, there was a bunch of rumors about the battery being substantially better because they were going to use stacked technologies.
01:02:58 ◼ ► Diagram it's in the show notes, I don't know, or in the notes that I'm looking at that may or may not be in the actual thing but it's from various rumor websites.
01:03:05 ◼ ► The idea is that if you look at a battery in cross section it's like a big rectangle but inside there is like a jelly roll of battery crap.
01:03:12 ◼ ► And the jelly roll on the edges is rounded and so all that space in the corners where the jelly roll is rounded but the container is rectangular, there's wasted space in the corners.
01:03:22 ◼ ► So stacked battery technology is it goes back and forth like a snake, left right left right left right and it fills in the rectangle more evenly without wasting space in the corners like the jelly roll version would.
01:03:32 ◼ ► And this is what's going to allow us to essentially have more battery in the same area on the new phones.
01:03:38 ◼ ► But then the rumor was, never mind, that didn't work out for this year, it's going to be next year.
01:03:46 ◼ ► Right, but then we have the actual rumors of the batteries which of course leak like crazy.
01:04:02 ◼ ► That is 12% larger than the 14 Pro on the Pro phone and 11% larger than the 14 Pro Max.
01:04:16 ◼ ► We don't know, but those are the milliamp hour numbers. These are exact specs, it'll be very easy to check these when the phones come out.
01:04:25 ◼ ► I'll be interested to see if they nail this exactly. But anyway, bigger batteries. Essentially 10% bigger batteries.
01:04:29 ◼ ► That's good. And remember everything else we said. The SoC is going to use less power, the support chips are using less power, the screen I think is basically the same as it was.
01:04:40 ◼ ► Oh and speaking of things that kill battery, another question mark item is 8K video recording.
01:04:46 ◼ ► Presumably the SoC could handle it and now you have Thunderbolt so you could actually get an 8K video off there in some reasonable amount of time.
01:04:54 ◼ ► Maybe they'll do it. Honestly I don't know how much value there is in 8K video recording.
01:04:59 ◼ ► Are there a lot of 8K video workflows that people are using with iPhones with as opposed to their giant red cameras or whatever.
01:05:06 ◼ ► We'll see. It would be a good bragging right interesting thing and I believe the hardware will be capable of it so I guess it's kind of a question of whether Apple wants to do that or not.
01:05:13 ◼ ► Wait, what's the resolution? Do they have enough megapixels for that? I don't think we do.
01:05:23 ◼ ► Yeah, but the 48 has such an asterisk on it though. I don't know. That's a little pushing it I think.
01:05:29 ◼ ► I will say it's of questionable value I feel like both because of the 48 megapixel sensor and also because those are big files.
01:05:38 ◼ ► Regardless of Thunderbolt, I guess you can get the 2 terabyte one. I don't know. I feel like if you're getting a 2 terabyte iPhone to run 8K video just get a real camera.
01:05:47 ◼ ► Charging. So wired charging is going to go up to 35 watts where previously it was 20 to 25 watts. MagSafe charging is supposedly going to go to 20 watts where previously it was 15.
01:05:59 ◼ ► And it will support Qi 2 charging. Qi 1 was limited to 7.5 watts and Qi 2 will go up to 15 watts.
01:06:06 ◼ ► Now to be clear, I've only read brief bits here and there. Do I understand correctly that Qi 2 is basically MagSafe?
01:06:14 ◼ ► It doesn't seem like it from the watts because MagSafe is supposedly going to go up to 20 watts but Qi 2 is stuck down at 15.
01:06:20 ◼ ► So MagSafe seems to have something extra to it if these rumors are to be believed. We'll see.
01:06:27 ◼ ► But anyway, it will have Qi 2 so if you buy Qi 2 charging accessories the Pro and Pro Max will support it.
01:06:33 ◼ ► The colors are the same old exciting colors that you can imagine the Pro phone having. How about these?
01:06:48 ◼ ► So in our document I have a picture of them. These are the actual phones. This is not a mockup.
01:07:34 ◼ ► Again, these pictures could be wrong and also as we know, colors look very different in different lighting conditions.
01:07:46 ◼ ► Color matched charging cables. Two things about them. One, they're going to be braided.
01:07:51 ◼ ► What things come with braided cables now? I think I have a braided cable that connects to my monitor.
01:08:02 ◼ ► It's kind of a woven fabric thing instead of rubber or plastic over the sheath of the cable.
01:08:10 ◼ ► You know when you get a cable, Apple does a good job of this because they wrap them in circles.
01:08:13 ◼ ► But if you get a cable for a cheap accessory out of a box and it's wrapped back and forth with a twisty tie around it, right?
01:08:24 ◼ ► That's because the outside of these cables are made of plastic or rubbery plastic type stuff.
01:08:37 ◼ ► People also think they're more durable. I'm not so sure about that because fabric woven casings do wear away from friction and stuff.
01:08:51 ◼ ► If you buy a deep blue iPhone or a space black iPhone or whatever, you'll get a cable that is color matched to your phone.
01:08:58 ◼ ► It may be hard to tell with the Pro phone, but they are doing that and it's a nice addition.
01:09:04 ◼ ► And the cables are supposedly going to be a little bit longer than they were last year.
01:09:17 ◼ ► I really think they feel great. They seem to me like they're more durable. That may not be true, but they seem like it.
01:09:25 ◼ ► Secondly, can you imagine if they just chose one color and we all just kind of assumed they were color matched?
01:09:32 ◼ ► But because these grays are so damn close to each other, can you imagine if they just shipped one?
01:09:52 ◼ ► Like, I hate to be able to tell them apart. It's like trying to tell, "Is this Thai Navy or black?"
01:10:15 ◼ ► Anyway, in case you were wondering if the price of the Pro phones would keep going up, yep.
01:10:38 ◼ ► Is this the time for the Ultra branding to come to the phone to give them an excuse to charge even more money for the one with the periscope camera?
01:10:44 ◼ ► This is not something that can leak. It's in marketing. This stuff pretty much never leaks.
01:10:57 ◼ ► I mean, obviously, as said earlier, it's a fool's errand to try to predict Apple's product naming schemes because they never make sense.
01:11:05 ◼ ► We justify them retroactively once we hear the names, but guessing Apple's names is extraordinarily difficult and almost never works.
01:11:13 ◼ ► But this would make sense. The term Pro Max is a mouthful and it's kind of a ridiculous term.
01:11:21 ◼ ► I think it would make a lot of sense to just call the phones the regular and then Pro and Ultra.
01:11:29 ◼ ► That's how I would do it. If I was going to do this, I would say iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Ultra.
01:11:53 ◼ ► Yeah, we never know what they're going to do with naming, but I agree that Pro Max is a mouthful.
01:11:57 ◼ ► And also, it's like they've made it worse for themselves, as they always do, because there's SOCs that have Pro and Max suffixes, but never together.
01:12:15 ◼ ► I'm not sure. That's why I like the fact that it's the iPhone 14 and the 14 Plus, because the Plus is the bigger version of the 14.
01:12:22 ◼ ► So I don't know what they're going to do with Ultra or if they do anything with it. We'll see.
01:12:29 ◼ ► So the iPhone 15 and the Plus, the rumor is they will make an iPhone 15 Plus, which will just be the bigger version of the iPhone 15.
01:12:36 ◼ ► They're sticking to the thing where the 15 doesn't have the A17 in it. It has last year's SOC. It has an A16 in it to save Apple money.
01:12:44 ◼ ► So those brief years we had where the Pro and non-Pro phones had the same SOC, it doesn't look like they're coming back anytime soon.
01:12:51 ◼ ► But the good thing is that the iPhone 15 and the 15 Plus will have the dynamic island, which means you'll be able to see sports scores and stuff like that when you're using another app.
01:13:00 ◼ ► It will have USB-C, just like the Pro, but no Thunderbolt is the rumor. The rumor is the non-Pro phones will have a USB-C port, but you get, what do you get? USB 2.0 speeds is the rumor.
01:13:15 ◼ ► This may be difficult to suss out from hardware, but just to remind everybody, USB 2.0 is 480 megabits. That is 1.2% as fast as Thunderbolt.
01:13:24 ◼ ► Thunderbolt is 40 gigabits. In all fairness, as stated earlier, most people just use the port for charging. I know.
01:13:31 ◼ ► So for the non-Pro phone to be limited to the same speed that to date every single iPhone has always been limited to, I think that's reasonable.
01:13:39 ◼ ► I don't think it is, because they could put USB 3 in there. It would still be a thin cable. It would still be a cheap cable.
01:13:45 ◼ ► Just give us USB 3 speeds. USB 2.0 speeds in 2023 on a phone that's going to cost as much as the iPhone 15 is inexcusable, I feel like.
01:13:53 ◼ ► But you know, whatever. People won't notice. I don't think it will actually be an issue. I just think from a technical perspective it is as shameful as there are RAM prices.
01:14:00 ◼ ► Well, and you know, it's almost certainly like, you know, they don't really need to do this. It's definitely for market segmentation.
01:14:06 ◼ ► But I would rather, like, there are features that are currently on the Pro phones that I would love to see in the non-Pro phones.
01:14:12 ◼ ► And if they have to do stuff like this to give us those better features that more people will benefit from, like display enhancements, that's fine.
01:14:18 ◼ ► I would take this trade off. This is good segmentation. Anyone who's going to be using it as a Pro camera, they want to be buying the Pro versions.
01:14:29 ◼ ► But sometimes people need to get videos off the phone even when they're not using Pro stuff.
01:14:33 ◼ ► But anyway, we'll see if they ever change that. But like, USB 2.0 speeds, like eventually this is going to be one of those embarrassing things that Apple needs to change.
01:14:39 ◼ ► Maybe not this year. They'll get away with it this year probably. They'll spin it because everyone will mostly be distracted by the shape of the port.
01:14:44 ◼ ► But again, to put this in perspective, this is literally the speed of every iPhone that's been released to date.
01:14:52 ◼ ► Like, it's not like they're making it slower. It's the speed that all iPhones have always been.
01:15:00 ◼ ► Anyway, we'll have the 48 megapixel camera. Like, basically if you want to think of what is the iPhone 15 non-Pro going to be like, it's going to be a lot like an iPhone 14 Pro, slightly decontented and different.
01:15:15 ◼ ► Although interestingly, the rumor is that this 48 megapixel sensor will be smaller than the 15 Pro's 48 megapixel 1X camera sensor.
01:15:23 ◼ ► So maybe they're using the one from the 14 Pro and the 15 and then the 15 Pro gets a new sensor that's slightly bigger. We'll see if they talk about that.
01:15:30 ◼ ► Still no ProMotion on the 15, which some people are really angry about. But honestly, if you want to do intentional segmentation, regular people don't notice 120Hz.
01:15:40 ◼ ► Honestly, again, like USB 2.0 speeds, it will eventually be embarrassing. But it has a way longer runway before it becomes embarrassing that it's 60Hz.
01:15:48 ◼ ► Because USB 2.0 speeds are super old, 60Hz versus 120. 120 just came out on phones like a couple years ago, so I think they have a little bit longer to keep that as a segmentation issue.
01:15:58 ◼ ► One thing that, as far as I can tell, there have been no rumors on either way is whether the non-Pro 15 will have an always-on screen. Have we heard anything about that?
01:16:09 ◼ ► No, because I feel like that's going to have physically the same screen hardware as the 14 Pro, but that type of choice is the thing that Apple could basically do in software to segment.
01:16:19 ◼ ► So I don't think anyone's been willing to say or not. I think it could, obviously, because if you look at the guts of the 15, it's like the guts of the 14 Pro and it has an always-on screen.
01:16:28 ◼ ► See, I'm going to guess no, because whatever type of OLED they used that got us ProMotion, maybe that type is required for them to do always-on in the same way that they've been doing it.
01:16:39 ◼ ► It's going to have that type. Like, the screen will be the same screen as in the 14 Pro.
01:16:47 ◼ ► ProMotion is a display driver issue, it's not just the screen. I feel like it can't do 120Hz.
01:16:54 ◼ ► I think it could do always-on screen, but I think that's going to end up being a software product segmentation choice.
01:17:00 ◼ ► Because all the rumors about the screens, even on the 15 Pro, the rumor is the screen is essentially the same screen as the 14 Pro.
01:17:10 ◼ ► Same maximum brightness, there's no real complaints about the screen, other than it'll have thinner bezels on the Pro.
01:17:17 ◼ ► I hope they do always-on. I'm not holding my breath on it, but I hope they do. Because again, for the same thing I was saying earlier about the Dynamic Island being limited to only the Pro phones for only one year, it kind of hurts software adoption.
01:17:29 ◼ ► There's a lot of cool software capabilities that you get with an always-on screen. Not only do you get standby mode, standby works on the phones that don't have always-on, but it sucks.
01:17:38 ◼ ► If you're going to use standby, you really want an always-on screen. And that's a cool feature that I would love to have more apps invest in and more of the software ecosystem invest in that and everything.
01:17:48 ◼ ► So I'm hoping that they bring always-on to the non-Pro phone this year, mostly for standby, but also just because it just makes it a better product for a lot of people.
01:18:02 ◼ ► Well, it could definitely support it because the battery in these things, here we have the exact numbers, for the 15, 3,877, that is 15% bigger than it was in the 14 non-Pro.
01:18:13 ◼ ► And it is also 5.8% bigger than the 15 Pro's battery. So the 15 will have a bigger battery than the 15 Pro, presumably because the 15 Pro has more space taken up by camera crap.
01:18:22 ◼ ► Because remember, the regular 15 just has two cameras and it's way small, like that whole gigantic mound is way smaller. So bigger battery, and this has the A16 in it, which is not 3nm.
01:18:35 ◼ ► Remember, it's going to be "4nm", which I think is just an enhanced version of the 5nm. It's the A16, it's the processor that's in the 14 Pro now.
01:18:42 ◼ ► So I'm not sure how this is going to work out, because the 15 Pro has a 3nm SoC, which is going to probably end up using less power, but then the 15 has a bigger battery. Maybe it'll be a wash, we'll see.
01:18:53 ◼ ► And then the 15 Plus will have a 4912 mAh battery, which is 12% larger than the 14 Plus and 1% larger than the 15 Pro Max.
01:19:03 ◼ ► 15 Pro Max has a big battery. I feel like that's still going to be the battery champ, because remember it's got the better SoC and a similar size battery.
01:19:12 ◼ ► Charging, same type of deal, supposedly 35W charging where previously it was 20-25W. MagSafe might still be 20W, and it'll have ChiTu charging at 15W instead of 7.5W.
01:19:24 ◼ ► And then the colors might have some actual colors here. So this is a picture of the colors. The colors are supposedly black, yellow, the product red thing, blue, purple, starlight, and again, no gold.
01:19:34 ◼ ► And in this picture, the black actually looks black on the iPhone 15, not, you know, space gray or whatever.
01:19:40 ◼ ► Yeah, the non-Pro black usually does really look black. And, you know, non-Pro, if they use the word "white", it usually does look white, although they've been using starlight in recent years.
01:19:57 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that's the yellow. Again, these pictures are taken with questionable white balance. We don't know if these are final things.
01:20:02 ◼ ► These are, you know, leaks from inside factories. We may or may not put these in the, but anyway.
01:20:08 ◼ ► These are the things that are leaking. Obviously the color names themselves other than product red are probably not going to be what they're called.
01:20:14 ◼ ► I hope this is an under-representation of these colors, because this looks so boring and so bland.
01:20:21 ◼ ► I mean, it could be 100%, it could just be 100% wrong, because colors, like, I'm sure these are real physical devices, but I think they do lots of different color tests, you know what I mean?
01:20:31 ◼ ► Because like, you know, so I have the yellow 14 Plus here. The yellow that they ship mid-cycle with the 14 series is very pale.
01:20:40 ◼ ► If you look at the back, it's a very pale yellow, but this picture of the alleged new phones, the one that corresponds to yellow looks like starlight.
01:20:56 ◼ ► We'll see. But here, the color match charging cables, I've seen, I didn't put them in here, but I've seen pictures of the color match charging cables and they look way more interesting.
01:21:04 ◼ ► This is what I was thinking of. The iMacs, the iMacs have color match braided cables, right? Because if you buy the purple iMac, you get the M1 iMacs, you get the color match cable.
01:21:12 ◼ ► That's what they're doing. If you've seen the new iMacs, the M1 iMacs, new, the M1 iMacs, how their cables look, that's what the cables of these phones look like.
01:21:21 ◼ ► Especially the non-Pro ones, because they will have white-like ends, but then the braided part will be color matched to your phone, so if you get a red phone, it'll be a red braided cable with a white end on it, very much like the M1 iMacs.
01:21:33 ◼ ► And that, I think, we were talking about how people can't tell the difference between these phones, they look the same, maybe the colors are more curved.
01:21:40 ◼ ► Those stupid cables are probably going to be the most important feature of this phone that's going to make regular people happy with their purchase.
01:21:49 ◼ ► Because they're not going to buy the Pro phone, because who buys that? It's too expensive. They're going to get the red version of this, it's going to come with a red cable and people are going to love it.
01:21:56 ◼ ► They're going to love it because it's braided, and most people don't have experience with braided cables, and every iPhone has not come with them before, and it's going to match the color of the phone and people are going to go bananas.
01:22:06 ◼ ► I think this is the number one feature of the phone, it's so dumb, but that's the level we're at. These phones basically do everything everybody needs.
01:22:14 ◼ ► Sometimes you need to get a new phone, sometimes your old one is old, sometimes it's broken, sometimes the battery's bad, sometimes you drop it into a lake, and when you get a new one you want to be excited about it.
01:22:23 ◼ ► You're like, "What can this new phone do? Does it feel faster than my old phone?" This one comes with a cable that matches the color of my phone, people are going to eat it up.
01:22:30 ◼ ► I hope so. I think one factor here to be aware of, I think it's nice to shine a light on, or put a hat on, the fact that yes, it's a different cable, and Apple is wise to own that and have, "Alright, color-matched cables.
01:22:46 ◼ ► Not only is this cable going to be a different plug on the end, it's going to look different, and even though the benefit to most people is not going to be clear to them, we're going to make this look like an upgrade.
01:23:01 ◼ ► And it's exciting, it's more exciting than just a plain old white cable that's come with your iPhone forever.
01:23:05 ◼ ► Yes, and you'll be able to tell it apart, which will be great, as you're learning that this is a new connector, you'll be able to tell it apart, you'll see instantly which is the cable for your new iPhone.
01:23:15 ◼ ► The problem is that most people do not buy Apple cables. Most people, you have the cable that comes with your phone, which you use until the end, frays off and it stops working, or the pin blackens or whatever.
01:23:27 ◼ ► And then, when you have to buy another cable sometime, you get whatever's cheap from Amazon, or a drugstore, or whatever. And no one buys Apple cables.
01:23:36 ◼ ► But third parties are going to see this and they're going to sell you cheaper quality color match cables for the new iPhones, because it's an opportunity for them to sell more cables.
01:23:46 ◼ ► I hope so. But I think we nerds, especially in the Apple comment-o-sphere, tend to assume that more people will use OEM accessories than actually do.
01:23:59 ◼ ► Like, when I'm out in the world, how often do you even see an Apple power brick? Like, now that the phones don't come with Apple power bricks anymore, how often do you see an Apple power brick for a phone out in the world?
01:24:09 ◼ ► For me, it's almost never. And I see a lot of people, because of my location in a vacation town, we have a lot of people who come here and use their phone all day on the beach, and then go to a restaurant for dinner or whatever, and they're like, "Can I plug in my phone somewhere? My phone died."
01:24:26 ◼ ► And I love the phrase, "My phone died," because it takes no ownership for the situation. It's like my child starved. It's like, "Mm, that's interesting. Is some part of that on you?"
01:24:35 ◼ ► But anyway, so my phone died, and they plug in their phone to a booth somewhere. And so I see a lot of regular people's iPhone charging setups. And yeah, a lot of frayed cables and zero Apple power bricks. Like, none. They're all rando third-party Amazon power bricks.
01:24:55 ◼ ► Well, hopefully with the fraying cable, they're doing better with that over time. Historically, Apple has not done well with strain relief or materials. And when they took whatever that harmful chemical is, they took out of their plastics, the cables got even worse for a while before they figured out how to hit break even again.
01:25:10 ◼ ► Hopefully the braided cables do better. But I buy third-party cables for my kids, because in their rooms, they all want to have their phones on their beds, and they don't manage their batteries well, so they're often using their phone plugged in.
01:25:18 ◼ ► So I have these gigantic six-foot-long braided Anker cables, and they come in colors. I get red ones, black ones, silver ones, pink ones, but none of those colors have anything to do with their phones.
01:25:29 ◼ ► With these color-matched cables, I think Anker and those other companies, those third-party companies that sell these really long cables or third-party cables, are going to see a business opportunity to say, "How does Anker pick the colors for their cables?"
01:25:40 ◼ ► They're like, "I guess people might like a red one. I guess we should make a black one." Now they know exactly what colors they need to make. Buy this thing to match your new phone.
01:25:48 ◼ ► That will be attractive to customers, and they don't care what color their cables are. We'll make it so they match Apple's cables. And of course, everybody gets this phone.
01:25:56 ◼ ► Buy a whole lot of gray thread. You're going to need light gray, medium gray, dark gray, blue gray, pink gray, yellow gray, and black gray.
01:26:03 ◼ ► That's for the pro phones. Again, I've got to find the picture of what the cables look like. The cables look more exciting than the phones. And every one of these iPhones will come in the box with one of these color-matched braided cables.
01:26:15 ◼ ► That's the whole thing. The one in the box will be color-matched to the phone that you buy. So I think that will give people a taste for it. And if they don't care, then they don't care. They'll just buy another white cable when they buy a third-party one.
01:26:25 ◼ ► The action button, obviously, is going to be exciting. Getting to that dynamic island, if you didn't have it before, is exciting. Maybe the periscope camera, but those color-matched cables.
01:26:35 ◼ ► These are the things that are going to stand out the most, physically speaking, before we get to whatever the heck Apple is going to promote about these phones on the software and feature side.
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01:28:12 ◼ ► We'll see. It sounds like there's a new SOC. Finally. That would be a significant upgrade. But are they going to have my wonderful brush titanium again, which they didn't have with the Series 8? Probably not. Nothing has indicated that.
01:28:29 ◼ ► That's going to actually impact a lot. A watch for me is partly functional and partly jewelry. I really like the way the titanium Series 7 and previous looks. It's wonderful.
01:28:43 ◼ ► And honestly, I really do not like the look of the Apple Watch aluminum. I understand a lot of people like it. That's fine. Good for you. To me, it's not for me. And so, before the titanium, I always wore the polished steel. And that's very nice too. But titanium, in my opinion, is even better.
01:29:01 ◼ ► And I miss it. Again, I buy everything. I didn't buy a Series 8 because of that. If the Series 9 is a lot better, maybe I'll jump to it and give up my titanium. But I hope they don't make me make that choice. But we'll see. It sounds like that's not in the cards.
01:29:20 ◼ ► And so, maybe, look, my Series 7 still works fine. So maybe I'll just not buy the watch this year too.
01:29:27 ◼ ► Well, I mean, this would be the year to buy it because it actually is going to be a new SoC. When we say the previous SoCs were the same, we don't mean that they were revised on a different thing. They were literally the same, fabbed at the same size.
01:29:38 ◼ ► This one is going to be fabbed, rumor is, at 5nm. Not at 3nm, which is kind of weird that they wouldn't try to do the watch things at 3nm because you'd think the watch SoC would be the easiest thing to fab because it's the smallest so the least things can go wrong because they're so tiny.
01:29:50 ◼ ► But it's going to be 5nm instead of 3. Again, I think, why not 3? Isn't the watch the most power sensitive? I think it just comes down to the economics, maybe.
01:30:03 ◼ ► And possibly just yields, too. The 3nm capacity at TSMC, rumors are that Apple has purchased their entire capacity for a year at least.
01:30:14 ◼ ► And they're going to be using it for all the iPhone Pros, which is a high volume product, obviously the highest profile product and very high volumes.
01:30:26 ◼ ► Then, once the M3 series of Mac chips comes out, probably not that far from now, maybe it'll come out next spring or summer with a new MacBook Air or something like that, that's going to probably use 3nm as well.
01:30:38 ◼ ► So even more of that capacity with even bigger chips that will have even lower yields. So maybe it's just like, look, we don't want to move the watch to this yet because it doesn't need it.
01:30:46 ◼ ► I mean, it's been fairly fine in terms of the market while not having an SoC update in three years.
01:30:54 ◼ ► I think part of it might be that the SoC is actually not the biggest source of power drain in the watch.
01:30:59 ◼ ► Obviously it is when you're doing heavy work, but from minute to minute I imagine the screen wins, maybe?
01:31:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I would assume so. As I've said before, with the watch, what I'm looking for as both a watch user but especially as a watch app developer, what I'm looking for is more ability to use CPU time.
01:31:25 ◼ ► And that's all in the name of power consumption savings because with the watch it's extremely power constrained.
01:31:31 ◼ ► So if they make the watch SoC more efficient and then that allows them to lift some of those limits on what developers can do with our apps, that would actually be a substantial update for users of those apps and users of the watch, therefore.
01:31:47 ◼ ► So that would be really interesting, but that's like a big, you know, if they do this and this and this kind of chain of events that so far to date they've basically never done those things.
01:32:02 ◼ ► I don't know how reliable this rumor that the S9 is going to be 5nm is though. Maybe it is going to be 3. Maybe it will be "4" which is like the improved 5. We'll see if they even mention it.
01:32:11 ◼ ► The other question about the S9 is will it just be an S8 fabbed on a smaller process? Which is, you know, it's not simple to do that. That is some work.
01:32:19 ◼ ► Or will it actually be revised things? The cores are a little different. Maybe there's a different count of cores. To the extent that they tell us anything about this new SoC, will we be able to determine that they didn't just shrink it?
01:32:31 ◼ ► It actually is slightly different in some way. They don't go into that much technical detail, but we'll find out eventually.
01:32:38 ◼ ► The other rumors for this are there will be a new color that's kind of pinkish and that it will come in a smaller box.
01:32:44 ◼ ► That should just be a perennial rumor. Has Apple ever made a bigger box for one of its products? The boxes just get smaller because the economics are good. You can fit more in a shipping container and there's less waste.
01:32:58 ◼ ► I love that there's so little rumored information about the Apple Watch Series 9, probably because there's so little change about the Apple Watch Series 9, that the box made the top list.
01:33:08 ◼ ► And then we have the Apple Watch Ultra, which the big thing here is black titanium finish. It actually looks pretty cool in the leaked pictures.
01:33:17 ◼ ► Obviously, we'll also have the new S9 SoC in there. The pictures seem to show that the action button was still going to be orange. I guess that works with black too.
01:33:28 ◼ ► People who wanted a black version. I think I didn't dig too far into these. I think that might be the only rumor. Basically an S9 and it also comes in black now, which is fine, but no radical changes to the Ultra. No big surprise. It's a brand new product, basically.
01:33:41 ◼ ► Prediction time. I'm really curious. How will they name updates to the Apple Watch Ultra? I was thinking maybe they would just never change the name. This is just the Apple Watch Ultra. Just like iPad Pro.
01:33:59 ◼ ► Right. I was thinking maybe they would say Apple Watch Series 9 Ultra or Ultra 2. The more I thought about it, the more I think they're just going to keep calling it Ultra. I don't expect them to keep old Ultras around as the cheaper option.
01:34:17 ◼ ► No, because they're not going to be that much cheaper. The only difference is S9 versus S6, according to the rumors, right?
01:34:23 ◼ ► If even that. Even the S9 has barely been rumored to exist. Anyway, Ultra is having a black finish. That'll be a big hit.
01:34:32 ◼ ► Related to both the watches and the phone is this rumor. It's been running around for a while now. They're like, "Oh, it seems like Apple's not making a leather case for the new iPhones."
01:34:42 ◼ ► Maybe they're going to make vegan leather. This is a big trend in the car industry to have interiors. They call them vegan leather as a marketing way to say fake leather. It's supposed to look and feel kind of like leather, but it's not leather. It's entirely non-animal based.
01:34:56 ◼ ► And that rumor extends to the watch bands. They make a bunch of leather watch bands, and they're like, "Are they going to not make leather watch bands, too?"
01:35:02 ◼ ► There's rumors that the Hermes leather bands are being offered for 90% off to Apple employees, and Hermes, their big thing is fancy leather.
01:35:12 ◼ ► So if Apple's getting out of the leather case and leather watch trap business, maybe that means the relationship with Hermes is over? We'll see how that goes.
01:35:22 ◼ ► Honestly, I kind of hope so for lots of reasons. First of all, going away from leather I think makes a lot of sense. Apple is so environmentally conscious and socially progressive in so many other ways, it has seemed odd that they still produced and sold so much animal leather.
01:35:40 ◼ ► It didn't fit with their image. We mentioned this in past years as well. Every year that went by they were still making leather, it seems like, "Hmmm, do they really want to be making that? Does that really make sense for them?"
01:35:59 ◼ ► Partly thanks to the car industry that has great interest in having something that is less expensive than leather but that they can charge the same amount for.
01:36:07 ◼ ► Watch bands, admittedly, leather is really nice but there are also a lot of alternatives. And phone cases too. If you still want a leather phone case, and Apple won't sell you one, there are lots of other brands that will.
01:36:21 ◼ ► As you know, they've gotten pretty good. We've talked about it on the show before. Third party leather phone cases have actually gotten pretty good. We don't necessarily need Apple to be doing it.
01:36:31 ◼ ► And from a different perspective on the Hermes front, I kind of want that partnership to end because Hermes controls the best shade of orange.
01:36:41 ◼ ► The Apple Watch, what I presume is a weird toe-stepping avoidance situation, they had this Hermes partnership with the Watch many years ago. Meanwhile, Apple has occasionally launched orange watch bands and orange phone cases.
01:37:02 ◼ ► And Hermes is sitting there squatting on the best shade of orange. I assume the reason why Apple's orange shades have traditionally been pretty far from Hermes orange is to avoid stepping on those toes.
01:37:16 ◼ ► Or maybe they were contractually prohibited from getting too close to it in certain areas. Well, then they launched the Apple Watch Ultra.
01:37:23 ◼ ► And the shade of orange that goes with the Apple Watch Ultra that they already sell in those cloth strap things for the Apple Watch Ultra is extremely close to Hermes orange.
01:37:34 ◼ ► It's very close. And Hermes orange does look the best with the Ultra and its orange action button. And even the regular Apple watches.
01:37:43 ◼ ► And they even had, I got one on eBay for some absurd price, but it was still way less than it actually cost. When you buy an Hermes watch, apparently, it comes with an orange sport band.
01:37:56 ◼ ► It's an exclusive Hermes sport band that comes with Hermes Apple watches. Not even advertised as coming with it, it just happens to come in the box with them.
01:38:06 ◼ ► And people sell these on eBay. And so it was more than a regular sport band, but a lot less than an Hermes watch. And so I got one of these because I'm like, man, it's such a great orange.
01:38:14 ◼ ► And it turns out, yes, it's wonderful. And I'm afraid to ever wear it because it costs more than a regular sport band. I don't want to mess it up.
01:38:20 ◼ ► But like, then when you compare that, like you can look back at Apple's history of other sport bands that they've made in orange-like shades.
01:38:28 ◼ ► And they're all terrible. They're all like these like weird pastel-y kind of candy, salmony oranges. And I've gone done that rabbit hole by going to eBay sellers and they're selling the old colors.
01:38:40 ◼ ► And like, oh, how about like, you know, vivid orange or melon orange or whatever, like all these old color names. And people, collectors will like line them up and take photos trying to show you the different shades of orange.
01:38:50 ◼ ► And the Hermes one is always the best. So what I'm hoping is if the Apple or Hermes partnership ends because they don't want to use leather anymore, which is great for lots of other reasons, as mentioned, I'm hoping that also allows them to start using better shades of orange in their watch bands, basically.
01:39:05 ◼ ► And maybe, you know, phone cases as well. Because I think that there's a lot of opportunity there for really great oranges that they currently seem to shy away from for whatever reason that might be that partnership.
01:39:15 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know about the Hermes thing because I do think Apple does like to fleece the ultra-rich by selling them super expensive stuff. And they always discount the Hermes stuff when they're trying to clear inventory before new stuff comes.
01:39:26 ◼ ► So it could be going away or it could just be replaced by newer Hermes stuff. So we'll see.
01:39:30 ◼ ► But the rumor that Apple is going to replace their iPhone, leather iPhone case with is that it's supposedly going to be fine woven twill, T-W-I-L-L, which is supposedly the branding that they would use in this. Again, how would they possibly know the branding? So take this with much grains of salt.
01:39:49 ◼ ► Well, is fine woven, capital F, capital W, all one word. And again, you can see pictures of this case. It is like woven textile and kind of like a crosshatch diamond pattern. It looks a little bit like suede.
01:40:02 ◼ ► People who have seen it and felt it think maybe it's not that water resistant, kind of like suede is not that water resistant. And also the rumor is that case might be about $100.
01:40:11 ◼ ► So if there is no leather, is this the replacement for it or is this just an addition and they are still going to sell leather? It looked interesting. It looked like a case I would like to feel because I'm all for new case designs. It did look like it would be comfortable and grippy.
01:40:26 ◼ ► It doesn't look anything like leather. It looks a little bit like suede, but it's kind of like the back looks like woven texture, but then the sides look kind of more plasticy. It's strange.
01:40:36 ◼ ► So again, this is a rumor. This is a real physical case that people have shown. Is that a third party case? Is that a real thing that Apple is going to ship? Watch for fine woven twill. However they spin that.
01:40:48 ◼ ► And there are also super vague rumors about potentially future watches having woven bands to replace leather bands. Again, the watch stuff is way sketchier in terms of rumor reliability than the phone stuff because the no more leather iPhone case from Apple thing has been pretty strong for a long time now.
01:41:03 ◼ ► I think people are just extrapolating from that, but this fine woven thing, I saw a video of someone handling it today and even if that's a third party case, I would be interested in going to an Apple store and seeing what that feels like because it looked kind of interesting.
01:41:15 ◼ ► Honestly, this looks really like there's I'm looking through like the rumor pictures now. Some of them look horrendous. Some of them look decent.
01:41:22 ◼ ► What I would hope this product is, first of all, again, if they're replacing leather, in my opinion, good, it's time. What I hope for this product is they already make the silicone cases and silicone cases are wonderful for durability, for water resistance, for the phone.
01:41:47 ◼ ► Eventually, yeah. But for water resistance, impact resistance, like a grip, it feels great. The problem is the grip is too good and it makes it hard to put it in pockets and stuff.
01:41:56 ◼ ► And then leather cases are kind of a nice happy medium in terms of grip, but they, first of all, require animals, which is, again, not great.
01:42:04 ◼ ► And then they also have no water resistance really whatsoever. Like the water does not do kind things to leather. And so ideally, if they can somehow solve the need of leather cases from Apple, which is something that looks nicer than silicone, like looks a little bit more upmarket and is easier to put into a pocket, easier than silicone to put in a pocket.
01:42:32 ◼ ► Right? Well, so it's a premium upsell for them and St. Jude, everybody. And then also, like, if they can get water resistance in there too, hey, this could be a huge upgrade. We'll see.
01:42:45 ◼ ► I have faith because Apple's, you know, ever since they launched the watch and really started making really great iPhone cases as well, their textile game has been very good.
01:42:55 ◼ ► They make really great materials for watch bands and phone cases. So I'm optimistic. I think if they have tackled this, they've probably done it with good reason and they've probably done a good job. So I'm actually very much looking forward to this.
01:43:09 ◼ ► Of course, this kind of fabricy texture, you know what it'll grow great with? Your color match braided cable on your phone. So you get the case that matches the cable that matches the phone all from Apple.
01:43:20 ◼ ► And like the texture of a match, the color, I'm sure will be an exact match. You know what I mean? Like, if this is true, there is obvious synergy for them to really go whole hog.
01:43:29 ◼ ► Kind of again, kind of like they did with the M1 iMac where everything is color matched the keyboard, the mouse, the cables, the front, the back. That is a thing. And I think it is a successful look and I encourage it.
01:43:40 ◼ ► The final bit here, wrapping up is other big rumors, AirPods cases with USB-C connectors instead of lightning.
01:43:47 ◼ ► We talked about it last show, every single product that Apple has with lightning, I think they should eventually change to USB-C. They're not all going to be announced tomorrow, but I really hope they don't drag this out for five years.
01:43:58 ◼ ► And we're all talking about in this show, what's the last standing Apple lightning accessory that they're still selling like we were for like the last time on a red and a Mac?
01:44:09 ◼ ► We'll see. But anyway, the AirPods cases are actually rumored that they might just say, you know, by the way, from this point forward, if you buy AirPods, nothing about them is changed, but you'll get a case that has a USB-C connector on it instead of lightning, which would be nice.
01:44:20 ◼ ► There are vague rumors about iPad Mini 7 going to an A16 from A15 and iPad Air 6 going from M1 to M2, but those seem pretty, pretty boring.
01:44:31 ◼ ► And B, iPad, I was shocked to find out the current iPad Air uses the M1. Is the iPad Air going to go to the M2 before the Pro goes to the M3? I don't know.
01:44:40 ◼ ► But anyway, those are, you know, and then obviously question mark stuff that we haven't thought of or whatever, but we're really tailing off here.
01:44:46 ◼ ► I feel like as always, it's going to be the iPhone event with some watch stuff and then, you know, maybe talk about accessories and stuff like that.
01:44:53 ◼ ► Yeah, I wouldn't expect to hear anything about the iPads yet. I think that's a separate event. iPad and Mac some other time, you know?
01:44:59 ◼ ► Yeah, there's not even any rumors of Mac stuff. And obviously the next Mac thing we're going to see is still going to be all about M3 or whatever the first model to get that is.
01:45:09 ◼ ► Yeah, so I'm interested to see like this is the most detailed that the rumor mill has been on every single spec.
01:45:15 ◼ ► The weight in grams, the power capacity of the battery down to the milliamp hour, the dimensions down to fractions of an inch about every single thing.
01:45:24 ◼ ► So we'll see. We'll see how well they did. Even if some of these details are off, like, I mean, people have the physical phones in their hands and they show videos of them and like we know what they're going to be.
01:45:34 ◼ ► They're going to look like iPhones, but it's that time of year. So stay tuned next week.
01:45:44 ◼ ► And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm/join and we will talk to you after the iPhone event next week.
01:45:54 ◼ ► Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:46:05 ◼ ► John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:46:16 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
01:46:31 ◼ ► So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental.
01:46:51 ◼ ► Tech by Cas, so long. So Marco, I am relieved because we heard, we've gotten word that Rivian is canning their ugliest paint option.
01:47:09 ◼ ► Everyone has sent this to me. It sent it to us, sir. It's not just you sent it to us. And so I'm excited because should I be in the unfortunate scenario that, well, let me rephrase.
01:47:22 ◼ ► Should I be in the scenario that I see a Rivian on the road? I am going to be ever less likely to be in the unfortunate scenario of seeing a yellow Rivian on the road.
01:47:30 ◼ ► Does this influence the purchase you made like two years ago that still hasn't come due yet?
01:47:42 ◼ ► All right. So I am looking at a building. It is very, very dark brick or dark painted brick. It says Rivian in the upper left hand corner.
01:47:52 ◼ ► There are a couple of Teslas in front of it. There looks to be a blue Land Rover Land Cruiser.
01:47:59 ◼ ► I always get it wrong. A blue thing that Marco once owned, I'm assuming, right on the right hand edge of the frame. And a obnoxious, just truly look at me, look at me.
01:48:11 ◼ ► I have confidence problems. Look at me. Yellow Rivian SUV with actually very good looking wheels directly in the center of the frame.
01:48:22 ◼ ► Well, I got myself an SUV. It's not a car. All right. So here's what happened. I reserved a yellow Rivian. I was sitting on the reservation list for a very long time.
01:48:42 ◼ ► So I reserved a yellow one and the date kept getting pushed back as they were scaling up and everything.
01:48:48 ◼ ► A couple of weeks ago, I was given access with my reservation to the R1 shop. And what this is, is basically once your reservation gets close within, I don't know how to determine how close, but mine was about six months away.
01:49:03 ◼ ► So once your reservation gets close, they give you access to the R1 shop. And this is basically like a real time updated inventory list of extra Rivians they have that they made.
01:49:13 ◼ ► And you can go and you can search and just refresh the page a few times a day and you can see like, oh, here's one that's like either my exact configuration or it's kind of close to my exact configuration.
01:49:25 ◼ ► And why don't I just grab that one? And if you're fast enough and you see the combination you want or one close enough, you can grab it and you can basically jump the line.
01:49:34 ◼ ► And I don't know how they get there. Maybe it's like reservations that people put it in and canceled or whatever. But however it was, I got access to the Rivian shop.
01:49:43 ◼ ► And my reservation was originally scheduled for, was most recently scheduled for something like this coming January, I think, or January to April, something like that.
01:49:51 ◼ ► And Rivian announced a few days ago, or last week, whenever, that they are discontinuing yellow as a color because it was the least popular and they discontinued a couple other like, you know, low volume options as they're trying to streamline their production.
01:50:05 ◼ ► They're discontinuing it as of like next week or two weeks from now. So anything that wasn't produced by then, they were emailing everybody saying, sorry, you got to choose different options.
01:50:14 ◼ ► And that, by the way, that kind of stinks. Like if you reserve this thing a year and a half ago, you picked out exactly the thing you wanted, you're like, I'm going to get one. I pre-ordered it on day one. I'm getting a yellow one.
01:50:23 ◼ ► And then a year and a half passes and they say, yeah, I know you pre-ordered a yellow one. You're not getting a yellow one because we don't want to make yellow.
01:50:29 ◼ ► That's kind of sucky, but you know, that's the brakes of being a new car company. The other thing related to our previous discussion is they're also discontinuing the vegan leather interior.
01:50:38 ◼ ► So they're not getting rid of leather. They're getting rid of their fake leather because I guess most people are buying the real leather and not the vegan leather.
01:50:44 ◼ ► I think there were some asterisks on that actually. Their Reddit went crazy and did some research. I think the leather thing is actually just like a shift or something.
01:50:54 ◼ ► But anyway, the big thing is they're definitely discontinuing yellow and the shiny off-road wheels and a couple other things.
01:51:06 ◼ ► So it just so happened that a couple of weeks ago, a little after I had access to the R1 shop, I'd go and refresh the page every so often.
01:51:15 ◼ ► There was usually no SUVs at all and there were no yellow ones, but this one day I happened to look and there were some yellow ones and one was really close to what I wanted.
01:51:32 ◼ ► I'm going to be impatient. Why should I wait for my perfect configuration six months from now when I could be impatient now?
01:51:39 ◼ ► And I felt really bad doing it. I didn't tell anybody. I'm just like, yeah, I'm just going to do it. And I just jumped on it.
01:51:47 ◼ ► All right. Well, then that's not bad. I was mostly silently judging you for spending a huge amount of extra money.
01:51:53 ◼ ► People know when you pre-ordered it, you like locked in like a good price. And since Marco pre-ordered it, the price has gone up and up.
01:51:59 ◼ ► So if you go to a Rivian dealer now and try to buy his same car, you're going to pay a lot more than he paid.
01:52:04 ◼ ► And so I'm like, that's great. You had the pre-order. You got it. You got it. But you got the pre-order price.
01:52:16 ◼ ► And so anyway, so I jumped on it thinking I was making like, you know, a rash decision.
01:52:26 ◼ ► Initially, the news comes, they're canceling the color. I'm like, oh my God, what luck.
01:52:30 ◼ ► So we've all been sitting on this knowledge for weeks as everyone in the Internet has been telling us, you know, they canceled yellow.
01:52:36 ◼ ► You know, they canceled yellow. Not only did we know that, we also knew that Marco had gotten his yellow one before they canceled the yellow.
01:52:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I had I had placed the order with the R1 shop and therefore like confirmed, you know, they assigned me a VIN and I got to sign all the paperwork.
01:52:55 ◼ ► Online and get the insurance line up and all that other stuff. But I didn't actually have the car.
01:53:00 ◼ ► Yeah, but I felt like you'd got it in under the wire. Like I assume the car that you had selected that they said was yellow is a real car that you would eventually get.
01:53:11 ◼ ► So anyway, the process of getting a Rivian from this point, I found a little interesting.
01:53:18 ◼ ► I'll go quickly through it. Basically, you do a bunch of online forms and I was going to trade in the Land Rover Defender that I've been driving.
01:53:24 ◼ ► I mostly liked I'm going to give it a brief exit interview in a minute. Mostly like the Defender.
01:53:34 ◼ ► You got to like send in all these pictures of it and have them give you a quote and all this other stuff.
01:53:43 ◼ ► Like a lot of times the the Web UI would ask me for the same thing three different days in a row.
01:53:48 ◼ ► Like I had I must have had to send them a picture of the Land Rover's license plate, I think five different times.
01:54:13 ◼ ► That's basically like your your like agent there that's working on your case to get your car.
01:54:17 ◼ ► Any time a person was involved from the guides, the people at the pickup center, the people are great.
01:54:22 ◼ ► The systems are still very young. So if you can get a person to look at something, they they have been fantastic.
01:54:35 ◼ ► My guide was fantastic. She had to deal with a whole bunch of crap for my insurance company.
01:54:42 ◼ ► And it was remarkable, like the amount of crap she had to deal with. And she did it and it was great.
01:54:46 ◼ ► So shout outs to guide Maggie over there and shout outs to Caribbean people in general who,
01:54:51 ◼ ► everyone I talked to has been wonderful. But yeah, they're still a young brand and there's still a lot of like, you know, bumps in the road with the paperwork process.
01:55:00 ◼ ► Did you mention in one of our slacks that like part of the crap that you're dealing with is the stuff that car dealers normally deal with on your behalf, like transferring insurance and everything?
01:55:09 ◼ ► Yeah. Usually when you buy a car in New York and I think in most places in the U.S., usually you basically tell them your insurance agent's phone number and they call and they work it out.
01:55:18 ◼ ► Like they just, and you pay like a few hundred dollars to a thousand dollars usually to the dealer for like documentation fees.
01:55:26 ◼ ► And it sounds like BS, but now I know what that money's for because I had to do some of it myself because Caribbean doesn't set up to do it yet.
01:55:32 ◼ ► And it was, yeah, it's worth it to have the dealers do it. But anyway, got all the paperwork in.
01:55:39 ◼ ► I was about to pick it up and I get a message saying there was an issue with my car upon delivery to the pickup center.
01:55:47 ◼ ► So it's being delayed indefinitely. And I'm like, oh no. And you look up, I looked up on like the Reddit and it's, all the people are like, well, that happened to me and it was weeks.
01:55:55 ◼ ► It happened to me and they had to assign me a whole new car. It happened to me. And you know, it's like, and people have all these theories of what those things could be.
01:56:02 ◼ ► I was thinking like, is it just like some panel misaligned or something got scuffed or something?
01:56:08 ◼ ► I mean, Tesla also does these checks and I think also holds them back, but this is never reassuring, kind of like the having to submit the license plate thing.
01:56:14 ◼ ► Like you would hope that when a car comes off the assembly line, unless it gets into an accident and transport, that it's good.
01:56:21 ◼ ► It left the factory. It's got all the wheels on it. It has four wheels, not three, not two, not five.
01:56:26 ◼ ► Just, you know, all the mirrors are in there. Every panel is the correct color. They all line up. The doors open and close, right?
01:56:33 ◼ ► But when you're a brand new car manufacturer, you find out very quickly making cars is very difficult, especially if you want them all to be consistent and you want to be able to make them affordably and quickly.
01:56:43 ◼ ► But also with high quality. And like the other car makers spent decades figuring out how to do this.
01:56:49 ◼ ► And if you're starting from zero, it can be hard. So at the very least, the thing they can do with these fairly expensive, low volume brands like Rivian and Lucid is, OK, we know we're not that great at making cars.
01:57:02 ◼ ► Before we put a car into a customer's hands at the very, very last minute, can someone just go around the car and make sure there's not a giant gash from transport or the doors seals line up right?
01:57:11 ◼ ► You know, like and maybe Tesla does a crappier job of this because there's so many stories of people getting a Tesla, driving it home and finding pieces of their car falling off and stuff like that.
01:57:19 ◼ ► But with them not telling you what the problem is, like, did they forget a wheel or is there a tiny, tiny nick from transport on the fender?
01:57:27 ◼ ► It could be anything in between those things. And that's where you get the horror stories of they need to like replace my suspension and need to wait a month and whatever.
01:57:34 ◼ ► Or from like, oh, they just needed to buff out a scratch or something. So, yeah. Do you know at this point?
01:57:39 ◼ ► Well, I guess you have a picture of it. Do you know what the supposed problem was with your car?
01:57:43 ◼ ► I don't, because it was resolved in possibly the best way, which is a few days later, they said, we've assigned you a new car. Here's a different VIN. Update the insurance.
01:57:56 ◼ ► Right. And with the same configuration. I didn't know. So I'm like, I don't know how the logistics of that worked out.
01:58:01 ◼ ► How many of these yellow cars they have. Is there a secret cache of yellow cars with the wrong wheels?
01:58:05 ◼ ► I don't know. But anyway, they, so I was given a new pickup date, like, you know, about a week later total. And so it was, it was resolved. So great.
01:58:13 ◼ ► So I picked it up yesterday. So I just got it. And before, and first of all, by the way, the pickup process could also, it's very, it's very beta in the sense that the Brooklyn Service Center, where I picked it up, is again, staffed by very nice, very capable people.
01:58:33 ◼ ► It is in a terrible location. So it's like deep in Brooklyn, which is a very long drive from center, Central Long Island. It's deep in Brooklyn. And it's, it's in like a warehouse district. Like there's just warehouses everywhere. It's nowhere near a highway.
01:58:50 ◼ ► It like the process of getting there involved, like get off a highway and then drive four miles in just stop and go traffic lights in Brooklyn, which takes like 45 minutes. And, and you get there, there's no signage of like, where do you park? Where do you go?
01:59:08 ◼ ► And it's Brooklyn. There's not massive space everywhere. So like, there's no, like, there's not just tons of extra space. You can just park your car and like stroll on in on across the lawn. Like that doesn't exist. This is a concrete jungle in Brooklyn's warehouse district. And you, you have to like, so I, I ended up driving around the whole block looking, how do I even enter this property? Where do I park my car? The property
01:59:30 ◼ ► would have been easier if you had maybe a smaller car. The property is covered in Rivian's. So I'm like, I'm like, I don't think I'm supposed to park here. This is clearly like their inventory. Like the, like, like I ended up pulling into a gate and parking in one of their, in clearly the wrong spot. And I just, I'm like, I'm just going to walk in and ask them where I'm supposed to park. So then I, then comes the point, how do I get in the building? I'm like walking around this whole block sized building, walking around trying to figure out how the heck do I get in? Where do I, eventually I find a guy who's parking Rivian's and I ask and he tells me,
01:59:59 ◼ ► Oh, go around here. I go around to the word. He says the door's locked. Oh, this is one, this is one o'clock in the afternoon. I'm like, okay. And there's like, there's like one of those, like, you know, touchscreen buzzer things next to it. And you know, I ended up pressing like all three buttons cause they have names like, you know, front left and upper or whatever. And it's like, I don't know what I'm supposed to be. Eventually I found one that responded with a beep after a while and the door unlocked. Okay, great. Once you get in, it's perfectly fine. Again, delightful people.
02:00:28 ◼ ► Nice little waiting area. Like it was great, but this could not be in a worse location.
02:00:34 ◼ ► Did you see a giant yellow R1S sitting there? Like could you tell where your car was? I sure did. I felt like it would stand out. Yes. Cause as I was walking through the lot, I got to see what I think is every current Rivian color cause they had tons of them. So I, I spent a minute like kind of looking around evaluating. So on that, by the way, I will say before I get to the yellow, um, I'm glad I didn't go with the blue.
02:00:57 ◼ ► The blue was my, was my first, when I initially made the reservation, I initially said blue. I found the blue in person to look a little brighter than I like and also fairly flat. Most of their paints, like Tesla, most of their paints don't have those like metallic flecks of shine.
02:01:12 ◼ ► They're, they're very flat colors. Um, and I found the blue to look a little too flat for me. Um, the yellow is also flat, but I think it works because of what it is. I'll get some more of that later. Um, I was very impressed in person seeing the Canyon Red and the El Cap Granite, which is their dark gray.
02:01:32 ◼ ► Those were both metallic flaked and they're both very, very nice in person. The Canyon Red has a little hint of orange in it and that really is very nice. I think my, I think those would be probably tied for my number two choice of color.
02:01:49 ◼ ► If I had to get a different color than yellow, I think Canyon Red might be the one. Um, but the El Cap Granite, El Cap Granite, it's, it's a very nice dark gray. It goes very well with the yellow accents that all Rivians have. It is though still a gray, so it's a little bit boring, but it's a very nice boring.
02:02:05 ◼ ► But yeah, if I was going to go for interesting, I'd go Canyon Red if I didn't get yellow.
02:02:09 ◼ ► Yeah. My recollection from when I was at the Rivian dealership or whatever you call it, service center here was, yeah, the, the Granite and the Canyon Red were both very, very good. Also, I should concede, I've been staring at the stupid yellow for the last 20 minutes that you've been talking.
02:02:25 ◼ ► I still think yellow cars are an abomination, but it doesn't look that bad in the shot. If you're going to go yellow, which I still think is a big f*cking mistake, if you're going to do it, this ain't so bad.
02:02:41 ◼ ► I don't know. I've seen a bunch of these colors in real life, including the yellow. I recently did see an R1S in yellow and the yellow continues to be baffling to me in person and Marco can talk about that more in a bit. But the one in my neighborhood, the one in my neighborhood is white.
02:02:54 ◼ ► And I have to say, I really like that color on this car. Like, I think it just works for the sort of boxy, stormtrooper-y nature of this. The black and white, especially with the stupid black wheels that I hate. The black and white, white really works.
02:03:08 ◼ ► The yellow is also a really good color, but I'm just so confused by the color. In the picture you have here...
02:03:18 ◼ ► Alright, so first, let me go back and give a quick exit interview to my Land Rover Defender. Overall, the Defender is a very nice vehicle. I've driven it now for a little over a year. It is very easy to drive and a very comfortable ride.
02:03:35 ◼ ► For an off-road, when you compare it to the Wrangler, the 4Runner, the FJ Cruiser, all these other off-roaders that I have experience with, as an off-roader it is extremely comfortable. Very, very nice as an off-roader.
02:03:50 ◼ ► It's even comfortable enough for long road trips. The suspension is really soft, the steering is super light. It's very smooth and easy to operate. Very nice.
02:03:59 ◼ ► I really enjoyed the storage and the various utility affordances in the cabin. It has a lot of places you can grab, it has a lot of compartments, places to store stuff. There's USB ports everywhere.
02:04:13 ◼ ► And even the cup holders, everything's rubberized so nothing scoots around when you're going on bumpy stuff. It's a very well designed car for utility.
02:04:32 ◼ ► I knew it was a song, I couldn't tell you it was Beyonce. Anyway, so Defender, it was a great off-roader. Carplay has proven to be nice, but with asterisks.
02:04:45 ◼ ► As discussed previously, I didn't like the lag with the wireless carplay, but the wired is inconvenient and dependent on a wire that would occasionally flake out, so that was not fun.
02:04:58 ◼ ► Land Rover also being pure gas and being a giant SUV gets comically bad gas mileage, which I never liked.
02:05:04 ◼ ► Little things, the automatic wipers were not good. To date, I have yet to be in a vehicle where I like the automatic wipers. I'm always left wishing for cars that only have automatic settings.
02:05:18 ◼ ► I'm always left wishing for just give me an old intermittent setting that I can adjust the little intermittent interval on because it's always better.
02:05:24 ◼ ► Land Rover also had a surprisingly bad climate control system for a vehicle of its stature. The fan speed would never be right, it was clunky to control, didn't like that.
02:05:34 ◼ ► That's part of their brand tradition, right? Unreliable Electronics was their brand signature, and when they said, "Well, we can't have the thing shorting out all the time, but can we just make the climate control crappy?"
02:05:47 ◼ ► It was reliably mediocre. What was unreliable was the sunroof, which I had to get repaired, and I was afraid to use it after that.
02:05:54 ◼ ► And the sound system was shockingly bad. For a vehicle of that stature and other quality areas, the sound system sounded horrendous. I don't know why.
02:06:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I guess. Anyway, that kind of hurt in other areas too. When I got it, I got it during the time when it was very hard to get cars. I had gotten the driving permit for the sand, so I wanted to get this vehicle as discussed previously.
02:06:21 ◼ ► There was one used one that they had that I could get for any reasonable amount of time at any reasonable cost. So I got it, but it didn't have some of the upscale features that the higher end models would.
02:06:32 ◼ ► It didn't have the fancy seats. I really missed seat position memory. I really missed that. Anytime I put it through a car wash or get it serviced or have anybody else like my wife drive it, I would lose my seat position.
02:06:50 ◼ ► I really missed that. It didn't have radar cruise and I really missed that as well. Adaptive cruise when I was on long highway drives. Of course it didn't have any kind of auto steer thing on the highway either. I missed that as well.
02:07:02 ◼ ► Coming from Tesla for a few years before that, I really missed being able to turn on the climate remotely. Now, Land Rover has this, but only if the car has been started within the last few days.
02:07:14 ◼ ► So my typical use of like I'm going off on the ferry, going back to my car that I haven't touched for two weeks and I want it to not be a thousand degrees in the car, that didn't work.
02:07:24 ◼ ► And then also it didn't have anything like dog mode. This is a wonderful feature that Tesla had.
02:07:32 ◼ ► If you have a pet in the car and you're like going into go get lunch at a rest stop for 20 minutes, you could leave the climate control running with just tapping like two buttons on the screen.
02:07:44 ◼ ► So it didn't involve the app. So you didn't need to like be in an area with cell coverage that the car would pick up the app signals from. You could just tap the screen and get out and walk away.
02:07:53 ◼ ► And then it would keep the AC on or the heat on and it would show in big print on the screen like dog mode with a happy wagon dog. You know, it's 75 degrees in here.
02:08:02 ◼ ► It would show you right there so other people walking by wouldn't think you were killing your dog and break your windows.
02:08:08 ◼ ► So it's a great feature. Land Rover didn't have that. They only had their very limited remote climate system that only worked for 30 minutes.
02:08:15 ◼ ► And it was only if you only through the app and only if you started the car recently. I very much missed that because we take road trips all the time as a family and not having dog mode.
02:08:27 ◼ ► I I really dramatically missed that. And as far as I know, the only Eevees that seem to offer this, I did a quick bit of research.
02:08:36 ◼ ► I think the only Eevees that offer anything like dog mode are Tesla and Rivian. I don't think anyone else does.
02:08:42 ◼ ► If any other Eevees do, I'd love to know. It didn't seem like the BMW iX or any other BMW or the Polestar. I looked at a whole bunch looking to see if anybody had this feature and I don't think they did.
02:08:57 ◼ ► Anyway, that was the Defender. It was a great car with some limitations and annoyances, but otherwise a great car. I was very happy with it.
02:09:05 ◼ ► If they made a pure electric Defender, I would probably have gotten that with some of the advanced options like the nice seats and everything. But that doesn't exist yet as far as I know.
02:09:16 ◼ ► So anyway, the Rivian. Let's talk about the yellow. I got news for you. It is a really good yellow.
02:09:26 ◼ ► A man that spends obscene amounts of money on a car painted yellow likes the yellow. You don't say.
02:09:32 ◼ ► Well, it was a risk because I saw one on the highway coming to the direction for two seconds a couple of weeks ago and that was the only one I'd ever seen in person.
02:09:41 ◼ ► So it's a risk for sure because yellow can go wrong. The online configurator makes it look almost like a champagne, like a light brown. I wouldn't have been so into that.
02:09:54 ◼ ► But yellow can be very tricky. Now, Jon, you've expressed a desire to know what this yellow is. So earlier today I took some photos.
02:10:05 ◼ ► Now, this was during sundown, basically, so it's not the best light. But I took some photos of some reference objects so that you can compare.
02:10:27 ◼ ► You parked next to a bus! Oh my god, it's amazing. This god-awful yellow... Well, it's not that... This god-awful color for a car, this might have been worth it just for this moment right now.
02:10:40 ◼ ► That school bus one, that's what I'm saying. Because I saw it cut, it was going in the opposite direction. I saw it go by and this school bus picture, that's what it looked like.
02:10:48 ◼ ► But it was 1pm. It was a sunny day, sun overhead, no clouds, 1pm, and it looked like that, kind of like goldy. And this really highlights how it is not school bus orange or yellow.
02:10:59 ◼ ► I was hoping that my gold hypercritical shirt would have arrived in time for this picture, but sadly it has not yet arrived.
02:11:05 ◼ ► It's definitely not that color. The playdate is a big help here too. So here's the thing. This color gold looks different in different light. Like it really does. It's not two different colors.
02:11:19 ◼ ► Because this is the same car we're seeing in all these pictures. Did you take this with your iPhone? Yes. Because now it's auto white balancing and doing all sorts of weird craft.
02:11:26 ◼ ► Well but you have reference objects now. I understand. So the reference objects in this picture are a yellow home pod, the banana yellow ATP shirt that we most recently sold, the current yellow iPhone 14, a yellow caution tape strip that I cut from a construction site, the yellow box of the Purdey brand of paint brush, they're yellow, the Amazon Basics AA batteries, because they're kind of an orangey yellow.
02:11:55 ◼ ► The Amazon Basics batteries. A playdate by Panic. And finally a Dewalt battery to show Dewalt yellow. Because I feel like these are like. Many people in our audience will probably have either a Dewalt battery or caution tape or yellow Amazon Basics batteries or a playdate.
02:12:15 ◼ ► Between all these things you might have one of these in your house. So I would say, just for reference, it's a little harder to see in the picture, but in person, the playdate is too yellow compared to the car. Yeah it's brighter.
02:12:29 ◼ ► The banana shirt and the iPhone are nowhere close. The yellow home pod and actually the Amazon Basics batteries look the closest in person. Really? In the pictures the Amazon Basics batteries look way more orange than the yellow car.
02:12:45 ◼ ► So in person, they're slightly. So what I like about this yellow is that it has a healthy amount of orange mixed in. And I think you need that to make a good yellow for a car. And I think so far they seem to have struck a very good balance of getting like, it doesn't look orange, it looks like a yellow car, but it has a little bit of orange mixed in and it's really nice.
02:13:08 ◼ ► So far, I like the color a lot. I was afraid it would be too tame and it's not. But it also doesn't look outrageously weird or cheap or anything like that. It's a very nice yellow.
02:13:20 ◼ ► These look like two different cars. That picture where you're at the Rivian dealer and the school bus picture, those look like two different cars. This is the problem with this yellow. It is a chameleon.
02:13:29 ◼ ► Because next to the Rivian thing, they're like, "There, that's a great yellow. I love that color." And then I look next to the school bus and I say, "No, no, what happened?" It's the same car.
02:13:39 ◼ ► Yeah, it's crazy. It's very difficult to accurately photograph. But in person, it looks very good. That's all I can tell you.
02:13:48 ◼ ► Again, I have such a horrible aversion to yellow automobiles. If you're going to do it, which you shouldn't, but if you're going to do it, I think this works well.
02:14:03 ◼ ► Similarly, I don't care for black wheels. I think it was the year after my car, the wheels that I eventually got, we had this whole conversation like a year ago now,
02:14:13 ◼ ► that I replaced the Englishtown wheels on my car that I hated and got Pretoria's, which are the ones that I preferred. The year after I bought my car, you could get a blacked-out version of the Pretoria's, and I didn't like that either.
02:14:25 ◼ ► Even though the Pretoria's are some of my favorite wheels on any car I've ever seen, I hated the blacked-out version. In this car, the combination of the yellow calipers, the blacked-out wheels, the pretty well-tinted rear windows on the car,
02:14:40 ◼ ► and this chameleon yellow, as a yellow automobile goes, this is one of the better that I've seen based on this handful of pictures. A yellow is still a terrible choice for an automobile, but if you're going to commit, this ain't bad.
02:14:54 ◼ ► So, some first impressions after a day and a half of driving, including driving on the beach. I drove it back to the beach tonight.
02:15:02 ◼ ► So, I have one sand trip in it so far. So, I think it's faster than my Tesla. I always got the middle configuration for Tesla, because I wanted the maximum range. I never had the super performance ones, but I think it's faster. It's ridiculous.
02:15:19 ◼ ► Honestly, the handling is very good. Look, it doesn't handle a low-slung sports car. It handles more like the Defender did, because it's a giant SUV. But for what it is, it handles surprisingly well. It's very, very nice.
02:15:32 ◼ ► One thing that I still have to get used to, it's kind of jumpy. The way it responds to throttle, it has so much power available to it that you have to be very gentle with your foot. And if you let up with your foot very slightly, I've been used to driving gas for all this time, and with a gas engine, especially with a Land Rover, you let up and it eventually considers coming to a stop.
02:15:57 ◼ ► But it's a very smooth in and out of power. With this, it's very jumpy. It responds a little too quickly to taking your foot off the pedal.
02:16:10 ◼ ► You can, but in regular driving mode, you only have standard or high. And I try both, and it's not that different, honestly. But it's a little aggressive. I would like to see that be a little bit smoother, or at least have a setting to make it a little bit smoother.
02:16:24 ◼ ► Did you change the drive mode? You don't really need different throttle curves for sport mode and whatever.
02:16:29 ◼ ► This was in the all-purpose mode. I didn't try sport, because I figured that would make the problem worse.
02:16:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I think it will make it worse, but there might be a comfort mode or something. I don't know what the drive modes are.
02:16:39 ◼ ► I didn't see anything like that, but I'll play with it more as I have it. And maybe I just have to get used to it.
02:16:44 ◼ ► You're used to driving a giant gas vehicle that does not respond instantly to throttle input, so maybe you just have to get used to EVs again.
02:16:51 ◼ ► The Defender, not only does it not respond instantly, it has massive turbo lag. So the Defender, if you want to go fast, you step on it, and then it submits a request to Britain, and then it comes back eventually.
02:17:07 ◼ ► The regen braking is, even on the regular standard mode, is substantially more aggressive than it is on Tesla, and it is very much encouraging you to do one-pedal driving.
02:17:21 ◼ ► And it's actually fairly nice as you get used to it. Again, it's going to take me a while to be able to operate this car smoothly, but it is nice to have that much regen available so quickly in terms of not having to use the brakes almost ever.
02:17:36 ◼ ► And one really nice feature, I don't know how common this is on EVs, I don't think Tesla did this at least, not only will it regen brake all the way to a stop, but if you regen brake all the way to a stop, it engages the hill hold, so it won't roll back.
02:17:53 ◼ ► Which is really nice! It's just a really nice EV luxury feature, because many cars have hill hold now. But Tesla doesn't do that? Does it literally roll backwards like a manual car?
02:18:07 ◼ ► If you have not touched the brake, I believe so. I'm saying if you let the regen brake come to a stop without ever touching the physical brake, the Rivian will engage the hill hold, which is really nice.
02:18:18 ◼ ► Anyway, visibility is better than the Land Rover by a lot. They have more glass, it's easier to see. Overall, much better visibility than the Land Rover and way better than the FJ Cruiser.
02:18:28 ◼ ► Great cameras, great top down, like bird's eye kind of view, very big, high resolution images, they're fantastic.
02:18:36 ◼ ► I finally have ventilated seats, which I haven't had in a very long time. I think the only car I ever had with the head was the M5. They don't have a butt massager on this one, but anyway, finally air conditioned seats, that's fantastic.
02:18:51 ◼ ► The capacity that you have for storage in this thing is ridiculous. The frunk alone, just the frunk, I can fit all of my towing gear, tow ropes, shackles, massive quantities of giant huge towing stuff, safety gear, battery gear, all of that, the charger, and four MaxTrax traction boards.
02:19:20 ◼ ► All fit in the frunk. That's amazing. And then of course the back is even bigger. It's a similar overall dimensions, like in terms of footprint on the road as the Land Rover, but it doesn't have a spare tire.
02:19:35 ◼ ► So the car is just longer to use that space. So you have not only a third row of seats, which will be occasionally useful to us, but when those seats are folded down, you just have massive storage capacity. And then there's no spare tire by default, so you can lift up the bottom of the trunk floor and go down under where the spare tire would go and just use that as even more storage.
02:19:59 ◼ ► This thing is a massive storage boat. You can fit so much stuff in this vehicle. The key situation is really nice. Land Rover, like most modern cars, has a giant key fob that you must carry with you. This huge brick that takes up your entire pocket and sticks out.
02:20:20 ◼ ► The Rivian, it has a key fob. It looks kind of like a padlock almost. It's like a carabiner with buttons on the bottom. Anyway, so it has a key fob. It comes with one. It also comes with two RFID kind of cards. So I can just keep that in my wallet and I'm set.
02:20:36 ◼ ► And also, you can pair up to four phones to be phone keys for it. So far in my experience, they all work really well. They work from surprisingly long distances away. It seems awesome so far.
02:20:50 ◼ ► And like all good EVs, you don't have to start it or unlock it or lock it. You walk up to it and it unlocks. You get in and start hitting things and it turns on and goes.
02:21:01 ◼ ► When you're done, you simply put it in park and open the door and leave and it will turn itself off and lock itself. Love it. It's so nice. I miss these features so much.
02:21:11 ◼ ► The sound system is really good. It's way better than the Land Rover. Even noticeably better than the last Tesla I had. Very, very good sound system. Clear, loud, great mid-range guitars. Of course I listen to Fish. It's really good.
02:21:28 ◼ ► It is so nice to have dog mode and seat memory back. I have both of those things now and I've only had the car for like two seconds. Love it. Radar cruise and auto steer.
02:21:42 ◼ ► So it has radar cruise. It seems wonderful so far. It seems really nice. Very smooth. Auto steer is not as good as Tesla's. When I say auto steer, I'm talking about what Tesla calls autopilot but what used to be the only kind of autopilot.
02:21:58 ◼ ► So nothing that would be considered real self-driving but it's basically a combination of radar cruise control and keeping you in the center of the lane on a highway.
02:22:07 ◼ ► So it will steer for you while keeping you in the center of a lane. If anything spooks it, it will beep like crazy and disengage so you have to be paying attention.
02:22:16 ◼ ► But it seems relatively comparable to Tesla's so far but it disengages more aggressively. So if for instance there's a merge coming up for the lanes that you're in that it doesn't really know what to do, it will alert you, merge coming up ahead and then it will beep and turn off.
02:22:35 ◼ ► Or if it has any trouble whatsoever seeing the lines on the road to mark where the lanes are, it will also like freak out and turn off.
02:22:45 ◼ ► So it's useless in Massachusetts then because there are no lines that are on our roads that are not just barely visible about to disappear completely.
02:22:53 ◼ ► Yeah. So I'm guessing the auto steer is going to be overall, I'm going to kind of miss Tesla's but it's way better than not having it at all because of my situation with the Land Rover.
02:23:05 ◼ ► The only thing, one little tweak I would love to make for that is when you've hit the brake or canceled it temporarily, when you go to resume the cruise control, what most cars will do is go back to the last set speed that you had used.
02:23:21 ◼ ► What Rivian does is it always resumes at the current speed. So if you disengage it to like slow down a bunch, then you reengage it, it's going to reengage it like 15 miles an hour and then you have to then like raise it all the way back up to 65.
02:23:35 ◼ ► So it's kind of clunky. But that's a software thing that I hope they can tweak over time.
02:23:39 ◼ ► Alright, now the short hit list. There is nowhere to put sunglasses. What is wrong with these EV companies? Tesla and Rivian both have nowhere to put sunglasses. What is the most common accessory people use while driving a car?
02:23:56 ◼ ► Well, it's probably a phone. We'll get to that in a second. Secondly, it's probably sunglasses. Like, oh my God. Why? There's nowhere to put, why?
02:24:04 ◼ ► On the Model X, they don't have a place because it's just one giant sweep of glass from the front to the back. But yeah, I don't know what the excuse is for the Rivian. You've got a roof and a headliner, you can put a little sunglass thing right there.
02:24:14 ◼ ► And like, you know, it's shallow. Like, they probably don't have the whole depth to have a recessed compartment. But give me like a clip or something. Like, geez. Anyway, nowhere to put sunglasses. Why?
02:24:25 ◼ ► One of the interesting design decisions of the Rivian is, and I presume this is to maximize frunk space, there's no glove box. Which is overall fine. Like, I can put like, you know, the car registration and the insurance card and like the flashlight, the flashlight's in the door.
02:24:41 ◼ ► So, you know, I can put like, you know, the paperwork for the car and stuff somewhere else. But it's kind of odd. I wish they had a glove box because that's just kind of a weird thing.
02:24:56 ◼ ► It's flat. It's like, surely there's room for a shallow glove box of some kind and they just don't give it to you. And it's not because it would intrude into frunk space. If you look at how they take apart this dashboard, there's stuff back there, but not so much that it's infeasible that they could have given you a small glove box without intruding into the frunk space.
02:25:15 ◼ ► And if they upgrade that, it kind of, you know, it smells a little bit like, you know, preemptive decontenting. Well, we don't have to give them a glove box. There's so much storage elsewhere. They don't want a glove box, but people get into the habit of expecting there to be a little door there in front of the passenger.
02:25:29 ◼ ► Yeah. And just in general, there is not enough console storage in this car. Like there's, again, there's a huge amount of space in the car, which is overall a good thing. This can fit tons of luggage and groceries and crap like that. But there is not nearly enough, like small compartment storage for the driver and passenger on the front. Like you need more there.
02:25:48 ◼ ► There's not even, nowhere on the dash is there even a USB or 12 volt plug. As far as I can tell, the only power available in the front, besides the Qi charger that kind of sucks and there's third party things that I'm going to try out to make that better.
02:26:04 ◼ ► The only power available in the front at all seems to be the two USB-C ports that are in the armrest compartment, which is itself kind of the only enclosed storage in the front of the vehicle. Besides this little tiny thing behind your knees on the seat that can hold basically nothing.
02:26:20 ◼ ► So, this again, like they kind of, they kind of learned the wrong lesson from early Tesla, where like the first Model S had this giant open dashboard with no storage. And people had to kind of hack various things in. People are doing the same thing with Rivian for the same reason. There's not enough storage.
02:26:37 ◼ ► I understand that it looks cool and minimal and modern, but it's a lot less useful. So I hope they change that in future versions. And in the meantime, I'm buying all sorts of weird accessories from all sorts of weird car hackers and Amazon makers and 3D printed dividers and stuff like that to try to solve that and report back in the future.
02:26:56 ◼ ► I really want CarPlay. I do miss it. It is not perfect, but I do miss it. It has built in Alexa, which this was new to me in a car context.
02:27:14 ◼ ► Right. And they have all the Amazon vans and stuff. So yeah, it can do a lot, but it's a little creepy. I don't love that. And also, most cars that don't have CarPlay. If your phone is connected via Bluetooth, usually there's like a button on the steering wheel or something that's a voice control button.
02:27:33 ◼ ► And maybe it triggers the car's built in crappy one. But usually if you hold it down, it'll trigger Siri via Bluetooth. Rivian has no such function. There is no current way as far as I can find with both internet research and poking around in the car.
02:27:47 ◼ ► Even if you disable Alexa completely, it will not have any way for you to engage Siri on your phone that's connected via Bluetooth. So that kind of sucks. That's again, software can get there.
02:27:58 ◼ ► I really want CarPlay. And if not, I really at least want to be able to trigger Siri easily via Bluetooth. The Bluetooth stack seems to be fairly decent as Bluetooth stacks go. It has moderate latency.
02:28:09 ◼ ► It shows a track list somehow when playing from the music app. So I got to figure out how to hack that with Overcast. But otherwise, you know, there's there's a nitpick list here. I hope they get to some of these things.
02:28:21 ◼ ► I think, you know, based on, you know, what the various interviews of the CEO and stuff like that. I don't know how likely CarPlay is, but I think they would do it before Tesla would. So I really, really want CarPlay. And we'll see what happens there.
02:28:36 ◼ ► And I see no reason not to offer it. I tried their built-in nav. It's fine. It's not as good as CarPlay. I tried their built-in Bluetooth. It's fine. It's not as good as CarPlay. Just add CarPlay for God's sake. And now that I went from CarPlay to not having CarPlay, it feels like a downgrade in those areas.
02:28:57 ◼ ► And like how many Rivian buyers will be coming from a car that has CarPlay? Not 100%, but not zero. And that number is probably going up over time. So I would strongly caution them if they want people to be happy with their Rivian purchases.
02:29:12 ◼ ► And if they want repeat customers, and if they want people to even consider them more than, you know, they might otherwise, you got to have CarPlay. It's table stakes. You got to add it.
02:29:21 ◼ ► And remember, you're coming from a car with probably crappy, feeble, you know, CPU/GPU power powering the CarPlay display into the Rivian, which presumably has way more power in terms of like, you know, computing capacity to power all those big screens for its own proprietary OS. CarPlay will surely be faster, better in Rivian if they did support it on that hardware.
02:29:44 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. So anyway, all right. Now the only other thing I'll talk about tonight is beach driving. Got to the checkpoint. It was time to air down my tires. Overall, it went well. The only thing I missed, so the Rivian hopefully does have a tire pressure display mode for the left part of your gauge cluster area.
02:30:04 ◼ ► So you can just like the Land Rover, you can put that up there and leave it there, which is nice. One thing I really miss, though, is that on the Defender, the tire pressure monitor seemed to be real time.
02:30:18 ◼ ► So as I'm airing down the tires, I could check my work with what is the car thing the pressure is. I've never seen another vehicle that offered that. I don't know what it I don't know enough about the components to know what that is.
02:30:29 ◼ ► But it was it was real time tire pressure update. So literally, as the car is parked, as I'm changing the air pressure, it would display it on the dash. The Rivian does not do that. The Rivian is more like the Tesla and other cars that I've driven where you have to like drive for a while before it will update those numbers.
02:30:45 ◼ ► That's because the cheaper ones do like what my Honda does, which is they're using rotation of the wheel to tell you the pressure. Basically, I have my house squished it, right? And so you have to rotate the wheel to get that. It sounds like the Land Rover had actual pressure sensors.
02:30:57 ◼ ► It must have. Yeah, because and that was a very nice feature for an off roader where you are you are frequently changing the tire pressure intentionally, like as opposed to like, you know, with with, you know, most cars you you you pump it up a couple times a year at the gas station, then you just move on.
02:31:12 ◼ ► But with an off roader, you really want that sometimes. And anyway, so it's not it's not a huge problem in the sense that, you know, I still I use I use my rapid tire deflator, the the valve pulling type.
02:31:23 ◼ ► And it's, you know, amazing. And, you know, I was able to deflate all four tires really quickly. But I the result could have been more precise if I had that. So anyway, I would like to see that otherwise fine.
02:31:36 ◼ ► Going off road, I put it into the sand mode, it was totally easy and fine to to change modes. It didn't give me any hard time about it. It was very, very nice.
02:31:46 ◼ ► And then I get on the beach. And what I had done is I had raised it to the highest ground clearance it offers, which is 15 inches of ground clearance, which is ridiculous for a vehicle this size. Like that's pretty much unheard of for a medium sized SUV.
02:32:04 ◼ ► But, you know, when you're when you're driving on loose sand, which this is, you don't want to feel like you're getting stuck. And what getting stuck feels like is slowing down and not being able to push faster.
02:32:16 ◼ ► That's that's what getting stuck feels like. I was limited in that high mode to 19 miles an hour.
02:32:26 ◼ ► And this usually on this stretch of beach, I usually go about 25. So it felt a little so and it turns out this is actually like a software limit. Like when you are at the highest ground clearance setting of 15 inches, it limits you to 19 miles an hour.
02:32:39 ◼ ► And it told me that on the screen, which is tiny prints, which took me a lot to figure out and notice it. But it felt like I was getting stuck. I couldn't go faster.
02:32:46 ◼ ► So it was it was a little bit a little bit of a bad feel. But I'm like, all right, then I lowered it down to standard height, which is still 11 and a half inches, which is I believe the highest setting of the Defender or in the ballpark of it.
02:33:00 ◼ ► So I just drove the rest of the way at a standard 11 and a half inches and went 25 miles an hour ish like I always do. And it was amazing. Like the Land Rover for all of its, you know, wonderfulness off road, that car did not have a ton of power.
02:33:19 ◼ ► And the aforementioned turbo lag made it harder to use. And that was the base engine, the four cylinder turbo. The Rivian, the the thing I was able to do like, you know, when you're when you're driving in a deep sand track, like, you know, other trucks are out on the beach, and they carve out this, you know, the two big tire tracks.
02:33:37 ◼ ► And sometimes people get weird and they they like turn in a weird way with the track or the track kind of gets sloppy as people cross over. And sometimes you have to change which track you're in, there'll be a bunch running in parallel from different vehicles that are driven there.
02:33:49 ◼ ► And you might want to like jump over the next one. The the traction and power required to do this is very difficult because you're basically asking your car you're you're currently driving on packed sand now turn into basically a huge thick berm of extremely loose sand and somehow jump out of the track you're in into the next one.
02:34:08 ◼ ► It's very you basically with linear I had to like, wait for a good moment and then basically floor it and run like, you know, get myself like on top of the track and then you know, kind of settle into the one next to it.
02:34:19 ◼ ► The Rivian has so much power instantly from zero, that I was basically just able to drive right over it like it was nothing like it just just Oh, I'm just, I was able to go basically wherever I wanted to go on the beach.
02:34:33 ◼ ► It was incredible. The the amount of power and traction that I had. And I just say I went down to about 25 psi on the tires. I wasn't I'm not sure yet like how low I can go without running weird risks with this vehicle because it's a pretty heavy vehicle.
02:34:55 ◼ ► challenging parts of the of the route before in the Defender and again, the Defender was a great off-roader, but things that were challenging the Defender were a lot less challenging in the Rivian.
02:35:05 ◼ ► It was just able to go once I once I you know, figured out that speed limit and to see and you know went to the different ground clearance.
02:35:13 ◼ ► It was incredible. So we'll see how it goes, you know throughout this this year of driving but so far I am extremely impressed with its ability as an off-roader and see how it goes.
02:35:28 ◼ ► Yeah, like there's no differentials. There's no locking. There's no modes of like, you know, complete independent control of power going to all four wheels.
02:35:36 ◼ ► They actually rolled out a new powertrain in the Rivians now, which is just two motors. So one for the front wheels one for the back wheels, which is less expensive and gets more range and so on and so forth.
02:35:45 ◼ ► But yeah for the ultimate and off-road having independent control of all four wheels is great.
02:35:49 ◼ ► And I think that 19 mile an hour mode think that's like when you're climbing over boulders at a 45 degree angle.
02:35:54 ◼ ► It's not when you're going on flat sand. I feel like the 11 inch ground clearance from your Land Rover is adequate.
02:36:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, yeah, like I would love to do 15 inch, you know and be able to go maybe 25 or 30 at max but you know, whatever and you know why they're stopping you from doing that.
02:36:13 ◼ ► Yeah, but do you think an extra three inches? I figured it's more about like efficiency.
02:36:17 ◼ ► It's five inches or four inches four inches. Yeah. No, these things want to roll don't roll rolling is bad.
02:36:23 ◼ ► I would also I would assume like because the weight is also low in an EV like it's probably a much lower risk. Exactly. I agree but it's also a very big and tall car that has 15 inches of ground clearance.
02:36:35 ◼ ► Don't listen to John. John doesn't believe in anything that has more than six centimeters of ground clearance.
02:36:44 ◼ ► John, when's the last time you spent more than 10 minutes driving something that was not a sedan?
02:36:49 ◼ ► You know rental cars you ever try to get a rental car that actually is a sedan? Actually, yeah, that's very difficult.
02:36:55 ◼ ► It's very difficult. Yeah. But anyway, you know that I agree that the battery is really should be keeping this thing for like basically ever rolling.
02:37:03 ◼ ► But I mean that limit is there for a reason. So well, frankly, I mean it has enough power, you know, if you want it to roll you probably could.
02:37:08 ◼ ► Oh, you absolutely can. But but I wonder if 19 miles an hour is conservative because I feel like okay, let me go 30. I still won't roll right?
02:37:18 ◼ ► Yeah. But anyway, this this thing so far it's amazing, you know, and again, there are there are things that I would tweak about it.