00:00:00 ◼ ► Jon is still coughing, that's remarkable, maybe. I mean, it's not a particularly good start to a show, but Jon is indeed still coughing.
00:00:08 ◼ ► You know what, it's September, which means it's Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which means we gotta talk about St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
00:00:17 ◼ ► And we don't just have to talk about it, we want to talk about it, because hey, here's the thing. For the fifth year in a row, Relay is coming together with ATP, although I mean, there's perhaps a distinction without a difference, is that the term or phrase I'm looking for?
00:00:29 ◼ ► Anyway, we're all coming together to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Since 2019, the community has raised over $2.2 million and actually, oh, breaking news, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, oh, it's actually over $3 million, which is incredible.
00:00:43 ◼ ► $3 million in the last five years, that's so incredibly cool, and that's thanks in no small part to all of you.
00:00:49 ◼ ► So hey, here's the thing, what's St. Jude Children's Research Hospital? Well, guess what? They are a hospital that does research, but they also treat kids.
00:00:55 ◼ ► And St. Jude is really incredible because they don't charge their patient families for anything.
00:01:01 ◼ ► The idea is, if you're in a position where your child is fighting for their lives, then the last thing you need to worry about is, hey, how am I going to fund that fight?
00:01:10 ◼ ► And so it is an opportunity for all of us, all of you that are listening and the three of us, to be a hero for someone.
00:01:17 ◼ ► And you can be a hero for five bucks. You can be a hero by sending five bucks to St. Jude at stjude.org/atp.
00:01:24 ◼ ► And that can make you a hero for somebody. That five bucks can buy something for somebody, be that treatment, be that, you know, some healthy thing to eat, or whatever the case may be, it makes a difference.
00:01:35 ◼ ► So the other great thing about St. Jude is that they try to do the best they can to make as good a time as they can for their patients and their families.
00:01:45 ◼ ► So St. Jude has actually got their own school, the St. Jude Imagine Academy, which is apparently sponsored by Chili's.
00:01:51 ◼ ► It's their own school that spans from preschool through 12th grade for patients who will be at St. Jude for upwards of six weeks.
00:01:57 ◼ ► And the staff has trainers trained in English language learner instruction, visual impairment instruction services, a librarian, a STEM coordinator.
00:02:04 ◼ ► They even have reading dogs who visit to read with kids. I don't know how that works, but it sounds awesome.
00:02:10 ◼ ► I don't know. Maybe they do. St. Jude has some really advanced medical practices. You never know.
00:02:15 ◼ ► They really do. So, hey, the Academy helps patients keep up with their schoolwork back home while they're undergoing treatment,
00:02:24 ◼ ► And you know what? If a patient isn't feeling great, then maybe they don't want to do math that day or whatever the case may be.
00:02:29 ◼ ► And maybe the teachers will say, "All right, we'll skip math for today and we'll do something different."
00:02:40 ◼ ► And if you want to see what those look like, you can actually go do a web search for St. Jude High School Graduation for a video of this year's graduating class.
00:02:46 ◼ ► Super cool. So, hey, not only all that is amazing, but we are spending literally the entire episode talking about rampant consumerism.
00:02:56 ◼ ► And Marco has come up with the patented and trademarked and copyrighted Marco offset in order to help offset our rampant consumerism.
00:03:13 ◼ ► I think the only thing that possibly could be is trademarked, because I don't believe in patents and copyright doesn't apply here.
00:03:20 ◼ ► But I'm not even going to trademark it, because it is an idea that I think should spread and I don't need to have my name be the only name ever attached to it.
00:03:28 ◼ ► Because here's what you do. You take your rampant consumerism that you are about to use or have already used to place orders for all these new tech products that have just come out or are about to come out,
00:03:38 ◼ ► and you look at the base price of those products. So the new iPhone, say it's $999. Is that the best? I don't even remember.
00:03:47 ◼ ► So iPhone Pro $999. So what you do is you say, "All right, well, I got an iPhone Pro. I got the bigger storage option. I got the Apple Care. I got a case. I got to pay sales tax."
00:03:55 ◼ ► Whatever additional money you're paying at the door above that $999 base price of the actual product, say it's a couple hundred bucks,
00:04:03 ◼ ► that becomes your suggested minimum donation to St. Jude, because that's the add-on money that you are kind of just tossing on at the end there.
00:04:11 ◼ ► The theory is you can probably afford something like that if you're fortunate enough to be buying this kind of gear in the first place most of the time.
00:04:18 ◼ ► So if that's you, if you can afford it, that is my suggested minimum donation, is that incremental offset above the base price of the product or products that you are buying.
00:04:27 ◼ ► If you truly can't afford it, that's cool. We understand. Donate a dollar if you can afford that. Any amount helps.
00:04:41 ◼ ► Victor Lung has decided to one-up even packet collision with a $10,001 donation. We're playing Price is Right rules right now, which is excellent.
00:04:51 ◼ ► I put Victor's stickers in the mail just a couple hours ago. And then Guillaume Morin, I hope I got that right. I butchered it last year, so hopefully I'm making progress in a good way.
00:05:01 ◼ ► They donated $13,141.59. I have no earthly idea what the significance is of the 314159. As soon as I said it out loud, I got it.
00:05:16 ◼ ► Anyway, we got there a little later, but better late than never. So thank you so much to them. I've been in communications with Guillaume, and they said, "No, I'm good on stickers because you sent a bunch last year." So thank you.
00:05:28 ◼ ► And then just briefly, there have been two anonymous donations, each with, this is not a joke, $100,000 each.
00:05:37 ◼ ► Now, that is phenomenal. And almost no one has the kind of money to be able to donate that incredible amount, let alone two almost nobodies. But here we are.
00:05:48 ◼ ► Just to be clear, though, John pointed out that we should talk or make clear that while if they are interested in stickers, please reach out.
00:05:55 ◼ ► That does not mean that you have to donate $100,001 to get a sticker. The limbo bar, if you will, is currently at $13,141.60.
00:06:10 ◼ ► That is your bare minimum for stickers at this time. So all that being said, all of that is a tremendous amount of money.
00:06:16 ◼ ► If you can just give five bucks, give five bucks. It really does help. I know it probably doesn't sound like it when we're talking about $13,000, but truly, even five bucks helps.
00:06:23 ◼ ► Please go to stjude.org/atp, S-T-J-U-D-E.org/atp, and send a few bucks their way. They really do deserve it.
00:06:32 ◼ ► And I'm actually going to St. Jude next week in order to participate in the Podcastathon, which we will talk about on next week's show.
00:06:39 ◼ ► All right, gentlemen, the rules of engagement for this are no follow-up, no soup for you, John.
00:06:47 ◼ ► So we are going to dive straight into the September 24, 2024 Apple event. And as always, I'm going to start to go chronologically, and we will immediately get sidetracked and go somewhere different.
00:06:58 ◼ ► But we're going to start by saying there was a really good and really cute, very accessibility-heavy introduction video, which I liked. I thought it was very good.
00:07:06 ◼ ► Then Tim spoke briefly about Apple Intelligence, and then we dove right into Apple Watch Series 10 with Jeff Williams.
00:07:17 ◼ ► I told myself I was going to ask each of you for opening statements, and I didn't ask you nor myself for an opening statement.
00:07:26 ◼ ► I didn't know what to make of this event because I felt like it was twice as long as it should have been.
00:07:38 ◼ ► But immediately I thought to myself, "That doesn't make for a fun podcast to listen to."
00:07:44 ◼ ► So I'm going to do my darnedest to try to look at the positive side of things because me just sitting here moaning about not being impressed by everything is not very fun.
00:07:55 ◼ ► But I definitely felt like this one dragged on in a way that Apple events almost never do, save game demos.
00:08:09 ◼ ► If you have an opening statement, forgive me for almost railroading all of us. Do you have an opening statement, Marco?
00:08:19 ◼ ► I think overall this event focused a lot more on software capabilities than hardware capabilities.
00:08:26 ◼ ► And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make for a different tone of the event compared to I think what a lot of people expect or hope from an iPhone/Apple Watch launch event.
00:08:51 ◼ ► The annual incremental updates are not that big anymore, you know, in terms of like interesting, showy new features or hardware changes.
00:09:06 ◼ ► What we tend to see though is interesting stuff in kind of, you know, software capabilities, backing services, things like that.
00:09:14 ◼ ► And this year the story is obviously all about AI-based features and Apple intelligence in particular is what Apple is trying to push.
00:09:23 ◼ ► And it's not just that. Obviously the whole industry is pushing it right now with a lot of good reason.
00:09:31 ◼ ► But what Apple is doing here is communicating to the world, look at us, we have AI too.
00:09:47 ◼ ► Like number one, we know that it's not really out yet and even when it quote comes out in, you know, a month, it'll be in beta and limited and only a subset of the features.
00:09:59 ◼ ► Like we know all those asterisks. We also know almost that entire story because they showed it all to us in June.
00:10:13 ◼ ► It's for people who don't care about anything else all year from Apple except the iPhone and the iPhone event.
00:10:21 ◼ ► And it also serves as a, you know, even for people who pay attention to the W2C keynote, it's kind of a reminder like, hey, remember that thing we showed you three months ago?
00:10:31 ◼ ► Well, now it's about to come out. So it's kind of a way to like refresh the excitement even for people who pay attention back then.
00:10:38 ◼ ► So in a large way, this event is not incredibly targeted at people who follow Apple regularly like us.
00:10:48 ◼ ► It is really a very mainstream event and it's made to promote the new iPhone to the world.
00:10:54 ◼ ► And usually in the iPhone event, what we see largely is trying to associate the new software features of the iOS update for that year with the new hardware to get people excited about the new hardware even though many of those things are software features that aren't necessarily exclusive to the new hardware.
00:11:13 ◼ ► So overall, like I see why people were a little bit meh about the announcements of this event.
00:11:30 ◼ ► And I think that's also the order of how interesting they are in descending order though.
00:11:44 ◼ ► And then I think the AirPods were in the middle and maybe the phone is the least substantial.
00:11:49 ◼ ► But overall, the story here is really about Apple intelligence and software features and the hardware is very incremental on the phone.
00:12:09 ◼ ► I wish the phone would have been a little bit more new and I actually even considered skipping the phone this year.
00:12:23 ◼ ► I think I have a little bit different perspective on this event this year for whatever reason.
00:12:28 ◼ ► I mean, maybe I've been like this for years and I would have the same stance no matter what happened.
00:12:48 ◼ ► Neither one of those things are particularly popular or in fashion and they haven't been for a long time.
00:13:03 ◼ ► I can understand why some people won't be like, "Ho-hum," whatever, especially if you know, repetition of stuff that we already know because we write WWC and everything.
00:13:11 ◼ ► But the way I look at it is, every single year, Apple comes out with a new phone and they try to make it better than the previous phone in a bunch of interesting ways.
00:13:27 ◼ ► They try out new ideas and then if those ideas don't work, they try something else a few years later.
00:13:48 ◼ ► I think this is actually a fairly significant year for the hardware itself, just looking at it.
00:13:53 ◼ ► It has at least one very big different thing than it had before and they changed all the other stuff.
00:13:58 ◼ ► I would say as someone who is out there not being catered to by the people who are making new automobiles or new desktop Macs, right?
00:14:08 ◼ ► That you should appreciate the fact that every single year, the product you want and that we all like to use is getting better.
00:14:16 ◼ ► We are not out there going, "Gee, I wonder if they will ever update the product that I care about."
00:14:22 ◼ ► If they do make another one of those, will they make it worse or will they make it better?
00:14:25 ◼ ► Every single year, Apple A puts out an iPhone that is usually pretty good and B tries to make it better than the last one and usually succeeds in some small way.
00:14:33 ◼ ► That may seem boring until you are a devoted customer of a product that isn't getting that kind of attention.
00:14:45 ◼ ► You would kill for them to every year just make a better version of that or try a different idea.
00:14:53 ◼ ► Remember every year they would come up with a new Honda Accord and I would either like it or I would not like it.
00:14:57 ◼ ► Maybe the styling would be to my taste or not taste, but I say, "Well, if I don't like this generation, wait until next year.
00:15:07 ◼ ► All they did is like the same as the previous Accord, but they changed it a little bit.
00:15:12 ◼ ► You will come to appreciate that if someday Apple moves on from the phone and is just too busy selling, I don't know, the successor to the Vision Pro or something like that.
00:15:22 ◼ ► And I know it's kind of silly because it's like, "Well, it's the smartphone. It's the most popular consumer product in the history of the planet."
00:15:31 ◼ ► But another way to look at it, another perspective, I'm not saying people's opinions on it are wrong or their feelings on it are wrong, but another perspective is,
00:15:37 ◼ ► "Hey, if you're interested in phones at all, isn't it kind of nice that they keep making new ones that are a little bit better?"
00:15:43 ◼ ► Especially if, like me, you don't get a new one every single year so that you can just kind of wait and see.
00:15:47 ◼ ► It's like, "Oh, do you like this phone? Does it appeal to you? Do you not like the colors? Do you want to wait and see on that whole capture button thing or whatever?"
00:15:53 ◼ ► Wait until next year. You know what? Next year, there's going to be another thing that is a smartphone that's called an iPhone that caters to people who like iPhones,
00:16:01 ◼ ► and they'll try something different with that one. And then again, and then again, and then again.
00:16:08 ◼ ► And it happens that I do like phones, and I do appreciate the fact that they make a new one every year.
00:16:13 ◼ ► And by the way, this is my year to get a new phone, so I was excited by the fact that they're going to make a new phone for me to buy,
00:16:19 ◼ ► and I'm going to have a new shiny thing, and it will be an upgrade over my iPhone 14 because I've waited two years.
00:16:26 ◼ ► So, yeah, I didn't like... That's why I come away from these events. I don't expect to be blown away.
00:16:32 ◼ ► I don't expect to be like the Vision Pro intro. I just wanted to see, and honestly, listen to past episodes.
00:16:37 ◼ ► We knew almost everything that was going to be in this thing. It's not even a surprise, but it's like,
00:16:41 ◼ ► "Yeah, but now you get to actually buy them. Now you actually get to see how Apple presents them,
00:16:46 ◼ ► and you get to see all their nice product photography on their website and hear all this stuff about it or whatever."
00:16:51 ◼ ► The final thing I'll say is that I agree with the people who said this presentation was weird and that Apple decided to try something different this year,
00:16:58 ◼ ► and really, really, really shy away from talking about anything that has a number associated with it.
00:17:07 ◼ ► And we'll talk about it when we get to the individual products, but they normally are more spec-heavy than they have been.
00:17:13 ◼ ► It's not because they had anything to hide or there's anything shameful. I remember when the watch section was done,
00:17:18 ◼ ► and we were wondering, "So are there two sizes or one?" It's not a secret. They're not hiding it.
00:17:24 ◼ ► It's not like, "Oh, we don't want to be too techie. Don't tell them there are two sizes."
00:17:33 ◼ ► It was just weird for us because we're making a show where we're going to tell you about all the technical details,
00:17:40 ◼ ► But it's an interesting strategy, as Margo said, as the one event that most people in the world watch.
00:17:47 ◼ ► This is Apple's opportunity to talk to the whole world, and maybe they just thought they were boring people
00:17:54 ◼ ► Even the fact that there are two Apple Watch Series X sizes. People don't care about that.
00:17:59 ◼ ► They'll just go in the store. They'll see there's two of them. They'll pick the one they want.
00:18:01 ◼ ► It's not important enough to even include in the presentation. I thought that was weird.
00:18:05 ◼ ► I don't like it personally, but maybe it turns out to be the best way to communicate to the rest of the world. We'll see.
00:18:11 ◼ ► And so we saw that accessibility and other intro video. We saw Tim talk about Apple Intelligence,
00:18:20 ◼ ► And I am on an every-two-year plan for watches. This is my year. We talked about this in the last couple of episodes.
00:18:26 ◼ ► And going into this event, I thought I was going to get an Ultra 3, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that.
00:18:32 ◼ ► But I watched the unveiling of the brand new design of the Apple Watch Series X that looked like a thinner version of the existing Apple Watch, which is fine.
00:18:48 ◼ ► And once again, the rumor mill about watch redesigns, it once again proves to be mostly wrong.
00:18:56 ◼ ► Well, no, but they got this one right. Everyone said that the X was not going to be a big redesign and it was going to look like the existing series.
00:19:02 ◼ ► Yeah, but only recently. Like only a couple months ago, they were saying it was going to have a whole new band attachment mechanism with magnetic bands, and they're going to change the size more.
00:19:10 ◼ ► Yeah, that was more like more than six months ago. Like the rumor solidified about halfway through the year that this is what we were going to be getting.
00:19:18 ◼ ► Although the rumors also said that both sizes would be getting substantially bigger, and that's also not true.
00:19:26 ◼ ► Yeah, by like one millimeter. Like that's not, like, you know, they were saying they were going to get rid of the small size.
00:19:31 ◼ ► It turns out that the watch rumor mill is, I think, the least reliable part of the Apple product rumor mill. And that continued, the pattern continued into this year as well.
00:19:41 ◼ ► I think it was pretty good, because, you know, within several months of the event, we knew it wasn't going to be a radical redesign.
00:19:47 ◼ ► We knew they would have bigger screens that went farther to the edge, and we knew they'd be bigger than their predecessors.
00:19:54 ◼ ► So when you're waiting for the "see this, this, this, here's the all new design," like, "Wait a second, did they get it wrong?"
00:19:58 ◼ ► And then they started showing the new design, like, "No, they got it right. It just looks the same as the other ones."
00:20:02 ◼ ► So yeah, so it's basically the same as the other ones, but thinner. And as much as I'm kind of grumbling and snarking, genuinely thinner sounds great to me,
00:20:11 ◼ ► because the current Apple Watch is a little bit chunky, and I love the idea of having something thinner,
00:20:17 ◼ ► which flies directly in the face of the whole intention of getting an Apple Watch Ultra 3, because that thing is chunkier still.
00:20:25 ◼ ► But in any case, it is thinner, it is a little bit bigger, it's 30% bigger than the Series 6,
00:20:33 ◼ ► and they said at one point that you can even see an additional line of text and messages in the news, of all things,
00:20:43 ◼ ► And then they explained that it's the first ever wide-angle OLED that Apple at least is releasing,
00:20:49 ◼ ► and it's 40% brighter when viewed at an angle. And this is one of those things, to try to look on the bright side,
00:20:55 ◼ ► hey, that's a good pun, to look on the bright side, this is one of those things that I think is Apple at its finest,
00:21:00 ◼ ► where they take a thing that is not great, but not an actual paper cut, and just make it better.
00:21:07 ◼ ► Because, yeah, off-axis viewing of the current Apple Watch is not stellar, but it's never been to the point that I was like,
00:21:12 ◼ ► "Oh, this sucks." But I tell you what, I'm pretty excited that my next Apple Watch, because guess what,
00:21:18 ◼ ► it's not going to be an Ultra 3, that my next Apple Watch is going to be 40% brighter when viewed at an angle.
00:21:25 ◼ ► So, screen tech-wise, obviously we've had the rumors for years that Apple was trying to make micro LED,
00:21:31 ◼ ► micro OLED displays for the watch, which is instead of having the organic light-emitting diode type things,
00:21:38 ◼ ► it's more like individual light-up LEDs in there. Anyway, it's very difficult to do that.
00:21:45 ◼ ► We thought, "If you're going to do this weird screen technology, start with a really small screen like the watch."
00:21:49 ◼ ► Apple was developing this technology itself, with funding research into this display technology itself,
00:21:55 ◼ ► and then a year or two ago, Apple said, "Ah, never mind, we're not doing that anymore."
00:22:00 ◼ ► They came up with nothing. They stopped that pursuit, they said, "We were unsuccessful."
00:22:05 ◼ ► And then after that, all the rumors for the watch switched and said, "Well, it's not going to be a micro OLED anymore,
00:22:18 ◼ ► Apple didn't say, but the only technologies that I'm aware of that can give you a wider viewing angle on OLED
00:22:25 ◼ ► are either QD OLED, which we talked about ages ago when we were talking about televisions,
00:22:48 ◼ ► which is you put a bunch of little tiny lenses on top of your existing regular WRGB OLED,
00:22:58 ◼ ► And when I say a bunch of lenses, I mean a bunch of lenses, as in each individual pixel,
00:23:04 ◼ ► like subpixel, the red, green, and blue subpixels, have hundreds of lenses in front of them.
00:23:13 ◼ ► We don't need one lens for each pixel, one lens for each subpixel, hundreds for each subpixel.
00:23:18 ◼ ► And this technology is what LG uses on their high-end televisions and has for a couple of years now.
00:23:21 ◼ ► And guess what? It increases the viewing angle because the light that's coming out of the pixels
00:23:36 ◼ ► Anyway, as soon as someone gets one of these watches, someone who's a display technology expert
00:23:49 ◼ ► And if so, that will be super interesting because the only places I've heard of micro lens arrays
00:23:56 ◼ ► And so now they're going to be used, it's on your TV and also on the tiniest screen you own.
00:24:05 ◼ ► You just put those lenses on there and you get more brightness and better viewing angles
00:24:18 ◼ ► For what it's worth, Quinn Nelson did a really good video on his reactions to the Apple of Head
00:24:32 ◼ ► No, I don't believe it was confirmed. I think it was all suspicion, but like you were saying.
00:25:01 ◼ ► If you can't do QD OLED, just adding one more layer to your display, it makes them much better.
00:25:39 ◼ ► I was. No, this is like my wish list for this Apple Watch included, please bring back titanium.
00:25:46 ◼ ► Now, the way they did it was not quite what I was imagining, but I will happily take it.
00:25:50 ◼ ► So what they've done is they've replaced stainless steel with titanium that has a polished finish, not a brushed finish.
00:25:59 ◼ ► So the old one had a brushed finish that would form linear reflections because it was brushed in a line.
00:26:06 ◼ ► This one appears to be just polished the same way that the stainless steel has been polished.
00:26:21 ◼ ► But the main advantage of titanium, as we see on the phones, is it's much lighter than stainless steel for the same type of product.
00:26:29 ◼ ► So this gets it a lot closer to the wonderful lightness of the aluminum models than it used to be.
00:26:37 ◼ ► Again, I think I would prefer a more brushed kind of finish, but hey, I'll take this. This is good.
00:26:43 ◼ ► And this is also, they've also added a bunch of new colors as part of their new metals refresh here.
00:26:51 ◼ ► On the aluminum side, they added a jet black, which looks a lot like the iPhone 7 jet black, according to the two pictures I've seen.
00:26:58 ◼ ► Again, I haven't seen any of these in person yet, so we'll see how they look in person.
00:27:02 ◼ ► But that's interesting, to have a shiny jet black in the aluminum side for the very first time.
00:27:41 ◼ ► Now, I am very curious to see those two in person, because how different is natural from silver?
00:27:59 ◼ ► But either way, I am very happy to see titanium is back in the regular series Apple Watch.
00:28:07 ◼ ► That is great news to me. I have already ordered one in titanium, and I'm looking forward to getting it for many reasons.
00:28:20 ◼ ► That being said, there were a couple other things about the display before we leave that that I thought were interesting.
00:28:26 ◼ ► So of course, as Jon mentioned, the wide angle viewing angle, I think that actually will matter a lot on the watch.
00:28:32 ◼ ► But also, the display now updates once a second when it's in the always-on sleeping mode.
00:28:42 ◼ ► So now they've actually updated a lot of the watch faces to have a ticking seconds hand, like quartz watches do, which is interesting.
00:28:49 ◼ ► They have a couple new designs, like they showed off, but that should overall make the sleep mode a little bit nicer.
00:28:56 ◼ ► That's kind of the theme of this display update, is the wider angle makes it a little bit nicer.
00:29:16 ◼ ► Even the 10% thinner, that is something that you will see and feel more than you might think, from just hearing the number 10%.
00:29:38 ◼ ► I believe they said aluminum is about 10% weight loss, and titanium is 20% less than the steel it's replacing.
00:29:48 ◼ ► Again, last year we were all very happy about a roughly 10% weight reduction on the iPhone.
00:30:04 ◼ ► That's kind of the theme of most of the Apple Watch update, the Series 9 to 10 update at least.
00:30:10 ◼ ► Most of the update seems to be a pretty nice sized collection of reasonably minor individual things that I think will all add up to a very nice overall update to the watch.
00:30:23 ◼ ► One other thing I wanted to call out, because I don't think you have it on your list here.
00:30:38 ◼ ► I don't think this is something I will find myself doing often, but there's definitely been a handful of times that I've wanted to do this, and I've been irrationally grumbly about the fact that I couldn't.
00:30:56 ◼ ► Playing out the built-in speaker for sustained amounts of time is a substantial battery cost.
00:31:03 ◼ ► So don't buy this expecting to do this on a regular basis, but it is nice that you can do it sometimes, instead of having to pair AirPods to it just to hear if you are just trying to listen to a podcast as you walk around or something.
00:31:20 ◼ ► Also, other things about it, they have a "larger and more efficient charging coil" and it makes it the fastest charging Apple Watch ever.
00:31:31 ◼ ► Again, as people move more into using these as sleep devices that you're wearing most of the day, charging speed matters a lot.
00:31:48 ◼ ► Even the Series 10 also gets the water depth gauge and the water temperature sensor, which are previously exclusive to the Ultra, which I think means that the Ultra, I think the only significant sensor difference that the Ultra has over the Series 10 now is the Ultra has the dual frequency GPS and Series 10 appears not to.
00:32:16 ◼ ► As far as I can think, I don't think there's many other gains the Ultra has now besides the more rugged physical design.
00:32:24 ◼ ► So if you were getting the Ultra, for a lot of reasons people were getting the Ultra before, I think they can now get a Series 10 and be very happy with it.
00:32:35 ◼ ► So before the event, did you think that you were in the market for a watch at this event? Did you expect to be buying one?
00:32:47 ◼ ► If you look at the Series 9 compared to the Series 6, say, or the Series 5, it's substantially better.
00:32:56 ◼ ► If you compare, very much like I was saying with the iPhone earlier, but the iPhone being largely incremental every year, if you compare the Apple Watch this year, the Series 9 compared to the Series 8 is not a significant update at all.
00:33:11 ◼ ► If you replace my Series 9 with a Series 8, I don't know if I would ever notice the difference until I tried to double tap and realized it was even less reliable than usual.
00:33:20 ◼ ► But that would be a hard thing to notice, whereas if you replaced a Series 7 with a Series 10, you will notice the difference immediately and vice versa.
00:33:42 ◼ ► Besides, the only thing that would be bigger than this would be a major physical redesign, which I think this is a moderate physical redesign.
00:33:54 ◼ ► And in fact, they even tweaked some of the bands. Of course you have the standard new colors for the silicone bands and new colors for all the bands that have colors.
00:34:12 ◼ ► Now this is a little tricky. You could be forgiven for assuming that the new standard series Milanese loop and link bracelet are now made of titanium. They're not.
00:34:24 ◼ ► Those are still made of steel, but they are made to match the titanium colors of the Series 10 watch.
00:34:36 ◼ ► So if you get a Series 10 watch and you want the Milanese loop or the Apple link bracelet, both of which are great bands in different ways, you can get those now that match the titanium finishes of the Series 10.
00:34:51 ◼ ► And then the Ultra didn't get a new watch at all, but it did get a new black color finally, and it has a bunch of cool new bands there as well, including its own Milanese loop with that cool big latch thing.
00:35:09 ◼ ► I think that actually might be a fun band to have on the regular Series 9, but it might be a little too chunky. We'll see.
00:35:14 ◼ ► Series 10, I mean. But anyway, it looks like overall, this is actually a really big update for the Series.
00:35:22 ◼ ► The Series line of watches, it's a really big update for the bands, and it's not an update for the Ultra or the SE, but I mean, it's a pretty good update.
00:35:34 ◼ ► I will say though, not updating the Ultra only two years into it is surprising to me, because as far as I can tell, just from looking around the world and hearing people who like Apple products, it seems like it's pretty popular.
00:35:51 ◼ ► I see a lot of Ultras out in the world, a lot. On non-Nerds, and on people who I know are not doing Ultra sports or Ultra activities, they're not even living an Ultra lifestyle. They're just people who like the way it looks or who want the battery life or whatever.
00:36:07 ◼ ► The Ultra is very popular, it seems. So it is kind of odd not to update it to the new S10 SIP and some of the new features that the Series 10 has. It is kind of weird. I wonder what the story there is.
00:36:23 ◼ ► Is it kind of like the Mac Pro and Mac Studio where they're like, "Eh, we can skip a generation. We don't sell that many of these." I don't know. Again, I see a lot of them out there.
00:36:32 ◼ ► So who knows? I don't know what happened there. We'll see what kind of update cycle the Ultra gets, but it is odd to skip one so soon.
00:36:44 ◼ ► The S10 is another place where the lack of numbers kind of hurt us. They said a bunch of stuff about it, but it's like, "Okay, so is this the S9 rebadged? Is this actually a new thing?" I think the S9 had a shrink, but I think the S9 went to like 4nm. Is the S10 3nm?
00:37:03 ◼ ► They didn't really talk about it in enough of a way to say whether this is going to be significant. It's a factor because what you're really wondering is what have they done with battery life. Does the Series 10 have ultra-like battery life? I doubt it. It's so much thinner, it probably doesn't.
00:37:20 ◼ ► But then again, the Ultra doesn't have an S10 in it, so maybe the S10 sips more power. So then Apple's claims about the battery life I think were not radically different than the Series 9. So we'll see, but Apple tends not to say much, if anything, about the little processors in their watches to the point where, as we've pointed out in a couple past years, they've incremented the number without actually really changing the chip in any significant way.
00:37:46 ◼ ► And I can't really tell if that happened this year. But that's what people really care about with these things. There's the physical appearance and Marco covered all that stuff and I think it actually is better this year. I personally like shinier better than matte finish and hey, they're all shiny now. And assuming the finishes are durable, that's great.
00:38:02 ◼ ► But aside from that, they're all one millimeter bigger than they were before, they're shiny, they look nice, the screen goes closer to the edge, and also has the battery life. That's what people care about. Is it comfortable, does it look nice, is it fashionable, and does it last all day?
00:38:16 ◼ ► I'm assuming this will strike as good a balance as the 9 did, maybe even better, but the fact that Apple didn't really brag about it, like, this is gonna last you so much longer than the Series 9, I feel like they're just probably like maintaining. And it's probably good enough, but this is not, it's not like the Ultra where, I think that's one of the reasons why you see a lot of people who have the Ultra, they hear from their friends who got one.
00:38:40 ◼ ► This is so much unlike the non-Ultra watch because if I mischarging it for a day, it's not the end of the world and that is not something that happens with any of the regular watches.
00:38:50 ◼ ► So, we'll see, alright? And obviously that's a side effect of it being chunkier. Hey, there's room for a bigger battery, but they went the opposite direction, that's when they made it thinner, so we'll see how it turns out.
00:39:00 ◼ ► And for the 1mm size difference, like, I know that doesn't sound like it's a lot, but with these little watches on people's wrists, a small change can actually look significant. That's why I'm kind of happy that it's thinner because maybe that'll make up for it being bigger.
00:39:15 ◼ ► Underscore put a little diagram of trying to show the size comparisons of older Apple watches and if you take a really old, like the 38mm Series 1 watch, that entire watch will basically fit inside the screen of a 42mm Series 10.
00:39:32 ◼ ► So, we've come a long way from that very, very, very tiny Series 1 watch, just a miniscule thing with terrible battery life. Now that whole watch fits inside the screen area of these new ones.
00:39:43 ◼ ► I think they're going in the right direction. It's obvious that people kind of like phones, and like Marco said last episode, people like bigger screens on their watches, and Apple is obliging, not just with bigger screens, but also, you know, they made the watch bigger, but then within the size of watch, push that screen as far to the edges as you possibly can.
00:40:00 ◼ ► You know, when I watched this event, like I'd said earlier, I thought I was getting an Ultra 3, mostly because I'm just so sick and tired of worrying about battery life, and then somebody, and I believe it was Marco, although every time I say that it ends up being Jon, but I'm pretty sure this time it was Marco, said to me, "You know, what you could do is just get the bigger watch again, and that would probably give you more than enough buffer to stop stressing about battery life all the time."
00:40:24 ◼ ► Because I don't necessarily begrudge, I don't begrudge putting the watch on the charger every night. I would love to do sleep tracking, but I mean, whatever, it's not a big deal to me, and I'm perfectly happy charging every night.
00:40:36 ◼ ► What chaps my bottom is that with my current Series 8 two years on, I'm not making it to nighttime unless I top it up at some point during the day.
00:40:45 ◼ ► I think you just got unlucky with your battery, which happens, you know, not every battery is the same, but we get a lot of people writing in saying that they don't have this problem with their watch, and normally, you get two kinds of feedback.
00:40:54 ◼ ► One is like, "Yes, this happens to me too, my Series 8 also doesn't last through the day," but we didn't get any of those, I don't think. We got all people saying, "I've got a watch and it lasts me through the day all the time."
00:41:02 ◼ ► My wife, she's grand, she's got a Series 9, but she had a Series 8 for a year, and it was fine by the end of the year.
00:41:09 ◼ ► Maybe you just got unlucky, or maybe you have some runaway process that's killing your battery, because every once in a while, my wife will say, "Oh, today my watch battery ran down, I don't understand why."
00:41:18 ◼ ► But then it goes back to normal and I never hear about it again. So, I think you just might have lost the battery lottery on that particular watch.
00:41:24 ◼ ► It very well could be. I did look at the battery health and it was reasonable, I forget exactly what the number was, I want to say it was like upper 80%.
00:41:31 ◼ ► I will say that I typically do a 30-45 minute workout, and by that I mean the watch is in workout mode for 30-45 minutes at least every day.
00:41:40 ◼ ► And so, I don't know if that makes a difference, but nevertheless, I am hopeful that the Series 10, what with it being a two-year newer battery, a brand new battery, will make a big difference.
00:41:51 ◼ ► And so what I've done is I have pre-ordered a very unremarkable, Wi-Fi only, Series 10 big-sized Apple Watch for myself, and basically the same thing for Erin except small size, because that's what she prefers.
00:42:06 ◼ ► And I'm hopeful that that will be at least good enough for a year, preferably for two years, because I generally, I don't think we've ever gone less than two years on an Apple Watch upgrade, but maybe I'm wrong.
00:42:17 ◼ ► And so that's what I've ordered, and I really set out to order an Ultra 3, but there wasn't one, and then Marco was in the back of my head, you know, just saying, "The big one will be enough, the big one will be enough, the big one will be enough."
00:42:29 ◼ ► And I think Marco, I hope, and I think you're probably going to be right, that I think that will be the difference I need.
00:42:33 ◼ ► Yeah, no, look, I'm not going to toot my own horn unnecessarily, no, I'm definitely right about this. The big, regular Series Watch is the watch that I think is right for you. Like, for reference, my Series 9, one-year-old, heavy use, wear it almost every day.
00:42:48 ◼ ► I worked out today for a little over an hour in workout mode. It is now almost 9 p.m., and it's still a 65% battery.
00:43:00 ◼ ► And I use Always On, like, you know, I'm using it all day, and I don't charge it at all during the day. So, yeah, I mean, there's, like, the battery life on the big one is fine.
00:43:08 ◼ ► I, you know, for whatever it's worth, I did wear the smaller one for a few years there in the middle, and I always thought that was decent battery life, but it wasn't amazing, especially after the watch was more than a couple years old.
00:43:20 ◼ ► You know, you would start to notice it would have trouble getting through the day if you were doing workouts. That's not the case with the big one.
00:43:26 ◼ ► Now, and there's different workout modes, too. Like, if you are, say, you know, running outside, so it's using the GPS, and if you're especially playing music while running, you know, playing music on the watch while running with GPS in workout mode, that's gonna be probably the worst-case scenario for battery life.
00:43:42 ◼ ► Even that, the big one is fine. Like, you know, the big regular Series watch, I can do an outdoor run for an hour, listening to a podcast over AirPods the entire time with the watch, maybe even using cellular during some of that time.
00:43:55 ◼ ► And it will still get through that day. It is fine. Like, I will go to bed, and it will not be in low-power mode. So, if your wrist supports it, I would strongly recommend getting the larger regular Series watch for most people.
00:44:09 ◼ ► Again, if you are okay with the size, you know, fashion-wise, and I think most people can pull it off, honestly. You have to be pretty petite and also care about that kind of thing to not be able to pull off the, you know, the middle-sized Apple Watch, which is what this is.
00:44:25 ◼ ► And for most people, that's not gonna be a concern. Most adults can easily pull off the big one, especially because large smart watches are in style. Like, even on people whose wrists are otherwise fairly small relative to, like, you know, the average adult, say, the bigger watch, even the Ultra.
00:44:42 ◼ ► Most people can wear whatever size they want, and no one bats an eye at, like, how it looks or whether it, like, quote, fits them or not. You can wear whatever size watch you want. Fashion is all over the place on that, and big smart watches are very much in fashion.
00:44:54 ◼ ► All right, this is probably in no small part my fault because this is a big watch here for me, but we have got to hurry it up a little bit, so I'm gonna try to speedrun the rest. We skipped some health stuff, so there's sleep apnea detection, which is extremely cool. I don't personally suffer from this yet, as far as I know.
00:45:11 ◼ ► But how would I know? And I feel like almost everyone I know seems to have sleep apnea these days, so this is very cool. It is not cleared.
00:45:20 ◼ ► And by the way, the way it reportedly does it is based on, like, the movement of your wrists and not by, say, measuring your blood oxygen, which is good because?
00:45:29 ◼ ► Yeah, because the blood oxygen sensor has been turned off. As far as we know, it is physically there, but it is disabled because of patent disputes.
00:45:38 ◼ ► Disabled only for U.S. customers. If you're in Canada or any place else in the world, you get blood oxygen measurement, but not inside the U.S.
00:45:46 ◼ ► This has not been cleared from the FDA or equivalent organizations in other countries, but they expect clearance very soon and availability in 150-plus countries or regions this month, allegedly.
00:46:00 ◼ ► For the sleep apnea thing. Then, yeah, like you said, no blood oxygen measurement inside the U.S., which is a bummer. We talked about size differences.
00:46:13 ◼ ► We already talked about the Ultra II, so let's move on to AirPods 4 with Kate Bergeron.
00:46:19 ◼ ► This has the H2 chip, a new acoustic architecture, the smallest case ever, and optionally, which this was not made clear or I missed it during the presentation, optionally you can get noise cancellation on the non-pro AirPods for the first time ever.
00:46:35 ◼ ► Oh, no. This is, oh my God, I loved this naming clumsiness. So here's what it is. So this is actually two different products.
00:46:45 ◼ ► There's AirPods 4, and they introduced another version of AirPods 4, and they didn't announce the name until the end.
00:46:58 ◼ ► So the introduction line was, for those looking for even more performance in this style of AirPods, and the entire rest of that section, she kept saying these AirPods.
00:47:09 ◼ ► You know, these AirPods have, you know, these AirPods have this, these AirPods have that.
00:47:14 ◼ ► The Apple Watch case charging compatibility in case speaker in this charging case for these AirPods.
00:47:20 ◼ ► And then eventually they unveiled the name as AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation, which is one of those like, you know, two Thunderbolt ports, you know, kind of names.
00:47:29 ◼ ► So I would suggest since the actual name is so comically clumsy, we should call them what they called them, these AirPods.
00:47:43 ◼ ► So here's the question. Is the hardware different in the noise canceling version and the non-noise canceling version?
00:47:58 ◼ ► Noise cancellation requires more microphones typically than just like one for receiving phone calls.
00:48:04 ◼ ► So my guess is they probably have additional microphones, but I don't think we know that yet.
00:48:10 ◼ ► Don't you think the regular ones have multiple microphones for just like, you know, voice isolation and the other basic voice features?
00:48:18 ◼ ► I don't know. I mean, either way, like microphones aren't expensive. Like this is not like...
00:48:21 ◼ ► What I'm saying is like, economically, it might make more sense for Apple to make one AirPods 4 piece of hardware.
00:48:27 ◼ ► Like why make two different ones where even if one of them had to have more microphones,
00:48:31 ◼ ► they would say, why don't we just put the more microphones in all of them? It's simpler.
00:48:36 ◼ ► And that this is purely like a software interlock where when you pay them $50 more, they enable the noise canceling features.
00:48:45 ◼ ► But I have to say this weird thing of like AirPods 4, there's the regular one and the one that costs $50 more that has more features, right?
00:48:52 ◼ ► And yes, they give you a better case with it and everything, which is more sort of like market segmentation.
00:48:56 ◼ ► But this smells so much like, you know, when they say like, this is one computer and if you pay more money, you can get more RAM in it or whatever.
00:49:03 ◼ ► I don't know if these pieces of hardware are different. And in the end, it doesn't really matter because it's not like...
00:49:08 ◼ ► I don't think it's going to be particularly easy to like buy an AirPods 4 and hack it to enable the noise canceling.
00:49:13 ◼ ► But if the hardware really is identical, that will be something because then it's like, why are you...
00:49:20 ◼ ► It's not like the cheap one is like $99, right? The cheap one is still $130 and the expensive one is $180.
00:49:28 ◼ ► And like, I don't quite understand. And especially since the case feature, like having a speaker so you can find your case when you lose it,
00:49:39 ◼ ► like that should kind of be in the $130 one too because that's a useful feature that's not like a pro feature.
00:49:46 ◼ ► That's a "I lost my case" feature, whereas noise canceling I can see. But anyway, we'll see when somebody cracks these things open,
00:49:52 ◼ ► if they can slice it open and find out like, is there any hardware difference whatsoever between them?
00:49:58 ◼ ► Because if there's not, this will be another strange hardware, I think from Apple, kind of like the 12 gigabytes of RAM and the 8 gigabyte iPad Pro.
00:50:11 ◼ ► Hold on, real time follow up real quick. The technical specs for the AirPods 4, the size and weight for the earbuds themselves are not distinguished.
00:50:23 ◼ ► Like the weight is the same for both flavors of AirPod. However, as Marco, I think had mentioned, the case is, what is this, like 2.5 grams heavier for the...
00:50:44 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't think that tells us anything because these things are so lightweight that even if the hardware was different, who's to say it wouldn't weigh the same?
00:50:52 ◼ ► We'll see. The processor in them is just branded H2 like every other H2 AirPods. We don't really know, is the H2 the CPU? Or is there a difference? Is the H2 just the Bluetooth? Who knows?
00:51:06 ◼ ► And then we also don't know, is there more than one kind of H2? Maybe they have, maybe they're binned, maybe it's two little tiny cores and some of them only have one core active. Who knows?
00:51:16 ◼ ► They could be higher clock speed. In the features that are in these AirPods, these features have more computational load to do some of those features.
00:51:28 ◼ ► Things like ANC to begin with, obviously transparency mode, they have adaptive audio, they have conversation awareness.
00:51:34 ◼ ► They have most of the core audio processing features of the AirPods Pro. So that's going to be substantially more processing needs than the standard AirPods 4 that don't have any of those.
00:51:49 ◼ ► But what gets me, the standard AirPods 4 does have voice isolation on phone calls. That's also kind of one of those features. So I don't know. It could be as simple as a different case and a couple of software enabled features. Who knows?
00:52:08 ◼ ► And regardless, they now have, most of the features available in the AirPods Pro are now available in "this open ear design".
00:52:19 ◼ ► As I was saying, I like my sedans and my desktop Macs with big GPUs, I also like the AirPods that don't go in your ear holes. And generally, that design does not get the fancy features. It's been two generations of AirPods Pro getting all their fancy features and their transparency mode and all this other stuff.
00:52:38 ◼ ► And the plain old AirPods that I like, eh, no, you don't get that stuff. And so I'm excited this year that they brought most of those features to the ones that don't go in your ear. Now granted, the fact that they don't go in my ear means the noise canceling is not going to be as good for obvious physical reasons.
00:52:53 ◼ ► They're not literally sealing my ear hole, right? And Apple itself says that the AirPods Pro have "two times better noise canceling" and I believe it, I get it, but I just don't like things in my ear holes. So I think it's great that I get all these features that I've been hearing about, everybody rave about on the AirPods that they like, and I'm going to get them in the kind that I like.
00:53:13 ◼ ► Now, the possible downside is they did subtly change the shape of these AirPods. They've done it, what, there's been three different shapes. There's the original AirPod shape, there's the one that I have now which is AirPods 3 or whatever, and then there's these new ones.
00:53:31 ◼ ► And every time they change the shape, there's a possibility that the thing that used to fit in your ear nice and comfy is not going to. The main hope I have is that the AirPods 3 have always felt a little big in my ears compared to their predecessors. Not uncomfortable and I'm fine with them or whatever, but they always feel a little bit big and these look like they might be a little bit slimmer, so I'm hoping these will be even more comfortable.
00:53:53 ◼ ► The one thing we didn't get is that the Pro still have is the little slidey volume thing. Still a Pro only feature.
00:54:09 ◼ ► Yeah, market segmentation, whatever, but I'm excited about these. I've already pre-ordered them.
00:54:17 ◼ ► AirPods 4, again, when you go to buy it, it says "What do you want to buy?" You say "I want to buy AirPods 4."
00:54:23 ◼ ► And then it's just like when you're configuring RAM. It's like, do you want the one with the 10-core CPU or the 12-core CPU? That's what you're picking. The only difference is the options say "AirPods 4," "AirPods 4 with noise canceling at $50."
00:54:37 ◼ ► That's how the checkout process works. So it is very kind of like, these are the AirPods 4 and there's a $50 more expensive version that has a bunch of new features.
00:54:46 ◼ ► And even if the noise canceling stinks and doesn't work and isn't useful at all, I'm just happy to have new AirPods with all the features that you expect a new thing to have.
00:54:56 ◼ ► The sound is a little bit better. Obviously they'll have fresh batteries. The case will have a little beepy thing in it.
00:55:01 ◼ ► The one thing I'm worried about the case a little bit is that they changed the Bluetooth pairing button from being a physical button to being a capacitive button, which obviously makes it more durable, simple to manufacture.
00:55:11 ◼ ► I understand why they did it, but when your AirPods are being ornery, there's something about having a physical button that you can hold down to let you know I'm really holding down the button for the required three seconds or whatever to go into pairing mode.
00:55:24 ◼ ► Now I'm just going to be putting my fingers vaguely somewhere on the smooth front surface of the thing and hoping that I'm hitting the capacitive section.
00:55:30 ◼ ► To go back a quick step, I completely meant to mention earlier in the Apple Watch segment that they made a point of saying that they are prioritizing non-air shipping.
00:55:42 ◼ ► And I really want to know, did they already send a whole batch of watches with a boat a month and a half ago?
00:55:53 ◼ ► No, no, but look at iPhones for example. As far as I knew, anytime I've paid attention, those things fly oftentimes directly from China to your house.
00:56:03 ◼ ► Obviously they're hubbing and spoking their way from across the planet, but my point is it's not like the beginning of the trip is noted as Louisville, Kentucky or something or wherever UPS's headquarters is.
00:56:15 ◼ ► Or that is UPS or FedEx in Memphis. It starts in Shenzhen or whatever and then you watch these things march across the planet and they go to Anchorage and they go to somewhere else and so on and so forth.
00:56:26 ◼ ► I can't help but wonder, did they ship a whole buttload of these via a ship over a month or two ago to get them ready for release this coming Friday? I really am curious.
00:56:37 ◼ ► Now that they have the pizza boxes to update them, maybe that's part of the reason why they did that, honestly.
00:56:43 ◼ ► And also if they can get that far ahead of the game, there's a reason that Apple keeps saying, "And this product is carbon neutral." And they haven't really said that about the iPhone yet.
00:56:50 ◼ ► I'm not sure that there are enough phones ready early enough to be put on a boat, but I can imagine there being enough AirPods ready early enough to be put on boats.
00:57:03 ◼ ► Or the watch even. I feel like the watch, the phone is the hardest one because they have to make the most of them and it pushes the technology the farthest usually.
00:57:13 ◼ ► Keep in mind also, the sales cycle of these products is the whole year and possibly beyond.
00:57:19 ◼ ► So even if they have a lot of air shipment for these first few weeks as they're pretty new coming out of the factory, at some point that sales rate is going to dip below the production rate by enough that they can start sending big batches of them by boat and it'll be fine by the time they get here.
00:57:36 ◼ ► But also, one other thing on the carbon neutrality of the watch, since we went back to there anyway, I forgot to mention that one, I think, significant change this year.
00:57:48 ◼ ► It was only like, you had to get, I think it was just the aluminum one with just certain bands.
00:57:53 ◼ ► So what they said this year was, now, any Apple Watch in any finish, quote, "can be carbon neutral."
00:58:01 ◼ ► So it depends on what kind of band you pick, but it's new that any of the metals, like all the Apple Watches with any of the metal choices can now be carbon neutral with certain band choices.
00:58:12 ◼ ► I think that's great. They have expanded how many of their products can be carbon neutral and they're indicating even in the store interface when you pick out things, they're telling you which choices are carbon neutral.
00:58:23 ◼ ► So again, they're pushing that goal forward. I think that's a very laudable thing that they're doing that they're actually making real progress on.
00:58:39 ◼ ► There are five new colors, midnight blue, purple, orange, starlight, they take USB-C, they're still 550 bucks, you can order them now.
00:58:47 ◼ ► Actually, I want to say about the AirPods Max, people being disappointed in this or whatever, it's like, look, obviously their successor is not ready yet.
00:58:55 ◼ ► So your alternative is no update or just put a USB-C port on it. And if they didn't update it, everyone would have said they should have just at least put a USB-C port on it.
00:59:04 ◼ ► Well, they did. And if you already have one and you don't want to buy a new one just to get the USB-C port, fine.
00:59:09 ◼ ► But they should put a USB-C port. While we wait for the AirPods Max 2, which presumably is going to come someday and hopefully will be better in a bunch of ways.
00:59:21 ◼ ► And it's not like, who's going to upgrade to these? Nobody. They're exactly the same as the ones you have.
00:59:26 ◼ ► Don't buy it. I mean, I'm going to tell you not to buy it, but honestly, don't buy a new thing just to change the port on the bottom. It's ridiculous.
00:59:35 ◼ ► For people who have never bought the AirPods Max, though, they're buying it for the very first time.
00:59:41 ◼ ► Guess what? They get a USB-C port and it's better for them. So I endorse this update even though obviously if you're waiting for the AirPods Max 2, this is not your time yet.
00:59:49 ◼ ► I mean, obviously, they really didn't have time to fix all of the AirPods Max's glaring shortcomings since it's only been out for four years.
00:59:58 ◼ ► Hey, as I was saying, sometimes if the product that you like isn't the one that gets updated every single year, you got to be patient.
01:00:06 ◼ ► So when the AirPods Max came out, pretty much everybody said, "Okay, these are pretty good in certain ways. They are a little heavy and uncomfortable as a result of that.
01:00:19 ◼ ► They are very expensive and the case they came with is stupid and garbage and very inconvenient, that weird kind of bra-shaped case. It's a bad case in so many ways."
01:00:32 ◼ ► So what they've changed is we got new colors and a USB-C port and we've addressed none of the major flaws of this product.
01:00:43 ◼ ► But they weren't trying to. The successor will potentially attempt to address those shortcomings. But this is not the successor.
01:00:50 ◼ ► This is just that we need to get products with Lightning on them out of our lineup and so they have.
01:00:56 ◼ ► An ever so slightly better product than the one that it replaced. Not enough for anyone to buy a second one, but for anyone buying their first one, now they don't have to deal with Lightning.
01:01:05 ◼ ► They couldn't even have given us a different case? That's one of the most egregious problems with these, that dumb case.
01:01:19 ◼ ► I don't want them to waste their time building a new case in what is probably the last year of this product's life. Just concentrate on the successor, get that done as soon as you can. Hopefully it will be next year.
01:01:28 ◼ ► I don't know, I see both sides of this. I am slightly disappointed by this, or more than slightly disappointed by this update, but I was never in the market for these anyway.
01:01:43 ◼ ► For the people who are buying their first one, just get that Lightning thing out of there. They need to do it with the Magic Mouse, they need to do it with all the keyboards, and they need to eventually get to that stuff.
01:01:52 ◼ ► I think the fear is that, and this is a very founded fear based on Apple's history, the fear is that this is going to be it for the next four years.
01:02:01 ◼ ► That they touched it, and it's like, "Alright, we touched it, it's updated, new banner," and then that's it.
01:02:06 ◼ ► No, that's not. This is clearly a sort of like, "Try to stem some of the pain while we work on the successor." Or they just can the whole product line, but I think there's going to be a successor.
01:02:16 ◼ ► Again, think about the Mac Pro people. Think about how long we wait for things to happen. You just got to chill, you just got to be patient, you just got to believe.
01:02:23 ◼ ► No, I think this is literally the Unix touch command. Like, "Alright, we touched it, now it counts."
01:02:28 ◼ ► Even the HomePod, those people are like, "Are they ever going to change the Big HomePod? Is it ever going to get better?" It looks like they're discontinuing it. And then what happened?
01:02:39 ◼ ► But it was also a lot better. It still had us a long way to go. But the second one was significantly updated.
01:02:46 ◼ ► What I'm saying is you never give up hope. They waited so long that the product was dead. You couldn't buy a Big HomePod. You're like, "This is it, it's over, there's never going to be another one." And then there was another one.
01:02:57 ◼ ► Oh my god. But the AirPods Max are a better product that's more successful than the HomePod. Anyway, if I was an AirPods Max fan and I was waiting for this update, I'd be pretty mad.
01:03:08 ◼ ► And John, I think you're optimistic. You can make a bet, add it to your calendar. I don't think there's a chance in hell the AirPods Max get another update at least for two years.
01:03:17 ◼ ► I don't think I would bet two years, but I would bet five. I can tell it's not a high priority product, but it seems like they still are going to make another one, but I would not bet on two years.
01:03:35 ◼ ► Alright, let's do it. Three years. I'll take that bet. I'm saying not before three years from now. You're saying before three years from now they will get an update.
01:03:42 ◼ ► Three is, like, I would have been more comfortable with four or five, but I'll do three because it's more interesting.
01:03:53 ◼ ► Alright, AirPods Pro 2, short, short version. No updates. Well, no hardware updates, but they're big, big software updates.
01:04:01 ◼ ► We're going to skip the first one. I'm going to come back to that. But they said that they're working with prevention awareness and assistance. We're going to skip prevention just for a moment.
01:04:09 ◼ ► For awareness, they're doing a hearing test that has been "clinically validated." It takes about five minutes.
01:04:15 ◼ ► Basically, you just tap the screen when you hear things and it makes a personal audio profile, we think. We're pretty sure that's right.
01:04:21 ◼ ► Yeah, so here's the thing. We've talked about this on the show many times in past years where there are third-party apps on the App Store.
01:04:31 ◼ ► They will give you a hearing test and then they will create an audio profile based on how well you can hear certain frequencies in the headphones you're using at the time you do the audio test.
01:04:41 ◼ ► And then it lets you save that audiogram to your phone and then you can say, "Hey phone, from now on when I'm using these headphones, apply this essential equalizer setting to all audio that comes out of my phone so that my stupid ears can hear it the best way possible."
01:04:58 ◼ ► So if your left ear has a real hard time hearing like 10 kHz, it will boost 10 kHz to your left ear only when using these headphones with your phone when playing any audio.
01:05:09 ◼ ► I did this back on the show, whatever it was, a year or two ago. I made an audiogram for myself with some third-party app that was terrible and I installed it on my phone.
01:05:19 ◼ ► And I've been using it ever since when I listen on my AirPods. Using that audiogram profile for every piece of audio I listen to, I recommend it.
01:05:26 ◼ ► But the one thing that I hated was what third-party app should I get. And I have to say they were all terrible. Some of them were weird and scammy and had some other thing they were doing. The other ones, the UI was terrible.
01:05:35 ◼ ► So thank goodness Apple is saying, "Forget about the third-party apps. This is part of the phone now, part of the OS. If you buy AirPods Pro 2 or whatever and you have a phone, you will be able to just do this on the phone with what has to be a better interface than these third-party things."
01:05:52 ◼ ► I think this is great. I think every single person who has AirPods Pro 2 and a phone and the new OS and everything should do this. It's real quick to do.
01:06:00 ◼ ► And what you get at, and don't do it like when you have a cold like I do now because your hearing will be all messed up.
01:06:04 ◼ ► When you're healthy and your ears are working at their optimum quality and you have a quiet moment somewhere with no background noise, do the five-minute test, save the audiogram, and I think it just syncs it with all your health data, and then apply the audiogram and all the audio coming out of your phone will sound better. Highly endorsed.
01:06:19 ◼ ► Yeah, this is awesome. For them to be leaning into hearing health and to be taking advantage of the AirPods Pro's amazing abilities here, this is a very big deal for a lot of people.
01:06:33 ◼ ► And it gets better because of the prevention, awareness, and assistance. So there's going to be clinical grade over-the-air hearing aid updates this fall.
01:06:51 ◼ ► Anyway, this fall, we're in 100 or more countries and regions, so you take that hearing test we just talked about and it boosts the specific sounds you need in real time, and they expect to receive that clearance soon. So let me repeat that.
01:07:03 ◼ ► You can basically use these as hearing aids starting this fall. And I don't know, luckily, I don't have to know yet much about this, but my very limited understanding about hearing aids is that they are all impossibly expensive, or at least here in America, impossibly expensive.
01:07:19 ◼ ► A lot of them, if not almost all of them, are rather trash, and it's just not very fun to get yourself a set of hearing aids.
01:07:27 ◼ ► And now you can just go to Best Buy or Walmart or the Apple Store, or not now I should say, but soon, and pick up a set of AirPods Pro 2, do the compulsory software-related things like the hearing test, and then you have clinical grade over-the-counter hearing aids in your ears this fall.
01:07:46 ◼ ► That is unreal, and I very, very much applaud Apple for doing this. This is extremely cool.
01:07:51 ◼ ► And to be clear, the hearing test thing, there's two sides to that. When they do that, they're measuring how well your ear hears, each of your ears hears different frequencies. And they do two things with that.
01:07:59 ◼ ► One, they can change the audio that you're playing, your podcast, your music, whatever, the audio playing from your phone. They modify that audio with an equalizer to make it sound more like it's supposed to.
01:08:09 ◼ ► The second thing is, with the hearing aid mode, sound coming in from the outside world hits the microphones on your AirPods and then gets replayed inside your ear, also applying that audiogram in sort of hearing aid mode.
01:08:21 ◼ ► And in terms of this versus "real hearing aids," obviously one advantage that real hearing aids have is they're very often much smaller and more discreet than AirPods.
01:08:32 ◼ ► But of course, the main advantage that AirPods have is people might already own them, right? Or if you're worried about having a hearing aid or you're nervous about it or embarrassed or whatever, just try the feature.
01:08:44 ◼ ► There's the barrier to entry of, "Am I the type of person who needs to go and get a hearing aid?" A lot of people don't want to go over that barrier.
01:08:51 ◼ ► But am I the type of person who either already owns or can buy AirPods with the Apple Star? Yeah, much lower barrier. You don't buy that and say, "Oh, I'm buying a hearing aid."
01:08:59 ◼ ► And then once people start using them, if they find that it is useful and people say, "We love that you love your new hearing aid, Dad, but you're always wearing your AirPods, it looks kind of weird. Why didn't you just get a 'real hearing aid' for 10 times the price?"
01:09:14 ◼ ► That is much, much smaller and it won't fall out of your ears as easily and the charge lasts longer and yada, yada, yada.
01:09:19 ◼ ► And so I feel like this is a great example of Apple lowering the barrier to entry, getting people over the hump to do a thing they wouldn't have otherwise done, even if it turns out that AirPods are not sufficient for their needs or eventually become insufficient for their needs or are not as good as a real thing or whatever, just because it starts them down the path.
01:09:36 ◼ ► There's like the sleep apnea stuff and all those other things of like, it's not as good as going to a doctor, it's not as good as getting a sleep test or whatever, but people who are like afraid to find out or don't want to sleep in a weird place or do a sleep test or trial or whatever, but they do own a watch.
01:09:50 ◼ ► And they will say, "Okay, I'm going to wear my watch when I sleep just to see." And what does it say? What it basically says is, "Maybe sleep apnea? Talk to your doctor." Right?
01:09:59 ◼ ► And that is the first step to getting them over the hump to saying like, people wondering, "Is there something wrong or whatever?" Maybe this will give them a little push to say, "Oh, actually the watch totally says that it's sensing sleep apnea. Is it right? Is it wrong? Go to your doctor and find out."
01:10:13 ◼ ► Versus, "I'm just going to sit here and fret. Do I have sleep apnea? I don't know. I don't want to find out. I don't want to have a CPAP, blah, blah, blah, blah."
01:10:19 ◼ ► This is one of the great strengths of Apple Health stuff. Not that it solves all your problems, but that it lowers the barrier to entry for people who are afraid of health stuff.
01:10:29 ◼ ► Whether it's they're afraid of getting into exercise, afraid of asking if they need a hearing aid, afraid of going to the doctor and asking about sleep apnea.
01:10:35 ◼ ► You just buy a bunch of Apple stuff and it will sort of nudge you in that direction with small, vague pieces of information to sort of push you along the path.
01:10:45 ◼ ► Yeah, and to be clear, if any of you out there are hearing this and you're like, "Well, it probably doesn't work that well."
01:10:51 ◼ ► If you've never heard transparency mode on AirPods Pro, it is way better than you think it can be.
01:10:59 ◼ ► Even if you've heard transparency mode or pass-through mode on other noise cancelling headphones, trust me, so have I.
01:11:07 ◼ ► Go read all the reviews. Everyone agrees the AirPods Pro transparency mode is way better than every other pair of headphones on the market.
01:11:17 ◼ ► Including, yes, the brand new, whatever new Sony XM series is out that year, yes, even better than that.
01:11:28 ◼ ► The transparency pass-through mode on AirPods Pro is remarkably good. It is stunningly good.
01:11:37 ◼ ► So they can do things like this. They can have really interesting and useful and amazing audio features for people's regular hearing that are built upon transparency mode and the amazing thing they've built there.
01:11:52 ◼ ► This is just one of the many things. I've mentioned in the past how I'm now using AirPods Pro 2 as my hearing protection when I go to concerts because it works.
01:12:06 ◼ ► This is the prevention of prevention, awareness, and assistance. There's now a hearing protection mode, otherwise known as the Marco mode.
01:12:15 ◼ ► We'll talk about it in the after show. I went to a concert this past weekend and I wore the same AirPods Pro in the same part of the audience, in the same venue that I was in a year ago.
01:12:30 ◼ ► A year ago, that was the first time I tried the hearing protection at a concert. I gave a whole report on the show about how it worked pretty well.
01:12:38 ◼ ► It worked better than any concert ear plugs that I had available and that I had tried. Way better than all those. It was pretty great.
01:12:46 ◼ ► The only problem I had noted last fall when I went to the Phish concert was that if I would turn my head a little bit side to side, sometimes they would get unbalanced because I was no longer aligned perfectly with the PA speakers.
01:13:02 ◼ ► Even on both sides, if I'm looking to the left or right, it would make the sound unbalanced and wacky. It was a little bit imperfect.
01:13:11 ◼ ► This past weekend with the iOS 18 and whatever latest versions of AirPods firmware there are, this past weekend it was flawless. It was just perfect.
01:13:20 ◼ ► There was no imbalance. There was no pumping effects. You get compressor pumping effects in audio terms. None of that.
01:13:29 ◼ ► It was just perfect. It sounded exact. At one point, I was like, the guitar sounds a little bit low in the mix. I wonder if that's the processing.
01:13:38 ◼ ► I took them out to see what it sounded like without them. First of all, it blew my ears off. It was so loud.
01:13:44 ◼ ► I also noticed, no, the mix is the same. It wasn't messing with the mix. It was just making everything evenly quieter.
01:13:50 ◼ ► All I was doing, this was not any new feature that they're about to add. This is the feature that's already there. It's just transparency mode with what is currently called reduced loud sounds, which I believe is on by default now.
01:14:02 ◼ ► They already, in the last year, have made massive strides before this new hearing protection version even launches.
01:14:10 ◼ ► To have that now on by default and available in all listening modes, that's incredible. The idea of using AirPods Pro as hearing aids, that's not only incredible for so many reasons, but also that's totally plausible as a thing that they could be very good at within the range of what they can correct for.
01:14:34 ◼ ► They can't correct above a certain level of decibel needs or whatever, and that's fine. There's obviously "real" hearing aids for that, but this is going to be great for a lot of people.
01:14:44 ◼ ► The only thing I would request, if they're going to lean more into this, which I love that they are, building on what Jon was saying earlier, wearing AirPods Pro when you're trying to talk to people, people don't know that you can hear them.
01:14:57 ◼ ► It's not like this is just something that people are going to figure out next year or in six months. We've had AirPods for a while now.
01:15:04 ◼ ► Society has not accepted the idea that you can just talk to people wearing headphones because you on the outside, you can't tell whether they can hear you or not.
01:15:15 ◼ ► See also the Vision Pro weird eye thing. You can't tell if they can hear you or not, so you kind of are hesitant to talk to people with headphones in.
01:15:21 ◼ ► I, as an AirPods user, will frequently, well almost always, take them out when talking to people because, again, even though my podcast is paused or whatever, they don't know that.
01:15:31 ◼ ► If they want to have AirPods Pro be able to take more of these roles, the smaller and more discreet they can become, the better.
01:15:41 ◼ ► This doesn't necessarily mean they have to be super tiny in your ears with the thing that loops behind you like the way many hearing aids are designed.
01:15:47 ◼ ► But even just something as simple as if they were available in something closer to skin tones rather than bright white.
01:15:55 ◼ ► Heck, even just give us a black version, but just something other than bright white, because that's one thing when I'm wearing them at a concert, I'm very aware that this is very visible.
01:16:05 ◼ ► I would love to have those be a little more discreet. Skin tones would be perfect, if not just something a little bit darker maybe.
01:16:14 ◼ ► And certainly if they can investigate maybe a stickless design for this kind of use, that would also be interesting.
01:16:21 ◼ ► That obviously starts, you start changing the product in pretty big ways once you do that, but we know it's possible because literally everyone else does it that way.
01:16:28 ◼ ► So there are different suggestions I would make in terms of the physical design and colors to lean into this kind of feature set.
01:16:35 ◼ ► I mean, Beats has stickless, basically stickless ones with, don't they use the H2 in Beats as well? And they also come in black.
01:16:41 ◼ ► Literally every other competitor, they're all, everything is stickless except the AirPods.
01:16:47 ◼ ► Well, but they let Beats explore different designs and different features and everything.
01:16:51 ◼ ► So overall, a discreet design would be great in the future, or at least different color choices.
01:17:00 ◼ ► They were already incredible headphones. They've already replaced all of my portable headphone uses, yes including on planes.
01:17:11 ◼ ► They're just so incredibly good, and this now expands their use even more, makes them even better.
01:17:21 ◼ ► I would have thought that Apple would not want to get into another medical area that might require certain approvals or things, but nope, they did it.
01:17:31 ◼ ► Yep, couldn't agree more. This stuff is all very, very good. And "proud" isn't the word I'm looking for, but I can't think of a better word.
01:17:39 ◼ ► I'm really proud of Apple, even though I have no relationship with them really, but I'm proud of Apple for doing these things because they're not easy.
01:17:49 ◼ ► And you don't often see a big, huge company do things that are important unless they're pretty much entirely self-serving.
01:17:59 ◼ ► And yeah, there's some self-serving aspects to this, but this just seems like the right thing to do, and you don't see that a lot from big companies these days.
01:18:11 ◼ ► Tailscale is the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other wherever they are.
01:18:15 ◼ ► Let's say you had a device in Richmond, and one in Boston, and one in New York, and one in San Francisco, and one in Europe, and Australia, and Asia.
01:18:22 ◼ ► What if you wanted all those devices to talk to each other as though they were on the same land?
01:18:48 ◼ ► What Tailscale's purpose in life is is to make it completely transparent to your devices to get to any of the other devices that you own.
01:18:56 ◼ ► So it's like they're on the same land, even if they're across continents from each other.
01:19:03 ◼ ► Before I tried Tailscale, I was like, "Ah, I don't know. What's the hype all about? Is this really that?"
01:19:20 ◼ ► It is so slick, so fast, so easy to use, and what's great about it is their personal plan is and always will be free.
01:19:48 ◼ ► Any of your devices talking to each other always, no matter what ridiculous network infrastructure stands between them, it's magic.
01:20:14 ◼ ► I told you that I didn't want to be Old Man Shouts at Clouds, so I'm going to take the Happy Spin on the iPhone 16.
01:20:32 ◼ ► No, the Unhappy Spin is me pissing and moaning about how I don't have it on the iPhone 16 Pro.
01:20:41 ◼ ► The Happy version, though, is these things look so damn good, and I am very jealous because I'm going to end up with an iPhone 16 Pro.
01:20:50 ◼ ► But this year, and I'm not the first person to say this, this year more than any other year, I have been extremely tempted by the iPhone 16.
01:20:59 ◼ ► And honestly, and I think Quinn made this point in his video as well, this is a really strong year for the iPhone 16 non-Pro.
01:21:10 ◼ ► And if you were ever wondering if you really needed to go Pro, and if you have a little more self-awareness than I do,
01:21:18 ◼ ► because I will always and forever buy the Pro because I'm a fancy lad, this is genuinely such a good year for the iPhone 16.
01:21:40 ◼ ► But yeah, my main complaint about the colors, despite the fact that I think the black and the white look really good,
01:21:57 ◼ ► I mean, all these colors leaked obviously, although this is one of those cases where Apple's product photography of the colors looks better than the leaked shots of someone just taking a picture of them or whatever.
01:22:06 ◼ ► But probably the truth will be somewhere in between when you actually go to the store and look at these.
01:22:14 ◼ ► But the thing to me, the most important thing about these phones physically wise is, and I know we talked about this, the vertical cameras, right?
01:22:24 ◼ ► So they're aligned for better spatial audio or whatever, or better spatial video and spatial photos.
01:22:29 ◼ ► But realigning them in that way minimizes the camera mesa in a way that we haven't seen in years.
01:22:38 ◼ ► Because when they were at an angle, it was always like there's a square mesa and it's got a bunch of crap on it.
01:22:48 ◼ ► And now we've gone back and now it's like, hey, you know the phone that doesn't have as much camera stuff?
01:23:06 ◼ ► But because they're just vertical, they're so skinny. The mesa is so skinny compared to what it used to be.
01:23:12 ◼ ► And it makes what is a smaller and lighter phone that only has two cameras get the advantage of only having two cameras.
01:23:24 ◼ ► And then obviously, as we'll get to in a little bit, the other side of all this is this is a year when the non-Pro phone doesn't get last year's processor.
01:23:37 ◼ ► Like, if you were ever thinking of buying a new phone and you don't typically buy the Pro phones, the 16 is a good year to buy.
01:23:47 ◼ ► You get the fancy new feature, which is the camera control button we'll talk about in a little bit.
01:23:52 ◼ ► And you get a bunch of nice colors. I'm a big fan of the 16. I'm not going to buy one. Big fan, though.
01:24:02 ◼ ► I think Aaron would adore the pink phone. And the other colors, teal is also very good.
01:24:09 ◼ ► The white is very white and the black is very black. But the three colorful colors, and I agree with what you said earlier, John, about it's too bad there's not a yellow or something.
01:24:17 ◼ ► These colors are so good. I'm so into these colors. So very much so. But anyways, moving on.
01:24:22 ◼ ► They say that it's got a 50% tougher than first generation ceramic shield. So I believe that's the front glass, right, that they're talking about?
01:24:31 ◼ ► Yeah, but this is another one of the, like, the first generation ceramic shield, wasn't it like 10 years ago?
01:24:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't know which. I said a lot of things they would say, like, second generation.
01:24:40 ◼ ► And I'm like, what generation were they on before? Has it been second generation for five years? Anyway.
01:24:45 ◼ ► Yeah, they usually, they will usually compare it to much longer than one year ago. It'll usually be at least two years ago and possibly more because it makes the comparisons all sound better.
01:24:56 ◼ ► Well, we'll find out in case he gets one because the same ceramic shield is on the Pro. So, we can compare the scratches.
01:25:02 ◼ ► Yeah, right, exactly. 6.1, 6.7 inches for the iPhone 16 Plus. It now gets the action button that the Pros had last year. It gets the fancy new camera control button. I'd like to come back to that in a minute, please.
01:25:17 ◼ ► It's got the vertically stacked lenses like we discussed. It's got the same chip, basically. It's the A18 and we later found out...
01:25:28 ◼ ► So, we found out later that there's an A18 Pro, so there is a difference, but it's largely the same.
01:25:37 ◼ ► Right. And that's, I mean, we've had years where the non-Pro phone gets last year's chip and we've had years where it gets the same chip and we've had years where it gets almost the same chip.
01:25:46 ◼ ► And this isn't almost the same chip year as we'll get to when we get to the Pro phone. But the point is, it's not the A17 or the A16 or any other, like, it's not a chip that you've seen before.
01:26:00 ◼ ► Yep. And so, I don't think we need to go into the specifics about the chip because we'll probably end up covering them in the Pro phone, but suffice to say it's almost the same.
01:26:07 ◼ ► There's improved cooling in both non-Pro and Pro, and so, I guess this was Jon? Maybe it was me. Somebody put in here.
01:26:15 ◼ ► Yeah, this is directly from the... So, they said stuff, they said new cooling stuff about both phones. This is a quote from the event video.
01:26:22 ◼ ► "We updated the main logic board, centralizing the chip placement and optimizing the surrounding architecture. We also added a thermal substructure to dissipate heat made from 100% recycled aluminum. As a result, the iPhone 16 delivers up to 30% higher sustained performance for gaming. I'm here for this. This is excellent."
01:26:37 ◼ ► I mean, basically it just sounds like they did a better heat sink than they had done previously and they have a measurement to say what does it do. We get better sustained performance for gaming. Thumbs up.
01:26:46 ◼ ► And again, the non-Pro phone is not known for overheating, but the fact that they did something to improve it and have some measurement on it is good.
01:26:53 ◼ ► So, it's interesting. So, on the Pro phone, they expanded a little bit on this, which might be related. On the Pro phone section, they said that they quote "maximized thermal capacity with a new aluminum frame with a quote 'graphite clad aluminum substructure that provides up to 20% improvement in sustained performance on the 16 Pro."
01:27:13 ◼ ► So, it sounds like at least in both phones they talked about thermals and in both phones, the euphemism they used was "improvement in sustained performance."
01:27:24 ◼ ► But what that really means is heat dissipation. That's what that means, cooling. And so, whether this base 16 has the graphite clad aluminum substructure, we don't know that.
01:27:35 ◼ ► It doesn't. They would have said it. Probably, yeah. But either way, the thermals are better in both phones and that's good because on the 15 Pro at least, I don't know if they're on the 15 Pro, thermals took a pretty big step back. So, this is good to see.
01:27:50 ◼ ► We had Craig come back out and do a reintroduction of Apple Intelligence, which does look good in theory, but none of it's coming.
01:28:00 ◼ ► Just a rehash of WWDC, which again, I think they had to do because the people who are watching this did not watch WWDC for the most part.
01:28:07 ◼ ► And this is like, look, Siri looks good in presentations too. We have no idea how this is going to be yet.
01:28:15 ◼ ► Right, but still, they still got to get the word out. Here's a bunch of stuff that we're promising and we'll all see how it turns out.
01:28:20 ◼ ► But it is important to get that word out because this is their chance to talk to the world about this stuff that we all know about, but they don't.
01:28:26 ◼ ► One quick note from the Apple Intelligence section, for those of us who still have young children, of which that's just me on the program,
01:28:33 ◼ ► I did think it was funny that they did the Australian Cattle Dog as the "What kind of breed is this?"
01:28:39 ◼ ► And that is, I think, or may have been construed as a subtle bluey nod, which I'm very much here for, so that made me have a good laugh.
01:28:49 ◼ ► So this is a Sapphire crystal where there's many different things that you're doing with this one camera control.
01:28:56 ◼ ► Before we get to the things, I've seen a lot of reports of people who were there at the event and they got to hold the phones and use the camera control,
01:29:03 ◼ ► which is what we had been calling in the months prior to this event the capture button, but Apple's calling it the camera control.
01:29:09 ◼ ► Talking about whether this thing moves in or not when you press it, I've seen people saying, "Oh, it does move in."
01:29:23 ◼ ► It amazes me that I guess maybe you didn't get enough hands on time, but no one just did a close-up and said,
01:29:28 ◼ ► "If it moves, you'll be able to see it. Even if it moves a millimeter, you'll be able to see it move that millimeter when you press it."
01:29:35 ◼ ► So I do not know the answer to this question of whether it moves or not, which I think is a testament.
01:29:46 ◼ ► If it moves and there's also haptic feedback, that is an interesting combination that I don't think Apple has ever done before.
01:29:51 ◼ ► Because they either do haptic feedback and it doesn't move, or it just moves and that's all there is to it.
01:29:56 ◼ ► So this is going to presumably give haptic feedback when it's partially through its actual travel to indicate a half press.
01:30:05 ◼ ► Or will it push back against you, as in force feedback to make it feel the half press thing.
01:30:15 ◼ ► As far as any camera that I've ever used, any "real camera" with the half button press or whatever,
01:30:20 ◼ ► I don't think there's any magic in them. It's literally a mechanical button with a spring underneath it that has a lot of travel and you push it halfway through the travel.
01:30:29 ◼ ► And it's a very natural thing to do, but at least I haven't owned a camera that has tried to do that with the help of haptics or whatever.
01:30:36 ◼ ► So I'm very curious to try this button because it's the big deal, this is the big feature on this phone.
01:30:43 ◼ ► I think this is much more significant than the action button, which was simply just another button that you can press.
01:30:48 ◼ ► This is another button that you can press that's very big, that's also touch sensitive, that has haptic feedback.
01:30:54 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think that the camera control, they kept calling it "Camera Control" or "The Camera Control".
01:31:02 ◼ ► It seems like this is a kind of loosey-goosey name, whether it includes "the" or not, whether you're supposed to capitalize it.
01:31:20 ◼ ► What's interesting is that if you look at the rest of the phone's updates, they're mostly, again, software and incremental improvements.
01:31:36 ◼ ► And the action button, because remember, it got both in one update. Last time, you didn't have anything.
01:31:42 ◼ ► This time it gets the action button and also the capture button or the camera control thing.
01:31:46 ◼ ► So this is just a great year for the 16. They look great, they rearrange the cameras, they got all the features, they have a good SoC tailored to it. Good year.
01:31:54 ◼ ► That's true, yeah. Sorry, I jumped ahead to the pro. But yeah, because they both have the camera control, which is great.
01:32:00 ◼ ► So what's interesting about the camera control is that it has all these different modes. It isn't just another action button.
01:32:07 ◼ ► It has much more input potential than that. So it has the concept of a light press, because it looks like it's kind of a touch ID button, where it has that metal ring around the end.
01:32:19 ◼ ► And so it can sense when you're just touching it. They also said that it appears to use optical sensing from below to see where your finger is on it and maybe how much content it's making, how hard you're pressing.
01:32:30 ◼ ► So what you have is, you have soft touch gestures, and then you have a push-in gesture, and you also have swipe gestures.
01:32:37 ◼ ► And so what they've done with this is all sorts of fun new controls that I think will actually be somewhat intuitive.
01:32:43 ◼ ► So one that we skipped over is visual intelligence, where it's like the humane pin thing of like, "What am I looking at? What is this?"
01:32:51 ◼ ► And do something with it. And that is, you just hold it down. And that actually makes sense, because visual intelligence is like Siri in a way.
01:33:00 ◼ ► And it's below the Siri button, and it's like, okay, you hold down the sleep/wake button for Siri, and now you hold down the button below it for visual Siri.
01:33:09 ◼ ► Like, I think that actually makes sense. And then of course, the camera, like, click to launch, click again to capture.
01:33:15 ◼ ► While you're in the camera mode, you can use the swipey gestures and the light touches to control different camera settings, zoom, stuff like that.
01:33:24 ◼ ► That, I think, is gonna be pretty great. We will talk about case implications in overtime today.
01:33:34 ◼ ► - But other than that, you know, we'll get to that in overtime. But I think this is gonna be a fun new input.
01:33:44 ◼ ► Because all of those functions are available in the UI on the screen. But it will be easier and better in certain ways.
01:33:50 ◼ ► You know, one way, for instance, that it will be better, besides the fact that you don't have to like, you know, reach that button at certain angles and stuff.
01:33:56 ◼ ► One angle you don't have to reach it in is if you're trying to use the back camera to take a picture of yourself.
01:34:01 ◼ ► You don't have to like, reach your finger around and guess or try to hit the volume button where you're like, reaching your hand around in a weird way.
01:34:11 ◼ ► - Yeah, and there's a whole bunch of contexts like that where like, the camera control, I think, will just make life a little bit nicer in a lot of different occasions.
01:34:20 ◼ ► So, I think it's gonna be a really big deal. And, you know, again, it's on both iPhones. I think it's gonna be a really big deal.
01:34:27 ◼ ► The only thing that, I've seen some people say like, is this gonna be the future of input for all apps?
01:34:33 ◼ ► Not for the foreseeable future, because while there is an API for it, which I think is great to have, you know, a day one API for third party camera apps to have all those same controls, that's great.
01:34:47 ◼ ► Problem is, that API only works if the app is in the foreground and running an AV capture session, which means only camera apps, basically, while the camera is open, are going to be able to use it.
01:35:02 ◼ ► So like, I couldn't, for instance, use it to offer, say like, a speed control for overcast. Like, I can't. It will not work for that, because I don't have an active capture session.
01:35:12 ◼ ► Well, you could do a thing where you open a session somewhere off in the background, like they used to play silence to get access to APIs, and then you get rejected by app review.
01:35:19 ◼ ► Yeah, also, I don't think that works in the background. But yeah, that would definitely get rejected.
01:35:23 ◼ ► So, Apple has restricted the use of that to only apps that are performing capture in the foreground.
01:35:31 ◼ ► So, I don't expect to see most apps use that for anything, really, because you kind of can't.
01:35:37 ◼ ► But, even if it's only ever used in camera apps, even if you only ever use it in Apple's built-in camera app, I think that's going to be really great.
01:35:46 ◼ ► And it's not, again, it's not going to be like massively life-changing, but it's going to be a nice quality of life improvement.
01:35:53 ◼ ► So, that, I think, is the feature for this year's iPhones, is, you know, besides Apple intelligence, we'll see how that works, when it actually comes out, how good it is, you know.
01:36:08 ◼ ► Yeah, and it's on both the regular and the pro. I do worry a little bit about how much stuff they put into the camera control,
01:36:15 ◼ ► because I can kind of imagine a regular person getting into one of those modes where they're swiping through like exposure and zoom and stuff, and not understanding where they are, and they just want to take a picture.
01:36:25 ◼ ► So, one of the things I'm going to test when I get it is, like, can you get yourself accidentally into one of those things where you're messing with controls when really you just wanted to take a picture, and then get out of it by essentially saying,
01:36:35 ◼ ► "I'm just going to press this button real hard, and I want to take a picture now." And I hope it will. I hope it'll say, like, "Alright, forget about all those menus. Forget about you changing your depth of field or zoom or exposure.
01:36:45 ◼ ► You press real hard, I just stop everything and say, 'That means take a picture,' so take a picture."
01:36:50 ◼ ► Because, honestly, they added so much to this one button, like, on day one, that I worry that it might be too much, especially if it's possible to get it into a mode or whatever. But we'll all try it when we get them and see how it is.
01:37:03 ◼ ► There's a pretty good series of short videos on Apple's website for the iPhone 16. I don't think I can link specifically this section, but they have what effectively amounts to a tutorial, which is four, like, very, very brief videos that are like three or four seconds each,
01:37:18 ◼ ► that show how it works. And it does make sense, having never used it, and I think I'll adjust fairly quickly, but I agree with what you're saying. Also, if you look at the keynote, at 58 minutes and about 18 seconds on the YouTube version of the keynote,
01:37:32 ◼ ► they show that cutaway we were talking about earlier. And to my eyes, they are very clearly showing this thing depressing a little bit. So I do think it moves, as Marco had said.
01:37:41 ◼ ► Yeah, I thought the same thing until I saw 50% of the reviewers who held them in their hands saying, "Well, the button doesn't actually move."
01:37:46 ◼ ► Well, I mean, we'll see, but I'm fairly confident. So anyways, so yeah, so I am super excited about the camera control. I think it's going to be really great. Is it the sort of thing where I must have this and, you know, any other iPhone that's ever existed is trash?
01:38:01 ◼ ► No, of course not. But I think it does look really slick. And I love, like Marco said, that there is what appears to be pretty robust third-party API or APIs for third-party use available day one. I'm very excited about that.
01:38:17 ◼ ► And I think the only other thing with the 16 non-pro is that they've announced that there is now 25-watt MagSafe charging with an updated charger.
01:38:31 ◼ ► Qi, too, can do, I think, 15 watts, if I'm not mistaken. And their bespoke MagSafe chargers can now do 25 watts with these new phones if you also get a brand new MagSafe charger, which is pretty slick. That's pretty cool.
01:38:52 ◼ ► Yeah, the non-pro iPhone 16 now has 48 megapixels on the main sensor. It's not the same camera, it's not the same lenses or sensor as the Pro.
01:39:06 ◼ ► No. The pixels are not as big, and the lens is 26mm vs. 24. So it does not have the same specs as the 15 Pro or the 16 Pro 1X camera.
01:39:18 ◼ ► Yeah, so they brought the pixel binning trick, where the 12 megapixel sensor becomes 48 if you ignore color divisions and temporarily figure stuff out.
01:39:27 ◼ ► So they brought over that trick to increase resolution and the processing that goes with that. A bigger jump should be the new UltraWide now has variable focus, macro capability, larger aperture, bigger pixels.
01:39:44 ◼ ► So the UltraWide has taken a significant step up for the non-pro phone, and the new arrangement of the sensors now allows it to take spatial video.
01:39:54 ◼ ► And interestingly, both phones now get the ability to capture spatial photos, which for some reason the 15 Pro could not do spatial photos. It could only do spatial video.
01:40:10 ◼ ► Oh, one other thing. When we were still in the 16 section, they briefly talked about emergency SOS and all the satellite features.
01:40:31 ◼ ► I believe, aren't we now to the point, aren't we now at the two year mark, or is it just one year?
01:40:36 ◼ ► I think they extended it. Didn't we have a follow up item a while ago where it's like, oh, they extended the free thing to be even longer?
01:40:43 ◼ ► Yeah, I think the answer is for most of this stuff they're probably just never going to charge, because as we talked about last time,
01:40:49 ◼ ► if somebody is stuck in a mountain and dies because they didn't buy their iCloud Plus, whatever, for satellite connectivity, that's not good.
01:40:56 ◼ ► And Apple knows that. And so it seems like they're probably just never going to charge for this, but they haven't had the data or whatever to be able to commit to that yet.
01:41:14 ◼ ► Alright, iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. This was Greg Jasviek at night, for whatever reason.
01:41:22 ◼ ► 6.3 and 6.9 inches, nice. The smallest bezel ever, or some people like to pronounce it bezel.
01:41:41 ◼ ► That's his euphemism for, we didn't make the phones bigger, or rather we did, we minimized how much bigger they got.
01:41:57 ◼ ► Every company has corporate speak and custom corporate vocabulary that drives outside people nuts when they hear it.
01:42:08 ◼ ► We could tell that obviously around the forestall era, using the term blowaway as an adjective seemed to be one of the--
01:42:18 ◼ ► Yeah, that's one of those things that infected the company back then and still going on.
01:42:26 ◼ ► And now we know, minimizing product growth, which is not about sales of a product, which sounds like a bad thing.
01:42:34 ◼ ► No, it's minimizing product growth, which is minimizing the amount that we make the iPhone bigger, which we've tried to fit this bigger screen in.
01:42:45 ◼ ► They took the previous phone and they made a tiny bit bigger screen and then shrunk all the phone in around it.
01:42:57 ◼ ► I don't actually want the Pro phone to get any bigger, the non-Max Pro phone to get any bigger.
01:43:03 ◼ ► I was kind of annoyed when I think my current one, my 14 Pro, was bigger than the previous Pro phone that it replaced by a little bit.
01:43:09 ◼ ► If this continues, we get a carflation situation where you wake up one day and your non-Max Pro phone is like 17 inches or something.
01:43:26 ◼ ► If you look at the size of the current "normal size" phone, which is, I mean, now that there's no more mini, I guess, these are the smallest phones Apple's making.
01:43:35 ◼ ► The size of the "small" phone in Apple's lineup is probably the size of the iPhone 6 Plus, if I had to guess, right?
01:43:58 ◼ ► I know. They've done it for, what, five years now, at least with the regular size phone?
01:44:12 ◼ ► And then they said, "You know what? From now on, every year they're just going to get a little bit bigger."
01:44:22 ◼ ► And I was like, "Okay, well, the 7 was kind of small now that I look at it, so it can get a little bit bigger."
01:44:47 ◼ ► But I'll have both phones for some period of time so I can hold them up to each other and see what the difference is.
01:44:55 ◼ ► But what am I going to do? There's no mini for me to buy and I wouldn't want to buy it anyway.
01:45:04 ◼ ► If you're wondering why you're buying the Pro, do you really need that Pro processor or whatever?
01:45:08 ◼ ► No, probably not, but I do really want those three cameras because I use my phone as a camera a lot.
01:45:15 ◼ ► But we should talk about the weight. Poor Marco, he's lifting all these weights. He's working out.
01:45:19 ◼ ► But the extra grams they added on these phones, I don't know if he's going to be able to take it.
01:45:23 ◼ ► Remember how nice it was last year, one year ago, when the 15 Pro came out and it had saved some weight?
01:45:29 ◼ ► And we were all talking about how nice those phones felt compared to the bricks of the previous ones.
01:45:53 ◼ ► So it's not pushing back into the 200s. It's not as heavy as the 14 Pro was, but it has gained some back.
01:46:12 ◼ ► And I do wonder where that weight has gone. I don't think it's that graphite sheet that's really making the difference, right?
01:46:25 ◼ ► I think, based on seeing the insides of these phones and all the rumors, that all these phones, all the 16 and 16 Pro,
01:46:33 ◼ ► they all have a slightly bigger battery, although 16 Pro Max is up for grabs based on the rumors that we talked about ages ago, right?
01:46:39 ◼ ► But Apple didn't really brag about the battery life. If you look on their site, they'll say,
01:46:43 ◼ ► "Yeah, you get an extra two hours of video time," and so on and so forth, but in the presentation, there was no graphs, no numbers,
01:46:48 ◼ ► not even a Bezos chart saying, they did say the Pro Max's best battery life ever, whatever, but like,
01:46:53 ◼ ► I'm holding out hope that part of the weight and size gain on the 16 Pro that I'm going to buy is the bigger battery,
01:47:01 ◼ ► because the logic board thing and everything else in there is shrinking over time to make more and more room for larger,
01:47:08 ◼ ► now mostly L-shaped batteries, so I'm hoping that's a benefit, and I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't really...
01:47:15 ◼ ► Well, they did say the batteries are both larger. They just didn't say how much larger.
01:47:20 ◼ ► Right, they just didn't say capacity-wise. The iPhone 16 is 170 grams, so again, 16 Pro, 199, plain old 16, 170.
01:47:28 ◼ ► If you want a light phone, get the one that has one fewer camera and is smaller and is made of aluminum.
01:47:32 ◼ ► And much better colors. This is still made of titanium, grade 5 titanium, which, John, tell me,
01:47:42 ◼ ► Is 5 the top grade? Is 5 the highest number? Dr. Drang tooted with a list of 37 grades of titanium.
01:47:49 ◼ ► I don't think there's an order like 2 is better than 1, you know, like I don't think they get better as the number goes up.
01:47:57 ◼ ► You can look at it yourself. It's basically just like how much nickel, how much aluminum, how much...
01:48:06 ◼ ► I don't know how they come up with these things, but anyway, there's at least 37 of them, if you want to see.
01:48:14 ◼ ► Good to know. With regard to cooling, "iPhone 16 Pro maximizes thermal capacity with a new machined chassis
01:48:20 ◼ ► made of 100% recycled aluminum, which is bonded to the titanium frame using solid state diffusion.
01:48:27 ◼ ► It's combined with a graphite clad aluminum substructure, creating an innovative architecture
01:48:41 ◼ ► Hey, graphite sheet. Hey, every year they said it's going to happen. No vapor chamber yet, but this was the year.
01:48:47 ◼ ► Graphite sheet, improved cooling, they're doing something. Like I said, they did something on the 16.
01:48:52 ◼ ► And they did something even more on the 16 Pro. We'll see how it works out, but it's good to see them addressing this.
01:48:58 ◼ ► Year over year. Every year they're making a new phone, they're trying to make it a little bit better, addressing the flaws in their previous model.
01:49:12 ◼ ► Rumors even nailed the name. I got to give props on that, because it's so hard to get these names because it's marketing, you know, like the supply chain doesn't need to know the name,
01:49:19 ◼ ► but I guess it gets printed on the packaging at some point. So yeah, they nailed it. Desert titanium is the brown, and I have to say, looking at both Apple's product shots,
01:49:26 ◼ ► and all the videos of the hands-on area, it does not look brown. So that spy shot we have where it looked like brown, brown, brown, obviously different lighting colors look different or whatever.
01:49:36 ◼ ► Desert titanium, like all the Pro phones, looks so pale that you're like, "Is that the white one? Is that the gray one?"
01:49:44 ◼ ► Like you have to look at the rim around like the edge of the phone or the little circles around the cameras to even tell that it's supposed to be the brown one.
01:49:54 ◼ ► Yep. Yeah, it's gray, more gray, less gray and brown. But anyways, let's talk about the A18 Pro, which is the chip for the iPhone's 16 Pro.
01:50:07 ◼ ► This is a 20% faster GPU than the A17 Pro. It's two times faster ray tracing than the A17 Pro.
01:50:16 ◼ ► The CPU broadly is 15% faster and uses 20% less power than the A17 Pro. It has larger caches versus the A18 non-Pro.
01:50:26 ◼ ► It has programmable ML accelerators, which is very fancy. Advanced media features, a new video encoder, an image signal processor.
01:50:34 ◼ ► Yeah, so at this point in the presentation, the question everybody had and I had as well was, even though they were listing all this stuff, I'm like, "Well, wait a second.
01:50:41 ◼ ► So we got two new chips this year, A18 and A18 Pro, neither one of which has been in a phone before.
01:50:48 ◼ ► All built on TSMC's M3e process. The question was, especially when they said like 6-core GPU versus 5-core GPU or whatever,
01:51:12 ◼ ► They obviously share a ton, but the A18 is not just an A18 Pro with parts that don't work, as far as anyone has been able to tell.
01:51:21 ◼ ► Maybe when they cut these things open, we'll see. I guess it's conceivable they could be, but there are enough differences that I think that can't possibly be true.
01:51:30 ◼ ► Well, so they said that the A18 Pro has larger caches. So I don't know what the structure is. Is the cache like a separate layer?
01:51:40 ◼ ► Well, that's not the thing that puts it over the edge. So here, let me list the differences. What does the A18 Pro have over the A18?
01:51:47 ◼ ► On the CPU side, it's got, yes, larger caches. And there you can go, "Okay, well maybe they're just like some of the cache RAM is turned off or whatever."
01:51:54 ◼ ► Probably not the way it does because the "S RAM" that's on the SOC is very expensive and complicated and they usually don't disable portions of it, but whatever.
01:52:03 ◼ ► Next generation ML accelerators, we talked about this before, these are instructions, like ARM instructions for doing media type things, that they're saying are only on the A18 Pro.
01:52:14 ◼ ► Instructions, the ability to execute instructions, the execution units for them, the ability to decode and execute those instructions is not a thing that you tend to, like, "Oh, it didn't."
01:52:23 ◼ ► "Some part of the CPU didn't work, so we'll just disable those instructions." Like, it's not a separate unit. This is part of the CPU.
01:52:29 ◼ ► This makes me think, the CPU cores are literally different between the A18 Pro and A18. Now again, you could have them just disabled in software, you know, in like firmware or whatever, just like blow some fuses or whatever.
01:52:41 ◼ ► That is technically possible. I'm not saying it's technically impossible, but I don't think it's anything that Apple has ever done.
01:52:46 ◼ ► And then the GPU, which is what I was making people suspect, 6-core instead of 5-core, oh, it's easy just when one of the GPU cores is bad or whatever.
01:52:54 ◼ ► But then we get to this whole section, which is ProRes video encoding, new image signal processor, and USB 3.
01:53:01 ◼ ► That's a lot of chip real estate to be shipping in the A18 just turned off, because the A18 has none of those things, right?
01:53:08 ◼ ► You know, and because they're Pro features. If this is really the same chip with huge sections of it turned off and special features that disable parts of the SRAM caches on the chip and also disable the ML acceleration instructions, even though they work perfectly fine because I don't think that's the type of thing where you get bad yields and you get them turned off, right?
01:53:28 ◼ ► I think these are two different chips. Because of all this stuff, if it was just one or two of these things, you could think about it because there's so much, these are two different chips.
01:53:37 ◼ ► We'll find out when someone gets them slices off the top and looks at a picture of them. You'll be able to see, because this is stuff you can see, like the ProRes video encoder, the image signal processor, and the USB 3 thing, you'll be able to see where they are.
01:53:48 ◼ ► That's enough real estate where you'll be able to say, are these blocks on the A18 or are they only on the A18 Pro?
01:53:54 ◼ ► Either way, we'll find out, but I have to say the differentiation of what makes this a Pro chip versus non-Pro chip, I think they did it exactly right.
01:54:02 ◼ ► Because if you look at these features, you're like, I don't care about any of these. That shows that you don't care about the Pro features.
01:54:07 ◼ ► ProRes video, a lot of them are using it as a video camera. ProRes video, the faster speeds, yes it's a shame that the 16 still has incredibly slow speeds or whatever.
01:54:19 ◼ ► And yes, if you want the fastest game performance, you have to get the Pro phone, yada yada, what else is new, right?
01:54:24 ◼ ► By the way, we didn't talk about this before, but one continuing disappointing status quo is that the non-Pro phone still does not have ProMotion, which is probably already criminal and will get increasingly so as time moves on.
01:54:38 ◼ ► I know regular people don't care about 60Hz versus 120Hz, but eventually you just have to give it to them because it's like the baseline, it's table stakes, it's an $800 phone with a 60Hz screen.
01:54:55 ◼ ► The faster USB speeds, people are not copying huge video files via wire to SSDs off of their plain old iPhone 16s.
01:55:05 ◼ ► That's what a Pro phone is for. And kudos to Apple, they're Pro and non-Pro phones, you look at them and they're exactly the same except for this one has three cameras.
01:55:14 ◼ ► Why would I ever get a Pro one and they give you a bunch of reasons. And if those reasons don't appeal to you, it's because you're not in the market for a Pro phone.
01:55:21 ◼ ► So I think they managed to differentiate it despite the fact that the camera control and the action button are not exclusive to the Pro phone.
01:55:29 ◼ ► The hardware features, with the exception of that third camera, are not exclusive to the Pro phone and yet the Pro phone still looks very much like a Pro thing.
01:55:37 ◼ ► Let's talk photography. There's a 48 megapixel fusion camera at f/1.78. It's a second gen.
01:55:46 ◼ ► So what's interesting about this lens and everything, it sounds like the sensor and the optics are the same as the 15 Pro.
01:55:57 ◼ ► Well, with one exception, with the readout speed. So they called a second gen quad pixel sensor.
01:56:03 ◼ ► It sounds like the main and possibly only difference is faster readout, which has benefits, but it's the same pixel size, it's the same aperture.
01:56:12 ◼ ► And as the 15 Pro and the 14 Pro, same lens it seems. And so just the sensor, the 15 Pro added the quad pixel binning thing over the 14 Pro.
01:56:25 ◼ ► And now the 16 Pro is making faster readouts on that. So this is a good camera, but we're really not seeing massive year over year camera differences anymore the way we used to.
01:56:43 ◼ ► Yeah, the 2x readout is significant though. The 2x readout is basically, that's a new sensor.
01:56:48 ◼ ► And you may think, well, the readout is part of the sensor. How fast can you get the data off of that? It's all a big one, big sandwich thing.
01:56:54 ◼ ► And that makes a big difference because a lot of the features that are upgraded this year, like being able to do 4K 120 and everything, is because of the faster readout.
01:57:01 ◼ ► Or even just something as simple as when you take a RAW, how long is it before you can use your phone to take another picture?
01:57:08 ◼ ► You have to wait for the readout to go by. They don't have huge buffers like they do on big fancy cameras for you to lean on the button and get 30 frames per second or 100 frames per second or whatever in RAWs.
01:57:19 ◼ ► On the phones, when you take a RAW, it's like it thinks about it for half a second or whatever.
01:57:24 ◼ ► Two times faster readout is a big improvement to the ability to take a RAW and then quickly take another RAW.
01:57:29 ◼ ► So additionally, the UltraWide is now also 48 megapixel, which is a new development, is it not?
01:57:36 ◼ ► Yes, so that is brand new. The UltraWide has a substantial upgrade in its quality and sensor.
01:57:43 ◼ ► It is not the same giant sensor and big optics as the One X camera. It never has been and probably never can be because of things like physics.
01:57:53 ◼ ► But it is a substantial upgrade, which should be good especially for things like spatial video capture, which uses both of those sensors.
01:58:02 ◼ ► Indeed. The 5X telephoto is still 12 megapixels, but guess what baby? It's on the regular size phone now.
01:58:13 ◼ ► Which means, as far as I'm concerned, unless something weird happens in the next two days before I do a pre-order, I'm coming back baby.
01:58:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I know. I honestly was thinking about it. I feel like I could do big phone again, but the thing that drives me nuts about this phone, which I love the screen real estate, I really do.
01:58:36 ◼ ► Once I committed to the absolutely preposterous PopSocket lifestyle, it got fairly comfortable to hold.
01:58:43 ◼ ► The problem though is that for my hands, I can't go all the way across the phone and use it one-handed.
01:58:50 ◼ ► And I use my phone one-handed fairly frequently, and so that's what drove me nuts about it.
01:59:00 ◼ ► But yeah, I'm going to be going back to the regular size this year because the whole reason I went to the big one was for the 5X, which was exclusive to it in the 15.
01:59:08 ◼ ► But now in the 16, you can get the tetra prism in both phones, so I will be going back, crawling back to the regular size phone.
01:59:14 ◼ ► Anyways, later this year, it'll be updated with a two-phase shutter. Marco, what the hell does that mean?
01:59:22 ◼ ► I think this is an instance where it's just like a software thing that wasn't ready, like so much of iOS 18 software features.
01:59:30 ◼ ► I think that what they're trying to say is using the shutter button to press and then press like that.
01:59:38 ◼ ► So it's not like, obviously the camera control can do that, but it's a question of is there software support for it.
01:59:44 ◼ ► I do wonder if it's a situation where they didn't get the software ready enough unless they didn't want to release it in a state where there could potentially be accidental input or it wasn't clear where the half press was.
01:59:56 ◼ ► It's tricky for some people even with big camera buttons that have relatively huge amounts of travel, and the amount of travel that the camera control seems to have is much, much smaller than the amount of travel that the giant shutter button on a real camera has.
02:00:07 ◼ ► So maybe they're still working on that, but yeah, add that to the giant pile of things that are not ready on day one launch of this phone, software wise.
02:00:16 ◼ ► You can change the photographic styles after capture, which is a new development, and I think that's mostly software, but nevertheless it's a new thing.
02:00:26 ◼ ► It's a little bit of a hardware thing too, because the photographic styles is essentially like filters or whatever.
02:00:33 ◼ ► You used to be able to pick them and you'd apply them when you took the picture, so if you chose a black and white style and you took a picture, you got a black and white picture.
02:00:40 ◼ ► And if you changed your mind later and said, "Oh, I shouldn't have taken that picture in black and white," tough luck.
02:00:47 ◼ ► Now what they're doing is kind of like what you can do when you take a RAW where it just saves the sensor data and you can have different interpretations of it, but RAWs are huge.
02:00:57 ◼ ► So what they're doing is they'll let you take the picture, pick a photographic style, but after you take the shot, you can pick a different photographic style.
02:01:06 ◼ ► And the way they're doing this, they have vague descriptions of how could they possibly be doing this if they're not capturing RAW.
02:01:12 ◼ ► How are they getting back sensor information that they've already made a decision about?
02:01:16 ◼ ► My vague understanding from seeing people who have talked to Apple about this is they're essentially storing more layers of information, essentially like tone maps of like, "Okay, well here's the thing that we captured, sort of the baseline picture, you know, heek or whatever.
02:01:36 ◼ ► Like the things that the filters are going to affect, they save them as separate maps, probably also massively compressed.
02:01:41 ◼ ► And so then later, they can apply the filters by taking the original photo and one or more of those sort of tone maps that they captured, combining them, decompressing them into the full array of pixels, running the filter over them, recompressing the output and saving that or something like that.
02:01:58 ◼ ► And so it is kind of like, it's not compressed RAW, which is another thing, you just take a RAW but compress it, right?
02:02:04 ◼ ► This is kind of like lossy compressed RAW with more layers saved during capture so that you can apply more interesting filters after the fact.
02:02:12 ◼ ► It's a hell of a long way to go for a feature that I've never found appealing in any way whatsoever.
02:02:19 ◼ ► But maybe regular people love to apply these filters to their pictures and now it doesn't force you to, and I'm glad, it doesn't force you to decide up front what filter you're going to apply and then regret it later when you say, "Why are all the pictures in this year look like crayons?"
02:02:33 ◼ ► And it's because, oh, that was the time that I decided to pick a photographic style and apply it to every single picture I took for a year and it was a terrible mistake.
02:02:40 ◼ ► I bet a lot of people feel that way about a lot of their early Instagram pictures, right?
02:02:43 ◼ ► You know me, it's one of the reasons I love to have photos. Save the original picture and then edit to your heart's content but there's got to always be a button that says "Revert to original."
02:02:52 ◼ ► Do not destroy the original, it's like your negatives, right? Edit, modify, filter, crop, do whatever you want non-destructively.
02:03:00 ◼ ► Kind of like Aperture used to back in the day. And so that's what they're doing here, they're giving you increased non-destructive editing abilities without requiring you to save gigantic RAW photos every single time.
02:03:10 ◼ ► Yeah, this is great. There's a few reasons why RAW files are so much bigger than JPEGs or HEKS and now I guess JPEG XLs. Part of it is that it's saving a larger range of possible values compared to a JPEG which is limited to a certain visible range or whatever.
02:03:35 ◼ ► So part of it is like we're storing more precision, more depth. But a big part of why RAWs are so big is that they are literally uncompressed.
02:03:44 ◼ ► So they are in some cases totally uncompressed, in some cases losslessly compressed which is not that compressed.
02:03:53 ◼ ► There's a lot of middle ground that we're exploring now as an industry in terms of like let's compress the image perceptually the way JPEG historically has done.
02:04:03 ◼ ► Perceptual image compression, so it is lossy compression but just at a very high bit rate so to speak. So we're not losing too much that people would actually notice.
02:04:11 ◼ ► But still try to save more range of values and less processed values so that way we can do things like this.
02:04:19 ◼ ► And so what seems to be the case is whatever they're doing with the photographic styles, they're storing more data like that so that you can do these things after the fact.
02:04:30 ◼ ► And that is a great direction for photography to go because RAW files are great for what they are really for which is not your phone and not most people using them.
02:04:42 ◼ ► It's for certain professional contexts, they're great for that. But for most people, something that has lossy compression but that can store more ranges of values is potentially very useful.
02:04:54 ◼ ► This is all very good. And by the way, this section was presented by Della Huff who I feel like I recognized from somewhere I couldn't figure out where it was.
02:05:01 ◼ ► And like two years ago on Analog we had solicited good Instagram follows and she was one of the people that somebody had recommended.
02:05:08 ◼ ► And sure enough I've been following her on Instagram for years, had no idea that she was this person at Apple. So that's super cool.
02:05:18 ◼ ► So anyway, with regard to photos you made brief mention of it a minute ago Marco, iPhone 16 Pro supports JPEG XL.
02:05:26 ◼ ► This is a reading from MacRumors now. The iPhone 16 Pro models will support the JPEG XL file format according to code found in iOS 18.
02:05:33 ◼ ► Apple did not mention JPEG XL support during the event on Monday but this feature was rumored ahead of the launch.
02:05:44 ◼ ► So this is MacRumors saying, "We see the code, it's in iOS 18, it's definitely coming."
02:05:49 ◼ ► No mention from Apple, none whatsoever. When they rolled out Heek they made kind of a big deal about it and talked about it and said this is going to be a better image format and our photos are going to take it by default or whatever and JPEG XL absolutely did not get that treatment.
02:06:02 ◼ ► We will find out if there's JPEG XL anywhere in these phones, even if the code is in iOS 18. Will it appear in the UI? Will it be turned on by default? Will it be anything at all?
02:06:10 ◼ ► The JPEG XL hype was high in my heart and it did not get fulfilled in this event, which is a bummer.
02:06:20 ◼ ► But hey, you never know. Again, this was a weird event. Maybe it's just too techy for them to mention.
02:06:24 ◼ ► Maybe today's Apple wouldn't have mentioned the Heek thing either so that's one of the things I'll be checking for as iOS 18 rolls out and as iOS 18.1 and .2 and so on and so forth.
02:06:40 ◼ ► Indeed. For video there's 4K at 120 frames per second with HDR which they're calling cinematic slow motion which had a very cheesy but kind of funny little advertisement in the middle of this 90 minute advertisement.
02:06:58 ◼ ► With regards to audio, there are 4 studio quality "microphones" with a lower noise floor. You can now also for the first time do spatial audio capture during video recording.
02:07:08 ◼ ► You can do audio mix in voice memos. I believe that's the right marketing term where basically let's say if you had musical talent, which I don't, and you hummed a rhythm or a beat or something like that.
02:07:21 ◼ ► You can then put a second track on top of it and then you can sing the lyrics and you can separate the two of them.
02:07:28 ◼ ► And it'll play back your rhythm as you're singing the lyrics but you can separate them so that you can hear only the lyrics.
02:07:42 ◼ ► No, but if we all had very different talents than what we actually have it could be pretty useful to us.
02:07:52 ◼ ► It's amazing they can do it and I'm glad they're working on improving things like the microphone array and different ML processes and stuff.
02:08:03 ◼ ► That can often filter down to features or benefits that everyone can use even if they aren't songwriters or movie makers or whatever else.
02:08:21 ◼ ► I wonder if this is just like, "Well, we're going to can that app but just grab that code and throw it into voice memos."
02:08:25 ◼ ► Basically, yeah. I think they realized that everyone was using voice memos for this anyway.
02:08:33 ◼ ► $1,000 for the 128 gig Pro. $1,200 for the, I think it's 256 gig Pro Max if I'm not mistaken.
02:08:44 ◼ ► I kind of wish that they took the non-Max Pro up for 128. I know they're trying to draw a distinction and get you to pay for the storage.
02:08:52 ◼ ► I get it. But like, come on. Anyway, not that 128 is that bad. It's not as bad as it is on a Max.
02:08:59 ◼ ► This is another one of those things where they're just riding it out. It's like, "We love the distinction. Pro Max starts at 256.
02:09:05 ◼ ► The plain old Pro because it's not Max. It starts at 128. Makes perfect sense to me. Love that money."
02:09:10 ◼ ► Okay. I think it's been like five years of this, four years of this. It's time to maybe bump that.
02:09:16 ◼ ► Yeah. The iPhone 16 models, all the iPhone 16 models are equipped with 8 gigs of RAM for Apple intelligence.
02:09:27 ◼ ► Indeed. Then I had a small victory dance just for me. The millimeter wave 5G is still limited to the US iPhone 16 models, but it's still there.
02:09:38 ◼ ► There was rumbling and rumors that they were going to kill it in the iPhone 16, but oh no, it's still there.
02:09:44 ◼ ► So reading from MacRumors, all four iPhone 16 models offer millimeter wave 5G in the US, but other countries are still limited to sub-6 gigahertz 5G.
02:09:52 ◼ ► Apple hasn't rolled out millimeter wave 5G in other countries because other countries largely have yet to widely adopt the faster speeds.
02:09:58 ◼ ► There are millimeter wave networks in countries like Australia, China, and Japan, but it is not a standard that has been fully embraced.
02:10:04 ◼ ► In Australia, for example, millimeter wave is only available in select areas in major cities like Melbourne and Sydney.
02:10:11 ◼ ► For me, my beloved, don't call it a park bench picnic table, is right near a millimeter wave tower.
02:10:18 ◼ ► I actually went there today, although I didn't use my millimeter wave iPhone 15 on it, but nevertheless, it is incredibly fast.
02:10:27 ◼ ► I can pull 2.5 gigabits per second down to my cellular telephone, which is absolutely bananas.
02:10:36 ◼ ► All the iPhone 16 models sold outside the United States still have a physical SIM card tray.
02:10:50 ◼ ► All of the iPhone 16 models support Wi-Fi 7, which will be excellent in 3 or 4 years when we all start getting Wi-Fi 7 routers and access points.
02:11:09 ◼ ► "And oh, the processor is a little bit better, and the screens are a little bit bigger."
02:11:15 ◼ ► They make a new one of these phones every year, and they always try to make it a little bit better.
02:11:23 ◼ ► And you're looking at AirPods Max, and you're wondering if they're ever going to get updated, or you're waiting for the next Mac Pro.
02:11:32 ◼ ► Appreciate it even more if you wait 4 or 5 years between phones, because the advances accumulate.
02:11:37 ◼ ► And then when you get this phone, you're like, "Wow, this microphone is way better than it was 5 phones ago," or whatever.
02:11:45 ◼ ► Everybody else in the industry is already on Wi-Fi 7, but in Appleland, they take their time, and you are only going to get that update if they update the product.
02:11:56 ◼ ► But if there's no new insert product name here, you're not getting Wi-Fi 7 no matter what.
02:12:03 ◼ ► Yep. The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max have the same feature set, excepting the display size and battery, which is exactly what I love to see.
02:12:13 ◼ ► One of my favorite things -- no joke -- one of my favorite things is when there's parity between the two devices to the degree that there can be.
02:12:23 ◼ ► And like we had talked about earlier, there's also to the degree that there can be parity between the 16 and 16 Pro, which mostly amounts to chips and buttons.
02:12:41 ◼ ► Mac OS 15, iPad OS 18, and other updates will all be released on September 16th, four days before the new hardware is here.
02:13:15 ◼ ► Oh, sure. Sorry. So obviously none of us have ordered anything yet because as we record, we're two days ahead of time.
02:13:21 ◼ ► But we should all have our orders already ready in the store app so we should know what we're getting.
02:13:25 ◼ ► For me, I'm going to be doing a natural titanium half terabyte iPhone 16 Pro, not Macs.
02:13:35 ◼ ► And I haven't actually figured out what we're going to do for Erin, but probably the same thing, maybe a 256 version for her.
02:13:46 ◼ ► I'm going to get the white one, the 256, and Tiff looked at the upgrades and was like, "I don't need one."
02:14:13 ◼ ► So maybe she'll see mine and get NVS at some point, but I think she honestly just doesn't care.
02:14:31 ◼ ► Again, it's a nice incremental update. And as John was saying, over time, incremental updates do add up and it does become great.
02:14:39 ◼ ► But if you have a 14 or a 15 Pro and you're looking at the 16 Pro, it's not that different.
02:14:48 ◼ ► From the 15 Pro, it's almost not different at all with the exception of the camera control.
02:14:54 ◼ ► The 14 Pro, at least you get the USB-C and the lighter weight-ish and two generations of improvements in certain areas.
02:15:06 ◼ ► If you have a 15 Pro, the only reason we're doing this is because we're idiots and podcasters.
02:15:14 ◼ ► I'm doing it like those people who aren't allowed to buy individual stocks, so they have to get their investments on a regimented plan that's scheduled years ahead of time.
02:15:22 ◼ ► I'm going to buy this much stock. Every two years, I get a phone. That's how it happens.
02:15:27 ◼ ► And so, yeah, I'm not choosing based on the phone, although I have to say, like I said before, having a product that gets attention every single year and gets improvements every single year gives you the luxury, like I used to be able to do with the Honda Accords, to sit back and say, "Oh, here's the new X. Here's the new iPhone."
02:15:47 ◼ ► Every year when they come out, they're a little bit better, and you can look at them and you can say, "Am I feeling like I feel like I want one now? Do I want one now because there's something particularly appealing to me? Do I want one now because my current phone feels old?"
02:15:59 ◼ ► The luxury of a product that gets better every single year without fail and is always good means you can just sit back like Tif and say, "Do I think I'm going to get one this year? Eh, wait till next year."
02:16:17 ◼ ► Keep in mind also, the next year we have those rumors of the iPhone slim, which even if that might not be what everybody chooses, that's certainly going to be an interesting new thing to shake things up.
02:16:34 ◼ ► That's great, but the beginning of the year of Apple Intelligence is not going to actually be there.
02:16:39 ◼ ► And Apple Intelligence is being gradually started over the course of a large chunk of the year.
02:16:53 ◼ ► Like next September, we should check and say, "Has everything that Apple talked about with Apple Intelligence actually been released yet?"
02:17:00 ◼ ► So if you're thinking, "I've got to jump right now to get Apple Intelligence," I would say you don't.
02:17:09 ◼ ► If Apple Intelligence is your main driver for upgrading, you might want to wait till next year.
02:17:19 ◼ ► And even if they are, they're still going to be in a fairly beta-like status for most of the year.
02:17:26 ◼ ► And most of the excitement of Apple Intelligence is going to be, first of all, if it works, it's going to develop over time.
02:17:40 ◼ ► So honestly, I think this is a nice incremental upgrade, and if you want a new phone, get it.
02:17:45 ◼ ► But if you're saying, "I've got to get a new phone for Apple Intelligence," you don't need to rush on that.
02:17:57 ◼ ► No. I ordered AirPods, as I said. I preordered the AirPods. I was excited to do that, although their engraving feature was broken for the first ten minutes, frustrating me.
02:18:27 ◼ ► For reasons that I've stated before that probably aren't important to other people or are important to me, I get the black phone.
02:18:34 ◼ ► And it's not because I like the color black so much. I think the white one looks nicer.
02:18:38 ◼ ► It's because I actually use my phone to watch video a lot, and I want the surround to be black.
02:18:49 ◼ ► And maybe you don't care about that, but there's a reason televisions tend not to be white when you buy them.
02:19:10 ◼ ► I do not fill 256, but just like a month or two ago, I did have to delete a bunch of stuff.
02:19:20 ◼ ► So not only did they get me on one storage upgrade bump of 128 to 256, they're getting me on two.