551: Tickle Rock You

39:19almost no one is using the cable to transfer large amounts of data to or to or from their phone so it makes sense for the very few people that will use this port's amazing speeds it makes sense for them to have to buy a special cable to do that since the trade-offs to make that everybody's cable are not good enough and thunderbolt cables are expensive like obviously apples are extra expensive but even if you just go to mono price like they're just expensive because they have chips in them and they're complicated and you know they're they have to be made to fairly exacting standards to carry that bandwidth and the chips in the ends cost money so they it would add so much to the price of the phone it would be a very bad it's not like it would oh it's five dollars extra no it wouldn't be five dollars extra it would be like probably twenty dollars additional cost to apple and that's huge when you're talking about you know hundreds of millions of phones um the the iphone pro and well just the pro i guess is supposedly going to be smaller than the non-pro iphone 15 the difference isn't going to be huge but if you take a 15 and a 15 pro put them on top of each other the pro will be 0.02 inches shorter 0.05 inches less wide and 0.01 inches less deep the width and height difference is mostly due to thinner bezels on the screen you may not care about this but there's a subset of the smartphone buying or at least smartphone reviewing world that's obsessed with how big is the little tiny black border that doesn't have pixels in it on the front of my phone for me it's it's already so small that i'd no longer notice it but just fyi the iphone 15 pro will have the thinnest bezels ever on any phone and they'll probably brag about it and it's a little bit silly but you know that does let you pull in the edges of the phone because you you know that those bezels are just not wasted space but like if you can reduce them you can reduce the size of the phone so the 15 pro will be smaller than the 15 in those dimensions for that reason why will it be less deep like less thick um i don't know maybe they've got some other savings that they're going to talk about uh as for what the materials are uh titanium frame instead of being stainless steel on the pro phone marco hates his phone being too heavy titanium will be lighter than stainless steel but it will not be as light as aluminum probably when we talk about how light things are the same i guess the same the same volume of titanium is heavier than the same volume of aluminum, but titanium is stronger, so you can use less of it than you do aluminum for the same strength.

41:42So I'm not sure how Apple will do this trade-off, but let's leave it to the rumor mill. The rumor mill has the weight of these phones down to the gram. So supposedly the iPhone 15 Pro is 191 grams, whereas the 14 Pro was 206, so it saved 15 grams. By the way for reference the non-pro 14 is 172 grams so basically this is saying it's going to take it roughly halfway between the current pro and non-pro yep and the pro max is going to be 19 grams lighter it's going to be 221 and it was the old one was 240 grams so they get lighter but not as light as they would be if they use aluminum and as for the titanium frame in the invitation to this event it said the word wonderlust which is a play on words of wonderlust and the apple logo is made of little tiny gray grains of sand which if you don't know how what the rumors are about how they're going to use titanium may not make too much sense to you but what what the rumor is of how they manufacture the titanium frame on the uh on this new phone and how they do it on the apple watch ultra and everything is instead of the old method where you get a solid block of material and then you take a bunch of tools and you carve it out so you sort of carve out the little you know the shape of the the watch case or whatever with a series of drills and other things like these little computer controlled milling machines and then that waste material gets like melted down and reused or whatever the new method that the rumor is that they're using this new method which is basically 3d printing with metal so you take a bunch of metal powder that looks a lot like the gray sandy things in this apple logo and i don't know what the technology is it's probably something we can do with heat or whatever but they they you know in the same way a 3d printer sort of melts little bits of plastic and builds up a material from in layers you can do that with metal too and this is a manufacturing process that has become more and more popular in many different industries i'll put a link in the show notes to a uh i don't know how to pronounce his name it's zinger c-z-i-n-g-e-r the zinger 21c hypercar one of the things they tout about this this is a few year old hypercar is that a lot of the parts of this car are essentially 3d printed with metal and you may be like well who cares i don't i don't care how they make it whether they carve it out of metal or whether they sort of 3d print it by taking metal dust and laying it down later what do i care there's a big difference in the the manufacturing trade-offs when you carve something out of a block of metal it's actually a pretty complicated process apple's super duper good at it because they've been doing it for years and years but you have to get like a high-speed precision-moving spinning tool with a cutting blade into all those nooks and crannies so you can carve out the shape that you want.

44:23And that is non-trivial. It's not like you just say, okay, well, here's what the watch has to look like. Okay, CNC machine, make this shape. You have to sort of define the toolpaths to make sure the giant bulky tool thing doesn't bang into the edge when it's carving out one particular little thing. You have to say, how many passes am I going to take in which direction to reduce the amount of burrs you make and everything? It It is a complicated process and it has limitations. And of course you're, you know, cutting away half of the material that you then have to melt down and reuse. 3D printing with metal works kind of like 3D printing with plastic or resin or other things where you're just laying down the material that you want to use in exactly where you want to use it.

45:01And the big thing about 3D printing stuff is when you want to make a change, like, oh, we made this thing like for the car, we made this suspension arm, but it turns out there's a weak part in it. We think we need to bulk this up in this area. making a new version of that there are limitations to 3d printing too they're different than they are for for cnc milling but it's much easier to say oh here's a new revision just print me another one that's different whereas if you say okay well we've changed our mind here's a new model for the watch maybe you have to change the tool paths maybe you have to change entirely how you're carving out because you made a change that is no longer compatible with how you were carving out before because it just won't work for like which part you're milling out at which time or whatever so it is way easier to make changes and the second thing is the shapes that are available to you because you are sort of 3d printing it are it's a much wider range of possibilities so if you look at this hyper car and you look at like the suspension carriers if you don't know what like suspension components look like in a regular car they look fairly mechanical look like a bunch of kind of like you know little struts and arms and i-beams and spans of metal and flanges and stuff like that you look at those same things in this car and they look like bones they look like a pelvis bone on like a like a mammal right because they ask the computer hey here are the loads here's the load from the wheel here's the load from the suspension moving up and down here where all the pivot points are make me the thing that can handle those loads to some degree of tolerance but uses the least amount of material and is the lightest weight and the computer figures out what that should look like and unsurprisingly perhaps it ends up looking a lot like a bone and it's all kind of organic and blobby and you know gets thin and gets thicker in all the ways that it needs to to use the least amount of material for the you know the the thing they want it to do now i'm not sure if apple's gonna brag about any of that but that is the promise of this technology that you can make even more interesting shapes you can use less material and have lower weight but get the same or better strength by making shapes that it wouldn't occur to you to make if your if your main tool is like a milling machine that cuts straight lines and things or you know what i mean so i don't know that's a you know we didn't do it last time uh last show but this is the part of the of the year where we read way too much into an image an apple invitation but i have to think that at some point they're gonna have to talk about 3d printing titanium powder into really cool shapes maybe they're just doing it for the watch honestly i don't even know if they're already doing that for the apple watch ultra they might be but the watch is the perfect place to test it out because it's small maybe they did it on the little phone like the band around the phone and again people are like so what it's like it's a metal it's a metal strip on the outside of my phone do i care that it was 3d printed it's not a very complicated shape but i am excited about this technology if not this year then for the future because it does hold the promise to be super interesting for future apple products yeah it is fascinating this is all news to me i didn't realize you could basically 3d print metal like you were saying that that is surprising and i had no idea and there are other trade-offs like obviously you know it's it's not the same as a solid piece of metal and not you know like they're everything has different trade-offs but the the the different set of trade-offs opens up new possibilities oh and and speaking of possibilities what is the other possibility opened up by having a titanium band the possibility of having less visible fingerprints than stainless steel i know this really bothers a lot of people but shiny stainless steel yeah it shows fingerprints a lot uh and the rumor is that this titanium band will be more of a brushed finish and that will show fingerprints less they'll still be there you just won't be able to see them as evilly oh and they're gonna have a slightly more curved edge it's still flat on the sides but a little bit more of a curve curve on the top and the bottom edge you know i i mean when they say oh it's a new phone design regular people are really gonna have to squint this because they're they're rounded rectangles with flat edges right it's it's gonna be really hard to tell i mean i i think i think people are going to honestly i i think it'll be interesting you know i think people will have a big problem with the usbc change because everyone's going to have to rebuy their all their cables and everything and so i i think like non-nerds are going to really complain about that a lot um and and i think it will look new but not super new and so i think the the like you know the people who like you can never please are like why isn't this a newer design like they say that every single year even when it is a new design like those people are going to complain about it not looking different enough um so i i think i think they're actually kind of in for a a bit of a challenging environment in terms of like non-nerd public perception of these models through no fault of their own like it seems like they are actually rumored to be making some pretty substantial physical upgrades and i think the usbc for you know from our point of view as nerds is a huge upgrade for most of us in most ways um so but i but i think like it'll be interesting to see like the the non-nerd reaction here and and i think they have a bit of work to do like i think they're going to be faced with a bit of a challenge.

49:51And with Apple seemingly famously failing to read the room a lot of times in recent years, I wonder if they know that. I wonder if they are prepared for that kind of backlash for mostly superficial things that might be stronger this year than usual, even though from a nerd's point of view, these all sound like great upgrades. They have a couple tools in their pocket that we'll get to in a little bit. We're still in the physical changes part here. Oh, and by the way, before we leave the physical things, I wanted to mention for the slightly smaller screen bezels that we're getting possibly with the 15 Pro.

50:26Smallest ever. Smallest in the world. So, okay, this is a stupid hot take, despite everything I just said. But I don't want this. Like, I really – maybe – look, we'll see what happens when we get it. this doesn't sound good to me because already the phone is very hard to handle without creating touch input yeah yeah and if they if they shrink those bezels down even further that problem becomes worse you know there's a reason why on the ipad the screen doesn't go all the way to the edge not yet anyway and but look they they have the technology to make the ipad bezels thinner They could get closer than they do.

51:06But they, I mean, the bezels used to be huge on the iPad. Do you remember that? Of course. They were like an inch and a half. And obviously they're way, way smaller now. But yes, they could make them thinner and they choose not to on the iPad. Right. And I think part of the reason, I mean, obviously cost is always challenging there. But I think part of the reason too on the iPad is that you need to hold it somewhere. And so that kind of makes sense. on the phone obviously i think the case usage on the phone is is probably way higher as a percentage than the ipad um i think on the phone it's probably nearly 100 whereas the ipad it's probably you know well under half um at least when you if you don't count like you know apple's folios which are barely cases um but on the phone i worry about like that bezel being shrunk i think that will make things worse for both case and non-case users because case users the case will have less area to like grip onto the phone without masking out part of the screen from from being possible to easily touch you're kidding they're just going to mask out part of the screen they do not care existing cases mask out part of the screen even with the existing bezels right but but that's going to be a problem right and then secondly then people who use it without a case which i've actually i've been trying going caseless for about the last month or so just kind of to get used to it more and since my phone's already super scratched up on the screen for the sand that is not in my pockets, I figured what I would have to lose.

52:27So I have my wonderful fingerprinty stainless steel bands that I can't wait to get rid of. But going caseless, the problem of like there being no safe area to hold on the edge is actually a little bit magnified because you don't have the rim of a case to rest your finger on. So you're resting your finger around the physical edge of the phone and if those bezels get even thinner i i don't think first of all i don't think the current ones look bad and i don't i don't think that would be that big of a of an upgrade and how it looks uh day to day but i also don't think it would be easier to use in any way i i see that as kind of a competition among gadget reviewers but not i don't think any regular people are asking for this and i think it would actually make our lives worse well i mean it's it's the naked robotic core theory like you can always add bezel by having a thicker case that is offset by more but you can't remove it so give give us you know apple wants to give us the naked robotic core and it has nothing on it that it doesn't need to have on it and you can add to it whatever you want um and honestly like the bezels are smaller than they were but they're already so small the difference is like a millimeter or less than a millimeter and you know it's it's bragging rights and maybe they'll brag about it but already on the 14 pro with a case on it i very frequently have the annoying experience that i'm when i'm watching something like usually like i'm watching like a video in landscape and somehow some fat fleshy part of one of my fingers finds its way onto the screen like i don't even feel it it's like i didn't even realize i touched it but all of a sudden the video like skips forward or the overlay comes down or something terrible happens i'm like i didn't wait oh some part of my hand must have touched the phone and and to be clear listeners john is not a thick man no certainly not no but i have all i have old flabby skin but i don't know you know it's like it's amazing it amazes me that it happens but here's the thing the solution is not oh put thicker bezels on it i think the solution other than getting a case that is offset by more is what the ipad you know bragged about doing and still tries to do but the iphone seems to do very poorly although i think it also has this feature which is what they call you know finger you know touch rejection palm rejection finger rejection where the OS tries to figure out, does that seem like an accidental touch or an intentional touch?

54:40I believe the iPhone already does this and so does the iPad. It's just a question of how good is it at figuring out what is accidental? And maybe it's something in a recent, in the recent OS update or something that rejects my touches less intelligently because I feel like it should know like when I'm watching a video and holding it in landscape and there's this vague squishy touch to the upper right corner of the screen that's just like the palm of my hand or something or part of my finger. so i'm i'm not worried about the smaller bezels causing a problem with that and i i do think it's in line with the naked robotic core thing i do think it is a little bit silly i don't you know i don't have any complaints about the bezels but if you can make the phone smaller that's a naked robotic win right because now if you really want the bigger size if you really want the bigger size just get a thicker case to put on it so we'll see um we'll see if they mention it at all other than in passing or if they do brag about it as much as uh you know a certain segment of the reviewing population seems to be excited about it but one thing that's not getting smaller the thing that i hate the stupid camera bump i still think they need to revisit that design i think it is outgrown it is like a grotesquerie of itself there every other phone has found some other way to incorporate all of the you know because they have to have the cameras like what's the reason we buy these yeah you have big cameras to take up a lot of room but they're they're still sticking with a design that was based on the idea that the cameras would be in the corner of the phone they've long since taken up more than half the width of the phone and now they're protruding even farther and nothing about the cameras on the 15 pro or pro max is going to change that the bump is going to be even bigger i'm kind of annoyed by it not that just the fact that it's a bump i would feel better if it was full width so many other phones do that in the android world just make it full width so it's not like a wobbly you know corner on a table or whatever obviously it's so big now that it doesn't really wobble that much anymore but like just just go whole hog just make it full width just rearrange the lenses do something but no they're going to be in the same arrangement the bump is even bigger whatever we'll we'll deal with it um the other physical change that uh you know we talked about ages ago is the action button where where once there was a little switch for what the ring silent switch whatever the hell apple calls it i think you dig your little fingernail in there and you move that switch back and forth that switch is gone and in its place is an action button which is just you know a rare thing for apple adding a new button uh and it will be you know configurable in the os to do all sorts of different things or whatever but just a plain old push button and by the way below it as we discussed months ago just plain old volume buttons one button for up one button for down the rumor was they were going to make a single button that didn't move and it was like you know haptic and blah blah that plan apparently got scrapped according to the rumor mill and it would just be plain old volume up and volume down buttons but there will be an action button above it that you'll be able to configure to do stuff and i think that's pretty cool yeah this sounds like a really good kind of like you know it'll probably mostly be used by nerds, let's be honest, in terms of changing from the defaults.

57:31But that's a really good nerd feature. What do you think the default will be? I think the default will be mute, to match what everyone has already grown accustomed to. But I think what many people will change it to will be things like launch a particular camera app or launch the iOS camera or maybe flashlight. Things like maybe one of the, if you use accessibility zoom frequently or stuff like that. I think it will be very frequently used by kind of the ios power user community and and i think if i had to guess the most common non-default setting people would choose will be to launch the camera app well i mean people the nerds will have it connected to a shortcut probably yeah god knows what they'll do yep uh yeah so the on the pro max only the rumor is that's where we get our periscope camera and uh supposedly it is a 3x to 6x optical zoom with the periscope camera obviously the pro max has more room inside it for all these lenses that will be laying lengthwise inside the case uh i just don't think there's physically room for that to be in the 15 pro i don't think they're just trying to do it for market segmentation we'll see when they show us like the cutaway of how big it is but all of the mock-up cutaways make me think yeah there's not room for that in the non-max phone it's just it's physically large um so yeah maybe casey will be getting a giant phone because he's just got to have that sweet sweet uh 3x 6x optical zoom i had to say though i think in apple's very first periscope camera, the optical quality at either 3X or 6X or anything in between is not going to be great.

58:58No, because it's already not great with the 3X lens that's laid out in the conventional way. I don't know anything about the details of how this is laid out, but I would assume that it would be probably a compromise in sensor size if you're laying it out that direction. What you're getting is more room for the optics and more reach optically, and that has its uses. you know that's going to be really great in certain situations but i'm guessing like the the light gathering ability of those sensors is going to be i'm guessing a very small sensor and you know very low sensitivity relative to the other ones now the sensor the sensor will be big because i think the sensor is still flat there's like a prism that that projects it down into it oh flips it back around yeah but the problem is just like any kind of zoom lens when you're going through lots of lens elements and you're zooming in a lot of the app the maximum aperture is not going to be yeah it's like i'm sure it's going to be you know obviously things don't match equivalently between different sensor sizes but i'm guessing you know in in like full frame terms it's going to be like f8 probably like minimum or maximum whatever um so yeah i'm guessing that's going to be awesome in well-lit situations um but i i would not expect that to be useful in in low light i mean i don't know how awesome it'll be here's the thing it's going to be better than digital zoom because that's what it's competing with because no iphone has anything past 3x and this will go up to 6x real like non not you know when we say digital zoom we say well just take the picture that's what we're talking before just take the picture that you got on the sensor and just zoom those existing pixels but the the 6x will say no i can project a 6x picture onto the sensor right so that is actual optical zoom not a digital enhancement and no iphone has ever had that reach and i think the reach that is the feature it's not going to be the quality of the pictures it's gonna be the fact that you can even do that when you're trying to get you know your kid at the elementary school assembly and you're five rows back and you want to get your kids so you can actually recognize their face and it doesn't look like an oil painting of a bunch of kids you know uh yeah 6x that's going to be a big improvement over what it was before and the 3x camera was bad especially in low light and the 6x camera is also going to be bad in low light but it's better than 3x you you will get more reach you can get more shots than you can maybe it was an outdoor assembly in bright sunlight you'll get a decent picture but you know they're going to talk about it and they're going to brag about it and uh i do like the direction of making the cameras better um i just do wonder what it will take for that to trickle down to a phone that's not gargantuan uh speaking of that little gigantic uh sensor bump area thing on the back of your phone supposedly they improved the lidar scanner back there as well which i mean if you haven't used one of those home design apps that lets you scan your room or whatever you maybe you don't care about the improved lidar sensor there is a very vague again this is software-based rumor so you got to take a lot of grains as all this is very vague rumor about the new phones having the ability to capture spatial photos for vision pro like that you would take a photo and i don't know we use multiple lenses and the lidar sensor to make it like a depth map or who knows that again anything software based you really have to just say that could just be someone's fantasy but uh but the improved lidar scanner that's a hardware thing so that's probably real but it may just be a matter of you know that part getting better over time so of course they're going to use the better sensor you know whatever whatever.

1:02:05uh base storage uh on the pro phones is going to be 256 instead of 128 which is what it was previously uh and the the top tier storage you can get for how much flash is going to be two terabytes up from one terabyte uh that's going to cost you a pretty penny uh and the ram is going to be eight gigabytes uh as opposed to the 14 pro and pro max where it was six gigabytes um the base storage going up let's see when we get to the price uh that's not magic they're just going to charge you more just kind of sucky uh because you know the base storage should go up at the same price but that's not the apple way so we'll deal with that well at least i'll be i'll be happy with the base model because that's i always get 256 there you go um well again it's like when they on the mac pro where they just cut off the base model right that's pretty much what they're doing here so the battery there was a bunch of rumors about the battery being substantially better because they were going to use stacked technologies diagram it's in the show notes i don't know or in the notes that i'm looking at that may or may not be in the actual thing but it's from various rumor websites the idea is that if you look at a battery in cross section it's like a big rectangle but inside there is like a jelly roll of battery crap like and the jelly roll on the edges is rounded and so all that space in the corners where like the jelly roll is rounded but the container is rectangular there's wasted space in the corners so stack battery technology is it goes back and forth like a snake you know left right left right left right and it fills in the rectangle more evenly without wasting space in the corners like the jelly roll version would and so like and this is what's going to allow us to essentially have more battery in the same area on the new phones but then the rumor was never mind that didn't work out for this year it's going to be next year take take that we'll find out right but then we have the actual rumors of the batteries which of course leak like crazy here is the exact milliamp hours of the pro and pro max battery the iphone 15 pro 3650 milliamp hours iphone 15 pro max 4862 milliamp hours and here is the improvement.

1:04:02That is 12 % larger than the 14 Pro on the Pro phone and 11 % larger than the 14 Pro Max. So these are both double digit increases, 12 and 11 % over last year. Is that because they're using stacking technology? Or are they just bigger batteries? We don't know. But those are the milliamp hour numbers like down down to the, you know, these are exact specs. It'll be very easy to check these when the phones come out. I'll be interested to see that they nail this exactly. But anyway, bigger batteries, essentially 10 % bigger batteries. That's good. And remember everything else we said, the SoC is going to use less power.

1:04:33The support chips are using less power. The screen, I think it's basically the same as it was and bigger battery. So that all bodes well. Oh, and speaking of things that kill battery, another question mark item is 8K video recording. Presumably the SoC could handle it. And now you have Thunderbolt. So you could actually get an 8K video off there in some reasonable amount of time. Maybe they'll do it. Honestly, I don't know how much value there is in 8K video recording. are there a lot of 8k video workflows that people are using with iphones with as opposed to their you know giant red cameras or whatever we'll see uh it would be a good bragging right interesting thing and i believe the hardware will be capable of it so i guess it's kind of a question of whether apple wants to do that or not wait what's the resolution are the do they have enough megapixels for that i don't think we do so i think oh maybe if you if you go from 48 yeah but but the 48 has suction asterisk on it though i i don't know that's that's a little pushing it i think we'll see yeah i mean like yeah it's it's of questionable value i feel like both because of the 48 megapixel sensor and also because like those are big files regardless of thunderbolt like how much space i guess you can get the two terabyte one i don't know i feel like if you're getting a two terabyte iphone to run ak video just get a real camera crying out loud um charging uh so wired charging is going to go up to 35 watts where previously it was 20 to 25 watts mag safe charging supposedly going to go to 20 watts where previously was 15 and it will support chi 2 charging chi 2 chi 1 was limited to 7.5 watts and chi 2 will go up to 15 watts now to be clear so i don't know i've only read brief bits here and there do i understand correctly that chi 2 is basically mag safe it doesn't seem like it from the watts because mag safe is supposedly going to go up to 20 watts but chi 2 is stuck down at 15 so they don't seem like the magsafe seems to have something extra to it if these rumors are to be believed we'll see um but anyway just it will have chi 2 so if you buy chi 2 charging accessories the the pro and pro max will support it the colors are the same old exciting colors that you can imagine the pro phone having how about these deep blue space black titanium gray and silver no gold this year bluish gray dark gray medium gray light gray yeah pretty much yeah so in our document i have a picture of them these are the actual phones this is not a mock-up like this is wait this is these are the it's like so these are the real camera bumps and everything like this yeah this is these are the phones yeah god man the leaks are nuts i know these are bananas but anyway look at the colors aren't you blown away by these pro colors wow i mean i don't i don't understand why they have to be so boring hmm i i made man that that gray one looks good but oh how about that gray one i mean they have they have black gray and silver and let me tell you the black one is not black so they basically have three different kinds of gray or even the blue one this looks like car colors it does your car's available in dark gray medium gray light gray and bluish gray yeah the pro that the the the colors of the pro phones are not getting exciting this year that is the headline again these these pictures could be wrong and also the color as we know colors look very different in different lighting conditions so we'll see when this thing these things come out i know here's the exciting part though we mentioned that the cables that come with these things color match charging cables two things about them one they're going to be braided uh so if you've gotten what things come with braided cables now i think i have a braided cable that connects my monitor yeah all the pro stuff comes with it yeah and i think some other accessories that apple sells these days come with braided cables but anyway it's like kind of a woven fabricy thing instead of uh rubber or plastic over the the sheath of the cable it makes it less like you know when you get a cable apple does a good job of this because they wrap them in circles but if you get like a cable for a cheap accessory out of a box and it's like wrapped back and forth with like a twisty tie around it right and it's kinked and you take it out and it doesn't straighten out it's still got all the kinks of how it was in the box that's because the outside of these cables are made of plastic or rubbery plastic type stuff and they hold those kinks braided cables do not hold the kinks they're more supple when you unwind them they just unwind and lay flat it's just a nicer experience people also think they're more durable i'm not so sure about that because fabric you know woven casings do wear away from friction and stuff but whatever people like them better they feel nicer and it's kind of a fad and the color matching is the thing that apple is doing if you buy a deep blue iphone or a space black iphone or whatever you'll get a cable that is color matched to your phone it may be hard to tell with the pro phone but they are doing that and it's a nice you know nice addition and the cables are supposedly going to be a little bit longer than they were last year not a huge amount longer but a little bit which is nice so a couple things here first of all i adore the braided cables i'm really being genuine when i say that i really think they feel great they seem to me like they're more durable that may not be true but they seem like it i love their braided cables secondly can you imagine if they just chose one color and we all just kind of assumed they were color matched but because these grays are so damn close to each other can you imagine if they just shipped one told us it was color matched but in reality it's just all the same damn gray like would we actually be able to tell the difference like maybe maybe all the leaks for the cables are just the same color and different lighting right right oh yeah it's gonna be difficult if you have two cables in the house like one is deep blue and one of them is space black like to be able to tell them apart it's like trying to tell is this thai navy or black is this titanium gray or silver and then finally price increase uh yeah maybe 100 to 200 more than last year uh almost entirely attributable to the fact that they took out the base storage and of course flash prices don't go down year over year why would why would they be able to put more storage at the same price anyway uh in case you were wondering if the price of the pro phones would keep going up yep uh and related to that there are some rumors swirling again this is not a hardware thing so you never know how this is going to go rumors swirling about ultra branding for the phone maybe these won't be called the 15 pro and pro max one of them maybe one of them will be the 15 ultra obviously apple uses the ultra branding on their soc and on the watch now is this the time for the ultra branding to come to the phone to give them an excuse to charge even more money for the one with the periscope camera this is not something that can leak it's in marketing this stuff pretty much never leaks So this could just be idle speculation, but it's a thing to watch for.

1:10:52Do they end up calling anything ultra or not? I mean, I'm going to say it makes sense. I mean, obviously, as I said earlier, it's a fool's errand to try to predict Apple's product naming schemes because they never make sense. We justify them retroactively once we hear the names, but guessing Apple's names is extraordinarily difficult and almost never works. But this would make sense. The term Pro Max is a mouthful, and it's kind of a ridiculous term. I think it would make a lot of sense to just call the phones the regular and then Pro and Ultra. So the Ultra would just be the big one? That's how I would do it.

1:11:31If I was going to do this, I would say iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Ultra. And that would just be the new name replacing the name Pro Max. But you're forgetting about the Plus. Oh, God. it's so bad i have one right here i'm the only one who bought one they're not dozens there's one of us there is one yeah we never know what they're going to do with naming but i agree that pro pro max is a mouthful and also it's it's like they made it worse for themselves as they always do because there's socs that have pro and max suffixes but never together there is like the m2 pro and the m2 max but there is no m2 pro max and of course max sounds like macs it's a real mess pro max is just needs to go i'm not sure like that's why i like the fact that it's the iphone 14 and the 14 plus because the plus is the bigger version of the 14 so i don't know what they're going to do with ultra or if they do anything with it we'll see and speaking of the 15 and the plus that's the next uh set of rumors here so the you know iphone 15 and the plus the rumor is they will make an iphone 15 plus which will just be a you know the bigger version of the iphone 15 uh they're sticking to the thing where the 15 doesn't have the a17 and it has last year's soc has an a16 in it to save apple money so those brief years we had where the the pro and non-pro phones have the same soc it doesn't look like they're coming back anytime soon uh but the good thing is that the iphone 15 and the 15 plus will have the dynamic island which means you'll be able to see sports scores and uh stuff like that when you're using another app um it will have usbc just like the pro but no thunderbolt is the rumor the rumor is the non-pro phones will have a usbc port but you get what do you get usb 2.0 speeds is the rumor this may be difficult to suss out from hardware but just to remind everybody usb 2.0 is 480 megabits that is 1.2 percent as fast as thunderbolt thunderbolt is 40 gigabits in all fairness as stated earlier most people just use the port for charging i know so for the non-pro phone to be limited to the same speed that to date every single iphone has always been limited to i think that's reasonable i don't think it is because they could put usb3 in there it would still be a thin cable it would still be a cheap cable just give us usb3 speeds usb 2.0 speeds in 2023 on a phone that's going to cost as much as the iphone 15 is inexcusable i feel like but you know whatever people won't notice i don't think it'll actually be an issue i just think from a technical perspective it is as shameful as there are ram prices well and and you know it's almost certainly like you know they don't they don't really need to do this it's definitely for market segmentation but i would rather like there are features that are currently on the pro phones that i would love to see in the non-pro phones and if they have to do stuff like this to give us those better features that more people will benefit from like display enhancements that's fine i i would take this trade off you know this is a good good segmentation anyone who's going to be using it as a pro camera they want to be buying the pro versions and generally those people do buy the pro version so i think this is fine but sometimes people need to get videos off the phone even when they're not using pro stuff but anyway we'll see if they ever change that but like the usb 2.0 speeds like and eventually this is going to be one of those embarrassing things that apple needs to change maybe not this year they'll get away with it this year probably they'll spin it because everyone will mostly be distracted by the shape of the port but but again it's like again to put us in perspective this is literally the speed of every iphone that's been released to date like it's not like they're making it slower like it's it's the speed that all iphones have always been but people have to wait for videos to come off their phones yeah but no one does that anymore all right anyway um we'll have the 48 megapixel camera like basically if you want to think of what is the iphone 15 non-pro going to be like it's going to be a lot like a iphone 14 pro slightly decontented and different so it'll have the 48 megapixel 1x camera sensor although interestingly the rumor is that this 48 megapixel sensor will be smaller than the 15 pros 48 megapixel one x camera sensor so maybe they're using the one from the 14 pro in the 15 and then the 15 pro gets a new sensor that's slightly bigger we'll see if they talk about that still no promotion on the 15 which some people are really angry about but honestly if you want to do like intentional segmentation regular people don't notice 120 hertz honestly like again like usb 2.0 speeds it will eventually be embarrassing but it has way longer runway before it becomes embarrassing that at 60 hertz because usb 2.0 speeds are super old uh 60 hertz versus 120 120 just came out on phones like a couple years ago so i think they have a little bit longer to keep that as a segmentation issue one thing that that as far as i can tell there have been no rumors on either way is whether the non-pro 15 will have an always-on screen have we heard anything about that no because i feel like that's uh it's going to have physically i think basically the same screen hardware as the 14 pro but that type of choice is the thing that apple could basically do in software to segment so i don't think anyone's been willing to say or not i think it could obviously because if you look at the guts of the 15 it's like the guts of the 14 pro and it has an always on screen see i'm gonna guess i'm gonna guess no because what whatever type of oled they used that got us promotion maybe that type is required for them to do always on in the same way that they've been doing it there it's gonna have that type like the screen will be the same screen as in the 14 pro oh but But with promotion just disabled in software?

1:16:48Promotion is a display driver issue. It's not just the screen. I feel like it can't do 120 hertz. I think it could do always on screen, but I think that's going to end up being a software product segmentation choice. Because all the rumors about the screens, even on the 15 Pro, the rumor is the screen is essentially the same screen as the 14 Pro. There's no screen update rumors. It's basically the same screen. It's a great screen. Same maximum brightness. There's no real complaints about the screen. other than they'll have thinner bezels on the Pro. I hope they do always on. I'm not holding my breath on it, but I hope they do.

1:17:22Because again, for the same thing I was saying earlier about the Dynamic Island being limited to only the Pro phones for only one year, it kind of hurts software adoption. There's a lot of cool software capabilities that you get with an always on screen. Not only do you get standby mode, standby works on the phones that don't have always on, but it sucks. Like if you're going to use standby, you really want an always on screen. And that's a cool feature that I would love to have more apps invest in and more of the software ecosystem invest in that and everything. So I'm hoping that they bring Always On to the non-pro phone this year, mostly for standby, but also just because it just makes it a better product for a lot of people.

1:17:57So I'm hoping for that, but I don't think it's very likely. Well, it could definitely support it because the battery in these things, here we have the exact miliamp numbers for the 15 3877 that is 15 bigger than it was in the 14 non-pro and it is also 5.8 bigger than the 15 pro's battery so the 15 will have a bigger battery than the 15 pro presumably because the 15 pro has more space taken up by camera crap right because remember the the regular 15 just has two cameras and it's way small like that whole gigantic mound is way smaller so bigger battery and this has the a16 in it which is not three nanometers remember it's going to be quote unquote four nanometers which i think is just an enhanced version of the five nanometers it's the a16 it's the processor that's in the 14 pro now right so i'm not sure how this is going to work out because the 15 pro has a three nanometer soc which is going to probably end up using less power but then the 15 has a bigger battery maybe it'll be a wash uh we'll see and then the 15 plus will have a 4912 milliamp hour battery which is 12 percent larger than the 14 plus and one percent larger than the 15 pro max wow 15 pro max got a big battery i feel like that's still going to be the battery champ because remember it's got the better soc uh and you know a similar size battery charging same type of deal supposedly 35 watts charging where previously was 20 to 25 mag safe might still be 20 watts uh and it'll have q2 charging at 15 watts instead of 7.5 and then the colors might have some actual colors here so this is a picture of the colors the colors are supposedly black yellow the product red thing blue purple starlight and again no gold and in this picture the black actually looks black on the iphone 15 not you know space gray or whatever yeah the the non-pro black usually does really look black and you know you know non-pro if they use the word white it usually does does look white although they've been using they've been doing starlight in recent years is is this is that the yellow that looks like that looks like almost nothing yeah i think that's the yellow again these pictures are taken with questionable white balance we don't know if these are final things we don't need these are these are you know leaks from inside factories that you know we may or may not put these in the but you know anyway these these are the things that are leaking obviously the color names themselves other than product red are probably not going to be what they're called and i i hope this is an under representation of these colors because this looks so boring and so bland i mean it could be 100 It could just be 100 % wrong.

1:20:24I hope so. I'm sure these are real physical devices, but I think they do lots of different color tests. You know what I mean? I have the yellow 14 Plus here. The yellow that they ship mid-cycle with the 14 series is very pale. If you look at the back, it's a very pale yellow. But this picture of the alleged new phones, the one that corresponds to yellow looks like starlight. it just looks like white with bad white balance yeah exactly oh i hope this is wrong we'll see um but here the color match charging cables i've seen i didn't put them in here but i've seen pictures of the color match charging cables and they look way more interesting this is what i was thinking of the imax the imax have color match braided cables right because if you buy the purple imac you get the the m1 imax you get the color match cable that's what they're doing if you've seen the new imax the m1 imax new the m1 imax how their cables look that's what the cables to these phones look especially the non-pro ones because they will have white like ends but then the braided part will be color matched to your phone so if you get a red phone it'll be a red braided cable with a white end on it very much like the m1 imax and that i think is you know we were talking about how people can't tell the difference between these phones or they look the same maybe the corners are curved those stupid cables are probably going to be the the most important feature of this phone that's going to make people happy with regular people happy with their purchase because they're not going to buy the pro phone because who buys that it's too expensive they're going to get the red version of this it's going to come with a red cable and people are going to love it they're going to love it because it's braided and most people have don't have experience with braided cables and every iphone has not come with them before and it's going to match the color of the phone and people are going to go bananas like i think this is like the number one feature of the phone it's so dumb but that's the level we're at like these phones basically do everything everybody needs sometimes you need to get a new phone sometimes your old one is old sometimes it's broken sometimes the battery's bad sometimes you drop it into a lake and when you get a new one you want to be excited about it and you're like what can this new phone do does it feel faster than my old phone this one comes with a cable that matches the color of my phone people are going to eat it up i hope so i mean i think one one factor here to be aware of like i i think it's it's nice to kind of you know shine a light on or you know put a hat on the fact that like yes it's a different cable and apple is wise to kind of own that and have all right color match cables this is gonna not only is this cable going to be a different plug on the end it's going to look different and even though the the benefit to most people is not going to be clear to them we're going to make this look like an upgrade so at least visibly it's an upgrade that's exciting it's more exciting than just a plain old white cable that's come with your iPhone forever.

1:23:05Yes. And you'll be able to tell it apart, which will be great. Like as you're learning that this is a new connector, you'll be able to tell it apart. You'll see instantly which is the cable for your new iPhone. The problem is that most people do not buy Apple cables. Most people, you have the cable that comes with your phone, which you use until the end, frays off and it stops working or the pin blackens or whatever. And then when you have to buy another cable sometime, you get whatever's cheap from Amazon or a drugstore or whatever and no one buys apple cables but third parties are going to see this and they're going to sell you color match like cheaper quality color match cables for the new iphones because it's an opportunity for them to sell more cables i hope so um but but i i think we nerds especially like in the apple commentosphere uh tend to tend to like assume that more people will use oem accessories than actually do like when i'm out in the world how often do you even see an apple power brick like now that now the phones don't come with apple power bricks anymore how often do you see an apple power brick for a phone out in the world for me it's almost never like and i see a lot of people like you know because because of my you know location in a vacation town we have a lot of people who come here and use their phone all day on the beach and then go to a restaurant for dinner or whatever and they're like can i plug in my phone somewhere my phone died which and i i love the phrase my phone died because it takes no ownership for the situation it it's like my child starved that's interesting that isn't some part of that on you uh but anyway so my phone died and they they plug in their phone like to the like to a booth somewhere like and so i i see a lot of like you know regular people's iphone charging setups and yeah a lot of frayed cables and zero apple power bricks like none they're all rando third-party amazon power bricks well hopefully with the fraying cable they're doing better with that over time the historically apple has not done well with strain relief or materials and when they when they got took like the whatever that harmful chemical is they took out of their plastics the cables got even worse for a while before they kind of figured out how to how to hit break even again hopefully the braided cables would better but like i buy third-party cables for my kids because in their rooms they all want to have their phones on their beds and they don't manage their batteries well so they're often using their phone plugged in so i have these gigantic six foot long braided anchor cables and they come in colors you know i get red ones black ones silver ones pink ones right but none of those colors have anything to do with their phones with this color match cables i think anchor and those other companies those third-party companies that sell these really long cables or you know third-party cables are going to see a business opportunity to say let's not you know because how does anchor pick the colors for their cables so like oh i guess people might like a red one i guess we should make a black one right now they know exactly what colors they need to make buy this thing to match your new phone that will be attractive to customers and they don't care what color their cables are like but we'll just make you know that we'll make it so they match apples cables and of course everybody gets by a whole lot of gray thread you're gonna need light gray medium gray dark gray blue gray pink gray yellow gray and black gray that's for the pro phones but like again i gotta find the picture of what the cables look like but the cables look more exciting than the phones and every one of these iphones will come in the box with one of these color match braided cables like that's the whole thing the one in the box will be color matched to the phone that you buy and so i think that will give people a taste for it and if they don't care then they don't care they just buy another white cable when they buy a third-party one but i you know the action button obviously is going to be exciting getting that dynamic island if you didn't have it before is exciting maybe the periscope camera but those color match cables like these are the these are the things that are going to stand out the most physically speaking before we get to whatever the heck apple is going to promote about these phones on the software and feature side we are brought to you this week by collide if you work in security or IT and your company uses Okta, this message is for you.

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1:27:58this is a lot it's a lot yeah there is going to be more though you've got the apple watch series 9 which uh i don't know if marco's going to buy this one but the rumors are it looks the same as the series 8 which look the same as the series 7 so get ready for that the rumors are vague it sounds like there's a new soc finally that's that would be a significant up to her upgrade but like are they gonna are they gonna have my wonderful brushed titanium again which they didn't have with the series 8 uh probably not it's nothing has indicated that um and it's like that's gonna actually impact a lot because you know a watch for for me it is partly functional and partly jewelry.

1:28:38And I really like the way the titanium series seven and previous looks. It's wonderful. And I, and honestly, I really do not like the look of the Apple watch aluminum. I, I know I understand a lot of people like it. That's fine. Good for you. It, to me, it's not for me. And so I love before, before the titanium, I always wore the polished steel and that's very nice too, but titanium in my opinion is even better. And I miss it. like again i buy everything i didn't buy a series 8 because of that um if the series 9 is a lot better maybe i'll jump to it and give up my titanium but i hope they don't make me make that choice uh but we'll see it's it sounds like that's not in the cards and so you know maybe look my series 7 still works fine so maybe i'll just not buy the watch this year too well i mean this would be the year to buy it because it actually is going to be a new soc when we say the previous SOCs were the same, we don't mean that they were revised on a different thing.

1:29:35They were literally the same, fabbed at the same size. This one is going to be fabbed, the rumor is, at 5 nanometers. Not at 3, which is kind of weird that they wouldn't try to do the watch things at 3 because you'd think the watch SOC would be the easiest thing to fab because it's the smallest, so the least things can go wrong because they're so tiny. But it's going to be 5 nanometers instead of 3. Again, I think, why not 3? Isn't the watch the most power sensitive? I think it just comes down to economics, maybe. Yeah, I think price is very sensitive with the watch. Yeah, and the phone is obviously a more important product.

1:30:03And possibly just yields, too. The 3-nanometer capacity at TSMC, rumors are that Apple has purchased their entire capacity for a year at least. And they're going to be using it for all the iPhone Pros, which is a high-volume product, obviously the highest-profile product and very high volumes. Then, once the M3 series of Mac chips comes out, probably not that far from now. Maybe it'll come out next spring or summer with a new MacBook Air or something like that. That's going to probably use 3 nanometer as well. So even more of that capacity with even bigger chips that will have even lower yields.

1:30:42So maybe it's just like, look, we don't want to move the watch to this yet because it doesn't need it. I mean, it's been fairly fine in terms of the market while not having an SoC update in three years. I think part of it might be that the SoC is actually not the biggest source of power drain in the watch. obviously it is when you're doing like heavy work but like you know from minute to minute I imagine the screen wins maybe I would assume so I mean and as I've said before like with the watch what I'm looking for as both a watch user but especially as a watch app developer what I'm looking for is more ability to use CPU time because it is extremely restrictive in what it lets apps do and for how long and when and it's all in the name of power consumption savings because with the watch it's extremely power constrained so if they make the watch soc more efficient and then that allows them to lift some of those limits on what developers can do with our apps that would actually be a substantial update for users of those apps and users of the watch therefore so that would be really interesting but that that's like a big you know if they do this and this and this kind of chain of events that uh so far to date they've basically never done those things so uh i i again i i hope for things like that but i i don't expect them i don't know how reliable this rumor that the s9 is going to be five nanometer is though maybe it is going to be three maybe there'll be quote unquote four which is like the improved five we'll see if they even mention it um the other question about the s9 is will it just be an s8 fab done a smaller process which is you know it's not simple to do that that is some work or will it actually be i'll actually be revised things the cores are a little different maybe there's a different count of cores like will to the extent that they tell us anything about this new soc will we be able to determine that like they didn't just shrink it it actually is slightly different in some way you know they don't go into that much technical detail but we'll find out eventually uh the other rumors for this are there'll be a new color that's kind of pinkish and that it will come in a smaller box which you know that should that should just be a that's the perennial rumor has apple ever made a bigger box for one of its products the boxes just get smaller because the economics are good you can fit more on a shipping container and there's less waste so the boxes keep getting i think the iphone box also got a little bit smaller but anyway i love like there's so little rumored information about the apple watch series 9 probably because there's so little change about the apple series 9 that the box made the top list and then we have the apple watch ultra which the big thing here is black titanium finish and it actually looks pretty cool in the leaked pictures obviously we'll also have the new s9 soc in there uh i don't know the pictures seem to show that the action button was still going to be orange and you know i guess that works with black too but uh people who wanted a black version and i think i didn't dig too far into these i think that might be the only room like basically an s9 and it also comes in black now which is fine but like no radical changes to the ultra no big surprise it's not it's a brand new product basically all right prediction time i'm i'm really curious what how will they name updates to the apple watch ultra like i was thinking like maybe they would call it maybe they would just never change the name which is this is just the apple watch ultra yeah just like you know ipad pro exactly just that's like the ipad pro or the mac pro it doesn't change name right i was thinking like maybe they would say like apple watch series 9 ultra or ultra 2 but the more i think the more i thought about the more i think they're just going to keep calling it ultra and it just because because and i i don't expect them to keep old ultras around as the cheaper option no because they're not going to be that much cheaper the only difference is s9 versus eight s3 is according to the rumors right if even that i mean even the s9 is like barely been rumored to exist yeah yeah anyway you know ultra is having a black finish that'll be a big hit related to both the watches and the phone is this rumor uh has been running around for a while now they're like oh it seems like apple's not making a leather case for the new iphones uh and then people maybe they're gonna make like vegan leather like this is a big trend in the car industry to have interiors that they call them vegan leather as a marketing way to say fake leather uh it's supposed to look and feel kind of like leather but it's not leather it's entirely non-animal based uh and that rumor extends to the watch bands they make a bunch of leather watch bands and they're like well they can not make leather watch bands too uh there's rumors that the the hermes uh like leather bands are being offered for 90 off to apple employees and hermes their big thing is fancy leather so if apple's getting out of the leather case and leather watch trap uh business maybe that means the relationship with hermes is over we'll see how that goes i honestly i kind of hope so for lots of reasons i mean so okay first of all going away from leather i think makes a lot of sense apple is so environmentally conscious and socially progressive in so many other ways it has seemed odd that they still produced and sold so much animal leather like that it doesn't seem like it didn't fit with their image and we mentioned this in past years as well um and especially recently it just seemed like as every year that went by they were still making leather kind of seems like hmm is that they really want to be want to be making that like does that really make sense for them and so this is good because leather alternatives have gotten really good in lots of ways and partly thanks to the car industry that has a great interest in having something that is less expensive than leather but that they can charge the same amount for right and and and you know and and watch bands like admittedly leather is really nice but there are also a lot of alternatives and phone cases too like and and if you still want a leather phone case and apple won't sell you one there's lots of other brands that will and they've and as you know like they've gotten pretty good we've talked about on the show before like third-party leather phone cases have actually gotten pretty good um so we don't necessarily need apple to be doing it and from a different perspective on on the hermes front i kind of want that partnership to end because hermes controls the best shade of orange and the apple watch like they've always i i what i presume is like a weird kind of you know toe-stepping avoidance situation they had this this Hermes partnership with the watch for many years ago and meanwhile they've also Apple has occasionally launched orange watch bands and orange phone cases things like that and Hermes is sitting there squatting on the best shade of orange and I would I assume the reason why Apple's orange shades have traditionally been pretty far from Hermes orange is to avoid stepping on those toes or maybe they were contractually prohibited from getting too close to it in certain areas well then they launched the apple watch ultra and the shade of orange that goes with the apple watch ultra that they already sell in those cloth uh like the like cloth strap things for the apple watch is extremely close to hermes orange it's very close and hermes orange does look the best with the ultra and its orange action button and and even the regular apple watches like and and they they even had like i got one on ebay for some absurd price but it was still way less than it actually cost um when you buy an hermes watch apparently it comes with an orange sport band that only is like it's an exclusive hermes sport band that comes with hermes apple watches like not even advertised as coming with it it just happens to come in the box with them and people sell these on ebay and so it was more than a regular sport band but a lot less than an hermes watch um and so i got one of these because i'm like man it's such a great orange and it turns out yes it's wonderful and i'm afraid to ever wear it because it costs more than a regular sport band i don't want to mess it up but like then when you compare that like you can look back at apple's history of other sport bands that they've made in orange like shades and they're all terrible they're all like these like weird like pastel-y kind of candy salmon-y oranges and i've i've i've gone done that rabbit hole like going to ebay sellers that they're selling the old colors and like, oh, how about like, you know, vivid orange or, you know, melon orange or whatever, like all these old color names and people collectors will like line them up and take photos trying to show you the different shades of orange.

1:38:50And the Hermes one is always the best. So what I'm hoping is if the Apple Hermes partnership ends because they don't want to use leather anymore, which is great for lots of other reasons, as mentioned, I'm hoping that also allows them to start using better shades of orange in their other in their watch bands, basically, and maybe, you know, phone cases as well, because I think that I think there's a lot of opportunity there for really great oranges that they currently seem to shy away from for whatever reason that might be that partnership yeah i don't know about the hermes thing because i do think like apple does like to fleece the ultra rich by selling them super expensive stuff uh and they always discount the hermes stuff when they're trying to clear inventory before new stuff comes so it could be going away or it could just be replaced by newer mess stuff so we'll see but uh the the rumor that uh what apple is going to replace their iphone leather iphone case with is that it's supposedly going to be fine woven twill t-w-i-l-l which supposedly the branding that they would use in this again how would they possibly know the branding so take this with much grains of salt if they have the box well is fine woven capital f capital w all one word but and again you can see pictures of this case it is like woven textile and kind of like a crosshatch diamond pattern it looks a little bit like suede uh people who have seen it and felt it think maybe it's not that water resistant kind of like suede is not that water resistant and also the rumor is that case might be about a hundred dollars so is this if there if there is no leather is this the replacement for it or is this just an addition and they are still going to sell leather it looked interesting it looked like a case i would like to feel because i'm all for new case designs it did look like it would be comfortable and grippy it doesn't look anything like leather it looks a little bit like suede but it's kind of like the back looks like woven texture but then the sides look kind of more plasticky it's it's strange so again this is a rumor this is a real physical case that people have shown is that a third party case is that a real thing that apple's going to ship watch for fine woven twill i don't however they spin that and they're also super vague rumors about potentially future watches having woven bands to replace leather bands again the watch stuff is way sketchier in terms of rumor reliability than the phone stuff because the no more leather iPhone case from Apple thing has been pretty strong for a long time now.

1:41:03I think people are just extrapolating from that. But this fine woven thing, I saw a video of someone handling it today. And even if that's a third party case, I would be interested in going to an Apple store and seeing what that feels like because it looked kind of interesting. Honestly, this looks really like there's I'm looking through like the rumor pictures now. Some of them look horrendous. Some of them look decent. I'm what I would hope this product is. first of all again i if they're replacing leather in my opinion good it's time um what i hope for this product is you know they already make the silicone cases and silicone cases are wonderful for durability for for durability water resistant for like for the phone not for the in the case flakes off eventually the case loses its skin eventually eventually yeah but you know for like water resistance impact resistance like a grip it feels great the problem is the grip is too good and it makes it hard to put it in pockets and stuff.

1:41:56And then leather cases are kind of a nice, happy medium in terms of grip, but they, you know, first of all, require animals, which is, again, not great. And then they also have no water resistance really whatsoever. Like the water does not do kind things to leather. And so ideally, if they can somehow solve the need of leather cases from Apple, which is something that looks nicer than silicone, looks a little bit more upmarket and is easier to put into a pocket, you know, easier than silicone to put in a pocket. And costs even more money than leather did, which is key for Apple. Right, well, so it's a premium upsell for them and St.

1:42:35Jude, everybody. And then also, and then also, like, if they can get water resistance in there too, hey, this could be a huge upgrade. And we'll see. I have faith because Apple's, you know, ever since they launched the watch and really started making really great iPhone cases as well. Their textile game has been very good. They make really great materials for watch bands and phone cases. So I'm optimistic. I think if they have tackled this, they've probably done it with good reason and they've probably done a good job. So I'm actually very much looking forward to this. Of course, this kind of fabric texture, you know what it'll grow great with?

1:43:12Your color match braided cable on your phone. So you get the case that matches the cable, that matches the phone all from apple and like the texture of a match the color i'm sure will be an exact match you know what i mean like if this is true there is obvious synergy for them to really go whole hog kind of again kind of like they did with the m1 iMac where everything is color match the keyboard the mouse the cables the the front the back that is a thing and i think it is a successful look and i encourage it uh the final bit here wrapping up is other big rumors airpods cases with usbc connectors instead of lightning hope so again we talked about it last show every single product that apple has with lightning i think they should eventually change to usbc they're not all going to be announced tomorrow but i really hope they don't drag this out for five years and we're all talking about on this show what's the last standing apple lightning accessory that they're still selling like we were for like the last can i guess the mouse it'll be the mouse i guarantee probably we'll see but anyway the airpods cases are actually rumored that they might just say you know by the way from this point forward if you buy airpods nothing about them is changed but you'll get a case that has a usbc connector on instead of lightning which would be nice there are vague rumors about ipad mini 7 going to an a16 from a15 and ipad air 6 going from m1 to m2 but those seem pretty a pretty boring and b ipad i was shocked to find out the current ipad air uses the m1 is the ipad air going to go to the m2 before the pro goes to the m3 i don't know but anyway those are you know and then obviously question mark stuff that we haven't thought of or whatever but we're really tailing off here i feel like as always it's going to be the iphone event uh with some watch stuff and then you know maybe talk about accessories and stuff like that yeah i wouldn't expect to hear anything about the ipads yet i think that's a separate event ipad ipad and mac some other time you know yeah there's not even any rumors of mac stuff and obviously the next mac thing we're going to see is still going to be all about m3 or whatever the first model to get that is i'm sure the rumor already knows but i did not compile that Yeah, so I'm interested to see, like, this is the most detailed that the rear mill has been on every single spec.

1:45:15The weight in grams, the power capacity of the battery down to the milliamp hour, the dimensions down to fractions of an inch, about every single thing. So we'll see. We'll see how well they did. Even if some of these details are off, like, I mean, people have the physical phones in their hands and they show videos of them. And, like, we know what they're going to be. They're going to look like iPhones. But it's that time of year. So stay tuned next week. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Collide, and Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.

1:45:49And we will talk to you after the iPhone event next week.

1:46:09and Casey wouldn't let him cause it was accidental it was accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's Casey Liss m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m and T-Marco So, R-M-E-N-T, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So, Marco, I am relieved because we heard, we've gotten word that Rivian is canning their ugliest paint option. Oh, everyone has sent this to me. It's sent it to us, sir. It's not just you. Sent it to us. And so I'm excited because should I be in the unfortunate scenario that, well, let me rephrase.

1:47:22Should I be in the scenario that I see a Rivian on the road? I am going to be ever less likely to be in the unfortunate scenario of seeing a yellow Rivian on the road. Does this influence the purchase you made like two years ago that still hasn't come due yet? um well uh here uh look at our slack real quick oh no all right so i am looking at a building it is a very very dark brick or dark painted brick it says rivian in the upper left hand corner there are a couple of teslas in front of it there looks to be a blue uh land land rover land cruiser i always get it wrong a blue thing that marco once owned i'm assuming right on the right hand edge of the frame and a obnoxious just truly look at me look at me i have confidence problems look at me yellow rivian suv with actually very good looking wheels directly in the center of the frame congratulations marco it looks like you just got yourself a car i well i got myself an suv whatever uh it's not a car all right so here's what happened i reserved a yellow rivian i was sitting on the reservation list for a very long time when did you reserve did you actually look up the date no i don't have it offhand it's multiple years ago right i think like a year and a half something like that year and a half um so i reserved a yellow one and the date kept getting pushed back as you know they were scaling up and everything um a couple of weeks ago i was given access with my reservation to the r1 shop and what this is is basically once your reservation gets close within i don't know how to determine like how close but like mine was about six months away so once your reservation gets close they give you access to the r1 shop and this is basically like a real-time updated inventory list of like extra revians they have that they made and you can go and you can search and just you know refresh the page a few times a day and you can see like oh here's one that's like either my exact configuration or it's kind of close to my exact configuration and why don't i just grab that one and if you if you're fast enough and you see the combination you want or one close enough you can grab it and you can basically jump the line and i don't know why i don't know how they get there maybe it's like reservations that people put it in and canceled or whatever but however it was i got access to the rivian shop and my reservation was originally scheduled for or was most recently scheduled for something like this coming January, I think, or January to April, something like that.

1:49:53And Rivian announced a few days ago, or last week, whenever, that they are discontinuing yellow as a color because it was the least popular, and they discontinued a couple other low-volume options as they're trying to streamline their production. They're discontinuing it as of next week or two weeks from now. So anything that wasn't produced by then, they were emailing everybody saying, sorry, you've got to choose different options. And that, by the way, that kind of stinks. If you reserve this thing a year and a half ago you picked out exactly the thing you wanted you're like i'm gonna get one i i pre-ordered it on day one i'm getting a yellow one and then a year and a half passes and they say yeah i know you pre-ordered a yellow one you're not getting a yellow one because we don't want to make yellow that's that's kind of sucky but you know that's the the brakes of being a new car company the other thing related to our previous discussion is they're also discontinuing the vegan leather interior so they're not getting rid of leather they're getting rid of their fake leather because i guess most people are buying the real leather and not the vegan leather i think there were some asterisks on that actually that the the their reddit went went crazy and did some research and i i think the the leather thing is actually just like a like a shift or something but anyway um the big thing is they're definitely discontinuing yellow and and the shiny off-road wheels and a couple other things um and are these the shiny off-road wheels in the picture these are the these are the black off-road wheels okay so it just so happened that a couple of weeks ago a little a little after i had access to the r1 shop i'd you know i'd go and refresh the page every so often there's usually there was usually nothing there was usually no suvs at all and there were no yellow ones but this one day i happened to look and there were some yellow ones and one was really close to what i wanted it had my second choice wheels and i thought you know i like these also yeah i like these wheels i'm gonna be impatient why should i wait for my perfect configuration six months from now when i could be impatient now and i felt really bad doing it i didn't tell anybody i'm just like yeah i'm just gonna do it and i just jumped on it well wait a second do you still get your pre-order price yes all right well then that's not bad i was mostly silently judging you for spending a huge amount of extra money because people know when you pre-ordered it you like locked in like a good price and since marco pre-ordered it the price has gone up and up so if you go to a rivian dealer now and try to buy his same car you're gonna pay a lot more than he paid and so i'm like that's great you had the pre-order you got it you got it but you got the pre-order price you just didn't get exactly the options you wanted and the only difference is it's my second choice wheels and it is fine you know and so anyway so i jumped on it thinking i was making like you know a rash decision and then the news comes like literally right after i'm scheduled to pick it up initially the news comes they're canceling the color i'm like oh my god what luck so we've all been sitting on this knowledge for weeks as everyone on the internet has been telling us you know they canceled yellow you know they canceled yellow not only did we know that we also knew that marco had gotten his yellow one before they canceled the yellow but we couldn't talk about well slow down though slow down though that's not entirely accurate yeah i i had i had placed the order with the r1 shop and therefore like confirmed you know they assigned me a vin and i got to sign all the paperwork online and get get the insurance lineup and all that other stuff but i didn't actually have the car yeah but i i i felt like you had got it in under the wire like i assumed that the car that you had selected that they said was yellow was a real car that you would eventually get and you can continue your story and see how that turned out yeah so anyway um the the process of of getting a rivian from this point um i found a little interesting i'll go quickly through it basically you do a bunch of online forms and i i was going to trade in the lamb river defender that i've been driving which i mostly liked i i'm going to give it a brief exit interview in a minute um mostly like the defender uh but i was going to trade it in and so that that complicates the process you got to like send in all these pictures of it and have them give you a quote and all this other stuff um and uh anyway that process was weird and buggy like a lot of times the the web ui would ask me for the same thing three different days in a row like i had to i must have had to send them a picture of the land rivers license plate i think five different times because it would ask for these things and it would say all right it's accepted and the next day be like all right you have one more task license plate picture I just gave you that.

1:54:02What happened? Very reassuring. Yeah. So very kind of lossy paperwork submission process. I will say anytime a human was involved, they assign you a person called a guide. That's basically like your agent there that's working on your case to get you your car. Anytime a person was involved, from the guides, the people at the pickup center, the people are great. The systems are still very young. So if you can get a person to look at something, they have been fantastic. Nice, patient, capable. They've been wonderful. My guide, Maggie, if anybody is there, my guide was fantastic. She had to deal with a whole bunch of crap from my insurance company, and she did it without complaining at all or even breaking a sweat, and it was remarkable.

1:54:44The amount of crap she had to deal with, and she did it, and it was great. So shout-outs to guide Maggie over there, and shout-outs to Rivian people in general, who everyone I talk to has been wonderful. But yeah, they're still a young brand, and there's still a lot of bumps in the road with the paperwork process. Didn't you mention in one of our slacks that part of the crap that you're dealing with is the stuff that car dealers normally deal with on your behalf, like transferring insurance and everything? Yeah. Usually when you buy a car in New York, and I think in most places in the US, usually you basically tell them your insurance agent's phone number, and they call and they work it out.

1:55:19And you pay a few hundred dollars to$1 ,000 usually to the dealer for documentation fees. and it sounds like bs but now i know what that money's for because i had to do some of it myself because riverian doesn't set up to do it yet and it was yeah it's worth it to have the dealers do it but anyway got all the paperwork in i was about to pick it up and i get a message saying there was an issue with my car upon delivery to the to the pickup center so it's being delayed indefinitely and i'm like oh no and you look up i looked up on like the the reddit and it's and all the people are like well that happened to me and it was weeks it happened to me and i they had to assign me a whole new car it happened to me and you know it's like and people have all these theories what those things could be i was thinking like is it just like some panel misaligned or something got scuffed or something well that doesn't stop tesla i know i mean tesla also does these checks and i think also holds them back but this is never reassuring kind of like the having to submit the license plate thing like you would hope that when a car comes off the assembly line unless it gets into an accident in transport that it's good it left the factory it's got all the wheels on it.

1:56:24It has four wheels, not three, not two, not five. All the mirrors are in there. Every panel is the correct color. They all line up. The doors open and close, right? But when you're a brand new car manufacturer, you find out very quickly making cars is very difficult, especially if you want them all to be consistent and you want to be able to make them affordably and quickly, but also with high quality. And like the other car makers spent decades figuring out how to do this. And if you're starting from zero, it can be hard. So at the very least the thing they can do with these you know fairly expensive low volume brands like rivian and lucid is okay we know we're not that great at making cars before we put a car into a customer's hands at the very very last minute can someone just go around the car and make sure there's not a giant gash from transport or the door seals line up right you know like and maybe tesla does a crappier job of this because there's so many stories about people getting a tesla driving it home and finding pieces of their car falling off and stuff like that but with them not telling you what the problem is like did they forget a wheel or is there a tiny tiny nick from transport on the fender it could be anything in between those things and that's where you get the horror stories of they needed to like replace my suspension and i need to wait a month and whatever or from like oh they just needed to buff out a scratch or something so yeah do you know at this point well i mean i guess you have a picture of it do you know what the supposed problem was with your car i don't because it was resolved in possibly the best way which is a few days later they said we've assigned you a new car here's a different vin update the insurance oh goodness and you can pick it up on tuesday or whatever yeah also another yellow one that is key right and with the same configuration i didn't know so i'm like i don't know how the logistics of that worked out how many of these yellow cars they have is there a secret cache of yellow cars with the wrong wheels i don't know but anyway they uh so i was given a new pickup date like you know about a week later total and so it was it was resolved so great so i picked it up yesterday day so i i just got it and uh before and first of all by the way the pickup process could also it's very it's very beta in the sense that the brooklyn service center where i picked it up is again staffed by very nice very capable people it is in a terrible location so it's it's like deep in brooklyn which is a very long drive from center central long island it's deep in brooklyn and it's it's in like a warehouse district like there's just warehouses everywhere it's nowhere near a highway it like the the process of getting there involved like get off a highway and then drive four miles in just stop and go traffic lights in brooklyn which takes like 45 minutes and and you get there there's no signage of like where do you park where do you go and it's brooklyn there's not massive space everywhere so like there's no like there's not just tons of extra space you can just park your car and like stroll on in on across the lawn like that doesn't exist this is a concrete jungle in brooklyn's warehouse district and you you have to like so i i ended up driving around the whole block looking how do i even enter this property where do i park my car the property easier if you had maybe a smaller car yeah the property is covered in Rivian so I'm like I'm like I don't think I'm supposed to park here this is clearly like their inventory like that like I'm like I ended up pulling into a gate and parking in one of their in clearly the wrong spot and I just I'm like I'm just gonna walk in and ask them where I'm supposed to park so then I then comes the point how do I get in the building I'm like walking around this whole like block sized building walking around trying to figure out how the heck do I get in where do we eventually I find a guy who's parking Rivian's and I ask and he tells me I'll go around here I go around to the what he says the door is locked oh this is one this is one o 'clock in the afternoon i'm like okay and there's like there's like one of those like you know touch screen buzzer things next to it and you know i i end pressing like all three buttons because they have names like you know front left and upper or whatever and it's like i don't know what i'm supposed to be eventually i found one that responded with a beep after a while and the door unlocked okay great once you get in it's perfectly fine again delightful people nice little waiting area like it was great but this could not be in a worst location did you see a giant yellow r1s sitting there like could you tell where your car was i sure did stand out yes because as i was walking through the lot i got to see what i think is every current rivian color because they had tons of them so i spent a minute like kind of looking around evaluating so on that by the way i will say before i get to the yellow um i'm glad i didn't go with the blue the blue was my was my first when i initially made the reservation i initially said blue.

2:01:02I found the blue in person to look a little brighter than I like and also fairly flat. Most of their paints, like Tesla, most of their paints don't have those like metallic flecks of shine. They're very flat colors. And I found the blue to look a little too flat for me. The yellow is also flat, but I think it works because of what it is. I'll get some more of that later. I was very impressed in person seeing the Canyon Red and the El Cap Granite, which is their dark gray. Those are both metallic flaked, and they're both very, very nice in person. The Canyon Red has a little hint of orange in it, and that really is very nice.

2:01:43I think those would be probably tied for my number two choice of color. If I had to get a different color than yellow, I think Canyon Red might be the one. But the El Cap Granite, El Cap Granite, it's a very nice dark gray. It goes very well with the yellow accents that all Rivians have. It is, though, still a gray, so it's a little bit boring, but it's a very nice boring. But yeah, if I was going to go for interesting, I'd go Canyon Red if I didn't get yellow. Yeah, my recollection from when I was at the Rivian dealership or whatever you call it, service center here, was, yeah, the Granite and the Canyon Red were both very, very good.

2:02:20also I should concede I've been staring at the stupid yellow for the last 20 minutes you've been talking I still think yellow cars are an abomination but it doesn't look that bad in this shot. if you're going to go yellow which I still think is a big f***ing mistake if you're going to do it this ain't so bad isn't that interesting I've seen a bunch of these colors in real life including the yellow I recently did see an R1S in yellow and the yellow continues to be baffling to me in person and Marco can talk about that more in a bit but the one in my neighborhood the one in my neighborhood is white and I have to say I really like that color on this car I think it just works for the sort of boxy stormtrooper-y nature of this, the black and white, especially with the stupid black wheels that I hate, the black and white.

2:03:06White really works. The yellow is also a really good color, but I'm just so confused by the color. Don't worry, I have help for you. I'll get there. Alright, so first, let me go back and give a quick exit interview to my Land Rover Defender. Overall, the Defender is a very nice vehicle. I found it, I've driven it now for a little over a year, It is very easy to drive and a very comfortable ride. It's very like for an off-road, like when you compare it to like the Wrangler, the 4Runner, the FJ Cruise, like all these other off-roaders that I have experience with. As an off-roader, it is extremely comfortable.

2:03:47Very, very nice as an off-roader. It's even comfortable enough for long road trips. The suspension is really soft. The steering is super light. Like it's very smooth and easy to operate. Very nice. I really enjoyed the storage and the various utility affordances in the cabin. It has a lot of places you can grab. It has a lot of compartments, places to store stuff. There's USB ports everywhere. And even the cup holders, everything's rubberized, so nothing scoots around when you're going on bumpy stuff. It's a very well-designed car for utility. If you like it, then you should have put a watch on it.

2:04:27It's a reference, Casey. yes it's a beyonce song i'm just helping you out i knew i knew it was a song i couldn't tell you anyway so defender it's it was a great off-roader um carplay has proven to be nice but with asterisks um it i i as discussed previously i i didn't like the lag with the wireless carplay but the wired is inconvenient and depended on a wire that would occasionally flake out so that was not fun um land river also being pure gas and being a giant hv gets comically bad gas mileage which i never liked um little things the uh automatic wipers were not good to date i have yet to be in a vehicle where i like the automatic wipers i have i'm always left wishing for for cars that only have automatic settings i'm always left wishing for just give me an old intermittent setting that i can adjust a little intermittent interval on because it's always better um the Glen River also had a surprisingly bad climate control system for a vehicle of its stature.

2:05:30The fan speed would never be right. It was clunky to control. Didn't like that. That's part of their brand tradition, right? Unreliable electronics was their brand signature. And when they said, well, we can't have the thing shorting out all the time. But can we just make the climate control crappy? They're like, yeah, that still is on brand for us. It was reliably mediocre. What was unreliable was the sunroof, which I had to get repaired. And I was afraid to use it after that. um and the sound system was shockingly bad for like for a vehicle of that stature and other quality areas the sound system sounded horrendous i don't know why they want to upsell you on the more expensive one yeah i guess but and anyway um and and that kind of hurt in other areas too i had to when i got it i got it during the time and it was very hard to get cars and i like i had gotten the driving permit for the sand so i i had i wanted to get this vehicle as discussed previously.

2:06:21And so I had to get, there was one used one that they had that I could get for any reasonable amount of time at any reasonable cost. So I got it, but it didn't have some of the upscale features that the higher end models would. It didn't have the fancy seats. I really missed seat position memory. I really missed that. Anytime I put it through a car wash or get it serviced or have anybody else, like my wife, drive it, I would lose my seat position and it would take me like weeks to get it right again. Welcome to my world. I really missed that. It didn't have radar cruise, and I really missed that as well, adaptive cruise, when I was on long highway drives.

2:06:58Of course, it didn't have any kind of auto steer thing on the highway either. I missed that as well. Coming from Tesla for a few years before that, I really missed being able to turn on the climate remotely. Now, Land Rover has this, but only if the car has been started within the last few days. so my typical use of like I'm going off on the ferry going back to my car that I haven't touched for two weeks and I want it to not be a thousand degrees in the car that didn't work and then also it didn't have anything like dog mode this is a wonderful feature that Tesla had if you have a pet in the car and you're like going in to go get you know long shutter rest stop for 20 minutes you could leave the climate control running with just tapping like two buttons on the screen so it didn't involve the app so you didn't need to like be in an area with cell coverage that the car would pick up the app signals from you could just tap the screen and get out and walk away and then it would keep the ac on or the heat on and it would show in big print on the screen like dog mode with a happy wagging dog you know it's 75 degrees in here whatever like it would show you right there so other people walking by wouldn't think you were killing your dog and break your windows so it's a great feature landmover didn't have that they only had their very limited remote climate system that only worked for 30 minutes and it was only if you only threw the app and only if you started the car recently i very much missed that because we take road trips all the time as a family and not having dog mode i i really dramatically missed that and as far as i know the only evs that seem to offer this i i did a quick bit of research i think the only evs that offer anything like dog mode are tesla and rivian i don't think anyone else does if if any other evs do i'd love to know like you know i i couldn't it didn't seem like the bmw ix or the or any other bmw uh or the the pole star like i looked at it i looked at a whole bunch like looking to see if anybody had this feature and i don't i don't think they did um anyway that was the defender it was a great car with some limitations and annoyances but otherwise a great car i was very happy with it if they made a pure electric defender i would probably have gotten that with you know some of the advanced options like the nice seats and everything of you know but that that's that doesn't exist yet as far as i know so anyway uh the rivian let's talk about the yellow i got news for you it is a really good yellow a man that spends obscene amounts of money on a car painted yellow likes the yellow you don't say well it was a risk because really i saw like one on the highway coming to the direction for two seconds a couple of weeks ago and that was the only one i'd ever seen in person so it's a risk for sure because yellow can go wrong and the the like online configurator makes it look almost like a champagne like a light brown and that so and that i wouldn't have been so into that um but yellow can be very tricky now john you've expressed a desire to know what this yellow is so earlier today i took some photos now this was during like sundown basically so it's not the best light but i took some photos of some reference objects so that you can compare so i have i've laid out i'll make this a chapter the chapter art i've laid out on the hood of my car there's a play date that's amazing various yellow reference objects so i have you parked next to a bus oh my god it's amazing you know this might this god awful yellow well it's not that this god awful color for a car this might have been worth it just for this moment right now yeah that's very good school bus one that's what i'm saying because i saw it cut it was going in the opposite direction i saw it go by and this school bus picture that's what it looked like when it was going but it was 1 p.m it was a sunny day sun overhead no clouds 1 p.m and it looked like that kind of like goldy and this really highlights how it is not school bus orange or yellow i was hoping that my gold hypercritical shirt would have arrived in time for this picture but sadly it has not yet arrived it's definitely not that color the play date is a big help here too but yeah this this so here's the thing so let me go through the objects this color gold looks different in different light like it really does it's not two different colors right because this is the same car we're seeing in all these pictures and did you take these with your iphone yes because now it's auto white balancing and doing all sorts of weird crap well but you have reference objects now i i understand but you know so anyway so the The reference objects in this picture are a yellow HomePod, the banana yellow ATP shirt that we most recently sold, the current yellow iPhone 14, a yellow caution tape strip that I cut from a construction site, the yellow box of the Purdy brand of paintbrush.

2:11:49They're yellow. The Amazon Basics AA batteries, because they're like a kind of an orangey yellow, the Amazon Basics batteries. A Playdate by Panic. And finally, a DeWalt battery to show DeWalt yellow, because I feel like there's like many people in our audience will probably have either a DeWalt battery or caution tape or yellow Amazon Basics batteries or a Playdate. Like between all these things, you might have one of these in your house. So I would say, just for reference, like seeing them, it's a little harder to see in the picture. But in person, the Playdate is too yellow compared to the car.

2:12:28Yeah, it's brighter. The banana shirt and the iPhone are nowhere close. The yellow HomePod and actually the Amazon Basics batteries look the closest in person. Really? Well, in the pictures, the Amazon Basics batteries look way more orange than the yellow car. So in person, they're slightly... So what I like about this yellow is that it has a healthy amount of orange mixed in. And I think you need that to make a good yellow for a car. and i think it it they so far they seem to have struck a very good balance of getting like it doesn't look orange it looks like a yellow car but it has a little bit of orange mixed in and it's really nice so far i like the color a lot it is i was afraid it would be like too tame and it's not but it's also it also doesn't look like outrageously weird or cheap or anything that it's a very nice yellow this looks like these look like two different cars if you that picture where you're at the river and the school bus picture those look like two different cars this is the problem with this yellow it is a chameleon because next to the rivian thing like there that's a great yellow i love that color and then i look next to the school bus and i say no no what happened it's not it's the same car yeah it's crazy like it it's very difficult to accurately photograph but in person it looks very good that's all i can tell you yeah you know again i i have such a horrible aversion to yellow automobiles if you're going to do it which you shouldn't if you're going to do it i think this works well similarly i don't care for black wheels when i think it was the year after my car the wheels that i eventually got you know we had this whole conversation like a year ago now that i i replaced the the english town wheels on my car that I hated and got Pretorias, which are the ones that I preferred.

2:14:19The year after I bought my car, you could get a blacked out version of the Pretorias, and I didn't like that either. Even though the Pretorias are some of my favorite wheels on any car I've ever seen, I hated the blacked out version. In this car, the combination of the yellow calipers, the blacked out wheels, the pretty well-tinted rear windows on the car, and this chameleon yellow, as a yellow automobile goes, This is one of the better that I've seen based on this handful of pictures. Yellow is still a terrible choice for an automobile. But if you're going to commit, this ain't bad. So some first impressions after a day and a half of driving, including driving on the beach.

2:14:59I drove it back to the beach tonight. Oh, nice. So I have one sand trip in it so far. So I think it's faster than my Tesla. I always got like the middle configuration for Tesla because I wanted the maximum range. I never had the super performance ones, but I think it's faster. It's ridiculous. As long as you don't turn. Honestly, the handling is very good. I mean, look, it doesn't handle like a low-slung sports car. It handles more like the Defender did because it's a giant SUV. But for what it is, it handles surprisingly well. It's very, very nice. One thing that I still have to get used to, it's kind of jumpy.

2:15:37The way it responds to throttle. and like it's so it has so much power available to it that you have to be very gentle with your foot and if you let up with your foot very slightly you know i've i've been used to driving gas for all this time and with a gas engine you let especially with a land rover you let up and you know it eventually considers coming to a stop but you have it's it very it's a very smooth like in and out of power with this it's it's very jumpy it responds like a little too quickly to taking your foot off the pedal can you adjust the region you can but in regular driver mode you only have standard or high and i have it i i try both and it's not that different honestly um but it's it it's a little aggressive i would like to i would like to see that be a little bit smoother or at least have a setting to make a little bit smoother did you change the drive mode like you don't really do different throttle curves for like sport mode and whatever this is this was in like the all all-purpose mode i didn't try sport because i figured that would make the problem worse yeah i think it will make it worse but there might be like a comfort mode or something i don't know what the drive modes are on this yeah it's i didn't see anything like that but i'll play with it more as i have it and maybe just i have to get used to it you know like because you're used to driving a giant gas vehicle that does not respond instantly to throttle input so maybe you just gotta get used to evs again yeah like the defender is like it not only does it not respond instantly it has massive turbo lag so the defender like if you want to go fast you step on it and then it submits a request to britain and then you know it comes back eventually that you know oh oh you want to go fast here you go uh anyway so back to the rivian i the the regen braking is even on even on the regular standard mode is substantially more aggressive than it is on tesla and it is very much encouraging you to do one pedal driving and that's actually it's actually fairly nice as you get used to it um again it's going to take me a while to be able to operate this car smoothly but it is nice to have that much regen available so quickly in terms of like not having to use the brakes almost ever.

2:17:35And one really nice feature, I don't know how common this is on EVs. I don't think Tesla did this at least. Not only will it regen brake all the way to a stop, but if you regen brake all the way to a stop, it engages the hill hold. So it won't roll back, which is really nice. Like that's a, it's just like a really nice kind of, you know, EV luxury feature that like, because many cars have a hill hold now. Tesla doesn't do that? Does it literally roll backwards like a manual car? If you have not touched the brake, I believe so. I'm saying if you let the regen brake come to a stop without ever touching the physical brake, the Rivian will engage the hill hold, which is really nice.

2:18:18Anyway, visibility is better than the Land Rover by a lot. They have more glass. It's easier to see. Overall, much better visibility than the Land Rover and way better than the FJ Cruiser. great cameras great top-down like bird's-eye kind of view very big high-resolution images they're fantastic um i finally have ventilated seats which i haven't had in a very long i think i think the only car i ever had but they had those was the m5 um they don't have a butt massager on this one but but anyway yeah finally air-conditioned seats that's fantastic um the capacity that you have for storage in this thing is ridiculous i like the frunk alone just the frunk i can fit all of my towing gear tow ropes shackles like all massive quantities of like giant huge towing stuff safety gear battery gear all of that the charger and four max tracks traction boards all fit in the frunk that's amazing um and then of course the back is even bigger you know it's a similar overall dimensions like in terms of footprint on the road as the land rover but it doesn't have a spare tire uh so like so they just kind of they the car's just longer to to use that space so you have you have not only a third row of seats which will be occasionally useful to us um but when those when those seats are folded down you just have massive storage capacity and then there's no spare tire by default so you can like lift up the bottom of the of the trunk floor and go down under where the spare tire would go and just use that as even more storage this thing is a massive storage boat like you can fit so much stuff in this vehicle um the key situation is really nice land rover like most modern cars has a giant key fob that you must carry with you this huge brick that takes up your entire pocket and sticks out the the rivian it has a key fob looks kind of like a like a padlock almost it's like a like a carabiner with buttons in the bottom anyway so it has a key fob comes with one it also comes with two rfid kind of cards so i can just keep that in my wallet and i'm set and also you can pair up to four phones to be phone keys for it so and so far my experience they all work really well they work from surprisingly long distances away.

2:20:48It seems awesome so far. And like all good EVs, you don't have to start it, or unlock it, or lock it. You walk up to it, and it unlocks. You get in and start hitting things, and it turns on and goes. When you're done, you simply put it in park and open the door and leave, and it will turn itself off and lock itself. Love it. It's so nice. I missed these features so much. the sound system is really good it's way better than the land rover even noticeably better than than the last tesla i had uh very very good sound system clear loud you know great great mid-range guitars like it's really of course i listen to fish it's really good um it is so nice to have dog mode and seat memory back i have both those things now and i i've only had the car for like two seconds love it um radar cruise and auto steer uh so it has it has radar cruise it seems wonderful so far seems really nice very smooth um auto steer is not as good as tesla's and and when i mean when i say auto steer i'm talking about what tesla calls autopilot but like what used to be the only kind of autopilot so nothing that would be considered like you know real self driving but it's basically a combination of radar cruise control and keeping you in the center of the lane on a highway so it will steer for you while keeping you in the center of a lane if anything like spooks it it will beep like crazy and disengage so you know you have to pay attention but it seems relatively comparable to teslas so far but it disengages more aggressively so like if if for instance like there's a merge coming up for the lanes that you're in that it doesn't really know what to do it will alert you merge coming up ahead and then it'll beep and turn off or if it has any trouble whatsoever seeing the lines on the road to mark where the lanes are it will also like freak out and turn off so it's useless in massachusetts then because there are no lines that are on our roads that are not just barely visible about to disappear completely yeah um so it i'm guessing the auto steer is going to be overall i'm i'm going to kind of miss teslas uh but it's it's a it's way better than not having it at all because of my situation with the Land Rover.

2:23:06The only thing, one little tweak I would love to make for that is when you've like hit the brake or cancelled it temporarily, when you go to resume the cruise control, what most cars will do is go back to the last set speed that you had used. What Rivian does is it always resumes at the current speed. So if you disengage it to like slow down a bunch, then you re-engage it, it's going to re-engage at like 15 miles an hour. and then you have to then like you know raise it all the way back up to 65 you know so it's kind of that's kind of clunky so but that's a software thing that i hope they can tweak over time all right now the the uh the short hit list there is nowhere to put sunglasses what is wrong with these ev companies tesla and rivian both have nowhere to put sunglasses what is the most common accessory people use while driving a car well it's probably a phone we'll get to that in a second secondly it's probably sunglasses like oh my god why there's nowhere to put why on the model x they don't have a place because it's just one giant sweep of glass from the front to the back but yeah i don't know what the excuse is for the rivian you've got you've got a roof and a headliner you can put a little sunglass thing right there and like you know it's shallow like i they probably don't have the whole depth to have a recessed compartment but give me like a clip or something like geez anyway nowhere to put sunglasses why um one of the interesting design decisions of the Caribbean is, and I presume this is to maximize frunk space, there's no glove box, which is overall fine.

2:24:36I can put the car registration and the insurance card and the flashlight in the door. So I can put the paperwork for the car and stuff somewhere else, but it's kind of odd. I wish they had a glove box because that's just kind of a weird thing. Yeah, I think it's pretty terrible for a car this big. It's so huge in there. The dashboard is so large and so straight, flat, and it's like surely there's room for a shallow glove box of some kind and they just don't give it to you and it's not because it would intrude into frunk space if you look at how they take apart this dashboard there's stuff back there but not so much that it's infeasible that they could have given you a small glove box without intruding into the frunk space i hope they upgrade that it kind of you know it smells a little bit like you know preemptive decontenting well we don't have to give them a glove box there's so much storage elsewhere they don't want a glove box but people get into the habit of expecting there to be a little door there in front of the passenger yeah and just in general there is not enough console storage in this car like there's again there's a huge amount of space in the car which is overall a good thing this can fit tons of luggage and groceries and crap like that but there is not nearly enough like small compartment storage for the driver and passenger on the front like you need more there there's not even nowhere on the dash is there even a usb or 12 volt plug as far as i can tell the only power available on the front besides the the chi charger that kind of sucks and there's third party things that i'm going to try out to make that better the only power available in the front at all seems to be the two usb c ports that are in the armrest compartment which is itself kind of the only enclosed storage in the front of the vehicle besides this little tiny thing behind your knees on the seat that can hold basically nothing.

2:26:21So this, again, they kind of learned the wrong lesson from early Tesla, where the first Model S had this giant open dashboard with no storage, and people had to kind of hack various things in. People were doing the same thing with Rivian for the same reason. There's not enough storage. I understand that it looks cool and minimal and modern, but it's a lot less useful. So I hope they change that in future versions, and in the meantime, I'm buying all sorts of weird accessories. from all sorts of weird car hackers and Amazon makers and 3D printed dividers and stuff like that to try to solve that and report back in the future.

2:26:57I really want CarPlay. I do miss it. It is not perfect, but I do miss it. It has built-in Alexa, which this was new to me in a car context. Because Amazon is a, or Bezos is an investor in Rivian. I forget it. Right, and they have all the Amazon vans and stuff. so yeah it can do a lot but it's it's a little creepy i don't love that and also most cars that don't have car play if your if your phone is connected via bluetooth usually there's like a button on the steering wheel or something that's a voice control button and maybe it triggers the car's built-in crappy one but usually if you hold it down it'll trigger siri via bluetooth rivian has no such function there there seem there is no current way as far as i can find with both internet research and poking around in the car, even if you disable Alexa completely, it will not have any way for you to engage Siri on your phone that's connected via Bluetooth.

2:27:54So that kind of sucks. That's, again, software can get there. I really want CarPlay. And if not, I really at least want to be able to trigger Siri easily via Bluetooth. The Bluetooth stack seems to be fairly decent as Bluetooth stacks go. It has moderate latency. It shows a track list somehow when playing from the music app, so I've got to figure out how to hack that with Overcast. but otherwise you know there's there's a nitpick list here i hope they get to some of these things um i i think you know based on you know what the you know various interviews of the ceo and stuff like that i don't know how likely carplay is but i think they would do it before tesla would so i really really want carplay and uh we'll we'll see what happens there and i and i see no reason not to offer it.

2:28:39I tried their built-in nav. It's fine. It's not as good as CarPlay. I tried their built-in Bluetooth. It's fine. It's not as good as CarPlay. Just add CarPlay, for God's sake. Now that I went from CarPlay to not having CarPlay, it feels like a downgrade in those areas. And how many Rivian buyers will be coming from a car that has CarPlay? Not 100%, but not zero. And that number is probably going up over time so i would strongly caution them if they want people to be happy with their rivian purchases and if they want repeat customers and if they want people to even consider them more than more than you know they might otherwise you got to have carplay it's it's table stakes you got to add it and remember you're coming from a car with probably crappy feeble uh you know cpu gpu power powering the carplay display into the rivian which presumably has way more power in terms of like you know computing capacity to power all those big screens for its own proprietary os carplay will surely be faster better in rivian if they did support it on that hardware yeah exactly so anyway all right now the only other thing i'll talk about tonight is beach driving got to the checkpoint it was time to air down my tires overall it went well the only thing i missed so the rivian helpfully does have a tire pressure display mode for the left part of your gauge cluster area.

2:30:05So you can, just like the Land Rover, you can put that up there and leave it there, which is nice. One thing I really miss, though, is that on the Defender, the tire pressure monitor seemed to be real time. So as I'm airing down the tires, I could check my work with what does the car think the pressure is. I've never seen another vehicle that offered that. I don't know what I don't know enough about the components to know what that is. But it was it was real time tire pressure update. So literally, as the car is parked, as I'm changing the air pressure, it would display it on the dash. The Rivian does not do that.

2:30:38The Rivian is more like the Tesla and other cars that I've driven where you have to like drive for a while before it will update those numbers. That's because the cheaper ones do like what my Honda does, which is they're using a rotation of the wheel to tell you the pressure basically by how squishes it. Right. And so you have to rotate the wheel to get that. where it sounds like the Land Rover had actual pressure sensors. It must have, yeah. And that was a very nice feature for an off-roader where you are frequently changing the tire pressure intentionally, as opposed to with most cars, you pump it up a couple times a year at the gas station and then you just move on.

2:31:12But with an off-roader, you really want that sometimes. And anyway, so it's not a huge problem in the sense that I still use my rapid tire deflator, the valve pulling type. and it's, you know, amazing. And, you know, I was able to deflate all four tires really quickly, but the result could have been more precise if I had that. So anyway, I would like to see that. Otherwise, fine. Going off-road, I put it into the sand mode. It was totally easy and fine to change modes. It didn't give me any hard time about it. It was very, very nice. And then I get on the beach and what I had done is I had raised it to the highest ground clearance it offers, which is 15 inches of ground clearance, which is ridiculous for a vehicle this size.

2:31:59That's pretty much unheard of for a medium-sized SUV. But when you're driving on loose sand, which this is, you don't want to feel like you're getting stuck. And what getting stuck feels like is slowing down and not being able to push faster. That's what getting stuck feels like. i was limited in that high mode to 19 miles an hour and this usually on this stretch of beach i usually go about 25 so it felt a little so and it turns out this is actually like it's a software limit like when you are at the highest ground clearance setting of 15 inches it limits you to 19 miles an hour and it told me that on the screen it was just a tiny print so it took me a lot to figure it out and notice it but it felt like i was getting stuck so i couldn't go faster um so it was It was a little bit of a bad feel, but I'm like, all right.

2:32:51Then I lowered it down to standard height, which is still 11 1⁄2 inches, which is, I believe, the highest setting of the Defender or in the ballpark of it. So I just drove the rest of the way at standard 11 1⁄2 inches and went 25 miles an hour-ish like I always do, and it was amazing. Like, the Land Rover, for all of its wonderfulness off-road, that car did not have a ton of power and the aforementioned turbo lag made it harder to to use and that was the base engine the four-cylinder turbo um the the ravian the the things i was able to do like you know when you're driving in a deep sand track like you know other trucks drive in the beach and they they carve out this you know the two big tire tracks and sometimes people get weird and they they like turn in a weird way with the track or the track kind of gets sloppy as people crossover and sometimes you have to change which track you're in there'll be a bunch running in parallel from different vehicles that are driven there and you might want to like jump over to the next one the the traction and power required to do this is very difficult because you're basically asking your car you're currently driving on packed sand now turn into basically a huge thick berm of extremely loose sand and somehow jump out of the track you're in into the next one it's very you basically with land river i had to like wait for a good moment and then basically floor it and like you know get myself like on top of the track and then you know kind of settle into the one next to it the rivian has so much power instantly from zero that i was basically just able to drive right over it like it was nothing like it just just oh i'm just i was able to go basically wherever i wanted to go on the beach it was incredible the the amount of power and traction that i had and i should say i went down to about 25 psi on the tires um i i i wasn't i'm not sure yet like how low i can go without running weird risks with this vehicle because it's a pretty heavy vehicle so i didn't want to go lower than 25 um it was amazing the challenging parts of the of the route before in the defender and again the defender was a great off-roader but things that were challenging in the defender were a lot less challenging in the rearview it was just able to go.

2:35:08Once I, once I, you know, figured out that speed limit and to say, and, you know, went to the different ground clearance, it was incredible. So we'll see how it goes, you know, throughout this, this year of driving. Uh, but so far I am extremely impressed with its ability as an off-roader and, uh, we'll see how it goes. The magic of having one motor per wheel. Yeah. Like there's no differentials, there's no locking, there's no modes of like, you know, Complete independent control of power going to all four wheels. They actually rolled out a new powertrain in the Rivians now, which is just two motors.

2:35:39So one for the front wheels, one for the back wheels, which is less expensive and gets more range and so on and so forth. But yeah, for the ultimate and off-road, having independent control of all four wheels is great. And I think that 19-mile-an-hour mode, I think that's like when you're climbing over boulders at a 45-degree angle. It's not when you're going on flat sand. I feel like the 11-inch ground clearance from your Land Rover is adequate. it yeah i mean yeah like i would love to do 15 inch you know and be able to go maybe 25 or 30 max but you know whatever and you know why they're stopping you from doing that i don't want you to roll this thing um yeah but do you think an extra three inches i i figured it's more about like efficiency it's five inches or four inches four inches yeah no these things want to roll don't roll rolling is bad oh you know i would also i would assume like because the weight is also low in an EV, it's probably a much lower risk.

2:36:29Exactly. I agree, but it's also a very big and tall car that have 15 inches of ground clearance. Don't listen to John. John doesn't believe in anything that has more than six centimeters of ground clearance. You have to watch these videos of how easy it is to roll these things on pavement. John, when's the last time you spent more than 10 minutes driving something that was not a sedan? You know, rental cars. You ever try to get a rental car that actually is a sedan? Actually, yeah, that's very difficult. it's very difficult yeah but anyway you know that i i agree that the battery is really should be keeping this thing from like basically ever rolling but i mean that limit is there for a reason so well frankly i mean it has enough power you know if you want it to roll you probably could oh you absolutely can but but i i wonder if 19 miles an hour is conservative because i feel like okay let me go 30 i still won't roll right yeah but anyway this this thing so far it's amazing and again there are things that I would tweak about it obviously CarPlay and Storage should be the biggest two but otherwise this thing is amazing and CarPlay you can fix with software updates and Storage I can fix with weird plastic from Amazon so let's hope for those software updates and see how it goes over time but my initial day one and a half impressions are very positive so far