554: Is This Your Dog?

33:56Or it could be a manufacturing defect. But yeah, tis the season for manufacturing defects and variability in the first run of the very new iPhone. All right. And then we have all sorts of problems with the fine woven case. And let me just start by saying that I did put the fine woven case on my phone when I received it on Friday. I lasted through the end of the day and then I decided I'm going to return it. I don't have as visceral a hatred for it as seemingly everyone else under the sun does. I don't think it's that bad, the conversation we're about to have notwithstanding, but I don't know. I didn't care for it and I really, really dislike not only the feel of the sides of it, but the look and the two-tone thing, I just, I don't like it.

34:47And as people are saying in the chat, it's okay, but it's just too darn expensive. Like this is not a$60 case in my eyes. It's a $20 or$30 case as far as I'm concerned in terms of the build quality and the way it feels in my hand. It's not, I don't like it. So right now I am caseless, casey-less. AppleCare is my case that I do not plan to keep it that way because I've shattered the last two phones I've treated this way. So I have not unequivocally concluded what I'm going to do, but I do have a peel case, P-E-E-L, in my Amazon shopping cart, which I plan whenever we do the next family Amazon order.

35:23I will send that through, so to speak. I will have that delivered, and I'll see if that does the trick. I will follow up in the future. Yeah, so my wife still got her fine woven case, and And it, you know, she's only used it for a few days now. So far, it's holding up okay. But the very first night she had the case on the phone and went to her nightstand to plug it in with the cables that we had wisely pre-ordered to make sure there was USB-C connections in all the places where she needed them. She said, uh, there's something wrong here. She couldn't plug the USB-C cable into her phone. What do you mean you can't plug it in?

35:59Like, it doesn't, do you have the wrong cable or it's like, it's not, it's not going in. And so I looked at it and you could see that we had, you know, a high quality anchor name brand USB-C charging cable three feet long on just on her nightstand. And if you try to plug it in, the plug does not insert all the way because the hole in the bottom of the case does not allow the sort of plastic jacket around the metal USB-C plug doesn't allow it to pass through. the hole is too small uh and i was like oh this is i guess do we just have really thick you know cable ends on these you know lots of good strain relief whatever and the answer is yes this anchor cable does have pretty a pretty thick plastic shatter shroud around it but that made me start looking at the bottom of this phone a little bit more closely and it was immediately clear that the hole in the bottom of this fine woven case was not correctly centered around the usbc port.

36:54Like not even close. Like you just visually, anybody can look at this and say, nope, that's not centered. I mean, one of the ways to look at it is there's two little screws around the USB-C port itself. And you can see a little bit of one of the screws and you can't see any of the other. But even if the screws weren't there, this is not centered horizontally. It's also not centered vertically. Now, all that said, I did the test where I took the case off of the phone and then just tried to see if I could pass the plug-in through it, you know, without worrying about actually plugging a connector in because now it's just an empty case the anchor connector still does not fit through the opening even when there's no phone inside there so there's two issues at play here one you you if you have a you know a usbc charging cable that maybe you've been using for years on an ipad or some other device maybe check whether the cable you're going to use is able to pass through the hole in the bottom of your iphone case or do like i do and get a bare bottom iphone case because that's something we hadn't didn't really have to think about with lightning because everybody selling a lightning cable or a case it was kind of a an ecosystem that where you knew what you were going to get the case has to accommodate a lightning cable and lightning cables have to accommodate cases and they all grew up together so there was no instance where anyone was selling a lightning cable that couldn't fit through a case hole and there's no one selling cases that a lightning cable wouldn't fit through right because it wouldn't make sense you know what's going to happen there but usbc cables have existed for years and years and many many many of those usbc cables never had any expectation of ever being put into an iphone because iphones didn't have usbc and so lo and behold all of these you know this anchor cable which we bought recently was nevertheless a cable that existed in anchor's line for probably years and it was not made with the expectation that would have to fit through a hole in the bottom of a an iphone case and lo and behold it doesn't so be aware of this i'll put a link in the show notes to two examples to the cable that didn't fit and i also found a tiny little short cable that i bought for for like our little charging like shelf area that does fit and it was just luck of the draw that one of them fit and one of them didn't but think about that even if you're not getting the apple case uh but yeah the apple case is getting slammed by everybody because the hole's off center and it's getting people very upset it's not just me that has an off center hole a lot of people have off center holes in fact uh a couple people wrote in with or you know tooted that the apple silicone case is also off center so i don't know if this is just a big manufacturing problem with their cases that they can't center the hole around the port maybe this has always happened and we just never noticed because again the lightning connector maybe there was enough like room around the openings that it wasn't a big deal but now the tolerances seem real close if you have a thick usbc cable so this is not going great for the fine woven case but uh the hits keep coming yeah well and for what it's worth i did break out my fine woven case from the box where i had put it to in order to uh send it or bring it back to apple which i plan to do in the next you know day or two and anyways i put it back on my phone very briefly and the port the hole seems to be perfectly centered on mine so i did get lucky in that regard uh unfortunately it sounds like you did not yeah yeah it's not just me there's lots of people reporting this uh vatici reported that he brought his uh fine woven case on his iphone to dinner with him and put his phone down on the table and the next morning woke up and realized he had picked up a stain because when you make things out of fabric or fabric type material you can pick up stains if you put it down in some kind of liquid um whoops i did peek at my wife's fine woven case before uh i came down here to podcast and it still looks pretty much pristine but i'll keep you updated on that but i can tell you from uh christian mumaw's tweet on uh sorry on september 23rd in the apple store in boston the two fine woven cases on display looked like they were attacked by a badger well that's probably from people who read the verge story like oh you scratch exactly some people go online they they read a story about how these things scratch when you you know look ugly when you scratch them with your fingernail then they go into an apple store what do they do they take their fingernail and they go so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy people are going to apple store i mean it it kind of makes some sense you want to know hey if i buy this case is it going to scratch real easily and one way to figure that out is to go scratch the case and so we'll put a link in the show notes to this uh two you'll see two very very scratched uh fine woven cases yeah it's it's not good there's a number of angles to this number one i i think anyone who's interested in a bunch of fine woven complaining and nerdery um definitely listen to upgrade from i think today or yesterday uh there was a great segment um jason was talking about how like there was there's probably like a group in apple responsible for make a premium case that we can sell for 60 bucks and when the leather went away they're kind of like uh now what and they made this kind of in that price point and in that role rather than trying to figure out like you know what can we actually make that's nice and doesn't doesn't need to keep that same price point or whatever else like well the leather cases were more expensive than this though this is under pricing the leather was leather was like 70 or 80 wasn't it no i think it was 60 bucks anyway it was in the ballpark regardless um this this is not a good case.

41:56This is an interesting first attempt. I hope they're going to revise this. Because, again, what they said in Upgrade, Apple's cases, you could always say they were expensive, but they were at least good. And this is expensive and not good. And that's not great for them. That being said, I got my Peak Design Everyday case, which I loved the iPhone 14 version of it. And I lasted about five minutes with it on my iPhone 15 Pro because they did not add a button for the action button. They just had a cutout. Oh, I did hear about this. So most third-party cases for the 15 continued their previous approximate design where you would have a cutout where the silent and ring switch was because that way you weren't constantly pushing it in and there was no way to have a sliding switch on a case that was any usefulness there.

42:53So everyone just had cutouts. You could reach in kind of with your fingernail and flip it over if you really wanted to, but it was more difficult. Well, I'm already so accustomed to using the action button for something fun that having it be like buried in a cutout of the case made it too difficult to access. And so I would strongly suggest anybody out there, if you're designing a case for the iPhone 15 Pro, that's got to be a button. It can't be a cutout anymore. And anybody out there who has an iPhone 15 Pro and is case shopping, strongly advise, get one that has a button there, not a cutout.

43:23And look at the cutout on the bottom and make sure your cables fit in it. I got a new case for my phone as well, my iPhone 14 Pro. I just went up to the attic and pulled down the bull strap case, which was basically a clone of the Ryan London leather case. And I swapped them out. so now i have a nice brand new case of course uh you know i thought about it i was like you know maybe i should just keep this one on because my ryan london one's been on it for a year and it's kind of nicely broken in uh but it's also kind of like dented and i dropped it a bunch of times or whatever so i'm starting over and i got a break in the bull strap case and it's it's working out well so far and i the fine woven thing obviously the manufacturing defects are bad um i don't like that the hole is not centered the fact that cables don't fit uh like the anchor usb c cable i have it doesn't fit both in width and in height so it's not like it's just one dimension both dimensions don't fit if you made the case larger to accommodate this cable i think the the edges of the case might be too thin like the top and bottom might be too thin so i kind of understand why the opening is the size it is it's just a very thick cable but it's something to keep in mind but i kind of like how it looks and how it feels again durability i don't know how that's going to work out it's only it's been like a week or whatever now uh but i think i like i kind of like the rubbery-ish sides i think the back looks and feels nice uh i think it is it would be a 60 case if you like how it looks and feels because that's just an aesthetic thing and just you know a tactile thing and if they can get the holes to line up with the ports because i feel like it's kind of an important thing for a 60 case and again someone put it put in a picture of an apple silicone case with exactly the same problem so this may be something that has always happened and we've just never noticed that the holes in the bottom of apple's iphone cases have been off by a fraction of a millimeter or two because it never mattered until you know people are trying to plug in cables that don't fit and then they're staring at that bottom hole like i was and noticing that it's off again i'm a strong proponent of an iphone case that does not have anything covering the bottom not for plugging in port so that's just a nice side effect but because you swipe up from the bottom to unlock a thing and i can't stand swiping up over the lip of a case and apple really needs to get on that i mean it was last year the clear case didn't have a bottom lip they have i was gonna say they they i haven't seen one yet but they still sell the clear case and honestly i actually might get one because oh by the way before i get to that similar time follow-up multiple people in the chat are reporting that apparently peak design agrees with me and they're going to revise the case and issue swaps or refunds so that that's amazing if that's true that i i can't believe that they would you know like everybody knew about the action button i can't believe they would sell the case with that giant opening in it but regard look hey look i thought bad on me that's i mean geez if they actually do that that's look i love peak design that's why that's why i blindly give them so much my business that's kind of amazing if they actually do that um anyway secondly on the clear case like right now i think i think the apple clear case might be the best apple case period because did you try the clear case in the 14 pro yes i owned one i i used it i used it until i got the peak design case which was probably about maybe a quarter or half the year that's right we talked about this last year no i did not like the clear case no the only problem it feels great in the hand because it has it's like nice tacky plastic the only problem i have with it is that like any clear case eventually you get a bunch of dust and crap under there and it looks really terrible probably does it they turn yellow do you know no i well i mean again i only did it for maybe four or five months but it didn't happen during that time but it was great i if i did if i had to discover the peak design case halfway through the year i would have stuck with it for the whole year i mean imagine the reason that i think we talked about this last year like why doesn't the clear case have a bottom lip while all of apple's other ones do i imagine it might have to do with the fact like what i just said when if you do the cutout hole for for the lightning or usbc port it leaves such a thin piece of material above and below the port uh that maybe they're afraid it would like crack of whatever material clear things made up so they just love to open but apple please open bottom cases you used to make them all the time and then you didn't just it kills me so anyway uh when for for iphone 16 pro i will be third-party case shopping again this is like unified timeline i i understand that it is a do or die requirement for you i don't understand why you do you i'm not saying you're wrong but i just don't know it it is better it really is like if you if you had a case like you know ignorance is less as you would say you haven't experienced this so you're like oh it's fine i don't mind it or whatever but as soon as you had a case that didn't have the lip it's just so much nicer i mean i guess but i'm i grabbed my my 14 pro which is sitting next to me and it has the apple leather case on it with a big old lip on the bottom.

47:49And I don't mind it. Like it just does not bother me like it bothers you, but to each their own. So Jim wrote in with some feedback. As a woman who has had to deal with phones being far too big for small hands for many years, I found pop sockets to be really uncomfortable. I find straps like this one, and we'll put a link in the show notes, to be much more ergonomic. There's plenty of versions available, including magnetic ones with card holders, et cetera. Just thought I'd pass the info along in case the pop socket gives you a cramp in your hand like it does for me and we'll put a link in the notes to this i will be the let me start by saying i've never tried one of these this doesn't look like the sort of thing that i would enjoy but you know i've seen several people make this recommendation so maybe it's worth a shot and certainly it's a heck of a lot cheaper than a pop socket it's like a third of the cost it's much it's less ridiculous than a pop socket a pop socket always struck me as like i know they have ones that collapse and everything but it's just like talk about adding a structural element to your phone a strap seems much less intrusive because it can kind of lay flat when you're not using it and you don't have to like unpop it or whatever but i know a lot of people love their pop sockets and it just becomes like part of the phone it just it always seemed kind of like it turns your phone into like one of those little puzzle pieces that you give like kids you know like little wooden puzzles they have little plastic pegs you can grab the puzzle piece real easily i should point out the peak design every everyday case does have a loop option on it for 10 bucks more um but that's what this what this link is is much larger this is this is the whole height of the phone that pokes yeah you shove your whole hand through this yeah it loops through the camera hole down to the bottom of the case i mean that's that's quite that's a huge ordeal i mean it's like a pop socket is like you know it's like a a peg in the middle that you put between your fingers right and this is the opposite of that it's around the outside of your hand either way it's making it so that if you open your hand the phone doesn't fall either because the pop socket is between your fingers or because the strap is over your hand yep uh anonymous writes now we are leaving uh all case related things and anonymous writes in with regard to apple and chip binning which i think was an ask atp from last week yes anyways uh when it comes to silicon chip production both apple and intel create bins based on efficiency but they do different things with the bins while intel holds power fixed and lets frequency vary apple holds frequency or performance fixed, and bins by power consumption.

50:04For example, a Mac Mini can tolerate a hotter SoC than a MacBook Air, hotter meaning higher power consumption. Just like Intel, Apple is motivated to use as much of the wafers as possible, not just for financial reasons, but also for carbon footprint. TSMC does not use particularly clean energy. Yeah, this is really interesting. So I don't, forgive me, again, I only have like a rudimentary understanding of modern chip and chip design and chip manufacturing but i know like you know back in the back in the days when i actually attempted overclocking as a pc user a chip might run at a certain frequency just fine only if you increase the voltage a little bit and when you increase the voltage it makes it use way more power like in whatever steps we were dealing with back then makes way more heat etc but you know certain speeds were attainable only by increasing the voltage so this is interesting you know if if things work at all that way today, which I'm sure it's more complicated than that today, but the basic idea is probably still there that a chip might be able to perform at full speed, but you need to give it a bit more power to do so.

51:05So that's a really interesting idea, if this is true, that they could bin based on, okay, the ones that can achieve full speed at the lowest power, those are going in laptops. The ones that need a bit more power, those are going in John's Mac Pro. No, not my Mac Pro, but yeah, the whole idea is if you don't know, like Apple basically more or less holds the clock speeds the same but they're just picking the ones like you know which one uses more power to achieve the target fixed clock speed that we have and so they'll try every chip off the line and say is this a good one we can achieve our single fixed clock speed and i know it's not fixes they can change whatever they're not selling faster or slower ones on their website you just you get what you get and it you know it clocks up and down right but the ones that use more power to do so they'll save them for the ones that have better cooling systems So that's the way Apple is bending.

51:50Because as we said last show, the variability in manufacturing exists no matter what. Like there's no way to make, if they could make them all exactly the same on the wafer, they would, but they can't. So there's always going to be quote unquote good ones and quote unquote bad ones. And what this is saying is within the line of laptops that use the same SoC, they're going to put the quote unquote good ones in the ones with the worst cooling system. So it's not, and that's going to be the cheapest ones, you know, the MacBook Air with no fan, right? And the quote unquote bad ones are going to end up in a Mac studio because they have a much bigger cooler there which is kind of the opposite of the way it is when you're bidding by clock speed where you test them and you find the ones that can go a higher clock speed but i don't you know apple doesn't crank up the clock speeds the higher i think that maybe the studio does have a little bit higher clock than like the macbook air and those stuff and obviously thermal throttling is a big deal but that's another reason the good ones end up going in the macbook air because it's going to thermal throttle no matter what you don't want it to be thermal throttled so badly that it kills the performance of the chip geeker one uh apparently has thoughts on the a17 pro and they decide that it is powerful but should be more efficient uh john tell me about this please yeah this is a youtuber i hadn't seen before uh i was really impressed by it because they're really diving as deep as they possibly can into the chip itself going down to the point of like more detail than apple gave we read the detail that apple gave uh during the event of like a wider decode and you know better branch predictor or whatever there's also new alus in there as well so they have like a chip diagram you know they they get these devices and then they probe them as best they can without cutting the top off the chip so they're probing them with software or whatever to figure out what's different about the a17 pro versus the a16 and so they have a bunch of diagrams giving that information and then they tested them you know a17 pro versus a16 versus like the latest snapdragon uh socs and everything to find out to try to dig into the point i was making on the last show of like three nan tsmc is three nanometer does it take less energy per instruction executed right are we what is the are we receiving any of the promise of a silicon shrink shrink uh and this is from the verdict chapter of the video after extensive testing i would i would encourage you to watch it if you're interested in this topic it's kind of long but they do go into lots of detail this is from the verdict uh this is uh geeker one whoever whoever is the uh presenter on this channel now i just feel a bit bad not only about iphones but also about the future of the semiconductor industry some conclusion huh the a17 pro being the first three nanometer chip didn't showcase any clear advantages over tsmc's last gen products electrical wise i still don't have a die shot so i don't know density wise but if efficiency isn't improved at all even with such a huge jump in fabrication then how can we make chips better in the future uh he is not excited about three nanometer based on the results and you can go through them benchmark by benchmark and see and by the way you also see that uh some of the uh the snapdragon socs are actually performing better in gpu but they don't have like the 3d ray tracing stuff or whatever so apple's lead in socs it's still there it still exists uh especially in power efficiency you'll see some tests where the a17 pro is matching a snapdragon's using twice as much power but it's not a giant clear-cut victory that it used to be the competition is kind of catching up and three nanometer according to the test uh that people have been able to do so far is not really bringing the dividends people thought it would so far.

55:09I wonder how much I mean, again, like this is not anywhere near my area of expertise. But I wonder how much of that is just that maybe Apple didn't really take advantage of as much of the new design tweaks that are possible with the new process. I'm not sure. Yeah, it's hard to tell. One of the one of the most convincing tests was there they got a point where like the A17 Pro was throttling, which is another issue. People are saying that the A17 Pro doesn't have as much thermal mass to dissipate heat so it's hot faster but anyway they were they had like a diagram of like um power draw and clock frequency and you'd see like the a17 pro would be uh taking more power but going a much higher clock than the a16 then all of a sudden a certain point in the test the a17 pro throttles and it throttled down to the same clock speed as the a16 was and at the same clock speed as the a16 it used exactly the same amount of power that's not what you would expect from a shrink you know what i mean like you would say oh if you shrink i can either go faster with the same power or use more power and you know like just it it's a very it was a very convincing diagram that to lend credence to the idea that three nanometer is not buying us any power efficiencies at least not yet and there's also other stories about how this three nanometer process that tsmc is using right now they have all these like we did the same thing with five nanometer they have like these letter suffixes this is you know the the 5n process or the 3e process this is like the first version of 3 nanometer and supposedly as early as next year like the beginning of next year they'll be on to a new variation of the 3 nanometer process that is better than this one so maybe just the very first 3 nanometer process is not giving lots of dividends but yeah it seems like most of the things that are better about the a17 pro have almost nothing to do with 3 nanometer and it's more like well it has ray tracing and has another gpu core and we can clock it a little bit higher but when we clock a little bit higher it also uses more power and that produces more heat and the the iphone 15 pro is not very good about dissipating that heat and so it thermothrottles and not not impressive showing for the a17 pro i do wonder how much that is the enclosure design you know because the the iphone 15 pro when i was setting it up gave me the the you know i'm too hot for full speed charging kind of warning like it overheated while i was just like transferring my my old phone to the new phone i've never seen an iphone do that i like i've only seen an iphone overheat like in the sun outside like you know that kind of stuff i've never seen it overheat while on my desk in the evening just you know transferring much data to it so it does seem like the new enclosure design for the iphone 15 pro as much as i love it in other ways which i guess we'll get to but as much as i love it in other ways some something is not as good about the cooling for sure i mean i you just go down to the fact that i don't think titanium dissipates as well as aluminum but either even if it did there's just less of it less mass right so you have less mass dissipating the heat so you know because the thing is lighter um and apple has never been particularly aggressive about the cooling of the phones there have been some rumors about them using like uh vapor chamber heat pipey type things or whatever but so far they haven't really gone whole hog with that in their phones uh android phones in many years past have had to by necessity have much more robust cooling systems because their socs just simply use more power right and there's a whole separate breed of android phones that are like gaming phones essentially some of them you have fans in them for crying out loud but like they have way more yeah they have way more robust i was about to make a joke about that that actually exists yeah i think a couple of them have tiny little fans but but even with the ones that don't they have more robust cooling systems and they reap the benefits from it it doesn't take much more effort in cooling to to really you know because you just have to do something more than what apple does but apple has thus far decided that they're not particularly interested in expending space weight cost to you know to allow this because i mean and i think it's reasonable like people aren't running sustained batch jobs for their work on their phone that they need to run without throttling and yeah all these phones throttle but um but again setting aside the the the thermal characteristics of the 15 pro and the 15 pro max the you know watch this video like what when going the same clock speed as the a16 this three nanometer chip was using exactly the same amount of power and that is not great and you can say oh but it's doing more because it was just it was like a cpu test it wasn't even like a ray tracing gpu thing where you can say well but it's doing more ray tracing stuff so technically it's still doing more work for the same power like watts per instruction executed is not looking impressive in three nanometer and someone in the chat room said that the a17 is on the n3b process and next year will it will be n3e because e is after b i guess anyway we're never going to remember these things but suffice it to say tsmc continues to improve their process uh and next year there'll be a better three nanometer process hopefully they'll use that one for the mac chips oh my god did you see what user tyler in the chat linked to is it a gaming phone this is a a magsafe compatible attachment fan oh my word sold by the gaming company razor that is 60 does it have rgb lights in it it sure does have rgb lights that must be for gamers oh my maybe well maybe i should get this next time i have to do a phone transfer oh my god this is incredible so you got to watch that video because in the video one of the things they do is they have they basically have phone coolers because they want to run some tests where they can guarantee the phone is not going to throttle so they massively cool them by sticking the phone into this rig that just like blows cold air at the back of a phone constantly when they're running it this this is like a consumer version of that seven blade fan with up to 6400 rpm you know how loud that would be i get headphones in anyway it's fine this is amazing that is kind of amazing holy jamolies all right and finally for follow-up john iowa 17 people's pets and places one of the things i was most excited about in this year's crop of os's that i think we talked about when we were discussing their feature sets was the fact that you know photos is going to start recognizing animals just like it recognizes people so i i had been fighting with photos to have a people album that recognizes everybody in my family and a bunch of my relatives and so on and so forth i still of course do manually tagging of my immediate family uh which is much more reliable because the faces thing occasionally forgets who everybody is and loses track but anyway i'm trying to use the system i'm like but i have so many pictures of my dog my my current dog my past dog and it has no idea who they are i know it knows it can identify dogs and it has that little dog overlay that will try to tell you what breed your dog is and get it hilariously wrong all the time but it will find other dogs that look so much of my dog which is a fun feature but this year is like now pets can be people too uh and on my iphone uh this is another thing when you have the shared the shared uh iCloud shared photo album you don't it doesn't share faces we've discussed before doesn't share album doesn't share faces right so any work that i do on my iphone related to faces is pointless because the quote-unquote real library is my wife's library or that my wife's is the owner of the shared library and nothing i do on my phone can influence the face data for our real library but despite that when i upgraded my phone to iowa 17 i went into the photos app on my phone and in the album section what was previously the people album now said people pets and places and lo and behold it had little circles for everyone in my family and then it had my little dog in a circle and it had my dog's name under it i'm like how the hell did you know my dog's name i guess based on the tag because i've tagged like you know i have a daisy tag for all the pictures of my dog but anyway i'm like wow this is great i can't wait until my wife upgrades and her mac upgrades right and everyone gets upgraded i'll be able to finally go into the real photo album she's the owner of the shared iCloud photo library and she has the canonical set of actually curated over many many years people place and face data and i'll be able to start tagging all the pictures of my dog do that thing where it says review these faces is this your dog is this your dog is this your dog you know that's the exercise of doing this right when i did it on my phone it didn't give me any pictures to review and in fact on my phone it had a little tag a little people thing for my wife and i went into it and had found one picture of my wife and i'm pretty sure i have more than that and then i went review additional pictures and it says sorry there are no additional pictures of your wife i'm like are you sure because again on my phone it's it has access to the whole shared photo library it's not just like my personal photos but the the face data that i derive from that is only private to me so my wife has the canonical face data anyway uh when my wife upgraded all her stuff i went into the canonical photo library on her phone and it just said people it didn't even say people in places i think it just said people and there was no dogs in there upgraded her mac to sonoma now it's running sonoma and i've let it sit there all day and i go over it and launch photos on her mac and go to the albums and it just says people like what happened what happened to people pets in places eventually it did say people in places but it doesn't say pets i can go and look at a picture of my dog i have so many of them does it circle my dog's face and say identify this dog no it does not and so here i am once again just as we discussed in a past episode begging apple for a button that would say find faces now only now i want to say find pet faces now i this is the the main feature i want to use from this cycle of upgrades is i want to be able to identify my all my you know current and past pets in my photo album and it's been one or two days since i've upgraded this stuff and i can't use the feature because i don't know when it's going to decide to identify my dog's face and the literal thousands of pictures i have of my dog but i had a similar experience and for what it's worth i am the tina in in our relationship when it comes to photo stuff uh my library was canonical one and aaron jumped onto it um i was also super excited to see penny pictures you know found in my photo library and our photo library and i went and did the same thing and said oh it's not there yet.

1:05:20And it took, I think one overnight on the charger for before my phone found Penny. It did not label Penny with a name, but it found Penny and added her as, you know, a potential pet or whatever. And I also noticed that as you said, the, the album or whatever, the, the thing that, that you can go to is no longer people. It's like you said, people, pets and places. Um, but anyways, it took overnight when it was, well, I was going to say plugged in but it was charging via chi uh it took overnight to churn on this presumably while power was connected before it gave me that option and flipped that switch now i agree it would be nice if you could say do it now but if you wait if you wait at least a night which i guess at this point you probably have no i've waited multiple nights like i know i know how this works i know they say oh we'll do it while your thing is plugged in and charging it's been multiple nights on her phone because she obviously got her phone on basically on lunch day so it's been multiple nights plugged in every single night into a cable and uh you know her mac is grinding away now using the thing i described before which is basically launch photos then quit photos then look in activity monitor make sure you see photo analysis that using some percentage of your cpu or whatever like it's doing the work and i have a huge library so it's going to take a while but it's the same problem i was saying before like i don't want to have to wait for the lowest of low priority processes to do this especially on her mac studio i wanted to say use all the resources of this Mac studio that is otherwise sitting idle while she's at work to right now find all the faces and maybe give me a progress bar that says you know how long how far along are you just gonna take a day 24 hours 15 hours two hours but instead it's like I will only do it under special circumstances when I feel just right when and then even then I'm gonna do it lowest possible priority and I mean how many nights does her phone need to be plugged in is it aborting in the middle because it doesn't finish and it's not making any progress is it going to do it after a week.

1:07:09So frustrating. Like this, this is a feature I want to use. And it's almost like, Hey, if you have 10 photos on your phone, yeah, when you upgrade to iOS 17, you'll create these new features. But if you have hundreds of thousands of photos, you'll get these new features at some point in the future. Can't tell you when no indication that it's doing any work. Just trust us. It probably is, but at the lowest possible priority, very frustrating. It's my dog's face and I want it now. I do. And there's so many pictures you would think like it would do it incrementally like there's just so many of them like go reverse chronological just thousands and thousands of dog pictures right just i don't want you to have identified all of them identify one just one so i can make the people album like make some progress but it's like we're not going to do anything until i've scanned all 170 000 photos all right fine i'll just keep waiting i suppose all right let's talk about new toys so uh john i guess we don't need you for a while you can go uh get a snack or whatever but uh marco and i have new toys and marco you got a 15 pro in what color in what capacity i got one of the many shades of gray that's available in the middle one oh oh thank you okay the middle one oh totally yes indeed it's gray and uh 256 my my usual capacity and i am so far extremely happy with it i i mean i know i say this pretty much every year um so the the way this thing feels i i might try to go caseless the whole year because it feels i've been thinking about it too it feels great like it's i it is it is noticeably lighter it is not as light as the non-pro phones and that's and that's clear as soon as you pick it up but the improvement is noticeable with you know with with the exception of the alleged sharp edge that john was talking about earlier i love the new rounded edges um i I think they really feel very good in the hand.

1:09:04I think the phone looks fantastic from the edge. And, you know, I mentioned this briefly last week, but I really never see the back of my phone. I only ever see the edges because if I'm holding my phone, I'm seeing the front. Then it goes in my pocket. If my phone is out like on a table or desk, I'm not going to put the screen down and scratch it like a monster. So the screen's always up. Or if it's charging on a dock, then it's up also. so I pretty much never see the back of my phone. It could be hot pink and I think it would take me three days to notice. So the fact that the back of it is gray instead of gray or gray doesn't really matter to me.

1:09:42The sides look fantastic. That's what I care about. The metal edges of the phone, that's the part I actually see. That looks fantastic. I'm extremely happy with it. It feels great in the hands, as I said. I'm very much enjoying playing with different options for the action button. I'm currently using the flashlight because I actually use the phone flashlight somewhat regularly in my life and I have found so far that is best bang for the buck for me but I love what everyone's, like I've heard so many reports of people having good ideas for it you know, so certain people, like you know Gruber has a shortcut to toggle certain things obviously I tried launching a camera with it and if you do launch a camera with it then it becomes a shutter button as well to me that doesn't offer enough over just like the regular lock screen, you know, long press camera button that I've been using.

1:10:30And yes, I know, but the swipe, I've never got used to it. But anyway, so I tried camera, wasn't good enough for me. Flash that I'm loving. Some people have made like, you know, create a new note shortcuts or certain like, you know, workflow-y kind of things. Tons of good ideas out there. Yeah, a lot of people are doing the thing where the button does something different based on all sorts of factors, which to me would just make me think too hard every time I pressed the button or what was going to happen. But some of those factors are simple things like orientation. if you're in landscape and you actually action button does one thing but if your portrait does something else you can combine that with things like am i on wi-fi or cellular what is my current location like basically anything that a shortcut can do you can do because you know it's just you can just have as many conditionals as you want and say okay well if i'm home and it's in landscape and it's a tuesday and the tide is down then when i press the button it should bring up that like you can do anything you want people i feel like are going a little bit overboard uh yeah i just uh i set my wife's thing to i think camera i'm not sure she's ever pressed the button yet so i'll give you more news than that as we go yeah actually what i i don't i don't think this is possible yet what i would love would be a um lock and unlock of my car because it's the proximity lock and sometimes i want to like just do it manually that would be you should be able to do that like that this is by the way is a new class of apps that i'm seeing get much more popular now that the action button is here apps that essentially the only thing they do is vend actions to shortcuts yeah uh there's a whole bunch of those out there that people i think gruber used one in one of his things there's another one that does like enter your your uh you know open ai key and we could do chat gpt things and and you know it's all just a connection to shortcuts uh shortcuts so it's exciting to see people trying stuff like this and i think unlocking your car that's something that should be possible with the cooperation of the people who make the app that unlocks your car or if there's like if someone has hacked the api you can just figure out what blob of json to send to your car then you could probably do it yourself well it's this whole like bluetooth short range thing i don't know how easy that would be anyway so it's been the action button so far loving it so so far i'm very happy with the phone i am a little concerned about the thermal situation um but i don't really you know my phone is not aggressively being used as like a benchmarking tool or you know i hardly ever play games on it so i'm probably not going to see problems with that i hope um over time and having no case by the way is much better than smothering your phone in a case that's keeping heat in because at least the heat is able to dissipate into the air rather than being trapped in a snug rubber case or whatever well and hey maybe you could make like you know oh man people can make heat sink cases that would be comfortable to hold there there is one that shaped like that or is trying to be an imitation of the 2019 mac pro actually 2019 the current mac pro like that kind of cheese gratery type uh look there is a bunch of metal cases that like that so yeah metal case should conduct that heat away better but uh i'm not sure you know people get that it's like oh this this case makes my phone so hot no if you're feeling the heat that means it's leaving your phone if you don't feel any heat that means that the heat that your phone is making is trapped next to your phone so your phone is getting hot if your hand is not it's a trade-off you know we were talking during the rumor show about how they were allegedly shrinking the dimensions a little bit like very tiny amounts in each dimension i actually kind of noticed that.

1:13:39It's not a huge difference, but it is noticeable. So the combination of the rounded-off edges, the slight dimensional shrink, and the substantially lighter weight, this really feels good. I would say this might be the best-feeling iPhone they've made maybe since the Mini. And this feels better in some ways, worse than others, mostly because it's bigger. But this is a very, very good design in my opinion so far. Again, I've had it for two seconds, so it's hard to know long term. I don't have any opinions of the cameras and stuff yet because it's just too soon to know. But so far I am very happy with this.

1:14:20And hearing everyone's reviews of how great the Max 5X camera is, and I'm sure I want to hear from Casey a lot about this in a minute, but I was a little bit tempted. Maybe I should go Max this year? you know, as many of us have been. And I'm actually glad I didn't for two reasons. Number one, I saw the rumor today that the iPhone 16 series is going to get slightly larger again, like by, you know, 0.2 inches for each one. And so I'm like, all right, I don't want to get used to the big size now, and then it gets even bigger next year. But then also, like, I am loving that they just made this nice advance in getting it lighter weight, getting it a little bit nicer to hold, in the hand, I want to actually use that and benefit from those savings rather than immediately spending them by getting the next size up phone.

1:15:13I've been asking for this for years. Make the phones lighter. The medium phone is a little bit too big and way too heavy. Make it lighter. Make it a little bit smaller. They actually just did that and it feels great and it looks great. And so I'm happy to stick with and enjoy the smaller size and actually really benefit from these savings. So for me, I did the unthinkable. And as discussed last week, I ordered a 15 Pro Max. I bought it in the good gray, the natural titanium in 512 gigabytes. and in short i think i like it i'm really uncomfortable with it i'm really not too comfortable with the fact that i kind of really like it have you broken it yet not yet okay good that's good this is this is better than i think it was my 12 my 12 pro if memory serves that um it was a podcast that i told the story many times but it was podcast sunday we had been to like a local fair aaron's car was just utterly obliterated with dirt and whatnot so i decided to wash it real quick, but I wanted to listen in to Podcastathon.

1:16:22My AirPods weren't working for some reason. This was when the windshield was still intact, right? This is when the windshield was still intact. Was your laptop dry? Yes. Both of our laptops were dry. But then in the process of washing the car, I was trying to go and do like a quick Carl version. And I jumped up with my phone that was in my back pocket of my shorts, my brand new phone that I had had for literally six hours at this point. And it fell out of my shorts onto the cement and shattered the back of it. Thankfully, I did have AppleCare, because especially at that point, it was like a$600 repair or whatever if I didn't have AppleCare.

1:16:53But anyways, I've lasted for several days now, so I've already beaten my record in a good sense. But yeah, so I got this 15 Pro Max. I have always hated the big phones. I always thought they were ridiculously oversized, ridiculously heavy, and just ridiculous in every measure. I have made incessant amounts of fun of Mike Hurley and the big phone boys over at Connected, which for a lot of the run of Connected was all of them. And yet here I am, hat in hand, saying, I would like to eat some crow, please. I really freaking like this phone. I really do. The weight difference between the 14 Pro and the 15 Pro Max.

1:17:37So I put it on our very unscientific kitchen scale because I was curious what our very unscientific kitchen scale said. And I know I could look up the numbers, but I wanted to see, you know, what does this thing say? I was going to say, Apple tells you right in the page. I have it right here. No, I know. I know. But I wanted to test it locally. I wanted to see what that thing said. Because I swear to you, they feel like they're either the same weight or maybe the 14 Pro might even be heavier. It is not. It is unequivocally not. Based on our kitchen scale, and I wish I didn't have the chance to look and see what the official rate numbers are, but according to the kitchen scale, the 14 Pro, 208 grams, 15 Pro Max, 221 grams.

1:18:15But I swear to you, it feels almost lighter, which maybe I've been incepted by everyone telling me this from the hands-on area, and maybe I'm lying to myself, but it certainly does not feel like the boat anchor that the 14 pro max felt like it is amazing because of the size i mean it's like the same same reason it's so impressive you get like a tiny little one centimeter by one centimeter cube of tungsten and you got like a block of aluminum that weighs twice as much but it's way bigger like the tungsten thing feels impressively heavy you know because it's smaller right so that's that's what you're getting if the if they were both the same size you'd be able to tell the white white uh the size difference the weight difference that's the word i want but because you expect the much bigger phone to be much much heavier and it's only a little bit heavier yeah that makes sense i did i do feel the same thing with tina's phone that like the i do feel the weight difference it is i i still contend that it is mostly the absolute weight difference and not the fact that the weight has been removed from the perimeter that is a big deal um but you can you can definitely feel it i in a blind test i could definitely tell the 14 pro with no case from the 15 pro with no case by the way i ran the numbers on apple's site and the 15 Pro Max is actually less dense than the 14 Pro in terms of like grams per cubic meter.

1:19:29It is less dense. Yeah, of course it is. Cause it's, it's, yeah, that's, that's what I'm saying. That's what you're feeling. Like it's, it's like when you get something that seems heavy for its size, the 14 Pro seems heavy for its size and the 15 Pro Max seems light for its size because it's less dense. Yeah, exactly. So I'm curious, Casey, really like, how are you, so it's like, you know, I've had the, the 14 plus as a test phone all summer and I was, you know, developing the app against it and everything and i'm wondering because every time i pick up the 14 plus i would always think to myself maybe i should try carrying this around for a week or so and get used to the size and see if i like it because the 14 plus is even lighter than the 15 pro max and so i thought maybe maybe i should try seeing see if i like the big phone uh and i would put it in my pocket and walk around for a couple hours and i would hate it i would like i would only last at most a couple hours like i i can't i can't it's too it's too big in my pocket too big in my hand like i i was just never able to get used to that size, at least in those short trial runs.

1:20:23How have you found, like going from medium to big, like how are you used to it? Did you get used to it quickly? So there's several different things I want to talk about. I'm not sure which one is the right one to do first, but I guess let's start with in pocket. I wear guy clothes. They're generally somewhat loose fitting, possibly and partially because I'm unfashionable, but nevertheless, I'm not in a situation where I've felt like the in-pocket feel was a problem. You know, it's definitely bigger, for sure, but it's not a night or day issue. What pocket are you putting the phone in? Right front pocket, as I have for many, many, many years.

1:21:02See, this is something I hadn't really thought about, I don't know why, but until this year. Not because I got a new phone, but because I'm transitioning from shorts weather to pants weather again, as the seasons finally start to change here. and one of the things i miss about shorts weather is when i wear my shorts i put my phone in my right front pocket right but when i wear jeans i find even with just a plain old 14 pro that my right front pocket is a little constricting like i i feel the phone there more when i sit down i feel like i might be like putting pressure on the phone so i'm amazed that you can put a pro max in your right front pocket are you talking about jeans pockets or you're just wearing sweatpants everywhere.

1:21:40No. Well, sweatpants when I'm in the house and shorts when I'm out of the house. Today was the first day here in Richmond that I think I could have done jeans and been okay. Up until today, it has been warm enough. All right. Well, so you haven't done the Pro Max jeans test yet. Correct. That is correct. And you know, had I thought about it, I would have run around today with jeans on. I didn't even think twice about it. But yeah, so the weight, not a problem. The in-hand feel, it's not a problem, but it's different, for sure. Now, I'm having a bit of a life crisis here. I need you to be gentle in this very challenging time for me.

1:22:23Did you get a kickstand for your phone? Kind of. Oh, no. Did you get a pop socket? He said he was getting a pop socket. I got a pop socket, and for a day or two I thought, I'm just going to return this pop socket because what kind of idiot uses a pop socket? It's got to be really flat collapsible if you want to get that into the front right jeans pocket of a Pro Max with a collapsible pop socket on it. I don't know the depth of a honest-to-goodness pop socket, but it's not tremendous. It's a little bit above the Camera Mesa, but not obnoxiously so. You would actually... It's one of the benefits of the giant Camera Mesa is that it makes the pop socket look slimmer.

1:22:59Exactly. But I did, after a day or two, I caved and opened the pop socket. I think I kind of like it. and I feel really gross about it because I was so anti-pop socket and I think I kind of like it. And so that's the thing. So to more directly answer your question, Marco, generally speaking, I don't think it's bad. I think it's a little tough as a one-handed phone. I am not in love with the Pro Max as a one-handed phone. So you kind of have to embrace that you either need to dual hand, you know, yield, excuse me, wield the phone, or you need to have some sort of affordance, be it a strap like we talked about earlier or a pop socket or what have you, in order to single-hand it.

1:23:37Because I really feel like my prior strategy of the load-bearing pinky basically renders the top half of the phone unreachable. Now, granted, there is reachability, so you can swipe down on the home indicator and you can bring that down to within reach. But I don't love that. And so for now, I've been using the official – it's a real honest-to-goodness pop socket, the circular one, not the pill-shaped one. And I'm not in love with the PopSocket, but I feel like it is extremely nice to have it so that that can increase my range. And I no longer feel like I need the load-bearing pinky. The thing that bothers me the most, though, is that I can barely reach the—you typically use the phone in my right hand.

1:24:22I can barely reach the left-hand corner of the screen, like the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, with one hand. And that is sometimes annoying. So like in the mail app, you know, if you're looking at a piece of mail and you would like to archive it or delete it, you need to go to the bottom left corner. Doing that one handed is tough. And that's frustrating. But all in all, I think I like it. And I think especially once you consider the camera, but even without the camera, I think the juice might be worth the squeeze at this point. Now that the bezels have been brought in some, the weight is way down from where it was.

1:24:56All in all, I think I'm into it. And sitting here now, I have absolutely no desire to return it. That being said, the one place where this falls down real bad for me is the action button. I love the idea of the action button, but it is so freaking far away from my hand that it's almost not even there. At least when I'm single-handing it. You should try being a left-handed phone person. It would be right under your thumb. You make a very good point. That is something I should probably at least investigate. You're just trying to get her to drop that phone. Yeah, right. He uses his less coordinated hand to carry this giant thing.

1:25:30Exactly. No, but you make a good point. And I have set the action button to camera. And I'm skipping ahead a little bit. I want to talk about the transfer process very briefly. But I went out this afternoon and took a few pictures. Now, granted, it was miserable weather here this afternoon. But I went out and took a few pictures, specifically because I thought you would probably want, you both of you would probably want to see the differences between the 3X and the 5X. and so I am not the world's greatest photographer. In fact, I'm at best an okay amateur photographer and I was kind of in a rush for uninteresting reasons and so I didn't do the best job of like framing these photos but I tried to get representative of examples of photos with both the 14 Pro and its 3X camera and the 15 Pro, Pro Max and the 5X camera which I've realized I don't think I labeled it always as a Pro Max in these images that I'm about to share but that's okay.

1:26:24You know what I'm talking about. So I'm going to quickly run through them. And if you have questions, I'm happy to field it. So I went to a park that's, you know, in the Richmond area. And again, it was disgusting weather. So consider that when you look at the like fidelity of these pictures, it was actively raining a little bit and so on and so forth. So the first thing I did was I parked my car. I parked it obnoxiously because nobody was at the park. I was only there for like five minutes. I don't need to hear any feedback about my parking job. Also, I'm a former BMW driver. So this is how I learned how to park.

1:26:49But anyway, I parked the car. A BMW would have been diagonal across the spot. That's probably true. You're merely perpendicular across the spot. Right, exactly. I should have thought about the fact that I'm going to get a whole bunch of flack for this. But I assure you I was one of like three cars in a parking lot that was like hundreds of meters long. But anyways, the point is I ran, and this was, I don't know, 30, 40 feet away from my car, something like that. And there's a little like knee height brick wall between the grass and a concrete area that I'm standing on. And I tried to frame the brick wall roughly equivalently at the bottom of the frame.

1:27:24And I took a shot with the 3X and the 5X. And there's a big difference. Like, there is a heck of a difference there. And you can see that plain as day in these two shots. So, yeah. So, there you can see quite a difference. I actually, it was not the next one I took, but the next one I'll talk about. I happened to be on my way out of this park and noticed a goose. This one I feel like is a little less dramatic. I was probably, I don't know, 10 to 20 meters away from the goose, but I took a picture with both of the 14 Pro, 15 Pro Max with the 3X and 5X. Again, I mislabeled it. My apologies. But you can see here that the difference isn't that dramatic to me in the goose itself.

1:28:08But if you look at the amount of fencing you can see on either side of the goose, which will make sense if you're looking at the photo, there's quite a bit more in the 3X and the 5X. Less dramatic in this case. Again, I was a bit closer to the subject matter, but still a difference nevertheless. So then I thought, all right, let's take a look and let's try all the quote-unquote lenses. This image is freaking huge. So I took one with the, this is all in the 15 Pro Max. I took it with the 1.5X ultrawide, the main at 25, main at 28, main at 35 and then the 2x main and the 5x main and so that's 48 and 120 millimeters interestingly and i don't think i did anything wrong or weird or anything like that maybe this is user error but the ultra wide the 2x and the 5x are all 30 24 by 40 32 but the main camera the three on the main camera the i'm sorry three of the four in the main camera so the 1x the 1.2 and the 1.5 the 25 28 35 millimeters we're all bigger 42 84 by 57 12 i don't know if i did something wrong i didn't knowingly do anything differently the math isn't that doing the 24 megapixel thing maybe yeah i think but i don't know i don't know why the uh the 2x wouldn't also be 24 but maybe the 2x had to bin because this is what we talked about before like that when you use the 2x thing we were talking about the 14 pro so i don't know the 15 pro does but on the 14 pro when you do the 2x thing where it takes a center crop of the main thing it will try not to bin those pixels and use the actual native pixels but of course the whole reason they use binning is because if you use the native pixels all the time they get a lot of noise and they're not a lot of light gathering so if there's insufficient light which there might not might not have might not have been a sufficient light on this kind of overcast day then it might be binning them and that's why you're getting that but that's a good call yeah i'm not sure but this is what i got out of the camera and and so anyway So I don't have a whole bunch to say about this other than to say you can see a truly dramatic amount of range between the ultra wide and the 5X.

1:30:10Like it is a humongous difference, which I think is pretty cool. And so far in my basic usage, and I'm not going to share these photos, but in quick usage that I've had, I've really enjoyed the 5X. I think it might have been Mike that said having the 3X as well would be nice. like if there was a quad lens or quad physical camera system. But I think I am here for the 5X. And I was at swim lessons with Michaela, I think, yesterday. And it's an indoor pool. And the parents sit on one side of glass and the pool area and the kids are on the other side. And I would occasionally take pictures of her while she's doing swim lessons with the 3X.

1:30:50And even though I'm 10, 20 yards away from where the action is happening, it always felt like it was far away even when using the 3x but i took a picture with the 5x and it was like we were right there and so for me i think i made the right choice so far again this is just like marco said we've barely had these phones but for a few days at this point but so far i'm really happy with the choice and i think it's worked out pretty well i have a couple other things to say but any questions or thoughts about the camera before i move on uh tyler in the chat said that the 2x photo you put is perfectly 12 megapixels is that what you're saying, Tyler?

1:31:26I don't know if that's the correct interpretation. Yeah, so that means it didn't bin and it is doing the center crop 12 megapixel, but then it is not doing the thing that the 15 and 15 Pro are capable of doing, which is combining the 48 and the 12 to make it 24. And again, I can't stress enough, super overcast day, actively raining at the time. This was not the right time to do this experiment, but this is the only time. It's been rainy all weekend, and this was the only time I had before we recorded tonight, so I did what I could with what I got. One thing I would suggest if with the for the 5x camera i know people like oh this is going to give me reach so i can see my kid at swim lessons better and that makes perfect sense but the other thing i would suggest perhaps trying i don't know how this is going to work out with a 5x camera you can find out and tell me um 120 millimeters is actually a popular fairly close to some fairly popular portrait uh lens ranges and in general if you take a portrait photo of somebody with kind of a wide angle lens they tend to look not great uh which is why portraits tend to use a little bit uh you know a higher focal uh range lens and people people are very confused about this online because they think like it's the lens itself that distorts the people's faces or whatever that's not actually the case uh what distorts people's faces is being real close to them if you're real close to them the view you have of their face is going to be different than if you're real far away you can figure this out with geometry and math and lines and you know you you basically you end up you can see more of the sides of their face when you're farther away than you can if you're up close you think of it being like an inch away from their face you're not even able to see their ears anymore right but if you go far far away yeah you can see both their ears look at that um and how that's related to the the focal length of the lens is to get a person's face in the 5x lens you have to stand farther away because if you're two inches away from them you're just going to get their nose, right?

1:33:18So you're like, oh, oh, I want to shoot you with a 5x lens. What will you do? You'll back up because you want to get their entire head in the frame. And when you back up, you're moving farther away from them. But all this is to say, the only thing that changes how a person's face looks in a camera sensor and a camera view is how far away you are from them. That is the only thing that will change your perspective. No amount of lens stuff will change your perspective. No zoom lens, no wide angle lens or whatever. The only thing that changes how much of the person's ears you can see is how far away you are from them which is why when you take a longer focal length like 120 millimeters and you do a portrait you will have to move farther away to get the person framed and those type of things tend to be more flattering it will i don't know what the right expression is flatten out your face it will make your nose look less big it will make you look less like you're in a funhouse mirror that's why when you know people get their portraits taken for the cover of a magazine and it's like a headshot that is not taken with a 11 millimeter lens it's like an 85 right or you know 110 or 120 and the person is farther away because it's more flattering so try that with the 5x because i think a lot of picture phone pictures people take like with whether it's a selfie camera or just the 1x it's not the most flattering to your face shape that's a lot of the reason why when i use my quote-unquote big camera you know they have better looking pictures of people it's simply because i'm using uh you know even something is like a 50 millimeter or an 85 and i have to be farther away you'll look you'll look better so try that try taking some pictures of your wife and your kids with the 5x lens essentially as a portrait lens rather than the oh i want to zoom in and catch my kid on the stage yeah it also i mean first of all i would say i one of my favorite lenses i've ever shot with it was a 135 prime and so this heavy you know a 120 is very close to that and if you haven't ever shot with a 135 prime it's difficult to use in a practical situation because it's a 135 prime but i would strongly encourage you if you're a photographer rent one sometime it's a lot of fun like it's you get some amazing pictures out of it you know also one of the major differences with using a longer lens is it is easier and better looking to get background blur so if you want your subject to be in focus and you want the background to be blurred really like optically, not through AI algorithms and stuff.

1:35:39If you want the actual optical background blur, that is not only much easier to get in a more severe way with longer lenses, but it tends to look more pleasing when you do get it compared to what's possible on less narrow lenses. And when you're dealing with something optically like an iPhone, where you don't really have the apertures and sensor size needed to get real good optical background, blur in most cases, using the longer lenses is often easier. If you use a long lenses somewhat close to you, like as close as you can reasonably focus and frame your subject, you can usually get some pretty good background blur without using any tricks at all.

1:36:20Take a look. I just put in our Slack, I occasionally do this. If you work really, really hard and find the few scenarios this works, you can get legit background blur from an iPhone camera. But the scenarios in which you can do that are slim. So take a look on our Slack. Here's me as I caption this on glass, working real hard to get that legit iPhone background blur. I mean, and it's not pretty. Like if you look at this, people don't see this picture. It's a, it's a closeup of a flower. Like I'm, I'm like an inch away from this flower. Okay. With the sun behind it. Uh, and being an inch away from the flower and the flower being in focus actually does give you a little bit of background blur, but that is not pretty background.

1:36:58I know this sounds dumb. It's like background blur is background blur, but in the realm of people testing cameras and lenses there's whole sections of every lens review that we'll talk about how nice is the bokeh how how nice are the bokeh balls as they call them do they look smooth and creamy or do they look like onion rings or are they busy or noisy are they perfectly round or do you see the blades and you know yeah exactly and sometimes you want a little bit but yeah so this this this this the the bokeh balls in this iphone 14 pro are not good but they're there that's legit camera blur are no portrait mode for me and i would take that any day over portrait mode like even i haven't tried the new portrait mode yet but you know i've seen the samples that people have posted and they look significantly better than old portrait mode to my eyes but they still don't look quite real i would take real but bad background blur every day over portrait mode if i had that option and so anyway i i would i would love like if i if it was an option and maybe in the future it will be based on you know on you know shaky rumors right now but I would love a future in which that 5x lens comes to the medium-sized phone that I have.

1:38:06I'm not willing to jump to the big phone for that alone, but I am envious of it, and I wish I could get it on my size. So I look forward to the future in which that might be possible. You know, and I'm glad we brought up Boca because I completely forgot there was one other thing I wanted to say about the phone, or the camera, excuse me. So I took a screen recording, and I needed somewhere to upload it, So I uploaded it to YouTube unlisted, and then it became a YouTube short, possibly because it's vertically oriented. I don't know. But suffice to say, what I did was I was standing against the side of a train car.

1:38:38This particular park I was at has a handful of train cars parked at it. And I used the telephoto lens to take a shot of a far away other train car. The train car I was against is like a black color. The one I was taking a shot of is blue and white. and it did the thing where it offered me the automatic portrait mode you know it shows a little aperture f or whatever it is you know at the bottom left hand corner of the photo so i tapped it and i took the picture and then the video is me going in after the fact and editing it and this is where you can decide you know the virtual aperture you can decide what's in focus and so on and so forth and i will be the first to tell you that even as an amateur photographer some of this like fake bokeh and you know fake blur it doesn't look stellar i'm not going to sit here and try to tell you that this is better than a big camera that it's natural and so on and so forth i'm sure joe steel will have all sorts of problems with this but taking off the cranky amateur photographer hat and putting on the just general user hat this blew my damn mind i am tapping around on this image, focusing different pieces of the image, some of which are 30 yards away from me and some of which are 30 inches away from me.

1:39:54And it doesn't always look stellar, but it always, to my eyes, looks at least passable. And you too might take issue with that, and I wouldn't really argue with you. But the fact that you can do this is so freaking cool and that you can do it after the fact. I don't need to worry about getting the shot exactly right in the heat of the moment. As long as I see that the little F symbol with the circle with the F in the middle, as long as that's on when I take the shot, I know I have at least a snowball's chance in hell of getting this right in post, even if I didn't get it right when I took the photo.

1:40:29This is so cool. I genuinely don't remember if this came via software to the 14 or not, but this alone might have been worth the price of admission for the 15 Pro because this is so freaking cool. My mind is blown by this. there have been a lot of features for the iphone camera over the years that like if you plan ahead and if you set up the shot and if you know or if your subject is very patient and they're they're like oh just hold on let me get one in portrait mode or let me use cinematic video like there's all these features that they've added over the years that like if you wanted if you wanted a certain advantage you had to like go turn it on and deal with it from the start plan ahead engage that mode possibly at the expense of other benefits from the other modes that you were then disabling by using that mode.

1:41:13Maybe you didn't get live photos. Maybe you didn't get the right resolution or whatever. To have something like this where it takes away nothing. You don't have to plan for it. It doesn't cost you anything except some trivial amount of storage space. It doesn't matter for the depth data. To just have that be there for you. To me, it's like when they added live photos. Live photos had that same thing where they're really, besides a trivial storage cost to them, there really was not much downside to having live photos enabled so all of your photos would just have this little bit of bonus available to them with you know no skin off your back or no sweat off your back whatever the expression is and so i never know but anyway so this is this is that now like you don't have to plan for portrait mode you don't have to you know set everything up and get everything right the first time and or or you know have your subject hold on hold still let me well let me get one in portrait like no none of that you just have it and you can deal with it later that's how you get more great shots because then you don't have to hesitate.

1:42:14You don't have to set it up. You just take the shot. You just fire, and that's it. And afterwards, you can say, ooh, if I tweak this like this, it's even better. That's true, like Apple iPhone camera magic. I love when they do stuff like that. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And again, if I put on my curmudgeon hat, which is the hat I normally have on, I can take issue with so many things in this little video, but that's not the point. The point is this camera is always with me. It is unusual. Maybe this is a problem, but it's unusual for my phone to be more than a few feet away from me ever. And so this camera is with me always.

1:42:53And if I can do this sort of magic with this camera, I mean, it's blowing my mind. I'm watching this thing on repeat and it's every time I see it, I'm the one who took the video and it's still blowing my mind. And you can, not only can you adjust what's in focus, but you can adjust how much focus or, or, you know, how much blur or no blur, and you can turn the blur totally off. And then you've got what appears to be a reasonably good photo from, you know, when of course you can, there's a tremendous amount of depth to it, but nevertheless, it's a pretty decent photo that I took with 120 millimeter lens.

1:43:24Like this is, this is so cool to me. And this alone is, is worth the 15 pro or 15 pro max, you know, pick your poison. It doesn't matter. This is so cool. yeah and what marco was saying about uh features that you get in post-processing that you don't have to think about during as much as i really dislike portrait mode that philosophy apple should continue to pursue that because what i want and it's going to take a while before they're able to even do this technically but eventually they will be is i want them to implement essentially the workflow i do myself which is uh shoot everything in both jpeg and raw but throw away the raws unless i favorite them you know what i mean like because it's like i don't have to decide is this is this because i have the same problem right now it's like should i spend the 75 megabytes to shoot this thing in raw or should i just take the jpeg and i end up just taking the jpeg because i don't have the storage space and i don't want everything to be seven but you have to think is this one of the ones i want to spend the raw on what if it just took everything in jpeg and raw and then give me like 30 days and if i don't heart it chuck the raw data in the garbage kind of like you know the live picture thing where if you uh i think like if you if you deactivate the live photo thing or whatever eventually it will chuck that sidecar i think at least that used to be the case um and i was i was wishing it kind of did the same thing with portrait but it's like i don't want to have to think about it in the moment just do all the things and then later there should be some way for me to say do i want this to be portrait mode or do i not and i'm never going to want to do portrait mode so it's useless but raw or not raw i can make that decision in post pretty easily which pictures actually came out which ones do i care about and more likely which ones like oh this jpeg came out really bad it's over processed or the shadows are crushed or something like that that's the one where i'm going to want to dig in there and say actually since you took raws for everything let me see the raw for this one and see if i can recover something and even if i just recover something from the raw and then re-burn a jpeg and then still chuck out the raw that's what i want you can't do it now because storage space processing time the capture like there's a million reasons why you can't now but if phones keep getting faster and then you know if tsmc's three nanometer thing isn't uh a sign of the end of moore's law coming sooner than we thought eventually these phones should be able to shoot everything in jpeg plus raw and that's what i do on my real cameras but then i have to manually like save the raws for the ones that i favorite that's something that the phone could do automatically so i'm looking forward to that in 10 years yep indeed uh the transfer process i wanted to quickly talk about that i did a device to device transfer.

1:45:47Oh, actually, I should have put this in follow-up. So we talked last episode about how I was doing a Finder-based encrypted backup, and I did the unthinkable, and I left my phone in the office overnight rather than next to my head and my bedside table. How did you sleep? Actually, I had a really crummy night's sleep. Knowing your best little buddy was so far away from you in another room in the same house. Well, no, no, no. Aaron was next to me, but my second best little buddy was across the house. And more importantly, Aaron's phone in case you just needed that phone. Yeah, right, right. But anyways, I left it overnight and it killed me, but I did it.

1:46:23And I woke up and the Finder backup was not there. And Finder was like, what are you talking about? You never asked me to do a backup. Well, great, thank you for that. So that didn't work. So I did a device-to-device transfer. I don't love that process. I love the results of the process because I had to log into almost nothing, Slack being the number one offender in this department because I had to log into my Slacks again. But almost everything else came across lickety-split. Even my WireGuard VPN came across, which I didn't expect in a million years that that would work. But everything came across just fine for the most part, but it takes forever.

1:47:01I started the process and I had a sheet of paper with this written down on it and somehow in the last hour I've thrown it somewhere. But nevertheless, off the top of my head, I started it roughly nine in the morning and it showed me something to the order of six hours left. It quickly dropped to about two hours, and it ended up that it finished sometime between 11.15 and 11.30-ish. I went downstairs to do something for a little bit, and it was during that time that it finished. I will say that it hung on two minutes remaining for something like 20 minutes. Again, I had it written down somewhere.

1:47:30I don't know what happened to it, but I don't love that process, and I don't love that you can't use either phone. I get it. I get why that is, but I don't love it. And I'm really, really hopeful that when I'm going from 15 to 16, or 15 Pro to 16 Pro, when theoretically I can do a high-speed USB cable between the two of them, I really hope that this process gets way freaking faster. Although, as we talked about in follow-up, I wonder if I should have done, if I should have put the 15 Pro on Ethernet, if not for the device-to-device transfer, which I don't think that would have mattered because I think that's peer-to-peer, but at least for the subsequent step where it's downloading all the apps again from the App Store and so on and so forth.

1:48:16So I wish that was better and faster, but I'm really hopeful that next year it will be. But we'll see what happens. But so far, I really like this phone. I probably should find a case for it, but I'm just rocking the PopSocket. And although I'm embarrassed about it because I feel like the PopSocket looks so ridiculous, but I think I'm in the minority in saying so because almost everyone uses one these days. I'm slightly embarrassed by it, but I really like this phone a lot. I really, really do. Just own it, man. It's cool. Look, it is no longer an unusual position to take to say that you like big phones.

1:48:53Like, big phones have been here for a long time now, and they offer some substantial advantages. You know, it's all about what you're prioritizing. Like, for many people, one-handed use, like, while moving, walking the dog, trying to reach that bottom left button, is not as important as it being, like, your primary computer throughout the day, which it is for so many people. You know, like, you get a way bigger screen. You get way more battery life. You get either either tied for the best camera or a better camera than the other pro every single year. There's a lot of good reasons that that's really attractive to people.

1:49:30And so it's all about, you know, what's what's important to you? What what are your needs? What are your what tradeoffs do you want to make? And and, you know, what's most important? Like in my in my life, I like to have that one handed use. I use it all the time. And meanwhile, you know, when I'm browsing my phone in bed, you know, I wish I had the bigger screen at that moment. when it's in my car mount, since my car doesn't have freaking CarPlay. I wish I had the bigger screen at that moment, but I've made the choice that the one-handed use while walking is the more frequent need for me, and so that's what I'm going to prioritize.

1:50:01But I'm very close to that dividing line where, like, yeah, actually, you know, I can see myself maybe down the road as different things in my life shift around and change. Maybe I would like the bigger screen phone then. Like, it's not so out of the question. I mean, you know, here I am sitting in my SUV that, you know, three years ago, five years ago, I hated SUVs and I never thought I would ever buy one, let alone enjoy it. And here I am loving the thing. So look, it happens. Like, you know, our positions change over time and our needs and preferences and priorities change over time. And that's fine.

1:50:33Liking the big phones now is not only nothing to be ashamed of, but surprisingly mainstream. He likes big phones and he cannot lie. Oh my God. Thanks to our sponsor this week, clean email. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.

1:51:14Accidental. 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, N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. One of the unexpected benefits of being in America again is, wow, Amazon's fast when you aren't on an island. I have been, you know, living at the beach for three, four years full time. You know, there is no door-to-door mail service. There is no access for FedEx and UPS. So stuff has to get, like, sent over on a ferry the next day.

1:52:18And, you know, you go pick it up with your wagon. It's a whole thing, which I find very charming and I love it. But the downside is that Amazon stuff takes up to a week to get there. It depends on how it's sent and how it goes, but you're looking at up to a week. Whereas last night, I had packed everything from the beach to do the show, I thought. I had everything set up, and I realized last night, oh, wait a minute. My mic stand that I brought is going to be really annoying to use in the car, because it was just one of those little tabletop tripod-looking ones. and I'm like there's no there's no where to really put that that I can like lean up against it without like bending my neck the whole show let me let me see what amazon options exist last night in bed I ordered a mic stand that got delivered at 4 p.m today for free like yep yep yep and I know and this is something like yeah everyone else in America is like yeah we've had that that's not new and that's not even like the you know the city people have like same day practically or like within you know that's what this was it was same day it was just you know i was ordering it at 10 p.m and it got it got here the next day yeah i know but you know what i'm talking about the ones the ones they have like in limited city things have it really close to the thing you can order it and get it a couple hours later i've never experienced that but it sounds really cool i i placed like four orders today for just random crap that i'm like i could go to the store for that but why waste the trip why take the time to drive to the store i can tell you one reason why though by the way and you're asking about the netgear thing that was a thousand dollars on amazon you got to be careful because occasionally you'll buy you want to buy some incidental item and you won't notice that amazon yeah amazon has it but it's two to three times the price it is in the regular store even for something simple like oh a duracell battery or something like is that how much duracell batteries how much could a battery cost ten dollars right if you don't look too closely and it's it's like basically what it's saying is amazon doesn't really carry this there is a seller who carries it who's selling it through amazon at a massive markup so be careful about like oh i just want something in hurry let me just order it on amazon and you're like wait a second if i if i just walk to the grocery store this thing is a third of literally a third of the price so be careful about that yeah that's fair and there you know there are certain things obviously that are much better to get locally like you know like you know because again because we're in this apartment temporarily i've i've taken a couple trips around to just get some little quality life improvement issues like a shower caddy a paper towel holder that kind of stuff and a lot of that stuff is like this stuff is so basic and cheap and any grocery store would have this so i'll just get it when i'm at the grocery store getting groceries anyway you know that kind of stuff that's that's simple but you know more specialized stuff like oh you know my life would be a lot better here if i had like one of my good nail clippers and so like you know that's i'm never gonna find that in the grocery store or in a local store without driving around bunch and it's like all right that that kind of stuff i can i can get that shipped in in like you know the amazon day delivery and it's no big deal and that man having having like modern amazon is i look i know i know they do some shady stuff i know they're not a great company in all ways by by a long shot uh but as a customer my god it's amazing and i know everyone else discovered this a million years ago but i'm just i'm just rediscovering this now and it's it's it's like christmas morning every day like oh wait i can just get that like tomorrow morning it'll just show up like i don't have to wait a week wow 2023 man