604: Minimized Embiggening

42:18And so that's what I've ordered. And I really set out to order an Ultra 3, but there wasn't one. And then Marco was in the back of my head, you know, just saying the big one will be enough, the big one will be enough, the big one will be enough. And I think, Marco, what you're i hope and i think you're probably going to be right that i think that will be the difference i need yeah no like look i'm not going to toot my own horn unnecessarily no i'm definitely right about this like the big regular series watch is the watch that i think is right for you um like for reference you know my my series nine one year old you know heavy use wear it almost every day i i worked out today uh for a little over an hour in workout mode it is now almost 9 p.m.

42:56and it's still a 65 % battery. Oh, God, that's bananas. That's absolutely bananas. And I use always on, like, you know, I'm using it all day, like, and I don't charge it at all during the day. So yeah, I mean, there's like, the battery life on the big one is fine. I, you know, for whatever it's worth, I did wear the smaller one for a few years there in the middle. And I always thought that was decent battery life, but it wasn't amazing, especially after the watch was more than a couple years old. You know, you would start to notice you would have trouble getting of the day if you were doing workouts um that's not the case with the big one um now and there's different workout modes too like if you are say you know running outside so it's using the gps um and if you're especially a playing music while running you know playing music on the watch while running with gps and workout mode that's going to be probably the worst case scenario for battery life even that the big one is fine like that you know the big regular series watch i can do an outdoor run for an hour listening to a podcast over AirPods the entire time with the watch, maybe even using cellular during some of that time.

43:56And it will still get through that day. It is fine. Like I will go to bed and it will not be in low power mode. So if your wrist supports it, I would strongly recommend getting the larger regular series watch for most people. Again, if you are okay with the size, you know, fashion wise, and I think most people can pull it off. honestly like you have you have to be pretty petite and also care about that kind of thing uh to to not be able to pull off the the you know the middle-sized apple watch which is what this is and for most people that's not going to be a concern for you know most adults can easily pull off the big one especially because large smart watches are in style like even on people whose wrists are otherwise fairly small relative to like you know the average adult say the bigger watch even the ultra most people can wear whatever size they want and and no one bats an eye at like how it looks or whether it like quote fits them or not you can wear whatever size watch you want fashion is all over the place on that and big what big smart watches are very much in fashion all right this is probably uh in no small part my fault because this is a big watch here for me but we have got to hurry it up a little bit so i'm gonna try to speed run the rest we skipped some health stuff so there's sleep apnea detection which is extremely cool i don't personally suffer from this yet, as far as I know.

45:10How would you know? But how would I know? And I feel like almost everyone I know seems to have sleep apnea these days. So this is very cool. It is not cleared. And by the way, the way it reportedly does it is based on like the movement of your wrists and not by say measuring your blood oxygen, which is good because. Yeah, because the blood oxygen sensor has been turned off. As far as we know, it is physically there, but it is disabled because of patent disputes. Disabled only for U.S. customers. If you're in Canada or any place else in the world, you get blood oxygen measurement, but not inside the U.S.

45:46Yep. This has not been cleared from the FDA or equivalent organizations in other countries, but they expect clearance very soon and availability in 150-plus countries or regions this month, allegedly. Talking about the sleep apnea thing, right? For the sleep apnea thing. Then, yeah, like you said, no blood oxygen measurement inside the U.S., which is a bummer. We talked about size differences. is uh four hundred dollars or five hundred dollars you can already pre-order it it'll be available on september 20th um we already talked about the ultra 2 so let's move on to airpods 4 with kate bergeron uh this has the h2 chip a new acoustic architecture the smallest case ever and optionally which this was not made clear or i missed it during the presentation optionally you can get noise cancellation on the non-pro AirPods for the first time ever.

46:35Oh, no. This is, oh, my God. I loved this naming clumsiness. So here's what it is. So this is actually two different products. There's AirPods 4, and they introduced another version of AirPods 4, and they didn't announce the name until the end. And during the entire introduction of that part, they kept calling them these AirPods. So the introduction line was, for those looking for even more performance in this style of AirPods, and the entire rest of that section, she kept saying, these AirPods. You know, these AirPods have this, these AirPods have that. The Apple Watch case charging compatibility in case speaker in this charging case for these AirPods.

47:20And then eventually they unveiled the name as AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation, which is one of those like you know two thunderbolt ports you know kind of names uh so i would suggest since the since the actual name is so comically clumsy we should call them what they called them these airpods so we have airpods for these airpods and airpods pro and airpods max so here's the question are is the hardware different in the noise cancelling version and the non-noise cancelling version well so we at least know the case is different this charging case but i'm like the air the things that go in your ears are they different noise cancellation requires more microphones typically than just like one for receiving phone calls so my guess is they probably have additional microphones but i don't think we know that yet don't you think the right don't you think the regular ones have multiple microphones for uh for just like you know voice isolation and the other basic voice features i don't know i mean either way like microphones aren't expensive like this is not like what i'm saying is like if economically it might make more sense for apple to make one AirPods 4 piece of hardware.

48:27Like why make two different ones where even if one of them had to have more microphones, they would say, why don't we just put the more microphones in all of them? It's simpler. It simplifies everything, inventory, everything. And that this is purely like a software interlock where when you pay them$50 more, they enable the noise cancelling features. Obviously, you know, I fix it. We'll tear these things down and let us know. But I have to say this weird thing of like AirPods 4, there's the regular one and the one that costs 50 bucks more that has more features, right? And yes, they give you a better case with it and everything which is more sort of like market segmentation but this smells so much like you know when they say like this is one computer and if you pay more money you can get you know more ram in it or whatever i i don't know if these pieces of hardware are different and in the end it doesn't really matter because it's not like i i don't think it's going to be particularly easy to like buy an airpods 4 and hack it to enable the noise canceling um but if the if the hardware really is identical that will be that will be something because then it's like like why are you well It's not like the cheap one is like$99, right?

49:24The cheap one is still$130, and the expensive one is$180. And I don't quite understand. And especially since the case feature, like having a speaker so you can find your case when you lose it, that should kind of be in the$130 one, too, because that's a useful feature. It's not like a pro feature. That's the I lost my case feature, whereas noise canceling I can see. But anyway, we'll see when somebody cracks these things open, if they can slice it open and find out, like, is there any hardware difference whatsoever between them? Because if there's not, this will be another strange hardware, I think, from Apple, kind of like the 12 gigabytes of RAM and the 8 gigabyte iPad Pro.

50:07But anyway, speaking of me with stick shift sedans and real time, real time, follow up real quick. The technical specs for the AirPods 4, the size and weight for the earbuds themselves are not distinguished. Like, the weight is the same for both flavors of AirPods. However, as Marco, I think, had mentioned, the case is, what is this, like two and a half grams heavier for the AirPods? Yeah, because it's got the speaker in it. Right, exactly. And the Apple Watch charging coil. but the earbuds themselves the dimensions are allegedly identical I don't think it tells anything because these things are so lightweight that even if the hardware was different who's to say it wouldn't weigh the same we'll find out when they tear them down yeah we'll see the processor in them is just branded H2 like every other H2 AirPods we don't really know is the H2 the CPU or is there a difference is the H2 just the Bluetooth who knows and then we also don't know like is there more than one kind of h2 like maybe they have like maybe they're binned maybe it's like two little tiny cores and you know some of them only have one core active who knows like they could be higher clock speed like who you know because they're the in the features that are in these airpods those these features have uh more computational load to do some of those features things like you know if anc to begin with obviously transparency mode they have adaptive audio they have conversation awareness like they have most of the core kind of audio processing features of the AirPods Pro.

51:40So that's going to be substantially more processing needs than the standard AirPods 4 that don't have any of those. But what gets me, the standard AirPods 4 does have voice isolation on phone calls. So that's also kind of one of those features. So I don't know. It could be as simple as a different case and a couple of software-enabled features. Who knows? But regardless, most of the features available in the AirPods Pro are now available in, quote, this open-ear design. As I was saying, I like my sedans and my desktop Macs with big GPUs. I also like the AirPods that don't go in your ear holes.

52:27and generally those that design does not get the fancy features it's been two generations of air pods pro getting all their fancy features and their transparency mode and all this other stuff and the plain old air pods that i like and no you don't get that stuff and so i'm excited this year that they brought most of those features to the ones that don't go in your ear now granted the fact that they don't go in my ear means the noise cancelling is not going to be as good for obvious physical reasons they're not literally sealing my ear hole right and apple itself says that the airpods pro have quote two times better noise canceling and i believe it like i i get it but i just don't like things in my ear holes so i think it's great that i get all these features that i've been hearing about everybody rave about on the airpods that they like and i'm gonna get them in the kind that i like now the possible downside is they did subtly change the shape of these airpods uh they've done it what there's been three different shapes there's the original airpod shape there's the one that i have now which is airpods 3 or whatever and then there's these new ones and every time they change the shape there's a possibility that the thing that used to fit in your ear nice and comfy is not going to the main hope i have is that the airpods 3 have always felt a little big in my ears compared to their predecessors not uncomfortable and i'm fine with them or whatever but they always feel a little bit big and these look like they might be a little bit slimmer so i'm hoping these will be even more comfortable the one thing we didn't get is that the pros still have is the little slidey volume thing still a pro only feature oh because you do have the the squeeze the stem to play pause thing right but not the volume thing that's all right the volume thing is very difficult to trigger yeah market segmentation whatever but i'm excited about these i've already pre-ordered them wait did you get airpods 4 or these airpods i'm getting airpods for again when you go like when you go like to buy it it says what do you want to buy you say i want to buy airpods 4 and then it's just like when you're configuring ram it's like do you want the one or they're saying like do you want the one with the you know the the 10 core cpu or the 12 core cpu like that's what you're picking the only difference is the options say airpods 4 airpods 4 with noise canceling at 50 right that's how the the checkout process works so it is very kind of like these are the airpods 4 and there's a 50 more expensive version that has a bunch of new features and like even if the noise cancelling stinks and doesn't work and isn't useful at all i'm just happy to have new airpods with you know all the features that you expect a new thing to have the sound is a little bit better obviously they'll have fresh batteries the case will have a little beepy thing in it uh the one thing i'm worried about the case a little bit is that they changed the bluetooth pairing button from being a physical button to being a capacitive button which obviously makes it more durable simple in a manufacturer yeah i I understand why they did it, but...

55:13you know some when when your airpods are being ornery there's something about having a physical button And then you can hold down to let you know I'm really holding down the button for the required three seconds or whatever to go into pairing mode. And now I'm just going to be putting my fingers vaguely somewhere on the smooth front surface of the thing and hope that I'm hitting the capacitive section. To go back a quick step, I completely meant to mention earlier in the Apple Watch segment that they made a point of saying that they are preferring or they're prioritizing non-air shipping. and I really want to know, like, did they already send a whole batch of watches with a boat a month and a half ago?

55:50I mean, I think yes. I think that's how they do things generally. No, no, but I mean, look at iPhones, for example. As far as I knew, anytime I've paid attention, those things fly oftentimes directly from China to your house. Obviously, they're hub and spoken their way from across the planet, but my point is, it's not like the beginning of the trip is noted as Louisville, Kentucky or something or wherever UPS's headquarters is, or that is UPS, or FedEx in Memphis, it starts in Shenzhen or whatever, and then you watch these things march across the planet and they go to Anchorage and they go to somewhere else and so on and so forth.

56:26I can't help but wonder, did they ship a whole buttload of these via a ship over a month or two ago to get them ready for release this coming Friday? I really am curious. Now that they have the pizza boxes to update them, Maybe that's part of the reason why they did that, honestly. It could be. And also, if they can get that far ahead of the game, there's a reason that Apple keeps saying, and this product is carbon neutral, and they haven't really said that about the iPhone yet. I'm not sure that there are enough phones ready early enough to be put on a boat, but I can imagine there being enough AirPods ready early enough to put on boats.

57:00Well, I was talking about the watch, though. That was when they said it was the watch. Or the watch, even. I feel like the watch, the phone is the hardest one because they have to make the most of them, and it pushes the technology the farthest usually. So, you know, who knows? Keep in mind also, like, what, you know, the sales cycle of these products is the whole year and possibly beyond. So, like, even if they have a lot of air shipment for these first few weeks as they're pretty new coming out of the factory, at some point that sales rate is going to, you know, dip below the production rate by enough that they can start sending big batches of them by boat and it'll be fine by the time they get here, you know?

57:36But also, one other thing on the carbon neutrality of the watch, as we went back to there anyway, I forgot to mention that one, I think, significant change this year. So last year, they introduced the first carbon neutral Apple Watch configuration. But it was only like you had to get, I think it was just the aluminum one with just certain bands. So what they said this year was now any Apple Watch in any finish, quote, can be carbon neutral. So it depends on what kind of band you pick, but it's new that any of the metals, like all the Apple Watches with any of the metal choices can now be carbon neutral with certain band choices.

58:12I think that's great. They have expanded how many of their products can be carbon neutral, and they're indicating even in the store interface when you pick out things, they're telling you which choices are carbon neutral. So again, they're pushing that goal forward. I think that's a very laudable thing that they're doing that they're actually making real progress on. yep yep very much so so apologies for uh going back in time for a minute uh good news is we have a lot to talk about with regard to the airpods max there are five new colors midnight blue purple orange starlight they take usbc they're still 550 bucks you can order them now moving on actually i want to say about the airpods max people people being disappointed in this or whatever it's like look the your alternative obviously their successor is not ready yet right so your alternative is no update or just put a usbc border and if they didn't update it everyone would have said they should have just at least put a usb c port on it well they did and if you if you already have one and you don't want to buy a new one just to get the usb c port fine but they should put a usb c while we wait for the airpods max 2 which presumably going to come someday and hopefully will be better in a bunch of ways in the meantime yeah get rid of the stupid lighting port the sooner the better and it's not like who's going to upgrade to these nobody don't like they're exactly the same as the ones you have don't buy it like i mean i'm gonna tell you not to buy but honestly don't buy a new thing just to change the port on the bottom it's ridiculous just hold on to them until the two's i don't know man it's not that ridiculous but for people who have never bought the airpods max though they're buying it for the very first time guess what they get a usbc port and it's better for them so i endorse this update even though obviously if you're waiting for the airpods max 2 this is not your time yet i mean obviously they they really didn't have time to fix all of the airpods max's glaring shortcomings since it's only been out for four years hey as i was saying sometimes if you're if the product that you like isn't the one that gets updated every single year you got to be patient so here so you know the when the airpods max came out pretty much everybody said okay these these these are pretty good in certain ways uh they are a little heavy and uncomfortable as a result of that uh they are very expensive and the case they came with is stupid and garbage and very inconvenient and like that we're kind of like you know bra shape you know case it's it's a bad case in so many ways so what they've changed is we got new colors and a usbc port and we've addressed none of the major flaws of this product but but they weren't trying to their the successor will potentially attempt to address those shortcomings but this is not the successor this is just the we need to get products with lightning on them out of our lineup and so they have but but and it makes it ever so slightly better product than the one that it replaced not enough for anyone to buy a second one but for anyone buying their first one now they don't have to deal with lightning i just they couldn't even have like given us a different case like that's one of the most egregious problems these is that that dumb case and like after four years they couldn't even revise that even a little bit i I don't want them to waste their time building a new case in like what is probably the last year of this product's life.

1:01:24You know, just concentrate on the successor. Get that done as soon as you can. Hopefully it'll be next year. Oh, my God. I mean, I don't know. I see both sides of this. Like, I am slightly disappointed by this or more than slightly disappointed by this update. But I was never in the market for these anyway. But it's better to have something than nothing, I guess. So, yeah, like I said, for the people who are buying their first one, just get that lightning thing out of there. Like, they need to do it with the magic mouse. They need to do it with all the keyboards and just like they need to eventually get to that stuff.

1:01:52I think the fear is that and this is a very founded fear based on Apple's history. The fear is that this is going to be it for the next four years, like that. They touched it and it's like, all right, we touched it. It's it's updated new banner. And then that's it. No, that's not. This is this is clearly a sort of like try to stem some of the pain while we work on the successor. Right. Or they just can the whole product line. But I think there's going to be a successor and it will be like, again, think about the Mac. pro people think of how long we wait for things to happen you just gotta chill you just gotta be patient you just gotta believe no i think this is literally the unix touch command like all right we touched it now it counts even the home pod those people like are they ever they ever gonna are they ever gonna change the home pod the big home pod is it ever gonna get better it looks like they're discontinuing it and then what happened they did come out with another big home pod after it was dead but it was also a lot better like it still had a long way to go but like but they the second one was significantly updated but you gotta you never give up what i'm saying is you never give up hope they waited so long that the product was dead they you couldn't buy a big home pod you're like this is it it's over there's never gonna be another one and then there was another one oh my god but the air the airpods max are a better product that's more successful than the home but like anyway this if i was an airpods max fan and i and i was waiting for this update i'd be pretty mad and john i think you're optimistic i don't think that you can make a bet add it to your calendar i don't think there's a chance in hell the airpods max get another update at least for two years i don't think i would bet two years but i would bet five you know like i know i can tell it's not a you know a high priority product but i it seems like they still are going to make another one but i would not bet on two years three you want to go three it's a little harder on me but i think i'll go i'll go three all right let's do it three years i'll take that bet i'm saying not before three years from now you're saying before three years from now they will get an update three three is like i would i would have been more comfortable with four or five but i'll We'll do three because it's more interesting.

1:03:47Yeah, because it's a bit of a risk for both of us, I think. Yeah, exactly. God willing, I'll see you all in September 11th, 2027. All right, AirPods Pro 2, short, short version. No updates. Well, no hardware updates. No hardware updates. Big, big software updates. We're going to skip the first one. I'm going to come back to that. But they said that they're working with prevention awareness and assistance. We're going to skip prevention just for a moment. For awareness, they're doing a hearing test that has been, quote, unquote, clinically validated. It takes about five minutes. basically you just tap the screen when you hear things and it makes a personal audio profile we think we're pretty sure that's right yeah so here's the thing we've talked about this on the show many times in past years where there are third-party apps on the app store you can see them listed in the health app that you can download that will do this they will give you a hearing test and then they will create an audio profile based on how well you can hear certain frequencies in the headphones you're using at the time you do the audio test and then it lets you save that audiogram to your phone and then you can say hey phone from now on when i'm using these headphones apply this essentially equalizer setting to all audio that comes out of my phone so that it that my stupid ears can hear it the best way possible so if your left ear has a real hard time hearing like 10 kilohertz it will boost 10 kilohertz to your left ear only when using these headphones with your phone when playing any audio i did this back on the show whatever it was a year or two ago I made an audiogram for myself with some third-party app that was terrible and and I installed it on my phone and I've been using it ever since when I listen on my airpods that using that audiogram profile for every piece of audio I listen to I recommend it but the one thing that I hated was what third-party app should I get and I have to say they were all terrible there some of them were weird and scammy and had some other thing they were going on the other ones the UI was terrible so thank goodness Apple is saying forget about the third-party apps this is part of the phone now part of the os if you buy airpods pro 2 or whatever and you have a phone you will be able to just do this on the phone with what has to be a better interface than these third-party things i think this is great i think every single person who has airpods pro 2 and a phone and the new os and everything should do this it's real quick to do and what you get and don't do it like when you have a cold like i do now because you're hearing all that stuff when you're healthy and your ears are working at their optimum quality and you have a quiet moment somewhere with no background noise do the five minute tests save the audiogram and i think it just syncs it with all your health data and then apply the audiogram and all the audio coming out of your phone will sound better highly endorsed yeah this is awesome like for them to be leaning into hearing health and to be taking advantage of the airpods pros amazing abilities here like that this is this is a very big deal for a lot of people yep and it gets better because oh yeah much prevention awareness assistance.

1:06:37Assistance. So there's going to be clinical grade over-the-air hearing aid update this fall. Over-the-counter, thank you. No, I think you're right. Over-the-counter and over-the-air because it's going to be a software update. We're both right. Hooray. Por que no los dos? Anyway, this fall in 100 or more countries and regions, so you take that hearing test we just talked about and it boosts the specific sounds you need in real time and they expect to receive that clearance soon. So let me repeat that. You can basically use these as hearing aids starting this fall. And I don't know, luckily, I don't have to know yet much about this, but my very limited understanding about hearing aids is that they are all impossibly expensive, or at least here in America, impossibly expensive.

1:07:19A lot of them, if not almost all of them, are rather trash, and it's just not very fun to get yourself a set of hearing aids. And now you can just go to Best Buy or Walmart or the Apple store, or not now, I should say, but soon, and pick up a set of AirPods Pro 2, do the compulsory software-related things like the hearing test, and then you have clinical-grade, over-the-counter hearing aids in your ears this fall. That is unreal, and I very, very much applaud Apple for doing this. This is extremely cool. And to be clear, the hearing test thing, there's two sides of that. When they do that, they're measuring how well your ear hears, each of your ears hears different frequencies, and they do two things with that.

1:07:59One, they can change the audio that you're playing, your podcast, your music, whatever. the audio playing from your phone, they modify that audio with an equalizer to make it sound more like it's supposed to. But the second thing is, with the hearing aid mode, sound coming in from the outside world hits the microphones on your AirPods and then gets replayed inside your ear, also applying that audiogram in sort of hearing aid mode. And in terms of like this versus like quote unquote real hearing aids, obviously one advantage that real hearing aids have is they're very often much smaller and more discreet than AirPods.

1:08:31but of course the main advantage that airpods have is people might already own them right or if you're worried about having a hearing aid or you're like nervous about it or embarrassed or whatever just try the feature like it's like the barrier to entry of like am i the type of person who needs to go and get a hearing aid a lot of people don't want to go over that barrier but am i the type of person who either already owns or can buy airpods at the apple star yeah much lower barrier you don't buy you don't buy that and say like oh i'm buying a hearing aid and then once people start using them uh if they find that it is useful and people say you know we love that you love your new hearing aid dad but you're always wearing your airpods it looks kind of weird why didn't you just get a quote-unquote real hearing aid for 10 times the price that is much much smaller and it won't fall out of your ears as easily and the charge lasts longer and yada yada yada and so i feel like this is a great example of apple sort of lowering the barrier to entry getting people over the hump to do a thing that they wouldn't have otherwise done even if it turns out that airpods are not sufficient for their needs or eventually become insufficient for their needs or not as good as a real thing or whatever just because it starts them down the path there's like the sleep apnea stuff and all those other things of like it's not as good as going to a doctor it's not as good as getting a sleep test or whatever but people who are like afraid to find out or don't want to sleep in a weird place or do a sleep test or trial or whatever but they do own a watch and they will say okay i'm going to wear my watch when i sleep just to see and what does it say?

1:09:54What it basically says is maybe sleep apnea? Talk to your doctor, right? And that is the first step to getting them over the hump to saying like people wondering, is there something wrong or whatever? Maybe this will give them a little push to say, oh, actually, the watch totally says that it's sensing sleep apnea. Is it right? Is it wrong? Go to your doctor and find out versus I'm just going to sit here and fret. Do I have sleep apnea? I don't know. I don't want to find out. I don't want to have a CPAP, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is one of the great strengths of Apple Health stuff. Not that it solves all your problems, but that it lowers the barrier to entry for people who are afraid of health stuff, whether it's are afraid of getting into exercise, afraid of asking if they need a hearing aid, afraid of going to the doctor and asking about sleep apnea.

1:10:35You just buy your bunch of Apple stuff and it will sort of nudge you in that direction with small, vague pieces of information to sort of push you along the path. Yeah, and to be clear, if any of you out there are hearing this and you're like, well, it probably doesn't work that well, If you've never heard transparency mode on AirPods Pro, it is way better than you think it can be. Even if you've heard transparency mode or pass-through mode on other noise-canceling headphones, trust me, so have I. Go read all the reviews. Everyone agrees the AirPods Pro transparency mode is way better than every other pair of headphones on the market.

1:11:17including yes the brand new you know whatever new sony xm series is out that year yes even better than that even better than the airpods max when they were new let alone now like the the transparency pass-through mode on airpods pro is remarkably good it is stunningly good so they can do things like this they can have really interesting and useful and amazing audio features for people's regular hearing that are built upon transparency mode and the amazing the amazing thing they felt there and this is just one of the many things like you know i've mentioned in the past um how i now i'm now using airpods pro 2 as my hearing protection when i go to concerts uh because it works and this is another feature they talked about is hearing protection this is now this is the prevention of prevention awareness and assistance and so yeah there's now a hearing protection mode or otherwise known as the marco mode yeah exactly like and and so i actually we'll talk about in the after show i went to a concert this past weekend and i wore the same airpods pro in the same part of the audience in the same venue that i was in a year ago and a year ago that was the first time i tried them as hearing protection at a concert and i gave a whole report on the show about how like it it worked pretty well it worked better than any like you know quote concert ear plugs that I had that I had available and I had tried way better than all those and it was pretty great the only problem I had noted last fall when I went to the Phish concert was that if I would like turn my head a little bit like side to side sometimes they would kind of get unbalanced because like I wasn't I was no longer like aligned perfectly with the PA speakers like evenly on both sides you know like if I'm like looking to the left or right and it would kind of like make the sound kind of unbalanced and wacky and it was like a little bit imperfect this past weekend with the ios 18 and you know whatever latest versions of airpods firmware there are this past weekend it was flawless it was just perfect there was no imbalance there was no like you know pumping effects like you get like compressor pumping effects if you're like you know in audio terms none of that it was just perfect it sounded exactly and at one point i was like the guitar car sounds a little bit low in the mix.

1:13:37I wonder if that's the processing. And I took them out to see what it sounded like without them. And first of all, it blew my ears off. It was so loud. But I also noticed like, no, the mix is the same. Like it wasn't messing with the mix. It was just making everything evenly quieter. And all I was doing, this was not any new feature that they're about to add. This is the feature that's already there. It's just transparency mode with what is currently called reduced loud sounds, which I believe is on by default now. So they already in the last year have made massive strides before this new hearing protection version even launches.

1:14:10And so to have that now on by default and available in all listening modes, that's incredible. And all of the idea of using AirPods Pro as hearing aids, that's not only incredible for so many reasons, but also that's totally plausible as a thing that they could be very good at within the range of what they can correct for. They can't correct above a certain level of decibel needs or whatever, and that's fine. you know there's there's obviously you know quote real hearing aids for that but this is going to be great for a lot of people the only thing i would request um if they're going to lean more into this which i i love that they are building on what john was saying earlier wearing airpods pro when you're trying to like talk to people people don't know that you can hear them and it's it's not like this is just something that people are going to figure out next year next year or in six months like we've had airpods for a while now society has not accepted the idea that you can just talk to people wearing headphones because you on the outside you can't tell whether they can hear you or not see also the vision pro weird eye thing like you can't tell if they can hear you or not so you kind of are hesitant to talk to people with headphones in and i as an airpods user will frequently will almost always take them out when talking to people because again like even though my podcast is paused or whatever they don't know that um so if they want to have airpods pro be able to take more of these roles, the smaller and more discreet they can become, the better.

1:15:41And this doesn't necessarily mean they have to be super tiny in your ears with the thing that loops behind you like the way many hearing aids are designed. But even just something as simple as if they were available in something closer to skin tones rather than bright white. Like even just, heck, even just give us a black version, but just like something other than bright white, because that's one thing when I'm wearing them at a concert, I'm very aware that like this is very visible. like this. I would love to have those be a little more discreet. Skin tones would be perfect. If not, just something a little bit darker maybe.

1:16:14And certainly, if they can investigate maybe a stickless design for this kind of use, that would also be interesting. That obviously starts, you start changing the product in pretty big ways once you do that, but we know it's possible because literally everyone else does it that way. So there are different suggestions I would make in terms of the physical design and colors to lean into this kind of feature set. I mean, Beats has stickless, basically stickless ones. Don't they use the H2 and Beats as well? And they also come in black. Literally every other competitor, everything is stickless except the AirPods.

1:16:44I was saying Beats isn't a competitor. It's also Apple. Well, but they let Beats explore different designs and different features and everything. But yeah, so overall, yeah, a discrete design would be great in the future or at least different color choices. But overall, what an amazing feature set for the AirPods Pro 2. They were already incredible headphones. They've already replaced all of my portable headphone uses, yes, including on planes. They've replaced every other time I use headphones that's not at my desk. They're just so incredibly good. And this now expands their use even more, makes them even better.

1:17:17I am so happy to see this. I would never have guessed that Apple would do this. I would have thought that Apple would not want to get into another medical area that might require certain approvals or things. But nope, they did it. And I'm super happy they did it. Yep, couldn't agree more. This stuff is all very, very good. And proud isn't the word I'm looking for, but I can't think of a better word. I'm really proud of Apple, even though I have no relationship with them really. But I'm proud of Apple for doing these things because they're not easy. And in a lot of ways, they're not terribly glamorous, but they're important.

1:17:49And you don't often see a big, huge company do things that are important unless they're pretty much entirely self-serving. And yeah, there's some self-serving aspects to this, but this just seems like the right thing to do. And you don't see that a lot from big companies these days. So I'm here for it. I really dig it. We are sponsored this week by Tailscale. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other wherever they are. Let's say you had a device in Richmond and one in Boston and one in New York and one in San Francisco and one in Europe and Australia and Asia. What if you wanted all those devices to talk to each other as though they were on the same LAN?

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1:20:03All right. 90 minutes in, let's talk iPhones. Good grief. Honestly, I don't think we're going to have trouble. I don't think there's that much to talk about. Yeah, well, I think you're mostly right, but we'll see what happens. I told you that I didn't want to be old man shouts at clouds. So I'm going to take the happy spin on the iPhone 16. Those colors look so good. And I am so impressed by them. And I want the unhappy spin. I love this phone. No, the unhappy spin is I, the unhappy spin is me pissing and moaning about how I don't have it on the iPhone 16 pro. That's the unhappy version. Oh, I see.

1:20:40The happy version, though, is these things look so damn good. And I am very jealous because I'm going to end up with an iPhone 16 Pro. But this year, and I'm not the first person to say this, this year more than any other year, I have been extremely tempted by the iPhone 16. And honestly, and I think Quinn made this point in his video as well, this is a really strong year for the iPhone 16 non-pro. It's really, really an impressive year for it. And if you were ever wondering if you really needed to go pro and if you have a little more self-awareness than I do because I will always and forever buy the pro because I'm a fancy lad.

1:21:23This is genuinely such a good year for the iPhone 16. And gosh knows these colors are so good. They're so good. I'm so jealous of these colors because they're so great. I wish they had done the backs like the iMac backs. You know what I mean? Like have the sides be the same. but the backs be richer but yeah i mean my my main complaint about the colors i mean despite the fact that i think the black and the white look really good they stick those black and the white take two slots that could have another interesting colors you know i mean like where's the where's the yellow where's the purple uh where's the red that's true um but but still a good pretty good year for colors i mean all these colors leaked obviously although this is one of those cases where apple's product photography of the colors looks better than the leaked shots of someone just taking a picture of them or whatever but probably the truth will be somewhere in between when you actually go to the store and look at these uh but yeah there's not not an ugly color in the bunch that's for sure but the the most the thing to me that the most important thing about these phones physically wise is i know we talked about this um the the vertical cameras right so they're aligned for better spatial audio or whatever or better spatial video and spatial photos but realigning them in that way minimizes the camera mesa in a way that we haven't seen in years because when they were in an angle it was always like there's a square mesa and it's got a bunch of crap on it and it's a smaller square than the pro square but it's still a square and now we've gone back and now it's like hey you know the phone that doesn't have as much camera stuff that has a capsule back and was the last one they did it like the the 10r maybe or the which i don't remember which or maybe the 10s was the last one of this like they've used this arrangement before and granted the cameras are still really big but because they're just vertical they're so skinny the mesa is so skinny compared to what it used to be and it makes what is a smaller and lighter phone that only has two cameras get the advantage of only having two cameras which is you don't have as much camera stuff bulging out of the back of the thing and then obviously as we'll get to in a little bit the other side of all this is this is a year when the non-pro phone doesn't get last year's processor doesn't get denied the cool new feature like if you were ever thinking of buying a new phone and you don't typically buy the pro phones the 16 is a good year to buy because you get the current soc more or less we'll talk about in a little bit you get the fancy new feature which is the camera control button we'll talk about in a little bit and you get a bunch of nice colors i'm a big fan of the 16th not gonna buy one big fan same absolutely same i would rock the snot out of the ultramarine phone i think aaron would adore the pink phone and and the other colors teal is also very good uh the white is very white the black is very black but the the three colorful colors and i agree with what you said earlier john about you know it's too bad there's not like a yellow or something these colors are so good i'm so into these colors, so very much so.

1:24:21But anyways, moving on. They say that it's got a 50 % tougher than first generation ceramic shield. So I believe that's the front glass, right, that they're talking about? Yeah, but this is another one of the, like, the first generation ceramic shield, wasn't it like 10 years ago? Yeah, I don't know which. I said a lot of things they would say like second generation. And I'm like, what generation were they on before? Has it been second generation for five years? Anyway. Yeah, they will usually compare it to much longer than one year ago it'll usually be at least two years ago and possibly more because it makes the comparisons all sound better well we'll find out when casey gets one because the same ceramic shield is on the pro so you can compare the scratches yeah right exactly uh 6.1 6.7 inches for the the 7.7 inches for the uh iphone 16 plus it now gets the action button that the pros had last year it gets the fancy new camera control button i'd like to come back to that in a minute please yes uh it's got the vertically stacked lenses like we discussed um it's got uh the same chip basically it's the a18 and we later found out the same chip not the same chip so it we found out later that there's an a18 pro so there is a difference but it's largely the same but it doesn't get last year's chip that's the important thing right and and that's i mean we've had years where the where the non-pro phone gets last year's chip and we've had years where it gets the same chip and we've had years where it gets almost the same chip and this is an almost the same chip years we'll get to when we get to the pro phone but the point is it's not the a17 or the a16 or any other like it's not a chip that you've seen before it is a new chip tailored for this phone and that's exactly what you want yep uh and so i don't think we need to go into the specifics about the chip because we'll probably end up covering them in the pro phone but suffice to say it's almost the same um there's improved cooling in both non-pro and pro and so uh i guess this was john maybe maybe it was me somebody put in here this So they said new cooling stuff about both phones.

1:26:19This is a quote from the event video. We updated the main logic board, centralizing the chip placement and optimizing the surrounding architecture. We also added a thermal substructure to dissipate heat made from 100 % recycled aluminum. As a result, the iPhone 16 delivers up to 30 % higher sustained performance for gaming. I'm here for this. This is excellent. I mean, it basically just sounds like they did a better heat sink than they had done previously. And they have a measurement to say, what does it do? we get better sustained performance for gaming thumbs up and then again the non-pro phone is not known for overheating but the fact that they did something to improve it and have some measurement on it is good so it's interesting so on the on the pro phone they expanded a little bit on this which might be related on the pro phone section they said that they quote maximized thermal capacity with a new aluminum frame with a quote graphite clad aluminum substructure that provides up to 20 % improvement in sustained performance on the 16 Pro.

1:27:13So it sounds like at least in both phones, they talked about thermals. And in both phones, the euphemism they used was improvement in sustained performance. But what that really means is heat dissipation. That's what that means, cooling. And so whether this Base 16 has the graphite clad aluminum substructure, we don't know that. No, it doesn't. They would have said it. probably yeah but either way um the the thermals are better in both phones and that's good because on the 15 pro at least i don't know about the regular 15 but on the 15 pro thermals took a pretty big step back uh so this is this is good to see uh we had craig come back out and do a reintroduction of apple intelligence which does look good in theory but none of it's coming just a rehash of wwc which i again i think they had to do because the people who are watching this did not watch wwc you know for the most part yeah but and this is like look siri looks good in presentations too like we have no idea how this is going to be yet right but still still they got to get the word out here's a bunch of stuff that we're promising and we'll all see how it turns out but it is important to get that word out because this is their chance to talk to the world about this stuff that we all know about but they don't uh one quick note uh from the apple intelligence section for those of us who still have young children of which that's just me on the program uh i did think it was funny that they uh did the australian cattle dog as the what kind of breed is this and uh that is i think or may have been construed as a subtle bluey nod which i'm very much here for uh so that made me have a good laugh but anyways uh then we move on to the camera let's talk camera control so this is a sapphire crystal where there's many different things that you're doing with this one camera control and but before before we get to the things i've seen a lot of reports of people who were there at the event and they got to hold the phones and use the camera control which is what we had been calling in the months prior to this uh event uh the capture button but that was calling it the camera control um talking about whether this thing moves in or not when you press it i've seen people saying oh it does move in i've seen people say it doesn't move in but it tricks you into thinking it does i've heard people say it's just force sensitive i and i'm it amazes me that i guess maybe you didn't get enough hands on time but no one just did a close-up and said i can because if it moves you'll be able to see it you'll be able to even if it moves a millimeter you'll be able to see it move that millimeter when you press it uh so i do not know the answer to this question of whether it moves or not which i think is a testament neil patel said specifically that it definitely moves but it's but is he right yeah well yeah they showed it like i mean if it moves and there's also haptic feedback that is an interesting combination that i don't think apple has ever done before because they either do you know have the feedback and it doesn't move or just it moves and that's all there is to it right and so this is going to presumably give haptic feedback when it's partially through its actual travel to indicate like a half press or will it push back against you as in like force feedback kind of to make it feel the the half press thing and everyone kept comparing it to you know real cameras with their half press or whatever as far as any camera that i've ever used any quote-unquote real camera with the half button press or whatever i don't think there's any non there's any magic in them it's literally a mechanical button with a spring underneath it that has a lot of travel and you push it halfway through the travel and it's a very natural thing to do but i haven't at least i haven't owned a camera that has tried to do that with the help of haptics or whatever so i'm very curious to try this button because you know it's it's the big deal this is the big feature on this phone i think this is much more significant than the action button which was simply just another button that you can press this is another button that you can press that's very big that's also touch sensitive that has haptic feedback yeah and i think that so the camera control and this literally like they kept calling it camera control or the camera control it seems like this is a kind of loosey-goosey name whether it includes the or not whether you're supposed to capitalize it but yeah it's the camera control anyway um it's better than these airpods at least it has a name anyway um so this button uh i think this is great i i think this is what's interesting is that if you look at the rest of the phone's updates there's they're mostly again software and incremental improvements the camera control is the update for the iphone 16 series like this is and the action button because remember it got both in one update last last time depending you didn't have anything this time it gets the action button and also the capture button or the camera control thing so this this is just a great year for the 16 they look great they rearranged the cameras they got all the features they have a good soc tailored to it good year that's true yeah sorry i jumped ahead to the uh to the pro but but yeah because they both have the camera control which is great and it looks like so what's interesting about the camera control is that it has all these different modes it isn't it isn't just another action button it has much more input potential than that so it has it has the concept of uh like a light press because it's it looks like it's kind of like a touch id button where it has that metal ring around the end and so it can sense when you're just touching it they also said that it appears to use optical sensing from from below to see like where your finger is on it and maybe how much content it's making like how hard you're pressing so what you have is you have soft touch gestures and then you have a push in gesture and you also have swipe gestures and so what they've done with this is all sorts of of fun new controls that i think will actually be somewhat intuitive so one that we skipped over is visual intelligence where it's like it's like the humane pin thing of like what am i looking at you know what is this and do something with it and that is you just hold it down and that actually makes sense because visual intelligence is like siri in a way and it's below the siri button and it's like okay you hold down the sleep wake button for siri and now you hold down the button below it for visual siri like i think that actually makes sense and then of course you know the camera like click to launch, click again to capture.

1:33:15While you're in the camera mode, you can use the swipey gestures and the light touches to control different camera settings, zoom, stuff like that. That, I think, is going to be pretty great. We will talk about case implications in overtime today. Yeah, that's going to be rough. But other than that, we'll get to that in overtime. But I think this is going to be a fun new input. But I don't think it's going to be like, I absolutely must have this right now. Because all of those functions are available in the UI on the screen. But it will be easier and better in certain ways. You know, one way, for instance, that it will be better.

1:33:52Besides the fact that you don't have to, like, you know, reach that button at certain angles and stuff. One angle you don't have to reach it in is if you're trying to use the back camera to take a picture of yourself. You don't have to, like, reach your finger around and guess or try to hit the volume button where you're, like, reaching your hand around in a weird way. Like it will be, it will make that a lot easier. Oh, that's a really good point. Yeah. And there's a whole bunch of context like that where like the, the, the camera control, I think will just make life a little bit nicer in a lot of, a lot of different occasions.

1:34:21So I think it's going to be a really big deal. And, you know, again, it's on both iPhones. I think it's gonna be a really big deal. The only thing that, that I've seen some people say like, is this going to be the future of input for all apps? Not for the foreseeable future, because while there is an API for it, which I think is great to have a day one API for third-party camera apps to have all those same controls, that's great. Problem is that API only works if the app is in the foreground and running an AV capture session, which means only camera apps, basically, while the camera is open are going to be able to use it.

1:35:01So I couldn't, for instance, use it to offer, say, like a speed control for overcast like i can't it will not work for that because i don't have an active capture session well you could do a thing where you open a session somewhere off in the background like they used to play silence to get access to apis and then you get rejected by app review yeah also i don't think that works in the background but yeah but you that would definitely get rejected so so apple has restricted the use of that to only apps that are performing capture in the foreground. So I don't expect to see most apps use that for anything really because you kind of can't.

1:35:37But even if it's only ever used in camera apps, even if you only ever use it in Apple's built-in camera app, I think that's going to be really great. And again, it's not going to be massively life-changing, but it's going to be a nice quality of life improvement. So that I think is the feature for this year's iPhones. is, you know, besides, you know, Apple intelligence, we'll see how that works, how, when it actually comes out, what's, how good it is, you know, but for right now, the camera control is the feature this year. Yeah. And it's on both the regular and the pro. Um, I do worry a little bit about how much stuff they put into the camera control, because I can kind of imagine a regular person getting into one of those modes where they're swiping through like exposure and, and, uh, and zoom and stuff and not understanding where they are.

1:36:24And they just want to take a picture. So one of the things I'm going to test when I get it is like, can you get yourself accidentally into one of those things where you're messing with controls when really you just wanted to take a picture and then get out of it by essentially saying, I'm just going to press this button real hard. And I want to take a picture now. And I hope it will. I hope it'll say like, all right, forget about all those menus. Forget about you changing your depth of field or zoom or exposure. You press real hard. I just stop everything and say that means take picture. So take a picture.

1:36:50Because honestly, they added so much to this to this one button. like on day one that I worry that it might be too much, especially if it's possible to get it into a mode or whatever. But we'll all try it when we get them and see how it is. There's a pretty good series of short videos on Apple's website for the iPhone 16. I don't think I can link specifically this section, but they have what effectively amounts to a tutorial, which is four like very, very brief videos that are like three or four seconds each that show how it works. And it does make sense having never used it. And I think I'll adjust fairly quickly, but I agree with what you're saying.

1:37:26Also, if you look at the keynote at 58 minutes and about 18 seconds on the YouTube version of the keynote, they show that cutaway we were talking about earlier. And to my eyes, they are very clearly showing this thing depressing a little bit. So I do think it moves, as Marco had said. I thought the same thing until I saw 50 % of the reviewers who held them in their hands saying, well, the button doesn't actually move. Well, I mean, we'll see, but I'm fairly confident. So anyway, so yeah, so I am super excited about the camera control. I think it's going to be really great. Is it the sort of thing where I must have this and, you know, any other iPhone that's ever existed is trash?

1:38:01No, of course not. But I think it does look really slick. And I love, like Marco said, that there is what appears to be pretty robust third-party APIs for third-party use available day one. I'm very excited about that. uh and i think the only other thing with the 16 non-pro is that um they've announced that there is now 25 watt mag safe charging with an updated charger chi too can do i think 15 watts if i'm not mistaken um and their bespoke mag safe chargers can now do 25 watts with these new phones if you also get a brand new mag safe charger which is pretty slick that that's pretty cool and they also update the cameras as well yes pretty substantially actually i'm sorry i'm sorry i totally skipped over that yeah the um the non-pro iphone 16 now has 48 megapixels on the main sensor it's not the same camera it's not the same lenses or sensor as the pro is it is it the same as the 15 pro though that's what wasn't clear to me no the pixels are not as big and the the lens is 26 millimeter versus 24 so it's not it is does not have the same specs as the 15 pro or the 16 pro a 1x camera but anyway it's a step up from the 15 for sure yeah so yeah they're doing they they brought the pixel binning trick where you know the 12 megapixel sensor becomes 48 if you ignore color divisions and temporarily figure stuff out like so it it it they brought over that trick to increase resolution and the processing that goes with that um they also um a bigger jump should be the new ultra wide now has variable focus macro capability larger aperture bigger pixels so the ultra wide has taken a significant step up for the non-pro phone and that and the new arrangement of the sensors now allows it to take spatial video and interestingly both phones now get the ability to capture spatial photos which for some reason the 15 could not do the 15 pro could not do spatial photos it could only do spatial video now both of these can do spatial photos as well.

1:40:11Oh, one other thing. When we were still in the 16 section, they briefly talked about emergency SOS and all the satellite features. They talked about how they are expending the satellite capability to more countries. They have just totally not mentioned SOS pricing over time. I believe, aren't we now to the point, aren't we now at the two-year mark? Or is it just one year? I think they extended it. Didn't we have a follow-up item a while ago where it's like oh they extended the free thing to be even longer like they're just pushing it off yeah i think i think the answer is for most of this stuff they're probably just never going to charge because as we talked about last time like if somebody's like stuck in a mountain and dies because they didn't buy their iCloud plus whatever for satellite connectivity like that's not good um and apple knows that and so it seems like they're probably just never going to charge for this but they haven't had the you know the the the data or whatever to be able to commit to that yet.

1:41:06So we'll see how that goes. But anyway, yeah, Emergency SOS and Find My is expanding in its coverage area. Great. Yep, that is good. All right. iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. This was Greg Joswiak. At night, for whatever reason, it suddenly became nighttime when we did this section. 6.3 and 6.9 inches. Nice. The smallest bezel ever, or some people like to pronounce it. I love, by the way, the way that Jaws phrased this. He said, you know, the even larger screens, quote, we did this while minimizing product growth. That's his euphemism for the phone. We didn't make the phones bigger. Well, rather we did.

1:41:48We minimized how much bigger they got. So now we've learned like, you know, over time, And we occasionally pick up little Apple-isms. Every company has corporate speak and custom corporate vocabulary that drives outside people nuts when they hear it. And we hear a couple – sometimes they'll leak out into public communications. We could tell that obviously around the four-stall era, using the term blow-away as an adjective seemed to be one of those. Still happening. Yeah. That's one of those things that infected the company back then and still going – So you hear certain Appleisms will occasionally leak out.

1:42:27And now we know minimizing product growth, which is not about sales of a product, which sounds like a bad thing. No, it's minimizing product growth, which is minimizing the amount that we make the iPhone bigger, which we've tried to fit this bigger screen in. So thanks, Jaws. That's a fun one. they took the previous phone and they made a tiny bit bigger screen and then shrunk all the phone in around it they minimized in beginning there use that one apple and so like i mean i i don't actually want the pro phone to get any bigger the non max pro phone to get any bigger i was kind of annoyed when i think my current one my 14 pro is bigger than the previous pro phone that it replaced by a little bit if this continues we get a carflation situation where you wake up one day and your non-Macs Pro phone is like 17 inches or something, like we need to draw the line somewhere.

1:43:18But the increase is very, very tight. Well, I think we are already seeing phoneflation over the last few years. Like if you look at, you know, like the size of the current, like, you know, quote, normal size phone, which is, I mean, now there's no more mini, I guess these are the smallest phones Apple's making. the size of the quote small phone in Apple's lineup is probably the size of the iPhone 6 Plus if I had to guess right I mean if somebody will do the math on that but like close it's certainly heavier and thicker it's much heavier right yeah like it's like the the you know phoneflation and sizing has already been happening this is not a new thing and it isn't a question of whether it's happening it's absolutely happening I know I was like they've done it for what five years now at least with the with the regular size phone they've been slowly slowly creeping up i i guess since the seven is when it really started right the six and six and the seven like that was like okay this is the size of the phone and then they said you know what from now on every year they're just going to get a little bit bigger and they do it by such a tiny amount you're like ah i can tolerate it i remember going from the seven to whatever i replaced it with uh maybe it was the 10 or whatever like it's like okay well the seven was kind of small now that i look at it so it can get a little bit bigger and then the next one i got was a little bit bigger too i'm like do they have to make it bigger again i guess it's okay and now i'm like all right please you gotta like lay off a little bit so i'm you know we'll see when the phone arrives like i i absorb the size difference in the 14 pro and i've essentially accepted it um maybe i'll accept this change too it is a smaller difference but i'll have both phones for some period of time so i can hold them up to each other and see what the difference is i do think this may be pushing up against the limit but what am i i'm gonna do there's no mini for me to buy and i wouldn't want to buy it anyway and i as much as i love the 16 that 5x camera is getting me on the pro if you're wondering why are you buying the pro do you really need that pro processor or whatever we'll talk about that in a minute no probably not but i do really want those three cameras because i use my phone as a camera a lot and i've been coveting that 5x and this is the year but we should talk about the weight poor poor marco he's lifting all these weights he's working out but uh the extra grams they added on these phones.

1:45:21I don't know if he's going to be able to take it. Remember how nice it was last year, one year ago, when the 15 Pro came out and it had saved some weight and we were all talking about how nice those phones felt compared to the bricks of the previous ones. We've now lost about half that gain. Well, it's like dieting, you know. A lot of the weight comes back. That's literally what happens. Here's the numbers on the things. The 14 Pro was 206 grams. 15 Pro, 188. Look at that. What a great diet. 206 to 188. 16 pro 199 so it's not pushing back into the 200s it's not as heavy as the 14 pro was but it has gained some back and then the pro max more than half the 14 pro max was 240 the 15 pro max was 221 16 pro max 227 barely moved i think that the pro max did a good job maintaining but yeah the regular pro um and i do wonder where that weight has gone i don't know i don't think it's that graphite sheet that's really making the difference right but uh you know bigger battery that's another thing like apple that's another weird thing about like with apple's lack of numbers and stuff i think based on seeing the insides of these phones and all the rumors that these all these phones all the 16 16 proceeds they all have a slightly bigger battery although 16 pro max is up for grabs based on the rumors that we talked about ages ago right but apple didn't really brag about the battery life if you look on their site they'll say yeah you get an extra two hours of video time and so on and so forth but in the presentation there was no graphs no numbers not even a bezos chart saying best they did say the pro max's best battery life ever whatever but like i'm holding out hope that part of the weight and size gain on the 16 pro that i'm going to buy is the bigger battery because the like the logic board thing and everything else in there is shrinking over time to make more and more room for larger now mostly l-shaped batteries So I'm hoping that's a benefit.

1:47:12And I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't really. Well, they did say the batteries are both larger. They just didn't say how much larger. Right. They just didn't say capacity was. The iPhone 16 is 170 grams. So again, 16 Pro, 199, plain old 16, 170. If you want a light phone, get the one that has one fewer camera and is smaller and is made of aluminum. And much better colors. This is still made of titanium. grade five titanium which john tell me grade five must mean it's like one of the best grades right five is five the top grade is five the highest number dr drang uh two did uh with a list of 37 grades of titanium so i don't think it's i don't think there's an order like two is better than than one you know like i don't think they get better as the number goes up you can look at it yourself it's basically just like how much nickel how much you know aluminum how much like just it's basically just what are the alloys what are the combinations of materials i don't know how they come up with these things but anyway there's at least 37 of them if you want to see and then you find out what grade five is 60 aluminum four percent bandium good to know uh with regard to cooling quote iphone 16 pro maximizes thermal capacity with a new machined chassis made of 100 recycled aluminum which is bonded to the titanium frame using solid state diffusion it's combined with a graphite clad aluminum substructure creating an innovative architecture that enables up to 20 % improvement in sustained performance.

1:48:36Sign me up. Marco just read that earlier, but you can read it again. That's fine. Hey, graphite sheet. Hey, every year they said it's going to happen. No vapor chamber yet, but this was the year. Graphite sheet, improved cooling. They're doing something. Like I said, they did something on the 16, and they did something even more on the 16 Pro. We'll see how it works out, but it's good to see them addressing this year over year. Every year they're making a new phone. and they're trying to make it a little bit better, addressing the flaws in the previous model, thumbs up. Mm-hmm. Colors, black, white, neutral, and, drumroll please, Desert Titanium.

1:49:12Broomers even nailed the name. I got to give props on that, because it's so hard to get these names, because it's marketing, you know, like the supply chain doesn't need to know the name, but I guess it gets printed on the packaging at some point. So yeah, they nailed it. Desert Titanium is the brown, and I have to say, looking at both Apple's product shots and all the videos of the hands-on area, it does not look brown. so that spy shot we have where it looked like brown brown brown obviously different lighting colors look different or whatever desert titanium like all the pro phones look so pale that you're like is that the white one is that the gray one like you have to look at the rim around like the uh the edge of the phone or the little circles around the cameras to even tell that it's supposed to be the brown one they all look white except for the black one yep uh yeah it's you know gray gray more gray less gray and brown uh but anyways let's talk about the a18 pro which is the chip for the iphone's 16 pro this is a 20 gpu faster gpu than the a17 pro it's two times faster ray tracing than the a17 pro the cpu broadly is 15 faster and uses 20 less power than the a17 pro it has larger caches versus the a18 non-pro it has programmable ml accelerators which is very fancy advanced media features a new video encoder and image signal processor yeah so at this point in the presentation the question everybody had and i had as well was even though they're listing all this stuff michael wait a second so we got two new chips this year a18 and a18 pro uh neither one of which has been in a phone before uh all built on uh you know tsmc's uh m3e process the question was especially when they said like you know six core gpu versus five core gpu or whatever are the a18 pros uh just versions of the a18 where all the parts work and i think eventually in the presentation apple made it clear that is not the case they obviously share a ton but a the a18 is not just a a18 pro with parts that don't work as far as anyone has been able to tell now maybe when they cut these things open we'll see i guess it's conceivable they could be but there's so there are enough differences that i think that can't possibly be true well so they said that the the a18 pro has larger caches so i don't know what the structure is like is the cache like a separate layer well that but that's not that's not the thing that puts it over the edge so here let me list the differences what does the a18 pro have over the a18 on the cpu side it's got yes larger caches and there you can go okay well then maybe they're just like some of the cache ram is turned off or whatever probably not the way it does because the the quote-unquote you know s ram that's on the socs is very expensive and complicated and that's not the they usually don't disable portions of but whatever next generation ml accelerators we talked about this before these are instructions like arm instructions for doing media type things that they're saying are only on the a18 pro instructions the ability to execute instructions the execution units for them the ability to decode and execute those instructions is not a thing that you tend to like oh it didn't there's some part of the cpu didn't work so we'll just disable those instructions like it's not a separate unit this is part of the cpu this makes me think the cpu cores are literally different between the a18 pro and a18 now again you could have them just disabled in soft when you know in like firmware or whatever just like blow some fuses or whatever that is technically possible not saying it's technically impossible but i don't think it's anything that apple has ever done uh and then the gpu which is what i'm making was making people suspecting six core instead of five core oh it's easy just when one of the gpu cores is bad or whatever but then we get to this whole section which is prores video encoding new image signal signal processor and usb3 that's a lot of chip real estate to be shipping in the a18 just turned off because the 18 has none of those things right it you know and because they're pro features if this is really the same chip with huge sections of it turned off and special features that disable parts of the sram caches on the chip and also disable the ml acceleration instructions even though they work perfectly fine because i don't think that's the type of thing where you get bad yields and you can you get them turned off right i think these are two different chips that because of all this stuff there if it was just one or two of these things you could think about it because is there so much these are two different chips we'll find out when someone gets them slices off the top and looks at a picture of them you'll be able to see because this is stuff you can see like the prores video encoder the image signal processor and the usb3 thing you'll be able to see where they are that's enough real estate where you'll be able to say are these blocks on the a18 or are they only on the a18 pro either way well you know we'll find out but i have to say like the differentiation of like what makes this a pro chip versus non-pro chip i think they did it exactly right because if you look at these features and you're like i don't care about any of these that shows that you don't care about the pro features pro is like a lot of them are using it as a video camera pro is video the faster speeds yes it's a shame that the 16 still has incredibly slow speeds or whatever hopefully that will come to the 16 eventually but like they put pro features on here and yes that you know if you want the fastest game performance you have to get the pro phone yada yada what else is new right um by the way we didn't talk about this before but one just continue one continuing disappointing status quo is that the non-pro phone still does not have promotion which is probably already criminal and will get increasingly so as time moves on i know regular people don't care about 60 hertz versus 120 hertz but eventually you just have to give it to them because it's this it's like the baseline it's table stakes it's an 800 phone with a 60 hertz screen that's bad um but yeah pro res video encoding nobody cares if that's missing uh the the faster usb speeds people are people are not copying huge video files via wire to ssds off of their plain old iphone 16s that's what a pro phone is for and kudos to apple like they're pro and non-pro phones you look at them and like they're exactly the same except for this one has three cameras why would i ever get a pro one and they give you a bunch of reasons and if those reasons don't appeal to you it's because you're not in the market for a pro phone so i think they managed to differentiate it despite the fact that the camera control and the action button are not exclusive to the pro phone the hardware features with the exception of that third camera are not exclusive to the pro phone and yet the pro phone still looks very much like a pro thing yep let's talk photography uh there's a 48 megapixel fusion camera at f1.78 it's a second gen so so what's interesting about this about this lens and everything the the it sounds like the sensor and the optics are the same as the 15 pro no no the sense the sensor is not the same well with one exception with the readout speed so they they called a second gen quad pixel sensor it sounds like the main and possibly only difference is faster readout which has benefits but it's the same pixel size it's the same aperture and as the 15 pro and the 14 pro same lens it seems and so just the sensor the 15 pro added the quad pixel binning thing over the 14 pro and now the 16 pro is making faster readouts on that so this is a good camera but we're really not seeing massive year-over-year camera differences anymore the way we used to the 14 pro also had the binning pixel binning oh it did okay then then we're seeing even less difference so the 2x readout is significant though like the 2x readout is basically that's that's a new sensor you know and you may think well is why does the readout is part of the sensor how fast can you get the data off that it's all big one of course big sandwich thing and that makes a big difference because a lot of the features that are upgrades this year like to be able to do 4k 120 and everything is because of the faster readout or even just something as simple as when you take a raw how long is it before you can use your phone to take another picture you have to wait for the readout to go by they don't have huge buffers like they do on big fancy cameras for you're able to lean on the button and get you know 30 frames per second or you know 100 frames per second or whatever in raws uh on the phones when you take a raw it's like it thinks about it for half a second or whatever two times faster readout is a big improvement to the ability to take a raw and then quickly take another raw so additionally the ultra wide is now also 48 megapixel, which is a new development, is it not?

1:57:36Yes, so that is brand new. The ultra-wide has a substantial upgrade in its quality and sensor. It is not the same giant sensor and big optics as the 1X camera. It never has been and probably never can be because of things like physics. But it is a substantial upgrade, which should be good, especially for things like spatial video capture, which uses both of those sensors. So it should be pretty good for that. Indeed. Uh, so there's also the, the five X telephoto is still 12 megapixels, but guess what, baby? It's on the regular size phone now, which means as far as I'm concerned, unless something weird happens in the next two days before I do a pre-order, I'm coming back, baby.

1:58:19I'm going back to the regular size phone. No more a huge phone for me. I am so surprised to hear that. Yeah, I know. I mean, I, I honestly, I was thinking about it. I feel like I could do big phone again. But the thing that drives me nuts about this phone, which I love the screen real estate, I really do. Once I committed to the absolutely preposterous pop socket lifestyle, it got fairly comfortable to hold. The problem though is that for my hands, I can't go all the way across the phone and use it one-handed. And I use my phone one-handed fairly frequently. And so that's what drove me nuts about it.

1:58:56And if I had bigger hands, I would perhaps stick with the big phone but yeah i'm going to be going back to the regular size this year because the whole reason i went to the big one was for the 5x which was exclusive to it in the 15 but now in the 16 you can get the tetra prism in both phones so i will be going back crawling back to the regular size phone anyways uh later this year it'll be updated with a two-phase shutter marco what the hell does that mean i don't know john what the hell does that mean this is i think this is a uh an instance where there's just like a software thing that wasn't ready like so much of ys18 software features i think that what they're trying to say is like the like using the shutter button to like press and like that and so it's not like obviously the the camera control can do that but it's a question of is there software support for it and i do wonder if it's a situation where they didn't have they didn't get the software ready enough unless they didn't want to release it in a state where there could potentially be accidental input or it wasn't clear where the half press was or whatever like i'm again i'm not sure how that's going to work it it's tricky for some people even with big camera buttons that have relatively huge amounts of travel and the amount of travel that the camera control seems to have is much much smaller than the amount of travel the giant shutter button on a real camera has so maybe they're still working on that but yeah add that to the giant pile of things that are not ready on day one launch of this phone software wise indeed um they you can change the photograph photographic styles after capture which is a new development and i think that's mostly software but um nevertheless it's a new thing yeah it's a it's a little bit of a little bit of hardware thing too because like the photographic styles is essentially like filters or whatever and if you used to be able to pick them and you'd apply them when you took the picture so if you chose like a black and white style and you took a picture you got a black and white picture right uh and if you change your mind later and said oh i shouldn't have taken that picture in black and white tough luck that was applied when you took the picture it threw away all the color information now what they're doing is kind of like what you can do when you take a raw where it just saves the sensor data and you can have different interpretations of it right but raws are huge right so what they're doing is they'll let you take the picture pick a photographic style but after you take the shot you can pick a different photographic style or remove the photographic style entirely or whatever and the way they're doing this they have vague descriptions of like like how could they possibly be doing this if they're not capturing raw like how how are they getting back sensor information that they've already made a decision about my vague understanding from seeing people who have talked to apple about this is they are essentially storing more layers of information essentially like tone maps of like okay well here's the picture here's the thing that we captured sort of the baseline picture you know heek or whatever here are five other things we measured this part of tonality or like the things that the filters are going to affect they save them as separate maps probably also massively compressed and so then later they can apply the filters by taking the original photo and one or more of those sort of tone maps that they captured combining them you know on decompressing them into the full array of pixels running the filter over them recompressing the output and saving that or something like that and so it is kind of like it's not compressed raw which is another thing you just take a raw but compress it right this is kind of like lossy compressed raw with more layers saved during capture so that you can apply more interesting filters after the fact it's a hell of a long way to go for a feature that i've never found appealing in any way whatsoever but maybe regular people love to apply these filters to their pictures and now it doesn't force you to and i'm glad it doesn't force you to decide up front what filter you're going to apply and then regret it later when you say why are all the pictures in this year look like crayons and it's because oh that was the time that i decided to pick a photographic style and apply it to every single picture i took for a year and it was a terrible mistake i bet a lot of people feel that way about a lot of their early instagram pictures right you know me it's one of the reasons i love apple photos save the original picture and then edit to your heart's content but there's got to always be a button that says revert to original do not destroy the original it's like your negatives right edit modify filter crop do whatever you want non-destructively kind of like aperture used to do back in the day and so they're that's what they're doing here they're giving you increased non-destructive editing abilities without requiring you to save gigantic raw photos every single time yeah this is great this because raw like there's a few reasons why raw files are so much bigger than jpegs or heeks and now i guess jpeg xls um part of it is that you know it's saving a larger range of possible values you know compared to a jpeg which you know is you know limited to a certain you know visible range or whatever uh so part of it is like you know we're storing more precision more depth but a big part of why raws are so big is that they are literally uncompressed like so they are in some cases totally uncompressed, in some cases losslessly compressed, which is not that compressed.

2:03:53There's a lot of, I think, middle ground that we're exploring now as an industry in terms of let's compress the image perceptually the way JPEG historically has done. Perceptual image compression, so it is lossy compression, but just at a very high bit rate, so to speak, so we're not losing too much to people to actually notice, but still try to save more range of values and like less processed values. So that way we can do things like this. And so what seems to be the case is whatever they're doing with the photographic styles, they're storing more data like that so that you can do these things after the fact.

2:04:30And that is a great direction for photography to go because raw files are great for what they are really for, which is not your phone and not most people using them. It's for certain professional contexts. They're great for that. But for most people, something that has lossy compression, but that can store more ranges of values is potentially very useful. yep this is all very good and by the way this section was presented by della huff who i feel like i had recognized from somewhere i couldn't figure out where it was and like two years ago on analog we had solicited good instagram follows and she was one of the people that somebody had recommended and sure enough i've been following her on instagram for years had no idea that that she was this this person at apple so that's super cool uh we'll put a link in the show notes really great instagram follow um so anyway so uh with regard to photos you made brief mention of it a minute ago marco uh iphone 16 pro supports jpeg excel um all of this is reading from mac rumors now the iphone 16 pro models will support the jpeg excel file format according to code found in ios 18 apple did not mention jpeg excel support during the event on monday but this feature was rumored ahead of the of the launch it appears that the pro models will support capturing images in jpeg excel so this is mac rumor is saying we see the code it's in ios 18 it's definitely coming no mention from Apple.

2:05:51None whatsoever. When they rolled out Heek, they made kind of a big deal about it and talked about it and said this is going to be a better image format and our photos are going to take it by default or whatever, and JPEG XL absolutely did not get that treatment. We will find out if there's JPEG XL anywhere in these phones. Even if the code is on iOS 18, will it appear in the UI? Will it be turned on by default? Will it be anything at all? The JPEG XL hype was high in my heart, and it did not get fulfilled in this event which is a bummer but hey you never know like again this was a weird event maybe it's just too techie for them to mention uh maybe uh in today's apple wouldn't have mentioned the heek thing either so that's one of the things i'll be checking for as ios ios 18 rolls out and as ios 18.1 and 0.2 and so on and so forth i'm looking for the jpeg xl sweetness but right now it's not looking great indeed for video there's 4k at 120 frames per second with HDR, which they're calling cinematic slow motion, which had a very cheesy, but kind of funny, uh, little like advertisement in the middle of this 90 minute advertisement.

2:06:54Um, and you can also adjust the playback speed after capture, which is pretty neat. Uh, with regards to audio, there are four studio quality quote unquote microphones with a lower noise floor. Uh, you can now also for the first time do spatial audio capture during video recording. Um, you can do audio mix in voice memos, I believe that's the right marketing term, where basically, let's say if you had musical talent, which I don't, and you hummed a rhythm or a beat or something like that, you could then put a second track on top of it, and then you could sing the lyrics. And you can separate the two of them, and it'll play back your rhythm as you're singing the lyrics, but you can separate them so that you can hear only the lyrics.

2:07:35I don't know. I don't know anything about creating music, but this looked super cool to me. Yeah, this looks amazing. Can we edit our podcasts and voice memos now? Yeah, probably. No, but if we all had very different talents than what we actually have, it could be pretty useful to us. No, this is all, this looks great. A lot of musicians do use this for this kind of purpose. So this is, it's great. It's amazing they can do it. And I'm glad they're working on improving things like the microphone array and different ML processes and stuff. because that can often filter down to features or benefits that everyone can use, even if they aren't songwriters or movie makers or whatever else.

2:08:10Didn't they make a dedicated app exactly for this? Yes. For musicians? Was it called Music Memos or Music Notes? Something like that. I don't know if it's still active. I have this vague memory. It's not. I wonder if this is just like, well, we're going to can that app and just grab that code and throw it into Voice Memos. Basically, yeah. Because I think they realized that everyone was using Voice Memos for this anyway. Yeah. A handful of quick hits before we round everything out. a thousand dollars for the 128 gig pro 1200 for the i think it's 256 gig pro max if i'm not mistaken uh pre-orders are this coming friday pick up on the following friday i kind of wish that they took the non-max pro up from 128 i know they're trying to draw distinction and get you to pay for the storage i get it but like come on anyway i not that 128 is that bad and it's not it's not as bad as it in a max i just like this is another one of those things that they're just riding it out it's like we we love the distinction pro max starts at 256 the plain old pro because it's not max it starts at 128 makes perfect sense to me love that money okay i think it's been like five years of this four years of this it's time to maybe bump that yeah um the iphone 16 models all the iphone 16 models are equipped with eight gigs of ram for apple intelligence that not that you would know by listening to Apple, but just FYI.

2:09:27Indeed. Then I had a small victory dance just for me. The millimeter wave 5G is still limited to the US iPhone 16 models, but it's still there. There was rumbling and rumors that they were going to kill it in this in the iPhone 16, but oh no, it's still there. So reading from Mac rumors, all four iPhone 16 models offer millimeter wave 5G in the US, but other countries are still limited to sub 6 gigahertz 5G. Apple hasn't rolled out millimeter wave 5G in other countries because other countries largely have yet to widely adopt the faster speeds there are millimeter wave networks in countries like australia china and japan but it is not a standard that has been fully embraced in australia for example millimeter wave is only available in select areas of major cities like melbourne melbourne and sydney uh for me my beloved uh don't call it a park bench picnic table is right near a millimeter wave tower and i actually went there today although i didn't use my millimeter wave iPhone 15 on it.

2:10:24But nevertheless, it is incredibly fast. I mean, I can pull like two and a half gigabits per second down to my cellular telephone, which is absolutely bananas. So I'm glad it's still there. All the iPhone 16 models sold outside of the United States still have a physical SIM card tray. I don't think that's terribly surprising, but it's a thing. American iPhone 16s do not have a sim card just like uh the 15s didn't uh all of the iphone 16 models support wi-fi 7 which will be excellent in three or four years when we all start getting wi-fi wi-fi 7 routers and access points and i just want to say like to reiterate my point from the opening statement oh so they're slightly improving the microphones on these phones and oh they get the new version of wi-fi and oh the processor is a little bit better and the screens are a little bit bigger like don't take this for granted that they're they make a new one of these phones every year and they always try to make it a little bit better and that sounds boring to you and still it stops happening and you're looking at airpods you know max and then and you're wondering if they're ever going to get updated or you're waiting for the next mac pro appreciate it appreciate it even more if you wait four or five years between phones because the advances accumulate and then when you get this phone you're like wow this microphone is way better than it was five phones ago or whatever.

2:11:42Wi-Fi 7. And Apple's not on top of these things. Everybody else in the industry is already on Wi-Fi 7. But in Apple land, they take their time and you are only going to get that update if they update the product, right? So yes, they're kind of late to Wi-Fi 7. But if there's no new insert product name here, you're not getting Wi-Fi 7 no matter what. So consider yourself lucky. Yep. The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max have the same feature set, excepting the display size and battery, which is exactly what I love to see. One of my favorite things, no joke, one of my favorite things is when there's parity between the two devices to the degree that there can be.

2:12:22And this year there is. And like we had talked about earlier, there's also to the degree that there can be parity between the 16 and 16 Pro, which mostly amounts to chips and buttons. There is mostly parity to the degree that we would expect. So I'm really genuinely happy about that. and then finally i was 16 mac os 15 ipad os 18 and other updates will all be released on september 16th uh four days before the new hardware is here look at that mac os getting released at the same time as the other os's hasn't happened in so long nice to see the whole family coming together all the new os is going to release at the same time they did it through the magic of dropping features and pushing them to the point once but it is it is a almost christmas miracle so a look at that.

2:13:09And with that, I think we're good, right? You want to talk about any orders or are we just going to plow right through? Oh, sure. Sorry. So obviously none of us have ordered anything yet because as we record, we're two days ahead of time. But we should all have our orders already ready in the store app, so we should know what we're getting. For me, I'm going to be doing a natural titanium half terabyte iPhone 16 Pro, not max. And And I haven't actually figured out what we're going to do for Aaron, but probably the same thing, maybe a 256 version for her. And that's going to be our order. Marco, what are you guys doing?

2:13:47I'm going to get the white one, the 256. And Tiff looked at the upgrades and was like, I don't need one. Good for her. Even with the camera stuff, I'm actually surprised by that. Well, she's already on the 15 Pro Max, so she already has the 5X camera. The other cameras didn't change enough for her to care. and I was mostly sorry I was mostly thinking of the camera control I did not right and the camera control like I described it to her and she's like yeah I don't care so you know we'll see maybe she'll see mine and get envious at some point but I think she honestly just doesn't care like again like this is this is a you know if you have a fairly recent iPhone this is not like a a blow away update oh gosh sorry like this it's again it's a nice incremental update and as john was saying like over time incremental updates do add up and it does become great but if you have if you have like a 14 or a 15 pro and you're looking at the 16 pro like it's not that different like it if you're in the fifth from the 15 pro it's almost not different at all um with the exception of the camera control the 14 pro at least you get like the usbc and the lighter weight ish uh and you know a few like you know two generations of improvements in certain areas like so the 14 pro to the 16 pro it's a better upgrade if you have a 15 pro the only reason we're doing this because we're idiots and podcasters like we we shouldn't we shouldn't be doing this like i even almost skipped this year i'm doing it like those people who like aren't allowed to buy individual stocks so they have to get their investments on like a regimented plan that's scheduled like years ahead of time that said on these dates i'm gonna buy this much stock every two years i get a phone that's how it happens and so yeah i'm not i'm not choosing based on the phone although i have to say like i said before having a product that gets attention every single year and gets improvements every single year gives you the luxury like i used to be able to do with haunted accords to sit back and say oh here's the new x here's the new iphone do i do i like it this year yeah i'll wait till next year because you know what there'll be another one next year every year when they come out they're a little bit better and you could look at them and you could say am I feeling like I feel like I want one now?

2:15:54Do I want one now because there's something particularly appealing to me? Do I want one now because my current phone feels old? The luxury of a product that gets better every single year without fail and is always good means you can just sit back like Tiff and say, do I think I'm going to get one this year? I'll wait until next year because there will be a next year, unlike the HomePod or the Mac Pro. And the AirPods Max. Keep in mind also, the next year, we have those rumors of the iPhone Slim, which even if that might not be what everybody chooses, that's certainly going to be an interesting new thing to shake things up.

2:16:27So that's something that's interesting. And also, this year is the year of Apple Intelligence. That's great, but the beginning of the year of Apple Intelligence is not going to actually be there. And Apple Intelligence is being gradually started over the course of a large chunk of the year. We'll be lucky if it's all rolled out by the end of the year. Right. Not by the end of 2024, but by the end of the iPhone year. Like next September, we should check and say, has everything that Apple talked about with Apple Intelligence actually been released yet? Right, exactly. So if you're thinking like, I've got to jump right now to get Apple Intelligence, I would say you don't.

2:17:07And you might want to wait. If Apple Intelligence is your main driver for upgrading, you might want to wait till next year because most of this year most of those features probably won't be available and even if they are they're probably not going to you know they're still going to be like in you know a beta like status for most of the year and most of the excitement of apple intelligence is going to be first of all if it works it's going to develop over time this is going to be like a multi-year ramp up it's not going to all come in the next few months so honestly i think this is this is a nice incremental upgrade and if you want a new phone get it but if you're saying i gotta get a new phone for apple intelligence like you don't need to rush on that yep agreed and john this is your year baby so what are you doing are you getting a pro max no uh i ordered airpods as i said i pre-ordered the airpods i was excited to do that although their engraving feature was broken for like the first 10 minutes frustrating me but i pre-ordered my uh airpods with noise canceling um and then for my phone uh you know i'm doing what i always do i looked at the other stuff i actually even considered the white one um as we'll talk about in overtime the case situation is dire not good that's we'll talk about in overtime um but you know i i did what i usually do because in the end this i decided this is what i want for for reasons the reasons that i've stated before that probably aren't important other people who are important to me i get the black phone uh and it's not because I like the color black so much.

2:18:36I think the white one looks nicer. It's because I actually use my phone to watch video a lot. And I don't, I want the surround to be black. Like I don't want white distracting me from the display in any way. And maybe you don't care about that, but like, there's a reason televisions tend not to be white when you buy them. And I don't want my phone to be white either. I want it to be all black and I have the bare bottom if I can again, see over time. And I don't want the bare bottom to be white sticking out of my case or so anyway i'm getting the black uh 16 pro non-max i actually bumped the storage this year i've been 256 for a long time i do not fill 256 but just like a month or two ago i did have to delete a bunch of stuff because i was pressing up against 256 i'm like now it's time so not only did they get me on one storage upgrade bump of you know 128 to 256 they're getting me on two i'm buying it with 512, which pains me.

2:19:29It hurts me. It hurts me. It hurts my wallet. But I think it's time for me to finally do that. So anyway, that's it. That's the phone I'm getting. I'm excited. All right. Thanks to our sponsor this week, Tailscale. Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atb.fm slash join. And this week, we're our overtime, which is our member-only exclusive bonus topic that we do every week for members, as mentioned, is about the iPhone 16 series case situation. And there's some interesting issues there to talk about. So we'll be talking about that in overtime. You can join to listen to hb.fm.com.

2:20:04Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

2:20:10Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Margo and 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 Mastodon 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 Arment S-I-R-A-C U-S-A-C-Racusa It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long As discussed in last week's after show where I was talking about some issues I was having with the Rivian and the even greater issues I was having getting it serviced I mentioned that part of the reason I needed a car to go a long distance with fast charging is that I was going to a Goose concert.

2:21:30This is a jam band and kind of very similar to Phish in certain ways. It's definitely the same genre as Phish, but of course they are their own band with their own identity and their own style. But certainly the closest analog I would say is it's closest to Phish from what people would know. Anyway, so I was going to a concert upstate and hundreds of miles away, so it was a lot of driving. And I do want to talk about the concert, and then I'll talk about how I got there. So anyway, because this is the first time I had seen Goose in concert, I used the AirPods Pro as my earplugs, as I mentioned earlier.

2:22:06They did a fantastic job, again, even better than last year. No artifacting, no imbalances, a flawless job. I was very happy using AirPods Pro as my concert earplugs. I really could not tell I was wearing them most of the time. It just sounded like it was a reasonable volume. It was great. I will say Goose as a band puts on a very good show. And if you are into seeing jam band concerts, I would say definitely go see Goose if you get a chance to. It is a little bit more, I'd say, a little more mainstream compatible than Phish. Not a lot more, mind you. It's still a jam band. But, you know, they don't they don't go quite as far off the deep end for quite as long as Phish tends to do.

2:22:53So it's a great show. I love and I just first of all, just on a personal level, for a long time, I felt like Phish is like my only band. And what the heck is going to happen to my enjoyment of music when that band inevitably ends at some point in the future? And I'm I'm very heartened to see that, like, there's more like Goose is now in that. same genre doing a great job as well. And so it's great to see like there's more bands making the kind of music that I like. So anyway, great show. They had especially an amazing and quite intense light show. My favorite thing, I strongly suggest one of the reasons to go Seagoo's in addition to the very good music.

2:23:36They are a really visually interesting band. I think unintentionally so. So, you know, it's a five-member band. The lead singer and guitarist looks like, you know, your standard, like, you know, band lead singer. He's like an attractive young guy who plays the guitar really well and looks kind of scruffy. Like exactly what you would expect, you know. He's also a very good guitar player. He's very good in the jams. I didn't hear a single missed note the entire time it was quite good next to the lead singer is this guy Peter Ansbach, I don't know most of the names but I know Peter Ansbach because I follow him on Instagram he looks like a cartoon character like a happy cartoon character if you see pictures of the band, the one who looks like a happy cartoon character, that's Peter he is like the nicest guy in the world and he's always smiling because he seemed like a genuinely like just smiley happy positive person like he's a super nice guy and so you have you know the lead the lead singer like you know looking all cool then you have peter looking like a cartoon smiling character like playing keyboards on the side then in the back you have two drummers one of them is like you know the regular kind of drummer the other one is like an accessories kind of drum he has like you know tambourines shakers and my favorite a gong like i love a band with a gong that's that's always a good thing then you have the bass player the bass player looks like a cop from an 80s movie with like a long mullet and those big sunglasses and he stays like perfectly stoic and still and emotionless the and he's a good bass player like he's playing very well but like you have the entire rest of the band is these like characters and like right behind the bass player is the drummer.

2:25:30They just replaced their drummer a few months ago. He's a new drummer to the band. He is working his butt off. So the entire time you're seeing this amazing new drummer who is just in constant motion, like he gets really physically into it. And to be a rock drummer, it's hard enough to be a jam band drummer. You're doing that for 25 minutes straight, like without a break, like you're doing that for a long time. So you have this drummer who is just working his butt off like really physical just banging around for 25 minutes straight and all around him is like rainbow lights and smoke effects and like all like there's just chaos going on back there and in front of it is this bass player who looks like a cop just staring at you like it's just totally still as all this chaos happens behind him it is an amazing thing to see so anyway it was a very very good show strongly recommend going to see Goose Inconscient if you get a chance.

2:26:29All right. So how I got there. So I mentioned, you know, I, my Rivian had problems, uh, with fast charging on the highway. Like I couldn't reliably fast charge without like rebooting the car and waiting and it kept throwing errors. I'm gonna have problems. And I believe the two of you and certainly people in the chat and listeners suggested, why don't I just rent a car for the trip? And so I decided, you know what since the rivian was being unreliable uh i thought i thought that's a good idea i'm going on a long trip i'll just rent something how bad could it be oh gosh here we go so i rented i you know i went to our local enterprise branch and of course on the website they list they have all these like fun sedans and everything and of course then you get there and they have two suvs and nothing else like okay like i i wish they would stop doing that like Like, it's literally false advertising.

2:27:24Like, anyway, I'm not super happy with Enterprise Rent-A-Car right now. Because what they rented me with the advertisement of all these, you know, sedans they didn't have and all these other fun cars they didn't actually have. And I get there and they have two SUVs. One of them was a Jeep Wagoneer, which is a bus. I'm pretty sure that the bus that brought my kid to school on the beach was smaller than that vehicle. Like, it's a very large vehicle, and I didn't want to pay that kind of premium. So they offered me, for the sedan rate that I actually reserved, they offered me the smaller SUV, which was a few years old Ford Escape plug-in hybrid.

2:28:05This was my first time using a plug-in hybrid. Yeah, it's not the right scenario for it, though. I don't think a few years old Ford Escape is really a good standard bearer for the current state of the technology. Well, not only that, but the plug-in hybrid is not great for doing a multi-hundred-mile. It's fine if you have one of the modern ones, but no, that's not it. Well, but even still, the plug-in portion of it, the battery electric portion of it, will be dead within 30 miles anyway, and you're not likely to find a charging support. Not with the new ones I was describing last time. The modern hybrid systems, you just drive, and it's fine, and there's nothing for you to worry about, and they don't work like the things you were describing.

2:28:45Anyway, that's not what he rented, unfortunately. Yeah, I rented the Ford Escape. Now, it was pretty old. It had like 37 ,000 miles, which I think is the highest I've ever seen on a rental car, not counting things like U-Hauls, which are always miserable. But just regular rental car places. So it has 36 ,000 miles. It's like falling apart. There's like padding is falling off of things. There's like different trim pieces that are just like kind of loose. It's not in good shape. It smells like a stale car. You know, it's not a great car, but it seemed to drive fine, you know, when I drove back to my house that, you know, the night before I left and was going to leave early in the morning.

2:29:23Okay. So I'm playing around with the plug-in hybrid part. I even charge it up in my house because I have the connector. I'm like, great, you know, charge it up and see how it goes. And I brought the family out for pizza that night, so I got a chance to drive it around town. And I decided to use only electric mode driving around town. And it was, like, decent. I was like, okay, it's not as good as an EV overall. but for those brief times you're driving around town before it runs out of battery it's actually a decent option the way i would describe it this is not a perfect analogy forgive me but the way i would describe it is like it's almost like the way like a bike with training wheels gives you the idea that you are riding a bike and you're like you're kind of but like a bike with training wheels is really not almost anything like riding a bike whereas like these days a lot of kids learn on what's called a balance bike which is basically a bike with no pedals because we've kind of figured and this is how this is how my kid learned as well we've kind of figured out like that like it the hard part of riding a bike is not the pedals it's the balancing it's like figuring out how to balance with the inertia and the tipping over and the turning and things like that and so a bike with training wheels teaches you to pedal but doesn't teach you anything about the balance a balance bike teaches you the hard part the balancing and the turning and everything and you can figure out the pedals afterwards when you use a regular bike so we've kind of learned that's kind of a better way to teach most kids uh anyway to me like the the plug-in hybrid is like the training wheels bike of evs like it gives you the idea that it's it's just like an ev most of the time right it's like no but it's better than nothing like it's better than well but in what ways is it not though because i mean i granted i don't have near the experience with evs that you have but aaron i don't know if we even talked about this on the show i think i mentioned it briefly we breezed over it so fast and i want to revisit it yeah so i can we don't have the time to do the long and drawn out version of the story but suffice to say we got aaron a 2024 xc90 a plug-in hybrid xc90 so they call it an xc90 recharge And basically the theory goes that it has roughly 30 to 35 miles range on pure electricity and 90, 95 % of the driving that she does is around town.

2:31:45And in a day, she'll typically go 20 miles, maybe. And so hopefully that means we can barely ever use gasoline. And on occasions when we're going on a long trip, like if we were going to see a concert a few hours away, then it's basically just a gasoline car all over again. And we just ignore the battery entirely. And we've had this car since mid-July. It is, as I sit here right now, mid-September, and it has over half a tank of gas in it. We've never filled it, and it's been two months. And we've gone from here to Charlottesville twice. So it's worked out extremely well for us. I think the only difference to my eyes between the XC90 and when it's not running the gasoline and a pure EV is that it's not as fast when you're not allowing the gasoline engine to kick in.

2:32:38You know, like a pure EV, it's a rocket ship fast, always, even crappy ones. Like my parents' Chevy Bolt, which is a piece of trash. It's a delightful piece of trash, but it's a piece of trash. That thing is reasonably quick because it's pure electric all the time. The Volvo, if you give it too much juice, unless you're in pure electricity mode, it will kick on the gasoline engine, and then it is actually properly fast. But without that, it's not very quick. If I run on pure electricity and I floor it, it takes a minute to get out of its own way. And so that is different than a pure BEV, a pure battery electric vehicle.

2:33:15But in every other way, it doesn't shift. you know it's quiet as hell it it in every other way it seems to me pretty much identical the only difference is the lack of a trillion torques from zero rpm i would say it's so that's you're right that like when when you're in the electric only range uh of a plug-in hybrid it is in the ballpark um certainly like you're right it is usually the electric motors are not very strong uh so you do have that problem of like it doesn't have the power of an ev it doesn't have the torque of an EV. Other minor things that I think make a big difference to EV drivers.

2:33:51So for instance, it will usually try to mimic the same way the gas engine would drive. So you have things like very strong creep, like when you lift off the gas pedal and it just starts going. You can turn that off in errands, but I take your point. The Ford Escape, it had I mean, granted, I'm used to driving electric recently, so I'm not that used to it, but you took your foot off the gas and it would go five miles an hour immediately. I was like, whoa, hold on. I didn't say go like it was the fastest creep i've ever seen in a vehicle um whether it was in gas or electric mode but um so yeah and also like you know you then have all of the complexity and size and weight of all of those systems that's true so it's again like if you if your option for your needs is either gas or plug-in hybrid go plug-in hybrid like it's definitely better than better than pure gas but don't tell yourself that like all right i'm done with the ev transition now like Like, no, like you have a halfway point there and it's a decent halfway point for a lot of people, but it's not the same as a full EV and you're not getting all the benefits of an EV.

2:34:55Yeah, very quickly to hijack your story. I think if we were to buy two new cars tomorrow, I think I would buy her exact same car again. And I would like to talk to you guys more about it another time. But I think for me, I should get the battery electric vehicle because I almost never leave the greater Richmond area in my car. And so I think for us, for our family, it works super well to have this halfway step, to your point, in the family hauler. But for the other car, it absolutely should not be what I have. I love my car, but it should not be. I should not have a gasoline-powered three-pedal Golf R.

2:35:31What I should have is some sort of battery electric small car, maybe even a Chevy Bolt for that matter. You should probably just have an e-bike. well the roads around me aren't don't don't lend themselves to bicycles but in terms of distance we do agree with each other yeah anyway i overall like i was i was actually fairly impressed with this kind of stinky ford escape like this is not a high-end vehicle but i was kind of impressed overall with the driving until i was driving through brooklyn and i was stopped at a traffic light and the car just kind of dies i'm like um that's did i do something wrong here is this well this is no different than the rivian then welcome to auto stop start well one great advantage of the ford escape plug-in hybrid i don't know if this is true of all plug-in hybrids there is no auto stop start because it just uses electric at low speeds so you don't have that effect at all and and there's not even a button to turn it on or off like you just what effect the gaslight engine will still turn itself off, will it not?

2:36:32Well, it will when it's not being used, but it's not like auto stop start where most cars that you stop at a traffic light and then the engine just kind of stops. No, no. These days, auto stop start turns it off, not just when you're at a traffic light, but whenever the heck it feels like it. Because you don't have to be stopped. You could just be driving and it will just turn itself off and say, you don't need this gas engine right now. Really? What? You need to drive things other than Hondas because I have never had that experience. This is what the modern hybrid systems do. They don't need, like I said, the modern hybrid systems use the gasoline engine to charge the battery.

2:37:06And they use the battery to drive the car unless you need more power than that, in which case you dip far enough into the pedal and it fires up the gas engine. But if you lift off the gas pedal and you're driving and it's like, oh, now you don't need the gas engine anymore. I'm going to turn that off for you. You're basically driving an EV that has like a little bit of a, that has, not a little bit, but it has assist from the gas engine. But most of the time, the gasoline engine is just running as a generator to charge your battery so you continue to drive it as an EV. And in that situation, you don't have to be at a stoplight for the gasoline engine to turn off.

2:37:34Well, and kind of, I mean, I didn't know most of that for regular hybrids. But I think my ideal setup, because like Casey, you're right that like around town being all electric and then just using gas on long trips is kind of the best of both worlds. Because, you know, I didn't have to think about charging at all. It's also the worst of both worlds, as you noted, because you have both things in your car that you need to maintain, deal with. Right. But, you know, TIFF has the BMW i3 with the range extender. And the way that works, which I think is the same way the Chevy Volt worked, is it is always driven by the electric motors.

2:38:09There is no direct connection between the gas motor and electric motors. Not even if you floor it, not even for extra power. The gas motor can never drive the wheels. It is only a generator to boost the range. So the way the i3 works is you're using all electric until you hit about 20 % battery. Then it will turn on the gas engine and just kind of keep it there. Like it will generate enough to keep it at 20 % until it runs out of gas. And it only has like a one and a half gallon gas tank. It's like a motorcycle engine. But it's using it as a generator to just give you more range when you get to the bottom of your electric range.

2:38:43And that's all, you know, it has like 100 miles of range before it even gets there. So you have a decent sized battery and then you have like 80 miles worth of range extension from using a gas generator from one and a half gallons of gas. I think my ideal setup for like a long range road car, if you didn't go all EV, would be just do that. But instead of having a 1.5 gallon tank, have like a five gallon tank. Then you could go 300 miles easily, 400 miles at least. and then you could on a long trip you just stop and get five gallons of gas and keep going for another few hundred miles like that i i don't i'm sure there's good reasons why no one ever made that but i i don't know those reasons like because i think that that sounds amazing and it's literally exactly what the i3 and the chevy volt were just with bigger gas tanks um but i'm sure there's probably reasons anyway so this car stalls and everything's dead and it's like it won't turn back on it's throwing errors on the screen it shows a little orange wrench oh oh it's properly dead and i'm like oh no this is not good i'm i'm going to a trip for a concert that is tonight i like i have to make it there but let me let me just you know turn it off turn it on again you know eventually after like 15 seconds of messing with it i finally just got it to turn on it and i was like okay i'm gonna try to keep going let's hope for the best well uh a short time later while driving on the West Side Highway in Manhattan.

2:40:15No. It dies again, and I slowly drift over, try to get to the shoulder. I have just enough power to get over to the right lane and block an entrance ramp. Oh, no. So now I'm dead again, and I'm blocking an entrance ramp to the West Side Highway. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. You should hear the horns that result from this. oh no this is not good it takes me a you know i turn the flashers i'm trying to and just i'm like all right well i know i got it going last time after a few seconds just try to turn it off turn it back on again eventually after maybe 30 seconds i eventually got going again so you know everyone's honking behind me i'm like waving so you know so i i keep going eventually um you know i'm i'm Going upstate, taking a highway off-ramp to go, I think.

2:41:11I'm sorry, wait. You didn't drive immediately to the nearest Enterprise at this juncture? That would be a two-hour detour. Right. And, like, I have a concert to go to that night. So I'm like, look, I can, there's Enterprises upstate. Like, if the worst case, like, I'm going to make this concert. Worst case, like, maybe tomorrow on the way back, I can get a different car if I really have to, you know, by going to some local location. But, like, I'm not going to miss the concert. so so i keep going over the core i didn't end up having to replace the car on the trip because there was just never a time where it was that urgent because i was able to get it going every time but over the course of this trip it stalled about 12 times like this oh my usually at least while it was stopped like at a light or something and i tried and and here of course i'm a nerd so i'm like i wonder if i like because you can pick because it's a plug-in hybrid it has all these different modes you can you can have auto or you could have only use the battery mode don't use the battery mode and you can have make the engine run constantly to charge the battery mode yeah so of course i tried all those different modes trying to figure out okay well is it maybe it's misreading the battery voltage so i'll keep the battery at a high charge level using the generate option maybe it's like you know dying in the switch over so i'll make it never use the battery and that didn't work i'm like maybe i'll make it always use the battery and then alternate between like always using it until it's down then make it charge itself all the way back up and then like i tried all these because i was i was in this car for like i don't know seven eight nine hours during this trip it was a long time so i was like i had a lot of time to play with the different modes none of them made any difference whatsoever it just kept dying so i did make the trip it was fine eventually uh i was you know in some pretty bad situations with this dying in the middle of busy highways and new york city and stuff but you know it was i did eventually make it back with all the including it even stalled literally the traffic light right before re-entering the enterprise location to drop it off it stalled there you should have just gotten out of the car walked up left it there on the road walked up to the counter and said your car is there so why did you leave it there i says well ask the car yeah i i told them i expressed them my dissatisfaction with the situation.

2:43:29They were apologetic. They didn't give me a discount or anything. I'm like, look, just take this car off the road. You have to take... I wasn't going to make a huge deal out of it because I don't want them to think I was making a big deal just to get a discount or something, but I'm like, you've got to take this car off the road. This is unsafe. Anyway, the idea that renting a car might be more reliable than my broken Rivian, nope, wasn't. this still might have been more reliable but remember i was suggested that you rent a honda i hope when you were stalled in the side of the west side highway the ghost of my head floating through your mind going honda honda not ford honda there's a difference oh my god john there exist other automobiles and hondas that also work just saying i i drove my 10 year old honda today and it got there and back without any problem yes i've driven a lot of 10 year old cars that or not hondas they get there and back your cars don't last that long the pebbles killed them god help me john i don't know how we've lasted 10 years the pebbles are vanos the avenging god of vanos it wasn't just the vanos there was the water pump there was the there was the drive train there were lots of different things that almost killed that car thank you very much the timing belt guides right i know right exactly uh anyways no there are exist cars sorry whatever there exist cars other than honda i swear to you they do they they work they really do not fords but they do work.

2:44:55Not Rivians. Not Volvos with Pebbles. That's right. Well, again, the Pebble doesn't matter if the serpentine belt ain't spinning. I was going to say, if your engine's not running all the time, you're just lugging that thing around. And someday when you need it, I hope it actually starts. Me too. Well, I'm glad the concert was good even if the travel was a bit disastrous. There, I'm back.