657: Ears Are Weird

31:50You could just keep making that bigger and bigger and shove all sorts of stuff up in there, which is what this next item is about. So basic Apple guy writes, the iPhone Air is all battery. The entire brains of the phone is essentially smushed into the camera plateau. I thought we knew this last week, did we not? We did more or less, but here, so a couple of shows back, I remember saying like we were looking at it all, back when we were looking at like the mock-up models that everybody had of all these things. And it's like, what's going to be in the in the camera bump essentially uh and in particular on the air what's going to be in the camera because it's just got the one camera in there like what's the why extend that lozenge and make it look like a google pixel what's the point in doing that and now we know from the presentation the point in doing that is they put basically all the computer chips up there that's what's in the rest of the lozenge is the rest of the phone and leaving the big long flat body to basically just have the battery and the taptic engine in it and like the ports and some other stuff like that that is also kind of true of the 17 pro that they've shoved stuff up there because you've got the three cameras and then way over on the right you've got like the flash and the lidar thing and in the middle there's there was speculation about them sneaking some battery up under there and some other things i do want to see the iFixit teardown of these just to see how much how because they hollowed out the glass on the on the air to get that in there and then of course on the pro that's not glass it's aluminum them they've also hollowed out i would love to see exactly what they've tucked in there but um like i said i think that the logic board is horizontal on the pro and then the whole rest of it is battery but how much should they hide in there so anyway that's why this thing looks like a google pixel i don't actually know if google pixel also puts all their circuit boards up there uh but if i don't i feel like they're missing out because it seems like it's a good idea well there are i mean it's probably i mean obviously there's there's considerations of things like you know how many cameras you can fit and how deep they can be but also like heat maybe like heat dissipation i think could be not amazing with that kind of layout like i think we're going to find the 17 pro with the vapor chamber thing like that you know that's going to spread the heat across the whole aluminum you know case and the whole back of the phone the air is kind of the opposite like the air does not seem to have much of a mechanism to spread the heat that's the the uh the brand promise of the name air is it will thermal throttle because there's no place for the heat to go it's true of the macbook air and it's true of the iphone air Yeah.

34:07Like when they benchmark these things, like you're going to see, you know, even if they we talked about this last time, like, do they have the same peak clock speed, but run some long running benchmark on the air? And boy, is it going to throttle before the pros? All right. The iPhone 17 Pro. Apparently, I owe you and Marco may owe you an apology, John. Both of you, yes. Last episode, I could not believe it when both of you were like, I didn't know this was going to be a unibody. And we talked about it on the previous show. And so someone actually looked up in the transcript the word we use multiple times.

34:42I literally said the word unibody at least twice. And you know what, Casey? You also said the word unibody. So both of you last episode were like, we never talked about this. We didn't know it was going to be like this. We didn't know it was going to be a unibody. You did. Wow. Briefly. I don't. I mean, I listened to the clip. I am not arguing that this is incorrect. I don't think I properly processed. I was in Ron Burgundy mode. I don't think I processed the implications of unibody, but so that's why it was so surprising to me. It was an extensive discussion and many words were spoken and you like, I put the timestamp link to you saying it.

35:15again, I'm not arguing it. It's a 100 % the case. I just, I totally blanked on that particular word on that, or I guess on that whole damn discussion, which is on me. I'm not saying it's not my fault, But yeah, I blanked on that. All right. The millimeter wave antenna is back, or the window, I should say, is back. On the 14, I think I have that right, it was in the spot that the camera control, or I guess 14 and 15, it was in the spot that the camera control took on the 16. And so there wasn't a bespoke antenna, or well, there wasn't a visibly bespoke antenna anywhere on the 16. on the 17 it's at the very top of the phone for american phones and i think only american phones because i don't think any other country gets millimeter wave interesting place to put it's dead center in the middle what we mean by window is there's a break in the metal case like a lozenge shape break i keep saying lozenge people will tell me that's not a lozenge shape a rounded capsule and capsule yeah shape uh at the top of the phone i believe it's made of like plastic or glass or something but it's something that's more radio transparent than aluminum uh and that's where they put the millimeter wave do you remember where they put the millimeter wave antenna on the 16 pro yeah but the 16 i think it's just integrated with the like antennas on the rim or something or maybe it's behind the glass i'm not sure yeah maybe i forget but anyway apparently that wasn't as good as it could be so the window is back and it is dead center on the top of the phone which is kind of weird looking at least it's in the middle yeah that's true and centered which we'll get to in a second yeah um and speaking of centering actually this is not the centering i was talking about but the logo placement on Apple's cases is a little wonky at first glance, but I actually think I can defend it, but we can talk about it.

36:58Yeah, no, it makes sense. Like, so one of the, one of the rumors we were talking about was like on the pro phones, which have that glass panel on the bottom, the rumor was that the Apple logo would be centered in the glass panel rather than centered on the back of the phone as it had been for ages. And then the question was, okay, but if you look at the existing clear apple case with the magsafe ring now the ring would cross over the apple like the apple wouldn't be in the center of the ring anymore because they didn't move the magsafe ring the magsafe ring is kind of where it always was proportionally speaking but the apple logo is lower on the phone so what are they going to do and there's all these mock-ups of like the ring wouldn't be a complete ring it would have an opening on it and like because you know you've got the ring and then you got the little vertical like notch the vertical line below the ring so it'll be like okay the ring and then there's a break in the ring and then then there's a little notch and the apple logo would be in that little empty spot where the break in the ring is it never really looked very nice or made any sense um so here's what apple actually did for their clear case for the 17 pro they do not have a clear case with a white ring on it they just white out the whole like the whole glass panel area that the place where the glass panel is on the 17 pro the case has an opaque white thing there and the apple logo is centered in the opaque white thing The ring is still what, you know, where it always is and is crossing over the Apple logo.

38:19But you don't see that because the whole back is white. So that's what they did there. But on the cases for the 17 Pro that aren't clear, like the tech woven thing, the Apple logo is centered within the full height of the phone, not centered within the glass panel, because when that case is on the phone, you can't even see the glass panel. And it'll be kind of weird, not that weird, but kind of weird to center the Apple logo in a structure that you can't see on an opaque case. i understand why people are like what the what but i actually i agree i think this makes perfect sense it makes so much more sense than those those mock-ups with the ring with the break in it you know and setting aside that you wouldn't have magnets where there was no ring this makes so much more sense although it does mean that your clear case it's not all that clear anymore yeah i did i do think it's a bit of a misnomer now like because it's like it's obviously like most of the actual area of the case is white.

39:09Yeah, it's like a clear edge case. All right. And speaking of cases, apparently a lot of case makers made a bet that didn't come true. So Tyler Hayes writes, I did a web search for iPhone 17 Pro case and the first four out of six sponsored products showed a black iPhone 17 Pro. I clicked through to several online stores and found the same thing. Let me just remind you, there is no black iPhone 17 Pro. This is an article on PC Magazine website, and the headline was, who wants to tell these case makers there's no black iPhone 17 Pro? There's so many pictures of black iPhone 17 Pros because they just did all their artwork based on the mock-ups, and they thought for sure that's a safe bet.

39:51Why don't we just do black? We don't know what the colors are going to be, but they're sure they're going to have a black one. Nope. all right john what are the actual what are what is the actual origin or what is your head canon for the origin of blue white and orange for the iphone 17 pro yeah because those are the only three colors it comes in is whatever it is that really really dark blue which is practically black but not really silver which just looks like silver and then cosmic orange um and i saw lots of people saying these three colors remind me of something in fact on last episode i even said the denver broncos and apparently denver broncos have changed their logo but their logo from 1997 to 2023 was a really deep dark blue white and then reddish orange um like casey you came up with the gamecube one here the uh showing the uh the really deep blue one next to the purple i think it's supposed to be the purple gamecube although the white bounces off on this picture and then there was a silver gamecube for the silver phone and then there's an orange gamecube sorry a spice gamecube for the orange phone i think this is not a good color match because first of all this image isn't very accurate and second the purple is very different from the dark blue and i think spice is different than that orange but okay it reminded you and by the way there was a black game cube too so it's not a perfect match some people think it reminded them of the flight suit that luke skywalker wears in the star wars trilogy because he's got an orange flight suit right which i guess has some dark black that could be like dark blue and there's gray stuff okay luke skywalker i see that uh but as soon as i realized this i feel like this is the actual answer uh when i saw the logo of auburn university which is where uh tim cook went to college uh in 1982 graduated 1982 their logo and colors are deep dark blue and orange and unless you think who cares tim cook fine he went there as an undergraduate you think he's going to color phones like his school i was doing some googles i'm like he's a really big auburn fan isn't he what can i find that will back up the idea that he's a really big auburn fan so i did some google searches and i came up i don't know if this is true this is some thing from silverwavesmedia.com it sounds like a rumor but this is what it says at that website we'll link it in the show notes cook graduated from auburn in 1982 and it is rumored that he paid for the whole buyout of former auburn football coach gus malzahn the total buyout was over 21 million they're saying that he you know paid to get rid of uh a football coach paid 21 million dollars for his own money that seems highly unlikely to me but who the heck knows but anyway what i did find is a strong evidence that he really cares about auburn football and if these really are the auburn colors they do look like a very good match for the iphones i would be hard-pressed to believe that tim has anything to do with any of these colors however even though the university of virginia does have very similar colors not the same but similar i think the auburn connection is the strongest of of the available options that have been presented.

42:41And let me tell you, as a very big college football fan, it is not at all surprising if he really did take care of that buyout. In fact, my actual alma mater, Virginia Tech, we just this past week fired our head football coach because he had not performed at all. And he has, I think it's$6 million buyout or something like that. So it's typically on the boosters on the fans to come up with that money because usually the university doesn't pay that. And I believe at Tech, and this is probably true of other universities, but at Tech, as far as I know, the school pays for little to maybe even none of the football program.

43:16It all comes from fans and people who donate to Virginia Tech and so on and so forth. So this is a real thing. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if Cook did indeed pay a$21 million buyout because to him that's like chump change. He should have paid to stju.org.stp, but that's neither here nor there. Yeah, the idea of like these ridiculous buyout contracts, like, okay, if we don't like you, we have to pay$21 million to get rid of you. It's a racket. That's very familiar to CEOs. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's very true. In certain jobs, certain rare jobs, CEO, head coach, they pay you to leave.

43:55and i totally believe that uh that tim cook had nothing to do with the colors in the phone but everybody who works there knows yeah oh yeah that he likes auburn and it could be a way of like oh if we show him this he's definitely going to approve and you know kind of like a wink i don't know it's kind of strange that no one asking the questions about this not that they're probably going to say but it is a weird lineup of colors no black really dark blue silver and orange could be luke skywalker could be the denver broncos could be eva i mean also well first of all the of all how much do you think we can get tim cook to leave for um but oh you know i don't think you want to see how much that is yeah seriously but it's also you know orange and blue have been a very popular color combination forever so i also like it it might just be that they they decided these were cool colors you know also keep in mind like the like the that particular shade of orange looks so far i have you know we don't we don't have them yet but it looks so far very similar to the orange on the button on the Apple Watch Ultra.

44:55You know, they've used... Is that called international orange or something? I believe so. And like an orange has been used as like an accent on electronics that Apple likes for a while by companies like Sony and Braun that provide a lot of their design inspiration. So these are just cool colors. And I think you have the cause and effect backwards. Like I think the reason why these colors are here is because they're cool. And the reason why all these other places also use these colors is also because they're cool i i mean like i said i'm with you on the orange but my thing is why is that blue so dark and then i see the auburn logo i'm like that's why the blue is so i just remember the whole thing on the internet like maybe five years ago where i was like did you notice that every movie poster uses complementary colors of orange and teal yeah yeah like they do that for a reason right but but like this is not what's in the movie posters it doesn't have orange and then the darkest blue you've ever seen in your life it looks like it's black it's it's orange and very light blue and that's why i was thinking denver broncos or virginia or whatever i mean it could be.

45:52It also could be that they knew they were not going to have a black. They decided not to have a black and they're like, okay, something dark. You see that again. In other Apple products, you see what they call midnight being used instead of black in the MacBook Air, the Apple Watch. I think some earlier, some lower end products, some of the lower end phones and stuff. You do see them using dark blue in place of black before. Again, I think these are just cool colors and everyone else is using them for the same reason. We are sponsored by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

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48:22All right, let's talk iPhone Air. We made passing reference to this a couple of minutes ago. Mark Spoonhour from Tom's Guide, Lance Ulanoff from TechRadar interviews, Jaws and Ternus. The first half of the interview is all I had a chance to watch. And I forget which one it is, but we'll link in the show notes. It was only about 15 minutes or something like that. And I thought it was really good. I mean, it's as with all Apple interviews, they're very polished, very well trained. You don't get a whole lot out of it, except I forget exactly what time it is. We'll put a timestamp link in the in the show notes.

48:55At one point, Jaws is talking about how rugged the iPhones, but particularly the iPhone Air is. And he has one sitting on like the side table next to him. And eventually you can see him like computing it in his head. And he thinks, and he decides, you know what? Here we go. And he hurls, he, as the kids would say, he, you know, yeeted the phone right across the room to Lance, who didn't even catch it. And then it fell on the next side table and it was no worse for wear. And Jaws literally says to them, go ahead and see if you can bend it. And sure enough, these two dudes that are probably roughly our age, they try to bend it both ways and couldn't do it.

49:32Apparently it started to give a little bit, but then we'll go right back to the shape. this was such an incredible flex and i i loved every second of it it was so cool important calculations so first it was a quoting from the interview here what turnus said was it exceeds our internal metrics for bend strength which jaws added which are pretty high and then yeah jaws made the calculation uh because they're like oh you know so thin is it really as rugged or whatever so he threw it to him first of all which is a risk it could have broken because he did not catch it he didn't throw it to him on top of my driveway it just clattered onto the side table didn't fall that long and then they said go ahead and try to bend it now here's the thing part of the calculation on that is like aren't these people gonna like jaws is like they're not gonna use all their strength to bend this and break the phone in front of us right and i believe looking at the video they did not use all their strength to bend it and break it in front which we'll see when the real youtubers with stronger forearms get a hold of these things and start cracking them in half uh because every phone will break eventually like they're made they're not it's not magic right um they did put a lot of pressure on it but i don't think they used all their strength and honestly i wouldn't have either who wants to have a glass thing shatter in your hand right they just have their bare hands on it and that's why this is such a genius move because jaws knows that even if they're capable of breaking it they're not going to break it right here in front of like that's that's why he gets the big bucks right it was a it was a smart move uh and it was it was a calculated risk but it worked out for him so um yeah and you know it's titanium it's very well glued and screwed together uh the new glass is stronger than ever uh i don't have any problem believing that it is much sturdier than for example the the eminently bendable iphone 6 uh is it more bendable than the pro yeah i think so so we'll find out once people get these and hook them up to scientific equipment and start cracking them in half but uh kudos to jaws for taking a risk and getting away with it.

51:26My guess is they have done that before internally. He definitely knew that this would pass this test. You can tell that he has done this before that interview. Yeah, I agree. Apple does not take risks like that, believe me. Especially Jaws has been there forever. He's a pro. Yeah, and I like that. Part of the risk is that no one is going to really put their back into it and do it because who wants to have glass shatter in your bare hands. Nobody. And it is kind of actually hard to get leverage on it if you're not accustomed to breaking phones in half, like the YouTubers are. So they just, you can see what they did.

52:02They just did whatever they would do, was they just take it and try to bend it. And they're applying force, but they're not like, let me get my whole fist around it and bend it over the edge of my leg. You know what I mean? Next year they'll have a blender on stage. Like, what's that for? Oh, just wait. Incredible. Sam Henry Gold writes, I'm guessing the iPhone Air name was Last Minute, because there's still a couple of straggler references to iphone 17 air on the website in alt text and some regional pages a japanese web page also at some point mentioned an iphone 17 plus so i don't know what's going on there maybe somebody asleep at the wheel i'm guessing this is not just like the name was changed last minute i'm guessing this was like somebody on the web team had the wrong name until the last minute but like the the name of these products like you know they're like printing boxes and stuff like months like this kind of stuff like this this is decided not at the last minute yeah well the thing is the the decision is not decided at the last minute but the information is not distributed widely so once they finally said are we doing 17 air are we doing air and they finally said no we're doing just doing plain air and they started printing the boxes three weeks passed but that information was not passed on to the web team so they're still writing 17 air and all their checks you know i mean it happened with uh i think it was lion 10.7 where they were trying to go from Mac space OS space capital letter X to just OS space capital letter X and Apple itself couldn't decide so is it Mac OS 10 10.7 or is it OS 10 10.7 and it was like 50 50 through all the material for the life of that OS that no one could agree whether it was OS 10 or Mac OS 10 they eventually settled on OS 10 I believe in 10.8 more thoroughly but uh yeah sometimes it's within a big organization especially when the information is not distributed that widely preliminary decisions have a way of just like having momentum and even when you know like in the lion case they never decided which what it was going to be but in this case when they settled on iphone air not everybody got that memo fast enough right before the the announcement like the show before the announcement uh before we knew for sure all the details but like it was we all had every detail from the rumor mill.

54:11John had asked me in the chat, what would make me not buy the iPhone Air? Because I had said in the previous episode, I'm probably going to buy the iPhone Air. And I said, there's three things. Number one, if it doesn't have always on screen. Number two, if it doesn't have promotion. And it has both of those things, great. But the number three thing I said was, if the speakers suck. Because I had seen, like that day, I had seen like some mock-up from some rumor site and I saw the bottom of the phone and I saw these little like it only had a couple of holes at the bottom. I'm like, huh. Speakers are hard to fit in a really thin enclosure.

54:53If the speakers suck in the phone, that would really be a problem for me and my usage of the phone. Casey, what did we learn? So this is a video from Max Tech, who did a really good and really fast-paced, you know, here's something like 17 things you didn't realize about the iPhone 17. And one of the first ones is there's no speaker at the bottom of the iPhone Air. The only speaker is the earpiece speaker that you would use when you're talking on the phone. Yeah. So a long time ago, you know, originally, like, the only out loud volume speaker of the iPhone was the big one on the bottom. A long time ago, I forget exactly which phone it was.

55:29they basically put a higher powered speaker as the phone earpiece speaker such that it became a second one and that way when you rotate the phone they can say look we have stereo sound now because it comes from the big one on the bottom and then also we just crank up the earpiece speaker enough and that's like a second speaker up top but the top speaker is not nearly as good as the bottom speaker so you're going from not only from two speakers to one speaker in the air but if you were going to pick one, you picked the worst one. So I think the iPhone Air is going to be a substantial degradation in both the quality and the total volume output of the built-in speakers.

56:11And that for me sealed the deal. I was probably going to get the Pro anyway, but I was really curious. I was going to like, oh, maybe I could try the Air at first, see how I like it. But no, without top class speaker capabilities, it's not for me. That's it that that's what did it is that because you're always talking loudly on speakerphone in public yeah i hold like a pizza like merlin likes no it's it's because you know i am very frequently listening to podcasts out loud on the speaker as i'm like doing stuff around the house i'll like set the phone down on the counter and do some stuff in the kitchen or whatever like i very frequently listen to podcasts out of that speaker you get some airpods i i also have airpods but and i have some home pods that sometimes even work the reality is i walk around and i do stuff and And I use the speaker a lot.

56:57If I'm in the shower, I'll like prop it up on a shelf nearby. You know, like there's I use the iPhone speaker all the time. And so that's that's a deal breaker for me. Yeah. And those little holes at the bottom of the iPhone air, those are just for the microphone or microphones. There's no speakers down there, but there is there are the microphones. So, yeah, it's it's one of the other compromises of this design. Not enough for speakers. You're down one speaker. Your speaker is worse. it's not going to be great for all those people who want to talk loudly on speakerphone in public yeah and i think like the more that we look at the air like i have tried because i do i am curious i was trying to like earlier today i was looking through all the trade-in prices i'm like i wonder if i can trade in a bunch of my old test devices and just get an air as a test device which i might still do um because i think it's i think it might be useful but But...

57:47I'm trying to come up with a reason to get this phone. and like the more I think about it or the more we learn about it, I'm just like, oh no, I really shouldn't get this phone. And I wonder like how other people are going to react to it. Like so far, you know, the tech press has all been pretty much in agreement that this thing looks and feels pretty cool, but it's not the phone you should buy. And I'm trying to like, who is it for? I'm having a hard time coming up with people it's for because they seem to have done a great job with like, you know, the physical design of it. It looks really cool.

58:20Everyone says it feels great. But I have a feeling that effectively no one is going to buy this phone, which maybe that's okay. Like, I think, honestly, I would love to see Apple continue to make weird phones that take risks and optimize, like, really hard for certain things. But if it's going to have the worst cameras and the worst battery life of any phone in their lineup, those are really huge things to most people. Like, most people. And it's not the cheapest. Yeah, it's not. So it's not cheap. It doesn't have good battery life. It doesn't have good cameras. It's not small. So it doesn't like, you know, fit the small hand people like their needs.

58:58It doesn't have good thermals. Probably. It doesn't have good speakers. Probably. What does it like? I have a feeling it's going to maybe sell even worse than the plus did. Like, I don't I'm trying to think like who's going to buy this. I think it's going to be something that everyone does cool videos on and everyone knows what it looks like and it looks cool. Maybe you'll occasionally see somebody who wants to look flashy. You'll occasionally see them using it. But I don't know. I think we're going to see a lot of orange phones this year and I think we're not going to see any errors in the real world.

59:36I'm trying to predict when's the first time I'm going to see one in the wild that's not at an Apple store. I bet it's going to be a while because I've never seen a plus. Granted, it's a little harder to spot those because phones are often in cases. So maybe I'm just not spotting them because cases are covering them up. But the Air, I don't know who is buying it. And we'll see. Maybe I'm totally wrong here. But it just seems like there's some really big trade-offs that I don't know anyone who would accept those trade-offs. reports from a day or two ago were that if you were to order an iphone air you'd still get september 19th delivery so take for that what you will it's you know there there's also a ming shu quo was saying like what he thinks that the air is not selling well blah blah blah i have no faith that he has any inside line on how many phones are being sold but the one thing we can't see from the outside is you know a few days after the phones are launched usually you can't get day of delivery anymore and apparently as of a day or two ago you still could get iphone air day of delivery.

1:00:34So maybe they just made a lot of them or maybe they're not selling well. Yeah, you can't get it today. But, you know, that's and again, you're right. Maybe they didn't make that many because maybe they did their own forecasting and they nailed it. And they said, oh, actually, we don't need to make a ton. And I still again, I still think Apple regardless of how much this actually ends up selling, I still think they should do stuff like this. They should have models that aren't like total sales hits, but just serve a certain need. I think that's great. You know, it It goes back to kind of your halo car argument, John, of like, you know, like Apple should do things that push the envelope and push things forward and have specialty appeal, even if they don't appeal to most people.

1:01:11Like most people don't buy supercars, but they exist and they're really cool and they serve other purposes of in their existence and in their development and in their research and what they have trickled down technology wise to other models. And like, so the iPhone Air, I think there's there was lots of reasons to make this phone, but I don't I really don't think it's going to sell well in the US. Now, it's possible it'll do better in China, where dynamics are different. I don't really understand them that much. I know the appearance and novelty looking is much more important there. But even then, I think the orange one would probably do better.

1:01:45But I don't know. We'll see. Didn't it replace the iPhone 16 Plus? I know it's not a direct one-to-one replacement. It replaced price-wise, more or less, but not features-wise, obviously. Well, I thought the screen is a touch bigger than the 17 and a touch. Yeah, no, the screen, the Plus was the same size as the Max, wasn't it? But this is in between the Max and the Pro. And like feature and capability wise, it is between the base 17 and the Pro. Like it does, it is better than the base 17 in certain ways. It has some of the Pro's features, but the trade-offs are so big. I don't think there's going to be that many people who are willing to accept those trade-offs.

1:02:22I mostly agree with you, but to argue for the sake of arguing, I think anyone who treats their phone as a fashion item now, to be fair, I don't really know anyone like that, but I presume they exist. This is what you were saying earlier. I think that there are presumably people who will say who will see this and say, oh, my God, this is incredible, even though it has not a stellar camera. And even though the battery life may be trash, you know, I must have it because it just looks so cool. I mean, keep in mind, the preorders are from people like us. And we have to wait until this gets in stores where regular people can see it.

1:02:54regular people don't even know the new five phones are out you know what i mean well but even then like i think i like you're right casey i think that is that is certainly like a strong motivator but they released this phone in the same year they made the pros look really bold and different too and so i think what most people want is the orange phone i think a lot of people are going to find the pro colors ugly and even and not be able to hide that giant plateau in the case like for example i think my daughter would love the air if it wasn't so big she's not a big phone person she's annoyed at the size of her 12 she's going to be annoyed at the size of her 17 and this is even bigger but i because i remember i was saying like if she doesn't like ones with lots of cameras in the back hey one camera on the back i think she might be turned off by the plateau or whatever but i'll actually i'll ask her about it because i i think the fashion angle on this is basically like i bet you'll see like fashion influencers having this phone because it's like a status symbol or whatever but i i can't possibly predict the sales i thought the plus phones would do i didn't think they'd do great but i thought they'd do better than they did because i mean we don't know obviously only apple knows how they actually did but all the doom and gloom i've heard about the plus phones it's like they just could not get rid of these things so will this do worse than the pluses or better i i can't i can't tell right now i wonder too like you know with the plus because i also like you i thought the plus was going to sell very well i've said the same thing about the 15-inch macbook air i wonder if that's i've never i've never seen one of those in real life either yeah like outside of an apple store so i i don't i wonder if those it's like i said last time i think apple is too good at upselling yeah like they they get you in the door with one of these things and they're just like well don't you want the macbook pro you're like okay fine it used to be that you if you wanted the biggest screen you had to get the high-end line of product and over the last few years they introduced the 15-inch macbook air the 13-inch ipad air and the iphone plus and it seems like none of those are really setting the world on fire even though at the time each one of those when it was introduced i said i think on this show this is going to sell tons of these things.

1:04:51And they probably thought the same thing. And maybe they had research showing they would. But I think, John, I think you're right. Most people who want the cheapest thing are okay with the smallest thing or even are seeking out the smallest thing. And then people who are willing to be upsold for a bigger screen are probably also much of the time willing to be upsold to better features also. And so we're just not seeing this market materialize of like, it's the same thing as the base model, but bigger screen. Like that market seems to not exist that much. Whereas that's what I think what they're trying to do with the iPhone Air now is say, OK, it isn't just the base model, but a bigger screen, or it isn't just the base model, but thinner.

1:05:31It is between the pro and the base model in capabilities as well, which I think is very smart. If they're going to have something in here, make it that smart. And the fact that they went a different direction with the industrial designer, it isn't just the base model with a few bonuses. No, it's this cool, new, unique thing that if you want this unique industrial design of the super slim, most of the way, phone, you have to get this model. There is no other choice if this is what you want. So they're making it unique. They're drawing in unique buyers that will seek that out. That's great. I think this is a much more promising strategy overall of make a mid-tier spec product with the unique design to fill that slot.

1:06:15That's a great strategy, but I think they made a few too many trade-offs with this implementation of this product, and I don't think it's going to sell well because of those trade-offs. But I think the concept of having something in a slot like that is sound. This just might not be that thing. You can wave a magic wand and leave all the specs and the price and everything about the iPhone Air the same, but shave off the camera plateau and make it completely flush. do you think that changes the attractiveness of this phone obviously that's not possible but like just imagine because i wonder how much of the because like it's i think it's going to sell based on its appearance and i really do for me personally i think that camera plateau makes the whole phone ugly and i wonder how many people are going to have a similar idea it's getting back to what you said marco it's like oh it's thin but not that thin at that part it looks ungainly and awkward i understand that's what you got to do right now with the tech that's available you can't make a phone with these capabilities that's flat on the back but boy if it was i mean they'll probably do it eventually if we keep doing the show long enough eventually technology will exist to make a compromised thin phone that doesn't have a camera plateau uh but that year is not now i think it would it would do a lot better if the air was the one with the bold cool new colors and the pro still had its boring colors that it always had that i think maybe like if they if they flip that around if this was both the new thin design and also had the cool colors um then I think it would be very, very tempting to a lot more people.

1:07:43But now it's like, oh, you made these awesome colors in the model that has the best cameras and the best battery life? Yeah, I'm going to take that one. Awesome color. To go back a step, if you'll permit me a quick story, we were doing all this home renovation, which is mostly done at this point. And as part of that, we were redoing the downstairs floors, as we talked about a few weeks ago. And that meant taking the oven and stove out from the little nook that it's in and moving it out of the way so floors could be put in. And during that process, we discovered, the people doing it, the contractors discovered a piece of technology that I was not aware that I was missing that I guess was way under the stove.

1:08:32I have no idea, or the oven. I have no idea how it got back there. I don't recall having lost it, but as we've particularly John established many times, my memory is trash. Anyway, what I found was my original four gigabyte iPod Nano. Whoa! And I can tell you this thing still boots. Like, the battery is garbage, but I plugged it in. I have one dock connector cable left, and I plugged it in. It started right up. It still has a bunch of music on it, which is questionable, even by my standards. But I bring all this up because I'm holding it in my hand right now. and this thing for today feels impossibly small and thin and with this was something like 2004 2005 it doesn't really matter i don't care which model is it the four gigabyte gigabyte ipod nano original one i think it was the very first ipod nano yeah the the super the ssd is it scratched to hell and is it oh god yes the back is ruined with scratch it's the first one um this thing in And 2025 feels almost astonishingly thin and light and small.

1:09:35I'm sure if we were to do this again with 2025 tech, it would in reality be so much thinner, so much smaller, etc. But it still feels modern in that regard. In 2004, this was impossible. This could not exist with 2004's tech, or again, whatever year it may have been. I saw this. I don't remember how I saw this. maybe it was a TV ad, maybe it was something else, because I didn't give a crap about Apple in 2004. I saw this and I said, I must have it. I must have this, because it was so impossibly thin. It was so impossibly small. And at the time, I still had a use for an MP3 player. I adored this device, and this was my very first Apple product.

1:10:18I cannot speak highly enough about how much I wanted this for the look and feel of it alone. I agree with everything you two said, And I think anyone who treats their phone as much more than a toy is going to choose a different phone. But there are people for whom the Air is just impossibly cool and I must have it. And that's not me. I mean, as we spoke about, I ordered a 17 Pro and I'm really looking forward to it. They claim it's going to fix a lot of the problems I have with the 16 Pro. but I can absolutely fathom a situation where I look at the air and say, I don't care that it's not perfect.

1:10:56Now, admittedly, the iPod Nano was fairly perfect in almost every way except the smaller capacity. I don't care that it's not perfect. I must have it. And that's exactly how I felt about this literally 20 years ago. There is a lot of value to that. And that's why I still have not ruled out the idea that maybe I will get one to replace all my test devices because their values will sum up to about its price, actually. So I could do that if I want to. And now that I'm requiring iOS 18, I need a lot fewer test devices. So interestingly enough, over the last couple of days, I've been doing a lot of work on my initial Overcast release for 26, had a few layout problems on when you had a very small screen and a very big font.

1:11:38And a lot of those people are iPhone mini users. So I took out and charged my trusty iPhone 13 mini test device. and I've been doing a lot of testing on the iPhone 13 mini over the last couple of days. And this thing, I have it in my hand right now. It feels incredible in the hand. Like I miss, you know, I never used 13 mini, but I did use the 12 mini for that year. I love this form factor in so many ways. It feels so good because the mini is about the same weight as the iPhone air. Like it feels really good in the hand. and it's light. It feels like nothing. And with the Mini, it has two cameras.

1:12:19It has the regular speaker on the bottom and top. It really has a lot fewer trade-offs than the Air. And I kind of think it is possible for them to make a smaller, lighter, probably thinner phone than the main ones making some of these trade-offs. But when you look at the Mini, the Mini didn't make nearly that many trade-offs, the Air makes a lot more of them. And I think there are a lot bigger trade-offs that are bigger to more people. So I don't think it's a category that can't be filled or that, quote, nobody wants. But I think if the Air is a sales bomb, people might assume nobody wants their phones to be thin and light.

1:13:02But that is probably not in itself, in isolation, true. I think they just went really extreme with this to make a statement. and that does make it, you know, more noticeable. It makes it more of a bombshell. But like Samsung released their super thin phone recently, which admittedly is not as thin as this and doesn't look as cool as this. But it's still like Samsung released their, I think it's the Galaxy Edge. People talked about it for like 30 minutes and it was gone. No one cares. No one bought it. You don't hear about it at all. I think that might happen with the iPhone Air. Like it'll last a little longer because they did a better job of it and it's Apple, not Samsung.

1:13:36But I think they just took too many trade-offs, and I don't think it's going to land well. Yeah, we'll see. I'm really excited to have one of these in hand. I have it on pretty good authority that we will be able to check these out during the podcast-a-thon, again, on Friday on YouTube. And so I am really curious to see what I think of it in hand. I can't imagine wanting this over the iPhone 17 Pro because the cameras are that important to me. not even you know additionally the thermals battery life etc but there's there is a lot to be said that's positive about the air even though i again i've said it a couple times i don't particularly disagree with anything you two have said but i can i can fathom away where one would want it coming back around to max tech from like three hours ago let's talk about no i was right there with you um the gap between the dynamic island and the top of the screen is larger on the air than it is on any other dynamic island phone which is very very interesting and i don't recall if it was max or maybe this was john uh theorizing that this might be due to the front cameras need to be inside the camera bump so maybe that's why they had to move it down a bit it has another compromise in the design because i'm pretty sure yeah that they do need to like like the front facing camera needs you know it's the front facing camera is thick it needs to be somewhere and where does it go it's going to go into the bump but if you look at the back of the iPhone Air, the camera bump is it's it's a concentricity.

1:15:03The camera bump is moved down like there's a margin around it because it would look weird if the camera bump was slammed up against the top of the phone. But if it was slammed up against the top of the phone, the dynamic island could be in the same place it is on all the other phones, but they didn't want to do that. So I feel like the dynamic island position and how much it interferes with the stuff on your screen is ever so slightly by a millimeter or two compromised by the need for the back of the phone to look the way it does. Moving along, the USB-C port, this is what I was alluding to earlier, the USB-C port is not vertically centered.

1:15:34This is one of those things like the FedEx logo that I really wish I never saw because now I cannot unsee it. A lot of thin Android phones have this same problem because the problem is the thickness of the OLED screens. Like you can only make the OLED screen so thin and if your total thickness is, you know, the USB-C port isn't changing thickness. It is what it is. And the screen thickness is as thin as we could possibly make it. and you want the overall thickness to be 5.6 millimeters, guess what? Port can't be in the middle. And when I saw the Android phones, I was like, oh, that's terrible.

1:16:00Do you think Apple would ever do something like that? Apparently, they have no choice with current technology. Haven't they done this once before? Wasn't there another iPhone where the port was not centered? I don't remember. Was there one with asymmetrical holes on the bottom, maybe for the speaker things? Or maybe, I think I know what you're talking about. There might have been one of them where the screw holes weren't aligned with the port or something like that. But anyway, it's a little bit more obvious here because the phone itself is so thin. In Apple's photography, they have so many like reflections of whatever, like the 3D renders with like an environment map or something or if it's a real phone.

1:16:34But anyway, it's hard to see. But in person, it should be pretty obvious. All right. There is no cinematic mode for video on the air, which is – isn't that the thing where you can adjust the focal point after the fact? I was trying to look up to refresh my memory about how it works. Yeah, that's what it is. I'm like, but why would they not have that on the air? I found this tech crunch article from 2021 about how Apple built the iPhone 13 cinematic mode that had some info in there. But yeah, it's not on the air. And this apparently includes the front camera. Apparently you can do cinematic video on the front camera on the other phones, but not on the air, even though the front camera on the air is the same as on all the other phones.

1:17:15So I'm not quite sure why. I I think it's not on the back because I think it might use LIDAR. And for this next item here, the Air does not have a LIDAR scanner on the back of it. I know people are all broken up about that. But I'm not sure how it gets the depth information to let you change the focal point. But it would make sense to me that a single camera, no LIDAR phone might not be able to do cinematic video with the back camera. But learning that you can do cinematic video from the front camera and that the Air doesn't have that, even though it has the same camera, another weird compromise.

1:17:45And I guess that's it, right? Oh, no, the new selfie camera also has a 24 megapixel sensor in all the phones, right? Not just the air question mark question mark. Does it have a 24? This was from Max Tech. I don't know where this information came from. The idea is that they as they showed it's a square sensor and they crop it to be either a landscape slice out of the square sensor or a portrait slice out of the square sensor. And the idea is that the sensor itself, if you were to take the full square, like all the pixels that that's 24 megapixels allowing any of the sensor crops to be 18 megapixels that makes sense to me but i don't have confirmation for it so that's that's a question mark but what this makes me think if it's true is i would love to see a full 24 megapixel square picture from that front camera yeah that'd be great and my guess is that you won't get that from the built-in camera app but that may be like apps that access the raw camera hardware um like you know like halide and stuff i mean maybe they'll be able to do it if the sensor really is 24 megapixels Again, I don't have this confirmed.

1:18:41That's why I put a question mark on it. All right. The iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 non-pro are limited to USB 2 speeds. Reading from MacRumors, the new iPhone 17 limited to USB 2 transfer speeds. USB 3 continues to be a pro-only feature. USB 2 supports transfer speeds up to 480 megabits per second. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max support transfer speeds up to 10 gigabits per second, which is about 20 times faster. i want to point out that usb 2.0 was introduced in april of the year 2000 incredible in the year 25 year old data speed now it just you might as well just think of that as a charging port and not a data port and many people are super angry about this i'm not particularly angry about it because i think most people do treat it as a charging point but at a certain point it starts to become embarrassing and i think we have passed that point 25 years after the advent of usb 2.0 the thousand dollar you know if it configured with more storage iphone 17 should not transfer data at usb 2.0 speeds through a wired connection i do wonder like you know so one of the main differences between usb 2 and 3 is that usb 3 adds more pins like that's one of the ways they're able to get more data transfer is they add more pins to the connector and that's also why like usb 3 cables are typically a little bit thicker and less flexible than usb 2 cables and again that's also why like charging cables tend to usually only support usb 2 speeds and that's because they have fewer wires in them which makes them cheaper and longer and more flexible more easily which is usually when people are charging their stuff that's all they care about anyway is like give me yeah give me a nice long flexible cable and make it cheap um but usb 3 more pins, more wires in the cable so it's more complicated and more costly.

1:20:34I wonder what it is about adding that to the phone. Is it a matter of the pins in the port? Is that too expensive or is it about the bandwidth on the chip for the USB 3 controller? Is that a bigger deal? I'd be shocked if it's the controller. I think the A19 probably has the controller. If it doesn't have the controller, shame on Apple because like again most people use it for charging but like at a certain point the pro features need to trickle down and it doesn't need to be like oh it needs to be thunderbolt 5 speeds or whatever there's a wide gap between usb 2.0 and thunderbolt 5 find somewhere in the middle that you can do economically this you know we'll check in next year like i'm not really broken up about this but it is kind of ridiculous and the reasoning for it it just seems like one of those things that apple doesn't it's kind of like why didn't the non-pro phones have promotion for so long even though like every phone in the android world has been over 60 hertz for ages sometimes just takes up a long time and anyway i'm i think they're overdoing this one i wonder too like i mean it's i don't think anybody would care about me on this one but like okay if usb3 having all these extra wires makes it so much less adopted in so many ways still all this time later what if we had like a usb 2.5 standard that oh gosh that's what we need more usb standards right but like what if it only used the same number of wires as usb 2 but just you know clocked the data lines faster or something like i don't i don't know enough about the physical side of it but like i don't think the standards are going to reach back to like we need to find a way to jam more data over charging cables i'm not sure that's an area of interest for them but like you know i meant like you can imagine like you know usb 2 and usb 3 it's it's what about 20 times difference in in speed what What if you could get a USB 2.5 that was like five or ten times faster and used all the old cables and used the thin, flexible, cheap ones?

1:22:26That actually might be pretty compelling for a lot of use cases. No one's going to do it, but I think it could be cool. All right. Let's talk about iPhone screens. It seems that every new iPhone screen has the exact same specifications other than size and resolution. Difficult to tell from the presentation because they emphasize certain features on certain things. But if you go to Apple's very handy Apple dot com slash iPhone slash compare page and bring up the pro or pro max, the air and the plane 17 and go down the screen specs, everything except the resolution is the same contrast ratio, true tone.

1:22:59The how many that's a max brightness, the peak brightness, the like it's all the minimum brightness there. All the specs are exactly the same, which is pretty rare. So let's celebrate that they all have really good screens now. Yeah, this is great. it's like there's now like a new minimum apple screen well i guess the e still won't have it probably but like all of the mainline iphones now have they all have promotion they all are always on you know it's been a while now they're all oled like you know now they they've just all are the good screen that's a great place to be and one of them is not like oh this one gets better peak brightness or it's better outdoors they just all have the same specs right although i'm guessing the overall heat dissipation performance of the Pro line.

1:23:41For how long? Yeah. If you actually want your screen to stay bright for more than a few seconds outside, you're probably going to want the Pro. All right. And the iPhone 17 models include a toggle to disable screen flickering due to PWM. Reading from Mac Rumors, the iPhone 17 models include an accessibility setting to disable pulse width modulation, or PWM, according to information found in the iOS 26 release candidate. There will be a toggle located in the display and text size section of the accessibility settings on the iPhone 17 labeled display pulse smoothing. Users will be able to turn PWM on or turn it off.

1:24:14Here's a description of the setting. Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions. We've confirmed that the PWM toggle is available on the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max. It is also likely available on the iPhone Air. reading from a different page at nine to five mac uh pulse width modulation is a tactic that displays used to produce lower brightness levels the screen rapidly switches the pixels on and off in a way that most users can't discern for some people however pwm might result in a screen flickering effect that can be that can cause eye strain and even severe headaches you can see the pwm sensitive subreddit which has 16 000 weekly visitors i got a lot of questions about this when i got my oled ipad because they're like how can you watch anything on that because it's the the the OLED iPad uses, you know, the whatever PWM, like basically just turning the screen on and off real fast instead of like putting the pixels on a lower brightness.

1:25:12They're like, you know, they're at a fixed brightness, but they just go on off, on off really, really fast. And they're like, Oh, I can't stand that. It looks weird to me. It flickers. It gives me headaches. It says this does that witness the, uh, the subreddit with all these people talking about it. Uh, my personal experience has been that I can't see the flickering and it doesn't bother me, but it, I'm fully willing to believe that other people can see it and it does bother them especially young people because one of the things good things about getting older is here as your sense is dull fewer things are annoying although young people themselves become annoying as you get older but this but i'm actually kind of surprised that apple rolled out this feature because even though some people are clearly sensitive to this it seemed like well apple's just going to ignore them forever but no they provided an option for it which is great um and i'm not i don't know what the the downsides of it maybe like the there's an energy trade-off i think it's like it's it's uh you can use lower power if you use pwm than if you don't and again maybe it like really dim brightnesses it won't look quite right uh but kudos to apple for adding this option if you're one of those people who can't stand that oled flickering why doesn't everybody else see it try out this option accessibility i guess i i guess we all have ios 26 on our oh i do anyway and i assume you do the release version so i should check if that option is actually there because when i put this in the notes it was from the rc but uh no but it says it's only on the 17 line of hardware oh that's right it's not yeah i can't use it okay all right well we'll find out when you guys get your new phones yeah this is interesting too like you know if if you if you can see pwm flickers i feel sorry for you because so many of the things in the modern world use pwm to control brightness like that's that's what they complained about on the subreddit i'm sure you know not only you know device screens but also any dimmable led bulb like almost all not all of them but most dimmable leds use pwm to achieve their dimming i didn't know that i can see that when when you get cruddy quality ones i can see it and it annoys me yeah it's and you know and if you have any kind of cheap uh led lighting that is you know especially stuff like christmas lights or like party lights um or a lot of car aftermarket headlights um if they are super cheap they will use half wave rectification of the ac supply to get dc power for the light and what that means they'll just shove it through a diode which means it flickers I believe that makes it flicker 30 times a second instead of 60.

1:27:27Which is very visible. Yeah, and that's why, like, especially you might not see it in the center of your vision, but you might notice if it's like at the periphery of your vision, you might notice a bit of a flickering of cheap LED party and Christmas lights. Or it seems like it's flickering only when you move your head or something. You can start to see a little bit of it there. And if you get good LED Christmas lights, they'll be full wave rectified at least. Or they'll just do some kind of other DC conversion. I don't know. I don't know the details of how those work. But you can spend a few extra cents of components and you can get both of the AC waves peaking the signal or whatever.

1:28:01And you can double the refresh rate to 60 hertz or you can have some fancier system that actually just lowers the voltage or something. But so much of the world now is this. Now, I wonder my theory on what Apple's option here says disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions. my theory maybe what what they mean by that is like if the display can say all right you have you know rgb values zero through 255 for each and it's probably a higher bit rate panel than that but we'll just say that for now um for each pixel you have these you know zero zero to 255 values for the color channels maybe the way they're achieving this is just compressing those down to the lower range and so so the display still thinks it is performing at its full voltage and brightness and everything but it's just being fed darker pixel values by the os because the way oleds work they won't use more power that way if you just compress those values down eventually you'll get compressed low enough that like you're not really getting a lot of distinction between the colors maybe or maybe you'll see banding um like ingredients because you don't have enough like pixel precision you know in those ranges maybe that would be how performance is uh you affected.

1:29:16But I don't know. I think this is a great option to have. We'll see what the trade-offs are, but this is very good for people who need it. All right. Let's talk Apple Watch. The Apple Watch Ultra Satellite Data Features Require a Cell Plan, which we talked about last episode. And Jason was in the chat and had the same theory that a friend of the show, Greg Pierce, wrote in about, which is the most likely reason to require a cell plan for satellite features is that they don't want those features used any more than absolutely required. A device without a cell plan might be trying to leverage that network as a primary means for texting, et cetera.

1:29:50Yeah, makes sense. And also there are some cell plans that come with satellite stuff. Not that this is relevant to the iPhone, but I was surprised to learn that you can buy a cell plan that you pay a little bit extra and you get satellite service with it as well. But yeah, they just want to use it as fallback. There's not enough satellite bandwidth or availability for everybody to be using it if they don't want to pay for cellular. Yeah. there is a post on reddit which is very interesting that seems to think that the 24 hour battery claim up from 18 is not really any different so reading from reddit the extra six hours that apple claims is just apple finally including sleep tracking in the test but sleep tracking barely sips power and previous apple watches have already been able to easily surpass their 18 hour claims and go through a night of sleep tracking on top in the low power mode test the difference is just two hours with 38 hours versus 36 a measly five percent difference but apple also lowered the active usage assumptions for the new model fewer checks fewer notifications less app time not really an upgrade just a shift in methodology i bet this is right and that makes it that makes me feel kind of gross yeah like it this i i wrote down like there's the three things i wanted to complain about with apple's marketing of these i mentioned earlier the the thinness of iphones and then having these massive camera plateaus um this is the second one it does like it seems like this is probably accurate like i can't find anything that refutes it it seems like this is probably right that like when i said last time like the big difference with the series 11 is this extra six hours of battery life from 18 to 24 hours that sounds like a big difference that's how apple sold it um but it does seem like they just changed the way they're testing it to include six hours of sleep.

1:31:29It looks like actually there is not a significant difference in battery life from the series 10 and the series 11. Maybe there's a small one, but there's not, it isn't that big the way that made it seem. Uh, and that really the primary or only difference between the series 10 and 11 is changing the cell radio to be 5g capable. I can't see anything else that actually was changed in the series 11. Yeah. When they tear these things down, we'll have to see if the capacity of the battery changed at all because if the battery is a little bit bigger that could account for a real difference even if all the other components are the same because we know the soc is the same we can assume maybe the screen is the same the 5g radio maybe that's a little bit more efficient but like yeah they have a regular test and a low power test and in the low power test there was this five percent difference but then if you look at the methodology it's like that they they have in the test like you know what what do we do in our test and it's like well every x minutes we do y activity this number of times and they reduce the number of things they do during the test so yeah they're i mean i it's not like you can never change the methodology methodology your test should change over time but when they do change the methodology it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison and yeah the sleep tracking thing by tacking those hours and it seems kind of uh misleading so i mean the thing about this is they'll it's probably not going to be a lot of outcry because anyone who gets a new watch replacing an old watch the battery iron the old watch was probably cruddy and so wow this new watch has such an amazing battery life yeah it's just got a new battery if you had bought a new version of your old watch it would probably have the similar effect all right then friend of the show dear friend of the show david smith writes something i found kind of surprising about the ultra 3 is that the quoted battery life for outdoor workouts and low power and reduced heart rate readings is identical to the ultra 2 at 35 hours similarly in normal use with low power mode enabled they both get the same 72 hours you get a few more hours in other types but the most demanding situations where you're trying to maximize the battery it isn't better uh where we do get improvements they are around 17 and there's a link to the apple watch battery uh page which you can see in the show notes so the ultra 3 is a little bit bigger than the ultra 2 at least the screen is a little bit bigger i don't know if the watch body is any bigger but again if it's the if if the screen is similar in power consumption and the soc is the same and the battery is the same size it's not shocking that it might get basically the same battery life as the predecessor yeah it seems like you know the more we learn about these new Apple Watch models, the more it seems like, oh, there's a lot less different about the battery life than the presentation made it seem.

1:33:55And there's other, you know, like the Ultra has the satellite connectivity. That's great. Like that's a nice upgrade for the Ultra. And it does have a different screen than its predecessor. Yes. Yeah. And so like those, and the Series 11 does also have the better IonX glass on the front, on the aluminum models. So that's a small upgrade. Like it's stronger glass. okay strong glass on the aluminums and 5g on the cellulars okay like that's something but that's not much um i heard i forget forgive me podcast world out there i forget where i heard it i think it might have been the verge cast last week somebody was saying on a podcast that like they should just move the apple watch to a two or three year cycle the way they do airpods and you can even cycle it have like you know like the the se one year have the series the next year have the ultra the next year and then you know cycle them i think that was dithering here then oh it was okay yeah thank you yeah and i think i think that makes a lot of sense because they're basically kind of doing that anyway like the apple watch hardly changes at all for three-year intervals they are already using the same soc for three years now for a couple of couple of spans now say the soc lasts three years most of the core features last three years the screen generally it comes close or you know maybe is slightly offset but basically lasts three years like i think they're they just don't have that much to show each year for the watch and maybe it would be better to make a bigger splash every two or three years with like putting all these updates together and having okay every two or three years there's the new soc and a bigger brighter screen and you know some other health capability if you lump those all together that I think that would actually be better than having these watch updates every year that barely touch anything and seem like they're not really doing anything.

1:35:41Because over time, the Apple Watch does get significantly better. But increasingly, the updates seem like nothing. Each individual update seems like almost nothing. That would make it more interesting for us to talk about. but I feel like from a sales and consumer perspective, it's better just to bump the number by one each year, even if you change literally nothing about them, because that makes people think that I'm going to get the latest and greatest phone and not the one with the same number as I saw two years ago. So yeah, definitely. I mean, when Dithering mentioned it, like it totally, from our perspective, commenting on Apple, that would be way better.

1:36:15But I don't know. I don't know if that's better for selling more watches. Well, but that's how they do AirPods. And it works great. AirPods are a great business, possibly even bigger than the Apple Watch. I mean, does it work great? Maybe they'll start bumping the number of AirPods every single year to get people. Oh, it's just the AirPod 2s again. Like they had the AirPod 2 and then the AirPod 2 revision or whatever. Right, the 2C. I wonder if they regret that. I wonder if they think we should have called that one the AirPod 3 and then called this one the 4. But, you know, I don't know. Like this, presumably they know what sells better.

1:36:44But, yeah, from a commentary perspective, it would be much better to save up more of these changes. Let's talk AirPods since you just brought it up. the AirPods and ear shapes. There's a post from Tyrael who writes, a quick note from your resident auditory neuroscientist. Human ear canals wander in every which direction. First time I used an otoscope to look at an eardrum, I was amazed at how different the human ear canal directions and shapes were, even within a single patient. The typical clinical equipment will have something between 10 and 16 different disposable tip shapes and sizes. So more tips for AirPods Pro is a good idea, in my opinion.

1:37:20Ears are weird. Good talk. I mean, you're not wrong, but good talk. All right. And the AirPods Pro 3 2X noise cancellation reduction, whatever you want to call it. Stephen Klink writes, Apple's AirPod product page in footnote one lists the tests that they are using to determine the 2X better noise canceling on the AirPods Pro 3. IEC 60268-24 is an international test standard for headphones and earphones. For ANC, the test measures how much sound from the outside environment gets reduced once the headphones electronics are turned on in decibels. So while the logarithmic nature of decibels means human perception doesn't have an intuitive understanding of the 2x better reduction, it at least isn't a Bezos stat.

1:38:00All right, the new AirPods Pro case is not actually smaller. In fact, according to Mac rumors, it is actually bigger, which I did not expect. Yeah, a little bit taller and a little bit wider. I guess they put more battery in there. It's kind of disappointing that it didn't get smaller because it's just so huge, but I guess they're just weirdly shaped, especially with the tips and everything it's there they take up a lot of space and they're awkward and i guess they have bigger bad i would assume they have bigger batteries than the um the four because isn't the battery in the pro isn't it like a coin battery inside the fat part or maybe it's like that in the fours as well now i don't know oh i honestly don't know um but anyway it's a big honking case and it is not getting smaller apparently yeah that's too bad like it does for whatever it's worth like the the reviews so far of the airpods pro 3 everybody loves them oh my god they sound like they're amazing i can't wait to get mine same i'm so excited they did this so that i apple should have done this but probably didn't you know the ear shape things or whatever these are the first ones that actually stay in marquez brownley's ears yes that's a smart idea to like could we just can we make sure they stay in his ears this time because that's the thing about years are weird right so uh every year like some people like oh it doesn't doesn't feel good in my ear doesn't stay in my ear and they change them and maybe for some people the old ones were good and the new ones are bad or vice versa so you never know what you're going to get but uh marquez has been on a streak of just not having them stay in his ears when he like jumps up and down these are the first ones that stay in that's not the only reason he likes them he raves about all the other features of them as well and we'll talk about them when you two get yours as well but that sure doesn't hurt that they stay in your ear right well i mean that's number one it doesn't like this is why i was so frustrated when the original AirPods just didn't fit in my ears.

1:39:43Like, number one with headphones is like, can you wear them? And if you can't wear them, if they either don't stay in your ears or they hurt or they're not comfortable or whatever, if they don't fit you, it doesn't matter how good they are in other ways. Like, you can't use them. And so, like, that is number one. Yeah, that makes sense. They would want to improve that because that will improve or that will increase how many customers they can get for this product. That's great. yeah the reviews are impressed by that 2x better noise cancellation which apparently is not a bs stat but a real standard test that does measure how much sound from outside gets in and it apparently is 2x better so there you go i should also note with regard to the airpods pro case allegedly according to mac rumors it is a touch lighter which is interesting all right the new generation of ultra wideband technology or so they said it is apparently now called the john here because i'm sorry the u2 chip and you can see that on the airpods compare page which we'll put a link to in the show notes yeah i think i spent at least a year calling this next generation ultra wideband chip or second generation ultra wideband chip but i guess the lawyer has got the clearances and now it is just the u2 following on the u1 chip which was its predecessor and then live translation it apparently runs on the iphone not on the airpods which is what you would expect this is according to mkbhd you have to download each language but it does work offline which is good the point is whether we always know it's going to run the iphone this is like it runs on device so like when when the phone is doing translation is the phone doing the translation using like local models on the phone or is it sending out network requests now that's what he said in the video he basically said you have to download each language and it works offline those are both true but i still had a question was like okay you download the languages and it works offline but does it always use local models on your phone or if you have a network connection does it go out to the server so i was trying to figure out the answer to this question before the show uh on because i have ios 26 on my phone now uh and if i if you go to your airpods you will see a thing that says translation and the parentheses beta and that has a languages sub item when you go into the languages sub item you'll see the list of languages and then there's some gray on gray text at the bottom that says download languages to translate when offline you can choose to always translate offline in settings and settings is a link you click the settings link and it takes you to the settings for the translate app like the just the plain old translate apple translate app and in the translate app settings there is a setting called on device mode which is off by default and the text under that one says always translate offline using downloaded languages Offline translation may not be as accurate as online translation.

1:42:20Siri and Safari will always process translations online. So I can't figure out if this means that if you don't have on-device mode turned on, that will it always go to the server? I mean, clearly they're saying that the server-side translation is better than on-device, which makes sense. You know, there's more computing power, blah, blah, blah, on the server. So I haven't tested this yet. I'm going to try it out. Actually, I don't know. Can I try it out? Yeah, I can. AirPods 4 support it. So I just got someone to speak a foreign language to me and I'll try it out maybe for the next show. But anyway, it does have a mode where it works offline, but it seems to me based on the sequence of wandering through settings that you will get better quality if you have a network connection.

1:42:58That I did not know. And then finally, AirPods live translation is blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts. Reading from Mac rumors, Apple says on its feature availability webpage that Apple intelligence live translation with AirPods won't be available. if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple account region is in the EU. Apple doesn't give a reason for the restriction, but legal and regulatory pressures seem the most plausible culprits. In particular, the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act and the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, both impose strict requirements for how speech and translation services are offered.

1:43:29Regulators may want to study how live translation works and how that impacts privacy, consent, data flows, and user rights. Apple will also want to ensure its system fully complies with these rules before enabling the feature across EU accounts. yeah so that that's the theory that there's actually existing er regulations on translation it's not a dma thing it's not a hey we can't put this in the eu because otherwise we'd have to let every third party app be like but because apple didn't say we don't actually know the answer but bummer for people in the eu that they can't use this although my understanding is that everyone in the eu speaks 20 languages anyway and they won't need this app all right that's an all follow up episode thank you as per tradition thank you to our sponsors who sponsored this amazing amount to follow up.

1:44:08That would be Squarespace and Anthropic for Claude. And thank you to our listeners who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about this cool new product announcement that came out called Alter Ego and Thought to Text Translation. This is a device that reads your thoughts and transforms them into text, allegedly. We're going to talk about that in Overtime. Thank you for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin.

1:44:48Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.com. 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, N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast, so long. John, you have something in the show notes that says John's Red Dot. and i'm guessing this has to do with your long struggle with the new apple care thing no because you stopped that you said you were done with that it's different so all right what's going on i think we've all had this issue at one point or another it's when you get a red badge on the settings app on one of your apple devices we've all been there and sometimes that badge is legitimate hey there's a new os update oh you need to sign back into your apple id for some stupid reason that you're never going to be able to figure out yep um but sometimes what happens is you get a red dot on your settings app icon and you go into settings and there's nothing there and the received wisdom from people who've been through this many times over is like well sometimes you got to look for it sometimes you don't realize that you might have to go into your apple id and then you'll see something there that's something you have to do maybe you have to go into the apple wallet settings maybe there's something in there maybe there's some marketing thing where they wanted to watch the F1 movie and somewhere buried in settings, even though there's not going to be a red badge in settings, you just have to show a screen somewhere in settings and that will satisfy settings and it'll make the badge go away.

1:46:55But if you're a programmer, what you're thinking is they just got their state unsynchronized and now this is never going to go away because something that was supposed to be incremented and decremented just got incremented and then something crashed or never decremented and it's never going to go away because it's just like it's like Delta rot, right? and there's nothing you can do to fix it and i've been through this many times i'm sure you too have had the red dot many times as well but i had recently had my worst bout of red dot syndrome on apple devices that lasted like the last two weeks it started i think on my phone and i got the red dot and i even posted a mask and i was like does anyone have any ideas here's all the things i tried i tried apple id i tried the wallet i tried settings i tried accessibility i tried you know i tried sub items in my apple idea like i tried to list all the things i tried does anyone have any new place where they can go to try to get rid of the badge or new thing that they can do uh i didn't get any good responses for that but the thing is it started to spread so then i started to see it on my mac like what the hell so i go into mac settings and again oh and software update of course software update you always check first no software updates no anything and so i'm trying to get rid of my mac then it spreads to my ipad like it's the red dot is slowly appearing a number one inside a red badge on the settings app icon on my mac on my ipad and on my iphone i was like well i mean worst case scenario when i do the os 26 updates it'll probably fix it but i didn't i was kind of at my wits end because normally when this comes out i eventually find what screen i have to display to make it go away and this time i could not do it so i wanted to put this segment here first of all just to let people know this is a thing that happens on apple devices sometimes not just settings but sometimes an app will get a badge and there's no way to make it go away and you don't know why it's there i get asked this question by family members why is there a badge on this app i got sometimes i can tell them the answers because you have a software update but sometimes i have to tell them after extensive uh exploration that's a bug no there's nothing you can do about it and they are more bothered by this than i would imagine people would think they would be because it's like of all the things that can bother you was like but i don't want that red badge to be there and you're like okay well but i just turn off badges can i just turn off badges i go to the notification setting and say i just don't want to see any badges i'm just turn off badges entirely well guess which app you can't turn off badges on settings cool you cannot turn off badges and notifications at least as of ios 18 i didn't check 26 so i this is this is a psa to say this is a thing that happens again as a programmer i can imagine a million scenarios that would cause this to exist and as a user there is sometimes literally nothing you can do about it to fix it now the bright side of the story is even before i started out doing the 26 os updates first the badge went away on my mac why did it go away no idea i didn't reboot i didn't install a software update i didn't discover a screen and settings to make it go away i just came back to my mac one day and the badge was gone and then it went away on ios before i did the os update i was like huh the badge that has been there for a week and a half it's gone now i have no idea why it's still there on my ipad as we record the show but i'm hoping if i just wait it out it will go away uh but yeah red dot syndrome i feel like there should be a dedicated team at apple to sort of uh spread the discipline throughout the organization to say if you badge your app icon there should be some kind of sanity check on app launch like if something force quits the app and launches it again to say hey let me just sanity check do i think there should be any badges on this which means they would probably have to use a different system for badging other than just like writing something to their uh you know user defaults or whatever but yeah this is a thing and it usually goes away quickly but sometimes it's really bad so watch out be careful out there red dot syndrome could come for you have you ever had one that you couldn't go away and do either two of you have a secret location that you go to to clear the badge no no this doesn't happen to me very often and usually it just kind of sorts itself after a while or maybe a reboot at worst all right yeah that's the thing are you able to just say i don't worry about it i'll just ignore it like some people i'm not able to ignore obviously but it's casey sounds like you'd be like oh there's a badge i can't make you go away i'm sure it'll go away eventually you just don't think about it anymore Well, I always have badges on my phone.

1:51:20On settings? No, but like, okay, but you know, just for instance, like on my home screen right now, the phone app has a 19 badge. Instagram has one and Messages has five. All right, well. If I go to the next page, I got the Nest app that has six. I don't know what the heck those are. Probably spam promos from Nest or whatever. At this point, like, everything has a badge all the time. Everyone's so, you know, it's a combination of like every app and company is so incredibly desperate and thirsty for every possible amount of everything from you that they're going to spam the crap out of every possible notification and inbox and thing they have.

1:51:56So that's number one. So that's probably the nest bullshit there. Number two, I tend to not check things that frequently in certain areas, voicemails and Instagram messages, and other areas like text messages, I sometimes will use the unread status as a like, i have to get to this later kind of thing which i know is not what i'm supposed to do but everyone does it okay so anyway um that's why those stick around for a while and therefore um badges on my stuff are not particularly unusual you can just turn off the badges like on your phone app unlike the settings app you can just decide not to show badges on the phone app you can solve that problem there i just looked at my home screen and i have no badges on it so i'm i'm i do not want badges unless they're like i want them to be there to tell me like for example messages i want it to be badged when i have a message like so i do want to see it but i don't routinely leave tons of unread messages and i know what you're talking about like they added the feature a couple of os's ago to mark it as unread which is useful which i also occasionally do but that's to get my attention so i don't forget about that message but there shouldn't be a very high number there but the settings thing really annoys me and yes i did check under warranty as well i've spent i've been spending a lot of time in the warranty thing with my apple care one battle so yeah i don't know where the badge came from and i don't know why i couldn't defeat it but i'm glad that it is departing me uh even again even before i did the os update i haven't updated my ipad yet it is the last one with a badge on it so maybe you want to do the 26 update i'll let you know if the badge goes away