658: Your First Mistake Phone

34:21And like when you – if you hold an iPhone Air, which I'll get to later, if you hold an iPhone Air, you almost feel like it's probably not necessary to get anything other than this really or at least to get much thinner than this because you start to run into like actual ergonomic challenges holding a phone like that or using a phone like that. It's actually not that desirable to get thinner. that's why i was talking about folding phones because they what if what if that's just half the thickness right when you unfold it uh you know i guess you could do a thing this would be fun some android phone maker will probably try it where um you can't plug a usbc plug into it when it's unfolded only when you fold it together does the usbc like come together that would be difficult because of the way usbc is half a port on each one it has like a tongue inside the port so you couldn't really do this but someone someone could try it but like i said if you i forget what the name of this phone is but i saw one very thin phone that like one it really was you can't make this any thinner and have usbc in it because it was it was as thin as you can make it and still pick a usbc port and two of those together is still reasonable thing is but i get what you're saying like this is what i said when we were talking about the on my blog post about the thin imac there is kind of like an uncomfortable valley between barely thick enough to hold the usbc port which as you said may be weird in terms of this feels too thin then there's sort of like uh this no good area as you get thinner but then you cross a threshold and you get to the sort of credit card thickness which is not particularly ergonomic to hold perhaps but it starts to become like unbreakable because if you drop a credit card it flutters to the ground and lands softly and is not going to break when it hits the ground and that would be an advantage for the phone on the other hand who wants to hold something as skinny as a credit card in your hand it would be like you know even if you're round over the edges it'll be weird anyway well we've got a long way to go before we get there the speaker would really suck yeah we've got a long way to go before we get there i'd love for someone to get a credit card thick phone and put a pop socket on the back that'd be great we are sponsored this episode by skims skims is now making underwear for men now this is really nice because this has been a company they make they're making women's clothes for a while they're very well regarded uh and they got into men's stuff recently and they're doing this awesome men's underwear plus a few other things too but today i'm talking about the underwear.

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38:19all right let's talk iphone 17 pro and let's start with teardowns rewa's technologies teardown rewa technology uh they commented many times about how there's a lot of screws in this phone and that they were saying this in a complimentary way because that means there's a lot less adhesive yeah that's part of the advantage of uh making the thing out of a block of aluminum machining it if you look at uh in the video they show the sort of the the chassis of the 17 pro versus the chassis of the 16 pro and obviously the 17 pro because of the giant camera plateau that's all aluminum and there are tons of places to put screws that are machined into the aluminum.

38:56On the 16 Pro, there's nothing there because the 16 Pro basically has like the wraparound, kind of the shell around the outside, but the front and back are separate pieces that come off. So they took advantage on the Pro of the fact that, hey, that entire camera bump, that's solid aluminum. We can put screw, whatever they call it, the little screw holes all over that thing. And so, so many more components are screwed in on the 17 Pro than they were on the 16, simply because it's easy to find places to screw them in. Yeah, it's much easier to service and that's much better for longevity. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there, though.

39:27Check out this video if you want to see what's inside these phones. There's so many things. There's so many tiny little things, so many delicate, tiny things. Be very careful. And also their teardown was showing the logic board. And that's the logic board is horizontal, just like it is in the air. It's near the top, but it has almost nothing in the bump area. There's so much camera crap and other things up there that, you know, obviously the front facing camera i think that one of the speaker or some other component is up there uh but the logic board in the 17 pro is almost entirely below the bump with only a little tiny part of it sticking up into the bump area uh tell me about accessibility from the front versus the back please yeah the the rewa tech people basically just said just treat this phone as only being accessible from the back from the front rather you can get in through the back like there's that big there's a big cutout on the aluminum there's a big you know there you there's a way in but there's like a black sheet of something or other on there and it i'm assuming you'd have to like peel that out and unglue it they basically consider this a phone that is only accessible from the front which is a disadvantage of this unibody design but you know there's trade-offs and then they also took a look at the vapor chamber as well if you want to see what that looks like inside there it's pretty cool we'll put a link in the show notes to a video that explains what vapor chambers are how they work and how they're built and they can show one of the factories making them and it looks exactly like the one that you see in the iphone and in tons of other android phones before this it's pretty cool video if you're curious about how they work but basically there's just water in there and it uh evaporates from the heat and then uh condenses and gets wicked back up to begin the journey again it's like a little miniature water cycle inside your phone it's kind of awesome like i really enjoy i watched that video i really enjoyed it yeah yeah it's it's they're so delicate at i love watching people tear them down and they're just like because you can destroy them by essentially just squishing them or piercing them in any way like they're very as you can they're very thin that's the whole magic they're very very thin and very very delicate and they have to pull a vacuum inside them so as soon as it's pierced in any way it becomes entirely useless and it's just amazing they can make something that precisely and that small that can maintain a vacuum it's one of the things i talk about in the video how do you how do you pull a vacuum how do you pull the air out of something that thin with not having it collapse on itself without having just all i it's like you know if you put a bag on your mouth and breathe in the bag just collapses on itself and the two walls of the bag just touch each other how do you not do that with something that's this thin and the answer is tons and tons of tiny little divots that act as little like standoffs like the little uh plastic table in your pizza box to keep the box from touching the pizza it's pretty cool stuff yeah all right going to max text here down uh they talk about the speakers as we previously mentioned and they said well they talked about speakers in the air but we're now talking about the Pro.

42:11And they said the speakers on the 17 Pro Max are a lot louder than the 16 Pro Max. That's interesting that they have a loudness delta year over year in the Max phones. I think they're making a concerted effort to make them louder. How good they sound, who knows, but making them louder, just got to serve all those people who are on speakerphone walking down the street. Yeah, not good. And then as we already talked about, the heat is indeed more evenly spread. Yeah, and this is compared to a 16 Pro. So in the 16 Pro, guess where the SoC is? Well, I can see it. There's the big white spot right there.

42:37And then the 17 Pro, it's much harder to pinpoint. It's more of an even distribution of heat. All right, let's talk scratches. There's been already a bit of a scratch gate, if you will. There's talk that the iPhone 17 Pro, people that have gone to the store have noticed a lot of scratches, particularly on the blue Pro and the black Air. Reading from Bloomberg, the deep blue variants of the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max exhibited scuffs after just a few hours of being on display. Bloomberg News found from visits to Apple stores in New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London. The black air also showed itself to be prone to scratching, the reporters observed.

43:12In addition, Apple's magnetic MagSafe charger can leave a visible circular mark on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro models Bloomberg found. Yeah, MacRumors had a bunch more pictures of them. We had a couple people write in to say that they saw the same thing and send in pictures of the phones that they saw in the store. But here's Jerry Rigg everything coming in to say, look, he's the expert damager of phones, and in particular, he does scratch them up and everything in what he says. and I'm inclined to believe him is that the anodized surface on the aluminum on these phones is tough enough that if you try to scratch it which he did with his various scratch hardness tools or whatever you can leave a mark but that mark just brushes off like that that white dust like that all these marks essentially will just brush he demonstrates it in the video he scratches it up he's like well this looks like it's damaged but then he just takes his finger goes rub rub rub and it just wipes off like it's he called it dust or something I don't know it's dust from the scratching implement or whatever, but supposedly it just rubs off everywhere except the edge of the camera bump.

44:09Apple made a very sharp edge of the camera bump. Anybody who has ever painted something like painted your house knows that if you have a very sharp corner on where two walls meet and you try to paint it, getting paint to stay there is very difficult. Paint wants to peel off the very sharp corner, which is why they have various things that will let you round over that corner. In the world of anodizing aluminum, there are international standards for how rounded over a surface has to be to keep an anodized finish on it of a given thickness. And Apple has not paid attention to those. They made the corners of the camera bump very sharp.

44:43And so the anodization on those corners will come off the phone, will flake off. If you take that thing that you were scratching on the surface of the thing, the left mark so you could just brush it off and it was fine, take that same exact thing, nick it on the edge of the camera bump and that will take a piece of that atomization off the phone and it will never come back you can look at it under a microscope and you can see ah this used to be dark blue but now i can see there's a little divot and there's shiny aluminum so that will get nicked up around the camera bump if you care about that the only thing i haven't seen conclusive testing on is the ceramic shield don't call it glass back panel on the pro which also gets scratched up i'm not sure if that also buffs out but uh i went to an apple store and i saw these phones and they look like the ones in these pictures but i saw that before i saw the jerry everything video so i didn't try to buff them out the other thing is the magsafe like ring looks like a coffee ring kind of i'm assuming that will also rub out if you care about it you see this a lot of cases like if the phone itself but also any case you put on your phone very often if you use magsafe a lot you will see sort of the imprint indentation or a mark from your the magsafe puck on the back of your phone that seems unavoidable if you keep pressing a circular thing to the back of your phone but these are this is on the actual aluminum back of or the actual glass back for example of the iphone air to see that thing there i'm assuming that will rub out but i don't know but anyway these phones are not impervious to marks especially the dark ones because if you get a mark on the dark one if you get all the way down to the aluminum the aluminum is shiny silver and the dark blue finish uh contrasts highly with that so if you want to show the least of scratches get the silver iPhone Pro, I guess, and the white iPhone Air.

46:21I did see Apple gave a statement to some news outlet, I forget which one, earlier today, saying that this was a result of material transfer from the chargers they use in the store and that they would just clean right off. So basically what Apple was saying is that the, quote, scratches you're seeing are not scratches in the iPhones. They are rubbed off scuffs of metal or whatever from the chargers. That's their official position. Yeah, and that's what Jerry Rigg was saying. So like anodized finishes on aluminum are so hard. There's no way that like that's what he was rubbing his tools on it. You'd see these terrible scratches like, oh, you've destroyed it.

46:55But then he literally rubs it off with his finger and said, no, what you're seeing is what came off the tool. Yes. Not what came off the phone. Yeah. If you're scratching with your fingernail, like you're seeing your fingernail. Yeah. But but here's the thing, though. All that said, the bottom line is if you scratch things against the back of this phone, it will leave marks that you will see with your eyes. So if your complaint is I don't want ugly marks on my phone and you use this phone without a case, it may have ugly marks on it. The fact that those marks will rub out is only a comfort to you if you routinely clean the back of your phone to get rid of the marks.

47:26And like I said, around the edges of the camera bump, that will actually take off the anodization because the corner is too sharp. They didn't round it over enough. Yeah. And also, if you are concerned about how noticeable scratches will be on your aluminum devices, the best thing you can do is get silver ones because you know if you scratch silver aluminum and you expose silver underneath it it's a lot less noticeable than if you have like a dark bold color and you scratch that you see the silver peeking out so you know if that's if that's a concern for you i suggest maybe just getting the silver one to begin with and same thing with the white air for like if the mag safe pucks are leaving like white dust you're not going to see it on the white air as much i uh can tell you that i got a blue iphone 17 pro and sure enough i have a little baby mark on the ridge of the camera plateau exactly as Jerry Rigg described in that, you know, there's a little teeny tiny mark of silver.

48:19The rest of it looks pristine, looks brand new. I don't know. I mean, I did it. I'm not arguing that I didn't do it, but I don't know how it happened. But yeah, it's right on the corner, off the corner. It's fine. It's just right on the corner there. To be honest, and maybe I'm just convincing myself to make myself feel better, I actually do feel like it's kind of a lovely little patina there. If it was like, you know, a scratch clear across the entire aluminum back or like on the Mesa or plateau rather. I think I would be less enthusiastic about it, but I kind of like that. It's got a little patina there, if you will.

48:49I don't have that same admiration for screen related scratches, but this one doesn't really bother me, but it absolutely is a thing. And it's right on the corner, just like Jerry Rigg everything said. All right. Talk to me about iPhone sales. Apparently the information as summarized by Mac rumors said that Apple's increasing production of the standard iPhone 17 due to unexpected demand for the device. Following a strong pre-order weekend, Apple told two suppliers to increase the daily iPhone 17 output by at least 30%. Apple allocated 25 % of its iPhone 17 production to the standard model, 10 % to the Air, and 65 % to the Pro and Pro Max, as those are typically Apple's best-selling devices.

49:26Yeah, this is all from the information, which is paywalled, but I'm assuming they have good sources here, and I was just really interested to see what Apple allocates on, like, launch weekend. Obviously, launch weekend for the phones is not representative of their lifetime sales. It's all the early adopters, all the tech enthusiasts, all the people who even know the new iPhones are coming out. But I was surprised to see such a huge bias towards the Pro. And then the percentages are, again, 25 % for the Plane 17, 65 for the Pro, and only 10 for the Air. So Apple's confidence in the Air more or less matches Marco's confidence in the Air, which is, it'll be okay.

49:59some people will want it but it is by far it's less than half of the next nearest one it's only 10 of the ones they're allocating and the 17 selling well doesn't surprise me because as we said in the earlier shows and the and the the event uh show that we did 17 is a great phone like it just it it has caught up to the pro in so many ways that people care but it's just a really good all-around even though it doesn't have 12 gigs of ram but other than that right it's a really good all and usb2 it's a really good all-around front so it doesn't surprise me that they had to up the percentage. But again, 24 % for 17, 10 for the Air, and 65 for the Pro and Pro Max, because people who want iPhones on iPhone day want the best, most expensive ones, and that's the Pro and Pro Max.

50:38All right. And then finally, Faisal writes, a while back, we heard about Apple being able to update new iPhones in their boxes at Apple stores and then didn't hear anything again. Is it actually live? Is it working? The day one patch for the new iPhones reminded me of this and how Apple supposedly was able to update phones while they're in storage. My guess is the volume was just absurd to try to do this. Like when you go to an Apple store and you see how many iPhones they're selling on launch day, like the idea that they would be sitting back there with the big pizza box updaters that update the phones in the boxes, like I just don't think they could keep up the volume on a launch day.

51:14Like I'm sure months from now, that's probably going to be happening, but I think it's unrealistic for the launch. yeah these boxes do exist that are real they are being used but it doesn't make the update go any faster if you've ever updated your phone you know how long it takes so multiply that by however many phones like the and the pizza box things can host i don't know like a dozen two dozen phones at the same time but they're selling so many phones during launch weekend that the the uh the presto pizza box os updater things aren't absolutely a non-factor on launch day probably in launch week because there's just so many phones flying through that store.

51:51There is no time to sit each one in the pizza box and get it updated. But yeah, they're real. We had some follow-up about it a while ago where they have it for phones. I believe they also have new ones coming out for Macs, but it's not a factor on launch day. We are sponsored this episode by 1Password. If you're a security or IT professional, you've got a mountain of assets to protect. Devices, identities, and applications. It's a lot, and it can create an mountain of security risks. Fortunately, you can conquer that mountain of security risks with 1Password Extended Access Management. Trellica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company.

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54:07if you do an encrypted, and that's the key, an encrypted backup to your computer, which you can still do in Finder now, that will save all your Wi-Fi passwords. It'll save basically as much as possible. And then you can do the restore onto the new phone once it arrives. And so you can back up your phone, maybe the morning of delivery, if you will, and then restore the new phone from that backup. And that was the guidance for years. And then they started being able to do the whole thing without involving a computer at all. And for a long time, what I decided to do for the last two or three years was use a Thunderbolt cable between the two phones.

54:41Now this becomes dodgy because then one phone's trying to charge the other and you need to get power into the source phone or maybe into both phones. And so that's a little squirrely, but you can use MagSafe and get around it. And that's what I did for this phone. But before I get derailed in my tale of whoa, What is your guys' approach and what do you recommend? That's what I used to do. I used to do the backup to the computer with the encryption thing. iCloud Keychain made that a lot less necessary. Because, again, to do the computer encrypted backup used to be the only way to transfer keychain entries.

55:17So that would be things like your logins and passwords. But once iCloud Keychain launched and became well supported by everything, that now includes your passwords that are stored in keychain now not all passwords apps can set basically like their storage class for if you if you have a password stored in an app in keychain you can say like this should persist between boots this should this should be only after unlock and you can say this should you know this should basically be included in backups or not and many apps don't. Slack, I'm looking directly at you. Slack is the worst. Any app that you have to log in every time you change your iPhone, that's a choice those apps make.

56:01They can choose to not suck and they don't. Brief sidebar on Slack. Slack, yeah, okay, so it doesn't store your password stuff. The worst thing about Slack, it doesn't even store all the Slacks that you're in and the order they are in in the sidebar. Now, granted, I'm in a lot of Slack. You don't have to store the password. Just at least keep my Slack. Fine, make me log into every single one of them. Don't make me remember what they all were. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Every social network app, every, you know, the banks, like everything. Anyway, so all that said, I just use iCloud now. And the reason why is because I have had the phone-to-phone, like the direct transfer thing, I've had that thing fail a lot, Casey.

56:46See, I've had that fail frequently. It just failed for us this weekend when I did Tiff's phone because we did hers that way. It failed. I always do mine with the option of like, you know, I have the phone paired to set it up with the other phone. But then when it asks you like, do you want to do iCloud or direct transfer? I pick iCloud now because it works a lot better for me in practice. That being said, there are some things that never transfer. I've never once had it properly passed the Apple Watch to the new phone ever. Is it even supposed to do that? Yes. It even says it's doing it. I've never seen that work either.

57:21Yeah. It even says it's going to do it for you. And I've heard of other people, the HDMI CEC unicorns. Somebody out there is having this work for them. I've never seen it work. It works for me. Oh, there you go. It works for me. That was about the only thing that worked for me. I don't have a watch. My wife does. It literally never worked for her. Yeah, exactly. In the same way, I've never seen a watch transfer a cellular plan to another watch either. Like that also never. Oh, God. That's asking a lot. yeah exactly but but it works for casey so i didn't even know it was supposed to work honestly i just always assume it won't be paired and sure enough it isn't yeah they ostensibly they added that i think like three or four years ago and and i've it's never worked for me not even once um that being said also before we get to your tail of oi because i don't have any well mine worked fine uh you know for the most part however ever.

58:04And since I forget which iPhone it was, it's been a while now. Apple started a while back trying to, I think, maybe boost their initial battery perceptions of the iPhone by this annoying behavior that whenever a new iPhone iPhone has been set up to it. And there's a lot of steps in the process where you have to like, all right, hit a thing. And then you see a spinner for a while while something activates against some server somewhere. And the phone just keeps turning off the screen. And then you, oh, wake it up again to see where, because you have to check to see, is it waiting for me for the next step?

58:50So you have to keep waking up the phone. And this is before any stage where you can actually go in and change the sleep setting because you don't have access to settings yet. the process is so user hostile and tedious because you have to keep waking up the stupid phone because the screen keeps going to sleep after two seconds you basically have to babysit it and because like there's i i only set up phones like once a year either i'm setting up my wife's or i'm setting up mine there's just no way to remember all the steps and they change from year to year anyway to answer the question can i leave now and come back and it will be done yeah because there is a step that takes like hours in the middle and you right but you can't leave you have to it's going to ask you something else later it's going to say okay now what about this okay now what about this okay now 45 minutes now what about this okay 30 minutes now what about this and you're like you can never leave you just have to constantly be checking how's it doing how's it doing how's it doing it is it's way too i understand there's a lot of steps in the process but they really need to have some kind of messaging that says now you can go away and come and when you come back it will either still be going or it will be done we require nothing else of you uh but i don't even know if there is that step because there are just so many phases and my advice for like to answer the question how should we set up the phone as you can see people have varying experiences some people have lots of success with one way less success with another i started to have less success with the itunes backup slash finder backup way so i switched to the device to device transfer but wireless and the reason i was doing it wireless was because i was transferring mostly from phones that had usb2 speed connections to phones that don't and usb2 speeds are slower than wi-fi so i was doing the wireless device to device transfer that is still sort of my go-to default i would say to characterize them the icloud one is probably the one that has the highest success rate but i think it is also has the lowest fidelity in terms of what it will copy uh the finder i'm not sure if the finder copy or the device to device with or without the wire are tied in fidelity or if the think the fun so assuming that you encrypt assuming you encrypt then i think they're yeah like so i would say the the finder one has lost its dominant like that using your mac has lost its dominance as the highest fidelity in terms of we will keep the most stuff so i would say if you want to do it with your computer fine hopefully you have a fast wired connection on your phone but my default and i think the default that apple pushes you towards is device to device wireless uh you don't you can keep phones plugged into power the whole time you don't have to do the thing whether you have mag safe on the back plus the cord and stuff you don't have to have a cord you don't have to know oh does this phone have a slow connection or fast connection oh i need a lightning to usbc connector device to device wireless is kind of the default but i do feel like icloud is going to have the highest success rate it's not going to be as fast it's not going to be as high fidelity but it will slowly trickle stuff over icloud assuming you have a good backup so like there's there used to be a good answer was that easier back in the years when we could say do an itunes encrypted itunes backup just do it that's the number one thing you have Because the other ones were so low fidelity in terms of like they would leave so much of your crap behind.

1:01:53But that's not the case anymore. Now the fidelity of all of them is similar. So, yeah, I would say do device-to-device wireless as your first choice. And if you have bad luck with that, iCloud is second choice. Yeah. The problem with device-to-device transfer of any kind, wired, not wired, whatever. The problem with that is you're losing both devices for anywhere between 15 minutes and literally three hours. Oh, yeah. That's why I tell everyone in my family, hey, if you're going to get a new phone, just assume you're not going to have any phones for four hours. Yeah, but honestly, and this is why I like the iCloud option, because the iCloud option minimizes the time that both phones are out of commission.

1:02:26It very much does. Because the new phone still has a lot to download, but you can at least start using stuff. Oh, and by the way, I think we are still in the phase, this is only a relevance to maybe us and other developers, but are we still in the phase where no matter what you do, your test flight apps will not make it to the new phone? oh yeah yeah test flight apps do not make it period which which like apple owns test flight it's not a third-party app anymore i don't know why they can't i guess they don't care like who guys yeah you know there's only a few million developers who cares they have they have a large to-do list that is above that if you are a developer take screenshots of your home screens because you'll forget where that test flight app was or just you know refer back to the old phone if at all possible yeah yeah you know don't and don't do not erase don't they'll say okay my new phone to set up now i can wipe my old phone they'd prompt you for that when you're done especially if you do device device transfer when you're done on the old phone they'll say great you got your new phone set up do you want to erase this one pay attention don't get like prompt fatigue you do not want to erase your old phone as soon as you set up the new one wait a week find out what you're missing by the way speaking of speaking of prompt fatigue there there are many steps to go through now after a migration or after a new install so here yeah like so i actually i wrote it down because I was like, this is, as I'm going through this, and for reasons I'll get to later, I went through it a lot.

1:03:46So here's what you have to go through. Location services, Apple ID, Apple Pay. Okay, those seem reasonable. But then - But before you move on, Apple Pay. Apple Pay is not one step. Let's say you have five credit cards in Apple Pay. You need to enter the little three-digit code for five credit cards. Then you need to wait for your phone to connect to whatever stupid server that is run by whatever card you're trying to use and hope that thing responds and decide, oh, I'm just going to do setup later. Am I going to remember to do this one card setup? Just getting through the Apple Pay part can be incredibly, and you've got to have all your cards on you unless you've memorized all your three-digit codes.

1:04:22Just that one step frustrates me to no end because I do want all the cards, and sometimes the servers don't respond, but then you skip it, but then you forget that you skipped it until you're trying to pay with it in a store, and you realize, oh, I never finished the setup. Anyway, go on. Yeah, but even that, I feel like those things, I can see why those are required, okay? but then apple intelligence why why do we need to why do we turn this on it's it says like it's ready and you there's only the only option is next or whatever you can't not turn it on so it's just advertising to you then it says you want to summarize notifications do you want priority notifications these are three different screens then the camera control thing which interestingly enough the default state is no swipey actions which is pretty clear that that's where they're going okay good visual intelligence after that explaining to you how to use visual intelligence again this is just promos the action button four screens of siri emergency sos welcome then a liquid glass show off and a liquid glass tour which is itself like four screens the four screens of siri i believe do not ask you to do anything right no they're just telling you about siri they're not saying like they're just like sometimes they make you say things like hey siri what's the weather with that like they're these are tutorial this is like the tutorial level in a video game where it's just like we want to teach you how to use your phone you're like come on come on just get me to the game yeah hey come on yeah like this like this this is showing the kind of thing that we used to like make fun of companies like microsoft for back in the day was like when you could kind of see like the org chart coming out of the products in user hostile ways but it's like oh every one of these departments wants their own promo screen in the setup and the problem is what we're seeing is like it feels like every division has their own pet projects that are spamming the user here without considering the like substantially ever growing burden of this entire experience for a brand new iphone setup and for for the customer like the customer going through this it just feels like we're just going through the motions and we're like yeah come on come why why is this so many screens this is and it's it's really it has reached a point where it is beyond ridiculous now it's just in it's just a slog and that's the last thing you want when you're when you're like you you're a customer setting up your new phone this is supposed to be a happy awesome time you're excited the last thing you want is to feel like it's a slog and there's enough steps involving you know setting up a new phone that are kind of just technically or realistic realistically required things like you know logins and activations like I understand that part.

1:06:54All this other crap on top of it is not actually necessary. This is just like promos and BS from Apple. They shouldn't be adding to the burden. They should be trying to get you into the experience of using the phone faster, as fast as they possibly can, because that's what you're there for. And instead, they're just loading on more and more stuff, thinking each one of these pebbles is not going to break our backs, but it's too much. i think they did have a year where they said we simplified the setup process and then they added the first one of those things which i think might have been the action button or maybe it was siri and then they had the second one then they had the third one like when they streamlined the process we're like wow setup is so good now and then like the next year it's like all right well you have some new feature it's fine to put that one new feature to have some flashy screen because it's just one new feature on top of thing but like you said fast forward a few years and now everybody has one of those things i think the thing i would suggest that maybe get past the mbas at apple is at the very least when doing a phone to phone transfer or an iCloud backup restore or something figure out what OS the old phone was running I feel like this information is available during any kind of phone transfer or even an iCloud backup and do not show me anything that's already on my old phone if my old phone had an Apple intelligence never show me those screens I know what it is it's already I set up the old phone somehow I was presented with this like in other don't show me things i already know camera control does my old phone have a camera control don't show the camera control stuff assume i know what it is assume that i've used the old phone for some period of time you don't need to show me anything that was on the old phone and that would save so much time because so many people are setting up a new phone to replace an old iphone now if you're replacing an iphone 10 or something with an iphone 17 by all means show me visual intelligence and show me because you don't know about these features you never you never had them on your phone like tutorial levels serve a purpose you're not going to get them to stop them but i would say a streamline then b do not show things that were already on the old phone because that just doesn't make any sense yeah they they need they need another one of those big uh you know the big flushes like they did like you know you gotta flush those toilet again it's it's full wow or like even better would be uh only to show the assemble essential steps during setup and then on essentially like first launch into springboard through the tutorial on our face no they already do enough they they already spam us enough with enough dialogues and red dots separate the separate to tutorial stuff from the stuff that's essential and when the tutorial stuff comes out have a thing that says skip all and never show again one button gets rid of all because you know what you're dismissing is not something you need to set up because you did the necessary setup things before you got to springboard but once you get to springboard throw the tutorial in our face and have us say nope don't want to see any of this crap even the new stuff that i don't know about and just have it never appear again that would that would be my second choice first one just don't show me stuff those in the old phone second one separate essential from non-essential and make the non-essential dismissible en masse with a single button press.

1:09:42All right. So before I tell my tale of woe, I have one additional question about this. So Marco, to the best that you can recall, and I know this is very unscientific, when you did the iCloud transfer, so it took roughly how long from the start of that to you being able to at least use and interact with your new phone? Which new phone? Oh, gosh. Take your pick. I don't care. okay um well i will say that i bought two new phones i bought the 17 pro and i traded in three old test phones for one new iphone air to be an iphone air test phone so i have an iphone air and an iphone 17 pro and i first transferred everything to the iphone air because i wanted to actually transfer to it, make it my phone, move into it, and live with it for a little while, which is exactly what I did.

1:10:39I will say I later transferred everything to the 17 Pro, and I spent some time with that as well, so I could talk about both of them. The process to go to the iPhone Air took substantially longer. In both cases, I did the same iCloud transfer. The iPhone Air was substantially longer, in large part because that day one software update on the iPhone Air took almost 20 minutes. Gracious. On the iPhone Pro, when I did it later, that one took about two or three minutes. Why? Thermal throttling. I mean, maybe, but was the Air on launch day and the Pro not on launch day? They were both on launch. Well, I didn't set up the Pro launch.

1:11:24However, the part of the process that took so long was, quote, preparing update. Not getting the update, not downloading the update. It's preparing update. Now, my understanding, I think the preparing update step of an Apple software update, I think that's basically like decompressing it or whatever. I think it's like a local operation on the phone, I think. I could be wrong, but the iPhone Air took a very long time on preparing update that the iPhone Pro did not. And it was very warm during that time. My wife's 17 Pro took forever on preparing update on lunch day. So I don't know. I don't know.

1:12:00I could be wrong. I will say it was very warm and it took almost 20 minutes to do the update. And the Pro done like a day later, did it in like three minutes. It flew right through it. Yeah, I don't. I did errands earlier today and it did not take three minutes. It took a fair bit of time. All right. So I think we got distracted so you said i know so ballpark in summary it was about how long from start transfer to i can interact with either the pro or the air um the air was over an hour the pro was about an hour i think and then subsequent to that hour being up so you know you've you've waited an hour ish give or take roughly the same for both you are now and you're doing this iCloud restore and then you are the the phone says okay i'm still doing a bunch of junk in the background but you can at least use me now was everything there were some things there were wi-fi passwords there were photos there were logins there or in were apps there or was it basically useless even though officially strictly speaking you could interact with it most things were i mean and now both of them i ran overnights um but but not like completely like you know i started using them a little bit and like before I went to bed just to check to make sure everything was there or everything had worked and it was fine.

1:13:18Both transfers went very well overall with a pretty big exception that when I did the second one from Air to Pro, I lost all my Safari tabs and I'm a little annoyed about that but otherwise, everything else went fine. You know, passwords, passwords were, you know, things like Wi-Fi passwords. Yeah, of course I had those. I believe that's iCloud Keychain. Everything that seems to be in iCloud Keychain, that all seemed to be just totally fine. the only things i lost with each transfer are things i mentioned earlier that i lose with every transfer like slack or ivory logins right i mean give me my timings on my thing um i like i said i always tell people four hours even though it's a conservative estimate and part of the reason is i've just been on a streak as you know from listening to past use of the show or i got a new phone whether it's mine or my wife's or whoever's and set it up takes a couple of hours to do the transfer uh but the phone number never transfers that's never gonna work and so you always have to call Verizon an iPhone day and this year we had to do it again and so factor in I didn't have that problem either I know you never do and I always do and guess what we did again because it said you want to transfer the number to this new phone and I said yeah totally transferred it's like sorry you need to contact global one I'm like okay global one what what see that step also that step works for me with at &t every time no problem yeah so this in this case um the our suspect is we're verizon customers we are not global one customers but my wife has traveled to overseas and has gotten various overseas e-sim slash i don't know if you get physical sim probably just yeah just e-sims and apparently if you have ever used one of those things the transfer process flips out and says oh talk to global one it's like i don't care about the global one thing maybe if we had deleted the like the overseas e-sims before we had done the transfer we would have said but we didn't think of it it's always something this year that's what it was we had to call Verizon on and I forgot I if you listen to the older episodes you're like didn't you learn last time that there's a web page of Verizon where you can do this transfer yourself I think I did learn that and then I forgot it and then I remembered it again after we'd already been on the phone with Verizon so factor that into the setup time that's why I say four hours that's fair.

1:15:27All right. So the reason I ask is because I feel like in my personal experience in years past, and I haven't done this for at least a couple of years, and iCloud backup doesn't bring that much back in. And I think that that information that I just stated as fact, I think that's outdated. I don't think that's true anymore. Like Marco said, you know, Wi-Fi passwords are now coming in. A lot of this stuff is coming in. Um, and even if photos don't come in, you know, like as in they're not the, the, the originals aren't on the device. If you use iCloud photo library as I do, I would almost argue that's a benefit, you know, in that it will now recash only the stuff you've used recently.

1:16:08Nevertheless, um, I'm in Memphis, Tennessee. I've just spent 12 hours doing the podcast-a-thon. I am on something like five or six hours sleep. It's now Saturday. We wake up, we go to the Memphis Tigers football game where it was approximately 17 billion degrees. We lasted through the first half and then bailed, went and got some incredible barbecue at Central Barbecue, which I loved. I'd been a couple times before. And we had all colluded in a happy way to do a 6.30 p.m. pickup at the Saddle Creek store in Germantown, Tennessee. We go at about 6.30, give or take a little bit. And I got my new AirPods Pro.

1:16:44I got Aaron's orange iPhone 17 Pro. I got my blue iPhone 17 Pro. Very quickly to go on a tangent and interrupt myself, this blue is way more purple than blue in my eyes. I don't dislike it, but in most light, I view this as more purple than blue, which is a little bit disappointing. I really wanted a true-to-form blue. That being said, Aaron freaking loves her orange phone in a way that she has not ever really been enthusiastic about any of the phone colors she's had before, even pink, which is probably her favorite color. Um, but she really, really likes the orange phone. And she said to me, and I'm quoting the orange is really cool.

1:17:23I think I want a clear case, which is again, not something she's ever been into. Um, I've only held her phone briefly. Uh, but the orange is very, very, very good. And I'm really glad that Apple did an honestly bold color. so anyway so it's 6 6 30 ish so maybe 7 o 'clock by the time we are on our way back to the hotel and i am and i have i have a decision to make it is 7 o 'clock p.m i have a 3 45 a.m wake up for a 4 30 departure for a 6 30 flight to get back home i am a strong and strong believer in online you electronic boarding passes i've already received one on my old phone i really don't want to travel with the old phone.

1:18:03I want to travel with the new hotness. Why? Because why not, man? I want to have the new thing. Did you hear me in your ear saying, do you have four hours to spend on it right now or do you not have four hours? I didn't, but I thought to myself, it's fine. It's fine because here's the thing. I brought with me in the car on the way back from the Apple store. I immediately opened the phone and I brought with me a USB-C I think it's a Belkin Mophie. I forget what it is, but one of those 3D rectangle battery packs that John Voorhees loves. I forget the model if you actually care, ask me about it. But anyways.

1:18:37Aren't all battery packs 3D rectangles? You know what I'm saying? They're like not cylinders, but like a round rec cylinder, if you will. I'm doing a terrible job describing it. You know what I'm thinking of. I'm doing a poor job describing it. Oh, like a candy bar form factor kind of? No, no, no. Not a candy bar. That's my whole point. It's more of like a square that's been extruded upwards. Anyways. Like an airport extreme? Yes, actually. Yeah. So I have that. I have my, I believe it's Mophie, three-in-one travel charger, which is MagSafe and charges really fast. The second edition charges quite quickly.

1:19:14And I have a Apple Thunderbolt. I think it's Thunderbolt three or four. I don't recall now. But it's maybe two-ish feet long. It's like two-thirds of a meter. This thing cost me$11 million when I bought it. It's seriously like a$70 cable or something like that. And actually, while we were there at the Apple store, Mike Impulse bought, I think, a one and a half meter Thunderbolt 5 cable, maybe it was 4, for literally$150 or thereabouts. It was absurd. This is an Apple cable. Cable transfers are not this good. This is the problem, Marco. I had convinced myself, and this is 100 % my fault. I'm not trying to blame anyone but myself.

1:19:55Only the guy in the mirror is at fault here. I had somehow convinced myself that these things support Thunderbolt. And these things have immensely fast transfer speeds. The pros specifically. Isn't it just USB 3 at best? I don't think the phones have ever supported Thunderbolt. This is my question. The iPads do. I think I have convinced myself of something that is patently untrue. I am owning that top to bottom inside now. But I thought to myself, all right, this has got to be the year. I have a half terabyte phone of which maybe two thirds is full or something like that. And I think a lot of that is just photos that can be, you know, they're cast photos.

1:20:31I'm not trying to keep my whole photo library on the phone. This has got to be fast. It's got to be. So I get in the car and I'm in the passenger seat. I'm riding shotgun and I start the transfer. And I do this from phone to phone in the middle of the car with no Wi-Fi available. And only one of these devices can get on the Internet. I do that. And it asks me, do you want to do the cellular transfer? Hell yeah, I do. Why not? this is going to be great. And so I immediately transfer my cell plan from the old phone to the new phone. You did this in a moving car and I can never successfully do it from my house.

1:21:01While traveling, by the way. And what, eight hours before a flight? Something like that. I can't do that mental math without distracting myself. Okay, great. This is so many good ideas. Yeah, this is just a litany of excellent ideas, like I said. And by the way, you just got through saying how you were probably mistaken about the transfer speeds of the wired connections on phones because you were misremembering about the iPads, blah blah but i just want to throw this out there you're not even going to be able to saturate the usb 3.0 whatever speeds of the phone when transferring thousands and thousands of tiny files when creating that's true tiny files because you will get swamped by the file io you will not saturate that bus unless you're transferring large individual files like just the ssd speed and the file system speed alone will kill you on that like it just you can see it yourself like Like even just in your house on your 2.5 gigabit per second Ethernet connection, copy a 20 gig file from one Mac to another and then copy 2 million 1K files.

1:22:00You'll get slaughtered on the file system IO alone. That I feel like is what is going to cause your phone setup to be slow because every application is a bundle of tiny little files. Yeah. And I mean, again, looking back on it, I think that this was a litany of poor assumptions and even poorer decision making. But here we were. So in the interest of telling the story, oh, and I should also interrupt myself and say, well, no, I'll get there, actually. I'll get there. So I'm in the car. I'm with Mike and Jason. Stephen had gone back to his house. So I'm with Mike and Jason and Jill from St. Jude, who was kind enough to travel to bring us to and from.

1:22:41And I'm doing this transfer and it's going. It's not going quickly. It's quoting two or maybe three hours, but it's going. We get to the lobby of the hotel. It's a very trendy, very, not fancy in the traditional way, but fancy in the like, you know, look at me. I'm hip and with it. That's a reference, John. Anyways, so we get to the hotel lobby, and Erin is there because she did not go with us for this adventure with Brad and Kathy. And I think that was it. And they basically said, hey, let's all have a drink together before we all go our separate ways. And I say, okay, sure. And I'm still allowing this transfer to happen.

1:23:15I should note that while this hotel was very nice, and I liked it quite a bit, the Wi-Fi at the hotel was hilariously bad. Hilariously bad Wi-Fi. Now, how could you have possibly known ahead of time that hotel Wi-Fi would be not amazing? Yes. And what really chaps my bottom is that I always will go and, I was going to say rent, but borrow a hotspot from one of two different counties' local libraries, because there's reciprocity in the whole rigmarole. and for this one trip, for some reason, I didn't do that. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn't thinking, but I didn't do that. And now granted, cellular Wi-Fi is still not stellar, but I guarantee it's a heck of a lot more stable than the crappy hotel Wi-Fi was.

1:23:59So we're all sitting around. It's Jason, me, Mike, Aaron, Kathy, Brad, and I think that's it. We're all sitting around and we're watching my transfer happening and everyone there is making so much fun of me and deservedly so. What are you doing? why would you do this? Why can't you be an adult? Why aren't you patient? You will be home. You will be in your house in like 16 hours where this will be so much less stressful and so much easier. Why did you not do that? In all logic, every ounce of logic on the planet says that's exactly correct because it is, but I'm me and I'm impatient and I wanted my new toy.

1:24:35How well did it go? So as we're sitting at the bar, all of a sudden the wired, you know, direct phone to phone transfer fails. And I have a red triangle on one of the phones and it says, this didn't work. Okay. Now I'm in a bit of a pickle because the old phone is still the old phone and it has the boarding pass and all that, except it now has no internet whatsoever because the cellular, like a dummy, I moved over to the new phone. This is not good. At this point, everyone around me is basically in hysterics. And Mike and Jason have this unbelievable glee. Their eyes are shining. It's eight o 'clock at night or thereabouts.

1:25:19Their eyes are like lighthouses because they know not only can they tell this story on Upgrade, but their recording Upgrade, what was at the time, tomorrow, which as I sit here now, was four days ago. And they look at me dead in the eyes and they say to me, we're going to tell this story and we're going to do it before you can. We're going to tell it on our podcast before you can. And this is going to be delicious. And they're basically like cackling. If I could do an evil laugh, I would do so. I'm not capable of such things. They are beside themselves with excitement. And sure enough, if you listen to the latest episode of Upgrade, number 582, first chance to make one impression, you will hear their retelling of this story, which I am very disappointed to say is pretty accurate, actually.

1:26:06I'm a little sad about that. I feel like, by the way, I feel like this now settles the debt of us stealing Ask Upgrade from them. I think that's true, actually. I think that's fair. See, I took one for the team, for you two. I took one for the team. You're welcome. So at this point, I realized, okay, this is not good. So I decide to, if I recall correctly, I should have taken notes, but I was in such a tizzy. Geez, I wonder why. I believe at this point I did the direct transfer. I'm sorry, the Wi-Fi direct peer-to-peer transfer. So I'm not using a cable anymore. I plug both of the phones into the wall and I let it run overnight.

1:26:40At 1.15-ish or thereabouts, I woke up and was like, oh, my God, what's happening with the phones? Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God. Did you sleep at all? I did. I did. I was passed out at like nine. But at about 1.15, I woke up and was like, well, I'm done because now I'm stressing out about the phones again. And so I tossed and turned until basically 3.30 when we, or no, 3.45, I think it was, when we needed to get up to catch the 4.30 car. But that being said, everything did transfer, except, except, curiously, my entire iMessage history disappeared from the new phone. It was on the old one, disappeared from the new phone, which was annoying, but fine.

1:27:18And I'm going to come back to this in a second. It didn't disappear from the new phone. It was just never on the new phone. Okay, sorry. Yes, yes, that is fair. And I'm going to come back around to this in just a second. But this, at first, I was like, oh, that's a bummer. Like, I mean, there's times I'll refer back to old messages, but in the grand scheme of things, it's probably fine. And then I realized, oh, oh, no, this isn't going to work because I'm in a handful of group chats. I wouldn't say it's an immense number, but enough. and most of these group chats have images that represent the group chat you know what i'm saying like little icons or whatever that have been stable for years which means i basically have the mental equivalent of muscle memory i guess mental memory whatever memory memory i have some sort of memory where i cannot find these friggin group chats unless they have the particular icons i'm used to and i'm screwed and so at that point i realized all right i'm gonna get home with this the way it is, but I'm going to have to handle this differently.

1:28:12So as an aside to this tale of woe, which is not done yet, do you guys use iMessage in iCloud or whatever the heck it's called? Yeah. Because I don't. Why don't you? Why not? Well, because. I guess we just got him to use iCloud Photo Library. I was just going to say, well, it's not going to be a problem because, of course, he uses messages in iCloud and it'll just eventually sync. Sometimes it takes a long time, but you know. So I don't for two reasons. Number one is uniquely me, which is that I don't know if you two have ever exchanged a message with me, but I tend to lean heavily on GIFs and other pieces of media.

1:28:45And over time, that adds up. And so I think I have something like 100 gigs of messages on my phone right now. And I don't necessarily want to take up 100 gigs of my iCloud account with my stupid GIFs. Like, as much as I love my GIFs, I don't think I need 100 gigs of the same five GIFs or whatever rolling around in iCloud. And the other reason was, I believe, and I'm probably going to get the details wrong, but if you use Messages in iCloud, Apple does have an encryption key to it. And even though I really genuinely have nothing to hide, that just kind of creeps me out. And it creeps me out that I'm also making a decision on your behalf, you, Marco, you, John, who might text me or iMessage me, that whatever you send me, Apple could see.

1:29:26Now, do they care about me? No. Would they ever bother? No. but it's something that could happen. And so I've always been a little scared of it, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should just go ahead and start using it. You should. Yes, you should. All right. All right, so that's all that. So I get home and I decide, all right, this is not going to work. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a backup from the old phone and then I'm going to do a restore to the new phone. I'm going to do a whole new restore. I'm going to do this from home where everything is calm. And by the way, I made it home, no problem.

1:29:56Everything worked great, except my iMessage, you know, snafu. And so everything will be fine. So I take a backup of the phone and then I have a brainwave. And I think, oh, you know what I should do just to make this easier and safer since I'm messing about with everything now? I should unpair my watch from the new phone and get it prepared for when I re-restore. What I didn't think about though is that I now have rings from that day and I have some other stuff that I had accumulated that day that never got backed up when I made the most recent backup because the most recent backup was from the old phone, which was no longer paired to the watch.

1:30:35I'm such an idiot in summary, but here we are. And so I did my backup, I did my restore, and I also thought to myself, you know what? Maybe the Thunderbolt 4 cable that I'm using that cost me$11 billion, maybe that was the issue. So I took the Thunderbolt 5 cable from my brand new CalDigit TS5 Plus and I used that directly plugged into my laptop to do the restore. Do you want to guess if it made any difference with regard to speed? No, it did not. Of course not. Just to give stats on this, your new phone has 10 gigabits per second out of that port. Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are 40. Thunderbolt 5 is 80 up to 120.

1:31:14So no, putting a faster than 40 gigabits per second thing into your 10 gigabit per second port is not going to help you. Yeah, so this was a disaster through and through. but I did that up I did the update or the restore and my iMessage stuff came back everything was good to go and so now I think for me I think and I can't decide what's the right answers but I'm starting to wonder if I do this again if I do the old school back to you know not find I almost said iTunes but do a backup to Finder and then restore from Finder I'm really wondering if maybe I'll do that next time I got a noodle on it but the right answer is probably what Marco said and just use iCloud but I'm wondering so much more reliable.

1:31:54But you can only use iCloud if you do messages on iCloud because otherwise your messages are never coming back on that phone. That's a good point. That's a good point. All right. So I got a lot to think about. But anyways, so I did all that. The storage is great. I got the watch repaired, but then I realized, oh no. Oh no. My rings for the day are gone. And I'm not above adjusting the rings on a day. You know, you can now do like bring your ring back for one day. But I've got some streaks to maintain. And I really try to be honest about it. I really, really do. And so for several hours, whatever background magical process that you can, of course, not just kick off by hand, you have to wait for Apple to decide, now it's the time to do it.

1:32:34And for many hours, like five hours, it didn't ever recompute the status of my rings. But I'm happy to say that eventually it did, and all is well. So I have a monthly FaceTime with our dear friend underscore David Smith, and I'm retelling the story. I want to say it's like yesterday, the day before. I guess it was yesterday. And I'm telling him about this, and he says, you know what you should do? Because you have the situation where you want to do a wired transfer, but you want it at the highest speed possible and you want to provide power, here's what you do. disconnect your computer from the cal digit when you do aaron's phone plug aaron's phone into the cal digit as like the source or i'm sorry the old phone in the cal digits like the source use your other thunderbolt cable also into the cal digit as the target and see if that works any better let me tell you do you want to guess how much better that worked made no difference whatsoever zero difference you cannot saturate that 10 gigabits per second when you're transferring in millions of tiny files anyway.

1:33:36Only when you're transferring a few large files will you saturate it if you're lucky. It made zero difference whatsoever. I'm a disaster. This is all waste. So I guess the official ATP guidance for the future, which I will forget. So it's on you guys to remind me, you folks to remind me in the future. I think the official ATP guidance is turn on messages in iCloud and just do a damn iCloud back over there. iCloud restore and just be done. I still say device to device should be your default. iCloud is the second fallback, but it depends on what you've had success with in the past. We are brought to you this episode by DeleteMe.

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1:35:59All right. So, Marco, tell me about your iPhone 17 Air. Okay. No, iPhone Air. I'm sorry. Not iPhone 17 Air. There you go. Saved us from a lot of angry people. All right. Easy peasy. Yeah. All right. So, I first moved in to the iPhone Air. It feels incredibly light for its size. Let me just quickly interject. I did briefly hold one in the Apple store when I was picking up my iPhones, oh my God, it feels incredible. It is incredible how good that feels in hand. Now, yes, it is big, but it's so thin and so light and oh my God, I want it so badly. It's almost like when I, so in order to get the iPhone Air, I actually, I ended up paying like 50 bucks for it because I had test phones that I traded in to get it.

1:36:47As part of my pile of test phones i brought in one of them had a case where i'd pop the case off of it so they could process the trade-in and holding the empty phone case for my uh it was it was a 14 plus the empty case for that and then i picked up the air i'm like this feels very similar it's incredible it really i have a dissenting opinion on the the feel of the air i did also visit an apple store to check out the new phones and here's the things that i was surprised by feeling the the air not for very long obviously but just you know playing with on a table it was nicer looking in person than i thought it would be uh and i already liked how it looked but i felt like the uh the ugly camera thing at the top didn't bother me as much especially on the white phone because it kind of blends in which of the whites yeah and it looks real good uh but also what i realized is just how much i hate big phones yes although although this phone was light and it felt very thin all i could think was this phone feels too big and i know it's like how is the iphone air too big it's not too big thickness wise it's too big for me personally with wise so all i could think of was this hearing of this phone was like oh man can you give me this phone in an iphone 14 let's say because that's my favorite size probably not the 17 is a little bit bigger but you know like like the normal non-mac size not these the areas in between the max and the pro right so give me the like the the normal pro size, maybe a little bit smaller.

1:38:12But this thin, and with three cameras on it, someday in the future, that's going to be an amazing phone. But I can say right now, for the Air, despite me really liking how it looks and it being nicer in person than I thought, it's just too darn wide for me. John, you are spoiling my review. I'm so mad. But you've used big phones, though. I thought you weren't against them. Well, no. I've never been into the Plus and Max. Anyway, so let's go back to a second. I'm going to go over this Plus a little more. Alright, so let's first start with color i got the blue one no i didn't i got one of the white ones what do you mean blue there's no blue one this phone is available in black and three whites they're all white like nothing about this looks blue at all if i didn't know i bought the blue and see on the box that it said blue i would never have guessed this was blue this does not come in colors it comes in black white white and white it's comical wait this is the is there a white one yes okay so maybe so maybe i was holding a white one and maybe i wasn't but there is in fact a white one there's no way to know even when you see them side by side in the store you can barely even tell like it's comical these are the most homeopathic colors i've ever seen in apple's lineup it is comical like there's there is no blue in this blue so anyway it does you know it feels very, you know, thin, light.

1:39:37It feels like shocking. However, you were right, John, like, this is not a thin Pro. This is a thin Max phone. It is noticeably bigger in, you know, length and width, noticeably bigger than the mid-sized Pro and, you know, base 17 lines. It also, it behaves like them software-wise. Like, if you ever used a Plus or a Max phone, if you turn the phone in landscape, a lot of apps will give you kind of an iPad style sidebar layout. This phone does that. Even Apple's software considers this a plus or a max phone. If you're coming from an iPhone mini, thinking that you might want an Air, I don't think you do.

1:40:21I think that's going to be a big jump in hand size. And for me, I actually have found that the Air, the ergonomics of it are not a great fit for me. And it's, it comes down to some of those little differences about it being a bigger phone than the pros. Like one of the simple things is like the sleep wake button is a little bit too high for me to hit comfortably with my regular way I hold a phone. Also the exceptional thinness of it, I find actually makes the ergonomics of using the phone a little bit worse in some ways. And this is what I was saying earlier about like, I don't think I would want a phone to be any thinner than this and you start running into like usability challenges so there's a couple things like so number one the combination of the thin the thinness and also the very thin screen bezels that modern phones have caused me to actually have a lot of accidental input on the tuck screen around the edges as i would just handle the phone more than the pros do like you know i've been using my phone without a case for a while and or using at best one of those leather leather magnetic backs that just is the back only and no sides.

1:41:28So I'm used to staying away from the sides holding this phone. And I should clarify, I was using the Air without a case. And also without the battery pack, just the regular, the phone by itself. It is actually, it's so thin that it is hard for me to operate without causing error input on the sides of the screen. It's also, because it's so thin, it's harder to pick up off a table. Like, it's little things like that. It also, if you lay it down on a surface, because it has that giant camera on one end, but nothing on the other end, really. It wobbles a lot more than the other phones on a flat surface.

1:42:02And so all these things, like the way it handles by being so big and so thin, it even like, like when you put it in your pants pocket, it's nice that it's super light, but even just the additional size of it made me feel like I was putting like a dinner plate in my pocket. Like it's a big phone. This is not, again, this is not a thin Pro. this is a thin plus or max really like that it's closer to that in feel i think if i were if i were to use this phone long term i think i would want a case for it to just to improve the physical handling of it but that would also very much defeat the purpose of the air so the ergonomics alone i decided after about one day like i don't think i'm going to stick with this phone but i was curious to try anyway um as for the other aspects the battery i didn't get enough chance to try it It seemed fine to me.

1:42:54I'm sure it's not amazing, not awful. We saw the test earlier. It seems like it's actually not as bad as people thought. It's not going to be great. It'll be fine. Camera and speaker. The speaker volume, as discussed earlier, is not as bad as I expected. The 17 Pro speaker, though, is way, way louder. But the volume out of the air speaker is not bad. It does have a bit of a rattling to it. If you turn it up all the way, and oftentimes I will be listening to podcasts out loud when I'm doing something like, I'll have the phone on the counter when I'm doing something in the kitchen, or I'll prop it up on a shelf if I'm taking a shower and want to listen to podcasts, stuff like that.

1:43:36When you crank up the speaker that loud in the air, it's very rattly and tinny. You hear little bit of distortions at the very top of the volume range, almost as if you had a little speck of dust in there or something. but also just like the tone of it it's very it sounds like a very small speaker it sounds like the way phone speakers used to sound before they got less crappy modern iphone pro speakers and even the base iphone speakers like modern iphone speakers in other models sound remarkably good for how small they are the air does not the air sounds like a tiny crappy old style phone speaker it does not sound good at all unless do you think marco had like a broken one or something lots of reviews have said essentially the same thing they said basically the air speaker gets really really loud but if you put it at max volume it basically there's like distortion of some kind and you have to back it off a little bit so even when it's backed off it is still louder than people expected it to be but max volume becomes less usable due to these issues yeah it's very tinny and harsh and generally it's an unpleasant speaker um cameras uh well camera um i did again only a day but I missed macro focus distance.

1:44:50You get macro focus distance from the wide angle lens. I missed the ultra wide. I missed that. I did try a test of like, let me try to read that tiny stupid gray on gray text on the Apple power adapters to see what wattage power adapter is. I did try that test with this phone and the other phones I had. And it was good enough that I could digital zoom. I could pinch in and I could read small, tiny little text on things using the regular camera on the air. So that's fine. But generally speaking, like macro distance stuff, it's much nicer to have the macro lens. And I did miss the telephoto reach even in just one day.

1:45:25And then when I later went to the Pro, I've been taking photos of the Pro the last couple of days and it's like, oh, wow, I'm so glad I have this reach with the telephotos. So generally, I do miss that camera a lot. Let's talk about heat. The air does seem to overheat and thermal throttle itself very easily and very frequently. I mentioned earlier how long that preparing update took, and it was really warm the whole time. So it could have been that. It could have been something else. If you look at benchmarks of the air, the benchmarks often show the air being a little bit slower than the 17 and 17 Pro in certain tests.

1:46:02My guess is that it's throttling during benchmarking. And it seems very likely because doing almost anything to it, if you feel that camera bump, it's warm. Now, you won't know if you're holding the phone using it regularly. You might not realize this because the heat doesn't travel down to the middle of the phone. Like the heat stays up in that camera mesa or camera plateau area. In some ways, that's nice in the sense that it's not heating up your hand uncomfortably. But it also makes it hard to dissipate the heat. So, for instance, my MagSafe fans that I have, they don't work on the air. They don't do anything because they're cooling the MagSafe area, but the MagSafe area doesn't get hot in the first place.

1:46:41The heat doesn't get there. It's all in the camera plateau. You need a camera bump fan. Yeah, I know. Speaking of throttling on these phones, the people who have done the tests on them, like all the phones throttle, all of them thermal throttle. But interestingly, what they found when doing like Air versus Pro tests, obviously the Pro comes out ahead. but looking at like the graph of how they throttle what happens is that like they a lot of these benchmarks would give like a stability score of like how even is like the frame rate in this game or whatever you know the this benchmark and the air would get a really high stability score is what would happen in the air is it would start off real high immediately throttle way way way way down and then stay at that way way way down for the whole thing so it had really good stability because it maintained it's really low thing the whole time but then on the pro it would start up really high go fall off a cliff after the first you know 30 seconds or something when it starts a thermal throttle and then for the next 10 minutes it would slowly get slower it would like a slow downward graph and like it never got as low as like the uh the air did or maybe you met it at the end after like 30 minutes when it got heat soaked but that's the magic of the vapor chamber like yeah all these thrones these phones are going to throttle on like a really high like cpu gpu benchmark type thing like they'll run really fast for a short period of time then they will throttle the question is what happens after that do they after that initial drop down the the pro is able to dissipate the heat for longer and it takes a longer time to essentially heat soak the whole phone because the heat is traveling down the whole phone dissipating into the aluminum dissipating into the air and so it slowly gets slower and the air is like as soon as i have to throttle it all super slow for the whole time that's it this is nowhere for the heat to go i guess yeah like that and that's the problem like the air's thermal design it just doesn't move the heat anywhere.

1:48:20It just keeps it right where it is, like in the top. And so it just has nowhere to go thermally. So my time with the Air, I think it makes a really good case for the base iPhone 17. Because what I ended up ultimately wanting after using the Air, I'm like, oh, you know, there's some goodness here. I wish the phone was not as big. And I wish it was a little bit thicker to have a few fewer trade-offs but keep a similar light weight and that's very that's very close to the regular iphone 17 like what i'm describing is basically the iphone 17 like the iphone 17 is the ultra wide camera too yeah you get the ultra wide camera you get fewer trade-offs really so i i found myself like appreciating that the air is an interesting experiment but like the thing is like there's so many trade-offs and you hear a lot of the reviewers saying this is the obvious path of the future.

1:49:15I hope it's not. Because what that would be like is like saying that the 12-inch MacBook was the obvious path of the future. It wasn't. And thank God for that. Because I hope the future is more like what we have now in the present. A lineup that has different products that serve different needs. The MacBook Air is not the only MacBook. Hopefully the iPhone Air will not be the only iPhone in the future. And we will all be better off continuing to have different product lines optimized for different needs. The iPhone Air has a role. It's like a two-door sports car. This is like a fun, totally impractical and unjustifiable on paper choice.

1:49:54But some people will just look at it or pick it up and they will fall in love with it. And they will buy it as a consciously irrational purchase for love. And that's okay. But keep in mind that when you hear reviewers saying that this is a great phone, they're saying this because they're testing it for a week. They're not buying a phone to keep for years and live with it every single day for years. And you can't quickly and easily switch between multiple phones all the time. You can't be like, oh, I'm going to take out my day phone, night phone, because switching phones with phone numbers and data transfers, it's a pain in the butt.

1:50:30So when you pick a phone, you're making a much bigger commitment than just, I'm going to review this for a week. You're saying, I'm going to have this same phone for one, two, three, four years, and you need that phone to serve you in as many circumstances as possible for as long as possible. The Air is not going to be that phone for most people. And you might go into it saying, you know what? I love it so much. I'm going to choose those trade-offs anyway. But make sure that you know what you're getting into and make sure that you love it enough to accept all the trade-offs and i just don't i went back to the 17 pro you know after one day and the pro the pro feels like home to me like the pro i'll just get some quick impressions here because i know we're running long and what and you guys want to talk about the pro too that's fine the pro is the safe purchase it is the phone that everything i was just saying like you make all those trade-offs with the air and you're like well if it's in this situation it's not going to be great if it's in that situation it's not going to be great the pro is the phone that i know i can have in any situation and i will never regret the choice i made i will never have the pro in something i'm like oh i wish it would i wish it would charge faster but it's overheating or i really wanted that wide camera or that telephoto camera or like whatever it is the pro will always handle what i want it to do it has the familiar size and shape and ergonomics if you know my hand knows how to handle the pro yes it is substantially thicker and heavier than the pro and a little bit thicker and heavier than the outgoing one but after my experience with the air i more willingly accept the pro's size and weight because i i want the utility that it offers and i and i've come to now appreciate better that utility um the sides are curved again and everything has kind of a little bit more slippery finish than the previous phones, which makes it a little bit less pleasant to use without a case for me.

1:52:32It's a little bit harder to hold and feel secure in my grip. I ordered the Nomad leather back for it, which I expect I will probably end up liking a lot, like I did on the 16 Pro. The new thermals have been great for me. I didn't even need my MagSafe coolers during setup. It never got that hot. New cameras seem very good, I think. You know, it's a little early. I've only been using them for a couple of days. A little early to say, but I think the new cameras are very, very good. The telephoto, the 4X is a much better range reach than the 5X. The 8X digital cropping on that is surprisingly decent.

1:53:09It's nowhere near the quality of the 1X lens, but it is less of a sacrifice than it was in the previous generations. like the that telephoto lens is always a trade-off it's always a sacrifice in optical quality but it's better this year than it has been i took two test photos of this because i wanted to test the same thing with my wife's pro phone and i tested the 16 pro 5x which is my phone versus the 17 pro 8x and obviously the 5x that's an optical 5x on the 16 pro and the 8x it's a sensor crop of the optically 4x lens and i stood i was a worst case scenario phone i was indoors it's dim lighting i I stood a pretty far distance away from a wall, took a picture of like my wife's diploma on the wall.

1:53:53And, you know, you'll see a link to the picture in the notes. I was shocked at how much better the 8X, which is again, not optical 8X, it's an optical 4X lens cropped to 8X, how much better that was than the 16 Pro 5X. And, you know, if you if you looked at the teardowns and see the difference in the size of the sensor on the 5X versus the 8X lens, you know, oh, this makes sense now uh but even even just looking at the sensor size it's still pretty shocking i took this picture several times like is this wrong is it out of focus am i are the settings wrong and like i said this is the worst case scenario it's dim lighting it's indoors but the the noise was out of control and the 8x just looks so much better uh so i you know obviously like i said it's nothing compared to the 1x but i was thoroughly impressed with the 17 pros 4x optical 8x sensor crop lens and I can't wait to have a camera like it on my phone next year.

1:54:46A couple of quick notes about this image. I have problems here. Number one, I forgot that Tina went to bad tech. She could have gone to Virginia Tech, but she went to Georgia Tech. I'm very disappointed. Number two, I'm even more disappointed with you because you know how so many people, I feel like we just went through this recently, how so many people can see curly quotes and straight quotes just drive them crazy. I don't have the problem. Straight quotes don't bother me at all. You know what bothers me? and actual letter X instead of the multiplication sign drives me batty. You're going to have to live with it because the multiplication symbol, lots of fonts looks weird.

1:55:21Sorry. It drives me batty and I'm disappointed in you. I am disappointed in you. I thought you would have handled this better, but here we are. You fought me on the curly quotes in the titles and you're complaining about the X versus multiplication sign. I'm telling you, the multiplication sign is weird in so many different fonts. I just don't trust it. Yeah. Anyway, the telephoto lens is a nice upgrade and I'm happy to have it. Again, it is still an optical compromise, but it is substantially less compromised than the previous ones have been. So that's great. Before we move off cameras, the selfie camera.

1:55:53I don't take a tremendous amount of selfies, but a lot of times, you know, I am a religious, if you will, day one user. I think they're a former sponsor, but I use day one all the time. I try to make sure I make at least one entry of what I've done every single day. and oftentimes that involves a picture of like the family or family and friends eating and i will typically do that with the selfie camera and i'll just hold it up high and try to get everyone in the shot and i've gotten pretty good at that over the years because i do it semi-often but there the images in years past up until this phone have always been pretty bad like they're they're serviceable they're not they're not unusable but they're not great and uh we went I am happy to report my long national nightmare is over instead of the nearest Shake Shack now being, or instead of it being like 15 to 20 minutes away, it's like 10 minutes away.

1:56:44And I'm very excited about this because a new one opened. And I took a selfie of myself and some friends that were all out to eat and the family. And this selfie picture looks incredible compared to the way the old ones looked. So I am really excited about that camera as well. yeah and it's i haven't had a lot of chances with i literally have taken one selfie since i got the phone but but yeah it does look like a pretty big upgrade um yeah otherwise battery life again i've only had it for a few days seems good so far um the orange it's a good orange yeah i'm really happy with it it's it is a bold color choice and you know i i did it i did think like i wonder if i'm going to be this happy with this you know every day of the at least year i'm going to have this phone.

1:57:32But I think, yes, I think I am. And I'm ready for this. I do worry a little bit about scratches over time. But again, like, it's fine. I buy my phones to use them, not to preserve them forever. So like, I will take whatever whatever happens to it, you know, scratch wise. It does, especially the orange, it does draw a decent amount of attention. But I think that's and I don't love that kind of attention. But I expect that's only because this is like the first week it's out. And I'm sure there will be so many of these out in the wild, you know, by next week. that I'm sure that, you know, over the coming weeks, this will no longer be a noteworthy visual thing that people will ask me about.

1:58:07But, you know, that is something like if you try to be discreet, you know, out in the world, this is not the phone to get, you know, or at least get the silver or blue one. But otherwise, I'm very happy with it. One thing I noticed about the orange at the store was that the, so that the orange, you know, the orange case is anodized orange aluminum. And then there's the back panel that is glass or ceramic shield, whatever. um and if you put the camera or the phone flat on the table screen down and look at it from directly above the back panel matches the orange of the anodized aluminum very very well it's not obviously it's two different materials it's glass whatever and aluminum and they look different the aluminum is more like metal flakes sparkly in car parlance or whatever and the and the glass back is not but the colors are matched as well as you could hope to match them kind of like those old things that used to calibrate your tv and like make this green thing match the green background right yep but but the second you look not dead on at the back yep that glass panel is no longer the same color as the case and they can't help it because it's just the way the light glints off the materials now that's not bad it looks kind of like a creamsicle but basically the back panel gets lighter the more you tilt it it's so much so that at certain angles the back panel looks practically white next to the uh orange case so be aware of that go to the store and check these out it's not that the back panel gets lighter when you tilt it's the aluminum gets darker or whatever's happening the the contrast between them increases dramatically which is really interesting because it's so clear that they color match them exactly dead on and not exactly not dead on yeah and i think and maybe this like having the having the the glass ish inset maybe that kind of shows why they didn't make bold colors of the previous designs of phones because it doesn't work that well on that on that kind of material i think didn't they do like one really deep red uh glass back phone i think they can do dark colored glass they just didn't want to well maybe anyway very very happy with the orange um and i do think like so i i i have my my nomad leather back i have it for my 16 pro which is now in a box waiting to go back to apple um and i i tried putting it on the 17 pro by just cutting off the top of the back because oh my god like where like you know just right below the mag save i just cut it across so it's and now it's like a flat cut across the top so it can fit below the camera mesa and it doesn't quite fit because the actual like too much of the leather back hangs off the bottom of the phone because the alignment of the circle has actually moved down on the phone back um but i have been using it that way for a few days to see how it feels and it feels great so i'm you know once i get my my real one is scheduled to arrive early next week.

2:00:49So I'll have a report on how much I enjoy the new leatherbacks. But I think this is going to be a nice combo. And certainly, I think the phone looks cool with the black leatherback. I originally had ordered the brown, but I decided to go black because the reality is that the iPhone is black and orange already because the screen is black and the camera lenses on the back are black. So it's already black and orange. So you might think brown would go better with orange but i think in practice i think black's going to also be a really nice option so i don't think brown goes better with orange i think you need a neutral color with that orange probably yeah because that's you know that's the other thing like orange having a bright color like this it's actually going to be fairly challenging to pair a lot of accessories with it um and i think it's one of the things you kind of have to see things in real life to know how they work together um and you know even though brown is just desaturated orange um that it could be challenging to pair those so anyway good luck with that but yeah that's it that's all i got for the pro so far love the pro um the air i find it so disappointing i might actually return it wow a couple of comments in the air uh one thing to note about it is both you noted and i noted we're not big phone people so the thing about the phone feeling too wide for us we just don't like big phones period so if you like big phones that may be a plus for you and not a minus i know a lot of people do like big phones and so you know there's that second thing is why is the air so big why did they make it big um the i would love to see the math on this of someone who actually knows these numbers but i would imagine that the back of the envelope math says that So every, you know, every little bit that you make the phone wider gives you enough additional battery that it makes up for the new pixels you have to light up.

2:02:30because I think the screen technology, especially the ones that drop down to one Hertz with like modern OLEDs are such that the bigger you make that phone, the better the battery life. Like, in other words, you don't, you don't, the battery outruns the screen. And so to get acceptable battery life, which seems like the air has acceptable battery life out of the air, you kind of have to make it essentially this size, because if you made it smaller, yes, you're having a smaller screen, but you're also getting much less battery. And now you're sacrificing battery life because the screen you sacrifice doesn't make up for the battery that you sacrificed and so i think when people say this is the future of the phone i hope what they're envisioning well two things i hope what they're envisioning is hey wouldn't it be great if the something with 17 pro features and 17 pro battery life was as thin as the air but not as wide for the people who don't like big phones uh that's that would be cool um you know in terms of like hitting the screen with the uh the fleshy parts of your hands overlapping since most people use cases i imagine it's not that much of an issue but honestly i have that issue with phones in cases sometimes so i'm not sure what the solution is there to bring back bezels we'll see if we ever end up with that thing and by the way the rumor is that the uh 20th anniversary phone is going to have screens that wrap around the edges so they're going to have to do some kind of like uh you know advanced uh touch rejection like they do with like uh palm rejection on the the uh i think they still already have that in ios anyway i'm not sure how it's tuned these days but there is code that rejects your touches if it thinks they're accidental touches both on ipads and on iphones i believe so hopefully they work on that uh and the other thing obviously that everyone's talking about which is true and we kind of alluded to before talking about uh making the thing thin enough for the usbc port when apple comes up with their foldable phone all the lessons they learned about how to make thin things with the air will be used there and people like oh the folding phone is going to be two errors put together geez i hope not because modern folding phones are thinner than the air in the two halves because you have two whole halves to get together like i mean if apple's first folding phone is the thickness of two errors put together that's going to be a pretty thick folding foam when it comes out next year so i hope the two halves of the folding phone are each thinner than the air or at least one of them is thinner i don't know if they would make it asymmetrical or not but keep that in mind but yeah so like i think the air is an important design experiment it will work for a lot of people oh and the other thing is uh so many people when you know i've talked to in the real world and seen other people interviewed about them they don't ever change cameras on their phone they just use what they think what you know maybe they don't but they pinch to zoom yeah then maybe they don't realize that they're switching to macro when they go up close and like oh i never change cameras like they never tap like the 2x 4x 8x thing they always just use 1x but even if you just use 1x when you put the camera real close it switches for you in its default mode to the macro thing which is using the ultra wide um but anyway i think a lot of people will be satisfied and happy with the air but it is a compromise and these are the compromises and keep that in mind and and i think what you said about it feeling weird to have something that thin i don't think the air is at the threshold where it's too thin and it feels uncomfortable i still think for both of us most of the issue is the width i really do think if i had something the size of a 16 or a 17 that was that thin i would enjoy it but please do go to the store and try it and see how it feels i mean i and i get the falling in love with the thing because when i was there i had no interest in this phone it it was more attractive to me in person kind of like a two-seat sports car was more attractive to me in person than logic would dictate and then how i thought i would like it because it is very pretty and it does feel very cool um yeah i did like it but i also would not buy it and if you do return it you should get a 17 as a test device because it's really good fun yeah because like honestly like i don't i think my the question remains and i think we'll see this over the coming year and you know what happens that you know how many more errors do they end up making in the line does it stick around does it go away i don't think we know yet how willing are people to buy a phone for love that that that suffers in the practical side of things you know you you see that in certain products people are more willing than others but i think the nature of phones is such that like the sacrifices that you have to make for the air are things that people do seemingly care a lot about namely battery life and camera like those are things that people do like a lot about their phones and typically it seems like phone sales are often driven by those very strongly well i think the biggest factor is whether the consumer whether the consumer that is considering the phone has been burned before in their life buying a phone for love right if they're if you're only an iphone customer maybe you bought a 13 mini because you just loved it but then the battery life was terrible and it spoiled you but like but if you've only been an iphone customer and you've only bought the mainline phones maybe you've never bought a phone because of like you just love how it looks So maybe this will be your first.

2:07:11I think when you get it, then you may say, oh, actually, it wasn't worth it for the sacrifice in battery life or I missed the camera or whatever. And that will change your opinion going forward. I just wonder how many people in the market for iPhones have never been burned by a phone that they bought because they thought it looked real cool. And if there's enough of them, the Air would be a great first phone to learn about those compromises. Because if you just buy mainstream phones, like, you know, the people who are like, they become like, like people who live through the depression who are like saving string and stuff like that.

2:07:38They're like, give me the phone that's the size of brick because I know that I need all the battery in the world. I need a battery pack. I need a battery. My phone just needs to be a gigantic, huge brick-like battery because their entire history with phones is my phone is out of battery. My phone is out of battery. So they just, they get in this mindset where they need massive battery. Those people are never going to look at the air. They just look at it and they say, nope, not a brick, not enough battery. I don't care how it works. I don't care if it's magic. I'm not even going to look at it, right?

2:08:02But if you've never been burned and you see this beautiful phone and you don't know whether or not you're going to be disappointed with one camera, you don't know whether the battery life is going to be, you're going to buy that as your first mistake phone, your first, like, you know, the phone you bought, you know, impulsively bought. And presumably Apple knows this. Again, looking at the numbers on launch week, 10 % of the allocation of what they were manufacturing were errors. But that's launch week. So this phone is going to have to, once the early adopters clear out and regular people start wandering into the store and looking at the phones on the table over the course of the next year, how many of them will be lured over by the beautiful air?

2:08:41And how many of them will go to it and say, I've been there before. I got burned by that. I dated a musician once. I already did that once. Sorry, musicians. I'm trying to think of an example. It's hard not to insult somebody, but like, have you been burned before? because you should do it once. You should date a musician at least once. You feel better musicians? I'm trying to get you on dates here. They seem like they don't need the help. Yeah, because even you, you bought a Mini, right, Marco? Yes. I used a Mini for a whole year. You've been burned once before. I wouldn't say, I didn't feel burned by it, I should say.

2:09:14But you wouldn't buy one again, though. No, we had our time together and I don't regret it. Right, and now you get the air. You're like, oh, I know this feeling. No, thanks. Yeah, I mean, the Mini was, the Mini was great for its time. I believe the Mini preceded the Pro and I went back up for the proness of the Pro. And I got the 12 Mini. I didn't get the 13 Mini because I believe the 13 was the first Pro. I think I've lost track. Anyway, yeah, but I think with the Air, the trade-offs with the Air are significantly more extreme than they were with the Mini. And I think the love will also be significantly more extreme.

2:09:51So that, like, I think we will see people in non-trivial numbers buying the mini because they're buying the air because they just love it so much especially if it becomes like an influencer thing like as you know like a fancy tote bag or like because it does have that not just the fashion in terms like oh it doesn't it comes in boring colors right but it is very shiny it is a shiny attractive sort of luxury looking object i can't predict whether it's going to like catch on and all the big influencers are going to be like well of course i have my bedazzled iphone air because everybody does like that could happen with the air but all this is going to do is lure more people into making their first uh mistake again i'm not saying it's a mistake the air is a good like like it's at the top of the show i'm not saying there's no reason to buy an air there's tons of reasons to buy an air like it's just a question of whether enough people are going to be happy enough with it to make it sustained because apple has had real problems with this part of the lineup with all of its products putting out products that we all think make perfect sense and have you know are great for certain people but Apple gives up on them.

2:10:50I'm not saying Apple's right. I'm saying Apple's probably wrong. I think they should still make the Plus phones, but the numbers don't bear out. They say it's not worth it to us to sell X million phones. It needs to be 3X million phones. Yeah. A couple additional thoughts about the 17 Pro. I really do like this phone a lot. I really like the cameras. I already talked about the selfie camera. I like that maybe I'm bananas, but I feel like the sides are a little bit more rounded than they were last year. The sides are still flat. It's not like an iPhone 6, but the rounded corners have a higher radius than they used to.

2:11:23Yes. Exactly. And I actually think that makes quite a bit of difference in how pleasurable the hand feel is. I like it. I do. Yeah, I do too. I have had a couple of weird issues, and one of them very well, well, both of them could be my fault. And I've jumped on enough swords this episode that I don't think these are my fault, but they might be. first of all i have a carplay wireless carplay dongle that i've used for many many years probably almost eight years now or something like that this there are many newer versions of the same dongle made by the same people i think it's car link it or something like that i will probably put a forget to put a link in the show notes but it's something like that and anyways i've been using it for years and i don't know if the dongle is upset or what's going on but i feel like or i can tell you it's not i feel like the 17 pro frequently loses the connection to the dongle now again it's not first party it's its own weird hack but it's been a consistently working hack with every other phone i've had and i know that some people have been seeing other wi-fi related issues to that that have nothing to do with carplay so i wonder if maybe this is something that's wrong with the phone or perhaps wrong with the software um i'm gonna i'll probably end up using this as an excuse to get a vastly newer and presumably upgraded, um, wireless CarPlay dongle, but we'll see what happens.

2:12:43Uh, but if you have similar issues and especially if you have a fix, let me know on like Mastodon or something. Additionally, uh, if I were to go and look at the phone right now, I have John Syracuse, a red badge over settings and it says renew Apple care coverage. If I tap on that, it's giving me the chance to, uh, or every Apple care plan provides one stop service or Apple, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can choose AppleCare one in$19.99 a month, or I can choose AppleCare plus with theft and lost from$13.99 a month. And then I can elect to do$13.99 a month or$139.99 a year until canceled. This shouldn't be interesting or news, except that during the purchase process, I already purchased the$140 package for one year of AppleCare plus.

2:13:27So what is going on like i have i've been emailed the proof of coverage thing that they give you what is happening why am i getting prompted to do this i don't understand and for whatever it's worth i have the last few years um when i've bought apple care either for my phone or for tiff's phone i have bought it in the purchase process of buying the phone and every time i would get that email like the like the day after saying like that didn't go through sorry when the phone arrives, do it on the phone. And so this time I just, I didn't even try. I just did it on the phone when the phone arrived and that, and it worked fine.

2:14:02So that's what I, that's what I should do for next year. However, I'm almost positive. I have already been dinged the$140 on my credit card for this service and I have the proof of coverage. So I don't know what's going on here, but it's not making me confident at all. Just dismiss that and go to settings, general, Apple care, or warranty. And you should see your phone listed in the list of covered products. Hold on. Slow down. Settings. General. Let's do this live. Apple care and warranty. Wait for the spinner. Thinking, thinking, thinking. All right. This device. KC phone 17. AppleCare Plus with theft and loss.

2:14:32There you go. You got it. So what the what? That's just bad. You know, they don't have they're not checking for that before I show you a thing, but you can hit the like dismiss and don't show me this again. There is a button for that. It should make the badge go away if you're lucky. All right. Let's try that and see what happens. Well, thank you, John. I appreciate it. But yeah, very, very frustrating. More frustrating is the CarPlay thing which could be the dongle i mean it is possible it's the dongle yeah like i said there have been reports of uh issues with the iphone 17s with the new n1 chip with doing wi-fi in particular car play stuff but they're still kind of scattered my life's 17 pro hasn't had any issues yet but who knows it could be an issue with the n1 it could be issue with drivers it could be issue with the ios uh 26 itself we'll find out all right so we're running really long and sorry not sorry, but also on the list of things that we will discuss, but we're going to have to save it for next week.

2:15:21Tech woven cases, silicon cases, potentially iPhone 17 regular AirPods Pro 3. I was able to use those on a flight literally the day after I got them, less than 24 hours after I got them, maybe even less than 12. Anyway, so I have thoughts about that. iOS 26. When I was at St. Jude, I asked a bunch of regular humans instead of nerds what they thought. So I have some reports about that. Also, Erin finally got upgraded today when she got her new phone, so she has some thoughts as well. So we'll talk about all that. We do desire to talk about it, but we're trying to have a less than seven-hour show, so we'll talk about that all next week.

2:15:58Yeah. Thank you to our sponsors this week. DeleteMe, 1Password, and Skims. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Anthropik's$1.5 billion book piracy settlement. So tune in to hear that. You can become a member for a lot less money than that. ATV.FM slash join. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.

2:16:41do 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.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 G-Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long So I have to do a quick ode to a device that I think most people who are computer nerds would be surprised to hear that I would do an ode to such a device. It is a printer. Oh, is it the brother printer that everyone and their mother has?

2:17:49No, it's the one that Marco has said wonderful things about for years. But he can say wonderful things about it again because not everyone has heard those shows. The giant one? Yeah. The giant one. So I will just go over quickly. The giant printer is the HP Color LaserJet M553. I was inspired to get this printer nine years ago, I believe, or nine or ten years ago. Okay, I've been a laser printer person for a very long time because laser printers are just awesome for everything except photos. But everything else they're amazing at. And since good photo printers are amazing at photos but terrible for everything else, including text or return labels or anything else that people tend to print, I love having, honestly, one of each.

2:18:35I have a photo inkjet, and I have a big laser printer. The problem with laser printers, generally speaking, like home laser printers, they've gotten very cheap and all right over the years, but they are just all right typically. They are oftentimes very slow to get started, like on that first page out. They're a little bit slow on that because they have to warm up and just start the entire world before you get that first page out. And their toner cartridges, while they're better than home inkjet printers, those toners are still pretty small and you still have to replace them a lot. And they're a little bit finicky with some of that stuff.

2:19:12So anyway, I bought this giant HP M553. I got it on sale at some point in the past, like almost a decade ago. And it's like a computer lab printer. And what is so satisfying about a giant pro-business laser printer like this is that you can hit print at your desk. And when you stand up and walk over to the printer, it's there waiting for you. It's done. They're so fast. and I had this printer for almost a decade and I have never changed a toner cartridge. Really? Yes. Because the cartridges are made, the cartridges for one of these, the printer when I bought it was like$600, which was on sale.

2:20:02I think they're usually closer to$1 ,000 in this kind of capability range. But the toners for them are like$200 to$300 each. And that's, you know, the black and then the three colors. So to buy a whole set of toner for this printer would have been like a grand. So it's substantial, but those also are made to print like, you know, two or three thousand pages. And I just, I never went through them all. And so this printer has been amazing. However, this printer has been moving with me throughout all the logistics of changing houses over the last couple of years. We had some apartments in the middle where we stayed briefly or like a rental house that we had to move into briefly while things were getting renovated.

2:20:51Like we've this printer has moved around a lot. And the last year it started getting a little bit flaky. Certain times like you'd send certain print jobs to it and it would just crash and reboot and not print it. And sometimes you like certain PDFs would be like it just you'd never get it to print. You'd have to like print it to a different PDF. And like it was a whole thing. Then we started getting some parts going a little bit bad on it. Like there's some giant transfer belt that runs through the whole printer. And if things go wrong there, you start getting like giant streaks across the pages you're printing.

2:21:23And I tried taking it out and cleaning it. And eventually it was it became apparent I needed a new one of those. That's like$400. and then I ran out of yellow toner and that's$250 and I'm like, you know what? With all this stuff, I think it's time that I replace this printer. After almost 10 years, I had one bad year at the end. I'm like, that's really good. So I feel like I got my money's worth especially considering how much I moved it around. It should have broken long ago and it didn't. I look around the printer landscape and I look at what's available now and you start doing the math. okay this has this toner cartridges and that you know that's rated for this many pages and you divide it out like what are you paying per page and you start looking around not a lot else out there makes a lot of sense to get almost everything on the market was for my purposes worse than what i bought almost a decade ago and if you look at hp's current lineup almost every entry in that current lineup is worse you know bigger plasticier smaller cartridges that cost more money and then you see that they seem to have replaced my m553 from a decade ago with the m554 which is almost the identical printer there is almost nothing different about it at all they upgraded some of the internals they upgraded the screen like but it looks almost identical and in fact because of my good experience with the 553 the 554 is the one i bought for the restaurant this spring because we needed one there and we print a lot of stuff at the restaurant and you know from menus to you know just other invoices we print a lot of stuff at a restaurant and so i bought the 554 for that and it is perfect it's everything i wanted it to be because it's just a slightly modernized 553 to the point where even like the the extra paper tray that you can buy for the bottom of it it's the same trade between the two printers like that's how little they have changed and so i got myself that for home i have i have replaced the 553 with its exact clone basically and i think it's remarkable that i had i had a printer for almost 10 years that i liked so much that i just bought the same basically the same one again there is no I've never had an experience with a printer that good any other time in my entire computing life, nor have I heard of anyone else ever having one.

2:23:56No one loves their printer that much. But I'm telling you, if you get this printer, you will. Incredible. So that's my experience, except I usually have to go on eBay because they don't have – they don't make the thing anymore. It's nice that they still make it. I guess they probably make printers for longer periods of time because there's just not much innovation in that space except for how to screw you out of more money by making you subscribe to ink or whatever. Yeah. And to be clear, this printer was like$900. Now, granted, I bought the first one for like six something. That was almost 10 years ago.

2:24:23There's some inflation. That one was on sale. This one wasn't. But also, when I'm looking at putting in$600 or$700 worth of parts to the old one, or I can get a new one with brand new full toners for$900, it's like, yeah, that's actually... And if I can expect to get that decent of a service life out of it, that's great. And I ran the numbers too. If I bought one of their newer models that's a smaller volume rated printer, what do I get toner wise with that? Basically what it comes down to is the moment you have to buy another toner cartridge for any other alternative out there, you'll come out ahead just having bought this one in the first place.

2:25:05I replaced my dehumidifier with the exact same model because I couldn't find a better one. I just replaced my toaster with the exact same model because I know I couldn't find a better one. uh i would keep buying these stupid mice on ebay because they don't make it anymore but if they did i'd be buying new ones uh i'm very familiar with this phenomenon i mean i when i've looked to get a new printer i talked about this on that show when i was discussing my new printer i would love to get something like yours i just don't have the space for it and my wife demands a scanner uh as part of it too which it makes you know so anyway i've got an epson ego tank thing with a scanner on top and you know we print so rarely that i don't mind how terrible the printing is and we use the scanner probably more often than that.

2:25:43But yeah, maybe when I get a bigger place someday or have more room or take over one of the kids' rooms someday, I'll get one of these big printers because I do wish I could have a big business-style laser printer, even if it's just black and white. But not there yet. But I'm glad they still make your model, or the one number higher. More companies should do that. When you have a product that works well and there's nothing really to change in this space, why not just keep making it, Microsoft slash Incase? Yeah. I'm glad you're happy and I'm glad you could find a new old printer