707: Haunting the Campus Like a Ghost

19:50The Mac Studio is surely the same, but I believe those were all PCI-5, so it would be weird if the Studio was PCI-Gen 6. When we get those into our hands, we can confirm this, but Apple made a little mistake there, it seems like.

20:04John Siracusa:All right, John, can you remind me, what is a Siri blob? If you're using Golden Gate on a Mac, you will know the Siri blob because you'll just be using your computer, and your pointer will be over some text, a text field, or I think sometimes even like just static text that happens to be selectable. And all of a sudden, a tiny circular Siri blob, you know, the gray, new gray, marble looking Siri orb that has a glowy thing inside it, that will appear floating next to where your pointer is. And you're like, what the hell is that? And you'll move your cursor and it will disappear. And you'll see it again.

20:36You'll be just using your computer and then the blob will appear. You're like, what is that? It's like the Siri, like, click on this and it will help you write whatever you're about to write. But like, you're not even going to write, you haven't even placed the insertion point yet. It's just like, hey, is there some text near here that you might possibly be able to put your insertion point into? Here's a Siri blob. It's annoying. And last episode, we had some feedback about how to supposedly turn that off, but it was minutes before the show was on the air and I hadn't actually tried it. So now I have a more precise instructions on how to do it and I have some results of trying it.

21:07So it is on Golden Gate. System settings, sorry. screen time content and privacy and then when you go into screen time and then content and privacy on that screen there's an item called content and privacy with a toggle switch on it you gotta turn that switch on and then after you turn that switch on scroll down on that same page find the siri line item click into that and there you will see the thing that says writing assistance and you want turn that switch off and i tried this and it mostly banished the blobs but i think not everywhere maybe like if an app was still running when i turned the switch off like put it this way i'm seeing fewer blobs but i'm not convinced that it turned it off entirely but i have tried it and again we're only on beta 8 so maybe it's buggy or whatever but i'll keep you updated on this because you may not care about the siri blob now but when you upgrade to mac os 27 you're going to care

21:58Marco Arment:about the siri blob yeah they're everywhere and in addition to the uh the siri menu item and context menus oh yeah you can't get rid of that seems oh geez it's all over the place there's these little did you try the the siri blob fix marco no not yet i'll try it so that we can compare results because like i said i think it has mostly banished them but i think i've still seen one or two you can't banish the one in the context menus i think uh speaking of ghi rambo from last week i think he looked into it to see if there was like some private api or private not private you have a private like internal apple feature key or something to turn off and he couldn't find one so i'm hoping somebody does or i'm hoping they backtrack on that what we're talking about is that when you pull up a context menu in golden gate there is like a new bar at the top of the pop-up context menu for like hey and you might want to do siri stuff here and maybe i would do and maybe i don't but i sure as hell don't want to see that on top of every single context menu

22:47John Siracusa:that pops up yeah all right uh john you are i don't know how to introduce this i totally blue screen there's something i forgot to say last episode last episode of the mac studios were introduced and i talked about what i was going to buy and what i had ended up ordering okay And one thing I just simply forgot to say, which I think is important to note, is how happy I was that the Mac Studios were introduced last week or whatever, because I fully believed that they weren't going to be introduced until an October event and they weren't going to ship until December and I wouldn't have mine until 2027.

23:20and so for all my hemming and hawing and getting my tied me over mac and all that other stuff i am extremely happy and relieved that they announced the new mac studio in end of august beginning of september and not at a date where i wouldn't get one until january so i just wanted to express my gratitude there because that was my that was honestly that was my overriding feeling when these things were announced like i cannot believe it like it's it's the first good news i've had of apple in so long like it's always like oh there's more delays and the new series not ready and RAM costs more and storage costs, which is just a bit bad news after bad news for like the past year, especially for me, because I'm waiting for a new computer.

23:55Oh, the Mac Pro is canceled. Just bad, bad, bad. Finally, one thing went my way and I just wanted to acknowledge that a good thing happened and I was happy about it. And I am happy for you. Let's talk about a bad thing that might happen to me.

24:06John Siracusa:Yes. So you had mentioned that you were planning or I guess you have bought a four terabyte SSD, which you're already bursting at the seams of your existing one. And you had made a mention that hey maybe you'll move your photo library to an external ssd surely that will solve all your problems right right got a lot of questions from people saying can you do that can you put your photo library on an external disk in apple photos does it allow you to do that uh and so there are some answers so first of all from apple they have a document called a text support document called move your photos library to save space on your mac and the relevant text is make sure the your external storage device such as the usb drive or thunderbolt drive is formatted for mac either apfs format or mac os extended journal format and the published date on this is june 16th 2026 so it's not an ancient document okay so they tell and there's more to the document they tell you here's make sure you do this make sure you do that here's how you do it blah blah blah so apple seems to say this is a supported configuration now apple says a lot of things and just because the tech note says published june 16th 2026 that could be an eight year old tech note that someone fixed a typo in in June.

25:12So I don't know. But then a lot because lots of people like you can't do that at all. Other people like I tried that and it didn't work. The most concrete thing I've seen feedback on this so far is from Lawrence Feynman, who says, I use an external drive for my photos library on numerous desktop Intel Macs. It worked OK. This is no longer the case. Apple's enhanced spotlight based photo search only indexes the system photo library when stored on internal Mac storage. Non-system libraries and any library on external storage are excluded from indexing so this makes some sense to me because we talked about how like apple intelligence wouldn't work if you booted mac os from an external drive not sense in that i understand the technical reason for it we've speculated but we don't actually know or i don't know anyway um but with like the not ai power but anyway the the fancier spotlight search where you can type in like pictures of fences in photos and it will find you pictures of fences supposedly if you have your uh photos library on an external drive and it is your system photos library you cannot use that search people feature now this is not a deal breaker to me because i have another computer two feet away from me that has the photos library on the main internal drive and i can do the search there if i really want to i can also do the search on my phone where it also works somehow if it really doesn't work on one of my photos libraries external drive i'm going to be annoyed and i'll probably file feedback to say hey what the hell make it work i don't understand why this would be the case but it is not a deal breaker otherwise if it works on an external drive as apple's document says it does i'll be okay and i by the way i have that external drive it's sitting on my desk right now i plugged it in and tried it it works fine it's just sitting here waiting for my computer to arrive hopefully on september 22nd

26:46Marco Arment:i actually have some additional info on this particular topic about photo libraries on external drives um because it just so happened by coincidence that this past week i was finally So on my travel laptop, it has a one terabyte internal drive. And because I'm an app developer, and Xcode keeps stomping all over the drive and dropping 80 gig directories everywhere and stuff like that. Ever since this beta season with Golden Gate, I keep running out of disk space. And I have iCloud Photos on there. My photo library doesn't fit, obviously, but I just have it on optimized storage. And it's just my travel laptop.

27:25Marco Arment:Who cares? A long time ago, I discovered that if you put your photo library on a size-constrained Sparks bundle file, you could do what Apple should have done years ago, which is you could give it a specific size limit. Because optimized storage does not mean you get to choose a size limit. It means Apple tries to automatically determine the size limit. What this means in practice is you're constantly running out of disk space and you have no control over it. And so what I decided, you know, the modern version of that, a little bit better than a sparse bundle, is using an additional APFS volume.

28:08Marco Arment:Because APFS allows you to split your internal drive into multiple volumes and they can be dynamically sized or you can tell one restricted to this size. Which, by the way, I learned that you can't do after you've created the volume. You have to delete the entire volume and everything on it and recreate the entire volume and move everything back to it if you actually want to change the size quota of it, which is ridiculous. But anyway, speaking of speaking of changing sizes, by the way, I was doing the thing that you described earlier where you make a disc image and put your photo library on it for my.

28:42It's complicated because my wife has the real photo libraries. That's the one with originals. But I have the same photo library because everything is shared now. Anyway, on my personal account, I have optimized storage turned on because that's not the real copies of stuff. Even though on the same computer, my wife's account, there's all the permanent copies. Anyway, and I was using a disk image and I picked a size for it. And I found out what happens if you pick a size that Photos decides. Yeah, that's just not big enough for me. Because Photos will throw up a thing and say, yeah, I've been using this disk image, but I've just decided I'm not syncing anymore because there's not enough room.

29:10I'm like, well, evict some stuff, man. It's optimized storage. He's like, no, I'm just not doing it. So I had to resize the image. And I can tell you, you can resize a disk image, unlike an APFS volume after the fact. So I expanded my disk image to be a little bit bigger. So that's the one advantage, I think, of putting your photos library on a confined disk image is that if and when Photos throws up his hands and says, no, it's too small, I can't do anything anymore, you can't expand it to give more breathing room. Because like Marco said, if you just give it unlimited space, it will fill your entire drive and you have no space for anything.

29:38Marco Arment:Yeah. And there's all these features in macOS that have purgeable disk space that try to be automatic. And when you need space, we'll reclaim it for you. They don't work at all. Like they are awful. Every one of those features fails in multiple ways. Like the iCloud Drive ones or, you know, store your desktop and documents in iCloud Drive. All that means is you will always be out of disk space. And also none of the files you create will ever actually be there, including ones that you just created or were just working with. Like every one of those features, like all of those features are better off not being used or being somehow worked around in other ways.

30:16Marco Arment:but anyway this feature in particular of you can put your photo library on another apfs volume that is size limited so i did that i made it i gave it a 128 gig volume out of my terabyte because it was it was well into the 300s before that i was like i don't need that much on here and so anyway 128 case i can say is enough for it to sync it is fine it is syncing just fine however However, this library isn't searchable in Spotlight due to its location. So even another volume on your internal SSD, it won't do it even then. So John, A, this is our moment to be loud and to try to convince them otherwise.

31:01But B, John, this is your next app. Someone's already made that. I think they have, doesn't the Iris app index your photo library? No, that's not what I'm saying. It's an app. I paid for it a while ago and I've already forgotten the name for it, but I think it's called Iris. I will look into it. It is. Because when I'm in this situation, I will look for solutions.

31:18Marco Arment:No, no, no. That's not your app. Your next app is fooling the system photo library into thinking it's talking to its own volume. And it's actually being proxied off to some other drive. That's such a you app. It's about file systems. It's about saving disk space. Like that's so that's right in your wheelhouse and photos. You love photos. I think somebody also did that. Didn't we talk about that when we were talking about booting Mac OS from an external drive and convincing someone did a hack to convince Mac OS that your external drive is really an internal drive? And I said, I didn't want to go anywhere near that.

31:53And that wasn't even something I wrote. So that's a little bit too sketchy for me.

31:57Marco Arment:Oh, I know there's no way you would do this, but it would be so amazing if you did. Like that's and it fits. It fits your your, you know, all of your attributes in so many ways. Like it is super nerdy. It has to do with these low level like file system access things that nobody would trust anyone else but you to do correctly. You would be incredibly stressed out about it all the time and you would be incredibly careful. I don't trust myself to do that correctly. Right. But and it would have a relatively small market that would be very difficult to reach. But it would be high value to those people who it's for.

32:31I'm more likely to just spend my time filing feedbacks and complaining about it on the show until it gets fixed a decade from now.

32:36Marco Arment:plus think about like talk about a growth business right now something that saves major internal SSD I already made an app that saves disk space that's what you should have done you should have run hyperspace on your 1 terabyte drive when you're running out of space that's not going to save me from a 300 gig photo library you don't know until you try it run it make sure you follow my tips for finding more space if you don't find a lot it shows a find more link that I hope people click on

33:03John Siracusa:I'm sure nobody's ever seen that link no no because i forget what it is but i set a threshold and like if it doesn't seem like it finds a lot of savings it has some tips for finding more which is basically uh allow it to scan more places and allow it to uh find to scan all file types oh i can't scan uh volume

33:18Marco Arment:is owned by another user the volume slash is owned by another user you can't scan it but it's just telling you you're not going to be able to uh why can't i scan my my macintosh hd john should i i pick a different so you just do my home directory yeah i mean you didn't read the message no one reads dialog boxes dialog box doesn't say you can't scan it says hey i'm just letting you know the directory you picked is owned by another user because it is slash is owned by root or whatever uh and so anything i find in there that's not owned by you i won't be able to reclaim but obviously it will find things that are owned by you and mostly they're in your home directory so yeah pick your home directory you saved me 600 megs well check your settings now are you are you looking at all file types do you have minimum file size set do you have all the switches turned on to scan photo libraries scan libraries all that stuff you know i think maybe

34:02John Siracusa:you should just drive your computer over to john's house just turn just there's like two setting screens just flip all the switches flip flip all right yeah looking inside packages allow

34:12Marco Arment:photos allow cloud allow library and do the file types thing in the other screen where you say allow all file types allow fun yes you want that okay i should i should have put a telemetry on

34:26John Siracusa:how many people turn that off yeah you probably should have to be honest all right may we move on or are we still going to? Yes, a marco scan is going to take a while once he flips all those switches. All right, let's see. AMX and SME. So ARMS, I'm sorry, this is from Shackron. Apple's ARM architectural license requires that any extensions they create to the ISA be submitted for standardization and that they transition to the standard when released. SME is the ARM standardized version of AMX. I didn't have any way to confirm this, but I'll take Shackron's word for it. It didn't make sense. It explains the facts before us, which is they came out with AMX and that eventually Amex was sunset in exchange for SME.

35:02And maybe that's part of the deal of their license that you can make up all sorts of weird extensions, but you have to work to get them standardized. And when they are, you got to switch to the standard. And that seems like something ARM would put in their contracts because they don't want a sort of a forking and bifurcation of their instruction set as everyone adds their own custom instructions.

35:18John Siracusa:All right, I wanted to quickly re-enter Vision Pro Corner. Last, this past Friday, Apple did their first Friday night baseball that had immersive video. so you could put on your Vision Pro and you could be in Yankee Stadium. And I'm not here to pass judgment on the Yankees or the Red Sox. I'm not much of a baseball person myself, but I wanted to at least experience what this was all about. I will say there's an excellent episode of Dithering about this.

35:44Marco Arment:Can I just say, how did Ben Thompson not watch this?

35:47John Siracusa:Don't even get me started.

35:49Marco Arment:Oh, I haven't heard that Dithering episode. He didn't even watch it? No. No, but he was basically like, yeah, this means I was right. I don't even need to watch it.

35:55John Siracusa:Like, yes, you definitely need to watch it.

35:57Marco Arment:You absolutely do. This is what you've been talking about for years.

36:01John Siracusa:I don't think Ben listens to our show, but he needs to watch it.

36:03Marco Arment:And he probably is right. But of all people, that's like if Apple released a new Mac Pro and John's like, I don't need to buy it.

36:11John Siracusa:Meh. Yeah. So to give a little bit more context. So there have been other immersive things, many of them. And Marco was on the journey with me of watching most of them, at least at first. And then Marco kind of gave up on it. And I've been continuing with it. And one of the things that Marco and Ben, Ben more than Marco, but both of them seem to think very strongly, is that when you're in an immersive environment, and to recap, that means you can twist your head and your perspective will change, right? Well, Ben especially seemed to think that you really should not be cutting to different cameras barely ever.

36:46John Siracusa:And I think, Marco, you were closer to Ben's perspective, maybe not quite as hardliner.

36:50Marco Arment:No, I was totally with them in that what Apple kept producing and releasing on the Vision Pro is a lot of things that had a bunch of quick cuts. And so because you were in the environment, like you're looking at 180 degree field of view video in 3D, so you really feel like you are there. And you just kept getting teleported around almost, and it was very disorienting and hard to follow stuff. And so what Ben was saying, and I believe I've made the same case, was just have a fixed camera. Like, have a fixed camera in a good seat at an event, whether it's a sporting event or a concert or whatever, and just sit you there.

37:28Marco Arment:And don't even have, like, announcers. Like, just make it – just put you in the event, in 3D, hearing the audio of being there, looking from a fixed position. And that simulates the feeling of being there, which is amazing. And that's something that only something like the Vision Pro can do. Like you can't get that on a big TV screen. You can't get that on YouTube. Like you can only get that from the Vision Pro, which is a great way in theory to lay some groundwork that might sell some Vision Pros someday.

38:02John Siracusa:Yeah. And so with the Yankees thing, first thing I wanted to quickly call your attention to is that they have in F1 speak, they have a race in 30, which is to say they have a 10 minute recap of the game. I don't personally have any interest in watching a three-hour baseball game, particularly with the Vision Pro on my face, but they do have a 10-minute version, which I very much recommend. I think that that gives you basically the gist of it. I can also say that at one point, spoilers for a baseball game from a week and a half or half a week ago, there was a home run at about an hour and 10 minutes into the broadcast.

38:36John Siracusa:So if you wanted to just see something exciting happen, you can see that. But what was interesting about the broadcast was that generally speaking from what I saw of it, when one team was batting, you were positioned basically right in front of their dugout. And so you have a view of one side of the field, but, and I liked that a lot, but I will say when there were deep balls into outfield, maybe it's just my own eyes, but it was hard to see where they went. Now, what was nice was Apple had like a floating jumbotron and like stats board thing kind of up above the field. So you could tune into the 2d broadcast as something was happening in the distance.

39:10John Siracusa:Overall, I did very much like this. And I mostly agree that in this context for sports, I mostly agree with Ben and Marco that cutting less frequently is the correct approach. Now, I think for different sports and different fields and different arenas, cuts make more or less sense. So when there's a, you know, pop fly into the outfield, maybe it does make sense to cut to an outfield camera. And they would do that, you know, occasionally for replays. but even during the meat of the game, it would be neat to see that. I think, uh, whereas I think in the basketball presentations, it makes a lot more sense to me to just park that camera somewhere, preferably mid court and don't freaking touch it unless you're doing like a replay or something.

39:52We talked about some when we were, when I still had the Eurovision pro here and I watched that basketball game and it's the same problem you just identified. And everyone who's talked about this game has identified, which is if you have a stationary camera, uh, and you see that stationary, you see the video that stationary camera is getting in your headset. Uh, you are subject to the decreased resolution as you move towards the edges because that's just the way it is what you would want to do with current tech is you would want to have a camera like not just one camera but like a big fisheye lens on it but like a set of cameras that covers whatever the field of view is going to be even it's 180 degrees but covers it all at the maximum center resolution of the vision pro and then when you turn your head in the vision pro rather than you're just looking at the fuzzy edge of the single capture from the camera what you'd be looking at is the highest resolution center of whatever camera was facing in that direction you know what i mean so your experience as a user would same vision pro the same hardware no different hardware but what you're saying is like the video signal that is coming to you is not a single video signal that's stretched out across your field of view because when they do that when they stretch that across your field of view when you turn your head you're looking at the highest resolution part of those sensors, the highest resolution part of your eyes is looking at the lowest resolution part of the video.

41:06And that is the weakness for balls in the outfield. And as I was saying with the basketball game, oh yeah, the tip off at half court, you got a great view of that, but the baskets are both in the lowest resolution part of the field of view because they just have single cameras. So no technology change on the viewing side, same old Vision Pro, same field division, but on the recording side, they need multiple cameras that can capture the entire field of view in full resolution and then you basically do foveated streaming kind of where you like turn your head and it says oh you're looking over here now we're going to give you camera four from that same tripod that has the full resolution view of the outfield so when you look at the outfield suddenly you can see the ball when you look back to the home plate in your peripheral vision the ball is fuzzy or invisible you know what i mean but that's you know that's we don't have that yet and i know it's there's not a lot of cost to justify it but i'm saying like with current technology that's what they need to do to make this experience better and as i said when i was talking about the basketball game and i mentioned football games sport dependency is is a thing because well ben wants is because he loves live sports he wants the experience of doing live sports and lots of people like live sports and they want that experience but i'm not even sure most people would prefer live sports especially for something like the nfl because you just get such better view on television than if you're in the nosebleed seats at a stadium and i know it's a whole experience and the smell and the people and whatever but you're only getting some of that in a headset so while being like courtside in an nba game may be an unparalleled way to watch a basketball game being in the nosebleeds in an nfl game is not better than watching it on tv if you really care about what's happening in the game just because the field is so big and you're so far away from it so there's definitely a place for this but my my stance on what ben wants is you want the experience of live sports and so do a lot of other people and they should provide that but that's not the thing that every single person wants so i think apple or whoever still has to figure out okay when when for the people who don't want a live sports experience what do we give them um and for the live sports things like you should talk about this casey how you felt about they have like a screen floating in the air over the outfield like can you imagine if you could for example look to the outfield and then do a pinch gesture with your hand to magically zoom in on what you want to look out and suddenly suddenly now you have a high-res view of the right fielder nobody else does but you do like that's you know the technology is there to do much cooler things than what they have here.

43:21And same thing with the Jumbotron. Can you move it around? Can you have stats on the side like the F1 app? Like there's fertile ground for doing cool things here. It's just we're really at the baby stages of all this.

43:32John Siracusa:Yeah, and I think that there's, like you said, a lot of room for improvements. I probably would have repositioned the Jumbotron. Not to say that it needed to be repositioned, but just to make it a little more comfortable for me. Is it annoying that you couldn't move it though? Like what the hell? I wouldn't go so far as to say annoying. It was lightly off-putting. but I think what you're describing and you make a great point is you ever seen the, I want to say it's called Matterport or something like that. It's these 3D walkthroughs for real estate where they have these circles where you can click on that circle and it'll show you a different perspective of the same room.

44:05John Siracusa:Click on VR. Yes, exactly. Exactly right. But anyways, they need something like that for this where you can pinch to effectively click, if you will, on the outfield. And to your point, it'll zoom you into the outfield. But no, I think this was really, really good. I think they are making steps in the right direction. I can absolutely see that if these were teams I really cared about, this would have been an amazing experience. And you do kind of feel like you're there. I mean, for good and for better and for worse, you see over your shoulder all of the sunflower shells getting spit onto the grass from the dugout.

44:43John Siracusa:And you see the people walking in and out of the dugout and you see the the lights in yankee stadium so much clearer than when you would what you would over a tv broadcast like as someone who really enjoys live sports this is extremely cool and on dithering they made the interesting point i think they called it like they didn't they had a funny name for it that wasn't like facetime it was like share time or something like that where they were saying how cool would it be if you know say me and john could sit courtside at say the u.s open or something like that and see our uh avatars i forget what they call them now.

45:12John Siracusa:But our fake people, you know, adjacent to each other, so we could hear each other and talk to each other, but we're still watching the same live event in immersive video. And that was the point they were making on Dithering, and I could not agree more. It was still incredibly impressive. Again, I was watching it on replay, but this was available live, which is extremely cool. And I really hope they do more with this and try new experiments and continue with this. I know we got some news recently. We'll talk about it in probably over time, but we've gotten some news recently that a lot of stuff with Vision Pro is in a little bit of turmoil potentially.

45:44John Siracusa:But man, I don't put the Vision Pro on often. I know I make this speech every time. I don't put the Vision Pro on often, but every time I do, I'm like, damn, this is the future. It's just heavy.

45:55Marco Arment:And low resolution and expensive and has no software. I mean, that's the thing. I think it would be wise for Apple to keep leaning into things like this because what you know it's very very clear that the market for this kind of thing in software is basically only specialized industrial and enterprise applications like and and that is a market for sure like you can see like the history you know the microsoft had the hollow lens like there there is a market for like specialty applications of this that's not really anything apple ever caters to in their other product lines like and and i think they're not really well suited to that market.

46:33Marco Arment:That's much more of a Microsoft market. And even Microsoft ended up canning HoloLens because it wasn't like a profitable enough market for them. But if the Vision Pro is going to succeed in software, it's in those areas. It's not going to be general purpose computing. However, there's another way this product can succeed. Well, there's two. There's games, which meta pretty much dominates. And I don't think Apple would ever make a product that would compete with games for lots of reasons um and the other one is content and like that's that's the other like if you want to get consumers to buy this who aren't like performing specialized surgery like through like just regular consumers to buy a vr headset like a high-end vr headset that's going to be content plays like this it's going to be things like live sports concerts sports theater like you know live experiences live spectacles and sports probably the biggest one and yeah as as we're saying there are some challenges like i think you're you're both right that the resolution of both the lenses and the and the screens and the video itself does not lend itself well to sports where you need to see fine details across wide fields of view like baseball.

47:50Marco Arment:So that does kind of make sense. That's a bit of a problem. Basketball is better, as you were saying, even though despite the fact that the baskets themselves, which are kind of an important part of the game, are kind of blurry on the edges there. And there's ways you can make this a little bit better. For instance, sit a little further back. For many of these sports, it's less of a wow factor, but it's actually a better overall experience. In the same way that like you don't usually want to sit in the front row of a movie theater either like the actual best experience of a movie theater is not in the front row um i think there's a lot here there's a lot of potential here but i also think it's very obvious that we are like 10 years too early for it that the the screens are just not high resolution enough the video feeds are just not high resolution enough the hardware the rest of the hardware to support it is still big and heavy and has terrible battery life and not like we are just 10 years too early and i don't know how we're going to get from here to it being good because i don't see how it's worth anybody continuing this product line but but if it gets good it's going to be a ways off and i think this shows that it can be good the the potential exists but we're just not there speaking of sitting in the front row of movie theaters did either of you go to see the odyssey and imax i haven't seen it at all of course i haven't seen it oh by the way real-time follow-up 30 gigs john so i went from 600 megs to 30 gigs of reclaim space from hyperspace and i wonder why why first of all that's not enough but i appreciate it anyway why does your default mode suck so badly compared to the everything on mode i'm being conservative being safe and also the the semi psychological part of it so obviously the conservatism is just like look don't go wandering through people's library folders and photos folders because if you screw them up people will be mad so be conservative to begin with and again i have the thing where if you don't find a lot there's the little find more thing and the second aspect of it is people do feel kind of good about themselves when they like tweak an app to make it perform better you know what i mean like now they go into settings and they flip a couple switches and they make decisions about do i want to search my photos library do you want to do this it makes them feel more like a power user so it's those two things combined they hit the nas yeah exactly anyway um i the reason i bring up the imax thing and odyssey and the odyssey because i did go see it um eventually in the uh the one 4k laser imax projector that's in new england um which was a bit of a drive for me but before i went to it because i'm seeing it late i saw it like uh i don't know like last week or whatever um the two people i know who uh saw it both told me it was so loud so you know idea when I went to the movie.

50:39I brought earplugs with me. It's the first time wearing earplugs in a movie theater. And let me tell you, it was really loud. And this stupid IMAX doesn't do assigned seating. It's the first movie I've gone to without assigned seating in forever. So I had to get there early and fight with people to get a seat. And so I was a little bit closer than I wanted to. But man, was it loud. With the earplugs in, I felt like it was loud. So anyway.

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52:44John Siracusa:The Tim Cook exit interview. We already did it. We did it in episode 688 entitled A Company Man. Starts at about an hour and eight minutes. We've also talked about it in many episodes before. And since then, we'll put a link in the show notes to the episode on our website, to the episode in Overcast with a timestamp link. Go check that out if you're interested. And as I said last week, Tim Cook has not done anything in between then and now that's worth talking about other than raising prices of a couple of the services on his way out the door. All right. And speaking of people on their way out the door, Phil Schiller, former ATP guest, Phil Schiller has apparently stepped down from his role leading the App Store and product events.

53:24John Siracusa:Sorry, I'm reading from Mark Ehrman. Schiller was Apple's senior vice president of marketing until leaving that job in 2020. While he is dropping his last two major responsibilities, Shiller is remaining at the company with his Apple Fellow title and told employees he'll be working on unspecified initiatives. Emma Roth of the Verge writes, Shiller initially joined Apple in 1987. Marco and I were five and became the company's head of marketing in 1997 when we were 15. He helped launch the App Store alongside Steve Jobs in 2008, but only started heading up the App Store in 2015. Over the years, Shiller has played a role in the development of many of Apple's products, including the phone, iPad, and Macs, and has presented several of them at the company's launch events.

54:01John Siracusa:In recent years, Schiller has started stepping away from some of these responsibilities as he relinquished his role as Senior Vice President of Marketing to Greg Joswiak in 2020. This is the longest goodbye ever. Really, he's just slowly working his way off campus, one job responsibility at a time, but never actually leaving. Not that I'm in a hurry for him to leave, But man, can you just keep dropping responsibilities and keep collecting your paycheck? I should have done this when I had a job, right?

54:30Marco Arment:I think this is actually a possibly very big deal. So first of all, you know, Phil Schiller is the oldest of old school Apple. Like he's so hardcore Apple. He's been there forever. And I think he's one of the last executives left with that, with like the old Apple experience and philosophy. via mentality. And also, but he's been there forever, but there's lots of people who've been there forever. He's been there forever at the highest levels of the company, like right next to Steve Jobs. Like he wasn't there, you know, like people have been there for a long time, but just have been in low level positions.

55:07He's been right in the thick of it practically his entire career.

55:10Marco Arment:Yeah. And I like Phil for a lot of reasons. I mean, you know, he has engaged with me and with our show over the years. And so, of course, that helps. It's been very meaningful for me in my career. When I first heard from Phil in response to a blog post I wrote years ago, and later on, when I wrote... What the hell was that? Functional High Ground. There you go. Yeah. When I wrote that, I actually had a phone call with Phil later that day, and that meant a huge amount to me. And then the whole elephant in the room thing at the live talk show. Basically, Phil and I go back a ways. And so I do feel honored at how much attention Phil has given me over the years as somebody who is so important at Apple.

55:54Marco Arment:And so maybe that colors my view of him a little bit. But I am very fond of Phil, even though I don't agree with him on everything. And I think he like there's a certain culture of California executives and California executives, first of all, tend to think I'm a I'm an a-hole and maybe they're right. Certainly many of our listeners might agree, especially some people on the reddits i'm sure but um there's like there's like a california attitude of being maybe like indirect insincere um you kind of can't tell what they think of you phil is not that phil is east coast you can always pretty much tell what he thinks of you he i think is pretty direct and pretty honest and that's something that i again i don't get a lot of that from a lot of the apple people because most of them are more West Coast culture.

56:50Marco Arment:And that's just the West Coast culture does not really understand the East Coast culture and vice versa, as well as it might seem, despite being in the same country. And because Phil is East Coast, I think I've always gotten along well with him and understood him, I think, a little bit better than the other executives. Phil is an honest, straight shooter, and he cares a lot about the product. And when he was head of marketing i don't know how much involvement he has now but when he was head of marketing he really advocated for very good product decisions from everything i've heard in in lots of i've heard lots of stories about like input that phil had or things phil was pushing for we even saw like in the in that app store trial the when in some of the epic uh discovery process like the emails from phil to the other executives like he seemed to be on the right side of a lot of issues and and have his head in the right place.

57:43Marco Arment:Overall, he's been, I think, a very good force in the company. But there have been areas that we disagree on. Phil has a little bit of an edge, like a little bit of a sharp prickliness. And as an East Coaster, I love that about him. The very first email he ever sent me, it was while I was doing Instapaper. And he ended it by saying, I also want to thank you for creating Instapaper it is a great app well deserving of it's four and a half star rating and that's the that's just the most amazing like because first of all it's like wow and he and he said he has it on his iPhone and iPad so like first of all wow Phil Schiller uses my app what an honor second of all it's well deserving of it's four and a half star rating like I think he just meant that nice and you just took it that he was talking about the half star I don't think that was him being prickly He did, but that's like he always means it nice.

58:38Marco Arment:But like there's that little tiny like this is a great compliment, but I just might have stepped on one of those little one by one flat Legos, you know. So and but that's Phil. He's honest. He's direct. And I love that about him. But he also has been all this time running the app store. And I've also heard stories about his role there, his leadership there, and him being pretty much like the driving force behind or the final authority of a lot of controversial App Store decisions over the years. Things like policy, what's allowed, what's not. That all goes to Phil. Like the toughest decisions, the real edge case rule enforcement things or the high level policies.

59:28Marco Arment:From my understanding, that was mostly Phil. The App Store under Phil has been mostly good but a little prickly. And that makes a lot of sense. So for Phil to be giving up the App Store, I think that might be a really big deal. Now, I'm not expecting tomorrow for Apple to open it wide open and say, all right, everyone do whatever you want in the App Store. No, I don't think that is a reasonable thing to expect here. I don't think they're likely to change the commission when not legally forced by some jurisdiction. I don't think we're likely to see big changes like that that are going to impact their ability to make tons of money because that's – the reality is they make tons of money from it.

1:00:14Marco Arment:And their growth story with the services business kind of needs that. So I don't think that's on the table. But I do think that a change in App Store leadership at this level, at the Phil level, is probably going to result in over the next, I don't know, six months to a year. I think we're going to start to see budging or bettering of things in other areas that, for whatever reason, Phil was like a hardliner on some of those decisions. whether it's stuff like what you're allowed to do, like rule-wise, maybe like a little bit of flexibility where we didn't have flexibility before, maybe like a rule that's kind of been vague will start to be interpreted a different way.

1:00:55Marco Arment:I think that's the level of thing that we're likely to see here. That's why I think this is a really big deal. As an app developer, that makes me, you know, similar to like the CEO change, it kind of makes me both excited and nervous because Phil, all these years running the App Store has been, you know, the devil you know, and when you change that up, it's like, well, you don't really know. What are we going to get with the new leadership, whoever that is? Is it going to be better in ways that we care about or is it actually going to get worse? We don't actually know that yet. But that's why I think this is a really big deal because I think most people weren't aware necessarily of Phil's role in the App Store and now that role is changing.

1:01:35Marco Arment:So that I think could be a big deal. But ultimately, setting the App Store aside, if this really is Phil's ultimate final retirement from the company, which it doesn't sound like it is. He's got one more step at least because he's still going to work on unspecified projects, but he's basically given up the two responsibilities that he had. So now he has zero responsibilities except for unspecified. Right. And knowing Phil, I bet he's still going to be working like crazy. But I did want to take this chance while he is still probably there to honor all the work he's done there. Because, again, I think he does so much work behind the scenes on so many products across the company that most people don't know about.

1:02:16Marco Arment:A lot of what we love about Apple products, Phil had input in those decisions. And he pushed for a lot of the right decisions. So he has had an amazing career at Apple. Again, I will always be fond of him because he kind of brought me into the Apple PR world in a way that no one else there has before or since. And I think he really believes in and pushes for most of the best things that we love about Apple products.

1:02:47John Siracusa:I would agree with that wholeheartedly. And, you know, I don't know that some of the crummy decisions around the App Store were him. I mean, I feel like we learned in Discovery for the Epic thing that he was trying to pump the brakes on some of the commissions that they charge us once they hit like a billion dollars in revenue or something like that. I'm getting the details wrong, I'm sure. but you get the idea. I thought that we had seen emails where he was like, do we really need any more money from developers? Like, aren't we good now? Yeah, we did.

1:03:15Marco Arment:That's part of what came out in that trial. And the answer was yes, they did any more money. Exactly. He was overruled in that decision. Asked and answered. Tim Cook says yes, we do need more money. Sit down, Phil.

1:03:26John Siracusa:Yeah. Now, I've never had the pleasure of meeting him in person, but obviously we interviewed him in episode 317, which was March 15th of 2019. Without hyperbole, I really mean this, hand on heart. One of the coolest and best moments of my entire career was, I forget exactly what question I asked Phil, but it was at the end we were just kind of goofing off. We were still on air, but we were kind of goofing off. And I'd asked Phil something car-related, and he started rattling off a couple of cars that I was like, yeah, okay, I know what that is. And then he went deep into the weeds about, I think Porsches, I might have that wrong, but I got the floor wiped with me because he was just like, oh, you think you know cars, sir.

1:04:00John Siracusa:And he wasn't being a jerk about it. It was just, oh, no, no, no, no, no. You sweet summer child, Casey. let me tell you about cars and it was incredible one of the coolest moments of my entire career i genuinely mean that and so phil i don't think you listen to this show i'm not sure you ever did other than perhaps the episode you were on but if you ever ever ever want to come back i don't care if you're an apple employee or not we don't even need to talk about apple i'll talk to you about car stuff again i don't care if you ever want to come back the uh the offer is there you you are we are ready and waiting yeah we're saying this is like as a phil exit interview but again he hasn't actually exited yet he's on his way anyway um yeah he should do the chris latner thing and leave apple and then come on the show uh my favorite part of that uh that interview by the way you should listen to i'm not sure how good a job we did interviewing him but at the end where he was a little bit loose he did give us some fun stuff which was uh retelling the story of uh how steve jobs uh made him jump off a tower onto a stage holding the first uh apple laptop with wi-fi to show that uh it didn't have any wires attached to it and you can hear in his retelling of the backstage story of like uh steve jobs telling him hey we're gonna have you jump off this thing and trying to get him to sign like an insurance waiver and him basically say i'm not signing that listen to that story again and think back to marco's description of him of being a nice friendly guy who's also got a little bit of an edge i think you'll hear it in the story yeah oh yeah it's it's a solid solid fill for sure i i really not i mean i'm saying this as though the man has passed away and god willing far from it but he hasn't even left apple i know i know but i really wish i had the opportunity to meet him at some point i'm sure he would have no freaking clue who I was, but it would be really great to shake his hand and thank him for all the incredible work that he's done.

1:05:34John Siracusa:Like, wasn't the iPod click wheel his, if I'm not mistaken? I mean, just incredible, incredible work over an impossibly long career. Yeah. Well, if I see him in town, I'll tell him you say hi. That's true. He is from Boston, isn't he?

1:05:46Marco Arment:Yeah. So, last time we said, when he moved to Apple Fellow and left his marketing role to Jaws, Johnny and I, we were saying, like, Johnny and I went to the sky, and we were like, Phil got promoted to the roof. Like, he was, like, still, like, near the building on the building you know what where is he now like in the visitor center he's just haunting the campus like a ghost you just walk around the corner at corner and there he is with sage advice because like unspecified projects is i mean that could be that could be something like you know whatever the next car project is or that could be like feeding the ducks in the duck pond in the middle he's working on the new pizza boxes for cafe max there you go

1:06:22John Siracusa:All right. Let's do some actual exit interviews for the hardware. So the event is next week. It is, when is it? I don't even know. It's like Wednesday, I think. The 9th, Wednesday. Yeah. Yeah. Because of Labor Day is on Monday. That's right. So it's Wednesday next week. So let's do the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air exit interviews. First of all, we should note, the rumor is that the iPhone 17 isn't really exiting quite yet. Allegedly, we're just getting the Pros and the Fold next week. but do you i don't remember is the air supposed to come next week too i don't that's kind of it's

1:06:55Marco Arment:been rumored to probably be in the spring with the others um so it doesn't seem like the air is being updated yet yeah there there is another coming we're just not sure of the date but yeah we'll exit interview all of them even though again uh it's certainly the iphone 17 if the rumors are to be believed is not exiting and maybe the air is also not exiting but they will exit

1:07:13John Siracusa:eventually uh yeah for me so i have an iphone 17 pro i have it in whatever the flavor of blue is from this past year. I really love this phone a lot and I don't have too much to say about it, or at least I don't think I do, but a couple of things I wanted to call out. I am brutal on my phones, as we've learned over the years. I have went from never shattering a phone to shattering like two or three in a row. I went through something like seven screen protectors on the last phone on my iPhone 16 Pro. For this one, it has never, ever been in a case and I have yet to shatter it and we are coming up on the end of its service life.

1:07:52John Siracusa:That's me knocking on wood. I have yet to shatter it. I did get a couple of gouges in the screen, which I'm not sure how that happened, but here we are. But I am very satisfied that I went almost the entire year with nary a scratch on it. And now I have a couple of scratches on the upper left, but I never shattered it. I have dropped it now, not as brutally as I have some other. No, that's not true. I dropped it on concrete once or twice. So yeah, really good work on the ceramic shield too, or whatever they're calling it. I forget the marketing name for it. I'm a little unhappy that there's a couple of scratches, but given the way this thing has been treated, really A, maybe even A plus for the ceramic shield.

1:08:30John Siracusa:Really, really good work there. The aluminum has chipped in a couple of spots, but I don't really mind it, to be honest. I think of it kind of like a patina. The other thing that really chapped my bottom around the 15 and 16 pros, if memory serves, was the thermal throttling. And I mean that not only in terms of speed, but especially in terms of screen brightness. And as someone who goes to football games in the fall and late summer, using your phone outside can really suck because, you know, you have it get hot and then you can barely see the screen because it's cranked the brightness to like negative 100%.

1:09:05John Siracusa:And this phone is not impervious to that, but thanks to the vapor chamber, I think it's called, it definitely does a lot better than any iPhone I've had in years. So I'd say B to B plus for the thermal throttling in this phone and A to A plus for the screen or ceramic shield. I have a couple of thoughts about the Air that are kind of tangential, but with regard to the 17 Pro, Marco, you also have a 17 Pro, if I remember correctly. But John, last year was not your year. Is that right? My wife has a 17 Pro, though, and really the only exposure I have to it is, you know, she uses phones differently than I do.

1:09:41she has like massive cases she has like the wallet cases like the magnetically attaching wallet case with like a with like an air tag type thing embedded in it's just she's got a lot of stuff on her phone her phone is big and heavy and you could like bludgeon someone with it it's the same 17 pro in there it's not a pro max it's just a pro but i compare it to my 16 pro and her thing is just way bigger but and she plays pokemon go on it all the time so my exposure to it is when i borrow her phone or pick it up or hand it to her or whatever to basically feel how hot it is and you would think you wouldn't be able to feel any heat through all that stuff but my subjective impression of handling my wife's phone for the past year because she got it on launch time is that the vapor chamber did help um i'm not sure if it helped her battery life because again she's very rough on these batteries and she has lots of charging solutions and stuff like that uh but she and the other the other thing i will measure it by is has she had complaints is she constantly saying my phone battery's dying or it's doing a weird thing or it's getting too hot and the answer No, she hasn't complained to me anything about her phone.

1:10:39So I give the 17 Pro a thumbs up. I think the vapor chamber actually did do something. And the rumor is that the phone that I'm getting this year, the 18 Pro, will have an even bigger vapor chamber. So thumbs up for cooling.

1:10:50Marco Arment:My experience using the 17 Pro for the past year, I just love this phone. It is awesome. I have no major complaints about the 17 Pro that I think are actually related to it. My only complaint is that tethering just doesn't work for me for more than like two minutes. And so I've been carrying around this hotspot for a year because I haven't wanted to go to an AT &T store and have them like fix my whatever SIM is causing that to be a problem. But but otherwise, like I love my 17 Pro. I got the orange one, which was the right choice. It is the best iPhone color I've ever had. It is I think I think it's the best color that's ever been offered in the Pro line.

1:11:33Marco Arment:And I think the sales of the 17 Pro back that up. It's been a huge hit. And when you look around the world, you see some of the dark blue ones, a very small handful of the silver ones, and a ton of the orange ones. Everyone chose orange. And I think the orange being such a good color played a significant role in the 17 Pro's sales, which by all accounts have been very, very strong, even stronger than Apple expected by most accounts. So I think it is no question that objectively having this be an awesome color was a good idea and helped the iPhone a lot and just made it a great, fun, awesome new release.

1:12:12Marco Arment:And then functionality wise, the cameras are great. The 4X is like finally the right distance for that camera to be. The 8X mode where it's like, you know, optic or it digitally samples the 4X middle section actually is usable. the stabilization of it is also perfect like i've never had a problem with blurry shots on the 4x or 8x distances i use those i use the 4x all the time and it actually provides a significantly different point of view than the 1x um so i do find frequent uses for it the battery life has been awesome on it and i i don't have the max i just have like the you know the medium-sized one the regular size one um it's been great i don't think i've ever seen the battery below 25 percent uh it's just been awesome cooling wise the vapor chamber for me has been way better than previous phones like if anything i think that was one of the worst things about the 16 pro line uh that it it was the 16 pro was pretty good but it got really hot and thermally throttled all the time the 17 pro with the vapor chamber it really needed it and it performs great it delivered Overall, I really, I can't say anything bad about this phone.

1:13:28Marco Arment:Like when I got it, you know, I also did originally get an iPhone Air. I ended up returning it. And then a couple months ago for beta season, I ended up buying a renewed, refurbished iPhone Air for a test phone for this summer. And so I've had some more time with the Air. I'll get to that when we get to the Air. But when I was deciding to go with the Pro, what I said last year was I wanted the Pro because I want to know that whatever situation I'm in, I'm not going to regret the phone I have. Whatever situation I'm in, I know I'm going to have enough battery life. I'm going to have the best cameras I can have with me.

1:14:05Marco Arment:It's not going to throttle under heat or whatever. It's going to be the best iPhone that it can be in every situation. And the iPhone 17 Pro has delivered. It has been that the entire year. This phone has been great. It has been so great that honestly, I don't think I'm going to upgrade, which I know that to the rest of the reasonable world, they're like, why the hell do you upgrade every year? You crazy lunatic. But the fact is, I have upgraded every year and I'll say it's for the show. But it's not. Of course, it's for me. Like, we all know that. like it's fine if not if we don't all get you know the newest phones as john has never gotten the phone every year and the show has gone on it's been fine um but honestly between the the new colors that are rumored honestly not doing much for me um and the and i love the orange but also this phone just is so good i will see what you know whatever the 18 pro has maybe i'll convince myself i need it but um you will ultimately honestly i think i'm just gonna get the foldable and try that for a while for development design purposes, which actually is important.

1:15:16Marco Arment:But I think I will probably end up switching back to this after I use the foldable for a little while, if I had to guess now at this point. But I love the 17 Pro. It has been remarkably good. And here I am a year in thinking I don't see any reason why I would replace this phone at all. Yeah, the new color has me a little bit nervous. I do think the the 18 Pro they picked one color for it and it's it's it I don't think it was a particularly controversial color like it was bold enough that it's going to stand out and make people notice it but it wasn't like oh I can't look at that it's like a traffic cone or it's like green neon it was it was a crowd pleaser okay like it was it was I think it was tasteful and bright it was just just walk that line the rumors of the new color being like a deep cherry and maybe all right i will admit that i don't have my finger on the pulse of what colors are in fashion okay so maybe for all i know deep cherry is going to make the world go wild but it's not making marco go wild it's not making me go wild either so maybe for the old man set it's not as popular as the orange was so maybe they're changing tactics we'll see how it sells but uh but yeah the the 17 pro definitely is a milestone in the iphone it's the year they

1:16:28John Siracusa:decided to give the pro phone a color yeah and to i forget which one of you said it but to one of your points uh i see the orange one everywhere and i would have hoped that the the message that apple received from that is hey we should embrace colors in the friggin pro phones but they're doing one color this year the rumor is so they're not decreasing it but they're also not increasing it i think the other reason you see the orange everywhere is obviously it does stand out and also if you got an orange phone you're less likely to put a case on it or less likely to put it have like it not a clear case on it because all those silver and black phones that are out there they're all in just giant cases and you don't have no idea what color they are yeah i mean what are they doing that you said like a wine color or something like yeah well i mean again we just have rumors and pictures but it looked like a deep cherry kind of thing and again i maybe it's in fashion and everyone's gonna go gaga for it but for me it's not as straight up the middle crowd pleasing as a really nice orange or a really nice red or something you know what i mean like it's just like one of the sort of basic colors as opposed to a subtle mix of purplish, reddish, deep kind of, yeah, I don't know.

1:17:34We'll see. I think this one is like a little bit more like metallic flaky again while we have our spy shots. So who knows what the real color will look like? Yeah.

1:17:41John Siracusa:I just, I think something more vibrant like that orange is the right way to go, but here we are. I don't have an iPhone air. I've handled an iPhone air a handful of times over the last year. I'm curious to hear Marco's thoughts, but one thing I will say is that from those that I know that have one, and I know a handful of people with one, it does not seem like for them anyway, the camera or the battery were near as much an issue as I would have expected. That is, that doesn't mean that the camera and the battery are not an issue at all. Just that it seems from the people I know with iPhone Airs, they make it work and it's not nearly as burdensome as I would have thought.

1:18:17John Siracusa:Now, Marco, I don't think you've ever properly used the Air as a carry phone, but tell me what was your experience one way or the other?

1:18:23Marco Arment:I use it as a carry phone for, I think, like two or three days when I first got it. And then I got a Pro and switched it to the Pro. So the Air, I think, the main problems with the Air are that it makes some pretty big compromises in areas that people care a lot about for benefits in areas that people don't care a lot about. It's an interesting statement phone in the way that like you know i i thought like the cyber truck was an interesting statement vehicle design but it doesn't mean i want it you know and so the like i'm glad that apple did the air because all of their other phones were kind of fitting the same mold making similar trade-offs and just kind of you know different sizes and price tiers of this of the same kind of thing and the air is way out there in a whole different you know continuum like it it does not follow the same trade-offs as their other phones the problem is it follows trade-offs nobody wants so the air significantly sacrifices the battery the cameras and also the performance which i know that's less of a thing that matters to most people but the air thermal throttles when you do anything it has no cooling whatsoever the no chill the like the little island in the back that has the camera and everything that also houses a huge amount of the circuitry that's why it's so thin um that little the island area gets so hot when it does anything that it turns out to do things very slowly even simple things like you know just like processing photos you've shot with the one camera.

1:20:08Marco Arment:Or, you know, like doing the migration is like it takes forever on the air because it's just thermal throttling constantly because it does not have the vapor chamber. There are rumors that the next air might gain some kind of vapor chamber. It badly needs it. I hope those are true. Thermal throttling aside, the main compromise to the air are that, yeah, the battery life is not amazing. Although, case is right, it was not as bad as most people expected it to be, in part because they gave the Air the Apple design cellular modem, which the Pro doesn't get. But that and it is apparently a pretty big savings.

1:20:42Marco Arment:So that helps. The biggest thing with the Air is the camera. Now, it has one camera. It is the 1X camera. And they do it can focus a little bit closer minimum focus distance than the 1X camera on the Pro. So it's not exactly the same camera so it does sort of make up for some of the loss of the macro focusing by not having the wide but it still doesn't have much close-up focusing ability and it doesn't have the wide and it doesn't have a zoom and that's just a that's a pretty big set of compromises for people and if people want you know a phone with like you know simpler cameras usually they go for like one of the cheaper ones that's like smaller and cheaper um if you want a phone that's very like lightweight in your in your hand in your pocket the base model 17 is i think a better overall balance of things for most people um if you want a phone that is that has a big screen you're probably going to want the max or the or the regular pro um and so the air kind of sits in this weird middle ground where they're like all right what if we made a really thin phone okay well nobody really cares about the thinness but we made it really light okay well that's you're getting somewhere but you already make the 17 that's that's pretty light and the the e that's pretty light too the air is big it's like okay so it's harder to hold because it's wide hmm okay it feels good but it is wide it's like almost as big as a max phone like footprint wise so okay and we're going to make your battery life mediocre to bad oh okay and oh and we're going to take away all your cameras and just leave one that's okay okay so the problem is no one who's buying a phone gives a crap how thin it is they want the best cameras they can afford they want the biggest battery they can afford that's what people buy phones for no one buys a phone saying i want it be the thinnest phone on the market.

1:22:46Marco Arment:They used to back when the Motorola Razr was groundbreaking. That used to matter a lot. That doesn't matter now. And oh, and as as Neil 58 in the chat points out, way worse speakers on the iPhone Air to another thing that people actually care a surprising amount about because people end up watching a lot of video and having a lot of speaker phone calls on their phones, listening to music out loud, playing podcasts out loud. It's actually a pretty common thing to use a speaker on a phone. So the Air was a really interesting experiment, industrial design wise, aesthetically, that they just made a product that nobody really wants.

1:23:22Marco Arment:And that's why if you look at anything that tries to estimate iPhone Air sales, whether it's, you know, the analytics firms that like look at having people buy stuff in Apple stores versus like, like apps that can report device type usage. Like I see in my own stats, the Air is so little in sales compared to anything else. Like no one bought the Air. No one is buying the Air. No one will buy the Air. The upcoming folding phone is supposed to inherit some of these trade-offs, but it sounds like they've done a better job of it. And the difference there is that the folding phone is going to offer a lot in return for those trade-offs that people do care about you know what people love giant screens on their phones they that's been proven people want the biggest screen they can possibly get and they will pay for it and that for sure like that's going to get people to the ultra or the fold whatever it's going to be called um so if you tell those people the battery life might only be okay and you might give up one camera there's still this huge plus that the foldable will give them that will be a compelling thing.

1:24:35Marco Arment:The Air doesn't have one of those. The Air just is all the trade-offs and the pluses just aren't that big and aren't things that most people really care about. To save people from, to save Marco from the feedback, we're going to hear Marco saying that no one wants a thin phone. He doesn't mean literally no one. I mean, we know people who got it because it's so thin and they love it. And as I said, when that phone was introduced, one of the reasons that it is that weird size where it's like almost as big as a Mac's. It's because you need to make it that big if you want it to be that thin and have a decent battery because every little extra bit of screen you have there is presumably more than offset by the extra battery you get for being behind it.

1:25:11What I want to say about the Air is I want to give kudos to the engineering effort where Apple sort of triumphantly returned to the thin phone game and created a thin phone that is so durable that as we saw when the YouTubers tried to test it, you cannot bend the thing with human hands like that's true i know it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things people shouldn't be abusing their phones that way and the product is the product who cares how bendable it is but from the same company that made the iphone 6 that would bend when you looked at it sideways they made this thing which is like like a miracle slab you know it looks beautiful it feels great it feels premium and you cannot bend it so kudos to the team that did that the team that did that is not responsible for the entire product they didn't decide what the iphone know where it was going to be.

1:25:58They didn't decide it was going to have one camera or whatever. There's the team that says, hey, we're making a thin phone. You don't get to design this product. Your job is to make it so it doesn't bend. And they did it. So I want to give that team a big thumbs up. And the fact that they're making a second one makes me think that either they're just recouping tooling costs of like, look, we've already paid up front for all the stuff to make one of these. So we're going to make another one no matter what. But it does make me hope that, again, what is it? I've already forgot it. Carbon silicon batteries, like the next jump in battery uh um composition to give a little bit more power that they could potentially shrink it down and maybe get some more of like oh it's it's light and thin but it's actually not that small i'm not advocating for the return of the mini but i hope they keep pursuing this because as technology increases all of the bad parts that marco was talking about will start to be less bad maybe you can fit two cameras on it eventually maybe the battery life isn't as bad anymore you know like and i don't know like i think it is a viable option i do think that the 20th anniversary phone that's all glass and blah blah blah like that's going to really throw a monkey wrench into the air's possible role as pointing towards the future but again the ultra slash folding phone uh will have a lot in common with the air in terms of the you know the design and uh manufacturing that apple developed to make things thin because the sides of the fold are going to be even thinner i would imagine and of course there's two of them so you you put it together the phone will be thick but those individual pieces are going to be thin so here's hoping they've gotten even better at it just to just to reiterate like something that i

1:27:27Marco Arment:think most most people who are buying at the high end don't really appreciate if what you want is a phone that feels noticeably light in your hands and is lighter to handle get the base model iphone 17 because it is almost as light as the air it's a very small difference between those two both of them are well under the weight of the 17 pro so if that's what you want the iphone 17 does a better job of it it's cheaper uh well at the moment um well let's that's we'll see what happens with pricing next week that that's remains to be seen um and the 17 is kind of an interesting case because it is it is a continued and the air both continuing to be sold so we'll see if they get price raises or not compared to the new models, which we'll almost certainly have them.

1:28:13Marco Arment:But the iPhone 17 is almost as light. It's smaller in the hand,$200 cheaper. It has better cameras, better battery life. Like there's a lot about the iPhone 17 that's like, well, you should probably buy that instead of the Air if what you're looking for is a lighter phone. i want to say for the iphone 17 i think this is probably the best no suffix iphone that they have ever made now obviously because it's new or whatever i'm saying like in the time that they've made it because it really just it came at a time when that phone with the specs that they gave it and its surrounding phones make it the kind of thing where it was like the macbook era phones back in the day when with the 2011 macbook air where just said you need a mac just get the macbook air everybody who was looking for a phone i'm like i didn't have to ask them anything about what they wanted to just get the iphone 17 the only thing i would say is like if the iphone 17 is still expensive then you can look at the 17e but the default was go to the iphone 17 i bought two of them i want one for each of my kids hopefully the last phone i'll ever buy any of them um we'll see how that goes um but yeah the iphone 17 is what an amazing phone because most people don't pay the extra for the pro or the air or the even the max you're just like what is the cheapest i can get an iphone for and the 17e is the answer or like older models obviously but the 17 i'm just like there's a new iphone the number is one more than last year i don't care about suffixes what a great phone that is like it just everything you said about it's like the perfect size the perfect weight it looks nice it came in fun colors like it just i will definitely have fond memories of the plane 17 it was definitely a good year uh it's going to be big shoes for the plane 18 to fill sometime in the spring and also this the the plane 17 brought the plane phone line up to always on display and promotion yeah yeah it was the year that like they that they they took a bunch of things they'd been using for market segmentation and say now is the final year finally the year that we dropped them so that's why you could recommend it wholeheartedly you don't have to ask questions oh do you care about the screen being on all the time do you have it was like they didn't drop all of them there was still market segmentation but they dropped a bunch of ones that people could see like they always on screen that's a thing you notice like regular people will notice that yep and promotion like that's like it's much smoother animation and like i'm not sure if regular people notice that but it is true yeah like it's they they brought the nicer screen to the base phone for the first time ever.

1:30:30Marco Arment:Like what a huge upgrade that was. Honestly, I think the only thing that I would really miss if I was using a 17, obviously I would miss the 4X camera and I would probably miss the heat pipe. But also I would miss kind of another thing that I forgot to mention with the iPhone 17 Pro, I would miss shooting in raw format. So in Apple's Pro Raw, I don't use any other apps to do it most of the time. But in the built-in regular iOS camera app, recent pro phones have supported shooting in Apple's Pro Raw. And you can just, whenever you want, you can just quickly go toggle like per shot. You hit the format thing that's usually like, you know, the Heek 24 megapixel.

1:31:12Marco Arment:And you can tap it and you can say make it 48 megapixel and make it raw. And it'll keep that setting for, you know, a couple of minutes. So if you're like shooting like a nice sunset or something, you can shoot a couple of raws there. but then you're not going to be shooting raw for you know all next week and accidentally blow up your storage but what's great about the iphone raw shots is that functionally speaking in like camera terms it's a lot more like raw plus jpeg that you shoot the raw but you don't have to deal with the raw if you don't want to the only thing you're giving up is you're taking more storage space with the raw and you can even you can do like the the kind of like slight compression options in it which i do but what's great about the iphone raws is if like me you are a little bit turned off a lot of times by like the very like kind of perfect processing a little bit over processing of iphone pictures or kind of the sameness of iphone pictures if you shoot in pro raw even again even if you don't use any other apps if you just shoot with apple's camera app and edit with the photos app right on the phone you have way more latitude in editing especially if you're adjusting colors or exposure so you can like bring up the shadows and tweak the contrast and tweak the white balance and everything you you can do so much with with the pro raw that it it for me it removed the need for me to really ever use the alternative and i have like i've bought like every alternative camera app but i'm just not a good enough photographer to really ever use them but like to have apple stuff built in the pro raw is so good and to be able to just toggle it on real fast for like one shot and then i know later i can go edit that and and get a lot out of it it's been awesome and that is something that is exclusive to the pro line so that honestly i think i would miss pro raw more than i would miss the 4x camera like i use it that much and it's and it's that big of a difference but anyway um yeah the 4x camera is really good but if you don't want any of that stuff the regular 17 as john was saying it is the best like regular line iphone in years.

1:33:13Marco Arment:And it was the biggest step up they've ever had in that line. It closed the gap from the regular to the Pro line to be a smaller gap than we've had in a long time.

1:33:24John Siracusa:I think it's worth stating, which I think all three of us are kind of dancing around this, but it's worth stating plainly, to my memory, having followed Apple closely since the iPhone 3GS and having this been my career or at least side hustle since 2013. This is the best iPhone lineup I think they've ever had. Like top to bottom inside and out. There's not a dud in the bunch. Even the Air. I'd say the Air is a dud.

1:33:52Marco Arment:But it also doesn't matter. Like because no one's buying it. So it's not really. It'd be one thing like if the Pro or if the main line phone of a year was kind of a stinker, that's a pretty big problem. Like that's a big deal because they're such high volume products. So many people buy them. the air is kind of a stinker but no one's buying it so it doesn't really affect the other lineups it's it's it's its own separate path in the same way that like the like the old plus model like the the not like the the old old plus but like the the middle one where they they gave like the the plain phone a larger screen um that was also a stinker didn't matter the mini as much as i loved my iphone 12 and 13 minis um the mini was a stinker sales wise too but it didn't it didn't affect the line really because just not a lot of people bought them um by the way i still today have more users of the mini than i do of the iphone air which should tell you something how many iphone airs have you guys seen in real life being used outside of like you know nerd events they sell a bunch of minis though you're comparing a one one year one generation phone to a multi-generation mini but how many how many iphone airs have you seen in the world uh i've seen zero and zero minis as well in this entire everywhere i am i'm looking around people's phones and stuff in this entire year i've seen two like that's it i've seen so many pros she's so many base phones i've seen two iphone airs in the world how many minis did you see uh more than that And honestly, I mean, I didn't count them because I saw too many to count.

1:35:31Marco Arment:But compared to, I mean, that's like, think about that. More minis than Airs in Overcast users. And Overcast users you would think would over represent the Air. By the way, just to clear up a question in the chat about that there were two generations of the iPhone mini. So obviously that's why it would over represent. Nope, that's not it for Overcast. I'll tell you the iPhone Air ranks below the 12 mini and also separately the 13 mini with approximately half of the usage of the 12 mini. And about a third of the usage of the 13 mini. All right.

1:36:15John Siracusa:Let's do a iPhone event preview to the degree that we have anything to say about any of these devices. is I'll walk through a list that John put together of what we think might happen potentially. And we'll start with the iPhone 18 Pro or Pro Max. I don't think I have anything to say about this. We'll get there in a second when we talk about the Ultra. But John, do you have any thoughts about your potential future phone? I'm assuming it's this and not the Ultra. Yeah, it is my future phone. I'll be getting the 18 Pro. I'll probably get it in a boring color. If it has a bigger vapor chamber, I'll be excited about it.

1:36:45I'm looking forward to it. I mean, the expectation and the rumor is that it's basically going to be the same as the 17 Pro, except with an even bigger camera plateau, which I'm not actually very excited about. But, you know, like this is true. You know, it's kind of a good thing that I only get a phone every two years because every time I do is just I just feel like it's such trauma trying to deal with the case situation for me. It's not like there's anything like Apple. I can't like, oh, Apple always will sell this case and I'll buy it. No, I have to always go third party. So there's like a delay and I end up buying multiple cases.

1:37:12And it's just very disruptive to my life to figure out. you know i think on my 16 pro i had like a couple different cases on it before i finally settled on the one that i have and now i'm going to the giant plateau my wife's done it she's got the i think she's got the case that like covers the plateau with the bra you know that one which on the one hand looks ugly and is bulky but on the other hand it does actually protect the corners of that plateau that get chipped a lot so i don't know what i'm gonna do so like yes i'm looking forward to my phone but uh my current phone is doing great especially since i've babied the battery for its entire life so it's it's it's a champ um and this new phone is going to be bigger and bulkier and heavier and have a bigger plateau in exchange um you know it'll be faster and have better cameras so i will you know i'll get over it but i'm a little i have a little bit of trepidation about that but i'm almost certainly not going to get whatever the new color is if the rumor is even remotely close to being true because i that the cherry doesn't appeal to me

1:38:03John Siracusa:yeah i don't it doesn't really appeal to me either all right then we've got the iphone ultra maybe the iPhone Fold. I think it was Connected. That's maybe his upgrade that somebody recommended or suggested the iPhone Studio, whatever it's called. I would guess iPhone Ultra would be my first pick and Fold being my second pick. But anyways, I've been thinking a lot about this. And I am interested in the idea of a folding phone, even though it's sitting here now, it doesn't solve any problems that I feel like I have. But I think I will definitely get one to try. And I think certainly my other job as an app developer, it seems pretty logical to have one in the house, despite the fact that it's going to be a million dollars.

1:38:47John Siracusa:But I think it makes sense to have one in the house, even if I don't use it as a carry phone. I probably will try to use it as a carry phone for at least the two weeks until the return policy is up. I don't know if I'm going to like it or not. And I can tell you that if the rumors are true, If it does not have face ID, I'm going to be bummed. If it doesn't potentially have Qi charging, which I would find, or MagSafe charging, which I would find very surprising, but I would also believe that is going to seriously bum me out. And there was something else. What was the other thing that people were saying it's not going to have?

1:39:22John Siracusa:Oh, the cameras. Cameras. That is going to massively bum me out. I use all three lenses or all five different magnifications or whatever. I use all of them all the time. I'm constantly popping between them. I'm sure I could do some science and some math and figure out what ones I use and what quantity. We've done this in years past. But suffice to say, my perception anyway is that I use all of the different Xs, if you will. The ultrawide at half X, one X. I use two X and four X and eight X. I use all of them. And so to lose any of them will really bum me out a lot. And that I think might be the thing that breaks me and makes me return or shelve the iPhone ultra.

1:40:09John Siracusa:If that's the direction I go, which is currently the plan, because I do think for the show, at least one of us needs to have this thing. And, and I think I, I am willing to take the fall at least for a couple of weeks. Don't worry. I'm going to get one. Yeah, I figured. Um, let's, uh, do our votes on what we think the name is going to be. Um, I guess you can introduce whatever choice you want, but I think Ultra, UltraFold, Duo, whatever name you want to pick. What's your pick for the name?

1:40:32Marco Arment:I think it's going to be Ultra. I think there's been so much smoke behind that fire. It's probably right. And that also just plausibly makes sense. Because Apple's product naming in general, it usually is fairly formulaic and a little bit problematic. Like, logically speaking, like, and that's what this is. Like, you know, they, they have people have suggested like, well, you know, does it make sense for the, for something named ultra to not actually have the best of everything? Like, it's not going to have the best cameras, probably. It's not going to probably have the best battery life. It's, it will have the best price from Apple's point of view, but it's, it's not going to like that front screen is going to be a little, maybe compromised and weird.

1:41:22Marco Arment:Like the whole thing, it's going to be like a little bit compromised and a little bit weird in certain ways. it's not going to have Face ID. That's not the best. If it's not going to have the best speakers, maybe. There's a lot of things that's not going to have the best. But that's exactly the kind of weird problem with naming that Apple marketing would just pave right over and just say, nope, Ultra. That's it. This is what this means now. So I think that's very likely to be the case. Casey?

1:41:48John Siracusa:I think Ultra is the most likely. I could see Duo, but I think they would go with Fold before Duo. all three of them seem plausible.

1:41:57Marco Arment:But doesn't Samsung call theirs a fold? Like Apple would never do what Android people do. Oh, that's true.

1:42:02John Siracusa:That's true. All right. So maybe Duo then. I guess we're all boring on the Ultra Train. I also agree with Marco that the reason I think is going to be the name is because it's dumb in certain ways and that definitely fits with Apple's naming. Duo would be the most fun just because of a throwback to the PowerBook Duo but that's, you know, just me and Phil remember that. Oh no, it's a throwback to the Core 2 Duo, John. No, it definitely is not. All right. Yeah, I mean, I think, like I said, my intention is probably to order an iPhone 18 Pro and just not open it and then an iPhone Ultra or whatever and open that and use the Ultra and then leave my options open.

1:42:39John Siracusa:But we'll see what happens. I've had Erin on the annual cycle Much to her own protest Because she doesn't really seem to see the point She's probably right But I've had her on the annual cycle for years now I think she's going to be It's going to be very hard for me to get her away From her orange phone to come back to our last topic She does not want to lose her orange phone And she's going to be very sad too And so I think this is going to be the first time in several years That Erin doesn't end up upgrading I mean, I'll talk to her about it. We'll see what she ends up thinking once everything is announced.

1:43:13John Siracusa:But I think she's going to say to me, there's nothing that really justifies it. And I don't like any of those colors. Why would I bother? And you know what? She ain't wrong. When she sees how much your folds is going to cost, then I'll also convince her, yeah, you basically just did buy my phone. The second half of your phone.

1:43:31Marco Arment:No, you're exactly right. No, I'm getting the Ultra. I don't know if it's going to be something I stick with for the whole year. I doubt it, honestly. I think I'm probably going to use it for like a week or two and then want to go back to my Orange Pro. Because ultimately, I don't think... I mean, look, we'll see. People who use these foldable phones oftentimes fall in love with them and say they never go back to anything else. So maybe that's going to happen. I don't know. I've never used one. but sitting here today with the rumored trade-offs and sizing and things like that I don't think the foldable is going to be the way I want to go long term but I know that not only as a podcaster but especially as a developer of iPhone apps I need one of those to test with I have not done any of the work to design Overcast for the foldable layout yet because I don't have one.

1:44:30Marco Arment:Like when I, back when the iPad first came out, we had the simulator for the iPad before we had the hardware. Like we could develop our apps with the simulator for, I think at least a month or two before anybody could get the hardware. And so I made Instapaper. I adapted Instapaper to the iPad and basically blew up the phone layout. And I got my iPad on day one and I tried Instapaper on it and immediately I was like, this sucks. like I did everything wrong and I I had the cardboard prototypes like I I did all that stuff right but as soon as I ran it on a real iPad and could actually interact with it I instantly knew that all of the UI decisions I made were crap and I had and I ended up having to redo the whole design so this time like you know what I'm not going to play that game with I don't even have a simulator yet I have a simulator that can kind of simulate wide apps but like I don't know exactly what size these things are going to be I don't know like what am I going to be able to reach control-wise with my thumb?

1:45:29Marco Arment:How am I going to operate that outside screen that's really weirdly squat? That's going to be a huge design challenge for a lot of apps. How do the keyboards work? I have no idea. It's going to be a big challenge. I'm not going to do that design without having the hardware. I've learned that lesson. I need one for my app design, no matter what. That's why I'm going to get it. I'm going to try it out for the show. but I think I'm going to end up mostly probably going back to my 17 Pro for most of the year.

1:46:01John Siracusa:That's fair. I think I'm in a similar path for sure. All right. iPhone Air 2. We briefly talked about this. We don't think it sounds like there's a consensus. We don't think it's going to happen. I'm sorry. We haven't. Probably the rumors would tell us the answer to this but apparently none of us have looked it up because none of us care. The rumors probably tell you the answer of whether it's going to come out or not so just go read them.

1:46:21Marco Arment:The rumors have been very consistent that the air 2 is not coming out now that that there there is apparently an air 2 being worked on but they've been pretty consistent that's probably coming out like in the spring or next year sometime yeah the next item here is i mean again it's the thing that most people don't care about but i did see it mentioned in the past week which is airpods 5 not airpods pro just the plain airpods they used to be four those are the ones i have five and i i briefly looked at like here's what the airpods 5 will be and it was like that's what the airpods 4 are but with a bigger number like maybe it has an h3 chip you know i mean like upgrade the chips in them but it seems like if the if the rumors are correct that product is simply a slightly better version of the airpods 4 which is fine i'm wearing my airpods 4 all the time i like them they're good they fit my ears well so i'm perfectly happy with the fives i may actually get them because i wear my airpods so much and they have such tiny batteries and that are not replaceable that i've really kind of worn down the battery life and i was like i've had many times where i'm trying to like watch the end of an episode of tv late at night on my ipad in my bed and one of the airpods goes i gotta watch the rest of the show with one it always it's always one ear that's lower than the other it's like weird like i don't know they're both put in the charging case at the same time but they just anyway so i'll probably end up that's interestingly i'll get an iphone 18 pro and if they introduce the airpods 5 i'll probably get them and the other thing about the airpods is both of my children and have some magical ability to destroy air pods with with their mind or their body like i have the same air pods as them and it's not like they're stepping on them or like running them through the wash they're just using them the way i mean the one thing they do is they leave them all over the house or one of my kids does but anyway and they let them fill with earwax but just somehow like first of all my daughter if you give her air pods and she's had so many air pods across her life she'll tell you within a month or two the microphone doesn't work anymore and we've done Apple care on a bunch of them and they've given her new ones.

1:48:18Then she says the microphone doesn't work anymore. I don't know what she's doing to make the microphones non-functional. Sometimes I think you had the microphone muted or it does work and you just think people can't hear you. Sometimes I've confirmed that they don't work. But anyway, it's mysterious. I use them all the time every single day. Like anytime I'm doing dishes and there's no one else. Those things are in and listen to podcasts. I put them in when I walk the dog like I use them like crazy and they just keep working. But my kids destroy them all the time. So maybe my kids will get themselves some new AirPods 5, maybe iPod as well.

1:48:47That's actually one of the products that no one probably cares about except for me. But, you know, it's like just you've got to cycle through these things. And maybe I'll rotate my perfectly good working everything works on them AirPods 4 down to one of my kids so they don't have to get any ones.

1:49:02Marco Arment:By the way, I must commend you on your perfect reproduction of the AirPods low battery sound. I messed it up a little bit. No, you didn't. I figured the wrong number of boops. But, yeah, you knew what I was talking about.

1:49:11John Siracusa:It was pretty much flawless. That's pretty great.

1:49:14Marco Arment:Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Is there anything else we expect to see? Maybe Apple Watches? I mean, that's – or do you think that might be later in the fall? But usually it's with the iPhones, right?

1:49:21John Siracusa:Oh, that's true. It is usually with the iPhone. Yeah, I think – We lost so much interest in – yeah, the Apple Watch 12, was it? But we lost so much interest in them because the rumors are, yeah, any of that cool stuff that we talked about, it's not this year. Maybe we'll be surprised. Who knows? Right. Because the Apple Watch rumors are wildly wrong sometimes.

1:49:35Marco Arment:I feel like every new generation of Apple Watch for the last, I don't know, five, six years. There's not much there, but there's like one good feature every year that they add. This one's going to have a new SoC. I mean, that's good because they're, what, on year three with the current one? Yeah, or four? Maybe year four? I forget how long we have the same SoC. They just kept renaming. I have, honestly, I haven't even put watchOS beta on any of my watches yet, but I've heard that new Siri operation on the watchOS beta is pretty slow. But that's, obviously, it's not. That's why you need the new SoC, just so you can do what you used to be able to do at close to the same speed.

1:50:10Marco Arment:I know, right? And I don't even, I'm not sure why it would be because like the watch is not running Apple intelligence. Like, but, but the, I think about three years ago they did. Yeah. I guess when this, when this SOC started, they did move some of series processing to run locally on the watch. So for simple things like timers, um, I believe that runs locally on everything past, I think a series nine. Yeah. every year you get like one good Apple Watch feature that's that, you know, it's not really worth upgrading just for that. But if you wait, you know, if you wait until your current Apple Watch's battery kind of sucks and, you know, maybe you have like a three, three or four year old Apple Watch, then you upgrade, you get a nice combination of things.

1:50:52Marco Arment:But yeah, the rumors are basically no form factor redesign, maybe ceramic coming back as a premium material. So that, that could be very nice. I was a big fan of the white ceramic back in the day. so we'll see about that but probably just a like materials maybe you know processing speed and maybe one one new or tweaked health feature and that's fine i do wish the apple watch was a little more exciting um i almost and i believe we talked about this last year i almost wish they wouldn't release it every year because each incremental update is so so much of a nothing burger most of the time but if you look again if you look at like a two or three year cycle on them they actually do get significantly better over like three years so i almost wish the apple watch would go on like an airpods release cycle like you don't get air you don't get new airpods pro every year like the airpods pro is staggered so i mean like if they did the apple watch that way maybe they would do like you know the ultra would be one year and then the next year the regular apple watch would would get updated but not the ultra you know stuff like that like if they could stagger it out to make just a little bit better of an update.

1:52:04Marco Arment:But anyway, we'll see what they give us. I'm not expecting it to be very exciting.

1:52:09John Siracusa:I think that's it, right? I mean, we don't expect anything else. Oh, we're going to be getting much more iCloud-free storage, didn't you hear? Yeah, right. Yeah.

1:52:16Marco Arment:I mean, we're going to be getting John Turnus. Like, that's a pretty big change. Not in terms of, like, at the end of the day, what the products are going to be, but that is a pretty big change. And also, by the way, I should also, this is a good time to also point out that Phil Schiller is stepping away, allegedly from the App Store and Apple events, that those were his two big duties that he was working on that we knew about. He was still actively playing a role in planning the events. And I assume that means the presentation style too. Like maybe he was somehow leading or somehow heavily involved in the style of the videos that we get or how those things are presented.

1:52:56Marco Arment:Certainly the events around like Apple Park and stuff, like the developer events and the press events, I'm sure he was involved in those too. If he is stepping away from that also, that also might introduce changes there. Maybe not immediate, probably not like this event, but maybe within the next couple of years, we might start to see like, oh, the style of this has shifted a little bit, or they started to do something differently that they weren't doing before. That's something to look out for too with this change. So we'll see, you know, between a new CEO and Phil's change, this could be the start of a whole, you know, shift of the entire format of these events.

1:53:35Marco Arment:So that's something I'm also looking forward to. I was going to say that the last presentation we saw, whatever it was, the Golden Gate announcement, I guess it was WWDC. I felt like that was actually a shift. We talked about it at the time, but I do think that that actually represented a realignment of like they took some of the feedback to heart and were a little bit less stiff than they had been in the past and everything. So I hope they just continue along that trend. Yeah. And they were like, they're showing things in real time that were actually kind of slow. And to be honest about it, like that was, I remember we all commented and commended that because it's like, oh yeah, they, they actually did bring like a little bit more humanity into this.

1:54:06Marco Arment:So I, I think that'll, that whole story will be interesting to see. Like it's John Ternus's first event. I assume there, I mean, maybe there'll be some kind of like, thank you to Tim or on the way or something. Um, but either way, it's, you know, Tim, who, right.

1:54:22John Siracusa:Tim Apple.

1:54:23Marco Arment:Even if the products were all really boring, and I don't think they will be, certainly the foldable phone is going to be pretty interesting if nothing else is. But even if the products were really boring, I think just the story around this event would be very interesting by itself. But it seems like we're also going to get some pretty exciting products, so that should be fun too. Thank you to our sponsor of this episode, ZocDoc. And thank you 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.

1:54:54Marco Arment:This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Ternus and the Vision Pro. There's been some recent events and rumors around what might be happening there. So we're going to be covering that in Overtime. You can listen atp.fm slash join. Get that and all of our other exclusive member content and various member perks there. Once again, atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week.

1:55:18Marco Arment:Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh 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 so that's casey list m a r c o a r m and g marco r meant s i r a c u s a syracusa it's accidental

1:56:17so i talked i think a couple of episodes ago uh about me doing some stuff related to storage and i would have some updates maybe it was more than a couple episodes ago i said i might have some updates in a couple of months here's why here's what i was doing as my ongoing uh filling of every ounce of storage i have in my entire life i was doing some triage as usual and certain things even hyperspace can't help me with like for example space on my synology which everyone's saying why are you using an external drive for your photo cell why don't you just put it on your nas my nas is full too man like everything's oh no you think this i have some huge amount of space sitting there on my network attached charge no i fill it i fill everything yeah and this isn't a

1:56:57Marco Arment:good time to buy that either like i like this summer at the restaurant we uh we have the ubiquity cameras and they have like the big ubiquity like nas thing to record the uh the camera footage and just it's you know has four hard drive bays in it and that when i bought it you know last winter or two inches ago um i bought i think 24 terabyte drives like you know big drives and it turns out we need a little more space like a little more retention and i went to go look at drive pricing and i'm like oh no like even hard drive price like i figured maybe it was just ssds or, you know, SST modules that were expensive.

1:57:28Marco Arment:Nope. Hard drives are also incredibly expensive right now compared to where they were a few years ago. Yeah, so fingers crossed for my NAS that has had constantly spinning hard drives since the year 2013 and has not lost a drive yet. Fingers crossed that that continues to go well. But I was trying to save space on everything that I possibly could. And one of the, and not to save space, but also look at my bills. And one of the things I do is I back up my NAS to cloud storage and because it's not directly attached i don't do the iSCSI thing or anything i can't use my my flat rate backblaze thing to somehow let it back up my giant nas which is not that giant these days but anyway um i was using b2 backup because it was like the cheapest it's the it's backblazes s3 get it b2 anyway it's their object storage with a i think it has an s3 compatible api like they all do but their rates are cheap uh and uh synology has an app that will back up your nas over b2 it's just it's a built-in feature you just say i wanted to go to b2 here's my account blah blah and it does it and i've done that for years not backing up my entire synology like obviously i'm not backing up my time machine backups on the synology because that would be probably wouldn't even work but anyway i'm backing up my other stuff that's there because that's the only way i have to back up my synology the cloud backup is it other than like the raid redundancy that i have right and i can lose a drive or two depending on the raid configs which i did poorly and made poor choices but it's too late now anyway um that used to cost me like it was like 10 bucks a month for me to back up my synology because it was so cheap but as time went on i was backing up more and more stuff and it was like 15 bucks a month 20 bucks a month and it used to be like oh 28 29 i'm like well as long as i keep it under 30 but then in i think in this past year i was like oh now it's 32 37 36 it varies because like i'll delete stuff from my synology and it'll go up and down but i'm like it's just too much now it's pushing up against 40 bucks a month for me to back up my synology like that's just my like backup of last resort if i lose like two drives at the same time or something or if like my house burns down and i'm paying 40 bucks a month for that like i've literally never used it and i know it's not a reason not to have backup but i'm like i feel like the price is out of whack with the with the value that i'm getting from it and so you know i looked at i said i mean i've talked about this on the show many times when marco has mused about this that uh aws is uh as an rpg uh and it's a game that you can play and the win condition is how can you figure out how to get what you want by not paying a lot uh and i have a lot of experience dealing with s3 in particular um in my jobby job um and so i'm like okay let me look let me see if i can do it you know s3 has changed a lot over the years can i beat b2 with s3 so the goal would be stop backing up to b2 and use the same synology feature and start backing up to s3 instead and then delete everything from b2 and stop paying that bill so that was my goal um now i do have a lot of experience literally writing billions of files to s3 and my jobby job okay billion with a b many billions um but the thing about my jobby job is i didn't have to pay for that now i was trying to save the company money obviously but i can tell you that when you're spending the amount of money that my jobby jobs are spending on aws you have like your own personal like concierge people who are talking to you and helping you with things and it's just a very different experience to being like a lone developer with a free aws account okay this is not excuse but merely to explain that when i went about doing this and i'm like okay i think i know how you can do this i've done the math and by the way their price calculator was and remains terrible third-party price calculators are a little bit better um i'm like i think i can save money like before i even attempted this i'm like i think i can save money on this so let me try it and i made like all of the rookie mistakes like i don't know if i've forgotten everything i didn't i didn't forget because as soon as i did it i'm like oh yeah don't you remember when you had your job this was a thing and when i was planning to do you know millions and billions of files you're very careful and cautious but i'm like oh it's just my little thingy i'll just do it i'll pick this blah blah it was uh again not excusing but explaining the synology interface doesn't let you pick all of the storage tiers when you say you're going to upload to s3 it just has like a limited selection and i made a poor choice in that first thing i was like oh well i'll just put it here and then i'll re-tier it and i know there's re-tiering costs but how bad could it be i should have looked at the numbers because month one of my transition where i you know i stopped sending it to b2 and started sending it to s3 uh i was going from like a 36 bill month one june 60 and 84 cents whoops going in the wrong direction that is not a success and part of it was because i made a poor choice in the in the limited tiering pop-up menu because i again i had forgotten what i once knew this is the thing that happens kids you think once you know a thing you're never gonna make that mistake again but then you'll get old and you're like i knew it the second i did it but it was too late it was my damn gigabit upload connection i had already uploaded so much stuff there um there's minimum time span cost so it's like x amount per like byte per period of time but there's a minimum if you keep the file there for one second we charge you for 30 days like that type of thing and that will screw you real bad because if you put that thing up there and then re-tier it because i had to re-tier it because i couldn't upload it in the tier i wanted because the synology tool only had a limited tier choice when i'm talking about tiers by the way it's like do you want to have it in the fast storage the not so fast storage like there's different levels of storage that cost you different amounts of money and give you different performance trade-offs and there's a lot of tiers and the names don't make any sense even if you know the history behind them um so i had to upload into one tier and then immediately re-tear into the tier that i wanted but the one second it was in the other tier charged me 30 days worth of it being there and that was bad but i still had hope i'm like i'm like i think i can fix this and i did some more re-tiering and the way you have to re-tier things sucks so bad it's like just i just i should have just done it like instead of using the synology thing i should just written the script myself because then maybe while i'm typing the code i would have like remembered oh yeah 30 day minimum dummy don't do that okay month two july after re-tiering rearranging just dealing with everything trying to do it and by the way their price uh not calculator but their price predictor here's what we think your month's gonna be it's so bad man like it'll be like your price for this month is going to be two cents and then like the day before the month ends like oh just kidding and then it shows you like the real price is going to be cool making this anyway month two july 23 and 32 cents oh that's better it's better than 36 but i'm like but it's still i still feel like i can do better here i still feel like i'm going to do better but you never know until the month ends you know what i mean like because the predictions are all over the place like i can't trust what it says but it thinks it's going to do it fluctuates like i don't i don't know how they're predicting i'm not there's not that much activity like once i've got everything uploaded yeah there's some fluctuation of like i'm pulling down like a new season of a television show or like who wanted something recently uh one of my kids wanted a tv show that i already watched that i had deleted so i put it back on and yes i am backing up downloaded tv shows to it's just don't worry about it it's what i do okay um month three august august just ended month three august and keep in mind the amount of stuff that i have in s3 is exactly the same as i had in b2 fluctuating plus or minus as it like fluctuates because again the discs are basically full so that's how much stuff is there month three That's$4.74.

2:04:53Wow. Victory. Well done. So exciting. And the tradeoff is that if I ever need to do a restore, A, it's going to take a long time. And B, I think I'll actually be charged more for the restore. But like considering I have never had to restore and this is my like thing of last resort, that's the tradeoff that I wanted to make. Like, how are you saving this money? I'm using the worst, slowest thing where you can't even get your data immediately. you just have to like put in a request and since like send a letter and we'll pull your things out of glacier deep archive and we'll tell you when they're ready like but that's fine because the whole point of this is like this is not live storage i don't access it it is just there just in case so i wanted the cheapest you can get four dollars and 74 cents big decrease from 36 a month i'm very happy and all this is to say that the uh the rpg that is aws can be won sometimes if you're persistent well done john awesome Awesome.