708: Primary, Tertiary, and Third Cousin

12:29Casey Liss:I just said that I thought the director or whoever got an almost genuine performance out of Tim Cook where he expressed a tiny bit of emotion for a fraction of a second. But what he also did was performed comfort, enthusiasm, and gusto that overshadowed Ternus. Because he does this little intro and he gives this little bit of emotion. You're like, Tim, I didn't even know you could raise your voice in that way and express emotion with your voice on an Apple video. I couldn't even believe it. and he's right in your face and he's loud and he's just so expressive and then they cut well it's all relative i mean so expressive for tim right but still and then they cut to turn us who first of all i think his audio equalization was messed up he's like me and that his voice just recorded straight sounds terrible so it needs a lot of help to not sound awful he just sounded like muted and like he was talking from inside of a paper bag and he was just like like tim just overpowered him and basically saying see ya i'm out of here remember me that dynamic figure often seen crushing ice and scaling walls it's like no but like right now it seems like you're that guy and then turnus is just this little lilting flower now i do think in the rest of the keynote when he got to do more normal turnus things that he felt much more comfortable so i think he did a fine job but this this is my note of this thing it makes it seem like tim cook was just an amazing figure which we know he wasn't he was very you know very very state and boring and just did not express anything.

13:53Casey Liss:And then it makes Ternus seem a little bit, uh, limp, but you know, this, I, I, like, as of the rest of the video, I think he just, he was just doing his normal turn of stuff that he always does in these videos. And he was pretty good at it.

14:04John Siracusa:I thought on the whole Ternus did a good job. Yes. He still did. Yes. He's got a Tim Cook suit on, but in the grand scheme of things, I thought he did pretty darn well. Uh, I, he also spent a little time in this opening montage, if you will, maybe not montage, but this opening segment, uh, talking about kind of his reestablishing maybe his, maybe Apple's values, kind of the corporate values, the hardware values, software values. I don't know that it was necessary, but I don't necessarily begrudge it. I think it was reasonably quick. It was reasonable to kind of set the tone for here's how my tenure is going to be at Apple.

14:37John Siracusa:I thought it was pretty good. Then they start talking or he starts talking about the intelligent personal hub, which is what's going to be at the center of everything they do uh i don't know john what do you think that intelligent personal hub might be i mean so

14:50Casey Liss:there was two parts this one was like uh you know we don't collect your stuff and sell it or whatever which is fine although they do show us a lot more ads than usual but anyway they did that which is fine like basically saying we don't have the same business model as other companies and then the other part of this little section was essentially a preemptive shot a preemptive shot over the bow of open ai uh hardware right it was basically saying um you know intelligence blah blah blah your info blah blah blah privacy blah blah blah and how will you access that information what you need something that's always with you and that has the power to do these things or whatever and it's like this whole big giant construction it's like and you know what guess what the answer is the iphone not anything anyone else is making like not a pendant not a donut not anything like the answer is the iphone like wow amazing apple so you're telling me that the product you already make is actually the ideal device for ai and i'm not saying they're wrong like they're probably right.

15:43Casey Liss:Right. But that was the point they were making. Hey, other people are making all sorts of AI stuff, but actually the phone is the right answer and we have the best phone. And, you know, it's totally preemptive because there's no, there's actually no competing product that is like a threat to the iPhone at this point, but open AI sure wants there to be one. So that was the segment of the thing, which is like open AI, stay away. The phone's where it's at.

16:03John Siracusa:All right. So, yeah. So, you know, John Ternus took a few shots across Google's bow and said things like, you know, So others see your info as data to collect and to store. Apple intelligence runs on device whenever it can. Personal intelligence, that's actually personal. iPhone brings powerful AI capabilities together with your personal contacts on a device that you have with you all the time. So we're establishing, okay, here's why the iPhone is important. I'm sorry, John. Here's why iPhone is important. No, that's what Apple does.

16:29Casey Liss:But we do all the opposite. Just like the GIF-JIF person. Remember, he tells us to say GIF, but we all disagree and say GIF. So that's the Apple situation.

16:36Marco Arment:It's the George Lucas clause. Sometimes the creator is wrong. Yep.

16:39John Siracusa:Anyway, so yeah, we start with the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. It's got the A20 Pro. The highlighted feature is a variable aperture main camera. It's color-matched aluminum and back glass. So if you think about the iPhone's 17 Pro, there's that inset glass section where you would plug or snap on like a MagSafe thing. And that's a slightly different color than the rest of the frame of the phone and now they're color matched between the glass and the aluminum that's what

17:09Casey Liss:they say in the thing with the color matching but we talked about this when the 17 pro came out it's not like the 17 pro wasn't color matched the problem was there was a texture difference so at a certain angle on the light it exactly matched the color of the aluminum but if you tilted it just off of that angle then it didn't match it anymore so i know what they're saying like they're just saying it's color matched now it will look the same in more lighting conditions but i think all they did was change the surface treatment so that the scattering effect is similar and so it looks like the same color and more conditions.

17:35Casey Liss:So I'll see when I get mine to, you know, tilt it to see if I can get it to change color or whatever. But that's the upshot here. I don't think the orange one wasn't color matched. It was just, it was only color matched at like one tiny angle of incident light and every place else will look different.

17:49John Siracusa:That may be true, but I don't think I've ever looked at either Aaron's phone or mine and thought, oh, that is perfectly matched. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't recall having seen it.

17:57Casey Liss:Just got to find like the 0.05 degrees where it is perfectly matched. I'm twirling mine around now. Like there is a point. It's just, it's a very small point. It's very narrow. If you're not exactly on that angle, it doesn't match anymore. And that's, I think it's just because it's not like they don't know how to match colors. It's the surface treatment.

18:13John Siracusa:In any case, we've got four colors. We've got black, silver, glacier, which actually looks really good to me. It's like a very light blue, almost white. And burgundy, which as a Virginia Tech Hokie, I should probably buy that one if I do end up buying an 18 Pro. But I don't know. I think the glacier looks really good.

18:29Casey Liss:Burgundy is not deep cherry, which everyone was like, oh, it's going to be deep cherry. or whatever and not only is it not called deep cherry because obviously the names are difficult to leak even though the leaks basically got the color right i think it is less deep cherry than deep cherry would have been like it is lighter than i thought it would be in apple's publicity shots it is not as deep and dark as a lot of the spy shots were it's a little bit like sort of more metallic-y brighter and i think maybe not as strong as the deep cherry ones that i saw in the spy shots but maybe also less offensive to people my wife loves the color she's this is one of her favorite colors she's not getting this phone but she actually does like that color so there's one

19:08Marco Arment:vote for somebody liking the color fair enough i think these colors are a lot more muted than the orange was like oh definitely based on all the leaks and everything i was at least expecting the glacier the the light blue color i was expecting that to be a little more saturated but like as i'm watching everyone's youtube hands-on videos and stuff from the hands-on area like i'm seeing these colors and kind of as close to a realistic view as I can at this moment, they all look kind of restrained. The burgundy was a lot more restrained than I thought it would be. The blue is that as well. They brought back black because everyone wished there was black on the 17 line.

19:44Marco Arment:And of course, silver, because some people like to make no choice. But ultimately, I think it says a lot about the success of the color of the iphone 17 pro with the orange that like they led the introduction of the of the new pro iphone they led it with the colors that was the very first thing they showed us and talked about about the new iphone pro which if you look like before the 17 pro with the orange one the colors of the pro line were like almost an apology at the end of the pro segment that they would have. Like, they would talk about everything else first. The chip, the camera, the screen, all this stuff.

20:25Marco Arment:And then at the very end, it's available in four colors. They're all different shades of gray. Good luck. And this is like, wow, we made people care about colors with the orange phone. Turns out people like pro phone colors. It was such a big hit. We're going to lead with that this time. That, I think, says a lot.

20:42John Siracusa:Yeah, I agree. I just wish that the colors were a little more bold. I think that would have been nicer.

20:46Marco Arment:Well, and I think ultimately it's going to go in cycles. If you look at how Apple did colors on the non-pro equipment over the years, that's always had much better color options. They also kind of went in waves of vibrance, I would say. Colors are fashion. iPhones are fashion. And, you know, we're going to see later when we get to the Apple Watch section, there's a lot of like fashion influence of the colors of the watches going on right now. Last year, they made a splash with the orange one, but not every year is going to have like a big, vibrant, splashy color. This year, I'm sure through lots of research and lots of analysis of trends around the world, they decided the colors this year are going to be a little bit more restrained, but a little bit different.

21:29Marco Arment:And it's not a new orange. It's two totally different colors. and I think that's the pattern I would expect to see I just I hope that the bold orange was not like a one-off that we're never going to see again like because you can already see like with this color line they're going a little bit safer like these don't seem as risky they definitely seem like they're like stepping back into their their comfort zone which in this case is a very bad thing so I'm hoping they remain uncomfortable and they somebody kicks them back out of their comfort zone next year and we get you know some kind of you know a little bit more striking color

22:06Casey Liss:next year i think the burgundy is just as saturated as the orange orange is just a brighter color than burgundy burgundy is by its nature a darker color but it is at least saturated just like the black is saturated the silver and the glacier are the typical pale ones that we always have but like yeah that burgundy i mean that is that is as saturated a burgundy as the orange was it's just

22:23Marco Arment:burgundy is not as bold a color as orange that's the bottom line i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily call it, etc. But the burgundy at least is a strong color. And I like it for that. Even though it's not really my thing, it is like a statement. It is a strong color. It's not as vibrant as the orange. But it is at least an opinion. Whereas when they were going through all the different shades of gray in the non-sexy way, it was all just like, we're going to have as little opinion as possible. Like last year, like the iPhone Air colors, where the iPhone Air came in three shades of very, very close to white and black.

22:59Marco Arment:And you looked at the three shades of white, you're like, why are these even different colors? That was like, we're afraid to make any statement whatsoever. This is not like that. This is making a statement. This year, the statement it's making is a little bit more low-key than last year's color.

23:16John Siracusa:The 18 Pro and Pro Max are the same size as 17 Pro and Pro Max. The Pro is five grams heavier. The Pro Max is 16 grams heavier. uh they also allegedly per mac rumors have 12 gigs of ram same as the 17 pro in pro max by the way

23:31Casey Liss:16 grams heavier on the max is a lot well it's all battery um there was one moment in the video where somebody said uh and blah blah blah something something the smaller size of the 18 pro is like did they make the 18 pro smaller no they meant compared to the the folding phone which we'll get to in a little bit but like i was excited for one moment but they're literally exactly the same size although they didn't give measurements on the what we all assume is to be the larger camera plateau apple really never gives that type of measurement so we'll see

24:01John Siracusa:when we see more videos about it then they made uh they did a little bit of talking about apple intelligence and they made kind of an offhanded point well maybe not offhanded they highlighted it but one way or another they said two and a half billion siri requests per day uh somebody pointed out i forget who i saw this that posted this but that would that would probably be one and a quarter billion for if it actually worked the first time. And then they noted, or I noted, that on the little slide that they put up, they said that they support or will support Chinese traditional and simplified, I believe is what it said.

24:33John Siracusa:But interestingly, Apple Intelligence is not available in China, or at least won't be initially anyhow.

24:38Marco Arment:Well, those languages are spoken in different places too.

24:40John Siracusa:No, no, I know. But it still struck me as striking, for lack of a better word.

24:44Casey Liss:Or are they doing something where they have to use like one of like some China AI model instead of using the ones that they have? Like there's this whole big deal with how they're going to get Apple intelligence to China. And it involves using entirely different tech stack as usual.

24:58John Siracusa:Yep. They also noted that there will be some server-side AI limits, which we've heard about in the past. They said increased access will be available in most iCloud Plus plans.

25:06Casey Liss:They keep talking about this. They've said it a few times that every time they say it, they're like, hand wave, hand wave. All right. We'll see.

25:12Marco Arment:by the way did you see that the they extended the free satellite sos i did for the iphone 14 15 and

25:20Casey Liss:16 again kicking that can down the road i mean hey that's what you want right it's free uh yeah

25:24Marco Arment:i mean i believe like i know i said back then like they're probably just never gonna let that expire because why like why would they ever let this emergency life-saving thing on an iphone expire like because one person dies from that and that's a disaster like they would never in a million years do it whereas they would love to keep that going forever for free for every iphone that supports it that way they can eventually say things like this person's life was saved by this feature like they would much rather do that so as long as the satellite sos stuff is not costing apple a huge amount of money which it probably isn't uh just by volume uh i'm sure it's fine i don't know i as

26:03Casey Liss:we discussed last time i think there are ways to make it so it's free for everybody to use but then like after it saves your life, charge you money. And I don't put it past them to figure out how to do that.

26:12Marco Arment:We are sponsored this episode by 11 labs and their 11 agents platform. Now, when I've had to call a customer phone number, you know, you go through the phone tree. That's really, you know, this primitive thing in a press for, for billing, you know, you hear their artificial voices. You have to wait on hold. You have to enter the same information over and over again, or tell the same information to agents over and over again. 11 labs has this product called 11 agents. And And this is made to solve this problem. And I actually can understand the complexity on the business side at the restaurant.

26:42Marco Arment:I also have a very simple phone system by, you know, a different provider. And it's just so primitive. It can't do any of this cool stuff. So Eleven Labs specializes in making it good for businesses and for customers. They're a platform for AI voice and chat agents that actually listen, understand, and resolve your customers' issues. They can look up things like your account. They can process requests. And they can hand off to people when needed. This helps create better experiences for customers while letting your call center and support teams focus on the issues that actually need a person. And it's made by 11 Labs.

27:13Marco Arment:This is an AI research and product company known for their realistic voice and audio models with over 70 languages supported. So if you've heard really good AI voices that actually sound expressive and natural, there's actually a good chance it was made by 11 Labs. And this is built for your enterprise at scale. They have more than 10 million conversations per week, SoC2, HIPAA, and PCI certifications, regional data residency, and even forward deployed engineers who can work alongside your team to get agents into production. So if you run a business or handle customer operations across support, sales, or marketing, you can start with a demo at 11labs.io slash ATP.

27:48Marco Arment:See how 11 agents can fit into your workflows and help build experiences that your customers will actually love. 11labs.io slash ATP. That's 11 spelled out, E-L-E-V-E-N, L-A-B-S dot I-O slash A-T-P. Thanks to 11 Labs and 11 Agents for sponsoring our show.

28:10John Siracusa:All right, let's talk about performance. They talk about the A20 Pro. I'll try to run through this quickly. It is a two nanometer process, which we expected a six core CPU with two new super cores, which they specifically quoted or said are desktop class. Four new efficiency cores, allegedly 20 % faster. A seven-core GPU with 40 % faster graphics performance. Neural accelerators, which, mind you, are different than the neural engine. The neural accelerators are two times faster on floating-point math. It has twice the neural engine with 32 total cores and two times the compute power. 50 % increase in memory bandwidth, which I reckon will make a big deal.

28:51John Siracusa:custom packaging inspired by the M series. They said with the silicon die side by side with memory. The CPU is connected directly to the vapor chamber now for quote, dramatically improved thermal performance.

29:03Casey Liss:And what do we call that Casey?

29:04John Siracusa:That's a chiplet, right?

29:05Casey Liss:None of you watched the meme video. I try to educate you on your history, but no,

29:09John Siracusa:I'm sorry.

29:09Casey Liss:It's Christian side Ram. Oh, wow. Remember the Christian side? You've already forgotten. It's three episodes ago. Give me that Christian side Ram. That's what's inspired by the M series. If you look at an M series SOC, they have RAM next to the SOC. And now the iPhone does too, which as we said in the past episode, when we were talking about the rumor, that means that the RAM is not on top of the SOC. And so you're not trying to cool down a sandwich of RAM and SOC. Instead, you've got the SOC and right next to it is the RAM. And you can put the heat dissipating things right up against the RAM and most importantly, right up against the SOC.

29:42Casey Liss:And like the M6, they doubled the neural engine. So that's a thing now. they're just you know we're gonna have two of those when once we had one uh because i guess it pays dividends um they didn't talk too much about the cores but they both had new it's a new super core it's a new efficiency core so i guess these are the better efficiency cores and maybe the same super cores from the m6 but we'll find that out when people start slicing these chips

30:02Marco Arment:open yeah it does seem like there's a lot of common elements here between the a20 pro and the m6 which we would expect like that is what they usually do um but it seems like the phone chips keep getting closer to the desktop chips well see the thing like they used to do the phone chips

30:17Casey Liss:would have the cores first and the m series would have them later so the phone would come out and then like the current m series would not have the same oh that's true i wonder if i wonder if they're in sync now uh anyway the schedules are all weird so we don't know but they the way apple refers to everything new super cores and new efficiency cores i just can't keep track of it anymore but we'll find out when people uh again slice the tops off these chips and start looking at the silicon on the actual chips and then we'll figure out which core is which.

30:42John Siracusa:All right. They have much better thermal design like we were talking about. The vapor chamber has three times the surface area versus the 17 Pro. It has 80 % recycled stainless steel. It has nano twin copper material to move heat away from the display. It's a 40 % gain versus the 17 Pro and twice as good as the 16 Pro and older. I can tell you that having been to a football game weekend before last, I think it was. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Having been to a football game where I'm outside for a long time in the direct sun, that is like my stress test for thermals on the iPhone. And where the, I think the 15, certainly the 14 was like this, where after getting in the direct sun for more than a few minutes, the screen got so dim and dark that you could literally barely read it, or at least I could.

31:28John Siracusa:The 17 Pro definitely dims itself, but never to the point that it's difficult to read. and allegedly the 18 pro is going to be even better so if you're one of those people like me that has had real hard had a real hard time uh using your phone in direct sunlight you should really consider the iphone 18 pro because i think it'll be way way better yeah if you look at the

31:47Casey Liss:pictures of it like the whole the whole back of the phone it's just one giant vapor chamber instead of like oh we put a little vapor chamber near where the chips are no it's like just covers the whole back of the phone and then the the whatever the nano twin copper material now i don't know if past phones also had some kind of heat dissipating thing behind the entire screen but if they did apple had never touted it before and so i have lots of hope that this will help specifically with the situation where like you were just talking about casey where you have a phone out in the sunlight and sun is going through the screen and bouncing around there a little greenhouse effect and heating things up because just from the direct sunlight on the screen now the entire screen has essentially a heat dissipating thing behind the whole screen and hopefully that is pulling heat out of there and into the place where the vapor chamber or can deal with it so I have high hopes for the cooling capacity of this phone based on the pictures they showed.

32:34Marco Arment:Yeah, and that's the kind of thing, like Casey was just saying, good thermals in a phone can just make such a difference in everyday capabilities and annoyances and limitations. And this is what, like part of what I was complaining about last episode about the iPhone Air is that the iPhone Air kind of went the other direction. It has terrible thermals. But the iPhone 17 Pro has great thermals thanks to the vapor chamber compared to the 16 Pro. and now they've done an even bigger step in that same direction the iphone 18 pro now allegedly if this is all correct which it probably is has even better thermals than the 17 pro did which was already very good so this should help a lot with things like you know having the thing work in the sun um working in cars like in the summertime uh and you know all the way up to things like sustained gaming performance which you know i'm not really that kind of gamer on my phone but a

33:24John Siracusa:kind of thing it does matter a lot all right the iphone 18 pro and pro max have the n1 which is wi-fi 7 and bluetooth 6 additionally according to mac rumors and this is a very sketchy was the word that came to mind that's a bit dramatic but a very unclear situation i mean i think i believe

33:43Casey Liss:they're sourcing because they're basically going off of like the bands like the the the wi-fi or not wi-fi the cellular bands that are supported by the chips and there is a difference between the 18 pro and the 18 pro max and so i think this is plausible so they are saying that the 18 pro

33:56John Siracusa:has the c2 cellular chip but the 18 pro max does not and we'll put a link in the show notes to that uh with regard to the battery uh they're saying in short a whole heck of a lot better and also you can get half a charge in 15 minutes via a wire and five minutes of wired charging gives you six hours of video playback which is really darn impressive uh then we got some gaming from cayenne drance i uh went to sleep for a little bit but then we talked about the camera still with cayenne uh we as i mentioned earlier get variable aperture so there's six laser cut blades each of which is thinner than a human hair they made their own specialized polymer composite there's a new rotor mechanism a custom design lens and it's automatic based on the scene in in the dark you should get up to 50 more light night mode will give you faster capture i've seen a couple of different uh people cite different f-stop numbers and the one that seems most consistent is f 1.8 but i've seen 1.4 something in other yeah they showed some sample shots that are 1.4 i mean the

34:57Casey Liss:f numbers are all weird because everything about this camera is tiny the sensor is tiny the lens is tiny the distance between the lens and the sensor is tiny like so i don't know like all these measurements that have to do with photography also have all sorts of weird historical reasons for why they are what they are and it's hard to translate them directly to a phone situation but you just have to judge from you know comparing to other iphones which have been roughly the same size uh that's where you can get an idea of the measurements of this but the important part is yeah it has an actual mechanical aperture which means the hole that lets light in can change size from a big hole to a smaller hole that's a thing that is useful in photography every other iphone up to this point has had different apertures on the different cameras sometimes but each individual circle on the back of your phone had a fixed aperture which meant the hole that let the light in to hit the sensor was always the same size on each one of those circles.

35:47Casey Liss:The circles could be different from each other, but it never changed size. And real cameras have an aperture on them that can change size. And now so does one of the cameras on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max.

35:58Marco Arment:Yeah. Now I think there's, this is going to probably be a fairly small deal, not as big of a deal as you think because of its variability. But so the four apertures that it supports are f1.48, 1.8, 2.8, 4.0. The outgoing iPhone 17 Pro camera has a fixed aperture of 1.78. So this one, 1.48 is its widest open, which means if the sensor has remained the same size, which it probably has, that means the 18 Pro camera can let in more light when it's wide open. And most of the time, that's going to be what it's doing. Like most people shooting most of the time are generally probably going to be shooting with the lens wide open unless you're trying to achieve certain effects which most people aren't which is why i'm kind of surprised they even put this in here at all but anyway well i the point they made with the narrow aperture is true because that

36:50Casey Liss:annoys me with my current phone camera if you have a bunch of people who are varying distances from the camera but the close one is close to you it's hard to get them all in focus with a fixed aperture and so being able to narrow it on a sunny day that's the picture they show like people on a staircase and it's like look the faraway person's face is also kind of in focus and so is the close up person because they narrowed it to f4 or whatever that's so that is true that but but i

37:11Marco Arment:think what what i think might be a little bit misleading about this um if for people who are thinking about it that way is that on a very very small sensor like this f 1.48 does not mean the same thing as f 1.4 on your slr lens like it does not mean the same thing at all it's it's much more i don't i don't know the math right off the top of my head like i don't know what the equivalent

37:32Casey Liss:is but they're all wildly different than you think but still 1.0 is 1.8 is bigger than four they're just not the same as that would be on a real camera.

37:39Marco Arment:Right. The other thing to keep in mind here is that, again, because of the light gathering abilities of these sensors and how tiny they are, most of the time, again, most of the time, the phone is going to run it at the widest open aperture anyway. So if you want that effect of having a lot more depth of field than you even normally would have, you're going to have to have a lot of light or have it be doing a lot of noise reduction and blurring of the picture afterwards. So it's always a trade-off. Finally, I would point out that the aperture blades that they showed off are few in number and straight compared to any SLR lens that's worth it.

38:17Marco Arment:Yeah, you're not getting good bokeh bubbles. Right. So when the iris of a good SLR lens contracts, it tries to make the hole in the middle as close to a circle as it can. Now, you see how it works in the video, how it has these blades that kind of slide in. And so when, you know, real cameras, like when they design these blades, they usually have at least eight of them. This, you know, there's only six in this. And they make the blades curved so that as they squish in, it is closer to a circle shape. And the nicer the lens is, usually the more blades there are and maybe the more curved they are.

38:49Marco Arment:I don't know about that part, but they at least add blades. And so what you're trying to do is approximate a circle because whatever shape the iris is that results from them closing in, know any blob you have in the background of the blurry area of any blob like a point light source

39:06John Siracusa:especially will take on that shape oh i don't think i knew that so you want it to be a circle

39:12Marco Arment:or you want to be close to circle and if you if you look at like you know the the comparisons on like lens reviews of like cheaper lenses with fewer blades versus the more expensive lenses like they'll show you the difference it's pretty apparent so to have only six blades and have them be straight you're not going to get the look that you want without some processing i mean the blades

39:32Casey Liss:are tiny though that's why yeah everything about this is so tiny i don't really blame them no i

39:37Marco Arment:agreed but this is all kind of why i think like if what you want is an slr look without computational tricks i don't think this is going to bring you as close to that as you might think yeah i think

39:49Casey Liss:it's just giving a little bit more flexibility for for the apertures that are all effectively very tiny holes and like again in the grand scheme of things how big physically speaking in millimeters is this hole leading to the sensor and how big is the sensor everything is so tiny having a little bit of flexibility here is good i'm looking forward to it especially you know given the manual controls that we're going to get to in a second if i can actually pick it and have some say over it i mean maybe it'll just be like the slider and liquid glass where it's just like look there's only two settings all the way to the left and all the right why bother in the middle but we'll see what the auto setting does for me yeah exactly and i

40:20Marco Arment:think overall like this sounds like a very good camera upgrade broadly for lots of reasons um mostly in the software honestly the hardware doesn't seem like it's that different um but the larger widest aperture going from f1.78 to f1.48 that will help everything that will help low light performance like that's oh that is always a good welcome change that's what they

40:45Casey Liss:were showing off with a video of like look it's like uh lighting a match in a totally dark scene and the match is illuminating the actor's face. It's like, oh, shot on iPhone. Yeah, there you go.

40:54John Siracusa:All righty. So we got some discussions about the software, and this is where we start talking about pro controls. First of all, there's cinematic effects from regular video after capture at 60 frames per second. That's pretty cool. You can do time-lapse in 4K with Dolby Vision. The audio mix where you select like, not scenes is the word I'm looking for, but like, oh, I want to focus on what's in the frame. I want to focus on the environment, whatever the case may be. that feature is uh now has music support which is cool so they showed like a couple of jazz

41:24Casey Liss:musicians playing on the street oh i will say also for the video like again this is all shot on iphone blah blah blah uh they really went with hdr in this whole presentation i know lots of past presentations have been hdr i know because i've struggled to download the stupid hdr version from apple's hls servers because of some kind of bad akamai uh node near me that refuses to let me download them but anyway i know they've done hdr a lot and for i think for a couple years now but having watched this on my pro display xdr i thought their use of hdr in these segments was really good like it wasn't like look the sun is in your eyes ah everything was just a little bit brighter a little bit sparklier a little bit richer it looked really good and if that was if that's the shot on the iphone stuff again a lot of it has to do with you know obviously the people who are directing the scenes and deciding where to stage them and how to light them and stuff like that but i think their their taste and how to deploy hdr in a video that is essentially people standing in front of things talking i think they did a really good job of that this time i'm not sure how much of that to credit the phone for but the phone was obviously part of the mix and if my if the videos that i take of my family and my dog and my outdoors and stuff uh could look half as good as their setups here i'll be happy all right so we got the pro controls and the camera app uh

42:40John Siracusa:uh sorry third-party camera folks this is yeah it's amazing that they've lasted this long basically

42:46Casey Liss:having such a simple camera app i mean i know there's lots of little gadgets and buttons and whatever but like there's such a huge uh market for third-party camera apps that like hey you know there are software controls for all the settings that you would want on a camera and we can just expose them to you in an app and there's lots of apps that do that uh you know obviously the the ones that stand head and shoulders by everywhere else are very popular and have their own technology to go with it but finally apple said all right we can do that too like we can we can just put we can just put the white balance control right in the the camera interface every other app in the world does it uh now we can do it and we can let you adjust shutter speed and like it's like yeah and i feel bad for those camera apps like oh man we had this market sewn up because apple just refused to do it with the built-in app so basically our app if our app's the one they find first well we have these controls and it's great and now the bar has been raised substantially now it's not enough to just say hey i have a third-party camera app that lets you have some more controls because the built-in one has a pretty good interface to a lot of the basic controls that weren't there before yeah and i believe they said it was customizable right did i hear that right yeah probably in the same way the current one is where you can kind of decide what you want to see and how many controls you want to see and which thing but we'll see how it uh it ends up like it's obviously not going to really compete with the high-end third-party camera apps that have way more features than this but it is they're finally taking a step in that direction saying it's there's we're not going to hold back and just give the simplest possible thing and arguably they started down that direction when they introduced the camera control and all that stuff and setting aside how that physical control worked they have been adding more stuff to the camera app and now they're continuing in that direction

44:19John Siracusa:so we've got these pro controls you can do white balance they'll show a histogram you can do the aforementioned manual aperture you can do shutter speed and all of this is also supported in video So one of the cooler things that they did talk about that I noticed or that, well, that I thought was cool. I'm not trying to imply I'm the only person that noticed this. I thought it was extremely cool that they made a specific mention that for video, and I'm not sure how you enable this, but for video, you can do focus tracking, which means like they showed the example of a kid's soccer game and the kid is running toward the camera.

44:50John Siracusa:And generally speaking, in the past, it's been kind of hard to get the phone to stay focused on the kid or anything really as it's moving closer or further away from the camera. Um, but they said, not only will they do focus tracking, so keeping the focus on this child as they're running closer and further away from the phone, but also if they exit and then reenter the frame, that is super cool. And I'm really excited to try that out.

45:14Casey Liss:Was this only video or was it also a photo? Cause that's another feature that, that like, you know, my, my son, my real Sony cameras, uh, one of their big selling points is how well they can latch onto a thing you're trying to photograph and keep the focus on it. And same deal, like keeping the focus on the person, even if they turn their head around, if they turn their head back, it grabs their eye again. If they're running across the frame, it keeps track of them. Like, same deal. And it's always amazed me that Apple has not jumped on that faster because the SOCs in the iPhone are massively more powerful than the ones that are in these Sony cameras.

45:46Casey Liss:And yet the Sony cameras have a reputation for grabbing focus and not letting go and doing really well in these situations. So it's good to see Apple taking some of that. If it's just for video, it'll be kind of disappointing. I was kind of wish they would just bring all my Sony camera controls to the iPhone plane still image thing again, because the phone has just so much power, like I should have no problem just trouncing the Sony in this area. But so far, they haven't been very excited to do so. And part of it is like, okay, if you're taking pictures or video of your kid playing soccer from reasonable distances, because of what we just said before about yeah, f1.4, blah, blah, blah.

46:20Casey Liss:But practically speaking, it's not the same as f1.4 on a full frame camera, because everything is tiny what that means is all your apertures are tiny so at the distance you're videoing your kid everything in that field is in focus like it's it's a tiny hole right i mean maybe it's like it just i don't think there's like this this shallow depth of field like oh no i was at f1.4 and only my kid's nose is in focus and if it and if it misses focus on him then he's just a blur in the background that's not a problem with phone video from normal viewing distances so maybe that's why they waited so long to get these fancy focus controls because it's like look just point in the direction of the kids and hit record and they'll be fine also um unless i missed something

47:01Marco Arment:it also appears as though all of the other cameras on the phone are unchanged from the 17 pro uh it seems like the the front camera like you know the new square censored front camera that we got last year that seems exactly the same the 4x camera seems exactly the same like every the ultra wide But it seems like everything else is unchanged. And most likely the sensor on the 48 megapixel one or on the 1X 48 megapixel, the sensor also seems like it was unchanged because they didn't mention anything about it. So it seems like the variable aperture is the only change for the camera system this year.

47:35Marco Arment:And then these other software controls, which, again, are useful. But this is a medium camera upgrade year, and it's much more on the software side than the hardware side.

47:45Casey Liss:yeah the only even rumor there was about cameras other than the variable aperture one being better was that maybe the telephoto would go to 10x but it doesn't so that didn't happen yeah there was

47:54Marco Arment:there was this like last minute rumor drop almost all of which was wrong

47:58John Siracusa:yeah yeah yeah all right so there are new uh texture and grain controls in the photo styles thing that's that like matrix where you can drag around the little cursory thing and try to lock in the exact photo style you want. So now you can do it with texture in green control. They did make a bit of a stink about authenticity, and they said they're supporting the synth ID standard, which John has helpfully linked for me in the show notes.

48:25Casey Liss:I think that's the right thing. I know that you had trouble hearing them, and I did look at the subtitles, but I'm pretty sure this is what they were saying. It is.

48:31John Siracusa:So this is something that Google's come up with that I think a fair number of people are starting to embrace. They spoke about Apple reference image, where the camera securely signs the photo data, data, excuse me, at pixel level at the time of capture. And then Private Cloud Compute creates a reference photo that lives peer to the edited photo. So you can visually confirm what's actually in the shot. So I guess what happens is it will always, as far as I can tell anyway, the original photo will always be there and will ride along with whatever edits you make to the photo. I'm unclear about the mechanics.

49:03John Siracusa:I mean, that's what happens now.

49:04Casey Liss:Like that's, that has always been Apple's photo system is your original remains unmodified. and then all your edits are like effects on top of it. But what they're saying is not only are we going to continue to do that, but we're going to sort of sign the original so you can prove that this was captured by Apple's camera and this original capture hasn't been altered. Whereas with their other system, you can just replace that original behind the scenes with whatever you want and say, look, this is what my iPhone took a picture of. It's like, well, was it signed by all the secret key? I don't know why they're sending it to private cloud compute, but presumably there's some computationally expensive thing that they don't want to do on your phone that they'll do at their leisure on private cloud compute.

49:39Casey Liss:But presumably there is some kind of hardware signing thing involving the secure enclave or whatever and the image processing and the sensor and blah, blah, blah that makes it so that you can't fake one of these things. If you have an image that is signed in this way, you can be sure that it was, these are the actual captured pixels from one of these Apple camera devices. That's the idea anyway.

49:59Marco Arment:Yeah, I'm very curious to learn over time, like how does this work? why does private cloud compute get involved? Is there some kind of registry of the keys or something? What happens if one of the keys gets compromised? If a phone's key gets compromised?

50:17Casey Liss:I think it's just because it's computationally expensive. I think that's why they always go to private cloud compute. It's because they don't want to do it on your phone because it's too much.

50:27Marco Arment:Right. So what they have set up here is basically a system that creates a pretty strong incentive for people to be able to prove something that wasn't really captured by a sensor? What happens if one phone's key gets compromised somehow or there's some hack developed such that people can make photos that aren't real get signed as if they were real? I don't know. This could be very interesting in the age of AI and fake everything if it all works. But that's a big if.

51:02Casey Liss:i mean but that's that's the what we do with all encryption like yeah if someone gets some secret key or whatever you can fake stuff but like we have to make an effort in that direction which is we'll use the best technology we have which i mean apple's pretty good at this stuff so far and like so far none of their hardware keys have been leaked in such a way that it's compromised everything but yeah that's it's possible but it's better than not doing it at all like the alternative is okay well don't do it at all and there's nothing you know trying to prove that this thing you know so i i know what you're saying it's like oh you have the system and people start believing in it then you can fake things more easily because people believe in it but i think Like if it's cracked, we'll all know that it's cracked pretty quickly.

51:36John Siracusa:All righty. So we got told that there's an upgraded Dynamic Island. It's a bit smaller. They did not make much of a big deal of this, which I was a little surprised about. But now you can have up to three live activities. And they specifically cited our friends over at Flighty, which I thought was neat. Then they did a kind of overview of the new features of iOS 27, which they spoke about back in June. There's new cases. There's an updated clear case. There's new colors for tech woven and for silicone. there's a new wrist strap for iphone cases and for airpods pro and the pricing so it starts at 1200 bucks for the 256 gig model which is up a hundred dollars over the 17 pro also the 16 17 17

52:15Casey Liss:and air are all now a hundred dollars more expensive phones they didn't change yep uh then

52:21John Siracusa:the max starts at 1300 both of these phones you can get up to two terabytes of storage Apple upgrade. It starts at$35 a month for 24 months. You get$1 ,200 off if you trade a 14 or newer. They introduced briefly Care One Family, so Apple Care One Family, so you can have family members on the same plan. I think this would have solved a lot of your problems, right, John?

52:43Casey Liss:Well, I have a section on that. I didn't realize you had that up there, but I had a section on it lower. So here's the deal with Apple Care Family. So what they say on their apple.com slash AppleCare page is, they say, cover up to three devices with Apple Care One Individual, which is the new name of what was previously just called apple care one so now it's apple care one individual and then they say or choose apple care one family to cover every eligible device for up to six people that's a great deal because it's not just like three you know the individual is three devices for one person the family is every eligible device for six people so it seems like if one person owns 50 devices you're you know anyway um obviously you pay for each device you cover but anyway um after you sign up easily add devices straight from your phone or mac including most devices less than four years old and in good working condition blah blah blah here's the problem with this plan and the reason i'm still staying away from it like i i said they should do a family plan but the problem is cover every eligible device for up to six people well how do they identify people because i have a lot of accounts with a lot of different apple ids i'm like for like dev testing stuff or whatever and i'm going to run out of the six people and i'm not going to add first of all i'm not going to add my dev testing device to my apple family i'm not even sure if you need to do that but second of all i've already got more than six i've got four actual people plus a bunch of test dev accounts and granted they don't have any devices that need to be covered by apple care but to remind everyone what happened to me last time was if you have a mac with multiple accounts which i totally do and you ever sign into an account that is not one of the accounts that is covered under apple care one they just yank that device off of the thing they say sorry we saw a different apple id on that device now it's not covered anymore um I have had reports from listeners who said, hey, I've got AppleCare one.

54:23Casey Liss:I log into a whole bunch of different accounts. It never bothers me. So maybe they change this. But if they changed it, they didn't say anything about it. And when I looked at like the terms of service, like the PDF terms of service, which is weird, they have like a picker. You have to pick your state that you're in. Anyway, when I read the language and their AppleCare one terms of service, it didn't look any different to me. It looked exactly the same as it was before, where they just say like one person, one this, whatever. But the problem with me was always, are you signing to a different Apple ID?

54:47Casey Liss:well now that mac belongs to a different person because you switched accounts and that person is not part of your apple care one family because that's limited to six and dev tester 22 is not part of that six and so sorry so yeah i'm staying far away from this because my last experience with it was terrible apple if someone in apple knows that they have changed this policy or have fixed this bug please tell me but last time i pursued this all the way to the end apple said that's just the way apple care one works no we can't change it if you don't like it get off apple care one. So that's what I did.

55:17Casey Liss:So, uh, and again, like I said, I've had multiple people say this is no longer the case, but I don't trust it. So I'm staying away until I get official word from Apple that I can log into a different account on my Mac and they won't yank it off Apple care one. Oh, I do get back confirmation. I am very interested in this.

55:31John Siracusa:Oh, I've skipped something earlier that I wanted to briefly talk about iPhone handoff. This was in the iOS 27 section. Uh, you can share a single phone number between two phones. This has been slightly rumored, slightly discovered earlier. It only supports T-Mobile, I think, anywhere right now. But they said that Verizon and EE will be adding support by end of year, which could be interesting and useful for me in the future. We'll talk about it a little later. Anyways, so yeah, AppleCareOne family, you can pre-order this Saturday and launch is September 18. All right. So then they talked about the AirPods 5.

56:06John Siracusa:I don't really have much to say about this, but the brief overview is that it's got, uh, all the AirPods five have active noise cancellation, uh, which is also 50 % better than it was before. They claim it's the best ANC in any open ear design. Um, they talked about some other features that has that have been common for a while. They had a very cheesy demo of live translation, which was very funny where somebody walked up to a woman saying like, Oh, come to our show. It'll be fun or something like that. And she says, thank you. It was very weird. Anyways, you get for$129, you get the, this is the same price as the previous generation, but that generation didn't have active noise cancellation.

56:47John Siracusa:So last time it was 130 bucks for no ANC. Now it's 130 bucks with ANC. And then they eventually got backed around to announcing AirPods five with wireless charging case, which they wouldn't say the name of it for a strangely long time. But this includes on-stem volume control, better battery life, and again, a wireless charging case. And here it is the same price as before, 150 Bones. That is, again, pre-ordered on Saturday. Both of these pre-order on Saturday out on the 18th. And they noted that this means active noise cancellation is now standard across the entire lineup. John, are you in for a pair?

57:24Casey Liss:I already ordered a pair. I must have not been paying attention to the AirPods 5 rumors, or maybe the on-stem volume didn't leak. but that is the killer feature for me because remember i don't use the pros so you've been enjoying the little on stem volume swipe you think and i haven't had it and now i do and so like i don't care about the anc because in general i don't use noise cancellation on these and honestly the the noise cancellation on the airpod 4 like they're open ear they don't go in your ear hole so it's never going to be great they say that it's better i'll try it i'll see how much better it is but it does really hurt your battery but anyway that's what i love about these airpods five with wireless charging case is that they've got the on sim volume control and they supposedly have better battery and those are all things i want i like i said i use the airpods all all the time every day goes by when i don't use these things yeah and so i'm replacing them with these five it's going to be a big upgrade for me and as far as i can tell they're the same shape which i like because the current shape fits me so i was very happy with this it was the first thing that

58:21John Siracusa:i ordered it's orderable today not on saturday then i misspoke a minute ago you can do a pre-order

58:25Casey Liss:or whatever. I don't know. I did a double tap on the side button with Apple Pay, so something happened.

58:32John Siracusa:Oh, my bad. Then I guess you can order today and am I right to say they're out on the 18th or am I making that up?

58:36Marco Arment:I didn't look what the ship date was. Now, John, did you order the AirPods 5 or did you order what was first called this version and then eventually was renamed AirPods 5 with wireless charging case? Remember last year, they did the same thing with the AirPods 4 or whatever that maybe two years ago whatever it was airpods 4 and they had like the airpods 4 with active noise cancellation and like right this is two different products and they just refuse to really name the second one just call it like airpods 5 plus yeah or like it's it's a different product between the base airpods and the pros just give it a real name because they have to keep dancing around it when they present it i'm sure it causes lots of confusion when people try to buy it what a weird thing they keep doing with just insisting that this is just it's the same product well except for this version this version of airpods 5 with wireless charging case with

59:35Casey Liss:different capabilities come on it's physically different on the outside now at least last time they were physically the same on the outside but this on the outside is the physical outside appearance is also different in addition to the inside something different when when i bought this on the phone app i was using the apple store phone app um you have to tap on airpods 5 you're like but i don't want the five i want the five with whatever like but you have to tap on five and then you have two choices within the five which is like it's like the bin cpu and then on cpu it's like airpods five or airpods five with wireless charging case and then it says in little bullet points also it has a volume control also it has better battery you know like yeah anyway it's a

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1:02:14John Siracusa:Apple Watch Series 12. They made a big stink about health and fitness and their new health sensing system. There's different physical sensors on the back of the Apple Watch. There's increased area for the electrodes, redesigned photodiodes, larger, more power-efficient green LEDs, and this leads to accurate heart rate measuring all day long every five seconds, which is like a 60x increase or something like that.

1:02:40Marco Arment:Yeah, this is huge. So this, I think, by introducing this new sensor array, and they talked a lot about, you know, they said that they did a new study where that showed that Apple Watch now has the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. Like, between that and this kind of more continuous background heart rate monitoring, this is really going to compete, if it works, a lot better with, like, the Garmins and the, you know, that kind of wearable of the world in a lot of those areas. I think this is great, especially like the background heart rate being taken every five seconds instead of, I guess, every 15 minutes or whatever that would be.

1:03:19Marco Arment:That's a big difference. That's a really big difference. And it samples HRV every five minutes, which is also like a huge increase from where it was before. This is much closer to continuous heart rate all day. Like that's basically what this is. Like that's very, very close to what this is. And that, if they choose to use the data this way, which that's a big if, but if they choose to use this data in this way, they could do things like it's basically always tracking a workout in some form. So like if you forget to start your workout or if you forget to stop your workout or if you forget to resume your workout after you pause it for a while, they now will have more data that they can kind of patch in to make up for that.

1:04:03Marco Arment:they can probably also if they choose to use this have better sensing for things like the workout detection things like did you did you start a walk outside like maybe that feature can get better with this new data there's all sorts of potential for All of the heart monitoring and related features of the Apple Watch to get significantly better now that they're going to have way more frequent data when you're not in a workout. So that, I think, could be very, very promising for general Apple Watch usefulness over time. And to also have this new sensor that promises to be more accurate, that's very, very promising.

1:04:41Marco Arment:I hope this pans out the way it sounds like it could.

1:04:45John Siracusa:Yep, it sounds really, really good. They did this comparison where they led to the conclusion that only we are the best and most accurate wearable. They did this by apparently comparing to an ECG chest strap as a reference, which, I mean, fair enough. They talked about all sorts of different health stuff. Honestly, I was paying attention, but it was so much so fast that I think I need to have some time with the redesigned health app, which is not coming until later this year. but one of the things they said is they're going to do a readiness like score from zero through 10 which is your body's capacity to take on the day so basically hey we think you're exhausted maybe take it easy or oh you slept great you should go run a marathon or whatever the case may be

1:05:26Casey Liss:this is uh such a great gamification of health like literally gamification like when you have video game characters where you have abilities on cooldown and it's like oh your your meters are fully charged right like this is basically you're starting the day and it's like you know what was it like good to go or like go for it it's like you're you know all your meters are fully charged versus like maybe take it easy maybe you know and this this goes great with the other gamification that they add which is health age which i know lots of apps and stuff have done this but it's like you know what everyone wants to hear is like you're 30 years old but you have the heart of a 20 year old like everyone wants to hear that no one wants to hear you're 30 years old but you have the heart of a 65 year old uh and unfortunately if this feature is accurate both of those are possibilities so everyone wants to hear that they're younger than they think they are but i guess finding out that you have the heart of an 80 year old when you're 40 is telling you something and maybe go to the doctor but uh that's another one of those sort of like gamified stats of like you know what what are my character stats uh how full are my meters uh that's what

1:06:24Marco Arment:these things are telling you in theory and this is also the the readiness score and and all this stuff this is following a lot of broader trends in the fitness wearable market like this is exactly the kind of thing that like whoop bands and aura rings and all these other wearables that have had some success recently. This is the kind of thing they do. Their apps analyze their data and they tell you basically all of these same things. And that's a large part of why people like them. People buy these other wearables for all sorts of other reasons. But these are all very popular features of them.

1:06:57Marco Arment:So as Apple, you know, we got the rumor a few shows ago that larger Apple Watch rethinks are in the works and they're looking to maybe rethink some of the lineup and expand them and go into new markets and stuff um you know over the next few years but none of that was going to be ready yet in time for this this kind of shows like they're taking a step towards that they i think they're realizing that they are honestly losing ground to a lot of these other wearables like as i said back then um you know a few weeks ago when we talked about it look around at how many like young people are wearing apple watches and it seems like the number's going down like It seems like no one's wearing an Apple Watch that I'm seeing below age 25.

1:07:38Casey Liss:Well, young people are healthy, or think they are anyway.

1:07:41Marco Arment:Yeah, but it does seem like I'm seeing a lot of whoop bands and Oura rings, and I'm not seeing the Apple Watch seem to grow. So they do need to move into these markets, and the hardware probably is not ready yet for them to start doing that. But I'm glad to see them starting to take this competition seriously by doing a lot more of these software features and by working on the basics, things like the heart rate accuracy, to try to compete better with the rest of the market. So this is all kind of playing into that story, I think. So I'm glad to see it.

1:08:15John Siracusa:Yeah. So like I said, there's a lot of health stuff. And I tried so hard to keep up and I couldn't. So we're going to mostly skip over that. They talked about some new Apple intelligence stuff for the watch specifically. and especially audio intelligence. This includes sound recognition. So your Apple Watch will know if there was like a doorbell in the background, for example. They also talked about live rewind, which lets you see a transcript of the last 15 seconds of conversation around you. You do this by double pressing the digital crown. They had this as, the way they demoed this is a waitress or, you know, a supposed waitress rattling off today's specials at a restaurant at just an astonishing pace, which of course, but it was very contrived and very funny to me.

1:08:59Casey Liss:You can just ask the server to repeat the specials just that point.

1:09:02Marco Arment:That is something you could do. And by the way, it's a 15 second cap. It's not going to fit. When's the last time? Like if you're at a restaurant and they're reading off some lengthy specials, let's say, it's not going to fit in 15 seconds. I assure you.

1:09:18John Siracusa:Marco, what do you even know about restaurants?

1:09:20Casey Liss:15 seconds is long for specials. So here's the other thing. It's not a transcript either. It's a summary.

1:09:24John Siracusa:That's true. I did say transcript, and I think that might be inaccurate. I think you're right, John. It's actually a summary of—

1:09:30Marco Arment:Well, no, I think the 15-second one, I think that—I'll double-check the white paper. I think that one actually is a transcript. But it's the Siri recap feature, which we'll probably get to in a second. That's the summary.

1:09:41John Siracusa:Yes, yes, yes. That's what it is.

1:09:43Casey Liss:Well, either way, when they showed the little demo, remember you're looking at this on a watch screen. So can you imagine scrolling through 15 seconds of speech on a watch screen and trying to get something out of it? It's not ideal.

1:09:53John Siracusa:Yeah, fair. Definitely not. And then as Marco just brought up, there's Siri recap, which is basically in the same way that the heart rate stuff was like a screw you to the whoop band. Siri recap is a screw you to like the little pendants that everyone seems to think are very cool. So what this is, it's a high level notes of your conversations. You review them in the Siri app. You can enable it always or on a schedule. You can turn it on or off via control center. The audio is not recorded or stored. I think the audio cannot be accessed by anyone, including Apple. The speakers are not identified.

1:10:25John Siracusa:And I didn't personally get a chance to read this. It sounds like, Marco, you at least got a chance to skim it. I read it. Okay, there you go. So there's a white paper that talks about the privacy implications of all this. Since, Marco, you read it, can you give us any notes from that, or is it not really that interesting?

1:10:39Marco Arment:All right. So everyone is reacting to this, and I think it is warranted. so the way this works the way Apple has designed it is audio is recorded on the watch in a special area of the SoC that is isolated from the rest so like the operating system and the rest of the SoC doesn't have access to the audio data it is signed, it is encrypted and signed it is then sent off the watch to your iPhone over Bluetooth the iPhone SoCs from iPhone 16 Pro forward the iPhone SoCs also have one of those similar exclaves that isolates the audio can decrypt the one with a key pair thing from the phone or from the watch and so basically the watch records audio but can't read it sends it to the phone, the phone reads the audio and transcribes it on the phone because I guess they don't want to burn the watch's battery burning the transcription model on the watch and the phone obviously can have better models anyway so then the phone summarizes it using local Apple intelligence to cut it down to about half of its length and try to enforce some kind of guardrails on whether this is a transcript of a conversation we want to keep or record at all.

1:11:51Marco Arment:Then it sends it to private cloud compute, which does an even more involved summarization and safety guardrail check. And it sends it to private cloud compute along with a bunch of context data, the same way they send Siri AI requests. So your personal context about things like where you are, what's going on around you, that kind of stuff. It sends all that to private cloud compute. And then that generates basically an even denser and more filtered summary of what is being said around you. And then those are kept for seven days and everything is local and encrypted, similar to other iCloud sensitive data, like your key chain and your health data and stuff like that.

1:12:32Marco Arment:So that's how this works. And they're saying they are filtering out things like personal identifiers and that kind of sensitive information. But that is all a lot of guardrails and a lot of safeties and a lot of technical hoops jumping through to protect your privacy for something that is fundamentally an invasion of privacy. there are lots of ways that you could see this going wrong um now they they're very careful to say that the audio is not accessible to anything anywhere anybody anytime but the topics of what you talked about are and there's lots of situations you can imagine where that is first of all pretty sensitive second of all possibly dangerous to the people in the conversation uh third of all possibly um violating people's trust around you by them not realizing that you have a device on your wrist that is taking notes on your criminal effing conspiracy um there's a lot of potential problems with this.

1:13:42Marco Arment:And honestly, I don't know why Apple is inviting the flames onto themselves for this. Like, why would they want to turn the Apple Watch into something that everyone is going to be as suspicious about as the Meta Ray-Ban glasses? That's what they're doing with this feature. And they're rumored to be doing the same thing with the AirPods with the cameras. And I this model of what we're seeing here is actually probably a pretty good indicator of what the AirPods Pro with cameras are going to do themselves, which is they're probably going to do the same thing, not only with audio, but also with video of like, they're taking video, probably, they're probably not going to make those recordings of the video available to anything, but they will probably analyze the content of what's going on around you and take notes and allow you to review those notes.

1:14:33Marco Arment:That's my guess. But anyway, going back to the Apple Watch, think about the kinds of things they can record here. Sensitive personal conversations, sensitive work conversations, things that are risky, things like, for instance, like coordinating, scheduling, and discussing an abortion. There's a lot of states where that is not a safe thing to be on a record somewhere. What about if you are queer and you live somewhere where that is illegal or very dangerous, and you have any record of that whatsoever. There's a lot of situations where Apple is considering that, well, this is all secure and no one's ever going to get to it.

1:15:11Marco Arment:What if your spouse knows your passcode? That's pretty common. What if someone else is looking at your phone and you don't necessarily know that they're looking at your phone? There's a lot of untrusting relationships out there or a lot of things that you think are no big deal and it's no big deal for someone to have access to this, but then they get access to it or they see something that maybe you didn't think they would see or maybe you didn't even know they could see. This just seems like it's an incredibly dangerous foot gun to use AI to speak, which I know AI didn't invent the term foot gun, but it uses it a lot, which is fun.

1:15:50Marco Arment:But I don't know why they're taking this on. I don't think the value is just so massive that it's worth the possible reputational damage and heat of this. In the same way, I said similar things when they launched the AirTag because the AirTag also kind of seemed like, wow, this is a really big risk of privacy, reputational problems and stuff like that for a pretty small product, honestly. And I think this is the next level of that. This is Apple putting a feature into every Series 12 and Ultra 4 Apple Watch that I think is going to really make people hate them. It's going to invite problems. It's going to be used in criminal cases.

1:16:35Marco Arment:It's going to be used for persecution. It's going to be used for domestic surveillance and spying on people. It's going to be used for harm. Now, it's also going to be used for good. And you can think of lots of useful things about this. But does that overcome the harm of even with what they've done, of like it is privately recorded and the audio is never sent anywhere or readable by anything and you're only seeing transcripts and summaries of transcripts, high-level topical summaries. But even a high-level topical summary could contain sensitive information. And I do think it is a violation of trust of the people around you to use something like this.

1:17:18Marco Arment:And I do not see this ending well for them.

1:17:22Casey Liss:Do they talk about the activation situation with this? Is this a thing that you have to opt into? Is it on all the time? Do you have to activate it and turn it on? If you do turn it on, how long does it stay on? Do they cover any of that?

1:17:34Marco Arment:Yeah. So there's a switch in control center on the watch, just like a regular icon in control center. You can turn it on and off whenever you want, and you can have it gated to certain areas. You can say only have it on when I'm at work, is the example they use. So it seems like it has some kind of geofence capability where you can use it here or don't use it here, but you know what's going to happen. People are going to leave it on. That's what's going to happen. And even if they don't, even if you say, fine, just use it at work, how does your employer feel about that? How do all of your coworkers feel about that?

1:18:02Marco Arment:Like there's just a lot of potential giant red flags on this that just make me wonder why they put this in here.

1:18:11John Siracusa:I think it's because this is the trendy AI thing to do. This is perhaps because Silicon Valley is its own little bubble that doesn't really understand reality a lot of the time. I think it's because this is a very much keeping up with the Joneses sort of feature. I don't disagree in any particular way with any particular thing you just said, but I think that Apple feels like this is table stakes. And so here they are.

1:18:33Marco Arment:My guess is this is a shot at OpenAI because like, yeah, there's a bunch of like dumb little startups trying to make stuff like this. No one's buying them. It isn't like Apple is catching up with the rest of the world here because the rest of the world largely has said we don't care about these kinds of products, which is why not everyone's wearing them all the time. So I could see like if if there was some like, you know, AI necklace that was taking off that everybody was buying and using in their work meetings, I could totally see Apple saying, OK, we're going to we're going to do that for the Apple Watch and neutralize that market.

1:19:05Marco Arment:But that market doesn't exist. It's it's not there. People keep saying it's going to be there like the next big thing, like, you know, the metaverse. And it's not there like nobody wants it. So Apple kind of walked in here as if that market was already there. So that's why I think maybe OpenAI was going in this direction with one of their products. And so Apple, as we know, is pretty annoyed at OpenAI's hardware efforts. So maybe that influenced this and possibly blinded them to some of the realities of what this means and what this might mean for them. I hope that's not the answer. I hope they had a better reason than that.

1:19:42Marco Arment:But at this moment, I'm not really seeing it.

1:19:45Casey Liss:maybe they're thinking of as an accessibility thing or whatever but it definitely wasn't pitched that way you know a more appley way to do this and obviously that is not what they chose to do but a more appley way to do this with the with the pieces they have is uh make an iphone only uh and require the proximity sensor on the front of the iphone to not be sensing anything in front of it right so then basically you're requiring the screen to be like unobstructed and then put some kind of graphic on the screen that's like a giant red siren rotating so that basically it becomes much much harder to surreptitiously record anybody because if you can't have your phone in your pocket you can't have your phone face down on the table you have to have it somewhere where there's like a clear shot from the screen out into the world and you could still use it that way but like that would be acknowledging the main problem with this which as you said is mark was like do people know like people are going to look at you and say oh you have an apple watch are you recording me which is exactly the meta ray-ban problem oh it's got a line that you always know blah blah blah oh yeah really um if it's if it can be hidden at all it's like you don't notice someone's watch you don't think their watch is recording you and maybe an ai pen it'll be more obvious but you know what's more obvious than a watch a phone screen up on the table with a graphic on it that's going with a giant ear going we're listening we're listening because these these products are useful in like work contexts and stuff like that but the problem is okay but what about the whole rest of the context and geofencing is not going to cut it and like you don't want to be suspicious of these things in other contexts and if it's just a built in feature of the watch that makes every watch suspect whereas if it's something that people just use at work in a very obvious way you know maybe the phone proximity sensor is not a great idea but like something like that you know where the egg or the donut has a a flashing light on it that can't be disabled or something and the egg or the donut is harder to hide i don't know it's it's difficult but like i feel like we're still in the early stages of adapting society to these technologies kind of in the same way when like photography first became a thing we had to establish societal norms and eventually laws about when it is and isn't okay to take a photograph of strangers um i'm not saying we have the perfect situation for that but it took a long time from the advent of photography to the current situation now where we don't view cameras as this giant invasion of privacy because we have again laws and social norms about when it is and isn't appropriate to use them and you can still be creepy with the camera and blah blah blah but nobody knows any of that stuff for this stuff forget about laws we don't have any laws about anything because we can't pass laws anymore in this country but um but for like societal norms this technology is all too new we have no idea like i mean the norm of the meta ray bands is don't do it because you look like a creep but what what's the social norm if once the apple watches can do it we'll we'll figure this out but i agree with you marco this is probably not the final form and it's probably a bad idea and why are they doing it yeah i think it's like it's competitive pressure and open ai and it's like well we can do it and everyone else is doing it so we should try to do it too and probably a bad call yeah and then if you think about like

1:22:38Marco Arment:think about all the contexts now that like in you know six months from now all the different types of workplaces and societal places and situations where they're no longer gonna allow people to wear apple watches and now think about the same thing happening to airpods within a year like that's why i think these features are are dangerous to the product in the sense in lots of ways but also in the sense of like you're giving more workplaces and and venues and things you're giving more places reasons to ban people from wearing these devices and using these devices there and that is not good for the products you know if you're wearing an apple watch for health monitoring or for the many many different utilities that it offers you don't want to have to take it off when you go to work because now your workplace is a policy that nobody can wear apple watches because they're recording everybody all the time same thing like they're if they're pushing the AirPods as health aids.

1:23:33Marco Arment:Like the hearing aid features of AirPods are amazing. The hearing protection, like this is the last thing Apple should be pushing for is any reason to make it societally unacceptable to wear AirPods. But yet, if they launch the camera AirPods, they're going to do exactly that. And again, this is that same thing for the Apple Watch. I worry about that for these products because these are products that have amazing value the more you wear them and the more places you wear them. And the last thing Apple should be doing is giving businesses and things reasons to ban them.

1:24:07Casey Liss:I think they could do the AirPods. I don't know what they're going to do with the AirPods one, but I think they could do the AirPods one in a way better way because, first of all, don't have it be a camera. We have it be like an IR sprayer or something so there's never any visual data or whatever. And second of all, have the only function of it be what's in front of you right now, I will speak a summary of it to you. Like, what kind of bird is that? What kind of car just went by? Who am I talking to? So there's never any permanent record of anything. There's no quote unquote recording of anything.

1:24:33Casey Liss:It is entirely some kind of sensor, sees what's in front of me, AI, blah, blah, blah, real time, speaks into my ears, and that's it. No data retention whatsoever. I think that would be privacy preserving. It would be good for accessibility, and it would let people identify birds and remember people names.

1:24:49Marco Arment:Yeah, I mean, when you hear the stories of how much blind people can benefit from the at a Ray-Bans because it's a way for something with AI sensibilities to look at the world around them, tell them what's around them and keep their hands free because their hands are probably busy with a dog, a cane, object, something else. Like that's why it's so game changing for blind people at the Ray-Bans. The AirPods with the cameras would have presumably similar value and probably even more value because they would probably have way longer battery life. They would cost less money. So like that's...

1:25:22Casey Liss:And they wouldn't be sending your video to a data center in some

1:25:24Marco Arment:country if someone can look at it yes exactly so that's possibly very helpful but again like if there's any creepy features that are there they're gonna get a stigma associated with them and it's going to harm all those use cases so apple has to be very careful with the features they develop around this and this apple watch feature suggests to me that they're not being careful enough

1:25:46John Siracusa:all right uh we gotta hurry this along so there's a new soc uh there's some new colors space gray black light gold and dark bronze uh the aluminum has ceramic shield 2 which you knew from the iphone's uh 17 pro uh there's two new polished titanium finishes radiant gold and natural which

1:26:05Marco Arment:are which is 100 recycled titanium it's one new finish the gold the gold is lighter gold it this

1:26:09John Siracusa:natural is the same fair enough uh there's also ceramic in pearl white and night blue this all starts for an aluminum gps model at 400 bones you can pre-order today available on the 18th of September. The List family is in for so far one of the Apple Watch aluminum, the 44 or whatever, 46 millimeter aluminum for me to replace my series 10. I thought about going ultra, but I just don't think I need it. I just don't think it's necessary for me. So I'm in for one. Once I get a chance to get Aaron in front of the Apple store, you know, like app or whatever, we're going

1:26:42Marco Arment:order one for her uh what did you guys buy if anything i i'm getting um no pro iphone this year uh for the first time ever i'm just talking watches slow down kid i'm just talking watch we passed the phones already you didn't ask uh well but there's one more phone to go there's one more thing marco i didn't say anything about that there's actually one more thing um but for the for the watches um i i didn't buy a watch last year uh so i'm rocking a series 10 uh i am going to upgrade to the series 12 because i want that ceramic they i had the ceramic back forever ago uh i believe it was the series 5 was the last ceramic one they did back then it was an edition that cost 1200 um so for now it only being 900 is actually a reasonable price for what it is it's about it's like i think it's slightly more than the titaniums or they're for the same price as titanium so that's honestly great news to me the thing was the thing to know about ceramic and it looks this way on the new ones too.

1:27:41Marco Arment:The bezel around the screen, there's like a slight gap between the screen crystal and where the ceramic starts, like the curvature of it, like it juts out slightly. So the crystal mound on top is slightly smaller than the ceramic base it's sitting on. So if you care about that kind of detail, like when I had the Series 5, I noticed that and I didn't like it. And this one looks like it has the exact same design. The ceramic is also very slightly larger in footprint, probably for that reason. And the ceramic is heavier than titanium. So it's something to know. The other thing with ceramic is that it will make it so that any watch band you have that has the shiny polished metal lugs will look wrong.

1:28:29Marco Arment:So it does restrict your band choice somewhat in that there is no like matching metal finish for the ceramic. One other thing to know, for some reason, the dark blue ceramic is heavier than the white ceramic. I don't know why. What? Yeah, it's not by a lot. It's like one gram or a gram and a half. But for some reason, the blue is heavier. And the white, I'm not entirely sure is white. Like I was watching all the YouTube videos from the hands-on area trying to figure out like eggshell. Yeah, like they're calling it, The band they sell that matches it is called Sand, and it's definitely some kind of off-white, but the question is how far off, I guess.

1:29:13Marco Arment:So that also could make it a little bit more difficult to match with straps. So we'll see how that goes, but I'm looking forward to it for – more for novelty's sake. Like the regular series Apple Watch has looked so similar for so long. I'm ready for some novelty in its design. And I've enjoyed wearing an Ultra for most of the summer in part because of the novelty of the design and in part because I like the big screen. I'm hoping the white ceramic will kind of tide us over design-wise on the regular series so it doesn't seem so boring and so played out until we get some kind of different hardware redesign.

1:29:51Marco Arment:which is again rumored for next year. And the other thing I'll say is on the Ultra 4. We're not there yet. Oh, sorry. We'll get there.

1:30:00John Siracusa:But to be honest, there's almost nothing to say. So carry on.

1:30:03Casey Liss:Although Marco, I will say, are you going to order your ceramic watch without seeing it? Are you going to wait till you see it in person to pick which one you want?

1:30:09Marco Arment:I just ordered it because in the videos, it looks pretty bright white. Oh, you got the white one? Yeah, I got the white one. And I went back to the smaller one. So for the last few months, I've kind of gone between the small one, the big one and the ultra at different times. I'll spend like a few weeks with each one, mostly testing out UIs and stuff. But then, you know, also kind of seeing how it fits in my life. I would wear the ultra year round if it didn't suck so badly when you have a long sleeve over it or a jacket cuff, like anything with like a cuff sleeve or a jacket. The way it goes over that ultra just it's so clumsy, like getting it over that thick, bulky, sharp edged watch.

1:30:50Marco Arment:but all summer I love the ultra because I'm not I don't have a jacket or a long sleeve shirt so that's great um but in the winter I like something that's sleeker and goes under a sleeve better so for me that's the regular one and I I like the small one it's just so light and and like unobtrusive on my wrist it feels like I'm you know like I'm I'm waving my arms around ridiculously right now it just feels like I can like wave my arms and they're all they're all lightweight and i'm free free as a bird um so i like that um so we'll see we'll see how that goes um the ultra let's might as well cover that now ultra 4 uh longer battery life uh seems the same otherwise you know the new soc so it has the new software features and the new sensors on the back longer battery life for some reason uh which seems probably mostly related to the soc and they ruin some of the band colors that's about like so all of the the watch bands this year the um the ultra i think the best band for the ultra is the ocean band it's that silicone band with like the bumps and the like the ridged loops and you can like pick any slot and you know stick it in kind of buckle it down and they made for some reason they turned these wonderfully colored ocean bands previously into this like translucent garbage color and it's three different garbage colors that are all translucent they look terrible in the pictures i'm hoping they look oh i didn't notice that i hope it looked better in real life it looks horrendous so i think they might have temporarily ruined the ocean band uh but that which would be which would be a shame because it is the best ultra band but the rest of the lineup everything is very earth toned which is very in right now this is what i was talking earlier browns beiges this is all very very in which honestly i'm not a fan of this trend it's very hard for me to buy nice shirts this year for as a result because everything is different colors of beige and brown which do not look good on me and are impossible to match to each other or anything else but that's what's in fashion so that's what the apple watch is the apple watch is trying to keep up with fashions lots of browns lots of earth tones, lots of soft grays and, you know, beiges and stuff like that.

1:32:57Marco Arment:So, that's why they're doing all these colors the way they are. We'll see how these look in practice, and, you know, it's going to look very much of this year, and then next year we'll have different colors, and we'll get it. Roll the dice again.

1:33:12John Siracusa:iPhone, or excuse me, Apple Watch Ultra 4, 800 bones, you can pre-order today, available the 18th of September.

1:33:19Casey Liss:Now, you circle back to the Series 12 watch for a second. uh i don't wear an apple watch so this is not particularly relevant to me but i will say that my expectations were so low for what the series 12 watch would be and you know physically speaking it is what you thought it just looks like every other watch and i knew there would be a new soc but i have to say when they got done with that series 12 presentation i'm like this is the best series x whatever apple watch they've introduced in years because first of all they did actually change the hardware with the new soc and it has you know fancy features and more neural engines and stuff like that like finally uh it has that whole like the back sensor thing that's not a small thing like that's the whole watch is basically a screen an soc a battery and that thing on the back and they 100 change the thing on the back in large ways that make it better and so i feel like this is kind of like a what we used to think of like an s generation phone oh it looks the same on the outside but everything about it is better um and then all the software features setting aside the privacy invasion stuff the other software features they had i just think this is the best the biggest leap over the series n minus one phone that they've had in years and again i don't even i don't even care about the phone or the watch i think i said phone i don't care about the watch i don't wear the watch but i think this is a great one so if you were waiting for like when is the right time to buy an apple watch if you have any interest in them i think the series 12 is a really good time especially if you like the current design because someday in theory they will change the design but that time is not this year and this seems like a really really good apple watch series whatever watch both in hardware and software and i think in the choices that you have of finishes setting aside the earth tone bands i do like the polished titanium versus like the matte ones i think ceramic is cool uh i was very impressed this is like it's the uh most improved or exceeded expectations that in the keynote for me is the

1:35:05Marco Arment:apple watch series 12 yeah it it looks like a a nice all-around update it depends a lot on how good those new sensors are. If they are as good as they sound, if they really do provide nearly continuous heart rate monitoring all day, and the heart rate monitoring is more accurate, and better HRV, and all those readiness features.

1:35:26Casey Liss:And all the software features that tie into it to give you the little scores and the gamification that build off the new stuff. I just think it's a great total package.

1:35:33Marco Arment:Yeah. One other little thing I noticed when I was doing the spec comparisons, the previous Apple Watch Series 11 is listed as having GPS the Apple Watch Ultra has precision dual frequency GPS which is L1 and L5 as I discussed back with my Suunto and Garmin segments the Apple Watch Series 12 now says precision L1 GPS which is possibly the same thing as the old one because the dual frequencies are L1 and L5 the Series 11 had L1, Series 12 now says precision L1 what does that mean? Is it actually different? I don't know. But it still isn't dual frequency, which honestly does surprise me because every modern iPhone, every modern Android phone, every Apple Watch Ultra, and every Suunto and Garmin watch, you know, above a certain level, they all have dual frequency GPS these days.

1:36:31Marco Arment:And the regular series Apple Watch for it still not to have that is a little weird to me and a little unfortunate. But anyway, that's hopefully a minor thing. And yes, I agree with John that this does look like potentially a very strong update if those sensors are as good as Apple says they are.

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1:38:50John Siracusa:Yeah, so that's the entire press. Oh, wait, one more thing.

1:38:54Marco Arment:But the way, first of all, what a move for John Ternus to have to use one more thing in his first keynote. But he kind of soft played it. He said, but actually there is one more thing. Which is like the but actually, I think, really softens it. Like, I mean, this is maybe this is, you know, Ternus's style. We'll see. But it was it was a little I thought it was like a little bit fumbled in that way.

1:39:20Casey Liss:well the whole one more thing phenomenon is totally undercut by the amount that phone stuff leaks yeah the ideal one more thing is i didn't even know apple was working on anything like this obviously that'll probably never happen again except for maybe with the mac pro that no one cares about to leak but yeah hell even that will probably leak but like this thing we knew every millimeter of this device before it was released so it's not like anyone was shocked like is the

1:39:47Marco Arment:presentation over no we know it's not well to be fair we knew everything about the hardware we really didn't know anything about the software yeah yeah yeah but i'm saying like it's not like

1:39:57Casey Liss:the one more thing is like what do you mean you made an x like we know it's a folding phone just say it right anyway it is it is a kind of silly in the age where everything in this thing leaks but yeah so the software stuff was all you know it's harder to leak uh although sometimes that

1:40:12John Siracusa:stuff leaks too but this time a lot of it was hidden right so we get the iphone duo uh he turned his state a lead in with a bunch of uh different quotes about it none of which are

1:40:24Casey Liss:actually that exciting so i will say that are all of our predictions of her being ultra because ultra was a stupid name and apple likes to do stupid names apple's like oh we always do stupid names let's do a sensible one what do you think of that and they did it's a sensible that's the reason one of the main reasons i thought they would never do it is because it made too much sense and also the surface duo it's like oh microsoft surface duo it's fine iphone duo and surface duo i feel like are not going to be in conflict anyway no one knows what that is the precedent here is obviously the powerbook duo uh either one of you ever seen this device in person

1:40:57John Siracusa:uh doesn't steven have one i believe that i think i've seen if i'm not mistaken yeah so when i when

1:41:02Casey Liss:And I worked in a, I don't know what the heck I was, computer lab attendant in college. There was someone, there was a professor who had a computer lab, and I took care of the computers there. Doing retrospect backups to tape from the various Macs. They had a NextCube that Richard Greenblatt would use sometimes. And the professor had a PowerBook Duo, which was an incredibly thin, incredibly light laptop from the 90s. I think it was like four pounds in the 90s. Like, this is unprecedented. and it was so small and thin because it had nothing in it there was no floppy drive can you i don't know a laptop with no floppy drive no optical drive uh it was just a screen and a track ball not a trackpad and a not even full-size keyboard but it was incredibly thin okay but it was useless because it's only good for portable stuff on the go um so it had a thing called the duo dock which was like a little garage that you shove it into it goes into a little slot and when you slot it into that thing sitting on top of it would be your big crt monitor and when you shoved it in there that box would have a floppy drive potentially another hard drive inside there networking and all the peripheral connections that you didn't have on the tiny laptop i think the box also had an fpu in it a floating point processing unit so the floating point unit was in the dock and not and you're like how can it use the floating point unit it's not even it's like things were slower back then you could do it um and so the idea was you're an important professor on the go you've got the thinnest laptop anyone has ever seen it's like a status symbol but you've also got a full powered computer when you get back to your desk because you slide it into that needless to say this trend did not catch on but boy was this amazing technology at the time totally weird and i think it is ample precedent for apple resurrecting the duo name not quite the same thing two screens versus a computer that is both a laptop and a not laptop at the same time but i give this name a big thumbs up it makes perfect sense that has none of the awkwardness of ultra we're not arguing about but his cameras aren't as good as the other ones how is this the ultra it saves the ultra potentially for the all glass 20th anniversary phone i don't know what's going on maybe josh was out that day and they said he's out sick we're just going to call the duo don't tell him until launch uh but yeah iphone duo i approve of the name even though i just because this name had been out there forever but nobody was picking it everyone was like yeah duo they're not going to do fold because of samsung probably it's probably just going to be ultra because apple's stupid with names and apple came out of nowhere and did a sensible name

1:43:29Marco Arment:congratulations by the way the powerbook duo was the first desktop laptop so i think that was i'm literally using that configuration not quite in the same way you think of it though literally it

1:43:40Casey Liss:goes inside the desktop it was cool to have like an eject like had an in like a motorized inject mechanism like it would go and like you know you know because you'd shove it in but you didn't have to like like it was like soft closed doors kind of it was really cool also horrendously expensive if you want to look at the prices and translate from like 1990 whatever money just it's

1:44:00Marco Arment:terrifying uh six thousand two hundred dollars today woof there you go oh is that just for the laptop or for the dock or both it was listed as a twenty six hundred and ten dollars for just the

1:44:10Casey Liss:laptop i think weren't they sold together no i don't think so okay forgive me i'll need more time And also don't forget the CRT is on top of it. And the keyboard and mouse keyboard is$200 in 1990s money. All right. I'm not doing all this. It was expensive.

1:44:24John Siracusa:Suffice to say, a lot of money. All right. So Molly and Steve talk about the design. The physical design is roughly what everyone expected. It's two cameras. Roughly?

1:44:35Casey Liss:How about down to the millimeter?

1:44:37John Siracusa:Okay. Down to the millimeter. What everyone expected. But the software design took me by surprise for sure. there is a right mount dock both opened and closed there's a right mount toolbar uh the status indicators for wi-fi and cellular are now a circle where in the inside shows you the wi-fi like fan looking thing and the bottom of the circle shows the commensurate number of dots to indicate your cellular connection um there's all sorts of oddities with regard to software we're going to come back to it in a little bit but clearly they did the apple thing which i mean in a complimentary way in this case, of really asking themselves, do we need things to be the way they are?

1:45:21John Siracusa:Do we need the dock to be on the bottom? What if we put it somewhere else? Do we need to have a separate Wi-Fi indicator and cellular indicator? Can we combine them? A lot of this is very, very different. And no matter how hard we try to paint you a word picture, I think it's best served for you to take a look at least at this portion of the video or somebody's recap on like YouTube or TikTok or what have you and see the way the software is on this phone because it is startlingly different than just, hey, let's put iOS on a phone with two screens. It's way different than that.

1:45:55Casey Liss:And this is all in service of, as they began those part of the presentation, all of this software stuff that we're going to talk about even more is in service of making an interface on a phone that is shaped the way this is. And so that's why they started with, why did we make it this kind of squat way why don't we do what other people do where they take two regular looking phones and connect them side to side and put a hinge on it uh and they explained they said we don't do that because that's kind of a waste of space because the things people might want to do with a big screen if you want to watch like letterbox uh you know video from a television show or movie it's a massive waste of space it sometimes can be not much bigger than a phone turn sideways so what are you using all the other space for and like it just it just doesn't work out size-wise to be you know is you don't get all the benefits so like we started from we want it to be this aspect ratio when it's open because then you can use it in portrait and in landscape and in both of those modes you get maximum benefit from having a big screen because you don't have such wasted space above and below letterbox video and in portrait it's like a little ipad and we know how useful that form factor is so they started from that shape and then i think what i would say the apple thing they did was okay given that we've decided that this is the shape it's going to be it's going to be short and squat and weird.

1:47:06Casey Liss:And it's, you know, it's going to be like this. Now, what are all the possible ways that we can make an interface on a thing that folds that is this shape? And they did all of them. They're like, what can you think of? Brainstorm, put it on the whiteboard. How could we, how could this, imagine they have like a physical wooden model. It's just the shape with a hinge, like we all had, or the, you know, the people who 3D printed them given this shape hardware, what can we do with software? And they just thought of every possible good idea they could and implemented them all and it's very impressive it is so much for developers to do though oh god well good thing you'll have the seven years that it took apple to develop this

1:47:46Marco Arment:for you to update your oh my god so let me just now that we're on this topic let me just outline for people what we're talking about here with with the reality of app development okay all the work that we were talking about with ios 27 having like a a simulator that allows you to resize your app. That was one part of making your app work on the Duo. That was not the hard part. That was not the hardest part. And that was not most of the work. Because what the Duo does is, as we're saying, it moves critical and key navigation elements like toolbars and tab bars. It moves them to be vertical, first of all.

1:48:31Marco Arment:But not all of them. and not all the time. Right. It makes them vertical much of the time. On the side of your app, it changes the safe area ratios completely in addition to the aspect ratios of the screens. And by the way, there's lots of different new aspect ratios to account for resizing of the apps in different split views and everything like that. So critical parts of how apps are built are dramatically restructured. And it isn't just restructured in one way. There's like six different modes your app could be in, all of which lay out the controls differently. For app developers to even start working on that, first of all, we need Xcode 27.1, which doesn't exist yet.

1:49:18Marco Arment:So this phone is coming out in about a month and a half. And for us to start developing our apps to account for all of its ridiculous new moves of the interface requires an SDK that Apple says will be available, quote, later this month. So we can't even start yet. And what we will have to do to make our apps use these new UI paradigms correctly without breaking, let alone to start like being good with them. I'd say it's six months of work for most apps, maybe a year. so I think the reality of what the app situation on the Duo is going to be like, first of all every developer needs to buy one of these and it's a lot of money so for small developers that's going to be a burden, I know that I'm not minimizing that but if you have an iPhone app you're going to have to buy one of these because you're going to have to test with it you're going to have to handle it, you're going to have to see how things are reachable and I have a whole thing about that in a second but this is something where the simulator is not going to be enough.

1:50:25Marco Arment:You're going to want the physical device to design your apps on and test them. But the amount of work this is, it isn't like adding another size of iPhone. It is a way more involved process than that. You're going to see a lot of apps that are going to need complete redesigns to work with this or to at least take advantage correctly without like weird, you know, letterboxing and stuff like that. You're going to see a lot of that. And so the reality of owning this phone for the first year is going to be, most of your apps are not going to be updated for this for months. I would say maybe by next summer, you know, that might be finally like everything will kind of look and work correctly.

1:51:06Marco Arment:But it's going to be a while. And for app developers, this is just, you know, yes, it's exciting as Apple fans, but to have this level of change and to have less than a month and a half to do it, and to not even give us the tools to do it on day one, that's a real slap in the face. And I'm excited about the hardware in most ways, except for one really giant one. I'm excited about the hardware in most ways. However, as a developer, this is a huge middle finger to us. They could not have prepared us less well for this and given us less time.

1:51:45John Siracusa:I want to reiterate or double, I don't think double down, I'm using that right. But nevertheless, I want to double down, so to speak. On what Marco just said, you know, we don't even have access to the current simulator. I know Marco said that a minute ago. I want to reiterate that. They haven't even released the version of Xcode that has a simulator for the iPhone Duo. And they've said it's coming later this month. Now, admittedly, that could be by the time this very episode is released. But realistically...

1:52:14Marco Arment:Right, technically. It could be tomorrow. But it probably won't be.

1:52:16John Siracusa:Realistically, though, probably not for at least a week or two. and we only have what like six weeks until this thing is in people's hands this is a real raw deal for app developers and that is a real bummer and my ask of all of you who are listening to the show if you're even considering buying an iphone duo or perhaps have people in your life who are buying an iphone duo i beg of you to give grace to especially teams of i don't know one uh that not only need to spend two to three thousand dollars on this phone but then need to spend days to months to weeks to you know or days to weeks to months to get it working right i know i i'm repeating what marco just said but i cannot stress enough i agree with him wholeheartedly this is a lot it's not just two screens it's several different layouts in several different configurations you also so one of the cool things that the software does now i'm jumping ahead But one of the cool things the software does is it lets you know or lets developers know what the state of the hinge is in such a way that you can react to the fact that the phone is slightly closed but not fully closed.

1:53:19John Siracusa:The idea here is you move some of the important things out of the crease area because that's going to be harder to touch. So that's a different mode. John, I think you put in the show notes a tweet from or a toot from Rafa that indicates some of these. And we'll put that in the show notes. There's a lot here. There's a lot here. And this is not just, oh, it's your iPad app, but smallish. No, no, no, no, no. It's way, way more than that. And this is going to take a lot of time. And we are all going to get bombarded with one-star reviews. And it's going to suck.

1:53:51Marco Arment:Yeah. Because also, keep in mind, again, this isn't just new screen sizes. Because it changes how controls are laid out. Because it dramatically changes safe areas. which is, you know, so for most of iPhone recent history, there's been safe areas around the top and around the bottom. The one on the bottom is around the home indicator. Around the top, it's around the island. And the idea of the safe area is it's like a layout guide that tells your app, you can render like background and scrolling content behind these, but don't put controls behind them. And, you know, SwiftUI and AppKit or UIKit, you know, they inset the controls to stay away from the safe areas.

1:54:27Marco Arment:Well, now there are safe areas on the left and right sometimes. And so the reality of app development and app usage for the next year, it's going to be similar to when the iPhone X first came out and introduced that safe area around the home indicator on the bottom where for like two years after the iPhone X came out, there were frequently still bugs in apps where some control would end up laying itself out under the home indicator. and as a user, you had to very carefully try to tap around it or you might have just restart the app to get it to work right. It's going to be another two years of that, but with stuff on the left and right because so many app developers have never considered the possibility of a left and right safe area, even though it's been in the API the whole time, but the safe areas were always zero on the left and right.

1:55:20Marco Arment:So there's probably a lot of app bugs that are going to result from this all of a sudden being a thing that the apps have to have to lay out their UIs around. So the type of work this is, it's a huge amount of work. It's also going to be just months of bugs in apps and months of broken or non-ideal layouts. It's going to be a ton of work. And so again, like going into this phone, I do think this is potentially very interesting, but it's going to be very much like a beta for a while. And by the way, iOS itself probably will also have a lot of those bugs because that's what it does too. Like whenever Apple does new stuff with the safe areas, lots of their own apps also have these bugs.

1:56:04Marco Arment:So I would totally expect similar levels of bugginess with the built-in system controls and system apps as well. Apple is not immune to this problem. So it's going to be a beta. Like treat this phone like a beta for at least the first few months, which it might be that long before you can get one because the rumors of it being very low production and it's probably going to be very hard to get. But anyway, before I move on from the fundamental design of this thing. So it is Touch ID, not Face ID. Touch ID is in the side button, like the sleep-wake button in that area on the right side. They were careful to point out that you can enroll multiple fingers and also you can unlock with your watch, which, yes, you've been able to unlock your phone with your watch for a long time.

1:56:47Marco Arment:They're obviously trying to remind people, hey, Touch ID is not that bad. Remember, oh, we made it a little bit less bad with all these things. Anyway, we'll see how that proves to be. The one thing that I am concerned about with using this phone, because I am going to get one so that I can develop with it. I'm going to try to live with it for a few weeks at least. but I hold my phone in my left hand and I keep my phone in my left pocket. This phone looks like it is very badly designed for holding it left-handed. And the Touch ID button is going to be in the wrong spot. I guess I'll enroll like my index finger on my left hand, but that's one problem.

1:57:27Marco Arment:But the entire UI is made to be used with your right thumb holding the phone in your right hand.

1:57:36Casey Liss:It's kind of a shame they can't do the Apple Watch flip over. You know what I mean?

1:57:38Marco Arment:Yeah, well, if you could, maybe you could hold the entire phone upside down, but then the Touch ID button's in the wrong spot. Yeah, I know.

1:57:44Casey Liss:I mean, you also have the problem of the camera sensors and live activity and blah, blah, blah.

1:57:49Marco Arment:But they're almost close to being able to pull an Apple Watch and say, just use it lefty. yeah but like i i think if you are a left-hand phone user i think this is going to possibly be terrible but we'll see i i hope they thought of that or have some kind of you know maybe it's not as bad as i think but like when i i have my little 3d printed mock-up of it here from months ago and like if i when i'm holding the 3d printed mock-up in my left hand my thumb cannot reach those side buttons on the right like it just it's not going to reach so i don't know like this this could be really bad.

1:58:21Casey Liss:You've got to come around the other side like you're going around the neck of a guitar and use your pointer finger to get at those.

1:58:28John Siracusa:Yeah, no, for lefties, this could be rough. And I wonder if there'll be some sort of software toggle to move the navigation bar and all that stuff that's currently on the right-hand side to the left-hand side.

1:58:39Marco Arment:Yeah, but then you're going to break my layouts that way too. No, actually, it already does that for if you have it open and you have a left-right split and you have one app on the left, one app on the right, then the app on the left gets its navigation stuff put on the

1:58:51Casey Liss:left oh there you go yeah the question is whether we'll do that when it's closed well they might have not shown everything although speaking of like this being a beta and everything given my many many years experience with plain old iphone and before that ipod touch rectangles and their ability to relay out the screen when i rotate to from between landscape and portrait and various apps and how buggy that has been for the entire decade of the iphone i look at this and i'm like oh man this is like that times a thousand because it's not just one rectangle rotating vertical to horizontal it's like all right what angle is it at how open is the hinge is it one app or two like i can i'm looking every demo they gave looked beautiful and perfect with all their built-in apps and it's like they call them poses here's all the different poses this device can be and it can be portrait or landscape or closed or closed landscape or closed portrait or half open portrait or half open landscape or like it's like wow there's a lot of poses and they would transition between all look how smoothly we transition between all these starting from like the cool effect or when you open it up it makes it look like the top is transparent and you're looking through to the thing all the way down to like rotate it and bend the hinge and put it landscape and everything was beautiful in these in these videos which i assume had simulated images on the screen but i couldn't really tell because i've heard that the screen is actually kind of matte finish so maybe it wasn't real but anyway wow that's a lot of opportunities for like oh you know when you rotate the phone like oh it didn't rotate or some half part of the ui rotated and some other part didn't and it's like or you ever see it like you're trying to watch a video and the video will be poking out of the side because it's not rotated like if we can't get basic rotation right at this point how is anything including apple's built-in apps going to be as perfect as it was in this video like the ideas are all great but i'm really really worried about just the basics of implementation involving not just accelerometers but now also hinge sensors and all of that working together with the app.

2:00:44Casey Liss:So we'll see. Like the video made it look beautiful and perfect. But I know from experience with regular phones that it's not going to be the case. And this is just with Apple's built-in apps, which have had the most time possible to get it right. And that was one of the questions everybody had is like, what will your app look like if you don't update it to understand the iPhone Duo? And Apple has videos for that. We'll link to Apple's playlist. They gave like a developer playlist of like six WWDC style sessions to tell you stuff that you need to know about the phone and in that you'll see screens as hey if your app is built uh it was built using something before the ios 27 sdk guess what it's going to look like just a phone app like a vertical rectangle shoved right in the middle of this crease when you have the thing open which is like the worst possible place for it i mean i guess granted you probably won't bend it but like and then when you have it closed yeah that whole right side where all the toolbars will be that's just empty like basically your phone app is just a phone app.

2:01:40Casey Liss:If you built with the iOS 27 SDK, your phone app is still just a phone app. But when you have the thing fully open, it's more like a wide phone app. And that's the only thing we could do with the simulator that we had like now like the Xcode 27 simulator, you could try your app wide and not wide wide and not wide. All of those is not how you want your app to look, it's going to be disappointing to you. But more importantly, someone who just spent two grand or more on a phone, it's going to be disappointing to them because they're like I spent two grand on this phone and when i open up the screen all i do is i see a light up a set of pixels that's like the same size or smaller than my old phone screen sitting in the middle of a sea of blackness and they don't know it's because that app hasn't been updated yet or whatever but it'll be really disappointing because it's like what what benefit am i getting out of this two thousand dollar phone in fact it's worse than a regular phone because it's shorter and i have fewer pixels lit up and there's just this giant waste of space around it so this is i mean it's a problem for developers and like oh you have to update my app and people will manage your apps or whatever but mostly it's problem for apple because customers are going to be disappointed if they get this expensive thing and like the only apps that look decent are apple's built-in ones for a pretty long time

2:02:46John Siracusa:yeah that all being said and i think all three of us myself included are being kind of you know downers at the moment but the hardware does look extremely cool i'm still unconvinced i would want this as a full-time daily phone although currently that's probably my plan at least for a little while to live with it and see how it feels but the hardware seems to be very slick um they talked about how they have a variable torque hinge uh when it's open it is the thinnest iphone ever uh they made brief mention of something being in the camera plateau just like the iphone air and then later they were showing like mocked up internals of the phone and it looked like the cpu was kind of dead center so i'm not entirely sure which one of these is real or maybe i misunderstood

2:03:30Casey Liss:oh you skipped over the facetime camera and i want to give a comment oh sorry yes the facetime camera is under the screen as the rumor said um and later in the video they showed how it's under screen but they showed like oh here's what it looks like actually we leave out like a whole bunch of the the the sub pixels you know instead of having rgb rgb or whatever pattern that they have they leave out a bunch of them basically making it like a like a window screen so that more light can get through to the camera uh earlier in the video when they were showing i guess it must have been not simulated image i guess it must have been the real image on the phone they were showing images of the the iphone duo and unfolded mode or whatever uh i thought like wow this what a weird uh you know mistake for apple usually so careful they had dust on their sensor when they took this video because there was because there was a little telltale slightly darker circular region which is what it looks like when you have dust on your camera sensor uh but and then i was like maybe it's not dust on the sensor of apple's camera maybe it's a smudge on my pro display xdr which i never touch i'm like how is that possible did someone come into my house and touch my screen but then they scroll the worst crime someone could commit against you yeah yeah it is it'd be terrible but then they like scroll the iphone off please take all the valuables just don't do that like like the iphone like the iphone that they were showing a picture of like lift it up and Basically, they moved the camera so it was pointing down.

2:04:50Casey Liss:And when that happened, the smudge moved with the phone. I'm like, that wasn't dust on the sensor. And that's not a smudge on my screen. Because in both of those cases, it shouldn't have moved. Dust on the sensor shouldn't move. And smudge on my screen shouldn't move when the iPhone moves in the frame. What that was, was the clearly visible circular section of the screen that the Face ID camera is behind. mind and if i could pick it up in apple's video i have to think that's going to be visible to the naked eye looking at this phone which is pretty disappointing like the whole point of putting it under the screen is i don't want some portion of the screen that i can't use and also i don't want to like see it's like it's invisible it's gone i guess you can still use that portion of the screen but if that portion of the screen is essentially a dimmer circle because it literally has fewer light up pixels in that area than the rest of the screen that is another disappointing technology limitation of how they chose to do this phone.

2:05:45Casey Liss:I almost rather have just the plain old like dynamic island cutout thing. Just make that bigger because at least that's an honest like, look, we had to make this so that the camera could see out of it. But instead they did this underscreen thing and in the video, in Apple's own video, it's not look good. So I'm a little worried about that.

2:06:01Marco Arment:I mean, I think the reality is like, you know, you're going to see the crease after a while too. Like you didn't see the crease in the video. You didn't, but you know, most of the hands-on videos so far have basically said like yeah you do kind of see it um and you know we don't know how this is going to age over time like you'll you'll probably see it more over time so i i think the reality of using this kind of device is like you're not going to have a perfect uninterrupted span of screen and you don't already with today's phones like you know you have the cutouts for the camera and dynamic island stuff like it's fine you know you kind of you get used to it, you stop seeing it, that's probably going to happen here too.

2:06:41Marco Arment:You will eventually notice the crease if you don't notice it on day one. You'll notice the crease, you'll notice the dim little circle where the camera's under the screen, and you'll notice it for a day, and then you'll stop noticing it. It'll be fine.

2:06:53Casey Liss:Well, the thing is with the Dynamic Island, I don't look at that unless there's a live activity around it, but with the thing under the screen, there could be content under that, and so I'm forced to look at it to read the content or to watch the thing that's over there, and now I'm forced to see that stupid smudge. I don't know. We'll see how it looks in person.

2:07:07Marco Arment:john this is the liquid glass era there could be content under everything there usually is it's

2:07:12Casey Liss:it's but but we're spotlighting your content our controls float over your content but like be careful don't put your stuff under there because you won't be able to get to it but you can see it sort of but it's blurry but it's like it's just not a great idea although i also will point out like you know we always talk about the uh signals apple sends to developers about upcoming changes and obviously when they have the simulator and the touch stuff and we're like you know uh well the touch stuff for touch max but anyway the simulator being wider for wider phones and we're Like, yeah, that's for the foldable phone, obviously.

2:07:40Casey Liss:And we were right, although there was much more to it than that, as we already said. But one of the other things that is so clearly for the foldable phone that I don't think a lot of people clocked, but that people have been complaining about for at least a year now, maybe more. I forget when they started doing this, was the new toolbar arrangement where you don't get to pick where your toolbar items are. You just get to say, like, this is the primary one. This is the tertiary second from left second most important third cousin one. And you're like, you give them all these semantic names. And it's like, why don't you just let me lay them out?

2:08:11Casey Liss:This is the first one, the second one, the third one, the fourth one. And when the overflow, just give me an overflow menu. And Apple's like, no, just tell us the role they provide. And that was 100 % for this stupid phone. Because what they do is they take your toolbar and they say, okay, your primary and secondary are going to be here. Unless your primary is a wide button, then that's going to be on the top. In which case, you're going to have your primary and tertiary and third cousin on the right. Like they split up the things in your toolbars according to their roles and put them where they think they should go.

2:08:38Casey Liss:Sometimes they're on top, sometimes on their side, sometimes the top of the side, sometimes at the bottom of the side, sometimes they're on the left, sometimes they're on the right. And if you had a toolbar API that said, tell me what goes in position one, two, three, and four, this would never work. So the semantic positions that have been driving developers up the wall for such a long time is like, I don't have enough control over my toolbar. Just tell me where things should go. Apple should have said you're going to have even less control of your toolbar pretty soon so get used to it. Oh and if you did a custom toolbar good luck.

2:09:08Marco Arment:I mean honestly this is part of why I'm dreading all the work that I have to do now because I have done a lot of custom work here and there. Because this is a story as old as Apple development time, that Apple gives you these stock widgets and controls and everything that work as long as you're making the ice cream stand WVC developer sample app. And then the moment it interacts with the real world, like, oh, well, hmm, it doesn't really fit this need I have or this use case or this condition in the real world. So I have to start doing a little bit of customization or workarounds or something or re-implementations of certain things.

2:09:50Marco Arment:And then Apple goes and does something like this and it breaks all of that. Like this is just the cycle of Apple development. But the reality is that you do often have to do that kind of stuff to make a good app. So this constant cycle always exists. Like one of the one thing about about this current, you know, what I'm seeing here, like we've been hearing for a while and the iOS styles have been for a while. Pull stuff away from the edges. Why? OK, well, for a while we thought the reason was they were going to do that rumored 20th anniversary phone that that was like all glass curving or the screen would curve around the edges.

2:10:24Marco Arment:And they still are. And yeah, they might still be doing that. We'll see. But we thought it was for that. It's also for this because now they're saying, oh, we're going to put controls on the left and right edges. So therefore, you can't have UI that goes to the edges, it won't look right, or it'll go under the controls or it'll get cut off or weirdly. So but at the same time, now we have to we have to design our UIs to pull everything in from the edges. Except to do that requires the whole UI to be narrower and to waste space on the left and right that we weren't wasting before, which means when you render one of those on display zoom on an on a smaller phone, it's not going to fit.

2:11:02Marco Arment:so it's going to be very difficult for us to develop and design the same ui to work on say an iphone 13 mini or an iphone se with display zoom on to have that same ui fit and work on a modern iphone duo that you have to pull everything away from the edges i mean that's what they're

2:11:21Casey Liss:trying to get you to do with those flexible toolbars and stuff like they try to show it as like look basically the the place you're going to get to draw is going to be similar to a traditional iphone proportion it's just that all your toolbars that you used to have on the top and bottom we've chucked to the four winds to the sides but some items are still on the top like it's they're like like if you just used our standard controls and you didn't try to do anything custom and you did it just the way we did it your app's actual content should still roughly be phone proportion it's just that phone proportion thing is going to be that rectangle is going to be moved all over the place and all the things that you had on top and bottom are now going to be squirming all around the sides of your phone but you don't have to worry about that because if you follow our apis and use standard controls that'll all be taken care of but like you said marco nobody is only use their most most app developers are not only using standard controls in the standard way with no customization because that would be very boring app you know and in fact apple

2:12:10Marco Arment:discourages that like what wins ada's it's nothing that has like really you know bog standard controls it's all rich custom designs so like apple encourages developers to go custom and to make very you know very you know elaborate custom rich design as i'm saying like apple encourages this. They push for it and the market rewards it. And so for them to keep saying like, oh, well, if you use standard controls, you can get all these behaviors for free, but don't use standard controls that much. It does create this friction. But anyway, it's going to be so much work. And I'm sure we'll get to a place where it's good eventually, but it's a lot of work to do in a very short time.

2:12:54Casey Liss:Yeah. I mean, like we did with the iPhone 10, there was a long time where there was like non-iPhone 10 savvy apps and some of those stragglers or whatever but we eventually did get over the hump so i just i do want to give lots of credit for the very thoughtful really good software design to fit this hardware i don't know if the hardware is any good i don't know if this is the right shape per phone i don't know if it's useful to carry people like it blah blah blah but but again starting from the premise that the phone is this shape and has the hinge here amazing job on the software just really clever thoughtful and like i said they did everything like when i saw them turning it upside down like a little tent and it turns into an alarm clock, I'm like, okay, now you're just showing off.

2:13:30Casey Liss:Like they're just, we should continue on because there's so many cool things they do with this software wise with their own apps to show like the things that are awesome.

2:13:37John Siracusa:So they did a lot with the software. Like you were saying, they specifically said they took advantage of liquid glass in order to make this work. They, like I said, have the status bar basically as a circular widget in the corner. You can have two home screen pages at once, side by side. You can have two apps side by side. If you tap the little knuckle handle, whatever you call it, thing in the center between the two apps, you can link them together as one unit, even if it's two different apps. Jaws eventually came up in the dark, as always, and said that the interior display is a 7.6-inch Super Retina XDR display, 50 % larger than the Pro Max and 80 % larger over the Pro.

2:14:17John Siracusa:The outer display is 5.4 inches, which is 90 % of the pixels of the iPhone 18 Pro. they said that later this year it will work with the apple pencil with usb c so i have a a second gen apple pencil pro the one that only ever charges via magnets on my ipad pro that will not work with this i don't think but rather the uh one that you can plug in via usb c by i think it's like a little section near the top that you kind of open up i've never actually had one that will later this year work with either display interior or exterior which is kind of cool yeah

2:14:56Marco Arment:that is really like finally an an iphone sort of an iphone with apple pencil support that's really cool you see a stylus they blew it yeah yeah right this excites me like because i again like i i love the idea of the apple pencil and i love using it sometimes i just am not really an ipad person i almost never have an ipad with me um so this is very promising also this type of pencil the usbc one um most people don't know there's a there's an entire world of very inexpensive apple pencil compatible pencils from other brands that like that work exactly the same now as the apple pencil like natively with every modern ipad and they cost like 25 bucks like they're they're way cheaper than apples they're all over amazon there's a bunch of different brands that make them and so if this works the same way which it probably does um because they're all usbc and you plug them in to sync them and then that's it they're synced they're done then this will probably work just fine with those two which means there will be a rich third-party ecosystem of like little stubby pencils that will work with the duo that'll be great uh so i i think this this could be very exciting um for lots of lots of different use cases for the for the pencil that this could

2:16:11Casey Liss:be this could be wonderful so one of the things they mentioned when they went over the screens uh and like their construction and all the different layers and how they fold and how they're fighting the crease and blah blah blah was they talked about the very top layer uh which i figure what they described as some kind of polymer material blah blah but basically the top layer that that you touch with your finger is plastic some special exotic kind of plastic but plastic uh not glass uh even though other layers of the thing of the sandwich may be glass and that is relevant to the stylus because presumably they picked a plastic that is harder than the tips on their own stylus or whatever but but if you're looking for a way to potentially mar your screen using a stylus with force on it especially around the crease area is probably a strong candidate so i do wonder how that's going to work out um that's also one of the reasons that maybe i don't know if it's one of the reasons but it makes sense to me that this screen would have a kind of a matte finish to it kind of like the paper like covers that they have for ipads or the nanotexture ipad and that if you are going to draw on it with a pencil it's not as much fun to have a slick glass thing with a smooth plastic thing sliding over it and so yeah this is nano textured plastic laser etched nano textured plastic that hopefully your stylus won't mar up

2:17:25John Siracusa:yep they have speakers on the top of the bottom uh like we said no face id but touch id which bums me out i get it but it bums me out uh the colors are star white and night sky they talked a lot about how it's very robust very stiff uh that they have a million layers on the display on the interior uh there's ceramic shield on the back and ceramic shield 2 on the front it's also ip68 rated for dust and water resistance which is a maximum depth of six meters for up to 30 minutes uh which is the same as the f118 pro this is a i think a pretty vast improvement from all the android ones which are not at all this robust i found this shocking because as we all

2:18:08Casey Liss:know with the foldable phones or maybe you don't if you haven't thought about it there's a region of the screen that is in the middle at the crease that is not like affixed permanently to something because it has to bend and and it can't crease you know the phone the phone folds completely shut but you can't have a crease like that bends on itself to that degree with the screen you need some kind of curve radius and so the phone always has the the hinge always has a place for the screen to go so it can curve more gently and not snap in half or break which means there's like an air gap for the screen to go into and how do you water seal something that has an air gap well there must be a part where the screen joins the rest of the phone and becomes affixed to it again and that has to be water sealed at that crease and same thing or the other and that has to be sealed and the hinge itself has to be sealed and obviously sealing up the parts where like the batteries and the socs are they know how to do that it's like a phone but that screen interface to the rest of it i'm amazed that they were able to pull this off and it makes me even more angry that all their laptops die if you put a tiny bit of water on them casey but like the fact that this has i looked up the thing like according to their spec pages this has the same waterproofness as an iphone 18 pro which is amazing for a folding phone so i hope someone youtube but both tries out if they can scratch the screen with an apple pencil and also puts this thing in a cup of water and see how it does i mean i believe them but it's like another amazing technical feat and like i said last time when we were talking about the iphone air exit interview i also imagine that using what they learned from the air this thing is incredibly stiff and incredibly sturdy but you can bet even though i'm totally not buying one of these that i will go to the apple store as soon as they have them and play with it extensively you should buy one but i know i'll never convince you no never never this is your job john not my job to buy everything that apple releases that's not the job of a critic the job of a critic is not to buy everything that apple

2:19:53Marco Arment:releases don't casey don't worry the job john's job is to buy the things we don't want to buy I guess.

2:19:59John Siracusa:I mean, well, there's a million places I can go from here, but I will walk away. Hey, so Craig came up and he had a bunch of things to say, including that there is a new minimalist wallpaper view on the lock screen where basically everything gets out of the way and you just see a giant wallpaper. You can do two ups, split view multitasking, like I was saying. You can also launch a second window of the same app if supported. The example they gave is two Safari windows. Like I said earlier, you can tap on the divider to pair apps for a kind of spaces-like experience. You can pin a video to the top while multitasking.

2:20:32John Siracusa:Hand to God, I'm not kidding, this looks so hot because there's so many times I want to do two things at once and one of them is just have a video, not literally in the background, but figuratively in the background. And this lets you pin the video to the top and you still have plenty of space down below. Genuinely excited for this. We had talked about earlier, you can use in various different orientations, what they call poses. You could do a tent. You can do an L, including with a video in the vertical portion of the L, or the L being like a laptop, if you will. A video on the quote-unquote laptop screen and the controls where the keyboard would be.

2:21:07John Siracusa:They were very excited about Netflix, which gave a demo of their edits to their app that supports this.

2:21:12Casey Liss:Yeah, Netflix won't do anything for the Vision Pro, but make a foldable phone and it fixes there.

2:21:17John Siracusa:indeed uh speakers will react to the position of the hinge to try to make things sound right including when things are partially folded um ios like i said earlier will try to move junk away from the crease wherever possible uh you can do standby even when you're not charging if you recall standbys when you put your phone in in a landscape position but it only turns on when the phone is charging in this case you can do standby even when it's not charging when it's in like tent mode, if you will. Uh, this makes for a very good bedside clock, including they made brief mention, but I don't think they showed it of wake up with a gentle glow.

2:21:50John Siracusa:Um, so this could wake you up by just brightening the screen over time, which is, uh, the way I, I don't typically wake up to an alarm, but when I do, that's how I wake up is there's a light next to my bed that glows very nicely. Um, and that is much less jarring than, you know, your wrist vibrating or an alarm playing. um they brought johnny sruji out for the display i'm so weird i'm like wait what chip is he going

2:22:15Casey Liss:to talk about yeah exactly no he's not talking about chips now he's the head of all hardware

2:22:18Marco Arment:okay oh that's what oh that's why you're confusing right like why is he out there but like he got

2:22:23Casey Liss:elevated to be like hardware guy and hey this is hardware that's right so always on hdr 120 hertz

2:22:30John Siracusa:display with p3 a thousand nits typical 1600 nits for hdr 3000 nits outdoors one nit minimum brightness. This is all the same as the iPhone 18 Pro and 17 Pro. The resolution, the interior resolution is 1878 by 2670 at 430 PPI. The outer resolution is 1398 by 2034 at 460 PPI, which is 30 PPI better.

2:23:00Casey Liss:It's interesting that this is a PPI difference. I'm not quite sure why they chose that. The outer screen is just so much easier because it's flat. It doesn't bend. It's got ceramic shield on it so it's scratch resistant like all the things that the inner screen is not the outer screen can be and i just for whatever reason they picked a different ppi which is also weird because like they again they show the the little opening animation it makes it seem like the cover of the book so to speak is transparent and that when you're opening it up you can see the the screen underneath like they do it's all an illusion this is kind of like the uh when the uh back of an orange iphone uh 17 pro looks like the same color as the surrounding thing from one particular angle this illusion that they show looks really cool from any other angle it's probably it's like watching someone do like a a scene in the volume at ilm but you're not looking from the right perspective and all the background looks wacky so we'll see how that looks but yeah they have to match that and they're matching a 460 ppi front screen to a 430 ppi back screen to maintain that illusion so a little weird but i mean i guess it makes sense

2:23:59John Siracusa:so they have a perceptually flat matte surface i did see a handful of videos uh tyler stallman put something that I'd seen on Instagram. I don't think I'll be able to find a link for the show notes, especially since I think it's a story, which means it'll disappear. But from what I could tell from video, so asterisk, double asterisk, dagger, double dagger, it did look like the crease did disappear visually. Now, my understanding is you can still feel it, but it sure looked like it just disappeared. This is very TBD. Don't take that as fact. I've not seen one in person. We will see. But I was impressed.

2:24:34Casey Liss:That was the whole pitch of the top layer was like, hey, the crease is going to be there and we can't stop it. But we're going to put this fuzz. That's another I guess the other reason of the matte texture. We're going to put this thing above it that's going to diffuse the light because the way you pick it up, if you've seen lots of reviews of these folding phones, is you get a specular highlight of the crease. Right. It's like that. The light gathers there, reflects as a little curve portion. You get a specular highlight. It makes it super obvious. Now, like this screen, no specular highlights.

2:24:59Casey Liss:Everything is diffuse. We're going to put this and you know, the, the plastic rumply laser coated thing on the top of it also may have a crease in it, but because it's so diffuse, because it is so matte, it dampens down. It spreads the specular highlight that would highlight highlight where the crease is over a larger area. I think that's the idea. And that's why I believe, especially with a brand new model that they just put out in front of the press, that it might actually not be possible to see the crease with the naked eye, especially if the screen is bright. You know what I mean?

2:25:27John Siracusa:So they talked a lot about how they made all this work. Like I was saying, there's a gazillion layers to the screen with a gazillion different materials involved. But one way or another, they do their best to try to make this look and feel as good as possible. The A20 has a display engine with the dual display support and under-camera display support. It has a 35 % higher sustained performance over an iPhone 17 Pro, not the 18. it has the c2 cellular modem which they specifically cited and this is the first time in an apple cellular modem 5g millimeter wave in the u.s which is a feature that i absolutely love didn't i was fairly convinced that it was never coming to an apple modem partially because i don't think anyone uses it including me anymore but man when you have it it's incredible um the c2 is supposed to be way way more efficient uh faster uploads etc uh the duo is e-sim only worldwide there are two batteries.

2:26:25John Siracusa:There's one on each side of the phone that operates seamlessly as one. You get 31 hours of video playback on the inner display, 44 on the outer display because it's smaller, less to illuminate. 24 hours of usage per charge, 50 % charge in 20 minutes by wire. Five hours of video on the outer display after five minutes of charging. Conspicuously absent from the keynote, which got me very nervous, was any mention of MagSafe whatsoever. They did say that one of the, that the back of the closed, when it's closed, that the back is Ceramic Shield 1, which would maybe... No, it's got MagSafe.

2:27:00Casey Liss:It's in the notes somewhere.

2:27:01John Siracusa:I'm getting there, darn it. So the fact that it's glass on the back made me think maybe it has MagSafe or maybe that's just for, you know, cellular and radio and whatever. But no, it does turn out, as John ruined for me, but that's all right. It's all right. It does indeed have MagSafe. Although I did see somewhere that it specifically cites in like the comparison that you can use. I forget these specifics, but it's something like you can use. Shoot. All right. Where is it? I can't see.

2:27:27Casey Liss:I can't find it either. I don't know if it's in there somewhere. All right. Well,

2:27:29John Siracusa:oh, there we go. I see it. So MagSafe wireless charging up to 25 watts with 30 watt adapter or higher, compatible with MagSafe cases, wallets, wireless chargers, and more. Although I don't, I think that's wrong. I think the Duo is not compatible with wallets, if I recall correctly.

2:27:44Casey Liss:I think I copied and pasted that from their comparison page. So maybe the compare page is wrong, but it seemed like it had the same kind of entry as everything else.

2:27:50John Siracusa:Yeah, maybe I've got it wrong. I don't know. Just go do a little investigation. But the point is, we had heard, okay, no face ID, true, bums me out, but we'll see how the touch ID is. We had heard no MagSafe really bummed me out because I almost never plug in my phone anymore. That turns out to be not true, which I'm very excited about. And the other thing we heard was that the camera situation was, as compared to the Pro anyway, not going to be stellar. And let me tell you, that is correct, and I am very sad about it. There is a Fusion main camera, which has the fake 2x zoom, where they do a crop of the full frame.

2:28:28John Siracusa:It does do 4K, 120 frames per second video. No variable aperture, no Apple reference image support. The zoom levels are half 1 and 2x as compared to the Pro, which is half 1, 2, 4, and 8. This means there is no telephoto. There's an ultrawide and a main camera. There's no telephoto. And your boy is not happy about it, y 'all. Not happy. What are you going to do? But that's all right. It's fine.

2:28:54Casey Liss:Oh, it doesn't have ProRAW either. The selfie camera is also lesser. It's a 12 megapixel center stage instead of 18 on the 18 Pro and Max.

2:29:03John Siracusa:That's right. The interior camera, the underscreen camera is not nearly as good.

2:29:07Casey Liss:Although it does have a dual capture FaceTime thing, which is nice.

2:29:10John Siracusa:Yes. So we're jumping ahead ever so slightly, but that's totally fine. It does dual capture and FaceTime. So you can do dual capture like when you're recording video, but you can also do duo FaceTime, which is where you're holding it open and you're seeing the other person and yourself. and at the same time the back display what would normally be the outer display is showing the remote person so that somebody else that's not you that's looking at the back of your phone can also participate in what's going on which is very very slick i'm curious to see maybe they showed it and i just didn't catch it i'm curious to see what this looks like on the other side of the call do you get two views to like do you get both the view of me and the view of marco in front

2:29:54Marco Arment:of the back camera i don't know but i mean i think ultimately like the the dynamics of having a screen that can face the same way as the back cameras that's going to sell a lot of these in lots of different ways because think about like they showed it for two seconds in the video but being able to take a selfie using the best camera on the phone is a huge advantage of foldables because the back you can use the back camera while looking at a screen and you can see what it's taking like that changes so much about taking pictures so that like i think a lot of people are going to buy the folding phones and and stick with them forever for that reason alone and they

2:30:40Casey Liss:showed it it's also its own stand which goes great with the feature they have where like it waits for everyone to be looking at the camera and staying still to take the picture so you don't have to use timers or anything but it is its own stand you just put it into a little l shape you point it where you want everyone gathers in front of it the smart software waits until everybody is looking at the camera and takes the picture like this is what again i think they like thought of everything they have the thing where like you're taking a picture of a little kid so it shows a little animation of snoopy on the screen that they can see to make them smile so just just every good idea that they

2:31:07John Siracusa:had they put into this phone software wise yep uh yeah that's called kid q where they show snoopy or perhaps other things on the outer display, such that the kid is very amused and smiles. We mentioned the smart take thing, which is where it will hit the shutter on its own once it thinks everyone is ready. They have a couple of cases. They have an iPhone Duo Folio with an integrated kickstand. I can't decide if this is the least appealing case I've ever seen or the most clever case I've ever seen.

2:31:34Casey Liss:I mean, kudos for them for just saying, look, we're going to try it. We're going to do cases. Like we know third parties are going to do them. So would Apple do a case? Yeah, it reminds me of like the original iPad case where like Apple's like, we think the iPad might need a case. How's this? And everyone was like, nope, that's not it. But good try. I look at these and I'm like, is that it? I don't know. It's something.

2:31:56John Siracusa:They also have a duo case, which has two parts that wrap around each half. Starting price, as we all pretty much expected, two grand for 256 gigs.

2:32:05Casey Liss:That's better than a lot of the people that saw the predictions. Like, oh, how much is this going to cost? I mean, they got it$199.99, right? That is, I think, the lowest end of any of the predictions I saw. It was like, maybe they'll get it for$2 ,000. And everyone's like, no, it's not even going to start under that. It's going to be more. So kudos for Apple for, again, beating expectations for the base price of what this very expensive phone would be.

2:32:27Marco Arment:Yeah, and I think that makes it pretty reasonably competitive with the other folding phones on the market. They're all in the same price range. And if you know, for Apple to be shipping like their, you know, their top of the line implementation of these ideas for Apple prices and for it to be competitive is pretty impressive. Yeah.

2:32:45John Siracusa:So it's it'll go up to two gigabytes, but again, two grand for 256 gigs. Pre-orders start on October 16. They are available on the 23rd. And that was the entire presentation. I'm going to circle back in a second to more phone stuff. But what we did not see in this presentation, which I'm not happy about, is no new Apple TVs. Hopefully, they're going to do some home-oriented presentation sometime in October or something. Or it's a press release product. Or a press release product. I'd be fine with that.

2:33:13Casey Liss:No, they could do it with the HomePod with the screen thing. This would fit right in there.

2:33:17Marco Arment:Yeah, I don't think there was ever any chance of Apple TVs being in this event. Because the pattern they've followed for many, many years is the iPhone event in early September is iPhones and Apple Watches. and basically nothing else. And then later, I guess AirPods in this case too, but, and then later on in the fall, there's the October event. And that's more, if there's any Macs, iPads and home products, they go in that event. So that I would expect Apple TV, if they do their like home doc thing, like if that makes it into this year, that's rumored, that I would expect to be in the October event as well.

2:33:53Marco Arment:So that's, that was never going to happen this time, Casey. Sorry.

2:33:56John Siracusa:I know. No, intellectually, I know that, but damn it, I want a new one.

2:34:00Marco Arment:But don't worry. We're going to be very busy over the next month changing our entire apps around. Seriously. So don't worry. The time will fly by, I assure you. That's very true.

2:34:09John Siracusa:So let's go back. First of all, the chat room seems to be very crotchety about the fact that nobody's going to buy this phone. Obviously, I don't know. But let me tell you, I really think that this is going to sell better than any of us, including the Xpact, In no small part because anyone who does any sort of the like prototypical content creation, so like Instagram, TikTok, something like that, this phone seems tremendous for that. I'm not saying like shooting a commercial with this phone. No, you're going to get an 18 Pro for that. But if you're doing more casual, now it could be professional, but yet a seemingly casual.

2:34:43John Siracusa:Influencer camera. Yeah, exactly. I'm trying not to be derogatory, but yes, that's what I'm driving at. as an influencer creation device, this seems to be freaking perfect.

2:34:54Casey Liss:Well, actually, I'm going to say this about the influencer thing of this. Here's the role this has in the influencer world. They're going to shoot it on their Sony whatever Z whatever, but they'll be holding this phone in the whole video.

2:35:04John Siracusa:No, that could be.

2:35:05Casey Liss:That's how it's going to work. That is true. Because it's a status item. I mean, the saving grace that this has is the reports are that they're, first of all, that they're not manufacturing a lot of them and that the manufacturing is going slower than expected. So maybe they'll sell every single one of these they could make, and we just don't know how many that's going to be. But yeah, like I think they're Apple's presentation of this device. Why would you want this? Having not touched the thing with my hands, I don't even have a model. From what I saw in the video, I'm like, okay, they have a compelling case.

2:35:35Casey Liss:And I was amazed in the ad that they didn't show some of the most compelling stuff. Like show the thing where the person you're taking a picture of can tell you that they're not frame right and to move. Show the thing where it's entertaining a kid and take like, show the thing where it's like a little laptop where the video controls for once do not dim the entire video image so it can show a giant pause button in the middle of it and take three seconds after you hit play to go one, two, three. Okay, now undim. All the controls can be away from the video like they were in QuickTime Player 7. Back in the days when our controls didn't float on top of our content.

2:36:08Casey Liss:Well, those days are back again with the iPhone Duo. Like, this is an easy phone to sell in ads. not so easy once they see the price tag but i think it will be perceived as a luxury high-end good even if it turns out that most people don't want to use a phone in this aspect ratio we'll see how that goes because again samsung's out there with their copycat phone in the same aspect ratio but until this phone and the samsung one i don't think there were a lot of foldable phones in this particular dimension so it's kind of an unknown but i don't you know yes it's horrendously expensive even more so elsewhere in the world but i feel like this is kind of like you know it's a high-end product that not a lot of people are going to buy uh and you know the the bigger question is follow-up phones the the duo two duo three two in the future do they keep making this do they you know does it eventually become a mass market product is it always just going to be a high end like how is this going to go in the future but for the very first one i think they'll probably sell most of what they can make oh i think they're going to have no problem selling

2:37:09Marco Arment:i think they're going to sell literally every single one of them i think they're going to be backordered for months.

2:37:14John Siracusa:Agreed. I want to go back to something you said about aspect ratio. I meant to bring this up earlier and I forgot. Something that occurred to me is that even though I do mostly like the size of my iPhone 17 Pro, not the Pro Max, but 17 Pro, first of all, I am deeply committed to using it with a pop socket because I just feel like it's too big for my hand anyway. It's too big to use without. But I cannot reach past the top, like I cannot reach the top quarter of this phone, maybe third to quarter of this phone. And yes, I know that the pull-down, reachability, whatever you call it, thing exists, but I can't reach the top of the screen.

2:37:48John Siracusa:I suspect, hope, that I will be able to reach much more of the exterior screen, the outer screen on the Duo, than I can on any phone I've had for the last several years. And that is genuinely exciting to me. Now, that also does, I'm not acknowledging the fact that they've also moved a lot of the things that i would need to reach closer to my thumb as a righty but even still even if stuff is still lingering at the top of the screen i suspect i'm going to have a much better time single handing this phone than i have in a long time now i could be wrong maybe the the extra width will ruin this idea but sitting here ignorance is less uh and i i think this could be a lot better and i'm really really stoked for that you know they didn't show speaking of things

2:38:29Casey Liss:reaching things maybe they showed it in one of the the wwc style developer videos but like uh In open book mode, whatever that mode is called, in landscape, do they do like a split keyboard like the iPad used to have?

2:38:40John Siracusa:That's another thing I meant to bring up. Thank you. I don't think they ever showed a keyboard.

2:38:44Marco Arment:No, I think text input is going to be a big question mark on this. Yeah, yeah. One thing I've always hated using the on-screen keyboard on iPads, even iPad minis. Yep. Because the size of it is just – it's like – It's just wrong. It's not what my thumbs are used to on the phone, but it's too small to use like a real keyboard. Like it just it never felt right to me. And I think that's going to be a challenge for this phone because basically, however you're going to use this phone, you're going to have at least two different sizes of the onscreen keyboard. Because if you use it closed, that's going to be one size of the keyboard.

2:39:23Marco Arment:But then if you open it, even if you hold it in portrait opened, it's going to be way wider. So you're going to constantly be shifting between different physical sizes of the onscreen keyboard. That I think is going to be weird and maybe not good.

2:39:39Casey Liss:That's why I think maybe in landscape that they'll bring back the split keyboard. Did that ever go away? And I pay to people just not use it anymore.

2:39:45Marco Arment:I think it's gone, but it was I mean, it wasn't good because, again, even then, like you're changing, you're changing the physical layout of it. So even if you move the on-screen keys into different rows set apart from each other, you're still changing the physical layout of the keyboard between different orientations. So I think that's going to be maybe a tough thing for people to get over.

2:40:05Casey Liss:Well, and this becomes popular, people will carry this with them much more than they would ever carry an iPad because it does fold and can fit in their pocket. So maybe people will become accustomed to typing in landscape like they did on those sidekick, hip-top sidekick things. I think people will get used to any form factor if they use it enough. I think the outer screen, like the book close screen, that's fine. That's just a phone keyboard. You'll be fine with that. But if people end up texting with this thing opened in portrait or landscape, I think people will get used to whatever form they put it in.

2:40:34Casey Liss:I imagine most people will be messaging with the thing closed, but we'll see.

2:40:38Marco Arment:We'll see. Because when it's closed, the screen is pretty short. and so I think like you're not going to be able to fit a lot of your content above the keyboard when it's closed I mean it's like the original it's not it's still bigger than the original iPhone I think there's plenty room to see text messages yeah but it's like my my guess is what's going to happen is people people who you get this are going to end up unfolding it and using it open for almost all messaging just because they will want the keyboard to be like one size that they're used to and they'll want more space to actually see what they're what they are texting you know

2:41:12John Siracusa:so all in all i i feel like this device the iphone duo is an exercise in compromise which is what we all expected you know we don't have face id but we have a pretty solid touch id in theory uh we don't have the world's greatest cameras but we have decent ones uh the the hinge sounds like it's good the crease sounds like it's mostly disappeared the matte screen is going to be really nice, especially in like sunshine. That should be really great. There's a lot of pluses and a lot of minuses, but I have to say in a lot of ways, this does seem like a return to form for Apple insofar as it's well-considered.

2:41:52John Siracusa:It seems like they've done their best job as we were talking about earlier in making, in re-examining all their priors and saying, does the dock need to be on the bottom? Does, does the toolbar need to be at the top, you know, and so on and so forth. the animation when you open it I forget if we even brought this up but the animation when you open this where you see kind of like a fuzzy bit like a reflected fuzzy bit on the left hand side oh that was genius

2:42:15Marco Arment:that is Apple at their best

2:42:17John Siracusa:exactly incredible so like is it dumb kind of but it's incredible I think that adds so much to it and that that animation as you're opening it is the Apple that the three of us and probably most of you listening to this show that's the apple we want that is the apple we want and i am so excited to see even a glimmer of that apple that's what i'm talking about so we were marco and i particularly are very embittered very grumpy grumpy very offended about the way the developer story is on this phone oh it's a mess it's a mess i stand by everything that both of us were saying yeah but i want to end i want to turn that frown upside down to end with and say i don't know i will be buying that's the next thing I was going to ask is, what are you guys doing?

2:43:05John Siracusa:I will be buying one. Marco said, he will be buying one. I will at least attempt to use it full time. I don't know if I'll stick with it or not, but I don't think that this is something I want necessarily, but I am genuinely excited to try it out. And I think a lot of the reason I'm excited to try it out is because not only is the hardware different, which in and of itself is novel, but the software is so different. And again, taking off my developer hat and putting on my user hat, that's really exciting. And let me tell you, I am not huge into the selfie, and I don't FaceTime that often. But man, some of the things that they're doing around this, and we don't need to rehash the last half hour, but it's so clever and so cool.

2:43:44John Siracusa:And the fact that this thing is so versatile, I mean, I would argue this is the most versatile iPhone ever. And I think that there's so much to like about this. Even if you're not in the market for a folding phone, which me, the user, I'm not in the market for a folding phone. Me, the developer is, unfortunately. But me, the user, not really. But even if you're not in the market, I think there's a lot to be excited about. And I genuinely think, price be damned, I think, like Marco said a few minutes ago, this is going to sell like crazy. And I'm not even just talking developers. I think this is going to sell and sell a lot.

2:44:19John Siracusa:So I'm in for one. Marco, you said you're in for one. And if you have any other thoughts, I'm happy to hear it.

2:44:26Marco Arment:Yeah, I mean, again, I think for developers of iOS apps, I think it's pretty important to get your hands on one of these. Because there's no way that the simulator is going to give us the real-world experience of handling and using the device. It can get close. It can help us work out the bugs of getting our crap away from the sidebars and figuring all that stuff out. It can help us develop the functional part of the UI, but it's not going to help us develop a great design. It's not going to help us be able to test how things handle, how things look, how things work, what makes a good design on the Duo.

2:45:04Marco Arment:We don't really know yet. So I think for developers, it's important to have this. As a user, I don't think this will stick for me. I think the compromises in some of the weird sizing of it, the text input the not as good cameras not as good speakers, I think a lot of that stuff is going to irritate me even beyond all that, it's heavy it's going to feel like a brick in my pocket and even though it is a smaller brick in some dimensions, but it's thick and heavy, and I think I love a lightweight phone and so I don't see myself using it full time to be honest But I see a pretty strong reason for me to have one as a developer.

2:45:49John Siracusa:Do you plan to trial it full time at all?

2:45:51Marco Arment:Yeah, my plan is basically like I'll get it as soon as I can get it. Because as I mentioned, I'm not getting an 18 Pro. I'm sticking with my 17 Pro for the time being. So as soon as I can get my hands on a Duo, like I'm going to try to order it on day one and see what the ship dates are. I'll try to be there right at the beginning, even though it's going to be like, isn't it like three in the morning or something? I honestly don't know. We'll have to look it up. But I'm going to try to be there on day one, but we'll see. In the meantime, I'll happily keep using my orange phone.

2:46:19John Siracusa:Fair enough. John, I presume you are not in for Duo. You've all but said that already. So what is the Syracuse family purchasing for this fall?

2:46:27Casey Liss:Yeah, I'm just getting an 18 Pro for myself. And I will say that if I had an iOS app, I would probably get this phone just because like Marco said, this is such a big change. there's no way to avoid getting this phone if you want if you want your app to take advantage of you don't want your app take advantage of it because you're like oh my app i don't care like it's not you know it's it's people who buy this phone are not going to buy my app or whatever then fine but like this is kind of one of those things it's like getting an arm mac like if you you know i had the dtk when uh when max went to arm right if you have mac apps and you know obviously that the arm mac ddk thing was cheaper than two thousand dollars or whatever but like it's kind of one of those things you have to do just to make sure your app works right and work out all the problems or whatever so i would do wonder how what percentage of the people who buy this phone are going to be developers because i mean it is very expensive but like if you are an ios developer and you want your app to take advantage of this you have to buy the hardware um that's not me i don't have any ios apps so i'm not getting it i showed it to my wife and she i don't think she quite understands like why i don't want a phone like this but i if i could somehow get her to watch that portion of the presentation i think she would like oh that is kind of cool um i fear her deciding that she wants it because it's a very expensive phone but next year will be her year so when she gets her new phone if she wants to get a fold next year or duo or whatever duo two whatever is out then that may be the introduction of the duo into her household especially if pokemon go

2:47:57Marco Arment:takes advantage of the screen i was gonna say like could you really run two pokemon go instances side by side.

2:48:03Casey Liss:I think you have to be signed in two different accounts. Maybe if she can do that, she's definitely getting this phone. Right now, she's just salivating at the pristine battery in my 16 Pro because she's going to get this phone and goes to the Pokemon Mines after I get my new one.

2:48:18Marco Arment:I mean, technically, she could run three instances of it, one on the back street and burn the battery down three times as fast. She would totally do that

2:48:26Casey Liss:if that is supported by that. But hey, it's up to the company that's making it to do that. um and i i think i tried to describe that opening animation two times earlier made like that's what i was talking about when saying they're trying to make it look like the front of the book the cover of the book is made of glass and you could see through it that's what you were getting at right casey yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean like again i think that effect only works dead on but uh i'm definitely going to try that out i mean it's kind of like i can see how they came up with that but like i think back to the original iphone with like the slide animation that works from any angle but it's so much less impressive and this is like way more impressive but only works if you're looking dead on on the phone but maybe you're always looking dead on on the phone when you open it who knows and it just seems strikes me that the kind of thing they might change kind of like the ripple effect and dashboard they're like all right that's enough of that um but we'll see how long this lasts and also if that is at all stuttery it kind of ruins the illusion so we'll see how that goes as well but boy did this phone demo well um and then on the c2 chip and the thing with millimeter and everything i was kind of upset when because the rumors were that the like this would get the c2 but the the the 18 pro would not but it turns out that was only half right the 18 pro gets the c2 which means it has the you know lower power blah blah and also millimeter wave so it's like the no compromise you've got the phone that i'm getting will have the apple hopefully good apple cell radio that still has millimeter wave even though i've never actually used it so it's like no compromises on features and lower power but for whatever reason the pro max doesn't i wonder if they just couldn't get fab capacity or something or they just had some deal with qualcomm or they had to buy qualcomm chips for something like it's it's mysterious i wonder if anyone will get an apple on the record saying why that split exists but searching apple's websites like again that's that's her mac rumors i can't even confirm that that's entirely the case i believe it it probably is but apple is not touting the fact that one of the 18 phones doesn't have the c2 in it but but yeah like they did everything they could with the hardware and software of this phone to give it the best possible chance the compromises it has are compromises that are necessary from a technological perspective at this price i will say because if they wanted to make this a four thousand dollar phone it probably could have better cameras you know what i mean but like within the realm of how they targeted this product i think the hardware and software team seem to have done a good job assuming that the software actually works the way the demo showed it working uh and we'll see how that goes because especially with stuff like this where there hasn't been a long beta period where iphone duo users have been testing ios 27 beta out in public no no one has been testing ios 27 on this phone except for apple employees and that is a way smaller group than all the developers in the world so expect a little bit of a bumpy road best case it's like the iphone 10 was uh worst case it's like the iphone 10 times

2:51:12Marco Arment:three i think i mean there is one difference though first of all i i am extremely extremely optimistic i think they're going to sell as many of these as they can make i think it's going to be way beyond developers who buy it i think it's going to be a significant hit within the category now that being said they're going to sell a hundred times more iphone pros than this but this will be a hit relative to other foldables and i i definitely think it will substantially outsell the iphone air from this past year like i think it will be it'll be a hit but it will still be you know probably less than 10 of the sales um but that that would still be a hit however what makes it different from the iphone 10 from the developer point of view is that the iphone 10 was the pro phone of that year.

2:52:02Marco Arment:And it was what all future iPhones would be like, and we knew it. So there was a huge volume of customers both there in year one, and we knew coming down the pipe so that we had a huge incentive to update our apps to make them ideal on that device. Whereas we're not gonna have that with this device because this is not the pro phone of this year. It will not be the biggest selling phone of this year or probably any year. And the future is not going to be all foldables. So this is going to be a new device family that we have to accommodate, but it's not going to be the one with the most people in it.

2:52:42Marco Arment:So that might actually slow down development efforts to adopt to its screen for, say, big companies. Like, you know, I can imagine this is going to be the kind of thing that like, you know, Google Docs, for instance, like they're going to take forever. Like, you know, that kind of app where a company has to justify it, it might not have the volume to motivate that kind of development yet.

2:53:05John Siracusa:All right. Anything else we want to talk about from the event today?

2:53:08Casey Liss:Oh, they gave a Golden Gate a release date. It's coming out on the 14th.

2:53:12John Siracusa:Yay.

2:53:12Casey Liss:Cool. I'm excited for it. This is a question for you two. Real-time question on the air. Is the Xcode RC, can you submit to the App Store from that? Yes. All right. Well, then I got some work to do this week. Yeah, I think we all have a lot. I mean, I just have to submit my already done, tested iOS 27 builds of maps.

2:53:33Marco Arment:Honestly, so I had mentioned somewhere else. I think it was here. I had mentioned that I had not done any overcast UI work to lay out for the new phone yet. I am so glad I didn't because this changes everything. Like it wasn't just resizing the app. It's like, oh, move all the toolbars, change the way sheets work, add rotation support, which Overcast has never had. Like, it's a tremendous undertaking. Like, oh, geez. OK, so, yeah, it's going to be it's going to be some work. But at least now I know what I'm aiming for. And maybe someday Apple will give me the tools to do it. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Quince, Factor and Eleven Labs.

2:54:14Marco Arment:And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATP.FM slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Here you are nearly three hours into this episode. And just think, you could have even more of us because this is not enough. You need more of us. You can hear more of us every week by joining as a member, ATP.fm slash join. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about Apple's new business terms for the EU, which sounds so delightful and simple. I'm sure it will be. You can hear us talk about that by joining ATP.fm slash join.

2:54:48Marco Arment:Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes

2:55:16Casey Liss:at ATP.fm And if you're into Mastodon you can follow them

2:55:24Marco Arment:at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's K-C-L-I-S-S M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Antimarko Arment S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to accidental tech podcast so long

2:55:54Casey Liss:quick after show update on my app jetty that I talked about a couple episodes ago that puts doc like things all around the edges of your screens and last time I talked about it I said I had this weird scheme where I was going to have like a free version on the app store and then if you have the app store version installed and you download the pro version the pro version will sense that you have the free version or not that it'll sense that you have the app store version and then just run for free because you've already paid through the app store um and that is a scheme that since then lots of developers have written to me and said oh i do that now and apple actually hasn't yelled at me about it and some people are like oh not only do i do it but inside my app i tell people to go download the pro version and apple hasn't stopped me um again that doesn't mean that they wouldn't stop me because there's no consistency in the app store but at least it is something that people have done and not gotten yelled at technical from a technical perspective it's easy to do i've already done um but my news is that i've you know and i said like uh atp members will it could be on the test flight and all the other stuff like i did with my other apps like casey did with his apps so i've been doing that and atp members have been joining the test flight and doing stuff and i have a slack and getting bug reports and doing all the things right and during that process what i pretty quickly discovered is that as i was like fixing bugs and adding features like i would do like the release notes of like okay in this test flight build i added x y and z and you know put you know doing your release notes for your test flight builds um and i kept realizing that like often when i was uploading the test flight build i didn't have anything to write because i hadn't actually changed anything in the mac app store version of the app because every single feature i added was only in the pro version because you can't do anything in the mac app store everything is oh private api this and no i can't do that and no i tried to get like seven different entitlements that would have let me do things and apple was like rejected rejected rejected your app doesn't need this your app doesn't need this you can't have this your app doesn't know there's no appeal process you can't have it you can't have it can't it's like why even have these entitlements like you know just if i want to like oh my god just some of the entitlements is getting rejected for us like if an app like this can't have it if an app like this where you can put like a folder in a dock and click on it and open the folder and put things into it if i can't have the entitlement that lets me do that with arbitrary folders then what app deserves it because you can put arbitrary folders in a doc like thing and i think apple's attitude is don't make a doc like thing so i pretty quickly came to the decision this is not going to be in the mac app store i still have the same project where there's jetty and jetty pro but i cannot like an an app like this that is any good that has the features that i wanted to have the features that I've written for it cannot be in the Mac app store.

2:58:31Casey Liss:So I basically stopped the test flight. I took it off the member page at ATP. If you go there, you'll see, I don't even mention the test flight. All I say is, Hey, do you want to be on the Jetty Pro beta? Send me an email and I'll add you to a list. And I just, you know, then you can download the beta and you can test it or whatever. So I'm all in on Jetty Pro, which is fun because the first fact item will be, why is it called Jetty Pro? Where's non-pro? Someday, maybe there will be a non-pro because in theory, I could do a lot of these things in the Mac app store. If Apple would get, let me have the entitlements, which they're currently not.

2:59:03Casey Liss:Cause I literally got rejected for every, every single title I asked for. And also if they fulfill the feedbacks that I filed over the past five to 10 years, asking for features that they don't currently provide that they totally should. But in pro I don't have to worry about that. I just use the private APIs and they can't stop me. So that's my plan. But of course, Oh, you're going to have this thing outside the Mac app store. How are you going to deal with payments? Well, I took a wild diversion off into figuring how to do payments outside the Mac App Store. I actually implemented it twice, once on FastSpring, which was by far the easiest to set up and the most full feature.

2:59:37Casey Liss:And I highly endorse and recommend it because everything else was like a nightmare to even get into. But after that, I decided that I'm going to rip all that out and redo it with a combination of RevenueCat and Stripe, mostly because I'm so familiar with Stripe. And I didn't think I could use Stripe because it doesn't provide all the functionality I need. But it turns out a combination of RevenueCat, which is also very well established and used by lots of developers, combining RevenueCat with Stripe in a way that RevenueCat blesses and describes on their website and has examples of Mac apps that do it.

3:00:10Casey Liss:I'm like, OK, so it was a pain and I wasted a lot of time and I totally ripped out. I did a new branch for just RevenueCat and ripped out the FastSpring stuff and replaced it with RevenueCat and Stripe. and that is my plan and as always like the payment part is the most terrifying and complicated part of the whole stupid app because if you screw it up it's bad so yeah that's the state of things jetty pro if you're an atp member and you want to beta test jetty pro there's instructions on your member page it's still going to be a while because the app is still kind of rough but boy am i adding lots of features and calling lots of private apis

3:00:42Marco Arment:i'm very happy for you honestly this i know this i know you know there's some downside to not being in the Mac App Store, but I think for the kind of apps that you make, I think it is good for you to get set up outside of there because you can do so much good without sandboxing and without being banned from using private APIs. I think it makes sense for John Syracuse to have direct sales of apps that do deep system things.

3:01:09Casey Liss:Yeah. Getting the first one for sale outside the Mac App Store is so much harder than the second. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like everything has to be done for the first one. And by the way, I tried Paddle and Paddle was like, talk to the hand. Paddle's like, Paddle's like, show me your product page and your refund policy and your terms of service. I'm like, I don't have a product page. My product isn't done yet. And they're like, no, we're not going to talk to you. Screw you. Like their onboarding process was so hostile. I was like, OK, well, then fine. Like they made it seem like you already had to have a product for sale to get a product for sale with Paddle.

3:01:42Casey Liss:And I'm like, this is chicken egg. Like, I don't understand how I bootstrap this. and they just kept rejecting me and sending me through this thing and it's like sorry we looked at your website and there's no product there i'm like well of course there's no product there it's not released yet i tried to put up a fake page like this is what the product will be like and they're like nope sorry so anyway fast spring was great i recommend it uh revenue cat plus stripe uh if you're familiar with those things revenue cat is is more modern and nicer than fast spring was and stripe is stripe but i'm just happy to be familiar with it so yeah i'll end i'll embark on that terrifying part when i finally get to the point where i think i have an app that is close to finish but right now i'm still in the development part where i'm discovering that even using private apis there are certain things that just don't work on the mac it's just fun it's just terrifying like the most recent one was like you know you can label folders and they turn colored right and also in like 26 and 27 you can put little symbols on folders do you any use those features in the finder i don't but i know what you're talking about yes but anyway you can do that uh and if you have private apis you can figure out like what they're supposed to look like which by the way the mac os doc does not do if you put a labeled uh folder into the doc on mac os 26 or 27 the doc doesn't care what the hell your label was it will not show it one of the reasons they don't show it is because there's no api to show it oh but there's private apis fine so i get the private apis to do that but there is a bug where if you have a folder in icloud drive and you label it as like red, about a half a second later, it changes back to gray.

3:03:10Casey Liss:Oh, unconditionally, no matter what, what color you set it to, you set it to red, changes to gray. Okay. And you're like, okay, but how does the finder not show it as gray? Because the metadata is gray. Okay. It says gray, but the finder doesn't. Well, it turns out the finder has its own database off to the size that remembers it's supposed to be yellow.

3:03:28Marco Arment:Oh my God.

3:03:29Casey Liss:Like what? Like, how does that stand for two releases? Like how, like how does any, once you start using private APIs, you're like, how does anything work in this operating system? first of all you realize where they're private and second of all that's no way to run an os okay well we we have a bug where the metadata on the folder will always be gray but we want the finder to show it as yellow because the user selected as yellow so finder have an off to the side database where you keep track of which folder is supposed to be yellow even though the folder totally says gray and when you look at the folder oh and by the way if you turn off network access if you unplug your land cables one of my testers found this out it stays yellow but as soon as you connect to the network again gray weird anyway that's what i've been doing Beep beep.