709: Steel-Cable Insurance

14:12Casey Liss:I need to give you a preamble for these. so these these pre preliminary scores is always like oh someone connected a device and ran geek bench and their device their score got registered that's how we see them like their devices are not in everyone's hands sometimes they aren't even in reviewers hands yet but anyway uh that's how they get up here that's why they're preliminary because there's a lot of variability when people report scores from their devices depending on if their device was hot or cold was it being over clocked was it sitting on an ice pack you know like who knows what else was going on on the device so take that with a grain of salt and the second thing is uh geekbench has recently changed from geekbench version 6 to geekbench version 7 and their website makes it really annoying to make sure you're comparing apples to apples so for all these scores i always tried to find if i can't find a geekbench 7 score for like an old mac i want to compare 6 to 6 or 7 to 7 but that means that the absolute values just ignore them because you won't know whether it's a 6 or a 7 value so all I was doing is like okay if I'm comparing this thing and this one has to be a six because there's no seven score for it I have to find another comparable six and then I can compare the two Geekbench six scores and say it's x percent different from each other but ignore the absolute values if you hear the absolute values like well that's much lower or higher than I thought it's just because it's a six or a seven score I you know Geekbench is in a difficult transition period here and it was really annoying to do this but anyway the percentage differences are the things that we care about.

15:32John Siracusa:All right, so the A20 Pro and the iPhone's 18 Pro. The CPU single-core performance is 24 % better than the A19 Pro and 11 % better than the previous iOS or iPadOS single-core champ, which is the M5 iPad Pro. And it's 260 % better than John's Mac Pro, which, in the defense of John Syracuse, he himself added to the show notes. I am very proud of you, John.

15:57Casey Liss:Yeah, I always want to look that up, you know. But this is pretty impressive. It's 11 % faster than the previous single-core champ, which is the M5. So the phone chip has better single-core. I mean, it makes sense because it's a newer super core and blah, blah, blah, or whatever, but still super impressive. And yes, 260 % faster than single-core than my Mac Pro.

16:13Marco Arment:It hurts. And that's in a phone. This is a phone chip that is performing at the same level in single-thread performance as a desktop chips. And like not just desktop chips three years ago, desktop chips this year, like the newest one it is matching the newest chip that just came out that's incredible oh i should have put an m6

16:34Casey Liss:comparison because i do have m6 later but i don't know whether the m6 was geekbench 6 or 7 so i can't

16:39Marco Arment:do the direct comparison now but yeah it's good no as far as i can see it is matching the m6 like so you know there's all these like you know preliminary scores on geekbench from these chips there because it it seems as though you know all the review units are out and so people are are testing them and the m6 matches the single threaded performance of the a20 pro or rather vice versa the a20 pro matches the m6 which itself like the m6 is a nice jump over the m5 so that's really like it looks like it probably shares the same super core yeah we'll get to it

17:11Casey Liss:in a second but yeah the m6 is a similar percentage faster than the m5 yeah it's incredible to for

17:16John Siracusa:that to be in a phone yeah it's astonishing so that was all single core let's talk multi-core 25 % better than the previous iPhone champ, which was last year's A19 Pro, but it's also 25 % less than the M5 iPad. Yet, it is still 20 % better than John's Mac Pro.

17:33Casey Liss:As we've said in the past years, the phones have been better than my Mac in both single-core and multi-core. Remember, I have a 12-core Xeon in here or whatever. That continues to be the case, although it can't compete with the M5 just because the M5 is just so much bigger chip. When it comes to multi-core, but still, it's only a 25 % gap. So it's within shouting distance of an M5 and multicore.

17:54John Siracusa:Astonishing. For GPU stuff, that was all CPU. GPU, the Metal benchmark, almost 40 % better than the previous iPhone champ, the A19 Pro. Apple's claim, well, so it was 38%. Apple's claim was a 40 % increase in gaming performance.

18:08Casey Liss:Yeah, and that makes me like sanity check the number because Apple's publicity claims is like 40 % increase in gaming performance. Like, hmm, really? The Metal score is 38 % higher. So I'm like, all right, that checks out.

18:18John Siracusa:then with regard to other comparisons it's 18 percent less than the m5 ipad pro and 21 percent

18:26Casey Liss:less than john's mac pro i'm going out this is my this is my final because by the time we record another episode or two i will have you know retired the mac pro and switched to my m5 max max studio so you know i use this intel mac pro for as long as i possibly could and obviously it's been destroyed by phone chips in every possible way except gpu the phone chip cannot beat my max 600 watt gpu or whatever the hell is in there i'm still 21 faster than a phone yeah in this one measure but i'm just i'm just glad that i didn't have to see the day where the phone beat my mac in single core multi-core and gpu well do you have a ship date for your studio i don't remember It's coming on 20 seconds, supposedly.

19:15John Siracusa:Oh, okay. That's not bad at all. No, day one. Yeah. All right. So that was all the A20 Pro, right? Now let's move on to the M6. CPU, single-core performance is 10 % better than the M5. Multi-core performance, 35 % better than the M5. These, like, year-over-year improvements are astonishing. I cannot believe we're still seeing this big of a jump every year. Yeah. M5 Ultra, CPU is the only thing we have.

19:40Casey Liss:Oh, you missed the GPU for the M6.

19:42John Siracusa:That's what I said. I'm going to do GPU for M6 first. The GPU is 25 % better than the M5. So the jump from M5 to M6, a 25 % increase.

19:52Casey Liss:And it's interesting that I don't know. I mean, so Geekbench is the general benchmark disclaimer. We don't know how representative Geekbench is or anything. It's just a popular benchmark that people use. God only knows if there's some particular benchmark that suddenly fits into some cache and gives this big boost or whatever, right? We'll find out with real world benchmarks how these things actually do. uh but yeah gpu 25 increase and in a year multi-core 35 increase these are pretty big increases for the vanilla no suffix m chips yep really incredible and then finally the m5 ultra

20:23John Siracusa:the cpu is roughly the same as the m5 max for single core which is to be expected i think but multi-core it's almost 40 better than the m3 ultra so again m3 to m5 is an almost 40 percent increase m5 max to m5 ultra a 60 increase that is astonishing to me so again m3 ultra to m5 ultra uh 40 increase but m5 max to m5 ultra 60 almost 60 increase yeah i mean you would uh it's tricky

20:58Casey Liss:but it's like hey isn't it two m5 maxes put together shouldn't it be 100 increase because you double everything and that's where you get into some of the obviously there's overhead of the you know the the way they do the interposer and blah blah blah but also are these benchmarks like what kind of data dependencies are in these benchmarks like there's a whole bunch of things that limit the exploitable parallelism and cpu stuff gpus are usually as they say embarrassingly parallel and there's not a lot of data dependency slowing things down and stuff whereas finding multi-core cpu benchmarks that really let all the cores go at full speed is difficult so it's hard to say without knowing the details of the benchmark you know is this just a uh you know is the over does the overhead of the two m5 max is stuck together continue to just cripple this chip or is it actually made a little bit worse by the fact that the benchmark can't actually exploit it again real world benchmarks are what you care about you're not going to be running a real world tests are what you care about you're not going to be running benchmarks all day you're going to be doing something with your chip so i don't know like someone who runs a local model uh you know doing local lms or some kind of thing that actually uses all the cbs like a cpu bound rendering thing in like Blender or something that really is embarrassingly parallel.

22:03Casey Liss:So we'll see with real world tests. But it's so weird for this comparison because you have to compare it to the M3 Ultra, which is two generations older, but it's the only thing that's close in terms of the amount of silicon in it.

22:13John Siracusa:Really incredible work by Apple's silicon team. It continues to be just astonishing. All right, let's talk the C2, the cellular modem. Joe Rossignol at MacRumors writes, Apple says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except the U.S. Is this American exceptionalism? I don't know if this is good or bad. Anyway, according to a tipster known as It's Pdiffu, iOS 27 code reveals that the iPhone 18 Pro Max is equipped with a Qualcomm modem instead of the C2 chip in the U.S. In 2023, Qualcomm announced it would supply Apple with smartphone modems through 2026.

22:48John Siracusa:So perhaps Apple is equipping the U.S. version of the iPhone 18 Pro Max with a Qualcomm modem in order to honor this agreement in a minimum way.

22:55Casey Liss:or maybe they just couldn't manufacture as many c2s like it's the i've seen the theory in a bunch of places like apple has to ship qualcomm chips because they had a contract or whatever i don't know if that's how contracts work but you know i'm glad i'm put it this way i'm glad i'm not getting the pro max because i want the c2 chip because it presumably you know uses less power like all of apple's modem chips too and uh the everyone who's tried the c1 and the c1x have said it's fine it's good like so i'm hoping when i get my iphone 18 pro with the c2 that i will be happy with the C2 chip and the battery life that it gives me.

23:28Casey Liss:Yep.

23:29John Siracusa:Flanker writes, so now there's a fancy heat dissipating plate behind the screen in the iPhone 18 Pro. How long before this turns into a solar panel to constantly recharge the phone? I don't know if that's feasible, but man, that sounds really slick.

23:40Marco Arment:It's not. So the problem with solar charging of small portable devices is that you just don't have a lot of surface area to have a meaningful charge added to modern devices in most real-world conditions. There was an episode of John Chidgy's podcast Pragmatic back in 2014, 12 years ago, called Watch This Time in Space, episode 38 of Pragmatic, we'll link to it in the show notes, where he goes over like, it was shortly after the Apple Watch had come out, and he goes over the question of like, could the Apple Watch basically be a solar panel like on its face the same way there are other like solar mechanical or solar quartz watches that are able to do that like the citizen eco drive series and seiko has some too like they're able to keep themselves charged through just the face of the watch having a solar panel kind of under it but the problem is those watches use very very little power to to drive their their mechanisms whereas you if you compare to a modern you know full color screened device like whatever battery is in it like you're talking about very different amounts of power so um i did some quick research before the show to figure out like and by that i mean i asked ai um but to figure out like roughly what are we talking about in terms of like if the entire face of the iphone 17 pro was a solar panel how much energy could it collect and how much would that charge its battery um in you know reasonable conditions and the answer is basically like a few percent per hour really like at most and that's if you You are not using the phone at all, and it's just sitting on a table flat like with collecting sun.

25:25Marco Arment:So it's obviously that varies based on where you are and time of day and sun angle and weather and stuff like that. But you're talking about a few percent per hour at most, most of the time. So it's not really enough to make a difference. And that's also ignoring things like, would it be the back of the phone? like can it then you know do you have to make room for the camera plateau if it's the front of the phone it has to obviously go under the screen which would significantly reduce the amount of light like there's just all sorts of practical problems but the fundamental problem is that it's just not a big enough surface to make a meaningful difference most of the time in most conditions for the actual amount of power that modern devices use which is a decent amount of power we are sponsored this episode by claude i have claude do so much for me every day now so just today alone.

26:18Marco Arment:I had it research a pricing issue with my iOS app and subscription price changes. I had it validate the validity of a Geekbench result that's for the purported new M6 and, you know, look around and see, like, do various factors of it look right? Are they plausible based on Apple's marketing? I had it look up the equivalent apertures of all the new iPhone 18 Pros lens apertures on the variable aperture lens and convert them to 35 millimeter equivalents. I had it look up what percentage of people around the world sleep on different types of mattress or surface types, just for a conversation I was having.

26:52Marco Arment:Had it match the DPI of a third-party mouse to match the response rate of a magic mouse. And look up various electrolyte products and see what's best for my runs. It's amazing what it can do. Oh, by the way, yesterday it solved a huge bug in Overcast downloader that's taken me months to find. All that is possible and so much more with Claude. Claude is the AI for problem solvers. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

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28:00Marco Arment:That's claude.ai slash ATP. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode claude.ai slash atp thank you so much to claude for sponsoring

28:11John Siracusa:our show let's talk cameras uh specifically the aperture blades on the iphone's 18 pro mkbhd says apparently third-party apps will be able to do infinite aperture values uh not just the four preset aperture values that apple exposes in the camera app that is news to me i have not

28:33Casey Liss:watched his review yet so that's exciting petapixel said the same thing i think apple has told everybody that essentially all the reviewers that even though we expose for aperture sizes it's adjustable so third-party apps can pick whichever sizes they want and apparently even during video you can smoothly change from one aperture to another without any stepping in between so i'm assuming they're getting this info for apple now that i've seen it in two review

28:56Marco Arment:videos yeah and i recommend the young movie bhd review it because he actually goes and shows like the difference in aperture values and how it affects the photos, which I thought was very good to see. I've also seen in Petapixel's review, they noted that if you actually open it up to the widest open aperture, the new f1.48, which lets in more light, you do give a little bit in sharpness and not just in the focal plane being shallower, but in the actual sharpness of the lens, that it is less sharp, especially outside of the center of the frame.

29:30Casey Liss:That's true. That's true of all cameras.

29:32Marco Arment:Yeah, it's true. It's very like any kind of camera or lens review, you're going to see them measure that. And, you know, the better the lens, the sharper the corners. But, you know, there's still always a tradeoff and it's never quite the same across the whole frame.

29:45Casey Liss:And when you make the aperture smaller, the corners sharpen up more.

29:48Marco Arment:Yeah. But you can tell, and based on some other reviews so far, it seems like Apple software is preferring the f1.8 aperture much of the time, unless it really needs that extra light like in low light scenes um and that's and they even mentioned in the in the video they said that they had like optimized the f1.8 aperture for most use and so it seems like in most of the time you're not going to get the benefit of that wider open aperture unless you manually set it but you might not want to but in low light it will be very nice

30:19Casey Liss:although my one complaint about the mkvhd video is when he was trying to just demonstrate aperture on his bazillion dollar like red video camera that he's being recorded on he just adjusted the aperture without like changing like the you know the shutter speed effectively or whatever like the equivalent is on a video camera so they were just when he made the aperture bigger everything got really bright and we made the aperture smaller everything got really dark and it's like well that's not how you actually use those things other things adjust as well i wish he had shown the uh the depth of field changing because it probably in the giant lens and sensor he has he could have demonstrated that inside a little room uh but whatever it's not he's not doing a photography tutorial but it just made i think it made people seem like oh that aperture thing just makes your pictures too bright or too dark it's like well no that's anyway it's fine also like to get to get an

31:02Marco Arment:idea of what these apertures are if you're used to other cameras um i did the conversion and the the widest open aperture f 1.48 on the iphone is equivalent to f 5.2 on a full frame sensor oh wow And then the narrowest one, F4 on the iPhone, is equivalent to F14. So it's F5.2 to F14 equivalent. So this is not terrible, but it's certainly like if you're if you are thinking it's going to be anything like, you know, a full frame 50, you know, 50, 50 prime lens that you got like it's it's not it's not going to be near that. It is nice relative to iPhone lenses, but you're still in iPhone lens land.

31:43Casey Liss:That's better than I thought. But F5 is honestly better than I thought the widest open thing would be. All right.

31:49John Siracusa:Orlando writes, a note about the benefits of the new adjustable aperture in the iPhone 18 Pro. Physically stopping down the aperture in bright environments with mixed artificial lighting helps avoid fast shutter speeds that cause banding or flickering of those sources, especially in video.

32:04Casey Liss:Yeah, because I mean, like all iPhone cameras ever, it has a quote unquote electronic shutter in that there's not something mechanical moving in front of the sensor. It is all just reading out the sensor in various strips. And if you have lighting that flickers real fast, like when you read one row, the light could be the LED light could be off and you read the next row, the light could be on or a little bit of overlapping. So you get this weird striping in your pictures. And if you read out more slowly, then the LED lights will flicker 17 times during each row. And so it'll all even out. And that's what they're talking about.

32:32Casey Liss:Stopping down means making the hole that the light gets in smaller. That means changing the aperture to be a high. Stopping down means changing the aperture to be a higher value. I know it's confusing terminology. But anyway, there's another possible benefit of, you know, using manual control. If you take a picture and you get those weird bands, you don't know where they're coming from. Increase your aperture value, which will make the hole smaller.

32:54John Siracusa:Chris Marquardt writes, I think a big reason why the aperture blades are straight and not round is to make good looking starbursts from point light sources. To aperture photographers, this shouts pro, and these starbursts are easiest to create with straight aperture blades.

33:07Casey Liss:He included a picture from one of Apple's samples that they showed in the keynote, which sure enough, someone has an earring and there's a specular highlight in it, and you get little starburst lines on the specular highlight.

33:17John Siracusa:PaiJersa, it's SLR Lounge, writes, as light passes into your camera through a small opening, i.e. a small aperture at a low focal length, it bends around the edges of the blades and creates the star look. The number of rays from each starburst is related to the number of aperture blades in your lens.

33:31Casey Liss:The reason I looked up all this stuff is because I had thought and was confirmed as I looked up the stuff that there is still some debate about the thing that Marco said last time, which is like straight aperture blades versus rounded and how many blades and how much that specifically affects starbursts. Not like the bokeh bubbles, which I think is much easier to just show, but the starbursts. Like, okay, but like the number of blades being the number of rays, sure, but if the blades are curved versus straight, how much difference does that make? So, uh, that's, you know, I pulled the SLR lounge one of just saying, here's someone straight up saying the thing that Orlando or another Chris was saying, which is like, uh, yeah, a number of blades, uh, straight edges make more starburst things than rounded edges.

34:16John Siracusa:Then, uh, we have effortless easy in reddits are photography, uh, who made a quick comparison image between two aperture types and the effect on starburst nine straight blades versus seven rounded blades. there is a link in the show notes where you can check out the image of like a cruise ship i think it is and there's a very bright light on the front of the cruise ship and you can see the straight

34:36Casey Liss:versus rounded starburst and the rounded one still has a starburst but it's a little bit different starburst i didn't count the little rays around it but yeah the final thing we'll link here is a thread from the dp reuse forum where it's just a bunch of foreign people debating this topic does it matter they're straight does it matter that around it doesn't matter how many there are it's again specifically related to starburst which is the thing that some people are kind of obsessed about and most like lens reviews and camera reviews and stuff like do a thing on starburst i've never found myself being particularly interested in them i wish they could be eliminated entirely but if you're going for something artsy uh it's good to know what the starburst performance characteristics are and if you want starburst starburst with your iphone camera uh i guess

35:16Marco Arment:make that hole a little smaller yeah in both of these cases it appears as though the number of rays from the starburst is just twice the number of aperture blades we might have something to do with it um but also like yeah a i would consider these both flaws but i understand like you know sometimes you can use flaws for artistic effect but b i think the rounded one unquestionably looks better if you're gonna have one i like the rounded one looks like more of like the dreamy

35:43Casey Liss:look that i think most people be going for well those are big like real cameras like look at the apple one i think apple the apple one is a great use of starbursts they're extremely thin and extremely sharp because again the actual like equivalent aperture of the tiny iphone thing is such that they're going to look a lot more like the nine straight blades than the seven rounded ones or whatever but i think it is artful in this picture little sparkle on the the person's earring i think that looks nice uh whereas the cruise ship ones look terrible yeah the other

36:08Marco Arment:thing i pointed out is that you know if you are using this to capture like point light sources there's a pretty good chance you're capturing this in low light because that's when you would most often see point light sources is in low light. And if you're stepping down the iPhone lens to the equivalent of f14 in low light, you're going to have some serious noise to deal with.

36:29Casey Liss:Got to hold it real still.

36:30Marco Arment:Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

36:32John Siracusa:All right. Also from MKBHD's video review, we'll put a timestamp link in the show notes, but there's some interesting comparisons between the section of the screen that has face ID behind it and the section that does not. Again, I didn't watch this yet. I apologize. I didn't have a chance, but John, can you tell me about what's going on here?

36:51Casey Liss:Yeah. Last episode, I talked about how I could see the little spot on the iPhone duo where there was the camera thing behind the screen because like they, they, uh, omit some pixels that are in front of it. So the camera can actually see. And of course the iPhone 18 pro and max do the same thing but with not with the camera but with the face id ir sprayer so i think it's a little bit less noticeable and you can kind of see why in these pictures they were just directly from the review we got like a microscope or something especially if you look at the like the bottom picture in our notes here again we'll have a time stamp link so you look at it but the super zoomed in one you can see the pattern of sub pixels on the phone and their weird pentile pattern of the r the g and the b and these little diamond shapes and then when you get over into the region where the FaceTime IR sprayer is up in the corner of the phone you can see they just omit like these zigzagging strips where there's no sub pixels there's nothing there that's where the IR is coming out of it's in between all these things if you look at the area where the IR camera is not there's no place for the IR rays to come out but where they are it's like it's like a little zigzag pattern and the zoomed out one like okay now that I know that's there and I look can you see it like around the 12 on this clock thing oh yeah there's a little circle that's a little bit darker i would assume that they would drive the pixels a little bit harder within that circle but maybe they're not like maybe that's too hard to do like in other words if you have fewer sub pixels drive them a little bit brighter so the overall appearance is that there's not a dim circle but uh once i get my phone i'll definitely be looking for this but anyway i guess i think it is less noticeable than the camera in the duo because the camera in the duo is a visible light camera and i think that just needs more holes in the pixels for the light to go in than an ir one needs for the IR to go out.

38:32John Siracusa:Yeah, makes sense. All right, let's talk iPhone Duo. I had an epiphany just before I sat down to record. I was trying to do something on my phone with iPhone mirroring, and I was trying to monitor something that was going on. And it occurred to me, what is going to happen for iPhone mirroring with the Duo? Will you be able to switch between the exterior and interior screens? Will you only get one or the other? I don't think we can solve this problem right now, but I'm just very curious to know, how is that going to work?

39:02Casey Liss:I think they'd let you switch between them. What they should really do is make it a 3D model that you can open and close. I bet it'll just be like a switch where you hit the switch and it does a little opening animation and you see the inner screen or you have it closed, but we'll see.

39:15John Siracusa:Are you excited to get iPhone mirroring when you finally have an Apple Silicon Mac?

39:19Casey Liss:No, I have iPhone mirroring now, don't I? I don't think you do. Yeah, I never used it, but I'm pretty sure I have it. Yeah, Casey, do you use it a lot?

39:26John Siracusa:I wouldn't say a lot. I use it probably a few times a week. Generally speaking, my phone is on my person. So if I'm using it on my computer, I could grab my phone. In this case, I was trying to monitor something that has an app but doesn't have like a website or anything. And so I was going to leave it up on one of my screens to just kind of glance at from time to time. As it turns out, something was going on where it kept timing out. And so I'm not sure what was going on there. But I use it from time to time. I definitely would miss it if it was gone, but it wouldn't like shatter my world or anything like that.

39:56John Siracusa:I'm guessing you barely use it, Marco.

39:58Marco Arment:Yeah. So the problem is I will occasionally get a notification forward to my Mac and I'll click it and it'll try to open iPhone mirroring. And the problem is I use iPhone mirroring infrequently enough that every time it has to authenticate itself again.

40:12John Siracusa:Yeah. Don't get John started on that sort of issue.

40:15Marco Arment:Yeah. And I'm just like, ah, forget it. Every time it's like, okay, I have to go unlock the phone or type it. It's like, forget it. I'll just take my phone out of my pocket and do this. so it's one of those areas where Apple's over security around this feature makes it so that I just never use it I hear you anyways moving on

40:31John Siracusa:there is no action button on the iPhone Duo and we couldn't remember if we actually called that out as an item on the last episode but we're saying it now that bums me out my action button is the flashlight which I'm pretty darn sure I stole that idea from Marco which I might have even made fun of you for when I initially heard it and let me tell you once I did it it was amazing. Yeah, it's a really good idea. So, uh, so I'm sad about that. Now I am glad that it does continue to have the camera control less because I almost never use camera control for the like slidey action, but I love using it not only to launch the camera app, but also sometimes to actually snap a photo.

41:07John Siracusa:Uh, so I'm glad that it still has camera control, but I am bummed about no action button.

41:10Casey Liss:It's so weird because the action button is so small. I know room is tight on the duo and they don't have a lot of room for stuff and the sides are shorter. Like I understand why it's like let's let's economize on buttons but i i almost kind of think that like they just made the camera control smaller and use the room use the room that they say because the action button is so tiny i mean maybe is it bigger on the 17 on my 16 the action button is the tiniest button ever like find a place for that but we'll see if the next version well that's the problem it's like on

41:37Marco Arment:on what edge like if it's on the top edge it's competing with volume which i guess it doesn't i

41:41Casey Liss:know like put it somewhere yeah like like there's that's the problem with the folding phones is like well you have to pick an edge and whatever edge you pick is going to be inconvenient for somebody in some situation like the volume buttons being on the top and bottom which i think we also didn't mention you just have to pick an edge uh and you know people will make it that's that's the beauty of the action button is like well what if there's some function that there's a button for but the way i use the phone it's not convenient for me to get to that button the action button would be like okay well i'll just i'll just configure the action button to do that thing even though there's already a button that does that like having the action button be the camera shutter because the way you hold your duo it's more convenient for you to hit that than the camera button so that's why i think it would have been useful just kind of like a another option for people uh because we don't i don't think even apple knows like how are people going to hold this and use it and what's going to be convenient and not like they made their best guess where they put the buttons now but uh you know once this thing gets out into the wider world we'll see yeah uh i think we were trying to

42:34John Siracusa:theorize what was going to happen with keyboards on the duo particularly when you're on the internal screen i can never keep their official terminology straight i apologize but anyway uh the duo does indeed have a split keyboard when you have it uh open so you are using the internal screen john where do you remember where the screenshot came from yeah i wish i would have been able to find

42:52Casey Liss:a source for it i just i screenshotted it it was probably from a video but i think this is an i think an official apple video but there's a bunch of things in official apple media that show yes it does indeed have an ipad style split keyboard although not the ipad style ipad used to actually have like a like a gap between the split where you could see the screen in some iterations but this is a straight across the bottom of the screen but the it's split because like half of the keys are close to your left thumb and half of the keys are close to your right thumb and then there's just a big alley around the crease where there's nothing yeah this is one of the parts i'm most

43:22Marco Arment:curious about like having the duo in use how weird is it that the keyboard can basically be three different sizes uh like i think just gut feeling wise i would think that would really bother me and that this is like i've never used the touch keyboard very much on ipads for this reason like because it's always like a different size than my phone like not what i'm used to so this though i mean this is a smart way to do it in that they can probably keep the keys like the same sizes and distances apart in both orientations of the inner screen but then it would be different on the outer screen. So I don't...

44:00Casey Liss:Yeah, I mean, it's like typing on an iPad. It's weird.

44:03Marco Arment:Yeah, and I suspect I mean, because I guess this is part of what we'll see when we have these devices and actually have time to use them, but like, are you going to want to type much on the outer screen given that it's so short and you're probably not going to have a lot of space above the keyboard to see what you're typing into? I don't know. It all remains to be seen how this device will actually be used by everybody and I think everyone's going to be forced to kind of like like relearn how to physically use a phone uh in a bunch of different ways while

44:34John Siracusa:getting used to it it's so funny to me because i i'm going to get one of these we talked about that before um i waffle a lot between being sad about the camera and you know the now the action button but when i get past that when i allow myself to actually be enthusiastic i am really excited to try this and i am really excited for something that is genuinely new in the world of iPhones. Yes, Android people, we hear you, we know. But in the world of iPhones, I'm genuinely excited to try something new. And even if this isn't for me, which who knows, but even if this isn't for me, I think it's going to be super neat to have something just wildly different to play with for a while.

45:14John Siracusa:And I'm getting ever more excited for it as time goes on. Now, remind me of this when I try to take a zoomed in shot of my children and can't, but I am genuinely getting really, really excited for this. And I think it's going to be a really, really interesting time. There's a lot of gotchas. There's a lot of compromises, as we talked about. There's a lot of, yeah, buts. But I feel like to offset some of my fetching and complaining from last episode, I genuinely am really excited for this. I don't know, Marco, you're in for one. You had said, are you feeling the same? Are you just dreading it? I know from the developer point of view, it sucks.

45:48John Siracusa:We're going to put that aside for now. But from a user point of view, I'm getting really, really amped for it.

45:52Marco Arment:But we got a piece of feedback sometime that was basically like, why are we so negative on the Duo? And I thought, were we that negative on the Duo? But I think I really am speaking from two different parts of my butt, I guess. I don't know. From the developer side, I'm really irked at how Apple is handling this. But from the user side, I am really excited about this new device. I think it's going to have a bit of a slow start on the software side. As I said last time, for everybody, for Apple's software and for our software, it's going to be a year of safe area inset bugs and betas and non-updated apps.

46:36Marco Arment:But from a physical device perspective, imagine what this opens up, no pun intended. Nice. There is so, like, first of all, even just the basics of, like, taking a selfie, you can now use the best camera on your phone to take a selfie because you can see yourself on the outer screen. Like, there's so many assumptions or, as I was saying earlier, patterns about using phones that this changes or at least gives you the opportunity to change. not to mention like you know as you you know as you open it up you have a way bigger screen than any other phone has ever or than any other iphone has ever offered i know andrew people are like on fire they didn't invent any of this like let's set that aside any other iphone has ever offered um so that that opens up lots of potential for software for different use cases i'm actually very excited about the Apple Pencil support.

47:36Marco Arment:Oh, tell me more. Well, first of all, just from an app development perspective, I want to make my note-taking app for it at some point.

47:45John Siracusa:Oh, breaking news. You didn't tell us this. I think I did. As I've said recently, you did, where was I when that happened? I do not remember you saying that. I'm sorry.

47:53Casey Liss:I mean, nothing was stopping you from making that app for the iPad except for your hatred of the iPad. Yes, that's what was stopping. You drove to the iPad because you'll be on your couch and you know people who like ipads are like oh when i sit on my couch and read through my news for the day i like to do it on my ipad and you're like ipad is my pad it's in the drawer i don't care but you'll have your phone and maybe when you're there you're like you know i'm gonna read a long article and actually it's nicer to read this long article if i open up my phone into uh you know the open mode and put it in portrait orientation and now i can make the text bigger and it's i can read more at once so maybe you'll end up as like a uh an accidental ipad mini user after doing this, but we'll see.

48:31Marco Arment:Yeah. I mean, but you know, a lot of people, like I've heard a lot of people say, um, that they, that, you know, why don't you just get an iPhone pro and an iPad mini? And you know, it's, it's like the similar price to just get both of those things. Um, and it's because I don't want two different devices. The whole appeal of this is that it's one device that is always with you in your pocket. Now, you know, I do think obviously there's downsides, you know, there's the camera systems are, are worse in a lot of ways. there's you know I'm sure the speakers are going to be worse thicker and heavier yeah it's obviously significantly thicker and heavier which I will not like at all in the summertime and you know in short it's going to be ridiculous bouncing around in my pocket but there is a lot opened up by this like there are so many tasks you know because I am over the age of 35 I don't there are some tasks that I'm just like I'll just wait till I get to my computer for this because the phone screen is too small to do this comfortably.

49:27Marco Arment:Or maybe, you know, I want to open up multiple tabs and go back and forth or have bounce between different things. And like, yeah, some of that won't change. You know, if I'm researching a major purchase, I'm still probably going to be doing that like mostly on a computer. But there are a lot of tasks that I attempt to do on my phone that would just be a lot easier if I had, you know, something else, you know, with a bigger screen and this the duo will be able to bridge that gap not for all tasks but for many tasks even something simple as like you know there are some times where i want to bring a laptop somewhere because you know if i'm going to be if i'm going somewhere like overnight but i don't know like is my server going to explode in the middle of the night and i'm gonna have to like ssh into something and fix it these days i just bring a mac i bring i bring my travel laptop because Oh, well, no big deal.

50:20Marco Arment:But there are some situations where I could just bring this and I might be okay, especially if I get one of those dumb little pocket keyboard things that like folds up, you know, like, you know, there's all sorts of ways to make this work as like a little mini workstation. And people have been doing this with iPads for years, but I just don't like the iPad. I want to like the iPad, but I don't. but there are parts of the iPad I like and I wish I liked the rest of the iPad enough to always have one with me but I don't and one of those parts is the Apple Pencil. I love using the Apple Pencil even though I'm not an artist at all and I hardly ever handwrite any notes but when I do I like having that.

51:04Marco Arment:I like you know earlier today I like I was having a conversation and I wanted to quickly doodle some graphs like just some basic like you know shapes of like a linear curve an exponential curve and i grabbed my remarkable tablet powered it on and you know took it out like it was great for that purpose but like if i had this i could just take that out and i could even i mean it's big enough i could just do it with my finger even like that's step one is like you don't even need the apple pencil for for like sharpie on a post-it note type granularity you know you could do that with your finger um but with you know with this size screen like if you have an Apple Pencil on this size screen, that's almost as big as a lot of pocket notebooks that people use.

51:48Marco Arment:Or it's actually bigger. It's bigger than a Moleskine. It's bigger than the Field Notes. So that becomes a potentially interesting digital notebook. So there are things like that that I'm interested in and that I think could be good markets to get into or at least good tools for you know for me to use myself so there's all sorts of stuff like that like part of what is daunting from a developer point of view is that it's not just a bigger iphone it's a smaller iphone that becomes a much bigger iphone that can also be a laptop sort of clamshell mode or a tent and all these different other like shapes that it can be in all of those both open up possibilities as a user and a developer and also create burdens as a developer to very, very quickly make your app not suck in all these different positions and stuff that it might end up in.

52:42Marco Arment:And we have no time to do it and literally still no tools to do it. So it is totally, I think, a consistent view to say both this sucks as developers right now and also as users, this is very exciting and I can't wait to get my hands on one. And I'm trying my hardest to, you know, do whatever it takes to get one on day one as soon as we can. But between now and then, it's going to be absolute hell as a developer.

53:10Casey Liss:I mean, the two things are related. The reason it sucks as a developer is also the exact same reason why it's exciting as a user. Because in theory, you're going to get to try all sorts of new things and apps. Unfortunately, you're a developer apps and you have to make all those new things.

53:21Marco Arment:Yeah. And I see a lot of commentary going around with people basically trying to rationalize why this sucks. and that's a very healthy human response because the response is first of all it's really expensive so you don't you don't you're trying to just disregard it so that you don't have to consider buying it because it's really expensive or you don't have to feel bad that you can't or won't buy it because it's expensive so their typical response disregard it find some way to say ah it's not it that's i don't that's that thing sucks um secondly there will be parts of it that suck because it's the first version.

53:55Marco Arment:I'm sure there's always going to be visible crease lines after a relatively short time. I'm sure you're going to be able to notice some of those under screen camera dim areas and stuff like that. It is going to be physically odd in certain ways. It is going to suck for left handers at least for a little while. I'm sure there's eventually going to be software toggles. But there will be parts of it that do suck. But there's also a lot of promise here. And it doesn't all suck. and at some point down the road they'll make one with better cameras and they'll make one that adds an action button somewhere for John at some point down the road many of these things will be improved in future versions but this first version like it's there's a lot of reasons for people to love this thing I bet and the reactions from people who have tried folding phones of this size are very very good and so i think it's going to be a hit it's just going to be a hit that's going to be pretty small relative to the rest of the iphones like you know people are saying it's like a like a two percent global industry for foldables so far or global market share for foldables and so if this if this ends up being two percent of all iphones sold first of all i think it'll probably be more than that but i don't think it's gonna be a ton more than that and that's that would still be a lot of units.

55:18Marco Arment:But if you want to say it sucks, you'll still find ways that you can say that because it's going to be a low percentage of market share. But I think every single person who buys this thing is going to have a very, very good chance of loving it because that's what typically happens in foldables. People who get into foldables tend to love them. And I think this is way better than the Android ones in almost every way. So I think it's going to be a big hit. I think they're going to be back ordered for months and it's going to be very difficult to get. And that's because it's going to be a big hit.

55:53John Siracusa:I'm very, very curious and excited to see how this lands from a market share perspective because I think it is likely it's going to be one of two extremes. It will either be a giant hit like you said or it will be an iPhone Air. We'll see.

56:10Marco Arment:There is no way that this ends up selling as little as the iPhone Air. I'm telling you. It's going to blow the iPhone Air out of the water.

56:18John Siracusa:I think you're right.

56:19Marco Arment:Granted, that's like blowing a little toy bathtub tugboat out of the water. It's a pretty small target. But the iPhone Air, as I mentioned, I don't want to be too cruel to it, but the iPhone Air has very little reason for almost anyone to choose it over the other iPhones, whereas the iPhone Duo has substantial reasons for people to choose it. So I think it's going to do great.

56:41John Siracusa:Yeah, we'll see. But I just wanted to say, because irrespective of feedback, I feel like I was so shell-shocked by the developer story, which as of today is still not getting better. There's a new version of Xcode, not including the simulator for the iPhone Duo.

56:56Marco Arment:That was amazing. So the news drops today, Xcode 26.2 beta release. Like, wait, what? We were waiting for 26.1. What happened? And then we go and look and at least Apple had the courtesy on the download page to have a big gray box that basically says this is not the one you're looking for if you're looking for Duo development. It's like, okay. So we have 26.0. We have 26.2 beta. 26.1 beta still to come sometime later this month well 27 sorry 27 yes yeah still to come so we still don't even have a simulator to try this with let alone you know be able to adjust our apps to actually try any of this stuff so yeah the developer story for this is incredibly fumbled Like it's going to be a mess.

57:45Marco Arment:And I'm still substantially irked as a result of what they're because like, honestly, I think, I think if they're never going to do this, but I think a fair thing for Apple to do would be to not allow app store reviews from the iPhone duo for the first three months. Years ago, they changed the policy for betas. They used to allow reviews from betas. And years ago, they realized what was happening was people would install the developer beta one on their phone on day one. Some app would not work on beta one because the developer hadn't had access to the beta until that day. And the person would go one star in the app store.

58:23Marco Arment:So Apple realized, OK, this is unfair to developers. So you can no longer leave app store reviews or ratings on beta versions of iOS. Well, I think for a similar reason, and again, they're never going to do this. But I think for a similar reason, they shouldn't allow people to review apps on the iPhone Duo when developers have had almost no time to adopt to it either. And again, they're not going to do this. But it would be great if they just disallowed those reviews for a few months.

58:51John Siracusa:Yeah. We'll see. I'm sure it won't happen. There's no chance. We are sponsored this week by Granola. Maybe you're like me and you are perhaps a little bit overconfident about your memory. And maybe you think, oh, surely I'll remember that important action item from that meeting with my boss and my boss's boss. Or maybe what really happens is it goes in one ear and out the other. I'm not proud of that, but let's be honest, that's how I am. Well, what you can do is have something on your side to help you with this. And that something could be Granola. Granola is an AI-powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful.

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1:01:00John Siracusa:All right, let's talk some other videos. Tom's Guide's Mark Spoonhour and TechRadar's Lance Ulanoff interviewed Ternus and Jaws in two parts. Like one of them was on the Tom's Guide YouTube, one of them was on TechRadar's YouTube. And Thomas Ricker at The Verge quoted Jaws from that interview. We'll put a link to both parts in the show notes. I believe this is from part one. Jaws said, people knew through leaks that we were working on a foldable, said Jaws. Unfortunately, they got the aspect ratio and a lot of coincidental instances of people finding that an interesting aspect ratio. Now, I'm sorry, reading from Thomas Ricker.

1:01:40John Siracusa:By people, JAWS means Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi, who all announced foldables with similar aspect ratios ahead of Apple. What did remain a secret is the folding nanotexture display unique to the iPhone Duo. Now, quoting JAWS again, what I'm super proud of, we kept it secret. We put the extra security on it. We didn't talk about it to anybody. We had a very funny codename, which I won't repeat, which had nothing to do with it.

1:02:02Marco Arment:First of all, Mark Gurman, get on that. We got to know what this codename was.

1:02:06Casey Liss:Right? Poor Jaws. He's out there being like, look, every millimeter of this phone hardware leaked. But there's one piece of the hardware that we kept secret. And we're so proud that we kept the matte coating on the screen. Secret.

1:02:22Marco Arment:Like, okay. By all accounts, it's a great coating.

1:02:24Casey Liss:Like, people who have seen it. Take your victory where you can get them. but like you know it's so thoroughly leaked that as as the as thomas noted the competitors had enough time to make their own copycat phones and release them before apple's phone was out they showed what they should be proud of and they did talk about it in the interview was like we kept the software secret so they did do that um obviously the supply chain for software is considerably narrower than the supply chain required to make a hardware product like the iphone do which is why all these things leak like crazy but i just like seeing jaws out there saying yeah we put extra secrecy on it's like okay well uh if you had put that extra secrecy on on the phone hardware do you think that would have helped the answer is no there's no stopping it like unless you're going to make all the phones yourself at apple park um every every phone you make is going to leak down to the millimeter now and forever sorry jaz i will say broadly um i really

1:03:14Marco Arment:enjoyed this interview um for two reasons number one i have the same shirt as jaws you would i was proud of myself for spotting it. Number two, it's a great shirt. Number two, it was really great seeing John Ternus in this interview. Now being CEO of Apple, you have a CEO doing interviews about the products where he shows personality and opinions and deep knowledge of the details of the product. These are things we never got from Tim Cook. And yes, everyone's being very kind to Tim. Oh, he's not the kind of leader. And that's true. He wasn't. He was what we needed at the time and blah, blah, blah.

1:03:59Marco Arment:Yes, that's true. It's really great and refreshing to have somebody now in that position who is showing personality and points of view and explaining product decisions in ways that Tim Cook never did and probably never could. Because again, that wasn't the kind of person he was. it's great it's refreshing and you know we're only seeing the very very first couple of moments of turnus's uh tenure here and again we we don't know how he's going to feel on issues that might be more controversial to us but at least this part really shows this is a product person he knows about the products he has that very deep knowledge in a similar way like i've always been very impressed in interviews by of craig federighi because federighi also you know despite being like a high-level executive federighi knows very deep details about a lot of the software and a lot of the like the the algorithms and the decision making and and the like he he knows deep stuff because federighi is a nerd first like he's an engineer who happened to rise into rise through the ranks and john turnus is also like he is that engineering mind he knows the hardware details like the little thing he said about like the the moving parts about the iphone aperture blades like you can tell he knows deeply what's going on in these products and for a company that the products are everything except with the services but the products are the main thing uh that's really great And I'm so happy to see this.

1:05:38Marco Arment:And I'm not that surprised because we've seen Ternus do interviews actually even with Jaws to these same people like last year. So it's not like we've never seen him before. But to know that this is the CEO of Apple now. And I think he's also gaining confidence and he's kind of letting loose a little bit more. And you're able to see like more of his personality. And so far, I really like what I see.

1:06:05John Siracusa:Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, I don't have any particular complaints about Tim Cook, particularly from a personality. Well, let me try that again. What I'm saying, Tim was always going to be guarded. I feel like that's just who Tim is based on no facts, but that's just the vibe I get. And Tim, I think, has taken his media training very seriously. as we spoke about last episode the way he delivered his one or two lines in the in the intro keynote i thought were more personality that that we got out of tim than we did in the 15 years prior um there's been a couple of flashes of exception i think one of you cited the uh you know get out of the stock or i forget exactly what he said um but like you know if you don't believe in environmental stuff the stock isn't for you or something like that um but i feel like Ternus is way more a human than Tim is.

1:06:53John Siracusa:And that is so refreshing and exciting. And, and I am really here for, you know, who is this person? I feel like Tim, as much as we snark and joke about our idiot president who called him Tim Apple, I kind of get it because he kind of is Tim Apple, you know, like there's so little Tim outside of his relationship with Apple. And I feel like we're already getting a sense that turnus while clearly media trained is willing to by comparison anyway wear his heart on his sleeve and be more of a human being than tim ever was and i'm really here

1:07:27Casey Liss:for it yeah i feel like in this interview turnus was very similar to how he was when he wasn't ceo so in other words having two days into the job or whatever being ceo has not changed him because he totally did this interview not as i am the apple ceo but just as the same john turnus you've seen do the interviews for years and which means he was relaxed and he was casual and you did see his personality because you always saw that from him so it's nice to see first of all that he didn't like oh now that i'm the ceo i have to act differently he didn't feel that at all he didn't act differently but i will say speaking of federighi uh one of the things i will miss from i know this was never really in the cards but like let's say federighi had become ceo federighi remains the only senior executive from apple maybe with the possible exception of schiller occasionally who's kind of on his way out the door and sometimes jobs but but federally the most uh he does the thing that back in the day only steve jobs would do and that steve jobs would offer up information to the press because he felt like it inside information that he would have like fired other employees for revealing if he felt like talking about it he would because he's steve jobs he's like who's going to tell him no and so he did it all the time you know it'd be some interview and jobs would go off on some tangent and he would say yeah when we did x we did y and z and q and like if anybody else had said that instant firing but jobs could say because what the hell federighi does that when he tells stories about software he always reveals infos that has never been revealed anywhere else and it's mostly just of interest to nerds or whatever but like he's not pre-clearing all that with people he just he's just like yeah when we did this we thought of this and we did that and we tried this and it's like that's not that's not the media a playbook like craig don't we don't tell them anything about our process or what we did or whatever he's always doing that and he gets away with it because it's always like details that only nerds care about right turnus is not like that turnus in all his past interviews and presentations usually does not uh accidentally or intentionally tell you some detail about their process i feel like everything federy everything turnus ever says about a product is something that has already been cleared as a talking point and that is not going to change when he's ceo if anything you would think it would go in the other direction but it seems to be just the same but that is one of the things i really enjoy about federighi is that he for whatever reason he feels like uh he has the authority to reveal you know minor internal details of their process of creating software because he's the head of software guy and i guess no one ever yells at him so he's like i'll just keep doing that so i do enjoy that about him i agree all right moving right along let's talk

1:10:03John Siracusa:iPhone side dock friend of the show Steven Robles points out that you know people are saying that this is the first time the iPhone dock is on the right but they're forgetting the iPhone 6 plus which would in landscape put the dock on the right

1:10:14Casey Liss:I mean it kept the dock where it was but it would rotate all the icons I totally forgotten about this because I obviously never had one of these big phones this was I guess this was their notion of how to do big phones in the iPhone 6 plus what does it do now on the maxes when you rotate it it just doesn't rotate right the springboard doesn't rotate

1:10:29John Siracusa:I understand the question and I don't have one within arm's reach to try it, but I'm not sure.

1:10:34Marco Arment:Yeah, I believe Springboard only rotated like on that first version. But now you still on the Plus phones and I believe on the Air too, you still have like, if you rotate things like Apple Mail, you get the sidebar.

1:10:47Casey Liss:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, but I think the reason they don't do it in Springboard is because basically it moves everyone's icons. I will once again point out that all the people who are like railing against spatial interfaces, guess what the iPhone home screen is, man. It's a spatial interface. And if you move those icons, Like if you rotate them and all of a sudden they rearrange like they do on the iPad, it is extremely jarring because people remember where they are by their position and appearance. All right.

1:11:12John Siracusa:You feel better, John? Also from Steven Robles, he put together a short video showing how, yes, the duo does support MagSafe. That's been stated after the keynote. But that may not be as great as we think it will be. And so his comparison was a couple of things. First of all, the iPhone Air and the way the camera plateau interacted, where it was in relation to the MagSafe thing. But more importantly, Stephen got a pre-release version of, I forget who it was, but somebody's case for the Duo. So this is a reasonable stand-in for what the Duo will be like. And was pointing out that a lot of MagSafe accessories, for example, batteries or wallets, are going to be just too darn tall for the Duo.

1:11:57John Siracusa:And so anything that's bigger than like a pop socket, you might need to replace or not use at all. Because there's just not enough surface area on the back of the Duo to support something as big as a wallet or a battery or something like that.

1:12:09Casey Liss:It's not so much that you can support it. It's just that they like the circle where the magnets are fine. Line up the circle where the magnets are. Maybe that will fit. If you're unlucky, when you line up the two circles with the magnets, it won't lay flat because you'll be sitting on top of the camera plateau because it's so short and squat. But let's say, you know, it does lay flat on the circle. Is the rest of that magnetic device within the borders of the phone or is some part of it sticking out? It's kind of like this comparison was to the Apple MagSafe battery pack that was only for the air because if you took it and put it on another phone and like hung off the bottom of the thing or whatever um yeah that's just a fact of life like magsafe compatible it was easy to say that and make that a reality when the phones were more or less the same proportion and there was just like a big one and a small one you could make like for example a wallet accessory that worked on any iphone with magsafe but the duo is just such a different aspect ratio and size that i think there's just going to have to be duo specific accessories you know like don't don't just buy a magsafe accessory assuming it will fit on the back of your duo, like either measure it or, you know, have a good return policy.

1:13:11Right.

1:13:12John Siracusa:With regard to Face ID, Pedro Fernandez writes, I don't think I've heard you mention it, but the iPhone duo, for the iPhone duo to have Face ID, besides the challenge of fitting the hardware in such a thin device, it would require twice the hardware in an already expensive device.

1:13:25Casey Liss:Only if you want it to be able to work open and close, which there are features of the phone that only work open and only work closed. So yeah, but yeah, it's going to be a challenge. hopefully they uh they make this a surmountable challenge unlike the apparently unsurmountable challenge of putting face id on a mac we just don't have enough room in the desktop mac monitors to put a face id scanner sorry it can't fit it's impossible but maybe on this incredibly thin phone in version 3 or 4 they'll have face id and if they only put it in one spot that's better than nothing and honestly like i feel like most of the time you're unlocking the phone wouldn't it start in a folded state so don't you want to unlock on the folded one i guess people want to take another their pocket open it up and start using it it's like but wait you didn't face id yet so yeah twice

1:14:07Marco Arment:the hardware would be great but uh we'll see yeah this is one of those things like in thinking about why does it never face id this never crossed my mind i never even realized like oh yeah they would

1:14:16Casey Liss:need two of them or would they like i said maybe they just put it in one place right nah they

1:14:21Marco Arment:wouldn't do that they would they would they would either put it both places or in either place oh

1:14:25Casey Liss:speaking of the interview and speaking of the duo uh there was a segment of that i think it was the the turn his jaws interview where the the interviewer is asked about like what about left-handed people isn't it gonna be awkward like the stuff that marco talked about last episode people who use their phone with the left hand to be clear marco is not left-handed he just uses his phone with his left hand and the duo is ill-suited to that and everyone's like you know like we said last week why don't they flip it like the apple watch or whatever there are problems with that as well but right now apple doesn't support it so that was the question posed to them and i forget the analogy but it was something like uh you know look we don't make like left-handed cars right like i mean it's sitting inside right hand drive and stuff like within the country we just put the steering wheel on one side and whether you're lefty or righty uh back in the days of stick shift you're using the stick shift with your right hand with left hand drive or whatever the gas pedal is always on the right it doesn't matter if you're righty or lefty right the brake is always to the left of the gas pedal um even on right hand drive the brake is the left of the gas pedal so they they had other examples too i forget what they were i'm just remembering a car one but like that there are products that are just they're just made the way they're made and your handedness is you know you have to you just have to pick and this is just the way this product works and that's easy to say the hegemony of the right-handed people right but uh i mean i guess that's i guess that's their uh their answer for now until and unless they have the version of ios that uh allows you to flip it and mirror it but as a lot of people pointed out when you do flip and mirror it lots of controls are in really weird places including things like the cameras and stuff they're like now on the bottom instead of the top and the volume buttons are in weird places so So I think Margaret was more right in that people will essentially adapt to this.

1:15:57Casey Liss:I wish I could remember their other analogy, but they were giving analogies of devices that are directional that people just get used to. I guess cars is the only one I could think of, but I'm sure there are more.

1:16:08John Siracusa:All right. Let's talk Apple Pencil support. I know we talked about this a little bit just a moment ago, but let's talk some more. Julie Clover over at MacRumors writes, It's likely the iPhone Duo doesn't support the Apple Pencil Pro because there's no magnetic surface for charging the pencil. The Apple Pencil Pro charges magnetically when connected to a compatible iPad, while the Apple Pencil with USB-C charges with a USB-C port hidden behind a sliding cap. Then Gruber points out, charging is the least of the problems. Because the Duo doesn't have the magnetic attachment for the Pencil Pro, there's no way to even pair a Pencil Pro.

1:16:41John Siracusa:Yep. And Steve Trout and Smith also adds in, also, let's not forget that the USB-C Apple Pencil doesn't have pressure sensitivity, so the artists are likely posting their already, excuse me, posting their disappointed reactions. I feel like this backs up the Gurman report that they were planning to create a bespoke Apple Pencil for the iPhone Duo that later got canceled, and perhaps the USB-C version is the fallback. I think they should just make a standalone universal pairing or charging dock for the Apple Pencil Pro and be done with all of this nonsense, just like the AirPods case, to which Gruber also added, the bottom line is that Apple's entire pencil compatibility story remains a mess.

1:17:20John Siracusa:True that.

1:17:21Casey Liss:when they do a teardown of this thing we'll probably be able to see if this rumor about oh they planned a special pencil is true because there's probably like the little places for where the magnets would go i forget where there was some recent device where you could see where they meant to put uh the the magnets or things for a pencil or whatever where they just weren't there uh but

1:17:37John Siracusa:if that's not there was that the 16e with the magsafe magnets maybe i thought maybe it was an

1:17:43Casey Liss:ipad but i don't remember anyway like if you know if it's not a decision that was made four years ago we'll be able to see evidence of it but uh you know the third parties will surely make stubby little pencils that are a better fit for the iphone duo i do wonder if there's a way to attach them to it i'm sure third parties will come up with something clever but if there actually are little magnets in the edges that would be great but yeah apple's pencil strategy is just so so weird like the feature sets are different the way they pair is different they made that pencil it's like look it doesn't have like no silly cap no plug it's just magic and it goes in the the side of your ipad it's like yeah but if you're if you don't have an ipad and you want to use that pencil you've got a problem i mean i don't even think that thing would fit on the side of like where the where like the magnets are would even fit on the side of the duo so maybe they'll sort this out depending on how popular the pencil actually turns out to be with the duo but right now it just kind of feels like they punted by saying it supports the cheap kind of pencils that don't have uh pressure sensitivity we sell you one of those uh good luck yeah i think what

1:18:43Marco Arment:we'll see is third party. I mean, the funny thing is like the, the very first Apple pencil with the happy to see you slash, you know, popsicle stick, uh, charging method, um, that actually would work very well today with USB-C because like, I mean, obviously, you know, you, you could engineer one that doesn't have a cap that comes off and gets lost or that rolls away. Um, but thanks Johnny. But, um, I'm sure third party, cause I, as I mentioned last time, like third party pencils exist on Amazon for like 25 bucks and they're all just USB-C. But if they had the USB-C I guess plug instead of the socket, they could theoretically plug into the bottom of the iPhone and charge up a little bit to be usable.

1:19:30Marco Arment:Same thing with the iPad. It would have all the same problems as that original pencil with the exception of the cap loss, but you could have it with you and have nothing else with you and you could charge it with your phone and so this is this seems like an obvious third-party opportunity for now and then maybe down the road like you know they did a lot in this version one of the iphone duo i suspect that there's there's there's a lot that can be added later in subsequent versions i mentioned earlier like yeah they're probably going to add better cameras at some point you know they're probably going to figure out if they want to do face id at some point um but yeah it wouldn't surprise me if there's like an iphone duo you know two or three down the road that supports a new pressure sensitive smaller apple pencil at that moment like that they would launch you know coincident with it um until then this will be a third-party

1:20:20Casey Liss:opportunity that i think will be very popular yeah i don't think the pencil will be that popular but if it turned out to be insanely popular they could always do the palm slash handspring thing and have the little pencil slot right into the device in a hole that's so anti-apple they would never do that

1:20:34Marco Arment:but it would be funny what was amazing about that is that it was always with you like yeah you're

1:20:40Casey Liss:right they would they would never in a million years it would just be such a waste of space people don't use it enough it's so awkward it's like there's a million reasons why it's a bad idea but what i having used those devices it was convenient it was you always had the pencil and it wasn't magnetically stuck to the side or put through a loop in the case you had to put on it

1:20:54Marco Arment:yeah exactly and like it's funny you know all the devices now that use like all the e-ink tablets that use styluses all the time, like as their primary or only input method, you know, they follow modern design principles of like the device should be super thin. And so none of them have the pen in a slot, but they all have to then have some kind of ridiculous contraption to keep it held onto it somehow. And so some of them do the magnetic thing like the iPads, which of course it falls off constantly. And then they have to have a case that like has a strap that wraps around it to keep it on there.

1:21:29Marco Arment:or some of them will have like a loop that you have to put it like none of them have solved this problem well but nobody wants a device that's super thick and and also like you know the the styluses that would go into your palm pilot were very skinny incredibly uncomfortable like there's good reasons not to do it yeah and i mean they were only like probably about five inches long but they were also like just super skinny part of that was to fit in the body whereas now everybody wants their styluses to be the same width as a pen or a pencil and this and you know nice and long. So if the weight feels right and everything.

1:22:01Marco Arment:So there's lots of reasons why this is a difficult and generally unsolved problem. But there is no graceful solution. And certainly for Apple to have a pencil with Duo, there's going to be no graceful solution there either. But I think it'll be high value enough that many people who like the same kind of people who would carry around a field notes notebook today, you're carrying a pen somewhere, you know, maybe a little pocket pen or something, I think the dealer is going to carry a separate pen in their pocket for this. We'll see.

1:22:34John Siracusa:There was something spotted by Benjamin Mayo over at 9to5Mac. Blogger Nicholas Lelouch went digging in the iPhone Duo settings during his hands-on time with the device. He found a curious new option in the display settings called Shift Left Edge. When enabled, this setting adds a bit of black border to the left side, essentially adding a fake bezel on the outside screen, pushing content away from the folding edge. The description for this setting in the iPhone Duo software says that it, quote, moves content when you are using a case that partially covers the left edge of the outer display of your iPhone.

1:23:05Casey Liss:Hello, all screen 20th anniversary iPhone. Everyone's getting used to safe area insets at non-zero values on their left and right. How are they going to put cases on a phone that has a wraparound screen? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I hope they, I mean, if they don't do this, they totally should, which is like, I've always wished they did something like they get like no bezels. The screen goes edge to edge. now the screen even wraps around a little bit but what if i want a case now the screen is hidden under the case well good news there should be something in settings that you can hit that takes the picture and just squishes it in so it's not under your case anymore because look if the screen begins exactly where the case ends that's an edge to edge screen like i'm great with that so i know they did it on this one because it's like look well it's folding and it's like kind of like at a sharp angle on the hinge side and it's almost impossible to put a case on it without it blocking some pixels so they built it and everyone's got to deal with safe area insets on the left and right on this phone anyway so they put this option in there to move it and it just basically shoves the screen in cuts off some pixels and because that's where the case goes i hope i hope apple doesn't think this is just a hack we had to do for the first generation iphone duo i hope they also decide like a much smaller version of this would be incredibly beneficial to our edge to edge all screen 20th anniversary phone that kind of sort of goes over the edges a little tiny bit

1:24:22Marco Arment:it's a good thing i didn't just design a brand new app that has edge-to-edge table cells oh crap

1:24:29John Siracusa:yeah you and i are not gonna have a fun few weeks well once you're doing safe area insets on all

1:24:33Casey Liss:four sides the only thing you have to worry about next is safe area regions where it's not just insets and this is like rectangles cutting into your app all right don't give them any ideas john oh no speaking of that i'm speaking of my app that i'm working on like um you know how the um in mac os uh things avoid the dock right like the windows the whole operating system and mission control and everything knows where the dock is so they don't put stuff behind it most of the time i'm like private api babies can i do that uh unfortunately the answer is that mac os supports one dock-like region like that and it's for the dock i'm like oh if only this api gave multiple regions you know what i mean like a bunch of rectangles but it's got essentially one safe Ferry inset and it is only where the official macOS dock is.

1:25:19Casey Liss:There is no way to give it multiple rectangles or regions or anything like. So hopefully that isn't coming for you folks over on the iOS side anytime soon. But yeah, once they have Safari insets everywhere and you adjust your apps for it, Apple is free to do this with any of their phones.

1:25:34Marco Arment:We are sponsored this episode by ZocDoc. It is so easy to put off making doctor's appointments. I'm an expert at procrastination in life in general. And this is one of those things like I've gone like, you know, a couple of years sometimes without getting my annual physical or I'll wait too long. You know, if I get prescribed something, I won't follow up because it's such a pain to book up a doctor's appointment and everything. So ZocDoc fixes this problem. ZocDoc lets you search and compare high quality in network doctors easily and across over 200 specialties and across all 50 states. They have over 150 ,000 providers in their directory, and they have tons of reviews from real patients and detailed profiles of each doctor, so you can find and choose the right one for you.

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1:26:58John Siracusa:All right, let's talk iOS 27 omissions. as noted in Steven Robles' iOS 27 review, the automatic agentic password changing feature is not in the initial 27 release. Steven also noted that the suggested action mini bubbles and messages also aren't in 27.0.

1:27:16Casey Liss:Yeah, the agentic password thing, we talked about that on a past show of people who had tried it and said it had a low single-digit percentage success rate. So that feature, I guess, was not ready for prime time. I do wonder if it will ever come out like what is going to change between now and 26.2 that's going to bring it from a six percent success rate to something that people would actually want to use we'll see i think it's going to be air powered yeah i mean like it always seemed really uh um aggressive and uh optimistic that it was going to work and apple had all those papers and everything about like how they have research on training models to understand user interfaces and stuff which is essentially what's required to like navigate a website and uh use it like a human would to find where you can go in and change your password and stuff.

1:28:00Casey Liss:It's a hard problem. It's just ambitious is the word I was looking for. It just always seemed like a very ambitious feature. So I'm not shocked that it didn't make it into 27.0.

1:28:08John Siracusa:All right. Photo libraries and external drives. Mike Brogan writes, for what it's worth, I'm working with someone that has their photos library on an external drive. They see that message in preferences about the library not being searchable in spotlight. I wish Apple was clearer on what this means is searching the library in the photos app for objects, places, people, et cetera, all works fine. I can search for quote unquote quote, mountains, and boom, I get all sorts of results. And then Jason apparently has some other information. Jason Snell, I'm sorry.

1:28:36Casey Liss:He's got the answer for Mike, because Mike was wondering what the whole deal is there. Jason's got the definitive answer. As he pointed out to me over messages, he does write a how-to-use-Apple Photos book every year, so he knows this stuff.

1:28:46John Siracusa:Jason writes, Spotlight and photos search are not the same. Searching for stuff inside photos is not spotlight. It certainly has been the case that searching photos is fine on an external drive until they broke it. My main library has been on the next - Unless they broke it, not until. Excuse me, unless they broke it. That's a very important difference. Thank you for catching that. My main library has been on an external drive for ages, says Jason.

1:29:06Casey Liss:So this is good news for me because the whole like, oh, your library is not searchable because X, Y, and Z, they're talking about spotlight search, like command F in Finder, find images, blah, blah, blah, whatever, which I never use to look through my photos. So this is good news for me that like on an external drive, yes, you will see this message, but all it means is that your photos won't come up in spotlight. But I don't care. I don't even want my photos and spotlight results. If I ever wanted to find my photos, I'm going to launch the photos app, and then I'm going to type mountains, pictures of fences, whatever.

1:29:35Casey Liss:And as long as that works, I'm good. So I'm happy with this. All right.

1:29:39John Siracusa:Let's also talk optimized storage again. Jason Snell writes, the way that optimized storage works is it fills your drive until there's only 10 % free. I got to stop Jason right there. 10 %? I'm not saying Jason's wrong. I'm sure he's right. But 10 %? That feels really aggressive to me.

1:29:56Casey Liss:I don't want to tell you what percentage full my drive has been for the past like four years. I don't want to think about it.

1:30:01Marco Arment:I'd be like on my laptop, there'd be 100 gigs. Like that's not that bad. I mean, the problem is that for whatever reason, you know, all the new indexing stuff or something in 27 seems to not have that problem. And so it'll just fill it right up. I have had macOS 27 fill my laptop all the way to full and to the point where apps start throwing errors at my disk is full numerous times throughout the summer. So I don't know if that's fixed in the final version, but possibly not. We'll see.

1:30:34John Siracusa:Yeah, I don't know. I feel like 10 % is way too aggressive. But nevertheless, continuing from Jason. so after it's 10 % free then it will start opportunistically evicting files but it is so slow that other apps xcode can write to the drive so fast that it runs out of room before the files get evicted fabrice newman writes i've been using the following terminal command to force fill the disk with zeros we're not going to share that command because this is a terrible idea generally speaking but um when the disk fabrice continues when the disk is chock full and you get a message from macOS, you stop the command.

1:31:10John Siracusa:If I understand correctly, as the disk is getting fuller, the system proceeds to delete caches and other temporary files. When the cat and mouse game is finished, because the disk is really full, then you wait a couple of minutes to make sure the system purged everything it could, and then delete the large file you just created. And Bob's your uncle, you reclaimed lots of space. Well, it worked for me. Is it a good solution? Ugh, I get it, but I don't love it.

1:31:32Casey Liss:Yeah, this is really playing chicken with your computer. So he's using DD to make a giant file and again i'm not putting this command because you can really hose yourself by using dd in a variety of ways do not use dd unless you really know what you're doing uh and you probably don't so don't use it um i don't use it because i don't um that says a lot this is this is like i'm just gonna fill the disk and once i filled the disk that whole thing that jason just talked about the optimized storage because we were complaining like if you put optimized storage in a photos library it's like yeah whatever it just ignores you and your disk gets full uh it just takes it's so it takes so long for it to notice that needs to delete stuff and then it's so slow to delete stuff because it's like a low priority background thread that your disk just gets full so it's like why don't i just force the issue i'll just fill my disk with this big file full of nothing and then once macOS notices oh the disk is full it will start evicting stuff i was gonna say evicting stuff like crazy but let's be honest it will start evicting stuff at its leisure at slow pace that it feels like doing and the whole idea is like uh you stop it like the problem is if you ever do 100 fill your disk bad things start to happen in mac os uh things will break things won't work the way you expect them various demons start getting no space left on device errors and bad things happen it's not unrecoverable but it's really pushing your luck on making something bad happen that you didn't want to happen so the idea is you almost fill it and then you just sit around with the disk pretty much almost entirely full and watching mac os evict stuff over i don't hours or days and then you say now finally i'm convinced that it has deleted a bunch of stuff then you delete your big empty file i do not recommend this approach but this all this is to say that this apple system of optimizing storage is not good and doesn't work well which was our point last time and i think all the feedback we've got about it has supported that even jason telling us how it works with the 10 threshold yeah that's great and all but it's too slow to evict files and it's very easy to outrun it by creating files and so you're back to the same situation which is my disk is full and I don't know how to solve the problem.

1:33:28Yeah.

1:33:28Marco Arment:Like every part of this is, it's, it's like me with the magazine, not wanting a setting screen. It's like in order to avoid Apple having to add a setting to say how much disk space to use for, for your photos library, they are trying to do all of these like, Oh, just magical automatic. Don't think about it kind of features and in this context it just doesn't work well enough it you need some kind of like adjustable limit or just a much lower limit or a big button that says delete

1:34:02Casey Liss:stuff that you can delete now right and tell me when you're done and how much you deleted like how much is available to purge how much do you want me to purge purge at all like just something anything yeah instead of just sitting there with your fingers crossed going boy i hope something's

1:34:14Marco Arment:happening yeah and or i hope something might happen soon someday like and we've seen you know like there's like in the photos app there's been over the years like you'll you just have to like wait for syncing sometimes and sometimes it just wouldn't sync and you would have no idea that it

1:34:29Casey Liss:wasn't syncing and no idea or face analysis all the all the stuff of like launch the app but then don't use it but then quit it but then don't let the computer go to sleep and then maybe at some

1:34:38Marco Arment:point it will decide to start doing face analysis right and like you know eventually over time they They have very occasionally added a button or a label telling you what's happening or allowing you to say sync now or whatever. And the reason they've had to add those is because it's just a complex problem and you can't just hand wave it all away with magic. And I think the amount of space that this opportunistic space thing uses on the Mac, it's obviously the same class of problem. It's just too difficult to do something magical all the time that will work for everybody. so some kind of control is needed john tell me about your s3 setup a lot of people had questions

1:35:19Casey Liss:about this i talked about it i think in an after show another episode about how i was saving money i got rid of b2 which is backblazes uh like s3 like storage where i was you know backing up my synology to b2 uh and i decided to back it up to s3 in order to save money and it took me three months to get it all sorted out but i eventually did and everyone wanted to know so what's the secret? What's your setup? And I sent this to a bunch of other people who asked about it directly, but we'll link it in the show notes. Some statistics on what I'm backing up. I'm backing up a very small number of files in the grand scheme of things.

1:35:52Casey Liss:It's only 86 ,000 files, which sounds like a lot, but it's about five terabytes. So 86 ,000 files making up five terabytes tells you that a lot of those files are big. So it's pretty easy. So if you have different data, that's a different shape, you have many smaller files or whatever, like your numbers won't be the same as mine. And nearly all of that five terabytes that I'm backing up there are in Glacier Deep Archive, which is the cheapest, slowest storage tier where you can't even get the file out without like sending a letter by carrier pigeon saying, hey, I'm going to want these files. So tell me in 24 hours when they're ready for me to pull and then you pay money to pull them like it is very much send the files in and we'll keep them safe.

1:36:30Casey Liss:But if you ever want them out, it's going to be a time consuming and expensive proposition, which is exactly what I want the trade-off I want for a backup of last resort that I've never had to use. I want it to be there when I do have to use it, but the chances are that it's going to spend year after year of me never getting it. And so I want it to be cheap in the steady state while they're storing it. And I will gladly pay whatever they will charge for me to get the data back out if it is an emergency and I need it. Okay. So everything is in Glacier Deep Archive, except the files that are less than 10 kilobytes because it would be more expensive to put them in Glacier Deep Archive because of the weird pricing.

1:37:03Casey Liss:so it's cheaper to store the 10 kilobyte files in s3 standard not in s3 infrequent access or one of the other tiers because it's only have minimum storage things and if it's small file it might get deleted and so if i put them in anyway this this is how it works out and my configuration which we will link in the show notes you can see my s3 lifecycle json file that i send up with the aws command line which is an aws is inscrutable uh format it's probably a nicer or at least uh better documented cloud formation thing that you could use for this um the only thing you can't put on that json file is the transition default minimum object size uh which is set to varies by storage class uh and that can be put into one big command and hopefully casey put this giant command into the uh the show notes which is an aws command line thing where it says you know aws s3 api put bucket lifestyle configuration you tell it the bucket name you tell it the the lifecycle configuration file in an insane format where you can't just give it the file path, but you have to do a file colon slash slash slash URL because AWS.

1:38:06Casey Liss:Uh, and then there's another option that says transition default minimum object size set to varies by storage class. Um, that's my setup. Is it the best, most optimal setup? I don't know, but I do know that it cost me like four bucks last month as compared to$36, which is what, uh, uh, B2 was, uh, asking me. I was shocked at how many people wanted to know all these nitty gritty details. So I guess there's a lot of other people out there who are paying too much for their cloud storage and heard that I had saved a lot of money. Yeah, I can't again, I can't guarantee this setup will work for you because do you have 86 ,000 files for five terabytes?

1:38:41Casey Liss:Like if your average file size is wildly different or if your access pattern is different than mine, this might not work. Again, my access pattern is send stuff up and literally never request it again unless something disastrous happens. So I'm optimizing for that. Your mileage may vary. All right.

1:38:57John Siracusa:We were talking earlier about iPhone Air sales and market penetration and whatnot. And underscore David Smith, dear friend of the show, put together his chart over of what Widget Smith usage looks like. And Widget Smith is so widely used that it's a pretty good stand-in for what the whole market probably looks like. I'm sure it's not exactly right, but it's probably at least in spirit correct so underscore writes here's the iphone 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for widgetsmith the iphone air really struggled to find market share for comparison the iphone 16 plus ended its first year at about 1.4 percent the air 0.3 percent then gruber took it upon himself to look at underscores numbers and wrote amongst all widgetsmith users if we only consider the 19.7 percent of widgetsmith users using one of the 17 generation iPhones, the percentages look like this.

1:39:51John Siracusa:iPhone 17, 37%. iPhone 17 Pro Max, 30%. iPhone 17 Pro, 29%. iPhone 17, 2%. And iPhone Air, 2%. I'm rounding a bit, but you get the idea.

1:40:05Casey Liss:I don't know why you're rounding, but yes, you are rounding.

1:40:08John Siracusa:All right, John, 36.5, 29.9, 29.4, 2.5, and 1.5.

1:40:13Casey Liss:There you go. I'm so happy I did that. But yeah, the real the real convincer is like reading numbers. It's like, well, I don't know. Numbers, numbers, whatever. He posted a chart, underscore posted a chart. And in the chart, you will see the iPhone 17, 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max. And you'll think this chart only contains those three phones. You're like, where are the other phones that you were talking about? I don't see them. They're about one pixel wide. That's that's why you're not seeing them. The 17 E in the air look like they're not on the chart, because when you visualize the numbers that casey just read both with and without rounding those products disappear now i'm always saying that every phone can't be your best-selling phone and i think they are rumors are sticking with the air but yeah the air just didn't get a lot of penetration it kind of surprised me that 17e didn't get enough penetration this is the example we talked about in the past about like why don't they do the uh the macbook neo but for phones it's really hard to do that like they you would have to get the phone cheap enough that it would be attractive to more than 2.5 percent of customers like it's not just like oh well everyone who buys the iphone has lots of money and so they all just want the expensive ones the 17e just isn't cheap enough i don't think it's a bad phone i think it's a good phone i think it looks great and it is cheaper than the other phones but it is not cheaper in the same way that the neo is cheaper like that it makes people think oh i wasn't even considering a mac laptop because they all cost a thousand dollars but you're telling me there's one that i can get for 600 bucks or you know like something that's considerably less than a thousand again studying beside ram again that kind of messed this up but before that happened the the neo made people sit up and notice because it was like they moved the mac laptop into a different price class and the 17e is not doing that especially as compared to used iphones and the other stuff that it's probably competing with and the iphone air is like i'm a brand new quote-unquote flagship phone that got a lot of press in a keynote and i'm selling substantially less than the 17e that apparently nobody wants to buy so it has not found an audience um although i will say 1.5 percent this is 1.5 percent of iphone 17 sales but um margaret was saying like the foldables are at two percent overall like worldwide share and from what i've read a substantial portion of that is in china so the folding phone market in the u.s is probably a fraction of a fraction of that uh but if the iphone air was 1.5 percent and the duo doubles it at three percent of new iphone sales that's a success but it is also still invisible on this chart so i don't i don't know how the duo sales are going to shake out but like i think a lot of it depends on how many they can make because everything we hear about the manufacturing is that it's going slower than expected and they're having quality problems and blah blah blah so it could be that they just can't make like however many they make they sell and we don't know what the actual demand was uh but yeah the error is just i look at these numbers i think maybe the air is only selling enough to make it stick around for two generations and it'll end up in the other bucket with all of the failed as far as apple concerned experiments and um underscore i'm sure has done these graphs in years past but i would love to see like the marco did them with his numbers but like the mini numbers the mini numbers potentially being uh substantially larger than the air and yet apple stopped making the mini didn't they that wasn't enough to keep the mini alive so if the air is doing substantially worse presumably apple's going to think that's not enough to keep the air alive but there is new management in the house so maybe turnus has a different idea about how long to keep iterating on a phone that is that has not found a big audience uh obviously the percentage market share numbers for the mac pro must have been worse than this despite that rumor that we heard where they were ridiculously large that was probably just bs yeah that was yeah so the mac pro was canned but you know turnus didn't make that decision so maybe he'll just look at my shirt one day and be like you know what i'm ceo now i should bring that back but that's always the question how much does something need to sell for apple to continue making it and in the realm of the iphone numbers like the air is having put it below that threshold or put it in the like the mini category of like we'll make it for a few years we'll see how it does but it doesn't prove that has legs the duo is going to be in the same situation it's going to have to fight for its life uh it will have to you know they make the first one the second one maybe they make the third one uh and they'll see what the numbers are um but yeah this this graph makes it so clear that most of the world is buying the quote-unquote normal phones when apple releases a new crop of phones and then there are the other phones that are also available and they're basically

1:44:43Marco Arment:a rounding error yeah i think it's also worth pointing out too like the iphone 17e has only been out for six months whereas the iphone air has been out for a year yeah it has that going against it as well yeah so like the f1 the f1 17e has you know you know nearly double the micro chair of the air in half the time that's a good point i mean it's essentially cheaper so again

1:45:03Casey Liss:you would expect the cheaper phone to sell more but like it is it is nothing like you think oh the bargain phone won't people rush to that one it's not cheap enough when you compare it to

1:45:13Marco Arment:cheap android phones like it's still it's still an expensive phone especially around the world Like, you know, if you look at different. Also, since slacking on the air, we've heard from a few people that apparently, especially outside of the US, I've heard a lot of Europeans saying that the air has apparently been heavily discounted for the last, you know, six months or so, like by hundreds of dollars equivalent. So that also might be helping like dump the air inventory a little bit.

1:45:43Casey Liss:We heard from somebody who had gotten a new iPhone Air very recently and the manufacture date was 2025. Oh, yeah. Like it might have been from like the first batch.

1:45:52Marco Arment:Like the HomePod phenomenon where they basically made one batch of HomePods four years ago and they just kept selling them. Yes. And I looked, you know, in overcast stats, you know, comparing the E's, I do have the 17E at about, you know, maybe about two thirds of the Air. So the 17E is worse than the Air for me. But the 16E is substantially ahead of the Air for me. It has like 25 % more than the Air. So granted, the 16E has been out a year and a half instead of a year. But it does kind of show like even in overcast, customers would skew higher end and nerdier and certainly American because overcast is not localized.

1:46:29Marco Arment:Even among overcast customers, like the Air is not doing well. And that's like that's who you would expect to, you know, for it to do well with it.

1:46:37Casey Liss:yeah on the one hand you could argue for the continued life of the air and being like look this is a high-end exclusive luxury product it's very expensive it's very fancy and those are always going to have tiny market share right you know how many cars does lamborghini sell versus volkswagen they're the same company but the numbers are very different because lamborghini is more expensive and it's fancy and also thinner um so then you could that you'd say for the air it's like look we never expected to sell a lot it's always going to be the weird luxury thing that we sell a small amount of and it's like our halo car it's like a sexy cool thin thing so we should keep making it on the flip side of that you would say well the minis already sell better than it and what what they're the niche they're filling is we don't have any small phones the air is not a small phone it's just like in between two other phones that we have it is not substantially different than those other phones other than the thinness and fanciness whereas the mini is getting customers that might never consider an iphone because they just don't want a phone that big uh but then of course the mini has terrible battery life because it's really small and part of the reason the air is the size it is so they can fit all the battery behind it so i've in the past made strong arguments that they should keep making the mini because as i said not every phone can be your best selling phone and like the mini fills a role that it like there's nothing in the lineup like the mini all of the phones are big and getting bigger all the time and the mini is like here's my selling proposition i'm small the air selling proposition is a little bit thinner but basically the same size and actually i'm kind of big right uh maybe i always how many times am i gonna mention silicon carbon batteries like they're not a miracle but let's say solid state batteries at some point in the future when we can get decent battery life or out of a mini size phone apple better bring it back for another try who knows what experiments they'll have in flight then because they've done the plus phone experiments they've got the e-phone experiments that are ongoing.

1:48:23Casey Liss:They've done the Air. They're going to do another Air. They got the Duo. I hope they keep trying these things, but they should go back to the MiniWell when they can make one of those that has battery life that is acceptable.

1:48:34Marco Arment:All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Claude, ZocDoc, and Granola. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the rumored changes, and I think real changes, to the Apple Store, including the Triumphant Return of the Genius Bar. We're going to be talking about that in Overtime. You can join or listen to atp.fm slash join. 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.

1:49:15Marco Arment:Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental

1:49:25Casey Liss:It was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon

1:49:37Marco Arment:You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long.

1:50:08Casey Liss:So, my new computer is coming soon. Let me look at the calendar. Will it be here by next episode? It will be. in theory it will be here by next episode although my desk may be in chaos as I try to set it up the day before recording a podcast but you know we'll see what happens in theory at least at the very least it might be in the house in a box on the floor next to me so I'm preparing the way as I do for my new computer and

1:50:29Marco Arment:I want to hear more about that so you're preparing the way to convert from a giant Mac Pro tower to a Mac studio which obviously is much smaller and now remind me is the Mac Pro tower

1:50:42Casey Liss:on your desk or is it on the floor it's on a it's on its own specially sized desk next to my desk it's like a little table so it's up off the ground because my last mac pro got dented by the vacuum cleaner not by me um and so this one i'm like there's no way in hell i'm putting this on the floor it's too nice and too expensive to be on the floor so it's up on a little pedestal okay like how far off the floor are we talking uh i don't know it's like uh maybe a foot lower

1:51:08Marco Arment:than my desk okay all right so that's first of all that's adorable that's like you get those

1:51:13Casey Liss:little purse chairs and really fancy restaurants i i did well this actually ties into the story because i think i talked about this in the show when i got my mac pro i knew i wanted to put it there and i knew i didn't want it on the floor but i also didn't want it like like i put it on my desk next to my computer the monitor when i first got it and i was like that's not it's too it's too imposing yeah i used to have my towers on my desk but it's too much so i needed to be a little bit lower so i had to find a table that exactly fit in the space between the end of my desk and the baseboard heater that is against the wall like it's so i had to find a table exactly the right depth exactly the right width with legs that straddled my ups like it was very specific so i had to go on this search for a table and you just find out how many of the search these search sites like can't you just let me search by dimensions like no no one searches by these many dimensions with this level of precision so i did find probably the one and only table in the entire world that matches the materials and dimensions that i needed and that is what my

1:52:10Marco Arment:mac pro is on all right so to prepare the way for a mac studio do you temporarily run them both at the same time for a little while like do you just like where does the mac where does the mac pro go does it leave this giant gaping hole behind that like what are you going to put like a potted plant

1:52:26Casey Liss:there like how what goes anywhere my my current plan is the mac pro does not move uh because i have plenty of place on my space on my desk for uh the mac studio so i will put the mac studio on the corner of my desk uh the mac pro will stay there i may if i can find a kvm that works i'll use it but honestly i'll probably just take the cable and yank it out of the studio and stick it into the mac pro when i want to switch um oh so you're going to actually keep using the pro not going to keep using it but it's going to first of all it's going to stay there whether it's on or off it's going to stay there as kind of a piece of sculpture or whatever oh my god but in the short term it's there because like oh i forgot that one thing on the computer or whatever like it is it is it is a form of backup and it is also for my mac os 15 testing for my apps it is also it becomes my mac os 15 test machine you know what i mean so it will stay there for the

1:53:13John Siracusa:foreseeable future you know that vnc is a thing that exists yeah yeah yeah i know i'll be that's

1:53:18Casey Liss:what i do screen sharing um but what the thing that i have to do for preparing the way is okay so i have this mac studio but mac studio has uh no internal expansion and i have stuff inside my mac pro that i want to take out of my mac pro and continue to use like my time machine backup drive like my super duper clone drive um i want to pull all that stuff out and plus also have my external photos drive that we talked about it was you know all the issues that like me or what what do i care about about how photos behaves on external drives because i had to buy a four terabyte mac studio and I'm going to take my photos library and put it on a 4TB external for a total of 8TB storage split up into two pieces.

1:53:58Casey Liss:So right away, I have three drives that I'm going to connect to a Mac Studio. Time Machine Backup, SuperDuperClone, Photo Library.

1:54:06Marco Arment:Where do I put those? I'm picturing the Mac Pro as the base and then the Mac Studio centered on top of the Mac Pro and then a pile of drives almost like the Empire State Building. Just drives stacked on top of that.

1:54:20Casey Liss:i would never i would never do that i would never put anything anything on top of it just a big spire but i do have the problem of where do i put those drives because i will tell you that the the the time machine and super duper drives those were really really inexpensive sata ssds because they're they're connected to the sata internal sata connectors inside my mac pro right so they were they were bought a long time ago incredibly slow sata interface is incredibly slow but like what do i care for like time machine or whatever like i don't care that it's slow they're ssds so there's no noise and you know so on and so forth but they're incredibly slow so it's easy for me to find enclosures for them because like who cares like bus speed doesn't mean anything like they're just they're fine obviously i got the expensive fancy thunderbolt 5 enclosure for my photos library because that's like live storage that i'll actually be using maybe i did a little overkill there but that's what i got um but physically speaking where do i put three ssds two of which are in 2.5 inch SSD, like the little plastic cases, like that are shaped like old 2.5 inch drives with the SATA connectors.

1:55:21Casey Liss:So if two of those, they have SATA connectors on them. I can't even like plug them directly in. So I have to get like enclosures or something for those to go in. And then I have my OWC metal heat sink, Thunderbolt 5, four terabyte, you know, very fast SSD thing. I don't want them sitting on my desk. They're all ugly. So what do I do with them?

1:55:40John Siracusa:You're going to put them under your desk like you did Tina's studio is what you're going to do.

1:55:44Casey Liss:Well, they're a problem. So first of all, the Mac Studio might end up under the desk. If it's noisy, I might banish it because I have done that with Tina's.

1:55:51John Siracusa:But I am so glad that I don't have all of your idiosyncrasies because I know you have

1:55:56Casey Liss:so many fans going in your room. You don't care. You have a fan in your ceiling.

1:56:00John Siracusa:I have a fan in my ceiling. Oftentimes I have a fan sitting under my main display blowing on me because this room gets so hot because of all the aforementioned fans within it. And it's fine. It doesn't matter.

1:56:10Casey Liss:So anyway, I don't want them on my desk. um the first thing i had to do was find somewhere to put the 2.5 inch drives uh and i had the idea of like you know these things are slow i should be able to find something cheap to narrow this problem can i find an enclosure that fits two 2.5 inch sata drives and yes i can so i got an enclosure that fits two 2.5 inch sata drives and connects through whatever piddly usb connection they need for their like five gigabits per second or whatever the hell like the enclosure does 10 gigabits and each of the drives is five gigabits right so i have an enclosure that just fits it's bus powered a bus powered enclosure that fits two 2.5 inch sata drives and since these are ssds instead of spinning disks the bus power will be adequate right although it does have external power supply if i need it but so i've got that and that is literally sized the size of two 2.5 inch sata drives um then i have my little owc thing which is kind of the size of one of those m.2 ssd sticks of my you know samsung 990 whatever the hell it is all right so that's where i need to stash i need to stash a rectangular thing as big as two 2.5 inch drives and a narrow rectangular thing it's kind of like a heat sink with my big drive in it i can't put them under the desk easily because the back of my desk has a metal sheet that extends from the top of the desk down the back you ever see those like office this is an yeah they're called modesty shield or something yeah like if you're using it in an office so that like people can't see your legs under the desk it's a metal thing it doesn't go down to the floor but it goes like halfway down to the floor and that has no holes in it and is like up against the top edge i could cut holes in it but like i'm not going to be cutting holes in metal in my desk or whatever um i you know i don't the one way i do this is there are holes in top of the desk that's how old this desk is where i take my keyboard like cable and stuff like that that goes under the desk get it's stapled to the top of the desk or whatever not stable but you know what i mean velcroed or hooked to the top of the desk and it comes up through the hole you know what i mean i can do that and so i probably could make the cables go from the mac studio into the hole and then find someplace under the desk to stick them but that's not particularly convenient and especially since i want to put the mac studio on the corner of the desk it would be covering the hole that the cables go through so it had to fish the cables under the mac studio which is where it's supposed to be getting the cool air from and it's just so my idea was because my desk is against the wall why don't i do the you know the the time-tested thing that you used to do with laptops where you just uh velcro uh drive to the back of the lid right yeah i was like why don't can't i just stick these drives to the back of my desk like the millennium falcon on the back of the star destroyer and empire strikes back i'm like that would be great because like then the cables would would leave the mac studio go down the back of my desk and plug into drives that are essentially stuck to the back of my desk where nobody can see them because it's against the wall i can't see them from the front because the metal modesty shield thing hides them uh that's what i need to do yeah i solve this

1:59:10Marco Arment:problem when i have my like my time machine drives i just have i like all my desks have some kind of like big like cable holding gutter thing like under on the underside of them i just put them

1:59:20Casey Liss:there it's fine yeah modern modern desks have that but this is really old desk it does not have anything like that underneath it and so someone in the chat room says too bad john doesn't know someone with a 3d printer well as marco already knows from looking at the show notes this after show item is labeled as john needed marco's 3d printer because i'm looking at this i'm like okay so how do i stick these drives to the back of my desk i'm like oh this is a job for a 3d printer because you make a little brackets or something you'd make them exactly size to your drives you'd put them wherever you wanted them to be you know you could have them clip over the edge of the desk or you could stick them with stuff or whatever like 3d printer i finally have a reason in my life that i would need a 3d printer but of course i don't have one i'm not particularly interested in buying one but i'm like like if i was marco i would 3d print brackets for this and i would be done and they would be exactly suited to my like your little things you made for your little yolink stuff exactly size for this specific purpose that's what you use it for literally right now

2:00:14Marco Arment:my 3d printer is printing a like you ever see like um if you have a shelf and you have you want and have like a divider that goes vertically from the shelf. And they have like, you know, different ones you can like clip on that, that just like, you know, clip on the end of a shelf and just have like a thing that sticks up. Well, in my closet, like the shelves in my closet that we like put clothes on are pretty shallow because it's like built into like this weird, like diagonal roof Eve thing. And so like none of the ones on Amazon fit. So I just custom modeled my own divider and my 3d printers right now, printing some dividers that will perfectly fit my shelf.

2:00:50Casey Liss:Yeah. Yeah. And the other advantage this has is, uh, especially if you don't have a good 3d printer, which I'm sure Margo has a good one, but if you don't have a good one, you're like, Oh, you can see the lines or I don't want to wait for like a, a, a print where it's all smooth and I don't want to sand it after no one's going to see this. Again, it's behind the desk between the desk and a wall. It's totally invisible. Kind of like my 3d printed bracket that is holding my wife's Mac studio under her desk. It's very ugly and you can see all the lines on it, but no one sees it. It's under a desk.

2:01:13Casey Liss:That's the whole point, but I don't have a 3d printer. So what I had to do was employ the exact same skill that i used when i found that perfectly sized little table for my mac pro which is i'm going to go online and i'm going to find a thing that can fit these rectangles and stick them to the back of my desk and the question is what kind of thing are you getting like i don't know i just know the dimensions you know it has to be it has to be this big have this much surface area for me to use a sticky 3m thing because these things are not particularly heavy so just some sticky like 3m stick them thingies from like the you know little i have plenty of that from setting up people's dorm rooms in college you know what i'm talking

2:01:50Marco Arment:about that's i was going to ask about that because like the way i solve this problem is i just use

2:01:55Casey Liss:command strips like the yeah that's what it is name brand i couldn't remember it not like the

2:01:59Marco Arment:regular ones they have the command strips that makes a version of it that is basically two-sided with velcro between them yep yep and those i find tend to hold the like the most weight if you're You're just like sticking something under a desk.

2:02:11Casey Liss:Yeah, they're way overkill. They hold like 50 pounds or something. Again, I use them setting up kids dorms rooms. They like hang tons of stuff off them, right? And I have a bunch of them, although honestly a lot of them are with my daughter now because we just moved her in, right? So the mounting -

2:02:24Marco Arment:So why don't you just stick the drives directly with like the command strips to the desk?

2:02:28Casey Liss:Oh, I don't want to put stickers on them. Even command strips, I don't want to stick them on the back of my drives. I mean, it may come to that, but I don't think it will because I used my skills and found things that hold my devices And I'll see you next time. Uh, that will let me mount them. And the first thing I found was, I don't know what you would even call these. I spent so long looking for like bracket clip mount, whatever, like, but apparently there's a thing where, uh, if you want to have a laptop so that it is like mounted under a desk in a slot, but it's not actually a slot instead of just two rails that the laptop goes into.

2:03:05too oh yeah yeah i know what you're thinking of there's a million of those and i found one of them

2:03:10Casey Liss:that is exactly the right width for my two sata bay thing and it comes in two pieces the left rail and the right rail so i can put them at any distance from each other that i want to exactly fit my thing and it's padded on the inside because you're supposed to put laptops in there and what it means is that if i ever need to like take that thing out or mess with it i don't need to unvelcro it i don't need to unstick it i can just pull it out of the slot like it's like a vertical slot so that solves that one and then for my little metal thingy i found two tiny little l-shaped brackets that come with their own sticky thing which i might use instead of command strips because they're just little l-shaped not l-shaped like i don't know like j-shaped brackets that the the uh the drive sits in and again if i ever want to mess with it i just reach behind the desk and pull it out from the little thing that it's sitting in and so that is my plan for my solution for where i'm going to put external drives they're going to be in their own little custom non-3d 3d printed plastic and metal bracket thingies i don't even know what the j-shaped brackets are made for i just know they are correctly sized and have plenty of surface area for a sticky thing to go on the back of my desk getting them in there will be me laying on my back reaching up behind the thing to try to get them you know with a headlight on my head or whatever but that's my current plan we'll see how it works out if it turns out that the mac mini of the mac studio itself gets banished onto the desk i may have to rejigger things a little bit but one thing at a time

2:04:35John Siracusa:john it's adorable you thought that this was going to be quick marco made it longer oh yeah

2:04:39Casey Liss:he had questions he asked me about my mac pro what my plans are the little table it happened to be relevant yes i could have raced through that without marco asking me for more i can't tell if you're being sarcastic but that's true he asked he asked questions that were relevant to the topic and extended it substantially.

2:04:56John Siracusa:All right. So Marco, please feel free to tell me what portion of that episode was, or that post show was you speaking versus what portion? Not him speaking.

2:05:04Casey Liss:He asked me questions and then I had to answer them.

2:05:06Marco Arment:The only thing that I would add is I did take a quick look. Now that I know more about 3D printing, I took a quick look at the under desk mounts for Mac Studios that everybody was buying a couple of years ago. I had one question in my head. what direction did they run the layer lines uh because yeah i was i was afraid that they would run them horizontally uh which is the weakest layer bond for something that would be mounted under a desk pulling downward and sure enough every single one of them on etsy that i can see the layer lines are horizontal because it's easiest to print it that way probably yes it is But I would never in a million years trust that to hold up a$6 ,000 plus heavy metal computer under my desk for a few years, especially one that's constantly producing heat.

2:06:00Casey Liss:Well, so I think I described this when I got Tina's under desk mount for her Mac Studio, but it is in fact a layer line visible. I think they are horizontal. And I also didn't trust it from day zero. So that 3D printed mount that our Mac Studio is in is screwed into the bottom of the desk and the Mac Studio is in it. But then I bought steel cables with screws in the ends. I like to go under it. And looped the steel cables under it so that basically the steel cables alone would hold it. And those steel cables are screwed at both ends. So if that 3D printed case blinked out of existence, the Mac Studio would fall one half a centimeter and be suspended by three steel cables.

2:06:42Marco Arment:Yeah, that's smart. Yeah, because basically layers come apart from each other much more easily than the plastic breaks in the other dimensions. Layer separation is the weakest point. So you would want this to be aligned the other way. You want the layer lines to be vertical or at worst diagonal. And you could design the part to print that way. It's a harder thing to design, but you could do it. But they didn't do that here. So that's terrifying.

2:07:11Casey Liss:and they sell commercial products that are actually like injection molded or metal or whatever so that would be much better printed ones anymore like if i if i did under desk mount i would probably just shop for commercial products and not a 3d printed thing from etsy like i got for her but remember she got the m1 max max studio was brand new there was no under desk mounts except for the etsy people but i'd say it's been in there since day one of the m1 max studio and so far the 3d printing has held up well good plus your steel cable supports i've I've got steel cable insurance. It's not going anywhere.

2:07:40Beep beep beep.