Do We Care About The iPhone Air?, Nepal's Discord Revolution, San Francisco’s 996 Culture

0:00The iPhone Air is here. Should we care? Meta's new AI smart glasses with a display are en route next week. Is South Park right about ChatGPT? And San Francisco goes 996. That's coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. We're going to talk all about the new iPhone, less about the specs and more about what it actually means. Do we want to pay attention to this stuff? Anymore in the age of generative AI? Is gendered AI actually threatening the phone or is that a lot of noise?

0:35We'll also cover Meta's forthcoming new smart glasses that will have a display expected to be launched next week. Oracle and OpenAI teaming up, making Larry Ellison the richest person in the world. And then, of course, the 996 WorkCulture Packed Day, Packed episode. And so much to talk about. And joining us, as always, on Fridays to do it is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you. Good to see you, Alex. I have to admit, on the Apple announcement day, I had forgotten about it until I think late evening when I started to see a couple of tweets coming through. But I don't know, this announcement, I was not excited.

1:15So I wrote about this a little bit in Big Technology today, basically saying that the Apple iPhone launch event was the marquee event on any tech reporter's calendar every single year. And a decade later, I mean, I was doing it last decade in San Francisco. A decade later, it doesn't really register as much. And I just, I mean, obviously the phone is starting to become, you know, we've sort of reached the ultimate form factor of the phone. But I do wonder if generative AI is as good as some of the hype makes it out to be and whether it's actually, you know, this threat that might get people to switch operating system to operating system, given how much these phones look alike.

1:58But you know what? Why don't we start with the good? We're optimists, you know, on some days. Some days. So let's talk about the good here. The good is the iPhone did get a very big upgrade when it comes to the Pro models. We'll get to the air in a moment. But Mark Gurman from Bloomberg has a great piece talking a lot about how the iPhone 17 Pro fixes some of the core things that you're going to want in a smartphone. It's more durable. It will overheat less than previous models. The camera looks great. It's going to be a 48 megapixel sensor. Oh, 48 megapixel sensors across the board with vastly improving optical zoom.

2:42There's also this selfie camera that can give you landscape selfies, which for someone like me is a major deal, given how often I'm doing selfies. There's also, there's a new processor with the full A19 Pro chip. It has six central processing cores and six graphic cores. That's coming to the Pro phones. The Air will get a limited version of that. And then the battery sounds amazing. All right, so listen to this. There is going to be 39 hours in a single charge on the iPhone 17 Pro. And you can also charge it up to 50 % of the battery in just 20 minutes of improvement from the prior 30 minutes.

3:23You know, for all the buzz about the iPhone Air, which again, we'll get into, sounds like this is a pretty substantial update to the iPhone Pro models. And kind of, as I'm reading this, makes me think I might want to upgrade from the 15. What's your reaction? Okay, I'm on the 15 as well. And for listeners, as we sometimes are a bit negative on Apple, I am wearing AirPods, and we're talking on a MacBook, and I have my iPhone next to me. So I'll recognize all those things. I think, actually, the durability side of it, maybe this is one of the things that's like the least talked about upgrade over the last few years and if it's actually getting better and better.

4:08Do you keep a case on your phone now? I do have a case. I have the old man version of the iPhone, which is that my case is also my wallet. So like I'll have slots for my credit card and license. And I think it's very nice and functional. And others have pointed out that it's a dad phone, which, okay, fair. That's fine. So I've gone caseless for the last couple of years. I'm on the 15 Pro Max, and I drop this thing all the time. It has a couple of light scratches, but I genuinely think Apple somehow did invent a somewhat unbreakable iPhone a couple of years ago, and for some reason does not actually tout this very much.

4:51So if they're actually increasing the durability, I think that's a good thing. I mean, even if we're joking about it, the selfie camera improving, this idea of landscape selfie mode, I actually think is a big deal, especially if they're marketing this towards creators. I always get all these like TikTok and Instagram ads for these. You can get like a visual video monitor MagSafe add-on that so you can, while in selfie mode, still see what you're filming. So the idea that cameras improving, people who actually want to film, like that's the main reason they're using the iPhone. It's an upgrade. I can see that.

5:31That's me trying to be positive. No, without a doubt. I mean, we never had a question about whether Apple was the best phone maker in the world. Clearly it is. But then you look at the news, right? The news was it was supposed to be this like it was billed as this awe-inspiring moment where we were going to see the thinnest iPhone ever. And we did with the iPhone Air. And again, for context, this is the first of three consecutive years of new model releases. It's going to start with the iPhone Air this year. Next year, they're going to move to the Fold in the year after the curved glass. But we have the Air now and we can see it.

6:09Pre-order has actually started today. Last week, we kind of joked about how there's a camera in this like pill-shaped little bump on the back. But you are not getting the top of the line specs that we just wrote about with the Pro. And to me, it just boggles the mind. Like, who is this for? I have racked my brains trying to figure out who the natural iPhone Air buyer is, and I can't. Is it the early adopter? This is where Gurman says. He goes, German says the consumers who would be most likely to buy the latest iPhone are probably the same people who price battery life and camera performance the most.

6:43It's not two different demographics. And if you want battery life and camera performance, you're going to go with the Pro model. So I just can't figure out who the Air is for. And that's where I'm like scratching my head about it doesn't matter that they have this new release. I'm trying desperately to come up with some kind of user persona or customer persona that would buy the Air, but same thing. There's absolutely nothing appealing about it to me. And I mean, we actually have in our prep talk, there was a great tweet around the Apple advertisement that's comparing the thinness of the new iPhone, completely ignoring the giant pill-shaped bump that is the camera and the lens.

7:27Now, I will say from an engineering feet perspective, it is impressive the idea that the entire like computer part of the phone is able to be stuffed into this little pill shaped part at the top of the phone where the camera lens is. That's interesting. That's great. And maybe there's going to be like follow on phone design that actually is able to leverage that. But agreed, I just don't understand who this phone is for. Exactly. And there's one more thing about that image that I think we should talk about, where there's the iPhone Air, right, which we just have just released, and the iPhone 6.

8:06It's side by side next to the 6. The iPhone Air is 5.6 millimeters. The iPhone 6 was 6.9 millimeters. You put the two next to each other. There's no difference. So what you're saying is you've gone 11 generations, and what you're now, you have a slightly more than a millimeter difference in width. I don't fully get why this is special. And in fact, I think Yishan Wang, the former CEO of Reddit, put it quite well in a tweet above this where he said the emperor has no clothes. It's hard to argue with that. Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Walk me through how does the iPhone Air come to be within Apple?

8:54Like who is pitching it? How do you think they were pitching it internally to actually get it to where it came to reality as the kind of marquee element of this announcement? Okay, so I will give you what is probably wrong, but to me is the most logical birthing experience of this phone. Which is that Apple, if you've been paying attention to their quarterly earnings reports, has had completely stagnant iPhone sales. Stagnant. I mean, last quarter it was up 13 percent. So give them credit there. But before that, you're looking at declining or basically teeny tiny growth within the iPhone unit, within Apple.

9:39By the way, this is the most important product unit in the company. Makes up 50 percent of their sales. So I think there was just a conversation within the company of saying, like, we need something new. We need lots of new things. And we're going to do something we've resisted for a long time, which is try to build a folding phone. And on the way there, we're going to have to make two sides of a phone that are probably a little thinner than the standard phone, than the standard Pro models. So why don't we, you know, in order to juice our sales, why don't we go and make a thin phone first and then put that together with another thin phone and release a folding phone and then our sales will go up.

10:17Now, I think it will probably work if that's what was going on. Like, I think they will probably have better iPhone sales quarters because they have something new. But I don't I don't it's not very inspiring to me. That makes sense. OK, so I'm going to give you some credit. I think that actually was a really good explanation. I think that very well could have been what happened. And that's also terrifying because this is exactly the kind of thing that if that was the order of events, which it does seem like it could be, that's not the apple of yesteryear that was inspiring and that would kind of wait for perfection and come out with the greatest product ever.

10:57If it really is an interim product to juice sales a bit, that's actually almost even more worrisome for Apple. I mean, it really feels like the fifth blade on your razor, right? It really feels like, all right, we'll do seven blades now. And here's the thing. So I think this is, yes, it's a big question about like what's going on. I think the bigger question here is you have to put this side by side with the AI moment, right? Because the phone, it's reached its final or its ultimate form factor, right? The phone is the phone. The Air looks like the iPhone 6. Like full circle, it's the same thing.

11:35Is it going to fold? Yes. Is that very different? No. So the question is, now that the phones are all looking the same, do they start to differentiate by, and by the way, you could take an Android phone, it looks very similar as well. do they start to differentiate by the generative AI services that they're offering? Does Samsung, for instance, by virtue of its partnership with Perplexity, now potentially convert some iPhone users away from Apple or iPhone customers away from Apple because it has that generative AI offering? Because I think the core question to all the Apple conversations we've had up until this point is, Is this company's inability to execute on AI just a mishap, or does it potentially put its core business at risk, which is the iPhone?

12:24I think that's a very good point because maybe it's not the phone itself, but it's the way we interact with the phone. So I've been using, there's an app Whisper Flow that kind of like gets embedded and it allows you to dictate much more efficiently than regular Apple dictation. You can even set specific terms in its library. So, you know, like names and my own name always gets misspelled when I dictate. So I talk to my phone a lot more. I dictate to my phone. I have like entire conversations, text messages I'm dictating with ChatGPT or other AI services. I'm dictating my prompts. So almost in the humane pin inspired way that RIP humane, like the way we're going to interact with it is going to fundamentally change.

13:15So the companies that are actually able to catch on that are going to be the ones that win. And I'll say, too, I have a Pixel 8 that I was given at some event, I think, two years ago. And I'd actually not used it ever. and then I fired it up and just on Wi-Fi, I'll kind of interact with it. And having Gemini integrated into the system layer of the phone is so different than trying to use Siri. So I agree. I think maybe we need to start really kind of thinking about the way we interact with that block that's in your hand rather than is it going to fold or is it going to be thinner? Right, exactly.

13:57So it's like if it's the interaction in the operating system, itself that would start to like put these releases that Apple was putting out in context, it would make it seem pretty bad for the company, right? Because effectively you're adding a razor while everybody is, you know, reinventing shaving to really beat this analogy. Let's keep going with it. Keep going. It tracks, right? It tracks a little bit. And if that is the case, if it is operating system level, then we have a real problem with Apple, don't you think? I mean, as the number one Siri not fan, I'm going to have to say, yes, I think we have a huge problem.

14:38I don't know. I think to me, the AirPods were interesting. I will say if you've ever gone running with AirPods and like sweat with them, the idea of the heart sensor in them wasn't that appealing to me because they just don't respond well to working out, at least in my experience. So adding a heart rate monitor to it versus just having the Apple Watch as your exercise device didn't make a lot of sense to me. But the live translation is a good, like kind of actually kind of building on what we were talking about already. It's a good example of what the way we interact with these devices could fundamentally change just how we kind of walk around, interact, talk to people.

15:21But my concern with it is Apple, I will admit, I have lost faith. like the demos they did with Siri two, a year and a half ago now, or two, a year ago. Like I don't, until I actually see the live translation in action working well, I just don't believe that it's real. You know, I had the same exact reaction. I was just like, I don't know if that's going to work. You know, whereas before I think I would have been like, that's amazing. I would have been like, this time I was like, I'll, I'll believe it when I see it. Like, why didn't they do it live? Why didn't they? I think you know the answer to that.

15:58Okay. Well, hold on. Did they? So I saw the video afterwards, at least the kind of like slickly produced demo video, but they didn't do a live demonstration of it, right? No. No, because the entire presentation these days is just video. Oh, yes, yes, yes. But you could have done it. They could have done it in the hands-on room. I didn't see anything like that. I did see them in one video toss the iPhone across the room and have a journalist like slam dunk the phone into a desk and it didn't break. so that was durability durability durability right uh but going back to this yeah again we'll believe it when we see is this going to happen for sure um is it going to be apple that pulls it off i don't know and is it going to yeah go ahead tim cook slamming a phone on the ground on stage that would get me hyped that would be him being like you want to see some durability just him drop kicking that thing into the audience and then them pulling it out screen unbroken, that would get me a little bit excited.

16:58Yeah, I think this would be a narrative changer for them. So if they're listening, well, they did a version of it in this interview, but I think it could be more dramatic. But again, the question is, is it also going to be... So we know what the phone looks like, right? The phone looks like the phone. And are these AI experiences going to be delivered in the phone or the AirPods or perhaps a different device? And now we have Meta coming up next week preparing to deliver the latest iteration of its answer, which is a different device. So, okay, is the Metaverse working? I would say probably not, right?

17:33We could agree there. But is the Meta smart glasses revolution taking off? Maybe it's just a Meta protest, right? It's not quite a revolution yet. But these things are catching on. You and I both like the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. and now next week we're going to see the latest iteration here. So this is from CNBC. Meta to unveil Hypernova smart glasses with a display wristband at Kinect. Meta is planning to use its annual Kinect conference, which is next week, to announce a deeper push into smart glasses, including the launch of the company's first consumer-ready glasses with a display. The company will also launch its first wristband that will allow users to control the glasses with hand gestures.

18:17The glasses are internally codenamed Hypernova and will include a small digital display in the right lens of the device. Although it will feature a display, those visual features are expected to be limited. There will be a color display, about a 20 degree field of view. So it will appear in a small window in a fixed position, unlike these Orion glasses that they showed off last year, which are still prototypes not available to the public. I don't know whether or not to be excited about smart glasses with a display. It brings me back to the Google Glass days. What do you think? I am excited. Everything about this, other than it's meta, excites me.

18:59But you know what? Meta's delivering. First of all, I want my new tech having a project codenamed Hypernova. That's a great codename. And to me, I think, yeah, as we're talking about this, things that are exciting to me now are not an upgrade to a 48 megapixel camera, which I don't even fully understand exactly what is the difference between that and the previous generation. It's incremental versus rethinking the way we interact with computing. And the Meta Ray-Bans, especially this summer, my God, in New York City, I wore them around all the time, talking to them. Like, Meta AI is still a work in progress, I'll say.

19:49But overall, they are moving in a whole new direction successfully. So for them to continue building on that, I think whatever they do, this is the kind of stuff that I'm excited about. Now imagine those bad boys with super intelligence baked in. Now we're talking. You got to have some super intelligence in your smart glasses. I agree. What about the display is interesting to you? Because to me, I really don't like it. It feels distracting, especially if it's only 20 % of the screen. What interests you about it? Well, no, I have thought for a long time that kind of, I guess, can we call it augmented reality here?

20:28like some kind of digital layer is not is interesting. I mean, I will it work? Will it be interfering with your everyday life? But, but to me, I still have this view that 20 years from now, people are going to look back at like videos of people walking around looking at their phones, and it's going to look like smoking cigarettes in an airplane. Like you're just going to be like, I cannot believe people actually did that. And that's how society functioned. And so if you're getting a little notification and you can see a message quickly, maybe that's actually dangerous or maybe it's not if it's done safely.

21:07But to me, not pulling out your phone and just interacting with technology rather than people staring at their phone as they walk around. I think anything in that direction is interesting. Maybe it's being read to you via your audio interface, whether that's AirPods or your glasses that have the speakers to the side. But anything that starts to change the way we interact with our phones, to me, is exciting. Yeah, I will say those smart glasses, again, were amazing. In my trip in Nepal, when I was like walking through the mountains, I had my phone in my backpack. I didn't want to have it in my pockets, especially in the rain.

21:46And it was just snapping photos with the glasses. And Nepal, by the way, seems like they overthrew their government with a Discord server and then elected a new president with Discord. I read a Financial Times article, I think just two days ago, and it was before this Discord governmental overthrow. But already it was bananas. It was around Nepo babies, and it was the idea that those in power, their children were posting photos of them in expensive cars. So people started using the hashtags around Nepo babies and kind of like posting negatively about the government. And so they just were threatening to shut down Facebook and Instagram.

22:28And because of that, that's where people revolted to start. And then on Discord, organizing and appointing a new leader. From everything I've read, this is exactly what happened. And having spent, I spent a lot of time in Nepal. I was there for 10 days. The thing that you hear consistently from people is, this is a beautiful country. Government is corrupt. And we don't have opportunities because of government corruption. You heard it day in and day out. And clearly there was something that was ready to, you know, light on fire. And obviously these moments are tough. 19 people were killed in the initial protests.

23:08And some of the images coming out of Kathmandu were very disturbing to see. But again, it's one of those stories where, you know, organizing on social media and the ability of social media to cause change in the world, that has certainly not gone away even as it's faded from the headlines. It's actually interesting to me that, I mean, 2009 Arab Spring being organized on Twitter was such a positive representation of social media and the way it was covered and spoken about. But it feels like this one still is kind of describing that it's a bit chaotic and it's not this kind of unalloyed positive.

23:47I don't know. Do we, I guess you were there. I have not spent too much time thinking about Nepal. So social media, because social media was new during the Arab spring. And I think that these stories will never be covered exactly in the fawning way they were previously, because I think the world now really understands that there is a complex set of consequences that come when you have social media introduced into society and used to organize and used to spark change. But I will say the discord thing is it's a new wrinkle. It's a new wrinkle. I hope that our Discord doesn't organize and overthrow us as the Friday podcast crew.

24:29But if they do, I'd have to respect their wishes. They're organizing. They're organizing. And you know what? If that's what the people want. We respect. We respect it. Okay. Speaking of what the people want, we have new data on GPT-5 and where it's impacting businesses. And we'll cover that right after this. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now, imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee.

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27:19This is from the head economist at Ramp. His name is Ara Karazian. And I actually spoke with him this week. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that conversation when we get to 996 in a bit. But he shared some very interesting data. He writes this in his substack. The GPT-5 launch was so botched that Sam Altman apologized for it. With increasing attention as to whether the pace of business AI investment is actually sustainable, The key metric we've been watching is whether businesses' adoption would continue to increase following a slowdown earlier this summer. And the results are good for OpenAI.