Reviewing the iPhone 16

27:39So by the end of this, you'll be able to open four different cameras from the lock screen. And you can now do it a million ways in Control Center. You can, yeah, anything. The world is your way. So you can tap on the back to open it. Like that's. Yeah. And I will say we, you know, as everyone knows, our rule is you have to review what's in the box. And you can't really talk about potential or future products. That's our longstanding rule. It is very obvious that one of the reasons you put a camera button like this on the phone is so that when you do launch Apple intelligence and you have visual intelligence and the phone can look at stuff, you can just get to the camera as fast as possible or set one of these many ways to open the camera to a regular camera and another one to an AI camera or whatever you want to do.

28:19None of that stuff is shipping it, but you can see how Apple's creating a lot of options for what the camera is doing. Only one of which necessarily is taking a picture. Right. Okay. Um, does all the stuff you guys have been talking about apply to video as well? The, the styles, the defaults, some of the same stuff. Like I just thinking about this, cause I know with iOS 18, a lot of people got really excited about the thing where you can pause a video recording as you're going, which is such a small thing, but it's like, it's a useful reminder that like, Oh, these are as much video cameras for people as they are anything else.

28:51Uh, what have you guys had with video so far? Any feelings? Um, I, there is a new feature in the, um, video recording with, uh, I think it's called audio mix, um, where after you record your clip, you can go in. And it's, it's one of those things that like 99 % of people are not going to find, but you go in and edit your video and you can mess with, uh, like audio channels. And I can't keep them straight in my head. There's like in frame, in studio, and they just change how much of the like subject you hear and how much of the like background noise it tunes out. Or if I'm talking and like saying dumb stuff to my kid while he's playing, like I can just like erase that now and just hear him, which is ideal.

29:39That's cool. Yeah, yeah. So I've been playing with that a little bit. And I always forget how nice the cinematic video is on the iPhone. Even the regular iPhone, it's kind of wild that you get that from this$799 phone. So, yeah. So I've been shooting the review video with our video team, with Viren, our supervising producer. We tested audio mix in a street festival in New York City. And it held up. Really? It wasn't perfect. You can watch the video. But it holds up, which is remarkable. And that's because they've added four studio quality mics to the iPhone, which is interesting. They record spatial audio as well.

30:21But they're really there for this audio mix feature. and so if you play the video back on an Apple TV it plays in 5.1 surround sound for some reason. So now your kid can sneak up on you. It's just like what is going on here in your video? If you airplay it, it's only in stereo but if you somehow get the file to an Apple TV or play it through photos or whatever you get 5.1 surround sound which is like a crazy thing for a phone to be able to do but it's all I love having a surround sound video that I'm going to watch vertically on my phone. Yeah, it took a long time poor the people at Apple. I have a number of surround sign questions and they're like, okay.

30:59This is going to take us a long time to get through. So that's cool. And then the Pro, the big feature is 4K 120 and shooting 4K 120 in log and you can attach all these external drives and Viren had the time of his life doing this and he came away being like, this is fun. But one of the weirdest pieces of this puzzle is that it's still an iPhone. It's like an incredibly personal device tied to an iCloud account that wants you to upgrade storage and all the like all the stuff and using it as a professional video camera is starting to run right up against the fact that it's a phone it's a phone meant for a person right it's this isn't like a utility like at our office we have a gear room where video producers from across the company like check out cameras they're not like tied to their iCloud accounts and so like you're just in this place where this phone is becoming an incredibly powerful video camera, but the way the software thinks about it is still as one person's phone, and you're just kind of like running into that reality.

32:00I think Apple will find some way to solve it. It's obvious they want people to use this as video cameras, but in that one context, it's like, do you want to install Game Center? And it's like, why? I don't, actually. You're shooting the weekend. There's a music video. Yeah. And it's like, you're getting an RCS message now. It's like, I don't want any of this. Fair enough. Okay. So the last thing I'm curious about is whether this has brought up any, what is a photo apocalypse feelings from both of you. It doesn't seem like Apple has done much of the like, here's some wacky editing stuff you can do that is either very cool or the end of truth and humanity in the world.

32:42What has been your experience so far? Have you had any of these feelings run across any of this stuff? My experience is a weird one because I more or less came over from the Pixel 9. I was doing all those reviews and picking up this. Which is a full-on what is a photo apocalypse. Yeah, it's just so beyond what is a photo. And then picking this up, I'm like, oh, I'm playing with sliders. I'm dialing in saturation and contrast. It's just such a wildly different experience. And yeah, I'm digging it. But I I haven't had anything, you know, throw me into a whirlwind of what is reality for sure. Yeah.

33:21I will say I've been using a Pixel 9 as part of this review and also an S24 Ultra. And both of those phones are like, AI? Do you want to do some AI? Like you pick up a Pixel and you open the camera. It's like, are you ready to make some weird stuff with me? And this phone is not that. Apple is releasing one feature with Apple Intelligence, a feature called Cleanup, which is basically Magic Eraser. that lets you take stuff out. So we'll see how that works and we'll see if that causes any particular what is a photo apocalypse thoughts. But I think Apple is going to play it pretty safe. I spent some time with John McCormick, who is the VP of Camera Software Engineering at Apple.

34:00Every year he and I have like an existential dilemma about photography together. And I basically asked him to respond to the Pixel team at Google saying they now make memories instead of photos, which they said in a wired piece. Um, and it's not like, what's a photo. And so here's what he told me. He answered. I've got John McCormick from Apple, uh, answering the question, what is a photo in Apple's mind? So here's the quote. It's long. I apologize. Um, here's our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is it's a personal celebration of something that really actually happened.

34:32Whether that's a simple thing, like a fancy cup of coffee that I had, that's got some cool design on it all the way through to my kids' first steps or my parents' last breath. It is something that really happened and it's something that is a marker in my life and it's something that deserves to be celebrated. That's the answer. It happened. Deserves to be celebrated is a really weird place to end that thought. But I think it is a personal celebration of something that really actually happened. Something that really actually happened is like a thing I wholeheartedly agree with. So I'm just going to focus on that.

35:07That feels good. I think this is tied to why they are so intent on bringing up the shadows and dropping the highlights and capturing all of the detail and solving the backlit photo. Right? They are like, we're going to get a photo of this. Whatever it is. Right? And that, I think, I agree with you, celebration is an odd word. But I think what they mean of it is like they need to honor the moment. I see. Right? I've been puzzling over this quote since he said it to me. And that's what I've gotten to. I think that's why this camera is so aggressive at so many of the things it does. Because Apple, they do not want to be in a hook for it was the birthday party and you all stood in front of the window and everyone's face was in shadows.

35:55And the window is bright white. That is a photo lots of people have taken by accident and Apple is not going to let that happen. None of the phone manufacturers are going to let that happen anymore. They are all chasing that same idea, which is we are going to get this. We're going to make this photo happen. And it's just, it's gotten to like a set of aesthetic trade-offs that I personally think is weird. It sounds like, Allison, you might think shadows are good too.

36:22But yeah, when I, I've been thinking about the word celebration here for a minute. I think that's what that means, right? Like the taking of the photo is a real moment that we were not going to screw up and it actually happened. And I'm curious, right, whether over time the competitors who are less idealistic push Apple off this position. You can already see it with some of the aggressive processing they've done in response to Samsung in other markets, right? Beautification filters and things like that are much more prevalent and much more accepted in markets like China. Apple hasn't gotten all the way that far, but they are starting to let people do it, right, in different ways.

36:59They're starting to let go because that is the competitive pressure. If Google starts selling a lot of Pixel phones because you can just add weed to every photo by literally writing add weed to photo, like who knows what's going to happen. But that's where they're starting today. And I think cleanup is like a little bit off of that. But his other point to me was they only do things that are rooted in photographic tradition. And taking stuff out of the background at this point is pretty much a part of photographic tradition. I mean, that's fair. I think I buy that thesis. It does seem like a pretty slippery slope from that sort of honorable starting point, I think, that is like, we are going to get the thing you wanted to get.

37:36Damn the shadows and the aesthetics, right? Like, you're going to see all the faces in that backlit photo, even if it makes everything else look like trash, because the thing you wanted was the faces. I actually think that's like a reasonable place to be. But then it does cause lots of tradeoffs. And I think to your point about like face filters and all this stuff, like Apple has seemed to start coming to this place where they're like, we're going to let you do it. We're not going to make it super easy. But if you want to do it, if you want to just nasty up your home screen, yeah, you can. You can now.

38:07We don't want you to, but you super can now. and and there is definitely a thing that apple is like look if you if you want to ruin it you can that's on you dog like and i think to some extent i think that's actually the right approach but it's it's interesting to see how far apple will go with that approach and just basically be like we didn't do it we just let you do it yeah which is very unapply and very interesting to watch as it tries to figure all of this out i do think one of the reasons apple hasn't gone into full what is a photo apocalypse territory is that there's no like meaningful at scale photo verification standard that works right there's c2pa which literally the day we're recording google said it's going to support in search and ads but not put in android um so this idea that you can like take a photo and have it verify that this is a real photo that happened and you know track the chain of edits and know whether it was ai generated or not and that's like cryptographically in the metadata.

39:08That's a big idea. There's a lot of companies signed up to make that idea work. Apple is not one of those companies yet. And I think their point of view is we don't want to adopt this until we know it's going to work and it's worth it. And it's actually the thing that we want to tie ourselves to because it is the most popular camera in the world. So I think if they can solve that problem or the industry can solve that problem, which who knows, big open question. I think that gives all these companies more freedom to let you do all kinds of wacky AI stuff. But I think you have to solve that problem first.

39:36yeah that makes sense to me all right last thing and then we got to take a break battery life uh full last week of theses about best battery life ever that didn't mean anything and didn't even have graphs that didn't mean anything just a lot of open-ended statements about battery life uh have either of you noticed any changes in the battery life of your iphone in your testing so for? I mean, I'll say it's good, but it's not like it's you can't get two days out of an iPhone battery all of a sudden. It's just sort of like, yeah, I think this it keeps up with me all day. I can do a whole bunch of stuff and stream the radio station and do GPS and and it's OK.

40:20It's I think the question in on our minds is like, how is this going to perform in the long run? Like the The 15 Pro has been kind of notorious for running down the battery health, like alarmingly fast. So, yeah, it's like TBD. It's fine now on the 16 and the 16 Plus. You can just like add 30 % to like it'll go that much more because it's just massive. But that's been my experience. Yeah, I have the same general experience. The 16 Pro Max, which is a huge phone, by the way, has a bigger battery in it. and it runs longer. I mean, I've had the camera open and the screen on shooting this video the whole week, basically.

41:04It's fine. It's doing its job. But my 15 Pro doesn't make it through the day anymore. And so does a brand new phone make it through the day? Yes, I think that is the case for every brand new phone. Six months from now or a year from now when you're still looking at your$1 ,400 investment, is it going to survive? And we have to find out. I think Apple is actually on a bad run of this. I think the 14 Pro was bad and the 15 Pro was bad and I'm hoping the 16 Pro is better. Yeah, I agree. And even in the best case scenario, it feels like we're still very much at, you can use your phone all day, but you should probably charge it every night.

41:39And until we're past that, don't give me big speeches about battery life. Oh no, I'm in a different spot entirely. Are you? Yeah, I'm at, until I don't have to leave my house with a little MagSafe battery. Don't talk to me. Oh wow. Right. That's where I'm at with the 15 Pro. I leave the house with a battery pack or I put it into low power mode. Right. And that battery is only at 93 percent, according to iOS. That's pretty bad. I know people who are down in the 80s after a year. I'm at 89 last I checked a few days ago. Yeah. It's pretty bad. And, you know, there's all this depends. It's impossible to measure.

42:12Like, if you stay at home on Wi-Fi, these batteries are great. Right. The second you leave the house, you go into, like, three or four challenging cell environments. If you take the subway, the phone's hunting between stations for signal. Like you're going to run the battery on faster. So the idea that it is just better is probably true in the beginning. You're going to have a radically different experience. And I think Apple's challenge now is maintaining battery health over time, especially because the battery replacements on these phones are more expensive than they were before. Right. Yeah.

42:42All right. Well, we'll see. I think this is going to be a particularly fun generation of iPhones to come back to in six months because like you're saying, all the software will change. All the software will change. Literally, it's possible that the whole value prop of an iPhone will change if Apple is right about what all of this stuff can do. Particularly for the 16. That's what I mean, yeah. Because then it becomes the one that you're supposed to upgrade to, and I just don't know. By the way, speaking of battery life, we have no idea what the effect of Apple intelligence and battery life will be.

43:08Here's a bunch of stuff that might just be running in the background, summarizing everything on your phone at all times. And we don't know. The Apple intelligence goes to the cloud, right? The private cloud compute for a bunch of stuff. Yep. It's going to run your radios at a bunch of moments, and we don't know when or how. We're going to find out. Yeah, fair enough. All right, we've got to take a break. Allison, you're going to come back in a little while because we have one more thing to do on the show. But thank you both. Godspeed finishing your reviews. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Later. All right, we've got to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk Apple Watch, and we're going to talk AirPods.

43:42We'll be right back.

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47:21All right, we're back. Let's get to the Apple Watch. So more new models, some new colors, new sizes, new screens, new ideas about battery life, lots of new software. You can read another line of text, which Apple thinks is very exciting. I think these are good upgrades. They seem like good upgrades. But what does all of this new stuff really add up to? I'm sitting here with my watch series eight, wondering if two years later, it's finally worth an upgrade. V song has been testing all of this stuff and has some thoughts. Let's get into it. V song. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. So many watches.

47:57All the watches. How many watches have you worn in the last 24 hours? Last 24? Four. Four in the last 24 hours. Three of them Apple watches. Actually, five. Five. Two of them were Ultra 2s, but they're not the same Ultra 2. Even though they are kind of the same Ultra 2. They're the same Ultra 2, but one of them's a different color. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a real theme this year of just like, what if we put a coat of paint on it? Is that new? What if we made it a different material? Is that new? Yeah. But so I think for the most part here, we should probably talk about the series 10, because I think that is the one with actual sort of new stuff going on.

48:39Some newness is happening. Yeah. So let's start with the outside of it, because I just can't get over this video. that like it's still seared into my brain all week of just this like very long pan shot down the watch band. And it's like, okay, sure, this is a thing. But anyway, how is it? It's thinner, it's bigger. What's the verdict? It's thinner and bigger and lighter, which, you know, that is a thing. Those are good things. I like all those things, right? Those are good things. Those are good design choices. It's just, if you know what an Apple Watch looks like, no amount of adjectives is going to really, you know, change the fact that it looks like an Apple watch.

49:22It looks like all the Apple watch, like, you know, when we were in the theater and he's like a design that you've never seen before. It's like, I regret to inform you. I have seen this design before. It has just been tweaked. They're very nice tweaks. I'm not trying to disparage the tweaks. It is, I will say there has been, even though there is like a thinning of the watch, Like it is a lot thinner. You know, take a lot with a grain of salt. It's 9.7 millimeters. That is quite thin for smartwatches. Generally, we see them in the 11 to 13 millimeter range, sometimes 14, 15 if they're chunkers. So that is quite thin.

49:58I'm not trying to say that that's not a thing, but I'm just saying. There has also been an embiggening of it because, you know, when the first Apple Watch came out back in 2014, 2015, It was 38 millimeters and 42 millimeters. Now we are at 42 millimeters and 46 millimeters. So the small watch has become what was the biggest watch back in the day. It's the, I mean, this is what happens, right? This is like the iPhone-in-inating of the whole thing. This is how it goes. There is like a real sense that it's, you know, we're 10 years into the Apple Watch. There is like an iPhone-ification of it and that they're facing similar problems now where the updates every year are iterative.

50:42And like sometimes they feel very iterative. Like, ooh, I think I saw someone online say this about both the phone and the watches, but it really feels like an S year. And yeah, it does. It does feel like an S year in some ways. And I think people were hoping for more of like a big jump of a year. Okay, but I will say, and this is the thing about the little hardware changes that I'm most curious about, is the sort of ideal watch screen size seems to be bigger, while the ideal watch size seems to be smaller, at least for me. There's a lot of min-maxing happening. Yeah, and so what I wonder is with this one, does it feel like Apple has gotten closer?

51:23I know you have kind of a tortured relationship with the sizes of smartwatches over the years. I really do. But I'm very curious if it feels like this one, And if you can make it a little bigger, but a little thinner and a little lighter, maybe it'll still feel smaller despite being bigger. And maybe that's the right combination of things. I think they're onto something. Whether people appreciate that is going to be a different thing. But, you know, I am wearing the 42 millimeter because they sent me the smaller size because I am a smaller person. So I have the 42 millimeter series 10. Which do you think is like the default size, by the way?

51:57Like, I feel like when it was 38 and 42, I think most people bought 42. But now that it's 42 and 46, if you just pure off the top of your head guess, which would you think is like the main one people have? I would think the 42, to be quite honest, because I think that's where I'm at, too. It's quite impressive. So actually, the 46 millimeter series 10 has the largest display area of any Apple watch. And that is including the ultra, which is nuts, which is nuts. When you think about it, like, truly the min-maxing has happened here with the 46 millimeter, and that's quite impressive and actually quite compelling to a lot of people who have ultras who don't love the weight, me being one of them.

52:37When I run and, you know, like, I love our blurple band, but the problem with the blurple band is that my wrist is a little too small, so I have to wear it a little looser, so I really feel that drag when I'm running. That is not the case when you have a Series 10. Yeah, and it is thinner and lighter. It feels like you're not really wearing quite as much when you go on a run. So I think for some people that will be quite compelling, especially since I do have the 42 millimeter and I'm right on the same wrist right next to the Ultra. I'm not really looking at that much smaller of a screen. So the 42 is slightly smaller, I believe, than the Ultra.

53:15But not by much. Not by much. And I remember when the first Ultra came out, we were talking about it. And I think it was Nilay who got really excited about it. And he was like, I'm just going to level with you. I'm not going to use any of these features. I don't care about any of the outdoorsy nonsense. I am going to sit on my couch and look at this huge screen and Apple Watch Ultra. And I think that's a lot of people, right? And I think especially as we get to this thing where Apple is big on glanceable information and it's an AI input output system, like I kind of get the appeal of like how much screen can we put on your wrist before it feels bad?

53:46And it sounds like they've got that balance kind of right. Like, does that forever change the appeal of an Apple Watch to most people? It feels like probably not. Probably not. But within the balance, like, as far as wearability goes, like, they did make some, like, meaningful, significant tweaks in terms of wearability, especially, you know, part of the impetus to make these lighter and more comfortable and more wearable is, you know, sleep tracking. Sleep tracking has historically not been the Apple Watch's biggest strength just because one battery life is not as impressive as other wearables in this category, which they're addressing with faster charging.

54:24But also comfort. I've been sleeping with the Ultra 2 for the past year. It's not fun. It's not what I would call the most comfortable smartwatch to sleep with. It's just not. Agreed. So, you know, in that respect, I've been wearing the Series 10 to sleep, and it's a lot more comfortable than the Ultra 2. So, you know, sleep tracking is a thing that's important to you. That is a thing. There is a blurring of the lines now because something that I've been thinking a lot about in the last couple of days is the ultrification of the Series 10. Because it does feel like they were like, hmm, there are certain things about the Ultra that have really gotten people excited.

55:02Let's port that over to the Series 10. So now you have people online just really confused as to like, should I ditch the Ultra? Because as you said, some of these people are not athletes or not very like into the training aspect or like the outdoorsyness of the Ultra. So they don't need dual band GPS. They don't need an 80 decibel siren. That's like, you know, like these things that were made for it to be extreme and raw outdoorsy. They just really want that big, beautiful screen and the lightness of it. So, like, for them, you're starting to look at the titanium version, which I must say, it's very fancy.

55:40I feel very special and fancy while wearing it. I'm like, ooh, I feel expensive. And it is expensive. It starts at$699. The Ultra is, I think, just$100 more. So you're starting to get to the point where it's like, well, why am I buying an Ultra then? So I think, like, the real question is, like, who is supposed to get what? because the prices, especially if you get the nicer materials, they're starting to look the same. So like the watches themselves also is just like, okay, so really what we're getting down to is battery. Like battery is a big thing. And dual-band GPS for like if you're like me, I'm just like, ooh, how do I feel about giving up dual-band GPS?

56:22Because I really want to know down to the hundredth of a mile what my run was this morning. For sure. And then you just like battery life, I think, for the Ultra is kind of going to be a distinguishing factor because, yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up because it does seem to me that for like an everyday user, the question of SKUs is kind of more complicated than ever. I think like and this is such classic Apple right now, right? There was a time when it was like, OK, I can pretty quickly explain to you which thing in the line is which. And now it's like there's the cheapest one and then everything up from there is confusing.

57:00Yes. And where you land on that line is very hard. But I think my instinct is the same as yours, that there's going to be a lot of people who would have wanted an Ultra who are now going to be perfectly happy with the Series 10, which does all the same stuff in terms of like day-to-day use, has an even bigger screen, is lighter. Like that all seems like a victory except for the battery life. Like the Ultra, this is the thing that has gotten me for the last couple of reps with this thing is the battery life. It's like an order of magnitude better. It's not like slightly better. It is like twice as good.

57:30And that is a huge difference. It is. You can go two days without charging if you have an Ultra, whereas I am still charging daily if I have the Series 10. And, you know, I had, I think I had a 25-minute shower this morning, and it went from 67 %-ish to 100 within that time. That's great. Right, because fast charging was one of the upgrades here, right? Yeah, like fast charging. That's pretty good. Yeah. Mine is currently charging much slower than that. I will say that fast charging can be tricky with the Apple Watch because, one, you have to make sure that the charger supports fast charging. And then, too, you have to make sure, like, all of your accessories are, like, going to do the fast charging for you because otherwise, like, even with the Ultra, which supports fast charging, like, my spouse is just like, it didn't charge.

58:18What happened? So, like, I find that to be, like, a thing that people have trouble with in general with knowing whether the charger they're using is actually going to support that. So especially since it's even less clear if you buy a dock, the docks don't all support the fast charging for the Apple Watch. So that can be very confusing. So, yeah, battery life, you know, the Ultra just is a lot more reliable when you stick it into battery saver mode. It does last quite a while in that mode. So I really think like battery life is kind of the distinguishing factor here because you're going from daily to multi-day.

58:58and for a lot of people that is really difficult to give up and I understand why it's a big difference I understand why because as soon as you take the smartwatch off there's a good chance you are not going to put it back on so that is the thing like I mean Garmin fans I love you but y 'all are insufferable about like comparing the battery life and it's like yes yes yes we know we know that the Garmin has the better battery life you also don't do quite as much so that there's like that trade off there yeah the big other thing about the Series 10 I'm curious about and I'm curious if there's anything else that has jumped out to you in testing is the speaker.

59:31Both the, like, I was thinking about this after the event. Like, A, God help us if we get to the point where people are like playing music and podcasts and yelling into their, like, awful dystopian disaster stuff. Like, sounds awful. Also, I'd probably do it. Like, would I occasionally like to be able to listen something through the speaker of my watch? Yeah. Do I hate that? Yeah. But like, so this is what I wonder, have you been testing this at all? Are you running around listening to just like bumping Taylor Swift out of your smartwatch? How's this going? I will not be bumping Taylor Swift out of my smartwatch.

1:00:09I'm not a Swifty. I'm a K-pop head. So I have been bumping K-pop out of my smartwatch. But there is like a question of etiquette there because if I'm on a subway, that just makes me a jerk doing that. And I think Apple itself is very aware that people are primarily going to be using headphones when they listen to stuff through the watch. That is the natural way of doing things. I'm a little baffled by this feature as to, like, why? And I think it just comes to a topic you and I have talked about is just open ear transparency, like needing that situational awareness. So like where I find it most natural to use is when I'm at home and I have to kind of cook.

1:00:55And, you know, I find that it's better if I don't have headphones in when I'm cooking because you should know what appliances are beeping and booping at you. I have a menace of a cat who thinks he's catatouille and wants to help. And I got to make sure he's not going to burn himself while licking a pan, you know, that kind of stuff. Or the spouse comes in, they have a question and like then you have to take out your headphones and you're like, what? so in those instances yeah like it's actually kind of nice to have it playing on the watch because it's closer to you i leave my phone i have a recipe up there i'm trying to do different things so in that instance sure it doesn't get that loud it's loud enough but like if you were to actually whip it out and just try and play your music like a jerk on the subway uh no one would hear it because it's it's just really loud the ambient noise is super loud anyway and it doesn't get that loud like if you're in a quiet room you're definitely going to be able to hear it but yeah does it have the best sound quality also no like if you care about like hearing the hi-hat in the distance like in a mix like let's be real that's that's not happening here but yeah i mean to me that actually feels like the right outcome the only occasions i ever would use this really is for like phone calls occasionally out of the watch when like my phone is somewhere else or I'm walking or whatever or the situation like the one you described where I'm in the kitchen cooking or even like you see the people on a on a bike ride with the Bluetooth speaker or whatever like little things like that there are moments in time I can see this being sort of okay and the fact that it's not good enough to be annoying on the subway actually feels like a huge victory so I will take that that is good for the world that the speaker is not good enough to do that yeah it it like I was with the podcast guys uh yesterday and they're like oh show us the speaker and I like I put it on they're like it doesn't get that loud and I'm like yeah it doesn't like I don't want it to get that loud no you don't want it to so it's like it's appropriate for like your headphones die and you want to listen to the last two minutes of your podcast or something like that it's appropriate for that it's not really we're not replacing phones as playing something we're not replacing speakers it's just it's there if you need it in a pinch that sort of situation yeah that's totally fair uh has anything else jumped out to you about this one as you've been reviewing it um It's just lighter and thinner and bigger.

1:03:25It's like really all about the screen and what's really kind of jumping out to me, like I said, is there's a whole extra line of text. I still I never not hear them saying that during the event. You can read an extra line of text. There's a whole extra line of text. Oh, actually, because the screen is bigger, actually, like the buttons are also slightly bigger, which is great. Oh, see, that's actually nice. Which is great if you have nails like me right now during review season and like touchscreens and nails are not friends. Tough times. They're not friends. So this actually does help me a little bit when I'm putting in the passcode.

1:03:58That's kind of nice. The thing that I have been thinking about, though, is whether we've reached the end of min-maxing size of screen versus comfort. because I really do not think we can get the case size much bigger. Like once you get to the 43, 44 millimeter as like the smallest size, you are leaving out quite a large swath of people because I have small wrists, but I don't have the smallest wrists. I know lots of like mostly women out here with very, very tiny bird wrists. And the 42 millimeter with this giant honky screen is kind of going to be the biggest that I think is going to be usable for them.

1:04:38After that, we start getting into a territory that's not great. And so I do think that means, like, we got to solve this battery issue because, you know, I saw this on the Pixel Watch 3 too. Like the 45 millimeter, that's about the biggest I could go comfortably. And so I don't know where companies are going to go from here as far as like these big screens, small, smaller wrist. I feel like we've reached the limit. So nice, nice that you pulled out the tricks and the stops. But what's next year? Are we going to go like the bezel is 8.76 percent thinner? Like, are we just going to go that route?

1:05:21Because, you know, I did see some people online and I think y 'all need to calm down. about how just visually the changes from the 9 to the 10 make the bezels look slightly larger on the 10. That is, optically speaking, true. Also, as someone who uses all manner of smartwatches, it's not that serious. It's really not that serious. A lot of the Apple Watch screens, like the Pixel Watch ones, make use of the darker background and the bezel. So it's functionally, depending on what watch face you use, it's functionally you're really not going to see it there. But, oh, oh, oh, wide OLED. so you can view more angles.

1:05:57That is surprisingly like, it's one of those things that you're like, okay, yeah, whatever. But like when you're just like very discreetly trying to read a funny text message in a meeting and you're going like, yeah, that actually is kind of fun. I agree with that. And it does, my strident belief since the first days of the Apple Watch has been that if you have a smartwatch that doesn't tell you the time every time you look at it, you have failed. and this is another step in the right direction of when I look at my watch, it will tell me the time. Yes. So I'll take it. This is a victory. Okay, so it seems to me that if you're in the position of like, I need to upgrade my watch, you have an old one, it broke, batteries, terrible, whatever.

1:06:42This is probably the one to get, right? Like the last couple of years, it's been like, you could maybe go back a year and it would be fine, but it feels like this one is probably worth the upgrade. I think it is worth the upgrading to this. There are a few exceptions, I guess. If you really like the color pink and you're going to go with the aluminum, last year's pink is more pink than this year's rose gold. There are a very small number of people I'm talking to at the moment here who care about that particular color. The one thing I would ask people to consider is blood oxygen. If you live in the U.S., if that matters to you in any capacity at all, If you do upgrade to the 10, you will be losing that feature.

1:07:25Right. If you upgrade at all. Well, like if you upgrade and you are in the U.S., if you're outside of the U.S., you still get blood oxygen. Love that for you. But my thought, though, as a caveat is, do you really need it on the Apple Watch? My read is no. I have not missed it using the Series 10. So there's that. It's not that serious. like I'm going to be real. I don't think most people use the blood oxygen app. So I tend to agree. Yeah. Okay. But then the other question is like, if I have an eight or a nine, my watch is fine. I'll get some trade in money. If I get the 10, is it worth like going out of my way to go get the 10?

1:08:09Calm down. No. Okay. Like calm down. No. Yeah. I mean, this is kind of what it feels like this whole year of Apple products is right. It's like, these are good ones. If you need a new one, these are probably the ones to get. But if you don't need a new one, there's nothing here that is going to give you like incredible gadget FOMO. Yeah, I would say that. Except maybe the titanium, like a tiny bit, a little bit the titanium. The titanium a little bit because I will say, you know, just in my experience in the past using stainless steel, it is lighter. It is significantly lighter to have the titanium.

1:08:41And it looks just like the stainless steel. And it's very pretty. And it has a little coating over it to prevent scratches. We'll see. That's not something I can know over like a really short term period. Like that has to be tested over a few months. Scrapes, cats trying to eat the watch, like that sort of thing. But I gotta say it really looks nice. I was just looking. I was like, wow, I look fancy. My outfit has been upgraded by like several points just because it looks much nicer. I tend to have like very sporty accessories, so I don't look polished. But I was like, oh, oh, I could go to a wedding in this and look cool.

1:09:18It's a little like super spy-ish. It is. It is. It is quite nice. It's quite nice. Colors. Colors are nice this year. All right. Well, that's not helping my FOMO as somebody with a perfectly usable Series 8. But that is probably the right answer. Yeah. No, no. You're in the chill out zone. I think the only— That's where I live. The only people who I think have a debate on their hands are people with Series 6s. Like, those are the only ones who I think— Series 5 older, time to upgrade. Yeah. Series 6, you could make a very good case for it. Series 7, Series 8, Series 9, I think you could just chill.

1:09:56Fair enough. All right, V, thank you so much as always. Yeah, thanks for having me. One quick note before we move on. V and I did talk very briefly about the sleep apnea testing stuff that's in the Apple Watch now. But when we talked, it hadn't come out yet and there were questions about FDA approval. Anyway, it did get approved by the FDA and it will be in the Apple Watch. And that is a thing we're going to have to follow up on. That's also a hard thing to do in a review cycle. The health stuff is complicated and it takes time. So we're going to let V do some real proper testing on that. And we'll get back to you on all things sleep apnea.

1:10:32Anyway, let's move on. Let's do AirPods. AirPods, I confess, are the ones I am most personally fascinated by. I'm forever looking at this perfect middle ground of comfy, good sounding, not terribly expensive, and noise-canceling headphones. And the perfect middle ground of that does not exist. At least it has not existed so far, but it seems like Apple might be inching ever closer with the AirPods 4. I know this is a hard thing to get right, so I'm not getting my hopes up, but I'm very, very, very, very curious. Chris Welch has reviewed all of these for us over the years. He has the new pairs.

1:11:11Let's get into it. Chris Welch, hello. Hello, David. It's a pleasure to be back. Just headphones. I feel like there are other things we should talk about on the show from time to time. You do all these things that are very interesting, and yet we just talk about headphones here on the show. Fine by me. So I've realized that unusually this year with Apple devices, the first question I have to ask is, what are you actually testing? There are things Apple announced that haven't shipped yet. There are things Apple announced that aren't shipping for a very long time. You got some devices. What have you been testing that you actually have access to right now?

1:11:45So I've got the AirPods 4, both pairs, the standard pair and also the new pair that has noise cancellation for the first time. That's really all I've been testing this whole time is really like how well does noise cancellation work in this open style of your bud. Thankfully, like all the features are there on day one with this product, unlike the rest of Apple's lineup this year. So it all works out of the box, which, you know, always very nice. So, yeah, just been kind of going back and forth. They sound the same. So there's not much there between them. That's all good. They sound really good.

1:12:14Like, honestly, I've never been like a standard AirPods person because like for years, they just didn't fit my ears right at all. Like you had to like twist them in just a certain way to get them to stay. These ones do a better job staying in my ears. So, so far, so good, I think. Okay. How different is the design? It's always hard to tell in the photos and renders. Very slight tweaks. So like the contours and the shape, yeah, they didn't change much. I'm somebody for whom the open ear AirPods have always worked really well. And I really like the way that they fit. So every time they're like, we've changed the design, I'm like, no, don't change the design.

1:12:43Yeah, they changed it ever so slightly using 50 million scans or data points of like ear shapes. So, you know, the usual, but not that different compared to the last ones. I compared them directly and yeah, they're still pretty similar. Okay. So the idea is there are some people for whom they should fit now, but they shouldn't not work for anybody that they did work for before. Hopefully. hopefully there's always someone who's going to complain. I know. Yeah, it will be me. I mean, I say they work for me, but also like the number of times they've just fallen out of my head. I don't know what work for me really counts as in a lot of cases.

1:13:14But it does seem like the big question with the AirPods 4 is just as simple as, is ANC worth$50? Right? Like that's the price difference. That is the only feature change, as far as I can tell. Is that kind of the frame? So there are some other differences. So with the ANC model, you get the wireless charging, which might be enough for a lot of people to spend$50 for. There's that. The case has the speaker for Find My, which I've never used, but it's there if you need it. And that's really the main three features that it has over the standard one. But the battery life, they're both IP54, I think, water-resistant.

1:13:49And so, yeah, that's all the same between the both. Okay. I am slightly bummed, I have to say, that we didn't get – Like one of the rumors right before was that there might be a more interesting capacitive case with like some music controls on it. Like we've seen from some of these other companies. I am slightly disappointed we didn't get that. I have to say. Still the white glass case. It is smaller. It's like so tiny now. It's almost like a square shape that it's gotten like so small. Okay. So sorry for people listening to this. It's like imagine a piece of Orbit gum stretched a little bit. That's basically what that case looks like now.

1:14:21Yeah. So all right. So what's first of all, let's just science this a little bit for a second. The idea of ANC on a pair of open ear headphones like the AirPods 4. I know you were skeptical going in that this is even a thing that is possible to do or do well. How does Apple do ANC on something like this? Like, how does it even sort of in theory work as opposed to a pair of headphones you can shove into your ears that actually physically block out? lot of things. So it's been done before. Like Samsung just put out the buds three that have the same kind of concept. It doesn't work quite as well, but the technology is the same between these and the AirPods pro.

1:15:02Like, so there are mics in the earbuds, they scan for noise and they play like the inverse of whatever you're hearing to kind of cancel it out. And so Apple says they like kind of changed the driver. So they like tilt towards your ears more with these. And I guess that helps out when it comes to the ANC. And so like, I've been impressed. You have to like set your expectations. Like it's nowhere near the pros. It's nowhere near tips. So you You can't like put these into your ears and have everything just like fade away. I'd say it cuts things down by like 30%, maybe 40%, probably 30-ish. So like if you like, what I found is like you can't just put them in and have quiet.

1:15:36But if you play music, that's really where you notice that you don't like turn up the volume as loud as you would have otherwise. Like that's really part of this whole appeal, I think. And also kind of ties into like Apple's like hearing health stuff lately. So you just don't have to crank the volume. That's been the main benefit. But if you're on a plane and you're like, just turn them on without music, you're going to hear everything around you still. So it's not going to be some miracle, but it's nice. Okay. So is maybe the right analogy just in terms of what this feels like in practice, like a pair of over-ear headphones without the noise cancellation turned on?

1:16:10Like you put them on and everything gets quieter and a little more isolated, but it's not like when you flip it on and the noise from the plane disappears. Yeah, no, not at all. Okay. Yeah, it takes off like you hear kind of like a, I'd say it's like a white noise machine. Like you would still hear like a fair amount of noise in the background. And so like I was at a bar last night, super loud. I just put them in for the sake of trying it and I could still hear conversations nearby and people talking. So it's not going to like change that kind of environment. But I did cut it down. So I was playing music at like 70 % volume and I could still hear my music just fine.

1:16:42And so like it does make a difference, which I think is going to be enough for a lot of people to just kind of say 50 bucks. Why not? Plus the wireless charging and whatnot. Right. Well, yeah, to your point about the hearing health stuff, that way of thinking about reducing the noise is actually really interesting because you can see that as a negative, right? What that sounds to me like is when I get on a plane, it's still going to be very loud. So these are not going to replace the Bose headphones that I like to get on a plane with because it's quiet and helps me sleep while I watch a movie.

1:17:12Right. But on the other hand, the thing you just described, like I can listen to music at the bar without it being impossibly loud and still sort of hear the people around me is actually like that's a that's a use case. Right. Like that's a real that's a real thing. And it's it's kind of a hack on transparency mode in a certain way where you have headphones that let you hear the world, but also your music. And if Apple can get that balance right, that's both it's a pro and a con of the level of ANC in a strange way. Right. Yeah. So it's been good. I mean, these actually have, so there's noise counseling mode.

1:17:43There is transparency mode on these as well. And you would think like, why is that necessary in open style earbuds? But so it boosts like certain frequencies, like voices. You can hear people easier when you turn on the transparency mode. And it's got all the like AirPods Pro software stuff, like the conversation awareness. So when you start speaking, the volume goes down, yada, yada. So that's all there, which is nice. Sound quality is actually surprisingly good. The bass response is way better than most of the past models they put out. So that's been my main thing I've noticed. The bass response is really good.

1:18:13They just sound really clear. They're still not my type of earbuds, but they're just really well-made AirPods. Okay. Yeah, do you think we're at a point now where the biggest difference between the AirPods and the Pros, just in sort of day-to-day use, obviously there's the hearing health stuff and all that, But do you think the main difference between the two is just going to be how they fit and feel in your ears? Like, it feels like the bass AirPods are getting closer to the Pros in such a way that the Pros are going to be better. And if the main thing you want is sound quality, fine. But it does seem like the gap between the two in terms of sort of everyday sound quality is much, much smaller than it once was.

1:18:53Yeah, for sure. That's really exciting. Yeah, it is. So the pros like still sound better, obviously. And the ANC is obviously like that much better than these are. So like if you want the best thing, there's that. So it's like good, better, best. Like good is the AirPods 4. And they sound really nice for the price. $129,$179 or the AirPods 4 with ANC. And then you go up to the pros. And so it's a pretty good, straightforward product lineup. I mean, I can't say that but like the iPads or whatever. But this is pretty straightforward as far as like what you should buy. And like here's what you get buying that thing.

1:19:25So, yeah, compared to the iPads, everything is straightforward. So I don't know that that's a totally valid point. Yeah. Does it make sense to you that the AirPods four and the AirPods four with ANC are two separate things? Like it seems like the normal Apple move in a lot of ways would have been to just scrap the bottom one and say$179 is still a pretty competitive price for this kind of headphone. Yeah. Is it surprising to you that the sort of very base model exists at all? Not really. I think they still want something like in that price point because there are so many lower cost options from like so many brands like JBL and whoever else that.

1:20:00Yeah. That costs like$70,$50. So you've got to have something that's like not too far off from that. And that's what the AirPods 4 are. And you get most of the same sound quality and like much of the same features. The call quality is nice. They've got this new voice isolation feature from the AirPods Pros as well. So it uses AI, of course, to make you clear on phone calls. So that's on both models too. So you get a lot for$129, honestly. But if you want ANC and wireless charging,$50 more. Got it. Okay. And one question we got on the hotline from actually a couple of people was, how big a deal is the H2 chip?

1:20:35And I think, to some extent, it's just better, right? Like, new chips do more things. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, Apple mentioned voice isolation as, like, one of the things that's going to get better with extra processing. Yeah. But I'm also assuming, based on the way you're describing ANC working, that that is like, that's a huge amount of processing this thing has to do. So that makes me think that there are going to be a lot of people who are like, do I buy the H1 AirPods because they're going to be cheaper? Or is the H2 chip worth it? And it sounds like maybe the H2 chip is going to be worth it.

1:21:08Yeah, for sure. For sure. Okay. I'd say so. I mean, it's not that much more expensive. I'm sure you can find deals on the past models, but these sound better, first of all. So that's why I would buy them most of all. They sound significantly better than the AirPods 3 did, to my ears at least. Always subjective. But yeah, you get a lot. And the H2 chip is key for a lot of those features, plus the ANC. This is why these have a lot of these features, and the AirPods Max still don't, because the AirPods Max do not have the H2 chip. But yes, I would go for the ANC model. I think it is worth just having those few extra features for not a ton more money.

1:21:42But yeah, I mean, there are some downsides. It's like there's still no multipoint, which I would love. Apple just loves its like multi-device like auto-switching, which has gotten better over the last couple of years, I think. But it can still like always like pair to the wrong thing at the wrong time when it's like most inconvenient for you. Apple is, I would say, guilty a lot of being too clever by half. And I think the clever multi-switching is the most too clever by half thing that Apple does. I just want a button that says I never, ever, ever, ever want to connect my AirPods to my Mac Mini.

1:22:12Ever. I have never once wanted to. I am never going to want to stop asking me every single time I sit down in a chair if I want to connect my AirPods to my Mac Mini. Like, it just drives me crazy. But that is neither here nor there. So you haven't gotten a chance to test the AirPods Pro 2 yet with the hearing health stuff. Otherwise, they're basically the same. The hearing health stuff is coming. We'll try that out when it comes. you have I would say for all intents and purposes tried the AirPods Max because they are the AirPods Max with a USB-C port and some new colors new colors yeah at some point I think we'll end up doing a full review of those because we should they're going to be on sale but my biggest question for you is coming into this event there was like a little bit of talk about what the Max's might be if there were going to be Max's on a you know scale of one to ten how surprised were you that apple decided to essentially do nothing with the airpods max uh pretty bummed honestly because i like the max you know i'm not sure like why they're like so unworthy of like actual hardware upgrades after all these years uh and like i see them everywhere it's like people clearly bought them people like buy like cases for their like ear cups have you seen these like on the street it's wild so there's a whole like aftermarket for accessories for the airpods max and they're really good headphones uh but i assume apple just has must have some kind of a customer data that says like people just don't need like some of the airpods pro features or care like they just want to get on a plane put these on and zone out and like that's all they really want them for that's interesting that like maybe there's less to do in that space yeah but like you would think they would want like some of the hearing health stuff there too like in the over ear yeah um format too so i'm not sure like what the thinking is there um but you would hope like there's a true airpods Max 2, not too far off.

1:23:56Who knows? Maybe once the AirPods Pro 3 come out, they'll do both at the same time. But yeah, it's a bummer. I mean, they're so heavy and that case hasn't changed. The case. The case is still as it was. That is the thing that kills me is there are just a couple of really obvious upgrades. I think the basic look of it I've really come around to over the years. I was not wild about it at the beginning, but I think it looks better on people's heads than it does kind of on its own. So like I'm in favor. Sounds good, works great, but there are enough sort of little upgrades both in the hardware and the case.

1:24:31And now even in the processing and the software, it's like you could make these better without trying very hard. And that is the thing that kind of bums me out about the Macs. So, okay, last question. And then I'll let you get out of here. Again, the big question I think a lot of people are gonna ask is, do I get the four or is it worth$50 to get the ANC? For most people, obviously, if price is your main question, get the cheaper one but do you think most people the right best option is going to be to spend the 50 bucks is it worth the upgrade yeah okay i think so i mean it's there if you need it and it's pretty easy to just like turn off if you don't like it like you can actually feel something some of the pressure that you would get like when you're on anc from the airpods pro you still get like some of that sensation some people don't like that but you can just turn it off if you don't want that but it's nice to have you know like if you're out somewhere on the street and it's like loud it'll cut it down by like you know like a third or so like but and that's like enough to just play your music and not go crazy from like outside whatever.

1:25:27So yeah, it's worth it. All right. Fair enough. All right. Well, one of these days you have to come back and we're going to do pixel buds. We're going to do galaxy buds and we're going to do AirPods and we are going to put a bunch of bad sounding audio on the Vergecast and I cannot wait. So many good reviews. Yeah, good. All right, Chris. Thank you as always. Thank you, sir. Cheers. All right. We got to take one more break and then we are going to take a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:29:20Welcome back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all your questions, and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. Right now, it is extremely phone season, and we have a question about phones. Hey, guys. My name is Keith. And ever since I was a teen, I really loved technology and smartphones. I would be the type of person that would upgrade my phone multiple times in a couple years. But since I've gotten older, I've gotten a family. Disposable income just doesn't exist the way it did anymore. But fortunately for me, I get an upgrade this year.

1:29:58Now, as somebody that's been kind of a techie guy, unfortunately, the simplicity of the iPhone ecosystem has been nice, mainly because of messaging, but also because it works with every case and it's easy to Apple pay things. my ask of you is to sell me on why I should get the new pixel fold or the new pixel pro XL over what Apple shipped. I want to buy into the ecosystem that Google offers. I have a fully Google home. I'm invested in that ecosystem, but the messaging has always kept me with an iPhone. Unfortunately this year, I didn't think they really showed me why I should get a new iPhone.

1:30:45But I'm doing upgrade. So should I spend another three years with Apple or two years, whatever the contract is? Or should I finally make a move to be my true teenage self, the nerd I always want to be? All right. As I sit here with two phones on my desk, an iPhone and a Pixel 9 Pro Fold that I'm deeply in love with, I too have this question. Allison Johnson's back. Hi, Allison. Hi. Okay. I want to do this in two parts. the first thing I want to do is I want to I want to throw away all urge to hedge and be reasonable and I want I want you to make the most aggressive case for switching to the pixel that you possibly can and then we're going to come back around and decide if this is actually a good idea okay but let's let's start with that if you if sell me and sell our friend Keith on switching to the pixel Okay, well, you got to go for the fold.

1:31:41I mean, it's two phones. It's twice the phone. You get a front phone and an inside phone. Um, no, I think like if you are into tinkering and if you're into like, oh, I can get my phone to do this and I couldn't do that before. Like the nine profile is like the poster child for that. Like you can, the way you can use the inner screen. there's just like there's really nothing else like it is kind of how I would put it. And, you know, RCS on iOS 18 might alleviate a little bit of the messaging woes. There's still, you know, really not a substitute for like FaceTime or any of that. But yeah, two times the phone.

1:32:33That's what I got. That's pretty good. I have been amazed by how much I like the Fold. We're going to come back. Zach, you and I are at some point in the next couple of weeks going to have to come back and re-litigate our flip versus fold debate. Because I have new feelings that are making me sad about my old feelings. And we're going to talk about that. I love this phone. And I think to Keith's point about the Google ecosystem, every time I really reinvest in Android, which I've been doing because of this phone, I am reminded of how much better it is to be a Google user on an Android phone. Yeah.

1:33:07Just in part because Gemini is so built into everything and you can access all of your information in all the different Google services. It's so much better as a Google Home controller than the iPhone is. You get like top level access to all that stuff in a way that if you're on an iPhone, you always have to launch an app before you can do Google stuff. You can just do it all from the whole screen of your phone. And that's very powerful. But literally, it is such a nice phone. It's such a nice phone. I cannot get over how much I like this phone. It's thin. It's the right size. Even if you don't open the inner screen all that often, which I don't, it's still a great phone.

1:33:43And then you're like, oh, my God, there's an inner screen. I love this phone. And I think the switching costs have gone way down, which is very exciting. The idea that leaving an iPhone and going to an Android phone is going to sort of break your brain is just not true anymore. anymore. Weirdly, the thing that is always the hardest for me switching is that you swipe down on an iPhone to get to Spotlight and be able to start searching for stuff, and you swipe up on Android. That is the thing that takes me the longest to switch every single time. Everything else, they've just become so similar over time.

1:34:16They have most of the same features. They do most things the same way. Apple has adopted a lot of Android's customization. Android has started to sort of organize the phone in the way that Apple did for a long time. They're just not that far apart. Like weirdly, I agree with you that FaceTime is the single stickiest thing left. The RCS thing, it won't solve everything, but it makes some things easier. You can deregister from iMessage much more easily than you used to. Liam, our producer, did this. He bought a Fold and he turned off iMessage. And it used to be somewhere between like 24 and 72 hours.

1:34:51You were in like weird iMessage limbo. It was like minutes with him this time. It was very exciting. Yeah. I live that dangerous life like several times a year when I switch from an iPhone to, yeah, one of the Android phones. And it is easier. I think there's kind of an outdated notion of like how difficult it is to switch between these systems. And I am living proof that you can do it multiple times a year. And there's no like major social cost to it. Yeah, you will still be a green bubble, but I think, like, it's fine. Just own being a green bubble. Lean in. Your phone has two screens. That's cooler than iPhones.

1:35:35Yeah, just open up the phone anytime, you know, you need to prove something. Someone like, well, do you have two phones attached to your phone? Yeah, right. Oh, you can't see those words on that screen? Watch this. I have a whole other screen. No big deal. Yeah, look at this. Yeah. Something else I think, particularly this year with the Pixel series, I haven't tried out the Pixel Watch 3 yet, but I'm dying to. But it seems like the ecosystem of hardware around it has also gotten, is just elevated this year. Like the Pixel 9 hardware, the Pixel Watch 3 by all accounts is very nice and finally just feels like this is a great smartwatch.

1:36:13Like you just buy this one when you have a Pixel phone and everything is nice. So I think that that's always been part of the math in the Apple ecosystem. It's like, well, you have this phone, you just buy these earbuds, you buy this watch, and you're done, and it all works. And yeah, Pixel may be getting there a little bit. 100%. And the other thing is that as Google has made all that stuff work really well with like FastPair and Nearby Share and all this stuff that is sort of knitting its own ecosystem together, it's giving that to other companies too. So like we're at a point now where Apple's ecosystem is probably still a little cleaner and simpler and better connected, but only if you only buy Apple products.

1:36:55And Google and Android have gotten 90 % of the way there with like the rest of the industry. And I think you're just pure sort of number of choices you have of things that you can attach to your devices way better on Android. and like it won't be quite as perfect as just buying an apple watch and scanning the thing and poof it's set up yeah but it's a lot closer and you have a lot more choices and i think i think like the the whole better together thing that apple has had for so long is not nearly the advantage it once was yeah uh i am also just sitting here convincing myself to switch to android like i'm using the fold but i haven't moved my e-sim yet and i'm sitting here being It's time to move to ESIM.

1:37:40Oh, that's a commitment. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's time. It's just time to do it. It's just time. I'm just, it's just time. But okay. So now, last question. Would you recommend doing this? Like, is this, if you've been debating leaving the ecosystem, switching Apple to Android, is this the year to do it? I think it is. I think that the hardware has been, on the Pixel side particularly, kind of inching towards this, like, is it really a flagship? It's kind of this, like, upper mid-range thing. In this, I hold a Pixel 9 up next to the iPhone 16, Galaxy S24, and, like, they are all just really nice phones.

1:38:23And it sort of feels like the first time that I've been like, yeah, these deserve to all be in the same conversation. I think it's a really good year to do it. And I think we're going to, yeah, to your point on the Gemini stuff, I think we're going to get funneled into these AI subscription nightmares where if you are in the Google ecosystem and like I am very much, you know, in Gmail and Google Docs and all of those services, it's going to get weird if you are, you know, trying to use the AI features and they're behind some kind of stuff. of like Google One paywall. You know, I don't know. This is speculation.

1:39:06I don't want to like get too far ahead of myself. But that is something to consider. I think there is potential for like value of being all in on one system like there quite wasn't before. I don't know. It feels like a stick that they're getting ready to just like smack us with. I totally agree. And I think the system thing is the one thing that weirdly keeps me sort of tied to iPhone. Like you can use most Google things, most of the Google universe on an iPhone. It's not as good, but it's there. Not true in reverse, right? If there are any Apple-only apps that you like or you like Siri or there are certain Apple-y experiences that you want to have, they just don't exist on Android.

1:40:01And so I think the question of like do I want to use a little of both kind of leads you to an iPhone in a strange way where I think if you just want to pick one, the clear answer at this moment is Gemini. I think I'm so happy if I'm wrong about this in six months, but I have incredibly low expectations for what Apple intelligence is going to look like for the foreseeable future. And Gemini has many flaws, but is doing a lot of stuff already. And so if you want to just buy in, that's probably the one to start with, as opposed to like crossing your fingers for Siri to get really good next year. yeah but you can a little bit have your cake and eat it too on the iphone because there is both siri and there is the google app and you can you can have both and so i think in a weird way android forces you to both it gives you a bigger ecosystem but also forces you to make a choice in a way that the iphone a little bit doesn't yet yeah yeah i think that's fair but the fold is so nice the The Fold is so nice.

1:41:00Just 10 out of 10 on like niceness. If this thing wasn't$1 ,800, I would be like screaming from rooftops that this is the phone everybody should buy. Yeah, absolutely. But it's$1 ,800. I know. So Keith, do with that what you will. I don't know if we helped at all, but that's where we are. Probably not. All right, Allison, thank you as always. Thank you. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about. all the reviews, all of our coverage, all of the hearing health stuff in the AirPods, all of the sleep apnea stuff in the Apple Watch.

1:41:36Lots of interesting things going on. Lots of stuff coming in the coming months. Lots of coverage of camera buttons. All of it on theverge.com. I'll put a lot of links in the show notes, but as always, just go read the site. Find our bylines. It's good stuff. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other reasons People should buy one phone over another. You can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Either way, we love hearing from you. Thank you to everybody who reaches out every week. It is the best. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez.

1:42:09Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Friday to talk about AI news, more gadgets, all the stuff happening in the many, many, many tech trials, like so many tech trials and everything else going on right now. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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