The iPhone 16 is here — but it's not finished

28:34I mean, this idea has been around forever. But Bixby, Samsung's Bixby is this idea. Yeah. You will talk to your phone and like it'll do stuff. But no one's done it well. And I just, I keep thinking of all these people who go to how-tos who are using all these other ways to try to figure out how to use their phone. And theoretically Apple's going to make it better. But you have to know to ask. I saw a demo of this today. Did it work? It's like a haze of demos. Yeah. They were showing me like you can ask it how to do XYZ feature. And it totally worked. They were obviously running 18.1 beta, not 18.0, which we'll ship with.

29:10But it worked. I mean, if you really think about all that's happening here, is Apple has a model that's running locally on the phone, and then they have their own user manuals, which they can load into the model. So you're asking a question of a pretty known set of information from their own knowledge bases and whatnot. And that's a pretty straightforward use case. I don't know how much people will use it, but from what I've seen, it works pretty well. No, I think it could be really useful if they actually promoted it. because I think of all the old people in my life who don't know how to use their phones.

29:39Right, but now you've got to get them to use Siri. Yeah, now you're going to be like, no, you asked Siri. Don't ask me, you asked Siri now. Get me out of it. This assumes that you can ask Siri in a way that is not prescribed and doesn't have to be a very specific kind of way. And again, so much of what Apple is asking us to assume is that after, what, 13 years, Apple has made Siri good. And I just am so not ready to assume that yet. But back to what you were saying, Eli, about when all this stuff is rolling out. This stuff is rolling out in beta, in pieces in October. And the biggest thing of it, which is this - Wait, can I just be really clear about that?

30:16Because even that is confusing. So it's in beta right now. Yes, you can technically do it right now. This is the weirdness, right. iOS 18.1 public beta is available. You can push the button, you can download it, you can run it if you have a 15 Pro. You can run Apple Intelligence some stuff right now. it's going to launch in the public release of ios 18.1 sometime in october but they're still calling it a beta in the public release which is insane the features will be labeled beta in the release and they've done this a handful of times they did it with portrait mode yeah free form the app launched like that i think yeah they um a couple other things like uh like facetime audio transcriptions or something launched this way there's a handful of this stuff uh deep fusion technically was in beta, but nobody could see it.

31:01No one can still see it. So it's fine. So Apple has this history of doing this, right? Particularly with the camera, but now what they're going to do is they're going to say, huge chunks of this operating system are in beta, and they're just going to have the label and the release. So it's not in beta, you have to go get it. It's in the public release, it will be labeled with the beta, which is a little messy. Which is kind of like just saying, here it is, it might suck. Which is, to be fair, what all of the AI systems do right now. They all have the label at the bottom that's like this thing might lie to you we don't know yeah not our problem it's also kind of what they did at this event when they announced all of this they were like and now we're doing apple intelligence also this is just a recap of wwdc yeah and all of the features are couched you will be able to without any hard dates and so i again i i don't care how many iphones apple sells to quote our friend and mentor walt mossberg i don't give a fuck about your stock price I just don't.

31:57But, you know, if one of the questions is, is this worth upgrading? The answer is not in the hardware. The answer is in the software. Right? If you have a regular iPhone or any pro phone, save the 15 Pro, to get Apple intelligence features, you need a new phone. Right. Okay. That's a good question. Like, are the features worth an upgrade? And the answer right now is no, because they're vapor. And I will just refer you back to one of the Verge's longstanding rules right up there with World of No7s and review what's in the box is it's vapor until it ships. Yep. It hasn't shipped yet. Apple has a great track record of shipping.

32:33I don't mean to say this in a pejorative way, but it's vapor until it ships. So you just like cannot evaluate this thing because it's not real in any way, shape or form. And especially with AI, it's not just shipping. Like shipping is the very beginning of the battle of making something that's actually any good when it comes to AI. And part of it is shipping. I know in the 18.1 beta, you can summarize notifications like no one's business. Have you ever looked at a small piece of information and thought to yourself, I wish this piece of information was smaller? Apple's got you. You can do that right now.

33:05It's all of the rest of it that isn't out yet, that has yet to ship. It's all of this private cloud compute stuff, which is up and running and supporting the beta, but actually hasn't scaled and has not actually yet been audited by third parties to prove that it's compliant with Apple's privacy promises. All of that, we don't know yet. We just don't know yet. So it's just hard to evaluate this phone. From the dumbest perspective, should I upgrade a phone? I don't know. Is your phone broken? This phone will be much nicer than the phone you have. Will this phone bring you a bunch of cool new AI features?

33:41Maybe, but I don't know yet. Your camera will be sick. Well. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. It's very hard to evaluate a camera at Apple Park. Well, okay. This is actually a good segue back into the pros, which we should talk about. Because obviously there was a ton of focus on the cameras. I mean, right, if you're buying this thing on day one, the two things you're buying it for hardware-wise are the camera upgrades and the camera control. Like, that's it. That's the thing, right? Unless you like deeply want a phone that is called desert titanium. And if you do, please email me and tell me why. I would love to hear from you.

34:19Cause it's called desert. It sounds cool. It's way better than natural. One of my favorite things that happened today was that as soon as they said desert titanium, every single person on our staff with live blog access made a different joke in the live blog. Can I, can I tell you the joke that I did not make in the live blog? Sure. Yes. Desert titanium sounds like if one of the mechs in Pacific Rim was a stripper. and now coming to the stage you see what I'm saying desert titanium get with me I have an entire idea here like I know how we can stop kaiju attacks and it's sexy but yeah with the prize that's my last verge cast everybody that's it yeah we're leaving Nilay and Sunnyvale this is the end possibly of the verge Who knows?

35:10We're so sorry, but it was always going to end like this. This is what it was. I'm just going to point this out. As far as I know, Jaegers are not gendered, and this is an equal opportunity, like full spectrum stripper robot situation. Just flinging their metal plates into the ocean. I'm just trying to be inclusive. Yeah, I love it. Just throwing metal around 2024. Anyway. Desert titanium. uh the the pro and the pro max it's just the camera this year right like better better processor different colors battery life which i'm going to get very angry about here in a minute but like the thing if you're if you're thinking regular iphone versus pro iphone you're basically making this decision based on the camera and bigger display okay and bigger display fair granted which i will say anecdotally it seems like has turned more people off than on just from what I've heard.

36:05Seven inch phone. I mean, that's not math. Hold on. Almost seven inches of phone. Yeah. So, I mean, I held it. And if you hold it without holding the 15 Pro Max in your hand, you're like, oh, it's manageable. And then you hold them next to each other. And you're like, well, this phone is big. And this phone is a surfboard. Oh, wow. And you're a Max guy. So for you to say that is not small. Yeah. Yeah. It's not anywhere close to a small phone. It's enormous. I love it. I'm super going to buy it. Are you? Obviously some people buy the Pro just for the camera, but then people were also going up to the Pro Max size because it had the better zoom lens.

36:40And now it's the same zoom lens on both. So you're not being forced into that biggest phone. You can sort of stop it gigantic and still get kind of the best camera system. And I think the 48 megapixel ultra wide here is a big deal. It's still the ultra wide, it doesn't capture as much light and it's impossible to really evaluate iPhone cameras at Apple Park because it's like a beautifully lit space no matter where you are. The best lit place you will ever exist. Yeah, it's like angelic light from the heavens just like suffuses the environment. So it's impossible to evaluate. But I took a bunch of photos and obviously the main camera is way better.

37:16Obviously the main camera has more modes and all this other stuff. And then they've, but having a 48 megapixel Ultrawide means you do get some more detail. You get, you know, it's just a better camera than the old Ultrawide. And I actually use the Ultrawide a lot. uh so i'm pretty excited about it what do you use the ultra wide for i'm just often in a space where it's like i want to take a picture of max and i want to capture the environment that i'm in with max yep like here's the whole playground and like that's a useful it's just a useful tool that's exactly my experience which is why i asked it is constantly like i can either get like the the shoulders up shot or i can use the ultra wide so that for me is it's exactly the same thing yeah but i think for the the pro like the reason i i brought this up when we started talking about the camera thing is the a big part of the keynote was about all of these new camera modes and all the different ways you can shoot and the fact that natural is just like a mode now is is deeply fascinating to me that they're like you can shoot a thousand ways one of them is regular and here's a bunch of other ones and i just feel like like obviously nila you were in the room so you saw this stuff on the screen which is always hit and miss everything always looks great on the screen has been my experience but also like took some pictures and saw them on the screen like what what do you make of apple's sort of million new ideas about photo processing here well one let me tell you two things about the screen okay uh something else will show told me so again they built the Steve Jobs theater they designed it ages ago and he pointed out to me they built it for projectors like the room is designed for big projectors and then they wanted to do a big led screen because that's what everyone does now uh so they had to basically engineer their own screen for the theater, and it goes past the wings of the stage to get the size and shape they wanted.

38:59That's very Apple. And Apple designed and engineered their own LED screen, which is hella bright. Let me just tell you, hella bright. The other thing is the audio in that room. I keep talking about the room, and it was very cheery in there. It was a little boomy today, unlike other times. Things were different today at the Steve Jobs. Anyhow, so it's hard to know all the modes. Yeah, every time I see Apple's camera team, they basically are like, here we go again. That's their attitude towards me. They just book it when you walk in. No, they're into it. All these companies are run by extremely type A individuals who want to fight.

39:35They would just prefer to win. So I always have these great conversations. It's always super interesting. In their point of view now, which, again, we have to review the phones. We have to see how true this is. It appears to be that they have realized that people are going to filter the photos anyway. Right? So they're like, look, people have a radically different interpretation of what their own skin tone is, and we just have to get out of their way. Like, that's not for us to decide anymore. So here's all these options, and here's all these sliders, and photo styles have existed on the iPhone for ages.

40:08In fact, they started as a response to the Pixel, because you will remember back when computational photography started, and the Pixel team and Mark Lavoie were talking about, like, you know, like old painters they liked and shadows and details. The iPhone was like too bright and too even and we like we like the pixels contrast So they added photo styles and one of them was basically shut up about the pixel But it was destructive so you could shoot in that mode and that was it and the reason they're making a big deal about it Again, is they've re-engineered the photo pipeline so you can change it at will after the shot, right?

40:42And so that means you can capture all the stuff and you can do all that you don't call them filters They were very careful to say like this kind of photo processing dates back to the 1800s all this stuff but the idea is you will be able to Get much more DSLR type photo with like heavy shadows and heavy detail or a much more modern smartphone Ultra tone match photo where all shadows have been banished from the face of the earth never to be spoken again And now those are controls are anyone gonna use these controls? I don't know the power of defaults really matter and does natural on an iPhone still have to stand for something.

41:17It does. Can you evaluate it inside of the angelic light of the Steve Jobs? You cannot. So you have to get it. But I think they're starting to see that other that their users are constantly changing these photos anyway. And so their own point of view has to kind of be a good starting plate for all the changes to come. Do you guys use those modes now? Because I just realized I've had it set in rich contrast for probably as long as I've had this phone. That's pixel mode. That's pixel mode. Oh, that's interesting. I've been in pixel mode for years. I think that's really telling, right? The power of defaults is a really real thing here.

41:55And I think what I wonder about the Pro is whether it is more prone to get people who are more likely to be interested in fussing with those things. Obviously, at the very top end, like the kind of people who are shooting the 4K 120 stuff and holding it up in a gimbal and like the people Apple likes to show in these keynotes and in their ads. Those are the people who are going to use these filters. And I think we'll be psyched about it, right? Like to have more options to do this stuff, quote unquote, in camera is great. All for it. But I think the interface question of how you surface this stuff for regular people is really fascinating and really hard.

42:31And I think it's kind of how I feel about the camera control thing, right? I think most people will figure out that if I smash this button, it will take a picture. and everything more nuanced than that, you start to lose some giant percentage of the number of people who are going to use the phone. That's why I keep thinking about this Apple intelligence. Like, I mean, obviously it's very easy to turn it into the personal assistant for your phone settings, but that feels like a win at this point. If it really works, that's like the thing you want to advertise constantly. Tell everybody, look at all these cool settings.

43:03It's too hard to remember. Seriously. What do you say? Like make this photo look like the 1980s and if everyone was doing drugs. Yeah, that's exactly what you say. I say like I want that creepy 2000 digital camera vibe. Right, but do you want to say that before you take the photo or after you take the photo? Well, you can do both now as I understand it with the Pro. It'll let you change the style after. They said that was a big part of the thing. It will, but there's just parts of taking a photo. like yeah how long is the exposure right like do you want to fire the flash if you want that indies leas look like you might want to fire the flash like there's a lot of steps in between make it look like this yeah and just tell the robot to make it look like this i want the robot to do all of it just and apple does too yeah well if they can do pull it off to be clear once again none of that is shipping it and what alex is describing in particular is just like us dreaming that you'll be able to just talk to the phone and we'll do stuff.

44:05It's also Apple dreaming. We're not making that up. That's Apple's idea. Right, and Apple wants to plug third-party apps in the series so they can do this stuff. We're just nowhere close. That is all pure vapor. That's not even it's going to ship in the next version of 18.1. That's maybe a year away. And what we have now, right now, in the camera, particularly Pro Camera, is infinite customizability. So if you know what you want, the camera can now get way closer to delivering it. and that is different than are the photos by default more realistic or less over processed we just don't know but the idea that the camera is now infinitely more flexible in the pro model is i think it's borne out by just the number of controls you have and the fact that most of the pipelines aren't destructive anymore yeah yeah which i think is very cool all right we need to take a break we've been talking about camera buttons for way too long uh any parting thoughts on on the iphones nila you've you've held all the things anything that jumped out to you before we stop talking about phones the the pro max is really big and all of the phones are really nice in a way that i don't think it's been a i think like iphone 5 nice like peak iphone nice no uh but they are they are the most refined versions of this design i've seen in quite a while and i i honestly think the 16s once they get some of the features they're they'll move like people will buy Okay.

45:26That's very exciting. All right. We got to take a break. We'll be right back.

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46:43All right, we're back. We've had the ad break to think. Any more phone thoughts? Everybody feel good? I didn't yell about the battery life, but I'm going to not yell about the battery life. You'll have time. Yeah, I feel like we need to talk about the processor and the battery life. So they kept saying it was the best battery life ever without a number. Just the best. The one that really killed me was there was a moment during the keynote where there was a slide in which they showed the battery meter with the green and then just extended it so there was more green. That doesn't mean anything. What am I supposed to do with that?

47:13Oh, good, you made the icon longer? Congratulations. I'm so angry at how many times they said battery life without giving any actual information about battery life. Just trust them. The 16 Pro Max is supposed to be the best battery life ever on iPhone. I will say my 15 Pro Max has garbage battery life. It is absolutely abhorrent. It's just bad. My 15 has deteriorated faster than any iPhone I've ever used. I haven't even looked at the deterioration. I'm just like, oh, it's the middle of the day. I should charge my phone. That's where I'm at with this phone. That's not good. But the stats, as far as I can tell, what they are talking about, is hours of video playback as a proxy for everything else.

47:52They just don't want to be like 33 hours of video playback on a slide. We spent a bunch of time last week talking about how stupid a metric that is. So whatever, we can move on. We'll talk about it next week or a week after. Dozens of hours of consecutive offline video on my phone. Do you guys not? Is that what people do? On its hyper-optimized video playback engine? Yeah. Amazing. So you wanted to say something about the processor? The processor. Speaking of ultra-optimized video playback engines, a lot of our commenters have noticed that the processor upgrades on the phone made for AI don't amount to much.

48:28Like, you actually still get, it's 35 flops, right, is the thing. And that's what you get. Like, the end. But on a phone. Ooh. Well, sure. But that's the same as, like, last year. Yeah. So I think the made-for-AI claims are kind of like running right up against the reality of phone development times. And I think most of what they've done is just put a bunch of RAM in all these phones. Yeah, eight gigs. Yeah. They loaded them up. Which is great. Like, terrific. More RAM is a good thing. Yeah, the fact that they're not each$400 more because Apple put more RAM in them is really impressive. Seriously.

49:07Yeah, but no, to some extent, the processor thing I think is whatever, right? Like, I think you're right that if you were going to make like an AI phone that wanted to do all this vastly complicated stuff offline and locally and be awesome, fine. But like what you have in the A18 is going to do the job of writing business emails for you. Perfectly fine. Like the ceiling of interesting AI features right now is still so much lower on a device like this than the performance ceiling of the device that I'm just not bothered by this. Just you wait, David. It's going to write the most beautiful email.

49:46I hope I'm wrong. Like someday in 2036 when Apple Intelligence actually ships, maybe it'll be amazing. Everything changes really fast. Who knows? It's going to be an email that makes you weep. You're going to be like, how could it? No human could write this. It's too pretty. The thing is, I'll never see it. My Apple mail will just summarize it for me. I'll never even see it. It's no problems. And that summary will also be beautiful. But we should talk about these AirPods, right? Yeah, let's talk about AirPods. Because these are actually exciting. I think this was the coolest part of the whole thing.

50:17Same. This is what I'm talking about. I was about to say it was three AirPods. I think it was four AirPods. Will you run this down for us? So, yeah, it's four technically. I think it's four. It is four. Well, three. It's like three and a half. Yeah, we'll go three and a half. We'll go three and a half. So there's the AirPods 4. It's two. Two. We'll get there. We're doing Apple math. It's at least. If they can have four lenses. It might be six or seven. We'll see. We're just going to keep adding. It's two. All right, go ahead. Okay. So there's the AirPods 4. And there are, Eli is correct, two versions of them.

50:51There's one that's like$129. And it's got, you know, it's the new shape and all of that stuff. And then there's one that's$179, and that's also got active noise canceling in it. And in both cases, there will be head shake to respond to Siri. I believe the personalized spatial audio, is that in both? I'm pretty sure. The H2 chip is going to be in both. USB-C charging case, 30 hours of battery life. The battery case is going to have a little speaker in it, so it'll beep beep when you lose it, which has been hugely helpful with my pros. They rule like these are just these are really good AirPods.

51:32And then just because I have to prove that there's four updates. There's the AirPods Max, which are still just five hundred and forty nine dollars. That didn't change. But now we get some more colors and you can charge them with USB-C. You don't have to care about your lightning cable. So technically, new AirPods Max. And just right there, you talked about it longer than Apple did. I did. Thank you. It was like somebody at Apple was being held hostage until they mentioned the AirPods Max. They didn't even list the colors. It was so bizarre. They were like, new colors, USB-C, moving up. Okay. They also were like, it's still$549.

52:07The AirPods Max are absolutely not a new product. USB-C. They changed the connector they should have had a year and a half ago, if not more. And they made two colors. It's the same. We're going to get them the Apple Watch. Same with the Apple Watch Ultra 2. We're like, here's a video about how it's black now. it sure is i i almost wrote in the live blog when there's a long sweeping shot of the watch band you know there's nothing else to tell you but anyway so wait kran did you talk about the the airpods pros no no and then this is our fourth set of airpods yeah the fourth one is the airpods pro two which will not change in any reasonable way but they are new because they're getting hearing aid features.

52:50Yeah, that's cool. New feature. That means a whole new audience. That's basically new. That is the single most important announcement of this entire event, but that is not new AirPods. I just want to be that they announced two new AirPods and some software features of monumental importance. Can I just admit something right now on this show? I didn't realize until right now that it was just a software update. I thought there had to be something new in the hardware if you're going to tell me about how this is a hearing aid. You're telling me this is just a software update? Just the same. It's just a software update.

53:20So if I have existing AirPods Pros, they're going to get these two? They have to be the two. Yeah, you need the AirPods Pro 2. AirPods 2 Pro? 2 Pro, 2 Furious. AirPods Pro 2. Attorneys General. You need the H2 chip. So you need the second generation AirPods Pro. And then you need a phone that can run iOS 18. So there's some cutoff on what phone you have. Sure. But if you have those two things, you can take the hearing test. which will, you know, Apple has to finish its FDA clearance, but they say they're going to do it, and then they can act as hearing aids for the same battery life as they get now, which is about six hours.

53:56I mean, you did that. Like, it would be remiss if I didn't point out, FDA clearance is, in fact, a thing they have to still get. They have to still get it. They haven't gotten it yet. They say they're going to get it around the world as well. They're also very careful with the language. They're not hearing aids. They have a certified hearing aid functionality. Which there's a lot of hearing aids now that were kind of like AirPods. So this feels like a huge deal. Again, I think I've told this story in the bookshast before, but I will tell it again. The only thing that our government of old people accomplished in the Trump administration is they all got together and passed bipartisan legislation that Trump signed to make hearing aids legal over the counter.

54:38Because they were all a million years old. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump were like, yeah, yeah, we should make hearing aids easier to get because we're all a billion years old. We can't hear shit. It was, it's a triumph of bipartisanship that they passed a law making hearing aids available over the counter in this way. Sony has them, Bose has them, a bunch of other companies sprung up. Bose entered the space and they left the space. They came back in with a partner because they're complicated. I sort of asked about this with Apple. Apple's attitude is like, it's not that complicated for us because we're Apple.

55:08And then also, fascinatingly, their belief is that because they are AirPods, they will be more socially acceptable than hearing aids. I believe that 100%. I think that is by far the most exciting thing about this is like we were debating this in the in the newsroom today. But like we have long since reached the point where just having one AirPod in all the time is completely socially normal and acceptable. Right. Like you can feel about it however you want. But like that it's just a fact. That's where we are in the world. I agree with you. One of my favorite things is to see couples walking down the street, holding hands, talking to each other, each with like the opposite AirPod in.

55:46like it's just life now people do it and i the fact that is this something you see couples do is something you do in your relationship i was i was like david i've never seen this i would never i see people doing this all the time you need to go outside more often cramps i don't know what people do in new jersey i was like they don't do that in jersey uh but no but i think the idea there are lots of interesting questions about like i just want to point out that david lives in washington dc home of an infinite variety of government lawyers and contractors and it sort of makes sense that they've all replaced blackberry hand with airpod ear yeah 100 100 100 dc was definitely like the last vestige of the huge bluetooth headset and they just like they went straight into wearing airpods on hinge dates like that's just it's an election year and everyone's got one airpod in it's like what david is describing all right it's just ezra klein talking to every single person in washington dc all at the same time that's just what it is It's not wrong.

56:41Yeah, it makes sense. No, it's you, me, and Ezra on a date together at all times. That's great. But no, I think the fact that no one would look at you twice for wearing an AirPod in a coffee shop is like a huge part of the reason this is incredibly compelling. I think it's so cool. But does this mean that now people are just, I mean, people are just going to talk to you when you have your AirPods in? Like before it was like a universal sign of don't talk to me. And now it's going to be like, I'll talk to you. That might be a hearing aid. If you zoom out, Apple pitched a pretty weird vision of reality today where you are always wearing AirPods.

57:16This is what I'm saying. I don't think that's a vision. I think that is reality. No, but you're wearing them at a concert. You're wearing them to prevent hearing loss. You're in adaptive mode all the time. On your job site. All of your hearing is being modulated through AirPods. They're just prosthetics. Fine. And then I, not to get too in the weeds of weirdness, Apple also makes the Vision Pro, which wants to mediate your site. And after a while, you're just like, Tim Cook is building a helmet. And you're gonna go in the helmet, and Apple's gonna manage the world for you and clean it up for you.

57:52And that is a weird vision of the future, but the amount of let us put a computer in between you and reality is very high in Apple world right now. That said, and you can feel about wearing AirPods. Isn't that a whole episode of Black Mirror 2? Tim Cook builds a helmet. It's a great episode of Black Mirror.

58:12All that is to say, maybe that stuff will hit regular people in different ways. The actual hearing aid functionality, if they can get more people to take real hearing tests and then wear hearing aids, they will do a great service to the world. This is very exciting. And all those competitor hearing aids I was talking about from Sony and Bose and all these other companies,$1 ,000. Yeah. No, this could change my Thanksgiving. And they have like bad apps and weird features and all this other stuff. This is what, AirPod Pros are$250, right? $250 and the hearing test is built into the OS and it is perfectly tuned.

58:47And you might not have the weird social acceptability problems. That's very meaningful. Again, I think it is probably the biggest announcement I made today in the scale of things. Yeah, I agree. And the fact that you take that hearing test and not only does it tune the hearing aid stuff, but it tunes everything else in the air pods to you i think is very cool like apple has clearly kind of gone all the way down this road watching them talk about it made me think about the stuff that they did for the vision pro which is like you have to do an incredible amount of work because of the affordances of like the human body so they had to like invent this new way to scan your face to do it and created this whole crazy pipeline just to get the thing to work on your face for some reason.

59:29This feels like it's in service of a much cooler, more real thing for people, which I agree. I think it's awesome. But they've done this before, too. The bit where it's supposed to modulate the hearing and stuff, they've done that before. That's an accessibility feature now, I think, where you can put it in and it'll do a hearing test. Yeah, they've had the voice captions. They've had transparency mode. They've had live listen. They've done a lot of stuff that walks right up to this line. Yeah. This is just over the line. Like the FDA is going to tell people these are hearing aid features and mean it.

1:00:00And that I think is at 250 bucks, it's just vastly more accessible for so many people. Well, I'm just curious the quality of it, because some of those changes they've done before, like I've messed with those accessibility features and they're not that great. Like the one where it's supposed to do kind of a little hearing test and be like, we're going to make the sound even better for your ears. I guess my ears are garbage. You don't love your personalized spatial audio? No, your ears are good. That's the dumb. There we go. Right? So if you don't have some big – as you get older, right, you lose your high frequencies.

1:00:36Have you ever watched these TikTok videos? It's like we can guess how old you are. Oh, no. There's a whole thing right now about Remarkable and this wine that people hear. Oh, interesting. Because I've been spending a lot of time going – They've got the super high-pitched wine on their tablets. Yeah, and I'm like, oh, my God. Am I just so old I didn't hear this wine on the Remarkable? Right. So you're losing you might be losing the very very top end but as you get older you lose even more or you have cutouts or what all this stuff happens so if you have reasonably good ears the Let's tune it to make it work for you is gonna accomplish nothing because there's nothing to tune if you have Frequency dropouts or other kinds of hearing issues the tuning will actually overcome it and it will sound clear and rich again.

1:01:18So Will any of this work? I have no idea. Yeah on air pods This is what audiologists do today to tune real hearing aids. You just made my ears sound better. So this is great. Yeah, you should be proud of, I mean, you can't hear the remarkable. You're getting old, Alex. I know, I'm getting old. I can't hear the remarkable, but the accessibility feature on AirPods sucks for me. So that means my hearing aids are great. I'm convinced most of those things are just scams perpetrated by young people to make old people feel old. They're not playing a sound when they're like, only young people can hear this.

1:01:45That's fully how you know you're getting old. That's it. You're right there. but but i think the the thing you just mentioned neil i think is actually like the question of all of the airpods kind of all the way down the line not including the max which are technically a new product but you know whatever uh that can apple back these really advanced features into the existing product i think is the question right and even if you go down to the the regular airpods it's a 50 upgrade to get noise cancellation and if apple has figured out how to do like genuinely good ANC inside of an open ear set of headphones.

1:02:22That's a big deal. $50 is a lot of money to spend for that particular upgrade, especially if you're like, if you're not so price sensitive, that you only want the cheapest one, but you're too price sensitive to buy the pros, like there's a very odd sort of middle ground there that I think Apple is trying to strike. And the question of can we bring these advanced features down into a different form factor that is not optimized and designed for those features kind of is the question and i have no idea have you tried these things at all yet i have not yet okay i don't know if i believe it like we have to see it yeah like noise canceling is pretty dumb technology it's very clever and you need a lot of processing power to do it but the idea is pretty dumb right you listen to some things that you identify as noise and then you just play back their inverse to cancel out the opposite of that It's a very dumb idea.

1:03:15And the hard parts are identifying what is noise, making sure you don't accidentally clip a bunch of useful frequencies, all this other stuff. Doing it open ear, you're just not in control of the sound environment. Sound is literally getting around the headphones. So are they just going to run a bunch of white noise cancellation? Will other people be able to hear the cancellation? Is kind of what I'm interested in. Oh, that's interesting. Well, I'm also curious. They have to fit, right? Like the whole thing that they don't have a seal. They just sort of sit in your ear. I never liked them because they were that leaky, because I could hear everything around me.

1:03:53And now I'm going to be able to hear everything around me. But then sometimes it's going to be blocking some stuff that feels like a good recipe for like your brain just getting messed up. Try and listen to your headphones. Yeah. We'll see. But it's Apple. I would expect they wouldn't break brains with a product. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're gonna, they're confident is what I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is the sort of thing that, uh, it's an odd skew of the product. Like if you go to Apple's website right now and you go to buy AirPods, the options are AirPods and AirPods with adaptive noise cancellation.

1:04:25And I think if you have a product that is technically titled AirPods with adaptive noise cancellation, you should maybe rethink your product skews. But if they've done that, I think suddenly this becomes at$179 maybe the pair of headphones that just about everybody should buy. But I don't think that's going to be the case because of the fit. The fit on the AirPods is so specific, and it works for a lot of people. And if it doesn't work for you, it sucks. That's true of the pros too, though. Can I say two things about this? One, Apple said without any sourcing that AirPods 2 are the most popular headphones in the world, which I can believe.

1:05:02I would just, sure. Sure, it's like, The Verge is the most popular website in the world, like sure, you can believe it. We are, by the way. It's true. And then second, they introduced the new AirPods 4 with this sort of like, you know, short description of how everyone's ears are different, they measured all the ears, and they got to the right shape. They said that the first time. No, no, not even the first time. They said that when they announced the wired ear pods. With not, I think not even the first iPhone, like with an iPod Nano is when EarPods came out, right? Yeah. Yeah, because you would ask, like I've asked them before, hey, are we ever going to get different sizes because these are too big for some ears?

1:05:40And they'd be like, no, we did a test and it works for 90.9 % or whatever. You're fine. But the thing is like, that's true. It turns out that everyone started wearing EarPods and buying iPhones because they worked for most people. Oh, no, I can't use the original AirPods. I couldn't fit in them at all. Well, listen, Alex, we've established. I've got tiny ear canals, okay? The Alex canals in Santa. This is a very specific problem for me. You're good with pros? Yeah, the pros fit, but I have to use this one. I'm the opposite. Pros feel awful on me. Yeah. So Apple announced the ear pods in 2012. It was a Johnny Ive video.

1:06:18It was alongside the iPhone 5 and the iPod. It was like iPod kids. This is how old they were. And at the time, they were like, We asked more than 600 people to test over 100 iterations of the EarPods. We made them run on treadmills in extreme heat and cold. They did cardio. They shook their heads up and down. And EarPods are like the design that fit the most ears. And now we're like 12 years later, and they're like, we did it again. We've once again measured all of the ears in the world. And they look a little bit different. Maybe that's true. Evolution, baby. Sure. It's true. They stuck with this design for a long time, and maybe ears have changed.

1:06:55but I think the reason AirPods Pro are the most more popular headphones even more expensive maybe just the word Pro in the name maybe it's noise cancelling I actually just think they stay in people's ears better yeah I would agree I do I do agree with that and I think especially early on the regular AirPods developed a reputation for falling out of your head for years there were all those stories of people losing the AirPod on the street and it would fall down and whether it was true for you or not that fear was real and even even for somebody like me they fit well in my ears they don't fall out i am perpetually terrified they're gonna fall out because they feel loose which is actually like the point right like that's why i like them because they don't feel like they're smooshed into my head but it makes me feel like they're gonna fall out all the time and the pros for better and worse smoosh into your head yeah and don't feel that way and i think i think that is real for people like i i i agree you see people like covering their ears sometimes if they're walking over a grate or hopping on the train.

1:07:54And because I think like the OG AirPods feel kind of like earrings, but then like clip on earrings. This is something you neither one of you probably have a lot of familiarity with. But there's earrings that go in your ear and they hang right there. That's true. What's that little piercing there, David? It's great. But people, you know, like when you have those clip ons, you're constantly like holding your hands up because they're going to fall off. And AirPods feel the same way. And nobody wants clip-ons. I just like how much you two are looking at people in their AirPods as anthropologists. Yes.

1:08:30Like, there's another couple wearing one AirPod each. And Alex is like, another person's earmuffing over a grate. It's nice because then I'm like, oh, I'm not alone. I'm fascinated. It's called journalism. Yeah, that too. This is also why I read everyone's screens when they're texting on the train. It's journalism. I love it when you find somebody typing spicy stuff. you're like oh my god literally i i one time this is a true story missed my train and wrote it for one extra hour because there was a guy i was standing and he was sitting in like the first seat next to me and he was in the middle of breaking up with his girlfriend over text messages and i rode the train for one more hour than i needed to just i got through the whole breakup it was spectacular it involved 7 000 words of text messages wow it was it was incredible were I don't regret it for one second.

1:09:19Just call her on the phone. Seriously, right? It's like, I'll FaceTime her right now. We can do this together. It'll be fine. You just sit down next to him. You're on the market. The guy next to me on the plane here, I swear to God, was trying to rot on his flight. He failed. Six-hour flight from New York to California. Failed. Failed. Just like failed. Then he picked up his phone, started typing in all lowercase and notes app for a while. Didn't read it. I did see him text the words, I need to write my own narrative to a friend, also in lowercase. and then weirdest of all on his phone on delta wi-fi which is garbage started powering through gmail on the web in safari with the banner at the top of the screen that said gmail is better in the app and i kept wanting to be like bro it is better in the app i love him i honestly believe in moments like that is it is it should be allowed to just reach over and tap the open button that opens it I really believe that.

1:10:13I was like, how are you using Safari with the address bar in the bottom? And you've got, all right, no, that's fine. That hurts me to think about. He needs that 6.7-inch iPhone, or 6.9-inch iPhone. He needs a big one. He can read one more line of text. Yeah. Speaking of one more line of text, let's talk about the watches. Yeah. They're big. They are big. uh another another moment in this keynote where apple took a minute to explain what you can do with a bigger screen i would like if anyone's out there if you can make me a super cut of apple executives patiently explaining that you can see more content on a bigger screen over the past five years i think it would be amazing it would also be hours long so okay the the the basic rundown on the watches as i understand it is uh apple watch series 10 new design that looks an awful lot like the old design.

1:11:09It's thinner. It has a bigger screen. It comes in black. I would say those are the salient points. It also comes in other colors. Nobody seems to care about those colors. It comes in black. Everybody's pretty excited about that fact. Shiny black. Okay, how shiny are we talking? Well, okay, hold on. We'll get to you. I want to talk. I want to hear what you think, Neelai, but then there's also the Watch 2, which is nothing at all has changed except now it also comes in black, which, again, a lot of it is. What did I say? You said Watch 2. Son of a... The Watch 2 is... It's dramatic changes since the Apple Watch Series 2.

1:11:40It's changed a lot since the Watch 2. If you have a Watch 2, you're in for a treat. But the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is unchanged. They basically reintroduced the product. They're like, the Ultra 2 is great for swimming and rowing and diving and also just looking chonky and like you have money. Also, it's black now. And that was the end of that. Yep. But the Series 10 is a new design. design it looks for all the world like the old design it's just thinner it's more rounded on the top uh and yeah it comes in polished aluminum black it also charges faster which i think is very exciting but the design is the one i'm curious about because i my immediate reaction when they said thinner was i i don't care right like i looked at the watch that was on my wrist and i was like i don't know that i've ever wished for this thing to be thinner it's how i feel about my iphone right like every time they make it thinner i'm like it's nothing for me um but then there were a bunch of people i saw on on threads and elsewhere who were like oh you know just based on like the the clothes i wear or like how i use my wrist having something that's thinner is actually really meaningful so what i'm curious about nilai especially as somebody who wears the chonky one every day did it feel different like if you had just picked it up would you have been able to tell because it's been years really since you've been able to tell kind of which one you were picking up if you were paying attention yeah okay for a normal person you'd be like the screen's bigger and that would be the thing.

1:13:02You know how you can tell between a two and a four because the screen got bigger? Was it the four or five where the screen got bigger? I think it was the four, right? I think that's right. So the screen got bigger. So you can tell. And then the four to everything else you couldn't tell. It's that again. So it's like a very minor adjustment, but it's bigger. Thinner I think is hard. But for all intents and purposes, it's the same design. Like we can lie to ourselves and say it's not the same design. It's the same design. Is the 10 screen now bigger than the Ultra's screen? Yes, that's the thing they said.

1:13:36Wild. Wild. Just the both screens or the 40, because it's a 49? No, the case is the same size, but I guess because they made the screen bigger in the case, it's now bigger? There's a 42 and a 46 are the case sizes. And the screen on both of them is bigger than the Ultra? No, it has to just be the 46. It has to be the one. Yeah. Yeah. It's the big one. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it looks very nice. It looks very cool. You know, the highlight feature is actually sleep apnea detection, not the size. We have to see how well sleep apnea detection works. Another FDA clearance situation for Apple. Did either of you have a moment during the keynote where you were like, oh, God, am I about to find out I have sleep apnea?

1:14:20Like, I don't know if this is a thing I want to know about myself. I'm ready. I'm ready to learn. I'm open to new experiences. I don't like wearing a watch when I sleep. you don't sleep with your watch no i just no thank you i would say truly sincerely my single favorite thing about the apple watch is how good an alarm clock it is for my body like it wakes me up better and easier and more pleasantly than any alarm clock i've ever tried and that is like two-thirds of the reason i wear it but when do you charge it uh i so i actually this is the reason faster charging is very exciting to me i charge it typically i will take it off when i go to shower in the morning and I will just leave it on the charger until it's full.

1:15:00And sometimes that means I leave it there for five days because I just forget about it. But so the idea of actually being able to like put it down, go shower, come back, and it has charged, I think it was 80 % in 30 minutes it was supposed to be. Yep. If it gets to that, suddenly in my own experience, Apple Watch battery life sort of ceases to be a thing. And I find that very exciting. Yeah. And the battery life's gotten really good over the last few years anyway. The Ultra is pretty good. And I think the Ultra is still rated like double what the Series 10 is. I worry a little about the Series 10.

1:15:36Bigger screen, brighter screen. Thinner. Thinner. Does not typically bode well for good battery. Yeah. Can I just say one thing, random comment on screens? The screens on the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro can now go down to one nit of brightness. It is actually wild to look at. You turn the brightness all the way down. it's like it's just like a ghost of an image it's pretty cool that's actually awesome like somebody who uses my phone in bed more than i'm proud of being able to get it like properly dim having it at one net yeah that's that's the dream like we were talking last week about like e-ink devices and like what if you could make your screen not look so blue and bright like one nitter brightness will do it i don't get you there yeah uh no it was very it was very impressive and then 2000 nits in sunlight which is ridiculous but yeah i really like accidentally flash it on in bed yeah who was it was it craig or somebody else who was like sometimes people look at their watches at an angle and i was like yeah thanks dude people look at their watches the viewing angle of the watch the series 10 oled is i mean like again if you watch this keynote the number of times where they explain things like basic facts about screens as though no one has seen a screen before is hilarious.

1:16:56Wide angle OLED. That's like a whole phrase they used. Also, and I say this in all compliments, as though Apple doesn't already make the best screens consistently in the screen. They're like, this piece of garbage series is not on display. You couldn't even look at it from an angle. It's like, you're fine, actually. No one was worried about that before. No, not a real thing. Wait, I want to know about the blacks. Talk about the blacks. you you looked at both watches sincerely it seems like if apple had just gotten on stage and said we've changed nothing except both watches now come in black everybody would have been psyched and gone home happy you've seen them both how do they look in black to be clear they said we've changed nothing on one watch which now comes okay fair and i was like i'm gonna buy that watch there's a new watch face that does sort of a swirly thing where you can't really tell what time it is that's fun i was talking to an apple person wearing the black ultra too and i i don't even know what that person was saying i was just like staring at the watch i was like what if i just now that watch belongs to you what if that was on my wrist and not yours uh so that's great i'm gonna buy that one the the shiny aluminum it is shiny aluminum black like it's it's it's fine like i don't know what to say about it it's it's a it's a black metallic like the shiny worries me because of scratches.

1:18:15Should I be worried about scratches? You know, that thing was so covered in fingerprints when I looked at it, I couldn't tell you if it was scratched or not. Also not great. Yeah. It's just not what you want. Did you notice my pictures of the phone? Also, Fingerprint City, but everybody puts the phone in cases, so who knows? Yeah, it's been true for years. Every Apple product is Fingerprint City at this point. But you don't have to put it in cases. Ceramic case. The watch, you don't put it in a case. By the way, the back of the Apple Watch ultra 2 has special black sapphire glass i'm gonna i'm gonna buy this product so fast for no reason it's so stupid i've been trying to decide so i have a series 8 that is fine it is like it is a perfectly serviceable apple watch and i found myself looking at the 10 being like well it's great looking and i like the black a lot but is there anything here that i'm like i need this upgrade yes for some reason i landed on bigger screen seems good and the faster charging would be really helpful that's the only two things i landed on yeah from an eight that's not a big jump i mean the sleep apnea will be nice again do i want to find out if i have sleep apnea you're gonna find out if you're am i ready for this information about myself every night alex you just said the sleep apnea will be nice yeah it will be you get it actually you get the watch and then you get sleep apnea.

1:19:34David is married and being married means you have a built-in sleep apnea detector. Or do you? She doesn't like how I breathe when I'm awake. So I think sleep would not be a problem. It's for real. If you are married and you can't reliably tell if you have sleep apnea, you just need to show them the list of sleep apnea symptoms and you'll be fine. Yeah, that seems right. All right. We need to take one more break and then we're going to do a lightning round of other Apple stuff and then we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital.

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1:21:17All right, we're back. So that was all the big stuff. There's lots of software stuff to talk about, but I feel like that's actually probably better for next week. Or when it ships. It's all shipping next week. all the well all the new os's are shipping next week all the apple intelligence stuff is shipping someday in the unknown future if you are a new apple os and you don't have apple intelligence are you a new apple os yet yeah dude have you seen how you can move the icons around on the grid now game changer i actually i'm i'm soliciting notes we're gonna have to review these phones I don't know how without Apple intelligence.

1:21:58I'm legitimately like, how are we going to write reviews of phones that will only exist in this form for some number of weeks before the big update comes? It's so funny. I'm less optimistic than that. I think there is a super solid chance that the actual experience of Apple intelligence is not going to show up in a real way until the iPhone 17. I would agree. Sure. Like, I think these phones are the iPhone 15 plus the camera control. And I think everyone who has to review this phone is going to have to spend a deeply hilarious amount of time litigating a button in a way that I think is so fun and so vergy and I'm very jealous to not get to do it.

1:22:43But like the AI stuff is going to come in these like tiny bits and pieces. And if we weren't in a crazy AI moment where everybody had to pretend to have an AI strategy or Wall Street would run away from you, we would just call these things software. They're just features of apps. and supposedly we're going to get game-changing Siri that makes everything better and solves phone interfaces forever someday in the future. I am in no single way holding my breath for any of that to happen on this cycle of this iPhone. Yeah, I agree with you. I'm just saying, I don't think iOS 18 plus camera button is like, there's not a lot there.

1:23:21You know what I mean? As much as I love a camera button and I, most iPhone reviews I've ever written have been long meditations on the camera happy to do it again now with a thrilled to do it again um i just it feels like the reason people will upgrade to this phone is because the ai capabilities will let them do stuff that they couldn't do on their old phone the old phones are very capable of taking a photo yeah i mean to be fair apple has been making this particular case since the ipad earlier this spring Like we're deep into this now. And Apple has been trying to sell you AI ready devices without real AI to do it with for months now.

1:24:03Well, I thought the AI stuff was largely for investors and less for actual people. That was always kind of my read on Apple AI. My number one question is why are they shipping these on September 20th when the AI features are supposed to hit weeks later in October? Again, some features in beta. like i don't know this is but like why aren't that long like fair or have to even have this the thing where you press the button and siri is now the border around the screen instead of the little circle just give me that i i honestly it's so funny you say that i was thinking about that this afternoon if they had just changed nothing else about siri but made it glow around the edges everybody immediately would have been like oh siri's better it would have it would have it would have given everybody like a 10 % boost in Siri confidence.

1:24:54Anyway, I'm open to feedback from y 'all on how to review these devices or when, because I'm honestly curious what would be the best service to everyone. Like a review of a phone that if you buy in November has nothing to do with the phone that you bought is kind of weird in my opinion. Yeah. What you're actually getting at, what I would say was the kind of biggest vibe question that I had for you as somebody who's in the room, because Alex and I were not in the room. And I would say the overwhelming sense that I got from people both at The Verge and elsewhere, I was getting text messages from people who were like, this is the most boring iPhone launch I can remember.

1:25:31Same. That like as a big flagship September event, we talk about this every year, like this is Apple's moment to speak to everyone. Like it is the one that everybody pays attention to. And I would say the overwhelming perception was that it was kind of a bust. How did it feel in the room as it was happening. I think this is why I kept noting the room was full of people who were just excited to be there. Right. So they curated the excitement they needed and it was packed and people were freaking out and they were doing the thing. That's not to say I wasn't running around trying to take photos and upload them as fast as I can.

1:26:05I like doing it. It's the funnest part of the job. But they had made the space feel very excited. And then you take a step out of it and you're like, okay, these are very iterative phones, like super iterative phones. The headphones upgrades, apart from the 1.5 new models, are iterative to the point where like, one of them didn't even change at all. The watch upgrades are also pretty iterative. There's not any I gotta have it upgrades, unless you really give a shit about the camera button. All of those upgrades are in the software. that's Apple's magic right hardware plus software plus services and we're just waiting on the big stuff like if Apple had said Siri can now do this like app coordination assistant thing that everyone wants to get to I think everybody would have upgraded the phones tomorrow yep right there were a bunch of moments in the keynote like that actually like the there was a moment where in the visual intelligence demo the guy holds up a phone to a it was like a concert poster or something I I think some kind of event.

1:27:16And it was like, it'll input the information directly into your calendar when you take that picture. And I was like, if that's, I will buy any phone that will do that for me tomorrow. That's awesome. And it just doesn't exist. There was also another extremely weird demo where somebody walked up to a dog and like asked the phone what kind of dog it was. And our own Kylie Robinson was like, why would you do that? Why would you walk up to a stranger's dog? Just holding your phone out like this. Why wouldn't you just ask them what kind of dog it is? that gave me the same vibes as the the gemini demo where uh they were like use this to write a for your kid to write a letter to an olympian it's like oh maybe you don't understand how people live and exist in the world like this is actually like bleak as hell and not cool and exciting technology the dog one i did think because that's the same demo you do with the meta ray-bans is you put them on you're like what car is that what dog is that but but the thing was he he walked up to the person holding the dog.

1:28:11And the intimation is that what he said is not, oh, that dog is so cute. What dog is that? He said, can I take a picture of your dog with my phone? Yeah. Because I want to know what kind of dog it is and I don't want to talk to you. And I would point out, you often encounter cars with their owners. If you encounter a dog without its owner, that's like a little bit of an emergency. Yeah. You're not like, what breed is this? I better find out. You're like, hold on, stop here, dog. You pause. I need to pose. I just think that is overwhelmingly the reason why at a distance, this one was a little content-free.

1:28:46Like even the feature boxes, right, the bento boxes they put up at the end of every segment, go look at the iPhone 16 feature box. It says USB-C on it. It's like, oh, we didn't even have enough to fill up the squares. and so like these are super iterative phones which whose key feature is the ram and the memory bandwidth to enable all of the ai stuff which isn't shipping right so like why would you be excited about it and i think that's really the gap i think they should have said we're shipping these phones with the first wave of beta features and just held them three weeks into october but apple sells so many phones i don't think they can do that yeah yeah they couldn't afford to hold it that long they needed to get it out and if the software is not ready so be it and this goes back alex to what you were saying is like the the reason you do that is wall street right like yeah this is not a thing you do in the service of good user experience this is a thing you do because we are in a moment where if you appear to be behind on ai you will be punished and that is right or wrong that is the world in which we live and so everyone is out here announcing features that aren't going to ship anytime soon or ever because you have to and it's so un-apple like to do that yeah it's so so so odd to see apple tell you its plans like this is not what apple does this is not what apple has ever done and and it has to because it can't build the things yet did you guys also notice that it was doing a weird thing where they didn't call it ai they called it like apple intelligence but they wouldn't call it ai they would always default to machine learning I clocked once that he said the word AI, but every other one was some, like, dance around it.

1:30:26Yeah, yeah. Like, they were really going out of their way to not sound like Google, to not sound like their competitors in this space, which is kind of interesting. I mean, they have branded Apple intelligence. They're fine with it. They do have their own AI. Yeah, they have multiple AI models. At one point, I believe, with the watch, if you go back and watch it, they point out that they're running many models to enable the features you enjoy today. And it's like, great. Right. So it's the same as the one I have today. Thanks. Yeah, that was just like, why are you talking to investors during this infomercial?

1:30:57You're trying to sell me these phones to the point where you even have buy now, like, verbiage in your thing. Stop it. It was weird. But let's talk about Fine Woven because it feels like Fine Woven might be gone. Yeah, this is good. Before we leave, let's just, a little bit of accessory news and then we're going to get out of here. Is this an accessory lightning round? this is an accessory lightning round um but the way we're gonna do this is i'm going to tell you what's happening and if you're not interested just don't say anything and we'll keep going it's gonna be great i love this this is great thing number one apple has a faster mag safe charger to go with the iphone 16s uh chi 2 which i believe this might be the first time a phone company has actually said chi 2 out loud on stage about a phone that people in america can buy that's very exciting yep i'm excited we're gonna charge faster yay great we love a fast charge uh i said this in the lightning blog but there was a time that neil i made fun of me for having a mag safe charger i i was we were we were in a restaurant somewhere and i slapped the puck onto the back of my phone and neil i made fun of me for like 10 straight minutes i'm sorry if you have a wire connected to a battery why would you pick the least efficient way of charging your phone with that wire because it it it thwocks i love the thwock yeah it's good noise i will say i'm a full convert into mag safe batteries actually i should have one over here that's what i do now is like the mag safe battery packs because you have to deal with the wires yeah they get hot and it's inefficient and if you have a wire connected to a battery pack david you should just plug it into the bottom of the phone fuck anyway uh next up like you're mentioning crayons so i would actually like you to explain this to me because we thought fine woven was probably dead apple didn't say fine woven is dead but it kind of seems like fine woven kind of seems like yeah fine woven being apple's terrible bad take on leather accessories this was their their their cloth accessory that was really just plastic that was meant to like replace all the leather and be a lot more eco-friendly and that's probably true but it also sucked and it got dirty and gross and nobody liked it.

1:33:08Like what if it was leather, but like much worse? Yeah. Like much, much worse. And now you can't buy a phone case made of fine woven. There's a wallet and that's about it. We've reached out. We haven't heard anything back yet. The wallet strikes me as one where they're like, look, we have a bunch of these. We might as well keep it for sale. It's like Google with the Chromecast now where they were like, they have the TV streamer. They're clearly out on the Chromecast, but they're like, look, there's a room full of these. like if you want to buy it please buy it fine woven has been dead i would say since about like a day after it launched the wallet doesn't require the size and shape of the phone right so like you can't just sell off the excess right you have an iphone 15 pro max faces and you don't make iphone 15 pro maxes anymore you're you're just like i don't can you recycle it we recycle everything around here just turn it into something else johnny fine woven is not fine yeah yeah all right next up i would say one of the stranger stories of the day uh beats famous music company you may have heard of them before they make headphones lebron james wears them uh made a bunch of iphone 16 cases sure beats beats made iphone 16 cases it feels like a real it feels like they've been trying to figure out where beats sits in their lineup especially as airpods get better and their idea is what if beats is budget you do cases now oh interesting do you do you think that's where this is going interesting yeah because because they are putting the good tech in their headphones but the headphones just also aren't don't have that that kind of cash that that quality feeling right um i just feel like my read on it was that apple was just like let beats be beats i just want to say to everybody listening to this by the way nila is furiously googling because he doesn't believe me that I got this right, which is how wild it is that Beats is making iPhone 16 cases.

1:35:05I'm just like reading this news. Neelai had to fact check me on the Vergecast because he didn't believe me that Beats was making iPhone 16 cases. This is all you need to know about this story. They're$49. They exist. That's it. They are cases. They're cases. They look like the Apple cases, but they're by Beats for some reason. They're so weird. It's so weird. yeah it's very it's very strange i was instructed if i had nothing to say to say nothing this is no this is great i'm into it perfect moving on uh bunch of new watch bands bunch of new band colors can i interest you in in that get one on etsy it'll be a quarter of the price or buy the verge's own nomad blurple band which is a big hit at apple park today oh yeah yeah many many compliments it looks great i bought that one which is very good And I also bought six Apple Watch bands on Amazon for like eight bucks.

1:36:06Loving bits. Can't recommend it highly. Those ones are slowly poisoning David and you should buy the Verges blurple sport band. I do occasionally look at my wrist just to make sure it's not like turning a color I'm not psyched about. So far, so good. But we're okay. The biggest question I have about accessories, Eli, is how the camera control is going to work with cases. This is a question a lot of people are asking. It's this capacitive kind of flush control, which seems like if you have any kind of raised case at all, is going to be hard to find a way to get your finger inside of. Do you have a sense of how this might work?

1:36:41Yeah. Although I think my worry is different than anyone else's worry. Can you make a capacitive button on a case connect to a capacitive button on the phone? It's like pretty well unsolved, right? They just have to be conductive to each other. And so Apple's own cases have a button that touches the other button and you're good. If there's any play at all, there's any space between the two buttons, then that like push a little bit is going to get weird. I haven't seen this thing in a case yet, but already it's like to push it to do the light tap to bring up the various menus or controls is already like you have to think about how hard you're pushing so you don't accidentally push the button.

1:37:22And so if you have a little play and then you have to push, like if you have a cheap case or a bad case, that might get weird. remains to be seen. That's why Beats is leading the way. Don't worry, Beats has it covered. They got you. Jimmy Iovine has it covered. Don't worry. See, everything Jimmy Iovine's like, ever just like looks in the direction of Apple Park. He's like, man, I really pulled one over. Yeah, he's like, I have so much money and we still make headphones. There is a brief, a real period, a real thing that happened is that Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, and Trent Reznor were Apple employees and they had no titles except for Jimmy and Dre.

1:37:59is that true though that was their title that was your time jimmy and well that's my title was was dre jimmy and jimmy was dre that's that's what i want it'd be great if apple is like another person gets the title of dre when dre left you gotta backfill the dre

1:38:18there's some like brand new engineers like you're dre now like just putting all those weights into a product to make it feel better yeah all right we have gone way over we all need to go to sleep and nilai needs to go figure out how to move this lamp nilai any any parting thoughts for us anything we missed any big feelings about the the apple stuff today before we get out of here i am very curious to see how people want us to to evaluate these products right like i i don't i don't disagree with the sense that this was kind of a a small event in its way. I wonder if the products will feel bigger with the Apple intelligence features.

1:38:55So let me know how you want us to talk about these because I suspect the answer is not just as regular new phones. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think especially if you have like a thing about the camera or the camera control or like a specific thing you're looking at that's like more than just my phone is dying. I need a new one. I'll buy the new one. But it's like, is this worth the upgrade yeah i want to know all your questions about is this worth the upgrade so you can email vergecast the verge.com call the hotline 866 verge 11 we have uh i would say a bunch more apple stuff to do over the next couple of weeks so we'll have lots of time to talk about this send us all of your questions for now that is it that's the verge cast rock and roll

1:39:40and that's it for the verge cast this week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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