The Vergecast - Apple iPhone XS event, iPhone XR, and Apple Watch Series 4

Episode Date: September 13, 2018

Vergecast hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn attended the Apple event on Wednesday, and they were able to get their hands on the new iPhones and Apple Watch that were on display. After the event, they headed to our San Francisco studio to Skype with Paul Miller to record their first impressions, a summary of the event, and lay to rest some conspiracies. That’s all you really need to know before listening! 3:11 - Apple’s AirPower charger is still a no-show, one year after it was first announced 5:18 - September Keynote 2018 — Opening Film 08:33 - iPhone XS and XS Max: hands-on with Apple’s giant new phone 13:18 - The 3 best and worst features of the iPhone XS and XS Max 20:32 - iPhone XS Max overview 31:16 - Apple iPhone XR hands-on: the new default iPhone 47:15 - Paul’s weekly segment “E-skates arm race” 49:39 - Apple watch4 hands-on: bigger is better 1:04:15 - Apple adds lyric search, phone calls, and multiple timers to the HomePod 1:14:47 - What’s worse than a dongle? No dongle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by the Audi ETRON. The electric car has always raised questions. Can I contend with the elements? What's the range? With high-speed charging, long-range capabilities, and quadro all-wheel drive, the fully electric Audi E-Tron could be the answer. Visit AudiUSA.com slash E-Tron to learn more and stay informed. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of humanity.

It's an Apple Day. I'm feeling myself expansive. This is the first podcast that has ever been released. That was our whole vibe today. It doesn't matter if you are aware of other podcasts. This podcast is the first one. Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli. I'm in San Francisco.

Yeah, so am I. With Dieter. I'm your little buddy, like Gilligan. I'm your Gilligan. Oh, that definitely makes me the skipper. Paul. And the Virchcast is a flagship. It's perfect, y'all.

Paul, are you the doctor? Most of what I know about Gilgan's Island. comes from a parody in veggie tails. And Bob the Tomato's the captain, Larry would be the skipper. I don't know who. I'll be an asparagus. You're an asparagus. It's Apple Day here, a national holiday for Verge listeners.

Yeah. I hope you took the day off work. By the time you're listening to this, it will not be Apple Day anymore. But you should know we're recording this at the end of Apple Day, and therefore we are loopy. I am, yeah, I'm loopy. Yeah. All I've eaten today is energy bars. Mm-hmm.

And then one sandwich that I dropped. Deeder got to the spaceship at like six in the morning. Seven. I got there slightly after that, and it's been a full day, and now it is 7 o'clock at night here. So we've been thinking about these phones or participating in Apple's phone party for a full 12 hours. Paul, how's your day been? Well, I had a nice breakfast. And I watched the Apple event on.

an Apple TV in my house. What was your vibe? Because Virchcats listeners know when we live blog these things, we often don't really remember what happened very well. This is why I'm just going to spend this entire Vergecast apologizing, screwed up a spec in the hands-on video of the iPhone 10S. But, you know, I took a lot of photos, but like I didn't absorb it in the way that normal people absorb it.

So I got back and normal people were telling me, man, well, that was me. What was your take on it, Paul? Well, I feel like any Apple event that doesn't have a one more. thing crazy surprise always feels like a terrible disappointment. So I was kind of trying to guard against that. I felt like it was like totally just straightforward and normal. It was just like a really tight ship. But then like on Twitter, you know, people are saying like, well, they had to cut a bunch of stuff out of the event and then there's an AirPods conspiracy. And so they padded it for length. And I don't know, it felt very straightforward. But when I was trying to describe

But afterwards, it's like, what happened? Well, there's a bigger phone and the phones are faster. Yeah. Yeah. That's what happened. So let's start with the conspiracy, because that's the true fun. The most fun, yeah. I think we can, like, lay it to rest.

Can we? Yeah. Okay. No. It's not fun at all. Well, first we're going to talk about it as though it's real, but then we're going to lay it to rest. Oh, okay.

Do you understand? So here's the conspiracy. Apple announced the air power charging mat and said there was going to be a new case for AirPods that was compatible with it. The air power charging mat, if you remember, is last year when they put out the iPhone 10 with wireless charging. They said air power is coming next year. And they showed all these videos of like, you come home, it's a big, it's like a oval-shaped

wireless charging mat. You throw your AirPods down, your Apple Watch, your phone, everything's charging. There's animations on the phone of like the AirPods case spinning through space and land. It was very impressive. Yeah. And at the same time that you do that, that is the air power. Air power is the thing that would turn on multiple alarms on the home pod. So we really wanted it.

Yeah, they can't ship multiple timers without wireless charging. By the way, that was announced today that multiple timers are coming to the home pod. At the very end, they're like, oh, yeah, the home pod still exists. Multiple timers are coming. I don't usually clap at events. And I gave them but one clap. So it's a year later. Yep.

New iPhone event. Everyone's expecting air power will be announced. Here it is. The Oval of your dreams. Yeah. There'll be the new AirPods. There's been rumors of AirPods too. Nothing.

Less than nothing. They scrubbed the air power thing from their website. Yeah. You can still find a photo of it there apparently, but apparently like the listing for it has gone. Yeah. It's just disappeared. Yeah. They don't want people to talk about it anymore.

It never happened, actually. Yeah. And they were like, I wasn't going to cost every single Apple person I talked to about this particular pad. I had other things to do. But like, you could tell that like a bunch of stuff was organized such that like it wouldn't come up naturally. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the conspiracy theory.

Yeah. And I thought this was a good joke from Apple. I appreciated this. Before the event starts. Yes. It looks like Tim Cook has a DM fail on Twitter. It's great. And he just tweets out, no.

Period. Is there somebody can get it to me quickly? Yeah. Okay. And we all like, get Tim Cook what he needs. We're joking. DM fail. He doesn't have the phone.

And the event starts with a video. Mission Impossible. The Mission Impossible theme. There's like a young Apple staffer. She's got a, like a Halliburton case. And she's running across the campus. She's jumping. She's flying.

She falls down. It slides into an elevator. Kevin Lynch, the guy who runs the Apple Watch, is like, beaming in and out. It was silly. Yeah. The case is revealed to have the clicker. Yeah. Tim Cook walks on stage as a clicker.

So how is Apple not using an Apple product as a clicker? Well, I think they had to, they had to like, the clicker should be watches. Yeah. Anyhow. Okay. So this is all like a big joke. This DM fail fed into this thing. It was great.

But in the course of this video, she's running across the campus. Yeah. She says, hey, Siri. She does. And her AirPods respond. Yeah. But it's possible she may or may not have touched the watch before she said it. Unclear.

Unclear. I just rewatched it. She does not touch the watch. You said she doesn't touch the watch. It is tight on her face and shoulders, so you can't see her hands, but she's holding something in her arms. That's true. And you can see that.

So everyone says this video is made when AirPods 2 are coming that support ambient, Hey, Siri. You understand it all. Yeah. So this is the evidence you have that it was cut. It was cut because air power isn't ready. There's other evidence that is not. as strong as that, such that, like, they, they padded the thing out by having Lisa Jackson come on

and talk about the environment, which, no, that's not fair. Apple actually does care about it, and Lisa Jackson does actually do incredibly good work there. And to say that, like, her, she was, like, the filler because they had to fill the time that was going to be spent by something else is, like, not something I believe. I think Apple would want to put her on stage to talk about their environmental efforts no matter what. Yeah.

This is why I'm saying I think we can lay this to rest. I don't think we can lay this to rest at all. Wait, wait, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, 10,000 tons of 10. Awesome. Ten or. Yeah. Not going to be mine.

Great. But I saw the video. She said, hey, Siri, to her AirPods. Huh. It's just taking a dark turn. Yeah. Our app is about to be removed from the app store. Anyhow, I think that stuff.

And then the other one was like, they spent so much time talking about how much faster the chip is. It's an S year. It's all they do in this year. It's all they got. Yeah. So. I think the conspiracy is it's not ready, and they scrubbed it from the website. I do not think it is true that it was supposed to be in this event.

And at the last minute, it was taken out. Right. It's not like it was ready at the last minute. And then, like, Johnny Eye was like, I don't, what if it was a square? You know, like, right? Like, they haven't fit. They either know it works or it doesn't work. Right.

And so, like, maybe the deadline, the deadline wasn't yesterday. Right? They either knew they were going to be able to ship it at volume. Yeah. Or not a while ago. Yeah. So like that's what I think you later on. They could have edited the video to something.

Well, okay. So I have a potential segue where we could actually start talking about the phone. So I do read your Twitter, N Eli. And thank you, Paul. You retweeted John Gruber something about headphones and how there's going to be USBC iPads. And there's too many, too many different things to plug into too many different things. And you were like, well, you know, there's a simple solution. And Apple has found the simple solution.

The simple solution is put wide stereo speakers on the iPhone, and we're just done with headphones. It's all over. Oh, God. So let's go into the phone. Look, I think the conspiracy theory about air power is fun. It was like the talk of the event here. Everyone was chatting about it. But they released stuff.

Yeah. They didn't release conspiracy theory. They released stuff. Real stuff. Real stuff. So let's start with the 10S, the 10S max. Yeah. The 10S.

Max Patel. You know, her middle name is Saya, which means shadow. So I'm just going to go with that. Yeah. They're not going to steal that one from me. Yeah, well, they do really want to break into the Indian market. They're going to name the next color. It's going to be shadow black.

Yeah, I'm doomed. Anyway, these are sort of the easier ones to talk about. Yeah. The 10R is, I think, a very complicated thing to talk about. Let's start with the 10S. All right. So, Paul, to your point about wide stereo, they made a huge deal about the speakers. I asked them about it.

Here is the situation with the speakers on the 10S. 10S. The 10 had stereo speakers. And the way they accomplished that was the regular speaker on the bottom and they were able to crank up the headset speaker to act as the left channel or the right channel depending on your holding it. The other channel. What they've done with the 10S is they've apparently matched the speakers. So now they're like the same thing. So they're totally matched. and because they're now totally matched, they're able to do some like sound expander algorithms to make it. I think they're basically just like, you know, like SRS audio on your old creative soundblaster speakers.

They click the checkbox that says yes. Exactly. Anyway, but we listened to it at the event. Yep. They sound good. It sounded like, yeah, it didn't sound. It was not an order of magnitude better than the iPhone 10, from what I could tell. We were not like a loud.

Yeah, so it's hard to know. But they spent a lot of time in the keynote on it, and I'm just going to say five syllables. Are you ready? At the end of these five syllables. At the end of these five syllables, you will understand my point, I hope, implicitly. You have to guess my point after I say these five syllables. Are you ready? Okay.

Who wants to go first on the guess, Paul or Eli? Paul. Paul. Okay, you ready, Paul? Here we go. H, T, C, sir, round. Do you remember this phone? Oh, I reviewed this phone.

I had to spend like three days of my life pretending this phone was my primary phone in New York City. Wait, wait, wait, you have to explain it to it. I mean, I remember HTC, the company. So HTC made a Windows phone called The Surround. And back then, there were a lot of phones that were horizontal sliders. So you'd slide a keyboard out and you'd get a landscape keyboard on it, landscape slider. But the HTC surround, it didn't slide out a keyboard. it slid out about a half an inch

and revealed a speaker and then there was a kickstand and the idea was you wouldn't need to buy a Bluetooth speaker because the HTC round would have you you'd be fine. It's all you'd need. When you slid up the speaker, there was a button that changed the timber of the sound. That

button, I don't know if they had branded this by then, but later on HTC tried to make a big deal out of boom sound. Anyway, okay, so your point is all audio is gimmickery. My point is If a phone company spends more than 45 seconds talking about the speakers on their phone, that means that they don't want to talk about the other parts.

Okay. 10S. A12 bionic chip. Yes. A12 bionic chip is a big deal. I'm just doing the specs. Run the specs. 10S.

Yes. A12 bionic chip. Yep. Slightly upgraded rear cameras. Yes. Optical image stabilization on both the wide and the telly. Hoor. Deeper pixels.

New pixels. New pixels. The pixels are deeper. God. Yeah. No, they used to be 3.1 microns and now they're 3.5.

Okay. I'm just telling you the information. I don't know what that means. They can collect more light in their little pixel buckets. That's facts. I want to tell you. Basically, the sensor is better and low light.

Better low light video. Yeah. Better IP 68. Yeah, better water resistance. Yeah. Dual sim. Sort of. Well, so the dual sim is actually.

super interesting. Yeah. So everywhere in the world, except for China, there's a regular SIM card. They will ship you the iPhone with a physical SIM card in it. Yep. If you buy it from a carrier. Yeah. But that's weird because they also have the ESIM. Yeah. Which you can configure to a lot of carriers, just like the iPad. So the iPad doesn't have a SIM card slot. It has an ESIM. The Apple Watch does have a SIM. iPad also has a SIM card slot. They have both. It has both? Yeah. Wait, can you guys clarify something for me? The way I imagined it when they were describing this is that I'd set it up with e-sim with my primary carrier. No.

And then just swap out physical sims when I'm traveling. It's actually more interesting than that. So first of all, Apple, good job not saying that you were the first to do this, because the first mass market phone to do this with an e-sim plus a regular sim was the pixel two. Okay. And you want two sims because you want to use them both, right? You want to have data on one and phone calls on the other. You want to switch between them or you got a work phone and a personal phone or whatever.

And so what normally you have to do is you have to pick one, and then the other one goes away. It, like, becomes dormant on most phones, and especially in the pixel this happens. What Apple has done in iOS 12, apparently, is they have allowed both Sims to just be active and running and there all the time, which is really smart. And it's great, but then they're also making a variant of it for China that has two SIM card slots. Yep. And no ESIM? No ESIM. Because China doesn't allow ESIM.

And so here's my thought. The Chinese government doesn't let ESIM. Right. How much must Apple want ESIM to happen that they went through the work of making two versions of the iPhone 10 that like physically have to be different because of the SIM card slot? Or how much do they hate the idea of physical Sims that they didn't make two versions and that the SIM card slot on the American, you know, rest of world iPhone 10S could potentially fit two SIM cards slots, but they're only letting you use. one because you have to use a ESIM for the other ones. It's like sealed off. Yeah. So people are trying to try an angle grinder to cut it open. Either way, like Apple loves them some ESIM. They do love ESIM. The argument that I've heard is it is far more convenient. So if you

have an iPad right now, you can have this experience with an iPad. Yeah. So I have an iPad with a cellular connection. It has an ESIM in it. I light it up on T-Mobile for like five days. Like I'm traveling. I just want to light this up. I let it for five days. I pay the money. Five days over. The contract's over. Yeah. It's. It's. kind of amazing. It's also kind of expensive. They haven't gotten the support from carriers that I wish they did to get ESIM going.

That's the fact that, and then you can take that same thing, don't have to change a SIM card or whatever, I can travel with it, push the sell button, whatever. Now I'm over there and three in England is going to be my carrier. That's all that's cool, right? I think what they're looking

at with their ESIM implementation is not just two, because what's really cool is they can store multiple ESIM configurations. Right. And you can have like 50 plans. Right. And just software rotate each of them in.

Yeah. But only two can be active at once. Which, by the way, is more than most phones. Most ones are only one. So good job. Yeah. So, look, that's really neat. Yeah.

I do think that they're all in on ESIM. They would prefer to have two lit up ESIMs. Anyway, so you get the iPhone. It's got your SIM card in the box. Yep. You can light up the other M1 if you want. So dual SIM support. The display is the same.

They said they did something to it. I asked about this. During the photos section, they said that they have 60% more dynamic range that they can then show on the display. So the camera can capture more dynamic range, which is then displayed on this place. Again, this is what they told me in the hands-on. So that was super not clear watching the keynote because I thought it meant better HDR. When you're watching a movie, you're going to get better HDR because you have 60% more. something yeah at least what i got from them in the hands-on when i asked about that specifically so

the screen is better well it's we were really talking about the camera and sneaky sneaky and they did this another screen step i need to me a couple of the youtube video this is when you should do it i did it again so uh they also they did a thing where they talked about the the touch response is 120 so it's very very responsive to touch but they presented in such a way that it sounded like it was like actually refresh rate. And I knew it was fuzzy. And so I got to the hands-on and I was packed in, just packed in, waited forever and ever, reading the notes, trying to remember the keynote, furiously doing the stuff. And I knew not to say refresh rate, because I knew that would imply promotion. And then I said it anyway. And the worst part of this story, I just want everyone to know.

I've made mistakes and hands-ons in the past. And I've been railed at by YouTube commenters. And I've been railed up by people on Twitter. I've had people email me and DM me and blah, blah, blah. and I will take it. It was a mistake I made in the moment. I feel bad about it. Give me a little bit of credit. It was a stressful situation, whatever. All of that is mortifying,

but none of it is a tenth as mortifying as the fact that as I was doing that hands-on trying to give that VO, the person standing just to my right that you can't see out of frame is Marquez Brownlee, just standing there watching me do my thing waiting for his turn at the phone. That sucks. Yeah. I tweeted a... I screwed up a screen spec in front of Marquez Brownley. Okay.

I definitely tweeted photos of the phones today. Yeah. And then I tweeted a photo of Marquez. Uh-huh. And the photo of Marquez has like five times the likes of the photos. He's better looking than the phones. It's true. By the way, here's the line from Apple's website.

Your HDR photos will have 60% greater dynamic range. Huh. So they're able, I don't know. Okay. I don't know what to tell you. The screen is the same. Yeah. How deep are the pixels on the screen?

The buckets. The little light buckets got a little bit deeper. How deep are your eyes light buckets? My eyes are deep like the ocean. It's been such a long day. I could go swimming in those pixel light buckets. We're done now. And then there's the iPhone 10S max.

There's one more thing I want to say with the 10S before we move on. And I'm losing it. I'm losing it. Oh, this also applies to the max. There is a 64 gig base model, which is pretty good. then 256 and then the top tier is now 512. That's a lot. It's not a small amount of memory.

There's no expandable. You can get more on a note. Yeah. But yeah. So 5.8 inch iPhone 10S. Yep. The iPhone 10 is discontinued. First time Apple has done this, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they've usually just let the old phones linger. Yeah. I mean, they're still selling iPhone 7. Yeah. They may have killed like the iPhone 2G pretty quick when the 3G came out. I don't recall though.

It doesn't matter. It's over now. Yeah. Moving on. So, yeah. So the 10S is sort of the new 5.8 inch. Hilariously, it is now the small phone. Yeah.

Like the 10R is huge. And the 10S max is even bigger. It's 6.5. What's the 10R? We can't talk about the 10R. It's 6.1. Okay. So the 10S max.

Same phone. Bigger screen. 6.5 inches. 6.5 inches. Yes. 2,68. by 1,242 pixels. Yes. And Apple gets credit.

I think this is the first time that the big phone and the small phone have had the same camera setup, the same exact camera stuff. Yep. Which is how it should be. And I think that's why they're calling it Max and Sonoma Plus. Yeah. I hate it. I'm naming my next baby plus. What a terrible name for Trump.

I'm naming her Siri. We're going to have another kid. I'm going to name her Siri. And she's going to be good at answering questions. Okay, but here's a question. He says in his processor voice, what would you have wanted them to call the two phones? We're making fun of 10S and 10S Max or XS because it's successive and XS Max because there's just too many X sounds in there. But what would you have preferred?

XS and XS Plus. 10. Go just do plus. Screw it. Yeah. That's probably the right answer, right? Yeah. All I know is that their actual branding, iPhone 10 with the S in the box, and then the word max in regular letters after it is a mess.

Yeah. It just looks a mess. Yeah. It's the same with the R. Mm-hmm. It's just messy. Well, and if there's no box and they have to write it out, it's actually a small cap S. And so websites that want to put the name of the phone at a headline have to choose between doing two capital letters.

So it technically matches Apple's branding of having two capital letters. But it looks different than it looks on Apple's website, which has a smaller S. And so some sites are going Big X, little less. It's a lot. Yeah. And then you have the plural of X. The brand of phones with a notch for Apple is iPhone 10. Yes.

And then there's variants of the iPhone 10. So next year there's going to be iPhone 102. It'll be the iPhone 102. No, I think they're going to go with iPhone 10S2. Good God. Or iPhone 10R2. No. Right?

Because they have the R line and the S line. Just stop. Just stop it. James Bear, my creative director, is like, if Apple's going to go with these car-like names, they got it all backwards. The 10S is like the luxury model, but the 10R is like the zippy sport hatchback. Like the type bars. Look, there's just not a lot to say about the 10.

I think this is the thing. Well, okay, okay, people are here. You guys held the phone. Yeah. What's it feel like in the hand? Does it feel... The max is... Does it feel good in the hand?

The 10S max is at once bigger and smaller than you think, right? So it's huge. It's the size of a plus phone. But because of the screen-to-body ratio, it doesn't feel like a surfboard like the plus phones felt like. Yeah. But it's still big. I agree. Like stretching your thumb across the keyboard is still like.

It's a big phone. Like, it's a two-hander of a phone in a way that the regular 10 is not. The keyboard might be slightly lower because I don't think the size of the, the size of like the swipe-up for home thing. Well, no, they still keep a bezel. I don't know, whatever. It didn't spend long enough with it. But it feels better than I expected.

But I was expecting the, like, doop-d-dub-dub of the plus phones. Yeah. The plus phones are, I mean, that entire generation of phones is some of the obvious work apples over-down in phones. Then the other really just great, cool thing is that portrait mode in the camera now lets you adjust the depth of field after the fact. Yeah, no one has ever done that before. Apple announced a lot of things today by saying no one's ever done it before, and they definitely like fudged the edges a lot. So Samsung definitely lets you like screw with the blur.

It's not very good. You know, Apple's whole thing is they capture the depth. So on the 10S, you've got depth from the two cameras on the back. You've got depth because of the true depth system on the front. It is really cool. It creates what they call a segmentation map. Yeah. So it slices the image into depth plane.

They're not the first to do that either, by the way. But just go with me on this way. Other people makes, okay. Who doesn't love a segmentation map? There's a rage in the industry here. You can't walk two feet in Silicon Valley about people talking about segmentation maps. But Apple, when you adjust the depth of field slider, it blurs the segments at different rates. Okay.

So you slide it from F11 to F1.4, whatever the lowest one is. And you can literally watch the far background get blurrier faster than like your shirt collar or whatever. Right, right. That's, it was just really neat. I've never seen anybody do that before. They say they've modeled it after full frame cameras and 52-mill prime lenses. Okay. That's what they told me.

That's legitimately cool. The 10R can't do it because it doesn't have the, it can't create the depth map. with either camera. Yeah. But can the iPhone, it seems like the iPhone 10 could do it. iPhone 10 cannot do it because the neural engine is not present in the iPhone 10. So the size of the neural engine and the A12 bionic is huge.

It's like a bigger percentage. But there's an app of the app store that does this. Sure. But what they told me. So the iPhone 10 maybe can't do it as fast as the 10S. I mean, it's just one of those things where they're like, it's not coming to the iPhone 10.

If you take the photo on a 10S, and send it to the iPhone 10, you can adjust it after the fact. What? But you cannot take the photo on the 10 in adjust it. This is absolutely what they told me. My God. Yeah. I don't know.

Okay. But it's all about the neural engine. The neural engine, it's now a 7 nanometer chip, so the whole thing is smaller. They will pack more transistors into it. Which, by the way, don't want to gloss over 7 nanometer. No, I agree. That's a big, a huge milestone. And it's been kind of a big stumbling block for a lot of companies.

A lot of people are struggling to get to 7 nanometer. I don't even know who manufactures Apple's chips. But that's... It's pretty cool. Yeah, I think it's TSM too. And yeah, so it's 7 nanometers, chips smaller, bigger GPU, the neural engine. The neural engine and the iPhone 10 and the A11 Bionic does like 500 billion operations per second. Okay.

The new one is, okay. The new one does like 6 trillion. It's like crazy. The new one does 5 trillion operations per second. also said that the neural engine is designed so that it can send tasks to the CPU and the GPU. So I'm wondering if those are included in the $5 trillion. My sense of all of this is they think the neural engine is like the future of their processor chain, right?

Like they know CPU, GPU stuff is important. But where they're going with a lot of their AR stuff, with their core ML stuff, with their camera stuff, is they want the neural engine to be far more involved, far more often, so they're just getting it more capacity on the chip. Yeah, and if I'm Google, I'm thinking I should be doing the same thing. They've got like a little chip that does the photo stuff on the pixel. Yeah. But if they're going to be like, if Qualcomm chips are going to be like the albatross hanging

around their neck for a while, like let the rest of Android use that and they should be pushing more and more stuff into the custom TPUs that they can make. Yeah. But like they really need to. And they're going to be behind for a while in terms of this chip stuff until they do. So speaking of Google and this camera, Vlad wrote a piece for us today that was like, Man, the iPhone camera idea sure sounds a lot like the Google Pixel camera idea. Yeah.

So I said it, I think, on the Verchcast last week, Apple really needs to catch up to the Pixel 2 camera. Yep. Once again, they spent their entire event comparing the iPhone to DSLRs. Yep. That's where they want you to think. This is a DSLR quality photo. The answer is that they're still not. They still don't have the resolution.

They definitely, when it comes to dynamic range and color capture, they're doing cooler stuff. and especially the smart HDR, they're doing stuff that no DSLR can do. But just in terms of like pure resolution and low light performance, an RX100 will do better. It's just like plain to see. But they do not compare it against a pixel two, right? They never talk about other smartphones. And I think part of the reason is other smartphones are beating the iPhone 10 camera.

Now they're doing this computational photography thing where they take four frames automatically. They're constantly capturing four frames. Yep. They capture a long frame, a short frame, a long frame and short frame. Then when you hit the shutter button, it decides if there's motion on, like, there's motion happening. It will pick either the long frame or the short frame and then start merging information back into it. That's pretty neat. Yeah.

It's very much what Google is doing. It's very, very close, yeah. Like they're basically, like, they're in the same, I don't know, ballpark. They're in the same pixel bucket. Well, it's adjacent pixel buckets. They can both fit because it's four microns bigger. So that's a 10S. I don't know what else to tell you. You talked about it at length because you get to lace in all the other stuff. It's like the phone. It's the one. Right. It's the top of the line. Johnny I've said it's uncompromising.

Yes, he did. Which surely implies the 10R is compromise. I don't know what else to tell you. But it's the most expensive phone. It's got the OLED screen. It's got 3D touch. It's got all the camera stuff they can throw at it. And now it's time for an ad so that we can tell you about the 10R. Have you ever wished your commute would be easier? MythBuster Carrie Byron finds out how in an advertiser segment brought to you by Audi. Hello, my name is Carrie Byron. I'm a former MythBuster and Seeker of Truth. So I'm always very curious about new technology. Today I'm going to talk to Sven Tieson. Through claims his life is changed for the better after purchasing an electric vehicle.

Sven, you're a self-proclaimed EV evangelist. What is that exactly? I feel like I've got this wonderful gift. that I want to give the world, and that's driving electric. So why am I so keen on driving electric? One, it's way more convenient. I don't have to go to gas stations anymore. Two, I have zero tailpipes, no tailpipes.

All right, Sven, so what's the maintenance like on one of those electric vehicles? It's pretty much windshield wipers and windshield fluid. If you look at the number of parts, there's on the order of a couple thousand moving parts on a gasoline car. and an EV there's on the order of less than 100. So which one is going to break down first? How many EV converts do you think you're responsible for? Well, I'm famous for grabbing the guy with a muscle car parked beside our EV and made him drive our EV around the block.

And he said, an EV is so in my future because he loved the instantaneous torque and the way it handled. Well, there it is. I've seen the light. To learn more about going electric with Audi, check out AudiUSA.com slash E-Tron. That's AudiUSA.com slash E-T-R-O-N. iPhone 10R. The zippy little sports car version. The civic of iPhones.

This thing looks really weird. That's my first take on it. When you hold it in your hands, it looks like they married an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 10. Or an 8 plus to an iPhone 10. So the band is aluminum, the back is glass, it's got the single camera. From the back, you would think it's an iPhone 8 plus. You flip it over, and it's got the edge-to-edge LCD. Except are the bezels bigger?

The bezels are bigger. The bezels are bigger. So here is my theory. This is pure unsubstantiated conspiracy stuff. This is the spicy conspiracy that gets me deplatformed. Okay. You ready for this? Always.

So every other phone that tries to go edge to edge ends up with a chin. Uh-huh. Right? Because they need to stick the display controller somewhere. Right. So Android phones, LCDs that are edge-to-edge with a notch, they still have a chin. Because Apple, with the OLED display, was able to curve the display under the bottom of the phone and mount the controller under the display. Android phones have not been able to do this because you can't curve an LCD in that way.

controller sits the bottom of the phone. There you go. Yeah. How does Apple solve this with their LCD on the iPhone 10R? They just make the bezels bigger all the way around, thus obviating the visual appearance of the chin. So they've tucked all the display controller into a thicker bezel at the bottom and just made the bezels bigger all the way around.

Okay. This is my theory. Sure. Convince me I'm wrong. Isn't that what the people do? There's not a ton of space down. Change my mind. There's not a ton of space down there, though.

There's not. I think they've done some other wacky stuff. I think the reason there's no 3D touch on this phone is related to the fact that they had to make this display work. I choose to believe that the reason there's no 3D touch on this phone is because the product manager who's ever actually in charge of creating this phone is the person at Apple, they're like, you know what, 3D touch is bullshit and I'm not putting it in. Just refuse. Yeah, her name is Amanda. She knows the truth. Hapdic click to me.

Is that what it's called? Oh, it's just a long press that makes the phone vibrate. Yeah, it's still not the tap. engine. So if you do a long press, it goes that's dumb. It's super dumb. Yeah, that's my new band, haptic click, I don't know if you heard of it. It's kind of like a

Maffrock shoegaze thing. So it's like with a touchscreen when you touch a touchscreen, but also there's a vibration. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, so when you long press to let you know that you've... There's no pressure sensitivity. Zero pressure sensitivity. You can squeeze on this thing until the cows come

home, but sometime before that time you will have squeezed long enough and it will click at you. It's just letting you know you've held it down long enough. Right. That's what's happening here. I don't think anyone in the target market of this phone gives one shit about 3D touch. I don't think anyone in the target market of any phone

gives any shit about 3D touch. No, everybody who has it is like, I love the keyboard thing. Like, we're not having this argument. Everybody loves the keyboard thing. All right, well, you can just walk the streets of San Francisco waiting for someone to talk to you about segmentation layers and 3D touch on keyboards. Can I just say one thing about 3D touch?

If you put a long list, like a quiz, like a personality quiz, and listed all the different features on the iPhone that either use long press or 3D touch, and you ask me to tell you which ones are long press and which ones are 3D touch, I would get a nice even 50% correct. So here's the thing about the 10R. It comes in all these colors. Wow, the colors are dope. The colors are amazing.

The coral, the orange is great. And I thought it would be my favorite because I stand for orange phones. I once color-wared iPhone 5 orange, not color-wared, but actually got it reanodized in orange. And I was very excited for it. Then I saw the yellow, and it is so good. Oh, the yellow is horrible. Oh, it's so good. The orange is way better.

I mean, it's not as good as like classic Nokia Windows phone yellows, but like it's a pretty good yellow. It's not a bright yellow. These are all kind of muted colors, but they're still vibrant. Yeah. I don't like the gold iPhone 10S, by the way. We didn't talk about the gold option, but whatever. Apple loves it. I know they do. Apple had people just like hidden in bushes at the event to pop out and be like, have you seen the gold one?

I don't like the gold watches. I don't like the gold phone. Anyway, I love the orange 10R. But I just didn't want you to just. Okay. The colors are beautiful. We have to talk about the colors. The colors are beautiful. So it comes in colors. I think that's going to be attracted to people. It's $750. Yeah. Too expensive. It has an edge to edge screen. So it's got a bigger screen than your iPhone 7 or 6S, whatever you have now. It's huge. This is the phone people are going to buy. So really, here's how I want you to think about it. Here's how I'm thinking about it. This is your headline. The iPhone, well, it's the default iPhone.

But no, there's the iPhone 10R. Yeah. And then for just $250 more, you can add a camera and 3D touch and a nicer screen. It's got the same process. I got the A12 Bionic. But it has a single camera on the back and the same true depth on the front. So you think they've normalized their product line in some way here? Yeah, I think, again, when Johnny Ive says the iPhone 10S is unful,

Uncompromised or utterly uncompromising or whatever he says what they mean is that's the best phone they can build Yeah absolutely this is the best phone we can build this is all we got We'll try again next year, but this is all we can do this year at this scale and also there's a big one now Yeah I think the 10 R just by definition Must be if that one's the uncompromising one Yeah, this is a compromise in some way and I think the compromises are We know people want big screens It's OLED screens are really expensive and made by Samsung

So we're going to go back to our LCD suppliers, bring down the price. The LCD that's going to change the design of the phone in some way. But it turns out, not everybody really wants two cameras. And we can fake portrait mode because of the neural engine anyway. So it can fake portrait mode now in the same way that the pixel can fix, fake portrait mode. And it's great. It'll be a great phone for everybody who has an iPhone 6S and has held on to it. It'll be a great phone for everybody who has an iPhone 7.

A lot of those people don't want a big-ass phone. They end the life to the iPhone SE. No, I think people, more people, a lot of people who, think they don't want a huge phone, do want a huge phone, they just won't admit it. And if you tell them that, they get very mad at you, but, like, it's the truth, you want a big phone. There are a lot of people who just know they want a big phone and will get it. But I think there is, there is a whole where there are a bunch of customers that, like, are still using the SE, right, that still thought the six was too big, that aren't convinced that even the 10S

is like the right size or the 10 is the right size. Well, and the 8's still on sale. Yeah. Right. And I think the iPhone 8 is not like the smallest phone in the lineup. Yeah. So, like, it's still there. But I think the 10R to me is, first of all, it's the most interesting to me because it's the new product. It's the newest thing they made. The 10S is the same design. The 8 is still there.

The 10R is 100% the new product. It's the new design of a product. It's really interesting for a variety of reasons. But what it mostly is notable for is what it doesn't have that the 10S has. But I think the way to think about it is the opposite, which is this is Apple's main phone. And the

10S is like they're their super car phone. I got to say, it really feels like that to me. I felt with the iPhone 8, like, oh, here's our phone for poor people. And I'll be check out this new one for rich people. But now you can get a phone of the tin ilk that seems to operate and look like a tin phone in every sense that you might want it to. And then an enthusiast can pay more for a small phone.

phone or pay more for a huge phone with a slightly better cameras. I think everybody listening to the version to see. It's probably interested in 10. Yeah. I'll be very interested to see if this plays out because I see, I have seen way more iPhone tens than I ever expected to. And maybe there's still more eights, but I can't tell because they look just like sevens and they sevens just look like sixes.

And so I just see that model. I just assume it's one of those. Yeah. Way more people sprung for the iPhone 10 than I expected. And maybe my expectations were off because there was like, all these were in short supply, and there really was short supply for a while until they resolved it. And they resolved it really quickly, fine. Maybe it was more available than I thought it would be.

But I think that more people, at least in America, are going to spring for the 10S if they can, then they will. But honestly, I have a 10. I am super unconvinced that I should upgrade. Yeah, I don't know that anyone should upgrade from a 10. Yeah. Unless all you're really going to get is... The neural engine, a bigger neural engine, a galaxy brain. You're going to be able to edit your photo, whatever.

If you're going to spend... Apps launched three times faster. If you're going to spend another $1,100 because you want better... 30%. 30%. ...boka on your phones. You should buy an RX100 mark six. Yeah.

I'm like kind of, like, that's where you're at, right? Yeah. If that's the thing that's going to make you spend $1,100 for the 10S max, then... Neil is trolling me right now because he knows that I broke my... I broke my RX.X.4. I didn't treat it... I didn't treat it good. So the front of it got dented, and that meant that the lens fins couldn't open and close.

And I needed a – I thought I needed a camera – I ended up using a cannon for the hands-ons, but I was like, I need a camera. I have to have – I have to own a camera. So – and I have to own a camera that I know how to use, and I have to own a camera that I can get right now before the Apple event. So I went to Best Buy, and I was like, well, I'm buying this $1,200 camera. Yeah. And I shouldn't have done that because it's expensive, but I'm probably going to keep it. I don't think that we've talked enough about the 10Rs display. Yeah, by the way, you should keep that camera.

Everyone should have that camera. Yeah, let's get into the display. Can you explain anti-aliasing corners? Okay, well, let's start at the beginning. First of all, Apple is referring to this as the liquid retina display. Yeah. Why? Because first what you do is...

Because it's full of pixel buckets that are full of liquid. sloshing around in there. It's the liquid retina display. Liquid crystal. As you know, in addition to liquid retina, there's solid retina and solidus retina. And they're the three clone brothers of big boss. Never mind. That's a metal choice. That's straight metal gear. Oh, my God. Liquid retina. I don't think they've just cut the display. I don't think they can just cut the display the way that you can just like cut the display. Like LC displays. Counterpoint. Essential phone. Because it has a But I think they do the anti-Iallos thing too. Okay.

Right. So I took some macro photos of this thing, and you can definitely see around the curve, they're lighting up some pixels a little less brightly. Okay. I think that's all that means, because you have to cut it on the pixel. Yeah. So to make it look like the curve, they're anti-aliasing that sort of jagged edge. It's neat.

Yeah. Whatever it is, it's neat. It looks totally fine in person. But if you are like me and you immediately see a new screen and stick a macro lens on it, you will see it, which is cool. The corners are rounded. Same retina resolution is sort of the... You see it?

Deer's looking at my picture. I see it. Yeah, that's there. 326 pixels per inch. It's just a nice display. It's a nice big... Same resolution as like the 7 and the 8, right? No.

Same PPI is the 7. Oh, sure, yeah, that's what I meant P. It's 1792 by 828 resolution, so it's obviously a bigger display. But a lot lower than the... A lot lower than X. It's basically a 720P display. Yeah. The bezels on this phone, though.

I know we're trying to talk about display, not the bezels, but the bezels on this phone, scream put a case on me right now. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Yep. It has obviously true tone. Yeah.

Great. Well, that's not obvious. Like, they could have saved a bunch of money. Right. So my expectation was that they would make this the cheap phone. Yeah. But, like, really, this is an iPhone 8 upgraded. Yeah.

Apple, like, does not make cheap phones. Like, full stop. Yeah. Like, we are like, every year, like, maybe this will be the year. they make a cheap phone. I thought this will be here. They make the big cheap phone. Yep, Apple just will not ever make a cheap phone. You want a cheap phone by last year's model, unless it's the iPhone 10 because that's a continued. So what is not, however, is an HDR display. Yeah. It does not, I think, have the same color gamut as the OLEDs. So, like, you can tell the

difference in person immediately. Like, without question in person, immediately. But if you're the sort of person who's been looking at an iPhone LCD this whole time, you're good. Yeah. Paul, you needed an upgrade, right? Yeah. I'm going to wait for the good. Google event to decide. Okay. I could not imagine myself in a phone larger than the 10S. So if I get a phone, it would be the 10S. Got it.

But yeah, I just, I'm still, to be honest, I'm still unsettled about getting a $1,000 phone. But I also really don't want a phone larger, a larger phone. Like, I would be completely 100% on board with the 10R if it was smaller. Yeah. Yeah. But I understand that a lot of people, like, that would be a negative for them. So I'm not saying it's irrational of Apple to make it a larger phone.

I'm just saying for me personally, I want a smaller phone. So I'm going to see what Google's going to do. I mean, I'm probably not going to get blown away. I have this kind of unsettled feeling where, like, I want somebody to disrupt Apple, but they just, they're doing a really good job at making it difficult to disrupt Apple. Yeah. Especially processor-wise. It's just so powerful.

Yeah. They make pretty phones that are easy to use and my family's on IMessage. So, like, between all those things, like, I'm guessing I'm probably going to end up with an iPhone before December. But we'll see what Google. Do you buy your phones outright or are you on one of the plans? I typically get, like, a loan from the carrier. That's how it kind of works with T-Mobile. Okay.

Because what Deter was saying was I'm surprised about iPhone 10s. Like, if you're on AT&T Edge or Next or. whatever T-Mobile's like if you're paying back that loan over time and you're like on the upgrade cycle you're basically leasing the phone the dollar amount difference between eight hundred dollars and a thousand dollars over two years is like you're paying five or six dollars more depending on the length the length of the plan you have and I think most people are just like yeah give me the give me the good one I agree but that's also in a sense semi irrational thinking oh it's insane upside down thinking yeah yeah right it's too

$250 and maybe you could do something cool with two and buy new hubcaps or something. I don't know. $250 is $250 is real money. I'm trying to get myself into that mindset, but I find it difficult because I agree. It's a couple more dollars a month. I just want to come back to hub caps. Yeah. Let's be real.

Are you looking for some spinner spot? Like, what are you? Well, people might not know this, but I'm living in the suburbs now. And so I might have to buy a car. Uh-oh. Oh, if you know what car Paul should buy, tweet at Future Paul.

I don't want you to make an argument. I just want you to tweet the name of a car at Paul. Yeah. Just, and then we'll round it up and whatever, whatever car name is most popular, Paul will have to buy that car.

Here's the thing. I love driving cars. Yeah. Especially in like low density areas. I don't even mind looking at cars, but I hate owning a car. Yeah. So anyways, that's why I hope to ask.

That's your criteria. It's just you've heard what Paul wants. And now I think what you should do is open the Twitter app on your phone. Type at Future Paul and then just with no, this is an instruction. No argument, no justification, just the name of a car. And then Paul will buy that car depending on whichever one gets the best. It's very likely to be honest. Okay, Paul.

We'll transition off the 10R. We're going to talk about the watch. But first, every week, my friend, you do a segment. He's a cucumber this week. No, he's an asparagus this week. He's not your friend. Oh, yeah. The asparagus is typically a condescending vegetable.

This week, just like every week, is a little segment I call East Gates Arms Race. We have a war in the hilariously looking hoverboards for individual feet market space between Segway and the Creweigh. and the creator of hoverboard. So the creator of hoverboard is working on, wait, where is the name of them? I lost them. Hover wheel. Hover wheel?

It was so obvious I thought I'd remember, so I didn't write it down. Hover wheel works like a pair of e-skates, which each foot sitting on top of a self-balancing wheel. So Segway is doing this, the $400 drift W-1. Yeah. And so now there's some competition.

There's a bit of a patent war. It's very exciting. Which ones are better? I have no idea. Which ones are more likely to kill me? Well, so the hoverboard got like a lot of knockoffs, right? Those are the ones that blew up. You know, so I'm guessing, you know, this hover wheel will be a quality product.

Okay. I mean, it's basically, to be honest, it's sort of like the 21st century healy. Yeah. That's how I'm thinking of it. You're going to just look a little off, but it's. If you can, like, you're, you're not going to look like a regular pedestrian or a regular cyclist or rollerblader or something. You've got to have your own look, but you're going to be kind of cruising along on your two

hover wheels. And I think it's going to be pretty cool. Do you think the people who invented the Razor scooter in, like, the early 2000s are looking at bird and lime and they're just like. Seathing? This could have been asked me. I mean, what's his name? Camel.

Dean Camel? Deventor of the Segwell. He invented the Segway? Yeah, he must be seething. I when I landed in San Francisco here I was like walking out of the airport and a cop on a segue just came flying by like like aggressively fast like people stopped to like

and just gaze at how fast this man of the law was moving on his weird alien contraption alright let's talk with the watch the watch is my favorite thing from the event it's beautiful yeah okay so they introduced two new sizes this is a series four so now it comes in 40 and 44.

So if you wanted the... Millimetres. Yeah, millimeters. If you had the 38 before, you might be a little bit worried, but I don't know. I've got... I saw the 44.

I looked at both sizes. I've got the 42, now, the slightly bigger one now, the series three. The 44 does not look that much bigger to me. Really? It, like, you really look, you can kind of see,

but it really doesn't look that much bigger. But the screen is amazing. Yeah. They say it's 30% bigger, and that's like, whatever. But, like, you look. look at, I'm looking at my very expensive series three Apple Watch right now and like I'm giving

it the middle finger with my other hand because the screen looks cramped and square and dumb compared to the beautiful almost edge to edge curved edges display on the series four. It is so good. I saw your side by side photo in the hands-on. Yeah. It looked like you were comparing an Apple Watch with like a like a knockoff that you can buy like at a drug store. Like a like a fake Apple Apple watch. Yeah. And like I specifically chose like the photo watch face so that I could, you could see the size of the screen in the corners. Typically I use a black, you know, background watch face so you don't really see the full like limits of the screen.

And so it hasn't been a problem. But yeah, like the screen is amazing. You know, standard stuff, GPS. You can pay more to get the LTE option. It has a more accurate accelerometer and something, something. More accurate. And that allow, they take less battery, but they ping more often, which means that they're able to do the fall detection. So if you fall, it'll be like, hey, you, you okay?

Are you cool? You're like, yeah, no, I'm cool. Or you could, if you don't answer, then it, like, calls somebody. Yeah. Which is, like, the one thing that as, like, a human person who is good, you can do, if you see somebody fall on the street, you, like, you be the one to go and be like, hey, are you okay? Yeah. Right. Like that is like, not everybody does it, but when you do it, you're like, you're a good person.

And now the Apple Watch is taking that away from us. Wait. Okay. Can we talk about fall detection a little bit more? Yeah. Apple made it clear that they spent a lot of time collecting the data. Yes. To make this an accurate reading of falls.

They presented the greatest slide in Apple history. We all know how Apple test products. It's a blank, empty room with like one wooden table in it. So did Apple put people in a room and just wait for that to follow? How did it gather this data? The greatest slide of Apple history is the types of fall slide. Yeah, that was good. It's in our live blind.

You're in. It is like stick figures with like fluorescent green arrows that are like a slip and the arrows like pointed that way. And the little stick figure is like, ah! Yeah. And then it's like a trip. And the arrows pointed the other way. the stick figures like, ah! And it's all about how fast you're moving in much direction.

Yeah. Paul, I agree with you. By the way, my second favorite, you're right, that's probably the best. My second favorite from today at least was them, like, throwing beer at a phone and, like, having a bunch of drunk people. Oh, they thought that was very cute. Anyway. They thought that was very cute.

So here's what I would say about fall detection. In general, Joanna Stern tweeted this. The Apple Watch is, the marketing for it this time around is far less beautiful young people exercising and far more like normal people doing ECGs and fall detection. Yeah. And they're targeting it towards older folks. Yep, for sure. I talked to a very smart analyst named Avi Greengart, who is a friend of the verge,

been around, we've known him for years. He's like, look, I got all these clients who are big enterprise companies. They got guys out in the field, you know, on top of towers and oil rigs, whatever. And they have to wear fall detection devices or they have huge Android phones that fall detectors built into them because they need to know when they're people. outworking and all they're just going to buy Apple watches by the bucket load yeah because it's this is simpler it's smaller and he's like the elderly market they need fall detectors they don't want to wear the big pendant necklace that screams I'm old and may fall yeah so now they can just like put it in

their Apple watch insurance companies are getting this out that to me is both I thought both of those like analyses of the situation are really smart and what it what came home to me was Apple said the watches for three things. And every year they narrow, they like narrow the focus of the watch. Yeah. So like, if you remember in 2014 when the watch came out, it was like... All things, to all people at all times. They just didn't know what it was for.

Yeah. And they threw a bunch of shit at the wall. You could like draw on it. You could like send your heartbeat to something. Like, it was crazy. Yeah. And they're slowly narrowing it. So this year, they said it's for communication.

Mm-hmm. They said it's for fitness. Mm-hmm. And they said it's for health. Yep. And the idea of health and fitness being different things that have different ideas, different focus, different markets. I don't think is how anybody has traditionally thought of them. But if you look at, we're going to monitor your heart rate to make sure you're not going to AFib.

We're going to make sure you don't fall down. And if you do, we're going to call emergency services. That is for, like, unhealthy people. Yeah. Right? Like, in a very serious way. And then there's, like, the fitness stuff where it's like, I'm swimming as fast as I can. And the Apple Watch is helping me out.

And like the, they're actually, I think they're slowly separating the activity rings from the fitness thing. Like, they're trying to make that be a thing that gets me off the couch, not a thing that makes a marathon runner run a slightly math, faster marathon. So I just think it's super interesting where they're going with the watch in general along these two seemingly related but increasingly divergent paths. But yeah, it's like, because it's pretty, it's the one I want. Yeah, we should run through some other stuff here. So it has the new S4 dual core processor. It has the W3 Apple Wireless chip, which is like, oh, ha, ha, because the W2 and the W1 were, like, very fancy Bluetooth proprietary says. What's the W3?

They're, like, buried in on, like, the spec page when you check out. Turns out it's just the W2 with Bluetooth 5. Yeah. So, end of that story. The ECG thing, EKG, whatever, is cool. It won't be ready at launch. Can I say that was my standout from the whole show as far as, like, when, I got like tingles was just that they were making a device. They claim it's like the first ever

consumer available over the counter. Yeah. This is another Apple fudges it around the, around the edges. Yeah. So there's like another consumer ECG band called the Cardia band, but you need to go ask your doctor to give it to you. This is over the counter FDA approved. Still, I, I, to me, I think why that's exciting is it feels like one step closer to tricorder, right? Yeah. It's like one step closer to a magical device that it didn't get any bigger. It didn't get, in fact, it got smaller, but now it can sense more things about you. No, it got thinner. It didn't get smaller.

It got slightly thinner. It got slightly thinner, but it got bigger. Yeah. But the battery is about the same size. The volume is bigger. Yeah. So they did a bunch of actually relatively interesting things. So it's now, you know, basically steel across the line.

You're not going to be able to get the high. The addition is gone. The addition is gone. They all, you know, iron glass in the top. They made the underside of it ceramic so that it was invisible or it's transparent to radio waves. So radio waves can pass through the bottom of the watch as well as the top. Not through your wrist, but like out. Yeah.

Or whatever. They added haptic feedback to the watch itself and wherever the little taptic thing of a jig is is relatively close to where the crown is. When you put it on and you twist it, you can feel it, the crown. When you feel the haptic feedback like a little bit on your finger, even though it's not actually vibrating the crown itself. It's very good haptic feedback. I was really impressed with it. Funny fact. So, you know, you push the button and you get the, what do we call this?

The Apple launcher. The honeycomb. The honeycomb. The honeycomb launcher. It's terrible. So there's a setting in WatchOS 5 where you can get the list. Yeah. Just a vertical list.

I think it might be in 4 or 2. I don't know. You can get a vertical list of your apps instead of the honeycomb. They had every single Apple watch at the hands-on event set to that. Yeah, I noticed that too. Yeah. I'm telling you, what they have done with the watch is remarkable. And there's all the people who are like, the watch became a business.

Who would have thought Apple always gets it right? And I'm kind of like, the first watch was not good. Yeah. Like, it wasn't great. I mean, they put it out and they refined it. And now they're on the fourth generation. But they have completely rebooted that software experience. It is a totally different product.

And it's too, okay, I do not like watchOS. He said it. It is too goddamn colorful. It is too goddamn bubbly. There's just, it's just, it's a little bit too, I don't even know what to compare it to, but it's a little bit too colorful and bubbly and play school and something. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say Fisher Price.

Fisher Price. It's a little, something like that. Yeah. And, you know, they're like, look, we have new watch faces where you can like fit 50,000 complications. on it. It's like, okay, sure, I guess that's cool. Did you make one that doesn't look God awful? Because they're just, it's like

phantasmagoric, all of these colors. It's just like everything is a different color and they all have gradients from one color to another color and you know why, and maybe you can figure it out and who knows, and like if you just want a plain, simple, stayed, boring, Lutheran, Minnesotan,

white bread, watch face that doesn't have a lot of colors on it, It still has a couple complications that is increasingly not available to you on the Apple Watch. Well, they've got the regular sort of, no, they don't do it. I think it looks fine, Peter. It looks terrible. I really want an Apple Watch. I just can't wear, I guess, I mean, I wear the Beets X around my neck a lot, but they are headphones. But there's something, I have some sort of block where I can't put an Apple product on my risk.

Like, I feel like it's just like, it's like, Mark of the Beast. I'm just signed up like, here I am and I. I also can't get the AirPods for that same reason. I just can't, I can't fully identify as much of an Apple person as I have been my whole life. I just can't shout it from the rooftops like that. I'm still mad that they don't give you an ambient display option. You have to lift your wrist and look at it. It feels like it's a little bit faster.

It does feel like it's a little bit faster. They said up to two times faster. To show you the time? That's an incredible step. They said it would be up to two times faster. to display the time when you lift your wrist. Or just in general. Oh, I thought it was just in general.

We're talking about to lift your wrist, it shows you the time. It does appear to be a little faster. But to your point about complications, I'm just looking at our photos, here are the complications that Apple put on the screen as a default. Yeah. A 15-minute timer that is bright orange. Just in case, at any moment. It's bright-ass orange.

You want to just run to that as fast as you can. Why is it bright-ass-orange? A temperature, which is great, but the temperature is to display 74 degrees. And then under it, there's a bar that goes from 55 degrees, which is green, to 75 degrees, which is orange. Why is it green instead of blue? Blue is... Okay. And then there's a circle that indicates where 74 degrees is on that scale inside of the bar.

I assume that's high and low. Yeah, it's high and low in where you are in the high and low. Sure. Yeah. Fine. Then there's... It's obviously displaying San Francisco Time, so it is displaying New York Time, and then it tells you, in orange, how many hours ahead that is. great and then there's a UV indicator which is at 7.0 and the UV indicator the bar goes from green gradients into purple which as everyone knows are the classic colors Roy G. Biv and you need to understand. What? Yeah. I don't like I really don't it's understand like some of these indicators make no sense and then obviously have a music control globe the calendar date and your rings and then the clock. That's a lot.

of default indicators, some of which mean nothing to anyone. Yep. The new watch faces that have motion are kind of cool. There's like, there's vapor. There's vapor for vapors. Yeah. That's what I choose to believe. For all the jewel kids.

For all the jewel kids. There's a liquid metal one. There's a fire one. True story, those are just videos of real things that they did. Yeah. They built, no, no. I saw a picture. They built a giant, like, welded watch face with like the indicator hands on it.

and then poured some freaking liquid metal in that shit and then recorded it and that's the watch face. What? Yeah. It's not like a, like a render. They shot like flame into like a transparent thing and then filmed it so that they could make the flame happen. And then they,

because they didn't want to do it digitally and they made sure that they were shaped in such a way that they matched the rounded corners of the watch face. I thought it was all rendered. Nope. It's just, I mean, they're rendered.

They tweak it so that does what it's supposed to do and blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, no, that's practical effects. I love it. That's like the most Apple. That's like when they're like, our new Mac is a new startup trym in orchestra and London spent six years developing this time.

The only Apple does that stuff. They also got rid of the stupid red dot on the LTE version. Now it's just a red ring. Yeah. That's, yeah. I don't know. In terms of like things that impressed me, the watch impressed me.

In terms of things that made me mad that I bought the previous version last year, I'm mad I bought a series three. I wish I had hung on to my OG watch just a little bit longer because this thing is great. If you have a series three, I don't think it's worse $400 to upgrade. But if you've got anything older and you kind of like it, this thing is great. I think it's important to note that the watch bands fit the entire line. Yeah, which is crazy because it's like they're different sizes. But they got it to.

I mean, the small one fits a small one. The big one fits the big one. Right. But yeah, I actually, I tested it out. They didn't want me to do it. And I kind of, you know, I'm sure. And yeah, they fit, the curves match, and it's fine. This is the one I'm going to buy.

I've never bought a previous Apple Watch. I've never wanted one. This is probably the one I buy. I fall down a lot, you know? The battery life on my series three is great. Like, it's two days. Yeah. Which is why I wish they just let me leave the screen on and make it one day, but whatever.

Okay, then there's other stuff. A home pod got up to. I don't even remember what the home pod. All I know is multiple al-al arms. They added multiple timers to the home pod. Yeah. And stereo pairs. Well, they already had stereo pairs and air pair two.

So he started with the, Tim Cook came back on stage and was like, there's some other stuff I want talk to you about. And we all thought this was just leading up to AirPods. Yes. And so it's like, first the home pod, we've added, you know, the home pod's great. And everyone was like, yes, we remember the home pod. Yeah. Lyric search, phone calls, multiple timers. And series shortcuts. And series shortcuts. Yeah. Which is, looks like there's going to be their version of Alexa skills. No, it's way better and way more interesting than that. Yeah, skills are like little cloud apps for Alexa. Series shortcuts are like. A big deal. It's workflow. And it's also suggested, like, I've got the beta. I need to write about it.

It is more intelligent at guessing what you might want to do than I gave it credit for when I was comparing it to Google Slices. And it is like the way it sort of integrates to the Siri is kind of smart. You basically, you set up a workflow, and then you like tell Siri this is my keyword for it, and then it just does that workflow. Or NAP developers like, hey, I see you do this thing all the time. Push this button and then we'll add it to Siri and it creates a workflow. But how does that translate to the home pod?

Because if your phone is on the same Wi-Fi network, then the HomePod will do whatever it can on its own, and then it will tell your phone to do the rest of it. Which is like a whole thing that it still assumes you have a phone, still to be in the same network, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if you set up a crazy complicated thing, text my wife and order sushi and order a red wine to be delivered and turn on the TV,

and tell the something something to play, you know, romantic comedy. And then you convert this to Markdown. Yeah, you save all that in the Siri Shortcuts app. And you just, you know, say, hey, Google, it's date night. Or not, hey, Google, because you wouldn't say that. You'd say, hey, Siri. You'd say, Siri, it's Date Night. And then you could say that to either the HomePod or your phone.

And if you say it to the HomePod, then it will tell your phone to do those things. And Shortcuts is powerful enough. Okay, sorry, I can keep going. So the leaks happen this morning because people were digging through Apple's XML files on the website. Yeah. Shortcuts is powerful enough that I believe it was Steve Trouton-Smith set up a series shortcuts workflow to just do the URL scraping for him. Yeah. Like you can, he was able to iterate on like the numbers and the URLs with shortcuts.

Yeah. I think it was him or you might have retweeted it. Like I saw someone running like a actual web page in a, in a shortcut. notification on an iPhone. Yeah, so when you take a Siri shortcut and you say, put this thing on my home screen because you want to have a home screen button instead of saying, hey Siri, what the freaking thing does is it creates a SIM link to the Siri shortcut. And the only way it can add it to your home screen is by loading up a Safari view with the

sim link with an add to home screen button. Really? So it loads in Safari. Then it uses it's basically a tiny little web link. that yeah. Also, the stuff gets synced across devices, like directly, fully end-to-end encryption. So if you set up a big, long, crazy shortcut that has, like, some kind of, like, personal information in it, Apple never gets to see it because it gets, you know, synced in the same end-to-end sort of encrypted system that your I messages do or your other Apple data does.

No way. Yeah. I think this is, like, one of the weirdest products that they have put out in some time. Well, I mean, they just bought workflow. Yeah, but like they did it. Right. They didn't kill it. Think what they get out of this. They get to have me stop complaining that iOS isn't a full desktop computer system, that you can't do stuff on it, right? Everybody that's like iOS, you can't do stuff. I still think there's a lot of merit to that argument.

I still think the file system metaphors in iOS are real bad. But anytime anybody says, oh, well, iOS is limited. Every single Apple fan on the planet can be like, yeah, but what about shortcuts? And you just, you're like, yes, fine. Yeah. That's what they get. That's incredible. How do we go from Apple Watch to shortcuts?

We just did. Okay. That's where we belong. Yeah. Let's be honest. Mojave's coming out. Yeah. We knew that.

iOS 12 was coming out a Monday. Mm-hmm. That's great. TVOS 12. TVOS 12. Yeah. Coming out with Atmos Monday. WatchOS 5 later sometime.

Yeah. And that's it. Yeah. And then, no, no, EKG for Watch is coming out later, but the other stuff's coming out watch OS5. Yeah. I mean, all in all, like, as we started the Vurchase with, like, a pretty dull event. Hmm. Right. Like, the phones are interesting. The 10R is I talk about it all day. The camera stuff I can talk about it all day. But really the question is like, is this going

to break through for regular people the way that the 10 broke through, right? And it's like, you know what's here? Like the notch is here. Yeah. And you know how they're solving the problem with a notch. They're making the screen's really big, so you're looking farther away from the notch if you look at the middle of the screen. They're just doing some rectangle math on you. The design is so similar, right? It's what iPhones look like now. This is what iPhones look like now. And the watch is great, and people are going to buy watches for the holidays, and that's what they do. At this event, I saw more sort of like journalists that we know just kind of hanging out than I've ever seen before. There's a lot of hanging. I spent some time just hanging

with John Gruber. I sent some time hanging with David Pierce. Yeah. Like, spent some time hanging with Joanna. So the counter argument is journalists are always me about S-year phones and then the public buys them in droves even more than the originals because they wait for the faster processor, they wait for the better camera, they wait for like whatever bugs there might be in the new design or whatever to work out. That the S model phones tend to do as well if not better than the full update phones. Yeah. I feel like this time around, I don't know if that'll be the case. but like you can't buy an iPhone 10 so it'll do better

I have a hunch that the 10 either the 10 R is going to be the hot phone people were waiting for the cheap iPhone model but new to be cool like the iPhone 10 or Apple's going to sell a lot of

thousand dollar phones and I'm sure Apple wouldn't be sad about that so I was on CNBC today after the event talk about the phones and the other person on with me was an analyst yeah I'm sorry It's been a long day. I've forgotten this poor analyst name. He sounded smart. Yeah. But he's like, look, well, here's what's going to happen. Stock price. I'm rating Apple a buy. He said a bunch of analysts stuff.

He's like, look, the average selling price the iPhone's going to go up. Like, everyone's underestiming the fact that iPhones used to start $700. Now the good one is $750. And they're going to sell everybody on these $1,000. Yep. And he's like, the ASP of the iPhone's going to go up. Yeah. And that's like, that's what the sort of like stock price people are saying.

Yeah. And what we're saying is, oh, you should buy. 10 are it's fine and we're just like not contending with the fact that it's a 750 phone yeah right there is not the 500 dollar one plus in apples range unless you go buy an iPhone 7 and that's just where they are and I think they're very happy to be yeah I mean 750 is expensive for a phone yeah so I mean look again I can buy a car for that you actually you could I'm gonna find there's like lots of like jalapnik articles about like what bought a car to buy for a thousand dollars I'm let's what you do I want you to open the Twitter app and your phone if you're driving

car just pull over the side right now they know dealer type at future paul and then just the name of a i don't want any other words i just want the name of a car and then paul will buy that car if you're selling a car you can send him your craigslist ad but only if you're selling your car on craigslist paul can we make a deal i bought the um the comma.a i i did civic kit because i have like the civic that that that that he has like the exact model that the exact model in year and maybe even the same like options. So I was like, all right, we should do this. I should install this in my car, turn it into a death trap, make a video out of it.

If I install this thing in my Honda Civic and I like kind of break it a little bit, would you be willing to buy it at a discount? I'll give you a really good deal on it. After you crash your Honda Civic? I'm not going to crash it. If I crash it, I crash it. But like if it's a- Well, you just give me your com AI because you're distrustful of Geohot, even though you should trust them with everything because he's amazing.

GioHop, by the way, stepping down as a CEO of Kama A. Oh, well, now I don't trust it at all. Now he's like the chief visionary and they're hiring a real CEO. Okay. Look, see, I'm on. I read the Verge today. I know what happened. I listened to a co-house where he was like, don't buy it.

Yeah. All right. I think that's it. That's enough. That's enough. Yeah. I will say this. Yeah.

The rumors are is that there's another Apple event coming later this fall. And we're going to be spending every single Verge cast between now and then discussing the possibility that the iPhone will switch to USBC. Yes. The iPhone 10R is not coming out for another few weeks. Yep. So there's just another cycle with 10R stuff happening for real. Yep. So there's a get ready.

And there's the Pixel event coming in October. There's a Microsoft event. There's a, it's event season. We're in it now. Yeah. Summer's over. No more talking about social apps and democracy. But we're going to talk about that too.

But like some good news is coming. During this event when Apple was like, the iPhone changed the world. You know, now it's changed how you get cars and look at maps and take photos. And I want to be like, Facebook, do you want to take some shots at Facebook? Yeah. And they didn't on stage. But then when you went and looked at every single iPhone on display, both the Facebook app and the Instagram app were screen timed out. Wow.

So you'd try to open Instagram on these things. And it's like, you've reached your time limit. That is incredible. It was the subtlest shade of the entire event. And I loved it the most. That's so good. It was really good. Wow.

Wait. Wait, I just remember one more thing. Sorry, I know we're trying to wrap up. The dongle's out of the box. Yeah, no headphone dongle in the box. Five watt charger. Five watt charger. Come on.

I asked them at the headphone dongle, and I was like, so many people have tweeted me with the headphone dongle, and they just looked at me and said, I wonder why, Nelai. And that was the end of that conversation. Wow. The five-watt charger is... Like, you're the bad guy.

The five-watt charger is unconscionable. Look, my personal bro. grand is every time the richest corporation in the world makes you think about headphone dongles, you think of me as well. Just whispering the word justice. How expensive is the iPhone 10S max with 512 storage? And a don't forget the $10 dongle. I think it's like, it's like $1450 or something like that?

Let me look. Like pre-order, I can't pre-order it yet, so I don't know. View pricing. Here we go. All right, $512, $1,449. Wow. For $1,449,000. You can get a phone that comes with a charger that will fully charge it in approximately 12 hours.

What are you doing? They say people love it because it's small. It's the biggest battery ever. Yeah. Okay. Here's some stuff I got to plug. Home of the Future is wrapped up. Yeah.

Go watch Grant last episode. Go watch that. It's great. It's on the YouTube channel. Don't watch the segment where he throws down the paper printed out directions. It's pretty good. Just don't, don't look at where the directions are there. Speaking of social apps and democracy, it's still happening.

It hasn't stopped happening. There's a big Google video leak today. It's got the conservative all riled up. Casey wrote it up. You should go read that. You go to the verge.com slash interface, sign up for his newsletter. Follow the interface. Speaking of Casey, you can also listen to all of season one that converge right now on Apple Podcasts.

And season three of watch you push up button in production right now. What? Caitlin Tiffany back in the building. Hey, but go listen to seasons one and two. That's great. Tell your friends about it. So when season three comes out shortly, they're all amped up for it. Fired up.

Yeah. Then you can listen to Rico Decode with Kara. By the caro is a new show coming out in the fall. It's going to be a thing. You host to Rico Media with Peter Kafka. They're all wonderful. Go do those things. Rate and review us.

It'd be great. Follow us everywhere. Let us know what you want to know about the iPhones. It's very helpful to me. Or the Apple Watch. Or the Apple Watch. It's very helpful to us as we start doing the rest of our coverage. So tweet us, tweet your questions at us. We'll try to get some answers for you. That's

it. I'm reckless. Paul's Future Paul on Twitter. Deeter's Backlon. It's Vergecast. Rock and roll. Paul. Promocode. This episode of Vergecast brought to you by Audi Eatron. Despite all of its technology, there's a lot that the all-new Audi E-Tron doesn't offer. For example, it has no tailpipe admissions and no need to fill up at the gas station. You just plug it in home. The Quadro all-wheel drive system offers no reason not to tackle roads in almost any weather and a long-range capabilities in high-speed charging, E-Tron is a new way to think about electric mobility, which makes sense. It's the first fully electric vehicle from Audi. E-Tron was built to defy the elements at upend the conventional wisdom, so in truth,

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