The Vergecast - Apple’s iPhone 14 event: the biggest announcements and our first impressions

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Apple held their annual hardware event on their campus, debuting new iPhones, new Watches, and new AirPods. Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss everything that happened at the "Far Out" event, first impressions of the products, and their expectations for Apple in the next year. Further reading: Apple’s iPhone 14 event: the 9 biggest announcements Apple Watch Series 8, SE, and Ultra hands-on: triple the fun Apple Watch Series 8 gets souped-up period and ovulation tracking  New Apple Watch SE announced: price, features, release date Apple Watch Ultra: price, specs, release date Apple watchOS 9 will add low-power mode to Series 4 and later devices Apple finally stops selling the Series 3 watch It’s time for the Apple Watch to become Apple’s next big thing  iPhone 14 and 14 Plus hands-on impressions: the big phone is big The iPhone 14 doesn’t have Apple’s latest processor  The iPhone 14 and 14 Plus are official with satellite-based Emergency SOS  iPhone 14 Pro: a first look at the new moving notch, camera, and more Apple might have fixed the notch by putting it on an island   The iPhone 14 lineup won’t have physical SIM support Apple’s new AirPods Pro hands-on: sticking close to a winning formula Apple’s new AirPods Pro can cancel twice as much noise Apple’s Lightning-only charging case for the third-gen AirPods doesn’t make sense Klutzes rejoice: AppleCare Plus now covers unlimited repairs  Everything Apple didn’t announce at its iPhone 14 event Tim Cook would rather sell you an iPhone than add RCS to iMessage Jony Ive doesn’t think your car should rely on multitouch Steve Jobs’ friends and family launched an archive celebrating his life Tens of thousands of viewers watched a fake Apple crypto scam on YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, the whole team does a deep dive on Boz's new quiet comfort earbuds too. I'm just kidding. We're going to talk about Apple the whole time. Everything that was announced in our first impressions. That's coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Good morning. Hello, welcome to the Vergecast.

The flagship podcast of crash detection, which you need, or no one will know that you've been in a car crash. Or a plane crash, a boat crash. I'm Nealai. I'm your friend. David Pierce is here. Hi. I am in our San Francisco office where I have been since like 11 days ago.

I live here now. Oh, don't even complain about being in one place for a long time. Alex Cranes is here. I have not left my house in two months. I'm very jealous. Yeah, Neely, can you just run us through your travel schedule for the last like 96 hours? I just find it deeply hilarious and I'd like you to tell everybody. One thing I don't recommend is being at LAX three times in three days.

No. I was like, I just live at LAX now. This is where I'm at. I know all the people. I like said hello to the concession stand. It was great. So I have had five flights in seven days, basically. Oof. So I flew home to do a panel with the Mount Pleasant community group, a better Mount Pleasant about Foxcon. That was really fun. It was great to be home. My dad was there nerve wrecking. Then I flew to L.A. for the first day of the code conference. Then I went to San Francisco for Apple. Then I flew back to L.A. the next day. And then a day later, I flew home. So it's just been a ride. I was at the point where I was. I left some clothes in a hotel room because I knew I was going to come back to the hotel room. And I was like, I just live here now. You had two simultaneous hotel rooms in two different cities.

That's amazing. I was like, I don't even know what's going on in my life. But it's great. The joke I made to David was like, I think people think that's what my job is always like. So I can't complain too much to be like, I'm chasing Tim Cook around the state of California. Like, it was great. It was fun. It was exciting.

Code was great. The Apple event was fun. We're going to talk about all of those things. Really, this is going to be an Apple-themed Vergecast because many things happened with Apple this last week. iPhone 14 event. There was the new iPhone 14, which is really the iPhone 13, iPhone 14 plus, the pro models, a pro max, lots of camera stuff, Apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch Ultra. I mean, there's a lot going on, new AirPods, AirPods Pro. And then that evening, we all went on separate planes. I will hasten to add to the Code Conference where Tim Cook spoke on a panel with Johnny Ive

and Logan Powell Jobs with the legacy of two jobs with Caras Fisher, which was incredible in many ways. So just a lot going on in that day. But a ton of news just for the Apple event. Let's start there. Do you want to start with, we should start with the phones. So let's take a look at the new iPhone. So the basic rundown is there's four phones.

There's the iPhone 14, which like you said is basically the iPhone 13. There's the iPhone 14 plus, which is the exact same thing as the iPhone 14, but instead of a 6.1 inch screen, it has a 6.7 inch screen. And then there's the iPhone Pro and Pro Max, which have all kinds of interesting stuff in them. The Dynamic Island. Yes. So now, when you receive an alert,

the Dynamic Island expands to notify you. So I tweeted yesterday on Thursday saying the Vergecast is going to be a little late. And also, if you have any questions, like anything you want us to talk about on the Vergecast, let me know. And solidly half of the responses I got were basically to the tune of, like, are we really going to let them get away with calling it the dynamic island?

Like, we're just going to do this? So they're already running the ads. I watched the Bills Rams game last night, and like every other ad was a dynamic island ad. What would they call it, though? But if they didn't call it that, just a toggle switch? Anything else. So I think the name is great. I've come around on the fact that, like, if you were a company the size of Apple,

Apple has been very conservative recently, right? Like, it's, I mean, it's a huge company. global scale, politics, regulators, data centers, and China. Like, they are now just because of who they are. They're a conservative company. Every now and again, Apple is the only company of that scale. It's like, Dynamic Island. Let's do it.

I mean, there's like a history of really stupid names for really cool user interfaces, right? Like, there's the hamburger. There's the meatballs. Straight up, we call it a mouse. Everyone all day long is like, let me get my mouse. And we just let that slide. I don't know the Dynamic Island is going to stay. Maybe it'll just be Island.

Yeah. Look, I think it's a fun name. They had to call it something. Do you think there was a meeting at Apple where somebody was like, what if we call it the touchbar? That's basically what it is, right? And then like, somebody from the Mac team just came sprinting into the room. It was like, no, we can't do that. It's not allowed.

I think what will almost certainly end up happening is that diehard Mac fans will call it dynamic island and then the billions upon billions of people who buy the phone will like emergent behavior some other name for it and that will be the name that everyone calls it it and then it will be our comments will be full of pedantic arguments about actually calling pedantic or actually calling it the dynamic island or not trust me like I live through the OSX wars yeah and like it's going to be bad yeah it's not going to be great the technology of it is super cool though it's super cool technology so that's where I'm like of both minds really so the basic idea, right? So they moved the notch down to a pill. It's the camera, the true-diff sensor,

the proximity sensor. There are actually two different spots. So there's screen above them. So there's no more notch. And there's screen in between them. And what the island does is it just like blacks out more of that area to put indicators to the left and right of the of the pill-shaped notches. Yeah. Cutouts. It's great. And so that part is interesting, right? You're going to take this thing where the screen is always blacked out. And you're actually going to lean into it and black. black out more of the screen. Yeah.

Cool. Like very few companies will do that. Very few companies will tell their developers to support such a thing and actually get their developers to it. Very Apple in that way. You know, someone spent hours upon hours doing the little bounce animations. And they look great. But like in use, David used it as well too.

Right. Really what you're getting is like when you play some music, you get music indicators. When you have a timer going, you get timer indicators. The voice memo is one is really cool. like legitimately my favorite one of the thing because you get the little you get the little sideways I love a soundwave they showed a bunch of other stuff right lift like if you call a lift it'll tell you how long the lift will be you get your sports scores sports scores so they're all connected to the the phone's widget system so that kind of like the way I have been thinking about

these are these are like minimized widgets yeah that's basically right are we going to call them widgets the widget yeah the widget notch notch wedge notch which notch which there it is we got it But wait, you say that, you say that like it's a bad thing. That feels like a good thing. But it's like how many widgets do you want to minimize? Yeah. And I've been making the list in my head and it's like actually vanishingly few. Oh, that's interesting.

I feel exactly the opposite. Really? Like, there are so many things that my phone knows that I wish it had quicker ways to tell me. Right. One of them is like, is my alarm set. This is like a spoiler alert for the iOS 16 review that I'm writing for next. week is that like there's just a ton of things that Apple used to require you. It's like if I want to know, if I, one easy example I always give is like if you're a person who uses like a habit tracker

app and you open up the app every time you want to like log that you at a glass of water, right? That's too many steps. And so for little things like that or like who won the Yankee game, like Apple is like slowly pulling that out of apps and into like the front of the phone. And with iOS 16 on the lock screen, it's pulling all that stuff even further to the front of the phone. And I feel like the dynamic island is the kind of thing where it's just like now it's even more there. And for me, there's like the question of am I going to want to see these things like 24 hours a day? I don't know. And do I want to see a tiny moving waveform all the time I'm listening to music?

I also don't know. But there is a lot of like little tiny bits of information that I'd like to have throughout the day that feel like they fit there perfectly. They're super contextual, right? Because like I haven't gotten to play with them. I've only seen like y'all's videos and the videos that Apple played. But they're contextual. So it's not like that waveform for the music is always there. You still have to like interact to make it happen.

No, and there's a little bit of a delay. So if you open the music app and stop the music and then go at the island is there and then it shrinks back down to the notch. Like, Island, get out of here. What are you doing? Yeah, you can't. So like actually to David's point, like one of the things that surprised me about it is it's the sort of like user flow of it is more complicated than you would expect.

Yes. And I think in one particular way backwards. Just having used to, I mean, we haven't gotten, we got to, like, review the phone, right? But so just to get it, you've got to, like, open an app and do something, right? You got to, like, start playing music. You got to set a timer. Now, you could do that from, like, maybe a lock screen widget or something else or from Siri, but you got to, like, do something. And, like, mostly you're going to do it. You're going to open an app and do something. Yeah. Right. So then you close the app and the thing flies into the widget. If you've got two things going at once, there's a cool animation. The island breaks actually into two islands. They haven't addressed that naming wise. It's the archa. Auercapelico. That's great. But you got to, like, do stuff, right? And then here's the thing. If you watch the ads, you watch the video, this is the thing that really tripped me up.

You would think that if you tap on the island, it opens the widget. Yes. Right? That is not the case. When you tap on it, it opens the app. No. And when you, if you want the widget, you got to hold down. And that, to me, is totally backwards.

I've come around to your side of this. When you first mentioned that, as we were standing there at the hands-on, like, the second you touch it, that was your instinct. And I didn't necessarily agree because, like, as it is with widgets, you hit, you tap the widget and it opens the app. So on the one hand, you would think that's expected behavior. But like, it does. It breaks the exact flow you're talking about it. It just go like, island to widget to app. And instead you have to like long press. I think, I think you're totally right. And I bet Apple changes that. Yeah, it just seems, it seems totally backwards to me. Like when I press it, I expect it to have a quick contextual thing so I can do my thing

without having to wait for the whole animation. I want to pause the music. I would just say, that if you have the functional equivalent of a right click in your ads, you should rethink that. Right? Like, that's what a long press on a phone is. It's a right click. Right. And it's undiscoverable by most people, like a year from now, someone's going to make a TikTok video that's like, top 10 features the iPhone you didn't know about.

And they're like, did you know you could long press on the camera to open more? And it's like, they're going to get a million views. That's ideas for free. Just start making that video now, TikTok. And run it in one year. Yeah. Just like book it, right? You want to avoid burnout.

You book your content now. So like that flow is just messy to me. And I'm sure they'll tweak it or maybe they'll give you a switch. Yeah. There's a million minutes of stuff. It's not like a deal breaker by any sense. But the earlier part of the flow where you got to go do something to get it. Like, David, what you're talking about is like there's a bunch of apps on my phone

where I just want them to kind of like flow data to me. Yeah. Or like give me a control for the one thing. And control center does that. For some of those apps, it doesn't do it for other apps. Lock screen widgets do it for some. some apps and not for other apps. And now you just have like 10 ways to do that thing. And it just the island creates another. But there's no like send this to the island button. That's true.

There's no like step one island move you can do. You have to like do the stuff and then leave. What would be a step one island? Because like it makes sense to be that I have to open the music app or the voice memo app. It looks like the the phone call one just pops up when you get a phone call. And that makes sense. But like, where are those cases you want it to pop up without interacting? But I think those are in apps. Like, I'm not playing fantasy football this year. I believe David is with our staff, which is going to cause a whole mutiny. But fantasy football happens on Sunday.

Like, those apps should just start on Sunday afternoon and populate the island and tell you how that's going. And like, maybe that's to come. I think that would be a great feature to build. It's just right now, like, you know, what the ad in the video promises you is like this like constant animation of activity. And at least so far as we've used it, you've got to like do stuff first. Yeah.

Well, and there is like what you just described is in an interesting way, like a low touch notification system, which I could actually kind of get behind. It's like, what if your dynamic island was like the ticker at the bottom of a news TV show? Like, I don't know if that's a good idea or a terrible idea, but it's like there's a version of this that turns into something like that. And I think... But isn't that a notification? Well, that's what I mean, right?

but like what if it didn't like buzz your phone or come up over top of what you're already doing, it just sort of like appears in there that it's like, what if it just says like touchdown and then goes away? That's all like. Yeah, there's just an out like we have to get it. We have to use it. We have to feel it out. I'm basing this off of 45 frenzied minutes of hands on time and a handful of conversations. But it's rare that there's any distance between Apple showing software and an ad and then what it is.

And here there just felt like a lot of distance actually. Yeah. Because they keep showing you the expanded widget view in those ads. Yeah. And that you actually have to know how to get those. Right. And like that to me is the first one is like you're going to show people that expanded view. It should be really easy to get those.

Because that's like the promise of the whole thing is you kind of get these like that area like minimized widgets. That area populates itself automatically with useful minimized widgets that quickly get you to controls. But right now you tap on it. Just like bomb into the app. How excited were people at Steve Dove theater about the dynamic island? Because I at home was very excited. That was the thing. People called me.

We were like, what phone should I get? And I was like, get this one because you get the dynamic island. And they're like, why do what are you talking about, Alex? I'm hanging up now. Were people excited? I mean, there was a room full of like press people and YouTubers. Like, of course, we were all excited. This is the thing we have to point a camera.

Yeah. But I think it's like, when you're in that room, everybody has some feature that they're like, okay, I got to go check out the camera. Or like the year was slow motion camera. Everybody was like. So the fight here was the island and the Apple Watch Ultra. And like the poor iPhone 14, the people tasked with like showing off the iPhone 14 were like, would you want to see this one?

13. But with a new name. And they're like, this one comes in a slightly different color. Everyone's like, I took one picture. I'm good. Like moving on. But I do think there was something to actually like touching the thing in a funny way because it's like it makes for a great on-screen.

in demo because and like Apple immediately got a bunch of credit from people for like leaning into the notch. And I think it's like sort of funny that Apple is getting credit for that now because Apple has always done that. Like when the notch first came out, Apple made all this noise to developers who were using the full frame screen in their screenshots. And Apple was like absolutely not. The notch has to be everywhere.

Like normalize the notch was like Apple's thing for a long time. Apple was really bad about pushing like their own. software design was often scared of the notch, right? Yeah, oh, that's definitely true. And it largely tried to pretend it didn't exist, but like... Yeah, I think they were really messy with the notch for years. And this is like, I think the software choice they made here was really smart and good, even if some elements of it, like having to long press to open it is really stupid.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And to turn it into software was very clever. I think I totally agree with that. Yeah, like that was like, oh, wow, Apple's doing it right. It just feels nifty. Like, there was just something about, you. You just press on the thing in it, like bubbles around. It feels alive in a very cool way.

Like you made an Instagram video and I kept watching it while I was working on my dynamic island piece. Just the clip of like the island itself. I was just like, that's just neat. Like, that just looks fun. It is. And I think like I just love this thing that Apple is doing where it's like, what if your phone wasn't just like a large collection of apps on a home screen that you do things with? So like anything that feels livelier than that makes me very happy. And this is like, like I agree with Nealai that there's going to be a bunch of.

decisions developers have to make. And I've talked to a couple of developers in the last few days who are very confused about what they're going to do in their apps with this stuff because there's a lot of things you can do in like no expected behavior for it. So folks are going to take a while to figure this out. But I think it's going to be the kind of space people are going to play with. Do you use this in a weather app and, like, Carrot right now will send you a notification if it's about to rain? Is that going to now pop up on the dynamic island, the notch? I think the answer is no. I think those are still notifications. Like, again, I think, I think, I think the way to think about this stuff right now is minimized widgets.

I think widgets are themselves kind of notifications, right? Like Apple's been using notifications as widgets to some extent for a long time. And then they just keep like changing the name of notifications and tweaking the functionality to be like, here's a new fresh type of notification. It's called widget. Here's a newer, fresher type of notification. It's called the Dynamic Island. Well, yeah, this is where like live activities figures in, too, because it's all, there's now this like wild spectrum of rectum. tangles you can put on your phone and they all do slightly different versions of sort of the same thing.

So as you've been playing with iOS 16, that seems like the most important new part of the whole operating system. Live activities? Yeah. So that's the new kind of widget where if you are following sports on ESPN, it'll like live populate the score. Yep. That to me is like, ages ago, Josh Topolski wrote in Apple's world, it's always 72 and sunny because the weather app wouldn't just tell you the temperature. And it's like they finally got all the way there. Right? They like finally got all the way to apps can actually write to the screen in these things

called live activity widgets. Almost all the way there. They're still slightly afraid of their developers in that sense. But it's pretty close. And I think it's a huge, huge. I mean, the thing that you can't interact with widgets still drives me insane, right? Like widgets are still functionally like app shortcuts. So that to me is like the last real thing that I want where it's like it can write to the icon,

but I can't talk back to it without opening the app. That's the one move Apple still has not made. And dynamic island stuff seems like it could have done more of that too. And instead they're just like, even they still want you to go to the app. Part of me wonders how much of this is that like Apple knows developers want you to open their app. And so Apple is petrified of anything that is going to like meaningfully depreciate the amount of time people spend opening apps. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

We'll see. Like we got to get the thing. Again, we're basing this off of a vanish in a small amount of time. And by the way, this event was wild. First event in the Steve Jobs Theater in three years. We were still watching a video, which was weird. I think it's time to let that go. Apple loves it because the video streams and it travels and people cut it up.

And like, if you're playing to the internet, it's better. But there's still something lost. It's also way harder to life log a video. It just moves so fast. No one ever takes a breath. Yeah. They should just put like breaths and applause breaks in time for people to walk on and off the stage back in the video. Maybe I'll be happy.

It doesn't matter. We're there for the hands-on. We're there to talk to people. But it was just the full theater, the big crowded rush in the room, everyone running around. That part of it was great. Yeah. And it was, like, the energy was super high.

And we talked about this at WWDC too. There is just like, again, it's a very self-selecting group of people who come to these things. So it's like people who are predisposed to be excited about new technology, I would say. But there was still this like first day of school energy again where it's like people are just like pumped to be back, excited to be able to, like, see things and try them and run around and talk to people and folks were, folks were amped to be back doing this kind of stuff, which was, which was very fun.

We've done like 25 minutes on the island. I'm good with that. That feels right. Like the iPhone 14, it's an iPhone, the end. Let's talk more about the dynamic island. Well, the dynamic island is connected to the rest of the iPhone 14 Pro, of which the two other notable features are they always on display, which welcome Apple. Apple claims, you know, that they did a lot of work, that they got the refresh rate down to 1 Hertz.

They have a new kind of LPTO OLED display that allows lower power. They could have done it before. They're waiting to invent the things they needed to invent. You can just believe whatever you want out of that and believe what you need to believe to make this okay. But they finally have shipped an always on display. It doesn't, it's strange. Like, it's more widgets, right? Like, why is the display?

Oh, it's on to show you more widgets. and show you more status information. They do really cool things with it. Here's my favorite one. So when the display goes to its low power state, you know, in iOS 16, they're doing the cool thing where they can cut out faces and put them over the clock. When they go to the low power mode, they reverse it. So the clock fades up over the face.

And then when you tap on the screen, it goes, the face comes back in front of it. It's neat. That's cool. They're doing all this like image management stuff for the wallpapers. So when it goes into that super dim low power mode, they actually preserve. or skin tones and colors in different ways. They're doing a bunch of Apple stuff, you know, that maybe other companies are doing too

and just don't talk about as reverently as Apple talks about, but they're doing a bunch of Apple stuff. But how long has it been since Samsung didn't always on display? Five years? Maybe longer. Like, they've had Android phones have had this forever. Yeah.

Yeah, because if you have an OLED display, you can just, like, cut the power and the pixels stay static. But Apple's doing it with like some amount of color. Like, I think the very first always on OLED displays actually went to black and white, right? The date and the time. That's it. Yeah. So Apple's doing far more than that.

So I think they waited to some extent to just like do far more than that. But really you tap on the thing, the display lights all the way up and you get it's interactive again. If it's in your pocket or upside down, it goes totally off. Yeah, they do seem to be really leaning into the idea that if you don't want to look at your phone, flip it over. That that is like an unexpected societal behavior now. That it's like your phone is going to sort of always be staring at you. And if you don't want that, put it away. which I very much appreciate.

Like as a flip the phone over on the table person, I very much appreciate that. It kind of reminds me of, did you guys watch Halt and Catch Fire? Best show ever made. And there's this whole thing where one of them becomes a VC. Whenever she sits down, she has one of those Yeager Le Coutre watches

that like just flips over. And when she flips it over, she's like, I will listen now because I'm not paying attention to the time. It's like, oh, okay, now I care about you. Yeah, it was the best thing in the world. And Apple's like, we see this? We love it.

You can do this too. Everyone should have this power move. Just be like, now I care about you. I flipped my phone over. Okay, so that's always on display. We should talk about the camera. A 48 megapixel camera with a quad-pixel sensor features our second-generation sensor shift OIS and 100% focus pixels. The camera's pretty interesting.

And then in some ways, like, right, it's still going to deliver you 12 megapixel photos. So it's a 48 megapixel sensor in the pro. They're pixel binning it in standard mode. So they're going to use four pixels to generate one. Can you explain what pixel binning is? It's one of those things that I like, I'm like 35% sure I understand what pixel bidding is. Can you explain what pixel binning is? Yeah.

So you've got 48, I mean, imagine a grid. Actually, the pixel pattern on this is probably not a grid. They said they have a new pixel pattern on the sensor and they had to like tweak their algorithms. So I don't know what the pattern is. But just for the purposes of this, imagine a grid. And so what you could do is use every single pixel as a pixel represented in a photo. And you can do that in pro-Raw.

And you generate a 57-megabyte file. So you get all the data back out of the thing. Wow. That's not useful for most people, especially those file sizes. And most people are sharing Instagram anyway. So what Apple and everyone else with big sensors do is actually say, we're going to use four of those pixels. to collect all the light we can, and then sample them down to one pixel.

So you've bin the pixel. And that's how you end up with a 12 megapixel photo out of a 48 megapixel sensor. So it's not just cropping, like when you're using a DSLR. Well, hold on, my friend. So, like, that's the standard wide camera mode, right? So, you know, on the iPhone 14,

they say they've made the pixels on the 12 megapixel sensor slightly bigger to collect more light. At some point, you just like run into the limit of doing that at scale. And it's better to just have more individual pixels and sample and combine them to get more light. Fair enough. Cool.

So that's like the standard wide camera 1x mode. Then Alex, the 2x mode, they are cropping the sensor. And they're saying because the sensor is so big that at the crop, it's still a true 2X zoom, which is a huge claim. Yes. Yeah, do we buy that? I feel like I am trained to think that's just cropping. Yeah, our video producer Viren was like outside.

And like, I heard him like hiss when they said this. Like, I don't know. We'll see, right? We got to get the thing. But they're saying that they can do that move to, which some other phones do. Some of their phones don't. Right. Like we're figuring out what to do with the huge sensors on these phones.

We're not firing out 96 megapixel images to people. Everyone is cropping and binning in different ways. Then the last thing you can do is the action mode that they've added to the video camera. where they use the whole sensor and then they do that dynamic cropping. So they like pick an object in the frame. They're going to hold that steady and they're going to move the frame around it inside of the sensor area, which again, we have to see. And that's what they're using to stabilize motion.

And I actually think if that's as good as it looked in that demo where it was like the sort of camera running behind a runner and on the left it's ultra shaky and on the right it was super still. If that's that good, that's going to be like a gigantic improvement for a lot of people who make video. because it's the kind of thing that is like everybody buys these wacky gimbals and does all kinds of crazy stuff. And if that is like an even like B plus solved problem now, that's a really big deal. But it is also the kind of thing that we have seen in the past is really hard to do without all that like hideous warping and really ugly artifacting as people move. Like that's one thing I'm very curious to see this test results of. Well, that's like a problem that Sony's face too, right? Like, because they've tried to do that kind of stuff with video.

And it always, you get that warping motion. It's really hard to do. Yeah, it's super hard. So we'll see. And they brought that same mode to the FN14, which has a regular 12 megapixel sensor. So we'll see if they're even different, right? Because they're still shooting 4K video, which is only the same area on the sensor. We just kind of don't know.

But yeah, they're using the 48 megapixel sensor on a pro in like several different ways. Like there are modes that it goes into. One is the like pixel bin. It's actually just a gigantic 12 megapixel sensor. the other is the cropped. We cut it down and we're using 12 megapixels out of the middle. The other way is this like action mode. And then that you can switch it in a pro ron.

Just like use it as a 48 megapixel sensor, which will generate gigantic images of which we will have to like look at and see if you lose anything by not pixel being them. So they're really like these are all. I mean, I don't know about phones as much, but these are all methodologies that like Sony's been using for years and it's DSLRs. To like.

Oh, and Samsung. Yeah. And like everybody. Like Apple is two years, three years behind the, let's put a big sensor and use it in funky ways trend. Certainly the, you know, like the S phones have had this for a while. Huawei phones have done this for a while. Like the trend is you can only make the pixels so big or pack them so densely before you start introducing errors or bad pixels. So your better move is to pack in more pixels and then bin them.

And that's like what we've been seeing across the industry. So Apple's like coming to it. We have to see what sensor they're using. Right. They have traditionally used any sensors. We don't know if they're still using. Like there's a million things you got to figure out. But it's funny because it's like now known.

Like I know what to go review it against and how to review it because they're late. But it seems like they are doing at least a couple more interesting things. All right. I'm going to ask you a question as that I get from my mom every year. She's asked me this question every year for the last seven years and I hate it. And so I want to pass on the pain to someone else. which will be better for her to take photos. This phone or her digital camera from 2003.

The phone. That answer is, what are you talking about? That answer is like five years of date. I just needed this so I can send it to her to maybe finally get her to stop using that digital camera. Is she recording onto like mini VHSs? No, she's got like a CF card in it. And it's a crappy, like, it's like a Canon point in. shoot from 2003.

Right. That thing has like a like a posted, like not even a postage set. It has like a quarter inch sensor. Yeah. And has a slow lens. And she probably zooms with the slow lens and makes it even slower. Right. Just like throw that like go to her house.

And it's like throw it away and just like leave an iPhone 12 in its place. And the iPhone 12 will be massively superior to this thing. No, I have to I have to give her this, this audio clip. Yeah. What's your mom's name? I can address her directly. Phyllis. Phyllis.

Let me talk to you. Settle in. throw away your camera and buy any modern cell phone, it will be faster and better for you, and you'll be able to more easily share photos with your daughter. Thank you. It's like little postage stamps. That's another thing Apple did actually is put in faster aperture lenses into, I think, all four of the phones.

Oh, really? I could be wrong. But I'm pretty sure every lens is faster. And that's another one of those things that is like the kind of thing most people don't notice, but just like instantly makes all of your photos slightly better. I'm very excited about that. And then they added, I think they did this just to troll me. I got to be honest with you.

I'm pretty sure they did this just to troll me. They were like, remember Deep Fusion? And they literally showed a picture of a person wearing a sweater. Yes. That was just all for you. Sweater mode. What are we doing? And they're like, we've moved Deep Fusion earlier in the process of taking the photo.

Oh, sure. And now we are calling that the Photonic Engine. Sure. Like, sure. Here's this thing that no one understood anyway. Like, do you remember when they're like, Deep Fusion is here and they rolled it out? Yeah. Or like, what does it do?

Sweeters. But it like perceptibly does very little. And maybe it's doing a lot. And it's generating like a 5% change. And that's very Apple to make a big hype about it. But you know, but like this is like they moved it early in the process. And then the claim is that all these cameras will perform better in low light because deep fusion is earlier in the process.

Okay. So it's up to 2x better on the front camera in low light. Against what, by the way, unspecified. So it's up to 2x better. on the front camera, the telephoto, and the main camera. And apparently it's up to 3x better on the ultra white. Up to 3x better. It's not necessarily 3.

It's just. But against what? Last year's phone, the first iPhone, who knows? Do you think they're comparing it to Phyllis's digital camera? Yeah. Phyllis is just out there shooting. We have a Canon Elf SD 400. And it's up to 3X better than that.

Boom, buy it. I had a Canon Alpha SD 400. That camera got me through a lot of nights at the bar. That's actually why you bought those cameras. You're like, one day someone will spill a beer fully on this. It'll be fine. Yep. Yeah.

And then they added some video features, right? So the cinematic mode can add you 4K30 and 4K24. I tried to test this out. I will tell you that cinematic mode does not like being in a room with hundreds of faces. It just lost its mind. Like, again, true. tremendously unfair, right? But it was like, who, who should be blurry?

I don't know. I'm freaking out. So we'll try it again when I get a review. Because it just focuses like on one face. It's like facial. Yeah. And it tries to blur everything out. So it's just like couldn't decide who I cared about, you know, like, which of these people should be in focus?

So is it like the visual representation of smart homes having to decide who, who to listen to when they adjust the temperature? It just, it just. And the poor person in the demo was like, it's not going to work. It's like, don't even try. I mean, look, I think the pro is great. I'm excited to review it. Like orders right now, I'm sure people are going to, regardless of whatever review says. The thing to me, though, is I'm just watching our GIF that we clipped out of the video.

It's like, they show the big widget a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually not the, it's not the user flow that you would expect in using it. And that's the cool part, right? Like, you've got the airplane app. Boy, do I have thoughts about airplane app design? like airlines if you're listening like I've been on a lot of different airlines in the past couple days all of them are bad you got feelings but like the cool one right we've you got your flight coming and you like it opens and it shows you the plane flying over the thing and estimated time like that stuff is amazing and it's not actually what happens like you tap on it it's going to kick you into an app so I think that's the flow that needs to get figured out you want the dynamic island to just show your plane flying from one end of the island to the other yeah

Well, it's neat that that's what they're showing. Yeah. That's the cool part about this is you got these little minimized widgets and you tap them. You get the big widget and they look really cool, right? Yep. And like, there's a reason they're showing it. They're not showing you bouncing into the American Airlines app, which is just one of the worst experiences you can have as a human being. They're like, no, here's a cool animation that shows you what you need right away.

And like, I think they'll get there or they'll give you, they'll give me a switch. Real quick, before we take a break, one more question on this. I was debating this with somebody the other day, and I'm curious what you guys think. Do you think people know, like, the average iPhone user that you can even long press on stuff to find more information? No. Like, the edit message thing is coming in messages,

and that's underneath a long press. And, like, Apple is increasingly doing more and more of these features and putting them under long presses. And my stance is basically, like, as soon as you do that, you assume 95% of your users are never going to find it. but I've talked to people who were like, no, people know. No, they had 3D touch. Remember, they had pressure sensitive screens,

and they were useless and they threw them away. Yeah. This is the company that still will not ship a multi-button mouse. Right? Because they, at their core, believe that everything should be on the surface of the interface. And then the phone is, like, right clicks for days. Like, all this is right-clicking. Yeah.

Right? Like, at a very basic level, they've added right-clicks to the phone. And it's cool if you're, like, I know, my mouse has 10 buttons. Like I love an alternative click But most people like will never find it Yeah, I think that's right I think a lot of the dynamic They should have called it the dynamic notch

I think they wanted to get away from the word notch And so here we are at Island I think all of the island stuff is right clicks And like they just need to flip that around We haven't talked about this other phone at all We should take a break and talk about the other phone Who cares? We're going to take a break

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which is a very minor improvement over the 13. iPhone 14 also has an updated internal design that improves thermal performance, which is great for staying in the action longer. Processer from last year's pro, the A15 bionic. Cool. minor upgrades to the cameras.

Cool. Faster it wins is mostly. The photonic engine. Extra sweater mode. Super sweater mode. Yeah. Super sweater mode. Oh, we didn't talk about this pro at all. It's got the satellite thing. Yep.

Which is a subscription, right? Well, they get it free for two years. And then you have to pay for it. And then you have to pay for it. Or buy a new phone. Buy a new phone and get it for free. Can we actually talk about this? Because I have been trying to decide since this event, whether or not this is actually

cool. because it's one of those things that like one of the themes of the Apple event was the apocalypse is coming slash you are going to get lost in the woods very soon you're going to be in a car crash and a computer should know about it yeah like but like it's coming it's like it's next week you're going to get in a car crash Apple can't tell you how it knows but it knows can I just can we talk about the one weirdest piece of staging at this whole event sure utterly bizarre so first of all lots of car crashes at the Apple event so many every product's introduction was accompanied by a video of a car crash.

Straight up. And then they would say something like, we hope you never have to use this feature. And it's like, shit. Me too. And then you started running around asking executives how many cars they crashed and nobody would answer your question. But here's the weirdest one.

In the Apple Watch type of which we'll talk about, they were like, here's a bunch of letters that people have written a Tim Cook. About how the Apple Watch like save their life. I placed my Apple Watch on his wrist and I couldn't believe my eyes. An atrial fibrillation notification popped up. Holy cow. And they got the actual people to read the letters, like recreate the letters. It was like very moving, right?

People are like, and it's the stuff that you would expect. My heart started racing. My friend's heart started racing. I went to the doctor. They were like, thank God you're here. There was also a guy who had a bear in his house just to like, it was a wide spectrum of things. But like familiar in the scheme of the Apple Watch saved my life, except maybe for the bear. Then there's a woman who was like, I was in a plane crash.

And I came to and like the, I pushed a button and I watched them and I called it. And it was like, but they, because it was a recreation, they had her sitting in a crashed plane. And I was like, did you take a plane crash survivor and be like, sit in? We built a crashed plane for you to sit in for our, like, it was just bizarre. Like, that's too much. Or the guy who was like, I almost got crushed by the trash compactor in my garbage truck standing there reading it into his garbage truck. It's like, man, Apple. That one made sense because the garbage truck was like functional.

Right? He was like back at work with his truck. This was like they had to make a plane crash. Well, there's two choices here. Someone built a plane crash and they had a physical plane crash set or, you know, the crack Apple TV production company. It was like, sit on the screen screen. We're not going to tell you what happens. And they matted in a plane crash.

Either way, it's like someone had to make a plane crash for this poor woman, sit in. We're far away from satellite connectivity. It jumped out to me so immediately. Yeah. Like, you took a plane crash provider and like, I need to sit in this plane crash and tell me how to watch save your life. I can't even imagine what that day of shooting was like. Let's just talk about that for the rest of the show. That's just very traumatic for a person. Oh, she seemed happy. Who knows? So this was like the theme, as David was talking about, right? The watch can detect a car crash. The phone can detect a car crash. If you're lost somewhere, you can hold up your phone and connect. We think we've learned that company's Glob Star.

interesting. Okay. In our preview episode, we're saying there was a big spectrum of ways a phone can connect to a satellite. One is cell towers in space, full connectivity. There's a bunch of companies doing that, like Link and others. Another is Starlink, which is basically cell towers in space. They're doing that with T-Mobile, a slightly different way.

And then all the way down the line is very low-data transmission in emergencies, and Apple went with very low-data transmission in emergencies. So you can only send text messages in an emergency, and that's it. And you can only really send text messages, I understand it, to emergency services. Right. Yeah, it is, it's the equivalent of like the thing when you don't have any service, but you can call 911. It's like that's essentially what it's just sort of expanding out. And there was a line in it where he was basically like, we've done a bunch of work to shrink the size of a message down to a third of its normal size, which is already like a hilarious thing because the text message is like not a large thing.

And he was like, so you can send a message in as little as 15 seconds. And it's like, wait. And you need perfect line of sight to the satellite. So Starlink eat your heart out, right? Yeah. This isn't a tree might be in the way. It's the phone puts up UI that's like, here's a satellite, point your phone directly at the satellite, holding it up in the air. And then effectively the UI is like clippy for emergencies.

That feels like not super productive. And like you have to text someone? Right. So the idea, so when I say it's clippy for emergencies, they're like, we've built. this system of common messages and replies you might want to send, which I think is how they're doing some of the compression, right? They're like, they have known messages and they can send codes instead of the messages. So it's like, even an accident. Like, do you need help? And then you can like push one and let go. And then if the emergency service provider that's near you doesn't accept text messages,

they have relay stations where people receive your text messages and call the emergency services for you. Okay, because that was the part, like, generally speaking, when you don't have connectivity, it's because you're in a more rural place where emergency services probably are not as often technologically advanced. So the likelihood of, like, them having the ability to receive your text messages in Abilene, Texas, small. Yeah. So we don't know.

So I've seen a lot of reports that Apple's partner with GlobStar for this. Even some reports on how much they've paid GlobStar to do this, right? Like we got to confirm all those details of how it works. But like who sits in the relay center? Is it open question, I think? Is it Apple? Does Apple staff a bunch of relay centers? There's like Glob Star and they're in a contract and they say they're Apple.

Like lots of details there. But fundamentally, it's you're in an accident. You don't have connectivity in the middle of nowhere. If you can point your phone at the right spot in the sky, you can have a sort of scripted conversation that gets you help. Does it only activate if you're in an accident? Like if the bear is in your house, how do you? I don't think there's any situation.

in which you buy an iPhone 14 just in case in your off the grid house a bear enters, and then you pointed at the sky to text emergency services. Bear here. Well, no, that's what I was just like, how do you activate, how do you activate that emergency thing? The use case you're talking about is somebody's in a crash. And Apple talked a lot about like, well, we can detect crashes now. But when are the situations where you aren't in a crash, but you do need emergency services?

You can just hold on the button on your phone just like now. Yeah, I believe it's not connected to the crash detection and stuff, that it is a separate thing. Okay, so it's just like an individual thing and you can be like, help. Yeah, yeah. So like when you, you know, right now, if you like hold the two buttons down to your phone, you can like go to emergency mode. I learn new things about my phone every day on the verge cast. Here are your choices when you want to turn your phone off. If you hold the volume and the power button down and you can turn the phone off, you can get your medical ID or you can do an SOS.

Right. And like picking the wrong one at the wrong time. seems very fraught. Which is also how babies like to call 911 by pressing all the buttons on your phone and then seeing what happens. But the thing that's interesting to me about this is like investing in all the satellite stuff for like the watch ultra, which we're going to talk about, makes a lot of sense to me because it is like a group of people who need this stuff and know that they need it are likely

to buy these devices. Right. This is the kind of thing that I would assume the earth-shattering majority of iPhone users will never once experience in the entire time that they have. this phone. So it was surprising to me that this was like a thing that not only did Apple build into the phone and all of the models of the phone, right? But like spend a lot of time telling us about

in launching the phone. And so the like galaxy brain version of this is like, okay, what is this the like 0.1 version of? And it's like, okay, is Apple eventually going to do I was talking to somebody who was like their big theory is eventually Apple is going to like obviate all the carriers by doing its own fully satellite based infrastructure. Apple loves the carriers now. The carrier, like, that is a lucrative relationship. Yeah, the carriers pay for all the ads for iPhones.

It's a perfect setup. But then if it's not that, though, then, like, what is the five-year plan here that makes this relevant to more than this teeny tiny fraction of iPhone users? Or does there just not need to be one? Yeah, I don't think there was one. I think this was just like, this is a cool feature. There's not a lot going on with the iPhone 14. This is a way to differentiate it from the iPhone 13.

Yeah, they said the big technical achievement here is they got the intent. is to switch to the satellite bands. So they didn't have to add a bulky plastic content. Like, there's obviously a lot of technical work here that has been done. But the future is cell towers in space. Yeah. Right. And actually, Elon, God bless Elon tweeted, like, of course I've talked to the iPhone team.

They're very smart. And it's like, sure you have. Who knows what you've done? Self-driving taxis will be roaming the streets of America tomorrow. Two years ago. Yeah. Sure. But he's like turning a Starling satellite into a cell tower in space is not the end goal.

And that's where that's the state of the art right now is a cell tower in space. So I think there's probably a lot of work to be done here. But right now what you've got is like clipy for emergencies. Which is fine. And it does seem to be true that Apple is leaning harder into this thing that it is like the Apple Watch can save your life. Like it's very clear that that like means something to Apple. And they're like not only is this like a hell of a marketing scheme, but they seem to actually buy this theory that this is meaningful to people in that. way. Yeah, Nicole wrote about it on the site. Like, a lot of the message here is like unsupported by

research fearmonger. Yes. But dressed up, right? Like the Appalachian monitor your temperature, but they can't make medical claims because it's not cleared by the FDA. So who knows? The Apple Watch can monitor your blood oxygen, but it's not clear by the FDA. So who knows? Like a lot of the heart detection stuff that they've done study in 2020 found led to nothing, but caused a burden and interpret it, an additional testing on the healthcare system. That's not discounting the fact that people have had their lives saved by the Apple Watch, but they're leaning into it in a way that they have to connect it to reality at the end. Right.

Life saving at scale is a very different thing. So we should talk with the watches. We have not talked about the iPhone 14 plus. Should we talk about it? No, that feels right. We just, just that moment, we talked about the iPhone 14 plus exactly as much as we should. I will say I do think a lot of people are going to buy the iPhone 14 plus. Oh, yeah.

This is the Nilai Patel big cheap screen theory, right? Like, it's cheaper than the other big one and it's big. And it's the exact same phone as the iPhone 14. Like, great. Very convenient that they're putting it out and they're not doing a mini this year. I'm telling you, ever, you can whine all you want. They're just trying to like feed your theory. Alison will back me up on this if she's on the show again.

They're just, they're feeding your theory that people love big phones. but that's because they don't offer them at the same time. Oh, I see what you mean. No, no, no. They offered both at the same time and people still bought the big ones so much. They got rid of the little one. Yeah, Apple famous for putting out products that people don't want just to spite me lie.

That would say that happens a lot. We got there and like a lot of people there had listened to our episode and they're like, so you want a TV, huh? I sure do. I'm just telling you, big cheap screens always win. The difference in price between the little pro and the big plus is $100. and like in any irrational universe you would upgrade and get the dynamic island and the better camera and the all this and everyone's going to buy the plus instead yep without without question which one are

you guys going to buy the pro max i already got the pro big or little little all right we said we were going to talk about the plus and here we are we should talk about the watches this is the new apple watch series eight it features a big brilliant always on display with narrow borders that Push the screen right to the edge. So speaking of big, cheap screens, Apple Watch eight, huge screen. People are going to upgrade just to get the big screen. Yeah. They added a temperature sensor.

They can do cycle tracking, which is really interesting. A lot of apps have done this over time. They can only retroactively tell you what ovulation is. They can't predict it, which is just another one of those, like, Apple's making claims right at the limit of the claims they can make. Yeah. But they can't go farther, which is interesting. Obviously, crash detection.

God only knows. If you were in a car crash and a computer doesn't know about it, Apple is mad at you. By the way, they've also fundamentally invented OnStar. Like, I went to code and I saw GM executive as not like, they just invented OnStar. And they're like, we had in all hands. And they were like, they just invented OnStar. But the 8 looks good. I think a lot of people are going to upgrade it.

Same basic chip, right? Like, not a lot of additional features they ain't just big screen. I think that the period in ovulation tracking is kind of a big deal for them because they've been notoriously. super far behind there for years and years and years and years. And this is like one of the biggest like places in wearable space. Well, the interesting thing though to, you know, just looking at how they talked about it, you have to wear it while you're asleep. Yes. Which is, you know, they're just going to have to initiate a new user behavior. Also, temper tracking a risk kind of like dicey. Another piece of the Nicole article that's your out, which is great. So we'll see.

It's good that they did it. It's cool. I think a lot of people find it useful. I'm just saying as a person at a baby. If you're trying to make a baby, you need to know ahead of time. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's like, I think this is like, I don't think this is necessarily like going to be useful. I just think it's like interesting that Apple is finally doing it and doing this catch up. And I would suspect those temperature sensors are not just going to be used for this because there's been so much talk in the wearable space of using temperature sensors to predict illness. And they, FDA will be like, you absolutely cannot say that right now. And so I think that's like, series nine or something.

Yeah, they are oceans of peer-reviewed studies away from making the claims they want to make, which is, again, they're making the claims they can. Which is one of the weird things. Like, we're used to these companies, like, massively over-promising all the stuff that they can do. And with a lot of this stuff, it's a totally different dance where there's, like, there's the stuff. And I've heard this from a lot of wearable companies where they're, like, we see things. We can't tell you what they are, but we're very confident about them, but we can't legally say a certain set of words in a row about,

what things actually do. But if you buy one and it's useful to you for that reason, terrific. And you just come out of that conversation being like, what? That's called government regulation working as intended. Yeah. Because it's keeping these companies from overpromising. Because otherwise, like, Apple would be like, we can predict when the baby is coming. And you'd be like, what?

A hundred percent. Yeah. We're going to save your life for sure. Yeah. Apple. Again, and the fact that you have to wear it overnight, like, I am not the right person to review this product. But I think, again, this is like a reveal.

like people are going to get, here's what we know. They're going to sum millions with them. And I think we're going to very quickly learn how accurate the thing is because people are going to talk about it. So that's the eight, I think people, just for those reasons, big screen, big, big cheap screen. That's the upgrade. Everyone's going to do it. Yes, he's really boring.

They just added color to the back. And now we've got to talk with the Ultra. This is Apple Watch Ultra, a completely new design, reimagined with extraordinary new capabilities that expand the ways you can use Apple Watch. I'm going to buy an ultra. It's $800. Why am I buying an ultra? I don't know. Like the most extreme sport I do is I throw Max in the pool. A friend of Vine was like, he called me and he's like, I'm buying the ultra. He's like a watch guy. And I was like, you're a watch guy. Why do you want the ultra? And he's like the tooling on it.

I was like, I'm hanging up on you right now. Yeah. That's right. The buttons are great. The digital crown is finally nerled. It's the whole thing. Like the way to describe the design of this thing is nerled. There isn't another word. I will say, though, Apple did a pretty good job of this thing is enormous. Like, do not get it twisted. It is enormous to the point where, like, you could see from across the room which Apple executive had an Ultra on versus a different Apple watch. Like, unbelievably noticeable.

At the start of the event, they were all wearing their regular Apple watches. That's right. When it was announced, they all put on the big watches. Because it was that noticeable. Like, you can run around with an iPhone 14 and no one's going to notice because it's just an iPhone, right? But the ultra is, it's a big boy. But it's pretty light, I will say. Like putting it on, I expected it to just like my hand to just like go down and make a dent in the floor based on how big it is.

But it's actually like it felt pretty wearable in that sense. It's still bigger than I want on my wrist and bigger than I think a lot of people are going to want on their wrist. But like if you're used to wearing the like dump truck of a garment watch on your wrist, like this will actually feel probably better on your wrist than a lot of those would be my guess. Well, and I do think it like hits that chart of people who are like the Garmin folks and then also the Neelys and my friends folks who like just want a big watch, right? Like big watches have always been a thing. They're very like fashionable for most guys, I think. It's like, yeah, I want to have a 49 millimeter behemoth on my wrist, whereas I'm crying over here saying no. Like, I can't do that.

You bring up the thing I've been wondering about. Like, yeah, right. It's enormous. But that point about like who has. Apple is trying to go after here, I think is exactly right and is going to be very complicated. And Thomas Ricker wrote a really good story for us about this, about whether Apple can do to Garmin what it once did to Nokia, which is basically just like iterated out of existence. Yeah. And what's interesting now is that the Ultra basically seems to be from a sort of

like hyperadventurer athlete perspective, like a mile wide and an inch deep, right? Like it does a lot of things, but if you're, it'll do scuba stuff. But if you like really seriously scuba, it won't don't do enough. It'll do a lot of like mountaineering stuff, but if you're a really serious mountaineer, mountaineer, one who mountaineers, sure, it won't be enough. And so I think trying to get this overlap of like how do you, can it do enough other stuff to make up for the sort of ultra-specific stuff it doesn't do? Seems to be the pitch Apple is trying to make on this one and seems very complicated because in all each of those little tiny niches are people willing to spend an awful lot of money but who have a really high bar for the features that they want and vizong on our team

is writing about this for weeks that like to try to be all things to all people in this sense is borderline impossible yeah it's funny the only customization on the watch is what band you get it with like there's a running band a mountaineering band and a scuba band and it's like that's those are your choices by the way the bands are totally interchangeable the existing bands um i might have four or some people by just like clipping on my like Amazon camel dance. Well, that was a rumor beforehand is that it wasn't going to work with the old band. No, that's all they worked.

It was the first thing I did. And everyone was like, stop that. And I was like, no, I'm still doing this. But the, you know, the scuba thing, Apple isn't making that app. Right. They're going out to like a dive computer company. Right. And they're letting them make the app, which is crazy.

Right. Like Apple, that's usually sort of thing Apple just like Sherlock's away. But they're like, we actually need the credibility with this audience. that the trusted name is going to build this app for this watch. They did not do that with mountaineering or ultramarathoning or this other stuff. And in fact, the watch when you use it is basically the same, right? It's a big square display.

It looks like it has a really big lip around the display, and it basically does not. Yeah, no, it actually, you almost want it to have more because you just, your, it's sort of, your finger sort of slides off the edge of it in a way that like, if I'm just running and want it to deal with, I actually want it to sort of trap at the edges. And just like it the thing's going to be out in the world like you assume the face is going to get scratched if it doesn't have more of a lip.

But so like it it looks different in person and it plays different in person than it does on the videos. But the button, the big orange clicky button is great, right? And it's customizable, which is a big first for Apple can drop you into whatever. The thing where you roll the crown and it turns the display red, this is neat. I'm sold. I'm done. I'm buying the thing. Like I saw that and I was like, do I need it?

No, do I want it now? Yes. Just night mode. But other than that, like the app model is the same, right? Like it hasn't gotten more powerful. They can't do more things. There's a new face. There's a new watch face.

It's complicated new face. There's so much stuff on that watch face. It's nuts. Does it like look feel more expensive than the regular watch? 100%. Because I wonder if like maybe they aren't going after that Garmin crowd, but they are going after those people who buy expensive watches and want to look like have nice expensive watches on their wrist.

And most of them also get like generally speaking, when you're getting a really expensive watch, it's got a diving computer on it or it's got like your flight computer because secretly you're a pilot in 1942. Like it's got all of that stuff. And I wonder if that's actually the crowd it's going after instead of people who run a lot in the wilderness. Yeah. I mean, it looks real fancy.

And I love it. I don't know what to tell you. You're like, yes, it's for me. It's, yeah, I'm going to pay too much money for this thing and use one tenth of it. You know what I'm going to use it for? I'm using it for two factor codes. There you go. The most extreme two factor codes that have entered been generated by any risk computer in the world.

Climb a mountain, be like, yes. Yeah, I'm logging into my Gmail and no one else is people. Apple Watch Ultra. All I could think during the event was how excited you must be that there are now, but more speakers so that you can just be running around walkie talking with Becky all day. It has an 80 decibel siren. You can do anything. So, yeah, so we have people on our staff that are going to review this thing appropriately.

Thomas Ricker is one of them. V is another. So we'll push on that front. But, like, the astonishing thing to me is that Apple has not just across the board here, right? They didn't show anything else you could do with a phone or watch. Like the apps are all basically the same. Dynamic Island is fun, but it's widgets. The cameras are improved, but they're still the same cameras.

Like, there was not a lot of here are useful features the way that, you know, for years, every iPhone event has added, like, meaningful daily interaction features to people. And so even the Ultra, I'm sure they're, like I said, I'm buy one. I'm not, I'm the sucker. Like, it looks really cool. And I'm sure people who are actually ultramarathonsers or explorers, Apple we love to use in the word explorers, which was great. It's like, what are they exploring? What is there?

Space. On the one hand, there's satellites everywhere and we can see anything. On the other hand, explorers, like old school. Magellan is buying this watch. But it's just like, I'm sure those people are interested in the features, but they're in a market where they're much more fully featured products. So it's just like I'm still waiting on the turn for the watch where it becomes a wrist computer instead of like, an ever larger, more complicated piece of hardware design. Same.

And we've, I mean, we've talked about this on the show, too, that I think, like, with more screen, more battery and essentially, like, more stuff you can do on it as a result, there's more you could do there. And I wonder why Apple is not necessarily pushing on some of that stuff. I feel it's the battery. I'm, like, just straight up, it's the battery. Like, until battery tech changes, they can only fit so much battery in this thing, in which case, like, you have to then have a processor that doesn't suck enough, like, destroy the battery.

Yeah. I will say the screen is now so big that you can open the keyboard and, like, kind of type with two thumbs on it. Almost. The swabby typing kind of works. You can swipe type. Like, the writing typing, I do that all the time on mine. I mean, it's like short sentences. Oh, that's all Siri for me.

And no one knows what I'm trying to say to them. Oh, yeah. A nightmare. And now with iOS 16, and I think probably on watchOS 9, you can dictate emojis. So now you can be running up a mountain yelling heart emoji, thumbs up emoji, dead emoji into your watch, which is just the life I'm very ready for. It's going to be like dancing lady emoji, dancing lady emoji. Plain crash emoji, bear emoji, house emoji. Plain crash.

There's a bear in my plane crash. Yeah. Look, they're so far ahead of everybody else. Like Sundar Pichai was at code on stage running a pixel watch, an unannounced pixel watch. He was very, and I was so mad I wasn't there. Like, but he was, he wore it with white bands. So people would notice it. Right.

And I was like, well, the old school blogger me like runs to get a Zoom lens and is like stocking him backstage. And like all the reporters there like didn't do it. Like Mark German caught it to his credit. But the, the end gadget in me, like the old school end gadget in me is like, I'm in the hallway. I've got a 200 millimeter lens. like Sunar's not leaving here until I have a photo of the pixel watch. But like, you know, you can see what it is. It's a circular watch.

It's going to have a bunch of Fitbit features in it. And they're, they are competing with the Apple Watch Series 5. Yeah. Like at just a fundamental level. There are three generations behind where Apple is. And Apple, so like it's, these complaints are minor on the edges. Right? Like, I wish they would make it more powerful.

Like, but this is more powerful than anything. But it's just weird that like, You know, the theme here is like you're going to be in a car crash, not look at all of the things you can do with your phone. Like, it's Apple has just like started to assume those things. It's like, what if we also saved your life? Right. They're going to places where they're adding features where they're, they are themselves even saying, we hope you never use these features. Well, and it's just like Apple is also sort of simultaneously on this like reset your relationship with technology.

and let's talk about screen time and focus modes and like let's help you disconnect and not feel so reliant on your screens. And it's like, you know what would help is make those interactions easier on the watch so I don't even have to get my phone out at all. I can just like leave it flip down on the table. And that's just like some of that is already in there and you can do it if you want. But either Apple doesn't think it's an interesting selling point for people or it just doesn't have any new ideas about how that stuff is supposed to work. All right. We need to take a break. Yes, we do.

I will quickly, here's everything you need to talk about the AirPods Pro. They are largely the same. They have a slightly new driver. They have an H2 chip. They are still running Bluetooth, and they do not do lossless. And they have a little loop in the case for Lanyard. But they do two times the noise canceling, whatever that means. Well, I think that one is the previous generation.

I think that one you can safely assume. I will say, I tried them. I spent like five minutes wearing a pair in the hands-on. And the noise canceling is like good but not great, like all noise canceling. Like it does the job, but it's not incredible. But the pass-through continues to amaze me. Like how good it is at passing through, I've used a lot of these headphones now. And that's the one place where Apple is just like leaps and bounce above everybody.

Yeah. By the way, the setup for the hands-on, they had people with boxes of AirPods Pro. Yeah. And so people would try them on and you would like put them away and like a fresh one would be delivered to the room. It's wild. Like lots of people with lots of boxes of AirPods. So what you're saying is there's going to be a really good opportunity to buy refurbished. AirPods press.

Just go to the Apple store and campus. If you want the AirPods that have been in Marquez Brownlee's ears, that is a thing you can probably accomplish. Sell them as an NFT, let's do it.

All right, we'll take the break. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited.

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features mentioned in today's episode. clod. a. I. slash verge cast. Okay, so that was the Apple event.

Obviously, we got to get all the stuff. We got to review. We got to talk about it more. You have to experience the island. The other thing that happened on the same day was

Tim Cook came to code, along with Johnny I and Lauren Powell Jobs. I will just tell you this brief story about what it's like being in the room versus what,

what it's like watching on a stream. And you could have paid to watch a stream. Code had virtual tickets. So on stage, very notably, Johnny I've sat on one chair with Warren Pall Choss in the middle and Tim Kweckstatt and another chair. Right. And Tripp Mickle just had his book after Steve about the differences between those two. It was just reported that his contract with his new firm, love from, is not Renew to Apple.

In the room, they both had like entourages. And they did not sit near each other. and they did not talk to each other. Oh, wow. I noticed that. And so, like, I'm watching Trip Mickle, like, clock this because he's there. And it was just, like, a really, that part of that dynamic. Like, they didn't really talk to each other.

They talked about Steve. They were there to talk about Steve. And that was very touching. Right. And, like, I believe that the value Steve instilled in Apple are still present at Apple. Just the way that all three of them talked about it and talked about him and their effect on him. Steve was the first guest at what was then called All Things. with Walt and Kara.

So this was Kara Swisher's Final Code, the last session. And she teared up at the end, which is remarkable for Kara Swisher. So all of that was very poignant. Then we got to the questions. So I asked a question, which, you know,

you kind of know that you're not going to get answers sometimes. But I was like, look, you guys all said Steve would have hated social media and the divisiveness. These apps all run on your phone. What are you going to do? People buy the phones to run Instagram and TikTok. Like, if you didn't have Instagram and TikTok

and your phone, like people would buy Android. phones. And he was like, yeah, you know, we have screen time. That was basically his answer. Didn't he say I'm not a TikTok expert? Wasn't that? Right. So then I asked because the theme of code was everyone down the line being like TikTok is dangerous. Like Scott Callow is like, we should ban it. Mathia Stoffner, who's the CEO of Axel Springer, a huge media company that owns Politico and these things are like, it should be banned in every democracy. It's just Chinese influence. He's on the board of Netflix. I think there might be some other motive there. You know, Evan

Spiegel was on stage right before. He was like, we got to compete with them, but they're under Sipheus review and like the United States government kick my like this whole thing and then Tim is like I'm not a TikTok expert and Casey Newton is there and he's like Apple has perfect data about TikTok. Yep, right? It's the most popular app on their phone. They can see every purchase that's made in the app. They get a cut of all those purchases like actually he's definitely a TikTok expert. Like this is the thing that people are using their phones for Apple is in it, but they don't want to talk about it. So whatever. But I ask a question. Great. Then, uh, Lequan Hunt, who, uh, is on the sort of revenue side of Fox Media, straight up asked about RCS. Not me. Love it. Right? I was like joking with Alex Heath.

Like, I should ask what RCS. But like, I don't think you'd answer the question, right? Yeah. So I try to ask, it's like earthy or a question. But anyway, LeQuon asked a question, like, you know, Apple's all about connecting people and equality and all the stuff. Like, why don't you support RCS? My Android phones are green bubbles.

And Tim said, I mean, he, he got like icy. Yeah. He said, I don't hear our customers saying we should put a lot of energy into it, which is hilarious because no customers asked them to put energy into the dynamic island. Right? No customers are like, here's what you do. Ship bad keyboards for five years. But this is his answer. Great.

And then Silicon says, well, you know, but there's videos. I want to send my mom that she can't get. And he was like, buy your mom an iPhone. That was like ice cold. And it was very funny. The room laughed really hard. It was funny. It was obviously telling a joke.

But it's where Apple is. Right. And like, I'll tell you the story we wrote. about that is neck and neck with the iPhone hands on. Right? Like the interest in green bubbles and blue bubbles is experienced by lots of people. And so Apple being like, no one wants this is actually inaccurate because people are experiencing the reality of some of my friends are green bubbles and some of my friends are blue bubbles and some of these videos are lower resolution. So there's a lot of pretending that this isn't important to people by Apple, by tech people. RCS is not important.

What is important is communicating with people. What is important is encrypted end-to-end encrypted messaging by default on your phone. And like if you're just going to exclude a huge portion of phones from that by default, I think you should account for it. Well, and I guess I'm of two minds about this. Because on the one hand, I think if you're Tim Cook, you can accurately say you're more supportive of open messaging than pretty much any other messaging app. Like, WhatsApp doesn't fall back to SMS. You're just hosed if you're not using WhatsApp, right?

Like, that just is what it is. There is no system. There is no open system inside of WhatsApp. So even the fact that Apple, like, does a crappy job of supporting an open system is, like, one order of magnitude better than most other messaging app. So on that level, great. I do think it seems impossible to me that this is not something users have expressed. For exactly the reason you're describing, I think the, like, green bubble versus blue bubble thing is, like, as, as. its own thing, totally overblown. Like, I actually don't think that matters that much at all.

It's the thing where my messages don't reliably go through. And when I try to send my wife a picture, it comes through as this teeny tiny little thumbnail-sized thing that looks like crap. And it's like, I don't care about whether it's RCS or if Apple just like does a better job of supporting MMS. Like the underneath part of it is not nearly as interesting as the fact that like the only way I can share a photo with my wife is to upload it to Google photos. And you should actually, if you're Apple. Well, but you could use Signal or WhatsApp. Like, there is that argument floating out there.

Sure, but this is my point. Like, she doesn't use those things. Like, she uses text messaging. And this should work. Like, we have a standard through which this works. And if Apple is going to support it at all, it should at least do the bare minimum to make it work functionally. Tim Cook was being, like, pretty honest. Like, when he said, buy your mom an Apple phone, right?

He has zero incentive to want to put RCS. Why should he make that interconnectivity easier for anyone? Like, why should he? He shouldn't. If you're running a business, there's no reason to do that. And we know from various lawsuits and discovery that they have thought about putting our message in Android, and they didn't, because the answer is then people would buy their kids cheap Android phones instead of giving them their old phones and upgrading, which is just callous math.

It is their main lock-in engine. Like, it really, really is. In the United States, we'll qualify it. In the United States, it's definitely a main luck. And they know that teenagers bully each other into buying iPhones because they have green bubbles. This is a real thing that happens. So, yeah, it was a moment, like the whole Steve Jobs thing, Lori and Powell Jobs, and that's the Steve Jobs archive, which you can go to. It's going to share a bunch of emails and videos of Steve that you maybe haven't seen before.

Like that moment was great. And then it ended with Buy your mom an iPhone, which, again, it was sharp, but it was still a joke. But I think it was a very revealing joke. Yeah, it was hard to come out of that thinking, this will ever happen. He was basically like, we're not going to fucking do RCS. Yeah, like, he was pretty clearly like, we're not doing this. Like, this is a bad line of questions. But like Amy Klobuchar is, like, floating around the wings, being like, yeah, you are.

You know? She was there. She talked about the whole thing. So it's code. We have lots of coverage of the stuff. I'm excited for reviews. I think the dynamic island will reveal itself to us in due time through usage. I'm excited by this camera.

So that's all coming up. We've got to run. We've gone way over here, as you people have demanded. By the way, thank you to the people who sent nice notes to Liam. I really appreciate it. That was very nice of you. Please keep doing that. Also, if you have Apple questions, call the Vergecast hotline.

It's 866, Verge11, and ask us all your Apple questions. I think in two Wednesdays we're going to do a bunch of Q&A about Apple stuff. So if you have burning questions, call them in. All right. That's it. That's Redcast. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reclos.

Alex H. Kranz. David is at Pierce. We love hearing from you. Call the number. Write us notes. Only nice notes to Liam. See you next week. Rock around.

And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Box Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.