The Vergecast - Ctrl-Walt-Delete: Nilay owes Walt $100

Episode Date: September 25, 2015

Walt and Nilay kick things off with a discussion of the iPhone 6S, the weird new prices of phones, the 2007 iPhone, and more. Subscribe to Ctrl-Walt-Delete on iTunes! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ctrl-+-walt-+-delete/id1043196031?mt=2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Control Walt Delete, a new podcast from The Verge. I am Neil I'm Patel, the editor and I'm joined here by Walt Mossberg, our executive editor and the co-founder of RICO. Hey, did you say Control-Aalt Delete? I say Control-Walt Delete. Do you want me to enunciate better? Why don't you enunciate better? All right, I'll do that. No problem. Being a stickler.

Hello, and welcome to Control Walt Delete, a new podcast from The Verge. I am Neel-Fatel, and the editor-in-chief of Verge. And I'm joined by Walt Mossberg, executive. editor of The Verge and co-founder of Recode. Hey, Walt, how's it going? Great. Nilai, how's it going for you? It's going great. So we, this is the first episode of what I think of is your podcast, Walt. I'm very excited to do a show with you.

It has been, people don't know this, Walt and I have known each other for quite some time. And then as Recode became part of the Vox Media family and Walt and Lauren Good and Katie Brett joined the Verge team, Walt and I've spent a lot of time together recently. And I'm really excited to let everybody in on just what it's like to hang out. with us because it's been really fun for me. I hope it's been fun for you, Walt. It's been a lot of fun. It's been great.

You guys rock. I just, in fact, we did that. Yeah. So it's been a pretty fun ride since May when we announced that RICO was joining the box family and we've been hanging out. And what a good time to do the first episode of the podcast. We've been promising that we're going to do the podcast together since like the first day. We had Walt and Lauren on the Vergecast.

That was super fun. But what a good day. It's been in stealth. It's been in stealth. It's absolutely been in stealth. I did convince Walt that we should use the name Control Walt Delete, which I'm very excited about. And props to our former podcast producer, John Logger-Mercino, for coming up with that name. But what a great time to start the show and start off a run of it.

iPhone reviews came out today. The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus were announced a couple weeks ago. I did the Big Verge review. Walt did the big Mossberg review. They're both up on the site. You should see them. We made a really fun video with Walt. We did an embarrassing video with me, as always.

other people did reviews, but I think ours are the best. And let's talk about it. Let's get into it. So, Walt, what do you think of the iPhone success? Well, you know, this is, people have to remember, this is one of those S years. You know, Apple is on this TikTok schedule, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, where they do a big release one year and then the next year they pretty much keep the same form factor of the phone, but they change the hardware and they try to introduce enough new features. to make it really significant to people considering upgrades.

So, for instance, a good example would be they brought out the iPhone 5, which was a whole new form factor because they increased the size of the screen, which now seems tiny, but to then at the time seem bigger. And but then the 5S came out and what did they do. They introduced touch ID, which was really the first workable fingerprint recognition on a phone and was an important. important feature. And of course, the phone was faster and all that. Now we have another S-cycle phone that I think has another fundamentally important, you know, addition, which is just, which is both hardware and software, and that's 3D touch. Yeah. So here's, here's my take on 3D touch. I think everybody was fairly positive on it who used it. It's, you know, it's one of those features where you can, I don't know, I'm going to go out and learn here. If this is one of those features where of Samsung or.

LG had just sort of gone off and yolode and just made it on their own outside of Android, we would be like, this is kind of a gimmick. Like, you know, a company like Samsung has never going to get the entire Android app ecosystem to support a feature like 3D touch. But because it's Apple and they control the hardware and the software, and they have the sales clout to go get Facebook and Instagram and all these people, you can see the potential for it right away. And so I actually thought, as I was using it, man, this is useful, but I don't use a lot

of Apple's apps. So I enjoy the quick launcher on messages so I could quickly text people. I loved being able to just grab a selfie using the, you know, pushing down and getting the quick action to take a selfie with the camera icon. In Safari, I thought the, you know, peak and pop was interesting. But I was like, I don't use mail. I don't use Apple's mail app. I don't use Apple's calendar app. And while you and I have talked about this, those are sort of the weakest parts of the iPhone. So you really have to depend on Apple's clout to extend it into the whole range of experiences with Apple stuff. And I think that's where Apple is just very uniquely positioned to do that in a way that

almost nobody else is. Well, I think that's exactly right. And I made that point in my review. This has always been the thing about Apple. If you go back to the very beginning, they control the hardware platform and the software platform. Yes, you know, it's true that they're not, as critics sometimes like to say, closed because, hey, a million and a half apps is not closed.

but they control the platform parts. And if Samsung had tried this, it probably would have been mostly software. A lot of things they've tried have sounded great and have like their fingerprint reader when they first did. It was terrible. It worked about 30% of the time. But you're right. The developers are likely to flock to this. I think maybe we ought to back up a second if that's okay and just explain to people who haven't tried this what it is

because it can look like a parlor trick when they look at the videos or the or the photos in the in everybody's review. This is this is taking the 10 finger multi-touch, which was not invented exactly by Apple because it was in university labs and things like that. And they had to buy some teams and some patents, but certainly refined and certainly made mainstream by Apple in 2007 with the first iPhone. Taking that, chat gestures, we all use every day now, swipe, pinch, zoom, scroll, everything with your finger, and adding an important new dimension, which I think you made a big point of in your review, which is depth and which is really the perception that the screen is almost flexible. You know, you hit that screen, you hit it with a certain amount of force, which, by the way, I discovered, is adjustable. And when you do that, it operates in two ways. If it's just on an icon on your home screen, you get haptic feedback so you know you've done it. And you get a pop up sort of a context menu, just like when you right click on a PC or Mac.

And you get a bunch of quick choices, the things that they think you're more likely to want to do. And I think that will improve a lot over time as they learn. and you mention a couple and you get to do them and that's one way to do it but to me even in some ways the cooler way is inside the app you may not use Apple Mail

I do use it I have complaints about it but I do use it I use other mail apps as well and in Apple Mail it's amazing I mean you know you're in a list of emails

yes there's a three line preview but you don't really necessarily know whether you care about it you just press down you get a popped up version of the mail. You can quickly look at it and make a decision. And when you lift your finger, it goes when you're back at the list. And that's the key thing.

You're back where you were. You know, you can do something with it or not do something with it. You can even, when your fingers down, you're looking at that preview, which they call a peak, you can even scroll up and it has some quick actions like reply. Or you can push a little bit harder and have the whole thing open for real. And that is called pop. So, you know, we're just seeing the very, It's just like trying to figure out the multi-touch stuff, which a lot of people laughed at, actually, because they didn't have a stylus or anything.

And now they do. Well, now they do on one device. Yeah. But it's, you know, if you were writing about this, you would have a split of people saying this is awesome, which I think I said. Yeah. And you would have other people saying this is like a gimmick. But it isn't a gimmick and everyone else is using it now. And, you know, they're not, we can.

I think we should avoid the legalities of all this, although one of us was a lawyer. But I made I made a lot of hay over patents on multi-touch. That was basically what I covered. Is that where you made your fortune? Yeah, my, I got $25 and I protected it with my life. No, you know, that's – I was going to go for a percentage of your fortune, but now not so much. Well, actually, well, I owe you $100. You do owe me $100.

This is actually, I think we should have started with this. So if you were listening to Vergecast, you know that I bet we had a planning, you know, before these events go on, we had these huge planning meetings, whole staff sits around, we talk about how we're going to cover the stuff and what we're expecting and we assign out stories, all the stuff that we do. And we were talking about, you know, the story that you got to write, which is this is how much the iPhone costs. And I was like, you know, everybody has these new pricing plans now, which we should talk about. I think the every year upgrade pricing plan changes. It changed my entire thought process in reviewing this phone. But anyway, we were talking about what number are they going to put on the screen? They put $199 and $2.99 on the screen for literally since the iPhone first came out.

Well, no, since the 3G came out, right? The first one was way more expensive. That's right. So since the the... Yeah, since whenever the $199 number... And the amazing thing is no one could charge more than $199 after that and, you know, with a two-year contract. succeed but anyway go ahead right so we're in this meeting I just I'm just to say this it is always Walt calls into our meetings all the time but you hate Walt hates

meetings so sometimes he doesn't you know he's there sometimes he's not there we give him his choice walk into every once so walk obviously Walt's on the Apple meeting he hasn't said anything for well and then I'm like they're never gonna put $27 on the screen right which is the price of the base model iPhone over the you 18T's two-year payment plan or Sprint's payment plan. Verizon and all have the same one. It's $27 a month. And Walt's like, you know, they will put $27 a month on the screen.

And I was like, well, I'll give you $100 of Apple puts $27, the least elegant number I can think of on the screen. And so sure enough, we're at the event, and they put up $199, and I was like, and then Phil Scheller was like, and all the carriers now have payment plans. So you can get an item for $27 a month. So I owe $100, which while I will, everyone asked me if I was going to pay you, I will definitely pay you. I will Venmo you or something after you. I've been waiting. But I wanted everybody to know. That was a very funny moment in our sort of fun, chaotic live blog of the event when they 27 flashed up and my Twitter exploded.

But yeah, so that is actually the thing that the notion that people are particularly, particularly if you're listening to a podcast like this, right? you are obviously interested in technology you're interested in phones and you're probably this for a person who maybe you don't get a new phone every year but you're certainly always considering it right you're always

if you're like me I always want a new phone every year and it's been hard because of these two-year contracts and you don't the upgrades don't come around and you got to buy them in full price and sell them and there's a little bit of complication there that some people have figured out how to manage and other people it's too much but now every carrier has divorced

and Walt just wrote a great call about this. They've divorced the price of the service, at least a little bit from the price of the device. I want more. I want them out of it altogether. You got a big rant about this. Walt wants them to shut down all their stores and the whole thing, right? I just don't want them involved in any way in phones in the actual handset business. I think they have a great business.

They spent a lot of money in networks. They ought to compete on who has the fastest, who has the most coverage, who has the best price, whatever. But, you know, why should they bother to be second-rate retailers and second-rate app developers? But that's another. Well, no, but I think this is part of it. So, and I'm very curious that this changed sort of your perception of how you thought about the iPhone. Because now every, you know, the goal is to get you to pay, you know, AT&T will take $27 a month from you for the rest of your life and give you an iPhone every year. Apple announced the iPhone upgrade plan, which is a little bit more.

It's like $32 or $35 a month. But you get... But I think for the bigger one, it's slightly more. But whatever. So it's 32 bucks a month, and you get a new iPhone over year in AppleCare. And the other – the five – we should explain that all these plans, including the carrier ones, are no interest, which is interesting. And the Apple one, which is also no interest, is $5 more because they're including the – they're typically expensive. But I find often worthwhile AppleCare warranty in it, just divided by 24, you know.

So that's like five bucks more a month. Right. But here's the thing about Apple's plan, which is called the, what, the iPhone upgrade program. They let you get one a new one every year. So, you know, this whole idea of a carrier deciding when you can get a new device, it would be like Comcast, if that was your home internet provider, saying, can't buy a new laptop, Neli, this year. But you can buy it next year or, you know, 11 and a half months for. now, whatever, you know. That's Apple saying every year you can buy one. Obviously, it's in their

interest. I get that. But I mean, it gives you the choice. And secondly, and this is even more important, the phone is unlocked. I mean, the iPhone is one of the few phones that's been made. So it's completely unlocked. It has bands that cover and the right radios that cover the competing, you know, Verizon Sprint on one side and T-Mobile on the AT&T on the other. And, of course, globally. I think it has 23 bands in it or something. So they can just unlock it. And if you start out with Verizon and then you want to at any time, really, just go and get another SIM, you can go get another SIM. Apple doesn't really care.

Keep making your payments. You decide to upgrade after 12 months. They just reset it at 24. You're paying exactly the same, you know, in the end, full price of the phone with no interest. And there's no, you are their customer, not the carrier's customer. Right. This has got to be very worrisome to the carriers. But what strikes me in reviewing the phone, and we should talk about, you know,

there's the camera and all this stuff we should talk about. Yeah, and more on 3D touch. Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot to go-to. But what struck me as I was reviewing the phone was in a world, I have friends. So I'm like, you know, I get a fun every year, right? I review phones to get any fun every year. But then I have friends who are very adamantly, you know, they're on this sort of non-S cycle.

They love getting the new design. So they get the new design every year. So they got the F&5. And then I have friends who are like, I'm on the S cycle. This is what I do. Every, I wait for the first one I get out, all the bugs that worked out and they make them faster. And all the cases and accessories are out there already for me. And I love getting the S phones.

So every two years you get the S phone. But in a world where the sort of market expectation is now, that you're going to just pay Apple $32 a month forever and you just get a new phone every year, that kind of takes the notion of the S cycle completely out of the picture. You're just going to get a new iPhone every year. And so things like

3D touch, they're going to roll out the big base of iPhone use ever faster than ever before. And things like these are pretty cameras are going to come out. And things like the processor, right? So Apple loves saying the A9 processor is faster than ever. It's just, it

kind of like doesn't matter because in a couple of years, everyone will have a process of that. And this is something that, you know, obviously all things can change. Right. But right now and for, you know, certainly the last, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, Apple's been the only company that could pull this off. I mean, it's why they were the only company that could pull off saying to a phone carrier, you don't get to touch the phone. Even right when they started it. Because they have such a powerful brand.

They have their own chain of retail stores, which are. very lucrative and very successful. And they just have a tremendous, and as you pointed out, and I pointed out in my column as well, they are the only people that control a powerful hardware platform and a powerful software platform and a cloud platform, which frankly could be better. But they do have a cloud platform. That should be another podcast, by the way. But they have all three things.

And they have people, there's a certain lock-in. there's a certain familiarity. There are iPhone or Apple families. And it's a very powerful thing. And so now they're in the, they're in the installment buying program. It's also very useful for them because they're a premium products company. They're like BMW. They charge a lot.

They don't make $180 phones. At least there's been no inclination that I can see that they're going to do that. And so $650 sounds like a lot of money for the base iPhone 6S. But $32 a month sounds like, well, I can swing that, you know. Right. So, yeah, it's a it's a big deal. I actually, my, my general prediction about the phones is that A, the next cycle of iPhones, they will all have five inch or bigger screens. I think that's just where the market's headed.

And if you look at the competitors, either the G4, the LGG4 or the guy. Alexe S6, they are using those bigger screens in a case that's much smaller in that sort of in, it's not. Yeah, smaller bezels and all that stuff, yeah. And it's funny because 3D touch kind of lets them, it lets them rethink that home button in a way. So I think that's like a fascinating, like the phone will get bigger. And then the upgrade cycle will just rapidly accelerate. So I don't know.

There's a part of me to think so maybe this is the last S phone that we're going to see. And maybe Apple will just because the expectation is new phone every year, they're just going to start hammering. away at it. I don't know. I sort of asked me about it. You know, I think it becomes a nomenclature thing. I mean, I have no idea where they called the desk in the first place. I mean, I could ask them and maybe they have an answer, but you might be right. Let's tackle this big screen thing. I agree with you very much that when they went to the bigger screens, and I include very much in that the standard iPhone 6 because that's 4.7 was a much bigger screen than they had ever had. And at the time it was, there were a lot of other phones in that range.

And then, of course, the bigger, the 5.5 inch 6 plus and now 6S plus. That broke open. I mean, it looked like Samsung as opposed to the Android platform. People get very confused. The Android platform has won globally, no doubt about it in terms of market share. Apple has won globally in terms of profits and I think prestige. But their individual handset competitor was Samsung. And once Apple went to big screens, that sort of coincided.

There were some other factors as well, like cheaper phones from China. But that sort of coincided with, you know, some of the magic dust went away from Samsung at that. point. And you may well be right that there'll be no iPhone smaller than five, let's say, or five and a half or five point two or something. And that's fine with me. That's cool with me. I mean, the reason that I personally reviewed both this year and last year, the six and not the plus, or the six S and not the plus, is just that I still think that at this moment for iPhone buyers, this is the mainstream model. Oh, yeah. And they have, except for one thing, which is optical image stabilization, they have the same hardware features, basically.

So whatever you say about the 6S applies to the plus as well. Yeah. So let's talk about it. But I don't really disagree with you that the whole thing may get bigger. But it'll have to do with their sense of two things. One is what are their customers buying? And the other is, because it's Apple, it'll have to do with. design. Yeah. You know, so if they, if they can do something that they think is even cooler with

bigger screens, they'll probably do it. So we should talk, speaking of hardware, we should talk about the cameras for a minute and then if you want to loop back to a 3D touch, get into that. But then I want to end by, I've pulled up your very first iPhone review. So Walt was one of the very few people to review the first iPhone ahead of everybody else. And I'm just, I would love to just hear how the thing is changed. So let's see the cameras real quick. So I think, the biggest change. I didn't notice a huge change in the back camera from 8 megapixels to 12. It is... Right. There was

a change. It is better, but it's not, like, enormously better because they had a fantastic camera last time. Yeah, but I thought there was a meaningful change from the 5S to the 6. That's what I mean, yeah. So last time, which was the 6,

they had a fantastic camera. They did not make a meaningful change, but by going to 12 megapixels and doing the work they did on the sensor, I think they poised themselves to maybe make a big jump next time. Right. But then what is actually really interesting to me

is that they were far or far behind on the front-facing camera where everyone else had gone to five and even eight in some cases and they were still at 1.2 megapixels. And now they've got a 5-megapixel camera and they're doing this retina flash thing which somebody reminded me

they've done a max in photo booth forever, which is when you take a picture of the whole screen flashes at you. And they've got the clever sort of two-tone stuff where they measure the light in the room and they flash the screen a slightly different shade of white to balance. It's very clever. Snapchat was doing it for a while. Apple's riff on it is obviously because they control the hardware. They can make the screen flash three times as bright as it normally would go at max brightness.

Right. It works. It's cute to play with. It does work. It works. I find my tests. But you've got to, you know, it doesn't work from particularly far away, right? Like you've got a, it's for selfies, right?

It's fine. It's a selfie, yeah. But I actually think that is the far more meaningful upgrade of the camera. Yeah. I was saying that I went, I recently went on a trip to South Africa and all of my favorite photos from South Africa, we took with a selfie stick, which is hilarious. All of my favorite photos from this trip are, you know, I went with like a Sony RX10 with like a crazy lens and all the stuff.

And all of my favorite photos are 1.2 megapixels. And I think that that's a sort of thing where, You know, Apple does this stuff like 3D touch. They push the market. They have these, like, big ideas. But then the thing that their competitors have been relentlessly trying to improve, which is the experience of what people are actually doing, which is taking selfies. Apple's just sort of like strolling in kind of late to the game.

And I think that's the sort of, you know, you look at something like live photos where HTC did the Zoe photos and Nokia did their own live photos. How many Zoe photos did you take? Yeah, that's the thing. How many live photos am I really going to take? I mean, if. Well, I don't know, but people are going to take more live photos than the people – I'll tell you something. I'll bet you that by four days from now, people have taken more live photos than the total ever taken of Zoe photos.

Well, it's because HC didn't sell me photos. And HCCs might even have been better. I don't remember. I remember writing about it, or one of my colleagues did. But, you know, so there's a reason I put it last in my research. review not because I hated. I mean, it works. It's fine. It's just not as important as the other stuff. Yeah. It's just the camera upgrades. Usually the camera upgrade for the last couple. I think the five had a meaningful upgrade from the fours. The five S had a great upgrade. The six had a

great camera upgrade. And it's just funny. This one, the rear camera to me feels very incremental. And the front camera feels like a revolution. Yeah. They caught up on the front camera. But, you know, look, Neely, I don't have the numbers on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they still with their 1.2 megapixel front camera, they were responsible for more selfies than any other individual manufacturer. Well, they don't sell. I mean, their platform is smaller, but yes, as a phone, as an individual phone product, yes, they sell more phones. And people trust the cameras on them.

That's true. I was talking to Lauren Good, one of our other reviewers here. The fabulous. The wonderful Lorngo, who was at Recode with Walton and joined the verge team when the sites came together. But she was like, you know, there's a strong argument to be made that Apple is just doing a bunch of the stuff that other companies, outside of 3D touch, of course. But, you know, a better selfie camera, animated automatic gif creation. Life photos are kind of a riff on GIFs. And some of this other stuff is very much along the lines what other companies have been trying to do to desperately differentiate their phones against Apple.

And you see Apple just sort of sweep them all in. But that's, look, that's a big part of their pattern. You know, Steve Jobs is a historical figure, certifiable, genius, whatever. But he didn't, and they did invent some things, and they did take big risks. But there's a lot of things where they just waited a little bit to see what other people fumbled around to do. and then they came in and tried to do it in a more, you know, kind of integrated, organized, hardware and software combined way. And I think this is, several of these things are examples of that here. I think 3D touch is the one that, in this case, is more of a bold stroke.

And I agree with you that it will be fascinating to see what developers do with it. I noticed I got an update a couple of hours ago from Shazam, which is using it. You can press down on their icon, and immediately it will, you know, Shazam the song, listen to the song and identify it for you without opening the app. So, you know, these are small things at the beginning, but I just, I won't belabor the topic because I think we both agreed on it. But this is, this is, you know, just when you think smartphones, okay, it's stale, it's mature, what the hell can anybody do with it?

they come up with another fundamental, and I stress fundamental kind of navigation thing that people are going to find interesting ways to use. All right, so let me read you, and I think that's a really good segue into this thing. I want to try to do

on this show as much as we can, which is to pull from this vast archive of reviews. Oh my God. Come on. You got to let me do this, man. Who else gets to do this? It's great. So, 2007, the first iPhone comes out. Well, I think it was just you and maybe two or three other people got to do the other. There were three of us.

Three of you got to the earlier reviews. And I remember I was working at Engadget at the time. The reviews came out. We devoured them. And we aggregated the hell out of you as we were want to do. And we were so excited to finally get our own phones. But there was so much hype around that. first iPhone. So I want to read you. I just want to ask you as you were as you were writing some

these lines, how you were thinking about evaluating the first iPhone and how you think that relates to this one. So here's my favorite line from your first review. You ready? The iPhone's most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard, turned out to be a non-issue despite our deep initial skepticism. Now I think that is if you, in this modern. Like, there isn't a great phone with a keyboard anymore, right? But at that time, that was such a, it was a, it was a, like a gamble to make a phone without a keyboard. What were you, how were you thinking through that? How do you think, how do you think we've gotten here from there? Well, I mean, I remember writing that. I mean, and I can remember arguing with Steve Jobs about it quite a bit, as a matter of fact. And I didn't write that because he sort of won the argument. I wrote it because I used it for however long, um, for however long, um, I had it, and I had it for more than, it was not like a five-day thing. I think it might have been a couple, three weeks, as a matter of fact, different days. And what happened to me was gradually, look, I'm not a touch typist, and that may have biased me somewhat, but I gradually found that, hey, this works.

You know, I was a, I was not a BlackBerry user, but I was a trio user. I don't know how many people remember the trio, but it was a very good. good pre-iphone smartphone and it had a physical keyboard and I that's why I was so hugely skeptical and as I use this thing I mean I think I went on somewhere in that comma say that within the first couple of days I was ready to throw the thing out the window because I was making so many typos then all of a sudden three days or four days in it just sort of clicked and it worked and worked for me and that's when my mind changed. So, you know, it's using it.

And then, of course, the advantages of the software keyboard, once you find it's usable, which I did, and there still are people who don't like it, but I do, once you find it's usable, then the advantages of it become super important. For instance, we don't even notice this anymore, I don't think, but when you're on, you. You're in different apps, both Apple and its developers, Android, you know, Google and its developers, can change the keyboard to be more sensible. So if you're filling out a URL, it doesn't have a space bar because there are no spaces in URLs, you know, and it put in it and it has the, the ad symbol in email address fields, but not in other places. So, you know, making its software makes it much more powerful in a way. All right. So I've got one more. one more line.

And I think this is the, you and I didn't focus on this so much, but I think we're both friends with Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal. And her entire review of the 6S was about, basically about battery life. She, you know, it's hard to review an S phone because in some ways are iterative. So she did a clever thing where she asked all of her readers to say, what's the biggest problem with your phone? And then she sort of paused the question of whether the success answers those questions. And the number one she got was battery life.

So here in 2007 is your line about battery life on the very first iPhone. In real life, you'll do a mix of these things. So the best gauge might be that in our two-week test, the iPhone generally lasted all day with a typical mix of tasks. Now, it is years later. And some phones like the, you know, the Razor Macs have come out, which are gigantic because they just physically have a giant bulge with a giant battery. But we're still reviewing iPhones that last about all day with a typical mix of. tasks. Is that change? I mean, should that change? Do you think that that's just acceptable? Is that just the number they have to hit and we can do whatever we want? Or is there? Well, I would, I would love one that

would last a week. But the fact is that for it's obvious from the success of the thing and the many other phones that also last about a day, that that's fine for people. Now, there are some people who live in places like New York City where signals bounce off tall buildings and the phone is constantly searching for signals and things where the battery life doesn't last all day and it's really an annoying thing. And one of those people.

And people, but I don't live there. And I'm telling you. The ruthlessly self-interested Walt Mossburg strikes again. No, but I mean, I test these in, I do test them in New York City. I do test them on the West Coast. I do test them here in the Washington, D.C. area,

which listeners is where I'm based, and where there's a height limit on the buildings, by the way. And, you know, I don't find it to be a problem to have to plug the phone in at night. Yeah. I don't. If somebody said to me, you won't have to plug it in for a week, that'd be even better. But that doesn't rank number one on my list of things. I don't think it's about plugging it at night, though.

I think it's about, you know, with electric cars, you talk about rain. anxiety. It's, you know, it turns red. You know, it's to get 20% it's red and it's eight o'clock. And the low power mode will get you to the end of the day. But like, but look, let's be real. Obviously, there are people who have jobs who don't have access to what I'm about to say, but there's lots and lots and lots and lots of people, particularly among the group of people who can afford this thing who, you know, are sitting at a desk at their office or their home. office or at the Starbucks or wherever or at a table and they can they can plug it in for periods during the

day. They're on a long conference call. If I'm on a long conference call, Neely, I just plug it in. Why wouldn't you? If you're just sitting at your desk and you... Freedom. Who knows? Maybe I'm going to run away. Well, then you know what?

Then you have to have the strength to unplug the lightning connector and get up. It's the same way I feel about this wireless charging pad stuff that you know Samsung has been pushing i'm not against it it's fine but it's not wireless it's still as a wire it's just that you can put the so they're saying okay guess what we're saving you plugging the little cable in and you can just put it down on this thing it's nice it's fine it's not a revolution a revolution would be that there's electricity in the air and when you walk in the room the phone no i i will say this i think a equal

revolution has been in the same period of time, laptop batteries have gone from four hours to 15, right? Yeah. And who's led that? Well, of course it's Apple, but the laptops are getting smaller too, right? It's funny to me that these two cats, these are the two most important products I have. I have a phone and a laptop. They run my life.

They run my business or how I communicate. Well, and tablets, iPads at least go about 10 hours to 12 sometimes. But an iPad, you know, an iPad is an iPhone with a huge battery attached to it. You know, it's like, it's just funny. Like, the reasoning I think it gets so much more batteries is because it has a huge battery. I mean, it does take a lot of tweaking. That operating system, various, you know, granular aspects of it are turning on and off all the time. Same with the hardware.

And, yeah, there are, there are non-Apple devices that have very good battery life, but Apple does a very good job of maximizing what they've done with the battery. So, you know, I don't know, maybe we've all become like, you know, hypnotized to the one-day plug-in cycle and are thrilled if we can get to the end of the day. And certainly, you know, if you're living in a place where something, notably looking for cell towers, my favorite, is draining the battery. Then, you know, you're pissed. And you should go buy that Razor Max or something with a giant battery or buy a Moffy case or if you love the eye. phone or whatever. I mean, I feel bad for you. I'm sorry. But all I can do as a reviewer is say, you know, this is what happened to me. And I don't, I don't think you bitched about the

battery in your review, right? No, you know, I think it's interesting that it's just exactly the same as the six, where, you know, I think iPhones, people want to know how's the battery going to do for me. It's going to be better than my current life, right? And I think every iPhone for me starts out wonderful, over the moon. I'm so excited. And then about a year later, I'm like, oh, this battery kind of sucks. And I, that... Yeah, well, batteries are, as you know, are not subject to Moore's law.

They're chemistry and physics, and they do have a tendency to get weaker. But I think that's it. It's that. I would rather start a much higher point so by the end of the run, I'm still feeling good instead of feeling worried. And I think that's the kind of range anxiety. I'm thinking about it. But, no, it's a good, it's a good point.

And I bet there would be people at Samsung and a Moto and an Apple and at Google who would love to do that for you without having a phone with a giant bulge in the back. And with, you know, I mean, look, I think Apple looks at the battery the way they look at the price. They take the phone and they give you more speed, more power. And this thing is very fast. and I used an adjective in the video that we did for how fast it was. And, you know, it's very fast. And even the touch ID, you know, the fingerprint reader is so fast. I don't even see the lock screen.

Right. The thing, you know, unlock so fast. So, you know, they do these things that obviously, and, you know, I presume it takes more battery power to use a better front-facing camera. I don't know. and then flash the screen three times. So there's a bunch of things there that put drain on the battery, and yet they have kept it about where it was last year. I think that's what they're optimizing around.

Yeah. Not degrading it rather than dramatically improving it. I think that's it. Right. And I think that, you know, aside from 3D touch, that's sort of the S cycle, right? It's we're making, we're optimizing and we're making it better. And I'm just... Maybe they'll, you know, maybe they'll surprise. maybe they'll decide next year that they have a way to make it be a two-day battery.

Maybe they will, but maybe they will. I think that would be if Apple wants to – if they want to – everybody, no matter what iPhone they have to upgrade, that would be the thing. That's sort of my – Then they could be a really profitable company with this market cap on the world and $190 billion in cash. All right. All right. So that – we've actually gone over. I promised Walt that I only take half of it.

an hour of his time every week. We were actually... Yeah, this is fun. It's fun. It's going to be a fun show. I'm excited to have it. So that was Control Walt's Elite. Thank you very much.

I'm excited too. To my friend, Mr. Mossberg. Thank you. You are my friend, and we are colleagues, and I'm really happy that we're colleagues, and I'm happy that the Burge and Recode are working together and that I'm based out of the verge, and I have the honor of working with you, and this is, and I'm sure we've already sickened half the people, but... Like, we need more conflict.

on that. Next time we've got to disagree. I'm hunting for ways to disagree. But it was great. More control-walt delete's coming. We're going to try to do one every week. We also have other great podcasts to listen to. There is What's Tech with Chris Plant. There is Virg ESP with Emily Ashita and Liz Zapato. And then there's the Verge cast with me and Dieter in a rotating cast of crazy characters, all talking about technology and culture and science and entertainment and the wonderful collision of things that is a Verge. You can find all of that at iTunes.com slash The Verge. Please throw us five-star rating, subscribe to everything. Tweet at me. I am at Reckless.

You can tweet to Walt. He's at Walt Mossberg. And we will see you again next week. Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to it.