The Vergecast - iPhone 15: the good, the bad, and the titanium

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

After attending Apple's fall hardware event, The Verge's Nilay Patel, Allison Johnson, Dan Seifert and Victoria Song break down the biggest announcements: the iPhone 15, 15 Pro, the new Apple Watch Series 9 and the Ultra 2. Further Reading: All the big conferences and events in tech, entertainment, and automotive coming this fall iPhone 15 event live blog: all the news from Apple's keynote Apple iPhone 15 event: the seven biggest announcements  Apple announces iPhone 15 with USB-C, a camera upgrade, and the Dynamic Island Apple iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max announced with titanium bodies and an Action Button iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max hands-on A first look at the new iPhone 15 with USB-C and a big camera upgrade Apple's cheapest iPhone 15 Pro Max now costs more — but also has double the storage  Apple is releasing iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 on September 18th Apple announces Apple Watch Series 9, and it has a handy double-tap feature  Apple Watch Ultra 2: price, release date, and features  Apple is switching the AirPods Pro charging case to USB-C Apple’s USB-C AirPods Pro will support lossless audio with the Vision Pro Apple's Lightning connector was the first great port — and USB-C might be the last Post-process: why the smartphone camera changed photography forever The iPhone 7 Plus vs. the original iPhone: a camera showdown  The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are the first smartphones with Thread Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Britishcast, the flagship podcast of USBC. It's finally here. The USBC puns are here in force. I heard so many of them today, including from this group of people. Hi, I'm your friend, Neely. I'm back after several weeks of not being on the show.

I hope you'll have me. We were all at the Apple event today. Dan Seaford's here. Hello. Victoria's song is here. Hi. Alison Johnson's here. Hello.

We did it. We went to an Apple event. at the Steve Jobs Theater. We saw new iPhones and new Apple Watches and nothing else. Well, we did watch a video. We did. We watched the video with Octavia Spencer. We'll get into it.

Before we get into the Apple event, that's what we're going to talk about on the entire show today, because we were all just there. We played with the new iPhones, new Apple Watches. I would say this day marks the beginning of just a bonkers fall tech season. So September is full. October is full. The end of September is the code conference for me. that's just

it's the bomb in the middle of my calendar but there is this Apple event there's the Amazon event there's a Microsoft event there's a Google event You forgot meta. There's a meta event It's just it's all happening There's also a One Plus event

There's a Qualcomm event Everybody loves a Qualcomm event Yeah who doesn't love it Qualcomm's like 5Gs right Five G's on the beach baby You love it we've patent moat You can anything you want Just pay us the money

And they make everybody go to Hawaii Yes Modems They love it. Just literally every week. So much so that we made a calendar you can subscribe to on our website. It'll just give you alerts and you can just like come look at events as this month goes on. It's the oldest school.

We're like, how do we make calendars? ICal. We did it. So just a bonkers month, including today the antitrust trial of our lives like kicked off. U.S. versus Google. illegal monopoly claims about the search engine and its dominance. The parallel is to U.S. versus Microsoft, which is 25 years ago. Which, to be clear, I was alive for.

I think we all were. I mean, I hope so. I just want to say, like, is this the trial of our lives? It could be, or was Microsoft? So the end of the Microsoft trials were created Google. It created the opportunity for Google loses. Whatever. That all happened.

It's all in the past. Adi Robertson was in the courthouse today, listening to opening arguments. It immediately got very technical. What is a search engine? A real question our government is currently grappling with. We will have Addie on the show on Friday. Obviously, I'm very interested in this. We're going to focus on Apple today.

But just a bonkers month has kicked off with this Apple event and with this Google trial. Google trial, by the way, for 10 weeks. So we'll be talking about this for the next two and a half months. But we're not going to talk about it today. Today we're going to talk about Apple. Agreed? Yes. Yeah.

No one wants to define what a search engine is today. Not in the slightest. I have a lot to say about this. but we'll talk about it on Friday. Let's talk about this Apple event. We were all recently here for Apple Vision Pro. The vibes that one were excited. They were, everyone was kind of on edge.

Like, they didn't know how it would go. There was a lot of expectations. They built a big structure in the middle of campus, and we had to go to it, and there was like new age music playing, and then you ascended in a headset. Whatever. You know, it was that thing where I was like, everyone wanted to know how it would go.

There was just a lot of curiosity in every direction. This event was. was not that. We kind of knew what was going to happen. We knew it was going to happen. It was an iPhone. We know how to cover new iPhones. Yeah, we've done a few. Right. There was just like an element of this where it was like it was comfy. Like everyone was just like back home, you know? So the vibes I think were just like different because of that. And even to me, Apple like started off by saying like this is our biggest event of the year. And I was like, really? I don't want to say it was chill. But I feel like I was chill in a way that I'm normally not for these events. I was just like, oh. Okay, I can go into V-A-O-V mode where it's just like, I know what I'm doing. I'm not going to freak out. I'm not on autopilot, but like there's no like, oh, my God. Like last year, when they called it the Ultra, I was like, oh, my God, I have to do so many find and replaces in this moment. My stress levels are through the roof.

And it was like, no, no, I'm chill and cool. I don't know what's going on. And they had us in the Steve Jobs Theater, which is like an easy place to kind of like do this work. It's very comfortable. It's comfy. That's right. The vibes of this event were comfortable. It was a video event again, which kind of made me sad.

I was hoping that they would come out on stage and actually do it. We all watch the video together. Again, the point of this is actually us holding the phones and devices at the end, not the presentation. But it's really weird to be just watching TV with, like, a bunch of other people. And Dan sitting next to me taking pictures of the TV. It's a very odd experience to spend an hour and a half taking photos of a TV. It's a nice TV. It's a very nice TV.

Yeah. So it opened with a video of people celebrating their birthday. and it was revealed that all the people in the video had their lives saved by an Apple device. Fine. This is great. I'm happy all these people are alive. I'm dying to know if Apple staged all those birthday parties. It had to have been.

The angles were too crisp. Right? If you watched that video and you're like here, like at some point, the richest company on Earth descended on this person. And I was like, here's what we'd like to do. We'd like you to have a birthday party. I have three kids. We have a lot of birthday parties. I've taken photos and video at a lot of birthday parties, and they never go that smoothly.

No. Yeah. As like, you know, they came out with the cakes with the candles. Everyone had remembered to turn off the lights and didn't turn them back on. Also, they were with them when they were waking up in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you one little side weird story.

I got a lot of dumb smart home stuff in my house, including like motion sensors. And what happens is every time we go to like sing happy birthday, we'll turn off the lights and then two words into happy birthday. the lights come back on. And so we fight with the lighting switch. That's pretty good. None of this happened in Apple's birthday parties. I'm just saying that. And all the homes are beautiful.

I was just like watching this. And again, I think it's great that the features are helping real people. Apple's obviously very proud of this. I was just watching this ad and I was like, they had to do this. Like there were like a lot of cameras up in these people and they had to like feel the emotions.

It was just a weird way to enter this event. They had to produce it in a time span. And I don't know if you all know this, but not everyone has the same birthday at the same time. So I'm guessing that a lot of these are just faked. I have the most questions about the birthday party video of almost any product here. Like, we'll get to it. I have one big question about the iPhone 15 Pro.

It's huge. But the birthday party video, the more you consider it, the more you're like, the production of this had to have been so weird. If you think about it, you always do it once for safety too when you do any video. That's like the kind of behind the scenes thing. So you had to have someone light this cake multiple times and bring it out. To be like, do it again. Did you notice the one?

She's like, can I blow out these candles now? And I was like, she said that for real. That was real. Anyway, so that was like the opening of it. And then Tim Cook, it was like, I want to give you an update on the Vision Pro, which they just announced. And he said, we're on track. The developers love it.

I don't know what else you would have said. Developers are deeply confused about her new product. We're excited about the things we're seeing. It's on track to ship early next year. That's it. And that's all we got from Vision Pro. There are some stuff with the iPhone. The pros can shoot special video for Vision Pro,

some stuff with AirPods, which we'll get to. That was all the updates on the Mac and the Vision Pro. The Mac update was like, they're great. People love the Mac. Yeah. We continue to manufacture Macintoshes. And then the other, just other video that we should talk about before we're talking about the products,

they did a big skit in the middle of the Apple Watch segment with Octavia Spencer, who was a great actress in the skit was funny, although... It was cringy, but funny. Yeah. It was well done, if you like, that sort of thing. About Apple's environmental efforts, they've announced a lot of stuff. Lisa Jackson, by the way, used to run the EPA.

She's their VP of environment there. The Series 9 has recycled cobalt in the battery. The sport loop is 82% recycled yarn. The manufacturing is carbon neutral. On and on and on. There's a whole list. And then they announced that the Apple watches its first carbon neutral product with a logo on the side if you buy it with certain bands.

Yes, it has to be specific bands. It's like... The ocean band will instantly harm the ocean. Yes. That floral elastomer. It's not, it's not biodegradable. Yeah. The video is, it was fine.

It's like this is, if you're going to announce a litany of environmental accomplishments, that's like the best way to do it. Like, it was worth paying attention to. But it was also just like, there's no reference frame for anything they were saying. Other companies plant trees, we plant forests. And it's like, does Google plant? I don't know. But they, I was like, okay, this is a clever way to stay all this and like keep us engaged.

But then they went and like repeated everything that was said in the video in like a less funny, serious way after that. I was like, oh, I don't need to hear this again. It's also weird because it felt like the whole premise of the video was skepticism and then answering that skepticism. So obviously, if you know anything about the environment, you're going to be like, okay, how much of this is. greenwashing. Half of us have watched John Oliver talk about, like, credits and why those aren't like real things. But they're like, no, we have the answers here. Mother Nature is like kind of happy with our answers. We're going to have this really funny stare down that is, I don't know. It was funny. It was funny. I just don't know. Like, you know, you're supposed to have Tim Cook in this video.

And I was like, you know what? Tim Cook can act. He can act like he's afraid of Octavia Spencer and like, as if he's on the spot, but at the same time, you know back in your head that Apple is just doing that to kind of head off the criticisms about greenwashing. Right,

this is like the frame of the video. That's what I mean. Yeah. By the way, Tim Cook spent years pretending to be afraid of Donald Trump. So, like, I mean, like,

this is his greatest accomplishment is, like, China Trump politics. Like, he navigated Apple through it. He is a good actor. But it was just, it was worth talking about, like,

that was a long video in the middle of this event. Like, really long. And I think it speaks to sort of, again, just the general vibe of the whole show was like, we have a lot of time to bring out Octavia Spencer and do a skit about the environment, like a long time. Yeah. I just wanted to start with that stuff because I think if you understand that stuff, I think it puts the products in the context because the products themselves are inherently iterative in like meaningful ways. I think they're good.

Like they seem cool. And again, big question about the 15 pro, which we'll get to. Like, there's a mystery in the iPhone 15 Pro, which I'm obsessed with. But the vibe of the event was like, we have enough time to do comedy. All right, let's talk about the phones. iPhone 15. Or the iPhone 14 Pro remix. Yes.

The iPhone 14 Pro 2. Yeah. But not quite 2. It's like negative.5. Yeah. It's missing a camera and some stuff. Yeah. Missing some promotion.

But basically, it is just like last year's iPhone 14. was a remix of the 13 pro. The 15 is a remix, or repackaging is probably a better way to say it, of the 14 pro from last year. So you get 48 megapixel camera, you get the dynamic island. What else? Slightly brighter. The A16 processor. Yeah.

They did update the screens a little bit brighter. And, of course, they added a USBC port, which was not on last year's phone. So that's like the new thing. And they rounded the sides. It's a little more comfortable to hold than the glass is matte now. What do you think, Alison? Yeah, it feels like last year was very much like a skip the upgrade year. And this is the one that like my husband, bless him, is still holding on to the iPhone 10R.

I'm like, this would be the one like there are enough things here that are different. You're going to get the dynamic island, which like every, I don't know, app developer is going to consider going forward. So yeah, it's not exciting. It's like we've seen all this before, but it's just the right. It seems like a smart kind of like packaging of everything. I just don't know if Apple's ever going to make this phone, whether it's the iPhone 15, 16, 17, or whatever. Exciting, right? Yeah.

Like, it's never going to be the one where they really introduce new stuff to. It's never going to be the one where they're pushing the envelope on anything. But it is the mainstream one that most people will buy, or a lot of people will buy at least. And if you've had a phone like the 10S or the 10R or whatever, or then 11, and you're upgrading now four or five years later, it will be a meaningful upgrade for you. But it's hard to get excited about it because we saw so much of this last year.

Are you telling me that you are not jazzed about color injected glass? I will say... At the atomic level, Daniel. The glass felt nice. My main takeaway from touching these phones today is they felt nice. They did. They felt really, really nice.

Even the pro models and the regular models less so, but for the past few years, they've been so heavy and the edges are sharp. And the stainless steel is nice, but it's kind of sticky and shows your fingerprints and stuff. These you pick up and they just feel soft and they feel nice in your hand. We ran out some people there who said that made them feel cheap, which is fascinating. Yes, they didn't have the perceived value because it wasn't as heavy. And I was like, I'll take the later phone.

But, you know, they rounded the corner of the edges of the frame. It's still aluminum with the iPhone 15, but it is nicer to hold. And the glass is a soft matte glass. In my experience, that makes things slippery. So we'll see how that goes. I mean, if you use a case, you're fine. Most people will use a case. Obviously, the big news here is they, again, it's the iPhone 14 Pro minus.

That's how to think about this phone. So you're losing a camera. You're losing the Zoom camera, like they have the ultra-eye. The telephone, yep. You get the main camera from the 14 Pro, which is a 48 megapixel. They're pixel-binning it kind of an interesting way, right? They're doing 24 megapixels by default. You can switch it to 12 in the settings, which is interesting.

Then you can crop it in different ways to get 2X. And then they've changed portrait mode, which seems like a big deal. But I also, so much of the hands-on area is just panic, but like beautifully lit panic. And you're like, well, that looks fine. And you're like, like, the light of heaven is upon me. Everything looks good in this. But they are capturing the depth map when you take a photo now and you can go into portrait mode later, which is cool. And you can change the focus point later, which is like, isn't the dream of like digital photography?

Lyro, baby. Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's 10 years since we've been covering this idea. If you don't know what Lightro is, Lyra is a, you can go look at it on the verge from a million years ago. They shipped a whole camera with like 50 lenses on the front. Well, no. The lightro that let you change the focus point was that weird rectangular thing with one lens. And it allowed you after the fact to choose different.

focus points, which is this, what is the iPhone's allowing you to do now. What you're thinking of is the light phone or the light camera that had the, the spider's eye array of lenses. And now, need and the eyes, quickly checking this and checking it. But yeah, that, which also, I believe tried to accomplish a similar thing. But Lightro was first. Yeah. The problem with the Lightro was, A, it took terrible photos.

B, it was expensive. And C, like, you couldn't do anything with those photos. Yeah. It was a weird form. It was a weird format. The only thing, I mean, I think the whole reason it existed was to like try and get that technology into other things and sell it to bigger companies, but it kind of failed. David Pierce wrote our Lytro review in 2012 and it is so broken now. It is not even worth a year.

Look it up. But yeah, 11 years ago, we were covered a camera that could refocus. The new Portraito can just do it. I will say Dan and I were playing with it at the event. It got a little confused sometimes. But again, at the event, there's like 900. hundred faces. It's like, it's not a fair test of it. I think, I think this, the feature of, the main thing that I think people would get from this is the ability to make a non-portrait

photo portrait after the fact. And so like so many times, like, you know, I think of my wife taking photos for our kids. She uses the normal camera mode. And I, I always like switch it to portrait or whatever, but she never does that switchover. But now, if she doesn't do the switchover, it doesn't matter. It captured the data. And I can like turn on the portrait mode after. to the fact. Yes. It is unclear whether you get live photos at the same time as the portrait capture. Yeah, we'll have to follow up with that.

Yeah. So, again, lots of questions there. But basically, you've got what should be the 14 Pro camera. I'd be shocked if it was meaningfully different. I don't know that it's the exact same camera sensor. It's the same resolution that we know. Yeah. And you get the two times lossless crop.

Right. Because it can go into the center of the sensor. And then the binning, as you were saying earlier, is kind of doing a unique thing where it's going to 24 megapixels, as opposed to normally, and what the iPhone has done in the past with the Pro Max, or the 14 Pro, is it just takes four of the 48 megapixels and turns them into one, which produces a 12 megapixel image. So this 24 is kind of a strange way to do it.

Like, I'm not sure how they're calculating the data there. But it does give you a meaningfully more resolution without, like, blowing up your storage. But does anyone need 24 megapixel? pixels like on the regular? People zoom at crop all the time I think. Yeah, but 12 is a good amount. My opinion on phone cameras

is that telephoto is always more useful than ultra wide because I watch people go like this with their phones and then pinch zoom to death and they take four pixels and snap that photo. Painful. Yeah. Like I see them do that all the time and then the ultra wide is like oh cool we got this really cool architectural

shot. It's like I mean it's good for like getting a group of people. Oh man I love the ultra-wide. I don't know what you're talking about. You are not watching the TikToks. It's so moody. How are you going to take a band photo? Where you flip the TikTok photographers are always like, flip your camera upside down, get really down, and then put it into ultra-wide, and then you have like this, I don't know, this insane. Basically, what you're saying is no matter what, people will find a way to make a great camera look like shit. Yes. No matter what. Interestingly, there's some modes in this camera that are new. So you can shoot 48 megapixel pro raw. You can shoot. 24, you can shoot 12. And then you can shoot 48 megapixel compressed in Apple's format, which they revealed that as a

company, they pronounced heif. Heath. So, H-E-I-F, which I get why you would head towards Heath. But they set it on stage, and then they were all saying it. It's like the iPhones are shot in H-HF for a long time. This is the first time I've heard anybody call it Heaf. It was deeply confusing. And this is what we've been calling.

I think we need to have Virchcast listeners call in or hit up Nelai online and say, how do you pronounce heaf? And do you say heaf? No one says heaf. People say I'm pushing the button that says maximize compatibility and shooting in JPEG. That's what everybody says. They say, what is this? Why doesn't it work? Why doesn't it work anywhere?

But I think it's fascinating that they're letting consumers on the iPhone 15 shoot 48 megapixel compressed photos, which I have no idea how these are going to look. Just none at all. Again, in the in the demo area with beautiful light. Like some of the most beautiful light I've ever seen in any room is in that demo area. It looked great. Very curious how it will look anywhere else. And then it's also fascinating they're letting consumers shoot 48 megamplea pro-raw, which they should. shouldn't do. From everything I know, very few people should do this.

Alison, anything else? Catch your eye about this camera? Yeah, I don't know. I think, like, I think the two times crop zoom makes a lot of sense here because you don't have the telephoto and you're kind of like getting something for, like, two lenses for the price of one. And then when on a phone where you already have a three times lens is sort of like, well, what was the point of this? So, yeah, having the big one move up to five times, you know, make sense. And then having this two times option is nice. It's nice for portraits.

I like it in portrait mode. So that's what I'm jazzed about. And then there's the thing. They switch the port to USBC. But at USB 2.0 speeds. Very confusing. They took forever. They took forever to get to that.

I feel like everybody was waiting for it. And it's like, okay. That's a big reveal. They did it in two parts. They said, let's talk about connectivity. And they said, let's start with wireless. And the whole room was like, no one cares. Like, you can talk about 5G again.

You're going to do this test again. But yeah, so it's USBC. The, you know, the word from Apple basically is like, the Europeans made us do it. But it's time and we think people aren't going to freak out. And to be clear, there was applause in this room. I mean, from Apple's employees. Yes, yes.

This room full of Apple's employees clapped for Apple's announcement. Well, there were some influencers there. It's inside baseball As journalists we are not supposed to clap So it's like a big thing Because people assume the room is full of media And they hear the clapping And it's like the media's clapping

And it's like no We're sitting on our hands We're trying to type Yeah we're like typing as fast we get It's like Apple employees, their partners And some people who don't have to play That same rules But they clap

They clap for iCloud storage increasing The 6 and 12 terabytes And who needs that much Who needs 12 terabytes Candy Crush whales I don't I'm just guessing I don't know because like I have I have the plan where it's two terabytes and you know I I I feel for all my friends I share it with six of my friends wow you're generous I am and I use most of it and we still have like 1.5 terabytes

well if you go buy an iPhone 15 and take 48 mic pixel pro raw images you will you will soak up that what I know every professional is dying to do is have their phone instantly an immediately choked their bandwidth out, by flipping their 48 megapixel stills to iCloud. So, USBC, we did it, we just did the same thing. I said, we're going to talk about USBC. Yeah.

We talked about wireless connectivity and iCloud. Great. They added it to the phone. The Vi very much was like, well, we had to do it, but we think it's going to be fine. And no further discussion was had. No. Yeah, they moved on pretty quickly.

There is a, was it, $29? It's $29. dollar dongle if you want to convert your lightning cable to USBC. Absolutely not. Why you would want to do this when you can buy an Apple branded USBC cable for $19 is beyond me. But Neil and I were trying to figure out why you would buy this earlier today. Maybe you have a lightning accessory?

What lightning accessory? I don't know, man. Because it's a cable. So like docks are out. Yeah, docs are out. Because your phone will be flopping. It's not even a long, it's just a little wisp of a cable. It's just like their USB A to USBC dongle, except it goes from lightning to USB.

So it's floppy. So your phone's going to flop right out of your dock. So that's not it. My answer was built-in lightning cables and cars. Which I don't think are a thing. Which Dan doesn't believe that they exist. But some things have built-in lightning cables. Yeah.

Some really weird obscure accessories that like four people bought. Yeah. And now those people have to pay $20. The outrage. In general, I think it's a great move. I think Apple held out. I think the Europeans made them do it. I will say, I was thinking about this because last week on the show, I said, I really

don't plug in my phone for anything. This is not going to impact me much at all. I use YOS charging. But the one time I do plug my phone in is when I'm in the car and I use carplay. And I'm going to upgrade my phone and have a USBC port. My wife is not going to upgrade her phone. And she's going to have a lightning port. And now I'm going to have to deal with the fact that one.

You're going to buy the dongle. You're going to buy that dongles. Dongle. Buy the don't. We have dueling cables in our car. And any time, because I'm usually on an Android phone. And when I switch back to iPhone, my husband's like, thank God. Oh, my God.

We can use one cable, like, God intended. My wife will get in the car and it's set up for Android Auto. And she'll be like, and I have to, like, go through the settings menu to turn on carplay. It's very obvious who's going to have to buy the dongle. And it's you. That's how that goes. Look, I think it's great. They didn't lock it down.

They didn't do any weird made-for-ide-phone stuff. They're not nerfing the cables. It's slower. Well, they nerfed the entire phone to run a USB2. But charging speed should be fine over USBC, 15 watts, we think, no matter what the cable, assuming you have a good cable that doesn't light itself on fire. Yeah. A real part of the USBC experience.

Transfer speeds on the pros, USBC, it's a standard they can do it. Like, they did it right. They did the thing they should have done. They could have put actual USB. like faster USB in it and they could have like done more video out or whatever but for 15 yeah why not it's an $800 phone they couldn't put USB 3 in there how long has you been 3 3 been around you could you could say it a different way it's an $800 phone yeah that's how Apple would prefer you to say this is a garbage phone for 800 people 800 dollars yeah USB 2 but you're right it does it does mean that

you can now travel with one charging cable, which I know a lot of people are excited about. I was on my way here, and I was packing my bag full of cables, the one that routinely gets me stopped at the airport as a brown man. You ever fly on September 11th is a brown man? The bag full of wires and batteries. It was great. I loved every minute of it. But I was packing my wires, you know, the USBC for everything, and then my one sad little lightning cable. And I was like, oh, buddy. Which now you'll just need for your AirPods Max. I was like, this is your last trip, little guy. You're coming with me. And then you're then you're never going to be seen again.

It's interesting they didn't upgrade the AirPods Max. They did not. They don't even talk about those things anymore. No, the rumors were, as of last week, according to Mark German, that we will see upgrades for them next year with the USB C port on it. But yeah, no. No word of the USB, the AirPods Max. There's the other, we talked about this last week as well, but like the other lightning products in Apple's lineup will remain. Though today they did quietly take off their store.

the MagSafe Duo Charger, which had a lightning port on it. Yeah. And the MagSafe battery, which also had a lightning port, which were taken off the store, not to be spoken of. They did not talk about upgrading those to USBC or anything. Because they suck. But you can still buy AirPods Macs for $549. You can still buy a 9th-chan iPad for $329.

Yeah, which is the iPad most people should buy. Yeah. I bought it. Yeah. We just are like, children, you have this iPad. You cannot hurt it in any meaningful way. It's encased in rubber. I think on the 15

The port is there for charging Yeah It's not it is not No one who buys an iPhone 15 is worried With their data transfer speeds Yeah No It just doesn't seem like a thing's happening

Oh they also came out with USBC Earpods Wire wired earpads Yeah which which I think people Would more likely use Than a 15 pro Here's a question Are they gonna work on your Mac

Hmm Because that would be great I mean your Mac has a headphone jack But sure If you want to use crappy ears Your pot. Yeah.

You know, that's true. Well, I just like a lot of people carry their rent for their phones. Yeah. It would be nice. It's unclear if that would happen. I bet it doesn't. And if it does work, like next year's Macs don't have headphone tracks. Oh, man.

It's just coming. So that's a 15. Solid upgrade. Nothing spectacular. Comes in five colors. They all have normal names. There's no dumb marking names on them. It's just pink, yellow, green, blue, and black.

I love it. Well, you didn't want it to be like Barbie, lemon, grass, sky. You do. You can go black. Black. You got it. It's not space black. It's not obsidian.

It's black. Before we break, we should talk about the prices real quick. iPhone prices are... So most of them are the same. The iPhone 15, the 15 plus are the same as the 14 and 14 plus from last year. So we're talking 799 to start, 899 to start on those. 100 bucks more if you upgrade the storage. The 15.

Pro comes with $128 gigs of storage, starts at $999, same price as before. Where it gets weird is with the 15 Pro Max, which is now $1199, $100 more than the starting price of last year. But it comes with $256 gigs of storage, which is twice as much as last year and the same price if you got this 256 gig model last year. So it's like kind of a sneaky price increase. Like, yes, you are getting a little more. one can argue that $100 is a lot of money to charge

for 128 gigs of storage in this... The 2,023rd year of our lord but it is more expensive. So if you want the ProMax with the 5X telephoto lens, you are going to pay more for it this year than last year.

Amortized over your phone plan. You're already getting scammed. Yes. Like you've signed up with a major American wireless carrier. And Apple loves to talk about the trade-ins. They love to talk about how your iPhone holds value and that you can recoup a lot

value and things like that. They put it on a slide now, the carrier promotions. Like, that's how much they want to talk about because they want to deflect the fact that they are now charging a $1,200 starting price for a phone. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. You're signed up to American Wires carrier. Like, you know what you're in for. They're just coming to your ass. They're just, one of your kids, keys to your car, $1,200 at the window. All right, so that's a 15. We should take a break. I need to emotionally prepare myself for the mystery of the iPhone 15 Pro. There's a lot. I'm dying tonight. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Apple event. We talked about the 15. Obviously, the interesting phone is the 15

pro in this lineup. They made it out of titanium this time. I like it. It's very nice. It's some titanium. There's a titanium frame, but that also connects to an aluminum frame on the inside. So it's like the part you touch is titanium, but then inside of it is an aluminum. Thermo mechanically bonded. Yes. Doesn't that just mean melted? Like, turned? Pushed. It sounds cooler if you say thermo. Have you bumped into anyone in a sauna? You've been thermo mechanically bonded. Gross. I don't. But that's how metals work, is my understanding. It's the lightest one.

ever, same sizes as before, 6.1, 6.7 inches. They're very proud of titanium. Apple, by the way, famously used titanium in another product, not the Apple Watch Ultra, the titanium powerbook, the single coolest power book ever made. Which lasted about six months before it looked like garbage because they painted the titanium and it all flaked off. And also the hinges broke. Let's not talk about it at this time.

They said it's more repairable, which is really a big deal for Apple. That's carrying on from the iPhone 14 from last year, so now it's with the pro line as well. But they're saying this word out loud. They're saying repairable out loud. They're basically giving into regulators, right? The California regulators want things to be repairable. This is the big capitulation show for Apple. They gave him on USBC to the Europeans.

They gave in to California on repair. Big A17 Pro processor. It's three nanometers, which is the industry first. That's a TSM extreme ultraviolet chip. Like, that's a big deal. And rumors are that Apple bought out TSM's entire capacity for the three nanometer chip. So I would not expect to see three nanometer chips from anybody else's a time soon. And then they said it's a breakthrough new GPU design for Apple, their first new one.

And it's like, guys, you're on the M2 chip. So, but they're very proud of this new GPU. What, it's 20% faster, new shader architecture. They have a new neural engine that's supposed to be faster. Basically, it does hardware ray tracing. Yeah. They talked a lot about games. No.

They talked a lot about games. Just, no. I'm just, listen, my phone is especially, it's like, specially. made for stupid games. If I want to play good games, it's not going to be on my phone. Let me tell you, there are a lot of stupid games on consoles, too. Okay. Fancy stupid games get to be on the console.

I am not playing Resident Evil on my phone because, as I said, the phone is going to get chucked. The second there's a jump scare, and then my expensive phone is going to be in pieces. And AppleCare Plus, well, whatever the thing he is, is not going to cover. Oh, you were scared by Resident Evil, and you chucked your phone. phone at the wall. Yeah. Well, their whole big claim

is that this is the first time a full console game experience is available on mobile device. What was the name of the other game? Begain of the D. Division.

Oh, yeah, Division. It's like the full console experience. Assassin's Creed is there because there's not a console in the world that Ubisoft won't put

Assassin's Creed on. Like, if you can play a game on it, Assassin's Creed will be there. You will be doing stabs on... It's just... It'so will be there and he'll be stabbing. But this was like a really weird

dichotomy and how they were talking about the pro. First, I said it's the most pro phone ever, which is an incredible phrase. Just a deeply incredible phrase that means whatever Apple wants it to mean. Like their answer to us was we think pro features are aspirational. It's the camera, it's the display. And we just want this to be the, and it's the best that we can do. And by definition, that means every new pro iPhone is the most pro phone ever made. Well, every new iPhone is the best iPhone ever. Right, because they don't make worse iPhones. It's amazing how that works. It's just, it's really something to make the most pro phone ever. And we've defined pro in a way that we will never not make the most pro phone ever. And then right next to it, they're like,

and I believe they actually said out loud, this is the best mobile gaming device ever made. And you can also spend 14 hours in a row playing Genshin impact on it. Yeah. And it's like, well, one, the Nintendo Switch exists. a deeply important mobile gaming device with maybe two of the best games ever made and the Zelda games on there, I don't think they're coming to the iPhone at this time. I'm confident the iPhone is more powerful

than the Nintendo Switch. It's got a nicer screen, too. Everything on the iPhone is nicer than my Switch. And I have like an original switch. But it's like that's the best one because it has the best games on it. Mobile games are not those games. I mean, that said, you know,

I'm not a mobile gamer, but I know that there's an enormous market of mobile gamers out there. Candy crush whales. Hello. It's me. I spend too much. She's a candy crush whale. There's the Genshin Impact players and there's a lot of mobas played on mobile and stuff like that. So like there's definitely a market here and like Apple is speaking to that market and they,

this market will also pay more for better performance, which is what they are trying to like make the case for with the 15 pro. I just don't need ray tracing for my bejeweled knockoff. You don't? Yeah, the one that gets your phone super hot and destroys your battery. This is why your battery health is down to like 87%. Like you're running like a Bitcoin botnet in the background of like a bejeweled clone. Listen, you know, do I need ray tracing on Sudoku?

Sudoku's a middle, a mobile game. No, I don't. Although I would like to see what retracing on Sudoku. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This is like ultra-realistic Minecraft. Like those videos come out and blow your mind. Look, there's somebody who said for the, the fact, like, it's weird that they did a ray tracing explanation in 2020. Like, on the other side of the house, PC gamers had ray tracing for a long time.

That cost curve is all the way down. And they're like, oh, this is a phone. Yeah. This is actually bonkers that they're like doing it on a phone at this scale. But I have asked people who use Android gaming phones to email us on the show for years. Well, I mean, we have never gotten one email. We've gotten emails from people who think they might know someone who plays games on an Android phone and needs a gaming Android phone. Because they're all playing them on iPhones.

So I say to you audience, I look at you directly and say, if you are a hardcore iPhone gamer who's going to buy a pro iPhone to play games, because this is how you want to play Assassin's Creed. So let me know. I'm just dying here from you. I just want to know what it's like in your life, in your brain. you're like you know what Genshin Impact That's a popular game That's $1,500 for me That's a popular game

I don't know what to say man I know it's a popular game But it's just like And it's clear It exists Genshin Impact is one of those things Where it's like very clear That their gaming audience is on the iPhone

Because it runs so much better On iOS devices than on Android And they put so much more development work into Android Allison can speak to how annoying it is To test Genshin Impact on new phones and devices because it's like a 30 gigabyte download on a mobile phone. Like four hours before I want to play it,

I'm like, I better start downloading Genshin Impact now. We stress test devices with it all the time because it is such an intensive thing, and the iPhones and the iPads just run circles around it. And they have better silicon, but it's a lot of the fact that the developers put all their work into it because that's where their audience is. And because in-app purchases are the money for all of these games,

and 30% of this in-at purchases, are the money for Apple, like Apple's entire services revenue chunk. The thing that's growing while iPhone sales are going down, the line of business is going for Apple's services and the biggest chunk of services is in-app purchases and games. Of course they want the iPhone to be an incredible gaming device, because if they can sell you more Genshin Impact stuff. Yeah, I mean, there's that outside of it. But I think that part of the reason that they spent so much time explaining ray tracing and showing

off all these capabilities and stuff. This is where you can see the most impact of a three nanometer cutting edge processor. It's not like, you know, if they didn't talk about that, they would be like, what, your email opens faster or like the browser. You can switch between the browser. Like we've hit the point where like I can use a phone from five years ago and be just fine for my daily day-to-day work because I'm doing those kinds of tasks. Whereas gaming is one area where they can push the envelope.

They can continue to show development. And like we've made this huge investment. on this three nanometer A17 Pro processor. I think they dropped Bionic. Bionics gone, am I right? Yeah, it's A17 Pro. But, you know, and like the, they, they talked about its ability to shoot Pro his video and decode AV1 video and all this kind of stuff.

But really, it's the games. That's where you're going to see the notice, notice the difference. People can buy an iPhone 15 that has the A16 from last year and not skip a beat because it's just fine. But if you want the best gaming things, which, as we know, PC gamers will literally spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get the best ultimate maximum performance for their games. If you are a mobile gamer, best maximum performance, I guess, is going to be spending big on the iPhone. Yeah, I'm just saying, Candy Crush Wales.

Candy Crush Wales. Like, they are, I understand what you mean. The demos are good. And they do have a giant, new spatial computing platform coming out. There's a lot of graphics stuff. With an M1 chip in it? Very confusing all the way around. We skip the most important part of the new iPhone Pro's thinnest borders ever.

That's true. They're a little bit thinner. It makes the screen look a little bit bigger. Yes. It looks a little. Like I put it next to my 13 Pro and like I don't think it's any smaller, but it looks smaller. It looks a little smaller. That screen, by the way, Pro Motion up to 120 hertz. That's pretty normal. Can get brighter.

Can go up to 2,000 that's a brightness, which is pretty cool. In bright sunlight. In bright sunlight, we'll see how long it'll hold that brightness. lots of phones will juice their brightness and then 15 seconds later dimmed unreadable. My 13 Pro does that all the time. So we'll see.

But like, you know, brighter is better. So that's moving forward, I guess. And then obviously, USBC3 with camera tether mode, USB 3 speeds up to 10 gigabytes. Yeah, which is actually... They're very proud of this thing. They talked a lot about the things you can do with that,

which we saw some very comical studio setups of people using iPhones to tether to much more powerful computers. But the rumor mill was expecting Thunderbolt here, which is four times the bandwidth of what it actually gets. So it's USB 3 at 10 gigabits. If you know your USB, there's also USB 3 at 20 gigabytes, which this is not. And then there's USB 4, which does 20 or 40 gigabytes.

And then also today, Intel announced Thunderbolt 5, which does 120 gigabits. So this is like, this is USBC, but it's like, or USB 3, but it's like one of the slowest tiers of USB 3, where they could have, or there's potential for much faster ones. I don't know if they're just setting themselves up to upgrade it later in the future, or if this is a limitation of the chip. It's kind of weird that, you know, we have Thunderbolt on the iPads and all the Macs and things like that, but it's not on the iPhone for whatever reason.

I think they're just managing battery life and heat, right? It's a much smaller chassis, all that stuff requires power, generate heat, and they don't know if anyone's going to actually use the shit. Well, they aren't going to use it out of the box because it doesn't come with a USB 3 cable in the box. But a USB-3 USB-C cable is, like, relatively inexpensive. They're relatively inexpensive, but this is the problem with USB-C is that you do not know looking at a cable unless it specifically says on there or you've tested it yourself what its capabilities are. Thunderbolt is annoying in a lot of ways, mostly because it's expensive, the cables are thicker, they have larger ends and stuff. But if it has the Thunderbolt logo on there, you know what that cable is capable of.

I have a bag full of USBC cables right now that I do not know if it charges at 60 watts, 100 watts, 240 watts, I don't know. I don't know if the data is supported is 480 megabits per second, which is USB 2, or is it 40 gigabits a second, which is thunderball. You take them all back to Apple so they can recycle them into watches

or whatever they're going to do, and then you just buy good cables. Yeah, I mean, you could do that, but you will inevitably end up with cables that you do not, like, so many things come with a charging, cable, you don't know what's capable of it. Yeah, and you just drive those directly to the Apple store.

You increase your carbon emissions and then you offset them by recycling the garbage cable. That's how you do it. Look, I think it's weird that when you plug a cable into an iPhone it doesn't tell you anything about the cable. With a Mac, you can go in a system profile. At least suss out what's going on. This is like you're going to plug a cable with an iPhone.

It's going to tell you nothing. Just like stuff is going to start happening. We're not happening. The dynamic island should just be like garbage cable. Get out of here. It would be really useful. They can do it. They have that layer of information on the screen.

I think Apple is just waiting to see what people do with these USBC ports. But with Capture 1, you can shoot 48 megabixel raw photos and tether immediately, which is cool. You can shoot video directly to external storage, which is cool. Those are their big ideas. Basically, camera stuff. Yeah. Because, I mean, what else are you going to do with it? Charge your phone.

Charge your phone at 15. Yeah. I mean, in a perfect world. you would plug your USBC iPhone into a studio display and get like a desktop interface. With your A17 Pro. With an A17 Pro and the A13. This is why I need to tell you that Dan actually uses Samsung decks. I love decks.

He's like he's serious about it. We talk about the action button and the camera sex. Let's do the action button quickly, I think. Okay. It's there. You don't like it? No, I like the action button on the Ultra. I think it's one of the cooler things about the Ultra.

but what I'm going to say is that I use the action button to do exactly one thing on my ultra, which is to launch my runs. And what I've noticed is that even though you can program the action button on the ultra using shortcuts, ain't nobody got time for that. Ain't nobody got time to think about. Some people do that time. Some people have that time. Pro user.

Most people ain't nobody got time for thinking about how they're going to do that. So for me, the problem with the action button on the ultra is that it has so much potential but it's really for the average person kind of hemmed in by what the presets are. So if the presets for this action button on the phone aren't great, you're just going to be like, well, I miss my old. Well, I think, I hear you. I feel the same way about the button on the watch. I think it's neutered by the fact that it's on the watch and the platform of the watch. The phone, I think it is more practical to use it to launch a shortcut, which is one of the preset options.

The others are by default, it will just control your ringer. and it's always a long press. So you long press it to switch between silent and ringing modes. You can also launch the camera with it. You could launch the flashlight with it. You can launch an accessibility shortcut. So if you use the back tap thing to pull down your notification sheet, you can program that to the action button, which seems pretty neat.

And you can run shortcuts with it. And I think there's one more that I'm not remembering right now. But I could see like really quickly, easily making a shortcut to launch halide and then using the action button to launch haylide. as my camera. The other thing you can do with it is you can take photos with it in the camera app.

So I think the camera app launching is going to be the thing that most people use because like... Well, to be clear, most people will use the default and they will not change it. Yes.

But if you do change the default, you are probably launching the camera. Are going to change the default. Like I always... I know that you can just go from the lock screen and go into your camera, but by the time I've done that,

my cat has moved. The cute picture is gone. I think the amount of time between that flow versus holding the button down? No, I think it's smoother to use the button. Like, Allison knows this with the Android phones. For years, you double

press the power button to launch the camera, you're in it. And you don't, like, it's one motion, you pull your phone up, you're double-clicking, and you can do that same thing with the action button. With the current system of you have to, like, wake the screen up, you have to put your finger on the screen, which is almost always your other hand, and you have to hold it

there for a few seconds as a second or whatever as it launches. That's like kind of cumbersome and clumsy. I think the action I have so much trouble with it. I don't know what is wrong with me, but like swiping that camera icon is like, I'll, like, miss it or I don't know. I'm jazzed about that. I always open the camera when I'm trying to swipe a notification away. I just almost like I'm opening the camera and drives me kind of bothers.

Yeah. And the action button, the camera, the like shortcut, you can customize it to go into like a certain mode. So if you want to get in a portrait mode really quickly or a video, I think it's nice. Yeah, I think it just has more potential on the phone. And the UI for customizing this button is the funnest UI that Apple has shipped in a movie. You go into the settings app, like just any other thing you might change on your iPhone, and then you're taken into this like completely render of the side of the phone. It turns and you see a different side of the phone. It's wild.

I'm kind of mad as a watch user. We're having more fun over here. Yeah. Yeah. Big ass screens, huge battery, Genshin Impact. action button that's good. Okay. The day they bring retracing against your impact.

You got an iPhone 10 strap to your wrist. Why? I mean, I have the same, I have the exact same watch. But the UI for this settings menu is so cool. Like, go look at our pictures, go look at the videos. It's so cool. It's so just, it's cool, but it's also just like so weird to go into kind of like normal iOS. Yeah, and more iOS.

It does not look like Apple's other U.S. More iOS should be. wacky. Yeah, sure. Like, if they could do all of settings and all of settings would be fun instead of right now the sort of impenetrable list of radio buttons and toggles. The nightmare of the settings app. Yeah, this is just like

cool as hell. And it's like fun to use and it makes you want to use it, which is neat. I just don't know that long press, I think they should have had double tap and long press. So this is the same argument that you made for, with the Dynamic Island last year, right? Like, they

have a long press and they have like short press and they they should be backwards. They should be backwards. No, here I'm saying there's only long press. Right. So you tap it once,

it'll just tell you what a long press will do. It'll pop up a thing that says, like if it's in the default, you tap it once, it says hold down for silent. And you tap it when it's in silence and says hold on for a ring. And it's like,

okay, that's great. But so everything by default is a long press on this button. I think they're doing that because you could accidentally hit it. Oh, sure. That makes sense to me.

You don't want to turn your ring around. But I'm saying they should have left ring at two clicks. So you double click it to switch ring modes and then you long press it and that's your custom action. That would be cool, yeah. And I hope that comes. It just seems very obvious they could do lots of things with this button beyond just long pressing it. And I think the long press is going to throw a lot of people off because you click it and it's like hold for ring and your natural instinct is to push it again and it just says it again.

Yeah, it gives you haptic feedback though. Like it vibrates and it like buzzes as you're holding it and stuff to kind of give you an indication. of what it's doing. I think they did that because they wanted to head off people being like, well, how am I supposed to know if my phone's on mute? I can just like reach in my pocket and mess with the mute switch or whatever. Or the people that insist they can feel when it's in mute without looking. Yeah.

But? Yeah. There's people that can insist they could feel the mute switch. So you push it once and you're like, aha, bullshit. Sorry. Well, it also just occurs to me that if anybody with an Apple Watch does not need the mute switch anymore, because unless you're a sociopath, your phone should always be a mute

because your watch is buzzing you and you're fine. Right? Like, you're probably fine. So we'll see. I'm excited about it. I'm excited about the camera stuff. I think the shortcuts people are going to make for this

are going to be bananas. I hope somebody does, like, an iPhone action button shortcuts website with all the best ones. There are already some cool shortcuts out there. But yeah, it's a good change. Along with USBC, I think the action button is like a good change to the phone.

Okay, then there's the camera, which seems all new kind of bananas, how else can go through it? Yeah, so they're saying that the main camera is 48 megapixels again, but they're saying it's a bigger sensor. And then you have the ultra-wide, which had some like new coatings or something. But the big story is the five-time telephoto lens, which they would not, they did not say periscope. They have a word for tetrapism.

I don't know. There's some mirrors and things happening inside there, but you don't get the three times, you get the five times instead. It's got some kind of sensor shift stabilization along with the optical stabilization, which is a good thing, you know, assuming it works. But yeah, and they're all about these like seven different lenses that you get with it. And that's counting, you know, macro and the ultra-wide and the crop modes you can do. but there's like a new thing where you can push the like main camera icon and it'll switch between like equivalent focal legs like 24 millimeters 35 millimeters yeah which I think is great yeah I'm excited for that because I just don't know how it works is too wide I've long felt like the main camera is like equivalent to like 24 or 26 millimeters for a few years now and it's too wide like I don't like it that wide like to shoot at like 30 or 35 and now I can just like to shoot it by default which is cool it by default it is going to like crop in the sensor. It's really unclear how this is working.

Is it cropping the sensor? I think it's using the same technology as the 2X. It's just cutting into the sensor to approximate that field of view. And then it will produce a 24 or 12 megapixel image out of that. The exact word that we were told was there's some other voodoo going on. Yes. Oh, voodoo. Because the claim is that it will foreshorten the way that those different focal links will.

Yeah. Which is, again, impossible to see on an iPhone in that environment. which is a totally crazy environment with perfect light. So I'm very curious as we review this thing to see if those modes actually foreshortened the way that a proper focal length would. I suspect that they do not. But you should be able to tell the difference for you 24 to 35. Yes, it's very obvious.

As you go down the numbers of equivalent focal lengths, the smaller they are, the more you notice each millimeter's difference. So when you are going from 24 to 28, it's actually a visible, noticeable difference. If you're going from 100 to 104, you don't notice that difference. It's too minute. But when you can see it punching in 24, 28, 35. And then I think the ultra-wide is like a 13 or something like that. And so the range is 13 to 120 now.

Yes. It's cool. Again, impossible to tell you what these cameras are actually like. It's just a bonkers environment. They took photos and they didn't explode. That's as much as I got right now. But I think that stuff is cool. Dan, you have some quams about the telephoto.

I'm not confident that the telephoto is going to be all that great. I think it's great that it gives a longer reach. Like that was needed. The 3x telephoto and prior pro models existed. Never was really that great. I know a lot of people never use it because they don't like the quality out of it. And it also doesn't bring you that much closer. 5X does bring you noticeably closer.

That 120 millimeter focal length is noticeably closer, but it's not super long. Like today for the live blog, I was shooting with an 18 to 300 millimeter lens on my camera. So like there's a lot further to go. Samsung's 10x zoom is much further than the 5X that you get on the pro now. But in order to make this work, and because of physics, they have to put a small sensor in there. And Samsung has the same problem with its cameras. The other manufacturers that have done periscope were not periscope cameras in the past have the same problem where they have to put a small sensor in there in order to get the physics to work right to get the light exposed.

and you can tell, like, pretty easily the quality difference. Even in the demo area, perfect lighting, all this stuff, I took a photo of some folks across the table and I zoom in and, like, I look at the details in the hair. It's all kind of blurred and mushed together. It's noisy, stuff like that. Allison's going to do a ton more testing. We'll get a more formal verdict on it. I'm just skeptical.

Yeah. You know, I don't, I think the 5X is going to be there and it'll be useful to some people, especially the folks, like I said earlier, who are standing there, pinched zooming on their phone to get as close as they possibly can. It's better to have a 5x optical starting point than a 3x, but I don't think it's going to be like, I think a lot of people are still going to fall back to the main camera if they care about the image quality.

Yeah, I shoot at 2X a lot with my 14 Pro. Like, I never go to... And I think that the 5X existence, Alison, you were saying earlier, didn't really make sense to have that 2X punch in when you have a 3X. It's not enough difference. Now I think it gives more of a reason for that 2X punch in to exist. Because 5X is like, if I'm sitting across from a small table from Unilife, I use 5X, I'm like taking pictures of your eyeballs and your nose. But like 2X, I can frame you nicely.

So I think that gives more of that punch in a reason to exist. Yeah. Awesome. What do you think? I am interested to try it out. I like the 5X like is sort of when I use like the Pixel 7 Pro has one and I find it useful in these like fringe cases where I'm on a hike and I'm trying to frame something and like 3X just gets you nothing. You're in the far away section at the Taylor Swift concert. Yeah, right.

You're in the back row. But 5X is like that much closer and it is an actual meaningful difference. So I'm interested to see what it looks like. The question is, is this good enough to get the Pro Max? Because I don't think we've actually stated that this is only on the Pro Max. It's not on the pro. The pro gets the same 3X as last year. So like, is this 5X a meaningful enough jump to get the bigger, more expensive phone,

which we can talk about is also more expensive than last year? But for me, based on what I saw so far, I would say no. I'm not going to make use of that camera often enough, and I'd rather have a smaller, lighter phone. Yeah, but I love a big screen and a big screen. And a big battery. We're different people. Yeah, the camera is not the thing. It's the bigger screen and the bigger battery.

I don't think anybody is going to buy this thing for the Zoom lens. I think if it was good enough, people would. I mean, this is not the first time we've seen Apple segregate the camera to the pro, the biggest phone. I did it with the 12 pro, right? The 12 Pro and Pro Max, the 12 Pro had the first time it had the really bigger sensor for the main one, and the regular Pro one did not. And there was a noticeable difference between the two if you cared enough about that. We'll see. I don't know.

There's some video stuff here. They now support 4K60, log encoding when you shoot in ProRes. They support ACEs, which is an industry standard for color grading. All very good. Cool. It's the stuff. It's the most pro phone ever, Dan. And then this is, I think, fascinating.

They support spatial video capture. If you turn the phone sideways and you use the main and the ultra wide, it'll do spatial. Great. It's for the Vision Pro. You're the divorced dad watching a birthday party. This is what it's for. It's happening. It's notable that in the demo clip that they showed on stage, it was not a divorced dad watching it.

They did not show the dad interacting with his kids to do. The face mask. It was, you know, another person reliving a memory on their couch. Yeah. Alone. In a headset. Alone. There's no way to avoid it.

You're wearing this headset. You only experience it alone. Here's what I'll say. Philosophically, this is fascinating to me. We have been writing about this for a long time. James Barham, our old creative record, has a piece on our site from ages ago. He's like, the power of the iPhone. It is the first device where the people consuming the photos are using the same device

as the people making the photos. And so your relationship with photography has changed. And we published this eight years ago, this piece. And James was a pro photographer before you. Like, big thinking. We'll link it. It's a great piece. I've been thinking about the piece a lot every time we do an iPhone interview.

Like, this is the dynamic. I cannot think of another creative tool, actually, where it is both the thing that makes the content and the thing that consumes the content. Then you have a relationship with the person on the other end of the, the platform, right? This is the first time Apple's broken that relationship where you can shoot spatial video on your iPhone

and you cannot watch it. See, they could have put a 3D screen on it. Yeah. We got old school, one of those with the lines. We've got Lycho, we've got 3D. Yeah, it's all coming back.

It's all the greatest hits. I don't think they should have a 3D screen on this. They should have done it like the fire phone or like 500 cameras around the screen. I just, there's just something fascinating about that. Yeah. That for the first time ever, the iPhone is a capture device for another system that nobody has it. That's super expensive.

That no one knows what it's for. And sure, they should do it. It's cool. They have to do it because otherwise, the only way to capture the spatial video is through the headset, which is like, we just kind of talked about how awkward that can be. So, I mean, we'll see what it's like to actually view spatial video on the iPhone. I'm sure what I expect is it just falls back to the main camera. It's a normal looking video.

You got a depth map. All that stuff. Yeah. And that's what the second camera is doing is creating the depth map. It's got the distance between the lenses to do so. Notable that you have to turn it in landscape mode to do so. It makes sense. Which makes sense from a technical level.

It does not make sense for how 99% of people shoot video on their phone. In a portrait headset video is not a good idea. I'm just saying this is how people shoot video on their phones. Yeah. Right? And so like they can switch to that mode. Maybe the phone will have a UI telling them turn the phone. to decide to do this.

But if it doesn't, they're going to have a lot of, like, weird videos. But, like, they had to do it in order to get any content for the headset down the road.

We'll see. I'm just saying, it's the first time Apple's broken the sort of power of the iPhone as a camera in that way. Okay,

we'll see how it goes. Kind of what they're assuming is that people will shoot spatial video without a headset. Yeah, because they will be buying an iPhone in a week and a half.

Right. And not have a headset and not have a headset. They did say it's coming later, but even then the iPhone Pro installed base, the iPhone 15 Pro install base necessarily will dwarf the headset install base for a long time. So I'm just wondering, like, there's just something in there. There's something important about this camera and what it represents to people that is broken by the ability to shoot spatial video. And it's not a technical thing. It's not a quality thing.

It is like a philosophical relationship between the camera. and the screen on the iPhone that Apple has for the first time divorced. It's the, it's the aspirational thing. They're like, you could buy a Vision Pro. You can record this video. You'll be ready for it. Yeah. Probably won't.

Yeah, but it's like, what's a good analog analogy? It's like if you bought a VHS camcorder, but you didn't have a VHS player in your house. Right? It's just like a totally weird thing. I think it's fascinating. Like, I just, I just like thinking about it, like, what that represents for this device. Because I think a lot of, it's the thing about the TikToks, how to get, how to take better videos and camp photos in your iPhone.

Like, everybody has an idea about it. And there's a cottage industry of content creators who are like, here's what you do. You turn your phone upside down. You count to 20. Throw it in the ocean. And it's like, whatever. And it's because they're like, you look at this photo. I will teach you how to make it using the tool that you're holding in your hand.

And this, I'm just telling you. this breaks it in a way that I think is utterly fascinating. And I'm just like waiting for the day when someone realized they've shot like oceans of spatial video. And they're like, what is this for? I mean, I think the people that will use it and know what it is are the people that are going to be

the first ones to buy a Vision Pro when it comes out. Yeah. Like most people were not going to touch it. They're not going to go into the mode. They're not going to enable it. Just walk through that. You're like walking down the street. beautiful San Francisco

like taking a photo of the bay the bridge the whole thing and like I can't wait to go put on my headset and like relive it's like there's just something I promise you there's something weird there divorce stats are going to love it yeah we'll link that piece by James I was thinking about it during this entire demo

of just how important it is that a lot of times when you look at a photo on your iPhone you're holding the same thing that someone was holding to take that photo and there's just something very important important about that. And it's all the

spatial computing tangent that Apple's going down is about to make all that way weirder. All right. I think that's enough for the Oh, the mystery.

The big, the whole reason, the whole thing. The only thing I want to talk about. Okay, the iPhone has Wi-Fi 6E, which is cool.

Sure. Because I just bought the wrong heroes, but now they're the right heroes. I should have bought the pro sixes. Should you have? Yeah,

because they have the that's a whole other podcast. Whatever. But I've actually about the 6E's. Yeah. Which have the 6E radios in them, but I have no 6E devices. Because they use the 6E radio to talk to each other.

Yeah, but 6GAR. It sucks for that. So whatever. It doesn't matter. Now I'm going to get an iPhone with 6E. And we get the full mega, the full gigabit. You will never know when it's on 6E. Because it's not going to tell you, and it's impossible to force it.

We're going to, I'm going to be downloading movies so fast. The phone explodes. This would be great. But then they also tucked into this press release, tucked into the feature bento box, says plus thread. It's a thread radio. Now, if you have been following Gen 2E at the verge, you know that thread is an important part of the future of the smart home, which Jen has a British accent. She always goes to the small home, which is great.

Thread and matter coexist. Yeah. Well, so thread is one of the technologies that matter runs on. Right. Matter can run anything. But the idea is that you will have the secondary wireless network in your smart home that is thread. And it's a mesh network between all your devices. You have a border router that connects into the Wi-Fi and the internet, whatever.

Why is there a thread radio in the iPhone? By the way, none of that works in. It is just a mess. Just a disaster mess. None of it quite works. None of it quite interoperates. If you buy one nanoleaf light bulb and connect it to a HomePod mini with a series of incantations and, like, crystals, it's a little bit faster than doing it for Wi-Fi. And that's about as good as it gets.

But the iPhone 15 Pro has a thread radio in it. Yeah. And the press race is like, it's there for future ideas. in the home app, and you're like, what are those ideas? And everyone's like, we don't know yet. And that's the whole answer. They're like, yeah, some stuff is going to happen with matter.

And it's like, what stuff? Like, who knows? Yeah. I've been trying to think about, like, what you would do with a thread radio on a phone that I can't do with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radio. You're going to light up that nanoleaf light bulb so fast. You're going to think it.

It's going to let up. So let's, let's think this through. You have thread radio on your iPhone. And... No, step one. The connectivity stage. Standards Alliance finishes the matter specification. Matter accepted.

You have thread on your iPhone and you have a thread device and it uses thread to talk to that device to communicate to it. What happens when you leave your house and someone else wants to control that device? Do they need thread on their? No, because you'll have some border router in your house. So why do I need thread on my phone? This is why I started with the connectivity standards alliance finishes the matter specification, which includes thread radio interoperable. wearability.

Yeah. Well, technically thread network interoperability. It gets so much one. Right. So right now,

my new heroes have thread radio in them. Yeah. But those, and they should make a mesh network with your home pods.

But they do not. They do not. They do not talk. So now I have two thread networks in my house. Yes. Yes. And if you introduce

a Google Hubmax, which I think you have. Yeah. No, we have the baby ones. Okay. So those. I don't think they do.

No. But a Hubmax would introduce yet another thread network in your house. And all of those are supposed to make one giant happy thread mesh network. And then you bring the iPhone into it and it sees that happy thread mesh network and it can

connect directly to devices on it. This is the dream. Now what is really going to happen is that HomeKit is also insanity and something on your home kit thread network will break and the solution to fixing it will be restarting your iPhone, which is often a solution. Which is, yeah, I mean, that is the default home kit fix because you Never, because HomeKit does not tell you what breaks or how it broke or why. The answer is reboot your iPhone and it weirdly fixes.

I've run a thread network in my home for a couple of years now. And frequently, if like say I move a home pod to a different room or I decide we don't need to use it anymore, devices will just stop working. Yeah. And so like light bulbs will just no longer connect. And they're supposed to be self-healing and all that doesn't do that. This is the first time. I've been just like taking them out when they stop working. Dan's how three kids and he's just like,

they'll never know what's going on. I'm away from home this week, and I'm convinced nothing in the house works. They're just sitting in the dark. They're sitting in the dark, or they're like sleeping with all the lights on. They're cutting the main power to the house. I just think this is the first time,

the ultra wide man shipped, the first time they shipped in a pro was the, I think, the first time they put in a thing that they hadn't quite enabled all the use cases for. But they had some use cases for that. Not yet. Didn't they? Not yet.

They announced it with a car keys and... They were hoping car keys with that. And it never happened. Yeah. But then they came out with the fire tag. They came out with... But that was next. First they did the chip.

That was the only time I can really think this. By the way, these have new ultra-wide band chips. Yes. That enable precision finding it with more... We could call them U-2 chips. Apple doesn't like it when you do that. No, but I'm going to do it. They kept saying second-generation ultra-ad-band chips.

They called it the U-1. It wasn't me that called it the U-1. But that's the only time I think this. This time they're putting a thread radio. I'm assuming it's coming for the ride with the Wi-Fi 6E chip that they're using. That's probably a safe bet. Right. And so they just have it.

They might as well do it. And they don't know what it's for. And like something good will have. I just, someone who has an idea of what to use the thread radio on an iPhone board. It has to be that right into the show and tell me. Again, it has to be that what you want is a direct connection to that nanoleafel or whatever other thread device. You're laughing.

This is all people want to do. We're going from red to blue. I'm just thinking of the nanoleaf bulb talking to the little iPhone radio. It's just a cute little thing in my head. That's all it is. I just don't see a scenario where that would ever happen. Because for the nanoleaf bulb to be running. On thread.

It's connected to a thread network in your house that you're on the same Wi-Fi with. Exactly. I have so much respect for Jen because my head hurts. It's not great. Jen wrote an entire piece that's basically like, what is this? Why is this here? And it just like runs through the options. She's written this multiple times out.

We have what is matter. What is thread? Yeah. What is all? No, but with this one in particular, it's like this phone has this chip in it. Why? And she just like runs down the options. And by the end of the piece, she's like, none of these are good ideas.

Like none of this makes any sense. I'm just dying to know what Apple obviously has a plan, right? They wouldn't. They just don't want to tell us. Apple often put stuff in their devices and doesn't even mention it, even when the tear downs reveal that it. it's there, whatever, until they're ready to light it up. And here they put it on the slide.

And in the press release, there has to be some plan. I just cannot figure out what it is. Like, not even a hypothesis that begins to make sense outside of Dan's kids need to light up their nanolete bulbs even faster than they were doing before. That's it. That's what I got. We're doing an entire hour with Chen on the thread radio and the 13th grade. I am so bewildered by all of that.

My head hurts. Yeah. So we just moved. So I'm buying all this stuff. And it's like, this is the worst time to buy smart home stuff. Like all of it is inherently obsolete right now. No. So the move is you buy stuff that is supported by a hub because the hub will get upgraded.

And then all the devices that connect to that hub will carry along with it. It's the individual devices that are a nightmare. This explains where I have like five hue bulbs just sitting in a box. But he works on a hub. And it's also bulletproof for live. No, no. The hub does not work in my house because the router is. in a closet. So I was like, you know, I will eventually move and then I will unpack these five bulbs for some future time.

I'm saying if we end up with door locks or acquire an external hub, like that something bad has happened in my life, right? Like that's a real issue. I don't think that's going to happen. I'm just saying basically you're ready for the next two years of the verge cast to be nightmare smart home integration stories. Me like complaining about the smart home, yes. Because it's just, it's so not ready. Yeah. And it feels like it's got. But the iPhone 15 Pro is mysteriously ready because it has a thread radio in it. I don't know why. It's matter ready. If you know why, let me know. Something will happen. If you've got an interesting idea, let us know.

All right. We've got to take a break. And then VS to complain about the watches. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them. to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. Where do you want to start, V? I know you got feelings. You can pent up over there. Yeah.

So I think a lot of my problems this year is that the smartwatch updates across the board have been so iterative. So the one I'm actually looking most forward to is the Pixel Watch 2 because it has the most room to grow. But everything else is like, I think I wrote a blog and it was buckle up, buckos, we're going to have some iterative smart watch updates

and this is the definition of iterative. By the way, our internal analytics suggests that if you put buckle up in a headline, it bonkers overperforms. Like I've heard Andy Hawkins say the phrase, people love buckling up before. Well, that explains it because

that blog did do well. So, yeah. So, you know, I was there and people were like, what's new about this watch? And it's like, well, not much. Like on the surface, at least. Like on the inside, after kind of checking it out and thinking about what the new features are there, it feels like there is stuff happening, but none of it is apparent on the surface level. So if you look at the Apple Watch Series 9, the most I can say is that it now comes in Barbie Pink, which I love.

but looking at it, it looks like the series eight. Which looked like the series seven. Which looked like the series seven. No, no, no. There's a slightly thinner bezel. Right. Ignoring thinner bezels look like the series six, which looked like the series five, which looked like the series four.

It hasn't really changed in terms of looks. It gets incrementally larger when they're like, ah, screens, let's make them slightly larger. And then, you know, the Ultra 2, I actually got told to put my original Ultra away because they were afraid I was going to lose it. That's how similar it looks. like to the Ultra 2.

Wow. So they were like, we just want to make sure you don't lose your watch. And it was like, well, I have this nomad glowing the dark band on. So there's no way I'm losing this watch. And they're like, man, there's pickpockets here. Yeah. On the demo floor. Yeah.

I get where they were coming from, though, because I was holding the Ultra in my hand. And I was like, I think this Ultra is lighter. The Ultra 2 is lighter. And this woman's looking at me, she's like, I think it's your strap. Which is their way of telling me that it's not. It's the same. It's basically the same. body. So I was like, okay, cool. And, you know, with the Ultra 2, there was at least the rumor that

it was going to come in a darker color. That's not the case. It is the same titanium color because titanium is hard to make different colors. So I just don't think they were, they were really going to do that with this one. But, you know, it basically comes down to there's a new chip. There's a new chip. There's a new chip. And it's been a while since there was a new chip. And the new chip will enable more things. What more things? Well, um, It's all going to be in the background, so you probably will notice how much more convenient everything is going to be for you. But it will be. It's like Siri will understand you more and it'll do everything.

They were like Siri is now using an on-device transformer model, which is as close as they got to saying AI. He said machine learning a lot, but no AI except for one mention of transformer model in the Siri section. So yeah, so Siri is supposed to do things on-device meaning so like right now if you are in your laundry, room and it's in the basement and you don't have your phone with you and you say Siri set my timer for five minutes from my laundry or whatever it's not going to work. Siri will be just like, hey, sorry, can't do that for you. And it's happened to me a lot of times. But now supposedly Siri will be able to do that for you, even if you have no connection, which, you know, if you think about it, that's actually kind of convenient. And you think about it in a way as like, well, didn't it

always do that? No, no, it's not something that they've always done. But then at the same time, you're like, Okay, well, they're saying Siri will have 25% better diction. I am going to conduct the longest sentence to test this way with so many multi-syllables and probably an ethnic or international word thrown in there just to, like, throw it off. Because there was a point in time where I said Maharshala Ali a lot, just to see whether Siri would understand it. Yeah, she did not. It did not. Don't gender the way.

I'm not gendering Siri. It did not understand that. Now it does. So I can tell you it has improved over time. So, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, I will take suggestions for what ridiculous words I can try and make Siri understand me with. But, you know, there's supposedly that's what's going to happen. And later on in the year, Siri is going to be able to answer your health data, which I don't know how I feel about. Do you see on the, you know, the flying things you could say to Siri about health data? And one of them was like, Siri, I weigh this much today. And it's like sociopath. That's sociopath stuff. If you're just announcing to your watch how much you weigh every day. Like, like. Again, something has gone wrong. Some of that is like, they're thinking, like, can we do this? Not whether we should.

Like, I don't think you should necessarily be like, Siri, log my weight as X pounds or kilograms today. I didn't purchase a connected scale. I bought a new Apple Watch to which I announce my weight every day. But that stuff is like interesting, right? It's all background. The processor is more powerful to doing more local processing of stuff. It also enables some other things. It does enable some other things.

Like double tap. Or as I like to call it, pinchy pinch. Pinchy pinch. It's the pinchy pinch. They rejected that one. That was on a whiteboard at Apple Park. They didn't like that one, but I like it. Yeah, no, pinchy pinch.

That's actually, like they're saying it's new. It's not really new because they introduced assistive touch a couple of years ago, which is an accessibility feature, which lets you control the watch one-handed. And now they're just kind of bringing it to the masses, which in my view, proves that accessible design benefits everybody. But, you know, so you can do a little pinchy pinch motion, and you'll be able to do all the primary actions of your watch, single-handed. So someone calls you, you're washing your ditches.

You can pinchy-pinch, the official term. You can pinchy-pinch and answer the phone call. Or, you know, you, let's say, set up your camera and you want to take a photo, you can now pinchy-pinch and control the shutter. Cool. If you, you know, watchOS 10 has the new widget stacks because it's all about widgets, so you can scroll through your widgets by pinching. So it essentially becomes a one-handed device

because you know, you wear it on one wrist, you have to use your other hand to use it, but now you don't have to do that. Incredible moment of the keynote when Jeff Liam said, this is great for those moments when your other hand is occupied. No further details. No example of what can be occupied with.

And it's like, well, you're just waving your watch hand around and this hand's busy. And I was like, okay, incredible thing to say it loud. You're the CEO of the richest, the CEO of the richest company in the world. And you're like, you know, a problem I have a lot? One hand's busy. Like, weird. It's weird.

It's weird all the way around. And I was like, you know what? Like, that's better than using my nose, which is what I have been doing this whole time. It is better than that. Because, like, we have all gone like, oh, crap, someone's calling me. Like, stick your nose into the watch. So it is better. I do have some questions about how intuitive it'll be for everyone.

because with assistive touch, you're basically being very specific about what these actions are doing. This is meant to be more contextual. So they're kind of making assumptions as to what you are going to think when it comes time to pinchy pinch. And I don't know that everyone has the same thoughts. They did tell me that some aspects will be customizable. So when you are going to do your music, not everyone has the same thought about whether it's going to play, pause, or skip forward. because these are different assumptions we have from other devices. So that at least will be customizable.

There's another one that I forget what will be customizable. But, you know, so that that's cool. On a very nerd level, I find it cool that it does not have to be your index finger. You can use your middle finger or your ring finger. That's important. It's very important because I was like, what if you don't have an index finger, which is, you know, some people don't have index fingers. So that at least is neat. And I think it will be kind of cool once you get used to using it, but you do have to get used to using it.

I did the demo like six different times on the demo floor. And for the first few times, I was just aggressively pinching. The thing that makes it hard, like, initially, is the watch has to be awake. So you have to do the gesture to wake it up. Then you pinchy pinch. And then it works more reliably. But if you're, if the watch isn't awake, you'll just be pinching. Yeah, that was me.

I was just pinching. And I was like, why isn't it working? And they're like, oh, you have to do the gesture. to wake it up and then you can pinch. But then I was only pinching once and not double pinching. So it has to be a double pinch. It's not a pinchy pinch. It's a pinchy pinchy pinch.

Are they going to add like a double pinching? We're just like bruceing this in the reality. I don't want you to. I mean, I'm just thinking of myself. Eventually I will be double wristing because I'm always double resting except for right now. But and I'm just going to be sitting here just. Oh my gosh. I can't wait.

So this is not. You know, their whole thing is this is because of the S-9 chip. We're doing sensor fusion. We're measuring your blood flow. I don't know about that. Well, so, I mean, that is how it's worried. It's monitoring the muscles in your forearm that react when you do these gestures with your figure.

So that is why it works with your other fingers. And like they said, you know, you could do it with a pinky, but depending on certain people, the way their arms are, it may not work as reliably. And that most people works reliably with the index finger or the middle finger. But that's what it's monitoring. It's monitoring the blood flow through your wrist in your forearm. So is the heart rate sensor all the time? Yes.

Yes. Yes. Well, when it's awake. They light up the heart rate sensor. Yeah, it lights up the heart rate sensor and then it's ready to. I think this is probably why it doesn't work when it's not awake. One, probably to stop false triggers. But also it does have to light up a bunch of sensors in order to detect. Right.

But this is the argument at the S-9, right? We need the gyroscope. We need the heart rate sensor, which they hadn't mentioned specifically. that's really cool to know. And then we're doing sensor fusion and machine learning and we're detecting a pinch. That's what the S-9 enables

and that's what all the extra cores that's got a four-core neural co-processor or whatever. They call it a SIP as opposed to instead of an S-S-C that we're used to hearing from other devices. SOSC is everything is on the same

chip die. The SIP is a package. So you have multiple chips integrated package. Stacked and assembled into a package. Yeah. So they keep referring to the S-9 as a S-P.

But it's got all those and like this is why you have a neural processor on your wrist to figure out these kinds of features. Also, more power efficient. But, you know, Apple has this tendency of like with power efficiency to be like, and so we will do more things

with the power efficiency that we have instead of giving what some people want, which is longer battery life. So, you know. The screen gets brighter. The screen is brighter. The screen goes up to 2,000 nits on the S-9. On the series 9.

We saw a demo compared to the S-8, and it was noticeably different. It's noticeable. When it's at peak prices. So, like, the original ultra goes up to 2,000 nts. And when you're outside, that's quite bright. And now the Ultra 2 goes up to 3,000.

So I'm just like, wow. Could you see that? Was that? It seems like a difficult thing to see. So, unless you're outside. Yeah. You need the older model right next to it at max brightness to really understand it. Because when I was looking at the S-9 in the perfect lighting,

in Heaven's Steve Jobs Theater, I was like, I can't tell the difference. But when they put the two next to, each other, then you can see it. Yeah, well, they put, they, they, they demoed an S8 that had been tricked into full brightness and an S9 that had been tricked into full brightness next to each other. And that's when you could see it. And the idea being that if you are in an environment where you need this brightness, that's where it'll come help you. But ultimately, it just looked nicer when it's brighter. Yeah, it does. Yeah, but that's brighter screens. And, you know, they always say the same battery life. It's never the same. Like with smart

watches, your individual usage really does kind of impact. how much mileage you're going to get. But when Apple says 18-hour battery life, like the Series 4, that was maybe like 24 hours. Series 5, that was maybe 20 hours. Like, you can get more. Apple is very conservative with their battery life estimates. So when they say 18 hours, I'm really going to see how far you can push that 18 hours for the original. Not the original, for the regular one.

But for the Ultra 2, they said it was 36. And I've gotten as far as 60 hours on the Ultra without doing anything, going on runs. Like I did a half marathon, a slow half marathon. I was not fast that day. And I think I only lost 15% battery with no low power mode enabled. So I'm really curious to see whether the extra power efficiency will push the Ultra into the 72-hour territory. Which is what they're claiming for low power mode. Which is what they claim for low power mode, but I think, I think, depending on how you use it, because let's be real, not everyone buying an ultra is the weather-beaten explorer athlete.

No, they said that. So you wrote a piece that was like, who is the ultra for? I think Jeff Williams read it. Because in his presentation, he was like, here's who the Apple Watch Ultras for. He said, do you catch this? He said it out loud. And his answer was, it's for people who want a big display and the best battery life. And he was not like an ocean explorers.

Like it was like the biggest display in the best battery life. Because I'm going to be real. Like I go to, I am not the most athletic person on the planet. I would consider myself a weekend warrior, a reformed couch potato. Like I do do a lot of exercise. I exercise probably like six out of seven days of the week. But I'm not athletically gifted and I never will be. But I do go to like run groups.

I have friends who are athletically gifted and absolutely none of them are interested in the ultra. They're just not. There's like, I grab my garment and my garment has 40,000 metrics that the Apple Watch will never have. And they're very, like, happy with that or a regular Apple Watch. So thinking about that, I was just like, I don't think that the Ultra is really for those extreme athletes until you can be like, oh, yeah, the Ultramarathon or you can run 60 hours.

I don't know why you would want to, but I know these people do, run 60 hours and you won't need to carry your charger on you. Until it can legitimately do that, I don't think that the ultra is really for that extreme explorer. So that was a question I did have. Like, who is this watch for? And the facetious answer that I get is, is for people who want to flex. It's for people who have $800. And yes and no, right? Because. And on the iPhone side, if you have $800, you get you get last year's garbage. shit. Here's some shit we had in the parts bin.

USB 2. Yeah, exactly. This is an 80s Pontiac made of leftover Cadillac parts. Like, that's what we're doing here. The other thing that the Ultra, that they did demo for us on the Ultra 2 was this automatic night mode.

And I was like, ooh. This was like a parlor trick that I should not have been as excited to see as I was. But if you turn off the light, it'll automatically switch into that mode. This is because the changes with watchOS 10. So you used to, on WatchWest 9 with the first Ultra, you used the digital crown to switch between the special watch face between its night mode, reds, which you can't do on that watch face, Nelai.

You need to use a special watch face. But with WatchWest 10, if you spin the crown, you go into the widgets. So you couldn't do that anymore. So basically they are using the light sensor to know when the lights are out and switch into the dark mode. But that actually is something that I'm like, ah, there you go. And to be clear, this is coming to the first Ultra as well. Yes, it is. So it's not exclusive.

I'm just going to complain about smart watches for a hot second. Remembering what comes on watchOS 10 to which watches, which is exclusive to what, on what skews is just like I need a whole other co-processor brain to remember that. You need a sip. I need a sip. I need a sip to memorize all that stuff. There's a new watch face. Speaking of watch faces. Modular Ultra.

Is that coming to this ultra? Yes, it is coming to your brain. WatchOS 10. Yep. There's no real reason for anyone to upgrade from the first ultra to the second. Well, it's the flex, Dan. Other than the flex, you get the pinchy pinch and you get the 3,000 nits, and that's really it. And the new YouTube chip for precision finding, which my fellow ADHD can't remember where you put anything. Hell, yeah, but you have to get an iPhone 15 for that to actually work. Yeah.

But, you know, they showed it to us. It was like, oh, it'll tell you exactly which direction. to go, how far to go, to find your phone, which I'm super excited about because I have lost my phone in a fridge before. It's basically the same experience you get tracking an air tag with an iPhone, except you're tracking an iPhone with your Apple Watch. It's a little slower. I did notice that because when you do it with the air tag, it's like pretty quick. You can only track your iPhone 15. You can't track like an air tag that's going to be there. So it does need to have that. but I was like, yes, for me specifically. I used the Find My Phone function at least 20 to 30 times a day.

So, yeah. That's it with the watch. They upgraded a chip. They made things a little bit brighter. They did not make the Ticenium Series 9, which did not make a Tentanym Series 9. It's interesting that the double tap is hardware locked these new ones. Do we think that the old phones, the old watches can't do them?

That is their line, right? Their line is that the S-9 enables this feature because of its normal. engine and because it's able to take all the data from the sensors and spit out something smart. And yet, if you turn on an assistive touch, it's like... So I think the part of that is the contextualizing of it, so that it's built into the system, whereas assistive touch is something that you have to go in and enable, and there is kind of a learning curve with assistive touch. So there's that. There's also more customizability with assistive touch, so I don't know, but... Yeah, yeah, like, I could see.

an argument for that just because your wrist is a very noisy place in terms of sensors. It's actually not great for heart rate accuracy. I think the most accurate place is the underside of your finger or your ear. So on that front, if you want it to be accurate, if you want it to be something that a lot of people can use reliably with multiple fingers, I could see an argument for needing a more powerful sip for that. But yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm going to say. That's good. No, it's well remembered.

I think that's what we didn't say the prices. The Apple Watch Series 9, 399. The Ultra 799, you know, if you want to flex. Yeah. If you want to flex. They did not drop the price of the SE. Some folks were hypothesizing that they might drop the SE price that didn't have. I think there's an argument that they should, that there's room to drop it now that the series three is dead and gone.

There's nothing at that 199 price point. All this stuff hits September 22nd. Yep. All that is pre-orders on Friday. Yeah. iOS 17 comes out September 18th. MacAWest Sonoma, September 26th. And then also on the 22nd are the USBC AirPods Pro, which have mysterious, another mystery.

They have a new mysterious, lossless audio feature that only works with the Vision Pro. It is a, quote, groundbreaking new wireless audio protocol and, quote, revolutionary new format that allows 20-bit 48-killerhertz audio transmission. from the Vision Pro to the AirPods Pro. So goodbye, Bluetooth. Get out of here, you old pirate. I wonder if it is a modification or a form of Bluetooth. I think if I had to hypothesize as to why it's only on the Vision Pro, I wonder if it's a distance thing.

If you're wearing the AirPods and the Vision Pro in your head, there's a maximum of six inches of distance between the devices, whereas if it's on your phone and the AirPods, you've got a few feet between them, and it can't maintain that fidelity. Who knows, man. Who knows? The phone's got a thread radio, man.

There's just a lot of mysteries that Apple did not address today. It obviously doesn't work with the iPhone. No lossless audio from the AirPods Pro. The old AirPods Pro don't get it. And you cannot buy the USBC case for your old AirPods Pro. We were told that it might be a, quote,

service part, which is fascinating. Yeah. The precedence for it being sold separately was when they moved, I think it was the AirPods 2 came out initially did not have wireless charging, and then they updated it to a wireless charging case. You could just buy the case if you wanted, but it doesn't look like that's happening with the USBC AirPods Pro 2.

Also notable, the regular AirPods 3, not getting USBC. We mentioned earlier that AirPods Max, not getting USBC, at least not today. Yeah, but the AirPods Pro also on 22nd with USBC. Yes. So you can buy, if you have an AirPods Pro 2 today, you can buy new AirPods Pro 2 today, you can buy new AirPods Pro. too. And I don't know.

They've been out for a while. Maybe your battery is not lessen. I think that's it. We've really bled this one dry. We've talked about every bento on the bento box. I mean, it was a good event. It was fun to be there and do our thing. When I say that bento boxes don't have a lot of stuff on them,

the iPhone 15 bento box says 5G on it. Oh no. And it's like, you guys, what are we doing here? But yeah, it interruptates all around. but I think solid, the USBC stuff is going to go over well. But that's it. This is the beginning of just a bonkers.

Two months in tech, basically. September or October are going to be nuts. We'll be back on Friday and talk about the Google antitrust case and everything else that's happening. And then it is just a sprint to the finish line of fall from here and out. We're going to be so dead at the end of this. It's going to be good, though. This is what we're here for.

This is what you signed up for. It is true. It's why we wake up in the morning. It's nuts. It's like crunch this year. It's very busy. I feel like that. There was at least like a day you could breathe in September last year.

Amazon Devices and Services event. Yeah. Let's do it. Get in there. Microsoft Service event. Yeah. Metac connect. Pixel watch too.

Let's not forget about code. I'm excited for that. Thread radio is everywhere for no one. All right. That's it. That's a rich cast. Rock and roll. 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 Vox 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.