The Vergecast - iPhone and watches and wallpapers, oh my

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of the Action Button: 03:34 - The Verge's David Pierce chats with Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert about their reviews of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. 41:02 - Victoria Song joins the show to talk about her review of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2. 1:07:58 - David chats with Isaac Mosna and Widgetsmith's David Smith about customizing your iPhone wallpaper and widgets. 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

Welcome with the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Action Button. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I'm having one of those days, I assume everybody has days like this, where you wake up at some outrageously early hour, and you look at the clock and you're like, oh, cool, I have five more hours to sleep. But then something in your brain is just like, no, we are awake now. Anyway, that's the kind of day I'm having. I've been up since like 2 o'clock this morning. I read a bunch of news.

I read a book. I looked at TikTok for a while. I saw every single thing that has like ever been posted to Reddit in history. I did all the New York Times games. And somehow it's still like first thing in the morning. It's a very confusing way to start the day because I kind of feel like it's lunchtime now. Now I'm out just like aimlessly wandering the neighborhood because I don't know what else to do with myself. Because the sun just came up and I've been awake for what feels like 100 hours.

Anyway, it's going to be a very confusing day. I'm going to get to 2 p.m. and be like, well, time for dinner. time to go to bed. Wish me luck. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're going to talk mostly about the iPhones because it's iPhone season. We have reviews of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro to talk about. We're also going to talk about our reviews of the Apple Watch and the Apple Watch Ultra.

But we're also going to talk about software stuff. There's obviously new stuff in iOS 17, interactive widgets and all kinds of cool things going on. But more broadly, thinking about all this stuff for the last few months has really led me down this rabbit hole of phone personalization. I think the work people are willing to do to make their phone feel like an extension of themselves, whether it's a case or the wallpaper or the app icons or the look and feel of the whole phone in general, people are willing to do a lot so that when you turn on the screen, it makes you feel something. It makes you feel like you. And I think that's really cool.

So I called up a couple of smart people to talk about how we do that and how that works and how Apple thinks about that. So we're going to dig into that too. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, it is finally time that I can go home and, like, reasonably make breakfast and have coffee and start the day and also probably take a several hour nap and see how we do. So I'm going to go do all of that. And then we'll be right back. This is the Vergecast. We'll see in a sec.

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Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic goals. medalist and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. All right, I've had coffee. I've had Cheerios. I kind of know what time it is. I'm ready. Let's do this.

The new iPhones go on sale this Friday and our reviews of the iPhone 15, 15 plus 15 Pro Pro Max are all live on the verge.com. You should read them all. They're all really great. I don't know if this is the most interesting phone of the year exactly. In fact, it's definitely not the most interesting phone of the year if you define interesting as just like the one trying to do the most new cool stuff. But it's almost certainly the one the most people are thinking about buying. But should you?

And which one? Who better, to answer that question, than the people, who reviewed the phones. The verdict is Allison Johnson and Dan Seaford. They're both here. Let's get into it. Allison, hello. Hello. Dan, hello. Hello. You both have used two of the four phones. You've done big reviews. I have a million like specific questions, but let's just kind of like top line takeaways from your reviews. Like are these phones any good? Yes or no. Who cares? Dan, you go first. iPhone 15 and 15 plus. What's

the verdict? Yeah. In a shocking turn. of events. Apple release the turd of a device. No, I'm kidding. This is the 15th iPhone. Like, it's like they've been doing this a long time. They know how to make iPhones. Yes, they are good devices. In fact, you could probably say they are great devices. And I think that I review the 15 and the 15 plus. I think if people buy them, they're going to be really happy with them. The type of person that buys this phone typically is coming from a much older iPhone. And so they're not coming from an iPhone 14, probably not a 13. So we're talking like a 12 or an 11 or maybe even a 10S. And they are going to get a lot of new features and new experiences, plus better camera, better battery life,

better performance, better display, all that stuff. So I think it is like a meaningful upgrade for the type of person that is buying this. Are the 15 and 15 plus all that exciting to us, like enthusiasts and maybe our audience? Probably not. Like we've seen all of these things before. They are, I've been calling them a repackaging of the 14 pro. They've got most of the same features is the 14 Pro, but not all of the features. Notably, they have, they don't have high refresh screens and they don't have always on displays, which is like two things that I think would make a better experience on these devices. We're going to come back to both those things. Yeah, but like, otherwise you get the Dynamic Island, you get a high-resolution camera, Apple's changes to the design

this year by just kind of softening the edges and the Mac glass and stuff do make them nicer to hold, which you'll never experience because you're going to put a case on it anyways. but it's there. And then they come in five very boring colors. The rage you feel about the colors, really. It fills me up in a lovely way. I don't get it. Like, why bother with colors if you're going to,

this is what you're going to do. And we know Apple's done good colors in the past. Yeah, Apple is perfectly capable of making cool colors. It just chose not to this year for some reason. Like, if you find yourself making a color that you call natural, like you've done it wrong. You just, you blew it. All right, Alison, the pro and pro max,

what's the kind of top of? line verdict here. Yeah, it's kind of along similar lines. I mean, they're good in the ways that we are used to a pro iPhone being good. I think the new things here this year are like certainly not breakthroughs and anyone on Android who's hearing me talk about USBC and like a five times zoom lens is, you know, like cackling. Yeah, we should just say right up top like Android users like we know. Yeah. The number of things we're going to say that. Android phones have had since like 2004. Like, we get it.

We're with you. We're on the same page. The S23 Ultra is a terrific phone. Yes. Just let Apple people have this one. Just for today. Yeah, just today. People have this.

Like a blanket statement of like, I get it. I know. Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, it is the first time these things have all come together on an iPhone. And I think they're smart in the pro. They're things that, you know, being able to hook up like in a. the card reader that isn't a special lightning dongle situation is cool. And like, I appreciate that someone who is maybe just, just wants a phone, just wants it to work is, it doesn't really care

so much, but it's there. The five-time Zoom, you know, is, is neat for people who want to get in there a little more and who are a little more picky about their photography and the action button is just nice. Like, you want a button that does whatever you want on your iPhone, you can have it now. Like, that's super sweet. Okay, I have a bunch of specific things in there I want to talk about. I think USBC is a big one and I want to spend a bunch of time talking about that because that surprised me a lot from both of your reviews. But the first thing that jumped out at me that you both said, which I thought was surprising, was that the new phones feel different like to hold in your hands than the other ones do. Like I feel like I'm used to Apple saying every year like we've

developed an all new way to make these phones that will change everything. And then you pick up and it's like, yep, this is still that one. It's an iPhone. But both of you had the experience of kind of picking up the new one and being like, this feels, this feels better. Walk me through that. What's actually better about it when you hold it? So I live the life, you guys know where I have like 10 phones on my desk at once. And I will reach for the 15 Pro and pick it up. And I just have that moment of like, ooh, this is a little nicer than I was expecting. Like it's the brushed finish. on the sides of the phones. They're a little more rounded the edges,

so they're just like a tiny bit more comfortable to hold. And really the major thing is on the pro models, especially just being noticeably lighter. Like they're not light phones, but if you ever hauled a 14 Pro Max, then you know the experience of like holding a paperweight in your hand. Yeah, it's a big phone. Yeah.

This feels like holding a normal phone. It doesn't feel like holding a normal phone. It doesn't feel like holding a super heavy phone. Okay. And so how much of that is like the titanium and all the stuff they talked about in the pro versus just kind of the way they've reshaped it? Because, Dan, you had a very similar experience in kind of how the lower end phones feel, right? Yeah. You know, the lower end phones, I guess, the 15 and the 15 plus, they're technically the same weights or within very small, minute differences of last year's models.

But if you're coming from like an iPhone 11, an iPhone 15 is like noticeably lighter, like the order of more than 20 grams, which is absolutely noticeable. I've been, my personal phone's an iPhone 13 pro, and that just feels like a lead weight to me. The 15 plus, which has a much larger screen, is actually technically lighter than my 13 pro. And so, you know, you may say like, oh, 10, 20 grams here, it doesn't really matter. Like when you're holding these things all day long and you're putting them in and in your pocket or whatever, like I feel every. every single gram that gets added. And it's like my biggest complaint with the iPhone for the past few years, the pro models, at least, is how heavy they've become because Apple is stuck with the stainless steel frame

and the polished and the premium, all that jazz. So I'm really excited that the pro models move to titanium. But I also appreciate that the standard model also benefits from the softer edges on the frame so that doesn't cut into your pinky or your palm as much when you're holding it. The back glass is now a frosted or matte finish, which is like nicer to hold. I think that makes it a little bit more slippery. Anyone who's owned a pro phone for the past few years kind of knows what that backglass feels like.

It's kind of a slippery experience. Again, most people are going to put cases on these and all kind of doesn't matter. But they just feel like nicer objects. And that's like befitting of what the prices are because really even the less expensive phones are starting at $800. And at this point, like that is like purely in premium phone territory. you can get really like advanced devices for this much. I mean, if you find a good deal,

you'll find a flip phone from Samsung for that much money. So like, you know, you have to like kind of justify what the cost is that you're paying for. And there's a lot of reasons for it. But, you know, part of it is the experience of the tactile device. And I think that these are very well made. It's very obvious that Apple's been making iPhones for a very long time. And they've continued to like kind of iterate and polish them to make them a nicer experience.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Alison, this was just for you. and then we're going to go back to things Dan's allowed to talk about. Action button. What did you do? Well, I don't care about anything else about the iPhone 15. I care so much about the action button.

Button, there's a new button. So I put it to open the camera, which I thought I would really like. Because I struggle with a swiping on the screen to open. I don't know why. The number of people I have heard say that in the last seven days is so fascinating. I feel like there are 100,000 ways to open the camera on iOS. Another button to do it is the last thing I need. Oh my gosh. It seems like so many people struggle with that same thing you're describing. It's really interesting.

Yeah. It's always when someone else is looking at me using the phone too. They're like, take this picture and you're like, I don't know. I'm sorry. Yeah. So I, that's like the first thing I did. I was super excited about it. But then I noticed I just wasn't really using it for that. I think it's just like I use the Pro Max a little more. And I think having it just like it's that much taller and the action button is that much farther away. It just felt like a. pain to it was like kind of awkward to be like reaching around the back of the phone to create you know push the button but so I have other ideas for it I'm gonna I'm gonna do the shortcuts like you all think I'm kidding about making it order me a pumpkin spice latte but I am 100% doing that yeah I'm back in my back in my natural environment so I can go wild with it now I love that Dan you're not allowed to answer because you reviewed the loser phones I'm just kidding, someday when you're allowed to have an action button, many years from now, what are you

going to do with it? I hate to be really boring, but I think I would probably use it for the ringer switch, maybe? But, like, I was thinking yesterday, there's a feature on Android that I really like, that if you flip the phone face down, it turns into do not disturb mode, and there isn't a way to do that on the iPhone. But I could set the action button to do not disturb. So, like, I could just, like, hold it for a second, put in do not disturb face down.

It's more than, like, I want to do it. I want to just flip it over and have it done. So I don't know. That's like my first initial idea. You know, Allison mentioned the camera. I think that what a lot of enthusiasts will do is set it up to open third-party camera apps, which right now is a pain, no matter which way you do it on the iPhone, whether it's from the lock screen or control center or whatever, opening a third-party camera app is kind of annoying.

I think maybe you could set a widget on the lock screen now to do it, which is a workaround. But I've already seen the developers of Halide are like adding a toggle in their apps. app to like let you do it from the action button. And so I'm sure a lot of people are going to do that. Yeah, that's a good one. It's funny you mentioned, do not disturb because that was, that was my thought too. Like somebody sent me a thing the other day where they had built a shortcut where whenever they plug their phone in, if it's after 10 p.m., it automatically switches it to sleep mode. And I was like, that's genius. But then this came out and I was just like, oh, it's the same thing. Like I can just punch on Do Not Disturb, which is the kind of thing that I'd

like to like do often when I even just want to pay attention for a few minutes or whatever, and having a button that can do it seems very nice. I'm very into that. But okay, that's enough of that. I could also talk to you about interactive widgets for several hours, but we'll do that on another podcast. Let's talk about USBC, because the thing that I think a bunch of us have discovered over the last eight days since this iPhone launched is that Apple made a much more open port than

any of us expected. And I'm just assuming knowing the two of you that you've spent a lot of time over the last week plugging random things into the iPhone to see what would happen. Alison, what have you been plugging into the iPhone and what has happened? Well, when we were shooting the video, you know, we had access to like an Ethernet cable and SD card and all this stuff. And yeah, it truly is like kind of mind blowing that you plug it in and it doesn't it doesn't complain. It doesn't, you know, make you jump through a bunch of hoops. Like, it just does whatever you're trying to do. And, like, we plugged in that Ethernet cable and turned off the Wi-Fi and the cell data.

And it just had Internet. It just had Internet from a cable. It was like, who saw that coming? What a world. I know. Yeah, I think we've been so conditioned for, like, especially with the iPhone for Apple to get in the way of what we want to do with it, that it's like, it feels a little silly to say that, like, I plugged in an Ethernet cable and it worked. Or like, I plugged it an SD card and I could see the files on it. Like, but we are just so conditioned to the iPhone's kind of like walled garden experience

where you wouldn't think that you can normally do these things. And in the past, they required special hardware adapters. And even then, it was still limited. So, like, it was kind of fun to just jam something into the USB port, watch what happens, and then be like, oh, that's the thing you would have expected to happen. And, like, I don't know how often you're going to use Ethernet on your iPhone, probably never, but photographers might use the SD card. Videographers can shoot directly to an SSD, stuff like that.

Like all those things just kind of work. It's almost like it's a computer. Yeah, what a crazy idea. It does seem like storage is probably the most likely real use case for people, right? In part because it's a way to like get stuff off of your phone in a way that is not always easy. But also because like I feel like a thing I have surprisingly often is I have something on a hard drive or somewhere else. that I would like to be on my phone so that I can do something with.

And you can just plug in external storage and it just opens up in the files app, right? Like, that's pretty meaningful and new. And it's nuts that I'm saying that like it's an exciting new feature. But like, here we are. Are there other things that you feel like rise to that level of like things people

might actually use this port for other than charging? I think that some people might want to use it for video out. You can plug a USBC cable to HDMI or to display port. It supports display port. out at 4K-60 resolution. So if you want to plug the phone into a TV and watch a video on the TV,

you get screen mirroring, basically. But if you're watching a video, you can make the video go full-screen. That might be a use case for some folks. But again, yeah, I think you're probably right in that it is either USB hubs that allow you to plug in like USBA accessories or storage are really going to be

the main type of accessories outside of charging. that you would use a USBC port for. Yeah, I just want to say, Alison, kudos for getting the sentence Dex remains undefeated into the 15 Pro review because you would think you could plug it into something and you might get a full-blown, you know, desktop environment on a screen. But we got a little, we got a little Dex win in the 15 Pro review and that made me very happy. And they're so intense about like how good this processor is that you would think, like,

okay, so let me do something with it. No, you can play Resident Evil. I will not lie. I have had the thought that Stage Manager feels like something that might appear when you plug your iPhone into a larger display sometime in the near future. I don't think it's ever going to happen. I will do that once if that exists and then never, ever, ever again because it's Stage Manager. Okay, so the other thing we should talk about is the cameras. And I think especially on the pro, Allison, there are a bunch of new things.

There's a bunch of new, like, underlying tech, but in terms of, like, features for people, there's the new telephoto lens, which is 5X zoom, which I think is a big deal. There are the new focal lengths on the default camera, which you can move around and pick between. It shoots 24 megapixels by default now. Am I missing anything? Like, have those jumped out to you as, like, really making a difference in how you use your phone's camera every day? Yeah, they're all things that I'm really appreciating.

And having that, you know, you could always, like, pinch a little bit of, zoom a little bit if you feel like the standard camera lens is too wide. But there's something different about especially having those little like millimeter focal length equivalence in there. It just kind of warms your heart. It makes you feel like, oh, I'm taking, I'm doing photography. I'm a real photographer. Yeah, I'm taking a picture at 35 millimeters, not 1.5x. It like switches back to 1.5x. As soon as you do it, you get to be the person who says, I make photos. I don't take photos. Yeah, that's what happens. Yeah. I've been saying that all we, and everyone's so tired of me.

I'm like, I'm making photographs. Yeah. No, I've like just very eagerly like incorporated them into how I think about taking pictures with an iPhone. And it's great. I'm happy with,

you know, all the flexibility we get this year. Yeah, Dan, you I remember when it first launched, we're very excited about the idea of the 24 megapixel default photos. Yeah. My worry was file size, right?

And there's always the thing where it's like it depends on where you put it at how much resolution you actually need and on and on. And we can debate that forever. But how good a photo do you want versus how many can you store on your phone is kind of a forever question? Like did Apple find the right middle there? Yeah, I think with the 24, it's not as big of a file size compromise as some people might have expected. If you're using the default heath mode, which I'm going to say heaf, which either is or is not pronounced heath, but we'll leave it alone for that. It's heaf. I notice that it's about like,

you know, if a JPEG is, or if a 12 megapixel image is two megabytes, a 24 is about three, that can vary some, you know, photos if they've got more detail in them and stuff like that, can be larger. And so then the 24 megapixel will be larger. But when you go to 48 megapixel, it's double the 24. So that is like a significant difference. And that will eat up your storage. And I don't think you actually gain much in terms of detail with the side-by-side comparisons

I did between the 24 and the full-size 48. you're not getting a lot there in terms of extra detail because these are such small sensors. But with 24 megapixels, you're moving past the 12, which we had been at since the iPhone success, and you are getting a little bit more room to crop, maybe a little bit more room to digital zoom, as Alison mentioned, and a little bit more flexibility.

But ultimately, you know, Apple likes to talk about how you could blow it up to a 20 inch by 30 inch poster and do all this stuff. It's like, no, you're not going to do that. It's a phone photo. It's still going to look like it comes from a phone, but it gives you a little bit more cropping ability after the fact without really compromising storage that much. These phones all start at 128 gigabytes now, which is not a terrible starting point,

especially if you're coming from an older one that had 64 gigs or getting twice as much storage, so you got more room for the photos. And Apple would love to sell you iCloud Plus storage, which it will do up to 12 terabytes a month now. I mean, it would love to. Like so much, it would make Tim Cook personally thrilled to sell you 12 terabytes. by cloud storage. Allison, you and I are both long-term anti-digital Zoom zealots, I would say. I believe it is criminal to just stand there and pinch and zoom on the screen to make your photos worse. But you, in the process of reviewing the 15 Pro Max, seem to have found some kind of zen with

the way that Apple is approaching this. Can you explain this to me? How did you, why does it feel like this works for you? Yeah, I think part of it is in my head, when you're going to like a specific focal length and Apple is doing a little bit extra in the background with the processing, you know, it's not just up-reszing the image and calling it a day. There's a fair amount going on with like deep fusion and then incorporating some detail from a higher resolution frame, which is either the 48 or 24 megapixel if you're in the 35-millimeter crop. How much of that makes a big difference? I don't know, but it makes me feel better. I feel like at ease with the picture that I'm taking. And I think that's something that we're all going to have to get more comfy with going forward

because even, you know, comparing it with the Samsung S23 Ultra, which has that 10x lens, you know, I'm going to 5x to compare it to the iPhone. And that's not a native focal length that it has. it still looks better than the iPhone image, which is funny. So it just kind of changes how you have to think about like letting the, trusting the camera a little more and not being quite so picky about focal length. It is a weird thing. I mean, all of the process now is digital.

Like every step of the way computers are doing computer things. So I think I'm also slowly learning to let go of the idea that if I do it at 1X, it is capturing a photo as photos were meant to be captured. And everything else is like some computer-y lie. Like it's all kind of a computer-y lie at this point, right? Yeah. It's an illusion. We've heard this from, I know Google, when it introduced its super res zoom feature,

it kind of said similar things that, like, if you were to use super res zoom before you take the photo, you will get a better image than if you just took the photo at the white angle and digitally cropped it afterwards. Because they're taking input from multiple frames. and averaging them together and things like that, whereas if you crop later, it is just a single frame that you have to work with. And Apple's doing a very similar type of thing here, where it is averaging multiple frames, stacking them together. That's what DeepFusion has been doing for a few years now. I think, I was in there on like Generation 3 or 5 of

deep fusion, something like that. And then now they have the larger sensor that they can also pair higher resolution data from for details. So I know that like when I go get an iPhone 15 pro and start using it, I'm going to lock it on 35 millimeter and never look back. That was actually going to be my next question is like, what's the right default setup here? Because the other part is. It's 35 millimeter. Is the only correct focal. Okay.

So we shoot 24 megapixel, hef images, 35 millimeter camera, victory forever. ProRes log video. You can fit four photos on your phone and it's all over. If you want to be the cool street photographer, you shoot a 35 millimeter. There we go. That's true. That is proven. Ask an answer.

All right. So let's do some like. straightforward buying advice here. So Dan, last year, it seems very clear that the people who wanted a 14 picked a 14 over a 14 plus. Is there any reason to believe that's not going to be the case again? Of the like entry phones, do we think the 14 is probably the one for most people? The 15, Jesus Christ. So I, you know, I think last year with the 14 and the 14 plus, it was kind of a weird scenario. One, the 14 plus didn't come out for quite a few months afterwards. So it didn't wasn't the variable at the same time.

And then the 14 plus was like if you want a big screen and a big battery and Allison's review last year, like she made the point like this delivers on both of those things. But it was doing it at $900. And if you wanted a 14 pro max, it was only 200 bucks more. This year the not only is the 15 and 15 plus available at the same time. So you will be able to take advantage of all the same carrier promotions or whatever. You'll be in the store. You'll look at it. It's like, oh, wow, this one actually is bigger.

But it's also, it's still $900, but the bigger pro phone, the pro max, has gone up in starting price $100. So now there's a $300 jump. And I think that starts to make it like, do I really need to go that much if I just want a big screen and a big battery? And I think that people will be making that calculus more. And maybe it'll do better for the plus model. I can tell you that the plus model this year absolutely delivers on battery life. I had a horrific travel day coming back from WWDC. I was staring at the 15 plus all day long.

I had like something like eight, nine hours of screen time. And I got home at like 11 or 12 midnight. And I still had like 35% battery left on it. It was pretty good. Like this thing just goes. And so for a lot of people, big screen, big batteries, exactly what they want. And 15 plus delivers. I think if you are coming from a mini, which if you have a 12 mini, maybe you're

getting around time to like, needing a new phone, the iPhone 15 is obviously going to be much more attractive to you. It's smaller, it's lighter, fits in your hand easier, and stuff like that. I think that's really the only practical option for anyone who wants a small iPhone at this point. And then the last point of consideration is, as usual, Apple is selling last year's $14 and $14 for $100 less than the $15 and $15 plus this year. I think that this year, the things you get for the $100 more make it worthwhile to get the $15. Last year, we had the opposite conclusion.

The 14 was not that much better than the $13. and you can still buy the 13 for 100 bucks less, go save your money. But this year you get USBC, which is a more convenient, flexible way to charge. You get the Dynamic Island, which is a more pleasant, fun user interface, and it's going to continue to get more utilized as we go forward. And you do get meaningful improvements on the camera. We didn't really talk too much about it, but I think that the automatic portrait mode is a thing that people will actually really like

and use and get a lot of value out of, especially the average consumer buying the iPhone 15 or 15 plus. So all of those things add up, I think it make it worthwhile to buy the 15 over the 14 this year. But if you have a 14, there's no reason to upgrade. There's probably not much of a reason upgrade. But if you are on a 12 or 11 or older, then I think you get a lot here this year. The portrait mode thing is a good one. I knew there was something in the cool things in the camera list I was forgetting.

And that's one. That's a big deal. Yeah. I think that, like, you know, I observe my spouse taking pictures of our kids all the time. and she never switches to portrait mode or anything like that. She just snaps with the default camera. And now if she had an iPhone 15 or a 15 Pro, she can just do that.

And then after the fact, I can go in the photos up and be like, oh, portrait mode, cool. And I can play with it and whatever and make it pop more. And I think that there's probably a lot of people who, A, never realized that they could switch to portrait mode because it was an entirely different setting. Or B, didn't remember how, or didn't remember to do it in the moment

when they're trying to capture the image, which is happening quickly in front of them. Because like Allison, they couldn't figure out how to get the button to work. Yeah, just stuck on that home screen. On the lock screen, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then, Alison, for you, the pro versus the pro max.

Again, screen and battery differences. Am I right in thinking that the 5X telephoto zoom is only on the pro max? That's right. Okay. So that's a big difference, too. Like, how would you rank between the two? Like, how should people choose which one to buy? Yeah.

it kind of throws all my usual, like, buying a new phone thinking out the window because I think there, you know, there is kind of a different customer for the pro and the pro max. And whether, whether or not your current phone is working well is like less part of the equation. But I think, yeah, the five-time zoom is nice. I get why it's only on the bigger phone. Google only puts it on his bigger phone. It's something I would consider going up to the bigger phone for, especially since it's a little bit lighter weight this year and it doesn't feel like such a burden carrying it around. But there's a lot to consider and I think some people are just going to jump on, you know, the new pro iPhone. And I think like as silly as the word pro is and kind of meaningless now, I think there is a

a certain kind of person who like, if your phone is kind of a big part of like how you work when you travel, you've got chargers for other things, or if you're a video creator and you can see yourself really, you know, using it more in your workflow. I think it does make sense for a, I don't think pros are the word I would use, but it makes sense for a certain kind of person. Yeah, it's like the iPhone 15 videographer. It's like if you shoot a lot of big files, this might work for extra. I like that. We kind of like have these discussions every year.

Like who is a person to buy a pro over a standard iPhone? And like ultimately at the end of the day, Apple sells a ton of pro phones. I think the reports from the 15 generation was like, the iPhone 14 was like single digit percentage more than the iPhone 14 pro in terms of like numbers of people that bought it. So like people will buy the more expensive phone, I think, because. it's more expensive, but also because it's nicer. I think a lot of people see the three lenses on the back, whether it does 3x or 5x, and they see that like, hey, this does more,

and their carriers willing to subsidize half the price anyways. So, you know, I think we'll see a lot of people buying the pro models this year, and then the 15 and the 15 plus will be, you know, a much slower ramp up in terms of, like, interest in buying, and people will buy them as their old phones break. But like the early adopter, the person who's upgrading every single year, they're going to gravitate to the pro. always it's the exciting one that's what I wrote in my review is like the regular 15 is never going

to be exciting it's never going to be like the platform for new ideas or technologies the pro pro is always going to be that so if you want that if you want to experience that you're always going to go with the pro yeah I totally agree I think that's right um all right I'm going to let you guys go here in a minute but before I do will you guys hang out and do a hotline question with me really fast just I think you're the right to people to help me answer this question as a reminder the hotline number is 866, Vorge11, call, ask us all your tech questions. And you can email Vergecast at theverge.com

if you don't want to call, but frankly, it's super fun when you call. It's nice to hear your voices. Okay, let's hear Dan, I have been pestering you about this all day. So I expect good things from you, but here we go. Let me just play the question we have for you right now. Hey there, guys.

My name is Jordan. I had a question about the new iPhone 15, specifically how you could charge, other iPhones by plugging in a USBC cable. I know that if you do a USBC to Lightning, it will always charge the Lightning phone. And if you use the iPhone, it will kind of do like a handshake action and charge the lesser charged of the two. My question is, you know, it'll do like a 51% versus 50% and then the 51% will start charging that one or whatever. But what if you take like an iPhone plus and you plug in, say, USBC cable?

to another like standard iPhone 15, and they're both at like, you know, let's say the iPhone plus is at like 45%, whereas the other one is at like 50%, right? So like the plus technically has less battery percentage, but it has a bigger battery. What happens? Who wins that exchange? Does the plus charge because it technically has more battery with which to charge, or does the phone with the higher percentage win every time? Thanks and love the show.

Okay, so this is maybe the most Vergecasty hotline question we have ever received. I was going to say. I love it so much. I have an answer. Dan, I have been making you plug things into other things all day. I've been also running down batteries to try and get the levels right or whatever. So tell me what you know so far. So what I know so far is he's correct that if you plug in a lightning iPhone to a USBC iPhone,

the USBC one will always send power to the lightning iPhone. The lightning does not work the other direction. And also AirPods and watches, which is like the thing it's ostensibly meant for is to charge your small devices. Yeah. AirPods and watches, it will charge those devices. They will not reverse charge the phone. But right now I've got the iPhone 15 plus, which is at 75% battery. And I've got the iPhone 15, which is at 96% battery.

And I plug them in together with my USBC cable. And the iPhone 15 is charging the 15 plus. Whoa. So the theory is, which everyone has the lowest amount of battery percentage on its meter, even if the real-life capacity is still more than the 15, seems to be the way that the power goes. USBC is kind of weird. You can kind of like sometimes unplug them and re-plug them and it will do its handshake again and like switch roles with other USBC devices. But with the iPhones at least, it seems to be consistently happening that the one with the larger battery percentage charges the one

with the lower battery percentage. So if you wanted to be a real mensch with your iPhone 15 and you've got a buddy who's got an iPhone 15 plus or Pro Max or whatever, and you want to give them your battery and give them some juice and they will just suck all the life out of your phone to power up their big battery cells. You can do that, but it does do this at a pretty slow wattage. It's 4.5 watch, which is slower than slow wireless charging. So you're not going to be charging all that quickly, but I guess if you, you know, really are in a pinch, you can do it. I tried some other devices. the MacBook will always charge the phone. The MacBook could have like no power

and it will still try to charge the phone. I plugged the iPhone 15 plus into a lightning iPad and what happened was the lightning iPad would start charging for a second and then it would say not charging because I think it's just not enough wattage. I plugged the 15 plus

into a Windows tablet thing and it would give enough juice to wake the Windows tablet up and then it would try to charge the iPhone. So for the most of the most, part, you're not really charging larger devices with this aside from the fact that you can charge the bigger iPhone with the swaller iPhone, which is kind of hilarious. If your friend with a 15 plus asks you to charge up their phone, that's not a good friend.

Yeah. I mean, where did they go wrong in their life management where they didn't charge their phone that gets massive battery life? Yeah. Real friends charge their own phone. Is what you're saying? Their problem. I don't know.

Good friends charge their own. phone, but best friends charge everybody's phone. That's what I always say. Maybe. The other weird thing you can do while we're on the topic is let me just see if this actually works. I've got a mag save charger here. I'm going to put the phone on the mag save charger and watch it start charging.

And then I'm going to plug it into another phone through a USBC cable and everybody charges. So you can Daisy chain. Oh. Oh, that's it. That's kind of rad. Yeah. I mean, I assume this is going to stop charging when it, like, overheats. But yeah.

All of these things are like use cases that don't exist, but I think it's delightful. This is the potential of USBC, the power of USBC that we've been missing with the iPhone for however many years. It's here. I love it. All right. Well, listen, I hope that helps. USBC is very confusing. And if we figure out the actual logic behind all of this, we'll be sure and let you know.

But for now, go charge your friends' iPhones. Be a good friend. All right. Thank you both. We got to take a break. and then we're going to come back and talk about the Apple Action. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere.

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posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. The iPhones aren't the only new Apple devices. coming out this week. There's also the new Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. The Virges Victoria Song, our resident wearer of many fitness watches simultaneously, reviewed them both, and she's been using the new WatchOS 10 software for a while as well. V and I haven't talked about this yet, but I have a feeling the software is actually the real story of the Apple Watch this year, but let's see if I'm right or not. Vee is with me here now. Hi, Hi, V. Hello. Dan Seferts still here. Hi, Dan. How you doing? Just can't get rid of you

this week. Oh, I'm a cockroach. Okay, so my overarching thesis, V.A., about these new watches, and I am curious to hear if I'm right, is that the software this year is significantly more interesting than the hardware this year. 100,000 percent. Okay. Like the, well, okay, maybe like 999,000.

Like, that 1% is that, so, like, if we're talking about hardware, the one little tiny stumble in your theory is the S-9 S-9 SIP that enables all the interesting software updates. So it's still software. Explain what that actually means in practice. So the S-9 S-9 SIP is the first, let's say, major, in Scare quotes, a major processor update that the Apple Watch has had in a very long time, because so far, the last few years, it's been a rebadged version of the processor from the year before. no real meaningful changes in terms of like features that it enables. But this year, it's actually got a 30% faster CPU and a four-core neural engine that, you know, that enables the double-tap feature. It enables a smarter series, smarter in the sense that it works offline now.

And it's supposedly 25% more accurate at dictation. And the screens are brighter, yay, because better power. efficiency, but they're not going to give you better battery life for that power efficiency, that are going to reinvest it into brighter screens. Yeah, this is the thing I wish Apple would stop doing. Like, I actually think on most of Apple's devices, it's the right call, especially with the MacBooks. I think we've reached a point where, like, the battery life is terrific, sacrificing a bunch

of stuff to get me like a few more hours. I'm not sure it's all that meaningful. I think especially with the entry-level watch, in this case, the Series 9, I would take small trade-offs to get like six more hours of battery life out of the thing. It's the only device of mine that reliably consistently dies at this point. Oh, God, David, you just opened the can of worms, which is to say that there are two camps with regards to the Apple Watch and their battery life. There's the camp that's like, don't even look at me in the face until this Apple Watch can last a week. How dare you come back to me after yet another year with 18 hours.

of battery life. I spit, I spit on your grave, Patui. There's that crowd. And then there's the other crowd, which I think Dan belongs to this crowd, which is like, I have my little charging routine. My Apple Watch is never out of battery. You charge your phone every night. It's not that hard to just plop your Apple Watch on a charger at like a time when you're not using it, like the shower or 10 minutes before bed. Why are you complaining so hard? I will just state in my own defense. I would love to not have to have the routine. I just happen to have the routine out of necessity. Can I tell you my problem with this routine?

The correct time you just said it, V, to charge your watch is while you're in the shower. And there's something about having a charger in the bathroom that I just can't do it. Maybe it's the specifics of my bathroom. We don't have to talk a lot about what my bathroom looks like. But the idea of just like having a cable dangling in my bathroom waiting for my Apple Watch is just like a bridge too far for me. I can't do it. You could just put it in your bedroom and just go back to your bedroom after your shoes. David, David is in a mansion.

His bedroom and his bathroom are like four football fields apart. They're in separate wings. He's going to miss all those steps. Who has the time? I know. No, my real problem is I forget to take it off until I'm already in the shower. And then I just kind of like huck it over to the sink. And that's my charging strategy.

But the actual features here, you basically named the three things I want to talk about. And it seems like from a pure hardware perspective, they're so similar that you, you couldn't tell which watch was which, right? Like, you had the Ultra and the Ultra 2, and they're the same damn thing as far as, like, what the actual thing looks and feels like, right? Yeah. And I've told this story before, but when I was at Apple Park and I had my Ultra out and I was, you know, taking comparison photos like this representative, very well-meaning, comes up

to me. She's like, can you put your Ultra away? We wouldn't want you to lose it. And that's because it looks exactly the same. I've actually had to have a code this week when I'm switching straps, where I say out loud, the ultra is the one with the gray strap. The ultra two is the one with the pink strap. I've basically been keeping the new ones in pink because pink is what's new.

And I had to do that because even the back crystal doesn't say ultra two. It says ultra. So there's really no way to tell unless I have terrible eyesight. If you read my reviews, you know, I complain about readability all the time. But I basically have to take the original Ultra straight up to my face and go, which one has that minuscule nick that I got one time? That only I know where it is. And that's how I tell the Ultra and the Ultra 2 apart as far as my review units go.

Okay, good. So we can just leave the hardware aside because it is what it is. The double tap seems like the thing, right? Like it's the thing Apple talked the most about. This feature has like been around for a while in. some accessibility ways, like just walk me through kind of how this thing like fits into your life as a watchwear. So I actually think this is potentially one of the most significant updates just that Apple's ever put out. But it's just not flashy, right? First of all, it's in some

capacity it's been around since watchOS 8 and assistive touch. Right now, that tech is just being repurposed in a more general use capacity. It's supposedly it's built into the system. So it's more contextual. You don't have to do anything. Whereas with assistive touch, you have to go into the accessibility settings. You have to enable it and you have to program it. Because for some people with limb differences, this is the only possible way for them to control the watch. It's how they're going to navigate menus. It's how they're going to operate the digital crown. If they have an ultra, it's how they're going to press the action button. So it's much more comprehensive and there's more gestures involved. There's a clench gesture. There's a single tap gesture. There's a

There's four actual gestures that you do with assistive touch. But double tap is just the double tap, or more accurately, the pinchy pinch. The pinchy pinch. The pinching motion. And you basically use it to control the primary function of an app. And what that means is say you get a phone call, you pinchy pinch, it's going to answer the phone call. When you're like, I'm done with you. I'm going to hang up in a rage.

Then you pinchy pinch again, and then it hangs up. Can you rage pinchy pinchy pinch? I'm not sure you can rage pinchy pinch. You can't do it really aggressively like you're an angry lobster. You just go, I like it. I can't wait to see the Wall Street Bros. Out on the street, just screaming at their assistant and then really violently pinching to hang up at them. I feel like you need to wear like castanets so that it like makes a loud noise when you pinchy pinch.

That's how you really get your feelings across. Yeah. So that thing you just described actually is one of the questions I have about watch a test because that idea that it's like the primary thing makes obvious sense to me in some ways, right? Like it should pause my music if my music is playing. But there are other ways where what is the primary thing I'm supposed to do with the tap here is substantially less obvious. And you're nodding like that has been true in practice. Has that been true in practice? Yes. Yes, it absolutely has. And, you know, Apple acknowledges this to an extent because there are two circumstances where you can

customize what the pinch does. So that first is, as you mentioned, music playback. So you can do it and it can pause or it can play your music. But actually, that's not intuitively what I would want it to do. What I would want it to do is skip a track. And you can, you know, edit it so that it skips a track. So I was just in the car the other day, driving. And I was like, nope, not this. Nope, not this. I'm just pinching while I'm driving. and that's kind of actually safer than me reaching over to the car infatainment and just trying to flip through that way. So that's that's one way you can customize it. The other way you can customize it, and it has to do with Apple Intuiting.

What you want is the smart stack. So the smart stack is new with watchOS 10 because it's widgets just everywhere and watchOS 10. And the smart stack, you can either double pinch to scroll through your smart stack or you, you can double pinch to select the first stack and only the first stack. And, you know, Apple's like, if they do their job right, and if they anticipate which widget you need at the right time of day, so that whenever you bring up your widgets, you just want to pick the first one there, you can pinch and select it. Which to me, I'm like, wow, that's almost never. But in order to bring up the widgets, you have to scroll the digital crown or swipe up on the screen. So you're already

you can pinch. So you just wake it up, pinch, brings up the widgets. And then the second pinch will either scroll through or select that first top one. So for me, testing, that's been a nightmare

because the first one that pops up has been the tips thing that I just can't get to go away, which goes away after a while, but it's like, I don't need these tips. So I can't actually use that particular function. But those are the only two ways

you can customize it. And for me, with messages, like, say I get a text, you pinchy pinch, and it'll bring up the voice message reply. Makes sense. That makes total sense if you're just trying to keep things hands free or single-handed. For me, though, I want to scroll through my quick replies and select one. I would love to do that, but that's kind of hard because pinching to scroll through your quick replies and then pausing and then pinching again to select it kind of is something that

has to be a lot more intuitive. You can do that in assistive touch, but you. You can't really do that with the double tap. But that is what I wish I could do with it. Dan, you and I are both sickos for customization, I would say, as a general rule. This strikes me as the kind of thing I would want tons of control over. Like, I should be able to decide in every single app what the double tap does. Well, I think we should clarify that.

It does nothing in third party apps. Wait, is that, oh, okay. So developers can do it. They just haven't yet. No, they actually can't. What? V, correct me if I get this wrong. Developers can interact with double tap through notifications.

So basically, if you get a notification in and you double tap, it will do what is like the default action on that notification. And developers can define that default action. So if you've got a notification that's like an email and the default action is a delete, you can double tap to delete it. Or you can double tap to reply to a message if it's in WhatsApp or something outside of Apple's messages. But if you are in a third party app, double tap doesn't do anything. Is that correct, V? Well, so far, I think you're right. I haven't been able to use it with any third party app right now, but this is also just like the first implementation of it. I imagine there's going to be a lot of trial and error as people use this for the first time. And I could see, I could see ways, ways down that third party apps will eventually get some ability to do it. But the problem really is that this is supposed to be contextual and intuitive. So you're having people, you're basically trying to, to mind read what people are going to try and pinch for. And it's funny because, you know, I have a

beta version with this enabled. There's no explanation on my version. I imagine there will be some short walkthrough in like the Tips app when Apple releases this to the public. But there's no real explanation of what apps this works with and what it'll do within those apps. You just kind of have to go into the app and start like pinching like a weirdo and seeing what it. It does. And there's a little glyph or an icon that appears that shows you that you've just done it. And when you can't have any double-tap gesture, it'll just like do a little shake that's like, nah-uh, can't do it. So I've just been like this past few days just sitting there just going like, oh, does this, does this work? Pinch, pinch, pinch. Oh, no, okay, can't do that. Does this work? Pinch, oh, no, can't do that. So it can be really intuitive and also weirdly frustrating because you don't know. know when you're going to run up against the wall of the pinch not working, like timers is the other example I'm going to use. If you have talked to Siri and you have a timer going and that timer app is front and center, when you do the double tap, it'll pause the timer. And then you can, you know,

restart the timer. And when it ends, you can close the timer. I want, what if I want a timer to restart? I have several like Pomodoro method nonsense where I just want to restart a timer as soon as it's done. can't do that. I actually have to go and figure out whether I'm going to ask Siri to set another timer or whether I'm going to go in manually and set that timer. So that's annoying. And then also, if the timer app goes away, it's not front-center, then no amount of pinching you're going to do is really going to change anything until it goes off. So if you want to pause the timer while the timer app is not front-center, you can't do anything. So it's sort of like, that's weirdly annoying for me. I don't know if it'll be weirdly annoying

for everyone. It just strikes me as a classic Apple kind of being too clever by half thing. And like the thing it got really right with the action button was it was just like just do whatever you want. Like here's some options. We have some ideas. Just do just action button on the phone.

Let's clarify. No, you're, that's absolutely right. But the action button and the iPhone 15, which we were talking about, that you have some control over and there's a cool interface for it and they're like, this will work. This is the equivalent of if they had taken the action button the phone and been like in every app it will do the thing we think it should do. It's like Apple like sometimes that thing is obvious.

If I open the camera app on my iPhone, it should be the shutter button and it is and that kicks ass. Sometimes I want it to do something and I should be able to make it do that thing. And I feel like so many times with the watch, Apple is like, this is a small screen. People don't want to spend too much time on it. We have to do all the work magically for them. And sometimes it works and way too often, I feel like it doesn't. And speaking of things that way too often don't work, Siri is the other thing I was curious about because Apple made a bunch of noise about Siri being offline and working on device, which if it is successful, it's a huge deal for the watch, right?

Like, it opens up all kinds of things you can do if you don't have a cellular device. If you're out in the world doing stuff, like potentially a big deal, what have you seen so far? Yeah, it works. It just works. Okay, wait, hold on. Hold on. Do you want to be on the record saying Siri works? I just like, I just want to be so clear about what you just saying. I'm getting into caveats.

Just give me a second to get into the butt of this here. So, you know, it does now work if you don't have your phone and you're not in any kind of internet connection. So like your laundry room is in your basement. You left your phone upstairs. Your hands are tied up. And you want to set the stupid laundry timer so that you know when to go get your laundry. Now you can say like, hey, set this timer and it'll do it. which feels like a thing that it should have been able to do already.

This happened to me, by the way, literally this morning, I was doing daycare drop-off with my kid, needed to remind myself to do something. I had left my phone at home and my watch just was useless to me. Yeah. Like this very simple, basic thing that it ought to be able to do, it couldn't do. Yeah, it can do that now. That's pretty reliably. I turned airplane mode on my phone and the watch on and made sure that there was no Wi-Fi

connection still. And it was able to do stuff. it was even able to pull weather updates because it had pulled that already. It may not have been the most accurate weather update at that point in time, but it was able to, like, give me an update, which I had not been expecting because, as I understand it, if it needs to pull some sort of data from the internet, it still needs the internet connection. It's more so that you can do tasks like, oh, set a timer or, I guess in my case, set a workout. Like, I don't know if you're in the trails of like Missouri somewhere where there's no any kind of internet connection and your phone

doesn't even have an internet connection. Well, now you can hands-free set a workout, which there is a use case for that, but I think for most people, that's not a thing that they've necessarily thought to do, but it can do it now. So yay, ha-zah. I've had the opportunity to test the new series as well. I haven't, my demo unit doesn't have the double tap, but I do have the new series. And I think the thing that is actually impactful is, for me at least, when I'm outside on the grill, I set timers for how long to leave the burgers on before I need to flip them or whatever. And because I'm like on the edge of my Wi-Fi network, it like, I will watch the, I will do the command and watch the watch figure itself out. And so, but with the series nine, I was able to

just say set a timer for five minutes and it just did it. And so like, I think those are like more practical use cases for where this better improved on-device Siri is going to make an impact. I will add that this new Siri doesn't do anything that the old Siri couldn't do. So it's not like Siri gets smarter or more capable. It's just it works better at the things that it could already do because it doesn't have to send your voice command out to the internet, transcribe it and bring it back down to the watch. My biggest issue with Siri on the watch has always been that it seems to just fail completely a lot more often than Siri elsewhere with really basic things like trying to set a reminder or add something to my calendar or. set a timer even. It much more often does the thing where it thinks and then it still thinks and then nothing happens. And my assumption has always been that's because of this sort of like

daisy chain of connections it's having to do in order to get the information back to the watch. Have you noticed that being any better on the watch because it's able to run locally? I would think it would just be able to do more things more reliably. Yeah. It has been more reliable for me except with understanding me. That is just the same level of you know, like, it's better. Like, it can finally understand Marcia Ali's name, which I've been using for years as a litmus test.

Progress. Okay. Understand me. And, you know, it's gotten better over the years, like four or five years ago. It was just like, Herschel Walker. And it's like, no, that's not what I said. It's a different guy. Completely different name.

But, you know, I live in a community where it's mixed language. I have to communicate with people with names that are not English. And with that really, respect, it is still not great. Like, I was messaging my friend and I was like, oh, new K-pop album come out, Do Kyeong-Zu. We love him. And it's like Joe Fang Fu or something like that. And it was like, no, that's not his name. That's not how it works. Okay, we still have to do the

thing where when I'm messaging my friends and with like Korean loan words, we have to go like bulgogi for it to understand me and it for it to be clear. and not to be ridiculous. And we had a lot of fun testing the dictation. Our video producer had me wrap alphabet aerobics. And that was certainly a time. I did a bunch of tongue twisters about Betty Botter and her bitter butter and her better butter and buying them. And for the most part, I want to say, both my S8 powered Ultra and the S9 powered series nine kind of overall, did about the same in terms of accuracy. Okay.

So I don't know if that's just me and the way I pronounce. And as Owen says, wow, you talk fast. So I'm not sure if I'm like having issues because I'm in an edge case of people who talk at the speed of New York. But it's it's better, just not so much better that if you upgraded now, you would be like, oh my God, they finally fix Siri, that kind of thing. Yeah, that tracks. So full takeaway here, like, it seems to me that if you bought a watch in the last couple of years, you're going to get watchOS 10. Is double tap coming to these other devices or is that only in the new stuff? Okay.

That is only on the new watches, along with the precision finding. Those are only on the new watches. And as far as I understand it, it's because, you know, some people have been like, why? Assistive touch works on the older watches. Why won't double touch work on those watches? And it's because assistive touch is powered on the CPU directly. it's very power-intensive. Double-tap is powered by the neural engine. So it can be offloaded a bit and is a lot more power-efficient and can run in the background. That's the line they're giving all of us.

So my interpretation is if they were to put double-tap on the older watches, your battery life would be even more in the toilet than it currently is. So basically in my review, I say if you have a series seven, eight, or an original ultra-cooler jets, contribute to Apple's carbon neutral plans and don't buy yourself a new punch. Yeah, it seems like even if double tap is like really meaningful to you, waiting a year for like developers to figure it out and the feature will get better, seems like the move. Dan, you're nodding. Like you agree with me. Yeah, I think in a year double tap will be more useful. Maybe Apple will have opened it up to third party developers in a more meaningful way. Maybe we'll have other gestures arriving that like use the same kind

of concept and logic that allows you to do this thing. for now, if you have the new watches, you get the new watches, it's neat. But I think V would agree that it's not a, like, absolute must-have feature. No, and you can experiment if you have a seven or eight with assistive touch to see whether gesture control is something you even like. Because if you're like, oh, this, whatever, I'm not passionate about this, then you really don't need. You have, like, empirical evidence that you don't need to update just for double tap. I will say that going forward, I think the combination of rearranging the watch to be. be very widget-centric. And double-tap kind of is like a fundamental groundwork that they're laying

to change the way that we interact with the device. So it's weird because on that one hand, I'm seeing that. And I'm like, oh, I see what you're doing. I see what you're doing. You are changing how we fundamentally interact with these devices, but you're doing it in a way where it's like, oh, what if I left this book of secrets out on this table? Who is curious enough to come and read this book of secrets and let's see what they do with that. And they're in the bushes somewhere in the bag with their little binoculars going what are they doing. That's kind of what this is. They're laying some very important groundwork to change the Apple Watch to be a single-handed device, much in the way that Dan pointed this out to be more like the iPhone, which is a, you know, if you get it in the right

size, everyone will agree that it is a single-handed device. And you're making it so that it's much more different. It's not just a mini phone on your wrist because the way that these new apps have been redesigned and that the way the widget stack works on the Apple Watch, you don't need quite as much of your phone because there is a lot of information that's glancable and a lot of information that you can operate with one hand now. And that's not something that you've really been able to do before. So I think once this gets refined going forward, maybe, I don't want to say for the 10, but maybe the 11 or the 12, I don't think we'll be using these watches in the same way that we currently do.

I like it. All right. Thank you both. We've got to take one more break, and then we're going to switch things up a little bit and talk about how we take these devices, which millions or tens of millions or billions of people buy and make them feel a lot more like ours. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from whatnot.

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Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands,

your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Cloud extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.a.ai slash verge That's clod.a.ai slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Welcome back. One of the things I like about this time of year is that it ends up being phone cleaning time.

It's like spring cleaning in the spring, phone cleaning in the fall. Particularly if you're an iPhone user, this is the time of year. You probably get some new software with some new features, some new widgets, a bunch of weird, new gestures and interaction ideas. And it's just a fun moment to kind of take stock of how you use your phone, which apps get a spot on your home screen, all that good stuff. This year's iOS, iOS 17, brings one of the biggest changes in a while, which is one we've already been talking about in this episode.

Interactive widgets. Instead of widgets just being things you look at, they're now things you can do. And widgets are actually a big feature of pretty much all of Apple's new software. software this year. The Apple Watch got a redesign with watchOS 10, so it's basically now just a clock and a bunch of widgets. MacOS is getting widgets with Sonoma. The iPad got widgets on the lock screen. It's just widgets all the way down, y'all. It's great. Oh, and I should say, before we get too far into this, if you're yelling at your podcast player right now, Android did it first. Please know that I know, and I'm with you. And Android widgets have been way better

than iOS widgets for years. That is absolutely true. But this is new for the I phone users. So, you know, let them have this one. Anyway, as all of this has been coming out, I've been trying to figure out not just which widgets I want to use, but how to think about widgets and how widgets work across all of these devices. Just on the iPhone, you have home screen widgets and lock screen widgets. There's the dynamic island. There's live activities. There's just a lot of different ways that information moves around the iPhone, and it can be kind of confusing. So to figure it out, I decided to call up the expert, David Smith. Apple added widgets, and it was great, and they worked, and it didn't have any negative impacts.

It was only positive ones. David makes an app called Widget Smith that is probably the most powerful and most successful widget-making app on the planet. It was a massive hit when it first came out in 2020, which you might remember was iOS 14, which was when homescreen widgets came to the iPhone for the first time. This year, for iOS 17, he's got a big update to Widget Smith with a bunch of really cool interactive widgets. You can now scroll the weather on your home screen. There's a way to flip through your music, like the cover flow thing that used to be in the iPod. It's just delightful. David knows how

widgets work better than just about anybody. And I think he understands how Apple thinks about them, too, which is really helpful. So I called him up and asked him all of my questions, starting with the most burning one, oddly enough. Is it as surprising to you as it is to me that people love widgets this much? Yes. I mean, I think, I mean, I don't know if I really expected widgets to be as big as they were when I started getting into the widget business. Like, Widget Smith was not something that I expected to ever be this massive app that kind of, you had a viral moment and like took over the world for a few weeks. And like it was, like, I did not expect that at all. I think I was excited about widgets when they first came out. But it was that definitely had no expectation for just how

much like pent up demand there is for that kind of thing that people really want to that kind of interaction and that kind of experience. And so, yeah, I mean, it definitely feels like, oh, and it just keeps coming. Like this year, I think other than Apple TV, widgets are everywhere on Apple's platforms now. It's really true. And so it was definitely like, okay, well, I guess next year I know what to expect, you know, somehow it's going to be widgets on Apple TV because they just, you know, complete the set. But yeah, it's a little wild. Yeah, I have to say, I did not expect Widget Smith to get as big as it did either. I sort of put it in the like shortcuts bucket at first where it's like, this is a cool thing. it's a little, you know, fiddly and finicky, and there's a lot of people who like that,

but this is not necessarily going to be sort of a mainstream thing. But the number of people who, even in the early days, were like willing to do the work to make a photo widget that looked nice on their home screen was just like orders of magnitude bigger than I would have expected. It was wild. The customization people started doing, the minute they were able to do it and the amount of work that they would put in to do it just kind of blew my mind from the very beginning. And I've, like, not really forgotten that lesson since then. I mean, it certainly helped that it launched it in 2020 when I think there's a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands to work on that level. But, yeah, like, the amount that people care about what their home screen looks like is dramatic. Like, there's a meaningful thing that people really care about, you know, how exactly what their home screen looks like, whether what colors it is, what fonts it is, the layout of it, and they're willing to put in the effort to make that happen.

And so, yeah, it's like, I definitely, when I launched, Wichitt Smith, I think very much short because it's a great. analogy that I was like, oh, this is a cool niche feature for like, you know, sort of power usury kind of people who enjoy really, you know, sort of tweaking and fiddling with things. And it turned out, actually, no, it's everyone. And, you know, it's like middle school kids through like, you know, retirees who are all just, they just want to have, you know, this device that they spend so much of their day looking at. They just wanted to be exactly the way they wanted. And, you know, Widjismith was, like, it turned out to be the tool that helps them accomplish that. I am curious how you've, like, over the last three years, I've even had trouble

thinking about where information kind of lives on your phone. First, it was just widgets, and then it was lock screen widgets, and then it was live activities, and then it was the dynamic island. And we've gotten at this point where it's like how I define a widget gets more complicated over time. And you've kind of tentacled out into some of those things, too. Like, do you have a really good sort of mental picture of how all of that stuff works and fits together and makes sense? Sure. I mean, I think at its core, widgets are about taking little bits of an app and exporting them outside of the app itself. And I think depending on what kind of experience you're trying to pull out of the app, those different locations, whether it's a home screen

widget, a lock screen widget, whether it's a live activity or a live activity in the Dynamic Island, but what makes sense in each of those places is going to be very different. If it's something that is like just showing the temperature, for example, is a great lock screen widget. It's something that's small, concise, useful, and very glancable. It's not something that you need. You know, it's just, you just want to know how hot it is outside in the same way that we put the time on our lock screen and we all got rid of our watches. And so like that kind of data was great on the lock screen. But I think home screen is to get into this, you start to get into a place where it's like, well, do I want a bit more? Can I have a lot more space? I can be like have a bit

more there? And is it allowing me to get the data that I want out of an app without having to go into that app? And then live activities and the dynamic island, it tends to be much more of the sense of, is there data that is changing in a very real-time way, which doesn't really lend itself to the other forms because of the performance limitations that Apple puts on the other types of widget? Those widgets, the home screen and lock screen widgets are static, essentially. I mean, there's interactivity we have this year, but fundamentally, they are showing a snapshot of data. And so if it's updating in real time, they are not the right place for that. And so instead, Apple made this other place where you have these temporary experiences that are

widgets that are given special permission to update very regularly. You know, where you're updating a few times, you know, every few seconds rather than every few minutes. And that I think is sort of generally the way that I think about these sort of this hierarchy of different budget experiences we have now, that they sort of go from the small to the large, then from the kind of real time to the just sort of static. And where you are on the sort of on those axes determines which one of those widget types you're going to be in. But there's definitely more and more places that we're sort of our widgets are being put

because they're catering to different needs or to different sort of user desires. That's really helpful perspective, actually, because I will say as a user who does not understand the sort of performance capabilities of each one, the distinction between kind of what's allowed to refresh constantly and what isn't, never really amazing. a lot of sense to me. And I think the thing that has been the hardest for me is to figure out the difference between like a very good home screen widget and let's say a live activity. Sure. Because to me, those should just be the same thing. And I get that they're not and I get that there are sort of artificial reasons that they can't be. But the idea of having something that is

like, why can't I run a, I don't know, FaceTime call from a widget on my home screen? Like that seems like a thing that maybe should exist in the world. I don't know if that's a good idea or not. But it's just interesting that there are those kind of artificial limitations put on each one to make that hierarchy. And when you understand it like that, that hierarchy does kind of make sense. Even though as a user, I'm kind of like just like let me, I just want to be able to hit a thing and just say, update this. Like the thing you can do with your email inbox where you decide how often it pulls or just have it push whenever there's new stuff, like I kind of want that in all my widgets too, even if it crushes my battery life. I don't know. Sure. I mean,

I think this is an area that I think has been a fascinating sort of timeline with Apple because Because widgets, originally, the first version of widgets was the TodayView screen that they added back in, I can remember, much older versions of iOS. And that was actually something more akin to a fully running app that was running. Like, when you looked at your Today View, that app was running. And it could do all kinds of real-time things and could be much more lively and interactive. And you could have buttons and you could do all these things. But in order to do that, Apple had to like put it somewhere to the side so that it wasn't running all the time. that it was only running if you swiped over to, you know, to the left of your home screen.

But that also meant that it was nearly as useful because you had to go and find it in order to do it. And, you know, the reason they did that is, of course, you know, its performance and battery, that it's whenever, if you allow an app to run all the time, inevitably, bad things are going to happen in terms of there's security issues, there's battery life issues, there's, is it interacting with other, you know, other apps that are running on the, on your phone issues. And so I think very wisely in many ways, what Apple instead did is they built, The standard widgets that you see are just a, they're a very clever snapshot, but almost just like a picture that my app will generate and send over to iOS. And then iOS can show that picture, and it doesn't cost them anything.

There's no performance hit. I can display a widget on your home screen all day, and it isn't costing you any more battery life than if you just had a collection of apps, app icons there. And I think that sort of is the cleverness behind what they've done by doing that. But yeah, it creates this weird tension between, it's like, well, why isn't it an app? Well, it's like, if we gave you what you want and let you run a full app inside of a widget, then your overall experience of your phone will be worse because inevitably it's going to be draining on your device in a way that isn't actually getting you. You know, you're not getting enough utility to justify that battery drain and performance hit that you're getting. And so instead, they're taking this very incremental approach and saying, it's like, well, we're going to do the snapshot approach.

We know, we're going to do live activities where it's like they're special and time bound. and they live in a special place. And even there, the technology that they're using to do those is similarly based on snapshots and clever things. A live activity isn't a live app that's running all the time. It's just an app that's given permission to refresh itself very regularly. I see. Okay.

Rather than something that is actually like a window into the application itself. And then similarly with interactivity, they did the same exact thing where instead they're just saying if a user pushes on a particular part of a widget, you get a, a, again, guaranteed refresh instantly. So you can respond to the user's interaction and it feels like you're interacting with an app, but actually it's just a very special way to say, give me the next snapshot, give me the next snapshot. And as a result, it's super performant because the last time you hit that button, the last time it generates that snapshot, it's done. And all the work is done and it'll be go back to immediately using zero battery and impacting your, you know, your

device at all from that point on goes immediately to zero. And so I think it's a very clever approach in that regard, technically, and it's just a very, it means that there's these weird distinctions. Users have to sort of navigate, but overall it means that I think widgets can be used everywhere, and the story wasn't Apple added widgets, and then my battery was toast. It's like Apple added widgets, and it was great, and they worked, and it didn't have any negative impacts. It was only positive ones. That makes sense. So yeah, you've been goofing around with interactivity. I've been using some of the stuff you found in Widget Smith. What do you make of it so far? Like, did they, does that balance feel right?

Yeah, I mean, I think the balance that I've struck right now with interactivity, I think, is very strong in the sense of it's amazing what you can get done with just, you know, getting a guaranteed refresh based on a user action. Like, it is surprisingly powerful for what the interactions and the experiences that you can build with that. You know, the WBC keynote was just like checking an item off a to-do list, which seems a bit basic. And it's like, you can totally do that. It's like, or you can, you know, scroll through your calendar in, you know, sort of dynamically or look at a weather forecast and say, you know, it's an hourly forecast and you want to see the next six hours after that. Well, you can tap and it'll slide over. And they can do things there where they can make these rich, it can make the experience that much richer and creates that many fewer places and reasons why you have to actually get into the app in the first place. And I think that's what interactivity mostly is allowing at this point is it reminds me a lot of watchOS apps where,

Like a really good watchOS app is an app that typically is something that you're only going to experience for a few seconds. That it's you're going in to get something and then coming out. And it's not an app that you're expecting to just be sitting, tapping on your wrist for five minutes. It's something that you're going to be in seconds. And similarly, I think interactive widgets allow you to have those same kinds of interactions on your home screen, where rather than having to open the app to do something, maybe you can just, you know, tap two or three times on the widget to get to the exact data view, that you're interested in or the exact behavior you want, and then you're done.

And you never actually had to launch the app to do that. And so I think they've struck a really interesting balance. I doubt this is the final form of it. Like my suspicion is that there will be more things that will come over time as they've kind of explore how users respond to interactivity. But it feels like they've been taking this incrementally growing out the widget story over the last, you know, since 2020. And I doubt they're done at this point.

I think it's a bit, this seems like a very meaningful step. forward to make them not just static things, but to have the user expectation of being able to interact with them in the first place. Got it. Okay. So, yeah, I guess part of me is trying to figure out how far I want that to go because it's like, oh, the check off the do-lis example is a good one, right? That's, that's an easy, obvious thing that it's always been sort of ridiculous you have to

open an app for. But then it's like, okay, I want to edit a task. Should it open up a text box on top of the widget? That seems like probably not. I don't know. it's there's finding out where that middle ground sort of eventually ought to be with all of this is really interesting. And I think that like refresh the snapshot thing makes me think that if that's the paradigm, it's always going to be just kind of you can do one thing at a time. And this is not meant

to be like a multi-step tool. It's a look at this thing and then look at this thing. Yes. And that that maybe that's enough. Yeah. And I think if we got further things, I think they would be in that same model. And And reminds me a bit of how in notifications, when you get a notification, and it's like you can respond to the, like someone sends you a text, you can respond to that text without opening the messages app in terms of you can respond inside the notification is a thing that they've allowed you to do for a while now. And I think I could imagine a similar thing in widgets where it's like you have the ability to, you know, prompt the user for text. And so if you wanted to have a to do list app where you are able to add items directly. from your home screen, it would be through some kind of, you know, system managed process where you would tap a button and the keyboard would pop up with a little text view. You're typing whatever it is you want. You hit return. That gets sent to the app and then it refreshes the widget. So you're not

launching, like the app is only ever getting the text. It's not, I'm not responsible for the keyboard. It's not an interactive experience in the same way. But it's a way of kind of pushing that next step forward. Because I think anything they do is going to be, through this kind of very regimented approach where your widgets are locked down in a way that is very performant and clever, but it's like if they added text entry and iOS 18, that would seem like a very logical next step to do.

And there expands the range of activities that would be potentially useful, that you could imagine a notes app or to-do app or any kind of thing that you're regularly collecting little bits of information. That seems great to not have to open an app in order to do that. As interactivity opened up your brain on stuff,

want to put into widget smith. I think most of the stuff I've seen so far is kind of extensions on the things you've already been doing. The one I've been using constantly is being able to scroll the hourly forecast. I love that. Sure. Like it's one of those little things I didn't expect to like really care about, but it loves, it's delightful. But are there things you've been either building or looking at that are sort of totally new and different because of interactivity? Sure. I mean, I think I mean, the most like silly example of that is like being able to put games into your widgets, which doesn't, it's like, it's a completely silly thing in many ways, but, like, sometimes the silly things are the best things.

And, like, that's an example of something that just wasn't possible before, and now you can. And obviously, there's limitations on a game because it has to be a game that you can play only by sort of intermittent tapping that is not in a timely way. So, like, tick, tack, toe in a widget would totally work. Yes, exactly. Like something, in any kind of game where you're taking turns or that kind of behavior is definitely something that's possible. But, you know, you're not going to be.

able to make Flappy Bird for the widget because there's no sense of timeliness to the, you know, when you tap and how it responds. But I think that's a kind of thing that's, I don't think the game itself necessarily is the end state of that. But I think that's an example of the kind of thing that you can start to do where just having the ability to respond to a button tap opens up a variety of things that you could come up with and you could think of that I'll like you to do. And, like, I mean, so I've done a bunch of things related to music.

It was actually a widget that I found super helpful for me is I've made a little like a coverflow widget. So you can put your albums into a medium widget and you can sort of do tap on the edges and you can scroll through them. And then you can tap on the one in the middle and it'll start to play. And because it's interactive, you don't have to launch the app for it to play. It's not needing you to even do an app launch. You can just start. And then because the now playing experience goes up into the dynamic island, you just see that the album started playing. and you can, you know, move on.

And I think that kind of thing is just really just different. That it feels very interesting to not even have to duck in and out of an app. Like previously, if I'd done music widgets, it's like, well, you have to launch WidgetSmith. It'll start to play, and then you have to quit it. Because you always had to have this weird round trip to the app, even if the app was doing hardly anything. Or similarly, you can start workouts is another thing with interactivity, where you could, you know, you can say you're going for a run and you tap it and your phone just starts tracking your run with. having to open an app necessarily. And you can just jump into the live activity or the dynamic island.

And you can tap the widget and then you can lock your phone and then off you go. And it's your progress would show up on your lock screen and the live activity. And it's not like that one step is huge. But I feel like taking the number of times that you can take out that one step will add up over time in terms of its value and utility. After David and I talked, naturally, I put a thousand new widgets on my iPhone. But while I'm in the middle of this personalization craze, I started thinking about changing my wallpaper and my app icons too, both of which are also really good ways to personalize your phone and make it work the way that you want it to. I ended up buying a wallpaper from a guy named Isaac Mazna, who you might know as Canoopsi from YouTube and elsewhere on the internet. Today, I'll be showing you how I've set up my phone, some of the apps I use, and generally how I've customized it to match my style and how I use my device.

I like the wallpaper. It looks great, but it kind of made me wonder, what is it like being in the iPhone personalization business? There are countless free iPhone wallpapers online. So how do you make some that people will pay for? What makes them pay for it? And what makes a great wallpaper great anyway? So I called up Isaac and asked him, and I asked him just to start at the very beginning. How do you become a person who makes wallpapers? It was kind of for myself originally, because I'm making YouTube videos, I can never find the wallpaper I wanted to, like, showcase in the YouTube video. Because you don't want to just have the same, like, stock wallpapers everybody has, right? No, no, I couldn't do that. I'm like, I used to do that, but then, like, making videos,

everybody has, like, a really nice, vibrant, eye-catching wallpaper in the thumbnail. And I used, like, a lot of them. And then I just kind of got sick of hunting and searching and being like, okay, this is okay, but, like, I wish it was a bit more orange or a bit more blue because the thumbnail idea I have doesn't really work. Or, you know, in the video, it doesn't really match the scheme of like my set design. So I'm like, what if I just made them? And it was during COVID. So I had so much time. Like I was home and I'm like, I'm going to get my iPad out. I'm going to start drawing. I'm going to start making some wallpapers. And I thought I was pretty happy with my original designs. And I thought that they looked, they looked great and matched my

style of like minimal designs and match sort of my thumbnail style and my video style. It was all a nice cohesive experience. You know, being a YouTube video, people would ask, and me, immediately like, where did you get your wallpaper from? It's the most common question in any tech video on a phone or a tablet or a laptop. It's like, where's the wallpaper from? For me, I just made them all. So eventually, I was able to launch a Shopify store with my zero knowledge of web design. I was able to figure it out. And Shopify makes it really easy to do all that stuff. And Shopify makes the whole sales process very easy too. Let's me sell to whoever I want. There's apps to have digital downloads, all that. that fun stuff. And next thing you know, I'm dropping a wallpaper pack every few weeks. And wallpaper packs for me just consist of different designs that kind of go together in a specific theme. I like to have fun with it. I like to think of really cool names for all the wallpaper names, for all the different wallpapers in a pack, have like a very themed design for like the mockup photos. Pretty much every pack would have like new photos with little quirks and little fun things here and there.

and I didn't really know how well it would do, but then it just started blowing up. Like it was just nonstop. It almost became a full business. I almost had to hire somebody to manage like customer service and manage hosting the website. I'm thankful that I had just finished university. So I was like ready to go.

I was ready to work. And my whole focus was dedicated to YouTube, Instagram, other content production, and now my website with these wallpapers. Why do you think it worked so well? I mean, wallpapers are a funny thing in that there are a billion of them out there, right? Like, if you just Google, like, iPhone wallpaper, like, you can look through the options until the day you die and you'll never run out. Like, I wonder if there is something to just, like, you have a style that fits and people just, like, understand your style and, like, your style, and that goes a long way.

I don't know. Like, why do you think it took off the way it did? It's a mix of different things. It's a mix of people seeing the wallpaper in action on my channel. people who know my style, they know I like these sort of designs. People seeing it in use, it's great. I think also Apple's customization push was also a good thing. It came at the right time. People like to make their phone personal and they like to make it something that is uniquely them. Because one thing that I also envisioned to, or I at least thought of when designing these is like,

we don't really hang that many things up in our homes anymore like art or designs, but our phone is like a canvas that we see every single day. It's like we turn it on, we see a wallpaper or a new wallpaper that cycles. And to be able to see like a little bit of art or a nice design, it has the same effect as art in your home. When you come home and you see it, you have like this nice feeling of this is familiar or this makes me feel a certain way. If something is dynamic and bold and bright, it kind of like wakes you up a little bit. It makes you feel a bit more energetic. And obviously I'm just talking about a image or a jpeg but it's like it does have that feeling whenever i turn my phone on like i get hit with like a bold textured vibrant piece and makes me happy so it's a mix of different things

no i i think i think you're totally right so take me through the process a little bit like you you sit down and you're like okay i want to i want to do a new pack a new collection where do you start so pretty much i like to start with colors i think colors are the best place to start for me personally and the way I work. Let's say I want to do like a very cool toned palette. Maybe it's like a purple and a pink and a blue. I start to just mess with things. I usually use procrate. I've done some stuff in illustrator, some stuff in Photoshop, but usually procrate is the most consistent best way I work. I know how it works to a T now. I know how all the brushes work, how everything kind of flows. I think procrate is so great because it's very natural and organic versus a computer. You're like

typing and you're clicking things. It's not as natural as like a pen or your finger. So I'll start by like mixing around different colors and trying different gradients or trying different shapes. And then usually I'm able to just think of the pack right there. Like let's say it's like a 2D shape based pack. I start drawing some flowing shapes. I start adding different colors. You know, things aren't really in the right place. I tweak them a little bit. Maybe I'll warp a shape a little bit until I really get that exact shape in form I want. If it's a more, abstract, gradient-based or like a really flowing designed pack, I'll just mess with it until I think it looks right. I think it has like the feeling I want. Then I do things like add a little bit of

noise, add a bit of sharpness to things, tweak the colors a little bit, and then I throw them onto most of my devices to test them out. So I have it on my phone. Looks good. Okay, that's solid. Put it on the desktop. I don't really know how that looks in the desktop. Maybe I have to tweak this one area a little bit. Maybe I have to blow this part up a little bit. Pull it back on the iPad, click that, send it to the desktop, try it on the iPad as well. And then once it's all shit, once it's all like in a state that I like, I'm ready to ship it on to my website. I do all the mock-up photos.

I shoot everything, you know, name everything as well, based on how I feel what the pack conveys in terms of the overall collection name and all the different names of all the different pieces. And then load it all up, write a nice little description, and then that's it. So talk to me about the icon pack before I forget to ask about the icon pack. Yeah. I find icons so fascinating because, like, you only have one wallpaper. There are a million apps out there in the world. So I would think trying to make an icon pack that, like, is both sort of cohesive and looks nice, but also, like, exists in a world where everybody has a mountain of

different apps on their phone strikes me as very hard. So, like, what made you want to do this in the first place? Like, you just saw everybody customizing and you're like, I want to, I want to see how I can be part of this, too? In some regards, but also, like, when I started designing the wallpapers, I felt like from my phone personally, the icons, like icons are all over the place these days. You know, there's like so many different colors. Some of them are all black. Some of them are all white. And I just couldn't really think of a way to make it look cohesive. So I'll have the wallpaper that I'm really happy with. But then I'm like, okay, but the icons are just, they kind of mess with the color scheme. And, you know, I like to

keep things simple. Usually I like to keep things pretty minimal with design. So I just wanted to have like a set that is you can either choose just you can choose all black or all white and uh that's it so with the with my icon pack like it's obviously a very specific taste like i hand drew every single icon i don't remember exactly all icons how many icons there are at this point that's so many icons i know i just it was all like stock apps and then also a bunch of the popular apps that people use every single day and i just wanted to make something that was very different than what everybody else did because I think a lot of people just shipped literally the same icons and like different packs.

Like everybody was dropping icon packs and a lot of them were just the same icons. And I just thought like what? There was so much like very basic like clip art looking stuff in all those icon packs. Yeah. And the reason why is because it was the easiest way to make a lot of money. Like there was all these stories about some developer making 100,000 in a month off of a minimal icon pack. And everybody wants to make 100,000 in a month.

But it's like, I can't do stuff like that. Like I just couldn't just ship out a random pack and then use my channels to promote it because I would feel bad. And also like, I probably wouldn't have designed all those icons. Like, where are they coming from? But obviously, I don't mean to trash talk that designer. I think he was one of the first people to see the potential of custom icons. And I think he did it all by himself, which is great.

I love that. I love seeing successes like that. Yeah. So for my collection, I wanted to have things that would fit my style, be a little bit unique, be a little bit different. It's not obviously for everyone, but the people who do like it are always sharing screenshots on Twitter or Instagram, tell me how much they like it, and request icons that they want to add. And obviously, I can't do every single icon. I'm not physically capable of doing that. But I like to be able to have icons for most of the popular apps and all the stock

apps. And now with the new iPhones that have dynamic islands, it hides that really annoying shortcut notification that drops down every single time you open a shortcut, as I'm sure you're familiar with, that's one of the biggest things that prevented me from even doing this in the first place, like even wanting to use icons. Because when, you know, this ability first came out, it was okay. Like, it was like, you know, that drop down, you forget it's there. You get used to it. Either decide, do I want to see that notification every single time? Or do I have a nice, beautiful custom home screen? And obviously, a lot of people have chosen the latter because it's worth the trade-off to sometimes have that customization in place.

But now with the new dynamic island functionality, you don't see that notification at all. It hides it in the island. It's very, very subtle. And now, even with things like the camera, before, if you used a shortcut with a custom icon to open up the camera app, it would take an extra full second for the camera to like be ready to go. Cancel. Deal break. I can't deal with that.

But now you can do it. And if you're willing to go through the process, which isn't super. terrible these days and there are very cohesive guides and I think even shortcuts you can download it's pretty easy to do but for me personally my home screen is very clean and I like to have just a couple icons everything else is in the app library and that's how I like it so I like that are you just a one home screen guy yeah yeah I admire that I aspire to be that it's all that works for me at this point I like to have four apps in the dock and then four apps on my home screen a little square arrangement using the Clear Spaces app.

Because I don't really want to see too much. When I turn my phone on, I want to be able to see my wallpaper and also be able to just see the core apps I need and any distracting things like Instagram and Twitter, all those are on in the app library. So they're not like the first thing I see when I turn my phone on. After I talked to Isaac, I blew up my whole phone again. I got rid of a bunch of the widgets.

I changed my wallpaper again, and I changed a few icons. I didn't change all of my icons, just the four in my dock, which tend to be the ones that never really move around, and they're all a single style now. I really like how it looks. Plus, I now have just two home screens, one is apps and one is widgets,

and I think Isaac's right that less is more there. The app library or the app drawer on Android, do the job great. After all this, suffice to say my phone looks really different than it did a few weeks ago. And it was a really fun exercise, actually. I wound up not just changing the look of my phone, but really thinking about where I want things to be,

and what I want to have easy access to, and maybe just as important what I don't want to have easy access to. Plus, what my home screen and wallpaper and icons and widgets should not just do, but make me feel every time I turn my phone on. Not everyone is going to want to go down this unbelievable rabbit hole of personalization and shortcuts and widgets and all kinds of different stuff, and that's okay. But I think it's worth at least spending a few minutes

to make sure that when you turn your phone on, as we all do a million times a day, it feels the way you want it to because I think that's important. All right, that's enough Apple Talk. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening.

There's lots more from everything we talked about on Theverge.com. We'll put some links to all our reviews in the show notes, but also, you know, read theverge.com. There's so much gadget news this week. There's Xbox leaks. There's a Microsoft event. There's an Amazon event.

There's a ton happening. All of it is on Theverge.com. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other phones you think people should buy instead of the iPhone 15, you can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or keep calling the hotline. 866, Verge 1-1, send us all of your thoughts and questions. And again, this is probably the last call for this. If you have questions about the Verge or the Vergecast, send them in. The meta episode is coming really soon. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.

Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast. podcast network. Eli, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Amazon, Microsoft, why Amazon and Microsoft are suddenly kind of at odds about gadgets, Xbox, and all the other stuff going on this week. See you then. Rock and roll.