The Vergecast - John Gruber and Nilay Patel compare their iPhone 11 reviews

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

John Gruber of Daring Fireball joins Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel for the annual iPhone review week to compare notes on Apple's new iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. John and Nilay also get into their approach for reviewing tech products in 2019. We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: www.voxmedia.com/podsurvey.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, it's Neil I from the Vergecast on this week's interview episode. It's John Gruber. If you're a Vergecast listener, you don't know who John is, I don't know what's going on.

John writes the very popular Apple blog Daring Fireball. He just reviewed the iPhone. Every year now, for a couple years, I've gone on John's show, the talk show after iPhone review week to get into it. This year we flipped it around.

He's coming on the Vergecast. We talked about the iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 Pro, Apple Watch Series 5, of course. We also talk quite a bit about the state of iPhone reviews, which to both of us is very strange right now.

We got into it in detail, and John has some very serious thoughts about what's going on the New York Times. Check it out. It's John Gruber on The Vergecast. All right, John Gruber, welcome to the Vergecast. Ah, it's good to be here, and Eli.

For the past two years after iPhone reviews, I've come on your show and this year on mine, but we should just set it up that we do a podcast after iPhone review land. Yeah, all right. But I do enjoy talking to you after these reviews come out because there's so much. It's like one of the most intense weeks

for people who care about. You get this thing. and then you're like put your head down and you've got to come out at the end of it on a deadline with like something smart to say about the iPhone, which seems to be getting both harder and easier as the years go by. Yeah, I agree with that. And, you know, it's different for everybody. But, you know, I'm in a sort of unique boat where I don't have colleagues or a staff. And the last two years where the like two years ago, the iPhone 8s came out and the iPhone 10 was delayed until October. And then last year it was swapped where the iPhone 10s models came out, quote, unquote, on time in

September. And the 10R was like late October. And so there was like a full month both of those years between reviewing the two tiers of new phones, whereas this year they all came out on the same day. And they gave me three review units. And I don't have anybody to hand them off to, you know? And it's. Oh, I definitely cheated.

I mean, if you just like, and then a watch. Like the Apple Watch came out too. So Deeter did our Apple Watch review, but if you look at ours, like, I'm just not capable of, like, critically reviewing a video camera. So I just, like, handed it to Becca who reviews video cameras for us. And then Deeter did, Dieter had an 11 because he had the watch. And so I was like, you just tell me how that battery life is. Like, I'm going to figure it out later. Yeah.

Last year, last year was a mess for me because the watch was so new. The Series 4 watches last year were so new, new form factor, a lot new. and I got at the same time I had the 10S and it was just like this 72 hour period where I had like four hours asleep and I'm like, wait, should I be writing? And I'm like the most looked forward to posed on Daring Fireball of the year

on like no sleep and like an IV drip of coffee. I don't know. I mean, the answer is yes like that. You know, if you're gonna push it, you gotta push it. I don't want to complain though. I think we've mentioned this before too. It also has reminded me throughout the whole like last 10 days

that man, this is why I love my job. I am having a blast. So I do want to get that out there. This has been so fun and it's like, man, this is why I feel like the luckiest guy in the face of the earth. Same deal. I was with our video team. It was like midnight and we were like arguing about whether the Note 10 or the iPhone took better video.

And I was like, how did I invent this job? If you had told me that when I was a teenager, like, you're just going to be playing with smartphones. And like lots of people are going to be yelling about whether the video stabilization is better. Like, couldn't ask for anything better. Anyway, let's start at the start. I want to start at the event because there was, I feel like the event was interesting, the sort of reaction to the event was interesting, and that has like bled into not how you and I reviewed the phone, but sort of the reception to the phone overall.

So the event was very muted, right? There's no earth shattering. There's no one more thing. It feels like a bunch of stuff didn't arrive at the event, most notably deep fusion, which It feels like the camera software that will push the camera even further. They mentioned it the event, but like it's not in the phone. Right. Then there's all these rumors about a location tag.

Right. And we know for a fact that the phones, all three new phones have this U1 chip, which is this ultra wideband. I don't know what we're going to end up calling it as this becomes established. Are we going to call it ultra wideband or are we going to go UWB? We'll probably go UWB. Yeah. Like I don't even remember.

We don't talk about universal cereal bus anymore. So I think we'll probably go UWB, but it has this chip, and it is bizarre because it's a chip. And Apple does not add chips for no reason. And the one and only feature that it does right now is let you point one iPhone 11 at another iPhone 11 to prioritize that person in AirDrop. And that doesn't work yet. It's coming. I mean, we're eventually to talk about iOS 13, but iOS 13 is very weird. And so this chip with this feature doesn't even work yet.

It's just like unused chip in the iPhone. And as you say, Apple doesn't do that? Yeah. So it's definitely, it is absolutely, there is something coming. And who knows, maybe it won't even come in the next year. I think it will. I think it's coming probably by the end of this year, some kind of product announcement or feature announcement that will do more.

But even if it doesn't come until we have new phones a year from now and we're talking on another podcast again, they've at least future-proofed this year's phones to be able to play in that game. Like they're clearly, whenever that time comes when they start unveiling the features, these new phones from this year are going to be in the game of this UWB future.

And that was weird, though. And you gotta think that like six months ago they were hoping to have something to announce in the event. I mean, so U-1 came out, the existence that you want, it's on the webpage for the pro, it's not on the webpage for the 11.

and the only reason I think people would have figured out, but during the event, they didn't mention it. It was just they have that slide with all the, all the other stuff, right? All the other stuff, which is redesign this year is very nice. And it was like tucked in the corner, new U1 chip. I remember, I still remember whenever, it's like an Apple tradition where they have the slide

for like a segment of a keynote where it's like, here's all this stuff that we didn't even fit into what we're talking about. about, right? And they put that slide up. My favorite of all time was from the original iPhone event, which is the keynote to end all keynotes. But my favorite part is that Jobs is up there. It's the greatest keynote. Apple's ever held. Steve Jobs' greatest moment on stage, the best product introduction ever. And one of the things that's up there on this slide with like 30 other things is it just says cocoa. And like in my world with all my developer friends, like people. saw it and they went nuts. They're like,

holy shit, it is, we can write Mac, you know, if you know how to write Mac apps, you can write apps for this thing. Because, you know, they didn't talk about apps at the iPhone there, but it just was like, just a little word, but like to developers, it literally could have been like the entire keynote. They wanted, immediately wanted like a

three hour briefing on what does this mean that the iPhone runs Coco. But anyway, yeah, yeah, the U1 chip was up there as a little oh yeah. Yeah, and so we were like, we asked and I'm like, yeah, you know, one day it'll do this AirDrop thing and They mentioned to us, you know, it'll be useful for like unlocking cars. Yes, they did tell me that too.

And I was like, what cars? They're like, you know, cars. And it was like, okay. So I don't know if the U1 chip and UWB is a standard. I'm told that there is a standard out there in the world. There is a consortium. I mean, whether that means it's a standard, I don't know. Nothing speaks to efficiency, like a consortium of tech companies.

Well, it's sort of like Chi, you know, like. Chi is a standard and you know I have to say it like that you have to pronounce it like standard But it's like there's all sorts of stuff like some things charge it you know It's kind of all over the place right like some people are selling some third parties are selling Che chargers that do things sort of like what air power was supposed to do where you can put an Apple watch on it but Apple watch is not a cheat device like you can't put an Apple watch on a stand most Chi chargers and have anything happen. But some companies are making chargers where you can charge it.

So it's, you know, who knows what's standard and what's not. Yeah. So that's the event is like kind of marked by, I think actually, in this played an Apple's favor when it came to the phones, sort of reduced expectation. Like there's no big thing to evaluate. They're like with iPhone 11, Schuller got on stage and he was like, we did what people care about. We like, better camera, improve battery life.

Here you go. there was, you know, a little razzle-dazzle around the pro because it's like the flagship phone. But at the end of the day, he's like, look at how great this camera is. We edit a third lens. Yeah. That's it. Like, there wasn't much going on there. So then you come out of the keynote.

You're like, great. That's kind of what we expected. Hmm. Got to poke at where this other stuff is. And there's a column from Charlie Worsell in the Times. Who is great? I think I like him a lot. Overall, I should say that.

And if there's one regret about my retort, it's that I didn't preface it by saying that in general, I'm a huge fan of his work. And I think he's, I would just say that. I am in general a big Charlie Warzel fan. Yeah, and he's leading like the privacy project in the opinion pages of the time. Right. In a very fair way. But Charlie wrote a column, which is just strange to me as well, but basically being like, there shouldn't be Apple keynotes anymore.

And then you wrote a response. So I kind of want to unpack your response a little bit. Like Charlie's point is this is out of touch, right? Like there's a trade war going on. It could affect most of Apple's products. the consequences of mobile phones have torn the world asunder why are we gathering in a room

to like clap for Apple? And it's funny to me because whether or not journalists slash bloggers like clap at Apple events in my world has been litigated since like 2007. Right? Like I remember when we were babies at Engadget

and like Ryan Block would look at me like people are going to clap, don't you dare clap? And like, okay, I've known that. It's been 12 years. I've never clapped. I think you wrote this like I'm busy I'm like live blogging I don't have time to clap it was it was literally like warzel's sentence was something to the effect of the laptop lit faces of the tech bloggers and then something something that they applaud you know break out and

applause and I'm like that doesn't even make any sense if you think about it because the reason their faces are laptop lit is that they're busy typing either live blogs or notes like people don't like it's really hard that I could never live blog I just could not do it I just could not do it I I would still be live blogging like the opening video. And meanwhile, like, Kyanne Drance is going off stage. Yeah. Like having intro. I'm like, what?

What did I miss? But I know, you know, I've sat next to, I've sat with you guys sometimes. I've sat next to Jason Snell who seriously is like a world-class typist, like a hundred 20 words a minute wonder. They're too busy. Yeah, there's just like a lot going on. But like there's like the room full of Apple employees and like partners. Well, that's the thing, one of the things that Warzel's column sort of laid bare is the misconceptions about these Apple events and who's attending.

And it's not an unreasonable presumption to think that these are press events. These are media events. And most of the people in the audience are members of the media. And so when you hear this applause, you think, well, there's the media cheering at this Steve Jobs thing. The media is very small, especially the English language media, is a very small percentage. of the people in the seats in the Steve Jobs Theater. Because one of the changes in recent years is that in years past, when Apple would have a keynote,

they would hold satellite events in London and I don't know where they did it in Asia, if they did China, if they did Japan. I'm pretty sure they did Japan. So, like, Asian journalists wouldn't have to travel all the way to Cupertino and weren't even invited. They would go to, like, a satellite event where it would be teleconferenced and there would be, you know, native speaking, Apple people there to do. briefings with these people and London always had these things and they don't do that anymore.

I forget when they stop, but they now fly, you know, everybody has to fly in to Cooper Tino. And the number of Asian language journalists who come, especially for the iPhone event, is off the charts. So the number and the number of Apple employees and VIPs and, you know, meaning people like from Pixar and stuff like that, like you often see like a, well, I know Lee Uncrich actually left Pixar, but he probably still gets special invitations. But you see people from Pixar and stuff like that. There's a huge number of those people.

And the number of English language journalists who are at these events, especially at a smaller venue like Steve Jobs, is really just a tiny fraction of the audience. If the journalist clapped and only the journalist clapped, you would hardly hear it on the video. It's funny. It's like you want to cede the room a little bit, right? Like Samsung invites a bunch of like Samsung fans. Like Tesla has events and Elon Musk is like handing out invites on Twitter to the people who reply the fastest to it. I'm like, there's a strategy here to be like, you. Yeah, you're on stage.

Like, you want someone to, like, look happy and clap. So, you, like, Samsung literally invite, like, hundreds of Samsung fans. Yeah. And so it's a little different. I mean, I don't think Apple's playing that game, but, yeah, there's a bunch of people who, like, worked on the product, like, clapping for the introduction. Apple's version of that would be at the Brooklyn event last year, which I think was their October event. Yeah. When they had the October event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is a much bigger venue than the Steve Jobs Theater, to fill the scene.

seats, they invited retail employees from around the country. And so, like, stores got to, and it was, I think it's a really nice perk for the retail employees, but like store managers got to pick, like, their best employees, and they got to, you know, I'm sure on Tim Cook's time, send them to Brooklyn to see this event. And I was sitting pretty far up close. Their enthusiasm was genuine. It wasn't like, oh, they were told, hey, you're here to fill seats and clap. They were just, like, out of their minds happy to be there. You know, like, that's why they work in Apple stores. That's why they're, like, the employee of the month at Apple stores is they just love this

stuff. And the other thing that was amazing to me, like, I was sitting there with Panzerino, Matthew Panzerino of TechCrunch. And there were a couple of retail employees, young women, right behind us. And they were so enthusiastic. And we saw, I know this because after the event, we introduced ourselves and I, you know, talked to them. And they're actually from, oh, geez, I forget, but it's like a suburb of Philly here.

They were actually from a store really close to Philly right outside the city. I never go there because I never leave the house, really. But the other thing that was fascinating is they were super into it, but they also clearly like don't follow the rumors at all. So like when they introduced, when they said that the new iPad Pro has USBC, which, you know, like me and you knew, right, that leaked months before. They were like, whoa. And it was so genuine.

It was so genuine. That's great. That's like Apple's method of priming to pump is putting retail employees in there. I mean, that's great. I mean, they all do it. But like, that's just like kind of, I wanted to bring up the column in that moment and my personal amusement at the idea that we're still litigating whether or not journalists clap at Apple events a decade later, because it set the tenor for me of like the reviews.

Right. So the phones come out. But the Apple rumor press was like, you know, there's going to be reversible charging. there's going to be this tile competitor tagging thing. Here's this big feature. And stuff wasn't there. So it's very nice updates to the phones, which we definitely talk about. But that's kind of the context for me of like, okay, we're going in this review,

is Apple put an event, which was not even their most bombastic event, right? Like Bono isn't floating around. They didn't rent a school and build an Apple store to tell you the Apple Watch would change health and fitness. You know what I mean? Like they just updated their products. It was great. They were very important products literally in the world. world, but they didn't oversell it. And then the reaction is they should just stop doing these

entirely, which makes no sense to me. So that, did you feel that context, like shift around the phone? Yeah, and I got a lot of good comments. I don't want to pat myself in the back here, but I got a lot of good comments, especially from people, fellow hacks in the industry about my response to Warzel. I think he missed the boat there. I really do. And I really do think that it was sort of a self-congratulatory way of you know, it just popped into his head to assert that he doesn't care. I really think, and like I wrote in my response, it really, if you really think about it, it had nothing to do with Apple. It had nothing to do with Apple fans.

It had nothing to do with society, really, even though he caged it that way. Because I don't think that that's the moment. You know, and talking about inequality and stuff like that, it's, if anything, to me, the iPhone and the smartphone revolution on the Android side that followed, you in the iPhone's wake. And without being religious about it, let's face it, every single phone that people use around the world today is either an iPhone or an Android phone that followed the iPhone's basic conceptual design.

It's one of the most democratizing pieces of technology in history. Like there are so many people around the world, like people in countries that are generally considered to be in poverty, where their only internet access is through a smartphone. It is truly democratizing because they don't have the wired infrastructure, so it has to be wireless. And if you're only going to have one device, a smartphone is it. So, yes, of course, if you're truly living in poverty, your phone may not be an iPhone. It's probably more likely to be an Android phone. But that Android phone is very iPhone-like and inspired by that revolution.

And I think to crap on it like that is really missing the mark because it's, to me, the stuff that's of the moment, it would be like yachts. It's the things that cost millions of dollars that are, hmm, where the hell have we gone wrong as a society? Stuff that cost $700 is and is something that you use all day every day is not that. Yeah. And Apple doesn't, they're not the Googles and Facebooks of the world, right? They're actually very publicly in opposition. I'm curious to see if, you know, like Google has an event coming out for the pixel. Right.

Like they've got to try to finder line than Apple did. But that's the context. We kind of talked about it a lot, but that, to me, is a really important context for the phone, for, like, Apple's moves to the phone this year. They didn't oversell it, which I think is actually a really smart move on their part because it over delivers. And then I really do want to talk to you about, like, the state of reviews because I think it's upside down. But let's talk about the phone because that's probably why people started listening to this show not to hear us talk about the New York Times opinion section. Although if you want, John and I will be doing a podcast about the New York Times opinion section. Let's talk about the phone.

So I read your review. You are like, this is basically a camera now. I'm into the camera. I want your thoughts on that. My read on it, and I'm very curious if you know anything extra here, is that I was not impressed with the 10-S camera last year. I actually reread my review. And I was like, why was I so polite to this thing? Like, I've had it for a year and I don't like it.

They fixed it. They fixed it a lot. One difference between you and my, you are my take on camera. cameras. And I don't want to belabor the point, but I think partially it's, it comes down to my declining close vision. But I tend to judge the picture, pictures as a whole. And you're very finely attuned to like 100% crops in what details you see. And I, I don't really get into that. I didn't, even doing my comparisons and tests with the phone this week, I never, I don't think I I want zoomed into 100%. Yeah. And I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. It's just,

just a different take. And I do see it like reading your review and looking at some of the, like in your review this week where you shot pictures with the new 11 cameras, also looked at 10S footage or images of the same exact scene. And, you know, like, I think you'd shot some with a pixel three and a note 10S or whatever the fuck the note is called. I see what you're talking about. And I'm glad. That's one of the reasons I'm glad that they give so many different people review units and people take different takes and I'm like oh that's very interesting I see exactly what nilai's talking about never occurred to me to look at that but I therefore think I was happier with the 10 S camera than you are because I think a lot of your displeasure with it are some of the things

that it did like with the whatever they call the super hDR I honestly can't remember smart hdr smart hdr I see what you mean at 100 but not at 100 percent I think it's I think it was all right and I think that's why apple shipped it as it was so I think Apple knows and this is true and I think like I agree with you 100% that most people are going to take a phone or they're going to take a photo on their phone and then look at it on their phones display right and then maybe you're going to send it to Instagram which is going to further compress it and keep it really small and destroy it and then like it'll show up on another phone display and like it is probably it is more than likely that most photos you take on your phone will never show up on a computer display

We'll never show up on anything bigger than what, 6.2 inches or whatever the maxes. Yeah, I buy it. Sure. Like, I agree. To be clear, I didn't do my whole review by only looking at the images on the phone. I definitely looked at them on my IMac and a lot of them on my MacBook, you know, at full size on a MacBook. So 13 inches, if not 27 inches. So I definitely looked at them big.

I just didn't really zoom in. But, you know, it's definitely true. And I think Apple knows that. And I do think that that is the, here's, you know, your laundry. I think your laundry list of complaints about the 10S camera is very astute, and I can't think of anybody who's said it better or proved it better than you. But I think that the refute to that, or why would Apple ship something that Nelai can show it does X, Y, and Z wrong?

And I think that their resort would be, well, look, here's the percentage of people who never look at an image bigger than six inches. Yeah, and I will tell you, that was effectively the response last year. But here's, and I think this also goes into my general thoughts about reviews. If you accept that, then every one of these phones has an absolutely blowaway camera. Note photos on a note display look incredible, right? Like, Samsung, they just like crank the brightness on that display. It is, I keep thinking of the Kool-Aid man when I think about Samsung's approach to how things should look.

Like, it's like, yeah, like, it's just out of control. It's a party, right? It's like your drunk friend at a party is like, I'm here. Like, I love it. It's like, it's awesome to look at, and everybody you see is a Samsung photo on a Samsung display is like, that's the one I love it. If you look at a pixel, pixels take really moody shots. They've got OLED screens. They look, the contrast is great.

If you look at an iPhone, an iPhone looks great. So to me, it's like, I don't know how to tell you what's good or bad unless I look very closely. And that's like, I don't think it's really that valuable. Right? Like, I kind of know that these are just fine. And, you know, I have an iPhone 10S and my wife has an iPhone 10S and she takes a million photos of the baby and they all look great. Like, no complaints.

But I know that I'm willing to upgrade this year for the first time a year-over-year upgrade because she's going to take better photos of the baby. And that's to me, like, I think we're at the point with these phones, we're to review these fine differences. You have to, you're kind of forced to go back to a very early kind of tech writing. and that is it feels very nerdy and out of like when Walt worked here he's like you were you write for enthusiasts and like you know you got to get more mainstream you got to like do the thing Walt did which is like bring technology the big audience because it's important and I feel like right now

with things like how bright is a screen how good is a camera you're kind of you have to do some enthusiast stuff again Walt was so good at that it really I mean nobody was better at writing a review for the most mainstream audience but no knowing that even still the quote unquote mainstream audience for the personal tech columnist of the Wall Street Journal or, you know, in his last decade, you know, at the verge and, you know, recode. They're still semi-enthusiists, right? Because the people who truly don't care at all aren't reading that column, right? If you don't give a shit at all about electronics, you just skipped Walt's column on the, you know, down the left-hand side of the journal all those years. So at least he knew his audience was somewhat, you know, at least interested. And he was so good at approaching technology from their perspective.

But I agree that at some level, and I hate to repeat myself, but I feel like I have to now year after year, and emphasize I'm going to do a lot of comparisons to the year-old iPhone with this iPhone. But I know for a fact and everybody should keep in mind and I'm going to use italics and I'm tempted to almost put this in all cap. normal people do not even think about upgrading a year old phone never even enters their mind because it still feels like like the whatever they spent for the year old iPhone 700 to you know up to $1,400, it still feels like a fresh wound to them. Yeah. And the phone's good, right? Like, and I like literally this is the year where the battery life improved so much year over year for the pro phones. And to my eye, the camera is those. photos hold up to scrutiny in a way that I think the tennis did not. And I don't, 100% crops, like, yep, you got to look hard. But even just if you want to crop them a little bit and print them out, right, you want to just get a little, you want to run them through a filter in

lightroom just to clean them up and put them on a Christmas card, these photos are substantially better because they have, they just have more detail. And I think, I don't think that's just smart HDR. I don't think it's just a rendering pipeline. I was looking at the HALID technology. I was looking at the halide technical readout blog that they did. I think the sensor is substantially improved, and they just kind of didn't talk about it a lot. Like 100% focused pixels, but it's actually a much better sensor. Yeah, and I did a lot of my testing in low light conditions, and it was tricky for two reasons. One was that Apple spent a lot of time talking about their night mode, and the night mode

comes on automatically. They really want you to just use it and go with it and let the phone, let the iPhone decide when to turn it on. Like it takes a little, I saw a couple people complain that it's too hard to disable. It's not too hard, but unlike the flash where if the flashes, or like, let's say live photos, same as the flash. If live photo mode is on, there's an icon that's yellow, you tap it once, it turns white, that means it's off and then you're not shooting live photo. With night mode, it takes more than a tap. You have to tap the thing that's yellow that indicates that it's on. And it tells you how many seconds it wants to be. It'll say like one second, two second, three second. You tap it and then there's a little dial where you have to flick, flick it to make it off.

So it's like a two-step process to disable it. They really want you to use it. But the thing that I noticed towards the end of my testing and really wish I had more time was when I did turn it off and shoot side by side with the year old 10S. in low light. Even with the night mode off, boy, did I get better results. And that's got to be the sensor because it's not the lens. Like with the telephoto lens, the sensor I think is exactly the same. But the lens went from F2.4 to F2.0, which if you don't speak, camera ease, lower numbers mean better in low light. And 2.0 from 2.4 is pretty significant. Yeah. No, they told me the telephoto sensor is basically the same. The lens on the main camera is basically the same. And then the sensor on the main cameras, all they would say is it's different. It's 100% of focus pixels.

The only thing they bragged about in the event and in their marketing material is that the standard lens, the main lens, the one they call the wide lens, the one that comes on by default, the one they call 1X. The thing they bragged about the sensor is that it now has, quote, 100% focus pixels. But I think there's more to it than that. Like focus pixels makes it sound like, all it does is better auto focus. But I think it's a vastly improved sensor. Yeah, I mean, so 100% at least it's a tell that it is definitely a different sensor. But I think the problem with the 10S, and I've kind of like heard this from a couple of folks, is that they ran that sensor really hard. Yeah. And it was just really noisy. Like, I think it was actually like,

I don't know if you can overclock a sensor, but they were basically like overclocking the sensor. And it was super noisy. And then the problems I see with 10S photos are, they're doing a shitload of noise reduction, right, to clean that up. So I think this one is just less noisy and they can just save more detail by doing less noise reduction. But that night mode, the way that sort of the pixel does night mode is they're just ultra high gain on the sensor. There's pulling in more data and they're like, we're really smart, we're Google. Our computer will tell you what that picture should be and then like fix it.

Whereas Apple is actually bracketing and it is a substantially better night mode to my eye. Which is incredibly impressive. I agree. And I know people are, some verge listeners are going to go, of course John Gruber agrees that the iPhone's night mode is better than the pixels night mode. But I mean, full credit to Google. I mean, they were a year ahead on this, you know, having a night mode. They call it night site.

And in some regards, it's impressive. And they deserve all the kudos they've gotten. But there's something about a lot of night site shots from the pixels that is off. And I noticed it right away, like when, when Vlad at the verge really was the, at least to my mind, the lead at the verge at really, I mean, he was all over it before it even shipped.

You know, like he somehow figured out how to enable it. Like it wasn't even like an official beta. It was like some kind of hack you installed. Like you... Vlad loves that camera. So he, Vlad is not Bloomberg. He's very happy at Bloomberg.

He moved to Tokyo. He works at Bloomberg, Tokyo. He loves taking pixel photos so much than you now as a side business, selling his pixel photos because people love them so much, which is incredible. But some of the ones that he published, and, you know, it's been a full year later and there have been software updates, and I think that they've toned it down a little bit.

But to me, a lot of the night sight shots look like what in the film, what the movie making world was called day for night. Where in like the early, I guess they used to do it in black and white era too. And it was probably less easy to tell. But in like the early days of color film, like the 50s and 60s, when they'd shoot night scenes, they'd shoot them during the daytime and just under-expose the film. And, you know, at a glance, it sort of looks like night. But like if you really pay attention, you can see there's these. It's very clear. Once you realize that the way they did it was shooting in daylight with under and

under-exposing the film, it looks like that. And it almost looks comical. And sometimes the night sight shots sort of have that effect where it's like you'd see, like, here's what the standard photo looks like. And it's clearly too dark to get a good exposure. It's a dark city street. And then here's the night site shot. And it looked sort of like daytime.

It didn't look like, wow, here's a nighttime shot with a proper exposure. You can take photos in night or in the dark with this thing. It actually just looked, it didn't accurately reflect the scene, is what I'm trying to say. Whereas Apple's, to me, always accurately reflects what my eyes tell me. It should see if it can get an exposure. I would say you're generally correct. There's a few places where I took photos where the pixel is just a moodyer. camera. Like, there's no, it's not better or worse. It is just, it takes moodyer photos. Like,

it's more contrasty. It, like, it, it tends to, to pull. I think it's definitely a worse camera than the, than the new 11. I think it's debatable compared to the 10S. I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't think there's any doubt that. And, and again, to be fair, Google is coming out with Pixel 4 and, in less than, less than, less than, they're not being shy about it. There's already billboards for a pixel 4. Right. So the fair comparison will be pixel 4 against the, iPhone 11. So, you know, let's just be clear about that. But I don't think, and, you know, and we're all, we're, you and I are both in full agreement that this 11 is a vast improvement over the 10S from just a year ago. It's quite possible, hopeful. And given their focus on

photography with the pixel that the pixel four might be a big improvement over the pixel three, so let me just get that out of the way. Yeah, the pixel four, I said it one of our, like, looms over this. Like, I'm comparing it to a phone and the other phone is already, like, they've leaked so much the pixel four that it would not surprise. me if they announced the pixel five at the pixel four. They're so far ahead of their own curve. No, I mean, it's more like different kinds of film, if you ever shot film. Yes, I did.

The pixel just looks different. Yeah. Even if the quality was exactly the same, the pixel just looks different. Yeah. And it's totally aesthetic, and I don't think that you can say better or worse. So there are times when you're absolutely correct. Like, the iPhone just sort of exposes that night shot better. But sometimes I get that pixel night site back, and I'd be like, it's just a more

contrasty photo. It looks like the photo I wanted to make from the jump, whereas the iPhone is like, everything is perfect, and I actually want some of these things to recede to highlight the thing I want. And like, that is purely whatever. I can just fix that problem in light room. Like I don't, whatever. But to me, the big thing that isn't there is this deep fusion.

So you were talking about night sight and why it wants to come on all the time. That middle ground between bright sunlight and, okay, night site is appropriate. It's dark. that middle ground is the thing that Apple is going to improve with DeepFusion, and it's not there. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think, I guess I could rewatch the event. But if there's anything that Apple missed during their event, it was during Schiller's segment when he said, look, we've got this feature. We're so excited about it. It'll be coming, quote unquote, later this year. But I'm so excited about it. I want to talk to you about it now. And that's this Deep Fusion.

My takeaway after the event was, well, wait, deep fusion has something to do with improving photography in lower light. And night mode definitely has something to do with low light. But night mode is already here. What's the difference? When do they kick in? And talking to Apple behind the scenes over the last week, it's very clear. But I don't think it was clear in the event. It's from like 600 Lux to 10 Lux is where deep fusion is going to try to make photographs better through this machine learning.

Night mode is about 10 lux and less lighting conditions. So it really is sort of like a very clear, like you said, like sort of like this middle ground is where deep fusion is supposed to kick in. Which is where you take most of your photos. Right. Well, a lot. I certainly do. I mean, if you're inside, that's like where you live. If you're inside, that's where you live.

That's great. You're not always like out in the park or whatever, right? Like you're mostly like around. You're in a bar or a restaurant. Right. So for Apple to have this like technology, it's kind of revolutionize that thing, which hits the most. most photos and for it to not be there and for them to not even tell you that's what it's going to fix like there's just that one photo of the dude in the sweater yeah it was a weird demo that

there was only one example and it was neat but also even the example it didn't really like show you like here's what it would have been like without deep fusion yeah and from what i can tell deep fusion i mean i Schiller called it mad science like it kind of is nuts right like it it let me get into a twitter debate with like steven sasovsky over what even is a photo yeah I saw that. I chipped in. I chimed in on that too. Yeah, it's like you kind of have to decide now. Like, okay, you're, you're collecting like, you know, nine frames or whatever diffusion does. And then it's going to look at them and then it's going to like make a photo of its own. And I think Panzerino's like at some point Apple's just going to tell you what photo you should have taken and you're going to have to take a photo at all.

Like, it seems incredible. But all I have is like one photo of a sweater. And then another photo they showed me of somebody else wearing a sweater. In the film era, the capture part was, I guess the word I'm looking for is deter. Hermanistic, that if you had a certain lens and we're using a certain brand of film and exposed for this aperture, for this shutter speed, this is what's going to be on the negative. And there's a certain purity to that, right? Like you and I could have, if we use the same camera with the same film and the same lens and same aperture and shutter speed are going to capture pretty much the same thing. I mean, obviously, because it's not digital, it's analog.

It's not like at the molecular level identical, but we're going to get captured the same image. And there's a purity to that. And what the Sinovsky argument was about was sort of like he brought up like, hey, how is this computational photography going to jive with the rules of photojournalists contests and awards where there are rules about like manipulating photos? Like you can't Photoshop something out of a photo and publish it as quote unquote photojournalism. but you know everything in like magazine stuff does go through photo you know like where do you draw the line and what are you allowed to do in Photoshop and what aren't you you know like the famous picture of the one you know the the guy standing there with Stalin who got erased from the official photo you know obviously that's not allowed like you can't just erase somebody but what do you know what are you allowed to do you're allowed to take a pimple off somebody's face you know everybody brightens and but even in the film days though there was so much there was so much

This is my point is that there was so much that went on in the developing room. Yeah. So much. And could really change the mood and overall effectiveness of the resulting image. And I kind of feel like you can't overlook that. And just because a lot of that type of stuff is now happening instantaneously in the quote-unquote, I'm not, I shouldn't say quote-unquote, the trillions of operations that these phones are doing instantaneously when you press and release the shot. button on your phone that they're all happening automatically and not guided by a human hand in a dark

room doesn't it still is to the to the same purpose which is to make the image look better by somebody's opinion of what looks better yeah yeah i mean the thing that gets me is i wish i knew like i would be smarter in this part of the conversation if i could use deep fusion and i can't and i i don't even know what it's like really going to do one thing i don't think people realize i don't think people realize like if you just look at like a raw image you mentioned halide before like If you just shoot like raw images on iPhone, they look like garbage. Yeah. They're terrible.

Like the, what, you know, like if you were going to do nothing, just open the shutter and expose an image on the sensor and then save it to a file, they look terrible. Yeah. They look absolutely terrible. Like, you could see what it is. It's like, oh, yeah, this is a city street and there's people. But like, nothing looks right. Like, it all requires processing.

And where do you draw the line is this is a legitimate, straight, fair, honest. photo and this is manipulated, I don't know. I mean, it's too, it's almost philosophical as an argument. It's funny, we took some Raws using Halite on this phone and the 10S, and I keep saying the sensor is less noisy. If those Raws are what I think they are, you know, like it hasn't yet yet hasn't yet yet sensor is way less noisy. Like the 10S sensor raws are really quite noisy. Yeah. But the reason I keep bringing up Dufusion and whether it ships is like to get you to iOS 13, right? Yes. Because I don't know what's going on with iOS 13. And like really the first question I had on my list for you was, hey, do you know what's going on with iOS 13? Not at the moment. I mean,

it is weird. I mean, basically what we do know, what is officially known is that iOS 13 is shipping on Friday the 20th and everybody who has an iPhone can upgrade if they want, but they probably shouldn't. Yeah. Really. Everybody who gets a new iPhone 11 on Friday when they, you know, ding dong, here's the UPS guy and here's the new iPhone you pre-ordered or if you go, you know, wait in line at your local Apple store and get one, we'll ship with iOS 13.0. But 10 days later at the end of the month, they've already told us iOS 13.1 is coming, which is really what I think most people, if you don't want to put a beta OS on your phone, then you should wait for iOS 13.1 because whether they call it a beta or not, iOS 13.0 is absolutely beta quality software and sort of like mid-beta quality software.

Yeah. I have, in all my years of using iPhones on day one, you know, like in the early years before I got review units, I'd still buy one on the first day. And then, I don't know, starting, I think the first phone I got a review unit of was the Verizon iPhone 4S. And so ever since then, I've had access to them, you know, a week before they come out or something like that. I have never seen anything like this. I have never had a review unit or day one iPhone with an OS that is so buggy. And I did not belabor the point in my, in my article. And I've even, said because 10 days from now there's going to be 13.1 if 13.1 comes out and it's as buggy as 13.0 then here comes the here comes the massive daring fireball essay this is a garbage fire yeah but let's give them 10 days uh it is weird though i got a lot of questions why did you give a phone a nine when you said that software buys it's like well because 10 days from now like most people will never experience the software in the life cycle of this phone right and they're historically pretty good about it. But it is, why not just wait the extra 10 days? Yeah, I wonder about that too. I really wonder why they didn't just put off shipping these things for 10 more days. Are they really that keen on getting

the sales booked for the quarter that ends at the end of September? I mean, that honestly could be the answer. I mean, Apple's quarter, you know, everybody's quarters, you know, whatever they call them differs. Like this is the fourth of an Apple's financial calendar. It's the fourth quarter of 2019, which always drives me freaking crazy. I have no idea how that ever happened. I don't want to get into it.

But everybody's quarter ends in September. And if they didn't ship them until September 30th, they'd still get those day one sales booked for the quarter, but they're going to book millions and tens of millions more probably because they're shipping starting on the 20th. I guess that could

honestly be the reason, but boy, it's a bad customer experience and questionable. I mean, some of the things I've seen bug-wise are freeze-ups. Like, it just happened, literally just happened while I was watching, rereading your iPhone 10-S review at lunch. Safari just completely froze up, like just was unresponsive to touch. Like, I couldn't close. Nothing I did on screen while Safari was open would respond to anything.

No scrolling, no tapping. Yet, Safari wasn't wedged. And just to test it, I went to an email, found a URL, tap the URL, went to Safari. It loaded it. Yeah. But yet it still wouldn't respond to touch. So, and I've seen that in a couple of other apps. I've seen that happen to messages.

The other thing I saw a couple times over the week was the keyboard, only in messages, but I'm not sure if it was a messages bug or if I only happened to see it in messages. But the keyboard would just disappear. Yep. And where the keyboard goes, it was just replaced by a white rectangle, the size of the keyboard. But I could still type. Oh, wait. So my messages bug is the keyboard goes away and then like the messages window just it like goes really small at the top.

And the it was like it was like literally like the phone had flipped upside down. Ah, yeah. I think I saw something like that once too where it got like it was almost like it turned into a window. Yeah. You know like and you could see what was behind it. But I had the thing happen a couple times where the keyboard just went white and I could still type and guess where the keys were. The other one I had that was really weird was messages completely wedged. and it just wouldn't respond at all.

It didn't respond to any touch. And the phone started getting really warm. And I had my wife next to me. I was like, here, send me a text. And she sent me a text, and it showed up as a notification, but there was, you know, I tapped the notification and nothing would happen. And then I'd go to, you know, the card switching mode

for, you know, where you can flip the app up to force quit it, and I'd flip it up and go back to messages, and it was still the same. So like, whatever it was that wedged, wasn't the messages app. It was some lower level background demon that messages uses. The only way I could get out of it was to turn the phone on and off. Yeah, I've had to restart it three times.

It's AirDrop that has crap. I mean, taking lots of photos, right? Yeah. Okay, I'm going to send 40 photos to my laptop. Well, AirDrop's just going to crash and I'm going to restart. My favorite bug, and I kind of wish I could just do it at will because it's hilarious, is, you know, they replaced 3D touch with haptic touch. So you hold down in the link to get the link preview.

And like, I would say 15% of the time, that just happens in slow motion. Just like ultra slow. Like the link comes up over. The drop shadow appears. There's like an animation. It's wild. Like when you minimize a window on the Mac while you hold down the shift key and slow motions into the dock. Yeah.

Just to show you. And I think they built that just for jobs to demo it on stage. Right. But this is like there's no one's demoing Haptic Touch. Like I think the thing is just confused. It's like we're going to take this one slow. Right. And it's just this.

You actually wrote about this in your piece. Like Haptic Touch is necessarily slower than 3D touch already. Yeah. So it just felt like insult to injury. Like I'm already waiting to open this link. And then all of a sudden it's like, hold on a minute. Yeah. So anyway, it is buggy in bad ways.

Deeter has had springboard crash out like two or three times. So, like, it's just, I've, you know, during our review, you have calls, like, hey, I've got 9,000 questions for you as I've been reviewing the phone. And the first question every time is like, what's up with iOS 13? And the answer is doing while iOS 13.1 is coming. Yeah. Okay. And that's going to bring the air drop feature.

It's going to light up the U1 chip. It's like, and then later this fall, you get deep fusion. I think that they've dropped features from 13.1 already, too. I mean, and like, I wrote, like, and this happened last year, too, there was like, eye messages in the cloud. I think that was last year. But for a while now, there have been, like, we have to stop thinking of what they tell us at WWDC in June.

Like, here's the next version of iOS. Here's the features. We have to stop thinking about them as here's what's coming in September. It's effectively a roadmap for the next year. And they don't know as of June which ones are going to ship when. And I think they should be a little more honest about that. Because at this point, because they make it seem at WWDC that all of this cool stuff will be coming in September.

When it doesn't, it seems like everything's late. Yeah, but you make that more diffuse, and it's like why even have big version number events, right? Yeah, that's part of Apple's culture. Yeah. You know, it's, there's no way you're going to rock them off that. Like, that's, it's, I mean, they don't have to do it, but they kind of feel like they have to do it.

Yeah, I mean, this has always been the debate, right? Like, you know, 45 minutes we've been talking. I'm sure Google is updated, Google.com 400 times with like a series of A.B test, and it's like automatically decided what it's doing. You're like other big software products just have rolling updates in this way. And Apple has had the big canonical update. And now that seems to be changing. And so the question of where they put that balance, I think is kind of open for interpretation.

Yeah. I'm aware of a memo that Craig Federigi wrote to the engineering staff, I think, in late July, somewhere around that point, more or less acknowledging that, hey, this, you know, we've got to rejigger our plans. And, you know, it didn't spell out. I read the memo. It didn't quite come out and say 13.0 is going to ship and 13.1 is going to come closely thereafter.

But more or less, that's what it said. And they knew that the iPad wasn't going to get 13 on day one. And they knew that they needed to, more or less, and again, it's even inside Apple, they don't know everything. They don't really share secrets. But reading between the lines, it seemed clear that the iPhone was going to ship on time and they're going to prioritize fixing more or less anything and everything to make the iPhone launch as unbuggy as possible, which more or less meant yanking features.

So that's the other thing is if they had kept all the features that were in the betas up through the end of July, it would have been even bugier. They actually took a lot of stuff out and went back to the corresponding components from iOS 12 to get 13 to the state where it is. Wow, I did not know that. You know what some point out to me is, iOS 12 was also super buggy at launch and 12.1 came really fast. Yeah. And it... Well, was it 12.1 or...

Yeah, I guess it was. But it wasn't as fast as this. Nothing is just... Yeah. 10 days. And pre-announced. Yeah. I mean, like, you know there's going to be a dot one.

I guess you just do it. Like, yeah, to their credit, everyone in the world knows there'll be a dot one release. You might as well just say it's coming. But it just seems like between this and the tile thing and the U-1 stuff, like, it just seems like they weren't ready for this moment. No. Even though the phone is great. That's actually the thing that, like, kills me is like, the phone is great.

Like, what's your battery life been? Like, that to me alone is like, just buy a new phone. Yeah, it's really good. And again, I didn't do any tests because I was too busy using it. But just my experience is that, especially using the camera, because the camera is really, you know, the display is on and, you know, shooting video is like the easy. I don't know what else you could do. I remember one time I asked, I needed to, I wanted to test how long it took to charge.

a phone that was completely depleted. And I was like, what's the bet? You know, and it's sort of a hard test to run because once you've filled it, you want to test it again, how do you deplete the battery? Best way to deplete the battery that I could find was to shoot 4K60 video and just let it run.

Just shoot 4K60 until the battery is dead. So shooting video is a really good way to drain your battery. It literally, like, if you want to drain the battery, it's the best thing I could think of to do. So out there testing and trying to shoot video and stuff like that, Usually, you know, you've got to charge the phone during the day during the reviews, whereas this time I didn't have to. Its battery life is seriously better. Yeah, we sent Becca out with the little pro to shoot her part of our review video because she does those.

She's great at it. So she went out all night. Well, we had it all day. And when we shoot our videos, we turn off auto brightness. And we are constantly monkeying with the brightness slider for the video cameras. And we turn off auto sleep. So the display is just on at a constant brightness while they're getting shot. No one uses their battery in this way.

You have to be maniac. So all day shooting, then they went out and shot video, then she didn't plug it in at night, and the next day it was still at 50%, which is incredible. To me, it's like, what is the argument for a year-over-year upgrade? It's vastly improved battery life and a much better camera. Like, I'm done. Let's do it.

I've never told anyone to buy a year over-year before. And I'm like, just, it's worth it if you have the money, obviously. It's worth it. And even if you're doing the year-over-year thing, you can get a pretty reasonable trade-in if your phone is in good condition. Oh, I mean, Apple is pushing the trade-in so hard. Right.

Like, Apple's, like my wife, is upgrading year-over-year from a 256-gibabyte 10-s plus 10-S-max, and Apple's trade-in with $600, which is pretty good for a year-old phone. And I know you can get a little more if you go to eBay and, you know, do it that way. But just the automatic trade-in you can get from Apple for a fine-conditioned. one-year-old 256

gigabyte is 600 bucks. So that greatly reduces the price of upgrading. I need to dig into whether it's worth it to do it with Apple or just continue paying whatever horrible fees to AT&TM paying because I'm on that plan. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting too because that is, at a certain level, it's like there was a point writing my review

and I'm like at 5,000 words. I'm like, why the hell did it take me 5,000 words to just say the camera's a lot better and the battery's a lot better? Right? There's a part of me that just wants to be a smart ass and just say, hey, the camera's way better. Here's two examples. The battery's way better.

You should get one and just be done. And then just, you know, have a crack open a beer and watch a movie. But it's funny, too. Those are clearly the two flagship features. They're the ones Apple emphasized. They're the ones. Every review that I've read have backed up and said both of these things are true. Apple says the camera's better, the battery's better.

The camera is a lot better. The battery is a lot better. They're very compelling features because the camera is something almost every iPhone user uses and the battery is one that every you can't use the phone without a battery but the difference is camera you know the camera being better is by definition and you and i just blew half an hour on it earlier it's very subjective like what you know do you like camera a or camera b do you like this you know the the the pixels moodyness do you like apple's sort of plainness you know like i don't know what you would call it you had a good adjective but unopinionated strongly a very strong opinion

that it should be an unopinionated image. It's very subjective, whereas battery life is the least subjective thing. Like if you have an iPhone, whether it's a year old or two years old or four years old or whatever, and it's in the red by the end of your typical day, you know you have a battery problem, right? Like there's no subjectivity to it.

You use the phone, the way you use it, and if you struggle to get to the end of the day on a charge, you know you have a battery problem. Like there's no doubt if, if ands or buts about it. And if that's you, listener of the podcast, that boy you should really consider uh and you know you're in the iPhone ecosystem boy you should really really consider getting one right now so did you get into them with how they do battery life numbers now because this to me is really interesting i like spent a lot of time and review talking about it yeah i saw

that i didn't i didn't talk to them about it because i just i just i like the way that they present it i i love this page by the way it's just you go to apple dot com i haven't memorized apple dot com slash iphone slash compare yeah and it's a really you get you get it's a really you get it's a this three column thing and you can pick three iPhones and it compares all the specs. But now they, the four more hours than last year's phone or five more or one more, yeah, you got into it where it's like, well, what the fuck does that mean? How do you replicate this test? And it's interesting. You can tell me what, you can tell us what Apple told you, which I found very interesting. But the other thing they do, which I found more interesting is here, we just

set them up full charge, streamed video. Here's how long. This one lasts 18 hours. This one was 17. This one was 20, something like that. Like, okay, I get that. Streaming video, I get it. Or audio playback. Audio playback is my favorite one because it just, I love the idea of the one person out of Apple's billion active devices who's like, yep, I just play audio, 27 hours a day. Like, right, once you have that number of users, there's the one.

Well, the other thing is that the number is like 65. It's like 65 hours. That person's very happy, right? Like the billionth user is like, yep. It's basically a tape deck, and that's what I do with it. So that's the thing that got me is these numbers are now getting increasingly self-referential. Right? Yeah.

This year, it's four hours longer than last year. Last year, it's two hours longer than the year before that. The year before that, it's an hour longer than... And it's like, is there a baseline? Is there... Can I run a test on both of these phones and see if one lasts longer than the other? So I get into it with Apple, and they told me that there exists no test. And they used to...

This is true. They used to have a test. They used to have a web browsing test. They basically just like automatically bang around the web. And we used to have one of these tests. Joanna Stern in the journal has a custom test that she does. And it's like these are tests are very difficult to make. Because you effectively have to write a website that has a frame in it

and then reload different pages in the frame at some random interval. And like web browsers don't like doing this. So like you can't, and they all treat it differently. Like this is just the weeds of battery testing. Like, we used to crash laptops all the time trying to do our battery test. They would just give up because, like, that's not how anyone actually browses the web. And you often, like, close a tab and, like, reset the memory. Like, it's just a really hard test.

It's like you want to use real websites because that's what people do. But, like, a real website, you know, like if you're testing right now and I go to the New York Times. There might be a certain ad on the page that actually takes more battery life because it's running some kind of JavaScript. script and an hour later there's a different ad on a page that uses different Java. You know, you might be loading the exact same URL, but getting different stuff sent to the browser. So it's not a scientific fair, fair is fair. Yeah, there's no, there's no rigor to it. But it's just like, here's this, we wrote up this, like, hacky script on a website that's

going to load other websites and then the battery eventually die. And, like, there's no way to tell you that the test is the same every time. And also the test isn't actually still, it's still too different from reality for it to be meaningful. So Apple gets away from this test, and they told me, and I would love to just know more about it. I'll push them on it one of these days, that they have a data set of iPhone usage, right? Like they have however many devices. People who have opted into sending Apple some kind of usage data. Yeah.

The phones are instrumented. If you hit share data, they've got some data, right? And they've turned that into a model, and they didn't even run it on, like, the real phone. It's a prediction based on, like, the use. usage model and then the new phone with the new chip and the new OS and everything and they're predicting this battery life and they actually have a chart right because if you have a big data set of usages you're like okay people who use the phone this much we'll get this much more battery life really heavy power users will get the four hour jump or whatever and then they come up with some

with the claim but there's literally no way unless apple was to give me nilipatel their data set of anonymized iPhone usage for me to get that result. So I can tell you that the phone ran for 14 hours. I can look at the battery settings page and say, okay, the screen was on for 10 hours and 51 minutes off the charger over the past 24 hours. But I don't know that that is even useful anymore to regular people because it doesn't map to anyone's actual use. It just maps to my personal use, which is as unrigorous as a website that loads on their website. Yeah, it is, you know, like I said before, it is a real discreet thing where anybody with a cell phone knows whether their cell phone get good enough battery life for them on a typical basis. But as a reviewer, you really have to do it in the most subjective way possible and just say, you know what, I use this thing for a week and I was using the hell out of it most days.

And yeah, the battery life is good. But, I mean, it's really hard to say more than that or be more precise. And if you're trying to help somebody make a buying decision and you know the questions are, is the camera battery? and it's the battery life longer. And you're like, I can, the one is inherently subjective. The other one is objective, but here's my subjective opinion. It's like, I'm not even, am I doing anything of value? Like, it was a very existential moment for me.

Yeah. And one thing we, it's, as we record, it's Wednesday. And I think probably by 24 hours from now, those mad fiends that I fix it will be in Australia, well, they're probably already in Australia. But they go, everybody knows I fix it does these tear downs as soon as they can get their hands on new iPhones. And to get them as soon as possible, they fly to,

they fly their tear-down team to Australia because that's where Friday the 20th happens first. I love that. I really love that that's, that is how obsessive they are about getting their tear-downs done first. So I think 24 hours from now, as we record, we'll have tear-down information. And I guess, I think it's legal that they have to print like the mill-amp hours

on the batteries. like maybe I could be wrong but somehow usually after the tear downs we'll get an exact figure on the milla amp and that's one of those weird Apple being app does not tell you how much RAM is in an iPhone and it's like trivial to find out there's APIs like so you don't have to like get like you know like write your own code or you know go into X code and do something you can just go to the app store get the geek bench app or there's like a whole bunch of system monitors you have launched the system thing and it tells you how much RAM there is So it's like you don't even have to ask Apple as a reviewer, like, hey, can you tell me how much RAM there is?

And then they say, we're not going to talk about that. You just get the phone, set it up, go to the app, you know, get the app, launch it. And it says, okay, four gigabytes of RAM. But for some reason, they don't want to tell you that. The other thing, among the other things they don't tell you is they will not tell you the millamph hours of the batteries in any iPhone ever. Yeah. I kind of get it from their perspective. And I kind of respect the way that they know it's going to come out and they still won't tell you.

Well, so I think the reasons they don't tell you, and this is like an Android iOS thing, Android phones just have shitloads of RAM. Right. And the iOS doesn't need it, so they don't want to be in a spec war that they're not going to win. And then Android phones also just have gigantic batteries because they need them. And Apple thinks it doesn't. I think the story of this year is, you wrote this, I think I wrote it too. They took out 3D touch, they made the phone sticker, they put a huge battery, and the battery life is 4 hours better.

It's like, yep, that's what you did. You should have done that a while ago. Joanna's theory is that Johnny I've left because they made a phone sticker. Well, the other interesting thing, and they talk about this, they talk about the fact that the A-13, it is faster. You know, did you see this? This is so amazing as a side note. I forget, I wish I could think of who observed this on Twitter,

but somebody observed this on Twitter. So the geek bunch numbers are out, geekbench five or whatever one you want to use. and one of the interesting things benchmarking could be the whole topic of a two-hour conversation. But one thing that's neat about GeekBench is that the same algorithms can be run on desktop computers and tablets and Android and iOS and phones and you get numbers that whether, you know, again,

we could go off on whether it's truly fair and truly accurate. But you get a number and you can compare device to device. The GeekBent single-threaded score for the iOS, iPhone's 11 is 1330 something on average. And that for single-threaded performance is faster than any other device Apple ships. It's faster than 15-inch MacBook Pro. It's faster single-threaded than the IMac Pro. Because the IMAQ Pro is a great computer, but the proeness of it is really on the multi-threaded

stuff. It really kicks in. And those Zeon chips in the iMac Pro by design aren't really as optimized for single-threaded as they are for massively multi-threaded. But that's just insane. The fastest single-threaded device Apple has ever shipped is a goddamn cell phone. It is absolutely hilarious. And it just is like, oh, my God, when the fuck are they going to ship all the Macs to these arm chips?

Because, Jesus, I mean, it's just crazy. Why, I could get a fast, it would be faster. Yeah. Even if they're emulating most of the operating system and applications at some point, it's faster than like a five-year-old MacBook, right? Oh, way faster. I have a five-year-old MacBook, which I love because it has a nice keyboard. The point being the A-13 chip is faster than the A-12.

They're Johnny Siruji's chip team is continuing to do its amazing years ahead of the competition and the rest of the industry magic in terms of performance. But the thing that Apple really talked about, and I think deservedly so, are the power efficiency savings in the A13. A13 apparently does all, you know, this, that, and the other thing to get better power efficiency. And the display on the somehow more power efficient, there's this, that, and the other thing. And you can cut, the neat thing about the 10R shipping last year as this sort of alternate universe 10 class phone with an LCD instead of an OLED and no 3D touch a year ahead of time is we can kind of see how much of the iPhone 11 pros back.

Amazing battery life game. One year after one year, four to five hours of battery life is bonkers. That is bananas. Like the iPhone 10R to the regular iPhone 11 gaining about one hour is nice. And that's normal. That seems normal. That seems like, well, that's a nice year over year improvement.

You know, if we can get an extra hour every year, that would be fine. And that's progress being made. Four to five hours is bananas. is. But the neat thing I think about the 10R being so similar in design to the regular iPhone 11 is you can kind of figure out. So the regular iPhone 11 gets about an hour. Well, whatever that is that gives that about an hour, you got to figure the iPhone 10 pros get that same hour. Yeah. Although I can throw a spanner into your works, which is that they told me the 11 also has a slightly bigger battery than the 10R. Well, then, you know, maybe it's less than an hour, right?

I guess that's interesting, you know, but I think we can assume that the pros have significantly better batteries, bigger batteries, and that that's where most of this four to five hours comes from, you know. Yeah, no, I think your comparison is right. The reason I know that is because I asked them, like, very directly, like, am I to assume that the one hour from the 10R to the 11 is simply due to more efficient hardware at iOS searching being smarter? And I'm like, it's a slightly bigger battery as well. but I think it's ever, they're just thicker phones. Yeah. Well, the thickness is a little negligible. It's four-tenths of a millimeter thicker. Yeah.

But it is thicker. And I think I, I think it's the iPhone 6, I think, is the thinnest iPhone ever shipped. But it might be the 5S. It's either the 5S or the 6. But from that point forward, every single new iPhone since has been thicker than the one a year before. Like, so from the original iPhone through the iPhone 6, they got thinner, thinner, thinner, thinner, thinner, thinner, or this exact same, like going from the 5 to the 5S was the same. And ever since the 6th, it's been thicker, thicker, thicker, even if it's just 4 tenths of a millimeter, philosophically, to me, they actually are, they're clearly aligned with what we on the outside have been saying is, hey, these are thin enough. How about like maybe more battery? Yeah, how about five more hours of battery life? I'll take it for four tenths of an inch. Like, I get it.

I get it that, you know, that at some point we're going to look back at these phones and laugh at how thick they are. That will be in the looper future where we've got these little things that are the thickness of a credit card and that's our phone. I get it. We'll get there, you know, probably maybe some point. But in the meantime, hey, the battery doesn't last long enough. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relative.

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So here's my last question. Which one are you going to get? That's my really last question. Because the 11 Pro versus 11 debate is like raging. Without question, I'd no hesitation. Zero hesitation, zero doubt. The only thing I hesitated on was color. But for me, without hesitation, the iPhone 10 or 11 pro. Not max.

because I want the three cameras. I truly, as a, I hesitate to even say pro sumer, as a long-time, 20-year devout amateur photographer, or at least photo enthusiast, it's just too important to me. And I really, really, I've gone more, I realize now, like my favorite personal real, quote-unquote, real camera, which I really, really have to put dick quotes around now,

because I really think that it's really getting harder to not call these real cameras. Is Fuji X100 S? And I think I got it in like 2015. And then it came the X100 T. And then I don't know. They've added like three letters since then. Like it's like four generations out of date.

I love it. It's a great camera. It's bigger than pocket size, but way smaller than like an SLR. And I have a Canon SLR. and I have some lenses for it that I spend a ridiculous amount of money on that I haven't used literally now in like a year. I just use my iPhone more and more. I have real cameras.

I've gone longer without buying a camera camera right now than I have since like 1999 when I first bought like my first camera. I haven't bought a camera in like four years. And it's not because I've given them up. It's just that I realize how seldom I use them. Like it's probably time for me to get one. And it's going to be neat because I'm going to get. get that like, hey, I haven't bought a camera in five years. Holy crap, are these a lot faster and autofocus works better and stuff like that. Yeah, you're going to get that iPhone 4 to iPhone 11 jump.

I use the telephoto lens. I like it. I love the portrait effect at times. I probably do use it less. And one of the things I think we should talk about, I do think it's a very interesting decision that the regular 11, when it gained the second lens, got an ultra wide instead of a telephoto, even though for the first four years of Apple having dual camera phones, it was regular and telephoto, not regular and ultra-wide. I think that's a very interesting decision, but I want all three. No hesitation. The only question for me was whether I should get the space gray or the midnight green,

and I went space gray because I'm boring. I'm going space gray. I'm the same as you. I'm buying the probe. I'm also very picky about displays, and I can see that LCD, just see it. And most people cannot. Do you know what? But it's funny, I don't see the details.

My close vision isn't good enough to see the details. In some ways, indoors, I actually prefer the color of the LCD. Yeah. I get it. I can see the contrast ratio. I don't watch a lot of movies, though. I almost never watch like movies. So like the black blacks of OLED don't really do much for me.

Where I see it, and again, it's important to me because I really am totally happy to justify spending $400 more for the pro than the regular 11 to use it as a camera is outdoors and sunshine when I'm like taking photos like the extra brightness and the extra contrast really do make it visible in conditions where the LCD isn't or more more visible yeah it's like I mean the contrast is great I mean I mean I stared at an LCD computer display all day and I'm not like throwing out the window like it's great I like the extra contrast I think it's great it's actually the sharpness I can just I can just tell yeah maybe it's all mental like I think so many of these these things are just mental.

I can't see the sharpness. But that's because my eyes aren't good enough anymore. But I believe you that you can because you're a youngster. But do you see what I mean, know, about the colors sometimes indoors? Yeah. I still see OLED is just really hard to get color right. And there are times when, especially this one week when I'm really testing these two phones side by side where like at nighttime in my house, I'm like, you know, I like the color on

the LCD, the iPhone 11 better. This is like what this is supposed to look like. This white looks like a better white to me than on this one. So that is almost certainly related to the fact that it's a stripe LCD and they're actually making white out of RGB pixels all at once as opposed to the weird diamond thing that the OLEDs are doing. And I see that. But especially indoors, especially side by side, I see it. Yeah.

No, I mean, I buy it. You know, it's weird is they should be the same because they all have true tone, right? So they should be calibrating the white the same and they don't. And I ask about this. This is a second year in a row now. I'm like, it's up here at true. Like, it should be the same. And they're like, oh, we made the true tone sensor.

It's wider channels now. So it's definitely different than last year, which is true. So the 10S, my 10S max and my pro are slightly different color temperatures because they're reading differently. But I do not know why the OLED and the LCD end up at different places. No. Because they should be the same. So I do.

And it's funny, there's this amazing consensus among all the reviewers, or almost all, at least, that most people should just get the iPhone 11. Yeah. I said that last year with the 10. I really, and I meant it. And I got some shit from Daring Fireball readers like, why in the world would you recommend to people the phone if you're not buying it? And I'm saying, my answer is I'm not saying everybody should get it.

I'm saying most people, most people I know, don't care anywhere near as much about photography as I do. I know a lot of people who have the iPhone 10S or the 10 who don't even know it has a second camera. And I'm like, look at the back. Don't you see that it has two cameras? You're like, oh, I didn't know. You know, it's really interesting to me. There's endless arguing about the camera tests. I'm assuming most people know this.

If you publish a subjective test into the world and say, this one's definitely better, the world will respond to you. So, like, I hit publish, like, all right, here comes the title wave. It's coming. But so many people are like, to compete with the pixel four, Google's going to have to add a second camera. And it's like, guys, they're not all on at once. It's one sensor at a time. They feel the same because you can do the zooming, but they're not all going.

And I think that is related to you saying people don't even know. Like, the phone isn't telling you. And so I think you talked about the ultra wide. I think part of the deal with the ultra wide is they can show it to you because they got that new viewfinder. And they can show you outside the frame. And they can do stuff. I haven't really gotten, have you gotten the auto cropping adjustment to work? I wasted an enormous amount of time the night before the review that was dropping.

And because I had it working. This is some real iOS 13 shit right here. Yeah. I had it working. And it was too late. It's, you know, the middle of the night. And so it was too late to talk to Apple about it again. I'd already talked to them.

And at the time, the last time I talked to Apple during the review week, it had been working. very well for me. One of the tests I ran was, and did you turn on the option, you go to the settings app and go to camera and you can shoot outside the frame? Yep. And by default, they only have it on for video. And I think the reason they have it off for photos, I asked, why not have it on by default for photos, too?

And I got a weird non-answer from Apple, like, you know, like it took me a second to process and think, hey, wait, that sounds like an answer, but it's not an answer. Yeah. I think the answer is it's buggy, to be honest. I really do think the reason it's not on by default is that it's buggy. Because I got some amazing results with that feature. And the typical use case of that feature is if the horizon is crooked on your photos. It shoots outside the frame all at the same time using the wider lens, the ultra-wide.

They tell you in settings that it keeps it, if you have this on, for 30 days, so that you have 30 days to edit, and then you can rotate the photo. And unlike every other photo you've ever rotated to straighten the horizon, it doesn't crop the original image, which is the way it always had to work. There was no other option. It actually doesn't do that because it uses sensor information from the ultra-wide image that was taken alongside. I tried it with a purposefully crooked horizon where in the outside of the frame of the regular middle wide angle lens was like a truck with writing on it, like a commercial van, thinking, well, maybe I'll be able to detect the edge where the two cameras were joined. Nope. I straighten the image and damn if I could.

So I lied when I told you I never zoomed into 100%. I did on this image. Gotcha. It wasn't to tell how good the camera was. It was to tell how good this using the sensor image from the ultra wide. It worked. And then meantime, flash forward to me the night before, finishing my review, and I'm trying it out.

I couldn't get it to work at all. It just didn't work. I've never once gotten it to work. Dieter got it to work on his ones. I got it to work, and it was amazing. And it was great. And at times with a really crooked horizon, it really had a very large amount outside the frame to choose from.

And with a slightly crooked sensor, it usually only captures or saves a little bit outside the frame. Like it somehow is doing machine learning or maybe even using the gyroscope. I don't know if they're doing that to store. Like they know that you were like two degrees off. It was working great. The night before my review dropped, I couldn't get it to save one pixel outside the frame,

even though I had the option. I thought I was going mad. I thought I was like, I really thought I was losing my mind. I took a lot of photos of our video team where I was like purposefully cropping off half of somebody's face, which is just a bizarre way to take photos. You just like find yourself in that moment. Like what am I doing? It's very strange. And it just did not work.

And then Dieter did the same thing in San Francisco and it worked. So I think it's super buggy. But I think that feature is why the ultra-white is there because it's the one time when actually having two cameras at once makes sense. Yeah, so I think there's two aspects to this feature. One is when you manually decide, I'm going to go in there and recrop this photo and the sensor data is there. And then the other feature is this automatic thing where it detects, hey, you would have been better off getting a little bit more to the right. I'll just move the frame over a little bit. And now the person who was face was half in is now fully in.

But I have never gotten either one of those things to work. Yeah. I never got the second one to work. But I got the reframing or, you know, horizon fixing to work. and then it didn't work, and then it worked again. Tune us. I mean, again, this is like when iOS 13.1 comes out and this stuff doesn't work, it's like, all right, we got to, you like told us this was going to work on stage.

You put this out as a feature of the phone. I'm willing to buy, I'll give them the 10 days, right? Having it stopped working while I was sleep deprived was just the worst. I really thought I was losing my mind. I really did. I mean, I think you're right on the, to wrap up on the 11 versus pro thing. Last year is $250, right, to get the $10. And I think that is, I've spent $250 on much dumber computer upgrades in my life, right?

Or like, I'm going to, I definitely need 16 gigs of RAM today. Sure, right, whatever. Much better display, the extra camera. 300 bucks actually feels significant to me. Yeah. Right? To go from $700 to I'm going to spend $1,000 on this phone, get a smaller screen. I think it's more than that, though, to me, because I,

I don't think that the 64-gigabyte models are good for anybody. And one of the other things that's fantastic about the regular 11, and it was also true of the 10R last year, it contributes to the this is the phone for most people recommendation, is that for 50 bucks, you can go from the base 64 to 128. And the pro models, just like the 10S models last year, don't even offer a 128.

You have to go all the way to 256 and pay even more, whereas just anecdotally testing with people like my wife and all sorts of family members, almost everybody I know would be either a tight fit or has more than 64 gigabytes. 64 wouldn't be good for them. But they easily fit within 128, especially if you turn on like the iCloud settings

to like, you know, store your photos in the cloud and stuff like that. 128 is the sweet spot. It's only 50 bucks more. So to me, the best comparison, and for most people, even people buying the pro, I think should probably get the 256. I'm an idiot and buy the 512. Even though I don't use it. Yeah, I just, why I can't stand not having the best.

So I buy it even though I don't need it. But I think most people should get the 256. What is no? $750 for the 128 iPhone 11. And you have to go all the way to, it's not $999 to get the, because $999 only gets you the 64. You have to pay $11.50, right? So it's $400. Yeah.

And I really think that's fair. I think it's a $400 difference for the phone most people should buy. I think most people, if they're going to get the pro, should get 256 gigabytes. That's $11.50 or $1250 for the max. Yeah. And most people buying the iPhone 11 should get the $1.28. And that's only $750. So it's a $400 difference.

Yeah. I mean, you have to, I think you have to really like zooming in on things or really, really give a shit about display quality. And those are the two things. Like, I am not, I don't know how to test a four by four Mimo LTE antenna versus a two by two. Yeah. Like, I live in New York and AT&T shit. Like, that's what I know. I've rolled my eyes at that.

I mean, I did run speed test side by side in there. And it's like, you know, fuck me in Philadelphia. I've got Verizon. And it's like, I mean, you got to be kidding. You know, I shouldn't complain. I actually do get pretty good Verizon service here in Philadelphia. But there was no way I was going to get better. It was the same.

The worst thing that happening with this review is a number of YouTube commenters, bless their hearts, were like, they said it didn't have 5G and there's a 5G logo. I'm like, oh, come on. I'm like, I literally want to like print it out and send it to AT&T, be like, you did this to me. That's one where AT&T gets to dictate what its network indicator is. And like, you need a lot of leverage to fight that fight. Yeah. So you and I have now spent an hour and 20 minutes, exhaustively talking about features of this phone, comparing them to. other phones and generally like reviewing the phones at one another. That's what we do. We love doing it.

And like you said this earlier, like if you're in the iOS ecosystem, you should buy it. That to me is the line because that line is the thing. I'm reading this New York Times review where Brian Chen is like, don't upgrade your phone, just take flash photos, which is the most insane thing in tech reviewer has ever written, in my opinion. BuzzFeed, John Pukowski, who I like love, he's like, good dude, just like took photos of his dog. He was like, the phone's fine. And then he was tweeting at me like phone reviews are useless. That's why I did it this way. Are you, do you get the sense that Apple, like the lock-in is so deep that no one is cross-shopping and that no one knows how to critically evaluate these products? Like, if you were reviewing

minivans, you would not be like, I drove the Honda Odyssey. I only compared it to last year's Honda Odyssey. I'm unaware of all other minivans in the world. And if you're a Honda Odyssey owner, you should wait five years and buy a Honda. Like, you wouldn't do that in any circumstance. And yet With this phone, it feels like everyone's like, it's inevitable. Apple will do a good job. Just go with the tide. I don't get it. That's a great point.

I think on Twitter, you mentioned, like, you did a Honda Odyssey thing there. You said, like, if you were reviewing blenders, it's like, I'm going to review blenders, but I know I'm going to buy a Vitamix, so I'm only going to review the Vitamix brand ones. Yeah. Software platforms are different. It's hard to make that comparison because you really could, if you're a cooking enthusiast, you really could get rid of your Vitamix and replace it with a different blender

and just keep going. Switching platforms for most people would be difficult. And I have a unique perspective. I mean, I don't write, it seems like it a lot, but, you know, the mission statement of Daring Fireball is not to write about Apple stuff.

It's to write about whatever I'm interested in. It just happens to largely be about Apple stuff. But, you know, I own a Pixel 3. I've, you know, I try to keep at least one foot in that world. I haven't used Windows on the other hand like when I reviewed, I don't even, I haven't used Windows in years. I just don't even look at it. Every once in a while I take a glance at it.

My son has a gaming PC. So I have actually used it recently and looked at it. And it's just like, well, you know, that's it for the next 10 years. I don't need to look at that. I don't know. It is weird. And the U.S. is definitely different than other countries. You know, like, and again, you mentioned this.

Like in India, people seem to be able to switch on the flip of a hat. because they're using like WhatsApp or other messaging things instead of I-Message, so there's no lock-in on that front. But I find it hard to understand how people can switch in other ways. Like I-Message, lock-in aside, I just feel lost and not maybe loss is even the wrong word. I just feel ill at ease in Android. Yeah. It doesn't appeal to me.

But I realize, I also realize fully that I think about user interface in ways that are, atypical from the typical user quote unquote so i don't know it's hard you know and it's that's not my game so i don't really try to do it i did shoot a lot of photos side by side with my pixel three which again i as i said earlier in the show it's you know not exactly it not even a fair comparison because the pixel three is 11 months old and the pixel four is coming next month but just to have it as a reference um what did you think of this new york times read like that's the one that really got me right well the times one i i'm going to write about it later today The Times one to me isn't even about the damn phones.

And I'm going to go off on a media ran here. But I think that the Times is leading the way. But I feel like other newspapers are in the same boat. And they've set their sights institutionally on the tech industry. And it's not just antitrust, which is a legitimate issue. And that's sort of what muddies the waters. I think there are legitimate antitrust issues to look at all of these companies. Certainly Google, probably Facebook, even Apple, and I think that some of these questions about how they were on the app store have legitimate, you know, there's some legitimacy to these investigations.

And that's why we have government. But I think on a larger sense that the traditional media, and the New York Times is the best example I can think of, have decided that they're going to bring down big tech. They're, they're, I think that they're, and I, you know, I'm spitballing here. I don't have proof of this. I could be off base. But I think that institutionally, they are mad that they've lost their role as gatekeepers of lots of things. Information, customer relationships. I think that in the print era, when they knew everything about you as a subscriber to the print version of the newspaper

that was delivered to your doorstep every day and they sold that to marketers when they're not the one selling stuff to marketers anymore. And I think that's reflected in Chen's interview, or not interview, review. I could be wrong. It could be that he had the idea all to himself and he wasn't trying to please his editors or fit in with the rest of the times. Could be wrong. I know Brian a little bit. I can't say we're pals. Could be totally wrong. But I read his review and to me it read like Soviet propaganda. Wow. It's like it's and the propaganda being you don't need big tech. Big tech is you know, you don't need this stuff. And Apple's part of big tech. They're the richest company in the world. That's actually true. They're the most profitable company.

in the world. You don't need to spend $1,000 on their new phone. And really, the whole review read to me as though that was his conclusion. It's not a bad idea. The idea that maybe you should keep your phone longer, the idea that you don't need to I emphasize it every year. Normal people

don't upgrade every year. Most people don't upgrade every two years. Even enthusiasts possibly don't need to upgrade every two years. I'm totally on board with that. If you're happy with your phone, keep using it. And the longer you go, the happier you'll be when you do upgrade because it'll be the more amazing upgrade, right? I'm totally on board with that as a premise. I'm not saying, I have to,

I have to do a lot of this prefacing to say, like, I'm totally on board with that. And I'm not encouraging and try never to encourage people to upgrade every year. I'll tell you what I think. I do upgrade the phone every year. But like I just told you, I'm still using a 2014 MacBook Pro because it's fine for me, and I like it. If you're happy to go with your phone like that, that's fine. But I think as the tech reviewer for the New York Time, reviewing, these phones to write this review. And literally, I'm not making this up. His advice is, you should think about upgrading if your phone is five years old. It's ridiculous. That is absolutely ridiculous as advice from the New York Times call. It reads like Soviet propaganda.

It literally says at some point he's comparing his two-year-old iPhone 10 to the new 11 pro. And he's like, well, the portrait mode is way better on the new one, especially. in low light where the iPhone 10's portrait mode really shoots garbage photos. But you can you could just turn on the flash. That killed me. Like I, it just killed like what what kind of cocaine photos do you want out of like America, right? Like they all look bad. They all look like it's 1988 and you're in the basement of a club when you turn the flash on.

I don't care how good the camera is or the colored sensor thing that they're doing. Like it just looks bad. It's just like, that one is like, no, that's not the answer. The answer is buy a camera instead. It's, I really can't believe that he wrote it. I really, it's. Like Deeter and I have been saying on this podcast, in our phone reviews for years, don't, if you like your phone, do not go out and spend $1,000 on a phone.

If what you want is better photos, buy a camera, right? Like, if you are so motivated to get a new phone because you want better photos, at this point, the year over your improvements, unless you switch ecosystems like a year ago to pixel are not very good. Like, they're fine. And like I, for years I wrote in camera reviews of iPhone reviews.

It takes great photos. That's like all the more you need to do. If you want to spend $1,000 because you want better photos or you're, motivated to spend $1,000, I've spent a year, and Deter spent a year saying buy a camera, buy a Sony RX100. You will be blissfully happy.

And Sony puts out an RX100 every year, just like the iPhone. So you can get like a two-generation old RX100 for like 600 bucks. Buy that. Spend your money there. That camera will last you another decade and you'll get great photos. But don't turn on your flash. That's the worst thing.

I mean, not only is it going to give you a shitty picture, it's also going to really annoy the subjects of your photos. It is some of the worst photographers I've ever heard. I honestly, I mean this in all sincerity with 100% honesty, you, no exaggeration. I don't think I've taken a photo with the flash on in, at least on purpose, in three or four years.

No. I don't know. I can't remember, maybe even longer. I never use it. If I can't get an exposure, I just don't even take the picture. In theory, I could imagine that there might be something that would happen where I really want to get a picture to commemorate this or capture a scene. And if I have to turn the flash on, I would do it.

But I can't remember the last time that happened. By accident, we turned a flash on while we were testing the phone. And literally, the person I was taking the photo of went, what are you doing? Like instinctively. I had to happen by accident. Right. It was very entertaining.

You know, and I would say they should just get rid of the flash, except I use the flashlight all the time. To me, it's not even a flash anymore. It's a flashlight. So that's a ridiculous paragraph. Here's one, though, that's not quite as ridiculous on the surface, but when you think about it really stands out. This is from Brian Chen's review.

I'm going to quote it. All the iPhone 11 models have a new ultra-wide angle lens in their cameras, which provides a wider field of view. than traditional phone cameras. This makes them handy for shooting landscapes or large group gatherings. The iPhone 10 lacks the ultra-wide angle lens, but its dual-lens camera

is capable of shooting portrait-mode photos, which puts the picture's main subject in sharp focus while softly blurring the background. So on the one hand, it doesn't have the ultra-wide, but on the other hand, the two-year-old iPhone 10, now I'm not quoting, I'm paraphrasing. It has a portrait lens. Well, the fucking iPhone 11-bro has a portrait.

lens and it's way better. So in other words, what he's saying, like to paraphrase Brian Chen's argument, the iPhone 10 doesn't have an ultra wide lens, but on the other hand, it does have a crappier version of the telephoto lens. So you've got that going for you.

Like, it makes no sense. Honest to God, Soviet propaganda is maybe a little harsh, but it really reads like that where, you know, it's, it's, the, the, he approached this with the angle of you don't need to upgrade your phone and to me, he wrote it backwards.

He had his conclusion and wrote it backwards. But if you actually read his arguments, he's arguing that you should upgrade. Like, that thing I just said is actually an argument for why you should upgrade because it doesn't have the ultra-wide and the portrait is crappier. This is what I'm getting at, though.

It's bizarre that, and I, you know, I don't, I know Brian a little bit too. Like, he got his job at the United Times because they don't hire, like, terrible people, right? Like, he knows what he's doing. And, like, maybe it's his editors, maybe it's him. I know a lot of tech journalists who are just sort of like full of malaise, right?

Like, everything's horrible. I thought I was getting a job to write about cool tech things. It turns out I'm writing about racist on YouTube. Like, what happened to me? Like, that's out there. That's a feeling a lot of people have. That's a feeling I feel from our audience, right? Like, this was, like, tech was supposed to be fun.

These companies are supposed to be cool. Mostly Nazis on Twitter. Like, I get it. I truly and deeply get it. But it is bizarre to me that you cannot take a thousand dollar product that is the most important product people use every day and evaluate it critically in its own merits. Like it, there's just not, I'm trying to think, you mentioned I have a vitamin mix blender,

cars, like you would not accept from if the New York Times is reviewing a new car, which they sometimes do, that they would just like not even, not even mention that other cars existed, right? That they would just be like, your car is probably fine. Like, it's just a bizarre way of thinking about these products. Right. This is the new Porsche Electric, you don't need it. Like, yeah, it's, it is true that most cars are fine, and the car you have is undoubtedly

going from place to place. But, like, it's, they're expensive, they say something about you. Like, there's an inevitability to, in particular the iPhone that I think is just, and this is like the BuzzFeed Review, which is very funny, where I think the Times Review is, it feels cynical. The BuzzFeed review is deeply funny, right? Like, John's like, look, I took a bunch of pictures of my dogs. That's really what you're going to do with the phone.

The pictures are great. Here's a list of features. I'm out. Like, if you want a phone, buy a phone, I don't give a shit. Like, that's his attitude. It's a very funny. He's a super funny writer. But it doesn't have the word Samsung in it.

Right. Well, he does mention the pixel, though. Yeah, but Google sells eight phones a year. I didn't mention Samsung in my review. But your audience does not give a shit about the Samsung phone. Right. They don't, really. They don't.

And, like, I personally think it is bizarre that Samsung sells as many phones. This goes back into that weird, dark world of carrier marketing. Yeah. Like, the Samsung phones are very good and they're very popular. But, like, if you're buying an Android phone, I think you should buy a pixel. Why doesn't Google sell more phones? Because Samsung markets the shit out of its phones. Like, fine.

Yeah. But, like, you can't, that's, that is Apple's competitor. In this country, the company that scares, quote, unquote, Apple the most is Samsung. It's just true. In China, it's Huawei. At the event, they were showing us photos from the Huawei P30 Pro and talking shit about them because they know that's the competition. But it's bizarre. Like, you've got your audience fine.

But BuzzFeed and the Times are big mainstream general interest news organizations. And they don't even mention, like, when you are in the store buying this phone that is being forced upon you every two years, there's some other phones you. can look at. Like, I just don't, there's something about that that kills me. Well, the, the hypothetical I like to toss out. And I think about it all the time. And I especially think about it when I'm using, like, getting, buying a pixel and using a pixel or something like that. And I used to do it with, used to use the same analogy with Windows and Mac. But the, the test I like to ask people is what would, like you, like, what would, if you were forced to choose between these two hypothetical devices, which would you choose? Would you choose an iPhone 11 pro running the latest,

version of Android or a pixel 3 or next month a pixel 4 running iOS 13.1. Yeah, right now, it's awesome. I personally, without hesitation, would choose to use a pixel running iOS. I'm more attached to iOS by far than I am to the iPhone hardware. Yeah. So to me, this comes down to literally two things because I do think the pixel is great and then you know every so often I like use a pixel for a while it's I message and it's hilariously AirDrop and now it's becoming my Apple Watch a little bit

right? I use AirDrop all day every day it is super convenient and great and like you know I again to come back to this like very narrow use case in my life like I take a lot of photos of the baby I send the photos to my wife like how do we do that we use AirDrop nonstop like that's the thing that we do every day

the tie to the Apple Watch is great. Like I've started wearing it this year. I wasn't wearing it before. Less so. And then it's eye message, right? Like all of my friends are on I message. The moments that I'm a green bubble, they're like, dude, what are you doing? We're not talking about.

The only person I know who said to be green bubbles is Matt Honin. And every time it comes, I'm like, what? Is something broken on Matt's phone? I'm like, oh yeah, he uses an Android. It means really something. We have done endless episodes of podcasts. Ashley Carmen, our senior reporter, and Caitlin Tiffany, who's not the Atlantic, they have a show called Watch and Press a Button. They've done episodes on, like, guys who are using dating apps to get ghosted when their bubbles are green.

So they wait. Like, it's a cultural phenomenon. Yes. Okay. If you put iMessage on Android, I think your question about would I take Apple hardware running Android totally changes. I might because Android can do a bunch of things. And, I mean, my iPhone is a vessel for Google search. services, right? Like, my company runs on G Suite. So it's like Gmail, we run a YouTube channel, right? Like, I use Google Maps. I think it's better. Like, on and on and on, I think their services are really, really good. And so, like, yeah, that integration is very appealing to me when I use an Android phone. There's something about it that works incredibly well. I think Google Assistant is way better than Siri. Like, it's just a fact. I have a Google HomeUp. Like, all that stuff, it seems so compelling. Right, I'm going to walk into my house and Google Assistant on my phone and the one, the, the

smart speaker I have is going to do a thing and I've got an Android TV and it's all going to beam around and do whatever cool ecosystem stuff it's going to do. And I'm like, but my friends won't talk to me. Yeah. And that's it. I think we're lucky that the rest of the world is less attached and maybe as a little bit makes these choices on a more, which is the better hardware? Because it definitely keeps Apple on its toes. Like if the whole world reflected the U.S. mentality, it would be a lot easier for Apple to rest on its laurels on the hardware side. Yeah. And I think the camera thing is absolutely related to the Chinese market.

The Chinese market is, Ben Thompson makes this point all the time, is a super hardware sensitive market because Wii chat is dominant. It cuts across all the platforms. Like the operating system is basically WeChat. And Apple was getting its ass kicked by the Chinese hardware makers, specifically in camera. Even though they've like totally ripped off the camera app, like it's hilarious, right? To a shameless degree.

An utterly shameless degree. But that is a kind of competition that makes Apple have to perform. And that's great. And here, it's like the biggest publications around are like, yeah, you don't have to overthink this. Just like wait until your phone explodes in your hand and then buy a new one and it'll be fine. And it's like, well, you want to know if Apple tried hard? Like, do you want to know if they made a good thing?

Because it doesn't, taking that for granted that Apple will do a good job is so tempting. But if you don't actually evaluate their claims, if you don't actually see if they are doing what they say they're going to do, then they have no incentive to keep doing it. Yeah. And that to me, I don't know, there's something about it that you were talking about antitrust. That lock-in that prevents competition that lets you basically write a review of a product that doesn't even gesture at the fact that it has competitors or that you might buy something else or that you could or you should, that's like, okay, the market is failing, right?

Like there's something there where, like, you can't vote with your dollars if you're always going to vote the same way. And like what, what in this country is going to push Apple to be better if we now have this, like, pretty solid evidence that you can write a review of the phone without ever suggesting that you should buy something else or you could. I don't know. Maybe I'm too heady. Maybe this is all too out there. But it, I was reading these reviews. I was like, no one's, no one's, like, you and I wrote the most about the cameras, ultimately. Yeah. Well, I thought Joanna's was really interesting because it was like the inverse of my take, where she focused so heavily on the, she's like, oh yeah, the cameras, the camera. Yeah. The cameras are

better, but let me tell you about the battery. And mine was, hey, the battery life is way better, and that's great. But let me tell you about the camera. Yeah. Well, I mean, like, Joanna is like a dear friend of mine. And we were like, they, I think they booked us on CNBC together. So we would argue, like, because we had that debate, like, is it the camera and the battery. I think Joanna did a great job, but her audience is the Wall Street Journal audience. Right. And it's like literally, will this, will this phone last on your trip to Davos? It's like, that's the thing. Like, your pro photographer's coming with you, Kim Kardashian. And Don't worry about your phone camera.

Like, yeah, I mean, I think that focus was really good. She wrote two pieces. Actually, she wrote the dead on review. Like, I'm evaluating the phone and talking about it. And then she wrote a Q&A for people who are switching or upgrading. Like, how is this going to feel if you have an iPhone 5? I thought that was really smart. I love writing these reviews.

Sometimes I always get to a point about two thirds of the way through where I, like, I hate myself. I think I'm lost. I think I've lost the thread. I'm in the weeds. What the hell am I doing? but at a basic level the people whose reviews I like reading and I love it when you know like Joanna's had this totally different angle where it's all about the battery life and I loved reading yours and like I told you I love your even though we were both photo obsessed you have a very different way of evaluating what you like or don't like you know about the photos I love that that's why I like reading it but fundamentally all the people who write reviews that I enjoy reading have the exact same why am I doing this what am I doing here? And to me, it's a very simple question.

It's or the purpose of a review is very simple. I would like to help the people reading this review understand this device so that they can make, like I'm not telling you whether you should upgrade or not. I'm trying to give you an understanding of what it is, what it's good for, what it's worth, and then you can evaluate whether that's appealing to you compared to what you already have. I just want you to understand it because you can't take, of course you can't take Apple at its word, you know, although I think more than most companies, you know, what they say about their products is generally true.

And we talked about it. Their event was a little bit low key, and it was mostly about photography, and that turns out that was pretty accurate. But I'm confirming it and trying to help you understand. Here's the things that are good and bad and frustrating. Yeah. I want you to understand it.

And that's where Chen's quote-unquote review is like useless. It really wasn't about helping you understand the device at all. It was like, don't look at the device. Don't look at the device. Yeah, just take it for granted. Are you like me? Do you read movie reviews only after you've watched a movie? Only, only.

And in fact, but it's gotten to the point now where I have this backlog of pin, I use pinboard, the delicious clone, you know, say bookmarks. I've got this backlog of reviews bookmarked and pinboard of movies I have watched and I haven't gone back and read the reviews. That to me is a goal. Like, great. Like, I think one of the biggest jobs of Virch has to help you buy stuff, like, make good buying decisions. We have a comprehensive review program.

Like that's part of it. That's one of the things we should do. Like which smart light bulbs should you buy? Like we should be able to help you do that. But why, right? You want them to understand, you know, you're not just giving them the advice here, buy this one. It's like, here's why.

You know, and to explain why, you try to give them the, look, I've got six days with this thing under my belt and I've spent all day every day doing it. You know, I've got the luxury where I didn't have, you know, my job actually is using the phone all day for six days. So it's not just like six days, but I was doing some other job. Yeah. And if you're going to assume that people are coming to you to help make buying decisions, like you have, I feel that as a very big responsibility.

My goal is that after you've bought the phone, that is the best time to read the review. Right. Yeah. You're holding it. You're excited. You've got it. You're going to read the review. And I'm going to tell you, here are all the steps of how it takes a photo.

Or like, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to learn that spatial audio means that Netflix plays in 5.1 and you're going to try it out. Like, that's a piece of that puzzle that I think is important for the review to do. And I, you buy the phone, you read the times where you're like, you feel bad about yourself. That is like weird. It's just, I don't know, I'm harping on it because there's just a piece of it where it's like we have to, these are the most important products that exist, like among the most important products. Like, you're talking about people in underdeveloped countries, like they will pick phone. over plumbing, like, that is a fact.

So, like, if we don't acknowledge, like, the centrality of the thing and, like, actually look at the thing for what it is instead of its ripple effect of consequences, like, we're going to miss the plot a little bit. All right, I got to ask you what it's, like, such a boring update, but I got to ask you with the watch. And I specifically, I want to call out a part of your review. I'm coming at you. I'm springing this on you.

You have this paragraph in your watch review today about when to launch a product. Yeah. And it my literally my 2015 Macquick Pro died, so I no longer can read it directly to you. But it's something like the first Apple Watch arguably came out too soon. It was slow. The apps barely worked. And Apple didn't quite know what it was for. Yeah.

Do you know that that is literally the first line and the last line of my Gen 1 Apple Watch review? Well, then hats off to you. You got it right. No, it was just super. I was like, because I knew you were coming on the show. I was like, do you think? Like the first line after the preamble is. I got to tell you the Apple Watch is kind of slow.

And the last line is don't spend money on how it looks until Apple knows what it's for. And that, to me, it's the summation of that first one. And thinking about this event and how it wasn't quite as bombastic, it made me remember how insanely bombastic the Apple Watch launch event was. Yeah, yeah, it was. And they totally overpromised. Yeah. Do you remember Tim Cook saying the digital crown was an input device on par with the mouse? Yes, I do.

I do. Like that is just, like, what are you doing, man? And now it's like this amazing product. Like, I really like my Series 4. I haven't done much with the Series 5 yet because I was reviewing these phones. But it seems like the always on display is like, it's done. Like, you don't, I think Dieter's line is, you know, every year we joke. Like, the new iPad is an iPad.

Like, it's great. This is like, it's an Apple Watch. Like, you know exactly what it is. You know exactly what it's going to do. It can be the thing you want it to be. And it doesn't have to be the stuff you don't. But other than that, there's like, not a lot to say.

Yeah, I agree. I think my review kind of conveys it. I'm really happy with my Apple Watch Series 5 review. I'm usually, usually I can't tell if I got a review right or not

until the dust is settled. Yeah. Whereas this one, I just feel certain. It's, you know, I really, really, it sounds snarky, but I really could have just said,

look, it has an always on display and that's the single thing that I've been waiting for ever since this thing appeared and now that it has it and it works great. So it's it. We were talking before we came on about the S5.

You want to go through that for the audience? Because they updated the chip, but it doesn't seem like the process is any different. Yeah. So I guess the way it came out is that through people using Xcode and developers can get, you know, some kind of information about it. And the gist is that I guess, you know, hand-waving the technical details that the CPU and GPU are the same in the last year's S-4 chip and this year's S-5. But I do think that it does, you know, so why did they call it? S5 instead of just saying it still has an S4. I suspect I don't know this for a fact.

I'm totally speculating here, but I'm almost certain. I do know, we do know that the display driver must be different because the way, one of the ways that they've made the always on display work without running your battery down is that the display can run at a different refresh rate. Typically it's, I guess every watch to date has been at 60 hertz, meaning it's update 60 times a second. The new one, the Series 5, can drop down to 1 hertz, meaning it update, the screen only refreshes once a second, and that's obviously much lower power.

But that comes from the display driver. And it sounds like that should be easy, but it actually isn't. I think, you know, the multiple, this dynamic refresh rates and displays is apparently, I don't understand why, but it's apparently very difficult technology. And for the most part, until very recently, all computers we've ever used have a consistent refresh rate. Remember in the old days with CRTs, you could like change it. You could change the, the Hertz on your monitor.

But it never changed. You had to like hit like a button on the side or rotate a dial or something. And you get that sound like, dooms? Yeah. Yeah. And like the cathode ray tube, it would like, you know, you'd get like a nice little effect. It would flash or something.

So I'm guessing. I can't, I would be shocked if the display driver wasn't on the, the system on a chip. So I think the reason it's called the S5 and not the S4 isn't because of The CPU and GPU might be the same, but like the display driver at the very least is different, and there might be all sorts of other things tucked into that system on a chip that are different. Yeah, I think the compass is on that chip too. Yeah, I bet it is. I would bet that it is.

Are you finding that low power one-hertz state to be effective? Yes. Or I don't know if it's always... The one thing I don't know is, is it always in a one-hurt state while it's in low-power mode? I don't know. I think so. So it is variable refresh, so it can go anywhere between 1 and 60, depending on. what you're doing, but in a low power mode, it's definitely just one hurts.

Well, one thing I noticed, I caught it was, again, I know it's dynamic. So I tend to use a watch face almost always. In fact, 99. something percent of the time with actual analog style hour and minute hands. I don't like, just the way my mind works for telling time. Like a digital watch, a digital display where it says like 7 colon 35, I have to like translate in my head. I have to think about what that means. just the way my mind works. Other people feel

the other way where they look at hour hands and they have to convert them to numbers. So anyway, I use hour and minute hands. When you go into low power mode, the second hand disappears because they don't want to show one that just tick, tick, tick. If they can't make it nice, smooth sweeping, they just take it

away. When the minute changes, the minute hand moves. So like if it's right now, if it's 715, that minute hand will stay exactly at the 3 o'clock marker. until 716 and then it'll move. So it doesn't, you know, and that's just a low power thing, right?

Whereas when the watches lit up, the minute hand slowly moves between, you know. But I watched it go from one minute to the next and it doesn't just snap. It does animate. So there's, you know, and while it's still in low power mode. So obviously to animate between one minute to the next minute, it's not doing it at 1 hertz. So the dynamic thing definitely kicks in in low power. mode. I find it very effective. I really like it. Yeah. I mean, I use Infograph Modular, which is not the world's most beautiful watch face, but I like having my calendar right there, like in

huge letters. So I just literally know what conference room in this office building I'm going to next. Like, that's the thing I need most for my watch. It's actually not the time. You're never going to believe this. My watch just restarted. iOS 13 strikes again. I swear God. I guess it was, you know what? The Apple logo was only there for a little bit, so it must have just been springboard, but it's still, it just restarted midpot guys. 10 days for now. Are they doing a watchOS 6.1? No, I don't think so. Or if they are, it hasn't been announced. The watch doesn't seem nearly as buggy, but it did just crash on me. That's amazing. I didn't review, I wanted to make a distinction between the OS and the

watch. So, like, my watch review is relatively short, at least by my standards. So I didn't really get into the watch thing. But if I were going to write about watchOS 6, how about, how about the watchOS 6, how at this point, I got to say, that honeycomb app arrangement when you press the digital crown and go to your apps is the most ridiculous interface ever. It's horrible. Half of the icons from Apple are indistinguishable at that size. They're just like, if it's related to time, it's an orange circle. Who knows if it's the timer or the stopwatch or whatever? It's an orange circle. Keep tapping until you get the right one. My number one tip for all Apple users, and I don't know how many people don't know this, but if you're listening, if you like force press on that screen, you get options.

and one of the options is just, or I guess the only options, are to switch between that honeycomb, they call it grid view and list view. List view is so much better. It just puts all your apps in an alphabetical order and then you can scroll through them. And in six, Apple made List View much prettier. And hilariously, every time they've demoed the watch to me,

it's been in List View. So I think the default is shifting because they're not even showing me the grid anymore. Yeah. All right. On that note, I've taken up so much every time, Mr. Gruber. I appreciate it. Well, I'll make it up to you next.

This is great. I do like this. I always enjoy it. And it really is a fun part. I look forward to it. It's a fun part of, it's like Super Bowl week for us. Yeah.

And it's at the end of it. It feels like we're watching the game tape. That's what that's how we should think about it. All right. John Gruber. Thank you so much for coming on the Vergecast. They can find you where? At Gruber on Twitter.

And of course, daring fireball. And you've got a very popular podcast if you're on. Don't hesitate to plug it. The talk show. But it's, you know, you can find it at Daring Fireball. dot net just go there you can find it all all right my thanks to john gruber from daring fireball

you heard him you can go check him out daring fireball dot net you can check out his show the talk show we'll back on friday with the chat show and then next week on tuesday i interviewed davis gugenheim who just directed the netflix documentary inside bill's brain about bill gates that is a great conversation look out for that stuff come to your feed soon