The Vergecast - Reviewing the iPhone 16

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

We've finally finished testing, scoring, and reviewing Apple's new gear for the fall. On this episode we talk through our reviews of the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, the Apple Watch 10, and the AirPods 4, to see whether they're real upgrades and whether they're worth your money. And then, on the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11), we make the case for the Pixel in 2024. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of ugly color-tinted app icons that we love anyway. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I bought a new computer monitor. This is not like exciting big news, but to me it is exciting and big news. I went from 24 inches to 27 inches, which is actually a bigger difference than I expected. I've almost got a 32-inch monitor, but the idea of being one of those people who has to like look from side to side to see everything on my screen just felt really. ridiculous. It's just a normal like 4K Dell monitor. I don't think I'm good enough or sensitive enough to need a studio display or one of those LG ones that everybody likes that are, you know, thousands of dollars. I'm a simple man with simple pixel needs and this one makes me happy.

But there is one feature about it that I deeply, deeply love already. So I spend all of my time staring into webcams, right? I'm doing podcasts. We're making videos. I'm just in media. I'm using webcams all day, every day. That is the life of a modern person, it seems. And I never know where to look, right? You can do the thing where you, like, barrel the camera and it kind of freaks everybody out because they're making eye contact with you over Zoom. Or you can sort of look way down and they're looking at the top of your head, but you're

looking at them, and so there's no eye contact. It's weird. And what this monitor does is it just lets me, it just lets me slide it up and down. So I can go down. so it's easier. It's like right at eye level. I can make eye contact. I can move it up.

So then it's up there and it's nice and high. And now it's not weird because I can look at sort of a normal distance. And I'm looking right into the screen and not into the camera. I love it. Now I can just make whatever level of eye contact I want to. And I can wield eye contact as a weapon instead of just awkwardly sort of staring down all the time. I'm unstoppable now. my webcam game is on point.

Anyway, we're not here to talk about computer monitors or webcams or my deep eye contact. We are here to talk about Apple reviews. That's what we're going to do on this whole show. All the new devices came out. We've reviewed all of them. That's actually the reason the show is a day late. Embargoes make everything complicated. But all of our reviews are out.

The new iPhones, the new Apple watches, the new AirPods, everything. And we're going to spend this whole show talking about those, whether you should buy them, whether they're good upgrades, what all this means? for the future of everything in our lives. So much to get to. It's going to be very fun. All that is coming up in just a second, but I have been sitting here staring into this camera for way too long now,

and I've got to go take a break before we get into it. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools

means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data

in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star,

Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. All right, let's just get right into the reviews, starting with, I think, the obvious one, the iPhone.

So four new iPhones this year, iPhone 16, 16 plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Macs. Max. And yes, I have reached the point we're saying the words iPhone or 16 all just sounds not like words anymore. You know how it happens? It's not great. But some spec bumps, some new buttons, some old buttons on new phones, an interesting lineup this year. And I would say one of the more complicated ones to suss out which phone is actually the right one for most people. So we're going to get into that. Neil I Patel and Alison Johnson have been reviewing these things ever since We got them and heard about them last week, and they have lots of thoughts. Let's dive in.

Neilie Patel, hello. Hello. Alison Johnson. Hi. Hello. Okay, so just to like pull back the cover slightly here, we are doing this 24 hours before the review embargo, not even 20 hours before the review embargo for the iPhones, which is not a super fun time to do anything if you are the person having to review the iPhone.

So just thank you both for doing this to me. And also, if you just sort of like disappear into a little. insanity in the middle of this, I will understand. Well, actually, can I say one thing about that, which is, I think, very funny. Please. The review period is a day longer than usual, even though there's a full days less worth of stuff to talk about on these things. Right, because the event was a Monday, and it's normally Tuesday to Tuesday.

Yeah. And now it's Monday to Wednesday. It's Monday to Wednesday, yeah. Every new button, we get an extra day. I think is how it works. It's just fun. It's like for as little stuff as there is to say, we have much more time to say it, which I think is fascinating.

Yeah. But please keep it this way. Apple, if you're listening, more time is better, which I've been telling them for a full decade. No takebacks. Yeah, agreed. This is the bare minimum forever, Apple. Okay, so, Allison, you're doing the regular iPhones, and Neely, you've, you've been reviewing the pro. Is that right? Yes. Okay. So let's just quickly dispense with all the stuff that is not on these phones yet, which is any sign of Apple intelligence. Have you noticed? Like, it's been a weird time. That was the big thing they talked about. The iOS 18 came out. There's a bunch of new stuff in there, but none of the really Apple intelligence stuff. Like, do these phones feel incomplete in your lives without Apple intelligence stuff? Like, how much should people write out of the fact that none of that is here yet? No, I'm finding it kind of easy to ignore. Like, there's a ton of new stuff in iOS 18, actually, without all the Apple intelligence. So it just very much feels like the new iPhone. Like, you know, there's two new buttons on the regular version.

There's all this stuff to dig into in iOS 18. So it's kind of out of my mind for the moment, for sure. Niela, what about you? We had a big argument about this last week. We did. I think these phones are incomplete in that it's hard to make the case to buy one if you have an iPhone. And the reason that you might buy, particularly the regular 16, is that it has the 8 gigs of RAM, which supports Apple intelligence,

which is not here. So if you have a regular iPhone and you upgrade to the new iPhone 16, you'll have a nice experience. Anything Allison has had a nice experience. It's a nice phone. It's $7.99. You get a bunch of stuff. But it will be essentially the same experience as upgrading a regular phone to iOS 18.

And I think that's a real problem for Apple. I feel the same way in the pro as well, particularly of a 15 pro. There is zero reason to get a 16 pro. The 15 pro is getting Apple intelligence when it arrives. it's just hard to make the case. So I've spent a week with these phones. I've come up with one reason to upgrade them. And that is so wonky and you have to be such a photo nerd to even make the argument that I don't think it's convincing.

Okay, well, that is where we're going to spend most of our time. But I am curious, big picture, Alison, has that been your takeaway to? Like, pretty good phone, nothing to sort of run out to the store for here. Yeah, I think, like, I agree with. everything, Neely says, except that there's no reason to upgrade to it. I think it is like, it's, it's the, we're on like a three or four year cadence of like you hold on to your iPhone and you're sort of doing this dance of like, should I upgrade? Should I not upgrade? And this is excluding anybody who's like super interested in a 5x telephoto lens or like any of the,

the cool pro stuff that happens. So I don't, I think for someone who's doing that dance of like, is it now to upgrade now? Like this is a really good year to upgrade. But yeah, it's going to be an iPhone. It's going to be a lot like the iPhone you had. I do like that as a way of thinking about it, actually, because there is the question of like, is this the phone you've been waiting for? And I think the answer is no.

But the question is, if the question is, should you wait for the next one, the answer is also kind of no, which says something about like the just the path that we're on with the iPhone. But it's also a nice place to be. It's like, if you need a new phone, go by this one. You'll like it. And it will do the things that are coming

you won't feel left out by the time we get to the next one. There's also just the reality of how most people are acquiring these phones now, which is they're on payment plans, their carriers on a cycle. Right. So will this phone just happen to you? It will. It will just occur to you, and you'll wake up one day and you'll have an iPhone 16, and that will just be the end of it.

And I think that's fine and weird, but it is true, as Alison points out, but those upgrade cycles can get much longer now. And that to me is why I keep saying the phone's incomplete. Because you would, ideally, Apple would get to push up the upgrade cycle by offering the suite of new features that you can't get on any of iPhones. And that is just not the case right now. Yeah, that's fair. So before we get into the camera stuff, which is I assume where we are going to get very lost in the weeds of Nelai's feelings. Is there anything else about these that you want to like spend some time talking about?

I think we've talked about the action button feels like it's good that that's coming to the base level phones. Has anything else really like jumped out at you and your experiences here, Alison, on particularly. curious for you with the entry-level phone, quote-unquote, entry-level phone. Is there anything that you feel like has jumped out in your experience so far that we should talk about? No, it's sort of just been a feeling like, oh, this is nice that this is here. You know, I spent some time with the 15 Pro before I moved over to the 16 that I'm reviewing and just feeling like, oh, okay, I get this little action button and I program it to open

the daycare app. So when I'm signing my kid out, there isn't like a line of people behind me while I'm fumbling around trying to find an app. So it's like just just a little nice to have things here and there. But yeah, the real actions and the camera stuff, I think. Okay. Let's just get into this now. And Nelai, I would like you to explain what I would call not quite an existential crisis, but like a deep philosophical hole you have fallen into. over the last week about the iPhone 16's camera.

Yeah. What has your experience been? There's just a lot going on with this camera. So I think the first thing to say is that the pro camera is in fact significantly better than the regular iPhone 16 camera. We've gotten a lot of questions from folks that are asking whether the pro is worth it this year because on paper, the specs seem pretty much the same. And then you actually look at the photos and the pro camera is just substantially better.

The main camera is substantially better. It can capture more. light, it has bigger pixels, all this stuff. But as you use them, and particularly as you use the new photographic styles, Alison and I have been talking. And the entire vibe from Apple is like, you figure it out. Like, what do you want? What do you want photos to look like?

You just, you just, whatever you want is fine. Whatever color you want the people to be is fine. And that is just like, it's not wrong, right? Like, that is a pretty valid approach to give the person taking the photo control over what the photos look like. But Apple also ships the most popular camera in the world, and it is like they have just let go

of having a point of view, which is, I think, a big change. And it's not a big change in the sense that, like, it's doing wild AI stuff. It's just a big, like,

once you let go of what color people are, like, there's not much left to hold on to, you know what I mean? Yeah. Real quick, how do you actually use the styles? It's a thing we saw like bits and pieces of it in the announcement, but you guys have actually used these.

Like how do they fit into the workflow of using the camera? In like 10 different ways. Well, this is why I asked because it's not. My initial impression was that it was kind of like an Instagram filter where like you take a picture and then it's like these are the things it can look like. It seems like it is that and not that at the same time. It is not. It's much fancier on Instagram filters, but at the end I think most people will perceive them to be Instagram. filters.

Okay. Do you know what I mean? Like they're, an Instagram filter literally just sits over the top of your photo. Apple controls the whole imaging pipeline,

so it can just do a higher quality job of adding colors and shadows and whatever. So yeah, Apple is running the same, you know, take up to nine photos, HDR imaging pipeline

that they always have been. They call the Photonic Engine, which is very funny. And all they've really done is reshuffle the steps so that you can edit the styles after you've taken a photo. That's it. It's the same basic steps as the iPhone 15, and the thing that they've changed is when you take your nine photos that expose everything in the

photo evenly, now you can do things like change which parts of the photo expose at what rates, how many shadows there are. They can semantically detect faces. So you can adjust things like the undertones and skin tone, which is one set of filters. Or you can go pretty wild into what they call the mood filters, then that's much more like the Fuji film recipes, where you're like simulating a film stock that has different colors. And it's cool. All of it is cool.

And then the actual controls of it are you can do it live with a preview. You can switch the styles using the new camera control, you like slide along. And then there's a really important control that we'll get to called tone, which you can also adjust while you're taking a photo. That is the HDRness of a photo, for lack of a better term. And you can just turn it down. When I say there's one reason to buy this camera, it's that.

You can just turn off Apple's super intense HDR look and make it look like a normal camera again. And so you can control that. Or once you've taken a photo, you open the photo picker and you can change the styles. And it is a D-pad, which is just a totally fiddly way of dealing with this. Yeah. But it's like you have a little two-axis D-pad of what your photo looks like. and you can mess around with it. So this sounds like the kind of thing that is like extra editing features as the way you're describing it, which seems like fine.

They're just like, here's some stuff you might do in Lightroom. We're going to let you do it in the Photos app. Alison, are you using this as much as Nile is? Like, has this caused you as much philosophical pain? Is this caused Neli over the last week? Yeah. I don't know if pain's the right. Well, no, pain is the right word.

Yeah, I'm super into it. Like, I am a person who want, I want more shadows in my photos. I'm tired of, you know, everything being smushed into this gray middle ground. Yes. And this feels like the answer to a lot of people being like, skin tones look weird on my iPhone or like, I don't like all this HDR processing. Yeah, they're just going like, okay, you do the work then. But I like that because I like getting in there and messing with things. It's kind of wonky how you set it up.

Like I think with the previous photographic styles, you would just kind of swipe to one and then, like, you could make that your default from the camera app, I think. This time around, you kind of have to go through this like setup process where it's like pick four of your favorite photos that you've taken with this camera. And there's like a whole philosophical thing of like, you know, the the thesis is like to get you to dial in the skin tone you kind of prefer, like a warmer or cooler cast. And so you're like, is this four pictures of me? Is this four pictures of my kid? Like, what does this mean? So there's a weird kind of, I kind of had to work through all that. And then I settled on one. I think I like. Allison and I both have families with ranges of skin tones in them. So you're like, I'm going to pick these four. four photos, and then I'm going to pick a style, and it's like, who? Yeah.

And I think we both landed on our kids who are, like, interesting, in the middle. Like, I only accidentally take a picture of my husband sometimes. Like, it's all pictures of my kid. But, yeah, he's sort of in the middle ground there. Yeah. And that picker is actually really interesting because you open it and it says pick four photos and you think you're going to do something algorithmic or mathematical, but it's just a preview.

It's just preview. You can slide through the presets and then pick one you like and then that is the default, which is, I think, a little odd. You can also just change it after the fact. You can leave it. You mess with the camera controls. There's so many camera controls.

You can leave it so it's sticky once you pick one. All the stuff you can do to get the camera to consistently shoot the photos you want them to look. But there's nothing about it that sort of guides you to it apart from pick four photos of someone and pick an undertone that, it becomes the preferred undertone. Yeah, that's really interesting.

There's such a like power of defaults thing in that that feels so unappily to me. That it's like Apple is, like, Apple is for better and for worse, the most aggressive company, maybe in tech at being like, here is how this should work. Yeah. And it has sort of slowly rolled it back in such a way that if you want to change things, you can, but it has still always had really strong opinions about how things should be. And so what's really interesting here is one, all of these features are on both the pro phone and the regular phone. The camera control,

the styles, the sliders, the tone, all of it is there on both phones, which is fascinating. And then the default, the take it out of the box, take a picture, it's even more HDR than it was before. Oh, really? So Apple has heard all this feedback. They've taken all this criticism. You know, in the review video, you'll see we just have a super cut of people on TikTok saying the camera looks bad on the iPhone 15 Pro. Alex Earle, to 7 million followers. like, why does the iPhone 15 camera suck? I've been reviewing things a long time. I will never publish anything that devastating.

That's bad, right? That's a bad place for them to be. And they, instead of walking it back, they've added these controls, but then the photos, one to one, are even brighter from the 15 pro to the 16 pro. The photos from the 16 pro are even, like, massively brighter than the photos from the 16. So Apple's really leaning into, we're going to bring down all the bright parts and bring up all the shadows and everything will be totally flat. so you can see all the detail,

but then they're adding this control, which is, you know, tone is like a weird word to put in the top level of a camera. Yeah. Right? And what they mean,

what that means is tone mapping, which is not a word that anyone knows. No. Like what most people, when they see tone, I think they think of the old control and like a CRT TV. They would just make everything green

or like make everything blue. Right. It's a color slider. Yeah. Right. And this, what this actually is a shadows. So they're taking that big stack

had nine photos, and then by tone mapping it, you're saying, okay, I'm going to find all the right exposures across the whole image and add them all up. So you get one even image with detail everywhere. So the blacks don't go to black and the brights don't go to white. It's just going to be stuff everywhere. And tone mapping, by turning it down, they're saying, we're going to do that less. And that's it. That's the whole control. And it is confusing and weird. And I think people are going to think it's just brightness, but it is actually controlling the HDR processing. So it sounds like the possibility, like, you're going to be able to take better looking photos on the 16, maybe than on any iPhone before.

But if you don't touch it, your photos might be even worse. And to me, yes, I agree. Like lower floor and higher ceiling than a lot of iPhone photos we've seen before. Yeah. Which is a really strange place to be. We're like min-maxing the phone setup here. I think Apple's default is getting away from them. I think they have some ideological rules about

never wanting to lose any detail, never letting things clip, never showing you noise. They are still doing an awful lot of sharpening in noise reduction. It's just all over the place in these phones. So if that's the thing that bothers you, the tone control isn't going to help you.

But I think that Apple has these rules. If anyone pulls out a photo and takes a photo, they should be able to generate a usable image no matter how hard it is, which is incredible, right? That has not been true of most cameras in most situations. Right.

And that's a reasonable starting point. Yeah. People love taking backlit photos. People are like, a window, let me stand in front of it and complain that the faces are in shadow. And the iPhone just doesn't have this problem anymore. Like, you can just do it and it can solve that problem, which is kind of incredible. But it also means that other things, like the tradeoffs of that are bad. Like people are complaining about those tradeoffs now.

But the weirdness of it for me in sort of the upgrade conversation is if you are the person who didn't like the way the 15 photos looked, you're going to not. not like the 16 photos, even more, unless you know to go into the settings, to mess with the tone control, to set the undertones to like, to really adjust the camera to your liking, which implies, one, you know why you don't like the 15 photos. And two, you understand what those controls mean, such you can get them to a place where you do like them while the default is getting worse. So you might be taking one step forward, but actually like two steps back and the upgrade. Well, and to your point about this coming to all of the phones, I think if your Apple, you can get away with that tradeoff to some extent on the pro and especially the pro max, right? Like you're selling these things to an audience of people who are willing to pay more to get more tools with which to do stuff.

And I think that's where you can say, like, look, if you want to have this other stuff, here it is, but it's going to be more complicated, but here it is. I think on the $799 iPhone 16, the default thing out of the box becomes much, much, much more important. And that's where I start to worry that you're going to get a lot of people who are disappointed with this camera because they don't know

and maybe shouldn't have to know all this other stuff that they can do with it. Yeah, I honestly think Apple should have labeled these presets in a much stupider way. Like, point and shoot camera, camera with big lens. You know, like, yeah.

Like just some, instead of, right tone, which again, once you understand it, it's very powerful. To me, it is the reason to buy this phone. I am a very unique individual in that sense. Like, I just want shadows in my photo. I'm going to spend money on a new phone. Like, weird. I own 50 cameras. I can just get shadows at any time. But I think for most people, these presets are just, there are a bunch of words. And then, I don't know if you've had this experience, the camera control is pretty sensitive. and it's kind of easy to get yourself sideways. Yeah.

By adjusting stuff you had no intention of adjusting. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I have had some struggles with the camera control, and boy, was I primed to like it. But I'm just generally finding it, like, really stiff to, like, you do the full press, you do the actual button press to take a photo,

and then there's all the other stuff that you can accidentally mess with. It's that, like, haptic kind of light, press and then you slide your finger to change one of those settings or like do a double press and you'll pick another setting. Yeah, I found myself like I'm trying so hard not to shake the phone and I'm pushing down on the shutter button but not hard enough and I keep pushing and like my finger will move a little bit and I'll change the exposure comp and I'm like, this is bad. Like I was just trying to take a photo. I am paying way more attention to like the camera settings than I am the thing I'm taking a picture of.

Mostly, I just want the controls to go away. Yeah. Once you adjust, like, on any other camera, you like adjust to control, your finger doesn't stay on the control. Yeah. And this is because it's a capacitive slider and a button. You, like, adjust it with a capacity part. And then your finger's still on it to push a photo.

And the control is still there. So you're still adjusting the control while you're pushing the shutter button. And it's all just a little bit too much. Yeah. And you're supposed to tap on the screen to, to get the controls to go away. And I'm like, well, then I'm tapping. I'm so close.

Don't make me do that. You know what that makes me think of is like, you know, when you're using a game controller and you're supposed to click with the joystick and how long it takes to learn to click the joystick without moving the joystick so that you're suddenly slightly in the wrong place when you're clicking.

And we talked about this on the show last week that the upside of this would be, forget all the funky stuff in the middle, mostly what you want to do is just mash the button and take a picture. And if you mash the button, it will take a picture. It sounds like it's actually maybe not even quite nailing that. That sometimes you want to mash the button and you can't mash the button. And so you're accidentally doing the stuff in the middle while you're trying to just mash the button.

No, you can just mash the button. It's just if you change anything using the button, then you can't mash the button anymore. Oh, okay, I see. Right. It's like you just can't get out of that unless you tap the screen. And once you've tapped the screen, you might as well just be tapping. the screen. Yeah. Right. Yeah, at that point, what are we accomplishing here? Okay. Interesting. Have you guys liked the camera control? Like, has it become part of the sort of muscle memory of

using your phone in the time you've been testing it? I will say I'm using it to launch the camera and that I'm going to stick with that, you know? So you're using it as an action button. Yeah, but I want my action. I want two action buttons. I want the other action button to do whatever I want. And then this one, yeah, I'm using to launch the camera. And I have it set on exposure comp because if you've ever tried to change the brightness of a photo while you're taking a picture on the iPhone, it's like the most infuriating thing. So I think I'm going to like that in the long term. But yeah, I've just gone back to like launch it with the camera control and then push the on-screen shutter button. Yeah. Exposure compensation is a good one because that one you

can't change after the fact. But tone you can. So you just, again, you're just kind of like making all these like calculations while you take an iPhone photo now. The other thing that I'll say is there are so many ways to launch camera apps in iOS 18 on one of these new phones because you can set the shutter button, the camera control button to open whatever. So I have a preview version of Hallide that you can just open there. You can change the button on the lock screen. You can set the action button to whatever you want.

And then you can still from the lock screen, slide over to the right and open the stock camera. So by the end of this, you'll be able to open four different cameras. Right. Cameras everywhere. And you can out do it a million ways in control center. You can, yeah, anything. The world is your way.

So you can tap on the back to open it. Like, that's, yeah. And I will say we are, we, you know, as everyone knows, our rule is you have to review what's in the box. And you, you can't really talk about potential or future products. That's our longstanding rule. It is very obvious that one of the reasons you put a camera button like this on the phone is so that when you do launch Apple intelligence and you have visual intelligence and the phone can look at stuff. Right. You can just get to the camera as fast as possible

or set one of these many ways to open the camera to a regular camera and another one to an AI camera or whatever you want to do. None of that stuff is shipping it. But you can see how Apple's creating a lot of options for what the camera is doing, only one of which necessarily is taking a picture. Right. Okay.

Does all this stuff you guys have been talking about apply to video as well? The styles, the defaults, some of the same stuff. I'm just thinking about this because I know with iOS 18, A lot of people got really excited about the thing where you can pause a video recording as you're going, which is such a small thing, but it's like it's a useful reminder that like, oh, these are as much video cameras for people as they are anything else. What have you guys had with video so far? Any feelings? I, there is a new feature in the video recording with a, I think it's called audio mix, where after you record your clip, you can go in. It's one of those things that like 99% of it.

people are not going to find, but you go in and edit your video and you can mess with the, like, audio channels. And I can't, I can't keep them straight in my head. There's, like, in frame, in studio. And they just change how much of the, like, subject you hear and how much of the, like, background noise it tunes out. Or if I'm talking and, like, saying dumb stuff to my kid while he's playing, like, I can just erase that now and just hear him, which is ideal. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. So I've been playing with that a little bit. And I always forget how nice, like the cinematic video is on the iPhone. Like even the regular iPhone, it's like kind of wild that you get that from this 799 phone. So. Yeah. So I've been shooting the review video with our video team with Viren, our supervising producer. We tested audio mix on a street festival in New York City. That it held up. Really? It wasn't perfect. You can watch the video, but it holds up, which is. remarkable. And that's because they've added four studio quality mics to the iPhone,

which is interesting. They record spatial audio as well, but they're really there for this audio mix feature. And so if you play the video back on an Apple TV, it plays in 5.1 surround sound for some reason. So now your kid can sneak up on you. It's just like what is going on in your video. If you airplay it, it's only in stereo, but if you somehow get the file to an Apple TV or play it through photos or whatever. You get 5 phone in strands out, which is like a crazy thing for a phone to be able to do.

But it's all, if you have a surround sound video that I'm going to watch vertically on my phone. Yeah, perfect. It took a long time port the people at Apple House. Like, I have a number of surround sign questions and they're like, okay. This is going to take us a long time to get through.

So that's cool. And then, you know, the pro, the big feature is 4K-120 and shooting 4K-120 in log, and you can attach all these extra external drives and Viren had the time of his life doing this. And he came away being like, this is fun. Um, but one of the weirdest pieces of this puzzle is that it's still an iPhone. It's like an incredibly personal device tied to an ICloud account that wants you to upgrade storage, all the, like all the stuff. And using it as a professional video camera is starting to run right up against the fact that it's a phone, it's a phone meant for a person.

Right. It's, this isn't like a utility. Like, at our office, we have a gear room where a video producers from across the company, like, check out cameras. They're not, like, tied to their high cloud accounts. And so, like, you're just in this place where this phone is getting incredibly powerful video camera. But the way the software thinks about it is still as one person's phone. And you're just kind of, like, running into that reality. I think Apple will find somebody to solve it. It's obviously they want people to use this as video cameras.

But in that one context, it's like, do you want to install game center? And it's like, why? Why? I don't, actually. You're shooting the weekend. There's, you know, a music video. Yeah. And it's like, you're getting an RCS message now.

It's like, I don't want to do that. I mean this. Fair enough. Okay. So the last thing I'm curious about is whether this has brought up any, what is a photo apocalypse feelings from both of you. It doesn't seem like Apple has done much of the, like, here's some wacky editing.

stuff you can do that is either very cool or the end of truth and humanity in the world. What has been your experience so far? Have you had any of these feelings run across any of this stuff? My experience is a weird one because I more or less came over from the pixel nine. I was doing all those reviews and picking up this. Which is a full on what is a photo. Yeah. It's just so beyond what is a photo. And then picking this up, I'm like, oh, I'm playing with sliders. Like, I'm dialing in, like, saturation and contrast. It's like just such a wildly different experience. And I, yeah, I'm digging it. But I haven't had anything, you know, throw me into a whirlwind of what is reality for sure. Yeah. I will say I've been using a pixel

line as part of this review and also an S-24 Ultra. And both of those phones are like, AI, do you want to do some AI? Like, you pick up a pixel and you open the camera. It's like, are you ready to make some weird stuff with me? This phone is not that. Apple is releasing one feature with Apple Intelligence, a feature called Cleanup, which is basically a magic eraser that lets you take stuff out. So we'll see how that works,

and we'll see if that causes any particular, what is it a photo apocalypse thoughts? But I think Apple is going to play it pretty safe. I spent some time with John McCormick, who is the VP of camera software engineering at Apple, every year he and I have like an existential dilemma about photography together. And I basically asked him to respond to the pixel team at Google saying they now make memories instead of photos, which they said in a wired piece.

And it's not like, what's a photo? And so here's what he told me. He answered. They've got Sean McCormick from Apple answering the question, what is a photo in Apple's mind? So here's the quote. It's long. I apologize. Here's our view of what a photograph is.

The way we like to think of it is it's a personal celebration. of something that really actually happened. Whether that's a simple thing, like a fancy cup of coffee that I had, that's got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kids' first steps or my parents' last breath, it is something that really happened. And it's something that is a marker in my life. And it's something that deserves to be celebrated. That's the answer.

It happened. Deserves to be celebrated as a really weird place to end that thought. But I think, like, it is a... personal celebration of something that really actually happened. Something that really actually happened is like a thing I wholeheartedly agree with. So I'm just going to focus on that. That feels good. I think this is tied to why they are so intent on bringing up the shadows and dropping the highlights

and capturing all of the detail and solving the backlit photo. Right? They are like, we're going to get a photo of this. Whatever it is. Right. And that I think, I agree with you, Celebrations, an odd word, but I think what they mean of it is like they need to honor the moment. I see.

Right? Like that, I've been puzzling over this quote since he said it to me. And that's what I've gotten to. It's like, I think that's why this camera is so aggressive. It's so many of the things it does because Apple is, they do not want to be in a hook for, it was the birthday party and you all stood in front of the window and everyone's face was in shadows. Right. And the window is bright white, right?

Like, that is a photo lots of people have taken by accident, and Apple is not going to let that happen. And, you know, none of the phone manufacturers are going to let that happen anymore. They are all chasing that same idea, which is we are going to get this. We're going to make this photo happen. And it's just, it's gotten to it like a set of aesthetic tradeoffs that I personally think is weird. It sounds like Allison, you might think shadows are good, too. But, yeah, when I, I've been thinking about the word celebration here for a minute. I think that's what that means, right?

Like the taking of the photo is a real moment that we're not going to screw up, and it actually happened. I'm curious, right, whether over time the competitors who are less idealistic push Apple off this position, you can already see it with some of the aggressive processing they've done in response to Samsung in other markets, right? Beautification filters and things like that are much more prevalent and much more accepted in markets like China. Apple hasn't gotten all the way that far, but they're starting to let people do it, right,

in different ways. They're starting to let go because that is the competitive pressure. If Google starts selling a lot of pixel phones, because you can just add weed to every photo, by literally writing add weed to photo, like, who knows what's going to happen? But that's where they're starting today, and I think cleanup is like a little bit off of that.

But his other point to me was they only do things that are rooted in photographic tradition and taking stuff out of the background at this point is pretty much a part of photographic tradition. I mean, that's fair. I think I buy that thesis. It does seem like a pretty slippery slope from that sort of honorable starting point, I think, that is like we are going to get the thing you wanted to get.

Damn the shadows and the aesthetics, right? Like, you're going to see all the faces in that backlit photo, even if it makes everything else look like trash, because the thing you wanted was the faces. I actually think that's like a reasonable place to be. But then it does cause lots of tradeoffs. And I think to your point about like face filters and all this stuff, like Apple has seemed to start coming to this place where they're like, we're going to let you do it. We're not going to make it super easy.

But if you want to do it, if you want to just nasty up your home screen, yeah, you can now. You can now. We don't want you to, but you super can now. And there is definitely a thing that Apple is like, look, if you want to ruin it, you can. That's on you, dog. And I think to some extent, I think that's actually the right approach. But it's interesting to see how far Apple will go with that approach and just basically be like, we didn't do it. We just let you do it.

Which is very unappily and very interesting to watch as it tries to figure all of this out. I do think one of the reasons Apple hasn't gone into full, what is a photo apocalypse territory, is that there's no like meaningful at scale photo verification standard that works. Right? There's C2PA, which literally the day we're recording, Google said it's going to support in. search and ads, but not put in Android. So this idea that you can take a photo and have it verified that this is a real photo that happened and track the chain of edits and know whether it was AI generated or not. And that's like cryptographically in the metadata.

That's a big idea. There's a lot of companies signed up to make that idea work. Apple is not one of those companies yet. And I think their point of view is we don't want to adopt this until we know it's going to work and it's worth it. And it's actually the thing that we want to tie ourselves to because it is the most popular camera in the world. So I think if they can solve that problem or the industry can

solve that problem, which, who knows? Big open question. I think that gives all these companies more freedom to let you do all kinds of wacky AI stuff. But I think you have to solve that problem first. Yeah, that makes sense to me. All right, last thing. And then we got to take a break. Battery Life. Full last week of feces about best battery life ever that didn't mean anything

and didn't even have graphs that didn't mean anything. just a lot of open-ended statements about battery life. Have either of you noticed any new changes in the battery life of your iPhone in your testing so far? I mean, I'll say it's good, but it's not like it's, you can't get two days out of an iPhone battery all of a sudden. It's just sort of like, yeah, I think this is, it keeps up with me all day. I can do a whole bunch of stuff and stream the radio station and do GPS and it's okay. hey, it's, I think the question on our minds is like, how is this going to perform in the long run? Like the 15 pro has been kind of notorious for running down the battery health, like, alarmingly fast.

So, yeah, it's like TBD. It's fine now on the 16 and the 16 plus. You can just like add 30% to like it'll go that much more because it's just massive. But that's been my experience. Yeah, I have the same general experience. The 16 Pro Max, which is a huge phone, by the way, has bigger battery in it, and it runs longer. I mean, I've had the camera open and the screen on shooting this video the whole week, basically. It's fine.

It's doing its job. But my 15 Pro doesn't make it through the day anymore. And so does a brand new phone make it through the day? Yes, I think that is the case for every brand new phone. Six months from now or a year from now when you're still looking at your $1,400 investment. Is it going to? is it going to survive? And we have to find out. I think Apple is actually on a bad run of this. I think the 14 pro was bad and the 15 pro is bad. And I'm hoping the 16 pro is better. Yeah, I agree.

And even in the best case scenario, it feels like we're still very much at you can use your phone all day, but you should probably charge it every night. And until we're past that, don't give me big speeches about battery life. Oh, no. I'm in a different spot entirely. Are you? Yeah. I'm at, um, uh, until I'm at, um, uh, until I, I don't have to leave my house with a little mag-safe battery. Don't talk to me. Oh, wow. Right.

That's where I'm at with the 15 Pro. I leave the house with the battery pack. Or I put it into low power mode, right? And that battery is only at 93% according to iOS. That's pretty bad. I know people who are down in the 80s after a year. I'm at 89 last I checked a few days ago. Yeah.

It's pretty bad. And, you know, there's all this depends. It's impossible to measure. Like, if you stay at home on the Wi-Fi, all day, these batteries are great. Right. The second you leave the house, you go into like three or four challenging a cellarer. environments. If you take the subway, the phones hunting between stations for signal, like, you're going to run the battery down faster. So the idea that it is just better is probably true

in the beginning. You're going to have a radically different experience. I think Apple's challenge now is maintaining battery health over time, especially because the battery replacements on these phones are more expensive than they were than they were before. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see. I think this is going to be a particularly fun generation of iPhones to come back to in six months, because like you're saying, because all the software will change. All the software will change. Literally, it's possible

that the whole like value prop of an iPhone will change if Apple is right about what all of this stuff can do. Particularly for the 16. That's what I mean, yeah. Because then it becomes the one that you're supposed to upgrade to

and I just know. By the way, speaking of battery life, we have no idea what the effect of Apple intelligence and battery life will be. Here's a bunch of stuff that might just be running in the background,

summarizing everything on your phone at all times. And we don't know. The Apple intelligence goes to the cloud, right? The private cloud compute for a bunch of stuff. It's going to run your radios at a bunch of moments,

and we don't know when or how. Like, we're going to find out. Yeah, fair enough. All right, we got to take a break. Allison, you're going to come back in a little while because we have one more thing to do on the show. But thank you both. Godspeed, finishing your reviews.

Thank you. Thanks, guys. Later. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk Apple Watch, and we're going to talk AirPods. We'll be right back.

Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise grade no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible.

Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent

across more than 125 categories, so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus.

Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post you. your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork.com. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things

you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies. Sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, whatnot sales. says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling.

That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T-com slash sell. What-N-com slash sell. All right, we're back. Let's get to the Apple Watch. So more new models, some new colors, new sizes, new screens, new ideas about batter. life, lots of new software. You can read another line of text, which Apple thinks is very exciting.

I think these are good upgrades. They seem like good upgrades. But what does all of this new stuff really add up to? I'm sitting here with my watch series eight wondering if two years later it's finally worth an upgrade. V-Song has been testing all of this stuff and has some thoughts. Let's get into it. V-Song, welcome back. Thanks for having me. So many watches. All the watches. How many watches have you worn in the last 24 hours? Last 24 hours? Four. Four in the last 24 hours. Three of them, Apple Watches. Actually, oh, God. Five. Five. Two of them were ultra-toes, but they're not the same ultra-two.

Even though they are kind of the same ultra-two. They're the same ultra-two, but one of them's a different color. So, yeah, yeah. There's a real theme this year of just like, what if we put a coat of paint on it? Is that new? What if we made it a different material? Is that new? Yeah. Yeah. But so I think for the most part here, we should probably talk about the series 10 because I think that is the one with actual sort of new stuff going on. Some newness is happening.

Yeah. So let's start with the outside of it because I just can't get over this video that like it's still seared into my brain all week of just this like very long pan shot down the watch band. And it's like, okay, sure, this is a thing. But anyway, how is it? It's thinner, it's bigger. What's the verdict? It's thinner and bigger and lighter, which, you know, that is a thing. Those are good things.

I like all those things, right? Those are good things. Those are good design choices. It's just, if you know what an Apple Watch looks like, no amount of adjectives is going to really, you know, change the fact that it looks like an Apple Watch. It looks like all the Apple Watch, like, you know, when we were in the theater and he's like a design that you've never seen before. It's like, I regret to inform you. I have seen this design before.

It has just been tweaked. They're very nice tweaks. I'm not trying to disparage the tweaks. It is, I will say there has been, even though there is like a thinning of the watch, like it is a lot thinner. You know, take a lot with a grain of salt. It's 9.7 millimeters. That is quite thin for smartwatches. Generally, we see them in the 11 to 13 millimeter range, sometimes 14, 15, 15 if they're chunkers.

So that is quite thin. I'm not trying to say that that's not a thing, but I'm just saying it's, it's, the, there has also been an ambigening of it because, you know, when the first Apple watch came out back in 2014, 2015, it was 38 millimeters and 42 millimeters. Now we are at 42 millimeters and 46 millimeters. So the small watch has become what was the biggest watch back in the day. It's the, I mean, this is, this is what happens, right? This is like the iPhone in ininating of the whole thing. This is how it goes. There is like a real sense that it's, you know, we're 10 years into the Apple Watch.

There is like an iPhoneification of it and that they're facing similar problems now where the updates every year are iterative. And like sometimes they feel very iterative. Like, ooh, I think I saw someone online say this about both the phone and the watches, but it really feels like an S year. And yeah, it does. It does feel like an S year in some ways. And I think people were hoping for more of like a big jump.

of a year. Okay, but I will say, and this is the thing about the little hardware changes that I'm most curious about is the sort of ideal watch screen size seems to be bigger, while the ideal watch size seems to be smaller, at least for me. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of min-maxing happening. Yeah, and so what I wonder is with this one, does it feel like Apple has gotten closer? I know you have kind of a tortured relationship with the sizes of smart watches over the years. I really do. But I'm very curious if it feels like this one, if you can make it a little bigger, but a little thinner and a little lighter, maybe it'll still feel smaller despite being bigger. And maybe that's the right combination of things.

I think they're onto something. Whether people appreciate that is going to be a different thing. But, you know, I am wearing the 42 millimeter because they sent me the smaller size because I am a smaller person. So I have the 42 millimeter series 10. Which do you think is like the default size, by the way? Like, I feel like when it was 38 and 42, I think most people bought 42. But now that it's 42 and 46, if you just pure off the top of your head guess, which would you think is like the main one people have? I would think the 42, to be quite honest, because...

I think that's where I'm at, too. It's quite impressive. So actually, the 46mm series 10 has the largest display area of any Apple Watch, and that is including the Ultra. Which is nuts. Which is nuts when you think about it. Like, truly the min-maxing has happened here with the 4. for the 46 millimeter, and that's quite impressive. And actually quite compelling to a lot of people who have ultras who don't love the weight,

me being one of them, when I run, and, you know, like, I love our blurple band, but the problem with the blurbill band is that my wrist is a little too small, so I have to wear it a little looser, so I really feel that drag when I'm running. That is not the case when you have a series 10. It is thinner and lighter. It feels like you're not really wearing quite as much when you go on a run. for some people that will be quite compelling, especially since I do have the 42 millimeter and I'm right on the same wrist right next to the to the Ultra, I'm not really looking at

that much smaller of a screen. So the 42 is slightly smaller, I believe, than the Ultra. But not by much, not by much. And I remember when the first Ultra came out, we were talking about it. And I think it was Neely who got really excited about it. And he was like, I'm just going to level it with you. I'm not going to use any of these features. I don't care, Ben. any of the outdoorsy nonsense. I am going to sit on my couch and look at this huge screen and Apple Watch Ultra. And I think that's a lot of people, right? And I think especially as we get to this thing where Apple is big on glancable information and it's an AI input output system, like I kind of get the appeal of like how much screen can we put on your wrist

before it feels bad. And it sounds like they've got that balance kind of right. Like does that forever change the appeal of an Apple Watch to most people? It feels like probably not. Probably not, but within the balance, like as far as wearability goes. Like, they did make some like meaningful, significant tweaks in terms of wearability, especially, you know, part of the impetus to make these lighter and more comfortable and more wearable is, you know, sleep tracking. Sleep tracking has historically not been the Apple Watch's, like, biggest strength just because one, battery life is not as impressive as other wearables in this category, which, you know, they're addressing with faster charging. But also comfort, like, I've been sleeping with the Ultra 2 for the past year. It's not fun. It's not what I would call the most comfortable smartwatch to sleep with.

It's just not. Agreed. So, you know, in that respect, I've been wearing the Series 10 to sleep, and it's a lot more comfortable than the Ultra 2. So, you know, sleep tracking is a thing that's important to you. That is a thing. There is a blurring of the lines now because something that I've been thinking a lot about in the last couple of days is the altruification. of the series 10 because it does feel like they were like, hmm, there are certain things about the ultra

that have really gotten people excited. Let's port that over to the series 10. So now you have people online just really confused as to like, should I ditch the ultra? Because as you said, some of these people are not athletes or not very like into the training aspect or like the outdoorsiness of the ultra so they don't need dual band GPS.

They don't need an 80 decibel siren. That's like, you know, like these things that were made for it to be extreme and raw, outdoorsy. They just really want that big, beautiful screen and the lightness of it. So, like, for them, you're starting to look at the titanium version, which I must say, it's very fancy. Yeah. I feel very special and fancy while wearing it. I'm like, ooh, I feel expensive. And it is expensive.

It starts at $6.99. The Ultra is, I think, just $100 more. So you're starting to get to the point where I was like, well, why am I buying an ultra then? So I think like the real question is like who is supposed to get what? Because the prices, especially if you get the nicer materials, they're starting to look the same. So like the watches themselves also is just like, okay. So really what we're getting down to is battery. Like battery is a big thing.

And dual band GPS for like if you're like me, I'm just like, ooh, how do I feel about giving up dual band GPS because I really want to know down to the hundredth of a mile like what my run was this morning. For sure. And then you just like battery life, I think for the ultra is kind of going to be a distinguishing factor because, yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up because it does seem to me that for like an everyday user, the question of skews is kind of more complicated than ever.

I think like, and this is such classic Apple right now, right? There was a time when it was like, okay, I can pretty quickly explain to you which thing in the line is which. And now it's like there's the cheapest one and then everything up from there is confusing. Yes. And where you land on that line is very hard. But I think my instinct is the same as yours that there's going to be a lot of people who would have won an ultra who are now going to be perfectly happy with a series 10, which does all the same stuff in terms of like day-to-day use, has an even bigger screen, is lighter. Like that all seems like a victory except for the battery life.

Like the ultra, this is the thing that has gotten me for the last couple of reps at this thing is the battery life, it's like an order of magnitude better. It's not like slightly better. It is twice as good. And that is a huge difference. It is. You can go two days without charging if you have an ultra, whereas I am still charging daily if I have the series 10. And, you know, I had a think I had a 25 minute shower this morning. And it went from 67%ish to 100 within that time. That's great. Right, because fast charging was one of the upgrades here, right? Yeah. Like fast charging. That's pretty good. Yeah. Mine is currently charging much slower than that.

I will say that fast charging can be tricky with the Apple Watch because, one, you have to make sure that the charger supports fast charging. And then two, you have to make sure, like, all of your accessories are, like, going to do the fast charging for you because otherwise, like, even with the ultra, which supports fast charging, like, my spouse is just like, it didn't charge. What happened? So, like, I find that to be, like, a thing that people have trouble with in general, with knowing whether the charger they're using is actually going to support that. So especially since it's even less clear if you buy a dock, the docks don't all support the fast charging for the Apple Watch. So that can be very confusing. So, yeah, battery life, you know, the Ultra just is a lot more reliable. When you stick it into battery saver mode, it does last quite a while in that.

that mode. So I really think like battery life is kind of the distinguishing factor here because you're going from daily to a multi-day. And for a lot of people, that is really difficult to give up. And I understand why. It's a big difference. I understand why. Because as soon as you take the smartwatch off, there's a good chance you are not going to put it back on. So that is the thing. Like, I mean, Garmin fans, I love you, but y'all are insufferable about like comparing the battery life. And it's like, yes, yes, yes. We know. We know that the Garmin has the better battery life, you also don't do quite as much. So that there's like that tradeoff there. Yeah. The big other thing about the series 10 I'm curious about, and then I'm curious if there's

anything else that has jumped out to you in testing is the speaker. Both the like, I was thinking about this after the event. Like, A, God help us if we get to the point where people are like playing music and podcasts and yelling into their, like awful dystopian disaster stuff. Like sounds awful. Also, I'd probably do it. Would I occasionally like to be able to listen something through the speaker of my watch? Yeah. Do I hate that? Yeah.

But like, so this is what I wonder. Have you been testing this at all? Are you running around listening to just like bumping Taylor Swift out of your smart watch? How's this going? I will not be bumping Taylor Swift out of my smart watch. I'm not a Swifty. I'm a K-pop head. So I have been bumping K-pop out of my smart watch.

Okay. But there is like a question of etiquette there because if I'm on a subway, that just makes me a jerk doing that. And I think Apple itself is very aware that people are primarily going to be using headphones when they listen to stuff through the watch. That is the natural way of doing things. I'm a little baffled by this feature as to like, why. And I think it just comes to a topic you and I have talked about is just open ear transparency. see, like, needing that situational awareness. So, like, where I find it most natural to use is when I'm at home and I have to kind of cook. And, you know, I find that it's better if I don't have

headphones in when I'm cooking because you should know what appliances are beeping and booping at you. I have a menace of a cat who thinks he's catatooie and wants to help. And I got to make sure he's not going to burn himself while licking a pan, you know, that kind of stuff. Or the spouse comes in. they have a question, and then you have to take out your headphones, and you're like, what? So in those instances, yeah, like, it's actually kind of nice to have it playing on the watch because it's closer to you. I leave my phone. I have a recipe up there. I'm trying to do different things. So in that instance, sure, it doesn't get that loud. It's loud enough, but, like, if you were to actually whip it out and just try and play your music like a jerk on the subway,

No one would hear it because it's just really loud. The ambient noise is super loud anyway, and it doesn't get that loud. Like, if you're in a quiet room, you're definitely going to be able to hear it. But yeah, does it have the best sound quality? Also, no. Like, if you care about, like, hearing the high hat in the distance, like, in a mix, like, let's be real. That's not happening here.

Yeah. I mean, to me, that actually feels like the right outcome. The only occasions I ever would use this, really, is for, like, phone calls occasionally out of the watch when, like, my phone is somewhere else or I'm walking or whatever. Or the situation, like the one you described where I'm in the kitchen cooking or even, like, you see the people on a bike ride with the Bluetooth speaker or whatever. Like, little things like that. There are moments in time I can see this being sort of okay.

And the fact that it's not good enough to be annoying on the subway actually feels like a huge victory. So I will take that. That is good for the world that the speaker is not good enough to do that. Yeah. It, like, I was with the podcast guys yesterday and they're like, oh, show us the speaker. And I like, I put it on. They're like, it doesn't get that loud. And I'm like, yeah, it doesn't. I don't want it to get that loud. No, you don't want it to. So it's like, it's appropriate for like your headphones die and you want to listen to the last two minutes of your podcast or something like that. It's appropriate for that. It's not really, we're not replacing phones as playing something. We're not replacing speakers. It's just, it's there if you need it in a pinch, that sort of situation.

Yeah, that's totally fair. Has anything else jumped out to you about this one as you've been reviewing it? It's just lighter and thinner and bigger. It's like really all about the screen and what's really kind of jumping out to me, like I said, is there's a whole extra line of text. I still, I will never not hear them saying that during the event. You can read an extra line of text. There's a whole extra line of text. Oh, actually, because the screen is bigger, actually, like, the buttons are also slightly bigger, which is great. Oh, see, that's actually nice. Which is great if you have nails like me right now during review season and, like, touch screens and nails are not friends. Tough times.

They're not friends. So this actually does help me a little bit when I'm putting in the passcode. That's kind of nice. The thing that I have been thinking about, though, is whether we've reached the end of min-maxing size of screen versus comfort because I really do not think we can get the case size much bigger. Like once you get to the 43-44 millimeter as like the smallest size, you are leaving out quite a large swath of people because I have small wrists, but I don't have the smallest wrists.

I know lots of like mostly women out here with very, very tiny bird wrists. And the 42 millimeter with this giant honky screen is kind of going to be the biggest that I think is going to be usable for them. After that, we start getting into a territory that's not great. And so I do think that means, like, we got to solve this battery issue because, you know, I saw this on the Pixel Watch 3, too. Like the 45 millimeter, that's about the biggest I could go comfortably. And so I don't know where companies are going to go from here as far as, like, these big screens, small, smaller wrist. I feel like we've reached the limit.

So nice, nice that you pulled out the tricks and the stops. But what's next year? Are we going to go like the bezel is 8.76% thinner? Like, are we just going to go that route? Because, you know, I did see some people online. I think y'all need to calm down about how, like, just visually the changes from the nine to the 10 make the bezels look slightly larger. on the 10 that is like optically speaking true also as someone who uses all manner of smart

watches is not that serious it's really not that serious a lot of the apple watch screens like the pixel watch ones make use of the darker background and the bezel so it's functionally depending on what watch face you use it's functionally you're not you're really not going to see it there but oh oh oh wide oled so you can view more angles that is surprisingly like it's one of those things that you're like okay yeah whatever but like when you're just like very discreetly trying to read a funny text message in a meeting and you're going like oh yeah that that actually is kind of kind of fun i agree with that and it does my my strident belief since the first days of the apple watch has been that if you have a smart watch that doesn't tell you the time every time you look at it you have failed and this is another step in the right direction of when i look at my watch it will tell me the time yes i'll take it this is this is a victory um okay so it's it's seems to me that if you're in the position of like, I need to upgrade my watch. You have an old one. It broke. Batteries, terrible, whatever. This is probably the one to get. Right? Like,

the last couple of years, it's been like, you could maybe go back a year and it would be fine. But it feels like this one is probably worth the upgrade. I think it is worth the upgrading to this. Like, there are a few exceptions, I guess. Like, if you really like the color pink and you're going to go with the aluminum. Last year's pink is more pink than this year's rose gold. There are like a very small number of people I'm talking to at the moment here who care about that particular color. The one thing I would ask people to consider is blood oxygen if you live in the U.S. If that matters to you in any capacity at all, if you do upgrade to the 10, you will be losing that feature. Right. If you upgrade at all.

Well, like if you upgrade and you are in the U.S., if you're outside of the U.S., you're outside of the U.S., You still get blood oxygen. Love that for you. But my thought, though, as a caveat is, do you really need it on the Apple Watch? My read is no. I have not missed it using the Series 10. So there's that.

It's not that serious. Like, I'm going to be real. I don't think most people use the blood oxygen app. I tend to agree. Yeah. Okay, but then the other question is, like, if I have an eight or a nine, my watch is fine, I'll get some trade in money if I get the 10. Is it worth like going out of my way to go get the 10?

Calm down. No. Okay. Like calm down, no. Yeah. I mean, this is kind of what it feels like this whole year of Apple products is, right? It's like these are good ones. If you need a new one, these are probably the ones to get. But if you don't need a new one, there's nothing here that is going to give you like incredible gadget fomo. Yeah, I would say that. Except maybe the titanium, like a tiny bit, a little bit, the titanium. The titanium a little bit, because I will say, you know, just in my experience in the past, using stainless steel, it is lighter. It is significantly lighter to have the titanium. And it looks just like the stainless steel. And it's very pretty. And it has a little coating over it to prevent scratches.

We'll see. That's not something I can know over like a really short term period. Like that has to be tested over a few months. Right. Scrapes. Cats trying to eat the watch like that sort of. of thing. But I gotta say it really looks nice. I was just looking. I was like, wow, I look fancy. My outfit has been upgraded by like several points just because it looks much nicer. I tend to have

like very sporty accessories, so I don't look polished. But I was like, oh, I could go to a wedding in this and look cool. It's a little like super spy-ish. It is. It is. It is quite nice. It's quite nice. Colors. Colors are nice this year. All right. Well, that's not helping my FOMO as somebody with a perfectly usable Series 8, but that is probably the right answer. Yeah, no, no, you're in the chill-out zone. I think the only... Always. That's where I live. The only people who I think have a debate on their hands are people with Series 6s. Like, those are the only ones who I think Series 5 older, time to upgrade. Series 6, you could make a very good case for it. Series 7, Series 8, Series 9, I think you could just chill.

Fair enough. All right, V, thank you so much as always. Yeah, thanks for having me. One quick note before we move on, V and I did talk very briefly about the sleep apnea testing stuff that's in the Apple Watch now. But when we talked, it hadn't come out yet, and there were questions about FDA approval. Anyway, it did get approved by the FDA, and it will be in the Apple Watch, and that is a thing we're going to have to follow up on. That's also a hard thing to do in a review cycle. The health stuff is complicated, and it takes time. we're going to let V do some real proper testing on that, and we'll get back to you on all things sleep apnea. Anyway, let's move on.

Let's do AirPods. AirPods, I confess, are the ones I am most personally fascinated by. I'm forever looking at this perfect middle ground of comfy, good sounding, not terribly expensive, and noise-canceling headphones. And the perfect middle ground of that does not exist. At least it has not existed so far, but it seems like Apple. might be inching ever closer with the AirPods for. I know this is a hard thing to get right,

so I'm not getting my hopes up, but I'm very, very, very, very curious. Chris Welch has reviewed all of these for us over the years. He has the new pairs. Let's get into it. Chris Welch, hello. Hello, David. It's a pleasure to be back.

Just headphones. I feel like there are other things we should talk about on this show from time to time. You do all these things that are very interesting, and yet we just talk about headphones here on the show. Fine by me. So I've realized that unusually this year with Apple devices, the first question I have to ask is, what are you actually testing? There are things Apple announced that haven't shipped yet.

There are things Apple announced that aren't shipping for a very long time. You got some devices. What have you been testing that you actually have access to right now? So I've got the AirPods for both pairs, the standard pair and also the new pair that has noise cancellation for the first time. That's really all I've been testing this whole time is really like how well does noise cancellation? work in this open style of your bud. Thankfully, like, all the features are there on day one with this product, unlike the rest of Apple's lineup this year.

So it all works out of the box, which, you know, always very nice. So, yeah, I've just been kind of going back and forth. They sound the same, so there's not much there between them. That's all good. They sound really good. Like, honestly, like, I've never been, like, a standard AirPods person. Because, like, for years, they just didn't fit my ears right at all. Like, you had to, like, twist them in just a certain way to get them to stay.

These ones do a better job staying in my ears. So, so far. so good, I think. Okay. How different is the design this type? It's always hard to tell in the photos and renders. Very slight tweaks, like the contours and the shape. Yeah, they didn't change much.

I'm somebody for whom the open-year AirPods have always worked really well, and I really like the way that they fit. So every time they're like, we've changed the design. I'm like, no, don't change the design. Yeah, they changed it ever so slightly using 50 million scans or data points of like ear shapes. So, you know, the usual. But not that different compared to the last ones.

I compare it them directly. And, yeah, they're still pretty similar. Okay. So the idea is there are some people for whom they should fit now, but they shouldn't not work for anybody that they did work for before. Hopefully. Hopefully. There's always someone who's going to complain. I know.

Yeah. It will be me. I mean, I say they work for me, but also, like, the number of times they've just fallen out of my head. I don't know what work for me really counts as in a lot of cases. Right. But it does seem like the big question with the AirPods 4 is just as simple as is A&C worth $50. Right? Like, that's the price difference.

That is the only feature change, as far as I can tell. Is that kind of the frame? So there are some other differences. So with the ANC model, you get the wireless charging, which might be enough for a lot of people to spend 50 bucks for. There's that. The case has the speaker for Fine Mine, which I've never used, but it's there if you need it. And that's really the main three features that it has over the standard one.

But the battery life, they're both IP-50 for, I think, water-resistant. And so, yeah, that's all the same between the both. Okay. I am slightly bummed, I have to say, that we didn't get, like, one of the rumors right before was that there might be a more interesting capacitive case with, like, some music controls on it, like, we've seen from some of these other companies. I am slightly disappointed we didn't get that, I have to say. Still, the white glass of case. It is smaller. It's, like, so tiny now. It's almost like a square shape that it's gotten, like, so small. Oh, that is small. Okay. So, sorry for people listening to this. It's like, imagine a piece of orbit gum stretched a little bit. That's basically what that case looks like now. Yeah. So, all right, so what's, first of all, let's just science this a little bit for a second.

The idea of ANC on a pair of open ear headphones like the AirPods 4, I know you were skeptical going in that this is even a thing that is possible to do or do well. How does Apple do ANC on something like this? Like, how does it even sort of, in theory, work as opposed to a pair of headphones, you can shove interiors that I actually. physically block out a lot of things. So it's been done before, like, Samsung just put out of the Buds 3 that have the same kind concept. It doesn't work quite as well. But the technology is the same between these and the AirPods pro-like.

So there are mics in the earbuds. They scan for noise and they play, like, the inverse of whatever you're hearing to kind of cancel it out. And so Apple says they, like, kind of changed the drivers. So they, like, tilt towards your ears more with these. And I guess that helps out when it comes to the ANC. And so, like, I've been impressed. You have to, like, set your expectations.

Like, it's nowhere near the pros. It's nowhere near tips. So you can't, like, put these into your ears. and have everything just, like, fade away. I'd say it cuts things down by, like, 30%, maybe, 40%, probably 30-ish. So, like, what I found is, like, you can't just put them in and have quiet. But if you play music, that's really where you notice that you don't, like, turn up the volume as loud as you would have otherwise.

Like, that's really part of this whole appeal, I think. And also kind of ties into, like, Apple's, like, hearing health stuff lately. So you just don't have to crank the volume. That's been the main benefit. But if you're on a plane and you're like just turn them on without music, you're going to hear everything around you still. So it's not going to like be some miracle. Right. But it's nice.

Yeah. Okay. So is maybe the right analogy just in terms of what this feels like in practice, like a pair of over ear headphones without the noise cancellation turned on? Like it's you put them on and everything gets quieter and a little more isolated. But it's not like when you flip it on and like the noise from the plane disappears. Yeah, no, not at all. Okay. Yeah, it takes off, like, you hear kind of like a, I'd say it's like a white noise machine.

Like you would still hear like a fair amount of noise in the background. And so, like, I was at a bar last night, super loud. I just put him in for the sake of trying it and I could still hear a conversation nearby and people talking. So it's not going to like change that kind of environment. But I did cut it down. So I was playing music at like 70% volume and I could still hear my music just fine. And so, like, it does make a difference, which I think is going to be enough for a lot of people to just kind of say 50 bucks. Why not?

You know, plus the wireless charge. and whatnot. Right. Well, yeah, to your point about the hearing health stuff, that way of thinking about reducing the noise is actually really interesting, because you can see that as a negative, right? Like, what that sounds to me like is when I get on a plane,

it's still going to be very loud. So these are not going to replace, like, the Bose headphones that I like to get on a plane with because it's quiet and helps me sleep while I watch a movie. Right. But on the other hand, the thing you just described, like, I can listen to music at the bar

without it being impossibly loud and still sort of hear the people around me is actually like that's a use case, right? Like that's a real thing. And it's kind of a hack on transparency mode in a certain way where you have headphones that let you hear the world, but also your music. And if Apple can get that balance right,

it's both it's a pro and a con of the level of ANC in a strange way. Right. Yeah. So it's been good. I mean, these actually have, so there's noise counseling mode. There is transparency mode on these as well.

And you would think like, why is that necessary in open-style earbuds? So it boosts certain frequencies, like voices. You can hear people easier when you turn on the transparency mode. And it's got all the AirPods Pro Software, stuff like the conversation awareness. So when you start speaking and the volume goes down, yada, yada. So that's all there, which is nice. Sound quality is actually, like, surprisingly good.

Like the bass response is, like, way better than, like, most of the past models they put out. So that's been my main, like, thing I've noticed. The base response is really good. Yeah, they just sound really clear. they're still not like my type of earbuds, but they're just really well-made AirPods. Okay. Yeah. Do you think we're at a point now where the biggest difference between the AirPods and the pros just in sort of day-to-day use?

Obviously, there's the hearing health stuff and all that. But do you think the main difference between the two is just going to be how they fit and feel in your ears? Like it feels like the base AirPods are getting closer to the pros in such a way that the pros are going to be better. And if the main thing you want is sound quality, fine. But it does seem like the gap between the two in terms of sort of everyday sound quality is much, much smaller than it once was. Yeah, for sure. That's really exciting.

Yeah, it is. Are the pros still sound better, obviously, and the ANC is obviously, like, that much better than these are. So, like, if you want the best thing, there's that. So it's like good, better, best. Like, good is the AirPods 4. And they sound really nice for the price, 129, 179, or the AirPods 4 with ANC. and then you go up to the pros.

And so it's a pretty good, straightforward product lineup. I can't say that about like the iPads or whatever, but this is pretty straightforward as far as like what you should buy. And like here's what you get buying that thing. Yeah, compared to the iPads, everything is straightforward. So I don't know that that's a totally fair bar. Valid point.

Yeah. Does it make sense to you that the AirPods 4 and the AirPods 4 with A&C are two separate things? Like it seems like the normal Apple move in a lot of ways would have been to just scrap the bottom one and say, $179 is still a pretty competitive price for this kind of headphone. Yeah. Is it surprising to you that the sort of very base model exists at all? Not really.

I think they still want something like in that price point because there are so many lower cost options from so many brands like JBL and whoever else. That costs like $70, $50. You've got to have something that's like not too far off from that. And that's what the AirPods 4R. And you get most of the same sound quality, well, same sound quality and like much of the same feature. The call quality is nice. They've got this new voice isolation feature from the AirPods

as well. So I use AI, of course, to make you clear on phone calls. So that's on both models, too. So you get a lot for 129, honestly. But if you want ANC and wireless charging, 50 bucks more. So got it. Okay. And one question we got on the hotline from actually a couple of people was how big a deal is the H2 chip? And I think to some extent, it's just better, right? Like new chips, do more things. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, Apple mentioned voice isolation as like one of the things that's going to get better with extra processing. Yeah. But I'm also assuming, based on the way you're describing A&C working, that that is like,

that's a huge amount of processing, this thing has to do. Yeah. So that makes me think that there are going to be a lot of people who are like, do I buy the H-1 AirPods because they're going to be cheaper or is the H-2 chip worth it? And it sounds like maybe the H-2 chip is going to be worth it.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Okay. I'd say so. I mean, it's not that. much more expensive. I'm sure you can find deals on the past models, but these sound better, first of all. So, like, that's why I would buy them. Most of all, they sound significantly better than the AirPods 3 did, to my years, at least. Always subjective. But, yeah, you get a lot. And, like, the H2 chip is key for a lot of those features, plus the ANC.

Like, this is why these have a lot of these features, and the AirPods Max still don't, because the AirPods Max do not have the H2 chip. So, but, yes, I would, myself, I would go with the ANC model. I think it is worth just having those few extra features for not a ton more money. But yeah, I mean, there are some downsides. There's still no multi-point, which I would love. Apple just loves its multi-device, like, auto-switching, which has gotten better of the last couple years, I think, but it can still, like, always, like, paired the wrong thing at the wrong time when it's, like, most inconvenient for you. I, Apple is, I would say, guilty a lot of being too clever by half. And I think the clever multi-switching is the most too clever by half thing that Apple does.

I just want a button that says, I never, ever, ever, ever want to connect my AirPods to. my Mac Mini ever. I have never once wanted to, I am never going to want to. Stop asking me every single time I sit down in a chair if I want to connect my AirPods to my Mac Mini. It just drives me crazy. But that is neither here nor there.

So you haven't gotten a chance to test the AirPods Pro 2 yet with the hearing health stuff. Otherwise they're basically the same. The hearing health stuff is coming. We'll try that when it comes. You have, I would say for all intents of purposes, tried the AirPods Macs, Max, because they the AirPods Max with a USBC port and some new colors.

New colors, yeah. At some point, I think we'll end up doing a full review of those because we should. They're going to be on sale. But my biggest question for you is, coming into this event, there was like a little bit of talk about what the maxes might be if there were going to be maxes. On a scale of 1 to 10, how surprised were you that Apple decided to essentially do nothing with the AirPods Max? Pretty bummed, honestly, because I like the Max.

I'm not sure why they're so unworthy of, like, actual. hardware upgrades after all these years. And like I see them everywhere. It's like people clearly buy them. People like buy like cases for their like ear cups. Have you seen these like on the street? It's wild. So there's a whole like aftermarket for accessories for the AirPods Macs.

And they're really good headphones. But I assume Apple just has must have some kind of like customer data that says like people just don't need like some of their AirPods pro features or care. They just want to get on a plane, put these on and zone out. And like that's all they really want them for. That's interesting. That like maybe there's less to do in that space. Yeah, but like you would think they would want some of the hearing health stuff there to, like in the over-ear format too.

So I'm not sure like what the thinking is there. But you would hope like there's a true AirPods Max 2, not too far off. Who knows, maybe once the AirPods Pro 3 come out, they'll like do both at the same time. But yeah, it's a bummer. I mean, they're so heavy and that case hasn't changed. The case. The case is still as it was. That is the thing that kills me is there are just a couple.

of really obvious upgrades. I think the basic look of it I've really come around to over the years. I was not wild about it at the beginning, but I think it looks better on people's heads than it does kind of on its own. So like I'm in favor. Sounds good. Works great. But there are enough sort of little upgrades both in the hardware and the case. And now even in the processing and the software, it's like you could make these better without trying very hard. And that that is the thing that kind of bums me out about the max. So, okay, last question. And then then I'll let you get out of here. Again, the big question I think a lot of people are going to ask is, do I get the four or is it worth $50 to get the ANC? For most people, obviously, if price is your main question, get the cheaper one.

But do you think most people, the right best option is going to be to spend the 50 bucks? Is it worth the upgrade? Yeah. Okay. I think so. I mean, it's there if you need it. And it's pretty easy to just, like, turn off if you don't like it. Like, you can actually feel some of the pressure that you would get, like, when you're on ANC from the AirPods Pro.

You still get, like, some of that sensation. Some people don't like that. But you can't just turn it off if you don't want that. But it's nice to have, you know, like if you're out somewhere on the street and it's like loud, it'll cut it down by like, you know, like a third or so. But and that's like enough to just play your music and not go crazy from like outside whatever. So yeah, it's worth it. All right, fair enough. All right.

Well, one of these days you have to come back and we're going to do pixel buds. We're going to do galaxy buds and we're going to do AirPods. And we are going to put a bunch of bad sounding audio on the birchcast and I cannot wait. So many good reviews. Yeah, good. All right, Chris, thank you as always. Thank you, sir. Cheers.

All right, we got to take one more break, and then we are going to take a question from the Vergecast Hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration

and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deal. deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Cloud is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move.

Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. a.ai slash vergecast. That's clod.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access

to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be

that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that.

That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID?

Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. Welcome back.

Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866Vorge11. The email is Vergecast at the verge.com. We love all your questions, and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. Right now, it is extremely phone season, and we have a question about phones. Hey, guys, my name's Keith,

and ever since I, you know, was a teen, I really love technology and smartphones. I would be the type of person that would upgrade my phone multiple times in a couple years, but since I've gotten older, I've gotten a family. Disposable income just doesn't exist the way it did anymore. But fortunately for me, I get an upgrade this year. Now, as somebody that's been kind of a techie guy. Unfortunately, the simplicity of the iPhone ecosystem has been nice mainly because of messaging, but also because it works for with every case and it's easy to Apple pay things. My ask of you is to sell me on why. I should get the new pixel fold or the new pixel Pro XL over what Apple shipped.

I want to buy into the ecosystem that Google offers. I have a fully Google home. I'm invested in that ecosystem, but the messaging has always kept me with an iPhone. Unfortunately, this year, I didn't think they really showed me why I should get a new iPhone, but I'm doing an upgrade. So should I spend another three years with Apple or two years, whatever the contract is, or should I finally make a move

to, you know, be my true teenage self, the nerd I always want to be? All right, as I sit here with two phones on my desk, an iPhone and a Pixel 9 Pro Fold that I'm deeply in love with. I too have this question.

Allison Johnson's back. Hi, Allison. Hi. Okay, I want to do this in two parts. The first thing I want to do is I want to throw away all urge to hedge and be reasonable.

And I want you to, make the most aggressive case for switching to the pixel that you possibly can. And then we're going to come back around and decide if this is actually a good idea. Okay. But let's start with that. If you sell me and sell our friend Keith on switching to the pixel. Okay. Well, you got to go for the fold.

I mean, it's two phones. It's twice the phone. You get a front phone and an inside phone. No, I think like if you are into tinkering and if you're into like, oh, I can get my phone to do this and I couldn't do that before, like, the nine pro fold is like the poster child for that. Like you can, the way you can use the inner screen, there's just like there's really nothing else like it is kind of how I would put it. And, you know, RCS on iOS 18 might alleviate a little bit of the messaging woes. There's still, you know, really not a substitute for, like, FaceTime or any of that. But, yeah, two times the phone. That's what I got.

That's pretty good. I have been amazed by how much I like the fold. We're going to come back. You and I are at some point in the next couple of weeks going to have to come back and relitigate our flip versus fold debate. Yeah. Because I have new feelings that are making me sad about my old feelings, and we're going to talk about that. I love this phone. And I think to Keith's point about the Google ecosystem, every time I really reinvest in Android, which I've been doing because of this phone, I am reminded of how much better it is to be a Google user on an Android phone.

Yeah. Just in part because Gemini is so built into everything and you can access all of your information in all the different Google services, it's so much better. It's a Google Home Controller than the iPhone is. You get, like, top-level access to all that stuff in a way that if you're on an iPhone, you always have to launch an app before you can do Google stuff. You can just do it all from the whole screen of your phone. And that's very powerful. But literally, it is such a nice phone.

It's such a nice phone. I cannot get over how much I like this phone. It's thin. It's the right size. Even if you, like, don't open the inner screen all that often, which I don't, it's still a great phone. And then you're like, oh, my God, there's an inner screen. Yeah. It's, I love this phone.

And I think the switching costs have gone way down, which is very exciting. Like the idea that leaving an iPhone and going to an Android phone is going to sort of break your brain is just not true anymore. Yeah. Weirdly, the thing that is always the hardest for me switching is that you swipe down on an iPhone to get to spotlight and be able to start searching for stuff and you swipe up on Android. That is the thing that takes me the longest to switch every single time. Everything else, they've just become so similar over time. They have most of the same features. They do most things the same way.

Apple has adopted a lot of Android's customization. Android has started to sort of organize the phone in the way that Apple did for a long time. They're just not that far apart. Like, weirdly, I agree with you that FaceTime is the single stickiest thing left. The RCS thing, it won't solve everything, but it makes some things easier. You can deregister from iMessage much more easily than you used to. Liam, our producer, did this. He bought a fold.

And he turned off iMess. And it used to be somewhere between like 24 and 72 hours. You were in like weird I message limbo. It was like minutes with this time. It was very exciting. Yeah. I live that dangerous life like several times a year when I switch from an iPhone to, yeah, one of the Android phones. And it is easier.

I think there's kind of an outdated notion of like how difficult it is to switch between these systems. and I am living proof that you can do it multiple times a year. And there's no, like, major social costs to it. Yeah, you will still be a green bubble. But I think, like, it's fine. Yeah. Just own being a green bubble. Lean in.

Yeah. Your phone has two screens. That's cooler than iPhones. So you win. Open up the phone anytime, you know, you need to prove something. You know, someone like, well, do you have two phones attached to your phone? Yeah, right. Oh, you can't see those words on that screen.

watch this, I have a whole other screen. No big deal. Yeah. Something else I think, particularly this year with the Pixel series, I haven't tried out the Pixel Watch 3 yet, but I'm dying to. But it seems like that the ecosystem of hardware around it has also gotten is just elevated this year, like the Pixel 9 hardware. The Pixel Watch 3 by all accounts is very nice and finally just feels like this is a great smart watch. Like you just buy, this one when you have a pixel phone and everything is nice. So I think that that's always been part of the math in the Apple ecosystem. It's like, well, you have this phone, you just buy these earbuds, you buy this watch, and you're done. And it all works. And yeah, pixel may be getting

there a little bit. A hundred percent. And the other thing is that as Google has made all that stuff work really well with like fast pair and nearby share and all this stuff that is sort of knitting its own ecosystem together. It's giving that to other companies too. So like we're at a point now where Apple's ecosystem is probably still a little cleaner and simpler and better connected, but only if you only buy Apple products. And Google and Android have gotten 90% of the way there with like the rest of the industry. And I think you're just pure sort of number of choices you have of things that you can attach to your devices. Way better on Android. And it won't be quite as perfect as just buying an Apple watch and scanning the thing and poof it's set up.

Yeah. But it's a lot closer and you have a lot more choices. And I think the whole better together thing that Apple has had for so long is not nearly the advantage it once was. Yeah. I am also just sitting here convincing myself to switch to Android. Like I'm using the fold, but I haven't moved my e-sim yet. And I'm sitting here being like, and it's time to move to E-Sim. commitment. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's time to do it. It's just time. I'm just, it's just time. I'm just, it's just time. But okay, so now, last question, would you recommend doing this? Like, is this, if you've been debating leaving the ecosystem, switching Apple to Android, is this the year to do it? I think it is. I think that the hardware has been, on the pixel side, particularly, kind of inching towards this, like, is. It. It's,

Is it really a flagship? It's kind of this upper mid-range thing. In this, I hold a pixel nine up next to iPhone 16, Galaxy S-24. And like, they are all just really nice phones. And it sort of feels like the first time that I've been like, yeah, these deserve to all be in the same conversation. I think it's a really good year to do it. And I think we're going to, yeah, to your point on the Gemini stuff, I think we're going to get funneled into these AI subscription nightmares where if you are in the Google ecosystem and like I am very much, you know, in Gmail and Google Docs and all of those services, it's going to get weird if you are, you know, trying to use the AI features and they're behind some kind of like Google One paywall, you know, I don't know. This is speculation. I don't want to like get too far ahead of myself. But that is something to consider. I think there is potential for, like, value of being all in on one system like there

quite wasn't before. I don't know. It feels like a stick that they're getting ready to just, like, smack us with. I totally agree. And I think the system thing is the one thing that weirdly keeps me sort of tied to iPhone. You can use most Google things, most of the Google universe on an iPhone. It's not as good, but it's there. Not true in reverse, right?

If there are any Apple-only apps that you like or you like Siri or there are certain Apple-e experiences that you want to have, they just don't exist on Android. And so I think the question of like, do I want to use a little of both? It kind of leads you to an iPhone in a strange way where. I think if you just want to pick one, the clear answer at this moment is Gemini. I think I'm so happy if I'm wrong about this in six months, but I have incredibly low expectations for what Apple intelligence is going to look like for the foreseeable future. And Gemini has many flaws, but is doing a lot of stuff already.

And so if you want to just buy in, that's probably the one to start with, as opposed to like crossing your fingers for Siri to get really good next year. Yeah. But you can a little bit have your cake and eat it. on the iPhone because there is both Siri and there is the Google app and you can have both. And so I think in a weird way, Android forces you to both, it gives you a bigger ecosystem, but also forces you to make a choice in a way that the iPhone a little bit doesn't yet. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair.

But the fold is so nice. The fold is so nice. Just 10 out of 10 on like niceness. If this thing wasn't $1,800, I would be like screaming from rooftops that this is the phone everybody should buy. Yeah. But it's $18,000. I know.

So, Keith, do it. Do it at what you will. I don't know if we helped at all, but that's where we are. Probably not. All right, Allison, thank you, as always. Thank you. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today.

Thank you to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about. All the reviews, all of our coverage, all of the hearing health stuff in the AirPods, all of the sleep apnea stuff in the Apple Watch. Lots of interesting things going on. Lots of stuff coming. in the coming months, lots of coverage of camera buttons, all of it on theverge.com.

I'll put a lot of links in the show notes, but as always, just go read the site, find our bylines. It's good stuff. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other reasons, people should buy one phone over another. You can always email us at Vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866, Verge11. Either way, we love hearing from you. Thank you to everybody who reaches out every week. It is the best.

This show is produced by Liam James, Wilpour, and Eric Gomez. Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Friday to talk about AI news, more gadgets, all the stuff happening in the many, many, many tech trials, like so many tech trials, and everything else going on right now. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.