The Vergecast - The iPhone 16 is here — but it's not finished

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Apple launched the iPhone 16, Apple Watch Series 10, and AirPods 4 at its annual fall event in Cupertino. The devices come with some big upgrades — a new camera control on the iPhone, a new design on the Watch — but also a lot of promises about AI. Today on the show, we discuss everything that's new, everything that's missing, and all the reasons you might or might not want to upgrade your Apple gear this year. Further reading: iPhone 16 event live blog: all the news from Apple’s keynote iPhone 16 event: all the news from Apple’s keynote Apple announces the iPhone 16 with a faster processor and Camera Control button Apple announces the iPhone 16 Pro iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max hands-on: don't call it a shutter button Apple Watch Series 10 announced with bigger screen and thinner design The AirPods Pro 2 will soon double as hearing aids iOS 18 will launch next week with new ways to customize your homescreen Apple announces AirPods 4 with noise cancellation and better sound  AirPods 4 hands-on: noise cancellation for people who hate ear tips Apple has a faster MagSafe charger to go with the new iPhone 16 phones  Apple has a faster MagSafe charger to go with the new iPhone 16s It sure looks like FineWoven is dead Apple’s Visual Intelligence is a built-in take on Google Lens Beats’ new iPhone 16 cases work with the Camera Control button 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

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. Prompts 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 vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the A18 and A18 Pro, which are different things. This is our Apple event special. I'm your friend David Pierce.

Alex Cranes is here. Are they different? Honestly, I couldn't tell you, but we'll get to that. Neilie Patel is here. Hi, Neilie. 35 flops. That's all you get for me. You want 36, you get 35.

That's a deal in the table. I love this for you. Okay, first of all, Nilai, it's very important to me that you describe your whole setup right now, both for people who can watch who would like to know what's happening and also for people who can't.

Just paint us a word picture of your current setup right now. I'm in my hotel room in Sunnyvale, California. I just came from Apple Park. David's running the show because I have no idea what's going on. I was in Apple's,

ambient experience. Either you're going to get a new phone or you're going to be at raptured. That's my experience every time I go to Apple Park. I don't know what's going to happen. But yeah, I was just at the Apple event with our whole crew, V, Allison, Chris Welch, Vering. We had a great time. We ran around and played a few phones.

And I'm in my hotel room, which I've attempted to turn into a podcast studio. It went six. Okay. How's the lamp? Tell us about the lamp. The lamp is glued to the table. I'm very late. I'm on the West Coast.

Everyone else is on the East Coast because they didn't come. They abandoned me to Apple. We did. That's correct. So they've been very patient while I tried to figure out how to make this room work.

And the lamp being glued to the table really through a... You know how you leave a room? You're like, I know what I'm going to do when I get back to that room and you walk back into the room and the lamp is glued to the table. I don't know that's a metaphor.

I don't know what's a thing that happens to other people. But anyway, back. I know, it's our room. We just played with the phones. I met a bunch of people. I talked to Phil Schiller for five minutes about camera buttons, which is a fascinating conversation.

I'm ready to rock. I am very excited because it does feel like a solid two-thirds of this episode is going to be about camera buttons. But let's go back to the beginning. You were saying, like, before the event even started, that the vibe of this event at the Steve Jobs Theater was unusual. And you've been to a million of these. And so just to hear you be like,

this is not how this room normally feels. is fascinating. So, like, what was the room? Yeah, I don't want to do too much media criticism on our show. It's not anything criticism. It's just media talking about itself. Sure. But the mix of people in that space was different than before. It was like tangibly different than before. There was a lot more foreign press. There were more TikTok creators column. It was just like a different, younger, more visual video crowd. And everyone was just like thrilled. Like, I think for a lot people was their first time at an Apple event. So you just had this like surge of enthusiasm and then all the old heads in the corner just like grumbling about how the kids don't know what they're doing

with their selfie sticks. And I think that's a healthy, it's like a healthy tension. Yeah. I mean, if you rewind a decade, it was just like the old heads and Apple employees at those events, right? No, it was like the legendary print reviewers and me being like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take a photo and upload it to the internet right away. And they were like, what are these bloggers doing, get them out of my face? They're like, I don't go to print for three days. Yeah. I appreciate that I'm in this circle of life.

But the point I kept making in the live blog was that the room was super enthusiastic, which we just have not seen in quite a while, right? Obviously, there was COVID, and then a bunch of people came back. And I think Apple turned over its crowd. I asked a few people, it feels like the big change was the dramatic increase in international press that feels like the big change. I don't have the numbers and on Apple's data. That just seems like they widen the aperture if it was covering the event and they had a more lively atmosphere. Interesting. I do miss the like I mostly don't miss Apple event days when I'm not at

Apple event days, but there is something kind of lovely about the Steve Jobs Theater. Like it's a, it's a nice place. They did a very good job with the Steve Jobs Theater. They did a good job and then they opened a new building for this event called the Observatory, which is just sort of like over the hill and around the corner, and that's their new, like, briefing space. Oh. So they have the Steve Jobs Theater was too small the day it opened. They've been saying this since literally the day it opened. Like, this was too small because they, you know, they designed it in a very different time.

It took a long time to build and design and improved. So it's always been too small. And in particular, the sort of spaces within it where you can, like, have conversations, always too small. So they built an entirely new thing called the Observatory where they were having additional meetings and stuff because they have so many more people there now. And the observatories are like this glass window that looks over Apple Park. Apple sent some photos to magazine called Dezine today.

We were not allowed to take photos. You can look at it. It's very cool. And that's sort of their space for after the event because they have so many more people to talk to. That's cool. There is nothing more appellee than, look, we built this very cool building. You are not allowed to photograph.

Like that's it. That's Johnny Ive. The Spirit of the Man lives on. All right. Let's talk about the announcement. So I think let's do it in reverse order, kind of, of how Apple did it. Just because we got to start with the phones, right? Like, the phones is the thing.

There were watches, there were AirPods, and there were phones. Those are the big three. Both of you, I believe, last week said that we weren't going to get Macs. Congratulations on all of your accomplishments. We also did not get a TV. We did not get a television. I was devastated. Ted Lasso, no appearance.

Very upsetting. Jason Sudecass wasn't even there as far as I know. He's just like shooting lefty threes at WNBA game still. When Tim Cook was like, this is some of our most breakthrough and meaningful innovations yet, I was like, oh, they're doing a TV. It was not to be. Alas. But the phones got bigger, which is we're on the way to a television. Yeah.

Yeah, the product is gigantic. Yeah. But let's do, let's start with the cheapest phones and then go up to the most expensive phones. Alex, do you just want to like brief rundown of the iPhone 16 and 16 plus? Yeah. Yeah, the iPhone 16 and 16 plus are like good. They're exciting. I think the big difference is a lot of the stuff is new on these as well,

specifically the camera control, i.e. camera button, shutter button, although I think Neely probably has some feelings about that, so maybe we don't call it the shutter button. So it's got camera control. It's got the action button, which was on the pro last year. it's one to two thousand nits, it's got the ceramic shields, so you should theoretically be able to drop it with minimal scratches, the 18, and visual intelligence, which is kind of like Google lens, but Apple did it.

Yeah, but Apple did it, and it goes through like the camera control button. And most of the stuff, they really spent most of their time talking about the action button and the camera control, which like, as a button lover, I was elated, but other people, I don't know. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's different this time too, right? Like, we got, we got, we got a blue, we got this teal, like blueish teal. We got the pink. We got a purple.

It's, it's some lovely colors this time. So this is my first question, actually. Neely, you've seen these phones. Apple described the colors as, uh, I, I believe the quote was more vibrant. Vibrant was a word that was used. Uh, are they? Thoughts? You've seen these things, some of them, right?

They look great. They look great. The pink is very pink. The blue is very blue. Like, they are, in fact, very vibrant. They're very saturated colors. That's exciting. They're in shy away from them.

The phones are cool. Apple continues, sort of round off the corners of the phones. And then, as Alex is saying, the big change to the hardware is the camera control button, which is also in the 16. So you don't get the sense that the 16 is missing anything this year. There's a whole bunch of camera features that's not getting it as a sort of processor. Well, it's got one less camera. camera, right? They said it could do four, but it's only got, it's got two actual cameras. They got the 48 megapixel fusion camera and then the 12 megapixel ultra-wide.

Which is not four cameras. It feels very important to say that's not four cameras. That's two. It's not four lenses. It's not four cameras. The way Apple would argue this. And I spent, I mean, you can't just like throw the words fusion camera at me and not expect me to ask everyone exactly what that means. So fusion. Fusion what they call the sweater mode. Tell us about the Tetris. That's DeepFusion. That's DeepFusian.

The TetraPrisim is on the pro. So Fusion camera specifically refers to the idea that you have a 48 megapixel sensor that generally produces 24 megapixel images, but you can run it at 48. And then when you zoom, it doesn't just crop the sensor to get you a 12 megapixel zoom lens. It runs an entirely new photo pipeline. So they are treating it like you swap. lens sensor photo pipeline everything so you've got a 12 megapixel zoom lens sitting inside the 48 megapixel main camera you have to believe all of this is true

that's how you get two lenses that's the argue that's why it's called the fusion lens is you have 48 and then when you run it as a telephoto it doesn't just crop the sensor it does all this other stuff to treat it like it's a different sensor do you believe it that's like me saying there's me and then there's me with a British accent and that's a whole different guy. Like I just, I don't, it's... That's the argument. And then the other two, just to be clear, the other two is you have the ultra-wide

and then when you hold it close to something, it switches to macro, so it's a different camera. So you get four... And that one is slightly more believable. It's a slightly more believable. One thing is far way, one thing is very close. Sure, but the way to think about it is

it's not four cameras or four lenses. It's four modes. Yeah, which is fine. I'm good with that. Four modes I can work with. Lots of cameras have many modes. That seems fine. And I will say all the camera stuff seems solid. I actually think the big improvement to an ultra-wide camera is a big deal. And there's been a lot of excitement about it. I think I mostly don't shoot with the 0.5 camera on the iPhone because it makes everything kind of fish-eyed and weird looking. But there are some like genuinely sincerely cool things you can do with that lens that you can't do otherwise. So if like

if they've made that actually work, I actually think that's pretty exciting. So this is like real macro mode, right? This isn't just the stuff where I would hold the phone up really close, and if it focused, then I'd get a nice shot and call it macro. No, the 13 pros, I think, started doing true macro with their ultra-wide, and the pros have had it for a while, but now the regular 16 has it. And really what you're seeing is the regular 16, unless you want all these additional photography features, is basically the good phone, which is a first. Like, I would have never considered buying a regular iPhone before. I've always bought the pros.

I'm still going to buy a pro because I'm a huge camera nerd. But there's not some piece of this puzzle where I'm like, oh, that's not good for most people. Like this is a great phone, probably the best straight up iPhone. Apple's made in quite some time because it is inheriting most of the features of the pro, including the camera control button. Right. And the reason that's happening is a theme we're going to come back to many times in the

course of this episode is AI, right? The thesis is that these are AI phones. You can shake your head all you want, Eli. I'm right. And we should talk about this. But like they, what was Tim Cook's line? Like, these are the first devices built from the ground up for Apple intelligence. Yeah.

Like, yeah. That's the British accent. That's the same. It's the whole sales pitch. Yeah. They started these phones a million years ago, right? Like, obviously. I think they, they did the action button.

They knew that the number one thing people would use the action button for is that the camera. They were right. That's the number one. something people used. And so they added this other button. And it's funny, after the event, I'm, like, scrambling to post photos. And I had posted a thing on threads that I still use the same ancient Nikon camera and lens.

And I have been since, like, the beginning. And I'm still using it. And the photos are still great. And Phil Schiller saw me. And he was like, that's your old camera, huh? Because he'd seen my post on threads. We just got to talk in for a little bit. Another major, no earth-shattering scoops.

So I asked him this question, like, is this button here, because this is a new input method for the phone? Right? Is this a camera shutter button? Is this just for camera nerds? Like, Phil's a camera nerd. We talk about cameras every time we see each other. Or is it you want people to have their iPhone engage with the world visually?

Right? You want the AI to be able to see stuff. So you need to put this button right here so you can, like, open it right away and like look at stuff with your iPhone. And it's basically like, yeah, it's both. Like people, you know, you know, you know, use their iPhones for cameras all the time. It's convenient. We already see that's happening.

But at the same time, we have cameras on iPads, and people use them as document scanners. And we are just aware, like Apple's just aware of the universe of things the camera is already doing for people, like scanning QR codes to get menus at restaurants. So I pushed him on it. And he was like, no, it's both. Like, you have to see it as both.

And we've seen it as both for a long time. So I think you're right, David, like, there's a view towards a long-term future where the iPhone is just looking at stuff and being smart about it. And then there's right now, which is people need to open the camera and take a photo.

And this button represents a little bit of a transition, but none of the features are shipping. So it's just a camera button. So, okay, this is actually, if I'm being completely honest with you, the single biggest question I have for you as somebody who has held one of these phones. Is it a button?

All Apple calls it is camera. camera control. Like Apple studiously avoids calling it a button. And from the description in the keynote, it sounds a little bit like it's, it's kind of, I think I compared it to like the tiny MacBook trackpad where it's like mostly doing the haptic thing and it doesn't really move, but it feels like it's moving and you can, you know, move your finger around and it's sensitive that way. But it's not like a clicky button. Is it, what is this thing? Does the button move? It is a physical, honest to God, clicky button. Okay. That makes me feel like that. I was really, but it's a little. But it's I'm really worried.

No. It also does the other thing, which is very confusing. And every time I've used it, I've used it now a dozen times. My brain is still trying to figure it out. And I'm not saying it's hard to figure out. It's just one of those things you have to use for a little bit and, like, figure it out. So when you're, it's capacitive. The reason they're not calling it a shutter button is because it has like multiple functions inside of it.

And they're all enabled by the fact that it is both extremely pressure sensitive, and capacitive. So you can just push it down and it clicks and that'll take a photo. Like every time that's going to take a photo. And the new sensors are zero lag. So you can just bang away on even the regular iPhone 16 but also on the iPhone 16 Pro,

just taking pictures zero shutter lag. You're off to the race. That's pretty cool. That's cool. If you, like, I don't even know how to, if you think about moving your finger, it'll register like a tap. Do you know what I mean?

Like you're not, because you don't want to push it. You want to like just like give it a little Hey, great. Yeah. Yeah, just like, I'm thinking about you. And that'll open up one menu. And if you do it twice, you get, like, the big menu. And you can, like, switch between modes. So, like, by default, it's like the zoom.

So you, like, hold it down a little bit, and you get, like, the zoom thing. And then you can, like, slide your finger back and forth to zoom. But you can also click down again and switch to the new photo styles or switch between the lenses or all this other stuff. Eventually, you're able to lock exposure and focus. I'm, like, dangerously worried that you're described. like 3D touch or force touch both ideas that Apple has had that didn't go super well

for Apple the idea of like what if we give you infinite levels of pressure to push and different things happen depending on what you did and everybody's like actually this sucks and I can't figure out how to use it well so the reason it's going to work uh is because Apple's not depending on like third party app developers to do anything fair they've just they're just like here it is here's how it works and you can like I said it is I have not immediately sussed it out but you can see how you will. And the thing that's actually the most confusing about it is if you are used to a MacBook trackpad where the click is fake, the fact that it is actually a physical click to take a photo is the thing your brain can't get around. Right. Because you can press hard enough to make

it do stuff, but then you can press even harder to make it take a photo. This is going to be a mess for people. I'm so excited. It's not, I promise you won't be that messy. It'll just be like a week of very confusing results. Yeah, I mean, that's going to be a great week. Well, it sounds like the hard part is going to be all this stuff in the middle. If you just button mash, it'll take a picture, which is what most people want to do. Yeah, but then the capacity of stuff is, is wild too, because it, it's an iPhone, right? It's iOS. So it has inertia. So when you're like looking at your range of zooms, you can just like slide your finger really fast and it'll just fly to the next detent, right? Or fly between lenses. Or if you have it open to the lens

switcher and where there's no detents, you just like go from the farthest zoom to the ultra-wide by just like sliping really fast and it's just like roll. So it just as a hardware, software, Apple-y thing, it is like absolutely not just a button. Like it is like another weird little touch surface with a lot of ideas packed into it. And the idea is, for as much as I can tell, that you should basically be able to control

the entire camera from this button. Hmm. There's parts of it that you can't do, but you should basically be able to, you know, like a real camera is like lots of buttons and knobs and exposure compensation and styles and macro and they've got a lot of those ideas inside the camera control button. What if this becomes like a generational thing? You know how like your parents are always turning the light on on their phone? Because they kind of screw it up and we're

just like our brains just can't process it. We'll hit it like an age point where we're like we just can't use the camera control because it's so complex. Because it does sound like there's like a lot of like it's like really awesome and that there's a lot of opportunity with it, but also it does sound super complex. I think people are trying to figure out what that middle part where you're lightly tapping is for. That might be confusing. But like David is saying,

if you just push the button really hard, it'll take a picture. And that that part seems very... I will say that there are... We have weird hue light switches in my house. They have to push really hard. And people often don't push them hard enough. And so maybe they're just like, won't.

Maybe they just won't push this button hard enough. Maybe. So what I've found myself wondering about this is I actually get all of the reasons Apple would make this thing, right? Like it actually makes a lot of sense. It seems like a really useful controller. It also makes sense both in landscape and vertical mode, which is very clever. Like to make a button that feels like it'll work, whether I'm holding my phone like this and using my index finger or holding my phone like this and using my thumb, strikes me as very clever. What I don't understand is why this isn't the action button.

Like, why didn't they ship this last year and call it the action button? That makes way more sense to me than calling it camera control. There's all kinds of interesting stuff you could let developers do with this. It feels like vastly deeper and cooler and more interesting than like, here, long press this button and one of eight things will happen. It's possible the answer is just they wasn't ready, so they shipped it. But like, this seems to me to be what the action button always should have been. I think I disagree with that.

I think the action button is, I mean, we talked about this so much last week. Action button is meant to be a configurable macro button. Sure. And it just happens that most people thought the camera was the most useful macro. But I think Apple's all in on the idea that you should just have a button on your phone that opens your transit app or launches a shortcut or it does one of any number of appliance-like things that your phone does. Shout out to all the people who told us about the transit apps, by the way. We got a lot of feedback from people who use it for their transit apps. Yeah.

And I think Apple's like super into this. because what they were doing before was like weird triple clicks of the home button to accomplish these goals. Right. Now they just have another surface to map things onto. And the fact that everyone is using it for the camera, I think, was proof to them that they needed a camera button too. So you think that, I mean, and I guess you're probably right. Like, I was thinking that there's a roadmap for this that ends in it being something that, like, every developer can do stuff with. And it becomes like a system for controlling how you do lots of things.

But what you're saying, and I guess what's probably right, given the fact that it's called camera control is like this thing is about the camera. Like maybe it will be the camera in lots of apps, but like this is a camera thing. And that is, I agree with you in that sense that this is like, this thing has a real sort of statement of purpose that the action button like deliberately does not. Do you guys think it means that eventually we don't get that port free totally smooth glass iPhone? Yes. I think that that idea is officially put to bed. Yeah.

I don't think they have any interest in that. In fact, since those rumors have started, we've had two physical buttons added to the iPhone. And I think Apple, one, realizes, charging-wise, these phones are more power-hungry than ever, especially as they start adding AI features to them. People are going to have to charge their phones more.

So that port's not going away. And then two, I think the things you want to do very quickly on a phone are going to start to take primacy over the idea of opening the home screen and picking an app. And again, the AI part of it where they call it visual intelligence, where the phone can see the world, I think the primacy of that is very, very high. And so over time, this button might get optimized for some of that. But right now, Apple knows, like, for a lot of people, the iPhone is a web browser, a really

a messaging client and a really good camera. And so they can just be like, now the camera is easier. There's actually a chance that can get you to do other stuff on the phone. Yeah. Well, and I think that that pushes the same one behind a lot of what's in, like, iOS 18, right? Which is more customization. They're pulling more stuff out of apps and onto the lock screen and onto the home screen and into widgets and into live activities.

Like, the idea that you should be able to do most things on your phone without doing very much feels totally central to like the entire design of the iPhone, both hardware and software. And as it happens, I think is exactly correct. And I'm very, very happy about that. We'll see how every app developer feels with this, right? Like, you know, it was not for nothing that Apple very specifically called out when you do visual intelligence features and you search for a restaurant. Like you take a picture of a restaurant. It tells you what the restaurant is. It's rating and the menu. And it's like, where's that coming from? The answer is Yelp. Right. Can they swap in another restaurant?

provider for Yelp. Yeah, probably in other countries where Yelp isn't like the dominant provider of that info. Like Apple will swap it. But then they were also very careful to say, if we don't know what's going on, we'll ask Google. And if we recognize that what you're looking at is like a blank homework page, we'll like ask ChatGPT to like help you. So they're trying to expand the like universe of third party services that can talk to. The question is whether any of that becomes modular, how any of those services make money. No one seems to know. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of of the whole Apple intelligence question, right? It's like Apple, Apple seems to be building this very simple, seeming, beautiful thing

that it doesn't make any sense how the rest of the ecosystem around it works. Yeah, and to be clear, the weirdest part of these phones, they were announced. It's the first phones built for Apple Intelligence. They are going to launch with none of it. And maybe that's only true for a couple weeks, right? They're launching September 20th is the on-sale date. You can pre-order them, I think, next week or the end of this week. 18.1, iOS 18.1, is supposed to arrive since I'm in October with the first set of Apple

intelligence features. Right. So it's only a few weeks gap. Maybe at most a month gap, right? But that's a long gap to launch a phone without its highlight features. It's a long gap. It's also, it's launching on 18.1 in beta, and it's only launching some of the features. Like, some of the stuff that shipping is going to be very cool, right? Like, transcriptions and summary is coming to voice memos, like that, the stuff that's coming to mail where they can rewrite your email, which Apple brought up like 11 times during this event. Like, please dear God, stop giving us tools to write worse emails. Like, please, I'm begging you.

That is right up there with Apple explaining what bigger screens are for. Like, we're just killed. We are truly killing time in these events at some point. Like, or Apple thinks everyone is stupid. It might be both. It might be both. The screen's bigger. You can have fit more content on a bigger screen is like a regular explanation at Apple.

event right next to, hey, you wrote a bad email, and now the robot will write a nice email. So that our robot on the other end can read it and summarize it for you and then rewrite. It's just Apple Mail nonsense all the way down from here on. By the actual flow, we're hitting the boundaries of text handling and interface metaphors in iOS 18 with some of the say I stuff. So if you want to use these features in 18.1, you've got like a long thing in like notes, right? and you want to summarize it and send an email, you have to select all of it, which is like grab the handle and scroll all the way down.

Or, you know, if some apps have the select all, fine. And then you have to tap it again to get that select, that little menu, that like modal pop-up menu to come back up. And then you hit, like, writing tools. And then it brings up a sheet. And that, to me, is just bananas. I just want to say, based on my ongoing ability to, like, accurately cut and paste things over time.

The odds of me getting all three of those taps correct in a row is like one in four. So like a video game. Yeah, it really is. Prince of Persia on your phone. You're going to have a great time. Well, you know, the iPhone can now play AAA console games out.

Oh, yeah, Assassin's Creed. Sorry, sorry. Somewhere you stopped. It's like, they did it. They mentioned us. No, but it's just like, if that's the thing you're selling and actually text handling in an iPhone

is, I would say it's messy. It's just, it's not like they've revolutionized it. No, it's pretty inelegant and it has been. It's basically the same way it has been since like they added it to the iPhone. You're now at a place where you're like,

oh, we're straining the interface metaphors of this in a real way because what we're asking people to do to use these new features is move a lot of text around or like take action on a lot of text. And it just doesn't, the iOS was not like built for that

in a particular way, and now in the way that a desktop computer, like, obviously is. And now we might, I hope Apple takes the opportunity to be like, we should rethink text handling here, or, like, find cursor control. Okay, but there was one AI feature that actually seemed good in this that they pointed out this time, which I don't think they mentioned at WWDC, which is that you can just ask Siri to, like, tell you how to do stuff on your phone. No, they didn't ask that at WWC.

Did they? That's very much the, like, future of user manuals. generated AI. Like we have to we have to boil the ocean in order to make a useful user manual for your iPhone. I mean this this idea has been around for Bixby Samsung's Bixby is this idea. Yeah. You will talk to your phone and like it'll do stuff. But no one's done it well and I just I keep thinking of all these people who go to how tos who are using all these other ways to try to figure out how to use their phone and theoretically Apple's going to make it better but you have to know to ask. I saw a demo of this today. I don't

Did it work? It's like a haze of demos. Yeah, they were showing me like, you can ask it how to do XYZ feature. And it totally worked. They were obviously running 18.1 beta, not 18.0, which we'll ship with. But it worked. I mean, if you really think about all that's happening here, is Apple has a model that's running locally on the phone, and then they have their own user manuals, which they could load into the model. So you're asking a question of a pretty known set of information from their own knowledge basis and whatnot.

And that's a pretty straightforward use case that I think they've, I don't know how much people will use it, but from what I've seen, it works pretty well. Yeah. No, I think it's like it could be really useful if they actually promoted it, because I think of all the old people in my life who don't know how to use their phones. Right, but now you've got to get them to use Siri. Yeah, now you're going to be able to be like, no, you ask Siri. Don't ask me, you ask Siri now. You'll be out of it. And this assumes that you can ask Siri in a way that is not prescribed and doesn't have to be a very specific kind of way.

And like, again, so much of what Apple is asking us to assume is that, after what 13 years Apple has made Siri good and I just am so not ready to assume that yet. But back to what you were saying, Neelai, about when all this stuff is rolling out. This stuff is rolling out in beta in pieces in October and the biggest thing of it, which is this. Can I just be really clear about that? Because even that is confusing. So it's in beta right now. Yes.

You can technically do it right now. Right. The iOS 18.1 public beta is available. You can push the button. you can download it, you can run it if you have a 15 Pro, you can run Apple Intelligence some stuff right now. It's going to launch in the public release of iOS 18.1 sometime in October. But they're still calling it a beta in the public release, which is insane.

The features will be labeled beta in the release. And they've done it's a handful of times. They did it with portrait mode. Yeah, freeform the app launched like that, I think. Yeah, a couple other things like FaceTime audio transcriptions or something launched this way. There's a handful of this stuff. Deep Fusion technically was in beta, but nobody could see it, no one can still see it.

So it's fine. So Apple has his history of doing this, right? Particularly with the camera, but now what they're going to do is they're going to say huge chunks of this operating system are in beta, and they're just going to have the label and the release. So it's not in beta. You have to go get it. It's in the public release, it will be labeled with the beta, which is a little...

That's messy. Which is kind of like just saying, here it is. It might suck. which is, to be fair, what all of the AI systems do right now. They all have the label at the bottom that's like, this thing might lie to you. We don't know. Yeah. Not our problem.

It's also kind of what they did at this event when they announced all of this. They were like, and now we're doing Apple Intelligence. Also, this is just a recap of WWDC. Yeah, and all of the features are couch that you will be able to without any hard dates. And so, again, I don't care how many iPhones Apple sells to quote our friend and mentor Walt Mossberg. I don't give a fuck about your stock price. I just don't. But, you know, if one of the questions is, is this worth upgrading?

The answer is not in the hardware. The answer is in the software. Right. If you have a regular iPhone or any pro phone, save the 15 Pro, to get Apple Intelligence features, you need a new phone. Right. Okay, that's a good question. Like, are the features worth an upgrade?

The answer right now is no, because they're vapor. And I will just refer you back to one of the verges longstanding rules right up there with World of No Sevens and review what's in the box is it's vapor until it ships. Yep. It hasn't shipped yet. Apple has a great track record of shipping. I'm not, I don't mean to say this in a pejorative way, but it's vapor until it ships. So you just like cannot evaluate this thing because it's not real in any way, shape, or form. Right.

And especially with AI, it's not just shipping. Like shipping, shipping is the very beginning of the battle of making something that's actually any good when it goes to AI. And part of it is shipping, I know in the 18.1 beta, and you can summarize notifications. Like, no one's business. Have you ever looked at a small piece of information and thought to yourself, I wish this piece of information is smaller? Apple's got you. Like, you can do that right now. It's all of the rest of it that isn't out yet that has yet to ship.

It's all of this private cloud compute stuff, which is up and running and supporting the beta, but actually hasn't scaled and has not actually yet been audited by third parties to prove that it's compliant with Apple's privacy's, like Apple's privacy promises. All of that, we don't know yet. Like, we just don't know yet. So it's just hard to evaluate this phone. Like, from the dumbest perspective, like, should I upgrade a phone? I don't know.

Like, is your phone broken? This phone will be much nicer than the phone you have. Will this phone bring you a bunch of cool new AI features? Like, maybe, but I don't know yet. Your camera will be sick. Well. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see.

It's very hard to evaluate a camera at Apple Park. Well, okay, this is actually a good segue back into the pros, which we should talk about, because obviously there was a ton of focus on the cameras. I mean, right, if you're buying this thing on day one, the two things you're buying it for hardware-wise are the camera upgrades and the camera control. Like, that's it. That's the thing, right? Unless you, like, deeply want a phone that is called Desert Titanium.

And if you do, please email me and tell me why. I would love to hear from me. Because it's called Desert. It sounds cool. It's way better than natural. One of my favorite things that happened today was that as soon as they said Desert Titanium, every single person on our staff with Live Blog access made a different joke in the Live Blog. Can I tell you the joke that I did not make in the live blog?

Sure. Yes. Desert Titanium sounds like if one of the Mex in Pacific Room was a stripper. And now coming to the stage, you see what I'm saying? Desert Titanium. Niome. Benicio del Toro, get with me. I have an entire idea here.

That's very good. Like, I know how we can stop hiju attacks, and it's sexy. But yeah, with the prize. That's my last verge cast, everybody. That's it, yeah. We're leaving Nilai in Sunnyvale. This is the end, possibly of the verge.

Who knows? We're so sorry, but it was always going to end like this. This is what it was. I'm just going to point this out. As far as I know, Yeagers are not gendered, and this is an equal opportunity, like full spectrum stripper robot situation. Just flinging their metal plates into the ocean.

I'm just trying to be inclusive. Yeah, I love it. Just throwing metal around, 2024. Anyway. Desert titanium. The pro and the pro max, it's just the camera this year, right? Like better, better processor, different colors,

battery life, which I'm going to get very angry, about here in a minute. But like the thing, if you're, if you're thinking regular iPhone versus pro iPhone, you're basically making this decision based on the camera. And bigger display. Okay. And bigger display. Fair.

Granted. Which I will say anecdotally, it seems like has turned more people off than on, just from what I've heard. Seven inch phone. I mean, that's not math. Hold on. Almost seven inches of phone. Yeah. So, I mean, I held it.

And if you hold it without holding the 15 Pro Max in your hand, you're like, oh, it's manageable. And then you hold them next to each other. You're like, well, this phone is big, and this phone is a surfboard. Oh, wow. And you're a Max guy. So for you to say that is not small. Yeah. Yeah, it's not anywhere close to a small phone.

It's enormous. I love it. I'm super going to buy it. Obviously, some people will buy the pro just for a camera. But then people are also going up to the pro max size because it had the better zoom lens. Right. And now it's the same zoom lens on both. So you're not being forced into that biggest phone.

You can sort of stop it gigantic. and still get kind of the best camera system. And I think the 48 megapixel ultra-wide here is a big deal. It's still the ultra-wide, it doesn't capture as much light. And it's impossible to really evaluate iPhone cameras at Apple Park because it's just like a beautifully lit space no matter where you are. The best lit place you will ever exist. Yeah, it's like angelic light from the heavens just like suffuses the environment.

So it's impossible to evaluate. But I took a bunch of photos and obviously the main camera is way better. obviously the main camera has more modes and all this other stuff. And then they've, but having a 48 megapixel ultra-wit means you do get some more detail. You get, you know, it's just a better

camera than the old ultralide. And I actually use the ultra-ride a lot, so I'm pretty excited about it. What do you use the ultra-ride for? I'm just often in a space where it's like I want to take a picture of Max and I want to capture the environment that I'm in with Max.

Yep. Like, here's the whole playground. And like, that's a useful, it's just a useful tool. That's exactly my experience, which is why I asked. It is constantly, like, I can either get, like, the shoulders up shot or I can use the ultra-wide.

So that, for me, it's exactly the same thing. Yeah. But I think for the pro, like, the reason I brought this up when we started talking about the camera thing is the, a big part of the keynote was about all of these new camera modes and all the different ways you can shoot and the fact that natural is just, like, a mode now, is deeply fascinating to me, that they're like, you can shoot a thousand ways. One of them is regular. and here's a bunch of other ones.

And I just feel like, obviously, Nila, you were in the room, so you saw this stuff on the screen, which is always hit and miss. Everything always looks great on the screen, has been my experience. But also, like, took some pictures and saw them on the screen.

Like, what do you make of Apple's sort of million new ideas about photo processing here? Well, one, let me tell you two things about the screen. Okay. Something else, Will Schold told me. So, again, they built the Steve Jobs Theater

they designed it ages ago, and he pointed out to me, they built it for projectors. The room is designed for big projectors, and then they wanted to do a big LED screen because that's what everyone does now. So they had to basically engineer their own screen for the theater, and it goes past the wings of the stage.

Oh, wow. To get the size and shape they wanted. That's very Apple. And Apple designed and engineered their own LED screen, which is hella bright. Let me just tell you. Hella bright. The other thing I saw the audio in that room,

I keep talking about the room and, like, it was very cheery in there. There's a little boomy today. I'm like other times. Things were different today at the Steve Jobs. Anyhow, so it's hard to know, like, all the modes. Yeah, every time I see Apple's camera team, they basically are like, here we go again. They just book it towards me? No, they're into it.

All these companies are run by extremely type A individuals who want to fight. They would just prefer to win. So I always have these great conversations. It's always super interesting. In their point of view now, which, again, we have to review the phones or to see how true this is, it appears to be that they have realized that people are going to filter the photos anyway. Right? So they're like, look, people have a radically different interpretation of what their own skin tone is,

and we just have to get out of their way. Like, that's not for us to decide anymore. So here's all of these options, and there's all these sliders, and photo styles have existed on the iPhone for ages. In fact, they started as a response to the picture. pixel. Because you will remember back when computational photography started and the pixel team and Mark Levoy were talking about like, you know, like old painters they liked and shadows and details. The iPhone was like too bright and too even and we'd be like, we like, we like the pixels

contrast. So they added photo styles and one of them was basically like shut up about the pixel. But it was destructive. So you could shoot in that mode and that was it. And the reason they're making a big deal about it again is they've re-engineered the photo pipeline so you can change it at will after the shot. And so that means you can capture all the stuff. You can do all, you don't call them filters. You're very careful to say like this kind of photo processing dates back to the 1800s, all this stuff.

But the idea is you will be able to get a much more DSLR type photo with like heavy shadows and heavy detail or a much more modern smartphone ultra tone matched photo where all shadows have been banished from the face of the earth, never be spoken again. And now those are controls. Are anyone going to use these controls? I don't know. The power of defaults really matter and does natural on an iPhone still have to stand for something? It does. Can you evaluate it inside of the angelic light of the Steve Jobs? You cannot. So you have to get it. But I think they're starting to see that their users are constantly changing these photos anyway. And so their own point of view has to kind of be a good starting plate for all the changes to come.

Do you guys use those modes now? Because I just realized I've had it set in rich contrast for probably as long as I've had this phone. That's pixel mode. That's interesting. I've been in pixel mode for years. I think that's really telling, right? The power of defaults is a really real thing here. And I think what I wonder about the pro is whether it is more prone to get people who are more likely to be interested in fussing with those things.

Obviously at the very top end, like the kind of people who are shooting. the 4K 120 stuff and holding it up in a gimbal and like the people Apple likes to show in these keynotes and in their ads, those are the people who are going to use these filters and I think will be psyched about it, right? Like to have more options to do this stuff, quote unquote, in camera is great, all for it. But I think the like interface question of how you surface this stuff for regular people is really fascinating and really hard. And I think it's kind of how I feel about the camera control thing, right? I think most people will figure out that if I smash this button, it will take a picture. And everything more nuanced than that, you start to lose some giant

percentage of the number of people who are going to use the phone. That's why I keep thinking about this Apple intelligence. Like, I mean, obviously it's very easy to turn it into the personal assistant for your phone settings. But that feels like a win at this point. If it really works, that's like the thing you want to advertise constantly tell everybody, look at all these cool settings. It's too hard to remember. Seriously. But what do you say? Like, make this photo look like the 1980s and if everyone was doing drugs. Yeah, that's exactly what you say.

I say, like, I want that creepy 2000 digital camera vibe. Right, but do you want that, do you want to say that before you take the photo or after you take the photo? Well, you can do both now, as I understand it, with the pro. It'll let you change the style after. They said that was a big part of the thing. It will, but there's just parts of taking a photo. Like, how long? is the exposure.

Like, do you want to fire the flash? If you want that in these sleeves, like, you might want to fire the flash. Like, there's a lot of steps in between make it look like this. Yeah. And just tell the robot to make it look like this. I want the robot to do all of it. Right. And Apple does too.

Yeah. If they can do pull it off. To be clear, once again, none of that is shipping it. And what Alex is describing in particular is just like us dreaming. Yeah. That's just, you'll be able to just like talk to the phone and it will do stuff. It's also Apple dreaming. That is like we're not making that up.

That's Apple's idea. Right. And Apple wants to plug third party apps in the series so they can do this stuff. We're just nowhere close. Like that is all pure vapor. That's not even, it's going to ship in the next version of 181.

That's maybe a year away. And what we have now, right now in the camera, particularly pro camera, is infinite customizability. So if you know what you want, the camera can now get way closer to delivering it. And that is different than are the photos by default more real?

or less over-processed. We just don't know. But the idea that the camera is now infinitely more flexible in the pro model is, I think it's borne out by just the number of controls you have, and the fact that most of the pipelines aren't destructive anymore. Yeah. Yeah, which I think is very cool. All right, we need to take a break.

We've been talking about camera buttons for way too long. Any parting thoughts on the iPhones, Nila? You've held all the things, anything that jumped out to you before we stopped talking about phones? The Pro Max is really big, and all of the phones are really nice in a way that I don't think has been a... Like iPhone 5 nice, like peak iPhone nice? No. But they are the most refined versions of this design I've seen in quite a while. And I honestly think the 16s, once they get some of the features, they'll move.

People will buy them. Okay. That's very exciting. All right. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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All right, we're back We've had the ad break to think Any more phone thoughts? Everybody feel good? I didn't yell about the battery life But I'm gonna not yell about the battery life You'll have time Yeah, I feel like we need to talk about the processor

And the battery life So they kept saying it was the best battery life Ever without a number. Yeah. Just the best. And they did, the one that really killed me was there was a moment during the keynote where there was a slide

in which they showed the battery meter with the green and then just extended it so there was more green. That doesn't mean anything. What am I supposed to do with that? Oh, good, you made the icon longer? Congratulations. That accomplished.

I'm so angry at how many times they said battery life without giving any actual information about battery life. So I think the 16 Pro Max is supposed to the best battery life ever on iPhone. I'll say my 15 Pro Max has garbage battery life. It is absolutely abhorrent. It is just bad. My 15 has deteriorated faster than any iPhone I've ever. ever used. I haven't even looked at the deterioration. I'm just like, oh, it's the middle of the day.

I should charge my phone. That's where I'm, that's tough. That's not good. But I, the, the, the, the stats, as far as I can tell, what they are talking about is hours of video playback. It's a proxy for everything else. They just don't want to be like 33 hours of video playback on a slide. We spent a bunch of time last week talking about how stupid a metric that is. So whatever, we can move on. Well, talk about it next week. I frequently watch dozens of hours of consecutive offline video on my phone. Do you guys not? Is that? Yeah. On its hyper optimized video playback engine. Yeah. Amazing. So you wanted to say something about the processor? The processor, speaking of ultra optimized video playback engines, a lot of our commenters have noticed that

the processor upgrades on the phone made for AI don't amount too much. Like, you actually still get, it's 35 flops, right? Is the thing. And that's what you get. Like, the end. But on a phone, Oh, sure, but that's the same as like last year. Yeah. So I think the made for AI claims are kind of like running right up against the reality of phone development times. And I think most of what they've done is just put a bunch of RAM in all these phones. Yeah, eight gigs.

Yeah. Which is. Which is great. Like, terrific. More RAM is a good thing. They're not each $400 more because Apple put more RAM in them is really impressive. Seriously. Yeah.

But no, to some extent, the processor thing I think is whatever, right? Like, I think you're right that if you were going to make, like, an AI phone that wanted to do all this vastly complicated stuff offline and locally and be awesome, fine. But, like, what you have in the A18 is going to do the job of writing business emails for you, perfectly fine. Like, the ceiling of interesting AI features right now is still so much lower on a device. like this than the performance ceiling of the device, that I'm just not bothered by this. Just do wait, David. It's going to write the most beautiful email. I hope I'm wrong. Like, someday in 2036 when Apple Intelligence actually ships, maybe it'll be amazing. Everything changes really fast. Who knows? It's going to be an email that makes

you weep. You're going to be like, how could it, no human could write this. It's too pretty. The thing is, I'll never see it. My Apple Mail will just summarize it for me. I'll never even see it. It's no problems. And that summary will also be beautiful. But we should talk about these AirPods, right? Yeah, let's talk AirPods. Because these are actually exciting. I think this was the coolest part of the whole thing.

Cranz, it was, I was about to say it was three AirPods. I think it was four AirPods. Will you run this down for us? So, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's four technically. I think it's four. It is four. Well, three. It's like three and a half.

Yeah, we'll go three and a half. We'll go three and a half. So there's the AirPods four. It's two. They're too flage. No. We'll get there. We're doing Apple math.

It's at least. It might be six or seven. We'll see. We're just going to keep adding. All right. Okay. So there are the AirPods four and there are, Deli is correct, two versions of them. There's one that's like $129 and it's got, you know, it's the new shape and all of that stuff.

And then there's one that's $179 and that's also got active noise canceling in it. And in both cases, there will be. headshake to respond to Siri. I believe the personalized spatial audio, is that in both? I'm pretty sure. The H-2 chip is going to be in both USBC charging case, 30 hours of battery life. The battery case is going to have a little speaker in it, so it'll beep-beep when you lose it, which has been hugely helpful with my pros.

They rule. Like, these are just really good iPods. And then, just because I have to prove that there's four updates. There's the AirPods Max, which are still just $549.49. That didn't change. But now we get some more colors. And you can charge them with USBC. You don't have to care about your lightning cable.

So technically, new AirPods Max. And just right there, you talked about it longer than Apple did during the keynote. I did. Thank you. It was like somebody at Apple was being held hostage until they mentioned the AirPods Max. They didn't just look at colors. It was so bizarre. They were like, new colors, USBC moving up.

Okay. They also were like, it's still $549. The AirPods Fax are absolutely not a new product. They changed the connector they should have had a year and a half ago, if not more. And they made two colors. It's the same. We're going to get them the Apple Watch. Same with the Apple Watch Ultra, too.

We're like, here's a video about how it's black now. It sure is. I almost wrote in the live blog, when there's a long sweeping shot of the watch band, you know there's nothing else to tell you. But anyway, so wait. Kranz, did you talk about the AirPods pros? No, no. And then this is our fourth set of AirPods. Yeah.

The fourth one is the AirPods Pro, two, which will not change in any reasonable way. But they are new because they're getting hearing aid features. Yeah, that's cool. A new feature. That means a whole new audience. That's basically due. That is the single most important announcement of this entire event, but that is not new AirPods. I just want to be that they announced two new AirPods and some software features.

of monumental importance. Can I just admit something right now on this show? I didn't realize until right now that it was just a software update. I thought there had to be something new in the hardware if you're going to tell me about how this is adhering it. You're telling me this is just the software update. It's just the software update. So if I have existing AirPods pros, they're going to get these two. They have to be the two.

Yeah, you need the AirPods to AirPods to Pro 2. AirPods 2 Pro 2. 2. Attorneys general. You need the H2 chip. So you need the second generation AirPods Pro, and then you need a phone that can run iOS 18. So there's some cutoff on what phone you have.

Sure. But if you have those two things, you can take the hearing test, which will, you know, Apple has to finish its FDA clearance, but they say they're going to do it, and then they can act as hearing aids for the same battery life as they get now,

should that six hours. I mean, you did that the, like, be remiss if I didn't point out, FDA clearance is, in fact, a thing they have to still get. They have to still get it. They haven't gotten yet. They say they're going to get it around the world as well. They're also very careful with the language.

They're not hearing aids. They have a certified hearing age functionality. There's a lot of hearing aids now that work kind of like AirPods. So this feels like a huge deal. Again, I think I've told this story in the rich past before, but I will tell it again. The only thing that our government of old people accomplished in the Trump administration is they all got together and passed bipartisan legislation that Trump, Trump signed to make hearing aids legal over the counter because they were all a million years old.

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump were like, yeah, yeah, we should make hearing aids easier to get because we're all a billion years old. We can't hear shit. It's a triumph of bipartisanship that they passed a lot of making hearing aids available over the counter in this way. Sony has them, Bose has them, a bunch of other companies sprung up. Bose entered the space and they left the space that came back in with a partner because they're complicated. I sort of asked about this with Apple. Apple's attitude is like, it's not that complicated for us because we're Apple. And then also, fascinatingly, their belief is that because they are AirPods, they will be more socially acceptable than hearing aids.

I believe that 100%. I think that is by far the most exciting thing about this. We were debating this in the newsroom today, but like we have long since reached the point where just having one AirPods in all the time is completely socially normal and acceptable. acceptable, right? Like, it's, you can feel about it however you want, but like that, it's just a fact. That's where we are in the world. Like, one of my favorite things is to see couples walking down the street, holding hands, talking to each other, each with like the opposite air pod in. Like, it's just life now. People do it. And I, the fact that. Is this something you see couples do or something you do in your relationship? I was like, David, I've never seen this. I would never. I see people doing this all the time. You need to go outside more often, Kranz. I don't know what people do in New Jersey. I was like, they don't be that in Jersey. But no, but I think the idea, there are lots of interesting questions about like... I just want to point out that David lives in Washington, D.C. home of an infinite variety of government lawyers and contractors. And it sort of makes sense that they've all replaced Blackberry hand with AirPods ear.

Yeah, 100%. A hundred percent. D.C. was definitely like the last vestige of the huge Bluetooth headset. And they just, like, they went straight into wearing AirPods on hinge dates. Like, that's just what we do. It's an election year and everyone's got one airport in. is like what David is describing. All right.

It's just Ezra Klein talking to every single person in Washington, D.C., all the same time. That's just what it is. That's not wrong. No, it's you, me, and Ezra on a date together at all times. That's great. But no, I think the fact that no one would look at you twice for wearing an AirPods in a coffee shop is like a huge part of the reason this is incredibly compelling. I think it's so cool. But does this mean that now people are just, I mean, people are just going to talk to you when you have your AirPods.

said. Like before it was like a universal sign of don't talk to me. And now it's going to be like, I'll talk to you. That might be a hearing aid. If you zoom out, Apple pitched a pretty weird vision of reality today where you are always wearing AirPods. This is what I'm saying, I don't think that's a vision. I think that is reality. No, but like you're wearing the minute at a concert. You're wearing them to prevent hearing loss. You're in adaptive mode all the time. We're like, all of your hearing is being modulated through AirPods. Like, they're just prosthetics. Right.

And then I, not to get too in the weeds of weirdness. Apple also makes the Vision Pro, which wants to mediate your site. And after a while, you're just like, Tim Cook is building a helmet. And you're going to go in the helmet. And Apple's going to manage the world for you and, like, clean it up for you. And that is a weird vision of the future. But the amount of let us put a computer in between you and reality is very high in Apple world right now. That said, you know, you can feel about wearing AirPods.

Is that a whole episode of Black Mirror, too? Tim Cook builds a helmet. It's a great episode of Black Mirror. All that is to say, maybe that stuff will hit regular people in different ways. The actual hearing aid functionality, if they can get more people to take real hearing tests and then wear hearing aids, they will do a great service to the world. This is very exciting. And all those competitor hearing aids I was talking about from Sony and Bose and all these other companies. companies, $1,000.

Yeah. No, this could change my Thanksgiving. And they have, like, bad apps and weird features and all this other stuff. This is, what, AirPod pros are 250, right? $250 and the hearing test is built into the OS and it is perfectly tuned. And you might not have the weird social accessibility problems. That's, like, very meaningful. Again, I think it is probably the biggest announcement I made today in the scale of things.

Yeah. I agree. And the fact that you take that hearing. test and not only does it tune the hearing aid stuff, but it tunes everything else in the AirPods to you, I think is very cool. Like, Apple has clearly kind of gone all the way down this road. Watching them talk about it, it made me think about the stuff that they did for the Vision Pro, which is like, you have to do an incredible amount of work because of the affordances of like the human body. So they had to like invent this new way to scan your face to do it and

created this whole crazy pipeline just to get the thing to work on your face for some reason. This feels like it's in service of like a much cooler, more real thing for people, which I agree. I think it's awesome. But they've done this before, too. Like the bit where it's supposed to modulate the hearing and stuff, they've done that before. Like, that's an accessibility feature now, I think, where you can put it in, it'll do a hearing test. Yeah, they've had the voice captions. They've had transparency mode.

They've had live listen. They've done a lot of stuff that walks right up to this line. Yeah. This is just over the line. Like the FDA is going to tell people these are hearing aid features and mean it. And that I think is it at 250 bucks, it's just vastly more accessible for so many people. Well, I'm just curious the quality of it because some of those changes they've done before, like I've messed with those accessibility features and they're not that great.

Like the one where it's supposed to do kind of a little hearing test and be like, we're going to make the sound even better for your ears. I guess my ears are garbage. You don't love your personalized spatial audio. No, your ears are good. That's the dumb. There we go. Right?

So if you're not, if you don't have some big, as you get older, right, you lose your high frequencies. It's like, have you ever watched these like TikTok videos? It's like we can guess how old you are. Oh, no, there's a whole thing right now about remarkable. And this, this wine that people hear. Apparently. Oh, interesting. Because I've been spending a lot of time going.

Yeah. And I'm like, oh, my God. Am I just so old? I didn't hear this wine on the remarkable? Right. So you're losing, you might be losing the very, very top end, but as you get older, you lose even more, or you have different cutouts or whatever. All this stuff happens. So if you have reasonably good ears that let's tune it to make it work for you is going to accomplish nothing because there's nothing to tune.

If you have frequency dropouts or other kinds of hearing issues, the tuning will actually overcome it and it will sound clear and rich again. So will any of this work? I have no idea on AirPods. This is what audiologists do today to tune real hearing aids. You just made my ears sound better, so this is great. Yeah, you should be proud of, I mean, you can't hear the remarkable. You're getting old, Alex. I know, I'm getting old.

I can't hear the remarkable, but the accessibility feature on AirPods sucks for me. So that means my head is great. Most of those things are just scams perpetrated by young people to make old people feel old. They're not playing a sound when they're like, only young people can hear this. That's fully how you know you're getting old. That's it. Right there. But I think the thing you just mentioned, Eli, I think is actually like the question of all of the AirPods,

kind of all the way down the line. not including the Macs, which are technically a new product, but, you know, whatever, that can Apple back these really advanced features into the existing product, I think, is the question, right? And even if you go down to the regular AirPods, it's a $50 upgrade to get noise cancellation. And if Apple has figured out how to do, like, genuinely good ANC inside of an open ear set of headphones, that's a big deal. $50 is a lot of money to spend for that particular upgrade, especially if you're not so price sensitive

that you only want the cheapest one, but you're too price sensitive to buy the pros. There's a very odd sort of middle ground there that I think Apple is trying to strike. And the question of can we bring these advanced features down into a different form factor that is not optimized and designed for those features? Kind of is the question.

And I have no idea. Have you tried these things at all yet? I have not yet. I don't know if I believe it. We have to see it. Like, noise canceling is pretty dumb technology. It's very clever, and you need a lot of processing power to do it. But the idea is pretty dumb, right?

You listen to some things that you identify as noise, and then you just play back their inverse to cancel out the sound waves. Right? It's a very dumb idea. And the hard parts are, like, identifying what is noise, making sure you don't accidentally clip a bunch of useful frequencies, all this other stuff. Doing an open ear, you're just not in control of the sound environment.

Like, sound is literally getting around the headphones. So are they just going to run a bunch of, like, white noise cancellation? Like, will other people be able to hear the cancellation is, like, kind of what I'm interested in it? Oh, that's interesting. Well, I'm also curious, they have to fit, right? Like, the whole thing that they don't have a seal, they just sort of sit in your ear. I never liked them because they were that. like you because I could hear everything around me.

And now I'm going to be able to hear everything around me, but then sometimes it's going to be blocking some stuff that feels like a good recipe for like your brain just getting messed up. Trying to listen to your headphones. Yeah, maybe we'll see. But it's Apple. I would expect they wouldn't break brains with a product. Yeah.

I mean, they're going to, they're confident in it is what I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is the sort of thing that it's an odd skew of the product. like if you go to Apple's website right now and you go to buy AirPods, the options are AirPods and AirPods with adaptive noise cancellation. And I think if you have a product

that is technically titled AirPods with adaptive noise cancellation, you should maybe rethink your product excuse. But like if they've done that, I think suddenly like this becomes at $179, like maybe the pair of headphones that just about everybody should buy. But I don't think that's going to be the case because of the fit.

Like the fit on the AirPods is so specific and it works for a lot of people. And if it doesn't work for you, it sucks. That's true of the pros, too, though. Can I say two things about this? One, Apple said without any sourcing that AirPods 2 are the most popular iPhones in the world, which I can believe, I would just...

Sure. Sure. It's like, The Verge is the most popular website in the world. Like, sure, you can believe it. We are, by the way. It's true. And then second, they introduced the new AirPods 4 with this sort of like, you know, short description about everyone's ears are different.

They've measured all the ears. they got to the right shape. They said that the first time. They, no, not even the first time. They said that when they announced the wired earpods. With not, I think not even the first iPhone, like with an iPod Nano is when the earpons came out, right? Yeah. Yeah, because you would ask, like, I've asked them before, hey, are we ever going to get different sizes because these are too big for some ears?

And they'd be like, no, we did a test and it works for 90.9% or whatever. You're fine. But the thing is, like, that's true. Like, it turns out that everyone started wearing ear pods and buying iPhones because they worked for most people. Oh, no, I can't use the original AirPods. I couldn't fit in them at all. Well, listen, Alex, we've established. I've got tiny ear canals, okay?

The Alex Cranes is a very specific problem for me. Do pros fit? You're good with pros? Yeah, but I have to use this. I'm the opposite. Pros feel awful on me. Yeah. So Apple announced the ear pods in 2012. It was a Johnny I video.

It was alongside the iPhone 5 and the iPod. It was like iPod. God, what a year. This is how old they were. And at the time, they were like, we asked more than 600 people to test over 100 iterations of the earpods. We made them run on treadmills in extreme heat and cold. They did cardio.

They shook their heads up and down. And AirPods are like the design that fit the most ears. And now we're like 12 years later and they're like, we did it again. We've once again measured all of the ears in the world. And they look a little bit different. Maybe that's true. Evolution, baby. Sure.

It's true. They stuck with this design for a long time and maybe ears have changed. But I think the reason AirPods Pro are the most more popular headphones even more expensive, maybe just the word pro in the name. Maybe it's noise canceling. I actually just think they stay in people's ears better. Yeah, I would agree. I do. I do agree with that.

And I think especially early on, the regular AirPods developed a reputation for falling out of your head, right? Like for years, there were all those stories of people like losing the AirPod on the street and it would fall down. And whether it was true for you or not, that fear was real. And even for somebody like me, they fit well in my ears and they don't fall out. I am perpetually terrified they're going to fall out because they feel loose, which is actually like the point. That's why I like them because they don't feel like they're smushed into my head. But it makes me feel like they're going to fall out all the time. And the pros, for better and worse, smush into your head.

And don't feel that. way. And I think that is real for people. Like I agree with you. You see people like covering their ears sometimes if they're walking over a great or or hopping on a train. And and, and, because I think like the, the OG AirPods feel kind of like earrings, but then like clip on earrings. This is something you, neither one of you probably have a lot of familiarity with. But there, you know, there's earrings that go in your and they hang right. That's true. What's a little piercing there, David? It looks great. But people, you know, And when you have those clipons, you're constantly, like, holding your hands up because they're going to fall off. And AirPods feel the same way.

And nobody wants, nobody wants clipons. I just like how much you two are looking at people in their AirPods. Like, is anthropologists. Like, David's like, there's another couple wearing one AirPods each. And Alex is like, another person's ear muffing over a great. It's nice because then I'm like, oh, I'm not alone. It's called journalism. Yeah, that too.

This is also why I read everyone's screens when they're texting on the train. It's journalism. I love it when you find somebody type in spicy stuff. Oh my God. I literally, I one time, this is a true story,

missed my train and wrote it for one extra hour because there was a guy I was standing and he was sitting in like the first seat next to me and he was in the middle of breaking up with his girlfriend

over text messages. And I wrote the train for one more hour than I needed to. Just I got through the whole breakup. It was spectacular. It involved 7,000 words of text.

messages. Wow. It was incredible. Were you like, just call her on the phone? Seriously, right? It's like, I'll FaceTime her right now. Like, we can do this together. What's up?

You just sit down next to him? Here on the market. The guy next to me on the plane here, I swear to God, was trying to rod August flight. He failed. Six-hour flight from New York to California. Failed. Failed. Just like failed.

Then he picked up his phone, started typing in all lowercase and notes app for a while. I didn't read it. I did see him text the words, I need to write my own narrative to a friend also in And then, weirdest of all, on his phone on Delta Wi-Fi, which is garbage, started powering through Gmail on the web in Safari with the banner at the top of the screen that said Gmail's better in the app. And I kept wanting to be like, bro, it is better in the app. I love him. I honestly believe in moments like that. It should be allowed to just reach over and tap the open button that opens it in the app.

I really believe that. I was like, how are you using Safari? with the address bar in the bottom and you've got all right no it's fine that hurts me

to think about he needs that that 6.7 inch iPhone or 6.9 inch iPhone he needs a big one he can use he can read one more line of text

yeah speaking of one more line of text let's talk about the watches yeah they're big they are big another moment in this keynote

where Apple took a minute to explain what you can do with the bigger screen to see more things I would like, if anyone's out there, if you can make me a super cut of Apple executives patiently explaining that you can see more content

on a bigger screen over the past five years, I think it would be amazing. It would also be hours long. So, okay, the basic rundown on the watches, as I understand it, is Apple Watch Series 10, new design that looks an awful lot like the old design. It's thinner, it has a bigger screen. It comes in black.

I would say those are the same. salient points. It also comes in other colors. Nobody seems to care about those colors. It comes in black. Everybody's pretty excited about that fact. Shiny black. Okay. How shiny are we talking? Well, okay, hold on. We'll get to you. I want to talk. I want to hear what you think, Nealai. But then there's also the watch two, which is nothing at all has changed, except now it also comes in black, which, again, the ultra, watch. What did I say? You said watch two. Son of it. The watch two is dramatic changes since the Apple Watch Two is. It's changed a lot since the watch two. If you have a watch two, you're in for a treat.

But the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is unchanged. They basically reintroduced the product. They're like, the Ultra 2 is great for swimming and rowing and diving and also just looking chunky and like you have money. Also, it's black now. And that was the end of that. Yep. But the Series 10 is a new design.

It looks for all the world like the old design. It's just thinner. It's more rounded on the top. And yeah, it comes in polished aluminum black. It also charges faster, which I think is very, exciting. But the design is the one I'm curious about because I, my immediate reaction when they said thinner was, I don't care, right? Like I looked at the watch that was on my wrist and I was like, I don't know that I've ever wished for this thing to be thinner. It's how I feel about my iPhone, right?

Like every time they make it thinner, I'm like, it's nothing for me. But then there were a bunch of people I saw on, on threads and elsewhere who were like, oh, you know, just based on like the clothes I wear or like how I use my wrist, having something that's thinner is actually really meaningful. So what I'm curious about, Nealai, especially as somebody who wears the chunky one every day, did it feel different? Like if you had just picked it up, would you have been able to tell?

Because there's been years, really, since you've been able to tell kind of which one you were picking up. If you were paying attention, yeah. Okay. For a normal person, you'd be like, the screen's bigger, and that would be the thing.

Okay. You know how you could tell between a two and a four because the screen got bigger? Was it the four or five with a screen got bigger? I think it was the four, right? I think that's right. So, you know, the screen got bigger. So you can tell.

And then the four to everything else you couldn't tell, it's that again. So it's like a very minor adjustment, but it's bigger. Thinner, I think, is hard. But it, you know, for all intents and purposes, it's the same design. Like, we can lie to ourselves and say it's not the same design. It's the same design. Is the 10 screen now bigger than the Ultras screen? Yes, that's the thing they said.

Wild. Wild. Just the both screens or the 40? Because it's a 49? No, the case is the same size, but I guess because they made the screen bigger in the case, it's now bigger? There's a 42 and a 46 are the case sizes.

And the screen on both of them is bigger than the ultra? No, it has to just be the 46. It has to be the big one. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bigger one. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, it looks very nice. It looks very cool. You know, the highlight feature is actually sleep apnea detection, not the size. we have to see how well sleep apnea detection works another FDA clearance situation for apple did either of you have a moment during the keynote where you were like oh god am i about to find out i have sleep apnea like i don't know if this is a thing i want to know about myself i'm ready i'm ready to learn i'm open to new experiences i don't like wearing a watch when i sleep you don't sleep with your watch no i just no thank you i would say truly sincerely my single

favorite thing about the Apple Watch is how good an alarm clock it is for my body. Like, it wakes me up better and easier and more pleasantly than any alarm clock I've ever tried, and that is like two-thirds of the reason I wear it. But when do you charge it? So I actually, this is the reason faster charging is very exciting to me. I charge it. Typically, I will take it off when I go to shower in the morning, and I will just leave it on the charger until it's full. And sometimes that means I leave it there for five days because I just forget about it. But so the idea of actually being able to put it down, go shower, come back, and it has charged,

I think it was 80% in 30 minutes it was supposed to be. Yep. If it gets to that, suddenly, in my own experience, Apple Watch battery life sort of ceases to be a thing. And I find that very exciting. Yeah. And the battery life's gotten really good over the last few years anyway.

The Ultra is pretty good. And I think the Ultra is still rated, like, double what the Series 10 is. I worry a little about the Series 10. bigger screen brighter screen thinner thinner does not typically

bode well for good battery yeah can I just say one thing random common on screens the screens on the iPhone 16

and 16 pro can now go down to one knit of brightness it is actually wild to look at you turn the brightness all the way down

it's like it's just like a ghost of an image it's pretty cool that's actually awesome like it's somebody who uses my phone

in bed more than I'm proud of being able to get it like properly dim. Have you get a one knit and bed? Yeah. That's the dream. Like we were talking last week about like e-ink devices and like what if you could

make your screen not look so blue and bright? Like one knit of brightness will do it. I don't get you there. Yeah. No, it was very impressive. And then 2,000 nits in sunlight, which is ridiculous. Yeah. I really like.

She accidentally flashed on in bed. Who was it? Was it Craig or somebody else who was like sometimes people look at their watches at an angle? Like, yeah, thanks, dude. People look at their watches at an angle. The viewing angle of the watch, the Series 10 OLED is picked. I mean, like, again, if you watch his keynote, the number of times where they explain things,

like basic facts about screens, as though no one has seen a screen before, is hilarious. Yeah. Wide angle OLED. That's like a whole phrase. Also, and I say this, it all compliments, as though Apple doesn't already make the best screens consistently in the street. They're like, this piece of garbage series 9 display, you couldn't even look at it from an angle.

You're fine, actually. No one was worried about that before. No, not a real thing. Wait, I want to know about the blacks. Talk about the blacks. You looked at both watches. Sincerely, it seems like if Apple had just gotten on stage and said, we've changed nothing except both watches now come in black,

everybody would have been psyched and gone home happy. You've seen them both. How do they look in black? To be clear, they said, we've changed nothing on one watch, which now comes in black. Okay, fair. And I was like, I'm going to buy that watch. There's a new watch face that does sort of a swirly thing where you can't really tell what time it is. That's fun.

I was talking to an Apple person wearing the black Ultra 2, and I don't even know what that person was saying. I was just like, staring at the watch. I was like, what if I just around you? But now that watch belongs to you. Yeah, what if that was on my wrist and not yours? So that's great. I'm going to buy that one. The shiny aluminum.

it is shiny aluminum black. Like, it's, it's fine. Like, I don't know what to say about it. It's a black metallic. The shiny worries me because of scratches. Should I be worried about scratches? You know, that thing was so covered in fingerprints when I looked at it. I could tell you if it was scratched or not.

Also, not great. Yeah. It's just not what you want. Do you notice my pictures of the phone, also fingerprint city, but everybody puts the phone in cases, so who knows. That's also, yeah, it's been true for years. Every Apple product is a favorite city at this point. Ceramic case. The watch, you don't put it in case.

By the way, the back of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has special black sapphire glass. I'm going to buy this product so fast for no reason. It's so stupid. I've been trying to decide. So I have a series 8 that is fine. It is like, it is a perfectly serviceable Apple Watch. And I found myself looking at the 10 being like, well, it's great looking. and I like the black a lot,

but is there anything here that I'm like, I need this upgrade? Yes. For some reason. I landed on bigger screen seems good and the faster charging would be really helpful. That's the only two things I landed on. Yeah, from an eight,

that's not a big jump. I mean, the sleep apnea will be nice. Again, do I want to find out if I have sleep apnea? You're going to find out if you're joking. Am I ready for this information about myself? Every night. Alex, you just said the sleep apnea will be nice. Yeah, it will be.

You get it, actually. You get the watch and then you get sleep apnea. David is married and being married means you have a built-in sleep apnea detector. Or do you really? She doesn't like how I breathe when I'm awake. So I think sleep would not be a problem. If you are married and you can't reliably tell you have sleep apnea, you just need to show them the list of sleep apnea symptoms and you'll be fine.

Yeah, that seems right. All right, we need to take one more break and then we're going to do a lightning round of other apple stuff And then we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

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So that was all the big stuff. There's lots of software stuff to talk about, but I feel like that's actually probably better for next week. Or when it ships. Well, it's all shipping next week. all the, well, all the new OSs are shipping next week. All the Apple Intelligence stuff is shipping someday in the unknown future. If you are a new Apple OS and you don't have Apple Intelligence, are you a new Apple OS yet?

Yeah, dude. Have you seen how you can move the icons around on the grid now? Game changer. I actually, I'm soliciting notes. We're going to have to review these phones. I don't know how without Apple Intelligence. I'm legitimately like how are we going to write reviews of phones. So it will only exist in this form for some number of weeks before the big update comes.

It's so funny. I'm less optimistic than that. I think there is a super solid chance that the actual experience of Apple intelligence is not going to show up in a real way until the iPhone 17. I would agree. Sure. like I think these phones are the iPhone 15 plus the camera control and I think I think everyone who has to review this phone is going to have to spend a deeply hilarious amount of time litigating a button in a way that I think is so fun and so vergy and I'm very jealous to not get to do it but like the AI stuff is going to come in these like tiny bits and pieces and if we weren't in a crazy AI moment where everybody had to pretend to have an AI strategy or Wall Street would run away from you we would just call these. things software. They're just features of apps. And supposedly we're going to get game-changing Siri that makes everything better and solves phone interfaces forever someday in the future.

I am in no single way holding my breath for any of that to happen on this cycle of this iPhone. Yeah, I agree with you. I'm just saying I don't think iOS 18 plus camera button is like, there's not a lot there. You know what I mean? As much as I love a camera button and I, most of iPhone reviews that I've ever written have been long meditations on the camera. Happy to do it again. Now with a button. Thrilled to do it again. I just, it feels like the reason people will upgrade to this phone is because the AI capabilities will let them do stuff that they couldn't do on their old phone. The old phones are very capable of taking a photo. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, Apple has been making this particular case since the iPad earlier this spring. Like, we're,

deep into this now. And Apple has been trying to sell you AI ready devices without real AI to do it with for months now. Well, I thought the AI stuff was largely for investors and less for actual people. That was always kind of my read

on Apple AI. My number one question is, why are they shipping these on September 20th when the AI features are supposed to hit weeks later in October? Again, some features in beta. Like, I don't know. This is... But like, why not write that log?

Fair. Or have one. Chip one. The thing where you press the button and Siri is now the border around the screen instead of the little circle. Just give me that. Honestly, it's so funny you say that. I was thinking about that this afternoon.

If they had just changed nothing else about Siri but made it glow around the edges, everybody immediately would have been like, oh, Siri's better. It would have given everybody like a 10% boost in Siri confidence. Anyway, I'm open to feedback from y'all on how to review these devices or when, because I'm honestly curious what would be the best service to everyone. Like, a review of a phone that if you buy in November has nothing to do with the phone that you bought is kind of weird, in my opinion. Yeah. What you're actually getting at what I would say was the kind of biggest vibe question that I had for you as somebody who's in the room because Alex and I were not in the room. and I would say the overwhelming sense that I got from people both at the verge and elsewhere,

I was getting text messages from people who were like, this is the most boring iPhone launch I can remember. Same. That like as a big flagship September event, we talk about this every year, like this is Apple's moment to speak to everyone. Like it is the one that everybody pays attention to. And I would say the overwhelming perception was that it was kind of a bust. How did it feel in the room as it was happening? I think this is why I kept notice, noting that the room was full of people who were just excited to be there.

Right. Yeah. So they curated the excitement that they needed, and it was packed, and people were freaking out, and they were doing the thing. And that's not to say I wasn't running around trying to take photos and upload them as fast as I can't. Like, I like doing it. It's like the funest part of the job. But they had made the space feel very excited. And then you, like, take a step out of it, and you're like, okay, these are very iterative phones, like super iterative phones.

The headphones upgrades, apart from the 1.5 new models, are iterative to the point where, like, one of them didn't even change at all. The watch upgrades are also pretty iterative. There's not any, I got to have it upgrades, unless you really give a shit about the camera button. All of those upgrades are in the software. That's Apple's magic, right? hardware plus software with services, and we're just waiting

on the big stuff. Like if Apple had said Siri can now do this like app coordination assistant thing that everyone wants to get to, I think everybody would have upgraded the phones tomorrow.

Yep. Right? There were a bunch of moments in the keynote like that, actually. Like there was a moment where in the visual intelligence demo, the guy holds up a phone

to a, it was like a concert poster or something, I think, some kind of event. And it was like, it'll input the information directly into your calendar when you take that picture. And I was like, if that's, I will buy any phone that will do that for me tomorrow. That's awesome. And it just doesn't exist.

There's also another extremely weird demo where somebody walked up to a dog and like asked the phone what kind of dog it was. And our own Kylie Robinson was like, why would you do that? Why would you walk up to a stranger's dog? Just holding your phone out like this? Why wouldn't you just ask them what kind of dog is? That gave me the same vibes as the Gemini demo, where they were like, use this to write a, for your kid to write a letter to an Olympian. It's like, oh, maybe you don't understand how people live and exist in the world.

Like, this is actually like bleak as hell and not cool and exciting technology. The dog one, I did think, because that's the same demo you do with the meta-ray bands. As you put them on, you're like, what car is that? What dog is that? But the thing was he walked up to the person holding the dog. And the intimation is that what he said is not, oh, that dog is so cute. What dog is that? He said, can I take a picture of your dog with my phone?

Yeah. Because I want to know what kind of dog it is and I don't want to talk to you. And I would point out, you often encounter cars with their owners. You encounter a dog without its owner. Like, that's like a little bit of an emergency. Yeah. You're not like, what breed is this? I better find out.

You're like, hold on. Stop here, dog. Pause. I need to pose. I just think that is overwhelmingly the reason why at a distance, this one, a little content free. Like, even the feature boxes, right, the bento boxes they put up at the end of every segment, go look at the iPhone 16 feature box. It says USBC on it.

It's like, oh, we didn't even have enough to fill up the squares. And so, like, these are super iterative phones, which whose key feature is the RAM and the memory bandwidth to enable all of the AI stuff, which isn't shipping. Right. So, like, why would you be excited about it? And I think that's really the gap. I think they should have said, we're shipping these phones with the first wave of beta features and just held them three weeks into October. But Apple sells so many phones. I don't think they can do that.

Yeah, they couldn't afford to hold it that long. They needed to get it out. And if the software is not ready, so be it. And this goes back, Alex. So what you were saying is like the reason you do that is Wall Street, right? Like, this is not a thing you do in the service of good user experience. This is a thing you do because we are in a moment where if you appear to be behind on AI, you will be punished. and that is right or wrong,

that is the world in which we live. And so everyone is out here announcing features that aren't going to ship anytime soon or ever because you have to. And it's so un-apple-like to do that. It's so, so, so odd to see Apple tell you its plans. Like, this is not what Apple does. This is not what Apple has ever done.

And it has to because it can't build the things yet. Did you guys also notice that it was doing a weird thing where they didn't call it AI? They called it like Apple Intelligence, but they wouldn't call it AI. They would always default to machine learning. I clocked once that he said the word AI, but every other one was some, like, dance around it. Yeah, yeah. Like, they were really going out of their way to not sound like Google, to not sound like their competitors in this space, which is kind of interesting.

I mean, they have branded Apple Intelligence. They're fine with it. They do have their own AI. Yeah, they have multiple AI models. At one point, I believe with the watch, if you go back and watch it, they point. out that they're running many models to enable the features you enjoy today. And it's like, great. So it's the same as the one I have today. Thanks. Yeah, that was just like, why are you talking to investors during this infomercial? You're trying to sell me these phones to the point

where you even have buy now, like verbiage in your thing. Stop it. It was weird. But let's talk about fine woven because it feels like phone woven might be gone. Yeah, this is good. Before we leave, let's just a little bit of accessory news and then we're going to get out of it. accessory lightning round. This is an accessory lightning round. But the way we're going to do this is I'm going to tell you what's happening. And if you're not interested, just don't say anything and we'll keep going. It's going to be great.

I love this. This is great. Thing number one, Apple has a faster MagSafe charger to go with the iPhone 16s. Chee 2, which I believe this might be the first time a phone company has actually said Chi 2 out loud on stage about a phone that people in America can buy. That's very exciting. Yep. I'm excited.

We're going to charge faster. Yay. Great. We love a fast charge. I said this in the lightning blog, but there was a time that Nelai made fun of me for having a MagSafe charger. I was, we were in a restaurant somewhere, and I slapped the puck onto the back of my phone and Nelai made phone of me for like 10 straight minutes. I'm sorry, if you have a wire connected to a battery, why would you pick the least efficient way of charging your phone with that wire? Because it thwarks. I love the thwock. Yeah. It's good noise. I will say I'm a full convert

into MagSafe batteries. Actually, I should have one over here. That's what I do now is like the magsafe battery packs because you have to deal with the wires. Yeah. They get hot and it's inefficient. And if you have a wire connected to a battery pack, David, you should just plug it into the bottom of the phone.

Fuck. Anyway, next up, like you were mentioning, Kranz. So I would actually like you to explain this to me because we thought fine woven was probably dead. Apple didn't say fine woven is dead but it kind of seems like fine woven is dead. Fine woven being Apple's terrible bad take on leather accessories.

This was their cloth accessory that was really just plastic that was meant to like replace all the leather and be a lot more ego friendly and that's probably true but it also sucked and it got dirty and gross and nobody liked it. Like what if it was leather but like much worse? Yeah. Much much worse.

And now you can't buy a phone case made a fine woven. There's a wallet and that's about it. We've reached out. We haven't heard anything back yet. The wallet strikes me as one where they're like, look, we have a bunch of these. We might as well keep it for sale. It's like Google with the Chromecast now where they were like they have the TV streamer. They're clearly out on the Chromecast.

But they're like, look, there's a room full of these. Like if you want to buy it, please buy it. Fine Woven has been dead, I would say, since about like a day after it. had launched. The wallet doesn't require the size and shape of the phone, right? So like you can't just sell off the excess. You have an iPhone 15 Pro Max cases and you don't make iPhone

15 Pro Maxes anymore. You're just like, I don't know, can you recycle it? We recycle everything around here. Just turn it into something else, Johnny. Fine, it's not fine. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Next up, I would say one of the stranger stories of the day. Beats

famous music company. You may have heard of them before they make headphones. LeBron James wears them. Made a bunch of iPhone 16 cases. Sure. Beets? Beets made iPhone 16 cases. It feels like a real,

it feels like they've been trying to figure out where beats sits in their lineup, especially as AirPods get better. And their idea is, what if Beets is budget? You do cases now. Oh, interesting. Do you think that's where this is going?

Interesting. Yeah, because they are putting the good tech in their headphones, but the headphones just also aren't, don't have that kind of cash, that quality feeling, right? I just feel like my read on it was that Apple was just like, let Beets be Beets. I just want to say to everybody listening to this, by the way, Nelai is furiously Googling because he doesn't believe me that I got this right, which is how wild it is that Beets is making iPhone 16 cases.

I'm just like reading this news. Nilai had to fact check me on the Vergecast because he didn't believe me that Beats was making iPhone 16 cases This is this is all you need to know about this story They're $49, they exist That's it They are cases They're like the Apple cases

But they're by Beets for some reason They're so weird It's so weird Yeah It's very strange I was instructed if I had nothing to say to say nothing This is great I'm into it, perfect

Moving on. Bunch of new watch bands, bunch of new band colors. Can I interest you in that? Get one on Etsy. It'll be a quarter of the price. Or buy the Verge's own Nomad Blurple Band, which is a big hit at Apple Park today. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. Love that. Many compliments. It looks great. I bought that one, which is very good. And I also bought six Apple Watch bands on Amazon for like $8. Lovein Bits. Can't write a lot.

minute highly. Those ones are slowly poisoning David and you should buy the verges, blurple sport band. I do occasionally look at my wrist just to make sure it's not like turning a color I'm not psyched about. So far, so good, but, but we're okay. The biggest question I have about accessories, Eli, is how the camera control is going to work with cases. This is a question a lot of people are asking. It's this, it's this capacitive kind of flush control, which seems like if you have any kind of raised case at all is going to be hard to find a way to get your finger inside of. Do you have a sense of how this might work? Yeah, although I think my worry is different than I'm around else's worry. Can you make a capacitive button on a case connect to a

capacitive button on the phone? It's like pretty well and solved, right? They just have to be conductive to each other. And so Applezone cases have a button that touches the other button and you're good. If there's any play at all, there's any space between the two buttons, then that like push a little bit is going to get weird. I haven't seen this thing in a case yet, but already it's like to push it to do the light tap to bring up the various menus or controls is already like you have to think about how hard you're pushing

so you don't accidentally push the button. And so if you have a little play and then you have to push, if you have a cheap case or a bad case, that might get weird. Remains to VC. That's why Beetz is leading the way with how to Zonari. has it covered.

They got you. Jimmy Iovine has it covered. Don't worry. Do you ever think Jimmy Iovine's like ever just like looks in the direction of Apple Park? He's like, man, I really pulled one over. Yeah. He's so much money and we still make headphones. There's a brief, a real period, a real thing that happened is that Jimmy Iivine, Dr. Dre, and Trent Resner were Apple employees.

And they had no titles except for Jimmy and Dre. Is that true? That was their title. That was their title. Jimmy and Dre. Well, that's my name. Was Drey Jimmy and Jimmy was Drey? That's what I want.

It'd be great if Apple is like another person gets the title of Drey when Drey left. You got to backfill the Drey. There's some like brand new engineers like you're Drey now. Just putting all those weights into a product to make it feel better. Yeah. All right. We have gone way over. We all need to go to sleep.

and Nilai needs to go figure out how to move this lamp. Nilai, any parting thoughts for us, anything we missed? Kick the lamp. Any big feelings about the Apple stuff today before we get out of here? I am very curious to see how people want us to evaluate these products. Right? Like, I don't disagree with the sense that this was kind of a small event in its way. I wonder if the products will feel bigger with the Apple intelligence features.

So let me know how you want us to talk about these. Because I suspect the answer is not just as regular new phones. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think especially if you have like a thing about the camera or the camera control or like a specific thing you're looking at that's like more than just my phone is dying. I need a new one. I'll buy the new one. But is like, is this worth the upgrade? Yeah. I want to know all your questions about is this worth the upgrade. So you can email vergecast at the burge.com. Call the hotline 866 Verge 1.1. We have, I would say, a bunch more Apple stuff to do over the next couple of weeks. So we'll have lots of time to talk about this. Send us all of your questions. For now, that is it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.