Upgrade - 423: Ultra Wednesday

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Apple has unveiled four new iPhones, new Apple Watches (including the new Apple Watch Ultra), and a new generation of AirPods Pro. Jason reports straight from the event--and still on the Apple Park campus!--as we break down all the details.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 423 today's show is brought to you by squarespace sourcegraph bombas and capital one my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snow hi jason snow i'm mike hurley how are you I am fine and dandy, my friend, because it's iPhone day. It is. It's iPhone day. It's Apple Watch day. And Apple Watch day. And it's Ultra day.

This is Ultra upgrade. Ultra day. It will always be known from now on as Ultra Wednesday. Yeah. So. So. I have a hashtag Snell talk question for you. Okay, sure.

Comes from me. Oh, no. I want to to know jason where are you i think we have referred to this in the past as undisclosed location c um i i all i can say is this i am somewhere deep deep within the bowels the ring i am i may be near johnny sruji's chip lab for all i know but no i'm actually in the ring at apple park you're in the ring at apple i am in the ring at apple park i'm not i'm not across the street on tantau avenue i am in the ring in an undisclosed location yeah that's not what i was i hope it was yeah nobody told me not to say that that's i will say that answers a question that i had because so i knew we were starting around this time and I was like, where's Jason? So I opened Find My and I was looking and I'm like, he's nowhere near where he needs to be. And then you appeared on this call that we've got going on. So, hey, thank you very much to Apple for hosting Jason. So we can have this conversation as soon as we can today.

I would like to just start with a little bit of follow-out, and I want to talk for a moment about our St. Jude campaign, because it's been going incredibly well so far, and I wanted to spend a little moment talking about that, Jason. Okay. We've raised for St. Jude so far this year over $117,000 so far, which I'm just blown away by the generosity so far of the RelayFM community and various podcasts and websites and all that kind of stuff. Similarly, we've got currently, Jason, over 100 people

who have signed up to fundraise as one of the sub-campaign fundraisers so far this year. So it's really going incredibly. I would love our listeners to go to Relay, go to stjude.org slash Relay and give to St. Jude. Because look, I will borrow a line from my friend Casey Liss, who talks about this on ATP. We're obviously about to talk about a bunch of products. That's what we're going to talk about today. And we're going to talk about things we want to spend our money on. This is a fantastic place to give some money to. For the fourth consecutive year, the RelayFM community is rallying together to support the life-saving mission of St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, which is finding cures and saving children. Since opening

its doors in 1962, St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital has grown in size and capability for one special reason. They believe that children all over the world deserve the same chance at survival. Treatments developed at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have helped increase the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20% to more than 80%. And while tremendous strides have been made, one in five children diagnosed in the US will not survive. And globally, those numbers are reversed, with four in five children in some developing countries not surviving. With limited access to high quality affordable medicines and the financial burden of research and care, these are hallmarks of the childhood cancer challenge that many developing countries face. And also, this is just a horrible thing that no family should ever have to go through,

is their child facing death. And this is why we come together to raise money for St. Jude. Because during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, it is an opportunity for us to fight childhood cancer because together we can make a big impact. I want everybody to go to stjude.org.

You can donate there and we have some wonderful gifts if you do. because together we can make a big impact. I want everybody to go to stdew.org slash relay. You can donate there, and we have some wonderful gifts if you do. If you give $60 or more, you'll get a digital bundle, which includes a wallpaper and a macOS screensaver pack, which I cannot wait to tell you more about. It was put together by a wonderful friend, James Thompson. James did just an absurdly incredible, weird, and wonderful job, and I can't wait for you all to see it. If you make a gift of $100 or more,

you get these and some stickers. If you sign up to fundraise, so you'll be able to go out to your friends, your family, your colleagues, people you know, your communities online and get them to give to St. Jude. If you raise $1 or more after signing up to be a fundraiser,

you will get an exclusive St. Jude limited edition of the Relay of Home Challenge coin. At $250 or more after signing up to be a fundraiser you will get an exclusive saint jude limited edition of the relay of home challenge coin at 250 dollars or more you get a really weird and wonderful desk mat of mine and steven's cartoon heads it's bananas please go to saint jude.org slash relay to donate and find out more about fundraising and don't forget to mark your calendars for september 16th for the fourth annual podcastathon that's from 12 to 8 p.m u.s eastern time i'll tell you a little bit more about that on next week's episode. Once again, please stjude.org slash relay to learn more and donate and let's cure

childhood cancer together. Should we look at the draft results, Jason Snell? I mean, if we have to, we have to. You're not keen? It was a momentous... Look, Mike. Yes, Jason. It turns out that I could have, I would have had to get every question right. Yeah.

I would have had to have a perfect score. And nobody, nobody gets a perfect score. Nobody gets a perfect score. Except for you, because you got a perfect score today. One time. You big boy over here. Oh yeah. I checked, Jason. Ten. Only time it's ever happened. Ten. for you because you got a perfect score today one time your big boy over here oh yeah i checked jason 10 only time it's ever happened 10 we've gotten close before we both got to nine once

the only thing you missed is the over under i know there was a moment where like it started to get towards the time and i was like i was at that point very convinced i was going to get the 10 because of the i only had one left. And I was like, if something happens and I end up getting screwed on this tiebreaker. Yeah, that would have been the saddest thing ever. No, so what I missed, because really we might as well just list the misses because that's all there is. I thought the prices would go up. Not Apple.

Tim Cook's holding them down. Now, isn't that a surprise? He's holding them down. And they made a note for each one to say the prices were staying the same. It starts the same. Because I think there have just been a lot of people

believing that that was going to be the case. And I think that they got to flex. Really? And also make that note that it's like, well, this is the same price because the Mini was cheaper, right? They're like, no, no, this is the same price that the 13 price was for the 14. So I got that one wrong. I got new Apple Watch model is called Pro wrong, but didn't we all get that one wrong?

We'll talk about that. And we didn't. Although I may be in it now, we did not pay a visit to Apple's chip lab. And so I got seven and you got ten it was one that i thought i wasn't gonna get when in the apple watch segment they closed it out right and i was like oh i'm not gonna get that fitness plus new watch faces well there was the new watch face there was the oh because that came in the ultra i was always expecting that would be the ultra though i that was where i thought they would do it because you got it it needed the new sensors you know like

maybe there would be a body temperature one but it actually we'll talk about it like when we get to it the body temperature thing just seems very specific they're using it not really for for anything and new a new fitness plus features thing yeah just ended up being oh and it'll work on your iphone which is great because my daughter called me the other week and said, I want to use Fitness Plus. How do I do it? And I said, you don't have an Apple Watch,

so you can't. That's interesting, right? I texted her and I was like, okay, you're going to be able to do that. What do you think the situation with that is? Do you think that they're just wanting to expand it? So I guess this is going to be kind of like, you know, think every device

integrates with the apple watch even the apple tv right so i guess that they're just going to say like i don't worry about it yeah i i think that's i think that's it that they decided now that they've launched it that um maybe getting fitness plus in front of more people is more important than tying it to the Apple Watch. I'm really intrigued to see how it translates because there are times, like in some of the Fitness Plus classes that I've done, they reference the heart rate and they reference, I mean, I guess the clothes and the rings just pops up, but they reference things which they show on the screen, like the burn rate and where you are compared to other people and like none of that's going to be or the burn but none of that's gonna translate

but it's all non-interactive right so i mean yeah they might they may make reference to it or they may just take that out of the scripts going forward i don't know maybe a thing pops up and says you should buy an apple watch buy an apple watch yeah you know it'd be great for you right now buy an apple watch yeah That would be really fun. Anyway, congratulations. You are the champion. I don't have to move my banner and neither do you. Our penance remain intact.

I would have to check, but I think this might be the first time I've won two on the bounce. I don't think I've ever done that before. Nope. Nope, I haven't. You're on a roll. Not going to lie, Jason. Feels pretty good good

good good you know how it feels I know how it feels you know how it feels I've been there I've been there before time and time again you win some you lose some

but it feels good to win yeah it does alright let's thank our first sponsor of this week's episode and we will start digging in

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squarespace.com upgrade and you can sign up for a free trial with no credit card required. Then when you're ready to launch, use the offer code upgrade to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com upgrade. Then when you sign up, use the offer code upgrade and you will get 10 use the offer code upgrade and you will get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of this show and all of RelayFM. I want to start with what I think may have been the most surprising product or like the product that I feel like maybe we didn't understand in the exact way going into it, Apple Watch Ultra. I feel like the conversations around this product when we first heard about it from Mark Gurman began with, this is an extreme sports watch, right?

Yes. And then we talked ourselves out of it. Then everybody did, right? I think including Mark Gurman. Then started talking about, no, this is a pro watch. No, no, this is a sports watch. And Apple multiple times called it a sports watch, the best sports watch.

Like that's what they're going for here, right? Yeah, I'm curious about the dynamic that made the initial report successful like he got it right and that then everything after that was hedging and i wonder partly i wonder if it might have actually been a reaction to that report that that everybody sort of like played it down because they didn't want people to get it completely right that it might have actually been like nah you you know, it's more complicated than that. But the truth is that his report was right. And all of us sort of like talks ourselves out of it

and started saying, oh, well, you know, but probably not. It'll probably just be aspirational and it'll have those features, but they won't really talk about it. And that was the thing that struck me, just like it struck you, that the Apple Watch Ultra is unrepentantly,

specifically, and I um learning the lesson of the original apple watch focusing on the thing that it needs to be which is a sports watch and so it is you know what is what is it notifications and uh and and health like those are the things that they figured out that the Apple Watch is good for. Well, clearly one of the Apple Watch stories has always been about health and about sports and about activity. And there's a sports watch category.

So why does the Apple Watch only sort of barely touch on the sports watch? So here it is. It is unabashedly a sports watch. And I loved that the whole presentation was focused on Apple talking to the experts in the field about what they wanted out of it, right? So they get the guy on the boat

doing his presentation about his dive computer app that's going to be on the Apple Watch. And you've got the ultra marathoner and one after the other saying, the message really is we talk to the experts and these are the features they want. And it's all in on sports. It's huge and it's funny

because it made sense at the time, but then we all just sort of like thought, nah, they're not going to do that. And we'll come back to this because there was a lot of that in this. I think a lot of the assumptions about this event were people underestimating Apple. All right. I mean, I'm excited to pick that apart as we go through. Big company, one of the most successful companies in the world. And yet somehow I think sometimes we underestimate them or we kind of blunt their ambition and say,

nah, they're not going to do that. And sometimes they take big shots. I think the thing that I've taken away from this is this really actually could have been called Apple Watch Extreme because yes, it's the sports watch, but they really are, they're really pushing on the hard end of sports because one of the things that I was intrigued about is going into this,

like if it's going to be a, say it's a pro-featured watch or a sports-featured watch or whatever, how do they stack it up against the others where the the whole promo for the series a is focused around a guy running outside so it's clearly like apple watch ultra is not like now the only one that's going to be positioned right sports right or fitness where this one like all of the promo videos is like no no you do no, do you climb mountains? Do you run in deserts? Do you dive? That's right.

Are you a scuba diver? But also, what I like about the way they do things, I find some of those watches to be really ugly because they're built to be utilitarian. I've seen images of this thing. I've seen hands-on photos of it afterwards. It looks really cool. Did you get to see one it does yeah absolutely it's uh it's it's chunky it looks chunky yeah it's chunky but like the uh the face is flat and and so it's that in that it's very different from

other apple watch it's still recognizably an apple watch because it's got the curved corners, but its face is flat. And then, you know how like the digital crown from the very beginning has meant to be kind of, I mean, you can almost hear it in Johnny Ives' voice, imparts a bit of elegance of using the language

of watchmaking in the Apple Watch, right? And it is. It is a fine kind of elegant control. You look at the one on the Apple Watch Ultra and it's like a gear or something or something out of a toolbox. It is chunky and heavy and it's the same word

in a different language almost. And then the other button, which is designed to kind of disappear, is more prominent. And then there's the big orange button on the other, the action button. Action button. On the other side.

It's all orange, right? No matter what color you get, that's always orange. International orange, the Golden Gate Bridge color. I love that color. All of the orange is definitely selling me on it. I no doubt that steven's freaking out he loves orange too um yeah and they mentioned and it makes sense that right like the crown is and the buttons they're meant to be operated even if you have gloves on have gloves on right right because in a lot of these environments you your hands are covered. So, yeah, that's really smart. Also, I don't think having a dedicated button for essentially user assignable or app assignable on that action button, it's a smart bit of, I think, Apple learning about how people want to use the Apple Watch and thinking about this context, but also more broadly, I was talking to James Thompson a little while ago about a watch app that I was thinking of, wondering why it doesn't

exist. And one of the challenges is those buttons sort of have system functions for the most part. They scroll, but like to push in the crown or push in the button, it does system things. And I don't think apps are allowed to take them right i mean it would break right you'd never be able to leave the app you never you could never leave the app right so action button there it is it's like well this button and they showed it with that dive computer that the yeah the action button does something in the app like the obviously the app is written to support the action button for an action which is really cool because that's the thing that apple watch apps haven't really been able to do legally, at least before.

So yeah, I love that this is, you know, it's a big chunky watch and it does what it's good at. It's got a big battery and then they've got their low power mode that makes it an even longer, longer lived battery and it's all good. It's the David Smith mode, right? They didn't really give any information about that. I don't know if you know anything more. No, and there's low power mode

and they didn't, they like specifically didn't call it that, right? So I think that maybe there's a variation on that or something for the Apple Watch Ultra. I mean, I expect that it has low power mode because it's in watchOS 9. I assume it has that. It probably gets like seven months of battery life.

But they referenced like 60 hours of battery life with enhancements like i expect it is a kind of like adventure mode or something yeah where it's still more more functionable um i there's a couple of design more functionable yeah that's a word don't worry about it yeah okay a couple of design things that i wanted to get your take on so the screen is flat and the case comes up and surrounds it what does that look like it seems interesting it i i don't even know how to describe it it's a it's just a flat face and then it's got a titanium ring around it basically and there's a little bit of a chamfer on the side and all that but it's it's it's a really different look in from one direction right like the edges look very apple watch but the flatness is very because it's got it's almost got like a camera bump look to me

now where it's like you've got the the part and then it's like a shelf that sits on top of it right you know like over the time our camera bumps they get like yeah little protrusions it kind of has that kind of look to it in a weird way i mean i'm sure they did a lot of uh sort of rugged ruggedness testing too of like what what are the shapes you know what's going to reduce the impact so it doesn't break and you know it doesn't it doesn't smash on the side of it or on the on the front of it like just so that it can survive in these environments rocks i saw a friend of the show quinn nelson of snazzy labs tweeting because quinn's a big watch guy and he helped me with uh a term crown guard so when when something on when you have like because you've got the digital crown has that bump right

and the bump kind of goes around it yeah it's called a crown guard in watch terms. So we have the phrase now for how to describe the bump that sits on the side now. It's a crown guard. Okay, crown guard. It has all of them have cellular, which makes sense, right? For some of the stuff that they describe later on.

And I think also just simplifies the offering. $7.99, which I think also just simplifies the offering. $7.99, which I think... Actually, do you know what? I don't know what I think about that price. $7.99? I haven't thought about it until just now. I would not have guessed that it would be that low, honestly. I was thinking that this was going to be a $9.99 kind of watch.

Right. Now, we'll have to think about where it fits given its functionality and all of that, but I would have overshot on that. I wanted to mention the whole dual-band GPS and on top of all that, that compass where you can set waypoints and there's a way back. So if you get lost, it's actually been tracking where you've been moving. How cool is that? And you can retrace your steps.

It's like the breadcrumb Apple Watch. You know? It is. Hansel and Gretel. Hansel and Gretel. Apple Watch, Hansel and Gretel. Another rejected name. Uh-huh.

A little bit long, a little wordy. I think that is a cool feature. And yeah, they've done some stuff that I don't really understand, but I believe them when they're like, they've put new GPS stuff in there. The dense urban conditions was a really interesting idea because I know this is something that I've struggled with. You're like in a big city and your iPhone just freaks out

because it doesn't know where you are anymore. So I really hope they bring this technology to their other devices, not just the Apple Watch Ultra in the future. The siren that they've put on the watch that you can hear from up to 180 meters away, which is powered by a bigger, louder speaker. And they put three microphones on it, I think,

so they can do some noise cancellation stuff if you're, as they showed in the video, climbing a mountain face and you need to call Basecamp. It literally said Basecamp on the watch. Yeah, that was where he was calling was Basecamp. Yeah, I think the idea there too that this is a watch that they think a common use case is going to be out

on its own without an iPhone attached to it using cellular and you have to use it to communicate and all of those things kind of follow from that. I was impressed because this was what, 45 minutes at the beginning of the presentation? I mean, the Apple Watch was not a footnote to this presentation, and this

particular model, I mean, the regular Apple Watch, we can talk about it. There's not as much interesting in there. There are a few things, but this Apple Watch Ultra, they had so much, and I didn't feel bored by most of it because it was more like they kept piling things

on. I lost a little focus when we went to the guy on the boat talking about the dive computer. Yeah, just because I don't understand what he's talking about, but it seems interesting. And I started to wonder, did they shoot that out on a boat or did they like have him be in front of a screen

and bumped him around there because he was being bumped around and he probably had to loop all his dialogue and it i i did take a moment and think about the filmmaking at that point because and and apple refers to this as a film by the way because tim cook came out on stage at the steve jobs steve jobs theater today before the presentation like he did at wwdc and he and he said good morning and then he said something interesting which was and since you didn't see it I'll tell you it's been three years since the last

event here and we really miss doing these events but he said we've made these films and we really like how these films are put together and how they get our product out there and we hope you enjoy the film it was very much what i that i've been saying which is it's the directors it's the director uh introducing the film at the film festival and then in this case i think he might have even been

in the front row afterward but uh but then we just watched the watch the film as it were but um i thought it was uh very very impressive and while the apple watch ultra a name that they've been using that they you know they use with the m1 ultra right so it's it's been flowing out there and it's a superlative right you could call it extreme but ultra is sort of like this is the this is the most um so it was in the palette and so they chose to use it i think it's an interesting product not you know Not necessarily a product that I'm personally interested in, but I love – it is the antithesis of that original Apple Watch presentation, if you think back, right, which was very much like, what's it for? Well, I mean anything.

And this is like, this is what it's for. This watch was born for a purpose, and I love products like that that know what they are. Yeah. Yeah, this is the most focused of any Apple Watch, for sure, of what it's made for. They even made three new watch bands to go alongside it, and they're named very clearly. Alpine Loop, Trail Loop, Ocean Band. If you can't work out what they're meant for, they can't help you.

But they look cool though. They do look, I love the look of the Alpine Band. And I think I did see, Jason, that these will work on the larger of the two existing watches. Nice. And if you have bands, they will still fit on these,

but they might not match up exactly but that's kind of how that's how that's going to work what i'll say is um i am really intrigued to see one of these i'm really intrigued to put one on it is i do not believe this is my I do not believe this is my everyday aesthetic for what I'm looking for in a watch. Now, I could imagine there are times where this would look really good with some of the clothes that I wear, especially with some of the orange pops and stuff like that. I just think wearing the right set of clothes would look really good. What I like about my current Apple Watch, and I use the gold stainless steel, is it looks simple enough in a regular day, but I can dress it up.

I feel like this watch is going to be difficult to dress up. I think it will always scream what it is. But if you are, you know, this really does feel to me similar in aesthetic to the G-Shock, which is what we've been talking about for a long time, in that it is big and it is bulky and you know what it is when you see it, and you

can't hide that. But you can, it looks cool if that's what you're into. Let's be honest, if you invite an ultramarathoner over to dinner, even if they dress up, you know they're an ultramar ultra marathoner and they want to tell you too so this is the easy way for them to tell you you could be like oh that's a big watch you're like oh yeah i need this one you used to run across the sahara desert because when i run across deserts i need the battery life you know yeah it's an easy if you are an ultramarathoner, congratulations, you now have a new way to tell people.

I use this to orient myself out of a snow blind situation where I had to go back to my base camp. I called my base camp. I keep them in my contacts list as base camp. Just, well, I mean, because who hasn't got their base camp in the contact list? If you're going to call base camp, why would you not put them in?

Why would you not? The one last thing I did want to mention, I just thought it was interesting. Okay. The Depth app that they've worked on, that they partnered with an existing company to do that. I just think that's really interesting. But I think that it's not,

I don't think it's called, they referenced it as like a Depth app, but I don't think, I think it's just they worked with this company called Oceanic Plus to integrate this new thing. And it's like really well done, it looks like. Yeah, the app is Oceanic Plus from Hewish Outdoors, right? But it looks very Apple-y in its design, I think. It looks like that.

I really do believe that this was a, oh there is a depth app okay so i've gotten that confused i'm looking at the app auto ultra page now oh there's two yeah it automatically uses the depth app and then there's oceanic plus which is the dive computer yeah i've computer app from a third party cost unknown so super cool super super cool yeah so that um 7.99 order today some products will today, which is interesting. But this one's shipping on the 23rd of September, so a couple of weeks away.

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Not even close. There was the Apple watch series 8 which there were points during the presentation where i couldn't work out if they were telling me there were new features to the watch or not uh-huh where they were telling me what the apple watch series 8 could do and what it was good at and the features that it had. And I was like, does it not already do this? I was very confused for quite a bit of this. That happened with the iPhone too, but definitely there's a –

like they ran that commercial basically. It's a film within a film, if you will. And they did the – it lists like, hey, you're doing stuff with your Apple Watch. And, you know, it included the new features along with all the other things that it does. And I understand that when you're trying to communicate the product, on one level, you want to communicate the totality of the product. Whereas we're kind of like interested in what is new and the new one that you're introducing today and so we got with the regular old apple watch there's not a lot here um it includes a feature that is it turns out is spanning the apple watch and the iphone which is the crash detection which is following on from from uh fall the Apple Watch. They now have across the watch and the iPhone this crash detection idea

because they've built in a new gyroscope, new accelerometer, a barometric sensor, and they built it together where it can basically determine if you're in a car crash using a machine learning model. And it will – so previously, if you fell while running with an Apple Watch, it would do this. Speaking of somebody you fell while running with an apple watch it would do this um speaking of somebody who fell while running with an apple watch how does it time with the iphone uh the iphone has crash detection too but like so if i had a crash and i just had my iphone in the car it would detect the crash same thing yes that's interesting because

obviously full detection is not on the iphone yeah right but same same feature uh for this that they've and it looks like they've put the same sensors in both devices so crash detection is not an apple watch only feature it's also an iphone feature but it was first introduced here um you know better battery life low power mode again you know that they're doing these are what some of these these are watch os 9 features right like that was also exactly there was like a lot of watch os 9 features like oh hey you can do you can do low power mode series four and later cellular now we'll support international warming warning series five onward roaming international roaming there we go if you need

to roam you can but it did get a new sensor and this was the temperature the temperature sensor so so remember what i said about how apple doing new sensors in the apple watch is a delicate balance of what it's allowed to make medical claims about for uh fda reasons well um I think what's interesting here is what they're allowed to talk about and what presumably they either aren't allowed to talk about or weren't satisfied that the results were worth it. Because what we didn't get is,

let's say you're running a fever, we'll warn you. It's just not claimed at all. This is a feature that has been very specifically limited to cycle tracking and retrospective ovulation estimation. And I want to say, so often the tech industry gets criticized because the perception is, and I think the reality is, it's a lot of men making decisions about features for men and not for women. And so to see a major health feature in the Apple Watch that is dedicated to ovulation and ovulation estimation, I think is interesting. I think it's an interesting milestone in terms of doing this. I also think it's interesting because, okay, I don't know the backstory of this feature and this sensor and the probably years-long attempt to get this

in an Apple Watch, but I wonder, is this what they initially thought would be the banner feature? Or did they try and try and try to get a temperature sensor in the apple watch and in the end this was the thing that it was capable of actually using it for right like this is the one where they're like well we can we can check you know because when we were having kids it was you know temping like like she said in the presentation it's temping to figure out when the ovulation is and all of that and And like, well, we can do that on the Apple Watch. That's awesome. But part of me thinks, was that always all you were looking for? Was that, I mean, great if it was, but there are other things you could probably do with a temperature sensor too that are not claimed here. So, but this is cool. I remember,

I mean, my kids are in college now, right? So I remember thinking back to the Excel spreadsheet with temperatures in it that we had 20 years ago and i think this is pretty awesome but even within what it can do it seems limited for at least from the way they described it and you have to wear it at night to benefit from this it is it is an overnight feature that they're they're metering you every five seconds overnight overnight where which is yeah clearly because what they said is although it's interesting because it's got the two temperature sensors so it's trying to reduce the noise of the temperature of your environment and and remove that from the equation like if you're are you in a hot room are you in a cold room what's the

difference between the temperature at the top of the watch and the bottom of the watch that's interesting but then overnight they feel like that's when you can get the best guess about what your kind of actual resting body temperature is not during the day so you have to wear it at night in order to do this tracking but that seems like a potentially and i would love to know otherwise a limit of the sensitivity of the technology right yeah i i think i think they must have tried it. Again, I'm just assuming here, I am assuming that they tried it to work all the time and found that there was too much noise during the day.

Yeah, and whilst very useful for those trying to have children or otherwise to understand like the, to understand ovulation is really important retrospectively is helpful for planning yeah but it's not like i want to know right now yeah you know or like i want to institute this in the morning every day. You know, like, so. Yeah. Yeah.

No, it's very much like, again, what's the story there? And are they not allowed to do it? Or is it that they tried that and they thought this is not reliable? And do you want to be, do you want to be the blamed when, when, when you say, okay, I think you might be ovulating now. And like, well, my Apple watch said I was. So I don't know. But what I will say about this this has been i think my hope is they learned from the blood oxygen sensor because the blood oxygen sensor also came with a bunch of caveats and really the story was hey you can do this but with no link between what it might be actually realistically useful for and this whilst caveated is useful is useful right because you can use this along with the

other things you're doing to track ovulation yeah as another data point yeah and to track the menstrual cycle and notify for cycle deviations, which is also a useful health feature. It's all good. It's all good. You're right. The rollout is tangible in that way.

And this is a claim that can be made, which is great. I'm happy for it. With all of these features, I'm curious about what the story is behind their conception. And then, no pun intended. Hey-oh!

And what finally gets put out there. And if there are features that died along the way because there was too much noise or it was unreliable. And on one level, like you, I'm glad to see that this actually came to pass. Because otherwise you end up in a situation where it's really awkward. And you're like, well, we have a sensor. What does it do? I don't know. Because I know we've been hearing about this for a while.

If they've maybe held off on this so they could do this with it, then great. Because even if not perfect perfect this is a feature you know it's like in the same way of like love it the ecg you know you can't use it in place of every other type of ecg available but it can give you useful information on that by the way to take a slight turn soon apple love to do their like stories right like right these were extreme guy falls into a garbage truck a bear breaks into the living room oh my god these are getting a lot more than they have i love that i love that they all they're all introduced and you you can't see them yet you can only hear them and the one guy is whispering yeah i was like what's that about him

that he's like i'm intrigued the answer is there's a bear is the answer there was a bear in there also the the filmmaking there where they're like hey um woman who who had was in a plane crash we're gonna make we're gonna make a set of a crashed plane and put you in it to sell an apple watch how do you feel about that i i was wondering that myself how does she feel any post-traumatic stress from that incident or we're good here you know what i mean like how you feeling yeah uh but and that one also was introduced halfway through right it wasn't introduced in the beginning they knew the hit they had on that one i would say i do every time one of these starts i'm like again and when it

ends i'm like that was real good yeah no i really like that a lot although my famous my favorite filmmaking craft note will come it i think comes later um in the iphone where there's an amazing it's almost like the the child of the home set happened did you notice that one yes there's the subway and the and the and the jack hammer man and the cafe um well that was in the iphone presentation right yes or was it airpods airpods that was airpods okay that was i loved i love that just i want to point out if people didn't notice um it starts with those like fun pans where like oh she's in the subway but now she stepped out of the doors of the subway and she's in an alley with a jackhammer guy behind her and i'm thinking that seems a little artificial i wonder uh again i'm thinking

about the filmmaking and then she steps into the cafe and i said well this is very stylized and artificial um but it's fun and then she steps out of the cafe forward and she's on a stage and it pulls back and you see the three things and they're both, they're all in like boxes in a set behind where she's standing. And I thought it was so, I thought that was so clever to call out the artifice of it. So I guess Tim Cook is right. It is a film. All right, fine. There have been a few people in our Discord, which is a member's Discord.

You can get access to it if you sign up at getupgradeplus.com. You also get longer ad-free versions of every episode of Upgrade, including this one. Including this one. People are like, surely they're actors in the Apple Watch presentation.

I know two people personally who wrote those letters in and who've been in those. And we had an Upgrade listener, so three. Yes. Do you remember there was that time we mentioned it?

Because Kyle, friend of the show Kyle, was in one. And then somebody else wrote in and said, that was me too, so three. That was me. So in the past, they've used the real people. And I will say- Those are real people. Some of those did not feel like actors' performances.

For sure. So I think they're the real people. And honestly, I feel like that's the way you should do it. Like, if you're going to read real people's stories, you should give those people the ability to tell those stories. And they do that. And I like that they do that. I agree.

So I think that's Apple Watch Series 8. Order today. Ship it on the 16th. I will tell you, Jason, I'm actually pretty happy happy i don't want a new apple watch i'm not gonna i'm not planning on upgrading that's fine there isn't but i'm happy about that i think i've said this before it's actually something i want from the apple watch that they do enough to get me every two to three years i don't want or need this to be replaced every year and so i'm pretty happy about it but adina's on a series a series

four and she's like i really want one so like perfect because we i've been one i've been wanting to upgrade her anyway because i think she would benefit from the always on display because i think it makes a huge difference to wearing the watch frequently um and these features she's like i want one so we're going with that. Apple Watch SE. They redid it, everybody. They redid it. I think, for me, they've done it. This is it. Now, Mike Hurley has been a staunch critic of the Apple Watch SE.

Because at $329, which I think it was before, if I'm right. $299. $299. $299. It was $299. Too expensive. And the Series 3 was $199, right? Yep. It's now $249.

They got it at $249 for the second generation. Same system in package as the big Apple Watch. The Series 8. So you're not really, you know, but it's the older display. It was $279 before. Okay. So it's cheaper. But even though I would love to see it at $199,

like that's the number I want them to hit, $249 for a brand new Apple Watch of any description, I think is good. I think that's fine. I agree. And it's a more advanced, like the display is more advanced. It's better in a bunch of ways

where it doesn't feel like, obviously, and they mentioned the kid thing. And there was just a story, I think in the New York Times about this, about kids with Apple Watches. And that's a thing. That's a real thing. And they get a lot of these that are like that.

So for that, you want the cellular model, but they obviously did some work to get the price down a little bit. Presumably that nylon composite on the back might be part of that, but it allows it to match the colors a little bit more. And good to see it. Glad to see it's there.

And that Apple seems to be comfortable at 249 as the base of the Apple Watch. They said 80% of Apple Watch SEO and it's their first time Apple Watch just makes sense, especially if they're going to young people. It includes motion sensors for crash detection, so it has all of that. What it

still doesn't have, and I would say to Apple's credit, they have a key differences on their comparison page now to show you what differs like very specifically between the models that you're suggesting or that you're looking at. Things it doesn't have, which I think are big things, doesn't have the ECG app and some of that kind of stuff. It just does high heart rate. I don't think this is important, but it doesn't have the blood oxygen sensor.

But the biggest one which i am actually pretty disappointed about is no always on display right like i think for 249 there should be a noise on display but i will say now 249 for something that's brand new i think they've hit a good point but what they don't have anymore is a sub 200 apple watch because the series 3 has gone away and they are not keeping around the original SE at all in the lineup. So the Apple Watch lineup starts at new SE and that's it. Which is interesting, right? Yeah, love it. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Bombas. Bombas' mission is simple, to make the most comfortable clothes ever and match every item sold of an equal item donated. So when you buy Bombas, you are also giving to someone in need.

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for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's talk AirPods Pro real quick. Okay. They put a new chip in it combined with some new drivers. They're apparently saying it's vastly better audio quality. Yeah, I did not test this out because there was a long wait and it was in a loud room. I guess I got to test the noise canceling a little bit,

but I want to hear it for myself to find out. But they did say the quality was better. High bandwidth. I don't know exactly. I mean, did they go into specifics? Or they're really just like high bandwidth connectivity, and you know what that means. And then did they make any claims beyond that like spatial audit

did they talk about lossless or higher bit rates or anything like that they just said high bandwidth connectivity on the pages either about that so more to come there probably is my guess is that there was a feature that they were not ready to talk about so they didn't talk about it but it's

implied big thing though is the precision finding right so like um i believe you can precision find the case and the individual earbuds um which is great like you're going to find mine it's like where's the left earbud it's over there i think that's the case and the little speaker so your case will chirp to and let you know where it is. So, you know, bring it to the Apple TV remote next. Two more features on the case.

They put a lanyard loop thing in there, right? Right. But Apple doesn't make a lanyard. The company in case make a lanyard and Apple have two or three of them available on their store. I think it's weird to put the holes on the case and not make a lanyard

yourself it's a little weird it seems like quite a strange thing to have done to then just have one third party manufacturer available for these things right now i mean they know that literally everybody in the world will make a lanyard case yeah and admittedly there are already lanyards made by everyone right in existence but it still was just a funny thing to me that they they did that um the case now as well you can use an apple watch charger to charge it yes it means that any of those combo uh combo chargers that have an apple watch charger now that is also a an airpods pro case charger yeah that's a nice little extra so you can use the travel duo thing that they have and even if you don't have an apple watch you can benefit from it i just think that's really cool uh it's like a good thing to have and it means that companies don't have to make the three charger thing anymore they

can just make a two charger thing and and the thing that we've been asking for since the very beginning capacitive sensor so that you can actually run your finger up and down to do volume control that's something that everybody's like why don't you make it like a trackpad and they're like you know we think you should tap on the side of your head and then later they're like we think you should squeeze that's what you should do and now it's like okay you can you can squeeze and stuff but you can also just run your finger up and down and do a volume control that's pretty cool i'm intrigued about that because i remember when they went from AirPods to AirPods Pro, I stopped thinking about that

because I felt the stems are too small now. So I'm really intrigued to see what that feels like. There is also an extra small ear tip. Great if you have tiny ears, right? That's good. Good for tiny ear people. Oh, and the active noise cancellation seems to have been vastly improved.

Double the amount before. I'm really intrigued. I'm very much interested in the part that they're doing with their own tech. And then they seem to suggest that sticking it in your ear, that seal is part of it too. So they work together. But yeah, I love AirPods Pro and I use mine all the time. that seal is part of it too so they work together but yeah i'm this is i i love airpods pro and i use mine all the time so i'm really looking forward to trying this out and seeing how they actually sound and feel is during this part of the presentation that there was a cameo from heli

from severance yeah i got that one getting on the train didn't win the draft for me but hell and at the end she comes back yeah very end of the credits she flickers into and out of existence it's her standing on the the the train platform of all of the shows did you notice the trains uh info board the train is on an infinite loop that's the that's the train line it's the infinite loop and the next stop is the milky way road Okay. That's weird. It's in the galaxy there. Yep. I will say of all of the TV shows to have a cameo, Severance is an odd one.

We had, me and you had spoken about this, I think, about the idea of them going down the floor and they go past the Severance floor. Did we talk about this in last week's episode? We did. We did because there was the idea that Stephen Colbert had done his Severance thing and they were filming. And so maybe there was an opportunity to do something there.

That's not what they did. But if you look at Apple's TV app right now, like the two big things that are promoting because they're the Emmy nominees are Severance and Ted Lasso. So Severance gives them something that's not Ted Lasso to talk about. And also Severance is the new darling, right? It is. Because Teddy, he's done this year, apparently. Ted's going out the door, but Severance is coming back.

And also, you know, like I think Severance has had the most recent popular acclaim. Ted Lasso season two didn't have a strong popular acclaim as season one did. No, it's the hot new thing. Let's talk about the iPhone. Hey, here we are. We got there.

Can you believe it? iPhone 14. We got 50 minutes to talk about the iPhone now. Let's do it. iPhone 14 and 14 Plus. 14 Plus. Yeah, it's Plus Club. Plus Club is back.

Plus Club has reopened its doors a club that i was never a member of no uh you were i mean obviously we knew this was gonna happen but this is the end of the road for mini it is sure how you feeling i mean i've had two years to prepare i feel like and the answer is that's why i bought one last year because i knew it was the last one both get a little bit of extra battery life that's like an important thing right off the top sure and the 14 plus because of its size and i guess the feature the feature that it has uh it is the biggest battery in an iphone ever or like the longest lasting battery in an iphone ever which makes sense really in the in the 14 plus yeah yeah uh the a15 bionic chip is powering it all okay weird right all right the way

they said this all right like i correct me if i'm wrong but i was under the impression that the iphone 14 or yeah the iphone 14 and 14 pro were powered by the A15 bionic chip and there was only one. And that was the chip. The way it was pitched in the presentation was ask, I think aspirational for the future of the iPhone, which is what they didn't say is this is the same chip that was in the iPhone 13 line. They said this is the chip that was in the iPhone 13 Pro. Now, going forward, I suspect this is what will happen. Yes.

Is that the Pro chip will next year be the regular chip and then the pro gets the new chip yeah but that didn't happen this year but they acted as if it did yes which is just amazing and fascinating but yeah it's the same chip it's the same chip same chip because they said last year this was the the chip in the uh the iphone 13 pro it was. And also the iPhone 13. And also the iPhone 13. Yeah, in fact, it was the iPhone 13 Pro introduced this amazing chip that you already know because it was also

in the iPhone 13. Yeah, that was a head scratcher for me. Like, I admire their commitment to the bit, but I think that is an aspirational thing. And like, look, what are you going to say? We didn't change the chip.

So emphasize the positive. So that's what they're going to do is their chip. Actually, the part that they did that I thought they would do, and I'm glad that they did, is the part where they said, we're way ahead. We're so far ahead that the competition hasn't even passed the iPhone 11 yet. That was a fun little shot at the competition hasn't even passed the iPhone 11 yet. That was a fun little shot at the competition. And the truth is, if I look at this, the fact that they're taking a year off from the chip development in the lower end iPhone, it's almost like reaping the rewards of being so

far ahead. You're so far ahead that you can stop and take a break for some of your phones, if not all of them and they're still going to be ahead they're still going to be great and i think that's what's going on here okay the discord is very excited and so i must address this before we also so people can close their twitter apps too this chip has the five core gpu that the pro version of the chip had so they were the same chips so that's the difference the that's the difference is that they bend the number of gpus yes but okay realistically let's all agree that one gpu core you're not gonna feel it like i just just so we all can agree here that yes you're technically correct but ultimately this is the thing um i think as well as the chip we are seeing now i and you were

alluding to this for sure of like maybe we're going to get a bit more of this going forward because they talk about improvements to the camera and a lot of the features referenced on the camera were features that were in the previous pro models like sensor shift optical image stabilization faster aperture and better low light performance auto focus on the front facing camera like this is stuff that came to the pro phones before and now it's being rolled down very excited about this i didn't notice it during the presentation but a friend of the show one two john john for he's mentioned it afterwards on twitter apple now calls the wide camera the main camera. Finally. Good.

We've been calling it main camera for a long time because it's just clearer. And they're doing that now. Deep Fusion got a shout out. It did. And I was hoping. It went further. It didn't just get a shout out, Mike. It went further up the pipeline.

I was hoping we would hear about Deep Fusion today because they would say no more Deep Fusion. No no no it is now a part of the photonic engine however the way they describe the photonic engine seems to do what i am looking for which is more detail brighter colors because i think deep fusion darkens images. And so I'm excited about this new thing. They brought it up the pipeline. They brought it up the pipeline. And when you bring it up the pipeline, color. And it's trying to solve perhaps the problem that you had with it by doing that. I think, I just want to say,

I don't envy the marketers who have to describe something like this, right? Because what they're really saying is we changed our photographic pipeline and the way we process multiple images in order to do, and like, they have to invent things like deep fusion and the photonic engine. They've got to explain in a sort of vague, but sort of understandable way to regular people what exactly it does.

And when, you know the alternative would be it's better okay like it just it's better just that's it it's better and instead they try like photonic engine and we're you know we branded it and we move it up the pipeline and it improves the low light and which is great i mean we'll have to see it i like that they brand a thing now there's a new brand which includes the old branded old brand and then in like four more years the photonic engine is going to become a part of ultra tele pro and then you know yeah exactly right and don't forget we also got a new mode

action action mode what do you think's happening with this which is just a stable it's more aggressive anti-stable or youization, anti-shake stuff. Yeah. But it seems to be something that they put in a mode or a toggle to turn it on and off. I could imagine it maybe zooms in the image a bit so you get some play. Yeah, something like that is probably what's going on. So you don't need to gamble anymore is the whole thing, right? Yeah, but you wouldn't want to use this all the time.

This is something you turn on because you know you're going to be doing this. So there are obviously trade-offs involved. Like you said, maybe they're zooming in or something like that, but it's there. I will say with the photonic engine thing, it was something that they kept mentioning, which is interesting.

It applies to all of the cameras. All of the cameras get this benefit. Yeah, because it's the pipeline. It's happening within the image pipeline that they built. It's further up. All US models eSIM now. Yeah, eSIM. eSIM.

This was introduced in the We Love eSIMs segment. Interesting. And I'm sure it's good for Apple because they get rid of the SIM tray and they don't have to engineer that. They don't have to cut it out of the side of the frame and they don't have to, they don't have to engineer that and they don't have to cut it out of the side of the, of the frame and they don't have to leave space on the inside and have a SIM reader or any of that stuff. It makes me uneasy just because I still use a SIM card because I keep transferring it to different phones that I'm reviewing.

So that's interesting. So I looked into this a little bit. Yeah. Apple has a support document. As part of the quick setup thing you're able to transfer the sim card that's in a phone to an e-sim on a new phone right which is my what the only things that give me hesitation are are things that are more about me than they're about the regular person right because for me it's like well if i want to try four different phones now i have to transfer

my e-sim to that phone and then transfer it to this one and how many transfers and does does my carrier get upset that i'm transferring my e-sim around or do they not care maybe they don't care but i'm always worried that they're going to say oh this guy's changed his e-sim 10 times so we're gonna flag his account or something like that so but i think i'm just gonna have to give up and embrace the e-sim now because sim cards are dumb right sim cards are stupid. We shouldn't have them anymore. No way.

It's like, why should we ever, yeah, we shouldn't have them anymore. And I have a similar thing to you. I'm like intrigued. So these iPhones come out when I'm in Memphis for the podcast-a-thon. I'm going to try and get an American phone. I will have to see if I can transfer my British eSIM to an American phone. Who knows? We'll find

out. I'll let you know how it goes, Jason. We can talk about it. But I want to get one. So, far out, Mike. Far out. Far out, baby. Far out. The answer is after a year, literally, this was the rumor for last year's iPhone event.

After a year of rumors, the satellite emergency feature, emergency SOS by satellite is true. It's true. It's all true. It's all true, baby. And it's great. I know we've talked about it before, but the idea is when you're out of service and something bad happens, that's really bad. And so they've made this thing. And I like how they talked about, look, it's complicated because we don't have the big antenna.

So we have this user interface where you have to point it at the satellite. And on the inside, it's like the range. It's doing the what's the strength of signal from the satellite. And I used to have satellite TV, and I remember being up on my roof trying to point the dish in exactly the right place to hit the satellite. It's kind of like that. You know, keep moving, keep pointing at satellite once you lock it in and you hold it there

and it can take less than 15 seconds in clear sky, but in light foliage, it might take a few minutes. It's a very low speed transfer, but it means that you can send an emergency message or, using Find My, share your current location via satellite. And I think this is great because, again, it's going to save lives. We know that already. Next year, we'll have the emergency SOS via satellite save my life video montage of real people. You're going to get a combo.

Someone's fallen down, and they're on a mountain, and they couldn't call base camp because they've fallen over right and or crash detection they're gonna be out outside of cell service and they crash into a tree and they uh and it calls and it uses the satellite to do it i also thought it was really interesting that they talk about having to compress the text because they're really, really limited with what they're able to send across the satellite from an iPhone, right? All the way out into space. That's hard. And that on top of that, they built basically a wizard that walks you through identifying your current emergency situation. And that's super smart because that allows them to boil it down to the exact details in a way that is a very, very short amount of data that's being sent over the satellite.

And then on the other end is being translated back into the report of where they are and what the situation is. And then they said that they've got it where those get sent as text messages to places that accept text messages and places that have a live operator. to places that accept text messages and places that have a live operator, they have an operator who will relay the message via voice from your message to the emergency. It's really well thought out. It's so smart.

It will save people's lives. And this leads me to my question, which is, this is a service. I was listening to Accidental Tech podcast from last week while I was driving down here. And they were talking about this and it struck me this rumor and i thought this is a service and you can't you can't really say if you don't want to die out in the middle of nowhere pay us a fee right like that that's a hard sell, right? Like, like, Hey, this new iPhone has this life-saving feature. Here's what it costs for us to save your life. And yet it's a service.

You can't not, I think, charge for it ultimately, because this is, this is a, you know, or they're using a satellite provider. They're doing all the satellite data transfer. It can't be cheap. they're using a satellite provider they're doing all the satellite data transfer it can't be cheap um so what they did and i was really impressed with this is they did a free for two years with purchase so you get this for your iphone for two years with purchase presumably at that point you're gonna have to pay something to keep it going but if you're a new iphone buyer or it's a part of icloud plus or something yeah but but right but it's not going to be an upsell where it's like congratulations on spending a thousand dollars on your phone would you like to not die out in the wilderness that'll be an extra whatever like it's no it's covered for two years i think it's an interesting solution to that problem of that this is totally

a service and they could have said pay us for this service up front. If you want satellite emergency SOS, you got to pay us. And that's not what they did. And I think that's a great move. And it really is something that not everybody's going to need, right? Like, lots of people, sure. But lots of people, not so much, I feel like. Depending on where you live in the world and what you might get up to. I don't know. But nevertheless, it's quite a morbid thing to think about. But it is really interesting to build features into your products that are designed to help you not die as a selling point so i yeah and that and that's what i mean when i say the challenge of of how do you use something that's that is going to save you from dying but has a

real cost right apple has had to make a deal with this satellite company and and build this whole system and it's not just the on the cost of of building the software and stuff it's the ongoing cost of connecting to their satellite network and that's a real cost because satellites aren't free you gotta you gotta shoot them up there and then they're up in space and if they come down you gotta have a replacement that you can you can switch to and it's it's it's expensive but yeah it's really unpleasant to have to juxtapose the idea that there's life-saving technology and pay up deadbeats right like you don't want to do that so what do you do and so making it the the the free for two years is an is a i think it's a a pretty interesting and good

compromise i think i mean the argument is maybe not everybody needs this thing, but I think, I think that's not, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I think that's not true. I will tell you that we had to drive up to Oregon for Julian's college orientation. And then we were just in the, in the Eastern Sierras over Labor Day weekend. And, you know, you're streaming music and then it stops and you realize that you are out of service. Like you're in the mountains, you're around Mount Shasta or you're going through the mountains in Oregon or you're going through Yosemite and sometimes you've got service. I mean, I would be surprised because then a notification would pop up and I'd be like, oh, we're back in service for a

moment and then it would go away again. If you live your life at any point in a place like that, and you hear these stories about people who are like, just they're going through the mountains on the way to see grandma and their car breaks down and they don't have service. Like what do you do in a situation like that? And the answer is you tell your kid to stay in the car and the snow's coming down and you try to get to the road. And if somebody's coming, you flag them down or is nobody coming because they've closed the road, but you were the last car through. I mean, it's terrifying. And our smartphones are so important and they're such an important part of our lives. So to have this be built into every iPhone and have it be free for two years after you buy

that iPhone, I'm really glad that they went to the trouble of building this feature in because there's a difference between buying a fancy survival radio that you carry with you in the backcountry and just getting stuck somewhere with your iPhone. So we mentioned already that these devices are sticking in price. $799 and $899. Both available to order this Friday. The iPhone 14 is shipping September

16th. The iPhone 14 Plus is the sacrificial iPhone. It's not shipping until October 7th. This is the only phone that has been dated this way. I expect it's like we have here's my thinking on this right who knows okay we have a limited amount of parts that we can use amongst the phones priorities let's put this on the phone that does not already have a direct model

right because they they don't you know they don't want to go for a period of time where they're not selling a certain phone or they do it today and it's like weeks and weeks and weeks away. And then they're like, well, does that mean nobody's going to buy an iPhone, regular iPhone for a long period of time? This phone is not replacing something technically. There isn't an iPhone 13 plus.

So they've just decided this is the one that will go into October. Because what could be part of this phone specifically that is a problem part is how I look at it. I don't know. Yeah, I think it's priorities. You're right. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Capital One. Have you ever hit a technical snafu while shopping online? Has filling out payment fields given you a headache? Has a mobile banking app ever been down when you wanted to use it? Capital One believes everyone deserves better banking. This means easier access to money and more security, and that's why Capital

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support of this show. iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. Oh yeah, it's time to Capital One for the support of this show. iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max. Oh yeah, it's time to go to a special island. I call it the Dynamic Island. This is exciting.

I am incredibly hyped for this phone. You know what's not exciting about this phone, Mike? What? The color. Oh yeah. I don't like the purple jason i've seen the purple tell me about it it is remember when i said apple would find a way to make purple not exciting no it's you know you know how the midnight uh laptop it's like oh it's black and then you look in exactly the right lane you're like oh i see i see it's it's blue this midnight laptop, it's like, oh, it's black. And then you look in exactly the right lane. You're like, oh, I see.

I see. It's blue. This is like that. It's like, hey, it's a gray phone. And then you look in the right and you're like, oh, I guess it's purple. So they really should have called this Twilight then, as the listener recommended. They should have, right. Except they didn't do midnight and starlight because those aren't professional colors.

Instead, we get silver, gold, deep purple, and another space black. What does that mean? Another space black. Why now? It's darker than space gray. But if space gray was already not a defined color. Yes. Why do we need space black?

Why can't it just be space gray? I don't know. How black is space black? Because it looks kind of gray to me. Apple has decided that the iphone pro should not come in fun colors even as an option it should just have sort of like really super standard colors okay but deep purple like midnight forest and darkened seascape and you know again 2 a.m lemon these are all just terrible colors i mean look ultimately i'm happy i don't have to

just to make a hard decision to move away from my beloved gold and gold looks as amazing as ever so i'm going gold deep purple i mean i like purple i like that it's purple uh let's go to the dynamic this thing looks amazing have you gotten to see it in use? Yeah, yeah. In use, I used it. So here's the thing. We base so many of our stories and speculations on rumors from the supply chain, and the rumor from the supply chain was about the cutouts. So everything was about the cutouts. It was about the little lozenge and the little dot, and it was cutouts. Apple's going to have cutouts in their display, like a hole punch. It's going to be like an Android. They're going to have little hole punch things, whatever. And then last week, it was sort of like, oh, but maybe they'll be connected.

And then over the weekend, it was like, oh, and maybe the little recording indicator light will be in there instead of somewhere else. And if you're somebody at Apple, if you're a fly on the wall at Apple, you're like, oh, they're getting closer. They're getting closer. Are they going to get it? Are they going to figure it out? And the answer is no, they didn't get it. It was an actual surprise because what Apple did with the dynamic island, I think it's so funny and clever, is they took the existence of those cutouts and the idea that they would mask it with a little element. And they designed a whole bunch

of status indicators around that element, that that element grows and stretches and, and the items that appear in the indicators are artfully placed, not on the cutouts. And it's like, you can in bright sunlight, you can see the cutouts, right? You can see them, but most of the time you forget that the cutouts are even there. And instead the little, the little dynamic Island is just your little buddy who gives you information about stuff and it's not marring your display it's an always on information bar it's so smart and clever and little whimsical animations everywhere to make it wider or taller as as needed so yeah you're in you're in music and you're you're playing music and then you flip up to go to the home screen and as you flip up

to the home screen, a music widget, essentially, for lack of a better name, flips up into the dynamic island and it sits there with a little tiny,

teeny tiny thumbnail of the album art and a dynamic waveform that is color matched to the album art, by the way, and it's not fake. It's real.

And you know, Mike, the answer here is this is why live activities weren't coming in iOS 16.0 and they said they were coming later this fall is because I think

these are basically live activities. No, they are. It's been confirmed. Yeah, they go together. You know, I was hedging, but like it was very clear in the moment.

It's like, oh, this is the other part of what the live activities API is, is this display. And so, yeah, it's like a huge change in the iPhone interface to have a live status area

that's available no matter what you're doing that says what else your iPhonehone is doing and and integrate it in a way that is funny and playful and natural so you know the proof is going to be in how it is how it is to use but in a short amount of time with it like i'm inclined to think that this is going to be a winner, that they took the bare problem of those two cutouts, and instead of doing nothing or doing the minimum, which is masking them out and maybe putting a dot back there, they said, why don't we, in a very quintessentially Apple way, why don't we lean into it and make this a fundamental iPhone interface element that is part of our identity going forward for the iPhone. Really excited about it. There was a confirmation from a friend of the show, Serenity Caldwell.

It is part of Live Activities and Activity Kit. It's not available in the release candidate right now, but will be coming to iOS 16 and Xcode later this year. So when the iPhone ship, it will only be Apple's. It will only be Apple's apps and services in the Dynamic Island. And then later on this year, you'll be able to see third-party apps when the live activities thing ships. It's all kind of tied into that. The always-on display got very little time and information.

Yeah, yeah, it is. I got to play with that too. It looks good. I think it's funny that, again, so remember when I got to play with that too. It looks good. I think it's funny that again, so remember when I said earlier in this episode that I think people underestimate Apple? Well, here are a couple other examples, which is the dynamic island.

Everybody underestimated Apple and figured they'd just patch it up with some pixels and call it a day. And they did not do that. They leaned into it. Always on display, display i think is in that category too because i think everybody just like we did where we said oh that it's just it's going to be an apple watch pro and they're not going to lean into the sports features i think

we said oh well you know let's get let's curb our enthusiasm let's get our let's not get our hopes up it's probably going to drop out the images and it's going to be really kind of a very boring thing because they want to save power and And it's like, no, no. If you've got a colorful background picture, when it's in always on mode, it's still visible. It's dimmer. And they are doing some algorithms to reduce what is displayed so that it draws less power on the OLED display. But it's not like everything fades to black and with some very light gray items. It's, it's the, the widgets are monochrome, but your background is not monochrome.

It's still there. And like the Apple watch, it will drop out. Um, I set a timer and then put it into always on mode. And it did the Apple watch thing where it doesn't show you the rest of the seconds. It only shows you the minute. Right. It right it's like come on you're refreshing once a second refresh the second hand please but um but yeah they they it's way more vibrant for an again a dimmed display but it's way more vibrant and personalized they're not throwing that stuff away like now that you've personalized your lock screen good news we're making it all disappear when it's always on um and then you tap and it all kind of lights up yeah this is a feature i feel like i really need to use myself as well to like fully understand it because it's not it is very different to what i

expected like i can't work out how bright does it feel like and again that would sound like what do you do of it at night? Like I'm intrigued about that. And it depends on, I think it probably depends on your light environment, right? Like I would imagine that it's actually brighter when you're outside and dimmer when you're inside, but it does.

And it's got a little animation. Like literally you tap it and it fades up, right? It doesn't just blink or anything. It fades up into the full presentation mode. Again, a little bit like the Apple Watch. Clearly, this was all a lesson learned on the Apple Watch applied to the iPhone, but it looks good.

It has an A16 chip. Yes, new chip. No chip lab, but Greg Joswiak gave us the plug. And I'm just going to point out, this is the next generation Apple chip, which means it might be the next generation on which the M3 is based for the Mac. Maybe not. There are some rumors that they might skip a generation at some point. It's their first four nanometer chip.

That's the key part though, right? Like if it does become, or even if this doesn't but now we can see what okay probably the m3 will undoubtedly be four nanometer at least right yeah yeah most or whatever we do yes uh and then i guess the only i think really for me the only thing that i noted which was interesting is as a new display engine on the chip which is powering the always on dynamic islands and the aliasing is powering the always on dynamic islands and aliasing so there's something going on there they didn't make a lot of um a lot of speed claims here i i do think that they focused on um they did talk about the the the high power

cores are are more powerful and they use less power and then the efficiency cores and the truth is those four efficiency cores the iphone is not using the high-performance cores often. It is not interesting or enlightening, I think, at this point to hear about the power of the chip inside of the iPhone. Yeah, honestly, I think you're right. I don't care about it anymore. That's why they talked about,

instead, they talked about using their cores and their CPU cores and their GPU cores and the neural engine and the ISP to do camera stuff, right? pixel sensor on it and therefore the chip development for this chip model needs to kill it on the image processing because this is when we're doing it it's got to do whatever it's got to do to to like to deal with so much more information coming down the pipeline our friend the pipeline uh yeah but you know for me you get higher up then you see what's coming down and you need more of it i for me i want to know like raw power and speeds and cores for the mac right but for the iphone and for the ipad it's not really interesting anymore it's more what you

can do with it because they're not constrained especially now because you know it used to be like fun of like look how much faster this is than my mac well that doesn't count anymore because we have those chips now so like it's not exactly the camera though jason snell my god i'm so freaking excited they gave me literally everything i wanted from the camera segment of the keynote today so so the things that we thought they might do right because the simple version was well that 48 megapixel though they're going to do pixel binning, which they did. They call it the quad pixel sensor. That's the whole idea. You use four pixels, so you've got lots of light to make a really, really, really good looking 12 megapixel image.

Great. But what else can you do? And this is where it's like, well, what do they choose to do? The answer is they chose to, among other things, create a virtual additional iPhone camera, which is the cropped middle 12 megapixels of the new sensor at which you can take a full resolution photo. There's no optical zoom or anything. It's just cropped in. It's not using the quad pixel at that point. It's using the actual pixels but you can do that and it's like you've zoomed into 2x for full resolution photos and 4k video i love this like i love that the 3 3x exists but i missed

the 2x and they even called it out in a way i was so happy about where they're like because also 3x is not so good for portrait which it's not like i feel like portrait photos now i'm either too far away or too close yes and 2x was so much better for that so i'm really happy about this i hoped they would do something like this um people thought and i had thought i wondered like will they use this sensor to do 10x zoom like some of that like samsung does but they hadn't done that no what i've what i'm happy is they've done what i actually realistically wanted which was more settings that are of high quality rather than pushing past quality and i think one

of the reasons they haven't done this is there is a future iphone expected to get a periscope camera and so you may as well wait for that one to do that, that kind of further out feature. I just want to be clear. Again, it's not a digital zoom. What they're doing is using the 12 megapixels instead of taking 48 and binning it to 12. And it's taking the 12 like it was the old iPhone.

But because it's got the lens that's displaying on the whole sensor and they're taking the 12 like it was the old iPhone. But because it's got the lens that's displaying on the whole sensor and they're taking the center of it, it's effectively a zoom, but it's zooming by discarding the quad pixel algorithm and instead using the more classic one dot per. So the image quality is not going to be as good as at the normal camera mode,

but it's not a digital zoom because it's not inventing pixels. Yep. But they can still throw it through our wonderful friend Photonic Engine and get some better results out of it maybe. Yeah, there's people in the chat room saying it's a digital zoom. I mean, define it how you want. To me, digital zoom means you're creating information where there isn't any. me digital zoom means you're creating information where there isn't any yeah where you're taking something that that you're blowing up pixels and making virtual pixels and making the image look uh bigger than it actually is and they're not blowing up pixels here they're just they're just

cropping the pixels so i i that feels different to me yeah but everything across the board is getting better with hardware and with software the ultra wide has a larger sensor three times uh better improvement in low light by the way the the main camera has a larger sensor three times uh better improvement in low light by the way the main camera has a 2x improvement over the 13 pro in low light for this stuff higher quality macro mode photos they have a new adaptive flash which i thought was really smart that dependent on the focal length of the image they adapt how much light they use which is genius uh and then for cinematic mode they go up to 4k now in video and you can do it at 24 frames per second and pro raw you can use the full 48 megapixels resolution if you know what you're doing with it yeah right that's it like what

so what if you say well it's great that you're doing this quad pixel thing but i i want all those pixels i'm a pro photographer and i want 48 megapixels and the answer is great then you use pro raw you get all 48 megapixels of it do what you want with it and that's great that's that's fantastic they didn't do 8k cinematic mode 4k at 24 and 30 is great for people who i mean again it's who is that it's a for the filmmakers who use the cinematic mode i'm not sure anybody is but uh if you're an aspiring filmmaker and you want to shoot 24 4k in cinematic mode you can now well i was listening to the six color secret subscriber podcast and our friend david sparks said he wanted to use cinematic mode but it was just at 1080,

and that wasn't working for what he wanted with the rest of his workflow. So there you go. It's for Sparky then. It's a higher quality image. There was no 8K video. Now, I'm assuming that this sensor could do it. I am expecting they are not doing it yet for two reasons.

One, not a lot of use, I think, for 8K as it stands right now. And two, the file size is massive. Yes, and you have to get it over that little lightning port. Yeah, which is not great. So I just think right now there isn't a need for 8K. Let me tell you, Jason, I'm so excited for this phone. This is a big upgrade, it looks like. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the real photo samples

yep but my own images right do you know what i mean like just yeah if you if you're the kind of person who buys an iphone for the camera i feel like there's no question about this like we'll see we'll see what the reviews are and all of that but like this is a camera upgrade. I do think that we have the Dynamic Island as an amazing design upgrade. And the always-on display, too. Yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch of... For the boring third...

Well, this is what Apple does, though, right? It's like it's the third version of this body. So what do you do to make it interesting? The answer is you do a lot of really interesting stuff that isn't changing the body in year three, because, you know, the body's been out there for a while and it's not that exciting, but you can do some other exciting stuff. And so here it is. They've got the Island, they've got the always on, and they've got this new camera system. And then that's a, again, it's's that for if you're just going on looks it looks

like it's more or less the same phone but if you're looking at the specs and you're looking at what it does it's actually a pretty dramatic upgrade yeah i'm really i am genuinely really pumped they've they've given me the things that i wanted the most right that i've really been looking forward to and you know one of them was just like hey the screen's going to look different but then they've taken it that step further with this like delightful ui element in the dynamic island which by the way that is a really bizarre name dynamic i love it like i love it but that's what it's a wild name my immediate thought was Dynamic Island is what happens when you release a phone with a notch

and everybody calls it the notch and you're an Apple product marketer and you're like I don't like that name and somebody says well why didn't you give it a name and you're like oh yeah well if we ever do something like the notch again we're going to brand it. You know what? And so here it is.

I'm going to say you are spot on there. Because Dave just wanted you to say the Face ID sensor. Or nothing. You just don't call it anything. It just is. Right. So we're going to have to retro name the notch now. I propose the Static Peninsula.

But it could be... We'll work on it. We'll workshop what the notch is called.'s it's offshore of the dynamic island so that's everything announced today yeah and this is uh again september 16th so we have i'm sure we'll have more to break down next week uh i'm sure so i mean i'm still comes out you you've had a little bit of time. I'm still sort of in the bubble here. Yeah, for sure. In the ring. Yeah, you're within the ring bubble.

Can you believe Upgrade is coming to people live from inside the circle at Apple Park? No, I cannot believe that. That was a big surprise for all of us. But look at that. Look where we've come, kids. We've come so far. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.

If you would like to support us, there's a few ways you can do that. You can sign up for Upgrade Plus. Go to getupgradeplus.com. You can support our sponsors Capital One, Bombas, Sourcegraph, and Squarespace. I will ask all of you please to go to stjude.org slash relay. Donate what you can. Sign up

to fundraise. Share it with your friends. stjude.org slash relay. If you want to keep up with what Jason will, I'm sure, will be writing many words. Lots of not ink spilled, but like characters spilled. I don't know. A pixel spill over at sixcolors.com.

He is at jsnl. J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at I-M-Y-K-E. And we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.