Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Did Apple Actually Duo It?

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

New iPhones are officially here! Marques, Andrew, and David talk about the new iPhone 18 Pro phones and the newest foldable on the block, the iPhone Duo. There were also some interesting updates to the new AirPods 5 and Apple Watch Series 12/Apple Watch Ultra 4, so they spend some time discussing all of the updates as well. Of course, we wrap it all up with trivia. Enjoy! Links: MKBHD - iPhone 18 Pro/Duo Impressions video Apple - AirPods 5 Paper This episode brought to you by: Airbnb: https://www.airbnb.com Granola AI: https://www.granola.ai/waveform Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/waveform Square: https://www.square.com/go/waveform Follow us on socials: Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Waveform Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Waveform Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en Waveform TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Intro/Outro music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Doc on the right. God, okay, so it's such a good idea. Unless you're lefty. Unless you're left-handed. In which case, become right-handed. You're holding it. You're holding it wrong. Yeah, what is up, people of the internet?

Welcome back to another episode of the Wayform podcast. We're our hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And over at the producer desk, we have Adam and Ellis. Hello. We, video listeners, video viewers.

You can already tell we're in a new place. Because it's Apple Event Week, and the news of the week is the event that happened here in California. And we figured before we flew home, we might as well use one of their nicely loaned podcast studio spaces to tell you guys all about what happened. So we have to because it's on a Wednesday and we have to get this out. Yeah, we are. It's Thursday right now. We are crushing this. This is going to be great.

But we do have a lot to talk about. So we should just jump directly into it. Now, I see here that we have this nicely organized doc where we have some of the more chill announcements first, Airpods first, watch first. Don't take you because he's going to say, but I'm going to go off script and miss all of the stuff you guys wrote. Let's stick with it because retention is very important. I say, but just to make sure people know what's coming, we are talking about the AirPods, we're talking about the new watches. We are also talking about the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max,

and the new folding iPhone Duo, which is all that we got. We did not get new base iPhone 18s. We did not get new iPhone Air or SC or anything like that. If you watch the Impressions video, we know we kind of assume that's coming like early next year. So we kind of like, they did the thing where they made room for the big important thing, and we talked a lot about foldable, and we will also talk a lot about foldable. But let's do the other stuff first.

Good, good. Great. Okay. Well, I figured the way that I organized this document was sort of least updates to biggest updates. Nice. Okay. Which is kind of how Apple usually presents this stuff. They're like, you guys love AirPods.

Here's the same thing. Yeah. They actually started off by reminding us that iOS 27 exists and that Siri exists. It's sort of re-announcement stuff. people who didn't watch dub-dub. I forgot about that. That was a big deal because a lot of these people are buying new iPhones, but they didn't, they were not on the betas. They weren't on beta five, you know. Yeah. I'd argue they started with a CEO pass-off. That's true. Also very true. We did. I liked the little Tim Cook, like, I'm not the main character. That's your guy. I thought

that was a cute way to do it. Yeah, that's a good nod to such main character energy. I mean, he always does. He always does. He did not it off to, uh, to Ternus, who did the whole event as we expected. Something we asked on our Man on the Street Pod, which will actually come out after this, is do we think, what was it, hello and good morning? Do we think that's a catchphrase or no? It sounds like he did not say that. Hello and welcome.

Hello and welcome. Is that what we started with? Only on the stream. On the stream. In person, he said, wow. Okay, that's actually, I feel better about that because whenever you see the little, like, lowercase hello text, I think that's like when you first boot an iPhone. That's what it says or whatever.

And then we all know Tim Cook's sort of trademarked opening line at every keynote was good morning, maybe five, six, seven, eight, nine times, which is great. But then I was like, Ternis can't say good morning. He has to say something else. So what will he say? And I figured it would be a lowercase hello. It kind of was. A lowercase hello? On the street.

Specifically a lowercase hello. What's a lowercase hello sound like? Hello. Yeah. And I think he could do it. It's not like, you know, Tim Cook has this like radiating energy when he says good morning. It's good morning. It's a capital G and a capital M.

Yeah, it was good. That was great. He was pretty low. He was practicing. Is he here? You know? Turnus is very low key, low key. So they did the CEO handoff.

Turnus leads the event, dives in. AirPods 5 is the first product we get. And as you said, probably the fewest amount of updates, but also pretty reasonably expected updates. It gets the $129 price tier has ANC. It's more powerful ANC. And it has a non-wireless charging case. And I think it has slightly. thicker mesh, so it has a little bit better passive cancellation as well. But then there's a

$149 version that adds a wireless charging case and the little volume control on the stems from the pros, which I really like. At this point, you basically have the pros without the rubber tips. Yeah. So nice. Yeah. That's good. And they sound pretty good. And yeah, it's interesting that if you pay $20 more to get the wireless charging case. And they just call it AirPods 5 with wireless charging case. You also get the volume thing on the stem. For some reason that's not on the standard model. It also gets an extra hour of battery life

over the version that doesn't have the wireless charging case. And the total battery life is 20 hours on the non-wireless charging case and 22 on the wireless charging case. Apparently it's a slightly bigger battery in the case too. That's strange. I don't get it. It's two skews. But they have two names. I'm going to say it's worth

the $20. I think so. You get to find my speaker too. Yeah, that's the other thing. You don't get a fine my speaker on I don't even know why they're making the non-wireless charging version. As a non-air pods user, this was already very confusing to me because I forgot that AirPods 4 had the AirPods 4 and AirPods 4 with ANC, correct? So the way they described things in comparison were like this is 50% or 1.5X more powerful ANC over last year's model.

But then the other one was just like, you actually get ANC. So I was just lost. Yeah. Last year the AirPods 4, there was a version with ANC and a version without. Yeah. So now they both have A and C. But one as wireless charging. But one as wireless charging.

I don't know why they made the cheaper version. I think just to keep it at that price point, I suppose. It is funny that it's with the wireless charging case, but the actual is actually different with the stem. Yeah. Yeah. Which is confusing. It's interesting. I think a lot of the software stuff is more interesting than the actual hardware.

The live translate. I want to try. Obviously the passive. The noise cancellation is always better for me. the silicon-tipped pros that actually stay in my ears, but for the people who allegedly are out there that just don't want that, that really, really want the hard-tipped earbuds, and it stays in their ears because they have the perfect ear. Like Brandon. Brandon is, I'm jealous of this. We met someone yesterday.

I said that. I know these people is this. Now you get the same headphone, and you just get to pick which one fits your ear better, which I think is a good thing. I think most truly wireless headphones, the worst part about them is finding one that fits your ear. Now you have two options for it without losing much else. Yeah. So that was good. That was pretty basic.

The next bigger thing that we'll shift to is the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, which actually are, in my opinion, bigger upgrades than we usually get from the Apple Watch series upgrades because they completely redesigned the bottom of the Apple Watch. Yeah. That's a bunch of different things. Yeah. I have two really big thoughts about them. I'm excited.

And I think the review has to dive into these thoughts. But we should first talk about the physical updates. which most of them are around like the cluster of sensors on the underside of the watch, which have been slowly evolving over the years. They've been adding a couple sensors here and there, but they completely redesign them, add way more photodiodes, way more sensors,

way more LEDs, more powerful and bigger LEDs. And all of this is in the name of measuring your heart rate way more frequently and way more accurately. And then they publish a paper, which I'm going to link below because I think it's really interesting, where they took a huge sample size of people and compared it to a whole bunch of other different wearables, including the whoop, including wearable rings,

and concluded with scientific rigor that it is the most accurate heart rate sensing wearable. Oh, so they did publish a paper. Yeah. That's what I was wondering yesterday during the event. I was like, where is this paper? It's a public paper. Yeah. Nice. Okay, cool.

Yeah. So that to me was a direct shot at all this. Like we've talked about all the year, like the whoops and then the whoop competitors, which is like, okay, obviously whoop has their subscription. So people are attacking that. You have Fitbit Air. Here you have the garment, the, what is it called?

The Circa. Like all of these are trying to directly essentially build whoop, but for not as much money. Yeah. And along comes Apple. No subscription for an Apple Watch. You get the Apple Watch. Obviously, it's in the ecosystem, but it's allegedly, well, now scientifically confirmed, just as accurate, if not more so, than a whoop.

And they redo the health app, which is coming in an update later this year, that adds a lot of the interpretation of the data. Because there's always been a ton of data, but the health app's been just like a doctor's office, just like tons of lists of stuff that it's been collecting. And it's not really fun to poke through there, but AI is going to sort of unveil your sleep score and your health age and your readiness today and all that stuff.

So that'll give you some recommendations. I wish you guys could have heard Andrew go off about health age yesterday when we were watching the event. I don't even remember what I said. I was in a fury. It is such a direct, I mean, because whoop, you know, whoop does your whoop age. A lot of things do.

Garvin does a thing. Everything does it now. Yeah. This is, it's directly, it's not cloning, but it's giving you the exact same set of features. So if you were choosing between any of these, if you're cross shopping. It's great entertainment. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There are so many small things about the updates to like the health app and the way that they're tracking data that I feel like are direct attacks at the things that we're trying to attack the Apple Watch. Every year the Pixel Watch is making, a big deal about how many more times it tracks your heart rate over like compared to the Apple Watch. And now Apple just came in and they're like, nope, we're doing it 60 times a minute now.

60 times more frequently. Yes. Every five seconds in the background polling for heart rate. Yeah. All day, every day, all day during your sleep. 24 times more frequent heart rate variability readings compared to series 11. Yeah, okay. So the readiness thing and like the new health app redesign, my hot take is that they are preparing to release.

a Fitbit Air competitor because yes look look this is not confirmed I'm into this I'm into that idea so a lot of the the changes in the health app kind of bring all the stuff that you would normally look at on your watch into like this more visual design like they have this new pedal design inside the new health app yeah that takes like all of these readings like you were talking about and usually it was just like charts and lists and all these things you have to scroll scroll scroll scroll now they have a whole tab that just has this pedal design that they call it which is sort of looks like flower

pedals with things like your sleep score and like your readiness score and all these things and it gives you sort of this barometer of how good you're doing in each thing and if the more filled those bars are the better you're doing yeah and if you look at like the Fitbit Air or like the whoop this is the thing that they do really well is like when you actually look at your phone that's the only surface you have to actually see your information yeah on the Apple Watch they designed most of that information to see on the Apple Watch screen. You're not opening the health app

on your phone that often. So putting that display in the health app prepares them to have an equivalent with no displaying your wrist. I just don't think they would want to do anything to get an Apple Watch off your wrist. I think that there are a lot of people who just don't want to wear the Apple Watch that much.

I mean, I think... I know you don't. I just don't think that's a big enough sample size of people. I think they want all of the extra whoop competitor FitBID Air competitor. Extra Garmin. I mean, Garmin's been doing this forever. Also, they want all those crazy.

metrics, especially with like an Apple Watch ultra replicating Garmin kind of stuff. Yeah. Totally makes sense. I just think they also want the, especially because they announced all this stuff, like the 15 second live rewind and listening all day kind of stuff. They want that on your wrist all the time. I have thoughts on that. And if a screenless one doesn't have that, they much prefer having the thing to listen to

you on your ears. I agree. It's kind of like Apple would love to sell you an Apple Watch. And if you, but I also think that the screenless fitness trackers are like a separate new growing category that if they don't offer anything, they're just going to leak Apple Watch users into that until they offer some equivalent. Yeah. And so the we've seen people, I'm an example. I have leaked out of Apple Watch into a screenless fitness tracker. And that's not everyone. That's obviously a small group of people. But whoop is huge. Fitbit Air is huge. Lots of these

scrimless screenless. It's eight in the morning. Lots of these fiendless scritiness trackers. Yeah, Lots of these screenless fitness trackers are interesting products, and I think if Apple could find a way to make it ecosystem pull, they would. I think do we think the screenless fitness tracker is only popular because whoop had all these very specific metrics and calculations and we're so much better than everyone else? No, do you think it's a different type of person? Yeah.

I don't know. I'm just wearing a watch right now that's not a smart watch. I know, but I'm not wearing a screenless fitness tracker. I think the screenless fitness tracker is a slightly more health-focused, slightly more athletic type of buyer versus the Apple Watch is it's the most popular the watch in the world it's the definition of like the baseline casual I'm going to maybe get into this a little bit so if they could offer something for the people who are like I want more than the Apple Watch will give me and I don't want the screen on my wrist and I want to run an

ultramarathon and the Ultra Watch is not what I want it's just a possible new thing to sell I think my reason for that is I think everyone likes the whoop because the metrics were different now everyone's copying it I think more people are going to keep screen on their wrist now because they get the benefits of that with notifications and everything I think they get all the new metrics and I also think in ultramarathons the number one time you want a screen on your wrist because you want all that stuff up to date that's why Garmin dominates ultramarathon runners because you have a huge battery life with constant information feeding to you and you do not carry a

phone with you know what I did think about that which is last year it was so easy for me to leave the Apple Watch because there was no black one there was only there is only dark blue, which is Series 11 is fine. It's a very nice watch. And I didn't want to wear the ultra. So it was like, they didn't have a black one.

It's like, you know what? I could leave the Apple Watch. Now they have a Series 12, and it has all these new features, and it has one more data, and there's a black one. And so I do see her playing. Do you miss having a screen?

I don't. I don't miss having a screen. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of people are like, oh my God, I can get all this without the annoyance of having a screen on my wrist. I think you guys are in her bubble too much. Yeah.

No, man. No, I don't miss a screen. People ask me about the Fitma Air all the time. Yeah, but I don't think people want... I think because no one wants the Pixel Watch. I think you guys are all thinking of these watches that no one really wants, but the Apple Watch is the most popular watch in the world. I mean, yeah.

Because watch is one category and it's enormous. And this smaller but growing category of not a watch but a fitness tracker, the debate is how big is this category? Is it big enough to warrant Apple's attention to make something? All right. Well, neither of us... So what's the bet? How many years until...

this comes out. Max 2. Max 2. But I do think it's going to come out in a year. I don't think this comes out. I think the iPhone Apple watch about it. No shot. No, it's not coming out ever. Yeah.

What would a screenless Apple Watch even be? Like the whole thing about the Apple Watch is that. Well, it wouldn't be an Apple Watch. It's crazy. I know, but like. I think they wouldn't make a good one. I'm just saying I don't think they're making it. Imagine you just wear an Apple Watch bracelet and it just has the tracking.

But don't all the screenless ones already plug into Apple Health? Like genuinely what would be the offering there? Apple would have to find a way to make theirs plug into the ecosystem better than everyone else's. And you're right. A lot of these do dump the data into Apple health already, which is a great point. And I wonder what Apple, if they were to jump in, I don't think there's any way they do it without finding something to add to theirs that no one else can do. I would argue everything they launched at this event is they're like, cool, stop buying that with your Apple Watch. You have it all on your Apple Watch.

Now there's no point of you getting a screen. That did feel like. I agree with that. But I do think those are more targeted at the AI wearables that are. going to come out, which... Okay, let's talk about that. Let's get to that. Wait, wait, wait, wait, what's the bet?

Yeah, I just wanted the bet to end two years. What are we doing? A year from now. A year. They're going to launch it at the iPhone 19. All right, what's the stakes? I don't know. Okay.

Embarrassed me somehow. No, we have to print out a full-size picture of the other person's face and put it on your laptop for a year. A year? A year? I love that. I think you have to drive to work for a week with a full-size cardboard cut out of the other person in the car.

That's just the car. Are you buying the cutout? Yeah. Okay, deal. Look, if it makes the people who pass me on the highway think I have more friends than I do, then that's a win for me. All right, we'll do that. Lane is going to hate that.

I'll do that or be very scared, but be prepared to have a full-size David in your car all the time. This is my other, and I'm not going to say it's a conspiracy theory, but the more I listen to Apple talk about this watch, these watches. And specifically, the new features that they added, which are sort of tied into the AI and software, the more I couldn't stop thinking about what we're expecting to come in this standalone AI device race. So for those who don't know,

the Series 12 watch and the Series or the Ultra 4 have these new features where Siri taps into the S11 ship to essentially and this is going to be an oversimplification but constantly be listening for conversations or words

to be said in the Apple Watch's microphone and at any point to summarize that for you in the Siri app. There's two features. There's one that's called like Live Rewind, which is something just happened and I want a summary of the last 15 seconds. I hit a button on the watch and because it's always processing data, it takes that raw 15 seconds of audio, processes it in the secure exclave, doesn't ever go to the cloud or leave your device unencrypted, but gives you a transcription or a summary of what you were just listening to. It's going to be hard to explain to the public without saying your watch is constantly

listening to you. They're going to try, but that's one of the features. I know you liked the other one more, but that demo to me felt so much like the, what kind of dog is this where you're taking the picture of the dog and the person's standing right there. Like, yeah, please read me the specials again while the waiter's standing right here. That was exactly. Hey, I missed that. Andrew in our briefing about this, multiple people were like, why wouldn't you just say, can you say that again? And they were like, you know, I don't know. 15 seconds just seems too short. Like, the person's still there. You can just clarify it. Okay, Apple is clearly very, very, very nervous about these features.

They are both put under the audio intelligence umbrella, which is a new thing they're doing because they already have visual intelligence, smart branding. But they are so nervous because this is the thing that public's going to freak out the most at. It's opt on. It's opt in. It's going to be in beta. It's like every question we would ask, they were like,

we're not really sure. And so give us feedback when you use it and we'll see, we'll maybe adapt the way it works. So they are just, they are like, they're stepping on coals right now. They're being very, very careful. So that's just want to say there's a giant blowback already with meta glasses. Having every watch in the world potentially recording people is going to make a lot of people a lot of. I think very nervous. Metaglasses are videos and used it.

People are wearing them in like bathrooms and stuff. That's way weird than. Than a private conversation with a person's watching. Listen, I'm not saying this is fantastic. And I agree with David that this is a very Apple. It is. knows privacy is their thing. They know they're trying to tiptoe on this

and make it as safe as possible, but yes. I'm sorry, Andrew, can you say that one more time? As you hold up your wrist. Just real quick, the other feature is that if you have it enabled during the day,

in a separate new tab in the Siri app, there is a recap button, which will show you all day as sort of a summary of some transcriptions and important things you may want to remember from your day. And once again, these are very difficult features

to market without essentially saying your watch is always listening to you for your convenience. Because it is. So that being said, I hear all of this. And then you think about what are these rumors we've all been seeing about like, oh, open AI is going to come out with some piece of hardware and their angle is going to be something where essentially it's listening to you all the time to deliver some feedback or some value to you with AI processing that information.

That is at least looming on the horizon. And I think Apple, with all of these features in the world, watch has decided that this is their way of offering the equivalent of that before the open AI device comes out and trying their best with the privacy angle of okay with the S11 ship and the secure exclave and the encryption and all of the way that we're processing it. I need to get like an exact explanation of how this feature actually works and how they explain it to the public just to see how it lines up. But that's the other theory which is like the Apple watches are specifically like there are teams of people working on these products,

and there's definitely a group in a room that's like, we kill whoop with this. And then there's definitely also a group in a room that's like, we get ahead of Open AI's new thing with this. Yeah, it's right down the hall. We pass it away. So it is fascinating to see them, like,

nervously go, I guess we have to do this with the watch, and here it is. They made a big deal about the privacy stuff, but a lot of it is, like, very hard to explain to the public and even to me. Because I still don't really understand I got text from people that were like,

I don't like that feature. Wow, yeah. Just straight up. That's the one thing they didn't like. They say Apple does not create or store audio recordings, which I guess, what is a recording? Like I know. This is a, what is a photo?

Yeah, yeah. This is literally what is a photo because it is taking, when we ask them about this, we're like, how do you do that? They're like, oh, we're looking for signals. And I was like, yeah, words are signals, bro. Like, I don't really understand. Yeah. They're kind of reworking the way that this is explained to people.

I almost want to try to explain it now, but I almost know I'm going to get part of it wrong. But it's like there are always sounds happening and feeding into the microphone. Kind of the same way your Google Home sits on your desk at home and isn't technically always recording or the way your pixel sits on your desk and isn't always listening all the time. But when either a song starts playing or you say, hey, the magic, hey, G words, the technology is good enough to, without recording you all the time. Understand that that is a trigger to start recording. No, but David is right, though, because it is recorded. It is.

It's unprocessed. So, I think this is the technicality. It's the memory buffer. They're like, it's not stored, but it's put in RAM, and then we dump it out of RAM. When you ask for it. Or when it identifies a signal in it. RAM is storage and storage is RAM, basically. Which is true.

That's why they have to explain it very carefully. Also, every example you just gave, no one believes. Everyone thinks my phone is listening to me all the time. We do hear that a lot. We do hear that a lot. We're just in the stage where we kind of assume if it has an on button is listening to us. I don't know.

I'm thinking about this more, because we do know that a lot of those devices are. Like there have been enough leaks of data centers, like, oh, recordings of people's homes have come out. But maybe there is a wacky world where none of this audio is getting written to a buffer. it's getting passed through an ADD converter and every bit is getting analyzed in real time and then dump. That's what they say is happening.

My thought was just, it's not starting audio recordings, it's just transcribing every time he hears words and now I have a transcription of things. Does that count as an audio storage? I don't think you can do a transcription without filling a buffer. I think that needs to go backwards.

I mean, yeah, they have to process data in order to... It has to be processed if it's giving you a daily brief at the end of the day. They gave a lot of credit. They just understand what you were saying. They gave a lot of credit to the S-11 chip in their explanations of it, specifically in these watches, which is that there is this new part of the chip, which does a lot of this processing, that doesn't touch the other parts of the chip or the other memory of the system, never goes to your phone, etc.

So that's what I want to dig into and trying to understand how this all works. I will say if there's any company that the general public might trust to pull this off, it's maybe Apple. It is why they can't mess it up. Which is, yeah, why it's important that they explain it clearly. Which is why they called a secure exclave, too. That's, like, the whole reason it's an exclave and an enclave because it's, like, separated from the rest of the chip. Yeah.

And they have, like, an always-on processor going on. They also made a big deal about the fact that you can never access the raw data. Like, there is no way to access, like, the sound data that is happening either from a third party, from Apple themselves, et cetera. There are no speaker labels. So, like, when you get those transcriptions and stuff, they don't want you to be able to be like, oh, Andrew said that or David said that. And that's, I think, a big deal because people, like, again,

it's not only the person that's wearing the watch that has to be nervous, it's everyone around you. Like when you see meta glasses and you're like, oh God, Apple doesn't want a situation where people see an Apple watch and they're like, I can't say. That would be worst case. That would be worst case. It's also ended in encrypted. The other thing is they said you can set it up so that it only goes during certain times of the day or during certain focus modes. That was the most confusing to me because if I remember correctly in the event, they said something like you control what? when it's on, which to me immediately says,

record, stop recording. There is a button. There is, yeah, and that's like a plod, a meeting note, kind of like AI device thing of like, let's do this conversation. Plaud's the first one you went to. Well, probably because they've sponsored the podcast before disclosure.

But then it was like, oh, or maybe you just don't want it running at night. I was like, hold on, that's a very different thing. Yeah. So this means it's running and now you set up when you don't want it. Running. It's like,

I think they're, this is good though, because now we can definitively know there's no ghosts. We're right on the edge. If it's running all night, paranormal activity could have never been made.

Can you imagine waking up and seeing like an AI summary that's like ghosts were having conversations? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Now we'll know. Also, quick, quick correction. I slip talk every night.

The most Apple way possible, the secure enclave was actually part of M4 and A18. But this is an exclave. Sorry, exclave. I misspoke. But,

I think they just declined to mention it until this generation. I'm trying to utilize that. I know they have a new part of the processor that is separate from the rest of the chips. Totally, but I think they've been doing this processing on a separate part of the chip since M4 and 18. I'm like trying to find the exact confirmation, but when you Google around Apple Exclave, there's articles a year and a half old about it. Okay. Interesting.

Yeah. Well, this is all under the audio intelligence umbrella. Yes. So they are going to be walking very slowly, testing this stuff. It's opt-in. You can decide when to have it on. I do think that having it on in certain focus modes is kind of a cool idea. And again, this is a direct shot at all the dedicated AI hardware.

And I think that there's a lot of things throughout this event and we'll get to more of it. The first 20 minutes. The first 20 minutes where it felt like John Ternis was just like, yeah, you guys could go do your fun little thing. Like, he talked, okay, he talked about the phone. he said that the phone was something else. What would he call it? Your intelligent personal hub. That's what he called it.

And I completely agree with that because I've always called my phone David's PDA because you know how you can name your phone. Because phones are not just phones. They're everything now, right? So his point was like, we have a bunch of computers all over your body. And they can do everything that this dedicated AI hardware can do. So why would you ever buy that? And I feel like to your point, Marquez, of getting ahead of Open AI,

he's just trying to plant that in people's heads. You don't need dedicated hardware. And I tend to think he's right. I do too. This is what happened when I review the Humane PIN, which is, and we talk about Humane all the time, but their fatal flaw slash decision they had to make was, do we want this product to live alone without ever having to talk to your phone? Because one, we know we're not Apple and we cannot talk to the phone the same way Apple accessories

can. And two, if we want this product to be used all the time and, they collect all the information and whatever, we want the user to wear it all day and have it actually be useful. We need it to be with them even when their phone's not with them and useful even when their phone's not with them.

And so it has to live separate from the phone. As soon as it lives separate from the phone, it loses all the context of the phone. Doesn't know any of your contacts, doesn't know any of your history, doesn't know any of your information, and it has to do all of that. And that was where it was doomed.

And that's why my conclusion and a lot of other people were like, oh yeah, smartphones are still pretty great. And they can, they are a better starting point for whatever AI assistance you want in your life. Two things. One, I think Humane had like 17 fatal flaws. Agreed. Agreed.

But I do think that was like one of the fundamental ones. Yeah. And yeah, it's everyone keeps talking about dedicated, we're going to get this dedicated AI thing. Apple's like, we're on every single person in the U.S. pretty much already. We can just add the stuff to it and you're wearing it already. And the entire, the only thing that makes all of this new wave of AI stuff work is context. every single piece of digital context that goes through your life, goes through your freaking phone. It's already on your phone.

You can't just do that with a new piece of hardware. Like you'd have to fully commit every single service in your life to going through this new piece of hardware, which no one can do. And carry it with you all the time. Carry it with you all the time. Like opening eyes supposedly, allegedly making a speaker that you're supposed to carry around with you. Like come on, guys.

It's a Bluetooth speaker that you carry around with you? Yeah. Wi-Fi speaker, David. Wi-Fi speaker. Okay, I want to just really quickly mention the actual physical new changes to the watches before we move on. Ceramic. Seris 12, there's new ceramic, which Brandon is super happy about. So is rich.

Sort of. Which is very happy about. They have a pearl white version and a night blue version. They're much more expensive. They're $899, as opposed to the $3.99 of the aluminum. There's also a, there's two new natural. options for the aluminum, which is like a natural gold and a one that's just called it's radiant gold and one's just called natural. Those are 300 bucks more than the

regular one, which is, they're all kind of expensive. Wait, the ceramics more expensive than the ultra for. Yeah. No, it's the same. Oh, yeah, it is. 100 bucks more than the base, yeah. So that's kind of crazy. I don't know. Whatever. They're doing the thing where they offer a whole bunch of prices, a whole bunch of colors and finishes, and you just kind of pick which one you like. We saw a band for the watch Ultra that was titanium. It's an Hermes titanium band. It was $2,200 for the band. That happens every year.

That's it. You can get in there deep with those watch bands, man. Okay, Ultra4. Wait, real quick, just on Series 12. Yes. Rich noticed very specifically that it seems like the crown is almost like offset in all the stuff they showed on that. Did you guys notice that at all?

Offset in what way? It's always like sitting flush right across the, I'm doing hand gestures on a podcast. But like offset. You could almost see the gap in between. in the bottom of the crown and the wall of the watch in the in the renders that they had in the on the vents we'll have to look at that when we get that it's so minimal gap but it was the the crown was not flush against the body of the watch one of those things where you see this

for 12 generations you're like wait a minute that looks different i also need to take a look at something i noticed during the hands-on time is it seemed like the bezels were slightly bigger but i think what i was doing research on this and what it actually seemed like was that they made the body slightly larger of the of the and so the bezels feel bigger compared the display. But I do think it's notable that the new Apple Watch wallpaper that like built in wallpaper is just a black OLED screen with like a few pieces of information. And it seems like every time they do that, it's to hide the vessel size. So we'll check that out when we actually get it. But you know, I'm not too worried. I'm not too worried. But okay, Ultra4, same $800 price.

It has a larger battery. Now they say over two days of battery life, which I think is a big deal for them. And specifically aimed at Garmin and a couple of these other companies, they now have a max extended workout mode, which gives you 45 hours of battery life, which they said is enough for ultra marathon. They hit us with 100 mile of run. They're like, this is good enough for running 100 miles,

which I think is the final boss. I don't think you get any more intense of a long workout than this will last you a 100 mile of run. So I think we've done it. Yeah. I think we've gotten there. And I think this is funny because when they first ultra came out, remember, we interviewed Hela.

Hela, yeah. And he specifically was like, yeah, I have to pass my Apple Watch off to my team to charge while I'm running because it won't last 100 miles. So I feel like this is like directly targeted at those people who have to buy other devices specifically for one task.

Yeah. Which is just, you know, funny and whatever. You can hot swap Apple Watches. You can? Yeah, did you know that? Did you really know. Marcus is the only person that in the whole world? I don't, oh, that's a good point.

Probably not during the exercise. You have to probably end the exercise. Yeah, you probably lose like 10 seconds of data. Yeah. Well, yeah, but then you start a new workout and it's like, why is your heart weight 300 BPM? Yeah. Are you dying?

Okay, we have so much left to get to, but we really have to take an ad break. So let's take a quick break, which means we didn't forget. It's not a trivia. This is crazy. You guys don't know, but for some reason the audio for us is like two bit.

There's like a loose cable somewhere. Yeah, that's like the only explanation. And it's hilarious. It sounds like there's so many in the next room playing the sound. Should I just leave it? We'll see. I'm so scared of where you're paying attention every year. Here's the thing.

You guys were paying attention. I've rewritten this question like three times because my question was just discussed. So way to go. But I do have one. Okay. Early on in their event, Apple noted how many Siri requests they get per day. Oh, they did. Did they?

Prices. Yes, I do. And I remember when they said it, Like are all of those intentional requests? I was doing, oh, that's a good point. That's such a good point. I was trying to do the math is like, is this only like averaging two people to requests a day?

Whoa. Anyway. How many? Price is right rules. How many times do people query Siri? Is that like the amount of total Siri requests they get? Yes. Not individual people.

Total request they get in a day. They did say it. They did say it. I was, I just want to tell you I was paying attention. Oh, clearly. You can prove it. I just don't remember this number at all. I've written this question.

so many times because you guys were actually paying amazing. My knowledge of the Apple keynote is like in these chunks of like hyper-focused and then taking a quick 12-second break to live tweet and write things down and then hyper-focusing. That's where I'm scared of the question being because then I'm hyper-focusing it. I'm like, I know I just heard something interesting 12 seconds ago. I don't have the feature on my watch. I have no idea what they said. When I was writing the podcast last night, the notes, I went back and like watched the different

segments of the keynote and I was like I don't remember this yeah because we're just yeah we're like taking quick photos tweeting we're like taking notes and like you you're not paying as much attention our TV turned off have way oh yeah we had to like emergency switch to a laptop also the TV we we were so confused because the TV had really bad color accuracy and so it looked like John Turnus was wearing all black and then we kept seeing like screenshots or like we flip on speed stream and he was wearing a red shirt and we were like is there an outfit change that we have yet to get to. That's wild.

Excuse me. A burgundy. Where are you? They missed out. I know we have to go to, I wish they called it oxblood. I think that was. It's for sure one of code names.

I don't disagree. That would be amazing. Okay. Anyway, we'll think about that. Ansles will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back. All right.

Welcome back. You've made it this far under the podcast. You deserve iPhone talk. Chalk. I'm going to start that over. I like that. Why? I'll take chalk.

All right, chalk. We're talking. Now, you deserve the iPhone talk. iPhone 18 Pro Max and iPhone Duo. I guess since we're doing an order of most changes, we should save the fold for last. So the 18 pros. 18 pros. There's only a few really significant changes, and if you want to even call them significant, like new colors.

They always do that. They have the obvious new one, which is ox blood, is what we're calling. Yeah, it's like the color of leather. like you stain leather oxblower. I think it's a good visual for people. But it's also burgundy. It's like deep red. It's the color.

Wine red. Yeah. So I think that feels like the flagship new color. There's also a glacier which is like David's pants, maybe lighter than. It's like light blue, sky blue. Yeah. Sky blue. Silver.

Calvin Valley is the same as ours. Exactly. Yeah. Silver and. And silver is a little different. Yeah. You're right. Ellis disagrees with you, but the silver is better.

It's more uniform. Because the last, the last silver one had like. the glass cut out for wireless charging and everything was white. Yeah. Now it's just more uniform. Closer color match. I liked my two-tone iPhone. I thought that was cool.

Ellis called it the panda yesterday. I was like, you don't understand. You can't. No, yeah. There have been panda phones. There's a panda phone. Yeah. And it's a pixel.

I had a panda iPhone 4S when my fingerprint reader went bad and I replaced it with a white well. See, you keep saying panda, but like that's some contrast. We used to have panda phones. That's true. Like the pixel two was. Back when you were crossing the Oregon I mean, pixel two days we were across in the Oregon Trail, bro.

Yeah, I felt like it. There was a lot going on back then. You could squeeze your phone back then. That's true. We had a few years before. Anyway, yeah, new gray, silver. But there's also a all-mat black phone. And I just got to say, that's the one that's calling my name.

A lot of people have been asking me, I'm just spoiling it now. Are you going to get a fold, Marquez? I think I'm going to get a Matt Black pro. Damn. So there's new colors. The second time he's mentioned the only thing he cares about. I just want to make it clear. That's what's selling me.

What is it about phone manufacturers this year in making Matt Black? because Google did it too. They're finally listening to me. They're finally they're tuned in. They're tuned in. Fair enough. New chip inside.

So A20 Pro Chip. So again, we're just getting the pro phones, no baseline phone. So A20 Pro chip, it's a two nanometer chip now. Speed's favorite feature. Yeah. I just want to really quick.

We didn't mention that speed was here. Speed was here. The couple clips we saw from a stream were very funny. I appreciate how much effort he put into it. He is a great example of free will, man. He's so good. He went up to John Ternis, took the phone out of his hand, and did a backflip.

In the hands-on area. That was amazing. I just wanted to. What Adam's referencing is he's like looking at the fold on the hands-on on the like thing. And he just goes, it's so thin. It's so thin. It's because of the A-20 and all the compatible components. And C-2.

And I was like, you are the greatest entertainer ever alive. That's the equivalent of Jimmy Fallon going. Tender is actually exactly the equipment. It was even quick because the C2 is a modem, right? No one has ever made a modem entertaining. I can see that he probably got pre-anyway. He was doing his best. He was doing his best, yeah.

It's like based on the M6 because the M6 was 2 nanometers, so they're using that technology, that process. Yeah. Six-core CPUs, two supercores and four efficiency cores. What is the super core? Okay. It's just a high-performance core. They did just rename the high-performance core.

Oh, this is the cores they renamed. Yeah, super core. Seven core GPU, which they say has up to a 40% performance increase. That is sort of a nebulous idea, like a 40% GPU performance increase. Do you get more frame rates on games? Do you get higher fidelity? A lot of these kind of feel like unlabeled graphs. We'll talk about the vapor chamber in a second.

And one of the claims was like 50% more sustained performance. Yeah. Compared to what? What? What? Like, what does that actually mean? Yeah, right. We will find out, is that longer? Is that higher threshold? Whatever. We'll find that out.

They added a separate neural, a second neural engine. So now they have 32 cores in their neural engine as opposed to 16. They're clearly trying to get in early with the AI stuff. They're trying to, like we said, they're trying to cut off the knees of everyone at the AI company. Or shoot an arrow in their knee or something. Where is this metaphor going? It's about Skyrim. I was sorry.

I was on Facebook yesterday, and I saw a really cringe. Facebook post I made when I was like 14. And it was about taking air. Do you care to share with a class? It was definitely an arrow in the knee. It was an arrow in the knee joke. Nice. Which is not funny anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I don't know. 50% increase in memory bandwidth. And it's a new package. It's a new CPU or a new SOC package. It is actually physically wider than the A-19.

Yeah. That doesn't really matter to most people. They explained that as moving the memory off of the top of the top of the CPU to directly next to the CPU, which obviously we don't think about that as meaning all that much, but that packaging means that they can more directly cool the CPU with that vapor chamber. And it's still being right next door and makes it still accessible. I heard a really good analogy yesterday, which is like thinking about these CPUs as, or these system on a chips as like Manhattan real estate. Every little bit of it is so important. And if you want to move

something around or add something, you really have to consider everything around it. Right. So the dye getting a little bit bigger, but also being two nanometer, kind of balanced out the fact that they're moving things around. Which is funny to me because I remember when they invented stacked memory and they made a big deal about the RAM is closer to the chip so you can move the data faster, et cetera. And now they separated it again. But I assume that we're right next door. Yeah, it's right next door. They're neighbors. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, they made a big deal about the better vapor chamber. Last year, if you remember, was the big vapor chamber year. That was like one of the big things about the 17 Pro. No, no, it was orange too. It was also orange or Clementine or whatever. They did also a big deal about the new vapor chamber, which is 3x larger. Three times the surface area.

The surface area. Essentially the entire midframe of the phone is thermal, like... Vapor. It's not all vapor chamber, but the whole mid-middle section of the phone is to design to wick heat away from the CPU. Yeah. Which is a lot. Which they say is 40% better again. better is a nebulous term.

They showed us some graphs. They actually had a thermal camera in one of our briefings where they showed us the difference in heat dissipation. Yeah. Did look better. But again,

these are very specific settings. Very notably, the thermal cameras just for context were pointed at the back of the phone, which makes sense. That's the part you're holding. Yeah. So when you point a thermal camera

at the back of the phone and see less heat, that generally means that the phone that you are holding in your hand feels less warm. Yeah, which is great. I don't know if the rails are warmer. I don't know if the screen

feels warmer yeah but it's great to not hold a warm they did add a new layer to also dissipate heat on the screen though that's nice I remember seeing that in the briefing as well the battery life is quoted as being way better they said that the 18 pro now has 24 hours of use it's what something I did appreciate they they quoted video playback and then also use general use mixed use mixed use which is good because video playback as we know video decoding is now basically the easiest possible thing for a phone to do and so they can quote 45 hours of video playback on the Pro Max,

but they also gave mixed use. So mixed use, 18 Pro Pro is 24 hours of usage. 18 Pro Max is 30. They said that the Pro, basically has the same battery life as the Pro Max had last year. That's the thing that most contextualized it for me. That was the best. They also, they didn't just say this was better.

They said this is the greatest iPhone battery increase ever. Specifically on the Pro Max. On Pro Max. On the Pro Max. So that's a big deal. It does charge for. faster. They didn't give us wattage numbers. I'm excited to, you know, attach the little dangle thing that shows the wattage. Screen. Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask a question about that?

Yes. Not that specifically the batteries. Yes. Is it silicon carbon? They would not tell us. They, we asked this specifically, Marquez asked, they were like, it's a combination of the A20 chip. It's a combination of the thermal management and it's a combination of two nanometer. And we also elevated our battery technology. Yeah. So. And I wanted to ask, because Apple famously doesn't give us capacities or like, or any of the numbers basically.

So they're not going to be like, yes, it's 80 watt charging with a 5,600 million-up bar battery. They're never going to say that. So we're going to get our hands on them and find out the numbers. But it is generally, I do think the two nanometer part is doing some heavy lifting on a lot of what's new with these chips, which is exciting. Yeah. So they said 50% charge in 15 minutes, which actually seems pretty good.

That's pretty good. And they said that across the phones. Like often when it has a larger cell, it charges faster because the zero to 50 or zero to 70 is obviously going to be faster than like 70 to 100. So usually the Pro Max is like a little bit faster. But they just quoted this across both devices, which I found interesting. So maybe they charge it different wattages. That's for battery life.

Camera, the big change was the variable aperture, which is on just the main camera. They didn't change the camera sensors at all. So they had to do something else. They did make the aperture on the main camera very slightly wider. Yeah. Which is something. I'm very interested in how much of a difference this makes.

Because as some of you listening have already started banging your keyboards, this is not a new feature. We have had variable aperture cameras on smartphone cameras before as early as the Galaxy S9. This is funny. There's a couple things in this event

that have happened already and then we went away from it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about that later. But exactly. Can you tell real quick, you guys got to see.

Yeah. What are in pro controls the four different apertures you can choose from? Because all we saw was in automotos at 1.8 and then at max it was F4. Wow. Tell me you didn't watch Marquez's video. Marquez's video also doesn't even say it out loud. He just shows it. I show it. We need someone saying out loud. I'll give you all the detail.

You know he was there in the room when Marquez was called the video, right? He literally watched the video. So in Apple's camera app, you can dial between F1. 448, F1.8, F2.8, and F4. Yeah. And I was also told that third-party apps will have infinite granular control. They can give a slider. If there was a camera app that wanted to, they could give you a slider for aperture.

David just exploded. I wish it would go higher than F4, though. Yeah, so Apple will give us those four. I imagine the infinite slider is between F1.48 and F4. Yeah. That being said, I played with this for a little while with the 18 Pro. I you know it's hard to tell I didn't get a bunch of sample photos but like when we first saw this on Samsung's phones like eight years ago or whatever it was it was like you want an F1 like a wide open aperture to take like a close up like a portrait photo and have a natural falloff or if you're shooting at night to let the most possible light in but that's not always ideal when you want a lot in focus maybe you're taking a landscape shot maybe there's a ton of light and you just want to stop down so it's sharper and you don't have to have a 10,000 shutter speed or whatever so that made sense. sense intuitively, but then we shot with them, and it didn't make that much of a difference.

Yeah. We fast forward now to 2026. These are bigger sensors. These are more advanced phone cameras. So I'm curious if I will actually notice that F1.48 on this iPhone sensor wide open will actually give me like a natural fall off, which is actually wider than the previous iPhone. And then if F4 on some landscape shot or some high brightness shot that I don't need it to be wide open will actually look sharper. I want to try. So they brought us into a room. Marquez and I were in this jazz bar set. I don't know why. Insane briefing. Yeah, it was a crazy brief. They brought us into this jazz bar set. They give us mock tails and then they like put, yeah, I don't know. Yeah,

they were really trying to set the scene. Yeah, it was crazy. And then they had like three jazz musicians playing. I did. Oh, to take photos of. To take photos. Okay. Yeah. So I did, I did test the aperture all the way open and all the way closed with the mock tail in the foreground and the musicians in the background. There is a noticeable difference in the in the depth of field. Okay. Did you get to look at like this is the ISO lower? Yeah.

Yeah. Noticed we faster shutter speed maybe. Yes. Yeah. It does dynamically change that information. I don't really care. I think that like what's interesting about smartphone cameras for a long time was like everything was always in focus.

And that was the biggest difference between a smartphone camera. and a real camera was depth of field basically automatically told you whether something was a professional camera or not. Eventually, these sensors got bigger and bigger. And now we have some. It still has sort of that, you know, it has that like that look where it looks a little bit plasticy. Fringy, weird stuff.

So now, yeah, you can do this. My take on why they did this is one, they needed something to change. Two, they know that the sensors are going to get bigger and bigger. And when I look at whenever we reviewed like the Sony phones with the 1.0 type sense, sensors. Sony did not optimize those well. Like, either they're blown out or there's so much depth of field that nothing's in focus because it's just like really, really narrow. And I think Apple is just trying to get ahead of that and kind of like prepare for a world where that's valid. I think that this, yeah, I think this variable aperture would make a, would make the biggest difference on the

biggest sensor. Yes. So like if we had the 1.0 type sensor, when we take like a, I take a lot of like, in my testing anyway, like close-ups of like things in my hand or like right in front of me just to see what the fall off is like. And I'll take a photo and part of the object I'm taking a picture of will be slightly out of focus.

Yeah. Which is annoying. It looks worse. And I think if you stop down that photo to F4, it looks much better. Yeah. So, I don't know. Honestly, the biggest difference I saw

was like the point lights. The little point lights, when I changed the aperture, it would change to a different number of points on the star. Yeah. So there are, I was just to say,

We were talking about this last night. It feels so similar to S-A-N-S-9 where the phones are exactly the same and they're just like, we need to change something. Variable Aperture. This is the iPhone 17 with some incremental upgrades and a variable. I very much think that's mostly the case. Matt Black, don't forget Matt Black. A lot of their advertising and like even John Turner's before the event tweeted this like little

video of this aperture skylight closing and like caught like it was like blown out and then it condenses the light into a little circle. It seems like they needed something to be like, it's different, it's different, it's different. And this will be useful in the future. And I wish that Sony would implement this in their phones too. I wish, like eventually all smartphones are going to need variable aperture if you don't want everything to be out of focus.

But yeah, for now it's basically pointless. It was crazy how big of a difference it is from like, if you change to F4, suddenly the sun stars are like really sharp sun stars. Generally with large lenses and large sensors, you don't really get that Sunstar until you stop down to like F-A, F-9.5, F-11, something like that. Yeah, that's just like the...

The aperture blades, but like how many blades the aperture is? If you have more aperture blades, it creates more of a circle. Did they say how many blades are six? Six. They weren't pretty in depth. I did not notice that. I did not hear that.

Yeah, they're six. They said they're thinner than a human hair, which is kind of crazy. They have to be, yeah. I guess they would be because hair is not. that thin. To be honest. I'm just going to say it. Damn. Anyway, yeah. So, so if you generally lenses that are more expensive have more aperture blades because when you close down the, they stay spherical. Yeah, they stay spherical. I don't want to get,

I could get way too. We are getting this. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. I was yeah. I have one question about the blades. Okay. I studied the blades. Yeah. So you know. You're a blade master? That feels like a thing from somewhere. Bay blade while you were, David's my bay blade. Um, uh, wow. Uh, nice. I was studying. Can you hear or feel them moving in the camera?

No, but it is, but you can see like when you press the, the aperture change buttons, you can see it like suddenly change. You can see the point lights like suddenly change. So it's really interesting. Yeah, I think it's pointless for now. I,

they like had some cool images where it's like there was a person with like holding like, they had an earring and so there was like the light on the earring that was, that was like a Sunstar and I was like I think whatever that that feels like on the level of like that phone that had like the S in the in the like reflection on the back where they just like yeah they noticed it while they were shooting and they were like let's talk about that like yeah sure but something that is very fun and interesting they added pro controls which I really like yeah pixel has had this for a while now so Apple's finally bringing it now it's interesting because they don't have like a separate pro control menu it's just at the top it's like they added all these little settings at the top that you can change. And they have things like white balance. They have things like aperture, shutter speed. The shutter speed thing is cool. I wish you could do more than one second.

You can only do one second, which is kind of annoying. But now you can do things like you can do a second long exposure and you can like whip the phone a little bit. So you kind of get this like motion blur effect. It's just like nice to have more control over those things. And every year Apple is going to add a little bit more of pro control, but without giving you everything that third party app. have access to. So that's super nice.

I have a question about that. Yeah. They said customizable pro controls. Can you move the like buttons around? Yeah, I think that I was messing with this. You can, I was able to remove and add different ones, but I wasn't able to change the order. Oh, okay. I'm not sure if I was just doing it wrong. But yeah, you could long press one and be like, I don't need the histogram.

I don't need shutter speed. But I do want ISO and manual focus. So you can pop those in and you tap it and it would go into the spot. They were always in the same order. Something that was pretty interesting to me was that, in a very Apple way, the white balance was not in Kelvin. They had like, I saw the white balance. It changes dynamically.

It didn't say like 2,200 or whatever. But mine did. Really? Yeah, at the bottom. And it would like abbreviate it. It would say like 5.2. Yeah. It would slide it was like 4.8.

But then when you look down at the bottom, it would say that's 5200. Oh, that's how they do it. Yeah. That's actually smart. Just to like have a tiny little. Oh yeah, at the top. At the top. At the top.

At the top. At the top. At the top. At the top. Yeah. It's like, yeah. It's like, did they just like compress the like, 2200 to 7800 into like just a 5.2k is what they wanted to say okay so anyway pro controls are

really helpful um I believe that's probably just going to be an iOS 27 feature uh I think people might have said that they didn't have that I'm gonna be I'm curious camera control how many years ago I assume it came with pro control no that's that's just for being annoying yeah that's just or launching the camera so you're saying it's an iOS feature I'm curious if they put this on the base iPhones because in the in the pixel. Who are those? I didn't see anyone. When we get the new iPhone 18, we'll have pro controls. I don't think so. Like in the pro pixels,

we get the pro controls in just the pro phones and you don't get it on the base pixels. That's possible because they call it pro controls and Apple basically hasn't, like they did put ProMotion is the only thing that ever made the job. It's the only thing and it still isn't LTPO promotion.

It's like, it's not one to 120 Hertz. You really don't think they're going to add that to the base side? I don't. Just because of the word pro. Yes, I think it's possible. Just because of the word pro. That's wild. Something else that they have, they have the audio mix feature, which kind of like zones in on certain things.

Please explain this to us. The demo of that was just like, here's the guy playing the piano. And it switches like, he's still playing the piano. Yeah, but it like isolates it more, I guess. I just thought that was like narratively and cinematically one of the funniest things. The demo. It's very like sleek, like serious Apple events.

They're like, ding, dink, dink, dink. Yeah, the song was weird. The song was a weird choice. Okay, the cinematic mode now gets 60 FPS, which they specifically, and I appreciate this from Apple, they mentioned this is so you can slow it down 2x times. And I was like, yes, never watch 60 FPS video. Always watch 30 at 0.5 speed. Very important. Time lapse you can now do in 4K. That's cool. Smart focus tracking.

This was sort of a sort of competing against like dedicated cameras because things like, you know, a dedicated Sony camera or something will track. the subject even when it moves, when it gets occluded. And they mentioned you can tap on a person like playing soccer or whatever. And if it gets occluded, it will stay tracked on that person. Oh, okay. Which is a big deal. Like a lot of dedicated camera companies have been doing this recently. Yeah.

Other big thing, they are supporting synth ID from Google. This is the standard that basically leaves an invisible watermark and an image that you can ask Gemini or whatever if it's a real photo. However, they spent a quarter second on that because they said, We support that they do, but also we have a new thing called Apple reference image, which they say signs data at a pixel level at time of capture. Private cloud compute becomes, private cloud compute creates an unalterable reference image like a digital negative. I do not yet understand how this works.

So I do not want to say this is great or this is bad, but I do want to look into it. So when we have more time, I'm going to dive deeper into this. Most Apple thing ever, it is the XKCD comic of there are 17 competing standards. Let's create an 18th competing standard. Yeah, but this is on the most popular camera in the world. Yeah, but it's at the pixel sensor level or something. Yeah, whatever. Surely it works.

At the center level. Real quick to explain how it works if people didn't see it, is that you can, I guess, through your phone, be able to any picture, see what the original photo taken was to see if there are any changes made through it. but actually like physically see it unlike. Yes. There's other things which like AI was used in here. Correct.

I think it's interesting because sometimes we get photos that are going to say AI was used, but it might be like to get a bird out of the background or something. Or the far more malicious versions, we can see like that is not even remotely close to what this. But I think the problem with this is like if someone takes a photo on their phone and then they alter it or whatever, they're the only ones that have the digital negative. So if they're the ones that are trying to, you know, I assumed the digital negative follows it all of the time. I thought it gets somehow imprinted.

Yeah. Well, probably only if it's like edited, if that metadata follows the image, which would have to be like supported by other third party. Ellis brought up a great program yesterday when we were talking about this, where he said this would be great for like Safari to have a little thing that pops up if you see an image that was a reference image. Yeah. It'll have like a, this is a real picture. Right.

I mean, maybe I shouldn't have assumed, but I just assumed this followed the picture wherever it. goes otherwise it feels I think that's the goal probably based into the metadata yeah my guess is it's in the yeah but that's a good point David like if I upload a picture to chat GPT and say like you know make me Batman or something like that and then I download a JPEG correct chat GPT I doubt that will be like will I be able to right click it and be like show me I don't think so but it's baked into the the pixel it's baked into the pixel it's baked into the pixel but not the iPhone if it does work like that there's a we have an amazing short opportunity on our hands.

Yeah. Pushing photos like to their absolute extreme and then making people guess with the original. Also, by the way, the thing that breaks all of these things is screenshots. Oh. Like, I remember when, you know, when the content authenticity initiative came out and we did a whole video on the studio channel about how this works and C2PA, you can just take a screenshot and it's gone. Yeah, but I think the thing is that moving forward,

we probably shouldn't trust any image unless we see a watermark on it like that. Yeah. Just assume it's fake. And I think the point of this is that when you post an image online, someone can say, that's not real. And then you can back it up

with I have this digital negative. Apple says this is real, whatever. So it is good that they're doing something like this. Also good that they're supporting sit-d-d-de, whatever. I don't think this is for like our pictures of like removing a bird, so it's a prettier picture. I think this is for like events are happening. Look at what's happening.

And I think you can be like, I can confirm that this is, if it goes through the correct way. And it solves the problem that synth ID creates where like I've heard a lot of creators talk about posting photos on Twitter that get the AI edited thing. And it's like the only AI edit was like I boosted the exposure. Yeah, on Photoshop. I've had the label when I didn't do anything. Exactly. So now the label can have, if you're really curious, you can actually see for yourself like,

oh, no, this is essentially the image that. was taken. Yeah. I think that's better. I mean, what's a photo am I right, guys? It's kind of cool because when they showed the digital negative version, it was like without the Apple processing too. It was like a more basic photo. I was just going to ask that. It doesn't look like the photo looks when you like take it and then Apple does the processing, does the smoothing, does the exposure boost, whatever. Let me get that with that. I know. I was like, can I just use that? So there are shadows. There are shadows. We got shadows, boy. Okay. Last big thing that is actually two. things because Marquez and I got a really interesting demo with a microscope.

Yeah, they didn't. Yeah. As far as I can tell, they didn't say this in the keynote? They didn't. Okay. Yeah, it was wild. So the dynamic island on the pros is 25% smaller. Neat. I think in the keynote they mentioned now there's more room for for three live activities up there instead of two. Cool. So much room for activities. What we didn't really get the details on, which I do think is fascinating, is the way they're doing that is just by taking the infrared blast, basically the face ID cluster, the infrared, and and moving that behind the display. And they actually move it over to the left-hand corner. So there is a bit of a different, like, pixel pitch and pixel matrix over that circle

where the face ID hole is. You'd never know looking at the phone. I was like, was I not paying attention when you kept reading this during April last night? It was genuinely a cool thing to know. And then we even got to like stare at it. Like under a microscope, you can see the difference in pixels. It's just kind of like what we're about to talk about

duo, which is there are less pixels there in the top left corner. And so if you are pixel peeping really, really hard, you can see that it's a little bit pixelated in the top left corner. That's how they achieve the smaller dynamic island. This is basically the same technology that they use for under display cameras where they basically just leave gaps between the OLED and then the camera can like fill in that information. But you can see it on the under display camera under duo. Yeah, because they need that's a separate. That needs way more information. This is just infrared so they didn't have to drastically remove as many pixels. Yeah. So it's interesting that put it in the top left corner. They showed us a little demo with two little Apple logos,

like one on the denser OLED and one on the one with gaps. If you look really close, you can see it, but again, it's in the top left corner. And they said, because now, you know, the face ID camera has always been pretty wide. I think it was like three generations ago of iPhone. They made it like a wider sensor. So if your phone's just like sitting on the table, it'll still recognize you. It still has that power. So I think that's pretty cool. It makes the dynamic Island smaller. It's, yeah, it's 25% smaller, but it also looks like shorter. It's kind of like strange and weird. Yeah, now they have three live activities. We said that. That was basically it. I don't know. That's pretty good. So the pros are 100 bucks more. Yeah. Uh, 1,200 for a pro,

1,300 for a pro max. So are all the old phones. All of the catalog of old phones they're still selling. Also, basically all 100 bucks more. So the price hikes finally hit iPhones. Yeah. But they are no longer the highest end phones Apple sells. It's very funny, though, because you can say, you can't say anymore, like, oh, just wait until the new one comes out and you can get the old one for cheaper. It actually went up $100. Yeah. Everything. Everything's more expensive.

Yeah. But we'll talk about the most expensive thing right after one more quick break. That's right. Trivia time. That one sounded like a jukebox. I was getting used to it and then the same. Swapped. Yeah, trivia.

I spent so much time on this special, like, version where it's the combines... No, didn't. Yeah, whatever. I love it. Well, during the AirPods 5 announcement, the actress was in the train station

looking at departures, and two of the cities that trains were going to were delayed. Come on. I don't even remember. I don't even remember this ad. In the background? No, no, it was in screen.

There were two shots of it, too. It showed it twice. She's looking at it. Yeah, so it's a shot of her in the foreground, and the board in the background. They changed to delayed. And then it changes.

I remember that. And you can see in the background that the two cities are delayed. I'm not going to get this. I'm not going to get this. I don't even remember this at at all. I'll give you three points per city. It's not even worth me trying to guess. That is the exact time to tune out mentally from the keynote when that is happening.

Because I was paying attention to other things. There's a hit here because she was in Los Angeles Union Station, which was one of the subway stations. I transferred it on my way to high school. So that station is. So I'm crossing LA off the list. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But they are two cities that have trains from Los Angeles.

I was going to say, funny. That's a good hint. It's not going to help me. Funny that Apple pretends there's public transit in California. Oh, go home. I will to Northern California. How? In my car.

I took Los Angeles public transit to school every day for four years. Okay. It works. All right, Ford Motor Industries. Well, we will again learn at the end, those answers. We'll be right back. All right, welcome back. we last

been at least, we should talk about the new form factor of an iPhone for the first time since it was introduced in 2007. There's a folding iPhone.

It was the one more thing, but it was literally the biggest thing at the event, which is hilarious, but I enjoy that anyway. So it's called iPhone Duo. It starts at $2,000. I think we guessed

maybe two episodes ago how much we thought this phone would cost, and I think all of us were over. Yeah, I think. Well, there was one podcast episode I only know this because someone blue skyed this at me, whatever that's called skeeting.

Where they said, wow, David, you guessed that price correctly. And I was like, I thought it was $2,400. And then there was apparently an episode many weeks ago where I said $2,000. Oh, all right. Weeks or years ago. It must have been a long time ago. Because someone also tweeted out is that I think the first wave format episode ever, we were talking about the iPhone folder.

Really? Something like that. Well, see, that's how long you've been waiting for this. My expectations clearly creeped up. But the funny thing about this is it's still a $2,000 phone, but it feels affordable because of what we were expecting. Yeah. So the fundamentals of this phone are exactly what you've been seeing in the leaks and rumors.

It is a smaller passport-shaped book-style foldable. It's a 5.4-inch display on the front. It's a 1 by 1.4 aspect ratio. 1.4, I believe notably, is a square root of 2, which is very important. When you open it, it is a 7.6 inch. Oh, were you paying attention? Yeah. It's a 7.6 inch display,

which is a 1.4 by one aspect ratio, but wide now. Yeah. They're both high refresh rate. They're both bright. The outside has a corner cut out. There's no face ID. There is just a touch ID power button. The frame is titanium.

It's a little heavier than some other folds. It's asymmetrical. It is asymmetrical at the front. This was a bigger deal to some, especially those who have used a bunch of foldables that are now basically all rectangular screens, but it's rounded on the right-hand side and squared on the left-hand side.

Do you think that's why they call it a duo? I was waiting to ask that. Because it looks like a D? It kind of does look like the letter D. We didn't hear the rumor of duo until last minute. Yeah, yeah. I tweeted last week, it's kind of crazy that we don't know the name of this yet,

and every reply was like, it's Ultra, you idiot. We've known this forever, it's Ultra. Mark, I shot a short last night, right after A-roll, and he goes, like, it's the iPhone Ultra and puts it down, like, nailed that line. And we all pause for a minute.

What did you just say? I've been calling it the Ultra in my head. Yeah. So anyway, it is, yeah, it's that small size, 7.6 inches open. And there are many, many interesting little things about it that are different from some of the other foldables we have. The thing that we've all been comparing it to in our heads is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8,

which is also a small 5.5 inch screen when it's closed and a 7.5 inch small rectangular screen when it's open. Dual cameras like same idea of a phone. Yeah, but there are yeah just a lot of little things that are different that we can sort of dive into each one I tend to think almost every little thing about the fold is good and like well considered and then there are just a small number of things that are a little odd to me. Yeah So let's just talk about the things that are different. Yeah Volume buttons are at the top of the phone not sure how they landed on that but they are at the top instead of the right-hand side I think that that's fine. I think that means you go right for higher volume, left for lower volume. Yeah. I think that screams to me that this is a, like this is turns into an iPad. Yeah. It just

really feels like an iPad when you do it. Yeah. Yeah. Also on the outside of the phone, dual cameras. So it's an ultra wide, which is the same as the 18 Pro and then a new 48 megapixel primary camera, which without much testing, I'm going to assume is on the same level as Samsung. It's like a smaller sensor, but it's the primary sensor. Because it is even thinner than the iPhone air when It's open. We're so, we're so cute. All three of us who are in the hotel room watching the event wrote down 12 megapixel telephoto for that.

No, okay. So I figured it out after. Yeah, during the keynote, they talk about that, but it's just a digital crop. It's the same as the air where it's a 48 megapixel main camera that then can be a bin to a 12 megapixel telephone. Dude, I got fusioned. Yeah.

It's the fusion fused. I got freaking fused. I said the wrong thing, and it was about fusion. I say the wrong thing on man on the street, like to four different people. Oh, no. And I'm just going to look like a morrow. No, we both doubled down too. Like, no, we're pretty sure it's a standard and it's hell of it.

I would have loved that, but no. Yeah. So that's that. And like you point out, it is thinner than an iPhone when it is open. So each half of it. Sorry, iPhone error. Which is probably why they didn't have enough room for face ID in the top of that thing. And so they did the fingerprint reader power button.

I think it all put it in the MacBook. Yeah. So, yeah. I think it all confirms our thought of. like iPhone Air is like one of the new full that we're going to see it's like pretty much now we have two iPhone errors with a haircut and it even looks like it it looks just like it yeah can i tell you something that marquez told me on the way here that is a deal break was it in confidence no okay i was just say do it anyways there's no action button yeah that's crazy to me yeah i yeah

i don't use my action button as much as me i don't anymore that is i used to use them more i was I was really into it the first year. I mean, maybe we'll get more into this later, but you use it a lot. Every day. When I had an iPhone, I used it all the time. I ran my life through the action. Adam, you're going to buy a deal?

Not anymore. I need the action bite. That's like what I missed most about iOS, was the action book. Very interesting. And shortcuts. Okay. But anyway.

Can we talk about some of the software in the closed mode? I thought it was really interesting to do dock on the right. Why do I keep forgetting the name of the, like, your Wi-Fi, your status icons, right? are all in this single, like, button now. They do a lot of cool software stuff

in liquid glass that, like, right aligns everything. Sounds like you're going to cut me off here. I thought it was a button, too. It's not a button. It's not a button. It looks like a button. I pressed it many times. It doesn't do anything. It's round.

You slide down, I know, it looks like a button. But when you slide down from the corner, then it expands and everything pushes down. I think you should be able to press it like a button. It's a button. It looks like one. It's circular. My thumb is attracted to it like a... There's about 15 seconds of clips of...

me in 8K pressing it and nothing happening. I'm like, why is it not a button? Yeah. Yeah. I have so many thoughts on the doc thing. Doc on the right. God, okay, so it's such a good idea. Unless you're lefty.

Unless you're left-handed. In which case, become right-handed. You're holding it. You're holding it wrong. Can you not just like hold it upside down? Yeah. I don't know. Well, then your selfie camera's on the bottom.

Okay, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. I have to talk about this. I have to talk about this. This is what I like so much. Okay. Okay. MacOS has a dock on the bottom, right? It is this area that you can technically use.

If you use the full screen button, if you use the big green button, it fills the entire screen, full screen, whatever. But generally, most of the time, windows and tabs and whatever are sitting above the dock. So it's this little area that's reserved for, you know, switching apps, doing these things, whatever, it's reserved. That's exactly what they did on the duo,

is that they left this little margin on the side of the screen. that basically is a doc, which you can only have four icons, I wish you could have more apps, whatever. Really bummed about that. But it makes it really easy to switch apps if you're right-handed. And when you have apps open and stuff like that,

all of Apple's apps have now been redesigned to make it so all the toggles and stuff are on that side as well. Something I noticed when I was using it is like a lot of notifications and stuff do not feel centered like they would on a regular, where it comes in from the center. They're slightly to the left.

And at first your brain is like, this is kind of weird because it's offset. But you eventually kind of start to understand like, oh, this whole second, this whole side of the phone is just for interacting with. You know what I'm getting flashbacks to? What? The Samsung Galaxy Note Edge.

Oh yeah. Remember that? The stock ticker? It was just a regular phone, rectangular, but then peeling off the right hand side of the phone was this little extra margin, which was like kind of a launcher and a clock. and you could put little tickers in there.

Yeah. Interesting. But that phone was terrible to use. It was. You're right. It almost makes the actual content on the front fold a little more normal in terms of aspect ratio of a regular because you just have this extra room for stuff. It would be awesome.

The dock could be way bigger because you're dedicated in that room. But yeah, little buttons will come up. Different things depending on what app you're in will all come right aligned. And like, I'm sorry software developers because you're going to have to make an iPhone duo version of every version of your app with all the like buttons and the. stuff but in the way that John Turnus like kind of describes what smartphones are now as a intelligent personal hub again I love this idea that like it's a computer that you carry with you in your hand and in your pocket and because of that you have a dock you have a dock you have a

usable area and you have a dock area and I just think that's a really cool way to like rethink the idea of like a PDA or a smartphone that no one else has really done yet is there any way to hide the dock. I couldn't find any dock customization. They're using all that they're dedicating that space so then it would just be empty probably. No, you can make it like an app full screen or something. Yeah. Like you know how on Mac

you can just automatically hide? When apps are open, the dock is hidden right? Yeah, the docks from. Yeah, the docs are. Every app opens full screen, but as soon as you go home, the dock comes in from the right side. This is Apple, okay? It's a computer, but it's not like a computer. Exactly. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of like the same way on Android phones

are at least foldables, they slide the dock in from the bottom and then when you open an app it hides. We've just gotten used to that coming up from the bottom because that's where docks usually are. But this one's on the right. It's more reachable. Yeah. I want more customization of that dock.

For sure. 100%. So, yeah, that's really nice. Yeah. You open the phone. You get this big, not huge, but bigger iPad mini type internal OLED display. And by the way, iPad mini is not OLED. It's just this is the nicest 7.5 inch Apple display.

Yeah. And, um, the animation? Yeah. It's so good. I know. It is maybe the most important piece of software on this phone. Which is so weird to say. Every time I get excited about this, I feel like I'm a shill.

I literally can't think about it. Like someone's going to yell at me about thinking about it. It's such a basic thing, but for some reason it's the most delightful possible thing. It does spark joy. People were describing it as like gradienting out. But when you really like look at it, so when it's close, and it opens, it's essentially leaving the screen behind and getting out of focus, right?

And then because the screen feels like it stays there, as you turn and see the screen on the interior, it's the same screen and you're like, whoa. And as you're opening it fully, you're starting to see the screen that's invisible, and it snaps. It makes you believe that it's a real glass window. Yeah.

That you are just like moving this glass. And it, like, for some reason, there's the in-between anime, that your eyes are collecting is like as you're moving it and seeing that icon still being there it just makes it feel like you're opening a glass whoever was in charge this animation cooked uh i think this animation is really important for several reasons yeah one is you use the word glass which is like liquid glass kind of falls into this so like that's convenient for them but two is it intuitively gives you a little bit more of an understanding of the continuity that's happening which is when you're closed,

you have the thing that's on the single screen. When you open it, you kind of get an idea of, I am extending something to the left of my current screen. So I'm like adding to the left. Yes. So when it's open, whatever is on that right-hand screen,

when you close it from the left, you are aware that that is what's going to stay on the screen. It's still there. Yes, the continuity. So it's intuitive, but it helps you to understand what you're going to get when you close it. And it's very fast.

And this, I didn't expect to hit me as hard as it did, but a lot of foldables I've been using these for years and Dave Tudy talked about it in his video but we've just gotten used to there being a little bit of a delay when you close a foldable there's just a beat and then it's ready to go and you open it and there's a beat and it's ready

and there's just a little beat and sometimes there's like a fun animation like butterfly wings or whatever on your wallpaper or something but this one by the time I like swivel it open as fast as I can like the inside screen's already open and by the time I close it

by the time I start to see the outside screen it's already on. It's so cool. So it's a really fast animation. I will not lie and say I didn't see any bugs. I did see some foldables bug out in the hands-on area and bug out as we were testing them. And I imagine this is a really hard animation to make it work perfectly every time. But for all of those reasons, I really wanted to work perfectly every time because it's really good.

So that is like the thing I posted a short of it. It's like the thing that helps you understand what's different about this foldable. Everyone appreciates that. But I had like 20 million views by the end of last year. It literally has 20 million views on Twitter. The entire feed was just UX designers losing their mind. By the time I think I had gotten back from recording pod, the top comment on the Galaxy subreddit was, why can't Samsung do this?

And by the time I woke up this morning, someone already put the animation on a Samsung fault. Yeah, which is, I want to see how well that works. Because if that's a third party, like, how do they do that? And is it going to work? Perfect. Yeah, it's not. It's not built. It's still cool, though.

Yeah. And it makes sense to me why we knew everything about the duo's hardware, but we had no idea how the software was going to work. Like Apple keeps that on lock because this is the stuff that actually separates them from those other companies and makes people like them, the intuitiveness. The other super intuitive thing that I thought was really cool is when you open the device

and you get the same continuity of the display from the front camera and then you sort of extend it to the left. Normally on your phone you have multiple home screens, right? You swipe to the right, you swipe to the left and it shifts everything and it's like, oh, we're on a new page, new page, new page, new page. But on the duo, when you have it open and you swipe to the right or you swipe to the left, everything kind of just flows.

And so it's almost as if there's one big, like, home page that you can't see. It's a big canvas of pages. You're just moving, you're like shifting the canvas back and forth. And the way that the animation works makes it feel like there's, there's just all of these apps that are sitting on your screen and widgets and whatever. And you're kind of just like shifting the page back and forth. So the home screen like scrolls instead of being paginated. Yes, it scrolls instead of paginated.

Well, no, no, it is paginated. But the animation as you move between pages helps you to understand that they are like separate. So like on a, on a Apofind N6, you swipe and all of it moves at once. Yeah. But on the Neo, sorry, the duo. On the duo, you swipe and like page page.

Yeah, it's like, and that little set, that little distinction helps you understand that there's another page here and there's another page here. So it's a clever. subtle animation flow, but it feels really cool. And even when you swipe into the app drawer, it's not like, oops, we're on the app drawer page.

It's like the app drawer flows in on the right side and the flows back out. Yeah. And it's- Apple do flow. Yeah. It's kind of hard to explain, but I think when we get it on video, it'll be easier to see. Definitely. Yeah.

But yeah, that inside screen, man, it is... Paper-like. Really, really, really good. So the two things that make it great. One is it has this... They called it a nanotexture finish, but it's some sort of an anti-glare finish on top. Yeah.

That makes it both really, really good at rejecting reflections. Yeah. Really good at hiding the crease. And really smooth to the touch with your finger as you actually scroll. Yeah. And yeah, this is one of the least crease visible foldables ever. It's not invisible, but on the scale of like first-gen foldables to today's foldables, like with N6, this is right next to N6 with best I've ever seen.

Yeah. You can run your finger over it and feel it a little bit, but it's pretty close to not there. It's smart. I mean, like, we've gotten to the point enough companies have made folding phones. Creases have been getting better, but the number one way to see a crease is a weird light reflection. Yep. Cut light reflections out. Exactly. Crease kind of goes away. There are always going to, it is anti-reflection, still has reflections in some spots. I see people clipping out one frames out of everyone's video like, oh my God, there's a giant crease in that. It's like, you are going to see it at some point on any phone.

I don't know if we will ever get past that. But it's a smart move. And as you look at content on the display, it really, like the bezels are even all the way around. There is a display under display selfie camera, so it's uninterrupted. But it looks mostly uninterrupted, so it looks really, really good.

Now you want to talk about that camera. Yeah, we can tell you. I do. Because you nailed the crease, that camera did not nail. Real quick on the crease before we get there, they are using a titanium backplate, and that was Samsung's big innovation in the full day, too.

Yeah. Was I heard them. I also helps get rid of the crease a little bit. I also heard maybe I'm making this up in my head. I heard carbon fiber back structures or something like that. There's a lot of engineering in the hinge that might not be coding perfectly. And there's like 10 layers of display panel as well that they use. So anyway, we can get to the underplay camera now.

Yeah. Okay. So they do have the selfie camera on the front display. It's a corner cut out. And they do have when you open it up on the right hand side, top middle, behind those pixels is an under display selfie camera. We've seen this before. in Samsung foldables. They've tried this for a couple of generations,

and the idea is that they have this pixel matrix that has gaps between pixels, and they have to shine those pixels twice as bright when the display is on because it's half as many pixels, but it does a decent job at sort of like covering the hole,

and then when you actually open the camera, I had blacked out of those pixels, and the camera can see through it. But it doesn't look great. Those pixels. Yeah, the, well, I don't actually, I guess I don't mind as much. The like slightly pixelated look. I wanted to ask you, I talked about David, with David in the car this morning.

I've seen some videos where I don't know it pre like it activating just when you're using the interior screen. I've seen some videos where I don't notice it. I've seen some videos where I can't not see it. And it's very annoying. Like, it's very visible. I said to David, it reminds me of like, if you take two colors, of paint that are very contrasty, they look like they should be apart. When you take two colors of paint that are supposed to be the same color but are off,

it's infuriating. So like once you see that and you know it's supposed to be hidden, but you can see it, it's really frustrating. It's really obvious. It's one of those things where I wonder how much it being on camera and like the moray of like those pixels being in focus is like amplifying it a little bit. In person, I didn't mind it so much. What I am more bummed about is how bad it makes the footage

from the camera look. Now, this is, to be fair, probably the least used camera on the device. Like you'll use it for some FaceTimes, maybe for some selfies if you really want to. I have a sample video from it in my hands-on video where you can tell. Yeah, it's not great.

It doesn't look that good. It's easy for sure. But like I said, we had this years ago, Samsung tried this. They never really got dramatically better. And then they just stopped. And they just started doing the whole punch cut out again. And everyone was fine with it.

And it looks like a good quality camera again. And now Apple's doing it. And it doesn't look. that much better. Like we see a lot of new things Apple waits till the right moment, jumps in, does it their way. This isn't like better than Samsung's version. So I wonder how long this lasts. Personally, I prefer this to a giant cutout. Really? Yeah. I never wanted Samsung to go back to the regular camera. Interesting. Because I think Apple thinks this way too where they're like, we would prefer that we have this mostly uninterrupted interior display. It was more magical.

Yeah. And then when you do use the camera, it shows up, but you just generally. don't. And even if you did for like FaceTime or whatever, who cares about like if the, if it's like ultra sharp for FaceTime, you know, it's like the Zoom camera. It's the FaceTime camera. I think it's like one of those things that it's maybe it's not perfectly sharp, but now the more variables you introduce into it, like weird lighting conditions, I'm assuming are going to be affected even stranger than it. So like if you FaceTime outside is now the whole thing going to be in crazy washed out. Yeah, it is hazy. The more variables. It's kind of like how we say, oh, you can take a photo on the iPhone 1

in good lighting and it's going to look great. We think, I thought it used to be bad. It's the variables. Now we have a camera that's like, it can handle anything and that doesn't feel like it's going to handle. In low light, this is probably going to be really awful, like especially bad. Some of the first gen under

display selfie cameras, when I take a photo in the office, the overhead lights would get like doubled because the pixels, you could see the pixels through, it looked like you were looking from behind the screen. I remember this. It was bad. And I, you know, we'll take this into other conditions. Apple's perfectly lit environment revealed that it looked meh, but we'll see.

I think that they just think about what is the amount of time that people spend using the screen versus using the camera on the interior of the screen. Which is probably the calculus they did. And they're like, people almost never use this camera. Let's make it look better. And because of it's my argument to get rid of it. Get rid of it entirely. Just get rid of the inside camera.

You can't FaceTime. That's fine. Close the phone. Yeah. It's a duo. It does make sense to FaceTime with that interior. because now you have bigger screens of the other people you're talking to. If I'm opening up the thing, it's because I want to watch something more than I want to be a part of.

Do you want to watch another person's face? No, I want to watch the people. I'm not going to open it up to like. Yeah, but they have to see you. Yeah, close it, I mean. Like, use the phone close with the front cam. Yeah, but what if you have two people? What if there's three people on FaceTime?

Now you can see their face is better because it's a bigger screen. Everyone has been getting along fine with their regular phones. That doesn't mean, okay, hell, hell, well, what about the FaceTime where you tilt it halfway? and it's pointed at you from across the room and you prop it up. That's cute. That's real cute, but my argument is the inside screen is for watching things and doing things.

And if they wanna take the hit and like just remove the inside camera and be like the inside screen is perfect because it's beautiful. It's like the nanotexture is sick. It's like a great display. Yeah. Just remove the camera. It's fine.

So we have all three spectrums. We have make it a whole bunch cut out. I think it's fine. Get rid of it entirely. remove it. Yeah. Alice does make it crumple. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I also think because we have the nanotexture on the rest of the display and you don't see any

reflections, that portion does reflect more light. Like if you if you like tilt the phone in different directions, the rest of the phone is like not really reflecting that much, but you see it more. Like it catches the light. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. It's not a huge deal. You can now use the Apple Pencil with USBC on both the outside and the inside. Not yet. Later this year.

You will be able to. Wait, only the USBC one. You can't use Apple until two. Okay, the reason for this almost definitely is because you have to be able to charge the pencil. And Apple is so scared of selling people pencils that only magnetically charged

to iPads that you can't. You can't. Yeah, the only way. You mean like a separate dock charger? Yes. I guess, but. What do you mean you guess? Yeah, I guess you could,

Apple could just sell us new chargers. It's a piece of plastic. plastic that big with a magnet in it. Like this is not rocket science. They could easily sell the pro. I mean, it is annoying that you can't use the pencil pro on the pro, like the big iPhone. But I think they're just afraid of selling people. I think that is.

It just stinks for someone who has an iPad already and maybe like is carrying it. And that's where it's charging. And you could pop it off and use it on your phone instead. Something is cool. Someone brought an iPad mini to the demo area to show like the difference. The size is barely different of the actual. display, but it makes the iPad menu look like it's 20 years old. Because of the

Bezzyl is one of the most neglected high potential products. I love my. But what if it had an... This is like the only Apple thing I own in it. I got my dad one too. I love the iPad Me, but what if it was an OLED and had like a really nice screen with an anti-reflective finish and like the inner Bezels? Oh, hey look, you've got a iPhone duo. Look, it's iPhone duo.

It would look. It would look. Great. The hinge is broken. Yeah. How long do you think we have to go before someone attempts to fold an iPad mini and thinking it's a duo. Derek everything. He's going to do it. IP68, fully dust and water resistant.

Second phone. Second foldable with Xel 10 Pro Fold and this. 11 Pro Fold too. Oh, 10 Pro Fold and. 10 Pro Fold was the first one. Yeah, and 11 pro fold. And now this. Yeah, now this.

So that's nice. One other thing if we're speaking about Zach is they had a very specific part where they mentioned the antenna parts and that they were reinforced. Because they looked very similar to where the pixel fold antennas are, which is where Zach keeps snapping them,

but they specifically said there's reinforcements in those. That's going to be one of the hardest videos to watch, dude. Yeah. When he puts sand in that thing? Oh my God. I mean, it always is for any phone. And you know you're going to watch it too.

That's with the new YouTube views, that's a 75 million view video. He snaps that in half. Yeah, that's true. Okay, so they have got two colors. They have like this pearlescent white, which... The best color.

And then they had a like a midnight blue. What was it called? Black sunset. No, it's like dark sky, night sky, something like that. They rhymed when they said both of them together. Yeah. Oh, pro. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Starlight and rain. Yeah. Starlight night sky. Nice guy is the better color. This is like a Jeopardy question. Starlight Night Sky iPhone duo. No, it's Star white.

Star white. Star white. Star light is like the yellowy. Macbook color. Why would they do that? It kind of looked like that. Star White and Starlight. That's grim confusing.

And then they went with Burgundy. A. I'm a... Wine barrel. Look, for a first gen... I'm going to call this first gen. For a first gen foldable from Apple, I think they overall

did a pretty good job. I mentioned that there are things I don't like. I don't love that it's only four items in the dock. Like, let me put five or six. Like, let me customize that more. I don't love that it's only two cameras. but that's about as good as good as it's gotten for this form factor. Like the big ultra one has had triple cameras,

but this isn't the big ultra one. Yeah. I think $2,000 is a pretty good price. I just, yeah, I think the animations in the software would really make this phone different. Yeah, speaking of the software, there's a few things that I want to talk about with it. They obviously had to bring more use cases to the fold

to actually entice people to have the fold. Some of them are a little silly. Some of them are kind of intuitive. Some of them are things that the Android manufacturers have done that are either good or bad. One of them is kind of weird and interesting is you can now, you know, standby mode. Don't talk bad about standby mode. Why not watch it? Because it's the greatest feature Apple has ever released in anything.

I didn't say it was bad. You said it was weird. Yeah. Okay. Your implementation is kind of weird. It's awesome. Okay. Do you remember the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i?

Of course. The tent mode? The first foldable laptop or at least 360 hinge laptop. Your point, David. Don't talk bad about. This is the new alarm clock thing, the tent mode with the underglow. Beautiful.

It's cool. OK, so here's what this is. You can put in tent mode. It's weird that we put everything in tent mode. Go on. You got a big clock on the right. You got a big time. And then you got a little calendar.

And you don't need to be charging it now because it can go down as low as 1 Hertz. So now you can just have it on your bedside table. Don't forget the glow. What do you mean the glow? It wakes you up with a soft underglow. Yes. The inside screen.

Your screen can glow. Okay, that's actually kind of cool. It's sick. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the Phillips Hue lamp and stuff that they have like sunrise lamps and their whole thing is that there's a glow next to your face. I don't know how much that's going to be. It costs a lot of money.

It looks cool. It looks cool. You know, it's, are you going to tent mode all the time, Ellis? I don't think I would buy one. Yes. But yeah. Yesterday, when we recorded our podcast. yesterday. He was like, we were talking to a guest

who came on and he goes, oh, tent mode is so sick, I do really hope they make a stand that's a wireless charge. You can put stent mode on and she goes, how would that work? And it would charge from the inside? Yeah, how would that work? Yeah, you'd have to, you can slap up. By the way, does that have mag safe. So you put a camera that sees light

through the screen, but God forbid a little wireless electricity goes through that thing. Well, it'd have to, it's like a big There's a lot. There's a lot of Z dimension. There's a lot between that coil. Yeah, there's a lot. They have a trillion dollars. They have $5 trillion dollars. Let's be clear.

They'll figure it out. Okay. So other little changes, they did the thing that we've done since the beginning of time with foldables that I just don't really understand where, you know, you can have the big video with playing back when it's sideways. Or you can fold it 90 degrees and then there's playback controls and the video is smaller. I've never done that. I have no idea way people care about this. Just use the example of like a live stream with chat on the bottom. That makes way more sense.

Maybe you do want to read the chat on the. the bottom. You see the Netflix version? Yeah. This is a very specific to Netflix implementation. Yeah. So the Netflix app, you fold it halfway. The top half is playing your video. The bottom half is generating

like a glowy, diffused reflection of the bottom of your video so that you can kind of... It feels a mercy. See it... It's like those TV lights that you can have. It's exactly kind of glow on the side. It's exactly like that. Cool. Cool. I guess. Yeah. I

It's very weird. First thing I asked was, can I turn that off? Yeah. That's weird. Yeah. And then they have a feature that I think a lot of other foldables have where it's basically universal copy paste between apps, which is cool. So you can have two apps open and you can do the thing where you can like press and hold

on an image and it'll cut it out and you can drag it into another thing. I don't know how many people are going to use this. They always use like keynote as an example, which is a soft piece of software that I do, I've never known a single person that has. This is more for like emails. are texting for me. Yeah, yeah, emails and texting is really nice because, so you have your email open and you've got an image and you want to text it to someone, you can just drag it.

I also found it super useful for like two factor. Yeah. Open up like all the end up and then just drag it over. And these are things that every other foldable has had for a very long time. So they're doing all that stuff. They just also implemented the small things like the tent mode, which is, you know, strange. My takeaway from like my very limited brief early hands on, and this comes out in October, so we'll have like a month of June on this, but like my,

I'm used to using like the Z Fold8 and like the latest generations of foldables from other companies. And they all feel like very, to me, very intentional. Like I get that phone and I, when I open it up, I'm like deciding to be productive with it and that's like an event. And then I close it and it's over.

But the duo feels like a little playful. It feels like it's way more willing to go back and forth between open and close. The animations are very thoughtful. It feels more fun to use. despite being not any more functional. They heard LSA, there's no more whimsy in tech. And that animation had some whimsy to it.

We got a little hint to it. They listened. It did. So, yeah, also, it uses the new C2 modem, which is supposed to be faster to C1X. It adds 5G millimeter way for people who care, which is one person. It has 50% charge in 20 minutes,

which is nice. That's fairly quick. All day battery. All day battery line, baby. They got a trademark. 24 hours of charge when using. both skins equally. Which looks, the interior display

is always going to use a lot more power. So I'm at least glad that they give us these averages. I need to test. That's kind of nice. I don't know how to use that number. The numbers were, I appreciated them giving us more numbers,

but they were kind of confusing. They are confusing. Also, it's ESIM only worldwide, which is a little bit different because usually European models of iPhone pros have ESIM. Yeah. I mean, have a physical sense.

That's about it, yeah. So it comes out October 23rd with pre-orders on October. 16th and again 1999 so we're gonna go to trivia now let's do it we've been typing today you got my letter guys did you scroll all the way down and read what I wrote worldwide how many times per day do people query Siri prices right yes price is right rules if you go over you are eliminated from Apple campus yeah we'll have security come and take you out because we can do that There's actually a hole below your chair, it'll just open up.

Whoa. No, it's more of a very compressed spring that shoots you out at the roof. All of Apple Campus is actually a convertible for that reason. Yeah. And by convertible, I mean, there's no ceiling. I was like, do you guys hear that? And it's because it's the trivia music. The trivia music is just white noise in my head at this point.

All right. Everyone read out your answers. Actually, David wins. What did I say? We're spaced out by like $2 billion each. I wrote $1 billion. David, it was 2.5 billion. That's 2.5.

I thought it was 3.5. So I went a little under-insers for the audio listeners. I wrote 5 billion. I was too high. Okay. All right. During the AirPods 5 announcements, during the AirPods 5 announcement,

what cities were the trains going to that were delayed? From L.A.? Sure. Is Pasadena a different city than L.A? It is a different city, but it's not far enough to warrant getting on a big old train. Yeah, you could walk there. It's very walkable, California.

Right. This is specifically in northern California. California cities and I'm having a lot of that are in the general. If you were paying attention, I'll give you an answer. You want another hint? It won't help. One of them is a Mac OS version. I have a hint for you.

I was going to actually write this before, but only because Adrian kept saying it yesterday. Flip-de-flip-di-flip. Oh, you're going to get it wrong. Then I'm just wrong. I'm not even flipping. There was a studio. Why do you know what that is? That's where I grew up.

Oh. Yeah. Oh, that's where I've heard this. Okay. Yeah. That's why I've heard this before. Is that one of the places? There were two cities.

You could have put two cities. New York City is in Los Angeles. Oh. Yeah. No. I wrote San Diego as one. And what's the other one? Sonoma, which is not.

That is not. San Diego. You got it. That's three points. I said it was worth three points. I've heard of that city before. Bro, I'm getting cooked and triv. Angie, what did you put?

I put Monterey. No, that's unfortunate. Yeah, yeah. So where was the other one? Ventura. Ventura. Ventura. Oh, the city.

Dang. All right. Well, hey, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for watching. and listening, of course, get subscribed to all the channels. Obviously, for more podcasts. If you're subscribed here, you're going to see the man on the street episode that we shot or that y'all shot right after the event talking to people.

And if you subscribe to the MKBHG channel, you'll see reviews of these things when they all come out. If you subscribe to the auto focus channel, you'll see video shot on the new iPhones. If you subscribe to the studio channel, you'll see the behind the scenes of us coming here to shoot the event. So it's all happening. It's TechTember. It's loaded. Thanks for watching.

Catch you guys very soon. Later. Peace. Thanks again to the team that led us set up here. Again, always a pleasure. And because it's Thursday, Adam has to edit this at less than 24 hours. So it's really saving us. And we're on West Coast times.

I have to run the hours left. Just Adam. Just Adam. Ellis is. Wayformers produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Rowan. We're part of the Box Media Podcast Network. And our introvertra music was created by Vincel. Bingo.

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