400: Reach Is the Next Frontier
15 Oct 2020The iPhone 12, 12 Mini, 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max, and HomePod Mini, all brought to you by the Verizon 5G Nationwide Ultra Wideband network. Oh, and Apple helped a bit.
Episode Description:
- Apple Event overview
- Have you heard the good word about Verizon’s 5G?
- HomePod Mini
- No, but really. Have you heard the good word about Verizon’s 5G?
- iPhone 12 and 12 Mini
- A14
- iPhone 12 Pro
- Grab Bag
- “Environmental” changes
- USB-C cable ↔ Lightning
- $30 surcharge?
- MagSafe
- Ship Dates
- Leather Cases
- Purchasing Plans
#askatp- Is John going to get the new Apple sleeve? (via Lew Piper)
- Post-show: Why is ATP worth it? A brief episode-400 introspection and retrospective.
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Chapters
- Metafollowup
- Verizon 5G
- HomePod Mini, Siri
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- 5G
- Sponsor: Bombas
- iPhone 12, Mini
- Xbox Series X SOC 🖼️
- A14 SOC 🖼️
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- Cameras, LiDAR, ProRAW
- Differences
- Grab bag
- MagSafe
- Planned purchases
- #askatp: Sleeve Case?
- Ending theme
- Episode 400 Spectacular
Metafollowup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a historic event, an episode today, because we are recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode 400 of your Accidental Tech podcast. But that’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the most impressive thing about this episode. I’m sure there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another time, but to the best of my recollection, I cannot recall a time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I have looked at the show notes and it says, followed hyphen up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey colon, and And then there’s a bullet and
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing else. How many times do we have to go over this? Chat room, would you like to inform Casey whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not we have follow up on episodes where there are Apple events? Does anyone in the chat room know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, but oh, no, no, no. I know how the rules work. I know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John understand. Do you though? Do you?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey time we have one of these episodes, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh my God, we’re not going to have follow up. I can’t handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. No, because usually you have, well, somebody probably you has a list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of follow up items that we choose to ignore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there any doubt that it’s John? You said probably you. It’s not me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, somebody deleted them all, and that wasn’t me. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I deleted all the ones that we’d already done. Or at least that’s what I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what you thought you did. Now we get to come to it. All right, so the revelation that Casey has at the start of this program
⏹️ ▶️ John is, look, if before the show starts I delete all the follow-up, we have empty follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, that’s the secret? I could have done this for 399 episodes? That’s all it takes? Google Docs never forgets. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to bring up the history pane later and pull it out, but it’s not relevant to this episode because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple event episode. Isn’t follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always something we’ve already done, by definition?
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t get confused here, Marco. Have we done the follow-up? It’s meta follow-up.
Verizon 5G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to complain right up front so I can be happy for the rest of the episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we do that? Is that okay?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can complain even faster thanks to Verizon’s new 5G broadband ultra-wide brand network.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, it’s like we planned it. What a flawlessly executed perfect segue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god, what was going on with that Verizon tie-in?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I know you two are upset about it. Can you explain to me why though? other than just saying, oh, Verizon,
⏹️ ▶️ John like expound on that. Elaborate. Why is it upsetting that that Apple would talk about Verizon?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was just not very classy, which is a very like snobby thing of me to say, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recognize that. But my perception, why is it snobby? Why is it not classy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because they’re shilling for another company, another company that’s only relevant to America, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am the king of forgetting that there are other countries in the world. But even I
⏹️ ▶️ John was going to say, US-centricness doesn’t seem like something you’re averse to.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, exactly. I agree with you. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re shilling for another company. Do you think that Verizon paid
⏹️ ▶️ John them to do it, and they’re keeping it a secret?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s that simple. So my best guess is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is part of a much bigger co-marketing deal between the two companies. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing is, what a lot of people outside of the US don’t realize is quite how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much power over what phones get sold the Verizon stores in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the US have. Like I know so many people, usually not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerds, most nerds switch to AT&T to get the iPhone before it was on Verizon. So the nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are on their own, they do what they want, they go to whatever care they need to to get whatever phone they want. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the non-nerds out there, I know so many non-nerds and especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco family members and stuff like that who don’t follow tech with any kind of enthusiasm, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they get a new phone is every few years, they go to a Verizon store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they get whatever they can get a good deal on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that still true today though? I don’t know if that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it still is true today. And so what I think has happened here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I think Apple recognized that a big chunk of their US sales could go up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they had a really good deal with Verizon. because one of the ways that Android took off in the US early on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of the ways it’s still pretty important, is that carriers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always were really good with, like, you know, having deals between, like, the carrier and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Android handset maker, usually Samsung. And this is one of the reasons why Samsung really has such a dominant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market share, because Samsung plays the sales game really well with the retail channel, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would have things like give bonuses to the salespeople who sold the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Samsung cell phones in the carrier stores. Like there’s all sorts of deals like that, that like marketing deals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and commission deals, and it’s all kind of, you know, a little bit skeezy, but that’s how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the reality is the carriers have a large say on what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones are pushed on people and what phone people actually buy because they can control things like price incentives. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biggest ways Android got big early on was these like, you know, buy one phone, get one free kind of things the carriers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would do. There’s all sorts of stuff like that. And so my theory here is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to improve US market share and to kind of put a bigger debt in Android here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than usual, I think Apple and Verizon made some kind of deal where Verizon is gonna be pushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phones even more heavily. And they already have a special price thing, which we’ll get to later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although AT&T mapped that as well, for however that works out. But I’m guessing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is part of a much bigger thing. Like I don’t think there were some like flat fee that Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid Apple to be part of this event. That’s too simple, and frankly, that wouldn’t be enough money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to matter to either company. I think it’s much more likely that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is about a deal that’s gonna be like over the whole next year, Verizon is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to extra hard push the iPhone onto their customers, because that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worth a lot to Apple. And clearly, Verizon must be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving Apple something that’s worth a lot to them, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is. Yeah, that’s well put actually. No, I’m glad you said it that way. That’s really well put because I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your theory is the best theory I’ve heard so far other than just money changing hands. But yeah, it definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like Apple was willing to make a trade for something. And something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big. And something big, exactly. And I don’t know what that is. And your theory, like I said, is the best I’ve heard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it just felt weird. I don’t mean to cut you off. And I do wanna go back to John’s question in a second, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what else did you have to say about that, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I have a lot to say about 5G as a whole, which we’ll get to later, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it just felt really gross. I’m with you on that. Like, it seemed, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweeted to this effect, like it seems like it’s beneath Apple. It seems kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cheap move, almost like a sellout move, but it’s like, why does Apple need to sell out to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone? And it just, it seemed like this was a Verizon commercial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happened to also have some new iPhones in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. And to come back to John’s question, like why was it gross? Why was it not classy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it would not have been terribly surprising to me to have Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, oh, and you know, this 5G works really well with Verizon. And it would have been only slightly surprising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me to say, oh, and here’s their CEO and he’s gonna talk for too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long. And like, that still would have been weird, But okay, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, I guess. But when it got really gross and really weird to me was the forced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey repeated mentions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And I can’t cite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a specific example offhand, but like, oh, it’s gonna be so easy to play whatever this Fortnite clone is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’ll be so easy to play whatever game on your new Verizon 5G iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just like, what? No, no, stop it with that. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. Apple’s supposed to be the classy one It doesn’t put the stupid like AT&T or singular logo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the phone. There’s, there’s, there’s supposed to be the good ones and this just feels. Icky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I just, it really, really felt gross to me. So John, am I, am I bananas or do you agree?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if the two of you are aware, but the iPhone doesn’t work without a cell network. So
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple doesn’t have one of those. They were thinking of doing one. They were thinking of being one of those MVNO, whatever things, but they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, so you kind of need a cell service plan unless you just want to use it as a a really expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John iPod Touch. Like, I don’t, you know, I’m not super interested in hearing the Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John CEO, like, but there are always boring parts of a keynote, right? But I don’t think it was
⏹️ ▶️ John classless or gross that the fact that Apple makes deals with carriers
⏹️ ▶️ John to promote their phones. They always have, they always will, and they should. The only place where
⏹️ ▶️ John I would get concerned about it is if it starts to affect the products they sell. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a slippery slope argument to say, well, they have this, it starts with this, and the next thing you know, it’s filled with the Verizon crapware. Well, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if that happens, then I’ll be mad about that. But I’m not mad or disgusted
⏹️ ▶️ John by the fact that Apple is selling a phone, one of the important new features of which is, hey, it’s capable of 5G,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then has carrier partners say, 5G, guess what? That’s pointless without a 5G network. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John have one of those and we had a partnership. I mean, we’ve all seen, like I’m very often fooled over the past several years by an
⏹️ ▶️ John ad that I think is an Apple ad, but it doesn’t quite look right. And then I realized it’s actually an AT&T ad. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there is a symbiotic relationship between the carriers and the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John makers. And yes, the phone makers compete for the love and favor of the carrier, all the stuff that Marco described,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But as long as that doesn’t affect the product that Apple’s selling,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so far it hasn’t, with the possible exception of Apple putting that 5GE in the little status bar, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one letter. It’s not a big deal, right? But other than that, there’s not crapware filling my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to, I no longer have to enter a two-year contract to get a reasonable deal on a phone. Phones are
⏹️ ▶️ John all unlocked from Apple, right? So things are going in the opposite direction of gross. I didn’t find Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John and the 5G and the pushing of 5G and the pushing of Verizon to be gross at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. I would be sad if I was AT&T that I wasn’t in the keynote and didn’t get my thing promoted like that or
⏹️ ▶️ John Sprint or T-Mobile, and we’ll get to the price differences there too. But that’s just how
⏹️ ▶️ John this market works. There are carriers and there are phone makers, and this is the relationship between them. And I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like, I don’t see a class distinction. Like I’m carriers, not my favorite companies
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world either. And there should, you know, we should have more competition in the U.S. than we do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like I hate Verizon so much that I can’t bear to see Apple mention its name on stage when they’re introducing
⏹️ ▶️ John their 5G phone. So, I mean, I guess, you know, whatever. If it bothers you, it bothers you. It didn’t bother me personally.
⏹️ ▶️ John And until and unless something changes in the product experience that I think is sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John impinging on. And this you know there is an argument made here that the whole services revenue
⏹️ ▶️ John push and Apple’s willingness to
⏹️ ▶️ John Potentially compromise the user experience in favor of their own revenue could eventually leave to that again That’s there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a slippery slope argument there that you might be able to get some traction on based on the accumulation of recent evidence
⏹️ ▶️ John But for this particular phone with the possible exception of the $30 that we’ll get to a little bit later
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s that big of a deal unfortunately in the US for the carriers there’s definitely a tiered system.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s the big ones and then there’s the also rans and the also rans at various times have
⏹️ ▶️ John done ridiculous things to get any kind of traction and at other times have kind of gotten screwed over
⏹️ ▶️ John by The big characters, which is like it’s happening this time around but
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t You know, I don’t know. I didn’t find it gross or classless. I just found it boring
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the game demos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, and again, I think the the repetition is where it went from boring and annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to genuinely distasteful to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When it’s part of like, you know, the original iPhone announcement with AT&T on stage, that’s one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they would have done something like that, where like there was a segment where the Verizon person came out, like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s all it was, and then there wasn’t any other mention of Verizon anywhere else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be one thing. But what made it feel weird was that it leaked out. Like it leaked out of its little segment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was spread throughout the whole presentation. And so it was kind of like having a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Verizon logo stuck on the phone. Like it kind of had that feel of like this is a commercial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Verizon and Apple. Not like having
⏹️ ▶️ John the logo on the phone. If you don’t see the keynote, you don’t hear any of this stuff. It doesn’t affect the product.
⏹️ ▶️ John It affect the presentation. You can say I didn’t I didn’t like that Verizon wasn’t corralled to its segment. They got mentioned elsewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, fine. It’s like it’s the presentation equivalent of having having a Verizon logo on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like because it was it bled out from from its borders.
⏹️ ▶️ John They must have some kind of deal with Verizon for this thing. And that’s part of the deal is they get more mentions in the keynote. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the end of the world. Like what did it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do to you? There were multiple elements here that felt gross. It was the fact that Verizon was mentioned outside of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little slot at all, plus the little pricing trick they’re pulling, plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that it kind of sold 5G benefits as Verizon only benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some of its implications and wording.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I still don’t quite understand why that’s gross. That sounds like advertising. And yes, there was
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously a partnership deal. That happens all the time. What about all those times back in the good old days when Epic would be on stage showing
⏹️ ▶️ John us some knight in armor swiping at a dragon 20 times. They’re trying to say that the only games you can buy for
⏹️ ▶️ John this phone are from Epic? They made me sound like all gaming is this Epic game. Like, it’s an advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect it from a Verizon ad. It makes sense for a Verizon ad to try to sell 5G benefits as Verizon benefits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t make sense for an Apple ad to try to sell 5G benefits as Verizon benefits.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the partnership we were just talking about. Money changed hands, I’m sure. Like, it’s not like that Apple’s doing this out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John goodness of their heart, right? There’s some kind of deal. But that’s the business they’re in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it really chapped my bottom, which is why I wanted to get it off my chest. Because the rest of the presentation and the stuff that was said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought was really, really good. And as per tradition, I’m going to try to go in timeline order and then we will get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about two sentences in and we will abandon ship.
HomePod Mini, Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We started with the HomePod Mini, which I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have any HomePods in the house. I am too cheap to buy a big HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This one, the price at $99, that was surprising to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seems like it’s a decent product. I still don’t think I have a place in my life for it because we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of Amazon tubes and that seems to work just fine for us. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m aware of privacy implications and so on and so forth. I’m not interested in having that conversation right now, But HomePod Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked good. And in direct contrast to me whining and moaning about the Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5G that appears everywhere, I thought the set for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the HomePod Mini demonstration was super cool. And I liked the way they like went into,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was his name? Was Bob. I think they like went from Tim and like into the shrunken room. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course, it’s obviously full size, but like they made it look like the room was shrunken to show the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini and all that. I thought this was very well done, and I really thought they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handled the introduction well, even though I’m not entirely sure that product is for me. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it all depends on how this thing sounds. Like, they’ll show you all the little thing and the speakers and so on and so forth, but the market
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s competing in has little tiny things that you talk to
⏹️ ▶️ John that are also speakers that are way cheaper than $99, right? And so, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John the $350 HomePod had to justify its price somehow and kind of fail to do that. The $99 one also has to justify its
⏹️ ▶️ John price because you can get a little thing to talk to for way
⏹️ ▶️ John less money. So this better, what benefit does this have that one of those little Alexa, I’m sorry, everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one of those little Amazon Echo
⏹️ ▶️ John puck things has, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the advantage they sold was, well, this sounds better. It probably does sound better than one of those pucks because those pucks sound awful,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But does it sound, you know, 80 bucks better or whatever the price difference
⏹️ ▶️ John is, that’s the question. The other thing is, as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John this HomePod mini has exactly the same feature set
⏹️ ▶️ John as the big HomePod, plus or minus the software update that’s coming soon for the big
⏹️ ▶️ John HomePod to make it have all the features they described here. So they kind of introduced this little product, which is a cheaper, smaller HomePod.
⏹️ ▶️ John At the same time, they told you about a bunch of software updates that are coming to all HomePods, but they sold them as features of just the mini
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re not on the big one quite yet. Right, so we can talk about the software features in a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in general, there’s feature parity between the two of them. The thing that worries me about
⏹️ ▶️ John this Mini, and one of the things I talked about is that it has an S5 chip in it, which is, you know, the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John chip, which is, it’s a fairly fast, you know, it’s not, it’s no slouch,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget which core it is, is it like the A10 cores in the S5? I forget. You know, so it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU power, but one of the complaints about the whole HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ John line is it’s not too quick, and I mean that in both the time and sort
⏹️ ▶️ John It takes a while to answer me, and sometimes the answer is not satisfactory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And an S5 does not give me much confidence that this Mini
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to improve on the responsiveness of its bigger brethren, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I understand cost controls and you don’t want to use a big expensive chip and so on and so forth, and honestly, why
⏹️ ▶️ John should you need a big expensive, like, why do I need a HomePod to run that A14? Isn’t that massive overkill?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, that absolutely should, is massive overkill, but I’m still faced with the issue that my
⏹️ ▶️ John $300-something dollar giant HomePod does not answer me correctly or quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the time. I just ask it to turn the lights on and off most of the time, and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I give it a couple seconds and then I go over and ask my other puck to do it. I have three, three, the Google
⏹️ ▶️ John one, the Amazon one and the Apple one and they can all do this job. And for whatever reason, I always give the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John one first shot, mostly because it can hear me from really far away. But sometimes it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait a moment or your lights aren’t responding or it’s like just. And so now there’s this little
⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s cheaper, certainly not any faster. And if the benefit was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that big expensive one that you would love. Now you can have that experience all over your house for only $99. I’d be like, yay. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re promoting to me is, you know that mediocre experience you have with your $350 one? Now you can have that same
⏹️ ▶️ John mediocre experience for $99. And that’s not attractive to me. And none of the hardware features
⏹️ ▶️ John that they showed made me think that this little one is going to improve
⏹️ ▶️ John in any of the areas that my big one is currently failing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used HomePods for about as long as you have, or the same, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really love them as speakers. They are really amazing speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is very hard to find anything anywhere near that price range that sounds as good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The microphones in them, as you said, are the best. Like, compared to every other voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing I’ve ever tried, the HomePod hears me better from further away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with more ambient noise. Like it’s especially clear like in kitchens, where I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found the Amazon Echo family of products has a really hard time hearing me when there’s any kind of white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise source, like a kitchen vent fan going, or like water running or something. Like white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise seems to really hurt the ability for Echoes to hear me. Whereas HomePods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can basically whisper from across the room with the oven fan going, and it’s fine, like it’ll still pick you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up just fine. But it’s slower every single time. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in good conditions and in bad conditions, the HomePod is just too slow to respond.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when it does respond, as you said, it is often less intelligent of a response,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it frequently will mishear you. It’ll think you hailed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and it’ll go, hmm, from across the room when you weren’t talking to it, or it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start talking back to you when you weren’t talking to it. And what they showed with the HomePod Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be impressive, but anybody who has tried a HomePod before or owns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a HomePod, or who has even read reviews of the HomePod to hear all these problems with them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t really answer whether any of those things are fixed, because the HomePod is already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by far, the best sounding smart speaker, and by far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best hearing smart speaker, not even close to other ones. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have old Echos, new Echos. I currently have a pair of the Sonos One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that is supposed to be competitive with HomePods with audio quality, and it’s totally not. HomePods are way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. These things all allegedly are as smart or as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounding. It’s not even close. The Alexa ecosystem is way smarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and way faster and way more consistent to respond to voice commands. And the Siri ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds way better and hears you way better, but is way stupider and slower and less consistent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the responses. And so during this entire presentation of the HomePod mini, I kept thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I don’t really wanna believe. You know, like, they’re selling this wonderful situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, but we all know that Siri is still Siri. It’s hard to tell if they know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like, it’s hard to tell, the way they sell Siri kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of makes it seem like they don’t know how mediocre it is. And I’m sure this is just PR and everything. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just me, but like, do they not, do they really not know? Like, do any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the higher ups at Apple use an Amazon Echo? I’m guessing the answer is no. And I think that should change.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would call upon whoever leads the HomePod project, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every person above them in the chain of command should spend a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months with an Amazon Echo in their house and using that as their primary like, you know, kitchen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cooking thing. I mean, they’re Apple executives. I don’t know if they have time to cook, but if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody in their house does, like just somehow like get them to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these devices. Because it seems like they are off in their own little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world, you know, the little like Apple, you know, white world, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like they think their stuff works the best, because in some areas of the company that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even for the HomePod, it does sound the best and it does hear you the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is the best in certain areas, but it doesn’t seem like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize how mediocre and inconsistent Siri is compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to its competitors. And until they can fix that, no hardware is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to save this product line. Now, that being said, looking at the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini, like just on specs alone, seeing like the type of speaker drivers it has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they are arranged and the design of them and comparing that to the performance of the big HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing for a hundred bucks is probably gonna be very competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against the, I guess it’s like the newest Echo, which is now a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ball, but it’s not the little ball, that’s the new Echo Dot. Now it’s a big ball.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Price-wise, this is the same price as the big ball. The little ball is 60 bucks, the big ball is a hundred.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The various small Echos fluctuate between like 30 and $60, depending on various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specials and things. But if they’re competing against those with quality and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna lose because they’re so much cheaper. I’m guessing they’re trying to compete with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mid-sized Echo family. Not even the Echo Studio, which is the more home pod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking one, which is, I think $200 or, oh, it’s, yeah, $200.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they compete well against the mid-sized Echo, then they’re gonna be priced exactly like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and that’ll be great. and then people will compare it only on Siri, where they will lose. But if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compare it on audio quality, they’ll probably win. I hope that the HomePod as a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line continues to grow and get actually competitive. When the first one came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the price was just ridiculous for what it was. Again, not for sound quality, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for being a smart speaker. It was way out of the market. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new one, this is a decent price. a hundred bucks, that’s a good price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s a good product, if it’s anywhere near as good as the big one was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, I say this as past tense. I don’t know if they’re ever gonna update the big one again. I kind of hope that any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefits that come down the road, I hope they do. And I hope if the speed of the local processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is indeed a pretty significant limiting factor in the responsiveness of the device, they need to upgrade that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But honestly, I bet it isn’t. I bet this is mostly a Siri problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a cloud service problem of, you know, why it’s so much slower and why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s less consistent and why it’s stupider. I don’t think the CPU on the device is likely to be a major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factor there. But anyway, this presentation looked really great, but it didn’t answer the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key questions that we all have. Will this actually be better than the original HomePod at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri? Will it have fewer false hailings? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has Siri really gotten better? Like, in the presentation, they did this whole thing about how great Siri is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you paid careful attention to the wording, they didn’t actually announce any changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Siri overall, like, today. You know, like, it was all like, over the last three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, it’s been getting better all the time. They did announce a couple new features. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s My Update, I thought was cool. The Intercom could be cool. But none of it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, the Siri service itself is better, or the Siri service itself is faster. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was just like, we’re always making it better. So it, this might be great. It might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a game changer in some way, but I’m guessing it won’t be. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guessing we still have to wait for Siri to get better. And it seems like we’re just waiting forever for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was one hardware thing that they touted, and this was the U1. So you can hand off to, hand off
⏹️ ▶️ John the audio to the thing cause it knows where you are cause you got a phone with a U1 and the thing’s got a U1. And so that’s, would be
⏹️ ▶️ John a cool experience if it worked well. actually a use case that I find a barrier on all of my various
⏹️ ▶️ John smart speakers is if I’m listening to something on my phone, say I’m listening on my phone, on
⏹️ ▶️ John my AirPods, my phone is just sitting somewhere, and I want it to suddenly come out over the speakers, I really
⏹️ ▶️ John have to think to make that happen. Whatever device I’m using, whether I want it to happen on the HomePod, or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, well I can go into the little pull-down thing and pick it and send the output there, right? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John if I wanted to go on something else, I can select that as an output. I would like to be able to just speak into the air and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, please take over playing the audio that’s currently playing on my phone. And the U1 handoff thing
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of promises that experience, if it actually works. And maybe getting to your point of like, why
⏹️ ▶️ John is Siri not quick, right? It’s not quick in terms of wits
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the Siri service being stupid and answering the wrong question.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not, oh, there it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not quick based on response time, probably because of the server,
⏹️ ▶️ John but handoff should happen all locally. So the server shouldn’t be a factor. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John they can get that working, maybe that works a little bit better. But anyway, that’s one small hardware innovation. The intercom
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like this is where it kind of bothers me
⏹️ ▶️ John that the HomePod in general, like it doesn’t have like a UI. Obviously on it, it doesn’t have much of a UI. it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got like the touch buttons and everything like that. But sort of how, features like intercom
⏹️ ▶️ John make me wish there was like some big control panel, not just a setting screen somewhere buried in one of my iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, but like a place that you could go, a screen that you could pull up that’s like, this is the control panel slash
⏹️ ▶️ John dashboard for your home pod. And features like intercom, you can personalize, say,
⏹️ ▶️ John should this interrupt my wife’s AirPods when she’s cooking when I intercom to everybody? Or should it only
⏹️ ▶️ John interrupt the kids, right? And like during what times? and just all those little picky features
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, that for a new feature like this from Apple, the settings
⏹️ ▶️ John for it are probably going to be fairly thin. And I just don’t feel like there’s a place to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with all the HomePod stuff. I did like that Apple is trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John push the idea of the HomePods as HomeKit hubs, because that is an important
⏹️ ▶️ John function they serve, because they’re on all the time, they’re plugged in all the time, and they’re in your home, so it’s ideal for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like that, the idea that you need or want a HomeKit
⏹️ ▶️ John hub for a HomeKit house is kind of techie and most people don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John think about it in that way. Like you can use your Apple TV or HomeKit hub, I think you can use any of your devices, but of course your devices come and
⏹️ ▶️ John go. And if you’re trying to sort of live the HomeKit lifestyle, this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John one more sort of sad reminder of how strategically
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe unwise it was for Apple to get out of the Wi-Fi router business?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if you’re going down that path of, I’m going to have a smart
⏹️ ▶️ John home and home kit and things that listen to me and so on and so forth, and you’re gonna buy this
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive thing and stick them all around your house, like that’s Wi-Fi mesh networking, right? You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John already buying a bunch of these little turds with CPUs in them and spreading them over your house, and they already have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be on Wi-Fi. Just, maybe Apple will come back to it someday, but I feel like that is a
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially a missing piece. Now, Amazon and Google don’t do that either for the most part. I don’t think either one of them have a product that is also
⏹️ ▶️ John a wifi hub. It just seems like a thing that Apple could do that would make this product more attractive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like, well, I’m just gonna get the Apple wifi for my house. And by the way, every one of those wifi things is also a little
⏹️ ▶️ John smart speaker home pod thing that I can talk to. Right, I keep thinking about the fact that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John purchased two Google homes, a big one and a small one, and Google has given me two of them for free because
⏹️ ▶️ John I pay for their cloud storage, right? Apple doesn’t do that. Apple’s not giving me any of these little
⏹️ ▶️ John balls for free, despite the fact that I’ve also paid for their maximum amount of cloud stuff and will pay for Apple one.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the kind of business Apple runs. But the fact that Google devices are slowly outnumbering everything
⏹️ ▶️ John else in my house is purely attributable to Google giving me their cheapest little puck thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know what? When the HomePod doesn’t hear me to turn on the lights, the next one I go to is that cheap little puck.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why do I do that? Because it’s right in the same room. It’s right there next to the lights. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think I actually officially have Google Home devices because I have Nest cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they made some change about a year ago where you can just now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn on a Nest camera’s ability to be a Google ball. Because they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco microphones and speakers in them. Because you can do that talk-through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John thing. So like you. I didn’t turn that on though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t either. But I technically have three of those. They’re just shoving them into everything. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon too. Amazon, to their credit, they have so much hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can be an Amazon Alexa-powered thing. And it isn’t just their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware. They’ve also enabled other people to build that in to the point where I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have at least one TV that has it built in, as well as God knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what else. I mean, my printer probably has it built in at this point. Like, there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that has Amazon Alexa or the Google Assistant or both built in, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just kind of everywhere. They’re just shoving it any place they possibly can to really make it ubiquitous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for as many people as possible. And Apple is just never gonna compete in that particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arena. Where they do compete is everyone has iPhones. So they use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to their advantage. Then if you have an iPhone and you have an Apple Watch and you have iPads and you have Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then we’re gonna have that everywhere. And I think it’s smart for Apple to build on that, to have something like Intercom, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s built on that, but that assumes, or that requires that their home smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker situation get a lot better than where it is today. So if the HomePod Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco succeeds and they actually end up selling a bunch of them, then great. Then they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a really competitive ecosystem against what I think now is going mostly to Amazon for a lot of their customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s a big if, and I think that still depends a lot on Siri being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way faster and way more consistent and way smarter than it is today. And Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemed to not be able to nail that ever throughout Siri’s entire lifespan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far, which is now, I mean, Siri launched with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 4S. So that’s a long time ago now. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be better than it is for how long, you know, they even said, like, Siri was the first voice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assistant, like, yes. or whatever qualifications they put in that, that was true. The Echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out a few years later and it just iterated way faster and got way better than Siri very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly. Whatever ability Apple has to get a fire litter under their butts to achieve great things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they get that ability sometimes and they focus it in great ways usually. That effort has seemingly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never been focused on Siri. And I wish it would be because so much could get so much better
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they also mentioned the CarPlay integration. That was one of their only Apple moments. It was like, hey, we have a thing in the car, we’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone, we’ve got your iPads, we’ve got your computers, and we’ve got these home speakers, and it can all be integrated. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John can intercom and someone who’s in the car pull up to the driveway, you can hear it, I forgot what the demo was. But like, all that
⏹️ ▶️ John integration makes a lot of sense. I think it’s good for Apple to be building on that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the U1 thing, the handoff, because they’ve got the chip in your phone, and they’ve got the chip in there. That all makes sense. It’s held back
⏹️ ▶️ John by the Siri stuff that we talked about. I think it’s still held back by the pricing, because Apple doesn’t have a $30 on sale
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you can put in there. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that the only way you’re gonna get people sort of on board to this thing in sort of an ambient way
⏹️ ▶️ John is you have to have enough benefits to get them over the line to overcome your weakness.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the series smartness and speed is their weakness, but you can overcome that if you can say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re cheap and they come with a bunch of other cool features and Apple getting third party music services
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to eliminate another weakness so they didn’t announce Spotify, but there are future announcements coming so we should assume that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re working on something with Spotify. Just get rid of the reasons why people don’t want one of these. Reducing the price really
⏹️ ▶️ John gets rid of a big one. They seemingly can’t get rid of Siri being dumb and slow,
⏹️ ▶️ John so get rid of some other stuff. Make this a little bit cheaper, make a really, really cheap version, bring back the wifi thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John just get it in people’s house whether they want it or not, Amazon Prime style, and then they can build up from
⏹️ ▶️ John there with services that I think, especially local only services that avoid their server,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparent server side weaknesses. They get a situation where, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John without you even realizing it, pretty soon your whole house is wired with Apple stuff. And one of the big advantages they can lean on, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John they did talk about it in this presentation too, is the privacy angle. Having a bunch of Google and Amazon stuff in my
⏹️ ▶️ John house makes me feel less good than having Apple stuff, because in general, I think they’re better on privacy and their
⏹️ ▶️ John business doesn’t depend as nearly as heavily on collecting information about me and selling targeted ads and yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’d rather have a house full of Apple things instead of a house full of free Google things they’re giving me or a house full of Amazon pucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, there are strengths that Apple can lean on. It just, and they’re tipping that seesaw away from,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’re eliminating some of their weaknesses or they’re mitigating some of their weaknesses and they’re trying to lean more heavily on the strengths. So this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it sounds like we’re down in the iPod mini, or the HomePod mini, every aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of this product is some important thing that Apple needed to do. Just that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think what we’re saying is they still have farther to go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only way forward that they would actually do, Apple is never going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cheap, everywhere ubiquitous version of anything. If Apple’s going to succeed in this market, they’re never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take that path. They’re never gonna be, they’re never gonna have like Siri in everything. Here’s a $25 Siri puck for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your car. They’re never gonna do that. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their style at all. And they aren’t good at it even if they wanted to, but they wouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only other path forward for that is, I think, if they’re not gonna be the cheapest, which they never are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they should be the best, which they often are. That’s their way out of this. Like their way to have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market work at all is to become the best. The challenge is that being the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this particular market requires them to be the best at something that is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a like, you know, big data, serious machine learning, AI powered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web service, basically. And that’s not something they have been great at. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s an entire category of skills that Apple has consistently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown that they can get like, yeah, 75% of the way there, and then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of stall, they plateau. They’re never able to get as good at that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing as other technology giants. And I don’t think you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, like, this is the kind of thing, like, if you would have asked me before the Echo came out, like, which company was gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best one of these things, I would have said Google, no question, because it’s like, it’s right in their wheelhouse to have the best voice assistant for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of reasons. data, machine learning talent, AI talent, and just having the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive web of data at their disposal. This is obviously the kind of thing that Google would be really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at. I would never in a million years have guessed that Amazon would have been able to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that talent and build that service in only a couple of years. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built it very quickly. They built up this entire thing from nothing, the entire Alexa service, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a point that it was really competitive and that it was better than Siri in many,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many ways, and it was way more consistent and way faster and everything. Amazon just did that. They just built that from nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a very short time without having a massive history of that kind of talent in their company the way Google has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if Amazon could do it, Apple can too. It’s just an issue of they seem to have just not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done it for whatever reason. But it isn’t that they can’t, it’s that they seemingly won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just haven’t. And that’s more concerning to me. But again, hopefully at some point, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will get that wake up call, Siri’s not good enough, and they have to fix it, and they have to actually prioritize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and give it resources and make it, just make it happen, direct their attention towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making Siri not only good enough, make it the best, make it better than all the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. That’s how Apple is gonna win any category they try to play in. And if they’re not willing to do that, they’re gonna lose.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, I think, is still the smartest, but I think what Amazon was smart about doing was,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the basic functionality, sure we are fast and responsive
⏹️ ▶️ John and work in the 80% case. I think Apple’s grand vision has always been
⏹️ ▶️ John more like Google’s and that we’re going to be super intelligent and do everything. If I had to give some advice
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Siri team, I would say narrow your focus. Just turn the lights on as fast as Alexa does. Just try
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Pick a few criteria. Stop thinking about how you’re going to parse this complex grammatical
⏹️ ▶️ John sentence to integrate these seven devices and yada yada for some cool demo and just say Let’s get the
⏹️ ▶️ John basics right because Amazon started with the basics and expanded outward without ever losing the basics And I
⏹️ ▶️ John still think Amazon is more sort of brain dead straightforward than Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Google actually does try to be like just say a bunch of stuff and we’ll figure it out because honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John Once they get into text they have their entire businesses built around just figuring out what the heck people are trying to ask for Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I think you’re never gonna catch Google in that area. Probably they have more data they have more expertise,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have more experience, but to be losing to Amazon in the how fast can I get the lights to turn off,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just embarrassing. So like fix that first before, and fix basic things like
⏹️ ▶️ John your uptime and the responsiveness of your servers and all that stuff before
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about the more complicated scenarios and the sort of understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John what people say in complex ways. Because that’s where the real, the
⏹️ ▶️ John next bend in this curve is going to be, as I always talk about this, being able to have a conversation with one of these things
⏹️ ▶️ John and to clarify and correct. And they showed demos of that all the time, but it’s in real life.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. It never feels natural. You feel like I could explain this to a toddler, but I can’t get you cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ John to understand what I would like you to do next. And that’s frustrating. So whoever gets over that next is going to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John big advantage. But for now, we just want to play a song, turn off the lights, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I did think the car play demo was really cool. Like if you you ask where the nearest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware store is, and then you go and use your phone in your car with CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the destinations it will offer is that store that was found a little while ago, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was really neat. I
⏹️ ▶️ John remember watching that demo. I think it was Target or whatever. I’m like, look, I forget what kind of store it was. And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have five of those stores. And I know you’re going to pick the wrong one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re going to pick the one that’s closest,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you’re going to pick the one and that gets me into the exact situation I was just talking about. I get into my car and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it has directions to target but it’s the wrong target because I don’t want to go to that one because it’s a madhouse at this hour.
⏹️ ▶️ John How what can I do or say to correct the situation? I can’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John hey dingus know the other target because only Google would understand that. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no way in hell that Apple’s dingus is going to do anything useful that and now you’re just faced with the thing of
⏹️ ▶️ John like again if it maybe not a toddler but another human you could say oh I see what you did there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice that that you set up my directions to go to the place, that actually there are several of those places that live near us. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, I always go to this one. And so stop recommending that one because parking is a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ John I never go to that one. I always go to this one. And with all these cylinders, you just can’t convey that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just can’t. There’s nothing you can say to the air. There’s no secret settings panel that you can probably find. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of helpfulness becomes frustrating because now you have to cancel navigation. Make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t start blindly following it because it’s taking you to the wrong one. Or maybe like, look, I know where all the targets are. Don’t try to be helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t give me speaking directions to target that I’ve gone to a thousand times. I know how to get there. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I’m just railing against these intelligent cylinders in general. I think it makes for a good demo and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a good idea and Apple should integrate their stuff, but their specific instance just triggered in
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Like I can see how that would fall down in my scenario with
⏹️ ▶️ John the particular store they picked. And I don’t think my situation is uncommon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you’d be lucky if they picked the closest one. They’d probably instead of, they’d send you to some-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll pick one in London. Yeah, it’d be like directions to Target Avenue in Pennsylvania. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, for some reason, Target is 300 miles away. I
⏹️ ▶️ John had one of those today. Today,
⏹️ ▶️ John coming home from a place. I took my, dropping my kid off at a place that I hadn’t been before,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I used the directions, right? And on the way back, like I always have Google and Apple, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I run them against each other. It’s my thing that I do. And on the way back, I said, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, Apple Maps, now’s your time to shine. And I can tell you to get there, there were many routes that I could go
⏹️ ▶️ John and I picked one, I picked the fastest one. It was like 21 minutes, right? On the way back, I say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, directions to home, which is like, this isn’t your wheelhouse, Siri. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know you can do this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know where I live. You can give me those directions. It’s really easy to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it gave me a route and it was, interestingly, it was a different route than I had taken there. I’m like, fine, you know, traffic patterns change time
⏹️ ▶️ John of day, makes sense. And the time I set was an hour and 45 minutes. I’m like, what?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I canceled it and I did it again. I manually typed in my home address and I said, give me directions to there from my
⏹️ ▶️ John current location in this parking lot. And it said, yep, an hour and 45 minutes. I’m like, no, no Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Maps. That’s not, that’s not right. And so I went to Google and it told me 21 minutes and I got home in like 21 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John What the hell? And no, it wasn’t sending me to the wrong place. It was sending me to my house. I looked on the map, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yep, that’s my house. That’s where I live. Yep, that’s where I am now. Stuff like that does not
⏹️ ▶️ John instill confidence.
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5G
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s move on to iPhones. We start with the iPhone 12, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the iPhone 11, 6.1 inches, but all of the new iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, did you hear they get Verizon 5G? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, 5G was the first feature announced before they showed any of the phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that was if you’re going to keynote order, 5G was more important than the iPhone, apparently. Which
⏹️ ▶️ John is so weird to me. I mean, 5G is not particularly important this year, but for future proofing these phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John which some of which will surely be in the lineup for years and years, 5G is pretty important.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then also talking about how we’re going to make and not destroy your battery, I think is also important to point out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I think 5G, the problem is that it’s being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grossly oversold for what it actually is today. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the way, you know, I know part of this is just, Verizon being Verizon, a cell carrier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling their network, claiming the benefits of things that are not due to the cell network technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it just seems like both Verizon and Apple pushed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5G way past what it can actually deliver, like in what they’re hyping it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. And in the future, once we have widespread 5G coverage, I’m sure it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. anytime the cell phone radio technology changes. It is better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco afterwards. Like, it is a better world. Things do get better. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes a while to get there, and it’s a transition. And then once we get there, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual problems that most people have are still kind of the same because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fundamental physics and economics problems of cell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone coverage. I don’t know a lot of people who are looking at their LTE phone today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and saying, wow, I wish I could do XYZ, but I can’t because the radio technology is too slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s not a problem that I don’t think I know anybody who has. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person I know with a cell phone, if they could ask for a way for their network to get better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be two things. It would be either or both, give me better coverage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in whatever area I don’t have good coverage in, or in my house or in a building or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s coverage issues or data caps on plans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that yeah, we’d love to use our phones to download at a gigabit per second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we do that for a few minutes and we’ve used up our plan for the month or even if we have a quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlimited plan, we will hit the throttling limit when our speeds get dropped down to like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 128K because we hit some threshold of gigabytes on our quote unlimited plan. So all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things that we’re being sold on 5G, like, oh, you’ll be able to stream all this video and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all this, yeah, we can stream video now at great quality if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have good coverage and if we’re willing to burn a bunch of gigs of data. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we usually don’t have the coverage that we want in many places, and we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that many gigs of data to burn on our plans. There are aspects of 5G that I’m sure, you know, they talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot about improvements and dense areas and stuff like that, and that will be nice once it’s widespread. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually long-term, if 5G technology allows them to deliver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster speeds and faster transfer and more transfer for less money on their end,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then maybe our plans will get a little bit better. Maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Let’s not go crazy. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at root, this is solving a problem that is not the biggest problem most people have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the problems that we have of not great coverage lots of places and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of not really unlimited data and, you know, having to kind of conserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our mobile data still in certain, in certain places in certain ways, those problems are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still here and they don’t seem like they’re going away anytime soon. And so what we really have here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some wonderful hype about a bunch of stuff, some of which might someday come true,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of which will probably come true, but you know, maybe not for a few years. And some of which has nothing to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with 5G. Some of the benefits they were touting, doctors will be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to save lives because they are able to view the scan of you or whatever. It’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can do that already on LTE, very well, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were saying it would download faster, so you had to wait seconds to get the big image instead of minutes. It made sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but LTE is very fast when it has good coverage and when you have a good plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very fast already. We’re way past diminishing returns on a lot of the stuff that people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their phones. And so, again, this will be nice, but I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oversold. It was kind of like when, I don’t know how many of our listeners will remember,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and John, I don’t know if you were even paying attention to the Intel ads in the mid to late
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 90s, but when Intel released MMX, this was their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multimedia instruction set, they had this huge ad campaign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that strongly implied, or maybe even outright said, that MMX made the internet faster for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Because that was a time when everybody was getting internet access and Intel wanted to sell its new chips. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they said, they had ads to the effect that MMX just made the internet faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your computer. And I’m sure that was based on some kind of claim where like, well, web browsers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to run certain things that, you know, to decode images, maybe they can use some of the MMX instructions and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images will decode faster and maybe a webpage might render, you know, 10% faster if you have one of these chips or something. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably based in some kind of technicality like that. But what most people thought when they saw the ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, oh wow, this CPU is gonna make my internet connection faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the real problem that made the internet so slow back then was we were all using modems. Yeah, MMX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have improved things, but there was this other massive problem in the way that was way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of a factor. And I feel like this is kind of like the inverse of that. Like we’re really selling and bragging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this faster network technology. And while that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is relevant, it is a factor, and maybe in the future it’ll be more of a factor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today it’s not that much of a factor. And today, we have much bigger other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with our cell phone data plans and coverage and everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this isn’t gonna really change in the near term. So I hope it changes in the long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco term. And I don’t know enough about the details of 5G’s capabilities to know, Are they gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to cover further? Are they gonna penetrate mountains and buildings better? Probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are they gonna drop the price on our plants? Probably not. Are they gonna make more unlimited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plans that are actually unlimited? Probably not. So there’s all these massive problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the areas that are holding back how and when and how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly we use our cellular data. 5G might eventually make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them better, but it’s making seemingly none of them better today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, just like the other thing, I thought, with you complaining about Verizon,
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought their selling of 5G was mostly accurate. Like they didn’t promote it in things that
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t help with. They promoted the few areas where it would. That’s why they were showing the doctor with the scans, because it’s not like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading an image of a brain. Those documents are humongous, and they’re the type of document that at
⏹️ ▶️ John max ideal LTE speeds might take a minute to download, and now they’re saying it will take seconds in those same
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal conditions if you’re on 5G. If you’re gonna sell the benefit of your faster connection, you have to find a use
⏹️ ▶️ John case where it actually matters. They found one, giant medical images. Is it a common use case? Are you a doctor?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you care? No, but that’s why they sold it. Similarly, low latency for gaming. How many
⏹️ ▶️ John people are playing Twitch games on their phones? I don’t know, but if you’re gonna try to find, well, does anyone care about latency
⏹️ ▶️ John of the cell network? Well, I suppose if someone was playing a game that required, like a network game that
⏹️ ▶️ John required really low latency, okay. That’s our thing that we’ll sell. Like I didn’t, I didn’t think it was overblown because
⏹️ ▶️ John the scenarios they were selling were so targeted at the specific strengths. That’s why they didn’t sell. Oh, it
⏹️ ▶️ John will penetrate mountains because it won’t, it’s not better at that. Right. In fact, you know, this is, this is the main, the root problem
⏹️ ▶️ John of 5g is that it, its main improvements are in use cases. Like they, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John said in the thing, dense population stadiums, you know, essentially short range,
⏹️ ▶️ John but your problem is there’s just too many darn people. Right. Um, and so that’s what they sold.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I don’t think that’s particularly compelling for all the reasons you said, because those aren’t the problems people have, but that is what they sold in the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John They sold in the keynote the strengths of 5G, which are not
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly compelling to most people, but I thought they were accurate. And I thought they were
⏹️ ▶️ John uncharacteristically underselling it by instead of saying up to, you know, 3.5 gigabits,
⏹️ ▶️ John they said 3.5 gigabits in ideal conditions, which sounds worse. If you just say up to,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is totally the Apple move, you just say up to, it’s like, well, you get anything between zero and that, which is true,
⏹️ ▶️ John but misleading. But if they say, here’s what you get in ideal conditions, everybody looks at that and says,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, who’s ever in ideal conditions? Certainly not me, and so they
⏹️ ▶️ John dismiss it, right? So anyway, it didn’t bother me. 5G is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell just based on the technology, but I mean, we’re all glad these phones
⏹️ ▶️ John have it, right? And I’m particularly glad that Apple at least says, we have to try
⏹️ ▶️ John this out to see how it affects, but says they’re doing something to control battery drain because
⏹️ ▶️ John in most cases, you probably don’t even wanna try 5G. Like that’s what that segment was about. It’s like, look, don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John bother. Like if you have a use case where you don’t think you need it, you’re not the doctor downloading the
⏹️ ▶️ John one gigabyte brain scan just don’t even try to get on 5G, just stay on LTE. If LTE
⏹️ ▶️ John signal is strong and that’s all you need for doing whatever the phone is doing now, like checking email or something, just stay on
⏹️ ▶️ John that, right? As opposed to a phone that’s gonna stubbornly say, I’m gonna be on 5g all the time because 5g
⏹️ ▶️ John is one bigger G than 4g Therefore I’m gonna constantly be on 5g and destroy your battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad the phones won’t do that I hope that feature works as advertised because That’s the phone recognizing
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff you were saying Marco is like is this a problem you need to solve? Well, if you’re playing League of Legends or you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading the brain scan fine We’ll kick up the 5g but the rest of the time you don’t have to change anything The phone will
⏹️ ▶️ John just go in LTE and everything will be fine. That’s that’s how I hope it works because we don’t have these phones yet, but I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John that that was their pitch because that part appealed to me.
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iPhone 12, Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so let’s talk about phones. The iPhone 12 and 12 mini were kind of lumped together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The 12 is the successor to the non-pro iPhone 11. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 6.1-inch screen, but it is 11% thinner, 15% smaller, 16% lighter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it has an OLED display now, which is really cool because the iPhone 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-pro did not. it has considerably more pixels, if I understood this right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 460 pixels per inch, which is a surprise. I didn’t expect to see that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, that’s kind of interesting though. Sorry to interrupt here. No, no, go ahead. So it does have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more pixels because the move to OLED, they made it 3X Retina instead of 2X Retina that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous LCD was. But actually, our friend Steve Trouton-Smith was poking through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the simulators, and I verified all this earlier today, the previous 6.1 inch line, that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the XR and the 11, the base 11, that had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same resolution in points as the iPhone, whatever, Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had 414 points across at 3x. The 6.1s up till now had 414 at 2x.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It basically took the screen real estate of the Max and shrunk it down so it just looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller. But you still had like the same system layout as the Max. The The new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones are 3X density with the OLED panels. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has done with almost all of the OLEDs to date, they actually made everything bigger, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They would use the same screen real estate from previously what was a smaller phone when they moved to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLED. And so, for instance, the iPhone X and XS and 11 Pro, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the same 375 point width as the old 678 series did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wouldn’t get more text on screen or more width of images on screen at default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings. Everything was just a little bit bigger. And what they’ve done with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new 6.1 inch line, the 12 and also the 12 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they now both match at 390 wide at 3x. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is great if you were accustomed to the 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro or the 10 or the 10S. But if you’re If you’re accustomed to the XR or the base 11,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re actually gonna have less screen real estate now at the same size, and everything will just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look a little bit bigger. It is interesting that they went this direction with it, but otherwise it is very nice that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it went OLED. All of the current models now, all the 12s, have OLED screens, and they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3X density, although the mini has an asterisk on it that we’ll get to later. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John although I think this is a theme of this year’s iPhones and it’s a theme that I like, which is uniformity
⏹️ ▶️ John across all of the products at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Fields, so they
⏹️ ▶️ John all get OLEDs. They all get, you know, it’s the, whatever they’re using, XDR on it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re all HDR capable, like the screens are, you know, again, with the caveat that we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John get to in the mini in a second, they didn’t downscale everything for the cheaper phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re gonna talk about this in a lot of the features, and we’re starting from the cheaper phones, which is the 12, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John makes somewhat of a problem in their line, and I think we’ll get to that a little bit later too, which is like, okay, well then how are
⏹️ ▶️ John you charging me $200 more for this and how do you actually differentiate them? But I love the fact that essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John they have one set of hardware for making phones and They don’t deny it to you
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get the cheapest one So now the cheapest one doesn’t have just a good screen like
⏹️ ▶️ John it always had it has The best screen because it’s the same screen as the other more
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive one As far as we know like I don’t I don’t think there’s actually any
⏹️ ▶️ John difference in quality and the specs that they said, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is one small difference, besides the asterisk that we’ll get to in a minute, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-pro screens max out at 625 nits of brightness. The pro screens are 800.
⏹️ ▶️ John In general, the uniformity of the hardware features of these products is
⏹️ ▶️ John something that makes me feel less bad about recommending the quote unquote lesser phones
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re really good and they have good stuff in them. I think, what is the other one? It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing they all got. They all get the ceramic shield, whatever, latest Gorilla
⏹️ ▶️ John Glass, 4X drop thing. That’s not just on the high-end phone, it’s on all of them. Correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, John, don’t forget, you get great 5G service with Verizon.
⏹️ ▶️ John We already mentioned that, 5G across the whole line. Imagine if they had the iPhone 5G was just the expensive one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the other ones still stayed with 4G because, you know, if you want 5G, you gotta step up to the Pro. No, they all
⏹️ ▶️ John get it of all sizes, which may actually be, let’s get to the Mini here, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mini, the Mini is the phone that has the most compromises, because it’s Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in the 12 family, it’s smaller. We talked about this before it was announced.
⏹️ ▶️ John Smaller phones have smaller batteries. They also have smaller screens, but that’s really this
⏹️ ▶️ John phone’s, as far as we know, because they don’t tell you lots of specs, as far as we know, this phone’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John saving grace when it comes to battery power is that the screen is smaller. It’s got the same system on the chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got 5G. It’s got all the same stuff inside it. The only place it can save
⏹️ ▶️ John on power is either by being clocked lower or having less RAM, but we don’t know about those yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple sure wasn’t telling us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have the RAM from Xcode stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s good. Is it less or the same?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Mini and the 12 both have four gigs, and the Pro and Max have
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it has the same amount of, I’m comparing it to the 12, because we’ve talked about 12 and 12 mini, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ John only place the 12 mini saves battery power is by having a smaller screen and maybe having a lower clock CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the battery is way smaller. And so when we think about, hey, everybody gets 5G, the last
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that I want destroying my battery on the mini is even well-intentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John attempts to hop up to 5G to do something. Like I hope that you can disable 5G on
⏹️ ▶️ John the mini because battery life is the big question mark on the small. I know everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John loves small phones. Maybe Marco’s gonna get this one, we’ll talk about it in a little bit, but small phones have smaller batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John and nobody likes it when their battery runs out. So I really hope that the Mini is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as it can hardware wise to make that small battery
⏹️ ▶️ John last acceptably long because the 12 is sitting there right next to it with a much bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John battery and a slightly bigger screen. And I feel like the 12’s battery life has got to be way better. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, you can talk about the visual compromise on the mini screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so this is the asterisk, that all the phones now have 3X OLED screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they all display at 3X with their relative point sizes, except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 12 mini. It does have a 3X pixel screen, and it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have OLED. And it has, you mentioned the cool new glass, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super hard glass. I’m very curious to see how that is in practice. I have high hopes, because they push it so hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I hope, in addition to drop performance, I hope it’s also very scratch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resistant, as Casey mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week and on the relay crossover show this week. Ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weird thing about the 12 mini screen is that it takes the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point resolution, the same screen space resolution, as the 10 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 10S and the 11 Pro, and it shrinks that down. It’s 375 points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across, and it displays that scaled down back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the size that it was. Now, I actually took out my phones for comparison here. I have a few phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with me here. I have my 11 Pro. I also have my old trusty Jet Black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone 7. I never had an 8, so I have an iPhone 7 Jet Black. It feels great, and I have my old trusty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone SE, the first-gen iPhone SE that’s based on the 5S. And just for a size comparison here, noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly when I went from the 11 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back down to the 7 size which is the same 375 point with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cross you know screen layout wise everything seems a little small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s smaller because again when they went to the 10 line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just kind of blew everything up they made everything a little bit bigger screen space wise what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they what they’re doing now is undoing that change only for the mini. So the mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to, it’s going to appear, like the content on it will also appear mini, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like everything’s gonna look a little bit smaller. That’s gonna be really interesting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use in practice, like now that we’ve gotten accustomed to the bigger phones, anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who steps back down to the mini size, who’s been using like the 10 size until now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna be a noticeable change. That you’re gonna have the same width, you’re gonna fit the same words per line default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco settings but everything just be smaller and of course I’m sure a lot of people will just crank the font size up one or two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notches to make up for that then you’ll have obviously less space but I think it’s an interesting choice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know to have that be not a narrower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logical layout size but to just shrink the what was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mainstream mid-range size in the pro line at least and then what was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only size in like the 678 you know not kind of the plus like that line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is now the the width of the mini logically they are the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of pixels on the screen is not actually enough to display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that resolution at 3x it’s close to do that resolution 3x you need 1125
⏹️ ▶️ Marco across the pixel is 1080. So they have to shrink it by like what is it like 9% or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that so they have to scale it down so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can tell so what we know so far the mini appears to be running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a scaling mode all the time and this is something that we haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seen since the 6, 7, and 8 plus line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we’ll see if that actually makes a difference with like noticeable visual quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing for most people, it probably won’t be noticeable because once you go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3x retina, some blurriness and pixels here and there becomes very easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgiven, and very hard to notice. I personally don’t have any ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see individual pixels. And if I like you know, if I mess up when I’m drawing something in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, and I like fall on a half pixel or third of a pixel boundary or quarter or pixel boundary on some line I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drawing, I can’t tell on a 3X phone. So maybe this won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be noticeable to most people. But if you’re super picky about sharpness and visual quality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mini might not work for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think we should explore before we leave this topic, you know, before we leave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phones, what we’re all intending to buy, if anything. But, you know, I glossed over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier, and I think, John, you had mentioned this. These do have flat sides, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot be more excited about. I am super excited to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the spiritual, like you said, John, like iPhone 5-ish, flat-sided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel and look. iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John 4-ish. I know everyone loves the 5, and I keep talking about the 5, but the 4 was the one that came out with the flat
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best looking phone. This is the love child between them because it’s flat sides like the 4, but no
⏹️ ▶️ John ice cream sandwich because the 5 was just a rounded rectangle solid. that didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a part that was sort of like raised on the back and front.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Disagree, the best part, the best one so far was the 5 Series.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know you disagree,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like for reasons that we can’t get back today, like one of the main reasons it was so great is that it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a glass back, so not only was it more durable, it was way lighter. And one thing, I am so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited about the Mini, personally, and we’ll get to that once we get into what we’re buying, but what’s interesting about the Mini is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size and weight wise, it is not just like the 6, 7, and 8. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly smaller and lighter than them. It is not quite, but almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as small and light as the 5 series. And that’s really exciting to me because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve wanted a light phone, a small and light phone ever since last summer when I carried just my SE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, my first gen SE, and I realized quite how heavy and big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 11 Pro and 10 and 10S are. And so I’ve wanted to go back for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while, but you couldn’t get a good phone that was that size if you wanted high-end stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s great about this is that now you can. With that one exception of the screen scaling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing and the sizing of elements on screen, which we’ll see how that plays out in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that exception, you’re not really giving up anything else, and that’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m really, really excited about the flat sides.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like the colors across all of the iPhones 12. I think that the five that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are offered on the 12 and 12 mini are all really, really good. It’s white, black,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blue, and it’s described as green, but it’s kind of like a minty green and red, a product
⏹️ ▶️ Casey red. The blue in particular, I love, and I also like it a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Pacific blue on the 12 Pro, which we’ll get to in a minute, but I love that the colors are here on the 12 and 12 mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know we spoke about this already, but I really want to reiterate, and we kind of talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this on Fusion, the Relay Crossover Show, it is extremely cool to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there are definitely choices to be made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between each of these different kinds of phone. But for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part, there aren’t that many compromises. There are certainly some, but there’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many. And I am really, really pleased to see Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just let all of them rip at the same time, asterisk. Uh, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all just here together and it’s really to, to some degree, I’m slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oversimplifying, but to some degree it’s here is what you want. Or here, here is what you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, how many slices of pizza do you want? Do you want a one slice of pizza, which is the mini? Do you want two slices of pizza? Which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 12? Do you want three? Which is the, you know, the 12 pro or do you want the entire pie, which is the 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro max. And I just think that’s so great that there are so few compromises across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the line. And I am really pleased that Apple was able to do this, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a year where I’m sure all of this was extremely, extremely difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this also plays into their sort of, you know, economies of scale. And we haven’t even talked about this, but I’m
Xbox Series X SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John This iPhone 12 has the a14 and so does the pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John so does the pro max like there is no There are their new line of phones their entire range
⏹️ ▶️ John of the new phones They introduced this year all have the a14 and again, they don’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John us clock speeds and they don’t tell us RAM Apparently there is a RAM difference. Is there a clock speed difference? We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know Maybe we’ll find out but in general it’s easier for them to just say look We’re gonna just make a bunch of a14 and
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have to guess how many of the 12s versus 12 flows we’re gonna make just make a bunch of a 14s Then they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all gonna be in all of our phones And so it’s really easy to recommend someone get the 12
⏹️ ▶️ John as opposed to 12 Pro In fact, that’s what most people should get because it has all the
⏹️ ▶️ John things and yes There are minor weaknesses that we’ll get to that You may or may not care about most people probably don’t but the price
⏹️ ▶️ John difference is big and you get you know It’s a future-proof phone. It’s got a big battery. It’s got a good
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU And Apple, you know, so last time we were talking about what does high speed mean? Oh, we wish it would mean
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, but of course it didn’t. Is it just gonna be 5G? Yeah, it was just 5G.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, I expected them to talk way more about the A14, but they didn’t. The A14 had already been
⏹️ ▶️ John announced in the iPad Air, and they really didn’t go much farther into it this time. They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have a whole suite of benchmarks. They just had a couple of like, oh, it’s the fastest SoC in the market,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is true. and it stomps all over the Android SoCs, which is true. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John really weren’t interested in charts and graphs or anything like that. But something I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John about with what they did say about the A14 in both presentations,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has done this for several years now. I got to thinking because I’ve been looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at similar slides in the game console world because we’re in a new game console generation. When they show you the floor
⏹️ ▶️ John plan of the chip, It’s in Apple’s pictures, it’s kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ John virtualized line diagram and it shows a little square and they show you all the different things. They, I think they maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John started doing this with like the M5 or I don’t even remember when they started doing it. Like different regions they
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna show off. Here’s our new neural engine, right? And it’s this little rectangle in the chip and it’s over here, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ll put this in the chat room and I’ll put these in the, they probably won’t be in the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark will probably make them chapter R. But anyway, take a look at, This is the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John Series X system on a chip, because these days game consoles also do system on a chip, which means
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU and GPU all on one chip, because we have lots of transistors, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much more expensive to make them separate, and you can get lots of benefits of putting them together. So if you look at this
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox Series X system on a chip, with the labeled regions of this floor plan, you
⏹️ ▶️ John say, boy, whoever made this cares a lot about GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John because most of the area of the chip is taken up with GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, in general, on the floor plan on a chip, area equals money. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John linear because it’s trickier to make different kinds of logic, certain kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of more regular logic like memory or even maybe more regular things like GPU are easier to make without errors than the
⏹️ ▶️ John more intricate parts of CPUs. But in general, you have a certain kind of size of a silicon wafer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the smaller you can make the features, the more things you can fit on there, the more transistors, right? The bigger you make your chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John the more expensive it is. And once you have a given area, the amount of area you dedicate
⏹️ ▶️ John on that chip to a particular function reflects how much value you put on it. So a game console using, looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like, more than half of its area for GPU makes sense, right? You look at the CPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re like practically the same size as the IO and memory interface, maybe even smaller, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Those cute little CPUs, you think of them running the show, it’s like, no, it’s all about GPU, right? because we can just, you can, the
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU can use all available area because you just add more execution units. Cause there’s always more pixels to be running through parallel
⏹️ ▶️ John in a thing. Right. And so with this in mind, with the idea that the floor plan of
⏹️ ▶️ John your chip expresses the sort of philosophy and values of
⏹️ ▶️ John the product it’s going into, like what’s important in a game console, it’s GPU, what’s important in a game
A14 SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s consider the floor plan of the A14, which Apple has shown many times. Now it’s not a real floor plan as in like
⏹️ ▶️ John a view through a microscope with false colored little regions or whatever, but I’m assuming it is
⏹️ ▶️ John in the ballpark of reality, right? I don’t think Apple’s showing us
⏹️ ▶️ John their exact chip design, but this entire section is predicated on
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that Apple’s just not totally making it up, right? It is kind of suspicious that it breaks into what looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John four neat regions. So if you’re looking at it now, they’ve highlighted these different areas of the chip. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the chip is a square, the system on a chip is a square, and the upper left quadrant is Apple’s six core
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU. And you can see the little six regions. You can see the four efficiency cores in the bottom and the two big
⏹️ ▶️ John power cores, right? There’s your six cores. Apparently some part of the chip is taken up with a giant A14 and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple logo. I’m pretty sure that’s not accurate. Right, maybe that’s a bunch of IOS stuff hidden behind there,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So one quarter of the chip is for the CPU. Six cores of the CPU, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one quarter of the chip more or less. One quarter of the chip, and this is a phone chip, is for the GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John a four core GPU, right? So we’ve used up half of the area so far in CPU and GPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John Half of the chip is left. What is in that other half of the chip? If we’ve used half of the area for CPU and GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John what else could it be? One quarter of the chip is the neural engine in the A14.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same size as the GPU core and probably bigger than the CPU core.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just the neural engine, right? That lets you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, when Apple’s dedicating one quarter of it’s extremely expensive, gonna make a million of
⏹️ ▶️ John these, stick them in every single phone. It lets you know what Apple values. And in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it that makes the phone a good phone? All that stuff they talk about with the camera that we’re gonna, you know, discuss
⏹️ ▶️ John later, all the stuff that they’ve done, the face ID, the recognition, all that stuff, neural engine, it’s bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU. It’s probably the same size as the GPU. And then finally, the final quarter of the chip, which
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t label all of, Half of the final quarter of the chip is image signal processor, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is different than the neural engines That’s just like for the phone to do for the camera to do its magic and also other
⏹️ ▶️ John image processing stuff And I’m assuming I owe is the is the remainder of the area there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this division of labor is very different than the division of labor on
⏹️ ▶️ John General purpose personal computers from the past couple of decades is different the game consoles In
⏹️ ▶️ John fact, it may be unique for phones and it may be unique to Apple’s phones to dedicate an entire quarter
⏹️ ▶️ John of your system on a chip To the neural engine shows how important Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks that thing is to the functionality of the phone and honestly I think they’re right like if you look at what the phone does
⏹️ ▶️ John and how it does it and how it’s able to do it Dedicating, you know nearly half your chip to neural engine
⏹️ ▶️ John plus image signal processor reflects the fact that yeah We call it a phone but most people use it as
⏹️ ▶️ John a very fancy camera. And then, oh, by the way, you’ve got a CPU so you can do the internet stuff. And then there’s the GPU so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can play some games on your phone, right? It’s really amazing to think about it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if these current trends continue, I do wonder if, you know, five phones from now,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we look at the floor plan and it will look like the Xbox system on a chip floor plan, only instead of GPU being the giant area,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just like neural engine. And then in the corner, it’s like CPU, GPU. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John all, it’s like right out of a Terminator movie. It’s all neural engine and some ancillary other functions to
⏹️ ▶️ John do IO and control the screen. Pretty fascinating. Anyway, I’m excited that this chip,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m more excited about the A14 than most people are, mostly because it’s gonna be the foundation of the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John chips. And you can imagine looking at this floor plan and say, okay, but what if I told you you could have twice as much area for CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and four times as much area for GPU? Then maybe we can shrink that neural engine back down to its proper
⏹️ ▶️ John proportion and dedicate way more transistors to CPU and GPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is more important on a, say, desktop computer than it is on a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, this is the chip they all get, and I think it’s looking pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re disappointed by only a high single-digit percent performance
⏹️ ▶️ John increase, then take a look at Intel’s line and you’ll feel a lot better.
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Cameras, LiDAR, ProRAW
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so let’s talk about iPhone 12 Pro. This was mostly bliss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me and then just a little bit of utter, utter despair. So the 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro is much like the 11 Pro. It has the three camera system, which has been improved.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has the standard wide lens. It has a, I believe it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey larger aperture, ultra wide. Is that right? Did I get that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think, yeah, it’s, I hate these terms. Can we just say the.5X camera, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1X camera, and the 2X camera? That’s fair, okay. Yeah, so the.5X camera got better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t, I don’t think they were very clear on how it got better, but the camera people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at places like Halide seem to think that it is at least significantly sharper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s nice. The 1X camera on the non-Max
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro has a faster lens, it’s in more light, f1.6, up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from f1.8, so that’s good. So that’s, it’ll be better in low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light just for that reason alone. The 2X camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the regular Pro seems to be, I think unchanged, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not significantly changed. The Max has two other changes. the Max has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1X camera, in addition to having that faster lens, also has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger sensor. And that allows it to capture more light, which is better for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low light pictures for lots of reasons. And not
⏹️ ▶️ John just a little bit bigger sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco 47% bigger sensor, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much bigger. Yeah, so a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much bigger 1X camera sensor. The 1X camera also has a better version of image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stabilization. It shifts the sensor around, instead of shifting one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lens elements around, which lets it basically respond faster and everything. So it’s better stabilization,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger sensor, all that adds up to way better low light performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the 2X camera on the Max is now a 2.5X,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has an actual, it actually has a less bright lens. It goes from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco F2.0 to F2.2. So that I think is gonna be a mixed blessing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice. One of the problems that the 2X cameras have always had ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the very first one in, what was it, was it the 6S Max or Plus? Oh, I thought it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 7, but I’m not confident I’m right about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eh, maybe, anyway, whenever the 2X camera’s been added, there’s always been significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse optical quality, usually with, usually being, having a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tighter aperture lens than the 1X camera. And the result of this has been usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty obvious in use that the pictures that you take with a 2X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera usually have worse noise, worse color,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse contrast. They’re usually just not as nice looking, especially in low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light. And it’s to the point where in low light, the system knows this. And so in low light,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes, even if you have the 2X selected as your focal length in the camera app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes the iOS image processor will actually use the 1X camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just crop in in the middle because it knows that below a certain light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level, that’s actually gonna be better results for you than actually using the 2X camera because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has such worse light performance. And so what they’re doing here with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max by scooting it a little bit further in, It’s now a 2.5X zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because it has that less bright lens from 2.2 to 2, or from 2.0 to 2.2,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it might exacerbate that problem of your 2X photos not looking very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. And this is actually part of the reason why, like in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use my 2X camera very much. Whenever I wanna capture something really great, that’s a little far away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll try to just get closer to it. And I’ll try to use the 1X camera anyway, because the One X pictures always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look better. And I think this is probably gonna make this an even bigger difference, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only did they make the 2X camera worse, but then they made the One X camera so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better on the Max, but with the new sensor and everything. So I think it’s actually gonna be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty substantial difference in quality between those two cameras. And so in practice, I bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max owners won’t actually use that 2.5X camera very often.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s interesting to hear you say this, and you’re not the only person who said, oh, I never really used the 2X. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like I use my 2X quite a bit because I’m trying to catch like a small child
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running away or something like that, which arguably means I should be on the 1X. But my point is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I really, really, and I’m kind of jumping ahead a little bit here, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the idea of the 12 mini and not having held one, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just seems like that would be such an unbelievably great set of compromises,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I really don’t want to lose out on the three camera system. And I think I feel more strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I do not want to lose out on the three camera system than I do that I want a smaller phone. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really I want both. And in a perfect world, I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 12 mini that has all three cameras. And if the 12 mini did have all three camera lenses,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I would be waffling at all. I think that’s absolutely what I would get. but because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t wanna give up the telephoto, and maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t use it as much as I think I do, but I feel like I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so because of that, I think what I plan to buy is a 12 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now on the flip side of that, however, I really do want the best camera I can get on my iPhone, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not looking forward to the smugness of everyone, particularly Mr. Mike Hurley,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when he gets his 12 Pro Max and the 1X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey photos are just phenomenal, particularly in low light situations. I’m going to be super jealous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I don’t know if you’re gonna have to worry about too much smugness, because we’ve had many years where the big phone has had the better
⏹️ ▶️ John camera, and it’s been better, but it’s not so much better
⏹️ ▶️ John that you should have this terrible feeling of FOMO. This is,
⏹️ ▶️ John to the 2X lens issue, this is something we didn’t talk about too much when we were talking about the pros and cons of having a big camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Reach is the next frontier for phone cameras. Like there’s a bunch of phone cameras out that have actual optical
⏹️ ▶️ John zoom because they do like a periscope thing where like there’s lens elements that move relative to each
⏹️ ▶️ John other, but they move inside the camera body. They don’t stick out of it, right? Or inside the phone body, they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t stick out of it, right? The reason we have all these stupid cameras in the back is because none of them
⏹️ ▶️ John are zoom lenses. They are all fixed focal length and it is what it is. We use
⏹️ ▶️ John smarts to switch between them. There was all the rumors about, oh, the big new iPhone’s gonna have a
⏹️ ▶️ John 5x optical zoom range. It’s like, yeah, from the widest lens to the
⏹️ ▶️ John zoomed in, that’s a 5x range. 0.5 to 2.5. Right, but it’s in three big steps.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you want it in between, it’s all computer smarts, right? And reach is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of, I’m not gonna say it’s a last frontier but it’s the next logical step that phone cameras have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John because back when we were in normal times, when you’re in the audience of your kid’s assembly and they’re all up there
⏹️ ▶️ John singing their little song and their chorus or playing their instrument and you’re in row 17 and you want a picture of your kid, guess what,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not getting one with your phone because it’s just gonna look like a bunch of blurred kids and you just
⏹️ ▶️ John want your kid and you’re not even gonna be able to identify your kid in the dimly lit, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John cafeteria or assembly area or wherever they are. Similarly, if you’re watching a soccer game
⏹️ ▶️ John and your kid’s out there running for it and they’re gonna score a goal and you’re gonna try to get, whether it’s a video or a photo of
⏹️ ▶️ John your kid, it’s gonna look like a speck in the distance because of where you’re sitting and they’re on the opposite side of the field. So you just do
⏹️ ▶️ John not have reach. And we’ve been trying to get reach by adding more and more
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras to the back of our phones. And I feel like the 2.5X on this is to try to give
⏹️ ▶️ John you just that little bit more reach. And in, you know, in adequate lighting scenarios
⏹️ ▶️ John where you’re in bright sunlight, you don’t care about like, oh, it’s not as fast. It doesn’t matter. Like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in bright sunlight, you want the reach. In situations where you’re in a dimly lit place, then
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the exactly the same trade-off Marco was talking about. It’s probably gonna use the 1X camera because that’s what’s important in that scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ John But 2.5X is not a lot of reach. I know when they say 5X optical zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s from the super wide one to this, right? You’re not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John snagging a shot of your kid kicking the winning goal from the
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite side of the field. You’re gonna get a picture of the entire team. Somewhere in there
⏹️ ▶️ John is your kid kicking, but you’re not gonna get your kid kicking it. And yes, you could just run to get
⏹️ ▶️ John closer, but sometimes you can’t get any closer. Again, if you’re in the big assembly at school, you’ve got the seat that you got,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe you could run it on the side of the field, but if it’s a big soccer field, you’re in there in the middle of the field and you’re on the sideline,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no getting around that distance. So we’re still working on that in the phone world.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it’s, I don’t know if it’s inevitable, because I’ve never used one of these telescoping optical ones
⏹️ ▶️ John in the, like the Android world, right? But if that is at all viable, Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably on the big phone first, Apple’s gonna have to eat that internal space cost and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’ve already done it. If you took all three of these lenses and then replaced them with one fixed focal
⏹️ ▶️ John length, really good lens, and then one internal periscope optical zoom lens, would that take up more or less
⏹️ ▶️ John room than the current giant cluster of things? I’m not sure, but, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t begrudge the big phone to have a better camera because it’s just got more room in there for stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John How much more room does the sensor shift take? How much more room does the little thing take? Probably not that
⏹️ ▶️ John much more, but hey, the phone that has more room is that one, and it’s bigger and it’s more expensive. By all
⏹️ ▶️ John means, differentiate it. And that’s like the 2.5X I feel like is them saying, and
⏹️ ▶️ John also, if you just want a little bit more reach, the big phone will give you that too. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the next step we need to move to is not just a little bit more reach, but like, can I take a picture of my kid
⏹️ ▶️ John playing their instrument up on stage in the school assembly? or do I have to get the entire group? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that is gonna be a big upgrade. We can’t really get there with like megapixel expansion
⏹️ ▶️ John and cropping. Like I think we just have to get there with optics. I mean, this again, I say
⏹️ ▶️ John this based on I’ve never actually used one of those periscope zoom phones. So maybe they’re terrible. Maybe the technology simply
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot solve this problem for us for reasons that I don’t yet know. But it’s a problem that needs to be solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John So until and unless we get to the point where I think I’ve talked about a couple of years back on the show where the entire back
⏹️ ▶️ John of your phone is a gigantic sensor, forget about full frame, it’s the whole back of your phone, incredible light
⏹️ ▶️ John gathering ability, it’s a light field camera, and we can crop down and refocus until we get there,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna have to have some kind of zoom situation where we can actually get closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to subjects that are far away and capture them with some reasonable amount of light. It’s a hard problem
⏹️ ▶️ John to solve on a phone, but I feel like that’s where we have to go. In the meantime, the trade-offs between the
⏹️ ▶️ John Max and the Pro, like I feel what you’re saying, Casey, about needing the telephoto, but I also totally feel what Marco was saying
⏹️ ▶️ John and that 2X camera, it’s never as good. Like I do not, I don’t wanna use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will always use my feet if I can. And when I can’t use my feet, I feel like I can’t use my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. So I don’t know, you can make your choice based on not having that third camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if you really love the small size or you just wanna save a bunch of money, it kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like saves you from being tempted to use the worst 2X camera, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And making your phone worse. And basically just saying, look, if I can’t zoom with my feet, if I can’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John closer to this subject, just this is not a phone photo that I can take. And then you’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John pull out your big camera that you bought because you followed my advice and put it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on a nice long lens
⏹️ ▶️ John and snag that awesome action shot of your kid kicking the winning goal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I also, whenever I, you know, I’ve had a 2X lens now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for what, three phones? You know, I never got the giant phones, but ever since they put it on the 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward, I’ve had it. and I do use it sometimes, but usually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, usually I’m pushed away from it for the quality loss, but also when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do need more reach, it’s never enough. Like what you were saying, John. That is true,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is true. I do frequently want more reach from my phone, and I hit 2X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, oh, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The main thing I use 2X for is to crop out more of the background when I’m taking photos of my house so people can’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like it’s not to get closer to the
⏹️ ▶️ John subject. It’s like, I want a cute picture of my dog, but I don’t want all my daughter’s crap that she left in the
⏹️ ▶️ John floor in the shot. So 2X and now I’ve cropped it to closer to just the dog. That’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the 12 Pros also add LiDAR for the first time on an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple phone. When this was demonstrated on the iPads, and I do not have an iPad with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LiDAR, I have a 2018 iPad Pro. When this was demonstrated on the iPads, It was one of those like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool sort of things for me. But one of the things that they said with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the phone was that, oh, this will help with autofocus, which I did think was cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know if we’ll see, I don’t know if we’ll be able to tell one way or the other, but if we do see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that autofocus is faster and or better, I can’t say that I typically have a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with that on my phone, but more is better. So that sounds good to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then additionally, the pros, I believe it’s only the pros, get ProRAW, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a whole new situation. And I think that, Marco, you’re probably best off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the three of us to describe what this means.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t know that much about it yet. You are right, it is a pro-exclusive feature, even though it appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be only a software difference. Like, it appears that this is not due to whatever hardware differences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have. It might be related to the RAM difference, but probably not. It’s probably just software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differentiation. But anyway, the idea here is there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been a raw API access to the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while now, for at least a few years worth of hardware that’s been like raw access for apps to use. And apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Halide and other like advanced camera apps do use it to great effect. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the first time Apple is actually like offering a raw capture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from it. Well, you’ll be able to go into like the camera app preferences from the way I understand this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just like, and turn on some checkbox that like saves your pictures as this new pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raw format. And then you can import those into, you know, Lightroom or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and do whatever you want with them. And you know, other apps will be able to access that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is, it’s interesting it for high end uses. If you’re trying to use, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is true of any raw capture for the iPhone, if you’re trying to use the camera hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but have more control over some of the effects it bakes into the pictures under normal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco circumstances, like things like noise reduction, which is a big one, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other stuff like just white balance and various things like that, various color balances, dynamic ring, stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. A lot of that gets stripped away when you save it as a JPEG or a HEIF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has to like bake in a certain degree of all those things to make the image look right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raw in all forms. The idea is you just save whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sensor data was and you let apps after the fact make adjustments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are oftentimes able to be done losslessly. Things like white balance, like you’re not baking that into the file, you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interpreting the camera, the raw data differently. So you’re able to make a lot of adjustments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the lossless domain or do things in, with different degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things like smoothing and stuff like that than what they might do automatically to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco achieve editing photos and having more control over the way your photos are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edited by the system without a lot of quality loss or being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull more out of them than what the built-in processing of the phone would have done on its own with your own custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjustments and things. So it’s very nice if you’re a pro photographer to have RAW.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always shoot RAW whenever I’m using a big camera, even though it’s very rare these days, as we talked about last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, but I always shoot raw because I love the ability to adjust things losslessly afterwards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The downside is usually that the files are way bigger and way slower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work with with whatever software you’re using, and that’s probably gonna be the case here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is the kind of thing that I would not recommend most people leave on. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get a Pro, I wouldn’t recommend it. And it’s something that frankly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I would use because as much as I used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super into all this, you know, camera nerdery stuff and I used to think I would edit my pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. I just don’t do it anymore. And anything that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add to my burden of taking pictures or of having some kind of workflow to do afterwards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know would not be good for me. And so I’m actually not going to use this feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as I can tell right now. But for people who are super camera enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and who are already the kind of people who today are using apps like Halide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or other third party apps to like really process your pictures and do a lot of post processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and editing on them, this could be really great for those people. I’m just not one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I have a lot of questions about this ProRAW stuff. Like one of the big
⏹️ ▶️ John selling points of it is kind of, as you said, like in phone cameras, In all cameras, obviously the raw sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John data is pretty garbagey and then it gets processed and you get a photo out of it, but nowhere is that more true
⏹️ ▶️ John than camera phones because the sensors are so small,
⏹️ ▶️ John the lenses are so tiny, everything is so noisy, and the iPhone in particular, its
⏹️ ▶️ John prowess is the computational photography. The neural engine, its GPU, the image signal processor,
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff is, you know, three quarters of the chip is working to take that
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous sensor data that looks like how How could you ever get a useful picture out of this and work their magic to
⏹️ ▶️ John give you a really, really good picture? But of course, if you go to RAW, of just like brain
⏹️ ▶️ John dead RAW, it’s like, well, but what about all the stuff the phone was gonna do for me? The whole reason I bought this iPhone is it
⏹️ ▶️ John does all this stuff, this computational photography. You’re just giving me the sensor data? This is no good to me. I can’t process it manually
⏹️ ▶️ John like the phone does because it does a bunch of stuff and I don’t know about, right? So pro-RAW, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well, we know you want the benefits of RAW as in we won’t bake in these changes. won’t actually change
⏹️ ▶️ John the colors of the pixels of your image. It will have the raw sensor data, and then we’ll just add lossless modifications. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John many image processing programs have done this over the years, right? Where if you change your mind about that adjustment,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can readjust it. Think of it as like a layer cake. You’ve got the raw sensor data at the bottom, and on top of it, you’ve got adjustment layers,
⏹️ ▶️ John like in Photoshop, right? And you can change your mind about the adjustment layers and enable and disable them and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what we want out of this ProRAW is, well, what I would want is,
⏹️ ▶️ John Phone, do all the awesome stuff you normally do, but do it all in essentially Photoshop adjustment
⏹️ ▶️ John layers on top of this image. So give me the raw sensor data, and then give me every single adjustment you would
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Now, I don’t know if Apple’s ProRAW does that. Think of things like deep fusion,
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR, taking pictures with multiple lenses and combining them, all
⏹️ ▶️ John of that stuff. Is all of that put in sort of an adjustment layer, or is it
⏹️ ▶️ John only sensor data plus denoising, white balance,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, curves? Like, is it just the straightforward things or is there a layer for deep
⏹️ ▶️ John fusion? Is there a layer for portrait mode? Is there a layer for HDR where they show me the three different
⏹️ ▶️ John exposures they took, each as RAWs, you know what I mean? That is an open question to me that I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how deep down that rabbit hole they go because I think as soon as you start giving
⏹️ ▶️ John up any of the cool things the phone does for you, it has a high potential to make
⏹️ ▶️ John your photos look worse. Because the phone is doing so much work and that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John you pay the big bucks and that’s why, that’s half the reason this system on a chip in there
⏹️ ▶️ John does all these things is to make your photos look better. And I don’t want it to not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would want it to do that and then on top of that, give me a little bit more adjustability later at the expense of massively
⏹️ ▶️ John larger, you know, file sizes or something. So I’m dubious
⏹️ ▶️ John about it being worthwhile except in very specific circumstances to
⏹️ ▶️ John use the ProRAW, not just because of the massive file size, but also because I wonder how much I’m giving up,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If I’m not giving up anything, great, then file size is the only thing you have to worry about, but I have to think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John giving up something, right? You’re giving, maybe even if it’s just you’re giving up the intelligence choice
⏹️ ▶️ John to use HDR, right? Or you’re giving up the deep fusion or like whatever one of those things you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John giving, I don’t wanna give up any of them because the phone needs all of them to make good photos, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s cool and I like the idea behind it. I really hope it is as cool as I think, but I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is more limited at least in this first iteration.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ll see. Moving on.
Differences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one of the things that I had feared in the rumors leading up to the event, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what I gather, everything leaked like the morning of and I didn’t pay attention to it because I wanted to be surprised. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rumors had said, you know, these phones are going to get a little bigger. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really, I mean, scared is dramatic, but for lack of a better word, scared about that because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really feel like my 11 Pro is as big as I would ever want my phone to be. I am just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in on the Max slash Plus club. not for me. And obviously, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t held any of these new ones yet, but I did on the Apple Store app, the compare your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing where you can compare the one that’s in your hand to one of the other ones. And I was looking at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and between the 12 Pro and my 11 Pro, the differences look to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really basically negligible. I mean, there are some differences for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, every dimension is a little bit different and a a little bit bigger with the exception of depth, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, these differences are like a couple of millimeters in any given direction. So I would suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll probably be able to notice, but I would also suspect that much like the notch, it will disappear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me within the span of a week or two. And I’m really relieved by that because I was really genuinely worried that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was just gonna feel like a monster in my hand. And maybe it will, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expecting it to, and I’m really, really excited about that. It seems like the decreased bezel size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the flattened sides are really gonna make a difference. And I haven’t mentioned how excited I am about flat sides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m excited.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here are the actual numbers, by the way, because I was worried about exactly the same thing. 2.7 millimeters wider, which you
⏹️ ▶️ John will be able to notice. Basically, if you took all the cases off and you put your current 11
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and just sat it on top of the table on top of a 12 Pro, you’d see the 12 Pro sticking out
⏹️ ▶️ John from both the left and the right side, for sure. Not by a lot, but you’d be able to see it, right? and you’d be able to feel it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Height, 0.1 millimeter, you’re not gonna notice that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you got your height and width confused. The height is 144 to 146.7. Oh, did I reverse it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, and then the width is just as you described for height, 0.1 millimeter.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, anyway, but yeah, the 2.7 dimension you’re going to notice. Apparently that’s height and not width.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna notice that and you’re gonna feel it. The width, 0.1, you probably won’t notice. The depth, 0.7,
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner, you probably won’t notice. The weight, one gram, you definitely won’t notice, right? So I’m relieved
⏹️ ▶️ John too, because despite the fact that I will, you know, if you stack them on top of each other and feel it, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John notice, it’s close enough that I’m just gonna forget about it. Right? Because once you get rid of the other phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re just using this phone, it’s gonna feel like the same size. Now, the flat sides,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know everyone likes them because there’s potential that it makes it easier to grip without the case. We, again, we don’t know how slippery these
⏹️ ▶️ John are yet because we haven’t held them. It kind of depends on what the glass feels like and what, you know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of factors that go on here. but I do feel like, kind of like the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air’s wedge shape and the old iBooks kind of rounded things, that curves
⏹️ ▶️ John on the current line of phones are slimming. I feel like the curves are slimming,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because it makes you think that the actual width is the width when the curve is done, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John is pulled in, you know what I mean? So I don’t know if even though this
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is more or less the same size, if it’s not gonna feel a little bit chunkier,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Does that make sense? Like not does, it’s not gonna be thicker. Like it’s literally going to be thinner, right? And it’s gonna be,
⏹️ ▶️ John but will it feel, will it feel bulkier? On the other hand, will it feel so
⏹️ ▶️ John good that you don’t need a case? In which case it will feel much skinnier because you don’t have a case around it. So these are, these
⏹️ ▶️ John are questions that can only be asked by holding it in our hands and we do not have these phones in our hands, nor
⏹️ ▶️ John probably will we, cause I assume we were all just gonna order them as soon as we can and then just cross our fingers. but
⏹️ ▶️ John many questions remain about the squared off sides. But at least the question of the size, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John dimensionally is relief for me and Casey anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very much so. Have I mentioned that the 12 Pro also gets excellent 5G service
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna stop being funny. Nope. Speaking of 5G, I do wonder about that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did actually think of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it because I haven’t really,
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares about 5G, right? But then I thought, you know what? I’m one of those people who has crappy signal. And even though 5G
⏹️ ▶️ John is not supposed to bring any sort of signal at me, it’s better at shorter ranges, I’m thinking, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for all I know, maybe someone put up a bunch of 5G things in sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John inconspicuous places that are actually near me, and maybe actually will have better signal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is all fantasizing. Maybe actually we’ll have better 5G signal. I’m asking, I just don’t know it yet because I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ John 5G devices. So even though I get one or two bars on LTE, if I’m lucky,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’ll get better in 5G. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are there any other major differences in the 12 Pro that we haven’t discussed? I think we basically
⏹️ ▶️ John it. There’s the video recording. So they do, it does HDR video recording, which people,
⏹️ ▶️ John some people have been saying like, oh, who, nobody cares about that. HDR is the most important
⏹️ ▶️ John change in video since high definition. It is not a thing that nobody notices or cares
⏹️ ▶️ John about, especially when taking videos in the real world where the dynamic range of the bright sun and
⏹️ ▶️ John shadow is tremendously bigger than any of our devices can catch, right? So any
⏹️ ▶️ John increase in dynamic range from SDR, you know, the non-HDR or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John is good and people will notice. No, and people don’t know or care what Dolby Vision is and they don’t know or care
⏹️ ▶️ John that, oh, isn’t it amazing how you can adjust the video and the Dolby Vision metadata will update and you can do it all on your phone. Who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John But they will notice that HDR video is better than non-HDR video, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if the actual scene has higher dynamic range than current phones can capture.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think this is actually an important picture. When you take a scenic video of a sunset
⏹️ ▶️ John on your vacation, it will look better in ways that every single person can notice in HDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the screen can display it, because it’s got whatever the 1200 nits HDR thing. If you have a television
⏹️ ▶️ John with good HDR support, it will look better there. The problem that comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in with like, well, when I shared this with somebody over the internet, well, you know, Instagram doesn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John anything about HDR, I don’t think, and you know, so there’s a gap there. but I feel like for your personal enjoyment
⏹️ ▶️ John on your actual phone and your iPad and your television, assuming they all support HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ John recording video in particular in HDR is a very important feature and I’m glad to see it happen
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone. The fact that it’s Dolby Vision and yada yada, it’s cool and everything like that, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John just feel like HDR video recording plus a screen that can show it in a
⏹️ ▶️ John more reasonable way, like 1200 nits I think is reasonable HDR, is an important advancement for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s phones. Yeah, that’s a good point. And yes, I’m gonna say more important than 120 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per second. We haven’t mentioned it, I don’t think either one of us really care that much about. It should come eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I want 0% of my battery life spent on 120 Hertz
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on my phone, I’m sorry, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It is better, we should get it eventually, we will get it eventually, I hope, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna give up basically nothing for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because- Yeah, I actually completely agree with you. I have it on my iPad and I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you twisted my arm, I could tell the difference between the two, but I don’t feel like I noticed it very often, except perhaps when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the pencil on the iPad. I don’t think this is something I long for. I know a friend of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, Mike Hurley, is not happy about this, but I’m right there with you, John. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not want to trade pretty much anything in favor of increased refresh rate.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and that said, like, if they just give it with this toggle switch and you can turn it on if you want and turn it off if you don’t, then that solves the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John The rumors were that we missed 120Hz just because of like screen hardware difficulties related
⏹️ ▶️ John to COVID or whatever, like it’s coming. We’ll get it eventually. It’s disappointing that it’s not here this year. I understand that. But for
⏹️ ▶️ John me personally, I’m not interested in trading anything for it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if they just put in a switch and let me do, you know, 60 Hertz max variable refresh rate,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah, I’ll be very excited next year when the phones have that. But I’m personally not disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John that the current phones have it. I’m much more excited about HDR video recording than I am disappointed about 120 Hertz. Yeah, see, and I love 120 hertz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad line. It’s wonderful there. Then when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go to my iPhone, I don’t miss it. Like I love it when I’m using it, but then when I don’t have it, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t notice its absence, you know? I will say the HDR video thing, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is significant. And it’s a little hard to tell whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have improved the regular video capture or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I remember back when I think it was the XS first added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDR video interpolation where it would basically shoot video at 60
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frames a second, but if you had it set to 30 frames a second saving, it would use that to basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do automatic exposure bracketing where it would, every frame it would shoot like a high exposure one and a low exposure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and then merge them together in real time to give you the higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definition video recording than what the sensor could natively capture.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at some point, I think in the 11, they made that available also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 60 frames a second. Now if you go to the text spec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comparison page, they call that extended dynamic range for video and it’s up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 60 frames a second on all these models, 11, 12, and 12 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HDR, though, with Dolby Vision, which is the new thing, on the 12 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes up to 60 frames a second on the 12 mini and 12 regular, it only goes up to 30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frames a second. So that is one difference. That if you want HDR video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recording, the 12 and mini can only do 30 frames a second and the pros can do 60. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, seems like it’s probably software differentiation only. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think, again, besides the possible use of RAM, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’d be any hardware reason why this has to be this way. But again, this is yet another thing where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want people who are using the iPhone as a pro camera, like a really pro camera, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want them buying the iPhone Pros. And I don’t blame them, that makes sense, even though this is probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screw me this year because I think I am probably gonna go mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, don’t tell me this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want you to go pro, so this way, if you love the mini, I don’t wanna know. I just don’t wanna know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not entirely sure I’m going to love the mini, to be honest. So I do plan to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My current plan as we stand today is to get the Mini, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little unsure how I’m gonna feel about the size. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little concerned about adjusting to the narrower phone for keyboard accuracy. I know that’s just usually just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a temporary adjustment period. And I’m a little concerned about just like having everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be so tiny on screen and whether that will actually be comfortable in use or not. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really concerned about losing the 2X camera. That I think I’ll be fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. I’m not happy about this video limitation because I would have loved to shoot everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in HDR. But again, the regular like auto exposure bracketing dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range thing they’ve been doing for the last few phones, that is great for me. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know that I necessarily need, like will the HDR Dolby Vision thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that actually capturing more dynamic range? Or is it just saving it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more precision? You know, they’re talking about the 10-bit HDR, like, that’s something I don’t need. I don’t need the precision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not taking these into Final Cut and editing them and making a professional thing. I’m just watching them on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone. And so if the actual dynamic range is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different at all, or only minimally different between these two modes, then I’m not missing anything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I would never turn on the Dolby Vision thing, because I’m not a video editor, I don’t need that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if I’m gonna be missing out on lots of dynamic range by not using that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will kind of regret that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you do want the Dolby Vision thing on it. It has nothing to do with whether you’re gonna be a video editor or whatever. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more metadata about the range of values in the scene that changes over time,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So you want that even if you just never adjust it because it helps give you a better
⏹️ ▶️ John moving picture over a period of time with different areas having dynamic, you know, brighter parts and
⏹️ ▶️ John darker parts and all that stuff. So you do want that. And I have the same question about
⏹️ ▶️ John why is there a half of, why does it do half the frame rate in the quote unquote lesser
⏹️ ▶️ John things? Like, I feel like this is the downside of the uniformity of the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John is that Apple does have to come up with some reason why you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be charged a couple hundred bucks more for the Pro. And yeah, it’s got one extra camera on the back,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like, is that $200 difference? And so there, I feel like they’re potentially differentiating
⏹️ ▶️ John with software, which feels bad. It feels bad to know that you have a phone that could do a thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John people get all upset about it, but it feels really good for them all to have the A14 and for
⏹️ ▶️ John them all to have all the good screen. You know what I mean? So like the only alternative would be
⏹️ ▶️ John compress Apple’s line price-wise and have the difference in price between the
⏹️ ▶️ John lowest end, you know, the 12 and the 12 Pro be much smaller than it is, either by
⏹️ ▶️ John making the 12 more expensive or making the 12 Pro less expensive. And both of those things are probably worse for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s sales revenue, profit, blah, blah, blah. So I kind of understand what they’re doing. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess stainless steel. I don’t know if we didn’t mention that, that the Pro has stainless steel instead of aluminum, which
⏹️ ▶️ John may not even be an upgrade if it’s heavier.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even know. Like, I didn’t look at the weight differences, but like, this is the narrowest
⏹️ ▶️ John gap I think ever between the quote unquote cheap phone and the top of the line that there
⏹️ ▶️ John has ever been in terms of things that you can explain to regular people. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good that that’s true, but the areas where they chose to differentiate
⏹️ ▶️ John them being software only just really doesn’t feel good to tech nerds. Regular people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to know, like they’ll just accept, oh, it does half frame rate. Well, it’s not the pro one. They won’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John to, yeah, but why? Why does it do half the frame rate? It’s got the same system on a chip, like
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably at the same clock speed, RAM’s not an issue, like what’s, I don’t understand it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand it either. Maybe we’ll discover what the answer is, but it could just be plain old differentiation and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of a shame. We didn’t talk about this with the Mini, but right. The Mini, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco has any angst whatsoever about the, or most of Marco’s angst about the Mini is the fact that it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone that the Mini disciples really want, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as the high-end phone, but smaller. and Apple just stubbornly refuses to make that
⏹️ ▶️ John phone for reasons that make some kind of sense because you know, smaller, and it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John size-based pricing of like Mac software sells more because Mac screens are bigger. Like, well, it’s smaller, shouldn’t it cost
⏹️ ▶️ John less? You know, so like if they made one that was the 12 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini, that would make this contingent of people a lot happier.
⏹️ ▶️ John got all the cameras on it, it’s got all the things, there’s no limitations, yada yada. Still, Marco would be worried about
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen being smaller and the keyboard being weird. Rather than that, it’s a no compromises Mini. This is a compromises
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini. It’s the Mini 12, it’s not the Pro Mini 12, right? So, should
⏹️ ▶️ John be glad you got something that was Mini, but that’s the problem. If you want a smaller size, there is no
⏹️ ▶️ John option for, there is no M2 competition. There’s just the plain old 2 Series.
⏹️ ▶️ John And no, sorry, we don’t make a fast version of that car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to whatever degree that, a lot of these limitations on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller products are physics, they just can’t fit as much in them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand that completely. It does kind of hurt though, when that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the reason. Like when the reason is just segmentation and price. It’s like, yeah, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has always made smaller equals low end, bigger equals high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end. And people who want high end stuff in a small product usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no option. And I really, as much as I want to complain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that, in this case, the differences between the Mini and the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max are so relatively few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and many of them relatively unimportant to most people that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as I want to complain that the Mini doesn’t have all the best features available in some kind of like Pro Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s still gonna be so damn close in day-to-day use, like in feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parody and everything, that I don’t think it really matters here for most people most of the time. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it hurts when people like me and Casey want the best stuff, but we also want small phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it does hurt that we can’t get the best stuff at any price in a small phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, I bet day-to-day we won’t even know. Like, in the same way that, like, the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of days, I don’t use my 2X camera. So when I lose the 2X camera by making this move,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably gonna regret it like maybe once a month when I’ll wanna hit that 2X button and realize, oh, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just getting digital zoom now, this is crappy. But it’s, you know, if even that often,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it might even be less than that once I remember how crappy the 2X cameras always are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Apple’s been burned a couple of times. I wonder if this is sort of, you know, institutional DNA
⏹️ ▶️ John of making the small expensive product. The G4 Cube was the small expensive product, didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John too well. the trashcan Mac Pro, the small, this is like basically the Mac Pro Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do too well.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There may be other examples out there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like, it just- The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the 12-inch MacBook.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eh, that wasn’t really a pro. That was a compromised slow machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It had- It wasn’t trying to take- It had like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco semi-pro features.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hmm, I don’t, that’s not an example of what I was talking about. I was thinking of like, no compromises, but small
⏹️ ▶️ John size. Like the only thing you compromise is on size, but it’s gotta be as fast as the big ones. So that, you know, the trashcan Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, the G4 Cube even though they weren’t exactly as fast. But anyway, for the 12 Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s the right choice. Like in general, I feel like most people are going to buy the
⏹️ ▶️ John non-pro phones just because they’re cheaper. And so if you’re gonna have any kind of size differentiation, put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the phones that most people buy and then let the weird pro people buy the pro things and be excited
⏹️ ▶️ John by their extra camera and their stainless steel. heh-hem haha
Grab bag
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so a couple of grab bag things, and then I’d like to discuss what John and I plan to do. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t mention that the 64 gig phones are gone. So it’s starting at 128 gigs, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is excellent. So we have 128, 256, and 512. That’s only for the Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, is that right? Oh, I’m sorry. The 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and Mini are 64, 128, 256.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Pro is 128, 256, 512.
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think that’s, you know, Apple doing anything with storage is good. And doubling it for the quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John same price, which we’ll get to in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey helps a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Right, and so speaking of pricing, Apple saving the environment again and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passing the savings on to Verizon with their 5G service.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, they are saving the environment in so far as they are not including the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little brick in the iPhone box anymore. They’re also not including headphones in the box anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I have any particular problem with this. I am, I find it ever so slightly gross that they’re painting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as exclusively environmental when clearly it’s helping,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s helping their bottom line. But I mean, whatever, I’ll roll with it. Also, interestingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a USB-C to lightning cable in the box, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB, whatever the traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to light, thank you, to lightning, which in and of itself, I think it’s an improvement for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most people until I realized after a while that wait, all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these 80 gazillion bricks, wall warts, whatever you want to call them, that everyone has, those are all USB-A,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and granted they all came with lightning cables and so on and so forth, but you’re telling us that we all have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bazillion of these bricks, and yet you’re giving us a cable that doesn’t work with any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of those bricks.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t want them to keep shipping A cables. Like they need to be the change they want to see in the world, which is USB-C everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, ship the cable. The weird thing about it though is if you walk into an Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ John or order online or whatever and you just get an iPhone and it’s your first Apple product, you can’t charge it
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you already have something. Like the USB-C is like, oh, well, just plug it into your Mac. It’s like, what Mac? I don’t have a Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you probably don’t have a PC with you. If you just like, it used to be that you could just buy an iPhone and have like nothing else in
⏹️ ▶️ John the house except for a power outlet and you were fine. Like, you know, you could plug it in, you can get on the cell network, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you do, like, I wonder if Apple, people in Apple stores will ask
⏹️ ▶️ John people, oh, and by the way, do you have something that you’re gonna be able to charge this with? because if you don’t, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem. They shouldn’t let you walk out of the store without buying a little, you know, USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John chargey turd thing for $29 or whatever. It’s only 19 now. You literally
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t charge your phone unless you plug it in somewhere. It doesn’t plug into the wall. It’s got, just got USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John on the end, right? So I, this, this changed to sort of more decontenting. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a time when I think iPhones came with a dock in the box or was that just iPods?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I thought they did. I think the very first iPhone might’ve come with a dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, iPods came with like an inline remote for the headphones and a dock, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they just slowly been removing the amount of stuff from the dock and honestly, in the box. And honestly, I think that’s the right thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do for a variety of reasons. I just wish the pricing reflected it
⏹️ ▶️ John more. I don’t think the pricing doesn’t reflect it at all because you do get double the storage on the Pro ones. So there’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of a trade-off there where it’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve more than made up for the price of the brick with that storage thing on the Pro specifically.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, we don’t know, like is the A14 more expensive to manufacture on this new five
⏹️ ▶️ John nanometer process? And we’re reading like, the cost trade-offs are not clear when the decontenting comes
⏹️ ▶️ John along with a new model, right? Because you don’t know what the cost of these phones would be if they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. We’re just assuming that’s like, oh, Apple just gets all of that as profit, but it’s probably not true, right? Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John if they were selling like, you know, the iPhone 11 Pro and then midway through the year took
⏹️ ▶️ John out the adapters but kept the price the same, then we could just say that Apple’s just taking all of that money or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I think it’s a simplification and a correct reasonable simplification to stop
⏹️ ▶️ John giving everybody a million different headphones and a million different plugs and let people buy it in pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be smarter for them to sell watches in pieces. They have them in separate boxes and now they’re learning how to do returns separately.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, a la carte buying of the components is a more consumer friendly And
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, also environmentally friendly approach. And so I applaud that even if we do feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like we’re kind of, you know, getting a few bucks pulled out of our pockets,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially on the low end phones. But you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the other thing you have to do is like over time, inflation is a thing too. Like you can’t, you know, I think about this whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone talks about $60 radio games for years and years. It’s like, well, $60 is not what it used to be in 1998.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? You say, let’s just keep the price the same, but it’s actually less now because of the magic of inflation.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I’m not super mad about this. I do worry a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John about where people can plug in their brand new phone to charge it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I agree. Speaking of money, something very peculiar has happened this year with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the cost of the iPhones which we were alluding to earlier but never actually spoke about. For, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 12 and 12 mini, if you were to buy one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outright, so a SIM-free model, model, it’s $30 more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the price it would be if you buy a SIM included model from Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or AT&T. Additionally, Sprint and T-Mobile here in the States, also $30 more than it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be from Verizon or AT&T, which is extremely peculiar. And I don’t really know why
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve McLaughlin That’s their preferred partner program. It’s basically just, you know, this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John rich gets richer and you know, whatever business relationship there is between Apple and these various carriers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of them have a worse deal. Money gets passed on to you and like who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it falls into the same category as like being charged activation fees for quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John new lines. Everything having to do with telecom companies is just a mess of fees
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s disappointing and annoying and confusing but almost anything having to do with telecom
⏹️ ▶️ John billing that’s true of and that is also true of you know
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, again, I still think back to the bad old days of contracts and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the current world where essentially all your phones are unlocked for the most part except what was it
⏹️ ▶️ John except for the AT&T one that was like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey AT&T was the.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s that’s almost it. If I recall correctly, because I was just looking at this the other day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you buy a subsidized AT&T phone, then you then it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locked. But literally everything else is not locked.
⏹️ ▶️ John So in general, this trend is going in the right direction, but weird carrier-related
⏹️ ▶️ John Charges and fees are still a thing.
MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We also didn’t mention MagSafe, which I’m actually kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited about. So I, I, I think I might have like blanked during this, this part of the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the presentation, perhaps because I was reflecting on 5g from Verizon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but it keeps on giving, keeps on giving. Um, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess that it’s a couple of things all rolled into one, right? So it’s improved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faster wireless charging. So it’s like, you know, Chi plus plus, but it also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that the phone, if I understand this right, the phone itself has a magnet within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it that you can use to attach like cases and wallets and things to the phone. Do I have that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Yeah, that’s what Apple’s cases do. In fact, like if you think about a phone with flat sides,
⏹️ ▶️ John how would you put a case on it? Like in general, like our existing phones, whatever 11
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever you have, even my XS, The case goes on by sort of wrapping around the front, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how it stays on. Like it’s all, you know, you have to sort of wedge the phone in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the case wraps around the front, and that’s why the phone doesn’t fall out of it. With flat sides, in order
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep the phone in the case, you’d need a case that came up along those flat sides and then turned
⏹️ ▶️ John over the front surface a little bit. It’d have to be like a lip, right? And those little lips are always kind of annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my impression, not having seen anyone or felt one of these in person, is that these magnetically
⏹️ ▶️ John attaching cases either don’t have a lip at all or can get away with having less of a lip because
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that is keeping the phone inside the case is that giant ring of magnets that’s embedded in the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and a corresponding ring of either magnets or magnetic material
⏹️ ▶️ John in the case. And so they stick together and so you don’t need as big a lip, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing they promoted is like, okay, once you’ve got a bunch of magnets embedded in the back of your phone, Yes, you can use it to
⏹️ ▶️ John align to your charger better and that alignment can give you more power. I think these chargers, what’d they say, they were like 15
⏹️ ▶️ John watts as opposed to the first Qi chargers which were 7.5 on the iPhone 10 or whatever. When did the first Qi charging
⏹️ ▶️ John come out? Something like that. Eight and 10. Yeah, so that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing you can do with magnets on the back of your phone is attach other things like
⏹️ ▶️ John they mentioned a dashboard mount for your car. Instead of having one of those like the
⏹️ ▶️ John claw machines where you put your phone in and it goes snap shut like a bear trap and your phone is trapped in this little thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like basically mechanical, friction-based grippy thing to hold your car in a phone mount.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you can have a magnetic phone mount. You can have pop sockets that attach to the back instead of
⏹️ ▶️ John marring your phone with some super sticky, you know, adhesive thing or whatever. You can have a magnetic
⏹️ ▶️ John pop socket, right? All these things sound super cool to me, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the presentation wasn’t over before I started to think about, oh, and by the way, one of the other ones they have It was like a
⏹️ ▶️ John wallet thing where you put credit cards in, the little wallet attaches to the magnets in the back. What I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, how powerful are these magnets?
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do a car mount with it? If I go over, you know, if I go through a Boston pothole
⏹️ ▶️ John that has already bent one of my rims on my car, is my magnetically attached
⏹️ ▶️ John phone going to stay? That’s gotta be some powerful ring of magnets, right? It’s gonna hold
⏹️ ▶️ John the case on? Is that enough to hold the case on it? Maybe it has no lip at all, just
⏹️ ▶️ John the magnets are enough to keep my phone in that case. Or if I, you know, wave my arm because I lose my balance
⏹️ ▶️ John or something and I don’t drop my phone, but I was just holding onto the case, does the phone go flying out of it?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the final thing is that I thought of when I saw the wallet is like, one of the thing I frequently do with my phone now is I
⏹️ ▶️ John put it in my pocket in my new pouch-free lifestyle, and then I put my wallet in that same pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ John And my wallet is full of credit cards. Do I want a bunch of credit cards? saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John laying smack up against a magnet that is powerful enough to keep my car in a car mount, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful enough to hold a pop socket. So when people use pop sockets, like it’s between their fingers or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re just holding the pop socket, they’re relying on the fact that the pop socket is securely fastened to the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not holding the phone. The whole point of the pop socket is it gives you like a handle for your phone. So these magnets have to be very strong.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not want any kind of card with a mag stripe anywhere near those magnets.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you get a case, like these cases that you get that attach magnetically, the cases themselves convey,
⏹️ ▶️ John either have their own magnets or like they don’t, you know, it doesn’t shield your credit, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John credit cards in your pocket along with it from the magnets in your phone because the cases themselves have
⏹️ ▶️ John secondary magnets so you can still use it to align with the Qi charger or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a little bit worried about exactly how magnetic my phone is gonna be because with
⏹️ ▶️ John the uniformity of line, they all have this. This is not just a pro feature. They all have these magnetic things
⏹️ ▶️ John and it seems super cool and it’s Essentially a variant of what I was talking about last show
⏹️ ▶️ John about like what can you do when you get rid of the port? Well, you can have Semi-proprietary charging stuff that also supports
⏹️ ▶️ John Qi but also has magnetically attaching little manta ray things. Well, I Swear
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. I had not read any of these rumors if they had I swear to you. I had no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact the thing I envisioned in my head was slightly different than what they did here but they literally brought back magsafe because
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t make any sense, honestly, because it’s not quite the same thing, but that’s what they had in their brand name bin, and so
⏹️ ▶️ John there we go. Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hell, bring back
⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe. And they did, with about the same amount of reasoning. It’s about magnets, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I am, I have two minds about these magnets. Are these magnets strong enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the jobs they’re being asked to do? And are these magnets weak enough to not destroy all my credit cards?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have multiple issues with this. First of all, most credit cards they’re not using magnetic stripes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore in most places. Like it’s there as a legacy thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco motivate people to put in a few more chip terminals because they have to for lots of other reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hotel room keys is one of the things that, again, I know we’re not going to hotels now,
⏹️ ▶️ John hotel room keys, it’s gonna take a while before they’re all updated to do chip
⏹️ ▶️ John And being locked out of your hotel room is worse than not being able to buy something in the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, although in all fairness, hotel room keys seem to wipe themselves if you breathe on them wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I’m saying. It’s already a hostile environment and I’m gonna put my, oh, give me my hotel key. I
⏹️ ▶️ John stood and put it into my pocket, up it’s dead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Secondarily, some people in the chat are saying that apparently the wallet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing shields the cards that are inside of it. I don’t, I didn’t even know that was possible for magnetism, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I had heard through various people that there is shielding in the wallet thing, which makes sense because they know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna have credit cards. So my question is, shielded how? Is my first question. And second question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s all well and good for the cards that are in my special wallet, but what if I just literally put my actual wallet
⏹️ ▶️ John in the pocket with my super magnet phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so this brings up number three. Actually, I think that, so I know like one of the ways that watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are anti-magnetic for their, to keep their movements from becoming magnetized, one of the ways they do that is by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encasing the movement in a soft iron cage. I don’t know what that means or how that works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s a thing. So maybe they’re doing the same kind of principle here for shielding. So if so, that actually can work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But my final question here is, you put your phone in the same pocket as your wallet?
⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you. Yeah, why would I not do that? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have multiple pockets and that makes one pocket really big and heavy and stick out really far.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, not my pants pocket, my coat pocket. Why is your wallet not in your
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on what season it is. If it’s coat season, I have big coat pockets. I put it there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if you had a wallet that was less than 13 inches thick, You wouldn’t have such a
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. My wallet has slimmed down a little bit, but no, yeah. But because here’s why, because my keys go in my left
⏹️ ▶️ John pocket and there’s no way I’m putting the keys in the same pocket as the phone or my wallet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Keys and wallets can share a pocket. Nothing, a phone gets its own pocket. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want my wallet being, my wallet being damaged by my pointy keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your wallet is being damaged by all the shit that’s inside of it. Are you
⏹️ ▶️ John kidding me? No, it’s not being damaged. I’ve had this wallet since I was a teenager. Obviously it’s not being
⏹️ ▶️ John damaged by anything. You’ve had the same wallet since you were a teenager?
⏹️ ▶️ John learning so many things today. You’ve seen it. It’s a nice wallet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was 30 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a black leather wallet. Are you gonna complain about my wallet? I mean, it’s a little thick. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey slimming down.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know when people lose a lot of weight, but like their skin doesn’t catch up with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my wallet looks like now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wallet. Yeah, it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Yeah, it’s a good thing you’re not having any keys touch it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s still pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Anyway, I’ve been trying to also slim down on the number of credit cards I have in there to try to, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, anyway, yes, it goes in the same, uh, because it’s, they’re both
⏹️ ▶️ John soft, kind of flat things. The, the phone goes screen against my body and in the nice felt
⏹️ ▶️ John pocket and the wallet goes outside of that. Oh
Planned purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so moving on. So Marco, you said you planned to get sitting here now you plan to get a mini But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you didn’t tell us what color you think you’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. I’m actually so one thing we haven’t mentioned I don’t think so is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mini and max are shipping three weeks later and ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three weeks later than the 6.1 inch models that the 12 and the 12 pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I am torn I I think I want the red, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures have been a little inconsistent as to whether the red is more of like a salmon kind of color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whether it’s like a more of like a deep red. If it’s a deep red, I want it. If it’s salmon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color, I don’t. And-
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s the deep red
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because like whenever you do product reds, they’re pretty consistent. If you’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John any of the existing product red phones, this looks a lot like it in the pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s why I think it’s gonna be great. And if so, I want that one. My fallback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably the white. Because I’m still in like a light color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of mood. I’m at the beach, man. I can’t have a black phone. So are you gonna get a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case with this? My plan is no. I wanna see how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is without a case. It does appear from the pictures that they’ve pulled the same finishing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trick as with the 11 series where the pros have brushed glass backs but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-pros have polished glass backs. And as I mentioned last week, polished glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me causes increased grip, whereas the brushed makes it like a little more slippery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think the combination of the straight sides, the polished glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, and the smaller size should result in a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better handhold ability without a case. So we will see how this works out in practice. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope it works out that well, because I would love to not have a case. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ends up that the size is wrong for me for whatever reason, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hoping to be able to use whatever bigger phone I would get instead, probably the 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro or the 12 Pro, I’m hoping to be able to use that without a case as well. But that’s more optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco given how poorly I use the existing 11 Pro without a case. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if I stick with my plan of getting the Mini, I do plan to go caseless. What about you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quick aside, the leather cases are not available right now, which is the case I used to use up until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 11 Pro, and I’m a little bummed out that they’re not available, at least at launch time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently coming around the same, like around that mid-November timescale.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I think it’s been made plain already. I’m going to be getting, or I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoping to get, barring a pre-order catastrophe, a 12 Pro in the Pacific Blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love the midnight green that I have currently, even though, I mean, I like green, but I’m not the world’s biggest green fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that midnight green is excellent. This Pacific blue, I mean, blue is my favorite color,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a very boring choice, I suppose, but I love this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blue. I think it looks phenomenal from what I can tell. I am really looking forward to it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna be getting a 256 gig because my current phone is 256 and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like half full, so that hopefully should be fine. A 256, 12 Pro in Midnight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Blue is the plan. I don’t, I never used to get AppleCare. I did get AppleCare on the 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, which was clutch because if you recall, I shattered the back of it literally the day I got it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey currently thinking that I’ll probably go AppleCare again because I’m probably gonna try to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey caseless, casey-less, but we’ll see where I land on that in the 11th hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and a quick aside, we are continuing with the East Coast friendly 8 a.m. or pre-order time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I am extremely thankful for. We are not paying the price of the 3 a.m. pre-orders
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we did for like five years running. John, what are your plans? Because it is a John Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year. What are you doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting the 12 Pro because the size is, you know, within parameters.
⏹️ ▶️ John I continue to be disappointed by the top of the line phones lack of cool colors. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I guess the blue this year instead of the midnight green or whatever, but you know, all the other options are not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also continue to be thwarted by the marrying of metal materials
⏹️ ▶️ John with colors, right? So I, this happened to a bunch of different phones, but my current thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ John want with this one is I like the stainless steel, but I like stainless steel to just be the plain old silver stainless steel.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you want that, you gotta get white because it’s the only one with plain old stainless steel on it. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get like a blackish one with that stainless steel, right? And I don’t really think I particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John like the white one. Now that is only relevant if I think I’m gonna use it without a case. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as you noted, Casey, the leather case is not shipping yet. So practically speaking, assuming these
⏹️ ▶️ John things are shipped and arrive at times that are proportional to their release,
⏹️ ▶️ John I will have this phone without a case for a while because I do want the leather case. I’ve used it for the past several phones and I like them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m going to get the phone, use it without a case for a little while because my case hasn’t come yet, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John put the leather thing on it. So the model I’m probably gonna get though is I don’t like the gold.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the silver and if I had it in a case, I would never see the white except for the gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John square that pokes out the back of the case. So I’m going to do what I always
⏹️ ▶️ John do, which is, sounds boring and it is kind of boring, but you know, it’s the option
⏹️ ▶️ John that I find the least objectionable, which is the graphite phone and a black leather case in April.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, that’s how I rolled for years and years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years. Yeah, nice. And honestly, I like that on my current phone, I like that look. Like I mind my current
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 10S is whatever the darkest black one was. In a black leather case, it’s a black
⏹️ ▶️ John monolith. The camera that pokes out of the back is also black. It’s a good look, I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t- Oh, it is a good look. I didn’t compromise to get this. I always like the shiny metal,
⏹️ ▶️ John but when I see the shiny metal just sticking out the bottom of a leather case, it’s a little bit jarring.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s like, you know, what I would really want is the magical ability to use this phone without a
⏹️ ▶️ John case and have one with stainless steel surround with a black back. but that doesn’t exist, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going all graphite and leather. I think that makes sense. And 256, I did the same exact thing. I looked
⏹️ ▶️ John up my storage and I’m about 50% storage. So if I got a 128, my phone would be immediately full. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got to go 256.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what’s your plan in that department, 256?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m usually hovering around 128 gigs of used storage. So, and you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Getting a new phone every year, it’s a wonderful luxury. What else is luxury? is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never having to worry about disk space on your phone. And so I figure if I’m going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ridiculous luxury thing for getting a new phone that I don’t really need, I might as well spend the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra, what is it, 100 bucks to make sure that I never see a disk space warning. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, I completely agree. Grandpa Marco’s so weird. He always says disk space on his phone. What is he talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ John Where are the disks? Do they mean the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey cameras? What’s a phone?
#askatp: Sleeve Case?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we don’t have time for a full-on Ask ATP, but I cannot resist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one question from Lou Piper, who writes, is John going to get the new Apple sleeve case to protect
⏹️ ▶️ John pouch, if you look it up, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco most people would think that it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing as a sleeve, because a sleeve is like stiff, you know what I mean? Right, like the phone, like
⏹️ ▶️ John when the phone is not in the sleeve, you can still kind of see where the phone would go, whereas when the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone is not in a pouch, you could wad it up into a ball, and it doesn’t hold the shape or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that case does not appeal to me in any
⏹️ ▶️ John whatsoever. It’s not a pouch, right? It is a sleeve or other kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of case. Although I think Tiff had the most underappreciated joke of
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire keynote live tweeting when she made a joke that neither one of you
⏹️ ▶️ John got about the sleeve case. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco joke? Yes. I got it. Oh, have you played that? It’s happening in my house. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard, I heard on the, we just did an episode about The Last of Us and Tiff said
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t even want to be in the room when she was playing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that game was disturbing, but no. The imposter game around us, above us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever, that’s. Among us, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I thought that was, but it does look a lot like that, you know? So I’m not going to use that sleeve case. I’ve never been
⏹️ ▶️ John into sleeves. That sleeve is not a pouch. And remember, I am mostly, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly off Twitter, not really. I’m mostly off the pouch lifestyle. We’ll see how this goes. New phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John pouch so I don’t need to get a new pouch. Yeah, new pouch, who dis? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna continue to try to be pouchless in these weird COVID times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Apple, Verizon, and the 5G
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Bombas. And thanks to our members. If you wanna be a member,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can join even faster with the new Verizon 5G network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. And thanks everybody. And thanks everybody. And thanks everybody, and we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t mean to, accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech Podcasts. So long.
Episode 400 Spectacular
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey believe you put
⏹️ ▶️ John me in a position to defend Verizon. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you doing this to me? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you brought this
⏹️ ▶️ John on yourself. You could disagree. No, you brought this. I hope you two get a ton of feedback of people saying, the 5G stuff wasn’t that bad, but honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it did not bother me. Oh, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John It did not bother me like it apparently bothered you. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John I have all the things to be mad about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John 5G. That’s so gross. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so, like, I don’t know, a couple of months ago, and I don’t remember how this came up.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we don’t have time for this. We’re just going to have to save it for 4.01. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no, we’re doing it now!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The show’s too long! This is episode 400, it’s important! It’s important,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you gotta do it now. You gotta do it now. Alright, so as I was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple months ago we were talking about oh, episode 400’s coming up, and as it turns out, it was timed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with an Apple event, so thank you, Apple. But John had indicated to the two of us that he wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spend a little time talking about why ATP is worth it. And I’m not entirely clear where you’re going with this, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m really excited to hear about it. about it. So, John, why is ATP worth it? Not ATP membership
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically, just ATP in general. John
⏹️ ▶️ John Greenewald I’m continuing this under protest because I think this episode is already too long. Jim Collison
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Greenewald Second
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, my plan for, and I think this was like a year or more
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, it was like, oh, we’re coming up an episode, whatever. But it’s like, we never do anything for our milestone
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes. And it’s true, we don’t really do anything for a milestone. It just happens that 400 land on an Apple event, which is nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or not so nice, depending on how long the stupid episode goes, and now we’re adding more after
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. But what I thought is like, you know what? We should do something for one
⏹️ ▶️ John of our milestone episodes to celebrate the fact that, you know, the show is still going
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And so here we are in episode 400, and what I wanted to do
⏹️ ▶️ John every couple hundred episodes is, and this is just me personally, you know, Marco Gassi
⏹️ ▶️ John can have no idea about any of this and can do whatever they want related to it or nothing related
⏹️ ▶️ John to it. This is just my thing. you said it like, why is ADP worth it? Or whatever, which makes it sound like it’s a monetary thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t, this is all conceived before we even had membership. It’s basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John what do I hope people get from listening to ADP? Which can be
⏹️ ▶️ John turned to say, why should somebody listen to ADP? Like, you know what I mean? And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna sound like an ad pitch, but really it’s like, from my perspective, what do I think I’m doing here? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what am I trying to accomplish? What do I think this show
⏹️ ▶️ John is producing? And I think that at episode 400, which is an arbitrary milestone, but it’s been a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of years and it’s a good time to reflect on that. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see if there’s a huge mismatch between what I’m hoping to give to people listening and what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John actually getting. But here we are, episode 400.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We do occasionally get emails from people who say that they use our show as part of their sleep timer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John routine and they fall asleep to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think, I don’t think they’re saying it to be mean. I think it’s actually a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey compliment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s definitely one of those like mixed compliments. Like is that a compliment?
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna give them weird dreams though, for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sure. Yeah. I mean, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you want, I don’t know. I mean, Casey uses it for the same purpose as we learned a couple of shows ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kept saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John why is it that turning off the lights helps? He’s like, it’s getting me ready for sleep. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t wanna be sleepy during the show. So why are you trying to make yourself as
⏹️ ▶️ John sleepy as possible when we’re recording the podcast? So you’re closer to complete sleep when the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John ends. That means during the show, you’re getting closer and closer to sleep. And we don’t want that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you not want that? I think you might want that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, that is not one of the things. So here, what do people get from it? What
⏹️ ▶️ John do I hope? Me personally, not Marco, not Casey. They can have their own answers. So like I said, no answer at all. What do I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John people get from listening to A.T. Peet’s? I’ve got three things. This is like a keynote slide here. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re kind of in priority order. But anyway, the number one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I hope people get from listening to ATP, I don’t think most people would guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Window management tips?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. But you’re close. Entertainment. Entertainment,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, well, what do you mean? Like that’s your number one thing? You want to give people entertainment? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing to do with tech. That has nothing to do with anything. Why are you trying to, you know, Entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John is the most important thing that I hope this podcast provides. Now, granted, it’s a weird kind of entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John that appeals to only people who are tech nerds and into tech stuff, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else that I’m gonna talk about, the other two things, none of that matters if people aren’t motivated to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep listening. And most people are not motivated enough by that other stuff to keep listening without
⏹️ ▶️ John it being entertaining. So the number one thing I hope I am delivering on the
⏹️ ▶️ John show that we collectively are delivering to listeners is entertaining you. And like I said, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John weird kind of entertainment. We’re not telling jokes. It’s not a song and dance or whatever. It’s entertaining. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John us talking about a particular set of topics in what we hope, what I hope is an
⏹️ ▶️ John entertaining way. Number two, this is the easy one, information.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously listening to a tech show should result in you knowing more about
⏹️ ▶️ John tech than someone who doesn’t listen to a tech show, especially a tech show that’s so long. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of information here, right? And the main effect in people’s lives
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to have is like when something dramatic happens in the regions, the things that we
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about. Oh, hey, did you hear they’re changing the processors in Macs? And when
⏹️ ▶️ John you hear that from your friend, because they saw it on CNN or whatever, or they found out when
⏹️ ▶️ John they went into an Apple store and someone started asking them questions about Intel and they didn’t know what they were talking about, oh, Macs have
⏹️ ▶️ John new processors now? It’s the same ones they have on the phone? By the time you hear that from someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in the outside world, if you’re an ATP listener, you’ve been hearing about our Macs for like three years,
⏹️ ▶️ John four years, right? You’ve heard about it so much that you’re sick of the topic, right? You’ve heard it from every
⏹️ ▶️ John angle. You’ve heard about like the pros and cons and if it’s feasible and what the trade-offs
⏹️ ▶️ John might be and what the timing might be and just on and on and on. You are more informed
⏹️ ▶️ John about this particular subject area than somebody who doesn’t listen to the show. Similarly
⏹️ ▶️ John for things like the Mac Pro or like the whole problem with Apple and its Pro Macs. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, arguably the show was founded on the problem of the Pro Mac. I remember the original logo with the, the
⏹️ ▶️ John cheese grater Mac Pro with the new label because they had introduced a quote unquote new Mac Pro that wasn’t really that new. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re like, what’s the deal with this? Are they still making professional Macs or whatever? That seems weird
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, not of, you know, very sort of narrow interest. But fast
⏹️ ▶️ John forward a handful of years and the biggest company in the world is having this important
⏹️ ▶️ John round table meeting to describe how they’re changing the direction of the company to address essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John the same problem that we had identified in the founding of the show. If you listen to the show, this is not a surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. What is this Mac round table about? Who cares about Pro Max? What? Again, you would have heard about
⏹️ ▶️ John it for literal years from many different angles. You will
⏹️ ▶️ John be informed, more informed than if you didn’t listen to the show about all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that are going on in tech industry. one is probably the most touchy feely maybe after entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John is insight. So there’s being entertaining and in whatever way that we managed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be entertaining, you know, I’m glad that people find any part of entertaining, but I’m trying, right. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the information, which is easy to convey. You can get that by, you can get that from anywhere. You can read a website, you can, you know, read
⏹️ ▶️ John a tech magazine. You can just follow people on Twitter. You get information other ways. What do we have to
⏹️ ▶️ John offer besides just that information being spewed out and rehashing and, and, you know, just talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about news of the day is insight. What does some hardware or software feature
⏹️ ▶️ John mean for the future of the user experience? How is the industry landscape changing? How does
⏹️ ▶️ John change in one tech sector affect some other tech sector? You know, what does, what does Silicon fab
⏹️ ▶️ John achievements have to do with what you end up being able to buy in the store, the gaming market versus app
⏹️ ▶️ John store, streaming services versus Apple TV versus Apple TV plus, right. changes to
⏹️ ▶️ John the core operating system and the features they affect. Yes, that includes file systems, right? New security features, new
⏹️ ▶️ John languages and APIs, like insight that we can provide because of who we are
⏹️ ▶️ John and our experience and what we know. We’re software developers, we’ve, you know, some of us have sold software for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. We’ve worked in the industry, we know people in the industry. We can not just tell you here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John information, but here is some insight about it. What does this mean? What does this technology or
⏹️ ▶️ John this change this news story actually going to, what is it going to change in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John or in my life today and in the future? So that’s it. Three things that I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m delivering with ATP that I hope we are collectively delivering. Entertainment, information, and insight. If the three of you
⏹️ ▶️ John think we’re delivering like something entirely different, then maybe we’re working at cross purposes. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what I think that we are providing to people over 400 episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John or trying to anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think that that’s completely reasonable and I think I agree with all of it. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as possibly the most touchy-feely of the three of us, I think it is important to recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how incredibly lucky the three of us are that we have an excuse to talk to our good friends once a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then we can actually make money off of that, which is super cool. And I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think about where all of us were on February 7th, 2013.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record seven years, eight months, and seven days ago. Like, that is a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. And we have put out an episode of ATP every single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week for seven years, eight months, and seven days. And that’s something that’s extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important to us, and it’s something that I think that we are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extraordinarily lucky to be able to do. And the fact that anyone listens to us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially at this point in the 17 hour long episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is incredible to me that anyone listens to all three of us. And we are so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lucky to any of you who listen, whether or not you’re a member, whether or not you have purchased anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from any of our advertisers, we’re just extremely lucky to have you. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hope that we’re growing as people over this time, the three of us. I mean, certainly when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started recording this with you two fine gentlemen, I was not yet an iOS developer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was not yet a dad. I was a different human being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven years ago. And I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. It’s just, I was in a very different place in life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now, you know, I’m much, much, much closer to 40 than I am 30. And in 2013, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was I, 30? I was not even 31 yet. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just shy of 31 at that point. So it has been quite a journey. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with what you said, John. And I just wanted to take this one quick moment to say thank you to anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has ever listened to us, who continues to listen to us. Um, it, it is genuinely been one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the great honors and pleasures of my life to be a part of this with the two of you fine gentlemen. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, and I, I’m, I pinch myself regularly because I cannot believe this is my life. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you to all of you, to the two of you and to all of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I, like the reason I wanted to talk about this is like, like the, what, what do I hope people
⏹️ ▶️ John get from it is not to toot our own horn, although episode 400 is some way of celebrating, at the very least, our longevity.
⏹️ ▶️ John As they say in the recent incomparable celebration episode, quantity. We
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco definitely have quantity. We
⏹️ ▶️ John did miss one week in the first year, I believe. Somehow, doing a scheduling snafu, we had a skipped week. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t think so. Yeah. I don’t think we did.
⏹️ ▶️ John The very, very first month. Go look at the gaps between episodes like one, two, three, and four. There’s like a two-week gap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, well, that, OK. So that asterisk. because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we didn’t really embrace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until March or April, thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and episode one was like a half episode because it was like an after show of Neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but we’ve done 52 episodes a year, right? So we’ve done a quantity, but like, I’m not trying to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John this is how awesome we are. I’m saying this is what I personally am trying to do. And it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey is more or less on the same page. It’s like, this is what we are trying to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John To the extent that we are able to succeed enough to get people to continue to listen to the show, we are
⏹️ ▶️ John all eternally grateful. Like, but that’s what we’re trying to do, right? And I don’t know who this
⏹️ ▶️ John is for. Maybe it’s just for me to say out loud, or maybe it’s just for me to express what I’m always thinking when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do this, or just to explain. And maybe it’s just to hear from people who say, that’s not what I’m getting from your show
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. I just, it helps my iguana go to sleep. Like, I don’t even know. Like, well, honestly, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John value you’re getting out of it, thank you. Thank you for listening, that’s great. But here, when I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the show, I’m trying to entertain, inform, and provide some measure of insight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the way I listen to podcasts, you know, I’ve been a heavy podcast listener since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we did the show, for years beforehand, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s always been two kinds of podcasts with me. There’s the kind of bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mass market shows that you listen to for either like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news value or for, you know, quote, storytelling. and this would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big popular public radio style shows, some of the very first big podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like This American Life, that kind of stuff, or shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are very focused on news, things like The Daily or a lot of the slate shows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news shows. And those I listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit of. I listen to almost none of them because what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really am into with podcasts is the other world of podcasts. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco primarily information driven. It’s primarily people driven.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when I listen to most of the shows I listen to, many of them are the shows that, you know, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the listeners listen to, like, you know, John Gruber’s show. The shows I listen to are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually about the people on them. Like, there is so much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the people than about the topics they’re talking about. And so in John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco categorization, that would be the entertainment side of things being number one. To me, that is number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it goes beyond just entertainment. It isn’t just like, you know, comedy hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, no, these are people who I consider my friends, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them are my actual friends in real life. Many of them aren’t, and I just feel like, I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel this great human connection to them because I get to know them. And I tell people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who wanna know about podcasting or who wanna start a podcast, they’re looking to grow their audience or they just wanna know how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always tell them that the subject matter is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what gets people in the door, but what keeps people there is the people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the host of the show, the chemistry they have with each other, their personalities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they show off to the world. I listen to Merlin Mann and John Roderick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk more than I talk to most of my friends. I talk to the two of you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guys, and to the 100,000 people listening in the audience indirectly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than I talk to my own mother or my sister. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy to me to think that, but podcasting is so much about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people, and it’s about that connection you feel to the hosts, it’s about how much you enjoy having them talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to each other and talking to you. And so to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show go for this long, and to have succeeded so much so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And with more to go, like this, to be clear, we’re not ending the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John We’re just celebrating 400. No one
⏹️ ▶️ John was thinking that until you said it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Why’d you have to do that? Well, it’s hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about this kind of stuff without it sounding like it’s an ending.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just the end, we go 400 more. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, but then when we get to 800, everyone’s gonna be like, is this it? Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John God, you said it. And then we do 800 more. You said it years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sequence. Yeah, anyway, point is, I’m really honored and thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our audience that you seem to really like us. Because otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wouldn’t listen to the show just for the information. Because while we have some information, you know, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also BS a lot and we, like, we will, it’s funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like we will occasionally get an email from somebody who’s like, you should stick to tech, why’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you talk about this thing for 10 minutes? And whenever I get one of those emails, again, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t frequent, I think we’ve driven most of those people away by now, but whenever I get one, I think like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have you ever heard the show? How far have you made it? Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often think, is this person, is this their very first episode they’ve heard that they’re not complaining that we don’t just take to tech? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to be. Because anybody who wants us to just be an information dump,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna be disappointed pretty quickly because that isn’t what we do. We do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some segments that are information filled, surrounded by a bunch of BS, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just goofing around with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re calling it entertainment now, Margot, not BS.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, yes. Right. Thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the point is, our show is a lot more than just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information. It always has been and it always will be. And people who want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just pure information, there’s a lot of other tech shows that’ll give you that. You don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us for that. and you probably shouldn’t use just us for that. You come here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us. And for that, I am eternally grateful because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such an honor that so many people wanna listen to hours of us BSing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with each other. That’s fantastic. And I’m just so happy about that. And I’m very thankful for that.