catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

449: An Unclean Mouse

23 Sep 2021

More details about the iPhone 13 lineup, new iPad Mini, and Apple Watch Series 7.

Episode Description:

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  • Jamf Now: The standard in Apple Enterprise Management.
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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Donate to St. Jude!
  2. The nicest Electron app
  3. Sponsor: Stripe
  4. Satellite-phone follow-up
  5. Thick iPhone is thicc 🖼️
  6. Sponsor: Sanity.io
  7. iPhone 13 safe areas
  8. ProRes and pro iPhone movies
  9. Battery life and ProMotion
  10. RAM, clock, eSIMs
  11. Macro camera switch
  12. Sponsor: Jamf Now
  13. A15 performance
  14. Photographic Styles
  15. New MagSafe wallet
  16. iPhone orders
  17. Apple Leather Case 🖼️
  18. iPad power brick
  19. No mmWave 5G on iPad Mini
  20. iPad Mini clock speed?
  21. Golf swing * tennis serve speed
  22. Series 7 fast-charge cable
  23. Series 7: same SOC as Series 6
  24. iOS 15 optional upgrade
  25. Ending theme
  26. John’s mouse update

⏹️ ▶️ John But an unclean mouse is funnier and makes people wait longer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you started out with it was going to be a mouse update, I was not expecting that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was going to be that good of an after show. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. That’s very true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much better than I expected. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some pre-show. Hey, you know what? It is still September, which means it is Childhood

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cancer Awareness Month. And even though RelayFM and all of you have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely done a phenomenal job of raising money for St. Jude, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey always more that can be done. There’s always more. We are insatiable. Just like rampant consumerism,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are insatiable. So hey, if you think that it would be crummy for any child

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to die because of cancer, which I think the three of us pretty much do, you should go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stjude.org and you should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kick in a little bit bit of money, and I will ask Marco in just a moment to repeat his plea, given what week we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are in this month. But in general, it would be a great thing to do, especially if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey American where our healthcare system is utterly broken, to please donate a little bit of money. Any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of money is perfectly okay. Because you know why? Cancer kills more children under the age

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 14 than any other disease. Doctors from all 50 states and around the world,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hello non-Americans, refer their patients to St. Jude because they have the world’s best survival rates for some of the most aggressive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey childhood cancers. St. Jude provides thousands of free consultations for doctors treating children

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worldwide. So hey, again, non-Americans, this affects you too, including kids in your community. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stjude.org slash ATP, if you please. Marco, why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this the best possible week to donate to St. Jude? Could you remind me, please?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you out there, listener, have just ordered a new iPhone, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for reasons I’ve I’ve ordered four, but I don’t… Oh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey my God,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoiler

⏹️ ▶️ Marco alert. It’s not, okay. So I ordered, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brief diversion. No, no, no, no, no, lock it up, lock it up. Concentrate on St. Jude, that’s more important. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I promise you we will dig into this later.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so listener, if you’ve ordered between zero and four iPhones,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I urge you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take whatever you paid for say the sales tax,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the case, or the AppleCare, or if you’re generous, all of those.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Duplicate that amount and give that to St. Jude because what you’ve said, by spending that on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sales tax or a case or whatever, what you’ve said is, this amount of money I can do without.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t even think about it really when planning this purchase. I looked at Apple’s price, it said like, you know, eight and nine or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m like, that’s what I’m gonna pay, even though at the end of the day you’re walking out of there like 1,200 bucks later, right? Whatever that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco margin is that you can kind of just spend without too much of a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit to you, give that to St. Jude if you can. And I know not everyone’s gonna have this. I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not everyone has that much to spare, but I also know a lot of you do. A lot of you out there are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fortunate enough to have that much to spare. So take what you can and give it to St. Jude. And this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will, I promise you, absolve you of your consumerism guilt

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having just bought between zero and four iPhones. So please, listeners, go out there, spend this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco money, give this money to St. Jude. It is the best thing you can do. As we mentioned before, they also accept

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cryptocurrency, and it’s way better to give them cryptocurrency than hold onto it yourself,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they can turn it into real money. Oh, God. We’re gonna hear about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They can turn it into real money that is much more environmentally friendly and useful, and that can actually help research

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and treat cancer. That’s much better than whatever it’s doing in your BitWallet or whatever. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s cryptocurrency, or whether it’s your iPhone tax and case and AppleCare or whatever else, please

⏹️ ▶️ Marco donate to St. Jude. It is a fantastic cause, and it makes such a difference

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in people’s lives, way more of a difference than that iPhone’s gonna make for you. So please donate if you can.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, absolutely, and we should say, at the time of recording, the fine, fine, fine folks at 1Password

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are still the top donors. I have dispatched some stickers to the 1Password folks. I know some of them have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been received, so I know they were very happy about that. Did you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to give them 475 stickers or whatever? No, I did not. I did not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they are leading the charge at nearly $27,000. But hey, you know what? It’s still September. It is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though the podcast-a-thon was last week, which by the way, you should go watch the video, it was excellent. But even though

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s already done, it is still September. It’s still Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. It’s not like childhood cancer just disappears in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey October, y’all. It’s still there. So please, anyone who is willing and interested,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re, hey, if you have $26,922.05, you could be the top donor. It’s a small, small, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even say it with a straight face. It’s a small price to pay, but I will send you stickers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you so desire. So please, stjude.org.at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you please.

The nicest Electron app

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of 1Password, I should note that, hey, if you are somewhat internet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey friendly with the founders of 1Password, you can get some bugs fixed real fast. So I complained very gently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how I couldn’t drag documents onto the Dock icon, and that’s either already fixed or coming soon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I complained about the shaky, the oh, your password was wrong shake, and that’s been fixed. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m feeling real good about this. All of a sudden, 1Password 8 is working great now, which is very exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be kind of funny if after all this kerfuffle about Electron

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, it would be kind of funny if one password ends up being the nicest Electron app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all other Electron apps will use that as an example of like, hey, you know what? It’s not so bad to use Electron because look at what they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could do. Like if they actually just end up making a really good app. It is possible. It’s just 500

⏹️ ▶️ Marco megabytes and uses all your RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a small price to pay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the thing. I’m trying to be nice. That was sarcasm. I’m not thinking of it serious.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, I know. I’m trying to be nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. That’s the one, like, OK, I know that with a lot of care and attention, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make an electron app that, usability-wise, is fine. I wouldn’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even say great, but you can get to the point where it’s fine and nobody cares. But what they do care about is how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly heavy they still are in startup time, memory usage, and disk space.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those three are way worse than native apps most of the time. and I really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes me sad that, like as a nerd, I actually still care about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the size of my app. My app is well under 10 megs, depending on how the app thinning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco process has gone on your phone or whatever. Usually it’s like five megs or less or something. It depends on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it’s happening. But I love having a small app. I value that, my customers occasionally notice,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and when they do, they value it. And it’s so nice to know, even though you’re gonna be downloading

⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple gigs of podcast with my app probably, that at least the app itself is only like 10 megs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I take pride in that, and there are people who notice. And I also take pride in the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you really are low on space, or if you have a small device, like small disk space device,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m not gonna be making your problem much worse. It seems like every app out there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels the need, or feels rather, not the need, but feels like it’s an acceptable compromise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take 300 banks of space on your phone or your Mac or whatever. And that to me, that sucks. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is greedy and unnecessary and sloppy and honestly unprofessional.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wish that the electrons of the world and the people who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it would prioritize that a little bit more. And like, you know, one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that I think would be one way to do this would be have a subset

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of electron that doesn’t use chromium or chrome, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the, the, you know, rendering blob is in the back end, have one that uses the native

⏹️ ▶️ Marco renderer on the platform it’s running on. So web kit on apple platforms,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the Microsoft thing is on Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now you’re going to get all the people who are going to say, well, we can’t because web kit doesn’t implement all of the, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John progressive web application APIs that we need for Electron.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get that, but they could make a wrapper API slash app. Oh, you know, Electron is not just a web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser. It is a wrapper SDK, you know, whatever. So they could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco move that up the stack. They could actually, you know, have a much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighter weight, like core rendering engine and still use web technology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the app and just have a little bit more of a shim layer on top of it. And I think the benefits

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that would pay off greatly. And so I hope that kind of thing takes off because it looks like, look, we’ve,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re all gonna be talking about this forever, but it looks like using web technologies to make one code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco base for multiple platform native apps is here to stay and is going to be an increasing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of our world going forward. So if that’s gonna be here to stay, we might as well make better ones because Electron

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is garbage. And I respect the efforts of people like 1Password who are trying to do a good job

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it. And I know Slack has put a lot of work into this as well. I respect these companies that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re taking this massive pile of crap and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing something good with it. But I also, I hope that we’re also putting, as an industry,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an equal or greater amount of effort into reducing the size of that pile of crap they have to deal with in the first place. And so, hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that moves forward. Anyway, that’s end rant, thank you.

⏹️ ▶️ John We got a URL in the chat from one of the One Password folks. That’s T-A-U-R-I

⏹️ ▶️ John dot studio, and apparently it’s, the slogan on the website is build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop

⏹️ ▶️ John applications with a web front end. So maybe that is like a WebKit powered thing that you’re thinking about. Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John What one pass for folks seem enthusiastic about it. You know, when you mentioned like application size, I’m of two minds

⏹️ ▶️ John about that. On the one hand, I do the whole thing like, of, you know, when I was a kid,

⏹️ ▶️ John I could get a candy for a nickel. Like that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco immediately comes to mind when you talk about my applications

⏹️ ▶️ John are small, they’re, you know, overcast is under 10 megabytes. And I think I have

⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system, my applications and my documents on a single

⏹️ ▶️ John 400K floppy disk. The whole OS, the whole thing, plus Mac Paint, plus all my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Paint documents. 400 kilobytes. But yeah, different times. And but on the other

⏹️ ▶️ John side, in the modern era, of all the sins of Electron, disk space,

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like, is the lowest on the Mac. Just because, yes, it’s kind of ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s 259 megabytes for one password, right? But in the grand scheme of things,

⏹️ ▶️ John that is such a spec on even the smallest hard drive

⏹️ ▶️ John or SSD or whatever, because people don’t install 10,000 applications. And for something like 1Password,

⏹️ ▶️ John where it is like, this isn’t just a random application. This is like an essential application that

⏹️ ▶️ John I use every day all the time, paying 250 megs, even though, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John we know from a technical perspective, it is wasteful. But paying that price for it is the least of people’s concerns.

⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, much worse, because there is much less RAM. and RAM there’s tons of contention for, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because you could run all sorts of stuff and they all want RAM and they’re all, you know, and you never quite have enough of it. Whereas again, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna install a whole jillion applications. Or if you’re gonna fill your SSD, it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be with like media files and movies. And one of those is four gigabytes. Your stupid 250 megabyte application is a drop in the

⏹️ ▶️ John bucket. So I think RAM is a bigger deal. And then of course CPU. CPU is perhaps the biggest deal because

⏹️ ▶️ John that burns your battery, that makes your computer feel slower, right? So in addressing the sins of electron,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would probably tackle them CPU first, memory second, and

⏹️ ▶️ John disk a distant third. But I agree that they all need to be addressed because it is kind of silly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Stripe. If you’re a startup founder or developer,

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kickstarter was actually able to scale to accept payments from 195 countries, all supported by Stripe’s

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco has engineered the world’s most powerful and easy to use APIs, so you can get up and running in minutes, not

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco things used to be before them. You know, payment processing is not an easy thing to do without Stripe.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suggest you look into it, you’ll see it’s not easy to do. And with Stripe, you can accept all sorts of

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they take care of for you. So if there’s some kind of weird verification thing that some payment method all of

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Satellite-phone follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of things from big donors, one of the side perks of being the biggest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey donor even, but for a moment, is that I will be much more likely to include your feedback in a future episode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is from the anonymous troll, self-declared anonymous troll from,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it was one of the first big donations, subsequent to the ATP donations.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was with regard to the satellite capabilities that were coming in the iPhone 13, but never landed, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey clearly means they abandoned ship. It was not a rumor at all, right? Because they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would never get that wrong. But anyways, I was lamenting on ATP a few weeks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back, I guess it was before the event, that, hey, the satellite phone I used many years

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, the antenna was massive. The phone was massive and the antenna was massive.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the anonymous troll pointed out, hey, there’s these things that you can get that are basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sat phones for consumers and even more than that, kind of like pagers, if you will.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s this thing called the Garmin inReach. And if you look at it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s still a big fat antenna by iPhone standards, but compared to what I was envisioning, it is way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tiny, super duper tiny. The antenna specifically, the rest of the device is about the size you would expect.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what’s cool about this is you can send like emails and text messages and whatnot, basically anywhere in the world. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was looking into it just out of curiosity. And you can get a one and done month’s service for $15, which I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think is terrible. I did love, I didn’t write it down here in the show notes, but I did love that they were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying something like, when you send an email, it can take up to two minutes to actually connect and send. Which,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, granted, it’s dialing freaking space. But at the same time, I thought that was quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny. It uses the Iridium satellite network. And actually, a friend of mine, who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco has met many years ago, does this sort of, is in a tangential like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey telecommunications space to satellite stuff. And I was discussing with him that there are apparently several different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey satellite networks that do this sort of thing. The one that Garmin uses is Iridium, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 485 miles up. And I just thought this was a delightful fun fact. And I believe I’m reading from Wikipedia

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. I didn’t cite the source. That was my own fault. I’m sorry. But anyways, due to the shape of the original Iridium

⏹️ ▶️ Casey satellites reflective antennas, the first generation satellites focused sunlight on a small area of the Earth’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey surface in an incidental manner. This resulted in a phenomenon called iridium flares, whereby

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the satellite momentarily appeared as one of the brightest objects in the night sky and could be seen even during

⏹️ ▶️ Casey daylight. Oh God. I just think that’s the wildest story. I think that’s so,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, it’s not delightful, but so delightful. At

⏹️ ▶️ Marco least it wasn’t like, you know, starting fires, like a big magnifying glass on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Earth, like.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right. If it was, do you think they would tell you? Probably not.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Probably not. They’d be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, they can’t prove that it was us. So just tell them there’s a light flare.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I just thought that was super interesting. And again, it’s not really relevant in the term in terms of the iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but, or at least not this year anyways, but I was impressed how small the device again, compared

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to what I was envisioning and especially the antenna was. So I thought that was cool.

Thick iPhone is thicc

Chapter Thick iPhone is thicc image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, every once in a while I will read something in the show notes that I know nobody can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see, but I assure you it’s there, and it will make me literally laugh out loud. And I was looking through the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes earlier today, as I try to remember to do, to kind of get myself prepared for what we’re going to talk about. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a section of follow-up, and this entire episode is likely to be follow-up. It’s John’s favorite episode.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, the section of follow-up is labeled iPhone, and the first bullet is as follows. Thick iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is thick. T-H-I-C-C. And the best part about this is I’m pretty sure this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was John Syracuse’s work. So John, was it you that wrote THICC? Because that is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most delightful thing I’ve seen in a while.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can I ask you something? First of all, when did the two of you first learn that word?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, a year or two

⏹️ ▶️ John ago? Yeah, many years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not many years ago for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, mine was like, I can tell you exactly when it was. It was 2019 at WDC. I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say why because it’s not nice, but that’s when I learned the word. But I’m wondering, do you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider the word thick with two C’s, if somebody called you that, is that a compliment?

⏹️ ▶️ John Sure, I’d take it as a compliment, why not? It’s all kind of it’s kind of thing you can decide.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can decide whether you think that’s a compliment. I’m gonna say yes. I don’t think anyone would ever call me that, but if they did, I would

⏹️ ▶️ John try to take it as a compliment. You of all people, absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you’d ever get that, John. This is never gonna be a problem you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they would just call me thick as in thick in the head. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I wouldn’t take that as a

⏹️ ▶️ John compliment, but it’s kind of hard to know how they’re spelling it when they say it out loud.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’s the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thick. I love, I love, I love so much that you wrote thick, iPhone is thick.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes me so happy.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, so just- John, tell me about

⏹️ ▶️ John this. Thus begins the avalanche of fallout because like we did the event, the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John event show the same day as the event. And so there’s a lot of things we didn’t know and now we know them and soon you will

⏹️ ▶️ John know them too. So the thickness of the phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about the camera bump and the little plateau, the little camera mesa and

⏹️ ▶️ John all the other fretting about that. A bunch of people have some good science in this now. So we’ll start with

⏹️ ▶️ John Ryan Jones, who did a tweet with a graph of all iPhones from the original on that

⏹️ ▶️ John shows the thickness of the phone body, the thickness of the rear camera plateau

⏹️ ▶️ John and the thickness of the rear camera turret, right? In different colors in a stacked bar graph. So

⏹️ ▶️ John like the first three phones, it’s just blue for the phone body because there was no camera bump, right? And then you get up

⏹️ ▶️ John to the six and that’s the first one with a bump, but it doesn’t have a Mesa or a Plateau, it just has the

⏹️ ▶️ John turret, right? And by the time you get up to the 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, there’s blue for the body,

⏹️ ▶️ John red for the Plateau, and then pinkish for the camera turret. So you get to

⏹️ ▶️ John see the overall thickness of the thickest part, and also how much of each phone’s thickness

⏹️ ▶️ John is made up by the Plateau and the turret or whatever. really gives a good perspective on the phone. You can see how

⏹️ ▶️ John dramatically the phones got skinnier down to the, basically the five.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then they slowly got thicker and then they started to get thicker in increments and they got thicker and thicker and they’re still, you know, there was

⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of little dips here, but anyway, it’s a good, check out the graph. We’ll put the link in the show notes and Marco will probably

⏹️ ▶️ John make it the chapter. Bottom line is that the, if you, if measured at the thickest

⏹️ ▶️ John point, which is of course the camera, the 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max are

⏹️ ▶️ John the thickest iPhones since the five, basically. No, wait,

⏹️ ▶️ John actually more than that, thickest iPhone since the 3G, I think. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s a big

⏹️ ▶️ John camera bump. We don’t, none of us have our phones yet, right? No, no.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco As a matter of fact,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. No, don’t even. I would really love to just be in Louisville, Kentucky right

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, because both our phones, spoiler alert, both our phones are now sitting in Louisville,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as with probably most Americans’ iPhones. And I really wish I could just kind of saunter on down there and be like, hey guys,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you wanna help me out? But no, none of us have our phones not until, in my case, probably late Friday.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, Marco, well, you probably won’t get yours until after the weekend, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m mostly gonna get mine after it arrives on a boat on Saturday.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, okay, there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I do think though, like, do you think, I mean, having none of us actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco handle these phones yet, do you think this is a worthy trade-off of, Like, you know, do you think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth making the phone thicker? However many C’s you spell that with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like for the camera, even like the phone body itself is not super thick. But, you know, for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera to continue to get larger and protrude out, do you think it’s worth it? Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got to say, I do like I to me, this is like, I mean, again, not having handled these yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is absolutely worth it. And even though this one has gotten so much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thicker that even in a case, people like the reviewers who have Apple’s cases,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in a case, it doesn’t sit flat on a surface anymore. Like, because the lens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John protrudes so far.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not even close. Yeah, we knew that was gonna be the case. The only chance it had was that the bump was gonna be so big

⏹️ ▶️ John that it itself would be a stabilizing factor. Like, for example, imagine the camera bump went the full width of the phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John then it would lay stable, not flat, but it would lay stable at least. This isn’t quite wide enough to do that

⏹️ ▶️ John either from reports.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but still, I’m very happy to see, when it comes to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera lens and optics and sensor size and everything else, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really is limited by how much physical size you’re willing to give something, and depth is one of the key

⏹️ ▶️ Marco limits. When you’re dealing with these optics, that’s why a lot of Android phones that have these super zoom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, they have to use a periscope kind of arrangement to turn the optics to the side to just achieve more depth,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get longer zooms and everything. For this, Apple’s not doing that yet, if ever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re achieving more depth, larger, wider apertures,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger sensors, and to do that, you need size, as simple as that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so Apple could have said, well, in order to preserve our ultra-thin, ultra-light design language

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our products, we’re just not gonna make the cameras bigger beyond a certain limit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they would stick out too far. And instead, they’re not saying that. Instead, they’re saying, you know what? know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera is so important to people and to us and to the sales of these devices that we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are going to let it stick out even to a somewhat ridiculous level. You know where it’s it’s almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doubling the thickness of the phone at this point. But it’s like you know we’re we’re going to let the camera stick out to a ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco level because it’s that important. And and even though it violates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our principles of like perfect physical design in certain ways, this is important

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to break those expectations. And so But frankly, I am happy that Apple makes that decision.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like in this case, if you want a thinner, lighter, you know, shallower

⏹️ ▶️ Marco depth phone in general that doesn’t have as much of a camera mountain sticking out of the back of it, you can get the non-pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. There’s two options for you, they’re both great. And if you want the best camera ever, well, you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to spend some depth and they give you that option. And that’s great too. And I’m really happy to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see that that’s an option. While I’m ranting about this, by the way, I wanna do some quick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow up. I had a little bit further down, but I’ll move it up here. We got a number of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing in to school us on lens optics, things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we had said things in the event episode about how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the apertures have gotten bigger in certain places, they’ve gotten smaller in others,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I was using that as a measure of quality, image quality. And a number of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote in to tell me all sorts of stuff. And let me tell you, about half of you are comically wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very easy to learn a little bit about optics and about lenses because you bought an SLR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once and you think you understand everything. I know, I’ve been there. My understanding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this is only slightly higher than you in certain areas, you half of these people out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And I’ll let you self-select and decide which half you’re in but I don’t know that much about it either.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I do know though is that optical quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a lot to do with how much light you let in. And so while yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is possible to have very high quality, say, f2.8 lenses,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as honestly, almost every professional working photographer is almost always shooting a lens that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no faster than f2.8, because it’s almost always a 24 to 70 or a 70 to 200. Like almost all pro photographers are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using those two lenses most of the time. So obviously I know that it is possible to have high quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lenses that are f2.8. I also know that both the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco F numbers and the equivalent optics and the equivalent background blur amounts also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change with sensor size. That’s why if you compare

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what f2.8 looks like on a full frame camera, if you compare it up to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that looks like on a medium format, or if you compare it down to what looks like on a crop sensor or down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say a phone. They all look different because that number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not the only number that matters. That number is actually derived from other numbers and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all matters. All these numbers mean things. And so if you think this is gonna work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone numbers, the way it works on your SLR, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t. It’s a different,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a whole different scene here. And then it’s also different because the way optical quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is achieved, You know, we’re not maximizing all 12 megapixels most of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco These lenses do not resolve that sharply, I would imagine, ever, let alone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time. And if they did, they would probably require a ton of light to do so. So, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also all sorts of software processing that’s going on here, and the way you give that software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing more to work with is by giving it more light, and by having those, having bigger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor pixels and everything else. So this is a very complicated issue, but when I said the f 2.8

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens the f 2.8 aperture of the 77 millimeter equivalent You know 3x optical lens on the pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I when I am expressing concern about that not being a ton of light coming in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That concern is warranted and I guarantee you when we see those images We will see and I think the reviews do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat back this up We will see that in medium to low light you’re not gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you really want out of that 3x lens. That being said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am really looking forward to having it anyway because that’s a lot of reach and based on both the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews and common sense, when you give it a good amount of light it looks great. So it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, but do a little research before you make assumptions about SLR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera lens equivalents, especially in regard to aperture because it does not work the same way. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more light coming in is better. And so the F 2.8 equivalent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3x lens is not going to produce as good images as that 1x lens with its whatever it is F 1.6

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever it is I forgot but it’s not gonna be as good as that because it’s not letting in nearly as much light

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna have to do a lot more ISO hiking to get acceptable shutter speeds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know for stopping motion like it’s gonna be a whole thing as you know SLR people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you know you have to really crank up the ISO and then and do more noise reduction to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture stuff with smaller apertures. So anyway, all that is to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s complicated and the 3X lens is not gonna be as good as you think necessarily, but it’s still gonna be great to have it and I’m looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it.

⏹️ ▶️ John To drive that point home, I just put a picture in both the chat and our Slack if you wanna take a look at it. This is a picture

⏹️ ▶️ John where you will see, I think what most people recognize as background blur. This photograph

⏹️ ▶️ John was taken at F2.8 on an APS-C size sensor. It’s not even a full frame sensor.

⏹️ ▶️ John try taking a picture at f 2.8 with your iPhone when you get it, you will not get these results.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and this also, I mean, this looks like it’s awfully, um, I mean, to get that amount of separation at f 2.8, I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyeball this and just say it’s probably something like a 90 millimeter equivalent, maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, very close, very close. Um, it is, I think if I’m reading the metadata in the glass

⏹️ ▶️ John app correctly, it is, uh, 62 millimeters, but that’s on APS-C. so it’s 93

⏹️ ▶️ John millimeters full frame. Yes! All right. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very impressive. Just a quick aside related to this. I think we might have brought this up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the show a couple of months back, but there’s an individual whose name I will absolutely butcher,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I will not even try to pronounce it, but this person has written or created

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some really phenomenal interactive animated web pages. One is about cameras and lenses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how they work and so on, and another is about the internal combustion engine. Both of these are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very long and involved and fascinating and well worth your time. So if you want to learn more about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how cameras and lenses work or internal combustion engines, we’ll put links in the show notes because they are very,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very well done.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. We need to talk more about phone thickness because believe it or not, we’re not even done with that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey item. Oh yeah. Well, and actually to answer Marco’s question, which was, you know…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have an answer to this question

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco too. Go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead. I’m the chief derailleur in chief.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. We’re never going to get through this episode. Oh my gosh. Anyways, your question was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, basically, is this increased thickness worth it, specifically with regard to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the camera? And, you know, I was thinking about it as you were talking, and early on, when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone would agree that iPhone cameras were improving, but were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not great, you know, this is, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly when I feel like they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey moved from garbage to at least passable, and then from passable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to good, I would say has only been in the last two, maybe four years tops. But anyway. When

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did they add autofocus? Was that like the iPhone 4 or 4S? I don’t recall.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say that was a huge jump.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, it’s been better every year, but certainly, you know, you look at early Instagram pictures with granted, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instagram butchered them in its own ways, but even the source of an Instagram picture of that era, you know, a 3G, 3GS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, they were not great photographs. But anyways, in my personal opinion,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They, their iPhone photos are pretty darn good. They’re not perfect, but they’re pretty darn good,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially if you’re not trying to do something super computational like portrait mode or whatever. Anyway, so with that in mind,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that the camera or cameras, I guess I should say, are very, very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good, I think it is worth the increased thickness. I am okay with my thick boy iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it’s for either battery life, actually it’s another thing, battery life or for improved

⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera, I don’t know, fidelity, quality, whatever. If it was thicker for other silly reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I don’t know, just to make up a BS idea, like what if the Taptic engine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like super thick and they said, well, screw it, we really want this super fancy Taptic engine, now we gotta make everything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey big too. That would not be worth it to me. That juice is not worth the squeeze. But if you tell me I gotta make this camera

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plateau with, I love camera turret as well, the plateau with the turrets on top,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, again, not having handled these, I think that juice is worth the squeeze. I think that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is worth it to me because as much as I do love having what I call a big camera, which is actually not that big

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a camera, um, I do love having it, but it’s unwieldy and I don’t have it with me all the time. And we’ve made

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this point a zillion times on the show and we’re not the only ones to make it. But you know, having an iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, or any phone that shoots decent pictures in your pocket always is amazing. If you have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pets, if you have kids, or if you’re just like documenting your life, even without either of those things. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth it, especially these days when the cameras are getting so darn good. John, what’s your two cents?

⏹️ ▶️ John So I agree that it’s worth it for the line of cameras they put out this year, because it separates the Pro from the regular

⏹️ ▶️ John and like Marco said, if you don’t like that big lump, you have a choice. The other one that is

⏹️ ▶️ John in most other ways, just as good a phone has a slimmer camera and still the

⏹️ ▶️ John slimmer camera is also better than it was last year. Like the one X camera is, you know, has a higher, a bigger aperture, right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they have sensor shift and all that, right? So it’s great for this lineup, they made the right choice.

⏹️ ▶️ John As I said in the last show, again, still never having handled these phones, my wife’s phone is

⏹️ ▶️ John on the way, she got the 13 Pro. I think their problem, Apple’s problem,

⏹️ ▶️ John they have two problems here. One is I think they’re at the natural end of the design of putting the cameras

⏹️ ▶️ John in the upper left corner of the phone. They need to revisit that, especially on the 13 Pro, the camera

⏹️ ▶️ John plateau is more than half the width of the phone. it is no longer in the corner in any sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is just, it is on the back of the phone, that’s true. And it’s not centered, that’s true, but it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John really in the corner. So they need to revisit that. And the second problem they have is, if they follow a typical Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John pattern of passing this down the line, this big giant plateau starts

⏹️ ▶️ John to become a problem when it is, when it filters down and you no longer

⏹️ ▶️ John have a slim camera choice. And to that end, Marco briefly alluded to this when we were talking about this before,

⏹️ ▶️ John The rumors are that the iPhone 14 will go with an internal periscoped system. Like that they

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t, they’re not gonna make it any thicker that like, if you need to get thicker than this, we need to do a periscope. And people are wondering what

⏹️ ▶️ John that looks like, like a periscope in a submarine where you’re looking into this little tube and then there’s a tube

⏹️ ▶️ John vertically and then it goes out the top. Imagine that big vertical tube in a submarine periscope

⏹️ ▶️ John is laying down inside your phone. It’s to be able to get more distance between the sensor and the place where the light comes

⏹️ ▶️ John in. And rather than getting more distance by making this plateau taller and taller, they get

⏹️ ▶️ John distance by laying it down and using a series of mirrors inside the phone. Who knows, we’re year

⏹️ ▶️ John out, are year out rumors worth anything? It’s hard enough to get the rumors when you’re six months out, but

⏹️ ▶️ John for what it’s worth, the year out rumors about the iPhone 14 show it with a flat

⏹️ ▶️ John back, and the only way you’re gonna get a flat back on a phone, on the top end Apple phone, is if

⏹️ ▶️ John they do Periscope stuff, because it’s not like they’re gonna say, oh, we changed our mind, we’re going back to crappy cameras. Like, they’re not gonna do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s a possibility in terms of where do they go from here, they’ve maxed out the

⏹️ ▶️ John plateau. But I think the problem is like, if that happens, like, okay, and then the iPhone 14

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro has a flat back and they’re all periscope lenses, I don’t wanna see this giant lump

⏹️ ▶️ John wandering down the line and just becoming like, cause I don’t want it to feel like punishment to get

⏹️ ▶️ John the cheaper phone, like, oh, I get the cheaper phone and it’s got this giant ugly camera bump. The new ones have better cameras and they’re flat

⏹️ ▶️ John on the back, right? Because getting the current 13 non-pro doesn’t feel like a punishment

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s got a good camera, it’s better than last year’s camera in a bunch of important ways, and it’s slimmer.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s a compromise that makes more sense to me. And by the way, the final bit in here, Adrian Weckler had a

⏹️ ▶️ John photograph, I’m not sure if he took this photo or if it’s from Apple’s website, but it shows,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think, what is this, the 13 Pro versus the 12 Pro side by side. And you can see

⏹️ ▶️ John that, of course, yes, the 13 Pro camera wonk is bigger than 12 Pro, we knew that already, but also the 13 Pro itself,

⏹️ ▶️ John the body is a little bit thicker as well. That’s true of almost all the phones this year. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John marginally thicker. The body part is marginally thicker than the other ones. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a move that I can’t get behind because it gives you more room for more battery, maybe more room for that 120 Hertz screen, who knows.

⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever they need more room for, by all means, yes, please. Take the extra half a millimeter.

⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody will notice, nobody will care. And yes, the phone gets a little bit heavier or whatever, but the battery life is well

⏹️ ▶️ John worth it. So to answer Mark’s question again, yeah, totally worth it this year, but I worry about the future. And I really

⏹️ ▶️ John do hope that they come up with some kind of solution. It doesn’t have to be Periscope. They could decide the solution is instead

⏹️ ▶️ John of having a camera lump, we’ll have a camera top half of the phone, which like I said, lots of Android phones do that right now.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that’s perfectly fine too. Like where your phone will have a thick half and a thin half, that

⏹️ ▶️ John will lay flat, not flat, but that will lay stably on a table. And it gives you even more room to work with. Who knows

⏹️ ▶️ John what they could do with all that space. So I say, go for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, the folks at Halide, I think that’s how you pronounce it. I might have that wrong, but anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a really good third-party camera app. They put together a evolution of the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera bumps on Twitter, which we will link to, which was very well done and unsurprisingly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very thoughtfully designed, and it’s worth taking a look at. I thought it was pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like a monochrome line art that I assume is to scale showing the evolution from the camera bumps. Because the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 6 was the first one to have a camera that stuck out from the phone at all in any way. And you could see how

⏹️ ▶️ John it went from one little thing sticking out, to two, to two vertically, to a giant square, to a giant square

⏹️ ▶️ John that looked like a stove, and like, you know, you can see. Yeah, things are getting,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you’re getting more and more circles because the LIDAR sensor is there and the flashes on low plateau, yeah.

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iPhone 13 safe areas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along and away from the cameras, Jeff Hackworth writes, as expected, the iPhone 13 devices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the same screen sizes and safe areas as the equivalently named iPhone 12. The notch is narrower

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a tiny bit taller, but the safe areas were far enough away for the safe areas to remain

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unchanged. So the safe areas, this is parts of the screen that Apple says, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you probably don’t want to put stuff there because it’s up in the horns, if you will, or generally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey areas where you don’t want to put your user interface. But you can do it if you really, really want to. And we had,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not just the three of us, but in general, the people had wondered, well, are the safe areas going to be different, which would cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers to potentially have to rejigger their user interfaces. And according to Jeff, no, that is not the case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there are some images in the tweet, which we will put in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to be clear, the system frameworks, like the system navigation bars and everything, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all automatically stay out of the safe areas. And so you would only, this would actually only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a problem if you would like really heavily customize an interface or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface controller to manually avoid the safe areas and had hard-coded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their values instead of just calling the system and saying whatever the top safe area inside is, you know, move the bar down this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount or add as much padding, whatever. And not only do most apps not do that, but it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to, you know, to code that correctly. It’s like to do it the wrong way is actually more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. So most apps will have no problems whatsoever won’t even notice.

ProRes and pro iPhone movies

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Robert Spivak writes as a techie amateur photographer I think the ability to shoot in ProRes even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 30 frames per second is awesome for simple reason I can continue to learn about color

⏹️ ▶️ Casey grading while actually being able to do it on a totally flat video without buying a thousand dollar External recorder for my already

⏹️ ▶️ Casey multi thousand dollar quote-unquote big camera Corollary to your reality check on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hollywood indie films being shot in the iPhone. It’s not one guy with iPhone running around It’s an entire expensive film

⏹️ ▶️ Casey crew with as many as 10, 20, or even 50 or more iPhones. And they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey solve the file, or they solve the problems of file transfer speed and downtime using brute force. Throw money at the problem,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get more phones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a typical, you know, movie production way to do it. Like, Oh, it takes so long to get everything on the phone. What are we going to do?

⏹️ ▶️ John 50 phones and a bunch of people done. Yes, it will take hours to get the footage

⏹️ ▶️ John off, but we have an intern for that. And another interviewer, another, another one just bring me a new, fresh iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ John refresh one terabyte iPhone. The cost of that is nothing compared to the cost of like one, you know, red camera.

⏹️ ▶️ John The thing about ProRes being like, oh, it doesn’t seem like it’s a worthwhile thing, as a learning tool, that totally makes sense. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what if you want to learn about color grading? What’s the cheapest way you can do that? Now, one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to

⏹️ ▶️ John do it is actually with an iPhone. You do have to use Apple’s native editing apps,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t think third party ones know about this whole… Well, I guess the ProRes is fine. They don’t know about the depth

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, which I would argue that you shouldn’t bother trying

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to

⏹️ ▶️ John learn if you’re into serious filmmaking because it’s not really relevant. But yeah, for calligraphing, the fact that you’ve got a little tiny thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John can shoot ProRes is kind of cool.

Battery life and ProMotion

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, battery sizes are going up. We’ve made a few mentions of this already. And the Verge had a really nice chart

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, you know, the new phone, what the capacity is, what its direct predecessor was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then what the increase in percent increase were. So the the 13 mini went up 9%, 13 went up 15%, the 13 Pro 11%, 13 Pro Max 18.5%. Hoo boy. Those are some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey big batteries. I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, we’re starting to see the results now like the reviews coming out. But the

⏹️ ▶️ John battery increases are no joke and in particular I wish I’d pulled this stat I didn’t get a chance

⏹️ ▶️ John to do it. Gruber had in his review on the pro phones the pro

⏹️ ▶️ John the 13 pro and pro max that have the high refresh displays they support promotion

⏹️ ▶️ John when promotion well when 120 Hertz came to Android phones very often there was an option to turn it

⏹️ ▶️ John off because it could really drain your battery if you left on 120 Hertz all the time right and so like oh these pro phones

⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve got 108 Hertz because it’s a pro feature, but boy, I’m worried about battery life. Well, as we discussed

⏹️ ▶️ John last time, it’s yes, they go up to 120 Hertz, but they also have variable refresh rate, which can save

⏹️ ▶️ John you a lot of energy. And the place where that shows up in dramatic fashion is if you’re, let’s say,

⏹️ ▶️ John sitting on public transportation or a plane flight or something, watching a movie on your iPhone movies,

⏹️ ▶️ John most movies, unless you’re Peter Jackson, are at 2430 frames per second.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when you’re watching a movie with a frame rate like that, the pro phones will refresh

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen 30 times a second instead of 60 or 120 or whatever. Whereas if you watch

⏹️ ▶️ John it on the non pro phone without promotion, they’re at 60 hertz all the time. So every single frame

⏹️ ▶️ John is being refreshed onto the display twice pointlessly because there’s only 30 frames per second in the movie, but your phone

⏹️ ▶️ John is like 60, 60, you know, doing 60 frames per second. And so the difference, hopefully Casey has

⏹️ ▶️ John looked it up by now, the difference in streaming video view time for

⏹️ ▶️ John the 13 Pro against the 12 Pro is dramatic. I think it might be double or close to

⏹️ ▶️ John double. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost doubled it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Almost doubled your so if you’re watching it’s like how many hours of movies can I watch on this plane flight on my phone

⏹️ ▶️ John before my batteries drain? Almost doubling for an 11% battery

⏹️ ▶️ John size increase. How do they do that? Don’t refresh the screen so much because when you’re watching video, that’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John all you’re doing. It’s like decompressing the video and even doing the networking is nothing for

⏹️ ▶️ John the A15 system on a chip. It’s not even, it’s like ho-hum, it’s like yawning, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because they’ve got hardware decoders for the codecs that are supported, like it’s extremely bad. The most expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you’re doing is running the screen and presumably playing audio. And given that

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re basically, they can probably, it probably takes straightforwardly half the energy to refresh

⏹️ ▶️ John it 30 frames per second instead of 60 and everything else is a rounding error. So if you’re worried, I

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna get the pro phone, it’s got all those cool features, but it isn’t gonna take a hit in battery life. it’s the opposite. If you pay more for the Pro phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what you’re doing, you may get dramatically better battery life if you’re really taking advantage of

⏹️ ▶️ John the screen refresh. And as we said last week, the same goes for if you’re just looking at a web page and not scrolling.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s refreshing at 10 Hertz instead of 60. That’s a big battery savings.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So reading from Gruber’s review, the 13 mini went from 10 hours to 13. The 13 went from 11 to 15,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but here we go, buckle up, the 13 Pro from 11 hours on the 12 Pro to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 20 hours on the 13 Pro, and then the Pro Max goes from 12 hours on the 12 Pro Max to 25

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours on the 13 Pro Max. So you could sit there, hypothetically,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey streaming Netflix or what have you for 25 hours on one charge of your battery.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which

⏹️ ▶️ John is double what you could do with last year’s phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you aren’t using the built-in speakers, because that’s a huge drain.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Physically moving air really kills your battery. Physically moving photons also kills your battery, apparently.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I feel like this is one of those areas where, as technology goes on,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s harder to give useful battery life estimates, because it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco becomes increasingly about picking up little efficiencies here and there. And therefore,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery life of something becomes much more dependent on what you’re doing. Like, you know, it’d be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing, like if you were like, you know, trying to measure the battery life of like, you know, a Game Gear. Well, it’s 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes, you know, whatever it is. If you’re lucky. Yeah, 10 minutes, there goes six

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AA batteries. Or is it six or eight?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Atari

⏹️ ▶️ John Lynx was similar in battery life, not counted in seconds.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, why would anyone use Sega hardware? It was all garbage. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. Moving on. So like, you know, back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, like, you know, things were simpler. You know, processors were always running at a fixed clock speed, and they were,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like, you know, whatever you were doing, like the screen was always using the same amount of power, no matter what it was displaying, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like stuff like that. And now, we’ve picked up all these efficiencies as technology’s gotten better and more complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so now, like, you know, when you look at something like video playback, well, that depends on a lot of things. Is the codec

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being hardware accelerated? That matters. You know, like part of the A15 changes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the A14, is they’ve added some more hardware acceleration for video.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I don’t know enough to know what that’s for. Some of it’s probably for ProRes, but what if some of it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like AV1 or whatever other codecs people are starting to use that are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not H.264, H.265, then if Apple can hardware accelerate that, then that’ll improve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the efficiency and therefore battery life of whatever new services or non-Apple services

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be using that kind of stuff. Maybe it’ll help with YouTube, maybe it’ll help with zoom, who knows. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s that kind of efficiency, hardware acceleration. Then it’s all right, well, now do we have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lower frame rate than 60 hertz to display? Then on the 13 Pros, now you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clock down the screen and save some screen refresh power there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, these are OLED screens. So if it’s showing dark content versus light content,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna save some power there. Like it’s so dependent. And also now, you know, like with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new promotion stuff, the screen is refreshing in other apps based on not only how much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is changing on screen, but also how often you are touching the screen. Because when you’re touching the screen, it has to ramp

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the refresh rate to track your finger faster and have smooth motion if you’re like scrolling through a list. So again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna depend even more now on how much are you touching the screen? What are you watching? Are you watching, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are constantly moving like video? Or are you watching, you know, a scrolling, you know, text or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed image view? in which case it can have more opportunities to save power. So we’re moving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just further down this road of the battery life is going to be increasingly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like shrug emoji, just, well, just try it and see how it goes for you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s gonna depend so much on what you’re doing. And this is only increasing over time.

⏹️ ▶️ John And another thing people in chat room pointed out is I’m not sure if the iPhone 13 Pro has this,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m gonna assume it does. Is the LTPO screens low temperature?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or

⏹️ ▶️ John polycrystalline silicon screen. My question is, okay, the 13 Pro has it, does the 13 have it too

⏹️ ▶️ John or no? As far as we know, no.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That seems to be like the difference between like whether something can have promotion or not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is whether it has the LPTO OLEDs.

⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, if it’s only in the Pro phones, that is another sort of blanket across the board power

⏹️ ▶️ John savings because the whole, one of the advantages of LTPOs is it takes less power to run the backplane

⏹️ ▶️ John behind the screen or whatever. So yeah, just, I

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like it makes sense to me when the more expensive fancier phone has better

⏹️ ▶️ John things in it. Like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, that sounds ridiculous, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, if you pay more, you get the fancier screen and you get more battery life and you get 120 Hertz, like, yeah, it

⏹️ ▶️ John is easier to explain what you’re getting with the 13 Pro versus the 13 than it was

⏹️ ▶️ John with the 12 Pro versus the 12.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say, I will disagree with something John said, you know, 15 hours ago at the beginning of this topic,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was you said that the gains on the batteries were substantial. And I would say, honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mini only going up 9%. I don’t think it’s enough.

⏹️ ▶️ John But like you just said, it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re watching movies on a plane, it’s huge. If yeah, if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just browsing the web, oh, it’s a, you know, single digit percent. But in terms of absolute time, Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John estimates are like you get like one extra hour on the mini or something, and it’s like web browsing test.

⏹️ ▶️ John one extra hour, that’s significant.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, but I think if the Mini’s battery life was not enough for you before,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s unlikely that this is going to make a difference.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m mostly just setting aside the Mini because nobody buys the phone and you’re not even buying it again this year.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But for the big phones, you get like an extra two

⏹️ ▶️ John hours or something or extra one point, like even just one extra hour on a phone really

⏹️ ▶️ John makes a big difference in terms of making it, like if you’re, the difference between

⏹️ ▶️ John running out and having an extra hour, if you’re anywhere close to making it through the day

⏹️ ▶️ John is a huge difference. And I think my 12 Pro battery life is great, granted I don’t really go anywhere, but I

⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s great. But when my phone is approaching zero, if I’m out doing something,

⏹️ ▶️ John if at that moment I said, what would you give for one extra hour? I would say, yes, I would pay for a new phone for that. So if you’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ John a half an hour or 15 minutes or whatever, but if you’re getting double for watching Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ John plus an extra hour in your average day or an extra 1.5 hours or whatever, I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty significant.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but if and for the record if the mini was offered with the pro camera system, I probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still would have gotten it

⏹️ ▶️ John that would be hilariously lopsided.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It would just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be the it would be go across the entire back like just the whole width of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John back. It would be 75% of the width.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why that’s what’s so awkward about their

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco design. It’s like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not in the corner anymore. Nobody puts his cameras in a corner. I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco finally got the reference.

⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, isn’t it? You carry your watermelon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a decent movie. I don’t love it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John as much as everyone else does.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s decent. You’re such a… Hard critic. I’ve only seen it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey once and I actually think Marco’s right. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re both wrong. It’s an amazing movie.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just arguing with Snell about real genius earlier tonight, so we can move on.

RAM, clock, eSIMs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, john, do you want to run through this like specs gobbledygook that’s in the show notes?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, sure. This is still an open question. I didn’t get any kind of confirmation of it because phones still aren’t quite

⏹️ ▶️ John in people’s hands or whatever. But there were some things that I saw early on someone speculating the 13 pros

⏹️ ▶️ John clocked higher than the 13 in terms of megahertz on the system on a chip. Don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I guess we’ll revisit that if anyone knows for sure let us know. But of course, probably by next week, people will turn the thing open

⏹️ ▶️ John and let us know for sure. One thing One thing we do know is same as last year, the 13 has four gigs of RAM

⏹️ ▶️ John and the 13 Pro has six. It’s exactly the same as it was with the 12, 12 Pro. So another

⏹️ ▶️ John thing you get on the Pro is more RAM, which is nice. Apparently they come with dual eSIMs

⏹️ ▶️ John now, which is important for people who want to be able to not deal with a physical SIM and have

⏹️ ▶️ John two eSIM thingies active. Given the messed up situation with carriers in the US, I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John even sure if I can use the eSIM, but I do like the idea of going to eSIMs. having a SIM

⏹️ ▶️ John card slot at all on the phones when we have this eSIM technology seems to me to be barbaric,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but that’s carriers. That’s carriers for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hard disagree, because one of the things that I love about just moving a SIM from one phone to another

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that generally speaking, I can A, handle it myself, B, not have to rely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the carrier at all, and C, don’t get charged the completely stupid like 25 to $50

⏹️ ▶️ Casey upgrade fee every single year, every other year, what have

⏹️ ▶️ John you. but you’re just complaining about carriers there. Like technologically speaking, there’s no reason any of that has to be true.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is true, I agree with you, but it’s because carriers are evil and stupid. But like, I want to live in a future where

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have to have the little magic plastic thingy with the metal things on it and a tiny little slot and a tiny

⏹️ ▶️ John little paperclip tool that comes with all of our phones. And so I really do hope that we get over this hurdle

⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually, kind of like back when, you know, all our phones were locked and everything, it took a long time for us to get over that BS.

⏹️ ▶️ John That was entirely carrier manufactured BS. That’s the type of stuff we can overcome with policy

⏹️ ▶️ John changes over time. And, or like even just something as simple for the old folks of having

⏹️ ▶️ John our phone numbers be portable. That didn’t used to be a thing, young kids. It just became

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing because people complained, right? So carrier BS, telecom carrier BS can,

⏹️ ▶️ John with many, many decades, eventually

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey be overcome.

⏹️ ▶️ John And having the technology in place to say, you know what, we don’t need your little plastic card anymore, just change your policies so they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not stupid. And we’ll just do everything in eSIMs and everything will be automatic. So we’re not living there yet, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John glad to see that dually sims are supported. And for people who live in the more civilized world, I think dually sims will

⏹️ ▶️ John already be convenience for them.

Macro camera switch

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s see, so lots of the reviews that are coming out now have pointed out that

⏹️ ▶️ John on the 13 Pro, the switching from the 1X camera to the macro lens,

⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re like going really, really close to something, is kind of jarring. Like you look in the viewfinder and

⏹️ ▶️ John the phone will automatically say, I know you have the 1X camera selected, but I’m gonna stop using that camera

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m gonna switch to, what is it, the ultra wide that does macro? Yes. I’m gonna switch to the ultra wide and put it in macro

⏹️ ▶️ John mode. So it switches cameras on you without you knowing and without the UI

⏹️ ▶️ John reflecting that. And what you see through the viewfinder goes through this jarring transition where it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John ooh, oh, now you’re looking through a different camera and like the background jumps and it looks weird. We’ll put a link to a YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John video so you can see it in action. But almost everybody who’s reviewed the camera has said, that’s kind of weird.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it doesn’t make for a pleasant experience. And it basically reframes your shot a little bit too while you’re zooming in and

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t control it. Like it changes to the macro lens when it thinks there’s a thing too close

⏹️ ▶️ John to it. So that’s kind of crappy, but already based on all these reviews, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John has said officially that they are going to release a software update that lets you enable or disable this auto switching. So if

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t like the auto switching and you just want to control which camera it uses yourself, you can turn that off. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John I probably will turn it off because if I want a macro shot, I know I want a macro shot, I will enable it or go

⏹️ ▶️ John to the macro camera or whatever. I don’t like it trying to switch for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it depends for me on like, what is the behavior? So if, you know, assuming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the ultra wide lens is always capable of focusing down to two centimeters,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is great, like if it’s always able to do that, and you know, just if you get close enough, it does it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then if you have to switch over to the ultra wide to have that close focus capability, that would be kind of nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you know, I saw the video clips of the people who show like, you know, what happens when it jumps over, and it is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say it’s inelegant. And so if they can in the future do it without that kind of jump,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. if this is what we have to live with to get macro, again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s inelegant, but I’ll live with it because macro focusing distances are very, very close.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it isn’t just if you wanna take a picture of a butterfly or whatever, it’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very useful in everyday situations. Scanning QR codes or magnifying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco text, taking the picture of the label on the back of your wifi router so you can then go type in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco password somewhere. There’s all sorts of useful little times like that where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having closer focusing distance will be very helpful. And so if I have to tolerate the little jump,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s inelegant, but I’ll take it because the utility is worth it. But if there’s ways to avoid that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even better.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think that having it auto-switch by default is probably the correct default because people won’t know about it otherwise.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m, what I’m mostly worried about is like, oh, my finger accidentally goes in front of the phone and it thinks something

⏹️ ▶️ John is in macro range and switches like sort of false starts or sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John gear hunting in automatic transmission parlance where you’re like, you’re right at the edge of the distance and it’s like a macro

⏹️ ▶️ John 1X, macro 1X, like it needs to be worked out a little bit. And we’ll have to see

⏹️ ▶️ John once we get the phones if the auto switching is easy to

⏹️ ▶️ John trip up, like by accidentally having something pass in front of the lens and switch you to the macro, which will just be a mess.

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A15 performance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, tell me about A15 performance.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a big question. The first one we have in the follow-up here is

⏹️ ▶️ John in a very early article from TechMeme. It’s linking to a semi-analysis

⏹️ ▶️ John sub stack that says, here’s a quote from the thing, Apple in a first reported no CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John gains for the A15, likely because of the engineers’ exodus to companies like Nuvia and Riveos. So

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a whole big story about how Apple has this huge brain drain in their chip design

⏹️ ▶️ John staff. Like a hundred people have left Apple’s chip design place to go work at other places or run their own startups,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is a thing that has happened. They’ve lost a lot of people because once you’re extremely experienced and

⏹️ ▶️ John know what you’re doing, the temptation to start your own company and do your own thing is

⏹️ ▶️ John very real and that’s, you know, that’s, that’s Apple’s challenge to overcome. But apparently Apple has lost a lot of good people

⏹️ ▶️ John to that. But the other part of the thing of saying, Apple in a first has reported no CPU gains.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Apple didn’t really, as we talked about last week, didn’t really say much specifically about the A15. They just

⏹️ ▶️ John compared it to chips that are way slower than it. And then we tried to do back of the envelope math to figure out how much faster

⏹️ ▶️ John the A15 is than the A14. But this was the first story of like no CPU gains, right? Now that people

⏹️ ▶️ John have them, reviewers have them, and they’ve been testing them a little bit, we have some numbers. So here’s Ben

⏹️ ▶️ John Bajoran. He has a big article about it, the A15 performance. you can read about it. They have some

⏹️ ▶️ John graphs. One of them shows for the past five years, Apple has had an average of 19% GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John gains year over year. But for the 815, Apple has increased GPU performance by 52%.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So normally

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a 20% increase and this year it’s 50%. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no surprise why extra GPU core. Like GPUs are embarrassingly parallel. If you want to make them go faster,

⏹️ ▶️ John you add more GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very easy to add more GPU. And so they, it’s not many more core, They wrote a four core GPU and they went

⏹️ ▶️ John to a five core, but hey, big bump. But on top of that, the A15

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU also has new features. It has an increased core count, which I just said. It has increased

⏹️ ▶️ John F32 math rate per core, lossy renderable textures that save memory and storage bandwidth, support for sparse

⏹️ ▶️ John depth and stencil textures, and a new SIMD shuffle and fill instructions. This is from Gokhan

⏹️ ▶️ John Avkarogullari, who gave me all this information about the GPU. and

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple itself has a tech talk video. Like they put up these little videos, they’re kind of like miniature WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ John videos. They have a tech talk called, Metal Advances in A15 Bionic that goes over a lot of these features.

⏹️ ▶️ John So not only does the A15 have another GPU core going from four to five,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you get the pro phones, although the non-pro ones have five too. One of them is just broken.

⏹️ ▶️ John But GPU performance is basically a double the normal year over

⏹️ ▶️ John year increase for GPUs on the iPhone. So that’s all good news, but what about CPU? So what Jason

⏹️ ▶️ John Snell says is, while the last four processor upgrades have averaged a 20% speed boost

⏹️ ▶️ John in single-core performance, on my scorecard, the A15 is only about 11% faster than the A14. At

⏹️ ▶️ John multi-core performance, the speed gains are even more meager, about 4% compared to average gains of around 22% every

⏹️ ▶️ John year for the past three years. So the A15, much faster

⏹️ ▶️ John and better and bigger GPU, you know, a very big GPU increase. Single core, 11%, 10%,

⏹️ ▶️ John but still not zero. And then multi-core only about 4% because it has the same number of CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John cores. So the A15 cores, the A15 is better

⏹️ ▶️ John than the A14. A lot in GPU, not so much in CPU, but still

⏹️ ▶️ John it is better. So the original tech meme story of no CPU gains, not true at all, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to see that in a graphical form, Mac Rumors has a story about

⏹️ ▶️ John it and there is a graph from, who is this from? This is Ben Bajoran’s graph, I think, showing single

⏹️ ▶️ John core percentage increase over time, starting with the iPhone 5S,

⏹️ ▶️ John plus a little line graph showing you what the percentage increase is. And yeah, this is a little bit of a

⏹️ ▶️ John down year, but in the overall graph, you can see their system on chips are still getting better.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the final bit here from our friend DHH at Basecamp,

⏹️ ▶️ John he did a tweet this afternoon, the fastest single core performance for JavaScript in

⏹️ ▶️ John any computer at any price is, drum roll please, the $499 iPad mini

⏹️ ▶️ John with an A15. This is bananas. Now why is that? We just got done

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey saying, oh, the A15 is only 10%

⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the A14. Yeah, but the A14 was really fast. The

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, this is in one particular JavaScript benchmark, you know, setting aside how representative this is. Obviously DHH

⏹️ ▶️ John cares about it because Basecamp has a web app and they have like web apps like the Hey Email app and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ John they care about JavaScript performance and apparently they care about this one benchmark. And in this one benchmark,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at the number three fastest computer is the MacBook M1 using Chrome.

⏹️ ▶️ John The number two, iPhone 13 Pro. And the number one device, iPad mini

⏹️ ▶️ John A15. And this is not a list of Apple devices. This is a list of like, at any price, any computer

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you can buy. Single core JavaScript performance. If you go down, I forget where it is, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John how many items is this? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, around item 16 or 17 is the first

⏹️ ▶️ John Android phone with a score of 84. The iPad mini has a score of 245.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, the iPad mini is the fastest single core JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ John performance device you can buy at any price from anybody. It’s faster than the M1 MacBooks, certainly faster

⏹️ ▶️ John than all the Intel ones. If you look down, there are some Intel ones, I guess, in the top 10. The iMac 3.8 i7 has a score of 150.

⏹️ ▶️ John Again, iPad mini 245. So is the A15 a good chip? Yeah, it’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John good. Are the A15 cores good? They seem pretty good. If there’s an M2 and it uses A15 cores, that

⏹️ ▶️ John will be a good thing for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s been interesting seeing more so right after the event, all the kerfuffle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, oh, Apple didn’t make any improvements. What are they doing here? I hear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea behind that, but I can’t help but wonder, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you look at all the departures that have supposedly happened from their chip team,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then on top of that, we’re still waiting for what I would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey call the real MacBook Pros and for, you know, potentially an iMac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a bunch of other, you know, Mac hardware. And if it really is the same team now, which I have to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey assume it is, what if they just kind of cruised on the A15 and they really dedicated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of their time on whatever’s coming up for the MacBook Pro that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to Insta-buy. And obviously I won’t know, I can’t know until we see what happens, and I will never know if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re related events or not, but if I were to wager a guess, I think what’s happening is that they’re just trying to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put out the biggest fire, which is getting chips for their forthcoming MacBook Pros.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard to know how they’re prioritizing things internally, but I think the explanation for the A15’s performance delta

⏹️ ▶️ John to the A14 is as simple as saying that they knew the A15 would be manufactured on the same process as the A14.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when you’re on the same process, when you don’t have a shrink, when your transistors don’t get any smaller, you are very

⏹️ ▶️ John limited, especially in a phone, to what you can do. Because, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the bottom line is you have a power envelope, and if you’re at the same process size, it’s kind of the same power envelope. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, do exactly what you did with the A14, but do it faster, but use the same

⏹️ ▶️ John amount of power or less. And you’re like, well, if I have a shrink, I can do that. That’s the whole point of shrinks. but if I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have a shrink, so I like, if I could have done that, or wouldn’t you think I would have done it on the A14? So it’s very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John to eke out extra performance. Not impossible, because you can see here they’re doing it, but it’s very difficult to eke out those

⏹️ ▶️ John huge, you know, oh, 30% faster this year, 20% faster in single core performance without also

⏹️ ▶️ John having a shrink. So why is the A15 only, you know, 10% faster in single

⏹️ ▶️ John core than the A14? Because it’s also on five nanometer and you know, what else are you going

⏹️ ▶️ John to do while staying within that power level? But as I was trying to emphasize with the iPad mini thing, like why is the iPad mini

⏹️ ▶️ John on top? Maybe it’s clocked higher, maybe it thermal throttles less. Like the iPad mini is obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John a friendlier thermal environment than the phone, just cause it’s so much bigger and there’s so much room

⏹️ ▶️ John for heat to dissipate and everything like that. And you know, it’s not that much faster than the iPad for some

⏹️ ▶️ John of the scores are 245 for the iPad mini and 238 for the iPhone 13 Pro, right? But the point is 10%

⏹️ ▶️ John faster than an A14 is phenomenal. It’s the, right? It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, it’s only 10% fast. Yeah, it’s 10% faster. Intel chips, if they got 10% faster, year over year we used

⏹️ ▶️ John to celebrate because it was so rare. So I, you know, I’m not disappointed in the A15 performance in anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited about the possibility of having A15 cores in an M2

⏹️ ▶️ John in like next year’s MacBook Air redesign that we talked about a few shows back.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We shall see.

Photographic Styles

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, photographic styles, John. We

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mention it all last week. It’s the thing where you can say like, I like my photos to be contrasty or I want them to be cool

⏹️ ▶️ John or warm or, you know, it’s kind of like applying a bunch of different settings

⏹️ ▶️ John to all the photos you take, which is a nice touch because iPhones take iPhone pictures. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very pervasive in the Apple world. If you take a picture with your phone, I see this all the time because I use Apple, you know, I have an iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John and I also use Apple photos. If you take a picture with your iPhone and then you load that picture

⏹️ ▶️ John up in Apple Photos and you click on the little like magic wand thing that says, just make my

⏹️ ▶️ John picture look nice, Apple. And it’s an iPhone picture. It says, it does what Fonzie does in

⏹️ ▶️ John front of the mirror in Happy Days. Neither one of you knows this reference. There you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey go.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Hey!

⏹️ ▶️ John What Fonzie does in the intro to Happy Days is he goes up to the mirror in the bathroom

⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s got his black plastic comb out of his back pocket.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And he goes and

⏹️ ▶️ John puts his two hands up to, he goes and puts his two hands up to his hair, to his greasy hair, to like, I’m gonna comb it with this black,

⏹️ ▶️ John my black plastic comb. And he goes about to comb it and he looks in the mirror and he says, ah, you know what? I already look

⏹️ ▶️ John great. Hey, and he doesn’t comb it. That’s exactly what Apple Photos does. When it’s easy, you take a photo on

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, it’s like, adjust your picture. Hey, it’s already great. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t change

⏹️ ▶️ John anything. I mean, maybe it did, like, because it already, whatever adjustment that little magic thing was gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John do, your iPhone already did. Your iPhone is very opinionated on how it interprets the incredible mess of

⏹️ ▶️ John noise that comes off the sensors from these cameras. And that opinion has been like the way iPhone pictures

⏹️ ▶️ John look and photographic styles finally lets people have some say in that and say, I don’t like the way

⏹️ ▶️ John they look. I think they’re too cool and I wish they were warmer. I think they’re too warm and I wish they were cooler. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re too low contrast and I wish they were higher. I’m not sure how flexible this feature is,

⏹️ ▶️ John but literally doing anything to sort of be able to change like across the

⏹️ ▶️ John board, how your pictures look, I think is a good idea. And I saw that picture, the thing I thought of TIFF because

⏹️ ▶️ John Tiff has her own personal photographic style. If you’ve seen a lot of her photography, you can pick

⏹️ ▶️ John it out. Tiff does that manually because it’s the Tiff style, right? I don’t think photographic

⏹️ ▶️ John styles can match the Tiff style. I don’t think there’s any chance in hell it could do what she wants to do to the pictures. But in

⏹️ ▶️ John that vein of having a personal style of how you want your pictures to look, it’s great

⏹️ ▶️ John that the phone is starting to go in that direction for people who don’t have Tiff’s photo retouching skills, or maybe don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even know what their taste is, but having three or four settings so they can flip through and say, oh, I like this. And they just turn that

⏹️ ▶️ John on. And from that point on, all their pictures are slightly warmer and they’re just happier with their cameras.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a good idea.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, me too. I am all for this feature. Like, I think this is great because I remember,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was only a month or two ago when we had friends visit. And I talked on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show about how like, one of them is a really good photographer and was using her own camera, like a standalone camera.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that I noticed that the way it just rendered colors contrast was just different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the iPhone. And it was, you know, in addition to being a really nice camera, it was also just refreshing to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different balance of, you know, choices there being made by that camera. It was, it was a refreshing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change of pace from my photo library, which is almost 100% iPhone pictures. It was like they stood

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out and it was, it was cool and nice. And so to be able to tweak this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for yourself and for your own photos just a little bit, not, you know, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t go, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, too severe with any of the adjustments here, but to be able to just tweak things slightly for your own preferences and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a little change them over time or change them for different settings. I like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really like that. So this I feel like can can reduce the amount of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sameness among what everyone sees and does and produces. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always a welcome change in my opinion. You know, like one, One of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco downsides of Apple making such great products and taking over so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of certain industries or certain demographics, or at least everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know, at least one of the downsides of that is that everyone has the same stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone has the same silverish computer with the Apple logo

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the black keyboard, and everyone has the same three or four models of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, that’s pretty much what everybody has. They all look similar, they’re all similar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors, they all do similar things, and they’re all great. Everyone’s wearing the same watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re all great, but a little individuality would be nice when things are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that successful and that ubiquitous. It’s nice to be able to have individuality in some way. This is why I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always pushing for them to have more colors in the products, more custom watch faces, stuff like that. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco individuality is always a good thing to have, and as their stuff has taken over and gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so popular, individuality has often suffered just by nature. So something like this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where, okay, now everyone isn’t shooting the exact same iPhone pictures.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone’s pictures can look a little bit different and still be good, not look wrong or not look over-processed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They can still be good just making different choices, having different priorities, having different looks. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I very much welcome.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I heartily agree on that. And I think that’s why widgets were and remain so popular is because it is, granted,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not the same kind of individuality you’re talking about in that it’s not externally visible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the same way, but it’s customizing your software life to be more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you. So yeah, I completely agree.

New MagSafe wallet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last episode we were speculating that the the physical wallet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can attach magnetically to your iPhone that it It has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of find my technology and we figured out what happens is when you disconnect it from your phone your phone reports into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mothership that oh I was at such-and-such a location when it gets disconnected and Snell writes that the new iPhone 13

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wallet has an NFC chip inside to enable its find where detached from my phone feature It turns out you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can use this feature with the iPhone 12 models. The magic is in the NFC chip, not the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was news to me. And that’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he’s got a whole article about it giving more detail than just this tweet. But yeah, it’s just an NFC thing. I will reiterate my

⏹️ ▶️ John anger that the solution to the problem of a wallet that keeps falling off your phone is to make

⏹️ ▶️ John it easier to find after it gets lost rather than saying, maybe we shouldn’t have a wallet that magnetically connects to the back of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco our

⏹️ ▶️ John phone. Although on that front, some of the people who have the new phones

⏹️ ▶️ John and the new wallet, I’m not sure how they have them already, maybe they’re reviewers, but anyway, there are some reports that everything is stronger.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have stronger magnets in the phone and in the wallet, and it is harder to detach than it was.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is it harder to detach than a wallet case though? Still don’t think that’s a great product.

iPhone orders

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it’s worth, our cases arrived yesterday, I believe. I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey opened either of them. I actually think I’m going to return the Apple leather case that I bought. Oh, we should probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey say what we purchased. I guess we kind of obliquely did. We never got to Marco’s whole situation,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so maybe we can slot that in in a moment. But I bought a 256 gig,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, Sierra Blue, iPhone 13 Pro. Aaron got a 256 gig, whatever the silver is. Is that not champagne? What’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey silver this year? Starlight or whatever was it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there you go. Thank you. I got one of those. She’s got the, I forget the official term, but basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a light pink silicone case. Silicon, silicone, I always get it wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Silicone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I said, silicone. Thank you. And then I ordered the Apple black leather case,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know if I’m going to actually even open it. I’ve tried at the recommendation of Paul Kothasis.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is it? It’s a, shoot, I don’t have it in front of me. The, stalling for time, Nudient,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a very funny word. NUD IENT case I have not received yet and probably won’t for another week or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, but I’m going to try that because it comes in a vaguely similar one of the options is a vaguely similar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar blue to the Sierra blue. John, you mentioned what Tina’s getting. Can you repeat that for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, please?

⏹️ ▶️ John She got a Sierra blue 13 pro 256.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And

⏹️ ▶️ John she ordered she ordered two cases because she likes to have different styles. Unfortunately, she ordered two iPhone 13

⏹️ ▶️ John cases. So those had to be returned. Whoopsies. Be careful when you’re ordering. She showed them to me and said, these

⏹️ ▶️ John are the wrong cases, aren’t they? I said, they sure are. So then she reordered. I believe

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re both, I can’t remember. I think they’re both silicone. She was picking based on color, whichever whichever one’s had

⏹️ ▶️ John the two case colors she wanted. She got two of those. And we also got the little battery, the Apple stick

⏹️ ▶️ John on battery pack thing, which I told her she would be disappointed in. And she listens to ATP. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that bad because you don’t understand that the battery she has now is gargantuan. It is bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John and it it doesn’t come off. And I was trying to say, remember that episode? It’s not like you’re gonna be able to take this battery pack, slap

⏹️ ▶️ John it on the back of your phone for five minutes and get a bunch of charge and then take it off. It’s gonna be on there all the time and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s smaller than your current battery. So be prepared to be disappointed, but she’s gonna try it. So that’s what she’s got.

⏹️ ▶️ John I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey she could just stop poking Manning all the time. That would also be a solution.

⏹️ ▶️ John She was angry about Apple is another thing. I think we mentioned on the show, this stupid policy that Apple has.

⏹️ ▶️ John She ordered all this stuff all at once in like one big pre-order thing. But then of course she had to return the 213 cases. so she just went

⏹️ ▶️ John to the physical store to return the 15 cases. About there like, oh, you can’t return that until

⏹️ ▶️ John your entire order has arrived, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like, you can’t return it to the physical store

⏹️ ▶️ John because the phone hasn’t gotten there yet, so we can’t do it because the order hasn’t, so she ended up like, she

⏹️ ▶️ John had to leave the store without giving them back the cases and then get like a shipping label from Apple and send, it was

⏹️ ▶️ John annoying. Like they have that policy of like, the address, maybe it was someone who wrote into us saying they

⏹️ ▶️ John address your order as an entire thing It’s not like you can piecemeal mess with individual parts of it, especially

⏹️ ▶️ John if some of it hasn’t arrived. So that was a little bit annoying. She came back from the Apple store kind of angry about that. But anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Understandably.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, seriously. Wow. All right, Marco, how did you end up with between zero and four iPhones?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is happening over there?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t that interesting of a story. So basically, so iPhone ordering time is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the time that I have to drop my kid off at school. And so I dropped him off,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went outside, and before I could get home, it turned eight o’clock, so I just stopped in front of the school

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and took out my phone and just, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco had, and you know, Tip was at home doing work stuff, so I didn’t want to disturb her, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was tasked with the annual commitment of ordering two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones, you know, the big phone for her and the little bit less big phone for me, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I opened up my phone at the right time and the pre-approvals are just not there because, oh well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John neato. They were hard to find. When my wife was trying to do her order, she handed me her phone

⏹️ ▶️ John and she launched the Apple Store app. She handed me her phone and said, where the heck are my orders? And I was like, uh, tap and I

⏹️ ▶️ John found them. I don’t actually don’t even remember where they were, but it’s not obvious.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they were supposed to show up in like the landing page, but that was only, I think, after

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pre-orders had opened. And of course, because Apple stinks at web services, it didn’t really work for a lot of people, including me, if I remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And you had to go, I’m doing this off the top of my head. You had to go into the store app and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the tabs at the bottom will end up putting your profile

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a button in the upper right-hand corner, like a picture of your profile or whatever. And if you drill into that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you scroll a ways and you can finally find your stupid pre-orders.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You would think they would put it front and center since obviously time is of the essence. Obviously they’re trying to get you to spend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey money. The information architects at Apple, I would love to have a sit down with them over a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of alcohol because,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh my gosh, that’s not that’s not information architecture problem. I think it’s probably like a why does nothing work on the store when

⏹️ ▶️ John on launch day because like you know everything is all slammed and so I bet it wasn’t supposed to work that

⏹️ ▶️ John way but in practice it did and I had to furiously tap around on the app before I could

⏹️ ▶️ John rematerialize her preorder. Oh and by the way, speaking of speaking of the preorder thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John just to remind everyone that DTK discount that I have that I fought to get back. Oh yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t can’t even try to use it with this, because I have no idea what that would

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mess well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reorder. It’s like I’ll get to that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, here we go. All

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, so I’m standing in front of the school just trying to order things on my phone through the apple store app, because I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know like first of all I’m I’m trying to order an iphone pro and an iphone pro max at lunch time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we both wanted the new blue color and I knew like odds are if something’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to sell out first, it’s going to be that blue max followed by the blue Like those are gonna be the ones that saw it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. So I was rushing. I’m like, all right, you know what? My pre-orders aren’t even here. Fine. I’ll just go through and order

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new. So first order mine because hey, you know, order is privilege. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first order mine. And again, like we’re not talking about multi-item carts here. No case.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just like order the phone. Boom, boom, boom, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Yes, go. Oh God, I forgot to agree to the terms.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fine. Agree to the terms. Go. Okay. Oh, Apple pay failed. Try again. Okay, it works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Throw the fork away. Just do everything again. Tap, tap, tap, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I want the Macs, whatever else. Now in that rush, I was able to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two phones with day one delivery. Great, so all right, get on my bike, ride home.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco After I’m home, now I’m like, all right. What I actually want is not two fresh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones that have no idea about AT&T and everything else. What I want is for one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those, Tiff’s phone, to be a trade-in to replace her existing one. So now it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, all right, now I got my definite day one orders in. Now that I’m home, 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes later, let me try, can I place a second order with Tiff’s phone that’s like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace this phone on my account kind of order so the trade-in is easier to deal with, and then I can cancel the first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco order. So that goes through, but there’s a weird, and again, even 10 minutes later,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprisingly, the Max, in the nice blue color, was still available for day

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one delivery. So I’m like, great, okay, lucked out. So from Tiff’s phone, we placed a second

⏹️ ▶️ Marco order that’s gonna be like the one that we hopefully keep. That’s great, okay. Got the trading, got everything set up properly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on her phone through her Apple Store app, okay. I don’t wanna cancel the first order

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until like 24 hours from now, just to make sure this actually is gonna go through.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then I thought, well, look at my luck. I actually have Apple gift cards to spend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my phone, now like 15, 20 minutes later, my phone is still available

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for day one delivery.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I went and created a new order for my phone as well using my DTK discount

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I figure this is clearly so I went went to my MacBook Air like you know doing it all like in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer way like the through the web store which is totally different than the app back end. So I’m like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right so I use my DTK discount to order myself a phone and got $500 off that’s fantastic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know so now I have four orders But I didn’t want to cancel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those first two until, you know, the next morning. This is last Friday.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew it was a few days away from shipping. It should be fine. Well, these orders went almost immediately

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the, like, preparing to ship status. And you can’t cancel phones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the preparing to ship status.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And by the way, I would

⏹️ ▶️ John remind you that you also can’t cancel or shouldn’t cancel that phone that you use the DTCA discount for because

⏹️ ▶️ John then you will lose the discount.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. going to cancel that one regardless, but I can’t anyway, because they all went almost immediately into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco preparing for ship. You can’t cancel that without contenting support. So I content the web support and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s, you know, well, we can try to put in requests, but we really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just initiating returns. So you might actually receive these, and then you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to immediately return them, or they might catch the return in the shipping process and just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never ship in the first place. So I still have four orders total, all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of of Vick’s Shade preparing to ship and all of Vick’s Shade delivers Friday.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t get those mixed up when they arrive at your house because it may not be obvious which one of your phones is

⏹️ ▶️ John the one that has DTK and I again, I will emphasize you do not want to return the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong one. Yeah, I know from your horror story, I heard that. So I’m like, alright, so I know, hopefully I’ll be receiving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly two phones and it will work itself out. But if not, it will be some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco logistics. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John And I didn’t use my DTK discount for two reasons. is I didn’t know how to do it from the app,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is where we have that staged pre-order. That’s why you did it on the web, I imagine, because the whole DTK discount is this weird thing, and

⏹️ ▶️ John they want you to go to URL and add a thing to cart. Maybe you can do it from the app, but I didn’t want to risk it in the rush. And the second thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ John because this is my wife’s phone, she ordered it from her existing phone that it’s replacing, just like you did with TIFFs,

⏹️ ▶️ John just because it makes everything more convenient. But the code thing, I’m like, is that tied to my Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John ID? Is that tied to my developer account? Too

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey many questions. And

⏹️ ▶️ John we do have, she’s gonna get a watch too. So we’re gonna use it with the watch, because I am gonna buy the watch quote-unquote for

⏹️ ▶️ John her. You know, I’ll buy it through my Apple ID because the watch doesn’t really matter. You can, anyone can buy the watch. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John screwed up by carrier crap. So I do still plan to use the DTK thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John It is still burning a hole in my pocket, but I’m going to use it very carefully and deliberately. and currently the plan is to use it on a watch.

Apple Leather Case

Chapter Apple Leather Case image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will also echo Casey’s complaint about the leather case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year. So normally, okay, I’ve been caseless Casey-less for my Mini, because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful, and I love the aluminum sides and the tacky glass back of the non-pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. You love dropping it on the ground, we know. Only a couple times. But this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I’m like, alright, I’m getting a bigger phone now, it has the fingerprint sides and the slippery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, because pro, I guess. So, all right, I might as well go back to the land of cases.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when I use cases, my favorite cases have always been the Apple leather cases. I wish I liked the silicone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because silicone cases are more practical. So much better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey colors, so much better colors and cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Way better colors, I’ll get to that. But yeah, so yeah, like 10 bucks cheaper, 20 bucks cheaper, and they,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I live in a place with a lot of water and surfaces that are always wet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, having leather cases, I always will develop like, you know, spots on the leather from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this one time I set it down on a drop of water on a wet counter or something like that and then it stains it forever or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would like the more practical material of silicone. The only problem is I hate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco having the silicone case go in and out of jeans pockets because it just catches and it pulls the whole pocket

⏹️ ▶️ Marco liner out. It’s just not a good… But this time I look at the colors that are available

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my blue phone and the case colors Apple offers for the leather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case this year are tan, gray, green, and two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shades of purple. So bad. There’s no blue like what?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I guess blue is a popular enough color to offer the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only like reasonable color of your pro phone that’s not like a shade of black or white

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s blue, but not popular enough to offer a blue leather case.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ridiculous. And of Of course, previous years cases won’t fit it. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordered the, I can’t bear any of these leather colors. I ordered the silicone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the bird blue was, it looked pretty good. But I’m gonna try silicone to see if I can get used

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it, but I’m not hopeful.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very curious to hear how that goes for you because I agree wholeheartedly that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey silicone cases are much better colors, they’re much cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they don’t feel quite as heavy, but not in a physical sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I don’t know, they just feel more slimming, but it’s just, I don’t know. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not for me, generally speaking, for all the reasons that you enumerated. So I’m curious to see how my Nudient

⏹️ ▶️ Casey case turns out. I, again, I think I’m not gonna get it for another week or two or something like that. So I’m briefly going to be caseless, caseless,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which if it’s anything like my 11 Pro, means I will shatter the back within that time before I actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the case that I’ve ordered for it. But nevertheless, I have AppleCare, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it shouldn’t be a problem. But yeah, I wish they had better options for the leather

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cases and that they were cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I also ordered the Nudient case, by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ John No lip at the bottom of your third-party case?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it completely encapsulates the bottom, which means it’s not a John Siracusa-approved case.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the main reason to buy a third-party one, is you don’t have to deal with that. Although the fact that it does cover everything, I know it

⏹️ ▶️ John seems weird that they sell this blue phone and don’t have a blue case, but honestly, if you put any of those leather cases

⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone, you basically don’t see the color of the phone anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and that’s the thing is I want to show off the color of the phone, and yes, I am aware that clear cases exist, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of the clear cases I’ve ever seen are always like gross, icky plastic. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like that clear keyboard. Do you remember the Apple keyboard that was clear on the bottom?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the breadcrumb keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not good, not good. And it happens with phone cases too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re right that yes, only the camera mountain really shines through, so that’s all you really see, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I love about Apple’s website is that when you look at their case pages, they show you a picture

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of every color of phone that’s available for it. So you can see how every color will look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in whatever color case you’re looking at. Pick the blue phone and go to the different colors and tell me,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do any of those colors look good on the blue phone? I’m gonna go with no.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think literally any of the iPhone 13 Pro leather cases

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look good on blue. The only one that looks remotely good, I think, is the Midnight, which is like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray with like a, there’s like a slight bluish tint, but it’s basically gray. That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ordered. I don’t want a gray. I mean, yeah, if I’m gonna order one, that’s the one I’m probably gonna get, but like, I don’t want a gray

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. Like, I want a blue phone. And to John’s point, whatever color

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case you get does basically become the color of your phone with the exception of the camera mountain. So like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want a beige, green, gray, or purple, or purple phone. I want a blue phone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And why? This is, it’s so ridiculous. So anyway, I’ve also, I’m also going to explore the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco third party market. I did order one of those Nudient cases. Thanks Paul. And we’ll see, you know, I’ll see what we can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco find, but what’s probably going to happen is we’re going to have like four different cases, none of which I love,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but go with my zero to four phones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It’s a shame because, is the Apple Silicon cases in all other ways? Like, cause I bought, remember of my,

⏹️ ▶️ John on my 12 Pro, I bought the Apple Silicon case for it to begin with. I loved it.

⏹️ ▶️ John about it was great, except of course, didn’t have the lip on the bottom. And I wanted to try it, say maybe it’s not a deal breaker for me. I

⏹️ ▶️ John tried it for a while. It turns out it was a deal breaker. I got a third party case. By the way, people are asking my third party case is still

⏹️ ▶️ John holding up fine. It was incredibly cheap. A bunch of people asked me for the link. It’s been in past show notes or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I’m happy with it so far. It’s just annoying to have to find a third party. Because I think I bought like three third

⏹️ ▶️ John party cases before I landed on this one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yours is the Sina case, S-E-N-A, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John No, mine is the Olexar something or other. It

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was

⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly cheap. I’ll find the link for the show notes again. But yeah, the Apple Silicone case is

⏹️ ▶️ John like, for setting aside the grippiness thing, which is its own factor, I know if that’s your

⏹️ ▶️ John deal killer, then that’s what it is, but like the fit and finish, the fact that the buttons line up, the buttons are

⏹️ ▶️ John even with each other, things that you don’t really think about until you buy a third party case and realize, wait a second,

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing doesn’t fit right, or one button sticks out more than the other, or it’s crooked, or it feels weird. Doesn’t happen with

⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple cases. The Apple cases in general are really good. So that’s why it pains me when they have the lip, And in

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s case, it pains him that they don’t have the colors that he likes.

iPad power brick

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we’ve got iPad stuff to discuss. Neil Hughes writes, you mentioned that the 2021

⏹️ ▶️ Casey low-end iPad has started using a lightning to USB-C cable, i.e. USB-C at the power brick

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end. A member of my family got the previous generation iPad here in the UK, and that also had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this cable. So the switch must have happened at least a year ago. That is news to me. I did not know that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or it could just be in the UK. They have wacky stuff over there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, have you seen the size of their ridiculous plugs? Please don’t at me. Please don’t at me. I know they’re safe or whatever. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey care. they’re ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, they’re safe and ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re safe and ridiculous. And deadly when they’re on the floor face up. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Can you imagine that? It ready? We’re going to really tick off all the UK people. That would be almost

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as bad as stepping on Legos. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is that a UK

⏹️ ▶️ John thing? The pedantry about a Lego bricks and whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear it. I hear it vehemently from UK

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John people. No, you

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. You hear it vehemently, but that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, fine. Okay. But, I’m not even going to go there. But anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any time I’ve ever been corrected about Legos, it’s always been from someone from the UK. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the UK, that’s like not Europe, right? Oh my God, I’m such a jerk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyway, moving on. Oh wow. So, yeah. What?

No mmWave 5G on iPad Mini

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPad mini does not support the millimeter, what is it, millimeter wave, is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that right? The millimeter wave 5G stuff, which is news to me. I did not know that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either. So this is the, I guess it’s sort of kind of, it’s not wifi, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a similar distance of coverage as like a wifi-based station, but it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey preposterously, absurdly, ridiculously fast. And apparently the iPad Mini doesn’t support

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it.

iPad Mini clock speed?

⏹️ ▶️ John And this next item about the iPad mini, I’m not sure this is earlier than the previous item

⏹️ ▶️ John about the benchmarks. I’m not sure how to square it with the benchmarks. According to this Mac rumors story here,

⏹️ ▶️ John both the A13 and the iPad mini are equipped with the A15, but benchmark results reveal that the chip is downclocked

⏹️ ▶️ John to 2.9 gigahertz in the iPad mini compared to 3.2 gigahertz in all the iPhone 13 models. Conceivably,

⏹️ ▶️ John that could still be true and the benchmark difference is due to thermal throttling. But as we just saw,

⏹️ ▶️ John running that JavaScript benchmark, the iPad mini is the tops in the entire world, also beating the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. So clock speed stuff, we’ve got to wait for these devices to

⏹️ ▶️ John be out in more people’s hands and for the particular techie reviewers to look at the clock speed and see how it changes over time

⏹️ ▶️ John and running benchmarks and all that other stuff. So I’m not sure what to make of this, but you know, Apple could

⏹️ ▶️ John help us here by giving specs like the clock speed and some obscure webpage, but Apple doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John bother, so we’d have to figure it out ourselves eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an area where it’s complicated, you know, like, because it’s so much about thermals and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different thermal states and charge levels and charge states and, you know, whatever gigahertz

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rating is reported on a benchmark for a processor that does not officially report its speed, like in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco its model name, that’s just whatever speed it was running at right then. But they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change speeds. They go up and down, like frequently. It’s it’s a you know, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly fluctuating to optimize for power and heat needs and everything else. So I wouldn’t put any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weight into, you know, whatever geek bench reports for one particular run

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the benchmark, because you could run the benchmark twice in a row and get two different clock speeds.

Golf swing * tennis serve speed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quick aside, I was preparing the next section of the show notes and I was typing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey golf swing ampersand tennis serve speed. Do you want to guess what I typed instead of an ampersand?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I hope you’re writing the word

⏹️ ▶️ John and. What do you have against the word and? I was watching Why the Last Man and the

⏹️ ▶️ John Monkey’s Name Ampersand and every time I see it, I think of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, thank you. That makes me oh so happy. So yeah, the Apple Watch Series 7, Actually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me give you a clean edit there. The Apple Watch Series 7, it is apparently going to track and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess report golf swing speed ampersand tennis serve speed.

⏹️ ▶️ John This was in the event, in the event video, and we just didn’t get a chance to talk about it. And I think we should

⏹️ ▶️ John because, so here’s the deal. I don’t know much about golf, so I’m not gonna comment on that, right? But I do know a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot about tennis. And here’s the thing with trying to register tennis

⏹️ ▶️ John serve speed with a thing that’s on your wrist. It’s going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John a wild guess because the way tennis serves, the way serving

⏹️ ▶️ John in tennis works, especially when you’re trying to serve fast, is it’s all about the wrist snap.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the wrist snap is to get the head of the racket moving as fast as possible. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the racket is like a lever because you’re holding one end of it and the head is way out there at the other end. So if you move your hand

⏹️ ▶️ John this much, the very, very tip of the racket or the head of the racket moves more because it’s at the end of

⏹️ ▶️ John a stick essentially, right? That’s what makes your serve go fast. But your watch

⏹️ ▶️ John is attached to your wrist, not the head of the racket. So how the hell do you know how fast the racket

⏹️ ▶️ John head was moving by measuring what happens on your wrist? You can’t, you just have to do some sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John multiply. I’m like, well, most amateur tennis players have a crappy wrist snap and their racket head speed

⏹️ ▶️ John is X percent faster than their actual wrist speed. Therefore, this is how fast your serve was. Eh,

⏹️ ▶️ John sorry, no, I don’t see this as, it’s not the fault of the watch. It’s just because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s attached to your wrist. And it’s not even attached like to your hand. At least your hand moves in relation to your wrist. It’s attached

⏹️ ▶️ John to your wrist. When I say you snap your wrist, it really means that your hand, which is at the

⏹️ ▶️ John end of your wrist, is the thing that snaps forward, but your watch isn’t on that part. So I don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ John how that could possibly work. Unless you’re a really bad tennis server and you do not snap your wrist, but you totally should. You have to pronate.

⏹️ ▶️ John Have to pronate. If you’re not pronating when you’re serving, you’re either a senior citizen or you’re not serving very fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey work on your tennis

⏹️ ▶️ John serve speed, but don’t expect the watch time. I think in terms of golf swing, I feel like we need to have Tiff on to say, so what

⏹️ ▶️ John about golf? Is the speed that your wrist moves directly translatable to

⏹️ ▶️ John the speed that you hit a golf ball? I don’t know, because I don’t know how wrists work in relation to golf,

⏹️ ▶️ John but in tennis, I can give this a big thumbs down.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Being an expert in neither thing or sports ever, I would expect golf to be a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier to measure because aren’t your hands generally in a straighter Alignment as you’re striking the ball. I

⏹️ ▶️ John believe so. I don’t know well I what I do know is the golf clubs are a long stick and That the part that hits

⏹️ ▶️ John the ball is at the end that your hands are at the other end And so I think there has to be some kind of lever action

⏹️ ▶️ John there And so I don’t think there is a direct linear relationship between the speed of your wrist and the

⏹️ ▶️ John racket The end of the golf club, but for all I know it is a more predictable relationship So

⏹️ ▶️ John tip was excited about this feature when she saw it in the video. I think she tweeted about it So I mean, I think it’s our

⏹️ ▶️ John duty for the show to have to go out to a driving range that has actual like radar measurement or something

⏹️ ▶️ John and Try it with the new Apple watch or a new watch OS or whatever and see if

⏹️ ▶️ John you get readings that are remotely meaningful

Series 7 fast-charge cable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Apple Watch Series 7, as per Mac rumors, includes faster charging, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we knew, claiming that it can charge to 80%, just 45 minutes, and that eight minutes of fast charging will provide sufficient

⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery life for eight hours of sleep trapping, which I believe we also knew. To support the new fast charging, Apple will be offering a new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one meter USB-C magnetic fast charging cable.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now what does that mean? Does that mean you get these new fast charging speeds with the new cable,

⏹️ ▶️ John or is it, oh, you get a new cable, but it’s like, I don’t understand this. It’s a MacRumors story.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell if they have any information or they’re just trying to say how it comes with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cable. Right, because as I mentioned, Apple has sold a USB-C Apple Watch cable for some time. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe it’s a third of a meter or a half a meter. And it was used to charge your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch from your USB-C only MacBook Pro since 2016. They’ve sold this for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does that cable do it too, or just the new one? Who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And additionally for MacRumors, on the connectivity front, The Series 7 includes the same Bluetooth 5.0 protocol as the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Series 6, but unlike the Series 6, the new Apple Watch Series 7 also has built-in support for Baidu, China’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey satellite navigation system.

Series 7: same SOC as Series 6

⏹️ ▶️ John So these are like the small differences in the Apple Watch. And here comes the big one that we speculated

⏹️ ▶️ John about last week. So they didn’t say anything about the system on a chip in the Apple Watch series 7. What do you think it might be? And then

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was saying, well, it might not be the big upgrade. And I said, well, what if it is literally the same system on a chip as

⏹️ ▶️ John the series 6? And then Marco said, oh, yeah, they did that. They’ve done that before. They did in the series one and two, and they did that between

⏹️ ▶️ John the four and five. And so according to whatever these are, part numbers

⏹️ ▶️ John or CPU identifies as identifiers as posted by Steve Trout and Smith.

⏹️ ▶️ John His tweet says, there is a reason Apple didn’t talk about the Apple Watch Series 7 CPU this year, and that’s because it’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John the same as last year’s Series 6. In fact, it doesn’t even get a new model number. It is effectively just a chassis tweak.

⏹️ ▶️ John And he says, same as Series 1 and 2 and 4 and 5, right? So we just went through

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of things that like the Watch Series 7 does have different internals because it’s got these different radio

⏹️ ▶️ John frequency band for China satellite thing. It’s got faster charging and different charging characteristics. It’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ John got a bunch of other stuff in there that’s different too but as far as we can tell right now the actual

⏹️ ▶️ John system on a chip plus or minus the Storage and maybe even the RAM but the actual system on chip is

⏹️ ▶️ John Reporting the same part number as far as we can tell again until people have these watches

⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t know for sure and they’re coming. What is it later this fall or whatever? So we don’t even know when they’re here December

⏹️ ▶️ John 20th Yeah, all signs are currently pointing to the series 7 having the

⏹️ ▶️ John same system on a chip in terms of CPU GPU or all that other stuff as the

⏹️ ▶️ John Series 6.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and when you first hear this, it’s kind of a bummer in the sense that it does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like the Series 7 is actually a very minor update.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I think I’m gonna buy it just because I wanna know what those screens look

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, and I can kind of excuse that from a development perspective of I do develop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch stuff, and so I kinda need to know how my complications and interfaces look.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus you want to measure your golf swing. Exactly. All the golfing I do all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This does seem like it’s a very minor update. And I almost wonder, we’ve all obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been complaining about how the Series 3 is still around and at the exact same price. And the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco SE that was introduced last year did not fall in price at all. And so it’s like, there’s actually kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of not much movement at all on the watch this year, with the exception

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, yeah, they made the screen different and better. and it charges

⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster. But it seems like there’s basically nothing else about the Series 7.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I kind of wonder, like if maybe all these things are related, that maybe just, they just couldn’t get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their, you know, the next generation of watch hardware, it just didn’t make it for this year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, that’s what it seems like. And maybe that’s why they couldn’t drop the prices on the Series 3 or SE

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. Maybe it’s all related. Maybe like they expected to make a certain amount of progress in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch hardware, you know, in the guts of the internals, and they just didn’t make it. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I just point to the process size again. It’s the same process size, I think, as the Series 6,

⏹️ ▶️ John and within, especially on the watch, within the same process size, what are you gonna do? Do the same thing you

⏹️ ▶️ John did last time, but make it better and faster? It’s really hard. The power envelope of the watch is so demanding.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, we already did this. We made the Series 6. It’s the best five nanometer watch chip that we

⏹️ ▶️ John can make. If you say, can you make another five nanometer watch chip for next year’s watch, it’s like, what

⏹️ ▶️ John do you think we’re gonna do? If we had thought of something, we would have done it last year. It’s very difficult. On the phone, you can afford to say, well, we’ll add another

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU core, we’ll put a bigger battery. All those things are basically off the table with the watch. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not much room in there for a bigger battery without physically changing the size of the watch. It’s not like you’re gonna add a

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU core. It’s not like you’re gonna clock it higher. Like the amount, like it’s just so constrained

⏹️ ▶️ John that it does not shock me that without a process shrink, you may find

⏹️ ▶️ John yourself in a situation where your best bet is to leave the system on a chip, which Mark, you

⏹️ ▶️ John said last week was, seemed like it was fast enough, leave that alone and improve the watch in areas that people

⏹️ ▶️ John will actually feel. Cause would someone feel a 10% single core CPU increase from a Siren 7 system

⏹️ ▶️ John on a chip? No, but will they fear, feel, oh, I can charge for a full eight hours, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John after sitting eight minutes on the charger? Yeah, cause that’ll let people do sleep tracking and stuff. Right? And charging to 80% in 45 minutes,

⏹️ ▶️ John those are changes people will notice. So I think Apple did the right thing. And the screen thing, the only difference is the screen. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the biggest changes in a watch in years. Like the fact, like I said, that the

⏹️ ▶️ John screen really fills the entire watch face and it gives you more data and more information display for

⏹️ ▶️ John the same physical size watch, plus potentially a thicker crystal for more durability. Those

⏹️ ▶️ John are all good changes, right? I don’t think that, you know, this is the reason my wife was getting another watch. You

⏹️ ▶️ John will be able to tell if you put it next to a six, you’ll say, oh, the seven has a bigger screen, but it’s the same size.

⏹️ ▶️ John Thumbs up. And it’s also brighter. on screen is brighter, like everything about it is better.

⏹️ ▶️ John The fact that the system on a chip hasn’t changed or like the overall shape hasn’t changed are two things

⏹️ ▶️ John that I think most people who have a watch don’t care about. They don’t care how fast this amount of chip is. They just care about the attributes

⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing, charging display, you know, functionality and all those things are essentially improved.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I still think this is a pretty good watch and I’m actually excited to see what the screen looks like and what the new watch

⏹️ ▶️ John faces look like given the, you know, more area and more pixels to work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. So I actually looked up some real-time follow-through. I actually looked up, because I remember there was one other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time when the watch didn’t really upgrade the CPU between generations. And I looked it up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which one it was, and I was right last week. It was the Series 4 and Series 5.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They use the same processor. The Series 5 did add a compass, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the actual computing part of the processor is, as far as we can tell, the same.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s interesting then that Series 4 and 5, that’s one processor, now Series 6

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 7, that’s the next processor. Maybe they’re just on a two-year cycle for this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe that’s fine. Because as I was just saying, when the watch was earlier,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really, I would say until that Series 4 and 5 processor, it was so ungodly slow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do pretty much anything. It was brutal as a developer and not that much better as a user.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, ever since that Series 4 and 5 processor, things have been more tolerable. They’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been pretty much fine as a user, and as developers, it’s been getting a lot better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, as I mentioned last week, like most of the time that I’m like waiting for the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do something as a developer, usually it doesn’t seem to be processor-throttled things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s not the bottleneck. There’s other bottlenecks, but it doesn’t seem to be the processor speed. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re on a two-year cycle here, this might not have been anything going wrong. might have just been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they plan to do all along that series six and seven are going to use the same chip and maybe series

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eight and nine will use the next chip you know maybe there’s a two-year cycle for chips now for the watch and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically fine

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I mean there’s you know series eight is not going to do probably anything with it unless it’s a shrink which

⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be like the three nanometer processes coming along but like that you’re kind of with the watch you’re really

⏹️ ▶️ John beholden to transistor shrinks because otherwise again unless you’re gonna decide to make different trade-offs

⏹️ ▶️ John and like make it slower or redistribute your transistors to be more GPU and less CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John or vice versa, you’re just moving things around like your power envelope is the same to actually get any

⏹️ ▶️ John appreciable increase in performance you need to have a shrink because then you can have more transistors for the same

⏹️ ▶️ John power budget.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean really the only reason why this really hasn’t come up before on the watch is that the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco series four to five also you know the CPU didn’t change in that transition, but the series

⏹️ ▶️ Marco five was one that added the always on screen and that dramatically improves what it’s like to wear the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple watch. And so there was something else to motivate upgrades for people who were really itching to see like, what’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are they gonna change? What are they gonna change? Whereas this year, a little bit faster charging and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bigger, brighter screen.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the bigger, brighter screen is a big feature. I may be able to see it in person, see what it is, but like, that is

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the most attractive things to me because it’s like getting, finally getting rid of all those borders,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and just saying I can now I can use the whole thing for watch faces. Maybe it doesn’t make a difference. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John you get one extra complication, maybe you don’t care, maybe you have a sparse watch face and it makes no difference, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it just feels better to me to be finally say, okay, now that we have a quote unquote true edge

⏹️ ▶️ John to edge display, whatever you wanna say.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, I mean, you still don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John that. Yeah, it’s close enough now that you can say fine, especially with the big,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially with the curve display, where it’s like, well, you’re, you know, because of the curve, it’s already kind of warping

⏹️ ▶️ John at the edges anyway. So it’s as big as you could reasonably put in this design. And once you go to flat, then you can maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John eek out another millimeter or two on the sides. But anyway, we’ll see. My wife’s gonna get

⏹️ ▶️ John one. I’ll look at it, see how it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s kind of how I am about it too. Like I’m not super excited about the watch this year,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but maybe it’s because I haven’t seen the screen yet. You know, maybe when you see it in person, it’s amazing. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I feel like I have to get it, you know, for design purposes and for, you know, tech curiosity purposes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But- Yeah, maybe get four of them. I’ll get between zero and four.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sounds like a plan.

iOS 15 optional upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally for this week, iOS 15 is not going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a compulsory upgrade, and apparently Apple has committed to continuing to provide security updates

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for iOS 14 for at least a pretty good time.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is interesting. I noticed this when I upgraded all my devices iOS 15, which by the way I did, and it’s been fine everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John in case you’re scared of iOS 15, it’s fine. When I upgraded, I went to do, you know, software update

⏹️ ▶️ John and a little thing spun and it was like, you know, your OS is up to date 14.8. I’m like, oh, I guess

⏹️ ▶️ John like I got to wait wait for the CDN to refresh, as I was doing it a fresh on Monday. But then I looked down lower on the screen at the very

⏹️ ▶️ John bottom of the screen on my phone, there was a thing that said, oh, and by the way, iOS 15 also exists. Are

⏹️ ▶️ John you interested in that? And boy, what a change. What a change from the old way that Apple used to do

⏹️ ▶️ John things, which was like a new iOS is out. Everybody has to upgrade now. In fact, we’re gonna do it while

⏹️ ▶️ John you sleep. You have no choice, get the new OS. Which always struck me as a very

⏹️ ▶️ John courageous, let’s say, and Phil

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Schiller speak

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco strategy. because

⏹️ ▶️ John especially when the point O’s weren’t that big, but like, but here, and I was like, oh, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is an interesting UI change, maybe a reaction to people complaining about being forced to upgrade, because it literally puts the

⏹️ ▶️ John text at the top of, the main center part of the screen that says, you are using iOS 14.8,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is the latest version. Like it’s not beating around the bush. If you just glance that screen and read the text, you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John be like, oh, I’m up to date. I’ve got the latest OS, I’m fine. How many people would even notice

⏹️ ▶️ John that at the literal bottom of the screen, is a tiny skinny little banner way smaller than anything ever advertising

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Music or Apple TV Plus. It says, oh, iOS 15, in case you’re interested, you can

⏹️ ▶️ John get that. So yeah, I’m excited to see Apple changing their

⏹️ ▶️ John stance on this. And it’s ironic that they did it this year in which 15.0 seems

⏹️ ▶️ John to be incredibly solid. Like I haven’t had a single problem or complaint other than my AirPods still

⏹️ ▶️ John doing this stupid connecting thing, but it was doing that with 14.8 too. So I don’t know what the hell to blame here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But other than

⏹️ ▶️ John that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Auto-switching, blame auto-switching. That’s it. Turn off auto-switching, it fixes AirPods.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then I use auto, every time I use auto-switching, now I think of Marco and saying, Marco wants me to turn this off. Why would I do that?

⏹️ ▶️ John I love auto-switching.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Good, you should. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should infect your brain. It doesn’t work. It causes bugs. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John turn it off. It

⏹️ ▶️ John does, I’m just saying I use auto-switching. Every time I successfully auto-switch, which happens a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ John I say, look at that. I didn’t have to do anything and it auto-switched. This is why I have this feature enabled. Anyway, it’s getting bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 15 seems to be really solid for me. but this year they seem to be not pushing it. And I wonder

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s gonna be the type of thing like after a month or two or six months, will they switch that policy and make that

⏹️ ▶️ John screen more prominently? Suggest to you that perhaps 14.8 isn’t the latest and greatest version? Because it isn’t, 15.0

⏹️ ▶️ John is out now, but it says you’re all up to date, which is not technically true,

⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, I applaud this new policy. I applaud the new UI being less pushy about

⏹️ ▶️ John this, but I do think eventually Apple has to stop telling people that 14.x is

⏹️ ▶️ John all up to date because it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Stripe, Sanity.io, and Jamf Now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at adb.fm slash join. We will talk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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, Auntie

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental Tech dreadcast all So

⏹️ ▶️ John long

John’s mouse update

⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta talk about my bad mousepad again.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Wow, again? Oh yeah, I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ John about that. All right, so here’s the problem. I was thinking about this. Why does this keep coming up?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the boring, practical realities of the physical world.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco When

⏹️ ▶️ John I was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco talking about my debugging

⏹️ ▶️ John last time, I was like, oh, I got this mousepad. I thought it was the mousepad, but then it turns out it must be the cable. And then I tried

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of different cables. And I was doing the experiment. Like as a programmer, you,

⏹️ ▶️ John God, I really hope, as most working programmers eventually learn to become good at debugging. Some

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, and I know sometimes I work with those people and I want to tear my hair out. But I would think most of the good ones,

⏹️ ▶️ John you learn what debugging is, right? But the problem in the physical world, in particular in the case of the mouse, is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the physical world stinks and there’s no undo button and you can’t copy and paste. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so in the example of my mouse, I might use my mouse in wired mode

⏹️ ▶️ John for a variety of reasons discussed in the past, but I do. And the wire is routed underneath my desks and

⏹️ ▶️ John I have these little fasteners that make a little channel for it. And the long skinny, you know, very

⏹️ ▶️ John thin mouse cord USB thing, snakes up through the little channels

⏹️ ▶️ John and goes around the desk and comes out a little hole in the desk and goes into the hub and everything is all arranged just so.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if I wanna do the real debugging that I know I should be doing, I have to

⏹️ ▶️ John rip all that out, right? Because you have to eliminate variables, you have to test your theories, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John is it the cable? Is it because the cable is routed here? Is it because the cable is kinked? Is it because the cable is touching a metal thing?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like you have to do that. If you really want to do an apples to apples comparison and eliminate

⏹️ ▶️ John variables, you have to start ripping apart the physical world. And I’m like, I don’t want to crawl into my desk and do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to take that, I don’t want to disconnect those fasteners. You know, I don’t want to remove that little

⏹️ ▶️ John piece of tape. Like it’s just everything is set up the way I want it. So I didn’t, I wouldn’t, I would do as much testing as I could without

⏹️ ▶️ John tearing stuff apart. And so I was doing not a great job of debugging. Last time I thought I had to

⏹️ ▶️ John determine that it was the wire because I tried a shorter wire and you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ John shorter USB cable worked with the longer one didn’t. I took out the longer one, the new one

⏹️ ▶️ John from the attic and try that and that one worked fine, but just there were too many variables. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John after we had that last show where I talked about it, I had to do more testing because it was still annoying me.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I finally did the thing, another physical world thing. I finally went up to the attic, it opened up my brand new replacement

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse because I had a backup mouse for this one, right? I opened it up, break the seal, open that package, take

⏹️ ▶️ John out the backup, the brand new backup replacement mouse. And I said, with this in hand,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can finally do a variable eliminating test, which is unplug

⏹️ ▶️ John my mouse from the cable, put it aside, take the brand new mouse and plug it right back

⏹️ ▶️ John into that same cable. So now the only variable that’s changing is the mouse. So now I can finally test, is it something wonky with the

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse? And the answer is yes, something wonky is the mouse, because when I plug the brand new mouse into that

⏹️ ▶️ John setup, everything’s fine. Unplug it, plug the old mouse back in, unresponsive,

⏹️ ▶️ John jumpy mess. So all that testing that it, yes, it’s true that if you take the

⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote broken mouse and connect it to a shorter cable or connect it directly to the Mac or do all sorts of other things, yes, it

⏹️ ▶️ John also works in those scenarios, but I don’t care about those scenarios. That’s not how I use my mouse. This test

⏹️ ▶️ John determines, look, this model of mouse, of which I have two copies right here,

⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same, should work in this scenario and does work in this scenario with this new one I just brought from

⏹️ ▶️ John my attic, but this old one that I’ve been using since 2019 or whatever doesn’t work. So I’m like, finally,

⏹️ ▶️ John all right, that’s it. This mouse, bad mouse. The mouse is bad. The mouse pad is not bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John The cord is not bad. The hub is not bad. The Mac is not bad. The mouse is bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John So then I had to embark on a process that let me appreciate. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, you know, we complain about Apple on the show, but having to deal with companies other than Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John going in with your Apple expectations, Really lets you appreciate Apple, right? I just talked about returning stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just got, you know, my wife was complaining that she couldn’t return a partially ordered thing, but that’s kind of like an edge case. In general,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have an Apple product and you want to return it, or it breaks and you want to get a warranty repair,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a straightforward process. You call somebody, and say you had an Apple mouse and it stopped working and it was under warranty.

⏹️ ▶️ John You just call Apple and be like, I got a mouse, came with my computer, still under warranty, mouse doesn’t work.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re like, okay, we’ll replace that for you. Return it to us, bring it in, do a cross shipping thing. Lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of different options, right? So easy. What if you have a Microsoft mouse and

⏹️ ▶️ John you want to do the same thing? I didn’t even know where to begin. So I go to the Microsoft website where you can buy

⏹️ ▶️ John these things and try to find somewhere on that website that says like warranty repair

⏹️ ▶️ John support. As hard as it is to find things at apple.com, I found it much harder to find things on the Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ John site. Eventually I found some series of links that led me down some tunnel of like trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John send me to support articles or make me talk to tech chat. I’m like, no, just it’s warranty repair. I have broken

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware. I want you to give me new hardware because it’s still under warranty or whatever. Or tell me it’s not under warranty,

⏹️ ▶️ John either way. That’s what I wanna do. And it was like, is your product a Surface Book, a

⏹️ ▶️ John Surface Studio Pro or other? I’m like, what? Like the whole process thought I

⏹️ ▶️ John had some kind of Surface product. And it’s like, well, it’s a Microsoft Precision Mouse. But it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John have you heard of this Microsoft? This is your product. And their website had no idea that this product existed or didn’t know anything about it. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I eventually fight my way through to some godforsaken chat thing where I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John talking with a human who’s talking with 800 other people at the same time and sending me canned responses.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, got a mouse, like I have everything ready. I can tell you the serial number, I can tell when I bought it,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I can tell you how old it is, I can, you know, tell you what’s wrong with it. And they required

⏹️ ▶️ John so much information and supporting evidence to process this claim,

⏹️ ▶️ John you would think I was trying to return like, you know, a hundred thousand dollar car. A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, Apple would take this Mac Pro back with way less hassle. They’d be like, oh, your

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mac Pro doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John work? It doesn’t turn on? Sure, send it back. It’s in one of the warranty. Well, you know, like they wanted me

⏹️ ▶️ John to have my original receipt, the date that I bought it, a photo

⏹️ ▶️ John of the mouse top and bottom, a video of

⏹️ ▶️ John the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mouse not

⏹️ ▶️ John working.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No.

⏹️ ▶️ John a video of them. I have never in my life had to record video to demonstrate

⏹️ ▶️ John a problem for any product repair. This is a mouse, people. This is a sub $100 mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t this like well under, isn’t this like a $40 mouse or something? Like what do you mean? It’s like, it’s $90 or whatever, something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Okay, but still,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it worth someone’s time at Microsoft to review

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John this stuff? Holy,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I was like, are you kidding me? And so they say this in the chat, they’re like, after me, after going

⏹️ ▶️ John through, like here’s what I did, here’s what I did to debug, Like I’m doing the chat thing of like, look, before you even ask any questions, let

⏹️ ▶️ John me tell you what I went through and prove to you with a series of statements that presumably you’ll believe that the mouse has problems,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And when I said, I started off with them, I said, look, I have an identical brand new

⏹️ ▶️ John just opened today mouse right out of the box of the exact same model. And I told them, if I unplug

⏹️ ▶️ John this mouse and plug the other one in, it works. And then I swap them and it doesn’t work. And they’re like, thank you for doing

⏹️ ▶️ John that. That really narrows down the problem. Like, oh yes, it definitely does. I just didn’t want to have to have some BS story. Like, are you sure your

⏹️ ▶️ John mouse doesn’t work? Have you tried rebooting? Have you installed new drivers and windows? I’m like, I’m not using Windows.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ John they were on board with the fact, like I quickly got them on board with the idea that this mouse is broken. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the ultimate test is literally the same mouse, just in the same scenario, just plug in and plug, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But then they said, okay, all you need to do is then this huge bullet list of things, including recording your video.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And then, so

⏹️ ▶️ John they throw this out. I’m like, you’ve gotta be kidding me. I’m like, whatever, I’m gonna do this. I’m getting, they’re taking the stupid mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John back, right? I get like, you know, two iPhone photographs into

⏹️ ▶️ John like taking pictures of my mouse, so the top and the bottom, and the person says, are you still there?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, how long do you think the average person takes to compile this evidence? Is there someone doing this faster than me?

⏹️ ▶️ John Is there someone? I was doing the thing, you know the thing where you can do a photo capture

⏹️ ▶️ John on your Mac with your phone, you know that feature?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Continuity camera, I believe it’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wasn’t even doing air dropping it to myself. I was doing them the most efficient way possible. I’m on the second picture and

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like, Are you still there? Are you doing it? You gotta be kidding me. Give

⏹️ ▶️ John me five minutes to record a fricking video of my, and so I had to get a video. I’m holding the

⏹️ ▶️ John camera with one hand and I have to make sure the mouse is in the shot and I have to make sure my

⏹️ ▶️ John giant Pro Display XDR is in the shot and that you can see the cursor and I have to narrate and say, see,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the new mouse. Watch as I move my hand right to left, the cursor moves right to left, and then cut,

⏹️ ▶️ John disconnect mouse, put the old one. Here’s the old mouse. See how I move the mouse right to left but see how the cursor doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John move or moves only a little tiny bit? That’s the bad mouse. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, and then they, you know, sent me a shipping label and I shipped the old mouse back

⏹️ ▶️ John and they eventually replaced it. And today I got the replacement. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of, speaking of sending things, I’ll put this in the Slack channel for us. Anyway, they sent it back in

⏹️ ▶️ John a box that’s big enough to hold like a record player. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s how big the box was. Oh gosh,

⏹️ ▶️ John huge, huge box. Inside that box, of course, was a smaller box, because we all know how this goes, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Inside the box was a smaller box, about the size of a mouse box. Inside the smaller box was

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of bubble wrap with no tape or fasteners of any kind, just a bunch of bubble

⏹️ ▶️ John wrap, and then loosely nestled in that bunch of bubble wrap, a bear mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John A bear mouse. What? That was absolutely not new.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was dirty and scuffed, and I’m like, is this somebody else’s mouse? Did I get somebody else’s mouse? The

⏹️ ▶️ John first thing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I looked was-

⏹️ ▶️ John You absolutely did. Yeah, the first thing I looked is, did I get my own mouse back? And I compared the serial numbers and no, they did not send

⏹️ ▶️ John me my own mouse back, right? But it is in worse condition than the mouse I sent them,

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of like dirt and scuff marks or whatever. And I was kind of grossed out, but I did test it. I did disconnect

⏹️ ▶️ John this mouse and put it in and it works. But I said, you know what? I don’t want to use the skeevy, like someone

⏹️ ▶️ John else has used this mouse mouse. So I put that one in the attic and I’m just using the new one for now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my gosh. Because when you get something replaced from Apple, like we talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John this before on the show, they basically say if you get a refurb, essentially everything you touch is brand new, the case is brand new, everything

⏹️ ▶️ John is brand new, or at the very least they clean it. This mouse was not clean. This is an unclean mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like you would not look at this. You would look at this and you would think the person who uses this eats like potato chips while

⏹️ ▶️ John they use their computer, right? It had scuffs and watermarks and just, ew,

⏹️ ▶️ John it was yucky. So it’s still my backup mouse and if I ever need to use it, I’ll have

⏹️ ▶️ John to like give it like a thorough cleaning, you know, with some kind of like computer cleaner stuff because I just don’t even want to touch it. But

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft, come on. I make you a video and bring up all this paperwork

⏹️ ▶️ John and do all this stuff. And you give me all this big hassle and take a long time for me to ship a thing back and I get a dirty mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John in return. Not great. Oh, and by the way, by the way, one more thing. When you

⏹️ ▶️ John do this process of sending your thing, the person gets off the phone with you and say, okay, we’ll email you a shipping label.

⏹️ ▶️ John I get the email with the shipping label instructions and it’s like in big, scary, bold text, make sure the

⏹️ ▶️ John serial number on your return matches the serial number of the product you’re returning, otherwise we will not process

⏹️ ▶️ John your return. And I was like, well, guess what? Your stupid customer support person never even asked me what my serial number was,

⏹️ ▶️ John so how the hell is it gonna match? And I look at my little shipping label email, and it

⏹️ ▶️ John has a serial number listed. What serial number is it? I don’t even know, it’s not even in the same form as my serial number,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it says, yeah, your return is for item serial number 75. I’m like, where did you get that number from? I never gave

⏹️ ▶️ John you a serial number and it doesn’t even look like the serial number. I mean, it did the return anyway, but it’s like their whole return

⏹️ ▶️ John process was like, so you’re returning a Surface Book Pro, right? Like, no, I’m not. Stop trying to tell me

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m returning a Surface, like terrible process, so much worse than Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my theory, which I think is backed up by almost everything you’ve said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that you are the first person who has ever tried to return a mouse to Microsoft. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally

⏹️ ▶️ John no one, like- Where did the dirty mouse come from then? Someone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey else’s mouse. Their office. They went to somewhere in Redmond.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why the person didn’t know how long it would take you to capture

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey videos and pictures is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally no one, like they were just following a script and literally they’ve never done this before.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone bails at that point.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, but like I bet the support person, you might be the first time they’ve ever had to deal with this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because most people would not go through this amount of ridiculousness for a flaky $90

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mouse, they would just think, well, I guess my mouse died after a long time of use, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would replace it with whatever they could find.

⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t that long. How long was it? It was like- Less than a year. I mean, yeah, I got it with my Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, right? So whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s not great, but this has to be something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they don’t deal with very often. And it seems like every part of this was just like, eh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, figure something out, like on their end.

⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat asked if the serial number on the return matches the serial number of the mouse that you sent to me. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John no it does not. It’s not even in the same form. It doesn’t even have the same number of digits. Like it’s, their return

⏹️ ▶️ John system is so, through this website is so tailored to like six products that they think you’re gonna return,

⏹️ ▶️ John none of which are this mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is one of those things too, like I haven’t dealt with Microsoft directly like this, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, you know, from other manufacturers and everything, this is one of those areas that Apple does pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. like at warranty repair and replacement, returns are super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy from the web store or the in-person store. And like, this is one of those areas like, Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always been pretty poor at this. Like whenever Google has tried to make their own phones, one of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the areas that they usually fall down with the Pixel phones is Google’s infrastructure for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco customer support and retail support is generally pretty terrible. And like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like Apple doesn’t get enough credit for how good they are at all that stuff. that like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever you, if you’re comparing phones and you see some feature checklist, usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things that is not on those checklists that compare, oh, this time, Google’s out innovating Apple or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually those checklists don’t contain like, all right, when I have a problem, how easy is it to deal with? And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s pretty good at that, and a lot of these other companies really aren’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the sad thing is it’s just a policy choice. Like, just take people’s word for it. When they say their thing is broken,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, a lot of time they’re gonna be wrong and they’re gonna send you back a perfectly working device. Just deal with that, eat it, sell

⏹️ ▶️ John it as refurb, right? Like Apple basically, for the most part, if you have a broken thing and they say,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, why do you think it’s broken? And you explain it to them, they’re like, okay, great. Well, we’ll get you a new one of those. Like if it’s, again, if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John under warranty or whatever, like they don’t spend time, like there’s no incentive

⏹️ ▶️ John for anyone involved in this process to give you a hard time or to ask for video evidence or to spend an extra

⏹️ ▶️ John hour on the phone with you to say, are you sure it’s broken? Maybe it’s just your cable. And that means that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, like I said, I’m sure gets a bunch of crap returned to them as quote unquote broken, that is perfectly fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple knows that the right thing to do is like, just take it, just take their perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ John good working returns. It is much better for everyone involved to get that person off the phone

⏹️ ▶️ John and happy and satisfied and just let them return their perfectly good working device because they didn’t realize that they had an on switch

⏹️ ▶️ John or something like, just do that. And Microsoft does not understand that or whatever company

⏹️ ▶️ John they have that doing support doesn’t understand that. apparently they’re incentivized to not, like Marco said, to not let anyone ever

⏹️ ▶️ John return anything, to put as many hurdles in front of them as possible. And even though I came fully prepared with

⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, I have the ultimate test that none of your customers ever, because I think I am the first person to say, you know

⏹️ ▶️ John how I know it’s broken? Because I bought a second one. And that one works and this one doesn’t. And the only thing

⏹️ ▶️ John I changed was the mouse. Everything else, the cable, the hub, I just unplug that one, plug this one in. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John perfect test, right? And so like, okay, well, yeah. And I really don’t think other people buy the second mouse

⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. So maybe that’s the only reason I got through that first part of the thing and they pulled out the big guns after

⏹️ ▶️ John that and had me make a video. That was… Should have bought myself a ring

⏹️ ▶️ John light so I could have good lighting on the video.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in Microsoft has this video of my angry voice saying, see how I’m moving the mouse back and forth?

⏹️ ▶️ John See how the Garza is not moving?

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