551: Tickle Rock You

07 Sep 2023

Rumors, expectations, and hopes for the iPhone event next week.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show: 🤬 cancer. Help sick kids. Donate to St. Jude now.
• Follow-up:
  • iPhone 14 Pro 2× vs. cropping a 1× photo
  • iPhone 14 Pro Dynamic Island
    • Flighty
    • Sports Alerts (App Store link)
  • You can update TCL Roku TV via USB (via Pierre-Luc Gagné)
  • Apple Park & garbage cans
• Apple Event on September 12
  • WiFi 6 vs. 6E
  • Google Pixel ad
  • Czinger 21C
  • Twill
• Post-show Neutral:
  • Rivian is canning their ugliest paint option

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Intro
2. Donate to St. Jude
3. Cropping vs. “2X” mode
4. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
5. Exit interview: Dynamic Island
6. TCL Roku TVs
7. Apple Park garbage cans
8. Sponsor: Trade Coffee
9. iPhone rumor dump
10. Sponsor: Kolide
11. Other rumors
12. Ending theme
13. Neutral 🖼️
14. Vs. school bus 🖼️
15. Reference objects 🖼️
16. First impressions 🖼️

Intro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is one of the biggest shows of the year! The show where we talk about iPhones that we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know that much about yet, but we kind of know everything about, but it’s… Oh, God! It’s such a weird time of the season.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really going to save a lot of time for next week’s show, because we’ll just cover everything this week, and then next week we’ll say, you know what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we said last week? Yeah, that happened.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or at least like much of that, or most of that, or,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you know, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t… So, the inevitability of iPhone season and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prediction season is that, due to the massive scale of the iPhone, the supply

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chain leaks like crazy, and there is basically nothing they can reasonably do to keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the physical details of the new iPhones from leaking ahead of time. And so going into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iPhone event, typically we know with reasonable certainty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the physical things that will be announced. Physical changes like, you know, there’s going to be a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size phone, or what kind of materials they’re using. oftentimes even what colors they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to be launching, because that kind of stuff tends to leak. But then a lot of times we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be surprised by something. And oftentimes, first of all, we’re always surprised by names, because they’re always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way worse than we think they’re going to be. We’re always surprised by software features,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and some of the software features of things like the camera, that’s usually surprising in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Well, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think the canonical example of everything you’re describing is the thing that we forgot to mention last week, which we’ll talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about again later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dynamic Island. Like I think that because we knew that there was some sort of cut out kind of situation, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nobody was 100% sure what the physical stuff would look like. We had a pretty good notion, but the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whole software story, I don’t think anyone had a freaking clue what that was going to be. And certainly nobody knew what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the god awful name Dynamic Island was going to be. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} not that bad of a name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Although to be honest, I was going to say, to be honest, it’s actually grown on me. But at the time I remember hating it. No. Hasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey grown on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’ve had many worse names. But anyway, so yeah, software tends to surprise us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s always fun. And then the other products that are less big than the iPhone like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Apple Watch, you know, the Apple Watch is probably gonna be updated tomorrow and we really haven’t heard that much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about it. You know, we have a couple of vague rumored notions but nothing nearly as concrete as we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tend to get about the iPhones. So there are usually surprising things in these events

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even though we go in kind of knowing what they’re going to show us for the most part

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in hardware at least.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you know, maybe it’s the old man in me coming out, which at this point is basically all of me, but that’s neither here nor there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I feel like some of the fun for me as I’ve watched Apple for longer and longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is seeing how they spin things. You know, like, how are they going, I was listening to Upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey earlier today, so this is fresh in mind, but like, how are they gonna spin the Periscope camera? Like, are they gonna use the term Periscope?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Are they going to say, well, of course they’re gonna say it’s the greatest thing ever, but you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what is the approach they take about this? When they talk about, if they talk about 3 nanometer, how does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that happen? Are we going down to the chip lab or are we making a passing reference to the fact that it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new chip technology and that’s all we get? You know, I think the meta observation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is what I find most interesting these days. And no small part because all the real observations we’ve already got and we’ll talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a little bit.

Donate to St. Jude

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, we should start off the show properly, though, and we should do that in the month of September by talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. We are all members of Real AFM

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the sense that we have shows on Real AFM. And even if we didn’t have shows on Real AFM, we would still be behind this cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it’s a darn good one. So what is St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital? You’ve probably heard it before. You’re going to hear it for the rest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of September. And I don’t care if you don’t like it. Don’t even. We shouldn’t even let you skip chapters. If such a thing were possible, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wouldn’t let you skip. But nevertheless, St. Jude is a research hospital. Their mission is to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey basically self-destruct. And by that, I mean, they will continue until no child dies of childhood

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cancer. And if we ever get to that point, then they’re done. Their mission’s accomplished and not in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ridiculous George Bush way, in the actual way. So St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, wow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s a mouthful. They are very well deserving of donations and we are asking you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to donate to them. You can go to stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E-E.org slash ATP,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you can send them some of your money. And given that this is iPhone time, I will defer to Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at this very moment to talk about, Marco, how could you kind of figure out a gauge for what you should donate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to St. Jude, which again is at stjude.org slash ATP?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right, so here’s how I’m gonna challenge you this time. So in the past, I’ve said things like, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you might spend on like an add-on purchase of your iPhone, like maybe a case, or at the higher end,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe like, you know, AppleCare or something else. I’m gonna make this more concrete and a little more ambitious. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right now, the official list price of the iPhone 14 Pro is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quote, starting at 999 in the US. So here’s what I want you to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When the new iPhones are announced, whatever the family is that you’re gonna purchase, either the iPhone 15

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the iPhone 15 Pro or whatever you’re gonna call, like the Max or the Ultra, whatever the big one is, look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the base list price for that model. And I’m gonna say the 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro is the base list price also for the Pro Max, okay?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, suppose, we’ve heard rumors of a price increase. Suppose the 15 Pro starts at $1,199.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If that is the starting price, I want you to look at your receipt when you order your iPhone 15 Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or Pro Max, and whatever the difference is between that $1,199 or whatever the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco base price is. And what your total actually is, that difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is your minimum St. Jude donation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Ooh, I like this. I like this a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So if you maybe upgrade from the Pro to the Pro Max or the Ultra or whatever, if you upgrade the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco storage, if you add on AppleCare, if you add on a case, whatever your order total is for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone order, the difference between that total and the starting price of the family that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you selected, Pro or non-Pro, that is your minimum donation. And even if you get the base model, there’s still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tax, right? Oh, totally, of course. There’s sales tax, you probably are gonna get a case or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re probably gonna get AppleCare. Maybe that’s billed per month. Maybe it’s 12 bucks a month or eight bucks a month or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The great thing is, you can just multiply that by 12, because we’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say the same thing next year. So multiply that by 12 and that’s your price for your AppleCare if you do monthly billing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you can do the math, you’re all smart people who are listening to this show. So that’s my challenge to you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you are at all financially able to do this, and fortunately many of our listeners are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lucky enough to be able to do this, that’s your minimum, and feel free to exceed it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. So yeah, here’s the thing. If you only have 10 or 20 dollars to spare, even though I completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey agree with Marco’s whole mathematics over here, if you only have 10 or 20 bucks, don’t feel bad. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feel bad at all. That’s 10 or 20 dollars that St. Jude didn’t have before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you donated. 10 or 20 dollars is great. The offset, we gotta come up with a catchy name this, we’ll have to workshop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that, but the Marco offset, that’s even better. But no matter what,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anything helps. Anything helps. And you know, why St. Jude? So here’s the thing. Before St.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Jude was opened in 1962, childhood cancer was basically considered

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey terminal. It was incurable, there was nothing you could do about it. Now, thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in no small part to treatments developed at St. Jude, the overhauled childhood cancer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey survival rate went from 20% to more than 80% since St. Jude opened in 1962.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But of course, there’s still way more work to be done. I mean, pediatric cancer is the leading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cause of death by disease amongst U.S. children ages 14 and younger. And you know what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m pretty sure that we can all agree, regardless of our political affiliation, that every kid deserves

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a chance to live their life. And so if you can scrounge together $5, $10,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or even better, the Marco offset of several hundred dollars and send it to stjude.org.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We’d really appreciate it. Now, John, we have some breaking news since last episode. We have a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey top of the leaderboard that is topped ATP. Can you tell me about this, please?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I didn’t spend a very long time at the very top of leaderboard. This happened shortly after last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John week’s episode, which is great. Guillaume Morin coming in at $7,500, taking in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the number one spot and has had it since last week when he donated. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if anyone wants to come for that title, he’s up there waiting. One Password, any other big companies that wanna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John donate. And by the way, speaking of companies, thing we forgot to mention last time, if you work for an employer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that does charity matching for your donation, make sure you take advantage of that. You will make your employer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give the amount that you gave. So you can basically double your own donation. I think there is like a charity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John match search tool on the donation website, but you can just, you know, also just go to your work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John intranet and find like the charity match thing. It will explain how to do it. It’s usually not complicated. And it will literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John double your donation up to whatever the limit of your company is. If you work at a really good company, they won’t have a limit. So whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you give, they will also pay the same amount. So please look for that company match. And if you already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did your donation, you can usually retroactively do the match. Just get your receipt. And that’s what the procedure usually is, is some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of thing where it’s like, just show us what you donated and prove that you donated. And then your company will donate it as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John please do that. Please look for that charity match at your company if you work for a company that does that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep, and as a final note, I forgot to mention also last week, the same offer from the last several

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey years applies. This is literally the only time that ATP stickers are for sale. That’s the great news.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Bad news is they now cost $7,501. So if you are the top donor,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey including you, Guillaume, Guillaume, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} sorry. Guillaume, Guillaume.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Guillaume, Guillaume, there we go, I’ll get there. If you would like a handful of ATP stickers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey please reach out to me. You can find my contact information on the internet, I promise. Reach out to me and I will dispatch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your stickers to anywhere that the US Postal Service will service, and that sounds like I mean just America, I don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can send it to almost any country and I am happy to swallow that cost. So please feel free to reach

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out. If you spend even but a moment at the top of the leaderboard you are eligible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for stickers. So please, please, please reach out to us. And no matter what, again, I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the idea of the Marco offset. I think it’s now a thing. We’ve made it a thing, fetch has happened. I love the idea of the Marco offset,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but don’t let that, don’t let us shame you and make you think that even 10 or 20 bucks isn’t enough. Whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you can spare, please. S T J U D E.org slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And by the way, we know Guillaume is doing it to knock me off leaderboard because his comment was ATP. And we see a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lot of comments, like they show the comments on leaderboard. A lot of people are putting ATP in the comments. We haven’t actually asked anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do that, but we do love seeing the ATP community contributing to this fun drive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even if you just assumed it was only the people who wrote something about ATP in comments it’s a lot of people so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re very proud of our audience and thankful that you’re uh you you know, helping us reach our goal this year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. All right, let’s do some follow-up.

Cropping vs. “2X” mode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We got some very fascinating, and I don’t say that with any sarcasm, very fascinating feedback with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey regard to the iPhone 14 Pro quote-unquote 2x camera versus John’s preferred strategy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of cropping a 1x photo from a photo from the 1x lens. John, would you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like me to cover this or would you prefer to?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can read the the anonymous feedback and I will explain it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so anonymous writes, if you know you want a zoomed-in frame, you should always zoom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in during capture rather than take a 1x photo and then crop later. In recent phone generations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple does a bunch of ML work underneath to fuse multiple frames together during capture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to result in a much cleaner processed result. Multi-frame fusion happens every time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so that’s deep fusion, to improve detail or noise, regardless of zoom range.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But there’s an additional phase in the fusion pipeline that does an upscale to 12 megapixels if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the digital zoom range. So John, translate this for us, please. All right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I did get a lot of feedback about this, and I think a lot of people who gave feedback we’re a little bit confused by the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple does with their, with the iPhone 14 Pro camera. It’s a 48 megapixel sensor, but they bin the pixels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John together. So they take every group of four pixels and consider that as one pixel to get a 12 megapixel image from it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you can also tell the camera, don’t do that. Just give me the all 48 megapixels, right? But by default,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you don’t change your settings, it will take those little sets of four pixels and count them as one pixel, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All of that has nothing to do with this. Yes, you can make that choice, but that’s orthogonal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this entire issue. Lots of people were confused and said, oh, you should definitely, you know, not crop it because then you’re not getting the pixels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. Like, it’s like taking a, you know, a crop photo sensor picture on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a quote unquote real camera. Light is hitting the entire sensor, but when you’re doing anything that’s zoomed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in, like say using 2X, it’s just not going to give you the pixels that hit the part of the sensor that’s around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the edges. It’s just going to give you the middle part that’s equivalent to the quote unquote 2X zoom. And given

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, that’s why I was saying like, well, why am I even bothering? Like, if I’m not getting those pixels around the edges anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why don’t I just take the entire sensor image and I can crop it myself later?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, do you shoot the full 48 megapixel raw image? It

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t matter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} No, it does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, whatever you choose to do, whatever you choose to do, you’re still, like light is still hitting the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John region of the sensor. You can tell the sensor, hey, when light hits that region, bend your pixels into sets of four or don’t bend your pixels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into sets of four. But bottom line is you’re getting the readout from what hit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the center portion of the sensor, right? And whether you crop it later or now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same pixels are exposed to light, right? So that’s not the issue because that’s why I was confused about it. And I went back and forth with this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person to clarify what the actual deal is. Here’s the deal has nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do with which pixels are being exposed or whether they’re binned or anything like that. The reason you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to let the camera like, you know, do the cropping for you is because the camera has access to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information that you do not when you crop later, when you crop later, what you’re doing is taking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the picture that it took and throwing away the outer pixels, right? What you’re missing is what the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera has during exposure, which is all of those frames that are used where they say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we do a bunch of ML work underneath to fuse multiple frames together. Those multiple frames are gone by the time you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John capture the 1x picture. You can’t get them back. They’ve already done their work to produce the 1x picture,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? There is the stuff they’re talking about is like, okay, well, when you do a 2x thing, they’re going to upscale it to 12 megapixels.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And again, I said, well, I can just upscale it myself to 12 megapixels later, what am I missing? And what you’re missing is those multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John frames. They have already done their work on the 1X picture, but when the camera takes a 2X picture,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it knows that it’s going to have to scale up to 12 megapixels to try to give you like a normal size capture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it uses all those multiple frames and fuses them together during the upscaling process

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from like the crop thing to be 12 full megapixels or whatever. And that’s why you don’t crop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John later because you don’t have, no matter what image editing program you use, use Lightroom, use Photoshop or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you do not have access to those multiple frames that are fused together. You just have the result of that work and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t reverse that back out because some data has been lost. So that’s why you always use a digital zoom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and take the picture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that way. It’s like the onion in your sauce, that you don’t have access to it. Once the sauce is served, the onions discard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. It has done its job.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not sure that analogy quite works, but anyway. Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} hope that, because that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was, and like I said, the reason I went back and forth with it is I was like, but can I do all of that after the fact? It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no we don’t you know give you those multiple frames like we give you the result of them being baked in but you Can’t unbake

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it get the frames back and rerun the same algorithm We do and by the way, it’s not just a 2x like this thing says it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every time It’s at a you know a zoom range that essentially doesn’t fill the entire Sensor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t take the all the pixels from the entire sensor They upscale that to make it look like a 12 megapixel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever picture that had that had lit up the entire sensor but when they do that upscaling, they’re doing it with multiple frames.

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Exit interview: Dynamic Island

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We made a terrible mistake. I don’t think we did. Well, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} think we did. Oh, let’s see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, hot takes incoming, hot takes incoming. So, last week we did the exit interviews, which is genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of my favorite segments that we do on the show. And we did the exit interview for the iPhone 14 Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and all three of us forgot to talk about the Dynamic Island. And a lot of people took

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that to mean, and understandably so, I would have as well, well, Does that mean the Dynamic Island sucks then? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I will start by saying, no, I don’t think it does at all. I think it’s underused. I can’t say that I personally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see it used that often, but I think that’s in part for a couple of reasons. My favorite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tools that I’ve used with the Dynamic Island is the absolutely great app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Flighty by in part friend of the show, Ryan Jones. And also, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shoot, it’s the thing that Gruber recommended and I knew I was gonna forget to look this up before the show. It’s a sports alerts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is visually not great, but the app is not great visually, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it does an absolutely phenomenal job of putting sports ball related things in the Dynamic Island. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey am not a person that uses a ton of timers. That’s another great example though. For like music playback

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and stuff, I like seeing what’s going on in the Dynamic Island, but I don’t interact with it that often.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But when the Dynamic Island is in use, which I will concede is not as often as I would like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is, to my eyes, really, really great. Marco, let’s have you jump in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey before John can tell me all the reasons I’m wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, we probably should have mentioned this. Like when people wrote in, why didn’t you mention the Dynamic Island? I thought, oh no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we made a mistake. But the Dynamic Island so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this year, where it has only been available for one year and only on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Pro phones. So only a subset of the product line, which we’ll get to later, but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has been like a good version one of this software concept, but in practice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have found relatively few apps have been using it very well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s the biggest downside to it, is that there isn’t that much software support. See also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco live activities, which is related to, on the software side, they’re very similar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the live activities also, we haven’t seen a ton of software adoption

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for those yet, those are also reasonably young. And so I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this will be a bigger deal down the road, but in my year so far of using the iPhone 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pro with the Dynamic Island, I haven’t had it really make a big impact in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco life. It’s a little nicety. It’s not a big deal. It’s a very nice small deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And maybe in the future it might become a bigger deal as more adoption happens to the software and as Apple refines like how it works,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, with different hardware and everything. We’ll see, but it’s a nice feature, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not, it doesn’t like steal the show. And if you’re still holding onto a phone that doesn’t have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Dynamic Island and like feeling like you’re really missing out, you’re not. It’ll be nice when you get a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phone, that’ll be like a nice little thing that, oh look, now I have this, you know, I haven’t had it yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that’s not, that alone is not a massive reason to upgrade in my opinion. So that’s why I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really feel it worth mentioning. Also, I forgot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So there’s two aspects of Dynamic Allen, and our discussion of it. So the first is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is not the first time Apple has taken a chunk out of the screen. The notch was the first time they did that. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John believe in our exit interview after the first notch phone, we did talk about it, because the thing with the notch was,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this a thing that’s gonna bother us? Because just looking at the phone, it’s like, oh, they just chopped away a bunch of pixels on our screen. Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that gonna be annoying? And our answer at the end of that year was, no, you don’t even notice it. You get the phone, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just, you immediately acclimate to it and the notch never bothers you again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In that aspect, the dynamic column is the same way. I mean, it moved the whole it moved the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part that doesn’t have pixels down a little bit on the screen. Would we care that you could see a stripe of little pixels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John above or whatever? The answer is no. You get the phone. You just like the notch, you just forget about it. So in that respect,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t really require any commentary because we’d already gone through this once before, essentially,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like they chop up some pixels. And we know that basically it’s the thing that doesn’t really bother

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you Second aspect is what I talked about when they first announced this and I still think it’s true The notch is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making lemonade out of lemons Apple doesn’t want to have a gigantic area of the screen that is entirely black because has no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pixels They currently have to do that for technological reasons to support their other features, but they absolutely do not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to do it But they have to so how can they get something good out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this and that’s what everyone was doing and eyeing about They’re like, oh, Dynamic Island’s so clever. Look what they did because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s OLED and every pixel is lit up individually. We can do all sorts of stuff that makes it look like the island grows and shrinks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When in reality, there’s a portion of it that’s never going to be lit up and it’s always going to be jet black and we can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it look like it’s growing, but of course we can’t really shrink it past that. So they do all sorts of UI stuff there. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as I said, when it came out, if Apple had a completely light up screen, I really doubt they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John choose to make a 100% black UI element so prominent on the top of their phones, because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just doesn’t fit with the aesthetic. Even in dark mode, they tend not to do 100% of black stuff everywhere. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they had to do it that way because they have a hole in their screen, right? And kind of like the notch,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which started off big and got smaller, if and when Apple can get rid of this and not have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a region of their screen be black, they will. But until then, they’re making the best of a bad situation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They did it in a clever way and it’s worthy of oohing and aahing about, aren’t those UI designers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clever and isn’t this a nice case of whimsy and stuff or whatever? But the bottom line is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t notice it. Like it’s not a thing that you notice. And then the final thing, I guess there’s three items here. The final thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most of the things that are beneficial about the Dynamic Island have nothing to do with it being dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or an island. And everything to do with, hey, iOS could choose to have a part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the interface that allows other applications to display information, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when they’re not the front most application. That’s the feature that people like about the Dynamic Island. It has nothing to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with the fact that it’s a black lozenge and whimsically glides away and grows and shrinks. It has to do with the fact that, oh, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a little place where I can see sports scores, even when I’m not in the sports score app. And you can have that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature without the Dynamic Island. And I think if and when the Dynamic Island finally goes away and the screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is fully pixels and Apple finally arrives at that dream scenario, they should keep some kind of global

⏹️ ▶️ ^John user interface element at the top of the phone using the exact same APIs where apps can display stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and where you can switch to navigation quickly by tapping there and all the things that we love about the Dynamic Island. And I have to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if I had to say anything about it, I would say those features, you will like those if you get a phone with Dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Island. I wish those features were on phones that didn’t have a Dynamic Island, but they’re not. But eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all phones will probably have that. And at some point, hopefully in the future, they will stop having to cut out a region of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their screen, or at least that region will get smaller and smaller. So I don’t mind not mentioning it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for completeness sake, I think I just reiterated everything that I said when I launched. So what I should have said is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey, all the things that I said about the Dynamic Island it launched, I found them to still be true a year later.

TCL Roku TVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right with regard to TCL Roku TVs and connecting to connecting them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the internet to update them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by the way Have we not decided that this is better better to be pronounced as tickle?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is not better. I think it’s TCL sorry tickle is taken by the language

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that tell the television company is TCL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tickle TV sounds so much more fun

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I’m team Marco on this one. So tickle Roku TV updates. That’s what sounds like a mouthful

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} My word anyway, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} gonna start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying rocky you again, too you. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tickle

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Rock You Television Update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s more fun too. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} the thing about Nolson.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But no one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will know what we’re talking about. Doesn’t matter. It’s fun. They’ll figure it out. Uh-huh. The Tickle Rock You Television

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Update. So Pierre-Luc Gagne writes…

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Oh, come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on. You got to work on your French pronunciation. Gagne.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Gagne writes, I bought a Tickle Rock You Television specifically because it doesn’t…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is so great. Hi, this is Casey. Because it doesn’t require going online to update it. And Pierre-Luc Luke

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey writes, there’s a link, how to use USB to update the software on your unconnected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Roku television. And we’ll put a link to this in the show notes. Apparently, you can do it via USB, which is pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Download a file, stick it on a thumb drive, shove it in the TV. I mean, if that’s why you’re buying this TV,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that must mean you really care about privacy. If you really care about privacy, don’t buy a TCL Roku TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you mean a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} TCL Roku. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the most privacy-preserving television software stack. It tickles your privacy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mm-hmm. Oh lordy. Moving right along.

Apple Park garbage cans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple Park and garbage cans. We got, I know this is from a few weeks ago, it’s been on the list for a while, we’ve got a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lot of conflicting feedback about this, so I don’t know, since the darn Apple Park

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey spaceship whatever is so darn big, maybe it worked different in different zip codes or whatever, but Anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey writes, regarding the ugly gray Rubbermaid garbage cans, either your source was misled or they had a different experience than I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have had. There are indeed little trash cans outside each individual office. They have been there as long as I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been at Apple Park, and I was there before the glass walls had safety stickers. Gosh, remember that? Either this source

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was one of the very first people to move into the building, or they were repeating an exaggerated retelling of how these rubbermaids

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey came to be. Engineers are sometimes told to leave certain types of trash, usually corrugated cardboard, outside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of their offices for special pickup. So perhaps that’s the origin of their piles of trash story.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The real design versus practicality story about Apple Park trash cans has to do with the cafeteria. Apple Park

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey features seemingly custom-designed outdoor trash receptacles, each capable of fitting one, two, or three buckets, compostable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recyclable, and landfill. When choosing how to deploy these bins near outdoor dining areas, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey designers primarily use the two-wide design, meaning that each dining area is missing one of the three bins,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey usually garbage. I do not know the rationale for this choice, but the two-wide design does have the best proportions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so make of that what you will. Given this, employees will often not have the needed bin close at hand, and may end up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey walking clear across the cafeteria to toss their garbage in the correct receptacle. The fact that these employees largely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do take these detours throws the quote little piles quote story into question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I like this one feedback because it said, you know, I’m not sure my experience at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work was a little bit different. Here’s some stuff. And by the way, the real problem is, and it was another

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} story about garbage cans. Like there’s, there’s enough,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, cause everyone had their own like, you know, story about a misdesign and apple park or whatever. Even this one made mention

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the stickers and the glass walls that people were running into. But this is like, no, the real apple park garbage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can story is this, it’s just, there’s, it kind of amazes me that there is enough sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of of like, you know, again, aspirational design choices that are very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aspirational about human nature that end up not working that well in practice. And we have multiple ones just about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John garbage cans.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I will say, though, I’ve been lucky enough to have a couple of meals in the Apple Park cafeteria.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And my favorite thing about those trash cans is that the icons on them are SF symbols.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Of course, they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Apple spent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all that money to have them drawn. might as well use them.

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iPhone rumor dump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is time as we sit here on what day is it? It’s the 6th

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of September, Wednesday, the 6th of September on the 12th is when we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are hearing about the new iPhones. And so we need to do our event preview and somebody,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, has done a tremendous amount of research, which selfishly I appreciate, but unselfishly you should not be doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} But here we are. I should be doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s the new era. It’s the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Come on. That is a song I have not heard in a long time. Anyways, we should talk about stuff. So let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talk about iPhones. And let’s start with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, do you want to go through this? Would you like me to quarterback and wait for one of you to jump

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} in?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can go through it. So one of the things, I put all these details in here partly because I’m kind of imagining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that when the event happens next week, we can just go through the same thing and just X out the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones that turned out not to be true. And can you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say like, what were the sources of all this information?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, so here’s the thing. So obviously the event hasn’t happened yet. Everything you’re seeing here is just an amalgamation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of rumors, right? And like Marco said at the top of the show, when you’re going to make hundreds of millions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of something, you can’t keep it a secret. You can’t keep the physical reality of this thing a secret, right? So, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much stuff about the physical reality of these devices leaks. And year over year, most of it ended

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up being right. I will emphasize when something is more questionable, but for the most part, I’m just gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John read these as like, this is what the consensus of the rumor mill is, and there’s a high probability that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s going to be true, unless otherwise noted by me in these notes where I put a question mark after something. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let’s begin with the A17 at three nanometers. Yeah, it’s a new SoC,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll be at three nanometers. The supposed, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, what does that give us? The sort of back of the envelope boost you might see They’re saying 15% speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John improvements 70% logic density increase and 30% power reduction Those are super fuzzy numbers But the bottom line

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is when they do a shrink you get lots of good things you get You know either you get more speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or you get less power at the same speed your thing gets smaller and you use less power That’s great. And that’s what we expected

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s nice to have a shrink spec wise the rumor is that the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has same number of efficiency cores, but to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one more, no, one more GPU core, right? So same number of efficiency and power cores, but just one more GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John core. The A16 was a five core GPU, and the A17 is supposedly a six core

⏹️ ▶️ ^John GPU. And there is a vague rumor that maybe the GPU cores are redesigned, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hard to nail down. The rumors about the CPU cores is that the performance cores might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John max out at 3.7 gigahertz, where previously they were 3.46 gigahertz. Again, those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John numbers are the type of things that are gonna be hard to pin down because that’s the type of thing you can, you know, that can change over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. So that’s the SoC we’re looking at. And obviously the A17 will be an important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chip because the cores that are in that thing will eventually be, you know, will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be used in the M3 and, you know, across the line, right? The iPhone leads the way. It’s gonna be the first one that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets a three nanometer chip and the work done for the A17 will be reused everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple always reuses the stuff they do with their phone chips. There’s also supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of updated support chips, which is like the chips that are not the SoC. If you look inside an iPhone and that tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little logic board that’s in there, there’s the SoC, which takes up most of the room and like the RAM and stuff. But there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of other chips in there too. And those chips don’t use the super expensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John TSMC processor or whatever. So like for example, the display driver chip apparently is currently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fabbed at 40 nanometers. That’s four zero. So the SoC is at three. Oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} display,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because you’re not gonna spend lots of money to make you know the display driver chip at 3 nanometers like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what are you saving it’s such a tiny little thing anyway and it uses very little power and it you want to save money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right so but that chip is supposedly going from 40 nanometers down to 28 in in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new things and I’m not sure if this is just on the pro or also on the non pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the rumor was about the pro the ultra wideband chip is going from 16 nanometers to 7 at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John least that’s within shooting distance of what the SoC is, but all that adds up to less power for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support chips, which is good for battery life. And Apple does this from time to time, but as you can see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not in a super big hurry to like, oh, everything’s in the phone is going to be three nanometers. No, that’s never the way it is. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SoC is the big, important, power hungry thing is three nanometers. The other chips are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less so. But it’ll be, and this is like Casey was saying at the beginning of the show, it’ll be interesting to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple mentions literally anything about this because they do this all the time. and I don’t think they’ve ever really mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it before. But practically speaking, this is the way you save battery power. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you make everything use less power. When Apple changes the screen to use less power, they brag about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. They don’t really brag about the fact that the ultra wide band chip went from 16 nanometers to 7. We’ll see if they do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this time. The Wi-Fi is being upgraded to Wi-Fi 6E, whereas previously it was Wi-Fi 6.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The big one that we’ve talked about before, USB-C instead of lightning. I thought this was, this is so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so like everybody knows this. there’s actually an existing Google Pixel ad that is running right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now. We will put a YouTube link for it. The Google Pixel ad makes fun of the upcoming iPhone for having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB-C. Like it has two little talking iPhones in a spa and the iPhone says like, well, just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wait, the new version of me is gonna be announced soon. There’s something coming and you’ll never guess what it is. And he’s like, is it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB-C? Something like that. You’ll never guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what it is, USB-C and me soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Oh God. Because like this is how, you know, I’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Mastodon people who like don’t follow these rumors saying, oh my God, the new iPhone’s gonna be, like it’s getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out into the mainstream. Like the new iPhone’s gonna be USB-C. We’ve known that for ages. The rumor mill has known that for ages.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google had literally had time to make an ad of making fun of it. Everybody knows this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is happening. So, you know, that’s a new low I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in iPhone leaks when Apple’s competitors are, not even speculating about it, but just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flat out assuming it’s true and making fun of it. The rumor for the 15 Pro Max is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you will be able to get Thunderbolt speeds, which is 40 gigabits per second from that port. So you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually get those giant video files off in a reasonable amount of time, which is great. But of course to do that, you’ll need a Thunderbolt cable, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will not be included because Apple doesn’t include anything with these phones anymore. And Thunderbolt cables are expensive, but don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worry, Apple will sell you one. What that cable will be able to run, Apple’s probably gonna sell one that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about two and a half feet long. It supports, of course, USB 4 Gen 2, 120 watts of power, something in that range

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for power delivery and possibly have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 4K 60 Hertz video monitoring capability. So like you could be filming something on your iPhone and it connect this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Thunderbolt cable to a monitor. So you can see in real time on a external 4K display what your camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is seeing as a kind of a monitor. We’ll see if they talk about or brag about that. But yeah, finally a port

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your phone that can carry lots of data and you’ll get to buy an expensive cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and by the way, on that front, you know, we, a lot of nerds are like, They’re probably just gonna put in like a USB 2.0

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cable because they’re cheap. And that’s not really the only reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, so, you know, if you look at most Apple USB-C cables that are out there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the world, usually it’s like the ones that come with iPads or the ones that come with MacBooks. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they almost all are USB 2.0. I don’t even know if Apple’s ever made a USB 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco USB-C cable. They certainly made Thunderbolt cables and that’s, anyway, that’s a whole mess. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost all the Apple cables, those nice, thin, beautiful white cables are USB 2. And the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why is very obvious if you compare them to an actual USB 3

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or Thunderbolt cable. They’re much thicker and less flexible and usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shorter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And- The Thunderbolt, to be clear, the Thunderbolt cables are much thicker and shorter and less flexible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because there’s way more wires in there. The connectors are usually larger because there’s little chips in the connectors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so by keeping the main charging cables that people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use, by keeping those USB 2.0 speeds, it allows them to make them much thinner and more flexible. And yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re cheaper as well, but that also has all these other benefits. And personally, I love those dumb

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco little Apple white USB 2 cables because they’re great charging cables. As far as I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tell, those little skinny cables support a hundred watt power delivery. So it’ll support any power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco delivery needs that I have in my house. And they’re so great to pack on trips. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so great in so many ways. And that’s largely because they are so skinny and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flexible and easy to carry around. So I think that makes a lot of sense, especially because the vast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco majority of people, like what is the cable that comes with your phone for? It’s to charge the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s it. Like that’s what almost anybody uses their cable for. Almost no one is using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the cable to transfer large amounts of data to or from their phone. So it makes sense for the very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco few people that will use this port’s amazing speeds, it makes sense for them to have to buy a special cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do that, since the trade-offs to make that everybody’s cable are not good enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And Thunderbolt cables are expensive. Like, obviously, Apple’s are extra expensive, but even if you just go to Monoprice, like, they’re just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expensive because they have chips in them and they’re complicated and, you know, they have to be made to fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exacting standards to carry that bandwidth, and the chips, in the end, cost money. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would add so much to the price of the phone, it would be a very bad, it’s not like it would be, oh, it’s $5 extra. No, it wouldn’t be $5 actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would be like probably $20 additional cost Apple. And that’s huge when you’re talking about, you know, hundreds of millions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of phones. The iPhone Pro and just the Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I guess, is supposedly going to be smaller than the non-Pro iPhone 15. The difference isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gonna be huge, but if you take a 15 and a 15 Pro, put them on top of each other, the Pro will be 0.02

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inches shorter, 0.05 inches less wide and 0.01 inches less deep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The width and height difference is mostly due to thinner bezels on the screen. You may not care about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this, but there’s a subset of the smartphone buying, or at least smartphone reviewing world that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obsessed with how big is the little tiny black border that doesn’t have pixels in it on the front of my phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For me, it’s already so small that I no longer notice it, but just FYI, the iPhone 15

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro will have the thinnest bezels ever on any phone, and they’ll probably brag

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it, and it’s a little bit silly, but you know that does let you pull in the edges of the phone because you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that those bezels are just not wasted space but like if you can reduce them you can reduce the size of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the phone so the 15 Pro will be smaller than the 15 in Those dimensions for that reason why will it be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less deep like less thick? I don’t know. Maybe they’ve got some other savings that they’re gonna talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John As for what the materials are Titanium frame instead of being stainless steel on the pro phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco hates his phone being too heavy. Titanium will be lighter than stainless steel, but it will not be as light as aluminum, probably.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When we talk about how light things are, the same, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess the same volume of titanium is heavier than the same volume of aluminum,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but titanium is stronger, so you can use less of it than you do aluminum

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the same strength. So I’m not sure how Apple will do this trade off, but let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leave it to the rumor mill. the rumor has the weight of these phones down to the gram. So supposedly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the iPhone 15 Pro is 191 grams, whereas the 14 Pro was 206, so it saved 15 grams.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco By the way, for reference, the non-Pro 14 is 172 grams. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically this is saying it’s gonna take it roughly halfway between the current Pro and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco non-Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep, and the Pro Max is gonna be 19 grams lighter, It’s gonna be 221 and it was the old one was 240

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grams so they get lighter but not as light as they would be if they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used aluminum and As for the titanium frame in the invitation to this event It said the word

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wonderlust which is a play on words of wanderlust and the Apple logo is made of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little tiny gray grains of sand which If you don’t know how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the rumors are about how they’re gonna use titanium may not make them too much sense to you but what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the rumor is of how they manufacture the titanium frame on the on this new phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and how they do it on the Apple watch ultra and everything is Instead of the old method where you get a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John solid block of material And then you take a bunch of tools and you carve it out so you sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John carve out the little you know that the shape of the Watch case or whatever with a series of drills and other things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like these little computer-controlled milling machines And then that waste material gets like melted down and reused or whatever However,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new method, the rumor is that they’re using this new method, which is basically 3D printing with metal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you take a bunch of metal powder that looks a lot like the gray sandy things in this Apple logo and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what the technology is. It’s probably something to do with heat or whatever, but they, you know, in the same way a 3D printer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of melts little bits of plastic and builds up a material from in layers, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do that with metal too. And this is a manufacturing process that has become more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and more popular in many different industries. notes to a, I don’t know how to pronounce

⏹️ ▶️ ^John his name, a Zinger CZINGER, the Zinger 21C hypercar. One of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the things they tout about this, this is a few year old hypercar, is that a lot of the parts of this car

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are essentially 3D printed with metal, and you may be like well who cares, I don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how they make it, whether they carve it out of metal or whether they sort of 3D print it by taking metal dust and laying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it down later, what do I care? There’s a big difference in the manufacturing tradeoffs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When you carve something out of a block of metal, it’s actually a pretty complicated process. Apple’s super duper good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at it because they’ve been doing it for years and years, but you have to get like a high speed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John precision moving spinning tool with a cutting blade into all those nooks and crannies so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can carve out the shape that you want. And that is non-trivial. When, it’s not like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, you just say, okay, well, here’s what the watch has to look like. Okay, CNC machine, make this shape. You have to sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John define the tool paths and make sure the giant bulky tool thing doesn’t bang into the edge when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s carving out one particular little thing. You have to say how many passes am I going to take in which direction to reduce

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the amount of burrs you make and everything. It is a complicated process and it has limitations and of course you’re, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cutting away half of the material that you then have to melt down and reuse. 3D printing with metal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John works kind of like 3D printing with plastic or resin or other things where you’re just laying down the material that you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use in exactly where you want to use it. And the big thing about 3D printing stuff is when you want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make a change like, Oh, we made this thing like for the car. We made this suspension arm, but it turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out there’s a weak part on it We think we need to bulk this up in this area making a new version of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that There are limitations to 3d printing tube. They’re different than they are for CNC milling, but it’s much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easier to say Oh, here’s a new revision. Just print me another one. That’s different. Whereas if you say, okay, well, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John changed our mind Here’s a new model for the watch. Maybe you have to change the tool paths Maybe you have to change Entirely how you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John carving out because you made a change that is no longer compatible with how you were carving out before because it just won’t work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for like which part you’re milling out at which time or whatever So it is way easier to make changes and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the second thing is the shapes that are available to you because you are sort of 3d printing it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are It’s a much wider range of possibilities So if you look at this hyper car and you look at like the suspension carriers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you don’t know what like suspension components look Like in a regular car, they look fairly mechanical it’s like a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of kind of like, you know, little struts and arms and I beams and spans

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of metal and flangers and stuff like that, you look at those same things in this car and they look like bones. They look like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pelvis bone on like a mammal, right? Because they ask the computer, hey, here

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the loads. Here’s the load from the wheel, here’s the load from the suspension moving up and down, here where all the pivot points are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Make me the thing that can handle those loads to some degree of tolerance but uses the least

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of material and is the lightest weight. And the computer figures out what that should look like and unsurprisingly, perhaps,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it ends up looking a lot like a bone. And it’s all kind of organic and blobby and gets thin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and gets thicker in all the ways that it needs to use the least amount of material for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing they want it to do. Now, I’m not sure if Apple’s going to brag about any of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, but that is the promise of this technology, that you can make even more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interesting shapes. You can use less material and have lower weight but get the same or better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John strength by making shapes that it wouldn’t occur to you to make if your main tool is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a milling machine that cuts straight lines and things, you know what I mean? So I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we didn’t do it last show, but this is the part of the year where we read

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way too much into an image in an Apple invitation, but I have to think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that at some point they’re going to have to talk about 3D printing titanium powder into really cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shapes. Maybe they’re just doing it for the watch. I don’t even know if they’re already doing that for the Apple Watch Ultra. They might be, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the watch is the perfect place to test that out because it’s small. Maybe they did it on the little phone, like the band around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the phone. And again, people are just like, so what? It’s like, it’s a metal, it’s a metal strip on the outside of my phone. Do I care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it was 3D printed? It’s not a very complicated shape, but I am excited about this technology, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not this year, then for the future, because it does hold the promise to be super interesting for future Apple products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it is fascinating. This is all news to me. I didn’t realize you could basically 3D print metal, like you were saying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that that is surprising and I had no idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there are other trade-offs, like obviously, you know, it’s not the same as a solid piece of metal. I’m not, you know, like everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has different trade-offs but the different set of trade-offs open up new possibilities. Oh, and speaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of possibilities, what is the other possibility opened up by having a titanium band? The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John possibility of having less visible fingerprints than stainless steel. You know, I know this really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bothers a lot of people but shiny stainless steel, yeah, it shows fingerprints a lot And the rumor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that this titanium band will be more of a brushed finish and that will show fingerprints less. They’ll still be there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You just won’t be able to see them as easily. Oh, and they’re going to have a slightly more curved edge. It’s still flat on the sides,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but a little bit more of a curve, curve on the top and the bottom edge. You know, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when they say, oh, it’s a new phone design. Regular people are really going to have to squint this because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re rounded rectangles with flat edges, right? It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it’s going to be hard to tell. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think people are going to, honestly, I think it’ll be interesting. I think people will have a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem with the USB-C change because everyone’s gonna have to rebuy all their cables and everything. And so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think non-nerds are gonna really complain about that a lot. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it will look new, but not super new. And so I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the people who you could never please are like, why isn’t this a newer design?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like they say that every single year, even when it is a new design. those people are going to complain about it not looking different enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think they’re actually kind of in for a bit of a challenging environment in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco terms of like non-nerd public perception of these models. Through no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fault of their own, like it seemed like they are actually rumored to be making some pretty substantial physical upgrades.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I think the USBC, you know, from our point of view as nerds is a huge upgrade for most of us in most ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, but I think like it’ll be interesting to see like the non-nerd reaction here. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think they have a bit of work to do. Like I think they’re gonna be faced with a bit of a challenge. And we know with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seemingly famously failing to read the room a lot of times in recent years, I wonder if they know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. Like I wonder if they are prepared for that kind of, you know, backlash for mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco superficial things that might be stronger this year than usual. Even though from a nerd’s point of view, these all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sound like great upgrades.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They have a couple of tools in their pocket that we’ll get to in a little bit. We’re still in the physical changes part here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh, and by the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before we before we leave the the the physical things I wanted to mention during for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the the slightly smaller screen bezels that are that we’re getting possibly with the 15 pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Smallest ever smallest in the world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So okay, this is this is a stupid hot take and despite everything. I just said I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Don’t want this like I I really maybe look we’ll see what happens when we get it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this doesn’t sound good to me because already the phone is very hard to handle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco without creating touch input. And if they shrink those bezels down even further

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that problem becomes worse. You know there’s a reason why on the iPad the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen doesn’t go all the way to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} edge.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} yet anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But look, they have the technology to make the iPad bezels thinner. They can get closer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than they do, but I mean, the bezels used to be huge on the iPad. Do you remember that? They were like an inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a half.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And obviously they’re way, way smaller now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but yes, they could make them thinner and they choose not to on the iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and I think part of the reason, I mean, obviously cost is always challenging there, but I think part of the reason too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the iPad is that you need to hold it somewhere. And so that kind of makes sense. On the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phone, obviously, I think case usage on the phone is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably way higher as a percentage than the iPad. I think on the phone it’s probably nearly 100%,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whereas the iPad it’s probably well under half, at least if you don’t count like Apple’s folios,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which are barely cases. But on the phone, I worry about that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bezel being shrunk. I think that’ll make things worse for both

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco case and non-case users. Because case users, the case will have less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco area to grip onto the phone without masking out part of the screen from being possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easily touch. Are you kidding? They’re just gonna mask out part of the screen. They do not care. Existing cases mask out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of the screen, even

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} with the existing bezels.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that’s gonna be a problem, right? And then secondly, then people who use it without a case, which I’ve actually, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been trying going caseless for about the last month or so, just kind of to get used to it more. And since my phone’s already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco super scratched up on the screen for the sand that is not in my pockets, I figured what do I have to lose?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I have my wonderful fingerprinty stainless steel bands that I can’t wait to get rid of. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going caseless, the problem of like, there being no safe area to hold

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the edge is actually a little bit magnified, because you don’t have the rim of a case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to rest your finger on. So you’re resting your finger around the physical edge of the phone. And if those bezels get even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thinner, I don’t think, first of all, I don’t think the current ones look bad, and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think that would be that big of an upgrade in how it looks day to day. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also don’t think it would be easier to use in any way. I see that as kind of a competition

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco among gadget reviewers, but I don’t think any regular people are asking for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, and I think it would actually make our lives worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, it’s the Naked Robotic Core theory. Like, you can always add bezel by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having a thicker case that is offset by more, but you can’t remove it. So give us, you know, Apple wants to give us the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Naked Robotic Core, and it has nothing on it that it doesn’t need to have on it, and you can add to it whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want. And honestly, like the bezels are smaller than they were, but they were already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so small. The difference is like a millimeter or less than a millimeter. And you know, it’s bragging rights and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll brag about it, but already on the 14 Pro with a case on it, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very frequently have the annoying experience that when I’m watching something, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John usually like I’m watching like a video in landscape and somehow some fat fleshy part of one of my fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finds

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} its way onto

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the screen. Like I don’t even feel it. It’s like, I didn’t even realize I touched it, but all of a sudden the video like skips forward or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the overlay comes down or something terrible happens. I’m like, I didn’t wait. Oh, some part of my hand must have touched

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And to be clear listeners, John is not a thick man.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, certainly not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, but I have old flabby skin, but I don’t know. Yeah, it’s like, it’s amazing. It amazes me that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happens, but here’s the thing. The solution is not, oh, put thicker bezels on it. I think the solution, other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than getting a case that is offset by more, is what the iPad bragged about doing and still tries

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do, but the iPhone seems to do very poorly, although I think it also has this feature, which is what they call, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John finger, you know, touch rejection, palm rejection, finger rejection, where the OS tries to figure out, does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that seem like an accidental touch or an intentional touch? I believe the iPhone already does this, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so does the iPad. It’s just a question of how good is it at figuring out what is accidental? And maybe it’s something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in a recent, in, you know, the recent OS update or something that rejects my touches less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John intelligently, because I feel like it should know, like when I’m watching a video and holding it in landscape

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there’s this vague, squishy touch to the upper right corner of the screen that’s just like the palm of my hand or something or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John part of my finger. So I’m not worried about the smaller bezels causing a problem with that. And I do think it’s in line with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Naked Robotic Core thing. I do think it is a little bit silly. I don’t, you know, I don’t have any complaints about the bezels, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you can make the phone smaller, that’s a Naked Robotic win, right? Because now if you really want the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bigger size, if you really want the bigger size, just get a thicker case to put on it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll see. We’ll see if they mention it at all, other than in passing, or if they do brag about it as much as,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, a certain segment of the reviewing population seems to be excited about it. But one thing that’s not getting smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing that I hate, the stupid camera bump.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still think they need to revisit that design. I think it is outgrown. It is like a grotesquerie

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of itself. Every other phone has found some other way to incorporate all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, you know, because they have to have the cameras. Like, what’s the reason we buy these? Yeah, you have big cameras, they take up a lot of room,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but they’re still sticking with a design that was based on the idea that the cameras would be in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corner of the phone. They’ve long since taken up more than half the width of the phone, and now they’re protruding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even farther. And nothing about the cameras on the 15 Pro or Pro Max is gonna change that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The bump is gonna be even bigger. I’m kind of annoyed by it. Not that just the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a bump, I would feel better if it was full width. So many other phones do that in the Android world. Just make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John full width, so it’s not like a wobbly, you know, corner on a table or whatever. Obviously it’s so big now that it doesn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wobble that much anymore. But I was like, just go whole hog, just make it full width, just rearrange the lenses, do something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But no, they’re gonna be in the same arrangement, the bump is even bigger, whatever, we’ll deal with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The other physical change that we talked about ages ago is the action button, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John once there was a little switch for what the ring silence switch, whatever the hell Apple calls it, that you dig your little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fingernail in there and you move that switch back and forth, that switch is gone and in its place is an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John action button, which is just a rare thing for Apple, adding a new button, and it will be configurable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the OS to do all sorts of different things or whatever, but just a plain old push button. And by the way, below it, as we discussed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John months ago, just plain old volume buttons, one button for up and one button for down. The rumor was that they were gonna make a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John single button that didn’t move, and it was like haptic and blah, blah, blah. That plan apparently got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scrapped according to the rumor mill, and it would just be plain old volume up and volume down buttons. But there will be an action

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button above it that you’ll be able to configure to do stuff, and I think that’s pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, this sounds like a really good kind of like, you know, it’ll probably mostly be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco used by nerds, let’s be honest, in terms of like changing from the defaults, but that’s a really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nerd feature. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} you know-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What do you think the default will be? I think the default would be mute, just like, you know, to match what everyone has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already grown accustomed to. But I think what many people will change it to will be things like launch a particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco camera app or launch the iOS camera, or maybe flashlight, you know, things like maybe one of the, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you use like accessibility zoom frequently or stuff like that. Like I think it will be very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco frequently used by kind of the iOS power user community. And I think if I had to guess the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco common non-default setting people will choose will be to launch the camera app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, the nerds will have a connection to a shortcut probably. Yeah. God knows what they’ll do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. Yeah, so on the Pro Max only, the rumor is that’s where we get our Periscope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera. And supposedly it is a 3X to 6X optical zoom with the Periscope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera. Obviously the Pro Max has more room inside it for all these lenses that will be laying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lengthwise inside the case. I just don’t think there’s physically room for that to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the 15 Pro. I don’t think they’re just trying to do it for market segmentation. We’ll see when they show us like the cutaway of how big it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but all of the mock-up cutaways make me think, yeah, there’s not room for that in the non-Max

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone. It’s just, it’s physically large. So yeah, maybe in case he will be getting a giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone because he’s just gotta have that sweet, sweet 3X, 6X optical zoom. I have to say though,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think in Apple’s very first periscope camera, the optical quality at either 3X or 6X or anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in between is not going to be great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, because it’s already not great with the 3X lens that’s laid out in the conventional way. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know anything about the details of how this is laid out, but I would assume that it would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably a compromise in sensor size if you’re laying it out that direction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What you’re getting is more room for the optics and more reach optically. And that has its uses,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s gonna be really great in certain situations. But I’m guessing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco light gathering ability of those sensors is gonna be, I’m guessing a very small sensor and very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco low sensitivity relative to the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} ones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the sensor will be big, so I think the sensor is still flat, there’s like a prism that projects it down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh, flips it back around?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but the problem is, just like any kind of zoom lens, when you’re going through lots of lens elements and you’re zooming in a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the maximum aperture is not going to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s like I’m sure it’s gonna be, you know, obviously things don’t match equivalently between different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sensor sizes, but I’m guessing, you know, in like full frame terms, it’s gonna be like F8, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like minimum or maximum, whatever. So yeah, I’m guessing that’s gonna be awesome

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in well-lit situations, but I would not expect that to be useful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in low light.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I don’t know how awesome it will be. Here’s the thing, it’s gonna be better than digital zoom, because that’s what it’s competing with, because no iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has anything past 3X, and this will go up to 6X real. Like non, not, you know, when we say digital zoom,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we say, well, just take the picture, that’s what we were talking about before. Just take the picture that you got on the sensor and just zoom those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John existing pixels. But the 6X will say, no, I can project a 6X picture onto the sensor, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that is actual optical zoom, not a digital enhancement. And no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone has ever had that reach. And I think the reach, that is the feature. It’s not going to be the quality of the pictures, it’s gonna be the fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you can even do that. When you’re trying to get, you know, your kid at the elementary school assembly and you’re five rows back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you want to get your kids, you can actually recognize their face and it doesn’t look like an oil painting of a bunch of kids, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, 6X, that’s gonna be a big improvement over what it was before. And the 3X camera was bad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially in low light. And the 6X camera is also going to be bad in low light, but it’s better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 3X. You will get more reach, you can get more shots than you, maybe it was an outdoor assembly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In bright sunlight, you’ll get a decent picture. But you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk about it and they’re gonna brag about it. and I do like the direction of making the cameras better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just do wonder what it will take for that to trickle down to a phone that’s not gargantuan. Speaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that little gigantic sensor bump area thing on the back of your phone, supposedly they improved the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LiDAR scanner back there as well, which I mean, if you haven’t used one of those home design apps that lets you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scan your room or whatever, maybe you don’t care about the improved LiDAR sensor. There is a very vague,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, this is software-based rumor, so you gotta take a lot of grains of salt. very vague rumor about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new phones having the ability to capture spatial photos for Vision Pro, like that you would take a photo and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, use multiple lenses and the LiDAR sensor to make it like a depth map or who knows that again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything software based you really have to just say that could just be someone’s fantasy. But but the improved LiDAR scanner,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s a hardware thing. So that’s probably real. But it may just be a matter of, you know, that part getting better over time. So of course,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re going to use the better sensor, you know, whatever. The storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Pro phones is gonna be 256 instead of 128, which is what it was previously.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the top tier storage you can get for how much flash is gonna be two terabytes up from one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terabyte. That’s gonna cost you a pretty penny. And the RAM is going to be eight gigabytes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as opposed to the 14 Pro and Pro Max where it was six gigabytes. The base storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going up, we’ll see when we get to the price. That’s not magic, they’re just gonna charge you more, which is kinda sucky.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because, you know, the base storage should go up at the same price, but that’s not the Apple way. So we’ll deal with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, at least I’ll be happy with the base model cause I always get 256. There you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, again, it’s like when on the Mac Pro where they just cut off the base model, right? That’s pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they’re doing here. So the battery, there was a bunch of rumors about the battery being substantially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better because they were gonna use stacked technologies. Diagram, it’s in the show notes, I don’t know. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the notes that I’m looking at that may or may not be in the actual thing, but it’s from various rumor websites. The idea is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that if you look at a battery in cross-section, it’s like a big rectangle, but inside there is like a jelly roll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of battery crap. And the jelly roll on the edges is rounded. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all that space in the corners, where the jelly roll is rounded, but the container is rectangular, there’s wasted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John space in the corners. So stacked battery technology is it goes back and forth like a snake, left, right, left,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right, left, right. And it fills in the rectangle more evenly without wasting space in the corners like the jelly roll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version would. And so this is what’s going to allow us to essentially have battery in the same area

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the new phones. But then the rumor was, never mind, that didn’t work out for this year, it’s going to be next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John year. Take that. We’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} find out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. But then we have the actual rumors of the batteries, which of course leak like crazy. Here’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exact milliamp hours of the pro and pro max battery. The iPhone 15 pro, 3,650

⏹️ ▶️ ^John milliamp hours, iPhone 15 pro max, 4,862 milliamp hours. And here’s the improvement. that is 12%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John larger than the 14 Pro on the Pro phone and 11% larger than the 14 Pro Max.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So these are both double digit increases, 12 and 11% over last year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is that because they’re using stacking technology or are they just bigger batteries? We don’t know, but those are the milliamp

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hour numbers like down to the, you know, these are exact specs. It’ll be very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John easy to check these when the phones come out. I’ll be interested to see if they nail us exactly. But anyway, bigger batteries, essentially 10%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bigger batteries. That’s good. And remember everything else we said, The SoC is gonna use less power, the support chips are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using less power, the screen I think is basically the same as it was, and bigger batteries. So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all bodes well. Oh, and speaking of things that kill battery, another question mark item is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 8K video recording. Presumably the SoC could handle it, and now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have Thunderbolt, so you could actually get an 8K video off of there in some reasonable amount of time. Maybe they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it. Honestly, I don’t know how much value there is in 8K video recording. Are there a lot of 8K

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video workflows that people are using with iPhones with as opposed to their giant red cameras

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. We’ll see, it would be a good bragging right, interesting thing and I believe the hardware will be capable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it, so I guess it’s kind of a question of whether Apple wants to do that or not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wait, what’s the resolution? Are the, do they have enough megapixels for that? I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} we do. I think so, I think so. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe if you go from 48.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} The 48 megapixel thing? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the 48 has such an asterisk on it though. I don’t know, that’s a little pushing it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll see. Yeah, I mean, like, it’s of questionable value,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like, both because of the 48 megapixel sensor and also because like, those are big files. Regardless of Thunderbolt, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much space, I guess you can get the two terabyte one. I don’t know, I feel like if you’re getting a two terabyte iPhone to run 8K

⏹️ ▶️ ^John video, just get a real camera. Right out loud. Charging,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so wired charging is gonna go up to 35 watts, where previously it was 20 to 25 watts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John MagSafe charging is supposedly gonna go to 20 watts, where previously it was 15. and it will support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Qi 2 charging. Qi 1 was limited to 7.5 watts and Qi 2 will go up to 15 watts. Now, to be clear, so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve only read brief bits here and there. Do I understand correctly that Qi 2

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is basically MagSafe?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t seem like it from the watts because MagSafe is supposedly gonna go up to 20 watts but Qi 2 is stuck down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at 15. So they don’t seem, like MagSafe seems to have something extra to it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if these rumors are to be believed. We’ll see. But anyway, it will have Qi 2, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you buy Qi 2 charging accessories, the Pro and Pro Max will support it. The colors are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same old exciting colors that you can imagine the Pro phone having. How about these? Deep blue, space

⏹️ ▶️ ^John black, titanium gray, and silver. No gold this year. Blueish gray,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dark gray, medium gray, light gray. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} pretty much. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, so in our document I have a picture of them. These are the actual phones. This is not a mock-up. Like, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is it. Wait, these are the real camera bumps and everything? Yeah, this is these are the phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco God man, the leaks are nuts. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know these are bananas. But anyway, look at the colors. Aren’t you blown away by these pro colors?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Wow. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} mean, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t I don’t understand why they have to be so boring. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made man that the gray one looks good, but how about that gray one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean they have they have black gray and silver and let me tell you the black one is not black. So they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically have three different kinds of gray or even the blue one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This looks like car colors. It does your car is available in dark medium gray, light gray, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bluish gray.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the colors of the Pro phones are not getting exciting this year. That is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John headline. Those

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} are awful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, these pictures could be wrong. And also the color, as we know, colors look very different in different lighting conditions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So we’ll see when these things come out. Oh, now here’s the exciting part though. We mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the cables that come with these things, color match charging cables. Two things about them. One,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re gonna be braided. So if you’ve gotten, what things come with braided cables now? I think I have a braided cable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that connects my monitor. Yeah, all the pro stuff comes with it. Yeah, and I think some other accessories

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple sells these days come with braided cables, but anyway, it’s like kind of a woven fabric-y thing instead of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rubber or plastic over the sheath of the cable. It makes it less like, you know when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a cable, Apple does a good job of this because they wrap them in circles, but if you get like a cable for a cheap accessory out of a box

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s like wrapped back and forth with like a twisty tie around it, right? Yep, yep, yep. And it’s kinked and you take it out and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t straighten out, it’s still got all the kinks of how it was in the box. That’s because the outside of these cables are made of plastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or rubbery plastic type stuff. And they hold those kinks. Braided cables do not hold the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kinks. They’re more supple. When you unwind them, they just unwind and lay flat. It’s just a nicer experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People also think they’re more durable. I’m not so sure about that because fabric, you know, woven casings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do wear away from friction and stuff, but whatever. People like them better. They feel nicer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s kind of a fad. And the color matching is a thing that Apple is doing. If you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a deep blue iPhone or a space black iPhone or whatever, you’ll get a cable that is color matched

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to your phone. It may be hard to tell with the pro phone, but they are doing that and it’s a nice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, nice addition. And the cables are supposedly going to be a little bit longer than they were last year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not a huge amount longer, but a little bit, which is nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So a couple of things here. First of all, I adore the braided cables. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really being genuine when I say that. I really think they feel great. They seem to me like they’re more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey durable. That may not be true, but they seem like it. I love their braided cables. Secondly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can you imagine if they just chose one color and we all just kind of assumed they were color matched, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because these

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} grays are so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey damn close to each other, can you imagine if they just shipped one, told us it was color matched, but in reality it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just all the same damn gray.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, would we actually be able to tell the difference? Like maybe all the leaks for the cables are just the same color and different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lighting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right, right? Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} God. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John difficult if you have two cables in the house, like one is deep blue and one of them is space black, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be able to tell them apart. It’s like trying to tell, is this Thai Navy or black?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is this titanium gray or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John silver? And then finally price increase. Yeah, maybe a hundred to $200 more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than last year, almost entirely attributable to the fact that they took out the base

⏹️ ▶️ ^John storage. And of course, flash prices don’t go down year over year. Why would they be able to put

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} more storage into the same price?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, in case you were wondering if the price of the Pro phones would keep going up, yep. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John related to that, there are some rumors swirling, again this is not a hardware thing so you never know how this is going to go,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumors swirling about ultra branding for the phone. Maybe these won’t be called the 15 Pro and Pro Max,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe one of them will be the 15 Ultra. Obviously Apple uses the ultra branding on their SOC and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the watch now. Is this the time for the ultra branding to come to the phone to give them an excuse to charge even more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money for the one with the periscope camera? This is not something that can leak. It’s in marketing. This stuff pretty much never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leaks, so this could just be idle speculation, but it’s a thing to watch for. Do they end up calling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything ultra or not?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, I’m going to say it makes sense. I mean, obviously, as I said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco earlier, it’s a fool’s errand to try to predict Apple’s product naming schemes because they never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make sense. We justify them retroactively once we hear the names, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guessing Apple’s names is extraordinarily difficult and almost never works. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this would make sense. You know, the term Pro Max is a mouthful and it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a ridiculous term. I think it would make a lot of sense to just call the phones, you know, the regular and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then Pro and Ultra. So the Ultra would just be the big one? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how I would do it. If I was gonna do this, I would say iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Ultra.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that would just be the new name, replacing the name Pro Max.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you’re forgetting about the plus. Oh God. So bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have one right here. I’m the only one who bought one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There are not dozens. There’s one of us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There is one. Yeah, we never know what they’re gonna do with naming, but I agree that Pro Max is a mouthful. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also it’s like they made it worse for themselves as they always do because there’s SOCs that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have Pro and Max suffixes, but never together. There is like the M2 Pro and the M2 Max, but there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no M2 Pro Max. And of course, MAX sounds like M-A-C-S. It’s a real mess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro Max just needs to go. I’m not sure, like that’s why I like the fact that it’s the iPhone 14 and the 14 Plus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the Plus is the bigger version of the 14. So I don’t know what they’re gonna do with Ultra or if they do anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with it, we’ll see. And speaking of the 15 and the Plus, that’s the next set of rumors here. So the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, iPhone 15 and the Plus, the rumor is they will make an iPhone 15 Plus, which will just be a, you know, the bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version of the iPhone 15. They’re sticking to the thing where the 15 doesn’t have the A17

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it has last year’s SoC, It has an A16 in it to save Apple money. So those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brief years we had where the Pro and non-Pro phones had the same SoC, it doesn’t look like they’re coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back anytime soon. But the good thing is that the iPhone 15 and the 15 Plus will have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the dynamic island, which means you’ll be able to see sports scores and stuff like that when you’re using another app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It will have USB-C just like the Pro, but no Thunderbolt is the rumor. The rumor is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non-Pro phones will have a USB-C port, but you get, what do you get? USB 2.0

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speeds, this is a rumor. This may be difficult to suss out from hardware, but just to remind everybody,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB 2.0 is 480 megabits. That is 1.2% as fast as Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is 40 gigabits.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In all fairness, as stated earlier,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most people just use the port for charging.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I know. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the non-pro phone to be limited to the same speed that to date every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco single iPhone has always been limited to, I think that’s reasonable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it is, because they could put USB 3 in there. It would still be a thin cable. It would still be a cheap cable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just give us USB 3 speeds, USB 2.0 speeds in 2023 on a phone that’s going to cost as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much as the iPhone 15 is inexcusable, I feel like. But you know, whatever, people won’t notice. I don’t think it’ll actually be an issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just think from a technical perspective, it is as shameful as their RAM prices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and you know, it’s almost certainly like, you know, they don’t really need to do this. It’s definitely for market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco segmentation, but I would rather, like, there are features that are currently on the Pro phones that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would love to see in the non-Pro phones. And if they have to do stuff like this to give us those better features that more people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will benefit from, like display enhancements, that’s fine. I would take this trade off. You know, this is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good segmentation. Anyone who’s gonna be using it as a Pro camera, they want to be buying the Pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco versions. And generally those people do buy the Pro versions. So I think this is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But sometimes people need to get videos off the phone even when they’re not using Pro stuff. But anyway, we’ll see if they ever change that. But like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB 2.0 speeds, like eventually this is gonna be one of those embarrassing things that Apple needs to change. Maybe not this year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll get away with it this year, probably they’ll spin it because everyone will mostly be distracted by the shape of the port. But,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but again, it’s like, again, to put it in perspective, this is literally the speed of every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone that’s been released to date. Like it’s not like they’re making it slower. Like it’s the speed that all iPhones have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But people have to wait for videos to come off their phones. Yeah, but no one does that anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} All right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, we’ll have the 48 megapixel camera. Like basically, if you want to think of what is the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 15 non-pro gonna be like? It’s gonna be a lot like a iPhone 14 Pro slightly decontented

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and different. So it’ll have the 48 megapixel 1X camera sensor. Although interestingly, the rumor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that this 48 megapixel sensor will be smaller than the 15 Pro’s 48

⏹️ ▶️ ^John megapixel 1X camera sensor. So maybe they’re using the one from the 14 Pro and the 15, and then the 15 Pro gets a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sensor that’s slightly bigger. We’ll see if they talk about that. Still no ProMotion on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the 15, which some people are really angry about, but honestly, if you wanna do like intentional segmentation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John regular people don’t notice 120 Hertz, honestly. Like again, like USB 2.0 speeds, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will eventually be embarrassing, but it has way longer runway before it becomes embarrassing that it’s 60 Hertz. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB 2.0 speeds are super old, 60 Hertz versus 120. 120 just came out on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones like a couple of years ago. So I think they have a little bit longer to keep that as a segmentation issue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One thing that as far as I can tell, there have been no rumors on either way is whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the non-Pro 15 will have an always on screen. Have we heard anything about that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, because I feel like that’s, it’s going to have physically, I think basically the same screen hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the 14 Pro, but that type of choice is the thing that Apple could basically do in software to segment. So I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyone’s been willing to say or not. I think it could, obviously, because if you look at the guts of the 15, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the guts of the 14 Pro and it has an always on screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco See,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guess no, because whatever type of OLED they used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that got us ProMotion, maybe that type is required for them to do Always On in the same way that they’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s gonna have that type. Like the screen will be the same screen as in the 14 Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but with ProMotion just disabled in software?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ProMotion is a display driver issue. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} just the screen. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like it can’t do 120 Hertz. I think it could do Always On screen, but I think that’s going to end up being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a software like product segmentation choice. Because all the rumors about the screens, even on the 15 Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the rumor is the screen is essentially the same screen as the 14 Pro. Like there’s no screen update rumors. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s basically the same screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Same maximum,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, same maximum brightness. You know, there’s no real complaints about the screen, you know, other than it’ll have thinner bezels on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope they do Always On. I’m not holding my breath on it, but I hope they do. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, for the same thing I was saying earlier about the Dynamic Island being limited to only the Pro phones for only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one year, kind of hurt software adoption. There’s a lot of cool software capabilities that you get with an Always On

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Screen. Not only do you get standby mode, standby works on the phones that don’t have Always On, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it sucks. Like if you’re gonna use standby, you really want an Always On Screen. And that’s a cool feature that I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco love to have more apps invest in and more of the software ecosystem invest in that and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything. So I’m hoping that they bring Always On to the non-pro phone this year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mostly for standby, but also just because it just makes it a better product for a lot of people. So I’m hoping

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that, but I don’t know how, I don’t think it’s very likely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, it could definitely support it because the battery in these things, here we have the exact milliamp numbers, for the 15, 3,877, that is 15% bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than it was in the 14 non-pro. And it is also 5.8% bigger than the 15 pro’s battery. So the 15 will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a bigger battery than the 15 pro, presumably because the 15 pro has more space taken up by camera crap, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because remember, the regular 15 just has two cameras It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way small like that whole gigantic mound is way smaller so Bigger battery

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and this has the a16 in it which is not three nanometers remember It’s gonna be quote-unquote four

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nanometers, which I think is just an enhanced version of the five nanometer. It’s a 16 It’s the processor that’s in the 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro now, right? So I’m not sure how this is going to work out because the 15 Pro has a three nanometer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SoC Which is going to probably end up using less power, but then the 15 has a bigger battery. Maybe it’ll be a wash

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll see and then the 15 plus will have a 4912 milliamp hour battery Which is 12% larger than the 14 plus and 1% larger than the 15 pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John max Wow 15 pro

⏹️ ▶️ ^John max got a big battery. I feel like that’s still gonna be the battery champ because remember it’s got the better SoC and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know Similar size battery charging same type of deal supposedly 35

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watts charging where previously was 20 to 25 MagSafe might still be 20 watts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’ll have Qi2 charging at 15 watts instead of 7.5. And then the colors might have some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actual colors here. So this is a picture of the colors. The colors are supposedly black, yellow, the product red thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blue, purple, starlight, and again, no gold. And in this picture the black actually looks black on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhone 15. Not, you know, space gray or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, the non-pro black usually does really look black. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, non-pro, if they use the word white, it usually does look white, although they’ve been using, they’ve been doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco starlight in recent years. Is this, is that the yellow? That looks like, that looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like almost nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think that’s the yellow. Again, these pictures are taken with questionable white balance. We don’t know if these are final things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We don’t know if, these are, you know, leaks from inside factories. You know, we may or may not put these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the, but you know, anyway, these are the things that are leaking. Obviously the color names themselves, other than product red, are probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not going to be what they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco called. And I hope this is an underrepresentation of these colors because this looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boring and so bland I mean it could be a hundred percent just it could just be a hundred percent wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I hope so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure these are real physical devices, but I think they do lots of different color tests You know what? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} mean like like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that like for you know So I have the yellow 14 plus here the yellow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they ship mid-cycle with the 14 series is Very pale if you look at the back. It’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pale yellow but this picture of the alleged new phones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the one that corresponds to yellow looks like starlight.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it just looks like white with bad white balance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, exactly. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hope this is wrong. We’ll see. But here, the color match charging cables, I’ve seen, I didn’t put them in here, but I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seen pictures of the color match charging cables and they look way more interesting. This is what I was thinking of, the iMacs. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iMacs have color match braided cables, right? Because if you buy the purple iMac, you get the M1 iMacs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get the color match cable. That’s what they’re doing. If you’ve seen the new iMacs, the M1 iMacs, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the M1 iMacs, how their cables look, that’s what the cables of these phones look like, especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the non-pro ones, because they will have white-like ends, but then the braided part will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John color matched to your phone. So if you get a red phone, it’ll be a red braided cable with a white end on it, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much like the M1 iMacs. And that, I think, is, you know, we were talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how people can’t tell the difference between these phones, or they look the same, maybe the corners are more curved. Those stupid cables

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are probably going to be the most important feature of this phone that’s gonna make people happy with, regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people happy with their purchase. Cause they’re not gonna buy the pro phone because who buys that, it’s too expensive. They’re gonna get the red version

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of this, it’s gonna come with a red cable and people are going to love it. They’re gonna love it because it’s braided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and most people don’t have experience with braided cables and every iPhone has not come with them before and it’s gonna match

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the color of the phone and people are gonna go bananas. Like I think this is like the number one feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the phone and it’s so dumb, But that’s the level we’re at. Like these phones basically do everything everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John needs. Sometimes you need to get a new phone. Sometimes your old one is old. Sometimes it’s broken. Sometimes the battery’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad. Sometimes you drop it into a lake. And when you get a new one, you want to be excited about it. And you’re like, what can this new phone do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Does it feel faster than my old phone? This one comes with a cable that matches the color of my phone. People are going to eat it up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope so. I mean, I think one factor here to be aware of, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s nice to kind of, you know, shine a light on, or, you know, put a hat on the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, yes, it’s a different cable and Apple is wise to kind of own that and have, all right, color match

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cables. This is gonna, not only is this cable going to be a different plug on the end, it’s going to look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different. And even though the benefit to most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not gonna be clear to them, we’re gonna make this look like an upgrade. So at least visibly it’s an upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s- And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s more exciting than just a plain old white cable that’s come with your iPhone forever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes. And you’ll be able to tell it apart, which will be great. as you’re learning that this is a new connector,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’ll be able to tell apart, you’ll see instantly which is the cable for your new iPhone. The problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that most people do not buy Apple cables. Most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people, you have the cable that comes with your phone, which you use until the end frays off and it stops working or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the pin blackens or whatever. And then when you have to buy another cable sometime, you get whatever’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cheap from Amazon or a drugstore or whatever. And no one buys Apple cables.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But third parties are gonna see this and they’re going to sell you color match like cheaper quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^John color match cables for the new iPhones, because it’s an opportunity for them to sell more cables.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope so. But but I think we nerds, especially like in the Apple commentosphere,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tend to tend to like assume that more people will use OEM accessories

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than actually do. Like when I’m out in the world, how often do you even see an Apple power brick?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like now, now the phones don’t come with Apple power bricks anymore. How often do you see an Apple PowerBrick for a phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out in the world? For me, it’s almost never. Like, and I see a lot of people, like, you know, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of my, you know, location in a vacation town, we have a lot of people who come here and use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their phone all day on the beach and then go to a restaurant for dinner or whatever and they’re like, can I plug in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phone somewhere? My phone died. And I love the phrase, my phone died, because it takes no ownership

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the situation. It’s like my child starved. It’s like, hmm, that’s interesting. That isn’t some part

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that on you. But anyway, so my phone died and they plug in their phone like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a booth somewhere. And so I see a lot of like, you know, regular people’s iPhone charging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco setups. And yeah, a lot of frayed cables and zero Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power bricks, like none. They’re all rando third-party Amazon power bricks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, hopefully with the fraying cable, they’re doing better with that over time. Like historically, Apple has not done well with strain relief

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or materials. And when they took like the, whatever that harmful chemical is, they took out of their plastics, the cables

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got even worse for a while before they kind of figured out how to hit break even again. Hopefully the braided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cables do better, but like I buy third party cables for my kids because in their rooms, they all want to have their phones on their beds and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they don’t manage their batteries well, so they’re often using their phone plugged in. So I have these gigantic six foot long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John braided anchor cables and they come in colors. So, you know, I get red ones, black ones, silver ones, pink ones, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But none of those colors have anything to do with their phones. With these color match cables, I think Anchor and those other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John companies, those third party companies that sell these really long cables or third party cables are gonna see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a business opportunity to say, let’s start, you know, cause how does Anker pick the colors for their cables? They’re like, oh, I guess people might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a red one. I guess we should make a black one, right? Now they know exactly what colors they need to make. Buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this thing to match your new phone. That will be attractive to customers and they don’t care what color their cables

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are. Like, fine, we’ll just make, you know, we’ll make it so they match Apple’s cables. And of course,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} everybody gets this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco phone. Buy a whole lot of gray thread. You’re gonna need light gray, medium gray, dark gray, blue gray, pink

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gray, yellow gray, and black gray. That’s for the pro phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But like, again, I gotta find the picture of what the cables look like, but the cables look more exciting than the phones.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And every one of these iPhones will come in the box with one of these color match braided cables.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like that’s the whole thing. The one in the box will be color matched to the phone that you buy. And so I think that will give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people a taste for it. And if they don’t care, then they don’t care. They’ll just buy another white cable when they buy a third party one. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I, you know, the action button obviously is gonna be exciting. Getting to that dynamic island,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you didn’t have it before, is exciting. Maybe the Periscope camera, but those color match cables. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these are the things that are gonna stand out the most physically speaking, before we get to whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the heck Apple is going to promote these phones on the software and feature side.

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Other rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a lot. It’s a lot. Yeah, there is going to be more, though. You got the Apple Watch Series 9, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if Margo’s going to buy this one, but the rumors are it looks the same as the Series 8, which looks the same as the Series

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 7. So get ready for that. The rumors are vague.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It sounds like there’s a new SoC. Finally. That’s that would be a significant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco upgrade. But like, are they going to are they going to have my wonderful brushed titanium again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which they didn’t have with the Series 8? Probably not. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} says

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nothing has indicated that. And it’s like, that’s gonna actually impact a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you know, a watch for me is partly functional and partly jewelry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I really like the way the Titanium Series 7 and previous looks. It’s wonderful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And honestly, I really do not like the look of the Apple Watch Aluminum. I understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of people like it. That’s fine, good for you. To me, it’s not for me. And so, I love…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Before the Titanium, I always wore the polished steel, and that’s very nice too. But Titanium,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my opinion, is even better. And… I miss it! Like…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Again, I buy everything. I didn’t buy a Series 8 because of that. If the Series 9

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a lot better, maybe I’ll jump to it and give up my Titanium, but I hope they don’t make me make that choice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But we’ll see. It sounds like that’s not in the cards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, you know, maybe, look, my Series 7 still works fine, so maybe I’ll just not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy the watch this year too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, this would be the year to buy it, because it actually is going to be a new SoC. When we say the previous SoCs were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same, we don’t mean that, like, they were, like, revised on a different thing. They were, like, literally the same, fabbed at the different, at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same size. This one is going to be fabbed, rumor is, at 5 nanometers. Not at 3! Which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of weird that, like, they wouldn’t try to do the watch things at 3, because you’d think the watch SoC would be the easiest thing to fab, because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the smallest, so the least things can go wrong because they’re so tiny, but it’s gonna be five nanometers instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of three. Again, I think like, why not three? Isn’t the watch the most power sensitive? I think it just comes down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to economics maybe. Yeah, I think price is very sensitive with the watch. Yeah, and the phone is obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a more important product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And possibly just yields too. Like the three nanometer capacity at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco TSMC, like rumors are that Apple has purchased their

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} entire capacity for like a year at least.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they’re gonna be using it for all the iPhones because as you said, well, sorry, for all the iPhone Pros,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is a high volume product, very high, obviously the highest profile products and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very high volumes. Then once the M3 series of Mac chips comes out, probably not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that far from now, you know, maybe it’ll come out next spring or summer with a new MacBook Air or something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s gonna probably use three nanometer as well. So even more of that capacity with even bigger chips that’ll have even lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yields. So maybe it’s just like, look, we don’t wanna move the watch to this yet because it doesn’t need it. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s been fairly fine in terms of the market while not having an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SOC update in three years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think part of it might be that the SOC is actually not the biggest source of power drain in the watch. It may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be, obviously it is when you’re doing like heavy work, but like, you know, from minute to minute, I imagine the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} wins maybe. I would assume

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so. I mean, you know, and as I’ve said before, like with the watch, what I’m looking for as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both a watch user, but especially as a watch app developer, What I’m looking for is more ability to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use CPU time because it is extremely restrictive in what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it lets apps do and for how long and when. And it’s all in the name

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of power consumption savings because with the watch, it’s extremely power constrained. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they make the watch SoC more efficient and then that allows them to lift

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of those limits on what developers can do with our apps, that would actually be a substantial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco update for users of those apps and users of the watch therefore. So that would be really interesting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that’s like a big, you know, if they do this and this and this kind of chain of events that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far to date, they’ve basically never done those things. So I, again, I hope for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things like that, but I don’t expect them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know how reliable this rumor that the S9 is gonna be five nanometer is though. Maybe it is gonna be three.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe there’ll be quote unquote four, which is like the improved five. We’ll see if they even mention it. The other question about the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S9 is, Will it just be an S8 fabbed on a smaller process? Which is, you know, it’s not simple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do that. That is some work. Or will it actually be, oh, actually be revised things. The cores are a little different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe there’s a different count of cores. Like, will, to the extent that they tell us anything about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new SoC, will we be able to determine that, like, they didn’t just shrink it. It actually is slightly different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in some way, you know. They don’t go into that much technical detail, but we’ll find out eventually. The other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumors for this are that there’ll be a new color that’s kind of pinkish and that it will come in a smaller box,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which, you know, that should just be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} perennial rumor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Has Apple ever made a bigger box for one of its products? The boxes just get smaller because the economics are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good. You can fit more on a shipping container and there’s less waste. So the boxes keep getting, I think the iPhone box also got a little bit smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco love like there’s so little rumored information about the Apple Watch Series 9, probably because there’s so little change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about the Apple Watch Series 9, that the box made the top list.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then we have the Apple Watch Ultra, which the big thing here is black titanium finish.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it actually looks pretty cool in the leaked pictures. Obviously we’ll also have the new S9

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SoC in there. I don’t know, the picture seemed to show that the action button was still gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be orange. And you know, I guess that works with black too, but people who wanted a black

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version. And I think, I didn’t dig too far into these. I think that might be the only rumor, like basically an S9 and it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also comes in black now, which is fine, but like no radical changes to the Ultra, no big surprise. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a brand new product, basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right, prediction time. I’m really curious, how will they name

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco updates to the Apple Watch Ultra? Like, I was thinking like maybe they would call it, maybe they would just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never change the name, which is this is just the Apple Watch Ultra? Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Just like, you know, iPad Pro. Exactly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like the iPad Pro or the Mac Pro. It doesn’t change name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. I was thinking like maybe they would say like, Apple Watch Series 9 Ultra? Or Ultra 2?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the more I thought about it, the more I think they’re just gonna keep calling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it Ultra. And it just be, this is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} cause,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cause, and I, I don’t expect them to keep old Ultras around as the cheaper option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, cause they’re not, they’re not going to be that much cheaper. The only difference is S9 versus 8, as we see is according to the rumors,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right? If, if even that, I mean, even the S9 is like barely been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rumored to exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, you know, Ultra is having a black finish. That’ll be a big hit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Related to both the watches and the phone is this rumor. It’s been running around for a while

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now. They’re like, oh, it seems like Apple’s not making a leather case for the new iPhones. And then people are like, well, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re going to make like vegan leather. Like this is a big trend in the car industry to have interiors that they call them vegan

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leather as a marketing way to say fake leather. It’s supposed to look and feel kind of like leather, but it’s not leather. It’s entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John non-animal based. And that rumor extends to the watch bands. They make a bunch of leather

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watch bands and they’re like, well, they can not make leather watch bands too. There’s rumors that the Hermes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John leather bands are being offered for 90% off to Apple employees. And Hermes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their big thing is fancy leather. So if Apple’s getting out of the leather case and leather watchtrap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John business, maybe that means the relationship with Hermes is over. We’ll see how that goes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Honestly, I kind of hope so for lots of reasons. So okay, first of all, going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco away from leather, I think makes a lot of sense. is so environmentally conscious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and socially progressive in so many other ways, it has seemed odd that they still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco produced and sold so much animal leather. It didn’t fit with their image. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mentioned this in past years as well, and especially recently. It just seems like every year that went by, they were still making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco leather. It kind of seems like, hmm, do they really want to be making that? Does that really make sense for them?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so this is good because leather alternatives have gotten really good in lots of ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco partly thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the car industry that has a great interest in having something that is less expensive than leather,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that they can charge the same amount for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And watch bands, like, admittedly, leather’s really nice, but there are also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of alternatives. And phone cases too. And if you still want a leather phone case, and Apple won’t sell you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one, there’s lots of other brands that will. And as you know, they’ve gotten pretty good. We’ve talked about it on the show before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Third party leather phone cases have actually gotten pretty good. So we don’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need Apple to be doing it. And from a different perspective on the Hermes front,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I kind of want that partnership to end because Hermes controls the best shade of orange.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the Apple watch, like they’ve always, what I presume is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a weird kind of, you know, toe stepping avoidance situation. They had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this Hermes partnership with the watch for many years ago. And meanwhile, they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also, Apple has occasionally launched orange watch bands and orange phone cases, things like that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hermes is sitting there squatting on the best shade of orange. And I assume

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reason why Apple’s orange shades have traditionally been pretty far from Hermes orange

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is to avoid stepping on those toes, or maybe they were contractually prohibited from getting too close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to it in certain areas. Well, then they launched the Apple Watch Ultra. And the shade

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of orange that goes with the Apple Watch Ultra that they already sell in those cloth, like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cloth strap things for the Apple Watch Ultra, is extremely close to Hermes orange. It’s very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco close. And Hermes orange does look the best with the Ultra and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s orange action button and even the regular Apple Watches. And they even had, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I got one on eBay for some absurd price, but it was still way less than it actually cost.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When you buy an Hermes watch, apparently, it comes with an orange sport band.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That only, it’s an exclusive Hermes sport band that comes with Hermes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple watches. Like not even advertised as coming with it, it just happens to come in the box with them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And people sell these on eBay. And so it was more than a regular sport band, but a lot less than an Hermes watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I got one of these, because I’m like, man, it’s such a great orange. And it turns out, yes, it’s wonderful. And I’m afraid to ever wear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it because it costs more than a regular sport band. I don’t want to mess it up. But like, then when you compare that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like you can look back at Apple’s history of other sport bands that they’ve made in orange-like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shades, and they’re all terrible. They’re all like these weird, like pastel-y

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of candy, salmon-y oranges. And I’ve gone down that rabbit hole,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like going to eBay sellers, they’re selling the old colors, and you’re like, oh, how about like, you know, vivid orange or,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, melon orange or whatever, like all these old color names. And people, collectors will like line them up and take photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trying to show you the different shades of orange, and the Hermes one is always the best. So what I’m hoping

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is if the Apple Hermes partnership ends because they don’t want to use leather anymore, which is great for lots of other reasons, as mentioned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m hoping that also allows them to start using better shades of orange in their watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bands, basically, and maybe phone cases as well. Because I think there’s a lot of opportunity there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for really great oranges that they currently seem to shy away from, for whatever reason, that might be that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco partnership.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I don’t know about the Hermes thing, because I do think Apple does like to fleece the ultra-rich by selling them super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expensive stuff. And they always discount their Hermes stuff when they’re trying to clear inventory before new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff comes. So it could be going away or it could just be replaced by new Hermes stuff. So we’ll see. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the rumor that what Apple is going to replace their iPhone, leather iPhone case with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that it’s supposedly going to be fine woven twill, T-W-I-L-L, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supposedly the branding that they would use in this, again, how would they possibly know the branding? So take this with much grains

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} salt. Well, if they have the box.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, is fine woven, capital F, capital W, all one word. And again, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see pictures of this case. It is like woven textile and kind of like a crosshatch diamond

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pattern. It looks a little bit like suede. People who have seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and felt it think maybe it’s not that water resistant, kind of like suede is not that water resistant. And also the rumor is that case might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be about $100. So is this, if there is no leather, is this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the replacement for it? Or is this just an addition and they are still gonna sell leather? It looked interesting. It looked like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a case I would like to feel because I’m all for new case designs. It did look like it would be comfortable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and grippy. It doesn’t look anything like leather. It looks a little bit like suede, but it’s kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the back looks like woven texture, but then the sides look kind of more plasticky. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John strange. So again, this is a rumor. This is a real physical case that people have shown. Is that a third party

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case? Is that a real thing that Apple’s gonna ship? Watch for fine woven twill.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t, however they spin that. And there are also super vague rumors about potentially future

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watches having woven bands to replace leather bands. Again, the watch stuff is way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sketchier in terms of rumor reliability than the phone stuff because the no more leather iPhone case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from Apple thing has been pretty strong for a long time now. I think people are just extrapolating from that. But this fine woven

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, I saw a video of someone handling it today. And even if that’s a third party case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would be interested in going to an Apple store and seeing what that feels like because it looked kind of interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Honestly, this looks really like, there’s, I’m looking through the rumor pictures now, some of them look horrendous,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some of them look decent. What I would hope this product is, first of all, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they’re replacing leather, in my opinion, good, it’s time. What I hope for this product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, they already make the silicone cases, and silicone cases

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are wonderful for durability, for water-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} For durability?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Water resistance, for the phone, not for the, the case flakes off

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} eventually, I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco case loses its skin eventually. Eventually yeah but you know for like water resistance, impact resistance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a grip it feels great. The problem is the grip is too good and it makes it hard to put it in pockets and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then leather cases are kind of a nice happy medium in terms of grip but they you know first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of all require animals which is again not great and then they also have no water

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco resistance really whatsoever like the water that water does not do kind things to leather and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so ideally if they can somehow solve the need of leather cases

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from Apple, which is something that looks nicer than silicone, like looks a little bit more upmarket,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and is easier to put into a pocket, you know, easier than silicone to put in a pocket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And costs even more money than leather did, which is key for Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, well, so it’s a premium upsell for them and St. Jude everybody, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then also, like, if they can get water resistance in there too, hey, this could be a huge upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we’ll see. I have faith, because Apple’s, ever since they launched the watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and really started making really great iPhone cases as well, their textile game has been very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. They make really great materials for watch bands and phone cases.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I’m optimistic. I think if they have tackled this, they’ve probably done it with good reason and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’ve probably done a good job. So I’m actually very much looking forward to this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Of course, this kind of fabric-y texture, you know what it’ll grow great with? Your color match braided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cable on your phone. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you get a case

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that matches the cable, that matches the phone, all from Apple. And like the texture of it will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John match, the color I’m sure will be an exact match. You know what I mean? Like if this is true, there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obvious synergy for them to really go whole hog. Kind of, again, kind of like they did with the M1 iMac where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything is color matched, the keyboard, the mouse, the cables, the front, the back, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a thing. and I think it is a successful look and I encourage it. The final bit here, wrapping up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is other big rumors, AirPods cases with USB-C connectors instead of Lightning. Hope so. Again, we talked about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it at the last show, every single product that Apple has with Lightning, I think they should eventually change to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John USB-C. They’re not all gonna be announced tomorrow, but I really hope they don’t drag this out for five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years and we’re all talking about it on this show, what’s the last standing Apple Lightning accessory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they’re still selling like we were for

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} like the last time on a Mac? Wait, can I guess? The mouse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’ll be the mouse. I guarantee you. Probably. Probably.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’ll see. But anyway, the AirPods cases are actually rumored that they might just say, you know, by the way, from this point forward, if you buy AirPods,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing about them has changed, but you’ll get a case that has a USB-C connector on it instead of lightning, which would be nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There are vague rumors about iPad mini 7 going to an A16 from A15 and iPad Air 6 going from M1 to M2, but those seem pretty,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John A, pretty boring, and B, iPad, I was shocked to find out the current iPad Air uses the M1.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is the iPad Air gonna go to the M2 before the Pro goes to the M3? I don’t know. But anyway, those are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then obviously question mark stuff that we haven’t thought of or whatever, but we’re really tailing off here. I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as always, it’s going to be the iPhone event with some watch stuff and then maybe talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about accessories and stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I wouldn’t expect to hear anything about the iPads yet. I think that’s a separate event. iPad and Mac some other time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, there’s not even any rumors of Mac stuff. And obviously the next Mac thing we’re gonna see is still gonna be all about M3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whatever the first model to get that is. I’m sure the rumor mill already knows, but I did not compile that for this. Yeah, so I’m interested

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see, like this is the most detailed that the rumor mill has been on every single spec.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The weight in grams, the power capacity of the battery down to the milliamp hour,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the dimensions down to fractions of an inch, about every single thing. So we’ll see,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’ll see how well they did. Even if some of these details are off, like, I mean, people have the physical phones

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in their hands and they show videos of them and like, we know what they’re gonna be. they’re gonna look like iPhones, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s that time of year. So stay tuned next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Trade Coffee, Collide, and Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join, and we will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talk to you after the iPhone event next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Harmon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they didn’t mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Accidental, check broadcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so long

Neutral

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, Marco, I am relieved because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we heard, we’ve gotten word that Rivian is canning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey their ugliest paint option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, everyone has sent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this to me. It’s sent it to us, sir. It’s not just you. Sent it to us. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m excited because should I be in the unfortunate scenario that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well, let me rephrase. Should I be in the scenario that I see a Rivian on the road, I am going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be ever less likely to be in the unfortunate scenario of seeing a yellow Rivian on the road. Does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this influence the purchase you made like two years ago that still hasn’t come due yet?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Um, well, here, look at our slack real quick.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Alright, so I am looking at a building. It is a very, very dark brick or dark

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey painted brick. It says Rivian in the upper left-hand corner. There are a couple of Teslas in front of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it. There looks to be a blue Land Rover, Land Cruiser, I always get it wrong,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a blue thing that Marco once owned, I’m assuming, right on the right-hand edge of the frame.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And a obnoxious, just truly look at me, look at me, I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey confidence problems, look at me, yellow Rivian SUV with actually very good-looking wheels

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey directly in the center of the frame. Congratulations, Marco. It looks like you just got yourself a car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I, well, I got myself an SUV. Whatever. It’s not a car, but…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Alright, so, here’s what happened. I reserved a yellow Rivian. I was sitting on the reservation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco list for a very long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When did you reserve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it? Did you actually look up the date? No, I don’t have it offhand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It was multiple years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ago, right? I think like a year and a half, something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} A year and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco half? So, I reserved a yellow one, and the date kept getting pushed back as they were scaling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up and everything. A couple of weeks ago, I was given access with my reservation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the R1 shop. And what this is, is basically, once your reservation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets close, within… I don’t know how to determine how close, but mine was about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six months away. So once your reservation gets close, they give you access to the R1 shop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this is basically like a real-time updated inventory list of extra ravines they have that they made.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you can go and you can search and just, you know, refresh the page a few times a day and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can see like, oh, here’s one that’s like either my exact configuration or it’s kind of close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to my exact configuration and why don’t I just grab that one? And if you if you’re fast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enough and you see the combination you want or one close enough, you can grab it and you can basically jump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the line. And I don’t know why, I don’t know how they get there. Maybe it’s like reservations that people put in and then canceled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or whatever. However it was, I got access to the Rivian shop. And my reservation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was originally scheduled for, or was most recently scheduled for, something like this coming January, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think, or January to April, something like that. And Rivian announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few days ago, or last week, whenever, that they are discontinuing yellow as a color,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it was the least popular, and they discontinued a couple other low volume options as they’re trying to streamline their production. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco discontinuing it as of next week, or two weeks from now. So anything that wasn’t produced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by then, they were emailing everybody saying, sorry, you gotta choose different options.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John By the way, that kind of stinks. Like if you reserved this thing a year and a half ago, you picked out exactly the thing you wanted, you’re like, I’m gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get one. I pre-ordered it on day one, I’m getting a yellow one. And then a year and a half passes and they say, yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know you pre-ordered a yellow one, you’re not getting a yellow one because we don’t wanna make yellow. That’s kind of sucky, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the breaks of being a new car company. The other thing related to our previous discussion is, they’re also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John discontinuing the vegan leather interior. So they’re not getting rid of leather, they’re getting rid of their fake leather,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I guess most people are buying the real leather and not the vegan leather.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think there were some asterisks on that actually. Their Reddit went crazy and did some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco research. I think the leather thing is actually just like a shift or something, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the big thing is they’re definitely discontinuing yellow and the shiny off-road wheels and a couple other things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Are these the shiny off-road wheels

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} in the picture?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, these are the black off-road wheels.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, it just so happened that a couple of weeks ago,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little after I had access to the R1 shop, I’d go and refresh the page every so often. There was usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no SUVs at all, and there were no yellow ones, but this one day I happened to look, and there were some yellow ones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and one was really close to what I wanted. It had my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco second choice wheels. And I thought, you know, I like these also. I like these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wheels. I’m gonna be impatient. Why should I wait for my perfect configuration six months

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from now when I could be impatient now? And I felt really bad doing it. I didn’t tell anybody. I’m just like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m just gonna do it. And I just jumped on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Well, wait

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a second. Do you still get your pre-order price? Yes. All right, well, then that’s not bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was mostly silently judging you for spending a huge amount of extra money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people know when you pre-ordered it, you like locked in like a good price. And since Marco pre-ordered it, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John price has gone up and up. So if you go to a Rivian dealer now and try to buy his same car, you’re gonna pay a lot more than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he paid. And so I’m like, that’s great, you had the pre-order. You got it, you got it, but you got the pre-order price.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just didn’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly the options you wanted. And the only difference is it’s my second choice wheels. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is fine, you know? And so anyway, so I jumped on it thinking I was making like, you know, a rash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decision. And then the news comes like, literally right after I’m scheduled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to pick it up, initially, the news comes, they’re canceling the color. I’m like, oh my God, what luck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So we’ve all been sitting on this knowledge for weeks, as everyone on the internet has been telling us. You know they canceled yellow? You know they canceled yellow?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not only did we know that, we also knew that Marco had gotten his yellow one before they canceled the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yellow, but we couldn’t talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} about it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the show. Well, slow down though, slow down though. That’s not entirely accurate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I had placed the order with the R1 shop and therefore like confirmed, you know, they assigned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me a VIN and I got to sign all the paperwork online and get the insurance lined up and all that other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff. But I didn’t actually have the car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but I felt like you’d got it in under the wire. Like I assumed that the car that you had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John selected that they said was yellow was a real car that you would eventually get, and you can continue your story and see how that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out. Yeah, so anyway, the process of getting a Rivian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from this point I found a little interesting. I’ll go quickly through it. Basically, you do a bunch of online

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forms, and I was gonna trade in the Land Rover Defender that I’ve been driving, which I mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco liked. I’m gonna give it a brief exit interview in a minute. mostly like the Defender,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I was gonna trade it in, and so that complicates the process. You gotta like send in all these pictures of it, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have them give you a quote, and all this other stuff. And anyway, that process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was weird and buggy. Like a lot of times the web UI would ask me for the same thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco three different days in a row. Like I must have had to send them a picture of the Land Rover’s license

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plate, I think five different times. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would ask for these things, and then it would say, all right, it’s got accepted. And the next day it’d be like, you have one more task, license

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plate picture. I just gave you that, what happened? Very reassuring. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so very kind of lossy paperwork submission process. I will say, anytime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a human was involved, they assign you a person called a guide. That’s basically your agent there that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco working on your case to get you your car. Anytime a person was involved, from the guides, the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the pickup center, the people are great. The systems are still very young. So if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can get a person to look at something, They have been fantastic, nice, patient,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco capable. They’ve been wonderful. My guide, Maggie, if anybody is there, my guide was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fantastic. She had to deal with a whole bunch of crap from my insurance company, and she did it without complaining at all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or even breaking a sweat, and it was remarkable. Like the amount of crap she had to deal with, and she did it, and it was great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, shout outs to guide Maggie over there, and shout outs to Verivion people in general, who everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I talked to has been wonderful. But yeah, they’re still a young brand, And there’s still a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bumps in the road with the paperwork process.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Didn’t you mention in one of our Slacks that part of the crap that you’re dealing with is the stuff that car

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dealers normally deal with on your behalf, like transferring insurance and everything?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, usually when you buy a car in New York, and I think in most places in the US, usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you basically tell them your insurance agent’s phone number, and they call and they work it out. And you pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few hundred dollars to $1,000 usually to the dealer for documentation fees.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it sounds like BS, but now I know what that money’s for because I had to do some of it myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because Reveria doesn’t set up to do it yet. And it was, yeah, it’s worth it to have the dealers do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But anyway, got all the paperwork in. I was about to pick it up and I get a message

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saying, there was an issue with my car upon delivery to the pickup center,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it’s being delayed indefinitely. And I’m like, oh no. And you look up, I looked up on the Reddit And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the people are like, well, that happened to me. And it was weeks. It happened to me. They had to assign me a whole new car. It happened

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to me. And people have all these theories of what those things could be. I was thinking, is it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some panel misaligned, or something got scuffed, or something?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Well, that doesn’t stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Tesla.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, Tesla also does these checks, and I think also holds them back. But this is never reassuring, kind of like having to submit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the license plate thing. You would hope that when a car comes off the assembly line, unless it gets into an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accident in transport, that it’s good. It left the factory. It’s got all the wheels on it. It has

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} four wheels, not three,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not two, not five. All the mirrors are in there. Every panel is the correct color.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They all line up. The doors open and close. But when you’re a brand new car manufacturer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you find out very quickly making cars is very difficult, especially if you want them all to be consistent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you want to be able to make them affordably and quickly, but also with high quality. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other car makers spent decades figuring out how to do this. And if you’re starting from zero, it can be hard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John At the very least the thing they can do with these, you know, fairly expensive low volume brands

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Rivian and Lucid is Okay, we know we’re not that great at making cars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Before we put a car into a customer’s hands at the very very last minute Can someone just go around the car and make sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s not a giant gash from transport or the door seals line up, right? You know like and maybe Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does a crappier job of this because there’s so many stories about people getting a Tesla driving at home and finding pieces of their car falling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off and stuff like that, but But with them not telling you what the problem is, like, did they forget

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a wheel or is there a tiny, tiny nick from transport on the fender? It could be anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in between those things. And that’s where you get the horror stories of they needed to like replace my suspension and I need to wait a month

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and whatever. Or from like, oh, they just needed to buff out a scratch or something. So yeah, do you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at this point? Well, I mean, I guess you have a picture of it. Do you know what the supposed problem was with your car?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t because it was resolved in possibly the best way, which is a few days later, they said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’ve assigned you a new car. was a different Vin update

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} the insurance goodness

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} and you can pick it up on Tuesday or whatever. Yeah, also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco another yellow one. That is key right and with the same configuration I didn’t look at it. So I’m like I don’t know how the logistics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that worked out. How many of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these yellow cars they have is there a secret cache of yellow cars with the wrong wheels? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t know. But anyway, they so I was given a new pick up date

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you know about a week later total and so it was it was resolved so great. So I picked it up yesterday.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I just got it and before and first of all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by the way the pickup process could also it’s very it’s very beta in the sense that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Brooklyn service center where I picked it up is again staffed by very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice very capable people it is in a terrible location it so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like deep in Brooklyn which is a very long drive from Center Central Long Island it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco deep in Brooklyn and it’s it’s in like a warehouse district like there’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco warehouses everywhere it’s nowhere near a highway it like the the process of getting there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco involved like get off a highway and then drive four miles in just stop-and-go traffic lights in Brooklyn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which takes like 45 minutes and and you get there there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco signage of like where do you park where do you go and it’s Brooklyn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s not massive space everywhere so like there’s no like there’s not just tons of extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco space you you can just park your car and like stroll on in on across the lawn. Like that doesn’t exist. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a concrete jungle in Brooklyn’s warehouse district and you you have to like so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I ended up driving around the whole block looking how do I even enter this property? Where do I park my car?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The property…

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easier if you had maybe a smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^John car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} the property

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is covered in Rivian so I’m like I’m like I don’t think I’m supposed to park here. This is clearly like their inventory like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I’m like I ended up pulling into a gate and parking in one of their, in clearly the wrong spot,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’m just gonna walk in and ask them where I’m supposed to park. So, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comes the point, how do I get in the building? I’m walking around this whole block-sized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco building, walking around trying to figure out how the heck do I get in, where do I, eventually I find a guy who’s parking Rivian’s, and I ask,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and he tells me, oh, go around here. I go around to where he says, the door’s locked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, neat. This is one o’clock in the afternoon. I’m like, okay, and there’s one of those touch screen buzzer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things next to it, And you know, I ended up pressing like all three buttons because they have names like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco front, left, and upper or whatever. And it’s like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. Eventually I found one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that responded with a beep after a while and the door unlocked. Okay, great. Once you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get in, it’s perfectly fine. Again, delightful people, nice little waiting area. Like it was great,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but this could not be in a worse location.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you see a giant yellow R1S sitting there? Like, could

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you tell where your car was? I sure did. out. Yes, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as I was walking through the lot I got to see what I think is every current Rivian color because they had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tons of them. So I spent a minute like kind of looking around evaluating. So on that, by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way I will say before I get to the yellow, I’m glad I didn’t go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the blue. The blue was my first, when I initially made the reservation I initially said blue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I found the blue in person to look a little brighter than I like and also fairly flat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Most of their paints, like Tesla, most of their paints don’t have those like metallic flecks of shine. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very flat colors and I found the blue to look a little too flat for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The yellow is also flat but I think it works because of what it is. I’ll get some more of that later.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was very impressed in person seeing the Canyon Red

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the El Cap Granite, which is they’re dark gray. Those are both metallic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flaked and they’re both very very nice in person. The canyon red has a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hint of orange in it and that really is very nice. I think those would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be probably tied for my number two choice of color. If I had to get a different color than yellow

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think canyon red might be the one but the elk cap granite, elk cap granite it’s it’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice dark gray. It goes very well with the yellow accents that all Rivians have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is though still a gray, so it’s a little bit boring, but it’s a very nice boring. But yeah, if I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was gonna go for interesting, I’d go Canyon Red if I didn’t get yellow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, my recollection from when I was at the Rivian dealership or whatever you call it, service center here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was yeah, the the Granite and the Canyon Red were both very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good. Also, I should concede I’ve been staring at the stupid yellow for the last 20 minutes you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been talking. I still think yellow cars are an abomination, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it doesn’t look that bad in this shot. Oh! If you’re going to go yellow, which I still think is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a big f***ing mistake, if you’re going to do it, this ain’t so bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Isn’t that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interesting? I don’t know. So I’ve seen a bunch of these colors in real life, including the yellow. I recently did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see an R1S in yellow, and the yellow continues to be baffling to me in person. And Marco can talk about that more in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} bit. I will in a minute. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the one in my neighborhood is white, and I have to say, I really like that color on this car. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it just works for the sort of boxy, stormtrooper-y nature of this. The black

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and white, especially with the stupid black wheels that I hate, the black and white, white really works. The yellow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is also a really good color, but I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John confused by the color. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} in the picture you have here… Don’t worry, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have help for you. I’ll get there. All right. So first, let me go back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and give a quick exit interview to my Land Rover Defender. Overall, the Defender

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a very nice vehicle. I’ve driven it now for a little over a year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is very easy to drive and a very comfortable ride. For an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off-roader, when you compare it to the Wrangler, the 4Runner, the FJ Cruiser,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all these other off-roaders that I have experience with, as an off-roader, it is extremely comfortable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Very, very nice as an off-roader. It’s even comfortable enough for long road trips.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The suspension is really soft, the steering is super light, it’s very smooth and easy to operate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Very nice. I really enjoyed the storage and the various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco utility affordances in the cabin. It has a lot of places you can grab, it has a lot of compartments,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco places to store stuff, there’s USB ports everywhere, and even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the cup holders, everything is rubberized, so nothing scoots around when you’re going on bumpy stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a very well-designed car for utility.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} If

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you like it, then you should have put a watch on it. It’s a reference, Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes, it’s the Beyonce

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} song. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} helping you out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I knew it was a song. I couldn’t tell you it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Beyonce.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, so Defender, it was a great off-roader. Carplay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has proven to be nice, but with asterisks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As discussed previously, I didn’t like the lag with the wireless CarPlay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the wired is inconvenient and depended on a wire that would occasionally flake out, so that was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not fun. Land Rover also being pure gas and being a giant SUV gets comically bad gas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mileage, which I never liked. Little things, the automatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wipers were not good. To date, I have yet to be in a vehicle where I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the automatic wipers. I’m always left wishing for cars that only have automatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco settings, I’m always left wishing for, just give me an old intermittent setting that I can adjust a little intermittent interval

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on, because it’s always better. The Land Rover also had a surprisingly bad climate control system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a vehicle of its stature. Like, the fan speed would never be right, it was clunky to control,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s part of their brand tradition, right? They really, you know, unreliable electronics was their, like, brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signature, and when they said, well, we can’t have the thing shorting out all the time, all the time but can we just make the the climate control crappy they’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah that that still is on brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for us it was it was reliably mediocre the what was unreliable was the sunroof which I had to get repaired

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and that I was afraid to use it after that and the sound system was shockingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad for like for a vehicle of that stature and other quality areas the sound system sounded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco horrendous I don’t know why

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} they want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John upsell you on the more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco expensive one yeah I guess but and anyway and and that kind of hurt in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco other areas too I I had to when I got it I got it during the time it was very hard to get cars and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I like I had gotten the driving permit for the sand so I had I wanted to get this vehicle as discussed previously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so I had to get there was one used one that they had that I could get for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any reason amount of time and any reasonable cost so I got it but it didn’t have some of the upscale features that the higher-end models

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would it didn’t have the fancy seats I really missed seat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco position memory. I really missed that. Anytime I put it through a car wash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or get it serviced or have anybody else like my wife drive it, I would lose my seat position and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would take me like weeks to get it right again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Welcome to my world. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really missed that. It didn’t have radar cruise and I really missed that as well, adaptive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cruise when I was on long highway drives. Of course it didn’t have any kind of auto steer thing on the highway either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I missed that as well. Coming from Tesla for a few years before that I really missed being able to turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the climate remotely. Now Land Rover has this but only if the car

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has been started within the last few days. So my typical use of it, like I’m going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off on the ferry going back to my car that I haven’t touched for two weeks and I want it to not be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thousand degrees in the car, that didn’t work. And then also it didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have anything like dog mode. This is a wonderful feature that Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had if you if you have a pet in the car and you’re like going in to go get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lunch at a rest stop for 20 minutes, you could leave the climate control running with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just tapping like two buttons on the screen. So it didn’t involve the app. So you didn’t need to like be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in an area with cell coverage that the car would pick up the app signals from. You could just tap the screen and get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out and walk away. And then it would keep the AC on or the heat on and it would show in big print on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco screen, like dog mode with a happy wagging dog. You know, it’s 75 degrees in here, here, but it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show you right there. So other people walking by wouldn’t think you were killing your dog and break your windows.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it’s a great feature. Land Rover didn’t have that. They only had their very limited remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco climate system that only worked for 30 minutes. And it was only if you only through the app and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only if you started the car recently, I very much missed that because we take road trips

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the time as a family and not having dog mode. I, I really dramatically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco missed that. And as far as I know, the only EVs that seem to offer this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did a quick bit of research, I think the only EVs that offer anything like dog mode are Tesla and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Rivian. I don’t think anyone else does. If any other EVs do, I’d love to know. Like, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco couldn’t, it didn’t seem like the BMW iX or the, or any other BMW

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the Polestar. Like I looked at it, I looked at a whole bunch, like looking to see if anybody had this feature and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think they did. Anyway, that was the Defender. It was a great car with some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco limitations and annoyances, but otherwise a great car. I was very happy with it. If they made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a pure electric Defender, I would probably have gotten that with some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the advanced options, like the nice seats and everything. But that doesn’t exist yet as far as I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, the Rivian. Let’s talk about the yellow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I got news for you. It is a really good yellow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} A man

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that spends obscene amounts of money on a car painted yellow likes the yellow. You don’t say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well it was a risk because really I saw like one on the highway coming in the direction

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for two seconds a couple of weeks ago and that was the only one I’d ever seen in person. So it’s a risk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for sure because yellow can go wrong and the like online configurator

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco makes it look almost like a champagne like a light brown and that I wouldn’t have been and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so into that but yellow can be very tricky now John you’ve expressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a desire to know what this yellow is so earlier today I took some photos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now this was during like sundown basically so it’s not the best light

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but and I’ll see you next time.

Vs. school bus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I took some photos of some reference objects so that you can compare.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I have laid out, I’ll make this a chapter art, I’ve laid out on the hood of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} my car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Matthew Feeney There’s a playdate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Steven Horwitz That’s amazing. Matthew Feeney Various yellow reference objects. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have… Steven Horwitz You parked next to a bus. Oh my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} god, that’s amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This might, this god awful yellow, well it’s not that, this god awful color for a car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this might have been worth it just for this moment right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah, that’s a very good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John school bus one. That’s what I’m saying, because I saw it cut. It was going in the opposite direction. I saw it go by and this school

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bus picture. That’s what it looked like when it was gone. But it was 1 p.m. It was a sunny day, sun overhead,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no clouds, 1 p.m. And it looked like that kind of like goldie. and this really highlights how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is not school bus orange or yellow.

Reference objects

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was hoping that my gold hypercritical shirt would have arrived in time for this picture, but sadly it has not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet arrived. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John definitely not that color. The Playdate is a big help here too, but yeah. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} here’s the thing. So let me confirm. Let me confirm, Jax.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This color gold looks different in different light. Like it really does. It’s not two different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John colors, right? Cause this is the same car we’re seeing in all these pictures. And did you take these with your iPhone? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Cause now it’s auto white balancing and doing all sorts of weird crap. Well, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have reference objects now. I understand but you know. So anyway so the reference objects in this picture are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a yellow HomePod, the banana yellow ATP shirt that we most recently sold,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the current yellow iPhone 14, a yellow caution tape strip that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I cut from a construction site, the yellow box of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Purdy brand of paintbrush, they’re yellow, the Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Basics AA batteries because they’re like a kind of an orangey yellow, the Amazon basics batteries,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a playdate by Panic, and finally a Dewalt battery to show Dewalt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yellow, because I feel like there’s like, many people in our audience will probably have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either a Dewalt battery or caution tape or yellow Amazon basics

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco batteries or a playdate, like between all these things, you might have one of these in your house. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say, just for reference, like seeing them, it’s a little harder to see in the picture, but in person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Playdate is too yellow compared to the car. Yeah, it’s brighter. The banana

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shirt and the iPhone are nowhere close. The yellow HomePod and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually the AmazonBasics batteries look the closest in person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Really? Well, in the picture is the AmazonBasics batteries look way more orange

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the yellow car. So in person, they’re slightly, so what I like about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this yellow is that it has a healthy amount of orange mixed in. And I think you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need that to make a good yellow for a car. And I think it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so far they seem to have struck a very good balance of getting like, it doesn’t look orange, it looks like a yellow car,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it has a little bit of orange mixed in and it’s really nice. So far, I like the color a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was afraid it would be like too tame and it’s not. But it also doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look like outrageously weird or cheap or anything like that. It’s a very nice yellow. This looks like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these look like two different cars. If you, that picture where you’re at the Rivian dealer and the school bus picture, those look like two different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cars. This is the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} with this yellow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} chameleon. I would agree with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because next to the Rivian thing, like there, that’s a great yellow. I love that color. And then I look next to the school bus and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, no, no, what happened? It’s not, it’s the same car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s crazy.

First impressions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like it, it’s very difficult to accurately photograph, but in person,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it looks very good. That’s all I can tell you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. You know, again, I have such a horrible aversion to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yellow automobiles. If you’re going to do it, which you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shouldn’t, but if you’re going to do it, I think this works well. Similarly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t care for black wheels when I think it was the year after my car, The wheels that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I eventually got, you know, we had this whole conversation like a year ago now, that I replaced the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey English Town wheels on my car that I hated and got Pretorias, which are the ones that I preferred.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The year after I bought my car, you could get a blacked-out version of the Pretorias, and I didn’t like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey either. Even though the Pretorias are some of my favorite wheels on any car I’ve ever seen, I hated the blacked-out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey version. In this car, the combination of the yellow calipers, the blacked-out wheels,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the pretty well tinted rear windows on the car, and this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey chameleon yellow. As a yellow automobile goes, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the better that I’ve seen based on this handful of pictures. A yellow is still a terrible choice for an automobile, but if you’re gonna commit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this ain’t bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, some first impressions after a day and a half of driving, including driving it on the beach.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I drove it back to the beach

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} tonight. Oh, nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have one sand trip in it so far. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think it’s faster than my Tesla. I always got like the middle configuration for Tesla because I wanted the maximum

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco range. I never had like the super performance ones, but I think it’s faster. It’s ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As long as you don’t turn. Honestly, the handling is very good. I mean, look, it doesn’t handle like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a low slung sports car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} It handles more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the Defender did because it’s a giant SUV. But for what it is, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco handles surprisingly well. It’s very, very nice. One thing that I still have to get used to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s kind of jumpy. Like the way it responds to throttle, and like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has so much power available to it that you have to be very gentle with your foot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if you let up with your foot very slightly, you know, I’ve been used to driving gas for all this time, and with a gas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco engine, especially with a Land Rover, you let up and it eventually considers coming to a stop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But you have, it’s a very smooth like in and out of power. With this, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very jumpy. It responds a little too quickly to taking your foot off the pedal. Can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you adjust the regen? You can, but in regular driver mode, you only have standard or high.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I try both, and it’s not that different, honestly. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a little aggressive. I would like to see that be a little bit smoother, or at least have a setting to make it a little bit smoother.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you change the drive mode? Like, you normally do different throttle curves for like sport mode and whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is this was in like the all-purpose mode. I didn’t try sports. I figured that would make the problem worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think it will make it worse, but there might be like a comfort mode or something I don’t know what the drive modes are

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} on yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s I didn’t see anything like that, but I’ll play with it more as I have it And maybe it’s just I have to get used to it You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know like it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re used to driving a giant gas vehicle that does not respond instantly to throttle input So maybe you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} just know I used to use again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like the defender is like it not only does it not respond instantly it has massive turbo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lag So the defender, like, if you want to go fast, you step on it and then it submits a request to Britain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} comes back eventually that, you know, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want to go fast? Here you go. Anyway, so back to the Rivian. The regen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco braking is, even on the regular standard mode, is substantially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more aggressive than it is on Tesla. And it is very much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco encouraging you to do one pedal driving. And that’s actually, it’s actually fairly nice as you get used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to it. Again, it’s gonna take me a while to be able to operate this car smoothly, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is nice to have that much regen available so quickly in terms of like not having to use the brakes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost ever. And one really nice feature, I don’t know how common this is on EVs. I don’t think Tesla did this at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco least. It not only will it regen brake all the way to a stop,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but if you regen brake all the way to a stop, it engages the hill hold

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it won’t roll back. Which is really nice like that’s a it’s just like a really nice kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of you know Evie luxury feature that like because many cars have

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} a little hold Tesla

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tesla doesn’t do that I don’t if it literally roll backwards like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco manual car if you have not touched the brake I believe so this is I’m saying like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you let the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} region break come

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a stop without ever touching the physical brake this now the rivium will engage the hill hold which is really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice anyway Visibility is better than the Land Rover by a lot. They have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more glass, it’s easier to see. Overall, much better visibility than the Land Rover, and way better than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the FJ Cruiser. Great cameras, great top-down, like bird’s eye kind of view.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Very big, high resolution images. They’re fantastic. I finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have ventilated seats, which I haven’t had in a very long, I think the only car I ever had that had those was the M5.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They don’t have a butt massager on this one, but. But anyway, finally air-conditioned seats,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s fantastic. The capacity that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have for storage in this thing is ridiculous. I, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the frunk alone, just the frunk, I can fit all of my towing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gear. Tow ropes, shackles, like, all, all, massive quantities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of, like, giant, huge towing stuff. Safety gear, battery gear,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of that, the charger, and four MaxTrax traction boards

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all fit in the frunk! That’s amazing!

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then, of course, the back is even bigger. It’s a similar overall dimensions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like in terms of footprint on the road as the Land Rover, but it doesn’t have a spare tire, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the car’s just longer to use that space. So you have not only a third row of seats, which will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be occasionally useful to us, but when those seats are folded down, you just have massive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco storage capacity. And then there’s no spare tire by default, so you can lift up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the bottom of the trunk floor and go down under where the spare tire would go and just use that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as even more storage. This thing is a massive storage boat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can fit so much stuff in this vehicle. The key situation is really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Land Rover, like most modern cars, has a giant key fob that you must carry with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you. This huge brick that takes up your entire pocket and sticks out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Rivian, it has a key fob. It looks kind of like a padlock almost. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a carabiner with buttons on the bottom. Anyway, so it has a key fob. It comes with one. It also comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with two RFID kind of cards. So I can just keep that in my wallet and I’m set.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And also, you can pair up to four phones to be phone keys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it. So, and so far in my experience, they all work really well. They work from surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco long distances away. It seems awesome so far. And like all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good EVs, you don’t have to start it, or unlock it, or lock it. You walk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up to it, and it unlocks. You get in and start hitting things, and it turns on and goes. When

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re done, you simply put it in park and open the door and leave, and it will turn itself off and lock itself.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Love it. It’s so nice. I missed these features so much. The sound system is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really good. It’s way better than the Land Rover. Even noticeably better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than the last Tesla I had. Very, very good sound system. Clear, loud,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, great, great mid-range guitars. Like, it’s really, of course, I listen to Phish. It’s really good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is so nice to have dog mode and seat memory back. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have both those things now and I’ve only had the car for like two seconds. Love it!

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Radar cruise and auto steer. So it has it has radar cruise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It seems wonderful so far. Seems really nice, very smooth. Auto steer is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not as good as Tesla’s and when I say auto steer, I’m talking about what Tesla called autopilot,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but like what used to be the only kind of autopilot. So nothing that would be considered like, you know, real self-driving,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s basically a combination of radar cruise control and keeping you in the center of the lane on a highway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So it will steer for you while keeping you in the center of a lane. If anything like spooks it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it will beep like crazy and disengage. So, you know, you have to be paying attention, but it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relatively comparable to Tesla’s so far, but it disengages

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more aggressively. So like if if for instance, like there’s a merge coming up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the lanes that you’re in that it doesn’t really know what to do, it will alert you merge coming up ahead and then it’ll beep

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and turn off. Or if it has any trouble whatsoever seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the lines on the road to mark where the lanes are, it will also like freak out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and turn off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s useless in Massachusetts because there are no lines that are on our roads that are not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just barely visible about to disappear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco completely. Yeah, so I’m guessing the auto steer is gonna be overall.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m gonna kind of miss Tesla’s But it’s it’s a it’s way better than not having it at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all because of my situation with the Land Rover the only thing one little tweak I would love to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that is When you when you when you’ve like hit the brake or cancel it temporarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you go to resume the cruise control What most cars will do is go back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the last set speed that you had used What Rivian does is it always resumes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the current speed. So if you disengage it to like slow down a bunch, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you re-engage it, it’s going to re-engage it like 15 miles an hour. And then you have to then like you know raise it all the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back up to 65, you know, so it’s kind of, it’s kind of clunky. But that’s a software thing that I hope they can tweak over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Alright, now the short hit list. There is nowhere to put

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sunglasses. What is wrong with these EV companies? Tesla and Rivian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both have nowhere to put sunglasses. What is the most common accessory people use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while driving a car? Well, it’s probably a phone. We’ll get to that in a second. Secondly, it’s probably sunglasses. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco oh, my God. Why? There is nowhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to put. Why? On the Model X, they don’t have a place because it’s just one giant sweep of glass from the front

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the back. But yeah, I don’t know what the excuse is for the Rivian. You’ve got you’ve got a roof and a headliner. You can put a little sunglass

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing right there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And like, you know, it’s shallow, like I- I- they probably don’t have the whole depth to have a recessed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco compartment, but give me like a clip or something, like, jeez. Anyway, nowhere to put sunglasses,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why? Um, one of the interesting design decisions of the Rivian is, and I presume this is to maximize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco frunk space, there’s no glove box. Uh, which is overall

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine, like I can put like, you know, the- the car registration and the insurance card and like the flashlight,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, the flashlight’s in the door. So, you know, I can put like, you know, the paperwork for the car and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhere else, but it’s kind of odd. I wish they had a glove box because that’s just kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} of weird.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think it’s pretty terrible for an Asa at a car this big. It’s so huge in there that the dashboard is so large

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so straight flat. It’s like surely there’s room for a shallow glove box of some kind and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just don’t give it to you. And it’s not because it would intrude into Frank space. If you look at how they take apart this dashboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s stuff back there, but not so much that it’s infeasible that they could have given you a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John small glove box without intruding into the frunk space. I hope they upgrade

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. It kind of, you know, it smells a little bit like, you know, preemptive decontenting. Well, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t have to give them a glove box. There’s so much storage elsewhere, they don’t want a glove box, but people get into the habit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of expecting there to be a little door there in front of the passenger.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and just in general, there is not enough console storage in this car. Like, there’s, again, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a huge amount of space in the car, Which is overall a good thing this can fit tons of luggage and groceries and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco crap like that But there is not nearly enough like small compartment storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the driver and passenger on the front like that You need more there. There’s not even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Nowhere on the dash is there even a USB or 12-volt plug?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As far as I can tell the only power available in the front besides the the Qi charger that kind of sucks and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s third-party things that I’m gonna try out to make that better the only power available in the front at all seems to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the two USB-C ports that are in the armrest compartment which is itself kind of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only enclosed storage in the front of the vehicle besides this little tiny thing behind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your knees on the seat that can hold basically nothing. So, this again, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they kind of learned the wrong lesson from early Tesla where like the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Model S had this giant open dashboard with no storage and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people had to kind of hack various things in. People are doing the same thing with Rivian for the same reason, there’s not enough storage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I understand that it looks cool and minimal and modern, but it’s a lot less useful. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I hope they change that in future versions, and in the meantime I’m buying all sorts of weird accessories from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all sorts of weird, you know, car hackers and Amazon makers and 3D printed dividers and stuff like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to try to solve that, and I’ll report back in the future. I really want CarPlay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do miss it. It is not perfect, but I do miss it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It has built-in Alexa, which this was new to me in a car context.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because Amazon is a, or Bezos is an investor in Rivian, I forget it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, and they have all the Amazon vans and stuff. So yeah, it can do a lot, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s a little creepy, I don’t love that. And also, most cars that don’t have CarPlay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if your phone is connected via Bluetooth, usually there’s like a button on the steering wheel or something that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a voice control button and maybe it triggers the car’s built-in crappy one but usually if you hold it down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’ll trigger Siri via Bluetooth. Rivian has no such function. There seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there is no current way as far as I can find with both internet research and poking around on the car even if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disable Alexa completely it will not have any way for you to engage Siri on your phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s connected via Bluetooth. So that that kind of sucks. That’s again software software can get there. I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco want CarPlay and if not I really at least want to be able to trigger Siri easily via Bluetooth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Bluetooth stack seems to be fairly decent as Bluetooth stacks go. It has moderate latency.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It shows a track list somehow when playing from the music app so I got to figure out how to hack that with Overcast but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco otherwise you know there’s a nitpick list here. I hope they get to some of these things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think you know based on you know what the you know various interviews of the CEO and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that. I don’t know how likely CarPlay is, but I think they would do it before Tesla would. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really, really want CarPlay. And we’ll see what happens there. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I see no reason not to offer it. I tried their built-in nav. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not as good as CarPlay. I tried their built-in Bluetooth. It’s fine. It’s not as good as CarPlay. Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco add CarPlay, for God’s sake. And now that I went from CarPlay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to not having carplay, it feels like a downgrade in those areas. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like how many Rivian buyers will be coming from a car that has carplay? Not 100%,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but not zero. And that number is probably going up over time. So I would strongly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco caution them if they want people to be happy with their Rivian purchases, and if they want repeat customers, and if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they want people to even consider them more than they might otherwise, you got to have carplay. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco table stakes. You gotta add it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And remember, you’re coming from a car with probably crappy, feeble

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CPU, GPU power, powering the CarPlay display into the Rivian, which presumably has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way more power in terms of computing capacity to power all those big screens for its own proprietary

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS. CarPlay will surely be faster, better in Rivian if they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John support it on that hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, exactly. So anyway, all right. Now, the only other thing I’ll talk about tonight is beach driving.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Got to the checkpoint, it was time to air down my tires. Overall it went well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only thing I missed, so the Rivian helpfully does have a tire pressure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco display mode for the left part of your gauge cluster area. So you can,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just like the Land Rover, you can put that up there and leave it there, which is nice. One thing I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco miss though, is that on the Defender, the tire pressure monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seem to be real time. So as I’m airing down the tires, I could check my work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with what does the car think the pressure is? I’ve never seen another vehicle that offered that. I don’t know what it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know enough about the components to know what that is. But it was real time tire pressure updates. So literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as the car is parked, as I’m changing the air pressure, it would display it on the dash. The Rivian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does not do that. The Rivian is more like the Tesla and other cars that I’ve driven where you have to like drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a while before it will update those numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s because the cheaper ones do like what my Honda does, which is they’re using a rotation of the wheel to tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you the pressure, basically by how squished it is, right? And so you have to rotate the wheel to get that. It sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the Land Rover had actual pressure sensors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It must have, yeah. And that was a very nice feature for an off-roader where you are frequently changing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the tire pressure intentionally, as opposed to, you know, with most cars,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you pump it up a couple times a year at the gas station and then you just move on. But with an off-roader, you really want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that sometimes and anyway, so it’s not a huge problem in the sense that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, I still use my Rapid Tire Deflator, the valve pulling type, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s, you know, amazing, and I was able to deflate all four tires really quickly, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the result could have been more precise if I had that. So anyway, I would like to see that. Otherwise,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine. Going off-road, I put it into the sand mode, it was totally easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and fine to change modes, It didn’t give me any hard time about it. It was very, very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice. Um, and then I get on the beach and, and what I had done is I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco raised it to the highest ground clearance it offers, which is 15 inches of ground

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clearance, which is ridiculous for a vehicle to size like that’s pretty much unheard

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of for a medium sized SUV. Uh, but you know, when you’re,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you’re driving on loose sand, which this is, you don’t want to feel like you’re getting stuck

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and what getting stuck feels like is slowing down and not being able to push faster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s what getting stuck feels like. I was limited in that high

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mode to 19 miles an hour. And this usually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this stretch of beach I usually go about 25. So it felt a little slow and it turns out this is actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a software limit. Like when you are at the highest ground clearance setting of 15 inches it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco limits you to 19 miles an hour. And it told me that on the screen. It tiny print so it took me a lot to figure it out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and notice it but it felt like I was getting stuck I couldn’t go faster so it was it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bad a little bit of a bad feel but I’m like alright then I lowered it down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to standard height which is still 11 and a half inches which is I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the highest setting of the defender or in the ballpark of it so I just drove the rest of the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at a standard 11 and a half inches and went 25 miles an hour like I always do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it was amazing. Like the Land Rover,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for all of its, you know, wonderfulness off-road, that car did not have a ton of power and the aforementioned

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turbo lag made it harder to use. And that was the base engine, the four-cylinder turbo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Ravion, the thing that I was able to do, like, you know, when you’re driving in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco deep sand track, like, you know, other trucks drive on the beach and they carve out the two big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tire tracks. And sometimes people get weird and they turn in a weird way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the track or the track kind of gets sloppy as people cross over. And sometimes you have to change which track you’re in. There’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be a bunch running in parallel from different vehicles that have driven there. And you might want to like jump over to the next one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The traction and power required to do this is very difficult because you’re basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco asking your car, you’re currently driving on packed sand, now turn into basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a huge thick berm of extremely loose sand and somehow jump out of the track you’re in into the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one. It’s very… you basically… with Land Rover I had to like wait for a good moment and then basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco floor it and like you know get myself like on top of the track and then you know kind of settle into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the one next to it. The Rivian has so much power instantly from zero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I was basically just able to drive right over it like it was nothing like just… Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m just I was able to go basically wherever I wanted to go on the beach. It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco incredible. The, the amount of power and traction that I had. And I should say, I went down

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to about 25 PSI on the tires. Um, I, I wasn’t, I’m not sure yet, like how low I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go without running weird risks with this vehicle, because it’s a, it’s a pretty heavy vehicle. So I didn’t want to go lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than 25. Um, it was amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco challenging parts of the of the route before in the Defender and again the Defender was a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off-roader but things that were challenging the Defender were a lot less challenging in the Rivian.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It was just able to go. Once I once I you know figured out that speed limit and went to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco different ground clearance it was incredible. So we’ll see how it goes you know throughout

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this this year of driving but so far I am extremely impressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with its ability as an off-roader. And we’ll see how it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John goes. The magic of having one motor per wheel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like there’s no differentials, there’s no locking, there’s no modes of like, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Complete independent control of power going into all four wheels. They actually rolled out a new powertrain in the Rivians now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is just two motors, so one for the front wheels, one for the back wheels, which is less expensive and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets more range and so on and so forth. But yeah, for the ultimate in off-road, having independent control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of all four wheels is great. is great. And I think that 19 mile an hour mode, I think that’s like when you’re climbing over boulders at a 45

⏹️ ▶️ ^John degree angle. It’s not when you’re going on flat sand. I feel like the 11 inch ground

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clearance from your land Rover is adequate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. I mean, yeah, like I would love to do 15 inch, you know, and be able to go maybe 25 or 30 at max, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, whatever. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why they’re stopping you from doing that? I don’t want you to roll this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Um, yeah, but do you think an extra three inches, I figured it was more about like efficiency.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s five inches or four inches, four inches. Yeah. No, these things want to roll. Don’t roll. Rolling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is bad. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you know, I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco also, I would assume like, because the weight is also low in an EV, like it’s probably a much lower risk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I agree,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also a very big, good, tall car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have 15 inches

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of ground clearance. Don’t listen to John. John doesn’t believe in anything that has more than six

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey centimeters of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} ground. You have to watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these videos of how easy it is to roll these things on pavement. John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey When’s the last time you spent more than 10 minutes driving something that was not a sedan?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know rental cars you ever try to get a rental car that actually is a sedan

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} actually. Yeah, that’s very difficult It’s very difficult I Agree, though

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The battery is really should be keeping this thing for like basically ever rolling But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean that limit is there for a reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} so well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco frankly I mean it has enough power, you know if you want it to roll you probably could oh you absolutely can but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I wonder if 19 miles an hour is conservative because I feel like, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John let me go 30. I still won’t roll, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but anyway, this thing, so far, it’s amazing. And again, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are things that I would tweak about it, obviously. CarPlay and storage would be the biggest two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But otherwise, this thing’s amazing. And CarPlay you can fix with software updates, and storage I can fix with weird plastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from Amazon. So let’s hope those software updates and see how it goes over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But my initial day one and a half impressions are very positive so far.