606: A Decade of Half-Presses
24 Sep 2024Our first impressions of the Camera Control, iPhone 16 Pro cases, (These) AirPods 4 with ANC, and the Apple Watch Series 10.
Episode Description:
- Join us in raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
- Follow-up:
- John filename extraction from Photos
- From the ATP Insider: Photo Workflows special
- John’s AppleScript
- Other suggestions
- Shortcuts (for example, Josh Woodward’s)
osxphotos(via Muli)- Directly read SQLite database
- Use Swift/
PhotoKit
- Always sending photos to the shared library (via Alexander Faxå)
- JPEG-XL in iOS 18 on iPhone 16
- iPhone apps and spying via the microphone
- Eavesdropping via Siri
- Secure Exclave
- iPhone 16 & 16 Plus battery removal
- Jeff Johnson figured out how to silence the monthly screen recording prompts
- John filename extraction from Photos
- iPhone 16 Pro Impressions
- AirPods 4 with ANC Impressions
- Apple Watch Series 10 Impressions
- Post-show Neutral: Volvo EX90’s annoying “feature”
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Meta kicks Apple when it’s down
Sponsored by:
- Trade Coffee: Coffee at home, made better. Get your first bag free!
- 1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Empty beach
- Donate to St. Jude
- Photo follow-up
- Mic-spying follow-up
- iPhone 16 battery removal
- Sponsor: 1Password XAM
- Sequoia prompt workaround
- The Apple Store
- Casey’s screen protector
- Activation woes
- Sponsor: Trade Coffee
- Camera Control & cases
- Photo Styles
- (These) AirPods
- Apple Watch Series 10
- Ending theme
- Neutral: John hates the EX90
Empty beach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am back on the beach today and I’m so happy. The beach in September is beautiful because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still pretty warm, some of the restaurants are still open, and there’s no one here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it like because as soon as the school year starts everyone stops coming here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like they you know the the workers who work locally here call it tumbleweed Tuesday the day after Labor Day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just it literally is like a light switch like Labor weekend massive you know crowded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything and then literally Tuesday just tumbleweeds blow through the town like it’s no one is here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it is you know we’re not able to spend a ton of time here because we also are bound now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the mainland school year but wow it’s it’s so it’s so nice here it’s like walking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through like one of those like deserted video game levels fewer zombies yeah few well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean you know the few people who were left you know we’re we’re certainly an eccentric crowd. Certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some characters walking around. We don’t get sent on a lot of side quests though. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s certainly some eccentrics.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the best things I love about being here in this weird beach town is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who are here for long enough, I don’t know if it makes you eccentric or if only eccentric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people can tolerate being here for that long, but whatever it is, it selects for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eccentricity. And so everyone here is weird. Like, I fit in great, because I’m weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. I’m just… and I’m weird in different ways than some of the other ones, but like everyone here is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so gloriously weird. I feel so at home here. Like Long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Island… Long Island has its weirdos, for sure, but it’s more like regular suburban America.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you don’t see a lot of that coming out. In the beach town, Everyone lets their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirdness fly and it is just glorious to be here. And you feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most normal person, even when you are as weird as I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have your car back?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve got it back. The issue has not recurred. It’s been fine. I actually heard from a couple of listeners who wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who said that they actually had similar problems with like, you know, some high voltage error message with their BMW
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ix on its first day, and then they and they got it fixed and they never saw it again. So I’m hoping that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to happen to me. Otherwise, still loving the car. It’s still really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s nothing more to report there. It’s now going to, I hope it’s now going to be just a boring car ownership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco story for the next three years. And then I’ll pick something else or the same thing again, or buy this one, who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows? But I look forward to going back to my car, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a point of flux. I’ve had various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neck and shoulder tension issues over the last couple of years, I’ve been working through some weird little issues. During all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Rivian drama, I couldn’t even turn my head all the way to one side. It was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad, my whole shoulder blade was all tense. I went to a physical therapist and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed it a little bit, but I had to go back the next week to fix it more. And then as soon as I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new car, it was like a light switch turned off there too. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was just all that stress was just melted away as it just started working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just like didn’t it wasn’t causing all this problem and distraction in my
⏹️ ▶️ John Did the physical therapist tell you that your neck was smart to move?
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, before we get started, it is still September. There’s a week left in September,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which means we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are still, still trying to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At one point, I had my little show notes up that would tell me the talking points I’m supposed to use, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidentally closed it, so I’m going to do this off the dome, as Marlon would say. You don’t need notes. You’ve lived
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve lived it, yes, that’s right. So speaking of, this past Friday as we record, I was in Memphis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at St. Jude’s campus and we did 12 hours of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live telethon. We called the podcast-a-thon. It was myself, Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason Snell, and Kathy Campbell, and we did all sorts of fun hijinks for 12 hours and raised $130,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or thereabouts for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So what do we do at St. Jude? It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, like I’ve said several times now, a children’s research hospital. So some of the incredible stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they do is not only do they treat children who are really in the throes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of terrible, life-threatening illnesses, but they also do a ton of research and they try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out ways to make sure that no child would die in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dawn of their lives and in the beginning of their lives. And so when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was there, I attended a couple of talks from some doctors there who were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just talking about these absolutely phenomenal things that they’re doing and how, you know, they’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at research for one type of cancer and very, you know, cautiously and in a controlled way applying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to different kinds of cancer and finding incredible, incredible solutions and fixes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. The work they do there is incredible. They talk about how they’re doing DNA sequencing in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out, okay, well, we know that you have, let’s say not a cancer, say epilepsy. We know you have epilepsy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there could be one of 50 different kinds of epilepsy. But thanks to genetic sequencing, we can say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, no, no, your particular style of epilepsy is the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 style. And we know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this drug treats that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 style really well. And we shouldn’t use this other drug that treats the 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 style, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the case may be. The work that St. Jude does is really incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And one of the most incredible things about what St. Jude does is that they do this without billing their patients
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or their patients’ families. So their perspective is, if you have a child that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fighting for their lives, the last thing you want to worry about as a family is anything but helping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that child and making that child feel better. If you need help getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Memphis, they will fund the trip to Memphis. If you need help staying in Memphis,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they will figure out a way for you to stay in Memphis, either on their own campus or somewhere else. If you need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or one, if you need the patient or perhaps a sibling to go to school, they have a school on campus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just utterly incredible all the work that St. Jude does in order to do everything they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to stop this just terrible, terrible series of diseases, because it’s not just cancer, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said. So how can you help? Well, you can do a couple of things. You can go to stjude.org and you can throw them a few bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now we’ve done a phenomenal job this year, a truly incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job. We’ve broken all—Relay as a whole has broken all of its records. As I sit here now, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over $800,000 raised, but here’s the thing. St. Jude uses a lot of money because all this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey research is expensive. All the treatments are expensive. And they’re also trying to help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fund treatments going to other countries. There’s a program, I forget the specifics off the top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my head, but they’re trying to figure out a way to get chemotherapy treatments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into other countries. This isn’t just America here. So you can go to stjude.org.jp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can throw them a few bucks, five bucks, ten bucks, it doesn’t matter. Anything you can contribute is helpful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that I, and perhaps the three of us, kind of get ourselves wrapped around the axle about the big donations,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but truly anything you can offer is helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw Ryan Richard, excuse me, Ryan Ricard earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey posted this, which I thought was great. And we’re going to talk about the Marco offset in a second, but Ryan said, an idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an alternative Marco offset for those who didn’t buy Apple stuff this year, check any credit cards with cash rewards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had over $100 hanging around, which I was happy to hand over to St. Jude. This is free money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you got generally for being a wealthy person, but it’s no more valuable. I think that’s great. So you could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, or you could apply the Marko offset. Marko, do you know anything about the Marko offset, or is that just a funny coincidence?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never heard of that before. No, actually, I came up with where, so you look at your purchases this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall of your new tech devices that you might have frivolously to some degree purchased.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe you could have gone without these tech devices, but you have your tech devices and you have the baseline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price for the device family. So if it’s the iPhone Pro, that’s $999 or whatever. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you add up whatever you actually spent at checkout or will spend over time with Apple care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscriptions or whatever. So it’s going to include things like sales tax, storage upgrades, size upgrades,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases, any kind of accessories you bought when you bought your new phone or whatever. Add those up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subtract the base price for the family, that is your Marco offset. So for a $1000 phone, it might be a few hundred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks and that is my suggested minimum donation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you consider putting into St. Jude. You know if you can swing it that’s great. If you can swing more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great too. If you can’t swing that but you can swing 10 bucks 20 bucks good that’s great too. Every little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps so please and you can actually as Casey I believe mentioned you can go to the MarcoOffset.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually compute this amount based on the iPhone purchase for this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, basically, look at what you tack on to your tech purchases as, you know, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extra money that you don’t, you know, scrutinize too much, maybe. And that’s a pretty good barometer for what you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably afford to give, if you can. So help out if you can, please. It helps a lot and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very much so. Now, John, I’d mentioned earlier that I was recording or I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing a telethon for 12 straight hours. Did you know anything about that by chance?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did. I watched almost all of it and I And I appeared briefly for 15 minutes of those 12
⏹️ ▶️ John hours. So I was glad to contribute in my small way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and so John and Jason did a live recording of Robot or Not, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John basically the keynote. With you
⏹️ ▶️ John there in the peanut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly right. Exactly what I was going to say. So I was the peanut gallery for that. That was, I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour eight or nine or something like that. It was toward the end of the broadcast. I don’t recall exactly when. But you can look it up, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check it out. So again, I don’t know if we’re going to do this again next week. This might be the last time. probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will next week, maybe not. Actually, maybe not. We’ll see. But one way or another, stjude.org.atp, S-T-J-U-D-E.org.atp,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please and thank you. We truly, truly, truly, truly appreciate all the money that you have sent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, again, most of the money that we have earned for St. Jude It comes from the $5, $10, $15 donations. So please,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything you can do, please feel free. stgu.org.atp
Photo follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow up. John, you’ve gotten some solutions to your, uh, your extracting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file names from photos conundrum. Would you, if you don’t mind, give a super duper brief recap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what the issue was, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. This was from our, uh, photo workflows, member special episode where we, we all described the
⏹️ ▶️ John way we deal with photos and also for our photography equipment. Uh, Casey’s system was the weirdest, but
⏹️ ▶️ John mine had one step in it that was definitely troubling and problematic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it involved me taking screenshots of the photos app and then OCRing text out of
⏹️ ▶️ John them because photos does not provide a convenient way to select a bunch of photos and then just copy their file names,
⏹️ ▶️ John which would be very helpful. So many, many people sent me solutions. As I
⏹️ ▶️ John said on the show, like, oh, I think maybe it was Casey who suggested this, like, why don’t you just use AppleScript? I’m like, yeah, that would totally work, but I hate
⏹️ ▶️ John AppleScript so much, which is true, I do. But one of the things that a couple of people did
⏹️ ▶️ John is they said, hey, I hate AppleScript too, but I asked ChatGPT to write me an Apple script. And I said, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what? That’s a good idea. I do hate Apple scripts, but I use ChatGPT all the time for programming stuff. So let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John give it a shot. So I went and opened up my own ChatGPT window and asked it to write an Apple script
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. And it did. And you know, the script didn’t work, but you know, it’s ChatGPT. Sometimes it needs a little bit of help.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it just got like one or two small things wrong and I fixed them and it was fine. I’m like, hey, now I have an Apple script.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, once I’ve got that Apple script to, and by the way, what I wanted the Apple script to do was
⏹️ ▶️ John get the file names of the current selection. Lots of other people were saying, oh, we’ll get file names of all your favorites. That’s 50,000
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, don’t do that. Or we’ll get the file names of all the favorites within a date range,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you have to pick a date range. It’s like, no, just let me just select the photos. Whenever I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ John my workflow in photos, during this step, it’s very easy for me to simply select
⏹️ ▶️ John the favorites that I’ve just processed. And maybe worst case, it’s like 200 photos or something, so I can
⏹️ ▶️ John just click and then shift-click. I’ve made a selection, then I run the script and it
⏹️ ▶️ John can get the file names out of the thing. So that’s what I did, I made an Apple script that did that. And of course, once I have an Apple script that does that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know where I’m going straight to Pearl. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I wrote a Pearl
⏹️ ▶️ John script that calls the Apple script using the OSA script command line thing or whatever. So now
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’ve written for myself is a Pearl script that all I have to do the next time I’m doing this sort of workflow is
⏹️ ▶️ John select the photos that I want. And again, listen to the episode if you wanna hear what I’m selecting, whatever, but select the
⏹️ ▶️ John photos that I want and then run the Pearl script. There is no other step. And when I run the Perl script, it will get
⏹️ ▶️ John this file names of the ones that are selected from photos using the Apple script. And then for each one of those file names, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John look to see if there’s a raw on my mounted SD card with the raws in it. And if there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a raw with that file name, it will copy it and do all the things. So that’s gonna save me a lot of time
⏹️ ▶️ John and a lot of screenshotting. Now, having said that, oh, and by the way, I will link in the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes to my Apple script. It’s not very exciting. It’s exactly what chat GPT would give you with like
⏹️ ▶️ John one bug fixed. So anyway, it’s very straightforward, but I just really hate AppleScript. And I’m glad Chajibati
⏹️ ▶️ John did it for me because I wouldn’t want to have to look up all that stuff because I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I really dislike AppleScript. I get why it’s the way it is largely, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think it’s potentially for the best, but I also don’t particularly care for it. I was going to ask you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why are you printing the file names or returning the file names rather than just copying them to the clipboard?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I didn’t think that because now you have something you can throw Perl at, of course, That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right, yeah. That’s why at the end of it, you’ll see I’m emitting the file names one per line,
⏹️ ▶️ John as opposed to comma separated or as JSON or whatever. One per line is straightforward. I promise
⏹️ ▶️ John to never have new lines in my file names.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All right, it’ll be fine. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I just want text output to standard out, and then I just feed that into Perl.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s my preferred way of doing things. All right, now onto all the many, many suggestions people sent, because so many people
⏹️ ▶️ John sent suggestions. I hope an equal or greater number of people to send suggestions to Casey, but I don’t know what Casey sees. All I know is what I see.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I saw a bazillion suggestions for this one step in my workflow. By far
⏹️ ▶️ John the most popular, which boggles my mind, was, hey, why don’t you just export all the photos? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John once you’ve exported them to the Finder, then you can just select them in the Finder and hit copy or you can do, you know, once there are files in the file system,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a million ways to get the file names from them. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John that would work. But why in the world would I export photos and make it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can do it small size, they won’t take up a lot of room, you know, but why would I make it do all that work? Why, it was empathy for
⏹️ ▶️ John the machine. Why would I make it like recompress, export, make a bunch of files just so I can get the file names and then
⏹️ ▶️ John delete the things? No, no, that’s, I mean, yes, technically that would absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John work. And some might find it preferable to what I was doing with OCRing, but at least when I was
⏹️ ▶️ John OCRing, I was making one screenshot for dozens and dozens of photos because I have a very big screen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exporting the files. Everyone suggested that. I guess, I mean, I guess if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not in a kind of like, I’m gonna write an automation script mindset, this is the most straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it. Hey, you want file names? Make files, they’ve got names, boom, problem solved. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not, that solution I reject. Some other people suggested using shortcuts, which is sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John modern sort of AppleScript type equivalent, we’ll put a link in the show notes to an example one from Josh Woodward.
⏹️ ▶️ John Shortcuts can totally do all the stuff, I’m sure. Shortcuts, I find I’m even more allergic to than AppleScript
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m a programmer and at least AppleScript lets me sort of kind of do programming but shortcuts makes me
⏹️ ▶️ John like Arrange widgets in a GUI instead of programming and you know I’m glad that it exists
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m glad that it is very powerful can do lots of things and I’m glad a lot of people Like it not for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but put an example in there Mootly suggested a Python project
⏹️ ▶️ John which will link to in the show notes called OS X OS 10 and whatever, OSX
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos. And it’s a command line utility that talks directly to the Photos database,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it can do all sorts of stuff. It can output stuff as CSV or JSON,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can also, of course, query the SQLite database that is behind Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself. For some reason that I don’t understand that someone from Apple will surely write in and tell us about
⏹️ ▶️ John all the tables that are interesting in the SQLite database, beginning with the letter Z.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing or something? I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John think so, yeah. Yeah, anyway, the Z asset table has the info you want, but this Python command line utility will just basically
⏹️ ▶️ John bypass everything and let you just query the database. I don’t think I actually want that because I imagine the
⏹️ ▶️ John current selection isn’t reflected in the database, but I could be wrong about that. But anyway, because I want to go off of the current
⏹️ ▶️ John selection as just a flexible way of saying, I know which photos I’m dealing with here, just let me select them in the
⏹️ ▶️ John app and then run the script, right? I don’t know if it’s convenient to get the current selection, but that’s another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you could do. Will Lineweber provide an example of directly reading the photos database
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to see what that looks like? It’s just SQLite, it’s just SQLite database. You can just query it like the tables are wacky
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, they begin with letter Z and the columns are maybe not what you expect but you can do it. And finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of people sent Swift code that uses PhotoKit. We’ll put a link in the show notes to
⏹️ ▶️ John one on GitHub from Alex Mazanov. Underscore David Smith also provided one. Yeah, Apple obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John has APIs to get to the photos database, that’s how you can do photo pickers and all sorts of other stuff that interacts with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can write Swift to do that. So if Swift is your preferred language, like Perl is mine, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John write up a Swift quote unquote script. Same thing, put a line at the top
⏹️ ▶️ John that will run user bin Swift or whatever. You can use Swift like that and it will compile it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John fly and run your thing. Same caveats about, I’m not sure you can get the current selection from the Photos
⏹️ ▶️ John app without asking it through shortcuts or AppleScript, but I could be wrong with that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are lots of ways to skin this cat, but predictably, the way I did it is with Perl,
⏹️ ▶️ John with the smallest amount of AppleScript possible, just to do the part that I didn’t want to do in Perl.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to your earlier half question, what kind of feedback did I get? I got basic, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey universally feedback that what I was doing was wrong. From the internet? Oh, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I’m shocked as well. It came with various degrees of obnoxiousness slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey empathy. I do get a couple of suggestions for minor things, including, I think the most actionable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggestion I got was there’s a couple other apps that’ll do the GPS tagging, um, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I need to at least investigate and see if they will better fit my workflow. But for the most part, people just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shook their heads in, in mutual embarrassment on my behalf.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I thought we gave you some good actionable improvements that didn’t really change your workflow, but just ahead in this step,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could do this with less work or whatever, uh, during the episode. But yes, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John people are amazed by the the Rube Goldberg machine that you’ve constructed I also checked out that well, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I figure which one it was. It was like the GPX I should have put a link in here. Someone suggested one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Tagging apps that looked pretty good basically it’s just an app that you run on your phone and it keeps track of your location and exports
⏹️ ▶️ John files in a format that a Lot of apps can read to tag your files Anything to get out of the world of proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John like in my case Sony apps that I think Sony like recently discontinued their app Anyway, I don’t even know if they replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John it but those apps were terrible. The good thing those apps had going for them is that they think they directly
⏹️ ▶️ John communicated with the camera, so there’s no like, bringing it all into the Mac and combining it or whatever, but I’ll gladly
⏹️ ▶️ John do that if it’s something more sane. So I have on my list to check out some of the apps. I think I already downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them to check out some of the apps that can export this standardized format for GPS tagging. And if I
⏹️ ▶️ John end up finding something that works, or if Casey does, we’ll talk about it on the show, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin All right. Then with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my question, if I’m not mistaken, about, hey, you know, I kind of wish I could just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always share all of my photos to the shared library, or at least default to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what Apple tries to do is it tries to be smart about it. And you can say, you can say, oh, you know, when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at home, always go to the shared photo library. And otherwise, if your partner or spouse or what have you is nearby,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, by way of Bluetooth, then you can then you you can do shared photo library, but otherwise it goes to your personal library.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Alexander F wrote in to say, if you select share manually in the shared library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings and then just press the yellow bubble on the camera app, it will remember that setting and automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always put all photos in the shared library, regardless of what the smarts thinks. I did this once when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared photo library came out and haven’t needed to touch it since. That’s a good tip. I didn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so there’s a couple of nuances here. One is like the feature that Casey was referring to, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you get basically two choices of like, what do you want me to do with respect to shared library and the choices are automatic
⏹️ ▶️ John which tries to do the smart thing and manual so Alexander solution is first select
⏹️ ▶️ John manual and then second in the camera app at the top There’ll be this little yellow circle with
⏹️ ▶️ John either like one little person’s head in it or two little people’s heads in it Change it to two little people’s head because that
⏹️ ▶️ John says hey when you take a photo with this camera It’ll go to the shared library and that’s it and
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike many other settings There is nothing in the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John settings in iOS that says in the section for preserving settings that refers to
⏹️ ▶️ John this. So if you go to settings, go to camera, there’s this thing of like, hey, which settings do you want me to
⏹️ ▶️ John preserve between launches of the camera? So like you launch the camera and say you change into video
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, and then you go to a different app. When you come back to camera, do you want it to still be in video mode
⏹️ ▶️ John or do you just want it always to go back to camera? That’s an example of deciding whether you want a setting to be preserved.
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple provides like a whole screen full of these. You want me to preserve the style, the focus,
⏹️ ▶️ John the zoom, like you can toggle these on and off. And so if you’ve never checked that out,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re frustrated that every time you launch the camera app, it doesn’t remember something or it does remember some other thing, you can change your mind
⏹️ ▶️ John about those. But this shared versus non-shared thing is not in that set of preferences. As
⏹️ ▶️ John far as I can tell, it’s just always remembered. So as long as you set that setting and don’t change it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be preserved and you basically have no choice about that. You gotta be careful, especially if it’s not your phone, that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t accidentally hit that and change it back to the other thing. So there’s some amount of vigilance required to make sure you
⏹️ ▶️ John stay on sending everything to shared. But this was a great tip. I did try to do the same thing to my wife’s camera
⏹️ ▶️ John app and told her about it and said, now everything will go into your shared library because occasionally she sends things into the
⏹️ ▶️ John regular library. So set to manual, change the setting in the camera app,
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t worry about the preserve settings because it doesn’t apply to this particular thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. John, can you tell me about JPEG XL in iOS 18 and on the iPhone 16, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was a bit of a letdown. We had the rumors of Apple’s gonna go to JPEG XL and they did add support for
⏹️ ▶️ John JPEG XL in iOS 18 on the iPhone 16s pretty much only
⏹️ ▶️ John and only for their ProRAW stuff. So it’s not like HEEC where they said,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, by the way, all our cameras take photos in a new format by default. And it’s this great new format. They didn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John that. They didn’t talk about it at all. But nevertheless, in iOS 18, on iPhone 16s only,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe, because when I was on iOS 16 on my 14 Pro, it didn’t mention JPEG XL anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it’s only on the 16s. It’s definitely not on the 14 Pro, I can tell you that. If you go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the formats section of the camera preferences, you will see at the top,
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro default, and you see Heaf Max, ProRAW 12 megapixel, ProRAW Max up to 18
⏹️ ▶️ John megapixel. And then the next section is ProRAW format, and your choices are JPEG lossless,
⏹️ ▶️ John which they now list as most compatible. And then there are two JPEG XL choices, lossless
⏹️ ▶️ John and lossy. And again, that’s only for when you’re shooting in RAWs. You can have a lossless RAW
⏹️ ▶️ John with JPEG XL or a lossy compressed RAW with JPEG XL. Here’s what Petapixel had to say about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has wrapped JPEG XL photos inside a DNG container, enabling ProRAW files to retain their flexibility
⏹️ ▶️ John while being significantly smaller. What would typically be a 75-ish megabyte ProRAW max file will
⏹️ ▶️ John be a 20 megabyte in lossy per raw format using JPEG XL compression. A lossless file is still under 50 megabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Without compromising quality, these are significant storage savings. So JPEG XL is
⏹️ ▶️ John on your iPhone if you have a newish iPhone and if you’re shooting in raw. And if you are, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get files that are up to half the size that they used to be at about the same quality. So good,
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up, but it is not the JPEG XL revolution that we had been waiting for. So I did change to JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ John XL. I think I went with lossless just because I’m shooting in RAW, I probably just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do it so rarely on my phone, I’ll just pay the full cost of the size, and it’s still smaller than it used to be. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, partial thumbs up on JPEG XL. Hopefully it will expand over the years.
Mic-spying follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Guillerme Rambeau with regard to iPhone apps spying via the microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we mostly debunked this but then Guillerme said, I once found a vulnerability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that allowed for an app to listen to the user’s AirPods microphone in the background without permission but in a very limited way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this has already been fixed a couple of years ago now in 16.1. I’d forgotten about this. I read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this when it debuted. In fact, I think Guy might have had me proofread this for him if memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serves, although I might be wrong about that. But anyways, it’s a fascinating write-up. It’s not too long,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really interesting if you’re even vaguely nerdy. And Guy does a great job of doing the write-up. So I would definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check that out. Just if you’re interested in, you know, I don’t know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing this sort of work in kind of, what is it, white hat? I don’t really love that phrasing, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kind of doing things that may seem bad, but for good. And that’s what Guy was doing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then Guy also added the iPhone 16 lineup and all devices based on the A18
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or M4 have a new secure exclave. That’s not enclave, but exclave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That presumably makes it impossible for an exploit, even with kernel level access, to disable the microphone or camera in use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicators because the little orange or green dot is rendered by a separate OS running in an exclave directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey onto the display hardware. That is pretty wild. And anyways, Apple calls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it the secure indicator light.
⏹️ ▶️ John I recall like way back in the PowerBook days maybe, or maybe it was the MacBook days, there was similar indicator
⏹️ ▶️ John light and Apple made similar claims about how, well, it’s impossible to hack
⏹️ ▶️ John this light because there’s a hardware feature in the laptops that basically says when the camera is active,
⏹️ ▶️ John this light comes on. Like this was an example of it not being software mediated at all, but it was something like, hey, if the camera’s on, the light’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on, there’s no software environment, software has no visibility into the light whatsoever, can’t turn it on, can’t turn it
⏹️ ▶️ John off, it’s just like an electrical fact of life about how we’ve connected the camera. And even
⏹️ ▶️ John when they did that, I believe someone found a way to get the camera to turn on without the light going on. Like, hackers
⏹️ ▶️ John are devious. So this X-Clave is, you know, in the game of cat and mouse, here’s Apple’s next move. It’s like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, let’s make it even harder for you to get this light. Even if you have kernel access, you still can’t get at
⏹️ ▶️ John this because this is a different OS running in this secure X-Clave which is this other little machine
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t get to. The secure enclave is obviously where you can put secrets that are hard to get to if you’re running on the main CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John SoC, But now we have the secure exclave, which is a whole other chip with a whole other OS. It’s even harder
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to. And I’m sure that’s true, but hackers are very devious. So let’s see how the next move goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, Apple continues to try to make it very difficult to spy using
⏹️ ▶️ John its products without using the easiest method, which is of course, social engineering.
iPhone 16 battery removal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPhone 16 and 16 plus batteries you can remove them as you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always could but in a very different way This is from Mac rumors Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confirmed that the iPhone 16 and 16 plus have a new electrically induced battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Removal process the batteries use a type of adhesive that can be loosened with low voltage electrical current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such as from a 9-volt battery According to Apple the battery can then be easily be removed from the devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This new process is considered to be easier than the adhesive pull tabs that are found under batteries in previous iPhone models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so there’s of course an iFixit teardown all about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, and they demonstrated so we talked about this I think before the event where there was rumors of this happening and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how I pictured it like working Maybe like that You know you’d you’d short something out and there’d be a puff
⏹️ ▶️ John of smoke and the battery would come out or it would just pop out Or whatever it is much less dramatic than that, but it is no less
⏹️ ▶️ John cool Yeah, in the in the I fix a video they take a little power supply and they hook
⏹️ ▶️ John it up to the battery There’s like a little metal you know contact that pops out for you to connect it to and then you just connect something else to
⏹️ ▶️ John like ground inside the thing and You put some power into it for a few seconds and it basically
⏹️ ▶️ John chemically changes the adhesive to make it not sticky anymore And then the battery just comes out
⏹️ ▶️ John And they explain a little bit how it works Interestingly if you were vault reverse the polarity where you put the plus and you
⏹️ ▶️ John know You put the plus and minus on the opposite side It will make it restick
⏹️ ▶️ John what but not to the thing it’ll restick to the battery. So don’t do it that way so there are still some dangers here, but another
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting thing about how they installed this is If you once the battery is out again,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see it in the I fix it video and the blog post that will also happen the show notes Inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the case where the battery goes Apple has essentially carved a
⏹️ ▶️ John u-shaped channel like intentionally roughly like it’s scuffed up like if you use like
⏹️ ▶️ John a a circular buffer on a car and you did a really bad job and you left swirl marks, that’s what they
⏹️ ▶️ John did inside the phone. They made this big long U-shaped channel which is where the adhesive goes that’s intentionally scuffed
⏹️ ▶️ John up and rough to give lots of like craggly surface for the adhesive to stick to, which is so wild to see
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple’s cases that are usually so beautifully, perfectly machined and everything’s precise and here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John this area that’s made intentionally rough and the adhesive sits directly down in that. And this process
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you know, the pull tabs are cool. It’s like those 3M things, It’s kind of like you pull sideways and big long stringy sticky
⏹️ ▶️ John things comes out and then it comes out, but this is just so much more elegant. You just apply the voltage
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the thing isn’t sticky anymore and you lift it out. It’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is only on the 16 and the 16 plus and not on the Pro. I think the Pro still use the sticky stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John because I saw a tear down of one of those things as well, which is interesting, but yeah, check out the whole iFixit video.
⏹️ ▶️ John They seem to think that the 16 continues to push the frontiers of easy repairability.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, not the 16 Pro. I haven’t seen the iFixit Teardown on that, but 16 using the dual-sided design and
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery that’s easier to remove and the way they have the parts arranged, Apple is making progress in making these
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, very delicate devices that much easier and less error-prone to repair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just very quickly, one of my favorite things about the iFixit Teardown was at one point they said, it comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so easily, gravity will do it. And so they turned one of them upside down, applied the voltage and waited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few seconds and sure enough, boop, all of a sudden the battery just came tumbling
⏹️ ▶️ John falls out because the adhesive is not sticky anymore doesn’t leave a residue it’s pretty amazing. That’s really cool.
Sponsor: 1Password XAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by 1Password Extended Access Management.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So quick question, do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on company owned devices and IT approved apps? Yeah, I didn’t think so. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next question, how do you keep your company’s data safe when it’s sitting on all those unmanaged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and devices? 1Password has the answer to this question. Extended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Access Management. 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign-in for every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on every device because it solves the problems that traditional IAM and MDM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t touch. So check it out at 1password.com. That’s 1password.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to 1Password Extended Access Management for sponsoring our show.
Sequoia prompt workaround
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so if you wanted to get rid of those annoying monthly screen recording prompts, Jeff Johnson
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has reverse engineered a way to do it. Jeff writes, Richie Adams found the file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where the prompt dates are stored and that will put a link to all this because I’m not going to read it out now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The files protected by TCC. What does that stand for, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco computer computing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the database that keeps from rushing to stop. I don’t remember what it stands for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s protected by TCC. So to access it, you’ll need to grant full disk access to the terminal app. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the plist file, the keys are the paths, or perhaps the fully qualified domain names, or whatever it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the executable files with screen recording permission, and the values are the dates. To
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stop the prompts forever, for the rest of your life anyway, set the date too far in the future. For example, the year 3024 instead of 2024.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ll need to do this for each app, and afterward, log out and log in again so that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the replay D process recognizes the new defaults. Dan Sully notes, my keys are not the paths of the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there it is, the bundle identifier. I couldn’t think of the name there. John, it looks like you have some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts about this, which we’ll get back to in just a second. But then Kyle Rubinock wrote a shell script that will set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dates to a year from now. So you could perhaps run that on login.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although that shell script doesn’t actually work, and I sent him a reply about that. It’s kind of like the chat GPT thing. I think he forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John a line in there. But one could write a shell script. You can take a look at his and fix it by adding the missing line
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But anyway, you might not have to do that because.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because now breaking news, as of just like an hour ago or something like that, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new app called Amnesia that apparently will allow you to disable these on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an app by app basis.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so the screen recording thing, I’m living it both. I saw this example
⏹️ ▶️ John here and I wanted to try it myself and I discovered that in my plist file, which is, I’ll read the thing just in case you wouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s in your library directory I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John groupcontainersgroup.com.apple.replayd screencaptureapproval.plist. Again, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes. This sounds like an Amazon product title.
⏹️ ▶️ John my paths were, my keys in this little, you know, the name value pairs, they were
⏹️ ▶️ John the full path. So it was application slash zoom.us.app slash content slash macOS and zoom.s.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why they were bundle paths in Dan’s thing, but maybe it varies on each system. But anyway, the values are just dates.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a simple default right command to change it. So I did that for Zoom, which I had recently used to
⏹️ ▶️ John share my screen and it had complained and I set its date to 3024. So in theory, it will never complain
⏹️ ▶️ John again. And having a GUI app for this is good if people don’t wanna mess with like
⏹️ ▶️ John command line stuff or whatever. But many questions
⏹️ ▶️ John are raised by this discovery, right? So first of all, the whole point of this thing was like, oh, what if someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John spying and you wanna be reminded every once in a while to know that someone’s spying and yada yada. Well, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can just write a value to a plist to override this, anyone who’s like spying on someone or
⏹️ ▶️ John like abusive partner or something, is just gonna Google this, find this result, set the dates forward to 3024
⏹️ ▶️ John and never have to worry about it again. So what the hell happened? Like the security benefits of this feature are
⏹️ ▶️ John so easily bypassed that now we’re just being annoyed for no reason, right? Before it’s like, oh, we’re being annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John but they can’t figure out a way to make this more secure without annoying us and they figure out a month interval is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now it’s like, actually there’s no security benefit because anyone who cares can Google this in two seconds and download
⏹️ ▶️ John a GUI app that will set all the things to the future. So this is, I’m assuming Apple will see this
⏹️ ▶️ John and then in a future update to Sequoia, come up with a different, much more secure system that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t allow you to run a single defaults right command or download a GUI app to change this
⏹️ ▶️ John and never have to worry about it again. Because like, what’s the point of the feature? It’s just annoying people for no reason at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second thing is, how has life been on Sequoia with the screen recordings? Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John did use Zoom and I did share my screen and it did prompt me and I’m like, ah, well, Zoom, how often do I share my screen?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think in the, in the, what, week or two I’ve had Sequoia, I’ve gotten prompted like four times
⏹️ ▶️ John by four different apps and it just keeps catching me by surprise. Just today, I used TextSniper, which by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still recommend. And what was using TextSniper for? Not to get files out of photos. You know what I was using it for?
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, good old preview. I had a PDF that had text in it and I wanted to copy and
⏹️ ▶️ John paste that text out of the PDF. But unfortunately, that text was tabular And selecting
⏹️ ▶️ John the text in preview and hitting copy and then pasting into a plain text document just was just a soup, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But Text Sniper actually printed it a line at a time. It didn’t put tabs between it or anything, but at least it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, here’s the first row, here’s the second row, here’s the third row. Text selection in both web
⏹️ ▶️ John pages and PDFs continues to be an unsolvable problem, apparently. If you ever try to like select
⏹️ ▶️ John text in a complicated web page and you just want the text to be pasted just like it appeared in your web page, but when you paste it, you see that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like out of order or it’s selected other weird stuff. Same thing with PDFs, at least in the preview
⏹️ ▶️ John app. I can select it and I can hit copy, and when I hit paste, I expect it to print
⏹️ ▶️ John those lines, but sometimes it just absolutely doesn’t. It prints a scrambled mess of the lines, all connected into one big
⏹️ ▶️ John long line or interleaved with each other or whatever. But TechSniper did it, because TechSniper doesn’t care about that stuff. TechSniper
⏹️ ▶️ John just sees pixels that look like text, and it parses them as lines of text, and it will print them as lines of text. But
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, when I launched TechSniper, it said, hey, TechSniper wants to capture your screen. Do you want to allow
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Allow for one month, blah, blah, blah. And so this is sort of the ongoing battle because every new app still
⏹️ ▶️ John prompts you. And then I went to the command line and did the defaults right. And said, now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John never going to ask me again until 3024 or until Sequoia 15.1 when Apple changes all of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a disappointing stopping point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to say conclusion in this saga of supposed increased security because now all the security,
⏹️ ▶️ John not all the security benefits, but most of the security benefits are out the window and yet we’re still continuing to be annoyed but to
⏹️ ▶️ John the point where people are writing GUI apps to help people circumvent this feature of macOS. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a good sign for Apple that they have struck the right balance with the features they’ve shipped.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s not great. And obviously, you know, we’ve all been upgrading to Sequoia and getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just absolutely overwhelmed with all the, hey, is it okay? Is it okay? Is it okay? Is it okay? Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, hey, hey, hey, oh, are we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we cool? It’s just incessant. And I don’t know, like perhaps I’m not having enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey empathy for security professionals because it’s just not a world I live in, but I find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to be extremely off-putting and frustrating. But
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, if the security benefits are nonexistent, if anybody who’s trying to do something nefarious
⏹️ ▶️ John just Googles for it and gets a thing they can paste into Terminal and solve the problem for them, Like, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very frustrating.
The Apple Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, but in happier news, we’ve all got new toys. And this is a year that even John has new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toys. So I will preface this by saying, I was in Memphis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the weekend. I thought about trying to do an in-store pickup or even delivery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while I was there. Coincidentally, some things were delivered to the hotel and I don’t know if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my business to say exactly what, but I know that it could have worked. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t have the gumption to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it. So anyways, so I set a in-store pickup for yesterday afternoon, Sunday afternoon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the day I got home.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well, you did get to unbox pretty much all the new products, didn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true, yes, because a lot of them did show up in Memphis and Jason had them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I unboxed a lot of them, but anyways, this morning I went and I picked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up my new iPhone 16 Pro, natural titanium 512,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my new Apple Watch, big boy in aluminum, and Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. Aaron hasn’t opened any of her stuff yet. We’ve been busy. I’ve barely gotten mine all set
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, which we can talk about the transfer here in a minute. But, and also, if we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have time for me to whine about the in-store experience, I’d also like to do that at some juncture. But if we don’t have time, that’s no problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s part of the setup. You shouldn’t talk about that now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. Let me start by saying, this is the first world is the first world problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna try to make this quick and I will move right along. But I go in and of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, there’s no lines anywhere. I walk up to the first person that doesn’t have somebody in front of them and I say, Hey, you know, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pickup to do. And they said, okay, go over to the pickup counter desk, whatever thing. Fine. There’s a couple of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, a couple of customers there and one employee. And this one employee is already looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever so slightly flummoxed. Here’s the thing. If Apple wants to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, magic happens. Just magically your products will appear where you’re standing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and magically you can just walk up to anyone and pay for them or even scan them on your own if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something cheaper, you know, and just walk out of the store. It has to work. And apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just from overhearing the conversations between the employees, the quote unquote backstage area was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like completely overwhelmed with a shipment coming in with all these people asking for runners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to bring out, you know, my phones and my watches and that person’s this and that person’s that. It’s just, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going to do this fancy stuff, it’s got to freaking work. And I was there for some—
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d already paid for everything. I should have just been able to swoop in and swoop out. And I was there for like half an hour, 45 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, in the grand scheme of things, does that matter? No. But Apple is supposed to be the, it-just-works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company. The, it’s, it’s, it’s the great experience company. And this was not a great experience. And some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey woman that was standing next to me was waiting for like half an hour to get a screen protector installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All— The reason was they couldn’t just get— The, the, the dude at the desk couldn’t get his hands on the screen protector
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was backstage. And I don’t know. Maybe I’m too East Coast for this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give me a f***** line to stand in and give me a get, have the person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s helping me run their a** to the back and go find my stuff. I don’t think this is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difficult. Why does it have to be so synthetically fancy? If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going to have it be fancy, make it be fancy. This wasn’t fancy. This was the illusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fancy. And it’s just infuriating. Like it didn’t have to be this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a system that doesn’t scale very well. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great. Like probably most of the year, probably most days, most of the time, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. Like I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I don’t love the Apple Store triage system because like, yeah, I don’t love that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to walk in, you know, okay, hey, hey, hey, hey, you want to check in with me right at the front door here. Oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to go that? Oh, go stand over at that table over there. It’s like, okay, well, so there is a queue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just confusing and you can’t really tell what it is. And the queue is, uh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say like kind of sloppily enforced enough that I feel like a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, it is a serviced out of order. Um, because like, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who’s waiting at this table? Oh, you got to go see so-and-so in the blue shirt, but oh, and then, you you’re put into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system as a person with a red striped shirt. And there could be someone else with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a red striped shirt gets served first. Am I sitting at this table or the one next to it? It’s such a vague
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system that you as the customer feel all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have I been lost? And oftentimes you have been, but even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you haven’t been, you can’t see that. You have no feedback as the customer of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the system working as intended? Are they, am I still in the queue? And neither did the employees,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way. Last time I was at the store, which was not a busy day, I was sent to a table and then eventually someone
⏹️ ▶️ John came to help me and they disappeared for a little bit and when they were gone, two other employees came up to me
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, are you being helped? Like, don’t you know if I’m being helped? Shouldn’t you know? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John being, like, the whole system is, you send us off to those little tables to distribute this visible line so we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t see the actual line, but then we get serviced in order and people are assigned to us. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John know that somebody is already handling it. If you don’t know, then what is the system? Do you just wander the
⏹️ ▶️ John store looking for people who look lonely and say, that person looks like they’re not being helped. Let me help
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and obviously the biggest problem, I mean, you’re both dancing around this. It was lunch day for the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Surely one of the busiest days in the Apple store or involving iPhones,
⏹️ ▶️ John anything on launch day of the iPhone is going to be fraud. And it exposes the weaknesses of their systems because this is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John the most people coming to the store in the shortest period of time who want phones.
Casey’s screen protector
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say, however, that as I think I’ve talked about in years past, I apparently one of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many superpowers is utterly ruining iPhone screens. And I don’t mean like shattering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, although that’s happened
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for sure. Have
⏹️ ▶️ John you scratched it already?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, I didn’t. No, no, no, this is, everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. I decided after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much chatter from the internet in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John direction, and I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep, I think I solicited, you know, requests about what do you do about screen protectors?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet came through. And a lot of them said, just do the Belkin one that Apple installs. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it right then and there, they’ll install it for you. They know exactly what they’re doing. There won’t be any bumps or anything like that. There won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be any dust. And you can get like free replacements. I don’t know if it’s for life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t read, apparently you have to register the screen protector. I guess you at least get a series of free replacements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that apparently Apple’s happy to, you know, reinstall for you if need
⏹️ ▶️ John be. Do you know what the nature of the Belkin protector is? Is it what, is it glass?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is glass. I don’t think I do. I have the bag. I don’t think I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bags in here so I can look it up. I apologize. When one of you starts talking, I’ll look around the office, make sure the bag isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in here. I believe it’s glass. I’m not 100% sure. I didn’t look closely at it, but I did have them install it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And do you want the good news or the bad news? Oh, no. The good news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, no, there’s no real bad news. The good news is it feels pretty good. Like it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tackier, and that’s maybe not the best word, but like there’s a little more friction on it than I think a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey piece of glass was. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it not as oleophobic as the screen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I wouldn’t say, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. I think it is, but I’m not 100% sure. However, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how I always thought you were nuts, John, and kind of still do, for insisting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a bottomless iPhone case, a case without a bottom so you can swipe up no problem. And I always thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were kind of nuts because what is the big deal? It’s fine. I’m not gonna tell you tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’ve tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is unquestionably better. Gosh, I’ve been talking a lot. Having said I had no opinions about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. Here we are. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Welcome to the show. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. Welcome, we’ve been here 10 years. It is definitely better to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bottomless iPhone case. Full stop, not arguing that. I just don’t think it’s as big a deal to me as it is to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me tell you what is not fun though. When you take a phone that you do not intend to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a case on it, and you put an extra two to three millimeters of screen on it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I have a ledge every time I swipe up, which is the screen protector. Sitting here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, I hate it so much. Like I think I’ll get used to it, but I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it so much. And this screen- They should round
⏹️ ▶️ Casey edge. They should round over the edge. I know, I don’t know. Ultimately, I think it’s worth it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me because again, I don’t, well, I was gonna say I don’t mistreat my phones. I mean, clearly I’m doing something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to scratch these screens every year for the last like four years. So I don’t think running without a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey protector is the right choice for me, but I kind of hate the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John way it feels right now. Why not put a case on it? Put
⏹️ ▶️ John a case that doesn’t have a bare bottom and then you’ll be hitting the gigantic bottom lip of the case and you won’t even feel the screen protector.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that may be what I end up doing, but I really don’t love any of the case options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now. And so we’ll see what happens. But I did very much like, however, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey application process because they basically, they asked me if they could unbox the phone. I said, of course, thank you for asking. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately put it in their fancy little machine that lines everything up just right, and then foop, foop, foop, and all of a sudden the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen protector’s on, and to my eyes, leaving aside that there’s an additional ledge that I wasn’t really considering, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my eyes, it did an absolutely perfect job. So in that sense, I’m very satisfied.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I mean, I think that’s, with regard to the purchase experience, that’s all I’ve really got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did go back down, oh, that’s the other thing. I went from Pro Max to Pro. Gentlemen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having a human-sized phone in my hand It feels so great. It’s so much better. I mean, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, I shouldn’t say that like the Max is bad. I do a little teeny bit miss the screen real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey estate of the Max, but oh my word, it’s so much nicer in the hand. It is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much nicer in the hand. I can use my phone without a pop socket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that. You can use a phone. Did you know this, gentlemen? You can actually hold a phone in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one hand. You can operate the entire keyboard with one hand. you don’t even need to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little thing poking out the back. You can just hold the phone. I stand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by having gone the max last year for the 5X lens or camera system or what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I actually am very glad that I tried it. I think I could do it again if we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a situation for like the 17 or something like that, where only the good cameras on the 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro Max or you know what I mean, something along those lines. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stand by and I have now reaffirmed my commitment to, oh my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not a big phone person. I can do it if I have to, but it’s not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the thing is, even the now quote small phone is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and it got bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It got even bigger. And this is just gonna keep happening. Obviously, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pattern of the market. It’s like, the market pushes phone sizes up, people buy them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it drives the small phone people nuts because they’re like, you’re going further
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from our needs, which is true. But also the problem is the market just keeps buying bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger phones also. So the small phone people are kind of being outvoted by most of the buyers in the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this is just gonna keep happening. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even a lot of Macs people are like switching back with this one because they just keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making it. Because the Macs got bigger too. Yes, they keep making it bigger. like eventually you’re like, okay, this is actually beyond what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually want. And I actually have a, I’ve started with this for a little bit for later. We’ll, we’ll get to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. But so far, I think I’ll wrap up even though, like I said, I’m already going longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I intended. Immediate impressions, the phone transfer, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did use a full bore, like $90 Apple bespoke Thunderbolt cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it took roughly an hour. And my vague recollection of last year was that it took like two and a half, three hours. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think that gets an A plus thumbs up from me. This is very not, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not do a lot of science here to be clear, but the vibe I got is that it was definitely better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I failed to transfer my SIM on the first shot. I mean, not from my fault, it just didn’t work. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried it again, this is a Verizon eSIM. Tried it again and it worked no problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Other than that, I mean, everything seems nice. I like the camera control. I don’t wanna go too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far into it because I think you guys are gonna have many more thoughts about it. It does not currently feel intuitive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad by any means. I think I will absolutely get used to it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s, I have to think through like, is this a half press? Is it a half double press? Is it a full press?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it a full double press? It hasn’t clicked in typically Apple stuff. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to think about it. It just does, or it works exactly the way you expect it to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in this case, I don’t think it’s successful, but I, again, I want to I don’t think that that’s necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an indictment of the camera control. It’s just I got to get used to it. That’s all
Activation woes
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll talk about it more in a little bit. I want to talk about my setup process and Mark can talk about his setup process. We’ll just do these
⏹️ ▶️ John piecemeal, piecewise, old setup and then, you know, anyway. So the
⏹️ ▶️ John setup process, you would think this is such a non-issue. Yours sounded like mostly a non-issue. Yeah, it was annoying picking it up from the store,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you used the cable to connect them because you had a 15 Pro to a 16 Pro and it seemed to work out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, I would grade your setup experience as pretty much went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The software, the software set of experience, I would say is a solid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A minus. You know, it took a long time. I don’t love that you still have to download all the apps, even when you’re doing a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone to phone transfer, but in the grand scheme of things, it was fine. There were no major issues.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I get a new phone every two years and there are two reasons that I dread
⏹️ ▶️ John getting a new phone. One of them is the setup process. The other one is cases, which we’ll talk about later. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and it really does deter me from getting a new phone. You think I’d be excited to get another
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and I am but then every time I actually am getting one I’m like, oh no, my world has been thrown into turmoil
⏹️ ▶️ John because the computing device that I use Probably the most that’s with me all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John now is going to Not be satisfactory for some period of time first I have to deal with the setup
⏹️ ▶️ John process where I just hope everything transfers over and I deal with all that or whatever and then The cases which we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about later, right? So I think last year if we go back to or not last year two years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago when I got the 14 Pro So I think I said that my setup process went smoothly for once. My
⏹️ ▶️ John usual experience is I get a new phone and the way I order it is through the Apple Store app
⏹️ ▶️ John and I order it on my old phone. And when you order on your old phone, you can say, hey, are you going to get a new phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to replace the one that you’re currently ordering on? And I say, yes. It’s like the most automatic,
⏹️ ▶️ John smoothest default path, which is like new phone will replace this phone. Don’t change
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. Don’t get an unlocked phone. Don’t do anything weird. Don’t change carriers. It’s like just the default
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward thing. And yet pretty much every year with the possible exception of last year, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John recall exactly, I end up on the phone with Verizon
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not the time you want to be on the phone with the Verizon. No. Well, guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John I ordered my new phone using that same old default method. I took it out of the box. I couldn’t use the wired. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I decided not to use the wired thing because the 14 Pro has USB 2 speeds and Wi-Fi can beat that, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m just using plain old, you know, phone to phone wireless transfer with both
⏹️ ▶️ John ones plugged in. Uh, and it starts doing the thing, you know, I see a new phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you want to do this? Connect to the phone, type in the passcode to this phone and that phone. Scan the fuzzy dot
⏹️ ▶️ John ball, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole, the whole process. Right. All right. Can we, can I interrupt you right there? Does that actually do like, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that like a QR code? Does that actually transmit data?
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s, there’s actual data in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. I, I, I can’t fathom how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I believe you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay. Yeah, it’s just artfully done, but yeah, it’s like sort of an obscured, artful, kind of like QR
⏹️ ▶️ John code type thing. Anyway, and then they start doing their thing. One
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s always annoyed me is the phone you are transferring from has like a white sheet up that
⏹️ ▶️ John says, you know, finish on other phone or whatever. But if you try to dismiss that sheet, it’s like, oh, do you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey process? It’s like, no, I just don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be staring at this white thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sometimes the screen won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even go to sleep, but just fine, the phone is plugged in, but it just seems stupid. But anyway, whatever. On the new phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s doing stuff and it gets to a thing that says, whatever screen this is like activating, blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this may take a few minutes. Well, I was on that phone for a solid hour the first time. And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just, because I was afraid to abort it and screw something up. And then I tried again and tried again and tried, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be like activating, this will take a few minutes. And then I resigned myself. I’m like, look, I just, it’s never gonna get past the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there was no skip, no thing. Like I’m assuming it was trying to transfer my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John number, eSIM, whatever thing from my 14 Pro to my 16 Pro, it just wouldn’t and couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. And I’m going all over, like I have five bars in my house these days, like they must’ve upgraded the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right here. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even like I have bad signal anymore. I’m like, and it’s on, they’re both on wifi. Like, I don’t know what the problem is. Time
⏹️ ▶️ John to contact Verizon, which is just the most terrible sort of resigned feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John of dread. Like you’re getting an exciting new thing and instead of setting up your exciting new thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to be calling your phone carrier on day one of iPhone. It’s just like, why? Why is this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey May I offer a suggestion? You make merciless fun of me for trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same thing more than once or twice, expecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the results to be different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it worked last year. I’m going to let it go because I don’t want to get any of us angry at each other. But I think maybe trying a different approach for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next year might be a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what would you suggest? I mean, next year I’ll use the wired one. But that wasn’t the problem. It was the carrier
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s where I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Maybe I’m the idiot here, which wouldn’t be the first time. but I always, or for the last several years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, I just buy an unlocked phone. I don’t want Verizon to know what’s coming. I don’t want them to think that they,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because a lot of times in the past, I don’t know if this is true anymore, but in the past, if you bought a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone to replace your existing one, like you’re describing, you know, I want this one to be my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new phone and I tell Apple that ahead of time. A lot of times like AT&T and Verizon would ding you like 50 bucks for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the activation for reasons unknown. And so I would just buy an unlocked one. And then typically, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not always, But typically neither Verizon or AT&T would ding you the $50 activation fee because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re just bringing something new to them It’s like, you know, how do they know if you’re just John Gruber or Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Snell and you’re just activating somebody else’s, you know Are you activating?
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, but I wanted to take over my other number obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, but you know mine does that every time it’s just oh, you know Do you want to take over the old phones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John they still charge you the fee if they’re gonna charge you the fee I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I get we’ll see what happens. I might be wrong. But in the last couple years I don’t believe that’s been the case or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last several years. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I yeah I could potentially try and unlock one, but I just feel like that’s been trading a bunch of known problems for unknown ones So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I have advanced in my ability to deal with this because I was like I can’t do it I can’t I can’t dial
⏹️ ▶️ John that because it remember I can’t call them on my cell phone either So I’d be calling on like my quote-unquote landline phone
⏹️ ▶️ John still wireless, whatever on my landline phone It would be on speakerphone. I have to hear that music over the So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, you know what this year I’m gonna try the chat thing They always heard you towards anyway, like in
⏹️ ▶️ John the in web page Verizon, you know text chat And so I did that and the
⏹️ ▶️ John world’s friendliest person telling me,
⏹️ ▶️ John hope you’re having such a wonderful day. Congratulations on your new phone, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, please, just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve got all the data ready to go. I tell him
⏹️ ▶️ John the situation. I say I’m on the activating screen. He says, could you please give
⏹️ ▶️ John me your IME ID, which I already have on the clipboard. I just paste it, you know, I’m going, which
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, I had to transcribe manually because when your phone is in this terrible state, you just use a little
⏹️ ▶️ John I and a circle in the upper right to get the IME ID, but you can’t copy and paste it because your phone isn’t even set up. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John transcribing that carefully. Like, anyway, I do all this information and you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John It takes like three seconds when someone at Verizon is doing it. They’re like, okay, this is your thing. Confirm
⏹️ ▶️ John this, do that. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And all of a sudden my phone screen says, instead of saying activating, wait a few
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes, it says, oh, transferring cellular service, whatever, blue, blue, blue, and it’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was like, okay, well that was, you know, maybe like a half an hour on web chat
⏹️ ▶️ John in the grand scheme of things. You know, it’s better to not have to contact them, but it wasn’t that bad. The only weird
⏹️ ▶️ John wrinkle was, they’re like, okay, now call like pound or, you know, 832 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s something they want you to do to confirm that everything worked. What year is this? I’m pretty sure it worked. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone is saying that it did all the things and it’s, you know, whatever. But they’re like, okay, well, and I said to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t dial anything right now because it’s doing the phone to phone transfer. I won’t have access to the dialer until it finishes
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone-to-phone transfer. And he says, that’s okay, I’ll wait. I’m like, it’s going to take hours. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey problem, I’ll just wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then he tried to sell me insurance and I said, no thanks. And then I walked away from the computer and I came back, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour or two later and the transfer had finished and the webpage had timed out. So
⏹️ ▶️ John customer service interaction. But chalk this up to another year where I
⏹️ ▶️ John had to contact Verizon. At least I didn’t have to go on the phone with them, but I had to contact Verizon to get my phone set up. After
⏹️ ▶️ John I had gotten over that hurdle, the phone-to-phone transfer worked the way it normally does, where it forgets the test flight
⏹️ ▶️ John exists and rearranges all my icons until I go back to test flight and figure out where they all have to belong and rearrange
⏹️ ▶️ John them manually. Yes, I tried to use iPhone mirroring to rearrange them with the mouse. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a little bit better, but boy, you can really see the insanity of that system when you have pixel precise
⏹️ ▶️ John control with a mouse cursor, because it’s such a cruel game. It’s like, oh, I went over the one pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John boundary and now it switched to the other screen. Like, it’s just your meat fingers aren’t in the way, but now I know precisely
⏹️ ▶️ John how insane the activation regions are, and precisely how broken it is where you will drag an icon and
⏹️ ▶️ John other icons will skitter out of the way and leave an empty spot for your icon, you will release and springboard
⏹️ ▶️ John will say, nope, and it’ll just close that spot back up. And you’ll do it 50 times. Drag an icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John put it right where you want it to go. It’s nothing else is there. It is dead center on the spot. Release, disappears
⏹️ ▶️ John like it never existed. The system’s just broken, so the mouse helps a little bit. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John setup worked fine. I managed to get through it all. And there you go. Marco, how was your setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mine was perfectly fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you buy unlocked or did you buy as a replacement?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did the thing in the Apple store app on the phone where I say replace this phone on my plan. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was simple. Now granted I use AT&T. So everything is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, mediocre but it worked better than
⏹️ ▶️ John yours. Yeah, I don’t know what it is. I mean, I’m assuming there’s some carrier servers that are involved in this process.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like the worst part is, there’s no way to say, forget about that, I’ll deal with it later, just do the
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the setup. Like you are stuck on that screen, this is activating, this may take a few minutes. And as far as I know, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to get past it, which argues for Casey’s thing of like, hey, why don’t you just buy it on lock? Because then at least you can do the
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, the data transfer part of the setup. And then when you have a functioning working phone that just
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have a phone number, then try to do the E-SIM transfer or whatever, however you initiate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I will say for whatever it’s worth, my Apple Watch cellular transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never work. The only way I ever get the watch to work is to cancel the plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from AT&T’s website for the old watch and then have the new watch start over again. And even then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually it’s like, it tries to activate, it fails a couple times, the plan shows up in the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular section as not in use. I gotta like reboot sometimes a couple times. Like I gotta do some dances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get that to work. And you gotta Google to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, wait, do I unpair from
⏹️ ▶️ John first? Or do I not? Like, there’s this whole, I’ve done it successfully. So I’ve watched several times. And
⏹️ ▶️ John every time I do it, I have no confidence that I’m going to be successful. I have no recollection of how I did it last time or why
⏹️ ▶️ John it worked. And I just like cross my fingers and just dive in. And by the way, everything on the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John takes forever. I guess it’s probably getting better as the watches get faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t, no. It takes so long to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. No, it’s not getting better. But the phone transfer, by the way, the phone, just before we leave this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone transfer for me was perfectly fine. the eSIM moved over, like it activated just fine in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you use a cable? Yeah, I used a cable and I used both. I used two of my like fan Peltier element fans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are the active cooling magsafe.
⏹️ ▶️ John ice packs just in honor of Marco. I used them briefly, but then I got worried about condensation and stopped.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very quickly with regard to the watch, I had heard a story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think this was accurate at the time, that the best way to move a watch is to unpair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the old phone. And if I remember correctly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco think is the only way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it will offer to, to move it for you. It just doesn’t usually work with cellular for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so that’s the thing. So I, the way it used to be years and years ago was you would unpair the watch, then do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone transfer, then repair the watch on the new phone. Uh, this time I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t do any of that. I just waited for the phone to say, Hey, would you like to move the watch over? And I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. And it worked. Now, I do not have cellular. I do not have cellular and I do think that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big difference. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah, it does. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it moved no problem. And then when I unboxed my Apple Watch Series 10, which we’ll get to later,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said, hey, can you make it or I think it asked or whatever, you know, do you want this to effectively replace the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old one? I said, yes. And it said, sure. And that worked pretty much no problem. So my Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transfer experience was a plus plus, like It was pretty much flawless. I was stunned.
Sponsor: Trade Coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Trade Coffee. Now if you make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee at home, get ready to discover how much better it can be with Trade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As America’s number one specialty coffee marketplace, Trade doesn’t actually make any of its own coffees. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they bring together top independent roasters from small towns across the USA, places you’d love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you live near them, and they curate the best of the best for you to enjoy at home.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s better coffee because they send high quality freshly roasted beans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are perfectly matched to your taste. This is the secret to all good coffee,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freshly roasted beans that are kind of bean that you like. So no matter how else you brew it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what equipment you have, what your ritual is, whatever, getting coffee from Trade is the easiest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to instantly improve your at-home coffee experience. So you subscribe to Trade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that lets you support all these small business roasters. They partner with all these roasters across the country and they have made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over 435,000 perfect coffee matches to date. And if you’re not satisfied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your first one, they’ll replace it for free. So it is a great service. I’ve used it myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time because it’s just, you know, not only are the recommendations great, but you just get such a variety
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with trade. Like I would never have found all these different roasters individually. And it’s, you know, it’s, it can be different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every week if you want, or if you want to, you know, kind of repeat some stuff, you can tell them what you like, you’ll get more of that. But like, I just love letting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them go off and find good stuff for me and they always do a great job. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a wonderful service. Check it out today. You can get your coffee at home made better with trade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Head to drink trade dot com slash ATP and you’ll receive your first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bag of coffee for free. And it’s super easy to control this. You know, if you’ve got to go away for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you want to pause or cancel or suspend or resume or increase or decrease, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all super easy. worry about that. Check it out today. Make your coffee at home better. Go to drinktrade.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Once again, you get your first bag free with that link. Thank you so much to trade for sponsoring
Camera Control & cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, camera control. I’ve used it a decent amount.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s a good idea. The actual usage of it, I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to need to tweak a little bit here and there with some of the timings and settings and tolerances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. But I think overall I like it. It is extremely useful for me just as a camera launch button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know a lot of people have been using the action button for that over the past year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what I was doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s totally fine. And there are some benefits and drawbacks to that. I, as I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in previous episodes, I use the action button for flashlight, which I actually use a decent amount. Although I actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am happy to report that as I progress through my denial of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I really should be wearing progressive reading glasses all the time because my close up reading distance is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not great anymore. And so, but my distance distance viewing is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what I really should be doing is wearing progressive reading glasses that have no correction on top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and reading correction on the bottom. I have yet to find any that I don’t hate. So instead, what I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mostly not wearing reading glasses and just holding stuff out really far to see it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally this system, you know, is not sufficient for something. And the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a magnifier feature built in. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long time, where it just basically is like a quick little view that uses the camera to show you a magnified view of whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re looking at. great especially when you have the modern ultra-wide lenses that have autofocus and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can actually get very close with macro distances to view things like you know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tiny little print on Apple’s power adapters and stuff. One of the things I tried to view recently was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have the new MagSafe pucks that charge at 25 watts and they look almost identical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the old ones. Apparently, I heard from John Gruber actually that apparently they’re slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrower, like which is going to be really annoying when I try to fit it into anything that’s made to like you bring your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MagSafe adapter into this 3D mount or whatever, like that’s gonna be annoying. I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John verify that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the radius is smaller?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like apparently the actual size of the circle is slightly smaller, so it’s not gonna fit in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, docks and stuff that are made to, you know, build an Apple’s MagSafe Pucks, but I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John verify that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I bet there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny light gray text on a slightly darker gray background that you could also-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I was trying to do is like, okay, how do I tell, if I’m holding one of these in my hand, how do I tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which one it is? Because they now, the modern MagSafe pucks now with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster charging, I believe they’re 10 bucks more, they’re 40 bucks instead of 30 bucks, and they have a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire model number, but if you’re just looking at it, it’s not obvious. And they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a tiny little bit of text printed on the metal right next to where the cable goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the metal ring. And I could not see this for the life of me. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this is to say, the magnifier is a good feature. And what I’ve actually done, since I have the action button as the flashlight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now with iOS 18, you can replace the two circular 3D touch buttons on the bottom of the lock screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones that used to be flashlight and camera. So I’ve actually replaced the flashlight one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the magnifier. I’m happy to announce I have reached that point in aging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’m going to be using the magnifier frequently enough on my phone. I’ve already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I just did this like the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day and I’ve already, I’ve already used it like three times. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John change it to a triple tap too. That’s the one that, that’s the real old person move. You change magnifier to triple tap with accessibility. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John tap the back of the phone three times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need that yet, but certainly having it on the lock screen on a button I was not using anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very useful. And then, you know, and so similarly, like you can have the camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you, if you don’t want to use Apple’s camera app anymore, or if you only want to launch it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera control, then you can reassign the camera circle button on the lock screen too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to something else. Like this is a whole new area of customization that I actually find quite, quite nice. But anyway, all that is to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera control, therefore being my camera launch button, will free up one of those spots for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so using it as that so far over the last couple of days, I have enjoyed it. It has proven useful to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only thing is that so far, I have a very, I had a very hard time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figuring out how to navigate the little tools menu inside of it. Like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said this before any of us had ever tried it. Remember by using the demos, I’m like, that’s modal. How
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to get out of that mode? And I, trying it for real life, I experienced the exact same thing. The exact problem
⏹️ ▶️ John I predicted. I’m like, I’m having that problem. I eventually figured it out, but it’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s going to be a quite learning curve there. And I think maybe Apple could tweak some of the like, you know, timings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and gestures and things on that to make that a little bit easier over time. Because I have found that like the actual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the pushing of the button to open the camera to take pictures, that works great, but I keep finding myself like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally in some of the little menu modes to the point where I might just turn them off. And the second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as soon as you start using those menu modes, it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even even I think even just using it for capture, like just pushing the button to take the picture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it dims or hides all of the camera UI on screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I noticed that too, which surprised me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it keeps it hidden for like a few seconds after you hit the picture. And so like, even if you want to just review the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture you just took, you have to like wait two or three seconds for it to like fade those controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back in. Like, it’s kind of annoying, like I see what they’re going for, it just becomes a camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this control. That, okay, that’s a nice idea, that’s very precious. In real life, I want those controls back immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, as soon as I’m done taking the picture, I want those controls. Or even if I’m just stuck in the weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, camera control menu thingy and I can’t to figure out how to zoom back out or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just keep the controls on screen at all times because yeah, it’s great to have them in the camera control,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also great to have them on the screen. And a lot of times you’re gonna wanna switch back and forth between them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s something that like, I think until Apple makes better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco balances and more usable defaults with the camera, or more usable behaviors with the camera control, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see myself using it for any of those little menu features other than just launching the camera and taking a picture. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those it’s great, it’s convenient. The actual implementation of all those little menus and things and the way it hides all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the controls in the main screen, that I think needs some iteration to really be useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so here’s my experience with the camera control. The very first thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I discovered with my new phone with the camera control is that the camera control
⏹️ ▶️ John is placed exactly where I apparently grabbed my phone. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve done this a couple times.
⏹️ ▶️ John With it, taking it out of the box, I kid you not, the phone is not even on. I’ve just taken
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of the box. I accidentally hit the camera control button three times in under 20 seconds. It’s not even on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the phone’s not even on. I’m hitting the button, which by the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco way, yes. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of your hand? Are you hitting it with like your like, your like.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s apparently where I grabbed the phone. I apparently grab it at the bottom with one, you know, my thumb
⏹️ ▶️ John on like the left side of where the camera control is.
⏹️ ▶️ John my other fingers exactly on the camera control. And it’s a flush button, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even stick out. I was hitting that button like crazy. I’m like, okay, well, I can retrain
⏹️ ▶️ John myself, but that’s an unfortunate personal habit. Apparently I grabbed the phone by the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera control. And so I have signed up for hitting that button accidentally a lot. I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ John better. And unfortunately, I think part of the way I’m getting better is learning not to press as hard,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is good in that I won’t activate the flush button, but bad in that now I’m not gripping the phone as hard when I
⏹️ ▶️ John pick it up, which I feel like It’s just an increased drop risk, but that’s a thing. So I’m setting that aside.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get that Apple care. Yeah, I do have it. Using the actual camera control
⏹️ ▶️ John button, I would not have predicted this based on their previews in our discussion of this, but because we
⏹️ ▶️ John had talked about like the whole idea of them modeling it after like half press on a real camera shutter
⏹️ ▶️ John button. And even though that feature for half press focus isn’t even shipping yet, the way you get into
⏹️ ▶️ John those menus that Marco was talking about these little things is you essentially half press, right, to get to
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing where you can change the zoom and the focal depth and that whole menu system. And yes, that is modal.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only way I’ve discovered to get out of it is to touch anywhere on the screen, which is a reasonable way to get out of it, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of wish there was a way to get out of it by, without taking a picture, by hitting the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John control. But I think you have to actually touch the screen to say, I want to get out of this mode where I’m adjusting things
⏹️ ▶️ John with the camera control, right? But here’s the kicker. This is the thing I wouldn’t have predicted. The half
⏹️ ▶️ John press on the camera control button to activate the menus is unlike any
⏹️ ▶️ John half press and any big camera that I’ve ever used in my entire life in that it is way,
⏹️ ▶️ John way more difficult to get to it. Like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that you have to train your fingers to do because if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John do what you would do to half press a real camera button, you’ve pressed it all the way, that’s too far. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I half press this button? And you have to press so much lighter than you
⏹️ ▶️ John think. and I know there’s this preference to adjust this or whatever, but it’s such a strange sensation. You’re like, am I
⏹️ ▶️ John even pressing it? Or am I just thinking hard about pressing it and it activates it? You can
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. You can learn to do it, but it is so much more of a precise, delicate
⏹️ ▶️ John gesture than I expected it to be. I fully expected, I’ve been half pressing shutter buttons for
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years, right, decades, right? I fully expected it would just be completely natural for me to half press it. Absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John not. It is so much more delicate than I thought it would be, which I don’t personally mind
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think I’m never going to use those menus now that I’ve experienced them. I don’t think I’m ever going to use them to adjust anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I’ll do the Zoom one because it has the advantage, I hate pinching to Zoom. It has the advantage that I can Zoom
⏹️ ▶️ John while, you know, having the phone in like camera taking position, right? In landscape mode
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, without me having to like take one of my hands off of the phone and use it to pinch the screen. I think Zoom
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one that’s most likely for me to use, But in practice I’ve never actually used it other than when I
⏹️ ▶️ John was experimenting with it just because I hate going into that mode, I can’t even decide which one to keep it
⏹️ ▶️ John on, I think I settled on keeping it on zoom because it’s the one I’m most likely to use but I would just much
⏹️ ▶️ John rather adjust those things on the screen. And I’m with Marco, like I understand how the UI goes away when you do that or whatever, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John just rather always see it, like again that should probably be a setting or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know for taking a photo and for having it as a shutter button, I’ve heard a lot of people complaining that the positioning is bad, that it should be closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to the corner and maybe that would have gotten that of my accidental activation area, but I’m mostly happy with the position. I take
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much all my pictures in landscape mode, but occasionally in portrait, and I find it works for both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have it launching the camera. I have it launching the camera on a single press. The reason I can get away with it is that when I
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally activate it, it’s because I’m picking up a locked phone off the table or whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ John when you when you hit it on a locked phone, it doesn’t launch the camera app. It just like wakes it up first, and you have to hit it
⏹️ ▶️ John again to launch the camera app, which is a nice defense against me accidentally launching the camera. I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally hitting the button a lot, but the consequences are not significant because when I’m doing that, it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ John always when I’m picking up a locked phone. So I don’t actually find myself landing in the camera app. Within,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think maybe less than a minute of my wife picking up my phone, she had
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally taken a picture with the camera control.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I should have saved it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like iPhone unboxing day. Here’s our first picture of the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a thing, right? Again, there’s a setting to make the camera control require a double click to get into the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John app. I don’t think I need to use that yet. I think I’m building my habits around it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the camera control was maybe a little bit overly ambitious. As a button, it
⏹️ ▶️ John feels good, it clicks good. I like the fact that it’s touch sensitive. The
⏹️ ▶️ John half press I’m not sold on, the menu interface I’m not sold on, and the upcoming feature that we don’t even have yet, the half
⏹️ ▶️ John press for like focus or whatever they’re gonna do. I don’t think that’s gonna make this better. They’re piling so
⏹️ ▶️ John much stuff onto this button. Like this is not like a version 1.0 button. This is like the version 4.5 of
⏹️ ▶️ John this button already. It does so much stuff. It is so overloaded, has so many capabilities. And like I said, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just me, but like when you find one of these phones, try, like you can learn how to get into
⏹️ ▶️ John the menus pretty easily, but it’s such a strange feeling. It’s like, press, but don’t press.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, it’s such a delicate operation. It reminds me of like some of the finesse moves I would have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with a thumb stick and Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube. Like where you just really have to learn how to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what the difference between, you know, 18 and 17 degrees on the stick is, as opposed to just being like, you know, like jam the stick
⏹️ ▶️ John to the left, right, up, down, right? So sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of delicate, like just think about pressing it and then you’ll get into the menus. And again, it’s not bad
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t think I wanna get into the menus a lot and I do know how to do it now, but it is so
⏹️ ▶️ John much, I don’t know what it is, so much more like, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to say sophisticated. It’s so much less
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward to do. Like it requires more mechanical finesse than I would have expected.
⏹️ ▶️ John Way more mechanical finesse than half pressing a shutter button. And having handed my very large cameras to many
⏹️ ▶️ John people over the years for them to take pictures, I can tell you that the average person has difficulty half pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John even a gigantic shutter button that is very easy in my opinion to half press because it has like miles of travel and you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John literally push it halfway down. you cannot push this button halfway down. Like the travel is so short,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you try to push it halfway down, you will completely depress it. You have to think about pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it and then you’ve just half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think like, it almost gives me the feeling of like when I’ve designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an interface in Xcode for my iPhone app, and I’ve been using the simulator,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for most of the design, and then I run it on the device for the first time, and I pick it up and I try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it, and I instantly feel like, oh, this is all wrong. Like this is either too small, too big, it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work right. You can tell as soon as you try to use it on the device, oh, this is wrong. That’s kind of how I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel with the camera control. Like what I was expecting based on how they were describing it, I was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of expecting this to work a certain way. And then as soon as I get it and I try it, I’m like, oh, this is wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I would actually call it maybe fiddly or like over sensitive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like it’s not, I don’t think I’m lacking appropriate dexterity in my index finger to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use it. And there are some case considerations, which we’ll get to in a moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think it’s just very finicky to get that right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what you don’t want with your camera controls is imprecision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when you’re using a camera, usually you are adjusting-
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially if you’re fumbling for it, like real quick, you,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting the camera out. It’s not the time for like a now I’m going to apply the most controlled pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve ever applied using the tendons in my fingers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and like, and you don’t want to like accidentally switch switch modes or overshoot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the setting that you were trying to adjust or whatever. Like it’s very sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and finicky in the way it operates. And so again, I think it’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like how it launches the camera and then takes pictures. Everything else about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Let me, let me fast forward this for Apple, Apple, uh, the solution to this, the real version 4.5 of this. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I don’t know how many years in the future this is gonna be, is to solve all these problems. Basically, that
⏹️ ▶️ John entire side of the phone needs to be a giant touch-sensitive, pressure-sensitive,
⏹️ ▶️ John clicky button. Because, like for example, zooming and swiping, the little interface
⏹️ ▶️ John that appears is maybe a little small, but the essentially trackpad area, it’s a small
⏹️ ▶️ John button. That area of like swipe, swipe, swipe, it’s barely enough to cycle through,
⏹️ ▶️ John to satisfactorily cycle through the menus, let alone being satisfactory for zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like that whole like side of the phone needs to be just one complete featureless
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you can squeeze and it haptically clicks. And the whole thing is touch sensitive,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it needs to like go in more. I don’t know how they solve this problem, but it needs, it’s strange to say, but I feel like the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John control is too small, like for what they want it to do. If you just want it to be a shutter
⏹️ ▶️ John button and you can use it that way, and by the way, I will say that is the big benefit of the camera control. If all these things we’re complaining about, You
⏹️ ▶️ John can just ignore them and just say this button is just a binary button and I press it all the way or not at All and
⏹️ ▶️ John it works that way. I don’t think you’ll accidentally half press it a lot Especially if you’re just always saying press
⏹️ ▶️ John press, right? But if they want to go whole hog and have this be like a touch sensitive thing to swipe through you
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes and stuff like That they need a bigger touch area and they need a way bigger button They need just that whole side to just
⏹️ ▶️ John be one giant button that also happens to click and I don’t know how they do that but that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John better than this tiny little thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll tell you what, so there are settings for camera control. There are not many of them. Right now there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are three settings. There’s what app does it open, launch camera with a single click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a double click, which you actually might want, John, if you’re having a lot of accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned, I don’t think I need to go to the double click.
⏹️ ▶️ John I also don’t think I need to adjust the sensitivity. Like I’ve tried the different settings and I feel like that’s not the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the third setting is called, for some reason it’s called clean preview, clean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preview on or off. And it says, light press camera control to quickly make adjustments. Oh, that leaves the menus up when you activate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, you’re right, it does. Okay, well, honestly, that solves one of my problems, but not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Yeah, that’s true. Actually, I agree with you that I do like that it leaves all the camera controls up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco have live solved one problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We made it slightly better, all right. I like it better this mode. We’ll see if I can actually stick with the other controls, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is good. Anyway, so let’s move on to talk about cases and the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control. Poor Peak Design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every other third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey case manufacturer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this case. I’ve been using it now for, I think, three phones in a row now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use it all year, but I use it some of the year, as mentioned. It is my kind of summer case. It’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, if I don’t want to use leather because it might get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summer or anyway. So I love the Peak Design case. They had drama
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last year with the action button where they didn’t really know it was coming, but they knew something was coming, so they left a cutout,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it turns out the cutout was, it made it too hard to use it because it was like a deep hole,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the action button’s small, and so it made it too hard to use. So they had this whole thing where they gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free, over a few months, they remade the case. They gave free replacements to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who bought the first one. It was a whole thing. I’m sure they lost a ton of money on it, but they’re a good company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they wanted to serve their customers well. I like Peak Design a lot. Anyway, so this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got their case and it has a cutout, not of the entire case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge, but just like a camera control shaped valley with like sloped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sides going into it from the other edges of the phone. You can see it, they have a 360 view on their page.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I tried this on my phone immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and within two hours, I was like, this isn’t gonna work, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Now there’s two problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one, the deep valley it creates does indeed make it difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use the camera control. Like it makes it much harder to use because it is not a cover, but they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just do a simple cover because you can see the way Apple did theirs with the Sapphire cover with the conductive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layer. You gotta make it work with all those, the camera control sensors. So instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of doing some kind of complicated button that they probably didn’t even know was possible until Apple released their cases, they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made a hole with like, you know, ramps going into it basically from all sides. Well, those ramps also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hurt my finger. Like they form kind of a sharp edge. And with, you know, I’m a left-hand phone user.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so one of my fingers is like basically resting right there all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just sharp. Like it just feels bad. So I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible. Like I got to say like peak design, like this is also not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel so bad for them because I know they’re going to have other people saying the same thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like this, I mean, two years in a row to really screw case makers by Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s got, it’s got to be rough for the case makers because you know, they got, they got to design cases with a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of guesses and speculation and you know, they got to like basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow the rumor mill and get whatever info they can get and just make a bunch and take a big risk. Like, Oh, well we think the dimensions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the phone will be this and we think it’s going to have a button here and we think the button will work like other buttons, but we don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s a big risky business to be in. And I got to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, again, I’m not a fan of the P-Design cases here. And maybe they’ll do another one sometime that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a proper cover over it that works with the weird sensors of the button, and maybe that’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. So I’ll keep that in mind. But what I did was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so as soon as I used this case, I thought, well, I have to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the Apple store. This is not going to do. I’m going to get one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple’s cases today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just very briefly, why not go caseless? I’m not saying that’s the right choice for anyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that is what I plan to do with this one. Why not just go caseless?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one, I didn’t buy AppleCare and I don’t really want to. I keep saying AppleCare is my case and then I just buy cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey spending hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of dollars on AppleCare over over the years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I figure, okay, if I just stop buying it now, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I end up having to have an expensive repair, then I’ll weigh that against all the savings that I’ll have with AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years and decide then whether to start changing my policy or not. But anyway, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason. And so I’m like, all right, I gotta go to the Apple Store. I gotta try their cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I went to the Apple Store and there was another reason I’ll mention in a little bit, But I went to the Apple store and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I immediately like, you know, went over to the case while like, you know, they told me, I’ll go stand over by so and so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, okay. And I directly walked to the opposite direction, go over to over, go over the case walks. I’m like, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge cluster of people waiting over there. Like I know I’m not going to be first in line. I have some time and I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, the everyone’s seen these new beats cases that they have, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are basically just like plastic, like shiny plastic cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are decent. I would say they come in zero good colors, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do feel very cheap, the outside has not much grip because it’s not like a TPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of plastic, it’s like a shiny shell kind of plastic. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no grip to it whatsoever. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s kind of not great. I almost bought one because the Beats cases are very light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very thin, which is nice, It’s just like, I think it’s like a peel case. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get that for cheaper in better colors from other manufacturers very easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me offer a differing opinion considering the Beats case is now on my phone right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which mediocre color did you get?
⏹️ ▶️ John Gray, dark gray, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, the color’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s got lines on the back for no reason. I think the Beats case, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the shape is nice. I think it does feel more expensive than your average
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic case simply because the shape is very like precise and consistent like the
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons, which are just plastic or whatever. The buttons are precise. The edges of the case are precise. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John rounded over in all the right places. It feels kind of like a giant iPhone 5C, which I liked.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is shiny plastic. It is not as grippy as a leather case, not by far, although
⏹️ ▶️ John it is grippier than I thought it would be. It is probably about as grippy as Apple’s clear cases
⏹️ ▶️ John are, which is again, it’s not as grippy as rubber, definitely not as grippy as silicone, but it’s grippier than I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be just because of the tackiness. It shows fingerprints disgustingly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it just- Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. I noticed that in the store actually. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t buy it. I noticed that when I was just handling the sample ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like that leather, one of the great things about leather is it will absorb all the oils from my fingers. This plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John will not. It is covered with oils, but I do have to say for this case, and by the way, the reason I got it of course is because it has
⏹️ ▶️ John a bare bottom and it does. Even the edges of the bare bottom, I think this case is beautifully, precisely
⏹️ ▶️ John shaped and formed, I like everything about it except for the material that it is made out of, which is a big thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for a case, right? But I’m not gonna say I’m happy with my purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John because I am looking forward to finding a suitable leather case that I can replace it with.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’ll say this, I am happier with this case than I was with the Apple Clear case, which also has
⏹️ ▶️ John a bare bottom, that I bought for my 14 Pro, right? So I’ve tried the Clear cases, they’re not for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John This, if I had to live with this, I could tolerate it, but it is nowhere near as nice
⏹️ ▶️ John as my leather one. So, you know, go to the store and check it out. My market looked at it, he thought it felt cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it feels very nice and solid and precise and good and grippier than I thought it would.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just not that, you know, the oil situation is a problem. It’s not as grippy. Even the
⏹️ ▶️ John ridge around the camera, I’ve used a lot of cases, first party and third party, that have like a vertical wall
⏹️ ▶️ John around the camera mesa. And the Beats case, it’s almost vertical, but not quite.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got just enough of a slant to it that it feels less cheap to me than just like a big vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John wall stuck into the back of the case. I guess it does have a circle and a line for MagSafe on the back for reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John that escape me, because it’s not a clear case. Why do you need to do that? It does have a Beats logo on the side.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I actually give a pretty good rating to the Beats case if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John tolerate the material that’s made out of it, which I can almost tolerate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my plan if I bought it, which I didn’t, but my plan was to take a magic eraser to the Beats logo on the side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see if I can get rid of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to scuff it up. Although, actually, by the way, one tiny bit of real-time follow-up. We mentioned already the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John control, which we’ll get to in a second on the Beats case, I’m assuming. The camera control has the settings for like how hard you want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be. That’s the reason I always forget what these things are. That was an accessibility. You know what else is an accessibility? It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, settings, accessibility, camera control. In accessibility under camera control, there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a toggle to just turn off the camera control you just don’t want to deal with it, so that’s great. There’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John a toggle to turn off the whole light press to show adjustments. If you don’t want that feature at all, period,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just turn that off.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John finally a toggle for how quickly you have to double press it if you want to use the double press feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just got default slow and slower if you can’t double press it that quickly, right? So kudos
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple for giving enough adjustability to say, hey, the massive overreach that we’ve done with this camera control,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just turn most of that off until you get it to the point where you think it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, suitable. I’m gonna leave everything on, but like I said, I probably just don’t want to use the
⏹️ ▶️ John adjustment feature. That’s interesting, we’ll play with
⏹️ ▶️ John again, it’s not in camera controls, it’s in accessibility. So these settings are always in weird places, and if you search for camera
⏹️ ▶️ John control, you won’t find it. So settings, accessibility, camera control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I ended up, for at least the moment, I ended up with the Apple silicone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. Which is funny, I got it in Lake Green, which is not at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco green. Like it is blue. It is absolutely blue. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John nothing about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you take that website test? Of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did. I mean, but like this, there is no, there’s nothing about this that is green.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, but anyway, it’s a nice, it’s a nice like weird middle blue is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not green, but it’s a nice color. Anyway, I ended up with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey silicone case for now. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks green on screen. I do not deny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that it may look blue. Trust me, when you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in person, you’re like, oh, that’s that color? Like I had to check, I had to like pull out the little drawer in the Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was on and like read the boxes to see like, is this really that color? Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just to very quickly interject here, I typically do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Apple Silicon cases. I feel like they’re way too tacky. I just, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really just viscerally do not like them. And I can’t, other than the tackiness, I can’t really put my finger on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why. And I did go and look at a bunch of the ones at the Apple store today while I was waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back room to bring me my, or backstage to bring me my stuff. And I gotta say, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I do end up wanting a case, that might be the direction I go, because it’s a lot less tacky than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it used to be. And it feels nice. Like, granted, I didn’t have one in hand. I was just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey petting it on the wall of cases. But it is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth looking into again, if you’re like, if you, like me, wrote it off many, many years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I’ll tell you, the reason I always shied away from it in the past was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t like that it was so tacky that it was actually difficult to get in and out of pants pockets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is still the case. I think it might be a little bit less annoying, but maybe I’m just giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, but it is still annoying to get in and out of pants pockets. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not terrible, but it’s not graceful in that way. Also, it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a bottom lip and it’s fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like to do edge gestures, you are running into the silicone a lot. So it is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protective case in the sense that like, you know, for if you’re worried about a case like for actually protecting your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against drops and stuff, it’s probably a pretty good choice for that. And the camera control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implementation on all of Apple’s cases is just great. Like it just feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the button got extended. It is still flush with the case, just like it is flush with the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The button feels well, it feels right, it works right. Like it feels and works pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much exactly the way it does on the bare phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I tested the camera control with no case in the beginning just to make sure I was getting the full experience. And then when I put the
⏹️ ▶️ John Beats case on it, same deal. They did a great job. Like it really, really does. It doesn’t feel any less
⏹️ ▶️ John precise or any more difficult or anything like that. And it’s nice and flush. They did a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John Be great if third parties could have done the same thing. Although I did see one now, as you would imagine, My Instagram ads
⏹️ ▶️ John are 98% ads for iPhone cases and 2% ads for Marco’s car. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, yeah, there is one third party case manufacturer. I forget what the name
⏹️ ▶️ John is. It’s like SU case or something or whatever, advertising the fact that they presumably will
⏹️ ▶️ John have the court’s pass-through thing or whatever. Everyone else just has holes
⏹️ ▶️ John or they leave out that section of the case. But I feel like this is totally possible for third parties
⏹️ ▶️ John to do, technologically speaking. They just didn’t have enough information to implement it in time for launch.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m hoping there will be third party cases that implement this, but Apple’s implementation is it’s really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I mean, geez, I would have loved to have some kind of like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco premium fabric of some kind of case this year, like something that is not plastic and
⏹️ ▶️ John something that doesn’t have a bottom lip. Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, and so, you know, the clear case, like maybe I might go with that in the future. I don’t know yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m gonna try the silicone case for a while, but it is jeans season, and it does suck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get in and out of jeans pockets, and I do that many times a day. So it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John little annoying. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna try the clear one, try the Beats one. They are very similar in feel, and I think the Beats one feels a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Beats one, though, like I noticed those fingerprints when I was playing with them in the store, and I’m like, if I made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it look that bad in two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John minutes. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on the clear one, too. They’re just a little bit harder to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, but like the silicone, you don’t see it at all. Yeah. I probably stick with silicone for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while until I mean, maybe the bull strap won’t be really good I don’t know, but I don’t I don’t think so like you got that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you haven’t opened it yet It’s it’s I’m on I’m at the beach and it’s over there in the mainland
⏹️ ▶️ John So, all right. Well, my case is coming on Wednesday. So next episode I will be able to tell you about the bull strap case but
⏹️ ▶️ John Marcos tale of the The sloped pit on the peak design one does not fill me with hope
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s exactly the design that pull strap is using I’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this is gonna be, you know similar to last year with the action bone And I think this is going to be like a lot of people realizing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh no, I’ve made the wrong case decision. And a lot of casemakers realizing, oh no, we’ve made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wrong cases. Um, and I think this is going to be a big shakeup year for that. And another good year for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple cases. Cynically, you can maybe think maybe that’s why they’re doing it, but no, I don’t, I don’t think that’s the reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I do wish that, you know, and, and, you know, got to give Apple credit. Like the beats cases are new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s something that kind of came out of nowhere. The way Apple uses the beats brand to me is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is sometimes a little bit puzzling, especially in recent years, but hey, some good stuff comes out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, they did add more cases than before. They took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away the fine woven, okay. They added the Beats ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay. Which has no bottom, which shows they still know that’s a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s fine. I do wonder, are they ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna try some kind of premium fabric again? I hope they do, because like honestly like Apple’s work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with fabrics and textiles in general on on the watch side has been great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do amazing things over there and part of the reason I like the peak design cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they have like the the the rim the edge around the sides is some kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plasticky rubbery thing but in the back of the case is really nice fabric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just it makes a very good feeling in fact when I was at the Apple Store checking out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the Apple Store or employee who was ringing me up, I was showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco her, because she was asking about the cases, and I was showing her the Peak Design one, and I let her handle it, and she’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, this feels really nice. Peak Design does very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So does Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just don’t make fabric cases right now. I hope that they revisit that. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine woven wasn’t it, but they make lots of other great fabrics they have over time with the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bands and everything, so I know they can do it. So hopefully over time, their case lineup continues to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evolve and expand. Because even before the fine-woven thing, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was usually the case that Apple’s, if you wanted a nice leather case for your iPhone, Apple’s leather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case was usually either the nicest one you could get or one of the nicest ones you can get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why everyone bought them. Because it’s like, oh, well, we know they’re gonna do a good job. We knew it was consistent. We knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the buttons would line up. It would be good quality. It would not have weird branding or anything. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be just a good basic leather case. And yeah, you know, sometimes the corners wouldn’t wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well as you wanted them to or whatever, but you know, you get the black one and it’s pretty safe. And you know, you kind of knew how to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was always a good safe bet. If you wanted like a guaranteed pretty good case that you could buy on day one and be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure it’d be the right choice, it was the Apple leather case. And I feel like right now we don’t have that unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you love silicone, in which case it’s the Apple silicone case. Then I don’t know what else to say after that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t just go caseless. That’s what the cool kids do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then the phone just slides off the flat surfaces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not that terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And then your fingerprints
⏹️ ▶️ John are all over your actual phone and so are all the nicks and scrapes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean the physical condition of my Pro Max leaving aside my freaking ruined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen, like the back of it, the sides of it, that’s all fine. And I did use a case occasionally, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most part I didn’t. And physically it’s in really, really good shape. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just the screen that’s bad news bears.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, speaking of, one final thing on cases, this is a good time to
⏹️ ▶️ John refresh people who haven’t been listening to the show for years and years. I always make reference to the naked
⏹️ ▶️ John robotic core idea, and for people who don’t know what that is, it is the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that I think I talked about back in the hypercritical days originally, that you will make a product
⏹️ ▶️ John that omits as much stuff as possible, because someone who buys your product can always add things to
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but they can’t take things away. So for example, in the case of the iPhone, you can imagine making
⏹️ ▶️ John a smartphone that has a grippy rubber back on it that is not as slippery
⏹️ ▶️ John as the phones that Apple makes. But if you don’t want a grippy rubber back and the phone comes
⏹️ ▶️ John with one, and that is literally the back of the phone, you can’t remove that. So the naked robotic core theory
⏹️ ▶️ John is ship the smallest, most minimal thing possible, and then anybody who
⏹️ ▶️ John wants something can add it to it. But people who want nothing get the smallest minimal product
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. And it is, I don’t know if Apple espouses this theory, is a thing that I came up with to
⏹️ ▶️ John explain Apple’s apparent design decisions on their phone. And I think they continue along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the specific instance with the iPhone 16 is, I think Marco talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe in the past episode, they’re shrinking the bezels around the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John just year after year, millimeter after millimeter. It’s not like there was a big giant one inch border like there
⏹️ ▶️ John was in the original iPad. Like the border around the screen on the iPhone has always been pretty small, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s like, no, we need to make it smaller because that border is a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that if you don’t want it, you can’t remove it from the phone. You can always add a border by putting a case
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, but if you get a phone and you want no border, you can’t have that unless we ship you the Naked Robotic Core. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then it’s up to you to decide. We ship you, if they could ship it with zero border, they would, like a Samsung phone
⏹️ ▶️ John where the screen goes over the edge or around it or whatever, right? they’re getting real close to essentially having zero border.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can decide, is zero border what you want? If not, add a case. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen is so close to the edge that I’ve heard from so many people with iPhone 16s that they’re accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John activating things on the screen simply by the act of holding the phone because the meat of their
⏹️ ▶️ John fingers wraps around and ends up touching the screen part. And yes, the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS has all sorts of like, what we would call in the iPad palm rejection, essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John touch rejection, rejecting what the OS thinks is an inadvertent touch, but it’s not enough for some people.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s still some of their touches are getting through. And by the way, I think there’s a fun one where like, if you,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you touch the screen where right by the camera control, where like the little camera control controls
⏹️ ▶️ John would appear on the screen. If you touch the screen there and then try to do anything else anywhere on the screen, all
⏹️ ▶️ John your touches are ignored, which I think is probably like a feature having to do with people trying to swipe the camera control
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, or maybe it’s a bug. I don’t know. But anyway, they’ve gotten so naked robotic
⏹️ ▶️ John core with the 16 line that people are now having to make the choice to get a case simply because
⏹️ ▶️ John they cannot avoid accidental input because now the screen is so close to the edge they just can’t avoid it
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely. So that is a possible thing to think about of like, am I gonna go caseless? Yeah, they’re giving
⏹️ ▶️ John you the most minimal, you know, they’re trying to get closer to that naked robotic core ideal that they don’t know about,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just a thing that I made up, but that’s what they’re doing. Like this is me explaining what they’re actually doing. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like it, your choice is to put a case on it. That’s the only way to get your fingers farther away
⏹️ ▶️ John from that screen surface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s part of the reason I use a case now, because as I mentioned a couple episodes ago, like I tried without a case, I’m on the 15 Pro at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end there, and I kept causing accidental input on the screen. And I’m actually, honestly, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding that problem a little bit with the new watch too. I’ll get to that when we get to talk about that. But like, you know, as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens get pushed out further and further to the edges, that’s what happens. you have less space to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold the phone with your fingers without causing input. And it’s something that you can get used to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, I don’t know, like I feel like I wasn’t really asking for the bezels to get narrower.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a robotic core. It’s like, hey, some people want the most minimal phone and they can’t get that
⏹️ ▶️ John unless we ship it. You can always add a case. And there, your problem is solved with the people who want the most minimal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you can argue, okay, no one wants this minimal. Like human fingers are squishy. Like people’s fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to overlap. And I also agree kind of on the 14 Pro, which had pretty big bezels,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But the 14 Pro that I was using previously, I was constantly finding that somehow, some fleshy
⏹️ ▶️ John part of my hand was touching the right edge of the screen when I was in landscape mode and causing YouTube to
⏹️ ▶️ John fast forward because they added that thing where if you like, hold on the right edge of the video, it like fast forwards or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, oh, here’s some accidental input that I hadn’t thought about before. Or like, just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, they’re getting close to like, you know, is this, is this robotic core too naked?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey who buys this
⏹️ ▶️ John phone need a case? Like, because again, the idea of Naked Robotic Core is provide
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone that is, you know, naked for the people who want it because they can’t remove stuff from it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like at a certain point, it’s like, okay, but who wants this? Who wants the bezels to be this small? And if
⏹️ ▶️ John the bezels are gonna be that small, maybe the stainless steel, titanium, whatever the hell, aluminum,
⏹️ ▶️ John aluminum and titanium, maybe that band should be thicker? At which point, like, why did you even
⏹️ ▶️ John remove the bezels? And now you’re just adding them back by making the band thicker or whatever. But it’s a thing for Apple to think about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know they’re probably gonna try to solve this with software of like, oh, we just need to tweak the touch rejection around the
⏹️ ▶️ John edges, which iOS has had for ages and apparently is slightly buggy with iOS 18.0, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that’s the solution. So they may be approaching kind of like, asymptotically approaching the
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal bezel size. Again, setting aside the old, like, phones. I think Samsung made a few of these and so did other people where
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen was like a waterfall and it curved over the edge so you could actually look at the side of the phone and see a portion of the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that was a great idea either, and I think Apple agrees there. But their current screen and their current bezels
⏹️ ▶️ John are really, really pushing the limit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, I might argue that like, since most people seem, appear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use cases, including, yes, we all saw the Johnny Ive picture where the New York Times, where there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco article in New York Times that had a picture of Johnny Ive at some dinner, and it showed him holding up an iPhone in an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco silicone case. And everyone’s like, oh my God, look, Even Johnny Ive uses a case on his iPhone now.
⏹️ ▶️ John notable because I think maybe Grubber even asked us at some thing where he asked a bunch of Apple executives, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you use a case on your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco phone? That was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the AntennaGate press conference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Johnny Ive wasn’t on stage for that, though, was he?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I believe it was Jobs, Tim Cook, and Eddie Q, I think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and they were all like, no. They took out their phones. They were all naked. Well, guess what? Ive uses a case, apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ John now in his old age anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway. But yeah, I would argue that since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people, I would assume it’s probably a pretty sizable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco majority of the iPhone user base uses a case, then that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you should be designing for. Like if people are gonna use cases anyway, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design for the fraction of the audience who’s not gonna use them? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually should optimize the phone for the much more common case of case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage. So it does actually make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they kind of are. Like the no bezel case is designed for a case because
⏹️ ▶️ John if we just assume everyone is gonna put a case on this, then we don’t wanna waste any space inside the case that doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen. We’ll let the case be the border and then people can decide how thick a border they want by picking how thick a case they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re arguably doing that, but the fact that so many Apple executives and so many people in real life
⏹️ ▶️ John continue to use the phone without a case shows that the caseless scenario is not zeroed
⏹️ ▶️ John out, right? I mean, at the very least, if Apple executives continue to insist that they don’t use cases on their phones, at the very least
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re living the no case, and so is Casey, the no case, the caseless, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so it’s not like nobody, right? I mean, maybe we should talk to them about what are the percentages? Is it more
⏹️ ▶️ John people than want an iPhone mini? Huh? Huh? Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up from like 20 minutes ago because I forgot to go look. Belkin UltraGlass 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen protector for iPhone 16 Pro. So it is Glass as far as I can tell, not only because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the name, but from what I can tell based on the packaging. But yeah, I’ll put a link in the show notes. I’ll put it in Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you to look at if you care. But I believe it is honest-to-goodness Glass. And it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rounded over. No, it is not. So but the good news is, like I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had said earlier, allegedly, if you screw something up, then you can get a new one for free and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the Apple Store put back on for you. Anyway, yeah, the case situation, uh, not great, which is part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I I am going caseless, caseless again.
Photo Styles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Do we want to talk Apple Watch or do we want to talk AirPods first?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey styles briefly? Oh, yes. I’m sorry. I completely skipped that. This, I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey played with this very briefly, but I’m really digging this. One of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I didn’t talk too much about during the HP Insider Special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I just don’t really edit my pictures other than doing color correction. So in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most basic, like silly, well, not silly, but like simple color correction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can possibly do. So if I take a photo inside and everything looks blue, I’ll try to do color correction to make it look, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the color it’s supposed to be. With these photo styles, and especially since they’re like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side cards, maybe that’s not the right term, but it’s, you know, additional information that’s kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, you know, attached to the photo. So you can go in and revisit it later. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really liking this. And this, for me, for my simple brain, this is the right amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey editing for a photo. I don’t want to have 85 different sliders to tweak. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to mouse around in that track pad of dots that they present to you. So you get this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grid of dots, and you can swirl around in there, and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live update the photo and show the results of that change. And I forget exactly what you’re editing. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s tone and contrast or something like that. Maybe one of you know. So that to me is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct amount of editing. And I’ve only done this like once or twice because I’ve only had the phone for a few hours, but I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey digging this so far. I haven’t gotten to the point of setting a new default, but I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really like having this as a means and mechanism to edit pictures that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just need that little extra like zhoosh.
⏹️ ▶️ John Spoilers for an upcoming episode, but there is an Ask ATP that somewhere buried down in our giant queue of Ask ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John that asks about photo editing. And I will say that this camera control, that the
⏹️ ▶️ John photographic styles control that he’s talking about, that grid of dots that lets you change things after the fact, is
⏹️ ▶️ John an interesting sort of entry into the photo editing UI
⏹️ ▶️ John spectrum. Obviously, the one end is like, I never edit my photos, and the other end is like Lightroom, right, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And somewhere in the middle is this grid thing, which is nice in that, like, Casey doesn’t even know what the axes
⏹️ ▶️ John stand for, but it doesn’t matter, because the whole point is you put your thumb on that thing, you move it around, and you move it around until you like how the picture
⏹️ ▶️ John looks, right? I mean, that’s like, there’s not so many places you can move it. It’s like up, down, left, right. I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ John how many rows and columns there are, but there’s not a million of them, right? And you move it until the picture looks good to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I will say that one of the problems with systems like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is people who don’t have a lot of experience in editing photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John often aren’t the best judge of what looks good to them. And that may sound ridiculous. Like, of course, everyone knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what looks good to them. It’s their opinion. In the moment when you’re editing, You will stop when it looks good to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then a year from now, when you look back at the picture, you may find yourself saying, why does this picture look weird? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looked good to you when you were using that control at the time you did it. But now looking back, it actually looks kind of odd.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does help to have some understanding of what you’re doing to know what goals that you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John get to. It’s kind of like, you know, going to the TV store, as we’ve talked about before and saying, that TV looks amazing. Yeah, cause it’s on vivid
⏹️ ▶️ John mode where every color is oversaturated and it’s the brightness is cranked up and it looks very
⏹️ ▶️ John striking, but that’s not how you want your TV to look. Experienced editing photos
⏹️ ▶️ John will help you avoid sort of the vivid, the vivid valley, I guess, of like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I moved my thumb on this control until it looked good to me, but I didn’t realize that I’m making all my pictures look
⏹️ ▶️ John like Samsung photographs, or everything, old-style Samsung photographs, where everything’s all blown out and every color is oversaturated
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything is too contrasty or whatever. Anyway, you do you, but the beauty of the photographic style is if you find
⏹️ ▶️ John out you’ve made a terrible mistake and your taste in thumb placement on that four-way controller bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can always go change it later and you can even just turn it off and go back to one of the preset modes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, thoughts, have you played with this any?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only a little bit, I need more time with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have played with it and I decided even before I got this phone that my plan was
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to change my default photographic style because I know it’s non-destructive
⏹️ ▶️ John and if I end up not liking it, like the default one that comes to is like called standard, right? That’s just like, hey, it’s gonna look like
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone pictures. This year’s iPhone pictures, this OS and this hardware standard, right? And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what all my previous pictures have been like, obviously. And I mostly like them, but I know what
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone pictures look like, the processing they do or whatever, and it’s not exactly to my taste.
⏹️ ▶️ John I decided that my default photographic style is going to be natural.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is the difference between standard and natural? I think they don’t over boost the saturation
⏹️ ▶️ John as much. maybe there’s less sharpening. All I know is that it looks closer to how
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I want them to look. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ll take a year’s worth of pictures in natural
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll look back at them and I’ll say, you know what, I wish these were all in standard. Well, guess what? I can go change them back to standard if I feel that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t plan on using that big four-way control because I like to edit it in photos, which is maybe one step up
⏹️ ▶️ John from the four-way control. It’s not all the way to Lightroom, but it is, I’m familiar with the controls in photos and I
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to tweak them to look the way I currently like them to look, although that changes over the years, see our photos
⏹️ ▶️ John episode that we talked about this. But I’m gonna go with natural. I’m gonna go with natural by default and I’m never gonna touch
⏹️ ▶️ John it and I’m gonna see how I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, did you go into settings for the camera and do the photographic style setting?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did, I used the camera control to do it. I set it to standard, or I set it to natural rather, and it just stays on natural.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because the reason I ask is when you drill into settings, camera, photographic styles, it brings up a screen and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it says photographic styles. To begin, select four of your favorite photos, captured with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this iPhone. Photographic styles lets you personalize how you appear in photos with incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nuance to get the look you want. Now I haven’t taken enough photos to do this yet. So I haven’t proceeded to the you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a button that says get started. But after I take, you know, maybe a bunch of photos of the kids and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a photo or two of penny and maybe like a landscape or something, I don’t know, I plan to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back in there and do whatever that wizard is to see, I presume it will suggest to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay, well, based on these photos or perhaps it’ll give me some editing options and say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe it’ll like blindly show me here’s like four of the different styles. Which one do you like the most?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my hope, having not tried it yet, is that maybe it’ll point me in a direction. Although as you were talking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did take a picture of Penny staring down a ball that she really wanted me to throw to for. Trevor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Burrusen Why didn’t you throw it? Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connelly And natural. Oh, I did. I did, but I was taking a picture. And so anyways, the natural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this does look very good. I don’t know if if it’s my favorite, but it definitely does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look very, very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’d never even seen that screen until you mentioned I just looked at it. One thing I did do, by the way, just to bring it up more,
⏹️ ▶️ John the preserve settings screen, you know, settings, camera, preserve settings. You have to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to that and turn on the toggle switch for photographic styles if you want the camera app to preserve it. So that’s what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John I turned on the preserve setting for photographic styles, then back on the camera app, I used the camera control to swipe over to
⏹️ ▶️ John the natural style, and it just stays on natural now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, I’m sorry, so where’s preserve settings? It’s in that same, I don’t see it here. It’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John Settings, Camera, Preserve Settings. And then scroll until you see Photographic Styles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Turn that toggle switch on, and now whatever setting you set in the Camera app for your photographic style,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t touch that setting again, We’ll just stay on whatever you set it to.
(These) AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, AirPods?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t have any new ones, so I think this is the John Show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the only new ones that exist are the AirPods 4, and you two are AirPods Pro users because you like things
⏹️ ▶️ John in your ear holes. But I don’t. I don’t like things in my ear holes, so I got the AirPods 4 with ANC.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the box it says AirPods 4. It says AirPods 4, and then it says active noise cancellation, and then the sticker
⏹️ ▶️ John on the box says AirPods 4 with ANC in parentheses or something. Anyway, these
⏹️ ▶️ John are a different shape than the AirPods 3, which is a different shape than their predecessor AirPods.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is a new shape for my ears. They don’t fall out of my ears. They don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John as big in my ears as the AirPods 3. Like they don’t feel like they’re pushing it out. Like they are physically smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that makes sense. They do feel like they go farther into my ears for what I think are obvious
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons because to get the noise cancellation to work a little bit better, they wanna be a little bit farther into your ears.
⏹️ ▶️ John Overall, I think it’s an upgrade in comfort over the previous one, but really it is just
⏹️ ▶️ John mildly, like it feels mildly uncomfortable in a different way. Not uncomfortable, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the part that I feel, because again, I’ve been using AirPods 3, I wear them every single day. Like they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John uncomfortable, they don’t hurt my ears, but I can feel which part of my ear are they pressing, and these press a different
⏹️ ▶️ John part, and they go in my ear farther. And for someone who doesn’t like things to go inside their ears, that’s not great, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still better than the ones that actually go inside your ears. I do really appreciate the fact that the case
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much smaller. I’m not sure it’s back to the original AirPods 1 case size, but it is so
⏹️ ▶️ John much smaller than its predecessor case, massively smaller than the Pro case. I wonder if the
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods Pro 3 will do a case shrink too. They did a case shrink in the straightforward way. They
⏹️ ▶️ John just make there be less case around the AirPods. Like it is essentially thinner around it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John kudos to them to making the case smaller. One of the consequences of having a new case
⏹️ ▶️ John is you have to learn a new way to get the AirPods out of the case. With every new shape of AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ John We all have to learn. When I open this case lid, how the hell do I get these things out of here? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John move has been different for every single kind of AirPod. The Pros, the Originals, the 2s, the 3s,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s, well, the 2s were the same as what I think. Anyway, it’s been different for all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John This one is same deal. I could not get them out the way I get the other ones out. Instead I have to come
⏹️ ▶️ John from like the side on an angle and that’s how they come up. It’s fine, you just learn it and do it. But it’s weird
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s always different. The sound, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing about AirPods. My daughter in particular, but both my kids, have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the people who have the fingers that wear the letters off the keyboards, right? My kids have ears that destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods. Wow. And the way they destroy them, well, my
⏹️ ▶️ John daughter somehow is able to destroy the microphones. I don’t know how she does this, but it’s a thing that happens, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve gone through so many, under AppleCare, we just keep getting new ones and she just destroys, Anyway, but both my kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John the failure mode of their AirPods, and they’re using, I think now they’re using threes, they all have the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John like non-pro models, is that the AirPods just lose all bass.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s like a tiny speaker cone tearing, so it’s only like the middle part of the driver that’s vibrating,
⏹️ ▶️ John it basically becomes all treble because the part that would be bass is gone because like the paper has torn or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think they’ve had like three or four pairs, sometimes under warranty, sometimes not, that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I put them in my ears and like, how are you listening to this? It’s all treble. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the bass is gone. Don’t you realize these are essentially broken and sure enough, you’ve taken them to the Apple store, they put them in some little test rig and they
⏹️ ▶️ John test them like, oh yeah, these are totally bad. Like they’re not producing sound the way they’re supposed to be, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what causes that. You can’t see inside the AirPods, but it’s a thing. I don’t know if my
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods 3 that I had before had this problem or we’re starting to have this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what I do know is that the AirPods 4 have so much more bass
⏹️ ▶️ John than my previous AirPods. So much more bass that I went immediately to try to find settings, like, is there
⏹️ ▶️ John a way I can turn the bass down? Because this is too much bass for me. Because I’m listening to podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John and everybody sounds like a newscaster with a super deep voice. So much bass.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know people who have AirPods Pro is like, yeah, that’s the right amount of bass, dummy, and you’ve just been listening to crappy AirPods. It should
⏹️ ▶️ John sound like that. I wasn’t used to it. But listening to music, I appreciate it. Listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to vocals, even with voice boost on, an overcast and like, could you turn the bass down a little bit?
⏹️ ▶️ John there was an adjustment for that, but I would say this is the result of the AirPods 4 having superior
⏹️ ▶️ John sound quality to my own personal AirPods 3, which may or may not be in the process of losing bass. So there
⏹️ ▶️ John is definitely that. Second thing is with the noise cancellation,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple said that their pros are twice as good. That may be underestimating it.
⏹️ ▶️ John the noise cancellation doesn’t cancel noise so much as,
⏹️ ▶️ John ah, tamps it down. Like, it changes the nature of the noise. So to give an example, I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ John often listening on my AirPods when doing dishes, and there’s the running water sound, right? It’s kind of like white noise, kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of running water sound. If I put on my gigantic Sony airplane headphones, I could just cancel out that
⏹️ ▶️ John running water sound where it’s just basically gone, right? With the AirPods 4, the running water sound
⏹️ ▶️ John is still there, and it is lower volume and it is also of a different
⏹️ ▶️ John nature. It is less loud and sort of less shrill, if that makes sense, but you can
⏹️ ▶️ John still absolutely hear it. To the point where I was trying to figure out, am I in noise canceling? And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got, I don’t know if the pros have this too, but like it cycles through the different modes and you can, there’s like tones that they play. Have you
⏹️ ▶️ John memorized all the tones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I don’t remember which ones are which until they’re presented. Then oftentimes I can mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure it out, but I couldn’t like demonstrate them now. Yeah, because this spoon
⏹️ ▶️ John is four settings and there’s four tones there’s off which is just like don’t do anything just be whatever there
⏹️ ▶️ John is Transparency which is take sounds from the outside and play them into my ears through the speakers. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the bling. Yeah, there is adaptive Which I have no idea I ask you about in a second
⏹️ ▶️ John And then there is noise cancelling which is cancel as much noise as possible
⏹️ ▶️ John very often I was like am I a noise cancelling and then I would Change the mode and it would like go to
⏹️ ▶️ John off and like oh, yeah I was a noise canceling because now everything is much louder and of a different nature
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is nothing like putting on like a big pair of over your headphones And I’m sure nothing like having AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro shoved into your ear hole, so I appreciate the noise cancellation It is doing something
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t expect it to do what like a real noise cancelling headphones like in other words I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John these are not a replacement for AirPods Pro or over your noise cancelling on a plane
⏹️ ▶️ John They will probably help a little bit, but it’s it’s like a night and day difference So I would still
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend these. I still think they’re worth the extra 50 bucks maybe for the case with the speaker alone. And I like that it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as you would expect from something that doesn’t seal your ears in any possible way, there’s only so much they can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the bottom line is sound is getting in. The sound can get around the AirPods. There’s no seal around the thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John what I wanna ask you guys is, I have no idea which one of these four modes I should ever be in. With the exception
⏹️ ▶️ John of being in noise canceling mode when I’m home alone in the kitchen doing dishes, which I feel like is safe. Every other
⏹️ ▶️ John context, I’m like, Should I be in transparency? Should I be in off?
⏹️ ▶️ John Should I be in adaptive? What the hell is adaptive? So please give me some guidance. Of the four
⏹️ ▶️ John modes that these things can go into, when do you use each mode and why?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I suggest is you can, in the settings, you can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove some of those modes from the rotation. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remove off and I remove adaptive. So my only two modes, the reason or the sounds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are transparency or noise cancellation. Adaptive, that’s the one where it tries to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use conversational awareness to try to cancel noise sometimes, but bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in things. And I have found, I haven’t tried it recently, so maybe it’s better now. When it first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out, I tried it for a day and just hated the choices it was making. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instantly, after one day, I’m like, all right, I’m out. So I went back to manually controlling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise cancellation versus transparency.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell what Adaptive is trying to do because there’s no like indicator that I’ve found in like the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, is it noise canceling now? Is it not doing it? Is it adding transparency? Like I turned off the conversation awareness
⏹️ ▶️ John features that are like, oh, do you want me to lower the volume when you start talking or someone talks to you? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that was just, it’s not what I want anyway. Like if you’re listening to a podcast, I don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to duck the volume. I want to pause it myself, which is what I’ll do. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John that Adaptive is trying to be smart, but I cannot tell what it’s doing. It doesn’t, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially because the noise canceling is not so dramatic, I’m like, is it doing noise canceling
⏹️ ▶️ John or has it decided not to? And then I have to switch modes to go to like either the off mode or the noise canceling mode
⏹️ ▶️ John and compare it to what it was in adapted to tell if it had decided, it’s just, it’s too much guesswork. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not an adaptive fan right off the bat, but I keep giving it a try in
⏹️ ▶️ John indoor context where I think I’m not gonna be hit by a car. But anyway, so you’re using, you don’t even use,
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you use off or you just use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transparency or noise cancelling? That’s it. Yeah. I’m in transparency the vast majority of the time, unless I happen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be either on a plane or on a subway platform where it’s super loud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I’ll turn on noise cancellation. So walking the dog is
⏹️ ▶️ John transparency then? Always. Yeah. See, I mean, I’ve been walking the dog with essentially off because
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t had AirPods with noise cancelling before. And if you’re listening to a podcast, especially with ones that don’t seal your
⏹️ ▶️ John ears, you can hear the outside world. Like, I don’t feel like I need transparency to replay the outside world because Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just hear it with these AirPods in. So maybe I’ll use off for dog walks, but… No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use transparency. Just use transparency. You can hear better. Trust me, it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Just use it. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want the outside world being played at louder volume into my ears when I’m trying to listen to the podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey John, John, it’s not louder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, pump the brakes. You’re thinking way too hard about this. Just do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transparency. You’re so wrapped around the axle about it. I promise it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fine. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve tried it. Like, I know what it’s like. and it does make the outside world more prominent than when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, because it’s but so typically, like, like back, like back when I was using aftershocks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my dog walks before I just before AirPods Pro existed. The big benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the of the of the bone conduction style of headphones is your ears are just unblocked, like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no, you know, obstruction whatsoever for noise coming in, you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the you know, you know, the bone conduction headphones to add your music or podcast to it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what transparency mode does on the AirPods Pro. So now granted, I haven’t tried these AirPods yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is as good. They don’t actually block your ear holes like the Pro’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. But I assume it’s probably close or as good. And the AirPods Pro transparency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just incredible. As I said, it’s way better than even the AirPods Max transparency. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why, but for whatever reason it is. Because the AirPods Max don’t have the H2. Maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway, so whatever the reason, the transparency in the AirPods Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfect. Like it really is like you’re wearing nothing. Like if you have the AirPods in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re not playing anything and you take them out, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the outside world is the same loudness as it was when you had them in. Like it’s as if you’re wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing and then you’re adding selectively to it with your podcast. Like, so it
⏹️ ▶️ John is great. Well, I mean, for these things that don’t seal the ear holes off is not the same as transparency to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fair, but I would experiment with it. I would give transparency as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of a shot as you can. I
⏹️ ▶️ John will try to get adaptive out of the rotation. Do you happen to know where in settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is buried? I find it by going into the Bluetooth menu and like go to Bluetooth, go to the AirPods, hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little eye button, it’s in there. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s annoying thing that you can’t do unless they’re currently paired. If they’re not in your ears,
⏹️ ▶️ John like when I go to Bluetooth, it just has like model number, serial number, AppleCare and forget this device.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have to be connected.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, all right, I’ll take it. I think I’ve basically decided that Adaptive is not working for me, but I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John still have to try the other ones. Yeah. One final thing on the case. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John no magnetic connection between the AirPods 4 case and the MagSafe puck.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least the original MagSafe puck, which is what I have. I have an original MagSafe puck on my nightstand. And that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John the new case is too small to hit the magnets, right? Because the case curves, right? It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you put it on the circuit, like, oh, it fills the circle, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is the parts that are over the magnets are the curved
⏹️ ▶️ John parts, not the flat part. So it does not magnetically align like the old case did, simply because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller. It still charges fine. And it even makes a nice little chime, you know, when you know you’ve done it. Oh, okay, so it does charge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you just put a dead center in the thing. It just doesn’t like magnetically align itself with the MagSafe thing, because it can’t. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it does magnetically align itself with the Apple Watch charger. And like in an offset, like if you put it on an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Watch charger, it snaps right to where it’s supposed to go. and it’s not centered, like where it wants to be in the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Watch charger is like in the lower portion of it, but it will snap right to it. So that’s just something
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep in mind. I don’t think it’s a problem. Again, I love the small case. I totally endorse it, but Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of outrun themselves. Maybe with the new, since you mentioned the new one is narrower, maybe the new one does
⏹️ ▶️ John magnetically align it because it’s that much smaller, but I haven’t tried it.
Apple Watch Series 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Apple Watch Series 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you have one? You have one, Casey. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey do you think of it? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I did get one. I went from the WELAD version to the Maddenly Man version,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to say, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small to large. I’m just kidding. I went from the small size to large size. Was it, now it’s 42 and- It’s 42 and 46.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This thing, compared to my Series 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little guy, little guy is chonky. It’s big. Actually, I shouldn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s chonky because it’s actually very, very thin, but it’s big. Now that being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it looks like a billboard on my wrist right now, but I think you were right the whole time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it only lightly pains me to admit that publicly, but I think I will quickly adjust to it. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s absurd seeing it on my wrist right now. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wonder if an ultra would have been a bridge too far. I’m not sure. Maybe it wouldn’t be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but looking at the way this is sitting on my wrist right now, I feel like the ultra might’ve been too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, if you look at it, it doesn’t look that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much thinner to me, but it sits in feels much thinner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes. And I was talking to Jason about this when we were in Memphis together and he pointed out to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think he’s exactly right. Exactly right. The like sensor plateau or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mesa or whatever that’s on the bottom, that’s the stuff that sits against your wrist with like the, um, with the little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LEDs that flash for, you know, uh, all the different things that it’s sensing except blood ox, apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, anyways, uh, that is quite a bit thinner than it used to be. And I think that makes a big difference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. Um, I really like it so far. I also liked speaking of old men with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old men problems. I like that the font appears to be noticeably bigger because the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so much bigger, which is also nice. In terms of the off-axis viewing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s definitely better, but I can’t say that I’m like, oh, you know what I mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just one of those things where I think in the past I would have had to twist my wrist more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, you know, just wouldn’t be able to see my watch or the watch face. And now I I can see it at more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angles, but it but it’s not the sort of thing that’s striking. It’s just oh, that’s nice It works better now
⏹️ ▶️ John well if you if you had your If you had the large size of the previous watch I think you would have noticed
⏹️ ▶️ John both the angle and the thickness because I watched the YouTube video of them comparing it was the max tech Channel they were comparing
⏹️ ▶️ John the the series 10 with the series 9 of the same sort of size class And the series 10
⏹️ ▶️ John looked dramatically thinner just setting aside that little blister on the bottom for the sensors Just the body of it look
⏹️ ▶️ John thinner And the same thing with the viewing angle if you take your old and your new and put them on the same surface
⏹️ ▶️ John and just Tilt your head to go at an angle. I think you’ll notice a difference I have been looking for YouTube videos
⏹️ ▶️ John of someone taking like a magnifier to this to see if it’s MLA Seems like the consensus is no no one
⏹️ ▶️ John has taken a magnifier to it but I Lot of people have said first of all a lot of people are saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John Emily doesn’t actually improve viewing angles Because it mostly just makes it brighter from the front It does make it brighter from the
⏹️ ▶️ John front but I think it also helps viewing angles if only because they’re getting rid of like the the color tint and sending light
⏹️ ▶️ John off in other directions, but I’m gonna guess I mean, I’m still looking for evidence There’ll be follow-up next week if
⏹️ ▶️ John I find something I’m going to guess that it’s actually not MLA, but simply just a better LTPO 3
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever OLED but still inconclusive no one on YouTube cares about this enough to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So one thing I haven’t tried. Oh There we go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s coming from the watch so I can play music?
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the speaker holes on the Series 10. I like how instead of being a speaker slot, there’s these tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little holes. It looks much nicer and hopefully less likely to clog with dust.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, for what it’s worth, I was trying to play music. Maybe it’s not coming through because of Zoom or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it plays actually surprisingly loud. I mean, this is definitely audible from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey waist level. I don’t know. Again, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John coming through. Testing YouTube seems to be about the same volume as the ultra which was the previous
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker King and the ultra has Gigantic speaker holes because it’s a big chunky watch But this one has
⏹️ ▶️ John very tiny elegant and numerous speaker holes and apparently it gets just as loud as the ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just tried it for the first time just now and I don’t know if like I said I don’t know if it’ll come through the recording. It certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t sound like it’s coming through on zoom, but It I mean it’s sufficient. I wouldn’t want to listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey music this way generally speaking, but in a pinch especially as someone who really hates silence,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s me. Yeah, that’s kind of nice. Yeah, I mean, I like it. I like it a lot so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Way too early to tell, because I did this after I did my phone upgrade. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so really, really early to tell, but so far so good. Did Tina get a new watch this year or now?
⏹️ ▶️ John So she didn’t want one on day one. I wonder if she’ll change her mind when she sees them in real life. I did tell her that the new ones don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have blood oxygen and her current one does. I don’t know if she cares about that, but bottom line is no, she didn’t order one. we’ll see how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so far so good. I think it’ll be worth revisiting this next week, both this and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phones, once Erin has a chance with hers. Because she is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much, I was going to say much more blasé. That has a negative connotation. I don’t mean that at all. But she’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, yeah, whatever about all this. Like, oh, that’s nice. It’s new, and it has new things. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what I mean? It doesn’t really rev her engine like it does us. And so I’m curious to hear her thoughts. by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next Wednesday when we record next. Hopefully I’ll be able to have her relay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of her opinions for me and I’ll see what she thinks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I took out my Series 10 and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the natural titanium and I had a number of initial impressions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one, the titanium feels great. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so light. It feels amazing, because not only did they reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weight of the watch in general, like all of the watches this year, all the Series
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 10s are lighter in all the metals compared to their previous version metal counterparts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so you have the weight savings there, and then they also have replaced steel with titanium.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the titanium models are almost as light as the aluminum models. They’re very, very light. They feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic. They did get bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the big one and I put it on my wrist and I thought, like Casey just said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like a billboard on my wrist. I also, it seemed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know, I don’t have my old one here to measure, but it seemed almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it looked like a more, a closer to square aspect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ratio than the outgoing one. They did they did make
⏹️ ▶️ John it wider. They widened it more than they tall end it,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey would agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that actually I don’t honestly like that. Look, I think it looks even more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a billboard on Your wrist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, really? I think I disagree. I think I like it a little more squared But I mean this is again initial impressions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might change my mind on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also found I find that the Natural color on the titanium.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I expect it to be a little bit brighter. It actually is like a pretty medium gray
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the point where I think it loses a bit of contrast. Like part of the reason why I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought the black watches in the past, or all the various forms of black that they’ve been, is that I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like seeing some contrast between the watch body case and the black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crystal above it. And when you have a black or dark gray watch, you lose a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of that contrast. And so if you’re going for like kind of like a unified blob look, then that’s what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want. What I want is the contrast between the case metal and the top. And so I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find I don’t like the natural color as much. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to the Apple store was like, I thought after a half day of wearing it, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made a mistake with the size. Oh, interesting. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They made it one millimeter bigger, whatever. They made it a little bit bigger and kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the way some people have switched from the Max phone down to the Pro phone. Casey, you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kill me. I switched to the smaller one. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John let me out to drive. You convinced
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey to get the big watch and they’re like, but for me, small watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, yeah, I wore it for a few hours and I’m like, I can’t, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looked too big on me. I’m here, I’ll send you comparison photos in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Slack. Do you have an Ultra, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not with me. I had an Ultra, I wore it for a little while, like when the first one came out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because this is very similarly sized in width and height, not obviously thickness because the Ultra is way thicker, but in width
⏹️ ▶️ John and height, the large is actually pretty close to the Ultra. If you can pull off the Ultra, why not this one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull it off, I just don’t like it. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Ultra? No, that’s why I don’t wear the Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I bought the Ultra mostly as like a test device because the screen felt and looked so different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the previous ones because it didn’t have the curvature and it was so big that I felt like as a developer of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app for the watch, I needed one to test and that did prove useful. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so when I got this one, I’m like, the big one, they made it too big. It does not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit me well. Like, again, I can pull it off, but what I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, first of all, how much of a role do I want this to play in my life? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the reason to get the Ultra before is if you really want a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your wrist and you wanna use it like a computer, like that’s, then you want the biggest screen. You want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one that can show the most text. You want the most interface elements on screen at once. You want that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want it to play quite that big of a role in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person, on my actual person. I’m happy to take the phone out to do computing tasks. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardly ever read or write anything on the watch itself. It is mostly a sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a brief display for me. I actually realized, I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually want the smaller one. So I’ve started doing sleep tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this one. I decided I wanted to start doing that. And the smaller, the better, honestly, when you’re doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the small one, I have, I actually tried the gold one too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have the 42 millimeter gold titanium, which honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not that gold. It’s a very, it’s the same way Apple does like their pro phone colors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s a little gold. It’s gold enough to look a little bit different in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighting. Most of the time it just looks like the steel, the polished silver steel. But that’s fine. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on the black sport band, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gold and black I think is a very nice look, and I’m very pleased with it right now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also works well on white. You gotta be a little careful with some of the colors if you try color straps to see if they go with the gold, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black and white look great with it. So I think I’m pretty well covered. Even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by going with the smaller watch, it is even lighter than the bigger one. So it is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like I’m wearing nothing. Like I think the band weighs more than the watch at this point. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very, very good overall fit for me. Surprisingly so, like I really did not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’d go back to the smaller one, but they pushed the big one a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit too far. And if you, and I actually did measure the two of them. If you measure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the aspect ratios of them, the bigger one is more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco square than the smaller one. Like it actually has a different aspect ratio. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smaller one I think looks better on me in part because it is a little bit smaller and in part because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has more rectangular shape. So overall, I like the small one a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is not as much screen space as my big Series 8, like they didn’t make that, or my big Series 9, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t make that big of a jump. But it is more, and I bumped the font size up a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of notches on it. so to accommodate my reading glasses need that I’m not satisfying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so far I’m liking it. I like the gold for a nice change of pace, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it’s not that gold, but it’s subtle enough. It’s a nice change of pace. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco titanium is so nice to be back. And yeah, so I’m gonna rock this look for the year and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it goes, but it’s been honestly very comfortable on me. It’s been great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You let me down. I just put a link in the show notes. I’ll see if I can maybe get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a better picture of it. I put a link in Slack, excuse me, maybe I’ll see if I can get a better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture for the show notes. It looks a little chunkier there than I feel like it’s sitting when I just look down. So this, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this picture ain’t great, but I mean, I don’t think it looks bad on me and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see what happens. I don’t personally, sitting here now, I don’t have any particular desire to return this and get the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. And I think maybe part of that is driven by me having kind of mentally prepped myself for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going ultra this year and just expecting to have, you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely mammoth watch on my wrist. And so while this is surface area mammoth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or slightly mammoth, at least it’s not depth mammoth. And I think that helps make it feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot more svelte than perhaps it actually is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus you get the bigger battery, which has been a concern for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I would say that looks big, but it doesn’t look bad. It does look big.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. And like smartwatch fashion is big as in like people like big watches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big smartwatches these days. That’s why the ultra has been so popular. It’s not because all those people are going diving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s because they like big watches. That’s what’s in fashion. And big screens are very useful and big batteries are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very useful. And so there’s lots of reasons why people choose bigger watches, even if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do look big on their wrists. For me, most of those things were like, and for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s less about, it’s less about like, you know, the superficial look. It’s more about like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it fits. Like it, even just like that little bit extra, like one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I’ve mentioned in the past is like, if a watch is too big on my wrist, I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if like, if I flex my wrist up, if I’m like, you know, in certain exercises or something, like if you’re like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing pictures of doing a pushup, if you’re doing a pushup, like your hand is bent upwards compared to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrist. And like, you know, you kind of just have to like, like when your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skin like crushes into the watch, Like it’s less comfortable. So for me, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my general lifestyle, having a slightly smaller watch is more comfortable. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the outgoing models, the big one was, yeah, it was bigger, but it was not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big. It was like, I think this is a noticeable jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that I didn’t expect it to be. Like when I took a picture of it, like sitting on top of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series 9, and like you see the size gain. It is not subtle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you absolutely see it. Like it is, it is like the big one, the big Series 10 compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the big Series 9 is like, it’s not just like imperceptibly bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can clearly see which one is which. It is obvious, like, oh, that’s the bigger one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s cause it’s a decent amount bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the big Series 10 is basically a curved ultra. Like I think it might even be wider than the ultra. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John they learned that, you know, people like the big screen on the ultra, but this is not as nearly as thick as the ultra. That is the
⏹️ ▶️ John big difference in this. And by the way, another change on the Series 10 that I saw in some videos is that whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they call the button on the side, not the crown, but like the button that you press, that button is way bigger now
⏹️ ▶️ John to compare it like to a series nine of the same sign class and look how big that button is on a 10 versus the nine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hmm. I don’t know. Which I mean, I think is a good improvement because like why make it so small? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t feel like, because I’m looking at my series eight with small one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then the series 10 is bigger for sure. But that’s, It appears to me to be more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the upgrade in size class than it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the fact that the button-
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, you’re maybe not comparing like to like there, but anyway, put a picture from my YouTube videos, but yeah, they made the button bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think they should. Like, there’s no reason to keep it as small. It’s, you know, make the whole area where you’re going to press
⏹️ ▶️ John be easier to press. You know, I don’t have an Apple Watch. My wife has
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many Apple Watches that she’s handed down to the kids that she’s gotten new ones. did
⏹️ ▶️ John the other day take out for curiosity and just to see if it would still work my series zero my
⏹️ ▶️ John series zero Apple watch the only Apple watch I ever purchased for myself it is a stainless steel silver stainless
⏹️ ▶️ John steel one and I wanted to know if it was dead and good news it’s not dead and I charged it up
⏹️ ▶️ John and it still looks great as long as you don’t look at the screen so they were so small
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the series zero but up until I think maybe now I think the series zero was the thinnest Apple watch that
⏹️ ▶️ John they had ever sold I think the 10 is probably thinner. But yeah, still looks real good. It’s too bad I don’t like watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our sponsors this episode, 1Passport, Extended Access Management and Trade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Coffee. Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATB.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the perks of membership is our ATP overtime segment every week. This is a bonus topic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we do after every episode. This week’s ATP overtime is meta kicking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple when it’s down. It’s the way Meta has recently been engaging with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and changing some of their own plans around their mixed reality efforts and kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how they interact with Apple and the Vision Pro line. That’s going to be in overtime this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode. Join to listen at AP.fm slash join. Thanks everybody and I’ll talk to you next
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental Check podcasts so long.
Neutral: John hates the EX90
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I hear you have some complaints about Volvo’s, I was going to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forthcoming, but it’s sort of kind of here, uh, electric version of Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car, which is called her car is the XC90, but the all electric is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EX90. And I hear you have complaints.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know my car makers keep doing this. We’ve talked about it before, especially in the context of Tesla early
⏹️ ▶️ John on that when car makers make an electric vehicle, they feel compelled to
⏹️ ▶️ John do things to make it seem futuristic. And I was hoping that would be something that car makers would get
⏹️ ▶️ John over after a few years or a decade or whatever. But they just can’t stop
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it. Door handles are the obvious victim here. Can we just have normal door handlers? No, it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John EV. They have to be annoying, hard to use, problematic door handles. It’s been just an epidemic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone keeps copying it, no one has figured out, hey, just make normal door handles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go back to normal. But no, they can’t. They can’t stop doing it. They make all sorts of excuses or whatever. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that extends to many other parts of the car. On the Volvo EX90, and I like these cars, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as far as SUV goes, I think they’re they’re nice looking. They have good features or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Volvo, like you said, decided to make an electric version of Casey’s car. All electric, battery powered EV, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the most part it looks like the regular one, right? It doesn’t they didn’t do anything weird with the styling
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget if they have messed up door handles, but who cares at this point? I just you know, it’s invisible to me
⏹️ ▶️ John What drove me insane was that they said you know What is there some other part of the car that we can screw
⏹️ ▶️ John up? Because it’s an EV we have the the XC 90 and it’s a perfectly nice car.
⏹️ ▶️ John Could we just make that an EV? No, wait Is there some part of the car that previously had no problems
⏹️ ▶️ John with it that we can screw up? because it’s an EV and they said yes, yes we can.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know what they screwed up? I don’t, if you haven’t seen reviews of this car, maybe you don’t know, because if you look at a picture of it, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it seems fine. It looks like, kind of like my XC90. They decided that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to screw up the headlights. Oh, stop, it’s fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, let me tell you. All right, so headlights, they’re things on the front of your car that light up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And over the years, we’ve done lots of different things with headlights.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about it on a previous episode that Mercedes used to have little windshield wipers and little sprayers to go on them because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if there’s road dirt? Not just Mercedes, others do as well. Yeah, BMW
⏹️ ▶️ John probably did as well. Although the German car makers had a little windshield, because like, hey, if you’re going on the road and dirt flies up on your headlights,
⏹️ ▶️ John not as much light will get out. So we’ll try to clean them off. And modern cars tend not to do that. It’s kind of out of
⏹️ ▶️ John fashion, but they’re more aerodynamic shaped. And we have LED lights, which of course can be smaller, but just as bright. And we have matrix
⏹️ ▶️ John LEDs, all sorts of advances trying to make lights better, to serve you better. And Volvo said,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is an EV. Let’s screw them up in some way. And so what they decided to do was
⏹️ ▶️ John for their headlights, they have, you know, you have to have daytime running lights which for laws in various
⏹️ ▶️ John places, which are just lights that are on when you’re just driving around. But then you have the headlight parts of it. And they said, what we can do
⏹️ ▶️ John is we’ll have a daytime running lights where the headlights normally are in the little Thor’s hammer Volvo
⏹️ ▶️ John design. We’re gonna have a little matrix LED daytime running lights, but they’ll be where the headlights are. You may be
⏹️ ▶️ John asking, but then where do you put the headlights? If you put the daytime running lights right where the headlights were going to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait for a little bit of historical context here. So you are right. It is called the Thor’s hammer, like headlight motif.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the way this is, is imagine an uppercase letter T and then pitch it so that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the, the horizontal cross bar on the T twist it 90 degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in either way. So now that horizontal cross bar is vertical, right? And that’s on the outsides of the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it looks kind of like a hammer. And on Erin’s car and on her prior one, may it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may God rest at soul, I don’t recall what specifically was daytime running lights
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what was headlight headlights. I believe it was additional lenses or, you know, LEDs or whatever that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, LEDs, I guess, that came on when you turned on the headlight proper and the Thor’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hammer stuff did still stay on, but the headlights were quite a bit brighter. But, and so at a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glance, this looks the same. But as you were about to say before I interrupted you it is quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit different now
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so they have a daytime running lights where the headlights normally are and yeah You get how
⏹️ ▶️ John you get to the headlights, you know If you’re in the car and you turn on the headlights or you’re probably don’t cuz just auto mode or whatever gets too
⏹️ ▶️ John dark and you Need the headlights to be turned on What happens is that the the Thor’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hammer daytime running lights? Open like a mouth mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ John shutters move vertically up and down to open a cavity
⏹️ ▶️ John that contains the actual headlights. What? They have reinvented pop-up headlights
⏹️ ▶️ John from the 80s, but 10 times worse, because they have mechanical things that need
⏹️ ▶️ John to open for your headlights to work at all, because your headlights are 100% blocked when this mouth is closed in front of each
⏹️ ▶️ John things. So they have to have a little thing that slides up and a little thing that slides down to reveal your headlights. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then what that opens is a cavity in the front of your car that presumably can fill with snow
⏹️ ▶️ John and ice and slush and whatever and screw up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the mechanism that has to constantly open and close for the headlights.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, if you’re gonna whine, at least get your facts straight. All right, it doesn’t open a cavity. It’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind the plexi or the glass or what have you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in front of the headlights. It’s all internal to the car. There is no cavity for snow to get into.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, what you’re saying is true that, let’s go back to a vertical T. Instead of the crossbar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the horizontal crossbar, Now we’re talking about the vertical bar, which once you twist it 90 degrees,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now it’s a horizontal bar. There are, well, there’s two rows of lights and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do part. That is correct. That is a physical thing that happens. That part you’re correct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, but there’s no opening to the outside world. This is all in the headlight
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, no. Where the, where the mouth parts used to be is now a cavity because they
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be filling that spot. So there is another two inches. is if you take a stick and you poke it in this car and it hits daytime running
⏹️ ▶️ John lights, and you open the mouth, you can push that stick in two more inches.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, it looks like John- Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John the little things used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s glass in front of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, there is, but the thickness of the shutters is now gone, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why is that cavity important?
⏹️ ▶️ John But why does that matter? Because when the mouth has to close, if there’s anything in that one or two inches, now they’re squishing it, and now you’re getting crap
⏹️ ▶️ John in between the little shutters. How is something getting in there? Here’s the thing. Nothing can get in there. a
⏹️ ▶️ John problem that needed to be solved. They have made it an overly complicated thing on
⏹️ ▶️ John a safety feature of the car, which is the headlights. This was not a problem anyone had. They didn’t say, we have no place
⏹️ ▶️ John to put the headlights. What are we going to do? We have to make up these shutters. It’s just a mechanical thing. It’s a moving
⏹️ ▶️ John part that can possibly fail and have things stuck into the crevices or whatever for no reason. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like the door handles that are like, you know, rise out to greet you. Like there was nothing wrong with the door handle that you could just
⏹️ ▶️ John grab. You just made an additional failure point for no benefit. This wasn’t there is no problem
⏹️ ▶️ John being solved here except for someone thinking this was cool and for Volvo a brand that is not known
⏹️ ▶️ John For this especially again for a safety feature to decide they want a mechanical moving part again
⏹️ ▶️ John Have we learned nothing from pop-up headlights of seeing the whatever the game used to play when you see a car with one headlight and
⏹️ ▶️ John you Punch somebody or whatever Because pop-up headlights will get stuck down or stuck up which was
⏹️ ▶️ John again a safety issue Mechanical things that move when they don’t have to is just asking for
⏹️ ▶️ John an additional failure This is one of the the most shockingly bad ideas from a company
⏹️ ▶️ John that I expect better of. Tesla, by all means, I would expect them to do this or worse, right? But Volvo,
⏹️ ▶️ John what are you doing, Volvo? The XC90 has, I think, A, more
⏹️ ▶️ John attractive headlights than the EX90. I think they just look nicer in both modes, but especially in the open modes,
⏹️ ▶️ John and B, guess what? No moving parts. It’s just a headlight. It just sits there on the car, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it just shines light, and that’s all it needs to do when it does everything. You’ve got the daytime running lights, you’ve got the headlights, you’ve got everything. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John was fine. This didn’t need to be changed. I’m just unreasonably angry about this. You are. It makes
⏹️ ▶️ John me, it crosses this whole car off my list. I will never recommend this to anybody until they fix these headlights,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s insanity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are losing your marbles, sir. Okay, I need to be completely clear one more time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is a lens in the front of this whole assembly, just like on your beloved Hondas,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like on my Volkswagen, just like on on the BMW that Marco just bought that’ll have for another 10 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a lens in the front. So unless that lens somehow disintegrates,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is no poking with the stick. There’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to poke. I see. I see what you’re saying. And the thing it’s hard to see in the video that I’m going to link in the show notes, but I see what you’re saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that’s the case and things won’t get in there, you can redact redact that part of my complaint. But every other part of it, in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John the moving parts that can fail because have you ever gotten condensation inside a headlight or a taillight?
⏹️ ▶️ John Those things are supposed to be sealed, but even on very expensive cars, they aren’t always.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you are right that this is needlessly mechanically complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your risk profile assessment is wrong because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it does appear to be sealed. But
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the thing about the risk. This is an unnecessary, this is a choice to have any additional
⏹️ ▶️ John risk over what was previously there. You know what I’m saying? Like the other one does not have any doors that have to move open at all. So like
⏹️ ▶️ John any additional risk, even if it’s tiny, is just foolish. And by the way, do you think it makes these headlights cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John to replace? I don’t think it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, that’s got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a thousand dollar assembly, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, more than that. Are you kidding? Have you not? You have not priced the headlight recently. No, I guess. Do not look up how much your
⏹️ ▶️ John headlights cost on your new car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, please do not do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So here’s the thing. I concur with reservations that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, this is needlessly complex and yes, it can break. And yes, that could be a very bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And do you agree that the XC90 has more attractive headlights?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $5,000. I looked it up. I told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you don’t look it up. Oh my God, your car for your car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John The ball. I told
⏹️ ▶️ John you not to look it up. Don’t have to stump. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should see what the headlights cost on like a like a Lamborghini. Each headlight. It costs as much as my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not true because the Diablo used 300 CX headlight. No, not another. I know. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding. I’m kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ John reason you two don’t know the names of because they’re too new.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, fair enough. No, I agree with you with reservations that it is needlessly complex and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, it could potentially be a safety issue, but I mean, no more so than a headlight going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out like bulbs used to go out on the regular.
⏹️ ▶️ John we use LEDs. We make advances to make headlights better and they’ve decided to voluntarily make them worse
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and more expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, real time follow up. It’s not, it’s only $5,000 per headlight if I get the laser lights option, which I do not have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the, the non laser BMW ix headlight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s, only 2100 per per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light for each one. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s on sale. It’s 20% off the official price of 2600
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing I will say though about these headlights is yes, it could be a safety issue. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my my retort to that is where’s your sense of adventure? These things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look so freaking cool. I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even think they look cool. That’s the thing. And by the way, I just googled this one just to give you the number the Bugatti
⏹️ ▶️ John Chiron. You may have heard of this is the Veyron successor. It is not the latest Bugatti because they have a new one that’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out soon But any the Chiron the Bugatti Chiron you’re familiar with this car Google for Bugatti ch iron.
⏹️ ▶️ John would you like to guess how much a headlight cost for that car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, weren’t the mufflers like 40 grand in the Veyron or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the headlights 10 grand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll say 15. I’m gonna say you’re both low. Do you want to make a second guess? Oh my god, really 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna say 30 per headlight
⏹️ ▶️ John $164,000. What? For a
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that might be for both of them, but you can double check.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the whole car? Like a million bucks? I think it’s like three million. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John God. Let me see if it’s per, let’s see.
⏹️ ▶️ John light? I think it’s for both of them. So it’s a bargain. You’re getting two for $164,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s, that’s very, nice of them.