657: Ears Are Weird
16 Sep 2025An iconic plateau of follow-up.
Episode Description:
- Marco 0️⃣ → 1️⃣
- 🗣️ It’s St. Jude time again! 🗣️
- Podcastathon 2025: Friday, noon → midnight EDT
- Stephen Hackett said the foldable will be the “iPhone Ultra”
- μm is a “micron”
- The iPhone Air battery pack does have a USB-C port after all
- iPhone 17 Pro requires a new adapter to charge at full speed
- A19 vs. A19 Pro
- A19 Pro benchmarks
- The N1 is in every new iPhone
- The whole of the iPhone Air is in the camera plateau
- Casey’s memory problems corner
- ATP #655 (Overcast timestamp link)
- The mmWave antenna window is back
- Logo placement on Apple’s cases
- Some funny renders from iPhone case makers
- Theories about the iPhone 17 Pro colors
- iPhone Air
- Will it bend?
- 17 was a last-second decision? (via Sam Henri Gold)
- Max Tech’s discoveries
- The Air does not have stereo speakers
- The Dynamic Island is lower than on other phones
- The USB-C port is not vertically centered
- No Cinematic Mode video, including the selfie camera
- The new selfie camera is actually a 24MP sensor
- No LiDAR scanner
- Air & 17 non-Pro are limited to USB 2
- Every new iPhone screen has the same specifications, save size/resolution
- iPhones 17 can now toggle screen flickering off
- Apple Watch
- Satellite data requires a cellular plan
- Jason & Greg Pierce agree
- Is “24-hour” battery claim because of a change in measurement?
- Underscore’s observations about the Ultra
- AirPods
- Ear shapes (via Tirial)
- About that “2×” noise reduction
- The new AirPods Pro case is not smaller
- “New generation of Ultra Wideband technology” is the U2 chip
- Live translation is on-device (not in ☁️)
- Live translation is blocked for EU users with EU Apple Accounts
- Safari on iOS 26’s compact toolbar
- Tahoe Toolbars (via Zhenyi Tan) * Frosting download link * Frosting test page
- Post-show: John’s red dot
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Alterego and “thought to text” translation
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Chapters
- 1
- Donate to St. Jude
- John’s fired
- micrometer != micrometer
- iPhone Air battery pack
- USB-PD AVS
- Chips
- Sponsor: Claude
- Plateaus & enclosures
- Cases & colors
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- iPhone Air
- Front camera & USB
- Screens & PWM
- Apple Watches
- AirPods Pro 3
- Ending theme
- John’s red dot
1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, I have to update my number. It’s now
⏹️ ▶️ John How many phones you smashed?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. Oh no! Well, at least you did it right before the new one.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re so angry at these old phones. Now that the new ones are out,
⏹️ ▶️ John have to smash them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Literally hours after I ordered its replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the time to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For the first time ever, I I missed my pocket.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no. Now remind me, are you a caseless, casey-less as well?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, you’re obviously not a caseless, casey-less, but do you roll with the case or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have been going caseless for maybe, I don’t know, six months, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You had the leather sticker thing on the back, right? Oh, that’s right. Yes. Yes. Yes. But that doesn’t protect against hitting
⏹️ ▶️ John on the corner of the front.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. And I, and this was literally like I was getting into my car in my driveway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I was wearing the new shorts. I’m not used to these. Maybe that’s the problem. Who knows? Who cares? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put my phone down into my pocket, but it was not in my pocket and I let go. And so it fell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, my legs aren’t that long, two and a half feet. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John You were still on the ground at this point?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, I was standing on the sidewalk, you know, on my driveway in front of my car. I was about to get in my car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put the phone and I dropped it from pocket height onto the concrete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driveway. And it didn’t sound like much, but I picked it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it hit the back corner and so the back glass has a huge spider crack. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s all right. The screen’s okay. You’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the good thing is I have AppleCare, it turns out. I am back to using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leather stick-on back again in the meantime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t say. Well, fun fact, I’m pretty damn sure we covered this on the show, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey express replacement is great, but it costs you a hundred bucks. Yes. this thing fixed, I would strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advise for you to do so at an Apple store and save yourself the 100 bones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I didn’t do that. I just ordered the 100 bucks thing and it’s going to be here, I think, tomorrow. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is certainly the easier way if you would like to set $100 a flame, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John get a new battery then, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And I figure, you know, this phone, yeah, because my battery, you know, I don’t baby it like John. I use the crap out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, I think I’m somewhere in the 90s, but I’m still, you know, not a brand new battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, this phone is about to either be traded in, in which case it requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replacement, otherwise it won’t be worth anything, or it’ll be like a long-term test device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone for me, in which case, you know, new battery would be nice. So either way, it’s like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll pay the hundred bucks. But it’s, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’ve broken the record. It’s almost like the very first time Overcast ever got an App Store rejection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it It took me like eight or nine years before I got one for Overcast. Every time I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I don’t wanna break the streak. It wasn’t that I didn’t wanna get rejected. It was I didn’t wanna break the streak. Now that my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no phones ever broken streak has been itself broken, maybe I’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little less stressed about it. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I hear that. I mean, it sucks every time. And I am not here to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an argument about whether or not AppleCare is worth it. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and I’m certainly not gonna have an argument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about AppleCare One or whatever it is, AppleCare Plus. I can never keep their names straight, but anyhow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppleCare Max. Yeah, right. They’re just gonna rename it just to Max later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally have come back around to liking having AppleCare on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phones, particularly as I’m going caseless. Yes, AppleCare is not a case, whatever. But it gives me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of peace of mind that if I have an oops like that, it is, there is a penalty for it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some degree. It’s either time, money, or both, but there is a parachute there. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I don’t have AppleCare, I feel like, well, that’s the phone now, because I’m not about to pay like $600, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually didn’t get a lot cheaper than newer ones, but it’s hundreds of dollars if I remember correctly to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the back glass, and no thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I figure, you know, there are certain things that I won’t get AppleCare on because the risk is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low. So for instance, my laptops, like I don’t get AppleCare on my laptops because I don’t break laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, the very first time I ever do, then I’ll be upset, and then I’ll maybe start buying it then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe. but the math just does not work very well on that. Whereas a phone, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a phone that you tend to use without a case, or a fake half case like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the leather backs, that is a higher risk thing. It
⏹️ ▶️ John depends on your drinking habits, I think. What? Laptops, you think,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco laptops, I’m not gonna miss a pocket. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know what’s gonna hurt your laptops? The thing that doesn’t hurt your phone anymore, liquid.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I feel attacked, John. That’s what’s gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I feel straight up attacked. I see it all the time. Watch how children use laptops. They think they’re waterproof.
⏹️ ▶️ John They put open containers, they’ll put their laptops all around a table, they’ll all have like open top
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses of liquid, they’re all drinking all around their laptops because they think they’re like phones. They think like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever, oops, I spilled a drink on my phone, but it was fine. Same thing’s true of laptops, right? No, not at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I feel like, you know, my number of laptops that I have broken is still zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re really pushing your luck here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, why are you putting that energy into the universe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John my friend? simply
⏹️ ▶️ John just check where your drink is right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s true. Mine has a cap on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. My life is on a stand. It’s okay. I’m just saying it’s just so long. It’s on a different level, a higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only is it high, it’s vertical. First of all, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lowest part of it is like an inch off the desk. But what about
⏹️ ▶️ John what about when you’re like coming over on the ferry and you got your laptop out and you’re doing stuff? Do you have a drink next to it? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s the I barely have enough hands to use the laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alright, alright, just just checking because I see a lot of very dangerous laptop use out there. It’s not because people are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to drop them, although sometimes they do that too, or they put them in their backpacks and then drop their backpack from a three foot height
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve seen that. I haven’t done it because I’m, you know, I realized those kinds of things, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Don’t miss your backpack with the laptop.
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, let’s move on and let’s talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it’s still September, and September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and so we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are joining our friends at Relay, which is partially ourselves, to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can go to stjude.org.atp to send them a little bit of your money because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they deserve it. They deserve some of your money. I want to do a couple of quick pieces of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey housekeeping. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet this month that if you donate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think the numbers is at least $60 if I recall correctly, you get some digital downloads, some wallpapers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and an incredible Mac OS screensaver by our friend, friend of the show, James Thompson.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you spend at least a hundred dollars, then that gets you a stickers of all six of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast, the fun hosts, including yours. Truly these stickers were done by friend of the show jelly or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey art anyway, and they are really incredible. So it only costs you a mere $100. Easy peasy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And additionally, as we record this, I will be traveling to Memphis extremely soon in order to participate in said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast on which is Friday from noon till midnight, one true time zone, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, which is New York time. I’m not interested in fighting about that either, but, uh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to give a couple of pieces of feedback that we actually received to the ATP feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account, uh, they’re a tiny bit long, but I think they’re worth it and really, really exemplify
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what makes St. Jude so great, and this is probably going to be most of what we’re going to talk about with regard to St. Jude tonight. So Thomas writes, prompted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by our discussion on ATP about the St. Jude fundraiser, I wanted to share a personal story. Being a long-time listener, I remember hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about St. Jude fundraisers for years. September was mostly just another month. That changed in 2022. In June
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that year, our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Maureen, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our life hasn’t been the same since, and September’s gained a different meaning. We were lucky to live close to one of the best cancer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hospitals in Europe, the Princess Maximus Center for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands. Our daughter got the best possible care there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude came up a number of times during our time there. Let me remind you, in the Netherlands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our doctors closely collaborated with the doctors at St. Jude, providing access to cutting edge medication through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared clinical trials. We witnessed the progress being made in cancer research thanks to fundraisers like yours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when our daughter’s leukemia unfortunately came back the following year. She got a new treatment that she responded very well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. It was still experimental at the time, but continued research is confirming it to be be a superior treatment for specific kinds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of leukemia. This year, September is different once again. Our daughter’s leukemia came back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a second time. Treating it a third time was unsuccessful. She passed in February of this year. It’s our first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey September without her. And I will just interrupt this to say that all three of us are incredibly sorry to Thomas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and your family. That is absolutely heartbreaking. And I cannot believe you spent the time to write this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because that is extremely kind of you. And I don’t know if I would have had the, I don’t know if gumption’s the word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking for, but the fortitude to do so. So finishing Thomas’s email, it’s a very kind email. Thanks for the work you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do raising money for research for childhood cancer. I wish for a future where no parent has to go through what we have had to experience. Let us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together make that a reality. And let me remind you that the slogan for this year and perhaps forevermore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is let’s give them more tomorrows. And that’s a great example. So if you’re moved by this, please feel free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to honor Maureen, which is spelled M-A-R-I-G-N, in making a donation to St. Jude. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stjude.org.atp. And then one more, a little bit quicker one. All Purpose Guru writes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recently underwent treatment for skin cancer melanoma, which included a year of immunotherapy. That required intravenous therapy every three
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weeks for an entire year. The cost of medication for my immunotherapy was $34,000 per dose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The fact that St. Jude gives away these medications to patients is not something you should ignore. The medication, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m cutting a little bit, but the medication cost a quarter of a million dollars, not counting the time and money it took to actually put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in my body. The nurse would hang the packet of medication on the IV, and I would look at it and think, that 100 milliliters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fluid cost more than my car. So this is what St. Jude does, kids. This is what they do. They are trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give children more tomorrows. So please, stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash ATP. Please feel free to send them a little bit of our money, and we need to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. John, you’ve noticed something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we did find the leaderboard that shows the comments on the St. Jude’s fundraising
⏹️ ▶️ John site, and we have someone who put ATP in the comment. They are the new leader of
⏹️ ▶️ John all ATP-related donations. Actually, they’re the leader of all donations for the Relay Pledge Drive, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Guillaume Morin, a name you may recognize from past years, has donated $12,718.28. Heck yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Love it. Firmly at the top of the leaderboard. Amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John contribution. You don’t have to donate thousands and thousands of dollars. Just give what you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re honoring the people who can give these huge amounts, and that’s great and everything. But $5 is just as good,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it all adds up. We’d rather have 1,000 people give $5 than one person give $2,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Absolutely. So again, one final time for this week anyway, stjude.org.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Guillaume wants stickers, he should write you, right Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, absolutely. I’m pretty sure I have sent at least one batch their way and I’m pretty sure they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have gracefully refused any further, but yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John absolutely. They have too many stickers. We accept your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. But yeah, and I mean, please, like John said, don’t feel like you have to donate 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus thousand dollars. $5 is great. Don’t, don’t feel like the only ones we care about are the $12,000 ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re watching all these donations come through and they make all of them make us very, very happy.
John’s fired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up. And I think this might be an all follow up episode. It’s John’s favorite kind of episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let’s start with, we need to fire slash sack someone. And I believe that someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be John. John, what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John In the last episode, I said that Stephen Hackett thought the name of the, what was eventually called
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone Air would actually be called iPhone Ultra. Maybe it was the episode before that I said that. That
⏹️ ▶️ John was not the case. He said that he thinks the folding phone will be
⏹️ ▶️ John called the Ultra. We’ll put a link to his blog post about that at 5HillPixels.net. We regret
micrometer != micrometer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then we were having a conversation about microns and micrometers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and micrometers and all sorts of different things. And I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was one of those times that I got myself wrapped around the axle and I didn’t want to participate and say, yes, this is definitely the case. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone whose name is probably John has done some research and figured out that what you might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call a micrometer is indeed called a micron here in the States. So reading from Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in American English, the use of micron may help differentiate the the unit from the micrometer, a measuring device,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nope, I got that wrong, didn’t I? A micrometer, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device. It’s confusing. A measuring device because that unit’s name in American spelling is a homograph of the device’s name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In spoken English, they are distinguished by pronunciation as the name of the measuring device is stressed on the second syllable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey micrometer, whereas the unit name places the stress on the first syllable, micrometer.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s why no one says micrometer. We said micrometer in the earlier episode. All three of us couldn’t remember what it was called. We said micrometer,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s micro and then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco meter. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what we call microns here in the US, and I think everybody else does as well.
iPhone Air battery pack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the iPhone Air battery pack. From what we knew last week, I stand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by this. I think John is the one who said it, but I stand by your assertion here. From what we knew last week, it was a portless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery pack, and it turns out that is incorrect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it does have a USB-C port on it. The reason I thought it was portless is because Apple is just so stingy with their product
⏹️ ▶️ John photos. The average eBay seller puts 10,000 pictures of the thing they’re selling for five bucks,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple’s own website just refuses to show certain angles of their products. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you found the super high res version of the slim iPhone Air battery pack and zoomed
⏹️ ▶️ John way, way in, you could see that it had a USB-C port, but I didn’t do that and I couldn’t see one in the normal size photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I didn’t have time to pour over the spec sheet to find out that it can charge other devices through the USB-C port. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone Air battery pack has a USB-C port, fear not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still salty that that’s only for the iPhone Air. I understand, but I’m still salty.
⏹️ ▶️ John see all the YouTube videos of people putting it on sideways on other phones? Cause it’ll charge your phone if you put it on sideways.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the whole problem is it hits the camera bump on most other phones. Although I believe on the 16E. 16E. Yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ John 16E it doesn’t hit the camera bump but it sticks off the other end.
USB-PD AVS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, speaking of charging and related, you’re going to need a new charger to take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the iPhone 17 Pro’s fast charging. I did not know this until I was doing my research for the episode this morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this bummed me out too. So a reading from a nine to five Mac. According to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max can charge faster than previous iPhone models, up to 50% in just 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. While that is true, it’s thanks to a brand new USB power delivery specification, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t widely available in the market yet. In short, you’ll need to buy Apple’s new 40-watt dynamic power adapter if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to charge your iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone 17 Pro Max as quickly as possible, at least for now. This is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s charging brick is seemingly the only option on the market that supports this new USB PD 3.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AVS protocol. Now, reading from the Verge, AVS, which stands for adjustable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey voltage supply, provides granular voltage options allowing the power source to offer more precise and efficient charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of devices like smartphones and laptops. For obvious reasons of safety, efficiency, and longevity, the batteries in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our phones and laptops do not charge their maximum possible input for the entirety of the charging cycle. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s regulated at predefined voltages to slow down charging as the battery fills. With AVS, the power source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can provide a very specific voltage that is closer to the ideal needed for the device being charged, speeding up charging without overheating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, unlike a true 60-watt charger, Apple’s little 40-watt GaN charger cannot maintain that peak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 60-watt rate forever. Only 18 minutes, as demonstrated by Privatur Bok over at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the USB-C hardware subreddit. That makes it suitable for fast charging a new iPhone 17, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a MacBook Pro, which is why Apple sells it as a 40 watt charger with 60 Watts max and not a 60
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watt charger. Coming back to the 95 Mac, other fast chargers on the market, like Anker’s 45 watt nano
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charger, will also fast charge the iPhone 17 Pro, just not as rapidly. You’ll gain roughly 50% in 30 minutes, rather than 20 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the plus side, Anker’s charger is two thirds the cost of Apple’s, and it includes a six foot USB-C
⏹️ ▶️ John Love to see advancements in charging tech. I like this. I mean, it’s interesting that Apple only sells one that will do this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine very shortly, you’ll see tons and tons of third party chargers that support this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because like, you know, the way USB power delivery worked before is there’s like certain, in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you read like the tiny little text printed in like, you know, gray on gray text on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most USB-C charging bricks, it’ll give you a list of its power outputs at different voltages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’ll be like, you know, five volts at two amps and then, you know, 9.7 volts, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, and it gives these steps. So my understanding, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what AVS gives you here, these new chargers, is basically a lot more granular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control instead of just those predefined stepped voltages. And so in theory, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good because as it says, like, you know, if the phone can only take, you know, a certain wattage right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now into the batteries, if, you know, suppose if the charger can only output like, you know, 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watts or 20 watts, and it could take 18, well, too bad, 20 is too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. So it’s gonna say, all right, just give me 10 now. it’ll step down to that. And so like you have these little steps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can fill in the differences and you can get more current into it over time. I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgive me if I’m wrong, people who know more about this than I do, I believe that’s how this works and why this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works. It’s more than that, I believe, because I think, again, I’m going, I’m shooting from the hip a little bit here, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that the voltage levels that this supports are down to like 0.1 volts, as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to normal USB PD or previous USB power delivery, which was something like you were saying before,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 10 volts, 20 volts, or 10, 15, 25, you know, something like that. This goes down to like, it goes in increments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like 0.1 volts or something along those lines. Again, the specifics may be a little different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. The only thing I would say though is like, you know, before everyone gets too much FOMO about, you know, your existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chargers with this or all the other chargers on the market so far, with the exception of, I believe, the Google Pixel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent one for the same reason, keep in mind that like, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones have gotten faster charging abilities before and you actually look at like, okay, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the real world benefit of this? It’s not as much as you think most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the battery still does slow down as it gets towards the end. Now this will help it slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down maybe more gradually and have, as we were saying, have those more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granular steps in the meantime, which will charge it faster, but it’s not gonna be like twice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as fast or three times as fast. It’s gonna be, as they say, like in this example of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll go from 30 minutes to 20 minutes. And that’s like probably that’s a best case scenario probably if you’re starting the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone very low, starting at like, you know, 10 or 20%.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just the first half of the battery charge. That’s from, I’m assuming from zero to 50%, which is like the easiest
⏹️ ▶️ John part to charge. And you get 10 minutes savings on there. When you go to the second 50% of the battery, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John probably getting even less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, like if you’re trying to charge it from 50 to 100, that’s gonna be substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slower. And that’s always gonna be the case with lithium ion batteries. But this kind of thing, if you’re frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging in that range, this kind of thing probably won’t make as big of a difference as you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still better, like ideally, you know, this will be great once these are more universal, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily like something to like, oh my God, I have to go throw out all my chargers now and get new ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m really debating if I wanna pick one of these up because in the living room we have, as most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey families I’m sure do, we have like the one USB-C cord that’s connected to a big fat charger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that can charge really, really fast. And that is our like emergency, well, not that we can’t use it other times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in particular like emergency use, oh, we’re about to leave the house, no, my battery’s dying and I didn’t realize it, let’s top up quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I kind of want to get one of these for that use, even though it’s, I agree with everything you just said.
⏹️ ▶️ John only going to be fast on the brand new phones though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, only on the 17s Pro. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Aaron and me. That’s all you care about is just the. Yeah, I don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone else. I mean, I mean, I do, but not as much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This would also, to me, I think this would also be good in a travel context. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like, okay, I just got to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hotel, we’re going to leave for dinner in a half hour, I got to charge up as much as I can like, you know that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing, you know It could be useful for that as well
⏹️ ▶️ John although I have to say like the shape of this one which is very similar to the shape of like the two USB C port
⏹️ ▶️ John one that comes with MacBook Airs if you option it for the $30 option or whatever it is. I don’t like that
⏹️ ▶️ John shape anchors Has better shapes for things that plug into the wall like the Apple one
⏹️ ▶️ John looks so beautiful It’s like a rounded top, but then it’s got sharp edges on the bottom and it’s just not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly space efficient and not the shape that I usually want in terms of how much room does it take up on a
⏹️ ▶️ John power strip, how well does it hold into a wall socket? So I’m not a big fan of Apple’s chargers, But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the slim pickings on the market right now for if you need this specific kind of charger.
Chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, last episode you were speculating about whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the A19 is a Bind A19 Pro, and Anonymous writes, regarding that speculation, I can confirm that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not the case. The two chips are designed separately. They share a lot of IP, but they are two unique variants, each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with their own layout and footprint. This provides energy and cost savings for the non-Pro phones since they don’t have all the features that the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. Still be cool to see the die shots, see exactly how different they are from each other. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to know if any of the cores are different, like probably the efficiency cores are the same, or the power core
⏹️ ▶️ John is different from each other in any way besides amount of cache. Still would love more details on this, but that’s some clarification.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not all the same A19. The A19 and A19 Pro are different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and speaking of the A19 Pro, there are some benchmarks that have come out. Single core,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not gonna read these numbers, but suffice to say single core is about 8% faster than the A18 Pro, multi-core about 13% faster,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and metal 40% faster. Can I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’m being a dummy, but how are we getting like 10% and 15% increments on the CPUs each?
⏹️ ▶️ John And 3P and good architecture changes and the metal score has gotta be like, cause remember this is not like frame rating
⏹️ ▶️ John your games are gonna be 40% faster. It’s just the metal compute score and it’s those embedded neural
⏹️ ▶️ John engines or neural accelerators or whatever. Like that’s where they’re getting the big numbers on the GPUs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause they added like, I don’t know what those things are, but everything they were touting is coming out of the benchmarks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And these are preliminary benchmarks. This is from searching geek bench for iPhone 18 comma one, which
⏹️ ▶️ John believe it or not is the signifier for the 17 pro. Don’t ask.
⏹️ ▶️ John Long sorted history of numbering in the phones. But yeah, these are numbers were just averaged together from
⏹️ ▶️ John all the results that were found as of like yesterday. So maybe the numbers will change a little bit as like the quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote official ones go to the site and people get their phones, but yeah, pretty good. 8% faster and
⏹️ ▶️ John single, 13% faster and multi. And I think the metal one is all the accelerators. So impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and this is probably a good indicator of roughly what to expect from the M5, if I had to guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget, is this the M6 destined core or is this the M5 destined
⏹️ ▶️ John core? I forget if the core is lagged behind, but we’ll probably find out from the scores. Keep in mind that
⏹️ ▶️ John this single core score, while impressive, is not as high as the M4, so I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John lost track of which cores are in which things, but it could be that these are the same cores that are gonna be the M5, but we’ll find out
⏹️ ▶️ John once that iPad is released, hopefully in October. Yeah, should be soon. Oh, and later
⏹️ ▶️ John in this marathon of follow-up, I will take both of you to task for something from the previous episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John So to balance that, to preemptively balance that, I have something for you two.
⏹️ ▶️ John I look at this all the time when the new phones come out. The A19 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to my Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh no. My 2019 Mac Pro. My 2019 Mac Pro with a 12-core Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ John is 63% slower than the A19 Pro in single core. Okay? It’s been slower than
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in the iPhone chip for years, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But 60, just to tell you how that’s going, 63% slower in single core. My Mac Pro is 1.5% slower
⏹️ ▶️ John in multi-core. Oh no! My 12 core Xeon is now
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco than the A19 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John in your iPhone in multi-core.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God. This is incredible. How much power does that Xeon consume? I’m curious.
⏹️ ▶️ John More than the A19 Pro. It’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco two or 300 watt CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now on the upside, my metal score is almost three times as fast
⏹️ ▶️ John and I have eight times as much RAM. So hang in there, Mac Pro. We’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for a worthy successor, but just to keep the world updated, the 2019 Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is now beat in single core and multi-core. Wow. By the phone. Maybe I’ll have to
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrade to a 28-core Xeon so I can beat it in multi-core again. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you brought this to us and that you didn’t put it in the show notes. This is incredible. You know, I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey repeat what Marco just pointed out very casually a moment ago. This A19 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what the maximum wattage it uses is, but I got to imagine it’s a heck of a lot less than that huge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honkin’ Xeon, or Xeon, sorry, whatever it’s called. So this is incredible performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all, performance not only in terms of speed, but in terms of energy performance. I mean, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of Apple’s issues these days, their chip team, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know they’ve had some departures recently, but their chip team, I can’t imagine they’re firing on anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than every cylinder. It’s incredible what they’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I mean, for all the complaints we have about Apple recently, I don’t think any of them are about hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The hardware is amazing. Like their hardware team, like I was thinking earlier today, like I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a coincidence that when people talk about potential successors to Tim Cook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Ternus is often mentioned recently as maybe possibly the next CEO, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s the hardware chief. I don’t think that’s out of the question. And I mean, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a very different job, so who knows what he would be like as a CEO, but if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at where Apple is right now, their software is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little shaky, their design a little shaky, you know, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hardware rock solid awesomeness constantly coming out of the hardware team.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it’s so good across the entire lineup. What other time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Apple history have you been able to point to the hardware lineup and have there be like no duds?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s nothing in the lineup that we could that like if some relative came to us and be like, oh, I just bought so and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so without asking you, we like there’s nothing that we’d be like, oh no, you got the wrong one. Unless they bought a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro. Well, yeah, but that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s unlikely. Which they’re not going to, so it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The hardware lineup is just incredible and it’s, there seems to be no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end in sight to its awesomeness. So like it’s hardware is on a roll, a multi-year, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strong roll and it’s, they really deserve to be commended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Very much so. All right. The N1, that’s N as in Nancy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in every new iPhone. It was only spoken about in the event as part of the Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portion, but it’s in every phone, which I did not realize.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread Radio, and they’re using it everywhere.
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Plateaus & enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about the iPhone’s iconic plateaus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, before we enter the plateau, plateau, Before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco climb up to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the plateau.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did want to call out, I think it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit BSE to talk about phone thickness now. Now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, but it’s it’s like I think the air really shows how ridiculous this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussion has gotten when you’re like the phone is You know five point whatever five point five ish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeters thick. I was like, well a lot of it is But it is a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part at the top that is a lot thicker than that and so can you really say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone is that thick when Only a portion of it is like like when the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was wedge-shaped No one ever said the MacBook Air is 0.2 or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tip of it. No one ever said the MacBook Air is 0.2 inches thick. Like no, it was always like it was explained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s 0.2 at the thinnest point you know and then it was 0.5 or whatever at the thickest you know whatever it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one ever said like the whole thing you know is or the the MacBook Air period is this thick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is it is misleading and not very useful anymore to describe the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thickness of iPhones by their big flat part on the bottom and kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ignore the fact that the camera plateau is there for thickness consideration because it’s so thick now and it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wide it’s like the top 20% of the phone. That’s a lot of space and it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot thicker than the body. So I’m calling BS on any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention of like the iPhone being X millimeters thick or thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without qualifications. Because that I think is no longer truthful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s fine, but your idea of, you’re mentioning the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air gives me an idea. How about making the phone wedge-shaped? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not- So much
⏹️ ▶️ John more room for, if it’s scalloped, bring back the scalloped batteries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, can you imagine the case manufacturers would have a fit? Because like, imagine how much harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is to get the right
⏹️ ▶️ John fit. It would be so slippery, it’d be squirting out of people’s hands, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s probably a terrible idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it like, you know, apparently we can’t get the camera bump. The camera was getting bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John not smaller. We’ve said this for years and years. Every year the camera bump was like, what are they gonna do about the camera bump? Then it was like, actually it’s bigger this year.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s bigger every year because people want the camera. So they spend the thickness on it. And by the way, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the vast majority of the phone is thin. I think it’s fine, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you can’t say the iPhone Air is five millimeters thin. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not. People know what you mean because the vast majority of the phone is that thin. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s like, I had made a slot in my house to fit through and doesn’t fit.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I built it based on
⏹️ ▶️ John your thickness. You told me like, anyway, but like they keep getting thicker. So at a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John point, a wedge shape starts to become, or like, I mean, they kind of did that with the, with the 17 pro by like
⏹️ ▶️ John having the iconic plateau, be even more plateau. It’s like, it’s really big, right? You could just keep making
⏹️ ▶️ John that bigger and bigger and shove all sorts of stuff up in there, which is what this next item is about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So basic Apple guy writes the iPhone air is all battery. The entire brains of the phone is essentially smushed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the camera plateau.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we knew this
⏹️ ▶️ John did more or less but here so a couple shows back I remember saying like we were looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at it all back when we were looking at like the mock-up models that everybody had of all these things and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s gonna be in the in the camera bump essentially and in particular
⏹️ ▶️ John on the air What’s gonna be in the camera because it’s just got the one camera in there Like what’s the, why
⏹️ ▶️ John extend that LOS engine and make it look like a Google Pixel? What’s the point in doing that? And now we know from the presentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John the point of doing that is they put basically all the computer chips up there. That’s what’s in the rest of the LOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is the rest of the phone. And leaving the big long flat body to basically just have the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Taptic Engine in it. And like the ports and some other stuff like that. That is also kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of true of the 17 Pro that they’ve shoved stuff up there. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got the three cameras and then way over on the right, You’ve got like the flash and the LIDAR thing in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s there was speculation about them sneaking some battery up under there and some other things I do want to see the iFixit
⏹️ ▶️ John teardown of these just to see how much Happened because they hollowed out the glass on the
⏹️ ▶️ John on the air to get that in there and then of course on the pro That’s not glass. It’s aluminum. They’ve also hollowed out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to see exactly what they’ve tucked in there But like I said, I think the logic board is horizontal
⏹️ ▶️ John on the pro and then the whole rest of it is battery but how much should they hide in there? So anyway, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing looks like a Google Pixel. I don’t actually know if Google Pixel also puts all their circuit boards up there,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if they don’t, I feel like they’re missing out because it seems like it’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there are, I mean, it’s probably, I mean, obviously there’s considerations of things like, you know, how many cameras you can fit and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how deep they can be, but also like heat, maybe like heat dissipation, I think could be not amazing with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of layout. Like, I think we’re going to find the 17 Pro with the vapor chamber thing, like that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, that’s going to spread the heat across the whole aluminum you know, case and the whole back of the phone, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air is kind of the opposite. Like the Air does not seem to have much of a mechanism to spread the heat.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the brand promise of the name Air is it will thermal throttle because there’s no place
⏹️ ▶️ John for the heat to go. It’s true of the MacBook Air and it’s true of the iPhone Air. Yeah. Like when they benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ John these things, like you’re gonna see, you know, even if we talked about this last time, like do they have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John peak clock speed, but run some long running benchmark on the Air and boy, is it gonna throttle before the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the iPhone 17 Pro. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I owe you and Marco may owe you an apology, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of you, yes. Last episode, I could not believe it when both of you were like, I didn’t know this was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be a unibody. And we talked about it on the previous show. And so someone actually looked up
⏹️ ▶️ John in the transcript that the word we used multiple times. I literally said the word unibody
⏹️ ▶️ John at least twice. And you know what, Casey? You also said the word unibody. So both
⏹️ ▶️ John of you last episode were like, we never talked about this. We didn’t know it was going to be like this. We didn’t know it was going to be a unibody.
⏹️ ▶️ John You did. Well, briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I mean, I listened to the clip. I am not arguing that this is incorrect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I properly processed. I was in Ron Burgundy mode. I don’t think I processed the implications of unibody,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I, so that’s why it was so surprising to
⏹️ ▶️ John It was an extensive discussion and many words were spoken and you like, I put the
⏹️ ▶️ John timestamp link to you saying it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Casey, again, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not arguing it. It’s a 100% the case. I just, I totally blanked on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular word on that, or I guess on that whole damn discussion, which is on me. I’m not saying it’s not my fault, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, yeah, I, I blanked on that. All right. Uh, the millimeter wave antenna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is back or the window I should say is back, uh, on the 14,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I have that right. It was in the spot that the camera control where I guess 14 and 15, it was in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spot that the camera control took on the 16. And so there wasn’t a bespoke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey antenna, or well, there wasn’t a visibly bespoke antenna anywhere on the 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the 17, it’s at the very top of the phone for American phones, and I think only American phones because I don’t think any other country
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets millimeter wave.
⏹️ ▶️ John Interesting place to put it. It’s dead center in the middle. What we mean by window is there’s a break in the middle case,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a lozenge-shaped break. I keep saying lozenge. People will tell me that’s not a lozenge-shaped. A rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Capsule, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Shape at the top of the phone. I believe it’s made of like plastic or glass or something, but it’s something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more radio transparent than aluminum. And that’s where they put the millimeter wave. Do you remember where they put the millimeter wave
⏹️ ▶️ John antenna on the 16 Pro? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the 16, I think it’s just integrated with the like antennas on the rim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something, or maybe it’s behind the glass. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe, I forget. But anyway, apparently that wasn’t as good as it could be. So the window is back
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is dead center on the top of the phone, which is kind of weird looking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey At least it’s in the middle. Yeah, that’s true. And centered, which we’ll get to in a second. Yeah.
Cases & colors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of centering, actually, this is not the centering I was talking about, but the logo placement on Apple’s cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a little wonky at first glance, but I actually think I can defend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but we can talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it makes sense. Like, so one of the rumors we were talking about was like on the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John phones, which have that glass panel on the bottom, the rumor was that the Apple logo would be centered
⏹️ ▶️ John in the glass panel rather than centered on the back of the phone as it had been for ages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the question was, okay, but if you look at the existing clear Apple case with the MagSafe ring,
⏹️ ▶️ John now the ring would cross over the Apple. Like the Apple wouldn’t be in the center of the ring anymore because they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John move the MagSafe ring. The MagSafe ring was kind of where it always was, proportionally speaking, but the Apple logo
⏹️ ▶️ John is lower on the phone. So what are they gonna do? And there’s all these mock-ups of like the ring wouldn’t be a complete ring, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would have an opening on it and like, because you know, you’ve got the ring and then you got the little vertical like notch,
⏹️ ▶️ John the vertical line below the ring. So it’d be like okay the ring and then there’s a break in the ring and then then there’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John notch And the Apple logo would be in that little empty spot where the break in the ring is it never
⏹️ ▶️ John really looked very nice or made any sense So here’s what Apple actually did for their clear
⏹️ ▶️ John case for the 17 Pro They do not have a clear case with a white ring on it
⏹️ ▶️ John They just white out the whole like the whole glass panel area that the place where the glass panel
⏹️ ▶️ John is on the 17 Pro The case has an opaque white thing there and the Apple logo
⏹️ ▶️ John is centered in the opaque white thing. The ring is still What you know where it always is
⏹️ ▶️ John and is quote unquote crossing over the Apple logo But you don’t see that because the whole back is white So that’s what they did there
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the cases for the 17 Pro that aren’t clear like the tech woven thing
⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple logo is centered within the full height of the phone Not centered within the glass panel because when that
⏹️ ▶️ John case is on the phone You can’t even see the glass panel and it’ll be kind of weird not that weird but kind of weird to center
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple logo in a structure that you can’t see on an opaque case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand why people are like what the what, but I actually I agree. I think this makes perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sense. It makes so
⏹️ ▶️ John much more sense than those mock-ups with the ring with the break in it, you know, and setting aside that you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have magnets where there was no ring. This makes so much more sense. Although it does mean that your clear
⏹️ ▶️ John case is not all that clear anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I do think it’s a bit of a misnomer now, because it’s like it’s obviously like most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the actual area of the case is white.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like a clear edge case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and speaking of cases, apparently a lot of case makers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made a bet that didn’t come true. So Tyler Hayes writes, I did a web search for iPhone 17 Pro case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the first four out of six sponsored products showed a black iPhone 17 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I clicked through to several online stores and found the same thing. Let me just remind you, there is no black
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 17 pro. This
⏹️ ▶️ John a article on PC magazine website. And the headline was who wants to tell these case makers? There’s no black iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ John pro. There’s so many pictures of black iPhone 17 pros. Cause they, they
⏹️ ▶️ John just did all their artwork based on the mock-ups and they thought for sure, that’s a safe bet. Why don’t we just
⏹️ ▶️ John do black? We don’t know what the colors are going to be, but the shirt, they’re going to have a black one. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, what are the actual, what are, what is the actual origin or what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your head canon for the origin of blue, white and orange
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the iPhone 17 Pro? Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ John those are the only three colors it comes in is whatever it is that really, really dark blue, which is practically black, but
⏹️ ▶️ John not really. Silver, which just looks like silver, and then cosmic orange. And I saw lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, these three colors remind me of something. In fact, on last episode, I even said the Denver Broncos, and apparently Denver Broncos
⏹️ ▶️ John have changed their logo, but their logo from 1997 to 2023 was a really deep dark
⏹️ ▶️ John blue, white, and then reddish orange. Casey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John came up with the GameCube one here, showing the really deep blue one next to the
⏹️ ▶️ John purple, I think it’s supposed to be the purple GameCube, although the white bounces off on this picture. And then there was a silver
⏹️ ▶️ John GameCube for the silver phone, and then there’s an orange GameCube, sorry, a spice GameCube for the
⏹️ ▶️ John orange phone. I think this is not a good color match because first of all, this image isn’t very accurate, and second,
⏹️ ▶️ John the purple is very different from the dark blue, and I think spice is different than that orange, but okay. It reminded
⏹️ ▶️ John you that, by the way, there was a black game cube too, so it’s not a perfect match. Some people think it reminded them
⏹️ ▶️ John of the flight suit that Luke Skywalker wears in the Star Wars trilogy because he’s got an orange flight
⏹️ ▶️ John suit, right? Which I guess has some dark black that could be like dark blue and there’s gray stuff. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Luke Skywalker, I see that. But as soon as I realized this, I feel like this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual answer. When I saw the logo of Auburn University, which is where
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook went to college in 1982, graduated in 1982, their logo
⏹️ ▶️ John and colors are deep dark blue and orange. And unless you think, who cares, Tim Cook, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John he went there as an undergraduate. You think he’s gonna color phones like his school? I was doing some Googling, I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s a really big Auburn fan, isn’t he? What can I find that will back up the idea that he’s a really big Auburn fan?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I did some Google searches and I came up, I don’t know if this is true, this is some thing from silverwavesmedia.com,
⏹️ ▶️ John it sounds like a rumor, but this is what it says at that website. We’ll link it in the show notes. Cook graduated from
⏹️ ▶️ John Auburn in 1982 and it is rumored that he paid for the whole buyout of former Auburn football
⏹️ ▶️ John coach Gus Malzan. The total buyout was over 21 million. So they’re saying that he, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, paid to get rid of a football coach, paid $21 million of his own money.
⏹️ ▶️ John That seems highly unlikely to me, but who the heck knows? But anyway, what I did find is a strong evidence that he
⏹️ ▶️ John really cares about Auburn football and that these really are the Auburn colors, they do
⏹️ ▶️ John look like a very good match for the iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would be hard-pressed to believe that Tim has anything to do with any of these colors. However, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the University of Virginia does have very similar colors, not the same but similar, I think the Auburn Connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the strongest of the available options that have been presented. And let me tell you, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very big college football fan, it is not at all surprising if he really did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take care of that buyout. In fact, my actual alma mater, Virginia Tech, we just this past week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fired our head football coach because he had not performed at all. And he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has, I think, a $6 million buyout or something like that. So it’s typically on the boosters, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fans to come up with that money because usually the university doesn’t pay that. And I believe at Tech,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this is probably true of other universities, but at Tech, as far as I know, the school pays for little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to maybe even none of the football program. It all comes from fans and people who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey donate to Virginia Tech and so on and so forth. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a real thing. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Cook did indeed pay a $21 million
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buyout because to him that’s like Trump change. He should have paid to stdrew.org.ctp but that’s neither
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the idea of like these ridiculous buyout contracts, like, okay, if we don’t like you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have to pay $21 million to get rid of you? It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John racket. That’s very familiar to CEOs.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s true. That’s very true.
⏹️ ▶️ John In certain jobs, certain rare jobs, CEO, head coach, they pay you to
⏹️ ▶️ John leave. And I totally believe that Tim Cook had nothing to do with the colors in the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John But everybody who works there knows that he likes Auburn.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it could be a way of like, oh, if we show him this, he’s definitely going to approve. And kind of like a wink.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. It’s kind of strange that no one asks questions about this. that they’re probably going to say, but in this
⏹️ ▶️ John weird lineup of colors, no black, really dark blue, silver and orange could be Luke Skywalker
⏹️ ▶️ John could be the Denver Broncos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Could be UVA. Could be Auburn. I mean, also, well, first of all, how much do you think we can get Tim Cook to leave for?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, you know, I hope you want to see how much that buyout is. Yeah, seriously.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s also, you know, orange and blue have been a very popular color combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. So I also like it might just be that they decided these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were cool colors. You know, also keep in mind like the, that particular shade of orange looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far, I have, you know, we don’t have them yet, but it looks so far very similar to the orange on the button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Apple Watch Ultra. You know, they’ve used- Is
⏹️ ▶️ John that called international orange or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe so. And like an orange has been used as an, as like an accent on electronics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple likes for a while by companies like Sony and Braun, like that provide a lot of like their design inspiration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So these are just cool colors. Like, and I think, I think you have the cause and effect backwards. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the reason why these colors are here is because they’re cool. And the reason why all these other places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also use these colors is also because they’re cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, like I said, I’m with you on the orange, but my thing is, why is that blue so dark? And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I see the Auburn logo. I’m like, that’s why the blue is so dark. Because remember the whole thing on the internet, like maybe five years ago, where I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, did you notice that every movie poster uses complementary colors of orange and teal. Yeah. Yeah. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they do that for a reason, right? But, but like this is not what’s in the movie posters. It doesn’t have orange and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John darkest blue you’ve ever seen in your life. It looks like it’s a black. It’s orange and very light blue. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why I was thinking Denver Broncos or Virginia or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it could be, it also could be that like they, they knew they were not going to have a black, like they decided not to have a black and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, okay, well, you’re trying to get to something dark. I mean, you know, you see that again in other Apple products, you see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what they call midnight being used instead of black in the MacBook Air, the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think some earlier, some lower end products, some of the lower end phones and stuff. So you do see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them using dark blue in place of black before. So again, I think these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just cool colors and everyone else is using them for the same reason.
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iPhone Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk iPhone Air. We made passing reference to this a couple of minutes ago. Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spoonhour from Tom’s Guide, Lance Ulanoff from TechRadar, interviews Jaws and Ternes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The first half of the interview is all I had a chance to watch, and I forget which one it is, but we’ll link in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes. It was only about 15 minutes or something like that, and I thought it was really good. I mean, it’s as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with all Apple interviews, very polished, very well trained. You don’t get a whole lot out of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except, uh, I forget exactly what time it is. We’ll put a timestamp link in the, uh, in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. At one point, uh, Jaws is talking about how rugged the iPhones,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but particularly the iPhone Air is, and he has one sitting on like the side table next to him. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually you can see him like computing it in his head. He thinks, and he, he decides, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here we go. And he hurls, he, as the kids would say, he, you know, yeeted the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right across the room to Lance, who didn’t even catch it, and then it fell on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next side table, and it was no worse for wear, and Jaws literally says to them, go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahead and see if you can bend it. And sure enough, these two dudes that are probably roughly our age,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they tried to bend it both ways and couldn’t do it. Apparently, it started to give a little bit, but then would go right back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the shape. This was such an incredible flex, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loved every second of it. It was so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an important calculation. So first, quoting from the interview here, what Ternus said was, it exceeds
⏹️ ▶️ John our internal metrics for bend strength, which Jaws added, which are pretty high. And then, yeah, Jaws
⏹️ ▶️ John made the calculation. He was
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you know, so thin, is it really as rugged or whatever? So he threw it to him, first of all, which is a risk, because it could have broken, because he did not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He didn’t throw it to him on top of my driveway.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just clattered onto the side table, it didn’t fall that low. And then they said, go ahead and try to bend it. Now, here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Part of the calculation on that is like, Are these people gonna, like, Jaws is like, they’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John use all their strength to bend this and break the phone in front of us, right? And I believe, looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ John video, they did not use all their strength to bend it and break it in front of them, which we’ll see when the real YouTubers
⏹️ ▶️ John with stronger forearms get ahold of these things and start cracking them in half, because every phone will break eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they’re made, they’re not, it’s not magic, right? They did put a lot of pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, but I don’t think they used all their strength. And honestly, I wouldn’t have either. Who wants to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John glass thing shatter in your hand? They just have their bare hands on it. And that’s why this is such a genius
⏹️ ▶️ John move. Because Jaws knows that even if they’re capable of breaking it, they’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to break it right here in front of, like, that’s why he gets the big bucks, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was a smart move, and it was a calculated risk, but it worked out for him. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, and it’s titanium. It’s very well glued and screwed together. The
⏹️ ▶️ John new glass is stronger than ever. I don’t have any problem believing that it is much sturdier than for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John the eminently bendable iPhone 6. Is it more bendable than the Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think so. So we’ll find out once people get these and hook them up to scientific equipment and start cracking
⏹️ ▶️ John them in half. But kudos to Jaws for taking a risk and getting away with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My guess is they have done that before. And like internally, like I get, he definitely knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this would pass this test. Like he, you can tell that he has done this before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that interview. Yeah, I agree. Apple does not take risks like that. Believe me, especially, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jaws has been there forever. He’s a pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I like to the part of the risk is that no one is going to really like put
⏹️ ▶️ John their back into it and do it because who wants to have glass shatter in your bare hands? Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s and it is kind of actually hard to get leverage on it. If you’re not accustomed to breaking phones and have like the universe are
⏹️ ▶️ John so they just you can see what they did. They just did whatever no one would do is like just take it and and tried to bend it and they they’re applying force,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not like, let me get my whole fist around it and bend it over the edge of my leg.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Next year, they’ll have a blender on stage. What’s that for? I mean, well…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just wait. Incredible. Sam Henry Gold writes, I’m guessing the iPhone Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name was last minute because there are still a couple of straggler references to iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air on the website in alt text and some regional pages. A Japanese webpage also at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point mentioned an iPhone 17 Plus, so I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe somebody asleep at the wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing this is not just like the name was changed last minute. I’m guessing this was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody in the web team had the wrong name until the last minute. But like the, the name of these products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, they’re like printing boxes and stuff like months, like this kind of stuff, like this, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is decided not at the last minute.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well the thing is the, the decision is not decided at the last minute, but the information
⏹️ ▶️ John is not distributed widely. So once they finally said are we doing 17 error, are we doing error? And they finally said, no, we’re doing just doing plain error.
⏹️ ▶️ John and they started printing the boxes. Three weeks passed, but that information was not passed on to the web team, so they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John writing 17-hour on all their checks. You know? I mean, it happened with, I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ John Lion 10.7, where they were trying to go from Mac space OS space capital
⏹️ ▶️ John letter X to just OS space capital letter X, and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John itself couldn’t decide. So is it Mac OS 10 10.7, or is it OS 10 10.7? And it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John 50-50 through all the material. for the life of that OS
⏹️ ▶️ John that no one could agree whether it was OS X or Mac OS X. They eventually settled on OS X, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John in 10.8 more thoroughly. But yeah, it’s within a big organization,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when the information is not distributed that widely, preliminary decisions have a way of just like having
⏹️ ▶️ John momentum. And even when, you know, like in the Lion case, they never decided what it was
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be. But in this case, when they settled on iPhone Air, not everybody got that memo fast enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right before the announcement, like the show before the announcement,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we knew for sure all the details, but like it was, we all had every detail from the murmur mill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John had asked me in the chat, like what would make me not buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone Air? So I had said in the previous episode, I’m probably gonna buy the iPhone Air. And I said, there’s three things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one, if it doesn’t have always on screen. Number two, if it doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promotion. And it has both of those things, great. But the number three thing I said was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the speakers suck. Because I had seen, like that day, I had seen like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some mock-up from some rumor site, and I saw the bottom of the phone. And I saw these little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it only had a couple of holes at the bottom. I’m like, huh. Speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are hard to fit in a really thin enclosure. If the speakers suck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the phone, that would really be a problem for me in my usage of the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, what did we learn?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this is a video from Max Tech, who did a really good and really fast-paced, you know, here’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 17 things you didn’t realize about the iPhone 17. And one of the first ones is there’s no speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the bottom of the iPhone Air. The only speaker is the earpiece speaker that you would use when you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so a long time ago, you know, originally, like, the only out loud volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker of the iPhone was the big one on the bottom. A long time ago, I forget exactly which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone it was, they basically put a higher powered speaker as the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earpiece speaker, such that it became a second one. And that way when you rotate the phone, they can say, look, we have stereo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound now because it comes from the big one on the bottom. And then also we just crank up the earpiece speaker enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s like a second speaker up top. But the top speaker is not nearly as good as the bottom speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re going from not only from two speakers to one speaker in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco air, But if you were gonna pick one, you picked the worst one. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone Air is going to be a substantial degradation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in both the quality and the total volume output of the built-in speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that for me sealed the deal. Like I was probably gonna get the Pro anyway, but I was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curious. I was going like, oh, maybe I could try the Air at first, see how I like it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without like top-class speaker capabilities, it’s not for me. That’s it, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that because you’re always talking loudly on speakerphone in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public? Yeah, I hold it like a pizza like Merlin likes. No, it’s because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am very frequently listening to podcasts out loud on the speaker. As I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff around the house, I’ll set the phone down on the counter and do some stuff in the kitchen or whatever. I very frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to podcasts out of that speaker.
⏹️ ▶️ John you get some AirPods?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I also had AirPods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have some HomePods that sometimes even work. The reality is I walk around and I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff and I use the speaker a lot. If I’m in the shower, I’ll like prop it up on a shelf nearby, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like there’s, I use the iPhone speaker all the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s a deal breaker for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and those little holes at the bottom of the iPhone Air, those are just for the microphone or microphones.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no speakers down there, but there are the microphones. So yeah, it’s, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the other compromises of this design, not enough room for speakers, you’re down one speaker, your speaker is worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not gonna be great for all those people to talk loudly on speakerphone in public.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the more that we look at the air, like I have tried because I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am curious. I was trying to like earlier today, I was looking through all the trade in prices. I’m like, I wonder if I can trade in a bunch of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old test devices and just get an air as a test device, which I might still do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I think it’s, I think it might be useful, but I’m trying to come up with a reason to get this phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like the more I think about it or the more we learn about it, I’m just like, Oh no, I really shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this phone and I wonder like how other people are going to react to it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far You know the tech press has all been pretty much in agreement that This thing looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and feels pretty cool But it’s not the phone you should buy and I’m training like who is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for I’m having a hard time coming up with people It’s for because they seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have done a great job with like, you know, the physical design of it Like it looks really cool. Everyone says it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great But I have a feeling that effectively no one is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy this phone. Which maybe that’s okay. Like I think honestly I would love to see Apple continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make weird phones that take risks and optimize like really hard for certain things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if it’s gonna have the worst cameras and the worst battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of any phone in their lineup. Those are really huge things to most people. Like most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not the cheapest. Yeah, it’s not. So it’s not cheap. It doesn’t have good battery life. It doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good cameras. It’s not small. So it doesn’t like, you know, fit the small hand people like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their needs. It doesn’t have good thermals. Probably. Uh, it doesn’t have good speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably. What does it like? I have a feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to maybe sell even worse than the plus did. Like, I don’t, I’m trying to think like, who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to buy this. I think it’s going to be something that like everyone does cool videos on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone knows what it looks like and it looks cool. Maybe you’ll occasionally see somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who wants to look flashy, you’ll occasionally see them using it. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. I think we’re gonna see a lot of orange phones this year and I think we’re not gonna see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any airs in the real world. I’m trying to predict, when’s the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to see one in the wild that’s not at an Apple store? I bet it’s gonna be a while because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen a Plus. And granted, it’s a little harder to spot those because their phones are often in cases. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe I’m just not spotting them because cases are covering them up. But like the Air, like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know who is buying it. And we’ll see, maybe I’m totally wrong here, but it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like there’s some really big trade-offs that I don’t know anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who would accept those trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Reports from a day or two ago were that if you were to order an iPhone Air,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d still get September 19th delivery. So take for that what you will. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John also a Ming-Chi Kuo was saying like what he thinks that the Air is not selling well, blah, blah, blah, blah, I have no faith that he
⏹️ ▶️ John has any inside line on how many phones are being sold. But the one thing we can see from the outside is, you know, a few
⏹️ ▶️ John days after the phones are launched, usually you can’t get day of delivery anymore. And apparently as of a day or two ago, you
⏹️ ▶️ John still could get iPhone Air day of delivery. So maybe they just made a lot of them or maybe they’re not selling well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you can’t get it today, but you know, that’s, and again, you’re right, maybe they just didn’t make that many, cause maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did their own forecasting and they nailed it and they said, Oh, actually, we don’t need to make a ton.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I still, again, I still think Apple, regardless of how much this actually ends up selling, I still think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should do stuff like this. They should have models that aren’t like total sales hits,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just serve a certain need. I think that’s great. It goes back to kind of your halo car argument,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, of like, you know, like Apple should do things that push the envelope and push things forward and have specialty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appeal, even if they don’t appeal to most people. Like most people don’t buy supercars, but they exist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re really cool and they serve other purposes of in their existence and in their development and in their research and what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have trickled down technology wise to other models and like, so the iPhone Air, I think there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of reasons to make this phone, but I don’t, I really don’t think it’s going to sell well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the US. Now, it’s possible it’ll do better like, you know, in China, you know, where dynamics are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different, you know, I don’t really understand them that much. I know, you know, the appearance and novelty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking is much more important there. But even then, I think the orange one would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do better, but I don’t know, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t it replace the iPhone 16 plus? Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not a direct one-to-one replacement,
⏹️ ▶️ John but- It replaced like price wise more or less, but not features wise, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And well, I thought the screen is a touch bigger than the 17 and a touch.
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen, the plus was the same size as the max, wasn’t it? But this is in between the max and the pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like feature and capability wise, it is between the base 17
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the pro. Like it does, it is better than the base 17 in certain ways. It has some of the pros features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the trade-offs are so big. I don’t think there’s going to be that many people who are willing to accept those trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mostly agree with you, but to argue for the sake of arguing, I think anyone who treats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their phone as a fashion item now, to be fair, I don’t really know anyone like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I presume the existence of what you were saying earlier, I think that there are presumably people who will say, or who will see this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and say, oh my God. This is incredible. Even though it has not a stellar camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and even though the battery life may be trash You know, I I must have it because it just looks so cool. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Keep in mind the pre-orders are from people like us and you have to wait until this gets in stores where regular people can
⏹️ ▶️ John see It regular people don’t even know the new five phones are out. You know, I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well But even then like I think I like you’re right Casey. I think that is that is certainly like a strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco motivator, but They released this phone in the same year. They made the pros
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look really bold and different, too And so I think what most people want is the orange
⏹️ ▶️ John think a lot of people are going to find the pro colors ugly and even not be able to hide that giant plateau in a case like, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think my daughter would love the air if it wasn’t so big. She’s not a big phone person. She’s, she’s annoyed at the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of her 12. She’s going to be annoyed at the size of her 17 and this is even bigger, but I, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember I was saying like, she doesn’t like ones with lots of cameras in the back. Hey, one camera on the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think she might be turned off by the plateau or whatever, but I’ll actually, I’ll ask her about it. because I think the fashion
⏹️ ▶️ John angle on this is basically like, I bet you’ll see like fashion influencers having this phone because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a status symbol or whatever, but I can’t possibly predict the sales. I thought the Plus phones
⏹️ ▶️ John would do, I didn’t think they’d do great, but I thought they’d do better than they did because we don’t know, obviously only Apple knows how they
⏹️ ▶️ John actually did it, but all the doom and gloom I’ve heard about the Plus phones is like they just could not get rid of these things. So will this do
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than the Pluses or better? I can’t tell right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder too, like, you know, with the Plus, because I also, like you, I thought the Plus was gonna sell very well. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said the same thing about the 15-inch MacBook Air. I wonder if that’s, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never seen one of those in real life either. Like outside of an Apple store. So I wonder if those-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like I said last time, I think Apple is too good at upselling. Yeah. Like they get you in the door with one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John things and they’re just like, well, don’t you want the MacBook Pro? And you’re like, okay, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It used to be that if you wanted the biggest screen, you had to get the high-end line of product. And over the last few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, they introduced the 15-inch MacBook Air, the 13-inch iPad Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the iPhone Plus. And it seems like none of those are really setting the world on fire, even though at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, each one of those, when it was introduced, I said, I think on this show, this is gonna sell tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these things. And they probably thought the same thing, and maybe they had research showing they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would, but I think, John, I think you’re right. Most people who want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cheapest thing are okay with the smallest thing, or even are seeking out the smallest thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then people who are willing to be upsold for a bigger screen are probably also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the time willing to be upsold to the better features also. And so we’re just not seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this market materialize of like, it’s the same thing as the base model, but bigger screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that market seems to not exist that much. Whereas that’s what I think what they’re trying to do with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone Air now is say, okay, it isn’t just the base model, but a bigger screen, or it isn’t just the base model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but thinner. It is between the pro and the base model in capabilities as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, which I think is very smart. If they’re going to have something in here, make it that smart. And the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they, you know, went a different direction with the industrial design, it isn’t just. You know, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model with a few bonuses. No, it’s this cool new, unique thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, if you want this unique industrial design of the super slim, most of the way phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to get this model, like there is no other choice if this is what you want, so they’re, They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making it unique. They’re drawing in unique buyers that will seek that out. That’s great. I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much more promising strategy overall of like make a mid-tier spec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product with a unique design to fill that slot. That’s a great strategy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think they made a few too many trade-offs with this implementation or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this product, and I don’t think it’s gonna sell well because of those trade-offs. But I think the concept of having something in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slot like that is sound. this just might not be that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can wave a magic wand and leave all the specs and the price and everything about the iPhone Air the same, but
⏹️ ▶️ John shave off the camera plateau and make it completely flush. Do you think that changes the attractiveness
⏹️ ▶️ John of this phone? Obviously that’s not possible, but like just imagine. Cause I wonder how much of the, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s gonna sell based on its appearance. And I really do, for me personally, I think that camera plateau makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole phone ugly. And I wonder how many people are gonna have a similar idea. It’s getting back to what you said, Marco. It’s like, oh, it’s thin, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John that thin at that part. It looks ungainly and awkward. I understand that’s what you got to do right now with the tech that’s available.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t make a phone with these capabilities that’s flat on the back, but boy, if it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll probably do it eventually. If we keep doing the show long enough, eventually technology will exist to make a compromised thin
⏹️ ▶️ John phone that doesn’t have a camera plateau, but that year is not now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would do a lot better if the Air was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one with the bold, cool new colors and the pro still had its boring colors that it always had.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, like if they flipped that around, if this was both the new thin design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also had the cool colors, then I think it would be very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very tempting to a lot more people. But now it’s like, oh, you made these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome colors in the model that has the best cameras and the best battery life? Yeah, I’m gonna take that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Awesome color.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back a step, if you’ll permit me a quick story,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were doing all this home renovation, which is mostly done at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as part of that, we were redoing the downstairs floors, as we talked about a few weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. And that meant taking the oven and stove
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out from the little nook that it’s in and moving it out of the way so floors could be put in. during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that process, we discovered the, the people doing it, the contractors discovered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a piece of technology that I was not aware that I was missing that I guess was way under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stove. I have no idea or the oven. I have no idea how it got back there. I don’t recall having lost it, but as we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly, John established many times, my memory is trash. Anyway, what I found was my original four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabyte iPod Nano. And I can tell you this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still boots like the battery is garbage, but I plugged it in. I have one dock connector cable left and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plugged it in. It started right up. It sells a bunch of music on it, which is questionable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even by my standards. I bring all this up because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am holding it in my hand right now. And this thing for today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels impossibly small and thin. And with this was something like 2004, 2005. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care. Which model is it? The four gigabyte, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John gigabyte iPod Nano.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it was the very first iPod Nano. Yeah, the super, the SSD. Is it scratched to hell? And is it? Oh God, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The back is ruined with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco scratches. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first one. This thing in 2025 feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost astonishingly thin and light and small. I’m sure if we were to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again with 2025 tech, it would in reality be so much thinner, so much smaller, etc. But it still feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modern in that regard. In 2004, this was impossible. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could not exist with 2004’s tech, or again, whatever year it may have been.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw this. I don’t remember how I saw this. Maybe it was a TV ad. Maybe it was something else because I didn’t give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a crap about Apple in 2004. I saw this and I said, I must have it. I must
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have this because it was so impossibly thin. It was so impossibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey small. And at the time, I still had a use for an MP3 player. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adored this device and this was my very first Apple product. I Cannot speak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey highly enough about how much I wanted this for the look and feel of it alone. I Agree with everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you two said and I think anyone who treats their phone as much more than a toy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Going to choose a different phone but there are people for whom the air is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Impossibly cool and I must have it and I that’s not me I mean as we spoke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about I ordered a 17 pro and I’m really looking forward to it it’s, they claim it’s going to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of the problems I have with the 16 Pro. Uh, but I, I can absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fathom a situation where I look at the air and say, I don’t care that it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect. Now, admittedly, the iPod Nano was fairly perfect in almost every way, except the smaller capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I don’t care that it’s not perfect. I must have it. And that’s exactly how I felt about this literally 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a lot of value to that. And that’s why I still have not ruled out the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that maybe I will get one to replace on my test devices because their values will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sum up to about its price, actually, so I could do that if I want to. And now that I’m requiring iOS 18,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need a lot fewer test devices. So interestingly enough, over the last couple of days, I’ve been doing a lot of work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my initial overcast release for 26 had a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout problems on when you had a very small screen and a very big font. and a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those people are iPhone mini users. So I took out and charged my trusty iPhone 13
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mini test device, and I’ve been doing a lot of testing on the iPhone 13 mini over the last couple of days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this thing, I have it in my hand right now, it feels incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the hand. Like I miss, you know, I never used the 13 mini, but I did use the 12 mini for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that year. I love this form factor in so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. It feels so good because the mini is about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same weight as the iPhone Air. Like it feels really good in the hand. It’s light. It feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing. And with the mini, it has two cameras. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular speaker on the bottom and top. It really has a lot fewer trade-offs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the Air. And I kind of think like it is possible for them to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller, lighter, probably thinner phone than the main ones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making some of these trade-offs. But when you look at the mini, like the mini didn’t make nearly that many trade-offs. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air makes a lot more of them and I think there are a lot bigger trade-offs that are bigger to more people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t think it’s a category that can’t be filled or that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote nobody wants. But I think if the Air is a sales bomb,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people might assume nobody wants their phones to be thin and light but that’s actually that is probably not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in itself in isolation true I think they just went really extreme with this to make a statement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that that does make it you know more noticeable it makes it more of a bombshell but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Samsung released their super thin phone recently which admittedly is not as thin as this and doesn’t look as cool as this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s still like Samsung released their I think it’s the Galaxy Edge people talked about it for like 30 minutes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was gone no one cares no one bought it you don’t hear about it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that might happen with the iPhone air. Like it’ll last a little longer because they did a better job of it. And it’s Apple, not Samsung,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think they just took too many trade-offs and, and I don’t think it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, we’ll see. I’m really excited to have one of these in hand. I have it on pretty good authority that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be able to check these out during the podcast athon again on Friday on YouTube. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I am, I am really curious to see what I think of it in hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t imagine wanting this over the iPhone 17 Pro because the cameras are that important to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, not even, you know, additionally the thermals, the battery life, et cetera. But there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a lot to be said that’s positive about the AR, even though, again, I’ve said it a couple of times, I don’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disagree with anything you two have said, but I can fathom a way where one would want it. Coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back around to Max Tech from like three hours ago. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco talk about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I was right there with you. The gap between the dynamic island and the top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the screen is larger on the Air than it is on any other dynamic island phone, which is very, very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t recall if it was Max, or maybe this was John, theorizing that this might be due
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the front camera’s need to be inside the camera bump. So maybe that’s why they had to move
⏹️ ▶️ John It has another compromise in the design because I’m pretty sure, yeah, that they do need to like, like the front facing
⏹️ ▶️ John camera needs, you know, it’s the front facing camera is thick. It needs to be somewhere. and where it is it
⏹️ ▶️ John go, it’s gonna go into the bump. But if you look at the back of the iPhone Air, the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John bump is, it’s a concentricity. The camera bump is moved down, like there’s a margin around
⏹️ ▶️ John it, because it would look weird if the camera bump was slammed up against the top of the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it was slammed up against the top of the phone, the dynamic island could be in the same place it is on all the other phones, but they didn’t wanna do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the dynamic island position, how much it interferes with the stuff on your screen, is ever
⏹️ ▶️ John so slightly by a millimeter or two compromised by the need for the back of the phone to look the way it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving along, the USB-C port, this is what I was alluding to earlier, the USB-C port is not vertically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey centered. This is one of those things like the FedEx logo that I really wish I never saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because now I cannot unsee it.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of thin Android phones have this same problem because the problem is the thickness of the OLED screens. Like you can only make
⏹️ ▶️ John the OLED screen so thin and if your total thickness is, you know, the USB-C port isn’t changing thickness.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is what it is. And the screen thickness is as thin as we could possibly make it. and you want the overall thickness to
⏹️ ▶️ John be 5.6 millimeters, guess what? Port can’t be in the middle. And when I saw the Android phones, I was like, oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. Do you think Apple would ever do something like that? Apparently they have no choice with current technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Haven’t they done this once before? Wasn’t there another iPhone where the port was not centered? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember. Was there one with asymmetrical holes on the bottom maybe for the speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John things? Or maybe, I think I know what you’re talking about. I think there might’ve been one of them where like the screw holes were
⏹️ ▶️ John in a line with the port or something like that. But anyway, it’s a little bit more obvious here because
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone itself is so thin. In Apple’s photography, they have so many like reflections of whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the, I don’t know if it’s like 3D renders with like an environment map or something, or if it’s a real phone. But anyway, it’s hard to see,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in person it should be pretty obvious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there is no cinematic mode for video on the air,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is, isn’t that the thing where you can adjust the focal point after the fact?
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to look up, refresh my memory about how it works. That’s what it is. I’m like, but why would they not
⏹️ ▶️ John have that on the air? I found this a TechCrunch article from 2021 about how Apple built the iPhone 13
⏹️ ▶️ John cinematic mode that had some info in there But yeah, it’s not on the air
⏹️ ▶️ John And this apparently includes the front camera Apparently you can do cinematic video on the front camera
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other phones, but not on the air Even though the front camera on the air is the same as on all the
⏹️ ▶️ John other phones so I’m not quite sure why I think it’s not on the back because I think it might use LiDAR
⏹️ ▶️ John and And for this next item here, the Air does not have a LiDAR scanner on the back of it. I know people are broken up about that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m not sure how it gets the depth information to let you change the focal point, but it would make sense to
⏹️ ▶️ John me that a single camera, no LiDAR phone might not be able to do cinematic video with the back camera, but
⏹️ ▶️ John learning that you can do cinematic video from the front camera and that the Air doesn’t have that, even though it has the same camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another weird compromise.
Front camera & USB
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess that’s it, right? Oh no, the new selfie camera also has a 24
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megapixel sensor in all the phones, right? Not just the Air- Question mark. Question mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it have a 24? This was from Max Tech. I don’t know where this information came from. The idea is that,
⏹️ ▶️ John as they showed, it’s a square sensor and they crop it to be either a landscape slice out of the square sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John or a portrait slice out of the square sensor. And the idea is that the sensor itself, if you were to take the
⏹️ ▶️ John full square, like all the pixels, that that’s 24 megapixels, allowing any of the sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John crops to be 18 megapixels. That makes sense to me, but I don’t have confirmation for it. So that’s a question
⏹️ ▶️ John mark. But what this makes me think if it’s true is, I would love to see a full 24 megapixel square picture from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’d be great. And my guess is that you won’t get that from the built-in camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, but that maybe like apps that access the raw camera hardware, like, you know, like Halide and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they’ll be able to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the sensor really is 24 megapixels. Again, I don’t have this confirmed. That’s why I put a question mark on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 non-pro are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limited to USB 2 speeds. Reading from MacRumors, the new iPhone Air and iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limited to USB 2 transfer speeds. USB 3 continues to be a pro only feature. USB 2 supports transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speeds up to 480 megabits per second. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max support transfer speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of up to 10 gigabits per second, which is about 20 times faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna point out that USB 2.0 was introduced in April of the year 2000. Incredible. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is a 25 year old data speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now it just, you might as well just think of that as a charging port and not a data port. And many people
⏹️ ▶️ John are super angry about this. I’m not particularly angry about it because I think most people do treat it as a charging point
⏹️ ▶️ John but at a certain point it starts to become embarrassing. And I think we have passed that point. 25 years after the
⏹️ ▶️ John advent of USB 2.0, The $1,000, you know, if configured with more storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 17 should not transfer data at USB 2.0 speeds through a wired connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do wonder, like, you know, so one of the main differences between USB 2 and 3 is that USB 3 adds more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pins. Like, that’s one of the ways they’re able to get more data transfer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they add more pins to the connector. And that’s also why, like, USB 3 cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are typically a little bit thicker and less flexible than USB 2 cables. And again, that’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why like charging cables tend to usually only support USB 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds. And that’s because they have fewer wires in them, which makes them cheaper and longer and more flexible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more easily. Which is what usually when people are charging their stuff, that’s all they’d care about anyway, is like, give me a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice long flexible cable and make it cheap. But USB 3, more pins,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more wires in the cable. So it’s more complicated and more costly. I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it is about adding that to the phone. Like, is it a matter of like the pins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the port? You know, is that too expensive? Or is it about like the bandwidth on the chip for the USB 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controller? Like, is that a bigger deal? Oh, I’m shocked.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I’d be shocked if it’s the controller. I think the A19 probably has the control. And if it doesn’t have the controller,
⏹️ ▶️ John shame on Apple. Because like, again, most people use it for charging. But like at a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John point, the pro features need to trickle down. And it doesn’t need to be like, oh, it needs to be Thunderbolt 5 speeds
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. There’s a wide gap between USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt 5.
⏹️ ▶️ John Find somewhere in the middle that you can do economically. This, you know, we’ll check in next year. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not really broken up about this, but it is kind of ridiculous. And the reasoning for it, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems like one of those things that Apple doesn’t, it’s kind of like, why didn’t the non-pro phones have promotion for so long? Even
⏹️ ▶️ John though like every phone in the Android world has been over 60 Hertz for ages. sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it just takes Apple a long time. And anyway, I think they’re overdue on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder too, like, I mean, I don’t think anybody would care but me on this one, but like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if USB 3, having all these extra wires makes it so much less adopted in so many ways still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this time later, what if we had like a USB 2.5 standard that- Oh gosh. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what we need, more USB standards. Right, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, what if it only used the same number of wires as USB 2, but just, you know, clocked the data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines faster or something, like, I don’t know enough about the physical side of it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the standards are gonna reach back to like, we need to find a way to jam more data over charging cables.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure that’s an area of interest for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, you know, you can imagine like, you know, USB 2 and USB 3, it’s what, about 20 times difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in speed? What if you could get a USB 2.5 that was like five or 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster and used all the old cables and used the thin, flexible, cheap ones? Like, that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be pretty compelling for a lot of use cases. No one’s gonna do it, but I think it could be cool.
Screens & PWM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about iPhone screens. It seems that every new iPhone screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has the exact same specifications other than size and resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ John Difficult to tell from the presentation because they emphasize certain features on certain things. But if you go to Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very handy apple.com slash iPhone slash compare page and bring up the pro or pro max,
⏹️ ▶️ John the air and the plane 17 and go down the screen specs, everything except the resolution is
⏹️ ▶️ John the same. Contrast ratio, true tone, the how many that’s a max brightness, the peak brightness,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, like, it’s all, the minimum brightness, all the specs are exactly the same, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is pretty rare. So let’s celebrate that they all have really good screens now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is great. It’s like, there’s now like a new minimum Apple screen. Well, I guess the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco E still won’t have it probably, but like all of the mainline iPhones now have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all have promotion. They all are always on, you know, it’s been a while now. They’re all OLED,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, now they’ve just all are the good screen. That’s a great place to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of them is not like, oh, this one gets better peak brightness or it’s better outdoors. They just all have the same specs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Although I’m guessing the overall heat dissipation performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of the Pro line. For how long? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you actually want your screen to stay bright for more than a few seconds outside, you’re probably going to want the Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And the iPhone 17 models include a toggle to disable screen flickering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey due to PWM. Reading from Mac Rumors, the iPhone 17 models include an accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting disable pulse width modulation, or PWM, according to information found in the iOS 26 release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey candidate. There will be a toggle located in the Display and Text Size section of the Accessibility Settings on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 17 labeled Display Pulse Smoothing. Users will be able to turn PWM on or turn it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off. Here’s a description of the setting. Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low brightness display performance under certain conditions. We’ve confirmed that the PWM toggle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is available on the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max. It is also likely available on the iPhone Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from a different page, at 9-5 Mac, pulse width modulation is a tactic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that displays used to produce lower brightness levels. The screen rapidly switches the pixels on and off in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most users can’t discern. For some people, however, PWM might result in a screen flickering effect that can cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eye strain and even severe headaches. You can see the PWM sensitive subreddit, which has 16,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weekly visitors. I
⏹️ ▶️ John got a lot of questions about this when I got my OLED iPad, but they’re like, how can you watch anything on that? Because it’s the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the OLED iPad uses, you know, the whatever, PWM, the like basically just turning the screen on and off real
⏹️ ▶️ John fast instead of like putting the pixels on a lower brightness. They’re like, you know, they’re at a fixed brightness,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they just go on, off, on, off really, really fast. And they’re like, Oh, I can’t stand that. It looks weird to
⏹️ ▶️ John me. It flickers. It gives me headaches. witnessed the subreddit with all these people talking about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John My personal experience has been that I can’t see the flickering and it doesn’t bother me, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John fully willing to believe that other people can see it and it does bother them, especially young people. Because one of the good things
⏹️ ▶️ John about getting older is as your sense is dull, fewer things are annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although young people themselves become annoying as you get older.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m actually kind of surprised that Apple rolled out this feature, because even though some people
⏹️ ▶️ John are clearly sensitive to this, It seemed like, well, Apple’s just gonna ignore them forever, but no, they provided
⏹️ ▶️ John an option for it, which is great. And I don’t know what the downsides of it, maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s an energy trade-off. I think it’s like, you can use lower power if you use PWM, then
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t, and again, maybe like really dim brightnesses that won’t look quite right. But kudos to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John for adding this option. If you’re one of those people who can’t stand that OLED flickering, why doesn’t everybody else see it? Try
⏹️ ▶️ John out this option in accessibility, I guess. I guess we all have iOS 26 on our, well, I do anyway, and I assume you
⏹️ ▶️ John do, the release version. So I should check up that option is actually there because when I put this in the notes, it was from the RC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but it says it’s only on the 17 line of hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s right. It’s not, yeah, I can’t use it. Okay, all right. Well, we’ll find out when you guys get your new phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is interesting too. Like, you know, if you can see PWM flickers, I feel sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you because so many of the things in the modern world use PWM to control
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they complained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about on the subreddit, I’m sure. You know, not only, you know, device screens, but also any dimmable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LED bulb, like almost all, not all of them, but most dimmable LEDs use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PWM to achieve their dimming.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know that. I can see that when you get cruddy quality ones, I can see it and it annoys me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and you know, and if you have any kind of cheap LED lighting that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, especially stuff like Christmas lights or like party lights or a lot of car aftermarket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headlights, if they are super cheap, they will use half wave rectification of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AC supply to get DC power for the light. And what that means, they’ll just shove it through a diode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which means it flickers, I believe that makes it flicker 30 times a second instead of 60.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Which is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that’s why, especially you might not see it in the center of your vision, but you might notice if it’s like at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco periphery of your vision, you might notice a bit of a flickering of cheap LED party and Christmas lights.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it seems like it’s flickering only when you move your head or something. You can start to see a little bit of it there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you get good LED Christmas lights, they’ll be full wave rectified at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they’ll just do some kind of other DC conversion. I don’t know. I don’t know the details of how those work, but you can spend a few extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cents of components and you can get both of the AC waves peaking the signal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And you can double the refresh rate to 60 Hertz or you can have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancier system that actually just lowers the voltage or something. But so much of the world now is this. Now I wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my theory on what Apple’s option here says, disabling PWM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions. My theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe what they mean by that is like, if the display can say, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, you have RGB values, zero through 255 for each of them, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably a higher bit rate panel than that, but we’ll just say that for now. For each pixel, you have these zero to 255 values
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the color channels. Maybe the way they’re achieving this is just compressing those down to the lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range. And so the display still thinks it is performing at its full voltage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and brightness and everything, but it’s just being fed darker pixel values by the OS. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way OLEDs work, they won’t use more power that way. If you just compress those values down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually you’ll get compressed low enough that you’re not really getting a lot of distinction between the colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, or maybe you’ll see banding in gradients you don’t have enough like pixel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precision it you know in those ranges maybe that would be how performance is you know affected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t know this I think this is this is a great option to have we’ll see what the trade-offs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are but this is very good for people who need it.
Apple Watches
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk Apple Watch. The Apple Watch Ultra satellite data features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey require a cell plan, which we talked about last episode. And Jason was in the chat and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the same theory that a friend of the show, Greg Pierce, wrote in about, which is, the most likely reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to require a cell plan for satellite features is that they don’t want those features used any more than absolutely required.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A device without a cell plan might be trying to leverage that network as a primary means for texting, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, makes sense. And also, there are some cell plans that come with satellite stuff. not this is relevant to the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone, but I was surprised to learn that you can buy a cell plan that you pay a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John extra and you get satellite service with it as well. But yeah, they just want to use it as fallback. There’s not enough satellite bandwidth
⏹️ ▶️ John or availability for everybody to be using it if they don’t want to pay for cellular. Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Yeah. There is a post on Reddit, which is very interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that seems to think that the 24-hour battery claim up from 18 is not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any different. So reading from Reddit, the extra six hours that Apple claims is just Apple finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including sleep tracking in the test. But sleep tracking barely sips power and previous Apple watches have already been able to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily surpass their 18 hour claims and go through a night of sleep tracking on top.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the low power mode test, the difference is just two hours with 38 hours versus 36, a measly 5% difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Apple also lowered the active usage assumptions for the new model. Fewer checks, fewer notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less app time, not really an upgrade, just a shift in methodology. I bet this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that makes, that makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me feel kind of gross. Yeah. Like it, this, I wrote down, like there’s the three things I wanted to complain about with Apple’s marketing of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mentioned earlier the, the thinness of iPhones and then having these massive camera plateaus. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the second one. It does like, it seems like this is probably accurate. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t find anything that refutes it. It seems like this is probably right. That like when I said last time, Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big difference with the Series 11 is this extra six hours of battery life from 18 to 24 hours That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds like a big difference. That’s how Apple sold it But it does seem like they just changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way they’re testing it to include six hours of sleep. It looks like actually There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a significant difference in battery life from the Series 10 of the Series 11 Maybe there’s a small one, but there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t that big the way that made it seem and that really the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco primary or only Difference between the series 10 and 11 is changing the cell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radio to be 5g capable I I can’t see anything else that actually was changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the series 11 Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John when they tear these things down we’ll have to see if the capacity of the battery changed at all because if the
⏹️ ▶️ John Battery is a little bit bigger that could account for a real difference even if all the other components are the same because we know The SOC is the
⏹️ ▶️ John same we can assume maybe the screen is the same the 5g radio Maybe that’s a little bit more efficient But like
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah that they have the regular tests and the low power test and in the low power test there was this 5% difference. But then if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at the methodology, it’s like that they have in the test, like, you know, what do we do in our tests?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, well, every X minutes, we do Y activity this number of times. And they reduce the number of things
⏹️ ▶️ John they do during the test. So yeah, I mean, it’s not like you can never change the methodology.
⏹️ ▶️ John Methodology of your tests should change over time. But when they do change the methodology, it’s hard to do an apples to apples
⏹️ ▶️ John comparison. And yeah, the sleep tracking thing by tacking those hours and it seems kind of misleading.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I mean, the thing about this is they’ll, it’s probably not going to be a lot of outcry because anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who gets a new watch, replacing an old watch, the battery on the old watch was probably cruddy. And so, wow, this new watch has
⏹️ ▶️ John such an amazing battery life. Yeah. It’s just got a new battery. If you had bought a new version of your old watch, it would probably have the similar effect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then front of the show, dear friend of the show, David Smith writes, something I found kind of surprising about the ultra three is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the quoted battery life for outdoor workouts and low power and reduced heart rate readings is identical to the ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two at 35 hours. Similarly, in normal use with low power mode enabled, they both get the same 72 hours. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a few more hours in other types, but the most demanding situations where you’re trying to maximize the battery, it isn’t better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where we do get improvements, they are around 17%. And there’s a link to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Watch battery page, which you can see in the shots.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the Ultra 3 is a little bit bigger than the Ultra 2, at least the screen is a little bit bigger. I don’t know if the watch body is
⏹️ ▶️ John any bigger, but again, if the screen is similar in power consumption and the SoC
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same and the battery is the same size, it’s not shocking that it might get basically the same battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life as the predecessor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems like, you know, the more we learn about these new Apple Watch models, the more it seems like, oh, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less different about the battery life than the presentation made it seem. And there’s other, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Ultra has the satellite connectivity. That’s great. Like that’s a nice upgrade for the Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then, and it does have a different screen than its predecessor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. And so like those, and the Series 11 does also have the better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IonX glass on the front, on the aluminum models. So that’s a small upgrade, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stronger glass. Okay, stronger glass on the aluminums and 5G on the cellulars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, like that’s something, but that’s not much. I heard, I forget,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgive me podcast world out there, I forget where I heard it, I think it might have been the Vergecast last week. Somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying on a podcast that like, they should just move the Apple Watch to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a two or three year cycle, the way they do AirPods. And you can even cycle it, have like, you know, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SE one year, have the series the next year, have the ultra the next year, and then, you know, cycle them. I think that was dithering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it was, okay, yeah, thank you. Yeah, and I think that makes a lot of sense because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically kind of doing that anyway. Like the Apple Watch hardly changes at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for three year intervals. They are already using the same SoC for three years now, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of spans now. the SoC lasts three years. Most of the core features last three years. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen generally it comes close or, you know, maybe it’s slightly offset, but basically last three years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I think they’re, they just don’t have that much to show each year for the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe it would be better to make a bigger splash every two or three years with like putting all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates together and having, okay, every two or three years, there’s the new SoC and the bigger, brighter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen and, you know, some other health capability. If you lump those all together, that I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would actually be better than having these watch updates every year that barely touch anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and seem like they’re not really doing anything. Because over time, the Apple Watch does get significantly better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but increasingly, like the updates seem like nothing. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each individual update seems like almost nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would make it more interesting for us to talk about, but I feel like from a sales and consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, it’s better just to bump the number by one each year, even if you change literally nothing about them, because that makes people
⏹️ ▶️ John think that it’s, I’m gonna get the latest and greatest phone and not the one with the same number as I saw two years ago. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I definitely, I mean, when Delegate mentioned it, like it totally, from our perspective, commenting on
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, that would be way better, but I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s better for selling more watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but you know, that’s how they do AirPods and it works great. AirPods are a great business, possibly even bigger than the Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John does it work great? Maybe they’ll start bumping the number of AirPods every single year to get people, oh, it’s just the AirPod 2s again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they had the AirPod 2 in the AirPod 2 revision
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or whatever. The 2C.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if they regret that. I wonder if they think we should have called that one the AirPod 3 and then called this one the 4.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, I don’t know. Like this, presumably they know what sells better. But yeah, from a commentary
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, it would be much better to save up more of these changes.
AirPods Pro 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk AirPods since you just brought it up. The AirPods and ear shapes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a post from Tyriel who writes, a quick note from your resident auditory neuroscientist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Human ear canals wander in every which direction. First time I used an otoscope to look in an eardrum, I was amazed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at how different the human ear canal directions and shapes were, even within a single patient. The typical clinical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equipment will have something between 10 and 16 different disposable tip shapes and sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So more tips for AirPods Pro is a good idea, in my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good talk. I mean, you’re not wrong, but good talk. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the AirPods Pro 3 2X noise cancellation reduction, whatever you want to call it, Stephen Klink
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, Apple’s AirPod product page in footnote one lists the tests that they are using to determine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 2X better noise canceling on the AirPods Pro 3. IEC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 60268-24 is an international test standard for headphones and earphones. For A and C, the test measures how much sound from the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey environment gets reduced once the headphones electronics are turned on in decibels. So while the logarithmic nature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of decibels means human perception doesn’t have an intuitive understanding of the 2X better reduction, it at least isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Bezos stat. All right, the new AirPods Pro case is not actually smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, according to Mac rumors, it is actually bigger, which I did not expect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, a little bit taller and a little bit wider. I guess they put more battery in there. I was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of disappointed that it didn’t get smaller It’s just so huge, but I guess they’re just they’re just weirdly shaped especially with the tips and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything It’s there they take up a lot of Space and they’re awkward and I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John they have bigger bad. I would assume they have bigger batteries than the The four because isn’t the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John in the pros in it like a coin battery inside the fat part Or maybe it’s like that in the fours as well now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I honestly don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, it’s a big honking case and it is not getting smaller apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s too bad Like it does for whatever it’s worth like the the reviews so far of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the air pods pro 3
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody loves them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, they sound like they’re amazing. I can’t wait to get mine same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m so excited
⏹️ ▶️ John They did this so that I had Apple should have done this but probably didn’t you know the view of the ear shape things or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John These are the first ones that actually stay in the Marquez Brownlee’s ears It’s a smart idea to like
⏹️ ▶️ John could we just can we make sure they stay in his ears this time? Because that’s the thing about years are weird, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So every year, like some people like, oh, it doesn’t doesn’t feel good in my ear. It doesn’t stay in my ear.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they change them. And maybe for some people, the old ones were good. And the new ones are bad or vice
⏹️ ▶️ John versa. So you never know what you’re going to get. But Marquez has been on a streak of just not having them stay
⏹️ ▶️ John in his ears when he like jumps up and down. These are the first ones that stay in. That’s not the only reason he likes them. He raves about all the
⏹️ ▶️ John other features of them as well. And we’ll talk about them when you two get yours as well. but that sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they stay in your ear, right? Well, I mean, that’s number one. It doesn’t, like, this is why I was so frustrated when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the original AirPods just didn’t fit in my ears. Like, number one with headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, can you wear them? Like, and it does, if you can’t wear them, if they either don’t stay in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ears or they hurt or they’re not comfortable or whatever, it’s like, if they don’t fit you, it doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how good they are in other ways. Like, you can’t use them. And so, like, that is number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. So yeah, that makes sense. They would want to improve that because that will improve or that will increase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many customers they can get for this product. That’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Their users are impressed by that 2X better noise cancellation, which apparently is not a BS stat, but a real standard
⏹️ ▶️ John test that does measure how much sound from outside gets in. And it apparently is 2X better. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go. I should also note with regard to the AirPods Pro case, allegedly, according to MacRumors, it is a touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lighter, which is interesting. All right, the new generation of ultra wide band technology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they said it is apparently now called the John Siracusa. I’m sorry, the U2 chip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can see that on the AirPods compare page, which we will put a link to in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think I spent at least a year calling this next generation ultra wide band chip or second generation
⏹️ ▶️ John ultra wide band chip. But I guess the lawyers got the clearances and now it’s just the U2 following on the U1
⏹️ ▶️ John chip, which was its predecessor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then live translation. It apparently runs on the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not on the AirPods, which is what you would expect. This is according to MKBHD. You have to download each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language, but it does work offline, which is good. The point
⏹️ ▶️ John is whether we always know is going to run the iPhone. This is like it runs on device. So like when when
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone is doing translation, is the phone doing the translation using like local models on the phone or is it sending out network
⏹️ ▶️ John requests? Now, that’s what he said in the video. He basically said you have to download each language and it works offline.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are both true. But I still had a question. I was like, OK, you download the languages and it works offline. But
⏹️ ▶️ John does it always use local models on your phone? Or if you have a network connection,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it go out to the server? So I was trying to figure out the answer to this question before the show because I
⏹️ ▶️ John have iOS 26 on my phone now. And if I if you go to your AirPods, you will
⏹️ ▶️ John see a thing that says translation and the parentheses beta and that has a languages sub item. When you go
⏹️ ▶️ John into the languages sub item, you’ll see the list of languages. And then there’s some gray on gray text at the bottom that says
⏹️ ▶️ John download languages to translate went offline. You can choose to always translate offline in settings and
⏹️ ▶️ John settings is a link you click the settings link And it takes you to the settings for the translate
⏹️ ▶️ John app Like the just the plain old translate Apple translate app and in the translate app
⏹️ ▶️ John settings There is a setting called on device mode Which is off by default and the text under that
⏹️ ▶️ John one says always translate offline using downloaded languages Offline translation may not be
⏹️ ▶️ John as accurate as online translation Siri and Safari will always process translations online
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can’t figure out if this means that if you don’t have on device mode turned on that it will
⏹️ ▶️ John it always go to The server. I mean, it’s clearly they’re saying that the server side translation is better than on
⏹️ ▶️ John device, which makes sense So, you know, there’s more computing power blah blah blah on the server So
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t tested this yet. I’m gonna try it out. I don’t actually I don’t know. Can I try it out? Yeah, I can’t have the AirPods for support
⏹️ ▶️ John it So I just got someone to speak a foreign language to me and I’ll try it out maybe for the next show But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does have a mode where it works offline But it seems to me based on the sequence of wandering through settings
⏹️ ▶️ John that you will get better quality if you have a network connection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That I did not know and then finally AirPods live translation is blocked for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EU users with EU Apple accounts reading for Mac rumors Apple says on its feature availability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web page that Apple intelligence live translation with AirPods won’t be available If both the user is physically in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey EU and their Apple account region is in the EU Apple doesn’t give a reason for the restriction, but legal and regulatory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pressures seem the most plausible culprits. In particular, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act and the General Data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Protection Regulation, or GDPR, both impose strict requirements for how speech and translation services are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offered. Regulators may want to study how live translation works and how that impacts privacy, consent, data flows,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and user rights. Apple will also want to ensure its system fully complies with these rules before enabling the feature across
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the theory that there’s actually existing ER regulations on translation It’s not a DMA thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a, hey, we can’t put this in the EU because otherwise we’d have to let every third party app be. But
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple didn’t say, we don’t actually know the answer. But bummer for people in the EU that they can’t use this. Although my
⏹️ ▶️ John understanding is that everyone in the EU speaks 20 languages anyway, and they won’t need this app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. That’s an all follow-up episode. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to our sponsors, who sponsored this amazing amount of follow-up. That would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace and Anthropic for Claude. And thank you to our listeners who support us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the perks of membership is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about this cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new product announcement that came out called Alter Ego and Thought-to-Text Translation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a device that reads your thoughts and transforms them into text, allegedly. We’re gonna talk about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Overtime. Thank you for listening, everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
John’s red dot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you have something in the show notes that says John’s red dot. And I’m guessing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this has to do with your long struggle with the new Apple care thing. No, because you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stopped that. You say you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John were done with that. No, it’s different. So.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. What’s going on?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’ve all had this issue at one point or another. It’s when you get
⏹️ ▶️ John a red badge on the settings app on one of your Apple devices. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John all been there. And sometimes that badge is legitimate. Hey, there’s a new OS update.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you need to sign back into your Apple ID for some stupid reason that you’re never gonna be able to figure out. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John But sometimes what happens is you get a red dot on your settings app icon, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John go into settings and there’s nothing there. And the received wisdom from people
⏹️ ▶️ John who have been through this many times over is like, well, sometimes you gotta look for it. Sometimes you don’t realize that you might
⏹️ ▶️ John have to go into your Apple ID and then you’ll see something there, something you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Maybe you have to go into the Apple wallet settings. Maybe there’s something in there. Maybe there’s some marketing thing where they wanted to watch the f1 movie
⏹️ ▶️ John and somewhere buried in settings Even though there’s not gonna be a red badge in settings. You just have to show
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen Somewhere in settings and that will satisfy settings and it’ll make the badge
⏹️ ▶️ John go away But if you’re a programmer what you’re thinking is they just got their state unsynchronized
⏹️ ▶️ John And now this is never gonna go away because something that was supposed to be incremented and decremented just got incremented
⏹️ ▶️ John and then something crashed never decremented and it’s never gonna go away because it’s just like, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John Delta rot, right? And there’s nothing you can do to fix it. And I’ve been through this many times.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure you two have had the red dot many times as well, but I had recently had my worst bout of red dot
⏹️ ▶️ John syndrome on Apple devices that lasted like the last two weeks. It started, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone and I got the red dot and I even posted, I’m asked that and I was like, does anyone have any ideas?
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s all the things I tried. I tried Apple ID, I tried the wallet, I tried settings, I tried accessibility. I tried,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I tried sub items in my Apple ID. Like I tried to list all the things I try. But does anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John have any new place where they can go to try to get rid of the badge or new thing that they can do?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t get any good responses for that. But the thing is it started to spread. So then
⏹️ ▶️ John I started to see it on my Mac. Like what the hell? So I go into Mac settings and again, oh, and software update. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John software update, you always check first. No software updates, no anything. And so now I’m trying to get rid of my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then it spreads to my iPad. Like it’s the red dot is slowly appearing, a number
⏹️ ▶️ John one inside a red badge on the settings app icon on my Mac, on my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John on my iPhone. I was like, well, I mean, worst case scenario, when I do the OS 26
⏹️ ▶️ John updates, it’ll probably fix it. But I didn’t, I was kind of at my wits end because normally when
⏹️ ▶️ John this comes out, I eventually find what screen I have to display to make it go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this time I could not do it. So I wanted to put this segment here. First of all, just to let people know, This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing that happens in Apple devices. Sometimes, not just settings, but sometimes an app will get a badge
⏹️ ▶️ John and there is no way to make it go away. And you don’t know why it’s there. I
⏹️ ▶️ John get asked this question by family members. Why is there a badge on this app icon? Sometimes I can tell them the answer is because you have a software
⏹️ ▶️ John update, but sometimes I have to tell them after extensive exploration,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a bug. No, there’s nothing you can do about it. And they are more bothered by this than I would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John people would think they would be. Because it’s like of all the things that can bother you, I was like, but I don’t want that red badge to be there. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, okay, well, but I would just turn off badges. Can I just turn off badges? I go to the notification setting and say, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t want to see any badges. I’m just turn off badges entirely. Well, guess which app you can’t turn off badges on?
⏹️ ▶️ John You cannot turn off badges and notifications, at least as of iOS 18. I didn’t check 26. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the PSA to say, this is a thing that happens. Again, as a programmer, I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John a million scenarios that would cause this to exist. And as a user, there is sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John literally nothing you can do about it to fix it. Now, the bright side of the story is even before I started
⏹️ ▶️ John out doing the 26 OS updates, first the badge went away on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why did it go away? No idea. I didn’t reboot. I didn’t install a software update. I didn’t discover
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen and settings to make it go away. I just came back to my Mac one day and the badge
⏹️ ▶️ John was gone. And then it went away on iOS. Before I did the OS update, I was like, huh, the badge
⏹️ ▶️ John that has been there for a week and a half, it’s gone now. I have no idea why. It’s still there on my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John as we record the show, but I’m hoping if I just wait it out, it will go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, red dot syndrome. I feel like there should be a dedicated team at Apple to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of spread the discipline throughout the organization to say, if you badge your app icon, there should be some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of sanity check on app launch. Like if someone force quits the app and launches it again
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, hey, let me just sanity check. Do I think there should be any badges on this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Which means they would probably have to use a different system for badging other than just like writing something to their, you know, user defaults
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But yeah, this is a thing. And it usually goes away quickly, but
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes it’s really bad. So watch out, be careful out there. Red dot syndrome could come for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you ever had one that you couldn’t go away? And do either two of you have a secret location
⏹️ ▶️ John that you go to to clear the badge? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. This doesn’t happen to me very often. and usually it just kind of sorts itself after a while or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reboot at worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the thing. Are you able to just say, ah, don’t worry about it, I’ll just ignore it. Like some people,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not able to ignore it, obviously, but Casey sounds like you’d be like, oh, there’s a badge, I can’t make it go away. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure it’ll go away eventually and you just don’t think about it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I always have badges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on my phone. On settings? No, but like, okay, but you know, just for instance, like on my home screen right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, the phone app has a 19 badge. Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has one and messages has five.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John All right. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I go to the next page, I got the nest app that has six. I don’t know what the heck those are probably spam promos from nest or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I there’s just at this point like everything has a badge all the time. Everyone’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it’s a combination of like every app and company is so incredibly desperate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thirsty for every possible amount of everything from you that they’re going to spam the crap out of every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible notification and inbox and thing they have. So that’s number one. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey bullsheep there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number two, I tend to not check things that frequently in certain areas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voicemails and Instagram messages. And other areas like text messages, I sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will use the unread status as a like, I have to get to this later kind of thing, which I know is not what I’m supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do, but everyone does it. Okay. So anyway, that’s why those stick around for a while. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therefore, badges on my stuff are not particularly unusual.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Unusual, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can just turn off the badges like on your phone app unlike the settings app You can just decide not to show badges on the phone app if you
⏹️ ▶️ John can solve that problem there I just looked at my home screen and I have no badges on it So I’m I’m I do not
⏹️ ▶️ John want badges do unless they’re like I want them to be there and tell me like for example messages I want it to be badged when
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a message Like so I do want to see it But I don’t routinely leave
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of unread messages and I know what you’re talking about Like they added the feature a couple of OS’s ago to market as unread which is useful
⏹️ ▶️ John Which I also occasionally do but that’s to get my attention So I don’t forget about that message, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there shouldn’t be a very high number there But the settings thing really annoys me and yes, I did check under warranty as well
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve spent I’ve been spending a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of time in the warranty thing with my Apple care one battle So yeah, I don’t know where the badge
⏹️ ▶️ John came from and I don’t know why I couldn’t defeat it But I’m glad that it is departing me
⏹️ ▶️ John Even be again even before I did the OS update. I haven’t updated my iPad yet It is the last one with a badge on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe you want to do that 26 update I’ll let you know if the badge goes away.