Apple unveils iPhone 16e, new Studio Display rumors, Siri delays

So literally, Mayo, like five minutes after we stopped recording last week, Tim Cook took to Twitter to say that Apple would have a special launch on Wednesday, February 19th to introduce the newest member of the Apple family. Did you think there was ever a chance that that newest member of the Apple family meant anything other than a new iPhone SE slash iPhone 16E? No. People read into that wording too.

forecast that it might be the rumored smart home hub or a smart camera or something in that category, but I never bought into that. I think Apple primed the pump with the Mac event at the end of last year, right? And that was also announced via a tweet from Greg Josriak, where it was mactacular, whatever stupid word he said at the time. And I think on that one, they hashtagged the Apple event, right? Yeah.

and then you had the three days of we had the the mac mini and the imac update and then the maverick pros with m4 um and that was one you know that was one day so it was three products total this time around If you only looked at it from a distance, it kind of looked like the same thing where Tim Cook tweeted, oh, you know, tune in or, you know, we're going to introduce a new member of the family. But I think they were very particular in hashtagging it Apple launch.

which heavily implied to me that this was a smaller scale affair. And I guess you could read into the welcome to the family, i.e. a new product category, like the home hub thing. But... It was pretty obvious to me they meant they can introduce a new iPhone SE. And I think I even said at the time, probably implies...

that they're going to make it part of the iPhone 16 family, i.e. they're going to rebrand it. I had no illusions that this release was going to be about anything else. I'm not sure... If Apple misplayed the run-up to it, maybe they should have been even more explicit and say, we're going to welcome a new iPhone to the family if they wanted to, you know.

set the expectations a bit better because i did see quite a lot of people run away with it and be like they're going to announce the new se they're going to announce the home of they're going to announce the macbook air update you know like all this yeah all this stuff which obviously was never on the cards was never going to happen um i have no problem with them doing

one-off little launches like this for single products it's kind of cool you know it makes it a bit more fun than just doing the press release and the video out of the blue The only thing I would say is, and I think we said this at the Mac event too, just please tell us what time the thing's going to be announced at or do a countdown. If you're going to make it like an Apple launch, tune in next Wednesday.

Just on the day of the event, or the quote-unquote event, you know, launch, whatever you want to call it, just put a countdown, you know, on the website, on the homepage. Look, we're going to announce this in an hour. We're going to announce this in three hours. So you don't have to, like, be ambiently...

because obviously you know we're covering the news so we you know regardless of how apple choose to do it you should be on top of it uh but if you're just like an average customer and you've seen a tim cook tweet

well you can't even tune in because you don't know what time it's out like you just i don't really get that part of the strategy just put some sort of countdown or say tune in at 10 a.m and we're gonna have a new announcement for you even if it's just gonna be a thing and again this time around they have an event video this kind of goes under the radar because they just kind of

you know you can watch the you can click the link on the home page to see it or it's on the youtube channel but i think for these kind of launches whether it's one product or three they should just do the countdown and then play the 10 minute video

stream it as part of the countdown when it reaches zero, and then the website goes back to normal. Apart from that, it's fine. But I just think they could make a slightly bigger deal about it in the actual run-up on the same day. And also, I think even if you put aside all of the... The drama surrounding Twitter slash X. It's very odd that Apple has announced both of these launch events, quote unquote events, solely via a post from an Apple executive on Twitter.

Like if you want to use social media to announce it, that's fine. But maybe also try to use threads or use Instagram or something. Or honestly, just do a press release because putting it on social media exclusively, it's just weird. It goes back to.

not hyping it up as much as it deserves to be hyped up or not giving people who aren't chronically online the awareness that a new Apple launch is happening. I find that weird. And you have the... you know some people have the aversion to twitter slash x these days and so yeah if you just want to make people happy or at least try and satiate them it probably doesn't behoove you to just to put the same teaser on other channels right uh

Apple does have a weird relationship with social media. I mean, they still, on the official Apple Twitter account, they've still never done an actual tweet. They only do sponsored posts, right? And they paused doing sponsored posts for a few years. Now they're back doing it again. If you look at Facebook... properties they obviously don't really like facebook but they use instagram for at least shot on iphone campaigns and some other stuff on even on facebook itself they do like

I don't think they have like an Apple presence, but they have like an Apple TV presence because they put all the trailers on there and all that stuff. So they have a very weird like splintered approach. If you can do an event thing. Just put the same announcement in more than one spot. Because we don't really want to link to the X tweet, you know, when we cover it on the site either. Like if they put...

on the homepage or just on the slash Apple event page account, that's good enough, you know? But only having one source, which is the tweet, is a bit odd. Putting aside that meta commentary. The iPhone 16e. So it joins the iPhone 16 lineup. All of the rumors were pretty much true. An A18 chip on the inside. 48 megapixel camera. 6.1 inch OLED screen.

Action button instead of a mute switch. Face ID. USB-C instead of lightning for charging. Full Apple intelligence support. The rumors ticked all of the boxes on this thing. accept the name. I think there was one leak from an account on Twitter that said it would be called the iPhone 16e. Everybody else expected the iPhone SE 4.

What do you make of the branding? Because I think that's an interesting strategy here. It's clear that Apple is trying to differentiate this more than it would differentiate an iPhone SE. And by saying it's the member of the newest iPhone family, you're not buying a quote-unquote budget iPhone. You're buying an iPhone 16, but it's an iPhone 16 that starts at a lower price point than the rest of the lineup. Yeah. The problem with the...

The name, in my opinion, is a bit irrelevant because this is the new SE in all intents and purposes, I would say. Yes. What would you expect if they'd have released it as Apple Today announced the new iPhone SE? I feel like this would be it, right? They're not going to do a home button phone in 2025. They're not going to do, you know, everything's USB-C. It's only going to have one camera. Like, I don't really know what differentiates it other than a market employee at. Well...

the reality is this phone's more expensive than the previous se so let's try and bind it closer to the iphone 16 family so it looks less out of place in terms of price points right like that's the only real justification i can give for it because Otherwise, it's just called the SE. In other words, it just is the SE in practice. I've never really cared for the SE name. It's kind of odd and out there, although now they have.

the 16e but they still have like the apple watch se so maybe that'll get rebranded too when they do the new you know when they do the rumored like plastic um apple watch maybe that becomes the series 11e or something and they go they start going down that route because se in its own special edition but It was never really a special edition. It was just the old design edition at the lower price point. 16E is a pretty cool name. Are they going to have a 17E?

That's the question is the update cadence of this. Because I don't think that in September we'll get an iPhone 17e alongside the rest of the iPhone 17 lineup. But do we get into a cadence where we're going to get the 17e? This time next year? Or back to having the fall or then a smaller spring iPhone launch? That's not a bad strategy. Or maybe every other year you have an e-version. But not every generation gets an e-version.

Because at least right now, we're definitely not getting an E in the fall. And I kind of feel like we'd kind of already know if we were getting one Spring 26. Do you know what I mean? It would kind of already be in the ether. So... It doesn't seem like there's visibility on that. So they're just going to sell a 16e next year too, I guess, like for the time being. Ultimately, though, if this thing does get an update next February or March or whatever.

The only change will probably be it has an A19 chip instead of an A18 chip inside. True. It's not going to be as dramatic as a refresh as this one was. Yeah, because they'll probably run this design for... three or four years even at least yeah ignoring performance updates um

And then eventually it will get two cameras, you know. That'll be like the next time it actually gets a redesign. And then at that time it can get the island rather than the notch. And that'll probably be about it, right, in terms of visual design changes. The other big change here that I think... is important but apple there were two paths apple could have taken with introducing it so the first ever apple designed 5g modem in an iphone they're calling it the c1 chip and it gets

About two sentences in the press release and about five seconds in the video announcing the iPhone 16e. And the thing that they tout is that it has the best efficiency, the most power efficient modem ever on an iPhone. So the first iPhone not to have a modem from Qualcomm or the brief Intel period, an Apple-designed modem that they've been working on for years and years at this point.

The rumor is it's starting with the iPhone 16e, then it'll come to the iPhone 17 Air this fall, and then a more powerful version, hopefully next year in the iPhone, all of the iPhone 18 phones. The biggest drawback, I guess, with this so far, based on what we know, is that it doesn't do millimeter wave 5G, which is not a huge deal for most people. I don't think Apple really cares about millimeter wave 5G. I mean, they took it out of the new iPad Pro and didn't even address it.

I mean, even before the recent changes, it's only been exclusive to US feature, right? Like, only the US iPhones have limited wave at all. The devil with this C1 chip is going to be in real-world performance, and I'm sure there's going to be tests of... An iPhone 16 with a Qualcomm modem side by side with an iPhone 16E with a C1 modem. Oh, I can't wait. That's what we're waiting for. We want to see the performance profile. Yeah. Did you expect Apple to mention this at all?

in the press release because that was one of the theories I think they had to I think they had to because if it's a if it becomes a bit of a scandal in terms of it's not as good everyone be like they hid it they tried to bury it you know they didn't mention that they had this other modem in it or whatever so i think they had to mention it and they're trying to they're trying to um include it in the efficiency you know longest battery life in an iphone

meta commentary that they're going for because it has if you look at the rated Apple's rated numbers which don't perfectly align to real world right but at least you can compare across models with Apple's tests it does have the longest quoted battery life in any 6.1-inch phone that they've released. Slight. It's only a couple of hours or whatever compared to some of them, but it is more.

My only issue is whether it's is how much more efficient is the chip versus just has it got a bigger battery inside because they also mentioned during the event video that they redesigned the internals to fit a bigger battery in there We don't quite know the capacity like the mah number million powers just yet um the thing with the modem project it was obviously made to be more efficient and to be better and you wait for the c1 c2 c3

It will become on par with the Qualcomm modems and hiring phones and eventually surpass it. At least that's the goal, right? But also, a driving factor, a big motivation, is cost-cutting. Because the Qualcomm modems invoke huge royalties. I think it's like $7 per phone, which is, once you get rid of the screen and the chassis and the chip, it's probably one of the most expensive components that they have to pay for.

And Apple hates Qualcomm. They tried to abandon them for Intel in the last about seven years ago now. And that was a failure.

And so they're trying the second best effort, which is, well, Intel sucks, so we'll just do it ourselves. And so they tried to make a modem and it's taken a while and it was meant to come out a couple of years ago. And, you know, modems are hard and Qualcomm has a lot of... advantage and everyone i think generally agrees that will come off for the best and but they were so pricey and if you can knock a few dollars off in royalties and every iphone sold

you're easily clocking up billions of dollars a year in savings, which ultimately helps profit margins, right? With the C1, I imagine it maybe is a little bit more efficient, but it's not really like... that substantial it'd be my and again this is based purely off the press release right i'm just thinking this is the first effort obviously they have power efficiency goals in mind but it's not like they weren't going to release this modem

until they hit the power efficiency goal that they're really going for. They just wanted to get this chip out of the door as soon as they can because they want to start saving money. And they can use the less important phone, the 16E, as the test bed, just in case there's any drama.

before they do it to all phones next year and so they've got a year and a year and change to do firmware updates and baseband software changes and tweaks or whatever if stuff does really go awry but otherwise this is just the start of the roadmap and then i would expect

more meaningful like performance slash efficiency gains to be seen with like the c2 and the c3 you know the future generations which is exactly how they've done for all of their other silicon i mean the the a series line started with the a4 not a1 just because that's how it began but the a4 was like basically an off the off the shelf arm chip with very little changes and then by the a7 they were doing completely custom design they were like the first company ever to do 64-bit right

So that's how they always go with this. And this is a starting point. And if the best I would hope for is to just match what the old Qualcomm chip could perform, excluding millimeter wave, right? So if in all the other areas... uh that it gets the same signal it doesn't drop calls it gives people fast enough data that'll be a success um in terms of saving money i'm not even sure that

they actually get to reap those rewards right now because, do you remember they keep having to renew that deal with Qualcomm and they keep every few years they're like, and we've signed another six-year deal with royalty agreements and patent licensing and everything.

the goal eventually is that they don't want to sign another one of those deals or if they do right they only have to sell it they have to sign one that's less extensive i.e instead of paying seven dollars a phone they have to pay two dollars a phone or something because there's always standard essential patents that you're going to have to rely on to make a modem

it's all the patterns above that that apple's hoping to sidestep by doing their own and at some point when that deal when the overarching deal expires which i think now is like starting in 2026 um qualcomm will inevitably like try and reverse engineer the apple modems and try and find places where they do infringe on pattern still and then there'll probably be a legal argument and try and force apple to pay more like that will come down the line

But right now, this is just making sure that Apple's chip can actually be good enough so that by the end of next year, it can be in all their phones. I think you're right. There's going to be further litigation about this. Just because for Qualcomm, losing Apple as a customer is going to be huge, right? It's going to be... It's a billion dollar fight. It's either way, exactly. I expect to in the next week or so.

we'll probably see like interviews with Johnny Surugi and other, maybe John Ternus talking about the C1 chip. Like I think to think that they were never going to tout this or talk about it was a naive take. And I think they're actually going to. do a full-court press about it. They're going to talk about how great it is, talk about how it's a big accomplishment, sets the stage for the future, most efficient modem ever. I think we're going to hear a lot more about this.

probably to get under Qualcomm's skin a bit. So that'll be interesting to watch. Yeah, if I was the Apple PR team, I might just wait a fortnight and just, you know, the phone comes out and there's no drama. Okay, right now we can do the full press call on how good we are at making modems. Yeah. Modems are hard, right? Oh, yeah. It doesn't matter how much testing you do. You won't be able to test a modem.

impractical circumstances for the billions of phones that get sold right around every corner of the world there's gonna be weird pockets and weird and weirdness they can test it all across california but

testing it around the world is a whole different challenge and yes they have all testing and they'll do it but there's nothing quite like doing it for real and putting customers hands right so there may be the best outcome is that this is like a almost like a silent rollout right where people don't notice

Hopefully that's what happens. But you go back to the days when like the iPhone 7 when half of the iPhone 7 sold had Qualcomm modems and half had Intel modems and people noticed and the Intel modem was strictly worse. So we'll see what happens this time around. So full Apple intelligence support, like I mentioned. And one interesting tidbit here is that because the iPhone 16e does not have a camera control, you can access visual intelligence via the action button. So you can choose in Apple's.

selected list of options for the action button. There's a new option for visual intelligence and you can access it via a new toggle for control center. This made a lot of iPhone 15 Pro owners very mad. Because they have support for Apple intelligence, but they do not have the option to add visual intelligence to control center or the action button. Apple says this will change in a future software update.

I think people with an iPhone 15 Pro are going to be kind of disappointed when they actually get visual intelligence support just because it is one of what I think is the most lackluster feature of Apple intelligence right now. But it is clever to see Apple add it to the iPhone 16e and the iPhone 15 Pro with software. Yeah, visual intelligence does what Apple said it would do. It's just, that's just not very useful.

You can take pictures of stuff and it'll tell you about it. You can ask questions about it. You can hold it up to a poster and it'll take the dates off the event, right? And put it in your calendar. And that's basically all they advertise and it does what it's advertised to do. It's just you never really want to bother to do it. Oh, here's this tree. I'll just...

Google the tree or, you know. What type of tree is this? Here's a concert poster. I'll just type into my calendar. Okay, I'll just add it manually. If you want to make visual intelligence kind of features more relevant, you have to make it...

more ambient right where you don't have to like enter this mode and then hold it up and then take a picture and then wait you need it more like where you just the phone just is always looking about in the world and then it can like pop up on the lock screen or something you need to make it more in your face or direct Because, yeah, it is on the current iPhone 16s, but you don't really have a...

much reason to go and do it i don't think and that won't change uh it is nice that they're putting it as a control center action button activation rather than forcing it to be um camera control because let's say you even are a big

avid vision intelligence user on the iphone 16 i think you could might prefer just to open it by a control center anyway even though the camera controls there like the camera control is best when it's kept simple right so just let the camera control be a camera shutter and nothing else and if you want to do vision intelligence go and find it in

control center so we should talk about some of the limitations of the iphone 16e the one that everybody's talking about and the one that the omission that makes pretty much no sense to me is no mag safe I understand the need to cut costs and to get this phone to a lower price point, but omitting MagSafe, the feature that has been on the iPhone since the iPhone 12 in 2020,

The feature that has spurred a huge ecosystem of very good and very wide-ranging accessories. Car mounts, wallets, charging solutions. There are so many MagSafe certified, MagSafe approved, or just... random accessories that have built-in magnets now, and those are great for the iPhone. But here you have a brand new iPhone that's part of the iPhone 16 family being introduced in the year of 2025 without MagSafe.

That makes zero sense. If it's because of a cost-cutting measure by Apple, then that's a very poor decision to make. And I can't imagine it's going to be worth it from just a... financial versus PR versus reviews versus customer satisfaction perspective. I don't know what it is, but I really struggle to believe that it's a cost cutting measure. Right. It makes me think that it's something to do with the internal design of this phone.

I've seen a lot of conspiracy theories that it's because of the C1 modem, like some sort of interference there. I don't know if I buy that theory necessarily, but it makes you think that it's something more than just we can save $1.50 if we don't put MagSafe on this phone. I promise you, the amount of cost that Apple pays per magnet...

is way less than $1.50. It's so infinitesimal on the price of that thing. The aluminium will cost way more than the tiny ring of magnets they have to put in it to make MagSafe work.

It has to be something to do with the internal design that just doesn't allow them to fit it in there. It has to be that. There's no way they sat there and were like, you know how we can make people... pay more or we can do market segmentation let's not put the magnets in like that just makes no sense at all because if you did have magnets and you could then

upsell people to more expensive accessories you know like so and even if it wasn't going to support the faster charging speeds of MagSafe you know right it was just the normal wireless charging but also it just magnetically attaches to stands and clips and everything i would even get that but the fact it has no magnets in it at all is just so odd it's like i mean if it is c1 related that's kind of worrying because then that feels like you could get world interference from

There's loads of sources of magnetism in the world, you know? So even if it's not directly in the phone, you put your phone near something, you're going to lose signal. Like, surely that can't be it. But the thing that maybe I thought is that, you know, they've got this new internal design to maximize the battery capacity. Maybe that just uses too much space and the magnets can't fit in there. That was the best theory I could come up with right now.

perhaps when we get a tear down the 16-8 might become slightly clearer maybe i don't know but that's the thing that the magnets aren't even that big in there like they're pretty small so yeah that definitely sucks a huge limitation i was thinking and obviously i'm not in the market

for an iPhone 16e. I'm not the target customer for an iPhone 16e. But I was thinking about all of the limitations and compromises that the iPhone 16e makes. The one I would notice on the most on a day-to-day basis is probably the lack of MagSafe. Promotion? Maybe ProMotion. Yeah, definitely ProMotion. I mean, it depends whether you count that as a compromise because obviously you're not comparing it to the ProPhones anyway, right? Exactly.

Because I'm looking on my desk, my charger is MagSafe. On my nightstand, MagSafe. In the car, a MagSafe mount. I use the MagSafe wallet. It's like MagSafe is this full, robust ecosystem now. And to have it missing on a modern iPhone is very disappointing.

Yeah, and this comes back to the position of it. Because the iPhone SE didn't have MagSafe, obviously. But I think a lot of people that are going to be buying the $599 iPhone 16e have got like... an iphone 12 maybe an iphone 12 mini do you know what i mean like and all those all that ever since the iphone 12 every phone had magsafe in it and so this will be like a straight regression which

it's not great because like you say people might have already bought the bedside table stand the charging stand thing and then they're going to get the new phone and try and latch it on. That's the kind of omission that I don't think people even think about. They just get really annoyed when they buy the phone and they bring it home and they try and charge it vertically and it falls straight off. It's like, oh, well, that sucks.

AirPods 4 don't have MagSafe either, right? Correct, yeah. That was the closest corollary I could think of, but that was explained by the fact the case is literally too small to fit the wireless ring and magnets in it, right? like the case is literally smaller than the radius of the MagSafe magnet array so that one you're like okay I get it you know the case is smaller it doesn't fit this the case is perfectly big enough at least it seems perfectly big enough

So yeah, I don't understand this at all. Another limitation that doesn't make a whole lot of sense is you get the older generation of photographic styles. So not the new version. That launched with the iPhone 16 where you can go in and you can change the photographic style after the fact. This is just the plain OG photographic styles feature. I don't understand this limitation either.

I can't think of a reason why a phone with the A18 chip inside with the same 48 megapixel main camera as the iPhone 16, why it can't use the newest generation photographic styles. The only thing I could think of is there's some difference in like the image pipeline. Signal processor. Yeah. Because you also miss out on the latest and greatest optical image stabilization.

on the 16e so the sensor shift optical image stabilization maybe that has something to do with it but yeah because the new photographic styles feature on the iphone 16 is very good it's probably one of the best camera upgrades this year Well, and here's the kicker. You don't need an iPhone 16 to edit photographic styles.

Oh, that's true, yeah. Like, you sent me a photographic style picture from your iPhone 16. I can open it on my iPhone 14 and edit the photographic style on it. I just can't take a picture with it. I forgot about that. But yeah, like, it's literally... The three-year-old phone can edit it. You can change it. You can change the styles. You can do it on the Mac. You can do it everywhere. But it's just not available on the 16e. That is very odd.

that's odd too because that's a cool feature and they talk about having this you know the 40 and i think the 40 megapixel fusion camera is not the same as the ones in the 16s it's close but it's not identical it's slightly worse um but it doesn't seem like that would be connected to the photographic styles thing specifically no sensor shift optimization makes sense because that's a clearly more expensive component than standard ois and it's just like hardware that goes around it but

I kind of figured photographing styles is like you just collect more data when you take the photo and then the rest of it's just a software pipeline. So yeah, I don't really understand that. You said it's the same A18 chip. Technically, it's not. It is missing. One GPU core, yeah. Yeah, boohoo. But you don't need GPU cores for photographic style editing, as proven by the iPhone 14 Pro being able to do it.

Other compromises. No ultra-wideband chip. This is one that I see a lot of people missing when they talk about the iPhone 16e. And it means you miss out on precision finding with AirTags and... AirPods Pro. And iPhone to iPhone. And the Find My app. Kind of sucks when we're on the verge of a new version of AirTags with an even better second generation ultra-wideband chip inside.

But what you also have to consider without having UWB, one of the new features coming to the home app is support for ultra-wideband locks. Apple's car key feature that is not super prevalent, but it is getting more prevalent. Lots of car makers are using UWB for that, including Tesla now uses UWB for their phone key locks. That's a weird limitation that I don't think a lot of people will notice right off the bat, but when they go, oh, hey, my car.

now supports car key with uwb oh but i use an iphone 16e i can't do that that's going to be a limitation that people gradually face i think as uwb becomes more prevalent in Air tags, cars, doors, all that kind of stuff. Is the UWB thing C1 related? Maybe. That's a good point. Maybe like the ultra wideband uses the same radios or antenna system or something. Like, I wish I knew.

for sure on that but that kind of feels at least in the same ballpark you know it's like yeah yeah it's in that it's in that world of connectivity yeah um so be interesting if the iphone 17 air likes UWB as well because that would be a deal breaker for me. That's a big problemo. Other things, no thread radio.

don't know who really cares about that i mean it is it is another you can't do anything with it don't worry it is another like future proofing thing like maybe next year is the year of thread and iphone 16e users won't be able to partake You only get Wi-Fi 6, not 6E or 7. Not a big deal for most people. Yeah, people made it. I saw quite a few threads. People made it. I only got Wi-Fi 6.

All the Macs Apple released have Wi-Fi 6 too, but all the latest M4 Macs will have Wi-Fi 6E. It's only like the pro phones, right, that have Wi-Fi 7. And the pro iPads, I think, yeah. Yeah, so that's like... Just like par for the course. You can buy the Mac Mini, you can buy the MacBook Pro and it's only got Wi-Fi 6E2. So the Wi-Fi 7 is not ubiquitous by any means. Are there any other...

big limitations that you can think of because it really boils down to what phone you're comparing it to. And that, I think, brings up the biggest question about where this phone fits in Apple's lineup because the one thing we haven't talked about yet is the price. iPhone 16E starts at $599 for 128 gigabytes of storage. The iPhone SE 3 started at $429 for 64 gigabytes of storage.

Then the 128 gigabyte version was $479. So you have $170 price increase from the base model or $120 price increase from the comparable storage tier. Apple, I think... got screwed a little bit by all of the rumors pointing to this as the quote-unquote iPhone SE4 because that is such a big price increase. I don't know if... The feature set that you get with the iPhone 16 E versus what you can get with the iPhone 16, which is $200 more. How exactly that balance is out. If you zoom out and squint.

You can kind of argue that you're just paying $200 extra to get one extra camera lens. Yes. So on that evaluation... that's pretty good yeah yeah it's 200 cheaper uh and you know your own like the biggest thing that's gone is just the extra camera lens right and so on that basis it's like that's not terrible. You know, $200 off, I guess people might go for that. But you do look at that bottom end and think, now the baseline iPhone price has gone from $429 to $599. Yep. That stings.

If you would have asked me a year ago if I thought Apple would ever consider raising the base model iPhone price to $599, I would have thought you were crazy. I was thinking it was going to go up. I thought $4.99. $4.99, maybe even $5.50. I was kind of thinking, oh, I hope it's $4.99, but it might be like $5.50 or whatever. And then it's $599. Because my thinking has always been that the point of the iPhone SE is to get people...

into the iPhone ecosystem or get people who are already in the iPhone ecosystem to stay in the iPhone ecosystem. Because in Apple's mind, once somebody's in the iPhone ecosystem, that lock-in is so strong, maybe you get somebody to buy. the iPhone SE. Then next year, they're like, oh, I'll get an Apple Watch to pair with this iPhone. Then I'll subscribe to Apple Music. I'll get a pair of AirPods. I'll upgrade to Apple One. Oh, I'm out of my five gigabytes of iCloud storage. Gotta buy that.

Oh, my iPhone's a bit old now. I'm going to buy the more expensive version that's got two camera lenses. It's just to remove that lowest tier and raise the barrier of entry that much is bizarre. Because you can look at... The $170 price increase and say, okay, you're getting a lot more for that price. But $179 is a lot of money to a lot of people. And then you say, okay.

You can upgrade to the iPhone 16. I see a lot of people saying, quote unquote, only $200. $200 is a lot of money, especially when you look at some of perhaps the few benefits that you get with that update. I don't know. As good as this phone I think is, I think the iPhone 16e has a great package of features. It has a couple notable omissions, like MagSafe. I think it's a great phone, but realistically, I go back to wondering who exactly it's for.

But can you argue that for the SE? But it was so old that why would you want to buy it anyway? Yeah, I mean, like the one. So the iPhone SE with a home button was what? 2020 was the iPhone SE 2. And then they revised it in 2022. Still had a home button. The argument you can make for the iPhone SEO is for people who didn't want a phone without a home button.

Right. There's a big crowd of people, older iPhone users who wanted the home button. They didn't want to swipe. You had Donald Trump who posted on Twitter to Tim. The home button is far better than the swipe. Like there's clearly people who did not like the transition away from the home button. But this one feels different. I don't know. I've had a lot of trouble like collating my thoughts on the iPhone 16e.

I think it is only just hitting a price point. It's just not quite as low a price point as it used to hit. So you go in the store, or you go in the carrier store more likely, and it's like, what's your budget? Well, it's $20 a month. Okay, well... $700 phone i.e. the iphone 16 is out of that price range but because it's $200 cheaper we can give you a 16e for $20 a month you know like that's ultimately what it comes down to is they're just they're just breaching a wider market uh by

being $200 cheaper at base and I'm sure this phone will get like carry discounts in the channel and they'll like push it and in emerging markets they can give it more of a you know more of a discount or whatever but officially it's just like

There's plenty of people that come into the store and they don't have as much money, enough money to get an iPhone 16, but they might be more happy by getting the iPhone 16e rather than an iPhone 14 or whatever, which had been the other option for the same price.

So that's that's only what it is like it doesn't make you know, it's hard to like well, this is a because sometimes I think people have like this oh this is a perfect master plan have you got this here you got this here it's all precisely arranged and aligned and you've got the perfect price points the perfect brackets and the perfect feature distribution across the line this time around i don't really feel like that's there but it's just apple's gone

We have so much market power. We've done the research. We don't need a $429 phone to cannibalize sales. Most people are just going to be able to get a $599 one instead.

and some people are going to be left behind maybe some more people buy iPhone 14s than used to buy SEs or something but overall we keep seeing at the high end people love iphones and the pro phones are becoming ever more popular right the more expensive apple keeps making the phones more expensive because people keep buying them and i guess that's the same impact you're just seeing at the lower end of the line where it's like we couldn't market people

the phone that looked really old for 429 but most of those people if you give them a phone that has a full screen design it has face id and it looks and it's called the iphone 16 hey you know oh they'll pay 599 for that which is really

$20 a month because that's how most phones are sold. It goes back to Tim Cook's favorite comment to make on an iPhone or on Apple earnings calls where he thinks Apple hasn't hit the ceiling of what people are willing to pay to have a new iPhone, but just taking that same strategy and applying it to the lower end. Yeah, it's now like budget plus. Yeah, budget plus. The current iPhone lineup now, the 14, 14 plus and SE have been...

Discontinued, mostly, Apple says the 14 will remain available through its channel partners, so carriers, select retailers, maybe Best Buy or wherever. So again, that raises the floor of the iPhone line up to $599. Same price as what you could get an iPhone 14 for a couple days ago. Available for pre-order tomorrow, February 21st. First orders arrive February 28th and Apple stores February 28th.

Two thrilling colors, black and white. Very disappointing on the colors front. They had a chance to make this phone very fun. Lots of different colors, sort of like the iPhone 5C, but they opted to go black and white instead. Some cases that you can get in various different colors. Anything else on the iPhone 16 email? Any closing thoughts? Anything we forgot to mention? I'll say the event video, if you do go and watch it.

Pretty cool. You know what those bento boxes do where they put all the features out in a grid? They've 3D-ified it. So there's humans sitting on the edges of the box. It's a physical thing. Obviously, it's CGI, but it looks really cool. Very cool, yeah. Yeah. And I guess for me...

the 16e kind of irrelevant right because we're never going to buy that model yeah but i am very curious to follow the apple c1 launch you know because whether you like it or not the c2 is going to be coming to the phones that we buy next year so And if you get in the iPhone 17 Air this fall, then you might be in the C1 bucket sooner than we think anyway. That's a good point, though. It's like we're not the target market for the 16e.

I would think that a lot of people listening to this show and a lot of people who read 9to5Mac are not the target market for the 16e. A lot of people who are fired up on Twitter about feature X, Y, and Z missing, they're not the target market for the iPhone 16e. This is going to be one where it's interesting to see the big picture roll out to the broader public to see what they think of it, to see how they adapt to the price increase, see whether they notice the lack of MagSafe and other things.

I just think we need to think outside of our Apple bubble on this one, and that's hard for us to do. This is 100% target of the people that, until this week, would be going to the camera stores and buying iPhone 15s, right? Yep. Now it's where you can get an iPhone 16e that's nicer. It's more modern. It supports Apple intelligence. There you go. Because of the way they've done the naming of it, right? I think it draws comparisons like the Google Pixel.

8a or whatever it's called you know what you know what i mean like they have they're more budget version and their budget phone is actually what i would call budget price because it's more in the 499 price point or 399 price point and it's looked way more modern the iphone se for a long time uh this least gives apple a modern looking phone at the lower end of the lineup but they're keeping their price premium clearly so that is iphone 16e

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Their campaign runs until April 12th, so don't miss your chance to get in early and take advantage of the limited pre-order prices. Shipping begins in August. Thanks again to ChargeASAP for sponsoring the show. A new wave of rumors about Apple's plans for a new version of the 5K Studio Display. Let's go! Maybe. I'm always skeptical. Come on, this has got to be it.

They do display revisions every few years, you know? Except for the few years where they act like the market just didn't exist at all. Yeah, but they didn't have one. They were like, we're done. They're at least in the market. You're not going to get Apple display refreshes every year or even every other year. But if you even look back to the Thunderbolt display days...

It was kind of every four to five years they did a revision of significance. And so this kind of lines up with that. This started with display analyst Ross Young, who said Apple is working on a new standalone 27-inch monitor with a 5K resolution. and mini LED backlighting, so the current studio display is LED backlit. It's pretty much the same panel that's been used in the iMac since the 27-inch Retina iMac was released, as far as I can remember.

an update to mini LED, much warranted, long overdue. Then in his power on newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman corroborated this and said Apple is testing prototypes of a display that should arrive by 2026. He says it'll be a successor to the current studio display rather than the Pro Display XDR and have a design that's similar to the 2022 model. So essentially it just sounds like a studio display with mini LED.

The one thing these rumors don't mention is refresh rate. So obviously what everybody wants is a standalone external Apple screen with ProMotion. So 120 hertz. That's not being rumored right now. There was the rumor, I think in November, where the rumor said Apple was developing a 90 hertz display that could be used in the iPad Air, Studio Display, and iMac. That could be a compromise for this studio display and get around some of the bandwidth requirements of 5K at 120Hz. But hopefully...

For our sake, where there's smoke, there's fire. And this actually happens either by the end of this year or sometime in 2026. Yeah, they can do 5K 120 on the newest HDMI ports, which they've started including on their latest laptops, right? So they've been planting the seeds.

And with Thunderbolt 5, you can obviously use adapters or whatever. So if you want to connect your Mac mini to it, you can go through that. Or the MacBook Pros just have a HDMI port that supports the faster bandwidth requirements. Apple hasn't released a mini LED. product that is not 120 true yes that's what i'm backing yeah that's fair now i am admittedly a bit blinded here by my hopes and dreams but give me a studio display with 120 hertz and i'll buy it so

I don't really... The mini LED part is nice. If it was LCD at 120, I'd probably still... You know what I mean? That's the more important thing. Just give me the refresh rate.

If it's a better mini-lily, because the mini-lily panel on the MacBook Pros is really nice, but it isn't perfect. It has like the vignette in it, the edges. It has the weird like pixel response problem where if you have like something that's really, if you have like a sea of black and then you immediately change to white, like the black will like...

fade out over like a third of a second so the refresh rate although it can go up to 120 you kind of see ghosting artifacts depending on what content's on the screen so it's not a perfect panel um If you're looking at it in static content, you know, like if you're just looking at like text on white background, I feel like you can see the more inky blacks in mini-LED compared to the LCD that came before it. But it's not as good as OLED, obviously.

But the big thing is it just feels silky smooth to scroll around on because it can ramp up to the high refresh rate. 90 hertz too. Does feel a lot better than 60, to be fair. But... I feel like they can just go the whole way. The thing I'm thinking is this is the update, right? They got one shot and then you've got to wait another four years. Yep, exactly. It's like for the...

If the next update is not going to be until the next decade, i.e. 2030, just give it 120, you know. 5K is fine. Give it 120 hertz. It'll make me happy. I would like it if they give it the slightly better camera. I mean, obviously they've given... The new iMacs have that improved center stage camera, right? So I guess they could give it that version. Ideally, they just give it a better camera in general. I think if they were being really nice, they could put two cameras in it.

They could have a two-lens studio display thing. One's an ultra-wide, one's just a normal camera that's higher resolution. Don't expect that to happen, but that would be really nice if they cared about it.

periphery stuff like oh is it going to act as a standalone airplay display this time around because it'll have a new series chip in it I really don't care about any of that just give me 5k high refresh rate I'll buy it ideally the price doesn't change but even if the price went up I'd still buy it because the studio display is kind of the best choice and if the camera is better that's a bonus so I'm on the hype train I'm ready to buy it as we'll talk about probably next week more

I'm rearranging my desk, so I'm all ready for a display upgrade. What are you using now? Like a Dell or something? Oh, yeah. The Dell is super old. You deserve a new studio display. It's a Dell 2560, so it's not even 4K. 2560. It's 2560 by 4.40, so it's half of a 5K display, basically. It's like the One X. And when the studio display came out in 2022...

It was $1,600. In 2022, that was expensive. But when you looked at options on the market, there basically weren't any 5K. 27 inch displays optimized for the mac you had the lg ultra fine but i tend to act like that product doesn't exist Nowadays, you do have kind of this new wave of 5K, 27-inch displays coming out. You have one from Asus. You have one from Samsung, the Viewfinity, whatever it's called, Viewfinity S9, I want to say.

And those aren't great displays. And the build quality doesn't match to what you get with the studio display. But you can get a Samsung Viewfinity S9. 5k 27 inch with some of those smart features built in for $800 on Amazon. 60 hertz. 60 hertz. Yes. Yeah. That's the thing. I've been spoiled by the high refresh rate. Yeah.

I don't want to buy another monitor that hasn't got a high refresh rate. So if Apple wasn't going to give me one, I'd be buying like a... I guess I wouldn't even buy another... I don't think there's a 5K 120 screen option out there. No, I don't think so. No. So Apple can give it to me on a plate and I'll pay you on my wallet out for it. Because if that wasn't on the horizon, I'd have probably bought like a...

You know the PC monitors, which are like 27-inch 4K, 144 hertz that you can find and stuff like that? Some of the BenQ displays, those are decent. Yeah, like that kind of range or something. That's probably what I was going down.

if the 2022 studio display was 120 I'd have bought it at the time and yeah it's expensive but it's got 120 that's my main that's my main care 5k 120 and if the bells can be symmetrical that's a really big bonus which they are on the studio display yeah obviously it's now been four almost four years since it came out and there are cheaper options in the market which is fantastic for people that want that because really if you're doing serious work on a mac and you're going to a 27 inch size 5k is

There's a big difference between 4K and 5K. There are a lot of people who buy the 4K 27-inch displays, but they hurt your eyeballs. At least they hurt my eyeballs. So give me 5K resolution, about 27 inches with a high refresh rate, and you're ticking my boxes, you know? As a Pro Display XDR user, this presents a predicament for me. Would I go from the Pro Display XDR to a version of the studio display that's five inches smaller but has mini LED with 120 hertz?

I would. That's a tempting upgrade. If you're worried about screen real estate, you would just end up with two of them. I don't like two monitor lifestyle. That's one thing that I've never been able to get on board with. I prefer one single. big monitor, but you give me promotion and I do miss how the, I do miss having speakers and a camera built into my display. The Spurtus Blake's there has neither of those. Your webcam is broken.

My webcam broke, so I'm now using continuity camera with a spare iPhone, which works pretty well, honestly. But it is kind of an eyesore to permanently have this pink iPhone 15 mounted above my per display XDR. I would probably make the jump. Especially because, and we'll see how this holds up over in the lead up to this product actually being announced, but especially because the Pro Display XDR has held its resale value incredibly well.

Like I can go on eBay and sell this thing for, I would take a loss, but not as big of a loss as I would expect based on a display that was first introduced in 2019. Depending on what Apple prices the new studio display at, I could probably upgrade. quote-unquote upgrade from the XDR to that new studio display and make a little money in the process, which is a pretty tempting opportunity to get 120 hertz or even 90 hertz. It is always just...

Sucks that we have these incredible MacBook Pros with mini LED with ProMotion. Then we connect them to these displays and don't get to take full advantage of that display quality. Because I use my MacBook Pro in clamshell mode. Like it sits way off to the side on my desk. I primarily use it connected to my Pro display. So I don't benefit from that beautiful screen as often as I should considering I paid for it.

macbook pro with such a good screen yeah um i use mine like screen open right because i have right above it um so i get to look at the nice mini ad screen all the time uh one thing i would like although I don't hold up with bated breath that I'll get it, is two inputs on the Studio's Play. Oh, yeah. There's only one, and I do have a gaming PC, right? So I'd have to figure that problem out if...

The next one only had one port as well. I'm not asking for, just give me two ports, you know, so I can have two inputs and switch between them. But Apple isn't inclined to do that. Two inputs, mini LED, ProMotion, less than. What, $3,000 and you're on board with it? Yeah. Ross Young says end of this year or early next year. Mark Gurman says sometime next year. My money would be on later than sooner for that.

Hopefully next year. Mark says it's going to be a companion to the M5 MacBook Pros. Huh. And we're expecting M5 MacBook Pros this fall, correct? Yeah, but maybe you can like...

weasel out that by saying if they come in the spring, they're still a companion to the MacBook Pro or something. I guess he means within the M5 MacBook Pro lifetime, right? So... before late like either end of this year or like spring to mid next year i guess is kind of the window um but that'd be cool if it comes out by the end of the year that'd be nice

In less exciting news, Mark also reports that Apple is once again exploring the idea of adding search advertising to Apple Maps. He talked about this a couple of years ago at this point. Yeah, a while back now. And it never actually happened. But now he says that Apple is once again considering it as a way to monetize Apple Maps. But the engineering work on actually implementing the feature hasn't even started. So it's clearly something that's just in.

Big picture, brainstorming, strategization right now. To me, I can put up with ads in the App Store, in App Store search. I can put up with ads in. Where? Apple News, that's fine. Ads in Apple Maps? I really don't want that to happen. I feel like ads in apps like Google Maps, Yelp, all of the things that mess with the search results when you're just trying to find...

someplace to eat, a hotel to stay at. Those just get in the way. I would really hope that they don't do this or that you can at least say, hey, I'm an Apple One subscriber. Don't show me ads in Apple Maps. Because these are the worst types of ads. Yeah, exactly. Maybe I've mellowed, but I don't think sponsored slots in Apple Maps is that offensive. Oh, I disagree. I disagree.

I hate ads and those types of apps so much. Obviously, it is nice if it's ad-free, right? I'm not going to make some argument about that. Apple Maps does cost Apple... a fair amount of money for what is currently a completely free service, right? They have the cars running all the time. It's labor intensive. They keep improving it. It's like an ongoing basis. So I can definitely see the...

You know, the executives in the company doing the Excel spreadsheets, they're like, this app here is a core iPhone experience, but also it costs us a lot of money. I don't care, though. It's Maps. Such a core feature. If you're Apple, you can see why they might want to reclaim some of the investment on it. Because I think a lot of it was going towards an Apple car, and then they gave out making the car. So some of that infrastructure is less relevant to them now.

Also, they just want to make more money, right? They're a company, right? And it doesn't matter what product you're talking about. They want to make more money. And out of all the places where they could put ads in the system... Putting one sponsored result when you do a search in the Maps app. Will it just be one? Well, that's what I'm imagining because it's like the app store, right? Yeah. Where you do a search and there's one ad spot at the top and then you have the rest of the results.

I don't think it's that bad. It's not terrible. I'm not going to welcome it with open arms, but I'm not going to stop using Apple Maps because there's one ad in it because all their competitors have more ads or at least have the same amount of advertising, right? It's like in Waze on...

CarPlay, and I'm sure in the iPhone app too, you come to a stop and it pops up and it's like, hey, you want to take this exit and get some KFC or some Taco Bell? Right, that is too far. That's awful. I was imagining Apple Maps search ads, if you see what I mean.

Yeah. No, that makes sense. I just don't like it. I think when you're searching for something in Apple Maps, nine times out of ten, you're in like a time-sensitive situation. Like you're somewhere and you need to find how to get to place X, Y, and Z.

You're in a new environment. You're looking for someplace to get food. You're looking for parking. To have to filter through an ad or even two or three ads, it's just something that I cannot get on board with. And I understand that Apple Maps is expensive to run. all of the data collection, in my opinion, it's off limits for advertising. The premium experience of Apple Maps is something that I think sets it apart from everything else on the market. And for them to degrade that, it just doesn't.

I'm sure it's going to be lucrative from them. I'm sure it's going to pad their services business or wherever they account for it. But I just, I kind of draw the line. Obviously you don't want it, right? No one wants it.

I don't think it's that much of a stretch. I've been kind of surprised it's been this long and I haven't done it, if you see what I mean. He's only saying they're thinking about it in the ideation phase. They haven't started working on it. It means it's still going to be years off, at least until next year, if not.

beyond that but it'd be different if if it was like oh they're going to put ads like you say like the thing where you finish your journey then it kind of pops up a recommendation at the end that's kind of too far but yeah if you're just doing search ads and there's like one promoted banner at the top

which is like how the app store does it, right? I don't think it's egregious. I prefer if it wasn't there, but I'm not going to be like, wow, this is offensive. There's plenty of other apps on the phone where if they started putting advertising in there, I'd be more mad.

Yeah, that's fair. So if you're going to choose any location on the iPhone where Apple wants to extract more revenue, if there's a tasteful spot in the iPhone to put an ad, I feel like Maps might be the next go-to location for it. That's my opinion. So you open, I opened Yelp and I just searched for lunch and I see three sponsored results at the top. No, one.

four sponsored results at the top. Scroll all the way down and you get to all results, which is the results actually sorted by whatever hybrid combination of distance to you and reviews. So if Apple does one, it's better than Yelp. I just don't think they should do any. And if you look at the App Store, didn't it start with search ads? And then they added it to the main Today View tab. True. Then they added it to the app listings for individual apps. Now you scroll down.

I would say that the ads on the listings of other developers is way more offensive than putting in Apple Maps. Right. So... Because at least Apple Maps is their own app. They've got the freedom to ruin their own application. I think it's kind of awful that they've forced ads onto other people's pages. you're a developer your one spot to do to present yourself to the world is that one page in the app store and now you're forced to have advertising the bottom of it

that you don't collect any revenue from either. I feel like you can apply that same argument to Apple Maps to a degree, though. You search for a restaurant, you find this nice, local, independently-owned restaurant, and then at the top, you're going to see an ad for, or even at the bottom, you're going to see an ad for like...

Cheesecake Factory or something like that crosses the line, too. But I mean, we'll see. Like you said, it's still early. They could opt to do just search ads, not ads on individual listings. I just am not a fan of this. I mean, they have these, like if you go on Apple Maps, you scroll down the main page, they have like those guides, right? Yeah. Maybe they start doing sponsored guides. Oh boy. Now you're talking. Yeah. Wonderful.

That is the problem when you start doing ads and you're like, we're going to do ads in search. Then two years go by and they're like, we can make this number go higher. We also put ads on the front page. So it's a slippery slope, right? You see Apple sensibility. You do. I think App Store research has been pretty good for them, at least in terms of making money, right? I don't get the feeling that people are like so offended by it that they're like not buying the iPhone anymore.

So if you put those two things together, the executive team are like, maybe we should try putting ads in a different spot on the phone. So, and if it's going to put it anywhere, my opinion, Apple Maps isn't a bad location for it. But if you, I think... If you go back to when Apple Maps was Google Maps, but not like the system app, right? When it was before iOS 5 and before, it had sponsored results in it.

Oh, did it? I guess it did, yeah. So you did searches and it sometimes puts sponsored results in the results at the top. And I presume that was just whatever Google, you know, the Google ad inventory had sold. Yeah.

So it was like, but that was like the Apple native app, but it had Google sponsored results in it for sure. I remember seeing them. It wasn't like every search or like all the time. It was, you know, certain places they obviously sold ads and it would have like a sponsored thing that would pop up. But I guess everything's coming full circle. And now you know what time it is, Mayo, for you to read us an ad. Finally this week, Happy Hour is sponsored by Shopify.

Check them out at shopify.com slash happy hour. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. It's the home of the number one checkout system in the world. Now Chance, let's talk about the time when you used Shopify. We sold wallpapers through 9to5Mac, right? Indeed, we've used Shopify at 95 Mac to do that, and it really did make it incredibly easy to set things up and get going.

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you know coded the checkout system all by hand and even though i knew i had to do it it was so much work and hassle that on reflection really wasn't worthwhile whereas what i love about shopify is that it's so simple and it has everything you need in one place so if you hit the jackpot and you get big you aren't stranded waiting for a dev team to then build out all the functionality you need shopify just has it there waiting for you

So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we used with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash happy hour, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash happy hour now to upgrade your selling today. That's Shopify. dot com slash happy hour Mark Gurman at Bloomberg also reports that Apple is running into some roadblocks shipping the upgraded version of Siri that we all expected as part of iOS 18.4.

He said Apple is now considering delaying or limiting at least some of this Siri overhaul until iOS 18.5, which is slated to be released as early as May. So this is things like personal context. on-screen awareness and in-app actions. The feature that Mark specifically references in the story is the one where the Apple presenter used Siri to quickly locate her mom's flight and lunch reservation plans just by searching.

across that person's email and text message history. So that's the personal context aspect of the overhauled Siri. And that is one of the features at risk of being delayed. He also says another option on the table is including the features. in iOS 18.4 in April, but having them turned off by default, then if everything goes according to plan, Apple could enable them automatically in iOS 18.5. This does not come as a surprise to me at all.

I think part of what's telling is that we still don't have iOS 18.4 beta one. I think everybody expected it this week. And Mark said Apple pulled it at the last minute due to quote unquote engineering challenges. That's not a good sign. This report. for mark is not a good sign feeling very pessimistic about this big siri overhaul right now well one of your yearly predictions at the start at the you know the first episode of the year was

one of the flagship Apple intelligence features will be delayed. That's looking like a pretty safe bet. Free money on that one. Well, if it comes out in the iOS 18 timeframe, Apple's still holding up its end of the bargain, right? That is true. The April date. is not a figment of imagination but it's it's conjured by mark right he's the one's been saying it's meant for april 18.4 if you take this story

If you dilute the story a little bit, it's kind of like saying, well, it's actually coming in 18.5. Is it that sensational? No, that's not the end of the world. I mean... So if it comes down 8.5 and everything's fine, then I guess it's okay, right? Yeah. But obviously, it puts seeds of doubt in your brain. Right. Is it going to work at all? Is it going to be a big watered down?

version of the features yeah the personal context thing is also what apple showed in that in one of their very first ads they did for apple intelligence remember when they did those like three ads with um bella ramsey yeah like when the iPhone 16 first came out, like September time. They had the movie memories, they had writing tools, and they did personal context theory.

which I thought was wild because that feature was not even on the horizon. Like when they were showing that off, 18.1 was in beta and everyone was like on the verge of 18.2 being in beta, right? And here we are in February and... we don't even know what's going to happen also if you look on the iphone 16e marking page they have they have a section on app and tenants right and they have the personal context example about the flight

you know find our flight and it comes up with the flight information it doesn't even have an asterisk on it like coming later or you know like it's just written on the pages if you could do it today which kind of inflamed me because I was like that's just not true I don't really care about like I'm more happy with stuff coming out like Apple showing stuff off that's coming later.

as long as they just couch it and it's actually coming later when they try and pass it off as like look at all these features like they try and sell you the phone based on these features and the features aren't even like dated let alone released that's when i get mad and so i was really upset about the better rams yet but the personal context thing because it was it just felt like too far off and on the iphone 16 page it literally like

i'm sure somewhere if you scroll to the very bottom of the page there might be a coming later but like there's no asterisk or little number on on the actual section of it so it just writes it there as if you can do it right now which is just not the case and that feature

Even if it's released in its best possible form, it's never going to be foolproof because it's an AI feature, right? Like, you know, ChatGPT is not perfect and it's like the best AI there is. This would be the exact same case where maybe nine times out of ten...

even if it works as well as Apple ever hoped it would, you know, nine times out of 10, it'll find your flight. The one out of 10 time, it's not going to find your flight because it'll just misunderstand you. It won't find the right date or try and throw through a million messages. And it turns out, well, you've had...

iCloud in messages turned off or you only had it set for one year so the messages are too old or it only goes back two months like there's so many asterisks and fears and worries and edge cases about this kind of thing because what they're essentially promising is here's a text box or you know here's a

open-ended field where you can dictate into or you can type and basically you can ask about anything you've ever spoken about on your phone and it will find out the information for it like that's basically what the promise of personal context feature is right

they've given it no boundaries or no like things they've shown it with a finding flight information they've shown it with finding books that someone's recommended across an email and a message thread separately with their mom like three months ago so they've almost set themselves up for some degree of

disappointment because people are just letting their minds run wild the imagination goes is unbounded uh because the feature is essentially unbounded in how it's presented but obviously we all know the reality is there's going to be constraints limitations on the system um i hope that it comes out i don't believe they would show something that they had no faith in ever releasing uh but i i'm skeptical that it will be anywhere near as good as they also promise it will be you know um

Like, I think it's going to be like a lot of Siri features where you kind of have to learn the lingo and you kind of have to know what kind of things is actually okay answering you about and what kind of things it will not have a clue. So maybe it's really good at finding your flight that you've mentioned an email, but not... very good at anything else but there'll still be a so ignoring the and then so you have all the upfront disappointment of the marketing and the you know the disappointment

But at least it then means you're getting features that you never got before, right? If it turns out that it gets delayed indefinitely, then that's really bad. But Mark's story kind of implies that, well, they've hit some teething issues. maybe they wanted it to come up to 18.4, but now it's coming to 18.5. If that's what happens, you know, what's the difference? One month, you know, 18.4 will be April and 18.5 will be May. So...

it's not quite as bad as maybe you could put it in the headline, if you know what I mean, if that's actually what happens. The idea about it shipping 8.4, but off by default, if you squint, that's what they did with Apple Intelligence 8.1. Yeah, you don't even got to squint. That's exactly what they did. Yeah, so maybe it's exactly the same rollout. Yeah. And then a month later, they're happy with it and they just turn it on by default. The in-app actions stuff, I think...

has a very clear route to shipping. The issue there is you just need all the apps to support all the actions. Right. Which will be a very long, a very long tail of slow progress. It's not even going to be in every Apple app at launch. let alone third-party app support. The on-screen awareness thing is similar, but it also is basically just like OCRing your screen and it can see what's going on. So I think that one's more...

I think in-app actions and on-screen awareness are, you can basically kind of imagine how they'd be coded, right? The personal context thing is like just blowing the world wide open and like, every...

bit of data that's at least on your email and your messages conversations will be somehow ingested into a Siri engine and be able to be regurged out to you in a nice format and layout like it's not just that they're promising that it'll be able to go and find your flight it like presents it with like the flight information and the weather

it's delayed or not and all this stuff around it so it's a pretty high bar um of feature that not even like that what you'd call cutting edge ais have really pulled off so it's a pretty extreme thing for them to even promise and I hope I hope they can deliver at least somewhat but there's no way they meet people's expectations because they've just let the expectations go sky high

If there's one feature of personal context that has to work at this point, it is that exact flight example because they've used it everywhere. And that's going to be the first thing people try. The question of it getting it right nine times out of ten. That depends on what happens that time that it fails. Does it tell you, hey, I couldn't find any flight information about this person? Or does it just hallucinate and give you the exactly wrong?

information about that flight. Whether it tells you an old flight, whether it just makes up a flight, the usefulness of that feature kind of hinges on that. Because if it just tells you it can't find the information,

That's fine. You go find it yourself. But if it tells you the complete wrong information and you show up at the wrong time at the airport or at the wrong airport, nobody's ever going to trust that feature again, even if it got it right nine times. Yeah, and you worry about stuff like... If you text me, you know, the flight's on Tuesday at 10 p.m. and the flight number is this, it'll find it. But if you talk as anyone normally does an actual conversation, you know...

I'm visiting blah, and then you just paste the flight number in. Will it be able to figure that out, for instance? That's all these questions that are tenuous. It is ultimately, too, the risk of Apple showing things off so early and setting expectations so high.

There is, I assume anyway, there was clear thinking behind the examples that they showed at WWDC last year that they've shown on the website, that they've shown in press releases. So everybody knows like that's where Apple has set the bar. And for them to miss that bar, regardless of how good the actual features they ship first are, all of the headlines, all of the stories are going to be Apple didn't hit that bar that they set a year ago with these features.

It's a risk of this new strategy where they announce things as part of the .0 update at WWDC and then don't ship them for... Especially things that are so open-ended, I think. Like, they could have previewed everything else. If they just didn't include the personal contact stuff in the original announcement and then April comes around and they're like, surprise, Siri also does this. It may have been received in a different way, but now there's so much hype in the run-up to it that...

They're almost just setting themselves up for disappointment at the end of the day. Because the other feature, by the way, that's far less intelligent in all metrics that still hasn't shipped is the priority notifications thing on the lock screen. Yep. And... all that is really is a different section on the lock screen with a nice rainbow effect around it but I expect they will ship that at some point but there's just far less focus on it because it's not as like

futuristic right as the because the the personal context thing is the closest they've got to this is like an ambient assistant that can help you out right um so there you go what we're talking about siri i got one random thing i'll just bring up now Okay. So you know if you've got a HomePod and you ask it to turn on the light, it will turn on the light in the room that the HomePod's set to, right? Yes. You don't have to say, turn on the living room light to the living room HomePod.

More recently, or it's happened for a while and it just annoyed me in the last week or so particularly. I will say, turn on the light. Obviously, you're saying the wake word before it, right? The phone or the watch intercepts the command. but the phone or the watch don't know what room i'm in yep i've seen this too yep so instead of the light turning on it's like which room living room hall entrance bedroom you know and then everywhere so then you have to wait like another five seconds

Then you have to say, live in Rue. And then it carries on. I don't know how they can fix it, but they should fix it. Like, if you're doing a... contextual room query but you haven't said what the room is maybe the phone does never intercept it or maybe it just reverts back to the home pod answering the question

Or maybe it knows that the HomePod woke up so the phone can just assume that you're in that room that the HomePod was also in. You know what I mean? There might be ways to infer it to make it better because it's really annoying because most of the time it happens when I'm leaving.

I'm like, turn off the light as I'm leaving the room. But then the watch light starts talking to me and the light's still on. And then you have to wait for it to thing. And then you have to say, you know, like it just adds friction when really I'd love to be able to like tell my phone, my watch, like.

If there's a HomePod anywhere nearby at all, never interject and just let the HomePod answer it. Or if it's about a HomeQuery, never interject and just let the HomePod answer it. It's complicated and like... There's ordering problems in terms of when it understands it's actually a question about your home in terms of when it takes over and stuff. So it's not a simple problem. But there's definitely an element of like, if I had less Apple products here, this would actually work better.

Yep. I think about that all the time when I say the wake word and ask something to happen. And it's a first word problem, but I'm at my Mac. I have an iPad next to me. I have my phone next to me. I have my watch and I have a HomePod. everything stops and listens. And then it's just a question of which one picks up that command. And it seems to be different every time, even if, like you said, you want it just to always default to the HomePod.

This also happens with HomePods themselves. So I've got a HomePod in the kitchen. I've got a HomePod in the living room. Not often, but sometimes you'll be in the living room and you'll say the request. The kitchen HomePods hears you first and it takes over.

So then it's like, turn off the light. And it's like, the light is already off. But that's good to talk about the kitchen light, not the living room light, because I'm in the living room. So as we get more into the future of worlds and virtual assistants and stuff, a real smart home. should know where you are in the home 100% of the time and therefore always has the correct context for you. Yeah. Yep. Right now it just doesn't. Finally this week, a couple of Apple TV things. So first off.

Last Friday, Mayo, you reported on this bright and early. It seemed like Netflix had finally started. integrating with the Apple TV app. So Netflix content would show up in your watch list and continue watching in the TV app. This manifested because people were opening the TV app and being prompted to connect their Netflix account.

to the tv app right that's how the integration is supposed to work yeah you get a little modal thing you have to approve it and then you're what you're currently watching synchronizes the tv app so you get one unified watch list across all your services and up to now

Most services support it, but Netflix has always opted out. So naturally this story appeared. Everybody thought hell had frozen over. Netflix was finally adopting support for the TV app. Then let's see, you published your story at... 2.42 a.m. Pacific Time. By 11 a.m. Pacific Time, Netflix confirmed that it didn't mean to implement this feature, and it was done so in air, and it still has not integrated support for the Apple TV app.

Eight hours of bliss before Netflix dashed all of our dreams, killed our hopes, killed the vibe, and we're right back to where we started. yeah to make this happen it obviously needs a negotiation between apple and netflix so it needs like a deal to be struck right but does it though i don't understand why people say that because you're not paying right because apple can't do it on their own

Right. Okay. Yeah. And if you participate in these features, you also get into the video partner program where you get like 15% commission instead of 30%. There's all stuff attached to it that Apple's built around it. Do you have to do that just to do the bare minimum TV app integration? I believe to do it, you have to get an entitlement at the very minimum, which basically means...

you've got to reach out to them. Like I can't release an app that integrates the TV app. It just, you can't do it because I think the way it works on the backend is like Apple then basically commits to indexing all the shows on that platform. Right. Okay. Because Netflix will send some back-end system of Apple's a library catalogue of all of its shows, and then it can then show them in the app. So what does exist...

And what Netflix has agreed to do for a long time is if you search for a Netflix original, it will appear in the TV app search, but you can't add it to your queue. It's basically just a shortcut to then open it in the Netflix app. So you can do that now. You can still do that, right? That's been there forever.

So you can search Stranger Things and it will tell me that Stranger Things is available on Netflix and you can click open in and it'll open it in the Netflix app. So that is a coordinated effort between Apple and Netflix at some level. The higher tier is getting it so that those shows then appear in your queue.

in the apple tv app right so you can add your watch list in the tv app alongside shows from other services including tv plus netflix doesn't want to do that because they don't want to be aggregated and i believe also that

they do do it on the, I need to double check this, but at least at one point they did it on Roku. So like you're in the, the Netflix shows appear in the Roku queue on Roku devices alongside other shows. But that was partly because Roku like gives them data about stuff that Apple won't give them.

is vaguely my understanding so like i think netflix wants to know like if you see a netflix show in the tv app how often do you click through on it what did you click on somebody else's show like all this kind of data that apple doesn't want to give out At least that was what someone told me once. I don't know if it's still the case today. Also, the case today is Netflix is just hugely dominant and has got a huge market power and they don't need anybody else, really. So...

you know, they're adding more subscribers in a month than maybe Apple TV has ever had. So like, you know, they're in a very dominant position and they don't have to co-tow to Apple necessarily. I think some of these other services... do support this stuff because they want the 15% commission on in-app purchases, right? Netflix, they haven't supported in-app purchases for many years, so they don't even care about that incentive. So that's kind of where we are.

I think what you probably saw on the Friday is like at some point there were backroom deals and I'm sure the technical team were like, let's just get the support ready for this feature so that if the...

if the marketing heads or the execs ever get their ducks in a row and make it work, we're ready to ship it, you know? And I presume what happened on Friday is someone accidentally just shipped to production what wasn't actually meant to go live. But the kind of support, or at least some support, is already...

you know sitting dormant in the app and has been for a while um so yeah unfortunately i don't think there's any any actual change to the status quo but people obviously want it I know I'm probably in the minority when I say this, but I would watch more Netflix stuff if it showed up in the TV app. We talked about this last week, but me and you use the TV app in very different ways. But I use it to see content from all the different streaming services, Hulu, Disney+, HBO.

And I'd love to see Netflix stuff right alongside that, because right now, in order to see what's new on Netflix, I have to go. I have to seek out the Netflix app and scroll through all of the endless lists and curations. collections and everything they do in that app when really I just want to see like the highlights I want to see it alongside everything else I'm watching and you can't do that for a brief moment it seemed like Netflix was doing something consumer friendly

For the first time in a long time, like I can't think of anything Netflix has done. I mean, they turn out content, yes, and that's consumer friendly to a degree. But in terms of adopting Apple platform features, in terms of. making their app significantly better. All they've done recently is raise prices, crack down on password sharing, move the 4K option to the highest end tier.

All they've done is introduced new restrictions, new limits, and higher prices. And this seemed like a much-needed, finally, consumer-friendly move that they accidentally implemented for a brief window. And that sucks. It's par for the course for the streaming industry as a whole. Just because with the exception of yes, most apps do integrate with the TV app. All of them are self-serving.

All of them, you go to Disney Plus, you go to Hulu, you go to Max. Everyone's a business, yeah. Yeah, everyone's a business, yeah. And it reminds me a lot of too, you go to these apps and in order to see like your continue watching queue.

And those apps, and Apple's guilty of this too, you have to scroll past like four or five rows of recommendations before you can just pick up watching where you left off. It's just more hostile behavior in this industry. And Netflix is by far, I think, the worst offender. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I hate the actual Apple TV continue watching QUnified Q, because on the phone app, you have to scroll past the featured grid.

The carousel at the top before you can see the up next queue. It's not like a dedicated tab or anything that's just on its own. For the longest time, Apple didn't do that. Like the continue watching thing was the first thing you saw, but then they caved to the pressure. And I mean, I said Netflix is super consumer hostile.

But that's also probably why they're so successful. Like you said, they're adding millions and millions of new subscribers every month. Last quarter, they had their most subscribers ever, their highest revenue ever. All of that. And what did they do? They increased the prices in the same breath. Yeah. And I mean, this might not apply to you, but I think it's a decent chunk of Netflix subscribers.

their default app is netflix right so they don't care about the tv app they just open netflix and then yep you know looking at other services like the last resort like otherwise most i think a lot of people they go to watch something they're opening netflix first they're scrolling everything netflix has to offer

And then, oh, I can't find anything to watch. Maybe then I'll consider opening a different app. So that's why they can get away with it because they have dedicated customer bases. Some good news for Severance fans this week though, right? It is officially. the most popular TV Plus show ever, overtaking the title that was previously held by Ted Lasso. So we saw on the Nielsen charts...

that TV Plus, I think for the first time ever, had two titles in the top 10 streaming regions in the US. They had Silo at number 10 and Severance at four. And this was covering the first week that... severance season two premiered but seven series and two only started on the friday so like most of the days of the week it wasn't actually out right so the fact that even hit four was kind of crazy because we have to see for the next week numbers it might even rise higher

But that shows if you're in the Netflix, if you're in the Nielsen top 10, you're pretty popular, right? So clearly severance is popping off. And then Apple followed up with a statement. You know, they still frustratingly don't say any hard concrete numbers about anything.

regarding their streaming business but they did confirm that it is now the number one show on their platform with more unique viewers than anything else including Ted Lasso which is their previous you know biggest hit so if you like severance which I know I do, chances yet to be converted. I think this is a pretty good sign that despite it costing insane amounts of money per episode, Apple's going to keep renewing it because it's popular.

All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show at 9to5mac.com slash join. $5 a month or $50 a year with bonus content each and every week. Send us feedback happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller and Mayo. What about you? At BZMA. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.