So maybe it's time to go back to our old friends at Epic Games, our old friend Tim Sweeney, because we have some late breaking developments as of last night, Wednesday night. Apple's kind of been, I don't know what the right word is, they've been beat up. They've been told that they need to... get their act together and stop resisting the judge's demands in the Epic versus Apple case. Yeah, this is really the buck stops here kind of judgment.
Where we last left off was so that in 2021, the judge, Yovan Gonzalez Rogers, ruled that Apple was not a monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws. but said that Apple must allow developers to steer app users to external payment platforms. So that's the infamous anti-steering rules that Apple imposes. Apple called this a resounding victory at the time but then appealed the anti-steering part of the decision.
Yeah, because they won on, like, what, 10 of 11 counts, and, like, the anti-steering was the 11th count that they appealed on, and this was November 2021, so basically almost five years ago at this point, yeah. To jump back even further, this is the thing that all started when Epic added the backdoor external payment system to Fortnite. Which was 2018. Launched the whole 1984-style campaign against Apple, all of that stuff. So the first decision in that case was 2021, like you said.
2023, an appeals court upheld that judge's decision on Apple not being a monopoly and they upheld the anti-steering stuff. So this meant that under the decision, Apple was required to implement the ability for developers to steer users to external payment platforms. Come last night, a new decision... Sorry to interrupt you, but implement is a funny word in that case because what we're really talking about is the ability to link out to the web, right? Right.
At the basic level, they didn't have to implement anything. They could have just said, There you go, go and link off to the web and you're all, you know, the only function that was preventing it before is app review, right? There's no technical requirements here. Apple imposed technical and policy requirements at their own behalf. So Apple did that, and they imposed the 27% commission on purchases made outside of the App Store.
Judge Yovan Gonzalez Rogers made it clear last night in this new ruling that she is not happy with that. she said apple willfully chose not to comply with the court's injunction it did so with the express intent to create new anti-competitive barriers which would by design and in effect maintain a valued revenue stream, a revenue stream previously found to be anti-competitive.
That it thought this court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation, and as always, the cover-up made it worse. For this court, there is no second bite at the apple. So that is the closing, and I think it paints a pretty good picture of where she stands in her belief in Apple's compliance with this decision.
and her belief as that and Apple's sort of obstinate behavior and complying with the decision. Yeah, because she basically, in this latest injunction, removed everything that apple quote-unquote implemented right so there's no commission allowed you can't apple can't um enforce a particular wording of the button that allows people to link out so developers can use whatever they want if they can't
implement star restrictions so like the previous rules said like it could only be like a link it couldn't have like a platter rounded rectangle shape it couldn't look like a button like a website link They can use dynamic links, just want to be a single static URL. All categories of apps can take advantage of it. You can't interfere with a customer's choice.
to use the link so part of the in addition to the 27 commission stuff before you even got to the website you were forced to put up that scare sheet dialogue right that full screen comically what like five line headline thing which was like you are leaving the apple ball you know be careful like that's not allowed anymore
So basically everything that Apple, quote unquote, implemented has basically been rejected by the court as saying these are all here to prevent adoption of alternative methods and steering. Basically she's saying... you didn't implement the original injunction in good faith, the original ruling in good faith, you've done everything you can to basically make it as... obsequious and
and pointless as possible by having such high commission rates and having all these requirements that no developers actually can be able to do it and have any sort of competition. These points were introduced to prevent anyone from competing with you, which was the whole point of the thing in the first place. you appealed the appeal failed so now you should do this they and they didn't and so now she's brought the hammer down and said here's all these
you know, everything that you said before out the window. Apple can appeal again, and they said they are appealing, but in the meantime, they have to comply. So... All of the 27% commission is gone. The scare sheet thing is gone. The only thing that the judge kind of conceded on is that there is an... an admission that Apple will be able to force show an alert before they go to the website, but it won't be allowed to be a full screen modal.
you know thing with big scary texts and big buttons of like cancel or whatever it's more like um you know like a system alert pop-up that's kind of what you see for location services right it's just a little thing in the middle of the screen with like continual cancel
It's not going to be the big full screen sheet thing. And one of the funniest parts of this is the middle of the screen alert dialogue was apparently a design that Apple was talking about internally when they were coming up with the original response to the 2020-2021 judgment.
and they eventually made that worse quote-unquote by going to the full screen modal sheet thing and the judge basically says Apple at every turn chose the most anti-competitive option and almost as like to embarrass them further she's saying we're not even going to let you
release documentation on what this interference alert should be. Just use that design that you thought about using three years ago and you didn't, right? And then you include the screenshot of it from the internal Apple presentation. So this is punishing and it is enforcing the original thing right so I believe the original ruling from 21 kind of left it a bit ambiguous as to what a suitable commission would be so
Like, she didn't explicitly say you're not allowed to charge 30%, right? It was kind of left out in the open. You're just not allowed to be super anti-competitive. Apple came back with the 27% thing, which once you added payment processing fees, basically put you at 30% or more expensive than using Apple in that purchase. Therefore, it was kind of stupid.
Maybe if they'd have been more forgiving in the earlier stages, they might have been able to come to a compromise on some sort of revenue stream. But because they were so obstinate on it, now it's come down to the fact that the judge has thrown everything out and said you're not allowed to impose commissions or fees of any kind.
so that's no commission on purchases that's no like core technology fee to take another apple model that they've tried they couldn't even do like a fee per download or anything right because no commission or fee of any kind And any app developer in the US and the US App Store, presumably from today, can put a link to the website to buy in their app and Apple legally can't do anything about it.
One of the interesting parts of this injunction is Judge Rogers kind of taking all of the evidence that we've gotten through this over the years, including some new stuff that she says Apple withheld from the original trial, and surmising it into revealing inside Apple the backdoor details of how Apple came to some of these decisions. And you mentioned the scare sheet thing in particular.
And in the injunction, she references that Tim Cook asked the team to revise the original version of this customer warning screen. to make it clear that the fact that Apple's privacy and security standards don't apply to those purchases made on the web So this change updated that sentence from, you will no longer be transacting with Apple.
which is a relatively mundane straightforward way of saying it's trying to imply that apple will uphold your safety and security of your data and your payment information and third parties won't to try and scare you away from doing it right but it was less it was less explicit than what they shipped Which was...
You're going to a third-party site. None of anything that Apple supports you with will be available. And we've kind of seen the opposite thing happen in the EU, right, where the EU had the same scare sheet with very similar text, and the EU has forced them now to rein it back a bit and make it less. Although I think they still let him have a full screen sheet, whereas the US case now has to be that middle of the screen dialogue.
There's a really funny thing that you talked about, Tim Cook's involvement, somewhere else in this 180-page rolling from the judge. It talks about how Apple was crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan, which was the codename for this compliance, on how best to frame the language.
Mr. Onek suggested the warning screen should include the language. By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website, because external website, quote-unquote, sounds scary, so execs will love it. From Mr Rodak's perspective, of the execs on the project Mr Schiller was at the top, one employee further wrote, to make your version even worse, you could add the developer name rather than the app name.
To that, another responded, ooh, keep going, as if they were kind of like relishing making this thing as annoying and frustrating and as, Opposition was possible and confrontational to force every possible user to never press the continue button. Continuing on with that story, it continues, Mr. Schiller was asked for feedback on in-app messaging, link out, and he responded,
This is not good. This is a big warning that the user is about to be sent out of the app to a website. I did not think the headline should say continue. This is a warning that the user is about to go out to the web and they're sure they want to do that. We cannot verify anything that occurs on the web as private and secure. The default button should not be continued. Don't continue. Don't pass go. Do not collect 27%.
And obviously you've got Cook's involvement as well, who's signing off on the messaging and the copy. And it's always funny when you hear about these stories that Tim Cook's not intimately involved with the product development. He doesn't really care about that stuff. He lets other people get on with it. But then you hear something like this,
And it's literally discussing a sentence in this one screen, right? And that gets the attention of the CEO to approve it. It's like, maybe something's out of balance there, if you know what I mean. The Phil Schiller stuff is particularly interesting to me because in this injunction he comes across as a relative voice of reason. He is explicitly quoted as saying he does not think it's right to charge a commission on external purchases made outside of the App Store.
And he is strongly overruled by then Apple CFO Luca Maestria, then Tim Cook. It shows that Phil Schiller is the voice of reason, or was the voice of reason, and that they kept Phil Schiller on as an Apple Fellow to lead the App Store. And he took this position on not charging a commission on external purchases. only to be overruled by the CEO and the CFO.
It's a very weird dichotomy to have no middle ground between what Schiller wanted and what Maestri and Cook wanted, right? Who are at the 27% marker and Phil Schiller is at the 0% marker. They didn't meet in the middle. Yeah, the judge refers to this, like, final meeting in, like, the November before these policies were introduced in January, and it's... Schiller on one side and Maestro on the other, and Schiller's arguing for zero commission, and...
Mastery Zaga of 27. and they came out obviously with 27 could they have not have got to 15 or 10 or like 20 you know like was there no no debate there i mean obviously should have went with it but his his position from this from this document seemed to be that he was going to say
It's unreasonable for us to charge commission on stuff, but outside the app, let's just make the... the options to link outside the app as difficult to do as possible with scary language and limitations on design and then there are other people
Like Maestri, who was like, I think we can do commission too, right? Or I think the judge even referenced at one point it was posed as either... lock down the framing and the presentation of the links, or let's charge commission when they do click on the link.
And what was the ultimate result? It was actually both, right? Because they charged the 27th commission and they locked down the design and presentation and language allowed for the linking out. So they almost got to the worst version of everything they were discussing. Again...
I'm not overruling the government, but obviously the judge's position, this document here is, she obviously has made her mind that she wants to punish Apple here, so she's going to take everything in that interpretation. I'm sure Apple's appeal will suggest that, you know, give the other side of the story. Wow, this is a long and full negotiation. We talked about all sorts of different things, and this is what we end up with.
Obviously, the judge presents it at every turn they pick the most anti-competitive option. But some of that is personal interpretation rather than hard fact, right? They're still bad. It's interesting to contrast this to the the ongoing EU stuff where we've criticized the EU for not outlining a Clear a breakdown of what exactly they want Apple to do.
to abide by the Digital Markets Act, and Apple will announce something. The EU will say, no, we don't like that. There's clearly some backdoor dealings going on.
between the European Commission and Apple trying to find where they can convene to come to a consensus. And here in the United States with this legal case between Apple and Epic, You have Apple flat out announcing this 27% commission, and maybe they were hoping that there was going to be like a next step in the process where Judge Rogers came back and was... more receptive to the fact that Apple could charge a commission, but that they were way off base being at 27%.
But instead, Judge Rogers came back with a vengeance and said, You've got to go to zero. 27% is ridiculous. You've been obstinate throughout this entire process. You have withheld information from the court. Your VP of Finance, Alex Roman, apparently lied under oath during the trial. She's done. She's fed up with this. And she's telling Apple to take it all the way to zero. Yeah, the EU thing only became somewhat specific.
most recently when they got that fine, right? And they got those provisions that you must support. this laundry list of features right for third-party devices and you must do these changes for interior steering so that only really came um really formulated into something concrete within the last couple of months
And the EU's obviously got other, you know, the DMA stretches very wide, but on those specific points, they only really came out with specific requirements in the last couple of months. The judges' release in 2021 was... Not point by point a bullet list of this is what you have to do, X, Y and Z. But I think any external commentary from us or anybody saw what Apple actually did in 2023.
And was like, this doesn't really line up with what the original intent of the ruling was, right? And then immediately Epic appealed it and fought back and Tim Sweeney called them gangsters or whatever. And sure enough, the hammers come down on that side at the end of the day. You mentioned Tim Sweeney. He posted on Twitter last night that Epic Games will return Fortnite to the U.S. App Store next week.
This is a bit of a gray area to me because Judge Rogers' decision, her injunction doesn't. There's not a clear timeline on when Apple needs to make these changes, unless I missed it. What he basically says, from now.
Yeah, because she just says time is of the essence and the court will not tolerate further delays. Yeah, I mean, she even, like, I can't remember the exact wording, but when she references the thing about not interfering with customers, choice to proceed by using anything other than neutral message she has like a footnote which is like
So we don't have another argument over what this means. Use this, developers, and points to this slide that Apple already discussed internally with the alert in the middle of the screen. So from her perspective... today right like it's like immediate there's no like implementation period it's like immediately this should be allowed and so i guess epic's gonna try and submit fortnite to the app store as soon as possible with just a link out to the epic game store on the web
And Tim Sweeney also says that if Apple extends this change, this policy, their compliance with Judge Rogers' injunction worldwide. They will also bring Fortnite back to the App Store globally and drop all current and future litigation on the matter. That's obviously not going to happen. It's going to be the same piecemeal approach, country by country, region by region, that we've had this entire process. Fortnite is not going to come back to the App Store anywhere other than the United States.
because Apple's not going to extend these steering changes anywhere that they don't have to. The bigger picture on all of this though, and we were talking about this a bit in Slack this morning.
What exactly does this mean for Apple's business? Because the whole argument throughout all of this on Apple's side is that... or at least internally on Apple's side, is that making it easier for developers to link out to external payment platforms and for users to take advantage of those external payment platforms. will be a hit to its services revenue. There are some numbers quoted in, or some vague numbers referenced in Judge Rogers' injunction where Apple is estimated.
impacts anywhere from in the tens of millions to the hundreds of millions to the billions depending on what percentage of its biggest developer partners send their users to these other platforms. So what do you think the actual impact will end up being? for apple's business on this i mean the impact will be in the billions
And the billions, okay. Yeah, but billions as a percentage of Apple's overall service business is still a percentage, right? It's probably a single-digit percent, but that's still billions, right? At Apple scale, it still is billions of dollars, but it's not like... their entire business is going to disappear. Because here's one way of looking at it. Up to now, right, with the 27% fee that's been imposed. How many people... How much money has Apple collected from the 27% fee?
Zero. Next to nothing, yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure there's a single app that we know of that actually used this policy because it was so anti-developer. Nobody wanted to use it. It wasn't worth it. And so it's not like they've gone from 27% to zero. All the people that would have used the 27% thing have already been offering their service on the web, they just haven't added a link in the app. It's not like the biggest users of this thing were not using an app purchase already, right?
Like Spotify is a perfect example. They will put a link in their app so you can go to the website to buy Spotify. But Apple's not actually losing money because they weren't getting any money from Spotify before. Now, the second tier of developers, the medium-sized businesses, they're 100% going to try and offer alternatives during that purchase, right? There's going to be...
As long as this ruling stands, there'll be a button to buy within a purchase and there'll be a button to go to the web and save 20% or whatever the offer is. And some percentage of users will go and do that. And that will cost Apple money. Because they won't be getting the commission on that anymore. Zero commission after all.
I think Apple will argue that the services business as in the App Store Commission is very diversified and I think they've said on previous earnings call that the biggest app contribute less than one percent to total services revenue right so unless you think that every single app on the store is going to convert to just going to the web
which I think is unlikely, the hit to Apple's business will be proportionately small. Not negligible, not important. It's definitely a problem and it will cost them billions. But they make tens of billions a quarter on services, right? So this will be a single-digit billions per year hit would be my very back-of-the-hand math on how much it's going to end up going to cost them. And also, if it up competition to the point where it is a threat...
Apple just dropped their commission down a little bit, you know? Rather than taking 30% If they see a load of games now linking out to the web and offering people 30% cheaper. they'll squeeze it so they'll change their rules so it's only 20% i.e. the whole point of this thing in the first place which is to evoke market competition rather than Apple just being able to say a number and no one else having anything to do but to either take it or leave it.
And so, yeah, they are going to take a hit to their bottom line business 100%. But it's not like... uprooting the foundations. The apps still won't be making billions of dollars of profit. That's just a fact. Will it be as many billions of dollars as it was yesterday? No, but it's still gonna be tens and tens of tens of billions. And I don't really see any other outcome than that. It is
A diversified business, Apple makes money from all sorts of people in the App Store. The biggest players don't contribute to App Store services revenue already. The medium-sized players will at least try. I think many of those customers are using it purchased anyway because they do prefer it.
And then some people will slice out. And Spotify will be very happy because they'll be able to convert more people to buying Spotify subscriptions directly from the iPhone app. Or the Amazon Kindle app will be able to direct someone to the Amazon website to buy the book that they're currently looking at. Apple would have preferred a world where everything had to flow through and it purchased and they get commission out of it. But the world as it stood in 2025,
The Kindle app just didn't let you buy a book through the store, right? So it's not like they're now losing commission on Kindle books. They weren't getting in commission in the first place. So there will be billions of dollars in damage to Apple's numbers, and maybe they'll talk about it on the earnings call.
But I don't think it's catastrophic. They would obviously prefer it not to be like this and they'll appeal to us every chance they can get. But I think that's kind of how it's going to play out. and today as we record this is apple's cue two earnings release, so I expect that this will come up to at least some degree during the earnings call. They might demo and just be like, we're going to appeal, and then they'll just push it back.
But I guess it would affect current quarter results, right? If developers start releasing stuff with links out right now. um so maybe there's more of a short-term impact because when the eu dma stuff came away they kind of brushed it aside they're like the eu only contributes seven percent of our worldwide revenue anyway and
No one in the EU is adopting the alternative purchase and payment methods are linking out to the web because of the commission rates and the core technology fee and all that stuff. So, you know, none of this stuff has really hit Apple's financials yet. This ruling is... Black and white, you have to allow people to link out right now and take zero fee. So some people are going to do it and it's going to cost Apple money.
Unless they come up with some crazy legal argument that blocks the option being approved. It's going to cost Apple money immediately. But it's going to be in the... Tens of millions, hundreds of millions, single digit billions kind of range. I don't think it compromises that. What is the apps are now? 100 billion a year business, you know, in terms of revenue.
Take 10 billion off. I was a naughty billion-year business, you know? I guess one of the biggest issues with the services revenue impact overall, though, is that the services business is Apple's primary driver of growth. Yep, from a quarter to quarter and year over year basis. So if you lose that growth and Apple has a quarter, which we've seen where iPhone sales are down, Mac sales are down, Apple Watch sales are down.
All of that is down. Every product category for Apple now will be down if they have that services revenue impact. So it's not hard to imagine where you do see some investor panic. In response to that, if that were to happen in Q3 or Q4, Yeah, you have to imagine there's gonna be a dip in the growth of that division.
The bigger issue on the earnings call, I expect, will be the ongoing tariff stuff just because that poses a bigger material impact to Apple's business than this does because, like you said, even though this is in the billions or could be in the billions. 145% tariff on imports of iPhones from China is a lot more than that in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, this is like a single-digit billions issue. Tariffs on iPhones is like a $100 billion issue, so the magnitudes are pretty different.
And the worst thing Apple could have this year is if the iPhone 17 has 145% tariff on it. And obviously they're doing everything possible to not make that happen, including the current exemptions that are in place and everything else. But that is the number one risk to the business in the short term. The services stuff is a problem.
And they would love to have the same growth stories they've always had. But I think they can absorb the impact and, you know, investors might not like it, but the business will still be very solid. And it is worth quoting Apple's comment on last night's injunction just because I think it's interesting they say, we strongly disagree with the decision, we will comply with the court's order, and we will appeal.
And that's all they say. It's a very reserved and tame statement compared to what I've seen from Apple and other markets. Like last week, you talked about their relatively scathing statement on the EU fine. And this is just two sentences. I would think that we hear more as soon as today or tomorrow, because like you said, it seems like these changes have to apply starting immediately.
So I was going to have to share some sort of documentation or something on what exactly they expect developers to do. if they want to take advantage of their newfound ability to link out. But as of right now, that's all they've said on the matter. And we're also still waiting for them to implement the changes that the EU require them to do for the anti-steering stuff, which was...
what, like April, March announced, but they had like a two-month implementation period for that. So I think the deadline for that is the end of May. So they've kind of got very similar requirements to roll out across the EU and the US imminently. Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by Square.
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For more information, be sure to check out the links in the show notes. Thanks to Insta360 for sponsoring the show. Let's move on to some more exciting stuff to talk about. A new rumor says that the iPhone 17 Pro could launch in a sky blue color.
so this comes from leaker mahjon boo who writes on his website sources close to the supply chain confirm that several iphone 17 prototypes have been made in various colors with sky blue as the current front runner my first thought when i saw some of the renders with this was that this looks very similar to the iPhone 13 Pro Color, which was, what did Apple call it? Pacific Blue? Yeah, that sounds right. We'll go with that. Yeah, Pacific Blue.
And he directly makes that comparison in his post and he says that it looks even more stunning than the Sierra Blue of the iPhone 13 Pro with a brightness and refinement that makes it irresistible. I don't know about all of that, but a sky blue color I guess is a nice addition to the lineup. It depends on the actual shade of the blue because Apple's colors, as we've talked about many times before.
tend to be relatively low saturation, relatively... At certain angles, you can't even tell what color the phone is. Yeah, especially on the Prime Motos. Yeah, the iPhone 16 Pro is what... There's desert titanium, natural titanium, black titanium, and white titanium, I think, are the four color options, none of which are particularly exciting.
The Desert Titanium is okay, but I think more than any of Apple's fourth special edition colors over the past few years, it's hard to even tell what color they're trying to achieve with Desert Titanium. and it's it's so close to like natural it's natural a lot of lying conditions yeah the the blue that they have for the iPhone 16 line.
It's really nice. I have the 16 Plus review unit, right, and that came in that blue, the ultramarine colour. Yep, that one's great. That is a really nice colour. If they had that on a pro phone, I think it'd be very popular. Like, basically all the 16, the normal line 16 colours this year.
I think they should just have them all in profile colours. They've got a nice pink, they've got blue, they've got green, and they've got white and black. It's just more punchy than the pretty samey lines on the profile that they seem to love for some reason. Are you buying an iPhone 17 this year? I can't remember. You should be up for one, right? This is the year. Yeah, this is the year. And you're going to go with black titanium, I'm assuming.
They offer on the air. I'm still kind of leaning towards the air. You're leaning to, okay, well, there's more rumors about the air this past couple weeks too. Yep. More dummy units that show just exactly how thin. the iphone 17 air will be there was one from unbox therapy there's a video from sam cole at apple track both of which I think on paper it's easy to see the 5.5mm number that we're expecting for the iPhone 17 Air.
But once you see it held in somebody's hand, once you see it compared to what we expect from the 17 Pro or compared to the 16 Pro today, That's where it really shines. That's where it's like, okay, this thing is thin, a lot thinner than the other phones. And it becomes more clear why Apple is making the phone, I think.
It's visually striking when you're actually seeing the phone. Visually striking, yeah. I mean, I've said on the show before, I think that maybe the impact will be less than the iPad Pro because you're still going to have the thick camera bump and it's a smaller phone. And I probably need to... rescind some of that commentary because now looking at photos I'm like this is a lot cooler maybe when you have to put the phone in a case
it loses some of that still, some of that sheen. But if you just look at the phone bare naked, I think these dummies make it look really cool next to the quote-unquote chunky Pro line. And right now it seems like it's going to come in cheaper than the Prolines by a couple of hundred dollars, right? People kind of assuming either like an $8.99 or a $9.99 price for the Air.
My biggest concern with the Air phone in terms of if I'm going to buy it or not is that the screen size is like a midway between the Pro phones. So you've got the 6.3 inch Pro, and you've got the Max, which is 6.9 inches, right, currently. The Air is 6.6. And... I like the 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 inch pro phone size. Until I really feel it in my hand, I'm not sure if the Air's going to be too big, you know, just because it's going to that 6.6, 6.7 kind of range, which was the old Mac size.
So maybe I won't like it just from those dimensions. But looking at on its side, the thinness really stands out and definitely has reminiscent of the iPad Pro or even maybe like the older iPod Touches. Because the iPod Touch has got down to like 5.1mm too. So you're in that kind of range, but it's an actual iPhone.
You mentioned the camera bump, and it does add a layer of thickness to the phone, obviously, but with the single camera, it's not as intrusive as I expected in comparison to the 5.5mm design. because I have the iPhone 16e reviewing it from Apple right now. And I think I said on the show at the time,
It's one of the most visually appealing iPhones in a long time just because of the fact that it has one camera. Yes, there are huge compromises to having an iPhone with only one camera instead of three cameras on the Pro. but even on the 17 air where you have the single camera housed in this like oval camera bar design it still looks
so much better than the triple camera design on the Pros. And it seems to stick out less protruded on the side, so it's slightly less thick as well than the Pro cameras, because obviously partly because they... the glass and the optics is worse, right? So they can fit worse glass and optics in a smaller package. But as long as the cameras... Decent, right? And not-
I'm assuming the main camera is going to be about the same as the current main camera on the iPhone 16 range, right? I think so, yeah. And then they'll say it's two cameras because you can do the optical 2X mode, but, you know, ignore that part.
I've come to terms with only having one lens let's put it that way I'm like how many times do I really take pictures with the 2x or the 3x camera or the ultra wide camera not very often so And this might be one of my shorter owned iPhones, because the iPhone 18 series is... gonna be a big change up right like So maybe I could get away with this one year and then I like flip it or something. But my current phone, which is the 14 Pro, it's at death's door point because the battery health is...
sub-zero. We're at about 75%, I think, on the official numbers. But I'm not going to pay 100 quid to get the battery changed when I'm going to buy a phone in September.
So the options are basically either ride out for another year with a battery replacement or upgrade this year. And the Air might be different enough that I might just go for that for now. And then if the 18 slash 18 folding one or whatever is... floats my boat then i can obviously resell one um because my general strategy is to go for a three or four year life cycle but if a really good phone comes out in between then i might change my mind right um so
I think we'll probably upgrade this full to the air. That's my current thought process. The Pro phones are fine, but I don't really like the camera design, at least as pictured in the renders and the mock-ups with the big bar. And the air just seems more different, you know. I just don't think we know enough about if there is a benefit to that new camera bar design on the pro phones. Is it just a change for change's sake?
It's totally something Apple would do. They just feel the need to shake it up a little bit. Or is there some sort of specific benefit to having that extra space in the camera bar? Is there a benefit to moving the flash and the LIDAR to the far right side instead of right? like right now it's kind of positioned on top and bottom of the lenses
Is there a benefit to that? Yeah, there's been some speculation that maybe you'll get better optical zoom because they're going to have a proper periscope lens in it with that camera bar. But there's nothing really been concrete on that, so we're still kind of waiting.
I mean the base phones will also have the camera bar and that's purely aesthetic right so maybe it's just aesthetic on the higher end models too. We'll find out. The other thing about the 17 Air is it looks like it's going to have an off-center USB-C port. so if you look on the bottom of the phone right now all the iphones have
Their port's perfectly centered, top but in the middle, vertically. On the air, based on the schematics that have come out, it's going to be slightly nudged downwards, presuming to avoid the... circuit boards for the screen in such a small design so they can nibble it down a millimeter or two so it's slightly annoying that it's not perfectly
aligned and not perfectly centered uh but you can always live with that and it's not the first time it's happened because they also did the same thing with the iphone 10r back in the day oh yeah i forgot about that an off-center lightning port yeah in the dummy units that Sam Cole shows off in particular.
I don't think without people pointing it out that I ever would have noticed that it's also- Oh no, come on, you'd 100% know it. Maybe if I had it in my hand, because it's just so hard to tell in the video. You can definitely, I look at it, you can definitely tell it's off-center. Even in just the video, like his video, you can tell? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. 100%. As soon as I saw that photo, I was like, this looks like the 10R. 10R's very similar.
I think that's an example of us having very different nitpicky standards for things. I'd notice it wouldn't stop me from buying that model. And back to Mahjong Boo for another rumor this week on iPadOS 19. They say that a couple of the changes coming to iPadOS 19 to make it more like a Mac is that when you dock an iPad with a magic keyboard, the iPadOS interface will adapt to show a menu bar at the top, just like on MacOS.
There are a couple of interesting parts to this, the first being Apple locking an iPadOS design decision behind the Magic Keyboard. which we kind of touched on being a possibility when we talked about Mark Gurman's report about iPadOS 19 making it more Mac-like. Because there's the constant push and pull between what people use the iPad for. The majority, or even the vast majority of people, use an iPad as the classic content consumption device.
They've never enabled stage manager. They've never even used split view or slide over. They've never connected a keyboard to it. Yeah, they use full-screen apps. That's me. Yeah, yeah. I try not to use full-screen apps. I try and use more split view stuff and slide over windows. But I'm definitely still in the consumption bucket. I'm not doing productivity. So to lock the menu bar, put the menu bar behind the magic keyboard paywall. I don't know, I don't know about that. Like.
I don't think it's that blatant as like an upsell thing. No, I just think it's referring to it as an upsell. Maybe it's just a function of screen real estate, right? Because if you don't have a keyboard connected, you have to show a virtual keyboard that takes up half the screen.
And if you've got a full screen iPad with a physical keyboard, maybe some of that screen can then, you know, fit a little control strip menu bar thing at the bottom. And you could access all the stuff that way. If you've got a virtual keyboard, maybe you have to like... press a button and hold it down and then it reveals the menu bar or something. I mean, the...
It's not a menu bar, but they already have kind of like a menu of actions that you can control a keyboard shortcut. It's already on iPadOS. Yeah. And you hold down... i think it's the globe key on a magic keyboard and it pops up that like overlay menu thing which is basically a different layout of a menu bar it's just not permanently shown on the screen
Obviously this rumor is saying it will be permanently shown on the screen in this state, so that makes it more Mac-like. But if you're connected to the display, you've got a lot of screen to use, so maybe you can fit a nice little control bar permanently on the screen up there. Then he also says, Stage Manager 2.0 is an enhanced multitasking mode that activates automatically when the keyboard is attached. It will make managing apps and windows smoother and more productive than ever.
Not a lot of details on that one. The obvious things that come to mind for what stage manager needs is A, more than four windows, and B, more flexibility to make the windows exactly the size you want because right now with stage manager when you drag that little hook thing in the bottom corner. All it's really doing is switching between the different size classes, right, of the iPad app. There's no... Freeform ability.
Yeah, I mean, this could be just the same rumour that German commented on a couple of weeks ago, right, where he said, iPadOS 19 would be more like macOS with improvements to multi-task and you'd be able to like 3d resize the window and it will like live show you the window changing rather than right now where you start to drag a window around the stage manager on the ipad and it kind of blurs it out and then it only pops in when you let go because it's like switching between
predefined widths basically or this could be slightly more than that but it kind of sounded like the same thing that Goemon was getting at right where they're just going to upgrade stage manager to make it slightly more free-form, less controlled, less of it trying to be intelligent about where the windows land and just upgrade the performance a little bit so you can resize a window and you can see the new layout immediately in 7 to let go and then let it refresh.
Yeah, so that's more, in my head, they're more on the kind of smaller improvement side, which are welcomed, but they're not like, no, the iPad works like a Mac. You know, it's just like taking a little bit more of a step forward. Something interesting to consider in the rumors about iPadOS 19 and anything that requires adoption from third-party developers to take advantage of these new Mac-like features on the iPad. The segment of the market that would use those features is so small.
that I'm wondering how many developers would take the leap to adopt an interface that could take advantage of a menu bar, could take advantage of better freeform window management and window sizing. I have a feeling it'll come down to you'll have some really great... indie apps that do it, but if you're expecting Like the Google Docs app to get updated with a menu bar, design and free form window management, or the Facebook app or something. Those companies just don't care.
Google Docs, Google Sheets, those are horrible. stewards of iPadOS as a platform, right? I mean, Apple's tried a fair amount of different things in terms of multi-window. Like, how many apps support the, you can make multiple instances of a window in an iPad app, you know? Very few. But they've got to at least put it in the platform so somebody can use it if they actually try. And in the case of the menu bar thing, they probably don't even need adoption on that because
They already have the groups of controls of keyboard shortcut actions that are grouped in high categories. They could just relay that out and show it in different ways. And that would basically make a menu bar. And they kind of do that because if you use a Catalyst app, which is only using iPadOS APIs,
They have a menu builder that translates across both platforms. If you run it on the Mac, it converts it into the menu bar design, right? So yes, obviously you always get a better experience when the developers tune it specifically for whatever... iOS 19 specific thing they've updated to, but they can kind of like polyfill that and get a rough approximation in for any app that already supports the keyboard shortcuts that are grouped.
window resizing live might be a bit more complicated. Although, at least in my understanding how it works, the blur is only... only a visual thing really and it's only done like that because apps aren't used to being able to resize in real time on iOS but there's nothing that would like stop them from being able to do it right so like some number of apps let's say half of the apps that are in the ecosystem right now could probably already do live resizing and it'll look fine.
and they just blur it just in case for the half that don't. Or it was like a performance thing in the earlier days where they could save CPU cycles when having to render every single frame. because again catalyst apps work exactly the same and you can live resize them and if you have ipad apps that run on mac right and you turn on the live resizing button in the sdk you're not like coding more stuff you're not writing new lines of code to make it do live resizing
So like most of my apps that I run on the indie apps, you could run them and do window resizing and they would work perfectly fine. So of the features that Apple could add to the platform, the ones you just said are actually quite not actually that hard for adoption. But obviously the general point applies and there's been an issue with advanced iPad software for its entire life.
Is there anything Apple could do with iPadOS 19? Or do these rumors do anything for you and your potential use of the iPad is more of a Netflix? I mean, if they make multitasking better, I would use that. I still don't think I'm going to be able to use it.
production workflows or productivity use cases, but you can even make my content consumption workflows better, right? Give me better ways to multitask and I can enjoy having videos and Twitter and threads and everything on the screen at the same time. Could you still hit things like...
a video stops playing when you play in another window because it only supports one audio source in most cases and like so yeah they can always make the platform better and better and better even for just quote-unquote consumption use cases and um versus content creation. But everything takes little steps forwards. I've written blog posts on an iPad before. Mm-hmm. Don't love it. I've done it.
They make it better. I might love it a bit more, you know? So it's all in that bucket. Nothing that has been rumoured so far for iPadOS 19 has made me like, well, now it's time to get rid of the laptop. We're going all in on the iPad, right? You've got a chasm of stuff before you can get to that point. But every year they gotta keep making it better if they care about it as a thing.
And some of this stuff might roll over into, like, the foldable iPhone, right? And stuff like that, because... you have different platforms and different layouts and as well as the foldable iphone there's going to be a foldable ipad not soon after right in the upcoming years they'll probably run variants of this same stuff
You kind of need multitasking if you've got foldables, right? So, like, this all kind of blends into the same bucket. Apple presents it as iOS and iPadOS. They're the same platform, right? That's the reality. When I think about the things that limit my use of the iPad for quote-unquote work,
It comes down to the lack of things like system-wide apps like a clipboard manager, like TextExpander. I cannot do so much of my job without TextExpander. And that's just not possible on an iPad due to iPadOS system limitations.
The audio limitations that you mentioned, that's a big one. The menu bar, I think, could be a step in the right direction if it can give you quick access to not only... controls for a specific app but also better access to system controls like you get on mac os there's just let's get super basic stage management ipad only supports four windows oh yeah that's time yep
Right now, I'm on the Mac doing this job. I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight windows open. Need to. Just couldn't do it on the iPad. Ignore everything else. Count is enough to stop making a podcast on it. Something else about iPadOS 2 that I've noticed I have the
11-inch M4 iPad Pro, the 1TB version, which means it has 16GB of RAM. Background tasks or background multitasking or opening an app, then opening like... switching between four or five apps at the same time then going back to the first app you opened even though you have 16 gigabytes of ram it almost always has been killed off in the background. There's some sort of, it feels like in a lot of ways, iPadOS is still optimized for the lowest common denominator, right? You have the iPads with...
What does the base model iPad have now? Six gigabytes of RAM? I think six, yeah. They aren't doing enough with RAM management and performance management to actually take advantage of all of the great hardware in the M4 iPad Pro. So that's another area that really needs it. addressed, especially if there's a chance that they increase the number of windows you can have with stage manager. Yeah, I mean, take a 16 gigabyte RAM Mac.
how many applications can you open at the same time and it still feels just as snappy you can have like a hundred it's like it's insane the ipad stuff Yeah, the reloading when you switch tabs around or whatever, it happens loads. Even if you're not even doing stage management stuff, right? It just, yeah, it just happens. And I can't fully explain it, but... I know, I know they did add, um... swap memory a couple of years ago right but i'm not sure it's used in all places for all situations and
Yeah, it still feels like an OS born out of a phone, which it has and always will be, or at least has been up to now. And they've got to do a lot more to get it to break out of that mould. And every year it gets slightly better and further along. but never gets to where you want it to be. So far, the rumours for Ipedos 19 don't change that general point, I would say.
then mahjongbu also has a very weird very out of left field rumor that yeah thrown out comment ios 19 will bring a stage manager like user interface to the iphone when you're connected to an external screen I'm guessing what exactly this means is that if you have an iPhone with a USB-C port, plug a USB-C cable into it, connect it to a studio display,
It's going to turn into an iPad-like experience, I guess. I don't buy this rumor at all. I don't think there's any chance that this is happening. There's one reason why they might do this. Samsung does it. That's true. What's it called? Samsung Dex. Yeah.
I don't think many people use it. I don't really see the point because everyone carries laptops or something or an iPad. But I guess maybe one person uses it and maybe it's used in other countries, especially international markets where people only have phones, right? and maybe they're feeling competitive pressure that people have been asking this feature. I wouldn't use it.
But it's not going to harm if it gets added. So, yeah, I don't think there's much motivation for it. And clearly it's been low down the priority list because I think Samsung Dex came out like five years ago now. And they get a ray on it and stuff.
But yeah, that'd be the number one reason why they're going to do this because other phone makers do it too. I don't really think there's like a standalone. This is why Apple can do it better or anything. And again, you might want to throw in some foldable phone connections there in the future. Happier This Week is also brought to you by Bitwarden. Bitwarden is the trusted solution for password, passkey, and secrets management.
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there were a pair of reports this week one in bloomberg and one in the financial times that say apple aims to manufacture and import almost all of its iPhones sold in the United States from India rather than China by the end of 2027.
so may you cover this and there are some numbers here that apple would need india to make more than 60 million phones a year in order to satisfy those sales overall iphone assembly would have to approximately double to meet this target There are a handful of reasons as to why this is. a lofty goal that I think seems unlikely to actually happen.
ties into a report from the information which said that China is pushing back on Apple's plans to try to move more iPhone production to India. There was a report that said Chinese, or there was a quote in the story that said Chinese authorities refused to allow one of Apple's Chinese equipment suppliers
to export machinery to India that Apple needed for upcoming iPhone 17 trial production. The solution to this problem is that suppliers set up a front company in Southeast Asia to buy the machines Once the equipment reached the Southeast Asian country, and then moved to a factory in India operated by Foxconn.
There are solutions to every problem, I guess. There are workarounds to every problem, but now that the information has spilled the beans on that workaround, they might have to come up with something new if they want to get more of their machinery out of China and into India. Yeah, I mean, you can see why they would want to do this, right? Because China is contentious at the moment and
faced with tariffs, you'd rather produce the products elsewhere. And we've already heard that Apple diverted a lot of production in the run-up to the tariffs coming in at the beginning of April through other countries as much as they could. So obviously it's a goal for them to produce outside of China in big quantities. because I can avoid the tariff problem. Equally, if they get other solutions to the tariff problem, like exemptions, like international...
trade relations just becoming better, moving all production to India becomes less of a priority, right? They're not going to stop doing it, but it doesn't have the immediacy issue of when to do it in two years' time. It seems unlikely to me, obviously I read the stories and I reported them because they were from credible publications, but it felt a bit out there to me to suggest that India would be able to double its output.
in like a year and a half you know yeah uh Maybe it can get close, but I'm not sure every single iPhone sold in the US will be coming from India within 2027. It just seems slightly too ambitious, but I guess if Apple really, really cares about it, they could spend a lot more money and get something up and going, right? And with the iPhone 16 series, they had India producing iPhone 16s.
contemporaneously with China at launch for the first time ever like always before it's been like China makes them first in September and then India comes along a few months later right with the FN16 it happened across the world at the same time which is a big milestone I think that was for the non-pro phones, right?
The other issue here is that for, let's say, Apple's phones shipping at the end of next year, they're expected to be some of the biggest change to the phones in a while. You've got the folding phone, you've got the upgrades to the iPhone 18, which German seems to suggest is going to be pretty significant. in the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the product, right?
With all these changes to the production and the different processes required, is that something that Apple is going to be able to entrust to India? for 2027. There's some doubt out there, right? Yeah. Maybe this is a goal. Maybe Apple's production people have gone to India and said, we want to do this, make this happen. But maybe internally they really know that, look, if it doesn't happen, we'll have to carry on relying on China for a bit.
Maybe that's the goal and they just think it's like a stretch goal and it might not be guaranteed to happen, but they're going to try and do it. And if it falls slightly short, then it's still better than not doing it at all. That's kind of where I came away from this report where...
They want to diversify. They're not going to stop making iPhones in China. They're just going to make them in many more places around the world, as they have been doing in smaller quantities. But now, in the wake of the tariff situation, they're really going to ramp it up. And so maybe by 2027, the majority of phones sold in the US come from India, whereas right now it's the minority.
Yeah, you touched on it, but the thing about iPhone 16 production happening simultaneously in India and China is... the iphone 16 design and form factor is largely iteration of what we've had since the iPhone 12, right? It's the 16, and then to a certain degree, the 17. These are the last phone.
of this design form factor this design language the iPhone 17 air is already going to buck that trend And I don't think we know if the 17 air is going to be made in India and China simultaneously or just China or what exactly the production plants are there. It was going to happen, but then China didn't let the factory components get exported. And China is contentious not just because of
The tariff stuff, the ongoing tariff and the implications of that. Because India has also been in the tariff... I mean, every country is rolled up in the tariff nonsense. Yeah, in the tariff nonsense, yeah. The difference is, A, the tariffs on India are significantly worse.
The tariffs on India are significantly less than China. And B, they're currently exempted from the quote-unquote reciprocal tariff stuff. But China is also contentious and risky from Apple's perspective because if there were to be another... pandemic. We saw what happened during COVID-19 where Apple was the iPhone. It would have been the iPhone. It was 14 or 15, yeah. I think it would have been the 14 Pro and Pro Max were basically completely out of stock for the last...
two months of the year or something during the holiday shopping quarter. And that was because of China's lockdowns because of COVID-19. And they had to release a statement to investors ahead of time being like, We're not going to be able to sell enough phones because of this problem, be aware. So there are a thousand and one reasons for Apple to reduce its reliance on China. This is, like you said, this is ambitious, but...
It's something that Apple has to do and if there's anybody that can do it, it's Tim Cook. Tim Cook built up the China infrastructure from ground zero, basically. They benefited from going all in on China as their strategy for like 20 years. And they reaped huge rewards from it. Only around 2018 did the crack start to show. And they dabbled for a while. Then the COVID stuff really hit them. I think that's when they really started ramping production in India and stuff and Brazil and Vietnam.
And now the tariffs is like a double whammy. So... whatever they were planning to do whatever percentage of iphone they thought were going to be made in india let's say five years ago as in like now five years ago what their target would be surely that percentage has now gone way up right because there's just way more motivation for them to do it
And Tim Cook's a really good operations person, so he can definitely make it happen. But a huge ship still takes a while to turn around. And other products are being made exclusively in other countries, but the iPhone is hundreds of millions of units. China has cities dedicated to iPhone production at this point, and it's ridiculous. So to make that happen in India...
Even if you've got all the money in the world, it still takes time. So they're working on it. They've ramped up a lot. I mean, selling 40 million phones from India is still good. But to get to 80 million is another step above. Maybe they'll get close. Maybe they'll even get there. But at least right now, it seems like something where they're like, that's what they're aiming to go for. But if they do fall short, then they'll have to mitigate with production of China and other places too.
Finally this week, Mayo, do you want a new way to discover more about the artists, actors, and athletes you love across Apple? Because now you can kind of sort of do that. Apple has launched something it's calling Snapshot. Did Apple launch it? Somebody in Apple hit a button. Whether or not they meant to launch it or not, I don't know. It's snapshot.apple.com. And it's a horizontally scrolling list of some of the biggest artists, actors, and athletes.
You click on one of them and you can see things like, so I click on Sabrina Carpenter. You can see the latest Apple Music release, discover more on Apple Music, Sabrina Carpenter content on Apple TV, Apple Podcasts. and some very basic biography information.
There's no way to search for different people so you can't type in your favorite artists to learn more about them just by name. This horizontally scrolling interface, you can't like... at least on the mac you can't like manually swipe yeah you just have to sit here and slowly watch all these names slowly go across
It's like a marketing grid rather than a thing you're actually meant to interact with, right? There's not much to say about this other than that it's an incredibly weird thing that is very half-baked, and I have no idea why. A, they really feel the need to do this to begin with, and B, why they launched it in this form. I presume that somewhere... Soon, you'll be able to click a link in the Apple TV app or the Apple Music app and it will take you to a page for these people.
And you're going to see what else they're doing across Apple services. I don't really think you're meant to navigate to snapshot.apple.com and use this homepage thing. I think what's meant to happen is you're going to somehow come across a link to one of the individual detail pages for these artists and actors, right? And if you look at what they do feature on the homepage...
They've at least started with the people they have close relationships with in terms of projects. They have Cate Blanchett because she did Disclaimer Rapid TV Plus recently. They've got Lionel Messi who obviously leads MLS Season Pass. You know, they've got Coldplay.
I guess because they're like Coldplay and that's more of an ally. But you know what I mean, right? A lot of the people on this page, like they've Kendrick Lamar because he did the halftime show, right? For the Super Bowl. And they've Maya Rudolph because she has the loot series.
They have Dua Lipa because she's also in an Apple TV Plus series and Apple Music presence and, you know, podcast interviews. So, like, they've clearly, that's where they're clearly coming from. So, I don't know if they're going to, like, augment, you know, like, the... What's that feature called on the Apple TV?
You know where they added it last year where you... Insight? You pause it and it shows... Insight, that's it. You pause it and it shows you the current actors and stuff. Maybe they'll let you... tap on the actor's name and it'll bring out more information like what's being sourced from snapdrive.com it kind of feels like the kind of thing where
if Siri worked well you could like ask Siri about these people and then it would bring you up this information right and they've had some of this in bits and pieces and like Apple Music has bios for a load of artists and Apple TV has bios for a load of artists so I think they're kind of trying to combine it all into one place and then presumably all of their services will extract data from it and present it to you.
The fact it has a web interface at all is quite funny, but maybe a better share from the TV app and then it will just use the URL. The homepage is completely pointless because no one's going to get any value out of that. But that's what I have to assume this is about.
but it is just kind of weird that they made the URL go live without any of the supporting features in any of the apps that we can find, right? Like, as of now, the only way to use it is to go to the website directly and click on this carousel items. Alright, 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 with bonus content each and every week at 9to5mac.com slash join.
for $5 a month or $50 a year. 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.