so my apple has announced its 2025 pride edition sport band apple watch face and wallpaper for iphone and ipad The watch band itself is very colorful as always and Apple says it features a tapestry of rainbow stripes that vary in shape and size. And each individual pride band is assembled by hand from individual stripes of color that are compression molded together. So no two bands are exactly alike.
They've done that trick before, right, with previous versions of the Pride Band, but this one seems more... Squatle.
Right, so they're like very straight lines. Some earlier versions of the Pride Band, like previous years, it was like strips of colour and like the joining part would be like... wiggly if you know what I mean so like that was where they're like oh it's variation whereas this one I think it's more varied in exactly which colours and how long each of the strips are but I kind of like the 2025 version because it's
a bit more geometric and that my my complaint with the early years pride bands where they tried that you know everyone's unique because it kind of looked a bit messy like oh they've just jammed some bits of material together and oh look at this look at this jaggedy line look how unique it is and this one feels more It's more like designed, even though it's still unique, if you know what I mean. More thoughtful. Yeah. Yeah, it's cool.
Then the Pride Harmony watch face is complementary to the band and it features that similar geometric design. And then it has a... And then the rainbow stripes will dynamically shift across the face of the display as you raise your wrist to check the time. So it's another one of those animations that they've toyed with on a few different watch faces. change as you raise your risk to check the time. Then the wallpaper does a similar thing.
sort of like the black unity wallpaper and other wallpapers when you swipe up to go from the lock screen to the home screen there's like a little Animation tying everything together. And on the watch face, the pattern reflects the hour. Yes. So like on their example, it's the classic 10.09. time which they use for all of their demonstration.
watches but if you look on the picture the they've kind of like done black cut out so you kind of see the number one the number zero because it's the hour 10 and then those obviously black regions change as the hours go by so it's a quite quite um sophisticated design, I think. And the watch band is available to order now from Apple for $49. And Apple says a percentage. And Apple says it's proud to support, financially support organizations behind LGBTQ plus causes.
then the watch face and the wallpapers are available in watch os 10.5 and ios 18.5 both of which are still in beta testing but this week mayo we got the release candidates and this includes the release notes for the first time A couple of interesting things here beyond the new Pride wallpaper. So for screen time, a parent will now receive a notification when the screen time passcode is used on a child's device.
neither of us have kids mail but i think the implication here is so the parent finds out if the kid learns the screen time passcode i think that's the implication of what this feature can address yeah i think that's the point um and also maybe if like
you can't the kid can't do the play one parent off each other thing so it's like oh you know you go up to your mom and you get like five extra minutes of screen time with the passcode and then an hour later you go to your dad and try and get the same trick off right so Both parents are aware simultaneously that the access has been prolonged.
I think it's just notable that we have a screen time mention for a new feature in release notes. Exactly. It's been a long time. Because screen time came out, what, originally iOS 12, and it got a few different features along the way, but it's actually been consistently criticized.
Like, the Wall Street Journal have been pretty heavy on this, where screen time's just buggy and sometimes doesn't work, or, you know, the restrictions don't enforce, or child's fine workarounds in various different ways, so the restrictions are kind of pointless. or they don't synchronise properly, so the adder will set a time limit on the phone and it doesn't actually get there, so the phone can just be used regardless.
And Apple said, oh, we're working on these fixes and we're doing bug fixes and we're always making screen time better. But they've never really called out changes beyond statements to press. And this is the first time in just, you know, a random .5 where screen time's got a mention in a long time. So it felt pretty notable.
The problem with screen time is what exactly Apple wants you to use it for. The obvious use case is for a parent and a kid, right? You want to control what they're doing, limit their... use of their device, give them permission to buy or to not buy something in the App Store. But there's also the element of something at an angle that Apple itself is used where Does it want people like us, like people like me and you, using screen time to monitor our use of our Apple devices?
it's hard to tell what their focus is. Because if you just want to monitor the pure, like... I've used my iPhone for nine hours a day this week. That's hard with screen time, especially if you have multiple devices. It's just not consistent and reliable enough to provide that screen time data to people like us. It feels very much like abandonware to the point where you question whether Apple actually...
Wants to fix it and wants to make it better for all use cases or whether they're just doing the bare minimum to say hey We have the screen time feature because we don't want you using your devices too much We don't want your kid accidentally spending $100 in...
and Candy Crush or whatever, but not actually putting any effort behind maintaining the feature. Yeah, I mean, it came out at a time when there was a lot of... buzz around you know a phone addiction and digital well-being yeah is apple being a menace to society by making these phones too good and like the idea and that's why they came up with those pr lines like
We make the phone that you can use and we want to give you insight and awareness to how much you're using your devices so you yourself can... be in control and change your usage patterns if you want to. And like Cook's been like quizzing us. And he said, well, it made me realise that I get so many notifications in a day. So I've helped to rein those back in. And like, so it's definitely, at least when it came out, it was targeted at individuals as well as, you know, parental controls.
but I think over time it's more shifted into the parental controls domain. I think a lot of it's just because people love their phones too much and they don't want to use the restrictions. And it's really hard to make restrictions that make sense because it's so easy for you. You can say to yourself, oh, I'm going to only use this four hours, but at the end of the day, you still need a way to... escape the restrictions right so
At some point, people just click five more minutes or they click the type of code and they just carry on using their social media apps forever because they like using them. And there's a fine line between enjoy and addiction, right? But ultimately, people like using their phones a lot. And so I think uptake on screen time for...
limiting individuals usage is low and then that combined with the bugginess of it especially when you're doing like the screen time hours restrictions across devices because like the Mac You know, you might not be using your Mac, but you might just have your Mac not in sleep. And, like, my laptop sits on the desk for hours and hours not in sleep mode or anything. But it, like, clocks up screen time hours.
which I'm not sitting there looking at the screen by any means, but you go on the screen time report and it's always super high. And a lot of that, I mean, I do use my devices a lot, but it's also a case that it's just counting hours of Safari usage being open to a window and I haven't just left the laptop like it.
and so you know it's a hard problem and there's many dimensions to it and you go through to the screen time settings pane and there's you know umpteen different options and different verbiage and like you can set a downtime limit or you can set a you know screen like there's all sorts of different
It's very multifaceted, right? Screen time's like a brand name for a whole umbrella of functionality. And unfortunately, not all of that functionality works perfectly. And so I don't think it really gets a lot of adoption apart from...
the child use cases where, you know, it's more obvious. It's like, oh, I want to try and strip my child of this. But then equally, the children fight back and you know you go on TikTok and there's loads like here's your how you avoid screen time workarounds and you know oh you can do this you can do that or
You can save a video to your files app and watch it even if you've been banned on YouTube. These problems are complicated and hard and I don't think society as a whole has fully reckoned with it either. So maybe when Screen Time first came out... It felt like a decent contribution from Apple, but the fact they haven't fully maintained it over the years has meant it's kind of fallen in a bit of
It's fallen back out of priority and doesn't feel critical. You can't trust that they're going to work perfectly. So if you're buying your child a device, you still need... Like you can't fully rely on screen time alone. Like obviously it always requires parental oversight too and the human condition is, you know, the human element is important. But the technological part...
Feels like Apple might be letting down slightly. So it was good to see that they've at least done something in iOS 18.5 relating to screen time because it did feel a bit like abandonware for a while.
And other things in the 18.5 release notes. The buy with iPhone feature is now available when purchasing content within the Apple TV app on a third-party device. This again, by the way, is more evidence that, you know, Apple TV Plus is not just about... marketing or brand value because they keep doing features that improve the
app experience when you're not using Apple devices, right? They want adoption for this platform in general and that means making it easier for people to buy stuff when you're not.
when you can't just double click your home button and do Apple Pay. And so this is kind of like the feature on... uh apple tv right where if you want to buy rent a film on apple tv you can like quickly authenticate by um double click on your watch or doing face video on your phone you know it kind of like hands off the purchase experience This is basically that, but for third-party devices like Firesticks or even the Android app will support it.
So let's say you have an Android tablet, but an iPhone, then you can buy, if you rent a film or whatever, or you subscribe, you can then pass over to the other device to finish the transaction. Some of this gets around. in-app purchase restrictions on third-party platforms. Like on Amazon Fire TV, I believe, the Apple TV app doesn't actually let you subscribe because that would require Apple give a cut to Amazon for the subscription price.
so they say firstly go and buy the subscription on another device then come back here But I think the intent of this feature is that they'll be able to update the Amazon app and be like, now you can buy even easier by just looking at your iPhone and subscribing and then carrying on with what you're doing on the 10-foot screen experience. So they keep making it better, which shows that it's not just an Apple-centric thing as much as some analysts like to point it out.
Then 18.5 brings the carrier-provided satellite features to iPhone 13. I think we talked about it at the time, but T-Mobile has a partnership with Starlink, so it was iOS 18. 3, I think 18.4 One recent iPhone update brought support for using T-Mobile's Starlink satellite feature on your iPhone, but only iPhone 14, 15, and 16. Now those carrier-provided satellite features are also available on iPhone 13.
but Apple's own emergency SOS via satellite, so its own satellite network connectivity features are still iPhone 14 and newer only. Yeah, and the features work differently, right? Because one uses cell towers and one uses the sky, and there's trade-offs and costs and benefits to each approach. And I think at the time when this came out, we were like, well, this T-Mobile solution sounds fantastic.
I think it's been in the real world for a little while and there are similar drawbacks with coverage limitations and speed being slow and dropping calls and stuff. So it kind of seems like Apple might want to make a first party.
satellite based cellular connectivity thing but also i don't think the demand for the dedicated you know hold your phone up to the sky and connect to those satellites like the global star thing is going to go away anytime soon you kind of need both things in combination um to get full coverage I think it's one of those things where the more options you have, the better. Whatever situation you find yourself in when you need to fall back to a satellite connection of some sort, having...
Multiple things to try is always better than having just one thing to try. Yeah, and you want your phone to just be able to graciously drop down to whatever's available, right? Yeah. It's nice that they backported this to the FN13 as well. That's all in the 18.5 release note. Expect an update for everyone in the public release next week, I'm assuming. And then we move on to 18.6, which...
at this point is looking like we'll have next to nothing in terms of new features. Because all the attention, all the focus is going to shift to 19, which is coming at WWDC in June, obviously. So this is probably our final iOS 18 beta with anything notable to talk about. Happy Night This Week is brought to you by HelloFresh.
Spring is here, and that means fresh air, bright sunny days, and good food. HelloFresh makes it easier to fit delicious home-cooked meals into your schedule each week by curating recipes like pasta primavera, chicken dijon, and pecan crusted trout. All HelloFresh meals use high quality ingredients including seasonal fresh produce and proteins that travel from the farm straight to your doorstep.
In 2025, HelloFresh is evolving to include even more convenience options for busy lifestyles without compromising on taste or quality. That includes new ready-made meals, that's chef-crafted, flavourful dishes that are ready in just three minutes. and you can also choose from 100 seasonal snacks, sides and trees, all with flexible deliveries that you can pause or skip when you need. Now chance you've tried HelloFresh right?
I've tried HelloFresh a number of times, and the most recent batch that I got included a really, really good tortellini that both me and Emily really liked. And like you said, one of my favorite things about HelloFresh is that first you get everything you need in the box so you know what you're making and you have a clear plan. And when you get a box from HelloFresh, You have a nice variety of different things to try for each meal.
so you're never having the same thing over and over again and getting tired of it and struggling to come up with new ideas. And of course it just tastes better than if you're using a pre-made sauce or something from a can. Everything from HelloFresh is as fresh as you would expect. So for me and my wife, HelloFresh is one of our favorite things to have for dinner, and we highly endorse it.
So feel great with meals that fit your spring schedule and make the season even more delicious. Go to hellofresh.com slash happyhour10fm now to get 10 free meals with a free item for life. One per box without a subscription. Free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com slash happy hour 10 FM. Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring the show.
Happy Day This Week is also brought to you by Bitwarden, the trusted solution for password, passkey and secrets management. Bitwarden empowers individuals and businesses to take control of their digital security with tools that make managing strong, unique credentials simple across all your accounts and devices. Whether you're logging in on desktop, browser, iOS, Android, or even the Apple Watch and Vision Pro, Bitwarden makes it seamless.
With features like enterprise, SSO integration, end-to-end encryption, and secure autofill capabilities, Bitwarden helps protect you from phishing attacks and data breaches, no matter where you are. If you've ever abandoned logging into an account because you forgot the password, you're not alone. Over 55% of people say they've done the same according to the Bitwarden World Password Day survey. And 60% report that managing passwords is somewhat to extremely stressful.
Well, Bitwarden helps solve that, offering options like biometric unlock, secure password sharing, and the ability to create, manage and autofill credentials, identities, and even payment info across all your devices. It even supports password creation, passkey, and secure sharing, all while maintaining zero-knowledge encryption.
So check out Bitwarden Password Manager by hitting the link in the show notes or visiting bitwarden.com. That's bitwarden.com. Thanks to Bitwarden for sponsoring the show. So Apple's quarterly earnings release for the second fiscal quarter of the year. was last thursday and as usual i don't think we need to dive in too much to the specific numbers that they announced but the big picture Revenue came in at $95.4 billion. That's up 5% year over year and higher than Wall Street had estimated.
The Mac was up 7%. The iPad was up 15%. The iPhone was up 2%. Wearables, home, and accessories was down 5%. Then services, they were up 12% year over year, but the number actually missed analyst expectations slightly, which I think was cause for concern in how the market reacted to Apple's earnings.
Yeah, I mean, that's their main growth centre. So even if it's only slightly off, then... um is like a harbinger of maybe the growth rate's going to fall off in the future quarters too and obviously that that's a lot of where the valuation comes from at the moment so if you miss that even slightly it has an impact on the share price. Then after the earnings release itself, Apple held its call with
CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevin Pareka, an analyst, going into the call. And we touched on this last week, Mayo. The focus was primarily on tariffs and AI. And the current ongoing App Store rule changes were basically an afterthought the entire call. There were countless questions on tariffs and AI, and one or maybe two singular questions about... the App Store, specifically as it relates to Apple updating its App Store guidelines to allow developers to link out to alternative payment methods.
That's the, of course, the injunction that was handed down as part of the Apple versus Epic case last Thursday. It makes sense that investors are more concerned particularly about tariffs. And during the call, Tim Cook said that if the current tariff situation... holds through the fiscal third quarter of the year, Apple expects an added cost of $900 million. And he was very careful to hedge that. This is assuming current tariff policy holds.
It's a big assumption. Yeah, because it changes every week. So it could go up, it could go down, it could be beneficial, it could be a negative impact further. But on the basis that the current policy held, it would be about $100 million. So basically just under a billion dollars of impact for the whole quarter, which I think was received relatively well.
in the financial community? I think so. A billion dollars is a lot of money, but over the span of a quarter, you're talking, I mean, this quarter just gone was, what, 95 billion? So you're talking about, what, 1% impact from this tariff chaos? And much of the product, like much of that amount is from products that Apple had to import before they got the exemption. So obviously with Apple working on, you know, four to six week inventory times.
Now they have the exemption on phones and stuff, so the higher tariff rate doesn't apply, but that wasn't there originally, so basically what Cook was explaining is that some million, you know, number of millions of units that will be sold in the June quarter and therefore are accounted for in the June quarter at the higher tariff rates that they didn't have the exemption for yet. So he wouldn't be drawn on future quarters.
So maybe it'll go down further. The other big thing was that he was very keen on talking about the country of origin. Because basically, this is going back to that report we had last week, right, where it claimed that Apple was planning to get almost all iPhone production. for the US to come from India by 2027.
And Cook basically said they're going to do that this quarter. The most, not all, but most iPhones sold in the US will have their India as their current country of origin. And then other products like iPad and Apple Watch will be from Vietnam as country of origin. And obviously country of origin is the big factor in terms of what percentage tariff you get hit with.
And China has the highest tariff, so if they can redirect their supply chain so that iPhones produced in China do not... supply the U.S. that's much better for their bottom line because then they're only seeing the 10%, 20% tariffs versus the 155% or 45% tariffs. Again, this thing is complicated because you have those exemptions and stuff.
at a high level. All iPhones that Apple can sell to the US that aren't coming from China is better for them. And they showed that they have the operational nimbleness to be able to change their plans around and quickly work so that for June, most iPhones sold in the US will come from India, which is obviously good for their bottom line because that's where the tariff impact is reduced the most.
And we were skeptical about whether they'd be able to do that for 2027 last week. So the fact that they've been able to make this, like you said, the nimble adjustments to get it done for... Q2 slash Q3 of 2025 is impressive. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll be able to sustain that, right? Right, exactly. Especially with new model introductions, i.e. the September releases.
unclear how many millions of those we'll be able to make from India from the beginning. We spoke about last week too, how the biggest design changes to the iPhone in a long time are coming in the next... 18 months, whether you're talking about the 20th anniversary phones with big design changes or the foldable phone generations. Currently unclear whether non-Chinese manufacturing will be able to take on the brunt of that production to the quality standards that Apple wants.
But it's a good sign because I don't think we were expecting that for the June quarter they'd be able to hit this benchmark. So if they've been able to spin stuff around and make it work, then that just shows how good Tim Cook and the operations group are at that company.
Obviously, it's probably easier for them to do it in these kind of middle, you know, mid-season quarters because there's just less demand in general. So when you're not supply constrained, you've got more flexibility to redirect. product from like maybe it was most efficient for them to ship from China direct to the US but because they've got a bit of slack in the system because they're not selling you know the 48 million kind of range for iPhone sales rather than
70, 80 million, which is what they are in the four quarters, there's a bit more slack in the system so that they can ship from India rather than ship from China. So obviously now they'll be planning and plotting for ways to keep this going throughout the rest of... eternity until the tariff situation changes, I guess. But still, it was a pretty impressive thing for them to be able to say so, so obliquely. Like, yes.
Most iPhones sold in June will have India as their country of origin. It wasn't a guarantee that they would be able to achieve that, and Cook says they will. One interesting comment or one question he was asked in his response was about whether they saw any There was more demand for new iPhones in the March quarter because people were worried about price increases because of tariffs. And he said that they saw no evidence of this in their results for the quarter. for their sales.
which counteracts a couple of different analyst reports. And we had a report from Bloomberg that said Apple stores were busier than usual because people were, quote unquote, panic buying. in fear that prices would go up because of the tariffs. Was that more in April, though? I guess so. Because the big reciprocal tariffs, you know, where Trump came out with that board of all the countries and all the big percentages, that was within April, right?
I feel like if there is some impact from that, it might not have made it to the March quarter. It might be like the start of this quarter, i.e. the June quarter. I guess it would have been mostly the last week of March would have been.
the only week where it was possible, and at that point, the tariffs were still largely threats, and they hadn't been formally announced yet. And maybe it will have an impact this quarter, but I can't imagine it will be like... tens of millions do you know what i mean like how many people out there have already pulled forward their device purchases because they thought maybe the price of the guy went before apple had even announced the prices were going to change you know
Because if you are one of those people who did buy in advance, you're looking a bit silly at the moment because it looks like they're going to try everything possible not to change prices. I mean, one of the analysts did ask them about pricing strategy. They wouldn't confirm or deny either way, but you can just look at their actions. We're now into the middle of May and there's been no price changes on any of Apple's current product.
And if you look at the estimated tariff impact of 900 million for the quarter, there's not that much money that they're missing, you know? So... If it was, you know, if it was 10 billion impact, then obviously that'd have to flow through to consumer prices. But when it's at the $900 million level, they can kind of just absorb it and have slightly lower profit margin.
Again, this is all on the basis of current tariff policy holding. Anything can happen, quite literally. But so far, it seems like they're going to try and ride it out and not have... prices change. If there is any pull forward, and it doesn't look like there will be, or like you said, if there is, it'll be minuscule, but it will be nothing like what we saw in 2020 when people bought so many more Macs, so many more iPads.
In the early days of COVID and throughout 2020, because A, they were working from home. B, they had stipends from the government, from their employers to buy new stuff to set up their home offices. You had enterprise people buying fleets and fleets of iPads and Macs for their employees for schools. And eventually what we saw and why I think the pull forward aspect is notable.
is because once we got that pull forward demand sustained through 2020 and into 2021, and then we get to 2022 and we start to see big drops in Mac sales, big drops in iPad sales, because that compare is so hard. because you're comparing against an unprecedented time of... A, the economy, and B, demand for Apple products. People that never worked from home before suddenly had to get the equipment they needed to work from home. That was literally tens of millions of iPads and stuff.
And Apple had one of its best quarters ever. Do you remember that? It was like the second quarter of 2020 and the earnings call was like Tim Cook was almost apologizing for their results being so good. He was like, the world's terrible, but we're doing really well and we're sorry. Obviously, some of that benefit was then...
recouped in negative in future quarters in the year you compare when it kind of eased off a bit but they definitely benefited overall. This time I don't think you're going to see that same impact. Like you said, they did kind of demur on the epic issue because they kind of gave the, you know, we're implementing the policy, but we're going to appeal the ruling and we'll see what happens.
They did also get some questions about the Google monopoly case, which is obviously ongoing. And obviously that has the $20 billion a year. profit margin to Apple included in it, and there's some questions about whether they'd lose that amount. Cook didn't say it wasn't a non-issue. Again, he said it's ongoing, hard to predict the outcome, but I think he said something like, there are risk factors.
Yep. Mm-hmm. Which are risks associated with them. Implies some degree of cost coming down the pipe, maybe. Like... They have to be truthful about this, and risk factors does let you have a fair amount of leeway in the amount of impact, but they're obviously concerned about it enough to have to mention it as a risk factor versus it being a non-issue. i also got several questions about apple intelligence
And unprompted, Tim Cook mentioned the delay of the more personal Siri features in his opening remarks. And he just said, With regard to the more personal Siri features we announced, we need more time to complete our work on these features so they meet our high quality bar. We are making progress and we look forward to getting these features into customers' hands.
So still no official timeline on when to expect the features. And he didn't even take a stab at giving a timeline. He didn't even say in the coming year or in the next year. He just said, we're making progress on it. I'm surprised that he addressed it unprompted in those prepared remarks. I kind of expected him to tout the features that were available and then just quickly move forward. But he clearly did have that answer prepared ahead of time.
I do wonder if maybe that's related to the fact that in like the previous quarters they said something to the effect of iPhones sold in regions where Apple intelligence is available sold faster, right? Or there was a bigger uptick than regions where Apple intelligence is unavailable. So they've obviously tried to convey a narrative to the investor community that Apple intelligence helps sell phones.
And look, and I think that the more unsaid side of that was we haven't rolled Apple intelligence to some key markets yet like Europe or China, et cetera, et cetera. And so the implication was maybe they'd get a sales boost. Now that those regions were coming online, obviously iOS 18.4 brought it to Europe. We think it's coming to China maybe with 18.6. Originally it might have been 18.5, but obviously that hasn't happened. I still am skeptical, though, that, like,
Is Apple intelligence really a seller of devices, you know? Does it sell the phones or is it just like... People like iPhones more in the US at the moment, and it happened to be the same place where Apple intelligence was available. Because especially with the new wave of features that have been delayed, so personal context, in-app actions, on-screen awareness,
They're not selling any fewer phones because those features aren't on the iPhone 16. People are not staying in now going, I'm not buying an iPhone 16 because I can't do personal context on my device. It's just a non-factor. It's nice to have. And obviously it would have been better if they'd have kept their original promises. But I don't think it's a meaningful influence or contributor to...
phone sales. It's just like a kind of a distraction. The iPhone 16 sells how much the iPhone 6 is going to sell regardless of any specific AI feature, any specific Apple intelligence feature at least. Maybe if it had a more fully-fledged chatbot or something as part of it that you know like a direct like chat gpd compare or something like that maybe that'd be a bit of a bigger factor in terms of driving phone sales
But the Appentance features that they've done, and even the ones they promised and didn't deliver, I don't think any of them are meaningful enough to make people... fork over their money or not. They're just, yeah, you know. Do you know what I mean? It's just like a, it's not a non-factor, but it's so negligible in the scheme of things. Which that's what we talked about too when we talked about the Siri delays was Apple's not going to lose iPhone sales over this. And I think that attitude was...
Kind of there in the earnings call, later on in the call. Cook was asked again about what led to the delays. And I think what the analyst was getting at was an indirect mention of some of the reporting we've seen about the structure of the siri team some of the behind the scenes drama
John G and Andrea, and then the Siri team being moved to Craig Federighi's domain. Yeah, and the narrative that Apple is ill-equipped to deal with the future and they might be left behind, right? Right. That's more of the investor risk about this AI stuff is that then here and now... Kind of irrelevant, but you go on a slightly longer timeframe.
Maybe Apple doesn't have the expertise, the knowledge, the entrepreneurial spirit to create the next big things that are actually going to matter. And it seems like AI will have some involvement in that and maybe Apple's going to be left behind and the iPhone will suffer in terms of, you know, Apple will suffer in terms of incoming revenue. But for right now, it's kind of like a non-factor.
And Cook's response to that second question later in the call about AI stuff, I understand that Apple earnings calls are almost always useless. They're all about saying a lot of words without really saying anything. They try to answer the analyst questions, but they very clearly have these canned remarks for almost anything that an analyst will ask.
So when this analyst asked what analysts and investors should look at to have a sense on whether Apple can deliver on some of the promises at WWDC of the prior WWDC, And Cook gave the same spiel again about we've shipped Image Playground, we've shipped ChatGPT, Genmoji, Visual Intelligence. All this stuff. And then he went right back into his canned response about the personal Siri features.
And I think even for the low bar of a canned response during an Apple earnings call, there just wasn't enough meat to that statement to give any investor or any analyst, to the degree that it matters, confidence that Apple has.
Confidence that Apple can ship what it promises to ship. And I think, like you said, it goes back to Tim Cook doesn't feel the need to say anything more than that. Because he knows that right now the impact is negligible if it's there at all. But from an outsider's perspective...
you would like a little bit of color, right, into what exactly happened. Yeah, they're not gonna tell you that, though. Yeah, exactly. Pareke did say that You know, they're making significant investments in R&D, trying to counter some of the comments that like...
Apple isn't using its big bank balance to get the investments it needs. He said we're continuing to grow our investment. We're definitely making the investments we think we need to enable our roadmap. So they're saying the words, but you're never going to get the... satiety or the nuance of the inside turmoil or not turmoil from an earnings call. It's just not going to happen.
Even the biggest issue they ever had of recent times was the iPhone XR sales period, where they had that massive fall off. Even then, when they were really against the wall, you never got the full story from the earnings call. It was the behind-the-scenes reporting that really showed the issues or the non-issues at play there. Anything else on earnings?
It was funny at the start when you said, we don't need to go into the details of the numbers, but then you basically give all the numbers that they actually give. That is the sad thing about earnings calls these days for the Apple earnings calls. They stop reporting unit sales, right? So you don't get any context really on which device is doing well. You don't get any comments on mix, you know, of like, is the pro models doing better than the base models? None of that happens.
you just get revenue for hardware divisions. And then for services, you just get one number, which is total service revenue. It's still... It's still- makes me go wild that they get away with only having one number for their division that is their growth division, right? Like hardware, you get the breakdown between wearables and iPad and Mac and iPhone. And then services, which has so many components inside of it, so many disparate businesses.
from the App Store Commission to, you know, the content services, you've got iCloud storage, you've got the Google deal, you know, the search deal. All that gets added up and accumulated into one number that they report. I still can't believe they kind of get away with that. You'd feel like there'd be more investor pressure there for them to break out that number into some sort of subcategories, but clearly they don't have to.
I think when I said I'm not going to get into all the numbers that they announced, my primary thing is not focusing on the individual billion revenue number for each of those categories. At a certain point, it's like... You hear somebody say they made $10.5 billion from product X.
that number without any sort of compare is meaningless, right? Is that up? Is that down year over year? Is that down quarter on quarter? So the year over year numbers is always what I try to focus on because that does give somewhat of a better picture. But even with something like services, Even the year-over-year compare is not a huge help because like you said, we don't have context about what exactly is growing and they love to tout the number of active subscriptions.
And I think even that, they've just been saying more than a billion for like the last year. It's like they don't even give a specific number anymore. It's just, well, more than a billion is basically what they say. Very valuable. Most analysts and investors know that that's referring to App Store subscriptions, like the total number of active subscriptions through Apple platforms. But somewhere out there, there's one guy who's like,
Apple has a billion subscribers to Apple Music and Apple TV. They know how they're phrasing it. They know exactly the angle that they're going for. You have to read between the lines to even get the context of what they're actually referring to as the broader app store. If I was Warren Buffett, that's what I'd want them to be reporting. Like, some...
detail or fine-grained number more than just the total revenue for the services business whether that's you know number of subscribers for their content services or something else you know just something so you can get more color on that number because otherwise it's just so opaque it's so hard to tell like
You know these risk factors they mentioned? How much percentage of that server's number is the risk factors going to impact? You can only kind of vainly guess. I mean we think it's over half but we don't really know. So we're just, it's just, and that's been the state of Apple earnings calls the last 10 years or ever since they stopped reporting unit sales is like,
All the hardware businesses are between minus 5% to plus 5% year over year. And the services business is somewhere between 10% and 20%. And it's literally been that for the last half decade. It kind of all comes to nothing, and the only things that really matter are some of the questions you get around the tariffs and the AI stuff. some more on the apple and epic
injunction, the fallout from that, Apple's appeal of that. So we talked last week about Apple having to update the App Store guidelines per Judge Yovon Gonzalez-Rogers. to allow developers to link out to alternative payment methods without paying a 27% commission, or any commission for that matter. And some of these companies have moved pretty quick on jumping on this app store chain. I guess Spotify was the first one.
The day after the injunction was handed down, they pushed an app update to App Store Review, taking full advantage of the App Store guideline changes. in the new Spotify app, which Apple approved the following day. So no pushback from Apple. Apple didn't try to get cute and delay the update or reject it for some nitpicky detail.
In the new version of Spotify you can see how much something costs including things like pricing for subscriptions and promotions. You can click a link to purchase the subscription of your choice and upgrade from a free account to a premium one. You can change from one premium subscription to another, like going from an individual plan to a family plan. And of course, when you click through that link,
You are not paying through Apple's in-app purchase flow. You're paying directly to Spotify. And notably, that link, you tap it, it takes you to a signed-in page on the Spotify website, so you don't have to... click the link, go to the Spotify website, and go through the sign-in process again.
In my testing with it, you can quite literally tap the link, enter your card information if you need to, and tap pay. There's no added hoops or anything. And Tim Cook doesn't get 27% commission on it. Yep. That is the most important part of it all.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny you say they move quickly. I mean, ultimately, it's not exactly hard technology. It's adding one link, right? And I'm the big, you know, all the companies in the Coalition for App Fairness, which is like Spotify and Epic and others, I'm sure they must have had like
you know, feature flags ready to go for whenever these policies change in various countries. And as long as they're favorable terms, they're just ready to press one button and boom, it's ready to go. And that's why you get these app updates literally submitted. because they've been ready for months. But ultimately, anyone, even if you haven't been preparing.
You don't need much technology or engineering to put a link in, right? It was almost harder before you had to take the link out and tell people to go to the website, or not even be allowed to tell people to go to the website, right? As long as you have a website access to your application, and most apps these days have some sort of web presence.
it's almost a no-brainer, right? You can still offer a purchase if you want to and get the customer benefit of that, but you can also now just have a little link below that says, save 10% or save 20% or just buy online and there's one button and it takes you out to a website. And that freedom is obviously what Apple is worried about in those risk factors.
You know, Spotify and Epic weren't paying Apple any money before. So they're not paying them any more money now either. So, you know, the impact of service revenue is zero on that. But the concern is that if this injunction is upheld long term... All the medium-sized developers will do the same thing, and they'll maybe stop it at offering an app purchase, and they'll just offer on the web, and customers will go there, and Apple won't see a cent of it.
That's the risk factor. Whether you think it's fair or not that Apple is allowed to do that or not is a different question. I kind of still think that at some point there's probably going to be some commission come back through or there's going to be some... Like, I... I don't think the injunction will hold in every form. Apple will appeal it and they'll probably get some.
compromises. Because I feel like the Gonzalez injunction of last week was so open-ended and basically didn't let Apple do anything. that I'm not sure that will hold up forever. And I think Apple's in its appeal even said this is like a punitive restrainment that doesn't really apply. And I can kind of get that argument because it's like...
Obviously, the judge was annoyed that Apple hadn't conformed to her original injunction in 22 and was delaying anything. And I kind of feel like she's gone slightly too far now with this laundry list of basically you're not allowed to do anything at all and it's free reign at 0%. I don't know whether it's going to be the commission rate that gets changed or whether it's some of the rules about the freedoms and the ways that these developers can show these links.
I feel like just something's going to get tweaked to be in at least somewhat Apple's favour, which will make this slightly more of a hard decision for these developers to do, because right now it's literally... You'd be stupid not to do it, right? If you go to a website, just put a link there.
I think over the long term, that might change. I'm not an expert on the law here, but it just feels like maybe what the Gonzalez ruling was was slightly overstepping because she was so angry, you know? And when the appeals court sees it, they'll have to like... actually go back to case law and figure out whatever's actually allowed. Apple's going to say, it's our intellectual property, we have control over it, blah, blah, blah.
I think there will be a meeting somewhere in the middle. It's not going to be as locked down as it was, but I don't think also this current open season is probably not sustainable because Apple's going to fight really hard for it not to be that way. But for now you kind of see We're kind of waiting to see the smaller wave of developers now follow suit, right? Because that's really where Apple's worried about losing all their money.
I think the challenge of the appeals court doing something in this case is going to be tricky because right now we have Spotify, we have Amazon.
with these app updates that are really showing maybe this is how it should have been all along. This works so much better because Spotify and Amazon are the two biggest examples of where the App Store policies were just kind of ridiculous like the fact that you couldn't click a link to buy a book in the amazon app That's the prime example of Apple's rules getting in the way.
prohibiting something that should just be allowed, right? Yeah, it's hard to argue. From a consumer standpoint, there's not really anything to gain from it being locked down, really. Because it's very clear you're going to a website.
you can argue it's slightly less secure and slightly less private than like the biggest thing i see people rebuke with is like i like it so that anything I buy within that purchase, I can then easily cancel by going to one place in settings versus having different payment systems for every single application.
And that is completely true, right, that it is slightly more convenient to have it all in one place in, you know, settings if you're doing everything through an app purchase. But under the current ruling, I think most companies are still going to offer any purchase before this would just be another option. And so you can carry on using any purchase if you want to. And if that condition of user experience was so important to Apple, they would cut their commission prices.
because they could offer convenient cancellation, auto-renewing in one place, privacy and security of the App Store ecosystem. If it wasn't 30%, if it was a low percentage, all these developers would just be using it and we wouldn't have this argument in the first place. And if Apple ultimately cared about user experience over money, they would reduce the commission rate.
Obviously, they're a business, so user experience is important, but so is money. And so they're fighting from the opposite side of the corner. And it's hard to make a favorable PR statement that's basically arguing to not let someone click on a link to buy a book in the Amazon app, in the Kindle app, right?
And Babel's going to try, and I think they'll probably end up getting some sort of something. I don't know what that will be. I think right now it's so open season that it just feels... too much of an overreach, just instinctively, even if it's the most consumer friendly option. I just can't shake the feeling there's going to be some sort of middle ground ultimately being found where maybe Apple can get.
five percent commission or maybe they can force users to have to go through a full screen screen to approve that they're leaving the app to buy and make a purchase or maybe if you're gonna go to the web to make a purchase you also have to offer in that purchase an option even if the net purchase option is more expensive like Right now there's just no conditions at all and it just feels...
If I was betting, I would say this is not where we're going to end up. And still US only, by the way. If I open the Spotify app right now, it basically says, we can't tell you about where to buy this. So for the purposes of this question, let's assume that things stay where we are right now with 0% commission on external links. But you mentioned the risk of the small to medium-sized developers moving. to external purchases entirely and ditching apples in that purchase system.
There are a few things Apple could do to counteract that. The small business program right now is capped at a million dollars a year in revenue. So if you go over that, you go to pay 30% commission. But if you're under a million dollars, you pay. 15% commission. One of the easiest ways for Apple to... lower the App Store commission on an average total basis would just be to raise that floor or something, right? So now, if you make...
under $2 million a year, the number of developers paying 15% increases dramatically, right? Or they can move it to some sort of... graduated structure where your first million is 15% than anything above that is 30%. Because right now, the biggest problem with the small business program is that once you cross over $100 million, And a penny?
You pay 30% on everything. Right now, if you cross over a million dollars and a penny, there's like a cliff where you end up paying more. Yeah, because it's not a progressive tax.
Progressive, yeah, that's what I was looking for. Yeah, it's just a full tax. It's like, all that million that you were paying 50% on, now you're paying 30% on. So yeah, the system's kind of stupid how it's arranged, and that's a very easy way where they could... keep more of the medium-sized developers in the internet purchase land just by giving more of them access to the 15% rate than the 30% rate.
You can also see on subscriptions, right now it's 30% on the first year, 15% on every year after that.
if they get down, if they get pressured, doesn't seem out of the question they could just make it 15% flat on all subscriptions. Yeah. You know, like, obviously it would cost them some money, but it would probably cost them less money than... them getting zero and then people buying through the web instead you know so like They have levers to pull, and all these levers probably see them making slightly less money than the-
their perfect world of no access at all to the web for purchasing. But it's a very big difference to them getting no money at all. I think some of the scaremongering out there is like Apple's entire castle is about to collapse. I don't think that's gonna happen. Through either legal process or Apple competing, right?
They'll lose a little bit, and maybe it goes from $20 billion to $15 billion or something. I don't think it's catastrophic in terms of they're going to start making nothing from the App Store. Ultimately, the competition, there are still customer advantages to InetPurchase. Users like InetPurchase, it is easier. And as long as the commission rates and the structure and the supporting rules around it aren't...
Super prohibitive. A lot of developers will still want to keep using it because it's easy and the conversion rates are quite high. So it's not going to be like, There was some, um... Some pundits were saying, well, Apple's all over. They're never going to make any more money from the 30% cut. And maybe the 30% cut is going away, but maybe it'll be a 20% cut on average. That's kind of where they're going to end up there, I think.
And ultimately, everything we've just talked about, all of the possible solutions or workarounds or whatever you want to call them from Apple's perspective, it is a result of competition. whether this competition stays in its current form as written in the injunction or whether it, if there's a big delta between what external links have to pay in commission versus what in-app purchases have to pay in commission, whatever that delta is.
it's still competition for Apple. And that's something they've never had with in-app purchases. And I think we both touched on things that they could do that they should have done years ago, but that they're now being, their hand's going to be forced to play. Yeah, they mow back against the wall. Yeah. Yeah.
Happy Hour This Week is also sponsored by StoryWorth. StoryWorth guides you along the process of making an emotional, touching memoir about your life, friends and family. Then, at the end of the year, you can get all of your stories printed in a physical book to keep and treasure. In fact, a StoryWorth subscription is a great unique gift idea to give to a parent, like your mum, for Mother's Day. The intimate private process just might reveal family stories that you've never heard told before.
So here's how it works. Each week, Storyworth emails your loved one a memory-provoking question that you can help choose. Things like, did you ever get in trouble at school? Or how did you decide how many children to have? and then your loved one simply replies to their email with their answer. They can type it out, or they can record a voice message over the phone, and StoryWorth will transcribe it.
Now their answers can also be shared with you via email so you can enjoy their ongoing retellings of stories you already know and also be surprised by the stories that you've never told before. And then at the end of the year, Storyworth compiles all the stories and photos into a beautiful hardcover book.
it makes for an incredible keepsake to cherish and revisit. You can easily imagine how it would become a treasured family heirloom that gets passed down generation by generation to reflect upon and relive family memories. I tried it out, and I really love how it can help connect you more closely with your parents and relatives. You can enjoy talking about the answers throughout the year with the scheduled email updates, and then everything's preserved in print and hardback at the end.
I've made photo albums before for family as gifts and StoryWorth is just like that but elevated where everything is just so much more personal and meaningful. And families love StoryWorth. The service has more than 40,000 five-star reviews on Trustpilot and has preserved millions of family stories since the company was founded more than a decade ago. So why not start your own story today? Give all the mums in your life a unique, heartfelt gift you'll all cherish for years. That's StoryWorth.
Right now, save $10 on your first purchase when you go to storyworth.com slash 9to5mac. That's storyworth.com slash 9to5mac to save $10 on your first purchase. Thanks to Storyworth for sponsoring the show. And Happier This Week is also sponsored by Oracle. There's a growing expense eating into your company's profits. It's your cloud computing bill. You may have gotten a deal to start, but now the spend is sky high and increasing every year.
What if you could cut your cloudbow in half and improve performance at the same time? Well, if you act by May 31st, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help you do just that. OCI is a next-generation cloud designed for every workload, where you can run any application, including any AI projects, faster and more securely for less.
In fact, Oracle is a special promotion where you can cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI. The savings are real. On average, OCI costs 50% less for compute and 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking. So join Modal, Skydance Animation and today's innovative AI tech companies who upgraded to OCI and Save.
Offer only for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify for half-off at oracle.com slash happy hour. That's oracle.com slash happy hour. Thanks to Oracle for sponsoring the show. A couple of new stories about the iPhone 17, the iPhone 18, and Apple's overall broader iPhone strategy in the coming couple of years because apparently there are some changes.
Both the information and Ming-Chi Kuo reported over the weekend that Apple is going to switch to a... staggered release calendar for the iPhone lineup starting with the iPhone 18. So the iPhone 17 coming this fall will be the same cadence we've always had since what the iPhone... 4S. 4S, yeah. Where they release in September. Entire lineups available in September. This September, that means the 17, the 17 Air, the 17 Pro, and the 17 Pro Mac.
But going forward, both Quo and the information say that we can expect the flagship iPhones to be released in the fall, followed by the entry-level iPhones in the following spring. so in the case in the case of the iphone 18 lineup that means in the fall of 2026 We would get the iPhone 18, the iPhone 18, or sorry, we'd get the iPhone 18 Air, the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and the foldable iPhone that's expected to launch next year.
Then in the spring of 2027, we'd get the base model iPhone 18e and the iPhone 18. So roughly we'd be looking at six months between the launch of the flagship phones and the cheaper phone. Both Quo and the information give a handful of different reasons for why Apple is making this change. There's a marketing component of it where Apple can focus all of its marketing on the flagship phones in the fall without those phones overshadowing the cheaper models.
There's a competitive aspect of it. Samsung and a lot of other of Apple's smartphone competitors released their phones in the first half of the year. There's a production aspect of it where Apple can focus on manufacturing and production of the flagship phones without having to allocate any of its production lines to the cheaper phones. A lot of reasons for this. And I guess the problem it would solve is the fact that it seems in recent years
And you can say this is a problem or not a problem. The Pro and the Pro Max are the best-selling iPhones. Yeah, I mean, the Pro ones they make the most money on. So why do they want to delay? the launch of the cheaper phones is because they don't want people to even have the option to buy the flag the latest I found an a lower price point
So the operational argument makes a lot of sense, right? So rather than having huge factory capacity that has to have a big peak around the fall and then is less, is it underutilized for the remainder of the year? By having bigger launches spread out, it means they can have less factory capacity in total, but it'll be running close to full capacity the whole year round, so you're basically smoothing out the curve, right?
So that makes a lot of sense, especially in light of these plans to move production to other countries, right? Because then you don't need as big an output in India if you're only releasing less phones at the same time, for instance. So that part of the equation makes a lot of sense to me.
The marketing side is a bit less clear because the Samsung does release flagship phones in the first half of the year, but then they'd be going up against the... the base model phones from apple right so it's not like a one-to-one comparison um and in some ways it's kind of weird that the
the pro phones of the same generation would be coming first, right? Rather than, like, the base model phones launch of the base model iphone 18 coming in the spring and then the pro phones coming in the fall of the same year instead the pro phones launch and then the base model phones launch months after almost like an afterthought
That maybe worries that people that might have bought an iPhone 18-based model might then think, well, it's out of date because the iPhone 18's already came out six months ago. Maybe I'll wait for the next. Do you know what I mean? The marketing argument's a lot. Murkier, I would say.
maybe there's maybe you can the overshadowing is the best thing you can say where like maybe there's customers out there who are in an upgrade a time to upgrade but then they only see advertising for the phones that are over a thousand dollars and they're like well they're too expensive i'm going to keep waiting and maybe they miss the base model phones a bit more in that configuration um i think the best argument for having to do this It's just they're going to be more fun models than ever.
Right? Yeah. Because you've got the Pro, the Pro Max, the Air, and the Foldable, and the E, and the base model. Right? Six. Yeah, so you've gone from four to six. And they've already started the E off in the spring, right? So really the difference here would be moving one more model of phone from the full to the spring instead, i.e. the base model phone, which is the cheapest one that is in the E, right?
And so I think that's the biggest reason for them to do this, is just that it doesn't make sense for them to launch so many models of phones in one month's span. Because you already see it with the review units, right? Like, what gets the most... talked about stuff when that September, late September period comes around where all the review embargoes lift. It's the pro phones, right? The base model phones kind of get short shrift.
and so if you split them up you can have more like You can have reviewers aren't belaboured with six models of phones to review all at the same time. Because basically, right now, how many phones do they have launched in the fall? Four, right? If you add the foldable, that'll be five, but then you're subtracting the base model iPhone, so you're back down to four. So they're still going to be launching four phones in the fall. and then we're going from one phone launch in the spring to two.
So I think when you just do it based on numbers, the counts start to line up a lot more. And it's like, how many different models of phone can they possibly launch in the same one month span? They clearly think they've hit their limit. And so they're just going to move one more model out, you know, months later.
i don't even want to get into what this means for the older iphones that apple continue to sell because then it gets really confusing oh what like when does the iphone 18 stop being sold like the base model iphone 18 the iphone so if in spring of 2020 or sorry fall of 2026 you have the 18 pro pro max foldable air Do you keep the 17 in the lineup, I guess, at its same price point? Then it sticks around until the 18 and the 18e?
then the 17 moves down a slot, it makes the whole keep older iPhones in the lineup approach that has been the hallmark of Tim Cook's management of the iPhone lineup even more confusing. But from what you said, it does make a lot of sense from a marketing perspective, purely in the fact of reviews and making sure the cheapest iPhones don't get swept under the rug.
the production flattening out the production that makes a lot of sense and you can see from an earning slash business perspective or that also might have the effect of not only flattening out production but also ensuring that you have
a bump to iPhone sales in the spring, too. Although then presumably the fall would be slightly lower. From an optics perspective, it depends on what analysts are looking for, I guess. Would they rather see the more sustained year-round demand with a smaller bump in September? Or would they rather take it all in September and have lower numbers throughout the rest of the year? Yeah, have a bigger photo for the spring. I don't know.
two in one and two in the other. It's kind of irrelevant. The main driver for me on this is the production argument makes a lot of sense. Smooth out the curve. Don't have a massive peak of six models all at the same time at the end of the year. try and make the production more efficient, and the fact that right now you have four phones launching in the fall under this new calendar schedule with the addition of more models.
You have to move some phones out of that time period, but you still have four phones launching in the fall. It makes total sense that six phones in the same month is not a strategy that Apple wants to employ, because it doesn't make a lot of sense for so many different reasons.
You could even make the argument that maybe the folder will come out at a different time of the year compared to the others, you know, like, because it kind of feels like a different model of device. But obviously they're going for keep the premium phones in the fall and take the base models to the spring. I mean, if you're going to pair the 18e with anything else, I guess it makes the most sense to do it with the iPhone 18, right? Yeah.
This is a potential endorsement to the fact that Apple thinks the e-strategy is working, because we don't even know whether people are buying the iPhone 16e. It's still such a new product, but apparently Apple has committed to multiple years of making a quote-unquote e-phone.
and is shifting its launch schedule under the assumption that people will be buying that quote-unquote e-phone. All I know is that we've, as I've said in the past when we've talked about these future iPhone plans, things are about to change, and that's at least good for the hashtag content of it all. It'll give us something to talk about year-round instead of just everything in September. There's a lot of exciting changes coming to the iPhone. Yep, in the next...
Two years. The information also says that the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max will have a hole punch cut out in the top left corner for the front-facing camera. So that would be... when face id moves under the screen itself so the only Cut out on the screen you'd need us for that front-facing camera.
and rather than to center it in the middle of the display, the information says Apple's going to move it to the top left corner. This one's weird, and that's for the 2026 phones. Yes, the 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max. and maybe the foldable. I don't know. Well, the foldable is said to be so thin it won't get Face ID, right? Oh, that's right. It's supposed to have Touch ID. Yeah, on the side. But they can still put the camera on the top left, I guess. Yeah.
symmetry top left camera hmm see i could see where it's either purely a design decision or there's something with moving Face ID under the screen and Face ID needing to be centered. that they just don't have the room to put the camera there. So that's what's getting, that's the compromise they're making to get Face ID under the screen. So if I, yeah. The other.
potential side effect or question mark around all of this is what it means for the dynamic island because honestly the dynamic island has become such a central feature to the iphone experience and it's something i mean i know i love the dynamic island
I use it for the Apple Sports app. I use it for Uber Eats or Uber, all kinds of stuff, weather. If you were to lose the Dynamic Island, that's a trade-off that I'm not sure a lot of people would be willing to make just to have a... screen that's less interrupted with cutouts because right now
It's hard to even know that the dynamic island is an actual cutout in your phone. Apart from when it's permanently there, when nothing's in the island, right? Yeah. The blank, rounded rectangle. I mean, my position has been, even when we get to the... iphone that has no cutouts at all physical cutouts they could still do a dynamic island when there's stuff to show that right yeah
the status bar could just move to the side and then the black the black expanse the island can't come up or they could come up with a different like visual treatment for it where right now it's obviously designed to cover up physical cutouts so it is a full black design
maybe they could change the way the notifications display in that region, right? To make it integrated a bit more with a white background or, you know what I mean? Like it doesn't have the same exact aesthetics if it's no longer constrained by the physical hardware.
if they're just moving the car to the top left of the screen maybe the island just moves the top left too and when you get you know when you get a sports um live activity it just goes from left to right rather than going from the center that'd be the most You know, stupidly obvious way to solve it. Yeah, that's true. But I'm not 100% sure why they'd want to put the camera to the corner rather than just keeping it in the middle.
Because for symmetry reasons, isn't it nicer to be centred than off in the left-hand side? But it would be different. Maybe they're just doing it to make it a bit different, you know? So it's either different or, like I said, it's a compromise they're making to get. Face ID under the display, which they think is worth it for whatever reason. I mean, I think it's worth it to make the car smaller. Yeah.
Even if it means the cutout is in an awkward location. Yeah, probably. And you know what makes me think? You know what they just did with the... the last update where the um microphone and camera lights like now in their own little separate island on the right hand side yeah Like, it'll be that, but it'll just be a camera hole. Which would be quite funny.
I think if you took it to the top left corner rather than the middle, it would look weird for a month and then people would get used to it probably. And it's like, oh, it's always up in the top left now. And the time just moves to the, maybe the time goes to the middle instead, you know, in the status bar. rather than the time being on the left hand side. It is going to be weird when you're either taking selfies or on a FaceTime call or something.
Because right now, especially on a FaceTime call, you tend to be looking at the center of the screen where the camera is centered, but above you. So you're never making eye contact with the camera directly.
This is going to be even weirder when you're looking at the center of the screen and the camera's getting like a partially side angle view of you or something. Because remember the feature they rolled out where they would like mess with your eyes to make it look like you're looking at the camera oh yeah the facetime will make eye corrections yeah Did they keep that? I can't remember. I think they got rid of it. Or they at least definitely turned it off by default.
Okay, it's still in the settings. It is. Establish natural eye contact while on FaceTime. It's still there. And at least for me, it's turned on. Wow, okay. People did not like it. I know that much. Yeah, that was pre-AI hatred as well. It was just... some transformation to the camera fade was rejected. I think they said it used ARKit or something to do it, but that was iOS 13. So yeah, they're going to develop a more robust version of that, update the AR models too.
shift your head a little bit to the right and down. By then, the personas will be so advanced, they can just use personas on the iPhone too. You don't need the actual front facing camera. Then back to the information for some more on the 17 air. They say that the battery life is going to be a significant compromise. Which completely contradicts.
An earlier report from Bloomberg which said that Apple wasn't willing to compromise battery life to make the phone thinner. So we have two conflicting reports. But the information report has enough detail that I'm inclined to side with it. Maybe Apple didn't want to compromise battery life, but when they actually came down to making the thing, they realized it's going to have slightly worse battery life. As the information says, the percentage of users who can go a single day without recharging.
The iPhone 17 Air will be between 60% and 70%, but for other iPhone models, that metric is between 80% and 90%. Only 60% of people being able to use a phone without charging it in the middle of the day. That's not great at all. But it sounds like Apple has a solution. They want you to put a phone case on with a built-in battery. The information says Apple's developing this optional accessory meant for the 17 error. That's a case that also contains a battery pack.
Sounds familiar, right? Also known as a thicker phone. Known as a thicker phone and also known as an accessory Apple made years ago that it stopped making for whatever reason. And also, notably, not a MagSafe battery pack, but a case. with the built-in battery. So like the iPhone 11 smart case, smart battery case, not like the MagSafe battery pack that Apple sold with the iPhone 12 through the iPhone 14. But yeah, or you could just buy the thicker phone.
Yeah, see, last week I was saying this is probably the phone I was going to buy, right? Yeah, now you're doubting it. But now I'm questioning myself. I like being able to go through one day on a single charge. And I don't know if I'm in the 40% bracket that uses the phone so much that I won't be able to do that. This is going to be a hard year to buy a phone. I might have to wait for reviews and stuff before I choose what I'm going to buy.
You need a phone for during the week when you don't leave the house, so that can be the 17 Air, and then you need your weekend phone, and that can be the 17 Pro. Fabulous. Weekday, weekend. And then in 2027 and 2026, I can sell them both and buy the foldable. Yep, exactly. Yeah. With its two and a half grand price. Now this is going to be a really weird year. I don't know what I'm going to do. I know I'm going to be drawn to the 17 era because
As we talked about last week, those dummy units look so good. They look so good. Battery life. I've been saying for years that battery life is... bad on the iPhone, and it's not a space that we've seen enough work on Apple's end to improve it. we saw the 15 was a honestly a pretty big regression from the 14 and then the 16 i think got us back to where we were with the 14. yeah with its improved thermals and the a18 chip and all that
Now with the 17 air, we're going to go back to, what, battery life of, like, the iPhone 5 or something? I thought I meant the iPhone 5, but yeah, I know what you mean. Gonna go back multiple years, it sounds like. But it'll be thin. And also, did you see Garman's little comment in Power On where he was like, And the 17 Pro will have a remarkable camera system. It's like, oh. That's referring to what all three lenses being 48 megapixels, I think. I guess so, yeah.
Or you can buy the 17 Air with a single camera and slap your big battery case on it. When you put it like that, it's not a compelling selling. It's a compelling product. Yeah, how big would a battery case make it, you know, in terms of thickness? Like, I'm clear. I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. Then Cole also says we'll get the 18 air as expected in 2026. Then the 19 air will have a bigger screen.
Current iPhone 17 air rumors say it'll have a 6.6 inch screen, which places it between the Pro and the Pro Max. Logic would tell you that the 19 error will just unify the lineup at 6.9 inches. which German in March said Apple originally intended or wanted the right slim device to be 6.9 inches, but because of
bending issues and they didn't want to replicate bendgate, they compromised on the six-point section size. So you can quite reasonably imagine that they went back to the drawing board after getting the first version out the door. to try and work on a way to get the bigger screen they originally wanted to do, but with the same thinness. So now I know the answer to your problem. you need to buy the 17 air or the 18 air but probably the 17 air because once we get to the 19 air
The phone will be too big for you to want to use because you don't want a 6.9-inch screen. I really don't like the Pro Max size. You were even saying last week you weren't sure about the 6.6-inch screen. I know. Well, I'm currently on the 6.1-inch phone, which is basically the same size as the 6.3-inch phones, right? because they made the bezel smaller and they made it slightly marginally bigger. But the jump from the Pro to the Pro Max is pretty substantial.
And the Pro Max used to be 6.7, it's only recently on to 6.9, right? So 6.7, it isn't that much different to 6.6. So, oh, this earphone, it's a quandary, it's a quandary. Or was it the information report that said Apple is, even Apple, is facing a quandary with it because they don't know how many people are going to buy it? So they're dedicating 10% of production of the iPhone 17 lineup to the Air. And the factories are supposedly like...
ready to either take on more or take on other models if the mix works out differently, because they just don't know how popular it's going to be. It all depends on whether Benjamin Mayo gives a resounding endorsement of the 17th in September, and if he does, they fire up the other production line. Well, they've never given me review units before, so I'll be reading the reviews and seeing what other people say and then I'll have to roll the dice, I guess.
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. Each and every week with bonus content at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I'm on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At VZMA. All right, thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.