So, Mayo, we've had some problems with the roof on our house recently. We've had some water coming in. And they say water is the enemy of the homeowner. The good news is, and the thing I've been very grateful about during all of this process, is that we are renting. We don't own the house, so I just... send a little message in the app and the company sends somebody out to fix it. And they came out last week and it was this older guy and this younger guy.
And the older guy, we have like a rooftop deck. So we were up on the deck and he crawled under the stairs to like get under the deck and get under the stairs and see what was happening. And he's down there, and he's using the younger guy's iPhone as a flashlight to look around and see what's going on. And then he's like, all right, I need to take a picture of this. How do you take a picture on this thing?
And the younger guy goes, well, it's the new iPhone. So on the right side, the bottom right side, there's a button. Just press the button and it'll take a picture. Referring to the camera control, obviously. Oh, it's so funny. The first real world. instance of somebody bragging about the camera control that I'm seeing. I love. He had to ask, how do you take a picture from this thing? He had to. Even pre-camera control.
from the lock screen there's a button on the screen for the camera you can swipe for the camera if there's a lot you could open the camera app you know there's a million different ways you can get to the camera app and it's still not ingrained in people's heads so all these options are here and now the phone has a physical camera button and not only is that kind of like an alien concept when
You can find Android phones going back a decade with dedicated camera buttons. It's then seen as like a cool thing. It's like, wow, there's a dedicated button to open the camera. And secretly you can swipe on it and do all this random stuff too. a headline feature you can press the button and the camera opens like wow and it's so funny you like overheard that going on
That's where I was expecting the conversation to go for the older guy to get in the camera app, but then it starts swiping around on the button and just for all hell to break loose. Why is your camera zooming in? But once he was in the camera app too, he was like, all right, now I need to turn the flash on. And I was like, oh God, because anybody who's used the camera app knows that like, you can't just tap the flash button in the upper left corner to turn the flash on now. It's always...
It wants you to use night mode by default, right? To actually force the flash to come on, you have to swipe up and tap on that control. and the bottom panel, you know, where it's like auto, off, or on.
I don't know if he ever got to flash working, but I guess he did take some pictures because he crawled out from under there. I think we spoke about it in the show a few episodes ago with my mum's issues taking pictures at night or whatever with the camera and the flash turning off constantly because, like...
I think there's a lot of smoke now that the camera app's going to get a big redesign this year. But I don't think, even though night mode's so important... and useful it feels a bit punitive that the when you tap on the flash in the top left it goes from auto to off you know yeah i kind of feel like it should open a little tri-state menu where you can do off, on or auto instead you have to go to the burrow down swipe button.
Because I know the flash, you should try and avoid using pictures with the flash at all costs. But out of all of the answer-y functionality in the camera app, the flash is pretty high up there. And if you're going to have the button on the screen in the first place,
Just let people have access to the three options rather than toggling it off. I really don't think it's obvious that tapping it, because obviously if you're just sitting there with it in your hand, it's just like an outlined icon, right? That's white. And so it almost feels like tapping it would like make it light up and turn on, not put a slasher and turn off. So yeah, the flash behavior has always been a bit unintuitive.
And the funniest part was he was under the stairs and he had the flashlight on. And when you have the flashlight on and then you open the camera app. the flashlight goes off so he's like where did the flashlight go now i need to turn the flash on it was a mess and now all he's trying to do is like it's the perfect situation for when you do want to use the flash he's just trying to get a picture of
some crap that's clogging up a pipe or something. He doesn't need a beautiful night mode, perfect picture. Just a very weird and very funny interaction. Yeah, it shouldn't be this hard to take a picture with a flash turned on. Our next topic, I wasn't sure if we were going to talk about, and you put it in the show notes, so we're going to talk about it a little bit. I feel like you've got to mention it at least a little bit. Yeah, it's so dominating at the moment.
As much as it's hit the headlines globally, so far Apple's been pretty mum, at least publicly, on it, right? Yeah. So this is the tariffs, the Trump tariffs that he announced last Wednesday. And when he, so his announcement, I'll just give the quick headline overview of five, or on April 5th. Because it will probably change by the time the episode goes out.
On April 5th, a 10% baseline tariff kicked in on all imports in the United States. On April 9th, the tariffs that Trump has tried to claim are reciprocal kicked in. So under these reciprocal tariffs, we had China being hit with a 54% total tariff, India being hit with a 27% tariff, and Vietnam being hit with a 46% tariff.
And the reasons I highlight those three countries in particular is because those are Apple's three primary partners, the three countries where Apple products are manufactured. Yeah, most Apple manufacturing happens in those three countries. Then, I guess it was Tuesday, Trump said that China had put a retaliatory tariff on the United States, so he was putting another 50% tariff on the United States, so we're up to 104% as of Tuesday.
Then we fast forward to Wednesday, the April 9th, the day that all of these tariffs were set to officially kick in. And Apple stock kind of, you know, stocks globally, it'll collapse through this stuff. I think Apple was down 20% or something ridiculous in the lead up to this. Then yesterday, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was putting a 90-day pause on tariffs from most countries. but only on the reciprocal tariffs. So that 10% baseline tariff is still in effect.
But for China in particular, we've gone from 104% to now we're at 125% on imports from China. This whole situation is a mess and there's a whole lot of politics to it that I don't think we should get into. But from an Apple perspective... We had a report from the Times of India that said Apple was racing to fill freight airplanes full of iPhones to get them out of China and India.
As soon as possible, before these tariffs kicked in. To try and give a buffer so they can sell phones at normal costs before they have to start importing at higher prices. And Times of India said that Apple flew five planes full of iPhones in just three days during the final week of March. To me, those are just the planes of the Times of India heard about. You have to imagine that Apple shipped a lot more planes in between that final week of March and...
April 5th or whenever the first round of 10% tariffs kicked in. Yeah, I mean, you can fit a lot of iPhones on a plane, but Apple also sells a lot of iPhones in a day. So five planes worth of phones is probably what, like a week's buffer? It's not very much. I mean, it's better than zero days, but... Yeah, Ryan Jones on Twitter did some rough math, and he estimated that it was about 12 days worth of inventory on those five planes.
It doesn't sound like a lot, but I think what Apple is trying to do here is buy its time to delay. the possibility of price increases on the iPhone until Trump inevitably backtracks on the China tariffs altogether or gives Apple an exemption. Yeah, and the fact that he reverted on the reciprocal tariff thing this week.
dramatically increase the chances that there's gonna be exemptions for companies like apple for chinese you know trade even if the headline tariff on china quote unquote sticks around i think the the likelihood of exemptions coming for apple has gone up a lot There's been nothing official yet, but it just seems... way more likely than it did a week ago you know um and so apple's got let's say a two-week buffer somewhere
Maybe that's enough time for them to stave off having to import any phones at inflated prices. Because the 10% worldwide tariff, let's just assume there's no exemptions on that. Apple can probably just stomach that if they really had to, you know? Yeah. Because the tariff applies to the import cost. It doesn't apply to the retail price, right? So a $1,000 iPhone, the tariff isn't $100. It's like... You know, the phone costs $500 to import because that's the sum cost for the manufacturing parts.
And so, you know, if the 10% tariff is about $50, Apple's margins are pretty damn healthy. If it really gets down to the wire, they can absorb those tariffs and then maybe also redirect.
and import components from other places, you know, upgrade, you know, and move more stuff from India or other places. Like, they're a huge operational giant and Tim Cook's great operations. A 10% tariff you know their gross margin goes from 46 to 45 if they are really after you know so right but the 104 tariff stuff is where it gets ridiculous and they can't manage that and they can't you know bear that that would have to
fall over onto the end price to the customer if that was actually forced onto them, if they had to pay that amount. But I just don't think anybody really thinks that's going to happen unless you see the stock price surge back up again by like 15%. So it's not as high as it was two weeks ago, but it's rapidly getting closer back to it. So I think Apple's kind of judged that...
We'll just stay mum. We won't increase prices in anything. And hopefully, by the time we actually need to, the exemptions will be there so we can just carry on as normal. If not, then yeah, they will have to change prices eventually if everything runs dry and the tariffs aren't removed. I think what's probably going to happen is the tariffs will disappear. And Trump said as much yesterday, he said he's looking at exemptions for some US companies.
Obviously, you can't necessarily take him at his word on any of this, just given the whiplash of decisions we've had in the past week alone. The one argument that Tim Cook made during Trump's first term, and what I think ultimately won Apple the exemptions on iPhone imports when Trump was putting tariffs on,
China imports then. Yeah, this was around 2018. Yeah, this was Tim Cook saying that, look, we're an American company who imports phones from China. We now have to pay this tariff on our imports, but Samsung, a South Korean company. who imports phones from South Korea to America, doesn't have to pay any sort of tariffs. So you're putting an American company at a disadvantage in the very competitive high-end smartphone industry.
And that argument is seemingly what won Trump over in 2018. And you've got to imagine that Tim Cook's been on the phone all week with Trump and Trump advisors and everybody saying, look, look, look, this is why we need an exemption. This is how we're being unfairly targeted by this. And the question is whether eventually he gets through to Trump and whether eventually Trump's like, okay, Tim, that makes sense. And like you said, I think it's going to happen at some point.
Apple just has to have the inventory on hand to stave off price increases for the iPhone. Apple's other products, though, in particular the Mac, my prediction has been that the Mac will see price increases sooner rather than later, sooner than the iPhone. For a couple of reasons. The first being that Apple just doesn't keep as much Mac inventory on hand as it does iPhone inventory. And second, if you look at Apple.com and you do pretty much any build to order configuration of a Mac.
so you buy a macbook air you soup it up with two terabytes of storage 24 gigabytes of memory. Once you've placed that order, that computer's not coming from an Apple warehouse in the United States. That computer's gonna ship straight from China to your doorstep. Don't they make, like, um, MacBooks and, like, Vietnam and stuff now?
I was researching that. I think they considered or tried to move some Mac production to Vietnam and it didn't work. And now they're pretty much exclusively back to making the Mac in China. Okay. I think it's AirPods and... Apple watch some of those models are made in Vietnam
but the Mac is entirely China right now. That'd be interesting then. If you look at Apple's margins though on some of those upgrade parts like what they charge you for two terabytes of storage versus what Apple actually pays for two terabytes of storage. it does have an incredible amount of margin in those prices. So maybe the price increases on those upgrades would be negligible. Because they can eat those price increases better than they can on the iPhone, where they...
quote-unquote, only have a 60% margin or whatever. Yeah, but you still got, like, the base price from the base, like, $9.99 or whatever. You know, AppWire has healthy margins and things, but you can't. A healthy margin does not compete with a 100% tariff on the build cost, you know. So if that was actually, if that's actually going to happen, the price would have to rise.
I'm pretty sure somewhere there'll be conversations going on that that won't happen. Or if it does, it'll happen very briefly, you know, so someone can put their stake in the ground and say, hey, look, look what we did, and now we've come into the quote-unquote negotiation table or whatever, and it's getting repealed. I think we saw comments this week from the White House Press Secretary that Trump firmly believes that Apple can just
pick up and start making iPhones in the United States right away. And he specifically is fixated on Apple's $500 billion investment thing where... I think it was February they announced they'll invest $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. That four-year timeline is pretty obvious as to who they were targeting with that announcement.
But Apple's press release for that makes no mention whatsoever of iPhone production or iPhone assembly. It's like, what is it? It's research and development. They're going to make private cloud computers and servers in Houston, apparently. The TV Plus production budget includes $500 billion, by the way. That's a good one. Yeah. No mention of iPhone production. Production in America of iPhone is not gonna happen. Full stop. Even if they started tomorrow.
It would take a decade before they could even make iPhones at scale in America. I mean, look how long it took them to start making them in India, you know, a country where there is you know, questionable human rights obligations and pricing and costing everything is way lower. And it still took them like five to seven years to actually get India production up at scale. The US is entirely... entirely a whole new thing altogether. If they wanted to, they could invest to make factories in the US.
But the price of the products that would come out the other end would be double, triple. At that point, you might as well pay the 104% tariff, you know, like, it, it, right. The tariff has to go to like 500% for it to make any sort of remote sense. Yeah, and it would take a decade for them to be able to build up and ramp up the production. Like, you can't do it overnight. in 10 years time who knows who's in what administration is in charge and whatever else is going on so the most Apple has
ever produced in the US is the Mac Pro, the 2019 Mac Pro, right? And the 2013 Mac Pro. An incredibly low volume product that also sells for an incredibly high price. And even doing that, there was trials and tribulations.
you know, up the wazoo and they couldn't even find screws that they needed in the US and they had to import all sorts of stuff. And like, you know, that's the only thing they've actually been able to pull off to any reasonable degree. And it's their lowest volume, most expensive product. the iphone sells more in a day than they probably ever sold with a mac pro you know like it's like the scale is ridiculous so The iPhone is way off the table.
If you wanted to, maybe they could make some other map models in the US, but again, the cost profile is huge and there's just no interest in doing it. So what you're seeing is them diversifying other countries where labour is cheaper and production is cheaper. That's why you've got India and Vietnam in addition to China.
And so maybe they can expand on those things. That's probably what they would turn to. Let's say the China tariffs persisted, which I don't think is going to happen, but imagine they did. It's probably more sensible for them to... invest in factories in India than it is invested in factories in the US. Because India right now only accounts for 10 to 15% of iPhone production.
China still accounts for the vast majority, so that's the obvious place to go where you have at least some of the infrastructure is India. Yeah, and even pre-tariff, Apple was really keen on diversifying iPhone production because of the disruption to production they saw during the COVID lockdowns, right? and the earlier tariff wars, trade wars of the previous administration in 2018. So they were already on this path, but, you know...
You can't click your fingers and expand production in India either. It takes a very, very, very long time. And I think only with the iPhone 16 was like, The iPhone 16 was being built in India at the same time as being built in China for launch. Like, only literally last year was the launch iPhone model being produced in India as well as China.
And they've been making older phone models in India for like five years, if not longer. This thing's a very, very slow. You know, you can't build iPhones at scale overnight. Impossible. And something else I don't think the people in power realize is that Apple assembles iPhones in China and India. But the parts come from everywhere. They come from Taiwan, South Korea, China, Japan. They come from everywhere. The best argument Apple has for US production is TSMC.
chip design you know they're bringing factories up and they can start saying the engine of the iPhone is built in the US they can refer to Corning Glass and stuff like that but assembly is But, you know, that's the India, China, Vietnam stuff. The last thing I'll say on this is that it is interesting. Like, you used to... Kind of pointed out at the start of this conversation, but it is interesting that Apple has been so silent on this and Tim Cook has been so silent on this. One, if there is.
Any company that has the power, the ability to kind of come out and light a fire under the decision makers in this situation, it's Apple. And even yesterday when Trump announced this 90-day pause on the reciprocal tariffs for every place but China. The thing he said in an interview is that he saw Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase Bank here.
on Fox News talking about his concerns about the bond market and the stock market in response to all of this. And that's what ultimately lit the fire under Trump to issue that 90-day delay. You have to imagine that there's something keeping Apple and Tim Cook quiet on this. There's some reason they don't want to go public.
Say, look at what we'll have to do if these 125% tariffs on China remain in place. Look at what we as an American company will have to do. And I was curious, I was wondering yesterday if Apple has ever sort of... Not tried to pump up the stock market or really pump up the economy too much, but I was looking particularly in regards to COVID. And yeah, in 2020, Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer, went on Fox News and was like, I think the economy's gonna come back stronger than ever.
There were reports Tim Cook was on the phone to Donald Trump saying we're going to see a V-shaped recovery from COVID. Very clearly doing what Apple felt they had to do to say we're going to come out okay. We're going to recover from this. Apple's going to recover this. We're going to be stronger than ever. Whereas right now, we just kind of have crickets, and that's interesting. It's interesting, too, in the context of...
just Tim Cook and Apple's relationship with Trump. Like, is there a piece of fear driving their decision to stay quiet? Yeah, because in the past, Cook hasn't shied away from cooperating very publicly with Trump, right? Yeah, yeah. And so this has been a bit of an exception. And obviously they do everything very tactically. So I guess we'll just see how it unfolds. But as is.
It seems to be going in their direction, right? Because, you know, most of the reciprocal tariffs are now gone away and you only need them to announce an exemption for Apple and then they don't have to say anything and put themselves in the firing line at all if that just comes out naturally. So maybe that's what they're banking on.
I guess the next time we know that we'll have to make a public statement of some kind is the next quarterly earnings call, which I think is the 1st of May. So a few weeks. Yeah. Who knows what the tariff situation is like. It's going to change every day until now. But so far, I feel like Apple's... Compared to two weeks ago, they're probably sleeping a lot more comfortably because it seems to be going in that direction.
All I know is I would absolutely love to be a fly on the wall inside Tim Cook's office for the past two weeks. Yep. He's probably had some crazy conversations. Happy Hour This Week is 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 your stories printed in a physical book to keep and treasure.
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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. So we have another new piece of immersive video content for Apple Vision Pro I wanted to talk about quickly. This is the VIP Yankee Stadium Tour. It's immersive video.
But before I talk about that specifically, I just wanted to, I told you this in private mail, but I put Vision Pro on last weekend to watch this and watch the studio. But my allergies have been really bad recently. They've just been... the springtime they're acting up so my sinuses hurt
So I put Vision Pro on and I basically had to bail out after like five minutes because I was putting so much pressure on my sinuses that it was unbearable. Like on the bridging nose and stuff? Yeah. It's an example of how... I love Vision Pro. I think I like and use Vision Pro more than a lot of people. But there's no denying that in order to use it, it kind of has to be like... The perfect storm of everything being just right.
Like, there's one little thing that doesn't work right, and you just don't want to use it. It's too big of a headache to use. It might give you a headache if you use it at the wrong time of day or something. Yeah, I mean, wearables are like that, right? Even for the Apple Watch. I wear the Apple Watch every single day.
But when I'm super ill and you're shivery and cold or sweaty or whatever, I don't put the watch on because it just feels bad on the wrist or whatever you just want to be like sluggled up with nothing in there and you know it doesn't feel like getting the bad or sweaty is worth it for anything and you know it just makes your hand feel cold or your arm you know the back of your palm feel cold or whatever with the metal on it like um so wearables have that thing where
When you are kind of sick or ill, you kind of don't want to talk to them. That isn't really feasible for your main computing devices, like your phone, right? So as we keep going forward into the future and more and more stuff is becoming wearable. Like I was thinking about, you know, if they ever did an AR glasses to replace the iPhone.
What if you are a bit ill or whatever and then you don't want to put your glasses on necessarily? It's just a weird dimension that we haven't really had to... conga before and with the with the watch is more accessory right like you don't have to put it on and it's not really you know you don't have to use it but
the vision pro is closer to something where it's like you wanted to watch this immersive content but you were literally disrupted by you know your personal physique being a bit unwell and then this whole $3,000 computer is then unpleasant to use immediately. Yeah, it's just a funny factor. But the VIP Yankee Stadium video itself, it's so good it's incredible i said this last time about the metallica thing
And it's kind of similar to where I'm not a Yankees fan, but I am a baseball fan. And in the case of Metallica, not really a Metallica fan, but I love music, I love concerts. It's similar to that. But the thing about the VIP Yankee Stadium tour is that... You have to be a baseball fan to appreciate it because it's very methodical in how it's shot. It kind of...
moves you around Yankee Stadium from different points. You might be in the stands for something, you'll be in the dugout, you'll be in the locker room or the clubhouse. You just kind of move around. And there's not much action happening except for some clips from a Yankees-Dodgers game that they kind of intermix with all of it. There's just not much happening, so you have to appreciate.
just being plopped down in this spot in Yankee Stadium and being able to look around, listen to the narration, and accept that there's not much happening, but you're just getting an unprecedented 180-degree look at... a baseball stadium a baseball clubhouse a dugout whatever it struck me how different it is than a lot of the other immersive video stuff
And for the most part, that's really good because one of the things we've criticized with immersive video in the past is just the number of cuts. It's also fast-paced. They put you down somewhere, and you start to look around, and then, boom, you're going somewhere else. You're going to go look at something else.
That's not really a thing with this. And it was really cool just to see that more documentary style, very methodical approach to something immersive. So it's more like just kind of a walkthrough of the environment. It's a walkthrough, but you never move. The camera is always stationary. You just kind of bounce around. That sounds pretty cool. I can see somebody who doesn't care for baseball not enjoying this just because.
What do you care about being put in the clubhouse and being able to look around if you don't know all of the ins and outs of a baseball clubhouse? You don't look around and see the jerseys hanging up. You can't say, oh, they're not talking about it, but that's Shohei Otani in the back corner putting on his jersey.
you have to be able to appreciate those little tidbits to get it. But if you get it, it's really cool. Does it include shots on pitch, like when they're actually playing the game, or is it just like the tour of the stadium? No, it includes multiple.
shots of the game itself you go from. I guess they had multiple cameras set up around UK Stadium for this Yankees-Dodgers game because you go from being in the stands, you go from being behind home plate, there's shots in the dugout, shots on the field itself. You move all around during the clips from the game.
So they clearly had a pretty robust setup for this. Yeah, I mean, this was a Friday Night Baseball game. Yeah. Lost June kind of timeframe. So I guess they get rights to that where they don't get rights to... any other game I guess yeah but then it begs the question if they've set up all these cameras why have they not got a full feed of the full three hour match you know what I mean like why do they cut it down to a 15 minute thing like because I'm not sure if you'd want to watch like
the entire match just from the dugout perspective but it'd be really cool if they had a full feed of it and you could like zoom through it a bit and see sequences or whatever you know like even if you're not going to sit there and watch the whole game over again in a three hour span Being able to have the timeline and let people zoom around on their own accord would be pretty compelling.
Something I was thinking too while watching it is it would be cool if you did want to watch like the whole game or at least a series of key moments. Like, let me... Pick my point of view. You had cameras set up in the dugout, behind home plate, and elsewhere throughout the stadium. Make it interactive so I can say, okay, I'll watch this at-bat from the dugout, then I'll move to behind home plate for the next at-bat.
Some sort of interactivity there would be nice. But then you're moving well beyond just the immersive video concept. You're moving into like an interactivity thing. And that's a lot different. Yeah, I mean, we're asking for the basics of a whole. a whole sports gaming immersive, let alone, you know, choosing different angles of a different perspective.
But this sounds like a pretty big operation with a number of different cameras in different spots and stuff, so it kind of feels like they're edging ever closer to be able to do the thing everybody actually wants, but obviously this isn't it. You also had shots outside of the stadium, just around New York City, around the stadium. They went to the bars where people were drinking before the game, and you had Dodgers fans and Yankees fans getting into it in the streets that you could watch.
There was a very compelling narrative aspect to it too. There was one part too where they had They're talking about the narration, which is Joe Buck. He was talking about the history of Yankee Stadium and how all the Yankee Stadium proceeded in. I think it was demolished in 2009, I think.
But they had this immersive shot of the outside of Yankee Stadium, of old Yankee Stadium. So they had like... recreated old Yankee Stadium in a rendering and made it fully immersive so he could look around and you would see, you could look over to the road and you'd see cars from the era when he was talking about.
They had gone full recreation of the environment from pre-2009, because that's when they demolished it. Wow. That's pretty common. Really cool. The last thing I'll say is, there was a... Or two more things, actually. There was a... clip of John Carlos Stanton, who was one of the stars on the Yankees. They had the immersive video camera set up in the hallway getting shots of the players walking into the clubhouse.
and he had John Carlos Dane come around the corner, and he sees the immersive video rig, and he just goes, whoa. I guess at how massive and intricate that camera rig is. Getting some, what's it called? Yeah. And then there was one shot in the press booth. or the broadcasters were calling the games. And I just found that so fascinating. And I actually paused the video so I could sit there and look around it more and see exactly like...
They have like their little teleprompter screen and it was like promo number one. Major League Baseball is brought to you by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like the promo that the broadcaster is going to read on the intro to that inning. I see, I see. You can see the notes, the handwritten notes that the broadcasters had on the papers in front of them, their laptops, their iPads. just really cool stuff that you can kind of get in a normal picture
But being able just to be like plopped down there right behind the broadcasters was just so cool. As a baseball fan, I think this takes the cake for my favorite immersive video content so far. Easily. Oh wow. It was Metallica. But I think this is better just for me and what I like. But if you give me a... Coldplay, immersive video concert, that'll take the day. But for now, it's VIP Yankee Stadium for sure.
Well, on the positive side, I think it's pretty a good indicator that you're now two most compelling immersive contents are the ones they just released, right? Yeah. In short order. So within the same month, they've one-opped themselves twice. So they're definitely doing something right. You're not getting Coldplay, but next month you'll get the U2 documentary, the Bono documentary that's featuring, but yeah, not quite Coldplay.
Yeah, and this one is only 13 minutes, so feature length I'm excited to see, see what they can do with that, with that more extended format. But back to iPhone rumors. Mark Gurman says the iPhone 17 Pro coming this year won't have as... dramatic of a redesign as we might have expected in particular he says the iphone 17 pro won't have a two-tone back so this is how a lot of the renders had shown like the top half of the phone was a different
like color, than the rest of the phone, separated mainly by the camera bar along the top. He says that this won't be the case. that the camera area will be the same color as the rest of the device. Yeah, but you're still going to get... The camera will be huge rather than full width. It's just rather than it being like silver and black, it'll just all be silver.
which is like the current camera rectangles, they use the same glass colouring as the main back of the phone, so it'll be that, but now the glass square will be a full width rectangle. Walk down and sign, basically. Which is fine. I think the thing people are going to notice is going to be that camera bar. Yeah, it's still pretty drastic for the camera bar. I don't think the color of the camera bar was necessarily the most.
you know, impacting part of that, of the leak. We also saw this week some cases, right, like the plastic cases to go on the iPhone 17 Pro Series. Bye. The back cut out of the camera is hilarious. It's full width, obviously, and it's huge. It's like... Wow. Still not 100% sure why they have to do that. Like Apple, I mean.
Why is it full width? I don't know. But there's going to need to be a story to this change, I think, especially if you're going to make cases look that goofy. Yeah, I mean, this year, all three cameras are going to be 48 megapixel. and there's been some rumors about changes to the telephoto lens in terms of the zoom distance and stuff so maybe that's making the lenses bigger and to fit it all in they have to make it a full width camera module on the back but
It doesn't seem like they're changing that drastically to need to go full width. We've seen the camera protrusion grow and grow and grow with basically every generation of iPhone. You compare the back of the iPhone 16 to the iPhone 11 Pro, where they first did the triple camera, and it's twice as big. So even if they are making all lenses 48 megapixels this year, Could they have just not made like
You know, a 20% bigger camera module, why is it going forward? Like it almost feels like so much that it's become like an aesthetic choice from them, not a necessity. But I guess we won't get the explanation for that until they've properly announced the phone in the fall. But for next year, Mark says that Apple is preparing a major shake-up for the iPhone's 20th anniversary.
including the foldable version that we've talked about before. And what he says is a bold new pro model that makes more extensive use of glass. Okay, pause one second. 20th anniversary, right? Yes, this is where I was going to. Yeah. The original iPhone came out in 2007, announced in January 2007, shipped in June. Next year is 2026, so that would be the 19th anniversary phone.
Our colleague Ryan did some critical thinking around this, trying to figure out the 20th anniversary angle, and his point was that... If Apple wants the 20th anniversary iPhone to be available for most of the 20th anniversary year, then you kind of have to release it slash announce it in September of the previous year. as opposed to announcing a 20th anniversary iPhone in September of 2027, I guess.
I don't know. It's weird. Well, when they did the iPhone X, which was kind of celebrating the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, that was in 2017, not 2016.
I think it's close enough that they could probably brand it either way, you know? And like, oh, maybe they were on track for doing a bigger redesign and it's like, oh, it just happens to almost line up to the 20th anniversary, so we'll do it that way around. And we can be like, this is the 20th anniversary phone because it's on sale for most of...
2027, right? Did they ever acknowledge for the iPhone X that it was the 10-year anniversary? Well, they called it the iPhone X. Well, beyond that, did they ever say, this is specifically yeah because they don't send 10th anniversary phone but it was kind of like winked at you know yeah like this is our big redesign it's the 10th anniversary like this is what we're gonna do because remember
It could have been called the iPhone 9. Like, they skipped the 9 to make it match up with the 10th anniversary. Yeah, that is true. And it's called the iPhone... letter x and they specifically call it 10 so like i felt like they were in the smallest way possible acknowledging that it was actually a 10th anniversary phone and this was like the biggest change it's the original iphone and everything They didn't explicitly call it an anniversary special edition or anything.
The phone itself, though, Mark doesn't have any details other than that it's bolt and a design that makes more extensive use of glass. And this will be alongside the foldable, right? Yes. Yeah. So more use of glass on the non-foldable phone. Well, right now, the phone's glass on the front, it's glass on the back. So the only place it is in glass is the sides. So are they going to make all the sides out of glass and it'll just be like a unibody glass design?
Sounds cool, I guess. That'd be kind of cool. Although I wonder how many people have noticed because the back glass already kind of, I'm not sure how many people already get into this glass because they treat it and give it that finish that almost makes it look like a metal-y finish. apart from when it shatters, but until then it looks kind of, you could pass it off for something that isn't glass.
But if they put that all the way around the phone, that'd be kind of cool. You know, right now we kind of have the ice cream sandwich design where you have the two plates and then the band around the middle section. So if you look, you know, there's like a separation, isn't there, where there's like steel and then... back glass and front glass like if they could do one continuous glass piece it would be more unified and kind of smooth so that'd be a nice direction
But I think it would be overshadowed by the foldable, right? There's not much they can do to the pro iPhone to make it... super distinguished i mean we're seeing this year they're going to do the super thin one right that'll stand out a little bit but if you've got if you're having a bold iphone lineup for
next year the foldable way of a shadow whatever the you know if you're using if the difference is you're using glass on the sides as well as the back right it's cool but it's minor in the scheme of things It does sound like at least the next 12 months or 18 months of iPhone upgrades will be interesting or fun after... Nothing crazy since the
what the iPhone 12 in 2020, we've kind of had that same, like you called it a sandwich design form factor. So it sounds like the next two years will be more exciting between the iPhone 17 Air. And then this iPhone 20th anniversary and the foldable iPhone. I think most importantly of all, some more interesting iPhone changes, I think, coming soon.
Yeah, and again, as soon as you go to the year after that, it will go to five years of iteration, right? Exactly. Yeah, but every five years at the moment, it feels like the cadence for the bigger overhauls. And they're lining up to happen a little bit this year and then mostly next year. Finally this week, happy hours brought to you by HelloFresh.
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so the slow leak of iphone or of ios 19 renders and details continues this week we have a new video from john prosser who walks through a few more gives us a few more glimpses of what we can expect from this quote unquote all new ios 19 design he has some renders of the music app the Messages app, a couple of just interface tweaks throughout the operating system, the Settings app. And I think the trend that we see through all of these renders
is the current static navigation bar that we see in a lot of apps is going to be floating. It's going to be rounded, more like a pill shape rather than like a squared off rectangle shape. clearly inspired by vision os clearly inspired by that VisionOS design language where you have that floating, oval-shaped navigation bar and app palette kind of design. Clearly inspired by that, clearly glossy, clearly a little bit transparent.
As more details about this redesign continue to come out, it starts to take more shape than based on the initial renders we had. And one of the things Prosser talks about in this video is that The home screen icons will probably, maybe, be not circles, but like... Square-ish. More rounded. More rounded. Yeah.
The way it's depicted in his video, I don't particularly love the random icons. The other stuff looks good, though. And again, kind of reiterating what I said on previous episodes where German said, you know, there's going to be major navigational changes, assuming the Prosser stuff is accurate.
It's not major navigational changes, it's just modernization of some additional things it's still a tab bar navigation for instance in the music app but now the tab bar floats and it's got integrated with the search bar and you can kind of move the search bar around and he shows in the message there that rather than having to take your finger all the way to the top of the screen to get to the search field. So right now on the iPhone, it's like before the first message in the list, right?
now it'll be floating at the bottom when you tap it and it brings it up. Kind of like how they do spotlight search on the home screen where you have the little search button at the bottom and then it kind of pops up into the keyboard. That seems to be more of the theme and the design trend going forward.
And yeah, it's little tweaks and balances. German has said some cryptic things on social media saying that these videos are going to be inaccurate and it's going to look pretty different, but we're still kind of waiting for his big.
post on exactly what to expect you know but the process stuff if that came true i'd be like pretty happy with it for the most part and it seems pretty legit in many places like they even change tweaks to the design of like the little switch control um you know the toggle switch is like
if someone was faking this, would they really bother to do that? So it definitely seems based off something legit, and it kind of speaks to the overall direction of what GEM's reported on. Maybe there's other stuff that... Proster hasn't seen or whatever, but based purely on the Proster videos, I was like, yeah, this seems pretty legit.
If you tell me this is Alice in the Teen, I could believe you. And I think most of it looks really nice. And it even says in a lot of the elements, you know, they're putting that kind of, border shimmer effect you know to kind of give that depth that it might like vary with the rotation of the phone so as you move your hand around the kind of glimmer on the circles and the buttons will also follow around in a circle format to give you some like fake lighting effect
which would give it a nice little added touch. I mean they first did those kind of effects with the Do you remember this? The volume control on the music app in iOS 6. It was like a steel circle, you know. And as you tuned your phone, there would be like a lighting effect that would rotate around the thing. So this goes back to the skeuomorphic days. So it'd be kind of cool if they revived some of that.
Is it kind of similar to what we see in the wallet app, for example, where you have those like for certain credit cards or if you have like your driver's license in the wallet app?
As you move your phone around, I can't remember the word for what this is called. Parallax, yeah. Kind of like that. It has to be about iOS 7. pushed a lot more harder on the parallax effect stuff right where they'd have like the home screen icons move around as you shift your phone in your hand and they kind of reined a lot of that back in
This isn't physically moving. It's not changing the position on the screen, but it's just changing the direction of the shadow that's around the border of the things that are raised up for the button shapes or whatever.
So I guess it's kind of like, you know, on TVOS, when you navigate the home screen, you get the little glow on the icons as you move left and right. And if you kind of... pan your finger around the touchpad the glow kind of shifts as it moves the selection around so it's kind of like that but obviously rather than you touching the screen to move the shadow it's just moving it based on the motion and the accelerometer um so a little subtle effect but i think it could actually look pretty nice
I'm still optimistic about this redesign. I think with each passing leak, it becomes more realistic and more legitimate where there's smoke, there's fire, that type of thing. Yeah, the only thing that would look actively bad is the icon shapes. Yeah, it's not good.
I'm not even sure if that's like the final thing if kids will be still in progress there's going to obviously be art updates to go alongside the change in shape so even if that was the new shape they're not just going to take the current icon set and just change the crop they're going to redesign the icons at least to some degree and that's the kind of stuff that won't hit until much later in the builds and probably isn't represented by wherever this leak has come from.
Even if they were purely circular icons, i don't love the second icon look i prefer the rounded rectangle yeah but i could get on with circles uh this is like a weird midway point which just looks kind of bad but i don't really i kind of dismissed that part of the video but everything else
a lot more close to final than his kind of sketches because he had the floating tab bar stuff in the first video he did but it just wasn't as refined it didn't have the same kind of animations and stuff that he's showing off in this video so I think it would be well-received, and it's not such an alien shift in navigation that people are going to be confused. It's just more iterative. But it looks nice and visually different.
then he also has a tidbit in the video where he talks about the camera app specifically for iphone 17 pro models where he says For the first time in the native camera app, the iPhone 17 Pro will be able to record from multiple cameras at the same time, so you can record with the back and the front cameras on an iPhone 17 Pro at the same time. E aí This is a cool feature, but it's something that's been available in third-party apps since I think the iPhone...
11 event yeah it was the 11 pro yeah they started it and that's where apple actually demoed it on stage with double take is it called yeah double take from filmic and then the app was demoed at the iPhone 11 in September, and the app was released in January. So not a new... technology or a revolutionary idea, but just something that I guess they never felt the need or had the space to add to the camera app until now. One of those like pro level features or pro-ish features.
that they were previously willing to offload to third party developers. For the users who need that feature, they can just go download an app and use it. but maybe with the advent of TikTok and short form videos where this type of stuff is more common. They finally felt the need to add it to the camera app itself. Just wait for it fast-bye. Just weird that it's a pro or...
seemingly going to be a pro-only feature. Oh, what, like a 17 pro-only feature? Yeah, that's what he says in the video, yeah. Yeah, even though they released the API alongside the iPhone 11, and any third-party app can use that API and take camera feeds from both sides. So it would be kind of weird if they locked it off as something primarily. When it's literally been possible and all the phones using an Apple sanctioned API for... 2019 2019 yeah yeah a long time
But ignoring that element of it, I think it does make sense to bring the camera app. Why should you have to download a third-party app to do that? I believe Samsung phones, the Samsung camera, has this mode where you can record from both sides simultaneously.
And I think if you have an average iPhone user and you ask them, can your phone record from the front camera and the back camera at the same time, they would tell you it can't because they're just not aware that you can download a third-party app that could do it. Even Prosser in his video doesn't seem aware that you can download a third-party app today and do it. Yeah.
finally this week the smart display smart home hub display product that you have routinely criticized on this podcast has been delayed until 2026.
i didn't routinely criticize it i just said this it should be a bigger screen than six inches yeah which now now german says seven inches so slowly but surely but well maybe if they delay a bit longer it'll get bigger inflation but he says delayed until 2026 because of the siri delays because of the siri personal contacts to app intense on-screen action stuff because of those delays this hardware product is also not delayed
Because remember, the earlier reporting on this said that it was going to make heavy use of the in-app actions stuff of the new Siri for its navigation and kind of hands-free control. And that it would be out maybe in the spring. March was the initial rumor. If anything, this is just an example of how bad Apple has botched this new Siri and how these software delays are now impacting hardware releases.
i'm curious if we see any other examples of this like there were rumors of a new home pod coming this year or at least a new HomePod mini coming this year. I don't think that will be delayed because of the Siri delays, but it's always interesting to see the dichotomy of Apple's hardware teams firing on all cylinders, having new products to release.
being held up by the lackluster state of software right now. Yeah, we're like a HomePod Mini or an Apple TV, even if there were software features intended to come out this year.
As long as they just ship the devices with the chips capable to run them, they can then release the software at a later date. I think the difference with the home display is that it was like this brand new OS and operating system and they had different layouts and obviously it doesn't have any kind of input method at all apart from...
the touchscreen and your voice right and it's meant to be used with voice across the room because even if it is a touchscreen you're meant to be able to just like look at it at a glance and respond to it that way so that was probably built with the idea of this kind of stuff being in mind and then you know managerial dysfunction meant that none of those features actually got finished on time and so everything is kind of now in limbo which is obviously unfortunate
Because I was kind of looking forward to the smart display, even with a 7-inch screen. I was like, oh, this would be cool. But now it's kind of just on the back burner and sitting around for... Probably at least a year delay, right? Because we're not really anticipating them to fix. or roll out this kind of stuff into iOS 19 now. So it'll just be one of those things that can be sat on the rumor mill and there'll be tiny tidbits of information about it again now for another cycle.
Because I'm all in on Apple's expansion of smart home stuff. And this was going to be their kind of hero product for it. And now it's pushed to the side. And again, it's a product category that Apple probably should have released something in years ago, right? These types of products have existed on the market for.
As long as I can remember Amazon's been making Alexa stuff, there's always been some version of it with a screen. Right, the controversy over the first HomePod, which ended up shipping in 2018, was why doesn't it have a screen version? Like, already it was considered a part of the lineup as there should be a speaker with a screen on it. And they ship.
They shipped a misty haze of LED lights on the top of the thing. Kind of has a screen, depending on how you look at it. But yeah, you can see colors in a rainbow pattern, but nothing definitive. There's no pixel resolution to that thing. 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 at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year with bonus content each and every week.
Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads, Twitter and elsewhere, at Chance H. Miller. And, Mayo, what about you? At BZMIA. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.