606: A Decade of Half-Presses

I am back on the beach today and I'm so happy. The beach in September is beautiful because it's still pretty warm. Some of the restaurants are still open and there's no one here. Like, because as soon as the school year starts, everyone stops coming here. It's like the workers who work locally here call it Tumbleweed Tuesday the day after Labor Day.

It literally is like a light switch, Labor Day weekend, massive crowded, everything. And then literally Tuesday, just Tumbleweed's blow through the town. It's no one here. So it is, we're not able to spend a ton of time here because we also are bad now by the mainland school year. But wow, it's so nice here.

It's like walking through one of those deserted video game levels, fewer zombies. Yeah, fewer. Well, the few people who were left were certainly an eccentric crowd. Certainly some characters walking around. We don't get sent a lot of side quests though. But it is certainly some eccentric.

That's part of one of the one of the best things I love about being here in this weird beach town is that the people who are here for long enough. I don't know if it makes you eccentric or if only eccentric people can tolerate being here for that long. But whatever it is, it selects for eccentricity. And so everyone here is weird. Like I fitted in great because I'm weird too. And I'm weird in different ways than some of the other ones. But like everyone here is just so gloriously weird.

I feel so at home here. Like Long Island. Long Island has its weirdos for sure. But it's more like regular suburban America. You know, you don't see a lot of that coming out. In the beach town, everyone lets their weirdness fly and it is just glorious to be here. And you feel like the most normal person even when you are as weird as I am. Do you have your car back?

Yeah, I've got it back. The issue has not recurred. It's been fine. I actually heard from a couple of listeners who wrote in who said that they actually had similar problems with like, you know, some high voltage error message with their BMW IX on its first day. And then they got it fixed in the next episode again. So I'm hoping that's going to happen to me. Otherwise still love in the car. It's still really great.

There's nothing more to report there is it's now going to I hope it's now going to be just a boring car ownership story for the next three years. And then I'll pick something else or the same thing again or buy this one who knows. But I look forward to going back to my car not being a point of flux. Like I had like I've had various like neck and shoulder tension issues over the last couple of years of working through some weird little issues during all the Caribbean drama.

My I like couldn't even turn my head all the way to one side like it was really bad like my whole shoulder blade was all tense and I went to a physical therapist and and you know fix it a little bit. But I had had to go back the next week to like fix it more and it's just like and then like as soon as I got the new car. It was like a light switch turned off there too.

It's like it was just all that stress was just melted away because it as it just started working and it just like didn't it wasn't causing all this problem and distraction in my life. The physical therapist tell you that your neck was too smart to move. All right before we get started it is still September there's a week left in September in September is childhood cancer awareness month which means we are still still trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's research hospital.

At one point I had my little show notes up or that would tell me the talking points I'm supposed to use but I accidentally closed it so I'm going to do this off the dome as well.

I don't know what you've lived it now. I've lived it yes that's right so speaking of this past Friday's we record I was in Memphis at St. Jude's campus and we did 12 hours of live telethon we call the podcast on it was myself Mike Hurley Stephen Hackett Jason Snal and Kathy Campbell and we did all sorts of fun hijinks for 12 hours and raised $130,000 or thereabouts for St. Jude Children's research hospital.

Why do we do it St. Jude is like I've said several times now a children's research hospital so some of the incredible stuff that they do is not only do they treat children who are really in the throes of terrible you know life threatening illnesses but they also do a ton of research and they try to figure out ways to make sure that no child would die in the dawn of their lives and in the beginning of their lives and and so we when I was there I attended a couple of.

Talks from some doctors there who were just talking about these absolutely phenomenal things that they're doing and how you know they're looking at research for one type of cancer and very you know cautiously and in a controlled way applying it to different kinds of cancer and finding incredible incredible solutions and fixes and whatnot the work they do there is incredible they talk about how they're doing you know DNA sequencing in order to figure out okay well we know that you have let's say not a cancer say epilepsy we know you have epilepsy.

But there it could be one of 50 different kinds of epilepsy but thanks to genetic sequencing we can say oh no no you're you know your particular style epilepsy is the 12345 style and and we know that this drug treats that 12345 style really well and we shouldn't use this other drug that treats the 67910 style or whatever the case maybe.

The work that St. Jude does is really incredible and one of the most incredible things about what St. Jude does is that they do this without billing their patients or their patients families so their perspective is if you have a child that's you know fighting for their lives the last thing you want to worry about as a family is anything but helping that child and making that child feel better you if you need help getting to Memphis they will fund the trip to Memphis if you need help staying in Memphis they will figure out how to do that.

If you need to stay in Memphis they will figure out a way for you to stay in Memphis either on their own campus or somewhere else if you need one or one if you need the patient or perhaps a sibling to go to school they have a school on campus it's just utterly incredible all the work that St. Jude does in order to do everything they can to stop this just terrible terrible series of diseases because it's not just cancer like I said so how can you help well you can do a couple things you can go to st. Jude dot org slash ATP STJU DE dot org slash ATP and you can do that.

TPP and you can throw them a few bucks now we've done a phenomenal job this year a truly incredible job we have broken all relay as a whole has broken all of its records as I sit here now were over 800 thousand dollars raised but here's the thing St. Jude uses a lot of money because they they all this research is expensive

all the treatments are expensive and they're also trying to help fund treatments going to other countries they there's a program I forget the specifics I'll stop my head but they're trying to figure out a way to get chemotherapy treatments into other countries. This isn't just America here. So you can go to www.saintew.org. So I should be. And you can throw them a few bucks, five bucks, ten bucks, it doesn't matter. Anything you can contribute is helpful.

And I think that I, and perhaps the three of us, kind of get ourselves wrapped around the axle about the big donations, but truly, anything you can offer is helpful. I saw Ryan Richard, excuse me, Ryan Ricard earlier today, and he posted this, which I thought was great. And we're going to talk about the Marko Offset in a second, but Ryan said, an idea for an alternative Marko Offset for those who didn't buy Apple stuff this year, check any credit cards with cash rewards.

Mine had over $100 hanging around, which I was happy to hand over to St. Jude. This is free money that you got generally for being a wealthy person, but it's somewhere valuable. I think that's great. So you could do that, or you could apply the Marko Offset. Marko, do you know anything about the Marko Offset or is that just a funny coincidence? I've never heard of that before.

I know actually I've taken up with where, so you look at your purchases this fall of your new tech devices that you might have frivolously to some degree purchase, maybe you could have gone without these tech devices, but you have your tech devices and you have the baseline price for the device family. So if it's the iPhone Pro, that's $9.99 or whatever. And then you add up whatever you actually spent at checkout, or we'll spend over time with Apple Care, if the conversions or whatever.

So it's going to include things like sales tax, storage upgrades, size upgrades, cases, any kind of accessories you bought when you bought your new phone or whatever. Add those up, subtract the base price for the family, that is your Marko Offset. So for a $1,000 phone, it might be a few hundred bucks. And that is my suggested minimum donation that you consider putting into St. Jude. If you can swing it, that's great. If you can swing more, that's great too.

If you can't swing that, you can swing 10 bucks, 20 bucks. Good, that's great too, every little bit helps. So please, and you can actually as Casey, I believe mentioned, you can go to the MarkoOffset.com to actually compute these amounts based on the iPhone purchase for this year. But yeah, basically, look at what you tack on to your tech purchases as kind of extra money that you don't scrutinize too much maybe.

And that's a pretty good barometer for what you can probably afford to give, if you can. So help out if you can, please. It helps a lot, and we appreciate it. Very much so. John, I had mentioned earlier that I was recording, or I was doing a telethon for 12 straight hours. Did you know anything about that by chance? I did, I watched almost all of it, and I appeared briefly for 15 minutes of those 12 hours. So I was glad to contribute in my small way.

Yeah, and so John and Jason did a live recording of RobotorNot, and I was basically... With you there in the peanut gallery. Exactly right, exactly what I was going to say. So I was the peanut gallery for that. That was, I don't know, like hour eight or nine or something like that. It was toward the end of the broadcast. I don't recall exactly when, but you can look it up and you can check it out. So again, I don't know if we're going to do this again next week, this might be the last time.

We probably will next week, maybe not. We'll see, but one of my other, stju.org slash ATP, stju.org slash ATP, please. And thank you. We truly, truly, truly, truly appreciate all the money that you have sent, because again, most of the money that we have earned for st. Jude comes from the 510, $15 donations. So please, anything you can do, please feel free. stju.org slash ATP. Let's do some follow up, John. You've gotten some solutions to your extracting file names from photos, conundrum.

Would you, if you don't mind, give a super duper brief recap of what the issue was, please? If this was from our photo workflows, member special episode, where we all described the way we deal with photos and also of our photography equipment. KC system was the weirdest, but mine had this one step in it that was definitely troubling and problematic.

And it involved me taking screenshots of the photos app and then OCRing text out of them, because photos does not provide a convenient way to select a bunch of photos and then just copy their file names, which would be very helpful. So many, many people sent me solutions. As I said on the show, I think maybe it was KC suggests or something. I just used Apple script. I'm like, yeah, that would totally work. But I hate to have Apple script so much, which is true. I do.

But one of the things that a couple of people did is they said, hey, I hate Apple script too, but I asked chatGPT to write me an Apple script. And I said, you know what? That's a good idea. I do hate Apple script, but I use chatGPT all the time for programming stuff. So let's give it a shot. So I went and opened up my own chatGPT window and asked it to write an Apple script for me. And it did. And you know, the script didn't work. But you know, it's chatGPT. Sometimes it needs a little bit help.

It just got like one or two small things wrong. And I fixed them and it was fine. I'm like, hey, now I have an Apple script. And of course, once I've got that Apple script to, and by the way, what I wanted the Apple script to do was get the file names of the current selection. Lots of other people saying, oh, we'll get file names of all your favorites. That's, you know, 50,000 photos. Don't do that. Or we'll get the file names of all the favorites within a date range.

And then you have to pick a date range. It's like, no, just let me just select the photos. You know, whenever I'm doing my workflow in photos, this, during this step, it's very easy for me to simply select the favorites that I've just processed. And maybe worst cases like 200 photos or something. So I can just click and then shift click. I've made a selection. Then I run the script and it can get the file names out of the thing. So that's what I did. I made an Apple script to do that.

And of course, once I have an Apple script that does that, you know where I'm going, straight to Pearl. So I've already been scripted that calls the Apple script using the OSA script, command line, thing, or whatever. So now, whatever it is for myself is a Pearl script that all I have to do the next time I'm doing this sort of workflow is select the photos that I want.

And again, listen to the episode of going here, what I'm selecting, whatever, but select the photos that I want, and then run the Pearl script. There is no other step. And when I run the Pearl script, it will get this file names of the ones that are selected from photos using the Apple script. And then for each one of those file names, it will look to see if there's a raw on my mounted SD card with the raw as in it.

And if there is a raw with that file name, it will copy it and do all the things. So that's going to save me a lot of time and a lot of screen shotting. Now, having said that, and by the way, I will link in the show notes to my Apple script. It's not very exciting. It's exactly what ChatGPT would give you with one bug fixed. So anyway, it's very straightforward. I just really hate Apple script. And I'm glad ChatGPT did it for me because I wouldn't want to have to look up all that stuff.

Because it's just hate. I really dislike Apple script. I get why it's the way it is largely. And I do think it's potentially for the best, but I also don't particularly care for it. I was going to ask you, why are you printing the file names, or returning the file names, rather than just copying them to the clipboard. But I didn't think that because now you have something you can throw pearl at, of course, that's what you're going to do. That's right.

Yeah, that's why at the end of it, you'll see I'm emitting the file names one per line, as opposed to comma separated, or as JSON, or whatever. One per line is straightforward. I promise to never have new lines in my file names. Just that'll be fine. Yeah, yeah, I just want text output to standard out. And then I just feed that into pearl. It's my preferred way of doing things. All right. Now, under all the many, many suggestions, people sent. Because so many people sent suggestions.

I hope an equal or greater number of people sent suggestions to Casey, but I don't know what Casey sees. All I know is what I see. And I saw a bazillion suggestions for this one step in my workflow. By far, the most popular, which boggles my mind, was, hey, why don't you just export all the photos? Because once you've exported them to the finder, then you can just select them in the finder and hit a copy.

Or you can do, once there are files in the file system, there's a million ways to get the file names from them. I mean, yeah, that would work. But why in the world export photos and make it like, you know, you can do it small size. They won't take a lot of room. Why would I make it do all that work? Why was empathy for the machine? Why would I make it like, recompress, export, make a bunch of files just so I can get the file names and then delete the things?

Oh, no, no. That's, I mean, yes, that would technically, that would absolutely work. And some might find it preferable to what I was doing with OCRing, but at least when I was OCRing, I was making one screenshot for dozens and dozens of photos because I have a very big screen, right? Actually, yeah, exporting the files. Everyone suggested that. I guess, I mean, I guess if you're not in a kind of like, I'm gonna write an automation script mindset, this is the most straightforward way to do it.

Hey, you want found names? Make files. They've got names. Boom, problem-salt. But no, I'm not that solution I reject. Some other people suggested using shortcuts, which is sort of the modern sort of AppleScript type, equivalent will put a link in the show, it's to an example and from Josh Woodward, shortcuts can totally do all the stuff I'm sure. Shortcuts, I find, I'm even more allergic to than AppleScript because I'm a programmer.

And at least AppleScript lets me sort of kind of do programming, but shortcuts makes me like arrange widgets in a GUI instead of programming. And I'm glad that it exists. And I'm glad that it is very powerful. It can do lots of things. And I'm glad a lot of people like it, not for me, but put an example in there. I'm really suggested a Python project, which we'll link to in the show notes called OSX, OS10, whatever, OSX photos.

And it's a command line utility that talks directly to the photos database. And it can do all sorts of stuff. It can output stuff as CSV or JSON. And you can also, of course, query the SQLite database that is behind photos of yourself. For some reason that I don't understand that someone from Apple will surely write in and tell us about all the tables that are interesting in the SQLite database begin with a letter Z. Is it like a core data thing? Or something else? I think so.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, the Z asset table has the info you want. But this Python command line utility will just basically like bypass everything that you just query the database. I don't think I actually want that because I imagine the current selection isn't reflection of the database, but I could be wrong about that. But anyway, because I want to go off of the current selection as just a flexible way of saying, I know which photos I'm dealing with here.

Just let me select them in the app and then run the script. I don't know if it's convenient to get the current selection, but that's nothing you could do. Will Lineweber provide an example of directly reading the photos database if you want to see what that looks like? It's just SQLite. It's just SQLite database. You can just query it. The tables are wacky and they begin with letters Z and the columns are maybe not what you expect, but you can do it.

And finally, a couple of people sent Swift code that uses PhotoKit. We'll put a link in the show notes to one on GitHub from Alex Mazanov, underscore David Smith, also provided one. Yeah, Apple obviously has APIs to get to the photos database. That's how you can do photo pickers and also some other stuff that interacts with it. And you can write Swift to do that. So if Swift is your preferred language, like Pearl is mine, you can write up a Swift quote unquote script. Same thing.

Put a line at the top that will run user bin Swift or whatever. You can use Swift like that and it will compile it on the fly and run your thing. Same caveats about, I'm not sure you can get the current selection from the photos app without asking it through shortcuts or Apple script, but I could be wrong with that as well.

There are lots of ways to skin this cat, but predictably, the way I did it is with Pearl with the smallest amount of Apple script possible just to do the part that I didn't want to do in Pearl. With regard to your earlier half question, what kind of feedback did I get? I got almost universally feedback that what I was doing was wrong. From the internet? Oh yes, I know I'm shocked as well. It came with various degrees of obnoxiousness slash empathy.

I do get a couple of suggestions for minor things, including, I think the most actionable suggestion I got was there's a couple other apps that'll do the GPS tagging that I need to at least investigate and see if they will better fit my workflow. But for the most part, people just shook their heads and mutual embarrassment on my behalf.

I thought we gave you some good actionable improvements that didn't really change your workflow, but just ahead in this step, you could do this with less work or whatever during the episode. But yes, obviously people are amazed by the root goal machine that you've constructed. I also checked out that, well, I think what I think which one it was was like the GPX, I should have put a link in there.

Someone suggested one of the tagging apps that looked pretty good basically, it's just an app that you run on your phone and it keeps track of your location and exports files in a format that a lot of apps can read to tag your files. Anything to get out of the world of proprietary, like in my case Sony apps that I think Sony like recently discontinued their app anyway, I don't even know if they replaced it, but those apps were terrible.

Those, the good thing those apps had going for them is they think they directly communicate with the camera so there's no like bringing it all into the Mac and combining it or whatever, but I'll gladly do that if it's something more sane. So I have on my list to check out some of the apps. I already downloaded one of them to check out some of the apps that can export the standardized format for a GPS tagging.

And if I end up finding something that works or if Casey does, we'll talk about it on the show. I'm sure. All right. Then with regard to my question, if I'm not mistaken, about, hey, I kind of wish I could just always share all of my photos to the shared library, or at least default to that. And what Apple tries to do is it tries to be smart about it. And you can say, oh, when you're at home, always go to the shared photo library.

And otherwise, if your partner or spouse or what have you is nearby, I guess by way of Bluetooth, then you can do shared photo library, but otherwise it goes to your personal library. And Alexander F wrote in to say, if you select share manually in the shared library settings and then just press the yellow bubble on the camera app, it will remember that setting. And automatically always put all photos in the shared library regardless of what the smarts thinks.

I did this once when the shared photo library came out and haven't needed to touch it since. That's a good tip. I didn't know that. Yeah. So a couple of nuances here. One is the feature that Casey was referring to. Like you get basically two choices of, hey, what do you want me to do with respect to shared library? And the choices are automatic, which tries to do the smart thing and manual. So Alexander's solution is first, select manual.

And then second, in the camera app at the top, there'll be this little yellow circle with either like one little person's head and it or two little people's heads in it. Change it to two little people's head because that says, hey, when you take a photo with this camera, it'll go to the shared library. And that's it. Unlike many other settings, there is nothing in the camera settings in iOS that says in the section for preserving settings that refers to this.

So if you go to settings, go to camera, there's this thing of like, hey, which settings do you want me to preserve between launches of the camera? So like you launch the camera and say you change into video mode. And then you go to a different app. When you come back to camera, do you want it to still be in video mode or do you just want it always to go back to camera?

That's an example of deciding whether you want a setting to be preserved and Apple provides it like a whole screen full of these. You want me to preserve the style, the focus, the zoom. Like you can toggle these on and off. And so if you've never checked that out, go if you're frustrated that every time you launch the camera app, it doesn't remember something or does remember some other thing. You can change your mind about those.

But this shared versus non-shared thing is not in that set of preferences. As far as I can tell, it's just always remembered. So as long as you set that setting and don't change it, it will be preserved and you basically have no choice about that. You gotta be careful of, especially if it's not your phone, that someone doesn't accidentally hit that and change it back to the other thing. So there's some amount of vigilance required to make sure you stay on sending everything to share it.

But this was a great tip. I did try to do the same thing to my wife's camera app and told her about it and said, now everything will go into your shared library because occasionally, she sends things into the regular library. So set to manual, change the setting in the camera app, and don't worry about the preserved settings because it doesn't apply to this particular thing. Excellent. John, can you tell me about JPEG XL in iOS 18 and on the iPhone 16, please? So this was a bit of a let down.

We had the rumors of Apple's gonna go to JPEG XL and they did add support for JPEG XL in iOS 18. On the iPhone 16, it's pretty much only and only for their Pro Raw stuff. So it's not like HEEQ where they said, oh, by the way, all our cameras take photos in a new format by default and it's this great new format. They didn't say that. They didn't talk about it at all.

But nevertheless, on an iOS 18, on iPhone 16's only, I believe because when I was on iOS 16 and my 14 Pro didn't mention JPEG XL anywhere. So I think it's only on the 16's. It's definitely not on the 14 Pro. I can tell you that if you go to the format section of the camera preferences, you will see at the top, Pro default and you see Heathmax, Pro Raw 12 megapixel, Pro Raw Max update, 18 megapixel.

And then the next section is Pro Raw format and your choices are JPEG lossless, which they now list as most compatible. And then there are two JPEG XL choices, lossless and lossy. And again, that's only for when you're shooting in RAWs. You can have a lossless RAW with JPEG XL or a lossy compressed RAW with JPEG XL. Here's what PetaPixel had to say about it.

Apple has wrapped JPEG XL photos inside a DNG container, enabling Pro Raw files to retain their flexibility while being significantly smaller. What would typically be a 75-ish megabyte Pro Raw Max file will be a 20-megabyte and lossy per RAW format using JPEG XL compression. A lossless file still under 50 megabytes. Without compromising quality, these are significant storage savings. So JPEG XL is on your iPhone.

If you have a new-ish iPhone and if you're shooting in RAW and if you are, you can get files that are up to half the size that they used to be at about the same quality. So good thumbs up, but it is not the JPEG XL revolution that we had been waiting for. So I did change to JPEG XL. I think I went with lossless just because I'm shooting in RAW. I probably just, I do it so rarely on my phone. I'll just pay the full cost of the size and it's still smaller than it used to be.

So, you know, partial thumbs up on JPEG XL. Hopefully it will expand over the years. Gereme Rambo with regard to iPhone apps buying via the microphone. So we mostly debunked this, but then Gereme said, I once found a vulnerability that allowed for an app to listen to the user's AirPods microphone in the background without permission, but in a very limited way. And this has already been fixed a couple of years ago now in 16.1. I'd forgotten about this. I read this one at a debut.

In fact, I think Gereme might have had me proofread this for a few of my memory serves, although I might be wrong about that. But anyways, it's a fascinating write-up. It's not too long, really, really interesting. If you're even vaguely nerdy, and Gere does a great job of doing the write-up. So I would definitely check that out. Just if you're interested in, you know, I don't know, like, doing this sort of work in kind of what is it white hat?

I don't really love that phrasing, but you know, the kind of doing things that may seem bad. But for good. And that's what Gere was doing. And then Gere also added the iPhone 16 lineup and all devices based on the A18 or M4 have a new secure X-Clave. That's not on-clave, but X-Clave. That presumably makes it impossible for an exploit, even with kernel level access, to disable the microphone or camera in use indicators.

Because the little orange or green dot is rendered by a separate OS running in an X-Clave directly onto the display hardware. That is pretty wild. In any ways, Apple calls it the secure indicator light.

I recall like way back in the power book days maybe, or maybe it was the MacBook days of similar indicator light, an Apple made similar claims about how, well, it's impossible to hack this light, because there's a hardware feature in the laptops that basically says when the camera is active, this light comes on. Like this was an example of it not being software mediated at all, but it was something like, hey, if the camera's on, the light's on, there's no software environment.

Software has no visibility into the light whatsoever. Can't turn it on. Can't turn it off. It's just like an electrical fact of life about how we've connected the camera. And even when they did that, I believe someone found a way to get the camera to turn on without the light going on. Like hackers are devious. So this X-Clave is, you know, in the game of cat and mouse, here is Apple's next move. It's like, oh yeah, let's make it even harder for you to get this light.

Even if you have kernel access, you still can't get it. This big, this is a different OS running in this, secure X-Clave, which is this other little machine that you can't get to. The secure enclave is obviously where you can put secrets that are hard to get to if you're running on the main CPU SOC, but now we have the secure X-Clave, which is a whole other chip with a whole other OS. It's even harder to get to. And I'm sure that's true, but hackers are very devious.

So let's see how the next move goes. But anyway, Apple continues to try to make it very difficult to spy using its products without using the easiest method, which is of course, social engineering. Of course, the iPhone 16 and 16 plus batteries, you can remove them as you always could, but in a very different way. This is from MacRomers. Apple has confirmed that the iPhone 16 and 16 plus have a new electrically induced battery removal process.

The batteries use a type of adhesive that can be loosened with low voltage electrical current, such as from a nine volt battery according to Apple. The battery can then be easily removed from the devices. This new process is considered to be easier than the adhesive pull tabs that are found under batteries in previous iPhone models. And so there's of course, and I fix a tear down all about this. Yep, and they demonstrated.

So we talked about this, I think, before the event where there was rumors of this happening. And I don't know how I pictured it like working, maybe like the, you know, you'd short something out and there'd be a puff of smoke and the battery would come out or it would just pop out or whatever. It is much less dramatic than that, but it is no less cool. Yeah. In the, in the, I fix a video, they take a little power supply and they hook it up to the battery.

There's like a little metal, you know, contact that pops out for you to connect to and then you just connect something else to like ground inside the thing. And you put some power into it for a few seconds and it basically chemically changes the adhesive to make it not sticky anymore. And then the battery just comes out. And they explain a little bit how it works.

Interestingly, if you reverse the polarity where you put the plus, you know, you put the plus and the minus the opposite side, it will make it restick. What? But not to the thing, it'll restick to the battery. So don't do it that way. So there are still some dangers here, but another interesting thing about how they installed this is if you, once the battery is out, you, again, you'll see the, I fix a video and the blog post that we'll also have in the show notes.

Inside the case, where the battery goes, Apple has essentially carved a U-shaped channel, like intentionally, roughly, like it's scuffed up, like if you use like a circular buffer on a car and you did a really bad job and you left swirl marks, that's what they did inside the phone.

They made this big long U-shaped channel, which is where the adhesive goes that's intentionally scuffed up and rough to give lots of like, cragly surface for the adhesive to stick to, which is so wild to see inside Apple's cases that are usually so beautifully, perfectly machined and everything's precise. And here's this area that's made intentionally rough and the adhesive sits directly down in that. And this process is, you know, the pull tabs are cool.

It's like those 3M things kind of like you pull sideways and big long stringy sticky things come down and then it comes out, but this is just so much more elegant. You just apply the voltage. And then the thing isn't sticky anymore and you lift it out. It's pretty cool. I think this is only on the 16 and the 16 plus and not on the Pro. I think the Pro still uses sticky stuff because I saw tear down of one of those things as well, which is interesting. But yeah, check out the whole IFixit video.

They seem to think that the 16 continues to push the front here is of easy repairability. Again, not the 16 Pro. I haven't seen the IFixit tear down on that, but the 16 using the dual-sided design and the battery is easy to remove and the way they have the parts arranged. Apple is making progress and making these tiny, very delicate devices that much easier and less error prone to repair.

Just very quickly, one of my favorite things about the IFixit tear down was at one point, they said, oh, it comes out so easily. Gravity will do it. And so they turned one of them upside down, applied the voltage and waited a few seconds and sure enough, all of a sudden the battery just came stumbling out. It just falls out because the adhesive is not sticky anymore. It doesn't leave a residue. It's pretty amazing. That's really cool.

We are sponsored this episode by one password Extended Access Management. So, quick question, do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps? Yeah, I didn't think so. So, next question, how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? One password has the answer to this question, Extended Access Management.

One password is going to access management, helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device, because it solves the problems that traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. So, check it out at onepassword.com slash ATP. That's onepassword.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to OnePassword Extended Access Management for sponsoring our show. All right, so if you wanted to get rid of those annoying monthly screen recording prompts, Jeff Johnson has reverse engineered a way to do it.

Jeff writes, Richie Adams found the file where the prompt dates are stored, and we'll put a link to all this, because I'm not going to read it out now. The file is protected by TCC. What does that stand for, John? Trusted. Computer. Computers? This is a database that keeps your mission stop. I don't remember what it stands for. Yeah, I know where it is. It's protected by TCC, so to access, you'll need to grant full disk access to the terminal app.

In the P list file, the keys are the paths or perhaps the fully qualified domain names or whatever it is. Of the executable files with screen recording permission and the values are the dates. To stop the prompts forever for the rest of your life, anyway, set the date too far in the future. For example, the year 3024, instead of 2024, you'll need to do this for each app and afterward log out and log in again so that they're play D process, recognize this in your defaults.

Dan Sully notes my keys and out the paths of the app, but there it is, the bundle identifier, I couldn't think of the name there. John, it looks like you have some thoughts about this, which we'll get back to in just a second, but then Kyle Rubenock wrote a shell script that will set the dates to a year from now, so you could perhaps run that on log in. Although that shell script doesn't actually work and I sent some reply about that, it's kind of like the chat GPT thing.

I think you forgot a line in there, but one could write a shell script. You can take a look at his and fix it by adding the missing line or whatever, but anyway, you might not have to do that because. Because now breaking news, as of just like an hour ago or something like that, there's a new app called Amnesia that apparently will allow you to disable these on an app by app basis. Yeah, and so the screen recording thing, I'm living it both.

I saw this example here and I wanted to try it myself and I discovered that in my P list file, which is I'll read the things case you wouldn't. It's in your library directory. And it's groupcontainersgroup.com.appl.replayd screen capture approval type list. Again, it'll be showing. This sounds like an Amazon product title. Yeah, my paths were my keys in this little, you know, the name value pairs. They were the full paths. So as application slash zoom.us.app slash content, such macOS as zoom.s.

Like, I don't know why they were bundle paths and dance thing, but maybe it varies on each system. But anyway, the values of your states, it's a simple default, right, command to change it. So I did that for a zoom, which I had recently used to share my screen and it had a complaint and I said it's date to 3024. So in theory, it will never complain again. And having a gooey app for this is good if people don't want to mess with like a command line and stuff or whatever.

But many questions are raised by this discovery, right? So first of all, the whole point of this thing was like, oh, what if someone's spying and you want to be reminded everyone's in a while to know that someone's spying and yada yada. Well, if you can just write a value to a playlist to override this, anyone who's like spying on someone or like abusive partner or something, is just gonna Google this, find this result, set the dates forward to 3024 and never have to worry about it again.

So what the hell happened to like the security benefits of this feature are so easily bypassed that now we're just being annoyed for no reason, right? Before it's like, oh, we're being annoyed but they can't figure out a way to make this more secure without annoying us and they figure out a month interval is good. But now it's like, actually there's no security benefit because anyone who cares can Google this in two seconds and download a gooey app that will set all the things to the future.

So this is, I'm assuming Apple will see this and then in a future update to Sequoia, come up with a different much more secure system that doesn't allow you to run a single false right command or download a gooey app to change this and never have to worry about it again. Because like what's the point of the feature? It's just annoying people for no reason at that point, right? And the second thing is, how has life been on Sequoia with these screen recordings?

Well, I did use Zoom and I did share my screen and it did prompt me and I'm like, oh well, Zoom, how often do I share my screen? I think in these, what, week or two I've had Sequoia, I've gotten prompted like four times by four different apps and it just keeps catching me by surprise. Just today I use TextNiper, which by the way, I still recommend and what was using TextNiper for? Not to get finds at a photos, you know what I was using it for?

Good old preview, I had a PDF that had text in it and I wanted to copy and paste that text out of the PDF. But unfortunately, that text was tabular and selecting the text and preview and hitting copy and then pasting into a plain text document just was just a soup, right? But TextNiper actually printed it in line at a time. It didn't put tabs between it or anything but at least it was like, here's the first row. Here's the second row, here's the third row.

Text selection in both web pages and PDFs continues to be an unsolvable problem apparently. If you were trying to like select text in a complicated web page and you just want the text to be pasted just like it appeared in your web page but when you paste it you see that it's like out of order or it's selected other word stuff. Same thing with PDFs, at least in the preview app.

I can select it and I can hit copy and when I hit paste I expect it to print those lines but sometimes it just absolutely doesn't. It prints just scrambled mess of the lines, all connected to one big long line or interleaved with each other or whatever but TextNiper did it because TextNiper doesn't care about that. So TextNiper just picks those that look like text and it parses them at lines of text and it will print them as lines of text.

But of course when I launched TextNiper it said, hey TextNiper wants to capture your screen. Do you want to allow it? Allow for one month blah, blah, blah. And so this is sort of the ongoing battle because every new app still prompts you and then I went to the command line and it had the defaults right and you know said, you're never going to ask me again until you know, 3024 or until Sequoia 5.15.1 when Apple changes all of this. So this is a disappointing stopping point.

I'm not going to say conclusion in this saga of supposed increased security because now all the security, not all the security been ever, it's been most of the security been if it's throughout the window and yet we're still continuing to be annoyed by it. To the point where people are writing GUI apps to help people circumvent this feature of Mac OS. This is not a good sign for Apple that they have struck the right balance with the features they've shipped. Yeah, it's not great.

And obviously, you know, we've all been upgrading to Sequoia and getting just absolutely overwhelmed with all the, hey, is it okay? Is it okay? Is it okay? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, it's just incessant. And I don't know, like perhaps I'm not having enough empathy for security professionals because it's just not a world I live in but I find it to be extremely off putting in frustrating.

And then again, if the security benefits are non-existent if anybody who's trying to do something the fariest just Google's for it and gets a thing they can pace into terminal and solve the problem for them, like it's just, it's very frustrating. All right, but in happier news, we've all got new toys and this is a year that even John has new toys. So I will preface this by saying, you know, I was in Memphis over the weekend.

I thought about trying to do an in-store pickup or even delivery while I was there. Coincidentally, some things were delivered to the hotel and I don't know if it's my business to say exactly what, but I know that it could have worked. Maybe I should have, but I didn't have the gumption to do it. So anyways, so I set a in-store pickup for yesterday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, the day I got home. Oh, well, you did get to unbox pretty much all the new products, didn't you?

That's true, yes, because a lot of them did show up in Memphis and Jason had them. So I unboxed a lot of them, but anyways, this morning I went and I picked up my new iPhone 16 Pro, natural titanium 512, my new Apple Watch big boy in aluminum and Aaron's stuff. Aaron hasn't opened any of her stuff yet, we've been busy. I've barely gotten mine all set up, which we can talk about the transfer here in a minute.

But, and also, if we have time for me to whine about the in-store experience, I'd also like to do that at some juncture, but if we don't have time, that's no problem. That's part of the setup, you shouldn't talk about that now. No, okay. Let me start by saying, this is the first world, it's the first world problems. I'm gonna try to make this quick and I will move right along.

But I go in and of course, there's no lines anywhere and I walk up to the first person that doesn't have somebody in front of them and I say, hey, I have a pickup to do and they say, okay, go over to the pickup counter desk, whatever thing. Fine, there's a couple of people there, there are a couple of customers there and one employee. And this one employee is already looking ever so slightly flummoxed.

Here's the thing, if Apple wants to do this, oh, magic happens, just magically your products will appear where you're standing. And magically you can just walk up to anyone and pay for them or even scan them on your own if it's something cheaper, you know, and just walk out of the store. It has to work.

And apparently just from overhearing the conversations between the employees, the quote unquote backstage area was like completely overwhelmed with shipment coming in, with all these people asking for the runners to bring out, you know, my phones and my watches and that person's this and that person's that, it's just, if you're gonna do this fancy stuff, it's gotta freaking work. And I was there for, I'd already paid for everything, I should have just been able to swoop in and swoop out.

And I was there for like half an hour, 45 minutes. Now in the grand scheme of things, does that matter? No, but Apple is supposed to be the, it just works company, it's the great experience company. And this was not a great experience. And some woman that was standing next to me was waiting for like half an hour to get a screen protector installed. All, the reason was they couldn't just get the dude at the desk couldn't get his hands on the screen protector because it was backstage.

And I don't know, I just, maybe I'm too east coast for this, but give me a f***ing line to stand in and give me, have the person that's helping me, run their f*** to the back and go find my stuff. Like I don't think this is that difficult. Why does it have to be so synthetically fancy? Like if you're gonna have it be fancy, make it be fancy. This wasn't fancy, this was the illusion of fancy. And it's just infuriating. Like it didn't have to be this way.

Yeah, it's a system that doesn't scale very well. Like it seems really great. Like probably most of the year, probably most days, most of the time, it's fine. Like I still honestly, like, I don't love the Apple Store triage system because like, I don't love that, you know, you have to walk in, you know, okay, hey, hey, you wanna check in with me right at the front door here? Oh, you wanna go with that? Oh, go stand over at that table over there. It's like, okay, well, so there is a queue.

You're just, it's just confusing and you can't really tell what it is. And the queue is, I would say like kind of sloppily enforced enough that I feel like a lot of times it is a service out of order. Because like, it's like, who's waiting at this table? Oh, you gotta go see so and so in the blue shirt, but oh, and then you're put into the system as like, you know, person with red striped shirt. And there could be someone else with red striped shirt get served first.

And like, am I standing at this table or the one next to it? Like it's such a vague system that you as the customer feel all the time like, have I been lost? And even when you have been, but oftentimes you have been. But even when you haven't been, you can't see that. Like you have no feedback as the customer of like, is a system working as intended? Are they, are they, am I still in the queue? And neither did the employees by the way.

Last time I was a store, which was, which was not a busy day, I was sent to a table. And then eventually someone came to help me and they disappeared for a little bit. And when they were gone, two other employees came up to be and said, are you being helped? Like, don't you know if I'm being helped, shouldn't you know? And then I'm being, like the whole system is, you send us off to this little table to distribute this visible line. So we can't see the actual line.

But then we get service in order and people are assigned to us. You should know that somebody already is already handling it. If you don't know, then what is the system? Do you just want to the store looking for people who look lonely and say, that person looks like they're not being helped? Let me help them. I mean, and obviously the biggest problem, I mean, you're both dancing around. It was launch day for the iPhone, right?

It's surely the, when the busiest day is in the Apple store or involving iPhones, anything on launch day of the iPhone is going to be fraud. And it exposes the weaknesses of their systems because this is going to be the most people coming to the store in the shortest period of time who want phones. I will say, however, that as I think I've talked about in years past, I, apparently, one of my many superpowers is utterly ruining iPhone screens.

And I don't mean like shattering them, although that's happened. If you scratch them already. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is, this is, everything's fine, everything's fine. I decided after much chatter from the internet in my direction, and I think, yep. I think I'd solicited requests about what do you do about screen protectors and the internet came through? And a lot of them said, just do the Belkin one that Apple installs. Do it right then and there.

They'll install it for you. They know exactly what they're doing. There won't be any bumps or anything like that. There won't be any dust. And you can get like free replacements. I don't know if it's for life. I haven't, apparently, have to register the screen protector. I guess you at least get a series of free replacements that apparently Apple is happy to, you know, reinstall for you if need be. Do you know what the, the nature of the Belkin protector is? Is it glasses? I believe it is glass.

I don't think I do I have the bag? No, I don't, I don't think I have the bags in here so I can look it up. I apologize. When one of you starts talking, I'll look around the office to make sure the bag isn't in here. I believe it's glass. I'm not 100% sure. I didn't look closely at it. But I did have them install it. And do you want the good news or the bad news? Oh, no. The good news is, no, there's no real bad news. The good news is it feels pretty good.

Like it's a little tackier, maybe not best word, but like there's a little more friction on it than I think a regular piece of glass was. Is it not as oleophobic as the screen? I know I wouldn't say I think it is. I think it is, but I'm not 100% sure. However, you know how I always thought you were nuts, John, and kind of still do for insisting on a bottomless iPhone case, a case without a bottom, so you can swipe up no problem.

And I always thought you were kind of nuts because what is the big deal? It's not going to get tried it. I've tried it. It is unquestionably better. Gosh, I've been talking a lot from having said I had no opinions about this. Here we are. Welcome to the show. Exactly. Welcome to leave in here 10 years. It is definitely better to have a bottomless iPhone case. Full stop. Not arguing that. I just don't think it's as big a deal to me as it is to you. Let me tell you what is not fun, though.

When you take a phone that you do not intend to have a case on it and you put an extra two to three millimeters of screen on it. So now I have a ledge every time I swipe up, which is the screen protected. Sitting here now, I hate it so much. I think I'll get used to it, but I hate it so much. It is ground over that edge. I know. I don't know. I don't think it's. Ultimately, I think it's worth it to me because again, I don't, well, I was going to say I don't mistreat my phones.

I mean, clearly I'm doing something to scratch these screens every year for the last like four years. So I don't think running without a screen protectors the right choice for me, but I kind of hate the way it feels right. Why don't you put a case on it? Put a case that doesn't have a bare bottom, and then you'll be hitting the gigantic bottom lip of the case and you won't even feel the screen protected.

And I think that maybe what I end up doing, but I don't really don't love any of the case options right now. And so we'll see what happens. But I do, I did very much like, however, the application process because they basically they asked me if they could unbox the phone. I said, of course, thank you for asking. They immediately put it in their fancy little machine that lines everything up just right, and then, and all of a sudden the screen protectors on.

And to my eyes, leaving aside that there's an additional ledge that I wasn't really considering, to my eyes, it had an absolutely perfect job. So in that sense, I'm very satisfied. But yeah, I mean, I think that's, with regard to the purchase experience, that's all I've really got. I did go back down, oh, that's the other thing. I went from Pro Max to Pro. Gentlemen, having a human-sized phone in my hand feels so great. It's so much better.

I mean, well, for me, I shouldn't say that like the max is bad. I do a little teeny bit miss the screen real estate of the max, but oh, my word is so much nicer in the hand. It is so much nicer in the hand. I can use my phone without a pop socket. Imagine that. You can use a phone. Did you know this gentleman? You could actually hold a phone in one hand. You can operate the entire keyboard with one hand. You don't even need to have a little thing poking out the back. You can just hold the phone.

I stand by having gone the max last year for the 5x lens or cameras, this remote, what have you. And I actually am very glad that I tried it. I think I could do it again if we're in a situation for like the 17 or something like that, where only the good cameras on the 17 Pro Max, or you know what I mean, something on those lines. But I stand by and I have now reaffirmed my commitment to, oh my, I am not a big phone person. I can do it if I have to, but it's not for me.

Because the thing is like even the now quote small phone is a big phone. Like and it got bigger. Like it got even bigger. Like and this is just gonna keep happening. And like obviously that's the pattern of the market. It's like the market pushes phone sizes up. People buy them, you know, and it drives the small people, the small phone people nuts because they're like, you're going further away from our needs, which is true.

But also the problem is the market just keeps buying bigger and bigger phones also. So you know, they're kind of, you know, the small phone people are kind of being outvoted by most of the buyers in the market. And so this is just gonna keep happening. Like even a lot of max people are like switching back with this one because like they just keep making. Because the max got bigger too. Yes, they keep making a bigger.

And so like eventually you're like, okay, this is actually beyond what I actually want. And I actually have a, I've started with this for a little bit for later. We'll get to that. But so far, just I think I'll wrap up even though like I said I'm already going longer than I intended. Immediate impressions. The phone transfer, I did use a full bore like $90 Apple bespoke Thunderbolt cable.

And it took roughly an hour and my vague recollection of last year was that it took like two and a half, three hours. I do think that gets an eight plus thumbs up for me. This is very not, I did not do a lot of science here to be clear. But the vibe I got is that it was definitely better. I failed to transfer my sim on the first shot. I mean, not from my fault, it just didn't work. And then I tried it again. This is a Verizon e-sim. I tried it again and it worked no problem.

Other than that, I mean, everything seems nice. I like the camera control. I don't want to go too far into it because I think you guys are going to have many more thoughts about it. It does not currently feel intuitive to me. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad by any means. I think I will absolutely get used to it. But I have to think through like, is this a half press? Is it a half double press? Is it a full press? Is it a full double press? It hasn't clicked.

And typically Apple stuff, you don't have to think about it. It just does, or it works exactly the way you expect it to work. And in this case, I don't think it's successful. But again, I want to repeat. I don't think that that's necessarily an indictment of the camera control. It's just, I got to get used to it. That's all. We'll talk about it more in a little bit. I want to talk about my setup process. I'm working on talking about it. It's setup process. We'll do these piecemeal piecewise.

We'll set up and then, you know, anyway. So the setup process, you would think this is such a non-issue. You're a sound like mostly a non-issue. Yeah, I was annoying picking out from the store, but you use the cable to connect them because you had a 15 Pro, to a 16 Pro. And it seemed to work out. And, you know, I would grade your setup experience as pretty much went okay. The software, the software setup experience, I would say is a solid A-, you know, it took a long time.

I don't love that you stuff to download all the apps even when you're doing a phone-to-phone transfer. But in the grand scheme of things, it was fine. There were no major issues. So I get a new phone every two years. And there are two reasons that I dread getting a new phone. One of them is the setup process. The other one is cases which we'll talk about later, right? And it really does deter me from getting a new phone.

You think I'd be excited to get enough phone, and I am, but then every time I actually am getting one, I'm like, oh no, my world has been thrown into turmoil because the computing device that I use, probably the most that's with me all the time, now is going to not be satisfactory for some period of time. First, I have to do with the setup process where I just hope everything transfers over and I deal with all that or whatever. And then the cases which we'll talk about later, right?

So, I think last year, if we go back to, or not last year, two years ago when I got the 14 pro, I think I said that my setup process went smoothly for once. My usual experience is I get a new phone and the way I order it is through the Apple Store app, I order it on my old phone. And when you order on your old phone, you can say, hey, are you going to get a new phone that's going to replace the one that you're currently ordering on? And I say yes.

It's like the most automatic, smoothest default path, which is like, new phone will replace this phone. Don't change anything, don't get an unlocked phone, don't do anything weird, don't change carriers, don't it's like just the default, straight forward thing. And yet, pretty much every year with the possible exception of last year, I don't recall exactly, I end up on the phone with Verizon on iPhone, which is not the time you want to be on the phone with this. No. Well, guess what?

I ordered my new phone using that same old default method, I took it out of the box, I couldn't use the wired, decided not to use the wired thing because the 14 pro is USB 2 speeds and Wi-Fi can beat that, I think. So I'm just using plain old phone to phone, wireless transfer with both phones plugged in. And it starts doing the thing, I see no phone, do you want to do this, connect to the phone, type in the passcode of this phone and that phone, scan the fuzzy dot ball, the whole process, right?

Oh, can I interrupt you right there? Does that actually, like is that a QR code? Does that actually transmit data? Yeah, there's actual data in there. Okay, I can't fathom how I believe you. Okay. It's just artfully done, but yeah, it's sort of an obscured artful kind of like QR code, I think. Anyway. And then they start doing their thing.

One thing that's always annoyed me is the phone you are transferring from has like a white sheet up that says, finish on other phone or whatever, but if you try to dismiss that sheet, it's like, oh, do you want to exit the set of processes? No, I just don't want to be staring at this white thing. And sometimes a screen won't even go to sleep, but just find the phone is plugged in, it just seems stupid, but anyway, whatever.

On the new phone, it's doing stuff and it gets to a thing that says, you know, whatever screen is like activating blah, blah, blah, this may take a few minutes. Well, I was on that phone for a solid hour the first time. And I'm like, I just, because I was afraid to abort it and screw something up. And then I tried again and tried again and try and it would be like activating. This will take a few minutes. And then I resigned myself and like, look, I just, it's never gonna get past the screen.

Like there was no skip, no thing I, like I'm assuming it was trying to transfer, you know, my phone number, eSIM, whatever thing, from my 14 pro to my 16 pro, it just wouldn't and couldn't do it. And I'm going all over, like I have five bars in my house these days, like they must have upgraded the cover dryer. It was not even like I have bad signal anymore. I'm like, and it's on, they're both on Wi-Fi.

Like I don't know what the problem is, time to contact Verizon, which is just the most terrible sort of resigned feeling of dread. Like you're getting an exciting new thing. And instead of setting up your exciting new thing, you're going to be calling your phone carrier on day one of life. That's just like, why is it my life? May I offer a suggestion? You make merciless fun of me for trying the same thing more than once or twice, expecting those will be a last year.

Mm. I'm gonna let it go because I don't want to get any of us angry at each other, but I think maybe trying a different approach for next year might be a good idea. Well, but what would you suggest? Like what's, I mean, next year I'll use the wired one, but that's the most in the problem. It was the carrier activation. Like that's where I'm getting up. Maybe I'm the idiot here, which wouldn't be the first time, but I always, or for the last several years anyway, I just buy an unlocked phone.

I don't want Verizon to know what's coming. I don't want them to think that, because a lot of times in the past, I don't know if this is true anymore, but in the past, if you bought a phone to replace your existing one, like you're describing, I want this one to be my new phone, and I tell Apple that ahead of time. A lot of times like AT&T and Verizon would ding you like 50 bucks for the activation for reasons unknown.

And so I would just buy an unlocked one and then typically, again, not always, but typically neither Verizon or AT&T would ding you the 50 dollar activation fee, because you're just bringing something new to them. It's like, how do they know if you're just John Gruber or Jason Snell and you're just activating somebody else's, or activating you? But I wanted to take over my other number, obviously. Well, yeah, but mine does that every time.

It's just, you know, do you want to take over the old phone? But I'm assuming that it's still charging you the fee. If they're going to charge you the fee, then you can charge it with the fee. I think, I get, we'll see what happens. I might be wrong, but the last couple of years, I don't believe that's been the case, or the last several years. Anyway, I potentially try to unlock one, but I just feel like that's been trading a bunch of known problems for unknown ones.

So anyway, I have advanced in my ability to deal with this because I was like, I can't do it. I can't dial that because remember, I can't call them on my cell phone either. So I'd be calling on like my, quote unquote, landline phone still wireless, whatever. On my landline phone, it would be on speaker phone. I have to hear that music over the, I just can't do it. So I'm like, you know what, this year, I'm going to try the chat thing. They always heard you towards anyway.

In the in web page Verizon, you know, text chat. And so I did that. And the world's friendliest person telling me, oh, I hope you're having such a wonderful day. Congratulations to your new phone, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, please, just, I got all the data ready to go. I tell them the situation. I say I'm on the activating screen. I says, could you please give me your IMED, which I already have in the clipboard. I just paced it, you know, I am gone.

Which by the way, I had to transcribe manually because when your phone is in this terrible state, you can just use the little eye and a circle on the upper right to get the IMED, but you can't copy and paste it because your phone is at even set up. So I'm transcribing that carefully. Like anyway, I do all this information. And you know what, it takes like three seconds when someone's, Verizon is doing it. They're like, okay, this is your thing.

Confirm this, do that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden my phone screen says, instead of saying activating wait a few minutes, it says, oh, transferring cellular service, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's done. And I was like, okay, well that was, you know, maybe like a half an hour on web chat in the grand scheme of things, you know, it's better not have to come in, but it wasn't that bad.

The only weird wrinkle was, they're like, okay, now call like pound or you know, eight, three, two, or whatever, there's something they want you to do to confirm that everything worked. What year is this? I'm pretty sure it worked. Because the phone is saying that it did all the things and you know, whatever, but they're like, okay, well, and I said to them, I can't dial anything right now because it's doing the phone to phone transfer.

I don't have access to the dialer until it finishes the phone to phone transfer. And he says, that's okay, I'll wait. I'm like, it's going to take hours. It's like the problem, I'll just wait. And then he tried to sell me insurance and I said no thanks. And then I walked away from the computer and I came back, you know, an hour or two later and the transfer had finished and the webpage had timed out.

So successful customer service interaction, but chalk this up to another year where I had to contact Verizon. At least I didn't have to go on the phone with them, I had to contact Verizon to get my phone set up. After that, I had gotten over that hurdle, the phone to phone transfer worked the way it normally does where it forgets the test flight exists and rearrange is all my icon until I go back to test flight and figure out where I'll have to belong and rearrange the manually.

Yes, I tried to use iPhone mirroring to rearrange them with the mouse. It's probably a little bit better, but boy, you can really see the insanity of that system when you have pixel-percise control with a mouse cursor because it's such a cruel game. It's like, oh, I went over the one pixel boundary and now it's switched to the other screen. It's just your meat fingers aren't in the way, but now I know precisely how insane the activation readings are.

I'm precisely how broken it is where you will drag an icon and other icons will skitter out of the way and leave an empty spot for your icon and you will release and springboard will say, nope. And it'll just close that spot back up and you'll do it 50 times. Drag an icon, put it right where you want it to go. It's nothing else is there. It is dead center on the spot. Release disappears like it never existed. The system's just broken, so the mouse helps a little bit.

But anyway, set up work fine. I managed to get through it all and there you go. Marco, please, you're set up. My was perfectly fine. I mean, what did you buy unlocked or did you buy as a replacement? I did the thing in the Apple Store app on the phone where I say replace this phone on my plan and it was simple. Now granted, I use AT&T, so everything is mediocre, but it worked better than yours. Yeah, I don't know what it is.

I mean, I'm assuming there's some carrier servers that are involved in this process. And the worst part is there's no way to say, forget about that. I'll deal with it later. Just do the rest of the setup. You are stuck on that screen. This is activating. This may take a few minutes. And as far as I know, there's no way to get past it, which argues for Casey's thing. I've like, hey, brunch just buy it unlocked because then at least you can do the data transfer part of the setup.

And then when you have a functioning working phone that just doesn't have a phone number, then try to do the ECM transfer, whatever, however you initiate that process. I mean, I will say forward whatever it's worth, my Apple Watch cellular transfers never work. The only way I ever get the watch to work is to cancel the plan from AT&T's website for the old watch and then have the new watch start over again. And even then, usually it's like, it tries to activate, it fails a couple times.

The plan shows up in the Apple Watch cellular section as not in use. I gotta like reboot sometimes a couple times. I gotta do some dances to get that to work. And you gotta Google to be like, wait, do I un-pair from the old one first? Do I not like this as whole? I've done it successfully. So my wife's watched several times and every time I do it, I have no confidence that I'm going to be successful. I have no recollection of how I did it last time or why it worked.

And I just like cross my fingers and just dive in. And by the way, everything on the watch takes forever. I guess it's probably getting better as the watch gets faster, but it doesn't take so long to do it. No, it's not getting better. But if the phone transfer, by the way, the foot just before we leave this, the phone transfer for me was perfectly fine. Like the ESM moved over, like it activated just fine in a reasonable amount of time. If you use the cable. Yeah, I used a cable and I use both.

I use two of my like fan peltier element fans that are the active cooling mags safe. I did use ice packs just in honor of Marco. I used them briefly, but then I got worried about conversation and stuff. Very quickly with regard to the watch, I had heard a story and I think this was accurate at the time that the best way to move a watch is to un-pair on the old phone. If I remember correctly. I think it's the only way. No, it will offer to move it for you.

It just doesn't usually work with Tyler for some reason. Well, so that's the thing. So the way it used to be years and years ago is you would un-pair the watch, then do your phone transfer, then repair the watch on the new phone. This time I didn't do any of that. I just waited for the phone to say, hey, would you like to move the watch over? And I said, yes. And it worked. I do not have cellular. I do not have cellular and I do think that makes a big difference. Oh, yeah. It does.

It moved no problem. And then when I unboxed my Apple Watch Series 10, which we'll get to later, I said, hey, can you make it, I think it asked or whatever, do you want this to effectively replace the old one? And I said, yes. And it said, sure. And that worked pretty much no problem. So my Apple Watch transfer experience was A plus plus. Like it was pretty much flawless. I was stunned. We're sponsored this episode by Trade Coffee.

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The actual usage of it, I think they're gonna need to tweak a little bit here and there with some of the like, you know, timings and settings and tolerances and things like that. But I think overall I like it. It is extremely useful for me just as a camera launch button. I know a lot of people have been using the action button for that over the past year. Yeah, that's what I was doing. And that's totally fine. And there are some benefits and drawbacks to that.

I, as I mentioned in previous episodes, I use the action button for flashlight, which I actually use a decent amount. Although I actually, I am happy to report that as I progress through my denial of, that I really should be wearing progressive reading glasses all the time because my closer reading distance is not great anymore. But my distance viewing is fine.

And so what I really should be doing is wearing progressive reading glasses that have no correction on top and reading correction on the bottom. I have yet to find any that I don't hate. So instead what I'm doing is mostly not wearing reading glasses and just holding stuff out really far to see it. But occasionally this system is not sufficient for something. And the phone has a magnifier feature built in.

It has for a very long time, where it just basically is like a quick little view that uses the camera to show you a magnified view of whatever you're looking at. It's great, especially when you have the modern ultra wide lenses that have autofocus and so they can actually get very close with macro distances to view things like, that tiny little print on Apple's power adapter or something. One of the things I tried to view recently was, they have the new MagSafe Pucks, the Charge 25 Watts.

And they look almost identical to the old ones. Apparently I heard from John Gruber actually that apparently they are slightly narrower, which is going to be really annoying when I try to fit it into anything that's made to like, you bring your MagSafe adapter into this 3D mount or whatever, like that's gonna be annoying. I gotta verify that. Like the radius is smaller?

Yeah, like apparently the actual size of the circle is slightly smaller, so it's not gonna fit in, you know, docks and stuff that are made to, you know, build an Apple's MagSafe Pucks. But I gotta verify that. But there's some tiny light gray text on a slightly darker gray background that you could also. Right, so what I was trying to do is like, okay, how do I tell, if I'm holding one of these in my hand, how do I tell which one it is?

Because they now, you know, the modern MagSafe Pucks now with the, you know, the faster charging, I believe there are 10 bucks more, there are 40 bucks instead of 30 bucks. And they have a different entire model number, but if you're just looking at it, it's not obvious. Like, and they do have a tiny little bit of text printed on the metal right next to where the cable goes into the metal ring. And I could not see this for the life of me.

So anyway, all this is to say, the magnifiers you could feature, and what I've actually done since I have the action button as the flashlight. Now with iOS 18, you can replace the two circular 3D touch buttons on the bottom of the lock screen, the ones that used to be flashlight and camera. So I've actually replaced the flashlight one with the magnifier. I'm happy to announce I've reached that point in aging where I'm going to be using the magnifier frequently enough on my phone.

I've already, I just did this like the other day, and I've already used it like three times. And you can change it to a triple tap too. That's the one that, that's the real old person move. You change magnifier to triple tap with accessibility. You just tap the back of the phone three times. I don't need that yet, but certainly having it on the lock screen on a button I was not using anymore is very useful.

And then, you know, and so similarly, like, you can have the camera, you know, if you don't want to use Apple's camera app anymore, or if you only want to launch it from the camera control, then you can reassign the camera circle button on the lock screen too to something else. Like, this is a whole new area of customization that I actually find quite, quite nice. But anyway, all that is to say, the camera control, therefore, being my camera launch button, will free up one of those spots for me.

And so using it as that so far over the last couple days, I have enjoyed it. It has proven useful to me. The only thing is that so far, I have a very, I had a very hard time figuring out how to navigate the little tools menu inside of it. Like that? Yep, same. I said this before, where any of us had ever tried it. Remember by using the demos, I'm like, yeah, that's modal. How are you gonna get out of that mode and I, trying it for real life?

I experienced the exact same thing, the exact problem I predicted. I'm like, I'm having that problem. I eventually figured it out, but it's not great. Yeah, I think there's gonna be a quite learning curve there. And I think maybe Apple could tweak some of the, like, you know, timings and gestures and things on that to make it a little bit easier over time. Because I have found that, like, the actual, like, the pushing of the button to open the camera and to take pictures, that works great.

But I keep finding myself, like, accidentally in some of the little menu modes to the point where I might just turn them off. And the second thing is that as soon as you start using those menu modes, it, or even, even I think even just using it for capture, like, just pushing the button to take the picture, it dims or hides all of the camera UI on screen. Yeah, I noticed that too, which surprised me. Yeah, and it keeps it hidden for, like, a few seconds after you hit the picture.

And so, like, even if you want to just review the picture, you just took it. You have to, like, wait two or three seconds for it to, like, fade those controls back in. Like, it's kind of annoying. Like, I see what they're going for. It just becomes a camera with this control. That, okay, that's, that's an ice idea. That's very precious. In real life, I want those controls back immediately.

So, like, as soon as I'm done taking the picture, I want those controls, or even, even if I'm just stuck in the weird, you know, camera control menu thingy and I can't figure out how to zoom back out or whatever, just keep the controls on screen at all times, because, yeah, it's great to have them in the camera control. It's also great to have them on the screen. And a lot of times, you're going to want to switch back and forth between them.

So, that's something that, like, I think, until Apple makes better balances and more usable defaults with the camera, or more usable behaviors with the camera control, I don't see myself using it for any of those little many features other than just launching the camera and taking a picture. I think, for those, it's great. It's convenient.

The actual implementation of all those little menus and things and the way it hides all the controls in the main screen, that, I think, needs some iteration to really be useful. All right, so here's my experience with the camera control. The very first thing that I discovered with my new phone with the camera control is that the camera control is placed exactly where I apparently grabbed my phone. Exactly. I've done this a couple of times. Like, with it taking it out of the box, I kid you not.

The phone is not even on. I've just taken it out of the box. I accidentally hit the camera control button three times in under 20 seconds. It's not even on. Like, the phone's not even on. I'm hitting the button. And, by the way, what part of your hand are you hitting it with, like, you're like, that's apparently where I grabbed the phone. I apparently grab it at the bottom with one, you know, my thumb on, like, the left side of where the camera control is.

And my other fingers exactly on the camera control. And it's a flush button. It doesn't even stick out. I was hitting that button like crazy. I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I can retrain myself, but that's an unfortunate personal habit. Apparently I grabbed the phone by the camera control. And so I have signed up for hitting that button accidentally a lot. I'm getting better.

And unfortunately, I think part of the way I'm getting better is learning not to press as hard, which is good in that I won't activate the flush button, but bad in that now I'm not gripping the phone as hard when I pick it up, which I feel like is just a increased drop risk. But that's a thing. So setting that aside, get that apple care. Yeah, I do have it using the actual camera control button.

I would not have predicted this based on their previews in our discussion of this, but because we talked about like the whole idea of them modeling it after like half press on a real camera shutter button. And even though that feature for half press focuses in even shipping yet, the way you get into those menus that Marco was talking about these little things is you essentially half press, right, to get to the thing where you can change the zoom and the focal depth of that whole menu system.

And yes, that is modal. And the only way I've discovered to get out of it is to touch anywhere on the screen, which is a reasonable way to get out of it, but I kind of wish there was a way to get out of it by without taking a picture, by hitting the camera control, but I think you have to actually touch the screen to say, I want to get out of this mode where I'm adjusting things with the camera control, right? But here's the kickers. This is the thing I wouldn't have predicted.

The half press on the camera control button to activate the menus is unlike any half press and any big camera that I've ever used in my entire life in that it is way, way more difficult to get to it. Like it is a thing that you have to train your fingers to do because if you just do what you would do to half press a real camera button, you press it all the way. That's too far. So I was like, how do I, how do I half press this button? And you have to press so much lighter than you think.

I know there's a preference to adjust this or whatever, but it's such a strange sensation. You're like, am I even pressing it? Or am I just thinking hard about pressing it in an active pace? You can do it. You can learn to do it, but it is so much more of a precise delicate gesture than I expected it to be. I fully expected, I've been half pressing shorter buttons for years and years, right? Decades, right? I fully expected it would just be completely natural for me to half press it.

Absolutely not. It is so much more delicate than I thought it would be, which I don't personally mind because I think I'm never going to use those menus. Now that I've experienced them, I don't think I'm ever going to use them to adjust anything. Maybe I'll do the zoom one because it has the advantage. I hate pinching to zoom.

It has the advantage that I can zoom while having the phone in camera taking position, in landscape mode or wherever without me having to take one of my hands off of the phone and use it to pinch the screen. I think zoom is the one that's most likely for me to use, but in practice, I've never actually used it other than when I was experimenting with it, just because I hate going into that mode. I can't even decide which one to keep it on.

I think I settled on keeping it on zoom because it's the one I'm most likely to use, but I would just much rather adjust those things on the screen and I'm with Marco like I understand how the UI goes away when you do that or whatever, I would just rather always see it. Like again, that should probably be a setting or whatever.

But you know, for taking a photo and for having this a shutter button, I've heard a lot of people complaining that the positioning is bad, that it should be closer to the corner and maybe that would have gotten that of my accidental activation area. But I'm mostly happy with the position. I take pretty much all my pictures in landscape mode, but occasionally in portrait and I find it works for both of them. I have it launching the camera, I have it launching the camera on a single press.

The reason I can get away with it is that when I accidentally activated, it's because I'm picking up a lock phone off the table or whatever. And when you hit it on a lock phone, it doesn't launch the camera app. It just like wakes it up first and you have to hit it again to launch the camera app, which is a nice defense against me accidentally when I'm launching the camera app.

I'm still accidentally hitting the button a lot, but the consequences are not significant because when I'm doing that, it's almost always when I'm picking up a lock phone, so I don't actually find myself landing in the camera app. Within, I think, maybe less than a minute of my wife picking up my phone sheet, accidentally thinking to picture with the camera control before I actually saved it. It's like, iPhone unboxing day, here's our first picture of the floor. Yeah. It is, it's a thing, right?

Again, there's a setting to make the camera control require a double click to get into the camera app. I don't think I need to use that yet. I think I'm building my habits around it, but I think the camera control was maybe a little bit overly ambitious. As a button, it feels good, it clicks good. I like the fact that it's touch sensitive.

The half press I'm not sold on, the menu interface I'm not sold on, and the upcoming feature that we don't even have yet, the half press for like focus or whatever they're gonna do, I don't think that's gonna make this better. They're piling so much stuff onto this button. This is not like a version 1.0 button. This is like the version 4.5 of this button already. It does so much stuff. It is so overloaded, has so many capabilities.

And like I said, maybe it's just me, but like when you find one of these phones, try, you can learn how to get into the menus pretty easily, but it's such a strange feeling. It's like press, but don't press. It's such a delicate operation. It reminds me of like some of the finesse moves I would have to do with a thumbstick and super monkey ball in the GameCube.

Like when you just really have to learn how to like, what the difference between, you know, 18 and 17 degrees on the stick is, as opposed to just being like, you know, like jam the stick to the left right up down, right? So sort of delicate, like just think about pressing and then you'll get into the menus.

And again, it's not bad because I don't think I wanna get into the menus a lot, and I do know how to do it now, but it is so much, I don't know how to say, so much more like, I don't wanna say sophisticated. It's so much less straightforward to do. Like it requires more mechanical finesse than I would have expected. Way more mechanical finesse than half pressing a shutter button.

And having handed my very large cameras to many people over the years for them to take pictures, I can tell you that the average person has difficulty half pressing even a gigantic shutter button. That is very easy in my opinion to half press, because it has like miles of travel and you literally push it halfway down. You cannot push this button halfway down. Like the travel is so short, if you try to push it halfway down, you will completely depress it.

You have to think about pressing it and then you just have to press it. Yeah, and I think like, it almost gives me the feeling of like, when I've designed an interface in Xcode for my iPhone app, and I've been using the simulator for most of the design, and then I run it on the device for the first time. And I pick it up and I try to use it, and I instantly feel like, oh, this is all wrong.

Like this, this is either too small, too big, it doesn't feel bad, it doesn't work, you can tell as soon as you try to use it on the device, oh, this is wrong. That's kind of how I feel with the camera control. Like what I was expecting based on how they were describing it, I was kind of expecting this to work a certain way. And then as soon as I get it, and I try, I'm like, oh, this is wrong. I would actually call it maybe fiddly, or like, over sensitive.

And like it's not, I don't think I'm lacking appropriate dexterity in my index finger to be able to use it. And there are some case considerations, which we'll get to in a moment. But I think like it's just very finicky to get that right. And what you don't want with your camera controls is imprecision. Like when you're using a camera, usually you are adjusting. Just something you're fumbling for it, like real quick. You, whoa, wait a minute, camera out.

It's not the time for like, and now I'm going to apply the most controlled pressure I've ever applied using the tendons in my fingers. Right, and like, and you don't want to like accidentally switch modes or overshoot the setting that you were trying to adjust or whatever, like it's very sensitive and finicky in the way it operates. And so again, I think it's a good idea. I like how it launches the camera and then takes pictures. Everything else about it, I really don't like.

Yeah, let me fast forward this for Apple. Apple, the solution to this, the real version 4.5 of this, I mean, I don't know how many years in the future this is going to be, is to solve all these problems. Basically, that entire side of the phone needs to be a giant touch sensitive, pressure sensitive, clicky button.

Because like, for example, zooming and swiping, the little interface that appears is maybe a little small, but the essentially track pad area, it's a small button, that area of like swipe, swipe, swipe, it's barely enough to cycle through to satisfactorily cycle through the menus. Well, long being satisfactory for zoom. I feel like that whole side of the phone needs to be just one complete featureless thing that you can squeeze and it haptically clicks. And the whole thing is touch sensitive.

And it needs to go in more. I don't know how they solve this problem, but it's strange to say, but I feel like the camera control is too small. Like, for what they want it to do. If you just want it to be a shutter button and you can use it that way, and by the way, I will say that is the big benefit of the camera control. If all these things we're complaining about, you can just ignore them and just say this button is just a binary button and I press it all the way or not at all.

And it works that way. I don't think you'll accidentally have pressed it a lot, especially if you're just always saying press, press, right? But if they want to go whole hog and have this be like a touch sensitive thing to swipe through UIs and stuff like that, they need a bigger touch area and they need a way bigger button. They need just that whole side to just be one giant button that also happens to click.

And I don't know how they do that, but that would be better than this tiny little thing. I'll tell you what, there are settings for camera control. There are not many of them. There is right now there are three settings. There's what app does it open? Launch camera with a single click or double click, which you actually might want John if you're having a lot of accidentally put it in. Yeah, I mentioned, I don't like I need to go to the double click.

And I also don't think I need to address a sensitivity. Like I've tried the different settings and I feel like that's not the problem. So the third setting is called, for some reason it's called clean preview, clean preview on or off. And this is light press camera control to quickly make adjustments. Oh, that leaves the menus up when you're active. Yeah, you're right, it does. Okay, well, honestly, that solves one of my problems, but not. Yeah, that's true.

Actually, I agree with you that I do like that. It leaves all the camera controls up. So yes, we have lives the hoped one for me. We made it slightly better, all right. I like it better this mode. We'll see if I can actually stick with the other controls. But that is good. Anyway, so let's move on to talk about cases and the camera control. Poor peak design. Oh, no. And every other third party case, right? That's true. I love this case.

I've been using it now for, I think, three phones in a row now. I don't use it all year, but I use it some of the year, as mentioned. It is my kind of summer case. It's great for, you know, if I don't want to use leather because it might get wet in the summer or anyway. So I love the peak design case. They had trauma last year with the action button where they didn't really know it was coming, but they knew something was coming.

So they left a cut out and it turns out the cut out was, you know, it was just, it made it too hard to use it because it was like a deep hole and the action button is small. And so it made it too hard to use. So they had this whole thing where they gave free, they like, you know, over the few months, they remade the case. They gave free replacements to people who bought the first one.

Like it was a whole thing, you know, I'm sure they lost a ton of money on it, but they're a good company and they wanted to serve the customers well, I like peak design a lot. Anyway, so this year, I got their case and it has a cut out, not of the entire case edge, but like just like a camera control shaped valley with like sloped sides going into it from the other edges of the phone. You can see it, they have a 360 view on there, on their page. And I tried this on my phone immediately.

And within two hours, I was like, this isn't gonna work. No. Now there's two problems. There's two problems. Number one, the deep valley it creates does indeed make it difficult to use the camera control. Like it just, it makes it much harder to use because it is not a cover, but they can't just do a simple cover because you can see like the way Apple did theirs with like the Sapphire cover with the conductive layer. Like you gotta make it work with all those camera control sensors.

So instead of doing some kind of complicated button that they probably didn't even know was possible until Apple released their cases, they just made a hole with like, you know, ramps going into it basically from all sides. Well, those ramps also hurt my finger. Like they form kind of a sharp edge. And you know, I'm a left hand phone user. And so one of my fingers is like basically resting right there all the time. And it's just sharp. Like it just feels bad. So I feel terrible.

Like I gotta say like this is also not good. And I feel so bad for them because I know they're gonna have other people saying the same thing. And again, like this, I mean, two years in a row to really screw case makers by Apple.

Like it's gotta be rough for the case makers because they got to design cases with a bunch of guesses and speculation and they gotta like basically like follow the rumor mail and get whatever they can get and just make a bunch and take a big risk like, oh, we think the dimensions of the phone will be this and we think it's going to have a button here and we think of the button will work like other buttons but we don't know. And so it's a big risk, risk you business to be in.

And I gotta say, again, I'm not a fan of the pizzas on cases here. And maybe they'll do another one sometime that has like a proper cover over it that works with the weird sensors of the button and maybe that'll be better. So I'll keep that in mind. But what I did was, so as soon as I use this case, I thought, well, I have to go to the Apple store. Okay, this is not going to do. Like I'm going to get one of Apple's cases today. Just very briefly, why not go caseless?

I'm not saying that's the right choice for anyone but that is what I plan to do with this one. Why not just go caseless? Number one, I didn't buy Apple care and I don't really want to. So I keep saying, Apple cares my case and then I just buy cases anyway. And I'm spending like, that's total. That's total. Hundreds of dollars on Apple care over the years. Never to use it.

So I figure, okay, you know, if I just stop buying it now, you know, maybe if I end up having to have an expensive repair, then I'll weigh that against all the savings that I'll have with Apple care over the years and decide then whether to start changing my policy or not. But anyway, so that's the reason. And so I'm like, all right, I gotta go to the Apple store. I gotta try their cases. So I went to the Apple store and there was another reason I'll mention it a little bit.

But I went to the Apple store and I immediately, like, you know, went over to the case while they told me, oh, go stand over by so and so and I'm like, okay, and I directly walked to the opposite direction to go over the case walk. So I'm like, there's a huge cluster of people waiting over there. Like, I know I'm not going to the first in line. I have some time and I did.

So anyway, the, everyone's seen these new beats cases that they have, which are basically just like, plastic, like shiny plastic cases. They are decent. I would say they come in zero good colors. They do feel very cheap. The outside has not much grip because it's not like a TPU kind of plastic. It's like a shiny like shell kind of plastic. So it's, it's, there's no grip to it whatsoever. And I was like, oh, that's kind of not great.

I almost bought one because the beats cases are very light and very thin, which is nice. But it just, it's just like, I think it's like a peel case. Like you can get that for cheaper in better colors from other manufacturers very easily. Let me offer a different opinion considering the beats cases now on my phone right now. Okay. Which, which mediocre color did you get? Great dark gray, whatever. Yeah, colors not great. And it's got lines on the back for no reason.

I think the beats case, I think the shape is nice. I think it does feel more expensive than your average plastic case. Simply because the shape is very like, precise and consistent like the buttons which are just plastic or whatever. The buttons are precise. The edges of the case are precise. It is rounded over in all of the right places. It feels kind of like a giant iPhone 5C, which I liked. It is shiny plastic. It is not as grippy as a leather case, not by far.

Although it is grippier than I thought it would be. It is probably about as grippy as Apple's clear cases are, which is again, it's not as grippy as rubber, definitely not as grippy as silicone. But it's grippier than I thought it would be just because of the tackiness. It shows fingerprints disgustingly. Like it just, I noticed that in the store actually. That's one of the reasons I didn't buy it. I noticed that when I was just handling the sample ones.

Yeah, like that leather, one of the great things about leather is a little absorb all the oils from my fingers. This plastic will not, it is covered with oils. But I do have to say for this case, and by the way, the reason I got it of course is because it has a bare bottom. And it does. Even the edges of the bare bottom, I think this case is beautifully precisely shaped and formed, everything about it except for the material, but it has made that, which is a big thing in the case, right?

But I'm not gonna say I'm happy with my purchase because I am looking forward to finding a suitable leather case that I can replace it with. But I am, I'll say this, I am happier with this case than I was with the Apple Clear case, which also has a bare bottom that I bought for my 14 Pro. Right, so I've tried the clear cases, they're not for me. This, if I had to live with this, I could tolerate it, but it is nowhere near as nice as my leather one. So, you know, go to the store and check it out.

My marker looked at it, we thought it felt cheap. I think it feels very nice and solid and precise and good and grippy than I thought it would. It's just not that, you know, the oil situation is a problem, it's not as grippy.

Even the ridge around the camera, I've used a lot of cases, first party and third party that have like a vertical wall around the camera mesa and the beets case, it's almost vertical, but not quite, it's got an adjust enough of a slant to it that it feels less cheap to me than just like a big vertical wall stuck into the back of the case. I guess it does have a circle on the line for Magsife on the back for reasons that escape may because it's not a clear case, why do you need to do that?

It does have a beets logo on the side, but I actually give a pretty good rating to the beets case if you can tolerate the material that's made out of which I can almost tolerate. Yeah, my plan if I bought it, which I didn't, but my plan was to take a magic eraser to the beets logo on the side and see if I get rid of it. Yeah, you don't want to scuffle it up.

Although, but actually by the way, one tiny bit of real time follow up, we mentioned already the camera control, which we have to in a second on the beets case, I'm assuming the camera control has the settings for like how hard you want it to be. That's the reason I always forget what these settings are. That was an accessibility. You know what else is an accessibility? It's, you know, setting accessibility camera control and accessibility under camera control.

There is a toggle to just turn off the camera control. You just don't want to deal with it. So that's great. There's also a toggle to turn off the whole light press to show adjustments. If you don't want that feature at all period, you could just turn that off. And there's also finally a toggle for how quickly you have to double press it. If you want to use the double press feature, it's just got the fault slow and slower. If you can't double press it that quickly, right?

So, could just Apple for giving enough adjustability to say, hey, the massive overreach that we have done with this camera control, you can just turn most of that off until you get it to the point where you think it is, suitable. I'm going to leave everything on, but I guess I probably just don't want to use the adjustment feature. That's interesting. We'll play with that. But again, it's not in camera controls and accessibility. So, these settings are always in weird places.

And if you search for camera control, you won't find it. So, settings accessibility camera control. Anyway, so I ended up, for at least the moment, I ended up with the Apple silicone case. I wish you any. I got it in Lake Green, which is not at all green. Like, it is blue. It is absolutely blue. There is nothing about this. Did you take that website test? Of course I did. But like, there is nothing about this that is green.

But anyway, it's a nice, it's a nice like weird middle blue is not green. But it's a nice color. Anyway, I ended up with silicone case for now. This looks green on screen. I do not deny that. See one in person. Trust me. When you see it in person, you're like, that's that color. I had to check, I had to like pull out the little drawer in the Apple store that it was on, like read the boxes to see like, is this really that color? Anyway.

Just to very quickly interject here, I typically do not like Apple Silicon cases. I feel like they're way too tacky. I just, I really just viscerally do not like them. And I can't other than the tackiness, I can't really put my finger on why. And I did go and look at a bunch of the ones at the Apple store today while I was waiting for the, for the back room to bring me or backstage to bring me my stuff.

And I got to say, I feel like if I, if I do end up wanting a case, that might be the direction I go. Because it's a lot less tacky than it used to be. And it feels nice, like at grants that I didn't have one in hand. I was just, you know, petting it on the wall of cases. But it is, it is definitely worth looking into again, if you're like, if you like me wrote it off many, many years ago.

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you like the, what the reason I always shied away from it in the past was, I didn't like that it was so tacky that it was actually difficult to get in and out of pants pockets. That is still the case. I don't, I think it might be a little bit less annoying, but maybe I'm just giving up. But it is still annoying to get in and out of pants pockets. So that's, it's not like, it's not terrible, but it's not graceful in that way.

Also, it does have a bottom lip and it's fairly thick. So like to do edge gestures, you are running into the silicone a lot. So it is a very protective case in the sense that like, you know, for, if you're worried about a case like for actually protecting your phone against drops and stuff, it's probably a pretty good choice for that. And the camera control implementation on all of Apple's cases is just great. Like it just feels like the button got extended.

It is still flush with the case, just like it is flush with the phone. The button feels well. It feels right. It works right. Like it, it feels and works pretty much exactly the way it does on the bare phone. Yeah, I tested the camera control with no case in the beginning, just to make sure I was getting the full experience. And then when I put the beats case on it, same deal did a great job. Like it really, it really doesn't feel any less precise or any more difficult or anything like that.

And it's nice and flush. They did a good job. It'd be great if third parties could have done the same thing. Although I did see one now, as you would imagine, my Instagram ads are 98% ads for iPhone cases and 2% ads for Marcos car. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, there is one third party case manufacturer. I figured with the name is like SU case or something or whatever. Advertising the fact that they presumably will have like the sort the courts pass through thing or whatever.

Everyone else is just as holes or they leave out that section of the case. But I feel like this is totally possible for third parties to do. Technologically speaking, they just didn't have enough information to implement it in time for launch. So I'm hoping there will be third party cases that implement this. But Apple's implementation is, it's really good. Yeah. And I mean, geez, I would have loved to have some kind of like Apple premium fabric of some kind to case this year.

Like something that is not plastic and not silicone. Something that doesn't have a bottom lip, Apple. Yeah. And so the clear case, like maybe I might go with that in the future. I don't know yet. I mean, I'm going to try this silicone case for a while, but it is gene season and it does suck to get it in and out of gene spot. It's an I do that many times a day. So it's a little annoying. You might try the clear one. Try the Beats one. They are very similar in feel.

And I think the Beats one feels a little bit nicer. The Beats one though. I noticed those fingerprints when I was playing with them in the store and I'm like, if I made it look that bad in two minutes, they're on the clear one too. They're just a little bit harder to see. Well, yeah. But like this look when you don't see it at all. Yeah. So I probably just took this silicone for a while until I mean, maybe the bulls trap won't be really good. I don't know, but I don't think so.

You got that, but you haven't opened it yet. It's I'm at the beach and it's over there in the mainland. So I'm all right. Well, my case is coming in Wednesday. So next episode, I will be able to tell you about the bulls trap case. And Marcos Tale of the sloped pit on the peak design one does not fill me with hope because that's exactly the design that bulls trap is using. I'll see how it goes. Yeah. I think this is going to be similar to last year with the action button.

I think this is going to be like a lot of people realizing, oh no, I've made the wrong case decision. And a lot of case makers realizing, oh no, we've made the wrong cases. And I think this is going to be a big shake up year for that and another good year for apple cases. Sonically, you can maybe think maybe that's what they're doing. But no, I don't think that's the reason. I do wish that. And you know, got to give Apple credit. Like the Beats cases are new.

That's something that kind of came out of nowhere. The way Apple uses the Beats brand to me is sometimes a little bit puzzling, especially in recent years. But hey, some good stuff comes out of it. And so they did add more cases than before. They took away the final oven. Okay. They added the Beats ones. Okay. Which has no bottom, which shows they still know that's a thing. It's fine. I do wonder, like, you know, are they ever going to try some kind of premium fabric again? I hope they do.

Because honestly, like, apples work with fabrics and textiles in general on the watch side. Has been great. They do amazing things over there. And part of the reason I like the peak design cases is that they have like the rim, the edge around the sides is some kind of like plasticky rubbery thing. But then the back of the case is really nice fabric. And it just, it makes a very good feeling.

In fact, when I was at the Apple store checking out the Apple store employee who was bringing me up, I was showing it because she was asking about the cases and I was showing her the peak design one. And I let her handle it. And she's like, oh, this feels really nice. Like the back, like, because the peak design does very, very good fabric work. So does Apple. They just don't make fabric cases right now. But I hope that they revisit that. Obviously, fine woven wasn't it.

But they make lots of other great fabrics they have over time with the watch bands and everything. So I know they can do it. So I hopefully over time their case line up continues to evolve and expand because even before the fine woven thing, it was usually the case that like apples, if you wanted like a nice leather case for your iPhone, Apple's leather case was usually either the nicest one you could get or one of the nicest ones you can get.

And that's why everyone bought them because like, oh, well, we know they're going to do a good job. We knew it was consistent. We knew like, you know, the buttons would line up. It would be good quality. It would not have a weird branding or anything like it would be, it would be just a good, basic leather case. And yeah, you know, sometimes the corners wouldn't wear out wear as well as you wanted them to or whatever. But you know, you get the black one and it's pretty safe.

And you know, you kind of knew how to do it. It was always a good, safe bet if you wanted like a guaranteed pretty good case that you could buy on day one and be pretty sure it would be the right choice. It was the Apple leather case. And I feel like right now we don't have that unless you love silicone in which case, the Apple silicone case. But then I don't know what else to say after that. Yeah. I don't just go caseless. That's what the cool kids do.

But then the phone just slides off the flat surfaces. Hey, that's not that terrible. And then your fingerprints are all over your actual phone and so are all the nicks and scrapes. Yeah. I mean, the physical condition of my pro max leaving aside my freaking ruins screen, like the back of the sides, but that's all fine and I did use a case occasionally for the most part I didn't. And it physically, it's in really, really good shape. It's just the screen that's bad name spares.

Yeah. Speaking of a final thing on cases, this is a good time to refresh people who haven't been listening to the show for years and years. I always make reference to the naked robotic core idea and for people who don't know what that is. It is the idea that I think I talked about back in the hypercritical days originally, that you will make a product that omits as much stuff as possible because someone who buys your product can always add things to it, but they can't take things away.

So for example, in the case of the iPhone, you can imagine making a smartphone that has a grippy rubber back on it that is not as slippery as the phones that Apple makes. But if you don't want a grippy rubber back and the phone comes with one and that is literally the back of the phone, you can't remove that. So the naked robotic core theory is ship the smallest, most minimal thing possible and then anybody who wants something can add it to it.

But people who want nothing get the smallest minimal product possible. And it is if, I don't know, if Apple espouses this theory is a thing that I came up with to explain Apple's apparent design decisions on their phone. And I think they continue along those lines. And the specific instance with the iPhone 16 is, I think Marco talked about this maybe in the past episode. They are shrinking the bezels around the screen just year after year, a millimeter after a millimeter.

It's not like there was a big giant one-inch border like that was in the original iPad. Like the border around the screen on the iPhone has always been pretty small, but I was like, no, we need to make it smaller because that border is a thing that if you don't want it, you can't remove it from the phone. You can always add a border by putting a case on it. But if you get a phone and you want no border, you can't have that unless we ship you the naked robotic core.

And then it's up to you to decide, we should be, if they could ship it with zero border they would like a Samsung phone with the screen goes up to the edge or around it or whatever. Right. They're getting real close to essentially having zero border. And you can decide is zero border what you want? If not, add a case.

And now the screen is so close to the edge that I've heard from so many people, the iPhone X-Tains that they're accidentally activating things on the screen simply by the act of holding the phone because the meat of their fingers wraps around and ends up touching the screen part.

And yes, the iPhone and iOS has all sorts of like, what we would call in the iPad palm rejection, but essentially touch rejection, rejecting what the OS thinks is an inadvertent touch, but it's not enough for some people. There's still some of their touches are getting through them.

By the way, I think there's a fun one where like if you touch the screen right by the camera control where like the little camera control controls would appear on the screen, if you touch the screen there and then try to do anything else anywhere on the screen, all your touches are ignored, which I think is probably like a feature having to do with people trying to swipe the camera controller or something or maybe it's a bug.

I don't know, but anyway, they've gotten so naked robotic core with the 16 line that people are now having to make the choice to get a case simply because they cannot avoid accidental input because now the screen is so close to the edge they just can't avoid it entirely. So that is a possible thing to think about. Am I going to go caseless? Yeah, they're giving you the most minimal.

They're trying to get closer to that naked robotic core ideal that they don't know about, but it's just a thing that I made up. But that's what they're doing. This is me explaining what they're actually doing. And if you don't like it, your choice is to put a case on it. That's the only way to get your fingers farther away from that screen surface. That's part of the reason I use a case now because as I mentioned a couple episodes ago, I tried without a case. I'm on the 15 pro at the end there.

And I kept causing accidental input on the screen. And I'm actually, honestly, I'm finding that problem a little bit with the new watch too. I'll get to that when we get to talk about that. But as the screens get pushed out further and further to the edges, that's what happens. You have less space to hold the phone with your fingers without causing input. And it's something that you can get used to, but I don't know. I think I wasn't really asking for the bezels to get narrower.

It's naked robotic core. It's like, hey, some people want the most minimal phone and they can't get that unless we ship it. You can always add a case. And there, your problem is solved with the people who want the most minimal. Now, you can argue, okay, no one wants it this minimal. Like human fingers are squishy. Like people's fingers are going to overlap. And I also agree kind of on the 14 pro, which had pretty big bezels, right?

But the 14 pro that I was using previously, I was constantly finding that somehow some fleshy part of my hand was touching the right edge of the screen when I was in landscape mode and causing YouTube to fast forward because they added that thing where if you like hold on the right edge of the video, it like fast forwards or whatever.

And I'm like, oh, here's some accidental input that I hadn't thought about before or like just it's, they're getting close to like, you know, is this, this is for a pot of core to naked will everyone who buys this phone need a case like because again, the idea of naked robotic core is provide the phone that is, you know, naked for the people who want it because they can't remove stuff from it. But like certain points like, okay, but who wants this? Who wants the bezels to be this small?

And if the bezels are going to be that small, maybe the stainless steel titanium, whatever the hell aluminum aluminum titanium, maybe that band should be thicker at which point like why do you even remove the bezels? So now you're just adding them back by making the band thicker or whatever. But it's a thing for Apple to think about.

And I know they're probably going to try to solve this software of like, oh, we just need to tweak the touch rejection around the edges, which iOS has had for ages and apparently is slightly buggy with iOS 18.0. But like, I'm not sure that's a solution. So they may be approaching kind of like, asymptotically approaching the ideal bezel size.

Again, setting aside the old like phones, I think Samsung made a few of these instead of other people where the, the screen was like a waterfall and it curved over the edge so you could actually look at the side of the phone and see a portion of the screen. I don't think that was the gravity either. And I think Apple agrees there. But their current screen and the current bezels are really, really pushing the limit.

Well, I mean, I mean, I'm going to argue that like since, as since most people seem appeared to use cases, including yes, we all saw the Johnny I've picture where the newer times where there were some article in New York Times that had picture Johnny I have at some dinner and it showed him holding up an iPhone in an Apple silicone case. And everyone's like, oh my god, look, even Johnny I've used this case on his iPhone now.

That's notable because I think it, I think maybe Grubri even asks us something where they asked a bunch of Apple executives to do you use a case in your phone? That was at the Intentimate Press Conference. It was, was, was Johnny I've wasn't on stage for that though? No, I believe it was Jobs, Tim Cook and Eddie Q, I think. Yeah, and they were all like, no, they took out their phones, they were all naked. Well, guess what? I've used this case, apparently now in his old age anyway.

Yeah. But yeah, like I would argue that, you know, since, since so many people, like I would assume it's probably a pretty sizable majority of the iPhone user base uses a case, then that is what you should be designing for. Like if people are going to use cases anyway, why design for the fraction of the audience who's not going to use them, you actually should optimize the phone for the much more common case of case usage. So it does actually make sense.

Well, they kind of are like, no, the no bezel case is designed for a case because if we just assume everyone is going to put a case on this, then we don't want to waste any space inside the case that doesn't have the screen, we'll let the case be the border and then people can decide how thick a border they want by picking how thick a case they want.

Like they're arguably doing that, but the fact that so many Apple executives and so many people in real life continue to use the phone without a case shows that the caseless scenario is not zeroed out, right? I mean, at the very least, if Apple executives continue to insist that they don't use cases on their phones, at the very least they're living the no case and so is Casey, the no case, the caseless, sorry. It's not like nobody, right?

Maybe we should talk to them about what are the percentages? Is it more people than one on iPhone many? Anyway. Real time follow up from like 20 minutes ago because I forgot to go look. Belkin Ultra Glass 2 screen protector for iPhone 16 Pro. So it is glass as far as I can tell, not only because of the name, but from what I can tell based on the packaging. But yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes.

I'll put it in Slack for you to look at if you care, but I believe it is honest to goodness glass. And it is not rounded over. No, it is not. So with good news, it's like I believe I had said earlier, allegedly if you screw something up, then you can get a new one for free and have the Apple store put back on for you. Anyway, yeah, the case situation, not great, which is part of the reason why I am going case list case list again. All right. Do we want to talk Apple Watch?

Or do we want to talk AirPods first? Can we talk photo styles briefly? Oh, yes, I'm sorry. I completely skipped that. This, I've only played with this very briefly, but I'm really digging this. One of the things that we, that I didn't talk too much about during the the ATP insider special is I just don't really edit my pictures other than doing color correction. And the most basic, like silly, well, not silly, but like simple color correction that I can possibly do.

So if I take a photo inside and everything looks blue, I'll try to do color correction to make it look, you know, the color it's supposed to be with these photo styles. And especially since they're like a side card, maybe that's not the right term, but it's you know, additional information that's kind of, you know, attached to the photo. So you can go in and revisit it later. I'm really liking this. This, for me, for my simple brain, this is the right amount of editing for a photo.

I don't want to have 85 different sliders to tweak. I just want to mouse around in that like track pad of dots that they present to you. So you get this like grid of dots and you can like kind of swirl around in there and it'll, you know, live, update the photo and show the results of that change. And I forget exactly what you're editing. I think it's tone and contrast or something like that. I maybe one of you know, but, um, but that's, that to me is the correct. The best amount of editing.

And I've only done this like once or twice, but I've only had the phone for a few hours, but I'm really digging this so far. I haven't gone to the point of setting a new default, but I really, really like having this as a means and mechanism to edit pictures that I, that I think just need that little extra like a Jewish. Spoilers for an upcoming episode, but there is an ask ATP that somewhere buried down in our giant queue of SKTP that asks about photo editing.

And I will say that, um, this camera control, the, uh, the photographic styles control that he's talking about, that grid of dots that lets you change things after the fact is an interesting, sort of entry into the photo editing UI spectrum. Obviously the one end is like, I never had it in my photos. And the other end is like light room, right? Or whatever.

And somewhere in the middle is this grid thing, which is nice in that, like case it doesn't even know what the axiast stand for, but it doesn't matter. But the whole point is you put your thumb at thing, you move it around and you move it around until you like how the picture looks, right? I mean, that's, that, like there's not, that's not so many places you can move it. It's like up down left right. I don't even know how many rows and columns there are, but there's not a million of them, right?

And you move it until the picture looks good to you. Now, I will say that one of the problems with systems like this is people who, uh, don't have a lot of experiencing editing photos often aren't the best judge of what looks good to them. And that may sound ridiculous. Like, of course, everyone knows who looks good to them. It's their opinion. In the moment when you're editing, you will stop when it looks good to you.

But then a year from now, when you look back at the picture, you may find yourself saying, why does this picture look weird? Well, it looked good to you when you were using that control at the time you did it. But now looking back, it actually looks kind of odd. It does help to have some understanding of what you're doing to know what goals that you want to get to. It's kind of like, you know, going to the TV stores, you're talking about before and saying, that TV looks amazing.

Yeah, because it's on vivid mode where every color is oversaturated and it's the brightness is cranked up and it looks very striking. But that's not how you want your TV to look. Experience editing photos will help you avoid sort of the vivid valley, I guess, of like, oh, no, I moved my thumb in this control until it looked good to me.

But I didn't realize that I'm making all my pictures look like Samsung photographs where everything old style Samsung photographs where everything's all blown out and every color is oversaturated and everything is too contrasty or whatever.

Anyway, you do you, but the beauty of the photographic style is if you find out you've made a terrible mistake and you're your taste in thumb placement on that four-way controller bed, you can always go change it later and you can even just turn it off and go back to one of the preset modes. Marco thoughts have you played with this, honey? Only a little bit. I need more time with it.

So I have played with it and I decided even before I got this phone that my plan was, I'm going to change my default photographic style because I know it's not destructive and if I end up not liking it, like the fault one that comes to it was like called standard, right? That's just like, hey, it's going to look like iPhone pictures. This year's iPhone pictures with the so S and this hardware standard, right? And that's what all my previous pictures have been like, obviously.

And I mostly like them, but I know what iPhone pictures look like, the processing they do or whatever. And it's not exactly to my taste. I decided that my default photographic style is going to be natural. What is different between standard and natural? I think they don't over boost the saturation as much. Maybe there's less sharpening. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll take a year's worth of pictures in natural and I'll look back at them and I'll say, you know what, I wish these were all in standard.

Well, guess what? I can go change them back to standard if I feel that way. But I don't plan on using that big four-week control because I like that it didn't photos which is maybe one step up from the four-week control. It's not all the way to Lightroom, but it is, I'm familiar with the controls and photos and I know how to tweak them to look the way I currently like them to look. I know that changes over the years, see our photos episode that we talked about this.

But I'm going to go with natural. I'm going to go with natural, it might have fault and I'm never going to touch it and I'm going to see how I like it. You know, did you go into settings for the camera and do the photographic style setting? I did. I used the camera control to do. I said it's a standard, I said it's natural rather and it just stays unnatural.

Well because the reason I ask is when you drill into settings camera photographic styles, it brings up a screen and it says photographic styles. To begin, select four of your favorite photos captured with this iPhone. Photographic styles lets you personalize how you appear in photos with incredible nuance to get what you want. I haven't taken enough photos to do this yet, so I haven't proceeded to the, you know, there's a button that says get started.

But after I take, you know, maybe a bunch of photos of the kids and maybe a photo or two of Penny and maybe like a landscape or something, I don't know. I plan to go back in there and do whatever that wizard is to see. I presume it will suggest to me. Okay, well based on, you know, the photos or perhaps it'll give me some editing options and say, okay, or maybe it'll like blindly show me, here's like four of the different styles, which one do you like the most?

And my hope, having not tried it yet, is that maybe it'll point me in a direction. Although as you were talking, I looked, I did take a picture of Penny staring down a ball that you really wanted me to throw to it for. I did, I did, but I was taking a picture. In some ways, the natural for this does look very good. I don't know if it's my favorite, but it definitely does look very, very good. Yeah, I'd never even seen that screen until you mentioned. I just looked at it.

One thing I did do, by the way, just to bring it up more of the preserve settings screen, you know, settings camera, preserve settings. You have to go to that and turn on the toggle switch for photographic styles if you want the camera up to preserve it. That's what I did. I turned on the preserve setting for photographic styles. Then back in the camera, I used the camera control to swipe over to the natural style and it just stays unnatural now. Wait, I'm sorry. So where's preserve settings?

That's the, I don't see it here. It's in settings camera, preserve settings, and then scroll until you see photographic styles, turn that, turn that toggle switch on. And now whatever setting you set in the camera app for your photographic style, if you don't touch that setting again, it will just stay on whatever you set it to. All right, AirPods. Yeah, I don't have any new ones. So I think this is the John show.

Well, they're, they only new ones that exist are the AirPods 4 and you two are AirPods Pro users because you like things in your ear holes. But I don't, I don't like things in my ear holes. So I got the AirPods 4 with, with ANC on the box. It says AirPods 4. It says AirPods 4 and then it says active noise cancellation and then like the sticker on the box says AirPods 4 with ANC and Prince. Is there something?

Anyway, these are a different shape than the AirPods 3, which is a different shape than their predecessor AirPods. So it is a new shape for my ears. They don't fall out of my ears. They don't feel as big in my ears as the AirPods 3, like they don't feel like they're pushing it out like they are physically smaller so that makes sense.

They do feel like they go farther into my ears for what I think are obvious reasons because to get the noise cancellation to work a little bit better, they want to be a little bit farther into your ears. Overall, I think it's an upgrade in comfort over the previous one, but really there's just mildly, like I, it feels mildly uncomfortable and a different one.

Not uncomfortable, but like I, the, the parts that I feel because I, again, I wore the AirPods, I've been using the AirPods 3. I wear them every single day. Like they're not uncomfortable. I don't hurt my ears, but I can feel what part of my ear are they pressing and these press a different part and they go in my ear farther. And for someone who doesn't like things to go inside their ears, that's not great, but it's still better than the ones that actually go inside your ears.

I do really appreciate the fact that the case is so much smaller. I'm not sure it's back to the original AirPods 1 case size, but it is so much smaller than its predecessor case. Massively smaller than the Pro case. I wonder if the AirPods Pro 3 will do a case shrink too. They did a case shrink in the straight forward way. They just make, there be less case around the AirPods. Like it is essentially thinner around it. So kudos to them to making the case smaller.

One of the consequences of having a new case is you have to learn a new way to get the AirPods out of the case. With every new shape of AirPods, we all have to learn. When I open this case lid, how the hell do I get these things out of here? And the move has been different for every single kind of AirPods. The pros, the originals, the twos, the threes, all the twos are the same as one nice things. Anyway, it's big different for all of them. This one is the same deal.

I could not get them out of the way I get the other ones out. Instead I have to come from the side on an angle and that's how they come up. It's fine. You just learn it and do it. But it's weird that that's always different. The sound? I can see the thing about AirPods. My daughter in particular, both my kids, have… You know the people have the fingers that wear the letters of the keyboards, right? My kids have ears that destroy AirPods.

Wow. And the way they destroy them, well, my daughter somehow is able to destroy the microphones. I don't know how she does this, but it's the thing that happens, right? We've gone through so many under AppleCare. We're just getting new ones and she just destroys… Anyway, but both my kids, the failure motor of their AirPods and they're using, I think now they're using threes. The previous non-pro models is that the AirPods just lose all bass.

I don't know if it's a tiny speaker count tearing, so it's only the middle part of the driver that's vibrating and basically becomes all treble because the part that would be bass is gone because the paper has torn or something. But I think they've had three or four pairs sometimes under warranty, sometimes not. I put them in my ears and I'm like, how are you listening to this? It's all treble. The bass is gone. So these are essentially broken and sure enough, you've taken it to the Apple store.

They put them in some little test rig and they test them and they're like, oh, yep, these are totally bad. They're not producing sound the way they're supposed to be, right? I don't know what causes that. You can't see inside the AirPods, but it's a thing. I don't know if my AirPods 3 that I had before have this problem or we're starting to have this problem. But what I do know is that the AirPods 4 have so much more bass in my free-rease AirPods.

So much more bass that I went immediately to try to find setting is like, is there a way I could turn the bass down? Because this is too much bass for me. Because I'm listening to podcasts and everybody sounds like a newscaster with a super deep voice. So much bass. I know people who AirPods Pro is like, yeah, that's the right amount of bass dummy and you've been listening to crappy AirPods. It should sound like that. I wasn't used to it. But listening to music, I appreciate it.

Listening to vocals, even with voice boost on and overcast. I'm like, could you turn the bass down a little bit? I wish there was an adjustment for that. But I would say this is the result of the AirPods 4 having superior sound quality to my own personal AirPods 3, which may or may not be in the process of losing bass. So there's definitely that. The second thing is with the noise cancellation. Apple said that the pros are twice as good. That may be underestimating.

The noise cancellation doesn't cancel noise so much as it changes the nature of the noise. So to give it an example, I'm very often listening to my AirPods, I've been doing dishes. And there's the running water sound. It's kind of like white noise, kind of running water sound. If I put up my gigantic Sony airplane headphones, I could just cancel out that running water sound where it's just basically gone. With the AirPods 4, the running water sound is still there.

And it is lower volume and it is also of a different nature. It is less loud and sort of less shrill if that makes sense. But you can still absolutely hear it. To the point where I was trying to figure out, am I in noise canceling? And it's got, I don't know if the pros have this too, but like it cycles through the different modes and you can, there's like tones that they play. Have you memorized all the tones? Yeah. I don't remember which ones are which until they're presented.

Then oftentimes I can mostly figure it out, but I couldn't like demonstrate them now. Bling. Because the spoon is four settings and there's four tones. There's off, which is just like don't do anything, just be whatever. There is transparency, which is take sounds from the outside and play them into my ears through the speakers. That's the bling. Yeah. There is adaptive, which I have no idea I'm going to ask you about in a second.

And then there is noise canceling, which is cancel as much noise as possible. And very often I was like, am I in noise canceling? And then I would change the mode and it would like go to off. And I'm like, oh yeah, I wasn't noise canceling because now everything is much louder. And of a different nature, but it is nothing like putting on like a big pair of over your headphones that I'm sure nothing like having AirPods Pro shoved into your hole. So I appreciate the noise cancellation.

It is doing something. Don't expect it to do like a real noise canceling headphones. Like in other words, I would say these are not a replacement for AirPods Pro or over your noise canceling on a plane. They will probably help a little bit, but it's like a night and day difference. So I would still recommend these. I still think they worked the extra 50 bucks maybe for the case with the speaker alone. And I like that it's there.

But as you would expect from something that doesn't seal your ears in any possible way, there's only so much they can do. Like the bottom line is sound is getting in because sound can get around the AirPods. There's no seal around the thing. And what I want to ask you guys is, I have no idea what one of these four modes I should ever be in.

With the exception of being in noise canceling mode when I'm home alone in the kitchen doing dishes, which I feel like is safe, every other context I'm like, should I be in transparency? Should I be in off? Should I be in adaptive? What the hell is adaptive? So please give me some guidance of the four modes that these things can go into. When do you use each mode and why? So what I suggest is you can in the settings, you can actually remove some of those modes from the rotation.

So I remove off and I remove adaptive. So my only two modes, the reason are the sounds are transparency or noise cancellation. Adaptive, that's the one where tries to use conversational awareness to like try to cancel noise sometimes, but like bring in things and I haven't tried it recently. So maybe it's better now. When it first came out, I tried it for like a day and just hated the choices it was making. And so I instantly, you know, after one day, I'm like, I'm out.

So I went back to manually controlling noise cancellation versus transparency. I can't tell what adaptive is trying to do because there's no like indicator that I've found. And like the UI and saying, is it noise can't say now? Is it not doing? Is it adding transparency? Like I turned off the conversation awareness features that are like, oh, do you want me to lower the volume when you when you start talking or someone talks to you? Like that was just, it's not what I want anyway.

Like if some like I, if you're listening to a podcast, I don't want it to duck the volume. I'm on a pause at myself for just what I'll do. Yeah. I, I guess that adaptive is trying to be smart, but I cannot tell what it's doing. It doesn't like, especially because the noise canceling is not so dramatic. I'm like, is it doing noise canceling or has it decided not to?

And then I have to switch modes to go to like either the off mode or the noise canceling mode and compare it to what it was in adapted to tell if it had decided. It's just, it's too much guesswork. So I'm not an adaptive fan right off the bat, but I keep giving it a try in indoor context where I think I'm not going to be hit by a car. But anyway, you, so you're using, you don't even use, do you use off? You just use transparency or noise can. That's it.

Yeah. I'm in transparency, the vast majority of the time, unless I happen to be either on a plane or on a, you know, a subway platform or it's super loud, then I'll turn on, trends, the noise can. So walking in the dog is transparency of that. Always. Yeah. See walk, I mean, I've been walking the dog with essentially off because I haven't had a pause for noise canceling before. And if you're listening to a podcast, especially with ones that don't see your ears, you can hear the outside world.

Like, I don't feel like I need transparency to replay the outside world because again, you can just hear it with these AirPods in. So maybe I'll use off for dog walks, but no, use transparency, just use transparency. You can hear better. Trust me. It's better. But I don't want the outside world being played at louder volume into my ears when I'm trying to listen to podcasts. John, it's not louder. John, pump the brakes. You're thinking way too hard about this, just do transparency.

You're so wrapped around the axle about it. I promise it'll be fine. I mean, I've tried it. I know what it's like, and it does make the outside world more prominent than when it's in off mode. Well, yeah, because it's, but so typically, like back when I was using aftershocks for my dog walks before AirPods Pro existed, the big benefit of the bone conduction style of headphones is your ears are just unblocked. You have no obstruction whatsoever for noise coming in.

You're just using the bone conduction headphones to add your music or podcast to it. That's what transparency mode does in the AirPods Pro. So now, granted, I haven't tried these AirPods yet. So I don't know if transparency is as good. I don't actually block your ear holes like I promised though. But I assume it's probably close or as good. And the AirPods Pro transparency is just incredible. It's way better than even the AirPods Max transparency. I don't know why, but for whatever reason it is.

Because the AirPods Max don't have the H2. Maybe. But anyway, so whatever the reason the transparency in the AirPods Pro is, it's perfect. Like it really is like you're wearing nothing. Like if you have the AirPods in and you're not playing anything and you take them out, it's the outside world is the same loudness as it was when you had them in. Like it's as if you're wearing nothing and then you're adding selectively to it with your podcast. So it is great.

Well, I mean, for these things that don't seal the ear holes, off is not the same as transparency to my ears. Fair. But I would experiment with it. I would give transparency as much of a shot. I will try to get adaptive out of the rotation. Do you happen to know where and settings that is, Barry? I find it by going into the Bluetooth menu and like go to Bluetooth, go to the AirPods, hit the little i button. Yeah. It's in there. It's something that you can't do unless they're currently paired.

Yeah. If they're not in your ears, like when I go to Bluetooth, it just has like model number, serial number, Apple care and forget this device. Yeah, I think they have to be connected. Yeah. I'll take it down. I think I've basically decided that adaptive is not working on for me, but I'll still have to try the other ones. Yeah. One final thing on the case. There is no magnetic connection between the AirPods 4 case and the MagSafe Puck.

At least the original MagSafe Puck, which is what I have in original MagSafe Puck, I'm going to write it stand. That's because the new case is too small to hit the magnets, right? Because the case curves, right? If you put it on the circuit, like oh, it fills the circle, what's the problem? But the problem is the parts that are over the magnets are the curved parts, not the flat part. So it does not magnetically align like the old case did simply because it's smaller. It's a charge is fine.

It even makes a nice little chime when you know you've done it. Okay. So it does charge. Yeah. You just put a dead center in the thing. It's not exactly aligned itself with the MagSafe thing because it can't. But it does magnetically align itself with the Apple Watch charger. And like in an offset, like if you put it on an Apple Watch charger, it snaps right to where it's supposed to go.

And it's not centered like where it wants to be in the Apple Watch charger is like in the lower portion of it, but it will snap right to it. So that's just something to keep in mind. I don't think it's a problem. Again, I love the small case. I totally endorse it, but Apple has sort of outrun themselves. Maybe with the new, she's mentioned the new one is narrower. Maybe the new one does magnetically align it because it's that much smaller, but I haven't tried it.

All right. Apple Watch Series 10. Do you have one? You have one, Casey. How do you think of it? Yes. So I did get one. I went from the We Lad version to the Manley Man version, which is to say. Oh my God. It's small to large. I'm just kidding. I went from the small size to large size. It was it. Now it's 42. It's 42 and 46. 46. Thank you. And compared to my Series 8 little guy, it's chunky. It's big. Actually, I shouldn't say it's chunky because it's actually very, very thin, but it's big.

Now that being said, it looks like a billboard on my wrist right now, but I think you were right the whole time. And it only lightly pains me to admit that publicly, but I think I will quickly adjust to it. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Maybe it wouldn't be. But looking at the way this is sitting on my wrist right now, I feel like the ultra might have been too much. If you look at it, it doesn't look that much thinner to me, but it sits and feels much thinner to my eyes.

And I was talking to Jason about this when we were in Memphis together and he pointed out to me and I think he's exactly right. The like sensor plateau or mason or whatever that's on the bottom, that's stuff that sits against your wrist with like the little LEDs of flash for, you know, all the different things that it's sensing except blood ox apparently. Anyways, that is quite a bit thinner than it used to be. And I think that makes a big difference as well. I really like it so far.

I also like speaking of old men with old men problems. I like that the font appears to be noticeably bigger because the screen is so much bigger, which is also nice. In terms of the off axis viewing, it's definitely better, but I can't say that I'm like, oh, you know what I mean? It's just one of those things where I think in the past I would have had to twist my wrist more or you know, just wouldn't be able to see my watch or the watch face.

And now I can see it more angles, but it's not the sort of thing that's striking. It's just, oh, that's nice. It works better now. Well, if you had your, if you had the large size of the previous watch, I think you would have noticed both the angle and the thickness because I've watched the YouTube video of them comparing, it was the max sectional. They were comparing the series 10 with the series nine of the same sort of size class.

And the series 10 looked dramatically thinner just setting aside the little blister on the bottom for the sense it was just the body of a look thinner. And the same thing with the viewing angle, if you take your old and your new and put them on the same surface, then just tilt your head to the go at an angle. I think I'll notice a difference. I have been looking for YouTube videos of someone taking like a magnifier to this to see if it's MLA.

It seems like the consensus is no. No one has taken a magnifier to it, but a lot of people have said, first of all, a lot of people have saying that MLA doesn't actually improve viewing angles because it mostly just makes it brighter from the front. It does make it brighter from the front, but I think it also helps viewing angles if only because they're getting rid of like the color tint and sending light off in other directions. But I'm going to guess, I mean, I'm still looking for evidence.

Still be fall up next week if I find something. But I'm going to guess that it's actually not MLA, but simply just a better LTPO3, whatever OLED, but still inconclusive. No one on YouTube cares about this enough to take a magnifier to it. So what I think I haven't tried. Oh, there we go. Let's come from the watch. So I can play. I like the speaker holes in the series, and I like, instead of being a speaker slot, there's these tiny little holes.

It looks much nicer and hopefully, it looks likely to clog with dust. I mean, for what it's worth, I was trying to play music. Maybe it's not coming through because of Zoom or whatever, but it plays actually surprisingly loud. I mean, this is definitely audible from, you know, from waist level. I don't know. I don't know how much that's coming through.

Again, testing on YouTube seems to be about the same volume as the Ultra, which was the previous speaker king, and the Ultra has gigantic speaker holes because it's a big junky watch. But this one has very tiny, elegant and numerous speaker holes. And apparently, it's just as loud as the Ultra. Yeah, I just tried it for the first time just now. And I don't know if, like I said, I don't know if it'll come through in the recording. It certainly doesn't sound like it's coming through on Zoom.

But it's, I mean, it's sufficient. I wouldn't want to listen to music this way, generally speaking, but it depends, especially as someone who really hates silence. And that's me. Yeah, that's kind of nice. Yeah, I mean, I like it. I like it a lot so far, way too early to tell, because I did this after I did my, my phone upgrade. And so really, really early to tell, but so far, so good. Did Tina get a new watch this year or no? So she didn't want one on day one.

I wonder if she'll change her mind when she sees them in real life. I did tell her that the new ones don't have blood oxygen, her current one does. I don't know if she cares about that, but bottom line is no she didn't order one. We'll see how long this lasts. Yeah, yeah. So so far, so good. I think it'll be worth revisiting this next week. It's this day on the phones once Aaron has a chance with hers because she is much, I was going to say much more blase.

That's, that has a negative connotation. I don't mean that at all, but she's kind of like you have whatever about all this. Like, oh, that's nice. It's new and it has new things. Cool. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't really rev her engine like it does us. And so I'm curious to hear her thoughts and buy, you know, next Wednesday when we record next, hopefully I'll be able to have her relay some of the, some of her opinions for me and I'll see what she thinks.

So I took out my series 10 and I, I had the, the natural titanium and I had a number of initial impressions. Number one, the titanium feels great. It is so light. It feels amazing like when you, because not only did they reduce the weight of the watch in general, like in all of the watches this year, all the series 10s are lighter in all the metals compared to their, their, their previous version metal counterparts.

But so, so you have the weight savings there and then they also have replaced steel with titanium. So the titanium models are almost as light as the aluminum models. They're very, very light. They feel fantastic. They did get bigger and I, and I got the big one and I put it on my wrist and I thought like Casey just said, it looks like a billboard on my wrist.

I also, it seemed, and I don't know, I, I don't have my open here to measure, but it seemed almost like it looked like a more, a closer to square aspect ratio than the outgoing one. And they did, they did make it wider. They widened it more than they tallened it. Right. And I would agree with that. And I think that actually, I, I don't honestly like that look. I think it looks even more like a billboard on your wrist. Oh, really? I think I disagree. I think I like it a little more squared.

But I mean, this is again, initial impressions. I might change my mind on that. I also found, I find that the, the natural color on the titanium, I expected to be a little bit brighter. It actually is like a pretty medium gray to the point where I think it loses a bit of contrast.

Like part of the reason why I don't, I haven't bought the black watches in the past or all the various forms of black that they've been, is that I actually like seeing some contrast between the watch body case and, and the black crystal above it. And when you have a black or dark gray watch, you lose a lot of that contrast. And so if you're going for like kind of a unified blob look, then that's, that's what you want. What I want is the contrast between the case metal on the top.

And so I actually find, I, I don't like the natural color as much. And the reason I went to the Apple store was like, I thought after a half day of wearing it, I think I made a mistake with the size. Oh, interesting. Really? They made it, you know, one millimeter bigger, whatever, like they made it a little bit bigger. And kind of like the way some people have switched from the max phone down to the pro phone. Casey, you're going to kill me. I switched to the smaller one. Really? You let me out.

You let me out. I get the big watch and then like, but for me, small watch. I, yeah, like I, I wore it for a few hours and I'm, and I'm like, I can't like it's, it looked too big on me. I'm here. I'll send you comparison photos and in the, do you have an ultra macro? Um, not with me. I, I had an ultra I wore it for a little while, like the one the first one came out. Because this is very similarly size and with and height. Not obviously thickness because the ultra is way thicker.

But in with and height, this, the large is actually pretty close to the ultra. If you can pull off the ultra, why not this one? I can pull it off. I just don't like it. Like the ultra. No. So I don't wear the ultra. All right.

Um, no, I bought the ultra mostly as like a test device because the screen felt and looked so different from the previous ones because it didn't have the curvature and it was so big that I felt like as a, as a developer of an app for the watch, I needed one to test and that, that did prove useful. Um, but yeah, so when I, when I got this one, I'm like, at the big one, they made it too big. It does not fit me well. Like if I, again, I can pull it off.

But like what I was thinking was like, first of all, how much of a role do I want this to play in my life? Like part of the reason to get the ultra before is if you really want a computer on your wrist and you want to use it like a computer. Like that's then you, you want the biggest screen. You want the one that can show the most text. You want the, you know, the most interface elements on screen at once. Like you want that.

I don't want it to play quite that big of a role in my, like in my person, like on my actual person. I'm happy to take the phone out to do computing tasks. I hardly ever read or write anything on the watch itself. It is mostly a sensor and a, and a brief display for me. So I actually realized like I, I think I actually want the smaller one. Um, and also I've, I've started doing sleep tracking with this one. I decided I wanted to start doing that.

And the, the smaller the better, honestly, when you're doing that. And so the small one, I have, I actually tried the gold one too. Um, so I have the, the, the 42 millimeter, uh, gold titanium, which honestly is not that gold. It's, it's a very, it's the same way Apple does like their pro phone colors. Like, it's a little gold. Um, it, it's, it's, it's gold enough to look a little bit different in certain lighting.

Most of the time it just looks like the steel, like the polished state, the polished silver steel. Um, but that's fine. I have it on the, on the, on the black sports or the black, yeah, sport band and the golden black, I think is a very nice look. And I'm, I'm very pleased with it right now. Um, and it, it also works well on white. You gotta be a little careful with some of the colors. If you try color straps to see if they go with the gold, but black and white look great with it.

Um, so I think I'm pretty well covered. Even, you know, by going with the smaller watch, it is even lighter than the bigger one. So it is like, it, it feels like I'm wearing nothing. Like I think the band weighs more than the watch at this point. So it's a, it's a very, very good overall fit for me. It's surprisingly so. Like I really did not think I'd go back to the smaller one, but they just, they pushed the big one a little bit too far.

And if you, and I actually did measure the two of them, if you, if you measure the, um, the aspect ratios of them, the bigger one is more square than the smaller one. Like it actually has a different aspect ratio. And so the smaller one, I think, looks better on me in part because it is a little bit smaller and in part because it has more rectangular shape. So overall, I like the small one a lot. It is not as much screen space as my big series eight.

Like they didn't make that or my big series nine. They didn't make that big of a jump. But it is more. And I, I, I bumped the font. Has a couple of notches on it. So to accommodate my reading glasses, uh, need that I'm not satisfying. And so far I'm liking it. Uh, I like the gold for an exchange of pays, even though again, it's not that gold, but it's subtle enough. It's, it's a nice change of pace. Um, the, again, titanium is so nice to be back.

And, uh, yeah, so I'm going to rock this look for the year and see how it goes, but it's been honestly very comfortable on me. It's, it's been great. You let me down. Uh, I just put a link in the show notes. I, I, I'll see if I can maybe get a better picture of it. Or I put a link in Slack, excuse me, me. Oh, see if I can get a better, better picture for the show notes. It looks a little chunkier there than I feel like it's sitting when I just look down. So this, again, this picture ain't great.

But I mean, I, I, I don't think it looks bad on me. And we'll see what happens. I don't personally, I'm sitting here now. I don't have any particular desire to return this and get the smaller one. Um, and I think maybe part of that is driven by me having kind of, mentally prep myself for going ultra this year and just expecting to have, you know, it just, you know, absolutely mammoth watch my wrist.

And so while this is surface area mammoth, uh, or slightly mammoth, at least it's not depth mammoth. And I think that helps make it feel a lot more svelop than perhaps it actually is. Plus you get the bigger battery, which has been a concern for you. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like I would say that looks big, but doesn't look bad. It does look big. Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, like smartwatch fashion is big is in.

Like people like big watches, big smartwatches these days. That's why the ultra has been so popular. It's not because all those people are going diving. It's because they like big watches. That's what's in fashion. And big screens are very useful and big batteries are very useful. And so there's lots of reasons why people choose bigger watches, even if they do look big on their wrists.

Um, for me, like most of those things were like, and for me, it's less about, it's less about like, you know, the superficial look. It's more about like just the way it fits.

Like it, even just like that little bit extra like one of the things I manage, I have mentioned in the past is like, if a watch is too big on my wrist, I don't like what if like if I flex my wrist up, if I'm like, you know, in certain exercises, there's something like if you're like, you know, doing pictures of doing a push up, if you're doing a push up, like your hand is bent upwards compared to your wrist.

And like, you know, you kind of just have to like, like when you're, when your skin, like crushes into the watch, like it's less comfortable. So for me, like in, in my general lifestyle, having a slightly smaller watch is more comfortable. And the outgoing models, the big one was, yeah, it was bigger, but it was not that big. It was like, it was like, I think this is a noticeable jump in a way that I didn't expect it to be.

Like when I, I took a picture of it, like sitting on top of my series nine, and like, you see the size gain, it is not subtle. Like you absolutely see it. Like it is, like the big one, the big series 10 compared to the big series nine is like, it's not just like imperceptibly bigger. You can, you can clearly see which one is which. It is obvious. Like, oh, that's the bigger one. It's, it's a decent amount bigger. Yeah, the big series 10 is basically a curved ultra.

Like I think I might even be wider than the ultra. Like it is, because they learn that, you know, people like the big screen on the ultra, but this is not as nearly as thick as the ultra. That is the big difference in this.

And by the way, another change in the series 10 that I saw in some videos is that whatever they call the button on the side, not the crown, but like the button that you press, that button is way bigger now to compare it like to a series nine of the same size class and look how big that button is on a 10 versus the nine. I don't know. Which I mean, I think it's a good improvement because like why make it so small? I don't know. I feel like, because I'm looking at my series eight with small one.

And then the series 10 is bigger for sure, but that's, it appears to me to be more about the upgrade and size class than it is the fact that you're maybe not comparing like to like there, but anyway, put a picture on my YouTube videos. So yeah, they made the button bigger, which I think they should like was no reason to keep it as small as, you know, make the whole area where you're going to press, be easier to press. I, you know, I don't have the Apple watch.

My wife has many, many Apple watches that she's handed down to the kids that she's gotten new ones, but I did it the other day. Take out for curiosity and just to see if it would still work. My series zero, my series zero Apple watch, the only Apple watch I ever purchased for myself. It is a stainless steel silver stainless steel one. I don't want to know if it was dead and good news. It's not dead. And I tried to shut up and it still looks great as long as you don't look at the screen.

What a screen. So there was so small back on the series zero, but up until I think maybe now I think the series zero was the thinnest Apple watch that they had ever sold. I think the 10 is probably thinner, but yeah, it still looks real good. It's too bad I don't like watches. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this episode, one pass per centred access management and trade coffee. Thanks for our members who support us directly.

You can join us at fm slash join one of the perks of membership is our ATP overtime segment every week. This is a bonus topic that we do after every episode. This week's ATP overtime is meta kicking Apple when it's down. It's the way meta has recently been engaging with Apple and changing some of their own plans around their mixed reality efforts and kind of how it interacts with Apple and the vision pro line. And to be in overtime this episode joined to listen ATP. Fm slash join.

Thanks everybody and we'll talk to you next week. You can find the show notes at ATP dot Fm. And if you're into master. You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M and T Marko Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-H-I-R-Q-S-O. It's accidental. We didn't mean to. It's accidental. Check podcast so long. John, I hear you have some complaints about Volvo's. I was going to say forthcoming but it's sort of kind of here.

Electric version of Aaron's car which is called the, her car is the XC90 but the all electric is the EX90. And I hear you have complaints. I know my car makers keep doing this. We've talked about it before, especially on the context of Tesla early on that when car makers make an electric vehicle, they feel compelled to do things to make it seem futuristic.

And I was hoping that would be something that car makers would get over after a few years or a decade or whatever but they just can't stop doing it. Door handles are the obvious victim here. Can we just have normal door handles? No, it's an UV. It has to be annoying, hard to use problematic door handles. It's been just an epidemic. Everyone keeps copying it. No one has figured out, hey, just make normal door handles. Go back to normal. No, they can't. They can't stop doing it.

They make all sorts of excuses or whatever. Anyway, that extends to many other parts of the car. On the Volvo EX90 and I like these cars. I like the, you know, as far as SUV goes, I think they're nice looking. They have good features or whatever. But Volvo, like you said, decided to make an electric version of the XC. All electric, battery powered EV, right? And for the most part, it looks like the regular one, right? It doesn't. They did do anything weird with the styling.

I forget if they have messed up door handles but who cares at this point? I just, you know, it's invisible to me. What drove me insane was that they said, you know what? Is there some other part of the car that we can screw up? Because it's an EV. We have the XC90 and it's a perfectly nice car. Could we just make that an EV? No, wait. Is there some part of the car that previously had no problems with it that we can screw up because it's an EV and they said, yes, yes, we can.

And you know what they screwed up? I don't, if you haven't seen or viewed this car, maybe you don't know. Because if you look at the picture, you're like, oh, it seems fine. It looks like kind of like my XC90. They decided that they were going to screw up the headlights. Oh, stop. It's fun. No, no, let me tell you. All right. So headlights. There are things on the front of your car that light up, right? And over the years, we've done lots of different things with headlights.

We talked about a previous episode that Mercedes used to have little windshield wipers and little sprayers to go on them because what about those Mercedes-Benz? Not those Mercedes-Benz. Other Mercedes-Benz. Yeah. And BMW probably did as well. All the German car makers had a little windshield because like, hey, if you're growing on the road and dirt flies up on your headlights, not as much light will get out. So we'll try to clean them off. And modern cars tend not to do that.

It's kind of out of fashion, but they're more aerodynamic shaped. And we have LED lights, which of course can be smaller, but just as bright. We have matrix LEDs. Also, if advances try to make lights better to serve you better. And Volvo said, but this is an EV. Let's screw them up in some way.

And so what they decided to do was for their headlights, they have, you know, you have to have daytime running lights, which for laws in various places, which are lights that are on when you're just driving around. But then you have the headlights parts of it. And they said, what we can do is we'll have a daytime running lights where the headlights normally are.

In the little Thor's hammer Volvo design, we're going to have a little matrix LED daytime running lights, but they'll be where the headlights are. And you may be asking, but then where do you put the headlights? If you put the daytime running lights, right, where the headlights were going to be? Wait, wait, for a little bit of historical context here. So you are right. It is called the Thor's hammer, like headlight motif.

And the way this is is imagine an uppercase letter T and then pitch it so that the horizontal crossbar on the T twist at 90 degrees in either way. So now that horizontal crossbar is vertical, right? And that's on the outsides of the car. So it looks kind of like a hammer. And on Aaron's car and on her prior one, may it, may it God rest at soul. I don't recall what specifically was daytime running lights and what was headlight headlights.

I believe it was additional lenses or, you know, LEDs or whatever that, yeah, LEDs, I guess that came on when you turned on the headlight proper and the Thor's hammer stuff did still stay on, but the headlights were quite a bit brighter. But and so at a glance, this looks the same. But as you were about to say before I interrupt you, it is quite a bit different now. Right. So the head of daytime running lights where the headlights normally are. And you get, you get to the headlights.

You know, if you're in the car and you turn on the headlights or you're probably don't because it's just auto mode or whatever gets too dark and you need the headlights to be turned on, what happens is that the Thor's hammer daytime running lights open like a mouth, mechanical shutters move vertically up and down to open a cavity. And that contains the actual headlights. What?

They have reinvented pop-up headlights from the 80s, but 10 times worse because they have mechanical things that need to open for your headlights to work at all because your headlights are 100% blocked when this mouth is closed in front of each things. So they have to have a little thing that slides up and a little thing that slides down to reveal your headlights.

And then what that opens is a cavity in the front of your car that presumably can fill with snow and ice and slush and whatever and scrub the mechanism that has to constantly open and close for the headlights. John, if you're going to wine, at least get your facts straight. All right, it doesn't open a cavity. It's still behind the, like, plexi or the glass or what have you that is in front of the headlights. It's all internal to the car. There is no cavity for snow to get into.

Now what you're saying is true that the, you know, let's go back to a vertical T. Instead of the crossbar, the horizontal crossbar. Now we're talking about the vertical bar, which once you twist at 90 degrees, now it's a horizontal bar. There are, well, there's two rows of lights and they do part that is correct. That is a physical thing that happens. That part you're correct about. But there's no opening to the outside world. This is all in the headlight housing.

No, no, no. Where the mouth parts used to be is now a cavity because they used to be filling that spot. So there is another two inches. If you take a stick and you poke it in this car and hit the daytime running lights and you open the mouth, you can push that stick in two more inches. No, that's what John, the little things used to be. There's glass in front of it. Yes, there is, but the thickness of the shutters is now gone, right? That's the cavity. And why is that cavity important?

Because when the mouth has to close, if there's anything in that one or two inches, now they're squishing it. Now you're getting crap in between the little shutters. How is something going in there? Here's the thing. Nothing is going in there. It's a problem that needed to be solved. They have made an overly complicated thing on a safety feature of the car, which is the headlights. This was not a problem anyone had, they didn't say we had no place to put the headlights. What are we going to do?

We have to make up these shutters. It's just a mechanical thing. It's a moving part. They can possibly fail and have things stuck into the crevices or whatever. For no reason, it's like the door handles that are like, you know, rise out to reach you're like, there was nothing wrong with the door handle that you could just grab. You just made an additional failure point for no benefit. This was there is no problem being solved here except for someone thinking this was cool.

And for Volvo, a brand that is not known for this, especially again, for a safety feature, to decide they want a mechanical moving part. Again, we have to learn nothing from Papa headlights of seeing the whatever the game used to play when you see a car with one headlight and you punch somebody or whatever. Because Papa headlights would get stuck down or stuck up, which was again a safety issue. Mechanical things that move when they don't have to is just asking for an additional failure.

This is one of the most shockingly bad ideas from a company that I expect better of. Tesla, by all means, I would expect them to do this or worse, right? But Volvo, what are you doing Volvo? The XC90 has, I think, a more attractive headlights in the X90. I think they just look nicer in both modes, but especially in the open modes and be, guess what, no moving parts. It's just a headlight.

It just sits there on the car and it just shines light and that's all it needs to do when it does everything. You've got the daytime running lights. You've got the headlights. Everything was fine. This didn't need to be changed. I'm just unreasonably angry about this. You are. It makes me, it crosses this whole car off my list. I will never recommend this to anybody until they fix these headlights because it's insanity. You are losing your marble, sir.

Okay, I need to be completely clear one more time. There is a lens in the front of this whole assembly just like on your beloved Honda's, just like on my Volkswagen, just like on the BMW that Marco just bought that it'll have for another 10 minutes. There is a lens in the front. So unless that lens somehow disintegrates, there is no poking with the stick. There's nothing to poke. I see what you're saying in the thing. It's hard to see in the video that I'm going to link in the show.

But I see what you're saying. If that's the case and things won't get in there, you can redact that part of my complaint, but everything out the part of it in terms of the moving parts that can fail. No, still stay. Okay, so because have you ever gotten condensation inside a headlight or a tail light, those things are supposed to be sealed, but even on a very expensive car as they aren't always. No, you are right that this is needlessly mechanically complicated. Correct.

Your risk profile assessment is wrong because it does appear to be sealed. But here's the thing about the risk. This is an unnecessary choice to have any additional risk over what was previously there. You know what I'm saying? The other one does not have any doors that have to move open at all. So any additional risk, even if it's tiny, is just foolish. And by the way, do you think it makes these headlights cheaper to replace? I don't think it does.

Oh, that's going to be a thousand dollar assembly, right? Oh, more than that. No, are you kidding? Have you not, you have not priced the headlight recently, I guess. And do not look up how much your headlights cost on your new car. Yeah, please do not do it. So here's the thing. I concur with reservations that yes, this is needlessly complex and yes, it can break. And yes, that could be a very bad safety. And do you agree that the XC90 has more attractive headlights? Five thousand dollars.

I let it out. I told you don't look it up. Oh my God. I told you not to look it up. Don't have a stump. Oh my God. You should see with the headlights cost on like a Lamborghini. Each headlight cost as much as my car. That's not true, because the Diablo used 300C X headlights. No, not in other diablo. I know I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I agree with you with reservations that it is needlessly complex. And yes, it could potentially be a safety issue.

But I mean, no more so than a headlight going out like bulbs used to go out on the regular of the LEDs. That's why we use LEDs. We make advances to make headlights better and they've decided to voluntarily make them worse and more expensive. Whether we real time follow up, it's not it's only five thousand dollars per headlight if I get the laser lights option which I did not have. So the the non laser BMW I X headlight. 4,800. It's it's only 2100 per light. Pretty good. And that's on sale.

1% off the official price of 26 metric. The thing I will say though about these headlights is yes, it could be a safety issue. But my my retort to that is where's your sense of adventure. These things look so freaking cool. I'm in. I don't even think they look cool. That's the thing. And by the way, I just googled this one just to give you the number. The Bugatti Shiran, you may have heard of this, it is the Veyron successor.

It is not the latest Bugatti because they have a new one that's coming out soon. But any of the Shiran, the Bugatti Shiran. Are you familiar with this car, Google for Bugatti CHIRON. I've heard of it. Yes. Would you like to guess how much a headlight cost for that car? Well, weren't the mufflers like 40 grand in the Veyron or something like that? Make your guess. For the headlights, 10 grand. Yeah, I'll say 15. I'm going to say you're both low. Do you want to make a second guess?

Oh my god, really? 30. I want to say 30 per headlight. 164,000 dollars. What? I don't have a headlight. I think that might be for both of them, but you can double check. How much is the whole car, like a million bucks? I think it's like 3 million. Oh my god. Let me see if it's per, let's see. What kind of light? I think it's for both of them. So it's a bargain. You're getting two for 164. Oh. That's very, very nice of them. So again, don't put your Bugatti Sheer on.