657: Ears Are Weird

John, I have to update my number. It's now one. How many phones have you smashed? Mm-hmm. Oh, no. Well, at least you did it right before the new one. You're so angry at these old phones. Now that the new ones are out, you have to smash them. Literally. Hours after I ordered its replacement. Well, that's the time to do it. For the first time ever, I missed my pocket.

Oh, no. Now, remind me, are you a caseless casey list as well? I mean, you're obviously not a caseless casey list, but do you roll with the case or no? I have been going caseless for maybe, I don't know, six months, something like that. You had the leather sticker thing on the back, right? Oh, that's right. Yes, yes, yes. But that doesn't project against hitting on the corner or the front. No, and this was literally like I was getting into my car in my driveway and I was wearing new shorts.

I'm not used to these. Maybe that's the problem. Who knows? Who cares? I put my phone down into my pocket, but it was not in my pocket, and I let go. And so it fell. I don't know. My legs aren't that long. Two and a half feet? I don't know. You were still on the ground at this point? Well, yeah. I was standing on the sidewalk on my driveway in front of my car. I was about to get in my car. I put the phone...

And I dropped it from pocket height onto the concrete driveway. And it didn't sound like much, but I picked it up and it hit the back corner into the back glass. It has a huge spider crack. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's all right. The screen's okay. You're fine. Well, the good thing is I have AppleCare, it turns out.

I am back to using the leather stick-on back again in the meantime. You don't say. Well, fun fact, I'm pretty damn sure we covered this on the show, but the Express replacement is great, but it costs you $100. Yes. If you're going to get this thing fixed. I would strongly advise for you to do so at an Apple store and save yourself the 100 bones. Oh, I didn't do that. I just ordered the 100 bucks thing and it's going to be here, I think, tomorrow.

I mean, that is certainly the easier way if you would like to set $100 aflame. Who's going to get a new battery then, too? Right. And I figure, you know, this phone, yeah, because my battery, you know, I don't baby it like John. I use the crap out of it. And so, you know, I think I'm somewhere. in the 90s, but it's still not a brand new battery. And this phone is about to either be traded in, in which case it requires replacement, otherwise it won't be worth anything.

Or it'll be like a long-term test device phone for me. In which case, you know, new battery would be nice. So either way, it's like, all right, I'll pay the $100. That's fair. But it's, I feel... I feel like I've broken the record. It's almost like the very first time Overcast ever got an App Store rejection. Because it took me like eight or nine years before I got one for Overcast. Every time I was like, oh, I don't want to break the streak. It wasn't that I didn't want to get rejected.

It was I didn't want to break the streak. Now that my no phones ever broken streak has been itself broken, maybe I'll be a little less stressed about it. Who knows? Yeah, I hear that. I mean, it sucks every time. And I.

I'm not here to have an argument about whether or not AppleCare is worth it. But, and I'm certainly not going to have an argument about AppleCare One or whatever it is, AppleCare Plus. I can never keep the name straight. But anyhow. AppleCare Max. Yeah, right. They're just going to rename it just to Max later.

I personally have come back around to liking having AppleCare on my phones, particularly as I'm going caseless. Yes, AppleCare is not a case, whatever. But it gives me a lot of peace of mind that if I have an oops like that, it is... There is a penalty for it to some degree. It's either time, money, or both.

But there is a parachute there. Whereas if I don't have AppleCare, I feel like, well, that's the phone now. Because I'm not about to pay like $600. Or I actually didn't get a lot cheaper in the newer ones. But it's hundreds of dollars, if I remember correctly, to replace the back glass.

No, thank you. And I figure, you know, there are certain things that I won't get AppleCare on because the risk is very low. So, for instance, my laptops. Like, I don't get AppleCare on my laptops because... I don't break laptops like you know the very first time I ever do then I'll be upset and then I'll maybe start buying it then maybe but the math just does not work very well on that whereas

A phone, especially a phone that you tend to use without a case, or a fake half case like the Leatherbacks, that is a higher risk thing. Depends on your drinking habits, I think. What? What? Laptops. You think, oh, laptops. I'm not going to miss a pocket. You know what's going to hurt your laptops? The thing that doesn't hurt your phone anymore. Liquid.

I feel attacked. I feel straight up. I see. I see it all the time. Watch how children use laptops. They think they're waterproof. They put open containers. They'll put their laptops all around a table. They'll all have like open top glasses of liquid. They're all.

drinking all around their laptops because they think they're like phones. They think like, oh, you know, whatever. Oops, I spilled the drink on my phone, but it was fine. Same thing's true of laptops, right? No, not at all. Absolutely not. Well, and I feel like my number of laptops that I have broken is still zero. You're really pushing your luck here. Yeah, seriously. Now, why are you putting that energy into the universe, my friend? Just check where your drink is right now.

It's true. Mine has a cap on it. My laptop's on a stand. Okay, I'm just saying, as long as it's on a different level, a higher level. Not only... It's vertical, first of all, and also the lowest part of it is like an inch off the desk. But what about when you're like coming over on the ferry and you have your laptop out and you're doing stuff? Do you have a drink next to it? No, because I barely have enough hands to use the laptop.

All right, all right. Just checking because I see a lot of very dangerous laptop use out there. It's not because people are going to drop them, although sometimes they do that too. Or they put them in their backpacks and then drop their backpack from a three-foot height because they're kids. Yeah, I've seen that. I haven't done it. because I realize those kind of things, but I have seen it. Don't miss your backpack with the laptop.

All right, let's move on and let's talk about how it's still September and September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And so we are joining our friends at Relay, which is partially ourselves, to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Go to stjude.org slash ATP to send them a little bit of your money because they deserve it. They deserve some of your money. I'm going to do a couple of quick pieces of housekeeping. I don't think I've mentioned yet this month that...

If you donate, and I think the numbers is at least $60, if I recall correctly, you get some digital downloads, some wallpapers, and an incredible... macOS screensaver by our friend, friend of the show, James Thompson. But if you spend at least $100, then that gets you stickers of all six of the podcast-a-thon hosts.

including yours truly. These stickers were done by a friend of the show, Jelly, or the art anyway, and they are really incredible. So it only costs you a mere $100. Easy peasy. And additionally, as we record this, I will be traveling to Memphis extremely soon in order to participate. in said podcast-a-thon, which is Friday from noon till midnight, one true time zone, which is New York time. I'm not interested in fighting about that either. But...

I wanted to give a couple of pieces of feedback that we actually received to the ATP feedback account. They're a tiny bit long, but I think they're worth it and really, really exemplify what makes St. Jude so great. And this is probably going to be most of what we're going to talk about with regard to St. Jude's.

So Thomas writes, prompted by our discussion on ATP about the St. Jude fundraiser, I wanted to share a personal story. Being a longtime listener, I remember hearing about St. Jude fundraisers for years. September was mostly just another month. That changed in 2022. In June of that year, our one and a half year old daughter, Maureen. was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Our life hasn't been the same since, and September's gained a different meaning.

We were lucky to live close to one of the best cancer hospitals in Europe, the Princess Maximus Center for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands. Our daughter got the best possible care there. St. Jude came up a number of times during our time there. Let me remind you, in the Netherlands.

Our doctors closely collaborated with the doctors at St. Jude, providing access to cutting-edge medication through shared clinical trials. We witnessed the progress being made in cancer research thanks to fundraisers like yours when our daughter's leukemia unfortunately came back the following year. She got a new treatment. that she responded very well to. It was still experimental at the time, but continued research is confirming it to be superior treatment for specific kinds of leukemia.

This year's September is different once again. Our daughter's leukemia came back a second time. Treating it a third time was unsuccessful. She passed in February of this year. It's our first September without her. And I will just interrupt this to say that all three of us are incredibly sorry to Thomas and your family.

that is absolutely heartbreaking. And I cannot believe you spent the time to write this because that is extremely kind of you. And I don't know if I would have had the, I don't know if gumption is the word I'm looking for, but the fortitude to do so. So finishing Thomas's email is very kind email.

Thanks for the work you do raising money for research for childhood cancer. I wish for a future where no parent has to go through. We have had to experience. Let us together make that a reality. And let me remind you that the slogan for this year and perhaps forevermore is let's give them more tomorrows. And that's a great example.

If you're moved by this, please feel free to honor Marine, which is spelled M-A-R-I-G-N, in making a donation to St. Jude. Again, stjude.org. And then one more, a little bit quicker one. All Purpose Guru writes, I recently underwent treatment for skin cancer. The cost of medication for my immunotherapy was $34,000 per dose. The fact that St. Jude gives away these medications to patients is not something you should ignore.

The medication, and I'm cutting a little bit, but the medication cost a quarter of a million dollars, not counting the time and money it took to actually put it in my body. The nurse would hang the packet of medication on the IV, and I would look at it and think, that 100 milliliters of fluid costs more than my car. So this is what St. Jude... does, kids. This is what they do. They are trying to give children more tomorrows. So please, stju.org slash ATP, sdjude.org slash ATP.

please feel free to send them a little bit of our money and we need to talk about that. John, you've noticed something. Yeah, we did find the leaderboard that shows the comments on the St. Jude's fundraising site, and we have someone who put ATP in the comment. They are the new leader of all ATP-related donations. Actually, they're the leader of all donations for the relay.

Pledge Drive, I believe. I think that's right. Guillaume Morin, a name you may recognize from past years, has donated $12,718.28. Heck yes. Love it. firmly at the top of the leaderboard. Amazing contribution. You don't have to donate thousands and thousands of dollars. Just give what you can.

Right. That we're honoring the people who can give these huge amounts and that's great and everything. But five bucks is just as good because it all adds up. We'd rather have a thousand people give five bucks than one person give two thousand dollars. Absolutely. So again, one final time for this week anyway, stjude.org.

And if Guillaume wants stickers, he should write you, right, Casey? Yes, absolutely. I'm pretty sure I have sent at least one batch their way, and I'm pretty sure they have gracefully refused any further. But yes, absolutely. They have too many stickers. Yeah, right, exactly. We accept your sticker refusal. Yes. But yeah, I mean, please, like John said, don't feel like you have to donate $12,000 plus. $5,000 is great.

Don't feel like the only ones we care about are the $12,000 ones. We're watching all these donations come through, and all of them make us very, very happy. All right, let's do some follow up. And I think this might be an all follow up episode. It's John's favorite kind of episode. And let's start with we need to fire slash sack someone. And I believe that someone might be John. John, what happened?

In the last episode, I said that Stephen Hackett thought the name of what was eventually called iPhone Air would actually be called iPhone Ultra. Maybe it was the episode before that I said that. That was not the case. He said that he thinks the folding phone, what we call the Ultra, We'll put a link to his blog post about that at 512pixels.net. We regret the error. All right. And then we were having a conversation about microns and micrometers and micrometers and all sorts of different things.

And I don't know why I didn't think of this, but it was one of those times that I got myself wrapped around the axle and I didn't want to participate and say, yes, this is definitely the case. But someone whose name is probably John has done some research and figured out that what you might call a micrometer.

is indeed called a micron here in the States. So reading from Wikipedia, in American English, the use of micron may help differentiate the unit from the micrometer, a measuring device. Nope, I got that wrong, didn't I? A micrometer, a measuring device. It's confusing. A measuring device because that unit's...

In spoken English, they are distinguished by pronunciation as the name of the measuring device is stressed on the second syllable, micrometer, whereas the unit name places the stress on the first syllable, micrometer. But that's why no one says micrometer. We said micrometer on the earlier episode. All three of us couldn't remember what it was called. We said micrometer, right? It's micro and then meter. Yeah, but we called microns here in the U.S. And I think everybody else does as well.

All right. The iPhone Air battery pack. From what we knew last week, I stand by this. I think John is the one who said it, but I stand by your assertion here. From what we knew last week, it was a portless battery pack, and it turns out that is incorrect.

Yeah, it does have a USB-C port on it. And the reason I thought it was portless is because Apple is just so stingy with their product photos. The average eBay seller puts 10,000 pictures of the thing they're selling for five bucks, but Apple's own website just refuses to show certain angles.

of their products and if you found the super high-res version of the slim iphone air battery pack and zoomed way way in you could see that it had a usbc port but i didn't do that and i couldn't see one in the normal size photos and i didn't have time to pour over the spec sheet

to find out that it can charge other devices through the USB-C port. Anyway, the iPhone Air battery pack has a USB-C port. Fear not. I'm still salty that that's only for the iPhone Air. I understand, but I'm still salty. Did you see all the YouTube videos of people putting it on sideways on other phones?

Because it'll charge your phone if you put it on sideways. Like the whole problem is it hits the camera bump on most other phones. Although I believe on the 16e. 16e. Yeah. The 16e, it doesn't hit the camera bump, but it sticks off the other end. Incredible.

All right. Speaking of charging and related, you're going to need a new charger to take advantage of the iPhone 17 Pro's fast charging. I did not know this until I was doing my research for the episode this morning. And this bummed me out too. So a reading from a nine to five.

9 to 5 Mac. According to Apple, the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max can charge faster than previous iPhone models, up to 50% in just 20 minutes. While that is true, it's thanks to a brand new USB power delivery specification, which isn't widely available on the market yet. In short, you'll need to buy Apple's new 40-watt dynamic power adapter if you want to charge your iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone 17 Pro Max as quickly as possible, at least for now.

This is because Apple's charging brick is seemingly the only option on the market that supports this new USB PD 3.2 AVS protocol. Now, reading from The Verge, AVS, which stands for Adjustable Voltage Supply, provides granular voltage options, allowing the power source to offer more precise and efficient charging of devices like smartphones and laptops.

For obvious reasons of safety, efficiency, and longevity, the batteries in our phones and laptops do not charge their maximum possible input for the entirety of the charging cycle. Instead, it's regulated at predefined voltages to slow down charging as the battery fills.

With AVS, the power source can provide a very specific voltage that is closer to the ideal needed for the device being charged, speeding up charging without overheating. However, unlike a true 60-watt charger, Apple's little 40-watt GAN charger cannot maintain that peak 60-watt weight rate forever.

Only 18 minutes as demonstrated by Privater Bach over at the USBC hardware subreddit. That makes it suitable for fast charging new iPhone 17, but not a MacBook Pro, which is why Apple sells it as a 40 watt charger with 60 watts max and not a 60 watt charger. Coming back to 9to5Mac, other fast chargers on the market like Anker's 45-watt nanocharger will also fast charge the iPhone 17 Pro, just not as rapidly. You'll gain roughly 50% in 30 minutes rather than 20 minutes.

On the plus side, it anchors chargers two-thirds the cost of Apple's, and it includes a six-foot USB-C cable. I'd love to see advancements in charging tech. I like this. I mean, it's interesting that Apple only sells one that will do this, but I would imagine. Very shortly, you'll see tons and tons of third-party chargers that support this.

Yeah, because the way USB power delivery worked before is there's certain – in fact, if you read the tiny little text printed in gray-on-gray text on most USB-C charging bricks, it will give you a list of its – power outputs at different voltages so it'll be like you know five five volts at two amps and then you know 9.7 volts you know and it gives these steps so my understanding i think what avs

gives you here these new chargers is basically a lot more granular control instead of just those predefined septa voltages um and so in theory this is good because as it says like you know if if the phone can only take you know a certain wattage right now into the batteries if you know if suppose if the charger can only output like you know 10 watts or 20 watts and it could take 18 well too bad 20 is too much so it's gonna say all right just give me 10 now

it'll step down to that and so like you have these little these little steps you can fill in the differences and you can get more current into it over time. I believe, forgive me if I'm wrong, people who know more about this than I do, I believe that's how this works and why this works. It's more than that, I believe, because I think, again, I'm shooting from the hip a little bit here, but I think that the voltage level Yeah.

volts or something along those lines. Again, the specifics may be a little different. The only thing I would say that is like, you know, before everyone gets too much FOMO about, you know, your existing chargers with this or all the other chargers on the market so far, with the exception of, I believe, the Google Pixel recently.

for the same reason. Keep in mind that like when iPhones have gotten faster charging abilities before and you actually look at like, OK, what's the real world benefit of this? It's not as much as you think most of the time because the battery still does slow down as it gets towards the end. Now, this will help it slow down maybe more gradually and have, you know.

as we were saying, like have those more granular steps in the meantime, which will charge it faster, but it's not going to be like twice as fast or three times as fast. It's going to be, you know, as they say, like in this example of like, it'll go from 30 minutes to 20 minutes.

And that's like probably that's a best case scenario, probably if you're starting the phone very low, starting at like, you know, 10 or 20 percent. Yeah, that's just the first half of the battery charge. That's I'm assuming from zero to 50 percent, which is like the easiest part to charge. And you get 10 minute savings on there when you go to the second 50 percent.

of the battery you'll probably get even less right yeah like if you're trying to charge it from 50 to 100 that's that's going to be substantially slower and that and that's always going to be the case with lithium-ion batteries but um this kind of thing if you're frequently charging in that range

this kind of thing probably won't make as big of a difference as you think. It's still better. Like ideally, you know, this will be great once these are more universal, but it's not necessarily like something to like, oh my God, I have to go throw out all my chargers now and get new ones.

Yeah, I'm really debating if I want to pick one of these up because in the living room we have, as most families I'm sure do, we have like the one USB-C cord that's connected to a big fat charger that can charge really, really fast. And that is our like emergency. Well, not that we can't use it other times, but in particular, like emergency use. Oh, we're about to leave the house. No, my battery is dying and I didn't realize it. Let's top up quickly.

And I kind of want to get one of these for that use, even though I agree with everything you just said. It's only going to be fast on the brand new phones, though. Yeah, only on the 17s Pro. Yeah, but, I mean, that's Aaron. That's all you care about is just that.

I don't care about anyone else. I mean, I do, but not as much. To me, I think this would also be good in a travel context. If you're like, okay, I just got to the hotel. We're going to leave for dinner in a half hour. I got to charge up as much as I can. That kind of thing.

useful for that as well although i have to say like the shape of this one which is similar very similar to the shape of like the two usbc port one that comes with uh macbook airs if you option it for the 30 option or whatever it is i don't like that shape anchors Has better shapes for things that plug into the wall like the Apple one looks so beautiful and it's like a rounded top But then it's got sharp edges on the bottom and it's just

Not particularly space efficient and not the shape that I usually want in terms of how much room does it take up on a power strip? How well does it hold into a wall socket? So I'm not a big fan of Apple's chargers, but you know, the slim pickings on the market right now for if you need this specific kind of. Sharjah.

All right. Marco, last episode, you were speculating about whether the A19 is a Bind A19 Pro and anonymous rights. Regarding that speculation, I can confirm that this is not the case. The two chips are designed separately. They share a lot of IP, but they are too unique. unique variants, each with their own layout and footprint. This provides energy and cost savings for the non-pro phones since they don't have all the features that the pro phones do.

cool still be cool to see the die shots see exactly how different they are from each other and it also uh i would love to know if any of the cores are different like probably the efficiency cores are the same are the power cores different from each other in any way besides amount of cash uh still would love more detail on this but that's some clarification it's not all the same a19 the a19 a19 pro are different all right and speaking of the a19 pro there are some benchmarks that have come out

Uh, single core. I'm not going to read these numbers, but suffice to say single cores about 8% faster than the 18 pro multi-core about 13% faster and metal 40% faster. Can I, maybe I'm being a dummy, but. How are we getting like 10% and 15% increments on the CPUs each? And 3P and good architecture changes. And the metal score has got to be like, because remember, this is not like frame rating. Your games are going to be 40% faster. It's just the metal.

compute score and it's those embedded neural engines or neural accelerators or whatever like that's where they're getting the big numbers on the gpus because they added like I don't know what those things are, but everything they were touting is coming out of the benchmarks. And these are preliminary benchmarks. This is from Searching Geekbench for iPhone 18,1, which, believe it or not, is the signifier for the 17 Pro. Don't ask. uh long sorted history of numbering in the phones um

But yeah, these are numbers were just averaged together from all the results that were found as of like yesterday. So maybe the numbers will change a little bit as like the quote unquote official ones go to the site and people get their phones. But yeah, pretty good. 8% faster in single, 13% faster in multi. one is all the accelerators. So, impressive showing.

Yeah, and this is probably a good indicator of roughly what to expect from the M5, if I had to guess. Is this the M6-destined core, or is this the M5-destined core? I forget if the core is lagged behind, but we'll probably find out from there.

from the scores keep in mind that like this this uh single core score while impressive is not as high as the the m4 so i i've lost track of which cores are in which things but it could be that these are the same cores they're going to be the m5 but we'll find out once that ipad is uh released hopefully in october

Yeah, should be soon. Oh, and later in this marathon of follow-up, I will take both of you to task for something from the previous episode. So to balance that, to preemptively balance that, I have something for you two. um i look at this all the time when the new phones come out uh the a19 pro uh compared to my mac pro oh no my 2019 mac pro with a 12 core zeon

is 63% slower than the A19 Pro in single core. Okay? It's been slower in single core than the iPhone chip for years, right? But 60, just to tell you how that's going, 63% slower in single core. My Mac Pro is... 1.5% slower in multi-core. Oh, no! My 12-core Xeon is now slower than the A19 Pro in your iPhone in multi-core. Oh my god. This is incredible. How much power does that Xeon consume? More than the A19 Pro. Significantly more. Two or three hundred watt CPU.

Now, on the upside, my metal score is almost three times as fast, and I have eight times as much RAM. So... Hang in there, Mac Pro. We're still waiting for a worthy successor, but just to keep the world updated, the 2019 Mac Pro is now beat in single-core and multi-core. Wow.

By the phone. Maybe I'll have to upgrade to a 28-core Xeon so I can beat it in multi-core again. I'm so glad that you brought this to us and that you didn't put it in the show notes. This is incredible. You know, I want to... repeat what Marco just pointed out very casually a moment ago. This A19 Pro, I don't know what the maximum wattage it uses is, but I got to imagine it's a heck of a lot less than that huge honking Xeon. Sorry, whatever it's called.

This is incredible performance. Performance not only in terms of speed, but in terms of energy performance. I mean, for all of Apple's... issues these days their chip team and i know they've had some departures recently but their chip team i i can't imagine they're firing on anything less than every cylinder it's incredible what they're doing oh yeah i mean for all the complaints we have about apple recently

I don't think any of them are about hardware. The hardware is amazing. Their hardware team... I was thinking earlier today, I don't think it's a coincidence that when people talk about potential successors to Tim Cook... John Ternus is often mentioned recently as like maybe possibly another like the next CEO. And he's the hardware chief. I don't think that's out of the question. And I mean, obviously, this is very different.

job you know so who knows what he would be like as a ceo but like if you look at where apple is right now their software is it's a little shaky Their design, a little shaky, you know, but like the hardware rock solid awesomeness constantly coming out of the hardware team. Like it's so good across the entire lineup.

What other time in Apple history have you been able to point to the hardware lineup and have there be like no duds? There's nothing in the lineup that we could that like if some relative came to us and be like, oh, I just bought so-and-so without asking you.

Like there's nothing that we'd be like, oh, no, you got the wrong one. Unless they bought a Mac Pro. Well, yeah, but that's unlikely. Which they're not going to, so it's fine. Right. They don't know it exists. The hardware lineup is just incredible. And there seems to be no end in sight to its awesomeness. Hardware is on a roll, a multi-year, very strong roll. And they really deserve to be commended. Very much so.

All right. The N1, that's N as in Nancy, 1, is in every new iPhone. It was only spoken about in the event as part of the Air portion, but it's in every phone, which I did not realize. That's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread Radio. And they're using it everywhere. We are sponsored this episode by Claude. Claude Code.

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If you are ready to tackle bigger problems, sign up for Claude today and get 50% off Claude Pro, which includes access to Claude code when you use Claude.ai slash ATP. Go to that URL, Claude.ai slash ATP. Thank you so much to Claude for sponsoring our show. Let's talk about the iPhone's iconic plateaus. By the way, before we enter the plateau... Before we mount the plateau, we climb up to the top of the plateau. Yikes. So...

I did want to call out, I think it's a little bit BSE to talk about phone thickness now. Now? Well, yeah, but I think the air really shows how ridiculous this discussion has gotten when you're like, the phone is 5.5-ish millimeters thick. I was like, well, a lot of it is. But there's a huge part at the top that is a lot thicker than that. And so can you really say the phone is that thick when...

Only a portion of it is like when the MacBook Air was wedge-shaped. No one ever said the MacBook Air is 0.2 or whatever the tip of it. No one ever said the MacBook Air is 0.2 inches thick.

like no it was always like it was explained like it's 0.2 at the thinnest point you know and then it was you know 0.5 or whatever at the thickest you know whatever it was no one ever said like the whole thing you know is or the the macbook air period is this thick I think it is misleading and not very useful anymore to describe the thickness of iPhones by their big flat part on the bottom.

And kind of ignore the fact that the camera plateau is there for thickness consideration because it's so thick now and it's so wide. It's like the top 20% of the phone. That's a lot of space and it's a lot thicker than the body. I'm calling BS on any mention of the iPhone being X millimeters thick or thin without qualifications. Because that, I think, is no longer truthful.

I think it's fine, but your idea of you're mentioning the MacBook Air gives me an idea. How about making the phone wedge-shaped? bring back the scalp batteries oh my god can you imagine the case manufacturers would have a fit because like imagine how much harder it is to get the right it would be so slippery you'd be squirting out of people's hands you know it's probably a terrible

idea. But like, you know... apparently we can't get the camera bump the camera bumps are getting bigger not smaller we've said this for years and years every year the camera bump was like what are they gonna do about the camera bump and it's like actually it's bigger this year it's bigger every year because people want the camera so they spend the thickness on it and and by the way this is the vast majority of the phone

thin. I think it's fine, but whatever. But you can't say the iPhone Air is five millimeters thin. Because it's not. People know what you mean because the vast majority of the phone is that thin. I don't think someone's like, I made a slot in my house to fit through and it doesn't fit through. I built it based on your thickness, you told me.

anyway but like they keep getting thicker so at a certain point a wedge shape starts to become or like i mean they kind of did that with the with the 17 pro by like having the iconic plateau be even more plateau it's like it's really big Right. You could just keep making that bigger and bigger and shove all sorts of stuff up in there, which is what this next item is about.

So, BasicAppleGuy writes, the iPhone Air is all battery. The entire brains of the phone is essentially smushed into the camera plateau. I thought we knew this last week, did we not? We did more or less, but a couple shows back, I remember saying, like, we were looking at it all.

back when we were looking at like the mock-up models that everybody had of all these things and it's like uh what's going to be in the in the camera bump essentially uh and in particular on the air what's going to be in the camera because it's just got the one camera

in there like what's the why extend that lozenge and make it look like a google pixel what's the point in doing that and now we know from the presentation the point in doing that is they put basically all the computer chips up there that's what's in the rest of the lozenge is

the rest of the phone and leaving the big long flat body to basically just have the battery and the taptic engine in it and like the ports and some other stuff like that. That is also kind of true of the 17 Pro that they've shoved stuff up there.

because you've got the three cameras and then way over on the right you've got like the flash and the lidar thing and in the middle there's there was speculation about them sneaking some battery up under there and some other things i do want to see the iFixit teardown of these just to see how much uh because they hollowed out the glass uh on the on the air to get that in there and then of course on the pro that's not glass it's aluminum

they've also hollowed out i would love to see exactly what they've tucked in there but um like i said i think that the logic board is horizontal on the pro and then the whole rest of it is battery but how much did they hide in there so anyway that's why This thing looks like a Google Pixel. I don't actually know if Google Pixel also puts all their circuit boards up there. But if they don't, I feel like they're missing out because it seems like it's a good idea.

Well, there are – I mean it's probably – I mean obviously there's considerations of things like how many cameras you can fit and how deep they can be. But also like – heat maybe like heat dissipation i think could be not amazing with that kind of layout like i think we're going to find the 17 pro with the vapor chamber thing like that you know that's going to spread the heat across the whole aluminum you know case and the whole back of the phone

the air is kind of the opposite like the air does not seem to have much of a mechanism to spread the heat that's the the uh the brand promise of the name air is it will thermal throttle because there's no place for the heat to go it's true of the macbook air and it's true of the iphone air

Yeah. Like when they benchmark these things, like you're going to see, you know, even if they, we talked about this last time, like, do they have the same peak clock speed, but run some long running benchmark on the air and boy, is it going to throttle before the pros. All right. The iPhone 17 Pro. Apparently, I owe you and Marco may owe you an apology, John. Both of you, yes. Last episode, I could not believe it when both of you were like, I didn't know this was going to be a unibody.

And we talked about it on the previous show. And so someone actually looked up in the transcript that the word we use multiple times. I literally said the word unibody at least twice. And you know what, Casey? You also said the word unibody. So both of you last episode were like, we never talked about this. We didn't know it was going to be like this. We didn't know it was going to be a unibody. You did. Wow. Briefly. I mean, I listened to the clip. I am not arguing that this is incorrect.

I don't think I properly processed. I was in Ron Burgundy mode. I don't think I processed the implications of unibody, but so that's why it was so surprising to me. It was an extensive discussion and many words were spoken and you like, I put the timestamp link to you saying it.

So again, I'm not arguing it. It's a 100% the case. I just, I totally blanked on that particular word on that, or I guess on that whole damn discussion, which is on me. I'm not saying it's not my fault, but yeah, I blanked on that. All right. The millimeter wave antenna is back, or the window, I should say, is back on the...

14, I think I have that right. It was in the spot that the camera control, or I guess 14 and 15, it was in the spot that the camera control took on the 16. And so there wasn't a bespoke antenna, or well, there wasn't a visibly...

a bespoke antenna anywhere on the 16. On the 17, it's at the very top of the phone for American phones, and I think only American phones, because I don't think any other country gets millimeter wave. Interesting place to put it. It's dead center in the middle. What we mean by window is there's a break in the metal case.

like a lozenge shaped brick i keep saying lozenge people will tell me that's not a lozenge shape a rounded capsule and capsule yeah shape uh at the top of the phone i believe it's made of like plastic or glass or something but it's something that's more radio transparent than aluminum And that's where they put the millimeter wave. Do you remember where they put the millimeter wave antenna on the 16 Pro? Yeah, but the 16, I think it's just integrated.

with the like antennas on the rim or something or maybe it's behind the glass i'm not sure yeah maybe i forget but anyway apparently that wasn't as good as it could be so the window is back and it is dead center on the top of the phone which is kind of weird looking at least it's in the middle Yeah, that's true. And centered, which we'll get to in a second. And speaking of centering, actually, this is not the centering I was talking about, but the logo placement on Apple's cases is a little...

It's wonky at first glance, but I actually think I can defend it, but we can talk about it. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Like, so one of the rumors we were talking about was like on the Pro phones, which have that glass panel on the bottom, the rumor was that the...

apple logo would be centered in the glass panel rather than centered on the back of the phone as it had been for ages um and then the question was okay but if you look at the existing clear apple case with the magsafe ring now the ring would Cross over the Apple like the Apple wouldn't be in the center of the ring anymore because they didn't move the MagSafe ring the MagSafe ring was kind of where it always was

proportionally speaking but the apple logo is lower on the phone so what are they going to do and there's all these mock-ups of like the ring wouldn't be a complete ring it would have an opening on it and like Because, you know, you've got the ring and then you've got the little vertical, like, notch, the vertical line below the ring. So it'll be like, okay, the ring, and then there's a break in the ring, and then there's a little notch.

The Apple logo would be in that little empty spot where the break in the ring is. It never really looked very nice or made any sense. So here's what Apple actually did for their clear case for the 17 Pro. They do not have a clear case with a white ring on it. They just white out the whole glass panel area, the place where the glass panel is on the 17 Pro. The case has an opaque white thing there.

and the apple logo is centered in the opaque white thing the ring is still what you know where it always is and is crossing over the apple logo but you don't see that because the whole back is white so that's what they did there but on the cases for the 17 pro

that aren't clear, like the tech woven thing, the Apple logo is centered within the full height of the phone, not centered within the glass panel, because when that case is on the phone, you can't even see the glass panel. And it would be kind of weird, not that weird, but kind of weird to center the Apple logo.

a structure that you can't see on an opaque case. I understand why people are like, what the what? But I actually, I agree. I think this makes perfect sense. It makes so much more sense than those mock-ups with the ring with the break in it.

Setting aside that you wouldn't have magnets where there was no ring, this makes so much more sense. Although it does mean that your clear case is not... all that clear anymore yeah i did i do think it's a bit of a misnomer now like because it's like it's obviously like most of the actual area of the case is white Yeah, it's like a clear edge case. All right. And speaking of cases, apparently...

a lot of case makers made a bet that didn't come true. So Tyler Hayes writes, I did a web search for iPhone 17 Pro case and the first four out of six sponsored products showed a black iPhone 17 Pro. I clicked through to several online stores and found on the same thing uh let me just remind you there is no black iphone 17 pro this is an article on pc magazine uh website and the headline was who wants to tell these case makers there's no black iphone 17 pro there's so many

the pictures of black iphone 17 pros because they they just did all their artwork based on the mock-ups and they thought for sure that's a safe bet why don't we just do black we don't know what the colors are going to be but sure they're going to have a black one nope All right, John, what are the actual, what is the actual origin or what is your headcanon for the origin of blue, white, and orange for the iPhone 17 Pro?

Yeah, because those are the only three colors that comes in is whatever it is that really, really dark blue, which is practically black, but not really. silver which just looked like silver and then cosmic orange um and i saw lots of people saying these three colors remind me of something in fact on last episode i even said the denver broncos and apparently denver broncos have changed their logo but their logo from 1997 to 2023 was a really deep

dark blue, white, and then reddish orange. Casey, you came up with the GameCube one here, showing the really deep blue one next to the purple. I think it's supposed to be the purple GameCube.

Although the white bounces off on this picture. And then there was a silver GameCube for the silver phone. And then there's an orange GameCube. Sorry, a Spice GameCube for the orange phone. I think this is not a good color match because... first of all this image isn't very accurate and second the purple is very different from the dark blue and i think spice is different than that orange but okay it reminded you and by the way there was a black game cube too so it's not a perfect match

Some people think it reminded them of the flight suit that Luke Skywalker wears in the Star Wars trilogy because he's got an orange flight suit, which I guess has some dark black that could be like dark blue and there's gray stuff. Okay, Luke Skywalker, I see that. But as soon as I realized this, I feel like this is the actual answer. When I saw the logo of Auburn University, which is where Tim Cook went to college.

uh in 1982 graduated 1982 their logo and colors are deep dark blue and orange and unless you think who cares tim cook fine he went there as an undergraduate you think he's going to color phones like his school i was doing some googling for this i'm like he's a really big

auburn fan isn't he what can i find that will back up the idea that he's a really big auburn fan so i did some google searches and i came up i don't know if this is true this is some thing from silverwavesmedia.com it sounds like a rumor but this is what it says at that website we'll link it in the show notes

Cook graduated from Auburn in 1982, and it is rumored that he paid for the whole buyout of former Auburn football coach Gus Malzahn. The total buyout was over $21 million. They're saying that he... you know paid to get rid of uh a football coach paid 21 million dollars for his own money that seems highly unlikely to me but who the heck knows but anyway what i did find is uh strong evidence that he really cares about auburn

football and if these really are the Auburn colors, they do look like a very good match. for the iPhones. I would be hard pressed to believe that Tim has anything to do with any of these colors. However, even though the University of Virginia does have very similar colors, not the same, but similar, I think the Auburn Connection is the strongest of the available options.

that have been presented. And let me tell you, as a very big college football fan, it is not at all surprising if he really did take care of that buyout. In fact, my actual alma mater, Virginia Tech, we just this past week fired our... head football coach because he had not performed at all and he has i think a six million dollar buyout or something like that so it's typically on the boosters on the fans to come up with that money because usually the university doesn't pay that and i believe it

At Tech, and this is probably true of other universities, but at Tech, as far as I know, the school pays for little to maybe even none of the football program. It all comes from fans and people who donate to Virginia Tech.

and so on and so forth. So, um, this is a real thing and it wouldn't surprise me at all if Cook did indeed pay a $21 million buyout because to him, that's like Trump change. Uh, he should have paid to st. Jude.org slash ATP, but that's neither here nor there. Yeah. The idea of like, like these.

these ridiculous buyout contracts. Like, okay, if we don't like you, we have to pay $21 million to get rid of you. It's a racket. That's very familiar to CEOs. Yeah, that's true. In certain jobs, certain rare... job ceo uh head coach uh they pay you to leave and i totally believe that uh that tim cook had nothing to do with the colors in the phone but

Everybody who works there knows that he likes Auburn. And it could be a way of like, oh, if we show him this, he's definitely going to approve. And, you know, kind of like a wink. I don't know. It's kind of strange that no one asked questions about this. Not that they're probably going to say, but.

And it's a weird lineup of colors. No black, really dark blue, silver, and orange. Could be Luke Skywalker. Could be the Denver Broncos. Could be UVA. I mean, well, first of all, how much do you think we can get? Tim Cook to leave for. But it's also, you know, orange and blue. have been a very popular color combination forever. So I also, like, it might just be that they decided these were cool colors. You know, also keep in mind, like, the...

That particular shade of orange looks so far – we don't have them yet, but – It looks so far very similar to the orange on the button on the Apple Watch Ultra. You know, they've used... Is that called international orange or something? I believe so. And like an orange has been used as like an accent on electronics that Apple likes. a while by companies like Sony and Braun that provide a lot of their design inspiration. These are just cool colors.

I think you have the cause and effect backwards. I think the reason why these colors are here is because they're cool, and the reason why all these other places also use these colors is also because they're cool. Like I said, I'm with you on the orange, but my thing is...

why is that blue so dark? And then I see the Auburn logo. I'm like, that's why the blue is dark. Remember the whole thing on the internet, like maybe five years ago where I was like, did you notice that every movie coaster uses complimentary colors of orange and teal? Yeah. Yeah. Like they do that for a reason, right? But, but like, this is not what's.

in the movie posters it doesn't have orange and then the darkest blue you've ever seen in your life it looks like it's black it's it's orange and very light blue and that's why i was thinking denver broncos or virginia or whatever i mean it could be it also could be that like they they knew they were not going to have a black

They decided not to have a black, and they're like, okay, well, something dark. I mean, you see that again. In other Apple products, you see what they call midnight being used instead of black in the MacBook Air, the Apple Watch. I think some earlier, some lower-end products. like some of the lower end phones and stuff. So you do see them using dark blue in place of black before. So again, I think these are just cool colors and everyone else uses them for the same reason.

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Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show. All right, let's talk iPhone Air. We made passing reference to this a couple of minutes ago. Mark Spoonhour from Tom's Guide, Lance Ulanoff from TechRadar interviews, JAWS and Ternus.

Uh, the first half of the interview is all I had a chance to watch and I forget which one it is, but we'll link in the show notes. Uh, it was only about 15 minutes or something like that. And I thought it was really good. I mean, it's as with all Apple interviews, they're very polished, very well trained. You don't get a whole lot out of it except, I forget exactly what time it is. We'll put a timestamp link in the show notes.

At one point, Jaws is talking about how rugged the iPhones, but particularly the iPhone Air is. And he has one sitting on the side table next to him. And eventually, you can see him computing it in his head. And he decides, you know what? what? Here we go. And he hurls, he, as the kids would say, he, you know, yeeted the phone right across the room to Lance, who didn't even catch it. And then it fell on the next side table and it was no worse for wear.

And Jaws literally says to them, go ahead and see if you can bend it. And sure enough, these two dudes that are probably roughly our age, they try to bend it both ways and couldn't do it. Apparently it started to give a little bit, but then we'll go right back to the shape. This was such a... incredible flex. And I loved every second of it. It was so cool.

This is an important calculation. So first, quoting from the interview here, what Turner said was, it exceeds our internal metrics for bend strength, which Jaws added, which are pretty high. And then, yeah, Jaws made the calculation because they're like, oh, you know, so thin, is it really as rugged?

whatever so he threw it to him first of all which is a risk it could have broken because he did not catch it he didn't throw it to him on top of my driveway it just clattered onto the side table didn't fall that long and then they said go ahead and try to bend it now here's the thing part of the calculation on that is like

Are these people going to, like, Jaws is like, they're not going to use all their strength to bend this and break the phone in front of us, right? And I believe, looking at the video, they did not use all their strength to bend it and break it in front of them, which we'll see when the real YouTubers with stronger...

forearms get a hold of these things and start cracking them in half uh because every phone will break eventually like they're made they're not it's not magic right um they did put a lot of pressure on it But I don't think they used all their strength. And honestly, I wouldn't have either. Who wants to have a glass thing shatter in your hand? They just have their bare hands on it. And that's why this is such a genius move. Because Jaws knows that even if they're capable of breaking it,

not going to break it right here in front of like that's that's why he gets the big bucks right it was a it was a smart move uh and it was a it was a calculated risk but it worked out for him so um yeah and you know it's titanium it's very well glued and screwed together uh the new glass is stronger than ever uh i don't have any problem believing that it is much sturdier than for example the the eminently bendable iphone 6 uh is it more bendable than the pro yeah i think so

So we'll find out once people get these and hook them up to scientific equipment and start cracking them in half. But kudos to Jaws for taking a risk and getting away with it. My guess is they have done that before. Like internally, like I get he definitely knew that this would pass this test. Like he you can tell that he has done this before before before that interview.

Yeah, I agree. Apple does not take risks like that. Believe me, especially, you know, Jaws has been there forever. He's a pro. Part of the risk is that no one is going to really put their back into it and do it because who wants to have glass shatter in your bare hands?

nobody and it's it is kind of actually hard to get leverage on it if you're not accustomed to breaking phones in half like the youtubers are so they just you can see what they did they just did whatever no one would do is like just take it and and try to bend it and they they're applying for us but they're not like let me get my whole fist around it Bended over the edge of my leg. You know what I mean? Next year, they'll have a blender on stage. Like, what's that for? Oh, just wait.

Incredible. Sam Henry Gold writes, I'm guessing the iPhone Air name was last minute because there are still a couple of straggler references to iPhone 17 Air on the website in alt text and some regional pages. A Japanese webpage also at some point mentioned an iPhone.

iPhone 17 plus. So I don't know what's going on there. Maybe somebody asleep at the wheel. I'm guessing this is not just like the name was changed last minute. I'm guessing this was like somebody on the web team had the wrong name until the last minute, but like. the the name of these products like you know they're like printing boxes and stuff like months like this kind of stuff like this this is decided not at the last minute yeah well the thing is

The decision is not at the last minute, but the information is not distributed widely. So once they finally said, are we doing 17 air or are we doing air? And they finally said, no, we're just doing plain air. And they started printing the boxes. Three weeks passed, but that information was not passed on to the web team. So they're still writing 17 air.

all their checks you know i mean it happened with uh i think it was lion 10.7 where they were trying to go from mac space os space capital letter x to just os space capital letter x And Apple itself couldn't decide. So is it? mac os 10 10.7 or is it os 10 10.7 and it was like 50 50 through all the material for the life of that os that no one could agree whether it was os 10 or mac os 10 they eventually settled on os 10 i believe in 10.8 more thoroughly

But yeah, sometimes it's within a big organization, especially when the information is not distributed that widely. Preliminary decisions have a way of just like having momentum. And even when, you know, like in the Lion case, they never decided what it was going to be. But in this case, when they settled on iPhone Air, not everybody got that memo fast enough.

Right before the announcement, the show before the announcement, before we knew for sure all the details, but we all had every detail from the rumor mill. John had asked me in the chat, what would... Make me not buy the iPhone Air. Because I had said in the previous episode, I'm probably going to buy the iPhone Air. And I said there's three things. Number one, if it doesn't have always on screen. Number two, if it doesn't have promotion.

And it has both of those things. Great. But the number three thing I said was, if the speakers suck. because I had seen, like, that day, I had seen, like, some mock-up from some rumor site, and I saw the bottom of the phone, and I saw these little, like, it only had a couple of holes at the bottom, and I'm like, huh. Speakers are hard to fit in a really thin enclosure. If the speakers suck in the phone, that would really be a problem for me and my usage of the phone. Casey, what did we learn?

So this is a video from Max Tech who did a really good and really fast-paced, you know, here's something like 17 things you didn't realize about the iPhone 17. And one of the first ones is there's no speaker at the bottom of the iPhone air. The only speaker is the earpiece speaker that you would use when you're talking on the phone. Yeah. So a long time ago, you know, the originally like the only out loud volume speaker.

of the iPhone was the big one on the bottom. A long time ago, I forget exactly which phone it was, they basically... put a higher powered speaker as the phone earpiece speaker such that it became a second one. And that way, when you rotate the phone, they can say, look, we have stereo sound now because it comes from the big one on the bottom. And then also we just crank up the earpiece speaker enough. And that's like a second.

speaker up top. But the top speaker is not nearly as good as the bottom speaker. So you're going from not only from two speakers to one speaker in the air, but if you were going to pick one, you picked the worst one. So I think the iPhone Air is going to be a substantial degradation in both the...

quality and the total volume output of the built-in speakers. And that, for me, sealed the deal. I was probably going to get the Pro anyway, but I was really curious. I was like, oh, maybe I could try the Air at first, see how I like it. But no, without like top class speaker capabilities, it's not for me. That's it. That's what did it. Is that because you're always talking loudly on speakerphone in public? Yeah, I hold it like a pizza, like Merlin likes. No, it's because, you know, I...

I'm very frequently listening to podcasts out loud on the speaker as I'm like doing stuff around the house. I'll like set the phone down on the counter and do some stuff in the kitchen or whatever. I very frequently listen to podcasts out of that speaker. You should get some AirPods. I also have AirPods. And I have some HomePods that sometimes even work. The reality is I walk around and I do stuff and I use the speaker a lot.

If I'm in the shower, I'll like prop it up on a shelf nearby. You know, like there's I use the iPhone speaker all the time. And so that's that's a deal breaker for me. Yeah, and those little holes at the bottom of the iPhone Air, those are just for the microphone or microphones. There's no speakers down there, but there are the microphones. So, yeah, it's...

It's one of the other compromises of this design. Not enough for speakers. You're down one speaker. Your speaker is worse. It's not going to be great for all those people who want to talk loudly on speakerphone in public. Yeah, and I think the more that we... Look at the air like I have tried because I do.

I am curious. I was trying to, like earlier today, I was looking through all the trade-in prices. I'm like, I wonder if I can trade in a bunch of my old test devices and just get an Air as a test device, which I might still do because I think it might be useful.

I'm trying to come up with a reason to get this phone. And like the more I think about it or the more we learn about it, I'm just like, oh, no, I really shouldn't get this phone. And I wonder like how other people are going to react to it. So far, you know, the tech press has all been pretty much in agreement that this thing looks and feels pretty cool, but it's not the phone you should buy. And I'm trying to like, who is it for? I'm having a hard time coming up with people it's for because.

They seem to have done a great job with the physical design of it. It looks really cool. Everyone says it feels great. But I have a feeling that effectively no one is going to buy this phone. which maybe that's okay. I think, honestly, I would love to see Apple continue to make weird phones that take risks and optimize really hard for certain things. But if it's going to have the worst cameras... And the worst battery life of any phone in their lineup.

Those are really huge things to most people. Most people. And it's not the cheapest. Yeah, it's not. So it's not cheap. It doesn't have good battery life. It doesn't have good cameras. It's not small. So it doesn't like, you know, fit the small hand people like their needs. It doesn't have good thermals, probably. It doesn't have good speakers, probably. What does it like? I have a feeling it's going to maybe sell even worse than the Plus did. Like, I don't.

I'm trying to think, like, who's going to buy this? I think it's going to be something that everyone does cool videos on. And everyone knows what it looks like. And, you know, it looks cool. And maybe, you know, maybe you'll occasionally see like somebody who. who wants to look flashy, you'll occasionally see them using it. But I don't know. I think we're going to see a lot of orange phones this year, and I think we're not going to see any airs in the real world. I'm trying to predict...

When's the first time I'm going to see one in the wild that's not at an Apple store? I bet it's going to be a while because I've never seen a plus. Granted, it's a little harder to spot those because their phones are often in cases. So maybe I'm just not spotting them because cases are covering them up. I don't know who is buying it. And we'll see. Maybe I'm totally wrong here, but it just seems like there's some really big trade-offs that I don't know anyone who would accept those trade-offs.

day or two ago, were that if you were to order an iPhone Air, you'd still get September 19th delivery. So take for that what you will. It's, you know, there's also Ming-Chi Kuo was saying like what he thinks that the air is not selling, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have no faith that he has any inside line on how many phones are being sold. But the one thing we can't see from the outside is, you know, a few days after the phones are launched, usually you can't.

get day of delivery anymore and apparently as of a day or two ago you still could get iPhone air day of delivery so maybe they just made a lot of them or maybe they're not selling well yeah you can't get it today but you know that's

And again, you're right. Maybe they didn't make that many because maybe they did their own forecasting and they nailed it. And they said, oh, actually, we don't need to make a ton. And I still – again, I still think Apple – regardless of how much this actually ends up selling. I still think they should do stuff like this. They should have models that aren't like total sales hits but just serve a certain need.

I think that's great. It goes back to kind of your halo car argument, John. Apple should do things that push the envelope and push things forward and have specialty appeal even if they don't appeal to most people. Most people don't buy supercars.

But they exist, and they're really cool, and they serve other purposes in their existence and in their development and in their research and what they have trickled down technology-wise to other models. So the iPhone Air, I think there was lots of reasons to make this phone, but I don't.

I really don't think it's going to sell well in the U.S. Now, it's possible it'll do better, like, you know, in China, you know, where dynamics are different. You know, I don't really understand them that much. I know, you know, the appearance and novelty looking is much more important there.

But even then, I think the orange one would probably do better. But I don't know. We'll see. Didn't it replace the iPhone 16 Plus? I know it's not a direct one-to-one replacement. It replaced it price-wise, more or less, but not... Features wise, obviously. Well, I thought the screen is a touch bigger than the 17 and a touch. Yeah, no, the screen, the Plus was the same size as the Max, wasn't it? But this is in between the Max and the Pro. And like feature and capability wise, it is between.

the base 17 and the pro like it does it is better than the base 17 in certain ways it has some of the pros features but the trade-offs are so big i don't think there's going to be that many people who are willing to accept those trade-offs I mostly agree with you, but to argue for the sake of arguing, I think anyone who treats their phone as a fashion item now, to be fair.

I don't really know anyone like that, but I presume the existence of what you were saying earlier. I think that there are presumably people who will see this and say, oh my God, this is incredible. Even though it has not a stellar camera and even though the battery life may be trash, you know, I must have it because it just looks so cool. I mean, keep in mind the pre-orders are from people like us and we have to wait until this gets in stores where regular people can see it.

People didn't even know the new 5 phones were out. You know what I mean? Well, but even then, like, I think, like, you're right, Casey. I think that is certainly, like, a strong motivator. But they released this phone in the same year that they made the Pros look really bold and different, too.

And so I think what most people want is the orange. I think a lot of people are going to find the pro colors ugly and even not be able to hide that giant plateau in the case. Like, for example, I think my daughter would love the air.

If it wasn't so big, she's not a big phone person. She's annoyed at the size of her 12. She's going to be annoyed at the size of her 17. And this is even bigger. But I, because I remember I was saying like, if she doesn't like ones with lots of cameras in the back, hey, one camera on the back.

i think she might be turned off by the plateau or whatever but i'll actually i'll ask her about it because i i think the fashion angle on this is basically like i bet you'll see like fashion influencers having this phone because it's like a status symbol or whatever but

and i i can't possibly predict the sales i thought the plus phones would do i didn't think they'd do great but i thought they'd do better than they did because we don't know obviously only apple knows how they actually did it but all the doom and gloom i've heard about the plus phones it's like they just could not get rid of these things so will this do worse than the pluses

or better? I can't tell right now. I wonder, too, with the Plus, because I also, like you, I thought the Plus was going to sell very well. I've said the same thing about the 15-inch MacBook Air.

I wonder if that's, I've never seen one of those in real life either. Yeah. Like outside of an Apple store. So I don't, I wonder if those. It's like I said last time, I think Apple is too good at upselling. Yeah. Like they, they get you in the door with one of these things and they're just like, well, don't you want the MacBook Pro? And you're like, okay, fine.

It used to be that if you wanted the biggest screen, you had to get the high-end line of product. And over the last few years, they introduced the 15-inch MacBook Air, the 13-inch iPad Air, and the iPhone Plus.

It seems like none of those are really setting the world on fire, even though at the time, each one of those, when it was introduced, I said, I think on this show, this is going to sell tons of these things. And they probably thought the same thing. And maybe they had research showing they would. I think, John, I think you're right. Most people who want the cheapest thing are okay with the smallest thing or even are seeking out the smallest thing. And then people who...

are willing to be upsold for a bigger screen are probably also much of the time willing to be upsold to the better features also. And so we're just not seeing this market materialize of like, it's the same thing as the base model, but... bigger screen like that market seems to not exist that much whereas that's what i think what they're trying to do with the iphone air now is say okay it isn't just the base model but a bigger screen or it isn't just the base model but thinner

It is between the pro and the base model in capabilities as well, which I think is very smart. If they're going to have something in here, make it that smart. And the fact that they went a different direction with the industrial designer, it isn't just... you know, like the base model with a few...

bonuses no it's this cool new unique thing that like if you want this unique industrial design of the super slim most of the way phone you have to get this model like there is no other choice if this is what you want So they're making it unique. They're drawing in unique buyers that will seek that out. That's great. I think this is a much more promising strategy overall of like make a mid-tier spec product. with a unique design to fill that slot. That's a great strategy. But I think...

They made a few too many trade-offs with this implementation of this product, and I don't think it's going to sell well because of those trade-offs. But I think the concept of having something in a slot like that is sound. This just might not be that thing. If you could wave a magic wand and leave all the specs and the price and everything about the iPhone Air the same, but shave off the camera plateau and make it completely flush.

Do you think that changes the attractiveness of this phone? Obviously, that's not possible. But like, just imagine because I wonder how much of the.

Because I think it's going to sell based on its appearance. And I really do, for me personally, I think that camera plateau makes the whole phone ugly. And I wonder how many people are going to have a similar idea. It's getting back to what you said, Marco. It's like, oh, it's thin, but not that thin at that part. It looks ungainly and awkward. I understand that.

That's what you got to do right now with the tech that's available. You can't make a phone with these capabilities that's flat on the back. But boy, if it was. They'll probably do it eventually. If we keep doing the show long enough, eventually technology will exist to make a compromised thin phone that doesn't have a camera plateau. But that year is not now. I think it would do a lot better if...

The Air was the one with the bold, cool new colors, and the Pro still had its boring colors that it always had. That, I think, if they flipped that around, if this was both the new thin... design and also had the cool colors um then i think i think it would be very very tempting to a lot more people but i now it's like oh you you made the These awesome colors in the model that has the best cameras and the best battery life. Yeah, I'm going to take that one. Awesome color. To go back a step.

If you'll permit me a quick story, you know, we were doing all this home renovation, which is mostly done at this point. And as part of that, we were redoing the downstairs floors, as we talked about a few weeks ago. That meant taking the oven and stove out from the little nook that it's in and moving it out of the way so floors could be put in. And during that process...

We discovered, the people doing it, the contractors discovered, a... piece of technology that i was not aware that i was missing that i guess was way under the stove i have no idea or the oven i have no idea how it got back there i didn't don't recall having lost it but as we've particularly john established many times my memory is trash Anyway, what I found was my original four gigabyte iPod Nano. And I can tell you this thing still boots like the batteries.

garbage but i plugged it in i have one dock connector cable left and i plugged it in it started right up uh it sells a bunch of music on it which is questionable even by my standards but um i bring all this up because I am holding it in my hand right now. And this thing for today feels impossibly small and thin. And with this was something like 2004, 2005, it doesn't really matter. I don't care. Which model is it? The four gigabyte, a gigabyte iPod nano. Original one.

I think it was the very first iPod Nano, yeah. The SSD... Is it scratched to hell? Oh, God, yes. The back is ruined with scratches. Yep, that's the first one. This thing in 2025 feels... almost astonishingly thin and light and small. I'm sure if we were to do this again with 2025 tech, it would in reality be so much thinner, so much smaller, et cetera. But it still feels modern in that regard. In 2004...

This was impossible. This could not exist with 2004's tech, or again, whatever year it may have been. I saw this. I don't remember how I saw this. Maybe it was a TV ad. Maybe it was something else because I didn't give a crap about Apple in 2004. I saw this and I said, I must have it. I must have this. Because it was so impossibly thin. It was so impossibly small. And at the time, I still had a use for an MP3 player. I adored this device. And this was my very first Apple product.

I cannot speak highly enough about how much I wanted this for the look and feel of it alone. I agree with everything you two said. And I think anyone who treats their phone as much more than a toy is going to choose a different phone.

But there are people for whom the air... is just impossibly cool and i must have it and i that's not me i mean as we spoke about i ordered a 17 pro and i'm really looking forward to it it's they claim it's going to fix a lot of the problems i have with the 16 pro uh but

I can absolutely fathom a situation where I look at the air and say, I don't care that it's not perfect. Now, admittedly, the iPod Nano was fairly perfect in almost every way except the smaller capacity. I don't care that it's not perfect. I must have it. And that's exactly how I felt about this literally 20 years ago. There is a lot of value to that. And that's why I still have not ruled out the idea that maybe I will get one to replace all my test devices.

their values will sum up to about its price, actually. So I could do that if I want to. And now that I'm requiring iOS 18, I need a lot fewer test devices. So interestingly enough, like over the last couple of days, I've been doing a lot of work. on my initial Overcast release for 26 had a few... layout problems on when you had a very small screen and a very big font. And a lot of those people are iPhone mini users. So I took out and charged my trusty iPhone 13 mini test device.

And I've been doing a lot of testing on the iPhone 13 mini over the last couple days. And this thing, I have it in my hand right now. It feels incredible in the hand. I never used the 13 mini, but I did use the 12 mini for that year. I love this form factor in so many ways. It feels so good because the Mini is about the same weight as the iPhone Air. Like, it feels really good in the hand. It's light. It feels like nothing. And with the Mini, it has two cameras.

It has the regular speaker on the bottom and top. It really has a lot fewer trade-offs than the Air. And I kind of think it is possible for them to make a smaller, lighter... probably thinner phone than the main ones making some of these trade-offs. But when you look at the Mini, the Mini didn't make nearly that many trade-offs. The Air makes a lot more of them. And I think there are a lot bigger trade-offs that are bigger to more people.

So I don't think it's a category that can't be filled or that, quote, nobody wants. But I think if the air is a sales bomb... People might assume nobody wants their phones to be thin and light, but that is probably not in itself in isolation true. I think they just went really extreme with this to make a statement, and that does make it.

you know, more noticeable. It makes it more of a bombshell. But like Samsung released their super thin phone recently, which admittedly is not as thin as this and doesn't look as cool as this. But it's still like Samsung released their, I think it's the Galaxy Edge.

People talked about it for like 30 minutes and it was gone. No one cares. No one bought it. You don't hear about it at all. I think that might happen with the iPhone air. Like it'll last a little longer because they did a better job of it. And it's Apple, not Samsung, but. I think they just took too many trade-offs, and I don't think it's going to land well.

Yeah, we'll see. I'm really excited to have one of these in hand. I have it on pretty good authority that we will be able to check these out during the podcast-a-thon again on Friday on YouTube. And so I am really curious to see.

what i think of it in hand i i can't imagine wanting this over the iphone 17 pro because the cameras are that important to me not even you know additionally the thermals battery life etc but There is a lot to be said that's positive about the AR, even though, again, I've said it a couple times, I don't particularly disagree with anything you two have said, but I can fathom away where one would want it.

Coming back around to MaxTech from like three hours ago. Yeah, sorry. No, I was right there with you. The gap between the Dynamic Island and the top of the screen is larger on the air than it is on any other Dynamic Island phone, which is very, very interesting. And I don't recall if it was Max or maybe this was John theorizing that this might be due to the front camera's need to be inside the camera bump. So maybe that's why they had to move it down a bit.

It has another compromise in the design because I'm pretty sure, yeah, that they do need to like, like the front facing camera needs. you know it's the front facing camera is thick it needs to be somewhere and where does it go it's going to go into the bump but if you look at the back of the iphone air The camera bump is, it's concentricity. The camera bump is moved down like there's a margin around it.

because it would look weird if the camera bump was slammed up against the top of the phone but if it was slammed up against the top of the phone the dynamic island could be in the same place it is on all the other phones but they didn't want to do that so i feel like the dynamic island position and how much it interferes with the stuff on your screen is ever so slightly by a millimeter or two compromised by the need for the back of the phone to look the way it does.

Moving along, the USB-C port, this is what I was alluding to earlier, the USB-C port is not vertically centered. This is one of those things like the FedEx logo that I really wish I never saw because now I cannot unsee it. A lot of thin Android phones have this same problem.

the problem is the thickness of the oled screens like you can only make the old screen so thin and if your total uh thickness is you know the usbc port isn't changing thickness it is what it is and the screen thickness is as thin as we could possibly make it and you want the overall thickness to be 5.6 millimeters guess what

Port can't be in the middle. And when I saw the Android phones, I was like, oh, that's terrible. Do you think Apple would ever do something like that? Apparently, they have no choice with current technology. Haven't they done this once before? Wasn't there another iPhone where the port was not centered? I don't remember. Was there one with asymmetrical holes on the bottom maybe for the speaker things?

Or maybe I think I know what you're talking about. I think there might have been one of them where like the screw holes weren't aligned with the port or something like that. But anyway, it's a little bit more obvious here because the phone itself is so thin. In Apple's photography, they have so many like reflections of whatever.

like the i don't know these like 3d renders with like an environment map or something or if it's a real phone but anyway it's hard to see uh but in person it should be pretty obvious All right. There is no cinematic mode for video on the air, which is, isn't that the thing where you can adjust the focal point after the fact? I was trying to look up, refresh my memory about how it works. Yeah, that's what it is.

like but why would they not have that on the air i found this tech crunch article from 2021 about uh how apple built the iphone 13 cinematic mode that had some info in there um But yeah, it's not on the air. And this apparently includes the front camera. Apparently you can do cinematic video on the front camera on the other phones, but not on the air.

even though the front camera on the air is the same as on all the other phones so i'm not quite sure why i think it's not on the back because i think it might use lidar and for this next item here the air does not have a lidar scanner on the back of it i know people are broken up about that but uh like

i'm not sure how it gets the depth information to let you change the focal point but it would make sense to me that a single camera no lidar phone might not be able to do cinematic video with the back camera but learning that you can do cinematic video from the front camera and that the air doesn't have that even though it has the same camera, another weird compromise.

And I guess that's it, right? Oh, no. The new selfie camera also has a 24 megapixel sensor in all the phones, right? Not just the air. Question mark. Question mark. Does it have a 24? This was from Max Tech. I don't know where this information came from. The idea is that.

uh they as they showed it's a square sensor and they crop it to be either a landscape slice out of the square sensor or a portrait slice out of the square sensor and the idea is that the sensor itself if you were to take the full square like all the pixels that that's 24 megapixels

allowing any of the sensor crops to be 18 megapixels. That makes sense to me, but I don't have confirmation for it. So that's a question mark. But what this makes me think if it's true is I would love to see a full 24 megapixel square picture from that front camera. Yeah, that'd be great. And my guess is that you won't get that from the built-in camera app, but that maybe apps that access the raw camera hardware, like Halide and stuff, maybe they'll be able to do it.

If the sensor really is 2400 pixels. Again, I don't have this confirmed. That's why I put a question mark on it. All right. The iPhone air and the iPhone 17 non-pro are limited to USB two speeds. Uh, reading from Mac rumors, the new iPhone air and iPhone 17 limited to USB two transfer speeds. USB three continues to be a pro only feature.

USB 2.0 supports transfer speeds up to 480 megabits per second. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max support transfer speeds up to 10 gigabits per second, which is about 20 times faster. I want to point out that USB 2.0 was introduced in April.

of the year 2000. Incredible. It is a 25-year-old... data speed now it just you might as well just think of that as a charging port and not a data port and many people are super angry about this i'm not particularly angry about it because i think most people do treat it as a charging point but at a certain point it starts to become embarrassing and i think we have passed that point 25 years after the advent of usb 2.0 the thousand dollar you know if it configured with more storage iphone

117 should not transfer data at usb 2.0 speeds through a wired connection i do wonder like you know so One of the main differences between USB 2 and 3 is that USB 3 adds more pins. That's one of the ways they're able to get more data transfer is they add more pins to the connector. And that's also why USB 3 cables are... are typically a little bit thicker and less flexible than USB 2.0 cables. And again, that's also why I like charging cables.

tend to usually only support USB 2 speeds. And that's because they have fewer wires in them, which makes them cheaper and longer and more flexible more easily. Which is what usually when people are charging their stuff, that's all they care about anyway. It's like, give me, yeah, give me a nice long flexible cable.

and make it cheap. But USB 3, more pins, more wires in the cable, so it's more complicated and more costly. I wonder what it is about adding that to the phone. Is it a matter of like... The pins in the port. you know is that too expensive or is it about like the bandwidth on the chip for the usb3 controller like is that a bigger deal oh i'm sure i'm i'd be shocked if it's the controller i think the a19 probably has the control and if it doesn't have the controller

shame on apple because like like again most people use it for charging but like at a certain point the pro features need to trickle down and it doesn't need to be like oh it needs to be thunderbolt five speeds or whatever there's a wide gap between usb 2.0 and thunderbolt 5 find somewhere in the middle that you can do economically this you know we'll check in next year like i'm not really broken up about this but it is

kind of ridiculous and the reasoning for it it just seems like one of those things that apple doesn't it's kind of like why didn't the non-pro phones have promotion for so long even though like every phone in the android world has been over 60 hertz for ages Sometimes it just takes Apple a long time. And anyway, I think they're overdoing this one. I wonder too, like, I mean, I don't think anybody would care but me on this one, but like...

Okay, if USB 3.0 having all these extra wires makes it so much less adopted in so many ways still all this time later.

What if we had like a USB 2.5 standard that... Oh, gosh. That's why we need more USB standards. Right. But like, what if it only used... the same number of wires as usb2 but just you know clocked the data lines faster or something like i don't i don't know enough about the physical side of it but like i don't think the standards are going to reach back to like we need to find a way to jam more data over charging cables i'm not sure that's an area of interest for them

But you can imagine USB 2 and USB 3, it's about 20 times difference in speed. What if you could get a USB 2.5 that was like 5 or 10 times faster? And use all the old cables and use the thin, flexible, cheap ones. That actually might be pretty compelling for a lot of use cases. No one's going to do it, but I think it could be cool. All right. Let's talk about iPhone screens. It seems that every new iPhone screen has the exact same specifications other than size and resolution.

Difficult to tell from the presentation because they emphasize certain features on certain things. But if you go to Apple's very handy apple.com slash iPhone slash compare page and bring up the Pro or Pro Max, the Air and the Plane 17 and go down the screen specs.

everything except the resolution is the same contrast ratio true tone the how many that's uh max brightness the peak brightness the like it's all the minimum brightness they're they're all the specs are exactly the same which is pretty rare so let's celebrate that they all have really good screens now yeah this is great it's like there's now like a new minimum apple screen well i guess the e still won't have it probably but like you know

All of the mainline iPhones now have – they all have promotion. They all are always on. It's been a while now. They're all OLED. Now they just all are the good screen. That's a great place to be. And one of them is not like, oh, this one gets better.

or peak brightness or it's better outdoors they just all have the same specs right although i'm guessing the overall heat dissipation performance of the pro line for how long yeah if you actually want your screen to stay bright for more than a few seconds outside you're probably going to want the pro

All right. And the iPhone 17 models include a toggle to disable screen flickering due to PWM. Reading from Mac rumors, the iPhone 17 models include an accessibility setting to disable pulse width modulation or PWM, according to information.

in the iOS 26 release candidate. There will be a toggle located in the display and text size section of the accessibility settings on the iPhone 17 labeled display pulse smoothing. Users will be able to turn PWM on or turn it off. Here's a description of the setting.

Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions. We've confirmed that the PWM toggle is available on the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max. It is also likely available on the iPhone Air.

Reading from a different page, at 9to5Mac, pulse width modulation is a tactic that displays used to produce lower brightness levels. The screen rapidly switches the pixels on and off in a way that most users can't discern. For some people, however, PWM might result in a screen flick... effect that can cause eye strain and even severe headaches. You can see the PWM sensitive subreddit, which has 16,000 weekly visitors.

I got a lot of questions about this when I got my OLED iPad because they're like, how can you watch anything on that? Because the OLED iPad uses, you know, the whatever PWM, like basically just turning the screen on and off real fast instead of like putting the pixels on a lower brightness. They're like it.

you know they're at a fixed brightness but they just go on off on off really really fast and uh they're like oh i can't stand that it looks weird to me it flickers it gives me headaches as this does that witness the uh the subreddit with all these people talking about it My personal experience has been that I can't see the flickering and it doesn't bother me, but I'm...

fully willing to believe that other people can't see it and it does bother them especially young people because one of the things good things about getting older is here as your sense is dull fewer things are annoying Although young people themselves become annoying as you get older. But I'm actually kind of surprised that Apple rolled out this feature because even though some people are clearly sensitive to this, it seemed like, well, Apple's just going to ignore them forever. But no.

they provided an option for it which is great um and i'm not i don't know what the the downsides of it maybe like there's an energy trade-off i think it's like it's it's uh you can use lower power if you use pwm than if you don't and again maybe like really dim brightnesses it won't look quite right. But kudos to Apple for adding this option. If you're one of those people who can't stand that OLED flickering, why doesn't everybody else see it?

try out this option accessibility i guess i guess we all have ios 26 on our oh i do anyway and i assume you do the release version so i should check if that option is actually there because when i put this in the notes it was from the rc but uh no but it says it's only on the 17 line of hardware oh that's right it's not

Yeah, I can't use it. Okay. All right. Well, we'll find out when you guys get your new phones. Yeah, this is interesting too. Like, you know, if you can see PWM flickers, I feel sorry for you because so many of... the things in the modern world use PWM to control brightness. That's what they complained about on the subreddit, I'm sure. Not only device screens, but also any dimmable LED bulb. Not all of them.

But most dimmable LEDs use PWM to achieve their dimming. I didn't know that. I can see that when you get cruddy quality ones, I can see it and it annoys me. Yeah, and if you have any kind of cheap... LED lighting that is, you know, especially stuff like Christmas lights or like party lights or a lot of car aftermarket headlights. If they are super cheap, they will use half-wave rectification of the AC.

supply to get dc power for the light and what that means they'll just shove it through a diode which means it flickers i believe that makes it flicker 30 times a second instead of 60 which is very visible yeah and that that's why like especially you might not see it in the center of your vision but you might know

Notice if it's like at the periphery of your vision, you might notice a bit of a flickering of cheap LED party and Christmas lights. Or it seems like it's flickering only when you move your head or something. You can start to see a little bit of it there. And if you get good LED Christmas lights.

They'll be full wave rectified at least, or they'll just do some kind of other DC conversion. I don't know the details of how those work, but you can spend a few extra cents of components and you can get both of the AC waves. peaking the signal or whatever and you know you can double the refresh rate to 60 hertz or you can have some fancier system that actually just you know lowers the voltage or something but so much of the world now is now i wonder my theory on

You know, what Apple's option here says disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions. My theory, maybe what they mean by that is like if the display can say, all right. You have RGB values 0 through 255 for each. And it's probably a higher bitrate panel than that, but we'll just say that for now. For each pixel, you have these 0 to 255 values for the color channels.

Maybe the way they're achieving this is just compressing those down to the lower range. And so the display still thinks. It is performing at its full voltage and brightness and everything, but it's just being fed darker pixel values by the OS. Because the way OLEDs work, they won't use more power that way. If you just compress those values down, eventually you'll get...

compressed low enough that like you're not really getting a lot of distinction between the colors maybe or maybe you'll see banding like in gradients because you don't have enough like pixel precision you know in those ranges maybe that would be how performance is affected, but I don't know. I think this is a great option to have. We'll see what the trade-offs are, but this is very good for people who need it. All right. Let's talk Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch Ultra satellite data features require a cell plan, which we talked about last episode. And Jason was in the chat and had the same theory that a friend of the show, Greg Pierce, wrote in about, which is the most likely reason to require a cell plan for satellite features.

is that they don't want those features used any more than absolutely required. A device without a cell plan might be trying to leverage that network as a primary means for texting, etc. Yeah, makes sense. And also there are some cell plans that come with satellite stuff. Not that this is relevant to the iPhone, but...

i was surprised to learn that you can buy a cell plan that uh you pay a little bit extra and you get satellite service with it as well but yeah they just want to use it as fallback there's not enough satellite bandwidth or availability for everybody to be using it if they don't want to pay for cellular yeah

There is a post on Reddit, which is very interesting, that seems to think that the 24-hour battery claim up from 18 is not really any different. So reading from Reddit, the extra six hours that Apple claims is just...

apple finally including sleep tracking in the test but sleep tracking barely sips power and previous apple watches have already been able to easily surpass their 18-hour claims and go through a night of sleep tracking on top in the low power mode test the difference is just two hours

38 hours versus 36, a measly 5% difference. But Apple also lowered the active usage assumptions for the new model. Fewer checks, fewer notifications, less app time, not really an upgrade, just a shift in methodology. I... bet this is right and that makes it that makes me feel kind of gross yeah like it this i i wrote down like there's the

Three things I wanted to complain about with Apple's marketing of these. I mentioned earlier the thinness of iPhones and then having these massive camera plateaus. This is the second one. It does like, it seems like this is probably accurate. Like I can't find anything that refutes it. It seems like this is probably right. That like when I said last time, like the big difference with the series 11 is this extra six hours of battery life from 18 to 24 hours.

That sounds like a big difference. That's how Apple sold it. But it does seem like they just changed the way they're testing it to include six hours of sleep. It looks like actually there is not a significant difference in battery life from the Series 10 to the Series 11. Maybe there's a small one, but it isn't that big the way that made it seem. And that really the primary or only difference between the Series 10 and 11 is changing the cell radio to be 5G capable.

I can't see anything else that actually was changed in the Series 11. Yeah, when they tear these things down, we'll have to see if the capacity of the battery changed at all. Because if the battery is a little bit bigger, that could account for a real difference, even if all the other components are the same. Because we know the SoC is the same. We can assume maybe the screen is the same. The 5G radio, maybe that's...

little bit more efficient but like yeah they have a regular test and a low power test and in the low power test there was this five percent difference but then if you look at the methodology it's like that they they have the test like

You know, what do we do in our test? And it's like, well, every X minutes we do Y activity this number of times. And they reduce the number of things they do during the test. So, yeah, I mean, it's not like you can never change the methodology. The methodology of your test should change over time.

But when they do change the methodology, it's hard to do an apples to apples comparison. And you have the sleep tracking thing by tacking those hours and it seems kind of misleading. So, I mean, the thing about this is they'll.

it's probably not going to be a lot of outcry because anyone who gets a new watch replacing an old watch the battery on the old watch was probably cruddy and so wow this new watch has such an amazing battery life yeah it's just got a new battery if you had bought a new version of your old watch it would probably have a similar effect

All right, then friend of the show, dear friend of the show, David Smith writes, something I found kind of surprising about the Ultra 3 is that the quoted battery life for outdoor workouts and low power and reduced heart rate readings is identical to the Ultra 2 at 35 hours. Similarly, in normal use with low power mode enabled, they both get the same 72 hours. You get a few more hours in other types, but the most demanding situations where you're trying to maximize the battery, it isn't better.

Where we do get improvements, they are around 17%. And there's a link to the Apple Watch battery page, which you can see in the show notes. so the ultra 3 is a little bit bigger than the ultra 2 at least the screen is a little bit bigger i don't know if the watch body is any bigger but again if it's the if if the screen is similar in power consumption and the soc is the same and the battery is the same size it's not shocking that it might get

basically the same battery life as the predecessor yeah it seems like you know the more we learn about these new apple watch models the more it seems like oh there's a lot less different about the battery life than

The Ultra has the satellite connectivity. That's great. That's a nice upgrade for the Ultra. And it does have a different screen than its predecessor. Yes. And the Series 11 does also have the better... ion x glass on the on the front on the aluminum models so that's that's a small upgrade like it's stronger glass okay strong glass on the aluminums and 5g on the cellulars

Okay. Like that's something, but that's not much. I heard, I forget, forgive me podcast world out there. I forgot where I heard it. I think it might've been the verge cast last week. Somebody was saying on a podcast that like. they should just move the Apple Watch to a two- or three-year cycle the way they do AirPods. And you can even cycle it, have the SE one year, have the Series the next year, have the Ultra the next year, and then cycle them. I think that was dithering here.

Oh, it was? Okay, yeah, thank you. Yeah, and I think that makes a lot of sense because they're basically kind of doing that anyway. Like, the Apple Watch hardly changes at all for three-year intervals.

They are already using the same SoC for three years now, for a couple of spans now. The SoC lasts three years. Most of the core features last three years. The screen generally comes close or... you know maybe is slightly offset but basically lasts three years like i think they're they just don't have that much to show each year for the watch and maybe it would be better to make a bigger splash every two or three years with like putting all these updates together and having okay

Every two or three years, there's the new SoC and a bigger, brighter screen and some other health capability. If you lump those all together, I think that would actually be better than having these watch updates every year that... barely touch anything and seem like they're not really doing anything because over time the apple watch does get significantly better but increasingly like the updates seem like nothing Each individual update seems like almost nothing.

That would make it more interesting for us to talk about, but I feel like from a sales and consumer perspective, it's better just to bump the number by one each year, even if you change literally nothing about them, because that makes people think that I'm going to get the latest and greatest phone and not the one with the same number.

as I saw two years ago. So yeah, definitely, I mean, when Dethering mentioned it, like it totally, from our perspective, commenting on Apple, that would be way better, but I don't know.

I don't know if that's better for selling more watches. Well, but, you know, that's how they do AirPods. And it works great. AirPods are a great business, possibly even bigger than the Apple Watch. I mean, does it work great? Maybe they'll start bumping the number of AirPods every single year to get people, oh, it's just the AirPod 2s again. Like, they have the AirPod 2 and then the Air...

pod 2 uh revision or whatever like 2c i wonder if they regret that i wonder if they think we should have called that one the airpod 3 and then called this one the 4 Uh, but you know, I don't know like this, they presumably they, they know what sells better, but, uh, yeah, from, from a commentary perspective, it would be much better to save up more of these changes.

Let's talk AirPods, since you just brought it up. The AirPods and ear shapes. There's a post from Tyrael who writes, a quick note from your resident auditory neuroscientist. Human ear canals wander in every which direction. The first time I used an otoscope to look at an eardrum, I was amazed at how different the human ear canal directions and shapes were, even within a single patient. The typical clinical equipment will have something between 10 and 16 different disposable tip shapes and sizes.

more tips for AirPods Pro is a good idea, in my opinion. Ears are weird. Good talk. I mean, you're not wrong, but good talk. All right, and the AirPods Pro 3 2X noise cancellation reduction, whatever you want to call it, Stephen Klink writes, Apple's AirPods... product page in footnote one lists the tests that they are using to determine the 2x better noise canceling on the airpods pro 3 iec 60268-24

is an international test standard for headphones and earphones. For ANC, the test measures how much sound from the outside environment gets reduced once the headphones electronics are turned on in decibels. So while the logarithmic nature of decibels means human perception doesn't have an intuitive understanding of the 2x better reduction,

it at least isn't a Bezos stat. All right, the new AirPods Pro case is not actually smaller. In fact, according to Mac rumors, it is actually bigger, which I did not expect. Yeah, a little bit taller and a little bit wider. I guess they put more battery in there. It's kind of disappointing that it didn't get smaller because it's just so huge. But I guess they're just weirdly shaped, especially with the tips and everything. They take up a lot of...

space and they're awkward and i guess they have bigger bad i would assume they have bigger batteries than the um the four because isn't the battery in the pro isn't it like a coin battery inside the fat part or maybe it's like that in the fours as well now i don't know i honestly don't know um

But anyway, it's a big honking case, and it is not getting smaller, apparently. Yeah, that's too bad. For whatever it's worth, the reviews so far of the AirPods Pro 3, everybody loves them. Oh my god, they sound like they're amazing. I can't wait to get mine. I'm so excited. They did this. So Apple should have done this, but probably didn't, you know, the ear shape things or whatever.

these are the first ones that actually stay in Marques Brownlee's ears. It's a smart idea to be like, can we make sure they stay in his ears? Because that's the thing about it. Ears are weird, right? So every year, some people are like, oh, it doesn't feel good in my ears.

ear doesn't stay in my ear and they change them and maybe for some people the old ones were good and the new ones are bad or vice versa so you never know what you're going to get but uh marquez has been on a streak of just not having them stay in his ears when he like jumps up and down these are the first ones that stay in

That's not the only reason he likes them. He raves about all the other features of them as well. And we'll talk about them when you two get yours as well. But that sure doesn't hurt that they stay in your hair, right? Well, I mean, that's number one. It doesn't like this is why I was so frustrated when the original AirPods just didn't fit in my ears. Like number one with headphones is like, can you wear them?

And if you can't wear them, if they either don't stay in your ears or they hurt or they're not comfortable or whatever, if they don't fit you. It doesn't matter how good they are in other ways. Like you can't use them. And so like that is number one. Yeah, that makes sense. They would want to improve that because that will improve or that will increase how many customers they can get for this product. That's great.

Yeah, the reviews are impressed by that 2x better noise cancellation, which apparently is not a BS stat, but a real standard test that does measure how much sound from outside gets in. And it apparently is 2x better. So there you go. I should also note with regard to the AirPods Pro case, allegedly, according to MacRumors, it is a touch lighter, which is interesting.

All right, the new generation of ultra-wideband technology, or so they said, it is apparently now called the John Syracuse, I'm sorry, the U2 chip. And you can see that on the AirPods Compare page, which we will put a link to in the show notes. Yeah, I think I spent at least a year calling this next generation ultra wideband chip or second generation ultra wideband chip. But I guess the lawyers got the clearances and now it is just the U2. going on the U1 chip, which was its predecessor.

And then live translation, it apparently runs on the iPhone, not on the AirPods, which is what you would expect. This is according to MKBHD. You have to download each language, but it does work offline, which is good news.

we always know it's going to run the iphone this is like it runs on device so like when when the phone is doing translation is the phone doing the translation using like local models on the phone or is it sending out network requests now that's what he said in the video he basically said you have to download each language and it works offline

Those are both true, but I still had a question where it's like, okay, you download the languages and it works offline, but does it always use local models on your phone? Or if you have a network connection, does it... go out to the server. So I was trying to figure out the answer to this question before the show, because I have iOS 26 on my phone now.

uh and if i if you go to your airpods you will see a thing that says translation and the parentheses beta and that has a languages sub item when you go into the languages sub item you'll see the list of languages and then there's some gray on gray text at the bottom that says download languages to translate when all offline. You can choose to always translate offline in settings and settings is a link. You click the settings link and it takes you to the settings for the translate app.

like the just the plain old translate apple translate app and in the translate app settings there is a setting called on device mode which is off by default and the text under that one says Always translate offline using downloaded languages. Offline translation may not be as accurate as online translation. Siri and Safari will always process translations online.

So I can't figure out if this means that if you don't have on device mode turned on, that it will always go to the server. I mean, it's clearly they're saying that the server side translation is better than on device, which makes sense that, you know, there's more computing power, blah, blah, blah on the server.

So I haven't tested this yet. I'm going to try it out. Actually, can I try it out? Yeah, I can. AirPods 4 support it. So I just got someone to speak a foreign language to me and I'll try it out maybe for the next show. Anyway, it does have a mode where it works offline, but it seems to me, based on the sequence of wandering through settings, that you will get better quality if you have a network connection. That I did not know.

And then finally, AirPods live translation is blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts. Reading from Mac rumors, Apple says on its feature availability webpage that Apple intelligence live translation with AirPods won't be available if both the user is physically in the EU and the... Apple account region is in the EU. ... ... ... ...

Translation works, and how that impacts privacy, consent, data flows, and user rights. Apple will also want to ensure its system fully complies with these rules before enabling the feature across EU accounts. yeah so that that's the theory that there's actually existing er regulations on translation it's not a dma thing it's not a hey we can't put this in the eu because otherwise we'd have to let every third party app be like but

Because Apple didn't say we don't actually know the answer, but bummer for people in the EU that they can't use this. Although my understanding is that everyone in the EU speaks 20 languages anyway, and they won't need this app. All right. That's an all follow-up episode.

Thank you. As per tradition. Thank you to our sponsors who sponsored this amazing amount of follow-up. That would be Squarespace and Anthropic for Claude. And thank you to our listeners who support us directly. You can join us at ATV.FM slash join. One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about this cool new product announcement that came out called Alter Ego.

And thought-to-text translation. This is a device that reads your thoughts and transforms them into text, allegedly. We're going to talk about that in overtime. Thank you for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental.

And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at CAS. E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental.

John, you have something in the show notes that says John's red dot. And I'm guessing this has to do with your long struggle with the new AppleCare thing. No, because you stopped that. You said you were done with that. No, it's different. All right. What's going on? I think we've all had this issue at one point or another. It's when you get a red badge on the settings app.

On one of your Apple devices. We've all been there. And sometimes that badge is legitimate. Hey, there's a new OS update. Oh, you need to sign back into your Apple ID for some stupid reason that you're never going to be able to figure out. Yep. But sometimes what happens is you get a red dot on your settings app icon and you go into settings and there's nothing there.

And the received wisdom from people who have been through this many times over is like, well, sometimes you got to look for it. Sometimes you don't realize that you might have to go into your Apple ID and then you'll see something there. That's something you have to do. Maybe you have to go into the Apple wallet settings. Maybe there's something in there.

or maybe there's some marketing thing where they wanted to watch the F1 movie and somewhere buried in settings, even though there's not going to be a red badge in settings, you just have to show a screen somewhere in settings and that will satisfy settings and it'll make the badge go away. But if you're a programmer, what you're thinking is...

They just got their state unsynchronized. And now this is never going to go away because something that was supposed to be incremented and decremented just got incremented. And then something crashed or never decremented. And it's never going to go away because it's just like it's like Delta rot. Right. And there's nothing.

you can do to fix it and i've been through this many times i'm sure you too have had the red dot many times as well but i had recently had my worst bout of red dot syndrome on apple devices that lasted like the last two weeks it started i think on my phone and i got the red dot and i even posted a mask and i was like does anyone have any ideas here's all the things i tried i tried apple id tried the wallet i tried

settings i tried accessibility i tried you know i tried sub items in my apple id like i tried to list all the things i tried but does anyone have any new place where they can go to try to get rid of the badge or new thing that they can do I didn't get any good responses for that. But the thing is, it started to spread. So then I started to see it on my Mac. Like, what the hell?

So I go into Mac settings and again, oh, and software update. Of course, software update, you always check first. No software updates, no anything. And so now I'm trying to get rid of my Mac. Then it spreads to my iPad. Like it's the red dot is slowly appearing. A number one inside a red. badge on the settings app icon on my mac on my ipad and on my iphone i was like well i mean worst case scenario when i do the os 26 updates it'll probably fix it

But I was kind of at my wits end because normally when this comes out, I eventually find what screen I have to display to make it go away. And this time I could not do it. So I wanted to put this segment in here. First of all, just to let people know. This is a thing that happens on Apple devices. Sometimes, not just settings, but sometimes an app will get a badge and there is no way to make it go away.

and you don't know why it's there i get asked this question by family members why is there a badge on this app i got sometimes i can tell them the answers because you have a software update but sometimes i have to tell them after extensive exploration that's a bug

No, there's nothing you can do about it. And they are more bothered by this than I would imagine people would think they would be because it's like of all the things that can bother you is like, but I don't want that red badge to be there. And you're like, OK, well, but I just turn off badges. Can I just turn off badges? I go to the notification setting and say, I just don't.

want to see any badges i'm just turn off badges entirely well guess which app you can't turn off badges on settings cool you cannot turn off badges and notifications at least as of ios 18 i didn't check 26 So this is the PSA to say this is a thing that happens. Again, as a programmer, I can imagine a million scenarios that would cause this to exist. And as a user, there is sometimes literally nothing you can do about it to fix it.

Now, the bright side of the story is, even before I started out doing the 26OS updates, first the badge went away on my Mac. Why did it go away? No idea. I didn't reboot. I didn't install a software update. I didn't discover a screen and settings to make it go away. I just came back to my Mac one day and the badge was gone. And then it went away on iOS. Before I did the OS update, I was like, huh.

The badge that has been there for a week and a half, it's gone now. I have no idea why. It's still there on my iPad as we record the show, but I'm hoping if I just wait it out, it will go away. But... Yeah. Red dot syndrome. I feel like there should be a dedicated team at Apple to sort of spread the discipline throughout the organization to say, if you badge your app icon, there should be some kind of sanity check on app launch. Like if something force quits the app and launches it again.

to say hey let me just sanity check do i think there should be any badges on this Which means they would probably have to use a different system for badging other than just like writing something to their, you know, user defaults or whatever. But yeah, this is a thing. And it usually goes away quickly, but sometimes it's really bad.

Watch out. Be careful out there. Red Dot Syndrome could come for you. Have you ever had one that you couldn't go away? And do either two of you have a secret location that you go to to clear the badge? No. No, this doesn't happen to me very often. And usually it just kind of sorts itself after a while or maybe a reboot at worst. Yeah, that's the thing. Are you able to just say, I don't worry about it. I'll just ignore it. Like some people I'm not able to ignore, obviously, but it's Casey.

sounds like you'd be like oh there's a badge i can't make it go away i'm sure it'll go away eventually you just don't think about it anymore well i always have badgers on my phone on settings no but like okay but you know just for instance like on my home screen right now the phone app has a 19 badge

Instagram has one and Messages has five. If I go to the next page, I got the Nest app that has six. I don't know what the heck those are. Probably spam promos from Nest or whatever. At this point, everything has a badge all the time. Everyone's so... It's a combination of like every app and company.

is so incredibly desperate and thirsty for every possible amount of everything from you that they're going to spam the crap out of every possible notification and inbox and thing they have. So that's number one. So that's probably the nest bullshit there.

Number two, I tend to not check things that frequently in certain areas, voicemails and Instagram messages. Clearly. And other areas like... text messages I sometimes will use the unread status as a like I have to get to this later kind of thing which I know is not what I'm supposed to do but everyone does it okay so anyway that's why those stick around for a while and therefore badges on my stuff are not particularly...

unusual you can just turn off the badges like on your phone app unlike the settings app you can just decide not to show badges on the phone app you can solve that problem there i just looked at my home screen and i have no badges on it so i'm i'm i do not want badges unless they're like i want them to be there to tell me like for example messages i want it to be badged when i have a message like so i do want to see it but i don't

routinely leave tons of unread messages and i know what you're talking about like they added the feature a couple of os's ago to mark it as unread which is useful which i also occasionally do but that's to get my attention so i don't forget about that message but There shouldn't be a very high number there, but the settings thing really annoys me. And yes, I did check under warranty as well.

is that i've spent i've been spending a lot of time in the warranty thing with my apple care one battle so yeah i don't know where the badge came from and i don't know why i couldn't defeat it but i'm glad that it is departing me uh even again even before i did the os update i haven't updated my ipad yet it is the last one with a badge on it so maybe you want to do that 26 update i'll let you know if the badge goes away