The iPhone 16 is here — but it's not finished

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Put your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at MintMobile.com slashverge. $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on the first three month plan only. Speed slower above 40GB on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See MintMobile for details. Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the A18 and A18 Pro, which are different things. This is our Apple event special. I'm your friend David Pierce. Alex Kranz is here.

Are they different? Honestly, I couldn't tell you, but we'll get to that. Neil, I have to tell us here. Hi, Neil. 35 flops. So you get from me. You want a 36, you get 35. That's a deal in the table. I love it. I love it. I love it. First of all, Neil, it's very important to me that you describe your whole setup right now, both for people who can watch who would like to know what's happening and also for people who can't. Just paint this

a word picture of your current setup right now. I'm in my hotel room in sunny Vail, California. I just came from Apple Park. There's, David's running the show because I have no idea what's going on. I was in Apple's Ambient Experience. I think you're going to get a new phone or you're going to be a rapture. That's my experience every time I go to Apple Park. I don't know what's going to happen. But yeah, it's just at the Apple event with our whole crew, V, Allison,

Chris Welch, Veerin. We had a great time. We ran around and played a few phones. And I'm in my hotel room, which I have attempted to turn into a podcast studio. It went six. Okay. What's the, how's the lamp? Tell us about the lamp. The lamp is glued to the table. I'm very late. I'm on the West Coast. Everyone else is on the East Coast because they didn't cut. They abandoned me to Apple. That's correct. They've been very patient while

I try to figure out how to make this room work. And the lamp being glued to the table really through a, you know, you leave a room. You're like, I know what I'm going to do when I get back to that room and you walk back in the room and the lamp is glued to the table. I don't know if that's enough or I don't know if that's enough to other people. But anyway, back,

you know, it's our room. We just played with the phones and met a bunch of people. I talked to Phil Schiller for five minutes about camera buttons, which is a fascinating conversation. I'm ready to rock. I am very excited because it does feel like a solid two-thirds of this episode is going to be about camera buttons. But let's go back to the beginning. You were saying, like, before the event even started that the vibe of this event at the Steve Jobs

theater was unusual. And you've been to a million of these. And so just to hear you be like, this is not how this room normally feels, is fascinating. So like, what was the room? Yeah, I don't want to do too much media criticism on our show. It's not even criticism. It's just media talking about itself. But the mix of people in that space was different than before. It was like tangibly different than before. There was a lot more foreign

press. There were more TikTok creators column. It was just like a different, younger, more visual video crowd than it was ever just like thrilled. I think for a lot of people, it was their first time at Apple event. So you just had this like surge of enthusiasm. And then all the old heads in the corner, just like grumbling about how the kids don't know what they're doing with their selfie sticks. And I think that's a healthy, it's

like a healthy tension. Yeah. I mean, if you rewind a decade, it was just like the old heads and Apple employees at those events, right? No, it was like, it was like the legendary print reviewers and me being like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take a photo and upload it to the internet right away. And they were like, what are these bloggers doing? Get them out of my face. Like, I'm going to print for three days. Yeah. I appreciate that I'm in the circle

of life. But the point I kept making in the life log was that the room was super enthusiastic, which we just have not seen in like quite a while, right? Obviously, there is COVID and then a bunch of people came back. And I think Apple turned over its crowd. I asked a few people, it feels like the big change was the dramatic increase in international

press that feels like the big change. I don't have the numbers and Apple's data. That just seems like they widen the aperture if it was covering the event and they cut a more lively atmosphere. Interesting. I do miss the like, I mostly don't miss Apple event days when I'm not at Apple event days. But there is something kind of lovely about the Steve Jobs theater. Like, it's a nice place. They did a very good

job with the Steve Jobs theater. They did a good job and they opened a new building for this event called the Observatory, which is just sort of like over the hill and around the corner. And that's their new like briefing space. So they have the Steve Jobs theater was too small the day it opened. They've been saying this since the litter of the day opened. Like, this was too small because they designed it in a very different time. It

took a long time to build and design and prove. So it's always been too small. And in particular, the sort of spaces within it where you can like have conversations, always too small. So they built an entirely new thing called the Observatory where they're having additional meetings and stuff because they have so many more people there now. And the Observatory is like this like glass window that looks over Apple Park. Apple sent some photos to a magazine

called Dazeen today. We were not allowed to take photos. You can look at it. It's very cool. And that's sort of their space for after the event because they have so many more people to talk to. That's cool. There is nothing more aptly than look we built this very cool building. You are not allowed to photograph. Like that's it. That's Johnny Ive, the spirit of the man lives on. All right. Let's let's talk about the announcer.

So I think let's do it in reverse order kind of of how Apple did it. Just because we got to start the phones, right? Like the phones is the thing. There were watches. There were AirPods and there were phones. Those are the big three. Both of you, I believe last week said that we weren't going to get max. Congratulations on all of your accomplishments. We also did not get a TV. We did not get a television. And I was devastated. Ted Lasso, no appearance.

Very upsetting. Jason Sudakis wasn't even there as far as I know. He was just like shooting lefty threes at WNBA games. Tim Cook was like this is some of our breakthrough and meaningful innovations yet. I was like, oh, they're doing a TV. It was not to be. No, I'll ask. But the phones got bigger, which is we're on the way to a television. Yeah. The Prime is a gigantic. Yeah. But let's do let's start with the cheapest phones and then go up

to the most expensive phones. Alex, do you just want to like brief rundown of the iPhone 16 and 16 plus? Yeah. Yeah. The iPhone 16 and 16 plus are like good. They're exciting. It's I think I think the big difference is a lot of the stuff is new on these as well. Specifically, the camera control, all the camera button, shutter button. Although I think Neil, I probably have some feelings about that. So maybe we don't call it the shutter

button. But it's got camera control. It's got the action button, which was on the pro last year. It's one to two thousand nits. It's got the ceramic shields. So you should theoretically be able to drop it with minimal scratches, the eight, 18 and visual intelligence, which is kind of like Google ins, but. But Apple did it. Yeah. But Apple did it. And it goes

through like the camera control button. And most of the stuff they really spent most of their time talking about the action button and the camera control, which like as a button lover, I was elated, but other people I don't know. And it's the colors are different this time too, right? Like we got we got a blue, we got this teal, like bluish teal, we got the pink, we got a purple. It's it's lovely colors. It's that. So this is my first

question. Actually, Neil, I you've seen these phones Apple described the colors as I believe the quote was more vibrant. Vibrant was a word that was used. Are they thoughts? You've seen these days, some of them, right? What's the correct? Yeah, the pink is very pink. The blue is very blue. Like they are they are in fact very vibrant. They're very saturated colors. That's exciting. They're in shy away from them. The phones are cool. They, you

know, Apple continues to sort of round off the corners of the phones. And then as Alex is saying, the big change to the hardware is the camera control button, which is also in the 16. So you don't get the sense the 16 is missing anything this year. Right. There's a whole bunch of camera features that's not getting as a sort of processor. Well, it's got one less camera, right? They said it could do four, but it's only got it's got two

actual cameras. They got the 48 megapixel fusion camera and then the 12 megapixel ultra wide. Which is not four cameras. It feels important to say that's not four cameras. That's true. It's not four lenses. It's not four cameras. The way Apple are you this, and I spent, I mean, you can't just like throw the words fusion camera at me and not expect me to ask everyone to act with that. So fusion fusion, what they call the sweater mode. Tell

us about the texture. That's fusion. That's deep fusion. That's what president is on the pro. So fusion camera specifically refers to the idea that you have a 48 megapixel sensor that generally produces 24 megapixel images, but you can run it at 48. And then when you zoom, it doesn't just crop the sensor to get you a 12 megapixel zoom lens. It runs an entirely new photo pipeline. So they are treating it like you swapped lens sensor photo pipeline

everything. So you've got a 12 megapixel zoom lens sitting inside the 48 megapixel main camera. You have to believe all of this is true. That's how you get two lenses. That's the argument. That's why it's called the fusion lens is you have 48. And then when you run it as a telephoto, it doesn't just crop the sensor. It does all this other stuff to treat it like it's a different sensor. Do you believe it? That's like me saying there's

me. And then there's me with a British accent. That's a whole different guy. Like I just got it. And then the other two just be clear. The other two is you have the ultra wide. And then when you hold it close to something, it switches to macro. So it's a different camera. So you get four. And I want to slightly more believable. One thing is far away. One thing is very close. Sure. But I would the way to think about it. It's not four cameras

or four lenses. It's four modes. Yeah. Okay. Which is fine. I'm good with that. Four modes I can work with. Lots of cameras have many modes. That seems fine. And I will say all the cameras have seems solid. Like the I actually think the like big improvement to an ultra wide camera is a big deal. And there's been a lot of excitement about it. I think I mostly don't shoot with the 0.5 camera on the iPhone because it makes everything

kind of fisheye and weird looking. But there are some like genuinely sincerely cool things you can do with that lens that you can't do otherwise. So if like if they've made that actually work, I actually think that's pretty exciting. So this is like real macro mode, right? This isn't just the stuff where I would hold the phone up really close. And if it focused then I'd get a nice shot and call it macro. No. The 13 pros I think started doing true macro

with their ultra wide. And the pros have had it for a while. But now the regular 16 has it. And really what you're seeing is the regular 16 unless you want all these additional photography features is basically the good phone, which is a first. Like I would have never considered buying a regular iPhone before I've always bought the pros. I'm still going to buy a pro because I'm a huge camera nerd. But there's not some piece of this puzzle

where I'm like, oh, that's not good for most people. Like if this is a great phone, probably the best straight up iPhone Apple's made in quite some time because it isn't herding most of the features of the pro, including the camera control button. Right. And the reason that's happening is a theme we're going to come back to many times in the course of this episode is AI, right? Like the thesis is that these are AI phones.

You can shake your head all you want, Nei. I'm right. And we should talk about this. But like they what was Tim Cook's line like these are the first devices built from the ground up for Apple intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. That's British accent. That's the same as the whole. Yeah. They sort of these phones a million years ago, right? Like obviously. I think they did the action button. They knew that the number one thing people would use

the action button for is that the camera, they were right. That's the number one thing people used. And so they they added this other button. And I it's funny after the event of like scrambling the post photos. And I had posted a thing on threads that I still use the same ancient Nikon camera and lens. And I have been since like the beginning. And I'm still using it. And the photos are still great. And Phil Schiller saw me. And he was

like, that's your old camera, huh? Because he's he'd seen my post on threads. We just got to talking for a little bit. Another major or no or a shattering soup. So I asked him this question. Like, is this button here? Because this is a new input method for the phone, right? Is this a camera shutter button? Is this just for camera nerds? Like Phil's a camera nerd. We talk like cameras every time we see each other. Or is it you want people to

have their iPhone engaged with the world visually? Right? You want the AI to be able to see stuff. So you need to put this button right here. So you can like open it right away and like look at stuff with your iPhone. And it was basically like, yeah, it's both. Like people use their iPhones for cameras all the time. It's convenient. We already see that happening. But at the same time, we have, you know, we have cameras on iPads and people use them

as document scanners. And we are just aware. Like Apple is just aware of the universe of things that camera is already doing for people like scanning QR codes to get many user restaurants. So I pushed them on it and he was like, no, it's both. Like you have to see it as both. And we've seen it as both for a long time. So I think you're right, David, like there's a view towards a long term future where the iPhone is just looking at stuff

and being smart about it. And then there's right now, which is people need to open the camera to take a photo. And we're in this button represents a little bit of a transition. But none of the features are shipping. So it's just a camera button. So okay, this is actually, if I'm being completely honest with you, the single biggest question I have for you as somebody who has held one of these phones, is it a button? All Apple calls it is camera

control. Like Apple studiously avoids calling it a button. And from the description in the keynote, it sounds a little bit like it's kind of, I think I compared it to like the a teeny tiny MacBook trackpad where it's like mostly doing a haptic thing and it doesn't really move, but it feels like it's moving. And you can, you know, move your finger around and it's sensitive that way. But it's not like a clicky button. Is it what is this thing?

Does the button is a button? It is a button. It is a button. Honest to God clicky button. Okay. That makes me so glad. I was really worried. It also does the other thing, which is very confusing. And every time I use it, I've used it now a dozen times, my brain is still trying to figure it out. So, I know I'm saying it's like hard to figure out. It's just one of those things you have to use for a little bit

and like figure it out. So when you, it's capacitive. The reason they're not calling it a shutter button is because it has like multiple functions inside of it. So in that, and they're all enabled by the fact that it is both extremely pressure sensitive and capacitive. So you can just push it down and it clicks and that'll take a photo. Like every time that's going to take a photo. And the new sensors are zero lag. So you can just bang away on even the

regular iPhone 16, but also on the iPhone 16 Pro. Just taking pictures zero shutter lag you're off the race. That's pretty cool. That's cool. If you, like, I don't even know how to, if you think about moving your finger, it'll register like a tap. Do you know what you're not? Because you don't want to push it. You want to like just like give it a little hand. Yeah, just like I'm thinking about you. And that'll, and that'll open up one menu.

And if you do it twice, you get like the big menu and you can like switch between modes. So like by default, it's like the zoom. So you like hold it down a little bit and you get like the zoom thing and then you can like slide your finger back and forth to zoom. But you can also click down again and switch to the new photo styles or switch between lenses or all this other stuff. Eventually you're able to lock exposure and focus.

I'm like dangerously worried that you're describing like 3D touch or source touch. Both ideas that Apple has had that didn't go super well for Apple. The idea of like what if we give you infinite levels of pressure to push and different things happen depending on what you did and everybody's like actually this sucks and I can't figure out how to use it. Well, so the reason it's going to work is because Apple's not depending on like

third party app developers to do anything. They're just like here it is, here's how it works. And like I said, it is, I have not immediately susted out, but you can see how you will. And the thing that's actually the most confusing about it is if you are used to a MacBook trackpad where the click is fake, the fact that it is actually a physical click to take a photo is the thing your brain can't get around. Right. Because you can

press hard enough to make it do stuff. But then you can press even harder to make it take a photo. This is going to be a mess for people. I'm so excited. It's not, it's not me that I promise you won't be that messy. It'll just be like a week of very confusing results. Yeah. I mean, that's going to be a great week. Well, it sounds like the hard part is going to be all this stuff in the middle. If you just button mash, it'll take

a picture, which is what most people want to do. Yeah. And then the capacitive stuff is is wild too, because it, it's an iPhone, right? It's iOS. So it has a NERSHA. So when you're like looking at your range of zooms, you can just like slide your finger early

fast and it'll just fly to the next to tent. Yeah. Right. Or fly between lenses. Or if you have it open to the lens switcher and there, where there's no detents, you just like go from the farthest zoom to the ultra wide by just like, like, slight being really fast. So it's just like a roll. So it, it just does a hardware software appily thing. It's, it is like, absolutely not just a button. Like it is like another weird little touch surface

with a lot of ideas packed into it. Then the idea is for as much as I can tell, that you should basically be able to control the entire camera from this button. There's parts of it that you can't do, but you should basically be able to, you know, like a, a real camera is like lots of buttons and knobs and exposure compensation and styles and macro. And they've got a lot of those ideas inside the camera control button. What if this becomes like a

generational thing? You know how like your parents are always turning the light on on their phone? Because they kind of screwed up. And we're just like, like our brains just can't process it. We'll hit it like an age point when we're like, we just can't use the camera control. Because it's so complex. Because it does sound like there's like a lot of like, it's like really awesome and that there's a lot of opportunity with it. But also,

it does sound super complex. I think people trying to figure out what that middle part we're lightly tapping is for. That might be confusing. But like David is saying, if you just push the button really hard, it'll take a picture. And that part seems very, I will say that there are, we have weird hue lights, which is in my house. They have to push really hard. And people often don't push them hard enough. And so maybe they just

like won't, they just won't push this button hard enough. Maybe. So what I found myself wondering about this is I actually get all of the reasons Apple would make this thing, right? Like it actually makes a lot of sense. It seems like a really useful controller.

It also makes sense both in landscape and vertical mode, which is very clever. Like to make a button that feels like it'll work, whether I'm holding my phone like this and using my index finger or holding my phone like this and using my thumb strikes me as very clever. What I don't understand is why this isn't the action button. Like why didn't they ship this last year and call it the action button? That makes way more sense to me

than calling it camera control. There's all kinds of interesting stuff you could let developers do with this. It feels like vastly deeper and cooler and more interesting than like here long press this button. And one of eight things will happen. It's possible the answer is just that it wasn't ready. So they shipped it. But like this seems to me to be what the action button always should have been. I think I disagree with that. I think the action button is, we talked about this so much

last week. The action button is meant to be a configurable macro button. Sure. And it just happens that most people thought the camera was the most useful macro. But I think Apple is all in on the idea that you should just have a button on your phone that opens your transit app or launches a shortcut or it doesn't want of any number of appliance like things that your phone does. Shout out to all the people who told us about the transit

apps by the way. We got a lot of feedback from people who use it for their transit apps. Yeah. And I think Apple is like super into this because what they were doing before was like weird triple clicks of the home button to accomplish these goals. Right. Now they just have another surface to map things onto. And the fact that everyone is using it for the camera, I think was proof to them that they needed a camera button to. So you think

that I mean, and I guess you're probably right. Like I was thinking that there's a road map for this that ends in it being something that like every developer can do stuff with. And it becomes like a system for controlling how you do lots of things. But what you're saying, and I guess what's probably right given the fact that it's called camera control is like this thing is about the camera. Like maybe it will be the camera in lots of apps.

But like this is a camera thing. And that is I agree with you in that sense that this is like this, this thing has a real sort of statement of purpose that the action button like deliberately does not. Do you guys think it means that eventually we don't get that port free, totally smooth glass iPhone? Yes, I think that that idea is officially puts a bed. Yeah. I don't think they have any interest in that. In fact, since those

rumors have started, we've had two physical buttons added to the iPhone. And I think Apple won, realizes charging wise, these phones are more power-hungry than ever, especially as they start adding AI features to them. People are going to have to charge their phones more. So that port's not going away. And then two, I think the things you want to do, very quickly on a phone, are going to start to take primacy over the idea of opening

the home screen and picking an app. And again, the AI part of it where they call it visual intelligence, where the phone can see the world, I think the primacy of that is very, very high. And so over time, this button might get optimized for some of that. But right now, Apple knows, like for a lot of people, the iPhone is a web browser, a really good messaging client, and a really good camera. And so they can just be like, now the camera is easier.

There's actually a chance they can get you to do other stuff on the phone. Yeah. Well, and I think that that pushes the same one behind a lot of what's in, like iOS 18, right, which is more customization. They're pulling more stuff out of apps and onto the lock screen and onto the home screen and into widgets and into live activities.

Like the idea that you should be able to do most things on your phone without doing very much feels totally central to like the entire design of the iPhone, both hardware and software. And as it happens, I think is exactly correct. And I'm very, very happy about that. Like we'll see how every app developer feels about this, right? Like, you know, it was not for nothing that Apple very specifically called out when you do visual intelligence

features and you search for a restaurant. Like you take a picture of a restaurant. It tells you what the restaurant is. It's rating in the menu. And it's like, where's that coming from? The answer is Yelp. Right. Can they swap it another provider for Yelp? Yeah, probably in other countries where Yelp isn't like the dominant provider that info. Like Apple will swap it. But then they were also very careful to say, if we don't know

what's going on, we'll ask Google. And if we recognize that we are looking at is like a blank homework page will like ask chat GPT to help you. So they're trying to expand the like universe of third party services that can talk to you. The question is whether any of that becomes modular, have any of those services make money. Right. No one seems to know. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the whole Apple intelligence question, right?

It's like Apple, Apple seems to be building this very simple, seeming, beautiful thing that it doesn't make any sense how the rest of the ecosystem around it works. Yeah. And to be clear, the weirdest part of these phones, they were announced as the first phones built for Apple intelligence, they are going to launch with none of it. And maybe that's only true for a couple of weeks, right? They're launching September 20th is the on sale date.

You can pre-order them, I think next week or the end of this week. 18.1, IOC 18.1 is supposed to arrive sometime in October with the first set of Apple intelligence features. Right. So it's only a few weeks gap. But that's- Maybe at most a month gap, right? But that's a long gap to launch a phone without its highlight features. It's a long gap. It's also it's launching on 18.1 in beta. And it's only launching some of the features. Like some of the stuff that shipping is going to be

very cool, right? Like transcriptions and summaries coming to voice memos. Like that, the stuff that's coming to mail where they can rewrite your email, which Apple brought up like 11 times during this event. Like- I'd see you- Please dear God. Stop giving us tools to write worse emails. Please, that is right up there with Apple explaining what bigger screens are for. Like, we're just getting an extra line of text.

We are truly killing time in these events. At some point like, or Apple thinks everyone is stupid. It might be both. It might be both. The screens bigger, you can have fit more content on a bigger screen is like a regular explanation in Apple event. Right next to, hey, you wrote a bad email and now the robot will write a nice, free mail. So that our robot on the other end can read it and summarize it for

you and then rewrite it. It's just, it's just Apple mail nonsense all the way down from here on. By the way, the actual flow, we're hitting the boundaries of text handling and interface metaphors in iOS 18 with some of the say ass stuff. So if you want to like use these features in 18.1, you've got like a long thing in like notes, right? You want to summarize it in some email. You have to select all of it, which is like grab the handle, like scroll

all the way down, or you know, if some apps have the select all fine. And then you have to tap it again to get that select that little menu that like modal pop up menu to come back up. And then you hit like writing tools and then it brings up a sheet. And that to me is just bananas. I just want to say based on my ongoing ability to like accurately cut and paste things over time, the odds of me getting all three of those taps correct in a row is like one in four.

Like a video game. Yeah, really. It's just principle show on your phone. You're going to have a great time. Well, you know, the iPhone can now play AAA console games out. Oh, yeah, Assassin's Creed. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, somewhere even stopped us like they did it. They mentioned us. No, but it's just like if that's the thing you're selling and actually text handling and an iPhone is, I would say it's a messy. It's just it's not like they've revolutionized it. No, it's

pretty ineligant. And it has been basically the same way it has been since like they added it to the iPhone. You're now to place where you're like, oh, we're straining the interface metaphors of this in a real way because we're asking people to do to use these new features is move a lot of text around or like take action on a lot of text. And it just doesn't that the iOS was not like built for that in a particular way. And now in a way that

a desktop computer like obviously is. And now we might I hope Apple takes the opportunity to be like, we should rethink text handling here or like fine cursor control. Okay, but there was one AI feature that actually seemed good in this that they that they pointed out this time, which I don't think they mentioned a WWDC, which is that you can just ask Siri to like tell you how to do stuff on your phone. No, they and I said it's

WBC. That's very much the like future of user manuals is generated AI. Like we have to boil the ocean in order to make a useful user manual for your iPhone. I mean this idea has been around for Bixby. Samsung's Bixby is this idea. Yeah. You will talk to your phone and like it'll do stuff. But no one's done it well. And I just I keep thinking of all these people who go to how to's who are using all these other ways to try to figure

out how to use their phone. And theoretically, Apple's going to make it better. But you have to know to ask. I saw a demo this today. I don't know where it is. It's like a haze of demos. Yeah. They were showing me like you can ask it how to do XYZ feature. And it totally worked. They were obviously running 18.1 beta, not 18.0 which we'll ship with. It worked. I mean, and if you really think about all that's happening here is Apple

has a model that's running locally on the phone. And then they have their own user manuals which they could load into the model. So you're asking a question of a pretty known set of information from their own knowledge bases and whatnot. And that's a pretty straightforward use case. I think they I don't know how much people will use it. But from what I've seen

it works pretty well. Yeah. No, I think it's like it could be really useful if they actually promoted it because I think of all the old people in my life who don't know how to use their phones. Right. But now you got to get them to you series. Yeah. Now you're going to be like, no, you asked Siri. Don't ask me you asked Siri now. Well, you can ask Siri

in a way that is not prescribed and doesn't have to be a very specific kind of way. And like, again, so much of what Apple is asking us to assume is that after what 13 years Apple has made Siri good. And I just am so not ready to assume that yet. But back to what you're saying, the light about when all this stuff is rolling out, the stuff is rolling out in beta in pieces in October. And the biggest thing of it, which is we're going to just be

really clear about that because even that is confusing. So it's in beta right now. Yes. You can technically do it right now. Right. The iOS 18.1 public beta is available. You can push the button. You can download it. You can run it if you have a 15 pro. You can run Apple intelligence. Some stuff right now. It's going to launch in the public release of iOS 18.1 sometime in October. But they're still calling it a beta in the public release,

which is insane. The features will be labeled beta in the release. And it's like a handful of times. They did it with portrait mode, freeform the app launch like that, I think. Yeah. A couple of other things like like FaceTime audio transcriptions or something launched this way. There's a handful of this stuff. Deep fusion technically was in beta, but nobody could see it. No one can still see it. So it's fine. So Apple has this history of doing

this, right? Yeah. Particularly with the camera. But now what they're going to do is they're going to say huge chunks of this operating system are in beta. And they're just going to have the label and the release. So it's not in beta. You have to go get it. It's in the public release, it will be labeled with the beta, which is a little messy, which is kind of like just saying here it is. It might suck, which is to be fair, what all of the AI systems

do right now. They all have the label at the bottom that's like this thing might lie to you. We don't know. Yeah. Not our problem. It's also kind of what they did at this event when they announced all of this. They were like, and now we're doing Apple intelligence. Also this is just a recap of WDC. Yeah. And all of the features are couch that you will be able to without hard dates. And so I again, I don't care how many iPhone's Apple

cells to quote our friend and mentor Walt Mossberg. I don't go fuck about your stock price. I just don't. But you know, if one of the questions is this worth upgrading, the answer is not in the hardware. The answer is in the software. If you have a regular iPhone or any pro phone, save the 15 pro to get Apple intelligence features, you need a new phone. Right. Okay. That's a good question. Like, is the new, are the features worth an upgrade?

In the answer right now is no, because they're vapor. And I will just refer you back to one of the version's longstanding rules right up there with World of No 7s. And review what's in the box is it's vapor until it ships. Yep. It hasn't shipped yet. Apple has a great track record or shipping. I'm not, I don't mean to say this in a pejorative way, but it's vapor until it ships. So you just like cannot evaluate this thing because it's

not real in any way, shape or form. Right. And especially with AI, it's not just shipping. Like shipping, shipping is the very beginning of the battle of making something that's actually any good when it gets to AI. And part of it is shipping, I know in the 19.1 beta and you can, you can summarize notifications like no one's business. Have you ever looked at a small piece of information and thought to yourself, I wish this piece of information

was smaller? Yeah. Apple's got you. Like, then you can do that right now. It's all of the rest of it that isn't out yet, that has yet to ship. It's all of this private cloud compute stuff, which is up and running and supporting the beta, but it actually hasn't scaled and has not actually yet been audited by third parties to prove that it's compliant with Apple's privacy, like Apple's privacy promises. All of that, we don't know yet.

We just don't know yet. So it's just hard to evaluate this phone. Like from the dumbest perspective, like should I upgrade a phone? I don't know. Like is your phone broken? This phone will be much nicer than the phone you have. Will this phone bring you a bunch of cool new AI features? Like maybe, but I don't know yet. It can't really sick. Well, yeah,

we'll see. We'll see. It's very hard to evaluate a camera at Apple Park. Well, okay, this is actually a good segue back into the pros, which we should talk about because obviously there was a ton of focus on the cameras. I mean, right, if you're buying this thing on day one, the two things you're buying it for hardware-wise are the camera upgrades and the camera control. Like that's that's it. That's the thing, right? Unless you

like deeply want a phone that is called Desert Titanium. And if I do, please email me and tell me why I would love to hear from you. Because it's called desert. It sounds cool. It's way better than that. One of my favorite things that happened today was that as soon as they said desert titanium, every single person on our staff with live blog access made a different joke in the live blog. Can I tell you the joke that I did not make in the live blog?

Sure. Yes. Desert Titanium sounds like if one of the Max and Pacific Rim was a stripper. And now coming to the stage, you see what I'm saying? Desert Titanium. You should get with me. I have an entire idea here. That's very good. I know how we can stop Kaiju attacks in its sexy. But yeah, with the pros. That's my last word. That's it. Yeah. We're leaving the lion's honeybill. This is the end. Possibly of the verge. Who knows? We're so sorry. But it

was always going to end like this. This is what it was. I'm just going to point this out. As far as I know, Yeager's not gendered. And this is an equal opportunity, like full spectrum stripper robot situation. Just pulling in their metal plates into the ocean. I'm just trying to be inclusive. Yeah. Just throw metal around 2024. Anyway, Desert Titanium.

The pro and the pro max. It's just the camera this year, right? Like better, better processor, different colors, battery life, which I'm going to get very angry about here in a minute. But like the thing if you're if you're thinking regular iPhone versus pro iPhone, you're basically making this decision based on the camera. A bigger display. Okay. And bigger display. Fair. Granted, which I will say anecdotally, it seems like has turned more people off

than on just from what I've heard. Seven inch phone. I mean, that's not math. Hold on. Almost seven inches of phone. Yeah. So I mean, I held it and if you hold it without holding the 15 pro max and you're like, Oh, it's manageable. And you hold them next to each other. I'm like, Well, this phone is big. And this phone is a surfboard. Oh, wow. And you're a max guy. So for you to say that is not small. Yeah. Yeah. It's not it's not

anywhere close to a small phone. It's it's in on us. I love it. I'm going to I'm super going to buy it. Yeah. Obviously, some people buy the pro just for the camera. But then people were also going up to the pro max size because it had the better zoom lens. Right. And now it's the same zoom lens. So you're not being forced into that biggest phone. You can sort of stop it gigantic and still get kind of the best camera system. And I think

the 48 megapixel ultra wide here is a big deal. It's still the ultra wide. It doesn't capture as much light. And it's impossible to like really evaluate iPhone cameras. That's the apple part because it's just like a beautifully lit space no matter where you are. The best lit place you will ever play. Yeah. It's like angelic light from the heavens just like the views of the environment. Yeah. And so it's impossible to evaluate.

But I took a bunch of photos and obviously the main camera is way better. Obviously the main camera has more modes and all this other stuff. And then they they've but the having a 48 megapixel ultra wide means you do get some more detail. You get you know, it it's just a better camera than the old ultra wide. And I actually use the ultra wide a lot.

So I'm pretty excited about it. What do you use the ultra wide for? I'm just often in a space where it's like I want to take a picture of Max and I want to capture the environment that I'm in with Max. Yeah. Like here's the whole playground and like that's a useful. It's just a useful tool. That's exactly my experience. Which is why I asked it is constantly like I can either get like the the shoulders up shot or I can use the ultra wide. So

that for me is it's exactly the same thing. Yeah. But I think for the pro like the reason I brought this up when we started talking about the camera thing is the a big part of the keynote was about all of these new camera modes and all the different ways you can shoot and the fact that natural is just like a mode now is is deeply fascinating to me that they're like you can shoot a thousand ways one of them is regular and here's a bunch

of other ones. And I just feel like like obviously Neela you were in the room. So you saw this stuff on the screen, which is always hidden miss everything always looks great on the screen has been my experience. But also like took some pictures and saw them on the screen like what what do you make of apples sort of million new ideas about photo processing here? Well, one let me tell you two things with the screen.

It's something else will show told me so again they built a Siege out theater they designed it ages ago and he pointed out to me they built it for projectors. Like the room is designed for big projectors and then they wanted to do a big LED screen because that's what everyone

does now. So they had to basically engineer their own screen for the theater and it goes past the wings of the stage so they to get to get the size and shape that's very apple and apple designed and engineered their own LED screen which is hella bright. Let me just tell you hella bright. The other thing I saw the audio in that room I keep talking about like the room and like it was very cheery in there. There's a little boomy today. I like other times things were different today to see jumps.

Anyhow, so it's hard to know like all the modes. Every time I see apples camera team they basically are like here we go again. They just split it towards me. No, they're into it. All these companies are run by extremely type A individuals who want to fight. They would just prefer to win. So I always have these great conversations that's always super interesting. And their point of view now which again we have to review

the phones or to see how true this is. It appears to be that they have realized that people are going to filter the photos anyway. So they're like look people have a radically different interpretation of what their own skin tone is and we just have to get out of their way. That's not for us to decide anymore. So here's all these options and there's all these

sliders and photo styles have existed on the iPhone for ages. In fact they started as a response to the pixel because you will remember back when computational photography started and the pixel team and Mark Levoire were talking about like old painters they liked and shadows and details. The iPhone was like too bright into even and we'd be like we like the pixels contrast. So they added photo styles and one of them was basically like shut up

about the pixel. But it was destructive. So you could shoot in that mode and that was it. And the reason I'm making a big deal about it again is they've reengineered the photo pipeline so you can change it at will after the shot. And so that means you can capture the stuff. And you can do it. You don't call them filters. They're very careful to say

like this kind of photo processing dates back to the 1800s all the stuff. But the idea is you will be able to get much more DSLR type photo with like heavy shadows and heavy detail or a much more modern smartphone ultra tone mapped photo where all shadows have been banished from face to the earth. Never be spoken again. And now those are controls. Are anyone going to use these controls? I don't know. The power of defaults really matter

and does a natural on an iPhone still have to stand for something. It does. Can you evaluate it inside of the angelic light of the sea of hubs you cannot? So you have to get it. But I think they're starting to see that all their users are constantly changing these photos anyway. And so their own point of view has to kind of be a good starting plate for all the changes to come. Do you guys use those modes now? Because I just realized I've had

it set in rich contrast for probably as long as I've had this phone. That's pixel mode. That's pixel mode. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. I've been in pixel mode for years. I think that's really telling, right? Like the power of defaults is a really real thing here. And I think what I wonder about the pro is whether it is more prone to get people who are

more likely to be interested in fussing with those things. Obviously at the very top end, like the kind of people who are shooting the 4k 120 stuff and holding it up in a gimbal and like the people Apple likes to show in these keynotes and in their ads, those are the people who are going to use these filters. And I think we'll be psyched about it, right? Like to have more options to do this stuff, quote unquote, in camera is great. All for

it. But I think the like interface question of how you surface this stuff for regular people is really fascinating and really hard. And I think it's kind of how I feel about the camera control thing, right? I think most people will figure out that if I smash this button, it will take a picture. And everything more nuanced than that, you start to lose some giant percentage of the number of people who are going to use the phone.

That's why I keep thinking about this Apple intelligence. Like, I mean, obviously it's very easy to turn it into the personal assistant for your phone settings. But that feels like a win at this point. If it really works, that's like the thing you want to advertise constantly. Tell everybody, look at all these cool settings. It's too hard to remember the series. What do you say? Like make this photo look like the 1980s and if everyone was

doing drugs, like, yeah, that's exactly what you say. I say like, I want that creepy 2000 digital camera vibe. Right. But do you want that? Do you want to say that before you take the photo or after you take it? Well, you can do both now as I understand it with the pro. It'll let you change the style after they said that was a big part of the thing. It will. But there's, you know, there's just parts of taking a photo like how long is

the exposure? Like, do you want to fire the flash? If you want that indiesly, it's like, you might want to fire the flash. Like, there's a lot of steps in between make it look like this. Yeah. And just tell the robot to make it look like this. I want the robot to do all of it. Just to get it in. Yeah. Well, they can do to be clear. Once again, none of that is shipping it. And when Alex is describing in particular is just like us dreaming. Yeah,

that's the only way we'll just like talk to the phone and we'll do stuff. And we're also Apple dreaming. That is like, we're not making that up. That's Apple's idea. Right. And Apple on subuck third party apps in the series, they can do this stuff. We're just nowhere like that is all pure vapor. That's not even it's going to ship in the next version of 181. That's maybe a year away. And what we have now right now in the camera, particularly

the pro camera is infinite customizability. So if you know what you want, the camera can now get way closer to delivering it. And that is different than are the photos by default more realistic or less processed. We just don't know. But the idea that the camera is now infinitely more flexible in the pro model is I think it's born out by just the number of controls you have. And the fact that most of the pipelines aren't destructive anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is very cool. All right. We need to take a break. We've been talking about camera buttons for way too long. Any parting thoughts on the iPhones Nila, you've held all the things, anything that jumped out to you before we stopped talking about phones? The pro max is really big. And all of the phones are really nice in a way that I don't think has been a. I think like I've found five nice like peak

iPhone nice. No, but they are, they are the most refined versions of this design I've seen in quite a while. And I honestly think the 16s once they get some of the features, they're the mood like people will buy them. Okay. That's very exciting. All right. We have a take a break. We'll be right back. Support for the Vergecast comes from Mint Mobile. If you're looking to reduce your monthly expenses, one of the first things you can save on is your phone. A lot of us pay way too

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plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. All right, we're back. We've had the ad break to think. Any more phone thoughts? Everybody feel good? I didn't yell about the battery life, but I'm going to not yell about the battery. You'll have time. Yeah, I feel like we need to talk about the processor of the battery life. So they kept saying it was the best battery life ever without a

number. Yeah. Just the best point. And the one that really killed me was there was a moment during the keynote where there was a slide in which they showed the battery meter with the green and then just extended it so there was more green. That doesn't mean anything. What am I supposed to do with that? Oh, good. You made the icon longer. Congratulations. That accomplished. I'm so angry at how many times they said battery life without giving

any actual information about battery life. So I think the 16 pro Max is the best battery life ever on iPhone. I also my 15 pro Max has garbage battery life. It is, it is absolutely abhorrently. It's just bad. My 15 has deteriorated faster than any iPhone I've ever used. I haven't even looked at the deterioration. I'm just like, oh, it's the middle of the day. I should charge my phone. That's where that's where I have this phone. That's

okay. But the stats as far as I can tell what they are talking about is hours of video playback. It's a proxy for everything else. They just don't want to be like 33 hours of video playback on a slide. We spent a bunch of time last week talking about how stupid a metric that is. So whatever we can move on. We'll talk about it next week. I frequently watch a few weeks after dozens of hours of consecutive offline video on my phone. Do

you guys not? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a little hyper optimized video playback engine. Yeah. Amazing. You wanted to say something about the processor? The processor speaking of ultra optimized video playback engines. A lot of our commenters have noticed that the processor upgrades on the phone made for AI don't amount to much. You actually still get 35 flops, right? Is the thing. That's what you get at the end. But on a phone. Oh, sure. But that's the

same as last year. I think the made for AI claims are kind of like running right up against the reality of phone development times. I think mostly what they've done is just put a bunch of RAM in all these phones. Yeah. It gigs. Yeah. Which is great. Like terrific. More. Yeah. They're not each $400 more because Apple put more RAM in them. It's really impressive. Seriously. Yeah. But no, I to some extent, the processor thing I think is

is whatever, right? Like I think you're right that if you were going to make like an AI phone that wanted to do all this vastly complicated stuff offline and locally and be awesome. Fine. But like what you have in the A18 is going to do the job of writing business emails for you. Perfectly fine. Like we the ceiling of interesting AI features right now is still so much lower on a device like this than the performance ceiling of the device that I'm

just not bothered by this. Just you wait, David. It's going to write the most beautiful email. I hope I'm wrong. Like someday in 2036 when Apple intelligence actually ships, it'll be amazing. Everything changes really fast. Who knows? It's going to be an email that makes you weep. You're going to be like, how could no human could write this? It's too pretty. The thing is, I'll never see it. My Apple mail will just summarize it for me.

I'll never even see it. It's no problems. And that summary will also be beautiful. But we should talk about we should talk about these AirPods. Yeah. Let's talk AirPods. Actually, this is the most exciting. Yeah. I think this was the coolest part of the app. It was about. I was about to say it was three AirPods. I think it was four AirPods. We run this down for us. So yeah, it's like, yeah, it's four technically. I think it's

four. It is four. Well, three. It's like three and a half. Yeah. We'll go three and a half. We'll go three and a half. So there's the AirPods four. It's two. They're two flit. No, we'll get there. We're doing Apple Mac. It's it. It's four lenses. It might be six or seven. We'll see. We're just going to keep adding two. All right. Go ahead. So there's the AirPods four. And there are the lies correct two versions of them. There's

one that's like $129. And it's got, you know, it's the new shape and and all of that stuff. And then there's one that's $179. And that's also got active noise canceling in it. And in both cases, there will be head shake to respond to Siri. I believe the personalized spatial audio is that in both? I'm pretty sure the H2 chip is going to be in both USB-C charging case 30 hours of battery life. The battery case is going to have a little speaker in it.

So it'll beep beep when you lose it, which has been hugely helpful with my pros. They rule. Like, these are just these are really good iPods. And then just because I have to prove that there's four updates, there's the AirPods Max, which you're still just $549. That didn't change. But now we get some more colors. And you can charge in with USB-C. You don't have to care about your lightning cable. So technically new AirPods Max. And

just right there, you talked about it longer than Apple did during the day. I did. Thank you. It was like somebody at Apple was being held hostage until they mentioned the AirPods Max. And then it was so bizarre. They're like new colors. USB-C moving up. They also are like it's still $549. The AirPods Max are absolutely not a new product. They changed the connector they should have had a year and a half ago. It's not more.

It's the same two colors. It's the same. We're going to get them the Apple Watch. Same with the Apple Watch Ultra 2. We're like, here's a video about how it's black and out. It's a sure. I almost wrote in the live blog when there's a long sweeping shot of the watch band. You know there's nothing else to tell you. But anyway, so what, Chris, did you talk about the AirPods Pros? No, no, no. This is our fourth set of AirPods.

The fourth one is the AirPods Pro, too, which will not change in any reasonable way. But they all do because they're getting hearing aid features. Yeah. That's cool feature. That's a whole new audience. That is basically do. That is the single most important announcement of this entire event. But that is not new AirPods. That's one of these. That's the band of the two new AirPods and some software features of monumental importance.

Can I just put them in something right now on their show? I didn't realize until right now that it was just a software update. I thought there had to be something new in the hardware if you're going to tell me about how this is hearing it. You're telling me this is just the software. It's just the software. So if I have existing AirPods Pros, they're going to get these two. They have me the two. Yeah, you need the AirPods Pro 2, AirPods 2 Pro,

2 Pro, 2 Pro, 2 Pro, 2. The attorneys general. You need the H2 chip. So you need the second generation AirPods Pro. And then you need a phone that can run iOS 18. So there's some cutoff on what phone you have. But if you have those two things, you can take the hearing test, which will, you know, Apple has to finish its FDA clearance, but they say they're going to do it. And then they can act as hearing aids for the same battery life as they

get now. So that's six hours. I mean, you did the like, we were mess if I didn't point out FDA clearances. In fact, I think they have to still get. They have to still get it. They haven't gotten yet. They say they're going to get it around the world as well. They're also very careful with the language. They're not hearing aids. They have a certified hearing age functionality. Which there's a lot of hearing aids now that were kind of like AirPods. So this feels like a huge deal.

Again, I think I've told the story in the workshop before, but I will tell it again. The only thing that our government of old people accomplished in the Trump administration is they all got together and passed bipartisan legislation that Trump signed to make hearing aids legal

over the counter. Because they were all a million years old. Shucks Schumer and that's simple, OCE, and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump were like, yeah, yeah, we should make hearing aids easier to get because we're all a billion years old. We can't hear shit. It's a triumph of bipartisanship that they passed a lot of making hearing aids available over the counter in this way. Sony has them, Bose has them, a bunch of other companies sprung up. Bose entered the space and the left of space

that came back in with the partner because they're complicated. I sort of asked about this with Apple. Apple's attitude is like, it's not my complicated for us because we're Apple. And then also, fascinatingly, their belief is that because they are AirPods, they'll be

more socially acceptable than hearing aids. I believe that 100%. I think that is by far the most exciting thing about this is like, we were debating this in the in the newsroom today, but like, we have long since reached the point where just having one AirPods in all the time is completely socially normal and acceptable. Right? Like, it's you could

feel about it however you want, but like that it's just a fact. That's one of my favorite things is to see couples walking down the street holding hands, talking to each other, each with like the opposite AirPods in. Like, it's just life now. People do it. And the fact that is something you see couples do is something you do in your relationship. I was like, David, I've never seen this. I would never. I see people doing this all the time.

You need to go outside more often, Chris. I don't know what people do in New Jersey. I was like, they don't have that in New Jersey. But no, but I think the idea, there are lots of interesting questions about like, I just want to point out that David Lewis in Washington DC, home of an infinite variety of government lawyers and contractors. And it sort of makes sense that they've all replaced Blackberry Hand with AirPods ear. 100%. 100%. DC was definitely like the last vestige of the huge

Bluetooth headset. And they just like, they went straight into wearing AirPods on hinge days. Like, that's just it's a selection year. And everyone's got one AirPods in. It's like what David is describing. All right. It's just as reclined, talking to every single person in Washington DC all the same time. That's just what it is. It's not wrong. Yeah. No, it's it's you, me and Ezra on a date together at all times. That's great.

But no, I think the fact that no one would look at you twice for wearing an AirPods in a coffee shop is like a huge part of the reason this is incredibly compelling. I think it's so cool. But does this mean that now people are just, I mean, people are just going to talk to you when you have your AirPods in. Like before it was like a universal sign of don't talk to me. And now it's going to be like, I'll talk to you. That might be

a hearing aid. If you zoom out, Apple pitched a pretty weird vision of reality today, where you are always wearing AirPods. This is what I don't think that's a vision. I think that is reality. No, but like you're wearing the minute of concert, you're wearing them to prevent hearing loss. You're in adaptive mode all the time. We're like on your job. So your hearing is being modulated through AirPods. Like they're just prosthetics. Fine.

And then I, not to get to in the weeds of weirdness. Apple also makes the vision pro, which wants to mediate your site. And after a while, you're just like, Tim Cook is building a helmet. And you're going to go and help it. And Apple is going to manage the world for you and like clean it up for you. And that is a weird vision of the future. But the amount of, but let us put a computer in between you and reality is very high in Apple world right

now. That said, you know, you can feel about wearing AirPods. Is it a whole episode of Black Mirror? It's too. Tim Cook builds a helmet. It's a great episode of Black Mirror. All that is to say, maybe that stuff will hit regular people in different ways. The actual hearing aid functionality. If they can get more people to take real hearing tests and then wear hearing aids, they

will do a great service to the world. Like, this is very exciting. And all those competitors hearing aids are segmented from Sony and Bose and all these other companies, a thousand dollars. Yeah. No, this could change my Thanksgiving. And they have like bad apps and weird features and all this other stuff. This is what AirPods Pros are 250, right? 250 bucks. And the hearing test is built in the OS and it is perfectly tuned. And you might not have the weird social

accessibility problems. That's a very meaningful. I think it's probably the biggest announcement I made today in the scale of things. Yeah. I agree. And the fact that you take that hearing test and not only does it tune the hearing aid stuff, but it tunes everything else in the AirPods to you, I think is very cool. Yeah. Apple has clearly kind of gone all the way down this road watching them talk about it.

It made me think about the stuff that they did for the Vision Pro, which is like, you have to do an incredible amount of work because of the affordances of like the human body. So they had to like invent this new way to scan your face to do it and created this whole crazy pipeline just to get the thing to work on your face for some reason. This feels like it's in service of like a much cooler, more real thing for people, which I agree. I think it's not.

But they've done this before too. Like the bit where it's supposed to modulate the hearing and stuff. They've done that before. Like that's an accessibility feature now, I think, where you can put it in and it'll do a hearing test. Yeah. They've had the voice captions. They've had transparency mode. They've had live listen. They've done a lot of stuff that walks right up to this line. Yeah. This is just over the line. Like the FDA is going to tell people these are hearing aid features and

mean it in that I think is it at $250. It's just vastly more accessible for so many people. Well, I'm just curious the quality of it because some of those changes they've done before, like I'm best with those accessibility features and they're not that great. Like the one we're supposed to do kind of a little hearing test and be like, we're going to make the sound even better for your ears. My guess my ears are garbage.

You don't love your personalized spatial audio. Your ears are good. That's the thing. There we go. Right. So if you don't have some big, as you get older, right, you lose your high frequencies. Yeah. If you're watching these like TikTok videos, it's like we can guess how old you are. Oh, no, there's a whole thing right now about the remarkable. And this wine that people hear apparently. Oh, interesting because I've been through a lot of time going. I've got this shoe high pitch wine.

Yeah, I'm like, oh my god. Am I just so old? I didn't hear this wine on the remarkable. Right. So you're losing. You might be losing a very, very top end. But as you get older, you lose even more or you have different cutouts or what all this stuff happens. So if you have reasonably good ears, the let's tune it to make it work for you is going to

accomplish nothing because there's nothing to tune. If you have frequency dropouts or other kinds of hearing issues, the tuning will actually overcome it and it will sound clear and rich again. So will any of this work? I have no idea. Yeah. On AirPods. This is what audiologists do today to tune real hearing aids. You just made my ears sound better. So this is great. Yeah, you should be proud of, I mean, you can't hear they're remarkable. You're getting old now. I know. You should be.

I can't hear they're remarkable. But the accessibility feature on AirPods sucks for you. That means most of those things are just scams perpetrated by young people to make old people feel old. They're not playing sound when they're like only young people can hear this. This is what I tell you. That's full of how you know you're getting old. That's right. That's right there.

But I think the thing you just mentioned, Eli, I think is actually like the question of all of the AirPods, kind of all the way down the line, not including the Macs, which are technically a new product, but you know, whatever. That can apple back these really advanced features into the existing product, I think is the question, right? And even if you go down to the the regular AirPods, it's a $50 upgrade to get noise cancellation.

And if Apple has figured out how to do like genuinely good ANC inside of an open ear set of headphones, that's a big deal. $50 is a lot of money to spend for that particular upgrade, especially if you're like if you're not so price sensitive that you only want the cheapest one, but you're too price sensitive to buy the pros. Like there's a very odd sort

of middle ground there that I think Apple is trying to strike. And the question of can we bring these advanced features down into a different form factor that is not optimized and designed for those features? It kind of is the question. And I have no idea. Have you tried these things at all yet? I have not yet. I don't know if I believe it. Like we have to see it. Like noise canceling is pretty dumb technology. It's very clever and you need a lot of

processing power to do it. But the idea is pretty dumb, right? You listen to some things that you identify as noise and then you just play back their inverse to cancel out the opposite of that noise. Yeah, right? It's like it's very dumb idea. And the hard parts are like identifying what is noise, making sure you don't you know, ask them to clip a bunch of useful frequencies, all this other stuff. Doing an open ear, you're just not

in control of the sound environment. Like sound is literally getting around the head fence. So are they just going to run a bunch of like white noise cancellation? It looks super like well, other people will be able to hear the cancellation is like kind of what I'm interested in. Oh, that's interesting. Well, I'm also curious. They have to fit, right? Like the whole thing that they don't have a seal, they just sort of sit in your ear. I never liked them because they were

that leaky because I could hear everything around me. And now I'm going to be able to hear everything around me. But then sometimes it's going to be blocking some stuff that feels like a good recipe for like your brain just getting messed up, trying to listen to your headphones. Yeah. Let me see. But it's Apple. I wouldn't expect they wouldn't break brains with a product. Yeah. I mean, they're going to they're confident is what

I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it is the sort of thing that it's an odd skew of the product. Like if you go to Apple's website right now and you go to buy AirPods, the options are AirPods and AirPods with adaptive noise cancellation. And I think if you have a product that is technically titled AirPods with adaptive noise cancellation, you should

maybe rethink your product's excuse. But like if they've done that, I think suddenly like this becomes at $179, like maybe the pair of headphones that just about everybody should buy. But I don't think that's going to be the case because of the fit. Like the fit on the AirPods is so specific and it works for a lot of people. And if it doesn't work for you, it sucks. That's true of the pros too though. Can I say two things about this?

One Apple said without any sourcing that AirPods do are the most popular headphones in the world. Which I can believe I would just sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. It's like the verge is the most popular website in the world. Like sure. You can believe it. We are by the way. It's true. And then second, they introduced the new AirPods for with this sort of like, you know, short description of everyone's ears are different. They measured all the ears

and they got to the right shape. They said that the first time. They, no, not even the first time. They said that when they announced the wired earpods with not, I think not even the first iPhone, like with an iPod Nano is when earpods came out, right? Yeah. Because you would ask like, like I've asked them before, hey, we're ever going to get different sizes because these are too big for some ears. And they'd be like, no, we did a test

and it works for 90.9% or whatever. You're fine. But the thing is like, that's, that's true. It turns out that everyone started wearing earpods and buying iPhones because they worked for most people. Oh, no, I can't use the original AirPods. I couldn't fit in them at all. Well, we've established. I've got tiny ear canals. Okay. Yeah. It's a very specific problem for me. You're good with pros. But I have to use this from the opposite. Pros

feel awful on me. Yeah. So Apple announced the earpods in 2012. It was a Johnny I video. It was alongside the iPhone 5 and the iPod. It was like, I got it. This is how old they were. And at the time, they were like, we asked more than 600 people to test over 100 iterations of the earpods that we made them run on treadmills and extreme heat and cold. They did cardio. They shook their heads up and down and earpods are like the design that fit the most ears.

Now we're like 12 years later and they're like, we did it again. We've once again measured all of the ears in the world and they look a little bit different. I may not sure. Evolution, baby. Sure. It's true. They stuck with this design for a long time and maybe ears have changed. But I think the reason AirPods Pro are the most more popular headphones even are more expensive. Maybe just the word pro and the name. Maybe it's noise canceling. I

think they stay in people's ears better. Yeah. I would agree. I do. I do agree with that. And I think especially early on, the regular AirPods developed a reputation for falling out of your head. Right? Like for years, there were all those stories of people like losing the AirPods on the street and it would fall down. And whether it was true for you or not, that fear was real. And even for somebody like me, they fit well in my ears. They don't fall out.

I am perpetually terrified. They're going to fall out because they feel loose, which is actually like the point. That's why I like them because they don't feel like they're smushed into my head. But it makes me feel like they're going to fall out all the time. And the pros for better and worse, smush into your head. Yeah. And don't feel that way. And I think that is real for people. Like I agree with you. You see people like covering their ears sometimes if they're walking over

a great or hopping on the train. Yeah. Exactly. And because I think like the OG AirPods feel kind of like earrings, but then like clip on earrings. This is something you neither want to be probably have a lot of familiarity with. But there's earrings that go in here and they hang right there. That's true. What's that little piercing there, David? It's great. But people, you know, they like, and when you have those clip on, you're constantly like holding your hands up

because they're going to fall off. And AirPods feel the same way. And nobody wants nobody wants clip on. I just like how much you two are looking at people in their AirPods. Like is that a collegeist? Like there's like, there's another couple wearing one AirPods each. And Alex is like another person's ear mopping over a great. And it's nice because then I'm like, oh, I'm not alone. I'm fascinated. It's called journalism. Yeah. That too. This is also why I read everyone's

screens when they're texting on the train. It's journalism. I love it when you find somebody's like type and spacey stuff. Oh my god. I literally I one time this is a true story missed my train and wrote it for one extra hour because there was a guy I was standing and he was sitting in like the first seat next to me. And he was in the middle of breaking up with his girlfriend over text messages. I wrote the train for one more hour than I needed to just I got through the

whole break up. It was spectacular. It involved 7,000 words of text messages. Wow. It was incredible. Were you like, just call her on the phone? Seriously, right? It's like, I'll FaceTime her right now. We can do this together. So we're here on the market. The guy next to me on the plane here, I swear to God, was trying to rod. I guess why he failed six hour flight from New York to California. It's failed. Just like failed. Then he picked up his phone, started typing in all lower case and

notes out for a while. It didn't read it. I did see him text the words. I need to write my own narrative to a friend also in marketing. And then weirdest of all on his phone on Delta Wi-Fi, which is garbage, started powering through Gmail on the web in Safari. With the better, the top of the screen that said Gmail is better in the app. And I kept wanting to be like, bro, it is better in the app. I love him. I honestly believe in moments like that. It is it,

it should be allowed to just reach over and tap the open button that opens it. I really believe that. I was like, how are you using Safari with the the the the address bar in the bottom? And you've got not. All right. That hurts me. He needs that that 6.7 inch iPhone or 6.9 inch iPhone. He needs to be. He can read one more line of text. Yeah. Speaking of one more line of text, let's talk about the watches. Yeah, they're big. They are big. Uh, they're not a no moment in this keynote. We're

Apple took a minute to explain what you can do with the bigger screen. I would like if anyone's out there, if you can make me a super cut of Apple executives patiently explaining that you can see more content on a bigger screen over the past five years, I think it would be amazing. It would also be hours long. So okay, the the the basic rundown on the watches as I understand it is Apple Watch Series 10, new design that looks an awful lot like the old design. It's thinner. It has a

bigger screen. It comes in black. I would say those are the salient points. It also comes in other colors. Nobody seems to care about those colors. It comes in black. Everybody's excited about that fact. Shiny black. Okay. How shiny are we talking? Well, okay, hold on. We'll get to I want to talk. I want to hear what you think, Neely. But then there's also the Watch 2, which is nothing at all has changed except now it also comes in black, which again, the ultra watch ultra two. What did

I say? You said watch to some of it. The watch to it's dramatic changes since that watch. Yes, it's the watch to if you watch to you're in for a treat. But the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is unchanged. They basically reintroduce the product. They're like the Ultra 2 is great for swimming and rowing and diving and also just looking chunky and like you have money. Also, it's black now. Then that was the end of that. Yep. But the the series 10 is a new design. It looks for all the

world like the old design. It's just thinner. It's more rounded on the top and it yeah, it comes in polished aluminum black. It's also a very charged faster, which I think is very exciting. But the design is the one I'm curious about because my immediate reaction when they said thinner was I don't care. I looked at the watch that was on my wrist and I was like I don't know that I've ever wished for this thing to be thinner. It's how I feel about my iPhone. I raise time to make it thinner

and it was nothing for me. But then there were a bunch of people I saw on on threads in elsewhere who were like oh, you know, just based on like the clothes I wear or like how I use my wrist having something that's thinner is actually really meaningful. So what I'm curious about Neely, especially as somebody who wears the Chonky one every day, did it feel different? Like if you had just picked it up, would you have been able to tell? Because it's been years really

since you've been able to tell kind of which one you were picking up. If you were paying attention, yeah. Okay. For a normal person, you'd be like the screens bigger and that would be the thing. Okay. You know how you could tell between a two and a four because the screen got bigger? Was the four or five with the screen got bigger? I think it was the four. I think that's it. So the screen got bigger. So you could tell. And then the four to everything else you couldn't tell,

it's that again. So it's like a very minor adjustment, but it's bigger. Thinner I think is hard. But it, you know, for all intents and purposes, it's the same design. Like we can lie to ourselves and say it's not the same design, it's the same design. Is the 10 screen now bigger than the ultra's screen? Yes. That's the thing they said. Wild. Just the both screens are the 40 is because it's a 49. No, the case is the same size, but I guess because they made the screen bigger in the case.

Okay. So yeah, so there's a 42 and a 46 are the case sizes. And the screen on both of them is bigger than the ultra? No, it has to just be the 46. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it looks very nice. It looks very cool. You know, the highlight features actually sleep apnea detection, not the size. We have to see how well sleep apnea detection works. Another FDA clearance situation for Apple. Did either of you have a moment during the keynote where you were like, oh God, am I about

to find that I have sleep apnea? Like, I don't know if this is a thing I want to know about myself. I'm ready. I'm ready to learn. I'm open to new experiences. I don't like wearing a watch when I sleep. You don't sleep if you're watch. No. I just, nothing. Thank you. I would say truly, sincerely, my single favorite thing about the Apple watch is how good an alarm clock it is for my body. Like it wakes me up better and easier and more pleasantly than any alarm clock I've ever

tried. And that is like two thirds of the reason I wear it. But when do you charge it? So I actually, this is the reason faster charging is very exciting to me. I charge it. Typically, I will take it off when I go to shower in the morning and I will just leave it on the charge until it's full. And sometimes that means I leave it there for five days because I just forget about it. But so the idea of actually being able to like put it down, go shower, come back and it has charged. Well, I think

it was 80% in 30 minutes it was supposed to be. Yep. If it gets to that suddenly in my own experience, Apple watch battery life sort of ceases to be a thing. And I find that very exciting. Yeah. And it's the battery life's gotten really good over the last few years anyway. The ultra is pretty good. And I think the ultra is still rated like double with the series 10 is I worry a little about the series 10 bigger screen brighter screen thinner thinner does not typically

bowed well for good battery. Yeah. So one can I just say one thing random comment on screens? The screens on the iPhone 16 16 Pro can now go down to one lit of brightness. It is actually wild to look at. You turn the brightness all the way down. It's like it's just like a ghost of an image. It's pretty cool. That's actually awesome. Like it's somebody who uses my phone in bed more than I'm proud of being able to get it like properly dim. Have you get it one nice bed? Yeah.

That's the treat like we were talking in last week about like eating devices and like what if you could make your screen not look so blue and bright like one lit of brightness will do it. I don't get you there. Yeah. No, it was very it was very impressive and then 2000 nits in sunlight which is ridiculous. Yeah. I really accidentally flashed it on in bed. Yeah. Who was it? Was it Craig or somebody else who was like sometimes people look at their watches at an angle and was

like yeah, thanks dude. People look at their watches. Yeah. They they they the viewing angle of the watch the series 10 OLED is pick. I mean like again. Why thank you know the number of times where they explain things like basic facts about screens is there no one has seen a screen before? Is hilarious. Yeah. Why'd angle OLED? Yeah. It's like a whole phrase. Also and I say this in all compliments is though Apple doesn't already make the best screens consistently in the street. They're

like this piece of garbage series and I can display. You couldn't even look at it from an angle. It's just a tear fine actually. No one is worried about that before. No. Not not a real thing. Wait, I want to know about the blacks. Talk about the blacks. You you looked at both watches. Since you're really it seems like if Apple had just gotten on stage and said we've changed nothing except both watches now come in black. Everybody would have been psyched and gone home happy. You've

seen them both. How do they look in black? To be clear they said we've changed nothing on one watch which now comes. Okay. Fair. I'm gonna buy that watch. There's a new watch face that does sort of a swirly thing where you can't really tell what time it is. That's fun. That's pretty I was talking to Apple person wearing the black ultra-too and I don't even know if that person was saying. I was just like just staring at the watch. I was like what if I just

were out there watching belongs to you. Yeah. What if that was on my wrist and not yours. So that's great. I'm gonna buy that one. The shiny aluminum it is shiny aluminum black. Like it's it's it's fine. Like I don't know what to say about it. It's it's a it's a black metallic. The shiny worries me because of scratches. Should I be worried about scratches? You know if that thing was so covered in fingerprints when I looked at it I couldn't tell you if it was scratched or not.

Also not great. Yeah. It's just not what you want. Do you notice my pictures of the phone also fingerprint city but every person found in cases so if it is. That's also yeah it's been true for years every Apple product. But you don't have to put it in this point. Cases. So random case. The watch you don't put in case. By the way the back of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has special black sapphire glass. I'm gonna I'm gonna buy this product so fast for no reason. It's so stupid.

I've been trying to decide so I have a series eight that is fine. It is like it is a perfectly serviceable Apple watch and I found myself looking at the 10 being like what's great looking and I like the black a lot but is there anything here that I'm like I need this upgrade for some reason. I landed on bigger screen seems good and the faster charging would be really helpful. That's the only two things I landed on. Yeah from an eight that's not a big jump. I mean the sleep apnea

will be nice. Again do I want to find out if I see that? You're gonna you're gonna find out if you're trying to. Am I ready for this information about myself? You're dying it every night. Alex you just said the sleep apnea will be nice. Yeah it will be. You did the sleep watch. Yeah you will get it actually. You get the watch and then you get sleep apnea. David is married and being married means you have a built-in sleep apnea detector. Or do you know she doesn't like how I breathe when

I'm awake so I think sleep would not be a problem. If you if you are married and you can't reliably tell her sleep apnea like you just you just need to show them the list of sleep apnea symptoms. Yeah that that seems right. All right we need to take one more break and then we're gonna do a lightning round of other Apple stuff and then we're gonna get out of here. We'll be right back. Support for the Vergecast comes from Mint Mobile. Look there are a lot of ways to spend 15 bucks.

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restrictions apply. See Mintmobile for details. All right we're back. So that was all the big stuff. There's lots of software stuff to talk about but I feel like that's actually probably better for next week. Or one extra. Well that's all shipping next week. All the new OSs are shipping next week. All the Apple intelligence stuff is shipping someday in the unknown future. If you are a new Apple OS and you don't have Apple intelligence are you a new Apple OS yet? Yeah dude. Have you seen

how you can move the icons around on the grid now? Game changer. I actually I'm soliciting notes. We're going to have to review these phones. I don't know how without Apple intelligence. I'm legitimately like how are we going to write reviews of phones. So we'll only exist in this form for some number of weeks before the big update comes. It's so funny. I'm less optimistic than that. I think I think there is a so per solid chance that the actual experience of Apple intelligence

is not going to show up in a real way until the iPhone 17. I would agree. Sure. Like I think these phones are the iPhone 15 plus the camera control. I think everyone who has to review this phone is going to have to spend a deeply hilarious amount of time litigating a button in a way that I think is so fun and so vergy. I'm very jealous to not get to do it. But like the AI stuff is going

to come in these tiny bits and pieces. And if we weren't in a crazy AI moment where everybody had to pretend to have an AI strategy or Wall Street would run away from you, we would just call these things software. They're just features of apps. And supposedly we're going to get game-changing Siri that makes everything better and solves phone interfaces forever someday in the future. I am in no single way holding my breath for any of that to happen on this cycle of this iPhone.

Yeah, I agree with you. I'm just saying I don't think iOS 18 plus camera button is like there's not a lot there. You know what I mean? As much as I love a camera button and I most iPhone reviews that I've written have been long meditations on the camera. Happy to do it again. Now with the fun. It's real to do it again. It feels like the reason people will upgrade to this phone is because the AI capabilities will let them do stuff that they couldn't do on their

old phone. The old phones are very capable of taking a photo. Yeah, I mean to be fair, Apple has been making this particular case since the iPad earlier this spring. We're deep into this now. And Apple has been trying to sell you AI ready devices without real AI to do it with for months now. Yeah. Well, the AI stuff was largely for investors,

unless for actual people. That was always kind of my read on Apple AI. My number one question is why are they shipping these on September 20th when the AI features are supposed to hit weeks later in October? Again, some features in data. Like, I don't know. This is the AI features aren't that long. Fair. Or have they even have this series? One, the thing where you press the button and series now, the border around the screen

and set it a little circle. Schimney that. I honestly, it's so funny you say that I was thinking about that this afternoon. If they had just changed nothing else about Siri, but made it glow around the edges, everybody immediately would have been like, oh, Siri's better. It would have it would have given everybody like a 10% boost in Siri confidence. Anyway, I'm open to feedback from y'all on how to review these devices or when.

Because I'm honestly curious what would be the best service to everyone. Like, a review of a phone that if you buy in November has nothing to do with the phone that you bought is kind of weird, in my opinion. Yeah. Well, you're actually getting at what I would say was the kind of biggest vibe question that I had for you as somebody who's in the room because Alex and I were not in the room. And I would say the overwhelming sense that I got from people both at the verge and elsewhere,

I was getting text messages from people who were like, this is the most boring iPhone launch. I can remember that like as a as a big flagship September event, we talk about this every year. Like, this is Apple's moment to speak to everyone. Like, it is it is the one that everybody pays attention to. And I would say the overwhelming perception was that it was kind of a bust. How did it feel in the room as it was happening? I think this is why I got noticed

noting the room was full of people who were just excited to be there. Right. Yeah. So they curated the excitement they needed. And it was packed and people were freaking out there doing the thing. And that's not to say I wasn't running around trying to take photos and upload them as fast as I can't like, I like doing it. It's like the funnest part of the job. But they had made the space feel very excited. And then you like take a step out of it and you're like,

okay, these are very iterative phones, like super iterative phones. The headphones upgrades apart from the 1.5 new models are iterative to the point where like one of them didn't even change at all. The watch upgrades are also pretty iterative. And there's not any, I gotta have it upgrades. Unless you really give a shit about the camera button. Right. All of those upgrades are in the software. That's Apple's magic, right? Hardware plus software plus services.

And we're just waiting on the big stuff. Like if Apple had said Siri can now do this like app coordination assistant thing that everyone wants to get to you. I think everybody would have upgraded the phones tomorrow. Yep. Right. There were a bunch of moments in the keynote like that. Actually, like there was a moment where in the visual intelligence demo, the guy holds up a phone to a, it was like a concert poster or something. I think some kind of effect. And it was like,

it'll input the information directly into your calendar when you take that picture. And I was like, if that's, I will buy any phone that will do that for me tomorrow. Yeah. That's already awesome. And it just doesn't exist. There's also another extremely weird demo where somebody walked up to a dog and like asked the phone, what kind of dog it was? In our own Kylie Robinson was like, why would you do that? Why would you walk up to a stranger's dog to get a phone out like this?

Why would you just ask them, what kind of dog this? That gave me the same vibes as the Gemini demo where they were like, use this to write a, for your kid to write a letter to an Olympian. It's like, oh, maybe you don't understand how people live and exist in the world. Like this is actually like bleak as hell and not cool and exciting technology. The dog one I didn't think, because this is the same demo you do with the Meta Ray bands. As you put them on, you're like,

what car is that? What dog is that? But the thing was he walked up to the person holding the dog. And the, the intumation is that what he said is not, oh, that dog is so cute. What dog is that? He said, can I take a picture of your dog with my phone? Yeah. Because I want to know what kind of dog is that I don't want to talk to you. And I'd point out you often encounter cars with their owners. If you encounter a dog with a owner like that's like a little bit of an emergency.

You're not like, what breed is this? I better find out. Yeah, like hold on, stop your dog. He paused. I need to pause. I just think I think that is overwhelmingly the reason why I added distance. This one, the little content free. Like even the feature boxes, right? The bento boxes they put up at the end of every segment. Go look at the iPhone 16 feature box. It says USB-C on it.

It's like, oh, we didn't even have enough to fill up the squares. And so like these are super iterative phones, which whose key feature is the RAM and the memory bandwidth to enable all of the AI stuff, which isn't shipping. So like, why would you be excited about it? And I think that's really the gap. I think they should have said we're shipping these phones with the first wave of beta features and just held them three weeks into October. But Apple sells so many

phones, so I don't think they can do that. Yeah. Yeah, they couldn't afford to hold it that long. They needed to get it out. And if the software is not ready, so be it. And this goes back to Alex. So what you were saying is like the reason you do that is Wall Street, right? Like, yeah, this is not a thing you do in the service of good user experience. This is a thing you do because we are in a moment where if you appear to be behind on AI,

you will be punished. And that is right or wrong. That is the world in which we live. And so everyone is out here announcing features that aren't going to ship anytime soon or ever because you have to. And it's so unappled like to do that. Yeah. It's so, so, so odd to see Apple tell you its plans. Like this is not what Apple does. This is not what Apple has ever done. And it has to because it can't build the things yet. Did you guys also notice that it was doing a

weird thing where they didn't call it AI? They called it like our Apple intelligence, but they wouldn't call it AI. They would always default to machine learning. I clocked once that he said the word AI. But every other one was some like dance around it. Yeah. Yeah. Like they were really going out of their way to not sound like Google to not sound like their competitors in this space, which is kind of interesting. I mean they have branded Apple intelligence. They're fun.

Yeah. They do have their own AI. Yeah. They have multiple AI models. At one point I believe with the watch, if you go back and watch it, they point out that they're running many models to enable the features you enjoy today. And it's like great. It's the same, the same as the one I have today. Thanks. Yeah. That was just like, why are you talking to investors during this info commercial? You're trying to sell me these phones. Just point where you even have buy now,

like, verbiage and your thing. Stop it. It was weird. But let's talk about fine woven because it feels like fine woven might be gone. Yeah. This is good. Before we leave, let's just little bit of accessory news. And then we're going to get that. Is this an accessory lighting round? This is an accessory lightning round. But the way we're going to do this is I'm going to tell you what's happening. And if you're not interested, just don't say anything and we'll keep going.

That's going to be great. I love this. This is great. Thing number one, Apple has a faster mag safe charger to go with the iPhone 16s. Chee 2, which I believe this might be the first time a phone company has actually said Chee 2 out loud on stage about a phone that people in America can buy. That's very exciting. Yep. I'm excited. We're going to charge faster. Yeah. Great. We love a fast charge. I said this in the lightning bug, but there was a time that NILI made fun of me

for having a mag safe charger. I was we were in a restaurant somewhere and I slapped the puck onto the back of my phone and NILI made fun of me for like 10 straight minutes. I'm sorry. Do you have a wire connected to a battery? Why would you pick the least efficient way of charging your phone with that wire? Because it it throcks. I love the throcks. Yeah. That's good noise. I will say I'm a full convert into mag safe batteries. Actually, I should have one over here.

That's what I do now is like the mag safe battery packs because you have to deal with the wires. Yeah. They get hot and it's inefficient and if you have a wire connected to a battery pack, David, you should just plug it into the bottom of the phone. Fuck. Anyway, next up, like you were mentioning, Kranz. So I would actually like you to explain to me because we thought fine woven was probably dead. Apple didn't say fine woven is dead.

But it kind of seems like fine woven is dead. Fine woven being Apple's terrible bad take on leather accessories. This was their cloth accessory that was really just plastic that was meant to like replace all the leather and be a lot more eco-friendly. And that's probably true, but it also sucked. And it got dirty and gross and nobody liked it. Like what if it was leather but like much worse? Yeah. Much, much worse. And now you can't buy a phone case made of fine woven.

There's a wallet. That's about it. We've reached out. We haven't heard anything back yet. The wallet strikes me as one where they're like, look, we have a bunch of these. We might as well keep it for sale. It's like Google with the Chromecast now where they were like they have the TNV streamer. They're clearly out on the Chromecast, but they're like, look, there's a room full of these. Like if you want to buy it, please buy it. Fine woven has been dead, I would say since about

like a day after it launched. The wallet doesn't require the size and shape of the phone, right? So like you can't just sell off the excess. Right. You don't have to buy. You have to iPhone 15 Pro Max cases and you don't make iPhone 15 Pro Maxes anymore. You're you're just like, I don't can you recycle it? We recycle everything around here. Just turn it into something else, Johnny. Fine. It's not fine. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Next up, I would say one

of the stranger stories of the day, Beats, famous music company. You may have heard of them before they make headphones. LeBron James wears them. Made a bunch of iPhone 16 cases. Sure. Beats. Beats made iPhone 16 cases. It feels like a real it feels like they've been trying to figure out where Beats sits in their lineup, especially as AirPods get better. And their idea is what if Beats is budget? You do cases now. Oh, interesting. Do you do you think that's why this is going?

Interesting. Yeah, because they're they're they are putting the good tech in their headphones. But the headphones just also aren't don't have that that kind of cash that that quality feeling, right? I just feel like my read on it was that Apple was just like let Beats be beats. I just want to say to everybody listening to this by the way, Nila is furiously googling because he doesn't believe me that I got this right, which is how wild it is that Beats is making

iPhone 16 cases. I'm just like reading this news. Nila, Nila, I had to fact check me on the verge cast because he didn't believe me that Beats was making iPhone 16 cases. This is this is all you need to know about this story. They're $49. They exist. That's it. They are cases. They're cases. They look like the Apple cases, but they're by Beats for some reason. They're so weird. It's so weird. Yeah, it's very it's very strange. I was instructed if I had

nothing to say to say nothing. This is great. I'm into it. Perfect. Moving on. Bunch of new watch bands, bunch of new band colors. Can I interest you in that? Get one on Etsy. It'll be a quarter of the price. Or buy the Verge's own Nomad Blurple band, which is a big hit at Apple Parts today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, many, many compliments. It looks great. I bought that one, which is very good. And I also bought six Apple Watch bands on

Amazon for like eight bucks, love and bits. Can't write them in highly. Those ones are slowly poisoning David and you should buy the Verge's, the purple, sport band. I do occasionally look at my wrist just to make sure it's not like turning a color. I'm not psyched about it. Yeah. So far so good. But, but we're okay. The biggest question I have about accessories, you know, is how the camera control

is going to work with cases. This is a question a lot of people are asking. It's this, it's this capacitive kind of flush control, which seems like if you have any kind of raised case at all, is going to be hard to find a way to get your finger inside of. Do you have a sense of how this might work? Yeah. Although I think my worry is different than Amazon's worry. Can you make a capacitive button on a case connect to a capacitive button on the phone? It's like pretty well and solved. Right?

They just have to be conductive to each other and so Apple's own cases have a button that touches the other button and you're good. If there's any play at all, there's any space between the two buttons, then that like push a little bit is going to get weird. In that, I haven't seen this thing in a case yet, but already it's like to push it to do the light tap to bring up the various menus. Or controls is already like you have to think about how hard you're pushing so you don't

accidentally push the button. And so if you have a little play and then you have to push, if you have a cheap case or a bad case, that might get weird. Remains to be sick. That's why Beats is leading the way. They got Jimmy Ivey never covered. Don't worry. So everything Jimmy Ivey's like ever just like looks in the direction of Apple Park is like, man, I really pulled one over. So funny. And we still make headphones.

There's a real thing that happened. Is it Jimmy Ivey and Dr. Dre and Trent Resner were Apple employees and they had no titles except for Jimmy and Dre. Is that true? That was their title. That was your time. Jimmy and Dre was my title. Well, that's my title. Was Dre Jimmy and Jimmy was Dre. That's what I want. It'd be great if Apple is like another person gets the title of Dre when Dre left. You got back to the chair. There's some brand new

engineers like you're Dre now. Like, I'm putting all those weights into a product to make it better. Yeah. All right. We have gone way over. We all need to go to sleep and Nila needs to go forget how to move this lamp. Nila, any parting thoughts for us, anything we missed and any big feelings about the Apple stuff today before we get out of here? I'm very curious to see how people want us to evaluate these products. Right? I don't disagree with the sense that this was kind of

a small event in its way. I wonder if the products will feel bigger with the Apple intelligence features. So let me know how you want us to talk about these. Because I suspect the answer is not just as regular new phones. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think especially if you have like a thing about the camera or the camera control or like a specific thing you're looking at that's like more than just my phone is dying. I need a new one. I'll buy the new one. But is like,

is this worth the upgrade? Yeah. I want to know all your questions about is this worth the upgrade. So you can email verchcaststhepers.com, call the hotline 866-111. We have, I would say, a bunch more Apple stuff to do over the next couple of weeks. So we'll have lots of time to talk about this. Send us all of your questions. For now, that is it. That's the verchcasts. I'm Ron Roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-111.

The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week. Support for the Vergecasts comes from Mint Mobile. Say goodbye to your over-priced phone bill when you switch to Mint Mobile. You can get three months of premium wireless service for just 15 bucks a month. That includes high-speed 5G data and unlimited talking text.

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