iPhone and watches and wallpapers, oh my

Today on the flagship podcast of the Action Button: 03:34 - The Verge's David Pierce chats with Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert about their reviews of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. 41:02 - Victoria Song joins the show to talk about her review of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2. 1:07:58 - David chats with Isaac Mosna and Widgetsmith's David Smith about customizing your iPhone wallpaper and widgets. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Action Button. I'm your friend David Pierce and I'm having one of those days, I assume everybody has days like this, where you wake up at some outrageously early hour and you look at the clock and you're like, "Aw, cool, I have five more hours to sleep." But then something in your brain is just like, "No, we are awake now." Anyway, that's the kind of day I'm having. I've been up since like 2 o'clock this morning. I read a bunch of news, I read a book, I looked at TikTok for a while, I saw every single thing that has like ever been posted to Reddit in history. I did all the New York Times games and somehow it's still like first thing in the morning. It's a very confusing way to start the day because I kind of feel like it's lunchtime now.

• 0:44David Pierce?

  Now I'm out just like aimlessly wandering the neighborhood because I don't know what else to do with myself because the sun just came up and I've been awake for what feels like 100 hours. Anyway, it's going to be a very confusing day. I'm going to get to 2:00 PM and be like, "Well, time for dinner, time to go to bed. Wish me luck." Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're going to talk mostly about the iPhones because it's iPhone season. We have reviews of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro to talk about. We're also going to talk about our reviews of the Apple Watch and the Apple Watch Ultra. But we're also going to talk about software stuff. There's obviously new stuff in iOS 17, interactive widgets and all kinds of cool things going on. But more broadly, thinking about all this stuff for the last few months has really led me down this rabbit hole of phone personalization.

• 1:28David Pierce?

  I think the work people are willing to do to make their phone feel like an extension of themselves, whether it's a case or the wallpaper or the app icons or the look and feel of the whole phone in general, people are willing to do a lot so that when you turn on the screen, it makes you feel something, it makes you feel like you. And I think that's really cool. So I called up a couple of smart people to talk about how we do that and how that works and how Apple thinks about that. So we're going to dig into that too. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first, it is finally time that I can go home and like reasonably make breakfast and have coffee and start the day and also probably take a several hour nap and see how we do. So I'm going to go do all of that and then we'll be right back. This is The Vergecast, we'll see you in a sec.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 3:19David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right, I've had coffee, I've had Cheerios. I kind of know what time it is. I'm ready, let's do this.

• 3:27David Pierce?

  The new iPhones go on sale this Friday, and our reviews of the iPhone 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, and 15 Pro Max are all live on theverge.com. You should read them all, they're all really great. I don't know if this is the most interesting phone of the year, exactly. In fact, it's definitely not the most interesting phone of the year if you define interesting as just like the one trying to do the most new, cool stuff. But it's almost certainly the one the most people are thinking about buying. But should you? And which one? Who better, to answer that question, than the people who reviewed the phones? The Verge's Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert. They're both here, let's get into it. Allison, hello. Hello. Dan, hello.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 4:10David Pierce?

  You both have used two of the four phones. You've done big reviews. I have a million like specific questions, but let's just kind of like top line takeaways from your reviews. Like, are these phones any good? Yes or no? Who cares? Dan, you go first. iPhone 15 and 15 plus. What's the verdict?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, in a shocking turn of events, Apple released a turn of a device. No, I'm kidding. This is the 15th iPhone. Like, it's like they've been doing this a long time. They know how to make iPhones. Yes, they are good devices. In fact, you could probably say they are great devices. And I think that I reviewed the 15 and the 15 plus. I think if people buy them, they're going to be really happy with them. The type of person that buys this phone typically is coming from a much older iPhone. And so they're not coming from an iPhone 14, probably not a 13. So we're talking like a 12 or an 11 or maybe even a 10s. And they are going to get a lot of new features and new experiences. Plus better camera, better battery life, better performance, better display, all that stuff. So I think it is like a meaningful upgrade for the type of person that is buying this. Are the 15 and 15 plus all that exciting to us?

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Like enthusiasts and maybe our audience? Probably not. Like, we've seen all of these things before. They are, I've been calling them a repackaging of the 14 Pro. They've got most of the same features as the 14 Pro, but not all of the features. Notably, they have, they don't have high refresh rate screens and they don't have always on displays, which is like two things that I think would make a better experience on these devices.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  And we're going to come back to both those things.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, otherwise you get the dynamic island. You get a high resolution camera. Apple's changes to the design this year by just kind of softening the edges and the matte glass and stuff do make them nicer to hold, which you'll never experience because you're going to put a case on it anyways. But it's there. And then they come in five very boring colors.

• 6:00David Pierce?

  The rage you feel about the colors really like it.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  It's just like.

• 6:03David Pierce?

  It fills me up in a lovely way.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  I don't get it. Like, why bother with colors if you're going to, if this is what you're going to do?

• 6:09David Pierce?

  And we know Apple's done good colors in the past. Yeah, Apple is perfectly capable of making cool colors. It just chose not to this year for some reason. Like, if you find yourself making a color that you call natural, like, you've done it wrong. You've just, you blew it. All right, Allison, the Pro and Pro Max, what's the, what's the kind of top line verdict here?

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's kind of along similar lines. I mean, they're good in the ways that we are used to a Pro iPhone being good. I think the new things here this year are like certainly not breakthroughs. And anyone on Android who's hearing me talk about USB C and like a five times zoom lens is, you know, like cackling.

• 6:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, we should just say right up top, like, Android users, like, we know.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:53David Pierce?

  The number of things we're going to say that Android phones have had since, like, 2004. Like, we get it. We're with you. We're on the same page. The S23 Ultra is a terrific phone.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:04David Pierce?

  Just let Apple people have this one, just, just for today.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, just today.

• 7:08David Pierce?

  People have this.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Like a blanket statement of like, I get it, I know.

• 7:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, but yeah, it is the first time these things have all come together on an iPhone. And I think they're, they're smart in the Pro. There are things that, you know, being able to, to hook up like an SD card reader that isn't a special lightning dongle situation is cool. And like, I appreciate that someone who is maybe just, just wants a phone, just wants it to work is, doesn't really care so much, but it's there. The five time zoom, you know, is, is neat for people who want to get in there a little more and who are a little more picky about their photography. And the action button is just nice. Like, you want a button that does whatever you want on your iPhone? You can have it now. Like, that's super sweet.

• 7:58David Pierce?

  Okay, I have a bunch of specific things in there I want to talk about. I think USB C is a, is a big one, and I want to spend a bunch of time talking about that because that surprised me a lot from both of your reviews. But the first thing that jumped out at me that you both said, which I thought was surprising, was that the new phones feel different, like, to hold in your hands than the other ones do. Like, I feel like I'm used to Apple saying every year, like, we've developed an all new way to make these phones that will change everything. And then you pick it up and it's like, yep, this is still that one. It's an iPhone. But both of you had the experience of kind of picking up the new one and being like, this feels, this feels better. Walk me through that. What's actually better about it when you hold it?

• 8:39Speaker 04

  So I live the life, you guys know where I have like 10 phones on my desk at once? And I will reach for the 15 Pro and pick it up. And I just have that moment of like, ooh, this is a little nicer than I was expecting. Like it's the brushed finish on the sides of the phone. It's they're a little more rounded, the edges. So they're they're just like a tiny bit more comfortable to hold. And really, the major thing is on the Pro models, especially just being noticeably lighter. Like they're not light phones, but if you've ever held a 14 Pro Max, then you know the experience of like, holding a paperweight in your hand.

• 9:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a it's a big phone.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, this this feels like holding a normal phone. It doesn't feel like holding a super heavy phone.

• 9:27David Pierce?

  Okay, and so how much of that is like the titanium and all the stuff they talked about in the Pro versus just kind of the way they've reshaped it? Because Dan, you had a very similar experience in kind of how the lower end phones feel, right?

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, the lower end phones, I guess, the 15 and 15 plus, they're technically the same weights or within very small minute differences of last year's models. But if you're coming from like an iPhone 11, an iPhone 15 is like noticeably lighter, like the order of more than 20 grams, which is absolutely noticeable. I've been, my personal phone's an iPhone 13 Pro, and that just feels like a lead weight to me. The 15 plus, which has a much larger screen, is actually technically lighter than my 13 Pro. And so, you know, you may say like, oh, 10, 20 grams here, it doesn't really matter. Like when you're holding these things all day long and you're putting them in your pocket or whatever, like I feel every single gram that gets added. And it's like, my biggest complaint with the iPhone for the past few years,

• 10:25Speaker 03

  the Pro models at least, is how heavy they've become. Because Apple is stuck with the stainless steel frame and the polished and the premium, all that jazz. So I'm really excited that the Pro models move to titanium. But I also appreciate that the standard model also benefits from the softer edges on the frame, so that doesn't cut into your Pinky or your your palm as much when you're holding it. The back glass is now a frosted or matte finish, which is like nicer to hold. I think that makes it a little bit more slippery. Uh, anyone who's owned a pro phone for the past few years kind of knows what that back glass feels like. It's kind of a slippery experience. Again, most people are going to put cases on these and all kind of doesn't matter. But they just feel like nicer objects and that's like befitting of what the prices are because really even

• 11:10Speaker 03

  the less expensive phones are starting at $800 and at this point like that is like purely in premium phone territory. You can get really like advanced devices for this much. I mean, if you find a good deal, you'll find a flip phone from Samsung for that much money. So like, you know, you have to like, kind of justify what the cost is that you're paying for. And there's a lot of reasons for it, but you know, part of it is the experience of the tactile device. And, and I think that these are very well made. It's very obvious that Apple's been making iPhones for a very long time. Uh, and they've continued to like, kind of iterate and polish them to, to make them a nicer experience.

• 11:43David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Allison, this was just for you. And then we're going to go back to things Dan's allowed to talk about. Uh, action button. What did you do?

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Well,

• 11:50David Pierce?

  I don't care about anything else about the iPhone 15. I care so much about the action button.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Button. There's a new button. I, so I put it to open the camera, which I thought I would really like because I, I struggle with a swiping on the screen to open. I don't know why.

• 12:05David Pierce?

  The number of people I have heard say that in the last seven days is so fascinating. I feel like there are a hundred thousand ways to open the camera on iOS. Another button to do it is the last thing I need.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 12:16David Pierce?

  It seems like so many people struggle with that same thing you're describing. It's really interesting.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's always when someone else is looking at me using the phone too.

• 12:25David Pierce?

  They're like, take this picture and you're like, ah.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  I don't know. I'm sorry. Um, yeah. So I, I, that's like the first thing I did. I was super excited about it. But then I noticed I just wasn't really using it for that. Uh, I think it's just like, I use the Pro Max a little more. And I think having it just like, like it's that much taller and the action button is that much farther away. It just felt like a pain to, it was like, kind of awkward to be like, Re- reaching around the back of the phone to, you know, push the button. But so I have other ideas for it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do the shortcuts. Like y'all think I'm kidding about making it, order me a pumpkin spice latte. But I am a hundred percent doing that. Yeah, I'm back in my, back in my natural environment. So I can go wild with it now.

• 13:10David Pierce?

  I love that. Dan, you're not allowed to answer because you reviewed the loser phones. I'm just kidding. Someday when you're allowed to have an action button, many years from now, what are you gonna do with it?

• 13:19Speaker 03

  I hate to be really boring, but I, I think I would probably use it for the ringer switch. Maybe, but like, I was thinking yesterday, there's a feature on Android that I really like that if you flip the phone face down, it turns into do not disturb mode. And there isn't a way to do that on the iPhone. But I could set the action button to do not disturb. So like, I could just like, hold it for a second, put it in do not disturb face down. It's more than like, I wanted to, I want to just flip it over and have it done. So I don't know. That's like my first initial idea. I, you know, Alison mentioned the camera. I think that what a lot of enthusiasts will do is set it up to open third party camera apps, which right now is a pain, no matter which way you do it on the iPhone, whether it's for the lock screen or control center or whatever, opening a third party camera

• 14:03Speaker 03

  app is kind of annoying. I think maybe you could set a widget on the lock screen now to do it, which is a workaround. But I've already seen the developers of Halide are like adding a toggle in their app to like, let you do it from the action button. And so I'm sure a lot of people are gonna do that.

• 14:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's a good one. It's funny you mentioned do not disturb because that was, that was my thought too. Like, somebody sent me a thing the other day where they had built a shortcut where whenever they plug their phone in, if it's after 10:00 PM, it automatically switches it to sleep mode. And I was like, that's genius. But then this came out and I was just like, oh, it's the same thing. Like I can just punch on do not disturb, which is the kind of thing that I'd like to like, do often when I even just want to pay attention for a few minutes or whatever. And having a button that can do it seems very nice. I'm very into that. But okay, that's enough of that. I could also talk to you about interactive widgets for several hours, but we'll do that on another podcast. Let's talk about USB-C because the thing that I think a bunch of us have discovered

• 14:58David Pierce?

  over the last eight days since this iPhone launched is that Apple made a much more open port than any of us expected. And I'm just assuming, knowing the two of you, that you've spent a lot of time over the last week plugging random things into the iPhone to see what would happen. Alison, what, what have you been plugging into the iPhone and what has happened?

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Well, when we were shooting the video, you know, we had access to like an ethernet cable and SD card and all this stuff. And yeah, it truly is like kind of mind blowing that you plug it in and it doesn't, it doesn't complain. It doesn't, you know, make you jump through a bunch of hoops. Like it just does whatever you're trying to do. And like, we plugged in that ethernet cable and turned off the wifi and the cell data and it just had internet, just had internet from a cable. It was like, who, who saw that coming?

• 15:53David Pierce?

  What a world.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  I know.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we've been so conditioned for like, especially with the iPhone, for Apple to get in the way of what we want to do with it. That is, it's like, it's, it feels a little silly to say that like, I plugged in an ethernet cable and it worked. Or like, I plugged in an SD card and I could see the files on it. Like, but we are just so conditioned to the iPhone's kind of like guarded, walled garden experience where you wouldn't think that you can normally do these things. And in the past, they required special hardware adapters. And even then it was still limited. So like, it was kind of fun to just jam something into the USB port, watch what happens and then be like, oh, that's the thing you would have expected to happen. And like, I don't know how often you're going to use ethernet on your iPhone, probably never. But photographers might use the SD card,

• 16:40Speaker 03

  videographers can shoot directly to an SSD, stuff like that. Like, all those things just kind of work. It's almost like it's a computer.

• 16:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, what a crazy idea. It does seem like storage is probably the most likely real use case for people, right? In part because it's a way to like, get stuff off of your phone in a way that is not always easy. But also because, like, I feel like a thing I have surprisingly often is I have something on a hard drive or somewhere else that I would like to be on my phone so that I can do something with. And you can just plug in external storage and it just opens up in the files app, right? Like, that's pretty meaningful and new. And it's nuts that I'm saying that, like, it's an exciting new feature. But, but like, here we are. Are there, are there other things that you feel like rise to that level of like, things people might actually use this port for other than charging?

• 17:30Speaker 03

  I think that some people might want to use it for video out.

• 17:32David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Plug a USB C cable to HDMI or to DisplayPort. It supports DisplayPort out at 4K 60 resolution. So if you want to plug the phone into a TV and watch a video on the TV, you get you get screen mirroring, basically. But the if you're watching a video, you can make the video go whole full screen. That might be a use case for some folks. But again, yeah, I think you're probably right in that it is either USB hubs that allow you to plug in like USB A accessories or storage are really going to be the main type of accessories outside of charging that you would use a USB C port for.

• 18:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, I just I just want to say, Allison, kudos for getting the sentence Dex remains undefeated into the 15 Pro review. Because you

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 18:18David Pierce?

  You would think you could plug it into something and you might get a full blown, you know, desktop environment on a screen. But we got a little, we got a little Dex win in the 15 Pro review and that made me very happy.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  And and they're so intense about like how good this processor is that you would think like, OK, so let me do something with it. No, you can play Resident Evil.

• 18:39David Pierce?

  I will not lie, I have had the thought that Stage Manager feels like something that might appear when you plug your iPhone into a larger display sometime in the near future.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  I don't think it's ever gonna happen.

• 18:51David Pierce?

  I will do that once if that exists and then never, ever, ever again. Because it's Stage Manager. OK, so the other thing we should talk about is the cameras. And I think especially on the Pro, Allison, there are a bunch of new things. There's a bunch of new like underlying tech, but in terms of like features for people, there's the new telephoto lens, the which is 5X zoom, which I think is a big deal. There are the new focal lengths on the default camera, which you can move around and pick between. It shoots 24 megapixels by default now. Am I missing anything like have those jumped out to you as like really making a difference in how you use your phone's camera every day?

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're all things that I'm really appreciating and having that, you know, you could always like pinch and zoom a little bit if you feel like the standard camera lens is too wide, but there's something different about especially having those little like millimeter focal length equivalents in there. It just kind of warms your heart. It makes you feel like, oh, I'm taking, I'm doing photography.

• 19:51David Pierce?

  I'm a real photographer.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm taking a picture at 35 millimeters, not 1.5x. It like switches back to 1.5x.

• 20:00David Pierce?

  As soon as you do it, you get to be the person who says, I make photos. I don't take photos.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 20:04David Pierce?

  That's what happens. Yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  I've been saying that all week and everyone's so tired of me. I'm like, shh, I'm making photographs. Yeah, no, I, I've like just very eagerly like incorporated them and how I think about taking pictures with an iPhone and it's great. I'm, I'm happy with, you know, all the flexibility we get this year.

• 20:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. Dan, you, I remember when it first launched, were very excited about the idea of the 24 megapixel default photos.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:32David Pierce?

  My worry was file size, right? And there's always the thing where it's like, it depends on where you put it, how much resolution you actually need and on and on. And we can debate that forever. But how good a photo do you want versus how many can you store on your phone is kind of a forever question? Like, did Apple find the right middle there?

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think with the 24, it's not as big of a file size compromise as, as some people might have expected. If you're using the default HEIF mode, which I'm going to say HEIF.

• 20:59David Pierce?

  Which either is or is not pronounced HEIF, but we'll leave it alone for now.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  It's HEIF. I noticed that it's about like, uh, you know, if a JPEG is, or if a 12 megapixel image is two megabytes, a 24 is about three. That can vary. Uh, some, you know, photos, if they've got more detail in them and stuff like that can be larger. And so then the 24 megapixel will be larger. But when you go to 48 megapixel, it's double the 24. So that is like a significant difference and that will eat up your storage. And I don't think you actually gain much in terms of detail with the side by side comparisons I did between the 24 and the full size 48. You're not getting a lot there in terms of extra detail because these are such small sensors. But with 24 megapixels, you're moving past the 12, which we had been at since the iPhone's success. And you are getting

• 21:45Speaker 03

  a little bit more room to crop, maybe a little bit more room to digital zoom, as Alison mentioned, and a little bit more flexibility. But ultimately, you know, Apple likes to talk about how, oh, you could blow it up to a 20 inch by 30 inch poster and do all this stuff. And it's like, yeah, no. You're not going to do that. It's a phone photo. It's still going to look like it comes from a phone, but it gives you a little bit more cropping ability after the fact without really compromising storage that much. These phones all start at 128 gigabytes now, which is not a terrible starting point, especially if you're coming from an older one that had 64 gigs or getting twice as much storage. So you got more room for the photos and Apple would love to sell you iCloud plus storage, which it will do up to 12 terabytes a month now.

• 22:24David Pierce?

  It would, I mean, it would love to, like, like so much. It would make Tim Cook personally thrilled to sell you 12 terabytes of iCloud storage. Allison, you and I are both long-term anti-digital zoom zealots, I would say. I believe it is criminal to just stand there and pinch and zoom on the screen to make your photos worse. But you, in the process of reviewing the 15 Pro and Pro Max, seem to have found some kind of zen with the way that Apple is approaching this. Can you, can you explain this to me? How did you, why does it feel like this works for you?

• 22:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think part of it is in my head, when you're, when you're going to like a specific focal length and Apple is doing a little bit extra in the background with the processing, you know, it's not just, it's not just up-resing the image and calling it a day. There's a fair amount going on with like deep fusion and then incorporating some detail from a higher resolution frame, which is either the 48 or 24 megapixel if you're in the 35 millimeter crop. How much of that makes a big difference? I don't know, but it makes me feel better. I feel like at ease with the picture that I'm taking. And

• 23:42Speaker 04

  I think that's something that we're all going to have to get more comfy with going forward because even while you, you know, comparing it with the Samsung S23 Ultra, which has that 10x lens, you know, I'm going to 5x to compare it to the iPhone and that's not a native focal length that it has. It still looks better than the iPhone image, which is funny. So it just kind of changes how you have to think about like. Like letting the trusting the camera a little more and not being quite so picky about focal length.

• 24:16David Pierce?

  It is a weird thing. I mean, all of the process now is digital, like every step of the way. Computers are doing computer things. So I think I'm also slowly learning to let go of the idea that if I do it. At one X, it is capturing a photo as photos were meant to be captured. And everything else is like some computery lie. Like it's all kind of a computery lie at this point, right?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  It's an illusion.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  We've heard this from, I know Google, when it introduced its super res zoom feature. It kind of said similar things that like, if you were to use super res zoom before you take the photo, you will get a better image. Then if you just took the photo at the wide angle and digitally cropped it afterwards. Because they're, they're taking input from multiple frames and averaging them together and things like that. Whereas if you crop later. It is just a single frame that you have to work with. And Apple's doing a very similar type of thing here. Where it is averaging multiple frames, stacking them together. That's what. Deep fusion has been doing for a few years now. I think it's in there on like generation three or five of deep fusion, something like that. And then now they have the larger sensor that they can also pair higher resolution data from for detail. So.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  I know that like, when I go get an iPhone 15 Pro and start using it, I'm going to lock it on 35 millimeter and never look back.

• 25:30David Pierce?

  That was actually going to be my next question is like, what's the right default setup here? Cause the other part is.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Millimeter is the only correct focal length.

• 25:37David Pierce?

  So we, we shoot 24 megapixel heath images, 35 millimeter camera, victory forever.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Pro res log video.

• 25:47David Pierce?

  You can fit four photos on your phone and it's all over.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  If you want to be the cool street photographer, you shoot a 35 millimeter.

• 25:55David Pierce?

  There we go.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  That's true. That is proven.

• 25:57David Pierce?

  Asked and answered. Alright, so let's, let's do some like straightforward buying advice here. So Dan. Last year, it seems very clear that the people who wanted a 14 picked a 14 over a 14 plus. Is there any reason to believe that's not going to be the case again of the like entry phones? Do we think the 14 is probably the one for most people? The 15? Jesus Christ.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  So I, you know, I think last year with the 14 and the 14 plus was kind of a weird scenario. One, the 14 plus didn't come out for quite a few months afterwards. So it didn't, wasn't available at the same time. And then the 14 plus was like, if you want a big screen and a big battery and, and Allison's review last year, like she made the point like, this delivers on both of those things, but it was doing it at $900. And if you wanted a 14 Pro Max, it was only 200 bucks more. This year, the, not only is the 15 and 15 plus available at the same time. So you will be able to take advantage of all the same carrier promotions or whatever. You'll be in the store, you'll look at it, it's like, oh wow, this one actually is bigger. But it's also, it's still $900, but the bigger pro phone, the Pro Max has gone up in starting price $100.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  So now there's a $300 jump. And I think that starts to make it like, do I really need to go that much if I just want a big screen and a big battery? And I, I think that people will be making that calculus more and maybe it'll do better for the plus model. I, I could tell you that the plus model this year absolutely delivers on battery life. I had a horrific travel day coming back from WWDC. I was staring at the 15 plus all day long. I had like something like eight, nine hours of screen time and I got home at like 11 or 12 midnight. And I still had like 35% battery left left on it. That's pretty good. Like this thing just goes. And so for a lot of people, big screen, big battery is exactly what they want. And 15 plus delivers.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  I think if you are coming from a mini, which if you have a 12 mini, maybe you're getting around time to like needing a new phone. The iPhone 15 is obviously going to be much more attractive to you. It's smaller, it's lighter, fits in your hand easier and stuff like that. I think that's really the only practical option for anyone who wants a small iPhone at this point. And then the last point of consideration is as usual, Apple is selling last year's 14 and 14 plus for a hundred dollars less than the 15 and 15 plus this year. I think that this year, the things you get for the $100 more make it worthwhile to get the 15. Last year, we had the opposite conclusion. The 14 was not that much better than the 13, and you can still buy the 13 for a hundred bucks less. Go save your money. But this year, you get USB-C, which is a more convenient, flexible way to charge.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  You get the Dynamic Island, which is a more pleasant, fun user interface, and it's going to continue to get more utilized as we go forward. And you do get meaningful improvements on the camera. We didn't really talk too much about it, but I think that the automatic portrait mode is a thing that people will actually really like and use and get a lot of value out of, especially the average consumer buying the iPhone 15 or 15 Plus. So all of those things add up. I think they make it worthwhile to buy the 15 over the 14 this year. But if you have a 14, there's no reason to upgrade. There's probably not much of a reason to upgrade. But if you are on a 12 or 11 or older, then I think you get a lot here this year.

• 29:09David Pierce?

  The portrait mode thing is a good one. I knew there was something in the cool things in the camera list I was forgetting, and that's one. That's a big deal.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that like, you know, I observe my spouse taking pictures of our kids all the time, and she never switches to portrait mode or anything like that. She just snaps with the default camera. And now, if she had an iPhone 15 or 15 Pro, she can just do that. And then after the fact, I can go in the photos app and be like, oh, portrait mode, cool. And I can play with it and whatever and make it pop more. And I think that there's probably a lot of people who A, never realized that they could switch to portrait mode because it was an entirely different setting, or B, didn't remember how or didn't remember to do it in the moment when they're trying to capture the image, which is happening quickly in front of them.

• 29:50David Pierce?

  Because like Allison, they couldn't figure out how to get the button to work.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, just stuck on that home screen, the lock screen, yeah.

• 29:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. Okay, and then Allison, for you, the Pro versus the Pro Max. Again, screen and battery differences. Am I right in thinking that the 5X telephoto zoom is only on the Pro Max?

• 30:10Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 30:11David Pierce?

  Okay, so that's a big difference, too. Like, what, how would you rank between the two? Like, how should people choose which one to buy?

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it kind of throws all my usual like buying a new phone thinking out the window because I think there, you know, there is kind of a different customer for the Pro and the Pro Max and whether whether or not your current phone is working well is like less part of the equation. But I think, yeah, the five time zoom is nice. I get why it's only on the bigger phone. Google only puts it on its bigger phone. It's something I would consider going up to the bigger phone for, especially since it's a little bit lighter weight this year and it doesn't feel like such a burden carrying it around. But there's a lot to consider and I think some people are just gonna jump on, you know, the new

• 31:01Speaker 04

  Pro iPhone. And I think like as silly as the word Pro is and kind of meaningless now, I think there is a certain kind of person who like if if your phone is kind of a big part of like how you work, when you travel, you've got chargers for other things, or if you if you're a video creator and you can see yourself really, you know, using it more in your workflow, I think it does make sense for a I don't think pros are the word I would use, but it makes sense for a certain kind of person.

• 31:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like the iPhone 15 videographer.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:40David Pierce?

  If you if you shoot a lot of big files, you're the this might work. Yeah, extras. I like.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  We kind of like have these discussions every year, like, who is a person to buy a Pro over a standard iPhone? And like, ultimately, at the end of the day, Apple sells a ton of Pro phones. I think the reports from the 14 generation was like, if the iPhone 14 was like, single digit percentage more than the iPhone 14 Pro in terms of like numbers of people that bought it. So like, people will buy the more expensive phone, I think, because it's more expensive, but also because it's nicer. I think a lot of people see the three lenses on the back, whether it's 3X or 5X, and they see that like, hey, this does more. And and their carrier is willing to subsidize half the price anyways. So, you know, I think we'll see a lot of people buying the Pro models this year and then the 15 and the 15 plus.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Will be, you know, a much slower ramp up in terms of like interest and buying and people will buy them as their old phones break. But like the early adopter, the person who's upgrading every single year, they're, they're going to gravitate to the pro. Always. It's the exciting one. That's what I wrote in my review. It's like the regular 15 is never going to be the exciting. It's never going to be like the platform for new ideas or technologies. The pro is always going to be that. So if you want that, if you want to experience that, you're always going to go with the pro.

• 32:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's right. Um, all right. I'm gonna let you guys go here in a minute, but before I do, will you guys hang out and do a hotline question with me really fast?

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:01David Pierce?

  I think you're the right two people to help me answer this question. As a reminder, the hotline number is 866 VERGE11. Call, ask us all your tech questions. Uh, and you can email [email protected] if you don't want to call. But frankly, it's super fun when you call. It's nice to hear your voices. Uh, okay. Let's hear, Dan, I have been pestering you about this all day, so I expect good things from you, but here we go. Let me just play the question we have for you right now.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  Hey there, guys. My name is Jordan. I had a question about the, uh, new iPhone 15. Specifically how you could charge other iPhones by plugging in a USB C cable. Um, I know that if you do a USB C to Lightning, it will always charge the Lightning phone. And if you use the iPhone, it will kind of do like a handshake action and charge the lesser charged of the two. My question is, you know, it'll, it'll do like a 51% versus 50% and then the 51% will start charging that one or whatever. But what if you take like an iPhone Plus and you plug in, say, a USB C cable to another like standard iPhone 15?

• 34:07Speaker 05

  And they're both at like, you know, let's say the, the iPhone Plus is at like 45%, whereas the other one is at like 50%, right? So like the Plus technically has less battery percentage, but it has a bigger battery. What happens? Who wins that exchange? Does the Plus charge because it technically has more battery with which to charge? Or does the phone with the higher percentage win every time? Thanks and I love the show.

• 34:35David Pierce?

  Okay, so this is maybe the most Vergecasty hotline question we have ever received.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  I was gonna say.

• 34:40David Pierce?

  I love it so much.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  I have an answer.

• 34:42David Pierce?

  Dan, I have been making you plug things into other things all day.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  I've been also running down batteries to try and get the levels right or whatever. So.

• 34:50David Pierce?

  Tell me what you know so far.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  So what I know so far is, uh, he's correct that if you plug in a Lightning iPhone to a USB-C iPhone, the USB-C one will always send power to the Lightning iPhone. The Lightning does not work the other direction.

• 35:04David Pierce?

  And also AirPods and watches, which is like the thing it's ostensibly meant for, is to charge your small devices.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. AirPods and watches, it will charge those devices. They will not reverse charge the phone. But right now, I've got the iPhone 15 Plus, which is at 75% battery, and I've got the iPhone 15, which is at 96% battery. And I plug them in together with my USB-C cable, and the iPhone 15 is charging the 15 Plus.

• 35:29David Pierce?

  Whoa.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  So the theory is, which everyone has the lowest amount of battery percentage on its meter, even if the real-life capacity is still more than the 15, uh, seems to be the way that the power goes. Uh, USB-C is kinda weird. You can kind of like sometimes unplug them and replug them, and it will do its handshake again and like switch roles with other USB-C devices. But with the iPhones, at least, it seems to be consistently happening that the one with the larger battery percentage charges the one with the lower battery percentage. So if you wanted to be a real mensch with your iPhone 15, and you've got a buddy who's got an iPhone 15 Plus or Pro Max or whatever, and you wanna give them your battery and give them some juice, and they will just suck all the life out of your phone

• 36:14Speaker 03

  to power up their big battery cells, you could do that. But it does do this at a pretty slow wattage. It's 4.5 watt, which is slower than slow wireless charging. So you're not gonna be charging all that quickly, but I guess if you, you know, really are in a pinch, you can do it. Uh, I tried some other devices. The MacBook will always charge the phone. The MacBook could have like no power, and it will still try to charge your phone. I plugged the iPhone 15 Plus into a Lightning iPad, and what happened was the. Lightning iPad would start charging for a second and then it would say not charging because I think it's just not enough wattage. I plugged the 15 plus into a Windows tablet thing and it would give enough juice to wake

• 36:57Speaker 03

  the Windows tablet up and then it would try to charge your iPhone. So for the most part, you're not really charging larger devices with this. Aside from the fact that you can charge the bigger iPhone with the smaller iPhone, which is kind of hilarious.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  If your friend with a 15 plus asks you to charge up their phone, that's not a good friend.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, where did they go wrong in their, in their managed life management where they need, they didn't charge their phone that gets massive battery life.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:25David Pierce?

  Real friends charge their own phone.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's their problem.

• 37:30David Pierce?

  I don't know. Good friends charge their own phone, but best friends charge everybody's phone. That's what I always say.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Maybe.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  The other weird thing you can do while we're on the topic is let me just see if this actually works. I've got a MagSafe charger here. I'm going to put the phone on the MagSafe charger and watch it start charging. And then I'm going to plug it into another phone through a USB C cable and everybody charges. So you could daisy chain.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 37:58David Pierce?

  Oh, that's it. That's kind of rad.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I assume this is going to stop charging when it like overheats, but yeah.

• 38:04David Pierce?

  All of these things are like use cases that don't exist, but I think it's delightful nonetheless.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  This is the, the potential of USB C, the power of USB C that we've been missing with the iPhone for however many years.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  It's here.

• 38:17David Pierce?

  I love it. All right. Well, listen, I hope that helps. USB C is very confusing. And if we figure out the actual logic behind all of this, we'll be sure and let you know. But for now, go charge your friends iPhones. Be a good friend. All right. Thank you both. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about the Apple Watch.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 39:39David Pierce?

  Welcome back. The iPhones aren't the only new Apple devices coming out this week. There's also the new Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. The Verge's Victoria Song, our resident wearer of many fitness watches simultaneously, reviewed them both, and she's been using the new watchOS 10 software for a while as well. Vee and I haven't talked about this yet, but I have a feeling the software is actually the real story of the Apple Watch this year. But let's see if I'm right or not. Vee is with me here now. Hi, Vee.

• 40:07Speaker 06

  Hello.

• 40:08David Pierce?

  Dan Seifert's still here. Hi, Dan.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  How you doing?

• 40:10David Pierce?

  Just can't get rid of you this week.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm a cockroach.

• 40:14David Pierce?

  Okay, so my overarching thesis, Vee, about these new watches, and I am curious to hear if I'm right, is that the software this year is significantly more interesting than the hardware this year.

• 40:26Speaker 06

  100,000%. Like, the, well, okay, 100, maybe like 999,000.

• 40:33Speaker 06

  Like that 1% is that so like if we're talking about hardware, the one little tiny stumble in your theory is the S9 SIP that enables all the interesting software updates. So it's still software.

• 40:48David Pierce?

  Explain what that what that actually means in practice.

• 40:51Speaker 06

  Uh, so the S9 SIP is the first, let's say, major, in scare quotes, a major processor update that the Apple Watch has had in a very long time because so far it the last few years, it's been a rebadged version of the processor from the year before. No real meaningful changes in terms of like features that it enables. But this year it's actually got a 30% faster CPU and a four core neural engine that, you know, that enables the double tap feature. It enables a smarter Siri, smarter in the sense that it works offline now and

• 41:29Speaker 06

  is supposedly 25% more accurate at dictation. And the screens are brighter. Yay, because better power efficiency, but they're not going to give you better battery life for that power efficiency. They're going to reinvest it into brighter screens.

• 41:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is the thing I wish Apple would stop doing. Like, I actually think on most of Apple's devices, it's the right call, especially with the MacBooks. I think we've reached a point where like the battery life is terrific. Sacrificing a bunch of stuff to get me like a few more hours, I'm not sure is all that meaningful. I think especially with the entry level watch, in this case, the Series 9, I would take small trade offs to get like six more hours of battery life out of the thing. It's the only device of mine that reliably consistently dies at this point.

• 42:14Speaker 06

  Oh, God, David, you just opened the can of worms, which is to say that there are two camps with regards to the Apple Watch and their battery life. There's the camp that's like, Don't even look at me in the face until this Apple Watch can last a week. How dare you come back to me after yet another year with 18 hours of battery life? I spit, I spit on your grave, Patouille. There's that crowd. And then there's the other crowd, which I think Dan belongs to this crowd, which is like, I have my little charging routine. My Apple Watch is never out of battery. You've charged your phone every night. It's not that hard to just plop your Apple Watch on a charger at like a time when you're not using it,

• 42:58Speaker 06

  like the shower or 10 minutes before bed. Why are you complaining so hard?

• 43:03Speaker 03

  I will just state in my own defense, I would love to not have to have the routine. I just happen to have the routine out of necessity.

• 43:11David Pierce?

  Can I tell you my problem with this routine? The, the correct time you just said it, V, to charge your watch is while you're in the shower. And there's something about having a charger in the bathroom that I just can't, I can't do it. Maybe it's the specifics of my bathroom. I don't, we don't have to talk a lot about what my bathroom looks like, but the idea of just like having a cable dangling in my bathroom, waiting for my Apple Watch is just like a bridge too far for me. I can't do it.

• 43:36Speaker 06

  You, you could just put it in your bedroom and just go back to your bedroom after.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  David, David is in a mansion. His bedroom and his bathroom are like four football fields.

• 43:46David Pierce?

  They're in separate wings.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  He's gonna miss all those steps.

• 43:48David Pierce?

  Who has the time? I know. No, my real problem is I forget to take it off until I'm already in the shower. And then I just kind of like huck it over to the sink and that's my charging strategy. But the actual features here, you basically named the three things I want to talk about. And it seems like from a pure hardware perspective, they're so similar that you couldn't tell which watch was which. Right? Like you had the Ultra and the Ultra 2, and they're the same damn thing as far as like what the actual thing looks and feels like, right?

• 44:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I, like I've told this story before, uh, but when I was at Apple Park and I had my Ultra out and I was, you know, taking comparison photos, like this representative, very well meaning, comes up to me, she's like, Can you put your Ultra away? We wouldn't want you to lose it. And that's because it looks exactly the same. I've actually had to have a code this week when I'm switching straps. I'm where I say out loud, the Ultra is the one with the gray strap. The Ultra 2 is the one with the pink strap. And like I've, I've basically been keeping the new ones in pink because pink is what's new.

• 44:51David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 44:52Speaker 06

  And I had to do that because even the back crystal doesn't say Ultra 2. It says Ultra. So there's really no way to tell unless I like, I have terrible eyesight. If you read my reviews, you know, I complain about readability all the time. But I basically have to take the original Ultra straight up to my face and go, which one has that minuscule nick that I got one time? Only I know where it is. And that's how I tell the Ultra and the Ultra 2 apart as far as my review units go.

• 45:21David Pierce?

  Okay, good. So we can just leave the hardware aside because it is what it is. The double tap seems like the thing, right? Like it's the thing Apple talked the most about. This feature has like been around for a while in some accessibility ways. Like just walk me through kind of how this thing like fits into your life as a watch wearer.

• 45:38Speaker 06

  So I actually think this is potentially one of the most significant updates just that Apple's ever put out. But it's just not flashy, right? First of all, it's in some capacity, it's been around since watch OS 8 and assistive touch. Right now, that tech is just being repurposed in a more general use capacity. It's supposedly it's built into the system, so it's more contextual. You don't have to do anything. Whereas with assistive touch, you have to go into the accessibility settings. You have to enable it and you have to program it. Because for some people with limb differences, this is the only possible way for them to control the watch. It's how they're going to navigate menus. It's how they're going to operate the digital crown.

• 46:20Speaker 06

  If they have an Ultra, it's how they're going to press the action button. So it's, it's much more comprehensive and there's more gestures involved. There's a clutch gesture, there's a single tap gesture. There's, there's, there's four actual gestures that you do with assistive touch. But double tap is just the double tap, or more accurately, the pinchy pinch.

• 46:40David Pierce?

  The pinchy pinch.

• 46:41Speaker 06

  The pinching motion. Uh, and. You basically use it to control the primary function of an app. And what that means is, say you get a phone call, you pinchy pinch, it's going to answer the phone call. When you're like, I'm done with you, I'm going to hang up in a rage. Then you pinchy pinch again, and then it hangs up.

• 46:59David Pierce?

  Can you rage pinchy pinch? I'm not sure you can rage pinchy pinch.

• 47:02Speaker 06

  You can rage pinchy pinch. You just do it really aggressively, like you're an angry lobster. You just go.

• 47:08David Pierce?

  Ah, I like it.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  I can't wait to see the Wall Street bros in, out on the street, just screaming at their assistant and then really violently pinching to hang up at them.

• 47:19David Pierce?

  I feel like you need to wear like castanets so that it like makes a loud noise when you pinchy pinch. That's how you really get your feelings across.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:27David Pierce?

  So that, that thing you just described actually is one of the questions I have about watchOS 10. Cause that, that idea that it's like the primary thing makes obvious sense to me in some ways, right? Like it's a, it, it should pause my music if my music is playing. But there are other ways where what is the primary thing I'm supposed to do with the tap here? Is substantially less obvious and you're, you're nodding like that has been true in practice. Has that been true in practice?

• 47:51Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, it absolutely has. And you know, Apple acknowledges this to an extent because there are two circumstances where you can customize what the pinch does. So that first is, as you mentioned, music playback. So you can do it and it can pause or it can play your, your music. But I actually, that's not intuitively what I would want it to do. What I would want it to do is skip a track and you can, you know, edit it so that it skips a track. So I was just in the car the other day driving and I was like, no, not this. Nope, not this. Nope, not this. I'm just pinching while I'm driving. And that's kind of actually safer than me reaching over to the car infotainment and just trying to flip through that way.

• 48:34Speaker 06

  So that's, that's one way you can customize it. The other way you can customize it, and it has to do with Apple intuiting what you want is the smart stack. So the smart stack is new with watchOS 10 because it's widgets just everywhere in watchOS 10. And the smart stack, you can either double pinch to scroll through your smart stack, or you can double pinch to select the first stack and only the first stack. And you know, Apple's like, if they do their job right, and if they anticipate which widget you need at the right time of day, so that whenever you bring up your widgets, you just want to pick the first one there, you can pinch and select it. Which to me, I'm like, wow, that's, that's almost never.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  But in order to bring up the widgets, you have to scroll the digital crown or swipe up on the screen. So you're already.

• 49:24Speaker 06

  You can pinch. So you just wake it up, pinch, brings up the widgets. And then the second pinch will either scroll through or select that first top one. So for me, testing, that's been a nightmare because the first one that pops up has been the tips thing that I just can't get to go away, which goes away after a while. But it's like, I don't need these tips. So I can't actually use that particular function. But those are the only two ways you can customize it. And for me with messages, like say I get a text, you pinchy pinch, and it'll bring up the voice message reply. Makes sense. That makes total sense if you're just trying to keep things hands free or single handed. For me though, I want to scroll through my quick replies and select one.

• 50:09Speaker 06

  I would love to do that, but that's kind of hard because pinching to scroll through your quick replies and then pausing and then pinching again to select it kind of is something that has to be a lot more intuitive. You can do that in assistive touch, but you can't really do that with the double tap. But that is what I wish I could do with it.

• 50:28David Pierce?

  Dan, you and I are both sickos for customization, I would say, as a, as a general rule. This strikes me as the kind of thing I would want tons of control over. Like I should be able to decide in every single app what the double tap does.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Well, I think we should, we should clarify that it does nothing in third party apps.

• 50:47David Pierce?

  Wait, is that, oh, okay. So developers can do it, they just haven't yet.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  No, they actually can't.

• 50:52David Pierce?

  What?

• 50:53Speaker 03

  V, correct me if I get this wrong. Developers can interact with double tap through notifications. So basically, if you get a notification in and you double tap, it will do what is like the default action on that notification. And developers can define that default action. So if you've got a notification that's like an email and the default action is a delete, you can double tap to delete it, or you can double tap to reply to a message if it's in WhatsApp or something outside of Apple's messages. But if you are in a third-party app, double tap doesn't do anything. Is that correct, V?

• 51:21Speaker 06

  Well, so far, I think, I think you're right. I haven't been able to use it with any third-party app right now, but this is also just like the first implementation of it. I imagine there's going to be a lot of trial and error as people use this for the first time. I could see, I could see ways, ways down that third-party apps will eventually get some ability to do it. But the problem really is that this is supposed to be contextual and intuitive. So you're having people, you're basically trying to mind read what people are going to try and pinch for. And it's funny because, you know, I have a beta version with this enabled. There's no explanation on my version.

• 52:03Speaker 06

  I imagine there will be some short walkthrough in like the Tips app when Apple releases this to the public. But there's no real explanation of what apps this works with and what it'll do within those apps. You just kind of have to go into the app and start like pinching like a weirdo and seeing what it does. And there's a little gliff or an icon that appears that shows you that you've just done it. And when you can't have any double tap gesture, it'll just like do a little shake. That's like, nah, can't do it. So I've just been like this past few days, just sitting there, just going like, oh, does this, does this work? Pinch, pinch. Oh, no. Okay, can't do that. Does this work? Pinch, pinch. Oh, no, can't do that.

• 52:45Speaker 06

  So it can be really intuitive and also weirdly frustrating because you don't know when you're going to run up against the wall of the pinch not working. Like timers is the other example I'm going to use. If you have Talk2Siri and you have it's, you have a timer going and that timer app is front and center, when you do the, the double tap, it'll pause the timer. And then you can, you know, restart the timer. And when it ends, you can close the timer. I want, what if I want a timer to restart? I have several like Pomodoro method nonsense where I just want to restart a timer as soon as it's done. Can't do that. I actually have to go and figure out whether I'm going to ask Siri to set another timer, or whether I'm going to go in manually and set that timer. So that's annoying.

• 53:30Speaker 06

  And then also, if the the the timer app goes away, it's not front and center, then no amount of pinching you're going to do is really going to change anything until it goes off. So if you want to pause the the timer while the timer app is not front and center, you can't do anything. So it's sort of like, that's weirdly annoying for me. I don't know if it'll be weirdly annoying for everyone.

• 53:51David Pierce?

  It just strikes me as a classic Apple kind of being too clever by half thing. And like, the thing it got really right with the action button was it was just like, just do, just do whatever you want. Like, here's some options, we have some ideas, just do, just... Action, action button on the phone. Let's, let's clarify. No, you're, that's absolutely right. With the action button in the iPhone 15, which we were just talking about, that you have some control over and there's a cool interface for it. And they're like, this will work. This is the equivalent of if they had taken the action button on the phone and been like, in every app, it will do the thing we think it should do. It's like, Apple, like, sometimes that thing is obvious. If I open the camera app on my iPhone, it should be the shutter button, and it is, and that kicks ass. Sometimes I want it to do something, and I should be able to make it do that thing. And I feel

• 54:34David Pierce?

  like so many times with the watch, Apple is like, this is a small screen, people don't want to spend too much time on it, we have to do all the work magically for them. And sometimes it works, and way too often, I feel like it doesn't. And speaking of things that way too often don't work, Siri is the other thing I was curious about, because Apple made a bunch of noise about Siri being offline and working on device, which, if it is successful, is a huge deal for the watch, right? Like, it opens up all kinds of things you can do if you don't have a cellular device, if you're out in the world doing stuff, like, potentially a big deal. What have you seen so far?

• 55:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, it works. It just works. Like...

• 55:09David Pierce?

  Okay, wait, hold on, hold on. Do you want to be on the record saying Siri works? I just like, I just want to be so clear about what you just said.

• 55:15Speaker 06

  I'm getting into caveats. Just give me a second to get into the butt of this here. So, you know, it does now work if you don't have your phone and you're not in any kind of internet connection. So like, your laundry room is in your basement, you left your phone upstairs, your hands are tied up, and you want to set the stupid laundry timer so that you know when to go get your laundry. Now you can say like, hey, set this timer and it'll do it, which feels like a thing that it should have been able to do already.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  This happened to me, by the way, literally this morning. I was doing daycare drop off with my kid, needed to remind myself to do something. Had I had left my phone at home and my watch just was useless to me.

• 55:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Like this very simple, basic thing that it ought to be able to do, it couldn't do.

• 56:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, it can do that now. Pretty reliably, um, I turned airplane mode on my phone and the watch on. And made sure that there was no wifi connection still. And it was, it was able to do stuff. It was even able to pull weather updates because it had pulled that already. It may not have been the most accurate weather update at that point in time, but it was able to like, give me an update, which I had not been expecting. Because as I understand it, if it needs to pull some sort of data from the internet, it still needs the internet connection. It's more so that you can do tasks like, oh, uh, set a timer or I guess in my case, set a workout like.

• 56:41Speaker 06

  I don't know if you're in the trails of, of like Missouri somewhere where there's no any kind of internet connection and your phone doesn't even have an internet connection. Well, now you can hands-free set a workout, which there is a use case for that, but I think for most people, that's not a thing that they've necessarily thought to do. But it can do it now. So yay, huzzah.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  I've had the opportunity to test the new Siri as well. I, I haven't, my demo unit doesn't have the double tap, but I do have the new Siri. And I think the thing that is actually impactful is for me at least, when I'm outside on the grill, I set timers for how long to keep, leave the burgers on before I need to flip them or whatever. And because I'm like on the edge of my wifi network, it like, I will watch the, I will do the, the command and watch the watch figure itself out. And so, but with the series nine, I was able to just say, set a timer for five minutes and it just did it. And so like, I think those are like more practical use cases for where this better improved on-device Siri is going to make an impact. I will add that this new Siri doesn't do anything that the old Siri couldn't do. So it's not like Siri gets smarter or more capable.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  It's just, it works better at the things that it could already do because it doesn't have to send your voice command out to the internet, transcribe it and bring it back down to the watch.

• 57:54David Pierce?

  My biggest issue with Siri on the watch has always been that it it seems to just fail completely a lot more often than Siri elsewhere. With really basic things like trying to set a reminder or add something to my calendar or set a timer even. It much more often does the thing where it thinks and then it still thinks and then nothing happens. And my assumption has always been that's because of this sort of like daisy chain of connections it's having to do in order to get the information back to the watch. Have you noticed that being any better on the watch because it's able to run locally? I would think it would just be able to do more things more reliably.

• 58:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, it has been more reliable for me, except with understanding me. That is just the same level of, you know, like it's better. Like it can finally understand Mahershala Ali's name, which I've been using for years as a litmus test.

• 58:43David Pierce?

  Progress, okay.

• 58:45Speaker 06

  Understand me and, you know, it's gotten better over the years. Like four or five years ago, it was just like Herschel Walker. And it's like, no, that's that's not what I said.

• 58:53David Pierce?

  It's a different guy.

• 58:54Speaker 06

  Completely different name. But, you know, I I live in a community where it's mixed language. I have to communicate with people with names that are not English. And with that respect, it is still not great. Like I was, I was messaging my friend and I was like, oh, new K-pop album come out. Do Kyung Seo, we love him. And it's like, Joe Fang Fu or something like that. It was like, no, that's not his name. That's not how it works. Okay, we we still have to do the thing where when I'm messaging my friends and with like Korean loan words, where I have to go like bullgogi for it to understand me and it for it to be clear and not to be ridiculous. And we had a lot of fun testing the dictation.

• 59:40Speaker 06

  Our video producer had me rap alphabet aerobics. And that was certainly a time. I did a bunch of tongue twisters about Betty Botter and her bitter butter and her better butter and buying them and. For the most part, I want to say both my S8 powered Ultra and the S9 powered Series 9 kind of overall did about the same in terms of accuracy.

• 1:00:05David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:00:05Speaker 06

  So I don't know if that's just me and the way I pronounce. And as Owen says, wow, you talk fast. So I'm not sure if I'm like having issues because I'm in an edge case of people who talk at the speed of New York, but it's, it's, it's better, just not so much better that if you upgraded now, you'd be like, oh my God, they finally fixed Siri, that kind of thing.

• 1:00:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, that tracks. So full takeaway here, like, it seems to me that if you bought a watch in the last couple of years, you're gonna get WatchOS 10. Is DoubleTap coming to these other devices or is that only in the new stuff? Okay.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  That is only on the new watches, along with the precision finding. Those are only on the new watches. And as far as I understand it, it's because, you know, some people have been like, why assistive touch works on the older watches? Why won't DoubleTap work on those watches? And it's because assistive touch is powered on the CPU directly. It's very power intensive. DoubleTap is powered by the neural engine, so it can be offloaded a bit and is a lot more power efficient and can run in the background. That's, that's the line they're giving all of us. So I, I like my interpretation is if they were to put DoubleTap on the older watches, your battery life would be even more in the toilet than it currently is. So basically in

• 1:01:23Speaker 06

  my review, I say if you have a Series 7, 8, or an original Ultra, cool your jets, contribute to Apple's carbon neutral plans and don't buy yourself a new watch.

• 1:01:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, it seems like even if DoubleTap is like really meaningful to you, waiting a year for like developers to figure it out and the feature will get better, seems like the move. Dan, you're nodding. Like you, you agree with me.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think in a year, DoubleTap will be more useful. Uh, maybe Apple will have opened it up to third party developers in a more meaningful way. Maybe we'll have other gestures arriving that like use the same kind of concept and logic that allows you to do this thing for now. If you have the new watches, you get the new watches, it's neat. But I think V would agree that it's not a like absolute must have feature.

• 1:02:08Speaker 06

  No, and you can you can experiment if you have a seven or eight with assistive touch to see whether gesture control is something you even like. Because if you're like, oh, this whatever, I'm not passionate about this, then you really don't need. You have like empirical evidence that you don't need to update just for double tap. I will say that going forward, I think the combination of rearranging the watch to be very widget centric and double tap kind of is like a fundamental groundwork that they're laying to change the way that we interact with the device.

• 1:02:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  So it's weird because on that one hand, I'm seeing that and I'm and I like, I'm like, oh, I see what you're doing. I see what you're doing. You are changing how we fundamentally interact with these devices, but you're doing it in a way where it's like, oh, what if I left this book of secrets out on this table? Who is curious enough to come and read this book of secrets? And let's see what they do with that. And they're in the bushes somewhere in the back with their little binoculars going, what are they doing? That's kind of what this is. They're they're laying some very important groundwork to change the Apple Watch to be a single handed device, much in the way that, you know, Dan pointed this out, to be more like the iPhone, which is a, you know, if you get it in the right size, everyone will agree that it is a single handed device.

• 1:03:25Speaker 06

  And you're making it so that it's much more different. It's not just a mini phone on your wrist because the way that these new apps have been redesigned and that the way the widget stack works on the Apple Watch, you don't need quite as much of your phone because there is a lot of information that's glanceable and a lot of information that you can operate with one hand now. And that's not something that you've really been able to do before. So I think once this gets refined going forward, maybe, I don't want to say for the 10, but maybe the 11 or the 12, I don't think we'll be using these watches in the same way that we currently do.

• 1:04:02David Pierce?

  I like it. All right. Thank you both. We got to take one more break and then we're going to switch things up a little bit and talk about how we take these devices, which millions or tens of millions or billions of people buy and make them feel a lot more like ours. We'll be right back.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:05:26David Pierce?

  Welcome back. One of the things I like about this time of year is that it ends up being phone cleaning time. It's like spring cleaning in the spring, phone cleaning in the fall. Particularly if you're an iPhone user, this is the time of year you probably get some new software with some new features, some new widgets, a bunch of weird new gestures and interaction ideas. And it's just a fun moment to kind of take stock of how you use your phone, which apps get a spot on your home screen, all that good stuff. This year's iOS, iOS 17, brings one of the biggest changes in a while, which is one we've already been talking about in this episode: interactive widgets. Instead of widgets just being things you look at, they're now things you can do. And widgets are actually a big feature

• 1:06:11David Pierce?

  of pretty much all of Apple's new software this year. The Apple Watch got a redesign with WatchOS 10, so it's basically now just a clock and a bunch of widgets. macOS is getting widgets with Sonoma. The iPad got widgets on the lock screen. It's just widgets all the way down, y'all. It's great. Oh, and I should say, before we get too far into this, if you're yelling at your podcast player right now, "Android did it first", please know that I know, and I'm with you. And Android widgets have been way better than iOS widgets for years. That is absolutely true. But this is new for the iPhone users. So, you know, let them have this one. Anyway, as all of this has been coming out, I've been trying to figure out not just which widgets I want to use, but how to think about widgets and how widgets work across all of these devices.

• 1:06:56David Pierce?

  Just on the iPhone, you have home screen widgets and lock screen widgets. There's the dynamic island, there's live activities. There's just a lot of different ways that information moves around the iPhone, and it can be kind of confusing. So to figure it out, I decided to call up the expert, David Smith.

• 1:07:13Speaker 07

  Apple added widgets, and it was great. And they worked, and it didn't have any negative impacts. It was only positive ones.

• 1:07:19David Pierce?

  David makes an app called WidgetSmith that is probably the most powerful and most successful widget-making app on the planet. It was a massive hit when it first came out in 2020, which you might remember was iOS 14, which was when home screen widgets came to the iPhone for the first time. This year, for iOS 17, he's got a big update to WidgetSmith with a bunch of really cool, interactive widgets. You can now scroll the weather on your home screen. There's a way to flip through your music, like the Cover Flow thing that used to be in the iPod. It's just delightful. David knows how widgets work better than just about anybody, and I think he understands how Apple thinks about them too, which is really helpful. So I called him up and asked him all of my questions, starting with the most burning one, oddly enough.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  Is it as surprising to you as it is to me that people love widgets this much?

• 1:08:08Speaker 07

  Yes. I mean, I think, I mean, I don't know if I really expected widgets to be as big as they were when I started getting into the widget business. Like WidgetSmith was not something that I expected it to ever be, this massive app that kind of had a viral moment and like took over the world for a few weeks. And like, it was, like, I did not expect that at all. I think I was excited about widgets when they first came out, but it was, I definitely had no expectation for just how much, like, pent-up demand there is for that kind of thing, that people really want that kind of interaction and that kind of experience. And so, yeah, I mean, it definitely feels like, oh, and it just keeps coming. Like, this year, I think, other than Apple TV, widgets are everywhere on Apple's platforms now. It's really true. So it was definitely like, okay, well, I guess next year I know what to expect. You know, somehow it's gonna be widgets on Apple TV, because it just, you know, completes the set.

• 1:08:53Speaker 07

  But yeah, it's a little wild.

• 1:08:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, I have to say, I didn't- Did not expect WidgetSmith to get as big as it did either. I I sort of put it in the like shortcuts bucket at first where it's like, this is a cool thing. It's a little, you know, fiddly and finicky, and there's a lot of people who like that, but this is not necessarily going to be sort of a mainstream thing. But the number of people who, even in the early days, were like willing to do the work to make a photo widget that looked nice on their home screen was just like orders of magnitude bigger than I would have expected. It was wild. The customization people started doing is the minute they were able to do it. And the amount of work that they would put in to do it just kind of blew my mind from the very beginning. And I've like not really forgotten that lesson since then.

• 1:09:36Speaker 07

  I mean, it certainly helped that it launched in 2020, when I think there was a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands to sort of to work on that level. But yeah, like the amount that people care about how what their home screen looks like is dramatic. It's like there's a meaningful thing that people really care about. You know, how what exactly what their home screen looks like, whether what colors it is, what fonts it is, the layout of it, and they're willing to put in the effort to to make that happen. And so, yeah, it's like, I definitely, when I launched WidgetSmith, I think very much shortcuts is a great analogy that I was like, oh, this is a cool niche feature for like, you know, sort of power user kind of people who enjoy really, you know, sort of tweaking and fiddling with things. And it turned out, actually, no, it's everyone.

• 1:10:13Speaker 07

  And, you know, it's like middle school kids through like, you know, retirees who are all just, they just want to have, you know, this device that they spend so much of their day looking at. They just want it to be exactly the way they want it. And WidgetSmith was, I guess, turned out to be the tool that helps them accomplish that.

• 1:10:30David Pierce?

  I am curious how you've, like, over the last three years, I've even had trouble thinking about where information kind of lives on your phone. First, it was just widgets, and then it was lock screen widgets, and then it was live activities, and then it was the dynamic island. And we've gotten to this point where it's like, how I define a widget gets more complicated over time. And you've kind of tentacled out into some of those things too. Like, do you have a really good sort of mental picture of how all of that stuff works and fits together and makes sense?

• 1:11:00Speaker 07

  Sure. I mean, I think at its core, widgets are about taking little Bits of an app and exporting them outside of the app itself.

• 1:11:09David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:11:10Speaker 07

  And I think depending on what kind of experience you're trying to pull out of the app, those different locations, whether it's a home screen widget, a lock screen widget, whether it's a live activity or a live activity in the dynamic island. But what makes sense in each of those places is going to be very different. If it's something that is like just showing the temperature, for example, is a great lock screen widget. It's something that's small, concise, useful and very glensible. It's not something that you need, you know, it's just, you just want to know how hot it is outside. In the same way that we put the time on our lock screen and we all got rid of our watches. And so like that kind of data was great on the lock screen. But I think home screen is to gets into this, you start to get into a place where it's like, well, do I want a bit more? Can I, you know, have a lot more space? I can be like, have a bit more there.

• 1:11:55Speaker 07

  And is it allowing me to get the data that I want out of an app without having to go into that app? And then live activities and the dynamic island, it tends to be much more of the sense of, is there data that is, that is changing in a very real time way? Which doesn't really lend itself to the other forms because of the performance limitations that Apple puts on the other types of widget. Those widgets, you know, the home screen and lock screen widgets are static essentially. I mean, there's interactivity we have this year, but fundamentally they are showing a snapshot of data. And so if it's updating in real time, they are not the right place for that. And so instead, Apple made this other place where you have these temporary experiences that are widgets that are given special permission to update very regularly.

• 1:12:39Speaker 07

  You know, you're updating a few times, you know, it's like every few seconds rather than every few minutes. And that I think is sort of generally the way that I think about these sort of this hierarchy of different widget experiences we have now, that they sort of go from the small to the large and then from the kind of real time to the just sort of static. And where you are on the sort of on those, on those axes determines which one of those widget types you're going to be in. But there's definitely more and more places that were sort of, our widgets are being put because they're catering to different needs or to different sort of user desires.

• 1:13:11David Pierce?

  That's really helpful perspective, actually, because I will say as a, as a user who does not Understand the sort of performance capabilities of each one. The distinction between kind of what's allowed to refresh constantly and what isn't never really made a lot of sense to me. And I think the thing that has been the hardest for me is to figure out the difference between like a very good home screen widget and let's say a live activity.

• 1:13:33Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:13:34David Pierce?

  Because to me, those should, those should just be the same thing. And I get that they're not, and I get that there are sort of artificial reasons that they can't be. But the idea of having something that is like, why can't I run a, I don't know, FaceTime call from a widget on my home screen? Like, that seems like a thing that maybe should exist in the world. I don't know if that's a good idea or not. But it's just interesting that there are those kind of artificial limitations put on each one to make that hierarchy. And when you understand it like that, that hierarchy does kind of make sense. Even though as a user, I'm kind of like, just, just like, let me, I just want to be able to hit a thing and just say, update this. Like, like the thing you can do with your email inbox where you decide how often it pulls or just have it push whenever there's new stuff. Like, I kind of want that in all my widgets too, even if it crushes my battery life.

• 1:14:17Speaker 07

  Sure. I mean, I think this is an area that I think is very, has been a fascinating sort of timeline with Apple. Because widgets originally, the first version of widgets was the Today View screen that they added back in, I can't remember, much older versions of iOS. And that was actually something more akin to a fully running app that was running. Like, when you looked at your Today View, that app was running and it could do all kinds of real time things and could be

• 1:14:43David Pierce?

  That's true, yeah.

• 1:14:43Speaker 07

  Much more lively and interactive and you could have buttons and you could do all these things. But in order to do that, Apple had to like, put it somewhere to the side so that it wasn't running all the time, that it was only running if you swiped over to, you know, to the left of your home screen. But that also meant that it wasn't nearly as useful because you had to go and find it in order to do it. And, you know, the reason they did that is of course, is, you know, is performance and battery. That it's, whenever, if you allow an app to run all the time, inevitably, bad things are going to happen. In terms of there's security issues, there's battery life issues, there's, is it interacting with other, you know, other apps that are running on the, on your phone issues? And so I think very wisely in many ways, what Apple instead did is they built the, you know, the standard widgets that you see are just a

• 1:15:25Speaker 07

  They're a very clever snapshot, but almost just like a picture that my app will generate and send over to iOS. And then iOS can show that that picture and it doesn't cost them anything. There's no performance hit. You know, I can display a widget on your home screen all day and it isn't costing you any more battery life than if you've just had a collection of apps, app icons there. And I think that sort of is the cleverness that behind what they did, they've done by doing that. But yeah, it creates this weird tension between like, well, why isn't it an app? Well, it's like, if we gave you what you want and let you run a full app inside of a widget, then your overall experience of your phone will be worse. Because inevitably it's going to be draining on your device in a way that isn't actually getting you.

• 1:16:09Speaker 07

  You know, you're not getting enough utility to justify the battery drain and performance hit that you're getting. And so instead they're taking this very incremental approach and saying it's like, well, we're going to do the snapshot approach. We are, we're going to do live activities where it's like they're special and time bound and they're live in a special place. And even there, the technology that they're using to do those is similarly based on snapshots and clever things. A live activity isn't a live app that's running all the time. It's just an app that's given permission to refresh itself very regularly.

• 1:16:36David Pierce?

  I see. Okay.

• 1:16:37Speaker 07

  Rather than something that is actually like a window into the application itself. And then similarly with interactivity, they did the same exact thing where instead they're just saying, if a user pushes on a particular part of a widget, you get a guaranteed refresh instantly. So you can respond to the user's interaction and it feels like you're interacting with an app. But actually you're, it's just a very special way to say, give me the next snapshot, give me the next snapshot. And as a result, it's super performant because the last time you hit that button, the last time it generates that snapshot, it's done. And all the work is done and it'll be go back to immediately using zero battery and impacting your, you know, your device at all from that point on goes immediately to zero. And so I think it's a very clever approach in that regard technically.

• 1:17:22Speaker 07

  And it's just a very, it means that there's these weird distinctions users have to sort of navigate. But overall, it means that I think widgets can be used everywhere. And the story wasn't Apple added widgets and then my battery was toast. It's like Apple added widgets and it was great and they worked and it didn't have any negative impacts. It was only positive ones.

• 1:17:41David Pierce?

  That makes sense. So yeah, is you've been goofing around with interactivity. I've been using some of the stuff you found in WidgetSmith. What do you make of it so far? Like, did they, does that balance feel right?

• 1:17:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think the balance that we've struck right now with interactivity, I think, is very strong in the sense of it's amazing what you can get done with just getting a guaranteed refresh based on a user action. Like, it is surprisingly powerful for what the interactions and the experiences that you can build with that. You know, the W C keynote was just like checking an item off a to-do list, which seems a bit basic. And it's like, you can totally do that. It's like, or you can scroll through your calendar in, you know, sort of dynamically, or look at a weather forecast and say, you know, it's an hourly forecast and you want to see the next six hours after that. Well, you can tap and it'll slide over. And they can do things there where they can make these rich, it can make

• 1:18:32Speaker 07

  the experience that much richer and creates that many fewer places and reasons why you have to actually get into the app in the first place. And I think that's what interactivity mostly is allowing at this point. It reminds me a lot of watch OS apps where like a really good watch OS app is an app that typically is something that you're only going to experience for a few seconds, that it's you're going in to get something and then coming out. And it's not an app that you're expecting to just like be sitting tapping on your wrist for five minutes. It's something that you're going to be in in seconds. And similarly, I think interactive widgets allow you to have those same kinds of interactions on your home screen where rather than having to open the app to do something, maybe you can just, you know, tap two or three times on the widget to get to the exact data view that you're

• 1:19:16Speaker 07

  interested in or the exact behavior you want, and then you're done. And you never actually had to launch the app to do that. And so I think they've struck a really interesting balance. I think I doubt this is the final form of it. Like, my suspicion is that there will be more things that will come over time as they've kind of explore how users respond to interactivity. But it feels like they've been taking this incrementally growing out the widget story over the last, you know, since 2020. And I doubt they're done at this point. I think it's a bit, this seems like a very meaningful step forward to make them not just static things, but to have the user expectation of being able to interact with them in the first place.

• 1:19:53David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. So, yeah, I guess part of me is trying to figure out how far I want that to go. Because it's like, the check off the to-do list example. That's a good one, right? That's that's an easy, obvious thing that it's always been sort of ridiculous. You have to open an app for. But then it's like, OK, I want to edit a task. Should it open up a text box on top of the widget? That seems like probably not. I don't know. It's it's there. There's finding out where that middle ground sort of eventually ought to be with all of this is really interesting. And I think that like refresh the snapshot thing makes me think that if that's the paradigm, it's always going to be just kind of you can do one thing at a time. And this is not meant to be like a multi step tool. It's a look at this thing and then look at this thing.

• 1:20:36Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:20:36David Pierce?

  And that that maybe that's enough.

• 1:20:38Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I think if we got further things, I think they would be in that same model. And it reminds me a bit of how in notifications, when you get a notification and it's like you can respond to the like someone sends you a text, you can respond to that text without opening the messages app in terms of you can respond inside the notification. It's a thing that they've allowed you to do for for a while now. And I think I could imagine a similar thing in widgets where it's like you have the ability to, you know, prompt the user for text. And so if you wanted to have a to do list app where you are able to add items directly from your home screen, it would be through some kind of, you know, system managed process where you would tap a button and then the keyboard will pop up with a little text view. You're typing whatever it is you want. You hit return.

• 1:21:24Speaker 07

  That gets sent to the app and then it refreshes the widget. So you're not launching like the app is not is only ever getting the text. It's not I'm not responsible for the keyboard. It's not an interactive experience in the same way. But it's a way of kind of pushing that next step forward. Because I think anything they do is going to be through this kind of very regimented approach where your widgets are locked down in a way that is very performant and clever. But it's like if they added text entry in iOS 18, like that would seem like a very logical next step to do. And there's expands the range of activities that would be potentially useful that, you know, you could imagine a notes app or to do app or any kind of thing that you're regularly collecting little bits of information. That seems great to not have to to open an app in order to do that.

• 1:22:09David Pierce?

  As interactivity opened up your brain on stuff you want to put into WidgetSmith, I think most of the stuff I've seen so far is kind of extensions on the things you've already been doing. The one I've been using constantly is being able to scroll the hourly forecast. I love that.

• 1:22:23Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:22:23David Pierce?

  Like, it's one of those little things I didn't expect to, like, really care about, but it loves, it's delightful. But are there things you've been either building or looking at that are sort of totally new and different because of interactivity?

• 1:22:35Speaker 07

  Sure. I mean, I think, I mean, the most, like, silly example of that is, like, being able to put games into your widgets, which doesn't, it's like, is a completely silly thing in many ways, but like, sometimes the silly things are the best things. And, like, that's an example of something that just wasn't possible before, and now you can. And obviously, there's limitations on a game, because it has to be a game that you can play only by sort of intermittent tapping that is not in a timely way.

• 1:22:59David Pierce?

  So, like, tic-tac-toe in a widget would totally work?

• 1:23:01Speaker 07

  Yes, exactly. Like, something, in any kind of game where there's, you're taking turns, or that kind of behavior, is definitely something that's possible. But, you know, you're not going to be able to make Flappy Bird for the widget, because there's no sense of timeliness to the, you know, when you tap and how it responds. But I think that's a kind of thing that's, I don't think the game itself necessarily is the end state of that, but I think that's an example of the kind of thing that you can start to do, where just having the ability to respond to a button tap opens up a variety of things that you could come up with and you could think of that, like, to do. And, like, I mean, so I've done a bunch of things with, related to music. It was actually a widget that I found super helpful for me, is I've made a little, like, a cover flow widget.

• 1:23:44Speaker 07

  So, you know, so you can put, put your albums into a medium widget, and you can, you know, sort of, you tap on the edges and you can scroll through them, and then you can tap on the one in the middle and it'll start to play. And because it's interactive, I don't, you don't have to launch the app for it to play. You know, it's, it's not needing you to even do an app launch, you can just start. And then because the now playing... Experience goes up into the Dynamic Island. You just see that the album has started playing and you can move on. And I think that kind of thing is just really just different. That it feels very interesting to not even have to duck in and out of an app. Like previously, if I'd done Music Widgets, it's like, well, you have to launch WidgetSmith, it'll start to play and then you have to quit it. Because you always had to have this weird round trip to the app, even if the app was doing hardly anything.

• 1:24:29Speaker 07

  Or similarly, you can start workouts is another thing with interactivity, where you can say you're going for a run and you tap it and your phone just starts tracking your run without having to open an app necessarily. You can just jump into the live activity or the Dynamic Island and you can tap the widget and then you can lock your phone and then off you go. And your progress would show up on your lock screen in the live activity. And it's not like that one step is huge, but I feel like the number of times that you can take out that one step will add up over time in terms of its value and utility.

• 1:25:06David Pierce?

  After David and I talked, naturally, I put 1,000 new widgets on my iPhone. But while I'm in the middle of this personalization craze, I started thinking about changing my wallpaper and my app icons too, both of which are also really good ways to personalize your phone and make it work the way that you want it to. I ended up buying a wallpaper from a guy named Isaac Mosna, who you might know as Knupsi from YouTube and elsewhere on the internet.

• 1:25:30Speaker 08

  Today, I'll be showing you how I've set up my phone, some of the apps I use, and generally how I've customized it to match my style and how I use my device.

• 1:25:39David Pierce?

  I like the wallpaper. It looks great. But it kind of made me wonder, what is it like being in the iPhone personalization business? There are countless free iPhone wallpapers online. So how do you make some that people will pay for? What makes them pay for it? And what makes a great wallpaper great anyway? So I called up Isaac and asked him. And I asked him just to start at the very beginning. How do you become a person who makes wallpapers?

• 1:26:05Speaker 08

  It was kind of for myself originally because I making YouTube videos, I can never find the the wallpaper I wanted to like showcase in a YouTube video.

• 1:26:13David Pierce?

  Cause you don't want to just have the same like stock wallpapers everybody has, right?

• 1:26:16Speaker 08

  No, no, I couldn't do that. I'm like, I used to do that, but then like making videos, everybody has like a really nice vibrant eye catching wallpaper in the thumbnail. And uh, I used like a lot of them and then I just kind of got sick of hunting and searching and be like, okay, this is okay, but like, I wish it was a bit more orange or a bit more blue because the thumbnail ID I have doesn't really work. Or, you know, in the video, it doesn't really match the the scheme of like my set design. So I'm like, what if I just made them? And it was during COVID, so I had so much time. Like I was home and I'm like, I'm gonna get my iPad out, I'm gonna start drawing, I'm gonna start making some wallpapers and I thought I was pretty happy with my original designs and I thought that they looked, they look great. It matched my style of like minimal designs and

• 1:27:00Speaker 08

  matched sort of my thumbnail style and my video style. It was all a nice cohesive experience. You know, being a YouTube video, people would ask immediately like, where'd you get your wallpaper from? It's the most common question in any tech video on a phone or a tablet or a laptop. It's like, where's the wallpaper from? For me, I I just made them all. So eventually I was able to launch a Shopify store with my zero knowledge of web design. I was able to figure it out and Shopify makes it really easy to do all that stuff and you know, Shopify makes the whole sales process very easy too. Lets me sell to whoever I want. Uh, there's apps to have digital downloads, all that fun stuff. And next thing you know, I'm dropping a wallpaper pack every few weeks. And wallpaper packs for me just consist of

• 1:27:46Speaker 08

  different designs that kind of go together in a specific theme. I like to have fun with it. I like to like, think of really cool names for all the wallpaper names, for all the different wallpapers in a pack. Have like a very themed design for like the mockup photos. Pretty much every pack would have like new photos with little quirks and little fun things here and there. And I didn't really know how well it would do, but then it just started blowing up. Like it was just nonstop. It almost became a full business. I almost had to hire somebody to manage like customer service and manage hosting the website. I'm thankful that I I had just finished uh, university. So I was like ready to go, I was ready to work and

• 1:28:27Speaker 08

  my whole focus was dedicated to YouTube, Instagram, other content production and and now my website with these wallpapers.

• 1:28:34David Pierce?

  Why do you think it worked so well? I mean, wallpapers are a funny thing in that there are a billion of them out there, right? Like, if you just Google like iPhone wallpaper, like you can, you can look through the options until the day you die and you'll never run out. Like, I wonder if there is something to just like, you have a style that fits and people just like, understand your style and like your style and that goes a long way. I don't know, like, why do you think it took off the way it did?

• 1:28:56Speaker 08

  It's a mix of different things. It's a mix of people seeing the wallpaper in action on my channel, people who know my style, they know, I like these sort of designs, people seeing it in use, it's great. I think also Apple's customization push was also a good thing. It came at the right time. People like to make their phone personal and they like to make it something that is uniquely them. Because one thing that I also envisioned too, or I at least thought of when designing these is like, we don't really hang that many things up in our homes anymore, like art or designs, but our phone is like a canvas that we see every single day. It's like, we turn it on, we see a wallpaper or a new wallpaper that cycles.

• 1:29:37Speaker 08

  And to be able to see like a little bit of art or a nice design, it has the same effect as art in your home. Whether, when you come home and you see it, you have like this nice feeling of this is familiar or this makes me feel a certain way. If something is dynamic and bold and bright, it kind of like wakes you up a little bit. It makes you feel a bit more energetic. And obviously, I'm just talking about a image or a JPEG, but it's like, it does have that feeling. Whenever I turn my phone on, like, I get hit with like a bold, textured, vibrant piece and makes me happy. So it's a mix of different things.

• 1:30:11David Pierce?

  No, I, I think, I think you're totally right. So take me through the process a little bit. Like, you, you sit down and you're like, okay, I wanna, I wanna do a new pack, a new collection. Where do you start?

• 1:30:20Speaker 08

  So pretty much, I like to start with colors. I think colors are the best place to start for me personally and the way I work. Let's say I wanna do like a very cool toned palette. Maybe it's like a purple and a pink and a blue. I start to just mess with things. I usually use Procreate. I've done some stuff in Illustrator, some stuff in Photoshop, but usually Procreate is the most consistent, best way I work. I know how it works to a T now. I know how all the brushes work, how everything kind of flows. And I think Procreate is so great because it's very natural and organic versus a computer. You're like typing and you're clicking things. It's not as natural as like a pen or your finger. So I'll start by like mixing around different colors and trying different gradients or trying different shapes.

• 1:31:04Speaker 08

  And then usually I'm able to just think of the pack right there. Like, let's say it's like a 2D shape based pack. I start drawing some flowing shapes. I start adding different colors. You know, things aren't really in the right place. I tweak them a little bit. Maybe I'll warp a shape a little bit. Until I really get that exact shape and form I want. If it's a more abstract, like gradient based or like a really flowing designed pack, I'll just mess with it until I think it looks right. And I think it has like the feeling I want. Then I do things like add a little bit of noise, add a bit of sharpness to things, tweak the colors a little bit. And then I throw them on to most of my devices to test them out. So I have it on my phone. Looks good. Okay, that's, that's solid.

• 1:31:43Speaker 08

  Put it on the desktop. Ah, I don't really know how that looks on the desktop. Maybe I have to tweak this one area a little bit. Maybe I have to blow this part up a little bit. Pull it back on the iPad, tweak that, send it to the desktop, try it on the iPad as well. And then once it's all shit, once it's all like in a, in a state that I like, I'm ready to ship it on to my website. I do all the mockup photos. I shoot everything, you know, name everything as well, based on how I feel, what the pack conveys in terms of the overall collection name and all the different names of all the different pieces. And then load it all up, write a nice little description, and then that's it.

• 1:32:18David Pierce?

  So talk to me about the icon pack before I forget to ask about the icon pack.

• 1:32:21Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:32:21David Pierce?

  I find icons so fascinating because like you only have one wallpaper. There are a million apps out there in the world. So I would think trying to make an icon pack that like is both sort of cohesive and looks nice, but also like exists in a world where everybody has a mountain of different apps on their phone. Strikes me as very hard. So like, what made you want to do this in the first place? Like you just saw everybody customizing and you're like, I wanna, I wanna see how I can be part of this too?

• 1:32:49Speaker 08

  In some regards, but also like when I started designing the wallpapers, I felt like for my phone personally, the icons, like icons are all over the place these days. You know, there's like so many different colors. Some of them are all black, some of them are all white. And I just couldn't really think of a way to make it look cohesive. So I'll have the wallpaper that I'm really happy with. But then I'm like, okay, but the icons are just, they kind of mess with the color scheme. And you know, I like to keep things simple. Usually I like to keep things pretty minimal with design. So I just wanted to have like a set that is, you can either choose, you can choose all black or all white and that's it. So with the, with my icon pack, like it's obviously a very specific taste. Like I hand drew every single icon.

• 1:33:31Speaker 08

  I don't remember exactly how icons, how many icons there are at this point.

• 1:33:35David Pierce?

  That's so many icons.

• 1:33:37Speaker 08

  I know, I just, it was all like stock apps and then also a bunch of the popular apps that people use every single day. And I just wanted to make something that was very different than what everybody else did. Cause I think a lot of people just shipped literally the same icons and like different, different packs. Like everybody was dropping icon packs and a lot of them were just the same icons. And I just thought like, what?

• 1:33:59David Pierce?

  There was so much like very basic, like clip art looking stuff in all those icon packs. Yeah.

• 1:34:04Speaker 08

  And the reason why is because it was the easiest way to make a lot of money. Like there was all these stories about some developer making a hundred thousand in a month off of a minimal icon pack. Everybody wants to make a hundred thousand in a month. But it's like, I can't do stuff like that. Like I just couldn't just ship out a random pack and then use my channels to promote it. Cause I would feel bad and also like, I probably wouldn't have designed all those icons. Like where are they coming from? But obviously, I don't mean to trash talk that designer. I think he was one of the first people to see the potential of custom icons, and I think he did it all by himself, which is great. I love that. I love seeing successes like that. Yeah, so for my collection, I wanted to have things that would fit my style, be a little bit unique, be a little bit different.

• 1:34:45Speaker 08

  It's not obviously for everyone, but the people who do like it are always sharing screenshots on Twitter or Instagram, tell me how much they like it, and request icons that they want to add. And obviously, I can't do every single icon. I'm not physically capable of doing that. But I like to be able to have icons for most of the popular apps and all the stock apps. And now with the new iPhones that have dynamic islands, it hides that really annoying shortcut notification that drops down every single time you open a shortcut, as I'm sure you're familiar with. That's one of the biggest things that prevented me from even doing this in the first place, like even wanting to use icons. Because when, you know, this ability first came out,

• 1:35:26Speaker 08

  it was okay, like, it was like, you know, that dropdown, you forget it's there, you get used to it. Either decide, do I want to see that notification every single time? Or do I have a nice, beautiful, custom home screen? And obviously, a lot of people have chosen the latter because it's worth the trade off to sometimes have that customization in place. But now with the new dynamic island functionality, you don't see that notification at all. It hides it in the island. It's very, very subtle. And now, even with things like the camera, before, if you used a shortcut with a custom icon to open up the camera app, it would take an extra full second for the camera to like be ready to go. Cancel, deal break, I can't deal with that. But now, you can do it. And if you're willing to go through the process, which isn't super

• 1:36:11Speaker 08

  terrible these days, and there are very cohesive guides, and I think even shortcuts you can download, it's pretty easy to do. But for me personally, my home screen is very clean, and I like to have just a couple icons. Everything else is in the app library, and that's how I like it, so.

• 1:36:26David Pierce?

  I like that. Are you just a one home screen guy?

• 1:36:29Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29David Pierce?

  I admire that. I aspire to be that.

• 1:36:31Speaker 08

  It's all that works for me at this point. I like to have four apps in the dock, and then four apps on my home screen, a little square arrangement using the Clear Spaces app. Because I don't really want to see too much. When I turn my phone on, I want to be able to see my wallpaper and also be able to just see the core apps I need and any distracting things like Instagram and Twitter, all those are on in the app library. So they're not like the first thing I see when I turn my phone on.

• 1:37:00David Pierce?

  After I talked to Isaac, I blew up my whole phone again. I got rid of a bunch of the widgets. I changed my wallpaper again, and I changed a few icons. I didn't change all of my icons, just the four in my dock, which tend to be the ones that never really move around. And they're all a single style now. I really like how it looks. Plus, I now have just two home screens. One is apps and one is widgets. And I think Isaac's right that less is more there. The app library or the app drawer on Android do the job great. After all this, suffice to say, my phone looks really different than it did a few weeks ago. And it was a really fun exercise, actually. I wound up not just changing the look of my phone, but really thinking about where I want things to be and what I want to have easy access to.

• 1:37:44David Pierce?

  And maybe just as important, what I don't want to have easy access to. Plus, what my home screen and wallpaper and icons and widgets should not just do, but make me feel every time I turn my phone on. Not everyone is going to want to go down this unbelievable rabbit hole of personalization and shortcuts and widgets and all kinds of different stuff. And that's okay. But I think it's worth at least spending a few minutes to make sure that when you turn your phone on, as we all do a million times a day, it feels the way you want it to. Because I think that's important.

• 1:38:17David Pierce?

  All right, that's enough Apple talk. That is it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more from everything we talked about on theverge.com. We'll put some links to all our reviews in the show notes. But also, you know, read theverge.com. There's so much gadget news this week. There's Xbox leaks. There's a Microsoft event. There's an Amazon event. There's a ton happening. All of it is on theverge.com. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other phones you think people should buy instead of the iPhone 15, you can always email us at [email protected] or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11. Send us all of your thoughts and questions. And again, this is probably the last call for this. If you have questions about The Verge or The Vergecast, send them in. The meta episode is coming really soon.

• 1:39:02David Pierce?

  This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Milai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about Amazon, Microsoft, why Amazon and Microsoft are suddenly kind of at odds about gadgets, Xbox and all the other stuff going on this week. See you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:39:33Speaker 09

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at homedepot.com.

• 1:40:04Speaker 10

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.