Apple’s iPhone 13 event: the biggest announcements

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz discuss all the products announced at Apple's hardware event this week: iPhones, iPads, the Apple Watch, and more. Keep listening for some gadget news, including Nintendo finally adding Bluetooth audio to the Switch. Further reading: ​​Apple’s iPhone 13 event: the 8 biggest announcements The iPhone 13 may finally get features Android has had for years The iPhone 13 event was a case study in Tim Cook-era product refinement iPhone 13 and 13 Mini announced with redesigned camera array and smaller notch iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max announced with high refresh rate 120Hz displays The iPhone 13 is a pitch-perfect iPhone 12S Goodbye and good riddance to Apple’s 64GB iPhones Apple announces new entry-level iPad with A13 Bionic chip The iPhone 13’s new camera tricks include cinematic video and macro photography Apple says it every year, but the iPhone 13 cameras do seem much improved Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro is the first iPhone with 1TB of storage Apple drops the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone XR from its lineup Apple’s updated leather MagSafe wallet supports Find My location tracking How the iPhone 13, Mini, Pro and Max compare to Android rivals — and vs. iPhone 12 All-new iPad Mini announced with 5G, USB-C, and larger 8.3-inch display Apple is releasing iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 on September 20th Apple announces new entry-level iPad with A13 Bionic chip The Apple Watch Series 7 has a brand-new look Apple is releasing watchOS 8 on September 20th Should you wait for the Apple Watch Series 7? Apple Fitness Plus is getting Group Workouts and Pilates The Apple rumors were wrong Where are Apple’s new Macs? Here’s what we’re still expecting Apple to announce this year Nintendo finally adds Bluetooth audio to the Switch in new software update Google’s rumored Pixel 6 Tensor processor sounds extremely weird Razer made gamer thimbles 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Alex Krantz joins the show. We go through the entire Apple event: new iPhones, new iPhones Pro, carrier discounts, the new iPad Mini, the new Apple Watch, some services updates, and a little bit of secret Nintendo news. It's all coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?" and "What sectors are on the move right now?" Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, "How do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting?" and "What sectors are on the move right now?" Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Microns, Micron Computer, that is, legendary DRAM vendor of the 90s.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst branded content you've ever heard in your life. I'm your friend, Neelai. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your favorite computer brand from the mid 90s, apparently. So, Com- Compaq? Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. All right. What was the cow one?

• 2:13Alex Cranz?

  Gateway.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Gateway. Yeah, I'm Gateway. My, uh, my uncle had an Apple II clone called a Legend. Hmm. Which is just a great name for it, because now it is.

• 2:23Alex Cranz?

  Good name.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  The prophecy. Alex Cranz is here.

• 2:26Alex Cranz?

  I'm the Tandy.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 2:28Alex Cranz?

  Going way back.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  The Radio Shack Store brand.

• 2:31Alex Cranz?

  Heck, yeah.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  Can I just tell you that, um, me and my friends, we all agreed to get different video game consoles so that we'd have access to all of them. And we did the same thing with computers. So I got the Apple II, my friend Les got the Commodore 64, and my friend Chris got stuck with a Tandy. I just felt super bad for him. Ooh, that's...

• 2:49Alex Cranz?

  Tandy was based in my hometown, so I had to go to my second grade birthday party was at the Tandy Ice Skating Rink.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  If you are under 40, we apologize.

• 2:58Alex Cranz?

  None of you know what we're talking about. It was great.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  I just want to correct myself. It wasn't the Legend. It was the Laser 128.

• 3:06Alex Cranz?

  That seems better.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  It's a much better name for it.

• 3:08Alex Cranz?

  Sounds a little like a printer.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it would also be a great name for a band. I'm just putting it out there. If you are starting a band, you're listening to this and you've been thinking about starting a band, welcome to the right podcast for you.

• 3:18Alex Cranz?

  Are you a 40-year-old starting a band? We're here for you.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  No, the teens love us.

• 3:24Alex Cranz?

  The teens. Sorry, teens.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  Laser 128. Someone start a band called Laser 128. Anyway, it is Apple Event Week. Apple had an event. They did. Another infomercial event. We were all sad. They're sad.

• 3:37Alex Cranz?

  I loved the drone shots.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  There were a lot of drone shots again. Uh, there was a weird song. There was a super weird song at the beginning about California, how great it is. And at the end. Yeah. You get to the place where they were like, you know, they've had a lot of virtual events now. The pandemics have gone on for a long time. They had the list of ideas for things they could do at a virtual event. You know, and they like crossed them all off, and finally they're like, "All right, Eric, you get to do the band thing."

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  Like a bunch of Apple engineers wrote a song about California. So it was very strange. It was subdued in its way for being a, you know, an hour and a half long infomercial. It was subdued because

• 4:18Speaker 03

  It was not bombastic at all in the way that some of their stuff has been super bombastic. This was like, this was an S event. They just, here's a bunch of stuff that we've got. They didn't claim to have reinvented interaction models with the digital crown, for example.

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  Right. U2 did not make an appearance. Instead of U2, they had a band that they just like found. Like the Apple Music slush pile was like

• 4:40Alex Cranz?

  Are they even on Apple Music? Like, where do I get this band?

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm surprised that everybody hasn't had to listen to this on logging into Apple Music. But they announced the stuff we expect them to announce in, uh, in September. A new iPhone, both regular and pro, both mini and max, a new iPad mini, which is very exciting. A new watch, which is very interesting because the rumors about it were very wrong and some tiny service updates. We should start with the phone, obviously, but we should also, I mentioned that some of the rumors are wrong. A lot of the rumors were wrong, I would say.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:16Alex Cranz?

  Good amount of rumors.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  The one that hurts me the most is, uh, there's no always on lock screen, which is, I mean, I wrote a whole damn article saying, we're finally getting this thing after years and years of waiting. There's no reason they wouldn't have done it. And then they just, they still don't feel the need to do it.

• 5:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know what they're, what they're doing. I guess that, you know, their always on lock screen is your watch.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:35Nilay Patel?

  That's kind of what they're getting at, right? Like, you shouldn't be looking at your phone because we've strapped a phone to your wrist. I, I think that's just the argument they want to make. So, uh, that wasn't there. The Apple Watch Series 7, there's all these rumors of flat sides. It does not have flat sides. Larger screen, that we'll get to it. And then there was this delightful rumor, which I loved, uh, that started way out, literally in space, that the iPhone would have satellite connectivity. It got walked back to it might support some bands that might, through repeater stations, potentially connect to satellites only in an emergency.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  Which is like a pretty, over the past few weeks, like the rumor walked back was like, great. You know, like it started out with, it will directly connect to satellites, carriers be damned. And it ended up at like, if you're dying and you're within range of a relay station, it might help you maybe.

• 6:27Alex Cranz?

  In four years.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  And then it ended with not being announced at all. The bands aren't in the phone. So that rumor also wrong, but I just want to put that in context. We've gotten pretty used to the rumors being correct. When Dieter called it an S event, actually, we ended up with much more than that.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  I know AirPods either was the other rumor. That didn't happen. Although, I suppose there's still time.

• 6:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're anticipating another event. You know, there's Macs and stuff. We'll talk about that's what we're anticipating for the next event. But let's start with this one. Dieter, walk us through the phones.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  So we call it DS phones. What they've done for the iPhone 13, the mini and the regular is they put a way bigger camera sensor in there, so big that they had to like rearrange the lenses and actually make the bump bigger. So your cases might not work. And they also put in a larger battery, and they also made the battery somehow more power efficient, possibly through this new A15 processor, which there was some rumbling that they didn't announce their usual like, the processor is TK faster than last year in terms of CPU speeds. They did some GPU stuff, but they didn't really pound their fists and say this thing is way faster. It seems like instead what they did is they made it more power efficient to increase battery life.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  But they also put in a bigger battery.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  But they also put in a bigger battery. So just so you've got the rundown, in terms of Apple's test, which is a mixed media, Wi-Fi, 5G, browser rev, do all the stuff. They won't, it's unclear exactly what their test is, but it's doing the stuff.

• 7:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, no. So what they've told me their test is in the past, and which appears to still be the case, is Apple has, you know, it's Apple. You still hit agree. You still send them telematics from your phone.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  So they have data about how people use their phones.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  Like a huge data set about how people use their phones, because you've hit agree and you've agreed to send it. What happens on your phone gets aggregated and sent to Apple. And they take that data set and they construct an average use model, and then they model it against the battery capacity and the power efficiency of the processor. So they're not running battery tests in the way that we would run a battery test. This is my understanding and I've, I've asked them about it a thousand times. I know Joanna Stern has asked him about it a thousand times. Joanna and I mostly text about bubble guns and battery testing.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  What's the battery life on a bubble gun these days?

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  Uh, bad. The lithium ion battery in our latest bubble gun is very bad. Uh, they don't do any modeling of that battery. Yeah. So Apple has this, Apple has this huge data set of phone usage, like telematics from your phone. Then they model it against obviously what they know, the power efficiency and battery capacity of like a 12 is. They know how long those batteries are lasting. Then they got a new chip. They've got a new battery capacity. They've got a new power envelope situation and they, they model it. But they're not running tests the way that we would want to run a test, which is like, you know, one of those like big fake thumbs swiping on a screen and clicking on stuff.

• 9:21Alex Cranz?

  That's the dream right there.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Or even collecting telematics from people, beta testing the phones internally. Like theoretically, they could be like, oh, well, from the, you know, however many hundreds of people allowed to use the phones, you know, and whatever context they're allowed to use a phone. They, they could figure it out. I don't know.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  But in their argument for this, by the way, is you have to buy it, but they're like, look, we can't predict what your cell signal is going to be, or how much power your radios and antennas are going to use or if you're on Wi-Fi all day. Like we could run that test, but we would run it in like a, a pretty good radio environment.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  So it's better for us to do this modeling because it's more reflective of this average from this huge iPhone data set. That means we can basically never verify their claims.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Their claims are that the regular plain old iPhone 13 will get two and a half hours longer. And that the iPhone 13 mini will get one and a half hours more, which will take the mini from, you need to watch the battery life like a goddamn hawk all day to you need to watch the battery life like a, I don't know, a sparrow, a less, a less aggressive bird.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Bird with crappier vision.

• 10:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, those are all good claims. I think that the processor stuff is interesting. Like, they did a lot of meaningless numbers. It's 50% faster than the nearest smartphone competitor.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  Sure. What is that? Is it the Samsung A series, the most popular smartphone on the market?

• 10:43Speaker 03

  I think they may have said high end. I don't know. It's probably the 888. It's maybe, maybe it's the one before. Who knows?

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my point is that if they don't say, it doesn't matter.

• 10:53Alex Cranz?

  I would agree. Yeah, that feels right.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of the A15 Bionic, there is one interesting thing. The regular iPhone 13s get four core CPUs, whereas the Pros get a five core CPU.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're doing the spinning constantly now with these chips, right?

• 11:08Nilay Patel?

  Which is fine. I don't know. Like, I have a hard time thinking that the extra GPU is doing a ton of work. But fundamentally, if you were to stop somebody on the street and say, hey, there's a new iPhone. What do you want it to do? What would they tell you?

• 11:23Alex Cranz?

  I want one more core.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  Alex walks very specific streets. Alex is in like the back alleys of Shenzhen. She's like, what do you want?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  She lives right next to Nvidia. It's very weird.

• 11:37Alex Cranz?

  Crazy, man.

• 11:38Nilay Patel?

  They did more battery life and better cameras.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 11:41Nilay Patel?

  That's what they did.

• 11:42Alex Cranz?

  And maybe more drop proof?

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, okay, that's fair.

• 11:44Alex Cranz?

  But I think we've all given up on that one, probably.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think Apple knows. I feel like we had this conversation with the camera bump. The camera bump has gotten bigger yet again. Soon the camera bump will be the back of the phone. Let's just get there. Like, why are we pretending that Pixel 6 is like cruising in that direction?

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Any number of Chinese phones are cruising in that direction. All these companies, people just put cases on their phone. The camera bump is like irrelevant to that problem. Like, very few people are not immediately buying a case for these phones.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  So I think the drop proof is like connected to that as much as anything. They know that you're gonna put a case on the phone. That said, I, you know, I've got a 12 Pro Max. I've never once thought it was slow.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  My old iPad Pro, which has a processor two generations old now, still extremely fast.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think the processor element to this is like, the phones last a long time and Apple should be committed for it. And every year, we're like, yep, they've got a lot of headroom for it to last a long time. What you're down to with these in particular is like, the cameras are better in ways that we're gonna have to test. And the battery life is longer. And the Pro Max has a fancier screen.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  So we've gone through the regular 13s. We should go through the Pros real quick and then we can really start digging in. So the Pro and the Pro Max both get high refresh rate screens. We assume it's LTPO. It can go from 10 Hz to 120 Hz. And there's lots of details about how that works inside apps. They also get a whole new camera system, but they share the camera system this time. The Pro Max doesn't get a better camera this time, which is great. We can get into all the details of all the different specs, but sort of the, the long and the short of it is they've all been improved. They all taken more light. And when I say they all, like, they actually like, put a lot more effort into the ultra wide. And critically, the telephoto lens seems to be much improved, which I'm really excited about. Same deal, more battery life for both of these phones as well.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  And across the Pro lot phones and the regular phones, it does not appear they've made any changes to the selfie camera other than making the notch smaller, which...

• 13:47Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's a step. It's like a, it's like a scooch.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  It's like very important to clarify what smaller means here.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:55Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's smaller.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  It's not thinner.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. You're not getting, like, what is important about the notch is it eats into the vertical real estate of the screen, right?

• 14:04Speaker 03

  And it looks doofy.

• 14:06Nilay Patel?

  I don't even see it anymore. But yes, what is important about the notch is like, from top to bottom, that whole area of the notch is like, kinda useless, right? You get the clock and you get a, maybe some status indicators. What most people think intuitively, the notch got smaller, I'm sure you believe it got thinner. And you get vertical real estate back. That is not, it's still the same height.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Yep. You get more horizontal real estate. And guess what they do with it?

• 14:33Nilay Patel?

  Is it nothing?

• 14:34Speaker 03

  It seems to be nothing.

• 14:39Alex Cranz?

  That's where the satellite connectivity is gonna go.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's just a big, empty part of the screen waiting for a satellite indicator to show up. But yeah, it's so, just to be clear, it's less horizontal, it's less wide.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, I want to just round out like the new, new stuff. Both the regular 13s and the pros get two new camera tricks. There are profiles in photos and there is a new cinematic mode in video. And that kind of, I mean, there's like, other than that, like, they're slightly thicker. The screens get slightly brighter in both, all four of the phones. But that's kind of it. Batteries, cameras, and some stuff around the edges. And determining whether this is, well, they made, they made the phones faster and the cameras better. Or, oh, man, they made the battery better and they made the cameras better. Like, it's hard to know.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Apple is, despite us saying that this was not a bombastic event, talking very big game about these cameras.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes, they keep saying it's the biggest improvement to the iPhone camera ever, which is, for Apple alone, is a heady claim. Like, Apple has made massive jumps in camera performance before. The iPhone 4, for example, massive jump over the 3GS. Like, so much so that that was when people started saying the iPhone can replace a camera.

• 16:03Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  No, nobody said that about the iPhone 3GS. We were like, it continues to have a camera. The iPhone 4, people like really started saying it. When they added 4K video, people, that's a huge jump. I would say the jump from the iPhone 10S to the iPhone 11.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  I thought the iPhone 10S had a bad camera. I thought the iPhone 11 had a great camera. Like, that's a huge jump. So, the iPhone 12 has a spectacular camera. So if you're gonna tell me it's the biggest jump you've ever made, like, oh, boy, you've got a, the camera has to perform at a, like, almost impossible level to meet that claim compared to Apple's own claims. Which means I'm very excited to like, play with this camera.

• 16:44Alex Cranz?

  It's got Lightro now or whatever, right? It doesn't have Lightro, but...

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  So, Lightro, if you're not the deepest possible Verge nerd. I like that Alex is like new and she's like already in it with like the deep virgin or tech nerd stuff. But Litra was a startup. They made a camera that had like 400 lenses on the back. They had a custom file format. And then you would take a picture and then you could refocus anywhere you wanted in real time on a picture after capture cinematic video. We still have to test it and see how it works. But it appears like it is using multiple cameras in its portrait mode for video.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  Right. And so the other cameras and presumably the LiDAR sensor on the Pro phones is creating a depth map. So while you're capturing video, it's doing some AI stuff. It can see your face or another face. You turn away from the camera, it'll focus on the other face. It'll do like a rack focus. Apple made a really cute knives out clone video. It's like very cute. It's just like endless rack focuses of people looking like, remember Dramatic Chipmunk? It's that video over and over again. And then you can obviously tap to focus and you get blur. You don't get the, from what I can tell anyway, you don't get the the Boca selector that you do in portrait mode. It's just like focusing and refocusing.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  But in speaking of rumors that maybe turned out wrong, I'm saying that portrait mode in video counts as a right, because I think that's what this is.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what that's what it appears to be. And then when you export the video, this is the truly important part. When you export the video, you can refocus it in Apple's apps and none others. So Clips will be able to read, Dieter's favorite Clips.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:23Nilay Patel?

  We'll be able to refocus the video. iMovie will be able to do it. Final Cut is getting an update. All those apps on the Mac too. I asked, did you talk to Adobe or the LumaFusion folks? And they were like, no. So like, and then they kept saying, well, they're, you know, people kept asking on API. It was an interesting way to think about it. Because on the phone, it makes sense. Like your app is running the phone, you have access to the system. On a Mac, that's like not the right way to think about it. On a Mac, you just get a file. And the file is just like an MP4 with a depth map.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, but isn't that what you have on the phone anyway? I mean, what is what is a file?

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  So on the iPhone, a file is an abstract concept that Apple would prefer to go away entirely.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  It's a stream of fits and you know, where does one stream end and another begin? Where, where does a drop of water go when it falls in the ocean, Eli?

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, it goes into a proprietary application sandbox, which Apple controls entirely.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  On a Mac, it's just a, it's just another video file, just has this metadata. So I don't think there's any reason that other apps, especially in the Mac, couldn't figure out how to read this file. I promise you that on the iPhone, Apple will find ways to control it. So it's just a very interesting moment for Apple.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Where like the key feature of the iPhone is, is they haven't, they're not even whispering about other people being able to do this. Whereas like last year when they added HDR, people like figured it out. They, they needed that workflow to exist because the videos themselves are HDR. Whereas here they're like, nope, this is our trick.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, and we have to see how it works, like portrait mode isn't perfect.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 19:59Nilay Patel?

  This thing is computationally blurring out the background.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  Portrait mode needs a lot of light. We'll see.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  So many questions, but it does look cool.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that again, applies across the board for all of the phones. Oh, I forgot, there is one thing the pros get, uh, which the regulars don't get, which is a macro mode. Because we, we should actually talk about like the ancillary sensors here. The ultra wide angle lens on the pros has focus pixels now, which means that it can do autofocus, which means that it is able to focus when you are up to or down to two centimeters away. And so you should be able to do macro photography with the ultra wide. Doing macro with an ultra wide is not a new trick, but I would say that it is a better way to think about doing macro on your phone than what a million Android phone manufacturers did in the last couple of years.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  It was just like, eh, sure, throw a macro camera in there. We don't know. Which is like what we've seen on every budget Android phone for like a year. And I don't, I never understood it.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  I'm, uh, is a long time macro photography fanboy.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, I mean, I own dedicated macro lenses for my DSLRs.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 21:09Nilay Patel?

  They're super rad. They're fun. I hope all of you are ready for me to, when events happen again, like the close up photos of ports that I used to take in my, and guys, they're coming back. You know what you do with a macro lens? You get real close to a screen and show people whether it's pentile or not.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  But so here's, Eli, there have to be ports to take photos of in the first place.

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  Damn it. The world has passed me by. I was walking around with my DSLR looking for ports like a zombie. Dieter, actually, go through the specs of because the camera specs here are kind of interesting, right?

• 21:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  Last year, there were effectively three camera systems on the 12, the 12 Pro and the 12 Pro Max. They were different. This year, we're down to two camera systems, the Pro one and the non-Pro one.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Correct. So we'll start with the non-Pro, the regular. We are pretty sure that the main wide lens on the regular ones are last year's Pro Max lenses or lenses sensor and so on, right? So it's 47% bigger. They're sticking with 12 megapixels basically across the board. This is f 1.6 and it has sensor shift. So it moves the sensor around instead of the lens around for OIS. It moves the sensor around. And so, and it should theoretically be basically equivalent to the 12 Pro Max, which is really interesting, which is if they could have put this thing in this body the whole time, why did the Pro not have it last year? Why did only the Pro Max have it last year? But whatever.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Then for the ultra wide, that now supports night mode and it's f 2.4.

• 22:42Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so a little bit faster.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  I am, Apple continues to go with ultra wide on the regular phones instead of a tele, which I think is the right decision.

• 22:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  And that, but that's still just the fixed focus ultra wide, just a little bit faster.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Correct. So it cannot do macro mode because it's just a fixed focus ultra wide.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay. And then the Pro system is like very different.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. So the wide angle is bigger. It may be as much as like twice as big as the regular Pro was last year. The pixel size is 1.9 microns, which is very large, very, very large. The only way other camera systems get that big is by binning their like 48 or 100 megapixel sensors into, you know, multiple pixels. And we can talk about basin filtering and all that if you want, but I don't want to. They're again sticking with 12 megapixels. And so that is, that's a dramatic increase in the amount of light that it can bring in. It has the sensor shift stuff and so on and so on. The ultra wide also gets night mode. This is, as we were saying before, a better ultra wide.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  So it's F 1.8 and it has those focus pixels. So it can do the, the close up stuff. And then finally, the, to me, maybe the most exciting one is a telephoto goes from 2.5 to 3. Apple says it's now equivalent to a 77 millimeter lens. And it also gets night mode, which should imply that it also is picking in more light than the last one, or they're just doing a better job computationally. We'll have to see. But what's interesting about the telephoto to me is Apple said it's great for portraits. They did not say it's great for zooming 100x. So they're, they're opting out completely of the periscope folding lens in a phone. Get 50 times zoom optically stuff. They're like, nope, we're just going to make a really good 3x telephoto.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  I think Apple's perspective there, and this is just kind of like after ambiently talking about cameras for years and years and years, they want every photo that comes out of an iPhone to be pretty good. And like, you look at some of the ultra zoom stuff.

• 24:44Alex Cranz?

  You're never going to get a good ultra zoom photo.

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're always just kind of, they're like impressive and scary.

• 24:51Alex Cranz?

  They're cool, like they're, they're cool, but they're not like good photos.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're often like, they're often pretty fringy, like they're, they're chromatically kind of wonky or they're like super processed.

• 25:03Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  I would say that having used a bunch of Samsung stuff, when they're in like the 8x zoom range, it's actually pretty good and they deserve more credit than I think they usually get at making that a pretty good photo.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm talking about the 100x.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Once you get above like 12 or 15 or 30 or whatever, yeah, you're, none of that ever looks good.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I, I don't think you can get 8x unless you build the lens that can get to 100, you know what I mean? Like, sure. And I, and I think doesn't, and that kind of requires the periscope lens and the, the crazy sensor. Like, I think Apple's like, we, they, I'm confident they will get there. Two years from now, it'll be like they did it. Samsung had it 10 years ago and like they finally did like Apple. But their deal is basically like every photo that comes out of the box should be pretty good.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  They won't give you the option to make the bad photo if they can help it.

• 25:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:51Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they'll let you do digital zoom, but then, but, but then it's like you're on, you did this to yourself.

• 25:56Alex Cranz?

  They have a little warning now.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  They should just pop up like a disappointed face when you go past. Really? Okay.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we're gonna let you, you know, if you want to drive off the road, you can. It's just not good for you or the car. So actually, I think that leads directly into this new photographic styles thing, which is

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  very confusing.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  But here's how I would put it. The simplest way to think about it. And I might have some like direct insight that this is true. Is that every year we review the iPhone cameras. And we're like, Apple looks like this. And the pixel looks like this. And Samsung looks crazy. And we prefer the way the pixel looks. And they're just looks, right? They're totally subjective decisions about how they look. And every year, Apple reads reviews and every year they like curse my name.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  I'm the one who like points out over and over again that these are totally subjective looks. And that the contrasty pixel look is like pleasing. It's like the, a lot of people would like actively choose that look or filter their pictures into the, you turn up the contrast on a photo, a lot of people like it. I think that is like, started to go away. Like all, I think all these ones are starting to look like each other more than not. But I, I just know that this is their pattern. Well, this year, with these photo styles, you can kind of just like tell it to look like a pixel, which is cool, like really cool. You can also, they've got a vibrant mode, which you know that they're just like, okay, well just, you can pick Apple, you can pick pixel, you can pick Samsung.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we should explain what these are. They are basically presets for the camera. And you know, you pick the, whatever the things are, they don't call it pixel, but it's called contrast or whatever. They don't call it Samsung, but it's called vibrant or whatever. And then when, once you've picked that mode, it's sticky and the camera takes photos in that mode. And Apple insists that it is not a filter, that picking this style does something to the process of taking a photo that is better than just a filter. And they will, they'll, while insisting on this, they will tell you that, you know, there's, there's like semantic rendering involved. If they, if you pick the, the warm

• 28:16Speaker 03

  filter, if you pick the warm profile, then it will, you know, make things, make colors warmer, but it knows not to make a face warmer.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  So it's using, it's using, you know, it's looking at, well, there's a sky here. So we want to make sure we don't make it look, you know, taupe or whatever. We don't want to make it look crazy. So they apply filters to the colors that they think are appropriate when you apply this profile.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  So I'll just make the direct comparison to, to Google, which has been much more transparent about this over time. Mark Lavoie, who was the head of the Pixel camera team, who's now at Adobe, Mark would tell us, he's been on this show and said to us, when we sat down to decide how the Pixel looked, we looked at various kinds of painting and artists and said it should look like this. And that is a totally subjective decision we made about what the Pixel should look like. And then we would go to Apple and be like, well, what do you want it to look like? Because ultimately, these are totally subjective decisions about what the photo should look like.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:13Nilay Patel?

  And they'd be like, the truth.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  And then like Dieter and I would like fall into like existential despair and be like, what is truth? Also, you're, have you met us? Also, you're taking seven photos and stacking them.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:28Nilay Patel?

  You're not actually capturing the truth. What, what is a photo? Again, have you met us? And now they're like, screw it. You can pick our truth, or you can pick these other things that you like. And I, that, that's all just tuning the processing. The big question for me, and we're just going to find out, is it appears to be destructive. You, you can pick it before you hit the shutter button, but you can't change it afterwards.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  So that, that's just what it appear, like I haven't seen any example or any press materials that say you can change it. And then like iPhones have a raw mode.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:02Nilay Patel?

  Can you shoot in raw with photo style? Like?

• 30:04Speaker 03

  What would it mean to shoot in raw with photo style?

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 30:06Alex Cranz?

  I always think of, do you, have you guys, I mean, you guys have shot with like Canon cameras, right? Like the Canon DSLR was always put out, even a raw, a noticeably warmer raw than Nikon or Sony. And you'd ask them, be like, it is noticeably warmer. And they would do the same thing. They'd be just, oh, it just, it just looks better. And I'm like, I'm having to like, correct the temperature every day, the time I shoot with this thing. It's not, but they're like, no, it just, it just looks better. It's, it's kind of like, is it the same thing? Basically? Like, it sounds like it is.

• 30:38Nilay Patel?

  I, I think this is like, one of those things that's super interesting. I, I kind of get like, one, if there's another Pixel coming out, and they have undercut the immediate thing that people say, which is, the iPhone is a great camera, but we prefer the look of the Pixel.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, now you can just change it, and it's, it stays.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, because if there's anything you think, when you think of iOS, is that, you know, you get more options and you can change the settings yourself and not just do the defaults out of the box. It's like, that, that world is completely gone, by the way. Like, Settings IDIS afflicts iOS and Apple as much as it does Android or Windows.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  Especially here, because the photo styles have, inside of them, two additional settings that remain. So you pick Vibrant or whatever, and then you can like, chain, tweak Vibrant to your particular look. But here's what I think it really buys them. Apple sells this phone around the world. They sell the phone in China, they sell the phone in South Korea. We have always known that those cultures and those countries are much more amenable to photo editing and photographic trickery than like, we are. So, Asian phone makers do a lot of face smoothing. They do all the color punchups. Like, that is the look that that market wants. Apple doesn't want to do it, but now you can just swipe

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  twice and get it if you want it. And I think that is a huge win for them. Because they, they don't have to chase Samsung down that rabbit hole. They don't have to chase Google down it. They get to still say it by default, you know, normal, or whatever. It's like, the truth.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:08Nilay Patel?

  A lot of complicated ideas in that phrase. But they, that's what they, that's what they're really getting. Also, I think they get to not deal with me, which I think they're happy.

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  But that all of that is really interesting, how it plays with RAW. Like if anyone is familiar with Lightroom. So like you take a RAW, like Alex takes a RAW for Canon camera. The RAW is just the data off the sensor.

• 32:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like you, every camera ships different data off the sensor. Adobe, to make Lightroom work, has to first know how to read all those, all that, those sensor files. Then your step one is like it quote unquote develops the RAW. And when it does that in Lightroom, you can do it in different styles.

• 32:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  Like lots of different styles.

• 32:51Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  Then you can like play with lights and shadows and all that stuff. Then you can add a filter, right? So like, and then you, and then you ship off a JPEG.

• 33:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  So like, at what point, if you just think of that as like pretty much the normal chain of like, you get data off the sensor, the data gets developed into something that you can edit, you can apply a filter over the top of that entire edit. And then you can like ship a JPEG, like where is it happening? I don't know the answer.

• 33:16Alex Cranz?

  It feels like it's happening in that development stage. Because even like how Lightroom develops, I went very deep on this in like 2016. With like Capture One actually has a slightly different development process than Lightroom. And so people will be like, oh, you can't use Lightroom. It has a crummy development process for Canon. You've got to go get Capture One and, and it's got the better one. And so I think like, that sounds kind of like what's almost happening here with the iPhone is saying, okay, now you can choose one of three, like development processes of the RAW itself. Like the flat Apple way that is truth.

• 33:53Alex Cranz?

  The vibrant Samsung way, or the, the really like contrasty, good looking pixel way.

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 34:00Alex Cranz?

  And then add a filter, even though they're all really just.

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  You can definitely add a filter at the end. And then you put it on Instagram and let it get compressed to hell, which is all that really matters. I don't know, like I, I think as we do reviews, we're just going to find out. And I think that's like, it is the big question to me is like, where does, where does this fit into the process? And how should you think about it? What does it mean for app developers like Heylied? Right? Like, I don't know. I think there's a lot there, but overall you're looking at Apple finding a way to more directly compete with the other two dominant looks in smartphone cameras without having to, to like leave what it thinks is real. That said, I still don't know what a photo is.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Speaking of looks and color science, we should just talk about the basics of like the colors you can get and the prices.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  So the Pros come in graphite, gold, which looks slightly different than the gold they've done before, silver, and a new Sierra blue, which is not really baby blue. I don't know. I think it looks okay. And then the regular 13 has got product red, starlight, which replaces the white, midnight, a darker blue, and pink, which of all of the colors that I have seen on their pictures, I think looks the best.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  I think that Sierra blue is the one I want to. It's where my eyes go.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  And I believe pricing is staying pretty much the same with like one exception. And when I say pretty much the same, I mean, they're doing, I think, the shenanigans where it's $6.99 for a mini, but like that assumes you're getting a little bit of a carrier bump. And so actually, it's like 30 bucks more. Is that correct? Yeah, they charge you 30 bucks more if you don't like activate with a carrier for the regular iPhones, which is just like, come on. But that that story plays into both the regular and the Pro because Apple was incapable of saying, you know, you can buy this thing without also in the same breath saying, and there are some amazing carrier deals out there.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should talk about this. Dieter, I know you're deep in it, but you know, after the event, we're talking to folks. Apple is not shying away from the idea that it survived the pandemic slowdown in phone sales that everybody else by just getting the carriers to discount the phone. Like, you know, iPhone 12 sales have been amazing like through the roof. The reason for that is not people wanted 5G or they love the design. I think that played into it, obviously.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  I think that maybe not 5G. There's a whole debate about whether 5G is actually part of a purchase decision. Every phone company in the world will tell you that it is.

• 36:34Nilay Patel?

  If you would like to see how good you are detecting a lie, go up to a carrier executive or a phone maker and say, do regular people care about 5G? And then they will tell you they do. And then you just have to decide whether you are good at sensing a lie or not.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  But they all say it's more important than you think.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  But I mean, so look, they did change the shape that always drives a sales cycle. But we saw the iPhone 12 do gangbusters and we saw every other phone not. And like a change in shape doesn't drive that huge difference that we saw.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so Apple is kind of like I said, they're not shying away from it. They did a lot of discounting with carriers. They did a lot of partnerships. They did a lot of free trade ins. You know, the, the argument is very much the carriers need people to get on the 5G networks. They can reform the LTE spectrum to 5G and finally do the thing. These phones support, for example, Verizon C-band. Verizon just spent billions of dollars in the spectrum, et cetera, et cetera. So there's like a big incentive for the carriers to get people on 5G. And Apple, I think, was very happy to be like, discount the phones all you want. Like, just pay us the money. Like, here you go. We don't care. They don't care. And I think that, I don't know how you feel about this phrase, but like, we are all the way back to phones being subsidized by carriers.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Yep. Greetings, children. If you don't remember, in the battle days, you couldn't just buy a phone. You had to buy a phone on contract. And it would, the price that would be listed would be like 200 bucks, 300 bucks. You're like, oh my God, such a deal. But you had to stay with your carrier for two years. And part of the monthly cost of the service from the carrier was the cost, extra cost of the phone. And sometimes it was even hard to buy it unsubsidized. And T-Mobile, John Ledger, bless your hearts, led the fight to give us what we wanted, which was just let us pay you for the data, the cellular service you provide. And we'll pay the manufacturer for the phone at the price that it actually costs.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  And we can leave if we want to. And that was great. Everybody had to switch over to that model. That model still theoretically is the world we live in now. But I kind of think it maybe, I don't know, it is or isn't. We might be paying a little bit extra because they're giving such deep discounts upfront. But they're just, they're not discounting it and calling it a subsidy. They're discounting it by saying that they'll give you like,

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  A thousand dollars for your trade in.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:05Nilay Patel?

  An ungodly amount of money for a trade in. Like, if you walk into AT&T and like, "I want to buy an iPhone." They're like, "Cool, we'll make a down payment on your house." And that's, that's the value of your phone. It's like, "Okay, sure."

• 39:17Speaker 03

  I don't get it.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  There's no bargain here happening.

• 39:19Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's also gonna be interesting because the trade ins you usually have to mail, like, you have to either go into the store and to physically trade it in, or most people are gonna buy it at home, and then you have to mail it in. You, like, with Verizon, you have to mail it in before you get traded. How many, last time, I totally forgot to do it and ended up, like, having to pay a bunch of extra money. But like...

• 39:39Nilay Patel?

  I traded my wife's phone in at AT&T this time to get a 12 Pro. They just never sent me the label for her old phone. And they never charged me. Like, I don't think they care. They were just like, "You got a new phone." And I don't have, like, a healthy relationship with AT&T. I don't think anyone's doing me any favors.

• 39:56Alex Cranz?

  Nobody was being nice.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, we're just paying them out the nose. I think they were like, "Fine, you know what? We've, we've made it up for you over the past 15 years." But I, I think they just want people to get the new phones. I think more importantly, they want you on two years of payments. Because the worst thing that can happen to a carrier, even in our time of low competition, is that you churn off and go to another carrier. Like, that, that's the, they're saturated. There are no more people in America for them to sell wireless service to. So they're, like, totally saturated and they're trying to lock you in. That's why all the prices are kind of the same, except for T-Mobile, which is creeping up there. And I think Apple managed to boost sales by doing aggressive carrier deals,

• 40:41Nilay Patel?

  not just in this country, but around the world. And I think they're just gonna continue doing that for, forever, until another challenger brand comes along and says, "Hey, we're not gonna price phone discounts or phone rebates or trade-in rebates into the price of our service." Because there's no way they're losing money on these deals.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Right. So, Neil, what, what you're saying is that the solution to this problem is a challenger brand, which would be competition? So, we, we should not expect a solution?

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's there's Project Gen 5 sis, baby.

• 41:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's coming.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  It's coming, any day now. But your point about Ledger is correct. What he correctly deduced was that if he could make the pricing clearer and more transparent, unbundle the phone from the service plan, people would realize, oh, T-Mobile has cheaper service and the price of the phone, because he was, he was, they were doing aggressive trade ins on phones because they were trying to make up that share. So he lowered the margin of T-Mobile, sold the service for cheaper and just dealt with the phone churn. He was, of course, doing this while the transition LTE was happening. So a lot of people were interested in trading their phones. And then very quickly Sprint, AT&T, Verizon all unbundled the price of the phone from

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  the service so they could compete on service price, which is what people like appeared to really care about. We're down to three carriers. The phone, price of the phone is getting bundled back into something. I don't know what it is.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the problem. You don't know what it is. Like, is it getting bundled into your monthly service plan with the carrier? Is it getting bundled into, I don't know, the, your Apple One subscription? Is there, is there money changing hands? Because like you, you go to Verizon or AT&T and you sign up and all of a sudden you accidentally have subscriptions to like three streaming video services without even like trying. It just like, they just throw it at you.

• 42:31Alex Cranz?

  I haven't paid for Hulu in years.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Whoa, who do you have?

• 42:34Alex Cranz?

  Verizon. It's great. Disney Plus and Hulu. And also, I think, a bunch of Apple services.

• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  All I get is HBO Max. It's no good.

• 42:44Alex Cranz?

  Miss it out.

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  Set my TV on fire every time I open.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  But yeah, like, there's still a price on the phone. And it like, we still can use that to sort of judge how much the phone costs. But after that, the amount of money that you get back from your trade in or what your monthly service cost is, or if you decide to like do a yearly, you know, get your phone replaced cycle plan or whatever, the transparency and all of that stuff after that main sticker price that we look at is like gone away. I just, I have no idea how much anything costs anymore, except that if you decide to buy something flat out unlocked.

• 43:21Nilay Patel?

  Can I say one more thing about T-Mobile, which is very funny? And then we should take a break and talk about the other stuff. So we, we mentioned that Apple's outselling everybody. They appear to not only survive but thrive in the pandemic with these aggressive discount programs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. T-Mobile CFO was at an event this week and he was like, Samsung has really fallen behind the eight ball relative to other OEMs and global supply chain. And then he was like, a majority of T-Mobile customers are, quote, "very significant Samsung lovers." Hmm. Oh. Now, all they want is the Galaxy Note and Samsung discontinued it. Well. Or whatever they did with it. Yeah. They hiatused it forever and now like T-Mobile's sales are down because there's

• 44:06Nilay Patel?

  a lot of unhappy like Samsung fans. Yeah. Wanted a new Note and they're not going to get one from T-Mobile because of Samsung.

• 44:13Alex Cranz?

  What were you talking about earlier about talking to certain execs and being able to tell?

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I look, I, this is only reported, I couldn't, you know, I wasn't.

• 44:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  Reading his, his cadence of his voice or his body language. I'm just saying, you roll up to an executive, you're like, do regular people care about 5G? And they all get that look in their eyes and that you can see the, the punch cards of their brain find the talking point about 5G. And then like cha-chink and then they're like, you know, our data shows that people are very interested in 5G.

• 44:48Alex Cranz?

  And there's also, they've got a card in there now for the Samsung Note.

• 44:52Nilay Patel?

  It's like, we have not discontinued the Note.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we'll see. Well, next year it'll fold. All right, we should take a break. We come back, but we got to review the phones. These are, Dieter, you know, you, you've got some work to do to verify all this stuff that's happening, but we'll get them a review and we'll talk about them soon. All right, we're going to take a break. We got an iPad and a watch to talk about.

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• 46:32Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Did you want to start with the iPad? I mean, do you already have it? You ordered it within seconds of this event closing.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  Well, not seconds. I waited a minute. I waited a little bit.

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  It's still seconds. Technically seconds.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  Technically.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  So there's two iPads. There's a new iPad iPad, which has an A13 now? Yes, A13 Bionic. And they put a good 12-megapixel front camera on it so it can do center stage and the camera can follow you around. And that's it. They left the form factor. They left the lightning plug. They left the fact that only like certain classrooms can have multi-users on it. They left the old stylus, the Apple pencil that plugs into the side of it, like a weird, I have no idea what to how to refer to it. It's still $329, which is super awesome, $299 for schools. But yeah, they just like, that parts bin is deep and they are not going to change this until it runs out.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think they're, I don't think there's like a bin, like they're good at managing their supply chain. I think that, I think that parts bin is cheap.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  Like they can make as many, was it 10.2-inch screens?

• 47:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  There's an infinite capacity to make 10.2-inch LCDs in the world for no money.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  Whereas like the, you know, the screen, the new OLED screen on the iPhone Pro Max is like expensive to produce.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Right, and it doesn't have to have curved edges or like, you know, whatever. Like, this is, this is a dirt cheap thing for them to make. And again, it's an incredibly good deal. Like, you can do everything with this iPad that 90% of people do when they buy a, you know, $1,200 iPad Pro. Like, you can do the same things.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Uh, it's just that I have emotions about USB C.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  I, to me, this one is like, uh, the comparisons they made to it were directly to Chromebooks, directly to cheap Windows PCs. This is in the center stage for Zoom. Right? They made a point of saying center stage works with Zoom and they said WebEx, which is very funny. Like, imagining schoolchildren using WebEx is like the funniest situation you can be. Poor kids. It's like, why would you traumatize them so early? But they made a point of saying it works a lot. So like, this is a definitely an educationally focused product. And by that, I mean, like widely, people buy it for their kid. We have a $329 iPad from two years ago, the cheapest one. It fundamentally runs Paw Patrol. That is the killer app for that iPad, is it?

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  Um, I've blocked the, the, the YouTube Kids app because, uh, I don't know if you've ever, I'm certain YouTube haven't. The parents don't, like YouTube Kids, you think is like a curated environment and then you get to the weird part of it. No, it goes on journeys. Where people are like playing with action figures and like acting out their own shows. And like, I don't know you, man. Like, why, why are you drawn to this? Like, anyway.

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  My daughter refers to it as the good app. It's terrifying. She's like, I don't want to use the bad app. I'm like, that's Netflix. Like, use that one. Anyway, Paw Patrol, that's what it's for. Uh, but then when you're in school, like you can run your classroom apps and that's what Apple wants for. Okay, that's that one.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  iPad Mini.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  I am convinced Apple makes this product because Tim Cook thinks it's cool that pilots use it. They talked about pilots four times. Uh, you know, the crew that went up, the, the civilian crew that went up in the SpaceX capsule last night. Did they use it? One of the crew members had, I've had many, old model, of course, Jaffa Leg. Like, you know, they're just like, that's the shit. Like, we should just make it so we can show people that all the time.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  And so that now they've made a cooler one.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  So it has the same design as the iPad Air and the iPad Pros with the rounded edges. It has a very good screen, but I don't believe it does the ProMotion stuff. It's just high liquid laminated, you know, stuff.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  It's an LCD.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  It's an LCD, yeah. But, you know, presumably it's very good. It has cameras, which I don't care about. It has them.

• 50:23Alex Cranz?

  Someone wants it.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  I'm excited, just like, it's got a bigger screen and about the same size body. I think it's 8.3. And it, yeah, it's like, it's an iPad Mini. And so, like, if what you do with an iPad is like, play some games and read a ton, read a ton of books, and, you know, watch a movie or two, and you're not trying to like, do work. Here is a thing that is much easier to carry around and much easier to hold in one hand, and that is very exciting.

• 50:52Alex Cranz?

  Or you could like, just get an iPhone Max and an e-reader.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  What is the difference between an iPhone 13 Pro Max and an iPad Mini? Fundamentally, I would say that it's a, it's a speaker for your ear.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  I don't know. There's a part of me that like, wants to buy an iPhone 12 Mini.

• 51:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  iPad Mini, and then the iPad Mini is the one that I just use. And then the 12 is there just because I have to have a traditional phone around, but I would just use this as my phone. That, that is an interesting world. But in, in addition to doing all this cool stuff and making this very nice screen and so on and so forth, putting USB-C on it, which is the way that an iPad should be plugged in. They put the price, the base price, I believe, at 500 bucks, which is not cheap, really. Yeah, it's not that cheap. I forget the storage on the 500 bucks. And actually, we didn't mention this in the iPhone section, but they increased base storage across the board there. And like, good on you. We should have, we should have given you credit for it earlier, but I'm really happy about that.

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No more 64 gig iPhones. It's, it's funny how, how long they, they stuck with 8 and 16, like stubbornly stuck with 8 and 16.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  And now they're just like, every year they're doubling. It's because they got to store 4K Ted Lasso on the phone.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  64 gigs for the base $500 iPad mini.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  I think they know that a lot of people use iPad minis as like, single-purpose devices. Right? Like-

• 52:25Alex Cranz?

  For their airplanes.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're using their, their, their navigation apps on airplanes, or they're doing a lot of eBooks, or they're, you know, they're doing their electronic medical records app. They talk a lot about doctors and nurses using these things like- And, you know, Tim Cook opened up the entire iPad section by saying, you know, his usual line, "It's a magical piece of glass that can turn into anything that you want." And I think they know, particularly with the mini, tends to turn into one thing for folks. Not like, you know, with the iPad Pro, they're like, "It's a laptop, it can do..."

• 52:51Speaker 03

  It's all singing, all dancing, blah, blah, blah. Uh, one thing that's not on the iPad mini, speaking of single-use, is a smart connector.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  Right, no keyboard, which is really weird.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:59Alex Cranz?

  That doesn't feel weird to me. That's a netbook-sized keyboard. That's just an unpleasant-sized keyboard, right?

• 53:06Speaker 03

  It's probably too small to be pleasant to type, yeah.

• 53:09Alex Cranz?

  Unless they, I mean, I guess if they did like a cool folding origami keyboard, that would be neat.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  When I went through the purchase process, they put Logitech's little, you know, super-thin fabric keyboard on the splurge checkout process. Whatever.

• 53:25Alex Cranz?

  Treat yourself.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  "Oh, you think you're checking out? No, what if you bought this stuff?" That part of the process.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  I did not buy that Logitech keyboard.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It'd be cool, like, Alex, what you're saying, like, the, the old ThinkPad keyboards that folded out.

• 53:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  Which, by the way, they used to be called butterfly keyboards, and then Apple completely ruined that term.

• 53:44Alex Cranz?

  Destroyed the butterfly.

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  But it'd be cool, like, you open it up, the keyboard holds up. I, I think this thing is rad. I think a lot of people are gonna like it. Dieter, I agree with you, like, the fact that it has cameras, like, sure.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, they went with Touch ID instead of Face ID. I'm totally fine with that.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  Is this their first button-based Touch ID?

• 54:01Speaker 03

  No, the iPad Air.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the iPad Air has one.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Had it. Um, and they also added support for the new, good Apple pencil, not the old, bad Apple pencil. And actually, this thing with an Apple pencil, like, if, if there's, I don't know, doctors or people that really do want that in their workflow, I think this will be pretty compelling. I'm just thinking of Creighton DeSimone, producer here, who, uh, back in the day, had that HTC-

• 54:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Flyer. That thing was cool.

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's funny, um, when you look at the, um, the specs comparison on Apple's website, it's like, the last line is keyboards, and like, the iPad Pro is like, "Magic keyboard, smart keyboard." iPad Air is like, "Magic keyboard." iPad is smart keyboard, and then iPad mini is like, "Bluetooth keyboards."

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  You know, actually, we didn't, you mentioned a spark connector. It's interesting, yeah, this is like the same Apple stuff. They have the ostensibly open connector that nobody uses on the iPads. We didn't talk about MagSafe at all with the phones. They're like, MagSafe is a hit. And we were like, no, it's not. Then like a little bit later, like, we were like, they're like, we think it's a hit.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  They have a new version of the wallet that has an NFC chip in it. So that if you, when you take it off your phone, Find My locates where you took it off. And so you can find it later. It doesn't actually beep or anything, doesn't have all that stuff. But it seems like you have to have the new version that has a chip in it. They can't just do it like the one you've got, uh, which, okay, I guess they want to identify each one of them uniquely. But then two, uh, there's a, there's an asterisk that it doesn't work with the clear case that Apple sells. Which means that like, it can't read the NFC chip through the clear case, apparently. Yeah. Yeah.

• 55:40Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. I know about that. I also say that we were in a meeting with Joanna and she's like, do you make the magnets stronger? Cause this, these old magnets suck. And then there was just like silence.

• 55:53Nilay Patel?

  God bless Joanna Stern. Okay, that's the iPad mini. I think we're excited about it, but fundamentally not all, I mean, it has USB C.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  So the, the iPad USB C story continues to get weirder and weirder, especially up against the iPhone.

• 56:08Alex Cranz?

  The poor little iPads just sitting over there that's lightning capable.

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, but again, like, they should just put USB C in everything. It's like the end of this conversation. I think that they want to continue taxing the lightning connector on the phone. It lets them control the ecosystem. It's Apple, they like doing it. Whatever.

• 56:27Alex Cranz?

  They're making all these schools buy lightning cables to power their educational iPads.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that is like the darkest. Yeah, I buy that completely.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  I'm actually surprised a little bit that the iPad mini had USB C and not lightning. If they had done lightning on that new shape, I, I would have, I would have died. But like, I'm a tiny little bit surprised, given that, you know, the size and where it sits in the lineup, that they didn't think about it.

• 56:53Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's because the, the 737 Max has a USB C connector.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  This is the only, I don't know.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming it does. Apple Watch. This was like another, almost like an S update. Like it's got a bigger screen.

• 57:07Alex Cranz?

  Like less than an S update.

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't have a new chip, as far as we know.

• 57:11Alex Cranz?

  Right. It sounds like it has the same chip as last year. The case is a millimeter bigger. The bezels are 1.7 millimeters smaller. So your screen is technically bigger, but we don't know the resolution. We don't know the actual size of it, but it's just a little bigger. I, I, like, I think it'll be neat. You know, it's nice that it's got dust protection now. I thought it did before. So this was a pleasant, well, actually not a pleasant surprise as somebody who like gets her Apple Watch really messy. I was like, oh, I've just been playing with fire for years now.

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, all right, it's cool. It charges with a USB C cable.

• 57:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it charges via USB C. It has.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  They added a new dongle.

• 57:50Alex Cranz?

  It's brighter when it's in its always on display. Like when you're not using it, it's brighter, which I think is actually one of the more interesting things about it, but for very weird reasons. Reasons. Cause like now it's a much more noticeable thing on your wrist.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, as watches have been for, for years.

• 58:09Alex Cranz?

  But it's like, it's bigger, it's brighter. Like it's going to catch your eye faster than just like, okay, yeah, the black square. Now you're gonna be like, oh, wow. Mickey Mouse is flying by my face as you move your hands.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  Is it, is it, it literally is brighter all the time, or it has the potential to be brighter in, for example, sunlight when you're outside?

• 58:25Alex Cranz?

  They're saying 70% brighter in the always on, when it's not, when you're not, when it's not activated. So just those times, which, but, which is kind of cool because also same amount of battery life. So I, I personally would have taken a dimmer screen for better battery life there.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. But, and it's not out for, until sometime in the fall.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that, that's like, you can't even, you can't even like go get in line to preorder it right now. It's just like, yep, it'll be there. The phone preorders are hilarious. By the time people are listening to this, the preorders will be up and running. But what they've been doing for the past two days is you can go to the Apple online store. You can select the phone. You can select your price, you know, whatever pricing shenanigans appeal to you. You can like lay all that out and you can get all the way up to checkout. And then when preorders go live, you can hit checkout. And it's like,

• 59:17Alex Cranz?

  And then you can hit it again and again and again until it actually goes through.

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  We just like deconstructed what it means to preorder or something like, what is the difference? Why can't I just hit checkout now? Like, who cares?

• 59:30Alex Cranz?

  But you know, you gotta wait.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  So close to hitting checkout, like,

• 59:33Alex Cranz?

  3am.

• 59:36Alex Cranz?

  Gotta earn it.

• 59:36Nilay Patel?

  What is the point of this?

• 59:39Alex Cranz?

  Gotta work for that preorder.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You get all the way there.

• 59:43Alex Cranz?

  But the Apple Watch comes in new colors, you know?

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:45Alex Cranz?

  We've got the midnight, which is basically black and the starlight, which is basically gold, silver.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Alex Cranz?

  Then the red and, and the blue, and then the new green, which, you know, we heard a lot of rumors beforehand that there was going to be a rugged Apple Watch and then like this army green watch came out with the dust protection. And I, I guess that was what that rumor meant.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. There are rumors of the flat sides. I think this is a product that got caught up in component and manufacturing chaos because of the pandemic.

• 1:00:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  And also when they, you know, when they changed the design, they better like do features and they've got a bunch of health features they've been working on forever.

• 1:00:28Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  You get the feeling this is like an interstitial. They made the screen bigger, which is great. I think a lot of people are going to like it. I'm considering, like, I'm a sucker for a bigger screen.

• 1:00:38Alex Cranz?

  I'm almost certainly gonna buy this thing.

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Alex Cranz?

  I'm on the series four, like,

• 1:00:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, from a Ford, this will be a huge jump.

• 1:00:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like, I'll probably get it. And then next year, they're going to announce a completely redesigned series eight, you know, totally different, tons of sensors and I'll, I'll be really annoyed with myself.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  They got you.

• 1:00:55Alex Cranz?

  And then be preordering it while trying to sell this one to my brother.

• 1:00:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, one option is they're, they're keeping the series three around because it's the super cheap one, that 199.

• 1:01:04Alex Cranz?

  Don't buy it.

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you should buy it either. But the watch SE is still sticking around for 279. You know, they're of course getting rid of that series six and the other stuff there. So.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  I don't know if you really feel like you need a holdover watch, maybe the SE, but that's like only, you know.

• 1:01:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the SE is like, if you're just really, you just saw Fitness Plus and you're very excited about Pilates, but you don't want to invest in the rest of this ecosystem? Okay, get the SE, like, hold over until next year when you get all the really cool, maybe next year when you maybe get all the really cool new sensors.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I still think it's dumb that it requires an Apple Watch, Fitness Plus. Like, what if I want to use the service and not have to like have it connected to telemetrics?

• 1:01:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  I also think it's dumb that it doesn't work with a Mac still.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, like, just put the iPad app on the Mac. You make M1 Macs, you just do, even Catalyst.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Alex Cranz?

  I think it's because of the experience. They don't want you like, like the iPad and the phone, they keep talking about like, oh, well, you can like plug it into your rower, or you can put it on your stationary bike. And I think part of it is like, they don't want you opening your phone, your computer, and like getting all your notifications from Slack and going through it. They want you like-

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Have you seen how people use iPads with keyboards attached to them? I'm on my bike, on its little trainer, and I'm like balancing it on my handlebars, just like, yeah.

• 1:02:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's definitely silly that they haven't done it yet, but like, it's goofy.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:24Alex Cranz?

  But we're getting Pilates, it's coming.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Dieter, you got the two things you want. You got, you got bike modes for the watch, and you got Pilates and Fitness Plus. These are like your, these are like Dieter's, it's like Dieter's stuff.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  I didn't get the bike mode I want. Like, it can detect falls better on a bike, and it can, it can go, it can do automatic tracking for when a bike ride starts. It can also make sure that it has an electronic bike mode, e-bike mode, so you don't get as much credit for your calories as you otherwise would, which is great, fine, go for it. Although, e-bike's still kind of exercise. But it's still talking to a bike computer, it's going to require a Bluetooth dongle, so.

• 1:02:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Which is fine, I didn't expect it, but I was hoping against hope. That's like the event, like, very low key for Apple.

• 1:03:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they updated some stuff, a lot of S updates, a lot of carrier shenanigans. I love monkeying with cameras, excited to monkey with these cameras, like.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, I don't, I don't know, I think we're still waiting for M1X MacBook Pros.

• 1:03:22Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's-

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  That's a big deal, right? I think we're still waiting for a redesigned watch, we're still waiting for AirPods. Like, there's a couple of categories where the big changes, we're still waiting for an AR headset. Hey, you know what they didn't talk about at all in this?

• 1:03:34Alex Cranz?

  AR.

• 1:03:35Nilay Patel?

  AR, or the LiDAR sensor on the Pros.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Here's a sensor. We put it on last year. It continues to do very little.

• 1:03:41Alex Cranz?

  Are the the AirPods just gonna get like tossed out one day? Are we just gonna be scrambling one morning to write up the AirPods because they just were suddenly announced overnight?

• 1:03:50Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, or like the Beats team will be like, we are here.

• 1:03:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  We made some more headphones again.

• 1:03:58Alex Cranz?

  Hi guys.

• 1:03:58Nilay Patel?

  They charge via micro USB for some reason.

• 1:04:03Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. We'll see. There's a bunch of Apple stuff like coming, we assume later this year, and particularly with MacBooks, I think it would be a big deal. That's it. We gotta, we gotta get this stuff. We gotta review it. I think there's a lot of question. Yeah, there's always stuff in the details that's interesting. Yeah, we'll get there.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  I mean, the big challenge for Apple here is we're ending this like, yep, there it is. Like, these might actually be genuinely like, they might be right about the cameras being the best ever update. That like, maybe that's the truth. And if so, how will Apple actually communicate it? Because from all, from everything I've seen, our reaction here, reaction elsewhere on the web was like, oh, yeah, it's an S update. And that historically, S phones were the phones to get. They were like the ones where they figured it out. And that might be the case here. But I don't know if Apple's gonna be able to like, communicate that to people.

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they're just gonna get AT&T to give you $45,000 to get any.

• 1:04:54Alex Cranz?

  They need to communicate it.

• 1:04:55Nilay Patel?

  You've got an iPhone 4S? That's worth $2,000. You heard about our ineffective 5G network? Okay, let's take a break. There's other, other gadgets you need to talk about, actually, including a secret Nintendo update. We'll be right back.

• 1:05:14Speaker 05

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

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• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Alex, walk us through the Verge team's reaction to Nintendo. And I'll say this, just tweeting it out.

• 1:06:31Alex Cranz?

  Just like the chaos.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  They just tweeted it out.

• 1:06:34Alex Cranz?

  Like it was like shock and everybody's like, is this a thing? This can't be a thing because it wouldn't be tweeted out, but it's a thing. And then just screaming and then Heim somewhere softly weeping.

• 1:06:45Nilay Patel?

  Heim was like not even near a computer and he just like felt it like a disturbance in the forest. All right, for years, we should say, Alex, say what it is.

• 1:06:56Alex Cranz?

  For years, for years, for years. So the Switch has been out. We've all been begging for Bluetooth audio on the Switch because many of us fly and do other things where we want to listen to use our headphones and nobody owns wired headphones anymore. So everybody's been asking for it. Heim Gartenberg has been like trying to figure out why Bluetooth doesn't exist on Bluetooth Audio doesn't exist on the Switch because it has Bluetooth. So theoretically it should. And it's been this big, long theory of why doesn't it have it? And now it has it. So there's, so instead it's like what the theory is, the question is, why did it take so long?

• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:07:34Alex Cranz?

  And we still don't really know. There are some, some clues because you can only attach two controllers at a time. To the Switch when you're using Bluetooth audio.

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:07:44Alex Cranz?

  And Bluetooth is like, I think maximizes like eight connections.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:07:49Alex Cranz?

  I think the theory is like the Joy-Cons themselves use more than one Bluetooth connection.

• 1:07:53Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so then, yeah, so that's one, two, three, four, and then you headphones are five, six.

• 1:07:57Alex Cranz?

  So they're like, you can't add another one. And I think it took so long is because the reason it never happened before this, it was always going to be kind of a friction. There's going to be a lot of friction there. There was going to be like, okay, how many controllers can I use? Okay. How do I set up the audio? And even now, we're still seeing like issues with the Bluetooth audio that people are using. And I know Sean Hollister is having some, some issues with it. So like, it's always, we don't fully know what's happened, but we have a good idea that there was like limitation. This is a game, a toy company, not a hardware company. And they were just trying to make the best toy that like my seven-year-old godson could use to roast me in Mario Kart. Destroy me.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  But it is incredible. They released an entirely new model of the Switch.

• 1:08:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  And they still didn't do it.

• 1:08:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  And then they were just like, I don't know, it's, there was an Apple event today. Let's just tweet it at 7:30 PM Eastern.

• 1:08:55Alex Cranz?

  We're all like logging off, enjoying our hard day's work.

• 1:09:00Nilay Patel?

  The entire Verge staff like arrived in Slack to be like, did you see it? Did you see the tweet? Like, this story has like eight bylines on it. Every one sentence of the story.

• 1:09:14Alex Cranz?

  Just wanted to feel included, man.

• 1:09:16Nilay Patel?

  It's very good, but they did it finally. And Sean is having weirdo problems. His Switch doesn't wake up as fast as it used to.

• 1:09:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Nilay Patel?

  We don't know if these are widespread, but good news.

• 1:09:25Alex Cranz?

  We'll, we'll learn more as, as time goes on about why it took so long.

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  It just says here, Razer made gamer thimbles. I have to admit, I didn't, I didn't read this story and I don't want to know more.

• 1:09:37Alex Cranz?

  They're little, this was upsetting to me because I was editing this story and, and I was like, but this is so stupid. Nobody would ever use this. And so like Cameron and I were Googling finger, gaming finger thimbles, trying to think of what it was. And it's like, they're called Cots.

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  Cots.

• 1:09:55Alex Cranz?

  And people do, you know, there's a very robust business on amazon.com of people getting little fabric.

• 1:10:02Alex Cranz?

  Thumb cots and, and playing, you know, Fortnite and stuff on, well, not Fortnite, but playing games on their phone and then they break down, the cots do, and then they buy new ones. And now Razors in on the business with a hefty markup.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  I mean, are these just the equivalent of the, like, when you need to go through a lot of paper or, and so you get the little sleeve that goes on your finger so it's grippier?

• 1:10:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's, well, it's less about that. It's more about catching the sweat from your fingers. So it doesn't make it more, I, I've never had that issue. Maybe I just don't play games on my phone enough that my phone is slipping out of my hand and flying across the room for my sweaty thumbs. But that's, that's kind of the thought process theoretically behind this. And it's really upsetting that, like, it exists.

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:10:53Alex Cranz?

  For me personally.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a great, great story for us to have on our website. Dieter, what's going on with this Pixel 6 thing, this new tensor processor? So, a known place for Android leaks to happen are Geekbench scores, because people will, Geekbench by default, if you get the free version, it uploads your results. And so people could, like, look at the public Geekbench results and see stuff. So, the processor that looked like it was probably the Pixel 6 appeared on Geekbench with a terrible score.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  And everyone's like, oh, what's going on here? And then over at XDA Developers, they talked to somebody who says that they have it, have a Pixel 6 in hand, and they were able to provide information about the processor and some other details, like camera specs and so on, that seems to corroborate that it was in fact a genuine Pixel 6 that got uploaded to Geekbench. So, okay, fine. But in this process, we have learned, apparently, what the different cores are inside the tensor system on a chip. And our headline, which I recommended and I'm fully agreed with, is "Google's rumored Pixel 6 tensor processor sounds extremely weird."

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  So what we have is two X1 cores, Cortex X1 Performance cores that clocked at 2.8, and two Cortex A76 Performance cores clocked at 2.25, and then four A55 Efficiency cores. So the way that Android tends to work is there's a, you know, big, little, like, there's the cores you use for like, high-intensity stuff, and then there's the Efficiency cores for low-intensity stuff.

• 1:12:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  So Android has basically moved up to three. There's like the like, super bursty, fast, powerful core. Then there's a couple of high-performance cores, and then there's the Efficiency cores, right? You with me so far? The way that most of these have gone, Snap 888 in particular, it's got one super bursty Performance core. The two regular Performance cores are the newer A78s? And then, you know, whatever you've got for Efficiency. So Google went for two of the super-high bursty cores. And then for the regular, you know, Performance cores, which are kind of the workforces in some ways, they went for some super-old processors that...

• 1:13:14Alex Cranz?

  They're from like, 2018 or something.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like, there's no good reason to have gone with these that anyone can imagine.

• 1:13:22Alex Cranz?

  Unless they started working on these in 20...

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  They could have started working on it a long time. I mean, that's like, the Surface Duo had an ancient processor when it came out. So that's a possibility. But the fact that they've got the X1 in there is like, well, that's weird. And the fact that they went with two, what are they gonna do with two? Is that gonna rail battery life? Well, no, you can have the other ones, but then the other ones are super-old and maybe not as efficient. So it's like, the Geekbench Tagore's were probably off because, you know, reasons, pre-production reasons, right? Not tuned, something, something, who knows? So far as anybody can tell, from the best evidence available to very smart Android nerds who know way more about this shit than I do, these seem to be what the processor cores are, and no one knows how or why. And we will find out at some point.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  But the relative performance of this CPU, this whole system on a chip, is gonna be very, very fascinating. Because like, the story was always Android can't keep up with Apple, right? No one expected the Pixel to catch up to the A14 or A15. Not really, not in our heart, we know. But maybe they're just trying to do it through brute force by putting two X ones in there, which would be wild. So And running them all the time. Well, there's no way that I mean, this, this thing, it's only got a 5,000 milliamp battery. I say only, that's a pretty big battery, but still like, there's no way that they could run those two X ones all the time and have anything that wouldn't just light on fire instantly. Look, Android phones lighting on fire.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  It's a thing, it happens. People miss the note, you know, I'm told reliably. But hey, you know, it's mid-September. Google is selling, um, Google branded potato chips in Japan. Okay. Cause Google chip, get it? Uh, it's pretty good. They look like the Pixel. They have a, um, they have a googly salty flavor.

• 1:15:12Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  They're running Pixel 6 ads during football. Yep. They've got Pixel 6 billboards around San Francisco. So it's coming. How much does it cost? When is it coming out? What are the megapixels on the camera? Like, I get building hype, but is, it's like, it's pretty wild to be building hype when there's literally no way that anybody will act on that hype for, what, a month?

• 1:15:36Alex Cranz?

  Is it just like trying to get us familiar with the name? So like, we'll almost think it's a brand new phone when it comes out and be like, oh, this must be the new Pixel. We've keep seeing that other one on, on TV.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  I think they just, they've, they've done so little with the Pixel over the past two and a half, three years that they just like, were too excited and they had to just start. They've made so much stuff for this. They're like, well, we gotta start it now because we've got too much.

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll see. I'm curious about this one. I mean, again, comes camera stuff, we're gonna find out. We'll see, we'll just see how it goes. But it's, this chip is real weird. And I think that if it's slower than other Android phones, it's a real weird look for them. It can't be where they're going.

• 1:16:13Alex Cranz?

  Well, it might not be because it's got two of the, the super high performance and everybody else has one, right?

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like you're saying, you can't run them all the time. So like, and it's sort of like day to day doing stuff. Maybe that's how they're gonna get battery life on it. They're like, you know what? You actually don't need this much performance day to day.

• 1:16:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  Who knows? They basically got away with it, the Pixel 5, basically. That's true. Uh, I think that's it. Are we out? Is there other stuff? I think, I think that's enough. That's how we're ending this one.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  I mean, look, there, there's, there's a lot of stuff going on. The Elizabeth Holmes trial is happening. Liz Zapata is covering it. She's at the courthouse. She's

• 1:16:52Alex Cranz?

  She's listening to them talk about spreadsheets.

• 1:16:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If you've, you've heard Liz on the show before, she's having the time of her life. Straight up. Amazing situation at the Holmes trial. There was just a guy hanging out with the press. And he was like, I'm just making sure, I'm just hanging out. I'm just a concerned

• 1:17:09Alex Cranz?

  I'm a watchdog.

• 1:17:10Nilay Patel?

  It turned out that it was her, her fiance's dad in disguise.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:17:15Alex Cranz?

  Did you hear how they knew, how people like were recognizing him?

• 1:17:18Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:17:19Alex Cranz?

  Cause he was wearing Ferragamo loafers.

• 1:17:22Nilay Patel?

  His shoes were too expensive.

• 1:17:24Alex Cranz?

  Like a reporter from like the NPR was like, whoa, those are too nice for just some guy.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Yeah. He turns out it's like a hotel, like magnate in San Francisco.

• 1:17:35Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:17:36Nilay Patel?

  Becca has the GoPro Hero 10 review up on YouTube on the site. It is really fun. Classic Becca video. There's a bunch of like Facebook nonsense going on, but we've done Facebook nonsense enough. We'll, we'll come back to that another time. There's just like a lot going on.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  Oh, and the Surface event is next week. If you download this right away, we've got a article of what to expect. And it's a lot. Like Surface Pro 8, maybe they'll actually redesign the Surface Pro. Be still my heart. Come on, do it. Surface Book 4, Surface Pro X, maybe they'll do something with ARM. Just kidding. Surface Go 3, they are going to do the little guy again. And then finally, Surface Duo 2.

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:18:19Alex Cranz?

  You asked for it.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  I mean, they, they put a big old camera bump on it. If the rumors are true, which I don't know. I guess maybe it'll have a newer version of Android. The original Surface is still hanging out on 10. We're about to get Android 12 is coming out in a matter of weeks.

• 1:18:36Alex Cranz?

  Maybe it'll have a newer processor.

• 1:18:38Nilay Patel?

  That's real good.

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we'll see what that does.

• 1:18:41Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot going on. Just we, you know, we, we've got Apple stuff to talk about. So we did that. I will say, by the way, there have been protests at Apple stores about the photo scanning. People are obviously still mad about Android stuff, but you know, doing one episode of the show, just on the actual phones, you know, peaks and valleys.

• 1:18:58Alex Cranz?

  They delayed it. They delayed it. So we can, we can delay talking about it for just a little bit.

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  All right. You can tweet at us. Dieter is at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. Alex is Alex H. Cranz. We love hearing from you. Decoder this week, we had Charlie Harding from Switched on Pop. We did an episode about music copyright and Olivia Rodrigo. It was, we played Stairway to Heaven on Decoder. We also played I'm Too Sexy by Right Said Fred, a really choice episode. Highs and lows. Highs and lows. Also, BTS fans have picked up on this episode of Decoder. Oh, heck yeah. To carry forward a theory about why BTS doesn't get a US radio airplay, except for the song Butter, which was, has a co-writing credit by the head of Columbia Records. You are, like, our friend David Pierce got wrongly tagged in a tweet by Nicki Minaj. Nicki Minaj

• 1:19:46Nilay Patel?

  has had a week on Twitter. David Pierce also had a week on Twitter because she, Nicki Minaj, wanted to yell at Piers Morgan, accidentally tweeted David Pierce. Yeah. A lot of Nicki Minaj fans first started yelling at David Pierce and then apologizing to David Pierce. And then they started yelling at Case. It was just a whole thing. Yeah. I'm watching this and then like, out of the corner of my eye, I'm like, oh, BTS has picked up Decoder. Oh, no. Very entertaining. That was last week on Decoder. Next week on Decoder, we have the CEO of an app called Fuck You Pay Me, which is, she was a former model. She has an MBA. She's built this app to help influencers get paid more money. Very cool. Excited about that one. And then Ashley Carmen is running, you may have already

• 1:20:31Nilay Patel?

  heard it if you're listening to this show, our AI series in the Vergecast feed. This week was voice synthesis. She cloned her voice, talked with Jameson about how all that would work. Next week is AI video. She's gonna deep fake some video. It's a very cool series. Very excited about it. That's in the Vergecast feed. Just a lot going on. Yeah. Here at the Verge. It's a busy time. We're over. We went over. However long the show is, we went over it. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll. Get the shot.

• 1:21:17Speaker 06

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• 1:22:01Speaker 07

  Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run subagents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and on the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the Am Law 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey, AI tailored for law. Learn more at harvey.ai.