Ctrl-Walt-Delete: Nilay owes Walt $100

Walt and Nilay kick things off with a discussion of the iPhone 6S, the weird new prices of phones, the 2007 iPhone, and more. Subscribe to Ctrl-Walt-Delete on iTunes! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ctrl-+-walt-+-delete/id1043196031?mt=2 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.

• 0:09Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Control, Alt, Delete, a new podcast from The Verge. I am Neelai Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge. I'm joined here by Walt Mossberg, our executive editor and the co-founder of Rico.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Hey, did you say Control, Alt, Delete?

• 0:23Nilay Patel?

  I said Control, Walt, Delete. Do you want me to enunciate better?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Why don't you enunciate better?

• 0:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'll do that. No problem.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Being a stickler.

• 0:35Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Control, Walt, Delete, a new podcast from The Verge. I am Neelai Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, and I'm joined by Walt Mossberg, executive editor of The Verge and co-founder of Rico. Hey Walt, how's it going?

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Great, Neelai, how's it going for you?

• 0:50Nilay Patel?

  It's going great. So we, this is the first episode of what I think of as your podcast, Walt. I'm very excited to do a show with you. It has been, people don't know this, Walt and I have known each other for quite some time, and then as Rico became part of the Vox Media family and Walt and Lauren Good and Katie Barrett joined The Verge team, Walt and I have spent a lot of time together recently. And I'm really excited to let everybody in on just what it's like to hang out with us because it's been really fun for me. I hope it's been fun for you, Walt.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  It's been a lot of fun. It's been great. You guys rock. I just back tweeted that.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's been, it's been a pretty fun ride since May when we announced that Rico was joining the Vox family and we've been hanging out. And what a good time to do the first episode of the podcast. We've been promising that we're going to do the podcast together since like the first day. We had Walt and Lauren on The Verge cast, that was super fun.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  But it's been in stealth. It's been in stealth, like a stealth company.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  It has, it's absolutely been in stealth. I did convince Walt that we should use the name Control Walt Delete, which I'm very excited about.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  And props to our former podcast producer, John Lago Mercino, for coming up with that name. But what a great time to start the show and start off a run of it. iPhone reviews came out today, the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus were announced a couple of weeks ago. I did the big Verge review, Walt did the big Mossberg review. They're both up on the site, you should see them. We made a really fun video with Walt, we did an embarrassing video with me as always. Other people did reviews, but I think ours the best. And let's talk about it, let's get into it. So Walt, what do you think of the iPhone 6S?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Well, you know, this is, people have to remember, this is one of those S-years. You know, Apple is on this TikTok schedule, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, where they do a big release one year and then the next year, they pretty much keep the same form factor of the phone, but they change the hardware and they try to introduce enough new features to make it really significant to people considering upgrades. So for instance, a good example would be, they brought out the iPhone 5, which was a whole new form factor because they increased the size of the screen, which now seems tiny, but then, at the time, seemed bigger. But then the 5S came out, and what did they do?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  They introduced Touch ID, which was really the first workable fingerprint recognition on a phone and was an important feature. And of course, the phone was faster and all that. And now we have another S-cycle phone that I think has another fundamentally important, you know, addition, which is both hardware and software, and that's 3D Touch.

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So here's my take on 3D Touch. I think everybody was fairly positive on it who used it. It's one of those features where you can, I don't know, I'm gonna go out in the limelight. If this is one of those features where Samsung or an LG had just sort of gone off and Yolo'd and just made it on their own outside of Android, we would be like, this is kind of a gimmick. Like, you know, a company like Samsung is never gonna get the entire Android app ecosystem to support a feature like 3D Touch. But because it's Apple and they control the hardware and the software, and they have the sales clout to go get Facebook and Instagram and all these people, you can see the potential for it right away. And so I actually thought, as I was using it, man, this is useful, but I don't use a lot of Apple's apps.

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  So I enjoy the quick launcher on messages, I could quickly text people. I loved being able to just grab a selfie using the, you know, pushing down and getting the quick action to take a selfie with the camera icon. And Safari, I thought the peek and pop was interesting, but I was like, I don't use mail. I don't use Apple's mail app. I don't use Apple's calendar app. And while you and I have talked about this, those are sort of the weakest parts of the iPhone. So you really have to depend on Apple's clout to extend it into the whole range of experiences with Apple stuff. And I think that's where Apple is just very uniquely positioned to do that in a way that almost nobody else is.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's exactly right, and I made that point in my review. This has always been the thing about Apple. If you go back to the very beginning, they control the hardware platform and the software platform. Yes, you know, it's true that they're not, as critics sometimes like to say, closed, because, hey, a million and a half apps is not closed. But they control the platform parts. And if Samsung had tried this, it probably would have been mostly software. A lot of things they've tried have sounded great and have, like, their fingerprint reader when they first did it was terrible. It worked about 30% of the time. But you're right. The developers are likely to flock to this.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  I think maybe we ought to back up a second, if that's okay, and just explain to people who haven't tried this what it is, because it can look like a parlor trick when they look at the videos or the photos in everybody's review. This is taking the 10-finger multi-touch, which was not invented exactly by Apple, because it was in university labs and things like that, and they had to buy some teams and some patents, but certainly refined and certainly made mainstream by Apple in 2007 with the first iPhone. This is taking that, chat gestures, as we all use every day now, swipe, you know, pinch, zoom, scroll, everything with your finger, and adding an important new dimension, which

• 6:16Speaker 01

  I think you made a big point of in your review, which is depth, and which is really the perception that the screen is almost flexible. You know, you hit that screen, you hit it with a certain amount of force, which, by the way, I discovered is adjustable. And when you do that, it operates in two ways. If it's just on an icon on your home screen, you get haptic feedback, so you know you've done it, and you get a pop-up, sort of a context menu, just like when you right-click on a PC or Mac, and you get a bunch of quick choices, the things that they think you're more likely to want to do, and I think that will improve a lot.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Over time, as they learn, and you mentioned a couple, and you get to do them. And that's one way to do it. But to me, even in some ways, the cooler way is inside the app. You may not use Apple Mail. I do use it.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  You're a crazy person.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I have complaints about it, but I do use it. I use other mail apps as well. And in Apple Mail, it's amazing. I mean, you know, you're in a list of emails. Yes, there's a three-line preview, but you don't really necessarily know whether you care about it. You just press down, you get a popped-up version of the mail. You can quickly look at it, make a decision. And when you lift your finger, it goes where you're back at the list. And that's the key thing. You're back where you were. You know, you can do something with it or not do something with it. You can even, when your finger's down, you're looking at that preview, which they call a peek. You can even scroll up, and it has some quick actions like replying.

• 7:52Nilay Patel?

  Or you can push a little bit harder and have the whole thing open for real.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And that is called pop. So, you know, we're just seeing the very... It's just like trying to figure out the multi-touch stuff, which a lot of people laughed at, actually, because they didn't have a stylus or anything.

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  And now they do.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Well, now they do on one device, yeah. But, but, it's... You know, if you were writing about this, you would have a split of people saying, "This is awesome," which I think I said.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And you would have other people saying, "This is like a gimmick." But it isn't a gimmick, and everyone else is using it now. And, you know, they're not... We can... I think we should avoid the legalities of all this, although one of us was a lawyer. But...

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  I made a lot of hay over patents on multi-touch. That was basically what I covered.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Is that where you made your fortune?

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The Patel fortune. I got $25, and I protected it with my life. No, you know that...

• 8:48Speaker 01

  I was gonna go for a percentage of your fortune, but now, not so much.

• 8:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, actually, well, I owe you $100.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  You do owe me $100.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  We should have started with this. So, if you were listening to Veritas, you know that I bet we had a planning... You know, before these events go on, we have these huge planning meetings. Whole staff sits around, we talk about how we're gonna cover the stuff, and what we're expecting, and we assign out stories, all the stuff that we do. And we were talking about, you know, the story that you gotta write, which is, this is how much the iPhone costs. And... I was like, you know, everybody has these new pricing plans now, which we should talk about. I think the every year upgrade pricing plan changes, it changed my entire thought process in reviewing this phone. But anyway.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  We were talking about how, what number are they going to put on the screen? They've put 199 and 299 on the screen for, literally since the iPhone first came out. Well, no, since the 3G came out, right? The first one was way more expensive.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  So, since the, the, the...

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, since whenever the 199 number... And the amazing thing is, no one could, could charge more than 199 after that, and, you know, with a two-year contract and succeed. But anyway, go ahead, go on.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  Right, so we're in this meeting, I, I'm just gonna say this. It is always, Walt calls into our meetings all the time, but you hate, Walt hates meetings. So, sometimes he doesn't, you know, he's there, sometimes he's not there. We give him his choice, Walt can do whatever he wants. So Walt, obviously Walt's on the Apple meeting. He hasn't said anything for a while. And then, I'm like, they're never gonna put $27 on the screen. Right, which is the price of the base model iPhone over the, you know, AT&T's two-year payment plan, or Sprint's payment plan.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Verizon and all that.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  They all have the same one. It's $27 a month. And Walt's like, you know, they will put $27 a month on the screen. And I was like, well, I'll give you $100 if Apple puts 27, the least elegant number I can think of on the screen. And so, sure enough, we're at the event, and they put up 199 and 299, and I was like, phew. And then, Phil Scheller's like, and all the carriers now have payment plans, so you can get iPhone for $27 a month. So, I owe Walt $100, which, Walt, I will, everyone asked me if I was gonna pay you. I will definitely pay you. I will Venmo you or something after.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I've been waiting.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  But I wanted everybody to know. That was, that was a very funny moment in our sort of fun, chaotic live blog at the event, when the 27 flashed up and my Twitter exploded.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, so that, that is actually the thing, that the notion that people aren't particularly, particularly if you're listening to a podcast like this, right?

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  You are almost, you're obviously interested in technology, you're interested in phones, and you're probably the sort of person who, maybe you don't get a new phone every year, but you're certainly always considering it, right? You're always, if you're like me, I always want a new phone every year. And it's been hard because of these two-year contracts and you don't, the upgrades don't come around, and you gotta buy them full price and sell them, and there's a little bit of complication there that some people have figured out how to manage, and other people, it's too much. But now, every carrier has divorced, and Walt just wrote a great column about this, they've divorced the price of the service, at least a little bit, from the price of the device.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  I want more. I want them out of it altogether.

• 12:00Nilay Patel?

  Walt wants them to stop, right, you, you got a big rant about this. Walt wants them to shut down all their stores and the whole thing, right?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Well, I just don't want them involved in any way in phones, in the actual handset business. I think they have a great business, they spend a lot of money in, networks, they ought to compete on who has the fastest, who has the most coverage, who has the best price, whatever, but, you know, why should they bother to be second-rate retailers and second-rate app developers? But that's another...

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, but I think, I think this is part of it, so, and I'm, I'm very curious if this changed sort of your perception of how you thought about the iPhone, because now, every, you know, the goal is to get you to pay, you know, AT&T will take $27 a month from you for the rest of your life and give you a new iPhone every year. Apple announced the iPhone upgrade plan, which is a little bit more, it's like $32 or $35 a month, but you get...

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Thirty-two.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  But I think for the bigger one, it's slightly more. But, whatever, so it's 32 bucks a month, and you get a new iPhone every year in Apple Care.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  And the other, the, we should explain that all these plans, including the carrier ones, are no interest, which is interesting, and the Apple one, which is also no interest, is $5 more because they're including the, they're, they're typically expensive, but I find often worthwhile, Apple Care warranty in it.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Just divided by 24, you know, so, that's like 5 bucks more a month.

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  But, but here's the thing about Apple's plan, which is called the, what, the iPhone Upgrade Program. They let you get one, a new one, every year, so, you know, this whole... The whole idea of a carrier deciding when you can get a new device. It would be like Comcast, if that was your home internet provider, saying, "Can't buy a new laptop, Eli, this year, but you can buy it next year," or, you know, "11 and a half months from now," whatever, you know. That's Apple saying, "Every year, you can buy one." Obviously, it's in their interest, I get that, but I mean, it gives you the choice. And secondly, and this is even more important, the phone is unlocked. I mean, the iPhone is one of the few phones that's been made so it's completely unlocked.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  It has bands that cover, and the right radios that cover the competing, you know, Verizon Sprint on one side, and T-Mobile and AT&T on the other, and of course, globally. I think it has 23 bands in it or something. So they can just unlock it, and you, if you start out with Verizon, and then you wanna, anytime, really, just go and get another SIM. You can go get another SIM, Apple doesn't really care. Keep making your payments. You decide to upgrade after 12 months, they just reset it at 24. You're paying exactly the same, you know, in the end, full price of the phone. With no interest. And there's no, you are their customer, not the carrier's customer.

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  This has got to be very worrisome to the carriers.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  But what strikes me in reviewing the phone, and we should talk about, you know, there's the camera and all this stuff we should talk about.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and more on 3D Touch, yeah, there's a lot.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's lots to go through. But what struck me as I was reviewing the phone was, in a world, I have friends, so I'm like, you know, I get a phone every year, right? I review phones, I get a new phone every year. But then I have friends who are very adamantly, you know, they're on the sort of non-S cycle. They love getting the new design. So they get the new design every year. So they got the iPhone 5. And then I have friends who are like, "I'm on the S cycle. This is what I do." Every, I wait for the first one to get out, all the bugs have worked out, and they make them faster. And all the cases and accessories are out there already for me. And I'm gonna, I love getting the S phones. So every two years, I get the S phone. But in a, just in a world where the sort of market expectation is now that you're gonna Just pay Apple thirty-two bucks a month forever and you just get a new phone every year.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  That kind of takes the notion of the S-cycle completely out of the picture. You're just gonna get a new iPhone every year. And so, things like 3D Touch, they're gonna roll out the big base of iPhone use ever faster than ever before. And things like, these upgraded cameras are gonna come out. And things like the processor, right? So, Apple loves saying the A9 processor is faster than ever. It's just, it kind of like doesn't matter because in a couple of years, everyone will have a processor that fast.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  And this is something that, you know, obviously, all things can change.

• 16:16Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  But right now, and for, you know, certainly the last, I don't know, ten or fifteen years, Apple's been the only company that could pull this off. I mean, it's why they were the only company that could pull off saying to a phone carrier, "You don't get to touch the phone." Even right when they started it. Because they have such a powerful brand, they have their own chain of retail stores, which are, as you know, very lucrative and very successful. And they just have a tremendous, and as you pointed out, and I pointed out in my column as well, they are the only people that control a powerful hardware platform and a powerful software platform and a cloud platform, which frankly, could be better. But they do have a cloud platform.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  That should be another podcast, by the way.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  And, but they have all three things, and they have people, there's a certain lock-in, there's a certain familiarity, there are iPhone or Apple families. And it's a very powerful thing. And so, now they're in the installment buying program. It's also very useful for them because they're a premium products company. They're like BMW. They charge a lot. They don't make hundred-and-eighty-dollar phones. At least, there's been no inclination that I can see that they're gonna do that. And so, six-fifty sounds like a lot of money for the base iPhone 6S, but thirty-two dollars a month sounds like, well, I can swing that, you know?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  So I, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big deal.

• 17:53Nilay Patel?

  I actually, my, my, my general prediction about the phones is that A, the next cycle of iPhones, they will all have five inch or bigger screens. I think that's just where the market's headed. And if you look at the competitors, either the G4, LG G4, or the Galaxy S6, they are using those bigger screens in a case that's much smaller in that sort of, in it's not-

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, smaller bezels, all that stuff, yeah.

• 18:16Nilay Patel?

  And it's funny because 3D Touch kind of lets them, it lets them rethink that home button in a way. So I-

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  I think that's like a fascinating, like, the phone will get bigger and then the upgrade cycle will just rapidly accelerate. So I, I don't know, there's a, there's a part of me that thinks that maybe this is the last S phone that we're gonna see. And maybe, maybe Apple will just, because the expectation is new phone every year, they're just gonna start hammering away at it. I don't know. It was, I, I sort of asked them about it.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  You know, I think it becomes a nomenclature thing. I mean, I, I, I have no idea why they called it S in the first place. I mean, I could ask them and maybe they have an answer, but you might be right. Let's, let's tackle this big screen thing.

• 18:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  I agree with you very much that when they went to the bigger screens, and I include very much in that the standard iPhone 6, because that's, 4.7 was a much bigger screen than they had ever had. And at the time, it was, there were a lot of other phones in that range. And then, of course, the bigger, the five and a half inch, 6 Plus, and now 6 S Plus, that broke open. I mean, it looked like Samsung, as opposed to the Android platform, people get very confused. The Android platform has won globally, no doubt about it in terms of market share. Apple has won globally in terms of profits and, I think, prestige.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  And, and, but their individual handset competitor was Samsung. And once Apple went to big screens, that sort of coincided. There were some other factors as well, like cheaper phones from China, but that sort of coincided with, you know, some of- The magic dust went away from Samsung at that point. And you may well be right that there'll be no iPhone smaller than five, let's say, or five and a half, or 5.2 or something. And that's fine with me. That's cool with me. I mean, the reason that I personally reviewed both this year and last year, the 6 and not the Plus,

• 20:22Speaker 01

  or the 6S and not the Plus, is just that I still think that at this moment for iPhone buyers, this is the mainstream model.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  And they have, except for one thing, which is optical image stabilization, they have the same hardware features, basically. So whatever you say about the 6S applies to the Plus as well.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so let's talk about-

• 20:47Speaker 01

  But I don't really disagree with you that the whole thing may get bigger. But it'll have to do with their sense of two things. One is, what are their customers buying? And the other is, because it's Apple, it'll have to do with design.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  You know, so if they can do something that they think is even cooler with bigger screens, they'll probably do it.

• 21:09Nilay Patel?

  So, we should talk, speaking of hardware, we should talk about the cameras for a minute, and then if you want to loop back to 3D Touch, get into that. But then, I want to end by, I've pulled up your very first iPhone review. So Walt was one of the very few people to review the first iPhone ahead of everybody else. And I'm just, I would love to just hear how the thing has changed. So, let's see the cameras real quick. So, I think the biggest change, I didn't notice a huge change in the back camera, from 8 megapixels to 12.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Right. There was a change. It is better, but it's not enormously better, because they had a fantastic camera last time.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I thought there was a meaningful change from the 5S to the 6.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  That's what I mean, yeah. So last time, which was the sixth,

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  they had a fantastic camera. They did not make a meaningful change, but by going to 12 megapixels and doing the work they did on the sensor, I think they poised themselves to maybe make a big jump next time.

• 22:06Nilay Patel?

  Right. But then, what is actually really interesting to me is that they were far, far behind on the front-facing camera, where everyone else had gone to five and even eight in some cases, and they were still at 1.2 megapixels. And now they've got a 5-megapixel camera and they're doing this retina flash thing, which somebody reminded me they've done in Max and Photo Booth forever, which is when you take a picture, the whole screen flashes at you. And they've got the clever, sort of, two-tone stuff where they measure the light in the room and they flash the screen a slightly different shade of white to balance. It's very clever. Snapchat was doing it for a while. Apple's riff on it is obviously because they control the hardware, they can make the screen flash three times as bright as it normally would go at max brightness.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:49Nilay Patel?

  It works. It's cute to play with.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  It does work.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  It works.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Fine in my tests.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  But you've got to, you know, it doesn't work from particularly far away, right? Like, you've got to, it's for selfies, right?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  It's a selfie, yeah.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  But I actually think that is the far more meaningful upgrade to the camera.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  I was saying that I went, I recently went on a trip to South Africa, and all of my favorite photos from South Africa, we took with a selfie stick, which is hilarious. All of my favorite photos from this trip are, you know, I went with like a Sony RX10 with like a crazy lens and all this stuff, and all of my favorite photos are 1.2 megapixels. And I think that's the sort of thing where, you know, Apple does this stuff like 3D Touch, they push the market, they have these like big ideas, but then the thing that their competitors have been relentlessly trying to improve, which is the experience of what people are actually doing, which is taking selfies. Apple's just sort of like strolling in kind of late to the game. And I think that's the sort of, you know, you look at something like live photos where HTC did the Zoe photos and Nokia did their own live photos.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  How many Zoe photos did you take?

• 23:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's the thing. How many live photos am I really going to take? I mean, if...

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know, but people are going to take more live photos than if people... I'll tell you something. I'll bet you that by... Four days from now, people have taken more live photos than the total ever taken of Zoe photos.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's because HCC didn't sell any phones.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And HCCs might even have been better. I don't remember. I remember writing about it, or one of my colleagues did, but, but, you know, so there's a reason I put it last in my review, not because I hate it, I mean, it works, it's fine. It's just not as important as the other stuff.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just the camera upgrades. Usually, the camera upgrade for the last couple, I think the 5 had a meaningful upgrade from the 4S, the 5S had a great upgrade, the 6 had a great camera upgrade. And it's just funny, this one, the rear camera to me feels very incremental. The front camera feels like a revolution.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they caught up on the front camera, but, you know, look, Neela, I don't have the numbers on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they still, with their 1.2 megapixel front camera, they were responsible for more selfies than any other individual manufacturer, you know. Well, they don't sell, I mean, their platform is smaller, but yes, as a phone, as an individual phone product, yes, they sell more phones. And people trust the cameras on them.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I just, there's, I was talking to Lauren Good, one of our other reviewers here, and

• 25:25Speaker 01

  The fabulous.

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  The wonderful Lauren Good, who was at Recode with Walton and joined the Verge team when the sites came together. But she was like, you know, there's a strong argument to be made that Apple is just doing a bunch of the stuff that other companies have, outside of 3D Touch, of course, but, you know, a better selfie camera, animated, automatic GIF creation, live photos are kind of a riff on GIFs. And some of this other stuff is very much along the lines of what other companies have been trying to do to desperately differentiate their phones against Apple. And you see Apple just sort of sweep them all in.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's, look, that's a big part of their pattern. You know, Steve Jobs is a historical figure, certifiable genius, whatever.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  But he didn't, and they did invent some things and they did take big risks. But there's a lot of things where they just waited a little bit to see what other people fumbled around to do, and then they came in and tried to do it in a more, you know, kind of integrated, organized, hardware and software combined way. And I think this is, several of these things are examples of that here. I think 3D Touch is the one that, in this case, is more of a, is more of a bold stroke. And I agree with you that it'll be fascinating to see what developers do with it. I noticed, I got an update a couple of hours ago from Shazam, which is using it.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  You, you can, you know, press down on their icon and immediately it will, you know, Shazam the song, listen to the song and identify it for you without opening the app. So, you know, these are small things at the beginning, but I just, I won't belabor the topic because I think we both agreed on it.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  This is, this is, you know, just when you think smartphones, okay, it's stale, it's mature, what the hell can anybody do with it? They come up with another, another fundamental, and I stress fundamental, you know, kind of navigation thing.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  That, that people are gonna find interesting things, ways to use.

• 27:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, so let me read you, and I think that's a really good, that's a really good segue into, to this thing I wanna, I wanna try to do on this show as much as we can, which is, which is to pull from this vast archive of reviews, so.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 27:49Nilay Patel?

  Come on, you gotta let me do this, man. Who else gets to do this? It's great. So, 2007, the first iPhone comes out.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think it was just you and maybe two or three other people got to do it.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Two, there were three of us.

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  Three of you got to the early reviews. And I remember, I was, I was working at Engadget at the time. The reviews came out, we devoured them, and we, we aggregated the hell out of you.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  All right.

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  As we were wont to do, and we were so excited to finally get our own phones. But there was so much hype around that first iPhone. So I want to read you, I just want to ask you, as you were, as you were writing some of these lines, how were you thinking about evaluating the first iPhone? And how do you think that relates to this one? So here's my favorite line from your first review. You ready? "The iPhone's most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard, turned out to be a non-issue despite our deep initial skepticism." Now, I think that is, if you, in this modern, like, there isn't a great phone with a keyboard anymore. Right?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  But at that time, that was such a, it was, it was like a gamble to make a phone without a keyboard. What were you, how were you thinking through that? And how do you think, how do you think we've gotten here from there?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I remember writing that, and I remember why. I mean, and I can remember arguing with Steve Jobs about it quite a bit, as a matter of fact. And I didn't write that because he sort of won the argument. I wrote it because I used it for however long I had it. And I had it for more than like, it was not like a five-day thing. I think it might have been a couple, three weeks, as a matter of fact, different days. And what happened to me was gradually, look, I'm not a type, touch typist, and that may have biased me somewhat, but I gradually found that, hey, this, this works. You know, I was a, I was not a BlackBerry user.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  But I was a Trio user. I don't know how many people remember the Trio, but it, but it was a very good pre-iPhone smartphone. And it had a physical keyboard. And I, that's why I was so hugely skeptical. And as I used this thing, I mean, I think I went on somewhere in that column to say that within the first couple of days, I was ready to throw the thing out the window because I was making so many typos. Then, all of a sudden, three, three days or four days in, it just sort of clicked. And it worked. And it worked for me. And, and that's when my mind changed.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's, it's, it's using it. And then...

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Of course, the advantages of the software keyboard, once you find it's usable, which I did, and there still are people who don't like it, but I do, once you find it's usable, then the advantages of it become super important. For instance, we don't even notice this anymore, I don't think, but when you're in different apps, both Apple and its developers, Android, you know, Google and its developers can change the keyboard to be more sensible. So if you're filling out a URL, it doesn't have a space bar because there are no spaces in URLs, you know, and it has the at symbol in email address fields, but not in other places.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  So, you know, making it software makes it much more powerful in a way.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  All right, so I've got one more, one more line, and I think this is, you and I didn't focus on this so much, but I think we're both friends with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, and her entire review of the six S was about, basically about battery life. She, you know, it's hard to review an S phone because in some ways they're iterative. So she did a clever thing where she asked all of her readers to say, what's the biggest problem with your phone? And then she sort of posited the question of whether the six S answers those questions. And the number one one she got was battery life. So here, in 2007, is your line about battery life on the very first iPhone. "In real life, you'll do a mix of these things, so the best gauge might be that in our two-week test, the iPhone generally lasted all day with a typical mix of tasks."

• 32:02Nilay Patel?

  Now, it is years later, and some phones, like the, you know, the Razr Max have come out, which are gigantic because they just physically have years back.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Because they have a giant bulge with a giant battery, yep.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  But we're still reviewing iPhones that last about all day with a typical mix of tasks. Is that, I mean, should that change? Do you think that that's just acceptable? Is that just the number they have to hit and we can do whatever we want? Or is there?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Well, I would, I would love one that would last a week, but the fact is that for, it's obvious from the success of the thing and the many other phones that also last about a day, that that's fine for people. Now, there are some people who live in places like New York City, where signals bounce off tall buildings and the phone is constantly searching for signals and things, where the battery life doesn't last all day and it's really an annoying thing.

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm one of those people.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  And people, but I don't live there. And...

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  The ruthlessly self-interested Walt Moss for ex- strikes again.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, I test these and I do test them in New York City. I do test them in, in, on the West Coast. I do test them here in the Washington DC area, which listeners is where I'm based. And, um, and where there's a height limit on the buildings, by the way. And, um, you know, I don't, I don't find it to be a problem to have to plug the phone in at night. I don't. Um, if somebody said to me, you won't have to plug it in for a week, that'd be even better. But that doesn't rank number one on, on my list of things.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's about plugging it in at night, though. I think it's, it's, it's, it's about, it's, you know, with electric cars, you talk about range anxiety. It's, you know, it turns red. It, you know, to get 20%, it's red and it's eight o'clock.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I don't get, I used to get anxious about that.

• 33:50Nilay Patel?

  And the low power mode will get you through the end of the day, but like.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  But look, let's be real. Um, obviously there are people who have jobs who don't have access to what I'm about to say. But there's lots and lots and lots and lots of people, particularly among the, the group of people who can afford this thing, who, um, you know, are sitting at a desk at their office or their home office or at the Starbucks or wherever at a table. And they can, they can plug it in for periods during the day. They're on a long conference call. If I'm on a long conference call, Neelai.

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  Just plug it in.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Why wouldn't you? If you're just sitting at your desk and you've.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  Freedom. Who knows? Maybe I'm gonna run away. I like.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Well, then you, then, then you know what?

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  Unplug it.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Then you have to have the strength to unplug the lightning connector and get up. It's the same way I feel about this wireless charging pad stuff that, that, you know, Samsung has been pushing. I'm not against it. It's fine, but it's not wireless. It still has a wire. It's just that you can put the, so they're saying, okay, guess what? We're saving you plugging the little cable in and you can just put it down on this thing. It's nice. It's fine. It's not a revolution. A revolution would be that there's electricity in the air and when you walk in the room, the phone and other things get charged.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  No, I, I will say this. I think an equal revolution has been in this, in the same period of time, laptop batteries have gone from four hours to 15. Right?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  You could-

• 35:21Speaker 01

  And who's led that?

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, of course, it's Apple, but it's, the laptops are getting smaller, too. Right? It's funny to me that in these two, these are the two most important products I have. I have a phone and a laptop. They run my life, they run my business, or how I communicate.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Well, and tablets, iPads at least, go about 10 hours to 12 sometimes.

• 35:40Nilay Patel?

  An iPad, you know, an iPad is a, iPhone has a huge battery attached to it. You know, it's like, it's just funny, like, the reason the iPad gets so much more battery-

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, let's be honest, it's a little more than that. I mean, it does take a lot of tweaking. That operating system, various, you know, granular aspects of it are turning on and off all the time. Same with the hardware. And, um, yeah, there are, there are, there are non-Apple devices that have very good battery life, but Apple does a very good job of maximizing what they've done with the battery.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  Alright.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, I don't know, maybe we've all become like, you know, hypnotized to the one-day plug-in cycle, and are thrilled if we can get to the end of the day. And, and certainly, you know, if you're living in a place where something, notably looking for a cell tower is my favorite-

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Um, is draining the battery, then, you know, you're pissed. And you should go buy that Razr Max, or something with a giant battery, or buy a Mophie case, or if you love the iPhone, or whatever. I mean, I feel bad for you, I'm sorry. But, all I can do as a reviewer is say, you know, this is what happened to me. And I don't, I don't think you bitched about the battery in your review, right?

• 36:53Nilay Patel?

  No, you know, I, I think it's interesting that it's just exactly the same as the six. Where, you know, I think iPhones, people want to know, how's the battery going to do for me? Is it going to be better than my current life? Right? Like, and I think every iPhone for me starts out wonderful, over the moon, I'm so excited. And then about a year later, I'm like, ah, this battery kind of sucks. And I, that-

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, batteries are, as you know, are not subject to Moore's Law. They're chemistry and physics, and they- And they do have a tendency to get weaker.

• 37:25Nilay Patel?

  But I think that's it. It's that. I would rather start at a much higher point so by the end of the by the end of the run, I'm still feeling good instead of feeling worried. And I think that's that's the kind of range anxiety I'm thinking about. But

• 37:37Speaker 01

  No, it's a good, it's a good point. And I bet there would be people at Samsung and at Moto and at Apple and at Google who would love to do that for you without having a phone with a giant bulge in the back. And with, you know, I mean, look, I think Apple looks at the battery the way they look at the price. They take the phone and they give you more speed, more power. And this thing is very fast. And I used an adjective in the video that we did for how fast it was. And, you know, it's very fast. And even the Touch ID, you know, the fingerprint reader is so fast.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  I don't even see the lock screen. The thing, you know, unlocks so fast. So, you know, they do these things that obviously, and, you know, I presume it takes more battery power to use a better front-facing camera. I don't know. And then flash the screen three times. So there's a bunch of things there that put drain on the battery. And yet they, they have kept it about where it was last year. I think that's what they're optimizing around.

• 38:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Not degrading it rather than dramatically improving it. I think that's it.

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I think that, you know, aside from 3D Touch, that's sort of the S cycle, right? It's, we're making, we're optimizing and we're making it better. And I'm just

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Maybe they'll, you know, maybe they'll surprise, maybe they'll decide next year that they have a way to make it be a two-day battery. Maybe they will, but maybe they won't.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  I think that would be if Apple wants to If they want everybody, no matter what iPhone they have, to upgrade, that would be the thing. That's sort of my answer.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Then they could be a really profitable company with this market cap on the world and $190 billion in cash, if only.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, all right. So that, we've actually gone over, I promised Walt that I only take half an hour of his time every week. We were actually...

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is fun.

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  It's fun. I think this is going to be a fun show. I'm excited to have it. So that was Control What's Lead. Thank you very much to my friend, Mr. Mossberg.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Thank you. You are my friend, and we are colleagues, and I'm really happy that we're colleagues, and I'm really happy that The Verge and Recode are working together, and that I'm based out of The Verge, and I have the honor of working with you. And this is, and I'm sure we've already sickened half the people, but...

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  Look, we need more conflict on that. Next time, we gotta disagree. I'm hunting for ways to disagree. But it was great. More Control What's Leads coming. We're going to try to do one every week. We also have other great podcasts to listen to. There is What's Tech with Chris Plant. There is Verge ESP with Emily Ashida and Liz Apoto. And then there's The Verge Cast with me and Dieter and a rotating cast of crazy characters all talking about technology and culture and science and entertainment and the wonderful collision of things that is The Verge. You can find all of that at itunes.com/theverge. Please throw us five-star ratings, subscribe to everything, tweet at me. I am at Reckless. You can tweet to Walt. He's at Walt Mossberg. And we will see you again next week. Thank you so much.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  I'm looking forward to it.