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

Apple launched the iPhone 16, Apple Watch Series 10, and AirPods 4 at its annual fall event in Cupertino. The devices come with some big upgrades — a new camera control on the iPhone, a new design on the Watch — but also a lot of promises about AI. Today on the show, we discuss everything that's new, everything that's missing, and all the reasons you might or might not want to upgrade your Apple gear this year. Further reading: iPhone 16 event live blog: all the news from Apple’s keynote iPhone 16 event: all the news from Apple’s keynote Apple announces the iPhone 16 with a faster processor and Camera Control button Apple announces the iPhone 16 Pro iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max hands-on: don't call it a shutter button Apple Watch Series 10 announced with bigger screen and thinner design The AirPods Pro 2 will soon double as hearing aids iOS 18 will launch next week with new ways to customize your homescreen Apple announces AirPods 4 with noise cancellation and better sound AirPods 4 hands-on: noise cancellation for people who hate ear tips Apple has a faster MagSafe charger to go with the new iPhone 16 phones Apple has a faster MagSafe charger to go with the new iPhone 16s It sure looks like FineWoven is dead Apple’s Visual Intelligence is a built-in take on Google Lens Beats’ new iPhone 16 cases work with the Camera Control button Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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

• 0:33David Pierce?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the A18 and A18 Pro, which are different things. This is our Apple event special. I'm your friend David Pierce. Alex Krantz is here.

• 0:47Alex Cranz?

  Are they different?

• 0:49David Pierce?

  Honestly, I couldn't tell you, but we'll get to that. Neelai Patel is here. Hi, Neelai.

• 0:53Nilay Patel?

  35 flops.

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  That's all you get from me. You won 36, you get 35. That's the deal on the table.

• 1:01David Pierce?

  I love this for you. Okay, first of all, Neelai, it's very important to me that you describe your whole setup right now, both for people who can watch, who would like to know what's happening, and also for people who can't. Just paint us a word picture of your current setup right now.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm in my hotel room in Sunnyvale, California. I just came from Apple Park. There's David's running the show because I have no idea what's going on. I was in Apple's ambient experience. Either you're going to get a new phone or you're going to be raptured. That's my experience every time I go to Apple Park. I don't know what's going to happen. But yeah, I was just at the Apple event with our whole crew. The, Allison, Chris Welch, Verin. We had a great time. We ran around, played a few phones. And I'm in my hotel room, which I have attempted to turn into a podcast studio. It went six.

• 1:48David Pierce?

  Okay. What's, how's the lamp? Tell us about the lamp.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  The lamp is glued to the table. I'm very late. And I'm on the West Coast. Everyone else is on the East Coast because they didn't, they didn't come. They abandoned me to Apple.

• 2:00David Pierce?

  We did. That's correct.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  So they've been very patient while I tried to figure out how to make this room work. And the lamp being glued to the table really threw a... You know, you like leave a room and you're like, I know what I'm going to do. And I get back to that room and you walk back in the room and the lamp is glued to the table.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  I know that's a metaphor. I know that's a thing that happens to other people. But anyway, I'm back. You know, it's our room. I just, we just played at the phones and met a bunch of people. Uh, I talked to Phil Schiller for five minutes about camera buttons, which was a fascinating conversation. I'm ready to rock.

• 2:30David Pierce?

  I am very excited because it does feel like a solid two thirds of this episode is going to be about camera buttons. But let's go back to the beginning. You were saying, like, before the event even started, that the vibe of this event at the Steve Jobs Theater was unusual. Uh, and you've been to a million of these. And so just to hear you be like, this is not how this room normally feels is fascinating. So like, what, what, what was the room?

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't want to do too much media criticism on our show. Um, it's not even criticism. It's just media talking about itself.

• 3:03David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

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

• 3:36David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, if you rewind a decade, it was just like the old heads and Apple employees at those events, right?

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it was like, it was like the legendary print reviewers and me being like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take a photo and upload it to the internet right away. And they were like, what are these bloggers doing? Get them out of my face.

• 3:55David Pierce?

  It's like, I don't go to print for three days.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, I appreciate that I'm in the circle of life, but the, the point I kept making in the live blog was that the room was super enthusiastic, which we just had not seen in like quite a while. Right, obviously there was COVID and then a bunch of people came back and I think Apple turned over its crowd. I asked a few people, it feels like the big change was the dramatic increase in international press that feels like the big change. I don't have the numbers on Apple's data, that just seems like they widened the aperture for who was covering the event and they had a more lively atmosphere.

• 4:32David Pierce?

  Interesting. I do miss the like, I mostly don't miss Apple event days when I'm not at Apple event days, but there is something kind of lovely about the Steve Jobs Theater. Like it's a, it's a, it's a nice place. They did a very good job with the Steve Jobs Theater.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  They did a good job and then they, they opened a new building for this event called the Observatory, which is just sort of like over the hill and around the corner and that's their new like briefing space.

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  So they have, the Steve Jobs Theater was too small the day it opened. They've been saying this since literally the day it opened. Like this was too small because they, you know, they designed it in a very different time. It took a long time to build and design and prove. And so it's always been too small and in particular, the, the sort of spaces within it where you can like have conversations, always too small. So they built an entirely new thing called the Observatory where they're having additional meetings and stuff because they have so many more people there now. And the Observatory is like this like glass window that looks over Apple Park. Apple sent some photos to a magazine called Dizine today. We were not allowed to take photos. And you can look at it, it's very cool. And that's sort of their, their, their space for after the event because they have so many more people to talk to.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  That's cool. There is nothing more Apple-y than look, we built this very cool building. You are not allowed to photograph. Like that's it. That's Johnny Ive, the spirit of the man lives on.

• 5:47David Pierce?

  All right, let's, let's talk about the announcement. So I think let's do it in reverse order, kind of of how Apple did it. Just because we, we got to start with the phones, right? Like the phones is the thing. There were watches, there were AirPods and there were phones. Those are the big three. Both of you, I believe last week said that we weren't going to get Macs. Congratulations on all of your accomplishments.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  We also did not get a TV.

• 6:10David Pierce?

  We did not get a television. I was devastated. Ted Lasso, no appearance. Very upsetting. Jason Sudeikis wasn't even there as far as I know. He's just like shooting lefty threes at WNBA games still.

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  When Tim Cook was like, this is some of our most breakthrough and meaningful innovations yet. I was like, oh, they're doing a TV. It was not to be.

• 6:27David Pierce?

  No, alas. But the phones got bigger, which is we're, we're on the way to a television.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Pro Max is gigantic. Yeah.

• 6:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, but let's, let's do, let's start with the cheapest phones and then go up to the most expensive phones. Alex, do you just want to like, brief rundown of the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus?

• 6:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:47David Pierce?

  And we can get into it.

• 6:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus are like, good. They're exciting. It's, I think, I think the big difference is a lot of the stuff is new on these as well. Specifically, the camera control, i.e. camera button, shutter button, although I think Neela probably has some feelings about that, so maybe we don't call it the shutter button. But, so it's got camera control, it's got the action button, which was on the Pro last year. It's 1,000 to 2,000 nits, it's got the ceramic shield, so you should theoretically be able to drop it with minimal scratches. The 18, and visual intelligence, which is kind of like Google Lens, but...

• 7:28David Pierce?

  But Apple did it?

• 7:29Alex Cranz?

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

• 7:54David Pierce?

  So this is my first question, actually. Neela, you've seen these phones. Apple described the colors as, I believe the quote was "more vibrant." Vibrant was a word that was used.

• 8:05Alex Cranz?

  Are they?

• 8:06David Pierce?

  Thoughts? You've seen these things, some of them, right?

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  They look great.

• 8:09David Pierce?

  What's the verdict?

• 8:10Nilay Patel?

  They look great. The pink is very pink, the blue is very blue. Like, they are, they are in fact very vibrant. They're very saturated colors.

• 8:17David Pierce?

  That's exciting.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  They didn't shy away from them. The phones are cool. They, Apple continues to sort of round off the corners of the phones. And then, as Alex is saying, the big change to the hardware is the camera control button, which is also in a 16. So you don't get the sense the 16 is missing anything this year. There's a whole bunch of camera features it's not getting as a solar processor.

• 8:41Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's got one less camera, right? They said it could do four, but it's only got, it's got two actual cameras. They got the 48-megapixel Fusion camera, and then the 12-megapixel Ultra Wide.

• 8:54David Pierce?

  Which is not four cameras. It feels very important to say that's not four cameras.

• 8:58Alex Cranz?

  That's two.

• 8:59David Pierce?

  It's not four lenses. It's not four cameras.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  The way Apple argue this, and I spent, I mean, you can't just like throw the words fusion camera at me and not expect me to ask everyone exactly what that means. So fusion camera.

• 9:13David Pierce?

  Wasn't fusion what they called the sweater mode?

• 9:14Alex Cranz?

  Tell us about the tetra prism.

• 9:17David Pierce?

  That's deep fusion.

• 9:18Nilay Patel?

  The tetra prism is on the Pro. So fusion camera specifically refers to the idea that you have a 48 megapixel sensor that generally produces 24 megapixel images, but you can run it at 48 and then when you zoom, it doesn't just crop the sensor to get you a 12 megapixel zoom lens. It runs an entirely new photo pipeline. So they are treating it like you swapped lens, sensor, photo pipeline, everything. So you've got a 12 megapixel zoom lens sitting inside the 48 megapixel main camera. You have to believe all of this is true. That's how you get two lenses. That's the argue. That's why it's called the fusion lens is you have 48 and then when you run it as a telephoto,

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  it doesn't just crop the sensor. It does all this other stuff to treat it like it's a different sensor. Do you believe it?

• 10:10David Pierce?

  That's like me saying, there's me and then there's me with a British accent and that's a whole different guy. Like I just, I don't.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  That's the argument. And then, and then the other two, just to be clear, the other two is you have the ultra wide and then when you hold it close to something, it switches to macro. So it's a different camera. So you get four. And that one is slightly more believable in the sense that one thing is far away and one thing is very close. Sure. But I would, the way to think about it is it's not four cameras or four lenses. It's four modes.

• 10:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. Which is fine. I'm good with that. Four modes I can work with. Lots of cameras have many modes. That seems fine. And I will say all the camera stuff seems solid. Like the, I actually think the like big improvement to an ultra wide camera is a big deal. And there's been a lot of excitement about it. I think I mostly don't shoot with the 0.5 camera on the iPhone because it makes everything kind of fish eyed and weird looking. But there are some like genuinely sincerely cool things you can do with that lens that you can't do otherwise. So if like, if they've made that actually work, I actually think that's pretty exciting.

• 11:10Alex Cranz?

  So this is like real macro mode, right? This isn't just the stuff where. I would hold the phone up really close and if it focused, then I'd get a nice shot and call it macro.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  No, the 13 Pros, I think, started doing true macro with their ultra wide. And the Pros have had it for a while, but now the regular 16 has it. And really what you're seeing is the regular 16, unless you want all these additional photography features, is basically the, the good phone, which is a first. Like, I would have never considered buying a regular iPhone before. I've always bought the Pros. I'm still gonna buy a Pro because I'm a huge camera nerd. But there's not some piece of this puzzle where I'm like, oh, that's not good for most people. Like, this is a great phone, probably the best straight up iPhone Apple's made in quite some time, because it is inheriting most of the features of the Pro, including the camera control button.

• 12:02David Pierce?

  Right. And the reason that's happening is a theme we're gonna come back to many times in the course of this episode, uh, is AI. Right? Like, the, the thesis is that these are AI phones. You can shake your head all you want, Neil. I'm right.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm super shaken in my head with that.

• 12:18David Pierce?

  But like, they, what was Tim Cook's line? Like, these are the first devices built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence?

• 12:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:23David Pierce?

  Like-

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's you and a British accent. That's, it's the same.

• 12:26Alex Cranz?

  It's the whole sales pitch.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They started these phones a million years ago, right? Like, obviously. I think they, they did the action button. They knew that the number one thing people would use the action button for is that the camera. They were right. That's the number one thing people used.

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  And so they, they added this other button. And I, the, it's funny, after the event, I'm like scrambling to post photos. And I had posted a thing on threads that I still use the same ancient Nikon camera and lens. And I have been since like the beginning. And I'm still using it. And the photos are still great. And Phil Schiller saw me and he was like, that's your old camera, huh? Cause he's, he'd seen my post on threads. And we just got to talking for a little bit. Nothing major, no earth shattering scoops. I asked him this question, like, is this button here? Because this is a new input method for the phone, right? Is this a camera shutter button? Is this just for camera nerds? Like, Phil's a camera nerd. We, we talk about cameras. We're telling me we, we see each other. Or is it-

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  You want people to have their iPhone engage the world visually. Right? You want the AI to be able to see stuff. So you need to put this button right here. So you can like, open it right away and like, look at stuff with your iPhone. And he was basically like, yeah, it's both. Like, people use their iPhones for cameras all the time. It's convenient. We already see that's happening. But at the same time, we have, you know, we have cameras on iPads and people use them as document scanners. And we are just aware, like, Apple's just aware of the universe of things the camera is already doing for people. Like, scanning QR codes to get menus at restaurants. So I pushed him on it and he was like, no, it's both. Like, you have to see it as both and we've seen it as both for a long time. So I think you're right, David, that like,

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  there's a view towards a long-term future where the iPhone is just looking at stuff and being smart about it. And then there's right now, which is people need to open the camera, take a photo. And we're in a, this button represents a little bit of a transition. But none of the features are shipping. So it's, it's just a camera button.

• 14:27David Pierce?

  So, okay. This is actually, if I'm being completely honest with you, the single biggest question I have for you as somebody who has held one of these phones. Is it a button? All Apple calls it is camera control. Like, Apple studiously avoids calling it a button. And from the description in the keynote, it sounds a little bit like it's, it's kind of, I think I compared it to like the, a teeny tiny MacBook trackpad. Where it's like mostly doing a haptic thing and it doesn't really move, but it feels like it's moving. And you can, you know, move your finger around and it's sensitive that way. But it's not like a clicky button. Is it, what is this thing?

• 15:00Nilay Patel?

  Does the button move? It is a physical, honest to God clicky button.

• 15:04David Pierce?

  Okay. That makes me feel worried. I was really worried.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  No. It also does the other thing, which is very confusing. And every time I've used it, I've used it now a dozen times. My brain is still trying to figure it out. So, and I'm not saying it's like hard to figure out. It's just one of those things you have to use for a little bit and like, figure it out.

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  So, when you, it's capacitive. The reason they're not calling it a shutter button is because it, it has like multiple functions. Inside of it. So, and they're all enabled by the fact that it is both extremely pressure sensitive and capacitive. So you can just push it down and it clicks and that'll take a photo like every time that's going to take a photo. And the new sensors are zero lag. So you can just bang away on even the regular iPhone 16, but also on the iPhone 16 Pro. Just taking pictures, zero shutter lag, you're off to the races.

• 15:53David Pierce?

  That's pretty cool.

• 15:54Alex Cranz?

  That's cool.

• 15:54Nilay Patel?

  If you like, I don't even know how to, if you think about moving your finger, it'll register like a tap.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what I mean? Like you're not, you don't, because you don't want to push it. You want to like, just like give it a little.

• 16:06Alex Cranz?

  Just a little.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. Just like, I'm thinking about you.

• 16:10Alex Cranz?

  Pardon.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

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

• 16:33David Pierce?

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

• 16:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the, the reason it's going to work, uh, is because Apple's not depending on like third party app developers to do anything.

• 16:57David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  They've just, they're just like, here it is. Here's how it works. And you can, like I said, it, it is, I have not immediately sussed it out. But you can see how you will. And the thing that's actually the most confusing about it is if you are used to a MacBook trackpad where the click is fake. The fact that it is actually a physical click to take a photo is the thing your brain can't get around.

• 17:17David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  Cause you can, you can press hard enough to make it do stuff, but then you can press even harder to make it take a photo.

• 17:24Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, this is going to be a mess for people. I'm so excited.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, I mean, I, I promise you it won't be that messy. It'll just be like a week of very confusing results.

• 17:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, that's going to be a great week.

• 17:34David Pierce?

  Well, it sounds like the hard part is going to be all this stuff in the middle. If you just button mash, it'll take a picture, which is what most people want to do.

• 17:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then, but then the capacitive stuff is, uh, is wild too, because it, it's an iPhone, right? It's iOS. So it has inertia. So when you're like looking at your range of zooms, you can just like slide your finger really fast and it'll just fly to the next detent.

• 17:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  Right? Or fly between lenses. Or if you have it open to the lens switcher and where there's no detents, you just like go from the farthest zoom to the ultra wide by just like sliding really fast and just like roll. So it. Just as a hardware, software, Apple-y thing, it is like absolutely not just a button. Like, it is like another weird little touch surface with a lot of ideas packed into it. And the idea is, for as much as I can tell, that you should basically be able to control the entire camera from this button.

• 18:25David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 18:26Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  There's parts of it that you can't do, but you should basically be able to, you know, like a real camera is like lots of buttons and knobs and exposure compensation and styles and they've got a lot of those ideas inside the camera control button.

• 18:40Alex Cranz?

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

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

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

• 19:32David Pierce?

  Maybe. So what I found myself wondering about this is, I actually get all of the reasons Apple would make this thing, right? Like, it actually makes a lot of sense. It seems like a really useful controller. It also makes sense both in landscape and vertical mode, which is very clever. Like, to make a button that feels like it'll work whether I'm holding my phone like this and using my index finger, or holding my phone like this and using my thumb, strikes me as very clever. What I don't understand is why this isn't the action button. Like, why didn't they ship this last year and call it the action button? That makes way more sense to me than calling it camera control. There's all kinds of interesting stuff you could let developers do with this. It feels like vastly deeper and cooler and more interesting than like, here, long press this button and one of eight things will happen.

• 20:16David Pierce?

  It's possible the answer is just that it wasn't ready, so they shipped it. But like, this seems to me to be what the action button always should have been.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  I think I disagree with that. I think the action button... Is, we talked about this so much last week, the action button is meant to be a configurable macro button.

• 20:32David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  And it just happens that most people thought the camera was the most useful macro. But I think Apple's all in on the idea that you should just have a button on your phone that opens your transit app or launches a shortcut, or it does one of any number of appliance-like things that your phone does.

• 20:50David Pierce?

  Shout out to all the people who told us about the transit apps, by the way. We got a lot of feedback from people who use it for their transit apps.

• 20:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think Apple's like, super into this, because what they were doing before was like weird triple clicks of the home button to accomplish these goals. Now they just have another surface to map things onto. And the fact that everyone is using it for the camera, I think, was proof to them that they needed a camera button too.

• 21:16David Pierce?

  So you think that, I mean, and I guess you're probably right, like, I was thinking that there's a roadmap for this that ends in it being something that like every developer can do stuff with, and it becomes like a system for controlling how you do lots of things. But what you're saying, and I guess what's probably right, given the fact that it's called camera control, is like, this thing is about the camera. Like, maybe it will be the camera in lots of apps, but like, this is a camera thing. And that is, I agree with you in that sense, that this is like, this thing has a real sort of statement of purpose that the action button, like, deliberately does not.

• 21:47Alex Cranz?

  Do you guys think it means that eventually we don't get that port-free, totally smooth glass iPhone?

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I think that that idea is officially put to bed.

• 21:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they have any interest in that. In fact, since those rumors have started, we've had two physical buttons added to the iPhone.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  And I think Apple, one, realizes, charging-wise, these phones are more power-hungry than ever, especially as they start adding AI features to them. People are gonna have to charge their phones more, so that port's not going away.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  And then, two, I think the things you want to do, like, very quickly on a phone, are going to start to take primacy over the idea of opening the home screen and picking an app. And again, the AI part of it, where, they call it visual intelligence, where the phone can see the world. That I I think the primacy of that is very, very high.

• 22:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  And so over time, this button might get optimized for some of that. But right now, Apple knows, like, for a lot of people, the iPhone is a web browser, a really good messaging client, and a really good camera. And so if they can just be like, now the camera is easier, there's actually a chance they can get you to do other stuff on the phone.

• 23:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, and I think that that push is the same one behind a lot of what's in like iOS eighteen, right? Which is more customization. They're pulling more stuff out of apps and onto the lock screen and onto the home screen and into widgets and into live activities. Like, the idea that you should be able to do most things on your phone without doing very much feels totally central to like the entire design of the iPhone, both hardware and software. And as it happens, I think is exactly correct, and I'm very, very happy about that.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, we'll see how every app developer feels about this, right? Like, you know, it was not for nothing that Apple very specifically called out when you do visual intelligence features and you search for a restaurant, like you take a picture of a restaurant, it tells you what the restaurant is, it's rating and the menu. And it's like, where's that coming from? And the answer is Yelp.

• 23:50David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Can they swap in another provider for Yelp? Yeah, probably in other countries where Yelp isn't like the dominant provider of that info, like Apple will swap it. But then they were also very careful to say, if we don't know what's going on, we'll ask Google. And if we recognize that what you're looking at is like a blank homework page, we'll like ask ChatGPT to like help you. So they're they're trying to expand the like universe of third party services they can talk to. The question is whether any of that becomes modular, how any of those services make money.

• 24:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 24:19Nilay Patel?

  No one seems to know.

• 24:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the whole Apple intelligence question, right? It's like Apple, Apple seems to be building this very simple seeming beautiful thing that it doesn't make any sense how the rest of the ecosystem around it works.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and and to be clear, the the weirdest part of these phones, they were announced as the first phones built for Apple Intelligence. They are going to launch with none of it. And maybe that's only true for a couple of weeks. Right, they're launching September 20th is the on sale date. You can preorder them, I think, next week or the end of this week. 18.1, iOS 18.1 is supposed to arrive sometime in October with the first set of Apple Intelligence features.

• 24:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  So it's only a few weeks gap.

• 25:00David Pierce?

  But that's-

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  Maybe at most a month gap, right? But that's a long gap to launch a phone without its highlight features.

• 25:06David Pierce?

  It's a long gap. It's also, it's launching on 18.1 in beta and it's only launching some of the features. Like, some of the stuff that shipping is going to be very cool, right? Like, transcriptions and summaries coming to voice memos, like that, the stuff that's coming to mail where they can rewrite your email, which Apple brought up like 11 times during this event, like-

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  That's what they got.

• 25:24David Pierce?

  Please, dear God, stop giving us tools to write worse emails. Like, please, I'm begging you.

• 25:29Nilay Patel?

  That is right up there with Apple explaining what bigger screens are for. Like, we're just-

• 25:34David Pierce?

  You can read an extra line of text.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  We are truly killing time in these events. At some point, like, or Apple thinks everyone is stupid. It might be both.

• 25:43David Pierce?

  It might be both.

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  The screen's bigger, you can have, fit more content on a bigger screen is like a regular explanation at Apple event, right next to, "Hey, you wrote a bad email and now the robot will write a nicer email."

• 25:55David Pierce?

  So, so that our robot on the other end can read it and summarize it for you and then rewrite, it's just, it's just Apple Mail nonsense all the way down from here on out.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the actual flow, we're hitting the boundaries of text handling and interface metaphors in iOS 18 with some of this AI stuff. So, if you want to like use these features in 18.1, you've got like a long thing in like notes, right? And you want to summarize it and send an email. You have to select all of it, which is like grab the handle, like scroll all the way down. Or, you know, if some apps have the select all, fine. And then you have to tap it again to get that select, that little menu, that like modal pop-up menu to come back up. And then you hit like writing tools and then it brings up a sheet. And that, to me, is just bananas.

• 26:43David Pierce?

  I just want to say, based on my ongoing ability to like accurately cut and paste things over time, the odds of me getting all three of those taps correct in a row is like 1 in 4.

• 26:57Alex Cranz?

  It's like a video game.

• 26:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, it really is.

• 26:59Alex Cranz?

  It's Prince of Persia on your phone. You're gonna have a great time.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, you know, the iPhone can now play AAA console games, Alex.

• 27:07Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah, Assassin's Creed. Sorry, sorry.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere even stopped us. Like, they did it. They mentioned us. No, but it's just like, if that's the thing you're selling and actually text handling on an iPhone is, I would say it's messy. It's just, it's not like they've revolutionized it.

• 27:25David Pierce?

  No, it's pretty inelegant and it has been.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  It's basically the same way it has been since like they added it to the iPhone. You're now at a place where you're like, oh, we're straining the interface metaphors of this in a real way. Because what we're asking people to do to use these new features is move a lot of text around. Or like take action on a lot of text and it just doesn't, the iOS was not like built for that in a particular way. And now, in a way that a desktop computer like obviously is, and now we might, I hope Apple takes the opportunity to be like, we should rethink text handling here. Or like find cursor control.

• 28:00Alex Cranz?

  Okay, but there was one AI feature that actually seemed good in this that they pointed out this time, which I don't think they mentioned at WWDC, which is that you can just ask Siri to like, tell you how to do stuff on your phone.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  No, they announced that at WWDC. That's very much the like future of user manuals is generative AI. Like, we have to boil the ocean in order to make a useful user manual for your iPhone. I mean, this idea has been around forever. Bixby, Samsung's Bixby is this idea.

• 28:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:31Nilay Patel?

  You will talk to your phone and like it'll do stuff.

• 28:33Alex Cranz?

  But no one's done it well. And I just, I keep thinking of all these people who go to how-tos, who are using all these other ways to try to figure out how to use their phone. And theoretically, Apple's gonna make it better. But you have to know to ask?

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  I saw a demo of this today.

• 28:48Alex Cranz?

  Did it work?

• 28:49Nilay Patel?

  It's like a haze of demos. Yeah, they were showing me like you can ask it how to do XYZ feature and it totally worked. They were obviously running 18.1 beta, not 18.0, which it will ship with, but it worked. I mean, and if you really think about all that's happening here is Apple has a model that's running locally on the phone and then they have their own user manuals, which they could load into the model. So you're asking a question of a pretty known set of information from their own knowledge bases and whatnot.

• 29:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  And that, that's a pretty straightforward use case that I think they, I don't know how much people will use it, but from what I've seen, it works pretty well.

• 29:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. No, I think it's like, it could be really useful if they actually promoted it because I think of all the old people in my life who don't know how to use their phones.

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  Right, but now you gotta get them to use Siri.

• 29:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, now you're gonna be like, no, you ask Siri. Don't ask me, you ask Siri now.

• 29:35David Pierce?

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

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  Can I just be really clear about that? Because even that is confusing. So it's in beta right now.

• 30:11Alex Cranz?

  Yes, you can technically do it right now.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's an iOS 18.1 public beta is available. You can push the button, you can download it, you can run it if you have a 15 Pro, you can run Apple Intelligence some stuff right now. It's going to launch in the public release of iOS 18.1 sometime in October.

• 30:28David Pierce?

  But they're still calling it a beta in the public release, which is insane.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  The features will be labeled beta in the release. And they've done this a handful of times. They did it with portrait mode.

• 30:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, Freeform, the app launched like that, I think.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they, a couple of other things like FaceTime audio transcriptions or something launched this way. There's a handful of this stuff. Deep Fusion technically was in beta, but nobody could see it, no one can still see it. So it's, it's fine. So Apple has this history of doing this, right? Particularly with the camera, but now what they're gonna do is they're gonna say huge chunks of this operating system are in beta and they're just gonna have the label in the release. So it's not in beta, you have to go get it, it's in the public release. It will be labeled with the beta, which is a little

• 31:12Alex Cranz?

  That's messy.

• 31:13David Pierce?

  Which is kind of like just saying, here it is, it might suck. Which is, to be fair, what all of the AI systems do right now. They all have the label at the bottom that's like, this thing might lie to you, we don't know.

• 31:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:22David Pierce?

  Not our problem.

• 31:23Alex Cranz?

  It's also kind of what they did at this event when they announced all of this. They were like, and now we're doing Apple Intelligence. Also, this is just a recap of WWDC.

• 31:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and all of the features are couched that you will be able to without any hard dates. And so I, again, I, I don't care how many iPhones Apple sells. To quote our friend and mentor Walt Mossberg, I don't give a fuck about your stock price. I just don't. But, you know, if one of the questions is, is this worth upgrading? The answer is not in the hardware. The answer is in the software. Right? If you have a regular iPhone or any pro phone, save the 15 Pro, to get Apple Intelligence features, you need a new phone.

• 32:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that's a good question. Like, is the new, are the features worth an upgrade? And the answer right now is no, because they're vapor. And I will just refer you back to one of the Verge's longstanding rules, right up there with World of No Sevens, and review what's in the box, is it's vapor until it ships.

• 32:21David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  It hasn't shipped yet. Apple has a great track record of shipping. I'm not, I don't mean to say this in a pejorative way, but it's vapor until it ships. So you just like cannot evaluate this thing because it's not real in any way, shape or form.

• 32:31David Pierce?

  Right. And especially with AI, it's not just shipping. Like, shipping, shipping is the very beginning of the battle of making something that's actually any good when it comes to AI.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  And part of it is shipping, I know in the 18.1 beta, and you can, you can summarize notifications like no one's business. Have you ever looked at a small piece of information and thought to yourself, I wish this piece of information was smaller? Apple's got you. Like, you can do that right now. It's all of the rest of it that isn't out yet, that has yet to ship. It's all of this private cloud compute stuff, which is up and running and supporting the beta, but actually hasn't scaled and has not actually yet been audited by third parties to prove that it's compliant with Apple's privacies, like Apple's privacy promises. All of that, we don't know yet. Like, we just don't know yet. So it's, it's just hard to evaluate this phone. Like, from the dumbest perspective, like, should I upgrade a phone? I don't know. Like, is your phone broken?

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  This phone will be much nicer than the phone you have. Will this phone bring you a bunch of cool new AI features? Like, maybe, but I don't know yet.

• 33:34Alex Cranz?

  Your camera will be sick.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  The, the, well.

• 33:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 33:38Alex Cranz?

  We'll see, we'll see.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  It's very hard to evaluate a camera at Apple Park.

• 33:42David Pierce?

  Well, okay, this is actually a good segue back into the, the pros, which we should talk about because, uh, obviously there was a ton of focus on the cameras. I mean, right, if you're, if you're buying this thing on day one, the two things you're buying it for hardware wise are the camera upgrades and the camera control. Like that's, that's it. That's the thing, right? Unless you like deeply want a phone that is called desert titanium. Uh, and if you do, please email me and tell me why. I would love to hear from you.

• 34:09Alex Cranz?

  Cause it's called desert. It sounds cool. It's way better than natural.

• 34:13David Pierce?

  One of my favorite things that happened today was that as soon as they said desert titanium, every single person on our staff with live blog access made a different joke in the live blog.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I tell you the, the joke that I did not make in the live blog?

• 34:26David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 34:26Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Desert titanium sounds like if one of the mechs in Pacific Rim was a stripper.

• 34:33David Pierce?

  And now coming to the stage.

• 34:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you see what I'm saying?

• 34:37Alex Cranz?

  Desert titanium.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  Benicio del Toro, get with me. I have an entire idea here.

• 34:44David Pierce?

  That's very good.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  I know how we can stop kaiju attacks and it's sexy.

• 34:51David Pierce?

  Uh, but yeah, with the pros.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's, that's my last Verge cast, everybody.

• 34:54David Pierce?

  That's it. Yeah. That's, we're, we're leaving Nilay in Sunnyvale. This is the end, possibly of the Verge. Who knows? We're so sorry, but it was always gonna end like this. This is what it was.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna point this out. As far as I know, Jaeger's are not gendered and this is an equal opportunity, like full spectrum stripper robot situation.

• 35:15Alex Cranz?

  Just pulling in their metal plates into the ocean.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm just trying to be inclusive.

• 35:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:22David Pierce?

  Just throwing metal around 2024. Anyway.

• 35:25Nilay Patel?

  Desert titanium.

• 35:29David Pierce?

  The Pro and the Pro Max, it's just the camera this year, right? Like, better processor, different colors, battery life, which I'm gonna get very angry about here in a minute, but like, the thing, if you're thinking regular iPhone versus Pro iPhone, you're basically making this decision based on the camera.

• 35:48Alex Cranz?

  And bigger display.

• 35:49David Pierce?

  Okay, and bigger display, fair, granted, which I will say anecdotally, it seems like has turned more people off than on, just from what I've heard.

• 35:56Alex Cranz?

  Seven inch phone. I mean, that's not math, hold on, almost seven inches of phone.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I mean, I held it, and if you hold it without holding the 15 Pro Max in your hand, you're like, oh, it's manageable, and then you hold them next to each other, and you're like, well, this phone is big, and this phone is a surfboard.

• 36:11David Pierce?

  Oh, wow, and you're a Max guy, so for you to say that is not small, yeah.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not anywhere close to a small phone, it's enormous. I love it, I'm super gonna buy it. You know, obviously, some people buy the Pro just for the camera, but then people were also going up to the Pro Max size because it had the better zoom lens.

• 36:30David Pierce?

  Right.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  And now it's the same zoom lens on both, so you're not being forced into that biggest phone, you can sort of stop it gigantic, and still get kind of the best camera system. And I think the 48-megapixel ultra-wide here is a big deal. It's still the ultra-wide, it doesn't capture as much light, and it's impossible to really evaluate iPhone cameras at Apple Park, because it's just like a beautifully lit space, no matter where you are.

• 36:56Alex Cranz?

  The best lit place you will ever, like, exist.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like angelic light from the heavens, just like suffuses the environment.

• 37:01Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  So it's impossible to evaluate, but I took a bunch of photos, and obviously, the main camera is way better, obviously, the main camera has more modes and all this other stuff, and then they've, but having a 48-megapixel ultra-wide means you do get some more detail, you get, you know, it's just a better camera than the old ultra-wide, and I actually use the ultra-wide a lot, so I'm pretty excited about it.

• 37:22David Pierce?

  What do you use the ultra-wide for?

• 37:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm just often in a space where it's like, I want to take a picture of Max, and I want to capture the environment that I'm in with Max.

• 37:30David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 37:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, here's the whole playground, and like, that's a useful... It's just a useful tool.

• 37:35David Pierce?

  That's exactly my experience, which is why I asked. It is constantly like I can either get like the shoulders up shot, or I can use the ultra wide. So that for me is it's exactly the same thing.

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:46David Pierce?

  But I think for the the pro, like the reason I brought this up when we started talking about the camera thing is the a big part of the keynote was about all of these new camera modes. And all the different ways you can shoot and the fact that natural is just like a mode now is is deeply fascinating to me. That they're like, you can shoot a thousand ways. One of them is regular and here's a bunch of other ones. And I just feel like, like, obviously, Neela, you were in the room. So you saw this stuff on the screen, which is always hit and miss. Everything always looks great on the screen has been my experience. But also like took some pictures and saw them on the screen like what? What do you make of Apple's sort of million new ideas about photo processing here?

• 38:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, one, let me tell you two things with the screen.

• 38:27David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 38:27Nilay Patel?

  It's something else Will told me. So again, they built the Steve Jobs Theater, they designed it ages ago. And he pointed out to me, they built it for projectors. Like the room is designed for big projectors and then they wanted to do a big LED screen because that's what everyone does now. So they had to basically engineer their own screen for the theater. And it goes past the wings of the stage. So to get to get the size and shape.

• 38:49David Pierce?

  That's very Apple.

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  And Apple designed and engineered their own LED screen, which is hella bright. Let me just tell you, hella bright. The other thing I saw, the audio in that room, I keep talking about like the room and like it was very cheery in there. It was a little boomy today. I'm like, things were different today at the Steve Jobs. Anyhow, so it's hard to know, like, all the modes. Yeah, every time I see Apple's camera team, they basically are like, here we go again.

• 39:18David Pierce?

  They just book it when you walk in.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  They're into it. All these companies are run by extremely type A individuals who want to fight. They would just prefer to win. So I always have these great conversations. It's always super interesting. And their point of view now, which again, we have to review the phones and to see how true this is. It appears to be that they have realized that people are going to filter the photos anyway. Right? So they're like, look, people have a radically different interpretation of what their own skin tone is. And we just have to get out of their way. Like, that's not for us to decide anymore. So here's all of these options. And there's all of these sliders and photo styles have existed on the iPhone for ages. In fact, they started as a response to the Pixel.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  Because you will remember back when computational photography started and the Pixel team and Mark Lavoie were talking about like, you know, like old painters they liked and shadows and details. The iPhone was like too bright and too even. And we'd be like, we like the Pixel's contrast. So they added photo styles and one of them was basically like, shut up about the Pixel.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  But it was destructive. So you could shoot in that mode and that was it. And the reason they're making a big deal about it again is they've re-engineered the photo pipeline. So you can change it at will after the shot. And so that means you can capture all the stuff and you can do all, you know, don't call them filters. They're very careful to say like, this kind of photo processing dates back to the 1800s, all this stuff.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  But the idea is you will be able to get a much more DSLR type photo with like heavy shadows and heavy detail. Or a much more modern smartphone ultra tone map photo where all shadows have been banished from the face of the earth. Never to be spoken again. And now those are controls. Are anyone going to use these controls? I don't know. Do the power of defaults really matter? And does natural on an iPhone still have to stand for something? It does. Can you evaluate it inside of the angelic light of the Steve Jobs? You cannot. So you have to get it. But I think they're starting to see that other, that their users are constantly changing these photos anyway. And so their own point of view has to kind of be a good starting plate for all the changes to come.

• 41:28Alex Cranz?

  Do you guys use those modes now? Because I just realized I've had it set in rich contrast for probably as long as I've had this phone.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's Pixel mode.

• 41:37David Pierce?

  That's Pixel mode. Oh, that's interesting.

• 41:39Alex Cranz?

  I've been in Pixel mode for years.

• 41:41David Pierce?

  I think that's really telling, right? Like, I, the power of defaults is a really real thing here. And I think what I wonder about the Pro is whether it is more prone to get people who are more likely to be interested in fussing with those things. Obviously, at the very top end, like the kind of people who are shooting the 4K 120 stuff and holding it up in a gimbal and like the people Apple likes to show in these keynotes and in their ads. Those are the people who are going to use these filters and I think will be psyched about it, right? Like to have more options to do this stuff. Quote unquote in camera is great, all for it. But I think the the like interface question of how you surface this stuff for regular people is really fascinating and really hard. And I think it's kind of how I feel about the camera control thing, right?

• 42:24David Pierce?

  I think most people will figure out that if I smash this button, it will take a picture. And everything more nuanced than that, you start to lose some giant percentage of the number of people who are going to use the phone.

• 42:36Alex Cranz?

  That's why I keep thinking about this Apple Intelligence like, I mean, obviously, it's very easy to to turn it into the personal assistant for your phone at settings. But that feels like a win at this point. If it really works, that's like the thing you want to advertise constantly. Tell everybody, look at all these cool settings. It's too hard to remember. Series.

• 42:55David Pierce?

  What do you say? Like, make this photo look like the 1980s. And if everyone was doing drugs, like.

• 43:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's exactly what you say. I say like, I want that creepy 2000 digital camera vibe.

• 43:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. But do you want that? Do you want to say that before you take the photo or after you take?

• 43:11Alex Cranz?

  Well, you can do both now, as I understand it with the Pro. It'll let you change the style after they they said that that was a big part of the the thing.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  It will, but there's, you know, there's just parts of taking a photo like.

• 43:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:25Nilay Patel?

  How long is the exposure? Like, do you want to fire the flash? If you want that indiesleeze look, like you might want to fire the flash. Like, there's a lot of steps in between make it look like this.

• 43:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Nilay Patel?

  And just tell the robot to make it look like this.

• 43:37Alex Cranz?

  I want the robot to do all of it.

• 43:39David Pierce?

  I think Apple does too.

• 43:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  Well.

• 43:42Alex Cranz?

  If they can do, pull it off.

• 43:43Nilay Patel?

  To be clear, once again, none of that is shipping it. And what Alex is describing in particular is just like us dreaming.

• 43:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? That you'll be able to just like talk to the phone and it will do stuff.

• 43:55David Pierce?

  It's also Apple dreaming. That is like, we're not making that up. That's Apple's idea.

• 43:59Nilay Patel?

  Right. And Apple wants to plug third party apps in series so they can do this stuff. We're just nowhere close. Like, that is all pure vapor. That's not even it's going to ship in the next version of 18.1. That's maybe a year away. And what we have now, right now, in the camera, particularly Pro camera, is infinite customizability. So if you know what you want, the camera can now get way closer to delivering it. And that is different than are the photos by default more realistic or less over processed. We just don't know. But the idea that the camera is now infinitely more flexible in the Pro model is, I think it's borne out by just the number of controls you have and the fact that most of the pipelines aren't destructive anymore.

• 44:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, which I think is very cool. All right, we need to take a break. We've been talking about camera buttons for way too long. Any parting thoughts on the iPhones, Neela? You've held all the things. Anything that jumped out to you before we stop talking about phones?

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  The Pro Max is really big and all of the phones are really nice in a way that I don't think has been a...

• 45:01David Pierce?

  Like iPhone 5 nice? Like peak iPhone nice?

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  No. But they are the most refined versions of this design I've seen in quite a while. And I honestly think the 16s, once they get some of the features, they'll move. Like, people will buy them.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Okay, that's very exciting. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll be right back.

• 45:53David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. We've had the ad break to think. Any more phone thoughts? Everybody feel good? I didn't yell about the battery life, but I'm gonna not yell about the battery.

• 46:02Alex Cranz?

  You'll have time.

• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like we need to talk about the processor and the battery life. So they kept saying it was the best battery life ever without a number.

• 46:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Alex Cranz?

  Just the best.

• 46:10David Pierce?

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

• 46:32Nilay Patel?

  So I think the 16 Pro Max is supposed to have the best battery life ever on iPhone. I also say my 15 Pro Max has garbage battery life. It is absolutely abhorrent. It is just bad.

• 46:43David Pierce?

  My 15 has deteriorated faster than any iPhone I've ever used.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  I haven't even looked at the deterioration. I'm just like, oh, it's the middle of the day. I should charge my phone.

• 46:51David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  That's where I'm at with this phone.

• 46:53David Pierce?

  That's not good.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  But the stats, as far as I can tell, what they are talking about is hours of video playback as a proxy for everything else. They just don't want to be like 33 hours of video playback on a slide.

• 47:08David Pierce?

  We spent a bunch of time last week talking about how stupid a metric that is, so whatever, we can move on.

• 47:13Alex Cranz?

  We'll talk about it next week or the week after.

• 47:16David Pierce?

  I frequently watch dozens of hours of consecutive offline video on my phone. Do you guys not?

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  On its hyper optimized video playback engine. Yeah. Amazing.

• 47:24David Pierce?

  So you wanted to say something about the processor?

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  The processor, speaking of ultra optimized video playback engines, a lot of our commenters have noticed that the processor upgrades on the phone made for AI don't amount to much. Like you actually still get, it's 35 flops, right, is the thing. And that's what you get. Like, the end.

• 47:45Alex Cranz?

  But on a phone. Ooh.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, sure, but that's the same as like last year.

• 47:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  So I think the made for AI claims are kind of like running right up against the reality of

• 47:58Alex Cranz?

  Reality.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  phone development times. And I think mostly what they've done is just put a bunch of RAM in all these phones.

• 48:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, 8 gigs.

• 48:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Alex Cranz?

  They loaded them up.

• 48:08David Pierce?

  Which is great. Like terrific. More RAM is a good thing.

• 48:11Alex Cranz?

  They're not each $400 more because Apple put more RAM in them is really impressive.

• 48:15David Pierce?

  Seriously. Yeah, but no, I, to some extent, the processor thing I think is, is whatever, right? Like, I think you're right that if you were going to make like an AI phone that wanted to do all this vastly complicated stuff offline and locally and be awesome, fine, but like what you have in the A18 is going to do the job of writing business emails for you, perfectly fine. Like, we, the ceiling of interesting AI features right now is still so much lower on a device like this than the performance ceiling of the device. That I'm just not bothered by this.

• 48:52Alex Cranz?

  Just do wait, David. It's gonna write the most beautiful email.

• 48:55David Pierce?

  I hope I'm wrong. Like someday in 2036, when Apple Intelligence actually ships, maybe it'll be amazing. Everything changes really fast. Who knows?

• 49:04Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be an email that makes you weep. You're gonna be like, how could it? No human could write this. It's too pretty.

• 49:11David Pierce?

  The thing is, I'll never see it. My, my Apple Mail will just summarize it for me. I'll never even see it. It's no problems.

• 49:17Alex Cranz?

  And that summary will also be beautiful. But we should talk about, we should talk about these AirPods, right?

• 49:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's talk AirPods. I actually think this was the most, I think this was the coolest part of the whole thing.

• 49:26Alex Cranz?

  Same. This is the part I'm pumped about.

• 49:28David Pierce?

  Well, I was about to say it was three AirPods. I think it was four AirPods. Will you, will you run this down for us?

• 49:33Alex Cranz?

  So yeah, it's like, yeah, it's four technically.

• 49:37David Pierce?

  I think it's four.

• 49:38Alex Cranz?

  It is four. Well, three.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  It's like three and a half.

• 49:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we'll go three and a half. We'll go three and a half. So there's the AirPods four.

• 49:44David Pierce?

  It's two.

• 49:45Alex Cranz?

  Two flip. We'll get there. We're doing Apple math.

• 49:49David Pierce?

  It's at least.

• 49:49Alex Cranz?

  If they can have four lenses.

• 49:50David Pierce?

  It might be six or seven. We'll see.

• 49:53Alex Cranz?

  We're just gonna keep adding.

• 49:55David Pierce?

  All right, go ahead.

• 49:55Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so there are the AirPods four, and there are, Delia is correct, two versions of them. There's one that's like $129. And it's got, you know, it's the new shape and, and all of that stuff. And then there's one that's $179. And that's also got active noise cancelling in it. And in both cases, there will be head shake to respond to Siri. Uh, I believe the personalized facial audio, is that in both? I'm pretty sure. The H2 chip is gonna be in both. USB-C charging case, 30 hours of battery life. The, the, the battery case is gonna have a little speaker in it, so it'll beep beep when you lose it, which has been hugely helpful with my Pros.

• 50:37Alex Cranz?

  They rule. Like, these are just, these are really good AirPods. And then, just because I have to prove that there's four updates. There's the AirPods Max, which are still just $549. That didn't change. But now we get some more colors. And you can charge them with USB-C. You don't have to care about your lightning cable. So technically, new AirPod Max.

• 50:59David Pierce?

  And just right there, you talked about it longer than Apple did during the keynote.

• 51:03Alex Cranz?

  I did. Thank you.

• 51:05David Pierce?

  It, it was like somebody at Apple was being held hostage until they mentioned the AirPods Max.

• 51:09Alex Cranz?

  Did you even list the colors?

• 51:09David Pierce?

  It was so bizarre. They're like, new colors, USB-C moving up. Okay.

• 51:14Nilay Patel?

  They also like, it's still $549. I don't, the AirPods Max are absolutely not a new product. They changed the connector they should have had a year and a half ago, if not more. And they made two colors. It's the same. We're gonna get the Apple Watch, same with the Apple Watch Ultra 2. We're like, here's a video about how it's black now.

• 51:34Alex Cranz?

  It sure is.

• 51:35David Pierce?

  I, I almost wrote in the live blog, when there's a long sweeping shot of the watch band, you know there's nothing else to tell you. But anyway, so wait, Chris, did you talk about the, the AirPods Pros?

• 51:45Alex Cranz?

  No, no, and then this is our fourth set of AirPods. The fourth one is the AirPods Pro 2, which will not change in any reasonable way, but they are new because they're getting hearing aid features.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 52:01Alex Cranz?

  New feature, that means a whole new audience. That's basically new.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  That is the single most important announcement of this entire event, but that is not new AirPods. I just wanted to be, they announced two new AirPods and some software features of monumental importance.

• 52:17David Pierce?

  Can I just admit something right now on this show? I didn't realize until right now that it was just a software update. I thought there had to be something new in the hardware, if you're gonna tell me about how this is a hearing aid. You're telling me this is just a software update?

• 52:29Alex Cranz?

  It's just a software.

• 52:30David Pierce?

  So if I have existing AirPods Pros, they're gonna get these two?

• 52:33Alex Cranz?

  They have to be the two.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you need the AirPods 2, AirPod, AirPods Pro 2, AirPods 2 Pro, 2 Pro, 2 Furious.

• 52:41David Pierce?

  Attorneys general.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  You need the H2 chip, so you need, you need the second generation AirPods Pro. And then you need a phone that can run iOS 18. So there's some cutoff on what phone you have.

• 52:52David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  But if you have those two things, you can take the hearing test, which will, you know, Apple has to finish its FDA clearance, but they, they say they're gonna do it. And then they can act as hearing aids for the same battery life as, as they get now, which is about six hours.

• 53:06Alex Cranz?

  I mean, you, you did that, the F, like... Be remiss if I didn't point out FDA clearance is in fact a thing they have to still get.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  They have to still get it. They haven't gotten it yet. They say they're gonna get it around the around the world as well. They're also very careful with the language. They're not hearing aids. They have a certified hearing aid functionality.

• 53:24Alex Cranz?

  There's a lot of hearing aids now that were kinda like AirPods. So this feels like a huge deal.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  Again, I think I've told this story in the first class before, but I will tell it again. The only thing that our government of old people accomplished in the Trump administration is they all got together and passed bipartisan legislation that Trump signed to make hearing aids legal over the counter. Because they were all a million years old. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump were like, yeah. Yeah, we should make hearing aids easier to get because we're all a billion years old.

• 53:58Alex Cranz?

  We can't hear shit.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  It was, it's a triumph of bipartisanship that they passed a law making hearing aids available over the counter in this way. Sony has them, Bose has them, a bunch of other companies sprung up. Bose entered the space and they left the space. They came back in with a partner because they're complicated. I sort of asked about this with Apple. Apple's attitude is like, it's not that complicated for us because we're Apple. And then also fascinatingly, their belief is that because they are AirPods, they will be more socially acceptable than hearing aids.

• 54:26David Pierce?

  I believe that 100%. I think that is by far the most exciting thing about this is like, we were debating this in the in the newsroom today, but like, we have long since reached the point where just having one AirPod in all the time is completely socially normal and acceptable, right? Like, you can feel about it however you want, but like that, it's just a fact. That's where we are in the world.

• 54:48Alex Cranz?

  I agree with you.

• 54:49David Pierce?

  One of my favorite things is to see couples walking down the street, holding hands, talking to each other, each with like the opposite AirPod in. Like, it's just life now. People do it. And the fact that

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  Is this something you see couples do? Is this something you do in your relationship?

• 55:03Alex Cranz?

  I was like, David, I've never seen this.

• 55:05David Pierce?

  I would never. I see people doing this all the time. You need to go outside more often, Chris. I don't know what people do in New Jersey.

• 55:12Alex Cranz?

  They don't do that in Jersey.

• 55:15David Pierce?

  But no, but I think the idea, there are lots of interesting questions about like.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  I just want to point out that David lives in Washington DC, home of an infinite variety of government lawyers and contractors. And it sort of makes sense that they've all replaced BlackBerry hand with AirPod ear.

• 55:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, 100%, 100%. DC was definitely like the last vestige of the huge Bluetooth headset. And they just like, they went straight into wearing AirPods on hinge dates. Like, that's just, that's just what we do.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  It's an election year and everyone's got one AirPod in is like what David is describing. All right.

• 55:43David Pierce?

  It's just Ezra Klein talking to every single person in Washington DC all at the same time. That's just what it is.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  It's not wrong. Yeah, it makes sense.

• 55:52David Pierce?

  No, it's, it's you, me and Ezra on a date together at all times. That's great. But, but no, I think the fact that no one would look at you twice for wearing an AirPod in a coffee shop is like a huge part of the reason this is incredibly compelling. I think it's so cool.

• 56:06Alex Cranz?

  But does this mean that now people are just, I mean, people are just going to talk to you when you have your AirPods in? Like before it was like a universal sign of don't talk to me. And now it's going to be like, I'll talk to you. That might be a hearing aid.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  If you zoom out, Apple pitched a pretty weird vision of reality today where you are always wearing AirPods.

• 56:26David Pierce?

  This is what I'm saying. I don't think that's a vision. I think that is reality.

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  No, but like you're wearing them at a concert, you're wearing them to prevent hearing loss, you're in adaptive mode all the time. We're like.

• 56:36Alex Cranz?

  On your job site.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  All of your hearing is being modulated through AirPods. Like they're just prosthetics. Fine. And then I, not to get too in the weeds of weirdness, Apple also makes the Vision Pro, which wants to mediate your sight. And after a while, you're just like, Tim Cook is building a helmet. And you're going to go in the helmet and Apple's going to manage the world for you and like clean it up for you. And that is a weird vision of the future. But the amount of let, let us put a computer in between you and reality is very high in Apple world right now. That said, and you know, you can feel about wearing AirPods to

• 57:13Alex Cranz?

  Isn't that a whole episode of Black Mirror?

• 57:15Nilay Patel?

  It's, Tim Cook builds a helmet. It's a great episode of Black Mirror.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  All that is to say, maybe that stuff will hit regular people in different ways. The actual hearing aid functionality, if they can get more people to take real hearing tests and then wear hearing aids, they will do a great service to the world. Like, this is very exciting. And all those competitor hearing aids I was talking about from Sony and Bose and all these other companies, a thousand dollars.

• 57:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. No, this could change my Thanksgiving.

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  And they have like bad apps and weird features and all this other stuff. This is, what, AirPod Pros are 250, right? 250 bucks and the hearing test is built into the OS and it is perfectly tuned. And you might have, might not have the weird social acceptability problems. That, that's a very meaningful. Again, I, I think it is probably the biggest announcement I made today on, on, in the scale of things.

• 58:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. And the fact that you take that hearing test and not only does it tune the hearing aid stuff, but it tunes everything else in the AirPods to you, I think is very cool. Like, Apple has clearly kind of gone all the way down this road. Watching them talk about it, it made me think about the stuff that they did for the Vision Pro, which is like, you have to do an incredible amount of work because of the affordances of like, the human body. So they had to like invent this new way to scan your face to do it and created this whole crazy pipeline just to get the thing to work on your face. For some reason, this feels like it's in service of like a much cooler, more real thing for people, which I, I agree, I think.

• 58:43Alex Cranz?

  But they, they've done this before too. Like, like the, the bit where it's supposed to modulate the hearing and stuff, they've done that before. Like, that's an accessibility feature now, I think. Where you can put it in and it'll do a hearing test.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they've had, uh, the voice captions, they've had transparency mode, they've had live listen. They've done a lot of stuff that walks right up to this line.

• 59:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  This is just over the line. Like, the FDA is going to tell people these are hearing aid features and mean it. And that, I think is, it, at 250 bucks, it's just vastly more accessible for so many people.

• 59:17Alex Cranz?

  Well, I'm just curious, the quality of it. Because some of those changes they've done before, like I've messed with those accessibility features, and they're not that great. Like, the one where it's supposed to do kind of a little hearing test and, and be like, "We're gonna make the sound even better for your ears." I guess my ears are garbage.

• 59:35David Pierce?

  You don't love your personalized spatial audio?

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  Your ears are good. That's the dumb.

• 59:40Alex Cranz?

  There we go.

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  Right? So if you're not, if you don't have some big, as you get older, right, you lose your high frequencies. It's like, have you ever watched these like TikTok videos? It's like, we can guess how old you are.

• 59:49Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, there's a whole thing right now about remarkable. And this, this wine that people hear. Apparently the new-

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, interesting.

• 59:57Alex Cranz?

  Because I've been spending a lot of time going-

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  They've got the super high pitched wine on their tablets.

• 1:00:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and I'm like, oh, my God, am I just so old? I didn't hear this wine on the remarkable?

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  Right. So you're losing, you might be losing the very, very top end, but as you get older, you lose even more. Or you have different cutouts or what, all this stuff happens. So if you have reasonably good ears, the, let's tune it to make it work for you, is going to accomplish nothing. Because there's nothing to tune.

• 1:00:20Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  If you have frequency dropouts or other kinds of hearing issues, the tuning will actually overcome it. And it will sound clear and rich again. So will any of this work? I have no idea.

• 1:00:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Nilay Patel?

  On AirPods. This is what audiologists do today to tune real hearing aids.

• 1:00:34Alex Cranz?

  You just made my ears sound better. So this is great.

• 1:00:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you should be proud of, I mean, you can't hear the remarkable. You're getting old, Alex. You should work.

• 1:00:41Alex Cranz?

  I know, I'm getting old. I can't hear the remarkable, but the accessibility feature on AirPods sucks for me.

• 1:00:46David Pierce?

  I'm convinced most of those things are just scams perpetrated by young people to make old people feel old. Uh, they're not playing a sound when they're like, only young people can hear this. This is what I tell myself.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  That's fully how you know you're getting old. That's, that's it, right there.

• 1:00:59David Pierce?

  But, but I think the, the thing you just mentioned, Eli, I think is actually like the question of all of the AirPods, kind of all the way down the line, not including the Max, which are technically a new product, but you know, whatever. That can Apple back these really advanced features into the existing product? I think is the question, right? And even if you go down to the, the regular AirPods, it's a $50 upgrade to get noise cancellation. And if Apple has figured out how to do like genuinely good ANC inside of an open ear set of headphones, that's a big deal. $50 is a lot of money to spend for that particular upgrade, especially if you're like, if you're not so price sensitive that you only want the cheapest one,

• 1:01:44David Pierce?

  but you're too price sensitive to buy the pros. Like, there's a very odd sort of middle ground there that I think Apple is trying to strike. And, and the question of can we bring these advanced features down into a different form factor that is not optimized and designed for those features, kind of is the question. And I have no idea. Have you tried these things at all yet?

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  I have not yet. I don't know if I believe it. Like, we have to see it.

• 1:02:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, noise cancelling is pretty dumb technology. It's very clever and you need a lot of processing power to do it. But the idea is pretty dumb, right? You listen to some things that you identify as noise. And then you just play back their inverse to cancel out the sound waves.

• 1:02:21David Pierce?

  The opposite of that noise, yeah.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's a very dumb idea.

• 1:02:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  And the hard parts are like identifying what is noise, making sure you don't, you know, accidentally clip a bunch of useful frequencies, all this other stuff. Doing it open ear, you're just not in control of the sound environment. Like, sound is literally getting around the headphones. So are they just gonna run a bunch of, like, white noise cancellation? Super like, will other people be able to hear the cancellation is like, kind of what I'm interested in.

• 1:02:49David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:02:50Alex Cranz?

  Well, I'm also curious, they have to fit, right? Like, the whole thing that they don't have a seal, they just sort of sit in your ear. I never liked them because they were that leaky, because I could hear everything around me. And now I'm gonna be able to hear everything around me, but then sometimes it's gonna be blocking some stuff that feels like a good recipe for like, your brain just getting messed up, trying to listen to your headphones.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, maybe we'll see.

• 1:03:14Alex Cranz?

  But it's Apple. I would expect they wouldn't break brains with a product.

• 1:03:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, they're gonna, they're confident in it, is what I'd say.

• 1:03:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think it is the sort of thing that, uh, it's an odd skew of the product. Like, if you go to Apple's website right now and you go to buy AirPods, the options are AirPods and AirPods with adaptive noise cancellation. And I think if you have a product that is technically titled AirPods with adaptive noise cancellation, you should maybe rethink your product's cues. But, like, if they've done that, I think suddenly, like, this becomes at $179, like, maybe the pair of headphones that just about everybody should buy.

• 1:03:53Alex Cranz?

  But I don't think that's gonna be the case because of the fit. Like, the fit on the AirPods is so specific and it works for a lot of people. And if it doesn't work for you, it sucks.

• 1:04:03David Pierce?

  That's true of the Pros too, though.

• 1:04:04Nilay Patel?

  Can I say two things about this? One, Apple said, without any sourcing, that AirPods 2 are the most popular headphones in the world. Which I can believe, I would just...

• 1:04:12David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:04:12Nilay Patel?

  Sure. It's like, The Verge is the most popular website in the world. Like, sure, you'd believe it. We are, by the way.

• 1:04:18Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  And then, second, they introduced the new AirPods 4 with this sort of like... You know, short description about everyone's ears are different. They measured all the ears and they got to the right.

• 1:04:29Alex Cranz?

  They said that the first time.

• 1:04:30Nilay Patel?

  They, no, not even the first time. They said that when they announced the wired ear pods. With not, I think not even the first iPhone, like with an iPod Nano is when the ear pods came out, right?

• 1:04:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah. Cause you would ask, like, like I've asked them before, hey, are we ever going to get different sizes? Because these are too big for some ears. And they'd be like, no, we did a test and it works for 90.9% or whatever. You're fine.

• 1:04:57David Pierce?

  But the thing is like, that's, that's true. It turns out that everyone started wearing ear pods and buying iPhones because they worked for most people.

• 1:05:07Alex Cranz?

  Oh no, I can't use the, the original AirPods. I couldn't fit in them at all.

• 1:05:11David Pierce?

  Well, listen, Alex, we've established.

• 1:05:12Alex Cranz?

  I've got tiny ear canals. Okay.

• 1:05:14David Pierce?

  The Alex Cranz is a saint.

• 1:05:15Alex Cranz?

  This is a very specific problem for me.

• 1:05:18David Pierce?

  Or you're good with pros?

• 1:05:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the pros fit, but I have to use the small ones.

• 1:05:20David Pierce?

  I'm the opposite. Pros feel awful on me.

• 1:05:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple announced the ear pods in 2012. It was a Johnny I video. It was alongside the iPhone 5 and the iPod. It was like iPods. This is how old they were. And at the time, they were like, we asked more than 600 people to test over 100 iterations of the ear pods. They, we made them run on treadmills in extreme heat and cold. They did cardio. They shook their heads up and down. And ear pods are like the design that fit in the most ears. And now we're like 12 years later and they're like, we did it again. We've once again measured all of the ears in the world and they look a little bit different. And maybe that's true.

• 1:05:58David Pierce?

  Evolution, baby.

• 1:05:59Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's true. They, they stuck with this design for a long time and, and maybe ears have changed. But I, I think the reason AirPods Pro are the most, more popular headphones, even more expensive. Maybe just the word Pro in the name. Maybe it's noise cancelling. I actually just think they stay in people's ears better.

• 1:06:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I, I would agree.

• 1:06:18David Pierce?

  I do. I, I do agree with that. And I think especially early on, the regular AirPods developed a reputation for falling out of your head. Right? Like there for years, there were all those stories of people like losing the AirPod on the street and it would fall down. And the, whether it was true for you or not, that fear was real. And even, even for somebody like me, they fit well in my ears. They don't fall out. I am perpetually terrified they're going to fall out because they feel loose, which is actually like the point.

• 1:06:43Alex Cranz?

  You see people like.

• 1:06:44David Pierce?

  That's why I like them because they don't feel like they're smooshed into my head. But it makes me feel like they're gonna fall out all the time. And the pros, for better and worse, smoosh into your head.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55David Pierce?

  And don't feel that way. And I think, I think that is real for people. Like, I, I, I agree with you.

• 1:06:59Alex Cranz?

  You see people like covering their ears sometimes if they're walking over a grate, or hopping on the train. And, and, because I think, like, the, the OG AirPods feel kinda like earrings, but then, like, clip-on earrings. This is something you, neither one of you probably have a lot of familiarity with. But there, you know, there's earrings that go in your ear and they, they hang right, that's true. What's, what's that little piercing there, David? That's great. Uh, but people, you know, they, they like, in, in, when you have those clip-ons, you're constantly like, holding your hands up because they're gonna fall off. And AirPods feel the same way. And nobody wants, nobody wants clip-ons.

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  I just like how much you two are looking at people and their AirPods. Like, as anthropologists. Like, David's like, there's another couple wearing one AirPod each. And Alex is like, another person's ear buffing over a grate. And...

• 1:07:45Alex Cranz?

  It's nice because then I'm like, oh, I'm not alone.

• 1:07:48David Pierce?

  It's called journalism.

• 1:07:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that too.

• 1:07:50David Pierce?

  This is also why I read everyone's screens when they're texting on the train. It's journalism.

• 1:07:55Alex Cranz?

  I love it when you find somebody's, like, typing spicy stuff. You're like...

• 1:07:58David Pierce?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:07:59Alex Cranz?

  A little entertainment from a trade.

• 1:08:00David Pierce?

  I, I, one time, this is a true story, missed my train and rode it for one extra hour, because there was a guy, I was standing and he was sitting in like, the first seat next to me. And he was in the middle of breaking up with his girlfriend over text messages.

• 1:08:13Nilay Patel?

  And you read the whole thing?

• 1:08:14David Pierce?

  And I rode the train for one more hour than I needed to. Just, I, I got through the whole breakup. It was spectacular. It, it involved 7,000 words of text messages, if you made me guess. It was, it was incredible.

• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  Were you like, just call her on the phone?

• 1:08:30David Pierce?

  Seriously, right? It's like, I'll FaceTime her right now. Like, we can do this together. Like, it'll be fine.

• 1:08:34Alex Cranz?

  You just sit down next to him?

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm here on the market. Uh, the guy next to me on the plane here, I swear to god, was trying to ride August flight. He failed. Six-hour flight from New York to California. Uh, failed, failed. Just like, failed. Uh, then he picked up his phone, started typing in, uh, all lowercase in Notes app for a while. Didn't read it. I did see him text the words, "I need to write my own narrative to a friend," also in lowercase. And then, weirdest of all, on his phone, on, on Delta Wi-Fi, which is garbage, started powering through Gmail on the web in Safari, with the banner at the top of the screen that said Gmail's better than the app. And I kept wanting to be like, "Bro, it is better than the app."

• 1:09:14Alex Cranz?

  I love him.

• 1:09:15David Pierce?

  I honestly believe in moments like that is it is it should be allowed to just reach over and tap the open button that opens it. I really believe that.

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  I was like, how are you using Safari with the the the the address bar in the bottom? And you've got, all right, no, it's fine.

• 1:09:31David Pierce?

  It hurts me to think about.

• 1:09:31Alex Cranz?

  He needs that that 6.7 inch iPhone or 6.9 inch iPhone.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  So you can use Gmail.

• 1:09:38David Pierce?

  He can read one more line of text.

• 1:09:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41David Pierce?

  Speaking of one more line of text, let's talk about the watches.

• 1:09:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're big.

• 1:09:45David Pierce?

  They are big. Uh.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  Another moment in this keynote where Apple took a minute to explain what you can do with a bigger screen to see more things. I would like, if anyone's out there, if you can make me a supercut of Apple executives patiently explaining that you can see more content on a bigger screen over the past five years, I think it would be amazing.

• 1:10:06David Pierce?

  It would also be hours long.

• 1:10:09David Pierce?

  So, okay, the the the basic rundown on the watches, as I understand it, is Apple Watch Series X, new design that looks an awful lot like the old design. It's thinner, it has a bigger screen. It comes in black. I would say those are the salient points. It also comes in other colors. Nobody seems to care about those colors. It comes in black. Everybody's pretty excited about that fact.

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  Shiny black.

• 1:10:31David Pierce?

  Okay, how shiny are we talking? Well, okay, hold on, we'll get to, I want to talk, I want to hear what you think, Neelai. But then there's also the Watch 2, which is, nothing at all has changed, except now it also comes in black, which, again.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  The Ultra, Watch Ultra 2.

• 1:10:44David Pierce?

  What did I say?

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  You said Watch 2.

• 1:10:46David Pierce?

  Son of a.

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  The Watch 2 is dramatic changes since the Apple Watch.

• 1:10:50David Pierce?

  It's changed a lot since the Watch 2. If you have a Watch 2, you're in for a treat.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  But the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is unchanged. They they basically reintroduced the product. They're like, the Ultra 2 is great for swimming and rowing and diving and also just looking chunky and like you have money. Also, it's black now. Then that was the end of that.

• 1:11:08David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  But the Series 10 is a new design. It looks for all the world like the old design. It's just thinner, it's more rounded on the top. And yeah, it comes in polished aluminum black.

• 1:11:21David Pierce?

  It also charges faster, which I think is very exciting. But the design is the one I'm curious about because I, my immediate reaction when they said thinner was I don't care, right? Like I looked at the watch that was on my wrist and I was like, I don't know that I've ever wished for this thing to be thinner. It's how I feel about my iPhone, right? Like every time they make it thinner, I'm like, it's nothing for me. But then there were a bunch of people I saw on threads and elsewhere who were like, oh, you know, just based on like the clothes I wear or like how I use my wrist, having something that's thinner is actually really meaningful. So what I'm curious about, Neelai, especially as somebody who wears the chunky one every day. Did it feel different? Like if you had just picked it up, would you have been able to tell? Because it's been years really since you've been able to tell kind of which one you were picking up.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  If you were paying attention, yeah.

• 1:12:06David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  For a normal person, you'd be like, the screen's bigger and that would be the thing.

• 1:12:11David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:12:12Nilay Patel?

  Right, you know how you could tell between a two and a four? Because the screen got bigger, was it four or five where the screen got bigger? I think it was the four, right?

• 1:12:18David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  So the screen got bigger, so you could tell. And then the four to everything else, you couldn't tell. It's that again. So it's like a very minor adjustment, but it's bigger. Thinner, I think, is hard. But it, you know, for all intents and purposes, it's the same design. Like we can lie to ourselves and say it's not the same design, it's the same design.

• 1:12:40David Pierce?

  Is the 10's screen now bigger than the Ultra's screen?

• 1:12:44Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that's the thing they said.

• 1:12:45David Pierce?

  Wild.

• 1:12:47Alex Cranz?

  Just the, both screens or the 40, because it's a 49?

• 1:12:52David Pierce?

  No, the case is the same size, but I guess because they made the screen bigger in the case.

• 1:12:58Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so yeah, so there's a 42 and a 46 are the case sizes. And the screen on both of them is bigger than the Ultra?

• 1:13:07David Pierce?

  No, it has to just be the 46.

• 1:13:09Alex Cranz?

  It has to be the, yeah.

• 1:13:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it looks very nice, it looks very cool. You know, the highlight feature is actually sleep apnea detection, not the size. We have to see how well sleep apnea detection works. Another FDA clearance situation for Apple.

• 1:13:25David Pierce?

  Did either of you have a moment during the keynote where you were like, oh, God, am I about to find out I have sleep apnea? Like, I don't know if this is a thing I want to know about myself.

• 1:13:32Alex Cranz?

  I'm ready. I'm ready to learn. I'm open to new experiences.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  I don't like wearing a watch when I sleep.

• 1:13:39David Pierce?

  You don't sleep with your watch?

• 1:13:40Nilay Patel?

  No. I just, no, thank you.

• 1:13:43David Pierce?

  I would say truly, sincerely, my single favorite thing about the Apple Watch is how good an alarm clock it is for my body. Like, it wakes me up better and easier and more pleasantly than any alarm clock I've ever tried, and that is like two thirds of the reason I wear it.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  But when do you charge it?

• 1:14:01David Pierce?

  Uh, I, so, I actually, this is the reason faster charging is very exciting to me. I charge it. Typically, I will take it off when I go to shower in the morning, and I will just leave it on the charger till it's full. And sometimes that means I leave it there for five days because I just forget about it. But, so the idea of actually being able to like, put it down, go shower, come back, and it has charged. Well, I think it was 80% in 30 minutes it was supposed to be.

• 1:14:22Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:14:23David Pierce?

  If it, if it gets to that, suddenly, in my own experience, Apple Watch battery life sort of ceases to be a thing. And I find that very exciting.

• 1:14:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Alex Cranz?

  And it's, the battery life's gotten really good over the last few years, anyway.

• 1:14:38David Pierce?

  The Ultra is pretty good. And I think the Ultra is still rated like double what the Series 10 is. I worry a little about the Series 10. Bigger screen, brighter screen.

• 1:14:48Alex Cranz?

  Thinner.

• 1:14:49David Pierce?

  Thinner. Does not typically bode well for good battery.

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, one, can I just say one thing, random comment on screens? The screens on the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro can now go down to one nit of brightness. And it's actually wild to look at. You turn the brightness all the way down. It's like, it's just like a ghost of an image. It's pretty cool.

• 1:15:10David Pierce?

  That's actually awesome. Like, as somebody who uses my phone in bed more than I'm proud of, being able to get it like properly dim.

• 1:15:17Alex Cranz?

  Have you get a one nit in bed?

• 1:15:19David Pierce?

  Yeah. That's, that's the dream. Like, we were talking last week about like e-ink devices and like, what if you could make your screen not look so blue and bright? Like, one nit of brightness will do it. That'll get you there.

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it was very, it was very impressive. And then 2000, it's in sunlight, which is ridiculous, but. Yeah.

• 1:15:38Alex Cranz?

  I really like.

• 1:15:38Nilay Patel?

  She accidentally flashed it on in bed.

• 1:15:40David Pierce?

  Who was it? Was it Craig or somebody else who was like, sometimes people look at their watches at an angle? And I was like, yeah, thanks, dude. People look at their watches at an angle? Like crazy.

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  The viewing angle of the watch, the Series 10 OLED is, I mean, like, again, if you watch this keynote, the number of times where they explain things, like basic facts about screens, as though no one has seen a screen before, is hilarious.

• 1:16:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  Wide angle OLED. That's like a whole phrase they use.

• 1:16:09Nilay Patel?

  Also, and I say this, it all complements, as though Apple doesn't already make the best screens consistently. They're like, this piece of garbage Series 9 display, you couldn't even look at it from an angle. It's like, you're fine, actually. No one was worried about that before.

• 1:16:27David Pierce?

  No, not, not a real thing. Uh, wait, I want to know about the blacks. Talk about the blacks. You, you looked at both watches. Sincerely, it seems like if Apple had just gotten on stage and said, "We've changed nothing, except both watches now come in black," everybody would have been psyched and gone home happy. You've seen them both. How do they look in black?

• 1:16:46Nilay Patel?

  To be clear, they said, "We've changed nothing on one watch, which now comes in black."

• 1:16:51David Pierce?

  Okay, fair.

• 1:16:52Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, I'm gonna buy that watch.

• 1:16:53David Pierce?

  There's a new watch face that does sort of a swirly thing where you can't really tell what time it is. That's fun.

• 1:16:58Nilay Patel?

  I was talking to an Apple person wearing the black Ultra 2, and I, I don't even know what that person was saying. I was just like. Staring at the watch? I was like, what if I just.

• 1:17:06David Pierce?

  But now that watch belongs to you.

• 1:17:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What if that was on my wrist and not yours? Uh, so that's great. I'm gonna buy that one. The, the shiny aluminum, it is shiny aluminum black. Like, it's, it's, it's fine. Like, I don't, I don't know what to say about it. It's, it's, it's a black metallic.

• 1:17:22David Pierce?

  The shiny worries me because of scratches. Should I be worried about scratches?

• 1:17:27Nilay Patel?

  You know, that thing was so covered in fingerprints when I looked at it. I couldn't tell you if it was scratch or not.

• 1:17:32David Pierce?

  Also not great.

• 1:17:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's just smudgy. Did you notice my pictures of the phone? Also, fingerprint city, but everyone puts the phone in cases, so who knows?

• 1:17:41David Pierce?

  That's also, yeah, it's been true for years. Every Apple product is fingerprint city at this point.

• 1:17:44Nilay Patel?

  But you don't have to put it in cases. Ceramic case. The watch, you don't put a case. By the way, the back of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has special black sapphire glass. I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy this product so fast for no reason.

• 1:17:59Nilay Patel?

  It's so stupid.

• 1:18:01David Pierce?

  I've been trying to decide. So I have a Series 8 that is fine. It is like, it is a perfectly serviceable Apple Watch. And I found myself looking at the 10 being like, well, it's great looking. And I like the black a lot. But is there anything here that I'm like, I need this upgrade?

• 1:18:18Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:18:18David Pierce?

  For some reason. I landed on bigger screen seems good and the faster charging would be really helpful. That's the only two things I landed on.

• 1:18:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, from an 8, that's not a big jump. I mean, the sleep apnea will be nice.

• 1:18:29David Pierce?

  Again, do I want to find out if I have sleep apnea?

• 1:18:31Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna find out if you're choking.

• 1:18:32David Pierce?

  Am I ready for this information about myself?

• 1:18:34Alex Cranz?

  If you're dying at night, every night.

• 1:18:35Nilay Patel?

  Alex, you just said the sleep apnea will be nice.

• 1:18:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it will be. You do the sleep apnea and you get it, actually. You get the watch and then you get sleep apnea.

• 1:18:44Nilay Patel?

  David is married and being married means you have a built in sleep apnea detector.

• 1:18:49David Pierce?

  Or do you? She doesn't like how I breathe when I'm awake. So I think sleep would not be a problem.

• 1:18:55Nilay Patel?

  It's real. If you, if you are married and you can't reliably tell if you have sleep apnea, you just need to show them the list of sleep apnea symptoms and you'll be fine.

• 1:19:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, that, that seems right. All right, we need to take one more break and then we're going to do a lightning round of other Apple stuff and then we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back.

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

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

• 1:19:45David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So that was all the big stuff. There's lots of software stuff to talk about, but I feel like that's actually probably better for next week.

• 1:19:55Nilay Patel?

  Or when it ships.

• 1:19:56David Pierce?

  Well, that's all, it's all shipping next week. All the, well, all the new OSs are shipping next week. All the Apple Intelligence stuff is shipping someday in the unknown future.

• 1:20:05Nilay Patel?

  If you are a new Apple OS and you don't have Apple Intelligence, are you a new Apple OS yet?

• 1:20:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, dude. Have you seen how you can move the icons around on the grid now? Game changer.

• 1:20:18Nilay Patel?

  I actually, I'm soliciting notes. We're gonna have to review these phones. I don't know how without Apple Intelligence. I'm legitimately like, how are we gonna write reviews of phones? So it will only exist in this form for some number of weeks before the big update comes.

• 1:20:36David Pierce?

  It's so funny. I'm less optimistic than that. I think, I think there is a super solid chance that the actual experience of Apple Intelligence is not going to show up in a real way until the iPhone 17.

• 1:20:52Alex Cranz?

  I would agree.

• 1:20:53Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:20:54David Pierce?

  Like, I think these phones are the iPhone 15 plus the camera control. And I think, I think everyone who has to review this phone is going to have to spend a deeply hilarious amount of time litigating a button in a way that I think is so fun and so vergy and I'm very jealous to not get to do it. But like, the AI stuff is gonna come in these like tiny bits and pieces. And if we weren't in a crazy AI moment where everybody had to pretend to have an AI strategy or Wall Street would run away from you, we would just call these things software. They're just features of apps. And supposedly, we're gonna get game-changing Siri that makes everything better and solves phone interfaces forever someday in the future.

• 1:21:35David Pierce?

  I am in no single way holding my breath for any of that to happen on this cycle of this iPhone.

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I agree with you. I'm just saying, I don't think iOS 18 plus camera button is like, there's not a lot there. You know what I mean? As much as I love a camera button and I, most iPhone reviews that I've ever written have been long meditations on the camera. Happy to do it again.

• 1:21:58Alex Cranz?

  Now with a button.

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  Thrilled to do it again. I just, it feels like the reason people will upgrade to this phone is because the AI capabilities will let them do stuff that they couldn't do on their old phone. The old phones are very capable of taking a photo.

• 1:22:14David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, to be fair, Apple has been making this particular case since the iPad. Earlier this spring, like, we're deep into this now. And, and Apple has been trying to sell you AI-ready devices without real AI to do it with for months now.

• 1:22:31Alex Cranz?

  Well, I thought the AI stuff was largely... For investors, and less for actual people. That was always kind of my read on Apple AI.

• 1:22:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, my, my number one question is, why are they shipping these on September 20th when the AI features are supposed to hit weeks later in October?

• 1:22:47David Pierce?

  Again, some features in beta. Like, I don't, this is.

• 1:22:52Nilay Patel?

  But like, why not wait that long?

• 1:22:55David Pierce?

  Like. Fair, or have one.

• 1:22:56Nilay Patel?

  To even have the Siri, the thing where you press the button and Siri is now the border around the screen instead of the little circle. Just give me that.

• 1:23:05David Pierce?

  I, I honestly, it's so funny you say that. I was thinking about that this afternoon. If they had just changed nothing else about Siri, but made it glow around the edges, everybody immediately would have been like, oh, Siri's better.

• 1:23:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:16David Pierce?

  It would have, it would have, it would have given everybody like a 10% boost in Siri confidence.

• 1:23:21Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I'm open to, to, to feedback from y'all on how to review these devices, or when, uh, cause I'm, I'm honestly curious what would be the best service to everyone? Like, a review of a phone that if you buy in November has nothing to do with the phone that you bought is kind of weird, in my opinion.

• 1:23:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, you're actually getting at what I would say was the kind of biggest vibe question that I had for you as somebody who's in the room, because Alex and I were not in the room. And I would say the overwhelming sense that I got from people, both at The Verge and elsewhere, I was getting text messages from people who were like, this is the most boring iPhone launch I can remember.

• 1:23:59Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 1:24:00David Pierce?

  That like, as, as a, as a big flagship September event, we talk about this every year, like, this is Apple's moment to speak to everyone. Like, it is, it is the one that everybody pays attention to. And I would say the overwhelming perception was that it was kind of a bust.

• 1:24:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15David Pierce?

  How did it feel in the room as it was happening?

• 1:24:18Nilay Patel?

  I think this is why I kept notice, noting, the room was full of people who were just excited to be there.

• 1:24:22David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:24:23Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:24:23Nilay Patel?

  So they curated the excitement that they needed, and it was packed, and people were freaking out, and they're doing the thing. And that's not to say I wasn't running around trying to take photos and upload them as fast as I can. Like, I like doing it. It's like, the funnest part of the job. But they had made the space feel very excited. And then you like, take a step out of it, and you're like, okay, these are very iterative phones, like, super iterative phones.

• 1:24:46David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:47Nilay Patel?

  The headphones upgrades, apart from the 1.5 new models, are iterative to the point where like,

• 1:24:57Nilay Patel?

  One of them didn't even change at all. The watch upgrades are also pretty iterative and there's not any I gotta have it upgrades unless you really give a shit about the camera button.

• 1:25:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:25:10Nilay Patel?

  All of those upgrades are in the software. That's Apple's magic, right? Hardware plus software plus services. And we're just waiting on the big stuff. Like if Apple had said Siri can now do this like app coordination assistant thing that everyone wants to get to, I think everybody would have upgraded the phones tomorrow.

• 1:25:31David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:25:32Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:25:32David Pierce?

  There were a bunch of moments in the keynote like that, actually. Like the, there was a moment where in the visual intelligence demo, the guy holds up a phone to a, it was like a concert poster or something, I think, some kind of event. And it was like, it'll input the information directly into your calendar when you take that picture. And I was like, if that's, I will buy any phone that will do that for me tomorrow.

• 1:25:53Nilay Patel?

  And it's not ready.

• 1:25:54David Pierce?

  Awesome. And it just doesn't exist.

• 1:25:55Nilay Patel?

  There was also another extremely weird demo where somebody walked up to a dog and like asked the phone what kind of dog it was. And our own Kylie Robinson was like, why would you do that? Why would you walk up to a stranger's dog?

• 1:26:06Alex Cranz?

  Just holding your phone out like this?

• 1:26:08Nilay Patel?

  Why, why wouldn't you just ask them what kind of dog it is?

• 1:26:11David Pierce?

  That gave me the same vibes as the Gemini demo where they were like, use this to write a, for your kid to write a letter to an Olympian. It's like, oh, maybe you don't understand how people live and exist in the world. Like this is actually like bleak as hell and not cool and exciting technology.

• 1:26:28Alex Cranz?

  The dog one, I did think, cause that's the same demo you do with the Meta Ray-Bans. Is you put them on, you're like, what car is that? What dog is that?

• 1:26:35David Pierce?

  But, but the thing was he, he walked up to the person holding the dog and the, the intimation is that what he said is not, oh, that dog is so cute. What dog is that? He said, can I take a picture of your dog with my phone?

• 1:26:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Alex Cranz?

  Cause I want to know what kind of dog it is and I don't want to talk to you.

• 1:26:50Nilay Patel?

  And I would point out, you often encounter cars with their owners. If you encounter a dog with its owner, like that's, that's like a little bit of an emergency.

• 1:26:59Nilay Patel?

  You're not like, what breed is this? I better find out.

• 1:27:01David Pierce?

  Like, hold on, stop here, dog.

• 1:27:03Alex Cranz?

  He paused. I need to pause.

• 1:27:06Nilay Patel?

  I just think, I think that is overwhelmingly the reason why at a distance, this one was a little content free. Like even the feature boxes, right? The Bento boxes they put up at the end of every segment. Go look at the iPhone 16 feature box. It says USB C on it. It's like, oh, we didn't even have enough to fill up the squares. And so like, these are super iterative phones, which whose key feature is the RAM and the memory bandwidth to enable all of the AI stuff, which isn't shipping.

• 1:27:39David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:27:39Nilay Patel?

  So like, why would you be excited about it? And I think that's really the gap. I think they should have said, we're shipping these phones with the first wave of beta features and just held them three weeks into October. But Apple sells so many phones. I don't think they can do that. Yeah.

• 1:27:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they couldn't afford to hold it that long. They needed to get it out. And if the software is not ready, so be it.

• 1:27:59David Pierce?

  And this goes back, Alex, to what you were saying is like, the reason you do that is Wall Street, right? Like, this is not a thing you do in the service of good user experience. This is a thing you do because we are in a moment where if you appear to be behind on AI, you will be punished. And that is, right or wrong, that is the world in which we live. And so everyone is out here announcing features that aren't going to ship anytime soon or ever, because you have to. And it's so un-Apple like to do that.

• 1:28:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26David Pierce?

  It's so, so, so odd to see Apple tell you its plans. Like, this is not what Apple does. This is not what Apple has ever done. And, and it has to because it can't build the things yet.

• 1:28:37Alex Cranz?

  Did you guys also notice that it was doing a weird thing where they didn't call it AI? They called it like Apple Intelligence, but they wouldn't call it AI. They would always default to machine learning.

• 1:28:47David Pierce?

  I clocked once that he said the word AI, but every other one was some like dance around it.

• 1:28:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. Like they were really going out of their way to not sound like Google, to not sound like their competitors in this space, which is kind of interesting.

• 1:29:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they have branded it Apple Intelligence. They're fine with it.

• 1:29:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. They, they do have their own AI.

• 1:29:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they have multiple AI models. At one point, I believe with the watch, if you go back and watch it, they point out that they're running many models to enable the features you enjoy today. And it's like, great. So it's the same, the same as the one I have today.

• 1:29:20Alex Cranz?

  Thanks. Yeah, that was just like, why are you talking to investors during this infomercial? You're trying to sell me these phones to the point where you even have buy now like verbiage in your thing. Stop it. It was weird. But let's talk about Finewoven because it feels like Finewoven might be gone.

• 1:29:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is good. Before we leave, let's just little bit of accessory news and then we're gonna get out of here.

• 1:29:42Nilay Patel?

  Is this an accessory lightning round?

• 1:29:44David Pierce?

  This is an accessory lightning round. But the way we're gonna do this is I'm going to tell you what's happening. And if you're not interested, just don't say anything and we'll keep going. It's gonna be great.

• 1:29:52Nilay Patel?

  I love this. This is great.

• 1:29:54David Pierce?

  Thing number one, Apple has a faster MagSafe charger to go with the iPhone 16s. Chi 2, which I believe this might be the first time a phone company has actually said Chi 2 out loud on stage about a phone that people in America can buy. That's very exciting.

• 1:30:07Alex Cranz?

  Yep. I'm excited. We're gonna charge faster. Yay.

• 1:30:12David Pierce?

  Great. We love a fast charge. I said this in the lightning bug, but there was a time that Neelai made fun of me for having a MagSafe charger. I was, we were, we were in a restaurant somewhere and I slapped the puck onto the back of my phone and Neelai made fun of me for like 10 straight minutes.

• 1:30:27Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, if you have a wire connected to a battery, why would you pick the least efficient way of charging your phone with that wire?

• 1:30:36David Pierce?

  Cause it, it, it thwacks. I love the thwack. Yeah.

• 1:30:41Alex Cranz?

  It's good noise.

• 1:30:42Nilay Patel?

  I will say I'm a full convert into MagSafe batteries. Actually, I should have one over here. That's what I do now is like the MagSafe battery packs because you don't have to deal with the wires.

• 1:30:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:53Nilay Patel?

  They get hot and it's inefficient. And if you have a wire connected to a battery pack, David, you should just plug it into the bottom of the phone.

• 1:31:00David Pierce?

  Thwack. Anyway, next up, like you were mentioning, Kranz, so I would actually like you to explain this to me because we thought Finewoven was probably dead. Apple didn't say fine woven is dead, but it kind of seems like fine woven.

• 1:31:15Alex Cranz?

  Kind of seems like, yeah.

• 1:31:17David Pierce?

  Fine woven being Apple's terrible, bad take on leather accessories.

• 1:31:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this was their, their, their cloth accessory that was really just plastic that was meant to like replace all of the leather and be a lot more eco-friendly. And that's probably true, but it also sucked. And it got dirty and gross and nobody liked it.

• 1:31:36David Pierce?

  Like, what if it was leather, but like much worse?

• 1:31:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:38David Pierce?

  Much, much worse.

• 1:31:39Alex Cranz?

  And now you can't buy a phone case made of fine woven. There's a, there's a wallet and that, that's about it. We've, we've reached out. We haven't heard anything back yet.

• 1:31:51David Pierce?

  The wallet strikes me as one where they're like, look, we have a bunch of these. We might as well keep it for sale. It's like Google with the Chromecast now where they were like, they have the TV streamer. They're clearly out on the Chromecast, but they're like, look, there's a room full of these. Like, if you want to buy it, please buy it. Fine woven has been dead, I would say, since about like a day after it launched.

• 1:32:10Nilay Patel?

  The wallet doesn't require the size and shape of the phone, right? So like you can't just sell off the excess.

• 1:32:16David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:32:17Nilay Patel?

  You have a bunch of iPhone 15 Pro Max cases and you don't make iPhone 15 Pro Maxes anymore. You're, you're just like, I don't, can you recycle it? We recycle everything around here. Just turn it into something else, Johnny.

• 1:32:30Alex Cranz?

  Fine woven is not fine.

• 1:32:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right. Next up, I would say one of the stranger stories of the day. Beats, famous music company. You may have heard of them before.

• 1:32:42Alex Cranz?

  They love to put weights in headphones.

• 1:32:43David Pierce?

  LeBron James wears them. Made a bunch of iPhone 16 cases. Sure.

• 1:32:48Nilay Patel?

  Beats?

• 1:32:49David Pierce?

  Beats made iPhone 16 cases.

• 1:32:51Alex Cranz?

  It feels like a real, it feels like they've been trying to figure out where Beats sits in their lineup, especially as AirPods get better. And their idea is, what if Beats' budget? You do cases now.

• 1:33:04David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting. Do you, do you think that's where this is going? Interesting.

• 1:33:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, cuz, cuz they, they, they are putting the good tech in their headphones. But the headphones just also aren't, don't have that, that kind of ca- cash, that, that quality feeling, right?

• 1:33:20David Pierce?

  I just feel like my read on it was that Apple was just like, let Beats be Beats. I just want to say to everybody listening to this, by the way, Neelai is furiously Googling because he doesn't believe me that I got this right. Which is how wild it is that Beats is making iPhone 16 cases.

• 1:33:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm just like, reading this news.

• 1:33:35David Pierce?

  Neelai, Neelai had to fact check me on The Vergecast. Because he didn't believe me that Beats was making iPhone 16 cases. This is, this is all you need to know about this story. They're $49, they exist.

• 1:33:47Alex Cranz?

  That's it?

• 1:33:48David Pierce?

  They are cases.

• 1:33:49Alex Cranz?

  They're cases?

• 1:33:50David Pierce?

  They look like the Apple cases, but they're by Beats for some reason.

• 1:33:53Nilay Patel?

  They're so weird.

• 1:33:56Alex Cranz?

  It's so weird.

• 1:33:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's very, it's very strange.

• 1:34:00Nilay Patel?

  I was instructed if I had nothing to say to say nothing.

• 1:34:03David Pierce?

  This is, no, this is great. I'm into it. Perfect. Moving on. Uh, bunch of new watch bands, bunch of new band colors? Can I interest you in, in that?

• 1:34:12Alex Cranz?

  Get one on Etsy, it'll be a quarter of the price.

• 1:34:15Nilay Patel?

  Or buy The Verge's own Nomad Blurple Band, which was a big hit at Apple Park today.

• 1:34:19David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:34:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, many, many compliments.

• 1:34:23Alex Cranz?

  It looks great.

• 1:34:25David Pierce?

  I bought that one, which is very good, and I also bought six Apple Watch Bands on Amazon for like, eight bucks. Lovin' bits. Can't recommend it highly.

• 1:34:35Nilay Patel?

  Those ones are slowly poisoning David, and you should buy The Verge's Blurple Sport Band.

• 1:34:41David Pierce?

  I do occasionally look at my wrist just to make sure it's not like turning a color I'm not psyched about.

• 1:34:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46David Pierce?

  So far, so good, but, but we're okay. The biggest question I have about accessories, Neelai, is how the camera control is gonna work with cases? This is a question a lot of people are asking. It's this, it's this capacitive kind of flush control, which seems like if you have any kind of raised case at all, is gonna be hard to find a way to get your finger inside of. Do you have a sense of how this might work?

• 1:35:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, although I think my worry is different than Amara's worry. That can you make a capacitive button on a case connect to a capacitive button on the phone? It's like, pretty well unsolved, right? They just have to be conductive to each other, and so Apple's own cases have a button that touches the other button and... You're good. If there's any play at all, there's any space between the two buttons, then that like push a little bit is gonna get weird. In that, I haven't seen this thing in a case yet, but already it's like to push it to do the light tap to bring up the the various menus or controls is already like you have to think about how hard you're pushing. So you don't accidentally push the button. And so if you have a little play and then you have to push, like if you have a cheap

• 1:35:54Nilay Patel?

  case or a bad case, that might get weird. Remains to be seen.

• 1:35:57Alex Cranz?

  That's why Beats is leading the way.

• 1:35:59David Pierce?

  Don't worry, Beats has it covered.

• 1:36:02Alex Cranz?

  They got you.

• 1:36:02David Pierce?

  Jimmy Iovine has it covered. Don't worry.

• 1:36:05Nilay Patel?

  See everything Jimmy Iovine's like ever just like looks in the direction of Apple Park. He's like, man, I really pulled one over.

• 1:36:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, he's like, I make so much money and we still make headphones.

• 1:36:16Nilay Patel?

  There's a, there is a brief, a real period, a real thing that happened is that Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor were Apple employees and they had no titles except for Jimmy and Dre.

• 1:36:27David Pierce?

  Is that true? That was their title?

• 1:36:28Nilay Patel?

  That was your type. Jimmy and Dre. That was my title.

• 1:36:31David Pierce?

  Was, was Dre Jimmy and Jimmy was Dre? That's, that's what I want.

• 1:36:35Nilay Patel?

  It'd be great if Apple is like another person gets the title of Dre when Dre left.

• 1:36:41David Pierce?

  You gotta backfill the Dre.

• 1:36:45Nilay Patel?

  There's some like brand new engineers like you're Dre now, like have fun.

• 1:36:52Alex Cranz?

  Putting all those weights into a product to make it feel better.

• 1:36:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right. We have gone way over. We all need to go to sleep and Neelai needs to go figure out how to move this lamp. Neelai, any, any parting thoughts for us? Anything we missed? Any, any big feelings about the, the Apple stuff today before we get out of here?

• 1:37:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm very curious to see how people want us to, to evaluate these products, right? Like I, I don't, I don't disagree with the sense that this was kind of a, a small event in its way. I wonder if the products will feel bigger with the Apple Intelligence features. So let me know how you want us to to talk about these because I suspect the answer is not just as regular new phones.

• 1:37:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, I I think that's right. And I think especially if you have like a thing about the camera or the camera control or like a specific thing you're looking at that's like more than just my phone is dying, I need a new one, I'll buy the new one, but is like, is this worth the upgrade?

• 1:37:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46David Pierce?

  I want to know all your questions about is this worth the upgrade? So you can email [email protected], call the hotline 866 VERGE11. We have, I would say, a bunch more Apple stuff to do over the next couple of weeks. So we'll have lots of time to talk about this. Send us all of your questions. For now, that is it. That's the Vergecast.

• 1:38:03Nilay Patel?

  Rock and roll.

• 1:38:08David Pierce?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:38:26Speaker 04

  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 a 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.