Reviewing the iPhone 16

We've finally finished testing, scoring, and reviewing Apple's new gear for the fall. On this episode we talk through our reviews of the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro, the Apple Watch 10, and the AirPods 4, to see whether they're real upgrades and whether they're worth your money. And then, on the Vergecast Hotline (866-VERGE11), we make the case for the Pixel in 2024. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of ugly, color-tinted app icons that we love, anyway. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I bought a new computer monitor. This is not like exciting, big news, but to me, it is exciting and big news. I went from 24 inches to 27 inches, which is actually a bigger difference than I expected. I almost got a 32-inch monitor, but the idea of being one of those people who has to like, look from side to side to see everything on my screen, just felt ridiculous. It's just a normal like 4K Dell monitor. I don't think I'm good enough or sensitive enough to need a studio display or one of those LG ones that everybody likes that are, you know,

• 0:44David Pierce?

  thousands of dollars. I'm a simple man with simple pixel needs, and this one makes me happy. But there is one feature about it that I deeply, deeply love already. So I spend all of my time staring into webcams, right? I'm doing podcasts, we're making videos, I'm just in meetings, I'm using webcams all day, every day. That is the life of a modern person, it seems. And I never know where to look, right? You can do the thing where you like barrel the camera, and it kind of freaks everybody out because they're making eye contact with you over Zoom. Or you can sort of look way down, and they're looking at the top of your head, but you're looking at them, and so there's no eye contact. It's weird. And what this monitor does is it just lets me, it just lets me slide it

• 1:29David Pierce?

  up and down. So I can go, I can go down. So it's easier. It's like right at eye level. I can make eye contact. I can move it up. So then it's up there, and it's nice and high. And now it's not weird, because I can look at sort of a normal distance, and I'm looking right into the screen and not into the camera. I love it. Now, I can just make whatever level of eye contact I want to, and I can wield eye contact as a weapon, instead of just awkwardly sort of staring down all the time. I'm unstoppable now. My webcam game is on point. Anyway, we're not here to talk about computer monitors or webcams or my deep eye contact. We are here to talk about Apple reviews. That's what we're going to do on this whole show.

• 2:13David Pierce?

  All the new devices came out. We've reviewed all of them. That's actually the reason the show is a day late. Embargoes make everything complicated. But all of our reviews are out. The new iPhones, the new Apple Watches, the new AirPods, everything. And we're going to spend this whole show talking about those. Whether you should buy them, whether they're good upgrades, what all this means for the future of everything in our lives. So much to get to. It's going to be very fun. All that is coming up in just a second. But I have been sitting here staring into this camera for way too long now, and I gotta go take a break before we get into it. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 3:49David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right, let's just get right into the reviews, starting with, I think, the obvious one: the iPhone. So four new iPhones this year: iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Max. And yes, I have reached the point where saying the words iPhone or 16 all just sounds not like words anymore. You know how that happens? It's not great. But- Some spec bumps, some new buttons, some old buttons on new phones. An interesting lineup this year, and I would say one of the more complicated ones to suss out which phone is actually the right one for most people. So we're gonna get into that. Neelai Patel and Allison Johnson have been reviewing these things ever since we got them and heard about them last week, and they have lots of thoughts. Let's dive in.

• 4:34David Pierce?

  Neelai Patel, hello.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  Hello.

• 4:37David Pierce?

  Allison Johnson, hi.

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 4:39David Pierce?

  Okay, so just to like pull back the cover slightly here, we are doing this 24 hours before the review embargo, not even 20 hours before the review embargo for the iPhones, which is not a super fun time to do anything if you are the person having to review the iPhones. So just thank you both for doing this to me, and also if you just sort of like disappear into insanity in the middle of this, I will, I will understand.

• 5:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, actually, can I say one thing about that, which is, I think, very funny?

• 5:04David Pierce?

  Please.

• 5:05Nilay Patel?

  The review period is a day longer than usual, even though there's a full day's less worth of stuff to talk about on these phones.

• 5:13David Pierce?

  Right, because the event was a Monday, and it's normally Tuesday to Tuesday.

• 5:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And now it's Monday to Wednesday.

• 5:19David Pierce?

  It's Monday to Wednesday, yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Every new button, we get an extra day. I think is how it works.

• 5:25Nilay Patel?

  It's just fun, it's like for, for as little stuff as there is to say, we have much more time to say it, which I think is fascinating.

• 5:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  But I, but please keep it this way, Apple, if you're listening, more time is better, which I have been telling them for a full decade.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  No take backs.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, agreed. This is the bare minimum forever, Apple. Okay, so Allison, you're doing the regular iPhones, and Neelai, you've, you've been reviewing the Pro, is that right?

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 5:50David Pierce?

  Okay. So let's just quickly dispense with all the stuff that is not on these phones yet, which is any sign of Apple intelligence. Have you noticed? Like, it's been a weird time, that was the big thing they talked about. The, the iOS 18 came out, there's a bunch of new stuff in there, but none of the really Apple intelligence stuff. Like, do these phones feel incomplete in your lives without Apple intelligence stuff? Like, how much should people write off the fact that none of that is here yet?

• 6:16Speaker 05

  No, I'm, I'm finding it kind of easy to ignore. Like, there's, there's a ton of new stuff in iOS 18, actually, without all the Apple Intelligence. So it just very much feels like the new iPhone. Like, there's two new buttons on the regular version. There's all this stuff to dig into in iOS 18. So that, it's kind of out of my mind for the moment, for sure.

• 6:39David Pierce?

  Nilay, what about you? We had a big argument about this last week.

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  We did. Um, I think these phones are incomplete in that it's hard to make the case to buy one if you have an iPhone. And the reason that you might buy particularly the regular 16 is that it has the 8 gigs of RAM, which supports Apple Intelligence, which is not here. So if you have a regular iPhone and you upgrade to the new iPhone 16, you'll have a nice experience. Anything else has had a nice experience. It's a nice phone. It's $7.99. You get a bunch of stuff. But it will be essentially the same experience as upgrading a regular phone to iOS 18. And I think that's a real problem for Apple. I feel the same way on the Pro as well, particularly if a 15 Pro, there is zero reason to get a 16 Pro.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  The 15 Pro is getting Apple Intelligence when it arrives. It's just hard to make the case. So I, I've spent a week with these phones. I've come up with one reason to upgrade them. And that is so wonky and you have to be such a photo nerd to even make the argument that I don't think it's convincing.

• 7:45David Pierce?

  Okay, well, that is where we're going to spend most of our time. But I am curious, big picture, Allison, has that been your, your takeaway too? Like, pretty good phone, nothing to sort of run out to the store for here.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, like, I agree with everything Nilay says, except that there's no reason to upgrade to it. I think it is like, it's, it's the, we're on like a three or four year cadence of like, you hold on to your iPhone and you're sort of doing this dance of like, should I upgrade? Should I not upgrade? And this is excluding anybody who's like, super interested in a 5X telephoto lens or like any of the, the cool Pro stuff that happens. So I don't, I think for someone who's doing that dance of like, is it now? Do I upgrade now? Like, this is a really good year to upgrade. But yeah, it's, it's going to be an iPhone. It's going to be a lot like the iPhone you had.

• 8:35David Pierce?

  I do like that as a way of thinking about it, actually, because there is the question of like, is this the phone you've been waiting for? And I think the answer is no. But the question is, if the question is, should you wait for the next one? The answer is also kind of no, which says something about like the, just the path that we're on with the iPhone. But it's also a nice place to be. It's like, if you need a new phone, go buy this one, you'll like it.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:56David Pierce?

  And it will do the things that are coming. You won't feel left out by the time we get to the next one.

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  There's also just the reality of how most people are acquiring these phones now, which is they're, they're on payment plans, their carriers on a cycle.

• 9:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  So will this phone just happen to you? It will. It will just occur to you. And you'll, you'll, you'll wake up one day and you'll have an iPhone 16 and that will just be the end of it. And I think that's fine and weird, but it is true, as Alison points out, but those upgrade cycles can get much longer now. And that to me is why I keep saying the phone's incomplete. Because you would, ideally, Apple would get to push up the upgrade cycle by offering the suite of new features that you can't get on any of your iPhones. And that is just not the case right now.

• 9:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. So before we get into the camera stuff, which is, I assume where we are going to get very lost in the weeds of Neil's feelings. Is there anything else about these that you want to like, spend some time talking about? I think we've talked about the action button. It feels like it's good that that's coming to the, the base level phones. Has anything else really like jumped out at you in your experiences here, Alison? I'm particularly curious for you with the, the entry level phone, quote unquote, entry level phone.

• 10:05David Pierce?

  Is there anything that you feel like has, has jumped out in your experience so far that we should talk about?

• 10:09Speaker 05

  No, it's sort of just been a feeling like, oh, this is nice that this is here. You know, I spent some time with the 15 Pro before I moved over to the 16 that I'm reviewing. And just feeling like, oh, okay, I get this little action button and I program it to open the daycare app. So when I'm signing my kid out, there isn't like a lot of people behind me while I'm fumbling around trying to find an app. So it's like, just, just a little nice, nice to have things here and there.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  But yeah, the, the real actions in the, the camera stuff, I think.

• 10:43David Pierce?

  Okay, uh, let's, let's just get into this now. And um, Neelai, I would like you to explain uh, what I would call not quite an existential crisis, but like a deep philosophical hole you have fallen into over the last week about the iPhone 16's camera.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:01David Pierce?

  What has your experience been?

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  There's just a lot going on with this camera. Um, so I think the first thing to say is that the Pro camera is, is in fact significantly better than the regular iPhone 16 camera. We've gotten a lot of questions from folks that are asking whether the Pro is worth it this year because on paper, the specs seem pretty much the same. And then you actually look at the photos and the Pro camera is just substantially better. The main camera is substantially better. It can capture more light. It has bigger pixels, all this stuff. But as you use them, and in particular, as you use the new photographic styles, Alison and I have been talking and the entire vibe from Apple is like, you figure it out. Like, what do you want? What do you want photos to look like? You just, you just, you, whatever you want is fine. Whatever color you want the people to be is fine.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  And that is just like, it's not wrong, right? Like, that is a pretty valid approach to give the person taking the photo, control over what the photos look like. But Apple also ships the most popular camera in the world, and it is like they have just let go of having a point of view, which is, I think, a big change. And it's not a big change in the sense that like, it's doing wild AI stuff. It's just a big, like, once you let go of what color people are, like, it's, there's not much left to hold on to. You know what I mean?

• 12:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Real quick, how do you actually use the styles? It's, it's a thing we saw like bits and pieces of it in the announcement, but you guys have actually used these. Like, how do they fit into the workflow of using the camera?

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  In like 10 different ways.

• 12:37David Pierce?

  Well, this is why I ask because it's it's not. My initial impression was that it was kind of like an Instagram filter where like you take a picture and then it's like, these are the things it can look like. It it seems like it is that and not that at the same time.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  It is, it is not that there's it's much fancier than Instagram filters, but at the end, I think most people perceive them to be Instagram filters.

• 12:56David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 12:56Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what I mean? Like they're an Instagram filter literally just sits over the top of your photo. Apple controls the whole imaging pipeline, so it can just do a higher quality job of adding colors and shadows and whatever. Um, so yeah, Apple is running the same. You know, take up to nine photos HDR imaging pipeline that they always have been. They call it photonic engine, which is very funny. Um, and all they've really done is reshuffle the steps so that you can edit the styles after you've taken a photo. That's it. Like it's the same basic steps as the iPhone 15. And the thing that they've changed is when you take your nine photos that expose everything in the photo evenly.

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  Now you can do things like change which parts of the photo expose at what rates, how many shadows there are. They can semantically detect faces. So you can adjust things like the undertones and skin tone, which is one set of filters. Or you can go pretty wild into what they call the mood filters. Then that's much more like the Fujifilm recipes. Where you're like simulating a film stock that has different colors and it it's cool. All of it is cool. And then the actual controls of it are you can do it live with a preview. You can switch the styles using the new camera control. You know, like slide along. And then there's a really important control that we'll get to called tone, which you can also adjust while you're taking a photo.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  Um, that is the HDR-ness of a photo, for lack of a better term. And you can just turn it down.

• 14:26Nilay Patel?

  This, when I say there's one reason to buy this camera, it's that you can just turn off Apple's super intense HDR look and make it look like a normal camera again. Um, that's, and so you can control that or once you've taken a photo, you open the the photo picker and you can change the styles and it is a D-pad, which is a just a totally fiddly way of dealing with this.

• 14:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  But it's like you have a a little two-axis D-pad of what your photo looks like and you can mess around with it.

• 14:55David Pierce?

  Is it so this sounds like the kind of thing that is like. Extra editing features as the waiter's grabbing it, which seems like fine. They're just like, here's some stuff you might do in Lightroom. We're gonna let you do it in the Photos app.

• 15:10David Pierce?

  Allison, are you using this as much as Neelai is? Like, has this caused you as much philosophical pain as this has caused Neelai over the last week?

• 15:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know if pain is the right, well, no, pain is the right word. Yeah, I'm super into it. Like, I am a person who want, I want more shadows in my photos. I'm tired of, you know, everything being smushed into this gray middle ground.

• 15:34David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 15:34Speaker 05

  And this feels like the answer to a lot of people being like, skin tones look weird on my iPhone, or like, I don't like all this HDR processing. Yeah, they're just going like, okay, you do the work then. But I like that because I like getting in there and messing with things. It's kind of wonky how you set it up. Like, I think with the previous photographic styles, you would just kind of swipe to one and then, yeah, I'm like, you could make that your default from the camera app, I think. This time around, you kind of have to go through this like, setup process where it's like, pick four of your favorite photos that you've taken with this camera.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  And there's like a whole philosophical thing of like, you know, the thesis is like, to get you to dial in the skin tone you kind of prefer, like a warmer or cooler cast. And so you're like, is this four pictures of me? Is this four pictures of my kid? Like, wow, what does this mean? So there's a weird kind of, I kind of had to work through all that and then I settled on one. I think I like.

• 16:44David Pierce?

  Allison and I both have families with ranges of skin tones in them. So you're like, I'm gonna pick these four photos and then I'm gonna pick a style. And it's like, whoo. And I think we both landed on our kids.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:54David Pierce?

  Who are like, interesting, in the middle.

• 16:57Speaker 05

  Like, I only, I only accidentally take a picture of my husband sometimes.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  It's all pictures of my kid, but yeah, he's sort of in the middle ground there. Yeah.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  And that picker is actually really interesting because you open it and it says, pick four photos. And you think you're going to do something algorithmic or mathematical, but it's just a preview. It's just preview, like you can slide through the presets and then pick one you like. And then that is the default, which is, I think, a little odd. You can also just change it after the fact. You can leave it, you can mess with the camera controls or so many camera controls now. You can leave it so it's sticky. Once you pick one, there's all this stuff you can do to get the camera to consistently shoot the photos you want them to look. But there's nothing about it that sort of guides you to it apart from pick four photos of someone and pick an undertone that it becomes the preferred undertone.

• 17:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's really interesting. There's, there's such a like power of defaults thing in that that feels so unapply to me that it's like Apple is for better and for worse, the most aggressive company maybe in tech at being like, here is how this should work.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:04David Pierce?

  And it has, it has sort of slowly rolled it back in such a way that if you want to change things, you can. But it has still always had really strong opinions about how things should be.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  And so what's really interesting here is one, all of these features are on both the pro phone and the regular phone. The camera control, the styles, the sliders, the tone, all of it is there on both phones, which is fascinating. And then the default, the take it out of the box, take a picture. It's even more HDR than it was before.

• 18:33David Pierce?

  Oh, really?

• 18:34Nilay Patel?

  So Apple's heard all this feedback, they've gotten, taken all this criticism, you know, in the review video, you'll see we just have a supercut of people on TikTok saying the camera looks bad on the iPhone 15 Pro. Alex Earl, to seven million followers is like, why does the iPhone 15 camera suck? I've been reviewing things a long time. I will never publish anything that devastating. That's bad, right? That's a bad place for them to be. And they, instead of walking it back, they've added these controls, but then the photos, one to one, are even brighter from the 15 Pro to 16 Pro. The photos from the 16 Pro are even massively brighter than the photos from the 16. So Apple's really leaning into, we're going to bring down all the bright parts and bring up all the shadows and everything will be totally flat. So you can see all the detail.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  But then they're adding this control, which is, you know, tone is like a weird word to put in the top level of a camera.

• 19:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? And what they mean, what that means is tone mapping, which is not a word that anyone knows.

• 19:32David Pierce?

  No.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  Like what most people, when they see tone, I think they think of the old control and like a CRT TV. They would make everything green or make everything blue.

• 19:39David Pierce?

  Right. It's a color slider. Yeah.

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  Right. And this, what this actually is a shadows. So they're taking that big stack of nine photos. And then they're, you know, by tone mapping it, you're, you're saying, okay, I'm going to find all the right exposures across the whole image and add them all up. So you get one even image with detail everywhere. So the blacks don't go to black and the brights don't go to white. It's just going to be stuff everywhere. And tone mapping by turning it down, they're saying, we're going to do that less. And that's it. That's the whole control. And it is confusing and weird. And I think people are going to think it's just brightness. But it is actually controlling the HDR processing.

• 20:13David Pierce?

  So it sounds like the possibility, like you're going to be able to take better looking photos on the 16, maybe than on any iPhone before. But if you don't touch it, your photos might be even worse.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  And yeah, this, and to me, yes, I agree.

• 20:28David Pierce?

  Like lower floor and higher ceiling than a lot of iPhone photos we've seen before. Which is a really strange place to be. We're like min-maxing the, the phone setup here.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  It's, I think Apple's default is getting away from them. I think they have like some ideological rules about never wanting to lose any detail, never letting things clip, never showing you noise. They are still doing an awful lot of sharpening and noise reduction. Like it's just all over the place in these phones. So if that's the thing that bothers you, the tone control isn't going to help you. But I think that Apple has these rules of like, if you, anyone pulls out a photo and takes a photo, they should be able to generate a usable image, no matter how hard it is. Which is incredible, right? Like, that has not been true of most cameras in most situations.

• 21:11David Pierce?

  Right. And that's a reasonable starting point.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like people love taking backlit photos. Like, they, people are like, a window? Let me stand in front of it and complain that the faces are in shadow. And the iPhone just doesn't have this problem anymore. Like, you can just do it and it can solve that problem, which is kind of incredible. But it also means that other things, like the trade offs of that are are bad. Like, people are complaining about those trade offs now. But the weirdness of it for me in, in sort of the upgrade conversation is if you are the person who didn't like the way the 15 photos looked, you're gonna not like the 16 photos even more, unless you know to go into the settings, to mess with the tone control, to set the, the undertones to like, to really adjust the camera to your liking, which implies, one, you know why you don't like the 15 photos.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  And two, you understand what those controls mean, so she can get them to a place where you do like them, while the default is getting worse. So you might be taking one step forward, but actually like two steps back in the upgrade.

• 22:09David Pierce?

  Well, and, and to your point about this coming to all of the phones, I think i- if you're Apple, you can get away with that trade off to some extent on the Pro and especially the Pro Max, right? Like, you're, you're selling these things to an audience of people who are willing to pay more to get more tools with which to do stuff. And I think that's where you can say, like, look, i- if you want to have this other stuff, here it is, but it's, it's going to be more complicated. But here it is. I think on the $799 iPhone 16, the default thing out of the box becomes much, much, much more important. And that's where I start to worry that you're going to get a lot of people who are disappointed with this camera because they don't know and maybe shouldn't have to know all this other stuff that they can do with it.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I honestly think Apple should have labeled these presets in a much stupider way. Like, point and shoot camera, camera with big lens. You know, like, yeah, like, just some, instead of, right, tone, which, again, once you understand it's very powerful, that it, to me, it is the reason to buy this phone. I am a very unique individual in that sense. Like, I just want shadows in my photo. I'm gonna spend money on a new phone. Like, weird. I own 50 cameras. I can just get shadows at any time. But I think for most people, these presets are just, they're a bunch of words. And then also, I don't know if you've had this experience, the camera control is pretty sensitive, and it's kind of easy to get yourself sideways.

• 23:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  By adjusting stuff you had no intention of adjusting.

• 23:39David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 23:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I have had some struggles with the camera control, and boy, was I primed to like it. But I'm just generally finding it like, really stiff to, like, you do the full press, you do the actual button press to take a photo, and then there's all the other stuff that you can accidentally mess with. It's, it's that like, haptic kind of light press, and then you slide your finger to change one of those settings, or like, do a double press and you'll pick another setting. Yeah, I found myself, like, I'm trying so hard not to shake the phone, and I'm pushing down on the shutter button, but not hard enough, and I keep pushing, and like, my finger will move a little bit, and I'll change the exposure comp, and I'm

• 24:24Speaker 05

  like, this is bad. Like, I was just trying to take a photo. I am paying way more attention to like, the camera settings than I am the thing I'm taking a picture of.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  Mostly, I just want the controls to go away.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  Right? Once you adjust, like, on any other camera, you like, adjust the control, your finger doesn't stay on the control.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:44Nilay Patel?

  And this is because it's a capacitive slider and a button. You like, adjust it with a capacitive part, and then your finger's still on it to push a photo, and the control is still there. So you're still adjusting the control while you're pushing the shutter button, and it's all just a little bit too much.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, and you're supposed to tap on the screen to get the controls to go away. And I'm like, well, then I'm tapping.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  Tapping, I'm so close.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know. Don't make me do that.

• 25:09David Pierce?

  You know what that makes me think of is, like, you know, when you're using a game controller, and you're supposed to click with the joystick, and how long it takes to learn to click the joystick without moving the joystick, so that you're suddenly slightly in the wrong place when you're clicking. And we talked about this on the show last week, that, like, the, the upside of this would be, forget all the funky stuff in the middle, mostly what you want to do is just mash the button and take a picture, and if you mash the button, it will take a picture. It sounds like it's actually maybe not even quite nailing that, that sometimes you want to mash the button. And you can't mash the button and so you're accidentally doing the stuff in the middle while you're trying to just mash the button.

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  No, you can just mash the button. It's just if you change anything using the button, then you can't mash the button anymore.

• 25:53David Pierce?

  Oh, okay, I see.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like you just can't get out of that unless you tap the screen. And once you've tapped the screen, you might as well just be tapping the screen.

• 26:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, at that point, what are we accomplishing here? Okay, interesting. Have you guys liked the camera control? Like, has it become part of the sort of muscle memory of using your phone in the time you've been testing it?

• 26:14Speaker 05

  I will say I'm using it to launch the camera and that I'm, I'm gonna stick with that, you know?

• 26:19David Pierce?

  So you're using it as an action button?

• 26:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I want my action button. I want two action buttons. I want the other action button to do whatever I want. And then this one, yeah, I'm using to launch the camera and I have it set on exposure comp because if you've ever tried to change the brightness of a photo while you're taking a picture on the iPhone, it's like the most infuriating thing. So I think I'm gonna like that in the long term. But yeah, I've just gone back to like, launch it with the camera control and then push the on-screen shutter button.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exposure compensation is a good one because that one you can't change after the fact, but tone you can. So you just, again, you're just kind of like making all these like calculations while you take an iPhone photo now. The other thing that I'll say is there are so many ways to launch camera apps in iOS 18 on these new phones because you can set the shutter button, the camera control button to open whatever. So I have a preview version of Halide that you can just open there. There's, you can change the button on the lock screen. You can set the action button to whatever you want. And then you can still, from the lock screen, slide over to the right and open the stock camera. So by the end of this, you'll be able to open four different cameras.

• 27:27David Pierce?

  Cameras everywhere. A million ways in Control Center. You can get anything. The world is yours. So you can tap on the back to open it like this.

• 27:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I will say, we, we, you know, as everyone knows, our rule is you have to review what's in the box and you, you can't really talk about potential or future products. That's our longstanding rule. It is very obvious that one of the reasons you put a camera button like this on the phone is so that when you do launch Apple Intelligence and you have visual intelligence and the phone can look at stuff, you can just get to the camera as fast as possible, or set one of these many ways to open a camera to a regular camera and another one to an AI camera, or whatever you want to do. None of that stuff is shipping it, but you can see how Apple's creating a lot of options for what the camera is doing, only one of which necessarily is taking a picture.

• 28:14David Pierce?

  Right. Okay. Does all the stuff you guys have been talking about apply to video as well? The styles, the defaults, some of the same stuff? Like, I'm just thinking about this because I know with iOS 18, a lot of people got really excited about the thing where you can pause a video recording as you're going, which is such a small thing, but it's like, it's a useful reminder that like, oh, these are as much video cameras for people as they are anything else. What have you guys had with video so far? Any feelings?

• 28:41Speaker 05

  There is a new feature in the video recording with, I think it's called Audio Mix, where after you record your clip, you can go in. It's one of those things that like 99% of people are not going to find, but you go in and edit your video and you can mess with like audio channels. And I can't, I can't keep them straight in my head. There's like in-frame, in-studio, and they just change how much of the like subject you hear and how much of the like background noise it tunes out. Or if I'm talking and like saying dumb stuff to my kid while he's playing, like I can just like erase that now and just hear him, which is ideal.

• 29:24David Pierce?

  That's cool.

• 29:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So I've been playing with that a little bit and I, I always forget how nice like the cinematic video is on the iPhone, like even the regular iPhone. It's like kind of wild that you get that from this 799 phone, so.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I've been shooting the review video with our video team, with Vera and our supervising producer. We tested Audio Mix in a street festival in New York City. It held up.

• 29:52David Pierce?

  Really?

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't perfect. You can watch the video, but it holds up, which is remarkable. And that's because they've added four studio quality mics to the iPhone, which is interesting. They record spatial audio as well. But if they're really there for this audio mix feature. And so if you play the video back on an Apple TV, it plays in 5.1 surround sound for some reason. Now your kid can sneak up on you. It's like, what is going on? If you airplay it, it's only in stereo. But if you somehow get the file to an Apple TV or play it through Photos or whatever, you get 5.1 surround sound, which is like a crazy thing for a phone to be able to do. But it's all. I love having a surround sound video that I'm going to watch vertically on my phone. Like, yeah. Perfect.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  It took a long time for the people at Apple. Like, I have a number of surround sound questions. And they're like, OK. This is going to take us a long time to get through. So that's cool. And then, you know, the Pro, the big feature is 4K 120 and shooting 4K 120 in log. And you can attach all these extra external drives. And Veeran had the time of his life doing this. And he came away being like, this is fun. But one of the weirdest pieces of this puzzle is that it's still an iPhone. It's like an incredibly personal device tied to an iCloud account that wants you to have great storage. And all the, like, all the stuff. And using it as a professional video camera is starting to run right up against the fact that it's a phone, it's a phone meant for a person.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's, this isn't like a utility. Like, in our office, we have a gear room where video producers from across the company, like, check out cameras. They're not, like, tied to their iCloud accounts. And so, like, you're just in this place where this phone is getting incredibly, becoming incredibly powerful video camera. But the way the software thinks about it is still as one person's phone. And you're just kind of like running into that reality. I think Apple will find some way to solve it. It's obvious they want people to use this as video cameras. But in that one context, it's like, do you want to install Game Center? And it's like, why? I don't, actually. You're shooting the weekend. There's, you know, a music video. Yeah. And it's like, you're getting an RCS message now.

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I don't want to do any of this.

• 32:08David Pierce?

  Fair enough. Okay. So the last thing I'm curious about is whether this has brought up any what is a photo apocalypse feelings from both of you. It doesn't seem like Apple has done much of the like, here's some wacky editing stuff you can do that is either very cool or the end of truth and humanity in the world. What has been your experience so far? Have you had any of these feelings, run across any of this stuff?

• 32:32Speaker 05

  I, my experience is a weird one because I more or less came over from the Pixel 9. I was doing all those reviews and picking up this-

• 32:41David Pierce?

  Which is a full on what is a photo apocalypse.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's just so beyond what is a photo. And then picking this up, I'm like, oh, I'm playing with sliders. Like I'm, I'm dialing in like saturation and contrast is like just such a wildly different experience. And I, um, yeah, I, I'm digging it, but I haven't had anything, um, you know, throw me into a whirlwind of what is reality for sure.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will say I've been using a Pixel line as part of this review and also an S24 Ultra. And both of those phones, like AI, do you want to do some AI? Like you pick up a Pixel and you open the camera. It's like, are you ready to make some weird stuff with me?

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  There's like very, and this, this phone is not that. Apple is releasing one feature with Apple Intelligence, a feature called Cleanup, which is basically magic eraser that lets you take stuff out. So we'll see how that works and we'll see if that causes any particular what is a photo apocalypse thoughts. But I think Apple is going to play it pretty safe. Uh, I, I spent some time with John McCormick, who is the VP of Camera Software Engineering at Apple. Every year he and I have like an existential dilemma about photography together. And I basically asked him to respond to the Pixel team at Google saying they now make memories instead of photos, which they said in a Wired piece. And it's not like, what's a photo? And so here's what he told me. He answered, they've got John McCormick from Apple, uh, answering the question, what is

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  a photo in Apple's mind? So here's a quote, it's long, I apologize. Here's our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is it's a personal celebration of something that really actually happened. Whether that's a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that I had that's got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid's first steps for my parents' last breath. It is something that really happened and it's something that is a marker in my life and it's something that deserves to be celebrated.

• 34:32Nilay Patel?

  That's the answer. It happened.

• 34:35David Pierce?

  Deserves to be celebrated is a really weird place to end that thought. But I think the like, it is a personal celebration of something that really actually happened. Something that really actually happened is like a thing I wholeheartedly agree with. So I'm just gonna focus on that. That feels good.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  I think this is tied to why they, why they are so intent on bringing up the shadows and dropping the highlights and capturing all of the detail and solving the backlit photo. Right there, like, we're gonna get a photo of this. Whatever it is, right? And that, I think, I agree with you, celebration is an odd word. But I think what they mean of it is like, they need to honor the moment.

• 35:20David Pierce?

  I see.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like that, I've been, I've been puzzling over this quote since he said it to me.

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  And that's what I've gotten to is like, I think that's why this camera is so aggressive. So many of the things it does, because Apple is, they do not want to be in a hook for, it was the birthday party and you all stood in front of the window and everyone's face was in shadows.

• 35:40David Pierce?

  Right.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  And the window is bright white, right? Like, that is a photo lots of people have taken by accident and Apple is not gonna let that happen. And I, you know, none of the phone manufacturers are gonna let that happen anymore. They are all chasing that same idea, which is we are gonna get this, we're gonna make this photo happen.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  And it's just, it's gotten to like a set of aesthetic trade offs that I personally think is weird. It sounds like Alison, you might think shadows are good too. But, uh, yeah, when I, I've been thinking about the word celebration here for a minute. I think that's what that means, right? Like, the, the taking of the photo is a real moment that we were not gonna screw up. And it actually happened. I'm curious, right? Whether, over time, the competitors who are less idealistic push Apple off this position. You can already see it with some of the aggressive processing they've done in response to Samsung in other markets, right?

• 36:35Nilay Patel?

  Beautification filters and things like that are much more prevalent and much more accepted in markets like China. Apple hasn't gotten all the way that far, but they are starting to let people do it. Right? In, in different ways, they're, they're trying to let go because that is the competitive pressure. If Google starts selling a lot of Pixel phones, because you can just add weed to every photo, but literally writing add weed to photo, like, who knows what's gonna happen? But that's where they're starting today. And I think cleanup is like a little bit off of that. But his other point to me was they only do things that are rooted in photographic tradition and taking stuff out of the background at this point is pretty much a part of photographic tradition.

• 37:09David Pierce?

  I mean, that's fair. I think I buy that thesis. It does seem like a pretty slippery slope from that sort of honorable starting point, I think, that is like, we are going to get the thing you wanted to get. Damn the shadows and the aesthetics, right? Like, you're going to see all the faces in that backlit photo, even if it makes everything else look like trash, because the thing you wanted was the faces. I actually think that's like a reasonable place to be. But then, it does cause lots of trade-offs. And I think, to your point about like, face filters and all this stuff, like, Apple has seemed to start coming to this place where they're like, we're gonna let you do it. We're not gonna make it super easy, but if you want to do it, if you want to just nasty up your

• 37:49David Pierce?

  home screen, yeah, you can now. You can now. We don't want you to, but you super can now. And there is definitely a thing that Apple is like, look, if you want to ruin it, you can. That's on you, dog. And I think, to some extent, I think that's actually the right approach. But it's interesting to see how far Apple will go with that approach and just basically be like, we didn't do it, we just let you do it. Yeah. Which is very unApple-y and very interesting to watch as it tries to figure all of this out.

• 38:20Nilay Patel?

  I do think one of the reasons Apple hasn't gone into full, what is a photo apocalypse territory, is that there's no, like, meaningful at-scale photo verification standard that works, right? There's C2PA, which, literally the day we're recording, Google said it's going to support in search and ads, but not put in Android. So this idea that you can, like, take a photo and have it verified that this was a real photo that happened and, you know, track the chain of edits and know whether it was AI-generated or not. And that's like cryptographically in the metadata. That's a big idea. There's a lot of companies signed up to make that idea work. Apple is not one of those companies yet. And I think their point of view is, we don't want to adopt this until we know it's gonna work and it's worth it. And it's actually the thing that we want to tie ourselves to, because

• 39:05Nilay Patel?

  it is the most popular camera in the world. So I think if they can solve that problem, or the industry can solve that problem, which, who knows? Big open question. I think that gives all these companies more freedom to let you do all kinds of wacky AI stuff. But I think you have to solve that problem first.

• 39:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, that makes sense to me. All right, last thing, and then we gotta take a break. Battery life.

• 39:28David Pierce?

  Full last week of theses about best battery life ever that didn't mean anything and didn't even have drafts that didn't mean anything. Just a lot of open-ended statements about battery life. Have either of you noticed any new changes in the battery life of your iPhone in your testing so far?

• 39:45Speaker 05

  I mean, I'll say it's good, but it's not like it's you can't get two days out of an iPhone battery all of a sudden. It's just sort of like, yeah, I think this it keeps up with me all day. I can do a whole bunch of stuff and stream the radio station and do GPS and and it's okay. It's I think the question in on our minds is like, how is this gonna perform in the long run? Like the 15 Pro has been kind of notorious for running down the battery health like alarmingly fast. So yeah, it's like TBD. It's fine now on the 16 and the 16 plus. You can just like add 30% to

• 40:28Speaker 05

  like it'll go that much more because it's just massive. But that's been my experience.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have the same general experience. The 16 Pro Max, which is a huge phone, by the way, has a bigger battery in it. And it runs longer. I mean, I've had the camera open and the screen on shooting this video the whole week, basically. It's fine. It's doing its job. But my 15 Pro doesn't make it through the day anymore. And so, does a brand new phone make it through the day? Yes, I think that is the case for every brand new phone. Six months from now or a year from now, when you're still looking at your $1,400 investment, is it gonna is it gonna survive? And I we have to find out. I think Apple is actually on a bad run of this. I think the 14 Pro was bad and the 15 Pro was bad, and I'm hoping the 16 Pro is better.

• 41:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. And even in the best case scenario, it feels like we're still very much at you can use your phone all day, but you should probably charge it every night. And until we're past that. Don't, don't give me big speeches about battery life.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, I'm in, I'm in a different spot entirely.

• 41:32David Pierce?

  Are you?

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm at, um, uh, until I don't have to leave my house with a little MagSafe battery. Don't talk to me.

• 41:39David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's where I'm at with the 15 Pro. I leave the house with a battery pack. Or I put it into low power mode, right? And that battery is only at 93% according to iOS.

• 41:48David Pierce?

  That's pretty bad.

• 41:49Nilay Patel?

  I know people who are down in the eighties after a year.

• 41:52David Pierce?

  I'm at, I'm at 89. Last I checked a few days ago.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:55David Pierce?

  It's pretty bad.

• 41:56Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, there's all this depends, it's impossible to measure it. Like, if you stay at home on Wi-Fi, I'll bet these batteries are great. The second you leave the house, you go into like three or four challenging cell environments. If you take the subway, the phone's hunting between stations for signal. Like, you're gonna run the battery down faster. So the idea that it is just better is probably true in the beginning. You're gonna have a radically different experience. And I think Apple's challenge now is maintaining battery health over time. Especially because the battery replacements on these phones are more expensive than they are, than they were before.

• 42:26David Pierce?

  Right, yeah. All right, well, we'll see. I think this is going to be a particularly fun generation of iPhones to come back to in six months. Because, like you're saying.

• 42:35Nilay Patel?

  Because all the software will change.

• 42:36David Pierce?

  All the software will change. Literally, it's possible that the whole, like, value prop of an iPhone will change if Apple is right about what all of this stuff can do.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  Particularly for the 16.

• 42:45David Pierce?

  That's what I mean, yeah.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Because then it, then it becomes the one that you're supposed to upgrade to, and I, I just don't know. By the way, speaking of battery life, we have no idea what the effect of Apple Intelligence in battery life will be. Here's a bunch of stuff that might just be running in the background, summarizing everything on your phone at all times. And we don't know. The Apple Intelligence goes to the cloud, right? The private cloud compute for a bunch of stuff.

• 43:04David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 43:04Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna run your radios, a bunch of moments, and we don't know when or how. Like, we're gonna find out.

• 43:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, fair enough. All right, we gotta take a break. Allison, you're gonna come back in a little while because we have one more thing to do on the show. But thank you both. Godspeed finishing your reviews.

• 43:20Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 43:21David Pierce?

  Thanks, guys.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  Later.

• 43:23David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk Apple Watch, and we're gonna talk AirPods. We'll be right back.

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• 45:01David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the Apple Watch. So more new models, some new colors, new sizes, new screens, new ideas about battery life, lots of new software. You can read another line of text, which Apple thinks is very exciting. I think these are good upgrades. They seem like good upgrades. But what does all of this new stuff really add up to? I'm sitting here with my watch, Series 8, wondering if, two years later, it's finally worth an upgrade. Vsong has been testing all of this stuff and has some thoughts. Let's get into it. Vsong, welcome back.

• 45:33Speaker 08

  Thanks for having me.

• 45:34David Pierce?

  So many watches.

• 45:36Speaker 08

  All the watches.

• 45:37David Pierce?

  How many watches have you worn in the last 24 hours?

• 45:41Speaker 08

  Last 24 hours, four.

• 45:44Speaker 08

  Four in the last 24 hours, three of them Apple Watches. Actually.

• 45:47David Pierce?

  Oh, God.

• 45:48Speaker 08

  Five.

• 45:49David Pierce?

  Five.

• 45:49Speaker 08

  Two of them were Ultra Twos, but they're not the same Ultra Two, so.

• 45:53David Pierce?

  Even though they are kind of the same Ultra Two.

• 45:54Speaker 08

  They're the same Ultra Two, but one of them's a different color. So, yeah, yeah.

• 45:59David Pierce?

  There's a real theme this year of just like, what if we put a coat of paint on it? Is that new?

• 46:06Speaker 08

  What if we made it a different material? Is that new? Yeah.

• 46:11David Pierce?

  But so I think for the most part here, we should probably talk about the Series 10. Because I think that is, that is the one with actual sort of new stuff going on.

• 46:18Speaker 08

  Some newness is, is happening.

• 46:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, so let's start with the outside of it because there, I just can't get over this video that like, it's still seared into my brain all week of just this like very long pan shot down the watchband. And it's like, okay, sure, we, this is a thing. But anyway, how is it? It's, it's thinner, it's bigger. What's the verdict?

• 46:40Speaker 08

  It's thinner and bigger and lighter, which, you know, that, that is a thing.

• 46:44David Pierce?

  Those are good things. I like all those things, right?

• 46:46Speaker 08

  Those are good things. Those are good design choices. Um, it's just if you know what an Apple Watch looks like, no amount of adjectives is going to really, you know, uh, change the fact that it looks like an Apple Watch. It looks like.

• 47:01David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 47:01Speaker 08

  All the Apple Watch, like, you know, when we were in the theater and he's like, a design that you've never seen before. It's like, um, I regret to inform you, I have seen this design before. It has just been tweaked. Uh, they're very nice tweaks. I'm not trying to disparage the tweaks. Um, it is, I will say there has been, even though there is like a, a thinning of the watch, like it is a lot thinner. Um, you know, take a lot with a grain of salt, it's 9.7 millimeters. That is quite thin for smartwatches generally. We see them in the 11 to 13 millimeter range, sometimes 14, 15 if they're chunkers. Um, so that is quite thin. I'm not, I'm not trying to say that that's not a thing, but I'm just saying it's, it's the, there has also been an embiggening of it because,

• 47:45Speaker 08

  you know, when the first Apple Watch came out back in 2014, 2015, it was 38 millimeters and 42 millimeters. Now we are at 42 millimeters and 46 millimeters. So the small watch has become what was the biggest watch back in the day.

• 48:01David Pierce?

  It's the, I mean, this is, this is what happens, right? This is like the iPhone in anating of the whole thing. This is, this is how it goes.

• 48:08Speaker 08

  There is like a, a real sense that it's, you know, we're 10 years into the Apple Watch. There is like an iPhone-ification of it and, and that they're facing similar problems now where the updates every year are iterative and like sometimes they feel very iterative. Like, ooh, I think I saw someone online say this about both the phone and the watches, but it really feels like an S year. And yeah, it does. It does feel like an S year in some ways. Um, and I think people were hoping for more of like a big jump of a year.

• 48:37David Pierce?

  Okay. But I will say, and this is, this is the thing about the little hardware changes that I'm most curious about is the sort of ideal watch screen size seems to be bigger, while the ideal watch size seems to be smaller, at least for me.

• 48:54Speaker 08

  Mm hmm. There's a lot of min-maxing happening.

• 48:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. And so what I wonder is with this one, does it feel like Apple has gotten closer? I know you have kind of a tortured relationship with the sizes of smart watches over the years.

• 49:05Speaker 08

  I really do.

• 49:06David Pierce?

  But I'm very curious if it feels like this one, if you can make it a little bigger, but a little thinner and a little lighter, maybe it'll still feel smaller despite being bigger. And maybe that's the right combination of things?

• 49:19Speaker 08

  I think they're on to something. Whether people appreciate that is going to be a different thing. But, you know, I am wearing the 42 millimeter, um, because they sent me the smaller size because I am a smaller person. So I have the 42 millimeter, uh, series 10.

• 49:34David Pierce?

  Which do you think is like the default size, by the way? Like, I feel like when it was 38 and 42, I think most people bought 42. But now that it's 42 and 46, if you just pure off the top of your head guess, which would you think is like the main one people have?

• 49:46Speaker 08

  I would think the forty two, to be quite honest, because

• 49:49David Pierce?

  I think that's where I'm at, too.

• 49:50Speaker 08

  It's quite impressive. So actually, the forty six millimeter, uh, series ten has the largest display area of any Apple Watch, and that is including the Ultra.

• 50:01David Pierce?

  Which is nuts.

• 50:01Speaker 08

  Which is nuts, when you think about it, like truly, the min-maxing has happened here with with the four for the forty six millimeter, and that's quite impressive, uh, and actually quite compelling to a lot of people who have ultras who don't love the weight, me being one of them, when I run, uh, and you know, like, I love our blurbel band, but the problem with the blurbel band is that my wrist is a little too small, so I have to wear it a little looser. So I really feel that drag when I'm running. That is not the case when you have a series ten. It is thinner and lighter. It feels like you're not really wearing quite as much when you go on a run. So I think for some people, that will be quite compelling, especially since I do have the forty two millimeter, and I'm right, right on the same wrist, right next to the, to the Ultra.

• 50:46Speaker 08

  I'm not really looking at that much smaller of a screen. So the forty two is slightly smaller, I believe, than the Ultra. But not by much, not by much.

• 50:56David Pierce?

  And I remember when the first Ultra came out, we were talking about it, and I think it was Neelai who got really excited about it. And he was like, I'm just gonna level with you. I'm not gonna use any of these features. I don't care about any of the outdoorsy nonsense. I am going to sit on my couch and look at this huge screen, an Apple Watch Ultra. And I think that's a lot of people, right? And I think especially as we get to this thing where Apple is big on glanceable information, and it's an AI input-output system, like, I kind of get the appeal of like, how much screen can we put on your wrist before it feels bad? And it sounds like they've got that balance kind of right. Like, does that forever change the appeal of an Apple Watch to most people? It feels like probably not.

• 51:34Speaker 08

  Probably not, but within the balance, like, as far as wearability goes, like, I, they did make some, like, meaningful, significant tweaks in terms of wearability, especially You know, part of the impetus to make these lighter and more comfortable and more wearable is, you know, sleep tracking. Sleep tracking has historically not been the Apple Watches like biggest strength, just because one, battery life is not as impressive as other wearables in this category, which you know, they're addressing with faster charging. But also comfort, like I've been sleeping with the Ultra 2 for the past year. It's not fun. It's not what I would call the most comfortable smartwatch to sleep with. It's just not. Agreed. So, you know, in that respect, I've been wearing the Series 10 to sleep and it's

• 52:19Speaker 08

  a lot more comfortable than the Ultra 2. So, you know, if sleep tracking is a thing that's important to you, that is a thing. There is a blurring of the lines now because something that I've been thinking a lot about in the last couple of days is the ultification of the Series 10. Because it does feel like they were like, hmm, there are certain things about the Ultra that have really gotten people excited. Let's port that over to the Series 10. So now you have people online just really confused as to like, should I ditch the Ultra? Because as you said, some of these people are not athletes or not very like into the training aspect or like the outdoorsiness of the Ultra, so they don't need dual band GPS.

• 53:02Speaker 08

  They don't need an 80 decibel siren. That's like, you know, like these things that were made for it to be extreme and raw, outdoorsy. They just really want that big, beautiful screen and the lightness of it. So like for them, you're starting to look at the titanium version, which I must say it's very fancy. I feel very special and fancy while wearing it. I'm like, ooh, I feel expensive. And it is expensive. It starts at $6.99. The Ultra is, I think, just $100 more. So you're starting to get to the point where it's like, well, why am I buying an Ultra then? So I think like the real question is like, who is supposed to get what? Because the prices, especially if you get the nicer materials. Uh, they're starting to look the same.

• 53:44David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:45Speaker 08

  So like the watches themselves also is just like, okay, so really what we're getting down to is battery, like battery is a big thing and dual band GPS for like, if you're like me, I, I'm just like, ooh, how do I feel about giving up dual band GPS because I really want to know down to the hundredth of a mile, like what my run was this morning.

• 54:06David Pierce?

  For sure.

• 54:07Speaker 08

  Um, and then you just like battery life, I think, uh, for the Ultra is kind of gonna be a distinguishing factor because, yeah.

• 54:15David Pierce?

  So I, I'm glad you brought that up because it, it does seem to me that for like an everyday user, the question of SKUs is kind of more complicated than ever, I think.

• 54:27Speaker 08

  Mm hmm.

• 54:27David Pierce?

  Like, and this is such classic Apple right now, right? There was a time when it was like, okay, I can pretty quickly explain to you which thing in the line is which, and now it's like, there's the cheapest one and then everything up from there is confusing.

• 54:38Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 54:39David Pierce?

  And where you land on that line is very hard. But I think my instinct is the same as yours, that there's going to be a lot of people who would have wanted an Ultra who are now going to be perfectly happy with a Series 10, which does all the same stuff in terms of like day to day use, has an even bigger screen, is lighter, like that all seems like a victory, except for the battery life. Like the, the Ultra, this is the thing that has gotten me for the last couple of reps of this thing is the battery life, it's, it's like an order of magnitude better. It's not like slightly better, it is like twice as good and that is a huge difference.

• 55:10Speaker 08

  It is, you can go two days without charging if you have an Ultra, whereas I, I am still charging daily if I have the Series 10. Um, and you know, I had a, I think I had a 25 minute shower this morning and it went from 67 percent ish to a hundred within that time. That's, that's great.

• 55:29David Pierce?

  Right, because fast charging was one of the upgrades here, right?

• 55:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, like fast charging.

• 55:33David Pierce?

  That's pretty good.

• 55:34Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 55:34David Pierce?

  Mine is currently charging much slower than that.

• 55:37Speaker 08

  I, I will say that fast charging can be tricky with the Apple Watch because one, you have to make sure that the charger supports fast charging and then two, you have to make sure like all of your accessories are, are like gonna do the fast charging for you because otherwise. Like even with the Ultra, which supports fast charging, like my, my spouse is just like, "It didn't charge. What happened?" So like there, I find that to be like a, a thing that people have trouble with in general with knowing whether the charger they're using is actually gonna support that. So especially since it's even less clear if you buy a dock. The docks don't all support the fast charging for the Apple Watch. That can be very confusing. So yeah, battery life, you know,

• 56:18Speaker 08

  I, the Ultra just is a lot more reliable. When you stick it into battery saver mode, it does last quite a while in that mode. So I really think like battery life is kind of the distinguishing factor here because you're going from daily to a multi-day. And for a lot of people, that is really difficult to give up. And I understand why.

• 56:40David Pierce?

  It's a big difference.

• 56:40Speaker 08

  I understand why because as soon as you take the smartwatch off, there's a good chance you are not going to put it back on. So that is the thing. Like, I mean, Garmin fans, I love you, but y'all are insufferable about like comparing the battery life. And it's like, yes, yes, yes, we know. We know that the Garmin has the better battery life. You also don't do quite as much. So that, that there's like that trade off there.

• 57:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. The big other thing about the Series 10 I'm curious about, and then I'm curious if there's anything else that has jumped out to you in testing, uh, is the speaker. Both, both the, like, I, I was thinking about this after the event. Uh, like, A, God help us if we get to the point where people are like playing music and podcasts and yelling into their, like, awful dystopian disaster stuff. Like, sounds awful. Also, I'd probably do it. Like, would I occasionally like to be able to listen something through the speaker of my watch? Yeah. Do I hate that? Yeah. But like, so this is what I wonder. Have you been, have you been testing this at all? Are you running around listening to just like bumping Taylor Swift out of your smartwatch? How's this going?

• 57:45Speaker 08

  I will not be bumping Taylor Swift out of my smartwatch. I'm not, I'm not a Swiftie. Uh, I'm, I'm a K-pop head. So I have been bumping K-pop out of my, uh, smartwatch.

• 57:54David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 57:55Speaker 08

  Uh, but there is like a question of etiquette there because if I'm on a subway, that just makes me a jerk doing that. Um, and I think Apple itself is very aware that people are primarily going to be using headphones when they listen to stuff through the watch. That is the natural way of doing things. I'm a little baffled by this feature as to like, why? And I think it just comes to a topic you and I have talked about is just open ear transparency, like needing that situational awareness. So like where I find it most natural to use is when I'm at home and I have to kind of cook. And you know, I find that it's better if I don't have headphones in when I'm cooking because

• 58:40Speaker 08

  you should know what appliances are beeping and booping at you. I have a menace of a cat who thinks he's catatooey and wants to help and I gotta make sure he's not gonna burn himself while licking a pan. You know, that kind of stuff. Or the spouse comes in, they have a question and like then you have to take out your headphones and you're like, what? So in those instances, yeah, like it's actually kind of nice to have it playing on the watch because it's closer to you. I leave my phone, I have a recipe up there, I'm trying to do different things. So in that instance, sure, it doesn't get that loud. It's loud enough, but like if you were to actually whip it out and just try and play your music like a jerk on the subway, uh, no one would hear it because it's, it's just

• 59:24Speaker 08

  really loud, the ambient noise is super loud anyway and it doesn't get that loud. Like if you're in a quiet room, you're definitely gonna be able to hear it, but yeah. Does it have the best sound quality? Also, no. Like if you care about like hearing the hi hat in the distance, like in a mix, like, let's be real, that's, that's not happening here, but.

• 59:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, to me, that actually feels like the right outcome. The only occasions I ever would use this really is for like phone calls occasionally out of the watch when like my phone is somewhere else or I'm walking or whatever. Or the situation like the one you described where I'm in the kitchen cooking or even like you see the people on a, on a bike ride with the Bluetooth speaker or whatever, like little things like that. There, there are moments in time I can see this being sort of okay. And the fact that it's not good enough to be annoying on the subway actually feels like a huge victory. So I will take that. That is good for the world that the speaker is not good enough to do that.

• 1:00:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, it, it like I was with the podcast guys, uh, yesterday and they're like, oh, show us the speaker. And I like, I put it on and they're like. It doesn't get that loud. And I'm like, yeah, it doesn't.

• 1:00:33David Pierce?

  I don't want it to get that loud.

• 1:00:34Speaker 08

  No, you don't want it to. So it's like, it's appropriate for like, your headphones die and you want to listen to the last two minutes of your podcast or something like that. It's appropriate for that. It's not really, we're not replacing phones as playing something. We're not replacing speakers. It's just, it's there if you need it in a pinch, that sort of situation.

• 1:00:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's totally fair. Has anything else jumped out to you about this one as you've been reviewing it?

• 1:00:59Speaker 08

  Um, it's just lighter and thinner and bigger. It's like really all about the screen. And what's really kind of jumping out to me, like I said, is

• 1:01:08David Pierce?

  There's a whole extra line of text. I still, I will never not hear them saying that during the event. You can read an extra line of text.

• 1:01:15Speaker 08

  There's a whole extra line of text. Oh, actually, because the screen is bigger, actually like the buttons are also slightly bigger, which is great.

• 1:01:23David Pierce?

  Oh, see, that's actually nice.

• 1:01:25Speaker 08

  Which is great if you have nails like me right now during review season and like, touchscreens and nails are not friends.

• 1:01:32David Pierce?

  Tough times.

• 1:01:32Speaker 08

  They're not friends. So this actually does help me a little bit when I'm putting in the passcode. That's kind of nice. The thing that I have been thinking about though is whether we've reached the end of min-maxing size of screen versus comfort. Because I really do not think we can get the case size much bigger. Like, once you get to the 43, 44 millimeter as like the smallest size, you are leaving out quite a large swath of people because I have small wrists, but I don't have the smallest wrists. I know lots of like, mostly women out here with very, very tiny bird wrists. And the 42 millimeter with this giant honky screen is kind of going to be the biggest that I think

• 1:02:14Speaker 08

  is going to be usable for them. After that, we start getting into a territory that's not great. And so I do think that means like, we got to solve this battery issue because, you know, I saw this on the Pixel Watch 3 too. Like the 45 millimeter, that's about the biggest I could go comfortably. And so I don't know where companies are going to go from here as far as like these big screens, small, smaller wrist. I feel like we've reached the limit. So, nice, nice that you pulled out the tricks and the stops, but What's next year? Are we gonna go like the bezel is 8.76% thinner?

• 1:02:58Speaker 08

  Like, are we just gonna go that route? Because, you know, I did see some people online, and I think y'all need to calm down about how like just visually the the changes from the nine to the 10 make the bezels look slightly larger on the 10. That is like, optically speaking, true. Also, as someone who uses all manner of smartwatches, it's not that serious. It's really not that serious. A lot of the Apple Watch screens, like the Pixel Watch ones, make use of the darker background and the bezel. So it's functionally, depending on what watch face you use, functionally, you're not, you're really not gonna see it there. Uh, but, oh, oh, oh, wide OLED, so you can view more angles? That is surprisingly like, it's one of those things that you're like, okay, yeah, whatever.

• 1:03:40Speaker 08

  Uh, but like when you're just like very discreetly trying to read a funny text message in a meeting and you go like, yeah, that that actually is kind of, kind of fun.

• 1:03:52David Pierce?

  I agree with that. And it does, my, my strident belief since the first days of the Apple Watch has been that if you have a smartwatch that doesn't tell you the time every time you look at it, you have failed. And this is another step in the right direction of when I look at my watch, it will tell me the time.

• 1:04:07Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:04:07David Pierce?

  So I'll take it.

• 1:04:08Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08David Pierce?

  This is a victory. Uh, okay, so it seems to me that if you're in the position of like, I need to upgrade my watch, you have an old one, it broke, battery's terrible, whatever. This is probably the one to get, right? Like, the last couple of years, it's been like, you could maybe go back a year and it would be fine. But it feels like this one is probably worth the upgrade.

• 1:04:31Speaker 08

  It's prob, I think it is worth the upgrading to this. Like, there are a few exceptions, I guess. Like, if you really like the color pink and you're gonna go with the aluminum. Uh, last year's pink is more pink than this year's rose gold. There are like a very small number of people I'm talking to at the moment here, uh, who care about that particular color. The one thing I would ask people to consider is blood oxygen. Uh, if you live in the US, if that matters to you in any capacity at all. If you do upgrade to the 10, you will be losing that feature.

• 1:05:03David Pierce?

  Right. If you upgrade at all.

• 1:05:05Speaker 08

  Well, like if you upgrade and you are in the US, if you're outside of the US, you still get blood oxygen. Love that for you. Um, but uh, my, my thought though, uh, as a caveat is, do you really need it on the Apple Watch? My, my, my, my read is no, I have not missed it using the series 10. So there's that. It's not that serious. Like I'm going to be real. I don't think most people use the blood oxygen app. So.

• 1:05:33David Pierce?

  I tend to agree.

• 1:05:34Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35David Pierce?

  Okay. But then the other question is like, if I have an eight or a nine, my watch is fine. I'll get some trade in money if I get the 10. Is it worth like going out of my way to go get the 10?

• 1:05:48Speaker 08

  Calm down. No.

• 1:05:49David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:05:50Speaker 08

  Like calm down. No.

• 1:05:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, this is kind of what it feels like this whole year of Apple products is, right? It's like, these are good ones. If you need a new one, these are probably the ones to get. But if you don't need a new one, there's nothing here that is going to give you like incredible gadget FOMO.

• 1:06:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, I would, I would say that.

• 1:06:07David Pierce?

  Except maybe the titanium of like a tiny bit, a little bit, the titanium.

• 1:06:11Speaker 08

  The titanium a little bit because I will say, you know, just in my experience in the past, using stainless steel, it is lighter. It is significantly lighter to have the titanium and it looks just like the stainless steel and it's very pretty. And it has a little coating over it to prevent scratches. We'll see that. That's not something I can know over like a really short term period. Like that has to be tested over a few months.

• 1:06:34David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:06:34Speaker 08

  Scrapes, cats trying to eat the watch, like that sort of thing. Uh, but I gotta say it really looks nice. I was just looking. I was like, wow, I look fancy. My outfit has been upgraded by like several points just because it looks much nicer. I, I tend to have like very sporty accessories. So I don't look polished, but I was like, oh. Oh, I could go to a wedding in this and look cool.

• 1:06:56David Pierce?

  It's a little like super spy-ish.

• 1:06:58Speaker 08

  It is. It is. It is quite nice. It's quite nice. Um, colors, colors are nice this year.

• 1:07:03David Pierce?

  All right. Well, that's not helping my FOMO as somebody with a perfectly usable Series 8, but uh, that is probably the right answer.

• 1:07:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, no, you're, you're in the chill out zone. I think the only-

• 1:07:15David Pierce?

  That's where I live.

• 1:07:16Speaker 08

  The only people who I think have a debate on their hands are people with Series 6s. Like, those are the only ones who I think- Series 5 older, time to upgrade.

• 1:07:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 08

  Series 6, ah, you could make a very good case for it. Uh, Series 7, mm, Series 8, Series 9, I think you could just chill.

• 1:07:35David Pierce?

  Fair enough. All right, V, thank you so much as always.

• 1:07:38Speaker 08

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:07:39David Pierce?

  One quick note before we move on. V and I did talk very briefly about the sleep apnea testing stuff that's in the Apple Watch now. But when we talked, it hadn't come out yet and there were questions about FDA approval. Anyway, it did get approved by the FDA and it will be in the Apple Watch. And that is a thing we're gonna have to follow up on. That's also a hard thing to do in a review cycle. The health stuff is complicated and it takes time. So we're gonna let V do some real proper testing on that. And we'll get back to you on all things sleep apnea. Anyway, let's move on. Let's do AirPods. AirPods, I confess, are the ones I am most personally fascinated by. I'm forever looking at this perfect middle ground of comfy,

• 1:08:23David Pierce?

  good sounding, not terribly expensive, and noise cancelling headphones. And the perfect middle ground of that does not exist. At least it has not existed so far. But it seems like Apple might be inching ever closer with the AirPods 4. I know this is a hard thing to get right, so I'm not getting my hopes up, but I'm very, very, very, very curious. Chris Welch has reviewed all of these for us over the years. He has the new pairs. Let's get into it. Chris Welch. Hello.

• 1:08:52Speaker 09

  Hello, David. It's a pleasure to be back.

• 1:08:54David Pierce?

  Just headphones. This is, I feel like there are other things we should talk about on this show from time to time. You do all these things that are very interesting and yet we just talk about headphones here on the show.

• 1:09:02Speaker 09

  Fine by me.

• 1:09:03David Pierce?

  So I've realized that unusually this year with Apple devices, the first question I have to ask is, what are you actually testing? There are things Apple announced that haven't shipped yet. There are things Apple announced that aren't shipping for a very long time.

• 1:09:18Speaker 09

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:18David Pierce?

  You got, you got some devices. What have you been testing that you actually have access to right now?

• 1:09:23Speaker 09

  So I've got the AirPods 4, both pairs, the standard pair and also the new pair that has noise cancellation for the first time. That's really all I've been testing this whole time is really like, how well does noise cancellation work in this open style of earbud? Thankfully, like all the features are there on day one with this product, unlike the rest of Apple's lineup this year. So it all works out of the box, which, you know, always very nice. So yeah, just been kind of going back and forth. They sound the same, so there's not much there between them. That's all good. They sound really good. Like honestly, like I've never been like a standard AirPods person because like for years they just didn't fit my ears right at all. Like you had to twist them in just a certain way to get them to stay. These ones do a better job staying in my ears. So, so far, so good, I think.

• 1:10:04David Pierce?

  Okay. How different is the design this time? It's always hard to tell in the photos and renders.

• 1:10:09Speaker 09

  Very slight tweaks, like the contours and the shape. Yeah, they didn't change much.

• 1:10:13David Pierce?

  I'm somebody for whom the open ear AirPods have always worked really well and I really like the way that they fit. So every time they're like, we've changed the design. I'm like, no, don't change the design.

• 1:10:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, they changed it ever so slightly using 50 million scans or data points of like ear shapes. So, you know, the usual, but not that different compared to the last ones. I compared them directly and yeah, they're still pretty similar.

• 1:10:32David Pierce?

  Okay. So the idea is there, there are some people for whom they should fit now, but they shouldn't not work for anybody that they did work for before.

• 1:10:39Speaker 09

  Hopefully. Hopefully. There's always someone who's going to complain.

• 1:10:42David Pierce?

  I know. Yeah, it will be me. I mean, I say they work for me, but also like the number of times they've just fallen out of my head.

• 1:10:50David Pierce?

  I don't know what work for me really counts as in a lot of cases.

• 1:10:52Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:10:53David Pierce?

  But it does seem like the big question with the AirPods 4 is just as simple as is ANC worth $50? Right? Like, that's the price difference. That is the only feature change, as far as I can tell. Is that kind of the frame?

• 1:11:08Speaker 09

  So there are some other differences. So with ANC model, you get the wireless charging, which might be enough for a lot of people to spend 50 bucks for. There's that.

• 1:11:15David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:11:15Speaker 09

  The case has the speaker for Find Mine, which I've never used, but it's there if you need it. And that's really the main three features that it has over the standard one. But the battery life, they're both IP54, I think, water resistant. And so, yeah, that's all the same between the both.

• 1:11:30David Pierce?

  Okay. I am slightly bummed, I have to say, that we didn't get, like, one of the rumors right before was that there might be a more interesting capacitive case with, like, some music controls on it, like we've seen from some of these other companies. I am slightly disappointed we didn't get that, I have to say.

• 1:11:44Speaker 09

  Still the white glossy case. It is smaller. It's like so tiny now. It's almost like a square shape that it's gotten like so small.

• 1:11:50David Pierce?

  It is small. Okay.

• 1:11:51Speaker 09

  So, sorry for people listening to this.

• 1:11:53David Pierce?

  It's like, imagine a piece of Orbit gum stretched a little bit. That's basically what that case looks like now.

• 1:12:00Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:12:01David Pierce?

  So, all right, so what's, first of all, let's just science this a little bit for a second. The idea of ANC on a pair of open ear headphones like the AirPods 4. I know you were skeptical going in that this is even a thing that is possible to do or do well. How does Apple do ANC on something like this? Like, how does it even sort of, in theory, work? As opposed to a pair of headphones you can shove into your ears that actually physically block out a lot of things?

• 1:12:32Speaker 09

  So it's been done before, like Samsung just put out the buds 3 that have the same kind of concept. It doesn't work quite as well. But the technology is the same between these and the AirPods Pro, like, so there are mics in the earbuds, they scan for noise, and they play like the inverse of whatever you're hearing to kind of cancel it out. And so Apple says they like kind of changed the driver, so they like tilt towards your ears more with these. And I guess that helps out when it comes to the ANC. And so like, I've been impressed. You have to like set your expectations. Like, it's nowhere near the pros. It's nowhere near tips. So you can't like put these in your ears and have everything just like fade away.

• 1:13:04Speaker 09

  I'd say it cuts things down by like... Thirty percent, maybe forty percent, probably thirty ish. So like if you're like, what I found is like you can't just put them in and have quiet, but if you play music, that's really where you notice that you don't like turn up the volume as loud as you would would have otherwise. Like that's really part of this whole appeal, I think, and also kind of ties into like Apple's like hearing health stuff lately. So you just don't have to crank the volume. That's been the main benefit. But if you're like on a plane and you're like, just turn them on without music, you're going to hear everything around you still. So it's not going to like be some miracle, but it's nice. Yeah.

• 1:13:37David Pierce?

  Okay. So is maybe the right analogy, just in terms of what this feels like in practice, like a pair of over ear headphones without the noise cancellation turned on. Like it's, you put them on and everything gets quieter and a little more isolated, but it's not like when you flip it on and like the noise from the plane disappears.

• 1:13:58Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, not at all. Yeah, it takes off like you hear what kind of like a, I'd say it's like a white noise machine. Like you would still hear like a fair amount of noise in the background. And it's like, I was at a bar last night, super loud. I just put them in for the sake of trying it. And I could still hear conversations nearby and people talking. So it's not going to like, change that kind of environment, but it did cut it down. So like I was playing music at like 70% volume and I could still hear my music just fine. And so like, it does make a difference, which I think is going to be enough for a lot of people to just kind of say 50 bucks. Why not? You know, plus the wireless charging and whatnot. So.

• 1:14:29David Pierce?

  Right. Well, yeah, it's to your point about the hearing health stuff. That way of thinking about reducing the noise is actually really interesting because you can see that as a negative, right? Like what that sounds to me like is when I get on a plane, it's still going to be very loud. So these are not going to replace like the, the Bose headphones that I like to get on a plane with because it's quiet and helps me sleep while I watch a movie.

• 1:14:51Speaker 09

  Right.

• 1:14:52David Pierce?

  But on the other hand, the thing you just described, like I can listen to music at the bar without it being impossibly loud and still sort of hear the people around me is actually like, that's, that's a use case, right? Like that's a real, that's a real thing and it's, it's kind of a. Hack on transparency mode in a certain way where you have headphones that let you hear the world, but also your music. And if if Apple can get that balance right, that's both it's a pro and a con of the level of ANC in a strange way.

• 1:15:19Speaker 09

  Right. Yeah. So it's been good. I mean, these actually have. So there's noise cancelling mode. There is transparency mode on these as well. And you would think like, why is that necessary in open, open style earbuds? But so it boosts like certain frequencies, like voices, you can hear people easier.

• 1:15:30David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:15:30Speaker 09

  When you turn on the transparency mode. And it's got all the like AirPods Pro software, stuff like the conversation awareness. So when you start speaking, the volume goes down, yada, yada. So that's all there, which is nice. Sound quality is actually like surprisingly, like the bass response is like way better than like most of the past models they put out. So that's been my main like thing I've noticed. The bass response is really good. Yeah, they just sound really clear. They're still not like my type of earbuds, but they're just really well made AirPods. So.

• 1:15:57David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah. Do you think we're at a point now where the biggest difference between the AirPods and the Pros, just in sort of day to day use? Obviously, there's the the hearing health stuff and all that. But do you think the main difference between the two is just going to be how they fit and feel in your ears? Like, it feels like the bass AirPods are getting closer to the Pros.

• 1:16:19Speaker 09

  Hmm.

• 1:16:20David Pierce?

  In such a way that the Pros are going to be better. And if if the main thing you want is sound quality.

• 1:16:24Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24David Pierce?

  Fine. But it does seem like the gap between the two, in terms of sort of everyday sound quality, is much, much smaller than it once was.

• 1:16:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:16:33David Pierce?

  That's really exciting.

• 1:16:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, it is. The Pros like still sound better, obviously. And the ANC is obviously like that much better than these are. So like, if you want the best thing, there's that. So it's like good, better, best. Like, good is the AirPods 4. And they sound really nice for the price. 129, 179 are the AirPods 4 with ANC. And then you go up to the Pros. And so it's a pretty good, straightforward product lineup. I mean, I can't say that about like, the iPads or whatever. But this is pretty straightforward, as far as like what you should buy. Like, here's what you get buying that thing. So.

• 1:17:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. Compared to the iPads, everything is straightforward. I don't know that that's a total fair bar.

• 1:17:08Speaker 09

  Valid point.

• 1:17:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. Does it make sense to you that the AirPods 4 and the AirPods 4 with ANC are two separate things? Like, it seems like the normal Apple move in a lot of ways would have been to just scrap the bottom one and say, $179 is still a pretty competitive price for this kind of headphone.

• 1:17:28Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:17:29David Pierce?

  Is it surprising to you that the sort of very base model exists at all?

• 1:17:32Speaker 09

  Not really. I think they still want something like in that price point because there are so many lower cost options from like so many brands like JBL and whoever else that

• 1:17:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Speaker 09

  that costs like $70, $50. So you've got to have something that's like not too far off from that. And that's what the AirPods 4 are. And you get most of the same sound quali- or same sound quality and like much of the same features. The call quality is nice. They've got this new voice isolation feature from the AirPod Pros as well. So it uses AI, of course, to make you clear on phone calls. So that's on both models too. So you get a lot for $129, honestly. But if you want ANC and wireless charging, 50 bucks more. So.

• 1:18:06David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. And one question we got on the hotline from actually a couple of people was, how big a deal is the H2 chip? And I think, to some extent, it's just better, right? Like, new chips do more things. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, Apple mentioned voice isolation as like one of the things that's going to get better with extra processing.

• 1:18:27Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:18:27David Pierce?

  But I'm also assuming, based on the way you're describing ANC working, that that is like, that's a huge amount of processing this thing has to do.

• 1:18:35Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35David Pierce?

  So that makes me think that there are going to be a lot of people who are like, do I buy the H1 AirPods because they're going to be cheaper? Or is the H2 chip worth it? And it sounds like maybe the H2 chip is going to be worth it.

• 1:18:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, for sure. For sure.

• 1:18:48David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:18:48Speaker 09

  I'd say so. I mean, it's not that much more expensive. I'm sure you can find deals on the past models, but these sound better, first of all. So like, that's why I would buy them, most of all. They sound significantly better than the AirPods 3 did, to my ears at least. Always subjective. But yeah, you get a lot. And like, the H2 chip is key for a lot of the, those features, plus the ANC. Like, this is why these have a lot of these features and the AirPods Max still don't, because the AirPods Max do not have the H2 chip. So, but yes, I would, myself, I would go with the ANC model. I think it is worth just having those few extra features for not a ton more money. But, yeah, I mean, there are some downsides. Like, there's still no multipoint. Which I would love. Apple just loves it's like multi-device like auto switching, which has gotten better over the last couple of years, I think, but it can still like always

• 1:19:30Speaker 09

  like pair to the wrong thing at the wrong time when it's like most inconvenient for you. So.

• 1:19:34David Pierce?

  I, Apple is, I would say guilty a lot of being too clever by half. And I think the clever multi-switching is the most too clever by half thing that Apple does. I just want a button that says, I never, ever, ever, ever want to connect my AirPods to my Mac Mini. Ever. I have never once wanted to. I am never going to want to. Stop asking me every single time I sit down in a chair if I want to connect my AirPods to my Mac Mini. Like, it just drives me crazy. But that is neither here nor there. So you haven't gotten a chance to test the AirPods Pro 2 yet with the hearing health stuff. Otherwise, they're basically the same. The hearing health stuff is coming. We'll try that when it comes.

• 1:20:16David Pierce?

  You have, I would say for all intents and purposes, tried the AirPods Max because they are the AirPods Max with a USB-C port and some new colors.

• 1:20:23Speaker 09

  New colors, yeah.

• 1:20:24David Pierce?

  At some point, I think we'll, we'll end up doing a full review of those because we should. They're going to be on sale. But my biggest question for you is, coming into this event, there was like a little bit of talk about what the Maxes might be if there were going to be Maxes. On a, you know, scale of one to 10, how surprised were you that Apple decided to essentially do nothing with the AirPods Max?

• 1:20:44Speaker 09

  Uh, pretty bummed, honestly, because I like the Max, you know? I'm not sure like why they're like so unworthy of like actual hardware upgrades after all these years. And like I see them everywhere. It's like people clearly buy them. People like buy like cases for their like ear cups. Have you seen these like on the street? It's wild. So there's a whole like aftermarket for accessories for the AirPods Max. And they're really good headphones. But I assume Apple just has, must have some kind of like customer data that says like, people just don't need like some of the AirPods Pro features or care. They just want to get on a plane, put these on and zone out. And like, that's all they really want them for.

• 1:21:16David Pierce?

  That's interesting. That like, maybe there's less to do in that space.

• 1:21:20Speaker 09

  Yeah. But like you would think they would want like some of the hearing health stuff there too, like in the over ear.

• 1:21:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Speaker 09

  Format too. So I'm not sure like what the thinking is there. But you would hope like there's a true AirPods Max 2, not, not too far off. Who knows? Maybe once the AirPods Pro 3 come out, they'll like do both at the same time, but. But yeah, it's a bummer. I mean, they're so heavy and that case hasn't changed the case. The case is still as it was.

• 1:21:48David Pierce?

  That is the thing that kills me is there are just a couple of really obvious upgrades. I think the the basic look of it I've really come around to over the years. Yeah, I was not wild about at the beginning, but I think it it looks better on people's heads than it does kind of on its own. So like I I'm I'm in favor. Sounds good, works great, but there there are enough sort of little upgrades, both in the hardware and the case. And now even in the the processing and the software, it's like you could make these better without trying very hard.

• 1:22:14Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14David Pierce?

  And that that is the thing that kind of bums me out about the Macs. So, OK, last question, and then then I'll let you get out of here. The the, again, the big question I think a lot of people are going to ask is, do I get the four? Or is it worth $50 to get the ANC? For most people, obviously, if price is your main question, get the cheaper one. But do you think most people, the right best option is going to be to spend the 50 bucks? Is it worth the upgrade?

• 1:22:38Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:22:39David Pierce?

  OK.

• 1:22:39Speaker 09

  I think so. I mean, it's there if you need it, and it's pretty easy to just like turn off if you don't like it. Like, you can actually feel something some of the pressure that you would get like when you turn on ANC from the AirPods Pro. You still got like some of that sensation. Some people don't like that, but you can just turn it off if you don't want that. But it's nice to have, you know, like if you're out somewhere on the street and it's like loud, it'll cut it down by like, you know, like a third or so. But and that's like enough to just play your music and not go crazy from like outside, whatever. So.

• 1:23:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Speaker 09

  It's worth it.

• 1:23:07David Pierce?

  All right, fair enough. All right. Well, one of these days you have to come back and we're going to do Pixel Buds, we're going to do Galaxy Buds, and we're going to do AirPods. And we are going to put a bunch of bad sounding audio on the Vergecast, and I cannot wait.

• 1:23:16Speaker 09

  So many good reviews. Yeah, good.

• 1:23:19David Pierce?

  All right, Chris, thank you as always.

• 1:23:20Speaker 09

  Thank you, sir. Cheers.

• 1:23:22David Pierce?

  All right, we got to take one more break, and then we are going to take a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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• 1:25:01David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is [email protected]. We love all your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. Right now, it is extremely phone season, and we have a question about phones.

• 1:25:17Speaker 10

  Hey, guys. My name's Keith. And ever since I was a teen, I really loved technology and smartphones. I would be the type of person that would upgrade my phone multiple times in a couple of years. But since I've gotten older, I've gotten a family. Disposable income just doesn't exist the way it did anymore. But fortunately for me, I get an upgrade this year. Now, as somebody that's been kind of a techie guy, unfortunately, the simplicity of the iPhone ecosystem has been nice, mainly because of messaging, but also because it works with every case and it's easy to just Apple Pay things. My ask of you is to sell me on why I should get

• 1:26:02Speaker 10

  the new Pixel Fold or the new Pixel Pro XL over what app is shipped?

• 1:26:09Speaker 10

  I want to buy into the ecosystem that Google offers. I have a fully Google Home. I'm invested in that ecosystem, but the messaging has always kept me with an iPhone. Unfortunately, this year, I didn't think they really showed me why I should get a new iPhone. But I'm doing upgrade. So should I spend another three years with Apple? Or two years, whatever the contract is? Or should I finally make a move to be my true teenage self? The nerd I always want to be?

• 1:26:39David Pierce?

  All right, as I sit here with two phones on my desk, an iPhone and a Pixel 9 Pro Fold that I'm deeply in love with, I too have this question. Allison Johnson's back. Hi, Allison.

• 1:26:48Speaker 05

  Hi.

• 1:26:49David Pierce?

  Okay, I want to do this in two parts. The first thing I want to do is I want to, I want to throw away all urge to hedge and be reasonable. And I want, I want you to make the most aggressive case for switching to the Pixel that you possibly can. And then we're going to come back around and decide if this is actually a good idea.

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:27:09David Pierce?

  But let's, let's start with that. If you, if, sell me and sell our friend Keith on switching to the Pixel.

• 1:27:16Speaker 05

  Okay, well, you, you gotta go for the, for the Fold. I mean, it's two phones. It's twice the phone. You get a front phone and an inside phone. No, I think like, if you are into tinkering and if you're into like, oh, I can get my phone to do this and I couldn't do that before. Like, the 9 Pro Fold is like the poster child for that. Like, you can, the way you can use the, the inner screen, there's just like, there's really nothing else like it, is kind of how I would put it.

• 1:27:57Speaker 05

  And, you know, RCS on iOS 18 might alleviate a little bit of the, the messaging woes. There's still, you know, really not a substitute for like FaceTime or any of that. But yeah, two times the phone, that's what I got.

• 1:28:15David Pierce?

  That's pretty good. I have been amazed by how much I like the Fold. We're going to come back. You and I are at some point in the next couple of weeks going to have to come back and relitigate our flip versus fold debate. Because I have I have new feelings that are making me sad about my old feelings. And we're going to talk about that. I love this phone.

• 1:28:34Speaker 05

  It's so nice.

• 1:28:36David Pierce?

  And I think to Keith's point about the Google ecosystem, every time I really reinvest in Android, which I've been doing because of this phone, I am reminded of how much better it is to be a Google user on an Android phone.

• 1:28:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47David Pierce?

  Just in part because Gemini is so built into everything and you can access all of your information in all the different Google services. It's so much better as a Google Home Controller than the iPhone is. You get like top level access to all that stuff in a way that if you're on an iPhone, you always have to launch an app before you can do Google stuff. You can just do it all from the whole screen of your phone. And that's very powerful. But literally, it is such a nice phone. It's such a nice phone. I cannot get over how much I like this phone. It's thin. It's the right size. Even if you like, don't open the inner screen all that often, which I don't, it's still a great phone. And then you're like, oh, my God, there's an inner screen.

• 1:29:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26David Pierce?

  It's, I love this phone. And I think the switching costs have gone way down, which is very exciting. Like, the idea that leaving an iPhone and going to an Android phone is going to sort of break your brain is just not true anymore.

• 1:29:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41David Pierce?

  Weirdly, the thing that is always the hardest for me, switching, is that you swipe down on an iPhone to get to Spotlight and be able to start searching for stuff, and you swipe up on Android.

• 1:29:51Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:51David Pierce?

  That is the thing that takes me the longest to switch every single time. Everything else, they've just become so similar over time. They have most of the same features. They do most things the same way. Apple has adopted a lot of Android's customization. Android has started to sort of organize the phone in the way that Apple did for a long time. They're just not that far apart. Like, weirdly, I agree with you that FaceTime is the single stickiest thing left. The RCS thing, it won't solve everything, but it makes some things easier. You can deregister from iMessage much more easily than you used to.

• 1:30:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:22David Pierce?

  Liam, our producer, did this. He bought a fold and he turned off iMessage. And it used to be somewhere between like 24 and 72 hours. You were in like weird iMessage limbo. It was like minutes with him this time. It was very exciting.

• 1:30:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I live that, that dangerous life like several times a year. When I switch from an iPhone to... Yeah, one of the Android phones and it is easier. I think there's kind of an outdated notion of like how difficult it is to switch between these systems. And I am living proof that you can do it multiple times a year and it, there's no like major social cost to it.

• 1:31:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, you will still be a green bubble, but I think like it's fine. Just own being a green bubble, lean in.

• 1:31:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:12David Pierce?

  Your phone has two screens. That's cooler than iPhones.

• 1:31:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, just open up the phone anytime, you know, you need to prove something to someone like, well, do you have two phones attached to your phone?

• 1:31:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. Oh, you can't see those words on that screen? Watch this. I have a whole nother screen. No big deal.

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, look at this. Yeah. Something else I think particularly this year with the Pixel series, I haven't tried out the Pixel Watch 3 yet, but I'm dying to. But it seems like that the ecosystem of hardware around it has also gotten, is just elevated this year, like the Pixel 9 hardware. The Pixel Watch 3 by all accounts is very nice and finally just feels like this is a great smartwatch. Like you, you just buy this one when you have a Pixel phone and everything is nice. So I think that that's always been part of the, the math in the Apple ecosystem. It's like, well, you have this phone, you just buy these earbuds, you buy this watch

• 1:32:08Speaker 05

  and you're done and it all works. And yeah, Pixel maybe getting there a little bit.

• 1:32:13David Pierce?

  A hundred percent. And the other thing is that as Google has made all that stuff work really well with like fast pair and nearby share and all this stuff that is sort of knitting its own ecosystem together, it's giving that to other companies too. So like we're at a point now where Apple's ecosystem is probably still a little cleaner and simpler and better connected, but only if you only buy Apple products. And Google and Android have gotten 90% of the way there with like the rest of the industry. And I think you're just pure sort of number of choices you have of things that you can attach to your devices. Way better on Android.

• 1:32:51Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:52David Pierce?

  Uh, and like it, it won't be quite as perfect as just buying an Apple Watch and scanning the thing and poof, it's set up.

• 1:32:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59David Pierce?

  But it's a lot closer and you have a lot more choices. And I think, I think like the, the whole better together thing that Apple has had for so long is not merely the advantage it once was.

• 1:33:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:11David Pierce?

  I am also just sitting here convincing myself to switch to Android. Like I'm, I'm using the fold, but I haven't moved my eSIM yet. And I'm sitting here being like, it's time to, it's

• 1:33:20Speaker 05

  Oh, that's a commitment. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's

• 1:33:23David Pierce?

  It's just time to do it. It's just time. I'm just, it's just time. Uh, but okay. So now, last question, would you recommend doing this? Like, is this, if you've been debating leaving the ecosystem, switching Apple to Android, is this the year to do it?

• 1:33:41Speaker 05

  I think it is. I think that the hardware has been on the Pixel side particularly, kind of inching towards this like, is it really a flagship? It's kind of this like upper mid-range thing. In this, I, I hold a Pixel nine up next to the iPhone 16, um, Galaxy S24. And like, they are all just really nice phones. And it sort of feels like the first time that I've, I've been like, yeah, these, these deserve to all be in the same conversation. Um, I think it's a really good year to do it. And I think we're gonna, um, yeah, to your point on the, the Gemini stuff, I think we're going to get funneled into these AI subscription nightmares.

• 1:34:26David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:34:26Speaker 05

  Where if you are in the Google ecosystem and like, I am very much, you know, in Gmail and Google Docs and all of those services, it's gonna get weird if you are, you know, trying to use the AI features and they're behind some kind of like Google One paywall, you know, I don't know. This is speculation. I don't want to like get too far ahead of myself. Um, but that is something to consider. I think there is potential for like value of being all in on one system like there quite wasn't before. I don't know. It, it feels like a, a stick that they're getting ready to just like smack us with.

• 1:35:11David Pierce?

  I totally agree, and I think the system thing is the one thing that weirdly keeps me sort of tied to iPhone. Like, you can use most Google things, most of the Google universe on an iPhone. It's not as good, but it's there.

• 1:35:29Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:29David Pierce?

  Not true in reverse, right? Like, if there are any Apple-only apps that you like, or you like Siri, or there are certain Apple-y experiences that you want to have, they just don't exist on Android. And so I think the question of like, do I want to use a little of both? Kind of leads you to an iPhone in a strange way, where I think if you just want to pick one, the clear answer at this moment is Gemini. I think I'm so happy if I'm wrong about this in six months, but I have incredibly low expectations for what Apple Intelligence is going to look like for the foreseeable future. And Gemini has many flaws, but is doing a lot of stuff already. And so if you want to just buy in, that's probably the one to start with, as opposed to like crossing

• 1:36:14David Pierce?

  your fingers for Siri to get really good next year.

• 1:36:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18David Pierce?

  But you can a little bit have your cake and eat it too on the iPhone, because there is both Siri and there is the Google app, and you can have both. And so I think in a weird way, Android forces you to both. It gives you a bigger ecosystem, but also forces you to make a choice in a way that the iPhone a little bit doesn't yet.

• 1:36:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair.

• 1:36:38David Pierce?

  But the fold is so nice.

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  The fold is so nice. Just 10 out of 10 on like niceness.

• 1:36:44David Pierce?

  If this thing wasn't $1,800, I would be like screaming from rooftops that this is the phone everybody should buy.

• 1:36:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:50David Pierce?

  But it's $1,800.

• 1:36:51Speaker 05

  I know.

• 1:36:52David Pierce?

  So Keith, do with that what you will. I don't know if we helped at all, but that's where we are.

• 1:36:56Speaker 05

  Probably not.

• 1:36:59David Pierce?

  All right, Alison, thank you as always.

• 1:37:00Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:37:01David Pierce?

  All right, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, all the reviews, all of our coverage, all of the hearing health stuff in the AirPods, all of the sleep apnea stuff in the Apple Watch, lots of interesting things going on, lots of stuff coming in the coming months, lots of coverage of camera buttons, all of it on theverge.com. I'll put a lot of links in the show notes, but as always, just go read the site, find our buy lines, it's good stuff. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other reasons people should buy one phone over another, you can always email us at [email protected] or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Either way, we love hearing from you.

• 1:37:43David Pierce?

  Thank you to everybody who reaches out every week, it is the best. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Friday to talk about AI news, more gadgets, all the stuff happening in the many, many, many tech trials, like so many tech trials, and everything else going on right now. We'll see you then, rock and roll.

• 1:38:16Speaker 11

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• 1:38:46Speaker 12

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