Apple announces the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, Watch Series 5, and more

Stories from this week: iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max: hands-on with Apple’s new flagship phonesApple’s new iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro cameras: what they doWith the iPhone 11 Pro, what does it even mean for a phone to be ‘pro’? Apple’s new iPhone finally sacrifices thinness for battery lifeThe 3 best and worst features of the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro MaxThe iPhone 11 Pro comes with a USB-C 18W wall charger and USB-C to Lightning cableiPhone 11 improves on the XR in every wayiPhone 11: a first look at Apple’s new default iPhoneThe iPhone 11, Pro, and Pro Max will cost $699, $999, and $1,099, respectivelyAirDrop on the iPhone 11 will let you point at people to share photosApple’s iPhone 11 doesn’t have 5G because 5G isn’t ready for the iPhoneWhat we’re still waiting for after Apple’s iPhone 11 eventApple Watch Series 5: hands-on with the new generation smartwatchThe upgraded seventh-gen iPad has a 10.2-inch displayiPad 10.2-inch: hands-on with Apple’s new 7th-gen tabletApple Arcade is launching on September 19th for $4.99 a monthApple TV Plus one-year trial comes with every Apple device purchasHere’s Apple TV Plus’ launch lineupApple TV Plus launches on November 1st for $4.99 per monthGoogle takes one tiny step closer to the world beneath the worldGoogle Pixel 4 XL leaked in extensive hands-on videos …Leak reveals how the Pixel 4’s new face unlock setup differs …Leaked Google Pixel 4 photos show orange color variant …Leaked Google Pixel 4 promo video includes gestures …Latest Pixel 4 rumors claim 8x zoom, improved Night Sight …Leaked Google Pixel 4 XL pictures show off the giant top ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, you know it is. It's the iPhone event. The iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 Pro, the iPhone Pro Max. New iPads, Apple Watches, some service talks, and we gotta do some Pixel Leaks. That's Vergecast coming up now.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Soft, cushy, plush, cozy. Soft, smooth, buttery, marshmallow-y, warm. Soft. Socks, underwear, tees, and more. Bombas. Everyday comfort worth obsessing over. Visit bombas.com/audio and use code AUDIO for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash AUDIO. One purchase equals one donated. Always.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Companies shouldn't have to choose between speed and control. Amex Corporate connects cards with flexible spending controls and real-time visibility to help teams adapt faster. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash Amex Corporate. Terms apply.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the 5G revolution. Huh? Huh? Where's that 5G race money?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  Bring it to me. I am Eli. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  I am right here.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Yes. I'm gonna be crabby in this podcast. It's gonna be fun.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that's exciting. Paul Miller is here.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  How's it going?

• 1:30Speaker 04

  I promised to bring a sense of optimism to the show.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  That's good. I like it.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  I can explain my crabby thing. I'm publicly now saying that I dropped the vape, just like Ashley Karman's excellent story pointed out to everybody that people are dropping vapes. I have done that as well, which means my nicotine content has dropped, which means my weight has gone up, and so has my relative level of like ambient anger. So, enjoy.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  There is real tech news this week. The good stuff. Tech season is here. There was an Apple event, y'all. Dieter and I went to the Circle. We were in it. It was big. There was a lot of people there. Two Pro phones, as we expected, an iPhone 11, a new Apple Watch, a surprise iPad. There's a lot going on. Some service announcements. Where do you want to start, Dieter?

• 2:16Speaker 03

  Honestly, we just got to start with the iPhones. Like, that's it. There's a bunch of other stuff we want to get into it. We could like tease the listeners by saying we're gonna get to the big stuff later, but you just want to know about the big iPhones right now. So we're just gonna tell you.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  So we were there. Dieter and I were there. It was, I would say the event was muted. It's funny how people ask a lot about like, what's the vibe?

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  I will tell you right now, the vibe at any tech event does not matter. Like, if you have a bunch of journalists and employees of your company together in a room, and they're excited, it doesn't make their products good. If they're crabby, it doesn't make their products bad. Like, it just doesn't matter. But the vibe, I would say, I'll just say it, the vibe was kind of muted. What are they gonna do? Are they gonna surprise us? Are they gonna like, make a move to like really jump the thing ahead? Is it gonna be iterative? And everyone's kind of expecting these iterative updates to the phones. And that's more or less what they delivered.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no one, no one was like unreasonably like, oh my god, this is amazing. Uh, no one was saying, oh, I'm really disappointed. It was just like, yep, that's, this is what we hoped you would do. You did it. Cool. Great. Let's go look at it. That was like, it was a chill, relaxed, you made the things vibe.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  And the keynote was, uh, they moved it along really fast. They're just like up and running. And they ended with Apple Retail, which I think is notable. We'll come back to that in a minute.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with the phones. So as we expected, they basically revved the XR and the XS and changed the names. So the XR got revved into the iPhone 11, which I think is a meaningful name because now it is just the iPhone. That's the iPhone you should get. That's what we've been saying about the XR. They added an ultra wide camera. That's basically what they did.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  They swapped the telephoto for the ultra wide. Well, the R didn't have a tele. It had just the regular wide. So they added a second camera. But anyway, we'll come back to that.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so they added the second camera. It's an ultra wide. They revved the processor to the A13 Bionic. That's what they did. That's a new car. That's like, that's what they did. And they changed the design of the back a little bit, so it's a square. The camera bump is a square. Then, they took the XS and the XS Max. They renamed them the iPhone 11 Pro and the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which I believe is the most unwieldy product name Apple has ever come out with. And those have a new OLED screen that gets a lot brighter. That's the big one. The screen is also more power efficient. They added a third camera, so the XS already had the standard and the telly, and then they added the ultra wide to that one as well. And the back is matte. That's it. That's like, more or less, it has a slightly faster LTE camera.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  So really, the difference in these phones, same processor, same basic camera, and the normal and the ultra wide. The Pro adds OLED display, it adds a matte finish back, and it adds a telephoto camera.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  And slightly faster LTE, which is just like an impossible thing to measure or test for most people. Like, it either happens to you or it doesn't.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  One other thing that the Pro adds, which I think is actually a little bit noteworthy, although I have mixed feelings about it. It adds a smaller size option. The default iPhone 11 is the exact same size as the iPhone XR, and it's big. The size is like, large. And the iPhone 11 Pro is the same size as the iPhone XS, the iPhone X, which is just slightly smaller. It's still a big phone. I don't think that the standard 11 is so much bigger than the Pro that it's like gonna drive you crazy. But I do guarantee you that there are people in the world who are probably going to spend the extra money to get the Pro because it's just a little bit smaller.

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think that's right.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  There's one other thing that I think is worth mentioning in terms of new stuff, and we should get into why, and that's battery life.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so the 11 Pro and the 11 Pro Max, a big difference from the XS is that they no longer have 3D Touch, and they are slightly thicker and heavier. So I think they took out the 3D Touch stuff. They made the phones a little bit bigger, and they stuffed a much bigger battery in these phones. So the 11 Pro gets four hours of additional battery life. The 11 Pro Max gets five hours of additional battery life. That is compared to the 11, which has a more efficient processor, gets one hour of additional battery life.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  So you don't get those huge jumps over the previous model just by refinements. They just shoved a bigger battery in there.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  But this is exciting and I don't know if it's important, but it's, it feels important as a statement that we can finally make things thicker because we did a lot of work making thin. It's fun when it's thin, but it's not good if it's, if you're going to sacrifice on heat performance, performance, performance or battery performance.

• 6:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's funny because it, I didn't even realize it was thicker or heavier until I was done at the event. I was like in the hotel room, I'm reading the Verge's coverage and I see Heim Gartenberg be like, hey, it's thicker and heavier. There's a bigger battery. I was like, I, you know, I was there, I was holding it. I, you know, we made our videos, we did all the things. I carry a 10S Max every day. I picked up the, the 11 Pro Max, did not notice, right? It is imperceptibly thicker and heavier and you get five hours of additional battery life. Like there's a lesson there, everybody.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  Now do laptops.

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  So those are the, kind of the top line changes. We should dive into these cameras because that's really, I think where all the action is. Dieter's, Dieter's making a face at me. Why don't, why don't you think so?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  So, okay, the, all the action is in the cameras. And this was my like thing I wrote before the event, like they gotta, they gotta do something with the cameras. They at least have to get up to par with the current state of Android cameras, which is quality of the pixel, number of lenses of everybody else, like do well with the cameras. And I think that is where like most of like the thing to pay attention to, most of the action. And for a lot of people, like most of the reason to upgrade is, but for me, even though there's not a whole lot else to say about it, because we've already said it, like to me, the, the most important thing, the best upgrade here, assuming they did the work on the cameras, is that the small Pro got that extra four hours of battery life. But again, there's nothing else to say. Let's talk about the cameras.

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, I, I mean, there's something there in the, in the reframing of these devices.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Right?

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. That, you know, the iPhone 10 came out and they put out the iPhone 8 and they're like, the iPhone 10 is the future of the iPhone. All, you know, this, this is new gesture system, new screen, OLED, the whole thing. And, you know, a couple of years later, the iPhone 11 is not, it's not an OLED screen anymore. It's a 720p LCD. It looks fine. Like I think a lot of people have 10Rs and think it looks just fine. The OLED screens on the Pros just look way better. And it's still like a seven, oh, they cut prices. This is notable.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, yeah.

• 8:51Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone 11 starts at $699, uh, which is-

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Instead of $749.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  Instead of $749. So that's a huge statement of this is gonna be the mainstream phone. Right? It's in it. It's more inexpensive than before. It's competitive on price against flagships. It offers you a bunch of the features of the flagships. And then if you want to spend a thousand dollars for the best stuff Apple can give you, you can get the Pro phone.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Uh, or notably, that $699 price is like really competitive with that, like just sub ultra-premium tier of Android phones. Like it's head to head with like the OnePlus 7 Pro, basically. Right?

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Um, and that is interesting because I don't know how many people are actually comparison shopping like a high-end Android phone and an iPhone like, or especially an iPhone 11. But if someone was like, oh, I want an iPhone, but look at these fancy new Android phones, like the iPhone 11 is a pretty bold statement of no, you don't need to go that way. You can, you can spend your 700 bucks and get an iPhone.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, with a 720p LCD.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's, it, it is a significant sort of like spec downgrade compared to the OnePlus stuff. But-

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  I think most people, at least in America, this is not true in other places, and we should talk about that too. But if you're locked in the iMessage walled garden, right, like one of Apple's jobs is to like make that garden like a very nice garden. Right? And to keep you from ever even thinking about leaving it. And now they've got a bunch of like price points inside the garden with competitive feature sets. Where you're like, you know, I could leave and like endure the switching costs of the green bubble and getting all my new apps and, and Google surveilling me relentlessly. Whatever it is, whatever, whatever happens outside these walls, or I just like pay the 700 bucks and like be happy. I think that's one of Apple's jobs now. I'm not saying that I love the walled garden. I think everybody knows how I feel about the walled garden.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  But as the maintainers of the walled garden, I think at least in the United States, Apple has to, it has to be competitive inside the walled garden. I think the 11 does that really well. I think you go to, in this, I think a lot, this will segue right into the camera stuff. You go to like the Chinese market. Where iMessage has no hold and everyone's jumping around all the time. There's like massively competitive ecosystem among Android and iOS. Then they've got to be competitive on hardware specs. And I think you see that with the Pro. I think you see that with these cameras. So, like I said, that's a segue into the cameras. I think you look at the phones Apple wanted us to compare, the iPhone 11 Pro 2. You look at the phones out in the world. There's a bunch of Android phones that have three cameras. There's a bunch of Android phones that have

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  a billion features for their camera apps. And Apple basically added all of those in.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Like, I don't know. There's a ton of features in the camera app now. It's got a bunch of stuff built into it.

• 11:37Nilay Patel?

  They didn't go full periscope.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  No, and they also didn't put a bunch of important camera settings inside the camera app. Like, some of them are still in the Settings app, which is just crazy.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  It is ridiculous to switch the video resolution from like 1080p to 4K. You have to jump out to the Settings app and like do it. Like, what is one of the main settings that you want to change on the fly when you're like opening video is, am I gonna blow my storage on 4K 60 right now? Or do I just need to take a quick video? And that's like into the Settings app. Anyhow, so let's focus the Pro because the 11 is basically the same without the telephoto. So, three cameras on the Pro. Main camera, f1.8, 12 megapixels. It appears the sensor is slightly different. It's now 100% focus pixels. My sense is that it can actually address higher ISOs. So, it might be a little bit less noisy than I think the 10s. I was just rereading our 10s review.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  You were not impressed with that camera.

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  It's funny how tentative I was in saying like medium photos or medium. Like, I know how I've been using this camera for a year and I think everyone has heard us. You just wrote that great piece. Like, they still look like smartphone photos. And like, I'm reading that review. I'm like, why was I so polite to these photos? They're like, they look weird. If you agree with me, then they look weird. Like, the Smart HDR and the 10s sensor, they generated some, I think aesthetically weird photos. You know, they pulled up all the shadows. They dropped all the highlights. Everything was very flat. The sensors were very noisy and they did a ton of noise reduction. So, they crushed a lot of detail. So, compared to the Pixel, compared to the, like, the Samsung phones, which do a lot of sharpening, I think the iPhone was just well behind.

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  And again, it's funny how polite I was about it in the review.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  Which from watching the keynote online, like I haven't handled the phone, but from just a remote perspective, it seems like Apple's fully focused on sweater detail this year. Is that correct?

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, so that's, we'll get to that. So they've, so they, they've got a slightly different sensor for the main camera, F1.8 lens. The telephoto lens in the Pro is a little bit faster. It's F2.0.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  And then the ultra wide is F2.4, which I mean, if you're doing like low, weird low light ultra wide stuff, like, fine. So you've got three different lenses, three different sensors going on.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Apple says they're all 12 megapixels and they insisted that they're all of basically like comparable quality. Oftentimes when you get a multi sensor camera on Android, like the main one's great and then the wide or the telephoto are like kind of garbage. They're there, but they're clearly cheap and crappy compared to the main.

• 14:20Nilay Patel?

  And this has been true of the iPhone as well. The telephoto, a better lens, right? Telephoto lens, like you get different foreshortening. Pros like to use it. You can like make all kinds of arguments, but a slower lens or the worst sensor, I never used it because it always looked worse to me. So hopefully the, you know, the new faster lens and the telly and the slightly better sensors all around are gonna make an improvement. Then they added a night mode, which is something that the Android phones have done for a long time. The night mode's really interesting. I played with it a little bit. It's automatic. So it senses that it's in the dark. You get a little yellow circle at the top. You get a meter at the bottom, like a dial, and you can select how long you want the shutter to, like you want night mode to operate, basically. So you can turn it off.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  It starts with like a suggestion and you can like ramp it up or down depending on what you want to do with it. But it goes, it starts like, we think in this mode it should be three seconds or five seconds or whatever, right?

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  Yep. So you hit the shutter, you hold still, thing counts down three seconds. I think it goes up to like nine or 10.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  They said their goal was not to make night into day, which is something that they were very critical of other phones' night modes for doing. We will have to see. So they're trying to do this like very naturalistic sort of night mode. They added a bunch of new portrait mode effects. Peter strolled his eyes.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  The cool thing with the portrait mode is you can now do it in more lenses than you could before, right? You could before, you could only do it on the wide. Now you can do it. I think it's on the wide and the ultra wide or wide and tele.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  No, before you could do it on the telephone. So when you switch to the true portrait mode on the 10s, it would kick you into the telly. And now you can kind of do it everywhere and they're faking it a bunch of ways. Then the sort of the big trick that they added was when you're in the main lens or the telly, the viewfinder is like the viewfinder and then it shows you what's outside of the frame of the lens you're going to shoot. So you're using the main lens, it'll show you, here's the stuff the ultra wide can see. That is really interesting to me. I hadn't quite caught this and then I was like playing with it more at the hands on. It is actually compositing both sensors, right? So it's like showing

• 16:27Nilay Patel?

  you what the main sensor sees here and then it's grabbing the stuff from the other sensor to show you the top and the bottom and like warping it to fit. So if you like jiggle the phone, they all move at different rates. It's like super impressive technically that they have everything going and warping in real time and it's showing you one image. But if you like try to break it, you can and it's like, it just shows you how cool it is. There are some features related to that. Like one, it just helps you zoom out. Like you're like, oh, I can see some more stuff, I'm gonna zoom out. But if you're like shooting a video, there's a setting that's on by default, capture outside the frame. So you're like shooting a video, somebody cut off of your frame, it will intelligently grab it from the other sensor and like map it in, which is super cool. You can turn

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  that setting on for photos as well. It's off by default and this is true, Apple was like, sometimes people just want to crop people out of their photos. So we didn't want to turn it on by default.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  It's called future ex-girlfriend.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  So it's there, you can turn it on. And then there's another setting to have those changes made automatically or not. So like, that to me is really interesting. Like they're trying to use all these sensors together in weird ways. I do not have a good sense for what these photos look like. The main thing that I was critical of last year is that Smart HDR was way too aggressive. It looked super weird and the camera was noisy, so the noise reduction was out of control. Apple is showing us photos. I thought this was great that they did this. I think this is like a level of honesty that most companies don't give you. When, if you go back and watch the keynote, they show you the technical details of every photo they're showing you. So you're just looking at them and it's like ISO 30, 1300 shutter speed.

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  ISO 20, 1,500 shutter speed. It's like, yeah, any camera looks good if you have a floodlight pointed at your subject and you're capturing like insane shutter speeds at low as, like, of course. So I think those images to me did not, they don't tell a story, right? Like, did smart HDR get better? Well, I don't know. All I saw was incredibly well-lit images in incredibly beautiful places. We're gonna have to use it. Then, Paul, there's the mode that you're talking about, the sweater mode. Sweater mode? And we only got to see two pictures in sweater mode. One's a dude in the sweater, and then we saw like a lady in a different sweater. Those were the pictures we saw. And this is called deep fusion, right?

• 18:51Nilay Patel?

  It's called deep fusion. So, smart HDR in the Pixel, for example, their HDR modes, they take a base frame, and then depending on which camera you're using, so that, like, for example, the Pixel, when you pick up the camera and point at something, it starts capturing underexposed frames. Then you like hit the button. It grabs a base frame, it grabs a bunch of underexposed frames around it, merges them all together, you get an HDR photo out of the Pixel. That's where you get all the extra dynamic range and detail. The iPhone does essentially the same thing, only it captures one overexposed frame too, right? So like, a thing that is interesting and a fun semantic argument that we will almost certainly have in mere moments is like, you're not even taking the photo when you think you're taking the photo. What's a photo, guys? Yeah, it's coming. I promise you it's coming. What's a photo?

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  So, but at least, at least with smart HDR and like, the Pixel's HDR, there's a base frame, right? You like, hit the button, and it picks a base frame, and then it like adds detail to the base frame. Yeah. My understanding of deep fusion, which is not shipping yet, we have not used it, we won't use it until it comes out, I saw a photo of a sweater, right? Like, that's what I know about deep fusion, is that it's, you pick up the phone, it's capturing a bunch of images, it takes nine images, it doesn't have a true base frame, it interpolates...

• 20:08Nilay Patel?

  Two different base frames weaves them together and then adds in all the other detail from the other images.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  What are these two base frames? Are you talking about the overexposed and the underexposed?

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  It's unclear to me what it is actually doing, but it is, it is basically manufacturing a photo at like the pixel level instead of this like, we see a face, we're gonna use the underexposed frame to pull in detail, right?

• 20:30Speaker 04

  What if the photo is the timestamp? If the moment that you clicked the shutter button, there's a timestamp and so you're telling the phone, I want a photo that looks like things look right now. And then all the frames it captures before and back in time, it's trying to bring those close to look like whatever stuff looked like at the timestamp, unless people were blinking or people that you don't like were in frame.

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's like what it's doing. So it shoots a deep fusion, shoots a total of nine images. Before you even push the shutter, it's already captured four short and four secondary images. When you press the shutter, it takes a long exposure image and then the neural engine fuses them all together and hits it pixel by pixel to pick like the correct tones and extract detail.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  So at no point do you have like a base frame, which is like the thing to me that like all the smart HDR stuff is, we have a photo that we took and we're gonna use like all this additional detail from under and overexposed photos to like fill in that photo, like this is the photo, which is basically what all HDR is, right? Like if you took HDR photos of DSLR before, you would basically just a bracket and then merge back, right? This is like, you're taking of, you're basically taking a video at different exposures and then you're sort of like merging that video into one photo that happened over time. It's, it's nuts. I think I'm so excited by this just because it's, they're pushing the level of computational photography like well beyond what cameras do.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  I mean, at what point could you just take a video? You just, you just have someone sit down for their portrait. You start filming them from one angle, then you move around a little bit just to get some more angles and then you like, when you in post, you say, this is the angle from which I want a, a photo to be generated. And then you just take all that. I guess you don't get all the exposure stuff.

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I'd like to officially welcome you to the what is a photo debate.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Here it is, we're having it. You were just describing like basically how photos were constructed like 100 years ago, right? Like the dawn of photography, photos like took minutes and they were like, that's right, so like-

• 22:42Speaker 04

  But the camera was staying still.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, unless the photographer is like, you know, like a drunk Victorian. I don't know. I don't know. I've never been in one of those rooms. My understanding of Victorian photographers were they're all quite tipsy. This to me is, we're hitting the point where the camera, when you hit the button, is no longer like trying to capture what's in front of you. It's trying to recreate an impression of that for you. And so I'm very, I'm very curious to see like, hey, how does this work? Be, are we just getting to the point where like the iPhone's gonna take a burst of photos of your friends hanging out and it's gonna be like, okay, in this one, she was smiling, he wasn't, we're gonna like flip his face in for the smiling one, right? And this one, like, they weren't looking, now they are. Right? You know those Vanity Fair photos that they do for the Hollywood issue?

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  Where it's like every famous actor in the world is on that. Like that photo doesn't exist.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  Right? All those people come in separately and they come in little groups and they comp that photo together. We're just like quickly getting to the place where on the pixel level, we're comping a photo. There's nothing to keep Apple from comping in like everyone's smiling.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  This is how eyeballs and brains work, right? Our eyes are just moving around and our brain constructs something that seems to us like an image or a memory. You know, in my memory, you guys were smiling at me, but in truth-

• 24:03Speaker 04

  They were frowned at disappointment.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  All images are composites, Neelai. Every single one of them.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  I disagree. I think most-

• 24:12Nilay Patel?

  They're composited at the neural level on your brain and at the neural engine in the iPhone.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Double neurons.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  It's photographs that were the lie this whole time.

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so this is the thing. It's like, you're like, oh, but there's no base frame of a moment in time, but there was never a perfect moment in time.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Instant, because that thing like, it's like Zenos paradox, you know, you can, you get halfway, halfway, halfway, like, a second is forever, half a second, like, the exposure is never, like, instantaneous, in like, the like, Newtonian sense of, you know, the, you know, limit going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 24:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  So, this thing that you-

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  That was some incredible calculus right there.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Right. The thing that's blowing your mind, that there's like, no base frame, well, the base frame was a composite, in the first place, we just, like, didn't think of it that way, because we didn't have the technology to, like, think about what it was, you know, doing over time. Just saying.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, right now, there is no base frame, because this feature has not shipped, it's one picture of a sweater.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Two pictures of sweaters.

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm very excited to have this argument, when this does ship, and, you know, we get some more details on how it actually works, I think, there are some philosophical questions about computational photography, that we should have, because most people think you hit the shutter, the shutter opens and closes, it hits a sensor, that, that is the photo.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:30Nilay Patel?

  And if we're quickly coming to a place where, your smartphone, which is the most common camera in existence, is making things not look exactly like reality, looking like enhanced reality, where it's able to add detail to an environment where they're, like, you were not perceiving detail, like, where it's basically creating the impression of reality that you wanted, but that wasn't there, like, it's, we should just have, like, we should just start talking about that.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  We're gonna ban old journalists from buying iPhone 12s, because the pictures they take won't be accurate to reality, and so, like, in the future, journalists are gonna be using crappier cameras than everybody else.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  In reality-

• 26:08Nilay Patel?

  Paul will be frowning in all photos.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Light is traveling at multiple angles, and sensors typically only capture one angle of the light that's traveling, so theoretically, you could see around objects, if you could see all the angles of light.

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  Yes. And then you get one of those camera, you get one of those smartphones that have like, 45 lenses on the back, like the light show cameras?

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:29Nilay Patel?

  This is just where, what's interesting to me about this is, one, it didn't ship. My understanding is that like, this was supposed to be the feature. And they missed it, which is like a big iOS 13 story. Like, the iOS 13 release cycle is pretty messy.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  It's cattywampus, is a technical term.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  So like, again, we have, we have one picture of sweater that everybody saw, and then like, the, the second picture of a sweater that we got to see as well. That's it. That's what we know of deep fusion. Does it work? Does it not work? Um, it could never ship, right, was just the thing. But you've got these three cameras in the back of the Pro. You've got night mode, you've got new effects, um, in portrait mode, you've got this deep fusion thing. You see them aggressively having to chase, in particular, the Chinese phone manufacturers. Because if they want to sell a bunch of iPhones in China, and no one's using iMessage and there's no lock-in, then they have to compete on specs and hardware. And you see, like, Apple having to do that in the Apple way, I think is really interesting. So they, yep, they've added a bunch of lenses, they've added a bunch of effects, they've added a bunch of modes.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we should talk about the front camera. It's been upgraded.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  It's been upgraded. It's 12, and then they, they do the thing that Samsung does, where like, you can choose between wide or not so wide, but it's still the same lens, basically.

• 27:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so when you have it in portrait, it like crops in a little bit. And when you rotate it to landscape, it crops out a little bit. It's neat. Like, I, I think the wide-angle selfie lens on the, on the Pixel is like still the best demo that I've given of a, of a phone a long time. It's the thing people are most excited about. So it's great to like compete there a little bit.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  I will say the, the camera app overall is like, right on the edge of like, becoming Samsung-y in terms of, we're gonna like, give you a bunch of features, because we're gonna impress you with featureitis, and then you don't really know how to use any of them or find them, and you forget about them. It's like, almost there. You know, they, they did this thing where they changed the shutter button, so you hold your finger down on the shutter button to record a quick video. And then it's like, what if you want burst? Well, then you like, you like slide it down for burst, and you slide it up to like, stick it into like a stuck recording thing, so you don't have to hold your finger down. Very clever. Once you see it, you're like, oh, that's really clever, that's great. You can like, swipe over into the, the lens frame from that shutter area, and it'll like reveal the other Different options for you instead of switching modes, you can like get to like that's where your,

• 28:48Speaker 03

  you know, flash on or off settings are also a very clever, nice touch. But again, a thing you need to discover. So they've packed enough into this camera now where they've hit the limit of what feels Apple-esque in a camera interface of like simplicity that literally every single Android manufacturer copied for years.

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  But now and or Apple is like getting to the place where like they need to figure out how to cram this many things into a camera interface and still have it be comprehensible. It's ironic that I'm complaining that there's not one more setting there for the HD, HD stuff for video. There you go.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, they've, you know, they've reorganized it a little bit. They have a new font, which Phil Schröder called on stage SF Camera, which he said is a quote, so pro, which was very funny. It was like, he was obviously making a joke, but it was very funny.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Why didn't they go into depth on that? Like, what is different about SF Camera? Is it, is it, is it because it looks like that weird font on camera lenses or something?

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  I have no idea. We, I will say we did not look at it deeply enough compared to that. It was not the focus of our extremely frantic hands on time was like, let's look at this, these fonts. So that's a pro. I mean, like they added an 18 watt USB C charger in the box. I heard Joanna for the pro, not for the 11. I think I heard Joanna Stern like cheer when that happened because she'd been asking for it for a long time. But it's USB C to lightning. It seems like it's a pretty big charger. Actually, like, I don't think Apple is great at making small chargers. Like, there's a part of me that's like, you should just let Anchor do it. They saw them in the stores now.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  But the iPhone 11 is still five watt, right?

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  I did not know until Dieter told me on the Vergecast last week that the iPhone still shipped with five watt chargers.

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  Sure does.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Ridiculous.

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  And then the OLED displays, it's 18% more efficient.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Something like that.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  In terms of power. It has its 800 nits brighter than normal, 1200 nits brighter. If you're doing an HDR mode like Dolby Vision.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Yes, but only in the peaks is a 1200 bright. A lot of people say, oh, it's 1200 brighter. It's actually only 1200 brighter in the peaks in HDR mode. So like, you know, the brightest thing in an HDR video can get up to 1200. But the number you should actually care about is 800 brighter outside.

• 31:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's 800. It's normally outside. If you watch a Dolby Vision movie from iTunes or whatever, the peaks can hit 1200. That is actually impressive. I have not been impressed with the iPhone XS's claimed HDR display. This one actually looks pretty bright to me, but they renamed it. It is now the Super Retina XDR display.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Which leaves them space for next year to call it the Super Retina ProMotion XDR display, when they finally increase the refresh rate to match everybody else.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, kill me.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  That's coming for you. Super Retina ProMotion XDR display.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So they pulled the XDR from their Pro XDR display they put out with the Mac Pro, which is like an insanely expensive display. And, you know, perfectly color calibrated, it has this like peak brightness that nothing else can do, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now they're like, our phone has it too. And it's like, this is just about as bright as the Samsung display. I don't know what to tell you. But it looks really nice. It has this thing that I don't quite understand that I'm gonna dig on called Spatial Audio. The iPhone 11 has this too. So it supports vision and Atmos, has all the lights. There they are. But then it has something called Spatial Audio. So you're watching, I think the demo that they showed us was Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which is a horrible movie. Just,

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  I have to tell you, it's not a good movie. I own it. That's the mistake I made. I bought it on iTunes. I own it.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Why?

• 32:31Nilay Patel?

  Because I'm dumb.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. It was like, you know, it was like not out to rent yet, but it was the thing that was dumb enough that I wanted to watch, so I own it.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  I got windowed into owning this movie. Anyway, so they start playing it. I literally said, "Oh, God, not this movie." The poor person doing the demo was like, "Are you okay?" It's like, no, it's just a bad... Anyway, that was the demo. So that movie is in vision and Atmos on iTunes. Looks very bright, lasers out of monsters' eyes, all the good stuff is happening, explosions are bright. And then their thing is, last year, the iPhone XS had wide stereo, which was indeed very impressive. Like the iPhone XS is one of the best sounding phones I've seen in a while, at least from its internal speakers. Now they've added this thing called spatial audio, which sits alongside Atmos. So like games on the iPhone can use the spatial audio encoder, but they don't have to be Atmos games.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  And then like Atmos movies get the benefit of like spatial audio. I, like I said, I don't quite understand it. I'm gonna dig on it and figure out what it means, but there's basically the second audio encoding next to regular wide stereo. So like a YouTube video, this podcast gets the benefit of wide stereo, which basically was like a cross talk eliminator for the left and right channel. So it sounded wider. Spatial audio is like, makes it supposed to sound like it's around you. And I'm unclear how it plays with Atmos, but like a YouTube video doesn't get spatial audio by default.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  Are you just talking about the speakers? This doesn't help me at all if I plug in, well, first I buy a Lightning to, um, I buy an adapter so I can plug my headphones.

• 34:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  But theoretically, I could plug headphones into this, or where, you know, Apple sells AirPods, right? I could connect headphones to a phone and then hear, like, like, why would you do this? Why would you watch a movie with surround sound from the phone speakers?

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  Why, I think a thing that is true, um, is that headphones are now so complicated and annoying that people just run their speakers all the time. Uh, people watch a lot of content just on their, I'd do it. So it sounds good. The speakerphone is like better because of it. That's the thing people use. And then a thing that is true, and I'll say it out loud, does AirPods sound bad? And so like, you might have a better experience watching a movie through your phone speakers than your AirPods, which is a real, uh, real line that Apple's walking up to with these phones.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  The spatial stuff helps you none at all with headphones?

• 34:48Nilay Patel?

  No, as, as far as I can tell, this is all speaker-based stuff. So that's like the big set of changes. The, the 11 has a spatial audio too. Is there anything else from the Pro? That's like it. It's, it's basically, and again, I have to keep saying this because it's on the list, faster LTE.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  But you have to be in a place with a faster LTE network for that to work for you.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:07Nilay Patel?

  Which is more likely, uh, for you to find than 5G. And so there's no 5G iPhone. That's true. That's a big thing that's missing. That was, uh, there were two extremely dumb Twitter fights about this event that went down.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  Um, one was about whether people were clapping or crying during the event.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  I, I would say if people who have followed us for a long time know that we started at Engadget. First Apple event I ever went to, I went to with Ryan Block, and he just looked at me and said, "Don't clap. Everyone's gonna clap. We don't clap. We're journalists." I assume that conversation was over in 2008. I'm happy we're having it again 11 years from now. By the way, the media doesn't clap. Like, Apple employees are there and they clap.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  Um, maybe some people clap. And then the crying, they played like a heart wrenching ad for the Apple Watch, where it was like saving people's lives. And there were like babies who weren't dead. And like, yeah, some people got emo, but like, I don't know, that's the point of the ad. I did not cry, but I completely understand why that ad would make you a little misty because it,

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:07Nilay Patel?

  A, Apple is good at doing that. And B, like, that's, it's what it's designed to do.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Can I ask you a question about how emotions work? Cause I don't understand them.

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  So, we're, I'm okay, and I get it, that if something is like genuinely like touching, heart wrenching enough, that like, if you tear up, you're like, you can't be blamed for that. That's not like you being a bad journalist. That's just like real human, genuine emotion.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Great. Fully on board. If Apple had created something so incredibly amazing and good, that you had the opposite spontaneous reaction of you just couldn't not clap in the same way you can't not cry, would that be okay?

• 36:40Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. I don't, I don't think I've ever in my life felt I can't clap. So, hmm.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, nothing has ever struck me as now I'm clapping and I don't know why.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  Like, I think the clapping is, um, not okay, but if you let out a whoop, like, sometimes a whoop can like sneak out.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  Like a cry of, like a cry of pain, you know?

• 37:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:05Nilay Patel?

  It's audible. I mean, I think if you, if you go back-

• 37:07Speaker 03

  That was, I, I had a cry of pain during this event when I saw it was still a lightning on the phone instead of USB C.

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, if you go back and watch Apple event streams from years past, you can definitely hear me like laughing, like quite laughingly or something.

• 37:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, whatever, like, it's a show, you're an audience. I just think journalists clapping has been litigated for so long. The fact there was a Twitter fight about it, just like, it's exhausting.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  But anyway.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  The other Twitter fight was, um, should they have made a 5G iPhones? And the reasoning is, uh, people are hanging on to phones for three, four, five years. Uh, in theory, 5G in three, four, five years is going to be a real thing. And so, to future proof yourself because you're going to upgrade on a slower cadence, it would be nice to buy a 5G phone now.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  I do not agree with this.

• 37:57Nilay Patel?

  I absolutely do not agree with this.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  Uh, what's your reasoning?

• 38:00Nilay Patel?

  I, I, I understand that people are keeping their phones for longer and longer now. Great. But that also means like you want a reason to upgrade your phone when it's time. Like, one of the reasons people keep their phones for a long time is the year over year iterative upgrades are not worth it. There are no 5G networks now. The 5G chipsets are bad. So, okay, yep, maybe 12 months from now or 24 months from now. You're gonna live in a city and someone has finally won their, their foolish race to 5G. Fine. Okay, at that point, like, you're still not missing out. Like, you're still operating LTE world, you've still got your old phone. It's not like you got some magic new capability. And when you do spend the money to upgrade, you will receive a very meaningful return for that investment.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  Versus any additional money you spend now, getting nothing. And then hopefully one day, you know what I mean? Like, it just seems duh, it, it, you're not, you're paying for the, you're paying for hope and I don't think you should pay for hope.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  And think, think of how much of your day you spend away from the maximum throughput of LTE. And then also think about four hours of battery life. Kiss it goodbye.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe one of the reasons they made the phones heavier in Thinker this year is to get that bigger battery in there. That's a promise they're making now. They cannot go backwards. They can't shave for five hours off the max's battery next year when they add a 5G radio. So they're, right, and Apple thinks their 5G phones are like all but done. Right? They know what chips they're gonna use, they probably designed them themselves at this point.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Do they know what chips they're gonna use because they had those, the whole thing with Intel and they got the things with the stuff? And yeah. Maybe they don't know.

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, they bought, they bought Intel. They bought them, they know what chips they're gonna use, they just, those, they have to manage that team better than Intel did.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  I wouldn't be surprised if the next iPhone is not 5G.

• 39:52Nilay Patel?

  I think there's, there's a lot of rumors out there that they will put out one with 5G. And maybe they'll just do the thing, right?

• 39:58Speaker 04

  One fancy model. The 11XS Max.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  5G.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  5G.

• 40:04Nilay Patel?

  Pro, pro LTE. I mean, it, the names are out of control. But I, I, Ars Technica, John Brokken, had a great story at Ars Technica this week that like Verizon is lighting up NFL stadiums with 5G. It's like the big promotion they're doing. And like, they can't even get the whole stadium.

• 40:22Speaker 03

  Right, like the small print is like certain seating areas will have 5G and it's like,

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  You can't, you can't even get the whole stadium. Like, I understand stadiums are quite large, but they're smaller than cities.

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  The way, the way I would deploy 5G is just put some loose ethernet cables on the ground and, and then people carry adapters and they plug that into their phone and, you know, I feel like you could reach as many people for a lower cost.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Oh, that's, that's cyberpunk. We could like go back to the days of jacking in.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  Right. And, and like old phone booths just have like hundreds of ethernet dongles in them. Like if you, right now, if you're an executive at like a Netgear or a Linksys, which have probably merged at this point, I don't even know, but you should pitch like the Netgear 5G network. It's just you stringing ethernet cables and like old Netgear switches around. Like you, you got like a warehouse for those. Let's go nuts.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like seriously, anytime there's a hard line, there's like an ethernet you can use, you plug it in, right? Like if it's there and you're sitting down, you're like, oh, well, this will be faster. Like there should, like, we should go back to those days. Like internet cafes should have hard lines.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  The future of the iPhone is an ethernet dongle. I think is where we've arrived in this. Anyway, it does not have 5G. That's the, that was the other big Twitter fight that occurred.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, is this a mistake? I do not think anyone cares. I think right now it is tech demos. The 5G networks in the United States are basically millimeter wave networks. Chris Welch has tested a bunch of them. They're very fast if you are standing on the right street corner in Chicago. You, you need that mid-band 5G network to get online. That's going to take a long time.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. My whole thing is like the very best 5G chipset available today to ship in a phone today is going to be utter garbage in four, compared to what's going to ship in four years.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that's also, it is also true that Apple literally like signed its deal with Qualcomm, settled the lawsuit, spent billions on Intel's modem team. Like they're, they're in a little bit of a, a reset around its chips and we know that they're very particular about their chips. Speaking of chips and wireless chips, you want to talk about U1? Did you figure out what U1 is?

• 42:35Speaker 03

  So it's an ultra wideband chip. So it can kick out an ultra wideband signal. And it is able to see other ultra wideband chips that kick out ultra wideband signals and then they're able to locate each other in space. So you're able to be like, oh. That car is over there, or oh, that iPhone is over there and I can airdrop to it. Those are the two examples they gave us. The airdrop thing is coming. You can like point your phone at another phone and like they're they can airdrop more easily. They're like pop that person to the top of your airdrop list. Um, the other example they gave was like pointed at a car to unlock it. Uh, you could also see pointing it out like a tile.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, that that was a rumor going in like Apple's, Apple's doing a tile killer, right?

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like this isn't like radar. It's not like mapping a room. There might be AR applications for it someday. Who knows? Uh, but it's like a thing that they clearly aren't taking full advantage of right now that's in there that is able to detect other things that are like it.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  It is kinda like radar. So the technology would

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Kinda, yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  What makes it different than a typical wireless radio? Like you know how Wi-Fi has channels, right? Or think of a Cat five cable, right? Like you've got multiple wires in it, right? Like typical wireless i- i- is, is, is narrow through one of those channels at a time, right? In, in, uh, inside of a range. It's narrow in one channel typically, and then you multiplex them if you're trying to do more. Um, and it's a continuous stream. It's like a sine wave or whatever, where ultra wide band fills the whole spectrum all at once with a big pulse. But the pulse is very short. That's the, that's the technological difference. And that pulse design makes it good for this location stuff.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  And then the location stuff makes it potentially like really great in conjunction with other wireless technologies. Because if you know exactly where something is, it's easier to send a lot of data to it instead of blasting a lot of data in all directions.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can be formed to the thing.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  I'm very, I'm very excited about you. What I hope it's not just total, complete proprietary, total patented.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  Paul, my friend.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  I want nice things.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Paul, I don't, what are you doing, man?

• 44:47Speaker 04

  I take it back. I'm not optimistic anymore.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you're like, you know how everyone thought you were smiling, but really you're frowning.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  I got news for you, buddy.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  How about this? When you're taking a photo, theoretically, the UWB or the ultra wideband can find things inside a very small, like maybe with 10 centimeter precision or maybe even less. So you take a photo of your friends and all the ones that are holding iPhones, their faces aren't blurred, but then everybody else's faces are blurred.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  Make it like the blue, the blue bubble of photography.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  I see what you're saying.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  It's just a thought.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  It's just another way to be mean to your friends. Wait, so just to zoom out on U1 a little bit, we only noticed it because it was on like the spec sheet slide at the end of the presentation. They didn't say it on stage, they didn't mention it, they didn't say a word about it. They put up the specs and says, "Apple designed U1 chip." Then we like, out there, we're like looking at the phones or talking to people. They brought up the car door thing twice, right? You can imagine unlocking a car. It's like, what car has U1? So maybe, Paul, that's the first opening up of proprietary, right? Like cars will suddenly have similar chips and then you're gonna unlock your car with your phone. Maybe, who knows? But that's the example. I think the thing that happened

• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  was they were supposed to launch this like tag, which we've seen all of this rumors about. There's been some leaks, there's some like codes, like the whole thing, this like tile competitor. It was supposed to be on stage. The U1 is there to support it, right? Like, "I lost my keys, I'm in the room, the U1 chips can see each other, it's like turn to the right, right? Like magic, it's in that drawer, you're getting closer." Because that's what it can do. But they didn't ship it, so they just like put it on the screen and they're like, have this fanciful story about unlocking your car. And airdrop getting better.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  NXP, I don't know if you're familiar with NXP, they have put out a press release, they have created a concept VW car, and their concept key fob uses ultra wideband so that, you know, instead of like clicking a button, you can like make a little like, you know, key turning gesture or some other little, you know, gesture that only you know, and that unlocks your car.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  Wait, like a gesture to unlock?

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Like you're holding the key fob and you like go like in a circle and then that's what unlocks the car.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 47:06Nilay Patel?

  Can someone tell NXP's that buttons are a proven technology and gestures are often quite bad and worse than buttons?

• 47:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, like did they never use the Wii?

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  I would also like to issue a press release in response to NXP. What is journalism but rival press releases in response to small companies?

• 47:24Speaker 03

  In automotive alone, UWB will enable automated trailer hitch activation, in-cabin passenger detection, automated valet parking, hands-free parking, lot access, and drive-through payments, to name a few.

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  I mean, those are all things app. I think there is some sort of like weird 802 dot standard around this stuff. Anyway, it's there. I'm all but certain it's there to support this like tag competitor, tile competitor called tag. It didn't show up. So that's like two, right? Deep Fusion, I think, was supposed to be the big feature of the camera. They teased it some later. They're not going to tease a hardware product. They already did that with AirPower. We know how that went. I think they've learned that lesson. They're going to wait for it to be done and ready. But I think this chip is there to fundamentally support that thing and then whatever other range of uses.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Why do you think they didn't ship reverse wireless charging from the phone to like AirPods?

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  Because I don't think anybody cares.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, I don't know. Like, it doesn't occur to me that I want to do that ever.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  It's real cute in the Samsung app. And watching the Samsung app, it's like, yeah, but I'm prob- how often am I in a coffee shop and someone has the exact same phone as me? But that happens a little more often with iPhone.

• 48:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think it'd be cool, like, we were just traveling, it would be cool if I didn't have to carry an Apple Watch charger around. I could just like put my watch on the phone and charge it at night. That'd be neat. But like-

• 48:45Speaker 03

  I think that's why they didn't include it, because the Apple Watch uses slightly different charging than standard, you know, whatever they use for everything else. And so they, they couldn't figure out how to get that on the iPhone.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  You think?

• 48:57Speaker 03

  If I, like, it's a wacky conspiracy theory, but that's, that's my wacky conspiracy theory.

• 49:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the good news is they make all of those products. So one imagines they could probably make that change. Speaking of the watch, we should take a break, come back, talk about the watch, talk about the iPad. We're going to review them. It's going to happen. I will tell you right now, I think most people should buy an iPhone 11, but we're going to put that to the test. So stay tuned for that stuff. Okay, we're going to take a break. We're going to talk about the Apple Watch and the iPad.

• 49:27Speaker 05

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

• 49:57Speaker 06

  Purchase new carpet from The Home Depot and get it installed for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorator's Collection, Traffic Master, or Life Proof with Pet Proof technology. And see for yourself why nobody beats our prices. Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at The Home Depot. Offer valid October 15 through November 1, 2026. Exclusions apply. For licenses, see home depot dot com slash license numbers.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter Bone.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  Tell me.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Every week.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  Every week you complain about the always on display of the Apple. No. Tell me about this Apple Watch.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  So it's the Series 5. It has the S5 system on chip, which means whatever. What? It means that they got new stuff in it. But it's the same processor. So what's new is they have a display that is called LTPO. It's a custom version of an OLED display. If we want to get deeper into the technicals, you could make me open up oledinfo.com or something and figure it out. But that combined with some of the custom, like, processors they have allows them to have a variable refresh rate on the screen from 60 Hz all the way down to 1 Hz. And that, they say, is what allows them to have an always on screen on the Apple Watch so that you could just see the time without having to make a stupid motion with your

• 51:21Speaker 03

  wrist and you're not going to offend anybody by looking at the time. It's just sort of there. And I'm very happy about that. So they added that. They added a compass and they, I don't even, there was like one more thing.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  It's cell band. So the reason it's called the S5, the processor component of the S5 chip is the same. They added the compass and they added a wider array of cell bands so they can support automatic emergency calling for the cell models internationally in more countries.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  That's it, exactly. The prices, I think, basically stayed the same, which is great. They, you know, they've got like a bunch of different casings now. So there's the stainless steel, there's titanium in a couple of different finishes, there's ceramic, and then there's steel. And then there's, you know, the Hermes stuff and the Nike stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm very excited for it just because it has the always on screen. It's something I've wanted since the, literally the original one. It's something that Android, it's like the one thing Android wear a hat on in the Apple Watch. So it's great, that's great. I do wish that they had put sleep tracking in.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  Another thing that was heavily rumored that didn't show up.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  I'm using sleep tracking. I use Sleep++.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  That's a great name.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  It's the best, yeah. It automatically tracks on the Apple Watch. The visualizations are like, okay, but it does pipe into Apple's Health app so you can like get all the graphs you want of, you know, whatever. I've realized that the variability of like when I go to bed and when I wake up is like all over the map in a way I didn't know before. It like didn't occur to me. So that was fun. I wish that had been built in, but it's not. So the big question is, why not? Is it battery life? I don't know. They say that they still get 18 hours of battery life with the always on display. We'll see. I think that they under-promised on battery life on the Series 4. I think the Series 4 battery life is way better than they said it was. I get more than 18 hours

• 53:14Speaker 03

  on it all the time. I'll be curious to see if the Series 5 also over-delivers on the promised battery lifetime.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Apologies if this is a dumb question, but if you slept with the watch on, when would you charge the watch?

• 53:28Speaker 03

  So, this is, this is a fascinating question. I don't, it's a different every time.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  What is a photo?

• 53:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, so like, you charge it when you go to take a shower, but they usually, you know, I don't know about you, but like that's not long enough to like fully charge it. And so like, maybe you like, before you go to bed, you throw it on the charger while you like do your like, you know, brush your teeth routine, check the windows are open or closed or whatever they're supposed to be. A little bit there. So like, I'm actually charging my Apple Watch in little bips and bobs a couple of times a day now, instead of just like throw it on the thing overnight. Now eventually like I get out of sync, it's just gonna die. And so I just have to throw it on the charger overnight and I don't track my sleep that night. But I like, I like sleep tracking. I think it's neat.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  I hate wearing something on my wrist when I sleep. That's like the thing that's kept me away from it.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  I'm gonna convert you because having your wristwatch be your alarm and having the incredibly good haptics and taptics on the Apple Watch be the first thing is so much better than beeping alarm. You have a chance to wake up without annoying anybody in the room and it's less intrusive. The one thing that Withings Smartwatch does is it tracks your sleep cycle enough so that it can know what stage of sleep you're in and it will, you give it a window of like 45 minutes or 20 or whatever. And then when you're in that lighter stage of sleep, that's when it sets the alarm off on your wrist.

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  So you're, you feel less grumpy waking up, which is great.

• 54:51Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you a story about how I woke up this morning?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  Yes. This is a true, is a true story. So SFO is a disaster, as you know. The, the main runway is down for maintenance. So my flight was delayed. I landed at like 2:30 in the morning. I got home. I went to bed at 4:00 in the morning. So this, so I fall, like fall asleep, dead to the world. Like 8:00 AM, like I'm four hours into sleep, just like dead to the world. And Becky like taps me on the forehead and just goes, "Are you serious?" Because she had gotten locked out and it was like ringing in the doorbell and I was too dead asleep to hear it. So she had to go get the extra key and unlock the door.

• 55:34Nilay Patel?

  And I will tell you, any situation is better than me woken up with your wife going, "Are you serious?" Like in your face. So I hear what you're saying. Gentle tactics, whatever. Like it's a, it's a low floor for me right now.

• 55:52Nilay Patel?

  So they, they dropped the Series 4 out of the line. Um, they're keeping the series three at 199.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  Which is great.

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  They are, this is already, and there was another Twitter fight about whether the Apple Watch is a hit product. The Apple Watch is a hit product. It is the dominant smartwatch in the world. It is cruising towards being like the dominant watch in the world. At 199, like every kid who has an iPhone gets one of these for Christmas, right? And that's where they're at. I do think that always on display in the series five, that's one of those things where I find myself wondering about the expense of the, the extra finishes, right? Like I didn't, I bought just the stainless. No, I bought the, I think I'm wearing the aluminum one, right?

• 56:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:33Nilay Patel?

  Cause I was like, I'm gonna buy it. I don't like, I buy the series four, the screen's bigger. I like the apps, like whatever. It's like finally making sense to me. I've enjoyed wearing it this year. Now I want a series five. If I had spent the ex, cause of the always on display. That's it. That's the reason I want it. Um, if I had spent the extra money on a finish, I would feel extremely upset.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Oh, cause right.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  Right. If I, if I'd spent $800 on this thing, I'd be like, this is ridiculous. Like I just want this one feature. And now I'm like, I have to re-up.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  And the series four has an L T P O display.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  Yes, they, they both have L T P O displays.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  But it doesn't have the controller to, you know, uh, ratchet the herds up and down, so.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. So the, the, Apple has a patent on these L T P O displays, where these like lower power OLED displays. You can like fall down a deep hole of like OLEDinfo.com and like

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:21Nilay Patel?

  weird supply chain manufacturing reports and like what L T P O could mean. By the way, uh, my hat is off to the people who write breathless supply chain reports about extremely niche display technologies. Cause you read them and it's like, this could change everything. No, like four people know what you're talking about and I love you. Um, so you can fall down a hole and like read those and read the patents. It's like quite fun. But it's the controller that does this variable refresh rate. And so when you, when you put it down, it basically drops into what you would call a low power mode. The second hand on the analog faces like disappears. And the screen only updates once a second, one hertz a second. And then it's variable.

• 58:02Nilay Patel?

  So like sometimes it's only running at like 30 hertz. Right. It's like it ramp, it can ramp all the way up and all the way down. So they're doing a lot of power management just with the display.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  If it's running one update a second, why can't it refresh and show the second hand move every second? Is it, would there be screen tearing?

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  Because the second, because the second you look at it, it'll show you the second hand. It'll, it'll brighten up and show you the second hand.

• 58:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  So their thing is like, you're not looking at it.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  No, but they, they showed off like you're doing cool exercises and you're totally looking at it.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Right. So when you, when you're doing cool exercises and you're like looking at it, literally the, the, like the stopwatch goes from measuring hundredths of a second to one second increments. And then when you just like look at it, it'll add you, it'll show you the, the more granular time.

• 58:48Speaker 04

  When you say look at, you mean do the gesture, the look at gesture.

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  It's not really a gesture. You just like turn, like right now, right now, like it doesn't show me anything.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  The way, right. Okay. Yes. Right now it's a blank screen until you, you look at it and you kind of got to move a little bit. And Apple's demo, this, this very strong selling point, because I've always hated the off screen. It just, it just bothers me seeing other people wear this phone with the screen off or this watch with the screen off. But the way Apple sells it, it's like, think of all these times how inconvenient it has been to turn your wrist and, and look at your, to, to brighten up the screen or to turn on the screen. So what I'm saying is like, you still have to do that to get the screen to be, to be moving is what you're saying.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  Right. To get it, to get that refresh rate up above one hertz, you gotta move your wrist. And so they're doing a bunch of stuff, right? So if you have like a sweeping second hand, it's animating faster than one hertz. Right. So like the sweeping second hand disappears.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Or if you're actually actively interacting with it and scrolling it, it, the screen refreshes faster at like a normal screen rate. The, the thing that you're stuck on Paul, I think is like, there are certain things that the activities you do with the Apple watch where it won't let the screen dim. So like, if you're actively exercising, you can like set it to like, not go into the screen dim mode and just so you can like look at it whenever you want without having to do the gesture. Like that's possible.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think all this framing is hilarious because even the like, their presentation of the always on screen made it seem like a revolution when every watch in history until Apple put this watch out, showed you the time at all times.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  So like it's it's a classic sort of like they've reset expectations and now they're at but that to me is like a reason it'll end up great and I it's the first time I've thought I'm really happy it didn't buy the nicer finish like I really was gonna buy the black stainless steel and I didn't cuz I I wasn't confident that I would like like it.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Nilay Patel?

  And so whatever and put I'm happy and now I'm like okay I'm gonna buy the next one I know I like it it's worth the money but then the series six is gonna come out and like am I just gonna be mad?

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  And that's also that's like interesting to me.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  You know, we're gonna review them but our advice on the iPhones is like most people should get the iPhone 11 not the iPhone Pro, right? And I think with the watches, most people should get the aluminum some some people should even get the series three. Um, and it's very clear that like Apple makes some stuff and then they make some stuff for people that just wanna spend more money to have a nicer thing.

• 1:01:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Right? And like the watch is a very clear example of that is like would you like to throw away $300 to feel like you have a nicer thing? Here you go.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the the amount of like Apple's entire product line is like a PhD thesis and price elasticity.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like how much do you care about how how much things cost? And like for some Apple customers, the answer is I do not at all. Like whatever it is, just give me the best one, Apple, I shall have it. And then I think now as they've expanded that market and they've like sold so many phones and in competition around the world they've needed to lower those prices and get more competitive, but they definitely have that part of the product line where it's like I just want the best one Apple makes.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Speaking of PhD theses, uh, Neil, I wanna commend you for not getting into the debate of what constitutes Pro and sending me off spinning. Thank you for that.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I believe constitutes Pro. Um, brands are weird and they don't care about language.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  Apple in particular, like stop trying to make sense of Apple's product names. What does air mean? Nobody knows. What does Pro mean?

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, this is perfect. We're gonna segue to the iPad.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  Stop trying.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  What is the iPad line right now is at once the most sensible, understandable version of this line that has ever existed.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  And also the the wackiest.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  They just made it wackier.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  Like it, I kinda get it. Like you see, like you're far away from it. It's in the distance. And you're like, oh, I see the shape of this. And you get up close, you're like, a number of things here don't line up with the image that it formed in my head. So they, this was a big surprise. No one was expecting this at all.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  Up until like the day before. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:53Nilay Patel?

  Greg Joswiak gets on stage. He's like, there's a new iPad. So that we're replacing the 9.7 inch, uh, $329 iPad. Now it's got a 10.2 inch display. Uh, it's got an A10 Fusion chip in it. Uh, a veritable antique, but here it is. And it's got a smart keyboard connector.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  That's the iPad, everybody. Like, see, like, they just read-

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  Same price.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  Same price, $329. Which, in many ways, is like, kinda like the best deal in tech right now.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like-

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  It really is.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  That's a, that's a lot of computer for $300. They actually put up a slide. Have we done this? Have we identified what computer that is? They put up a slide showing a Windows PC. Like, this is the top selling Windows PC this year. And I think Jaws even was like, yeah, I know. Cause it's like ugly. But they showed it. And they're like, the iPad is so much more. Like, the iPad lets you do so much more. It has all these apps, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then iPadOS with the real browser and so on and so forth. It, this thing is made to, A, go after the education market. Has a keyboard connector. Can use a smart keyboard. And it's kinda there to like, challenge Chromebooks and cheap Windows laptops.

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't know if it's gonna be successful at that. The $329 one wasn't. Maybe. The keyboard connector might help. Uh, but also Apple's smart keyboard costs, uh, $160.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  Isn't there like a cheaper Logitech one, though?

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, but whatever. There, there's other things that hold the iPad back in education, but we shouldn't get into it. This is the best deal in tech. Like, if you, if you wanna, if you don't wanna give your relative an Apple Watch, you can give them this iPad.

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  That's so rude. Do not do that. Yo, no, no, you're, you're like, I'm related to you and enough to, I'm related to you enough. I'm related to you enough to demonstrate like a couple hundred bucks worth of care as a gift.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there's like a lot of those relationships. That, that's AirPods or the 199 watch.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  And even the 199 watch is like, you have to know that they don't know that there's a better watch. Like AirPods are like a home run. There's no better AirPods.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  Hmm, right.

• 1:04:57Nilay Patel?

  And even if you, they already have AirPods and you gave them some more AirPods, it's still like, yep, you got more of the good thing. The watch, you gotta be careful.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like I bought you the, I bought you the one from two years ago and the screen doesn't turn on all the time? Like, I love you that much, Ken. Right? Everybody will know that you're, you're poor. Right. You throw someone a $300 iPad. It's like, I don't really like you. I found this in the basement.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's, that's a, that's a rough gift. If you don't, if it's not exactly right.

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay, fair. Okay. So I, there's the iPad mini, then there's the iPad, iPad, iPad, iPad.

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, then it's, that's the 10 to lightning connector headphone jack.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Right. Apple pencil support also.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  Yes. First gen Apple pencil. The silly, the silly pencil.

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  Then there's a relatively recent iPad Air, which is basically a bunch of parts from like two year, year ago, year and a half ago, iPad Pro. Uh, with some other stuff and they put it together into like this middle zone iPad, lightning connector, keyboard connector.

• 1:06:02Nilay Patel?

  First gen pencil.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  First gen pencil. And then there's the like iPad Pro.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  So there's four, like mini iPad Air Pro.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, so there's, there's a clear line. We want to talk about what Pro means. Yeah, just a second, one second. The Air still exists? The Air still exists. I was not aware.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  They brought it back.

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  So the, the, the difference with the Air is it's got the, the better screen? Right. So the iPad mini.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  Has an A12 bionic and a True Tone display. The iPad Air has an A12 bionic, a True Tone display, lightning connector, headphone jack. Then in the middle is the iPad, 10.2 non-laminated, 329.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  A ten fusion chip, right? Like it's just like a worse product than the mini or the air.

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  But it's the cheap, big one. And I think the presence of the cheap, big one is we don't account for it enough when we like, we talk about technology. But like the, the 10R and the iPhone 11 also fit into the realm of like the cheaper, big one.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Half of all Windows laptops.

• 1:07:04Nilay Patel?

  Are the cheap big ones.

• 1:07:05Speaker 04

  The cheap big one.

• 1:07:06Nilay Patel?

  Would you like to look at a mediocre 15 inch display? That will be $400. Like that product is very popular. Like how many horrible 65 inch TVs are sold? That's the cheap, big one.

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Nilay Patel?

  And it's just like a real product that exists and Apple made a cheap, big iPad. Then there, but then there's the hard cut.

• 1:07:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? And then there's the iPad Pros, which are 7.99 and up, although they're getting discounted. They've got USB C, no headphone jack, like faster GPUs, basically. There's still A12s, right?

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  Yep. Smaller bezels.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  A12 Xs or whatever.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  And they're like the next generation. They've got the variable refresh rate display, like the whole thing. And that's up there for Pro, but they all run the same software and the same apps.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  Like they haven't yet. I don't think the iPad Pros have yet like developed the software ecosystem of Pro stuff. Right. It all works on everything. So that's like the, I think the next big split that's coming.

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  They're starting to develop that stuff, but you can still run that Pro stuff on the smaller ones. It's just that nobody who buys the cheaper ones tries to do it. So.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  Just like you can run Photoshop on a crappy old Mac or whatever.

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  I mean, I, these iPads are very powerful and like, like, like A10 chip, like a lot of the, the Pro apps that I like on the iPad are music apps. And there'll be something where it's like, you know, this one can do like 40 simultaneous sample playbacks. But then this with A12, you could do 80 or you know, stuff like that. There's stuff where you can do the same capabilities, but maybe you can do more of it at once or faster on, on the A12 iPad.

• 1:08:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  It's just, it, all these, the incompatible peripherals, I understand if you've got a parts bin iPad, right? But when you're coming out with new iPads with old stuff, like there's no, I, I guess I understand that it's cheaper for them to do it. But like the, the pencil incompatibility.

• 1:08:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, the pencil is like, well, so it's, there's very clearly a lightning ecosystem of iPads and a USB ecosystem of iPads.

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  So what you're saying is the iPhone Pro should have USB C.

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  I am saying that just because I want to see if Dieter can sigh so much he passes out.

• 1:09:14Nilay Patel?

  Yes, right, like if you just want to like, put it out there. Like, that is the thing they did with the iPad, but I don't think these words mean anything to Apple. I think in the end, everyone just thinks of them as iPads and iPhones. And they have a bunch of like, signifiers around those core names that do some thing. Just like, I don't think anybody thinks of the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro as being fundamentally distinct products.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  Right, well, so just, there's this bizarre world called personal computers. And I bought a keyboard for my personal computer. And then I got another computer, guess what, keyboard works with the new one. Can you believe it? It's wild.

• 1:09:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, if you had one of the three lightning accessories in the world. It might work with your new iPad. Anyway, it was a kind of a surprise announcement, you get why. There's a lot of rumors there's gonna be another event in October with the new 16 Schmack Pro. Maybe some rev'd iPad Pros. You understand why they wouldn't want to, like, toss out this iPad. Although, they could have just done it as a press release.

• 1:10:11Speaker 04

  They could have.

• 1:10:12Nilay Patel?

  Right, nothing in the world would have stopped them from doing this as a press release.

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  They need to give it at least a little bit of juice, a little bit of love to like, because they really do need to catch up to Chromebooks and education.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think if they had had, if they had had like, the tag for the iPhone, this iPad would have been cut. And relegated to a press release.

• 1:10:29Speaker 04

  Ooh, yeah.

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  You know what I mean, I think if they had shipped some of the other stuff that was rumored, that's in the pipeline.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely, this would have been, would have been a press release time.

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  I think if Apple put the 9.7 inch screen on, back in this, the slower processor back in this. And they bundled it with the pencil and the keyboard and sold it for $330, it'd be the best selling computer in the world.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, sure, here's what I think you should do. You should buy a bunch of these, put that bundle together, start an Amazon store, get to work.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  There's your startup idea.

• 1:11:03Speaker 04

  No, but the bundle is, is five, $500, 160 plus, I'm not going to do the math, but you know, it's a lot of money.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  I refuse to do this.

• 1:11:13Speaker 04

  It's $600. It's $600.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of math, just two things to talk about. They announced a price for Apple TV Plus. $4.99 a month. We got to see, we got to see the blind Aquaman trailer.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  The $4.99 a month thing isn't the most important part. It's $4.99 a month, but if you buy any Apple hardware at all, you get a year for free.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  Which means like, a bunch of people are just going to get Apple TV for free, um, which is going to really juice their numbers. And so, you know, when we're, there's like industry stories in eight months of Apple TV versus Disney Plus versus Quibi versus Hulu versus Netflix versus HBO Max.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  AT&T TV Plus.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Apple like basically is like they're on the, on the cost of their hardware margins is going to be like up in the upper echelons of that conversation, just by default, because a ton of people are just going to have it for free.

• 1:12:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, they've got, what, 10 shows? Like, it, it's weird that like a thing you get with an iPhone now is like a Jennifer Aniston show. Like, I mean, that's like the reality of it.

• 1:12:18Speaker 04

  This, this works with, with music.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't work with music. I mean, like, you get three months of Apple Music as a subscription, sure, but like, Apple doesn't make the music.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Right. That's what I'm saying. That's why it works better to, to give this for free with music, because i- if someone becomes accustomed to Apple Music, like, they're not going to stop like, you know, there's not just one season of your favorite band and it's only on Apple Music, you know? But this, this is implying that, yeah, they have these shows that are somehow compelling enough that after a year, you'll want to start paying $5 a month to keep watching.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  I want to actually, I want to actually press you on the, there's not a one season of your band and then they're done, because I, I've listened to Arcade Fire, okay?

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  What I meant to say is that when you say a music subscription service, you mean music. You don't mean Spotify's proprietary lineup of bands you can hear nowhere else.

• 1:13:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, Spotify now has a proprietary lineup of podcasts you can hear nowhere else.

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  Well, I don't listen to those.

• 1:13:20Nilay Patel?

  It's all happening. I encourage you to talk to Ashley. Like, that's her beat. She's on it. She's on the case. Like, it's that thing where you own the content. Make it. Look, I think it's gonna get them in the conversation. I think the trailer we saw of Sea, which is Jason Momoa in a world where everyone's blind hundreds of years in the future, looked so nonsensical and dumb that like, I don't even believe that they made it, right? But is it exciting that like, you get some like, free, high production value show to watch? Like, sure. Is that gonna make you buy another iPhone a year from now if you decide the ecosystem isn't worth it to you anymore? Like, I think the thing they're doing is they're just making the ecosystem more and more like valuable. So you have to give up more and more things to switch. That's a great way to spend money.

• 1:14:06Nilay Patel?

  Is Apple TV Plus going to become a profit center for this company over time? I have no idea. Because they have to, they're gonna have to, if The Morning Show is successful, they gotta get Jennifer Aniston to come back for season two. That's not an asset with like, lots of value unless they make a bunch of seasons and turn into Friends. That's a lot of money. And then what? You're just not gonna ever, that part to me is confusing in a way that the games, for example, are way less confusing to me. So the game service is also announced, Apple Arcade. $4.99 a month. You get a bunch of games that have no scammy free-to-play ads, no in-app purchases. They're just like beautiful little jewels of games, and then more of them will appear over time. And that to me is like, incredible. Like, that's, it's the best thing that they've ever done with the App Store.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  It's like, there's a place here where there's cool games that we've vetted, we've selected, they're high quality. There's no scams or bullshit in them. Just like, enjoy. Like, absolutely worth $5 a month to me.

• 1:15:03Speaker 03

  And they've got a bunch of like really interesting like indie games that a lot of people have actually been waiting for. I'm way more excited about Arcade than I am about Apple TV+ I just am. Because I'm looking for my next iPhone game and now I like I don't have to like look, I'll just do that. I think it's going to create a lot of winners and losers. I still don't know how developers get paid in this system. That's going to be a very fascinating thing. Will the second year of Apple Arcade have as good a games? How much is Apple subsidizing these games? How much, what cut of that five bucks a month the developers get? Is it going to be enough? Is it actually going to fun stuff? Like the whole economics of games on the iPhone are very, very different and also very, very broken, right? They're broken.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  It's bad. The incentives are bad. So these incentives theoretically are good, but they might not be. They're just definitely better than what we have right now.

• 1:15:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think it's at least definitely going to lead to better consumer experiences.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:16:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. There's going to be less, just anything that's less free to play games and it's not, man, I hope this game is worth 15 to 30 dollars, which is sort of the two buckets you have now. Anything that like fills in that middle zone of like, this is a high-quality complete object, right? And I'm just like, play it and that'll be fun. I'm excited about. I think it's the smartest thing they've done.

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. It is ironic though, because back when the App Store first launched, it was a revolution because people were tired of having to beg mobile carriers to include their games on the phone because that was the only way to make money. Now they can make money without having to beg carriers to let them in the door.

• 1:16:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, that, that, what really, I don't know why it doesn't rub me the wrong way with the television stuff, but with video games, I just don't like the idea of an indie studio, like that they're, I mean, happy for all of the indie studios that won the lottery and hopefully Apple's paying them a lot. If Apple's not paying them a lot, I hate this a lot. But, but the idea that you now you're designing your company around hoping that Apple thinks that you match their vision for, for games, you know, there's that layer of indirection. Your customer becomes Apple, not game, people who play video games, if that makes sense.

• 1:17:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but if you want those people, you can just make an App Store game.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  Sure, sure, absolutely.

• 1:17:23Nilay Patel?

  Or you can make a, I don't know, I mean, like, you have to get a license from Nintendo to make a Switch game.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it doesn't hurt me in any ways, it doesn't excite me.

• 1:17:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that production company model is like, also real, like, if you want to make TV shows, your customers, Netflix and ABC and whatever, you know what I mean, like, that's been around for a while. I, I don't know, there's a part of me that's like, this is, this is a thing that will make the iPhone ecosystem radically different than the Google ecosystem, at least until Google does the same thing, which is something-

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  There's, there's a rumor that Google's doing the same thing.

• 1:17:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, alright, let's take a break, we're way over, I clapped, by the way, I couldn't help it. There it is, that's the time when I clap without helping it. Yeah, so excited about Paul's segment, we're gonna take a break, we'll be right back.

• 1:18:04Speaker 07

  Fall savings are happening now at The Home Depot. Save up to $500 on select appliances. Plus, enjoy free delivery when you spend $998 or more. From prepping to cooking to cleaning up, Frigidaire has you covered. The custom Flex Temp drawer switches from fridge to freezer. With more than 15 cooking modes, including stone baked pizza mode, you can enjoy restaurant quality pizza in as little as two minutes. Then clean up with the Frigidaire Dishwasher, featuring the industry's fastest normal wash cycle. Shop fall savings now at The Home Depot. Off the ballot through October 21st, US only, see store online for details.

• 1:18:37Speaker 08

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27, no purchase necessary, open to US residents 21+ Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods, see official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 1:19:06Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:08Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  With shocking consistency.

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  You do a thing, what's that thing called?

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  It's called, "Here's the place where we do the crimes, signed, your friend, a teen."

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  Isn't this the same as, this is actually consistent to last week?

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, that's the thing, the segment doesn't just have the same name, it's also part of a shared universe about teens who do crimes.

• 1:19:35Nilay Patel?

  All right. I got it. I, I, you know, it's funny how after several seasons, it's finally the shared universe has been revealed.

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  It's all, all the threads coming together. So Google's doing this thing with AR core. So, you know, like Apple makes AR kit, Google makes AR core. These are like technologies to scan your environment, find like little points of visual interest and do like tracking with it, right? So you can do AR experiences like Pokemon Go. Google is adding like a, a, a save button to AR core so that you save, let's say you put your Ikea lamp in the middle of a park, right? And you're tracking it and then you click save. That is, it can be a persistent cloud anchor that other people feel like

• 1:20:25Speaker 04

  maybe your friends or whatever. Um, like, you know, Minecraft is doing something like this with, um, uh, using, Microsoft has similar technology for like these cloud type anchors. So that there's going to be shared Minecraft experiences where I built the thing and my friends can see it. And not just they can see it, but they can see it in the same place where I, I built it in AR. All that to say, what if the teams put, put little messages up and say, here's the place where we do crimes and then they share it with each other somehow. I don't know. It's not fully fleshed out, but I'm excited about, uh, uh, cloud anchors. Cause I, I just, it's, yeah.

• 1:21:05Nilay Patel?

  So I saw Microsoft demo a bunch of cloud anchor stuff to me a while back. I will say they were mostly interested in like architects, land surveyors, not so much into teams doing petty crimes. But I liked it sort of like the Google riff on it is like, what if we open this up to young criminals of all, of all stripes?

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  Um, Google is opening this up to developers. There's like a, there's this Mark AR app where you, you do, you do, um, pretend graffiti.

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  But but see, obviously, the thing is, is that you can't make this just like the world is one big MMO, right, of AR stuff, because every it would just be dicks, like, everybody be drawing dicks all the time, and you'd be inundated. So they there have to be so like that Minecraft Earth, you can create make these things. This is the Microsoft version of this technology. You can make things and share them with your friends. And but I don't think I'm hoping someday, there is some sort of we figure out we solve the dick problem, and we somehow can have a shared world, because I do want some way of just discovering weird

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  stuff in the world that someone has built, you know, like, maybe they they made a sculpture out of IKEA furniture, you know, in AR, and they've saved it into like a park I visit. And I'm at the park. And so I just see, hey, there's something in this park. You want to look at it? And I say, yes. And then I can see it through my phone. I think that's pretty cool. Obviously, when we get AR glasses, that's going to be even I that seems like what the world will be like someday, if we could solve the the dick problem.

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Step one, fix YouTube comments. Step two, anybody can put any virtual object anywhere, and we all see it. You know, yeah.

• 1:22:53Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say the can you imagine the if like the ecosystem lock in problem of like, the world is entirely different if you have an Apple phone?

• 1:23:00Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:00Nilay Patel?

  Versus an Android phone, like, you see incompatible realities.

• 1:23:04Speaker 04

  No, that's exactly what's gonna happen.

• 1:23:07Nilay Patel?

  It's that's 100% what's gonna happen. All right, Dieter, walk us through these Pixel 4 leaks. Let's end like, the iPhones here, you know, we're gonna do reviews, like, tech season has started. But they're obviously in even as we talk about the camera, as much as we talked about the camera, they're up against not only like the Pixel 3 and the Note 10 or whatever, but sort of like, promise of the Pixel 4, right? Because we expect that to lead the way for Android for the next minute.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  There are just so many.

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  It's been reviewed on camera. We have seen the orange color. We've seen a walkthrough of how the face unlock works. There's claims that it's going to have 8x zoom and improved night sight. Just there's even like camera samples and like, these are like, are rough and ready enough where like, we can't like, really make judgments off this stuff, but like, it's every day. It's every day, y'all. There is one to three new Pixel 4 leaks and I don't know, you want me to walk through? It's like, it's the whole phone is out there.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Like, you know?

• 1:24:14Speaker 04

  Is Google bad at securing things or is Google thirsty for coverage?

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  I think it is 90% Google's bad at securing things and 10% they're thirsty and they're like, they're not super sad that all these leaks are happening right around the time the iPhone got announced.

• 1:24:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of interest in the Pixel 4. I do think also Google is just notoriously leaky.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Nilay Patel?

  Right, they're like.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  But like, these leaks are, maybe it was the same last year. I mean, the things like literally like got stolen from a truck, fell off a truck last year. Actually, oh, look at that, one of the YouTube videos got taken down. Look at that.

• 1:24:49Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because, you know, Google owns, owns that platform.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, look at that.

• 1:24:53Nilay Patel?

  It's like, that's just a call they can make at any time.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  There's apparently a new voice recording app, which is exciting. I like the way the orange one looks. The, the way that they're handling the, the finish with the glass and the bezels and all that stuff across the different colors seems really interesting. But the only thing that really matters is what are they going to do in the software that we haven't seen yet? We've already seen the Face ID. We've also seen the theming. The theming actually looks kind of interesting because it looks like it's not as like, do whatever you want and get kids who just discovered Tron and Manga building themes. You actually get like some like nice subtle, you know, themes that feel like they fit with the phone. But like, what else is there? Like, what is the quality of the photos? What are they actually doing in the photos?

• 1:25:36Speaker 04

  Battery life?

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  How's the battery life? Yeah, the battery life, especially in the small one will matter. Yeah, what else is there to, what else, like, what other mysteries are there left for the Pixel 4? There just aren't.

• 1:25:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, does the solo gesture stuff actually work?

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, that's true.

• 1:25:50Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, we, I think we know what the phone is. We have no idea whether it's any good. It's funny, they should just release it now and let us review it.

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying, they shouldn't have an announcement event. They should just like, hand it out to reviewers and be done.

• 1:26:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, if they get every carrier, which is I think what we're expecting this time around, they need to like build some hype. But it's interesting that, you know, it's, the iPhone's gonna hit, people are gonna get them. I personally am wondering if there are in this world iOS to Android switchers, or people are just happy in that ecosystem, particularly because of iMessage lock-in, but they're gonna go up against, like, Apple's putting out a phone into a world where the Pixel 4 all but exists. Yeah. Right? You're already measuring it against this phone that you know is coming, that has set the tone for cameras for so long. I think that's, that's super interesting, but we have to actually get it and see it. I will say, I'll put this out there. I understand it has been technically surpassed. There has never been a phone camera as good as the Pixel 2.

• 1:26:45Nilay Patel?

  And what I mean by that is the Pixel 2 was like a step change for cameras. It was so much better than everything in its class, than everything that had come before it, and we've just been iterating on that pattern. I thought the Pixel 3 was a little disappointing in that regard, like, it went kinda sideways, it didn't go forward. I hope the Pixel 4 can like push it again. I'm like looking for, and they're adding lenses and stuff to the back, we'll see. But that's what I'm looking for from the Pixel 4. Okay. I think that is all of the phone news from this week. That's enough. Is that, have we, have we accomplished it all? Did you know Motorola like has a phone coming? Oh my god. Nobody knows Motorola still exists. Alright, some of the phones are gonna start folding soon. We gotta get these, you gotta like, milk it from the candy bars as long as we can.

• 1:27:29Nilay Patel?

  And then they're gonna add Gs. Next year, 15 cameras, 34 Gs. Folded in half. Good. Here you go. Finally. Only runs on, only runs on Apple's NBNL. Alright, that's it, that's the Vergecast for this week. A no long one, thank you for sticking with us. It is tech season, it's here. Apple had its stuff. There's gonna be a Surface event, they promised not only hardware but experiences. You will have experiences with Surface devices, that, that's out in the world. Presumably, Google will do something for a Pixel. They'll just do low flybys of New York City, dropping them out of a plane so everyone can just have them. Amazon just announced they're doing a thing on the 25th. Amazon has an event, we're in it. It's here, the most exciting part of the year if you're into gadgets, it's hardware season, so get ready for a lot of very long Vergecasts that are coming at you.

• 1:28:14Nilay Patel?

  We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul.

• 1:28:37Speaker 07

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

• 1:29:07Speaker 09

  Finding a doctor is hard enough. Finding the right doctor, even harder. Someone who takes your insurance, has an available appointment when you need one, and feels like someone you can actually open up to. That's where Zocdoc comes in. Download the Zocdoc app to search and compare doctors by specialty, insurance, and availability. Read real patient reviews, find the right fit for you, and book instantly. Because getting seen by the right doctor matters. Zocdoc. Ready to be seen? Download the Zocdoc app today.