Apple announces iPhone 12, MagSafe charger, HomePod mini

Stories from this week: Apple’s iPhone 12 event: the 7 biggest announcements Apple announces iPhone 12 with OLED screen and 5G speeds iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max announced with larger displays, updated design, and 5G Apple announces iPhone 12 mini, the ‘smallest and lightest 5G phone in the world’ Apple’s new iPhone 12 line-up comes with a ceramic-hardened display Apple’s new iPhones won’t ship with earbuds or wall chargers Apple cuts EarPods and iPhone charger prices by $10 after it stops bundling them Apple’s iPhone 12 can wirelessly charge twice as fast, but only with a MagSafe charger Apple’s revived MagSafe charging standard opens the door for a portless iPhone The iPhone 12 Pro Max could be Apple’s biggest camera jump in years Breaking down Apple’s three new iPhone 12 camera systems Here’s how you’ll know when you’re on Verizon’s fast or slow 5G on an iPhone 12 The iPhone 12’s mysterious groove is a 5G mmWave antenna window — and it’s exclusive to the US Apple’s iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini cost $30 extra for anyone who’s not an AT&T or Verizon customer Apple announces smaller HomePod mini for $99 Apple’s HomePod will soon support Dolby Atmos with the Apple TV 4K Beats announces $50 Beats Flex earbuds with USB-C and 12-hour battery life 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, Dan Seifert joins me and Dieter to talk about Apple's new iPhones, all four of them, the new HomePod. And I promise you, we talk a lot about DOL Vision cameras. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, a flagship podcast with extended dynamic range. It's like we're a trade pub, you know, like XDR Weekly.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  You come out.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  More, more nits than you could possibly imagine.

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  That was like a Ctrl-Walt-Delete intro.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Although, if we're going to complain, we'd be, we'd be picking it, wouldn't we?

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  Oh, stop it. Okay. I'm Neelai Patel. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  I'm also here.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Dan Seifert is here.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  I am here as well. Hello.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  So iPhone, it was iPhone week. It happened to us. It occurred. Finally. Yeah, it took, it took a little bit longer than usual because of COVID. So that's where I'm going to start because that's where I start every week. 31 weeks since the president said there would be a national testing plan with a website built by four to five million Google engineers, I believe it was. Go to website, the website is small, it's related to Verily, and there's no national testing plan. And this is true, this is a true thing that happened this week. Nancy Pelosi's, I believe it was her press secretary, chief of staff for press secretary tweeted, "Congress is working with the president. The big sticking point is the White House does not understand the need for a comprehensive national testing plan." Okay, I just remember there was supposed to be a website. There was a flow chart and

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  everything. Anyway, it's been 31 weeks since that happened. Just going to keep counting. Just some other quick COVID updates. Again, remains the biggest story in the world. This week mostly kind of like a platform content moderation zone, but Johnson and Johnson paused COVID-19 vaccine trials due to unexpected illnesses. We're tracking that very closely. Mary Beth Griggs is writing a newsletter called antivirus every week. You can just check in on the status of it. So you don't have to like be flooded with it. I find it very useful. And then what I was saying about content moderation, Facebook announced a ban on anti-vaccination ads because that will be a problem when this vaccine hits in whatever form it hits. And YouTube said it will remove videos with COVID-19 vaccine

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  misinformation. So platforms are being a little preemptive here in terms of how they're moderating vaccine-related content because it feels like we're going to get closer to this vaccine over time and actually getting people to comply and take it is important once it is actually here. I mentioned the platform moderation stuff because as we are recording right now, there is a massive platform content moderation controversy unfolding in the United States of America, which we are basically not going to talk about at all. I just want to comment on it and say we know it's here. Our policy desk, Addie McKenna, Russell, all covering it furiously, but Twitter and Facebook preemptively took down or are limiting the reach of news reports about Hunter Biden. It's a whole thing. Addie

• 4:03Nilay Patel?

  wrote a great piece about it, just 15 things we know and takeaways from the situation. Go read that. And right as we sat down to start recording, Chairman of the FCC Ajit Pai, he tweeted that the FCC has decided has the authority to interpret Section 230, which is wild because. He doesn't, and we don't know why he thinks he does, but that's what he announced.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  I think that power is vested into the FCC by the power of a giant Reese's coffee cup.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  It's like a scepter, right? If you hold it, then you're in charge of 230.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, that's going on. It's literally happening as we're recording, so I don't have a lot to say about it. Next week, we'll be busy. All these weeks are going to be busy. A major theme of the next few weeks in the lead up of the election is pressure placed on platforms from both sides to moderate in different ways into the election and then the aftermath of the election, which promises to be chaotic. So Addy, McKenna, Russell, all doing a great job. Read that Addy post, 15 things to know about the Hunter Biden scandal. It just lays it out really well. I thought it was really well done. And then McKenna is tracking this FCC 230 thing very closely. So check out a site on that. We need to mention it. It's

• 5:14Nilay Patel?

  important. It is huge breaking news as we were recording, but because it's unformed, I just don't have a lot to say about it right at the second. And by the time you hear about it tomorrow, everything will have changed. Anyway, so that's the nature of 2020. Okay. All that said, there's an iPhone.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  There's four, four of them.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, this was a weird event. Verizon got a branded content segment. At one point, can I just say my favorite moment from this whole event? Like, they've all been infomercials. We've talked about it this whole time. The moment when Tim Cook was standing in this empty Steve Jobs theater and the screen behind him had a giant 5G logo, just like broadcasting to no one. That's like, yeah, that's, it's, this is a visual metaphor for the entire 5G situation.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Someone tweeted a supercut of every time somebody said 5G during the event, and it is, you will break your brain.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. All right. Tell us about the phones.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Well, you want to, so the phones were second after the HomePod Mini, so we'll come back to that later, but they introduced that. We get to the phones. There are four. There are two Pros, the Pro and the Pro Max iPhone 12. And then there's a regular iPhone 12, and then there's the iPhone 12 Mini. And much to my chagrin, I have a chagrin, and much to it, 5G was the headline feature.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  They all have 5G. They really want you to know that they have 5G. They care deeply about the importance of 5G and it's going to revolutionize everything. And to prove that to you, Verizon is going to come on and get its own special segment. They're going to light up their nationwide sub six network. So it's not just millimeter wave anymore. And then we'll talk about the phones now, which have you heard? Did you know that they have 5G?

• 6:59Nilay Patel?

  We got all 5Gs.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  So we need to talk about the phones, but you just said some like code words there. Sub six millimeter wave. There's no way to talk about the phones and 5G without unpacking that all. Can you just do a little bit on that?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  So sub six is it's the spectrum that gets used to deliver the wireless signal to you. And the sub six is the is very close to what you're used to with LTE and 3G and whatever. And it travels far, penetrates buildings and isn't like insanely fast, but it can be faster. Then there's millimeter wave, which is the thing that up to now Verizon has been using as its 5G. And it is the it's the just it's just a Virg cast. We're just friends here. Don't tell anybody. It is the biggest scam in the history of phones. You it only works on like certain street corners. If you go look at Verizon's 5G map, you could just like you just like see dark lines on streets in a few major cities. And that's that was their 5G network. And you had to go stand on that street, look and get a line

• 8:03Speaker 03

  of sight with the tower. And then you would get insane wicked fast 5G speeds. So US has especially with Verizon, a lot of they've been putting a lot more effort into millimeter wave than everybody else. Everybody else is like, oh, yeah, phones. They should use, you know, spectrum and radios that are optimized for phone things. And so everybody else just made good 5G networks. We are somewhere in the middle. We're waiting to reallocate spectrum, etc. The reason all this matters is Verizon had only had those millimeter wave. They've been waiting for them to launch their nationwide regular 5G network that actually is useful for phones. And they decided to take the opportunity of the launch of the iPhone 12s to do

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Which meant that both Tim Cook and Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon, both said 5G is real now, like implying that it didn't matter before when, you know, Android phones has it. Now that the iPhone has it, now it matters, which is

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Or it didn't matter before when T-Mobile had a gigantic, well comparatively gigantic Sub65 5G network.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Rockin'. They both have their own reasons for wanting to say it wasn't real until now. They also both have reasons for wanting to say it is real now because they want to sell phones. And

• 9:22Speaker 03

  it's, it's okay. Like you will sometimes get slower speeds than 5G than you will on 4G. You will have a hard time finding a millimeter wave signal no matter what network you're on. And it's just not going to be life changing. All of the hypey promises from the 5G hype industrial complex are not coming true right now. They may be true in two years. And so if you need to buy a new phone and you think you're going to have your phone for more than a couple of years, it makes sense to maybe get a 5G phone, but you shouldn't buy it just because it has 5G.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  The thing is, even if they become true in two years, and like, I don't think Apple nailed this either. Nobody has really given the use case for having one gigabit, two gigabit speeds on your phone, other than download movies fast and download big games fast. Like, so like, even if it comes true in two years and millimeter wave is somehow magically everywhere, what do you do with it?

• 10:15Speaker 03

  You download games fast and you download movies fast.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't want to discount, like faster is always a compelling upgrade, right? But faster, you gotta get a new phone plan, which may or may not be more expensive. Faster, you gotta get a new phone. Faster, you're going to do all those things and still not even get it. It's a little, it's a tougher sell. And I do think the 5G hype industrial complex, I mean, I think Greg Josweak, he's, you know, he's the new SVP of, of marketing at Apple. Your place, Phil Schiller, he's a good dude. Like, I like talking to him a lot, but he had this moment in the keynote where he was like, here's what 5G can do. And he showed like a doctor looking at some medical imaging on a street corner. And he was like, not being able to download that file

• 10:59Nilay Patel?

  fast enough is the difference between life or death. And I'm like, I think the stakes are just not that high. Like, if, if that's the situation you're in with your medical professionals, like, maybe you have a different set of problems.

• 11:13Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, there's no other radiologist available in the world to look at your imaging file. Like, and that has just been, and I don't mean to put that on Apple or Jaws or anybody, like, that has just been how the carriers have talked about 5G the whole time, right? It's gonna enable telemedicine and remote learning in rural areas and all, like, it will, the joke I keep making is it will feed and clothe your family, and it is just faster wireless networking, which is great. But it, it would be like if the Wi-Fi 6 people were like, you gotta, you gotta get this Wi-Fi 6, like, can you, you can't wait to download stuff faster. And like, they can't support it because everyone already, anyway, the point of all this is, it was the highlight feature of the iPhone

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  event. The 5G is finally real now is deeply funny for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that 5G in the rest of the world is more widespread and faster than 5G in the United States right now.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  So we were like, on our meeting after the event, talking about all the stuff we're gonna cover, and Tom Warren was like, you guys keep complaining 5G in the UK is great. I was like, crap. Like, that's true. And so, you know, the question I have is, most people are gonna buy this phone, they're just gonna get it, they're gonna be inundated with 5G.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  Hype, and then they're gonna pull it out of the box and it's gonna be 5G.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  The thing is, like, even if it's great, though, like, I mean, we talked about millimeter wave, other parts of the world are not using millimeter wave, but like, they're also not, like, 5G on like, sub 6 or other frequencies is like, Dieter said, slightly faster, but we're not, we're not talking about like, 2, 3, 4 times faster, we're talking like, 20% faster. Like, that's not like, a dramatic increase, that's, is that worth the cost of the phone? And we'll talk about the cost, I'm sure, about the iPhone 12 is significantly more expensive than the iPhone 11. Is it worth that cost for 25 megabits faster download speeds?

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  For 25, I would take it for 25 megabits. Uh, let's talk about the phones. We, we should come back to 5G. I didn't mean to fall down the rabbit hole quite so fast.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Well, we needed to start there because that's where Apple started. That was like the central conceit of the, of what they're pitching here. Right?

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But so, okay. So there's four phones.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Yep. Okay. So again, 12, 12 mini, 12 pro, 12 pro max. The interesting thing though, is you would think, okay, so the 12 and the 12 mini are the same. One is big, one is small. The 12 is obviously the successor to the iPhone 11 and then the pro and pro max are the same. One is, you know, kind of big and one is very big. Uh, but actually the split between them gets way more complicated because the pro max has different camera hardware. It has a telephoto lens. So does the pro, but it also has a larger sensor. So you like, you really start getting in these weird divisions between the capabilities of these different phones. Um, the main one, and the one that I suspect most people will buy, and that I think it's probably, once we get through the review is going to be the answer for most people,

• 14:11Speaker 03

  is the standard iPhone 12. And the big changes there, um, there's 5G, there's now a new design. They all have and share the new design with flat rails that are on the side, either aluminum or steel, depending on the model. It looks, people are saying it's like designed to look like the iPad pro. It's a little bit reminiscent of the iPhone four, but it's just, they're very, very flat. Uh, not exactly sharp edges, but it just, it looks very modern to me. And then you also on the iPhone 12, switch over from an LCD panel to a OLED panel. Um, and you, of course you use face ID to unlock the phone. There's no fingerprint sensor.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Um, the cameras have an upgrade on the 12, but it, the main, main thing is Apple's saying that's moved the ball forward on computational photography. And they also have a slightly better aperture on the main sensor. So it should be slightly better in low light.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Dan, do you want to do your aperture math? You've done it. You've done it so loudly in every meeting we've had so far.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  So, ready for some specs. So, last year's iPhone 11, it had an F 1.8 lens. This year on the iPhone 12, it's an F 1.6 lens. It is about, I think Apple quotes, 27% more light. When you're talking about that in terms of like pictures that you take, that is one-third of one-stop brighter. So that means that if you had to use 1/60th of a second shutter speed with the iPhone 11, you can now use 1/80th of a second with the iPhone 12. It's a pretty marginal, not very significant difference in terms of brightness. It may make a difference in some edge cases, and I think Apple really loves to show off the edge cases that it does make a difference in.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  But in everyday use, you're really unlikely to see a difference between the iPhone 11 and the iPhone 12 in terms of brightness or image quality due to the lens. Now, the processing might be different, and if the processing is different, that can change your story significantly. That's what we know from phone cameras is processing matters all. But with the lenses, it looks like a lot on paper. In real life, it's not that much.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Oh, I should mention that there's also, there's two lenses. It's a regular and an ultra-wide on the base models, the 12 and the 12 mini.

• 16:24Nilay Patel?

  And they did say with the ultra-wide in particular, they've reduced the distortion at the edges, which is great. Dan, you mentioned edge cases on the camera. All the photos they showed us are extreme edge cases.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  So, night mode on the front camera in a bar only lit by neon.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Oh, so that's, they went to your house?

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. They're in my basement. Not just like you're in a brightly lit desert, but you're inside of a tent.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:51Nilay Patel?

  Right, and like, there's like crazy, like a major edge case. You're using portrait mode at night. Like, they did not, if you just look at the photos they're showing off, they're not showing you took a photo outside of your kid, right? And I-

• 17:04Speaker 03

  My belief here is that the improvements on the cameras, the Smart HDR 3, which is what they have now, in sort of normal situations, they're very minor, but their ability to capture and create photos in a wider range of situations has been increased. That's just, that's what I got from the photos they were showing us, is that these are all, these are all edge cases or not, you're just at your house taking a photo like?

• 17:28Speaker 04

  At the end of the day, I think the, the leap from the iPhone XS to the iPhone 11 was much more significant than what we're seeing from the iPhone 11 to the iPhone 12 in terms of camera. Now, that may be different with the 12 Max and its, its new camera system. Maybe that's giving that big leap, but in terms of the iPhone 12 and the 12 Pro that have essentially very similar camera systems to last year, we're not seeing the same kind of generational leap.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  So the, the story of smartphone cameras for 2020 is Samsung comes out and says, all right, we are going to be the ones to move it forward this time. We're not going to let Google do it. We're not going to wait for Apple. We're going to be the ones. We're doing it with 108 megapixel sensor that does pixel binning. And we're like, cool, but it can't focus. So they had to fix out the laser later. Google and the Pixel, you know, we're actually not going to get into the Pixel reviews. We've got a whole other episode that's coming out on that Tuesday with that. So stay tuned for that. But it made pretty minor updates to its cameras. So the big question for the iPhone is, is this more tweaking? Or does their new computational photography move to the state of the art significantly forward? Or is it basically in the same way that Samsung and Google did? Is it like tweaks

• 18:37Speaker 03

  around the edges? Is it, you know, year over year improvements that feel iterative instead of like, oh, man, this is a reason to go get this phone?

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, we're going to have to see it, right? Like, what, what did we learn from the XS? It took pretty medium pictures. It didn't make a dent, right? Like, whatever. It's like, this is this year's iPhone and it takes worse pictures than the Pixel. Maybe one person, and God bless you, you're probably a Vergecast listener, decided to switch to a Pixel because of it, right? Like, I think it was James Baron. I think it was our former creative director, James Baron. I think that's the person. And so, you know, like, we have to see the Pro Max with this bigger sensor. We have to see what it's capable of. They're obviously very proud of it. It's just not out yet. And that kind of leads me to You know, the the jump from the 11 to the 12 is very big, right?

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  Like OLED display, new design, 5G.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Smaller size.

• 19:31Nilay Patel?

  Smaller size.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  We should talk about the the processor too, a little bit, because it seems like it's, you know, every you're like, oh, my God, the processor seems fast. But they're putting a lot of a lot of work into this thing that does a lot more with photo processing. And so it it may be that that's it may feel faster than the last ever. We never really see directly the speed improvements, except in certain things like photo processing or editing video or something. But it may be that it will enable future things to happen, you know, more easily because it's on the new 5 nanometer process than it is so much faster.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and you know, I always think of I the iPhone processor claims to me are never about now. They're always about three years from now, you didn't upgrade and your iPhone still feels pretty fast because it was always so fast to begin with. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's great, but like the year to year jump, new design, OLED display. Like, what was the big knock on the 11 was that it had a fairly low resolution LCD. And, you know, I'm the one who's the most display nerd and I'm like, yeah, it's like, unless you're a huge display nerd, like this is gonna be fine. But now it's got the OLED at high res, it looks, seems to be, the spec wise, seems to be right on par with the Pro. Yeah, I mean, it's just a huge jump from the 11 to the 12.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  But then if you look at the 12 line, the difference between the 12 and the 12 Pro is utterly tiny. It's like one more camera.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:54Nilay Patel?

  And the ability to shoot Dolby Vision video at 60 frames per second instead of 30, which kind of hints that the Pro has more more RAM. And then it there's the case is different.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  Like trying to like to say, I was I was talking about this with with Heim yesterday for like an hour. Because both of us are trying to figure out which one do you choose? I know he was working on some comparison posts and things like that between the 12 and the 12 Pro. And I think one of the biggest like things that the 12 Pro has going in its favor is that it starts at twice the storage. So, once you like upgrade the 12 to that 128 gig storage, you start getting into like spitting distance of. The 12 Pro price where it's like, okay, I can justify a hundred bucks for that third, third lens and that stainless steel body and maybe that like ever so slightly brighter screen in extreme sunlight. Like they really like made this really hard to choose in a clear concise way.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  If you want more storage, you maybe should just go with the Pro.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  They didn't make that hard to choose at all. They made it easy to spend 100 extra dollars.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, there you go.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  The other thing about pricing that we should actually mention is carriers, especially Verizon and AT&T, are being remarkably aggressive at offering subsidy plans and deals and trade-ins and whatever to move these phones.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Especially the 12.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, to the point where like the initial pricing that got listed was like the discounted price you get from these carriers, not the actual unlocked price, which was like 30 bucks more.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  Can we just take a, just a pause? I want to talk about the phones. This was the most weirdly carrier-driven iPhone event ever.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Like in an icky way, like in a straight up icky way. Verizon on stage being like, it's finally here. The hype waves are coursing through your body as you speak, right? And then the price of the phone is that they're showing on screen is a carrier subsidized price. And you know, in all the other conversations we're having, we're hearing about AT&T and Verizon being aggressive with the phone. Like there's more carrier shenanigans with this iPhone than any other that I can ever think of.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  The last on the carrier was this much part of the conversation. I think there was two, two instances when it was, and it was 2011 in February or whatever it was, when the iPhone finally lost it, the exclusivity with AT&T was over and it came to Verizon. Like Verizon was a big part of that announcement for obvious reasons. And then the original announcement in 2007, when like, AT&T or Singular at the time was like very excited to be the carrier that had the iPhone. Like they were very much part of the conversation, but since then it doesn't matter.

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  But if you remember that original one, 2007, right? They like Steve Jobs is like, and this asshole let me put it on his network and like Stan Stigman shows up and he's like, we're so proud of you. And Steve's like, I didn't let them do shit. Right? And then he's like, here's the plan we invented. The iPhone data plan, 30 bucks a month unlimited edge. That's what you get. It's the only plan available for the iPhone. Get the fuck off my stage. Like it was still, it was Apple's event.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  I remember this a little differently, but okay.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  It was a glorious moment in, in unbending the carrier control of America. I, it's, it's like mythic status. I never want to watch it again. That's how I remember it and that's fine. But like the entire, the, the attitude there was very much like, this is Apple's phone. Thank you, AT&T. But Apple had a custom data plan. It was unlimited 30, they were like, we're going to make the plan simple. This time it's more like even to know how much the phone costs, you have to navigate carrier pricing shenanigans.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right? You're only going to get that price if you sign a two-year contract. I'm like, whatever Verizon thinks unlimited means is part of the iPhone story now.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  The thing that is like the most striking about this is that carrier discounted pricing is what is on Apple's website and what was Apple was showing on stage. Like normally like Apple will show the price and then like the carriers will say like, they'll, they'll advertise their trade-in deals, they'll advertise their discounts, what have you.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  This is why it's so hard to know how much Samsung phones cost, by the way.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. If you go to Samsung.com, this is seriously, if you go to Samsung.com and you look at a Fold 2, which is a $1,980 phone, it is advertised to you at like $1,100 because it says in fine print after trade-in and then, or it might be advertised to you at like $40 a month for 48 months. So like, this is like just a very odd thing to see Apple. Doing Apple, who is always like staunchly kind of like spat in the face of the carriers and done away with their shenanigans or whatever. And now they are like literally obfuscating the real price on their own website. Until you get to the checkout and you're like, oh, I'm not a Verizon or AT&T customer.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Or I just want to buy the unlocked thing and now I have to pay more. And yeah, it's only $30. Sure, you're already spending $800 on the thing. $30 is not a huge difference, but like, that's not the point. The point is you're paying more at the end of it than you were when you started the process.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  It's weird, by the way, that T-Mobile is not doing this discounting, right?

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe they just, maybe John Ledger is just a.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  No, he's gone.

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, but like a year ago, when they were negotiating the deals, maybe John Ledger.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  John Ledger was like, look, I'm out of here.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  He blew it off to go do barbecue on Sunday and they just didn't get the deal done.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  I maybe, maybe they'll have some by the time, I mean, by the time you listen to this, the, the pre-orders will be live and, and who knows what deals will be live. But like, but yeah, it is odd that it is literally only AT&T and Verizon, at least at the time of, of recording this. But again, that's like the oddest part is the fact that like Apple's showing the carrier price. It's not showing the real price and that's so weird.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  My concern is that this is a symptom of the real reason that the 5G hype industrial complex is, exists and has everybody so excited is that the technology, the technological architecture of the network and like the way that it's being launched and run and the way it necessarily might have to be in order to like work as 5G seeds a little bit more control to the carriers than they had before at like some very baseband fundamental level. And at this moment here, isn't a direct, you know, symptom necessarily, but it's part of a trend of carriers resting back more control over what happens with our phones.

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, look, if you're Apple and you are facing effectively flat iPhone sales every year and you're trying to, you know, get more services revenue and all this stuff. And Verizon decides this is the year they're going to sell more Samsung phones and they just turn that lever by three or 4%. Right? I think Apple has to play ball now because they can't just count on ever increasing iPhone sales. Now they can count on iMessage lock-in, so maybe that's fine. But that the numbers that these companies play with, hundreds of millions of phones. Like 2% or 3% of marketing budget and like those are, those become real numbers really fast. So we'll see. I, I don't, I, I feel like we're just constantly, we've spent 30 minutes just yelling about 5G and carriers.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  We haven't, like, we should talk about the phones. We've said it like 10 times. We gotta talk about the mini. Everyone, everyone's hyped about the mini. They come in blue. The mini is super interesting to me, right?

• 28:20Speaker 03

  How come? It's small and it's good is what I, like, it doesn't lose anything from the, the big one, the 12.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  I think that's very interesting. That doesn't exist in the market.

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  So, right, so they've got, they, with, because they have a 5 nanometer chip, because they have the ability, I think, we have to figure out what the battery life is with 5G, but it seems like they have the ability to save some battery. So they can use a smaller battery. OLED screen draws less power, doesn't have LCD backlighting. So they were able to basically make the full phone smaller, necessarily make the battery smaller. Yeah. It's not like there's wasted space inside the 12 and like ship it finally and finally be like, it's here. And I, that to me is like, great. I, I have no idea if this seems to be the biggest hit in the world or just medium, but all signs point to biggest hit in the, in the world.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  They also, they can do a thing that no Android manufacturer can do, which is they can say, this is the same chip, but we're gonna, we're gonna spend a little bit more time tuning it for low power for the smaller phone. And like, they actually don't need to tell anybody, right? Like, they could just be like, it'll use the small cores a little bit more often. Nobody will feel it because iPhones always feel fast in the first place. So where Google and Samsung need to go to Qualcomm and get the, like, the chip that's got the lower number on it so that, and then, you know, so it could be cheaper and everybody feels bad about it because it's not the flagship chip. Apple can just put its flagship chip in. I'm not saying that it is slower. I'm sure it's not, but if that, like, they could. They have, they control the complete stack. They're getting whatever customizations are getting on their 5G modems.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  And that, that ability makes them, makes it possible for them to say, this is like the full, you know, full fat iPhone in the smaller size.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  You know, if you look at Apple's comparison charts and stuff like that, the, the mini does have less stated battery life. So I think it's something like 20% less if you look at like their video playback. Because they don't, they don't really express battery life in a sensible way. But the, the point is like, yes, it's a smaller phone. You should expect less battery life. That only makes sense. It's logical, but is it so much less battery life that actually like matters? Like we learned with the elevens last year, the 11 has exceptional battery life. It's, you know, it's will last all day for the vast majority of people, even though Apple still rates it at like whatever X hours a day.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  The point is, I mean, if you're able to get nearly that with a smaller phone, that's more comfortable in your pocket. If you've got, you know, smaller hands, you've just been tired of the surfboard phones. And, and you're still getting all the other features of the 12, same cameras, same display, same processor, like Dieter mentioned, same build quality, same design, same colors. Like that's, that's a significant thing that we have not seen. What we've seen in the past, especially from Apple is they built the SE, which is technically a smaller phone, but that's built for a price point. That's built to hit $399. It's built to hit that sub $500 crowd. This is a phone that's not built for a price point. It's built for a size and it's built for somebody who is looking for a smaller device and doesn't want to compromise on that smaller device.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  And I think that's pretty interesting and pretty exciting.

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  It's built for a price point. It's built to say that what the iPhones start at. The, the existence of the mini allows a regular iPhone 12 to cost more.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  Yes, which it does. Yes. But it's not so aggressively priced down that it becomes like a budget phone. You're still getting a high mid-range, almost premium phone, just in a smaller package.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the 11 is still there if you want the bigger screen, right? So if you look at their pricing chart, it's like every price from $399 to 1100. Like they did it. Dieter just made a video about like Samsung pricing. Apple has hit Samsung pricing. Other little notes about the phone. This was particularly interesting to me. So they, the front is covered in what they're calling ceramic shield, which is not a coating. The actual material is, as we have learned, glass ceramic hybrid.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  It actually has ceramic in the the structure of the material and they're not allowed to call it glass because glass does not is not supposed to have crystals in it in this way. So it's we have to see, but they're very proud of this material, this hybrid glass ceramic material that developed with Corning. The back is still just the same glass as before.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Yep. Well, just, but it's pretty good glass. But so the the point of this ceramic glass hybrid material.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  See, we got it's like we're being baited into calling it ceramic shield.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, we need to come up with our own name.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  It's for drop durability. It's not necessarily for scratch durability. Scratch durability would probably be the same, but it's a thing to to like, maybe wait for because we've seen Corning increased drop and then decreased scratch and vice versa. It's hard to do both at the same time. In theory, what the the ceramic shield allows them to do is not have to reduce scratch resistance in order to improve drop resistance. That's that's why it's very interesting and why I'm really excited to to see how it performs.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  And their their claim is it's 4X more resistant to shattering on drops, 4X drop resistant. And they're saying that's not just because of the new material, but because the edges are flat. And so they're like, yeah, when you drop it, like, you're more like, and I was like, that is, it's crazy that you've quantified that. I appreciate you. That was like, my only reaction to that is, yeah, there's like, some engineer had to do that math on that reason and like, come up with the answer. And I appreciate the effort. We should take a break. We got to talk about MagSafe. We got to talk about the charger not being in the box. We got to talk about these cameras. But we got to take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  All right, do you want to start with MagSafe? Or do you want to talk about the charger coming out the box?

• 35:22Speaker 04

  I mean, it's part of the same story? Question mark?

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  So the charger's not in the box anymore. Neither are headphones, which I don't know. I don't know if first cast listeners remember like two years ago now, I interviewed a CEO of Anchor, like right when they were on their meteoric rise. And he was like, eventually there will be no chargers in the box. Like, we gotta stop making these chargers. That's why we make power banks. And like, remember we talked about Gan a lot? Guy in my truck, like, he's like, this is the future. Like, and I was like, you are a crazy dreamer, but I love a hustler, right? Like, this is great.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  I mean, it's good for Anchor if there's no charger in the box. That's, that's really what it is. It's, there's no charger in the phone box is a good thing for Anchor.

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  Can I address this right now? Cause I know we're gonna yell at each other about it. I know, right? There's no charger in the box, but there is still lightning cable in the box. And everyone's all up in arms because lightning cable is USB C now.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  Which is great. It was just great because you already have a USB A lightning cable. The chances that there is a USB A lightning cable just floating around you is very high. If you buy an iPhone, right?

• 36:26Speaker 04

  But then, like, so.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  If you are switching from Android to an iPhone, the chances that you have a USB C charger is very high.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Ah, no. That's only if you're switching from an extremely recent Android phone. Like Samsung switched to USB-C adapters in the box this year. If you have an S10 or an S9 and you buy an iPhone this year, your charger from Samsung has a USB-A port on it.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  So if you wanted to get conspiratorial about it, why did they get rid of the essential reason for getting rid of the AC adapter in the box is it's a wasteful because you're making a bunch of things that end up in landfill. Everyone has one anyway. And let's get the box smaller and lighter so they can fit more of them on a pallet, which saves on all sorts of carbon emissions and so on. Okay, so smaller and lighter, fit in a pallet, yes, better for the environment for sure. But the question of does everybody already have an AC adapter is like a tougher one because I think fewer people have USB-C AC adapters than people have USB-A AC adapters. They've got drawers full of the USB-A ones.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  I personally wish that everything would just move to USB-C. I personally think that asking someone to like, you buy an AC adapter and that's like your AC adapter for life, you know, how long it lasts. You buy one, you can choose the one you want that's got one or two or three ports on it or whatever. That's great. I wish it meant that the price of the iPhone went down a commensurate amount to the, you know, whatever the cost of the AC adapter is. That was, you know, that was a real, real, real optimistic of me to think that there would be like a choice between a discount or getting an AC adapter.

• 38:07Nilay Patel?

  They made the accessories cheaper.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  Chargers are 10 bucks cheaper. The ear pods are 10 bucks. Do you think a pair of ear pods honestly cost them money to make?

• 38:17Speaker 04

  They probably cost more to ship than to make.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm just saying, what we like a couple hundred thousand people listen to the show. I'm at the point where I could probably ship an AC adapter to every listener of this show. Like, there's just a room full of them over there.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  I mean, I would say, Neelai, you're not representative of the typical smartphone buyer. Like, I think we can all agree, none of us in this show are representative of the smartphone buyer. Like, I've got a drawer behind me as well. The point is-

• 38:44Nilay Patel?

  Between you and me, everyone gets two. This is a great service to America, except for the shipping costs and fuel. I'm just saying-

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the boxes and the-

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  I am the cynical, snarky one, and I actually buy the environmental argument here. Oh, so do I.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  I I don't buy it for a second.

• 39:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh, come on.

• 39:02Speaker 04

  I don't buy it for a second. I think what it does is it really is great for Apple. It shrinks Apple's carbon footprint because it allows Apple to use the smaller boxes and to ship fewer things and all that stuff. But all it does is it offsets that carbon footprint to the company that you eventually buy the brick and the headphones from. So you're gonna need a different cable or you're gonna need a different charging brick or head or you're gonna need replacement headphones.

• 39:28Nilay Patel?

  You don't need it. It's a lightning cable.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, or you but you've already got that cable or you're gonna buy that brick less often. And you know what? Like, let's let's assume that Apple is being 1,000% cynical and Machiavellian about this. They're only doing it because they can shave that money off the cost of the building materials and they can charge, you know, the same money that costs them less. They're only doing it so they can sell more of their accessories because ha, ha, ha, they left a USB C cable in there instead of a USB A cable. So some people are gonna have to go out and buy the charger from Apple. Ha, ha, ha. Like, go every single step down the line, take the worst possible interpretation of Apple's decisions here. It's still good because it's still good for the environment. I don't care.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  But I I my my take is it's not as good for the environment as Apple is claiming because it is just offsetting that carbon cost to someone else. And it offsets that device cost to you. You're not saving money when you buy an iPhone without a charger. You are having to spend money more on top of the iPhone if you want a charger with it. So like.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  People aren't gonna buy a charger with every single phone purchase.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  That's right. It's the attach rate, right?

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  Last year, you were guaranteed to manufacture one brick per iPhone. If they bring that number down at all, that's a win. It's not like Anker sales or Belkin sales are gonna skyrocket for 5 watt USB C bricks.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Don't tell that to the CEO of Anker.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  I think that's what Anker wants.

• 40:53Nilay Patel?

  I mean, maybe. I don't know. Like, we'll see how it plays out. I just think it's, I'm the one who gets mad at Apple when they take things out of the box or move things from the phone.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:01Nilay Patel?

  And I'm, I'm totally like, I am so happy. I don't have to throw this thing in a drawer and never think about it again.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  We haven't gotten to the ultimate point of this, which we'll get to.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  There's no USB C on the phone itself.

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  That's not.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Well, there's that point, but like the MagSafe conversation is like the ultimate point and the ultimate end game of this is you're not going to have a lightning port or an USB C port on the phone in a year or two or whatever.

• 41:27Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  And there will be any cable in the box. Like that's the end game here, right?

• 41:31Nilay Patel?

  So MagSafe, by the way, what a troll of a name.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  Everybody misses this port from their MacBook so much. And like you're like in dongle hell.

• 41:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  Watching this event and Apple's like, we're bringing MagSafe back. And you get this warm flicker of a glow and they're like, it's a giant circle for your phone.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  What's safe about it? The point of MagSafe is that it would detach from your laptop when you tripped on it. So the laptop wouldn't go flying. Do you think that your phone is going to detach from the circular magnet when you trip on the cable and it won't go flying? There's nothing safe about it.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's, I'm saying they're trading on the goodwill we had towards rational ports and laptops. And instead it's a circle. So it looks very much like the, like the Apple Watch charger. It's Qi. So the phones can still charge using your old Qi chargers. A lot of confusion about this yesterday. So you can still just charge your phone on any old wireless charging pad you have. If you buy Apple's MagSafe one.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  It will use magnets to click on the back of the phone, align itself and charge it 15 watts, which is faster than most. Not as fast as a cable, but the magnets are strong enough to hold the thing on the back of the phone. And I swear to God, the point of this is so that when you get in a bed at night, your phone's almost dead and you still want to screw around on your phone while plugged in.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  You can. That's what it, that's a hundred percent why they made this happen.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  Only if they made it like a six foot cable though.

• 42:58Nilay Patel?

  You, but I'm sure that, so it's an open standard. They've published the spec. There's, there's like some MFI stuff floating around, but anybody can just, it's magnets. They can't, they can't DRM the magnets as far as I can tell.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  The question is, can they, can they MFI made for iPhone DRM the 15 watt charging speed? They definitely MFI Apple Watch chargers. So.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So they're, they're definitely, there's little NFC tags and the cases and the official stuff. So I'm sure they can software rate limit the charger, but anybody can make a mount. Belkin's already making car mounts. Scochi is already making car like it's happening. This is the accessory ecosystem for the iPhone.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  And it is all happening. So that is built out so that when they take the port off the phone, everyone's already used to clicking little circles on the back.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  It is, by the way, that we've had this whole environmental conversation. The MagSafe circle looks very big.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  Like compared to how tiny a lightning cable is like, it's a giant.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  It's like a coaster that you're like throwing around.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Wireless chargers waste electricity compared to a cable. They're radically less efficient and so it's not good for the environment to use wireless charger.

• 44:10Nilay Patel?

  Apple buys Tesla.

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  Confirmed.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  You thought the conspiracy theory was taking the port off the phone. I'm saying they're, they're buying Tesla. Everyone gets a Tesla power wall, a solar roof. It's all happening. I think MagSafe is exciting. I for one, like I have a wireless car charger mount in my car and it's the, it's the best. And so being able to just like throw your phone on there and take it off is really awesome. There are already all kinds of magnetic cases for that. Um, I keep thinking about my little Osmo gimbal.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:42Nilay Patel?

  And so the new one has a magnet, but you still have to like fiddle with a clip to get on your phone. If that thing just becomes a MagSafe attachment.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  That's awesome. Like there's a million things you are taking your phone in and out of.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Plus they're going to sell more pants because people will have to buy special pants with an extra pocket with a protective liner on it to keep it from demagnetizing credit cards.

• 45:05Nilay Patel?

  Battery packs that just magnet on the back. That solves your iPhone mini problem.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  Like there's just like a bunch of cool ideas that happen when you have. You can attach things to a phone.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. I guess the question is, how strong are these magnets? Can they hold the weight of a battery pack? Can they stay, keep your gimbal mounted while you're, I don't know, doing extreme sports?

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  You're like, whatever gimbal people do.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, what do you do with those? When you're bombing down the snowboard mountain.

• 45:33Nilay Patel?

  Will those magnets mess with the compass? Because that was a problem on the first phone that had magnets and a wireless charger, the Palm Pre.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Just pointing that out.

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna say, I'm pretty sure like Palm rushing the phone out the door and like crap, the compass doesn't work. Like on their like Kanban board of problems like was far below like sprint exclusive.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  May hopefully Apple is like, did anybody check the magnets? And like 5,000 Apple engineers were assigned to that problem. Now, I think it's really neat. I do think that it's obvious that the march to taking the port off the phone is underway. I have very mixed feelings about this. Deeply mixed feelings about this, but for now, it's got a port.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  I know we're cracking jokes about it, but it if they really wanted to do the right thing for the environment and they really wanted to have courage, they would switch from lightning to USB C. It is the same cable that's being every charge used to charge every other consumer electronic that's, you know, modern, other than stuff that's trying to save a penny here, they're going to like micro USB. It's the same cable for the Mac. It's the same cable for the iPad Air. It's better for the environment because it's more efficient than a wireless charger. Like what do you get out of dropping the lightning port and going portless, other than you get to say you were portless? We've seen portless phones. They're dumb. I don't.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  You can't fat like unless they have got a wireless charging standard that is radically better than MagSafe, which is only 15 watts. Like you can't fast charge. You just can't. So I, I know it's funny. Ha ha. They'll never switch to it. Why are you obsessed with this? But these are just choices Apple decided to make and they could have chosen to switch to USB C, move the standard forward, improve the USB ecosystem for everybody and like have fewer cables in addition to fewer AC adapters out of the world. It was a mistake.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  I fully agree with you, Dieter, but I'm going to play the advocate and say removing the port removes a failure point on the phone. So that's one less thing to break and breaking ports is a, is a thing that happens when you're, you know, you drop it when it's plugged in or whatever. And it obviously will make construction or manufacture less costly because there's less component to be putting in there. I've said, I've said the advocate piece that all said, I fully agree with you, Dieter. I'd rather see an USB C port on it.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, we did an entire segment just on USB C, which is the most Vergecast thing we could do, to be honest. Let's talk about connector standards for 30 minutes. We gotta take a break. We gotta talk about these cameras. I have so many thoughts about Dolby Vision. And there's a, there's a little baby home pod to talk about. We'll be right back.

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• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Neelai, how many lights are there when you play video that's shot with an iPhone 12?

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  So a thing we know, this is a real thing we know. Dieter and I live logged the events.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  We did.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  And they, Apple reads them. And now because the events are just videos, they're like reading them in real time.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, they got nothing else to do. They're not like sitting, watching it. They're not literally on stage.

• 49:58Nilay Patel?

  So like, we're live, we're live logging away. You know, everyone's doing their infomercials now. We're like live logging. And they get to Dolby Vision camera, which is very exciting, extremely in my wheelhouse. And it's great that they're doing it. 10,000 questions about how this works. So I start live logging all the questions and then like a little later, like here's the answers to your question.

• 50:18Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I know about this camera so far. We gotta get it. We gotta use it. We gotta see how it works in practice.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  So before we get too far down the Dolby Vision rabbit hole, just as a reminder, the iPhone 12 mini and the iPhone 12 have two cameras, a wide and ultra wide with slightly better aperture. The iPhone 12 Pro adds a telephoto camera, but otherwise seems like it's pretty much the same, except it can do 4K 60 in Dolby Vision. And then the iPhone 12 Pro Max has a larger sensor for the main wide camera, which is very interesting. And it also has a LiDAR sensor, which gets used for mapping the room or whatever, but also for certain camera effects, like that require depth or fast forward. So they can use for focusing in low light.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  The little Pro has LiDAR too.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Okay. Sorry. The little Pro has LiDAR too. So they use it for focusing in low light, which everybody does with laser, laser autofocus. But they're also using it for like depth.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Which seems very cool.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, and we've gotten a little taste of what LiDAR and these camera systems can do with the iPad. Got it tested. I do think being able to do portrait mode at night, it's like I said, it's all edge cases, right? And like, they're making those better. I think that's great.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Yep. So presented with the idea of LiDAR being used to revolutionize camera photography, Neelai wants to talk about how HDR standards work.

• 51:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that is correct.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Okay, great. Here we go.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we'll see. I think it's going to be an incremental year for the iPhone camera. I really do.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Okay, interesting.

• 51:48Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. Maybe like, you know, maybe Portrait at Night is great. I think the LiDAR sensors are there because they are building an AR ecosystem for their eventual glasses, which is very clever. Yeah. Shipping a LiDAR sensor on hundreds of millions of phones, which they're moving towards, very smart. But much like 5G, I think LiDAR is there as a... Well, eventually someone will figure out what to do with this. But that's how I feel about 5G. Dolby Vision. So, they say it can shoot Dolby Vision, it can shoot HDR. It is, right now, very difficult for the average person to make an HDR video. Very easy for the average person to watch an HDR video.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  You just get your HDR TV, you download Netflix, or Disney Plus, or Apple TV Plus, hit Play, the lights come on, the Dolby Vision light comes on, or comes on the screen, and you're watching HDR. Why is HDR good? You get higher peak brightness, so you get more luminance, and usually bundled with HDR, not as part of the same standard, but they usually come as a package pair, you get a wider color gamut, so you get more colors.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  Those are good things.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  And that, that increased luminance at the peaks makes things look just a little bit more realistic in a way that no other real TV standard had done since, basically, HD. Like, you, you will actually, it actually looks natural when there's a sun in a dark room, or whatever.

• 53:11Nilay Patel?

  I would rather have HDR in a wider color gamut than 4K.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's, there's something about it that I think looks great. Other people feel very much differently. Anyway. Great, very easy to watch, very hard to make. You could make HDR content, Dolby Vision HDR 10, with any number of cameras that already exist. So like, I have an RX 105, you can set it to shoot in SLog 2, which is like an ungraded RAW format, and then you can like, grade it in HDR. Because the sensor is capturing all the data, it's really what format are you putting it out into the world in? What format are you creating? So kind of saying we made a Dolby Vision camera. I keep saying this is basically saying we made a JPEG camera. Right, like it just what they're talking about is the output format of the camera of the video.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  So you're saying that it's easy to watch and it's technically easy to for the hardware of a camera to shoot. But the difficult part is making sure that the data that the cameras, the hardware of the camera shoots turns into that HDR format.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I can't think, given how fast these phones are now, the fact that like three year old Sony effectively point and shoots. I know the RX 100 isn't really point and shoot, but you get what I'm saying like several year old Sony handheld cameras can capture a video that can be turned into HDR. I'm confident that last year's iPhone could shoot S log two and export this. It might be slower.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so the iPhone 12 Pro can shoot HDR video and export it to vision at 4K 60. And then the regular 12 can do it at 4K 30. I'm guessing this is like a RAM limitation. It seems obvious the product are lame. Okay, here's the real part because Dolby Vision is an output format. They're not actually shooting in Dolby Vision. They're shooting in a different HDR format called HLG.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  And that is the thing that's actually on your phone. Until you tell the phone to send it somewhere. And so you can send it to an Apple TV over AirPlay. If you have TVOS 14 on your Apple TV, it'll play it'll play Dolby Vision, which means there's a conversion happening somewhere in there that we don't know about. And then this is the crazy one. If I airdrop you or message you use iMessage to send you a video. The system will say, oh, you've got an iPhone eight or later, or a newer iPad, or a Mac running Big Sur. You can handle this will send you a Dolby Vision file. If not, it'll send you a regular file.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  So a regular file, what is a regular file?

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  A standard 4K Rec 709, standard brightness, standard color space file.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  So my, my question here is, why does Apple hate files?

• 55:53Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how many files are on the phone. Like, I've been, I've been puzzling this out. When you hit record, it makes a file. That file necessarily, because that file is so incompatible with other things. Like, if you play a Dolby Vision file on a non-Dolby Vision TV, it will look crazy.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:09Nilay Patel?

  It will just look nuts. The colors are all out of whack. It'll look washed out and crazy. Like,

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  So they need to have, do you remember, we had this story earlier this year about people taking the AP test?

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Monica Chin wrote it, and the College Board's website was not configured to take HEIC photos from iPhones. So kids were like bombing out of their AP tests. They all had to retake it. Imagine that, but for every video you take on your iPhone.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Right? Nothing is compatible to videos that the iPhone makes, because it shoots Dolby Vision.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. The solution would be to like, save two files, which seems like a pain in the ass.

• 56:43Nilay Patel?

  They're doing. They told us it's only like 10 or 15% bigger. I think, I think they're actually, we'll see. I just think what they're actually doing is they're keeping the HLG. So HLG stands for Hybrid Log Gamma. More acronyms than the Vergecast. HLG was made, HLG was created by NHK, a Japanese broadcaster and the BBC for live events. It's the broadcast standard. So last year, remember, we covered Fox doing NFL games in HDR. They were broadcasting in HLG, and at some point you had to convert it to Dolby Vision or HDR10. So it's like the, Sony calls it instant HDR. You can shoot in HLG, even though it's not really made for it, but you can. And the thing that is good about HLG is that if you play back that file on an SDR TV, it looks fine.

• 57:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  So it's a more compatible file, or a more compatible standard for video.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  It's kind of like the JPG of HDR standards.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So my question is, if it's capturing HLG, which we know, that's the file on your phone, when do they turn it into Dolby Vision? I don't know the I don't know the answer. Like you it's in the reason I keep saying it's like a JPEG camera is like JPEGs don't magically turn into PNGs just because you want to or you say it did. It has to do it sometime.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know when that happens and I'm dying to find out. And I like, Apple does not want to talk to me about its file system. It does not want to talk to me about on the fly, re-rendering a video like, right? Like, these are just at the DNA level, Apple is not like, well, there's a directory on your iPhone. Like, they just. That's not how they want you to think about it.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  It took them to like iOS 12 to admit that there was a file system there in the first place.

• 58:23Nilay Patel?

  They don't want to do that. So a million questions about Dolby Vision video capture on the iPhone, like all related to the wonkiest file format details you can imagine.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  Coupled with having basically to explain what HDR is and why you'd want it in the first place. That said, you can play like the iPhone 11 has has Dolby Vision compatible screen. And so you go to Netflix or you go play it Dolby Vision video from from iTunes.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:52Nilay Patel?

  You play a Dolby Vision movie from iTunes, the screen will get brighter and it does look good. And the iPhone 11, like you could see it look good in a way the iPhone 10 did not. That's pretty exciting for like the videos you shoot. I am probably the only person who really cares about the file formats, but I mean, who am I? What is this show? Why are you here? We just spent 30 minutes yelling about magnets. So we'll see. I mean, to me, that's like one of the most interesting bits and bobs of this phone is they made a big deal out of it. All of them can do it, by the way, the iPhone 12 mini can shoot Dolby Vision, the iPhone 12, the, you know, the two pros. So we'll see. I just where you, even if it's on your phone, you can only send it right now to other iPhones and to Max running Big Sur, maybe to some Apple TVs.

• 59:36Nilay Patel?

  We, you know, like, where is that conversion happening? But you can send it, you can play it on Apple TV. Can you send it to YouTube? Is Instagram gonna support Dolby Vision HD? Like-

• 59:46Speaker 04

  Is TikTok, like, will it make your TikToks look better?

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's, I'll be wild. I mean, someone's gotta do it. I should point out, by the way, Apple's not the first to this in the way that, right? They made a big deal out of it. I'm sure it will cause the ecosystem to move. You can shoot HDR 10 plus on a Samsung Galaxy S10. No one does it. No one. But you can flip that switch and do it. One of the reasons no one does it is because HDR 10 plus is like Samsung's riff on HDR 10. And so like, it only works if you are playing it back on a Samsung TV in HDR 10 plus, which maybe I'm sure there's some people who live in that ecosystem.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  And when you, when you turn on that toggle on a Samsung phone, it like warns you. It says, "May not be compatible with other devices." So like, it's, and it's also buried in like a lab setting and stuff like that. It's fully capable of it, but you're right, nobody does it for these compatibility reasons that we've been talking about for the past 15 minutes.

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  And there's like a Reddit forum that's like Bixby Stans. It's like, "We're in the Samsung ecosystem. We've been doing it." "Come at me, Bixby Stans."

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  Dogs wearing shoes.

• 1:00:47Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's enough of me ranting about file systems. Dan, it's time for you to rant about the HomePod Mini.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they did it. They made a less expensive HomePod. I mean, like, this is like the thing that, I don't know, when did the HomePod come out? 2017, 2018? And it was $300 and everyone was like, "I can buy an Echo Dot for a quarter." Like a literal quarter. Why would I buy this? And so like, now Apple has a smart speaker that's priced at $99. It's priced head to head with the new Nest Audio from Google, the new Echo from Amazon, which are both new things for this fall. So it's like they are right in the mix. It is physically smaller. It's about, Apple said 3.3 inches tall. We don't really know the size of the actual speaker inside of it. But the thing itself is about 3.3 inches tall, which is, um, I don't know, the size of a Yankee candle.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  What's it, what is it in regard to the size of a Magic 8-Ball?

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  My God.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  That's my reference for, uh, sphere shaped.

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  I think it's a little smaller than a Magic 8-Ball. I wanna-

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  Than the standard Magic 8-Ball or the Magic 8-Ball Pro Max?

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  You know, there's like the 12 inch magic.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  What happens? What happens when you shake the HomePod Mini? Does it? Does Siri?

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  Siri just yells at you. Stop shaking me.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  So it has it has it like top display that's not a display like that shows little glowy lights or whatever?

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, yeah, it's got a lot of design elements from the original HomePod in that it's got that kind of multi-color LED display on top that doesn't display like information, but it just lights up when Siri is listening to you. And Siri's speaking, it's got some volume controls on there. And then it's got that same fabric mesh surrounding it. But instead of being a cylinder shape like the HomePod, it is a ball because spheres are so hot right now. So it's a it's less expensive. It's obviously not going to be as impressive on the audio side of things as the HomePod. It only has one driver in there and then it's got like two passive radiators. They call it base radiators for base. So it doesn't have all the tweeters.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  And then it has like a cone underneath that they say is doing some other kind of audio shaping.

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's it's so. So the speaker faces down and like it projects down, which is actually the same way that the old echoes worked. The the old tennis ball tube echoes, there are speakers fired down onto what looks like a rounded cone. And that cone then bounces the sound out and projects it out into the room. So that's the way that this is working. And what that does is allows 360 degree audio. So if you could put this in the middle of your room, Apple's demos during its event, they were all like putting the thing in the middle of the room and then strategically shooting the camera. So you couldn't see the power cord.

• 1:03:26Speaker 04

  The thing that nobody ever actually does, it it puts out 360 video audio, which is kind of interesting because as we saw, and I think as we talked about maybe a week or two ago, Google Nest and Amazon have both shifted their designs this year to more directional audio because nobody puts smart speakers in the middle of their room. So that said, that does 360 audio. You can also put two of them in the same room and they'll automatically become stereo, which is pretty cool. You can do that with the Nest Audio and you can do that with Echoes, but it's a setup process. Apple saying this is like, basically, they just know they're in the same room and they they become stereo.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, so they have you, they have ultra wideband in some way.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. So and then they also have ultra wideband. So they can like interact with your phone. If you've got an iPhone 11 or newer, they can tell when your phone is nearby. You can throw music or podcasts or whatever from your phone to the speaker. Apple says there's like this kind of like haptic interaction that makes it feel like you're physically transferring the audio to the speaker. We'll have to see how real that is.

• 1:04:29Nilay Patel?

  And then there's a big rumble when you just throw Spotify out.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  Anybody that comes to your house with an iPhone can like walk up to the speaker and hold their phone next to it and get the song information.

• 1:04:39Speaker 04

  That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, there's, there's like a bunch of little tricks in there and it's great to see that like Apple's actually using the ultra wideband radio that's been in the iPhone for a year for something practical other than like a car key for a car you don't own. But there's, there's that. And then of course, there's the always listening microphones. It's got Siri in there. So you can control HomeKit devices. You can ask Siri to play music and things like that. Not Spotify. You could play music from like a handful of services, but not yet Spotify. Spotify apparently would have to build support for it, which they haven't done yet. Yada, yada. And, you know, manage your calendar and things like that. And then I think one of the most interesting things to me, as someone who lives in a home with

• 1:05:19Speaker 04

  a family and other people, is that depending on who's speaking to Siri on the HomePod Mini, it will personalize answers to them. So it can tell what your voice is, or it's using your proximity of your personal iPhone to customize responses. So you can get your own calendar as opposed to like a shared calendar or your own to do list as opposed to a shared one. So I think that's really interesting. We've seen Amazon and Google try to do that with voice matching and they both kind of, yeah, not so great. So it'll be interesting to see if Apple's able to pull that off. But the point of this is, there's now an accessible smart speaker in the Apple HomeKit ecosystem. That'll be out there and will actually maybe compete with Amazon and Google on a more

• 1:06:03Speaker 04

  footing than it has been in the past.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  This thing is going to compete on sound quality, right? If you're already got the smart speakers, you're going to stay in that ecosystem. They have to convince you to switch. Siri, it all really, I think, comes down to sound quality. I mean, Apple really can't compromise on that. That was the whole point of the first HomePod. One interesting thing, though, it doesn't do proper, full-on room tuning where it like detects the shape of the room. It just, it does customize the music to the acoustic signature of the HomePod itself.

• 1:06:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, I rolled my eyes so hard during this thing. Apple's like, we're doing computational audio. And I was expecting.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  Room tuning.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  Room tuning. I was expecting HomePod stuff, right? The HomePod has like multiple microphones. It measures the excursion of the woofer to get more bass. If you move it, it'll do it again within, I mean, we did, my whole review was like, how does this thing work? Beam forming. This thing is like just some speakers. And what they're saying computational audio is, this was, their diagram was they had a sound wave and there was a line and the sound wave was one color and then it passed through the line and it got a little bit smaller and turned into a different color.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  That doesn't just happen by magic, Neel. I mean, you need a computer.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they might have been like, they might as well have been like, yo, it's got mega bass. Like, they're just doing like SRS wow.

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  Google does the same thing with the Nest Audio. Google Nest Audio does not do room tuning, even though the Nest Max or the, whatever their big speaker is called, does do room tuning. The Nest Audio does not. What Google says is like, they've got an algorithm that's got 2,500 different room placements baked in and it automatically base, looks at the content you're playing and adjusts the audio based on that. And so like, it seems like Apple's doing a similar thing to that. And yes, maybe, maybe it's a little bit of super extra bass on like, in terms of like the technical level, but.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  This is a podcast, so you can't see it, but I'm genuinely worried for Neel's health for how he's rolling his eyes right now. Like, I've seen nothing but white for the past two minutes. I just, I don't know what it is about tech companies that when they make speakers, they're just like, yeah, we'll just tell lies, that'll be fine.

• 1:08:09Nilay Patel?

  It's crazy. Every one of them is like, it sounds good. And then you play, you're like, it sounds like a small speaker. Like, you can't AI your way out of physics. You just cannot do it.

• 1:08:19Speaker 04

  I'll be very interested to compare these. And like, so like, at this price point, a hundred bucks, you've got the Nest Audio, that's got two drivers in it. It's got a small tweeter and a larger woofer.

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 04

  You've got-

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  It's a big bread loaf.

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  It's a big, it's a big ciabatta, ciabatta bread. Uh, tastes good. And then you've got the Echo at $99, which we haven't heard yet, but it's got a speaker and then two tweeters as well. So it's multiple drivers. They're competing on multiple drivers at this price point. And Apple only has one, and those passive bass radiators are like, kind of nonsense. So like, can one speaker sound as good as these others that have multiple units?

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  They are all going to sound bad. Like, I don't, it's like, the, the fact that they've even convinced us that what we're talking about is audio quality is insane.

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  I disagree.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  They're all going to sound like three inch speakers.

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  The Nest Audio sounds good. Like, it sounds like the average person listening to the Nest Audio is gonna be like, oh, that sounds great. Like,

• 1:09:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna drive to your house with like, a, a set of good speakers from like, 1972, and you're gonna be like, oh, yeah.

• 1:09:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I don't disagree, but those are also enormous and heavy and expensive, and they require a receiver and a player and all this other stuff. Like-

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  I know, I understand that convenience trumps all. I'm just saying, they have managed to negotiate us down to being like, yeah, this doesn't sound like a potato. And we're like, the AI is working. And it's like, alright. We'll see, maybe they're gonna blow me away. Uh, maybe. I have hope. I'm an optimist. This is the, this is the Vergecast where I'm optimistic.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  I'm way more excited about the HomePod Mini than I was ever about the original HomePod. So I'm, I'm very curious to try it out.

• 1:09:53Nilay Patel?

  I think that is really, like, the HomePod, just from the jump, seemed way overpriced. Um, although they are regularly discounted now. Apparently, when they get discounted by like, a hundred dollars, they're selling okay. But, um, actually, that's the other thing. The big HomePod- When I did the review, the number one question I got about the HomePod at the time of the original review is can I use it on my Apple TV? And because the HomePod does have beam forming microphones and can do all kinds of crazy audio processing, it's actually doing it. You will be able sometime to pair two HomePods with an Apple TV 4K and they will in some way deliver Dolby Atmos audio to you or 5.1.

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  To be fair, it is what Amazon's been doing with the Echo Studio and the Fire TV 4K since last year. Like they have the exact same setup. It's wirelessly talking to the Fire TV and it sends an Atmos signal. And if you have two of those, I mean, you could do it one, but it's obviously better with two of those Echo Studios. You can blast Atmos into the room because it's got beam forming and speakers all over it, just like the HomePod.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  So I haven't heard those. I mean, the thing with the HomePod is like it's very much designed. You're talking about directional audio. The HomePod is very much designed. Apple knows you're going to put it near a wall mostly. So like it sends audio out in the front and then it bounces much audio off the wall. Like that's a thing that it wants to do. And I feel like for a surround application, that might work. You might get that height effect. We'll see how it goes. Both Amazon and Apple have the exact same problem though, which is you pair this stuff with their box and it generates audio from their box. And then when you go to play your game console, you're like, my TV speakers sound amazing because it won't work with any of that stuff. And I just, you know, like maybe, maybe Apple Arcade is going to blow away the PS5 and the Series X.

• 1:11:41Nilay Patel?

  Then like I just, I don't, I don't think so. So like it's cool. It's like overdue. They should have always had it. But if you're going to spend the money on two HomePods, do not do it for that. Just buy a soundbar because you'll get way more use of it.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  I think Apple knows it. They're not, they're not acting like this is a huge deal that's going to change everything and blow HomePods off the shelf. Right? It's a little bonus if you have a certain kind of setup.

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  Owners of the HomePod have been asking for this, so they're adding it. Like that's what it feels like and we'll, we'll try it out.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  So I will say when I, when I did the Senna's Arc review, I was very skeptical that you could get height, bass, surround and the sense of sound above and behind you from just bouncing audio from a soundbar. And it did really well.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  So long as you're in a rectangular box room. Yeah, you gotta be in the box. If you're not in the box.

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  I mostly spend my time in the basement now. Like, that's where I spend most of my days. So, yeah, it was great for me. Um, that's a lot of Apple stuff. Do we miss? Is there anything we have not been angry about?

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Uh, this isn't something to be angry about, but Beats also announced new headphones. They're $50, they're wireless. And Dieter, you could say it. I'm gonna let you say it.

• 1:12:53Nilay Patel?

  They switched from Lightning to USB-C. Yeah. Do you know why? It's because no one at Apple is paying attention to Beats. Like, this is their, like, are they paying attention? No, they are not. We split USB-C in it. I think Beats is supposed to be their, like, it's their, uh, mass market brand now. Oh.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, like, Beats has always been expensive, though. Forever long knock against Beats was that they were expensive, pretty headphones that weren't actually that good. They've changed that. Like, Beats headphones are actually quite good now and recommend them all the time. But they were still on the expensive side. The fact that these are $50 and they're wireless and they charge with USB-C, which is a great perk.

• 1:13:32Nilay Patel?

  I love these. I bought them already. Right? 50 bucks, 12 hours of battery life, charges via USB-C, pauses the music when they click together with Magnus, which they should have done in the first place, and they finally added that. Working from home, like, they're just always around your neck. You have to fiddle, put in the headphones in and out, no cable, which is great. And like, when somebody in your house walks by and wants to talk to you, they don't have to, like, scope out your ear to see if you've got an earbud in there before they can tell if they can hear you. They could just see the wire from the neckbud. Love them. Very excited.

• 1:14:01Speaker 04

  They also help take the sting a little bit out of the fact that the iPhone doesn't come with a headphone now, because you can buy what appear to be decent wireless ones from Apple for $50.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  With a completely different charging standard.

• 1:14:16Nilay Patel?

  Sting got a little weirder. That's a little weird. No, I just find Beats as the mass market brand in that like, they're clearly positioning AirPods to be their halo, right? There's all the rumors of the actual AirPod headphones.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  I don't know. I, I, I find it hard to see AirPods as not being the mass market brand. They are so immensely popular. They are like as, as mainstream as it gets for headphones are AirPods, right? And maybe AirPods Pro are the premium and maybe the, the over ears that we've been rumored forever and haven't yet come out will be along the pro line and, and up there. But like, I don't know. It's, it's hard to see what they're doing with Beats. Like, like you said, like, no, nobody, it feels like nobody at Apple cares about Beats anymore because the AirPods are the new baby. But like.

• 1:14:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm telling you, there's USB C on these headphones. It's just a test. Well, they all came into the office yesterday.

• 1:15:06Speaker 04

  Like the rogue Android users that are still working at Beats.

• 1:15:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  Doing it.

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  Like they literally, they came in the office yesterday and like, did anybody call? Any, anyone get an email? Anybody? No? All right. Three months from now, Tim Cook calls him up and is like, hey, my cousin told me we make, what the hell? I don't know. Like, like, I don't know. Steve Beats is, I don't know who runs Beats.

• 1:15:37Speaker 04

  No, that's, that's the guy from Amazon, right? No, that's Steve Boom. Steve Boom is at Amazon.

• 1:15:41Nilay Patel?

  Boom is at Amazon. All right. That's it. A lot of stuff to review coming out. I, I know we, we've dissected in minute detail every feature of these phones. These phones look great. They, they do look great. I'm excited to review them. I'm excited to play with them.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  I like the blue.

• 1:15:55Nilay Patel?

  The blue looks great. Wow. Green. The green was great. I love the green last year. Just an exciting set of announcements. Two phones, the 12 and the 12 Pro are coming first. The Mini and the Pro Max are coming later. And I will say this, we are due by the end of the year from Apple, one ARM MacBook, which seems like it will be a big event unto itself. So it feels like there's one more Apple event to come this year, which is very exciting. But also like, uh, the actual iPad Air with the A14 is supposed to be around at some point. So just a lot of stuff.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  Apple will allow it to be released now that the phones are.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  Now that you can benchmark the A14. I just, it's, it's going to be a busy, it's going to be a busy month of reviews and gadgets. It's, it's good. It'll take our mind off the other chaos in the world.

• 1:16:43Nilay Patel?

  Which is the FCC directly regulating tweets.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Oh, hey, if you're wondering why we didn't talk about the pixels at all, we are gonna do the Tuesday episode on the pixel reviews. And our guests are gonna be David Ruttig from Android Police and Daniel Bader from Android Central. I'm very excited to talk to like two hardcore Android bloggers that run Android sites about this Android phone. It's gonna be super fun.

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. I want to say we went over. It's just like a tradition that I don't know how long this show is anymore. We went over your head talking about Dolby Vision. What format is it? So many acronyms. Tell me, just tell me what it's. Okay. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Steve Beats. I await your call. Dieter's at Backline. Dan is at DCC. Like Dieter said, he's hosting Tuesday's show. I'm launching Decoder next month. We're working hard at work on it. I'm very excited. We got some guestbook. I'm very excited about that. That's coming. That's it. Rock and roll. Vote.

• 1:17:58Speaker 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 a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:18:28Speaker 06

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