Pod Insights The Vergecast Apple’s iPhone 14 event: the biggest announcements and our first impressions About this episode Apple held their annual hardware event on their campus, debuting new iPhones, new Watches, and new AirPods. Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss everything that happened at the "Far Out" event, first impressions of the products, and their expectations for Apple in the next year.
Further reading:
Apple’s iPhone 14 event: the 9 biggest announcements
Apple Watch Series 8, SE, and Ultra hands-on: triple the fun
Apple Watch Series 8 gets souped-up period and ovulation tracking
New Apple Watch SE announced: price, features, release date
Apple Watch Ultra: price, specs, release date
Apple watchOS 9 will add low-power mode to Series 4 and later devices
Apple finally stops selling the Series 3 watch
It’s time for the Apple Watch to become Apple’s next big thing
iPhone 14 and 14 Plus hands-on impressions: the big phone is big
The iPhone 14 doesn’t have Apple’s latest processor
The iPhone 14 and 14 Plus are official with satellite-based Emergency SOS
iPhone 14 Pro: a first look at the new moving notch, camera, and more
Apple might have fixed the notch by putting it on an island
The iPhone 14 lineup won’t have physical SIM support
Apple’s new AirPods Pro hands-on: sticking close to a winning formula
Apple’s new AirPods Pro can cancel twice as much noise
Apple’s Lightning-only charging case for the third-gen AirPods doesn’t make sense
Klutzes rejoice: AppleCare Plus now covers unlimited repairs
Everything Apple didn’t announce at its iPhone 14 event
Tim Cook would rather sell you an iPhone than add RCS to iMessage
Jony Ive doesn’t think your car should rely on multitouch
Steve Jobs’ friends and family launched an archive celebrating his life
Tens of thousands of viewers watched a fake Apple crypto scam on YouTube
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 16,450 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Today on The Vergecast, the whole team does a deep dive on Bose's new Quiet Comfort Earbuds 2. I'm just kidding. We're going to talk about Apple the whole time, everything that was announced and our first impressions. That's coming up right after this.
0:15 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:00 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:55 Nilay Patel? Good morning. Hello and welcome to The Vergecast. The flagship podcast of crash detection, which you need, or no one will know that you've been in a car crash.
2:05 Alex Cranz? Or a plane crash, a boat crash.
2:08 David Pierce? I'm Neelai, I'm your friend. David Pierce is here. Hi, I am in our San Francisco office, where I have been since like 11 days ago. That's, I live here now.
2:16 Nilay Patel? Oh, don't even complain about being in one place for a long time. Alex Krantz is here.
2:21 Alex Cranz? I have not left my house in two months.
2:25 Nilay Patel? Very jealous.
2:26 David Pierce? Yeah, Neil, can you just run us through your travel schedule for the last like 96 hours? I just find it deeply hilarious and I'd like you to tell everybody.
2:33 Nilay Patel? One thing I don't recommend is being at LAX three times in three days.
2:37 David Pierce? No.
2:37 Nilay Patel? I was like, I just live at LAX now. This is where I'm at. I know all the people. I like said hello to the concession stand. It was great. So I have had five flights in seven days, basically.
2:47 David Pierce? Oof.
2:48 Nilay Patel? So I flew home to do a panel with the Mount Pleasant Community Group, a better Mount Pleasant, about Foxconn. That was really fun. It was great to be home. My dad was there, nerve wracking. Then I flew to LA for the first day of the code conference. Then I went to San Francisco for Apple. Then I flew back to LA the next day and then a day later I flew home. So it's just been a ride. I was at the point where I left some clothes in a hotel room because I knew I was going to come back to the hotel room. And I was like, I just live here now.
3:16 David Pierce? You had two simultaneous hotel rooms in two different cities.
3:19 Nilay Patel? Two simultaneous.
3:20 David Pierce? That's amazing.
3:21 Nilay Patel? I was like, I don't even know what's going on now, but it's great. The joke I made to David was like, I think people think that's what my job is always like. So I can't complain too much to be like, I'm chasing Tim Cook around the state of California. Like it was great. It was fun. It was exciting. Code was great. The Apple event was fun. We're going to talk about all of those things. Really, this is going to be an Apple themed first guest because it, many things happened with Apple this last week. iPhone 14 event, there was the new iPhone 14, which is really iPhone 13, iPhone 14 plus the Pro models, a Pro Max, lots of camera stuff. Apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch Ultra. I mean, there's a lot going on. New AirPods, new AirPods Pro.
4:03 Nilay Patel? And then that evening, we all went on separate planes. I will hasten to add to the code conference where Tim Cook spoke on a panel with Johnny Ive and William Powell Jobs with the legacy of two jobs with Kara Swisher, which was incredible in many ways. So just a lot going on in that day, but a ton of news just from the Apple event. Let's start there. Do you want to start with, we should start with phones.
4:23 Speaker 05 So let's take a look at the new iPhone.
4:25 David Pierce? So the basic rundown is there's four phones. There's the iPhone 14, which, like you said, is basically the iPhone 13. There's the iPhone 14 Plus, which is the exact same thing as the iPhone 14, but instead of a 6.1 inch screen, it has a 6.7 inch screen. And then there's the iPhone Pro and Pro Max, which have all kinds of interesting stuff in them.
4:43 Nilay Patel? The Dynamic Island.
4:44 David Pierce? Yes. So now, when you receive an alert, the Dynamic Island expands to notify you. So I tweeted yesterday, on Thursday, saying, "The Vergecast is gonna be a little late." And also, if you have any questions, like anything you want us to talk about on the Vergecast, let me know. And solidly, half of the responses I got were basically to the tune of like, "Are we really gonna let them get away with calling it the Dynamic Island? Like, we're just gonna do this?"
5:08 Nilay Patel? So they're already running the ads. I watched the Bills-Rams game last night, and like, every other ad was a Dynamic Island ad.
5:15 David Pierce? Ugh.
5:16 Alex Cranz? Well, what would they call it, though? If they didn't call it that, just a toggle switch?
5:21 David Pierce? Anything else.
5:22 Nilay Patel? So I think the name is great. I've come around on the fact that like, if you're a company the size of Apple, Apple has been very conservative recently, right? Like, it's a huge company, global scale, politics, regulators, data centers. Like, they are now, just because of who they are, they're a conservative company. Every now and again, Apple is the only company of that scale that's like, "Dynamic Island, let's do it."
5:46 Alex Cranz? I mean, there's like a history of really stupid names for really cool user interfaces, right? Like, there's the hamburger, there's the meatballs.
5:55 Nilay Patel? Straight up, we call it a mouse. Everyone all day long is like, "Let me get my mouse." And we just let that slide. I don't know the Dynamic Island is gonna stay.
6:03 Alex Cranz? Maybe it'll just be Island.
6:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah, look, I think it's a fun name. They had to call it something.
6:07 David Pierce? Do you think there was a meeting at Apple where somebody was like, "What if we call it the Touch Bar?" That's basically what it is, right? And then like, somebody from the Mac team just came sprinting into the room. It's like, "No, we can't do that, it's not allowed."
6:20 Nilay Patel? I think what will almost certainly end up happening is that diehard Mac fans will call it the Dynamic Island, and then the billions upon billions of people who buy the phone will like, emergent behavior some other name for it, and that will be the name that everyone calls it. And then we'll be... Our comments will be full of pedantic arguments about actually calling it pedantic, or actually calling it the dynamic island or not. Trust me, like I lived through the OSX wars.
6:43 David Pierce? Yeah.
6:43 Nilay Patel? And like, it's gonna be bad.
6:45 David Pierce? Yeah.
6:45 Nilay Patel? It's not gonna be great.
6:46 David Pierce? The technology of it is super cool, though. It's super cool technology.
6:50 Nilay Patel? So that's where I'm like of both minds.
6:52 David Pierce? Really?
6:52 Nilay Patel? So the basic idea, right? So they moved the notch down to a pill. It's the camera, the true depth sensor, the proximity sensor. There are actually two different spots. So there's screen above them. So there's no more notch and a screen in between them. And what the island does is it just like blacks out more of that area to put indicators to the left and right of the, of the pill shaped notches.
7:15 David Pierce? Yeah.
7:15 Nilay Patel? Cutouts.
7:16 David Pierce? It's great.
7:16 Nilay Patel? And so that part is interesting, right? You're gonna take this thing where the screen, where the screen is always blacked out, you're actually gonna lean into it and blackout more of the screen.
7:24 David Pierce? Yeah.
7:24 Nilay Patel? Cool. Like, very few companies will do that. Very few companies will tell their developers to support such a thing and actually get their developers to do it. Very Apple in that way. You know, someone spent hours upon hours doing the little bounce animations.
7:38 David Pierce? And they look great.
7:39 Nilay Patel? But like, in use, David, you used it as well, too. The, right? Really what you're getting is like, when you play some music, you get music indicators. When you have a timer going, you get timer indicators. The voice memos one is really cool. Like legitimately my favorite one of the thing, because you get the little, you have the little sound waves. I love a sound wave. They showed a bunch of other stuff, right? Lift, like if you call a lift, it'll tell you how long the lift will be.
8:02 David Pierce? You get your sport scores.
8:03 Nilay Patel? Sport scores. So they're all connected to the, the phone's widget system. So the, kinda like the way I have been thinking about this, these are like minimized widgets.
8:13 David Pierce? Yeah, that's basically right. Are we gonna call them widgets?
8:16 Nilay Patel? The widget, yeah, the widget notch. Notch wedge.
8:19 David Pierce? Notch wedge. There it is. Uh, we got it in one. But wait, you, you say that, you say that like it's a bad thing. That feels like a good thing.
8:25 Nilay Patel? But it's like, how many widgets do you want to minimize?
8:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
8:29 Nilay Patel? And I was, I've been making the list in my head and it's like actually vanishingly few.
8:33 David Pierce? Oh, that's interesting. I feel exactly the opposite. I
8:36 Nilay Patel? Really?
8:36 David Pierce? Like, there are so many things. That my phone knows that I wish it had quicker ways to tell me, right? One of them is like, is my alarm set? This is like a spoiler alert for the iOS 16 review that I'm writing for next week. Is that like, there's just a ton of things that Apple used to require you. It's like, if I want to know, if I, one easy example I always give is like, if you're a person who uses like a habit tracker app and you open up the app every time you want to like log that you had a glass of water, right? That's too many steps. And so for little things like that, or like, who won the Yankee game? Like, Apple is like slowly pulling that out of apps and into like, the front of the phone. And with iOS 16, on the lock screen, it's pulling all that stuff even further to the front of the phone.
9:20 David Pierce? And I feel like the dynamic island is the kind of thing where it's just like, now it's even more there. And for me, there's like, the question of, am I going to want to see these things like 24 hours a day? I don't know. And do I want to see a tiny moving waveform all the time I'm listening to music? I also don't know. But there is a lot of like, little tiny bits of information that I'd like to have throughout the day, that feel like they fit there perfectly.
9:41 Alex Cranz? They're super contextual, right? Because like, I haven't gotten to play with them. I've only seen like, y'all's videos and the videos that Apple played. But they're contextual. So it's not like, that waveform for the music is always there. You still have to like, interact to make it happen.
9:55 Nilay Patel? No, and there's a little bit of a delay. So if you open the music app and stop the music and then go it, the island is there and then it shrinks back down to the notch.
10:03 Alex Cranz? Like, Island, get out of here. What are you doing?
10:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you can't, so like, actually, to David's point, like, one of the things that surprised me about it is, it's the sort of like, user flow of it is more complicated than you would expect.
10:16 David Pierce? Yes.
10:17 Nilay Patel? And I think in one particular way, backwards. Just having used, I mean, we haven't gotten, we got to like, review the phone, right? But, so just to get it, you've got to like, open an app and do something, right? You got to like, start playing music, you got to set a timer. Now, you could do that from like, maybe a lock screen widget or something else, or from Siri, but you got to like, do something. And like, mostly, you're going to do it, you're going to open an app and do something.
10:38 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
10:38 Nilay Patel? Right? So then you close the app and the thing flies into the widget. If you've got two things going at once, there's a cool animation, the island breaks actually into two islands. They haven't addressed that, naming wise.
10:48 David Pierce? It's the archipelago.
10:51 Nilay Patel? That's great. So like, but you gotta like, do stuff, right? And then here's the thing, if you watch the ads, you watch the video, this is the thing that really tripped me up. You would think that if you tap on the island, it opens the widget.
11:04 Alex Cranz? Yes.
11:04 Nilay Patel? Right? That is not the case. When you tap on it, it opens the app.
11:08 Alex Cranz? No.
11:08 Nilay Patel? And when you, if you want the widget, you gotta hold down. And that to me is totally backwards.
11:13 David Pierce? I've come around to your side of this. When you first mentioned that, as we were standing there at the hands on, like the second you touched it, that was your instinct. And I didn't necessarily agree because like, as it is with widgets, you hit, you tap the widget and it opens the app. So on the one hand, you would think that's expected behavior, but like, it does, it breaks the exact flow you're talking about. It should go like island to widget to app. And instead, you have to like, long press. I think, I think you're totally right. And I bet Apple changes that.
11:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it just seems, it seems totally backwards to me.
11:40 Alex Cranz? Like when I press it, I expect it to have a quick contextual thing. So I can do my thing without having to wait for the whole animation.
11:47 David Pierce? I want to pause the music.
11:48 Nilay Patel? I would just say that if you have the functional equivalent of a right click in your ads, you should rethink that. Right? Like, that's what a long press on a phone is. It's a right click. Right? And it's undiscoverable by most people. Like a year from now, someone's gonna make a TikTok video that's like, top 10 feature of the iPhone you didn't know about. And then be like, did you know you could long press on the camera to open more? And it's like, they're gonna get a million views. That's ideas for free. Just start making that video now TikTok.
12:15 David Pierce? And run it in one year.
12:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, just like, book it. Right? You want to avoid burnout? You book your content now. So like, that's, that flow is just messy to me. And I'm sure they'll tweak it, or maybe they'll give you a switch.
12:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
12:29 Nilay Patel? There's a million ways to solve it. It's not like a deal breaker by any sense. But the earlier part of the flow, where you gotta go do something to get it, like David, what you're talking about is like, there's a bunch of apps on my phone where I just want them to kind of like flow data to me.
12:41 David Pierce? Yeah.
12:41 Nilay Patel? Or like, give me a control for the one thing. And Control Center does that. For some of those apps, it doesn't do it. For other apps, lock screen widgets do it for some apps and not for other apps. And now you just have like 10 ways to do that thing. And it just, the island creates another, but there's no like, send this to the island button.
12:59 David Pierce? That's true. There's no like step one island move you can do. You have to like do the stuff and then leave.
13:04 Alex Cranz? What would be a step one island? Because like it makes sense to me that I have to open the music app or the voice memo app. It's looks like the the phone call one just pops up when you get a phone call. And that makes sense, but like, where are those cases you want it to pop up without interacting?
13:19 Nilay Patel? Well, I think those are in apps like, uh, I'm not playing fantasy football this year. I believe David is with our staff, which is going to cause a whole mutiny. But fantasy football happens on Sunday. Like those apps should just start on Sunday afternoon and populate the island and tell you how that's going. And like, maybe that's to come. I think that would be a great feature to build. It just right now, like, you know, the what the ad in the video promises you is like this like constant animation of activity. And at least so far as we've used it, you gotta like do stuff first.
13:51 David Pierce? Yeah. Well, and there there is like what you just described is in an interesting way, like a low touch notification system, which I could actually kind of get behind. It's like, what if your dynamic island was like the ticker at the bottom of a news TV show? Like, I don't know if that's a good idea or a terrible idea, but it's like, there's a version of this that turns into something like that. And I think.
14:11 Alex Cranz? But isn't that a notification?
14:13 David Pierce? Well, that's what I mean, right? But like, what if it didn't like buzz your phone or come up over top of what you were already doing? It just sort of like appears in there that it's like, what if it just says like touchdown and then goes away?
14:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's just an out like we have to get it. We have to use it. We have to feel it out. I'm basing this off of 45 frenzied minutes of hands on time and a handful of conversations, but it's rare that there's any distance between Apple showing software in an ad and then what it is. And here they're just like a lot of distance, actually.
14:43 David Pierce? Yeah.
14:43 Nilay Patel? Because they keep showing you the expanded widget view in those ads.
14:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:47 Nilay Patel? And that you actually have to know how to get those.
14:50 David Pierce? Right.
14:50 Nilay Patel? And like that to me is the first one is like, you're going to show people that expanded view. It should be really easy to get those because that's like the promise of the whole thing. Is you you kind of get these like that area like minimized widgets. That area populates itself automatically with useful minimized widgets that quickly get you to controls. But right now you tap on it, you just like bomb into the app.
15:12 Alex Cranz? How excited were people at Steve Dove Theater about the dynamic? Because I at home was very excited. That was the thing. People called me and were like, what phone should I get? And I was like, get this one because you get the dynamic island. And they're like, why? Why do what are you talking about, Alex? I'm hanging up now. Were people excited?
15:29 Nilay Patel? I mean, there was a room full of like press people and YouTubers. Like, of course, we were all excited. We're like, this is the thing we have to put a camera.
15:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but I think it's like when you're in that room, everybody has some feature that they're like, OK, I got to go check out the camera. Or like the year where slow motion camera, everybody was like.
15:44 Nilay Patel? So the the fight here was the the island and the Apple Watch Ultra. And like the poor iPhone 14. The the people tasked with like showing off the iPhone 14 were like, would you want to see this one?
15:55 Alex Cranz? 13, but with a new name.
15:57 Nilay Patel? And they're like, this one, it comes in a slightly different color. Everyone's like, I took one picture, I'm good. Moving on.
16:02 David Pierce? But I do think there was something to actually like touching the thing in a in a funny way because it's like it makes for a great on screen demo because and like Apple immediately got a bunch of credit from people for like leaning into the notch. And I think it's like sort of funny that Apple is getting credit for that now because Apple has always done that like.
16:21 Alex Cranz? Disagree.
16:22 David Pierce? When the notch first came out, Apple made all this noise to developers who were using the full frame screen in their screenshots. And Apple was like, absolutely not. The notch has to be everywhere. Like normalize the notch was like Apple's thing for a long time.
16:36 Alex Cranz? Apple was really bad about pushing like their own software design was often scared of the notch, right? Like, like.
16:44 David Pierce? Yeah, that's definitely true. And it largely tried to pretend it didn't exist, but like.
16:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I think they were really messy with the notch for years. And this is like, I think the software choice they made here was really smart and good. Even if some elements of it, like having to long press to open it is really stupid.
17:00 David Pierce? Yeah, no, I think that's right. And to turn it into software was very clever. I think I totally agree with that.
17:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like that was like, oh, wow, Apple's doing it right.
17:07 David Pierce? It just feels nifty. Like, there was just something about you just you just press on the thing and it like bubbles around. It feels alive in a very cool way.
17:14 Alex Cranz? Like, you made an Instagram video and I kept watching it while I was working on my dynamic island piece. Just the clip of like the island itself. I was just like, that's just neat. Like, that just looks fun.
17:25 David Pierce? It is. And I think, like, I just love this thing that Apple is doing where it's like, what if your phone wasn't just like a large collection of apps on a home screen that you do things with? So like, anything that feels livelier than that makes me very happy. And this is like, like, I agree with Neil I that there's going to be a bunch of decisions developers have to make. And I've talked to a couple of developers in the last few days who are very confused about what they're going to do in their apps with this stuff. Because there's a lot of things you can do and like no expected behavior for it. So folks are going to take a while to figure this out, but I think it's going to be the kind of space people are going to play with.
17:56 Alex Cranz? Do you use this in a weather app and like Carrot right now will send you a notification if it's about to rain? Is that going to now pop up on the the dynamic island, the notch?
18:06 Nilay Patel? I think the answer is no. I think those are still notifications. Like, again, I think the way to think about this stuff right now is minimized widgets.
18:13 Alex Cranz? I think widgets are themselves kind of notifications, right? Like, like, Apple's been using notifications as widgets to some extent for a long time. And then they just keep like changing the name of notifications and tweaking the functionality to be like, here's a new fresh type of notification. It's called widget. Here's a newer, fresher type of notification. It's called the dynamic island.
18:34 David Pierce? Well, yeah, this is where like live activities figures in too, because it's all there's now this like wild spectrum of rectangles you can put on your phone. And they all do slightly different versions of sort of the same thing.
18:45 Nilay Patel? So as you've been playing with iOS 16, that seems like the most important new part of the whole operating system.
18:52 David Pierce? Live activities?
18:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So that's the new kind of widget where if you are following sports on ESPN, it'll like live populate the score.
19:00 David Pierce? Yep.
19:01 Nilay Patel? That, to me, is like, ages ago, Josh Topolsky wrote, in Apple's world, it's always 72 and sunny. Because the weather app wouldn't just tell you the temperature and it's like they finally got all the way there, right? They're like finally got all the way to apps can actually write to the screen in these things called live activity widgets.
19:17 David Pierce? Almost all the way there. They're still slightly afraid of their developers in that sense, but it's, it's, it's pretty close. And I think it's a huge, huge, I mean, the thing that you can't interact with widgets still drives me insane, right? Like widgets are still functionally like app shortcuts. So that to me is like the last real thing that I want where it's like it can write to the icon, but I can't talk back to it without opening the app. That's the one move Apple still has not made. And dynamic island stuff seems like it could have done more of that, too. And instead they're just like, even they still want you to go to the app. Like, part of me wonders how much of this is that like, Apple knows developers want you to open their app. And so Apple is petrified of anything that is going to like meaningfully depreciate the amount of time people spend opening apps.
20:02 Nilay Patel? Oh, interesting. Yeah. I will see. Like, we gotta get the thing. Again, we're basing this off of a vanishingly small amount of time. And by the way, this event was wild. First event in the Steve Jobs Theater in three years. We were still watching a video, which was weird. I think it's time to let that go. Apple loves it because the video streams and it travels and people cut it up. And like, if you're playing to the internet, it's better. But there's still something lost. It's also way harder to live log a video.
20:26 David Pierce? It just moves so fast.
20:27 Nilay Patel? No one ever takes a breath.
20:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
20:29 Nilay Patel? They should just put like breaths and applause breaks in time for people to walk on and off the stage back in the video. Maybe I'll be happy. It doesn't matter. We're there for the hands on. We're there to talk to people. But it was, it was just the, you know, a full theater, the big crowded rush in the room, everyone running around. That part of it was great.
20:47 David Pierce? Yeah, it was. And it was like, the energy was super high. And we talked about this at WWDC, too. There is just like, again, it's a very self-selecting group of people who come to these things. So it's like people who are predisposed to be excited about new technology, I would say. But
21:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:01 David Pierce? There was still this like, first day of school energy again, where it's like, people are just like pumped to be back, excited to be able to like see things and try them and run around and talk to people. And folks were, folks were amped to be back doing this kind of stuff, which was, which was very fun.
21:15 Nilay Patel? We've done like 25 minutes on the island.
21:17 David Pierce? I'm good with that. That feels right. Like the iPhone 14, it's an iPhone. The end. Let's talk more about the dynamic island.
21:23 Nilay Patel? Well, the dynamic island is connected to the rest of the iPhone 14 Pro, of which the two other notable features are the always on display, which welcome, Apple. You know, Apple claims, you know, that they did a lot of work, that they got the refresh rate down to 1 Hz. They have a new kind of LPTO OLED display that allows lower power. They could have done it before. They're waiting to invent the things they needed to invent. You can just believe whatever, you just take whatever you want out of that and believe what you need to believe to make this okay. But they're, they finally have shifted and always on display. It doesn't, it's strange. Like it's more widgets, right?
21:59 Nilay Patel? Like, why is the display always on? It's to show you more widgets and show you more status information. They do really cool things with it. Here's my favorite one. So when the display goes to its like low power state, you know, in iOS 16, they're doing the cool thing where the, they can cut out faces and put them over the clock. When they go to the low power mode, they reverse it. So the clock fades up over the face. And then when you tap on the screen, it goes, the face comes back in front of it. It's neat.
22:24 David Pierce? That's cool.
22:25 Nilay Patel? They're doing all this like image management stuff for the wallpapers. So when it goes into that super dim low power mode, they actually preserve skin tones and colors in different ways. It's like they're doing a bunch of Apple stuff, you know, that maybe other companies are doing too, and just don't talk about as reverently as Apple talks about, but they're doing a bunch of Apple stuff.
22:43 Alex Cranz? But how long has it been since Samsung did an always on display? Five years?
22:48 David Pierce? Maybe longer. Like it's, they've had, Android phones have had this forever.
22:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Cause if you have an OLED display, you can just like cut the power and pixels stay static. But Apple's doing it with like some amount of color. Like I think the very first always on OLED displays actually went to black and white, right?
23:02 Alex Cranz? The date and the time. That's it.
23:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So Apple's doing far more than that. So I think they, they waited to some extent to just like do far more than that. But really you tap on the thing, the display lights all the way up and you get, it's interactive again. If it's in your pocket or upside down, it goes totally off.
23:17 David Pierce? Yeah. They do seem to be really leaning into the idea that if you don't want to look at your phone, flip it over, that that is like a, an unexpected societal behavior now, that it's like, your phone is going to sort of always be staring at you. And if you don't want that, put it away. Which I very much appreciate. Like as a, as a flip the phone over on the table person, uh, I very much appreciate that.
23:37 Alex Cranz? It kind of reminds me of, did you guys watch Hold and Catch Fire? Best show ever made. And there's this whole thing where one of them becomes a VC. Whenever she sits down, she has one of those Jaeger LeCoultre watches that like just flips over. And when she flips it over, she's like, I will listen now because I'm not paying attention to the time.
23:56 David Pierce? It's like, oh, okay. Now I care about you.
23:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it was the best thing in the world. And Apple's like, we see this. We love it. You can do this, too. Everyone should have this power move. Just be like, now I care about you. I flipped my phone over.
24:08 Nilay Patel? Okay, so that's always on display. We should talk about the camera.
24:11 Speaker 06 A 48-megapixel camera with a quad-pixel sensor features our second-generation SensorShift OIS and 100% focus pixels.
24:22 Nilay Patel? The camera's pretty interesting. And then in some ways, like, right, it's still going to deliver you 12-megapixel photos. So it's a 48-megapixel sensor in the Pro. They're pixel-binning it in standard mode. So, you know, they're going to use four pixels to generate one.
24:38 David Pierce? Can you explain what pixel-binning is? It's one of those things that I like, I'm like 35% sure I understand what pixel-binning is. Can you explain what pixel-binning is?
24:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so you've got 48, I mean, imagine a grid. Actually, the pixel pattern on this is probably not a grid. They said they have a new pixel pattern on the sensor and they had to like tweak their algorithm. So I don't know what the pattern is, but just for the purposes of this, imagine a grid. And so what you could do is use every single pixel as a pixel represented in a photo. And you can do that in ProRAW and you generate a 57-megabyte file per photo. So you get all the data back out of the thing. That's not useful for most people, especially those file sizes. And most people are sharing Instagram anyway. So what Apple and everyone else with big sensors do is actually say, we're going to use four of those pixels to collect all the light we can and then sample them down
25:30 Nilay Patel? to one pixel. So you've bin the pixel. And that's how you end up with a 12-megapixel photo out of a 48-megapixel sensor.
25:36 Alex Cranz? So it's not just cropping, like when you're using a DSLR?
25:41 Nilay Patel? Well, hold on, my friend.
25:45 Nilay Patel? So like, that's the standard wide camera mode, right? So, you know, on the iPhone 14, they said they've made the pixels on the 12 megapixel sensor slightly bigger to collect more light. At some point, you just like run into the limit of doing that at scale. And it's better to just have more individual pixels and sample and combine them to get more light.
26:04 David Pierce? Fair enough.
26:05 Nilay Patel? Cool. So that's like the standard wide camera 1x mode. Then Alex, the 2x mode, they are cropping the sensor. And they're saying, because the sensor is so big, that at the crop, it's still a true 2x zoom, which is a huge claim.
26:21 Alex Cranz? Yes.
26:21 David Pierce? Yeah, do we buy that? I feel like I am trained to think that's just cropping.
26:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, our video producer, Veron, was like outside. And like, I heard him like hiss.
26:33 Nilay Patel? I don't know. We'll see, right? We gotta get the thing. But they're saying that they can do that move too, which some other phones do, some other phones don't. Right? Like, we're figuring out what to do with the huge sensor or something phones. We're not, we're not firing out 96 megapixel images to people. Everyone is cropping and binning in different ways. Then the last thing you can do is the action mode that they've added to the video camera, where they use the whole sensor and then they do that dynamic cropping. Right? So they like pick an object in the frame, they're gonna hold that steady, and they're gonna move the frame around it inside of the sensor area, which, again, we have to see.
27:07 David Pierce? And that's what they're using to stabilize motion. And I actually think if that's as good as it looked in that demo, where it was like the sort of camera running behind a runner, and on the left, it's ultra shaky, and on the right, it was super still. If that's that good, that's gonna be like a gigantic improvement for a lot of people who make video. Because it's the kind of thing that is like, everybody buys these wacky gimbals and does all kinds of crazy stuff. And if that is like an even like B plus solved problem now, that's a really big deal. But it is also the kind of thing that we have seen in the past is really hard to do without all that like hideous warping and really ugly artifacting as people move. Like, that's one thing I'm very curious to see the test results of.
27:45 Alex Cranz? Well, that's like a problem that Sony's faced too, right? Like, because they've tried to do that kind of stuff with video. And it always, you get that warping motion.
27:55 David Pierce? It's really hard to do.
27:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's super hard.
27:57 Nilay Patel? So we'll see. And they brought that same mode to the iPhone 14, which has a regular 12 megapixel sensor. So we'll see if they're even different, right? Because they're still shooting 4K video, which is only the same area on the sensor. We just kind of don't know. But yeah, they're using the 48 megapixel sensor on a Pro in like several different ways. Like, there are modes that it goes into. One is the like pixel bind. It's actually just a gigantic 12 megapixel sensor. The other is the cropped. We cut it down and we're using 12 megapixels out of the middle. The other way is this like action mode. And then that you can switch it in a pro and just like use it as a 48 megapixel sensor, which will generate gigantic images of which we will have to like look at and see if you lose anything by not pixeling them.
28:42 Alex Cranz? So they're really like, these are all, I mean, I don't know about phones as much, but these are all methodologies like Sony's been using for years and it's DSLRs to like.
28:51 Nilay Patel? Oh, and Samsung and like everybody, like, Apple is two years, three years behind the let's put a big sensor and use it in funky ways trend. Certainly, the, you know, like the S phones have had this for a while. Huawei phones have done this for a while. Like, like the trend is you can only make the pixels so big or pack them so densely before you start introducing errors or bad pixels. So your better move is to pack in more pixels and then, and then bin them. And that's like what we've been seeing across the industry. So Apple's like coming to it. We have to see what sensor they're using, right? They have traditionally Sony sensors. We don't know if they're still using this. Like, there's a million things you got to figure out, but
29:32 Nilay Patel? it's funny because it's like now known. Like, I know what to go review it against and how to review it because they're late. But it seems like they are doing at least a couple more interesting things.
29:41 Alex Cranz? All right, I'm gonna ask you a question as that I get from my mom every year. She's asked me this question every year for the last seven years and I hate it. And so I want to pass on the pain to someone else. Which will be better for her to take photos? This phone or her digital camera from 2003?
29:59 Nilay Patel? The phone. That answers, what are you talking about? That, that answer is like five, five years out of date.
30:05 Alex Cranz? I just needed this, this so I can send it to her to maybe finally get her to stop using that digital camera.
30:12 David Pierce? Is she recording onto like mini VHSs?
30:14 Alex Cranz? No, she's got like, she's got like a CF card in it. And it's a crappy, like, it's like a Canon point and shoot from 2003.
30:22 Nilay Patel? Right. That thing has like a, like a posted, like not even a posted. It has like a quarter inch sensor.
30:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
30:28 Nilay Patel? And has a slow lens and she probably zooms with the slow lens and makes it even slower. Right? Just like throw that, like go to her house and just like throw it away and just like leave an iPhone 12 in its place and the iPhone 12 will be massively superior to this thing.
30:41 Alex Cranz? No, I have to, I have to give her this, this audio clip.
30:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah. What's your mom's name? I can address her directly.
30:47 Alex Cranz? Phyllis.
30:48 Nilay Patel? Phyllis, let me talk to you. Uh, settle in. Uh, throw away your camera and buy any modern cellphone. It will be faster and better for you and you'll be able to more easily share photos with your daughter.
30:58 Alex Cranz? Thank you. It's like little postage stamps.
31:01 David Pierce? That's another thing Apple did actually is put in faster aperture lenses into, I think all four of the phones.
31:07 Alex Cranz? Oh, really?
31:07 David Pierce? I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure every lens is faster. And that's another one of those things that is like the kind of thing most people don't notice, but just like instantly makes all of your photos slightly better. I'm very excited about that.
31:17 Nilay Patel? And then they added, I think they did this just to troll me. I gotta be honest with you. I'm pretty sure they did this just to troll me. They were like, remember deep fusion? And they literally showed a picture of a person wearing a sweater.
31:27 Alex Cranz? Yes. That was just all for you.
31:29 David Pierce? Sweater mode.
31:30 Nilay Patel? What are we doing? And they're like, we've moved deep fusion earlier in the process of taking the photo.
31:36 Alex Cranz? Oh, sure.
31:37 Nilay Patel? And now we are calling that the photonic engine. Sure. Like, sure. Here's this thing that no one understood anyway. Like, do you remember when they're like, deep fusion is here and they rolled it out? And you're like, what does it do?
31:51 Alex Cranz? Sweaters.
31:52 Nilay Patel? But it like perceptibly does very little. And maybe it's, maybe it's doing a lot and it's generating like a 5% change. And that's very Apple to make a big hype about it. But, you know, but like, this is like, they moved it earlier in the process. And then the claim is that all these cameras will perform better in low light because deep fusion is earlier in the process.
32:09 Alex Cranz? Okay.
32:10 Nilay Patel? So it's up to 2X better on the front camera in low light. Against what, by the way, unspecified. So it's up to 2X better on the front camera, the telephoto and the main camera. And apparently it's up to 3X better on the ultra light.
32:27 David Pierce? Up to 3X better. Not, it's not necessarily three. It's just.
32:30 Nilay Patel? But against what? Last year's phone, the first iPhone, who knows?
32:34 David Pierce? Do you think they're comparing it to Phyllis's digital camera? Yeah. Phyllis is just out there shooting.
32:39 Nilay Patel? We have a Canon Elf SD 400. And, uh, it's up to 3X better than that.
32:45 Alex Cranz? Boom, buy it.
32:48 Nilay Patel? I had a Canon Alpha SD 400. That camera, that camera got me through a lot of nights at the bar. That's actually why you bought those cameras. You're like, one day, someone will spill a beer fully on this.
32:58 Alex Cranz? It'll be fine.
32:59 Nilay Patel? It'll be fine. Yep. Yeah. And then they added some video features, right? So the cinematic mode can add you 4K 30 and 4K 24. I tried to test this out. I will tell you that cinematic mode does not like being in a room with hundreds of faces. It just lost its mind. Like, again, tremendously unfair, right? But it was like, who, who, who should be blurry? I don't know. I'm freaking out. So we'll try it again when we get a review.
33:23 Alex Cranz? Cause it just focuses like on one face. It's like facial.
33:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And it tries to blur everyone out. So it just like couldn't decide who I cared about, you know, like, yeah, which of these people should be in focus?
33:33 Alex Cranz? So is it like the visual representation of smart homes having to decide who, who to listen to when you, they adjust the temperature?
33:41 Nilay Patel? It just, it just, and the poor person in the demo was like, it's not gonna work.
33:45 Alex Cranz? Don't even try.
33:46 Nilay Patel? I mean, look, I, I think the pro is great. I'm excited to review it. Like orders are now. I'm sure people are gonna, regardless of whatever review says. The thing to me though, is I'm, I'm just watching our gif that we clipped out of the video. And it's like, they show the big widget a lot.
34:02 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And it's actually not, it's not the user flow that you would expect in, in using it. And that's the cool part, right? Like you've got the airplane app. Boy, do I have thoughts about airplane app design. Like airlines, if you're listening, like, I've been on a lot of different airlines in the past couple of days. All of them are bad.
34:22 Alex Cranz? You got feelings.
34:23 Nilay Patel? But like the cool one, right? We, you, you got your flight coming and you're like, it opens and it shows you the plane flying over the thing and estimated time. Like, that stuff is amazing. And it's not actually what happens. Like you tap on it, it's gonna kick you into an app. So I think that's the flow that needs to get figured out.
34:38 David Pierce? You want the dynamic island to just show your plane flying from one end of the island to the other?
34:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:44 Nilay Patel? Well, I just, it's neat that that's what they're showing. Like, yeah, that's the cool part about this is you got these little minimized widgets and you tap them, you get the big widget and they look really cool. Right? Yep. And like, there's a reason they're showing it. They're not showing you bouncing into the American Airlines app.
35:01 Nilay Patel? Which is just one of the worst experiences you can have as a human being. They're like, no, here's a cool animation that shows you what you need right away. And like, I think they'll, I think they'll get there or they'll give you, they'll give me a switch.
35:13 David Pierce? Real quick, before we take a break, one more question on this. I was debating this with somebody the other day. I'm curious what you guys think. Do you think people know, like the average iPhone user, that you can even long press on stuff to find more information? Because like the, the edit message thing is coming in, in messages and that's underneath the long press. And like, Apple is increasingly doing more and more of these features and putting them under long presses. And my stance is basically like, as soon as you do that, you assume 95% of your users are never going to find it. But I've talked to people who were like, no, people know.
35:44 Nilay Patel? No, they had 3D touch. Remember they had pressure sensitive screens and they were useless and they threw them away. This is a company that still will not ship a multi-button mouse.
35:54 Nilay Patel? Right? Because they, at their core, believe that everything should be on the surface of the interface. And then the phone is like right clicks for days. Like all, all this is, is right clicking.
36:03 David Pierce? Yeah.
36:03 Nilay Patel? Right? Like at a very basic level, they've added right clicks to the phone. And it's cool if you're like, all right, my mouse has 10 buttons. Like, I love an alternative click, but most people like will never find it.
36:15 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's right.
36:16 Nilay Patel? I think a lot of the, the dynamic, they should have called it the dynamic notch. I think they wanted to get away from the word notch. And so here we are at Island. I think all of the Island stuff is right clicks. And like they, they just need to flip that around. We haven't talked about this other phone at all. We should, we'll take a break and talk about the other phone.
36:33 David Pierce? Who cares?
36:35 Nilay Patel? We're gonna take a break. We're gonna have that argument in the background.
36:39 Nilay Patel? We'll be right back.
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38:08 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. We have to talk the iPhone 14 Plus, which is a very minor improvement over the 13.
38:13 Speaker 08 iPhone 14 also has an updated internal design that improves thermal performance, which is great for staying in the action longer.
38:22 Nilay Patel? Processor from last year's Pro, the A15 Bionic. Cool. Minor upgrades to the cameras. Cool. Faster lenses, mostly. The photonic engine.
38:31 David Pierce? Extra sweater mode. Super sweater mode.
38:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
38:33 Nilay Patel? Super sweater mode. And, oh, we didn't talk about this Pro at all. It's got the satellite thing.
38:38 David Pierce? Yep.
38:38 Alex Cranz? Which is a subscription, right?
38:40 Nilay Patel? Well, they get it free for two years.
38:42 Alex Cranz? And then you have to pay for it.
38:44 Nilay Patel? And then you have to pay for it.
38:45 Alex Cranz? Or buy a new phone.
38:46 Nilay Patel? Buy a new phone and get it for free.
38:47 David Pierce? Can we actually talk about this? Because I have been trying to decide since this event whether or not this is actually cool. Because it's one of those things that like, one of the themes of the Apple event was the apocalypse is coming slash you are going to get lost in the woods very soon.
39:03 Nilay Patel? You're gonna be in a car crash and a computer should know about it.
39:06 David Pierce? Yeah, like, but like, it's coming. It's like, it's next week, you're gonna get in a car crash. Apple can't tell you how it knows, but it knows.
39:12 Nilay Patel? Can I just, can we talk about the one weirdest piece of staging at this whole event?
39:16 David Pierce? Sure.
39:16 Nilay Patel? Utterly bizarre. So, first of all, lots of car crashes at the Apple event.
39:21 David Pierce? So many.
39:22 Nilay Patel? Every product introduction was accompanied by a video of a car crash, straight up. And then they would say something like, "We hope you never have to use this feature." And it's like, shit, me too.
39:31 David Pierce? And then you started running around asking executives how many cars they crashed and nobody would answer your question.
39:38 Nilay Patel? Okay, but here's the weirdest one in the Apple Watch segment, which we'll talk about. They were like, here's a bunch of letters that people have written to Tim Cook about how the Apple Watch like saved their life.
39:46 David Pierce? I placed my Apple Watch on his wrist and I couldn't believe my eyes. An atrial fibrillation notification popped up. Holy cow.
39:55 Alex Cranz? Aww.
39:55 Nilay Patel? And they got the actual people to read the letters, like recreate the letters. It was like very moving, right? People are like, and it's the stuff that you would expect. My heart started racing, my friend's heart started racing. I went to the doctor. They were like, thank God you're here.
40:09 David Pierce? There was also a guy who had a bear in his house, just to like, it was a wide spectrum of things.
40:13 Nilay Patel? But like familiar in the scheme of the Apple Watch saved my life, except maybe for the bear. Then there's a woman who was like, I was in a plane crash and I came to and like the, I pushed a button on my watch and it was like, but they, because it was a recreation, they had her sitting in a crashed plane. And I was like, did you take a plane crash survivor and be like, sit in, we built a crashed plane for you to sit in for our, like, it was just bizarre. Like, that's too much.
40:46 David Pierce? Or the guy who was like, I almost got crushed by the trash compactor in my garbage truck, standing there reading it into his garbage truck. It's like, it's like, man.
40:54 Nilay Patel? That one made sense because the garbage truck was like functional, right? He was like back at work at his, with his truck. This was like, they had to make a plane crash. Well, there's two choices here. Someone built a plane crash and they had a physical plane crash set or, you know, the crack Apple TV production company was like, sit on the screen, screen, we're not going to tell you what happens. And they matted in a plane crash.
41:19 Nilay Patel? Either way, it's like someone had to make a plane crash for this poor woman to sit in. We're far away from satellite connectivity. I just, it jumped out to me so immediately.
41:27 David Pierce? Yeah.
41:27 Nilay Patel? Like you took a plane crash provider, like I need you to sit in this plane crash and tell me how the watch saved your life. I can't even imagine what that day of shooting was like. Let's just talk about that for the rest of the show.
41:36 Alex Cranz? That's just very traumatic for a person.
41:39 Nilay Patel? Oh, she seemed happy. Who knows? So this was like the theme as David was talking about, right? The watch can detect a car crash, the phone can detect a car crash. If you're lost somewhere, you can hold up your phone and connect. We think we've learned that company's Globe Star.
41:52 David Pierce? Oh, interesting.
41:53 Nilay Patel? So in our, in our preview episode, we're saying there was, there's a big spectrum of ways a phone can connect to a satellite. One is cell towers in space, full connectivity. There's a bunch of companies doing that, like Lincoln others. Another is Starlink, which is basically cell towers in space. They're doing that with T-Mobile in a slightly different way. And then all the way down the line is very low data transmission in emergencies. And Apple went with very low data transmission in emergencies. So you can only send text messages in an emergency and that's it. And you can only really send text messages, I understand it, to emergency services.
42:27 David Pierce? Right. It's, yeah, it is, it's the equivalent of like the thing when you don't have any service, but you can call 911. It's like, that's, that's essentially what it's just sort of expanding out. And there was a line in it where he was basically like, we've done a bunch of work to shrink the size of a message down to a third of its normal size, which is already like a hilarious thing because a text message is like not a large thing. And he was like, so you can send a message in as little as 15 seconds. It's like, wait.
42:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And you need perfect line of sight to the satellite. So Starlink, eat your heart out, right?
43:00 David Pierce? Yeah.
43:01 Nilay Patel? This isn't, a tree might be in the way. It's the phone puts up UI that's like, here's the satellite. Point your phone directly at the satellite, holding it up in the air. And then effectively the UI is like clippy for emergencies.
43:15 Alex Cranz? That feels like not super productive. And like you have to text someone?
43:18 Nilay Patel? Right. So the idea, so when I say it's clippy for emergencies, they're like, we've built this system of common messages and replies you might want to send, which I think is how they're doing some of the compression.
43:30 Alex Cranz? Mm hmm.
43:30 Nilay Patel? Right? They're like, they, they have known messages and they can
43:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
43:34 Nilay Patel? send codes instead of the messages. So it's like, even in an accident, like, do you need help? And then you like push one and like go. And then if the emergency service provider that's near you doesn't accept text messages, they have relay stations where people receive your text messages and call the emergency services for you.
43:51 Alex Cranz? Okay. Cause that was the part, like generally speaking, when you don't have connectivity, it's because you're in a more rural place where emergency services probably are not as often technic, technologically advanced. So the likelihood of like them having the ability to receive your text messages in Abilene, Texas. Small.
44:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so we don't know. So I've seen a lot of reports that Apple's partnered with GlobeStar for this, even some reports on how much they've paid GlobeStar to do this, right? Like, we gotta confirm all those details of how it works. But like, who sits in the relay center is an open question, I think. Is it Apple? Does Apple staff a bunch of relay centers? Is it like GlobeStar, they're in a contract and they say they're Apple? Like, lots of details there. But fundamentally, it's you're in an accident, you don't have connectivity in the middle of nowhere. If you can point your phone at the right spot in the sky, you can have a sort of scripted conversation that gets you help.
44:43 Alex Cranz? Does it only activate if you're in an accident? Like, if the bear is in your house, how do you?
44:48 Nilay Patel? I don't think there's any situation in which you buy an iPhone 14 just in case in your off-the-grid house a bear enters, and then you point it at the sky to text emergency services.
45:00 David Pierce? Bear here.
45:01 Alex Cranz? Well, no, that's so I was just like, how do you activate? How do you activate that emergency thing? The use case you're talking about is somebody's in a crash. And Apple's talked a lot about like, well, we can detect crashes now. But when are the situations where you aren't in a crash, but you do need emergency services?
45:16 Nilay Patel? And you can just hold down the button on your phone, just like now.
45:19 David Pierce? Yeah, I believe it's it's not connected to the like crash detection and stuff, that it is a separate thing.
45:25 Alex Cranz? Okay, so it's just like an individual thing and you can be like, help.
45:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah. So like when you, you know, right now, if you like, hold the two buttons on your phone, you can like, go to emergency mode.
45:35 Alex Cranz? I learn new things about my phone every day on the Vergecast.
45:38 Nilay Patel? Here are your choices when you want to turn your phone off. If you hold the the volume and the power button down and you can turn the phone off, you can get your medical ID or you can do an SOS.
45:46 David Pierce? Right.
45:46 Nilay Patel? And like, picking the wrong one at the wrong time seems very fraught.
45:49 David Pierce? Which is also how babies like to call 911 by pressing all the buttons on your phone and then seeing what happens.
45:57 David Pierce? But no, the thing that's interesting to me about this is like, Investing in all the satellite stuff for like the watch Ultra, which we're going to talk about, makes a lot of sense to me because it is like a group of people who need this stuff and know that they need it are likely to buy these devices. Right, this is the kind of thing that I would assume the earth-shattering majority of iPhone users will never once experience in the entire time that they had this phone. So it was surprising to me that this was like a thing that not only did Apple build into the phone and all of the models of the phone, right? But like spend a lot of time telling us about in launching the phone. And so the like galaxy brain version of this is like, okay, what is this the like point one version of? And it's like, okay, is Apple eventually going to do? I was talking to somebody who was like, their big theory is eventually Apple is going
46:41 David Pierce? to like obviate all the carriers by doing its own fully satellite-based infrastructure.
46:45 Nilay Patel? Apple loves the carriers now. The carrier like, that is a lucrative relationship.
46:50 David Pierce? Yeah, the carriers pay for all the ads for iPhones. It's a perfect setup. But then if it's not that though, then like, what is the five-year plan here that makes this relevant to more than this teeny tiny fraction of iPhone users? Or does there just not need to be one?
47:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I don't think there was one. I think this was just like, this is a cool feature. There's not a lot going on with the iPhone 14. This is a way to differentiate it from the iPhone 13.
47:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they said the big technical achievement here is they got the antennas to switch to the satellite bands. So they didn't have to add a bulky plastic. Like, there's obviously a lot of technical work here that has been done, but the future is cell towers in space.
47:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
47:28 Nilay Patel? Right. And actually Elon, God bless Elon tweeted like, of course I've talked to the iPhone team, they're very smart. And it's like, sure you have. Who knows what you've done? Self-driving taxis will be roaming the streets of America tomorrow.
47:39 David Pierce? Two years ago.
47:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Sure. But he's like, turning a Starlink satellite into a cell tower in space is not the end goal. And that's where, that's the state of the art right now is a cell tower in space. So I think there's probably a lot of work to be done here, but right now what you've got is like klippy for emergencies.
47:56 David Pierce? Which is fine. And it does seem to be true that Apple is leaning harder into this thing that it is like the Apple Watch can save your life. Like, it's very clear that that like means something to Apple. And they're like, not only is this like a hell of a marketing scheme, but they seem to actually buy this theory that this is meaningful to people in that way.
48:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Nicole wrote about it on the site. Like, a lot of the message here is like unsupported by research fear mongers.
48:24 David Pierce? Yes.
48:25 Nilay Patel? But dressed up, right? Like, the Apple Watch can monitor your temperature, but they can't make medical claims because it's not cleared by the FDA. So who knows? The Apple Watch can monitor your blood oxygen, but it's not cleared by the FDA. So who knows? Like, a lot of the heart detection stuff that they've done, study in 2020, found led to nothing, but caused a burden in interpreting additional testing in the healthcare system. That's not discounting the fact that people have had their lives saved by the Apple Watch. But they're leaning into it in a way that they have to connect it to reality at the end.
48:59 David Pierce? Right. Life saving at scale is a very different thing.
49:02 Nilay Patel? So we start with the watches. We have not talked about the iPhone 14 Plus. Should we talk about it?
49:07 David Pierce? No, that feels right. We just, just that moment, we talked about the iPhone 14 Plus exactly as much as we should. I will say, I do think a lot of people are going to buy the iPhone 14 Plus.
49:15 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah.
49:15 David Pierce? This is the Neelai Patel big cheap screen theory, right? Like, it's cheaper than the other big one, and it's big. And it's the exact same phone as the iPhone 14. Like, great.
49:24 Alex Cranz? Very convenient that they're putting it out, and they're not doing a mini this year.
49:28 Nilay Patel? I'm telling you, ever, you can whine all you want.
49:31 Alex Cranz? They're, they're just trying to like, feed your theory. Alison will back me up on this if she's on the show again. They're just, they're, they're feeding your theory that people love big phones, but that's because they don't offer them at the same time.
49:44 Nilay Patel? Oh, I see what you mean. No, no, no. They offered both at the same time, and people still bought the big ones so much. They got rid of the little one.
49:50 David Pierce? Yeah, Apple, famous for putting out products that people don't want just to spite Neelai. That would say that. That happens a lot.
49:58 Nilay Patel? I was, we got there, and like, a lot of people there had listened to our episode, and they're like, so you want a TV, huh? Sure do. I'm just telling you, big cheap screens always win. The difference in price between the little Pro and the big Plus is 100 bucks. And like, in any irrational universe, you would upgrade and get the dynamic island and the better camera and the, all this, and everyone's going to buy the Plus instead.
50:20 David Pierce? Yep.
50:21 Nilay Patel? Without, without question.
50:22 David Pierce? Which one are you guys going to buy?
50:23 Nilay Patel? The Pro Max.
50:25 Alex Cranz? I already got the Pro.
50:26 David Pierce? Big or little?
50:27 Alex Cranz? Little.
50:27 Nilay Patel? All right. We said we weren't going to talk about the Plus, and here we are. We should talk about the watches.
50:31 Speaker 05 This is the new Apple Watch Series 8. It features a big, brilliant, always on display with narrow borders that push the screen right to the edge.
50:41 Nilay Patel? So, speaking of big, cheap screens, Apple Watch 8, huge screen. People are going to upgrade just to get the big screen. Yeah. They added a temperature sensor. They can do cycle tracking, which is really interesting. A lot of apps have done this over time. They can, they can only retroactively tell you what ovulation is. They can't predict it, which is just another one of those like, Apple's making claims right at the limit of the claims they can make. Mm hmm.
51:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:05 Nilay Patel? But they can't go farther, which is interesting. Obviously, crash detection. God only knows. If you were in a car crash and a computer doesn't know about it, Apple is mad at you. By the way, they've also fundamentally invented OnStar. Like, I went to Code and I saw GM executives, like, they just invented OnStar. And they're like, we had it all hands. And we were like, they just invented OnStar.
51:26 Nilay Patel? But the 8 looks good. I think a lot of people are going to upgrade it. Same basic chip, right? Like, not a lot of additional features in the 8, just big screen.
51:32 Alex Cranz? I think that the period and ovulation tracking is kind of a big deal for them because they've been notoriously super far behind there for years and years and years and years. And this is like, one of the biggest, like, places in wearable space.
51:47 Nilay Patel? Well, the interesting thing, though, to, you know, just looking at how they talked about it, you have to wear it while you're asleep.
51:53 Alex Cranz? Yes.
51:54 Nilay Patel? Which is, you know, they're just going to have to initiate a new user behavior. Also, temperature tracking on the wrist, kind of like Dicey, another piece of the nickel article that's great. So we'll see. It's good that they did it. It's cool. I think a lot of people find it useful. I'm just saying, as a person who had a baby, you, if you're trying to make a baby, you need to know ahead of time.
52:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah. No, I think, I think it's like, I think this is like, I don't think this is necessarily like, gonna be useful. I just think it's like, interesting that Apple is finally doing it and doing this catch up.
52:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:23 Alex Cranz? And I would suspect those temperature sensors are not just going to be used for this because there's been so much talk in the wearable space of using temperature sensors to predict illness. And they, FDA will be like, you absolutely cannot say that right now. And so I think that's like, Series nine or something.
52:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they are oceans of peer reviewed studies away from making the claims they want to make.
52:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:45 Nilay Patel? Again, they're making the claims they can.
52:46 David Pierce? Which is one of the weird things like we're used to these companies like massively over promising all the stuff that they can do. And with a lot of this stuff, it's a totally different dance where there's like, there's this stuff. And I've heard this from a lot of wearable companies where they're like, we see things, we can't tell you what they are, but we're very confident about them, but we can't legally say a certain set of words in a row about what things actually do. But if you buy one and it's useful to you for that reason, terrific. And you just come out of that conversation being like, what?
53:13 Alex Cranz? That's called government regulation working as intended.
53:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:17 Alex Cranz? Because it's keeping these companies from over promising. Because otherwise, like, Apple would be like, we can predict when the baby is coming. And you'd be like, what?
53:24 David Pierce? A hundred percent. Yeah. We're going to save your life for sure. Apple.
53:28 Nilay Patel? Again, and the fact they have to wear it overnight, like, I am not the right person to review this product. But
53:33 Alex Cranz? No.
53:34 Nilay Patel? I think, again, this is like a reveal, like, people are gonna get, here's what we know. They're gonna sum millions with them. And I think we're gonna very quickly learn how accurate the thing is. Because people are gonna talk about it. So that's the eight. I think people, just for those reasons, big screen, big, big, cheap screen. That's the upgrade. Everyone's gonna do it. The SC is really boring. They just added color to the back. And now we gotta start with the Ultra.
53:56 Speaker 05 This is Apple Watch Ultra. A completely new design, reimagined with extraordinary new capabilities that expand the ways you can use Apple Watch.
54:06 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna buy an Ultra. It's $800. Why am I buying an Ultra? I don't know. Like, the most extreme sport I do is I throw Max in the pool.
54:14 Alex Cranz? Fred Devine was like, he called me and he's like, I'm buying the Ultra. He's like a watch guy. And I was like, you're a watch guy. Why do you want the Ultra? And he's like, the tooling on it. I was like, I'm hanging up on you right now.
54:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's right. The buttons are great. The digital crown is finely knurled.
54:29 David Pierce? It's finely knurled.
54:30 Nilay Patel? It's a whole thing. Like, the way to describe the design of this thing is knurled.
54:34 David Pierce? There isn't another word. I will say, though, Apple did a pretty good job of this. This thing is enormous. Like, do not get it twisted. It is enormous. To the point where like, you can, you could see from across the room which Apple executive had an Ultra on versus a different Apple Watch. Like, unbelievably noticeable. At the start of the event, they were all wearing the regular Apple Watches. That's right. When it was announced, they all put on the big watches. Because it was that noticeable. Like, you can, you can run around with an iPhone 14 and no one's gonna notice because it's just an iPhone, right? Like, but the Ultra is, it's a big boy. But it, it's pretty light, I will say. Like, putting it on, I expected it to just like, my hand to just like, go down and make a dent in the floor.
55:14 David Pierce? Based on how big it is. But it's actually like, it felt pretty wearable in that sense. It's still bigger than I want on my wrist and bigger than I think a lot of people are gonna want on their wrist. But like, if you're used to wearing the like, dump truck of a Garmin watch on your wrist, like, this will actually feel probably better on your wrist than a lot of those, would be my guess.
55:33 Alex Cranz? Well, and I do think it like, hits that chart of people who are like, the Garmin folks, and then also the Neelys and my friends' folks, who like, just want a big watch, right? Like, big watches have always been a thing. They're very like, fashionable for, for most guys, I think. It's like, yeah, I wanna have a 49 millimeter behemoth on my wrist, whereas I'm crying over here saying, no. I can't do that.
55:55 David Pierce? You, you bring up the thing I've been wondering about. Like, yeah, right. It's enormous. But that point about like, who Apple is trying to go after here, I think is, is exactly right and is going to be very complicated. And Thomas Ricker wrote a really good story for us about this, about whether Apple can do to Garmin what it once did to Nokia, which is basically just like, iterated out of existence. Yeah. And what's interesting now is that the Ultra basically seems to be from a sort of like, hyper adventurer athlete perspective, like a mile wide and an inch deep, right? Like, it does a lot of things, but if you're, it'll, it'll do scuba stuff, but if you like, really seriously scuba, it won't do enough.
56:33 David Pierce? It, it'll do a lot of like, mountaineering stuff, but if you're a really serious mountaineer, mountaineerer, one who mountaineers, sure, uh, it won't be enough. And so I think, trying to get This overlap of like, how do you, can it do enough other stuff to make up for the sort of ultra specific stuff it doesn't do? Seems to be the pitch Apple is trying to make on this one and seems very complicated because in all, each of those little tiny niches are people willing to spend an awful lot of money, but who have a really high bar for the features that they want. And V Song on our team has been writing about this for weeks that like, to try to be all things to all people in this sense is borderline impossible.
57:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's funny. The only customization on the watch is what band you get it with. Like there's a running band, a mountaineering band and a scuba band. And it's like, that's, those are your choices. By the way, the, the bands are totally interchangeable, the existing bands. I might've horrified some people by just like clipping on my like Amazon.
57:31 Alex Cranz? Well, that was a rumor beforehand is that it wasn't going to work with the, the old bands.
57:34 Nilay Patel? No, it totally worked. It was the first thing I did and they, everyone was like, stop that. And I was like, no, I'm still doing this. But the, you know, the scuba thing, Apple isn't making that app, right? They're going out to like a dive computer company.
57:45 David Pierce? Right.
57:46 Nilay Patel? And they're letting them make the app, which is crazy, right? Like Apple, that's usually the sort of thing Apple just like sherlocks away. But they're like, we actually need the credibility with this audience that the trusted name is going to build this app for this watch. They did not do that with mountaineering or ultra marathoning or this sort of stuff. And in fact, the watch, when you use it is basically the same. Right? It's big square display. It looks like it has a really big lip around the display and it basically does not.
58:13 David Pierce? Yeah, no, it actually, you almost want it to have more because you, you just, you're, it's sort of, your finger sort of slides off the edge of it in a way that like, if I'm just running and want it to deal with, I actually want it to sort of trap at the edges.
58:26 Nilay Patel? And just like, the thing's going to be out in the world. Like you assume the face is going to get scratched if it doesn't have more of a lip, but. So like, it, it looks different in person and it plays different in person than it does on the videos. But the button, the big orange clicky button is great, right? And it's customizable, which is a big first for Apple can drop you into whatever. The thing where you roll the crown and it turns the display red, this is neat. I'm sold. I'm done. I'm buying the thing.
58:54 Alex Cranz? Like I saw that and I was like, do I need it? No. Do I want it now? Yes. Just night mode.
58:59 Nilay Patel? But other than that, like the app model is the same, right? Like it hasn't gotten more powerful. It can't do more things.
59:05 David Pierce? There's a new face. That's the, there's new watch face.
59:08 Nilay Patel? It's a complicated new face.
59:09 David Pierce? There's so much stuff on that watch face. It's nuts.
59:12 Alex Cranz? Does it like look, feel more expensive than the regular watch?
59:16 Nilay Patel? A hundred percent like.
59:18 Alex Cranz? Cause I wonder if like, maybe they, they aren't going after that Garmin crowd, but they are going after those people who buy expensive watches and want to look like, have nice expensive watches on their wrist. And most of them also get like, generally speaking, when you're getting a really expensive watch, it's got a diving computer on it, or it's got like your flight computer because secretly you're a pilot in 1942. Like it's, it's got all of that stuff. And I wonder if that's actually the crowd it's going after instead of people who run a lot in the wilderness.
59:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, it looks real fancy. And I love it.
59:57 Nilay Patel? I don't know what to tell you.
59:59 Alex Cranz? You're like, yes, it's for me.
1:00:01 Nilay Patel? It's, yeah, I'm going to buy, I'm going to pay too much money for this thing and use one tenth of it. You know what I mean? Use it for, I'm going to use it for two factor codes.
1:00:08 David Pierce? There you go.
1:00:08 Nilay Patel? The most extreme two factor codes that have been generated by any wrist computer in the world.
1:00:13 Alex Cranz? Just climb a mountain, be like, yes.
1:00:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I'm logging into my Gmail and no one else's people. Apple Watch Ultra.
1:00:20 David Pierce? All I could think during the event was how excited you must be that there are now a bit more speakers so that you can just be running around walkie talkieing with Becky all day.
1:00:28 Nilay Patel? It has an 80 decibel siren. You can do anything. So yeah, so we have people on our staff that are going to review this thing appropriately. Thomas Ricker is one of them. V is another. So we'll, we'll, we'll push on it on that front, but like the astonishing thing to me is that Apple has not, just across the board here, right? They didn't show anything else you could do with a phone. Or watch, like, the apps are all basically the same. There are, the dynamic island is fun, but it's widgets. The cameras are improved, but they're still the same cameras. Like, there was not a lot of, here are useful features. The way that, you know, for years, every iPhone event has added like,
1:01:13 Nilay Patel? meaningful daily interaction features to people. And so even the Ultra, I'm sure there, like I said, I'm buy one. I'm not, I'm the sucker, like, it looks really cool. And I'm sure people who are actually Ultra marathoners or explorers, Apple loved using the word explorers, which was great. It's like, what are they exploring?
1:01:31 Alex Cranz? What is there?
1:01:32 Nilay Patel? On the one hand, there's satellites everywhere and we can see anything. On the other hand, explorers, like old school, Magellan is buying this watch. But it's just like, I'm sure those people are interested in the features, but they're in a market where they're much more fully featured products. So it's just like, I'm still waiting on the turn for the watch, where it becomes a wrist computer, instead of like an ever larger, more complicated piece of hardware design.
1:01:56 David Pierce? Same. And we, I mean, we've talked about this on the show too, that I think like, with more screen, more battery, and essentially like more stuff you can do on it as a result. There's more you could do there. And I wonder why Apple is not necessarily pushing on some of that stuff.
1:02:13 Alex Cranz? I feel it's the battery. I'm like, just straight up, it's the battery. Like, until battery tech changes, they can only fit so much battery in this thing. In which case, like, you have to then have a processor that doesn't suck enough, like, destroy the battery.
1:02:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:02:28 Nilay Patel? I will say the screen is now so big that you can open the keyboard and like, kinda type with two thumbs.
1:02:37 David Pierce? Almost. The swipy typing kinda works. You can, you can swipe type.
1:02:41 Alex Cranz? Like, the writing typing, I do that all the time on mine. I mean, it's like, short sentences. I don't.
1:02:47 Nilay Patel? That's all Siri for me. And no one knows what I'm trying to say to them.
1:02:51 David Pierce? A nightmare. And now with iOS 16, and I think probably on Watch last night, you can dictate emojis. So now you can be running up a mountain yelling, heart emoji, thumbs up emoji, dead emoji, into your watch, which is just a life I'm very ready for.
1:03:06 Alex Cranz? It's gonna be like dancing lady emoji, dancing lady emoji.
1:03:09 David Pierce? Plane crash emoji, bear emoji, house emoji.
1:03:14 Nilay Patel? There's a bear in my plane crash.
1:03:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, look, they're so far ahead of everybody else. Like Sundar Pichai was at Code onstage running a Pixel Watch, an unannounced Pixel Watch. He was very, and I was so mad I wasn't there. Like, he wore it with white pants, so people would notice that, right? And I was like, well, the old school blogger in me like runs to get a zoom lens and is like stalking him backstage. And like, all the reporters there like didn't do it. Like Mark Gurman caught it to his credit, but the the NGadget in me, like the old school NGadget in me is like, I'm in the hallway. I've got a 200 millimeter lens. Like Sundar's not leaving here until I have a photo of the Pixel Watch. But like, you know, you can see what it is. It's a circular watch. It's gonna have a bunch of Fitbit features in it. And they're, they're, they are competing with the Apple Watch Series 5.
1:04:02 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:04:02 Nilay Patel? Like, at just a fundamental level, they are three generations behind where Apple is. And Apple, so like, it's, these complaints are minor on the edges. Right? Like, I wish they would make it more powerful. Like, but this is more powerful than anything. But it's just weird that like, you know, the theme here is like, you're gonna be in a car crash, not look at all of the things you can do with your phone. Like, it's, Apple has just like started to assume those things.
1:04:27 Alex Cranz? It's like, what if we also saved your life?
1:04:29 Nilay Patel? Right. They're going to places where they're adding features, where they're, they are themselves even saying, we hope you never use these features.
1:04:38 David Pierce? Well, and it's just like, Apple is also sort of simultaneously on this, like, reset your relationship with technology, and let's talk about screen time and focus modes, and like, let's help you disconnect and not feel so reliant on your screens. And it's like, you know, what would help is make those interactions easier on the watch, so I don't even have to get my phone out at all. I can just like leave it flipped down on the table. And that's just like, some of that is already in there, and you can do it if you want, but either Apple doesn't think it's an interesting selling point for people, or it just doesn't have any new ideas about how that stuff is supposed to work.
1:05:10 Nilay Patel? All right, we need to take a break.
1:05:12 David Pierce? Yes, we do.
1:05:12 Nilay Patel? I will quickly, here's everything you need to know about the AirPods Pro. They are largely the same. They have a slightly new driver. They have an H2 chip. They are still running Bluetooth, and they do not do lossless. And they have a little loop in the case for a linear.
1:05:24 Alex Cranz? But they do two times the noise cancelling, whatever that means.
1:05:29 Nilay Patel? Well, I think that one is the previous generation. I think that one you can safely assume.
1:05:33 David Pierce? I will say, I tried them, I spent like five minutes wearing a pair in the hands on and the noise cancelling is like good, but not great. Like all noise cancelling, like it does the job, but it's not incredible. But the pass through continues to amaze me. Like how good it is at passing through. I've used a lot of these headphones now and like that's the one place where Apple is just like leaps and bounds above everybody.
1:05:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah. By the way, the setup for the hands on, they had people with boxes of AirPods Pro.
1:06:02 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:06:03 Nilay Patel? And then so people would try them on and you would like put them away and like a fresh one would be delivered to the room.
1:06:08 David Pierce? It's wild.
1:06:09 Nilay Patel? Like lots of people with lots of boxes of AirPods.
1:06:11 Alex Cranz? So what you're saying is there's going to be a really good opportunity to buy refurbished AirPods Pro.
1:06:16 Nilay Patel? Just go to the Apple Store on campus.
1:06:18 David Pierce? If you want the AirPods that have been in Marques Brownlee's ears, that is a thing you can probably accomplish.
1:06:22 Nilay Patel? Sell them as an NFT. Let's do it. All right, we'll take the break. We'll be right back.
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1:07:44 Nilay Patel? Okay, so that was the Apple event. Obviously, you got to get all the stuff we got to review. We got to talk about it more. You have to experience the island. The other thing that happened on the same day was Tim Cook came to Code along with Johnny Ive and Larian Powell Jobs. I will just tell you this brief story about what it's like being in the room versus what it's like watching on a stream. And you could have paid to watch a stream. Code had virtual tickets. So onstage, very notably, Johnny Ive sat on one chair with Larian Powell Jobs in the middle and Tim Cook sat in another chair. Right. And Tripp Mickle just had his book after Steve about the differences between those two. It was just reported that his contract with his new firm, Love From, is not renewed at Apple. In the room, they all, they both had like entourages and they did
1:08:27 Nilay Patel? not sit near each other and they did not talk to each other. Oh, wow. I noticed that. And so like, I'm watching Tripp Mickle like clock this because he's there. And it was just like a really, that part of that dynamic, like they didn't really talk to each other. They talked about Steve. They were there to talk about Steve and that was very touching, right? And like, I believe that the values Steve instilled in Apple are still present at Apple, just the way that all three of them talked about it and talked about him and their effect on him. Steve was the first guest at what was then called All Things D with Walton Kara. And so Kara, this was Kara Swisher's final code, the last session, and she teared up at the end, which is remarkable for Kara Swisher.
1:09:06 Nilay Patel? So all that was very poignant. Then we got to the questions. So I asked a question, which, you know, you kind of know you're not going to answer sometimes, but I was like, look, you guys all said Steve would have hated social media and the divisiveness they call, these apps all run on your phone. What are you going to do? People buy the phones to run Instagram and TikTok. But if you didn't have Instagram and TikTok on your phone, like people would buy Android phones. And he was like, yeah, you know, we have screen time. That was basically his answer. Didn't he say, I'm not a TikTok expert? Wasn't that? Right. So then I asked, because the theme of Code was everyone down the line being like TikTok is dangerous. Like Scott Allen is like, we should ban it. Mathias Stoffner, who's the CEO of Axel Springer, a huge media company that owns Politico and all these other things, like it should be banned in every democracy. It's just Chinese influence.
1:09:51 Nilay Patel? He's on the board of Netflix, I think. There might be, there might be some other motive there. Um, yeah, Evan Spiegel was on stage right before. He was like, we got to compete with them, but they're under CFIUS review and like the United States government kick them out, like this whole thing. And then Tim is like, I'm not a TikTok expert. And Casey Newton is there and he's like, Apple has perfect data about TikTok. Yep. Right. It's the most popular app on their phone. They can see every purchase that's made in the app. They get a cut of all those purchases. Like, actually, he's definitely a TikTok expert. Like, this is the thing that people are using their phones for. Apple's, but they don't want to talk about it. So whatever. But ask the question, great. Then, Laquan Hunt, who is on the revenue side of Fox Media, straight up asked about RCS. Not
1:10:35 Nilay Patel? me. Love it. Right. I was like joking with Alex Heath, like, I should ask about RCS. But like, I don't think he'd answer the question, right?
1:10:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:10:43 Nilay Patel? So I tried to ask this like earthier question. But anyway, Laquan asked a question like, you know, Apple's all about connecting people and equality and all the stuff. Like, why don't you support RCS? My Android phones are green bubbles. And Tim said, I mean, he, he got like icy.
1:10:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:10:58 Nilay Patel? He said, I don't hear our customers saying we should put a lot of energy into it, which is hilarious, because no customers asked them to put energy into the dynamic island. Right? No customers like, here's what you do. Ship bad keyboards for five years. But this is his answer. Great. And then so Laquan says, well, you know, but there's videos I want to send my mom that she can't get. And he was like, buy your mom an iPhone.
1:11:18 Alex Cranz? That was like ice cold.
1:11:19 Nilay Patel? And it was very funny. The room laughed really hard. Like, it was funny. It was obviously Italian joke. But it's where Apple is, right? And like, I will tell you the story we wrote about that is neck and neck with the iPhone hands on. Right? Like, the interest in green bubbles and blue bubbles is experienced by lots of people. And so Apple being like, no one wants this is actually inaccurate, because people are experiencing the reality of some of my friends are green bubbles and some of my friends are blue bubbles and some of these videos are at lower resolution. So there's a lot of pretending that this isn't important to people. By Apple, by tech people. RCS is not important. What is important is communicating with people. What is important is encrypted, end to end encrypted messaging by default on your phone.
1:12:04 Nilay Patel? And like, if you're just gonna exclude a huge portion of phones from that by default, like, I think you should account for it.
1:12:11 David Pierce? Well, and I guess I'm of two minds about this, because on the one hand, I think if you're Tim Cook, you can accurately say you're more supportive of open messaging than pretty much any other messaging app. Like, WhatsApp doesn't fall back to SMS. You're just hosed if you're not using WhatsApp, right? Like, that just is what it is. There is no open system inside of WhatsApp. So even the fact that Apple, like, does a crappy job of supporting an open system is like one order of magnitude better than most other messaging apps. So on that level, great. I do think, it seems impossible to me that this is not something users have expressed, for exactly the reason you're describing. I think the, like, green bubble versus blue bubble thing is, like, as its own thing, totally overblown. Like,
1:12:55 David Pierce? I actually don't think that matters that much at all. It's the thing where my messages don't reliably go through, and when I try to send my wife a picture, it comes through as this teeny, tiny, little thumbnail-sized thing that looks like crap. And it's like, I don't care about whether it's RCS or if Apple just, like, does a better job of supporting MMS. Like, the underneath part of it is not nearly as interesting as the fact that, like, the only way I can share a photo with my wife is to upload it to Google Photos, and you should actually, if you're Apple-
1:13:27 Nilay Patel? Well, but you could use Signal or WhatsApp. Like-
1:13:30 Alex Cranz? But I mean, like-
1:13:30 Nilay Patel? There is that argument floating out there.
1:13:32 David Pierce? Sure, but this is my point. Like, she doesn't use those things. Like, she uses text messaging. And this should work. Like, we have a standard through which this works, and if Apple is going to support it at all, it should at least do the bare minimum to make it work functionally.
1:13:45 Alex Cranz? Tim Cook was being, like, pretty honest, like, when he said, "Buy your mom an Apple phone," right? He has zero incentive to want to put RCS. Why should he make- That interconnectivity easier for anyone like, why should he? He shouldn't. If you're running a business, there's no reason to do that.
1:14:03 Nilay Patel? And we know from various lawsuits and discovery that they have thought about putting iMessage on Android and they didn't because the answer is then people buy their kids cheap Android phones instead of giving them their old phones and upgrading, which is
1:14:15 Alex Cranz? Exactly.
1:14:15 Nilay Patel? Just callous math.
1:14:17 Speaker 00 It is their main lock-in engine. Like it really, really is.
1:14:20 Nilay Patel? In the United States, we'll qualify it. In the United States, it's definitely a main lock-in and they know that teenagers bully each other into buying iPhones because they have green bubbles. This is a real thing that happens. So yeah, it was a, it was a moment like the whole Steve Jobs thing, Lauren Pal Jobs announced the Steve Jobs archive, which you can go to, it's going to share a bunch of emails and videos of Steve that you maybe haven't seen before. Like that moment was great. And then it ended with buy your mom an iPhone, which again, it was sharp, but it was still a joke, but I think it was a very revealing joke.
1:14:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's, it was hard to come out of that thinking this will ever happen.
1:14:50 Nilay Patel? He was basically like, we're not going to fucking do RCS.
1:14:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Like he was, he was pretty clearly like, we're not doing this. Like this is a bad line of questions.
1:14:57 Nilay Patel? But, but like Amy Klobuchar was like floating around the wings being like, yeah, you are, you know? She was there. She, she talked about the whole thing. So it's code. We have lots of coverage of the stuff. I'm excited for reviews. I think the dynamic island will reveal itself to us in due time through usage. I'm excited by this camera. So that's all coming up. We gotta run. We've gone way over here as you people have demanded.
1:15:22 Nilay Patel? By the way, thank you to the people who sent nice notes to Liam. I really appreciate it. That was very nice of you. Please keep doing that.
1:15:28 Speaker 00 Also, if you have Apple questions, call the Vergecast hotline. It's 866 VERGE11 and ask us all your Apple questions. I think in two Wednesdays, we're going to do a bunch of Q and A about Apple stuff. So if you have burning questions, call them in.
1:15:40 Nilay Patel? All right. That's it. That's Vergecast. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless. Alex is Alex Cranz. David is at Pierce. We love hearing from you. Call the number, write us notes. Only nice notes to Liam. We'll see you next week.
1:15:57 Speaker 00 And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected] . The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.
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