00:00:00 ◼ ► People who are not as nerdy as us might expect us to do something really special for episode number 450.
00:00:07 ◼ ► Well, I didn't even know it was 450. So now Casey and I have this new piece of information.
00:00:18 ◼ ► No, we did make a big deal. Like, 400 is where we actually talked about the show on the show for a little bit.
00:00:23 ◼ ► But it wasn't like we did that at 100. I think we talked about it at maybe 100, 200. But 400 is a random thing.
00:00:28 ◼ ► And I feel like we did that discussion on 400 if you want to hear it. Go listen to episode 400.
00:00:34 ◼ ► And now we don't need to do it again for another, like, another 400 episodes or something.
00:00:42 ◼ ► Is this kind of like your pasta shape thing where, like, you know, you allowed one fun shape of the four?
00:00:48 ◼ ► Is this, you know, are we allowed to have, like, you know, only one celebratory episode per 100 or per 400?
00:00:53 ◼ ► My pasta shape thing wasn't allowing one shape. I was saying if you have a limited collection, at least make one of them fun.
00:01:15 ◼ ► So, when I tried the first of the four boxes, I instantly knew, oh, this is not going to be enough.
00:01:27 ◼ ► Because when you have to order pasta three months ahead of time, you got to figure, well, how many might I need, and how many might I want to, like, you know, give away to neighbors and friends to try, you know.
00:01:38 ◼ ► And, yes, I'm aware of the Fines Pechete Monster. This is, like, a whole new pasta religion, even beyond that.
00:01:46 ◼ ► I was, for reasons. But anyway, we now have a new pasta religion, and it is Cascatelli, and it is curly and delicious.
00:01:59 ◼ ► Like, it was, I think it was like early in COVID, when, you know, when some stuff you couldn't find in the stores, and we were out of a particular shape.
00:02:04 ◼ ► So, we bought it from Amazon, but the only thing they had available was, you know, a giant box of, like, 20 individual boxes.
00:02:18 ◼ ► And pasta doesn't, dried pasta tends not to go bad, unless you have some serious, like, climate and moisture control situations.
00:02:26 ◼ ► But I will warn you that one thing that can happen, and I know this is having too much in the pasta house, in the house for too long.
00:02:31 ◼ ► Is that you can get bugs, either bugs that go into it, or bugs that are already in there that sort of hatch and go through their life cycle.
00:02:40 ◼ ► I don't know what they are, kind of like these little dry, like, you'll know you do it because you won't notice.
00:02:45 ◼ ► You'll pour the pasta into the boiling water, and then all of a sudden these little insect husks will float to the top of the water, and that's how you know.
00:02:51 ◼ ► See, when you were starting, I thought you were going to say mice, which you can also get in boxes of dried pasta, but wow.
00:03:09 ◼ ► I was trying to find it, I couldn't find it. Someone tweeted Halloween pasta shapes, like little ghosts and stuff, and then someone had a follow-up tweet to that calling it spookatini, which I thought was nice.
00:03:26 ◼ ► So, hey, it is almost October, which means we're only going to do this this one last time. That's a reference.
00:03:32 ◼ ► So, anyway, we are trying to raise money, even still, on the 29th of September, we are trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
00:03:39 ◼ ► Hey, guess what? Thanks to some incredible donations, which we'll get to in a second, we are, all of us, anyone who has donated, even a dollar, that includes you, all of us are sitting at $634,000.76.
00:03:53 ◼ ► I am exceptionally proud. I think they started at like a third of a million, and we have blown past a half, and almost at two-thirds of a million dollars, so I am extremely proud of all of us.
00:04:02 ◼ ► But, hey, you know, a lot of us just got new phones, we're going to talk about that a lot in a little bit.
00:04:06 ◼ ► And if you want to feel better about your unbridled consumerism, now is a great time to go to stjude.org/atp, S-T-J-U-D-E.org/atp, and throw St. Jude a little bit of money.
00:04:20 ◼ ► Because, hey, you know what? Cancer kills more kids under the age of 14 than any other disease.
00:04:24 ◼ ► Doctors from all 50 states and around the world, non-Americans, refer their patients to St. Jude because they have the world's best survival rates for some of the most aggressive childhood cancers.
00:04:34 ◼ ► St. Jude also provides thousands of free consultations for doctors treating children, again, worldwide, not just Americans worldwide, including kids in your community.
00:04:43 ◼ ► So, hey, if you want to go to stjude.org/atp, or if you want to feel better about that crypto you've been holding onto, which, why wouldn't you, stjude.org/donate/crypto.html, these links will be in the show notes, please feel free to donate.
00:05:03 ◼ ► We know that many of you out there can't really afford a whole lot of extra expenditure, and that's cool. For you, you're absolved. For everyone else who can afford some extra expenditure here and there, and is going around buying new Apple gear on a regular basis, we know you can spare a little bit.
00:05:22 ◼ ► And so you, feel free to absolve yourself of your consumerism guilt. We know you don't really recycle all of your iPhones. We know a lot of your electronics aren't really recyclable, and a lot of the recyclables that we put in recycling bins aren't recyclable.
00:05:38 ◼ ► You can avoid all of the guilt from all of that, for a short time at least, by donating to St. Jude. Give them 70 bucks, give them 100 bucks, give them 200 bucks, whatever amount of money that you think is not just a drop in the bucket to you, but not so much that's going to hurt you and your family.
00:05:56 ◼ ► Obviously, don't overspend yourself, but whatever you can give, please give it. If you can give more, that's fantastic. If you can't give that much, but you can give something, give something. Please. It's a fantastic cause, and as we spend probably the rest of this show celebrating our ridiculous consumerism, I hope you can join us in absolving our guilt by donating to St. Jude. Thank you.
00:06:20 ◼ ► I think one other thing to keep in mind for people who, it depends on what age you are, and if you're in the tech industry, maybe you have a job and a burgeoning career that's giving you a decent income, but we all start out, most of us start out in a place where we don't have an awesome job, and maybe we have school debt and all that other stuff.
00:06:40 ◼ ► And I can say from experience that going from someone who's supported by your parents, maybe, then to someone who's just going through school and doesn't have a lot of money or maybe has student loans and stuff like that, to eventually, if you're in the tech sector, someone who's got a pretty good salary based on that education and being in the tech sector, and you've got money coming in and everything like that, it's easy to not notice that, "Hey, wait a second, I have money now."
00:07:06 ◼ ► And one thing that's part of that is, it's a thing that "rich people" do, it's like, "Oh, every year we do charitable giving."
00:07:14 ◼ ► But when you're a starving college student or otherwise don't have a lot of money, your annual charity budget is maybe not something that you think about because you realize, "What annual charity budget? I'm just trying to pay my rent."
00:07:27 ◼ ► But eventually, those of us that are lucky enough to get to a place in life with our lucrative tech jobs, where we're not living paycheck to paycheck, it's time to start thinking about what are my charitable contributions going to be for the year.
00:07:44 ◼ ► Pick charities that you care about. Pick things that are close to your heart, that you feel good about giving money to or whatever, and then every year, do that. Maybe do it around tax time, maybe do it around Christmas time, maybe do it in September when Relay has their pledge drive.
00:07:59 ◼ ► Whenever you want to do it, if you reach this level of financial security, you have to make a conscious effort to say, "Oh, I'm one of those people that gives to charities now because I am not living paycheck to paycheck anymore. I do have a good tech job. I should, every year, give to the charities of my choice."
00:08:19 ◼ ► Even if you're not doing it in September, I'd encourage you to do it on an annual basis. I encourage you to think about it. If you've never thought about it before, and you're a few years into your tech career and you've got a bunch of money but you never thought about every year giving to charity, do it.
00:08:32 ◼ ► It feels good. It's tax deductible if you care about that. You just make a habit of it. Then you can change the charities from year to year or whatever. Then if you can work, the Relay seems to fund drive into that. That's great, too.
00:08:45 ◼ ► Indeed. So finally, before we leave the subject for the very last time this year, we do have a new top donor. If you recall, our previous top donor was the fine folks at AgileBits and 1Password who donated $26,922.04.
00:09:00 ◼ ► Someone who is apparently a superfan of Thoroughly Considered, which is a very good podcast on Real AFM with our friends Dan Provost and Tom Gerhart and Mike Hurley, while some superfan donated $26,922.05.
00:09:16 ◼ ► So fine, fine listener. First of all, I respect the hustle. Second of all, if you would like stickers, please reach out. You know where to find me. Thank you so very much for doing that. Also, there was an honorable mention. There was someone who donated a tremendous something like $17,000.
00:09:34 ◼ ► And this person, I don't recall if they wanted to be anonymous, so I don't want to name them just to be safe, but they did reach out to me. And for that sum of money, I am indeed awarding them with some stickers, even though they were not the top donor.
00:09:46 ◼ ► So appeal to my good side, donate a bunch of money to a good cause and maybe you'll get some really overpriced ATP stickers. Please feel free. stjude.org/ATP. And that is the last you'll hear of this until about this time next year. But you can always donate.
00:10:01 ◼ ► And finally, thank you to all of you who have donated. I mean, this is, I mean, you all out there really did an incredible showing this year. This was ridiculously good turnout. Amazing donations, amazing generosity from all of you. So thank you so much for doing this.
00:10:19 ◼ ► We can now talk about ridiculous consumerism, totally absolved of our guilt because of your generosity. Oh, and by the way, you might have saved a kid's life. Like that's, that's really quite an impressive thing. And oh, yes.
00:10:32 ◼ ► Yeah. And we've been doing this, what? This is like the third year of the Relay Pledge Drive thing. And if you look at how much money was raised in year one versus how much was raised now, I don't know the details of Relay's business, but I think the growth in people giving to St. Jude during this pledge drive has far outstripped the growth of like people, new people listening to the show.
00:10:51 ◼ ► So what it comes down to is more people who listen to these podcasts are responding during this pledge drive thing, giving money. So everyone should be proud of themselves because it is basically like this group of people who is slowly coming around to the idea of, ah, sure, I'll get a couple bucks, save some kids from cancer. And that's awesome. We should, you know, we thank you. And, you know, let's keep it up.
00:11:09 ◼ ► Yep, very much so. All right, so let's do some follow up. We have a whole, just a smorgasbord of return related follow up. This is coming off of your excellent post show, Jon, from last episode with regard to your mouse. So do you want to run through this? Do you want me to? How would you like to handle this?
00:11:26 ◼ ► You can do it until you trip over your tongue to a degree where you're knocked unconscious, then I'll take over.
00:11:34 ◼ ► All right. So John Halter writes, I deal with returning Surface Pro tablets to Microsoft regularly, mostly smashed screens and swollen or bulging batteries. Initially, I had to send a picture of the serial number and damage. Now they require a video showing the serial number and the damage in one continuous shot. Ridiculous.
00:11:50 ◼ ► I like the idea that it has to be a continuous shot because they're afraid you're going to use editing tricks to somehow swindle them into replacing your Surface Pro. So that's another Microsoft experience in line with the video that I was asked to make.
00:12:08 ◼ ► It's something else. I mean, what's going to happen? Like if you ship the thing to them, they're going to see that you're full of garbage and they just won't refund you, right?
00:12:23 ◼ ► But anyway, Bernd Kilgo writes, I also went through the pleasure of returning an Xbox Elite Series 2 controller. Isn't that the one that Cotton Bureau bought for you? Is that right?
00:12:31 ◼ ► That is the one that I have. And I mentioned when I reviewed it that a lot of people complained about reliability problems. So keep reading.
00:12:45 ◼ ► Oh wait, Marco, you're jumping the gun here. And none of them worked. Well done, Microsoft. Good work.
00:12:57 ◼ ► Bernd says, I only buy Microsoft stuff at Amazon now and use their return system instead.
00:13:04 ◼ ► See, I did buy my mouse at Amazon, I think, so I wonder if I should have gone that route. Maybe I will next time.
00:13:11 ◼ ► All right, continuing on. Damien Shaw writes, recently my Surface headphones headband snapped.
00:13:21 ◼ ► Customer support said actually they have a one-time exception on headband snapping and they'll replace it.
00:13:28 ◼ ► After sending and waiting some time, they sent me my same headphones back saying they don't replace physical damage.
00:13:35 ◼ ► I checked with customer service and they said that the replacement team made a mistake and just went through the process again.
00:13:40 ◼ ► So I returned it for a second time and got it back a second time and then again a third time.
00:13:43 ◼ ► Eventually on the fourth attempt, the support team just stopped emailing me and I never got a shipping label to send it back a fourth time.
00:13:49 ◼ ► Also, these rather fragile headphones were shipped back to me in a large empty box with a single piece of unattached bubble wrap.
00:13:58 ◼ ► I like the idea that they're just sending the same pair of headphones back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
00:14:05 ◼ ► Also, for the record, headphones where the headband cracks or snaps, usually by the middle, where the top of your head would be,
00:14:13 ◼ ► that's a very common design flaw in headphones that use solid plastic headbands usually.
00:14:22 ◼ ► That is almost always a design defect or it just wore out usually prematurely for headphones that do that.
00:14:35 ◼ ► Alright, moving right along. Christopher Dillon writes, "Logitech made me record a video and provide a similar ridiculous quality of information,"
00:14:41 ◼ ► I think perhaps quantity was intended there, but anyway, "to return a broken MX Master which has a very well known but not officially recognized fault.
00:14:51 ◼ ► Ricky Wilson writes, "I had to go through the exact same process with Google to return a non-functioning Google Home Mini.
00:14:58 ◼ ► Long chat session, multiple photos, video of touch feature not working. Almost worth paying quadruple for an Apple HomePod Mini.
00:15:10 ◼ ► So we started off with all these Microsoft stories and like, "Boy, Microsoft has bad return things that make you do all this onerous stuff."
00:15:16 ◼ ► Now we've had Logitech and Google, I hope you're starting to see a trend here. Keep going.
00:15:20 ◼ ► Cheryl Wilde writes, "On the remote for my new Apple TV 4K, the microphone button physically clicked, but most of the time didn't actually activate anything.
00:15:29 ◼ ► Within two months, this button stopped working entirely. So I called Apple support to ask for the remote to be replaced under warranty.
00:15:34 ◼ ► Long story short, I had to provide..." Oh my God, I can't even get through this because of what's about to be said.
00:15:39 ◼ ► "I had to provide them with a sysdiagnose of 160 megs, mother of God, from the Apple TV, as well as a video of me using the defective remote to show how all the buttons were working except for the microphone button.
00:15:53 ◼ ► These had to be uploaded to Apple for their engineers to evaluate before they would decide on a remedy.
00:15:56 ◼ ► The inevitable conclusion came some days later, which was to do it in warranty replacement for the remote. You don't freaking say."
00:16:05 ◼ ► So I think what we've learned is that apparently now that companies can assume that everybody has easy access to hardware that can take pictures and videos, like they just assume that, I suppose.
00:16:19 ◼ ► Like what if you said, "Oh, I have nothing to take video with." Well, anyway, apparently everybody's doing it now.
00:16:23 ◼ ► It's not just Microsoft. Google, Logitech, Apple, and of course Apple throws in the extra little knife of like, oh, and also a sysdiagnose from your Apple TV.
00:16:33 ◼ ► This is a bad trend. I just got through saying in the last show that all the returns I've done with Apple, I just say, "Hey, my thing's broken," and they say, "Okay, fine," and they send me the new thing.
00:16:42 ◼ ► Or maybe they'll take me through one or two troubleshooting steps or whatever, but normally I preempt them on that because I've already done all the troubleshooting.
00:16:47 ◼ ► I've never had Apple ask me for a video, but apparently now that's on the table. So I don't know how long I'm going to do about this.
00:16:55 ◼ ► Maybe it's just like, well, you know, what can you do? Time marches on. They prefer to have video.
00:16:59 ◼ ► In the grand scheme of things, it's not that onerous, but I would implore anybody who makes decisions at a company about their return policies to, in cases where it makes financial sense, simply take people with their word for it.
00:17:12 ◼ ► When they say their thing is broken, there's no moral hazard here. They're not recreationally calling you and returning items. That's not a fun thing to do.
00:17:20 ◼ ► Nobody does that voluntarily as some kind of scam, or if there is some kind of scam angle, surely your video is not going to stop that scam angle.
00:17:28 ◼ ► Just get your people off the phone sooner. You know, you don't have to pay people to be on the phone for an hour to go through all these troubleshooting things.
00:17:35 ◼ ► You don't have to worry about debugging the problems. Well, I took the video, but I can't upload it and I can't find the file and it's taking too little slow on my connection and it's in a codec that you can't read.
00:17:44 ◼ ► Like that can't possibly be worthwhile. Just when they say their thing is broken, maybe troubleshoot for a few seconds, let them describe the problem, write it down in their case file and send them a shipping label.
00:17:58 ◼ ► Indeed. We have an iPad mini quickie. This is via Mike Bullock Ziegler. Mike writes, "It's new iPad mini day for me. It's great in everything the reviews say, but I didn't read about this feature anywhere."
00:18:11 ◼ ► And I hadn't, Casey, I hadn't seen this either, although I think it has come out since I put this in the show notes.
00:18:16 ◼ ► "The volume buttons dynamically change based on orientation. For example, the volume button on top is always the volume up while holding it in landscape."
00:18:27 ◼ ► Although given how much I fight with iOS devices and their sort of hysteresis or whatever of not accepting that I've rotated them, because if you remember this from the original iPad, it used to be a lot more jumpy with the accelerometers.
00:18:41 ◼ ► And now they have kind of a delay where it's like, I know you might, accelerometers say you just might have changed orientation, but it was kind of like a quick jerky movement and maybe we won't rotate them.
00:18:51 ◼ ► And it just, I don't like having to sort of do, it's like the little watch gesture where you have to wake it up before the always on screen or whatever.
00:18:57 ◼ ► I don't like having to sort of intentionally do the thing to let the iPad know that I'm rotating it or the iPhone know that I'm rotating it. I wish it would just rotate.
00:19:06 ◼ ► And I worry that at least when, you know, for screen rotation, I could tell if it didn't happen.
00:19:11 ◼ ► My phone is now sideways, but the YouTube video is not sideways anymore. No rotation lock is an on. What I have to do is put it back vertical again and then rotate it sideways again. Ah, now I did it in a way that makes the algorithm happy that the accelerometer readings mean I really rotated it.
00:19:26 ◼ ► But if that affects the volume buttons and they don't notice that it was rotated, I suppose the screen would also reflect that. Or maybe it would, maybe if it was they were both landscape and one was landscape one way and then one was landscape the other way.
00:19:37 ◼ ► The volume buttons could be reversed and it wouldn't know until I started hitting one of them. And that would make me feel like something was terribly wrong with my mind.
00:19:43 ◼ ► But on paper, on paper, this sounds like a really cool feature. I just hope it works a little bit better than their screen rotation.
00:19:50 ◼ ► Indeed. Now we have some stuff about tennis. So that's your, that's your neck of the woods, John.
00:19:55 ◼ ► Yep. I was talking about the basic impossibility of a watch that is on your wrist being able to measure the speed that you are serving. But of course they showed something like that in the keynote.
00:20:08 ◼ ► Michael Gok wrote in to say that he looked at the keynote video and paused on that frame. And it turns out it's just the swing vision app, which we will put a link to in the show notes.
00:20:20 ◼ ► And the swing vision app uses cameras viewing the entire court to measure the speed of the little dot through moving through the camera frame.
00:20:27 ◼ ► That's how it measures how fast you're serving. And then it just puts the result on your watch. So apparently the watch is not being used to measure your speed.
00:20:35 ◼ ► The watch is being used to display the speed that was measured by a camera that was tracking the ball, which makes way more sense. We apologize for the confusion.
00:20:44 ◼ ► All right. We got a really, really good tip that I will promptly forget, especially because it's only applicable a year from now, but this is with regard to fast pre-ordering from TJ Luoma.
00:20:54 ◼ ► TJ writes, when I finished my pre-order, the last screen that said, come back tomorrow and finalize this also had a link to add the event to your calendar.
00:21:01 ◼ ► Now you're probably thinking like I was says TJ, but as I did, says Casey, that seems pointless.
00:21:07 ◼ ► Why do I need a calendar reminder for something I already know when I'm going to do it? It's not like I'm going to forget.
00:21:12 ◼ ► But TJ clicked the link anyway, and then I learned something, writes TJ. When you click that link, it downloads an ICS file for you to add that event to your calendar.
00:21:20 ◼ ► And the event has a URL with the event details that is specific for your cart or pre-order.
00:21:26 ◼ ► So when you click that link, it brings up exactly the page you need to finalize things. No clicking around needed.
00:21:31 ◼ ► Using that link allowed me to finalize my order so fast that I was even able to use my Apple card before the card pop-alips happened.
00:21:36 ◼ ► So this is, if you recall, we had said that, you know, in order to set up the pre-order, which I liked or the pre pre-order, you needed to like get it back at pre-order time.
00:21:46 ◼ ► That was a little bit confusing where it was. And you had to like go digging in your profile or whatever to go find it.
00:21:50 ◼ ► And so if you listen to TJ, you can get a URL out of that ICS calendar invite that you can download when you're done, which I thought was a very clever trick.
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00:24:00 ◼ ► I had pooped on the idea of eSIMS last episode or maybe the one before saying that I didn't think they were really worth it, blah blah blah.
00:24:07 ◼ ► It turns out my information is very old and very wrong. So Harrison Krebs was one who wrote in to correct me.
00:24:13 ◼ ► Harrison writes, "I wanted to add some eSIM feedback after this week's episode. A long suffering AT&T customer here." I feel that.
00:24:20 ◼ ► "We have used eSIMS on iPhones since they came out on the XS. Initially it was definitely a pain, but I'm happy to report that it's gotten much better, with iOS 15 especially.
00:24:30 ◼ ► You used to have to go to a physical carrier store, scan a code, and have them basically approve it on their back end.
00:24:34 ◼ ► And then all you had to do was call them and read a bunch of numbers. Now all you need is your old physical SIM.
00:24:39 ◼ ► Over the summer I was having some issues. I got an AT&T SIM and popped it in there and there was a "Convert to eSIM" setting in cellular on the phone that basically converted my physical SIM to an eSIM, no carrier involvement.
00:24:50 ◼ ► Along with this, when you get your new phone, your eSIM will automatically transfer, no calling your carrier, with no changes that you need to make on your end. It just works.
00:24:59 ◼ ► I definitely understand the initial frustration with eSIMS, but I'm happy to report it's gotten much better and this is my preferred way to deal with phones, especially the ability to transfer to your new phone without having any carrier input.
00:25:08 ◼ ► And there is a KBase article, "Hi Steven Hackett," that we will link in the show notes. So I thought that was very good stuff."
00:25:15 ◼ ► I have a little bit of stuff to add to that, but we'll talk about it when we talk about our setup experiences later.
00:25:25 ◼ ► I think it was Marco who was saying that there's probably not any raw formats for video because video is just so darn big.
00:25:34 ◼ ► Yes, uncompressed raw formats. Apparently, according to the feedback, there are actually a few raw formats for video, "Scene DNG, CINE DNG, REDS THING, and even ProRes RAW, but ProRes non-RAW is compressed and lossy."
00:25:48 ◼ ► So the implication is that these other things are not only raw, but also non-lossy compressed. Like they might be compressed raw, but they'd be losslessly compressed.
00:25:57 ◼ ► I don't know enough about the formats to know, but when you get into these super high-end cameras that cost more than a car, it doesn't surprise me that some of them might support losslessly compressed raw video.
00:26:08 ◼ ► Yeah, that actually did surprise me because that's a lot of data. That's a massive amount.
00:26:16 ◼ ► I mean, they just charge you the money for the bazillion dollar memory cards that RED uses, their magic memory card.
00:26:23 ◼ ► You ever see that? There's a whole YouTube subgenre of cracking open the RED memory cards and seeing, "Look, it's just a Samsung thing in there. Why does it cost ten times as much?"
00:26:35 ◼ ► By the way, just for reference, I don't know exactly what pixel depth we're talking about here, but if you just do the math, just for what uncompressed video means, like truly uncompressed, lossless.
00:26:47 ◼ ► Losslessly compressed, I think is the thing. Not uncompressed, but losslessly compressed, right?
00:26:52 ◼ ► Well, okay, but we know what lossless compression typically averages, and it's not great.
00:26:58 ◼ ► Usually, most lossless schemes, it obviously depends on what the content is, but you're looking at usually about 50% compression, best case or best average case at least.
00:27:18 ◼ ► If they're 24 bits, which I know there's like 10-bit raw, I don't know. Is that 10 bits per channel? Then it would be 30 bits? I don't know.
00:27:38 ◼ ► Because even if you have the space to record whatever duration you need to record at 1.5 gigs per second, it's fairly difficult to find hardware that can even write that much data at once, on a sustained basis.
00:27:58 ◼ ► Uncompressed video is so impractically massive that that's why almost nothing actually is dealing with truly uncompressed video or lossless compressed video.
00:28:08 ◼ ► Almost everything, ProRes, as you mentioned, is lossless and compressed in ways that leaves a lot of leeway for editing and everything.
00:28:19 ◼ ► I think, unless I'm just doing this off the top of my head, I might be confusing bits and bytes because of the capital B lowercase b.
00:28:25 ◼ ► But I believe the minimum specs for the SSD expansion on a PlayStation 5 is they have to be able to do 5 gigabytes per second sustained read performance.
00:28:37 ◼ ► I know that's not the same, or maybe it's write performance. Anyway, what I'm saying is solid state storage is surprisingly fast.
00:28:42 ◼ ► And the PS4 has a PCIe version 4. I know a gig a second sounds like a lot, but for a RED camera that, again, costs more than a car, it's probably within the realm of possibility.
00:28:55 ◼ ► Again, I don't know the details. There wasn't enough detail in this feedback to know whether they mean is it lossy compressed, or is it just less compressed, or losslessly compressed, or anything like that.
00:29:05 ◼ ► But, kind of like I said a couple shows ago, where the tech is slowly but surely catching up to our perception in video.
00:29:13 ◼ ► It's got probably another few decades to go before it gets there, but it's getting pretty darn close when a game console, a sub $1,000 game console, has onboard SSD storage that's measured in gigs per second.
00:29:24 ◼ ► And that you can buy it for not too much money. The expansion is an M.2 card for the PS5, and it's internal and everything, and it needs to have a heatsink.
00:29:33 ◼ ► And there are minimum specs, and when you put one in there, the PS5 will measure the performance of the thing you put in and will yell at you if it's not up to snuff.
00:29:42 ◼ ► But for only a couple hundred bucks, you can get another 500 gigs, one terabyte, of insanely fast storage in your game console.
00:29:54 ◼ ► Oh, speaking of things that will test the performance of the cards you put into them, I have a brief update on my home security camera situation.
00:30:03 ◼ ► The EufyCams that I said were pretty good. I had gotten the two-pack of the indoor cams, and I had placed both of them outdoors.
00:30:10 ◼ ► Knowing that that would probably kill one of them eventually, the second one was in a pretty good spot. It was fine.
00:30:18 ◼ ► But the one that was in a more precarious location, it turns out it did at one time finally rain sideways, and just the right way to kill it.
00:30:35 ◼ ► So, are we done with this now? Because every time you put an indoor thing outdoors and it dies and we yell at you, and you do it again and it dies and we yell at you, is this the end of this now?
00:30:56 ◼ ► I did. That's why it lasted through multiple storms. It just didn't last through all of them.
00:31:04 ◼ ► Anyway, so I replaced it with one of their outdoor cameras, and it is substantially worse.
00:31:10 ◼ ► All of the positive experiences I had with the indoor one, I cannot say the same about the outdoor one.
00:31:17 ◼ ► And so I don't want to, you know, slag on them too much because, you know, maybe I just have a bad model or maybe I have a dud or maybe my Wi-Fi doesn't reach it well enough.
00:31:27 ◼ ► But like the indoor camera in the exact same location worked so much better until it didn't.
00:31:33 ◼ ► But, you know, anyway, all this is to say I am substantially disappointed by their outdoor camera offering that I've tried so far.
00:31:39 ◼ ► And so I'm phasing that out and moving over to just more Logitech circle views for HomeKit, which has been working fine.
00:31:55 ◼ ► They only give read performance, which makes sense because most of the time you're just reading game data off of the thing.
00:32:00 ◼ ► So the write performance is unknown what the minimum spec is, but the read performance is 5,500 megabytes per second, capital B.
00:32:17 ◼ ► We were talking a couple of weeks, maybe even a few weeks back about a dock auto-hide delay and basically when we were shaming each other's docks and I said, you know, I like to auto-hide.
00:32:27 ◼ ► And Danny Tsang wrote in with some information with regard to how to decrease or, you know, all but kill the auto-hide delay.
00:32:35 ◼ ► There's a link to a different website that we'll put in the show notes, but the short, short version is we will put also in the show notes the defaults write incantations you need in order to make that happen.
00:32:51 ◼ ► So now if you wondered what do I type into terminal to make the thing that was mentioned three shows ago happen, it will be in the show notes.
00:32:59 ◼ ► Right, but you didn't say, and we also said during that segment, hey, because I asked you.
00:33:04 ◼ ► Did you decrease the delay on the animation because when you were saying you went to auto-hide, you said, no, I didn't decrease the delay on the animation.
00:33:13 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Backblaze, unlimited computer backup for Macs and PCs for just $7 a month.
00:33:23 ◼ ► I love the concept of cloud backup because there's all these possible risks that if you only have local backups like within your office or within your home, if you only have like, you know, maybe a time machine drive or a disk clone that attacks your computer, there's a whole class of problems that only cloud backup can protect you from.
00:33:57 ◼ ► You can back up all your files. Any hard drive that's connected to your computer, it'll back that up too.
00:34:02 ◼ ► So if you have like, you know, your books and storage plus like a big external drive, it'll back that up too. No problem.
00:34:14 ◼ ► If you are on the go and you just want access to your files, you can do a restore onto your phone and view your files there.
00:34:19 ◼ ► Or if you have a lot of files to restore, they can mail you a hard drive. They'll overnight it to you.
00:34:23 ◼ ► And after you restore, you can return the hard drive to them and get a refund on the price of the drive.
00:34:28 ◼ ► Now they also have this other cool service. If you're worried about accidental deletion or maybe accidental changes or ransomware, for an extra $2 a month,
00:34:35 ◼ ► you can increase your version retention history to one year. So it's just a fantastic backup service.
00:34:41 ◼ ► This is the one that before anybody sponsored us, this is the one that I chose on my own.
00:34:54 ◼ ► Go to backblaze.com/atp for a free 15-day trial with all features enabled and with no credit card required.
00:35:09 ◼ ► Thank you so much to Backblaze for keeping all my files safe and for sponsoring our show.
00:35:24 ◼ ► I'll start because I don't have much of a story. I just have one complaint. This is my wife's phone, it's not even mine.
00:35:29 ◼ ► But I was helping with the setup thing. I decided to try to do the device-to-device transfer because Goober is raving about it.
00:35:36 ◼ ► I think I've done that in past phones. I generally do the iCloud one just because it gets you a working phone, a quote-unquote working phone, faster.
00:35:45 ◼ ► Even as, you know, it used to be really bad where you'd have applications on page two that are just waiting days to download.
00:35:54 ◼ ► But the promise of device-to-device was like, it's almost as good as an iTunes backup. I didn't have to relog into Slack and all my data was like, all right, well, as long as my wife's willing to be without her phone for however many hours it's going to take to do this device-to-device transfer, I could say the promise is that you won't have to log back into as much stuff.
00:36:17 ◼ ► You recall last year when it was my year to get a new phone, I had the whole hassle with the two-factor authentication stuff and apparently device-to-device transfer would have handled that better for me, although I've actually got that problem solved by other means now because the apps that I use have been updated since then.
00:36:31 ◼ ► She doesn't use test flight apps, as Casey found out. If you use test flight apps, device-to-device transfer doesn't give a damn. Those aren't going to be trying.
00:36:39 ◼ ► And you, Casey, were saying, why does my home screen look different? It's like, oh, I'm missing five apps because they're all test flights.
00:36:45 ◼ ► In all fairness, I don't think any of the new phone installation methods transfer test flight apps.
00:36:50 ◼ ► Yeah, no, they never have. They've never been transferred. I'm just saying this one also continues to not do that.
00:36:55 ◼ ► And it makes some sense because those are managed by test flight, but that's part of Apple now, so I feel like they could if they wanted to be nice, get this on board, but it's an edge case. Who cares?
00:37:03 ◼ ► But anyway, I did the device-to-device transfer. It does say this is going to take a super long time, and it's annoying.
00:37:09 ◼ ► This process is annoying because there are various points where there's a long wait and then it prompts you.
00:37:15 ◼ ► And I like the type of thing where I go through a series of prompts in the beginning and then I can walk away for a few hours.
00:37:20 ◼ ► Don't do that with device-to-device transfer, especially since there's various phases where it's like, I don't remember what it said, but there's various phases where it sits there for a while thinking, and then it wants you to confirm or do some other thing like 20 or 30 minutes later because it thinks that step is going to take three minutes, but really, if you have tons of stuff in your phone, it might not.
00:37:38 ◼ ► But anyway, eventually it gave me some reading of many hours. It didn't take that many hours, but it did take multiple hours. It was pretty slow.
00:37:46 ◼ ► And when it was done, I think the phone more or less had all the stuff on it, so good success there.
00:37:53 ◼ ► But I continue my streak and my wife's streak for I don't know how long. Every time we get a new phone, we have to call Verizon on the telephone.
00:38:03 ◼ ► Why? Because the phone can't make phone calls when we're done, right? No matter how we do the thing like, hey, I am ordering the new phone on the phone that is replacing, and the Apple store knows that, and it's like, oh, or do you want this new phone to replace the one that you're making the order on?
00:38:18 ◼ ► And you say, yes, I believe it has worked for me at least once in the past, but recently, not so much.
00:38:25 ◼ ► So she did that with her phone. We did all the big setup. We got the phone out of the box, did all the thing, set it up, did all that stuff.
00:38:33 ◼ ► I think maybe if we physically moved the SIM from one phone to the other, this would have worked.
00:38:39 ◼ ► But my recollection is the time that it worked for me, I didn't move the physical SIM from one phone to the other, but it was so long ago, who knows?
00:38:45 ◼ ► But anyway, we wanted to use the eSIM, the aforementioned eSIM that Casey was just saying all those nice things about.
00:38:51 ◼ ► And so my wife said, I'd like to try the eSIM, let's not move the physical SIM, let's just see if we can get this to work.
00:38:59 ◼ ► And it was really confusing, if you looked on it, it seemed to think you had a plan, but of course you couldn't make any calls, and you couldn't do any cellular data.
00:39:09 ◼ ► Is there something I could do differently to successfully have an iPhone 13 Pro with an eSIM taking over for my wife's iPhone 11 Pro with a regular SIM?
00:39:24 ◼ ► And if you ever wanted to call your cell phone carrier, the worst day to do it is on iPhone day.
00:39:28 ◼ ► Because everybody's calling them, and so we're on hold for so long that our cordless phone, what are they called? I guess they just called them phones.
00:39:37 ◼ ► If anyone listening to this still has a landline phone in their house, and it used to be that landline phones were connected with a cord to a thing that was mounted to a wall or sitting on a desk.
00:39:48 ◼ ► So we have cordless phones in our house, because we still do have a landline, because our cell signal sucks.
00:39:54 ◼ ► And we were on hold so long that the battery died on our cordless phone, just from sitting on the desk listening to the terrible, massively over-compressed, clipping, extremely high-volume hold music, Verizon.
00:40:08 ◼ ► And then you eventually get someone on the phone, and you talk to them, and you explain the situation, and they're like, sometimes they say, "Oh, that should have worked for you." It's like, yeah, but it never does.
00:40:15 ◼ ► So that's just my disappointment. It's still 2021. You buy a new iPhone, you try to do everything the right way, and you still got to spend an hour, two hours on hold with Verizon to get your phone working.
00:40:26 ◼ ► But once you did that, they pushed whatever buttons they needed to push on their end. We did not have to move the SIM. Now I believe my wife has an eSIM, and it is working.
00:40:33 ◼ ► Maybe the next time she upgrades her phone in two years, it will work the way it's supposed to.
00:40:41 ◼ ► All right, so I set up two phones. I set up both mine and Aaron's. For mine, I listened to Gruber, and I did the device-to-device transfer. It did work. It took four-fucking-ever.
00:40:56 ◼ ► It was so slow. I don't know, maybe it was user error, I don't know what happened, but it was like easily two and a half, maybe three hours. I was quoted as two.
00:41:05 ◼ ► And alarmingly, for anything over an hour, the bar on—I forget if it was the source of the destination phone, I would assume the destination—but the bar was moving, but the time estimate just stayed at about two hours.
00:41:20 ◼ ► I'm looking at the bar gaining like 10, 20, 30 percent in about two hours. It wasn't until it was under an hour that it's finally like, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, I can do this by minute now."
00:41:29 ◼ ► Yeah, it'll be 57 minutes. 56 minutes. 55 minutes. Like, "Where the hell were you for the last hour and a half?"
00:41:36 ◼ ► But anyway, but it took forever, and I learned from that. And with Aaron's, I did a once iTunes Now Finder backup. And I still maintain, in my personal opinion, that's the right way to go.
00:41:51 ◼ ► I know that's barbaric for most of you. I know you think that's silly. I know a lot of you don't have enough storage space to do that.
00:41:56 ◼ ► But for those of us who do, I still think that's the best way to go. To be fair, I have not tried an iCloud backup in a long, long, long time, or an iCloud-based restore.
00:42:05 ◼ ► So maybe that's even better than a Finder backup, but the one I did for Aaron I thought was way faster.
00:42:10 ◼ ► And the advantage of doing it that way for me was that I could do the Finder backup the day before, and yeah, I might lose like a few hours' worth of text messages or whatever, but it's not anything critical.
00:42:19 ◼ ► And so I could do the hour-long Finder backup as long as you encrypt it, because otherwise you will lose all your logins.
00:42:26 ◼ ► Your encrypted Finder backup you do the night before, maybe the morning of, and then you do the restore later, and it takes like an hour, and lickety-split, you're ready to rock.
00:42:34 ◼ ► It is frustrating, although I understand it, that no matter what mechanism I chose, I always had to redownload all my apps, which was a real pain, but you know, neither here nor there.
00:42:44 ◼ ► But all in all, the upgrade process worked pretty well. I moved Sims, physical Sims, which is my preferred way of doing it thus far.
00:42:53 ◼ ► Although after everyone's good words about e-Sims, I might try doing that in the future, I don't know, we'll see what happens.
00:43:00 ◼ ► But anyway, I personally recommend doing the Finder backup if at all possible, but that's just my two cents.
00:43:11 ◼ ► Or first, how did you, what was your system for making sure that you were setting up the correct two phones out of the four that arrived?
00:43:18 ◼ ► Yeah, so yeah, all four arrived. The two that I was trying to cancel and send back, I was able to very easily, because if you go on Apple's website, and you go into your orders, if you go to the invoice, it'll say "view invoice", it'll tell you the serial number of the phone on the order.
00:43:40 ◼ ► And on the outside of the box is a sticker that tells you the part number and serial number of the phone inside.
00:43:47 ◼ ► So I was able to identify and return the two duplicate order phones without even opening them.
00:43:55 ◼ ► So it was easy, it was done, very high confidence that I had the right ones. Those are on their way back now. I hope and assume they'll get there.
00:44:05 ◼ ► So I unpacked the correct one. I did the phone to phone transfer, the official Gruber method. I had a similar experience as Casey where it did take a very long time and it said, it also gave the about two hours estimate.
00:44:17 ◼ ► It ended up being a fairly accurate time estimate, it did take about two hours. But with the lack of granularity, I actually ended up, you know the little strip of paper that you have to like tear across to open the box?
00:44:30 ◼ ► So I ended up laying that strip on the screen of the phone at the tip of the progress bar so I could see, so I could come back later and see has the progress bar moved past the strip of paper?
00:44:40 ◼ ► See, if the iPhone had a cursor, you wouldn't have to do that. You could have used the tried and true method of putting the arrow cursor next to it.
00:44:46 ◼ ► My device to device transfer was stuck on seven minutes remaining for about a half an hour.
00:44:52 ◼ ► That's always reassuring because it just said about seven minutes remaining and then I'd come back in ten minutes and it would say about seven minutes remaining and I was like, mmm.
00:45:00 ◼ ► Well, you know the two hardest problems in computer science, right? The, you know, cache and validation, naming things, counting and progress bars.
00:45:08 ◼ ► Anyway, so the rest of the process was fairly straightforward. It did complete it in about two hours. Nothing bad happened really, like it moved the watch over after I bugged it a few times.
00:45:19 ◼ ► Which was actually extra surprising because the watch had taken it upon itself to update itself to the 8.1 beta the day before.
00:45:31 ◼ ► That's why I should throw in my thing here because I had heard Gruber stories like, oh, and it offers to transfer your watch and you just say yes.
00:45:36 ◼ ► And of course, you know, my wife has a watch and it did indeed say, hey, do you want to transfer your watch to the new phone?
00:45:41 ◼ ► And we said yes and it seemed like it worked until we hit the bug, which is that apparently there's a bug in iOS 15 that is, I think, fixed in the 15.1 beta that's out now.
00:46:00 ◼ ► Exactly. There is a preference to enable that, but on my wife's phone and other people affected by this bug, when you press that little.
00:46:07 ◼ ► Yeah, when you press that little switch to enable it, it says unable to communicate with Apple watch.
00:46:14 ◼ ► And it's a bug. Apple acknowledges it. We'll put a link in the show notes to their tech note about it.
00:46:21 ◼ ► Kind of like, you know, oh, everything will be transferred or everything will work great, except the one feature you most need out of your watch in this world where we're still wearing masks doesn't quite work yet.
00:46:34 ◼ ► Well, I shouldn't say by a device to device transfer, but I, I did do a device to device transfer.
00:46:48 ◼ ► I'm not sure what the cause is because I've heard lots of people with different stories, but here's one thing I will say.
00:46:53 ◼ ► And this is just general advice, especially on like, you know, if you get a new iPhone on day one or whatever.
00:46:58 ◼ ► When you have problems like this and you find other people reporting them, it's difficult to know in the moment you're trying to set up your new toy or whatever.
00:47:08 ◼ ► Is there some way I can get this to work or is this just as it is in this case, just playing a bug with iOS 15 and there actually is no way to get it to work.
00:47:20 ◼ ► What I would suggest is I know people get impatient, but like wait a day or two, live with the bug for a day or two because lots of people, if you look at all the Twitter threads and people discussing things on Reddit or whatever, they're like, I wiped my whole phone.
00:47:41 ◼ ► And like you just think of how many hours people put into just like, because you know how long it takes to do this.
00:47:53 ◼ ► You will be much happier not spending literal like, you know, seven hours of your life wiping and restoring, especially if you have an older watch and it takes forever.
00:48:03 ◼ ► Wiping and restoring watches and phones and repairing and unpairing and doing all the things only to find that after that seven hours of you just like babysitting these things and wiping and restoring them, you haven't solved your problem.
00:48:16 ◼ ► Then the next day you find this, you know, support article at Apple that says, oh yeah, that's a bug.
00:48:33 ◼ ► In three days, I will know whether this is a bug or whether this is just a, you know, a thing that I can work around somehow.
00:48:43 ◼ ► Because you will see people said, I just erased everything in my house, burned down my whole house, built into life for myself and now my watch pairs correctly.
00:48:56 ◼ ► And I remember you not do it too, because that process of backing up and restoring and factory resetting takes so long and is potentially error prone.
00:49:03 ◼ ► That's a good way for you to accidentally lose stuff if during the backup your Mac dies or like you mess up somehow or you forgot there was some piece of data that you didn't realize wouldn't transfer.
00:49:17 ◼ ► Don't try to, don't try to be a debugging hero and don't try like, because you see one comment on Reddit that says, I just erased everything in my life and remarried and everything works now.
00:49:35 ◼ ► I don't recall what you said you had ordered, but I got a 256 gig iPhone 13 Pro in Sierra blue.
00:49:49 ◼ ► And in fact, in most lighting, I would say it actually looks more like a off color gray, which sounds bad, but I don't mean it that way.
00:49:57 ◼ ► But it looks like a kind of funky gray in a lot of light more than it does legitimately blue.
00:50:09 ◼ ► I do like it, but it is not nearly as blue as perhaps I would have preferred in a perfect world.
00:50:33 ◼ ► Maybe I expected to be able to see a little bit more blue in the band than I can see, but it doesn't really matter that much.
00:50:44 ◼ ► And following my iPhone case regime, which is essentially iPhone cases are put onto their phones only once and taken off only once.
00:51:04 ◼ ► Or I'm also worried about myself bending or breaking the phone because some of these cases are super tight.
00:51:08 ◼ ► So all that meant, no cases going on this phone until we've resolved the whole carrier eSIM SIM situation.
00:51:14 ◼ ► Because the last thing you want to do is put the case on the phone and then have to take it off and take out the SIM and put it back.
00:51:20 ◼ ► So what I was saying is I handled it without the case for a while to see what that was like.
00:51:26 ◼ ► And it didn't feel that different. Remember I used my 12 Pro valid case for a while as well. It felt very similar.
00:51:32 ◼ ► I didn't even really notice the weight. I felt like I kind of noticed the extra thickness a little tiny bit.
00:51:37 ◼ ► But it's hard to say because I'm so aware of the specs. Whether I would notice if I didn't know about all these things.
00:51:51 ◼ ► And some prompt would come up and it would want me to type something on the on-screen keyboard.
00:51:55 ◼ ► And I'd try typing on the on-screen keyboard and the thing would rock when it felt like half a centimeter.
00:52:16 ◼ ► It's very, very unstable, very sort of tippy. By a big distance, not a little distance.
00:52:24 ◼ ► But I'm like, okay, well, I'm not going to use it on the case. So who cares what it's like now.
00:52:27 ◼ ► But just FYI, if you think you're going to put your phone on the table and type on the keyboard when it's flat on the table, you are not.
00:52:36 ◼ ► Although my policy doesn't matter because my wife changes her case when she wants a different color.
00:52:46 ◼ ► And I do find, as many people have reported, that my fingers find and hit the camera bump on the back of the case.
00:52:52 ◼ ► Which is something I do not notice on my 12 Pro because my 12 Pro with the case on is basically flush on the back.
00:52:58 ◼ ► But when I'm just using this phone, I'll be like, what is this on the back of the... Oh, it's the camera bump.
00:53:03 ◼ ► I will actually touch it and hit it with my fingers. It's not a big deal. It doesn't really interfere with it.
00:53:08 ◼ ► But it's something that never happens in my flat-backed 12 Pro with the case because the case flattens it out.
00:53:22 ◼ ► Because I like the way the 12 Pro feels in my hand better. I don't like the camera bump. I like the fact that it lays flat.
00:53:28 ◼ ► In fact, the only physical feature that I'm jealous of about the 13 Pro is that they moved all the buttons down on the side slightly.
00:53:36 ◼ ► Something we didn't mention last show, I think. The power button and the volume buttons have moved down a bit.
00:53:40 ◼ ► And I think that's a good move. I think they're not moved down a lot, but they're moved down a little bit.
00:53:43 ◼ ► And I think it's a better position for them now. But other than that, physically speaking, I'm kind of glad I have my 12 Pro and don't have to deal with a giant camera bump.
00:53:55 ◼ ► All right, Marco, let's start with what color you got. And then, if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to hear a little bit about what you think of the new size.
00:54:25 ◼ ► As I mentioned, towards the end, the battery life was really kind of getting to me. But overall, other than that, I really liked it.
00:54:41 ◼ ► I know that this has become the default/normal size. This is not a normal size. This is a plus phone.
00:54:53 ◼ ► When the 6 Plus first came out, and a lot of people tried it. I tried it. I bought one for testing. It was a really weird device for developers in certain ways.
00:55:02 ◼ ► So I bought one for testing, and I took it as my only phone on a couple of trips and tried it for a week here and there.
00:55:09 ◼ ► And every time I tried the Plus phone, I always thought, "Well, I like some of the benefits of this, but my God, is it big in my pocket."
00:55:19 ◼ ► And it wasn't even heavy. Weight wasn't even its problem. It was just really big in the pocket. And that's really awkward.
00:55:26 ◼ ► And I eventually tried it here and there, but I ended up always going back to the smaller size, the medium-sized phones.
00:55:34 ◼ ► I had the 10 and the 10S and the 11 Pro. Those were all near this size, and I had all those phones.
00:55:41 ◼ ► When they released the 12, they made it a little bit bigger. They made the sides flat, and the whole phone just got even bigger and even heavier.
00:55:53 ◼ ► And I remember when I was leaving the large size, and when I went to the mini for last year, I said one of the big reasons why I was excited about the mini was just how much lighter it was.
00:56:06 ◼ ► Because these phones had gotten so heavy and so big, and we had grown to just accept that what used to be the outrageously large 6 Plus, that's now the regular size that most people get.
00:56:24 ◼ ► Do you actually do a size comparison? Was the 6 Plus, like what dimension-wise, was the 6 Plus wider, taller, or the same as that?
00:56:32 ◼ ► My recollection from the phone is that the 12 Pro is still, in fact, not as tall and not as wide as the 6 Plus.
00:56:49 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, that was a bit of a problem. I didn't have that problem, I didn't use mine enough.
00:56:54 ◼ ► But anyway, so this phone, I'm almost a week into having it now, and I'm still not used to the size and the weight.
00:57:49 ◼ ► So again, a little bit thinner. Depth is, let's see, 7.65mm. So it is a little bit deeper, which I thought we knew.
00:58:05 ◼ ► But yeah, so it's a little bit thinner, less wide, a little bit shorter, but a little bit deeper.
00:58:15 ◼ ► And part of why this feels so big to me is that I'm coming from the last year of using the 12 Mini.
00:58:21 ◼ ► And the 12 Mini, when you go from Mini to this size, that is a much bigger jump, in my opinion, than going from the Pro to the Pro Max.
00:58:34 ◼ ► Like now, when I handle Tiff's phone, because Tiff has the Pro Max, when I handle that, before, when I was using the 12 Mini every day, it felt almost ridiculous that these were two of the same product.
00:58:48 ◼ ► It's like when you see a really tiny dog and a really massive dog standing next to each other, and you're like, "How can this be the same animal?"
00:58:53 ◼ ► Like, it was like that. Now, the Max doesn't seem like that big of a jump over what I have.
00:59:01 ◼ ► Until you try to put it in your pocket, because I still maintain that the Max breaks through some kind of pocket barrier, where it becomes like, this is not comfortable in any pocket.
00:59:10 ◼ ► Whereas I know the Mini obviously is way smaller and way more comfortable in more kinds of pockets, but I still find the 12 size and the 13 size to be pocketable.
00:59:22 ◼ ► And my hand, for that matter, when I pick up a Max phone, I know what you're saying. I think you're right that if I gave you a Mini in your hand and then I gave you the Pro, it would feel like a bigger jump than the Pro to the Max.
00:59:37 ◼ ► But in terms of, can I use this thing in one hand with my thumb? The Max is beyond my finger size.
00:59:46 ◼ ► You're shimmying all over the place. You just can't get to it. Whereas the 12 Pro and the 13 Pro is within the realm of reason for my hand.
00:59:56 ◼ ► So, in terms of size, I would still say that the Max is more uncomfortable for me, going from the regular to the Max is more uncomfortable to me than going in the other direction.
01:00:07 ◼ ► Alright, that's fair. Again, I haven't tried going to the Max with these options of just handling test phones here and there.
01:00:16 ◼ ► Try actually using it as your phone and carrying it around with you all day and try and use it one-handed when you're doing stuff and realize I can't reach anywhere on this phone.
01:00:21 ◼ ► Yeah, probably. And I haven't really had that problem with this move. Certain things have been a little harder to reach, but I rearranged two icons on my home screen and it was fine.
01:00:34 ◼ ► It hasn't been that big of a deal. So, that part was fine. This is very close to the screen size that I used for three or four years.
01:00:44 ◼ ► So, overall, the size to me, I am still not used to it. I don't know if I'm ever going to get used to it. It's just a big, heavy brick to me.
01:00:54 ◼ ► And I think, and I'll get to what I like about the phone later. I think there are certain things about it that I'm willing to tolerate that big, heavy brickness for.
01:01:05 ◼ ► But it's just such a big difference. And when I see the mini line and when I see that the mini line is able to achieve 80% of what I like about this phone in such a more pocketable and handleable size, I've never more wished for a pro mini.
01:01:27 ◼ ► And I know there are challenges with that. Obviously, the battery is going to be the biggest one. Physically, it's just probably very hard to even fit something like the giant camera module.
01:01:37 ◼ ► I have my mini right here next to this. If you look at the backs of both phones, so you can see the camera modules, you would never say that the 12 mini next to the 13 Pro with this little tiny two camera module versus this massive three camera.
01:01:56 ◼ ► You would never say this was a one year change. You would think this is like the mini is the phone from five years ago and the Pro is the phone from now because the camera module got so much bigger.
01:02:09 ◼ ► And so I understand that it would be a heck of a challenge to try to fit that kind of camera module into the mini. And I'm not saying that I'm blaming them for not doing it.
01:02:21 ◼ ► I just wish they could do it. And hopefully over time, maybe they'll be able to do stuff like that because I just love these cameras. I'll get to that.
01:02:32 ◼ ► But my God, this phone is a brick. It's so big and heavy compared to this mini that has pretty much all the other features. So wow, I just I hope over time, you know, I don't jump at any chance to tell Apple they should make their stuff thinner and lighter.
01:02:49 ◼ ► Because that's usually usually comes with compromises I don't want. But I really hope that this is not just like the new baseline that oh, our phones are always going to be this big and heavy if you want the good camera and the good battery life.
01:03:04 ◼ ► Because it's really big and heavy. And I wonder, and this is this is an honest question. Okay, I swear I am not joking. Where am I supposed to put this phone? Am I supposed to put it in my pants?
01:03:22 ◼ ► Steve Jobs was here. He would say, I'll tell you where you can put it. Yeah. Because I'm so okay, I understand. You know, men in America don't usually carry like a handbag or anything like that. So we have to somehow carry the phone on our person somewhere.
01:03:38 ◼ ► And I also understand that belt clips have been out of style since they existed. And so where am I supposed to put it?
01:03:47 ◼ ► You can put it in your front pocket. It fits fine. It doesn't fit fine. When I put it in my front pocket. It doesn't stick out. No, it doesn't stick out or fall out.
01:03:57 ◼ ► He's a little shorty person, Jon. Yeah. It doesn't stick out or fall out. But as I'm walking, it like swings over to the front of my leg.
01:04:06 ◼ ► Maybe your pockets are too big. No, not only does it. No, I'm wearing like fairly snugly fitting. I'm not like these aren't like big baggy pants. These are these are stress jeans.
01:04:15 ◼ ► So, I mean, let me just make a performance pants. Let me reference the piece of clothing that all three of us probably own. Do you have the Mack Weldon shorts?
01:04:23 ◼ ► I have the exercise shorts, the soft ace ones and the running ones. I have the regular the regular Mack Weldon shorts have become my go to shorts.
01:04:33 ◼ ► Not just because they sponsor the show. Yes, they're a sponsor. The khaki ones like the but but also they're kind of a stretchy material.
01:04:39 ◼ ► It's just like the default shorts. But also because I found that my previous just like crappy like around the house summer like champion shorts from like Costco or Target or whatever, you know, I'm talking about like just sweat shorts kind of things.
01:04:52 ◼ ► Those have the problem you're describing where the pockets are so big in the material so loose that if I put a phone like this in and I walk at a brisk pace, I feel the phone kind of slapping against my leg up and down.
01:05:02 ◼ ► The Mack Weldon shorts do not have that problem because that I think the pockets are a little bit tighter and the material is stretchy.
01:05:09 ◼ ► And also the other problem I had because I think I buy my clothes all too big was that my phone was start to pull down my shorts on that side of my body as I walked because of the weight of the weight of the phone.
01:05:18 ◼ ► You're talking about a different set of problems than what I have. First of all, if your phone is bouncing up and down your shorts are too loose. That's you need different shorts.
01:05:27 ◼ ► I mean, it's not like I'm getting tailor-made shorts. I get like I get the size where the waistband is comfortable on me. It's like small, medium and large, right?
01:05:34 ◼ ► These are these are these are cheap. All I'm saying is the Mack Weldon shorts, I think had a appreciable improvement in sort of keeping the phone close to my leg as I walk.
01:05:45 ◼ ► So I would recommend at least try. I think you have to have a pair of these shorts. We all have a pair of these shorts.
01:05:50 ◼ ► I can tell you, I have the ace and I have the Stratus, but I think it sounds like you might be talking about the Maverick Taccino or the radius. I don't have all these names. You're much more familiar with my I have exercise shorts from them.
01:06:01 ◼ ► I'm literally wearing them right now. But of course, I can't look at the tag. Calm down. Calm down.
01:06:05 ◼ ► Please try. Just hold on. Just hold on. Do they have belt loops? Do the do your do your sweatshirts? They are have belt. They do not. Okay. Are they more of a plasticky feeling or more? Do they feel more like sweatpants?
01:06:18 ◼ ► They have a drawstring. Does that help? They have a drawstring with little metal tips in the drawstrings? No. Is the drawstring mounted on the inside or the outside? Outside. So it's got to be the ace, right?
01:06:26 ◼ ► That's what I've been thinking this whole time. Yeah, it's the ace sweatshort, which is excellent by the way. Yeah, that's that's almost always that's what I'm wearing when I'm doing a workout. Almost always.
01:06:35 ◼ ► And all right, when you walk with those with your phone with your now giant phone in your pocket, I think you will find that you have less of the problem of it swinging to the center.
01:06:42 ◼ ► Well, okay. But so normally so first of all, that's that's a more casual fit than I would normally walk around a lot in.
01:06:50 ◼ ► You're going to have your fancy your fancy shorts. But also I'm wearing pants. And so anyway, I'm wearing jeans.
01:06:56 ◼ ► If you're wearing pants and you're wearing jeans, I think I find I have no problem with with the phone this size in my jeans front pocket.
01:07:01 ◼ ► Yeah, shorts, I think shorts I find are more forgiving of large phones. They always have been because they have a baggier more casual fit usually or but like, but jeans and pants usually are a little bit more snug up top.
01:07:13 ◼ ► At least, well, if you eat too much pizza like I do, but it's normally the you know, you don't have as much looseness in your pants pockets.
01:07:21 ◼ ► So anyway, so get the question. So I've always been a front pocket phone and wallet person. I never use my back pockets slash but pockets. I never use this for anything.
01:07:31 ◼ ► Because that's I don't want to break my back and I don't like the way it looks. And I would be afraid of it just falling out or me forgetting it's there. So nothing goes in the butt pockets.
01:07:41 ◼ ► You don't you don't mess up the line of your butt because people are checking you out from behind. You want them to get the full picture of what you've got to offer.
01:07:47 ◼ ► Hey, I work out for a reason. So anyway, so yeah, my butt pockets are clear. So everything goes in front and you know, left his phone right as well and anything else.
01:07:58 ◼ ► So I cannot find a pair of pants where this where this giant heavy phone doesn't like migrate over to the front of my leg as I'm walking and that that both looks and feels bad.
01:08:15 ◼ ► When I insert the phone into the pocket, I try to basically align it onto like the side of my leg like the outer edge of my leg.
01:08:22 ◼ ► But then as I walk it like scoots forward and migrates to the front of my leg and that's not what I want.
01:08:27 ◼ ► I mean, it's kind of like Merlin's jeans where you get like the outline of the phone where you can see the corners eventually and that shows where like the natural place that the phone settles because it's not like a smear.
01:08:37 ◼ ► There's like a clear place where the phone it I mean it has to do with the basically has to do with the shape of your body.
01:08:41 ◼ ► And you can see like, oh, those are those are my iPhone 5 pants because you can see how big the how big the outline is.
01:08:46 ◼ ► Right. Well, so it's the shape of your leg and then the position and size of the pocket and there is one place for the phone where it will find its most natural home.
01:08:53 ◼ ► And I think if you're fighting against that you need different shaped legs or different pockets.
01:08:57 ◼ ► Well, I also by the way, I like the butt pocket isn't even an option because the phone doesn't fit in it without sticking out the top.
01:09:04 ◼ ► Like the phones are so big now and I know please any women out there who are listening and you're like, oh, boo hoo because like I know it sticks out of all of your pockets like we know at least they're real pockets on your pants and not just like fake pockets and look like pockets but have nothing in them.
01:09:18 ◼ ► I just I want to know where am I supposed to be keeping my phone because it doesn't fit in the back pockets.
01:09:28 ◼ ► And I what else am I supposed to be doing? I mean, if I'm wearing a jacket then it's easy to put it in one of those like, you know, chest pockets in the jacket that's really big, but I don't know what to do.
01:09:38 ◼ ► I mean, I think you just put it in the front pocket of your jeans and whatever you say, it's not working because you don't like it when it goes to the front.
01:09:43 ◼ ► But that's where it goes on everybody. And I think we're all okay with it. Like I'm not sure what you're worried about with the phone going to the front.
01:09:49 ◼ ► I know you want it on the side, but apparently it's not where that's not where the pockets are in your pants.
01:09:54 ◼ ► And so when you put the phone in the front pocket, the phone is in the front. It's fine.
01:09:58 ◼ ► Also, I would recommend in jacket weather, I put my phone in the same jackets like that my hand's going, you know, those pockets.
01:10:09 ◼ ► And so if I want to get my phone out of my pocket, it's in, I put my hand in my pocket and there's the phone and I can take it out and I can put it right back in.
01:10:20 ◼ ► Because the jackets are very shallow, they move a lot and your hands are taking up their space.
01:10:24 ◼ ► Right. Well, I mean, I can imagine they would fall out if you have, again, it has to do with where is the pocket positioned and like how is it facing and so on and so forth.
01:10:36 ◼ ► A lot of my jacket pockets have zippers on them so you can zip them up and then you know it's not going to fall out.
01:10:42 ◼ ► But even ones that don't, I know what you mean. Like a lot of people have this problem with their pants pockets.
01:10:46 ◼ ► They sit down and their phone goes shoop and that ends up in the couch cushions or whatever.
01:10:54 ◼ ► I'm sure there's some tailor would know the difference between the type of pockets, but you basically need like a ledge in the pocket.
01:10:59 ◼ ► So if you put your hands in your pockets or your jacket and there's no kind of ledge, like if along the bottom of the jacket, it's just a straight line out of your pocket.
01:11:06 ◼ ► Yeah, your phone's going to fall out and you're going to be a Casey and jump up to wash your car and crack your phone.
01:11:11 ◼ ► But my coat pockets aren't like that and I find it really convenient because I can always, then I can put my hand on my phone.
01:11:28 ◼ ► So do you think the people from the UK are more offended by me justifiably snarking on their hilariously oversized plugs or by us saying pants a thousand times in the last ten minutes?
01:11:44 ◼ ► Hey, I wanted to, no, not really. I wanted to give a quick shout out, if you will, to the Apple silicone case, which is something I never thought I would say.
01:11:55 ◼ ► For Erin's phone, yeah, seriously. For Erin's phone, she for years had the, what I would call light pink, it always has a different name, but a light pink silicone case has been the case for years.
01:12:06 ◼ ► For the 12 Pro, they didn't offer it, and we were too slow on the uptake to get a different kind of case, and then she shattered her phone in the same style that I did in the span of the first week.
01:12:29 ◼ ► I was very surprised. It is not nearly as sticky as the right word, tacky maybe is the right word.
01:12:39 ◼ ► Exactly. I mean, it's still more than I would necessarily want, but it is at least in the realm of workable.
01:12:46 ◼ ► Like in the past, I would tell you there is no freaking way I could put one of those in my pant pockets or trouser pockets all the time.
01:12:54 ◼ ► I shouldn't capitulate to them. I wouldn't put one of those in my pant pockets all the time.
01:13:00 ◼ ► It's English traditional versus English modern. So anyway, I wouldn't put one of these silicone cases in my pocket.
01:13:07 ◼ ► Or if she asked me to and I did for a few minutes, I'd be like, "Oh, God, give me 20 minutes to extract this thing."
01:13:13 ◼ ► But the new one, again, it's only been a few days, so I haven't had a whole lot of experience, and I haven't had jeans on in I can't even tell you how many months now.
01:13:33 ◼ ► And then today, both Marco and I, I believe, got our Nudiant cases. I think it's like a Nudiant Thin V3 or something like that.
01:13:51 ◼ ► I like it a lot. The cutout for the lock button, I feel like, I wish it was a little bit, I don't know, wider?
01:14:03 ◼ ► Because I feel like the lock button is kind of buried within the cutout, if that makes sense.
01:14:11 ◼ ► However, overall, I really like it, and I've slapped my MagSafe battery on there just to see how it feels, and it's still just fine.
01:14:24 ◼ ► I will say, however, they use a very, what is it, what's the term for this, like a dark tactic or something like that?
01:14:30 ◼ ► They use a terrible mechanism by which, if you go to check out, the default shipping is like $20, and it's UPS, like super fast or whatever.
01:14:38 ◼ ► If you would like, you can change it to free shipping, and it takes an additional few days.
01:15:02 ◼ ► I think you chose the better color. Mine's almost black, so if I'm sticking with this case, I might end up getting the lighter one.
01:15:26 ◼ ► They call it vegan leather, which I feel like is not maybe saying what they want it to be saying.
01:15:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I guess that's true. But it doesn't feel like a leather. It feels like a matte plastic, if that makes sense.
01:15:44 ◼ ► It's a good feeling overall. I'm not super keen on the buttons, because they use holes so that you can actually just use the buttons on the phone.
01:16:01 ◼ ► And you have to press in a little bit, and I can't operate the silence switch with one hand anymore.
01:16:07 ◼ ► Because it's slightly too recessed, so I have to hold the phone with one hand and use my fingernail on the other hand to go over and hit it.
01:16:15 ◼ ► But overall, it's fine. But I've been using it without a case for the last few days, until this came today.
01:16:23 ◼ ► And so far, I'm liking it without a case. Because the case, you know, my main problem with this phone is that it's really big and heavy.
01:16:36 ◼ ► And it makes it even bigger in my pocket. And it makes it even weirder in my pants situation, because it is slightly grippy in the pocket.
01:16:46 ◼ ► It does slightly pull the lining out of the pocket when I take it out, the way I always complain about Apple silicone cases doing.
01:16:56 ◼ ► And it makes the holding situation a little bit worse in those ways, like with the buttons.
01:17:01 ◼ ► So I don't know if I'm going to keep using cases. I do have the Apple silicone case on order.
01:17:11 ◼ ► But I'm not I think for what this case is the new the new case, you know, for for being an inexpensive, then like kind of tacky, but not leather or silicone case.
01:17:24 ◼ ► But I don't know if that's even what I'm looking for anymore now that I've actually tried it. So I'll figure it out.
01:17:44 ◼ ► Do you find either one of you find your finger touching either the giant the great wall around the case on the back or in Marco's case, the extra camera bump more than it did on your previous phones?
01:18:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm very often because I again, I hold my phone on my left hand because it comes out of my left pocket.
01:18:12 ◼ ► And so I'm often my left my index finger on my left hand is often resting on the edge of the bottom camera.
01:18:19 ◼ ► I wonder if, like, I mean, again, I think Apple's rethink this whole thing for the next one or hopefully use those periscope things.
01:18:25 ◼ ► But even if not, I wonder if in this round of cases, one approach that maybe a third party could use or something is instead of making the you know, the wall around the camera bump to kind of do what people what third party cases have done with or Apple even Apple cases done with battery cases, which is essentially slope the sides to hide the lump, like make it a gradual transition to the lump instead of having a flat, flat, flat and then a giant wall.
01:18:52 ◼ ► Right. So that there is just a basically a lump. And so you would never find yourself hitting anything protruding.
01:18:59 ◼ ► It would just be one smooth slope up to the full height of the camera lump, and it would make your phone lopsidedly round on the back like a sort of a bar of soap that had been used on evenly.
01:19:11 ◼ ► Right. But you do never you would never encounter something like protruding from your phone.
01:19:16 ◼ ► Yeah, we'll see what happens. It's worth noting very quickly that the MagSafe Duo, this is the like wallet-y thing.
01:19:28 ◼ ► That's right. The MagSafe Duo wallet-y thing that you're supposed to travel with it. The camera plateau is so darn big that it is a little precarious when used on the MagSafe Duo and Marques Brownlee did a very good Twitter video of this. It's like a minute and a half long. That's worth watching. It's quite funny. Worth checking out.
01:19:47 ◼ ► It doesn't lay flat. Like basically the phone doesn't like this is a this is an inductive charging, you know, like wireless charging thing that you're supposed to lay your phone down on. But the camera bump is so big that it extends into the area where the phone is expected to be laying flat so that you can see daylight underneath the phone because the phone is on an angle.
01:20:04 ◼ ► Still charges. It still works. But like in general, the farther away the coil in your phone is from the coil and the charger, the less efficient the charging and the worse and the more heat. And so I don't like being able to see daylight between my phone and the inductive charging mat. But that's what you get for the big bump.
01:20:21 ◼ ► And it's kind of a shame. Like, you know, obviously the coil doesn't extend under the camera bump on the back of the phone. It's just that the MagSafe Duo obviously is wider than the coil.
01:20:32 ◼ ► Indeed. Well, as I was using this phone, the top speaker. So the thing you would put your ear to in order to make a telephone call, it is like way up at the top of the screen area at the top of the phone. And it just feels a little bit wrong.
01:20:47 ◼ ► Like not to the point that it's bothersome, but I have how many years of having an iPhone speaker at roughly the same location, regardless of the iPhone that it's within. And now I find that I have to pull the entire phone or place the entire phone like a little bit further down than I'm used to.
01:21:03 ◼ ► You do not have to move the phone farther down. No, he's right. You totally do have to. It's like two millimeters difference. No, but it matters when I answer a call. I have to like, I'm like, at first I can't hear the person. I got to scoot it down slightly.
01:21:17 ◼ ► Yup. I swear to you. Are you moving it more than two millimeters down? I would say two to five. We can measure how far the speaker has moved. It has not moved that far.
01:21:27 ◼ ► I'm telling you if it matters because it, because it now it's closer to the edge. Like if you, if you're accustomed to how the, how the phone feels like in your ear around, like relative to the edge of the phone, it's going to be slightly different.
01:21:39 ◼ ► Exactly. It's going to be different by the amount that the speaker moved. All I'm saying is it didn't actually move like a centimeter.
01:21:44 ◼ ► It's a noticeable difference. I don't care how much it is. I don't care if it's a micron. I'm telling you, I can notice the difference. I'm serious. I can notice it. I mean, I do wonder if, especially Casey, you have a case on, I talked about this before.
01:21:57 ◼ ► I was saying that like they did move the thing up there and there is the potential that the case could screw with the sound. I guess I'm assuming Apple's cases don't accidentally cover the speaker, but the case being so close to the speaker could change how the sound bounces around.
01:22:11 ◼ ► And maybe that's why you're having to position more than very, very good theory, except I haven't placed a phone call on my phone since I got a case on it literally four hours ago.
01:22:23 ◼ ► I know I took a call on it earlier with the case. It was fine. I will say also, by the way, before, before I forget, the speakers are great. Like it's a big, I don't know. I don't know if compared to the mini, I bet.
01:22:35 ◼ ► Yeah, but even people who are coming from the 12 Pro, the speakers are really good. They are both, I mean, compared to the mini at least, I can tell you directly comparison, they are both noticeably louder and also noticeably less distortion. Like way clearer for podcast playback at least. It's great.
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01:24:51 ◼ ► I would like to know what everyone thinks about promotion because promotion is Apple's 120Hz fast refresh thing. And we have had it on our iPad Pros since 2018, I believe. And when I got my 2018 iPad Pro, which is still the most recent iPad in the house, I think I might have noticed, maybe.
01:25:14 ◼ ► When I picked up the iPhone 13 Pro, my socks flew off my, well I wasn't wearing socks, but still, it was bananas to me how quickly I immediately noticed how fluid the animations look, how much better everything felt and looked and seemed. This promotion stuff, I am all in and I don't want any phone that does not have it ever again.
01:25:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I am pretty sold as well. So unlike you, I did notice instantly on the 10.5 inch iPad Pro the first time we saw it. I still remember this day, we were sitting at the old slow coffee shop in San Jose.
01:25:48 ◼ ► Oh yeah, we had a friend of ours who had a review unit was playing with it and I noticed it instantly. Just like swiping through home screens, you see, oh my god, that looks incredible.
01:25:58 ◼ ► But at the same time, all this time, whenever the topic of it coming to the iPhone came up, and people, especially people in the Android world, would often criticize iPhones for not having high refresh rate screens yet.
01:26:10 ◼ ► And my position was always like, well, I'm sure it'll be great when we get it, but I don't need it. I don't notice its absence. And so when I've been on the phone in the past, I never noticed, oh, I wish the frame rate was faster.
01:26:24 ◼ ► But now that I've seen it, oh my god, it's nice. It's so nice. I especially notice it because, I don't know if I'm just misremembering, but I think that ever since we've moved to OLED, I think scrolling has been a little bit mushier.
01:26:41 ◼ ► Like scrolling text, it's been a little bit blurrier since we've moved to OLED. And now it's not. Not only is it not blurry now, now it looks better than it even did on LCDs.
01:26:54 ◼ ► And I am just so happy with, you know, obviously the animations when you come in and out of apps or you unlock the phone and your home screen bounces in, all that stuff looks fantastic.
01:27:04 ◼ ► But I notice it most when I'm scrolling text. That to me is such a massive upgrade in visual quality and clarity that, again, I didn't think this would be a big deal. It is a big deal. It's a really big deal.
01:27:19 ◼ ► And that alone, if I was having any doubts about whether I made the wrong move going to the pro phone and having this giant heavy brick floating to the front of my pants all the time, that alone answers it for me. Nope, this is the right move.
01:27:34 ◼ ► And that I think is a good distinguishing feature for Apple to have to distinguish the pro line from the non-pro line. Like if they have to pick something and make it pro only, this is a good one to pick because it's the kind of thing that most people don't care about or notice.
01:27:48 ◼ ► But if you do care and you do notice, you will pay extra for this because it is very, very good. And so far I have also been pretty impressed by the battery life and I think that's related because as we were talking about last episode, promotion, you know, if you're doing a lot of motion, you could maybe use more battery life.
01:28:06 ◼ ► But in most common usage, you might actually be using less battery power doing stuff with promotion enabled because it is dynamically ramping the frame rate down when you're not touching and moving the screen all the time.
01:28:16 ◼ ► So, so far, battery life has been great and I think that might also have something to do with promotion, of course. But even if it doesn't, wow, promotion is great. And it's way nicer of a thing than I expected it to be.
01:28:31 ◼ ► It's a good time for me to continue to bang my limits of human perception drum and say, yeah, like promotion, you know, is if we're finally getting to the point where we have frame rates, where we get real diminishing returns because you can tell 60 to 120. Could you tell 120 to 240? Maybe. But really, that's diminishing returns.
01:28:49 ◼ ► And so it'll be great when variable refresh and at least 120 hertz max is on all devices everywhere for the reasons you just said, Marco. Like you can like scrolling text like it's kind of you just get used to the idea of all.
01:29:02 ◼ ► Of course, you can't read text when it's scrolling. Nobody can read text when it's scrolling. And then you get 120 hertz screen. Like, oh, you actually can kind of read this just because the refresh rate was too slow before.
01:29:12 ◼ ► That said, my personal relationship with 120 hertz, because I've had it on my iPad Pro and everything, is kind of weird. And I wonder I've been trying to figure out like why.
01:29:23 ◼ ► Like, I like it and I prefer it and I will buy devices that have it and I want them all to have it eventually. But I don't find it as like, oh, I can't go back into the 60 hertz.
01:29:34 ◼ ► And I wonder why that is, because again, it's not like I can't see it, but I think it's the way I interact with the screen. And the best theory I have is like, you know, so I'm if you know me, you know, I get terribly motion sick and I have for my entire life.
01:29:45 ◼ ► And I've built up a lot of habits, you know, for my entire life, essentially around what does it take not to get motion sick because I don't really like feeling nauseated. It's a terrible feeling.
01:29:56 ◼ ► Does anybody like that feeling? I don't know, but it's like it's like one of the if you're afflicted with any condition that subjects you to that in places when normal people wouldn't be subjected to it.
01:30:07 ◼ ► It's just like it's just as lurking, you know, just like at any moment you could be nauseated. It's like, no, I don't like that. Anyway, it feels worse to be vulnerable to that, like that you don't have a protection at any moment.
01:30:19 ◼ ► And the general theory, which I have subscribed to my whole life, has been like, OK, well, if what your eyes see does not match what your inner ear feels, evolutionarily speaking, like you may have just eaten some berries that are poison.
01:30:34 ◼ ► And so it's a good idea for you to puke those up. And the people who had that response had a slightly higher chance of passing on the genes than the people who didn't.
01:30:41 ◼ ► Therefore, we have a bunch of humans on the planet, pretty much all the humans on the planet, that if there is too big of a disconnect between what your inner ear feels, your accelerometers that are inside your head and what your eyes see, your brain thinks something is terribly wrong and makes you puke.
01:30:55 ◼ ► And that actually, it turns out, has a use, is a useful response as much as we hate it.
01:31:00 ◼ ► And essentially, as far as I'm aware, everyone with a functioning inner ear gets motion sick. It's just a question of when.
01:31:05 ◼ ► Astronauts get motion sick, the people on the deadliest catch get motion sick, everybody gets motion sick. But your threshold may be, I have to be on one of those crab boats in Alaska for me to get sick.
01:31:17 ◼ ► Or you could be like me, where you go on a teacup ride at Disney World and you're terribly sick. And that's the other extreme.
01:31:24 ◼ ► So, the reason this is relevant to ProMotion is, I think I have trained my brain for my entire life that once motion starts happening in front of me, disconnect the visual system and just be like, don't pay any attention to that motion, just wait for the motion to stop and then look again.
01:31:40 ◼ ► And what that means to me with ProMotion is that when I flick and scroll, obviously no one is able to read it at 60 hertz because it gets too blurry.
01:31:50 ◼ ► But my brain doesn't even try. When I flick and scroll, my brain says, ignore the motion on the screen, just sort of disconnect, focus behind the phone.
01:31:58 ◼ ► And this is not a thing I consciously do, but I think I don't even attempt to track the motion.
01:32:03 ◼ ► That's kind of why, remember when iOS 7 first came out and there was the reduced motion because there was all those animations?
01:32:08 ◼ ► When iOS 7 first came out, I had to have reduced motion on because when I did anything like close an app, open an app, swipe back, or whatever the hell was, hit the home button.
01:32:17 ◼ ► Those animations were so, I don't know, they had such high fidelity, they would say, we're going to take what's on the screen now and smoothly morph every single pixel of it to the new thing.
01:32:33 ◼ ► And my eyes would try to track those and it would make me feel sick because of course, my inner ear feels nothing, I'm sitting still, but I see all this motion as if I'm zooming into or out of things.
01:32:41 ◼ ► So I had to turn on reduce motion. Eventually, you know, we get the face ID phones or whatever, I found that I didn't need to turn reduce motion anymore because I had trained myself to not look at those animations.
01:32:54 ◼ ► To say, yeah, when you do stuff on your phone, there's going to be animations, but just disconnect the visual system for those, you know, fractions of a second.
01:33:01 ◼ ► Like don't try to track it, don't try to read what's happening, don't try to do anything to keep track of the motion at all.
01:33:08 ◼ ► So on a phone with ProMotion, despite the fact that everything is much more smooth scrolling or whatever, if I don't make a conscious effort to look at and track the motion, my brain says, well, 120 hertz means nothing to you because if anything's moving on the screen, you're not, I'm not going to show that to you until it stops moving.
01:33:26 ◼ ► And so it's this strange experience where I essentially notice ProMotion if I'm trying to notice it, but if I'm not, it just goes completely into the background, so much so that if you had told me like you have you swapped out my 60 hertz phone for 120 hertz phone or vice versa, and didn't tell me, I might not notice for days because I'm never looking at anything that's in motion.
01:33:48 ◼ ► And it's really weird. And so I don't know, maybe other people who get motion sick have the same thing, or maybe people, you know, you saw some YouTube videos of like, we showed the new iPhone to people and can they tell 120 hertz at all? Do they notice it? Do they care? I think it does vary a lot from person to person.
01:34:21 ◼ ► The Mac. Guess what? PCs have had a high refresh screen support for high refresh screens forever and Macs I think technically do too if you get a third party monitor or whatever. But the fact is the protospeck CR that I'm staring at is 60 hertz. And all the Mac laptops I believe are 60 hertz. And there's no reason for that. We've if this little dinky phone can be 120 hertz, the new MacBook Pro should be 120 hertz with variable refresh rate, which will save them battery life too. So please Apple do that for us.
01:34:49 ◼ ► Well, I mean, there are reasons you know that like, I hope they get there, but I'm but there are obviously technical challenges to this as well. Like, you know, most of those PC high refresh rate screens are not super high resolution and dense. And most of them are also probably not having to, you know, fit 8k resolution over a Thunderbolt cable.
01:35:09 ◼ ► Yeah, no, I I'm you know, obviously the protospeck CR is the extreme example. Like you're not going to do 120 hertz at 6k. Sorry, 6k. Yeah, but but like for the laptops, like, I feel like it's, you know, compare the screen of the big iPad with promotion to most of Apple laptops that is in striking distance. I feel like we're on the cusp. Obviously the Macs get things much later. Macs don't even have face ID like where there is a time lag here.
01:35:36 ◼ ► But it is within the realm of technical possibility. And I really hope they go down that path, not just for gaming or things like that, but just because for the same reason, like I'm more likely to try to track a scroll thing if I'm like scrolling slowly on my Mac than I am to try to read something while I'm scrolling on my phone just because everything's bigger on my Mac. Like I make the font size bigger, like the text is bigger.
01:35:55 ◼ ► It is conceivable that I can read text as it scrolls, especially if it's scrolling not too fast. Right. So I hope the Macs get all those benefits and then, you know, the battery saving benefits of the variable refresh rate.
01:36:08 ◼ ► I have this to our long list of things that we feel like the Mac should have. And again, like technically speaking, you know, they're all ARM. They're using the same system on a chip.
01:36:15 ◼ ► So whatever stuff they did to the system on a chip, they talked about this in all various interviews. Oh, we have the system on a chip team work with the display team and they all work together to make sure that this is right. Great. That's all the same crap that's in the Mac now. Right.
01:36:26 ◼ ► So there's no more excuses at all. We couldn't do with Intel or whatever. Please, please, Apple high refresh rate Mac screens sometime in the next five years.
01:36:34 ◼ ► So let's talk about cameras. I haven't had a in-depth, like deep dive into the cameras so I can just tell you my initial experiences. I've played with macro mode a little bit. I really dig it.
01:36:47 ◼ ► This is only going to take a second. Then I'm happy for Marco for you to dive in on all of it. Macro mode I like. I've only briefly played with it. Same with the cinematic thing with the, you know, the focus polling and all that. I played with it very briefly.
01:36:59 ◼ ► Looks very cool. I'm not sure that either of these things are something I'm going to be doing a lot, but I really dig that they're part of the phone, particularly macro photography. I think that's going to be really nice.
01:37:09 ◼ ► The telephoto camera. My initial impression was I love the 3X. My current impression is I like the 3X. I'm not sure where I'm going to land on this, but I suspect I'm going to land back on I love the 3X and that I like having more zoom.
01:37:25 ◼ ► But when I'm mostly around the house and mostly, you know, not really leaving the house, the 3X is not a do or die sort of thing. But my initial impression is I would definitely choose 3 over 2 given the choice. Marco, take us on a deep dive of the camera stuff.
01:37:42 ◼ ► I mean, look, I'm not a pro photographer and I've only been shooting with this for, you know, less than a week, so I can't be incredibly thorough about it, but I can just say from the point of view of somebody who's fairly casual with it, it's amazing.
01:37:57 ◼ ► These cameras are ridiculous. So, you know, again, if you're coming from the 12 Pro Max, you know, last year's Max phone had the sensor shift image stabilization and the larger sensor compared to the phones that preceded it and compared to the other 12 series phones.
01:38:19 ◼ ► And so if you're coming from the 12 Pro Max, this is going to be a smaller upgrade. It's still going to be an upgrade because now you have, you know, that sensor shift thing on all the lenses and the sensor got even bigger and the lenses got even bigger and you have the macro, which I'll get to in a second.
01:38:33 ◼ ► So it's a decent upgrade for 12 Pro Max users. It's a substantially bigger upgrade for everyone else who was the rest of the 12 series or any earlier phones.
01:38:44 ◼ ► So having the larger sensor and having the wider open lenses, like, you know, the more light gathering lenses, it's a pretty good difference.
01:38:54 ◼ ► You know, it's not, it's still not going to compete with full frame and, you know, big or even mirrorless cameras in terms of light gathering ability when paired with, you know, a good big glass lens.
01:39:05 ◼ ► Like it's not going to compete with that for, you know, what it is capable of doing in, in ideal conditions and everything, but in the hands of an amateur and for something that's always with you, it's amazing.
01:39:17 ◼ ► It's ridiculously good. I will say on the three X lens, I do appreciate the reach. However, my concerns about the three X lens being only F 2.8 and therefore having a lot less light gathering.
01:39:27 ◼ ► And of course it has, you know, the smaller sensor, it doesn't have the big sensor, the one X lens. So the combination of all that, the three X lens, yeah, the pictures are, are a lot more dull and noise processed.
01:39:39 ◼ ► I expected that it's not, this is not a low light lens. This is a daytime lens. And so for the purposes of having, having all that reach in the daytime is great, but yeah, at night, you're not going to want to use that lens for anything or, you know, in, in, indoors or in low light.
01:39:54 ◼ ► It's going to, it's going to be limited usefulness. But the, either the one X lens is really good. Like I posted this, this picture of hops that I just took, like while sitting on a couch outside.
01:40:06 ◼ ► And so it has, it has good light. And I used the one X lens and I just was close because he was sitting next to my legs. It looks like a portrait mode picture, but the hair is crisp and perfect because it's not portrait mode.
01:40:21 ◼ ► It's just optics. It's just when you get close to your subject, even that, like, you know, that relatively, you know, modest, you know, F 1.5, I know F 1.5 means a lot for the full frame.
01:40:33 ◼ ► It doesn't mean so much when your thumb, when your sensors, the size of your, of your pinky nail or whatever, but F 1.5 wide open on the one X lens without portrait mode looks fantastic.
01:40:44 ◼ ► If you're, if you can get close enough to your subject, you can get really good optical background blur without any tricks. And it looks good and it doesn't blur people's ears or hair off.
01:40:53 ◼ ► So it's just, it's great that I love the macro. I have found to be a lot of fun and a lot of usefulness too. Again, you know, the macro is not using the best sensor.
01:41:04 ◼ ► It's using the ultra wide and the ultra wide has, has, you know, a smaller sensor, not as good optics as the one X camera, but for utility and for fun value, it's great.
01:41:15 ◼ ► And that's another thing that that's a pretty good feature to have as a pro feature. And if I were ever to think about going back to a smaller phone, macro is one thing I would miss.
01:41:26 ◼ ► You know, when I was first getting into photography, you know, back 15 or so years ago, one of the first lenses I bought was a macro lens because I rented one once and it was so much fun.
01:41:38 ◼ ► And I was like, I have to have one of these and because macro lenses, they're, they're just fun. If you're looking for like a fun novel lens to get for your camera, rent a macro lens or buy a cheap one.
01:41:49 ◼ ► They're just there and they're not super easy to use because macro photography, you need a ton of light. Like before the zoom generation, the main buyers of ring lights were for macro photography.
01:42:05 ◼ ► Because you just, you just need a ton of light to capture stuff that close because you also, the way depth of field works, if you're shooting, you know, say you're shooting at F 2.8 or whatever, F 2.8 for a subject that is an inch in front of you is going to have a lot less depth in focus than a subject that's, you know, 20 feet from you.
01:42:29 ◼ ► The depth of your focus field, like, like how deep, you know, from you of a slice of the world is in focus increases with distance. A macro lens. Typically, like if you're shooting like on a real camera with a macro lens, if you're shooting like, you know, an insect, you know, something very close up.
01:42:45 ◼ ► If you want anything beyond like one hair on that insect to be in focus, you're probably shooting at like F 12, F 16. Like you're really stepping it down because you're, you're dealing with such distances that you need. And that's usually a ton of light.
01:42:59 ◼ ► So super macro pictures that you take with this, with this lens, they're going to have all those same challenges when you're very, very close to your subject. You need a ton of light and it needs to step it down a lot to get much of it in focus.
01:43:10 ◼ ► And so this is again going to be mostly an outdoor in sun kind of lens, you're not going to have great macro results indoors most of the time, but it's still useful. It's still good for like, you know, scanning QR codes, or taking the picture of the back of your wireless modem to get the the tag on the back like it's good for stuff like that.
01:43:29 ◼ ► And that's, that's always gonna be a great utility and it but more importantly, the fun that I had when I first discovered macro lenses. Now everyone's getting that because everyone's everyone who's bought the 13 pros like oh my God, look at this, here's a picture of my eye really close or this be in my backyard or whatever and it's, it's just really cool.
01:43:46 ◼ ► And so that it's great to be able to share the fun of macro lenses with with more people. But overall, I am just really impressed with this camera system. You know, it wasn't bad before, like by all means I love the 12 mini camera system as much as everything else.
01:44:02 ◼ ► But this one is even more versatile. And it has even more, you know, features in terms of like, I now have three x reach, which is really nice sometimes. And I now have macro which is really nice sometimes, most importantly, to have the increased quality on the one x lens.
01:44:18 ◼ ► It's a lot better. It's, it's not, you know, again, it's not going to replace, you know, a big camera for how good it can be. But for the camera that I always have with me that I'm taking 99.999% of my pictures with. It's just great. And I'm very, very happy with it. And that is why I'm carrying this giant brick of a phone in my pocket.
01:44:42 ◼ ► I can't tell if this is an upgrade from the previous phones, but my wife just took some video of my son running at a cross country meet today. And it was it was later in the day, like it was getting to be dark, right? I knew she was there. And I suggested to her to take video, I had her change her video settings from whatever they were. I think she had them on like 1080p from who knows how long. But anyway, I'm like, you have a you have a good phone now. 4k 60. Let's go.
01:45:07 ◼ ► And try out, try out her new phone and check some video. And it was, but I saw what the light was like outside. I'm like, Oh, it's so dark. There's nothing's going to come out. And then I saw the video she took. And it reminds me of reminds me of the first time I used one of Marco's fancy cameras. I think it was the original a seven.
01:45:24 ◼ ► Our is the a seven r two r two whatever your when I was over your house for the overcast party. Do you remember that? That was the a seven r two like when you hand me the phone and like one of my kids was running through your kitchen and I just snapped the picture. And again, this is a camera with no flash on it. Right? This is a picture in my experience with taking photos. Like this is a picture that is not going to come out because you're inside. It's like, you know, you're an indoor space. A kid is running by. It is not a sunny day. Right? This isn't going to come out.
01:45:52 ◼ ► You're going to get a blur of your kid because there's just not enough light. And I just took a picture of my cashing and then I looked at it and I was like, the whole picture was in focus and I was like, how is that possible? How, how did that camera like it was just an auto. It was just, I pointed it. How is it possible that it was a, because it's just kind of a giant sensor and it gathered all that light. And it, it reminded me of this. The thing that you say about the five d mark two as well as like this camera can see better in the dark than my eyeballs can because if I look when someone's running by like that, I don't see that much light.
01:46:23 ◼ ► But then I take a picture and it's like, did someone bring a lighting rig in here and shine it on my child so I could take this picture? Cause this picture is brighter than reality because in many cases, especially the old eyes, that sensor can gather more light than your eyeballs. I mean, my retina is not as big as a full frame sensor. I don't know about you.
01:46:40 ◼ ► So the video on this iPhone 13 pro of my son running, it looked like they had brought in a lighting rig and like added extra light because this, this video looks so much brighter than the outdoors look to my eyes at the time that this event was taking place.
01:46:58 ◼ ► Right. Everything is so bright. Now part of that is like the, the brightness boosting thing where it does the HDR and it has the extra bright, but like, I don't know what to attribute this to.
01:47:08 ◼ ► Is it the slightly larger sensor that is in this thing compared to the previous thing, but she has taken and I've taken videos of my son running at various track meets before.
01:47:16 ◼ ► And these videos look appreciably noticeably brighter on a day that I know we were running it like, you know, I don't know, 7 PM or something.
01:47:40 ◼ ► And also, I don't know what this is attributable to, but when you switch into macro, the colors change too.
01:47:59 ◼ ► Like, is it less accurate because it's starting to get blurry and then it snaps into focus.
01:48:04 ◼ ► I haven't actually really dug into these pictures in detail, but, but yeah, macro is definitely fun.
01:48:08 ◼ ► Um, and I enjoyed getting the phone really, really close to a bunch of plants and insects and other things.
01:48:16 ◼ ► To be clear, like, unless, unless your wife's previous phone was the max, which it wasn't right.
01:48:24 ◼ ► So unless your previous phone was the 12 pro max, the sensor size increase is non-trivial.
01:48:31 ◼ ► Uh, I believe, I don't have the numbers for him, but I believe it's something like twice the area as, as the previous one X camera was.
01:48:38 ◼ ► It's again, with the exception of the 12 pro max, which was, I think it's only quote only 50% more than the area of that one or something.
01:48:49 ◼ ► And again, we're still not talking about full frame or anywhere close to even a micro four thirds, you know, sensor size, but with Apple's processing and everything, you know, it's, it's pretty great.
01:49:12 ◼ ► I was just talking about, uh, when I, when I was, I was referencing like, you know, the hops picture where I have the really good optical blur behind it.
01:49:32 ◼ ► Of course, as, as any modern phone, modern iPhone shoots, it just looks, it looks like I have a window to the outside world right now.
01:49:39 ◼ ► Like it looks like all of the other quote white background and windows that are on my screen right now look like dirty dishwater compared to the bright sunlight that's being shown in HDR in this little region of the screen over here.
01:49:53 ◼ ► This picture is showing, like, that's another thing where like, you know, I know that you can get, you can shoot and create HDR pictures with other, with, you know, full size cameras.
01:50:04 ◼ ► Uh, it just takes more work, more time, usually some processing, uh, or at least much more talent than I have.
01:50:16 ◼ ► And it's one of those things you don't quite appreciate when you start doing it until you, until once you notice like, Oh wow, that sunset, when I look at that sunset picture and the HDR fades in after a second, like, wow, that looks really cool.
01:50:37 ◼ ► And this is why, you know, my usage of full size cameras has really faded out a lot over the last few years to where it's based on basically not using them at all anymore.
01:50:50 ◼ ► And I honestly don't miss them because these pictures are, yeah, you know, they're not as megapixel as I can get with, with my, with a big Sony or something.
01:51:01 ◼ ► But what, again, just what you can get with no effort, but this thing that's always in your pocket, even though it shifts around to the front of your pants and feels weird and is heavy.
01:51:16 ◼ ► I haven't taken much of it yet, but, but I've, you know, with previous last few years of phones, I've been blown away by how good the video is with them too.
01:51:23 ◼ ► And so I imagine it's, it's of course even better now, especially now that this is my first phone that can shoot HDR video or like this can shoot Dolby vision now the 12 mini couldn't.
01:51:33 ◼ ► So, Oh, I'm just, I'm so, I'm so looking forward to just spending more time with this camera and just taking more pictures of my everyday life with this cause it just looks so damn good.
01:51:42 ◼ ► And, uh, and just to have this in my pocket all the time is, is really something special.
01:53:04 ◼ ► Okay, since we haven't done Ask ATP in a while, we are running long, obviously, but we thought we'd pluck out one and do it here in the post show.
01:53:12 ◼ ► So Alex Merle writes, "On an infinite time scale, do you expect the following three features to come to the iPhone?
01:53:22 ◼ ► Under screen touch ID, under screen selfie camera, or under screen speakers? Since we're talking about infinite time scale, Jon, let's start with you.
01:53:34 ◼ ► I know, not the earpiece one, but I think don't the screens, don't the speakers shake the screen to some degree as part of the way they transmit sound?
01:53:53 ◼ ► I mean, obviously, technically the speakers are beneath the screen physically speaking, but people think like, oh, but the sound it's moving the air through those little holes in the bottom of your phone.
01:54:03 ◼ ► Don't you see it's not under the screen, but I do wonder if there is actual sound transmission up through the screen simply because the screen is literally on top of the speakers, even though they are quote unquote firing sideways.
01:54:13 ◼ ► So I'm maybe that's just going to, I'm just going to eliminate that when I say I'm not sure if we don't already have that.
01:54:18 ◼ ► The reason this is a good infinite time scale argument is like, you can pick any technology and be like under screen, touch ID, under screen selfie camera.
01:54:27 ◼ ► It's like, well, of course we'll have them eventually, but that's not necessarily true.
01:54:33 ◼ ► And so there is never a need to have them because it turns out during the whole time that that was a viable choice, Apple never did it.
01:54:43 ◼ ► And that's why, you know, the infinite timescale doesn't say, okay, we'll definitely get to all these things.
01:54:48 ◼ ► It could be that face ID continues to evolve and be able to work with masks and, you know, see through clothing and scarves and ski goggles and just like get so good that it's like, why would you ever need touch ID?
01:55:03 ◼ ► Right. The only use case would be like, I want to unlock it without having it facing my face or whatever.
01:55:11 ◼ ► But I think. I think there is a reasonable chance that no vastly superior replacement exists for these technologies within the time frame that Apple would consider implementing them and also based on the rumors.
01:55:26 ◼ ► So setting aside the speaker one, I expect under screen touch ID to come before under screen selfie cameras simply because.
01:55:40 ◼ ► Oh, face ID. Face ID need needs a lot of crap that I think is harder to put under the screen in the camera.
01:55:57 ◼ ► Why are you going to stick the selfie camera under the screen? Doesn't matter. You're still going to not slow down, though.
01:56:06 ◼ ► Right. But like, why would you go through that? Why would you go through the hassle of sticking the selfie camera under the screen and all the potential compromises that involves when you got to have a notch anyway for the IR sprayer or whatever the hell that for the face?
01:56:18 ◼ ► I do. You know what I mean? Like, that's why I think under screen touch ID will come first if it comes at all.
01:56:25 ◼ ► Now, all that said, I think there is a reasonable chance that unless Apple can get under screen touch ID to work acceptably with with security remotely comparable to non under screen touch ID.
01:56:41 ◼ ► You know, if Apple can't do that, they're just not going to bring touch ID back to these phones because Apple seems happy with face ID.
01:56:48 ◼ ► And obviously we know there are use cases where touch ID is advantageous, but Apple is not going to bother doing it at all.
01:56:54 ◼ ► If it can at least match the security and performance and so on and so forth and reliability of the previous touch ID.
01:57:01 ◼ ► I know tons of Android phones have under screen touch ID and everything like that are under screen fingerprint readers, whatever.
01:57:06 ◼ ► But in general, those manufacturers seem to care a lot less about the actual security of those things.
01:57:10 ◼ ► Witness the various Android phones that used to be able to be fooled by like a printout of someone's face or whatever.
01:57:15 ◼ ► Right. And so for Apple, I think there is a good chance that we never get under screen touch ID.
01:57:22 ◼ ► And in terms of under screen sensors of any kind, Apple would love to put everything under the screen, have no notch or whatever.
01:57:31 ◼ ► Apple is embracing it because they must and they want the features that the notch provides.
01:57:35 ◼ ► But if given a choice to say, what if you could have face ID but no notch? Yes, that's what Apple wants.
01:57:39 ◼ ► Right. You know, setting aside all the branding of like, oh, I can tell it's an iPhone because when I see the outline,
01:57:44 ◼ ► I see the little notch or whatever. Apple surely would love everything under the screen.
01:57:48 ◼ ► But so far, again, I don't think there is a zero compromises way to get a selfie camera.
01:58:00 ◼ ► I think we can all agree. And so maybe there will be more willing to compromise on on the front facing camera just because they care less about it.
01:58:08 ◼ ► So that's my thing. I'm saying I'm setting aside speakers who I think we kind of already have them by accident touch ID before selfie camera.
01:58:16 ◼ ► But there is a reasonable chance that you will never see touch ID on a phone again. Marco.
01:58:22 ◼ ► Under screen speakers in the way Alex most likely means where like there are no more holes on the top and bottom of the phone that like it.
01:58:33 ◼ ► I assume it would like vibrate the glass or something, you know, with the exception of the Taptic engine,
01:58:38 ◼ ► which is basically a giant subwoofer, I don't think we're going to have, you know, screen vibrating speaker technology in the phone.
01:59:04 ◼ ► but I think it would have a lot of trouble having like anywhere near an even frequency response.
01:59:10 ◼ ► It would probably have significant trouble with low frequencies and because you just have to use to move the glass so much like it would be very hard to generate that much energy.
01:59:21 ◼ ► And I think the this it would end up being a very large and power intensive module in the phone to be able to do this.
01:59:30 ◼ ► are you going to have two different speakers for stereo separation when you hold the phone and landscape like you have now like that's that that to me just seems it seems like it's not.
01:59:40 ◼ ► That's not going to really be practical when you can just make tiny holes in the top and bottom edges of the phone and be fine.
01:59:49 ◼ ► as you mentioned lots of big TVs have this on televisions television manufacturers obviously a different scenario.
01:59:57 ◼ ► So your power constraints aren't as big but televisions have had impressively good sound quality using this exact technique with the giant canvas they have to work with.
02:00:06 ◼ ► So if you're thinking like, oh, that's got to have be a compromised sound at TV scale doesn't have to be like not only can they get good stereo separation because again,
02:00:23 ◼ ► it's built-in speakers like don't expect miracles right but as compared to the previous sort of traditional downward-facing drivers that bounce sound off of your like entertainment center whatever on you know,
02:00:47 ◼ ► I think I discussed before where they will locate the sound to like the mouth of the person speaking on your giant 80 inch television or whatever.
02:00:58 ◼ ► So it will sound like the sound is coming from the mouth of the person who's speaking because they do image processing to identify the speaker and and put the sound there.
02:01:09 ◼ ► This would otherwise all just be center channel voice right but they are they located on the screen.
02:01:13 ◼ ► So if you're sitting really close to your 80 inch television that shaking the glass you can hear different people speaking from the left and right of you which is wacky.
02:01:21 ◼ ► I must look at the market when you down to phone sizes that and phone battery power envelopes that becomes much more difficult,
02:01:27 ◼ ► but I'd still maintain that screen is shaking right now and it actually is contributing to the sound.
02:01:32 ◼ ► you know to to achieve reasonable volume would it start to become unpleasant to hold because you'd be feeling more of the vibration in your hands as you're holding it like that.
02:01:41 ◼ ► I think there's multiple reasons why that kind of thing would not work well for a phone.
02:01:55 ◼ ► It's not that I don't think the tech can or will exist but when you're dealing with cameras,
02:02:03 ◼ ► cameras in this case cameras for the purposes of capturing images like for people to view and share and stuff.
02:02:11 ◼ ► I would expect from having to shoot through a screen that you probably wouldn't want to make that decision for a camera unless that was going to be the only thing like if that would allow you to get rid of the notch completely.
02:02:31 ◼ ► And so this is it would only make sense to lose that much light from the selfie camera and therefore make it take worse pictures.
02:02:38 ◼ ► If that was the last thing and I just I don't think we're going to be there anytime soon if ever so.
02:02:44 ◼ ► So I'm going to say I'm just green selfie camera probably also never and that leaves under screen touch ID.
02:02:55 ◼ ► We're probably not even that far from it being practical to do touch ID does not need the camera to be as precise or as sensitive to light as the selfie camera does.
02:03:07 ◼ ► can you shoot through a screen and spare a bit of light touch ID can you know because it works in a different way.
02:03:19 ◼ ► Anyway, whatever you be losing like detail wise or resolution wise or whatever strength wise from going through the screen touch ID can probably tolerate it long before a camera can.
02:03:41 ◼ ► I'm sure there would be some compromises as John was saying like with security and things like that on the other hand.
02:03:48 ◼ ► there's the power button touch ID thing with the iPads are using so that's an option they could put in the phone.
02:03:58 ◼ ► And I think the people who demand touch ID who like the phones the way they used to be and don't want to move to face ID still I think to please those people you probably have to do under screen as opposed to a power button touch ID feature.
02:04:11 ◼ ► Do you think there's huge demand because I remember the the senior citizen contingent for whom touch ID doesn't work because they have old people fingerprints.
02:04:18 ◼ ► I feel like that is a large constituency making touch ID continue to not be viable and masks are a big motivator for touch ID,
02:04:33 ◼ ► I just think the feature won't be attractive to Apple unless they can reasonably match the performance of the previous one because imagine they come out with under screen touch ID and already they basically said face ID has better security than touch ID because it's more points of,
02:05:01 ◼ ► So we have to get an under screen touch ID that is in the ballpark of the old touch ID at least before Apple will even consider it and then even then you get the old people finger problem.
02:05:24 ◼ ► but only one face ID is the one to have it is the most it serves the needs of the most people the best which is why you know,
02:05:31 ◼ ► why no iPhones have touch ID obviously both is better than just one but I do wonder how big the demand is like once everyone finally upgrades to a touch ID phone.
02:06:04 ◼ ► But the more I listen to the two of you and the more I think about it the more I think the under screen selfie camera on an infinite time scale sure,
02:06:17 ◼ ► Like I think Apple would go a different direction like the power there the lock button rather than going under screen.
02:06:45 ◼ ► I mean to sure in an infinite time scale, but realistically I don't see any of them happening,
02:06:49 ◼ ► but not necessarily an infinite time scale because like sometimes technology just passes by these things and they become an acronyms and we have better things that do equivalent jobs like arguably touch ID could already find itself in that situation.
02:07:02 ◼ ► Yeah, so like I did I you know, just you know, if you're waiting around for one of these it just be resigned to the fact that it may never happen,