00:00:00 ◼ ► I don't know how many years in a row now you've been graciously appearing on this show,
00:00:03 ◼ ► sometime shortly after the iPhone event, and there are reviews and everything. And this year,
00:00:11 ◼ ► you kindly reached out, but we had the dilemma, like, what do we do about the Apple Intelligence
00:00:17 ◼ ► stuff, which I went ahead and reviewed and per Verge, totally reasonable guidelines, you reviewed
00:00:24 ◼ ► what's in the box. Yeah. And then after I published my review, and gave my full thoughts
00:00:33 ◼ ► on Apple Intelligence as it exists today, then a week ago in the developer beta, now it's in public
00:00:39 ◼ ► beta, but in 18.1, I was like, Oh, to hell with it. Just come on the show. Right? Yeah, I mean,
00:00:47 ◼ ► I read I read what you wrote. And your take seems to be, there's nothing here worth talking about
00:00:52 ◼ ► yet. And I well, I have played with this stuff. It's not Voldemort, like we can go look at it.
00:00:58 ◼ ► That's the rule isn't so hard and fast. It's just, we won't tell people whether to buy something
00:01:04 ◼ ► based on unshipping software, which I think is reasonable. And I agree with you, I think right
00:01:08 ◼ ► now the features that are coming are on the whole, like not a lot, right? It's like summaries and
00:01:15 ◼ ► some writing tool. It's stuff people have played with in apps, basically, but now in the operating
00:01:20 ◼ ► system. And for me, it often, sometimes I come up with ideas, and the idea sticks. And I'm like,
00:01:30 ◼ ► I came up with my lead angle to compare adding a dedicated hardware button for the camera to the
00:01:38 ◼ ► old green, yellow hardware buttons for phones that the iPhone never had. And just strong idea loosely
00:01:45 ◼ ► held. I was like, Who knows, maybe I'll come up with a better lead. And no, I didn't. But I really
00:01:49 ◼ ► like it. And it was there. I kind of started thinking about it even before the event, because
00:01:55 ◼ ► the rumor that this hardware button would be there was there. But the Apple intelligence
00:02:00 ◼ ► thing was a perfect example of the sort of thing where I didn't really know what I thought until
00:02:09 ◼ ► I wrote it. I really did. It was the writing. That was the thinking. Like I was like, Okay,
00:02:21 ◼ ► That's how I feel about the the photographic styles. Honestly, I, I wrote through it. And
00:02:25 ◼ ► then I thought, Oh, wait, I am convincing myself that I really like this. In a way that way,
00:02:34 ◼ ► me. I was writing and yeah, here's the stuff that I'm describing it. And then about halfway through,
00:02:52 ◼ ► Yeah, I really don't think it makes that big a difference that your review was like, look,
00:03:00 ◼ ► we're going to review 18.0. And my review was I'm just going to fully include the 18.1 experience.
00:03:06 ◼ ► It's just not that different. And I liked I never know what's going to resonate with the people who
00:03:11 ◼ ► read my review and which part they're going to quote or whatever. And doesn't seem like other
00:03:16 ◼ ► people really picked up on it. But maybe they did. And they just didn't retweet it in social
00:03:21 ◼ ► or whatever. But for me personally, I just really, really feel strongly about the observation that if
00:03:27 ◼ ► they had just Apple had just added these exact same features exactly as they are. But without
00:03:34 ◼ ► making this major marketing deal, both at WWDC and especially at the event last week, which is
00:03:44 ◼ ► different. I mean, it's really unusual for Craig Federighi to appear in an iPhone event, just
00:03:48 ◼ ► because the way Apple does their keynote. It's whoever's responsible for a thing who gets to be
00:03:55 ◼ ► in the event speaking about it. And the software stuff comes out at WWDC. And it's the hardware
00:04:00 ◼ ► stuff here. But because they wanted to talk about Apple intelligence, well, there's Craig Federighi
00:04:04 ◼ ► for 15 minutes. Yeah. And what do they make of that? If they hadn't done that, these features
00:04:11 ◼ ► would just be like, Oh, yeah, there's a bunch of little bullet point features on the Bento slide,
00:04:19 ◼ ► Remember last year, they said that the keyboard autocorrect now had an LLM in it or something,
00:04:26 ◼ ► Transformers. And it really was just like a little bullet point. Like autocorrect is a little bit
00:04:30 ◼ ► better. Yeah. What I can't actually figure out, and maybe the answer is just Wall Street, but I
00:04:36 ◼ ► can't figure out why they are leaning so heavily into marketing features that don't exist on the
00:04:41 ◼ ► phone people is buying today. But do you say they lit up the cube in New York with the new Siri
00:04:47 ◼ ► lights and the people that the staff is outside, cheering Apple intelligence? And you say, Hey,
00:04:53 ◼ ► I say I truly what are we doing? Like, it's not there. Like, in the most direct way possible,
00:05:00 ◼ ► you are selling people a thing that is not there. And there's just something about I can't tell if
00:05:08 ◼ ► it's Apple, I can't tell if it's Wall Street, I can't tell if it there's nothing else to say.
00:05:12 ◼ ► If Apple itself can't come up with an angle on its own phone, aside from the software that isn't
00:05:19 ◼ ► shipping, like maybe we are just at the end of the phones, like that, like that was like, in the
00:05:25 ◼ ► middle of reviewing this phone, or how many of these phones have you read now 1516? Like, you
00:05:31 ◼ ► count all the this is the 18th generation, right? They've kind of they've kind of caught up numbering
00:05:37 ◼ ► wise by skipping there with all those years with the s generation where they lost incrementing the
00:05:44 ◼ ► integer. But I think it's more than that, because you get the you had the pros, and there's like a
00:05:48 ◼ ► five C, like, yeah, but I'd review a lot of iPhones along the way. And I was just like holding this
00:05:54 ◼ ► one. And I was like, I have, I could feed all of my old reviews in the chat. GPT like Joe has to
00:06:01 ◼ ► just spit out another review. And that is like, I think was one it was existential crisis. And but
00:06:09 ◼ ► then two is very freeing. Because I my response was fine. I'm just gonna write 4500 words on
00:06:15 ◼ ► photos, and call it a day. Like, here's the thing I care about the most. And I don't think anyone
00:06:20 ◼ ► else is going to do that. So here we go. Like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna be as indulgent as
00:06:24 ◼ ► possible. And that will be fun. But I wouldn't have been if the Apple intelligence features had
00:06:30 ◼ ► been there, I found myself asking the same question as you would, would it have radically
00:06:34 ◼ ► changed my experience with the phone, right? So all of my time, doing what other reviewers did,
00:06:39 ◼ ► and like, printing the responses, the writing tools gave in an attempt to value, I don't know
00:06:46 ◼ ► that I would have. Yeah, no, I actually think it made your review better. I mean, I it's not just
00:06:52 ◼ ► because you're my friend, and you're here on the show. But I always do enjoy your reviews, even
00:06:56 ◼ ► especially when we disagree about something, which is typically at the edges. I don't know that we've
00:07:02 ◼ ► ever fundamentally disagreed about a new iPhone. But I think it made your review better because
00:07:09 ◼ ► you got to focus on the actual stuff that really does differentiate the 16 pros from the regular
00:07:15 ◼ ► 16s and previous generations of the pros, which is the new photographic styles, which are truly
00:07:30 ◼ ► like your absolutely excellent walkthrough of like Italian festival or some kind of festival
00:07:37 ◼ ► San Genaro festival in New York. It was great. It was so much fun. And we ate so much food.
00:07:41 ◼ ► It was a great but it was, but it was great and and made for a great share on social media.
00:08:05 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, that was fun. And like, it's, it's fun to put those things through their paces,
00:08:09 ◼ ► especially when I have a video team that is like excited to shoot and log and mess around
00:08:18 ◼ ► but on focusing on the main features that that truly differentiate this year's 16 pro product.
00:08:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, to be clear, one of the weirdness is of this generation. And I think you caught
00:08:41 ◼ ► question we got was this is you're going to buy a regular 16 because I like the colors.
00:08:48 ◼ ► so much. And what is really the difference? And then you look and you actually evaluate it. Oh,
00:08:53 ◼ ► there's there's actually quite a few differences here that the spec sheet is not showing you
00:08:58 ◼ ► like the sensor on the main camera is substantially better on the pro than a regular 16. If you care
00:09:05 ◼ ► about these video features, they are here on the pro. If the pro has the, the different focal
00:09:11 ◼ ► lengths, the fusion camera, so it has 24 and 35 and 28, I think in the middle, and then that's up
00:09:16 ◼ ► to two x zoom. Maybe you care about these things. Maybe you don't, but they are substantially
00:09:21 ◼ ► different on the pro than on the other phone. And then I think what's really interesting
00:09:27 ◼ ► is the pro max, if you like the big phone is like, it's starting to get too big. So the plus is
00:09:33 ◼ ► actually a much more manageable size in its way. And so you're, you're just like, you're thinking
00:09:38 ◼ ► about all these trade offs that are on the fine edge of like, what kind of iPhone do I want? Not
00:09:42 ◼ ► is this the next greatest iPhone? It's more like here's Apple suite of features. They are expressed
00:09:49 ◼ ► in these phones. And now we can evaluate the sort of cultural object they are instead of
00:09:54 ◼ ► is this the reason to buy a new one? Cause I can't, especially at 15, there's no reason to
00:10:00 ◼ ► buy a new one, like none. And if you have an older one, it's the argument is still quite hard. And
00:10:06 ◼ ► like, really it's your carrier will probably upgrade you for you or you're in the iPhone
00:10:10 ◼ ► upgrade program or something. But I don't know. A lot of our readers are just like paying cash for
00:10:15 ◼ ► a new phone every two years. They're just sort of on the ride. And that, that, I think that really
00:10:20 ◼ ► changes the calculus, how you review the phones. Yeah. The, the trade in value and Apple's official
00:10:26 ◼ ► trade in program, which I know probably doesn't give anybody the most money that they could
00:10:32 ◼ ► possibly get, but certainly gives them the easiest trade in experience. But it, it does keep the,
00:10:41 ◼ ► well, maybe I won't upgrade every year, but every other year impulse going longer than it would
00:10:48 ◼ ► without it, because it significantly reduces what you have to trade in your, the amount of money out
00:10:55 ◼ ► of pocket. Oh yeah. But like AT&T is sending me like flyers every day being like, do it,
00:11:00 ◼ ► and I think most people are, they're just paying a fee anyway. It's like leasing a car at this
00:11:06 ◼ ► point. And it's like every, I got a new Corolla, like here, here's the next one. Like it's just
00:11:10 ◼ ► going to, yeah, I noted. And I noticed that in all of the, cause the other weird thing about our,
00:11:16 ◼ ► you're in my September, September schedule, at least for me, I don't know, but like I definitely
00:11:23 ◼ ► missed the first week of NFL football. Cause that that Sunday was the day before the event. And I
00:11:28 ◼ ► was flying out to California and I was thinking maybe I'd try to watch some games on the flight,
00:11:34 ◼ ► but I just sort of slept instead. And then the next weekend I was too busy working, trying to
00:11:39 ◼ ► test the phone. So I didn't re so lat yesterday was as we recorded is Monday, September 23,
00:11:54 ◼ ► Well, I, if you're going to lose a heartbreaker though, I guess the best way to lose it is to
00:12:01 ◼ ► be getting absolutely embarrassed for three plus quarters and then come raging back. And the funny
00:12:08 ◼ ► part as an aside is Brady was announcing the game on Fox. And at some point in the third quarter,
00:12:15 ◼ ► while it was, I think 28 to six with the Cowboys behind, they've showed a picture. And I don't know
00:12:20 ◼ ► why this guy wore the t-shirt, but there's a guy in AT&T stadium outside Dallas wearing a t-shirt
00:12:28 ◼ ► that says Atlanta 28, New England three. And it's a reference to that Superbowl comeback. And Brady
00:12:39 ◼ ► spoke about it a little in his mindset, leading a comeback, but why would I don't even know who
00:12:44 ◼ ► this guy was rooting for in the game, whether he was rooting for Dallas or rooting for Baltimore,
00:12:54 ◼ ► I it's the tag at the end of our video, I've watched a Packers game in our video studio every
00:13:02 ◼ ► year for however many years, like shooting the iPhone review. I'm just like, I'm going to be here
00:13:07 ◼ ► watching some football. And it's like the video team is like, are you watching the game?
00:13:16 ◼ ► it's always CS comes and I end up watching a playoff game in Las Vegas. And that is always,
00:13:25 ◼ ► But the thing that deja vu, they came back to me yesterday. And my reason for this whole aside
00:13:29 ◼ ► is I had also, I was thinking was, oh, it'll be nice to have like a regular Sunday and just watch
00:13:35 ◼ ► football and hopefully my Cowboys win. Well, that didn't work out, but the rest of the day was fun.
00:13:41 ◼ ► Well, I forgot how much these mid September football games are just dominated by iPhone
00:13:48 ◼ ► commercials. Just cause I, I don't watch many commercials in general. Cause most of the TV I
00:13:52 ◼ ► watch is on Apple TV and doesn't have commercials and sports are the one thing where I'm watching
00:13:57 ◼ ► live. And so I see the commercials like traditional and it's just iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, iPhone from
00:14:04 ◼ ► T-Mobile, iPhone from AT&T, iPhone from Apple. It's iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. Have you heard about
00:14:11 ◼ ► the iPhone 16? I think one of the reasons that the phone is out ahead of the software is because if
00:14:19 ◼ ► you just like ruin the GDP of America, if you knock the iPhone off its cadence, like if, if
00:14:27 ◼ ► Apple doesn't hit its Q4 and AT&T doesn't hit its Q4 and T-Mobile and Verizon and everybody
00:14:32 ◼ ► else doesn't hit their Q4 and then like all the case makers of America don't get to sell all their
00:14:36 ◼ ► cases. Like you're just like, okay, like we we've scooted the GDP of America off by a couple of
00:14:42 ◼ ► weeks and that's not good for anybody. Like we can't actually do this. And I think that there's,
00:14:49 ◼ ► you know, it's, I try very hard not to think of Wall Street or the fact that Apple is a company
00:14:56 ◼ ► that often acts more like a state than the company. There's a famous Walt Mossberg quote
00:15:01 ◼ ► from profile fit in Wired magazine from ages ago where the CEO of like Sirius XM is like screaming
00:15:07 ◼ ► at him that he ruined his stock price. And while at CES and Walt's like, I don't give a fuck about
00:15:12 ◼ ► your stock price. And I, that's it. That's if I learned one lesson from Walt, it's I don't give a
00:15:16 ◼ ► fuck about your stock price. I learned a lot of lessons from Walt, but that's at the top of my
00:15:19 ◼ ► list. And sometimes you're like, oh, this actually explains why the phone is out many weeks before
00:15:27 ◼ ► it's software. Because they probably wanted it all to happen at the same time. And the software
00:15:32 ◼ ► isn't ready. But if you don't ship the iPhone on time, a lot of there's just the firefighters
00:15:43 ◼ ► Yeah. And there's always certain years there are hardware hiccups. I mean, in putting 2020 in a
00:15:49 ◼ ► category of its own, it's it's small miracle that the iPhones shipped as close to on regular
00:15:55 ◼ ► schedule in 2020 as they did. But every once in a while, there's something like a certain model
00:16:01 ◼ ► that the I don't I don't remember the exact years, but you know, the iPhone eight plus is going to
00:16:09 ◼ ► ship in October. And the other one came out in the end of September. But for the most part, yeah,
00:16:16 ◼ ► this is like, and I've talked about it on this show, Apple, their culture is that that's partly
00:16:23 ◼ ► what puts the emphasis on Apple intelligence in their marketing. What makes it even more
00:16:35 ◼ ► Yeah. Right. And like I've say, like, if you asked JAWS on the record, at like, in my on stage
00:16:44 ◼ ► interview after WWDC, is there going to be a September iPhone event? He would not answer?
00:16:55 ◼ ► he would come up with, he'd make an instant joke, but he's absolutely would not commit to it that
00:17:00 ◼ ► and that's Apple's way. But yet, here they are talking about these features that definitely,
00:17:18 ◼ ► No, like at all. And then the ones that would be like the agentic Siri that can go take actions in
00:17:25 ◼ ► the apps on your phone. I don't think that stuff is going to ship until well into next year.
00:17:30 ◼ ► Yeah. And Gherman is saying something like that. But I don't even think you need Gherman's
00:17:34 ◼ ► two cents with whatever info he's getting from his sources. I think just sort of being used to
00:17:42 ◼ ► the cadence of Apple's beta operating systems, those features feel like they're way out like 18.4,
00:17:51 ◼ ► which just the usual schedule for this year's integer point four is like March or April.
00:17:57 ◼ ► But I think it's even farther than that, like that the the promise of all these AI features
00:18:02 ◼ ► is not we're going to do a bunch of summaries or generate images for you. It's you're going to speak
00:18:09 ◼ ► to your phone in natural language, and it's going to do stuff for you. And then it will talk to you
00:18:13 ◼ ► in natural language. So I just yell like, I need to order a sandwich. And then the phone will go
00:18:18 ◼ ► and do it. And then let me know when the sandwich will arrive. And that is not just a technical
00:18:30 ◼ ► It is also just a set of interlocking business and regulatory problems like sometime between now and
00:18:38 ◼ ► whenever that ships, California might pass an AI safety bill that Apple will have to like prove
00:18:45 ◼ ► that it's not going to break everything. It's not going to destroy the world by letting me tell Siri
00:18:49 ◼ ► to order me a sandwich. Apple's got to get outdoor dash or seamless or grubhub or any of those apps to
00:18:56 ◼ ► plug into the Siri system, which those companies don't really want to do, because all the other
00:19:01 ◼ ► companies are trying to do that. It's got to get all of the app makers on the iPhone to plug into
00:19:06 ◼ ► a Siri that can then control their apps for them. That's not March. That might be next September,
00:19:14 ◼ ► where we're demoing the full promise of Apple intelligence, which is you just talk to the phone
00:19:20 ◼ ► and does stuff for you. Yeah. And my take coming out of, I don't know how many days out of WWD,
00:19:26 ◼ ► but I wrote it in June, so shortly out of WWDC. And I stand by it now in the middle of September
00:19:32 ◼ ► is this whole thing feels like if there weren't this industry wide hype cycle, both on the tech
00:19:41 ◼ ► side and the Wall Street side of the industry, this whole thing feels like it ought to be next
00:19:47 ◼ ► year's WWDC tent pole. Okay, now we're going to talk about this. And that would be more like the
00:19:55 ◼ ► normal pace of Apple. For as much griping Apple's behind on AI, Apple has no story about modern AI,
00:20:05 ◼ ► there was. When those things start happening, they typically last longer than eight months.
00:20:11 ◼ ► They're closer to two years before Apple says, "Oh, and now we've reinvented blank by blank,"
00:20:17 ◼ ► which is the thing for two years everybody has been saying they're behind on. That's the way
00:20:21 ◼ ► the company operates. And they just using the features they're already exposing in 18.1,
00:20:29 ◼ ► which are fine, but they're kind of rough. I mean, for example, I plugged my whole 7,000 plus word
00:20:40 ◼ ► review into Apple Notes at the end after I was done copy editing it, put the whole thing in and
00:20:47 ◼ ► told Apple Intelligence to proofread it. It took forever. It was, well, I mean, forever
00:20:53 ◼ ► by my judgment of how long that feature should take, which was like, I think I said like two
00:20:59 ◼ ► minutes or something. But the worst part about taking two minutes was that it didn't show any
00:21:05 ◼ ► kind of progress dialogue. It just sort of showed a little bit of a wavy modern Apple Intelligence
00:21:15 ◼ ► waviness animation to the text as it was applying temporarily its proofreading suggestions.
00:21:22 ◼ ► But there was no sort of progress bar or estimate of how long it would take. And two minutes is just
00:21:28 ◼ ► I know 7,000 words is significantly longer than most works of writing that people are going to
00:21:35 ◼ ► want to proofread. But I don't think it's a ridiculous amount. I think lots and lots of people
00:21:40 ◼ ► have jobs where they write 1520 page reports as part of their work, and they would like to
00:21:45 ◼ ► proofread them. And you know, if that was happening on your phone, or if it was going to Apple's
00:21:49 ◼ ► private cloud? I don't know. I really don't know. And I thought about that question. And then I
00:21:54 ◼ ► thought, it is already 1415 hours behind the embargo. I am not going to even broach that
00:22:00 ◼ ► subject. But and I don't think Apple wants to talk about it ever. I think because they want to always
00:22:06 ◼ ► maintain the flexibility to change what is on device and leaves, but I can't help but think
00:22:12 ◼ ► it was on device, which is why it was so slow. That's my feeling is in this early period,
00:22:17 ◼ ► all this stuff is on device right now. They told me that the servers are ready, and they're ready
00:22:22 ◼ ► to go. And the audits are taking place, and they'll release the stuff when the audits are ready. And
00:22:32 ◼ ► And you have to scale up to sending things out. So things like, even like Genmoji is local.
00:22:42 ◼ ► Yeah. And, well, I don't know about the full images that the image what they call image
00:22:49 ◼ ► playground is going to be the name of the app. I don't know about that. Because that seems like
00:22:53 ◼ ► this. But again, I almost admire the way that Apple says you as a user, you don't need to
00:22:58 ◼ ► care which is on device and which is not I mean, but maybe you kind of do if you're going to be
00:23:03 ◼ ► using it all the time you want to know, is it killing my device battery, but I can't imagine
00:23:08 ◼ ► like which of these features is somebody going to be using so much, even if it is on device that
00:23:13 ◼ ► it's going to kill their device battery? How many Genmoji are you going to create in a day?
00:23:17 ◼ ► It's not that to me that question I have, did you have good battery life in your 15 Pro, my 15 Pro,
00:23:22 ◼ ► the battery degraded so fast. To me, the question is, all right, if you're running a bunch of
00:23:27 ◼ ► AI summaries of email and text in the background, and at any moment while I'm texting, I can just
00:23:33 ◼ ► have it fire out a nicer version of what I'm doing. I'm going to end up like using more
00:23:39 ◼ ► processing power, right? Like the just the latent amount of background processing power just to do
00:23:44 ◼ ► the notification summaries is going to go up a little bit. And if is that going to hurt my
00:23:50 ◼ ► already degraded battery? And that to me was okay, maybe this is the reason I should buy a new phone.
00:23:55 ◼ ► And that does not rise at all to a reason to buy a new phone. That's I should get a new battery in
00:24:00 ◼ ► my phone. And I this is what I mean, like, particularly if you have a 15 Pro. Unless you are
00:24:14 ◼ ► even accounting for Apple intelligence. And if you have a regular 15 or 14, that doesn't have enough
00:24:19 ◼ ► Ramder on Apple intelligence. It seems like the only right answer is you ought to wait until this
00:24:25 ◼ ► offer actually ships or enough of it ships that it's worth it. Because then you will. And that
00:24:31 ◼ ► might be into next year. And then you're probably gonna get a better deal. So yeah, that to me felt
00:24:37 ◼ ► very challenging. Yeah. And I also think that if you're going to wait for a signal, at least
00:24:48 ◼ ► even just a majority of the promised features already for Apple intelligence to be available
00:24:55 ◼ ► in some form, even in like public beta sometime next year, say March, April, which I think might
00:25:01 ◼ ► be like you said, might be optimistic for all of that. At that point, you're halfway through the
00:25:07 ◼ ► hardware cycle. And so you might as well wait for the iPhone 17. If that's really if you think that
00:25:15 ◼ ► these AI features are really going to be the deciding yes, this this is now a device that is
00:25:20 ◼ ► worth upgrading to me. Because I also think it is much more likely that the iPhone 17 models will
00:25:28 ◼ ► actually have been hardware engineered with these generative AI needs in mind than these even though
00:25:36 ◼ ► Apple keeps reiterating and almost ad nauseum that this these are the first iPhones built from the
00:25:43 ◼ ► ground up for Apple intelligence, which knowing Apple's hardware cycle really doesn't make sense
00:25:49 ◼ ► to me. Not really. I noticed AI last year, like this phone has been on the drawing board for at
00:25:55 ◼ ► least two if not three years given their cycles. So I truly do not believe that. I think if you're
00:26:01 ◼ ► going to spend the money if you feel like what I need to do now is spend money, which I understand
00:26:05 ◼ ► is an instinct. I feel this all the time. This is how I manage. I feel it all the time. Right.
00:26:09 ◼ ► And I write, I don't have like a my emotional the way I manage my emotions, I just buy technology,
00:26:16 ◼ ► you should spend 20 bucks a month on chat chippy tea or clod, which is by all accounts better or
00:26:21 ◼ ► rotate through them one a month for the next six months. Just like screw around with all of these
00:26:27 ◼ ► tools. Because then when you're like, Okay, do I want Apple intelligence, you'll be able to
00:26:33 ◼ ► evaluate it. And you won't you don't need a new phone for all of those tools around the cloud.
00:26:37 ◼ ► And they've got all kinds of weird privacy problems and all the rest of it. But you don't
00:26:41 ◼ ► have to give up. You're not locking yourself into literally one AI ecosystem with all that cash here.
00:26:47 ◼ ► You're just trying a bunch of things out. I think not enough people, especially in the world of
00:26:53 ◼ ► consumers have tried enough things to know what they prefer. And I think that's what Apple is
00:26:57 ◼ ► really betting on here, right? Everyone trusts Apple to make a good decision. They have a massive
00:27:02 ◼ ► distribution advantage because they have the phone and iOS and all this other stuff. And they'll do a
00:27:06 ◼ ► good job. And then the win. And you can see that that is part of the thinking, at least across the
00:27:12 ◼ ► board. That's part of the thinking. But there's no reason to rush into buying their hardware to run
00:27:17 ◼ ► their software and the software isn't available yet. Yeah. And it just comes back to why they
00:27:22 ◼ ► marketing it so hard. I mean, I wrote about it, it just, it's, I don't know if it's worrisome,
00:27:29 ◼ ► but maybe it is a little I don't know. And if it's really about Wall Street, then that's outside my
00:27:41 ◼ ► these features at WWDC, but actually promoting them as the, as they say, the design for the ground up
00:27:49 ◼ ► feature that the phone support, that the stock would take a significant hit because investors
00:27:55 ◼ ► would judge that the company is missing out on this new thing. But I just don't see that as,
00:28:04 ◼ ► to me, the strength of Apple's marketing across all of their products has always been that it's
00:28:09 ◼ ► especially at its best. It's fundamentally true. And I know that drives some justifiably skeptical
00:28:17 ◼ ► people out there who just think, ah, corporate marketing and the better some company is at
00:28:21 ◼ ► quote unquote marketing, the more you have to be skeptical of them. I agree, be skeptical.
00:28:31 ◼ ► for decades tend to be true. And here is this whole thing that to me just does not ring true.
00:28:41 ◼ ► family of software features. And on the other side, the software features as we've seen them
00:28:48 ◼ ► and the ones that are even forthcoming, even if all of them ship as promised by March or April,
00:28:54 ◼ ► I just don't see it as all that groundbreaking. And I don't see any of them as unique to Apple.
00:29:01 ◼ ► The one area that would be unique to Apple would be that highlighted at WWDC by the example of some
00:29:09 ◼ ► woman asking Siri, "Hey, what time does my mom's flight get here?" And it requires Siri to parse
00:29:16 ◼ ► all of that. Who is her mother? Where, you know, oh, look at the context of all of the iMessages
00:29:25 ◼ ► she sent to her mother, the emails between them. Maybe her mom forwarded her flight info so it's
00:29:31 ◼ ► not from her mom. It's from American Airlines or something. And that Siri will just figure it out
00:29:37 ◼ ► and say she gets to SFO at four o'clock on Thursday. Yeah. I mean, but this is a dream,
00:29:43 ◼ ► right? Like the big, big dream. And we've had Satya Nadella in decoder, and I've talked to
00:29:50 ◼ ► Sundar Pichai in decoder, and they will all tell you that AI is a platform shift. And you're like,
00:29:55 ◼ ► what on earth does that mean? Like, what does that mean? And what they mean very specifically
00:30:01 ◼ ► is this is a new input method and new input methods to computers typically result in new
00:30:08 ◼ ► application models. And we all get to build new kinds of computers, right? Like, broadly, this is
00:30:13 ◼ ► what they mean. This is what Microsoft in particular means. Like, you're just going to talk
00:30:17 ◼ ► to the computer, and a bunch of stuff is going to happen on Azure, and we're going to collect our
00:30:20 ◼ ► money. And that's the future of computers. And it doesn't really matter to them if it's open AI or
00:30:25 ◼ ► if it's dang or whatever, because it all going to run on Azure in the end. But if you see that,
00:30:30 ◼ ► if you're Apple, like, okay, the big companies are aligned around the idea that there's a platform
00:30:34 ◼ ► shift. And the platform shift is we went from mice and keyboards to click wheels, to touch screens,
00:30:46 ◼ ► And so you can just say, what time is my mom's plane land? And the computer will figure it out.
00:30:51 ◼ ► You better be on it. Like, you had better be on it. You're going to miss it because they're
00:30:55 ◼ ► all chasing it. But actually, like, look at it. Like, an LLM can just get you the first part.
00:31:00 ◼ ► It can just understand the thing that is being said. All of the rest of it is still fantasy,
00:31:06 ◼ ► right? And this is the problem with humane. And the problem with rabbit companies is they could
00:31:11 ◼ ► very convincingly fake the first part where some little device can just understand what you said
00:31:16 ◼ ► and then talk to a cloud server somewhere. Then what? And maybe Google will figure it out because
00:31:21 ◼ ► Google has a lot of information. Maybe Microsoft figure out because they have Azure and they have
00:31:24 ◼ ► all these resources and they have open AI. Maybe Apple can figure out because it's their computer
00:31:29 ◼ ► at the end of the day. Everyone is talking to all of these services through an iPhone, mostly.
00:31:34 ◼ ► And on desktop, it's all happening through a web browser. So we're not touching anyone's
00:31:41 ◼ ► but you still have that same problem of, boy, I hope your mom sent you all that information
00:31:52 ◼ ► sending like a plain text JPEGs or JPEGs flow of text that the system can't read. Like you
00:32:00 ◼ ► just have, you just have these like series of complicated problems besides natural language
00:32:05 ◼ ► input. And you talk to more app developers than I do, but like the Apple and developer relationship
00:32:12 ◼ ► is not great lately. And kind of the end of this road is what if we commoditize all of your apps?
00:32:24 ◼ ► customer never sees? And I, you got, you got to do a lot of work to get all the way there,
00:32:30 ◼ ► but that's like the final turn of the screw. And no one who's ever tried to pull that off has ever
00:32:34 ◼ ► pulled that off. Like windows phone didn't work. And that was like the idea of live title,
00:32:39 ◼ ► windows phone, right? Apple has tried to do app clips for years and it just like doesn't work.
00:32:43 ◼ ► Like everyone's like, I want you to have my whole app and I want to put my monetization in front of
00:32:46 ◼ ► you and I want to own my customer experience. And now you're like, here's, what's going to happen.
00:32:50 ◼ ► So I'm going to talk to Siri and they're never going to see your app. They will never know you
00:32:53 ◼ ► exist. And then we will tell them what you did. And that's a big, that's such a big idea that,
00:32:58 ◼ ► yes, it's a platform shift, but you can't just like light up the cube and be like, it's here.
00:33:03 ◼ ► You have to do it. Well, the only thing I will say in their defense in defense of their marketing of
00:33:15 ◼ ► but it apparently did look very cool. Yeah, no, it looked awesome. Like every picture I saw of it,
00:33:20 ◼ ► I was like, man, if this, if that, if the promise is being delivered, this would be the sickest
00:33:24 ◼ ► market. Maybe that's the explanation, right? Wouldn't it be funny if Tim Cook was like,
00:33:29 ◼ ► ah, the hell with wall street, we're going to do the right thing. I don't think we should promote
00:33:32 ◼ ► this stuff. And it's like, I don't know, whoever's team put, put behind this lighting plan for the
00:33:36 ◼ ► cube on fifth avenue was like, yeah, but look at these renders. And they're like, oh yeah,
00:33:41 ◼ ► great deal on leds. We got to do this. Yeah. All right, let me take a break here and thank our
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00:35:26 ◼ ► tip top.com. I missed Panzerino at the event. Yeah. It's funny. Do you get the same feeling
00:35:34 ◼ ► that Apple had turned over the invite list and it was a lot of younger and successful YouTubers and
00:35:41 ◼ ► tech talkers? I don't mean to denigrate them. No, there was just a moment where I was like,
00:35:45 ◼ ► Oh, there's a bunch of kids here. You talked to it. I talked about it with a few of our
00:35:56 ◼ ► Well, I don't think I think the difference like when I was up and coming, I've told this story
00:36:03 ◼ ► before. I remember, I think it was a WWDC. It might have been a Macworld Expo, but it was
00:36:12 ◼ ► probably WWDC. It was at Moscone West. And it was the first time that I had a, maybe not the first
00:36:21 ◼ ► time I had a press media badge, but it was the first time I was scheduled for a post keynote
00:36:27 ◼ ► briefing. And so I got to the, there's always like a little green room area, but there at Moscone,
00:36:39 ◼ ► didn't know who, and I was like, Oh, there's Holy shit. There's Walt Mossberg sitting at a table
00:36:43 ◼ ► and Walt. And I said, hello. And he knew who I was. He had very kind things to say about
00:36:48 ◼ ► Daring Fireball made me feel so welcome. And I'll never forget that. And now I know that I'm sort of
00:36:57 ◼ ► at that position where there might be new people in the media who see me somewhere. And I try to
00:37:03 ◼ ► be as gracious as Walt, half as gracious as Walt was to me at the time. But I totally see that
00:37:11 ◼ ► though, like so many of the people who I consider of my peer group have just dropped out of the
00:37:16 ◼ ► game. Yeah. Well, I mean, and there are the public hate that the spectrum of publications and the
00:37:21 ◼ ► audiences they reach is radically different, right? There just aren't as many type publications as
00:37:28 ◼ ► there were. I, I still pride myself on getting the first great hands-on photo out. I'm always posting
00:37:35 ◼ ► like old man still got it. And Walt made fun of me. He's like, what are you talking about? I was
00:37:37 ◼ ► like, I, I I'm, I got 20 years in some of these, but then I had said, I was like, I now know what
00:37:45 ◼ ► it was like when I was around. He started laughing at me. Cause I was that kid and I appreciate it.
00:37:50 ◼ ► So whatever it's a circle of life, but the thing that gets me about it is they're all kind of solo
00:37:56 ◼ ► YouTubers and TikTokers. And you can just see like, they're, they're kind of on rails, right?
00:38:02 ◼ ► And again, I'm not, that's just the, the sort of media economy that they're in, whatever, but the,
00:38:15 ◼ ► where there's, there's just something happening here. I'll give you my conspiracy theory. All
00:38:20 ◼ ► the there's all the discourse about the camera button and what we'll case makers do. And it's
00:38:26 ◼ ► like, well, all the YouTubers are sponsored by case me, right? There's, there's, there's that
00:38:31 ◼ ► weird sort of like flattening and where I think TikTok and YouTube are kind of insular media
00:38:37 ◼ ► economies. Like there's a lot of people talking themselves inside of one algorithm. And I,
00:38:44 ◼ ► And I was like, a lot of this looks the same. A lot of this feels the same. A lot of this feels
00:38:47 ◼ ► very controlled. And I'm, I'm glad Apple still gives us the access and we have a different set
00:38:52 ◼ ► of review rules than other people. This is a real thing. Like they can't tell us what to do. They
00:38:58 ◼ ► can't tell me what to do. They certainly can't tell you. I know what to do. Good luck because
00:39:03 ◼ ► we are precious and now we're old and now we're arrogant, all of it. And I, there's something
00:39:07 ◼ ► happening at these events that I can feel the change. I mean, I don't think it's just age.
00:39:12 ◼ ► I think there's a different kind of media being made and Apple is reacting to it. All the big
00:39:16 ◼ ► companies are reacting to it. I talked to a bunch of folks about it, but it has definitely changed
00:39:21 ◼ ► the tenor of the event. Yeah, I think that the difference is that when our web generation was
00:39:30 ◼ ► coming up and it was really just that we were, there were so many more of us than there were
00:39:38 ◼ ► figures like Mossberg and Pogue and Ed Beg who I saw he's still writing. He's just not at USA Today
00:39:45 ◼ ► anymore. And Steven Levy, those were the four, the only four people who got the original iPhone to
00:39:52 ◼ ► review in advance. Steven Levy at Wired, Ed Beg at USA Today, Pogue at the Times and Walt, of course,
00:39:59 ◼ ► at the Wall Street Journal at the time. And with the web, there just became more of us,
00:40:04 ◼ ► but we were trying to do what they did at their best, which is write comprehensive, fair, balanced,
00:40:11 ◼ ► informative reviews for our readers. And we could do things they couldn't do because we have
00:40:16 ◼ ► the unlimited space of the web as compared to the very constrained physical space of ink on a
00:40:29 ◼ ► the YouTube and especially TikTok generation of creators, they're just playing an entirely
00:40:51 ◼ ► and anybody who has, and many of them surely reach literally millions more people than I'm
00:40:58 ◼ ► ever going to reach. But the people who want to read the sort of thing I write aren't watching
00:41:20 ◼ ► Yeah, it just washes over you in the algorithm. Yeah. And the thing I agree through that no one's
00:41:24 ◼ ► playing the same game and we are, The Verge is very much modeled on traditional magazines. Like
00:41:31 ◼ ► we, our competitor is wired. Like that's what it is. Our ethics policy is actually just boosted
00:41:38 ◼ ► from Walton Kara's ethics policy. I don't know if that's ethical to steal an ethics policy,
00:41:41 ◼ ► but that's what we did in 2011. And then it's grown over time. So we exist in the ecosystem
00:41:47 ◼ ► of like traditional print journalism. And we are very annoying about all of it. And I look at that
00:41:58 ◼ ► it's weird to me that as many YouTubers and TikTokers talk openly about the companies that
00:42:03 ◼ ► sponsor them and take the junkets. And even down to, if you look at the number of tech executives
00:42:09 ◼ ► who appear on sort of like YouTube or podcasts, I know for a fact, many of them submit their
00:42:15 ◼ ► questions for approval beforehand, which we would never do. And there's just that back and forth
00:42:19 ◼ ► there where it's just a much more commercial space. And everyone talks about it as content
00:42:25 ◼ ► and not journalism. I'm like, that's fine. Like I truly think it's fine. We make a different product.
00:42:31 ◼ ► I think our product has a place in the ecosystem. I think a lot of people sort of rely on us to make
00:42:36 ◼ ► that product. And I take that very seriously, but you see the tenor of the end is changing
00:42:41 ◼ ► as that ecosystem becomes more ascendant. It obviously has more people and as more people
00:42:47 ◼ ► assume that that is the default. Right. And that sort of flipped to that as the default, as opposed
00:42:51 ◼ ► to fancy print journalism is the default is really interesting across the board in media.
00:42:57 ◼ ► And then you kind of see how the big tech companies, Apple included, are engaging with it.
00:43:02 ◼ ► So Tim Cook is giving pretty tightly controlled interviews to YouTubers with pretty small
00:43:06 ◼ ► audiences. And they won't put him in front of the Times or the Journal or what us or whatever it is.
00:43:13 ◼ ► Mark Zuckerberg is he loves the interviews like MMA stars that like, there's just a whole other
00:43:17 ◼ ► thing happening. It is truly fascinating to look at from the outside, but was actually at his most
00:43:24 ◼ ► revealing, I think, in any interview in the one he just did. So yeah, you can take it all in. It's
00:43:31 ◼ ► just, I think we were the upstarts. We were the ones like the virtual stuff. And gadget, they
00:43:37 ◼ ► would complain about us because we were the bloggers. Right. And so the idea that this is
00:43:40 ◼ ► bloggers versus journalism. I'm like, why was the other I was on the other side of that equation.
00:43:44 ◼ ► And there is one thing here that's very different, which is the media that's been created is
00:43:50 ◼ ► inherently more commercial to begin with. Yeah, right. And yeah, that I think that's a change.
00:43:56 ◼ ► Yeah. And it's almost it was, it's funny, I never really thought about this. But it was
00:44:23 ◼ ► And like, when ads on blogs first became a thing, it, people had a knee jerk reaction against it.
00:44:32 ◼ ► And I get it, I got it at the time. And I mean, and I've tried for 20 years now to keep my
00:44:40 ◼ ► advertising to something that I think is palatable to consume, even if it's at the expense of how
00:44:48 ◼ ► much revenue it generates. But it just adds at all, there was sort of a no, no, that's electric
00:44:55 ◼ ► for blogs, right? And it feels Yeah, it feels like you're talking about something a long time
00:44:59 ◼ ► ago there, Gruber. But it was the way that the medium evolved that it was like, I don't know,
00:45:08 ◼ ► when blogging started adding commercial, which was ads, not subscriptions at that time, it was like,
00:45:26 ◼ ► modern video social media was like dive right in its commercial from the day one. Yeah, right. It
00:45:35 ◼ ► was it was part and parcel of the message and the and it's not even it certainly isn't probably is
00:45:43 ◼ ► actually even less on the tech side of that as opposed to the lifestyle side of social media,
00:45:51 ◼ ► where it's almost indistinguishable. It's it's so partner and junket and free stuff heavy.
00:45:59 ◼ ► Oh, I'm writing a piece. I'm writing a piece for this. So I'll keep it all away. But I'm writing
00:46:02 ◼ ► a piece for this. And I'm going to interview. I shouldn't say it because it's not complete. All
00:46:06 ◼ ► right. But writing piece. And I'm going to I'll just say I'm writing a piece of this. And I'm
00:46:10 ◼ ► interviewing the CEO of one of the big ad agencies on stage for an ad week conference in October. And
00:46:15 ◼ ► so I've been doing all this reporting. And in the advertising world, it's like chaos. Like you think
00:46:22 ◼ ► the media world is chaos because of social media. Sure. But like, traditional media, like basically
00:46:27 ◼ ► sucks at making money. And like mostly complaints. Like the ad agencies are really good at making
00:46:33 ◼ ► money. And they run pretty cutthroat businesses. And they know they have to deliver value and they
00:46:36 ◼ ► have to make money. And they are responding to this as aggressively as any other industry
00:46:41 ◼ ► would ever respond to any sort of perceived external threat. So you look at in lifestyle,
00:46:46 ◼ ► there's the idea that small lifestyle companies or fashion companies like they won't hire ad agencies,
00:46:51 ◼ ► they'll just hire a creator to be their outbound marketing. And that's how they get customers.
00:46:56 ◼ ► And so the ad agencies like that, we can't do that. And they're spending billions of dollars
00:47:02 ◼ ► in total, buying influencer marketing agencies to have these relationships. And then they're
00:47:07 ◼ ► offering things like, you tell us who you want. And our AI system will go out to our network of
00:47:13 ◼ ► 300 million influencers, figure out who has the audience you want, generate creative and give it
00:47:19 ◼ ► to them. And that's just crazy. Like, that's just like fully if you just like, take one step back,
00:47:25 ◼ ► you're like, this is getting a little nuts. Right? We're just like programming hundreds of millions
00:47:30 ◼ ► of influencers around the world to talk about whatever car company pays up paid us the money
00:47:35 ◼ ► today. And that's where that whole industry is going. And they're not shy about it. Right? Like
00:47:40 ◼ ► publicist, the one of the biggest ad holding companies world just spent $500 million on an
00:47:46 ◼ ► influencer marketing company, like one of its biggest acquisitions, and all of them are excited
00:47:50 ◼ ► about it. Mark Penn. Remember, he had scruggled. He was like a Clinton advisor. He went Oh, yeah.
00:47:56 ◼ ► Yeah. He has a new mark pen, the mark pen. He's like, in the last 10 months, he's bought like,
00:48:02 ◼ ► four of these companies. Like, it's just, and that's, you know, I don't think anyone wants me
00:48:08 ◼ ► to talk show to talk about the industry. But you, you just kind of look at that world. And you're
00:48:12 ◼ ► like, there's something else going on here. And it's super fascinating. And all of it is built on
00:48:19 ◼ ► the back of the iPhone camera, and like distributing iPhone videos. And so like, Apple invites the
00:48:24 ◼ ► creators to their events, and they are like, super into it. Because this is in many ways, the future
00:48:29 ◼ ► of their own content creation. And like, I was batting around ideas about angles for the review
00:48:34 ◼ ► of Joanna. And she's like, in many ways, this is like the creator phone, like the pro phone has
00:48:39 ◼ ► all these moves for creators. Because this is the market for this phone, because they're the future
00:48:43 ◼ ► of the media in this specific way. I think the other thing that really hit me watching,
00:48:50 ◼ ► you know, and that's part of it is that sometimes I'm just as interested in the people as I am the
00:48:59 ◼ ► technology. And part of part of it's really mainly the privilege of being on somewhere near the top
00:49:06 ◼ ► list of media people after the iPhone event. And I, I already know I have a briefing schedule.
00:49:12 ◼ ► And then they, you know, sometime during the event, you get an email that tells you what they are.
00:49:16 ◼ ► And I could see I am getting a briefing about the watch. I'm getting a briefing about AirPods,
00:49:20 ◼ ► I've got a briefing, obviously about the iPhone. And I know I'm going to get to see the devices in
00:49:28 ◼ ► those briefings. Like if I'm really curious about what the jet black Apple Watch Series 11, I'm going
00:49:33 ◼ ► to get to see it. And I don't have to like elbow my way into the table in there. So I'm just going
00:49:38 ◼ ► to watch the people. It's not that I'm not there. But I'm not going to fight for a spot at the
00:49:43 ◼ ► table, unless one opens up and I have some questions. But watching the creators, the thing
00:49:48 ◼ ► that really struck me too, because I saw that sometimes, sometimes they weren't creating even
00:49:54 ◼ ► though they were on, you know, their own self imposed deadlines to get stuff out right away,
00:49:59 ◼ ► right away, right away. They were also consuming others already. And it hit me that that is partly
00:50:06 ◼ ► what makes the iPhone still the iPhone, like, we can go back to talking about the sort of
00:50:11 ◼ ► diminishing returns on year over year improvements. But the iPhone still is unique in the industry.
00:50:19 ◼ ► And I think a big part of it, in terms of what we're talking about with the media, is it's both
00:50:25 ◼ ► the creation device and the consumption device. Like, that's, that's bananas, when you really
00:50:30 ◼ ► think about it, like, nobody ever would have imagined, when we were growing up, you know,
00:50:36 ◼ ► that you're going to get your television to the future is also going to be a thing that lets you
00:50:40 ◼ ► put yourself on television. Yeah, right, that doesn't make any sense. And that collapse is
00:50:45 ◼ ► really culturally important in like, a lot of ways. If you told me I would forever have to
00:50:50 ◼ ► look at photos in the viewfinder of an icon, like, I would just say no. But it's also, you know,
00:51:02 ◼ ► where they're shooting it on the back with a huge rig. Yeah, I do it. I don't get it. Like,
00:51:12 ◼ ► I'm curious what they're going to. But people have pointed out that it's, it is a 75 million
00:51:19 ◼ ► budget movie, pretty big, I think. I think that was the budget. But it's a major Hollywood
00:51:24 ◼ ► production. They don't have to shoot on iPhones. And you think, oh, but the original was shot on
00:51:30 ◼ ► the Canon, I think it was called the X one R, I forget what it was. But it was a breakthrough
00:51:35 ◼ ► Canon camera from the turn of the century, that it's old enough that it shot to like mini DV tapes
00:51:41 ◼ ► or something like that, or some kind of tape, the actual tapes, but gave 28 days later, a sort of
00:51:49 ◼ ► lo fi look that I love the movie. I haven't seen it in quite a few years. But I recall really liking
00:51:55 ◼ ► the way it looked. And that maybe they're doing something like that. Or remember Blair Witch
00:52:00 ◼ ► Project? Of course, I know you do. But yeah, Blair Witch Project was a horror movie, a typical
00:52:06 ◼ ► scenario, kids in the woods, and then some kind of supernatural thing. But the whole movie was shot
00:52:12 ◼ ► as found footage from kids with a consumer camera. And it looked like it. I don't know, you know,
00:52:29 ◼ ► More than that, it is quite a rig in front of it. But you look at that, and you're like,
00:52:38 ◼ ► there's Marquez at the iPhone event, shooting the hands on on his red. And you're like, oh,
00:52:43 ◼ ► this is a weird inversion. Like, something else is happening here where the the economics of the
00:52:50 ◼ ► YouTuber are supporting this camera, the economics of supporting the iPhone camera. And like,
00:52:55 ◼ ► I don't quite understand it. And I one day, I'll figure it out. But it is really interesting to
00:53:00 ◼ ► think like, tick tock has a point of view on these cameras that is totally independent of what
00:53:08 ◼ ► everyone else thinks about the cameras. Because they are, they start with the video camera,
00:53:13 ◼ ► they start on a different place. Right. And they start with a different set of assumptions about
00:53:20 ◼ ► how that video will be compressed and distributed. Tiktok's HDR handling is completely horrible.
00:53:26 ◼ ► And if you lived through that period of Tiktok, where they would just ramp up the brightness to
00:53:30 ◼ ► neon levels and completely ruin the display calibration. And you're combining the consumption
00:53:37 ◼ ► with a creation just changes your experience of using the phone and like using the tool.
00:53:43 ◼ ► And that's why I always spend so much time thinking about the camera, because it is even
00:53:48 ◼ ► a camera control button. Apple's point of view, everyone's point of view is eventually the camera
00:53:54 ◼ ► will become the input mechanism of the phone. Eventually, like visual intelligence, we're going
00:53:59 ◼ ► to look around for you. And then eventually, the way you will communicate with everybody is through
00:54:03 ◼ ► video in some way, shape or form. And you're like, oh, these cameras have gone from being a fun,
00:54:09 ◼ ► Phil Schiller loves cameras, sort of side show of like, some Apple executives love this stuff,
00:54:15 ◼ ► and they're just going for it to, oh, well, it already has in many ways completely reshaped all
00:54:20 ◼ ► of society by putting cameras on phones. And then this next turn is going to do it even one more
00:54:26 ◼ ► time. And we ought to take a look at what they're making before we like, completely go a few.
00:54:30 ◼ ► Hmm. I, I remember, I don't know, again, I'm never gonna, it doesn't really matter which one
00:54:37 ◼ ► it was. But it was like in the first few years after Jobs is passing, there was a iPhone keynote
00:54:43 ◼ ► where Schiller was on stage and went deep on, like the size of the pixels of the sensor. And it was
00:54:52 ◼ ► Phil was great at those sort of things. And it didn't take that much time. But then after
00:54:57 ◼ ► the keynote, they're like, Can you believe they spent three minutes talking about pixels on sensor?
00:55:05 ◼ ► oh, that's laughable now compared to how much emphasis the camera gets in these events. I mean,
00:55:10 ◼ ► it was like, there was like a couple of years where it really was just to other people,
00:55:20 ◼ ► even just the size it took, took up on the back of the camera, the fact that the lenses started
00:55:25 ◼ ► sticking out. Now they stick out like a roll of quarters. I mean, I think if you're marketing
00:55:32 ◼ ► this phone, or I think about how, again, there's like the tick tock of it all. You ask a bunch of
00:55:41 ◼ ► And then ask the influencers, like, how do you begin to become an influencer? And like,
00:55:46 ◼ ► Mark Marquez will tell you, or Doug DeMuro will tell you, or whoever will tell you just like,
00:55:49 ◼ ► start tomorrow. So you can get good at it. So that then this thing, the camera on the front and
00:55:55 ◼ ► the back of the phone is not just a camera. It's like an economic engine. It's a communications
00:56:02 ◼ ► tool. Apple refers to it as a very social camera. This thing has always been used with other people.
00:56:10 ◼ ► I got a reply from someone who's like, I just use this thing, take pictures of serial numbers, like
00:56:14 ◼ ► boost the shadows as much as you can. Cause I'm always like sticking my phone under a thing to
00:56:19 ◼ ► take a picture of a serial number. And it's like, Oh, this thing is everything. And it is,
00:56:24 ◼ ► it has become such an important piece of like the input mechanism of the phone that of course,
00:56:31 ◼ ► it's going to take up most of the phone. It's like if in five years, it's not as big as the screen,
00:56:36 ◼ ► like something weird will have happened. Yeah. I guess, what else do you want to talk about with
00:56:41 ◼ ► the iPhone? I mean, the camera control, I really think it's interesting. I don't think camera
00:56:49 ◼ ► control is a reason to upgrade year over year. To me, the photographic styles thing, if you're
00:56:54 ◼ ► really into shooting photos and I, again, am I just describing myself or is there a large coat?
00:57:00 ◼ ► But I, like I wrote in my review, I have never really gotten into shooting raw with any of my
00:57:05 ◼ ► cameras, including expensive Canon DSLRs and my Ricoh GRD, which I love. It's like too much work
00:57:13 ◼ ► for me. It's like, that's my threshold. So I love these photographic styles and I kind of like,
00:57:19 ◼ ► I'm usually pretty slow to update my main Mac to the new year's thing. Cause I'm a little
00:57:24 ◼ ► conservative cause I don't know about you. I use it for work. So yeah. Yeah. This, the Mac that I'm
00:57:30 ◼ ► podcasting on, this is going to stay where it is until, until I'm forced to upgrade that one.
00:57:42 ◼ ► is that my Mac interface to my photos is therefore rev lock to the OS, right? So now I've got a
00:57:50 ◼ ► version of photos, you know, and if I change the photographic style on my iPhone in iOS 18 to go
00:57:58 ◼ ► from standard to stark black and white, which is a very noticeable difference, it upgrades, or when
00:58:05 ◼ ► it syncs to my Mac, I see it there, but I don't have the interface to actually change those styles
00:58:10 ◼ ► on the Mac until after I upgrade to the new thing. But I feel like that it'll be a couple of weeks,
00:58:21 ◼ ► it's like, if you're on the fence about whether this is your year to upgrade or not, you can wait,
00:58:26 ◼ ► this button's not going anywhere. It's only gonna get better. I don't have any. I don't know why the
00:58:31 ◼ ► button is unfinished on top of everything else. Like the tap and hold the focus isn't there yet.
00:58:35 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't get that. I I'm thinking like I've never had a problem focusing with the iPhone. Like
00:58:42 ◼ ► I have a litany of complaints with iPhone cameras over the years. It doesn't get this has never been
00:58:47 ◼ ► one of the complaints. If anything, it's the singular feature of iPhone photography that
00:58:52 ◼ ► has most ruined my photography with other cameras. Like I really like my Ricoh. I keep talking about
00:58:59 ◼ ► it because it's the only other camera I really use nowadays. But I have this Ricoh GR3X. The
00:59:05 ◼ ► X just means it has a 40 millimeter equivalent lens, fixed lens, instead of the regular GR3
00:59:12 ◼ ► has a 28 millimeter, I think. And I'm just like, so the only reason I got the X to get the 40
00:59:20 ◼ ► millimeter field of view is I'm so bored with shooting 28 millimeter field of view, because
00:59:25 ◼ ► that's what iPhones have shot for years. And it's like, yeah, give me something more like a 50
00:59:31 ◼ ► millimeter normal lens. But I have found I have more out of focus shots with it that are my fault,
00:59:36 ◼ ► my fault, because I'm like, I just because the iPhone just always snaps the faces. And if you
00:59:43 ◼ ► do want to focus on something else, you just tap and it never fails. And it stays on the thing you
00:59:48 ◼ ► tapped on and then you snap. Focusing on the iPhone is not an issue. Yeah, at all. So it's like,
00:59:53 ◼ ► it's weird that it's unfinished. It's also like, do I do I care about this? Yeah, I do. Am I even
01:00:00 ◼ ► I don't do it on the iPhone. Really, I do it when I want to play with like, a wide one of those
01:00:05 ◼ ► apps. That's fun. But I shoot my old Nikon, which I've had now for years in my Sony RX 100. I think
01:00:12 ◼ ► I have a five that I bought when my kid was born in 2018. I shoot those in raw because Lightroom's
01:00:18 ◼ ► AI powered denoise is so good. It's like having a new camera. So now I can just run the ISO on
01:00:26 ◼ ► those cameras to whatever. I don't even care anymore. Right? Because Lightroom can fix it.
01:00:31 ◼ ► And that has like changed my relationship to those cameras entirely. And that's like to me
01:00:35 ◼ ► as a whole reason to to play with big cameras and have a lot of fun over there and whatever.
01:00:39 ◼ ► The iPhone raw has always been, I need to get away from their processing. This is the reason
01:00:45 ◼ ► to shoot raw on iPhone. I want to process my own photos. And that's why I think people really,
01:00:49 ◼ ► really like the Halide Process Zero that they've released, like really like it in a way that's
01:00:54 ◼ ► surprising. Right? Like you, you would not expect the response to that to be. It's almost the point
01:01:00 ◼ ► where like, when people complain on iPhone photos, like just shoot with the processor, like, it's
01:01:04 ◼ ► become an answer to a question that no one knew that they were asking. I think that's utterly
01:01:08 ◼ ► fascinating. And so the styles, I think, on the photos are really interesting. But what's way more
01:01:14 ◼ ► interesting to me is that they added the tone control that basically lets you turn off or
01:01:20 ◼ ► radically turn down their HDR tone mapping. I also think it's wild that they decided that the word
01:01:28 ◼ ► tone meant tone mapping, which in the history of imaging is not what it has meant. And they just
01:01:34 ◼ ► sort of decided that's what it meant. And that's fine. But just that alone, like, if you're a photo
01:01:39 ◼ ► nerd being like, I would like some contrast and shadows, I'm willing to accept blown highlights.
01:01:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I, I'm not even criticizing their use of the word tone. But I agree that what playing with
01:01:59 ◼ ► tone in the new photographic styles do doesn't feel like it does justice to how powerful the
01:02:05 ◼ ► feature is and how useful the effect is. And they had, they had tone, quote unquote, tone with the
01:02:12 ◼ ► old photo styles, the one for iPhones 13, 14, 15. But it wasn't something you could adjust on the
01:02:20 ◼ ► fly. It was like, Oh, I'm going to set up a new photographic style. And I think it more or less
01:02:24 ◼ ► did the same thing because I wanted there. So I asked, and I know the difference. It's so wonky,
01:02:28 ◼ ► but it's good. This is, it feels so bad for them. Every time I review the phone, I'm like,
01:02:31 ◼ ► get your whole camera, get your old camera team on the phone. We're gonna take an hour. We're
01:02:35 ◼ ► gonna have through every single button here and tell me what it does. Like I said, totally
01:02:38 ◼ ► indulgent best part of my best part of the year. So on the old styles on the, I think they introduced
01:02:43 ◼ ► him on a 13, the old styles was the global tone mapping. So the whole image and they were just
01:02:53 ◼ ► the styles are just presets of the tone control and the what's the other one color. Yeah,
01:03:02 ◼ ► you would see those two sliders and move back and forth. So all of the styles are sort of in one
01:03:07 ◼ ► ecosystem of, of tone, like controls. They're one bubble, the new styles, the tone control is local
01:03:15 ◼ ► tone mapping. So it is semantically aware. So it knows that this is a face and that is a sky and
01:03:20 ◼ ► whatever. And so it will preserve, it won't just like turn everything down. It will like
01:03:25 ◼ ► do it at different rates for different parts of the image because it knows. And then if you
01:03:37 ◼ ► it's non-destructive, which is like a whole conversation about how much do you want to shoot
01:03:42 ◼ ► and like, do you want to live a life of having those photos because they've done some wacky
01:04:02 ◼ ► which I think is unbalanced mistake. Like if you have the ability to unprocess an image,
01:04:07 ◼ ► you should let every image editing app in the world, unprocess the image and then do it.
01:04:11 ◼ ► I have a, I don't, I have any inside information about this. So this is purely speculative,
01:04:17 ◼ ► but my guess is they will release that information, but that perhaps the reason they haven't already
01:04:25 ◼ ► is that they haven't, they don't feel like it's public API ready. Even if it's not an API,
01:04:30 ◼ ► I think it's probably just going to be a description of what they're stuffing into the file
01:04:37 ◼ ► that, that the HEI, and I never know which one's HEI. This is one of the, the main reason I prefer
01:04:43 ◼ ► JPEG is that a JPEG is JPEG. And here it's HEIF is the file format, but the files have a dot H-E-I-C
01:04:51 ◼ ► extension. And then Apple Brown says it HEIF, which is just, it's just like an up front to
01:04:57 ◼ ► American society. HEIF or I don't know. I wish it's so poorly named just because we don't all
01:05:04 ◼ ► call it the same thing, but I'm pretty sure that the reason I think this is what's going on,
01:05:10 ◼ ► maybe you know more and can confirm it. I just think that the, the actual file format and JPEG
01:05:15 ◼ ► has metadata file that information exif data is in there and you can write custom exif data
01:05:23 ◼ ► to a JPEG. I think it's just sort of stuffed in there. It's not like a sidecar file. I think it's
01:05:29 ◼ ► all in the actual files. Right. And that rather than implement this twice with two entirely
01:05:36 ◼ ► different file formats, they're like, no, screw this. We're only going to do it once. But I do
01:05:41 ◼ ► think this was a sort of small own goal on Apple's part that they did not make clear to anybody users
01:05:48 ◼ ► or the media alike that if you are shooting JPEG instead, which Apple calls more compatible,
01:05:56 ◼ ► right? So the default is to shoot HEIF. HEIF. You got to say it. That's what they say. They're,
01:06:03 ◼ ► they're all in. They all say HEIF, up and down the chain. And that's, they call that better
01:06:07 ◼ ► compression or something like more efficient, more efficient because the file sizes are smaller for
01:06:12 ◼ ► the equivalent image quality. Then you get these features. And if you're shooting more compatible,
01:06:19 ◼ ► which means you're shooting two JPEG files, you just don't get these features, but it never tells
01:06:24 ◼ ► you that. It doesn't say the thing. So you can still shoot, I think in the styles, but you don't,
01:06:30 ◼ ► you lose the ability to non-destructively edit. So you're just, it's kind of like the way the
01:06:35 ◼ ► old styles work. You just burn. But I think they should warn you. I think they should say, Hey,
01:06:38 ◼ ► you're shooting this because maybe you thought this would be better, but maybe you should rethink
01:06:42 ◼ ► if you think it's better. Yeah. I mean, to me, it's, there's a freedom and being able to edit
01:06:47 ◼ ► after the fact, it's like, I'm gonna mess with this. It looks good. I don't have to commit.
01:06:51 ◼ ► That means I'm going to use the tool more because later on I can, I can fix it. And I do agree with
01:06:57 ◼ ► you that someone will either reverse engineer or Apple will publish the spec of like, here's our
01:07:01 ◼ ► little, the files are, I think they told me the files are 25% bigger than the previous generation
01:07:06 ◼ ► files because they have this little Delta. It's a significant amount of metadata that is added in
01:07:12 ◼ ► or whatever you want. And maybe it doesn't, it's not even metadata. It's some kind of exposure
01:07:18 ◼ ► sensor data, which is why it adds 25% to the file size. Yeah. They're just doing what they told me
01:07:24 ◼ ► that they moved the tone mapping step to the end of the HDR pipeline. So they, Apple takes nine
01:07:30 ◼ ► shots at different exposures and they stitched them all together to make one final image at the
01:07:36 ◼ ► very last part of this. They're saying, okay, here's all of the exposure data. And now we're
01:07:41 ◼ ► going to expose the sky and the face and the tree and whatever. And that's the, we're going to lift
01:07:45 ◼ ► the shadows and bring down the highlights. And so they put that all the way at the end of the
01:07:48 ◼ ► pipeline. It's like one of the last things they do. And it's that information that's getting stored
01:07:57 ◼ ► I think all of that's super fascinating. I, I am very proud of the fact that like the Verge
01:08:03 ◼ ► drove an entire discourse cycle about whether shadows are good. Like, have I accomplished my
01:08:10 ◼ ► goal in starting a tech website 13 years ago? Yeah. Fully accomplished our goal. Like we're
01:08:15 ◼ ► going to, we're all going to talk about shadows for a couple of days. And I think it's interesting
01:08:19 ◼ ► that people not just like camera nerds can see how flat iPhone photos have gotten. Lots of people can
01:08:28 ◼ ► see how flat iPhone photos have gotten, including the aforementioned like TikTokers. They were just
01:08:32 ◼ ► making videos. They're like, why do these photos look bad? And they don't have the vocabulary or
01:08:36 ◼ ► they're just doing engagement baits. So they're not using the vocabulary, who knows what they're
01:08:46 ◼ ► it's like, I always, I don't know about every engineer, most engineers who I've ever worked
01:08:53 ◼ ► with will always say that the best bug reports just described the problem with as much specificity
01:09:00 ◼ ► and the most accurate steps to reproduce as possible and include the least optimally zero
01:09:07 ◼ ► guesses as to why the bug is happening. Right? Just report the problem and, and steps to
01:09:15 ◼ ► reproduce and the engineer will figure his job is to figure out their job is to figure out who.
01:09:27 ◼ ► what HDR is. It's it, you just know that this doesn't look right. It doesn't look natural.
01:09:40 ◼ ► which I don't know that I, I think they are even taken by surprise by the reaction to this feature,
01:09:48 ◼ ► which produces images, which on their surface, you would say, well, that's not exciting at all. This,
01:09:52 ◼ ► this image has less pop and it just looks real. And that's the whole point. And the enthusiasm
01:10:00 ◼ ► over that feature in one third party camera app, I think is almost the proof that something's going
01:10:10 ◼ ► on with our collective. It's society-wide thoughts on the look of over-processed images from phones.
01:10:22 ◼ ► Or, or if you take the filters that are really popular on the various apps on snap, on TikTok,
01:10:28 ◼ ► on Instagram, and the number of times that the vintage or nostalgic filters are popular
01:10:33 ◼ ► to make your thousand dollar state of the art HDR pipeline camera look like an old film camera,
01:10:40 ◼ ► there's a reason for that, right? Like there's a whole set of emotional connections to that.
01:10:45 ◼ ► Those looks that don't go away just cause we're all shooting ultra flat HDR. And I, I styles kind
01:10:52 ◼ ► of hinted this, but former verge reporter, Sam Byford, who lives in Japan, he has a blog called
01:10:57 ◼ ► multi-core. Now he's actually gonna write a piece for us. He's like, look, the American market is
01:11:00 ◼ ► totally confused because you only have three smartphone vendors, really, but Jaumi and Oppo
01:11:11 ◼ ► Like I think it's Jaumi has the, has Leica modes. Like one is called authentic and one is called
01:11:17 ◼ ► dumb. It's like the normal HDR one. And he's like, authentic is just a top level control.
01:11:23 ◼ ► And it just looks like a Leica camera and like forever, whatever branding is going on there,
01:11:29 ◼ ► whatever deals, wherever that's real like or not. The point is in other markets, because there's so
01:11:48 ◼ ► always sort of had an affinity for film looks and I did, I will admit, I think it was a huge part of
01:11:55 ◼ ► what made Instagram explosive on day one, in terms of becoming sort of an instant little social
01:12:02 ◼ ► network that was a hit, were those filters, which were silly in hindsight, today, in today, and
01:12:10 ◼ ► over the top in terms of how strong they were, the original Instagram 1.0 filters. But the cameras on
01:12:19 ◼ ► the phones, circa 2010, were really bad. And so applying these over the top retro film filters
01:12:32 ◼ ► at the time, which took like 30 seconds, which I'd never understood was actually processing,
01:12:37 ◼ ► or if it was part of the kitsch that, oh, we're gonna make you wait 30 seconds to see what your
01:12:42 ◼ ► image looked like. It's like you're waving a Polaroid in the air. It was a huge part about
01:12:48 ◼ ► what made it take off. And I think that they, within a few years, they're like, yeah, we're
01:12:52 ◼ ► dialing back all that, that stuff's all gimmicky. It was gimmicky, but it was a fun gimmick for a
01:12:56 ◼ ► couple of years. But I think it's more than just nostalgia for my youth or for old media. It's the
01:13:04 ◼ ► fact that when technology settles in and is no longer novelty and seeing breakthroughs on a
01:13:13 ◼ ► regular basis, which shooting on film, whether it was still film or movie film, became at some point,
01:13:22 ◼ ► I don't know, color, the world kind of shifted from black and white photography and filmmaking
01:13:27 ◼ ► to color in the 60s. And by the 70s, black and white was considered old, like by the time I was
01:13:34 ◼ ► born. If you knew it was the first season at Gilligan's Island, if the rerun was in black
01:13:39 ◼ ► and white, then the other ones were in color. And then in the 70s and 80s, it kind of shook out and
01:13:45 ◼ ► it just was incremental returns. But everything just sort of went towards making it look better.
01:13:59 ◼ ► Fuji to get their film stocks to just be as useful for as many people as possible and produce
01:14:07 ◼ ► pleasing, very pleasing results under as many circumstances as possible. It all was just more
01:14:15 ◼ ► attractive. It really is. It's hard to deny it. And I think that the current over-processed look
01:14:22 ◼ ► is going to look very dated, even just 10 years from now. I think you'll be able to say, "Oh,
01:14:27 ◼ ► yeah, that was like the early 2020s." Remember when all our phone pictures looked like this?
01:14:35 ◼ ► given all the things we want these cameras to do. So I'm just thinking about the amount of times I
01:14:40 ◼ ► use my camera just to capture a serial number or like zoom in on something to just like look at
01:14:47 ◼ ► something. Yeah, I do just blow out the shadows. Like I need every ounce of detail from that as I
01:14:52 ◼ ► can get. That's fine. If this AI, multimodal AI visual intelligence becomes a thing, I assume
01:15:00 ◼ ► those systems will not care about the aesthetics of an image. They're going to just want as much
01:15:07 ◼ ► detail out of the images they can get, so they can read it. So now you have this like very
01:15:11 ◼ ► conflicting like, "I need it to be a utility, and I need it to be beautiful." And I don't think we've
01:15:20 ◼ ► had cameras that have really... I think this is just a real point where those needs are going to
01:15:25 ◼ ► diverge. And I think I've seen a lot of people testing out the 16 Pro camera in the past week
01:15:42 ◼ ► this other stuff. And you can get it to look like that. And I think the question for Apple is,
01:15:46 ◼ ► do you want your camera to look like this? Does Apple have a point of view on what this camera
01:15:52 ◼ ► should look like? Or is it, we're going to give you all of the information and then some tools
01:15:57 ◼ ► to get it to look like whatever you want? And I think the biggest example of this is in the skin
01:16:01 ◼ ► tones. They call them undertones, and you can adjust how you want skin tone to look. And I think
01:16:08 ◼ ► Apple has basically absolved itself of responsibility for producing accurate skin tones.
01:16:14 ◼ ► They're like, "This isn't just a physics problem for us. This is very much a... People around the
01:16:20 ◼ ► world and different countries have very different views on what a good skin tone is. And we're just
01:16:24 ◼ ► going to let people do whatever they want." And you contrast that to Google, which is much more
01:16:28 ◼ ► open to AI image editing and all this other stuff. And Google's point of view is like, "We have an
01:16:32 ◼ ► entire... We have a warehouse full of contractors. We take pictures of people with skin tones,
01:16:36 ◼ ► and then we figure out how to make really, really accurate skin tones. And we call that real tone.
01:16:39 ◼ ► And here's an entire article in Wired about it." And those are just radically different philosophies.
01:16:49 ◼ ► to have that kind of strong point of view and go market it. But it's interesting to see how much
01:16:53 ◼ ► Apple is letting go versus what they're holding on to. Yeah. I think it's always been... And again,
01:17:01 ◼ ► my personal opinion here skews my perspective because I've never... At times, I like film grain.
01:17:16 ◼ ► the claim to... And this is at a time when little point-and-shoots shooting higher ISOs. I would say
01:17:22 ◼ ► for that original GRD, ISO 800 was really pushing it. It was really... Which was very much equivalent
01:17:30 ◼ ► to film shooting 35-millimeter film. 400 was a very consumery. 800 ISO film, you could really
01:17:37 ◼ ► see the grain. But the Ricoh claim was that their sensor was designed to make the... Which isn't...
01:17:44 ◼ ► It's not grain, it's noise on a digital sensor, but that their noise was supposed to be more
01:17:48 ◼ ► flattering and appealing. And I thought it was true. And I shot tons, thousands of photos with
01:17:54 ◼ ► that camera. And all the indoor ones had what anybody today would say, "Oh, there's a lot of
01:17:59 ◼ ► noise." But I think the noise looks good. Apple's allergic reaction to image noise is... It's
01:18:10 ◼ ► characteristic for the company because noise is an imperfection and the company is obsessed with
01:18:15 ◼ ► perfection. But it's inevitable in low light with a small sensor. And I get that noise reduction has
01:18:25 ◼ ► to happen. And you talked about what it looks like when you look at raw images, even from
01:18:29 ◼ ► really expensive cameras with world-class sensors. You see the noise. And Adobe's leading... I think
01:18:37 ◼ ► Adobe's algorithm, the one in Lightroom is clearly the best. You can use... Now, AI is helping to
01:18:44 ◼ ► reduce noise in photos. But trying to bleed all the noise out of iPhone photography has, to me,
01:18:53 ◼ ► contributed to this sort of over-computational look. And the HDR thing really sticks out to more
01:19:01 ◼ ► people, especially when they're looking at a white background on their phone and parts of the image
01:19:06 ◼ ► make the white background on their phone look like 50% gray because it's so crazy bright.
01:19:10 ◼ ► The noise doesn't jump out like that, but the lack of noise is a big part of the problem,
01:19:19 ◼ ► in my opinion. The other thing, and you mentioned shadows, the sharpening and the noise reduction,
01:19:26 ◼ ► that's like the next frontier. It's like this year we got a tone control to put some shadows back.
01:19:36 ◼ ► I think Apple just doesn't want you to take a bad photo. They're very... I think they are
01:19:44 ◼ ► protective of... People go to restaurants and they will shoot a backlit photo in front of a window
01:19:50 ◼ ► of the birthday party, and the iPhone had better get that photo. And we're gonna do everything in
01:19:56 ◼ ► our power to make sure that that photo is... It won't be great, but it'll be there, as opposed
01:20:02 ◼ ► to an old camera will just blow out. Something horrible would happen. Everyone's faces would be
01:20:06 ◼ ► in shadow or you would expose the background or something like... You would not get a photo in
01:20:11 ◼ ► that situation like nine times. No, you'd get like a white background and a silhouette in the
01:20:15 ◼ ► foreground. Yeah, it would look horrible. And an iPhone just is like, "Here's your photo." As
01:20:21 ◼ ► promised, here's everyone's faces. And through Hocus Pocus, we have exposed the background
01:20:33 ◼ ► astray in a handful of other places. Right. But it looks like all of a sudden the way that like
01:20:38 ◼ ► in an old movie or in a movie that's trying to call back to old movies like Pulp Fiction when
01:20:44 ◼ ► Bruce Willis is in the taxi cab and they're doing rear projection behind the car. It's like, well,
01:20:50 ◼ ► you know that that wasn't filmed in a car on a real street. You can kind of tell. It's like,
01:20:55 ◼ ► you look out the window and you're like, "Well, that's not real." Even though it was real,
01:20:58 ◼ ► it was there. It just looks that phony through the window. Yeah. But to get that backlit shot,
01:21:05 ◼ ► you have to do a lot of noise reduction. At the end of the day, you're over, you're gonna crank
01:21:10 ◼ ► the ISO in the shot. You just have to do a lot of work to get that shot. And then you end up with a
01:21:15 ◼ ► ton of processing, a ton of sharpening, a ton of noise reduction. And you're like, "Is this good?
01:21:19 ◼ ► Would it have been better to tell everyone to get away from the window? Like, should Apple
01:21:33 ◼ ► because I just did not, I mean, I shot as many photos as I could, but just didn't pixel peep
01:21:38 ◼ ► because I just didn't have time. But you mentioned, and it was a gut feeling I had, but it was so
01:21:43 ◼ ► unbacked up by any evidence that I could point to that I was like, "I can't mention this in a
01:21:48 ◼ ► review." I'm curious to see if others pick up on it. And it seems like you did, that Apple's
01:21:54 ◼ ► standard processing, the photographic style that you get out of the box, it's in the middle,
01:22:00 ◼ ► it's the one that if you don't change anything, you get, looks more processed than ever in the
01:22:05 ◼ ► iPhone 16 Pro. That's what I thought. And when you wrote it, I was like, "Yeah, I think so too."
01:22:11 ◼ ► And I kind of think, "Oh, maybe, I don't know if because whoever's pushing for that more
01:22:19 ◼ ► processed look, because they were going to win and it was going to ship with a more processed
01:22:31 ◼ ► to counterbalance that for people who don't like it, or was it the other way around where they,
01:22:35 ◼ ► I think it's probably the other way around, where they were building out and building towards this
01:22:40 ◼ ► non-destructive photographic styles feature, but then that in turn gave the, "Well, we want this
01:22:47 ◼ ► to look more processed team, the go ahead to do it." It doesn't feel like a coincidence to me that
01:22:53 ◼ ► it looks more processed year over year at the same time that you've got some controls to undo it and
01:23:04 ◼ ► JS Yeah, I mean, I am of the opinion that every tech company knows in its heart that people like
01:23:12 ◼ ► brighter things and louder things. And so if you can just make it things brighter, people will like
01:23:30 ◼ ► doing speaker comparisons. If one speaker is louder than the other, that's the one everyone prefers.
01:23:39 ◼ ► And it doesn't matter how good that camera is. So at some point, I think Apple is just like,
01:23:44 ◼ ► "Screw it, it's brighter. We're just going to win the comparison this year. You're going to take a
01:23:48 ◼ ► picture on this phone in the Apple store with your old phone, and this phone is going to look brighter
01:23:52 ◼ ► and that's going to win." The fascinating part about this is I spent some time with them just
01:23:57 ◼ ► being like, "What is the difference between...?" Because there's lots of styles. One of them is
01:24:01 ◼ ► standard, and then two clicks over is natural. What on earth is the difference between standard
01:24:08 ◼ ► and natural? Those are big words to put right next to each other and say, "These are different."
01:24:15 ◼ ► And as far as I can tell, and as far as they told me, one is just slightly warmer than the other.
01:24:20 ◼ ► So the iPhone in standard, just in a way that photo processors have done for years. They know
01:24:26 ◼ ► people like slightly warmer photos. They just warm everyone up a little bit. And that is standard,
01:24:31 ◼ ► and the natural is flat. I think natural is more different than that. I've been shooting natural
01:24:42 ◼ ► And it doesn't matter because I could change it afterwards. But I think natural is a little bit
01:24:47 ◼ ► more than just cooler. Although there is some... There's definitely a color temperature part.
01:24:54 ◼ ► I think it's less processed. I do. I think it's a very accurate name for the style. To me,
01:25:02 ◼ ► the pictures just do look more natural. They do. They also look more like older pictures from
01:25:14 ◼ ► shooting for natural, that you get your film back from development and you want the pictures to look
01:25:21 ◼ ► like you remembered the scene when you shot them. I think it's a little more... It's not
01:25:26 ◼ ► super dramatically less processed, but I think it's just less processed in general. I just do.
01:25:32 ◼ ► But I also think the names, it's like, well, why isn't standard as natural as possible?
01:25:39 ◼ ► That's to me the difference. You can go nuts doing this, right? What is a standard photo?
01:25:44 ◼ ► Yeah. And if you duplicate the photo and it's because they're non-destructive, shoot one,
01:25:50 ◼ ► duplicate it and set one to standard, one to natural, and then just go right toggle back
01:25:56 ◼ ► and forth between them. In almost all lighting conditions, you'll see that there is a difference.
01:26:01 ◼ ► And at times when I'm pixel peeping and I've set to other styles, I'm like, "Ah, maybe I don't like
01:26:08 ◼ ► natural so much. I don't know." Because I'm looking too closely. And that's where the Best Buy scenario
01:26:14 ◼ ► comes in, where you're like, "I don't know. This one really pops." Because you're in a weird mode.
01:26:18 ◼ ► You're looking at six different TVs at once, playing different things. And that's not really
01:26:25 ◼ ► simulating the real life experience of watching TV. And what I have noticed is when I'm sitting
01:26:33 ◼ ► there switching between styles on the same photo and just going through all the other ones that
01:26:39 ◼ ► they have in addition to standard and natural, I start thinking, "Ah, maybe natural is kind of
01:26:50 ◼ ► But then when I just leave it there and come back to it and I'm looking through my photos, I'm like,
01:26:58 ◼ ► JS Yeah, it's the one. This comes up a lot. I had some of the most fun I've ever had being
01:27:03 ◼ ► a tech journalist a couple months ago. I was a judge in a TV review shootout at a store in
01:27:08 ◼ ► Scarsdale, New York. It's a super high-end store. And all the TV manufacturers come and they bring
01:27:13 ◼ ► their highest end TVs and a bunch of professional TV calibrators and colorists from Hollywood
01:27:22 ◼ ► studios and me judge the TVs. I was like, "Very fun." And I was completely outgunned and outclassed
01:27:27 ◼ ► and I had the time of my life. And what you notice is like the professionally calibrated,
01:27:31 ◼ ► beautiful OLED TVs at the highest end, they're relaxed. They're not trying to prove it to you.
01:27:37 ◼ ► And then you get really used to it. And then you see a TV that's trying to show off. And you're
01:27:42 ◼ ► like, "It's nuclear bright." And it's actually rather fatiguing to look at for a while. It's the
01:27:47 ◼ ► same with a lot of stereos. People are listening and you've got a stereo and you've got a loudness
01:27:52 ◼ ► control on it. All that does is it boosts the lows and the mids at low volume to preserve the
01:27:57 ◼ ► sensational loudness. But if you don't always listen quietly, turn that off. And it will seem
01:28:02 ◼ ► quieter. But after a while, you're like, "Oh, I'm hearing vastly more of this. I'm getting much more
01:28:09 ◼ ► out of this speaker." Because when everything is loud or you're artificially making everything as
01:28:16 ◼ ► big as it can be, you actually lose your dynamic range. And so it's a weird... We need a name for
01:28:23 ◼ ► this. We'll be famous, John. What is the name for the paradox of dynamic range? So when you have
01:28:31 ◼ ► everything, you actually lose the impact of the dynamics. That's the thing that's happening.
01:28:40 ◼ ► the loudness wars. There's ancient, butch vague blog posts being like, "Fuck this. It's great. I
01:28:46 ◼ ► love it." I think it's happening with cameras right now in a big way. And that's what I mean
01:28:49 ◼ ► by it's more processed than ever. Because it's more than ever it's happening and it's making
01:28:54 ◼ ► everything look very flat. Yeah, I agree. But we've got control to turn it back. So the dynamic
01:29:01 ◼ ► paradox. Yeah. All right. I like that. Ooh, that's good. Yeah, I like that dynamic paradox.
01:29:08 ◼ ► I guess that kind of goes up against the dynamic island, which I feel like our name is more useful.
01:29:12 ◼ ► Yeah. It describes a more useful concept than... I do think too, there might be a side effect here
01:29:19 ◼ ► of too little competition in the US. Who is the iPhone really competing against? Well, Samsung,
01:29:42 ◼ ► if not the leading at any given year phone camera ever since they switched from calling them Nexus
01:29:51 ◼ ► to Pixels. But like you said, they sell like five a year. It's just not a factor in the real world,
01:29:57 ◼ ► which is its own side note of, is it because Google doesn't want to step on their partner's
01:30:12 ◼ ► which is all super highly regarded, but yet they're still trying to keep every other high-end
01:30:26 ◼ ► really factor in. And who else are they competing against? So we've written a lot of pieces about
01:30:32 ◼ ► sort of the dangers of AI image editing recently, because it's just sort of like everyone's just
01:30:36 ◼ ► going for it. You can go on X and use Grok and it'll just make new faces of celebrities all day
01:30:42 ◼ ► long. Reimagine on the Pixel, you can just like add drugs to photos. It's like, yeah, yeah, not
01:30:49 ◼ ► great. We have, the examples are all over our site. And one of the arguments, sort of back channel
01:30:53 ◼ ► arguments from Google is like, well, we don't sell any phones anyway. This isn't really a problem.
01:30:58 ◼ ► Like you guys are overreacting. This comes all the way back around to Apple intelligence.
01:31:02 ◼ ► It was hard to review the, like I can review the cameras because cameras all just like doing
01:31:06 ◼ ► whatever they do. There's an aspect of using an S24 Ultra right now and using a Pixel right now,
01:31:13 ◼ ► that's a little more fun than using an iPhone. Cause they have all these like chaotic AI ideas,
01:31:18 ◼ ► like particularly the Pixel. You cannot glance at a Pixel phone without it being like, do you
01:31:23 ◼ ► want Gemini to do some crazy shit for you? And it'll just like start. It's like off to the races.
01:31:27 ◼ ► Like here's another idea we have for Gemini, like, especially in the camera. Maybe if you
01:31:32 ◼ ► take a photo of people with a camera, if you take a photo of like four people with the Pixel camera,
01:31:40 ◼ ► it's very clippy, like, and maybe overbearing, but there's an, there's an entertainment factor to it.
01:31:45 ◼ ► Like the phone has all of these new capabilities and it's kind of fun. And Google's a little
01:31:49 ◼ ► feeling itself. Like I think the Pixel 9s have had some battery issues, but like overall,
01:31:54 ◼ ► they are great pieces of hardware. The Pixel Fold in particular is like the foldable phones reached
01:32:00 ◼ ► one kind of end state with the Pixel Fold. I think the Samsung is sort of the same in much more
01:32:07 ◼ ► Samsung fashion and that there's like two of every idea, but it's just like tons of new ideas because
01:32:13 ◼ ► they just have access to Gemini. And they're just like going for it across the board with assistant,
01:32:17 ◼ ► with Gemini, with the camera features. And because Apple intelligence is not yet, I haven't,
01:32:23 ◼ ► I thought it was unfair to point this out, right? Like the features are coming right now today.
01:32:29 ◼ ► It is sort of more fun to mess around with the Pixel phone because Google has just loaded it
01:32:33 ◼ ► full of AI ideas and off you go. And I think that is the competition. That's like all the
01:32:39 ◼ ► way back around to what is the platform change really mean? If you say AI is a platform change,
01:32:42 ◼ ► what does it really mean? It means you're going to address a new set of capabilities with computers
01:32:48 ◼ ► in a new way. And it's probably voice and natural language and camera. The Pixel is like already
01:32:53 ◼ ► there. And I think Apple does feel some of that competition. I think you go to other countries
01:32:56 ◼ ► and I super feel that competition and China in particular, it's a massive, like constant,
01:33:02 ◼ ► endless competition. But here, I think it's going to come from, hey, do we think Google is a better
01:33:08 ◼ ► competitor on this phone? And I think what Google is going to ultimately decide is that they don't
01:33:13 ◼ ► care and they're going to ship the app on iPhones and they will, they will knife the Pixels they've
01:33:18 ◼ ► always done, but it is really fascinating. I think you have a Pixel 9. I think I've seen you tweet.
01:33:27 ◼ ► So I'm five years out. Oh yeah. You should get one. The camera's great. The zoom is better.
01:33:33 ◼ ► There's, there's AI stuff happening, but the operating system is in particular just infused
01:33:39 ◼ ► with a bunch of like, Hey, do you want to do some stuff you couldn't do before? And I think that's,
01:33:42 ◼ ► there's an excitement to that that I think is, is palpable. No, you got a really interesting quote
01:33:48 ◼ ► from John McCormack, whose title is VP of Camera Software Engineering at Apple. And I first met him
01:33:56 ◼ ► a couple of years ago, but he comes from a real photographic background. I think they recruited
01:34:02 ◼ ► him from like DP review or I don't know if he was at Amazon, or he was Amazon devices, I think.
01:34:09 ◼ ► But he, he has, I don't know, the quote, I was just going to read the quote. It was it and it
01:34:15 ◼ ► comes to your oft repeated, what is a photo? Here's our view. This is from Apple's perspective of what
01:34:22 ◼ ► a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it's a personal celebration of something that
01:34:26 ◼ ► really actually happened. Whether that's a simple thing, like a fancy cup of coffee that's got some
01:34:32 ◼ ► cool design on it all the way to my kids first steps or my parents last breath. It's something
01:34:37 ◼ ► that really happened. It's something that is a marker in my life. And it's something that
01:34:40 ◼ ► deserves to be celebrated. And then that's why when we think about evolving in the camera,
01:34:44 ◼ ► we also rooted it very heavily in tradition. Photography is not a new thing. It's been around
01:34:49 ◼ ► for 198 years, people seem to like it. There's a lot to learn from that. There's a lot to rely on
01:34:54 ◼ ► from that. Think about stylization. The first example of stylization that we can find is Roger
01:35:07 ◼ ► proudly on the shoulders of photographic history. You ran that quote in an entirety in your review,
01:35:13 ◼ ► and I can see it's beautiful. And I'm like reading it and I'm like, yeah, yeah, this is I like this.
01:35:20 ◼ ► And then I'm thinking, but wait a minute, is Apple screwing itself by thinking about what happened
01:35:25 ◼ ► 170 years ago in film photography while the world is saying what if I had a bunch of penguins here
01:35:31 ◼ ► in my living room with me? Can I read you two other quotes? Sure. These three companies are
01:35:36 ◼ ► on a spectrum. So that's the Apple quote. In August, I ran a piece today, putting all these
01:35:41 ◼ ► quotes together because I think it's fascinating. So in in August, Google's Isaac Reynolds,
01:35:47 ◼ ► who I've interviewed before he runs pixel camera, he said to wired, they make memories,
01:35:52 ◼ ► not photos. So here's his quote. It's about what you're remembering. When you define a memory is
01:35:57 ◼ ► that there's fallibility to it, you can have a true and perfect representation of a moment
01:36:01 ◼ ► that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits help you do is create
01:36:05 ◼ ► the moment the way you remember it that's authentic to your memory in the greater context,
01:36:15 ◼ ► it's really interesting is with Apple intelligence, Apple is going to ship what's a cleanup where you
01:36:20 ◼ ► can delete things in the background. So there it's not necessary. They're already moving.
01:36:26 ◼ ► The drift is real. And Isaac has actually been talking about memories for a long time in 2019.
01:36:30 ◼ ► He was talking about memories back then. So that's Google. Here is Samsung. In January,
01:36:38 ◼ ► Samsung's, Patrick show may, I think is how you pronounce his last name in January. He said this
01:36:43 ◼ ► to tech radar. Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors
01:36:51 ◼ ► to capture something, you reproduce what you're seeing. And it doesn't mean anything. There is no
01:36:55 ◼ ► real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying I took that picture. But if you used AI
01:37:00 ◼ ► to optimize the zoom, the autofocus and the scene, is it real or is it all filters? There is no real
01:37:05 ◼ ► picture. Full stop. So like, there's the spectrum, like, all right. And you're like, Oh, are they
01:37:13 ◼ ► going to converge in the middle? Are they going to say different? Is the EU going to pass a law
01:37:19 ◼ ► defining what a phone like, I have no idea what happens next. That is a huge amount of diversions.
01:37:27 ◼ ► think it's pretty interesting that one of the companies at the one extreme, I mean, Samsung's
01:37:39 ◼ ► Apple's position, if you're saying, well, that's the traditional perspective, and it's a real moment,
01:37:45 ◼ ► and it's a real moment capture in time, and that they're thinking not about the capabilities of
01:37:58 ◼ ► sepia tone and stuff like that from 170 years ago, that even their perspective is that, Oh,
01:38:04 ◼ ► yeah, we're shipping a cleanup tool where if you just tap on somebody in the background,
01:38:07 ◼ ► they disappear and get generatively filled. That's the conservative company's viewpoint is,
01:38:14 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, we're shipping this cleanup feature, which again, I've used already. I already used
01:38:18 ◼ ► the feature. And it's not just to see how it works. But like on a photo I took, I was like,
01:38:24 ◼ ► Oh, that's annoying. Let me take that out. I was like, Oh, that looks pretty good. Is it work?
01:38:28 ◼ ► Because it took Google several runs of this to make it work. I didn't pixel peep it super big.
01:38:34 ◼ ► I just blew it up on the phone. I mean, at least in some of the images. And it's it's a lot reminds
01:38:41 ◼ ► me a lot of the first generation of Apple portrait mode, where like the first generation really
01:38:47 ◼ ► couldn't deal with hair, really couldn't do deal with off angle eyeglasses. It reminds me of that
01:38:54 ◼ ► there was a picture where it was a picture of Amy and my son together. And there was somebody off
01:39:00 ◼ ► on the side that I took out and it took them out, I think very well. I think if you zoom in, maybe
01:39:05 ◼ ► you can see that the generative fill, it's like, something's a little fishy there. But you'd never
01:39:10 ◼ ► notice it. Like if I showed you the image, you wouldn't think, Oh, you took something out over
01:39:14 ◼ ► there. No, it's pretty good. But there was also something in between them. They were, you know,
01:39:20 ◼ ► very close in the frame. And in between her and him, there was something between them. And trying
01:39:24 ◼ ► to take that out didn't give it a realistic fill. It sort of had a Photoshop II, somebody who's not
01:39:32 ◼ ► very talented at Photoshop II removed something there. So it's, you know, it's not magic that it
01:39:38 ◼ ► can take anything you see in any picture out. But it takes a lot of things out and fills it in very
01:39:44 ◼ ► well. But just the fact that they're exposing that and prominently promoting it shows you just how
01:39:51 ◼ ► there's already drift, right? Yeah, something that really acts as the conservative is already drift.
01:39:57 ◼ ► Yeah. And it's like, you can look, everyone's gonna say it's just like Photoshop. And like,
01:40:00 ◼ ► there's a million reasons to say yes or no. No, you guys had a great article about that.
01:40:08 ◼ ► because scale matters. I mean, scales, you can't take scale out of the equation. It's like saying,
01:40:14 ◼ ► that a 2400 bob modem is the same as a modern one gigabit down. It's just faster. It's like, no.
01:40:20 ◼ ► Yeah, it's what if we gave one person a pistol or everyone a machine gun is kind of the way
01:40:26 ◼ ► I think about it. It's the same. It's just got an arm population. It's like, it's a little different.
01:40:32 ◼ ► But I think Apple is being conservative. I think cleanup is one of those things where it's like,
01:40:35 ◼ ► yeah, sometimes you take a picture of the beach and you just want to get the background out of it.
01:40:40 ◼ ► Like it happens and so goes. I think the slide to we are making memories is really notable. Right.
01:40:47 ◼ ► And the idea that you're, you want to create a thing that never actually happened is and that's
01:40:53 ◼ ► appropriate because that's what you remember. That's a PhD thesis. Just go write one right now.
01:40:59 ◼ ► Like if you're like a struggling grad student, you're like, I can't figure. It's like, there it
01:41:03 ◼ ► is. You should just write that one. And then the slide all the way to there's no such thing as a
01:41:07 ◼ ► photo. I think that was the same with what Patrick was with the Samsung guy was reacting to you back
01:41:13 ◼ ► then. Was there their moon situation where if I was about Samsung phone at a moon, it'll just like
01:41:18 ◼ ► paste a moon in and like I love talking about it. I'm not going to waste another hour on your show,
01:41:24 ◼ ► but like every photo of the moon is technically the same. So that's fine. You're not lying to
01:41:29 ◼ ► anyone. That's usually what the moon looks like unless we crashed something else into the moon.
01:41:35 ◼ ► That's what it looks like. I felt like that I wrote about that and I forget exactly what my
01:41:41 ◼ ► take was of some degree of snark, but I clearly was laughing at Samsung's feature that if the
01:41:49 ◼ ► moon is in the photo, they detected and it's, it's more than just, is it around circle or around
01:41:55 ◼ ► crescent? It is something to do. It knows it's outside. It knows the angle of the phone. It's not
01:42:01 ◼ ► pointed down. It's pointed up. Oh, that's the moon. And then they, they just generatively fill
01:42:07 ◼ ► it with like a high res photo from a camera with a telescope. I was at a graduation party last year
01:42:13 ◼ ► with a very drunk friend and he was like, you Apple nerds. And he like pulls out his Samsung
01:42:18 ◼ ► phone. He points at the moon. I was like, am I going to ruin this? Like, I can't be Googling
01:42:23 ◼ ► at this party, but I did have some interesting back and forths on social media and with email
01:42:35 ◼ ► doesn't change. So why not? And my argument was, but it's so detailed that if I was like,
01:42:43 ◼ ► what if, cause don't put it past him, right? What if Elon Musk spends a couple of, I mean,
01:42:49 ◼ ► he's been known to spend 40 some billion dollars on vanity projects. So what if he spent a couple
01:43:03 ◼ ► Yeah, just go for it. Uh, there's also a lot of other things that don't change, right? Like
01:43:08 ◼ ► the statue of Liberty mostly looks the same day to day, like other landmarks look the same.
01:43:19 ◼ ► well, it's mostly the same in every picture. Like we'll just, we'll just generate for you.
01:43:26 ◼ ► you have a picture of me, right? Stick it in front of the Lincoln Memorial, call it a day.
01:43:30 ◼ ► And like, I, that's not like there's some amount of nihilism there that I think honestly connects
01:43:36 ◼ ► all the way back down to Apple, which is very conservative saying, we'll let you pick your
01:43:40 ◼ ► own skin tone, right? Like we will, we will let you make a bunch of decisions on how this looks,
01:43:45 ◼ ► because that's your taste. And I'm not sure that a film camera, you can put different kinds of film
01:43:50 ◼ ► in it. You can do different kinds of look in it. But again, I come back to like the default for
01:43:55 ◼ ► Apple. They share a point of view and iPhone picture should have a point of view about like
01:43:59 ◼ ► a style and the aesthetic that then you can change. But right now it's their, their point
01:44:04 ◼ ► of view is kind of like, here's all of it. And then you can do whatever you want. And I think
01:44:08 ◼ ► that means that the default picture is a, like we talked about a lot, like look a little gray,
01:44:13 ◼ ► but also Apple is the only company that has the sort of aesthetic credibility to be like,
01:44:17 ◼ ► this is what the photo should look like. And it's kind of weird that they're not using it.
01:44:20 ◼ ► Trenton Larkin Yeah. Well, and the other thing too, and I look at them because I see the billboards,
01:44:25 ◼ ► they're not up again. Now it's just the one I see that's in my neighborhood. It just says
01:44:29 ◼ ► iPhone 15 Pro, but there's like a billboard that Apple's had the their ads on nonstop for,
01:44:35 ◼ ► I don't know, probably over a decade. But their shot on iPhone ads don't look like over processed
01:44:43 ◼ ► iPhone photos. No, not even a little bit. They're obviously shooting in raw, right? They're doing
01:44:48 ◼ ► it. And like I said, the camera's great. But I think this next turn that we have across the board
01:44:54 ◼ ► with smartphone photos, where we can just make them look good, or we can make them look like
01:45:00 ◼ ► whatever we want, or we can add a few views of the Google Ad Me feature. It's not great,
01:45:03 ◼ ► but it's convincing. I haven't used it, but I've seen the results right where you take a picture,
01:45:08 ◼ ► and then it like captures a volumetric scan of the thing. And you can go stand in your own picture.
01:45:16 ◼ ► any first generation photo gimmick on a smartphone. You can tell this is gonna get better, right?
01:45:21 ◼ ► We're just entering this really wacky place where the industry is way ahead of the systems we have
01:45:28 ◼ ► to evaluate the photos. Like whether that's labels that say this is AI generated, or this is real, or
01:45:34 ◼ ► whether it's just like all of society wakes up tomorrow and takes a half hour course about what
01:45:39 ◼ ► a photo is. It's like, whatever you think needs to happen there. We're just like not ready for it.
01:45:44 ◼ ► And even when Instagram tries to do some basic stuff like, "Hey, we detected some AI edits in
01:45:50 ◼ ► the metadata of the photo. We're gonna put it here." The photographers get mad. And it's like,
01:45:55 ◼ ► "Well, that's the price. You did something." And now we're gonna do full dropdowns of exif,
01:46:06 ◼ ► Yeah. My wife has pointed out, because she's not following AI closely, and she's also hearing these
01:46:12 ◼ ► descriptions. And I mean, this might be a whole tangent, but she's like, "Why would I want this?
01:46:18 ◼ ► Why would I want this notification summary thing? I want to read the text. And if I don't want to
01:46:22 ◼ ► read the text, I'm leaving the group." And I'm like, "Well, actually, I kind of agree with you.
01:46:29 ◼ ► I don't think AI summaries that absolve me of actually reading the emails or the messages
01:46:38 ◼ ► interest me at all." But she's seeing so many more images people are posting, like, "Oh, look at
01:46:46 ◼ ► these hippies from 1967. They were at Woodstock, but the one guy had an iPhone." And it's like,
01:46:52 ◼ ► "Isn't that weird? How does that pop? Was he a time traveler?" And everyone's like, "It's AI
01:46:56 ◼ ► generated," which it is. And the image is like, she's like, "Look at this stupid... Who posted
01:47:01 ◼ ► this? Who thought that this was interesting?" And I'm like, "Eh, it's a new toy." I don't know.
01:47:07 ◼ ► It's going to wear eyes. I think it's going to get old, but it's here to stay and people
01:47:13 ◼ ► are going to do it. But why? Why would people do this? And it's like, "Eh, I don't know."
01:47:24 ◼ ► The next turn is going to be dynamically generated video advertising with influencers in it.
01:47:40 ◼ ► so they can manage the influx of communication that they get, which is a really important tool
01:47:46 ◼ ► because creator burnout is real and you want to spend all your time making videos and not talking
01:47:49 ◼ ► to your audience. So maybe you should let the AI chat with, but it's like the next turn is the AI
01:47:53 ◼ ► just makes the video for you. And it's coming so fast. And whether or not the smartphone camera is
01:48:00 ◼ ► the harbinger of doom or meta letting Instagram reels creators make AI avatars of themselves to
01:48:08 ◼ ► hawk vacuum cleaners or whatever they do, it's somewhere in the middle is like, "Hey, I just want
01:48:13 ◼ ► to open an app on my phone and see real photos that real people took." And that would be a good
01:48:18 ◼ ► outcome, I think, for a lot of folks. It's a total tangent, but it does make me wonder.
01:48:26 ◼ ► And like I said, scale makes for a difference, right? Anybody with Photoshop and who's really
01:48:34 ◼ ► good at Photoshop could have made any fake image that it takes you 15 seconds to type into
01:48:46 ◼ ► Photoshop who's good at it could have done it before for a still. It's not so easy to do it
01:48:52 ◼ ► for video, right? So video generation is like you're talking about pre-AI that would have taken
01:49:00 ◼ ► a very talented person significant amount of time and equipment and software and stuff like that.
01:49:07 ◼ ► So that's different video. But even with the still photos, it's just different at how easy it is,
01:49:16 ◼ ► right? Even the talented Photoshop person who could have done it before, it would have taken
01:49:20 ◼ ► that talented person some amount of time, and now it's like, "Ah, lol." Seven seconds. However
01:49:26 ◼ ► long it takes you to type the prompt is how long it takes you, and that makes it different. And
01:49:37 ◼ ► I'm excited. I mean, the new frontiers that are opening in insurance fraud, I think, will bring us
01:49:42 ◼ ► all many great stories to tell for years to come. Like, "Here's a car accident that just didn't
01:49:48 ◼ ► happen." We're just going to enter into, I think, a period of chaos that will resolve because if it
01:49:55 ◼ ► doesn't resolve, I think we can argue about AI safety bills and training frontier models and
01:50:02 ◼ ► whether or not they can scam their way into meeting alignment data, which is a real kind
01:50:06 ◼ ► of danger. Or you can be like, "No one will ever trust a photograph again, and society will collapse
01:50:12 ◼ ► because everyone is on guard that nothing that they don't see with their own eyes has happened."
01:50:17 ◼ ► I think that will resolve. I don't think we're all going to charge into that future without
01:50:27 ◼ ► like the C2PA standard, content authenticity initiative, the stuff we have is a lot of big
01:50:35 ◼ ► companies being like, "Bluetooth is going to be amazing. We're going to ship it five years from
01:50:54 ◼ ► Yeah, it's sort of a digression. But I do wonder, I think you've spoken about this. I'm not sure who disagrees that Google search results have gotten worse in recent years. And I think part of it is that the company is just less focused on it. It used to be the crown jewel of the company. It still is financially, but I just don't think the interest is there. But then I wonder how much of it is
01:51:22 ◼ ► just the avalanche of AI-generated bullshit that's out there. And it's even if the top minds at
01:51:28 ◼ ► Google had no priority other than making Google search web results as good as they could possibly
01:51:35 ◼ ► be, that dealing with AI-generated content is just, it's a losing battle. I don't know.
01:51:42 ◼ ► I think every company that has an algorithm, like every algorithmic media company, so it's Google or
01:51:49 ◼ ► Meta or TikTok or Snapchat or whatever, that is also invested in AI is sort of inherently at war with itself.
01:51:56 ◼ ► Right. You've got one part of the company that's making the AI slop, and then you've got the
01:51:59 ◼ ► recommendation algorithm team that's like, "We need to keep the slop out of here." And they are
01:52:08 ◼ ► There's some kind of cartoon, single panel cartoon, where it's like Google is a building,
01:52:15 ◼ ► and there's slop coming out of one end, and it's going into Google search at the other end.
01:52:19 ◼ ► Yeah. And then there's this guy trying to filter out the real stuff. So that's a real problem for
01:52:23 ◼ ► Google. I think the other problem is there's not a lot of other great sources of referral traffic
01:52:31 ◼ ► on the web. So that if you and I still run websites, we're very committed to this thing.
01:52:38 ◼ ► And I want our website to have a user experience and be a good place to come visit directly. And
01:52:44 ◼ ► Darren, I know you've cared about that for a long time. Other publishers, they're just suppliers to
01:52:55 ◼ ► Yeah. They're just like, "You're here. You came from a search engine. Here's all the ads we can
01:53:04 ◼ ► The guy who bought the domain name for Tua a couple months ago and a couple other sites like
01:53:29 ◼ ► a little bit, right? No, not even a little bit, as opposed to the old days of content farms where
01:53:34 ◼ ► there was some kind of, "If you want to come every day, that'd be great too." It's not really our
01:53:39 ◼ ► primary goal, but it's there. Whereas now it's just, "No, no, we're just trying to get search
01:53:43 ◼ ► traffic." And it's all, we don't have any real people. So our marginal costs are nothing to just
01:53:48 ◼ ► generate tons of slop instead of a little slop. But what's interesting about Google search in
01:53:53 ◼ ► particular is they don't control any of the other inputs to that system. They're just the thing,
01:54:00 ◼ ► they're just the incentive structure for everyone. So everyone's constantly trying to gain Google
01:54:04 ◼ ► search. And then Google has this army of people who are constantly explaining that you shouldn't
01:54:09 ◼ ► really, and here's this thing. Whereas Instagram, it's just a closed ecosystem. So Adam and Sarah
01:54:18 ◼ ► until he changes his mind. And they're just more in control of this integrated algorithmic media
01:54:25 ◼ ► ecosystem. And I don't think that means the slop will stay away. There's already slop all over
01:54:30 ◼ ► these platforms. But Google just has this fire hose problem that it is just not in control of.
01:54:36 ◼ ► They can't just be like, "We're going to punish all of you." Because it wants to remain this
01:54:41 ◼ ► neutral, it wants to search the web. And the web is just so radically optimized for one referrer.
01:54:48 ◼ ► Honestly, the best thing Google to do to fix Google search is set up another company that
01:55:07 ◼ ► When you lose diversity in the ecosystem, it collapses. That's what's happening to the web
01:55:17 ◼ ► Yeah. It's just going to fall. And the web pages look like it. We're going to get canceled for
01:55:24 ◼ ► saying this. But this over optimization is the symptom of only having one major referrer.
01:55:31 ◼ ► Yeah, I think so. And it's almost like Google's going to shrug its shoulders and be like, "Well,
01:55:38 ◼ ► what are we supposed to do?" But I think you're right that they almost need a second input.
01:55:42 ◼ ► I don't know. But then Google also runs YouTube, which is a closed ecosystem. And they can run the
01:55:48 ◼ ► made on YouTube creator event and Neil Mo on the CEO of YouTube can be like, "Make this." And then
01:55:57 ◼ ► So I just look at all this stuff and it's like, "Yep, all these algorithmic companies are going
01:56:01 ◼ ► to be at war with each other because they're making their own slop." But Google search in
01:56:10 ◼ ► and it's in constant antitrust battles, basically, it just doesn't have... It can't fix it the way
01:56:22 ◼ ► I don't track my referrals more than once or twice a month. I look at them and Google's still there,
01:56:29 ◼ ► but it's lower than ever. But the number of people who come to my homepage, I think it's ticked back
01:56:35 ◼ ► up recently. And surely it has for the verge. Your homepage is designed to be a destination.
01:56:41 ◼ ► And the few things we can see is direct traffic is up and our comments are up. I think both of
01:56:46 ◼ ► those are very much related to Twitter going away. People are coming to us, the tech Twitter is all
01:56:57 ◼ ► great. And that's our common system. And so you can just do it. And those two things, those numbers
01:57:02 ◼ ► are just going up. And I think it's healthier overall. I really do. And it's not that Twitter's
01:57:08 ◼ ► gone away or that Twitter like social networking has gone away, but the centrality of Twitter has
01:57:12 ◼ ► gone away. And I don't think it's ever going to come back. I mean, who knows long run, but maybe
01:57:19 ◼ ► threads is the only one with patience. But I also don't think Instagram has, or meta has a history of
01:57:25 ◼ ► patience. Like I don't know that they're going to care. But I think though, even if the aggregate
01:57:31 ◼ ► number of tweet like posts that the world is sending is higher than ever because of threads
01:57:36 ◼ ► and the remnants of Twitter at X and the rise of Mastodon and however much blue sky has taken. And
01:57:43 ◼ ► they shot up in Brazil when X got shut down down there. The fact that there's no more one place
01:57:50 ◼ ► where Twitter like tweets go, which used to be Twitter means that in people's minds in its media
01:57:57 ◼ ► influence, none of them do. Collectively, they don't have the influence that Twitter used to
01:58:02 ◼ ► have, even if Twitter at its peak was smaller than the aggregate of all the ones people are using
01:58:08 ◼ ► today. I think that's right. I think it's pretty good that there's not centrality. I do too. I
01:58:12 ◼ ► think it's good. I think it's great that verge verge readers are spending more time on verge
01:58:17 ◼ ► comments. I think it's absolutely a win. I really did. In the line I've long stolen from my friend
01:58:23 ◼ ► Casey Newton is anybody can get traffic, but it's really hard to build an audience. We have an
01:58:27 ◼ ► audience. So true. We're just gonna we're just gonna try to serve that audience as much as we
01:58:31 ◼ ► can. We're betting really hard and Federation like, I think activity pub is it. We have to
01:58:38 ◼ ► there's a lot there. Like it is. It is a very it's a standard right now that supports mastodon
01:58:43 ◼ ► and like a little bit of threads. And then some other companies like Ghost are starting to figure
01:58:48 ◼ ► it out. And there's some really interesting ideas and flipboard and other like, but it's all a bunch
01:58:53 ◼ ► of nascent ideas. You remember you used to describe Twitter as a playground for app design. And I
01:58:58 ◼ ► really want activity pub to get to that state. It's just there isn't enough yet. And so we and
01:59:05 ◼ ► and then we are like, OK, so we're going to post a quick post to our site that will get federated.
01:59:09 ◼ ► It'll show up on threads and then millions of follow up questions. What happens when someone
01:59:15 ◼ ► likes that post? Am I going to start showing likes on our home page? That's a big decision for a
01:59:20 ◼ ► publisher. What if someone replies to it and it's not a comment we want to expose because it's
01:59:24 ◼ ► outside of our community guidelines on our site, like how will we handle that moderation? And you
01:59:28 ◼ ► just have to solve a bunch of problems. And the thing I keep saying is like, at least they're new
01:59:33 ◼ ► problems. Like I've solved the old problems a lot. I'd like to solve some new ones. So that's really
01:59:40 ◼ ► interesting to me, but it's going to take us some time. But I think that is actually that the way
01:59:44 ◼ ► forward is to say, actually, you can you can take a bunch of content, a lot of places and remix it
01:59:48 ◼ ► into new kinds of experiences. And we can all participate in like a network, an ecosystem,
01:59:53 ◼ ► without this notion that Jack Dorsey is in charge. Right. And I, I get being turning your
02:00:02 ◼ ► cynicism dial all the way to 10 for anything related to meta, I get it. I mean, mine's pretty
02:00:09 ◼ ► close to 10. But I actually think it makes total sense that they're actually pretty invested in
02:00:16 ◼ ► getting threads to embrace activity pub as best they can, and as best fits their model. Because
02:00:23 ◼ ► the whole thing with threads is just sort of, they're just sort of punking on Elon, they really
02:00:28 ◼ ► are. There's no other point. They know that there's no real money from from their scale,
02:00:34 ◼ ► from their perspective, in text based bursts of social media. They just know, I mean, there's
02:00:41 ◼ ► some money and they will turn on the ad spigot eventually on threads. But overall, it's just
02:00:48 ◼ ► there to fuck with Elon Musk. And I'm here for it. And it's not bad. But that therefore, like,
02:00:54 ◼ ► there's a reason why they're not talking about bringing Instagram to activity pub. Right?
02:01:00 ◼ ► Yeah. I don't know if they can at this point. I don't even know if they can, but they're not
02:01:05 ◼ ► going to because they don't want to open that up because it generates so much money because
02:01:09 ◼ ► it's a video. And even still, even the still photography remnants of Instagram that are still
02:01:15 ◼ ► there, it's visual and people, more people are more engaged with visual media and visual media
02:01:27 ◼ ► before. I mean, if you just think about like ads, it's funny how much I brought up ads in this.
02:01:37 ◼ ► pure chaos. But if you're an advertiser and you want to do programmatic advertising on the web,
02:01:41 ◼ ► which is what they all want to do, you know, like I want to target 18 to 35 year old men in New York
02:01:52 ◼ ► like basic programmatic advertising stuff. Well, that's one big target. And you can send some ads
02:01:57 ◼ ► to those things. Or you could say, here are my assets. Here's my face to sell these assets.
02:02:02 ◼ ► Find every single person with a propensity to buy my shoes and make them an ad based on what
02:02:08 ◼ ► meta knows about them. And we're like two turns away from this. Right. Like it's way closer than
02:02:15 ◼ ► you think. They're all investing in it. They're all talking about it. TikTok is already selling
02:02:19 ◼ ► the capabilities at the conferences that the advertisers are going to. It's so close. And
02:02:25 ◼ ► I actually think what that will open up is some desire, some demand in the market for. I would
02:02:30 ◼ ► like to talk to some real people in some sane environments. And I'm just hopeful that we can
02:02:35 ◼ ► somehow make a business for journalism out of that demand, as opposed to the pure entertainment
02:02:41 ◼ ► of various feeds. I agree. All right, let me take a break here and thank our final sponsor of the
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02:04:56 ◼ ► Oh, it's a good one. Yes. It's overloaded. Yeah. I wish actually I saw a video of someone today
02:05:03 ◼ ► doing, I think the most interesting thing you can do with it. They were shooting in portrait
02:05:08 ◼ ► and they like squeezed it with their thumb and then they use their finger on the screen to
02:05:13 ◼ ► move the camera control. And I was like, oh, that's pretty good. Like actually it's pretty
02:05:18 ◼ ► good to have a quick access button to bring up these controls that you just use with your finger.
02:05:22 ◼ ► But I have found it almost impossible to dial in doing the horizontal slip in landscape.
02:05:26 ◼ ► I love the idea of it and I have used it and there are times like carefully constructing
02:05:34 ◼ ► a frame where I do think it's useful not to be obscuring the screen and to just be going back
02:05:42 ◼ ► and forth between two things. But also it's good that photographic styles are not destructive
02:05:54 ◼ ► because I have shot a bunch of photos that are in like, why am I shooting luminous? Why is everything
02:05:59 ◼ ► purple? All right. Luminous is this like sort of purple pink color cast to an image. And it's
02:06:06 ◼ ► because it's like right next to natural, which I have been shooting. And apparently my fingers
02:06:11 ◼ ► slid over. I really wish another click would make those controls go away. I actually said that to
02:06:16 ◼ ► Apple. I was like, it's hard to make them go away because once you're done setting it, you want to
02:06:21 ◼ ► like dismiss the control. So you'd actually change it. And they were like, oh yeah, it's good note.
02:06:26 ◼ ► You can tap on the screen to make it go. And I was like that this destroys the purpose of this,
02:06:31 ◼ ► but it's for now until we figure out a way to dismiss it. That's been my solution is used to
02:06:36 ◼ ► a quick tap on the screen and control goes away. I think they're very serious about it. I think
02:06:40 ◼ ► it's here to stay. I don't think they did this on a whim and they're going to be like, oh,
02:06:43 ◼ ► nobody really used it. And next year's phones aren't going to have camera control. I think
02:06:47 ◼ ► this was definitely a, they say measure twice, cut once. I think this was think about it for years
02:07:00 ◼ ► and as much as it exposes so many different things, two layers, it's it for a first version
02:07:08 ◼ ► of this product in the first OS that supports it. There's a lot there, but the main thing I
02:07:13 ◼ ► want from it that's not there is the ability to take stuff out. Right? Like I wrote in my review,
02:07:19 ◼ ► I never want the zoom feature. I do not want to zoom to 1.7 or 2.4 or 5.3. I want to snap
02:07:29 ◼ ► between the lenses. I want to snap between 0.5125 and that's it. And you could do that with the
02:07:37 ◼ ► camera one. That's not zoom, but camera, it just switches between those things, those hard stops.
02:07:44 ◼ ► But I want to take zoom out so I never get over there. I don't want it. And if I do want to zoom,
02:07:49 ◼ ► it doesn't, you know, if I take it out of camera control, like you said, I could just go back to
02:07:52 ◼ ► the screen, pinch and zoom or use the zoom dial. There's no reason it has to be up there. So,
02:07:58 ◼ ► and I would love to take out all the photographic styles that I don't want in there. And if I ever
02:08:11 ◼ ► I can't, I can't help but agree with you. I just want the tone control. I just want the one control
02:08:16 ◼ ► that I'm going to use all the time. Right. Yeah. And it, it's kind of weird that they've exposed
02:08:22 ◼ ► so much, but not the ability to specify what you want at your fingertips. It's all there all the
02:08:29 ◼ ► time in their hard-coded coded order. Like I want standard and natural right next to each other with
02:08:35 ◼ ► stark black and white next, because those are the three I'm imagining shooting with the most. But in
02:08:42 ◼ ► the meantime, I've got to skip over all of these other styles that I definitely don't want.
02:09:04 ◼ ► Because if you look at preserve settings, a lot of it is kind of what you're getting at. Like,
02:09:09 ◼ ► how do I want this thing to work every time I open it? I have a point of view on how I want it
02:09:14 ◼ ► to work every time I open it. So here's the style I want it to be set in. Here's the tone. Like,
02:09:18 ◼ ► here's this stuff versus just jump back to the fault every time I open the camera. And it's,
02:09:23 ◼ ► it, it makes sense. Like it's logical. There's nothing irrational about it, but it's also just
02:09:30 ◼ ► not how my brain works. That setting the camera requires me to go to a screen called preserve
02:09:35 ◼ ► settings. Like it, it's, it's like a, it's like like a weird evolutionary path to a name that
02:09:43 ◼ ► doesn't mean anything in this context. And I think there's just a point where like, just do it how
02:09:49 ◼ ► Canon or Nikon or Sony does it. Like all those pro cameras have tons of configurable buttons and
02:09:54 ◼ ► everyone, those people who use those cameras, figure them out. And that's fine. And I think
02:09:58 ◼ ► this is kind of the same place. Yeah. It's like, they've exposed so much and you're right.
02:10:03 ◼ ► There's a, there's a long list. It's a lot of scrolling, just settings, camera preserve
02:10:08 ◼ ► settings, just that alone. But it's, it's like, they're not breaking down to just let me
02:10:17 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. You could, I was like, I basically asked the question, like, how do I make this
02:10:22 ◼ ► student? They're like preserve settings. I'm like, that doesn't, that's, it's a weird sort
02:10:25 ◼ ► of like sideways turn into like, let me program the button. I mean, it's fine. It does the job,
02:10:31 ◼ ► but it's, it's not quite what you're saying, which is get rid of the extraneous stuff I don't need.
02:10:36 ◼ ► Because at least let me reorder them. Even if I could just reorder them, it would help me just
02:10:55 ◼ ► which is just like a paradise of configurability in the least Apple way I can think of.
02:11:00 ◼ ► Like shit's just moving around and resizing and flying off another screen. It's so much so that I
02:11:07 ◼ ► think the beta, the newest beta of 18.1 has a button in it to reset control center because you
02:11:19 ◼ ► I have hardly played with that feature because I find it so fiddly and annoying. And it's like
02:11:37 ◼ ► You can make a design based around your wallpaper or whatever, snapping them to a grid rather than
02:11:45 ◼ ► filling. But then control center is like, oh, you miss the frustration of trying to get an icon in
02:11:50 ◼ ► the right place on your home screen? Here's a new game for you. It's like playing a really bad iPhone
02:11:57 ◼ ► game, or at least bad to me trying to get the controls in place. And I'm sure it's just thinking
02:12:05 ◼ ► about it for a few seconds. I'm sure it's a hard problem to solve. What should be the touchscreen
02:12:11 ◼ ► interface for rearranging a grid of irregular shapes that some of them are one by one, some
02:12:18 ◼ ► are one by two, they could be two by one, they could be two by two. It's tricky, but solving
02:12:25 ◼ ► those problems used to be Apple's bread and butter. And it's like I often think about the fact
02:12:33 ◼ ► that it's hard and annoying. And really, it's really annoying because I do it every year like
02:12:40 ◼ ► before I set up a new iPhone. So I'm like, let me start deleting some of these apps I never use. Let
02:12:44 ◼ ► me simplify my home screen a little. It's so hard to select multiple apps at one time. And it's like,
02:12:51 ◼ ► "Oh, it's possible." And somebody's gonna say, "Oh, it's possible you hold your one finger down on one
02:12:55 ◼ ► and you start tapping other ones with another finger." And everything's sliding all over the
02:13:00 ◼ ► place. Whereas the original Macintosh in 1984 invented that dancing ants rectangle. So if you
02:13:08 ◼ ► wanted to select three files on your desktop, you just drag a rectangle where the rectangle includes
02:13:13 ◼ ► all three. As soon as you let go, all three of those icons are selected and none of the other
02:13:18 ◼ ► ones are. And you've got a selection of three. That's a really tricky problem. How do you select
02:13:26 ◼ ► these three icons, but not those three icons that are next to them? Oh, you just drag a box around
02:13:31 ◼ ► them. Well, that's a really simple, elegant, fast solution that people will remember to do a
02:13:37 ◼ ► complicated thing. And I feel like— I'm at the point where I think they need an editor on the Mac
02:13:42 ◼ ► to let me design my home screen and my control center. And I opened phone mirroring on Sequoia,
02:13:49 ◼ ► and I was like, "Oh, man. What if I could just drag some boxes with my mouse? What if I could
02:13:55 ◼ ► edit these screens?" What if I can use these Mac paradigms? You absolutely cannot do it,
02:14:01 ◼ ► and it's the thing I want the most, actually. What I want phone mirroring the most is to edit
02:14:06 ◼ ► control center. Have a big window with all the icons over here. I have more or less left my
02:14:13 ◼ ► control. I'm patient zero for that reset to default because mine is mostly default. I've
02:14:19 ◼ ► got one or two customizations that I've changed over the last few months, but that's it.
02:14:25 ◼ ► Yeah. Mine is just we have so many smart home gadgets that some of them need to be there and
02:14:31 ◼ ► some of them don't. You want to move some up there. And then I really like the new flashlight
02:14:35 ◼ ► with the ring that gets wider and narrower. I think that's really cool, so I want that right
02:14:39 ◼ ► away. There's a lot of that stuff going on here. Yeah, and that's such a little feature. But to me,
02:14:46 ◼ ► and again, I'm not trying to be cynical, but to me, that flashlight feature is almost as cool
02:14:56 ◼ ► and worthy of attention as some of the AI features, right? It's at least as interesting
02:15:02 ◼ ► to me. It's more interesting to me than the whole image playground thing because I can do
02:15:07 ◼ ► what image playground does on other services right now. I don't have to wait for Apple,
02:15:17 ◼ ► thankfully, a very beautiful Apple-like interface to control it, right? It's both functional and
02:15:24 ◼ ► fun and original and clever, and nobody else was ever going to be able to do that to the flashlight
02:15:29 ◼ ► on the back of my phone, whereas I have at least a dozen choices for image generation from a text
02:15:35 ◼ ► prompt already. I don't have to wait for it from Apple. So why not talk about that? Like, people
02:15:41 ◼ ► use the flashlight. They really do. I know that sounds silly for me to say they should make a
02:15:46 ◼ ► commercial telling people the flashlight's better than ever, but I'm telling you that actually would
02:15:50 ◼ ► get an awful lot of people watching football on Sunday to say, "Oh, I use the flashlight every
02:15:54 ◼ ► night." I know you had a lot of feelings about the video keynote versus the live keynote. You can't
02:16:01 ◼ ► show off the flashlight if you're doing a video keynote. Do you know what I mean? A live keynote,
02:16:06 ◼ ► you can have the presenter do the aside. It's like, "I want to show you one more thing."
02:16:10 ◼ ► Look at this and just make it even seem like an accident or an improv bit. Video keynote,
02:16:18 ◼ ► no spontaneity, right? And I think that's missing from a lot of this because you end up
02:16:23 ◼ ► trying to only talk about things that can hit in basically a flashy infomercial style instead of
02:16:30 ◼ ► just being enthusiastic about the product and these little flourishes. And I don't think they're
02:16:37 ◼ ► ever going to go back to live. I think they love how much video chat's travel. But I really think
02:16:41 ◼ ► they should. I think it's writ large what I was talking about an hour ago about Apple's
02:16:51 ◼ ► institutional cultural values leading them to overemphasize noise reduction in the photos.
02:16:59 ◼ ► It's that same sensibility that leads them internally to a fallen head over heels in love
02:17:07 ◼ ► with the prerecorded keynote film style because it looks so much more polished. It is. They are
02:17:19 ◼ ► not stage shows, right? And that's really what they were, right? It's like the old in-person
02:17:25 ◼ ► keynotes were stage shows. They were on a physical stage and the primary audience was the people like
02:17:31 ◼ ► us who were in them, which at times like at WWDC was 5,000 people, lots of developers. It wasn't
02:17:37 ◼ ► just for the media. And watching them afterwards or the millions of people instead of thousands
02:17:45 ◼ ► of people who were in the theater or the keynote hall or Moscone or the San Jose Convention Center,
02:17:51 ◼ ► yes, millions of people watched at home and they were watching a recording of a stage show.
02:17:59 ◼ ► And old TV shows when TV was new looked like stage shows in the 1950s. So you could just sort of see
02:18:05 ◼ ► like, oh, they knew how to make a play. And now they put a camera in front of the play and that's
02:18:10 ◼ ► what you get. But there are times where you want to go see a play, not a movie, right? There's times
02:18:17 ◼ ► that there's a reason why theater, live theater is still a thing, right? And my wife and I like
02:18:24 ◼ ► to go see stand-up comedy and we've observed it is so sort of mid-level. But that was a pretty good
02:18:31 ◼ ► set. If you're in the room watching them live, you will think and laugh. You will think it funnier and
02:18:37 ◼ ► laugh harder than you would if you watched a recording of the exact same performance on YouTube
02:18:44 ◼ ► later. You would. It's better. But it's also, I could see though the Apple impulses, my God,
02:18:52 ◼ ► look at how much higher the production values are on these prerecorded videos. And we don't have to
02:18:57 ◼ ► worry. No demo is ever going to fail again, right? And from Apple's perspective, that's a win. But I
02:19:04 ◼ ► don't know that it really is a win. There's, I wrote about it last week that, I don't know,
02:19:09 ◼ ► there's a certain drama to the potential for a live demo to fail, right? And I read your piece
02:19:16 ◼ ► last week and I, you were talking about how they're less quirky, right? They're more polished.
02:19:20 ◼ ► I mean, this is again, like the GDP of the country depends on Apple shipping the iPhone on time. Like
02:19:26 ◼ ► there's that. I also wonder if they don't have someone who can hold the room, like jobs could
02:19:33 ◼ ► hold the room, right? Like if you want to put on the stage show, you got to put on a great stage
02:19:37 ◼ ► show. You can make any group of presenters pull off an infomercial, like you got music, you got,
02:19:43 ◼ ► you can swoop through Apple Park, you can do transitions. Craig can jump out of a plane,
02:19:48 ◼ ► all that stuff. And they can show and they get to put way more employees in the keynotes than
02:19:54 ◼ ► they would otherwise, which and from what I understand, those are the other companies and
02:19:59 ◼ ► like fake it. Like those are Apple's actual product marketing folks, like by and large.
02:20:04 ◼ ► So that's very impressive that they do that. But I do wonder if one of the reasons they haven't,
02:20:08 ◼ ► if they had a Steve Jobs like figure who could just command that room, then being in that room
02:20:15 ◼ ► when he was doing that demo would be a whole thing, right? They would be able to meter that
02:20:21 ◼ ► access, that would be an asset for them in a way that like I'm in the room watching the video.
02:20:27 ◼ ► I'm just here for the hands on you guys. Like I don't, whatever. Like I can live blog this from
02:20:32 ◼ ► home. And I did for two years in the pandemic. That's the I think that's the thing they're
02:20:37 ◼ ► missing, right? Is this this should be exclusive for a whole set of reasons. Or this should feel
02:20:42 ◼ ► special for a whole set of reasons, not just while this is happening, there are guys behind you
02:20:47 ◼ ► putting the phones on stands. I do think that that's also part of the reason that you don't get
02:21:00 ◼ ► Yeah. And like you said, the quirkiness, or I wrote about quirkiness and you saying like,
02:21:07 ◼ ► what if back in the day, if it had been Scott Forstall, who just loved, or maybe it was Jobs
02:21:12 ◼ ► himself, or Schiller or anybody who just really friggin like the time that Schiller really,
02:21:17 ◼ ► really wanted to spend a couple minutes talking about the subpixel, the size of the sensor or
02:21:23 ◼ ► whatever. What if somebody just really wants to show off how cool the new flashlight UI is?
02:21:29 ◼ ► Right? Like Jobs used to do that all the time. Like he would just say like, look at this,
02:21:33 ◼ ► and he'd just go boom. And then and then he'd go back and do it again. Boom. If there was like an
02:21:39 ◼ ► animation or like a button or something that he just thought really look cool, he would do it
02:21:44 ◼ ► like two or three times, which when they when he first demoed Aqua OS, yes, it was OS 10 Aqua back
02:21:51 ◼ ► then. It was not Mac OS yet. Right. It was probably still public beta when they and he was like,
02:21:54 ◼ ► here's the minimize. And he would, yes, motion like five times in a row. Yeah, it was just
02:21:58 ◼ ► minimizing windows. Yeah. What do you do? No, and even showed off. And it the shortcut is still
02:22:06 ◼ ► there to this day. If you hold down the shift button, really sure. Yeah, if you hold down the
02:22:10 ◼ ► shift, now, john and I are just minimizing windows, hit the yellow button. Yeah, it goes
02:22:13 ◼ ► in slow motion in slow motioning you into the dock right now. This hold down shift, hit the yellow
02:22:19 ◼ ► button on any Mac window. And it's slow mose into this is not happening for me. I think you're I
02:22:25 ◼ ► think they took it out. Oh, no. Well, I'm running Sonoma. What are you running? Sonoma? Are you
02:22:31 ◼ ► sure? I know it's still there. It's there in Chrome, at least but but yeah, he had them build
02:22:36 ◼ ► the feature. They left it in just to show. And again, it still works. I was watching you were
02:22:42 ◼ ► doing were you and I see video of each other as we talk here. As it's closing windows, as it's
02:22:48 ◼ ► zooming into the dock it in slow mo, the video is still playing even as it's squished. And yeah,
02:22:53 ◼ ► he showed it multiple times. You take take the windows back out of the dock. Let me show you
02:22:58 ◼ ► again. And that would never happen in the pre recorded version. They they might show it once,
02:23:03 ◼ ► but then they'd be moving on to the next thing. It's next next next. And the just I just want to
02:23:09 ◼ ► take a moment here and connect with you in the audience. And I know some of you are going to
02:23:13 ◼ ► share my emotional response to this cool little thing the same way I do like look at how the
02:23:19 ◼ ► flashlight beam actually changes on screen as the real flashlight actually changes its beam.
02:23:25 ◼ ► Isn't that cool? I kind of miss that. And I do feel like it works live in a way that it doesn't
02:23:32 ◼ ► work at all in these pre recorded keynotes. So they don't even try. So they skip all that stuff.
02:23:54 ◼ ► that's just weird. Like a normal person would never just be like, I'm gonna just bluster my
02:24:00 ◼ ► way through this. Like the richest company in the world, they bluster through it. I think there's
02:24:05 ◼ ► just an element of kind of all this with Apple intelligence. Kind of all this with here's what
02:24:10 ◼ ► the photos are gonna look like. All this we're going to do infomercials now instead of live
02:24:15 ◼ ► events, where I think they're very confident in the things that they have. And they don't quite
02:24:22 ◼ ► know how to talk about the things that they're really, really good at. Because at the end of
02:24:26 ◼ ► the day, like smartphones are, they are very similar, like the photos from the Pixel and the
02:24:31 ◼ ► Samsung and the Apple, like, they're, they're so cool. You'd have to, I could argue about them. I
02:24:36 ◼ ► love arguing with them. But they all run apps, they all have web browsers, like, they're all
02:24:40 ◼ ► very good. And what makes Apple's phone better in lots of people's estimation is the level of polish
02:24:47 ◼ ► and attention to detail, and the tight integration between the hardware and software and everything.
02:24:51 ◼ ► And it's like, they've kind of lost that ability to be like, we're very proud of this very small
02:24:56 ◼ ► thing. And that thing is the thing that everybody emotionally connects with. They're off into,
02:25:01 ◼ ► we're summarizing your notifications, just like everyone else's. And that there's like,
02:25:06 ◼ ► I don't know if doing them live again would solve it. But there's like an emphasis on how human
02:25:13 ◼ ► Apple is that would that would definitely bring back to, to how they talk about themselves.
02:25:18 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah, I feel like some of that still there. It's just that they don't talk about it. I feel
02:25:24 ◼ ► like a lot of the emphasis on the little like this flashlight thing is a is such a great example.
02:25:29 ◼ ► It's not that important. But I do think I wouldn't be surprised at all. If that feature in the live
02:25:42 ◼ ► even think it was even considered for this. It wasn't like, well, let's shoot a little bit about
02:25:46 ◼ ► the cool new flashlight thing. But maybe we'll have to cut it. I don't even think they put it in.
02:25:50 ◼ ► Right. It's, it's so the, the fact that they built the feature is still there. But the fact that they
02:25:58 ◼ ► might promote it in its announcement was like, Oh, no, we're not gonna do that. We got it. We
02:26:03 ◼ ► have 20 minutes budgeted for Apple intelligence. Yeah. And we which we've already, which we've
02:26:09 ◼ ► already announced. Yeah. I have to say the chances of me buying a black Apple watch ultra two are
02:26:14 ◼ ► very high. But it's like that product is well announced. The AirPods Max were like super
02:26:21 ◼ ► announced in shipping for years. They've only made but one change like there's something here that is
02:26:29 ◼ ► a little lost in my opinion. Yeah. It's like I don't I don't think it's wrong to say that there's
02:26:37 ◼ ► no new Apple there's no new ultra three this year. And yet in the meantime to say but there is a cool
02:26:43 ◼ ► new color. Yeah, that's fine. But then you just have to say in some ways and just make it super
02:26:50 ◼ ► clear. There's no new ultra three this year. That's not quite how Apple would say it but we have a cool
02:26:55 ◼ ► new color of the ultra two people love their Apple watch ultras. And the Apple watch ultra two is now
02:27:01 ◼ ► available in this excellent diamond like coating they would have done in a previous iteration of
02:27:07 ◼ ► Apple they would have done like five minutes on anodizing aluminum. Johnny I would have been like,
02:27:13 ◼ ► here's what I do. I take the black color and then I vapor blast it onto this thing and that
02:27:17 ◼ ► turns upside down. There's five lasers and then everything gets very cold and now it's black.
02:27:21 ◼ ► And like that would have been captivating. You know what's funny? I didn't think about that. But
02:27:25 ◼ ► that's one of the most telltale signs of Johnny Ives absence from Apple is their complete lack
02:27:33 ◼ ► of any promotional interest in their materials engineering chops. Right. They just ship the new
02:27:41 ◼ ► colors. And it's like, yes, desert titanium. Everybody I've spoken to as who has an opinion on
02:27:47 ◼ ► colors as fashion thinks it's a very hot color. Yes, this is going to sell very well. This is
02:28:00 ◼ ► machinery that creates this thing. It's just like, nope, here's a new color where there's
02:28:04 ◼ ► 10 minutes of CNC aluminum machining to make MacBook bodies. Right. The most the most Johnny
02:28:11 ◼ ► Ive moment of any keynote ever, I think was when they spent time talking about how they learned
02:28:17 ◼ ► to, they learned advanced for, I forget the verb, but how to make really, really premium 24 karat
02:28:26 ◼ ► gold for the Apple Watch. Like, it's not the fact that they made $20,000 Apple Watches and sold them
02:28:33 ◼ ► for a year, which was unusual. But I actually kind of get the thinking there to get the intro to get
02:28:42 ◼ ► covers on Vogue or something and just sort of say this isn't a nerd watch to watch watch. But the
02:28:49 ◼ ► fact that they spent time in the keynote bragging about how they learned to make the gold and it was
02:28:54 ◼ ► a long part of the keynote. That's the crazy part. Because it's like you just know that Johnny Ive
02:29:00 ◼ ► actually spent a lot of time learning how gold is made and he wanted to share that with everybody,
02:29:05 ◼ ► like Mr. Rogers. It's almost like it didn't look like an episode of Mr. Rogers, but it's like Johnny
02:29:11 ◼ ► Ive teaching us something about how gold is made. Did you see that there's a long profile of Ive
02:29:16 ◼ ► and Love From and The Times? Did you check that? I just linked to it a couple an hour or two before
02:29:21 ◼ ► we started recording. Yes, by Trip Mickle of all people. Yeah, you can really tell. I mean,
02:29:27 ◼ ► Trip wrote the big book about Johnny versus Tim. I leave those dots stubbornly unconnected.
02:29:33 ◼ ► It makes you wonder if maybe they've ever spoken before. I don't know. Trip was on this show a while
02:29:41 ◼ ► ago and I tried to after his book came out and yeah, he obviously wasn't going to spill about
02:29:47 ◼ ► who unnamed sources are for certain things. He's held his tongue on who's who, but kind of obvious.
02:29:57 ◼ ► Anyway, there's a he designed a jacket and he's yeah, I researched the history of all buttons.
02:30:03 ◼ ► Yeah, and they made a book. And I made a book about it's perfect. You ever read that profile?
02:30:07 ◼ ► It's good. They made a new book. They made a book. They make books for their clients at Love From,
02:30:12 ◼ ► which and Johnny apparently started this at Apple too. And that's like the the coffee table book
02:30:25 ◼ ► took the chief design officer role for a couple years. But the made by Apple in California super
02:30:32 ◼ ► expensive coffee table book is a type of book that Johnny's design team had been making for
02:30:36 ◼ ► themselves internally for years. And Love From continues to do this. They make hardcover books
02:30:42 ◼ ► for their like if The Verge hired Love From to design a new comment form or something. Part of
02:30:49 ◼ ► the deliverables would be a delightful I'm sure hardcover book showing the design process. Yeah.
02:30:55 ◼ ► And in addition to those books for clients, they made their own book showing the history of
02:31:00 ◼ ► fasteners for jackets. It's very good. It's very good. And the button looks cool. Although people
02:31:05 ◼ ► have made those kinds of buttons before, it must be said. But I think there's there's something
02:31:10 ◼ ► there where the delight in the like, nitty gritty of the process, particularly when you go all the
02:31:17 ◼ ► way to the video format. You just you just lose the ability to shift into it. Because remember,
02:31:23 ◼ ► Johnny never was on stage. Now be like, and here's a video from Johnny. And he would be like,
02:31:27 ◼ ► here's how I vapor deposit aluminium. And that would be cool. And then we would come back to like,
02:31:32 ◼ ► and now I'm holding the thing. And that shift was actually important. That made it work in a way
02:31:38 ◼ ► that I think if you just did material science in the middle of it, right? You would not be able to
02:31:42 ◼ ► pull it off. Yeah, they totally made it work. Yeah, I think Johnny's appearances he just
02:31:50 ◼ ► apparently just I don't think he's got stage fright per se. And he does on stage interviews.
02:31:55 ◼ ► It's not like he won't appear on say he just didn't want to do it in the context of a keynote.
02:32:00 ◼ ► And I can understand it. And I kind of feel like to he he knew that jobs is literally the best
02:32:08 ◼ ► there ever was and probably will be at that. And so why would he want to be on stage? But he I think
02:32:17 ◼ ► he was he took like a phone call from Steve Jobs, like with the iPhone. And I don't know, he'd appear
02:32:24 ◼ ► like on FaceTime or something if they were demoing a new FaceTime feature or something, but no, not
02:32:28 ◼ ► live. What else did you what else did you make of the sort of love from because the other thing I
02:32:36 ◼ ► thought was the thing I called out was the timing of the profile coming out the day after the iPhones
02:32:41 ◼ ► were released. I don't know that the interview took place in June. It was it said multiple
02:32:48 ◼ ► times that Michael was there at love from office in San Francisco or burgeoning offices in San
02:32:54 ◼ ► Francisco. So I don't think it's a coincidence that it came out the day after the iPhones released,
02:32:59 ◼ ► but it might have entirely been the New York Times his own editorial decision to save this and put it
02:33:05 ◼ ► out the day after iPhone day not loving my my instinct is that the Times made that call. There's
02:33:12 ◼ ► no Yeah. And because the other thing I know is a feature. There's no like scoop in here. Yeah. And
02:33:18 ◼ ► I don't really I don't see how anybody including Johnny I've can boss the times around on Okay,
02:33:25 ◼ ► we'll give you this access. But we want this to come out on September 21. Because we kind of want
02:33:32 ◼ ► to take a little steal a little thunder from the iPhone. I don't see that happening. I really don't
02:33:37 ◼ ► not unless there's like product use in here, which would be a pretty normal embargo. And there's just
02:33:41 ◼ ► none of it. I sincere I think this is just the Times found an opportune moment to publish the
02:33:45 ◼ ► story when there's interest is high. The thing that really caught me. There's a picture in here
02:33:50 ◼ ► of I've dinner. And it's like the birthday the five year anniversary of love from and he's taking
02:33:56 ◼ ► a photo with his iPhone. And he's just got like, a light blue silicon case on the phone. And I,
02:34:04 ◼ ► I don't even knew I like had this thought. But I was like, Oh, the most famous designer in the
02:34:24 ◼ ► Yeah, it's just the light blue silicon case. Yeah, it's like nothing, right? I always say
02:34:32 ◼ ► it's like rubber. No, it's, it's just a very boring thing for him to have. Yeah. And it's
02:34:37 ◼ ► obviously is like complicated beast. And it's maybe the most important consumer electronic
02:34:42 ◼ ► product all time. But you just look at this photo. And you're like, Oh, you just got like,
02:34:46 ◼ ► and there's just something about that, that I, in reading this whole thing, and there's that whole,
02:34:53 ◼ ► that picture is right before a big scoop about how he's working on a AI device with Sam Altman.
02:35:10 ◼ ► maybe interpret that as a warning sign. But even inside of all that, I'm like looking in this
02:35:16 ◼ ► photo. And I'm like, he doesn't have a cooler iPhone. No. Right. And like, a lot of the things
02:35:21 ◼ ► he has are cooler. He has a cooler car than I do. Yeah, definitely. He has he wears more expensive
02:35:26 ◼ ► t shirts, and he has cooler shoes. And, and I know a book about buttons just to make a jacket.
02:35:47 ◼ ► coke, that every coke is the one thing that's great. America popularized this notion that some
02:35:52 ◼ ► of our best and most beloved products are the same ones available to everybody. The President
02:35:58 ◼ ► drinks a regular coke, Liz Taylor drinks a coke, and the bum on the corner gets the same coke that
02:36:03 ◼ ► they get to drink. And I remember thinking it at South by Southwest. I haven't been there forever.
02:36:14 ◼ ► 2008 2009. And I'm coming out of dinner with a couple of friends and I saw Michael Dell waiting
02:36:21 ◼ ► in the lobby. I guess he was all by himself. So I don't know if his people were in the bathroom or
02:36:27 ◼ ► the other people he was eating with weren't there yet. And he had some kind of phone from Microsoft
02:36:32 ◼ ► or something. I forget what it was at the time, but it wasn't an iPhone. And I just remember
02:36:35 ◼ ► thinking that dude's a billionaire and I have a better phone. How is that possible? And I thought,
02:36:41 ◼ ► oh, that is kind of possible. If he's going to refuse to use an iPhone on principle as Michael
02:36:47 ◼ ► Dell, the guy who put the Dell in Dell, then, and there's no phone that's as good as the iPhone.
02:36:53 ◼ ► And there's no way for a billionaire like James Bond style to commission their own or Tony Stark,
02:37:00 ◼ ► right? Like you can't just commission your own Tony Stark phone. That's not how it works. Then,
02:37:06 ◼ ► yeah, I have a better phone than a billionaire. Yeah, I mean, there's just something again,
02:37:10 ◼ ► that's a harp on this photo too much. It was just the thing that I think I spent the most,
02:37:13 ◼ ► like the rest of it. You're like, oh, he's like doing some stuff. He made, made a Ferrari. Like
02:37:16 ◼ ► he wrote a book on steering wheels before he made a Ferrari steering. Great stuff, $2,000 jackets,
02:37:22 ◼ ► Ferrari, electronic time of his life. And then you're like, he made this one extraordinarily
02:37:28 ◼ ► complicated world-changing device. So common that when he's holding, I'm like, huh, shouldn't he
02:37:34 ◼ ► have one? And it's like, no, actually that's the thing that he made the most. And there, I don't,
02:37:39 ◼ ► I was just very struck by it. John Syracuse pointed that to me over the weekend. He texted
02:37:43 ◼ ► me just because I always rib him a little. John Syracuse always keeps his iPhone in a case and I
02:37:49 ◼ ► keep my phones out of the case most of the year. And his comment was even Johnny I've used as a
02:37:55 ◼ ► case. I thought that was interesting that he uses a case at all, but, but the fact that it is just a
02:38:02 ◼ ► basic Apple silicone case. Interesting too. Yeah. My belief is that these phones are not made to
02:38:12 ◼ ► I actually, maybe it's just, you get used to it. I've had this phone in a case. This phone
02:38:18 ◼ ► has Apple's review in it, so I can't break it. So it's been in a case since the second I got it.
02:38:23 ◼ ► And I think I just, because it's how I got used to it, I think I prefer the camera control in
02:38:29 ◼ ► the case than out of the case. Ah, interesting. It works really well with Apple's cases. And
02:38:35 ◼ ► did they send you the Beats one too? I have that. Chris Walsh has the Beats one. It's pretty good.
02:38:40 ◼ ► Yeah, it is pretty good. It's interesting. I actually think I like it better than Apple's.
02:38:55 ◼ ► like the emails were coming from someone with an Apple address. It's like, there seemed to be
02:39:00 ◼ ► blurring, whatever pretend lines they had between Beats and Apple, or if these cases seemed to be
02:39:06 ◼ ► blurring the line a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I'm surprised Beats still exists to
02:39:11 ◼ ► be perfectly honest with you. I, well, I don't know though. Maybe they sell a lot more Beats
02:39:16 ◼ ► headphones than, than I think. And, and they obviously have a very, putting aside the colors
02:39:22 ◼ ► for the Max, they have some very strong opinions on the color options available for the Bud style
02:39:27 ◼ ► AirPods. Yeah. And some people don't want that look. I don't know. But I don't, I guess the
02:39:33 ◼ ► first party case thing is weird too, with the lack of fine woven, which I'm not surprised by.
02:39:38 ◼ ► And it's not that fine woven has been abandoned. They make the watch straps in it. They make the
02:39:42 ◼ ► key chain fobs for the air, air tags still are in fine woven. There's something else. Oh, the
02:39:48 ◼ ► wallets, the magnetic wallets you can snap on the back are still made of fine woven. It's just the
02:39:53 ◼ ► cases that they've stopped making this year because they did not last. It was not a good
02:39:58 ◼ ► material for something that your dirty hands and pockets are constantly in contact with,
02:40:04 ◼ ► but now they don't have a premium phone material because it's like, well, we tried to replace
02:40:08 ◼ ► leather and we bad mouth the environmental impact of leather. So they're not, they can't go back to
02:40:14 ◼ ► leather PR wise, but now there's nothing. And it's still just rubber cases with no nice metal buttons
02:40:22 ◼ ► or anything, which is kind of weird because this is the year when a premium phone case would have
02:40:27 ◼ ► the most likely appeal because they have the camera cutout or a camera control. That's not
02:40:34 ◼ ► a cutout. That actually is a pass through button. I think the case makers are going to figure out
02:40:39 ◼ ► how to make it capacitive. Oh yeah, I think so. And Apple told me that they, now that it's out
02:40:44 ◼ ► and it's public, they are going to share specs so that they'll have as much info. It's just that,
02:40:51 ◼ ► how long will it take them to get them on the market? What a business that I would not want
02:40:56 ◼ ► anything to do with. One of my favorite stories, actually Carmen wrote this first, ages ago,
02:41:08 ◼ ► Yeah, I remember that. They're like rival and they make markets. They can make or break these
02:41:12 ◼ ► case companies by stocking their cases in the AT&T store. I remember, and I remember after I
02:41:18 ◼ ► read that story, there's a Verizon and AT&T store. I mean, it's not a coincidence. They're like
02:41:23 ◼ ► Catacorra from each other in Center City, Philadelphia. And so I popped into them just to
02:41:27 ◼ ► see. And it's AT&T does carry more, or at least as of like a year or two ago, more cases and Verizon
02:41:34 ◼ ► has fewer, even though it's a huge store in Philadelphia. But from the story I gathered,
02:41:41 ◼ ► it's sort of a strategic difference that it's like they're optimized, but the case makers that
02:41:45 ◼ ► are on Verizon's list, they must be selling boatloads of them to people who buy their phones
02:41:50 ◼ ► in the store. It's crazy. What a business. It's 100% attached, right? If you buy a phone that you
02:41:55 ◼ ► buy a case like absolutely no, no one's no one's not doing it. So I think they had it's like pure
02:42:00 ◼ ► margin at this. Yeah. Yeah. And the third party ones, I'm sure they get a much bigger cut of than
02:42:06 ◼ ► apples. All right. I think that's enough. I love how you start and end your show. Mine is like,
02:42:23 ◼ ► And of all the people who are on the show, I think Nilay, you'd probably need the less direction
02:42:28 ◼ ► to people where to find you. Obviously, your writing is at theverge.com. You're on Threads.
02:42:35 ◼ ► You're on, are you on Mastodon or is it Threads mostly? It's Threads federated. I have a Mastodon