Join us in raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Donate in ATP’s name! Ryan Ricard’s great idea Calculate your Marco Offset Podcastathon: Casey was live from noon → midnight on Friday, 20 September Follow-up: John filename extraction from Photos From the ATP Insider: Photo Workflows special John’s AppleScript Other suggestions Shortcuts (for example, Josh Woodward’s) osxphotos (via Muli) Directly read SQLite database Suggestion from Will Leinweber Use Swift/PhotoKit Example from Alex Mazanov SwiftBar Always sending photos to the shared library (via Alexander Faxå) JPEG-XL in iOS 18 on iPhone 16 iPhone apps and spying via the microphone Eavesdropping via Siri Secure Exclave iPhone 16 & 16 Plus battery removal iFixIt teardown iFixIt blog post Jeff Johnson figured out how to silence the monthly screen recording prompts Sometimes the keys are bundle IDs Shell script to push everything out a year by Kyle Rubenok Amnesia App has come out to handle this for you TextSniper iPhone 16 Pro Impressions Is it green or blue? Belkin UltraGlass 2 Screen Protector Hypercritical #86: Naked Robotic Core AirPods 4 with ANC Impressions Apple Watch Series 10 Impressions Post-show Neutral: Volvo EX90’s annoying “feature” Animation Timestamp link to a video review Still images Bugatti Chiron Headlight replacement Members-only ATP Overtime: Meta kicks Apple when it’s down Meta canceled its Vision Pro competitor The Information Zuckerberg calls Meta the “opposite of Apple” Interview video Sponsored by: Trade Coffee: Coffee at home, made better. Get your first bag free! 1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device. Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
I am back on the beach today, and I'm so happy. The beach in September is beautiful, because it's still pretty warm, some of the restaurants are still open, and there's no one here. Because as soon as the school year starts, everyone stops coming here. The workers who work locally here call it Tumbleweed Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, because...
it's just it literally is like a light switch like labor day weekend massive you know crowded everything and then literally like tuesday just tumbleweeds blow through the town like it's no one is here um so it is uh you know we're not able to spend a ton of time here because we also are bound now by the mainland school year but uh wow it's it's so it's so nice here it's like walking through like one of those like deserted video game levels fewer zombies
yeah a few well i mean you know the few people who were left you know we're certainly an eccentric crowd certainly some characters walking around we don't get sent a lot of side quests though but but it is certainly uh certainly some some eccentrics that's that's part of part of one of the one of the best things i love about being here in this weird beach town is that
the people who are here for long enough i don't know if it makes you eccentric or if only eccentric people can tolerate being here for that long but whatever it is it selects for eccentricity and so everyone here is weird like i fit in great because i'm weird too i'm just and i'm weird in different ways than some of the other ones but like everyone here is just so gloriously weird i'm
i feel so at home here like long island long island has its weirdos for sure uh but it's it's more like regular suburban america you know you don't see a lot of that coming out in the beach town everyone lets their weirdness fly and it is just glorious to be here and and you could you feel like the most normal person even when you are as weird as i am oh my uh do you have your car back
uh yeah i've got it back the issue has not recurred it's been fine i actually heard from a couple of listeners who wrote in uh who said that they actually had similar problems with like you know some high voltage error message with their bmw ix on its first day and then they got it fixed and they never saw it again so i'm hoping that's going to happen to me uh otherwise still loving the car it's still really great there's nothing more to report there is it's now gonna i hope it's now gonna be just a boring car ownership story for the next three years
And then I'll pick something else or the same thing again or buy this one. Who knows? But I look forward to going back to my car not being a point of flux. I've had various neck and shoulder tension issues over the last couple of years. I've been working through some weird little issues. During all the Rivian drama, I couldn't even turn my head all the way to one side. It was really bad.
My whole shoulder blade was all tense. I went to a physical therapist and fixed it a little bit, but I had to go back the next week to fix it more. As soon as I got the new car... It was like a light switch turned off there, too. It's like it was just all that stress was just melted away as it just started working.
And it just like didn't it wasn't causing all this problem and distraction in my life.
Did the physical therapist tell you that your neck was too smart to move?
All right, before we get started, it is still September. There's a week left in September, and September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which means we are still, still trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
At one point, I had my little show notes up that would tell me the talking points I'm supposed to use, but I accidentally closed it, so I'm going to do this off the dome, as Marlon would say. You don't need notes.
You've You've lived it now.
I've lived it. Yes, that's right. So, speaking of, this past Friday as we record, I was in Memphis at St. Jude's campus, and we did 12 hours of live telethon. We called the podcast-a-thon. It was myself, Mike Hurley, Stephen Hackett, Jason Snell, and Kathy Campbell, and we did all sorts of fun hijinks for 12 hours and raised $130,000 or thereabouts for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So...
Why do we do it? St. Jude is, like I've said several times now, a children's research hospital. So some of the incredible stuff that they do is not only do they treat children who are really in the throes of terrible, you know, life-threatening illnesses, but they also do a ton of research and they try to figure out ways to make sure that no child would die in the dawn of their lives and in the
When I was there, I attended a couple of talks from some doctors there who were just talking about these absolutely phenomenal things that they're doing and how they're looking at research for one type of cancer very cautiously and in a controlled way, applying it to different kinds of cancer and finding incredible, incredible solutions and fixes and whatnot. The work they do there is incredible.
They talk about how they're doing DNA sequencing in order to figure out, okay, well, we know that you have Let's say not a cancer, say epilepsy. We know you have epilepsy, but it could be one of 50 different kinds of epilepsy. But thanks to genetic sequencing, we can say, oh, no, no, your particular style of epilepsy is the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 style.
And we know that this drug treats that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 style really well. And we shouldn't use this other drug that treats the 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 style or whatever the case may be. So the work that St. Jude does is really incredible. And one of the most incredible things about what St. Jude does is that they do this without billing their patients or their patients' families.
So their perspective is, if you have a child that's fighting for their lives, the last thing you want to worry about as a family is anything but helping that child and making that child feel better. If you need help getting to Memphis, they will fund the trip to Memphis.
If you need help staying in Memphis, they will figure out a way for you to stay in Memphis, either on their own campus or somewhere else. If you need the patient or perhaps a sibling to go to school, they have a school on campus. It's just utterly incredible, all the work that St.
Jude does in order to do everything they can to stop this just terrible, terrible series of diseases, because it's not just cancer, like I said. So how can you help? Well, you can do a couple things. You can go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, and you can throw them a few bucks. Now, we've done a phenomenal job this year, a truly incredible job.
We've broken all – Relay as a whole has broken all of its records. As I sit here now, we're over $800,000 raised. But here's the thing. St. Jude uses a lot of money because they – All this research is expensive. All the treatments are expensive. And they're also trying to help fund treatments going to other countries.
There's a program, I forget the specifics off the top of my head, but they're trying to figure out a way to get chemotherapy treatments into other countries. This isn't just America here. Um, so you can go to stg.org slash ATP and you can throw them a few bucks, five bucks, 10 bucks. It doesn't matter. Anything you can contribute is helpful.
And I think that I, and perhaps the three of us kind of get ourselves wrapped around the axle about the big donations, but truly anything you can offer is helpful. I saw Ryan Richard, excuse me, Ryan Ricard earlier today posted this, which I thought was great. And we're going to talk about the Marco offset in a second.
But Ryan said, an idea for an alternative Marco offset for those who didn't buy Apple stuff this year, check any credit cards with cash rewards. Mine had over $100 hanging around, which I was happy to hand over to St. Jude. This is free money that you got generally for being a wealthy person, but it's no more valuable. I think that's great.
So you could do that, or you could apply the Marco Offset. Marco, do you know anything about the Marco Offset, or is that just a funny coincidence?
I've never heard of that before. No, actually, it's something I came up with. So you look at your purchases this fall of your new tech devices that you might have...
frivolously to some degree purchase maybe you could have gone without these tech devices but you you got you have your tech devices and you have the baseline price for the device family so you know if it's the iphone pro that's 9.99 or whatever uh and then you add up whatever you actually spent at checkout or will spend over time with apple care subscriptions or whatever so it's going to include things like sales tax storage upgrades size upgrades cases any kind of accessories you bought when you bought your new your new phone or whatever
Add those up. Subtract the base price for the family. That is your Marco Offset. So, you know, for a $1,000 phone, it might be a few hundred bucks. And that is my suggested minimum donation that you consider putting into St. Jude. You know, if you can swing it, that's great. If you can swing more, that's great, too. If you can't swing that, but you can swing $10, $20, good. That's great, too.
Every little bit helps. So, please. And you can actually, as Casey, I believe, mentioned, you can go to the MarcoOffset.com to actually compute...
this amount based on the iPhone purchase for this year but yeah basically look at look at what you tack on to your tech purchases as you know kind of extra money that you don't you know scrutinize too much maybe and that's a pretty good barometer for what you can probably afford to give if you can so help out if you can please it helps a lot and we appreciate it very much so now John I'd mentioned earlier that I was recording or I was I was I was doing a telethon for 12 straight hours did you know anything about that by chance
I did. I watched almost all of it. And I appeared briefly for 15 minutes of those 12 hours. So I was glad to contribute in my small way.
Yeah. And so John and Jason did a live recording of Robot or Not.
With you there in the peanut gallery.
Exactly right. Exactly what I was going to say. So I was the peanut gallery for that. That was, I don't know, like hour eight or nine or something like that. It was toward the end of the broadcast. I don't recall exactly when, but you can look it up and you can check it out. So again, I don't know if we're going to do this again next week. This might be the last time. We probably will. next week?
Actually, maybe not. We'll see. But one way or another, stjude.org.atp. S-T-J-U-D-E.org.atp. Please and thank you. We truly, truly, truly, truly appreciate all the money that you have sent because, again, most of the money that we have earned for St. Jude comes from the $5, $10, $15 donations. So please, anything you can do, please feel free. stjude.org.atp. Let's do some follow-up.
John, you've gotten some solutions to your extracting file names from photos conundrum. Would you, if you don't mind, give a super-duper brief recap of what the issue was, please?
Yeah, this was from our Photo Workflows member special episode where we all described the way we deal with photos and also our photography equipment. Casey's system was the weirdest, but mine had one step in it that was definitely...
troubling and problematic and involving it involved me taking screenshots of the photos app and then ocring text out of them because photos does not provide a convenient way to select a bunch of photos and then just copy their file names uh which would be very helpful so many many people sent me uh solutions as i said on the show like oh i think maybe it was casey's gesture so i just use apple script i'm like yeah that would totally work but i hate apple script so much which is true i do
Um, but one of the things that a couple of people did is they said, Hey, I hate Apple script too, but I asked chat GPT to write me an Apple script. And I said, you know what? That's a good idea. I do hate Apple scripts, but I use chat GPT all the time for programming stuff. So let's give it a shot. So I went and opened up my own chat GPT window and asked it to write an Apple script for me.
And it did. And you know, the script didn't work, but you know, it's chat GPT. Sometimes it needs a little bit of help. Like it just got like one or two small things wrong and I fixed them and it was fine. I'm like, Hey, now I have an Apple script. Um,
And of course, once I've got that Apple script to and by the way, what I wanted the Apple script to do was get the file names of the current selection. Lots of other people saying, oh, we'll get file names of all your favorites. That's, you know, 50,000 photos. Don't do that. Or we'll get the file names of all the favorites within a date range. Then you have to pick a date range.
It's like, no, just let me just select the photos. You know, whenever I'm doing my workflow and photos. This during this step, it's very easy for me to simply select the favorites that I've just processed. And, you know, maybe worst case is like 200 photos or something. So I can just, you know, click and then shift click. I've made a selection.
Then I run the script and it can get the file names out of the thing. So that's what I did. I made an Apple script that did that. And of course, once I have an Apple script that does that, you know where I'm going straight to Perl. So I wrote a Perl script that calls the Apple script using the OSA script command line thing or whatever.
So now what I've written for myself is a Perl script that all I have to do the next time I'm doing this sort of workflow is select the photos that I want. And again, listen to the episode if you want to hear what I'm selecting, whatever, but select the photos that I want. and then run the Perl script. There is no other step.
And when I run the Perl script, it will get this file names of the ones that are selected from photos using the Apple script. And then for each one of those file names, it will look to see if there's a raw on my mounted SD card with the raws in it. And if there is a raw with that file name, it will copy it and do all the things. So that's going to save me a lot of time and a lot of screenshotting.
Now, having said that, oh, and by the way, I will link in the show notes to my Apple script. It's not very exciting. It's exactly what ChatGPT would give you with like one bug fixed. So anyway, it's very straightforward, but I just really hate Apple script. And I'm glad ChatGPT did it for me because I wouldn't want to have to look up all that stuff.
I really dislike AppleScript. I get why it's the way it is largely, and I do think it's potentially for the best, but I also don't particularly care for it. I was going to ask you, why are you printing the file names or returning the file names rather than just copying them to the clipboard?
But I didn't think that because now you have something you can throw Perl at, of course that's what you're going to do.
That's right. That's why at the end of it you'll see I'm emitting the file names one per line. as opposed to comma separated or as JSON or whatever. One per line is straightforward. I promise to never have new lines in my file names, right? It'll just, it'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah. I just want text output to standard standard out. And then I just feed that into Perl, you know,
it's it's my preferred way of doing things all right now on to all the many many suggestions people sent because so many people sent suggestions i hope an equal or greater number of people sent suggestions to casey but i don't know what casey sees all i know is what i see and i saw a bazillion suggestions for this one step in my workflow by far the most popular which boggles my mind was hey why don't you just export all the photos because once you've exported them to the finder then you can just select them in the finder and hit copy or you can do you know once they're files in the file system there's a million ways to get the file names from them you know what i mean
uh yeah that would work but why in the world export photos and make it like you know you can you do it small size they won't take up a lot of room you know but why would i make it do all that work why is empathy for the machine why would i make it like recompress export make a bunch of files just so i can get the file names and then delete the things oh no no that's i mean yes that technically that would absolutely work
and some might find it preferable to what I was doing with OCRing, but at least when I was OCRing, I was making one screenshot for dozens and dozens of photos because I have a very big screen, right? Exporting the files. Everyone suggested that. I mean, I guess if you're not in a kind of like... I'm going to write an automation script mindset. This is the most straightforward way to do it.
Hey, you want file names? Make files. They've got names. Boom. Problem solved. But no, I'm not. That solution I reject. Some other people suggested using shortcuts, which is sort of the modern sort of AppleScript type equivalent. We'll put a link in the show notes to an example one from Josh Woodward. Shortcuts can totally do all the stuff, I'm sure.
Shortcuts, I find, I'm even more allergic to than AppleScript because I'm a programmer. And at least AppleScript lets me sort of kind of do programming, but shortcuts... It makes me arrange widgets in a GUI instead of programming. And I'm glad that it exists, and I'm glad that it is very powerful. It can do lots of things, and I'm glad a lot of people like it.
Not for me, but we'll put an example in there. Mootly suggested a Python project, which we'll link to in the show notes, called OSX, OS10, whatever, OSX Photos. And it's a command line utility that talks directly to the photos database. And it can do all sorts of stuff. It can output stuff as CSV or JSON. And you can also, of course, query the SQLite database that is behind photos yourself.
For some reason that I don't understand that someone from Apple will surely write in and tell us about all the tables that are interesting in the SQLite database beginning with the letter Z. Is it like a core data thing or something? I think so. Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, the Z asset table has the info you want, but this Python command line utility will just basically bypass everything and let you just query the database. I don't think I actually want that because I imagine the current selection isn't reflected in the database, but I could be wrong about that.
But anyway, because I want to go off of the current selection as just a flexible way of saying, I know which photos I'm dealing with here. Just let me select them in the app and then run the script, right? I don't know if it's convenient to get the current selection, but that's another thing you could do.
Will Lineweber provide an example of directly reading the Photos database if you want to see what that looks like? It's just SQLite. It's just a SQLite database. You can just query it. The tables are wacky, and they begin with the letter Z, and the columns are maybe not what you expect, but you can do it. And finally, a couple of people sent Swift code that uses PhotoKit.
we'll put a link in the show notes to one on GitHub from Alex Mazinov. Underscore David Smith also provided one. Yeah, Apple obviously has APIs to get to the photos database. That's how you can do photo pickers and all sorts of other stuff that interacts with it. And, you know, you can write Swift to do that.
So if Swift is your preferred language, like Perl is mine, you can write up a Swift quote unquote script, you know, same thing. Put a line at the top, you know, that will run, you know, user bin Swift or whatever. Like you can use Swift like that and it will compile it on the fly and run your thing.
same caveats about i'm not sure you can get the current selection from the photos app without asking it through like shortcuts or apple script but i could be wrong with that as well so there are lots of ways to skin this cat but predictably the way i did it is with pearl with the smallest amount of apple script possible just to do the part that i didn't want to do in pearl
With regard to your earlier half question, what kind of feedback did I get? I got basic, almost universally feedback that what I was doing was wrong.
From the internet?
I do get a couple of suggestions for minor things, including I think the most actionable suggestion I got was there's a couple other apps that will do the GPS tagging that that I need to at least investigate and see if they will better fit my workflow. But for the most part, people just shook their heads in in mutual embarrassment on my behalf.
I thought we gave you some good actionable improvements that didn't really change your workflow, but just said, hey, in this step, you could do this with less work or whatever during the episode. But yes, obviously, people are amazed by the Rube Goldberg machine that you've constructed. I also checked out that... I think... I forget which one it was. It was like the GPX.
I should have put a link in here. Someone suggested one of the... the tagging apps that looked pretty good. Basically, it's just an app that you run on your phone and it keeps track of your location and exports files in a format that a lot of apps can read to tag your files.
Anything to get out of the world of proprietary, like in my case, Sony apps that I think Sony like recently discontinued their app anyway. I don't even know if they replaced it, but those apps were terrible.
The good thing those apps had going for them is that they think they directly communicate with the camera, so there's no bringing it all into the Mac and combining it or whatever, but I'll gladly do that if it's something more sane. So I have on my list to check out some of the apps.
I think I already downloaded one of them to check out some of the apps that can export this standardized format for GPS tagging. And if I end up finding something that works, or if Casey does, we'll talk about it on the show, I'm sure.
Mm-hmm. All right. Then with regard to my question, if I'm not mistaken, about, hey, you know, I kind of wish I could just always share all of my photos to the shared library or at least default to that. And what Apple tries to do is it tries to be smart about it. And you can say, oh, you know, when you're at home, always go to the shared photo library.
And otherwise, if your partner or spouse or what have you is nearby, I guess by way of Bluetooth, then you can do shared photo library. But otherwise, it goes to your personal library.
And Alexander F wrote in to say, if you select share manually in the shared library settings and then just press the yellow bubble on the camera app, it will remember that setting and automatically always put all photos in the shared library, regardless of what the smarts thinks. I did this once when shared photo library came out and haven't needed to touch it since. That's a good tip.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, so there's a couple of nuances here. One is like the feature that Casey was referring to, like you get basically two choices of like, hey, what do you want me to do with respect to shared library? And the choices are automatic, which tries to do the smart thing, and manual. So Alexander's solution is first, select manual.
And then second, in the camera app at the top, there'll be this little yellow circle with either like one little person's head in it or two little people's heads in it. Change it to two little people's heads because that says, hey, when you take a photo with this camera, it'll go to the shared library. And that's it.
And unlike many other settings, there is nothing in the camera settings in iOS that says in the section for preserving settings that refers to this. So if you go to settings, go to camera, there's a thing of like, hey, which settings do you want me to preserve between launches of the camera? So like you launch the camera and say you change into video mode and then you go to a different app.
When you come back to camera, do you want it to still be in video mode or do you just want it always to go back to camera? That's an example of deciding whether you want a setting to be preserved. And Apple provides a whole screen full of these. You want me to preserve the style, the focus, the zoom. You can toggle these on and off.
And so if you've never checked that out, if you're frustrated that every time you launch the camera app, it doesn't remember something or it does remember some other thing, you can change your mind about those. But this shared versus non-shared thing is not in that set of preferences.
as far as i can tell it's just always remembered so as long as you set that setting and don't change it it will be preserved and you basically have no choice about that you got to be careful especially if it's not your phone that someone doesn't accidentally hit that and change it back to the other thing so there's some amount of vigilance required to make sure you stay on sending everything to shared but this was a great tip i did tried to do the same thing to my wife's camera app and told her about it and said now everything will go into your shared library because occasionally she sends things into the regular library so
Set to manual, change the setting in the camera app, and don't worry about the preserve settings because it doesn't apply to this particular thing.
Excellent. John, can you tell me about JPEG XL in iOS 18 and on the iPhone 16, please?
So this was a bit of a letdown. We had the rumors of Apple's going to go to JPEG XL and they did add support for JPEG XL in iOS 18 on the iPhone 16s pretty much only and only for their pro raw stuff. So it's not like geek where they said, oh, by the way, all our cameras take photos in a new format by default. And it's this great new format. They didn't say that they didn't talk about it. at all.
But nevertheless, on an iOS 18, on iPhone 16s only, I believe, because when I was on iOS 16 on my 14 Pro, it didn't mention JPEG XL anywhere. So I think it's only on the 16s. It's definitely not on the 14 Pro. I can tell you that. If you go to the formats section of the camera preferences, you will see at the top...
uh pro default and you you see heath max pro raw 12 megapixel pro raw max up to 18 megapixel and then the next section is pro raw format and your choices are jpeg lossless which they now list as most compatible and then there are two jpeg xl choices lossless and lossy and again that's only for when you're shooting in raw so you can have a lossless raw with jpeg xl or a lossy compressed raw with jpeg xl here's what petapixel had to say about it
Apple has wrapped JPEG XL photos inside a DNG container, enabling ProRAW files to retain their flexibility while being significantly smaller. What would typically be a 75-ish megabyte ProRAW max file will be a 20 megabyte in lossy ProRAW format using JPEG XL compression, a lossless file still under 50 megabytes. Without compromising quality, these are significant storage savings.
So JPEG XL is on your iPhone. If you have a newish iPhone... And if you're shooting in raw and if you are, you can get files that are up to half the size that they used to be at about the same quality. So good thumbs up, but it is not the JPEG XL revolution that we had been waiting for. So I did change to JPEG XL. I think I went with lossless just because I'm shooting in raw.
I probably just, you know, I do it so rarely on my phone. I'll just pay the full cost of the size and it's still smaller than it used to be. So, you know, partial thumbs up on JPEG XL. Hopefully it will expand over the years.
uh, Jeremy Rambo with regard to iPhone apps buying via the microphone. Uh, so we mostly debunked this, but then, uh, Jeremy said, uh, I once found a vulnerability that allowed for an app to listen to the user's AirPods microphone in the background without permission, but in a very limited way. And this has already been fixed a couple of years ago now. And 16.1, I'd forgotten about this.
I read this one at a debut. And in fact, I think, uh, Guy might've had me proofread this for him if memory serves, although I might be, uh,
wrong about that but anyways it's a fascinating write-up it's not too long really really interesting if you're even vaguely nerdy uh and gee does a great job of doing the write-up so i would definitely check that out just if you're interested in you know uh i don't know like uh doing this sort of work in in kind of what is it white hat i don't really love that phrasing but you know the the kind of doing doing things that may seem bad but for good uh and that's what he was doing
And then he also added the iPhone 16 lineup and all devices based on the A18 or M4 have a new secure exclave. That's not enclave, but exclave.
That presumably makes it impossible for an exploit, even with kernel level access, to disable the microphone or camera in use indicators because the little orange or green dot is rendered by a separate OS running in an exclave directly onto the display hardware. That is pretty wild. And anyways, Apple calls it the secure indicator light.
I recall like way back in the PowerBook days, maybe, or maybe it was the MacBook days, there was similar indicator light and Apple made similar claims about how, well, it's impossible to hack this light because there's a hardware feature in the laptops that basically says when the camera is active, this light comes on.
Like this was an example of it not being software mediated at all, but it was something like, hey, if the camera's on, the light's on, there's no software environment. Software has no visibility into the light whatsoever. Can't turn it on, can't turn it off. It's just like an electrical fact of life about how we've connected the camera.
And even when they did that, I believe someone found a way to get the camera to turn on without the light going on. Like hackers are devious. So this exclave is, you know, in the game of cat and mouse, here's Apple's next move. It's like, oh yeah, let's make it even harder for you to get this light. Even if you have kernel access.
You still can't get at this because this is a different OS running in this secure exclave, which is this other little machine that you can't get to. The secure enclave is obviously where you can put secrets that are hard to get to if you're running on the main CPU SoC. But now we have the secure exclave, which is a whole other chip with a whole other OS. It's even harder to get to.
And I'm sure that's true. But hackers are very devious. So let's see how the next move goes. But anyway, Apple continues to try to make it very difficult. to spy using its products without using the easiest method, which is, of course, social engineering.
Of course. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus batteries, you can remove them as you always could, but in a very different way. This is from MacRumors. Apple has confirmed that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus have a new electrically-induced battery removal process. The batteries use a type of adhesive that can be loosened with low-voltage electrical current, such as from a 9-volt battery, according to Apple.
The battery can then easily be removed from the devices. This new process is considered to be easier than the adhesive pull tabs that are found under batteries in previous iPhone models. And so there's, of course, an iFixit teardown all about this.
And they demonstrated. So we talked about this, I think, before the event where there was rumors of this happening. And I don't know how I pictured it like working. Maybe like you'd short something out and there'd be a puff of smoke and the battery would come out or it would just pop out or whatever. It is much less dramatic than that, but it is no less cool.
In the iFixit video, they take a little power supply and they hook it up to the battery. There's like a little metal, you know, contact that pops out for you to connect it to. And then you just connect something else to like ground inside the thing.
And you put some power into it for a few seconds, and it basically chemically changes the adhesive to make it not sticky anymore, and then the battery just comes out. And they explain a little bit how it works. Interestingly, if you reverse the polarity, where you put the plus and the minus on the opposite side, it will make it re-stick. What? But not to the thing.
It'll re-stick to the battery, so don't do it that way. So there are still some dangers here. But another interesting thing about how they installed this is...
Once the battery is out, again, you'll see it in the iFixit video and the blog post that we'll also have in the show notes, inside the case where the battery goes, Apple has essentially carved a U-shaped channel, like intentionally, roughly, like it's scuffed up, like if you use like a... A circular buffer on a car and you did a really bad job and you left swirl marks.
That's what they did inside the phone. They made this big, long U-shaped channel, which is where the adhesive goes, that's intentionally scuffed up and rough to give lots of like craggly surface for the adhesive to stick to, which is so wild to see inside Apple's cases that are usually so beautifully, perfectly machined and everything's precise. And here's this area that's made intentionally rough.
And the adhesive sits directly down in that. And this process is, you know, the pull tabs are cool. It's like those 3M things, kind of like you pull sideways and big, long, stringy, sticky things comes out and then it comes out. But this is just so much more elegant. You just apply the voltage and then the thing isn't sticky anymore and you lift it out. It's pretty cool.
I think this is only on the 16 and the 16 Plus and not on the Pro. I think the Pro still used the sticky stuff because I saw a teardown of one of those things as well, which is interesting. But yeah, check out the whole iFixit video. They seem to think that the 16 continues to push the frontiers of easy repairability. Again, not the 16 Pro.
I haven't seen the iFixit teardown of that, but the 16 using the dual-sided design and the battery that's easy to remove and the way they have the parts arranged. Apple is making progress in making these Tiny, very delicate devices that much easier and less error prone to repair.
Just very quickly, one of my favorite things about the iFixit Teardown was at one point they said, oh, you know, it comes out so easily, gravity will do it. And so they turned one of them upside down, applied the voltage and waited a few seconds. And sure enough, all of a sudden the battery just came tumbling out.
It just falls out because the adhesive is not sticky anymore. It doesn't leave a residue. It's pretty amazing. That's really cool.
We are sponsored this episode by 1Password Extended Access Management. So quick question. Do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps? Yeah, I didn't think so. So next question. How do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has the answer to this question.
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All right, so if you wanted to get rid of those annoying monthly screen recording prompts, Jeff Johnson has reverse engineered a way to do it. Jeff writes, Richie Adams found the file where the prompt dates are stored. And we'll put a link to all this because I'm not going to read it out now. The file is protected by TCC. What does that stand for, John?
Trusted Computer Computing. It's the database that keeps permission to stop. I don't remember what it stands for.
All right, no worries. It's protected by TCC, so to access it, you'll need to grant full disk access to the terminal app. In the plist file, the keys are the paths, or perhaps the fully qualified domain names or whatever it is, of the executable files with screen recording permission, and the values are the dates.
To stop the prompts forever, for the rest of your life anyway, set the date too far in the future. For example, the year 3024 instead of 2024. You'll need to do this for each app and afterward log out and log in again so that the replay D process recognizes the new defaults. Dan Sully notes, my keys are not the paths of the app, but there it is, the bundle identifier.
I couldn't think of the name there. John, it looks like you have some thoughts about this, which we'll get back to in just a second. But then Kyle Rubinock wrote a shell script that will set the dates to a year from now. So you could perhaps run that
on login although that shell script doesn't actually work and i sent him a reply about that it's kind of like the chat gpt thing i think he forgot a line in there but one could write a shell script you can take a look at his and fix it by adding the missing line or whatever but anyway you might not have to do that because because now breaking news as of just like an hour ago or something like that there's a new app called amnesia that apparently will allow you to disable these on an app by app basis
Yeah, and so the screen recording thing, I'm living it. I saw this example here, and I wanted to try it myself, and I discovered that in my plist file, which is, I'll read the thing in case you wouldn't. It's in your library directory, and it's groupcontainersgroup.com.apple.replayd screencaptureapprovals.plist. Again, it'll be showing. This sounds like an Amazon product title. Yeah.
My paths were, my keys in this little, you know, the name value pairs, they were the full path. So it was application slash zoom.us.app slash content slash macos.zoom.s. I don't know why they were bundle paths in Dan's thing, but maybe it varies on each system. But anyway, the values are just dates. It's a simple default to write a command to change it.
So I did that for Zoom, which I had recently used to share my screen, and it had complained, and I set its date to 3024. So in theory, it will never complain again. And having a GUI app for this is good if people don't want to mess with like command line stuff or whatever. But many questions are raised by this discovery, right?
So first of all, the whole point of this thing was like, oh, what if someone's spying and you want to be reminded every once in a while to know that someone's spying and yada yada?
Well, if you can just write a value to a P list to override this, anyone who's like spying on someone or like abusive partner or something is just going to Google this, find this result, set the dates forward to 3024 and never have to worry about it again. So what the hell happened?
Like the security benefits of this feature are so easily bypassed that now we're just being annoyed for no reason, right? Before it's like, oh, we're being annoyed, but they can't figure out a way to make this more secure without annoying us and they figure a month interval is good.
But now it's like, actually, there's no security benefit because anyone who cares can Google this in two seconds and download a GUI app that will set all the things to the future.
So this is, I'm assuming Apple will see this and then in a future update to Sequoia, come up with a different, much more secure system that doesn't allow you to run a single default write command or download a GUI app to change this and never have to worry about it again. Because like, what's the point of the feature? It's just annoying people for no reason at that point, right?
And the second thing is, how has life been on Sequoia with these screen recordings? Well, I did use Zoom, and I did share my screen, and it did prompt me. And I'm like, ah, well, Zoom, how often do I share my screen? I think in the, what, week or two I've had Sequoia, I've gotten prompted like four times by four different apps. And it just keeps catching me by surprise.
Just today, I used TechSniper, which, by the way, I still recommend. And what was I using TechSniper for? Not to get fines out of photos. You know what I was using it for? Ah, good old preview. I had a PDF that had text in it. And I wanted to copy and paste that text out of the PDF. But unfortunately, that text was tabular.
And selecting the text in preview and hitting copy and then pasting into a plain text document was just a soup.
right but text sniper actually printed it a line at a time it didn't put tabs between it or anything but at least it was like here's the first row here's the second row here's the third row text selection in both web pages and pdfs continues to be an unsolvable problem apparently if you ever try to like select text in a complicated web page and you just want the text to be pasted just like it appeared in your web page but when you paste it you see that it's like out of order or it's selected other weird stuff same thing with pdfs at least in the preview app
I can select it and I can hit copy. And when I hit paste, I expect it to to print those lines. But sometimes it just absolutely doesn't. It prints a scrambled mess of the lines all all connected to one big long line or interleave with each other or whatever. But TechSniper did it because TechSniper doesn't care about that stuff.
TechSniper just sees pixels that look like text and it parses them as lines of text and it will print them as lines of text. But of course, when I launched TechSniper, it said, hey, TechSniper wants to capture your screen. Do you want to allow it? Allow for one month, blah, blah, blah. And so this is sort of the ongoing battle because every new app still prompts you.
And then I went to the command line at the defaults right and said, now you're never going to ask me again until 3024 or until Sequoia 15.1 when Apple changes all of this. So this is a disappointing...
stopping point i'm not going to say conclusion in this saga of supposed increased security because now all the security not all the security benefits but most of the security benefits are out the window and yet we're still continuing to be annoyed by it to the point where people are writing gooey apps to help people circumvent this feature of mac os this is not a good sign for apple that they have struck the right balance with the features they've shipped
Yeah, it's not great. And obviously, you know, we've all been upgrading to Sequoia and getting just absolutely overwhelmed with all the, hey, is it okay? Is it okay? Is it okay? Is it okay? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, are we cool? It's just incessant. And I don't know, like, perhaps I'm not having enough empathy for security professionals, because it's just not a world I live in.
But I find it to be extremely off-putting and frustrating. But Yeah.
And then the security, again, if the security benefits are non-existent, if anybody who's trying to do something nefarious just Googles for it and gets a thing they can paste into terminal and solve the problem for them. Like it's just, it's very frustrating.
All right, but in happier news, we've all got new toys, and this is a year that even John has new toys. So I will preface this by saying, you know, I was in Memphis over the weekend. I thought about trying to do an in-store pickup or even delivery while I was there.
Coincidentally, some things were delivered to the hotel, and I don't know if it's my business to say exactly what, but I know that it could have worked. Maybe I should have, but I didn't have the gumption to do it. So anyway, so I set a in-store pickup for yesterday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, the day I got home.
Oh, well, you did get to unbox pretty much all the new products, didn't you?
That's true, yes, because a lot of them did show up in Memphis, and Jason had them. So I unboxed a lot of them. But anyways, this morning I went and I picked up my new iPhone 16 Pro Natural Titanium 512. my new Apple Watch, Big Boy in aluminum, and Erin's stuff. Erin hasn't opened any of her stuff yet. We've been busy.
I've barely gotten mine all set up, which we can talk about the transfer here in a minute. And also, if we have time for me to whine about the in-store experience, I'd also like to do that at some juncture. But if we don't have time, that's no problem.
That's part of the setup. You should talk about that now.
Oh, okay. Let me start by saying this is the first world. These are the first world problems. I'm going to try to make this quick and I will move right along. But I go in and of course, you know, there's no lines anywhere. And I walk up to the first person that doesn't have somebody in front of them. And I say, hey, you know, I have a pickup to do.
And they said, okay, go over to the pickup counter desk, whatever thing. Fine. There's a couple of people there. There are a couple of customers there and one employee. And this one employee is already looking ever so slightly flummoxed. Here's the thing. If Apple wants to do this, oh, magic happens. Just magically your products will appear where you're standing.
And magically you can just walk up to anyone and pay for them or even scan them on your own if it's something cheaper, you know, and just walk out of the store. It has to work.
And apparently just from overhearing the conversations between the employees, the quote unquote backstage area was like completely overwhelmed with a shipment coming in with all these people asking for runners to bring out, you know, my phones and my watches and that person's this and that person's that. It's just, if you're going to do this fancy stuff, it's got to freaking work.
And I was there for some, I'd already paid for everything. I should have just been able to swoop in and swoop out. And I was there for like half an hour, 45 minutes. Now, in the grand scheme of things, does that matter? No. But Apple is supposed to be the, it just works company. It's the great experience company. And this was not a great experience.
And some woman that was standing next to me was waiting for like half an hour to get a screen protector installed. The reason was they couldn't just get... The dude at the desk couldn't get his hands on the screen protector because it was backstage. And I don't know.
I just... Maybe I'm too East Coast for this, but give me a f***ing line to stand in and give me... Have the person that's helping me run their a** to the back and go find my stuff. Like... I don't think this is that difficult. Why does it have to be so synthetically fancy? Like, if you're going to have it be fancy, make it be fancy. This wasn't fancy. This was the illusion of fancy.
And it's just infuriating. Like, it didn't have to be this way.
it's a system that doesn't scale very well like it it seems really great like probably most of the year probably most days most of the time it's fine like i still honestly like i don't love the apple store triage system because like yeah i don't love that you know you have to walk in you know okay hey hey hey hey you want to check in with me right at the front door here um oh you want to go that oh go stand over at that table over there it's like okay well
So there is a queue. You're just... It's just confusing and you can't really tell what it is. And the queue is, I would say, kind of sloppily enforced enough that I feel like a lot of times it is serviced out of order. Because it's like... who's waiting at this table?
Oh, you gotta go see so-and-so in the blue shirt, but oh, and then, you know, you're put into the system as, like, you know, a person with a red-striped shirt, and, you know, there could be someone else with a red-striped shirt get served first, and, like, am I sitting at this table or the one next to it? Like, it's such a vague system that you as the customer feel all the time, like,
have I been lost? And even when you haven't been, but, and oftentimes you have been, but even when you haven't been, you can't see that. Like you, you have no feedback as the customer of like, is, is a system working as intended? Are they, am I still in the queue?
And neither did the employees, by the way, last time I was at the store, which was, which was not a busy day. I was sent to a table and then eventually someone came to help me and they disappeared for a little bit. And when they were gone, two other employees came up to me and said, uh,
are you being helped like don't you know if i'm being helped shouldn't you know i'm being like the whole system is you send us off to these little tables to distribute this visible line so we can't see the actual line but then we get serviced in order and people are assigned to us you should know that somebody already is already handling it if you don't know then what is the system do you just look look wander the store looking for people who look lonely and say that person looks like they're not being helped let me help them
I mean, and obviously the biggest problem, I mean, you're both dancing around. It was lunch day for the iPhone, right? Right. Surely one of the busiest days in the Apple store or involving iPhones, anything on lunch day of the iPhone is going to be fraud.
And it exposes the weaknesses of their systems because this is going to be the most people coming to the store in the shortest period of time who want phones.
I will say, however, that as I think I've talked about in years past, I apparently – one of my many superpowers is utterly ruining iPhone screens. And I don't mean like shattering them, although that's happened for sure.
Have you scratched it already?
Well, no.
Oh, no.
No, no, no. I didn't. No, no, no. Everything's fine. Everything's fine.
i decided after much chatter from the internet in my direction and i think yep i think i'd solicited uh you know requests about what do you do about screen protectors the internet came through and a lot of them said just do the belkin one that apple installs do it right then and there they'll install it for you they know exactly what they're doing there won't be any bumps or anything like that there won't be any dust and you can get like a
Free replacements. I don't know if it's for life. Apparently, you have to register the screen protector. I guess you at least get a series of free replacements that apparently Apple is happy to reinstall for you if need be.
Do you know what the nature of the Belkin protector is? Is it glass? Is it plastic?
I believe it is glass. I don't think I... Do I have the bag in here? I don't think I have the bags in here so I can look it up. I apologize. When one of you starts talking, I'll look around the office to make sure the bag isn't in here. I believe it's glass. I'm not 100% sure. I didn't look closely at it. But I did have them install it. And do you want the good news or the bad news? Oh, no.
The good news is, no, there's no real bad news. The good news is it feels pretty good. Like it's a little tackier. That's maybe not the best word, but like there's a little more friction on it than I think a regular piece of glass was.
Is it not as oleophobic as the screen?
No, I wouldn't say I think it is. I think it is, but I'm not 100% sure. However, you know how I always thought you were nuts, John, and kind of still do? For insisting on a bottomless iPhone case. A case without a bottom so you can swipe up no problem. And I always thought you were kind of nuts because what is the big deal? It's fine.
I'm not going to tell you you tried it. I've tried it.
It is unquestionably better. Gosh, I've been talking a lot for having said I had no opinions about this. Here we are. Welcome to the show. Right, exactly. Welcome. We've been here 10 years. It is definitely better to have a bottomless iPhone case. Full stop. Not arguing that. I just don't think it's as big a deal to me as it is to you. Let me tell you what is not fun though.
When you take a phone that you do not intend to have a case on it and you put an extra two to three millimeters of screen on it. So now I have a ledge every time I swipe up, which is the screen protector. Sitting here now, I hate it so much. Like, I think I'll get used to it, but I hate it so much.
They should round over that edge.
I know. I don't know. Ultimately, I think it's worth it to me because, again, I don't, well, I was going to say I don't mistreat my phones. I mean, clearly I'm doing something to scratch these screens every year for the last, like, four years. So I don't think running without a screen protector is the right choice for me, but I kind of hate the way it feels right now.
Why don't you put a case on it? Put a case that doesn't have a bare bottom, and then you'll be hitting the gigantic bottom lip of the case, and you won't even feel the screen protector.
And I think that may be what I end up doing, but I really don't love any of the case options right now. And so... we'll see what happens. But I do, I did very much like, however, the application process because they basically, they asked me if they could unbox the phone. I said, of course, thank you for asking.
They immediately put it in their fancy little machine that lines everything up just right. And then and all of a sudden the screen protectors on and into my eyes, leaving aside that there's an additional ledge that I wasn't really considering, uh, to my eyes that it absolutely perfect job. So in that sense, I'm very satisfied. Um,
But yeah, I mean, I think that's, with regard to the purchase experience, that's all I've really got. I did go back down. Oh, that's the other thing. I went from Pro Max to Pro. Gentlemen. Having a human-sized phone in my hand feels so great. It's so much better. I mean, well, for me, I shouldn't say that like the Max is bad.
I do a little teeny bit miss the screen real estate of the Max, but oh my word, it's so much nicer in the hand. It is so much nicer in the hand. I can use my phone without a pop socket. Imagine that you can use a phone. Did you know this gentleman? You could actually hold a phone in one hand. You can operate the entire keyboard with one hand.
You don't even need to have a little thing poking out the back. You can just hold the phone. I stand by having gone the max last year for the five X lens or, you know, camera system or what have you. And I actually am very glad that I tried it.
I think I could do it again if we're in a situation for like the 17 or something like that, where, you know, only the good cameras on the 17 pro max or, you know, you know what I mean? Something along those lines. But I stand by and I have now reaffirmed my commitment to, oh my, I am not a big phone person. I can do it if I have to, but it's not for me.
Because the thing is like, even, even the now quote, small phone is a big phone. Like, and it got bigger. Like, It got even bigger. And this is just going to keep happening. Obviously, that's the pattern of the market. It's like the market pushes phone sizes up. People buy them. And it drives the small phone people nuts because they're like, you're going further away from our needs, which is true.
But also, the problem is the market just keeps buying bigger and bigger phones also. So the small phone people are kind of being outvoted by most of the buyers in the market. And so...
this is going to keep happening like even a lot of max people are like switching back with this one because like they just keep because the max got bigger too yes they keep making it bigger like eventually you're like okay this is actually beyond what i actually want and i actually have a i have a story with this for a little bit for later we'll we'll get to that
All right. But so far, I think I'll wrap up, even though, like I said, I'm already going longer than I intended. Immediate impressions. The phone transfer, I did use a full bore, like $90 Apple bespoke Thunderbolt cable, and it took roughly an hour. And my vague recollection of last year was that it took like two and a half, three hours. So I do think that gets an A plus thumbs up from me.
This is very not – I did not do a lot of science here, to be clear. But the vibe I got is that it was definitely better. I failed to transfer my sim on the first shot. I mean, not from my fault. It just didn't work. And then I tried it again. This is a Verizon eSIM. I tried it again, and it worked no problem. Other than that, I mean, everything seems nice. I like the camera control.
I don't want to go too far into it because I think you guys are going to have many more thoughts about it. It does not currently feel intuitive to me, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad by any means. I think I will absolutely get used to it. But I have to think through, like, is this a half press? Is it a half double press? Is it a full press? Is it a full double press? It hasn't clicked.
And typically Apple stuff, you don't have to think about it. It just does or it works exactly the way you expect it to work. And in this case, I don't think it's successful. But again, I want to repeat, I don't think that that's necessarily an indictment of the camera control. It's just I got to get used to it. That's all. Yeah.
We'll talk about it more in a little bit. I want to talk about my setup process that Mark can talk about his setup process. We'll just do these piece piecemeal piecewise old setup. And then, you know, anyway, so the setup process, you would think this is such a non-issue. You're sounding like mostly a non-issue. Yeah.
It was annoying picking up from the store, but you use the cable to connect them because you had a 15 pro to a 16 pro and it seemed to work out. And, you know, I would grade your setup experience as pretty much went. Okay.
The software setup experience, I would say, is solid A-. You know, it took a long time. I don't love that you still have to download all the apps even when you're doing a phone-to-phone transfer. But in the grand scheme of things, it was fine. There were no major issues.
So I get a new phone every two years, and there are two reasons that I dread getting a new phone. One of them is the setup process. The other one is cases, which we'll talk about later, right? And it really does deter me from getting a new phone.
You think I'd be excited to get another phone and I am, but then every time I actually am getting one, I'm like, Oh no, my world has been thrown into turmoil because the computing device that I use probably the most that's with me all the time now is going to not be satisfactory for some period of time.
First I have to deal with the setup process where I just hope everything transfers over and I deal with all that or whatever. And then the cases, which we'll talk about later. Right? So, uh, I think last year, if we go back to, or not last year, two years ago when I got the 14 Pro, I think I said that my setup process went smoothly for once.
My usual experience is I get a new phone and the way I order it is through the Apple star app. I order it on my old phone. And when you order on your old phone, you can say, Hey, are you going to get a new phone? That's going to replace the one that you're currently ordering on. And I say, yes, it's like the most automatic smoothest default path, which is like new phone will replace this phone.
Don't change anything. Don't get an unlocked phone. Don't do anything weird. Don't change carriers. Don't it's like just the default straightforward thing. And yet, pretty much every year, with the possible exception of last year, I don't recall exactly, I end up on the phone with Verizon. On iPhone. Which is not the time you want to be on the phone with Verizon. No. Well, guess what?
I ordered my new phone using that same old default method. I took it out of the box. I couldn't use the wired. Well, I decided not to use the wired thing because the 14 Pro has USB 2 speeds and Wi-Fi can beat that, I think. So I'm just using plain old, you know, phone-to-phone wireless transfer with both phones plugged in. And it starts doing the thing. You know, I see a new phone.
Do you want to do this? Connect to the other phone. Type in the passcode of this phone and that phone. Scan the fuzzy dot ball, you know what I mean?
the whole the whole process right all right can i interrupt you right there does that actually do like is that like a qr code does that actually transmit data yeah there's there's actual data in there okay i i just i can't fathom how i believe you okay yeah it's just it's just artfully done but yeah it's it's like sort of an obscured artful kind of like qr code type thing anyway um
And then they start doing their thing. One thing that's always annoyed me is the phone you are transferring from has like a white sheet up that says, you know, finish on other phone or whatever. But if you try to dismiss that sheet, it's like, oh, do you want to exit the setup process? It's like, no, I just don't want to be staring at this white thing.
And sometimes the screen won't even go to sleep, but just fine. The phone is plugged in, but it just seems stupid. But anyway, whatever. On the new phone, it's doing stuff and it gets to a thing that says, you know, whatever screens are like activating, blah, blah, blah. This may take a few minutes. Well, I was on that phone for a solid hour the first time.
And I'm like, because I was afraid to abort it and screw something up. And then I tried again and tried again and tried. And it would be like activating. This will take a few minutes. And then I resigned myself. I'm like, look, I just it's never going to get past the screen. Like there was no skip, no thing.
Like I'm assuming it was trying to transfer, you know, my phone number, eSIM, whatever thing from my 14 Pro to my 16 Pro. It just wouldn't and couldn't do it. and I'm going all over. Like, I have five bars in my house these days. Like, they must have upgraded the coverage right here. It's not even like I have bad signal anymore. I'm like, and it's on, they're both on Wi-Fi.
Like, I don't know what the problem is. Time to contact Verizon, which is just the most terrible sort of resigned feeling of dread. Like, you're getting an exciting new thing, and instead of setting up your exciting new thing, you're going to be calling your phone carrier on day one of iPhone. It's just like, Why is this my life?
May I offer a suggestion? You make merciless fun of me for trying the same thing more than once or twice, expecting the results to be different. I think it worked last year. I'm going to let it go because I don't want to get any of us angry at each other, but I think maybe trying a different approach for next year might be a good idea.
But what would you suggest? I mean, next year I'll use the wired one, but that wasn't the problem. It was the carrier activation. That's where I'm getting it now.
Maybe I'm the idiot here, which wouldn't be the first time, but I always, or for the last several years anyway, I just buy an unlocked phone. I don't want Verizon to know what's coming. I don't want them to think that they... Because a lot of times in the past, I don't know if this is true anymore, but in the past, if you bought a phone...
to replace your existing one, like you're describing, you know, I want this one to be my new phone. And I tell Apple that ahead of time, a lot of times like AT&T and Verizon would ding you like 50 bucks for the activation for reasons unknown. And so I would just buy an unlocked one.
And then typically again, not always, but typically neither Verizon or AT&T would ding you the $50 activation fee because you're just bringing something new to them. It's like, you know, how do they know if you're just a John Gruber or Jason Snell and you're just activating somebody else's, you know, or activating.
But I wanted to take over my other number, obviously.
Well, yeah, but mine does that every time. It says, oh, you know, do you want to take over the old phone?
But I'm assuming they still charge you the fee. If they're going to charge you the fee, I don't think I get.
We'll see what happens. I might be wrong. But the last couple of years, I don't believe that's been the case or the last several years.
Anyway, yeah, I could potentially try to unlock one, but I just feel like that's been trading a bunch of known problems for unknown ones.
so anyway i have advanced in my ability to deal with this because i was like i can't do it i can't i can't dial that because remember i can't call them on my cell phone either so i'd be calling on like my quote-unquote landline phone still wireless whatever on my landline phone it would be on speakerphone i have to hear that music over the i just i can't do it so i'm like you know what this year i'm gonna try the chat thing they always heard you towards anyway like in the in web page verizon you know text chat
And so I did that. And the world's friendliest person telling me, oh, I hope you're having such a wonderful day. Congratulations on your new phone, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, please, just... I've got all the data ready to go. I tell him the situation. I say I'm on the activating screen. He says, could you please give me your IME ID, which I already have on the clipboard. I just paste it.
Which, by the way, I had to transcribe manually because when your phone is in this terrible state, you just use a little I and a circle on the upper right to get the IME ID, but you can't copy and paste it because your phone isn't even set up, so I'm transcribing that carefully. Anyway... I do all this information, and you know what? It takes like three seconds when someone at Verizon is doing it.
They're like, okay, this is your thing. Confirm this. Do that. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And all of a sudden, my phone screen says, instead of saying activate and wait a few minutes, it says, oh, transferring cellular service, whatever, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, and it's done.
And I was like, okay, well, that was, you know, maybe like a half an hour on web chat in the grand scheme of things. You know, it's better to not have to contact them, but it wasn't that bad. The only weird wrinkle was they're like, okay, now call like pound or, you know, 832 or whatever. There's something they want you to do to confirm that everything worked. What year is this?
I'm pretty sure it worked.
because the phone is saying that it did all the things and it's you know whatever but they're like okay well and i said to him i i can't dial anything right now because it's doing the phone to phone transfer i won't have access to the dialer until it finishes the phone to phone transfer and he says that's okay i'll wait i'm like it's going to take hours it's like no problem i'll just wait
And then he tried to sell me insurance and I said, no, thanks. And then I walked away from the computer and I came back, you know, an hour or two later and the transfer had finished and the web page had timed out. So successful customer service interaction. But chalk this up to another year where I had to contact Verizon.
At least I didn't have to go on the phone with them, but I had to contact Verizon to get my phone set up. After I had gotten over that hurdle, the phone to phone transfer worked the way it normally does, where it forgets the test flight exists and rearranges all my icons until I go back to test flight and figure out where they all have to belong and rearrange them manually.
Yes, I tried to use iPhone mirroring to rearrange them with the mouse. It's probably a little bit better, but boy, you can really see the insanity of that system when you have pixel precise control with a mouse cursor because it's such a cruel game. It's like, oh, I went over the one pixel boundary and I switched to the other screen.
It's just your meat fingers aren't in the way, but now I know precisely how insane the activation readings are and precisely how broken it is where you will drag an icon and other icons will skitter out of the way and leave an empty spot for your icon and you will release and Springboard will say, nope.
and it'll just close that spot back up and you'll do it 50 times drag an icon put it right where you want it to go it's nothing else is there it is dead center on the spot release disappears like it never existed the system's just broken so the mouse helps a little bit but anyway uh setup worked fine i i managed to get through it all uh and there you go marco how's your setup process mine was perfectly fine
Did you buy unlocked or did you buy as a replacement?
I did the thing in the Apple Store app on the phone where I say replace this phone on my plan. And it was simple. Now, granted, I use AT&T. So everything is, you know, mediocre, but it worked better than yours. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know what it is. I mean, I'm assuming there's some carrier servers that are involved in this process. And like the worst part is there's no way to say, forget about that. I'll deal with it later. Just do the rest of the setup. Like you are stuck on that screen. This is activating. This may take a few minutes.
And as far as I know, there's no way to get past it, which argues for Casey's thing of like, hey, why don't you just buy it on lock? Because then at least you can do. the phone, like the data transfer part of the setup. And then when you have a functioning working phone that just doesn't have a phone number, then try to do the eSIM like transfer or whatever, however you initiate that process.
I mean, I will say for whatever it's worth, my Apple Watch cellular transfers never work. The only way I ever get the watch to work is to cancel the plan from AT&T's website for the old watch and then have the new watch start over again. And even then, usually it's like it tries to activate, it fails a couple times, the plan shows up in the Apple Watch cellular section as not in use.
I gotta reboot sometimes a couple times. I gotta do some dances to get that to work.
And you gotta Google to be like, wait, do I unpair
from the old one first or doing that like this this whole i've done it successfully so my wife's watched several times and every time i do it i have no confidence that i'm going to be successful i have no recollection of how i did it last time or why it worked and i just like cross my fingers and just dive in and and by the way everything on the watch takes forever i guess it's probably getting better as the watches get faster it doesn't take so long to do anything
No, it's not getting better. But the phone transfer, by the way, just before we leave this, the phone transfer for me was perfectly fine. Like the eSIM moved over, like it activated just fine in a reasonable amount of time.
Did you use a cable?
Yeah, I used a cable and I used both. I used two of my like fan Peltier element fans that are the active cooling mag safe.
I did use ice packs just in honor of Marco. I used them briefly, but then I got worried about condensation and stopped.
Very quickly with regard to the watch, I had heard a story, and I think this was accurate at the time, that the best way to move a watch is to unpair on the old phone, if I remember correctly.
I think it's the only way. No, it'll offer to move it for you. It just doesn't usually work with cellular for some reason.
Well, so that's the thing. So the way it used to be years and years ago is you would unpair the watch, then do your phone transfer, then repair the watch on the new phone. This time, I didn't do any of that. I just waited for the phone to say, hey, would you like to move the watch over? And I said, yes. And it worked. Now, I do not have cellular, though.
I do not have cellular, and I do think that makes a big difference. Oh, yeah.
It does. Very much so.
It moved no problem. And then when I unboxed my Apple Watch Series 10, which we'll get to later, I said, hey, can you make it, or I think it asked or whatever, do you want this to effectively replace the old one? And I said, yes. And it said, sure. And that worked pretty much no problem. So my Apple Watch transfer experience was A++. It was pretty much flawless. I was stunned.
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Once again, you get your first bag free with that link. Thank you so much to Trade for sponsoring our show. All right, camera control. I've used it a decent amount. I think it's a good idea. The actual usage of it, I think they're going to need to tweak a little bit here and there with some of the timings and settings and tolerances and things like that. But I think overall, I like it.
It is extremely useful for me just as a camera launch button. I know a lot of people have been using the action button for that over the past year.
Yeah, that's what I was doing.
And that's totally fine, and there are some benefits and drawbacks to that. As I mentioned in previous episodes, I use the action button for flashlight, which I actually use a decent amount, although I actually – I am happy to report that as I progress through my denial of –
that i really should be wearing progressive reading glasses all the time because my close-up reading distance is not great anymore and so but my my distance distance viewing is fine um and so what i really should be doing is wearing progressive reading glasses that have no correction on top and reading correction on the bottom um i have yet to find any that i don't hate so instead what i'm doing is mostly not wearing reading glasses and just holding stuff out really far to see it um but
But occasionally this system is not sufficient for something, and the phone has a magnifier feature built in. It has for a very long time where it just basically is like a quick little view that uses the camera to show you a magnified view of whatever you're looking at.
It's great especially when you have the modern ultra-wide lenses that have autofocus, and so they can actually get very close with macro distances to view things like that camera. Tiny little print on Apple's power adapters and stuff. One of the things I tried to view recently was they have the new MagSafe pucks that charge at 25 watts, and they look almost identical to the old ones.
Apparently, I heard from John Gruber, actually, that apparently they are slightly different.
uh narrower like which is going to be really annoying when i try to fit it into anything that's made to like you bring your magsafe adapter into this 3d mount or whatever like that's going to be annoying i gotta verify that the radius is smaller yeah like apparently the actual size of the circle is slightly smaller so it's not going to fit in you know docks and stuff that are made to you know build an apple's magsafe pucks but i gotta verify that there's some tiny light gray text on a slightly darker gray background that you could also right
so what i was trying to do is like okay how do how do i tell if i'm holding one of these in my hand how do i tell which one it is because they now you know the the modern magsafe pucks now with the you know the faster charging i believe they're 10 bucks more they're 40 bucks instead of 30 bucks and they have a different entire model number but if you're just looking at it it's not obvious like and they do have a tiny
little bit of text printed on the metal right next to where the cable goes into the metal ring and I could not see this for the life of me so anyway all this is to say the magnifiers you could feature and what I've actually done since I have the action button as the flashlight now with iOS 18 you can replace the two circular 3d touch buttons on the bottom of the lock screen the ones that used to be flashlight and camera and
um so i've actually replaced the flashlight one with the magnifier i'm happy to announce i have reached that point in aging where i'm going to be using the magnifier frequently enough on my phone i've already i just did this like the other day and i've already i've already used it like three times you can change it to a triple tap too that's the one that that's the real old person move you change magnifier to triple tap with accessibility you just tap the back of the phone three times
I don't need that yet. But certainly having it on the lock screen on a button I was not using anymore is very useful. And then, you know, and so similarly, like you can have the camera, you know, if you if you don't want to use Apple's camera app anymore or if you only want to launch it from.
the camera control then you can reassign the camera circle button on the lock screen too to something else like this is a whole new area of customization that i actually find quite quite nice but anyway all that is to say uh the camera control therefore being my camera launch button will free up one of those spots for me and so using it as that so far over the last couple days i have enjoyed it it has proven useful to me the only thing is that so far um
I had a very hard time figuring out how to navigate the little tools menu inside of it. Yep, same.
I said this before any of us had ever tried it. Remember by seeing the demos, I'm like, that's modal. How are you going to get out of that mode? And trying it for real life, I experienced the exact same thing. The exact problem I predicted. I'm like, I'm having that problem. I eventually figured it out, but it's... Not great.
Yeah, I think there's going to be quite a learning curve there. And I think maybe Apple could tweak some of the timings and gestures and things on that to make that a little bit easier over time. Because I have found that the actual pushing of the button to open the camera and to take pictures, that works great.
But I keep finding myself accidentally in some of the little menu modes to the point where I might just turn them off. And the second thing is that as soon as you start using those menu modes, or even I think even just using it for Capture, like just pushing the button to take the picture, it dims or hides all of the camera UI on screen.
Yeah, I noticed that too, which surprised me.
Yeah, and it keeps it hidden for a few seconds after you hit the picture. And so even if you want to just review the picture you just took, you have to wait two or three seconds for it to fade those controls back in. It's kind of annoying. I see what they're going for. It just becomes a camera with this control. Okay, that's a nice idea. That's very precious.
In real life, I want those controls back immediately. So, like, as soon as I'm done taking the picture, I want those controls. Or even if I'm just stuck in the weird, you know, camera control menu thingy and I can't figure out how to zoom back out or whatever, just keep the controls on screen at all times. Because, yeah, it's great to have them in the camera control.
It's also great to have them on the screen. And a lot of times you're going to want to switch back and forth between them. So that's something that, like... I think until Apple makes better balances and more usable defaults or more usable behaviors with the camera control, I don't see myself using it for any of those little menu features other than just launching the camera and taking a picture.
I think for those, it's great. It's convenient. The actual implementation of all those little menus and things and the way it hides all the controls in the main screen, that I think needs some iteration to really be useful.
All right. So here's my experience with the camera control. The very first thing that I discovered with my new phone with the camera control is that the camera control is placed exactly where I apparently grabbed my phone. Exactly. I've done this a couple of times. Like with it taking it out of the box. I kid you not. It's the phone is not even on. I've just taken it out of the box.
I accidentally hit the camera control button three times in under 20 seconds. It's not even on. Like, the phone's not even on. I'm hitting the button, which, by the way... With what part of your hand? Are you hitting it with, like, your, like... That's apparently where I grab the phone.
I apparently grab it at the bottom with one, you know, my thumb on, like, the left side of where the camera control is, and my other finger is exactly on the camera control. And it's a flush button. It doesn't even stick out. I was hitting that button like crazy. I'm like, okay, well...
i can retrain myself but that's an unfortunate personal habit apparently i grabbed the phone by the camera control and so i have signed up for hitting that button accidentally a lot i'm getting better and unfortunately i think part of the way i'm getting better is learning not to press as hard which is good in that i won't activate the flush button but bad in that now i'm not gripping the phone as hard when i pick it up which i feel like it's just an increased drop risk but that's a thing so setting that aside get that apple care
Yeah, I do have it using using the actual camera control button. I would not have predicted this based on their previews in our discussion of this, but because we talked about like the whole idea of them modeling it after like half press on a real camera shutter button.
And even though that feature for half press focus isn't even shipping yet, the way you get into those menus that Marco was talking about, these little things is you essentially half press right to get to the thing where you can change the zoom and the focal depth and that whole menu system. And yes, that is modal.
And the only way I've discovered to get out of it is to touch anywhere on the screen, which is a reasonable way to get out of it. But I kind of wish there was a way to get out of it by without taking a picture by hitting the camera control. But I think you have to actually touch the screen to say, I want to get out of this mode where I'm adjusting things with the camera control. Right.
But here's the kicker. This is the thing I wouldn't have predicted. The half press on the camera control button to activate the menus is unlike any half press on any big camera that I've ever used in my entire life in that it is way, way more difficult to get to it.
Like it is a thing that you have to train your fingers to do because if you just do what you would do to half press a real camera button, you've pressed it all the way. That's too far. So it's like... how do I half press this button? And you have to press so much lighter than you think. And I know there's this preference to adjust this or whatever, but it's such a strange sensation.
You're like, am I even pressing it? Or am I just thinking hard about pressing it and it activates it? You can do it. You can learn to do it. But it is so much more of a precise, delicate gesture than I expected it to be. I fully expected... I've been half pressing shutter buttons for... you know, years and years, right? Decades, right?
I fully expected it would just be completely natural for me to half press it. Absolutely not. It is so much more delicate than I thought it would be, which I don't personally mind because I think I'm never going to use those menus now that I've experienced them. I don't think I'm ever going to use them to adjust anything. Maybe I'll do the zoom one because it has the advantage.
I hate pinching to zoom. It has the advantage that I can zoom while, you know, having the phone in like,
camera taking position right in landscape mode or whatever without me having to like take one of my hands off of the phone and use it to pinch the screen i think zoom is the one that's most likely for me to use but in practice i've never actually used it other than when i was experimenting with it just because i hate going into that mode i can't even decide which one to keep it on i think i settled on keeping it on zoom because it's the one i'm most likely to use but
i would just much rather adjust those things on the screen and i'm with marco like i understand how the ui goes away when you do that or whatever i would just rather always see it like again that should probably be a setting or whatever
But, you know, for taking a photo and for having it as a shutter button, I've heard a lot of people complaining that the positioning is bad, that it should be closer to the corner, and maybe that would have gotten out of my accidental activation area. But I'm mostly happy with the position.
I take pretty much all my pictures in landscape mode, but occasionally in portrait, and I find it works for both of them. I have it launching the camera. I have it launching the camera on a single press. The reason I can get away with it is that when I accidentally activate it,
It's because I'm picking up a locked phone off the table or whatever, and when you hit it on a locked phone, it doesn't launch the camera app. It just wakes it up first, and you have to hit it again to launch the camera app, which is a nice defense against me accidentally launching the camera app.
I'm still accidentally hitting the button a lot, but the consequences are not significant because when I'm doing that, it's almost always when I'm picking up a locked phone, so I don't actually find myself landing in the camera app. Within, I think, maybe... Less than a minute of my wife picking up my phone, she had accidentally taken a picture with the camera control. I should have saved it.
It was like, iPhone unboxing day. Here's our first picture of the floor. It's a thing, right? Again, there's a setting to make the camera control require a double click to get into the camera app. I don't think I need to use that yet. I think I'm building my habits around it, but... I think the camera control was maybe a little bit overly ambitious. As a button, it feels good. It clicks good.
I like the fact that it's touch sensitive. The half press I'm not sold on, the menu interface I'm not sold on, and the upcoming feature that we don't even have yet, the half press for focus or whatever they're going to do. I don't think that's going to make this better. They're piling so much stuff onto this button. This is not like a version 1.0 button.
This is like the version 4.5 of this button already. It does so much stuff. It is so overloaded. It has so many capabilities. And like I said, maybe it's just me, but when you find one of these phones, you can learn how to get into the menus pretty easily, but it's such a strange feeling. It's like, press, but don't press. It's such a delicate operation. It reminds me of like...
Some of the finesse moves I would have to do with a thumb stick in Super Monkey Ball in the GameCube. Like, where you just really have to learn how to, like, what the difference between, you know, 18 and 17 degrees on the stick is, as opposed to just being like, you know, like, jam the stick to the left, right, up, down, right?
So sort of delicate, like, just think about pressing it, and then you'll get into the menus. And again, it's not bad, because I don't think I want to get into the menus a lot, and I do know how to do it now. But it is so much... I don't know how to... So much more like... I don't want to say sophisticated. It's so much less...
straightforward to do like it requires more mechanical finesse than i would have expected way more mechanical finesse than half pressing a shutter button and having handed my very large cameras to many people over the years for them to take pictures i can tell you that the average person has difficulty half pressing even a gigantic shutter button that is very easy in my opinion to half press because it has like miles of travel and you literally push it halfway down you cannot push this button halfway down like the travel is so short if you try to push it halfway halfway down you will completely depress it you have to think about pressing
and then you've just half pressed it.
Yeah, and I think it almost gives me the feeling of when I've designed an interface in Xcode for my iPhone app, and I've been using the simulator for most of the design, and then I run it on the device for the first time. And I pick it up and I try to use it and I instantly feel like, oh, this is all wrong. Like this, this is either too small, too big. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't work right.
You can tell as soon as you try to use it on the device. Oh, this is wrong. That's kind of how I feel with the camera control. Like, you know, what I was expecting based on how they were describing it, I was kind of expecting this to work a certain way. And then as soon as I get it and I try it, I'm like, oh, this is wrong.
Like, I would actually call it maybe fiddly or, like, you know, oversensitive. And, like, it's not – I don't think I'm, you know, lacking appropriate dexterity in my index finger to be able to use it. And there are some case considerations, which we'll get to in a moment. But I think, like, it's just very finicky to get that right. And what you don't want with your camera controls is imprecision.
When you're using a camera, usually you are adjusting... Especially if you're fumbling for it, like real quick, you go, oh, I'm getting the camera out. It's not the time for a now. I'm going to apply the most controlled pressure I've ever applied using the tendons in my fingers.
Right, and you don't want to accidentally switch modes or overshoot the setting that you were trying to adjust or whatever. It's very sensitive and finicky in the way it operates. And so, again, I think it's a good idea I like how it launches the camera and then takes pictures. Everything else about it, I really don't like.
Yeah, let me fast forward this for Apple. The solution to this, the real version 4.5 of this, I mean, I don't know how many years in the future this is going to be, is to solve all these problems. Basically, that entire side of the phone needs to be a giant touch-sensitive, pressure-sensitive clicky button. Because, for example, zooming and swiping...
The little interface that appears is maybe a little small, but the essentially trackpad area, it's a small button. That area of like swipe, swipe, swipe, it's barely enough to satisfactorily cycle through the menus, let alone being satisfactory for Zoom.
I feel like that whole side of the phone needs to be just one complete featureless thing that you can squeeze and it haptically clicks and the whole thing is touch sensitive and it needs to go in more. I don't know how they solve this problem, but it needs, it's strange to say, but I feel like the camera control is
too small like for what they want it to do if you just want it to be a shutter button and you can use it that way and by the way i will say that is the big benefit of the camera control if all these things we're complaining about you can just ignore them and just say this button is just a binary button and i press it all the way or not at all and it works that way i don't think you'll accidentally half press it a lot especially if you're just always saying press
press right but if they want to go whole hog and have this be like a touch sensitive thing to swipe through uis and stuff like that they need a bigger touch area and they need a way bigger button they need just that whole side to just be one giant button that also happens to click and i don't know how they do that but that would be that would be better than this tiny little thing
I'll tell you what. So there are settings for camera control. Not many of them. Right now there are three settings. There's what app does it open, launch camera with a single click or double click, which you actually might want, John, if you're having a lot of accidental input.
I don't think I need to go to the double click. And I also don't think I need to adjust the sensitivity. I've tried the different settings and I feel like that's not the problem.
So the third setting is called, for some reason, it's called clean preview. Clean preview on or off. And it says, light press camera control to quickly make adjustments. Oh, that leaves the menus up when you activate it. Yeah, you're right. It does. Okay. Well, honestly, that solves one of my problems, but not.
Okay. Yeah, that's true. Actually, I agree with you that I do like that it leaves all the camera controls up. So, yes, we have live solved one problem.
All right. We made it slightly better. All right. I like it better this mode. We'll see if I can actually stick with the other controls. But that is good. Anyway, so let's move on to talk about cases and the camera control. Poor Peak Design.
Oh, no. And every other third-party case manufacturer.
I love this case. I've been using it now for, I think, three phones in a row now. I don't use it all year, but I use it some of the year, as mentioned. It is my kind of summer case. It's great for if I don't want to use leather because it might get wet in the summer or anyway. So I love the Peak Design case.
They had drama last year with the action button where, like, they didn't really know it was coming, but they knew something was coming, so they left a cutout. And it turns out the cutout was... It was just... It made it too hard to use it because it was, like, a deep hole and the action button's small, and so it made it too hard to use. So they had this whole thing where they...
Over a few months, they remade the case. They gave free replacements to people who bought the first one. It was a whole thing. I'm sure they lost a ton of money on it, but they're a good company, and they wanted to serve their customers well. I like Peak Design a lot. Anyway, so this year...
I got their case, and it has a cutout, not of the entire case edge, but just like a camera control-shaped valley with sloped sides going into it from the other edges of the phone. You can see it. They have a 360 view on their page. And I tried this on my phone immediately.
and within two hours i was like this this isn't gonna work no now there's there's there's two problems number one the deep valley it creates does indeed make it difficult to use the camera control like that's it just it makes it much harder to use because it is not a cover but they can't just do a simple cover because you know you can see like the way apple did theirs with like the sapphire cover with the conductive layer like you got to make it work with all those the camera control sensors and
Um, so, you know, instead of doing some kind of complicated button that they probably didn't even know was possible until Apple released their cases, they just made a hole with like, you know, ramps going into it basically from all sides. Well, those ramps also hurt my finger. Like they form kind of a sharp edge and with, you know, I'm a left-hand phone user.
And so one of my fingers is like basically resting right there all the time and it's just sharp. Like it just feels bad. Um, So I feel terrible. Like, I got to say, like, Peak Design, like, this is also not good. And I feel so bad for them because I know they're going to have other people saying the same thing. And again, like this, I mean, two years in a row to really screw case makers by Apple.
Like, it's got to be rough for the case makers because, you know, they got to design cases with a bunch of guesses and speculation. And, you know, they got to, like, basically, like,
follow the rumor mill and get whatever info they can get and just make a bunch and take a big risk like oh well we think the dimensions of the phone will be this and we think it's going to have a button here and we think the button will work like other buttons but we don't know like and so it's it's a big risk risky business to be in um and and i gotta say i'm i'm again i'm not a fan of the p design case this year and maybe maybe they'll do another one sometime that has like you know a proper cover over it that works with the weird sensors of the button and and maybe that'll be better so i'll keep that in mind but
What I did was so as soon as I use this case, I thought, well, I have to go to the Apple store. This this is not going to do like I'm going to get one of Apple's cases today.
Just very briefly, why why not go caseless? I'm not saying that's the right choice for anyone, but that is what I plan to do with this one. Why not just go caseless?
number one i didn't buy apple care and i don't really want to because i keep saying apple care is my case and then i just buy cases anyway and so and i'm spending like that's totally hundreds of dollars on apple care over the years never to use it um so i figure okay you know if i just stop buying it now you know i'll maybe if i if i end up having to have an expensive repair then i'll weigh that against all the savings that i'll have with apple care over the years and decide then whether to start changing my policy or not but anyway um so that's that's the reason
Um, and so I'm like, all right, I gotta go to the Apple store. I got, I gotta try their cases. Um, so I went to the Apple store and there was another reason I'll mention it in a little bit. Um, but I went to the Apple store and I immediately like, you know, went over to the case while I got, you know, they told me, Oh, go stand over by so-and-so. And I'm like, okay.
And I directly walked to the opposite direction, go over to over the, go over the case walks. I'm like, there's a huge cluster of people waiting over there. Like, I know I'm not going to be the first in line. I have some time and I did. So anyway, everyone's seen these new Beats cases that they have, which are basically just like shiny plastic cases. They are decent.
I would say they come in zero good colors. They do feel very cheap. The outside has not much grip because it's not like a TPU kind of plastic. It's like a shiny shell kind of plastic. So there's no grip to it whatsoever. And I was like, oh, that's kind of not great. I almost bought one because the Beats cases are very light and very thin, which is nice.
But it just it's just like I think it's like a peel case like you can get that for cheaper in better colors from other manufacturers very easily.
Let me offer a differing opinion considering the cases now on my phone right now.
OK, which which mediocre color did you get?
gray dark gray whatever yeah the color's not great and it's got lines on the back for no reason I think the Beats case I think the shape is nice I think it does feel more expensive than your average plastic case simply because the shape is very like precise and consistent like the buttons which are just plastic or whatever the buttons are precise the edges of the case are precise it is rounded over in all the right places it feels kind of like a giant iPhone 5c which I liked
Um, it is shiny plastic. Uh, it is not as grippy as a leather case, not by far, although it is grippier than I thought it would be. It is probably about as grippy as Apple's clear cases are, which is again, it's not as grippy as rubber, definitely not as grippy as silicone, but it's grippier than I thought it would be just because of the tackiness. It shows fingerprints disgustingly.
I noticed that in the store. Actually, that's one of the reasons I didn't buy it because I noticed that when I was just handling the sample ones.
Yeah, like, leather, one of the great things about leather is it will absorb all the oils from my fingers. This plastic will not. It is covered with oils. But I do have to say, for this case, and by the way, the reason I got it, of course, is because it has a bare bottom, and it does. Even the edges of the bare bottom, I think this case is beautifully, precisely shaped and formed.
I like everything about it except for the material that it is made out of, which is a big thing for a case, right? But...
um i'm not going to say i'm happy with my purchase because i am looking forward to finding a suitable leather case that i can replace it with but i am i'll say this i am happier with this case than i was with the apple clear case which also has a bare bottom that i bought for my 14 pro right so i i've tried the clear cases they're not for me this this
If I had to live with this, I could tolerate it, but it is nowhere near as nice as my leather one. So, you know, go to the store and check it out. Marco looked at it, he thought it felt cheap. I think it feels very nice and solid and precise and good and grippier than I thought it would. It's just not that, you know, the oil situation is a problem. It's not as grippy.
Even the ridge around the camera, I've used a lot of cases, first party and third party, that have like a vertical wall around the camera mesa. And the Beats case, it's almost vertical, But not quite. It's got just enough of a slant to it that it feels less cheap to me than just like a big vertical wall stuck into the back of the case.
Like I said, it does have a circle and a line for MagSafe on the back for reasons that escape me because it's not a clear case. Why do you need to do that? It does have a Beats logo on the side. But I... I actually give a pretty good rating to the Beats case if you can tolerate the material that's made out of, which I can almost tolerate.
Yeah, my plan if I bought it, which I didn't, but my plan was to take a magic eraser to the Beats logo on the side and see if I could get rid of it.
No, you don't want to scuff it up. Although, actually, by the way, a tiny bit of real-time follow-up. We mentioned already the camera control, which we'll get to in a second on the Beats case, I'm assuming.
um the camera control has the settings for like how hard you want it to be that's the reason i always forget what these things are that was an accessibility you know what else is an accessibility it's you know settings accessibility camera control and accessibility under camera control there is a toggle to just turn off the camera control if you just don't want to deal with it so that's great um there's also a toggle to turn off the whole light press to show adjustments if you don't want that feature at all period you can just turn that off
And there's also finally a toggle for how quickly you have to double press it if you want to use the double press feature. It's just got default slow and slower if you can't double press it that quickly, right?
So kudos to Apple for giving enough adjustability to say, hey, the massive overreach that we've done with this camera control, you can just turn most of that off until you get it to the point where you think it is uh, you know, suitable. I'm going to leave everything on, but like I said, I'd probably just don't want to use the, uh, the adjustment feature. That's interesting. We'll play with that.
But again, it's not in camera control. It's an accessibility. So these, these settings are always in weird places. And if you search for camera control, you won't find it. So settings, accessibility, camera control.
Anyway, so I ended up, for at least the moment, I ended up with the Apple silicone case. Which is funny. I got it in Lake Green, which is not at all green. Like, it is blue. It is absolutely blue.
There is nothing about this. Did you take that website test? Of course I did.
But, like, there's nothing about this that is green. But anyway, it's a nice, like, weird middle blue. It's not green. But it's a nice color. Anyway, I ended up with silicone case for now.
This looks green on screen. I do not deny that it may look blue. See one in person. Trust me.
When you see it in person, you're like, oh, that's that color? Like, I had to check. I had to, like, pull out the little drawer in the Apple store that it was on and, like, read the boxes to see, like, is this really that color? Yeah. Anyway.
Just to very quickly interject here, I typically do not like Apple Silicon cases. I feel like they're way too tacky. I really just viscerally do not like them. And I can't, other than the tackiness, I can't really put my finger on why. And I did go and look at a bunch of the ones at the Apple store today while I was waiting for the back room to bring me, or backstage to bring me my stuff.
And I got to say, I feel like If I do end up wanting a case, that might be the direction I go because it's a lot less tacky than it used to be. And it feels nice. Granted, I didn't have one in hand. I was just petting it on the wall of cases. But it is definitely worth looking into again if you, like me, wrote it off many, many years ago.
Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, the reason I always shied away from it in the past was I didn't like that it was so tacky that it was actually difficult to get in and out of pants pockets. That is still the case. I think it might be a little bit less annoying, but maybe I'm just giving up. But it is still annoying to get in and out of pants pockets.
So it's not terrible, but it's not graceful in that way. Also, it does have a bottom lip, and it's fairly thick. So like to do edge gestures, you are running into the silicone a lot. So it is a very protective case in the sense that like, you know, for if you're worried about a case like for actually protecting your phone against drops and stuff, it's probably a pretty good choice for that.
And the camera control implementation on all of Apple's cases is, is just great. It just feels like the button got extended. It is still flush with the case, just like it is flush with the phone. The button feels well. It feels right. It works right. It feels and works pretty much exactly the way it does on the bare phone.
Yeah, I tested the camera control with no case in the beginning just to make sure I was getting the full experience. And then when I put the Beats case on it, same deal. They did a great job. Like it really, really does. It doesn't feel any less precise or any more difficult or anything like that. And it's nice and flush. They did a good job.
It'd be great if third parties could have done the same thing. Although I did see one. Now, as you would imagine, my Instagram ads are 98% ads for iPhone cases and 2% ads for Marco's car. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, there is one third party case manufacturer. I forget what the name is.
It's like SU case or something or whatever, advertising the fact that they presumably will have like the courts pass through thing or whatever. Everyone else is just just has holes or they leave out that section of the case. But I feel like this is totally possible for third parties to do. Technologically speaking, they just didn't have enough information to implement it in time for launch.
So I'm hoping there will be third party cases that implement this. But Apple's implementation is it's really good.
Yeah. And I mean, geez, I would have loved to have some kind of like Apple premium fabric of some kind to case this year, like something that is not plastic and not silicone.
something that doesn't have a bottom lip apple yeah i mean and so you know the clear case like maybe i might go with that in the future i don't know yet um i i i mean i'm gonna try the silicon case for a while but it is jeans season and it does suck to get it in and out of jeans pockets and i do that many times a day so it's a little annoying try the clear one try try the beats one they are very similar in feel and i think the beats one feels a little bit nicer
ah the beats one though like it well i i noticed those fingerprints when i was playing with in the store and i'm like if i made it look that bad in two minutes they're on the clear one too they're just a little bit harder to see well yeah but they but like the silicone you don't see it at all yeah so i don't know i probably stick with silicone for a while until i mean maybe the bull strap won't be really good i don't know but i don't i don't think so like you got that but you haven't opened it yet
it's it's i'm on i'm at the beach and it's over there in the mainland so all right well my case is coming on wednesday so next episode i will be able to tell you about the bull strap case but marco's tale of the uh the sloped pit on the peak design one does not fill me with hope because that's exactly the design that pull strap is using and we'll see how it goes
Yeah, I think this is going to be similar to last year with the action button. I think this is going to be like a lot of people realizing, oh, no, I've made the wrong case decision. And a lot of case makers realizing, oh, no, we've made the wrong cases. And I think this is going to be a big shakeup year for that. And another good year for Apple cases.
Cynically, you can maybe think maybe that's why they're doing it. But no, I don't think that's the reason. But I do wish that... And, you know, gotta give Apple credit. The Beats cases are new. That's something that kind of came out of nowhere. The way Apple uses the Beats brand, to me, is... sometimes a little bit puzzling, especially in recent years, but hey, some good stuff comes out of it.
And so they did add more cases than before. They took away the final moving, okay. They added the Beats ones, okay. Which has no bottom, which shows they still know that's a thing. Yeah, it's fine. I do wonder, are they ever going to try some kind of premium fabric again? I hope they do, because honestly, Apple's work with
fabrics and textiles in general on on the watch side has been great they do amazing things over there and part of the reason i like the peak design cases is that they have like the the the rim the edge around the sides is some kind of like plasticky rubbery thing but then the back of the case is really nice fabric and it just it makes a very good feeling in fact when i was at the apple store checking out um the the apple store uh employee who was who was ringing me up
I was showing it because she was asking about the cases, and I was showing her the Peak Design one, and I let her handle it, and she's like, oh, this feels really nice. Peak Design does very, very good fabric work. So does Apple. They just don't make fabric cases right now. I hope that they revisit that. Obviously, fine woven wasn't it.
um but they make lots of other great fabrics they have over time with the watch bands and everything so i know they can do it uh so i hopefully over time their case lineup continues to evolve and expand because even you know before before the final woven thing it was usually the case that like apples if you wanted like a nice leather case for your iphone apple's leather case was usually either the nicest one you could get or one of the nicest ones you can get yeah
um and that's why everyone bought them because like oh well we know they're going to do a good job we you know we we knew it was consistent we knew like you know the buttons would line up it would be good quality it would it would not have weird branding or anything like it would be it would be just a good basic leather case and yeah you know sometimes the corners wouldn't wear out wear as well as you wanted them to or whatever but you know you get the black one and it's pretty safe and you know you kind of knew how to do it it was always a good safe bet if you wanted like a guaranteed pretty good case that you could buy on day one and be pretty sure it'd be the right choice it was the apple leather case
And I feel like right now we don't have that unless you love silicone, in which case it's the Apple silicone case. But then I don't know what else to say after that.
Yeah. I don't know. Just go caseless. That's what the cool kids do.
But then the phone just slides off the flat surfaces.
It's not that terrible.
And then your fingerprints are all over your actual phone, and so are all the nicks and scrapes.
Yeah. I mean, the physical condition of my Pro Max, leaving aside my freaking ruined screen, like the back of it, the sides of it, that's all fine. And I did use a case occasionally, but for the most part, I didn't. And physically, it's in really, really good shape. It's just the screen that's bad news bears.
Speaking of the final thing on cases, this is a good time to refresh people who haven't been listening to the show for years and years. I always make reference to the naked robotic core idea. And for people who don't know what that is, it is the idea that I think I talked about back in the hypercritical days originally that you will make a product.
that omits as much stuff as possible because someone who buys your product can always add things to it, but they can't take things away. So for example, in the case of the iPhone, you can imagine making a smartphone that has a grippy rubber back on it that is not as slippery as the phones that Apple makes. But if you don't want a grippy rubber back,
And the phone comes with one, and that is literally the back of the phone. You can't remove that. So the naked robotic core theory is ship the smallest, most minimal thing possible, and then anybody who wants something can add it to it. But people who want nothing get the smallest minimal product possible. And it is a...
I don't know if Apple espouses this theory is a thing that I came up with to explain Apple's apparent design decisions on their phone. And I think they continue along those lines. And the specific instance with the iPhone 16 is I think Marco talked about this maybe in the past episode. Um, they're shrinking the bezels around the screen just year after year, millimeter after millimeter.
It's not like there was a big giant one inch border like there was in the original iPad. Like the border around the screen, uh, on the iPhone has always been pretty small, but I was like, no, we need to make it smaller. because that border is a thing that if you don't want it, you can't remove it from the phone. You can always add a border by putting a case on it.
But if you get a phone and you want no border, you can't have that unless we ship you the naked robotic core. And then it's up to you to decide. We ship you, if they could ship it with zero border, they would like a Samsung phone with the screen goes over the edge or rounded or whatever, right? They're getting real close to essentially having zero border.
And you can decide, is zero border what you want? If not, add a case. And now the screen is so close to the edge that I've heard from so many people with iPhone 16s that they're accidentally activating things on the screen simply by the act of holding the phone. Because the meat of their fingers wraps around and ends up touching the screen part. And yes, the iPhone and iOS has all sorts of like...
what we would call on the iPad palm rejection, but essentially touch rejection, rejecting what the OS thinks is an inadvertent touch, but it's not enough for some people. There's still some of their touches are getting through.
And by the way, I think there's a fun one where like, if you, if you touch the screen where right by the camera control, where like the little camera control controls would appear on the screen, if you touch the screen there and then try to do anything else anywhere on the screen, all your touches are ignored.
which I think is probably like a feature having to do with people trying to swipe the camera control or something, or maybe it's a bug. I don't know.
But anyway, they've gotten so naked robotic core with the 16 line that people are now having to make the choice to get a case simply because they cannot avoid accidental input because now the screen is so close to the edge, they just can't avoid it entirely. So that is a possible thing to think about of like, am I going to go caseless?
Yeah, they're giving you the most minimal... They're trying to get closer to that naked robotic core ideal that they don't know about, but it's just a thing that I made up. But that's what they're doing. This is me explaining what they're actually doing. And if you don't like it... your choice is to put a case on it. That's the only way to get your fingers farther away from that screen surface.
That's part of the reason I use a case now, because as I mentioned a couple episodes ago, like I tried without a case, I'm on the 15 Pro at the end there, and I kept causing accidental input on the screen. And I'm actually, honestly, I'm finding that problem a little bit with the new watch too. I'll get to that when we get to talk about that.
But like, you know, as the screens get pushed out further and further to the edges, that's what happens. You have less space to hold the phone with your fingers without causing input. And it's, it's something that you can get used to, but like, I don't know. Like, I feel like I wasn't really asking for the bezels to get, to get narrower.
It's like a robotic core. It's like, Hey, some people want the most minimal phone and they can't get that unless we ship it. You can always add a case. And there, your problem is solved with the people who want the most minimal. Now, you can argue, okay, no one wants it this minimal. Like human fingers are squishy. Like people's fingers are going to overlap.
And I also agree kind of on the 14 Pro, which had pretty big bezels, right?
But the 14 Pro that I was using previously, I was constantly finding that somehow some fleshy part of my hand was touching the right edge of the screen when I was in landscape mode and causing YouTube to fast forward because they added that thing where if you like hold on the right edge of the video, it like fast forwards or whatever.
And I'm like, oh, here's some accidental input that I hadn't thought about before. They're getting close to like, is this robotic core too naked? Will everyone who buys this phone need a case? Because again, the idea of naked robotic core is provide the phone that is naked for the people who want it because they can't remove stuff from it.
But at a certain point, it's like, okay, but who wants this? Who wants the bezels to be this small? And if the bezels are going to be that small, maybe the stainless steel, titanium, whatever the hell, aluminum, aluminum and titanium, maybe that band should be thicker. At which point, like, why did you even remove the bezels?
And now you're just adding them back by making the band thicker or whatever. But it's a thing for Apple to think about. I know they're probably going to try to solve this with software of like, oh, we just need to tweak the touch rejection around the edges, which iOS has had for ages and apparently is slightly buggy with iOS 18.0. But like, I'm not sure that's the solution.
So they may be approaching kind of like asymptotically approaching the ideal bezel size. Again, setting aside the old like phones. I think Samsung made a few of these and sort of other people where the screen was like a waterfall and it curved over the edge. So you could actually look at the side of the phone and see a portion of the screen.
I don't think that was a great idea either, and I think Apple agrees there. But their current screen and their current bezels are really, really pushing the limit.
Well, I mean, I might argue that, like, since most people appear to use cases, including, yes, we all saw the Johnny Ive picture in the New York Times where there was some article in the New York Times that had a picture of Johnny Ive at some dinner, and it showed him holding up an iPhone in an Apple silicone case.
And everyone's like, oh, my God, look, even Johnny Ive uses a case on his iPhone now.
That's notable because I think maybe Gruber even asked this at some thing where he asked a bunch of Apple executives, do you use a case on your phone? That was at the AntennaGate press conference.
it was was johnny i wasn't on stage for that though was no i believe it was jobs uh tim cook and eddie q i think yeah and they were all like no they took out their phones they were all naked well guess what uh i've uses a case apparently now in his old age anyway yeah anyway um but yeah like i i would argue that you know since since so many people like i i would assume it's probably a pretty sizable majority of the iphone user base uses a case and
then that is what you should be designing for. Like if people are going to use cases anyway, why design for the fraction of the audience who's not going to use them? You actually should optimize the phone for the much more common case of case usage. So it does actually make sense.
Well, they kind of are. The no bezel case is designed for a case. Because if we just assume everyone is going to put a case on this, then we don't want to waste any space inside the case that doesn't have the screen. We'll let the case be the border. And then people can decide how thick a border they want by picking how thick a case they want. They're arguably doing that.
But the fact that so many Apple executives and so many people in real life continue to use the phone without a case...
shows that the caseless scenario is not zeroed out right i mean at the very least if apple executives continue to insist that they don't use cases on their phones at the very least they're living the no case and so is casey the no case the caseless sorry uh lifestyle yep right so it's not it's not like nobody right i mean maybe we should talk to them about what are the percentages is it more people than one an iphone mini huh
Huh? Anyway.
Real-time follow-up from like 20 minutes ago because I forgot to go look. Belkin Ultra Glass 2 screen protector for iPhone 16 Pro. So it is glass as far as I can tell, not only because of the name, but from what I can tell based on the packaging. But yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes. I'll put it in Slack for you to look at if you care. But I believe it is honest-to-goodness glass.
And it is not rounded over.
no it is not so uh but the good news is like i believe i had said earlier allegedly if you screw something up then you can get a new one for free and have the apple store put back on for you anyway yeah the case situation uh not great which is part of the reason why i am going caseless caseless again uh all right do we want to talk uh apple watch or do we want to talk airpods first can we talk photo styles briefly
Oh, yes, I'm sorry. I completely skipped that. I've only played with this very briefly, but I'm really digging this. One of the things that I didn't talk too much about during the ATP Insider special is I just don't really... edit my pictures other than doing color correction in the most basic, like silly, well, not silly, but like simple color correction that I can possibly do.
So if I take a photo inside and everything looks blue, I'll try to do color correction and make it look, you know, the color it's supposed to be with these photo styles. Yeah. And especially since they're like a sidecar, maybe that's not the right term, but it's additional information that's kind of attached to the photo. So you can go in and revisit it later. I'm really liking this.
And this, for me, for my simple brain, this is the right amount of editing for a photo. I don't want to have 85 different sliders to tweak. I just want to mouse around in that like trackpad of dots that they present to you. So you get this like grid of dots and you can like kind of, swirl around in there and it'll, you know, live update the photo and show the results of that change.
And I forget exactly what you're editing. I think it's tone and contrast or something like that. Maybe one of you know, but that to me is the correct amount of editing. And I've only done this like once or twice because I've only had the phone for a few hours, but I'm really digging this so far.
you
Spoilers for an upcoming episode, but there is an AskATP that somewhere buried down in our giant queue of AskATP that asks about photo editing. And I will say that this camera control, the photographic styles control that he's talking about, that grid of dots that lets you change things after the fact, is an interesting sort of entry into the photo editing UI spectrum.
Obviously, the one end is like, I never edit my photos. And the other end is like Lightroom, right? Or whatever. And somewhere in the middle is this grid thing, which is...
nice in that like Casey doesn't even know what the axes stand for but it doesn't matter because the whole point is you put your thumb on that thing you move it around and you move it around until you like how the picture looks right I mean that's that like there's not that's not so many places you can move it it's like up down left right I don't even know how many rows and columns there are but there's not a million of them right and you move it until the picture looks good to you now I will say that one of the
problems with systems like this is people who uh don't have a lot of experiencing editing photos often aren't the best judge of what looks good to them and that may sound ridiculous like of course everyone knows what looks good to them it's their opinion in the moment when you're editing you will stop when it looks good to you but then a year from now when you look back at the picture you may find yourself saying why does this picture look weird why
Well, it looked good to you when you were using that control at the time you did it. But now looking back, it actually looks kind of odd. It does help to have some understanding of what you're doing to know what goals that you want to get to. It's kind of like, you know, going to the TV store as we talked about before and saying that TV looks amazing.
Yeah, because it's on vivid mode where every color is oversaturated and it's the brightness is cranked up and it looks very striking. But that's not how you want your TV to look.
experience editing photos will help you avoid sort of the vivid the vivid valley i guess of like oh no i move my thumb on this control until it looked good to me but i didn't realize that i'm making all my pictures look like samsung photographs or everything old old style samsung photographs everything's all blown out and every color is oversaturated and everything is too contrasty or whatever
Anyway, you do you. But the beauty of the photographic stylus is if you find out you've made a terrible mistake and your taste in thumb placement on that four-way controller bad, you can always go change it later. And you can even just turn it off and go back to one of the preset modes.
Marco, thoughts? Have you played with this any?
Only a little bit. I need more time with it. So I have played with it. And I decided even before I got this phone that my plan was I'm going to change my default photographic style because I know it's non-destructive. And if I end up not liking it, like the default one that comes to is like called standard, right? That's just like, hey, it's going to look like iPhone pictures.
This year's iPhone pictures with this OS and this hardware standard, right? And that's what all my previous pictures have been like, obviously. And I mostly like them, but I know what iPhone pictures look like, the processing they do or whatever, and it's not exactly to my taste. I decided that my default photographic style is going to be natural.
What is the difference between standard and natural? I think they don't overboost the saturation as much. Maybe there's less sharpening. All I know is that it looks closer to how I think I want them to look. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll take a year's worth of pictures in natural and I'll look back at them and I'll say, you know what? I wish these were all in standard. Well, guess what?
I can go change them back to standard if I feel that way. But I don't plan on using that big four-way control because I like to edit it in photos, which is maybe one step up from the four-way control. It's not all the way to Lightroom, but I'm familiar with the controls in photos, and I know how to tweak them to look the way I currently like them to look, although that changes over the years.
See our photos episode that we talked about this. But I'm going to go with natural. I'm going to go with natural as my default, and I'm never going to touch it, and I'm going to see how I like it.
You know, did you go into settings for the camera and do the photographic style setting? I did. I used the camera control to do it.
I set it to standard or set it to natural rather. And it just stays on natural.
Well, because the reason I ask is when you drill into settings, camera, photographic styles, it brings up a screen and it says photographic styles. To begin, select four of your favorite photos captured with this iPhone. Photographic styles lets you personalize how you appear in photos with incredible nuance to get the look you want.
Now, I haven't taken enough photos to do this yet, so I haven't proceeded to the, you know, there's a button that says get started. But after I take, you know, maybe a bunch of photos of the kids and maybe, you know, a photo or two of Penny and maybe like a
landscape or something i don't know i plan to go back in there and do whatever that wizard is to see i presume it will suggest to me okay well based on you know these photos or perhaps it'll give me some editing options and say okay or maybe it'll like blindly show me here's like four of the different styles which one do you like the most and my hope having not tried it yet is that maybe it'll point me in a direction although as you were talking
I did take a picture of Penny staring down a ball that she really wanted me to throw for her. Why did you throw it? Oh, I did. I did, but I was taking a picture. And so anyways, the natural for this does look very good. I don't know if it's my favorite, but it definitely does look very, very good.
Yeah, I'd never even seen that screen until you mentioned it. I just looked at it. One thing I did do, by the way, just to bring it up more, the preserve settings screen, you know, settings, camera, preserve settings. You have to go to that and turn on the toggle switch for photographic styles if you want the camera app to preserve it. That's what I did.
I turned on the preserve setting for photographic styles. Then back on the camera app, I used the camera control to swipe over to the natural style, and it just stays unnatural now.
wait i'm sorry so where's preserve settings it's in that scene i don't see it here it's in settings camera preserve settings and then scroll until you see photographic styles turn that turn that toggle switch on and now whatever setting you set in the camera app for your photographic style if you don't touch that setting again it will just stay on whatever you set it to all right airpods yeah i don't have any new ones so i think this is the john show
Well, the only new ones that exist are the AirPods 4, and you two are AirPods Pro users because you like things in your ear holes. But I don't. I don't like things in my ear holes, so I got the AirPods 4 with ANC on the box that says AirPods 4. It says AirPods 4, and then it says active noise cancellation, and then the sticker on the box says AirPods 4 with ANC in parentheses or something.
Anyway, these are a different shape than the AirPods 3, which was a different shape than their predecessor AirPods. So it is a new shape for my ears. They don't fall out of my ears. They don't feel as big in my ears as the AirPods 3. Like, they don't feel like they're pushing it out. Like, they are physically smaller, so that makes sense.
They do feel like they go farther into my ears for what I think are obvious reasons, because to get the noise cancellation to work a little bit better, they want to be a little bit farther into your ears. Overall, I think it's an upgrade in comfort over the previous one, but really it is just mildly... It feels mildly uncomfortable in a different way.
Not uncomfortable, but the part that I feel... Because again, I've been using AirPods 3. I wear them every single day. They're not uncomfortable. They don't hurt my ears, but I can feel which part of my ear are they pressing, and these press a different part, and they go in my ear farther.
And for someone who doesn't like things to go inside their ears, that's not great, but it's still better than the ones that actually... Go inside your ears. I do really appreciate the fact that the case is so much smaller. I'm not sure it's back to the original AirPods 1 case size, but it is so much smaller than its predecessor case. Massively smaller than the Pro case.
I wonder if the AirPods Pro 3 will do a case shrink too. They did a case shrink in the straightforward way. They just make there be less case around the AirPods. Like it is essentially thinner around it. So kudos to them for making the case smaller. One of the consequences of having a new case is you have to learn a new way to get the AirPods out of the case.
With every new shape of AirPods, we all have to learn, when I open this case lid, how the hell do I get these things out of here? And the move has been different for every single kind of AirPod. The Pros, the Originals, the 2s, the 3s. Well, the 2s were the same as one of those things. Anyway. It's a bit different for all of them. This one is same deal.
I could not get them out the way I get the other ones out. Instead, I have to come from the side on an angle, and that's how they come up. It's fine. You just learn it and do it, but it's weird that that's always different. The sound...
here's the thing about airpods my my uh daughter in particular but both my kids have you know the people who have the fingers that wear the the letters off the keyboards right my kids have ears that destroy airpods wow and and the way they destroy them well my daughter somehow is able to destroy the microphones i don't know how she does this but it's a thing that happens right we've gone through so many under apple care we just keep getting new ones and she just destroyed anyway
But both my kids, the failure mode of their AirPods, and I think now they're using 3s, the previous non-pro models, is that the AirPods just lose all bass. I don't know if it's like a tiny speaker cone tearing, so it's only like the middle part of the driver that's vibrating. It basically becomes all treble because the part that would be bass is gone because the paper has torn or something.
But I think they've had like three or four pairs, sometimes under warranty, sometimes not, that like...
you know i put them in my ears i'm like how are you listening to this it's all treble like the bass is gone don't you realize these are essentially broken and sure enough you've taken them to the apple store they put them in some little test rig and they test them like oh yep these are totally bad like they're not producing sound the way they're supposed to be right i don't know what causes that you can't see inside the airpods but it's a thing uh i don't know if my airpods 3 that i had before have this problem or we're starting to have this problem
But what I do know is that the AirPods 4 have so much more bass than my previous AirPods. So much more bass that I went immediately to try to find settings like, is there a way I can turn the bass down? Because this is too much bass for me. Because I'm listening to podcasts and everybody sounds like a newscaster with a super deep voice. So much bass.
And I know people who have AirPods Pro are like, yeah, that's the right amount of bass, dummy. And you've just been listening to crappy AirPods. It should sound like that.
i wasn't used to it but listening to music i appreciate it listening to vocals even with voice boost on and overcast i'm like could you turn the bass down a little bit so i wish there was an adjustment for that but i would say this is the result of the airpods 4 having superior sound quality to my own personal airpods 3 which may or may not be in the process of losing bass so there is definitely that um the second thing is with the noise cancellation uh
You know, Apple said that their pros are twice as good. That may be underestimating it. The noise cancellation doesn't cancel noise so much as... It changes the nature of the noise. So to give an example, I'm very often listening to my AirPods when doing dishes, and there's the running water sound, right? It's kind of like white noise, kind of running water sound.
If I put on my gigantic Sony airplane headphones, I could just cancel out that running water sound where it's just basically gone, right? With the AirPods 4, the running water sound is still there... And it is lower volume and it is also of a different nature.
It is less loud and sort of less shrill, if that makes sense, but you can still absolutely hear it to the point where I was trying to figure out, am I in noise canceling? And it's got, I don't know if the pros have this too, but like it cycles through the different modes and you can, there's like tones that they play. Have you memorized all the tones?
Yeah, I don't remember which ones are which until they're presented. Then oftentimes I can mostly figure it out, but I couldn't like demonstrate them now.
Yeah, because there's four settings and there's four tones. There's off, which is just like don't do anything, just be whatever. There is transparency, which is take sounds from the outside and play them into my ears through the speakers. That's the bling. Yeah, there is adaptive. which I have no idea and I'll ask you about in a second.
And then there is noise canceling, which is cancel as much noise as possible. And very often I was like, am I in noise canceling? And then I would change the mode and it would like go to off. And I'm like, oh yeah, I was in noise canceling because now everything is much louder and of a different nature.
But it is nothing like putting on like a big pair of over-ear headphones that I'm sure nothing like having AirPods Pro shoved into your ear hole. So I appreciate the noise cancellation. It is doing something. Don't expect it to do like a real...
noise canceling headphones like in other words i would say these are not a replacement for airpods pro or over ear noise canceling on a plane they will probably help a little bit but it's it's like a night and day difference so i would still recommend these i still think they're worth the extra 50 bucks maybe for the case with the speaker alone and i like that it's there
But as you would expect from something that doesn't seal your ears in any possible way, there's only so much they can do. Like the bottom line is sound is getting in. The sound can get around the AirPods. There's no seal around the thing. And what I want to ask you guys is I have no idea which one of these four modes I should ever be in.
With the exception of being in noise canceling mode when I'm home alone in the kitchen doing dishes, which I feel like is safe. Every other context, I'm like, should I be in transparency? Should I be in off? Should I be in adaptive? What the hell is adaptive? So please give me some guidance. Of the four modes that these things can go into, when do you use each mode and why?
So what I suggest is in the settings, you can actually remove some of those modes from the rotation. So I remove off. And I remove adaptive. So my only two modes, the reasoning of the sounds, are transparency or noise cancellation. Adaptive, that's the one where it tries to use conversational awareness to try to cancel noise sometimes, but bring in things.
And I haven't tried it recently, so maybe it's better now. When it first came out, I tried it for a day and just hated the choices it was making. And so I instantly – after one day, I'm like, all right, I'm out. So I went back to manually controlling noise cancellation versus transparency.
I can't tell what Adaptive is trying to do because there's no indicator that I found in the UI and saying, is it noise canceling now? Is it not doing it? Is it adding transparency? I turned off the conversation awareness features that are like, oh, do you want me to lower the volume when you start talking or someone talks to you? That was just – It's not what I want anyway.
If you're listening to a podcast, I don't want it to duck the volume. I want to pause it myself, which is what I'll do. I guess that Adaptive is trying to be smart, but I cannot tell what it's doing. Especially because the noise canceling is not so dramatic. I'm like... is it doing noise canceling or has it decided not to?
And then I have to switch modes to go to like either the off mode or the noise canceling mode and compare it to what it was in adapted to tell if it had decided. It's just, it's too much guesswork. So I'm not an adaptive fan right off the bat, but I keep giving it a try in indoor context where I think I'm not going to be hit by a car.
But anyway, so you're using – you don't even use – do you use off? You just use transparency or noise cancelation?
That's it, yeah. I'm in transparency the vast majority of the time unless I happen to be either on a plane or on a subway platform where it's super loud. Then I'll turn on noise cancellation.
So walking the dog is transparency then? Always, yeah.
see what i mean i've been walking the dog with essentially off because i haven't had airpods with noise canceling before and if you're listening to a podcast especially with ones that don't seal your ears you can hear the outside world like i don't feel like i need transparency to replay the outside world because again you can just hear it with these airpods in so maybe i'll use off for dog walks but no use transparency just use transparency you can hear better
trust me it's better just but i don't want the outside world being played at larger volume into my ears when i'm trying to listen to the podcast it's not louder john pump the brakes you're you're thinking way too hard about this just do transparency you're you're you're so wrapped around the axle about it i promise it'll be fine i mean i've tried it like i know what it's like and it does make the outside world more prominent than when it's in off mode
Well, yeah, because it's... So typically, like back when I was using AfterShokz for my dog walks before AirPods Pro existed, the big benefit of the bone conduction style of headphones is your ears are just unblocked. Like you have no... You know, obstruction whatsoever for noise coming in. You're just using the, you know, the bone conduction headphones to add your music or podcast to it.
That's what transparency mode does on the AirPods Pro. So now granted, I haven't tried these AirPods yet. So I don't know if transparency is as good. They don't actually block your ear holes like the Pros do. But I assume it's probably close or as good. And the AirPods Pro transparency is just incredible. As I said, it's way better than even the AirPods Max transparency.
I don't know why, but for whatever reason it is.
Because the AirPods Max don't have the H2.
Maybe. But anyway, so whatever the reason, the transparency in the AirPods Pro is perfect. It really is like you're wearing nothing. If you have the AirPods in and you're not playing anything, and you take them out. The outside world is the same loudness as it was when you had them in. It's as if you're wearing nothing, and then you're adding selectively to it with your podcast. So it is great.
Well, I mean, for these things that don't seal the ear holes, off is not the same as transparency to my ears.
fair but i i would i would experiment with it uh give i would give transparency as much of a shot as you can i will i will try to get adaptive out of it out of the uh the rotation do you happen to know where in settings that is buried i find it by going into the bluetooth menu and and like go go to blue go to the airpods hit the little i button it's in there yeah that's that's annoying thing that you can't do unless they're currently pair yeah it's
If they're not in your ears, like when I go to Bluetooth, it just has like model number, serial number, AppleCare, and forget this device. Yeah, I think they have to be connected. Yeah, right. I'll take it that way. I think I've basically decided that Adaptive is not working for me, but I'll still have to try the other ones. Yeah. One final thing on the case.
There is no magnetic connection between the AirPods 4 case and the MagSafe puck. At least the original MagSafe pod, which is what I have. I have an original MagSafe pod at my nightstand. And that's because the new case is too small to hit the magnets, right? Because the case curves, right? If you put it on the circuit, you're like, oh, it fills the circle. What's the problem?
Well, the problem is the parts that are over the magnets are the curved parts, not the flat part. So it does not magnetically align like the old case did simply because it's smaller. It still charges fine. And it even makes a nice little chime, you know, when you know you've done it. Oh, okay.
So it does charge.
Yeah, you just put a dead center in the thing. It just doesn't like magnetically align itself with the MagSafe thing because it can't. But it does magnetically align itself with the Apple Watch charger. And like in an offset, like if you put on an Apple Watch charger, it snaps right to where it's supposed to go.
And it's not centered like where it wants to be in the Apple Watch charger is like in the lower portion of it, but it will snap right to it. So that's just something to keep in mind. I don't think it's a problem. Again, I love the small case. I totally endorse it. But Apple has sort of outrun themselves.
Maybe, maybe with the new, since you mentioned the new one is narrower, maybe the new one does magnetically align it because it's that much smaller, but I haven't tried it.
All right. Apple watch series 10.
Do you have one? You have one, Casey. What do you think of it?
46.
Thank you. This thing, compared to my Series 8...
little guy it's chonky it's big actually i shouldn't say it's chonky because it's actually very very thin but it's big now that being said it looks like a billboard on my wrist right now but i think you were right the whole time and it only lightly pains me to admit that publicly but i think i will quickly adjust to it and i don't think it's absurd seeing it on my wrist right now
I do wonder if an Ultra would have been a bridge too far. I'm not sure. Maybe it wouldn't be. But looking at the way this is sitting on my wrist right now, I feel like the Ultra might have been too much. If you look at it, it doesn't look that much thinner to me than... But it sits and feels much thinner to my eyes.
And I was talking to Jason about this when we were in Memphis together, and he pointed out to me, and I think he's exactly right, the sensor plateau or mesa or whatever that's on the bottom, the stuff that sits against your wrist with the... with the little LEDs that flash for all the different things that it's sensing, except blood ox, apparently, in many ways.
That is quite a bit thinner than it used to be, and I think that makes a big difference as well. I really like it so far. I also like, speaking of old men with old men problems, I like that the font appears to be noticeably bigger because the screen is so much bigger, which is also nice. In terms of the off-axis viewing,
It's definitely better, but I can't say that I'm like, oh, you know what I mean? Like, it's just one of those things where I think in the past I would have had to twist my wrist more or, you know, just wouldn't be able to see my watch or the watch face. And now I can see it at more angles, but it's not the sort of thing that's striking. It's just, oh, that's nice. It works better now.
Well, if you had the large size of the previous watch, I think you would have noticed both the angle and the thickness. Because I watched a YouTube video of them comparing. It was the Max Tech channel. They were comparing the Series 10 with the Series 9 of the same sort of size class. And the Series 10 looked dramatically thinner.
Just setting aside the little blister on the bottom for the sensors, just the body of it looked thinner. And the same thing with the viewing angle. If you take your old and your new and put them on the same surface and just tilt your head to go at an angle, I think you'll notice a difference. I have been looking for YouTube videos of someone taking, like, a magnifier to this to see if it's MLA.
Seems like the consensus is no. No one has taken a magnifier to it, but... A lot of people have said, first of all, a lot of people are saying that MLA doesn't actually improve viewing angles because it mostly just makes it brighter from the front.
It does make it brighter from the front, but I think it also helps viewing angles if only because they're getting rid of like the color tint and sending light off in other directions. But I'm going to guess, I mean, I'm still looking for evidence.
There'll be follow-up next week if I find some, but I'm going to guess that it's actually not MLA, but simply just a better LTP03, whatever OLED, but still inconclusive. No one on YouTube cares about this enough to take a magnifier to it.
So one thing I haven't tried. Oh, there we go. It's coming from the watch. So I can play music.
I like the speaker holes on the Series 10. I like how instead of being a speaker slot, there's these tiny little holes. It looks much nicer and hopefully less likely to clog with dust.
I mean, for what it's worth, I was trying to play music. Maybe it's not coming through because of Zoom or whatever. But it plays actually surprisingly loud. I mean, this is definitely audible from waist level. I don't know. Again, I don't know how much that's coming through.
Again, testing on YouTube, it seems to be about the same volume as the Ultra, which was the previous Speaker King. And the Ultra has gigantic speaker holes because it's a big, chunky watch. But this one has very tiny, elegant, and numerous speaker holes. And apparently, it gets just as loud as the Ultra.
Yeah, I just tried it for the first time just now. And I don't know if like I said, I don't know if it will come through the recording. It certainly doesn't sound like it's coming through on Zoom. But it I mean, it's sufficient. I wouldn't want to listen to music this way, generally speaking, but in a pinch, especially as someone who really hates silence. And that's me. Yeah, that's kind of nice.
Yeah, I mean, I like it. I like it a lot so far. Way too early to tell because I did this after I did my phone upgrade. And so really, really early to tell. But so far, so good. Did Tina get a new watch this year or no?
So she didn't want one on day one. I wonder if she'll change her mind when she sees them in real life. I did tell her that the new ones don't have blood oxygen. Her current one does. I don't know if she cares about that. But bottom line is, no, she didn't order one. We'll see how long this lasts.
Yeah, so far so good. I think it'll be worth revisiting this next week, both this and the phones once Erin has a chance with hers, because she is much, I was going to say much more blasé. That has a negative connotation. I don't mean that at all, but she's kind of like, yeah, whatever about all this. Like, oh, that's nice. It's new and it has new things. Cool. You know what I mean?
Like it doesn't really rev her engine like it does us. And so I'm curious to hear her thoughts. And by, you know, next Wednesday when we record next, hopefully I'll be able to have her relay some of the some of her opinions for me and I'll see what see what she thinks.
So I took out my series 10. And I had the natural titanium, and I had a number of initial impressions. Number one, the titanium feels great. It is so light. It feels amazing. Because not only did they reduce the weight of the watch in general, like in all of the watches this year, all the Series 10s are lighter in all the metals compared to their previous version metal counterparts. But...
So you have the weight savings there, and then they also have replaced steel with titanium. So the titanium models are almost as light as the aluminum models. They're very, very light. They feel fantastic. They did get bigger, and I got the big one, and I put it on my wrist. And I thought, like Casey just said, it looks like a billboard on my wrist.
I also, it seemed, and I don't know, I don't have my old one here to measure, but it seemed almost like it looked like a more, a closer to square aspect ratio than the outgoing one. Yeah, they did make it wider. They widened it more than they tallened it. Right. And I think that actually I don't honestly like that look. I think it looks even more like a billboard on your wrist.
Oh, really? I think I disagree. I think I like it a little more squared. But I mean, this is, again, initial impressions. I might change my mind on that.
I also find that the natural color of the titanium, I expect it to be a little bit brighter. It actually is like a pretty medium gray to the point where I think it loses a bit of contrast.
Part of the reason why I haven't bought the black watches in the past or all the various forms of black that they've been is that I actually like seeing some contrast between the watch body case and the black crystal above it. and when you have a black or dark gray watch, you lose a lot of that contrast. And so if you're going for kind of like a unified blob look, then that's what you want.
What I want is the contrast between the case metal and the top. And so I actually find I don't like the natural color as much. And the reason I went to the Apple store was like I thought after a half day of wearing it, I think I made a mistake.
with the size oh interesting really they made it you know one millimeter bigger or whatever like they made it a little bit bigger and kind of like the way some people have switched from the max phone down to the pro phone casey you're gonna kill me i switched to the smaller one really you let me out you let me out to convince casey to get the big watch and they're like but for me small watch
i yeah like i i wore it for a few hours and i'm and i'm like i can't like it's it looked too big on me i'm here i'll send you comparison photos and in the slack do you have an ultra marco um not with me i i had an ultra i wore it for a little while like when the first one came out because this is very similarly sized in width and height not obviously thickness because the ultra is way thicker but in width and height this the large is actually pretty close to the ultra if you can pull off the ultra why not this one
I can pull it off. I just don't like it. Do you like the Ultra? No. That's why I don't wear the Ultra.
All right. Fair enough.
No, I bought the Ultra mostly as a test device because the screen felt and looked so different from the previous ones because it didn't have the curvature and it was so big that I felt like as a developer of an app for the watch, I needed one to test. And that did prove useful. But yeah, so when I got this one, I'm like, the big one, they made it too big. It does not...
fit me well like if again i can pull it off but like what i was thinking was like first of all how much of a role do i want this to play in my life like part of the reason to get the ultra before is if you really want a computer on your wrist and you want to use it like a computer like that's then you you want the biggest screen you want the one that can show the most text you want you know the most interface elements on screen at once like you want that but
I don't want it to play quite that big of a role in my person, like on my actual person. I'm happy to take the phone out to do computing tasks. I hardly ever read or write anything on the watch itself. It is mostly a sensor and a brief display for me. So I actually realized, like, I think I actually want the smaller one. And also, I've started doing sleep tracking with this one.
I decided I wanted to start doing that. And the smaller, the better, honestly, when you're doing that. And so the small one, I actually tried the gold one, too.
um so i have the the the 42 millimeter uh gold titanium which honestly is not that gold it's it's a very it's the same way apple does like their pro phone colors like it's a little gold um it's it's it's gold enough to look a little bit different in certain lighting most of the time it just looks like the steel the polished state the polished silver steel But that's fine.
I have it on the black sport band, and that gold and black I think is a very nice look, and I'm very pleased with it right now. It also works well on white. You've got to be a little careful with some of the colors if you try color straps to see if they go with the gold, but black and white look great with it. So I think I'm pretty well covered.
Even by going with the smaller watch, it is even lighter than the bigger one. So it feels like I'm wearing nothing. I think the band weighs more than the watch at this point. So it's a very, very good overall fit for me. Surprisingly so. I really did not think I'd go back to the smaller one. But... They push the big one a little bit too far. And I actually did measure the two of them.
If you measure the aspect ratios of them, the bigger one is more square than the smaller one. Like, it actually has a different aspect ratio. And so the smaller one, I think, looks better on me in part because it is a little bit smaller and in part because it has more rectangular shape. So overall, I like the small one a lot. It is not as much screen space as my big series eight.
Like they didn't make that or my big series nine. They didn't make that big of a jump. But it is more. And I bumped the font size up a couple of notches on it to accommodate my reading glasses need that I'm not satisfying. And so far, I'm liking it. I like the gold for a nice change of pace, even though, again, it's not that gold. But it's subtle enough. It's a nice change of pace.
Again, titanium is so nice to be back. And yeah, so I'm going to rock this look for the year and see how it goes. But it's been honestly very comfortable on me. It's been great.
You let me down. I just put a link in the show notes. I'll see if I can maybe get a better picture of it. I put a link in Slack. Excuse me. I'll see if I can get a better picture for the show notes. It looks a little chunkier there than I feel like it's sitting when I just look down. So, again, this picture ain't great. But, I mean… I don't think it looks bad on me, and we'll see what happens.
I don't personally... Sitting here now, I don't have any particular desire to return this and get the smaller one. And I think maybe part of that is driven by me having kind of mentally prepped myself for going ultra this year and just expecting to have, you know, just... Absolutely mammoth watch on my wrist.
And so while this is surface area mammoth or slightly mammoth, at least it's not depth mammoth. And I think that helps make it feel a lot more svelte than perhaps it actually is.
Plus you get the bigger battery, which has been a concern for you.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Like I would say that looks big, but it doesn't look bad. It does look big.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. Yeah.
And again, like smartwatch fashion is big as in like people like big watches, big smartwatches these days. That's why the ultra has been so popular. It's not because all those people are going diving. It's because they like big watches. That's what's in fashion. and big screens are very useful, and big batteries are very useful.
And so there's lots of reasons why people choose bigger watches, even if they do look big on their wrists. For me, most of those things were... And for me, it's less about the superficial look. It's more about just the way it fits. It...
Even just, like, that little bit extra, like, one of the things I've mentioned in the past is, like, if a watch is too big on my wrist, I don't like what, if, like, if I flex my wrist up, if I'm, like, you know, in certain exercises or something, like, if you're, like, you know, doing, picture yourself doing a push-up.
If you're doing a push-up, like, your hand is bent upwards compared to your wrist. And like, you know, you kind of just have to like, like when you're, when your skin like crushes into the watch, like it's, it's, it's less comfortable. So for me, like in, in my general lifestyle, having a slightly smaller watch is more comfortable and the, the outgoing models are,
the big one was, yeah, it was bigger, but it was not that big. It was, it was like, I think this is a, a noticeable jump in, in, in a way that I didn't expect it to be. Like when I, I took a picture of it, like sitting on top of my series nine and like, you see the size gain. It is not subtle. Like you absolutely see it. Like it is, it is like the big one.
The big series 10 compared to the big series nine is like, it's not just like imperceptibly bigger. You can, you can clearly see which one is which it is obvious. Like, Oh, that's the bigger one. It's cause it's, it's a decent amount bigger.
The big series 10 is basically a curved ultra. Like I think it might even be wider than the ultra. Like it is because they learned that people like the big screen on the ultra, but this is not as nearly as thick as the ultra. That is the big difference in this. And by the way, another change on the series 10 that I saw in some videos is that
Whatever they call the button on the side, not the crown, but, like, the button that you press, that button is way bigger now. Compare it, like, to a Series 9 of the same sign class, and look how big that button is on a 10 versus the 9. I don't know. Which, I mean, I think is a good improvement because, like, why make it so small?
I don't feel like, because I'm looking at my Series 8, the small one, and then the Series 10 is bigger for sure, but that appears to me to be more about the upgrade in size class than it is the fact that the button... Well, I mean, you're maybe not comparing like to like there, but anyway, put a picture from one of the YouTube videos.
But yeah, they made the button bigger, which I think they should. Like, there's no reason to keep it as small. It's, you know, make the whole area where you're going to press be easier to press. I don't have an Apple Watch. My wife has many, many Apple Watches that she's handed down to the kids that she's gotten new ones.
But I did the other day take out for curiosity and just to see if it would still work my Series Zero. My Series Zero Apple Watch, the only Apple Watch I ever purchased for myself. It is a stainless steel, silver stainless steel one. And I wanted to know if it was dead. And good news, it's not dead. And I charged it up and it still looks great as long as you don't look at the screen.
Yeah.
All right.
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Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental. John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
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John, I hear you have some complaints about Volvo's, I was going to say forthcoming, but it's sort of kind of here, electric version of Aaron's car, which is called, her car is the XC90, but the all electric is the EX90. And I hear you have complaints.
I know why car makers keep doing this. We've talked about it before, especially in the context of Tesla early on, that when car makers make an electric vehicle, they feel compelled. To do things to make it seem futuristic. And I was hoping that would be something that car makers would get over after a few years or a decade or whatever. But they just can't stop doing it.
Door handles are the obvious victim here. Can we just have normal door handles? No, it's an EV. They have to be annoying, hard to use, problematic door handles. It's been just an epidemic. Everyone keeps copying it. No one has figured out, hey, just make normal door handles. Going back to normal. But no, they can't. They can't stop doing it. They make all sorts of excuses or whatever.
Anyway, that extends to many other parts of the car. On the Volvo EX90, and I like these cars. I like, you know, as far as SUV goes, I think they're nice looking. They have good features or whatever. But Volvo, like you said, decided to make an electric version of Casey's car. All electric, battery powered EV, right? And for the most part, it looks like the regular one, right?
It doesn't, they didn't do anything weird with the styling. I forget if they have messed up door handles, but who cares at this point? I just, you know, it's invisible to me. What drove me insane was that they said, you know what? Is there some other part of the car that we can screw up because it's an EV? We have the XC90, and it's a perfectly nice car. Could we just make that an EV? No, wait.
Is there some part of the car that previously had no problems with it that we can screw up because it's an EV? And they said, yes, yes, we can. And you know what they screwed up? If you haven't seen reviews of this car, maybe you don't know, because if you look at a picture of it, you're like, oh, it seems fine. It looks kind of like my XC90.
They decided that they're going to screw up the headlights. Oh, stop. It's fun. No, no. Let me tell you. All right. So headlights, there are things on the front of your car that light up, right? And over the years, we've done lots of different things with headlights. We talked about it on a previous episode that Mercedes used to have little windshield wipers and little sprayers to go on them.
Not just Mercedes.
BMW probably did it as well. All the German car makers had little windshield wipers. It's like, hey, if you're going on the road and dirt flies up on your headlights, not as much light will get out. So we'll try to clean them off.
modern cars tend not to do that it's kind of out of fashion but they're more aerodynamic shaped and we have led lights which of course can be smaller but just as bright and we have matrix leds all sorts of advances trying to make lights better to serve you better and volvo said but this is an ev let's screw them up in some way and so what they decided to do was for their headlights
You have to have daytime running lights for laws in various places, which are just lights that are on when you're just driving around. But then you have the headlight part of it. And they said, what we can do is we'll have the daytime running lights where the headlights normally are. In the little Thor's hammer Volvo design, we're going to have little matrix LED daytime running lights.
But they'll be where the headlights are. And you may be asking, but then where do you put the headlights? If you put the daytime running lights right where the headlights were going to be.
Wait for a little bit of historical context here. So you are right. It is called the Thor's hammer, like headlight motif. And the way this is, is imagine an uppercase letter T and then pitch it so that the, the, the horizontal crossbar on the T twist it 90 degrees in either way. So now that horizontal crossbar is vertical, right? And that's on the outsides of the car.
So it looks kind of like a hammer and on Aaron's car and on her prior one, may it, may God rest its soul. Um,
um i don't recall what specifically was daytime running lights and what was headlight headlights i believe it was additional lenses or you know leds or whatever that yeah leds i guess that came on um when you turned on the headlight proper and and the thor's hammer stuff did still stay on but the headlights were quite a bit brighter but and so at a glance this looks the same but as you were about to say before i interrupted you it is quite a bit different now right so they have a daytime running lights where the headlights normally are
And how do you get to the headlights? You know, if you're in the car and you turn on the headlights, or you probably don't because it's just auto mode or whatever, it gets too dark and you need the headlights to be turned on, what happens is that the Thor's Hammer daytime running lights open like a mouth.
Mechanical shutters move vertically up and down to open a cavity that contains the actual headlights.
what they have reinvented pop-up headlights from the 80s but 10 times worse because they have mechanical things that need to open for your headlights to work at all because your headlights are 100 blocked when this mouth is closed in front of each things so they have to have a little thing that slides up and a little thing that slides down to reveal your headlights and then what that opens is a cavity in the front of your car that presumably can fill with snow and ice and slush and whatever and screw up the mechanism that has to constantly open and close for the headlights
John, if you're going to whine, at least get your facts straight. All right. It doesn't open a cavity. It's still behind the like plexi or the glass or what have you that is in front of the headlights. It's all internal to the car. There is no cavity for snow to get into.
Now, what you're saying is true that, you know, let's go back to a vertical T. Instead of the crossbar, the horizontal crossbar, now we're talking about the vertical bar. Which, once you twist it 90 degrees, now it's a horizontal bar. There's two rows of lights, and they do part. That is correct. That is a physical thing that happens. That part you're correct about.
But there's no opening to the outside world. This is all in the headlight housing. No.
No, no, no. Where the mouth parts used to be is now a cavity because they used to be filling that spot. So there is another two inches. If you take a stick and you poke it in this car and it hits daytime running lights and you open the mouth, you can push that stick in two more inches. No, it looks like John. That's where the little things used to be.
There's glass in front of it.
Yes, there is, but the thickness of the shutters is now gone, right? That's the cavity. And why is that cavity important? Because when the mouth has to close, if there's anything in that one or two inches, now they're squishing it, and now you're getting crap in between the little shutters. How is something getting in there? Here's the thing.
here here's the thing nothing this is not a problem right that needed to be solved they have made it an overly complicated thing on a safety feature of the car which is the headlights this was not a problem anyone had they didn't say we have no place to put the headlights what are we going to do we have to make up these shutters it's just a mechanical thing it's a moving part they can possibly fail and have things stuck into the crevices or whatever for no reason it's like the door handles that are like you know
rise out to greet you like there was nothing wrong with the door handle that you could just grab you just made an additional failure point for no benefit this wasn't there is no problem being solved here except for someone thinking this was cool and for volvo a brand that is not known for this especially again for a safety feature to decide they want a mechanical moving part again have we learned nothing from pop-up headlights of seeing the whatever the game used to play when you see a car with one headlight and you punch somebody or whatever
Because pop-up headlights would get stuck down or stuck up, which was again a safety issue. Mechanical things that move when they don't have to is just asking for an additional failure. This is one of the most shockingly bad ideas from a company that I expect better of. Tesla... By all means, I would expect them to do this or worse, right? But Volvo, what are you doing, Volvo?
The XC90 has, I think, A, more attractive headlights than the EX90. I think they just look nicer in both modes, but especially in the open modes. And B, guess what? No moving parts. It's just a headlight. It just sits there on the car and it just shines light. And that's all it needs to do when it does everything. You've got the daytime running lights. You've got the headlights.
You've got everything. Everything was fine. This didn't need to be changed. I'm just unreasonably angry about this. You are. And it makes me, it crosses this whole car off my list. I will never recommend this to anybody until they fix these headlights because it's insanity.
You are losing your marbles, sir. Okay. I need to be completely clear one more time. There is a lens in the front of this whole assembly, just like on your beloved Hondas, just like on my Volkswagen, just like on the BMW that Marco just bought that he'll have for another 10 minutes. There is a lens in the front. So unless that lens somehow disintegrates, there is no poking with a stick.
There's nothing to
poke i see i see what you're saying in the thing it's hard to see in the video that i'm going to link in the show notes but i see what you're saying if that's the case and things won't get in there you can redact that part of my complaint but every other part of it in terms of the moving parts that can fail still stands because have you ever gotten condensation inside a headlight or a taillight those things are supposed to be sealed but even on very expensive cars they aren't always
no like you are right that this is needlessly mechanically complicated correct your risk profile assessment is wrong because it does appear to be sealed but here's the thing about the risk this is an unnecessary this is a choice to have any additional risk over what was previously there you know what i'm saying like the other one does not have any doors that have to move open at all so like any additional risk even if it's tiny is just foolish and and by the way do you think it makes these headlights cheaper to replace i don't think it does oh that's gotta be a thousand dollar assembly right
Oh, more than that. Are you kidding? You have not priced a headlight recently. No, I guess not. Do not look up how much your headlights cost on your new car.
Yeah, please don't. Do not do it. So here's the thing. I concur with reservations that, yes, this is needlessly complex, and yes, it can break, and yes, that could be a very bad safety issue.
$5,000?
I looked it up. I told you, don't look it up. Oh, my God. For your car or the Volvo?
I told you not to look it up.
Don't hit a stump. Oh, my God. You should see what the headlights cost on like a Lamborghini. Each headlight, it costs as much as my car.
That's not true because the Diablo used 300ZX headlights.
No, not the Diablo.
I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
The Lamborghinis that you two don't know the names of because they're too new.
Yeah, fair enough. No, I agree with you with reservations that it is needlessly complex. And yes, it could potentially be a safety issue. But I mean, no more so than a headlight going out like bulbs used to go out on the regular.
That's why we use LEDs. We make advances to make headlights better. And they've decided to voluntarily make them worse and more expensive.
By the way, real time follow up. It's not it's only five thousand dollars per headlight. If I get the laser lights option, which I do not have. So the non-laser BMW iX headlight, it's only $2,100 per light. And that's on sale. That's 20% off the official price of $2,600. Gracious.
The thing I will say, though, about these headlights is, yes, it could be a safety issue. But my retort to that is, where's your sense of adventure? These things look so freaking cool. I'm in.
I don't even think they look cool. That's the thing. And by the way, I just Googled this one just to give you the number. The Bugatti Chiron. You may have heard of this. It is the Veyron's successor. It is not the latest Bugatti because they have a new one that's coming out soon. But anyway, the Chiron. The Bugatti Chiron. Are you familiar with this car? Google for Bugatti C-H-I-R-O-N.
I've heard of it, yes.
Would you like to guess how much a headlight costs for that car?
Well, weren't the mufflers like $40,000 in the Veyron or something like that?
Go ahead. Make your guess.
For the headlights, $10,000.
30.
I'm going to say 30 per headlight.
164 000 what for for one headlight i think that might be for both of them but you can double check how much is the whole car like a million bucks i think it's like three million oh my god let me see if it's per let's see uh what kind of light i think it's for both of them so it's a bargain you're getting two for 164 oh that's that's very very nice of them so again don't get a stump with your bugatti chiron