Episode 1005: Apple Watch Series 12 review

Welcome and Episode Overview

0:00UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com slash work. UKG, HR, pay, and workforce management.

0:30Into the wild. The Cartier Panther encounters a shimmering crocodile, a lonely lovebird, a breathless zebra, and a restless tiger.

0:50Unscripted, unfiltered, unafraid, welcome to the Macworld Podcast. My name is Michael Simon, and I am joined today by my UK colleague, David Price. Hello. And my San Francisco colleague, producer, Roman Loyola. Howdy. Wow. I usually say ahoy, but I said ahoy. Yeah, that was very dramatic, Roman. I didn't know what you were going to do with those fingers. Finger guns. Yeah. So, anyways. This is episode number 1,005.

1:20Roman, I don't like saying 1,000. Like, it's never going to go back to an easy number. Like, what if it's 1,236? Like, I can't say all those numbers. It's kind of clumsy. Maybe you could just say the numbers. Can we go back to five? Or reset it to zero? No, I can't reset it to zero. I don't know. If anybody listening or view watching this has a solution. Yeah, is there like a, I mean, I'll do Roman numerals. What's the, what's it that? An M or C or something? Yes, just MV. MV, X, X, X, X, X, X.

1:53Doing binary. I-V, you're binary. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. One, zero, zero, one, zero. All right. This is episode number 1,000. My son is learning binary. And I was impressed because I never learned it in school. But he's too. He's like taking computer science and they have to learn all these various languages. It's almost like a foreign language at this point. Like, you take French and you take computer science. um anyway episode number 1005 and today the reason why um david is on is because he reviewed the apple watch series 12 uh it feels like it was like months ago david but i looked it up it

2:27was october 6th it was two weeks ago but apple has done so much in the last two weeks you actually got bumped we've never bumped a guest on the podcast is that true of course we're not we're we're desperate for guests we're not we're not bumping anybody but uh i got bumped last week because of the um what was it called i forgot the name of the event already welcome home that's right welcome with the home view and all that stuff um so we're going to talk about the series 12 what he liked what he didn't like um performance battery all the things whether i i want to know

3:01if he's still wearing it and we'll talk about why i'm wondering that um when he talks about his review uh it was a fun review to edit i'll i'll say that a little teaser for if anybody doesn't like the watch and wants to click away from this show um it's going to be a really interesting conversation about it um then we'll have this week in apple history and we will close with our comment corner speaking in comments you can contact us through blue sky facebook threads search for macworld look for the blue mouse logo send an email to podcast at macworld.com send us a personal email um

3:32comment under a post comment under a video just get in touch with us some way and um we will talk about uh your comment on a future show all right so before we get into the watch yesterday apple

Upcoming Pro Intel Event

3:44announced which we had expected uh an event uh called pro intel which is a uh just a terrible pun apple apple apple loves its puns and um david david already registered his uh his complaint roman said he's can fit what roman what what did you confuse it with when you were writing your uh preview wait hold on i have it here you sent me a message oh i always confuse it with touch and pro

4:15touch and pro right that's also a bad like touch and go touch and pro because of the rumored touch screen macbook pro that we're supposed to get oh hey that's actually better yeah i think apple should apple should hire you to do taglines but if they did that then that's you know they're tipping their hat or obvious they're showing right right it says too much yeah it says maybe you're right i bet you that's what they wanted i bet you that's what they thought about somebody yeah someone at apple uh who's on the list yeah anyway i've always said i i wish i wish i could be in the room

4:51when they're coming up with these like do they have like a list that they just go to and like all right we'll do this one this time or do they say all right this is what we're doing this is the artwork let's come up with a tagline i'd like to know they're so generic that's the thing yeah yeah they are pro intel so you're just gonna tell us about a pro product i mean that's it's so non-specific it's i don't like it also it doesn't really make sense i don't think it works as a pun i'm sorry to bang on about this but i used to have to write puns because i was a sub editor for

5:24many years and it doesn't work the surface reading of it doesn't work like i get that it's a pun or based on show and tell but pro and tell pro is not a verb so what's the surface it is an apple an apple world a kind of a verb you're not thinking different right yeah i don't think it works but uh what about welcome home did you did you like that uh yeah that's that's that's solid enough yeah and once we knew it was called home view like that makes

5:58even more sense like yeah that that's not a bad one at all what was the iphone one roman do you remember uh the one from september man i have a terrible memory for this stuff no that was like three years ago jeez i don't remember oh the one yeah i don't remember the one that would just i got it when was surprise and shine that was it that was i just looked it up surprise and shine which doesn't really mean in retrospect did it even mean anything um well rise and shine uh

6:28like the dawn of something maybe i don't know it was just that was on their list of generic names so they could use any event so yeah yeah maybe um but anyway so next week pro intel event now i want to call it touching pro roman that's better but you're right it's too apple would never do that because it tells you everything anyway uh pro intel um if you don't know what's coming it's actually quite a few stuff we're expecting the m6 imac the m6 macbook pro not the

7:02high-end version like the base model the um ipad mini which the ipad mini is such a weird device like it doesn't really have a home like it just kind of comes and goes when apple feels like it so that's going to be part of this like sandwiched into this mac event and then the the marquee thing is this touchscreen macbook pro a high-end macbook pro um roman you can you can run through the the specs of it what we expect uh so we're expecting a m5 pro and m5 max chip it had been rumored

7:43to have an m6 but then apple decided to skip that series because they wanted to focus on m series m7 development because they want to make that more of an ai uh focused chip right uh an oled display i almost said oled almost said oled i love saying oled but uh oled display uh supposed to be maybe thinner and lighter lighter more than thinner from what we yeah we've heard in the in the rumors like

8:16lighter is the is the bigger thing it's uh so 14 and 16 we're expecting right right like two two sizes oh that's the interesting thing it's 14 and 16 we have not heard that the current m5 m5 pro and m5 max macbook pros are going to be replaced right so you would think they would be but i could also see apple going yeah we'll leave them in the line for now and then we'll discontinue them later yeah it sounds like based on everything we read that it's going to be

8:51a higher end version of rice machines not uh a replacement so right now the m the m the m5 pro and max start at like twenty five hundred and thirty five hundred or something something like that yeah so like this could be like four grand these things starting at like four thousand dollars for the 16 inch which is that is a lot of money and um all right david i'll ask you because you're like you

9:22you use max but you're not like a an enthusiast like roman is like do you care about a touchscreen mac i i care in the negative like i think it's an active i can't possibly see why anybody would want a touchscreen mac other than the sort of it next sort of logic but i don't want to be reaching up to touch the screen in my macbook it that's not ergonomic at all so i agree and i i wonder and even like so the ipad is the obvious you know comparison

9:56if you buy an ipad pro or any ipad and you pop it into a magic keyboard it becomes a touchscreen laptop of sorts that has a keyboard a trackpad and a screen but the point of that is in my mind maybe at least the way i use it when i use it is i don't want to touch the screen anymore i want to use it like a laptop i want to type i want to use the trackpad and i the only thing i can think of roman maybe it's a it's a convertible and the screen flips around so you can use it like a laptop and then you flip it that's why it's so thin and

10:31light and all that stuff so you flip it and then it becomes a tablet a mac tablet that makes the most sense to me we haven't heard anything about that right like that's like that like generally like german would float like oh and they're thinking of making the hinge 180 but he hasn't said that so i have to assume that that was happening we would know but that's the only way it makes sense to me otherwise why would you pay more so it's going to have the same chip the same ports and this and a slightly better screen but the mini led screen on the macbook pro is fantastic

11:04i can't imagine oled is that much better visually so you're talking about do you want to pay for touch or do you want to not pay for touch and i i don't know i'm with you david i don't know of any of any pro user who would be like yeah i gotta have um touch that option to touch my screen i hate when people touch my screen my son does it all the time because he thinks that everything is a touch screen and i'm like no no no like i never now i gotta clean it because i hate looking at fingerprints when i'm using my like i don't mind it so much in my phone because it has the

11:36coating and everything maybe they'll make a coating so it won't be so obvious but i don't know i'm with you i'm i'm very interested to see it because this is for one it's the thing that steve jobs said forever like no we're not doing it even tim cook said like no we're not doing a touch screen mac it doesn't make sense so i i why now is my big question like the touch screen laptops have that ship has sailed so long ago like what makes it now that apple and turnus or whoever decided to do that has to do it right now and if they do that now then that will know that will make

12:12three products in a row that they've done that were very new for apple but quite late for the market because they've done they've done a foldable phone they've been around for years they've done a sort of amazon echo type smart speaker with a with a display and now they're going to do a touch screen mac i i don't see why any of those really make sense timing wise they they should have done them all a while ago yeah yeah it's like the season of ketchup roman write that down that's an idea for

12:44an article david write that tomorrow that's the next the next apple event is called the season of ketchup seriously it really is that's that's a that's a good observation that i i'm you're right like october this this the last five weeks it's like apple being like all right we got to catch up to all the things we haven't done in the last 10 years and it's yeah we'll see we'll see if they can sell it i mean the the folding phone went on sale last week and it's it's back ordered till january so clearly there's a pent-up demand for for apple doing things that other people are already doing even the

13:17home view um it's not you can't get one until well through apple until like december so people are buying this stuff but yeah i don't i don't know we'll see if people are going to spend four to five thousand dollars on a touch screen mac i don't know i mean to be fair there is a logic you know having said having said that the timing doesn't make sense we know why home view was delayed it's because siri ai wasn't ready they wanted to make a home ai a year two years ago and they didn't have the ai for it um and they wanted to wait until they had a really really good foldable phone before

13:52they could launch that and based on what people are saying i haven't tried one out but based on what people are saying based on the early sales projections it looks like it might have worked really well so yes maybe i'm talking through my hat and the touch screen mac would be great as well so i don't know but it's still it's it's a lot to happen at once and it's somewhat uncharacteristic for apple to drop so many new categories of devices at one time i mean however you slice it maybe they're all great and you know we have no reason to think that they're not but to release

14:24these three major new categories in less than five weeks or whatever it's been is it's it's it's a lot and i wonder what the thinking was there why not do even if home view came out in june at wwdc and said like it's gonna get siri ai in a couple months like there's nothing wrong with that it still does a lot of other stuff there's something to be said for for for like product fatigue for out for buying fatigue even you know these aren't cheap things if you buy all three of these things you're

14:56spending like 10 grand i don't have that line around roman might he's he's he's always traveling all over the world but i don't so we'll see um all this stuff's coming out next week we're not sure how it's going to be we do know it's not a keynote it's another experience thing this time it's in la uh so it's it's all like the the iphone event was in their their campus in cupertino the last week's welcome home event was in new york and now this one's in la so they're all over the u.s but um

15:29next week's thing it's it's when so wednesday at one o'clock eastern 10 o'clock pacific we assume that's when apple will announce the touchscreen macbook pro but since that's a wednesday in the past they've done a couple days of announcements and we're expecting a few different things so we could get max on tuesday or monday and ipad on monday we don't know so stay tuned there's probably a couple days worth of stuff there's a few things coming next week and um yeah start saving your money because this thing is not going to be cheap ukg is the workforce operating platform with unified

16:05hr payroll and workforce management built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work powered by people first ai and decades of labor data ukg turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing pay compliance and productivity enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens because when work works everything works learn more at ukg.com work ukg hr pay and workforce management in deepest jungle cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies

16:40a lovebird lost and missing his mate is far from his path in lonely state dry your tears now bears a start follow my steps to heal your heart panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace through the power of scent she finds the trace behold two lovers reunite in the skies a most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes together forever they shine each day bound by the beauty

Apple Watch Series 12 Review

17:13of cartier okay all right david apple watch series 12 as an editor i'm i haven't reviewed an apple watch like firsthand in a long time as an editor i'm never really excited to read apple watch reviews because they're you know they're out their watches the last one you wrote i forget what your headline was but it was basically like hey this is it's it's really good but it's you don't need to buy it

17:44and blah blah blah you should get the sc instead right that was last year right the sc3 yeah which which was also not all that exciting but it was a it had enough stuff and enough of an upgrade and a better price and great value you know right value so i you know i opened the the watch review and our system and i said all right here we go and i looked at your headline and i said huh and then i looked at your score and i said oh okay well this is going to be interesting because you know apple stuff is

18:14they're always well made and we always like them and we rarely give out five stars but sometimes we do we rarely give out anything less than four i i can think of vision pro god i think three and a half uh airpods max got a low score but i didn't think this was one of those but you gave it three and a half stars or three stars i think you started at three we went up to three and a half is that right yeah we talked about it uh originally it was going to be three and it is weird i know for anybody who's watching this listening to this who isn't who isn't in the media bubble and thinks three three out of

18:48five should be a perfectly good score it's not it's not that's a bad score yeah three three might as well be a zero yeah like like when i saw three i'm thinking oh like apple might reach out to me and be like hey maybe he had a bad a bum unit because like three stars is he might as well tell someone to throw it in the garbage yeah i wasn't very happy but i after i talked to you i thought it was fair enough to bump it to three and a half because it's not it's not a bad product it's it's not terrible it's just

19:18disappointing um right after the year before the year before was was was good um although as you said i didn't think you needed to buy the more expensive of the two models but this year there's no new se i mean which is a tragedy so it was i think what i wrote at the start of the article was was like there's no new se this year which which left a gap for the series 12 to slide into and just take the crown and and become the essential smartwatch and it didn't for me anyway it was um

19:52it was it was full of annoying flaws annoying imperfections things that weren't ready um things that didn't feel quite right and in answer to your question earlier i am uh still wearing it as that is my ongoing smartwatch so i i can't obviously i can't hate it that much but um yeah i was a little bit disappointed well apple has established a precedent with the apple watch and um you know

20:28it's like you don't need to buy each generation you you know it the chip might be the same even if it gets a new name there might be a new sensor but maybe we don't really know if it does it's not a something that you can use every day blah blah so but this one and the reason why i was taken so back by your score because for the first time in quite a while the series 12 is being presented as an upgrade watch there are several features in the series 12 the the continuous heart rate

21:01monitoring the the audio intelligence stuff the the readiness app that you need a series 12 to to use so i expected your review to be like yeah this is the great finally there's a reason to upgrade go buy one and it was very much not that because well for one let's so let's start with the most obvious thing is you had you you experienced quite a few like little bugs while you were reviewing

21:32it some of them were software and some of them weren't though it reset spontaneously uh three times on one day right and i was quite put out by that but you you pointed out that there was a known bug going around and since since i last updated watch os it hasn't done that again so i'm never really sure how much to mark down a product for things like that it it it it shipped with a bug which caused

22:03quite a serious um annoyance but they they patched it punctually so i mean i i guess that's a that's fine um yeah worth worth noting but not yes if you buy one now and upgrade you'll be it'll be fine um but the things in general seem to be a bit slow which is which was really confusing to me because it has a faster processor um but i would i would like so i went out walking i was walking for

22:34an hour um it didn't notice i was walking like all the last multiple generations of apple which have been really sharp and noticing i'm i'm doing some form of exercise and correctly guessing what form of exercise and then offering a workout that's that's one of the things they do really accurately which is one of the best things it does because yeah i even when i'm on like a treadmill or or an exercise bike i often forget to turn the workout thing on it it's nice after a couple minutes of hey you know you're doing this can you want to track it and it does it retrospectively that's a really nice thing

23:06it doesn't start recording it from when it says it was listening the whole time it was monitoring the whole time so that's nice but this on this occasion uh after an hour i finished the walk and at no point in the walk had it said i think you're walking or started measuring or anything and i don't think i was walking super slow i just think it was a bit dopey that day um the other day is when it was like that when i did shazam uh and it it was having a good old think about this song and then the song

23:36finished and it had nothing and and it was you know lots of little things like that and each one you could say uh or maybe the internet connection wasn't so good although something else was working fine but or maybe i was walking slowly there were lots of things like that and the accumulative effect of it was i just thought i can't depend on this watch to quite the same um slick level that i'm used to with with many previous generations of upwatch i've got used to that level of performance that wasn't it wasn't quite there like i have to really emphasize um it was just slightly off it's

24:15a good watch but just not quite as good in those respects um as the previous model i would say and and there was a physical flaw as well sorry sorry to carry on to trample on you but um when you mentioned that i might have a duff unit i thought this too because on the um the surface or the front surface where the screen gives away to the bezel when you when you run your finger over it on my unit there's a little sharp edge and i checked that against the series 11 i checked it against the se3 neither of

24:51them had the same thing and one of our one of our freelancers i believe got in touch with you to say yeah he had the same thing he bought one um on the day it released and he hadn't noticed that flaw until you he read your review and then said oh my i i have it too yeah and maybe it's not a flaw maybe it's a design thing but again apple has it's been you know we're on series 12 it's been over 10 years that apple has been refining the apple watch and you expect a certain level it's almost like

25:27if i was reviewing it it's starting with a four it convinced me it's better than that convinced me it's worse than that and in this case they convinced you that it was worse than that because you've you know you it's not like you're new to apple watch you've you've you've reviewed the last several for us and you've owned them for years so like you know what you're talking about and um you know i agree all those little things like each one on its own like okay shazam's a little slow siri the siri i we haven't talked about yet we will but you know that's a little slow fine i can

26:02overlook that but together you know it's yeah it's definitely taken a a small step backward from the series 11 from what i i haven't used it yet but from what i read in your review yeah because these sorts of reviews are so much about vibes um because of course the smart couple days yeah they don't have the same um range of benchmarking suites that you get you know when you review a macbook or a phone or a tablet you you run you run geekbench you know you you run on tutu you run one of these automated

26:37things that will tell you this is the speed this is what it did this apple watches um you just use them for a while and you get an impression and it's really subjective um and you know when we talk about battery life that's a big part of it as well but you just try and you use it for a while you make a part of your life and you just have to sort of go with your instincts and my instincts on this uh were not good and i and i would tend to trust them because as you said i must have used

27:08sort of the last 10 generations of apple watch um and i never previously had that that nagging doubt that maybe it wasn't particularly well designed maybe it wasn't particularly well um manufactured which is such a rare thing to think about an apple product and it made me start doubting it and thinking have they changed the factory tolerances have they have they tried to save money by by cutting something um cutting costs somewhere that previously it would have been beautifully smoothed

27:41off and now it's not so and you know that's i mean we don't know but sure i mean maybe because they didn't raise the price of it notably and they raised the price of everything else that has ram in it and storage so i mean it could be that they shaved a little bit off here a little bit off there i noticed um and i wrote a i wrote a silly little article right after the announcement that the bezels the just the what you can see of the screen of the of the blackness of the screen is significantly thicker on the 12 than it was on the 11 or the 10 and that's also a a design or

28:18a manufacturing or an engineering decision because it's the same size screen it's just a slightly bigger you see a little bit more of the black it's not as draped over the edges as it was on previous generations and you know it doesn't look bad but it's noticeable you know if you remember back with the series one i mean those bezels there was a square screen the bezels were gigantic and over the years apple has gradually pushed them to the edges where with the series eight and nine they were almost invisible and now it's very noticeably back

28:51you um you wrote five bullet points for issues that were related to speed and responsiveness that you uh experienced over the two weeks or whatever that you were using it and you know like there were significant things like uh even aside from the resetting like you said that it didn't offer your sleep score till till almost 10 30 like you know like you're you've forgotten all about your sleep by then yeah you're you're on to the next day yeah and i wouldn't mind that if that was how it's

29:25designed like if if they've made a conscious decision maybe sometimes people get up and then they go back to bed or something like that then fine but it normally tells me much sooner than that so it was clear that isn't deliberate it's clear that that was not how it's supposed to work and it was and something for whatever reason had gone wrong and yeah and that adds to the impression of of is this a properly made watch yeah right ukg is the workforce operating platform with unified hr payroll and workforce

29:59management built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work powered by people first ai and decades of labor data ukg turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing pay compliance and productivity enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens because when work works everything works learn more at ukg.com slash work ukg hr pay and workforce management in deepest jungle cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies

30:32a love bird lost and missing his mate is far from his path in lonely state dry your tears now there's a start follow my steps to heal your heart panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace through the power of scent she finds the trace behold two lovers reunite in the skies a most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes together forever they shine each day bound by the beauty of cartier

Watch AI Features and Readiness

31:07so i said before the series 12 has a bunch of features that are for lack of a better word exclusive i guess they are but i mean the the ultra gets them too but that are just for this generation of watches and half of them haven't even come yet like the biggest ones haven't even arrived yet exactly you've got the the four siri ai the four strands of the ai features two of them here two of

31:38them are not and inevitably the two that are not are the ones that are most interesting and most useful so it's it's got sound recognition which is which is essentially an old feature but used to be something you'd have on the iphone and it's the home pad did it too i believe yes and it's a good feature right and it's uh and it's for people with um uh with hearing impairments so it's listening out and you and you choose what sounds you wanted to listen out for and it can listen out for smoke alarms fire alarms breaking glass crying babies and pets of various kinds and i tested it out and it's

32:16and it's it's good uh it it nearly always gets them it nearly always it nearly always correctly identifies those things if they are happening but it also does quite a lot of false positives so um it's not something you'd put on unless you needed it to be on and then it could save your life potentially but also it would be very annoying the rest of the time that that's my assessment of it yeah it also like i it seems as though a feature i would use like

32:46like i never understood the home pod one because like if it can hear a smoke alarm so can i so what's the point but if i'm away from my house and my watch says hey there's an alarm going off like that that would be useful yeah but i think it's also meant for people who are deaf um so if you can't hear if you can't hear your babies crying for example then it might be useful to have your watch inform you of that um so i i think it's really it's a well thought through idea for a for a feature

33:20but the idea of it being sort of packaged with these other serial features as being really groundbreaking when as you said it's something that's been possible for a while on the on the home pod and the iphone it's not a huge thing uh and and similarly with music recognition i i like that it's essentially shazam but always on always on yeah um so you you'd have uh in the smart stack on your um on the face it's always got um or when it's active it's a bit subjective for when

33:54it appears but it's always listening out to music so you just have to sort of swipe down a little bit bring up the widget for shazam and it and it will show you the song that it has already worked out is playing so it doesn't have to do that um the thinking process which i found so annoying when i when i did uh shazam actively so that it it saves all that time and yeah it's much better it is much better than doing shazam manually so i like it but yep it's not really a new feature it's a different

34:25way of activating an existing feature yeah it was always built into the it's been built into the control center on iphone for a while shazam like you don't even have to go into the app like you just yeah press the little control circle and it tells you um and uh google introduced this many many years ago on its pixel maybe the first pixel if not the first and the second where it would always be listening and tell you on the lock screen like if you're in the mall or in your car or whatever it'll

34:57tell you what the uh what the phone is yeah it's not particularly revolutionary or ingenuitive but you know like you say it's it's it's nice to have yeah and then the other two siri ai features are much more interesting like yeah i mean potentially creepier but much more interesting um the live recap wait no i'm gonna make sure i get these right around live rewind and siri recap isn't it yeah that's right and live rewind you do a little double double press on the button on the

35:30watch and it goes and then it and it shows you the last 15 seconds of what it's been listening to in your conversation in your vicinity so if the if the wait has just come over and been speaking you couldn't quite make out what they said and they've walked away rudely then you just do 15 seconds it shows you everything that they said that's that's great that's a really great idea they've put a lot of thought into it they've you know they've been aware of the privacy concerns around that so they've they've made sure that there's a big i mean this they say because it's not available yet but they say

36:02there's a big obvious animation on the screen it makes a noise you have to do this one specific gesture that people will start to recognize because it's it's always that double tap so people will know what's happening so it's a really nice idea it's useful it's well thought through can't do it can't do it yet it's not here so you still can't it's not even so we're getting 27.2 um next week the the release candidates just came out this week and that's obviously tied to the all the max and stuff and it's it's not even part of that yeah so it's been a month since they've been on shelves

36:36and it's still not available apple says it'll ship before the end of 2026 but we'll see if it's not in 27.3 beta that we'll probably get next week it might not you know and that's not uncommon they've done that before look at siri ai that was delayed for two years so like you know it's not uncommon to delay sweep features but again when you're reviewing a new product that's supposed to have x number of new features and two major ones aren't there you know it's it's hard not to

37:10take that into account and say hey this is not this is an unfinished product exactly and and people will have bought it on the strength of those features the same exactly the same as they bought the iphone 16 yeah um for for apple intelligence and for the new version of uh siri that was supposed to be coming um and the contextual stuff that was in the advert um and didn't arrive for years and they got sued for that and they had to pay out a lot of money and i'm i'm not inclined to be

37:41particularly forgiving for them putting this in their big keynote presentation and saying wow look at um look at live rewind look at siri recap these are amazing features and they demonstrate them and then we don't get them for months so right i find that frustrating um yeah and disappointing as i said yeah and i'm looking forward to when you do review them because i you know they are they're the most interesting they're the most controversial they're the the probably the the most polarizing

38:14new apple watch feature in 10 years i mean because of what it does and like you said the privacy stuff or you say it so much more elegantly when you say privacy but uh yeah it's they're they're very interesting features they're useful but also you know there's a slippery slope there's a line there you know i'm very interested to see and i was actually looking forward to i mean i knew it wasn't going to be in your review because i knew it wasn't out yet but when you said you were getting a watch and you would be reviewing it and that's the one thing i couldn't wait to see how does it

38:45work you know what do you think of it also if everything else is slow on your watch how you know how quickly does that 15 seconds if it takes 10 seconds to generate the thing are you going to lose five seconds of the 15 seconds at its approach you know what i mean so i'm like i'm interested in and how all that works yeah well because i've all i've just been using the airpods 5 um and i found that there is always a big pause after after you engage siri ai on that so i i've just got used to

39:19the idea really that a lot of these newer apple features are are a bit sluggish um and it's it doesn't really help the user experience when you when you're constantly waiting for technology we i think we've we've grown quite impatient in that sense i know i have and i sit there going well i want to know what the capital of finland is now thank you very much airpods why are you pausing i mean it's like that on the phone uh yeah as well i mean i have a air and it has a whatever an 18 pro processor

39:54whatever 19 pro whatever it is and yeah when i ask it something it thinks for a bit of time before it tells me and you know it's the true of gemini and chat gpt and all these things but as you say like we're used to or we expect instantaneous at this point and you know we're just not we're just not there yet and it's worse on these smaller devices with with lesser chips and you know like the home pod will be even worse home view i'm very interested to see what home view is like

40:25that that has an a18 processor not even a pro so i'm really interested to see like that commercial that they ran everything works so great and they flip it around and they like i don't know if it's gonna really work quite as well as that but we'll see readiness though is on is on the uh the beta um well no because you get so you get the full readiness app uh i was trying to explain this to jason because it's not fully integrated yet so this is another thing that we're still waiting on the the

41:00up what is it it's not upgraded it's a redesigned health app right i don't think that's in the beta either is that right i think it was and i mean i think they took it off yeah i think it was in beta one and then it got removed in beta three or something i forget but yes and that was there to start right well that had that had readiness built into it so readiness is on the series 12 and you can use it and it gives its data to to you but then if you want to see that information integrated into your wider

41:31health data visualization that will be in the new version of health so that's also not quite ready um but readiness readiness itself i i was pleased with i thought that's i thought that was pretty good i think that's um it's a really nice way of using data in a simple way so it just it takes um how well you slept heart rate information um h i can't remember the acronym hp wait i got it here

42:04um uh hrv hrv hbv some illness isn't it yeah but it takes that information and various other data points and then it uses that to just produce a score out of 10 so really nice and simple and that score out of 10 is how um ready your body is to exercise right now so you get up in the morning and you go into that app and it will say seven or say nine great let's go you know you haven't you haven't done a lot of exercise recently you had loads of sleep last night you're in good health it's a great

42:38day to go to the gym um or i might say three you know you didn't get a lot of sleep or you exercised a lot yesterday you probably should rest and that's really useful information it's actionable information as our managers would probably say um you can you can do something with that um it's it's brilliant and my only issues with it were that it's it's difficult to get it going at the beginning um and i know that they explain this but you have to you have to record your sleep date

43:09of seven days or seven nights running before it before it's prepared to even start making those scores right but then even after that point i found that it's um it's quite almost brittle like it will lose its confidence quite quickly there's been several times i've tried to use it and it said no data um you know we didn't get any sleep data last night and i'll go and i'll check and i i did wear it last night um if i think it was a heart rate issue it said last night we didn't get the heart rate data we

43:40need to and i had been wearing it so something had obviously gone wrong with the very exciting new health sensor array um and it hadn't managed to get the correct data to to create a readiness score and it's happened a few times and it may be to do with how i wear the watch although i think i'm i think i'm wearing it right when i'm trying to wear it tighter than that it actually hurts and leaves a mark yeah i think yeah if it's if it's leaving an impression on your skin it's too tight um so that

44:12that was a slight issue with readiness um that occasionally it isn't ready um but when it works i think it's a really brilliant idea um nice and simple easy for me to use um and yeah at my age um i worry a lot about getting injured i i try and look after my fitness but i worry about getting injured so i i having that information of now is a good day to do this now is a good day to push it or have a rest i i want to be told things like that so yeah i think i think it's a really good

44:46app like you say so that the the new health app on the phone will then incorporate all that stuff from the watch and show you the same thing on your phone one i don't remember if it got pulled in 27.2 but i know it's it's close to being there but it just speaks to another thing where this has been an ongoing apple issue for a while and it looked like they were trying to you know really keep software features under wraps until they were absolutely ready to ship and you know it's just

45:17another instance where it's not quite ready and you know yet they they're on this timeline where they got to push out ios updates with the new iphone ships in september and some of the features won't be there and you know it's i i don't know how many people notice these things i mean we we're obviously hyper hyper aware of it because we work with this stuff every day i wonder how many people buy a series 12 and don't even really know that there's not on the i it doesn't sync with the i don't know it's sort of understandable that apple tries to uh push out software features as early as

45:49possible because we spent so long criticizing it for not bringing the new version of siri um the number of headlines rightfully so the i alone wrote saying siri ai delayed again this is a this is a travesty and a disgrace um well and and i wouldn't have we wouldn't have given apple such a hard time if they didn't run a whole ad campaign around siri ai promoting a thousand dollar series of phones

46:20that didn't have it and wouldn't get it until most people probably got rid of those phones it's a crazy thing that not only did that happen but they appeared to apple kind of was it didn't really have any repercussions i mean i know they had to pay out there's a class action lawsuit but that's not like the people didn't seem to care i don't know if that speaks to how little people use siri or how much they love apple but there was no real like blowback public blowback if that was samsung or google

46:53i feel like it would have been a greater thing like hey you're advertising this thing that doesn't exist but you know apple made it through and i think it was right it's right to criticize him for it

Battery Performance and Redesigns

47:02we did our best didn't we all right battery life day because that was a bit of a bright spot for the apple watch well yes yes and no again there were sort of ambiguities dissatisfactions all through this review process the first the first time i um tested the battery life on the apple watch series 12 it broke the record set by the series uh 11 it was it was like for it was over 48 hours and apple says 24 and it lasted for more than 48 which is obviously amazing

47:40um then and you know the frustrating this is the thing with the apple watch is that you can't just you can't just put it into an app and spit out a battery score you have to do it manually you have to be using it and hope hopefully you try and do it in a sort of subjectively realistic amount of use but anyway so then several days later i managed to complete a second run-through of the battery and this one was um sort of like 40 i think it was 40 hours i'm doing this from memory i'm gonna have

48:11to see if i can actually look at the scores here i got it here i can i can fact check okay so the first one was 47 i know oh no that's the series 11 series 11 lasted just under 48 hours um and the series 12 lasted 51 so beating that score by more than three hours but then the second time it was only 40 hours so it was it was wildly inconsistent because i do multiple tests all the time i did multiple tests for the last one and they were nicely clustered together as you would expect but this time they

48:44were you know nearly 10 hours apart so it clearly has a good battery um there's no question of it being a bad battery you know apple says 24 on at its worst it lasted 40 so that's that's still objectively a good result but it's on average worse than the series 11 so we have gone backwards year on year but more importantly it's much less dependable so you don't know exactly what you're going to get if you're

49:14you can't go out on a two-day hike or something right and think well i know it's going to last 48 hours so i'm safe with this it might not do that it might let you down so i was and i was i was so excited because as you said i i actually wrote an article one that we sometimes like to to split off part of a review when as we do it and go here's an exciting thing i've just discovered because i was so excited by its battery performance in the first test and then it was back down to earth you know it was it was

49:48um just so disappointing really that it couldn't sustain that high level of performance and it was inconsistent and again my impression is this is a piece of technology i can't rely on um well even though it is it is good it is absolutely fine but it's not quite there for some reason um apple we've been hearing rumors for years about as an apple watch redesign that may or may not be coming next

50:22year i mean we we literally hear about it read it or publish it write about it every year so i almost wonder reading your review and i just want to point out before i forget that when i get a review like this to read like that's you know again three stars three and a half stars shouldn't be bad but in the age of yelp and amazon reviews three stars is might as well be one so i don't usually read other reviews when i'm look but i did look at other reviewers and i couldn't find a single one that gave it under like

50:56four stars and you know i just want to commend you because you know there's a certain degree of access we have to this stuff when we're when we're you know we work for mac world where where we we have um access to things that people wouldn't get if we had to buy all this stuff on our own we wouldn't review 25 of the things that we do but to put yourself out there you know to say hey listen this is my experience this is what you should know if you're trying to buy this thing because it would have been easy to say oh it's yeah it's four stars and there's a couple of things that i didn't like but

51:29that was great because you could you could do that you could spin this and say you know yeah sure it's it's great but you didn't you were very thoughtful you were very precise in your testing and your language and uh i just want to commend you if i didn't do that already privately publicly i will tell you that um you know it's it's not easy to put yourself out there and to and to to hang your hat on a on a on an opinion that might not be the mainstream opinion it's easy when everybody hates it but in a in a situation like this with apple um you know people read these people care about this

52:04product and you know there's a lot of opinions on the internet so um kudos for sticking to yours thank you very much yeah so so we we're expecting a redone we always expect to redesign i wonder if the series 12 was a stopgap release that apple was supposed to come out with a new a new redesigned apple watch and because everything is so expensive it was cost prohibitive to release the watch that they wanted to release alongside syria and all this other stuff so they said all right let's just design

52:38we'll design something quickly in between the 11 and the 13 or whatever the next one and that's the result of this is a chip that doesn't isn't optimized the way it should be a design that isn't as smooth and fluid as it should be a battery that isn't as dependable as it should be you know it's still great they can make these things in their sleep in there and they're really good but to have that level that we expect from apple that almost near perfection maybe that's what happened here i don't know i'm

53:10just spitballing i have i don't have any actual information that this is what happened but it's a good theory though i like i like the theory i'm i've got to that level of cynicism now that i don't think there will ever i don't think there will ever be a different apple watch um because it comes around every every year every year literally every year since like the series six we've been hearing about this brand new mechanism and listen it's commendable that the watch bands have worked for like 10 years and you can have one from the series four and you still pop it onto your new that's great but you know in technology we're used to you know i can't think of another industry like

53:49like like like like a car for instance like no one no one like blasts bmw because their series three looks the same every five years but with technology we expect things to look differently to get to uh upgraded visually and apple watch really hasn't in quite some time um yeah we'll see if it ever happens i'm not even sure if i want them to to be honest right um yeah because i i like the way that apple watches look and i've done almost as long as i've had them and the way that apple

54:22approaches design on the apple watch is just to take the is to take the existing design and just slightly file it down tweak it make the screen slightly bigger and have rounded corners and i think that's how you should approach something that works like this um and also at the same time the fact that there's no really serious rival they don't have the impetus they don't have the incentive to risk anything by changing it substantially so i think i don't particularly

54:54want them to change they clearly don't want to change at some point i suppose they will have to yeah i mean i don't even know what that looks like like they're not going to come out with the circle that we read every now and again there's no way it just doesn't even work for a device like this i don't know maybe maybe more curved maybe thinner i mean i don't really know what else they could do but um you're right it's a it's a they they settled on a great design for it back in the back with day one square is the is the thing i mean i've used the galaxy watch i've used the pixel watch

55:27and it doesn't work as well i know it looks when you're not doing any of the smart watch stuff it's great but as soon as you start to do something you're getting words that are cut off you got to scroll a million times to see things because it doesn't fit like it the square is the better shape yeah yeah they built it to last it's a good design um just real quick about the price still $399 which is nice because everything else went up iphones went up by $100 max went up by $300 uh roman my son

55:58needs a needs a laptop for school and like i was looking at the mac for like i'm gonna get him a macbook air and it's like damn like that thing starts at like two grand almost the uh like i was looking at the one with 24 gigs of ram and yet it's like man these are so everything's so expensive i don't know how so many people had two thousand plus dollars to pre-order an iphone duo like i understand it's exciting but who's walking around how have that many people walking around with this

56:31kind of money to spend on a new phone it's it's crazy anyway back to the watch um $399 can't get a macbook neo yeah well is he not really good enough no no right i think that's the issue is that um like he's taking computer classes and stuff and i'm thinking like i want this to last all four years so i feel like if it was the if i could wait till next year and get the 12 gig a19 pro neo

57:01i would do that but i think eight gigs is a little bit too minimal for like when he's a junior like he's a freshman now so like two years from now i think that's going to be it'll still be good it won't be as good as an m5 with 16 or 24 gigs of ram and he also wants a 14 or 15 inch screen so you know a couple inches bigger on the display but yeah if he was in middle school i'd get him the neo no no problem but he's taking like like computer classes and stuff and i just think that i'll be a little

57:34bit too sluggish in a couple years but i wish it was i wish he was a a year younger a year older whatever i wish i was this was this time last year because the back book the 15 inch air was like i don't know like 1200 bucks anyway i digress um the aboy series 12 it starts at 399 the for some reason the 46 millimeter version went up 20 bucks which is odd it went from from 429 to 449

58:06well it the the number they quote is the entry level so that's the that's the they they clearly a memo went around saying we want to be able to say the same number sure to keep that the same level but you can you know you can massage the profit margins in on other models um right i guess yeah i mean 20 bucks doesn't seem like much to us but when you're talking about millions of watches over 12 months it's it adds up i wonder what the split is for 42 millimeters to 46 millimeters because

58:38i have the smaller one and i've used the larger one and i don't like it it's just too big and if you're going to get 46 you might as well just get the ultra which is but and that's a lot more so i don't know anyway um you have the smaller one or the larger one david i have the larger one purely because apple sends that to me right um i i think one year i had the smallest um but i've got used to the big one i've used the ultra as well and i would say that there is quite a big difference the ultra is so bulky and so you know it's almost 15 millimeters yeah you can't sleep with it on um

59:13it just keeps getting i mean well people do clearly but right when i was testing it i'm saying you you you had an issue with subjectively i found it very difficult to sleep with it on okay um whereas the yeah the 46 is fine um but a lot of this stuff is just what you're used to i suppose so sure i see a lot of ultras out it's funny i see like my my son plays baseball yeah so there's a lot of like baseball dads for lack of a better word and a lot of them have apple watch ultras i guess they're

59:43they they they're more for you know gym people or former athletes or whatever yeah there's a there's quite a few of them roman you would buy an ultra you've said in the past because you like larger watches yeah and i keep thinking i'm gonna buy one and then i look at the price and i start to cringe and i think oh it's only gonna go up so i should buy one the the ultra did not go up it's worth noting that's the 799 which it's not cheap but it it comes with gps built in so that apple charges a hundred

1:00:16dollars for that normally um it has a 50 inch 50 millimeter 50 inches imagine a 50 inch watch a 50 millimeter screen um you know a nice band uh tons of features it's it's a i yeah you're right it's not cheap but for what you're getting that for the technology you're getting it's it's it's it's fairly it's it's a fairly good value not that i'm trying to get you to buy one roman no i think i'm just waiting for you know one of those amazon deals that you know reduces the price by 150

1:00:48dollars or something like that then you got black fridays next next month right i'd even consider an older apple watch ultra yeah doesn't yeah so all right david any final thoughts on um your recommendations for you so let's say someone has a all right so actually i'll bring up myself i have a series uh i actually don't know hold on i have a series seven oh wow my wife has a series eight what do you think i feel i feel really cut

1:01:25off from the common man i have no experience of something as old as that um i have a series four but you don't wear it though so yours are the you don't count i don't wear it see listen some of us have to buy our watches okay yes goodness uh i mean you'll yeah you'll you'll see a huge um improvement you'll be you'll be in clover that'd be amazing uh i would still say ideally

1:01:56my recommendation would be to wait until next year and get the s i mean assuming they make an se next year but i think they do it generally every other year but they've been on that every other year cadence i mean we don't yeah but that's that's how they've released them one two three every two years i mean if you're having issues at this point and it's noticeably slow or there are some features that you've seen other people that have that you're jealous of it really isn't i'd wait until next year um and see i do like like the the siri rewind or the live rewind and a lot

1:02:30whatever like that's those that's cool stuff yeah i'd like to try it i can't even get watch os 27 on this thing like i'm stuck on watch os 26 i don't know if maybe i'm just not using the watch right but there's never been a single day in my life where i've said i wish this did more or was faster like i use it for notifications i use it for exercise fitness stuff sleep score like those things but like i never i've never used it to summon siri like never i never even thought of it

1:03:05maybe like it'll catch it if i ask my home pod or my phone something and it and i and i say the wake word and it like hears it here first or something but i i never do it by pressing the side button i don't really use it i don't i don't deliberately use my apple watch for really anything if it buzzes i'll look at it if i'm doing a workout um i have a peloton bike so i just kind of raise my wrist to it and it like sinks but that's it like i i use it as a watch um like i don't know maybe i'm using it

1:03:42wrong what like wake well i don't think so um because i was you know having having joked about always having the latest version yeah like 80 percent of my apple watch use is um can be can be grouped like you under getting a notification on from my iphone and not having to take out my iphone to look at it that's convenient um checking my sleep score checking uh monitoring a workout um you know some the activity rings that sort of thing yeah 80 maybe even 90 percent of what i do

1:04:15in the apple watch is just that um yeah and my view we're looking to see what time it is and my view of why it's worth getting a a later apple watch the the pleasure the convenience you get from a later apple watch is that it does those things a bit better so it has a it has a longer lasting battery so you don't have to worry the battery is the is the biggest thing yeah that i have to charge it at some point during the day if i want to use it both during the day and while sleeping i do have to put it on the charger for at least 20 minutes yeah well that's annoying that

1:04:51is annoying i charge it once just before i go to bed right for i would guess 30 40 minutes uh and that's it and then not and then till the next night another 30 40 minutes then um and that's well but that's what i do too so it's literally only once per day yeah well that's i mean i'll use it until it tells me it's dead and then i'll put it on the charger for a half hour and then i'll put it back on if i remember to put it back on sometimes i forget i mean oftentimes i forget quite frankly

1:05:22what i want what i would want from the battery is i sleep get through my day sleep and then i have to charge it i think that i based on what your numbers are i think i would be able to do that two sleeps in one day what's that what is that like a two one night and two two days i think it would be whatever they say in vacations two nights one day i think two nights two days is that it's at the bleeding edge that's even better it's on the periphery of that um but maybe not dependably so

1:05:55and it would depend on how much you use it during those two days right i don't which which isn't much from the sound of it it's not you would be to track a workout it would be to you know 2 000 notifications however everybody i got during the day um but yeah that's that's really it the big my biggest annoyance with my watch is when it tells me it's 10 at like 11 30 at night and i'm like well i don't i don't want to wait for this thing to charge so i just put it on the charger and i go to sleep that happens to me a lot if that didn't happen that would be a great reason to upgrade

1:06:31and it sounds like it wouldn't i'll tell you an annoyance i have with the with the so you know originally the apple watch was a was a charge overnight device like like most apple mobile devices put on the charger go to sleep then they brought in sleep charging sleep uh tracking so now you're encouraged to wear it overnight and things like readiness depend on that so you really have to you because for a while i had a fitbit and an apple watch i would use a fitbit during the

1:07:03night because it's sleep tracking was better and i have the two things charging when the other thing was in use right but now you kind of have to use your apple watch during the night when do you install watch os updates because the automated process will try and do it during the night um and i have yeah i have um updates as automatic but whenever i wake up in the morning it will say well watch os 27.0.1 wasn't uh wasn't installed last night because you were using it because you were

1:07:33to track your sleep as we constantly encourage you to do right so that's a good point so updating watch os has essentially become a manual process again which i can't be bothered with um at all right which means i'm probably going to end up stuck on 27.0 until next year but um i don't think apple has really addressed that because they still seem to think that it is an acceptable way to automate the watch os update process to default to 2 a.m or whatever it is right and most people

1:08:03that's the worst time to try and update it because they're using it to track their sleep so there you go my little rant that's a good point if i use twitter i would have had a little rant on twitter about that um and don't you have to take it off your wrist to update it as well doesn't have to be charging or or is that not yes yeah it needs to be on me do it needs to yeah i mean they say it so you can't even never tried right yeah you're right that's that's that's uh it should alert you at like two in the afternoon yes to uh update not to anymore uh yeah right right roman take a note

1:08:38write to apple about that tell them that we have an idea we have a product suggestion or feature suggestion um okay good thanks david uh you can read david's review on our website uh roman will put it in our uh the the article for the show um it was a good job nice nice work and uh david's airpods 5 review which he mentioned briefly but we don't have any time to get into will be up i don't know maybe by the time you hear this maybe by next week something like that around there ukg is the workforce operating platform with unified hr payroll and workforce management

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1:09:47a lovebird lost and missing his mate is far from his path in lonely state dry your tears now there's a start follow my steps to heal your heart panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace through the power of scent she finds the trace behold two lovers reunite in the skies a most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes together forever they shine each day bound by the beauty of cartier

The iPad Mini Anniversary

1:10:21uh all right roman let's get into apple history because we're going to talk about this for a little while too yeah so in this week in apple history on october 23rd 2012 apple introduced the ipad mini uh and one of the reasons why we wanted to bring this up is because the new ipad mini is rumored to going to be released at next week next week's i wanted to call it touch and go

1:10:59touch and pro no it's pro intel pro intel see touch and pro because you touch the ipad mini although it's not a pro but anyways pro yeah um so i remember when the ipad mini came out and i thought for a while there that maybe i could use it as a phone because back then yeah that was back then when they only had one size of the iphone and i wanted a bigger phone but it was that big

1:11:34well that was the thing there was nothing in between so and when i saw it i was like yeah this is too big this is way too big so um it's funny i looked at the specs it had an a5 chip yep the second one a4 was the first and the original ipad was the a4 yeah um it had a the resolution was 1024 by 768 which i which i think is kind of funny now because like the current ipad mini

1:12:07its resolution is 2266 by 1488 it was retina though technically so right maybe not maybe it wasn't actually it was not retina i think retina was i think you're right it came out the name of the second gen yeah yeah uh and it had a second gen it had a five megapixel cam back camera so it's kind of funny though those those numbers are so small

1:12:37um and then it also had this kind of stigma when it came out where it kind of was just similar to when the um original ipad came out where people were all like oh it's just a big the ipad's just a big iphone and ipad mini was like it's just a big iphone and no it was it was more like a small ipad which i don't know if anybody thinks there's a difference but there there is a difference

1:13:08uh johnny johnny i've famously called it a concentration of the larger ipad yeah um it was a pretty big deal when the ipad mini came out because the ipad is big you know particularly when it had the bezels and stuff it was only a 9.7 inch screen but it had you know the big giant bezels at the top of them i like like the phone and the mini was like something you could kind of put into a big pocket like a cargo pants pocket yeah you know more way more portable than the than

1:13:39the big ipad um it was 329 when it released which was a pretty aggressive price the big ipad was 499 it it increased the next year because it got it got the retina display i think it went up to like 500 which is what it is what it was now it's 600 and it's allegedly might be as high as 800 next week david did you review the original ipad do you remember the i think i reviewed the original i think i

1:14:09reviewed the ipad 2 but i didn't review an ipad mini for several generations after um but i i i was really taken with it i thought it was a brilliant idea i part of me thought it was going to be the form factor that we would stick with like i thought the ipad would sort of condense into that and then you'd have your phone you'd have the ipad mini and then you'd have a laptop or something like that and it just never really quite worked out and i'm not i'm still not completely sure

1:14:42why but i was thinking about this the way i i put the ipad mini on a pedestal i put the iphone mini i don't know if you remember those i think it was the 13 mini that i gave this really positive review to because i thought it was just fantastic and it was in the middle of this sort of um september of hell where i ended up reviewing three iphones so i think i went a bit mad but i said the iphone 13 mini is so good and then i put it down and then i don't know i think it was the iphone 13 pro or something

1:15:14but i then went back and never picked up the 13 mini again and i had an ipad mini for a while that was literally in my desk in the office and i never took it out because it just it wasn't really good enough and there were always better alternatives um because once you've used an iphone you know 16 plus or whatever um you can't go back to an iphone 13 mini once you've used a normal sized ipad you don't want to go back to an ipad mini the comparison is constantly there and it just yeah

1:15:49i think that was it i think everybody thought it was a good idea but nobody wanted to use it yeah they um they still i mean it got it's it's redesigned in i think 2024 to 2022 with uh the the larger screen and you know the the uh liquid retina display uh but this one which comes out we hear uh next week is like a massive massive upgrade it's supposed to get an oled display

1:16:20which would be the only ipad other than the ipad pro to have one it's supposed to get an a 19 pro processor which is you know like a uh uh i uh the iphone 18 no not the 17 pro has um probably new colors uh uh it's it's a it's a big it's a big upgrade and i don't quite oh it's supposed to get water resistance too so i think apple is going to frame it a little bit differently now and i wonder

1:16:52what i wonder how that how they're going to sell this thing because so uh in back in june when they raised prices uh the the ipad and the ipad mini went up 100 bucks the ipad air and the ipad pro went up 150 and 200 so they're right now the ipad starts at 599 um the rumors are that it's going to go as much as up to possibly 799 which would mean it's more expensive than the ipad air which starts at 749 for an 11 inch screen so i'm i'm i'm really interested to see how they present the ipad mini

1:17:30next week and also why like why does it why is it getting all this i don't quite understand why it's getting an oled screen i don't understand why it's getting it would be the only ipad with with with full water resistance why it's getting a more powerful processor than the ipad air i don't know well not more but but well maybe the i the a19 pro is probably comparable to an m4 i think that our benchmarks show that they're they're almost similar it's it's interesting to me i don't know

Apple Tablet Branding Confusion

1:18:01it is strange um yeah apple does tend to do that that they they don't synchronize their ipad releases that's for sure it always ends up that whichever ipad came out most recently is way better so when i try and advise people i'm constantly switching between you know normally i would say get the vanilla ipad but then if it's been particularly long time then maybe the ipad mini is better but then yeah it's really confusing like so many people say to me that they don't

1:18:33know which ipad they should get because there's so many different versions of it and in so many different sizes with all the other different options and they come out at different times and you never know which one to get right and if it sounds like it sounds like they're going to make it an ipad pro just in a new screen close close close to it like a mini ipad pro yeah yeah it won't have an m5 quite but it's going to be pretty fast i've always said that they should just the in branding it should just be ipad pro ipad air and then you can have different screen sizes

1:19:06within those two brands but having four different brands for the ipads is is madness nobody knows what's going on and one of them is just ipad you can't you can't do that right in terms of branding yeah i don't right you've written about it i've written about it um yes one of the lines needs to go uh it would be really interesting if they call this ipad pro and it's just a smaller version of it that would be crazy because it is supposed to get thinner and it's going to get the landscape uh uh selfie uh face id or face facetime camera so maybe that would be that would be wild

1:19:43and then yeah the ip so they need an ipad that's cheap the the the 349 one was perfect now that's 449 they can't so the ipad air you can't you can't have the cheapest ipad start at 749 that's just too much so they would have to rebrand that lower by lack of a better word there um so i don't know but yeah one of those lines has to go maybe the ipad air goes because either you want a big expensive

1:20:18tablet and you spend a lot of money or you want a cheap tablet and then the mini is just a smaller version i don't know we'll see next week because it's going to be really weird if the mini starts at a higher price point than the ipad air regardless of of that it was just updated it's just going to be really strange like people are going to walk into an apple store and be like wait what this little thing is cost more than this than this thing it doesn't make sense not to mention it's going to be a four thousand dollar or six thousand dollar uh touchscreen macbook pro 2 the apple store is going

1:20:48to be wild when people look into it like for holiday shopping and they haven't like followed all this stuff because you're going to have a two thousand dollar iphone ultra uh duo you're going to have a five thousand dollar touchscreen mac and you're going to have a eight hundred dollar ipad mini and people are going to be like what on earth i bought these things for like 400 bucks last year what's going on i went away six months come back and it's like that yeah yeah i'm sure it'll work somehow but yeah it doesn't make sense

HomePod Generation Pairing

1:21:18their their earnings don't they'll make 150 billion dollars in the in the holiday quarter it's not gonna matter yeah all right let's move on to a comment corner uh we've got a couple of uh messages in regards to the some of the welcome home stuff that was announced last week and we covered in last week's podcast mark h asked via email if i pair a home pod mini original version and a home pod mini the new one with my apple tv and ask siri ai something

1:21:57will the og siri be smart enough to just keep quiet or is it even that too much to ask of og siri and i picked this one because i liked oh i liked how he referred to old siri og siri um i i would assume so but we we don't actually know because we haven't tried it but well for one you can't you can't create a stereo pair out of the different generations you have to have matching

1:22:27generations right so that his his original it's og siri would be connected on its own and not to apple tv if the home pod mini 2 is already connected that you can't have both so i mean i i assume the newer one would answer i always wonder that like like you know we all have 800 apple devices i like how like i don't know what which one knows to answer because like

1:23:00i'll have my watch my phone your home pod and an ipad all with an earshot and i'll say you know turn on the lights and generally the home pod answers first but i don't know how the system knows which should respond and which shouldn't respond yeah i will say that in general the system is very good at that um yeah because i i'm surrounded by devices and if i say sure the trigger phrase it nearly always seems to know based on right i don't know the specific command or where my where i'm facing or i don't

1:23:33know how it does it but it's very rare that it messes that up and because it happened to me once while i was testing the airpods uh five that i asked them something and my home pod also answered and this might be quite a similar situation because my it's a it's a full-size home pod it has og siri the airpods 5 have siri ai and they did both try and tackle the same question that's interesting the home pod is quicker uh and it's and it admitted it couldn't do it and then the and then the airpods successfully got it so that's a that's very unusual that they

1:24:10failed to do it like that i did send apple an email asking them how it would work if you have multiple generations of uh home pod mini on the same network and they haven't replied which i think is generally not a brilliant sign or it could just be that they hate me but um i mean because i read the apple watch review but yeah you're right you can't have them in a stereo pair but you you can have them i'm pretty sure in the same house and on the same network and you know different rooms so the

1:24:41question is yeah do i get the benefits of siri ai even though most of them are og siri i want to find that out but i i haven't been able to find out yet um for what it's worth uh apple probably doesn't hate david but they generally don't respond to queries like that unless they have a coordinated pr media statement that they're willing to give all right yeah they're a very very difficult company to deal with because like you'll never get some pr person say hey david we haven't never

1:25:15like it's uh this is on background you can't quote anybody and here's our statement and it's been sent through seven layers of apple executives to get to you so it's not uncommon that we don't get responses to uh answers to questions like that or apple could just hey david i don't know i said apple maybe i'll say conservatively 12 emails a year for clarification on something just out of the blue not in relation to like them contacting me and i think i maybe get two or three responses out of that dozen so yeah and like even if you're reviewing something and you're asking

1:25:50a question like they'll be like well look at your reviewer guide like thanks like i i obviously did that already but like like like they don't like it's not so much that the pr people don't have like the authority but they really don't have the authority unless it goes through other people and even then like honestly turnist probably gets involved in those statements because apple is very careful

Apple TV Longevity and Chips

1:26:15about what he tells what what it puts out publicly as as we all know uh this next comment is about the apple tv and uh are kind of like some of the disparaging things we said about the last episode rcvw said via youtube gentlemen the reason that this new apple tv is overbuilt with an a19 and etc is because it's often a five or seven year purchase sure whatever they put in it today has to sustain the next seven operating systems

1:26:50sure but a15 is is perfectly fine i understand what he's saying sure yeah yeah i understand i think also maybe there's maybe there's a production issue like they can't keep building a15 processors you know it's it's a it's a chip process uh because they've moved on to the next generation they can't sure so maybe there's like a cost benefit uh thing to that so well they they did raise the price by 50 bucks speaking of cost benefit toss better with the apple there yeah yeah um there's no

1:27:28need for the apple tv to have the latest and greatest chip but at the same time there's there's kind of a need in terms of longevity of the device because yeah the boxes are the tv box streaming boxes are a type of device that people buy and forget about they don't think about upgrading until they i have i have a second generation apple tv 4k and i have apps i use it every day it's probably my most used next to my laptop well no my phone too it's probably my my most used non-mac iphone device

1:28:04like i use it more than an ipad i use it more than my watch i have no complaints about the speed or the performance or the quality or anything i it's my i he if if it broke tomorrow i would bite the bullet and swallow my pride and buy a new one for 300 bucks that's how much i i like it but that generation i have has like an a12 or something and it's fine it's fine but maybe you're right roman i mean you know we're talking about billions of devices and and and they got to move at the at the speed of

1:28:36light to to get these things out there and it probably is if they had an a15 they'd probably have to raise the price by another 25 dollars i mean you're probably right and that does it for comment corner all right good i will say goodbye to you all and next week we will um we'll talk about the uh the new apple stuff i guess right roman we're gonna have new stuff to talk about yeah so maybe that's a good heads up to let people know that uh generally we post on wednesday

1:29:11afternoons on like apple podcasts on youtube and spotify there might be a little bit of time shifting because the event is on wednesday it's wednesday yeah so we might be posting later than usual or we might do posting earlier than usual and doing a preview show we we're still kind of figuring it out it's true it's awkward timing this time around so yeah but we will post something yeah yeah in the meantime you can listen to this one twice

1:29:41and on that note we will see you next week

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1:30:37everyone's got a hard question about ai your job your kids where it's going anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions ask yours at claude.ai slash spotify and keep thinking that's claude.ai slash spotify hey listen power up your play with nintendo switch 2 and experience link's legendary adventure

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