Episode 997: ‘Surprise and Shine!’ iPhone event preview

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0:50Unscripted, unfiltered, unafraid, welcome to the Macworld podcast. My name is Michael Simon and I am joined. When am I going to call you today, Jason? Jason. Jason's fine. Well, yeah, it's too late. I'm joined by Jason Cross. Good morning. And producer, Roman Loyola. Hi there. This is episode number 998. Roman, we're two away, so it's not. The thousandth episode will not be the week of the iPhone event. It'll be the week after the iPhone event. For those keeping score. This is episode number 998. And today is, as we just talked about, this is the iPhone event preview because next week is the iPhone event.

1:32Wednesday, September 9th, we got invitations last week. We talked about it last week. And did we, maybe we didn't talk about it last week. No, they didn't because they came out on Wednesday. We didn't talk about it last week. They came out the day after we did the podcast. Yeah, yeah. So the invitation came out last week and we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the keynote, the rumors, what we expect, what we don't expect, what we're going to buy, what we're going to skip, whatever else comes up. We're going to, we're going to do like a, like a mock, not mock. That's a, that's the wrong word. We're not acting, but we're going to like, like go in order of what we think is going to be released.

2:08And when, uh, during the keynote, um, this was pretty exciting because you know, you got Ternus and the, and the folding iPhone. So yeah. So we'll, we'll, we'll talk about all that. We'll do this week in Apple history and we'll close with our comment corner. Speaking of comments, you can contact us through blue sky, Facebook threads, search for macro, look for the blue mouse logo. So then email the podcast at macro.com. Send us a personal email, comment under a video, comment under a story, a post or other. And, uh, we'll talk about, um, your comment on a future show.

Apple Vision Pro baseball review

2:37Okay. All right. Before we get to the, um, the iPhone event, I just want to talk real quick. Um, Jason sent me our, like Macworld's vision pro cause Apple didn't send us one. So, so we bought it a couple of years ago and, um, we've tried to get our money's worth out of it as best we can, but, um, he sent it to a, he's, he sent it to me last week or two weeks ago. And, um, the reason why I wanted it is because Friday night, this past Friday, Apple was broadcasting it's Friday night baseball for the first time live in, um, Apple immersive, which is, it's like thing.

3:13Yeah. VR does where you can like look around and stuff. Um, so I had to buy those little, um, magnetic, uh, inserts. I, I tried, I tried using it without it and I couldn't see anything. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a funny thing. It's like really close to your eye. So I'm nearsighted. So I can't see far away. So I thought maybe because of it was, you know, it's upfront up close that I would be fine, but I can't, I couldn't see anything. And it's so close to your face, your eyes. You obviously can't wear it without, with glasses.

I thought when, when they were talking about that at first, like you could like, like, man, maybe it'll be uncomfortable. Like no way. Like it doesn't work at all. So I bought the little glasses. You, you do it online. You send in your prescription. They're $149, which, you know, I guess that's not so bad. I feel like it was a little pricey, but, but they're, they're cool. They, they, they magnetically pop into place. They're easy to put in and out.

4:09Um, so yeah, so I was all ready for the thing and the broadcast starts and I don't really know what I was expecting, but it was way cooler than whatever that was. It's, um, so there was like five spots in the stadium. This, this was in Yankee stadium. It was Yankees Red Sox, which is really why I wanted it. Cause I'm a Red Sox fan, even though they lost. Um, so, but for the most of the game, you're like standing in like right next to the dugout is on one side and the on deck circle is on the other. So you can like turn to look at the guy warming up and turn this way and see like the person next to you, uh, put their arm over the dugout. You can see the whole field. It was pretty damn cool.

4:50Um, like I've been to a bunch of baseball games. That's, that's, that's what we do for vacations and stuff. And this was in some ways better than being there because you got a, like a perspective that you wouldn't get just from buying a seat. Like I could hear all of the people talking in the dugout and I can hear the umpires, like, uh, uh, the catcher got injured. And like when the broadcast was quiet, I can almost hear what they were saying to him. It was pretty cool, man. Yeah. It's like cutting incredibly good seats and like a parabolic microphone to like listen to stuff.

5:28It wasn't, it wasn't like a hundred and I mean, it wasn't like three 60. So I think they, I think it was either one 80 or 200, but I could turn quite a bit and still see like more stadium, you know? Yeah. And you could see everything you need to see on the field. You could definitely, you know, see, right? Yeah, totally. And there's what you said. If I looked up into the sky, the, um, the Apple TV broad, like the flat Apple TV broadcast was, was playing in like a, like a little window.

5:58Up there if I wanted to watch that. Cause you see different stuff, obviously replays and stuff, closeups and they had stats up there as well. And you said there were like five place locations to choose from in the, I couldn't choose from them. That would be cool. If I could, they, they just, they sent you to different times. Yeah. So when whatever team was up, you were in their dugout, like, or next to their dugout, there was one up top where the broadcast booth was that they went to between innings that, that showed you like right behind a home plate, but, but, but, but way high that showed you that expansive view.

6:32And then there were two in the outfields that they went to pretty, pretty, like maybe three or four times. It would be really cool if I could pick a camera. Like this was the first one. I was very impressed with how smoothly it went and the quality was, was just outstanding. Like it was, you know, there was a couple times when it like buffered, but other than that, it was, wasn't quite live, but it was, you know, 10 seconds behind the TV broadcast. It was, it was great. Just a incredible how, like, you know, I know it's, this thing is $4,000 and you know, it's, it's out of reach for most people, but the fact that we have this technology that is somewhat attainable is, you know, it's just, it's crazy.

7:17I made a joke in the article I wrote that Apple should, you know, Friday night, just have people show up and watch it at the, at an Apple store. Like, you know, I, I, like, I, and I don't think that's a crazy thing to have a bunch of vision pros on hand and have people hang out and watch a baseball game. Um, the, the normal vision pro issues are there. It's heavy. I couldn't watch the whole thing. I couldn't sit with that thing strapped in my head for three hours. Um, it's a very obviously individual experience.

7:51Like my son was with me. So I had to take out the things and give it to him and he had to put it on his head and we kind of described to each other what we were, what we were seeing. And so there's that, which is, that's the, the, that's the biggest barrier I think to all this VR stuff is that you're alone. You know, a baseball game, I sit with my family and we watch it together. Yeah. Or movies or whatever. Like people like to watch content like together. If it's not short form little YouTube stuff, they want to see this stuff.

8:23We, where do we, where does everyone put their TV in front of a couch? Like exactly where people, not, not, not, not a desk chair, like a couch because you want people to watch things with you. So yeah, it, and it takes that away. But of course, like you, I'm sure you've tried watching like a movie or something on any of their big virtual theater things and stuff like that. It's really impressive. It's, it's a great way to watch a movie. It's like sitting in the best seat in the movie theater in a really nice big movie theater.

8:55It's got, it's very sharp. It's crystal clear. The dynamic range is great. The sound is great. Like it's, they're great, but you're by yourself. Right. And I don't know if there's a way to overcome that. You know, they tried that. Like they, there's in that, don't they have like those avatar things that you can hang out with someone, but. Yeah. That, did you make one? Did it go? No, I haven't done that yet. Is that a, it goes through the personas, they call them. Yeah. Those are, that is some uncanny valley stuff. It's creepy.

9:25They're really good, but they also look a little creepy. Because they're just not quite good enough. But yeah, I mean, you could put somebody's persona next to you and do body tracking and send that and like, look, but that's wonky. They don't have that done really good. And it's not the same and, you know, it's also hard to eat. Like everyone eats or drinks while they watch TV. Certainly while watching the baseball game. You've got this on and you're trying to like, you have to like pull it off and eat something so you can see what you're doing.

9:56Right. Because of the immersive thing, there's obviously no pass through. So I couldn't see anything. Yeah. Yeah. But as a, as a solo experience, I mean, it was, it was awesome. I'll, I'll, I'll watch it. There's a couple of them this month and I'm sure I'll watch parts of all of them because it was, it was just, it was excellent. And when Roman, I've tried the, um, the Mac virtual display stuff and, um, that's, that's surprisingly really cool. Like you can, it's like, it's, it's, it's like you're in like a, like a, like a Mac cockpit and you're, you know, I'm looking around and all my stuff.

10:31It's, it's awesome. It got a lot better when they started supporting higher resolutions and widescreen resolutions from your Mac that your Mac, when it first launched, you got your Mac's same resolution, like in a little window and it wasn't two screens and it wasn't like an ultra wide or anything like that. So it's, it's way better now. Yeah. It's actually, it's pretty cool. It is. If you're good at good enough at typing to not be able to read your keyboard very well and still work well, then it's a good way to work.

11:06Yeah. I wrote part of the review in, in, uh, using it. Yeah. And yeah, that's, that's the biggest thing is that I, I, I know the keyboard, but I still look down instinctively. Right. And you can see it, but like the pastor is a little blurry and you know, it's just not quite great. So, yeah. Anyway, if you can get your hands on a vision pro and you're a baseball fan, um, uh, it's a shame they, it's the same. They don't publish the TV app in the meta quest store or anything because there's no reason

11:38a meta quest can't do this. I mean, the resolution will be slightly less, but like, like, let me watch all my TV content and stuff there. They, they, they publish the TV app on all kinds of things, game consoles, smart TVs, what, you know, Android phones, whatever. Um, but they've never published it there. And I'd be curious to see how much worse the experience is on a three to $400 meta quest, you know, that I've, I've, I've used one of, I've got one and I've got the, and it, it's

12:09not as sharp, you know, the resolution's not quite as high. Like the, the contrast isn't quite as good, but it's pretty good. Like for costing literally 10 times less, like one 10th the price, literally it's pretty, it's, it's pretty close, you know? And I bet it would be great for a baseball game or something. Yeah. I'd be curious to see. Um, I, my only experience with VR is those like Samsung back when I covered Android. Oh yeah. The galaxy dream thingy, you put your phone in there and you use it as a, yeah.

12:41You put the phone in there. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, vision pro, uh, sounds like Apple's destroying the whole project. It's not destroying, destroying is the wrong word, but like, you know, they fired a bunch of people and from the team recently. So it doesn't sound like it has much of a future, but, um, anyway, uh, I'm glad I got to see it cause it was, it was, it's, it's, it's pretty cool.

John Ternus as new CEO

13:05Anyway. All right. iPhone events. We will not be seeing vision pro at the iPhone event. That's, that's, that is one thing I'm certain. That's pretty sure. Certain of. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Jason, let's see. So today is John Ternus, his first day as CEO of Apple. Welcome. Yeah. Um, how do you think, so Tim Cook for, for everything, like his somewhat personality, less nature had a very signature sign on at keynotes. He would stand there and do his prayer and say, good morning.

13:38I mean, yeah. Do you think Ternus will have a similar thing? Cause Steve Chavs never really had that. He would walk out in his, you know, his trademark outfit, but every time you walked out, he would do something different. Is Ternus going to have a, uh, a signature thing on, on Wednesday? That's a good question. Well, Harry, here's a question. I don't think we'll, I don't think we'll know. Is he going to start the show?

14:03They don't really do this skits. They don't really do this skits for the, um, for the September events. They do, it's, it's usually just some like cool, you know, camera swoops in from the clouds down to Apple park. And it's just some cool transition. Last year they did that. Um, I, I just watched it last week. They did, it was like a design video and they had, remember they showed like circles, like the MagSafe went into, went into Apple park, but they have like how all the, their design

14:34elements interact, but it didn't have any people in it. Yeah. And then it transitions from that to like, it slides over to the, to Coke or whoever who says good morning. And I was asking myself overall, just like, are they going to change the sort of format and tone of any of these events? And I think the answer is probably going to be no, or at least if they do, it's not going to, it's going to be a gradual thing over the next several years that may have happened anyway, if cook was still there.

15:06But like, I think what we're going to see probably next week is something where if you just popped out, turn us and popped in Tim cook outside of the mannerisms and the accent, it's going to be the same. Like it's going to, you know, he's going to toss over to other executives to introduce products and he's going to, you know, it's going to have the same bookends with him introducing this stuff. You know, I think it's going to be very much like a, an event that we're used to in terms

15:38of its like overall format. And, and yeah, the, um, the virtual, these virtual events that started in 2020 because of COVID, like, like they're really Tim Cook's thing. Like the stage event was Steve jobs's thing. Yeah. Now the virtual thing is Tim Cook's thing. So I, I, I, I don't disagree with you in that. Yeah. Turn us will probably just plug in. I wonder how much input Tim cook even had on like the script and stuff. Like probably not much. Yeah. Probably, probably not much. I think cause they do, they rehearse these things a lot and then they film them and there's

16:12multiple takes of filming them and all that other kind of stuff. And I'm sure just turn us was just the one involved in all that stuff. Is he going to have a signature move? Like, I don't think we'll know until there's been two of them, two or six, like, and then he just keeps doing the same thing every time. Uh, it wouldn't shock me if he opened up saying good morning, but that's not necessarily, you know, like that's just, it's morning and it's a thing. And right. He's not going to do, I, I'll, I'll freak out if he does prayer and you know, all that

16:48stuff. But he, uh, he has a Twitter account now. He didn't have one before and he tweeted today one tweet and all it says is hello in lowercase, which I assume is a reference to the, you know, the Mac hello thing. And he's only following three people, Apple, the Apple account, which doesn't tweet anything. Um, Greg Joswiak and Tim Cook. Those are, those are the three people he's following, which, uh, if I was an Apple exec, I'd be like, what the hell? You can follow me too.

17:20What, like, what about Craig Federighi? He doesn't follow him. Like, like Tim Cook. I think the, uh, count is not going to, is going to be run by assistants or marketing people and is going to be used for that purpose. Yeah, like, which is why he got the account. I don't think he's going to be replying to anyone ever. I don't think he's going to be discussing anything ever. I think it's, he's going to blast out a, a, a marketing message from the marketing team

17:50from that account. So like, uh, just, you don't need to follow it. Like, uh, you know, yeah, you're not going to miss anything on like the event mornings. He would have a picture of Apple park and say, we're so excited for what we're going to bring you. And he would, you know, if there was a tragedy, he would say Apple reaches out and we're going to help these people. Like it was very canned responses and tweets that not responses, a very canned tweets for specific moments. And yeah, all smoothed over by a dozen lawyers and marketing people and probably not even

18:26his original idea, just more like the marketing people could say, Hey, we need to send this from your account. Like it's not, I don't even know if they have access to it, but I'm just saying it's, I wouldn't expect something different from him. I would expect it to in the, in that term in, in, in that way. So, yeah, I don't think, uh, I don't know if he's going to have a signature move. I don't think we'll know if he'll have a signature move. It wouldn't surprise me if he said good morning, but I don't think he's going to imitate Tim Cook. I just think it's a morning event.

18:57And yeah, I mean, for a lot of people, this is the first time they're going to get to hear him say anything. He's, he's not a public guy. I mean, he's been on kids, but not in a major, in a major way. So, you know, um, okay. So camera goes down to him. He says his thing. Here's your report. Oh, thanks Jane. I wish I could hire someone just like you. Try LinkedIn hiring pro. It's more than a job board. It's like the recruiter you always wished you had. Hiring pro uses real-time insights to match your role to LinkedIn's unique network of professionals

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Apple Watch and AirPods expectations

20:17What's first? I would say one of two things. It's either Apple Watches, which are the least exciting thing they're going to do tomorrow, or it's the iPhone Pro. I think they're going to put iPhones together, and I think the Ultra or whatever they end up calling the Fold one is going to be a one more thing. So that's going to be last. So my guess is they're going to start with Apple Watch. They're going to say, and it all starts, they're going to say something true, and they're going to say, it all starts with the Apple Watch.

20:47Here's so-and-so to tell you more, and that cool transition over, and then they talk about Series 12 and Ultra 4, which they will spend 10 minutes trying to make it sound like it's something new and exciting, but they're just not new and exciting. They're going to go over some new of the health features that are in WatchOS 12, but exist for other watches. I mean, WatchOS 12. WatchOS 27, but exist for other watches as well.

21:18And there might be one little new thing that just the new watches have that's pretty small, but the main thing is going to be ceramic, going back to having ceramic cases. Yeah, a couple of things Mark Herman reported over the weekend. Yeah, ceramic options, which haven't been available in a while. I think 2019 was the latest one. They were a little more expensive. Those were the addition models. I think it was available in white. He says they're testing white and gray. Also, always on heart rate tracking, which I didn't even realize it didn't do.

21:52But as it stands now, your heart rate is tracked kind of randomly throughout the day or continuously when you're doing a workout or using the breathe and the mindfulness app. So that's going to be a thing where I guess they've gotten the battery to be efficient enough where it can do that the entire day. Well, the way he said it, German said it, was it's a thing that they're testing. And it's not necessarily – he didn't say this is what the new watches do.

22:23He said the new watches have ceramic, and I've heard that one of the features that they're testing for Apple Watch is this. That doesn't mean it's only going to come to these watches or it's even going to come to these watches or it's going to come later or it's going to come to old watches as well. They'll announce it for these, but it works on every watch after a Series 6 or something. Sure. The thing I would wonder is when it checks your heart rate, it lights up. If you've ever seen it, it can't do that all day.

22:55So they've got to have something else to do. Yeah, it checks roughly once an hour when you're not doing something. And then if it detects – even if you haven't started a workout, if it detects a lot of motion or something, it checks much more often. If you just go for a walk and you're walking around your neighborhood and you haven't started an outdoor walk. Well, it tells you like it looks like you're doing this. Do you want to turn on a workout? Yeah, well, that's a workout detection thing.

23:26But even if you say no, even if you're not in a workout – Oh, I see. It will just say, oh, there's a lot more motion and everything. I'm going to check heart rate more often than once an hour. So there's kind of this variable thing now. And maybe that's not good enough. I don't know. But I just don't know. Is that a killer feature? No, definitely not. It's probably someone who cares, but it's not most people, yeah.

23:56Yeah, I just don't think it's a killer feature. The biggest thing is getting a – or so we hear is a new chip, which will be faster for the first time in a couple years and have more newer old stuff and AI stuff and maybe a little more RAM for the series stuff. You know, like that's the biggest selling point, but it's a watch. And I don't know how much we care that it's a little bit faster than it was a couple years ago. So, yeah, I think that'll be a quick segment. There is – Yeah, okay. There's some speculation about – Apple's been working on an overhaul of the health app together

24:30that will present data in a different way, do more sort of AI, sort of health, like looking at all your health metrics and saying like, you need to do this more, you should do that. Hey, have you got – whatever, you know. It's gotten really popular from the fitness bands. You know, everybody gave up on trying to compete with Apple Watch and said, well, what if we didn't do a watch? What if we just made it a band that had all the sensors and not like a screen and touch and all that other stuff and we could make it cheap and it's worked? So there's like Whoop and there's the Fitbit.

25:01Yeah, Google. Google is one. That's what they're doing. And they're leaning heavy into sort of AI health and exercise metrics. Apple has been working for a long time on a project to catch up with that that is apparently close to being ready. We haven't seen that. They didn't announce that at WWDC. We haven't seen it or heard of it or anything. But sometimes they save the health app stuff to go along with a new Apple Watch. Right. Because that's their like health hardware.

25:32Yep. So there is some speculation that, hey, they may announce all those things and you'll get them all on the existing Apple Watches too, but they won't really mention that. They'll just be like, they'll talk about an all new health app coming soon and it'll come in like a .1 update, 27.1 or something like that. Yeah. Since Apple updates these things once a year, it wouldn't make sense for it to happen now rather than wait another year. Wait another year. It could be in the big, there's a big update in like March. Usually it could be part of that, but it's got to be a part of the OS update.

26:04Like it's a big iOS update. So yeah, that's something we might see. I give it kind of like maybe 30% odds that that happens. Okay. It's not, it's not, they're going to do that soon. This would be a good time to do it. I don't know if it's not ready to come out real soon. I don't know if they would announce it. So. And that's another thing that's not going to make or break sales. Like you're not going to buy. Right. Exactly. You know? Um, so, and of course, new bands, maybe a new color or two for the, um, for the body.

26:41Yeah. And I expect it to be similar price. Same price. Jason, what do you think? Everything's getting the price bump. We haven't heard anything about Apple watch and they didn't increase it when they increased the other stuff. It didn't increase when they increased the other stuff. And, and the problem components are Ram and storage, Ram and S and flash storage. And I don't think, I think if they didn't need to raise the price on the existing line, they may not need to raise the price on the new ones.

27:11Okay. I mean, there's not, even if it gets a Ram upgrade, it's still only like two or three gigs. It's not, you know, 30 gigs of Ram in that thing, you know? No, no, it's very, it's very little. Um, I would, I think what they're going to do is they're going to have, they're going to rely on the fact that they have the ceramic model as an upsell to sort of offset some of that cost. Okay. Because that's going to be a thing that costs like another one or $200. I think it's going to be something that's like $300, $300 or $400 more, but it costs Apple

27:46like $20 more. Like it's not, like it doesn't cost them that much more to make the ceramic case, but that's the kind of thing where they can make up a lot of margin and offset some of the like cost for other people. Yep. Um, I, I, every year I hope that the battery life is going to be longer, but that was last year. That's the same. Not significantly longer, but it was, well, it was significantly, but, but not, it's not longer enough where you don't have to charge it at least once every 24 hours, but it does

28:20last longer. These new ones lasted about 50% longer than they did. Um, Apple watch ultra, probably the same upgrades as the series 12. Like we haven't really heard anything about anything specific going to the ultra model. Yeah. Um, catching up on some of the satellite connectivity is part of it to what they have in the other non ultra models, but, um, it's supposed to be the same. Yeah. So, so yeah.

28:50All right. So watches, will there be AirPods, a new AirPods at the iPhone event? So there's the AirPods pro with cameras that we've heard about. And then German said, they're also working on an AirPods, regular AirPods five. Right. The AirPods pro with cameras is according to German and some others not ready yet. That's going to be like a spring kind of a thing like, or, or even later, but it's going, it's not, not going to be here.

29:21So I, I'm just like, well, what would they put in AirPods five? Like, yeah, I agree. They already has an H two chip. Like, I guess maybe H three is ready. We've expected H three for a while. So maybe it's going to have H three and they'll say it has, I don't know, better noise canceling and better sound and longer battery life or something. Right. Like, but, but I, I don't know what they're going to change. He didn't, his report was completely void of all anything about it.

29:52It just said that they're working on it. He didn't even give any, they're working on it. And it's going to be two models, just like the four. It's going to be a way and see, uh, definitely, definitely there's there. They said they're trying to put more health features into regular AirPods, but it's not going to have the heart rate sensor. So, uh, it could be something like a temperature sensor or something, but you know, yeah, it's just the whole thing. I was like, well, what would they do? Like, why would there's no reason?

30:23Why do they need a five? Uh, maybe they'll surprise us with maybe the H three chip does really do something cool and special. I don't know. Yeah, and then the AirPods pro would get it next year, which next year also makes some sense. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So Apple watch AirPods, AirPods, the, the, so the, the, if you think the iPhones are going to be at the end, is this where they plug in part?

30:55So the smart home stuff, the Apple TV, the, uh, home pod mini, and maybe this home pad smart home hub thing, do you think that's going to come here at this event or are they going to push that later in the fall? You do think. I kind of, I kind of feel like it's not just because we would have heard more confirmation about it by now. Okay. Like a month ago, you could have said like, well, is it ready? Are they maybe going to do it? But like, by the time it's a week out like this, usually somebody's like, oh, it's definitely

31:27in the show and they're manufacturing them in cause they got to start manufacturing them a couple months ahead of time, you know? So, so like, yeah, they're manufacturing them in, it's in, unless they preview it could be a preview thing and then it doesn't ship until like February or something. Um, that's, that's possible. They have done that several times when it's a new product category. Right. Um, and it all did it, uh, AirPods did it. Yeah. It seems almost designed explicitly to Apple watch did it like they do that to introduce

32:04it before everything leaks. Before it got spoiled. No, you're right. Yeah. So it's, it's very possible. It, the reason I think maybe it's not going to happen is because from the software services side, it may not be ready. Although I think they do want to tie into as much smart home stuff as they can. So they want to give developers time for that. But do they want to steal the thunder of the folding iPhone? Right. That's the, like, are they going to have two wildly new products in one thing?

32:39Um, maybe, I don't think they're going to spend any time at all on a new Apple TV and a home pod. I think, right. I agree. If they announced this new home hub thing at all, then they'll, it'll be a throwaway line and you can use it with your great new Apple TV and new home pod for only this much money. And it'll be the same. They've already raised the prices on those. It'll be the new raised price. The same price as the current. Right. The outrageously high price. Yeah. Yeah. Outrageously high price.

33:09But I don't think they're going to like go into them a lot. They might highlight something new in tvOS 27, but it's, I don't think they're going to dive deep into those products. I think if they show this new home pad, they're going to dive deep into it because it's a new OS. It's a new interface. It's new. There's a lot to show and tell about. Um, and I, I would be excited to see it. I hope they show it, but I feel the biggest reason not to do that is, well, they could just, there's, there's a lot left to release this year.

33:41They could have an event next year or something. And I mean, next year, next month or next year. Do they want to steal any thunder from the folding phone? So yeah, I'm, I'm with you on that one because the folding phone is like a marquee flagship. Yes. It's a big deal. It's an iPhone. It's most people don't really know what folding phones are or can do. Like they see the, the Samsung commercials, but it's not, it's not a thing.

34:16Yeah. So people are going to be like, Oh wow. What's this new thing that Apple came out with? Oh, it's $2,500. And let's see what it does. But if you also have on top of that, a new smart home hub that people do know, like that's much more common. Everyone has echoes in their house and things like, and things with screens and the show. And like, that's not as, as uncommon, but it's new from Apple. I would be, I would also tend to think that they're going to skip the home pad at this

34:48event and maybe push that to a second event. Maybe, maybe, maybe a Mac event or something. Yeah. If there's an event that has the touchscreen Mac and some other stuff like later this year, they could put it there. Yeah. It's hard because that's another big marquee thing, but that's, it is, but it's a Mac. And that was a different audience. It's like the home pad maybe fits more of the iPhone audience, but I mean, Apple has done it before they've announced major products simultaneously, but I don't know.

35:23It just seems like maybe I thought we talked about this a couple of months ago. I thought they were going to preview the, the home pad at WWDC and then ship it in the fall. That's what we all, not all, but some of us were expecting that they didn't do that. So we'll see. I mean, I guess it, it kind of hinges on like Siri, does Siri get like a, like a spotlight here? Cause if that's the case, maybe they use Syria as the umbrella for the watches cause they're getting a faster chip and they have the Siri AI thing, TV OS and home pod and mini can

35:56now do Siri AI and ask questions and have conversations. Oh, and also we have this thing that ties it all together. And now here's the phones. They could do that. Yeah. And also maybe the home, the home isn't a big of a deal as we're making it. Maybe it's a cheap little $300 device that doesn't do much other than, you know, you're like the home app. Yeah. Maybe they don't want people to pay attention. Camera and do FaceTime and stuff. And, but yeah, it is expected to be relatively affordable. It's not going to be an iPad pro you stick on a dock.

36:29Um, uh, the rumor from a while back is it's not going to have an app store. It's, you know, it's going to tie into Apple services, maybe a couple of third party services, but it's meant to be an accessory for your Apple stuff, your home kit stuff, your home kit stuff and your matter stuff, um, for people who are already in the ecosystem. Right. So yeah, uh, they, they always introduce new AirPods when they introduce new AirPods at

37:03the iPhone event. It's like the Apple watch, right? It's like, it goes with the iPhone event. So if they're doing that, they're doing that. The home stuff can go anytime. It's been at any time of year. So I, my, my feeling on it is it would be a spectacular event if we had all this new stuff. And that's probably a good reason to think it's not going to happen. We always get a little disappointed in the like, Oh, all they talked about was the folding iPhone. Right. You know, that's, that was the only big deal.

37:33Right. Yep. So we'll see. Uh, uh, okay. Here's your report. Oh, thanks Jane. I wish I could hire someone just like you. Try LinkedIn hiring pro. It's more than a job board. It's like the recruiter you always wished you had. Hiring pro uses real-time insights to match your role to LinkedIn's unique network of professionals and delivers a short list of best fit candidates. You'll spend less time sorting applicants and more time talking to the right people. Let's do it. You're irreplaceable, Jane, but another you would be great.

38:03Hire right. The first time post your job for free on LinkedIn today at linkedin.com slash quality. United connects you to more of the world than any U S airline and United for business can get your company where you need to go. Whether you're growing a business or managing travel for thousands, they offer solutions to fit your needs, track expenses, create reports and manage traveler perks. Plus employees earn mileage plus miles while your company saves on travel. Get started with no minimum spend or flight requirements. Visit business.united.com slash podcast.

iPhone 18 Pro expectations

38:38So then they'll get to iPhones.

38:43Your Apple watch AirPods, maybe smart home and then iPhones. Yep. And if it's not, if there's no AirPods and no smart home stuff, then it's just going to go watches, iPhone pros, and then a lot, they're going to spend a lot of time on that folding, which they kind of have to, you know, it's, it's a little, so I don't expect there to be a show. Like there was a couple of weeks there where you're wondering, oh, like this is the kind

39:15of a kind of product for the first time in a long time, probably since Apple watch that could really use like a stage introduction. Like you have the, the buildup and it rises up out of the floor or he takes that out of his pocket and unfolds it. Takes that out of his pocket and unfolds it, yeah. Yeah. Like, like it's a shame that. Kicks back on a couch on this stage and unfolds it. Yeah, yeah. Watches Ted Lasso, right? Totally. Yeah. So, um, all right. So we'll start with, let's start with the pros. So, all right. So we're not getting, I think you've, the people listening to the show know by now, the

39:49iPhone 18 will not be announced at this show from what we hear. That's going to be another six months of the iPhone 17 and it'll, it'll launch in March or April or something. Yeah. It'll March and together with the 18 E. Right. It's going to be a spring thing. I think that's super new for Apple and most, I think most of the people out there who have iPhones, even people who kind of pay attention, don't watch this event. And I still get people who have used nothing but an iPhone for years and years who ask me

40:24like, when's the new iPhone coming out and everything. Like, so, so those people like September, it's always September, man. It's September.

40:32I think they're going to be shocked when they see commercials on TV for this new iPhone Pro and they'll be like, oh, the new iPhone's out. And they'll go to the carrier and find out that no, only this one that's like $1,200 is out. And they'll, there's a lot of sticker shock, right? There's like, what? And then they'll talk them into something here in the U S anyways, they'll talk them into something where you get on some payment plan where it's free after like all this stuff.

41:05So it's free, but you're stuck with it for two years and you pay more for your service. It could mean that Apple's going to sell a bunch more pros this season because of the holiday season, of course. Right. But yeah, it's, it's a, it's a straight, I mean, we'll talk about prices at the end of this, but you know, iPhone 17, I assume it's going to have the same price. Because it's going to be significantly cheaper than whatever these pros cost and, and obviously the iPhone ultra. So it's, it's, I'm just interested if they're going to address it at all, or if they're just

41:39going to leave it be and use the new iPhones right now and that's it. Oh, I don't think they even mention it. I think there's no upside to them saying that there's an iPhone 18 coming later or anything. Like there's, that's that there's no benefit to Apple in any way. They're just going to say the new iPhone 18 pro, the greatest iPhone we've ever made. It's so spectacular. I'm thrilled to introduce it. And here's so-and-so to tell you more. All right. Well, tell us, tell us more, Jason. What do you, what do you expect from the iPhone?

42:10They're going to, they're going to highlight the chip, the new A20 Pro. The A20 Pro, they'll say it's built on a new manufacturing process from TSMC. They won't mention TSMC, but like a whole new process that- So it'll be the two nanometer that we saw with the M6, that, that, that process. Yeah, that process, but they, they'll just call it the advanced, you know, the world's most advanced process or something like that. And then, which makes it so energy efficient and faster than ever and all this other stuff.

42:44I expect the A20 Pro to be faster in all of the expected ways. Like the, the CPU performance gets better at an incredibly steady pace over the years. Like you just look year after year, the core gets 10% faster. The thing goes, you know, uh, I don't know if they're going to have three cores in it, like the M6, like super and performance and thing, but they'll- Yeah, we were, we were talking about that, Jason, you and I on Slack, because I didn't quite understand.

43:15So the, the super cores, you, you run an article about a year ago. Yeah. Basically saying like, like, come on, Apple, like you just renamed a core and now it's super, but now like, is it, there's like a third one. So the super cores are actually super cores and there's performance and there's efficiency. So like, like they would, like now they're different. We don't really know why. They needed a better marketing word for when they introduced a middle core, right? Which they didn't have when they, when they announced the term. So instead of performance and efficiency cores, they're like, well, what, we're going to introduce a middle performance core.

43:47What do we call that? Just like a standard core or something like that. It's like, no, we need to call that something that makes it sound amazing. So we're going to rename the performance core to super core. And then when we introduce the regular normal core, we'll call that a performance core. And then, yeah, whatever, these names, these names don't mean anything to anyone. Every CPU manufacturer from computers all the way down to mobile devices and stuff does this. They have heterogeneous cores.

44:18They have cores that perform the same instructions, but bigger ones that go faster and smaller ones that are slower, but use a lot less power. And they shove them all together in a chip, and Apple's just doing more of that.

44:33So it's going to have super cores. We don't know if it's going to be like two super cores and four efficiency cores. Correct me if I'm wrong, Jason. Whatever. The iPhone doesn't have a super core right now. It has performance and efficiency, right?

44:46I think that's true. I think they did this super core thing after the A19. Right, the M5 Max, Max and Pro is what brought them, and then they renamed the M5 Max. Roman, just correct me on that if I'm wrong, but I don't think the iPhone, the A19 Pro chip has a performance and efficiency. I don't think they renamed it. I think they still call it performance cores, but they're going to call them super cores. Oh, there's no doubt in my mind. It's the fastest cores in a performance. Yeah.

45:15None of that matters. Nobody's looking at their iPhone going like, this isn't fast enough. The most important thing they can do for the iPhone is give it more RAM, which they don't announce anyway. They never talk about it at any time and won't in this. And then the GPU performance will be 20% to 30% better and be better at doing AI stuff. The thing they could do that could be really big is a big update to the neural engine. What they did with the M6 was interesting.

45:46Instead of adding more cores, instead of going from a 16-core neural engine to a 24 or 32-core neural engine, they just added a second 16-core neural engine. And they don't call it a 32-core neural engine. They call it two 16-core neural engines. Like, well, okay, I don't know. That's weird. But they could do that or they could just make it bigger. But I think the focus is going to be on AI performance.

46:16That's what they're going to talk about more than anything. And then they're going to talk a lot about the camera because that's the other big update. Yep. They'll highlight the new color. They always do.

46:32Dark cherry is what we're expecting. Yeah, they'll have their own name for it, like they did with Cosmic Orange. Cosmic Orange was tangerine or something like that. Because of the way it looked, they call it Cosmic Orange. So they'll come up with their own name for it. Merlot. I don't know. But, like, it's not going to be Cosmic Orange. Cosmic Orange was a shock to the system. It was. They loved it. And I don't think dark cherry is going to be that hot.

47:02It looks fine. Who knows? Yeah. It looks nice in the way that that dark green looks nice and stuff that they had back then and whatever.

47:12The camera is expected to get a pretty big update. They're adding, mostly the main lens is going to be updated to a new sensor that supports variable aperture. And they're going to have a variable aperture, mechanical variable aperture. So, yeah. So, I was going to ask. So, that's, like, literally a part that's going to open and close. Yeah. Yep. And there's been a few phones in the past, in the recent years that have had that. When they used to cover Android, the S10 or 11 or whatever had that.

47:46And then they quickly moved away from it. It was only one generation. And then they stopped doing it. There's been a couple more recent ones from Huawei or Honor or whatever, some flagship phones that have had that.

48:01What's the benefit of that? So, it's literally, without getting too much into how photography works. Okay. Wide aperture lets in more light. Right. And has a shorter depth of field. Right? Like, the background stuff is blurred more. And then as you shrink the aperture, it lets in less light, which means your shutter speed has to be longer. And the background is sharper. Like, your depth of field gets longer and you get sharper.

48:33Some people are saying, like, well, now there's a variable aperture. It'll be really great at low light. That's not going to happen because it's already, like, what is it? F 2.0 or something. Yeah. And it's wide open. It's always wide open now. It's not, it's not, this isn't going to let them get a wider aperture than they have now. It's going to let them have a smaller aperture than they have now. For higher, for, like, oversaturation stuff.

49:03Yeah. So, what it's going to be good at is if you want to take a picture outside in bright light, but you want the whole background and foreground and everything in focus, that's really hard to do right now. You have to, the shutter speed would need to be incredibly fast to, already you get oversaturation of stuff. But, like, you would never get the background in focus. There's always a natural depth of field to the camera. Well, now you'd be able to shut that down. I think the big benefit is going to be to video.

49:38Okay. Follow me here if you can. But there's a video, there's a principle in shooting video where your shutter speed is supposed to be 180 degrees of the frame rate of your video. Basically, double your, your thing. So, if you're shooting for a movie for the cinema screen and it's 24 frames per second, your shutter speed should be 148th of a second. Okay. If you're shooting a 60 frames per second video for digital home, whatever, most are not 60, but, like, if you were to do that, your shutter speed is supposed to be 120 frames per second.

50:19That's the shutter speed that captures enough blur within the frame to have, when you, all the frames run together, to have the motion look properly smooth. Right? Right. That is very difficult to do for phone cameras now in bright light. So, if you're outside and you're shooting 30 frames a second video, it's really hard to have a shutter speed of 160th of a second. Your, your, your little wide open camera lens is way too sensitive for that.

50:53And so, you get overblown highlights and stuff, or what you get more often now is heavily processed video to bring down the exposure as much as they can. And, um, you get motion that doesn't quite look right. They still usually can't hit that, like, 160th of a second shutter speed or 148th if you're doing 24 frames a second, right? That's a really slow shutter, that's a really, like, long shutter speed for bright light for a camera like you have in your phone with a F2.0 aperture.

51:26So, this would let them shut down the aperture a lot so they could have those shutter speeds and not have it all be overexposed. Okay. And so, um, it would just help video quality look more natural and, like, the proper smoothness and stuff like you would get, like, with a real proper video camera or DSLR set properly or something. It says the iPhone 17 Pro, the main, the Fusion main camera has a F1.78 aperture.

52:02That's the, that's the widest, I presume?

52:06That's, it's always 1.78. It's, it's, it can't go smaller than that. And that's a wide, that's a pretty wide, it's fixed at 1.78 all the time for every shot. And this will let them go down to F4, F5, F8, you know, maybe F12. I don't know how, how much range this aperture will have, but that just really helps. I don't know anything about this stuff, but how come they can't do it, like, so, like, night mode, for example.

52:37Yeah. Is able to digitally, I don't know, what is it, what is it, make it larger or smaller? It, it, it does something. It does, it doesn't move the aperture at all. It just holds the, it just takes a really long exposure. Oh, okay. And it compensates for your, for your frame moving a little bit. It stacks a whole bunch of exposures together. It just keeps it open for a really long time. Okay. This is going to, this is going to allow them to go in the other direction. When it's bright, not having things overexposed. If you take a picture outside with your main camera on your iPhone, you'll see the shutter speed is like one 64,000th of a second or something.

53:14Okay. And they can't make the aperture smaller to bring that down. And it doesn't usually matter a lot. But if you want your outdoor photos to have the foreground and background in focus, that's tricky. And if you're shooting video, they have to really work their way around trying to get the shutter speed to be the proper shutter speed for the frame rate of video that you're doing. So I think this is the variable. There may be other benefits that I don't know and I can't figure out.

53:46They're going to talk about, but I think it's going to make video look really good because they'll be able to lock in on a frame rate that's exactly double, I mean, a shutter speed that's exactly like half of what your video frame rate is.

54:05Apple gets a lot of Apple and other phones, but they get a lot of criticism for post-processing stuff. Like if you take a picture and they're doing whatever they do and will they dial that back? Will they allow you to turn it off because of this? Like, is that a step in that direction? If they do any of that, it's not going to be because of a variable aperture. Okay. They could do that now. Like there's nothing about having a wide aperture that means like that they have to make everything look super saturated and plasticky and heavy noise reduction and all that stuff.

54:42That's about other parts of their image pipeline. If anything, it makes it a little more challenging because as you make the aperture smaller, you need a longer shutter speed. You need to have the shutter open longer. And that makes it hard to take like 30 exposures and stack them together and process them with all their photographic computing buzzword stuff. It's just harder to take more frames when your shutter speed's longer.

55:17Okay. So the benefits are, like everybody always wants better low light. This is not really about better low light. Right. It could also just be... Pretty good low light already. Yeah. It could also... It could just be like this sensor is also bigger and more sensitive and therefore good at low light. But the variable aperture thing in particular helps you with bright light and it helps you with video.

55:43Okay. Roman, you got all that? All right. So camera is a big deal. Like that's... Don't make a big deal of that. They'll make a big deal out of that. They'll show like a close-up and it'll go bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Like it'll, you know, the commercial. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

56:01Oh, just quick for my own brain to figure this out. When you say a smaller aperture, the number gets bigger. So like F5 is smaller than F1.5. Correct. Okay. Yes. It's because it's the focal... It's the focal length divided by X, right? So the focal length divided by two is wide. The focal length divided by eight is smaller, right? Okay.

56:32All right. Any other... Like is this... Like we haven't heard about the zoom. Oh, so before we move away from the... From the optical, from the mechanical aperture stuff, there's some reports that this is only coming to the Pro Max. We're not sure. Yeah. But this could be a Pro Max feature. Yeah. I hope not. I hate when they do features that require you to get the bigger phone. Yeah. The telephoto was the most recent. Yeah. You had to upgrade to the giant one if you wanted the optical telephoto lens.

57:07Or the better one. A better optical telephoto. It was like 5X versus 2X or something. Yeah. But then they caught up like the next year. Yeah. Like with the 17, it's all... They're all the same again. They're identical. Yeah. It's bigger and smaller. Yeah. Any... We haven't heard anything about like a better zoom, right? Like we don't know. I haven't. No. Yeah. Unless they're doing something with software. They can do software tricks that don't... Those things don't leak very well because they don't have a supply chain to work with and all these other people to... Right. to deal with.

57:37So you never know what they're going to do software-wise.

57:42Any... Oh, battery's supposed to be bigger, but it's always bigger. It's always bigger. The battery life's always a little better. And we expect that. Everything else... Second generation, great cooling thing. Yeah. What is it? Thermal... Thermal something. Thermal engine. Thermal... No. Thermal something. What they call it? Thermal chamber? Is it the chamber? Yeah. They call it an evaporation chamber for thermal... Vapor or something. Vapor cooling. Yeah. So that's going to go...

58:13The reports that from casemakers selling these things that iPhone 17 Pro cases will fit iPhone 18 Pro phones. They're going to be pretty much identical for... That's neat. Yeah. That hasn't happened in a while because they always made that little thing a little bit bigger in the corner and then they went to the wide one. So the first couple of cases that we've seen from like Otterbox and stuff, like it just says iPhone 17 Pro slash 18 Pro.

58:43So they don't know for sure, but they get pretty good sources and they talk to people in the supply chain and they get CAD things linked to them and stuff. Yeah. So... Sometimes the thickness is just like a half a millimeter different. Right. And that's enough to make your case not fit. But... So if the case is actually fit, then that's... Yeah. They're very similar. The online leaks for the Pro, the Pro Max might be a little bit thicker because of the camera or something.

59:14Okay. We'll have to see. Or even bigger battery or something. You know, we're like an hour in and we haven't gotten to the Ultra. So, you know... Can you put like a commercial break here? Can you do that? Here's your report. Oh, thanks, Jane. I wish I could hire someone just like you. Try LinkedIn Hiring Pro. It's more than a job board. It's like the recruiter you always wished you had. Hiring Pro uses real-time insights to match your role to LinkedIn's unique network of professionals and delivers a shortlist of best-fit candidates.

59:44You'll spend less time sorting applicants and more time talking to the right people. Let's do it. You're irreplaceable, Jane, but another you would be great. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free on LinkedIn today at linkedin.com slash quality. United connects you to more of the world than any U.S. airline, and United for Business can get your company where you need to go. Whether you're growing a business or managing travel for thousands, they offer solutions to fit your needs. Track expenses, create reports, and manage traveler perks.

1:00:15Plus, employees earn mileage plus miles while your company saves on travel. Get started with no minimum spend or flight requirements. Visit business.united.com slash podcast.

1:00:30Well, you said you wanted to follow along just like the keynote. Yeah. I'm exhausted and we're not even, like the keynote's not for another week. The keynote's probably going to be two hours, so yeah. That'd be a close. They typically spend a little time when they talk about these iPhone pros talking about basically professional video making. Right. And so it wouldn't surprise me if they had a little bit of that. Like a little. Yeah, they had, was last year Olivia Rodrigo or The Weeknd or something? Like they have like a major somebody doing something with the phones that they put in the keynote.

1:01:04Yes. Yeah. Real movie makers, real filmmakers, real people shooting real stuff shot on iPhone, you know, with $10,000 worth of lighting gear and everything. But the iPhone's the camera. They do all that. Like the iPhone could do so much cool stuff. Most people take it out of the pocket, hit record and just point it. Sure. Yeah, because it's not, it's not just the iPhone, like it's shot on iPhone, but like with a gimbal and lighting rigs and microphones and all this stuff.

1:01:35When they had the, when I watched the Apple immersive baseball thing, like I'm on the field and the on Nexus, so like a couple of times like the camera guy would come over with his big giant rig and yeah, in the center of it's an iPhone, but it's, it's enormous. Like what the guy's holding, it's a whole thing. But it is a, it is shot on iPhone. Right. So you can do it. You just got to know what you're doing. So there'll be something there that's like, this is for professional people. It's always something about like color grading or, or syncing up multiple camera, you know,

1:02:10time things or stuff like, yeah, there'll be something like that. That's like, all right, that's, that's for pros. That's not for us.

The expected folding iPhone Ultra

1:02:16Yeah. And then I think, boy, wouldn't it be exciting if John Ternus's first keynote as CEO and his first thing, he got to come out and say one more thing. You know, like there's nothing cooler than, than the one more thing. And you know, it gets to connect Ternus to, to jobs. And it just seems to me that it would be a perfect time to do that. So I think Ternus come out, he'll come out and say, oh, the great, how great the iPhone

1:02:47is, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, but we have one more thing. And then. Yep. The folding iPhone and it'll show a little video, a cool video, a cool video that's super up close, artistic CG rendered version of it.

1:03:05And then do you think it'll be called iPhone ultra? Like most people think I do, but I also understand why people that I do, I'm going to say, I'm going to put my, my pin in the ground here and say, yes, it will be called iPhone ultra. Yeah, me too. I think they have an established brand.

1:03:24I think iPhone fold would have been fine and still might be fine. But I think saying ultra excuses all kinds of price geneticans, like it, like if you were just to look at like its performance or specs or whatever, it may not justify a super high price. So calling it ultra helps cement in everybody's mind that this is the, by far the best one, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, all right, run down what we know about it or what we think we know about it.

1:04:02Surprisingly little, but we do know a lot. It's going to be an A20 Pro. So it may have to be like, like they did with the air and A20 Pro with like one less core or two less GPU cores or something to be like, but it's still going to be an A20 Pro. It's shorter and wider than a normal iPhone when closed. They call it passport size. And then you open it like a book. It's not a vertical flip. Yep. When it opens, it's roughly the size of an iPad mini.

1:04:34Yeah. About seven. It says 7.8 ish, a little under eight inches. Like so roughly, right? Yep. It's in that neighborhood.

1:04:45No face ID. They'll put touch ID on the little homey button instead. Yep.

1:04:52Because they can't. Yeah. Power side button. I think they call it the side button, but it'll be up around the corner. So the top button, I don't know what they'll call it. You like the iPad when you rotate it, like the buttons kind of rotate with you. The power, the volume buttons rotate. I assume it'll be a similar thing. Yeah. Yeah. They can't really do face ID because there's an outside screen. And so they would need like a face ID camera pointing out, but then they also need one when it's open for all the authentications and passwords and stuff like that. They're not sticking to in something that needs to be so super thin.

1:05:26Right. So cameras, a wide and an ultra wide, no telephoto. We don't know if it's going to be the exact same wide as the pros, like the variable aperture thing. Yeah. That's a big question mark. That's one of those things we need to, to, to know. I'm going to, I'm going to say no, that that'll be a iPhone pro feature and not an iPhone ultra feature. Yeah. I mean, it would be weird if the biggest, most expensive one had like a worse main camera,

1:05:59but I could see why they wouldn't do it just in terms of like, maybe they need, it's not the kind of thing they necessarily need more depth for, but maybe they do need more depth and thickness. It's on a big Island. So maybe they can't. Yeah. I don't know. It's going to have a worse camera because there's only two. And yeah, it won't have the telephoto. Telephoto. Yeah. But I want that main, I want that main camera to be at least just as good. Right. All the iPhones, there has been a rumor that the front facing selfie camera will get an

1:06:32upgrade to 24 megapixels this year. Yeah. Didn't we have that rumor last year? Do we have that rumor last year? Yeah, we did. We did and it didn't happen. And it's recirculated. They did the landscape selfie portrait thing where you go in any direction and switch it That was, was that two years ago or last year? I don't remember. No, I don't remember. But it was like, yeah, it was, it's a different sensor. It's square and 18 megapixels. And that was great. You can take any orientation holding your phone in any orientation.

1:07:05So it may still be that, or it may be that like upgraded 24 megapixels. And then the rest of it, we just don't know a lot about it. Like we don't know, they're going to probably make a big deal about how durable the hinge is and how you don't see the crease and stuff like that. That's the, that's the two, the two biggest pain points for all folding phones are the, the, the, the dust and dirt ingress on the pinch and the, the crease down the center of

1:07:37the, of the phone. The other thing is like, this is obviously it's like the screen isn't glass. So, you know, Apple is going to be doing some of its engineering wizardry here to make this feel as high end as it possibly can. But like, I've used the, the, the Samsung phones and you can tell, you can also scratch it if you have pointing fingernails or something like, so there's going to be some things that we're going to be watching and looking at. Cause you know, this is unlike, it's not just like, it's going to feel and look differently

1:08:12the screen itself than any phone that, that we've used for a long time. Some of these folding phones, the screen is glass, but it's, I mean, glass when it's thin enough bends like, right? But it's very thin glass and it doesn't have that super ultra hard coatings that make them super scratch resistant. So there's going to be, I don't know how much they'll talk about it, but that's going to be a key aspect. They're going to have to convince people how durable it is. You can spend all this money. For sure. It's going to have to hold up. The Samsung version is IP four.

1:08:46Yeah. The first one, the dust ingress is bad. Yeah. So it's not like the water ingress is fine. It's like 47 or something. But like, if you have a bunch of junk in your pocket or you take it to the beach or you take it hiking, like it could get in there and get crunching. And then don't be opening and folding it a lot at the beach. Right. Yeah. You have to watch for those things. It's also difficult to put a case on these. Yes. The case doesn't really cover the hinge. And yeah, you know, I don't know what Apple's going to do for official cases for this.

1:09:17If anything, it might just be kind of two halves and leaves the hinge exposed. I don't know. Yeah. And, you know, it's all sort of like opening and closing. It's somewhat inelegant when it's open. Like it doesn't, some of them aren't quite flat. They're a little bit like this and, you know. Some open straight flat. I mean, they've, other people have kind of nailed that. I expect Apple to do a good job with that. But what the big question mark, the real thing that we, nobody knows, there's no great rumors

1:09:48about or anything like that is, what's the software experience going to be like? Yeah. It's going to be an iPhone. It's got to be able to run all your iPhone apps. Right. But what, that, that outside screen is kind of squat. So what does it do for your apps that don't fit on that screen? Like, does it shrink? Does there bars on the side? Does it scroll? Does it scroll? Like, what does it do when you open it up? Is, can you put, can you run two apps side by side? That, to me, seems like a table stakes thing. Like, they'd better at least do that.

1:10:20But no iPhone has ever. Yeah, but this is, is it going to have an iPad interface on the inside with floating windows and stage manager and that stuff? My guess is no. My guess is they're not going to make it an iPad in any way. They're going to, like, limit it to two apps that each take up, like, half the screen. And you can't move that and all that other. It's like, make it, keep it simple. But it's got to at least do that. But are they going to do anything surprising? Are they going to do anything that really changes how any of this works?

1:10:51Am I going to be able to, you know, drag down Control Center and leave that open and run another app? Am I going to, is it going to do anything cool with apps moving between the outside window when closed and then opened up? Could it do something really, really cool when, even when you have it open with the outside screen? Like, maybe when I'm taking a picture, like, the outside screen could show the people I'm taking a picture of, like, what I see or something.

1:11:23You know, whatever. Like, just something, just any kind of, are they doing anything creative and new here? Or is it just going to be, like, welcome to Android 2020, Apple? Like, is it going to be, are they going to do anything special? Anything special. That's what I see. Yeah. Because if it doesn't, and I believe it will, but if it's just an iPhone on the outside and a split screen iPhone on the inside, you know, there's nothing that's going to encourage or entice anyone to spend what we think is going to be upwards of $2,500 on this new device.

1:12:02Yeah, that's the other thing is, like, we really don't know what the price is, that what we've heard is $2,000 and up for the starting price, which means it could start at $2,000. That's what other ones start at, too. Yeah, it could start at $22, something, and go up in there. That's, to me, that's bonkers money anyway. There are folding phones that are cheaper. They go down to $1,500, and they go on sale all the time and all this other kind of stuff. To me, a good price is a couple hundred more than the Pro Max, right, which would be something like $1,799 or whatever.

1:12:44Like $2,000 is, I looked it up, $2,000 is MacBook Pro money. Sure. That is an M's, that is an... Not anymore, but it was, well, yeah, that's not true. You can't get the M5. That is an M5 MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage and a whole keyboard and a 14-inch dual LCD screen and all that other kind of stuff. Like, so that's a great, you gotta, it's gotta be real special to justify $2,000, much less more than $2,000.

1:13:22All right, let me give you this analogy. A current iPhone Pro is the cost of a MacBook Air, which is also a full laptop. So, like, we're already in that comparison. I think there was a time, not that long ago, when the iPhone Ultra unfolding thing would have been the same price as a M5 MacBook, which was $1,599 a couple months ago. Yeah. Like, this RAM, I think, blew everything up. I mean, you know, I'm not being, you know, it doesn't take a genius to see that.

1:13:54But I think, like, it's screwed with their plans for this thing. Because if they had announced this at $1,599, they would have sold a ton of them. Yeah. When they announced it at $2299 or $19, even if it's $1999. Right. I think that's gonna cut down a bunch of people that might have spent a little more on this than they would have on a normal phone. Yeah. It will clearly sell out just because, like, also, it's Apple. The manufacturing run is supposed to be pretty small so far, like, at the start and everything.

1:14:26So, who knows how many they'll have. But it will vary. As soon as it goes on sale, you'll be like, it says my delivery date's December. Like, yeah, it's gonna bump. We're gonna have that, for sure. Because this is the first folding phone from Apple. Right. And they're gonna make it seem so luxurious. But when it comes down to brass tacks, and it might be, but it comes down to brass tacks, like, if it's just, like, the iPhone 18 Pro is actually better in every way except for having a big old screen.

1:14:57Yeah. Like, that's gonna be real hard to justify spending on. And if they take that big old screen and the folding and all that stuff and they do some really cool software stuff with it, then they could justify that price.

1:15:10Yeah. What do you think?

Expected iPhone price hikes

1:15:11We didn't talk about what the iPhone Pro will cost. Right now it's $10.99 and $11.99, I think. What do you think? I think it has to go up. Yeah. I think they're gonna raise it as little as possible, but they did not, like, iPhones is the only thing they didn't raise the prices on. Right. And I think they were just waiting for the new bottles to do it. Yep. RAM is really important. They need to add RAM. That's the hold back for them for AI everything.

1:15:42Apple notoriously has less RAM than other phones and everything. So, I think that they need to raise the price. I think they're gonna try and raise it. I don't think they like doing 50s. I think they like their 99s round numbers. So, I think they'll raise it. I think everything's gonna be $100 more. So, $11.99, $12.99. And some of the options for storage, for extra storage, might also be wanted. Yeah. They might also be like, what?

1:16:12Like a 2-terabyte one will be way... Yeah, they'll be a 2-terabyte one, but it'll cost $29.99 or some bonkers thing. You think the Pro Max will get a bigger price jump or the same? Because they've raised that before without the Pro. Yeah. And I think that sets them up to have the same price hike now. I think my guess, total guess, everything's $100 more at the starting price. Okay. All the phone, all the, you know, Pro phones. So, $11.99, $12.99.

1:16:43Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Part of me thinks it's gonna be $11.99 for the Pro and $13.99 for the Pro Max. Maybe with a terabyte of storage. Maybe they give you a little more storage. Yeah, maybe they do the thing where they get rid of the lowest storage thing. And so, it's, quote, only a $100 price increase, but they also took away the cheapest model. So, you... Yeah. Which they've done a lot lately. They've done a lot, yeah. The iPhone 17, which will still be on sale, will that remain at $7.99?

1:17:17Yeah. Yeah, I don't think they touched that price. Okay. And then, that's it. They say pre-orders will start Saturday because of 9-11 is Friday for the Pros. And probably a couple weeks later for the Ultra. Like, it doesn't sound like it's gonna go up for sale for pre-order at the same time. They've done that before. They did that with the iPhone 10. They did that in COVID with the iPhone 12.

1:17:49So, it's not unprecedented. It's not unprecedented. I'm a little surprised. I would think they would open the pre-orders at the same time, but with a shipping date later. Like, tell everybody. And it ships on October 14th or whatever.

1:18:03That's the rumor. They'll have a pre-order for the watches and the Pros. And then the Ultra will be like a week or three later. A separate pre-order for them. Yeah. Makes sense. Yep. I mean, they could do it. All right.

Which new phones we plan to buy

1:18:17Roman, are you buying a folding phone? Or a watch?

1:18:24You're muted, Roman. So, clearly, you're not buying one.

1:18:29No. You know, when the first rumors came out of a folding phone, I was gonna buy it. And then when the rumors kind of reiterated that it's only gonna have two cameras, I decided I'm not gonna buy it. Is that true? So, that means that much to you? Yeah. Yeah, the third camera. Yeah. I came to that realization when, because last year I had an iPhone 16 Plus. Mm-hmm. And during my usage of it, I was like, I actually used that third camera a lot. Okay. So, when I got to the 17 Pro, the Pro Max, I was like, oh, yeah, it kind of reaffirmed that my dependency on that third camera.

1:19:06So, if the Fold is not having a third camera, I'm not getting it. Okay. Jason, would you buy one? I'm a hard sell on folding phones to begin with. And then, with the prices, like, I mean, I never want to say never until I see what they do with the software. Because that could be, it could be like, oh, I've always wanted to do that on my iPhone. Like, but my guess, I really want to see what the compatibility thing is, too.

1:19:39Because the aspect ratios are changing. So, like, what do they do when you're running apps that aren't, that don't resize themselves elegantly, like a lot of games and stuff do, where it's, like, we have black bars, what do they do, the scale? I don't know. So, I still have a lot of questions, but my gut feeling is, no, I don't want to buy one.

1:20:03But on the other hand, we need to make a lot of video content for all you lovely people. Yeah, we might have to buy one. And so, we need to have one to do videos for, because it's not like the pros and the regulars, where if you're doing a software feature that's not reliant on, like, that third camera or something, it's going to look the same. You can show that. This is going to look different. This is going to be very individual. So, yeah, we may end up having a buy one, but I'm not excited about it.

1:20:36I'm in the same boat. I don't want one either. And the reason, the main reason is that it's going to be too thick for me. I like, I have the Air, and I love the Air, and I don't want to, I wouldn't want to get a phone that's twice as thick. And I don't really care about the widescreen. I don't think I would use it as much as, I don't know, Apple thinks I would, I guess. I don't know. I'm not, like, I want to go see it. I want to use it. I want to test it.

1:21:06I want to do all that stuff. But as my daily phone, I don't think so. The Air 2 sounds great. Yeah. I mean, that's expected in the spring. But the Air 2, well, they're going to add that ultra-wide camera, and that means it has macro. I can deal with doing digital zoom, but I need to be able to shoot things that are small up close, like, and so I need that ultra-wide camera. So if they do that and then make the battery life better, I loved using the Air.

1:21:37I loved holding it. I loved the way it felt. I loved the size of it. It was, like, in between. It's perfect. Small and big iPhone. It was perfect in so many ways. It was freakishly strong. Like, how is that the most durable iPhone they make? Yeah, I've been using it without a case since, what, September. Yeah. And I can barely see a scratch on this thing. Yeah, the screen doesn't scratch. Like, I have to turn it at, like, a certain angle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the pros, too, the new screen scratch resistance that they have is probably the first time that I don't even get little micro-scratches or anything on the screen.

1:22:15So I just couldn't. Now, the ultra- deal with that battery life in the one camera. And the ultra, I think, is going to kind of go backwards and pick up micro-scratches based on what we see from other manufacturers. Like, they'll have the outside screen all super protected, but the inside folding one, I don't know. Yeah. So, yeah, I require convincing for this ultra. And with the price hikes we're expecting, I require convincing for the pros.

1:22:50Yeah. Well, sounds like Roman's convinced about the pros. You're going to like the aperture thingy, I assume, if you're that much into iPhone photography. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. It's only on the main camera. If you use the telephoto a lot, it won't be on that or the wide angle or whatever. To me, the camera is one of the most important things on my iPhone. I always want it to be better and more capable without it being one of those things where it's like, download another app and spend all this time setting all these settings.

1:23:21Like, no, no, I want to point and shoot. And it's just having it look good. Yeah. Right. Because you can never retake that photo. That photo is done. Yeah. You know, and however many years from now, that's the photo you have. So I just want those to be better.

1:23:39Okay. Well, that's what's coming. That's what we think is coming. Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra, maybe AirPods 5, maybe HomePod and Apple TV and a new HomePad. Definitely iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max. Definitely iPhone Ultra might not be called that. And definitely John Ternus doing something new. Yeah. And definitely a new CEO. Yeah. New CEO, who dis?

1:24:07A week from tomorrow. That'd be hilarious if they started off with like the text message. Somebody texts like Tim and John's answering the text, new CEO, who dis? They won't do that, but that would be awesome. Well, they might do something playful with Ternus and Cook and, you know, they might. Tim Cook comes out, good morning, and then Ternus shoves him.

1:24:34They won't do anything that fun. But yeah, they might do something. They might do some sort of baton passing kind of skit.

1:24:44The skits are usually a WWDC thing. Ternus has shown a little bit of a playful side to me. Yeah. Events. Like he did that one presentation like when he was on a train or something, like on a subway train or something. And I made a little gif of him. He was like he's walking through a hallway and he turns to the camera and he winks. Yeah. I made a gif of that and put it up on our website. Yeah. He's a very likable, affable, performative guy.

1:25:15Like he's – you'll see. If you've never – if you don't know who John Ternus is, you'll meet him next weekend. He's very photogenic and he's very – he's like an actor almost. He's not as performative as Craig Federighi is, but he does the little things. Federighi is like over-the-top performance. Yeah. Yeah. So Ternus is like Brad Pitt. Federighi is like Jim Carrey.

1:25:44Okay.

1:25:48But I do think, yeah, he's got the CEO energy. He's ready for the role in terms of like he's spent all the time. He's paid his dues. He understands the entire product stack very deeply. For sure, yeah. This is very much not like bringing in someone from the outside in any way. Right.

1:26:09All right. We will see you next time we see you all. The event will have taken place. The event's on a Wednesday. So we're probably going to record a broadcast on Thursday. We can't. We can't. Yeah. We're going to have to. We can't record one on Tuesday. That makes no sense. So, yeah. No, no. I mean we won't even record it Wednesday because the event's Wednesday. Right. It's Wednesday morning. We'll be. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to be a little. Yeah. We'll be a little later than usual. Yeah. For people because we usually post a podcast on Wednesdays, Wednesday afternoons.

1:26:44And so people, if you're looking out for it, we're going to be a little later than usual. Hey, listen. If there's anyone that's upset, we salute you and thank you. Here's your report. Oh, thanks, Jane. I wish I could hire someone just like you. Try LinkedIn Hiring Pro. It's more than a job board. It's like the recruiter you always wished you had. Hiring Pro uses real-time insights to match your role to LinkedIn's unique network of professionals and delivers a short list of best-fit candidates.

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This week in Apple history

1:27:41Learn more at onesourceair.com. All right, Roman, let's do Apple history. Okay, so this week in Apple history on September 5th, 2007, so was that 19 years ago? It was. The first iPod Touch hit the market. Yeah. So it came out about what? So the iPhone, the original iPhone came out earlier that June.

1:28:13Yeah. So then a few months later, the iPod Touch came out.

1:28:18I have one at home. I don't know where it is. I know I have one. It's in a drawer. Yeah. It's in a drawer somewhere with another iPod Touch. Like, I don't remember which. All iPods. All iPods are iPod Touches. You touched them all. No.

1:28:35I thought it was a genius thing, not as an iPod. Like, I thought it was kind of a terrible iPod because it's got a big, like, it's got a big old touchscreen that, like, added not as much storage. Like, as a music listening thing, it wasn't the best. But it was an iPhone without the phone. Right. Like, it was a non-cellular iPhone. And that was the perfect thing to give your kids so they could, like, play games and watch their, you know, kids' videos and all that other, all educational content, whatever.

1:29:11You didn't have to worry about them being online. You just don't connect the Wi-Fi when you don't want to, whatever. You know, you could just load it up and give this to your kid. And your kid has their phone. It was a lot cheaper, too, than a phone. But it was the same. It was kind of the same as the iPhone. Yeah. It looked the same. And, you know, like Jason just said, it was perfect for kids. It was also perfect for people who didn't want to spend $600 on a phone. At the time, the iPhone was super expensive and tied to AT&T.

1:29:44Right? Am I right about that? I don't know if that had ended by then. I don't remember. I think it was still tied to AT&T. Yeah. So you had to sign a contract. You had to spend $700. If you had another, like, it wasn't so easy to switch carriers at that point. So if you had bought, like, a Motorola Razr or something a year before, you were stuck. So this gave people a taste of the iPhone without having that whole expense. It was, what, $199 or $249 or something? And as Jason just said, it ran iPhone OS.

1:30:17Like, it was an iPhone. It had the whole app store. And it didn't have, well, there was no app store yet. We didn't have the app store yet. That was next year. No. It didn't. iPhone OS didn't have the app store. Okay. No. Next year. The two. No, it was the next year. The app store didn't come out until, yeah. And it started at $299 for the 8 gigabyte. Oh, $300. Okay. So about half the price of an iPhone without the contract. And, you know, the iPhone was still new.

1:30:50And it was surprising that Apple, when we heard rumors of this, you know, they think we thought maybe it would undercut the success of the iPhone. And quite the opposite. It, you know, it led, it probably pushed it higher because people tried out the iPod and then said, well, I want to take this thing around with me everywhere, but I can't because it only has Wi-Fi. Yeah. But I, I had an iPhone. I didn't buy, like, if you had an iPhone, you didn't really need the iPod touch.

1:31:20But. I think the first gen iPod touch, when it was released, it didn't have the app store. But isn't that that thing where the new OS update that included the app store, iPhone OS 2, that came out, but it wasn't free? Like, if you had an iPhone touch, you had to pay, like, $10 or something for it? Yeah. So, like, the first iPod touch did eventually get the app store, but you had to, like, pay

1:31:50to update the OS? Yeah, I remember, you're right. I don't remember why, but there was. Wasn't that a weird thing? It was $10 and $5. I think they, I think they charged for FaceTime at some, also, like, $2 or something. There was some, like, regulatory weird thing that they had to charge for some reason. Right. They were, they were charging for codecs that they licensed or something like that, that they didn't include in the price before. They didn't want to eat $2. Yeah, it was, it's strange. Let me see. Now I need to know.

1:32:22Yeah, so it was $10 and then it was $5. And I'm not 100% sure. Oh, right. Yeah. The next year for iPhone OS 3, 3.0, iPhone OS 2 was $10. iPhone OS 3 was $10, but then there was a 3.1 that was $5. And then it was, and then it was free after that. But yeah, so the, the original iPod touch did eventually get the app store, but you had to pay 10 bucks to update the OS.

1:32:53What a weird thing. What a weird, I remember when you just had to pay for operating systems. It's so, it's so strange that like how they've, how it's all changed. Like OS updates aren't free, are free now. They were used to pay. I mean, we used to pay 130 bucks just to get a new Mac update for a while. That's what I'm saying. Like every, every OS update used to be, I feel like that was a good thing in a way. Cause they needed to make it justify that price.

1:33:26Like they needed every OS update for your computer to be significant or you wouldn't buy it. Now that it's free, they can be little.

1:33:39I'm looking at the Apple press release. This says it was $20.

1:33:44Major software upgrade for the iPod touch.

1:33:49$19.99 by purchase and downloading through iTunes. Huh.

1:33:54Okay. Well, either way, that was that weird, weird thing where they just, the iPod touch for some reason had a paid OS update and then it got the app store and other stuff. So this says, I don't know if this is true, but this is from our website. The iPod touch, uh, uh, uh, says, uh, this is from Needham and company financial analyst charge. Wolf says it's an accounting requirement. If you upgrade a device that's not on a subscription, you have to charge, but why just that device? Yeah. That's BS.

1:34:25That doesn't sound right.

1:34:30Uh, I don't know.

1:34:34Yeah. That sounds like that. That doesn't make any sense. Logical. This, this article from 2008. So yeah, it was 20 bucks. What do they know? So the free iPod touch 11.3. Oh no, I'm sorry. 1.1.3. Yeah. So that's just an update to the existing one. It's not just a plan.

1:34:56Oh, that was the ability to rearrange. Okay. All right. We're getting in the weeds here, but, um, we used to just pay that stuff without even thinking about it. And now, um, yeah, you know, and now it's just free. Now it's just free. We just pay. We pay for other stuff. We pay in other ways, but other ways. Okay. Um, anyway, iPod touch is no longer with us. I forget when, but it was, wasn't that long ago when they got rid of it. Maybe I think it went for like seven, seven or eight generations. It never got the iPhone 10 update, like with the full screen and then no home button, but

1:35:33it, it, it, it hung on for a little while. The last, it went seven generations. Last one. According to this. I feel like 2022. Oh yeah. I see only four years ago. I feel like they'd still, they'd still, if they came out with a, like an, uh, an iPhone SE with the notch and stuff, I feel like parents would buy those for kids now. Yeah. That's seventh gen. It came out in 2019. They kept selling it until 2022. Yeah. And then they just stopped selling it. They just officially killed it. Yeah.

1:36:03Yeah. The thing is now you have what the, is it the, you have the, well, it's 449 now. I forgot. You have, you have the iPad at, I think back when the iPad was 349 before the price upgrade, you wouldn't have a market for the iPod touch. But now that it's 449. Yeah. Give me a $200 iPod touch. Yeah. Yeah. Like a $200, even a 299 iPod touch for, like you said, for the kid, you know, give it to

1:36:36the back of the car on the long road trip kind of thing. If it's basically an iPhone without the phone part, without cellular, like it was, I wonder if that would cannibalize the market these days because now Wi-Fi is so everywhere. Yeah, that's true. That you could just do like a FaceTime voice calls and Wi-Fi. There's all these Wi-Fi calling things and stuff. Like, could you just get around not having cellular for the hundreds of dollars less money that you'd spend?

1:37:06Right. Thousands a year, you know, hundreds a month, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I didn't mean the cellular plan. I just meant like the actual device, just the device being hundreds cheaper and then also not the plan, like you said. Yeah.

1:37:25All right. All right. Food for dark, people. Write in, write in to us if you, if you like your iPod touch. Let's move on to comment corner.

Listener mail and comment corner

1:37:37Michael D. sent us an email in response to Apple's higher prices for the Mac Mini. He wrote that he had the last Intel Mac Pro and he paid $12,000 for it. Then he went to a Mac Mini M4 Pro and paid $3,000 for it. And it had 50% headroom on my Pro Audio projects. I'm not sure what he means by that, but I think he's referring to performance.

1:38:07I plan on waiting till 2030 or later. Don't need a faster Mac for audio or web development. Occasional music videos are fine. New computer prices are too high for me. I'll wait for a RAM to drop, which, what Mac Mini Series does he have? What do you have? He got the M4 Pro. M4 Pro. Oh yeah. He's set. Yeah. That'll last you for a while. My fear with this whole thing is by the time RAM prices come down, which is looking like

1:38:42at least $12,000 to $18,000. Never. Never. Right. Prices that we pay. These are the new prices. This is what they are. This is the new norm. This is the new norm. Yeah. This happened. We've seen this happen so often. You know, airlines, oh, the price of oil goes up, so tickets go up. They don't ever come down. They stay there. Yeah. Also, they don't buy. They don't buy. And they don't buy oil at the market price. They buy oil. They buy five-year contracts for oil. So, right.

1:39:12So, it's an excuse to raise prices. The price of oil goes up for them. Yeah. Don't get me started. And, you know, listen, Apple, I'm not saying Apple did this because they could. I do believe this is a crisis. I do believe they held off as long as they could. I do believe they raised prices higher than they need to so they don't have to keep raising them. I mean, Google today just raised the price of its thing by 50 bucks. That's like 50%. Yeah. Like, everything is going up. Everything's going up. I just don't think it's ever going to come back down. I agree.

1:39:42Even if the price of the components comes down. Right. The devices that you buy and everything, everyone's just going to be like, hey, more margin for me. You know? Totally. Yeah. Right. Pocket that money. So, this is the new norm. So, like if prices go up 30% and you lose 15% of customers, you're still making out. Yeah. So, just buy less stuff, everybody. I'm serious. Just like, just don't, that's all they're going to understand is if sales plummet, that's

1:40:13the only thing that's going to make them go like, well, we need to lower prices because sales have plummeted. That's literally, that's all that's going to do it. So, yeah.

1:40:25Last episode, we discussed Tim Cook's tenure as Apple CEO and Craig E had these thoughts about what was said. He wrote, in your criticism of Apple Project Titan, Apple spent an estimated $10 billion over eight years, a whopping $1.25 billion a year for what ended up being an R&D project. Isn't it a little revisionist to call the endeavor a failure if all it provided was the neural engine, the photo processing pipeline, and visual intelligence?

1:40:59Especially considering Meta spent $60 billion on the Metaverse and what the hyperscalers are spending each quarter on data centers. Yeah. I mean, look, there's, I'm not going to defend that Meta has ever, like, Zuckerberg has not made the right call about any, like, the whole Metaverse thing, like, anything. That's a whole other podcast. That's a whole other, that's not our podcast, man. But, like, yeah, the fact that other people are failing worse does not mean that that was

1:41:30a misstep, wasn't a misstep. But regardless of what the money was spent was or how they salvaged that R&D for other things, which they clearly, or some of it for other things, which they clearly did. Like, if you, anytime you hire thousands of people and put them all in a building on a certain project for years and then scrap it and all those people got to go, like, that's, like, that's clearly you went down the wrong route.

1:42:01Like. Yeah. I don't think we were using it as necessarily a criticism of Tim Cook. Listen, I'm glad that he swung for the fences. Even if, even if you don't hit a home run, you have to have projects that, that do that and you have to have failures.

1:42:17I think he was a great CEO. I don't think that that project, if Apple did have designs on building a car, was misguided from the start. There's no way. Yeah. Could have been. Apple's ever going to make a car. There's no way. Yeah. Maybe just to clarify it, you know, we, you know, I think that, but I think you guys think the same in terms of it being a car project, it was a total failure, but in the

1:42:49whole scheme of things, it, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't that big a failure. Certainly they could afford the money that they spent on it. It didn't like jeopardize the company in any way. Certainly they did salvage good art, some of the R and D out of it. And they had to do more work to make it into things that you would use on your phone and all that stuff. But like there, there was value. They took what value they could add. Yeah. Sure. But. And for all we know, Tim Cook said to the team, Hey, listen, we're not making a car, but I want you to act as if we are, because we can learn from this.

1:43:22This is the direction the world's going in AI and self-driving. Yeah. That's that you, I, you wouldn't hire that. They were hiring enough people that they were working on car things. Not just like processor and, and software stuff. They were working on like car stuff. That's literally like a lot of people. There were a lot of people involved. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I think a lot of people like me, like, would like to see Apple take a few more chances

1:43:53like that. Yeah. Even if they don't. Yeah. And if, even if they don't directly pan out. Yeah. If you know what they mean. Look, I don't know if anybody would buy an air, uh, uh, an airport, but I know that everybody wants Apple to make another airport. Like they tell us all the time that they want Apple to make a new airport. Yeah. And it was fun for like five years to every, before every event we were like, is there going to be a car at this event? Yeah. I know. Yeah. Well, uh, that does it for comment corner.

1:44:26All right. And that does it for this show. It is an hour and 45 minutes and this is not the iPhone post event show. This is the pre event show. So next podcast will be at least as long. So I'm going to leave you off here. Uh, next time we see you or talk to you, um, the surprise, we didn't even talk about the, the damn name, Jason, not once we didn't say it once surprise and shine is the name of the event and I had it written in my notes and I just looked at it, uh, real

1:45:00quick. Does that mean anything or is it just a clever little thing? Uh, I think if you're Apple and you assume that, that everybody watching the event has no idea about this folding phone, then it's going to be a giant surprise. I think anybody who actually watches the event, uh, probably is dialed in enough to know about the rumors of the folding book. Okay. And then most people just don't watch the event. But I think that's the surprise we're talking about. I hope it's something else. That'd be great. I don't know what the shine thing is. I don't know what the, like the logo looks like.

1:45:30It's the sun, like it's the Apple logo, but it's the sun. It's that shining and stuff. Like, I don't know what that could be referenced to like an ultra bright display or anything like that. Like, no, no, there's no rumors or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. We always, um, try to figure out what they're doing. And then after they've like, Oh, that's what they meant. Like they probably just pick these things up out of a, there's like a list of 50 names and they go, Oh, that one's cool. Use that one. Um, anyway, surprise and shine Wednesday, uh, 10 a.m. Pacific. Uh, and we will talk to y'all on, um, Thursday.

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