456: ‘Lubricate the Inside of the Hinge’, With Joanna Stern

Podcasting and product launch fatigue

0:00Everything's going to be fine on Friday, John. Podcasting on Friday. Who thinks such things? Well, it's better because I was trying to sneak in a Saturday podcast. No, there's no Saturday podcasting in this house right now.

0:18100%. You don't think your family remembers your name at this point? No, my kids don't even know who I am. They're just like, oh, you once were here. You once lived in this house and spent time with us. I feel like this is one of the things podcasting is meant for, is the sort of kvetching that I would never put in print, because I love my job. I do. Even people from Apple have been like, hey, are you busy? You feel like we're overworking? Yeah. It's like, no, this is why I want to do this.

0:49But on the other hand, yes, I'm exhausted. And I'm going to LA next week. I do not believe I'm going to LA. I had to cut it off somewhere. And this would have been my fifth trip to the Bay Area, to California in, yeah. I mean, when was the iPhone event? The iPhone event was the first week of September. So that would have been the fifth trip in eight weeks. Can't do it. Yeah. As much as I, you know, it's like, you kind of feel like you offend the products in a way.

1:20Yeah. I'm not worried about offending Apple. It's just, but like, I've really wanted a touchscreen Mac for a long time. I've been talking about it for a long time. And now I feel like I'm offending it by not going to its launch event. And I don't want one and don't think they should make one. And yet I'm going. So kind of got it backwards. Kind of got it backwards. But we got it. I mean, we got to just spend two hours talking about the one device. Everybody wants to hear us talk about the HomePod Mini 2.

The sleeper hit Siri remote

1:52I was thinking about the Siri remote. Oh, yes. I actually could talk about that. Honestly, the Siri remote might be the sleeper hit of the fall. And the fact that it has the sound now, the AirTag searchability makes it, I mean, this could be the best, it could be the best product Apple releases in 2026. I mentioned it. And I, again, I don't know how much can you complain? And it's like, well, and you don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth. They've finally shipped a remote that has

2:22the Precision Find My. But the last remote came out after Precision Find My. It came out after AirTags. And AirTags, I don't know, they're not that expensive. What are they, 25 bucks or something? And the Apple TV, even before all the price hikes, was expensive. So the fact that the last generation remote came out after AirTags and didn't have it, I feel like none of us complained enough about that in the intervening years. So it is great that it finally has it, but it should have had it a generation ago.

2:54And there are all these cases that you can buy to attach the AirTag. Right. Which is crazy. It's not like they're selling a little $50 Fire Stick and it comes with the remote and how much do you want us to put in there. Everybody knows the first thing anybody talks about with Apple TV is it is more expensive than other devices that you connect. But I guess we should talk about the Duo first. I think we should talk about the Siri remote. You know what? I bet there's an app that will

3:24now turn the display of your Duo into a Siri remote that looks like one. Obviously, there's the remote app, which I've actually been using on the Duo.

Writing the iPhone Duo review

3:36How are you feeling about your Duo review now that we're a couple of days out and everybody else's reviews are out?

3:44Well, as you know, it took me some time to get through your review, John. Every night I would sit down to read your review on the Duo and I would fall asleep. And it doesn't have to do with your great writing, but I've just been exhausted because I have not stopped working. Like you said earlier, I don't want to complain about working. I have never worked harder in my life because I've simultaneously just had the craziest product launches, but also I launched a company, right? So I'm doing all the company stuff and I'm trying to maintain

4:15my level of editorial work at the same time. So I haven't stopped working. And then when the review published, I just was like, I'm going to sleep. So every night I've been getting in bed at like 930 and I'm reading on my Duo, I really, you know, I probably didn't write enough too about how much I like reading on it because I didn't have time much to read during the review process. And then I fall asleep with the Duo in my hand reading your review. So now I just finally finished it. And I think to answer your question, sometimes you think things and you're thinking about them and you want to get them in your review, but you don't really realize you were

4:47thinking about them until you read someone else's review. And I felt a lot of that throughout your piece. There were certain points you kept making. I was like, I really should have talked about how this is not a great phone, but it is a great tablet. That was a great framing for it. And I guess maybe I didn't even feel that way until I read your piece. And it's like, this is just such a smart way to frame it. So there's a lot of, I feel good about my review, but I think then you see other people's reviews. You're like, oh, I really could have made that point harder. I always feel that way. Yeah. But also, look, we can talk through all the bumps of this review. It was very hard.

5:22It was one of the hardest reviews to write. Oh, without question. Because of the changing app ecosystem that was happening and playing out as we had these devices. So day one of, or maybe day zero of getting the device was very different than day three, then day four, then day seven of when you publish your review.

Third party app support evolution

5:43Yeah. And because there was like, it really was, I think, and you and me and Neelai had a little three-way chat going and it's not super extensive and it's not like we're being secretive with each other. It's not a zero sum review competition, but honestly, I think we're just busy. Right. And so there's not tons of, here's something we're sharing drafts of our reviews with each other, but we're just asking some questions. I think Neelai was the first to ask, Hey, is your duo getting a little warm? And it's like, yeah, sometimes when the camera runs and

6:16just little things like that. But we all agreed though, that there was like three different periods of third-party app support. We all, I think we all got them on Tuesday, the week before and I set it up right away. I really, and I was very happy with a Wednesday embargo, eight days. Huge. And I can't even imagine with the video that you and Neelai and Alison and everybody else does. I can't, I can't get a print review out on time, but eight days makes so much bigger difference than seven days. And when it's six days, which it happens, like sometimes I'll have a Wednesday

6:51event and there's two products and one of them comes out on Tuesday, the embargo. And so you only have six days. It makes so much, I can't do it. It's like, I can't, I just can't. But it was like, initially it was like, Hey, I think I'm going to have to spend a lot of time writing about how third-party apps suck. And then by the end of the week, like Friday, it was like, Hey, and Apple PR hooked us up with like test flights for some apps that weren't in the app store yet. And it was like, Oh, this is not so bad. And then it was like Monday morning or Tuesday even. And

7:25it's, Oh, here's, here's a bunch more, including some really big names. Yeah. Like Google. I mean, my whole review, that was the third time I say it in the piece. It was the third time I shot that section of the review because the other times I was showing apps that got updated and it wasn't to smear these specific developers. I actually made a point on the second revision. I wasn't going to name apps because they could have changed. So I was like, let me just show as an example. And maybe I named the app that I show as an example. Cause I, the first drafts were like,

7:57here's the group in this group is Slack and this and this and that. And then it would change like a day later. And so I decided, okay, second rewrite, I'm not going to do that. But even in that second one, I did include some Google apps because that's my whole home screen is Google apps. Then by I wake up Tuesday morning. And by the way, I've been in touch with Google PR this whole time to let them know, Hey guys, it's not going to look good for you. You know, it looks really like crap on the screen. There's giant black bars across your maps app. It looks ridiculous. And then it's

8:30like Tuesday morning, Google PR clearly didn't even really know. And they're like, Oh yeah, you know, we've updated to iOS 27, those apps and they look, they look fine. So I'm like, up, I'm back in and I'm rewriting and re-scripting. And so I feel like it worked out well, but I think there was a lot of editing like yours to either reshoot or rewrite or take out complaints. And it's what makes a review like this one difficult because like when you're reviewing the iPhone 18 pro a month ago, you don't really have to worry

9:04like, okay, I've got a week with this device. Is the universe of apps going to change a month from now? No, it's going to be the same. But whereas with this device, it's like, you kind of want to review that hits, Hey, this is the product that is shipping on Friday, October 23rd. And this is what it's like, but also you don't want to spend too much time complaining about an app situation that is going to be very different in a few weeks. And in a few months, it's probably going to be over,

9:34right? Like all with some exceptions, I guess. How much do you think, and I thought about this and I don't think we talked about it, but how much do you think we had, I guess I want to call it post-traumatic vision pro disorder, right? Because I think that might've played into a little bit about the initial feelings of, Oh my God, the apps are terrible. This is, they're going to ship a device that the apps are terrible. No one's going to catch up and we're

10:06going to all, they're going to have a $2,000 device with no apps. And it is insane that they ship this thing where it was like insane that they shipped a $3,000 vision pro that the apps never came.

10:20I think we had that as reviewers. And I think Apple had that as the 800 pound gorilla in the relationships between developers and customers and reviewers and everybody. And I really do think that they looked back at the vision pro launch. What is that two years ago, two or close to three years ago. And they see that they got bitten by their hubris that they just launched this.

10:50And they, they gave developers seven, they announced the APIs in June at WWDC. And then the thing comes out in January to largely crickets chirping, right? Including the big obvious names like Netflix wasn't there or still isn't there. I think YouTube did not have a native app and the best experiences on vision pro were, were like watching video and they clearly, you know, it it's, it's what the

11:22platform vendor should do is evangelize to developers and not just say, here's the APIs go. We just expect you to go build them, but reach out, run sessions. They have, they've had like dozens of sessions around the world where developers could come in and actually, they can't take it with them, but they could actually see their in progress apps on duo hardware. And they, they did a great job and are continuing to do a great job of co-marketing the apps that are optimized for duo. They didn't do any of that with the vision. And I think that's where I was a little bit,

11:55I could almost feel some of that momentum going into the review process. And I, like you probably, I got a lot of emails from indie developers about, right. And that was even coming into this, but, and I just did a piece on that today, just like all these fun things you can turn your duo into, right? It's like, it really is like first generation iPhone vibes and it's, it's super fun. I think it, I wanted to at some point call these apps stupid, but they're not stupid because it's just, it's clearly developers are having fun. They know people want to have fun with their new $2,000 phone.

12:27And I think it's wonderful. But what happened was we got these devices and it's like, you restore your phone, you set it up and every app on your home screen looks ridiculous. But then like we're saying, like it just, each app day after day kept getting better. The meta apps came, the Google apps came and look, they're not all optimized right now for 27.1, but they're fine. I think that you've got like the fine apps and then you've got these others that are really going

12:57above and beyond and trying to do better for this device. And I think that's also going to motivate the big companies to do things that are unique and different because they see the tech community and they see the people on X and all buzzing about, Oh, look how cool this does. This thing does. And that, that motivates the big tech companies to go and make their apps better for that. So it isn't a, I mean, just to be clear, it is not a vision pro experience a hundred percent. It's just, it's not that at all. Yeah. And I think meta in particular is really pretty interesting.

Meta and Apple app development

13:31I'm not a huge user of meta's apps. I mean, threads, I guess is the one I use the most, but even I check Instagram and Instagram famously did not have an iPad app until like last year, right? It was like 15 years of iPad, iPad and Instagram came out. I think the same year, 2010, I think iPad came out first and, and Instagram launched a few months later and they did not have an iPad app until this year. And I don't think it's a coincidence. I kind of feel like the

14:05improved relationship between Apple and meta involved them. Apple saying, we're not going to tell you exactly what we're doing, but maybe you read the rumors about what we're doing this fall. And based on those rumors, you really want to do the work to have an iPad app, even though that won't automatically run as a full screen app on something we might be making this fall, but it would really help. And here, here they are. It's not like a half-assed support. I mean, I'm sure they might

14:35have more work to do, but it's there. Almost all of their apps are all the ones I've looked at. They're, they're really pretty good. I was going to complain about WhatsApp because WhatsApp was in that middle state where it always has, does take full screen, but it still has the black strip on the side. And by the time I was going to complain about it, they had the native version out. They truly optimized. I think, what does Neil, I call these the vibe-coded apps. Like they, they did very little to kind of get by. I think that's that, look, there's a lot more they could do with the tablet real estate on

15:07the Duo, I think for the Instagram app, but as I said, it's fine, right? It's fine. It's not, it's not, it's not the little window running in the sea of black. Exactly. Like there's, they could do something in the, in the laptop mode. They also could do, I think, look, in terms of like, just as now a person who has to post a lot to Instagram, the tools to post on like the iPhone interface just can get mad at him. So this is to say, I really appreciate what Meta does, but they could do better.

15:37Yeah. Well, but this is certainly a better relationship between the two companies than there's ever been. And it just, by this actually, I do think the timing is mostly coincidental, but it is coincidentally timed with the thing last week where Meta's new local AI model was announced as being the best to run on the new Mac studios with 512 gigabytes of RAM. And Zuck announced it on X and John Ternus followed it up with, Hey, it was great working with your team.

16:11And it's like, those are CEOs who just did not use to glad hand and slap each other's backs. And now they are. And if you don't really care about the drama of CEOs and who, which companies hate each other, but you are going to buy an iPhone duo, this is actually great news for you. If you use any of Meta's apps and there's, I don't know, 4 billion people on the planet who use Meta's apps. So it's good news. Right. It goes again to those, those apps on your home screen. I've got three Meta apps on my

16:43home screen. We've got threads, Instagram and WhatsApp. Those were, those were key ones that had to fall. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What else? I feel, I guess I, and I, today was my day CNBC. I did it with the iPhone 18 pro a month ago too. I was on for, I don't know, five minutes this morning on TV. So I'm playing video content creator for five minutes, once of once or twice a year. I feel like, I guess so far of the reviews I've read, I'm grumpier than anybody else, especially about

17:18using the outside phone. But I do feel like you and I are very much aligned about it. It's. I mean, I loved it. I was reading through your review and I took some notes on the duo, which I did text you some, some more. Well, again, I think this is another part of this that I think got a little bit lost, which was like, there's the software bugginess of what you call duo S right. Or you don't officially call it iPhone duo, iOS duo. I don't know what to call it, but it is a different flavor of iOS. I mean, you should have a different name.

17:53And so I think I was, I was taking screenshots and finding bugs and duo S, but I was taking screenshots of your review. And I thought this metaphor you had with transformers was so smart.

Transformers and hinge durability

18:06It also made me really wonder what kind of kid you were. Let me just read you what you wrote here. You said, when I was a kid, when I was a kid, when transformers hit the toy market, I had a few, every boy my age did, but I was more of a GI Joe guy. So I was skip ahead. We don't need this history. It always bothered me that as toys, transformers were clearly compromised in both states folded up. They weren't good cars, trucks, fighter jets. They had obvious seams and folds as a child, John. Yeah. You, you were noticing these things about the product. I did. I used to hate, I hated toys that

18:42did not look realistic. I did not like a toy car that didn't look like a true two scale version of the car that it represented. And when I was even younger, I mean, the big obsession of like my single digit childhood was star Wars and the Kenner toys for star Wars were all over the map where some of the toys would be like, Oh, that looks exactly like the X-wing fighter from the movies. And some of the toys just looked like somebody heard a description of the ship

19:17from the movies and made the toy. They were the AI slop version of the toy. Yeah. And it always bothered me. This doesn't look realistic. I wanted high production values and the transformers always bothered me because you'd fold them up into a car and you could see where they come apart. There was no, it, it, there was no way that you'd ever fool anybody. Like if you held it up, like which one of these two toy cars do you think is a transformer? They would be like, well, obviously that one, but it's like, if you slice an apple and then put

19:48the slices back together, you can see that it's a sliced apple and it doesn't really stay together. Right. That it always bothered me. Production values always irritated me. And I did not like the transformers for that reason. And I really, and this had doesn't happen to me with every review. Cause I don't come up with something like that. But when I came upon the transformers metaphor, and I said this, I'm dithering, but I was trying to reconstruct how long it took me to write the

20:18review. And I use BB edit when I write a long review and BB edit saves automatic backups every couple minutes or every time you do certain actions. So there's like a whole folder full of backups. And at Tuesday morning at 9 40 AM, there's the first version, the first backup of the text file where I was writing it. And it has one word in it. And the word is transformers. Like it was like, and I like hit return, return, return to move it down. Cause it wasn't, I wasn't going to start with

20:51it, but I was like, well, I want to remember that point. It's a really good point. And I love, I love it as a metaphor, but I also obviously made me have a lot of questions about young John, which I don't know why I was not surprised by what John, young John was reviewing toys, but I think it was just such a good metaphor. And I think also it was funny that it, for me, my, my two boys have loved transformers. And the thing that I always noticed with them is they break. And so obviously I focused my review a lot on, is this thing going to break? Because you have a

21:25phone that is fundamentally something that is more mechanical parts than a usual phone, because as you're saying, it transforms into something else. And those sorts of things tend to break. Yeah. I got to the point with the transformer metaphor where I knew, and this is the sign that I know that it was good, is by the time it was like Tuesday night, I thought everybody's going to write about this. Everybody's going to use the metaphor to transformers. And I thought, and I was depressed about it. And I was like, ah, this is going to be so obvious. And I woke up in

21:58the morning and I still had like all day to finish writing my review. And I had other stuff on Wednesday. I would have actually been so much closer to the embargo than most years. You were close this year. Yeah. And I would have been even closer except for some in real life stuff on Wednesday that I could not move and was important enough to actually delay the publication of the review by a few hours. But when I woke up, I realized now that it's, I bet nobody else. A, I'm old and transformer toys, although they're still around, right? I sent you a picture.

22:28Oh, they're fully around. Yeah. No, I mean, you sent me the picture of Target and I'm like, like as if I don't know it, like I'm there all the time. Yeah. And I actually, but I felt good. I was in Target this afternoon and I saw this big end cap for transformers because that was my other concern. I was like, how much am I dating myself? Because my son's 22 now, so I don't know the toys anymore. Right. No, no, they're still huge. I mean, we've got a bunch of them downstairs. I can, I'm happy to show you them, John, if you want after I'll send you some pictures of the transformers. I, but I do think that, and that was an angle I thought about taking with the review. And I thought,

23:06oh, I wrote 8,900 words. There's only so many things you can fit in. But I thought about the fact that you could really spend a lot of time talking about the hinge, right? And that is the difference between a $2,000 device with Apple's A team of mechanical engineers designing the hinge probably for years versus Hasbro's team of people making $28 plastic robots. And how good are the shoulder joints? Not very good. But this hinge is just a mechanical marvel. It is very fun to just

23:43sort of open and close, even if you don't have a robot that you custom ordered to do it. I mean, 32,000 times, 32,000 times. And it was such a weird process. So funny enough, like you have this worry that someone's going to do the transformers thing. And I have this worry that somebody is going to do the folding thing, which somebody did in China. And so it's funny, I had this idea like two weeks ago or a week ago. And I was like, what are we going to do for this review? We're out of

24:14ideas. I haven't slept in months. I have no good ideas. And I was like, people really have been asking a lot about the hinge, a lot about the crease. What could we do? So I start looking around for these machines, actual lab grade testing machines. And I was like, there's no way I'm getting one of these to New Jersey. It's not happening in a week. But I knew a guy, I know this guy named Aaron Cohen in New Jersey, who happens to be a great hardware prototyper and designer. And I just called them and said, I want to open and close this phone a couple thousand times.

24:47Do you think you can make something? He's like, yeah, I can make something. I think I can make something. And we had no idea if it would work. We brought the phone over the second day that I had it and stuck it in his this contraption, which we called Hingy, that has this 3D printed. Well, it was pretty simple. It's like a MagSafe holder to hold the back of the phone and put the phone into a case, opened it up into tablet mode, stuck one side into a 3D printed part. And then the server motor just changes the angle of that little 3D printed part. And so it's like,

25:20I was wowed when I first saw it. You see that in the video. I'm just like, wow, it works. I think we're going to actually be able to pull this off. And I started running it. And I thought the machine was going to break. I thought it was like, I kept wondering what's going to break first, the phone or the machine. And every morning I would run up here because it was, it was, I would set it at 11 o'clock at night, go all night. I had a Nest camera so I could monitor it. I'd come up here 7am every morning to just, did I break this phone? Because I was petrified at breaking the phone. We're not supposed to break the phone during review

25:52units or during the review time. We basically sign away that we're not going to break the phone. And you're not going to take it apart. Right. I'm not going to take it apart, which I figured, look, I'm not intentionally breaking the phone. Right. Right. I felt very safe about that in a way. And I was like, I'm not taking it apart. And like, psychologically, I kept being like, maybe it is feeling looser. Maybe it does look different. But then I would go about my day and I was like, no, this feels like the same phone I got day one. So anyway, this whole process was just to prove that, yeah, the hinge is pretty amazing.

26:28Yeah. Yeah. The one that I saw on YouTube is a guy, I never saw him before, but he is from China. His name's Tim Pan. Yes, that's it. That's right. They used, he's a young guy, and he folded it and unfolded it 500 times with his hands. And then they've used, obviously, high speed, fast forwarding to go through that. And then they put it in a robot and did 10,000. So still nowhere near the 32,000.

26:58That Hingy did. Well, it was also really funny, because when I first had this idea, I was like, you know, what if I make my kids do this? We're like, yeah, no, I think that like a seen as child labor, we probably shouldn't put that on the internet. And I was like, well, like, they would probably do it for a little bit if I like promise something at the end of it, if I promise a transformer. Especially though, like, what if they developed a blister or something? You'd feel terrible. I would totally feel terrible. But yeah, no, I mean, look, at the end of the day,

27:28we did do some friction testing. It's a great test. Yeah. And you obviously had it set up where there was a MagSafe charging cable. So it would charge overnight, too. No, it wouldn't charge. Oh, no, it wouldn't. So you charged it separately from this? I charged it separately from this. I powered it off because I didn't want to have any software issues or whatever. So I powered it off. I would actually, what I would do is I would charge it before it would do the testing overnight, because I would wake up at seven o'clock. And then I was like, I need to be testing the battery through the day, right? I need to be. So and the whole thing was that I needed to be able to do this at night, because

28:01I wouldn't be able to do the rest of the review if I had it in the machine the whole time. And I ran out of hours to do battery life testing. Yeah. What ended up happening. It's and that is one even with eight days, it is so hard because a battery test and I don't typically do them, but I salute everybody who does while trying to because it's not like when you're on the list of people to review it in the first week that you can just say, oh, and by the way, I want to run battery tests. So can I have a second one like that? It doesn't work that way. And a battery test, by definition, takes all day.

28:33I mean, like you like lose a day of review time and you only have a limited number of reviews. It's very hard, but it is information that is at the top of everybody's mind. Everybody cares about battery life. You kind of want to tell when Apple in its history tends to be very honest about their promises of battery life. But that's our job as reviewers to like trust, but verify. Right. I don't know. I mean, that's how I felt like about the hinge thing. I was like, look, they've spent a lot of time in that presentation talking about the hinge. I put

29:05it in the review. Right. Johnny Scrooge is shown two or three times talking about that hinge. They come back to him. It's talking about the screen. And I'm like, it's time to test that. It's like, what else do we get to test here? Yeah. And same with battery life. I think I did my iPhone 18 Pro reviews talking about the battery life claims. Cause that was the main thing they focused on really with the Macs other than the new aperture settings, battery life testing. I have a lot of thoughts on it. It's very hard. It's very hard to do. It's all very subjective. You built a robot for that this year too. Well, I didn't build a robot. I just bought a, I bought auto clickers on Amazon.

29:39What was it called? Mr. Pickle? Yeah. Poke the pickle. Poke the pickle. Poke the pickle. That's right. You build a website. You build a website. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all getting to, it's so much easier to do anything with AI these days. To me, the icing on the cake, like you're so good at these reviews and you're so good at coming up with these premises for the videos, but the, oh, nobody else would do this is that you even give them names, right? Hingey has a name. That's, that's the new things touch. It's not just that

30:13you commissioned Aaron Cohen to build a one-off iPhone duo hinge testing robot that could do 32,000 tests over four nights, but you gave it a name. We gave it a name. And I will say some people came up with some much better names after we published like Hingeneer. I think that's a far better name than Hingey. And maybe we will build Hingeneer too for iPhone duo dose was what I call it.

30:43But we had to start somewhere. And so please keep sending your name ideas. Please keep sending your testing ideas. But I mean, look, I think that like, and I think I read your review too. And I read it as you had fun reviewing this thing. And I think, oh, without question. People who I've been talking to today who are unboxing, and I bet a lot of your listeners, look, we're critical, but we're not saying this isn't fun. This isn't some real new platform and exciting time for what Apple's trying to do. And I think you're so on it. I love the end of the review for you, which is this isn't

31:14for me, but this, this is going to be for a number of people who want this kind of more tablet focused phone. Yeah. And it's just like, it's exciting. I mean, I felt like I hadn't had this much fun reviewing a phone since the iPhone 10. Yeah, I would I could see that except Face ID was huge. Face ID was like, and your your review is so on the money about how important Face ID is. And it's very clear Apple just is going to do that here. Yeah. Well, the difference I can think is with the iPhone 10, the difference, it was just as much fun about exploring the novelty and

31:48oh, this is new. And yes, there's software incompatibilities. And oh, but this app is updated. And oh, look how fun it is. Oh, this app isn't. The difference for me is that I could tell is I could tell when I walked out of the keynote for the iPhone 10. Oh, I love this. I think they've nailed it. I think they've redefined the sort of fundamental metaphor of using the iPhone software. And I think I think this is better. I think I love it. Whereas with this, I remember even in the keynote thinking, I think this is the best foldable ever. And I think they've put a lot of nice Apple

32:19touches and really, really thought about certain of these details. But I think I still think fundamentally, this is not a form factor for me. And then I got to use it for a week. And the longer I used it, the more I was like, yeah, this is not for me. So it was a little less fun that way. But it was still very fun. But I think that sums up foldable phones in general, that that's the whole market, right? There's a reason the Android foldable phones haven't taken off. And it isn't just because there's unsightly crease in the middle, right? Let's be very clear. This is a real reason

32:49they haven't taken off. And that is because of all of the intrinsic things that come at a compromise from putting a phone with a tablet together. And so everyone is a smartphone user, but not everyone is a foldable smartphone user. That's not the potential. And that's never going to be the full market for Apple. I don't think anyone's fooling. And there's been some analysis like this is the future of the iPhone. Everyone's going to have it's going to be fully mainstream. I think it can go more mainstream than any other foldable. But I do not think every person who has a smartphone wants a

33:23foldable phone. Right. And I would even if even if by the way, you get everything right, you get the price back, you get all of the stuff back to what what we expect of an iPhone. This is not something everyone wants. I agree. And I would go back and I thought about this as an angle for my review and just sort of as like, yeah, it's not bad, but I'm going to go with Transformers. But no, but I thought about the way that Apple pitched previous major iPhone announcements when they pitched the iPhone

33:5810 specifically. They were very clear in the keynote for that iPhone. This is the future of the iPhone. And the iPhone 8 debuted alongside it. And it is the most forgotten iPhone ever. It's if all of the iPhones got together and were anthropomorphized and had a party, there would be like, who's that? And it would be like, oh, that's iPhone 8. And they're like, oh, yeah, there was an iPhone 8. Right. And it's like, ah, and it'd be like, I'm sorry, buddy. And like iPhone 7 in particular, I think would

34:30go up to iPhone 8 because iPhone 7 was like hot shit when it came out. It was only had a year in the sun because the iPhone 10 came a year later. But it was like, man, the iPhone 7 was the best version of that that form factor. And iPhone 8 would be like, no, no, I was better. I had the newer chip like the iPhone 8 had the same whatever. I don't remember a thing about the iPhone 8. I truly, yeah. It was just unforgettable or the most forgettable iPhone. Yeah. But it had the newest chip, just like the iPhone 10, whatever the A, whatever was called for

35:03that year, probably A11. Yeah. I did nine years minus A20. I was like, that's A11. But Apple would just, nobody remembered it from the keynote. It was, if you were afraid of getting the new style phone without the clickable home button and touch ID and you thought it, you, of course, again, you weren't doing it at the new things, but you're the one who commissioned the masks for face ID. I know. I know. I just found that mask. That's what I'm saying. I had so much fun

35:34making that phone, reviewing that phone. It was a huge moment. It was such a fun gimmick that you commissioned high quality, were they like Hollywood people? I forget who you got to do the masks. Yeah. They were. Yeah. Yeah. They wanted to charge a lot of money. I had to talk them down because my budget at the time at the Wall Street Journal was not high. Much higher here at the new things. Much higher. I have full control of what I want to do here at the new things. If I want to go spend $20,000 on a mask, I can. I wouldn't do that, but just to be clear. But it was, I can see why Apple did it because those of us like me and you,

36:11this is why we do this. This is why we're excited to write these reviews. We're excited to be exhausted after all of this. I'm still excited to go out to LA next week and see touchscreen MacBook Pros I may not like, but we like to try the new stuff. And most normal people don't like to try the new stuff. And people heard things nine years ago. All of a sudden, there's no touch ID button on the phone and it just reads your face. I don't know about that. Right. And it's like, but I need a new phone. So you go into the store and you, I'm sure they sold

36:42tens and tens of millions of iPhone eights to people because they just didn't percent. They did. Right. They wanted the one that they definitely did. Yep. Right. They wanted the one that was familiar, but I just remember that's how Apple sold the iPhone 10 in a keynote. They were like, this is the future of the iPhone. When the original iPhone came out, Steve Jobs was like, this is the way to make a smartphone. You see these ones with the keyboards. That's stupid. This is the way all he didn't say, this is the way all phones are going to be. Cause he didn't want to really think about the fact that all the other brands of phones were going to do the same

37:15thing, but you could read between the lines. This is the future of all phones. They didn't sell the iPhone duo that way. They were, it was the last segment of the keynote. It was the one more thing. It was a big deal there. They're saying this is a big deal, but there is no way that, and it comes down to the name, right? Everybody, a lot of people thought it was going to be called iPhone ultra, right? And iPhone ultra, just as a name would have said, this is the best iPhone. This is the one, you know, that tops the iPhone pro. Right. And in hindsight, that's why the name, I don't even

37:49think they even thought about it for a second, really. I, cause it's not. I thought it was to be called the fold, but I don't know why I thought that either. I absolutely. And also, yeah, it comes at the end of the presentation and it's called duo. It's almost like it kind of implies this is a second phone. And I mean, then they've done a lot of, by the way, to make this possibly a second phone for people. Yeah. Right. I didn't get to test it cause I have Verizon, but the same here, what's it called? The handoff, iPhone handoff. I think a lot of early adopters that get this phone are going to

38:21have that. They're going to say, I don't really want to bring that phone with me here. But I think just when you think about the foldable market, especially that it's been around now for seven, eight years from the Samsungs and all the, all the other players, Googles and Motorola's and Huawei's, it's not a considerable size of the market. And Apple single-handedly in the next number of months is going to have as many units as those companies have sold likely. Yeah. And they understand, I think they know that. I think

38:54they'd kind of know that that's the thing. And this is. I think it's particularly irritating for Samsung. Like Samsung's let, I always think of Pepsi, Pepsi, Coke never acknowledges Pepsi. I think in the history of Coca-Cola, they have never once even acknowledged that Pepsi exists. And every once a decade, Pepsi comes out with an ad campaign that talks about Coke, right? And the Pepsi challenge would specifically taste them side by side, Pepsi and Coke. And Samsung is clearly the Pepsi. And they have billboards like, well, we've had a fold for all these years and stuff like that. And it's like,

39:29it gets to them that they've had seven years of Galaxy folds and now everybody cares about a folding phone. But I think the truth, I forget the number, but it was like, as I was standing by this morning with ready to go on CNBC over Zoom, or I think it was Zoom, whatever it was. Yeah, it was Zoom. I can watch the five minutes of preceding CNBC. And they had some analysts talking about the pretty good expectation that the numbers out of the supply chain is that Apple has about six and a half

40:02million for this calendar year. And it's obviously sold out because if you go to buy one now, you get the end of January shipping date. And that six and a half million foldables sold in this quarter would make them the number, you know, more than all the other foldables combined for this quarter. And it's like, that's kind of embarrassing if you've been doing it for seven years. Have you seen the Everything You See Nathan Fielder documentary? I did. And as busy as I've been, my son and I went to see it in the last weekend. And I've been

40:38actually, I loved it so much, I've been meaning to write about it. It's one of the most amazing motion pictures I've ever seen in my life. I went Wednesday after the review. And it was like a perfect because it just took my mind off of everything. What's the reaction to the review all of a sudden, like, and I'd just been thinking about iPhones for so long and folding screens and hinges. It was amazing. But I don't, we're not gonna do any spoilers on your podcast. It's very important to Nathan Fielder that we never spoil this movie. If you've read any interviews with him, you know that he has no spoilers, but I think we need to spoil something that a character in the

41:11movie has a folding Android phone. Do you notice that? Yes. And I kept thinking, this is the guy who's had a folding Android phone. Okay. And by the way, it's also the same guy who you could see everything was the most literal. It's true. We can't spoil anything here. But for people who know and have seen the movie, you'll get the implication of what we are both saying about this guy who has

41:47the folding Android phone. Yeah. Honestly, we have so much others to talk about. But if you're out there listening, and you're like, yeah, you keep hearing that this is a good movie, this is a good movie. I'm telling you, this is a groundbreaking movie that it and it literally is if you're like, I don't really give a shit about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. And it's this has calling this a movie about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is like saying that 2001 A Space Odyssey was about a big black

42:20rectangle buried in the ground. It's like that. Great, great analogy. That's not what the movie's about. It's not about a black monolith in the ground. It's just a fantastic movie. It really is. But I will say what I want one. I'm going to take a break then for a sponsor break. But before I do, to me, one of the most notable things about the movie was the aspect ratio. It was shot and four to three. I know. I know. And it kind of bothered me in the theater. That's I think the movie is

42:51beautiful. I've never seen a documentary. I don't even know how they got some of the shots with the long lenses they used of close ups. I think they must have told the subjects for this conversation. Please, you know, hold your spot. Don't don't move. No, because what read the Wired article about it. He talks about how he set the cameras. I'll have to I it's one of those things where I've seen the movie and haven't read the interviews yet. But I have that Wired one open in a tab to read. I read it on my iPhone. Do I fell asleep reading it, by the way? Not

43:21just you. Not just you. Okay. But I love the aspect ratio. And for this movie and the places they went and shot and the way that they framed it, shooting it in four to three was brilliant. The only thing that bothered me was in the theater. They clearly projected it from 16 to nine or something. So the the pillar boxes on the side, like letterboxes that go up and down weren't pure black because they were projected. Yeah. And it would have looked even better if

43:53they had projected it for three so that you would get true inky blackness on the side. But it's such a small complaint and whatever. But go see it. And you're also probably thinking the whole time, wow, this is not going to look amazing on my iPhone duo when I watch it there. No. Well, maybe it would because the iPhone two isn't isn't that wide. Right. You open it up. It's it for four to three would actually fill more to the screen. I don't know. It actually or you could turn it the other way and see how that looks. I think it's such a groundbreaking movie.

44:26And I think the four to three thing is so cool that I think it's going to start a trend of movies being shot, being shot that way. Anyway, let me take a break here. I don't have a special microphone like you do. You've got a money mic. I've got to use my just regular mic. I'm happy to license that idea to you, John. Your money mic is actually shiny, too. Oh, yeah. It's it's pure gold.

Notion sponsor break

44:48Yeah, it is. I'm jealous every time I see it. I want to talk to you about notion. Hey, I don't know about you. I work by myself. I am a one person company. But I don't like the idea of companies that are like, pretending to have a whole bunch of employees. And in fact, it is just one guy and a bunch of AI agents. I and I do have people I collaborate with people who edit Caleb Sexton who edits the show and Joanna, who I talked to while I'm writing my review throughout the week.

45:22Notion isn't built for somebody who just wants to be one person with like 20 AI agents pretending to be a company of 21 people. It's for real people and real teams who are actually collaborating together as humans, but who want to integrate AI and AI agency into their work. It's the AI workspace where your team's knowledge and projects and agents all come together in one place. Teams using Notion move faster, cut friction and costs by consolidating tools and stay aligned. In Notion,

45:58your docs, your meetings, your projects, and more all live in one connected system where AI has the context it needs. You can learn more about how Notion can support your business at notion.com slash talk show. That's all lowercase letters. I don't know why. I don't know who would think to put uppercase letters in a URL, but they want me to tell you all lowercase letters, notion.com slash talk show to try Notion today. And when you use that link, you are supporting the talk show.

46:33Thank you to Notion. You know what I'm going to say about Notion here? What are you going to say about Notion? I'm a big Notion user. It's on my home screen. Guess who updated to iOS 27.1? Today? Guess who up? It must have been in the last two days. Yeah. Notion did. See? Yeah. So I'm not getting paid by Notion. I don't have my money, Mike, but let me just tell you, if you use Notion, you will get it optimized for the duo. Yeah. I will just say it's a long story, but there was an extended family member with some

47:04medical problem. Everything's good. Everything worked out. But I had like some recording with a doctor and put it in Notion to get it summarized. And it turned a very long recorded conversation with a lot of information into an incredibly short summary that was like, yeah, why didn't the doctor say this? It's really good. Before we move on, one thing about the hinge. I don't know if anybody else did it. It would have been another angle, but I've noticed this too. And I, all the other ones, or I don't know about all, but I know Samsung, the Galaxy Fold 8, whatever, the one that

47:40looks more like this. Z Fold, John. Z Fold. It's the Z Fold. It's IP4. Galaxy Z Fold 8. IP, oh, now I've got to enter my goddamn passcode. Son of a bitch. This, you can't make this up. I can't, not touch ID. You don't have your watch on? Do you have your watch on? Yeah, look, here, vouch for it. I've got a watch. You have a watch on. Just so you guys, because we, I know this is audio only, John and I are both opening our iPhone duos and we're, he obviously tried to go use the fingerprint sensor and it stalled and he had to use the passcode. Enter the passcode. I've typed my

48:15passcode more times in a week than in a year. Look, there's a lot of, make your point and then I'll go into what I, well, my point is Apple's says their hinge is IP68, which is what the same IP rating as the regular iPhones or as I call them, the iPhone Unos. And the, it, the way that the IP ratings, IP just stands for the organization. The first digit is particles and the second digit is water. So eight is good. That's kind of what you can like dunk it in water for some number of minutes.

48:47And apparently even the Samsung Z Fold can do that. But the four eight for the Z Fold means it's not even like dust proof dust. And I forget the size of particles, but it's surprisingly large particles. And that's been a problem for foldables in the Android world from the get go. And I'd actually looked back. It was the first Samsung back seven years ago where the Verges review, the review unit broke two days in because it got a piece of dust in the hinge and it broke. It was a huge problem.

49:18It was a huge problem. I did not, I didn't take this to the beach. I didn't spray dust on it, but I believe it, that this one is IP68. It, and I, I don't know how a review would test that, but the fact that Samsung's been doing this for seven years and there still is IP48, it's a big difference. It, and it means dust and stuff can get in there. And it's like, this is Apple. Apple's saying you don't have to baby this hinge. You don't have to baby the whole phone. I mean, I, I, look, I think the, the thing is, is that I think this is the most, how do I say? Case

49:54worthy iPhone in a really long time. It, it needs, it feels like it needs a case. Yeah. But I feel like it's a mistake to put a case on it.

Cases and left handed ergonomics

50:04Well, I'm torn on it because I, I, the wobble on it when you put it on the table from the camera is, is atrocious. I mean, it's worse than any iPhone pro there's been. I mean, I haven't done significant wobble testing, but it's, I mean, when you put it on and you, I mean, let me just, I'll do the sound effect here. I mean, it's terrible. I've given up on worrying about table wobble. No, I know. But then you've got, I don't know.

50:38I can't believe that. I mean, and I can't believe you're saying this. I haven't been wearing a case. I have gone caseless. I have been going caseless, but when I'm going out someplace, like with my kids, we went apple picking last week and I was like, I'm bringing, putting the case on. I, I feel like you're crazy. If you buy this thing and you put a case on it because it's like the, the silicone case, it, it has glue and you, you even said it got, it got some of your hair stuck in it. It was totally like, I just pulled the case out of my

51:09bag and I was like, there's hair in my case. It's disgusting. I would not get that case to be clear. I would not get that case. Yeah. The folio seems to me like, and I know third parties are going to have a hundred different cases and some of them are not there. Third party ones should be less expensive than apples. The folio one, I can totally see somebody using, I kind of like the tech woven fabric. And I love that. Yeah. I think they learned their lesson from the first generation of the fine woven fabric, which was horrible. And again, you, I was the leading journalist on the

51:44takedown of the fine woven case. I mean, when, when it, when they write my obituary, they will say things I killed the butterfly keyboard and the fine woven case. I find those are significant. That was a weird one. Significant milestones in my career. Because sometimes it's like, I don't know what happens at Apple where there are times. And I feel, again, I have not read it and watched everybody's review yet, but it seems like people are just over, not overlooking, but it's sort of like, and of course Apple's iPhone is IP 68. And of course the

52:21hinge did well when Joanna and Tim Pan had a robot fold it 10,000 times. Well, they're Apple, they're going to do this, right? They're going to build it for durability, but it's the same company that when they said, you know what, we're not going to make leather cases anymore. And we've invented a new thing we're calling fine woven. And it was like, if you use it for a week, it got stained. Well, look, this was the same thing. We were in the briefing together and I was like, does no one at Apple use the, as left-handed? Right. Right. Because I was like, it was no one testing

52:56this phone have a left hand or predominantly use a left hand. And I thought you did a good job talking about that in your review, but, and look, there's been a lot of factors. I am not left-handed, so I don't know, but it does strike me as it would be great if they could move the dock to the left side or there's more they could have done for the left-handed folks. I've seen the pushback that if you're left-handed, there's no reason, but clearly Apple thinks there's a reason because they're about to release a version of the software that does some left-handed accommodation, right? But I think

53:31that's what happens. You don't sometimes know how phones and things are going to, or cases or keyboards are going to perform until you get it out in the real world. And they do their best to try to hedge against that. But then sometimes life literally gets in the way of their products. And it's funny what Apple wants to explain and what they don't want to explain. And it's like, they make like a short list of things that they will explain. And if you, in a briefing or, they might even say, we'll tell you way more, we'll put you in touch with somebody afterwards if

54:03you want to go deep on that, sometimes for some specific things. And then there's other things where they just act like they have no idea what you're talking about. Oh, I don't know what you're talking about. And to me, one of those things was the left-handed thing. They were like, and again, we were, this was, it wasn't back in September. It was last Tuesday in New York. I went up and it was the same day as the Home View and the HomePod and the third party, the LG and Schneider locks and cameras and whatever. But we were in a small group press briefing to refresh us on the

54:40duo. I think that's what they called it. And they let you ask this left-handed question. And they honestly, I felt like that was one of the ones where they gave us the apple. We never really heard of this left-handed thing. Right. They never really heard of it, but yet next month or at the end of this month, there's going to be an update that does something for those people. So they clearly thought about it now. Yeah. I think one of the answers to the left-handed question, one of them I found, and I just, and I put it in my review because it's so bothered me. I, it surprised me how

55:11much I really do without thinking. I never noticed before. I use my iPhone left-handed a lot. And I mentioned, and when I told you this, you were very surprised that I, I'm right-handed, but use my mouse left-handed and I can play sports a little bit left-handed, better than most right-handers. But I wouldn't say I'm ambidextrous, just a little bit. But when I'm brushing my teeth and just throughout the day, I just pick up my phone from my desk left-handed and that corner digs into your palm in a way that is very uncomfortable and is completely different than when that nice rounded corner

55:43digs into your right hand. But either way, you can't reach across, unless you have giant, giant hands, you can't reach across to the other side anyway. And even if the toolbars on the right, there's, there's is stuff on the left side of the screen. I mean, that's, that's the whole point of a touchscreen. You can't really use this thing one-handed. And that's, I think what Apple didn't want to come out and say is even when it's closed, you kind of need to hold it in two hands, right? And isn't that the classic BlackBerry posture? The classic BlackBerry posture is two

56:16thumb typing, right? It's, it wasn't really a, you were a BlackBerry person. I don't know. Did you ever use, type on your BlackBerry with one hand? No, but I also, no, I definitely needed two hands for that. But I've been using this phone one-handed for quite a few things. I scroll, you know. Scroll. I think scrolling is a big one. You can fire off a quick text with one hand. Well, I can hit the microphone button so I can dictate a text. I don't like typing with one hand

56:49on this. And honestly, one thing too, I expected to drop this phone a lot. Again, kind of thinking this is why you'd want a case, right? For your $2,000 phone that you might drop. But I haven't dropped it yet. Knock on wood. With one hand. And you're, you do have a history of breaking your reviews. I really do. I kept thinking, oh, I'm definitely going to drop it. It's going to be a great funny pit in the video. And it's hopefully not going to break. But I really haven't dropped this. So maybe, I don't know. I have not found that the outer screen, when it's closed, I've been

57:25fine with one hand for certain things. I mean, I don't, typing for sure, I need the other hand. I don't need it. But if I'm going to do an email, I'm opening the phone. Which I think you also made such a good point about, and I've been thinking a lot more about since the review. But because the outer screen, the phone screen, as I call it, is so small, you're often wanting to open the tablet screen. Right? In all these things where you would just never use the tablet screen, you would never grab your iPad mini to do certain things. But because you have it, and because that outer screen

57:59is so small, yeah, of course, I'm going to watch this quick video with a bigger screen. Or I'm, of course, I'm going to read John's review on the bigger screen, even if I'm like, don't have a ton of place where I want to use a tablet, which is usually in bed, or when I'm on a commute or something. Yeah. No, and I do find that the third implicit option, I do find myself doing it, which is, I'll just put it back in my pocket and wait till later. Because I don't have, I've only got another minute while I'm waiting in line, or as New Yorkers say, online. But I'm in a line at this

58:34store, and I'm waiting to check out. Or I was waiting to pick up sandwiches the other day. And I knew that I didn't have that much time. So why do I want to open it? Then I got to close it, and I'll just wait. And so I do see that as a potential selling point to some people where it's like, okay, my quick hit, just look at my notification screen. And I do think that's a good way to think of the outer screen, that it's sort of like a stat, you know, you check the time, check your notifications, just quick flick it up and press touch ID and quick type something out.

59:09But you're not going to really do stuff on it. If you really want to do stuff, you want to open it up. And it is awesome when you open it up. It's such a good little tablet. It is so good. But it's like a, it's like a production. I don't know. I thought one of my other lines that I really liked, was satisfied with in my review was, if you have to choose between the two verbs, flip and pry to get it open, it's definitely pry. You have to pry it open. And that's even tried. I've been trying to do it. I mean, I've seen some, some better people like doing a one handed flip. I can't do it. I

59:44really can't. No, I don't know how you do that. And you, you are the one with the most opened duo I know of 30, probably 33,000, right? 32,000 robot folds and at least a thousand from you. And it's, it's still just as hard to open. And again, I'm not saying it's too hard. I think that they've engineered the feel of this and they nailed it, but it's a two handed action to open it up. Well, yeah. And the magnet from there, you know, I'm starting to feel like maybe this hinge has

1:00:15gotten stiffer at this point. Yeah. But stiffer is what is the opposite of what you were worried about. You were worried it would get looser. Exactly. But I think actually what might end up happening and we'll see over time, but is that it gets stiffer because whatever they've used to sort of, for lack of a better word, lubricate the inside of the, of the hinge over time that goes away. Right. And you have more of the mechanics inside the hinge and these parts rubbing up against each other and that becomes stiffer. So yeah, for lack of a lot of better words there, but I don't think

1:00:49in my video, I showed the, just the beauty of opening up a Motorola flip phone from the nineties, or that was probably actually, it was like early two thousands. You don't get that. You're not getting some. No, I think people will, will use this as like a fidget and there'll be opening and closing like this and like that. You're not, you're not going to be opening the whole thing and doing some cool move there. It is. It's so satisfying to play with. And I get, maybe the novelty would wear off if I bought it and was going to carry it all the time, but it is such a fun little fidgety thing that that

1:01:21might be part of the reason that I find myself locked out of touch ID all the time is that I'm sitting there playing with it. I don't know that I complained about it enough in my review. It was one of those things where I thought, well, I shouldn't complain too much about it because I think if I owned it and, and as the week went on, I was doing it less, but I found early on, I kept pressing buttons while I was opening and closing it like the camera control and the, the, the other button and the volume, but I don't know. It's, you have to get a buttons. It's so many button issues. And what about the, were you, I don't remember if your review touched

1:01:56on it. I don't, I don't know that it did. Yeah. But for me and Neelai, I know it was, it's, it's which way, where's the button? I don't know. Am I upside down? The volume buttons are maddening to me. I mean, they're crazy. They're crazy. They're totally crazy. And I talk on the phone a lot and I'm adjust, I'm like trying to feel for the buttons on the top of the phone. I mean, even when I was taking screenshots of your review with the, the phone in vertical mode, how many times I turned the phone off when I was just trying to take a screenshot of your thing.

1:02:27And it's like, oh, the phone is off now. Crap. I just, I just want to take a screenshot of this, which by the way, the way I've gotten around using the buttons a lot is by talking to Siri. So maybe this was their intention. Do you find, I find it very hard. I mean, like Siri, adjust the volume. Siri, take a screenshot. I'm just like, you do it. I cannot deal with your buttons. I find it very hard at times to take a screenshot because it's corner buttons, right? The, the power button, whatever you want to call it, the touch ID button, the side button, and the volume button that you need to press together to take a screenshot. They're up

1:03:02it on a regular iPhone. You just squeeze it, right? Cause they're opposite each other. It is actually super easy. This is a two handed thing. Always a two handed thing. And I found that it's like trying to photograph the camera app, the camera app UI. It's like, you can't because, but you're squeezing it and then you're twisting it. And then whatever you were trying to frame as you took the screenshot is now at a 45 degree angle. It's, it's, I don't know. It's, but what's the solution. So is the solution, they move the volume buttons to the right side.

1:03:39I don't think that's the solution. I, I'm not sure. I didn't mention this. I want to see what you think. I don't know. Like they, the, the regular iPhones have an action button and a camera control button. This one, they got rid of the action button. Something had to give, there's no room for more buttons on this, but I don't know if this one needs a camera control button. I don't, I did not miss the, I did not miss the action button. I wish you, you, can you reassign the camera control to the action button? No, you cannot. So I don't know. That would be a nice

1:04:11thing. I don't know. I mean, I do use the action button for very specific things that I guess I wasn't really doing on this week. I can't say I miss it a ton. I, I, I, I use mine, but, and I, but let's say, let's say they, look, I don't, I think it's going to, they're going to put face ID on the front of this thing eventually. I just, they're going to do that, right? Okay. Let's talk about that. So if they put face ID on the front, do you need the power button on the side?

1:04:42Because you don't need to always be unlocking it that way. Right. They could put the volume buttons on the side and put the power button on the top. But is that the sort of thing Apple doesn't like to do, which is move buttons around because if you've already gotten used to the old one, they don't want to admit that they had the buttons in the wrong place on the other one. I don't know. And if they only put face ID on the, on the front, you would still need touch ID when you're on the inside. What I have heard from people who no longer work at Apple, but maybe

1:05:16worked on this, well, more than maybe, but worked on this before they left Apple is that they, they definitely could have had face ID on the front. And there were people who had worked on this, not

Face ID and touch ID security

1:05:32like they left over the summer, but left a year or two ago who were actually surprised a month ago at the keynote when they were like, Oh, it's no touch. It's no face ID. It's touch ID where they still thought, Oh, but they just mean only face ID on the front that, that at some point, like a year or two ago, the debate was, can we get face ID on both sides engineering wise and cost wise is the cost of business. We can't, this shouldn't cost $4,000 like vision pro. We have to draw a line

1:06:02somewhere. And what they shipped without any face ID at all was already $2,000 starting point. But there are people who worked on prototypes of this over a year ago who were very surprised there's no face ID at all. That was something they could have done. And I guess the determination was better to have no face ID at all than face ID only on the outside. I don't know if I agree with that. Right. Because the argument, and this is in my review and Apple said on the record, which is basically, we wanted it to be consistent that the way you unlock the phone when it's closed. And when

1:06:35you unlock the phone, when it's open is the same to which I say, I'm mostly unlocking the phone as a phone and then I'm opening it. Right. Right. And I don't have to re unlock the phone when that happens. I just unlock and open and it's unlocked. So what would be wrong with that? I, the scenario I've thought about this and in the first few days last week, I was like, they should have done that. They should have done exactly what you just said. And what I found last

1:07:07week was a lot of my days, cause I was last week there was, I'd like work all day. And then at night I was watching playoff baseball. And while I was watching baseball on my TV, I was playing with the, or you playing with, I guess is a better word, playing with the duo on the couch only while it was open. Once my day was over and it's getting, it's 10 o'clock at night, I'm watching baseball. And at that point it was like a permanent iPad mini. And I wasn't, right. Cause I'd, I'd put it on the

1:07:41coffee table, get up, go make popcorn or, or something, get another drink out of the fridge or something like that and come back. And it's, Oh, I don't want, I'm not folding it up. I'm just leaving it. Cause I only want to use the inside screen while I'm on the sofa. And I've seen other people, even before it started shipping today, I saw it like all over social media where people were either based on my review or based on everybody's reviews after Wednesday, where they're like, this sounds like sort of not a great phone, like when it's in your pocket and you're standing,

1:08:13but it sounds like the best phone ever when you're on the couch. And I would agree with that, right? It is fantastic. But that's because it's already tablet size and you can leave it tablet size and just put it down on the coffee table and get up. And at that point it would totally be inconsistent not to have face ID if it was only on the outside. And the other thing that's worth thinking about, and I've noticed this over the years, face ID first came out with the iPhone 10, nine years ago. They have still to this date, and this would have been the first device where they

1:08:45could have broken it and it would have made sense to do it, but they've never shipped any device for any platform that has both touch ID and face ID. And it's, that's not that. No, none of the iPads. iPads are either one or the other. iPhones are either one or the other. Even the Mac, none of the Macs have face ID. They all have touch ID on a keyboard. That's the only thing that they have. Right. And people have been asking about face ID on Macs nonstop ever since the iPhone 10 came

1:09:16out. And they can talk about, and it's one of those things they talk around, who knows, maybe next week they will have face ID. I don't know. Everybody's talking about the touchscreen, but maybe that'll be one of the things that they bring to. I don't know. It's seems kind of weird. They've never done it. But one of the reasons I think is, it's not that they can't, and it's maybe not that it would be like baffling, confusing, but it would be like conflicting. Oh, now you have a payment to confirm. Which way do you want to do it? Right. And it's one of the little interactions that I think people

1:09:48don't think about, but it's clever is like when you use your phone to do a payment, like at a retail store, Apple pay, you, it uses face ID to confirm that you double click the side button and you have to do a face ID, but you have to double click the side button. Even when you do Apple pay on the website or something, because face ID wouldn't be enough. You wouldn't want an app or software just because you're looking at your screen to trick you into a payment, the physical clicking. You're confirming again. Right.

1:10:19I want to make this payment. Right. So I don't think it would be confusing, but it just wouldn't be consistent where on the outside you could- But I think you'd set up one. I don't know. You'd set up one. Android phones have this. Android phones have the ability to do face, whatever the facial recognition term is, that it's facial recognition. Or many of the Android phones have under display fingerprint sensors, which I love. Just the ability to quickly put your finger on the display and swipe up is great. But you kind of, yeah, you, you choose, you're

1:10:53choosing. You're like, Android's like, here, here's a whole list of ways to get into your phone. You decide when you set up your phone.

1:11:01Yeah. I, I, but I do wish that they did it and it has to be coming. I, I would, I don't know if they're waiting until they- Oh yeah, the rumors are already reports. I don't know if they can do it on, if they're going to wait until they can do it on both sides, but it, it clearly is a thing that ought to be coming. And it's, it's one of my biggest gripes about it. I know Neelai said he got used to it and I've seen, I've seen a couple other reviews where they've said they've gotten used to it. I can't get used to it. And I have some friends who've never loved Face ID, you know, who've said Touch ID always worked perfectly for

1:11:31me and Face ID often doesn't get it. And just, I have other friends whose fingers have apparently always been invisible to Touch ID, you know? I think for me, the slim design of this button and I, a few people have made a really good point, which I haven't done. I did multiple fingers, but I didn't do the same finger registered multiple times. Oh, I didn't do that either. Why would you do that? Because then maybe it gets different parts of your fingers and registers you, lets you in faster. Yeah, maybe. I think it's part of this design, which I did disable the rest to unlock, which, you know,

1:12:09it's basically taking another extra second for you to get in because it wants you to rest your hand, your finger. So you disabled that. Yes. And it, and it helps a little bit. The thing that helps the most is just the Apple Watch. Right. Right. And we, I had a conversation with Mark Gurman about, well, not a conversation, but I, he was saying maybe Apple might consider if this Touch ID conversation continues and this, I would say backlash, but people don't like it. Maybe they would consider doing the home view facial recognition, right? Using a, or normal, using the normal cameras and then another form

1:12:40of verification. Which I said, like, I don't actually think they would do that because I think they think that the Apple Watch to unlock features, fine, it's good enough. And it does. To me, that was the saving grace. I have my watch on, now I just swipe in and it works most of the time. Then people started chiming in saying, well, that feature never works on the Mac, or at least it can be very flaky on the Mac, which has been my experience too. But I don't have that experience on the Duo. The Duo is just, I would say, 95% of the time, the watch unlocks and I'm fine.

1:13:11Yeah. I saw that, I didn't see the back and forth, but I saw Mark's original tweet this morning and I just ran out of time, but I did not chime in. But I don't think, I think he's not thinking through the way Apple thinks of security. And it is, it's not even just opinion. It is actually some technical facts. Like, for example, Apple itself in their own security white paper says that, that Face ID is, I forget how many thousand times or 20 times more secure than Touch ID or it's a significant factor. If you're really, really, really concerned about

1:13:45security, Face ID is more secure than Touch ID for whatever technical reasons, that fingerprints are more likely to be the same as somebody else's or look the same than your face, which I would have thought would be the other way around, but intuitively, but I think it's because somehow the world thinks fingerprint, I mean, that's what we call it, fingerprinting, right? Like what did, what does, what did the ad surveillance ad networks do? Oh, they fingerprint you. They fingerprint your device. Yeah. But the way Apple thinks about it with the home view is you need

1:14:17a truly secure device on the network and the secure devices that are the only ones that are allowed are an iPad or an iPhone. So there's no way that they could do the home view style authentication with your face because you need an iPhone or an iPad. Well, it isn't your iPhone, you know, your eye, it becomes a circular thing. And I'm not quite sure why, and I've asked them, and it's one of those questions they really, they don't say, no, I'm not going to answer the question, but they don't really answer the question. Why doesn't your Apple watch count as a secure device for the home view?

1:14:51If you are just walking around with your Apple watch and you've punched your number on your wrist or used your iPhone to unlock your watch, but it's still on your wrist, that's not good enough to get you into home view. It has to be your phone or your iPad unlocked recently. They haven't said how recent, recent, I think the reason they don't want to say, cause they might change how recent it is. And so they don't want to say it's within an hour or two hours or whatever, cause they might change it around, but it has to have been unlocked recently and has to be present currently on the

1:15:24home wifi network. And so maybe, I don't know, they don't want you to leave the house with your phone, but you're not wearing your Apple watch and your kid knows your number for your watch. And now they can get into your home view. I don't know what they're thinking, but there are certainly scenarios like that. Or is there something like more intrinsically secure of the phone and the iPad? Yeah. And I think the other thing they don't want to mess around with, and it goes all the way back to your video with in 2017 with the iPhone 10 is they don't want to mix up people's opinions on how

1:16:00accurate their facial recognition is. And they don't want to say, Oh, on all the other iPhones, it's actually 20 times more secure than touch ID. But on this iPhone, the iPhone duo, which costs $2,000, by the way, it's actually way less secure because it's just using the camera. You think about the access that you would have to more such deeply sensitive things on the iPhone versus it. Oh, it's everything. It's, you know, it's literally not, it's not comparable. Yeah. It's not even comparable. So there's no way they're going to do that. And they do funny things

1:16:32like they call the front facing camera on the outside. That's a center stage camera. And in Apple's parlance, center stage means a good front facing camera. And this isn't as good as the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro and the 17 Pro last year have an 18 megapixel center stage camera. This one is 12 megapixels and, and megapixels isn't an exact measurement of camera quality, but if they call it center stage though, it's good quality. And when they call it a FaceTime camera,

1:17:04which is what they call the one behind the screen on the inside, that means it's not good. Yeah. And they're not going to do that with a facial recognition, like face ID means face ID. And it means you can trust it. And this is actually seriously secure. And they're not going to say you can facial unlock, but it's not face ID. And they're not going to play a game like that when it comes to security. I think, I think we can be very confident that Apple's working on this.

1:17:36It is such an obvious second generation or maybe third generation type of feature. It's just so obvious. Yeah. And as, as, and I think you're probably totally right, by the way, on the reasons why they, they did it this way, right. For, for price lowering, for consistency, all the things. And I don't think they're sandbagging it. And I don't think they could have, I think they could have done the front alone, but I feel like they thought, well, let's save it until we can do both.

1:18:06And then it is already in the pipeline for a major upgrade a year from now or two years from now. And it's not that they're sandbagging the current one to save stuff for the future, but it's better than drip, drip, dripping it in a half-assed state. I think it's as down as I am over the fact that this uses touch ID instead of face ID. I kind of get the not wanting to do only the one side, but it is frustrating. Here's another one that I think is coming. And again, this one isn't, I don't think there are rumors about it. So I have no idea. I'm making this up.

1:18:42I don't have any little birdies who've told me this or that it is coming, but I know that it is something Apple's thinking about with the last two years of front facing cameras on the phones, they're using a square sensor. And that means you can hold the phone in either orientation when you take a selfie and you can take a wide angle or wide, wide aspect radio aspect ratio shot or a tall screen shot, either way that you hold the phone because the sensors square and a rectangular frame

1:19:14is just cropped on the square. And that's really cool. I think they should have used a square sensor for the main cameras because then you could shoot with the main one X camera. You could shoot either way, no matter which way the phone is opened. Right. That's one of, one of my biggest complaints in the review is that when you open this phone, you don't, you don't get a bigger viewfinder than you do on the outside because when you're holding the phone open and you're holding it horizontally,

1:19:49you're shooting vertically. And when you're holding it vertically, you're shooting horizontally, which makes no sense to me. And I kind of, and I asked Apple about it and they said, well, we, and I guess maybe it's reasonable that they think most people will, most people will shoot most photos on the duo using the outside screen. So that's why the camera horizontal vertical alignment is aligned with the outside screen. And maybe they're right. I don't know, but I used to, it was a viewfinder a lot. I just didn't notice what you're talking about, which is kind of dumb

1:20:19of me. I just never rotated it that way. But if it used, if the main camera sensor was square, then it wouldn't be a problem. They could just do it right either way. And when they first announced that for the front facing camera, and I had a briefing with the camera team, I'm pretty sure that was last year with the iPhone 17 pro in the air. And I talked to the camera team and I asked them, well, did you guys, I think that sounds awesome, but did you, I'm sure you guys have thought about it for the main camera. And I knew that they weren't really going to answer. And it was one

1:20:51of those answers where their words were, they pretended like they'd never even considered it. Oh, that's an interesting idea, John. But the look on their face was sort of like, like in their eyes was like, yeah, we thought about it. And what I have heard from little birdies, again, who don't even work at Apple anymore, is that the camera team themselves, the people who work on the camera team at Apple for iPhones, they definitely would love to have square sensors on all the cameras for this reason. But other people at Apple, like the finance people or the operations

1:21:25people who have to worry about profit margins, don't because it's not like you're cutting the sensor to make it square, you're growing the sensor to make it square. So you have to pay for all those extra pixels. And the bigger the sensor, the more it costs. So it cuts into the margin. And you don't really ever use the corners of the sensor. I mean, if you take a square aspect ratio photo, you maybe you do. But most people don't shoot square photos, they shoot either widescreen or

1:21:56tall screen photos. And so you wind up using only the middle plus shape like the take the the red cross logo, right? You're only really using the red part. And but Apple somebody the operations people have to pay for the corners that don't really get used. And it cuts into the margin of the phone. And it's also an engineering problem where because it's a bigger sensor, everybody's fighting for space inside the iPhone. But the camera team who cares only about the camera would

1:22:28love to have square sensors. And I can't help but think and again, I don't have a little birdie who said, yeah, they're definitely going to do it for the one x camera, only that they would love to do it for the one x camera. So and I can't think of any device where that would be better than the iPhone duo, because it's the one device where you really, yeah, you just want to twist it all the time you wanted. Yeah, I even though I had never really did that with the I don't know why I think I'm just so used to holding my camera vertically. It's just Yeah, I was doing it all all week long. And it was

1:23:02driving me nuts. And I was trying to, because I you know, and I know some people think, oh, it's that don't you feel embarrassed if you're shooting with this big tablet in front of your face as a camera. And it's like, I don't feel no, I having a big a big preview. I wouldn't do it for every photo I take. Sometimes you do just want to take your iPhone out, quick take a picture. But if you're really are trying to frame something up perfectly, it's fantastic to have a bigger preview. And I used the preview so many times I use the bigger viewfinder so many times. It's just like

1:23:34it really is a nice way to look at it. But it's not a bigger viewfinder when you open the inside screen. But it moves the controls off the preview. Because that's the other thing when you're when you use the outside screen with it with the Apple camera app. All of the controls are on top of the preview, right? The buttons on top of the preview, everything is are you saying the measurements of the viewfinder is not the same? It's, you still get the same, but you it shows you through the black bars, the rest of your frame, like where you're going to see. It's just it just doesn't go edge to

1:24:08edge. But it's still nicer to look at this screen. You don't think it's nicer to look at? Oh, yeah, it's just nice outside screen. It's just a nicer screen. Yeah, yeah. It's just it's a nicer viewfinder. I get what you're saying that you're still getting the same. Yeah, you just aspect ratio of the picture. But using the screen even it's like a it's just a trick. When you watch video on the iPhone duo, when I watched your video review, I watched it on the duo. I opened it up and I held it

1:24:39widescreen to watch your video. But when you shoot video, you're and you're using the inner screen. If you want to shoot widescreen video, you have to hold it up and down. You don't hold it the way that you would watch it because the cameras align the other way. And if it had a square sensor, then you could do that. So I feel like that's another thing that they could definitely improve. They can't magically because a foldable really needs to be thin because it's every time you put it in your pocket, it's going to be twice as thick. There's the laws of physics about, hey, the thinner

1:25:11a camera is, the worse the image quality is because the lens is going to be closer to the sensor, blah, blah, blah. But the one thing they could do if they could switch to a square sensor, it would really help in that regard. And I would love to see them do that in a year or two. We'll see. All right, let me take a break. I would choose face ID. Oh, face ID, I would take first. I would take face ID and take off the ultrawide camera lens if that's what it took to get it. Even though it is very nice to have the ultrawide camera lens. Yeah. Face ID and telephoto. That's what we need.

Factor sponsor break

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Journal app and hotel notes

1:28:53into your review that you wanted to talk about? Do you ever use iPhone mirroring? I'm a big iPhone mirroring user. On my Mac? No. I use it because my main work Mac is still on the, one of the main reasons I use it is that I, I like using the Apple journal app and, but my work Mac is still on macOS Sequoia, macOS 15, which doesn't have a Mac version of the journaling app. So I use the journaling app through iPhone mirroring. I'm not writing novels in there. I just, little short journal entries so

1:29:26I can remember what I did on each day. When you use iPhone mirror, journal, just the Apple journal app. Just journal. Yeah. Oh, the Apple journal app. Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. I, I should maybe have my head examined for putting so many entries in there because I don't think it's a great app and I have complaints about it, but I've. Like you're journaling about life in there? Yeah. Just like what happened, you know, wrote about my Saturday and what I did and went to see a movie with my son and I don't know. I'm not going to tell you what's in my journal, Joanna. Tell

1:29:57me what's in your journal. But I use it. Do you put a lock on it? You put, can you do that with the journal app? No. You can. You can put a lock on any app actually. Yeah. And you can put an extra lock on it, but I don't because I, I trust anybody. I feel like I would use some maybe more for notes, what you're talking about, but I think it's nice that you use the journal app for such reflective moments. And the thing that's nice about journal, I should, I'd probably be happier in some ways. It'd be better to write in the notes app, but like in the notes app, whenever you update an entry, it sorts entries by the last time

1:30:32you updated them. Whereas the journal app, because it's meant to be a journal, you can assign a date to it. And then even if you add to it later, it stays with the date that you gave it. Oh, I'll tell you something I use in the journal app all the time. Journal app is where I put restaurant reviews. So whenever we go to a restaurant, I, I, well, not like every restaurant, but if I go to Shake Shack, I don't make a journal entry, but if I go to a real restaurant, I will write and I'll put the name of the restaurant as the title, the

1:31:03date, and I'll say what we got and what we liked or didn't like. And I usually attach a photo of the receipt that has a, has a list of everything we've gotten and shows how much we paid. But then, and this is where Amy thinks I'm crazy that I do it. But then when we go to a restaurant, we haven't been to in eight years or eight months in your journal app. Yeah. She'll say, what did I think of the shrimp scampi here? Did I get that before? And then I can look it up and say that you liked it or you didn't like it. And then, but she never

1:31:33thanks me. She never says thank you because you take these copious notes. That's actually amazing. You're an amazing partner. I really have to say, like the AI agent of your partner. Can you please, next time you see Amy, tell her that. I will tell her when I see her. I will. I think I have her number somewhere. I'll just read you the last time I wrote in the journal app must've been the launch of the journal app because it says, I'm writing some feelings in my journal now. I'm feeling happy and also so sad. Happy that Apple isn't tracking me in this app. Thursday, March 28th, 2024 at 3.24 PM.

1:32:11Not exactly a regular user of the app.