John is still coughing. That's remarkable. Maybe. I mean, it's not a particularly good start to a show, but John is indeed still coughing.
Yeah. You know what? It's September, which means it's childhood cancer awareness month, which means we got to talk about St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
And we don't just have to talk about it. We want to talk about it because, hey, here's the thing. For the fifth year in a row, relay is coming together with ATP, although I mean, there's perhaps a distinction without a difference. I'm looking for anyway.
We're all coming together to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital since 2019. The community has raised over 2.2 million and actually breaking news. Oh, it's actually over $3 million, which is incredible.
$3 million in the last five years. That's so incredibly cool. And that's thanks in no small part to all of you. So hey, here's the thing.
What St. Jude Children's Research Hospital? Guess what? They are hospitals that research, but they also treat kids.
And what St. Jude is really incredible because they don't charge their patient families for anything. You know, the idea is if you're in a position where your child is fighting for their lives, then the last thing you need to worry about is, hey, how am I going to fund that fight? And so it is an opportunity for all of us, all of you that are listening and the three of us to be a hero for someone.
And you can be a hero for $5. You can be a hero by sending $5 to St. Jude at St. Jude.org.
ATP. And that can make you a hero for somebody. That $5 can buy something for somebody, be that treatment, be that, you know, some healthy thing to eat or whatever the case may be, it makes a difference. So the other great thing about St.
Jude is that they try to do the best they can to make as good a time as they can for their patients and their families. So St. Jude has actually got their own school, the St. Jude Imagine Academy, which is apparently sponsored by Chili's.
It's their own school that spans from preschool through 12th grade for patients who will be at St. Jude for upwards of six weeks. And the staff has trainers trained in English language learner instruction, visual impairment, instruction services, librarian, STEM coordinator, even reading dogs who visit to read with kids. I don't know how that works, but it sounds awesome.
Reading to the dogs read. I don't know. They do. St.
Jude has some really advanced medical practices. You never know. They do amazing work there. They really do.
So hey, the Academy helps patients keep up their schoolwork back home while they're undergoing treatment, but also gives patients what they need at whatever they need at that moment. And you know what, if a patient isn't feeling great, then maybe they don't want to do math that day or whatever the patient may be. And maybe the teachers will say, all right, we'll skip math for today and we'll do something different. Or maybe we'll do math in a different way.
We'll play Uno or something like that. And so they have kindergarten and high school graduation ceremonies. And if you want to see what those look like, you can actually go to a web search for St. Jude High School graduation for video of this year's graduating class.
Super cool. So hey, you know, not only all that is amazing, but we are spending literally the entire episode talking about rampant consumerism. And Marco has come up with the patented and trademarked and copyrighted Marco Offset in order to help offset our rampant consumerism. So Marco, can you describe the Marco Offset, please?
I sure can. It is not patented or copyrighted or trademarked. I think the only thing that possibly could be is trademarked, but because I'm not going to, I don't believe in patents and copyright doesn't apply here. But I'm not going to even trade market because it is an idea that I think should spread and I don't need to have my name be the only name ever attached to it.
Because here's what you do. You take your rampant consumerism that you are about to use or have already used to place orders for all these new tech products that have just come out of our about to come out. And you look at the base price of those products. So the new iPhone, say it's $9.99.
Is that the price? That's right for the pro. Yes, I'm right. So iPhone Pro 99.
So what you do is you say, all right, well, I got an iPhone Pro. I got the bigger storage option. I got the Apple Care. I got a case.
I got to pay sales tax. Whatever additional money you're paying out the door above that $9.99 base price of the actual product. It says a couple hundred bucks. That becomes your suggested minimum donation to St.
Jude. Because that's like the add-on money that you are kind of just tossing on at the end there. The theory is you can probably afford something like that if you're fortunate enough to be buying this kind of gear in the first place most of the time. So if that's you, if you can afford it, that is my suggested minimum donation.
Is that incremental offset above the base price of the product that you are buying? If you truly can't afford it, that's cool. We understand. Don't need a dollar if you can afford that.
Any amount helps. But if you can afford more, we encourage it. Yes. And speaking of affording more, we have some more breaking updates.
Victor Long has decided to one up even pack a collision with a $10,001 donation. We're playing prices right now, which is excellent. I put Victor's stickers in the mail just a couple hours ago. And then Guillaume Moron.
I hope I got that right. I butchered it last year. So hopefully I'm making progress in a good way. They donated $13,141.59.
I have no idea what the significance is of the 314,414.com. As soon as I said, I'm out. I got it. Oh, see, that's movie magic right there.
You got it. So anyway, we got there a little later, but better late than ever. So, yeah, so thank you so much to them. I've been in communications with Guillaume.
And they said, no, I'm good on stickers because you sent a bunch last year. So thank you. And then just briefly, there have been two anonymous donations each with. This is not a joke.
$100,000 each. Now, that is phenomenal. And almost no one has the kind of money to be able to donate that incredible amount. A little too almost nobody's.
But here we are. Just to be clear, though, John pointed out that we should talk or make clear that, well, if they are interested in stickers, please reach out. That does not mean you have to donate $100,001 to get a sticker. The limbo bar, if you will, is currently at $1,300.
I can talk $13, $11,161.60. That is your bare minimum for stickers at this time. So all that being said, all of that is a tremendous amount of money. If you can just give $5, $5, it really does help.
I know it probably doesn't sound like it. We're talking about $13,000. But truly, even $5 helps. Please go to stg.org.ctjut.de.org.ctp and send a few bucks there way.
They really do deserve it. And I'm actually going to St. Jude next week in order to participate in the podcast. We will talk about next week's show.
All right, John, the rules for rules engagement for this are no follow-up. No super you, John. So we are going to dive straight into the September 24, 24 Apple events. And as always, I'm going to start to go chronologically and immediately get sidetracked and go somewhere different.
But we're going to start by saying it was really good and really cute. Very accessibility heavy introduction video, which I liked. I thought it was very good. Then Tim spoke briefly about Apple intelligence.
And we dove right into Apple Watch series 10 with Jeff Williams. And it's got a new, well, all right, here's that. Let me stop myself. I told myself I was going to ask each of you for opening statements.
And I didn't ask you nor myself for opening statement. I would like to interrupt myself and give an opening statement. I didn't know what to make of this event because I felt like it was twice as long as it should have been. Nothing really knocked my socks off.
And I just left it saying, huh. But immediately I thought to myself, that doesn't make for a fun podcast to listen to. So I'm going to do my darn disc to try to look at the positive side of things because me just sitting here moaning about not being impressed by everything is not very fun. And there were some impressive things in here.
But I definitely felt like this one dragged on in a way that Apple events almost never do save game demos. And I just wasn't like, yes, by the end of it, which is very unusual for me. So let's start with Marco and then John. If you have an opening statement, forgive me for almost re-alroading all of us.
Do you have an opening statement, Marco? In terms of looking at each of the products individually, I think overall, this event focused a lot more on software capabilities than hardware capabilities. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make for a different tone of the event compared to, I think, what a lot of people expect or hope from an iPhone slash Apple Watch, whatever launch event. The reality is this is the, what, 18th iPhone or something?
Like there have been so many iPhones. It is such a mature product. The annual incremental updates are not that big anymore, you know, in terms of like interesting, showy new features or hardware changes. Like it's not that much every year.
It's incremental in the hardware. What we tend to see though is interesting stuff in kind of, you know, software capabilities, backing services, things like that. And this year, the story is obviously all about AI based features and Apple intelligence in particular is what Apple is trying to push. And it's not just the whole industry is pushing it right now with a lot of good reason.
There's a lot of excitement there and a lot of advancement there. But what Apple is doing here is communicating to the world. Look at us. We have AI too.
And to most of us who watch Apple very closely, we know the asterisk on that. Like number one, we know that it's not really out yet. And even when it quote comes out in a month, it'll be in beta and limited and only a subset of the features. Like we know all those asterisks.
We also know almost that entire story because they showed it all to us in June. But the iPhone event is for the entire world. It's for world media. It's for people who don't care about anything else all year from Apple except the iPhone and the iPhone event.
It's for mainstream people to hear about the stuff. And it also serves as even for people who pay attention to the new iPhone event. And it's made to promote the new iPhone to the world. And usually in the iPhone event, what we see largely is trying to associate the new software features of the iOS update for that year with the new hardware to get people excited about the new hardware, even though many of those things are software features that aren't necessarily exclusive to the new hardware.
So overall, I see why people were a little bit meh about the announcement of this event. I actually, to me, the event went Apple Watch, then AirPods, then Phones. And I think that's also the order of how interesting they are in descending order though. I think the Apple Watch, to me, had possibly the most substantial update.
And then I think the AirPods were in the middle and maybe the Phones were the least substantial. But overall, the story here is really about Apple intelligence and software features. And the hardware is very incremental on the phone. I would say it's more than incremental on the watch.
But on the phone, it's pretty incremental. So we'll get to those details. But I am fine with how this went. I wish the phone would have been a little bit more new.
And I actually even considered skipping the phone this year. But we should be the first time ever, honestly. So I see why people are a little disappointed by that. We have a little bit of a different perspective on this event this year for whatever reason.
I mean, maybe I've been like this for years and I would have the same stance. I don't know what happened, but let me give you some framing here. As people who listen to this show know, I like desktop Macs with big GPUs in them. I like sedans with stick shifts.
Neither one of those things are particularly popular or in fashion. And they haven't been for a long time. Macs desktop is not regular for computer desktops. So when I see an event like this, I can understand why some people don't be like Ho-hum, whatever, especially if you know repetition of stuff that we already know, because we've already done everything.
But the way I look at it is every single year, Apple comes out with a new phone, and they try to make it better than the previous phone in a bunch of interesting ways. They try to learn from mistakes from past phones. They try out new ideas, and then if those ideas don't work, they try something else a few years later. They try to improve on it in every possible way.
Can we make it more water resistant? Can we make the battery life better? Can we make it a little bit bigger? Maybe we should make a smaller one.
Like every year, they are working on that product. And this year is no different. They did. I think this is actually a fairly significant year for the hardware itself, just looking at it.
That it has at least one very big different thing than it had before, and I would say someone who is out there not being catered to by the people who are making new automobiles or new desktop mangs, that you should appreciate the fact that every single year, the product you want and that we all like to use, is getting better. We're not out there going to be a wonderful update on the product that I care about. We'll never make another one of those. If they do make another one of those, will they make it worse or will they make it better?
Every single year, Apple A puts out an iPhone that's usually pretty good, and B tries to make it better than the last one, and you should succeed in some small way. And that may seem boring until you are a devoted customer of a product that isn't getting that kind of attention. Like I stick to four-door sedans with an unhedrin for me. And you would kill for them to every year, just make a better version of that or try a different idea.
You look back, you don't appreciate it. Remember every year they come up with a new Honda Accord, and I already like it or I would not like it. Maybe the styling would be to my taste or not. I say, well, if I don't like this generation, wait till next year, there will be another one, they get another crack at it, or whatever.
And then that's not happening. And suddenly all those years where it's like, oh, it's just another cord, all they did, it's like the same as the previous Accord, but they changed it a little bit, but all those different headlights, who cares, right? You will come to appreciate that if someday Apple moves on from the phone, and it's just too busy selling, I don't know, the Success Division Pro or something like that. And I know it's kind of like, well, it's the smartphone, like it's the most popular consumer product on the history of the planet, right?
It's not like it's going to go away or whatever, but another way to look at it, another perspective. Not saying people's opinions on it are wrong, or they're feelings on it are wrong, but another perspective is, hey, if you're interested in phones at all, isn't it kind of nice that they keep making new ones that are a little bit better, especially if like me, you don't get a new one every single year, so that you can just kind of wait and see. It's like, oh, do you like this phone? Does that peel to you?
Do you not like the colors? Do you want to wait and see on that whole capture button thing or whatever? Wait until next year, you know what, next year, there's going to be another thing that is a smartphone that's called an iPhone that caters to people who like iPhones, and they'll try something different with that one. And then again, and then again, and then again, and I just want to sit here and appreciate that because that isn't always the case.
And I happen to say I do like phones, and I do appreciate the fact that I make a new one every year. And by the way, this is my year to get a new phone, so I was excited by the fact that they're going to make a new phone for me to buy, and I'm going to have a new shiny thing, and it will be an upgrade over my iPhone 14 because I've waited two years. So, yeah, I didn't like, that's why I can't wait for these events. I don't expect to be blown away.
I don't expect to be like the Vision Pro intro. I just want to see, and honestly, like listen to past episodes, we knew almost everything was going to be in this thing. It's like, it's not even surprises, but it's like, yeah, but now you get to actually buy them. Now you actually got to see how Apple presents them, see all their nice product photography on their website and hear all this stuff about it or whatever.
The final thing I'll say is that I agree with the people who said this presentation was weird and that Apple decided to try something different this year and really, really shy away from talking about anything that has a number associated with it. Not entirely. Like they did talk about, oh, the CPU is extra percent faster. We'll talk about it when we get to the image of products, but like they normally are more speck heavy than they have been.
It's not because they had anything to hide or there's anything shameful. I remember when the watch section was done, we were wondering, are there two sizes or one? Like, it's not a secret. They're not hiding it.
It's not like, oh, we don't want to be too techy. Don't tell them there are two sizes. There was a distinct lack of detail. And I don't know if that's good or bad.
It was just weird for us because we're making a show. We're going to tell you about all the details. So we have to look them up and it's like, couldn't you just hold us? Right?
But it's an interesting strategy, as Margar said, is the event that most people in the world watch, this is Apple's opportunity to talk to the whole world and maybe they just thought they were boring people with a bunch of stuff that's interesting to us, but not relevant to them. Even the fact that there are two, so Apple's watch, there is ten sizes. Like people don't care about that. They'll just go in the store.
They'll see there's two of them. They'll pick the one they want. It's not important enough to even include in the presentation. I thought that was weird.
I don't like it personally, but maybe it turns out to be the best way to communicate to the rest of the world. We'll see. And so we saw that accessibility and other intro video. We saw Tim talk about Apple intelligence and we get to Jeff Williams and the new Apple Watch series 10 design.
And I am on a every two year plan for watches. This is my year. We talked about this in the last couple of episodes. And going into this event, I thought I was going to get an ultra three.
And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. But I watched the unveiling of the brand new design of the Apple Watch series 10. That looked like a thinner version of the existing Apple Watch, which is fine. The Apple Watch really makes the 9-11 look radical from generation to generation.
And once again, the rumor mill about watch-free designs once again proves to be mostly wrong. But they got this one right. Everyone said that the 10 was not going to be a big redesign. It was going to look like the existing series.
But only recently, only a couple months ago, they were saying it was going to have a whole new band attachment mechanism with magnetic bands and all these. They're going to change the size more. That was more than six months ago. The rumors were solidified about halfway through the year that this is what we were going to be getting.
The rumors also said that both sizes would be getting substantially bigger, and that's also not true. Of all sizes did get bigger, just not substantially. Yeah, by one millimeter. They were saying they were going to get rid of the small size.
It turns out the watch-roomer mill is the least reliable part of the Apple product-roomer mill. And the pattern continued into this year as well. I think it was pretty good. Within several months of the event, we knew it wasn't going to be radical resum.
We knew they would have bigger screens that went farther to the edge. We knew they'd be bigger than predecessors. Yes, they got the details and the magnitude wrong. But we knew all of that.
So when you're waiting for the series, here's the all new design. Wait a second. Did they get it wrong? They started showing the new design like now?
They got it right. It looks the same as the other ones. So yeah, so it's basically the same as the other ones. But thinner, and as much as I'm kind of grumbling and snarking, genuinely thinner sounds great to me, because the current Apple Watch is a little bit chunky, and I love the idea of having something thinner, which flies directly in the face of the whole intention of getting an Apple Watch Ultra III, because that thing is chonky or still.
But in any case, it is thinner, it is a little bit bigger. It's 30% bigger than the series six, and they said at one point that you can even see an additional line of text and messages and news of all things, which I was like, sure guys, whatever. That's a slightly wider aspect ratio. And then they explain that it's the first ever wide angle OLED that Apple at least is releasing, and it's 40% brighter when viewed at an angle.
And this is one of those things to try to look on the bright side. Hey, that's a good pun. To look at the bright side, this is one of those things that I think is Apple at a finest, where they take a thing that is not great, but not an actual like paper cut, and just make it better, because yeah, all of this viewing of the current Apple Watch is not stellar, but it's never been to the point that I was like, oh, this sucks. But I tell you what, I'm pretty excited that my next Apple Watch, because guess what, it's not gonna be Ultra 3, that my next Apple Watch is gonna be 40% brighter when viewed at an angle.
I'm here for that. And that's pretty great. So screen tech wise, obviously we've had the rumors for years that Apple was trying to make micro LED micro OLED displays for the watch, which is instead of having the organic, light emitting diode type things, it's more like individual light up LEDs in there. Anyway, it's very difficult to do that.
We thought, hey, you're gonna do this weird screen technology, start with a really small screen. Like the watch, Apple was developing this technology itself with like funding research into this display technology itself. And then a year or two ago, Apple said, and their mind, we're not doing that anymore. And it came up with nothing.
They stopped that pursuit. They said, we were unsuccessful. And then after that, all the rumors for the watch is switched and said, well, it's not gonna be micro OLED anymore. It's going to be plain old OLED.
And that's of course what we got. Now, so what is it about? So let the gives the better viewing angle. Apple didn't say, but the only technologies that I'm aware of that can give you a wider viewing angle on OLED are either QD OLED, which we talked about ages ago, or television, which is you don't have a white sub pixel, you don't have a polarizing layer.
The color is closer to the surface of the screen, and the viewing angles are better. It's why the viewing angle of a QD OLED television is better than an OLED one, you get less color shift, you get better brightness, the other right? And the other technology, which is the most likely one, is micro lens arrays, which is what LG uses because they don't have QD OLEDs, which is you put a bunch of little tiny lenses on top of your existing regular WRGB OLED, and that increases the viewing angle. And when I say a bunch of lenses, I mean a bunch of lenses, as if each individual pixel, like sub pixel, the red, green, and blue sub pixels, have hundreds of lenses in front of them.
When we say micro lens array, we mean micro lens. We don't need one lens for each pixel, one legendary sub pixel, hundreds for each sub pixel. And this technology is what LG uses on their high-intelligence and has for a couple years now. And guess what?
It increases the viewing angle because the light that's coming out of pixels and going through all the polarizers or whatever hits those micro lens array and shoots off in all sorts of directions instead of just mostly going straight. And I think LG might be the supplier for these things. Anyway, soon as someone gets one of these watches, someone who's a display technology expert will put it under one of those little microscope magnifier things, you can tell when you have an MLA OLED. You can actually see the little micro lenses when you zoom in on one pixel.
And if so, that would be super interesting because the only places I've heard of micro lens arrays being used are on television sets. And so now they're going to be using it's on your TV and also on the tiny screen on your wrist. And the great thing about MLA is it's essentially a passive technology. You just put those lenses on there and you get more brightness and better viewing angles for the same power output.
So again, I deal with the watch. Not as cool as micro OLED, but that didn't work out. So waiting for micro OLED, we're going to be waiting a while longer. For what it's worth, Quinn Nelson did a really good video on his reactions to the Apple head and spent a not insignificant amount of time on this and specifically theorized the exact same thing you're saying, John.
Did he have a confirmed or no? No, I don't believe it was confirmed. I think it was also suspicion, but like you're saying, but it you two landed on the same conclusion, which is that this is LG Tech. I believe Quinn said that it's LG that's providing the displays.
We have a watch. I can't tell you if that's right or wrong, but I'm inclined to believe Quinn. And so anyways, he was theorizing that it's that because LG is using it on their TVs, it's probably the same basic technology here on the Apple watch. And by the way, MLA, as I described, it's a pretty good technology.
If you can't do QD OLED, you know, just adding one more layer to display and makes it much better. So when Apple eventually gets OLEDs into their MacBook Pros or whatever, I know they're doing the 10 mobile lids on the M4 iPad Pro and everything. But I do wonder if we might see some MLA tech coming to Macbooks in 2026 or 2027. In any case, so yeah, we've got this better screen.
The cases are up to 10% less weight. It's 10% thinner than the Series 9. And then I believe as Marco got wish that you had been looking for, it is polished titanium that replaced the stainless steel because Marco, you were a big fan of the titanium watch in the past, right? Or am I making this up?
I was. No, this is like my wish list for this Apple watch included. Please bring back titanium. Now, the way they did it was not quite what I was imagining, but I will happily take it.
So what they've done is they've replaced stainless steel with titanium that is that has a polished finish, not a brushed finish. So the old one had a brush finish that would form like, you know, linear reflections. It was brushed in a line. This one appears to be just polished the same way that the stainless steel has been polished.
It's like a shiny chrome like look on the outside. I actually prefer the old one. I think I haven't seen this one in person yet. I prefer the look of the old one, I think.
But the main advantage of titanium as we see on the phones is it's much lighter than stainless steel for the same type of product. So this gets it a lot closer to the wonderful lightness, the aluminum models than it used to be. I think I would prefer a more like, you know, brushed kind of finish, but hey, I'll take this. This is good.
And this is also like they've also added a bunch of new colors as part of their new kind of metals refresh here. On the aluminum side, they added a jet black, which looks like the iPhone seven jet black according to pictures I've seen. Again, I haven't seen any of these in person yet, so we'll see how they look in person. But that's interesting to have a shiny jet black in the aluminum side for the very first time.
In the past, you'd have to go to steel to get shiny black. So that should be really cool. Rose gold and silver there in the aluminum and then the titanium. They have an interesting color set in titanium.
They have gold, cool slate, which is basically, you know, space gray making space gray, you know, since we have time and they've been in many different grades, but it's basically dark, very dark gray. Then they have natural titanium in most of the models, but then the Hermes model has a exclusive silver color. Now, I am very curious to see those two in person because how different is natural from silver is natural just a little shade darker, maybe like that's what I would expect because I think that is the quote natural color of titanium. We'll see what that means in practice.
But either way, I am very happy to see titanium is back in the regular series Apple Watch. That is great news to me. I have already ordered one in titanium and I'm looking forward to getting it for many reasons, but that alone, like just bring back to titanium is a big deal. That being said, there was there were a couple of things about the display before we leave that I thought we're just doing.
So, of course, as John mentioned, the wide angle viewing angle, I think that actually will matter a lot on the watch, but also the display now updates once a second when it's in like the always on sleeping mode. It used to be once a minute. So now it's once a second. So now that they've actually updated a lot of the watch faces to have like a ticking seconds hand like quartz watches do, which is interesting.
And they have a couple of designs like they showed off, but that should overall make the sleep mode like a little bit nicer. That's kind of the theme of this display update is, you know, the wider angle makes it a little bit nicer. The once every second updating a little bit nicer, the slightly bigger screen, a little bit nicer, like all those things just make the watch a little bit nicer. And so I'm I think this is actually a substantial update to the watch.
The even the like, you know, 10% thinner, that is something that you will see and feel more than you might think from just hearing the number of 10%. It doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal, but you notice with that kind of stuff. Also, they all way less than the outgoing models. So that you know, you also will notice that the I believe that aluminum is about 10% weight loss and titanium is 20% less than the steel is replacing.
So those are substantial savings. Again, like last year we were able to get to this. But last year, we were all very happy about a roughly 10% weight reduction on the iPhone. I think it was less than that.
But like, you know, we you notice that. And so on the watch, like, I think we will notice these changes. These will be very, I think very nice to have. And that's kind of the theme of most of the Apple Watch update, the series nine to 10, at least most of the update seems to be a pretty nice sized collection of reasonably minor individual things that I think will all add up to a very nice overall update to the watch.
One of the thing I wanted to call out because I don't think you had on your list here. Oh, you did never mind your bullet later. You can now play music and podcasts directly through the speaker on the watch. I am really genuinely very excited for this.
I don't think this is something I will find myself doing often, but there's definitely been a handful of times that I wanted to do this and I've been irrationally grumbly about the fact that I couldn't. So this is very exciting for me. You hate your battery, Casey? Yeah, well, apparently I do.
Yeah. I mean, to be clear, like this will destroy because it destroys a battery on the phone. Like playing out the built-in speaker for sustained amounts of time is a substantial battery cost. So, you know, don't buy this expecting to do this on a regular basis, but it is nice that you can do it sometimes instead of having to pair air pods to it just to hear like, you know, if you like, you know, or just try not listen to a podcast and walk around something.
So that's nice. That's a pretty substantial fix. Also, other things about it, like they have a quote, larger and more efficient charging coil and that makes it the fastest charging Apple watch ever. That's also very interesting.
Again, as people move more into using these as sleep devices that you're wearing most of the day, charging speed matters a lot. So that's also a great thing. So this all sounds really good so far. I was very excited to get this update to the watch.
Even the series 10 also gets the water depth gauge and the water temperature sensor, which are previously exclusive to the Ultra, which I think means that the Ultra, I think the only significant sensor difference the Ultra has over the series 10 now is the Ultra has the dual frequency GPS and series 10 appears not to. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. As far as I can think, I don't think there's many other gains the Ultra has now besides like the more rugged physical design.
So if you were getting Ultra for a lot of reasons, people were going to be Ultra before. I think they can now get a series 10 and be very happy with it. Yeah. So before the event, did you think that you were in the market for a watch at this event?
Did you expect to be buying one? I wasn't sure. I mean, most of the Apple watch updates are very minor. And if you look at the series nine compared to the series six, say, or the series five, like it's substantially better.
If you compare, you know, very much like I was saying with the iPhone, but the iPhone being largely incremental every year, if you compare the Apple watch this year, like the series nine compared to the series eight is not a significant update. Like at all, if you replace my series nine with a series eight, I don't know if I would ever notice the difference until I tried to double tap and realize it was even less reliable than usual. But, you know, that would be a hard thing to notice. Whereas if you replaced, you know, a series seven with a series 10, you will notice the difference immediately and vice versa.
If you replace the other direction, you will definitely notice that difference. So they do make big changes over time. This is bigger than I expected. Besides, the only thing that would be bigger than this would be like a major physical redesign, which I think this is a moderate physical redesign.
It's not nothing. It's not everything. I'm actually glad I can still use all my bands. And in fact, they even tweet some of the bands.
Like, you know, of course you have, you know, the standard new colors for the silicone bands and stuff, new colors for all the bands that have colors, but they even have new finishes for the steel bands. So now this is a little tricky. It kind of, you could be forgiven for assuming that the new standard series, Milanese Loop and Link bracelet are now made of titanium. They're not.
Those are still made of steel, but they are made to match the titanium colors of the series 10 watch. So they're now made in slate, gold, and I guess natural, most of them. So if you get a series 10 watch and you want the Milanese Loop or the Apple Link bracelet, both of which are great bands in different ways, you can get those now that match the titanium finishes of the series 10, which is nice. And then the Ultra didn't get a new watch at all, but it did get a new color, a new black color finally.
And it has a bunch of cool new bands there as well, including its own Milanese Loop with that cool big latch thing. I'm actually really curious to see that in person. I think that actually might be a fun band to have on the regular series. I'm a little too chunky.
We'll see. A serious ten. I mean, but anyway, it looks like overall, like this is actually a really big update for the series, the series line of watches. It's a really big update for the bands and it's not an update for the Ultra or the SE, but I mean, it's a pretty good day.
I will say though, not updating the Ultra. Only two years into it is surprising to me because as far as I can tell, just like from looking around the world and hearing people who like Apple products, it seems like it's pretty popular. I see a lot of ultras out in the world, a lot. Like on non nerds and on people who I know are not doing Ultra sports or Ultra activities, they're not even living ultra lifestyle.
They're just people who like the way it looks or want the battery life or whatever. The Ultra is very popular, it seems. So it is kind of odd not to update it to like the new, you know, the S10 SIP and some of the new features that the series 10 has. It is kind of weird.
I wonder what the story there is. Like, is it kind of like the Mac Pro and Mac Studio where they're like, we can skip a generation. We don't sell that many things. Like, I don't know.
Again, I see a lot of them out there. So who knows? I don't know what happened there. We'll see kind of going on.
Like, we'll see what kind of update cycle the Ultra gets. But it is odd to skip one so soon. The S10 is another place where the lack of numbers kind of hurt us because they're like, oh, it's going to S10. SIP blah blah blah.
And they said a bunch of stuff about it. But it's like, okay, so is this the S9 rebadged? Is this actually a new thing? I think the S9 had a shrink.
But I think the S9 was like four nanometers. Is the S10 three nanometers? Like, they didn't really talk about it in enough of a way to say whether this is going to be significant. And it's a factor because what you're really wondering is like, what have they done with battery life?
Like, does the series 10? Does the big series 10 have Ultra like battery life? I doubted it so much that it probably doesn't. But then again, the Ultra doesn't have an S10 in it.
So maybe the S10 sips more power. And then Apple's claims about the battery life, I think we're not radically different than the series 9. So we'll see. But Apple tends not to say much of anything about their little processors in their watches, to the point where as we put it on a couple of past years, they've incremented the number without actually really changing the chip in any way.
And I can't really tell if that happened this year. But that's what people really care about with these things. Like there's the physical appearance and the market coverage and all that stuff. And I think it actually is better this year.
I personally like Shineer better than Matt Finish. And hey, they're all shining now. And assuming the finishers are durable, that's great. But aside from that, you know, they're all one millimeter bigger than they were before.
They're shiny. They look nice. The screen goes closer to the edge and also has the battery life. Right?
That's what people care about. It's comfortable. It's look nice. It's fashionable and it's a last-all day.
I'm assuming this will strike as good a balance as the 9 did, maybe even better. But the fact that Apple didn't really brag about it like, and this is going to last you so much longer than the series 9. I feel like they're just probably like maintaining. And it's probably good enough.
But this is not like the Ultra where I think that's one of the reasons why you see a lot of people have the Ultra. They hear from their friends who got one. This is so much unlike the non-Ultra watch because if I mischarging it for a day, it's not the end of the world. And that is not something that happens with any of the regular watches.
Nope. So we'll see. And obviously that's a side effect of it being shrunk. You're, hey, there's room for a bigger battery.
But they went the opposite direction. So we'll see how it turns out. And for the 1 millimeter size difference, I know that doesn't sound like it's a lot, but with these little watches on people's wrists, a small change can actually look significant. That's why I'm kind of happy that it's thinner because maybe that'll make up for it being bigger.
Underscore put a little diagram of trying to show the sizing comparisons of older Apple watches. And if you take a really old, like a 38 millimeter series 1 watch, that entire watch will basically fit inside the screen. Oh, a 40 millimeter series 10. So we've come a long way from that very, very tiny series 1 watch.
Just a minuscule thing with terrible battery life. Now that whole watch fits inside the screen area of these new ones. So I think they ran the right direction. It's obvious that people kind of like phones and like Mark said last episode, people like bigger screens on their watches and Apple is obliging.
Not just with bigger screens, but also, you know, they made the watch bigger. But then within the size of watch, push that screen as far to the edges as you possibly can. You know, when I watched this event, like I said earlier, you know, I thought I was getting an ultra three mostly because I'm just so sick and tired of worrying about battery life. And then somebody I believe it was Marco all the time I say that it ends up being John.
I'm pretty sure this time was Marco said to me, you know, you could do is just get the bigger watch again. And that would probably give you more than enough buffer to stop stressing about battery life all the time because I don't necessarily begrudge. I don't begrudge putting the watch on the charger every night. I would love to do sleep tracking, but I mean, whatever, it's not a big deal to me.
And I'm perfectly happy charging every night. What chaps my bottom is that with my current series eight two years on, I'm not making it to nighttime unless I top it up at some point during the day. I think you just got unlucky with your battery, which happens, you know, not every battery is the same, but we got a lot of people writing and saying that they don't have this problem with their watching normally. Two kinds of feedback.
One is like, yes, this happens to me too. My series eight also doesn't last through the day, but we didn't get any of those. I don't think we got all people saying I've got to watch and it lasts me through the day all the time. My wife, she's grand, she's got a series nine, but she had a series eight for a year.
And it was fine by the end of the year. Maybe you're just gone lucky or maybe you have like some runway process killing your battery because everyone's an all-white life will say, oh, today my watch battery ran down. I don't understand why. I think I was back to normal and never hear about it again.
So I think you just might have lost the battery lottery on that particular watch. It very well could be. I did look at battery health and it was reasonable. I forget exactly what the number was.
I want to say was like upper 80%. I will say that I typically do a 30 to 45 minute workout. And by that, I mean, like the watch is in workout mode for 30 to 45 minutes at least every day. And so I don't know if that makes a difference, but nevertheless, I am hopeful that the series 10, what with it being a two year new or battery, a brand new battery will make a big difference.
And so what I've done is I have pre-ordered a very unremarkable Wi-Fi only series 10 big size Apple watch for myself and basically the same thing for Aaron except small size because that's what she prefers. And I'm hopeful that that will be at least good enough for a year, preferably for two years because I generally, I don't think we've ever gone less than two years on an Apple watch upgrade, but maybe I'm wrong. And so that's what I've ordered. And I really set out to order an ultra three, but there wasn't one.
And then Marco was in the back of my head, you know, just saying big one will be enough. Big one will be enough. And I think Marco, I hope and I think you're probably going to be right. I think that will be the day I need.
Yeah, like, look, I'm not going to do my porn unnecessarily. No, I'm definitely right about this. Like the big regular series watch is the watch that I think is right for you. Like for reference, you know, my series nine, one year old, you know, heavy use where almost every day I worked out today for a little over an hour in workout mode.
It is now almost 9 p.m. and it's still a 65% battery. Oh, God, that's bananas. That's absolutely bananas.
And I use always on the game. I'm using it all day like and I don't charge it at all during the day. So yeah, I mean, there's the battery life on the big one is fine. I know for whatever I did wear the smaller one for a few years there in the middle.
And I always thought that was decent battery life, but it wasn't amazing, especially after the watch was more than a couple of years old. You know, you would start to notice you would have trouble doing the day if you were doing workouts. That's not the case with the big one. Now, and there's different workout modes too.
Like if you are, say, you know, running outside, so it's using the GPS. And if you're especially playing music while running, you know, playing music on the watch while running with GPS and workout mode, that's going to be probably the worst case scenario for battery life. Even that, the big one is fine. Like the big regular series watch, I can do an outdoor run for an hour listening to a podcast over airpods the entire time with the watch, maybe even using cellular during some of that time.
And it will still get through that day. It is fine. Like I will go to bed and it will not be in low power mode. So if your wrist supports it, I would strongly recommend getting the larger regular series watch for most people.
Again, if you are okay with the size, you know, fashion wise, and I think most people can pull it off honestly. You have to be pretty petite and also care about that kind of thing to not be able to pull off the middle sized Apple watch with this. And for most people, that's not going to be a concern. Most adults can easily pull off the big one, especially because large smart watches are in style.
Like even on people whose wrists are otherwise fairly small relative to the average adult, say the bigger watch, even the ultra. Most people can wear whatever size they want. And no one bets an eye at how it looks or whether it fits them or not. You can wear whatever size you want.
Fashion is all over the place on that. And big smart watches are very much in fashion. All right. This is probably in no small part of my fault because this was a big watch here for me.
We have got to hurry it up a little bit. So I'm going to try to speedrun the rest. We skipped some health stuff. So there's sleep apnea detection, which is extremely cool.
I don't personally suffer from this yet as far as I know. How would you know? But how would I know? And I feel like almost everyone I know seems to have sleep apnea these days.
So this is very cool. It is not clear. And by the way, the way it reportedly does it is based on like the movement of your wrists and not by say measuring your blood oxygen, which is good because. Yeah, because the blood oxygen sensor has been turned off.
As far as we know, it is physically there, but it is disabled because it's patent disputes. It's disabled only for US customers. Sorry, Canada or any place else in the world, you get blood oxygen measurement, but not inside the US. This has not been cleared from the FDA or equivalent organizations in other countries, but they expect clearance very soon and availability in 150 plus countries or regions this month, allegedly.
Talk about the sleep apnea thing. For the sleep apnea thing. Then, yeah, like you said, no blood oxygen measurement in the side of the US, which is a bummer. We talked about size differences.
$400 or $500. You can already pre-order it. It will be available on September 20th. We already talked about the Ultra 2.
So let's move on to AirPods 4 with Kate Bergeron. This has the H2 chip, a new acoustic architecture, the smallest case ever, and optionally, which this was not made clear or I missed it during the presentation. Optionally, you can get noise cancellation on the non-pro AirPods for the first time ever. Oh, no.
This is, oh my God, I loved this naming clumsiness. So here's what it is. So this is actually two different products. There's AirPods 4, and they introduced another version of AirPods 4, and they didn't announce the name until the end.
And during the entire introduction of that part, they kept calling them these AirPods. The line, the intro came on was for those looking for even more performance in this style of AirPods. And the entire rest of that section, she kept saying these AirPods, these AirPods have, you know, these AirPods have this, these AirPods have that. The Apple Watch case charging compatibility in case speaker in this charging case for these AirPods.
And then eventually they didn't build a name as AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation, which is one of those two Thunderbolt ports, you know, kind of names. So I would suggest since the actual name is so comically clumsy. We should call them what they call them, these AirPods. So we have AirPods 4, these AirPods, and AirPods Pro and AirPods Max.
So here's the question. Is the hardware different in the noise canceling version of the non-noise canceling version? Well, so we at least know the case is different. This charging case, but outside the air, the things that go in your ears, are they different?
Noise cancellation requires more microphones typically than just like one for receiving phone calls. So my guess is they probably have additional microphones, but I don't think we know that yet. Don't you think the regular ones have multiple microphones for just like, you know, voice isolation and the other voice features? I mean, either way, microphones aren't expensive.
Like this is not like, what I'm saying is like economically it might make more sense for Apple to make one AirPods 4 piece of hardware. Like why make two different ones? Or even if one of them had to have more microphones, I would say why don't we just put the more microphones in all of them? It simplifies everything, inventory, everything.
And this is purely like a software interlock where when you pay them $50 more, they enable the noise canceling features. Obviously, you know, I fix it, we'll tear these things down and let us know. But I have to say this weird thing of like AirPods 4, there's the regular one and the one that costs $50 more, that has more features, right? And yes, they give you a better case with everything, which is more sort of like market segmentation.
But this smells so much like, you know, when they say like, this is one computer and if you pay more money, you can get, you know, more RAM and whatever. I don't know if these pieces of hardware are different. And in the end, it doesn't really matter because I don't think it's going to be particularly easy to buy an AirPods 4 and hack it to enable the noise canceling. But if the hardware really is identical, that will be something because it's like, why are you, it's not like the cheap one is like $99, right?
The cheap one is still 130 and the expensive one is 180. And like, I don't quite understand. And especially since they're like the case feature, like having a speaker that like, you know, so you can find your case when you lose it, like that should kind of be in $130 one two because that's a useful feature that's not like a pro feature that I lost my case feature, whereas noise canceling, I can see. But anyway, we'll see when somebody cracks these things open if they can slice it open and find out like, is there any hardware difference whatsoever between them?
Because if there's not, this will be another strange hardware. I think we'll kind of like the 12 gigabytes of RAM and the 8 gigabyte iPad Pro. But anyway, speaking of me with six shift sedans and real time real time follow up real quick, the technical specs for the AirPods 4, the size and weight for the earbuds themselves are not distinguished. Like the weight is the same for both flavors of AirPod.
However, as Marco, I think had mentioned, the case is what is this like two and a half grams heavier for the speaker. It's got the speaker in it. Right. Exactly.
But any Apple watch charging coil. But the earbuds themselves, the dimensions are allegedly identical. I don't think it tells anything because these things are so lightweight that even if the hardware was different, who's to say it wouldn't weigh the same? We'll find it when they turn them down.
Yeah, we'll see. I mean, the processor in them is just branded H2, like every other H2 AirPods. Like we don't really know like, is the H2 the CPU? Or is there a difference?
Is the H2 just the Bluetooth? Who knows? And then we also know like, is there more than one kind of H2? Like maybe they have like, maybe they're BIND, maybe it's like two little tiny cores and you know, some of them only have one core active.
Who knows? Like it could be higher clock speed, like, you know, because the features that are in these AirPods, those, these features have more computational load to do some of those features. Things like, you know, ANC to begin with, obviously, transparency mode, they have an active audio, they have compensation awareness, like they have most of the core kind of audio processing features of the AirPods Pro. So that's that's going to be substantially more processing needs than the standard AirPods for that don't have any of those.
But they do, like, what gets me like the standard AirPods for does have voice isolation on phone calls. So that's that's also kind of one of those features. So I don't know. It could be as simple as a different case and a couple of software enabled features.
Who knows? But regardless, they now have, you know, most of the features available in the AirPods Pro are now available in quote, this open ear design. As I was saying, as I was saying, as I like those, my sedans and my desktop Macs with big GPUs, I also like the AirPods that don't go in your ear holes. And generally, those that design does not get the fancy features.
It's been two generations of AirPods Pro getting all their fancy features and their transparency mode and all this other stuff. And the plain all their pods that I like, and now you don't get that stuff. And so I'm excited this year that they brought most of those features to the ones that don't go in your ear. Now granted, the fact that they don't go in my ear means the noise canceling is not going to be as good for obvious physical reasons.
They're not literally sealing my ear hole, right? And Apple itself says that the AirPods Pro have quote, two times better noise canceling. And I believe it. Like, I get it.
But I just don't like things in my ear holes. So I think it's great that I get all these features that I've been hearing about everybody rave about on the AirPods that they like and I get them in the kind of like now. The possible downside is they did subtly change the shape of these AirPods. They've done it, but there's been three different shapes.
There's the original AirPods shape. There's the one that I have now, which is AirPods 3 or whatever. And then there's these new ones. And every time they change the shape, there's a possibility that the thing that used to fit in your ear and ice and comfy is not going to.
The main hope I have is that the AirPods 3 have always felt a little big in my ears compared to their predecessors. Not uncomfortable and I'm fine with them or whatever. But they always feel a little bit big. And these look like they might be a little bit slimmer.
So I'm hoping these will be even more comfortable. The one thing we didn't get is that the Pro still have a little slight volume thing. Still a pro-only feature. Because you do have the squeeze the stem to play pause thing.
Right, but not the volume thing. That's right. The volume thing is very difficult to trigger. Yeah, market segmentation, whatever.
But I'm excited about these. I already pre-ordered them. Wait, did you get AirPods 4 or these AirPods? I'm getting AirPods 4.
Again, when you go, like when you go like to buy it, it says, what do you want to buy? You say, I want to buy AirPods 4. And then it's just like when you're configuring RAM. It's like, do you want the one with the 10 core CPU or the 12 core CPU?
Like, that's what you're picking. The only difference is the options say AirPods 4? AirPods 4 with noise cancelling at $50, right? That's how the checkout process works.
So it is very kind of like, these are the AirPods 4 and there's a 50-dollar more expensive version that has a bunch of new features. And even if the noise cancelling stinks and doesn't work and isn't useful at all, I'm just happy to have new AirPods with all the features that you expect and new things have. This sound is a little bit better. Obviously they'll have fresh batteries.
The case will have a little beepy thing in it. The one thing I'm worried about is that they change the Bluetooth pairing button from being a physical button to being a capacitive button, which obviously makes it more durable, simple and manufactured. I understand why they did it. But when your AirPods are being ornery, there's something about having a physical button that you can hold down to let you know that I'm really holding down the button for the required three seconds or whatever.
I'm going to be putting my fingers vaguely somewhere on the smooth front surface of the thing and I hope it I'm hitting the commasitive section. To go back a quick step, I completely meant to mention earlier in the Apple Watch segment that they made a point of saying that they are prioritizing non-air shipping. And I really want to know, did they already send a whole batch of watches with a boat a month and a half ago? I think that's how they do things generally.
No, no, but I mean, look at iPhones, for example, as far as I knew, anytime I paid attention, those things fly often times directly from China to your house. Obviously they're hub and smoking away from across the planet. But my point is it's not like the beginning of the trip is noted as Louisville, Kentucky, or something or wherever UPS's headquarters is. That is UPS or FedEx in Memphis.
It starts in Shenzhen or whatever. And then you watch these things march across the planet and they go to Anchorage and they go to somewhere else and so on and so forth. I can't help but wonder, did they ship a whole butload of these via ship over a month or two ago to get them ready for release this coming Friday? I really am curious.
Now that they have the pizza boxes to update them, maybe that's part of the reason why they did that, honestly. And also if they can get that far ahead of the game, there's a reason that Apple keeps saying, and this product is carbon neutral and they haven't really said that about the iPhone yet. I'm not sure that there are enough phones ready early enough to be put on a boat, but I can imagine there being enough air pods ready early enough to put on boats. Well, I was talking about the watch though.