Hello and welcome to the Android Police podcast. My name is Daniel Bader. This week on the show. Sorry, let me start again. Hello and welcome to the Apple police podcast. My name is Daniel Bader. This week on the show, we're talking iPhone 16, Apple Watch Series 10. AirPods 4, AirPods Max 1.5 and everything else. Apple announced at the event. Joining me this week, as always, is Will Settleberg. How are you? I'm good. I'm back from my vacation in your city. I know you didn't call me. I'm very mad about you. We I got yelled at for it yesterday. Very sad. And the person I like better at the moment. Joining us once again on the show, Joe Marring. Welcome. Welcome back. How are you? Thank you. I'm good. I'm very tired. I've been on planes a lot in the last. A couple of weeks, I think, from Berlin for IFA and then Cupertino for the Apple event. So I actually want to break this down. I'm very tired. I want to break this down, Joe. When did you get home from Germany? I got home on Saturday. Late Friday night had like all day Saturday at home to recuperate. And then Sunday was morning off to California Sunday morning. Yes. Yeah, you're sick. That's disgusting. I don't know how anybody travels like that. I will ask you, Joe, before we get into Apple, what was your favorite part of IFA? Because everybody goes to this show in Berlin and has a very different experience. It's either like I got drunk with a Samsung executive at some like Shady Club or like I did a massive walk around the city and I absolutely loved it. Or I saw this super weird gadget and it made me fall in love with trade shows again. Like everybody's got this story. So what's your IFA story? The first just kind of shocking thing was seeing a messy Berlin and like being told ahead of time that during the media days, it is basically just a construction zone and was born to plenty of times before going to the event, but seeing it in person where it's like there are kind of booths set up before it officially opens for the public. But there is just ladders and like construction work everywhere. And it was completely unlike anything I've seen at a for CES or MWC. So that was interesting to see that and also just trying to navigate that convention center is challenging. But other than that, Ben Shown and Andrew Romero, both from nine to five Google, we took one night getting back from the messy and all across Berlin are dozens and dozens of little electric lime scooters and we took those around the city and what was supposed to be like a 10 minute ride turned into almost an hour because we kept getting lost because Google Maps navigation kept taking us to their own spots. Fantastic time. It was we were not navigating the city well, which is ridiculous because it's extremely easy to get around Berlin, but it was a happy accident, happy accident. It was a very fun way to just kind of like get an unexpected tour of the olive Berlin. One evening after FIFA, so that's my favorite part of Berlin is just walking around the city. It's such a cool spot. And because of the history, right, like East and West Berlin is so different in that, like, even with an East Berlin, like there are places that are still kind of a little bit rougher, a little bit sort of less built up than others. And yeah, I'm I missed that city. I haven't been in a few years. Very nice. Was there any gadget or anything like that? You saw that was that was really, did you see the new remarkable pro? I did not. Christine on our team has that and she's reviewing it. Belkin at showstoppers, they had a iPad pro keyboard that they're kind of like soft launching in Europe and they're not bringing it to the US yet, but they've got like a couple different models available because they were trying to like test the waters with iPad keyboards again, just because it's been a minute since they've done anything there, they both seem really good and they're priced way, way better than apples. Magic keyboard and they feel good to type on. They seem really durable and was not expecting it. So as a iPad keyboard, sicko, it was very nice to see some of that stuff there. Did you play with the honor Magic V3? I do. I've got that. It is a I think it's fantastic. I know not everybody is completely sold on the super thin design, but I'm all for it. I think the hinge could use a little bit of work for the V4, but it is kind of shocking going right from the Pixel 9 Pro Fold to holding the Magic V3 and it's like, Oh, one of these feels like I'm holding two phones and one of them just feels like a regular sensible phone I would want to use. So that's been fun to play with for sure. OK, that's that's an interesting. We could probably talk about this for a while. So let's derail the podcast before it begins. Is that what we usually do? That's why the show is so fun. Last week's show, Joe was all about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. Will, yeah, Will and Michael had there's already I got mine the day after we recorded and I've been using it since. And what I find really interesting is that even though it's obviously heavier than a typical phone, I don't really feel encumbered by it at all. And I don't think it's particularly thick or difficult to use. I think there are issues with the hardware, particularly like the magnetic latch is actually too strong and I find it difficult occasionally to open it, which makes it because it's so slippery. I almost drop it whenever I try to open it, which is bad. But I'm curious because you kind of have this sort of like very simple, utilitarian approach to foldables, both on the hardware and software side with the Pixel. And then the honor is like from what I've seen just a very hardware first approach. And while people like Ben Sin have said that the software on it is way better than then last year, like it's still nowhere close to being as straightforward as something like the OnePlus Open or the Pixel Fold. So what's your take on that sort of compromise between hardware and software on it? Yeah, it software is not amazing. Like I think it's usable. I don't think it makes the phone impossible to to use as a daily driver. Like it is porkier and not nearly as well polished as like oxygen OS or I think even like Google's their pixel interface on the on the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. Well, it's not big enough for deterrent for me. And I think that the hardware being like as thin and as light as it is, which like Pixel 9 Pro Fold, like a lot of things about it, but I don't know. I don't know if I'm just too much of a wimp, but it is just so heavy and just feels so uncomfortable like for me to use like as a as a daily phone, just because it is so weighty compared to this. People are not watching the show and now you should be watching Joe's wearing literally the heaviest pair of headphones ever produced wearing the AirPods Max. So I've got a strong head. I've got hair to support these, but I've got it. I've got what you do look a little bit. Like hair force one there. So I actually did you get to meet Craig Federighi at the Apple event, compare hairstyles? I did not. I saw I saw him in the front row watching himself during the pre recorded keynote, but I did not get to do a hair contest with him. Unfortunately, that's a plane for the iPhone 17 next year. Hopefully we'll get that to happen. But let's jump into Apple. So you went to the event. I think it's kind of interesting that Apple has completely foregone any semblance of like a live keynote and just gone full on infomercial. Like it's been that way for a few years now. I would say this was the most infomercial of all of their presentations that they've done since they started during COVID. It just felt extremely transactional and hyperbolic in a way that wasn't earned. And I wonder if you felt that to being there. Obviously, there's three major products launch. They started with the Apple Watch. There's the Apple Watch Series 10, which is a they hyped it a bit as an all new design. And then you end up looking at it and it's like, well, not really. There's the Apple Watch Ultra 2 that comes now in matte black. No mention of the Apple Watch SC AirPods 4 in two varieties, but same name, which is interesting, and then obviously the iPhone 16. So let's start with the Apple Watch. What was your first impression of sort of the new design and them saying, like, this is now a bigger display than the Apple Watch Ultra 2. There's now sleep apnea. It's 10% thinner. It's a little bit lighter, et cetera, et cetera. Like what's your impression having gone hands on with it? Yeah, so, I mean, watching the keynote, like before touching it, it was kind of easy to look at it and like it does look very, very similar to the Series 9 and the Series 8 and the Series 7, but wearing it and like kind of getting to hold it side by side with like hold a Series 10 next to a Series 9, it does feel noticeably lighter. And the Series 10 kind of sits more flush on your wrist than the Series 9 does, which is not a bulky smartwatch by any means. But when you kind of have both of them on and you're holding both of them, like it is a, I think a pretty noticeable weight and just kind of comfort difference. Obviously, like, I don't think it's reason enough if you have a Series 9, like you need to get the Series 10 just because it's a little bit lighter and it's thinner, but like it is extremely comfortable, like not that the Series 9 ever felt like an uncomfortable watch to wear, but I'm not going to complain about having it be even lighter and even thinner and just more comfortable to wear to bed or just wearing it all day or going on a run or something. So that, that part of it, I really do like the display looks really good. Like the, the off axis viewing angles with the wide angle OLED like is quite noticeable. We got to look at like it side by side with the Series 9 and the Series 10. And if you're just kind of looking at it, not head on like it is brighter. The colors are better. It's not, again, like reason to ditch your Series 9 if you've got that, but it looks very good. Like it, it's a looks better than ever. But again, like the Series 9 already has a very good display, but this one is just a little bit better in that regard. As far as the size increase, I think the metric Apple was using is that you get an extra line of text on the screen compared to the Series 9 of a Series 8. So if you're in Apple news or messages or mail, you can read another line of text compared to last year's Apple Watch, which is a little bit less scrolling, but like that's obviously not a drastic change there. But I think it's nice. Like the Apple is pretty clear for every Apple Watch generation. Like they're not really targeting people with last year's Apple Watch to get this one. Like this is kind of for people who have a Series 4 or a Series 5 or a Series 6. And like for them, it's really like it seems fantastic. It's like foundation of the Series 9, but bigger display, it's thinner, it's lighter. It's the same price. Like it's not a game-changing upgrade, but like it's also difficult to find like anything to really complain about too much with it. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because this is the first Apple Watch with an LTPO panel. So this now matches what most of the other manufacturers, Samsung, Pixel even introduced an LTPO panel on the Pixel Watch 3, or sorry, Google introduced. So it does clocked down to one Hertz when it's not in use. They're talking about how because it updates every second, you can have a second's hand on the always on display, which you couldn't in the past. It's more efficient. It's about 10 to 20 percent more efficient. The other thing that they mentioned, the wide angle OLED is is interesting. I saw a video by Quinn Nelson, snazzy lab who says that he thinks that it's a technology from LG OLED called meta technology, which basically has been created for curved displays and AR related displays that allows you to have a wider field of view, plane of view, but for non-curved or not, not like significantly curved displays, it does allow for increased viewing angles when you're looking at it from the side. And it's interesting because like, I've never thought that the Apple Watch or any really OLED based smartwatch has bad viewing angles viewed from the side. Like, it's true if I kind of like look, if I look with a critical eye, I can tell that older Apple watches are like the Pixel Watch 3 that I'm wearing. Doesn't have amazing viewing angles from the side, but when you say you noticed it, like, what does that mean? Like, we're not talking off axis color shift here. We're talking about, you can see if you're looking at it from like 45 degrees, the fidelity is the same as it is if you're looking at it straight on. Some of the examples, like we got to see war, like the photos watch face or any of the watch faces that have like a color background. Like, if you're looking at that from any kind of angle on the series 10, like to my eye and with like the photos watch face or where there's like a lot of color on the screen, it does look brighter and like the colors look better from those angles, which like is not a massive upgrade. Like, it's nice to have better fidelity and like better viewing angles from those things if you want to see your watch face and like the best quality possible if it's on your, if like your hand is in your lap or on a table or something. Like, like, it looks very nice. I don't know, I don't think it really is going to impact like day to day Apple watch using like I've never, like you said, I've never had a problem seeing my series nine or other Apple watches from an off angle like that. But it seems like a very Apple thing to do to take this thing that is either a non issue or something that's like very, very small thing and put like this new display technology into like to go so heavy, fisted into improving something that I would never have thought to put that attention towards. And like, it looks good. I don't know if it's going to change the way I use my Apple watch, but like it is nice to have that better visibility from those angles like that. Right. Will any thoughts on the Apple watch? No, to be honest, like it's, it's, uh, I know that's a really boring take, but like this is a really boring watch to me. Like I think what Joe said about it being a good update for people who are like ready to buy a new watch is fine. Like I think that's correct. And, and how people should probably think about their gadgets. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think this was way less of a significant update than people had hope for given that it was the 10th version. A lot of rumors around like Apple watch X and how that would have been. In parallel to the iPhone 10, though, like, like, I feel like for three years now, it's been like you, you don't even understand the redesign that's coming this year is crazy. It's going to blow your mind. And then like Apple announces a watch with like a slightly larger display and it's a little thinner, a lighter, whatever. And everyone's like, okay, okay, but next year, okay, okay, okay. But the 10th, you know, Apple watch the anniversary. Trust me, guys, this is the one. And it's like Apple is just fairly happy with the fact that like there is no other square smartwatch on the market that is meaningful in any way. It is immediately recognizable in a way that no other smartwatch I would argue really is to like a normal person. And like it's like a comfortable design that displays a lot of information. I just don't think they're going to like, I don't think they see a need to change it up, which is fine. But it does mean that like the Apple watch will remain, you know, for Apple watch users, a four to five year upgrade cycle. Yeah, I think Apple has, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly on wearables on iOS, because no other wearable works nearly as functionally. And because of that, the competition, the desire to compete is way lower. They took on Garmin with the Apple Watch Ultra and they won, right? Garmin didn't go away. Obviously you can use your Garmin fine on an iPhone and many millions of people do. But it's just that the integration with the OS is so much more marketable than the fact that like Garmin basically allows you to do everything on your wrist and then offload it to an app. And I don't know. I mean, Samsung does the same thing on the Galaxy watch to some extent. And there are features that are limited to Samsung phones. Even the Pixel has some advantages, right? When you have a Pixel watch on a Pixel, but I think nowhere near to the extent of an iPhone with an Apple watch. And Apple seems to be very comfortable with that. So yeah, I don't know. I'm interested in seeing what the hardware upgrades feel like, if a 10% lighter and thinner actually make a big difference in day to day. But I'd rather a bigger battery that lasts longer so that I can sleep with it comfortably without worrying about it dying. But I don't know. Last Apple Watch note, this is like the dumbest thing, but I'm so excited that the external speaker grill can now play podcasts and music. Not that it's probably going to sound amazing, but just for like whenever I'm around the house, like swiffering the floors or dusting or doing dishes, like I want to have something to listen to, but it's kind of a pain to make sure my phone is somewhere and to like carry it with me and like put it on the table or whatever. So just to have a speaker that is on my wrist and is close to me that I can listen to the Android police podcast or whatever else it may be. It's the smallest thing, but I'm extremely excited to mess with that. I think it's going to be fun and I don't like to wear like earbuds or headphones around the house and I'm doing that kind of stuff. So a very small thing, but I'm because your AirPods Max are so heavy that I cannot move with that. This is true. You could swiffer in one this chair and cover it over again. No, I think it's funny that you mentioned that because I've just anecdotally been seeing more and more people using their phones as speakers out in public or even people bringing little clip on Bluetooth speakers and just like listening to music with a speaker on the subway or some ridiculous thing like that. And I wonder how many people are just going to start kind of like blaring tinny music on their Apple Watch when they get this. I think this will this will not be good for my mental health is what I'm saying. So all right, no updates, really. I mean, obviously there's now a jet black Apple Watch Series 10, the map black series or Apple Watch Ultra 2 is available. I'm not surprised they didn't update the Ultra 2 given that it's still good. I don't see any reason why it needed to get updated. It's still expensive. No update to the SE, which is disappointing given how limited that is. That's basically like an Apple Watch Series 3. Well, like series 3.5 series 4, but next year, I'm sure there'll be an update. Let's move on to AirPods. So this is interesting. I think this lineup got the biggest overhaul of all of the products announced. They got rid of the AirPods 3. The AirPods 4 now come in a $129 version and $179 version. The latter same design. They're still open design, but there's ANC as well as a wireless charging case with the speaker, like what came with the AirPods Pro 2. So Joe, I find this fascinating, right? Because ANC on an open earbud is difficult. I would say it's relatively new to the market. Samsung did it with the Buds 3 this year. There seems to be an acknowledgement that you can do ANC with an open design, even though it's not nearly as effective. What did Apple say about this to you? Like, is this something that they're touting as like their ANC is tuned for specific use cases or it's just you don't have the passive isolation, but we're going to cut as much noise through the microphones as possible. And you're going to get a decent experience. Yeah, so I didn't spend really any time with AirPods stuff. Caleb, our like AV audio guy was the point person for that. So I can't speak too much more to like other than just what Apple said during the keynote and stuff, like I didn't get a chance to try them out or anything. Just from like my personal perspective, look at the lineup, it just seems kind of, it seems a little messy and just a little cumbersome where it's like AirPods 4, it's the ANC version, it's a non ANC version. And then AirPods Pro 2 obviously have the closed design and they've got some of the new features Apple talked about with the hearing aid stuff and the being able to use them for earplugs or like noise suppression during concerts. Or if you're playing instruments or something. So it's interesting where the ANC AirPods 4 seem like they're trying to mimic part of the Pro 2 features, but the Pro 2 are now kind of being pushed towards their earbuds, but they're also can be hearing aids. They can also help you get a hearing test. They can also help you not wreck your ears at a concert or something. So I'm torn on it where like the one hand, it seems like a complicated lineup, but also I can kind of see what they're going for with trying to make the Pro 2 more than just earbuds, like the extra functionality they announced during the keynote. I don't know what your guys' thoughts are if you think it's messy or if you think it makes sense, but I'm still trying to grapple what I think about how that lineup is looking now. I think it's pretty intelligible, right? They have basically three price tiers, 129, 179, 249, two of the three now of ANC, two of the three are of the same design. They still look like AirPods, and I think that's the main thing here. I think you're right that they're trying to make that 179 default AirPod into the one that most people buy, and then the AirPods Pro become more than just earbuds, right? They're adding gesture controls, that's rolling out with iOS 13 where you can like nod your head or shake your head to accept Siri commands. They're doing additional noise suppression for voice calls. Soon they'll act as hearing aids. Those are value ads that I think most people won't need or won't particularly care about, and I just anecdotally know a lot of people that don't like the passive noise isolation that comes from wearing an earbud like the AirPods Pro 2. So the fact that I still see so many people with the long stem AirPods one or two, like I very rarely see people with AirPods 3, which is surprising. I don't know about you guys, but it's really still like they're AirPods Pro or it's old school AirPods one or two. So I think it's because of the price. I think like those the AirPods 2 dropped to like you can find them constantly for like $80 to $100, and I just think most people bought those or like buy those if they need a replacement because the like upgrade between that, the more expensive third gen ones was not evidently clear when you were in Best Buy or whatever. Like it's just, oh, they're AirPods. Those have a different design, but I'm used to this design. I might as well just get these and save 50 bucks. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. That it's it's a lot less confusing than it used to be. So obviously, like the hearing aid thing is significant as over the counter. Hearing aids have have become accepted through the FDA. The fact that Apple did its own massive study to be able to accrue enough data to submit to the FDA for clearance is also really interesting, right? Because the companies with Apple scale selling millions and millions of the same product and generating a massive amount of anonymized data to be able to create studies that show a certain amount of effectiveness for amplification, noise isolation, things like that, plus the core technologies are already so good. The fact that the transparency mode on the AirPod is among the best in the industry. Microphones are among the most capable and clearest in the industry. Although I've a lot of people have criticized the AirPods Pro for having low quality voice calls. There was a bit of a cycle like a new cycle when the Galaxy Buds 3 were announced that people were comparing the transparency mode and see and voice call quality and people were like, Oh, like Samsung has now lapped Apple in terms of call quality, even though everybody thinks of the AirPods as the top of the line for voice calls. And evidently, that's not really true. So I don't know how much of that is microphone quality, or if it's tuning or maybe a codec issue. I don't know. Anyway, I think that's that's a dead end there. Jewels, you can you can cut, you can cut that part. Leave it in, Jewels. Keep that silence, like double it 30 seconds. So then there's the AirPods Max with USB-C, which was the biggest announcement of the day. Talk about another dead end. Five hundred and fifty dollars with a USB-C port and five new colors. Just a tremendous victory for Apple. These, OK, I know we made jokes about Joe's AirPods Max today. These are not lighter, right? There's no change other than the color. There's no hardware change other than swapping out USB-C. They couldn't have found weight to take out of these. Like really? OK, they didn't even change the case. OK, yeah, people don't people hate the case? The case is bad. It's not good. OK. All right, guys, whatever, when were the AirPods Max? It didn't even upgrade to the H2. Like, it's still the H1 chip, like from five years ago. Truly, truly sick over here. 2020. Yeah. Wow. OK, guys, I didn't love. Did you guys see all the jokes on Twitter about like these, these USB-C AirPods Max outselling the Sony and then just like 30, 30 strings of characters. The WH-1,000, XM-4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, they all all of the jokes I saw started with the correct model number of like WH-1,000, XM-5, and then just kept going. And it was really funny. Amazing. Apple has the opposite problem. They just call them the AirPods Max and they're the same, the same product, even though they're you're you can buy them for pre-order. Is is hilarious. OK, let's talk iPhones. So these had some minor changes and some big changes depending on which phone you're talking about. Let's start with the 16. So you wrote something at Digital Trends Joe with the title. I tried the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro and this one feature blew me away. So spoiler for us, which one feature blew you away? It is the camera control button that we thought was going to be the capture button officially named camera control. It's very funky, like going into this event, like all the the rumors and leaks just said that we were going to get a dedicated camera button on the iPhone that you could just use as like a shutter button. Essentially, like we've seen on many other. Sony phone, Sony phones and other other older Android phones over the years. And it does do that when you press it once from wherever you are on the phone or if it's turned off or whatever, single press opens the camera app. And then you can press it again to take a photo and then you can press and hold in the camera app to start recording a video. And then as long as you're holding the button, the video keeps going. Then when you take your finger off and stop holding it, it stops reporting video, which is all pretty basic stuff what we expected. But there's also a capacitive touch sensor because it's a actual button. But then later on top of that is a capacitive sensor. So if you do a light press and don't fully click the button, it essentially brings up like a new UI for just various camera controls you can adjust. So there's stuff for zoom, photographic styles, the depth of field, your aperture and just numerous settings you can already adjust in the camera app. But you double tap the button, you can then swipe up and down to choose which thing you want to adjust and then just keep swiping on it to zoom in more to adjust your depth of field or whatever it may be. It kind of reminds me of the dynamic island when it was first announced where we kind of just thought that Apple was going to put a notch in their phone and they ended up creating this really cool like special user interface around it, which is pretty similar here where like it could have just been a button and like that could have been it, but they did a whole new UI around it. It also works in apps like Snapchat where you can like lightly tap the button in a third party app and get specific controls or options for Snapchat or whatever other apps end up adopting it down the road. It's very fun. It also kind of helps curb the horrible layout for those camera controls and the camera app the way it stands today where it is not particularly easy to navigate from like as many years as I've used it. Like I still forget where certain things are. So just being able to have like all of those controls with that button and it just kind of a delightful like interface they made for it, I'm very happy with it. It is I think going to be difficult to go back to an iPhone without it because it's not I don't think it's like a game-changing thing, but it's fun enough and like quirky enough like I love it. Like I don't know if I'm making too big of a deal out of it, but like it it's very charming to me. I'm not sure if you share the same optimism or if I'm too high in the camera control button, but I think it's very fun. Well, at its core, this is a good idea. I would not say no to having this on like my Pixel 9 Pro or whatever. My concern with it comes from how poorly, at least like on their face, like case makers are going to have to deal with this additional button. I understand that that's not really Apple's problem because they're just making the phone, but everyone puts their phones in a case and like a capacitive button is like a nightmare for this. Like Daniel, you and I were talking literally in a meeting an hour ago about how the three options are a big cutout that exposes part of the frame, a smaller cutout that just exposes the top of the button, but then like maybe makes it difficult to like actually use the camera capture button, right, to use the gestures or like a case with like a capacitive piece built in that is communicating to the capacitive button and who knows how that works. We'll have to wait for reviews and people testing cases and whatnot. But like putting my concerns about that aside, like I think it is a better way to think about a camera button than what we've seen from other Android OEMs. Like I said, I think Sony is the only one still doing dedicated camera buttons on their hardware and you know, sell in the US anymore. Did they ever really? I'm sorry to the 10 Sony fans listening. Actually, our entire demographic might be Sony fans, to be honest. I'm very sorry. But I don't know, like I think it's like a good idea. As Joe said, I think it's what Apple is probably the best at, which is like doing a thing like that we've seen on other devices, like a display cutout, but then using the tie between their hardware and software to like actually build functionality into it that you might not see on other devices. It's clever. I'm excited to check it out when I get my hands on an iPhone 16 Pro Max. But yeah, I don't know. Like that's that's kind of I don't have a ton of takes on it like on its face. It's a cool idea. I don't know if I if I have an iPhone 15 or 14. I don't know if it's worth upgrading to just for this, but yeah. I'd argue that the last two hardware features that Apple launched, but the iPhone have been somewhat underwhelming, right? We had the dynamic island with the iPhone 14 series and then the action button with the iPhone 15 series and there was a lot of hoopla about the dynamic island becoming some sort of input mechanism. You'd use it for live activities and you would start making your iPhone more useful when you were waiting for an Uber or when you were watching a football game or when you're doing other things and you wanted to just like glance. And I would say that it's true, right? When your Uber's coming, you see at the top of your dynamic island. It's three minutes away and you can click on you can tap on it. It's going to jump into the Uber app or you can check how badly the bills are losing. Like it's it's all very useful one. It's all very one nothing record. It's all very good. But I would also argue that live activities as an API has not taken off. Only a few developers use it. You don't need a dynamic island to use live activities, right? If you have an older phone, it just shows up on your lock screen, arguably just as useful. And all of the promises that Apple made about it have not come to fruition again because of developer ambivalence. The action button I would say is even more indicative of that, not necessarily because it's developer ambivalence, but because Apple created a system that was too inherently locked in or locked up. I cannot believe they have not expanded. I really thought with iOS 18 they would expand it to be like we have added the ability to double tap the action. Yes. It blows my mind that they are just letting that thing sit at the same time they are announcing a button that does all these things, right? You can press it. You can press and hold it. You can slide your finger along it. They're like, look at how many things this button does. The button they added last year, that is now just coming to the regular iPhone 16 and 16 plus. Jesus Christ, their naming instructor sucks. I always want to say 16 Macs or 15 Macs or whatever and that's not right. They're just letting it sit there and it's got this fancy animation that still doesn't match anything else in iOS. I once again thought that was a teaser of what we'd see in the future of iOS and it's not and it does one thing. You've said it to do one thing. I would guess that most people either left it on like the mute switch. So it's the same thing it was before except harder to like trigger it in your pocket, which I would say is bad because I liked being able when I had when I was using an iPhone, liked being able to like go to the movies and just flip the switch without thinking about it. Or it's like you switched it to like the flashlight, which is what every time I've used a good boy. Joe's dog disagrees with me, he's mad at me. I actually like the dynamic island and every time I pick up my iPhone, I find that it is useful. You did basically name the main two things that I would use it for. Not so much football scores necessarily, but definitely keeping my fantasy team score active while I'm watching a different football game. So that way I know how badly I'm losing Daniel to your point. As long as you know, I don't care how you learn the information. Listen, I, I blew week one out of the water in my fantasy league. That's all I want to say. I could have went against anybody in my fantasy league, I went over your chat GPT generated fantasy league. No, that one would have lost the one that I had Gemini draft for me. That one would have done very poorly, but the the one I actually did by myself did great. I like the dynamic island. I agree with you that I don't think it's seen enough adoption, but since it arrived on like the regular iPhone a year ago, I it has become a little more prominent. I like it for apps like flighty, which I use when I'm traveling because there is no equivalent to flighty on on Android and so I'll have an iPhone in my pocket with like my flight data on it. But yeah, I don't know the action button remains confounding to me and a pretty big miss on Apple's part that I don't think enough people are talking about a year on. Yeah, I think it's also weird that now the iPhone 16 gets the action button after it wasn't on the 15 and that it's, as you said, has not evolved at all. You can program the action button to open the camera, which everybody criticizes being super awkward to use last year. You can also open the camera app using the dedicated camera capture button and there's the lock screen shortcut, which opens the camera. So at least you can change that. You couldn't. No, no, but what I'm saying is like the default is still the camera, right? Yes. You. So there are immediately two ways that you can default to opening the camera app and you can have a third. You can have a third if you want. It just feels a bit messy because Apple is not really guiding you through like this. The camera capture in isolation feels extremely focused, right? It's a single serving feature and it does the thing, right? It might. There was some criticism in the hands-ons that you could do a lot with it and that learning curve might be a bit high, but once you get used to it, I'm sure it'll be fine, but it also feels like the rest of the input structure on the iPhone is just getting a little weird and a little messy, especially with iOS 18 opening up more customization options. The fact that the action button itself has not evolved at all in the last year is strange. But yeah, I think the camera capture is fascinating. The fact that it's both a button and a capacitive area means that it's a two and one, right? It does have that physical feedback as well as you can tap it, you can hold it, you can swipe on it and do all different things based on how you're using it. My hot take is I think this is Apple testing the water to do the same thing with all of its iPhone buttons that it didn't want to do this with the power button or the volume buttons because those are used so consistently by hundreds of millions of people every day. But by putting the camera capture on every single iPhone 16, they're going to have 100 million phones sold by the end of next year and they're going to have a ton of data about how reliable it is. And as we've heard over many years, Apple has been playing with capacitive replacements for physical buttons because they are a huge failure point. And if you eventually get to the point where you can just put all capacitive buttons on your iPhone and have the Taptic Engine take care of the feedback and you can give people a bunch of options depending on whether you tap it, press it, tap to hold, double tap, whatever. That adds enormous versatility while maintaining the core functionality of all those buttons in general. And this is just like pie in the sky, I don't know how if this will ever happen or how long it will take. But when Apple adds a hardware feature, it rarely removes it except for the touch 3D touch. Well, 3D touch and then there's the touchpad as well, which did not touchpad, what was it called? Oh, the touch bar. Touch bar. Thank you. That got removed. But I think what you're saying though about the camera control kind of like being a testing ground for like other button changes, like I think there's some, I would not be shocked to see that happen. And I noticed too, when you press the camera control button, that edge of the screen kind of juts out a little, so like when you press it, there's like a little like black border from the bezel that kind of pushes out to kind of like mimic that you're pressing the button. Oh, which they added with the volume. With the, I always say team beta, yeah, they did the same thing when you press the volume buttons and the Siri power button, it does that same kind of like jut out animation. So like I could fully see if they're, that's like a new UI they're going to use. So like when they do switch to capacitive buttons like down the road, theoretically like you get that haptic feedback and you see that sort of like visual cue on the screen that you're pressing it, which maybe that's what they're doing or maybe it's just a funky animation they're having fun with. But like I think that's a, I wouldn't be shocked if that's kind of what they're doing. Like you, like you kind of suggested Daniel. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with, with your theory, Daniel, and I'll take it one step farther, they're going to make the volume rocker one button and you're going to have to slide your finger up and down into control. Oh, I don't know about, I don't know if that's a good idea. I'm not saying it's a good idea. I'm saying they're going to do this. They're, they're going to make it one long button and, and it might press, it might have two places that you can press, but like I really think like the more I think about how they're making people and training people to slide their finger back and forth on the camera button. Like I think they're going to do the same thing with the volume. I wouldn't be surprised actually because most Android phones have a single button for volume. Exactly. Yeah. Again, fewer failure points is a good thing for theirs. Exactly. Okay. So iPhone 15 and 16 plus other than the camera capture five colors, I'm, I like the teal. I, I think the teal is so thin. Pink is very nice too. I might buy one of these because of the teal. Yeah. The teal is hot. Ultra Marines nice. Pink is really nice. Yeah. Blacker there existing. Yeah. It's all, it's Matt this year, right? They're all Matt. Yeah. Yep. That's nice. That's nice. They look fantastic in person too. The, the, I don't know. Three are kind of excellent. Like the last few years, it's been kind of disappointing with like every iPhone color has just been this like muted pastel sheet of whatever and these are like super saturated. Like they look right online. They look great in person. Ken, my partner is very upset. There's not like a vibrant yellow, but other than that, I think these are, these are really, really good. Maddie would feel the same if I show it, but the reason Maddie has an iPhone 14 and on an iPhone 15 is because she wanted the vibrant yellow and did not care about anything else other than the fact that the pastel yellow they did last year looked terrible. What did you do? So the display is a little brighter, but it's still 60 Hertz. A lot of people are fine with this. I think it's about time Apple puts a 120 Hertz display on an $800 phone. I don't think it'll happen because pro typically means higher refresh rate across the product lineups, but yeah, I think this is just, it's about time. And then there's the A18 chip. So it takes a jump from A16 bionic to A18, which appears to be a pretty nice speed boost, particularly around ML and AI functionality, which we'll talk about in a minute, but like that's really the name of the game with the iOS 18 and beyond. Joe, did they talk at all about the camera, the 48 megapixel, they're calling it a fusion camera, but is it a new sensor or is it basically just reusing that sensor? I have not looked at the spec sheet to confirm that because it's essentially just using the fusion aspect comes from, it's a main camera, then also it like crops in for that two X telephoto sensor, which is what they did on the 15 last year and the 15 pro last year. So I'm not sure if it's just like a rebrand or if it is like a actually new sensor, but it seems like it's achieving the same thing that last year's phones did too. Yeah, it's unclear to me whether the main sensors are different on both the 16 and 16 pro over last year, because they both had 48 megapixel mains. The ultra wide is new, we know this, it's a newer sensor, wider aperture, it lets in more light. So that's good. There's a macro photography now on the 16, which wasn't there on the 15, which is enabled by the new ultra wide. There's also new photographic styles, which I'm interested in because, I mean, I just kept my one photography style on when I had an iPhone, but I don't know, I like playing around with them. I think they're interesting. They're just filters. Not anything special, but the fact that they're tightly integrated into the camera app, which actually, I want to go back to what you said, Joe, because I agree with you, the camera app itself on the iPhone is a disaster. And I think it needed a complete redesign while launching the camera capture because that separate interface when you're using it feels much more intuitive than having to like find the arrow and then go up to the other end of the screen to make changes. It's never felt intuitive to me. No, and it's kind of funny because when you use the camera control thing, like once you, when you're in the camera app and you touch the camera control to like bring up that UI, like the entire rest of the interface for the camera app just disappears. It's still there and it's still bad if you're not interacting with the camera control button, but like the second you use that to bring up that new like UI for everything, it's just the, the rest of the camera app is gone and just disappears, which is like kind of solving the problem, but also not really like the second you stop using the camera control, like that same app interface is still there. It's very bizarre that like they just get rid of it and you, you do get a better, a better way to interact with the camera app with the camera control button, but like that obviously doesn't fully solve the fact that the, the app without that new UI is not good still. Yeah, it's, it's very bad. Other than that, there's more like it's, it's better battery life and still USB C USB 2, which if you're still charged, if you're doing any data transfer on your iPhone in 2024 with a wire, I want to know why I just, I want to understand you. But yeah, faster MagSafe wireless charging up to 25 watts with the 30 watt adapter, you have to buy a new MagSafe adapter, which whatever, but yeah, I mean, that's fine. So Will, you were saying earlier that this would be an instant upgrade for you if it was a higher refresh rate display. Well, not so much an instant upgrade. It's just that, so like I have a personal iPhone that I find handy to like keep around for comparison purposes, right? And we're not talking like I have been carrying an iPhone 15 Pro Max that was, that is the review unit that like Android police bought for me to review last year, but I have an iPhone 14 Pro Max that I bought myself that has been sitting in a desk for a year and I would like to do something with it before the trade in value and that really like bombs out. And to me, it's just, I don't know, like I, I don't see as especially considering that it is a secondary phone that I do not have on me all the time. I do not see like a huge reason for me to want to like upgrade this 14 Pro Max to a 16 Pro Max. I don't see what I'm getting there, right? Like it is a better chip, but it's not that much better of a chip than what's in the iPhone 16. I think that's really what it is is that this here Apple did not kneecap the regular iPhone 16 in any way except for the refresh rate, which matters to some people, not to everyone. Although I do think that it is a thing that people, even like regular users would notice once they like set up their phone side by side, like I think when you look for it, it's there. I understand that is how they are pushing people to spend two to $400 more, but I think that it is beyond time. And I don't think they will. Let me be very clear. I don't think they're going to change their strategy, but I think it's beyond time to stick like a 90 Hertz display on the basic iPhone and I am going to find it frustrating. I think when reviews of the regular iPhone 16 come out over the next couple of weeks and people cut Apple a break for charging $800, $900 in 2024 for a phone that is running 60 Hertz display. I don't know. It's a real quality of life improvement in a way that I just don't understand why they won't make the jump. Well, I understand why they won't, but like I do not think anyone should excuse it anymore. It sucks. Now, that said, again, I'm probably going to just pick up an iPhone 16 because I like the design. It will be a fun phone to throw in my bag when I go on trips that I can use apps like flighty. It's like the reason I carry it, but I will be grimacing every time I pick it up and I see the unlock motion just jutter across the screen at a terrible 60 frames per second. What we really need is the PS5 Pro of iPhones is what I'm saying. Yeah, the PS5 Pro is only $100 less than the iPhone 16. Just there you go. What a bargain. What a deal. That makes it either much cheaper or like great value or terrible value depending on how you look at it. Okay, Joe, I want to hear your 16 Pro and Pro Max take. It has everything we talked about, but slightly larger displays, slimmer front bezels around those displays, an upgraded ultra wide camera, 48 megapixels. It has 4K 120 video capture, much improved battery life over the iPhone 15s and the new A18 Pro chip, which has an extra core over the A18. I'm sure there's some other things in there, maybe faster memory, but we're not entirely sure. Really quickly. Can we just point out that a month after we've watched as like Google's been like, guys, don't worry, we've got our second generation of video boost. It's going to make your pixel video look so good that Apple comes out here and is like, we're doing hardware 4K 120, you don't need to upload it to the cloud and wait like a second hour for us to process it. I just like, it's such a miss on Google's part. They really need to improve their video recording is all I want to say about that. Well, it won't happen until the tensor isn't a piece of shit. I don't think this year's 10 chip is a piece of shit. No, but it's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. 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It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. It's not a piece of shit. Joe, I mean, what's your take on the things that you've seen with Apple Intelligence? Because obviously, Craig spends a lot of time in the infomercial talking about Apple Intelligence, rehashing a whole bunch of stuff, but also the visual intelligence stuff that was shown off, which is only possible with the camera capture button. What did that look like in person when you were testing it? So the visual intelligence stuff, like, was I didn't get a chance to use that stuff? Like, I got to see some demos of just other Apple Intelligence features, like the writing tools and the image playground and all that, all the stuff we've seen since WWDC. Like, I'm so indifferent on all of the Apple Intelligence stuff, like just the way I've been kind of like indifferent on Galaxy AI and Google's been doing with a lot of their AI stuff. It's like the writing tools, like for helping you like write an email or change your tone of your writing, maybe for somebody who doesn't have the jobs that we do where we're writers and we write for a living, like, I don't find that anything. I would personally want to use, for my workflow, the gen Moji stuff of being able to make your own emojis is neat, but I think, like, it'll never be an emoji keyboard in Gboard or emoji. Joe and I just send each other emoji kitchen creations all the time. That's how we communicate these days. It's just football's crying when our team is doing that. I love that, actually, because the emoji keyboard is actually brilliant and so much better than the image studio or Pixel Studio will ever, ever be. Absolutely. Because it's got that an artist took the time to think about how these two emojis would look like. Yes. It's curated. It's somebody made these that it's an artist that put effort into making and thinking about that. Yeah. And I just, I don't see gen Moji being, I mean, it'll get more use, I'm sure, just because there are so many iPhones and so many people and, you know, using iMessage, especially in the States, but I don't see myself ever, like, being jealous of it when, like, emoji and God, I hope we will never kill off emoji kitchen to be, like, we don't need it anymore. Like, AI has discovered. I'm sure they will, but I'm just bumming myself out thinking about it. You could do a comparison, Will, of gen Moji, emoji kitchen, which one makes the better football-related? I'll leak my DMs with Joe on Twitter when we, when we both have iPhone 16. Perfect. Um, yeah. I don't know. It's not just an Apple intelligence thing. Like I said, it's been the same with Samsung on Google where I don't know if I'm just not the target demo for this stuff or if this is just missing for everybody, but like, there's nothing I've seen with any big AI features where it's like, I need to have this on my next phone or like, I'm not going to buy it. Like, the, the, the most interesting thing Apple intelligence, like, we've seen from it is the demos Apple said with like the improved series where you can ask, like, when is my mom's flight today? Like, what did we talk about in this text conversation or this email or something? But like, there's no firm release date for that stuff. Like, that's going to be further down the road from writing tools and the gen Moji stuff and everything else. So other than that, there's nothing since WWDC with this or just other AI stuff that's, that's sold me on anything. And again, I don't know if it's like a me problem or if like, this stuff is just not hitting for everybody, but there's nothing really grabbing my attention there. I will believe Siri is good when Siri's good. I don't believe them that they're like, Siri's good now. Like maybe eventually, but like, I, I, this is so like down the road. I also just want to say visual intelligence is man, like Google lenses existed for like a decade. I'm sorry. Like, I'm not impressed by the fact that like, they're like, you can point your phone at a restaurant and then see the restaurant's menu. And I'm like, I bet you can already do that. It has nothing to do with AI. I mean, it does, but you don't need it. My favorite part was the guy walking up to not a puppy, but a dog and calling it a puppy and then being like, screw you owner. I'm not going to talk to you. I'm just going to bend down and be creepy and take a photo of your dog. And then get, you know, without asking the owner what the breed is, like it, that to me is the worst example of how AI is just making us all zombies and not people, like it's removing. It's abstracting. But I don't think it is. I think this is proof that Apple is in the same club as Google where all of these people who are working on these products just do not talk to like regular humans on the street. They do not know how people communicate. They don't know how parents are their kids. You're misinterpreting this, Will, because it's your, your, I mean, yes, you're a sicko in many other ways, I think, but like it's in some ways, you're also a normal person. Sure. I try. Thank you. It's important to, to remember that like Facebook or sorry, meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, these companies have an outsized influence in how we interact with technology, whether we acknowledge it or not. And if there are companies like this that are essentially giving a 12 year old their first iPhone with these tools built in, it is telling them that they are, it's encouraging them to use them instead of the social tools that we as parents are trying to imbue in our angelic little ones, right? And that's what I find so problematic about this. It's not that we are going to use these tools. It's that when they are as easily accessible to a 13 year old with their first iPhone as they will become, they will be discouraged to write their own stuff. And I have many friends who are high school teachers who are already getting essays clearly written by chat GPT augmented with chat GPT or otherwise like undermined by AI in ways that are not as overt as what we think of as like pure plagiarism. It's not that people are going in and like write me an essay about the American Revolution and then they submit it unedited. It's really much more insidious than that. And as this becomes built into our phones, that's where I find this stuff to be more problematic. It just flattens, as you said, all of the interactions that we end up having with one another because it's a single tap to like, you know, we're joking about like, add it to a mode to all these AI tools because that's when it will become interesting and fun. But that won't be the default, it will be 9 a.m. on a Monday morning mode for all of the texts that we make with AI. And that just flattens culture so much because while we are focusing on photo and video generation, it's really the text generation that we're going to interact with the most because we just do more text based interaction with our phones. Unfortunately, you've sold me on AI text generation with that 9 a.m. idea and I would love for Slack to just auto respond to whatever I wake up to after a weekend. Give it time. Just like, just go out there Slack. Just say yes or no to freelancers at random. You'll probably get it right. Oh, man, that's coming. Okay. I think that's it for the iPhone. I want to talk very, very, very quickly about PS5, which went way long super over. Sorry, Joe. Hope you didn't have work to do today. Yeah. I'm already like running, running super late. So we'll just chat about this quickly. There's not a whole lot to say here, but will I want to give you space to rants about the $700 PS5 Pro that was announced yesterday? This is what happens when Sony doesn't have competition. We've seen it before. This is not new. This happened. I would. I would. This was the PS3 launch, right? This was the infamous like E3 presentation for the PS3 where it cost $600. I would say that this is the closest we've seen Sony come to that. They were on their back foot with the PS4. They were able to recover through that generation like pretty quickly and we've seen Xbox flounder for a decade and what you get when Sony has no real competition in the space. I understand, you know, the PC market is growing, but it's over here, right? Like consoles are infinitely more popular even today, even with the Steam Deck. And you have Xbox floundering, Nintendo is doing its own thing. You get a $700 PS5 Pro that I can't figure out why it exists. I watched these demos and they are using like, they're like, look in the background and just see how much clearer the foliage is and I'm like, I, we have fully lost the plot. Sony is shipping like two games a year at this point. They, they are coming off a month, the last like four weeks where they launched a game called Concord, canned Concord, a week and a half in, and then launched Astrobot, which is not trying to do photorealistic graphics like the PS5 Pro is aiming for two massive acclaim and I assume sales success. I haven't, I don't think we have sales numbers yet, but certainly like critical acclaim. I think it's got like a 94 in Metacritic. I just think this is crazy. I just think that we, we have lost the plot on what games should look like on what consoles should be doing, I do not understand who the $700 PS5 Pro is for. It only exists to try to get people who already own a PS5 to upgrade, but I don't see anything here that would spur someone to dump their $500 one and spend, let's be real, $800 because it doesn't come with a disk drive. You have to spend $80 for the disk drive. So to spend $800 in the PS5 Pro, only for the PS6 to be probably three years away, like max. I don't know who this is for. I think it's like an embarrassing launch. I have not seen anyone be positive about it. And at this point, like when you were talking about $800, like go buy a computer, build a computer, go, you know, like there are so many other options that you could do with this. I just like, they didn't even show it off with a new game. They were showing like the last of us to remastered, which is a PS4 game. Like I'm sorry. I just this entire thing is like pretty embarrassing and that's my like two minute rant on it. I don't know. Do you guys have anything to add on the PS5 Pro? Have you considered that in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 taxi cabs are a little bit sharper than before? They're a little bit sharper. I haven't. You know what? I hadn't considered that. The one thing that they're like promising here that I'm like, yeah, I would love that is that they're like, finally, final fantasy seven rebirth will run properly at 60 frames per second without looking like garbage. And I'm like, that's great. I am not buying a $700 console for that game to look like it is supposed to look. That's that's what I would say to that is very clear that both Sony and Microsoft were subsidizing the 2020 releases significantly, right? There were literal documents that showed Xbox was subsidizing the Xbox series X and S to I think it was like a one one and two billion dollars or one and a half billion dollar extent. Like it was a lot at least like 50 to $100 per console, right? And the idea that they would make it up in subscriptions. And then obviously with the expanded PS plus that launched during the PS5's window, like we now have Sony no longer feeling like it needs to subsidize hardware either. I think the most cynical thing about this is the lack of a disk drive, right? Oh, yeah. Because it so many things require a disk drive. Sony gets to eat 30% of every single purchase game archiving is way more difficult without a physical hardware. Like it just the whole thing is just it just speaks to the fact that Sony, as you said, can get away with this. And the fact that it is 700 US dollars and then 700 pounds and 800 euros is just like, this is blatant. We are so dominant in Europe that we can charge basically whatever we want. And in the US, we're not as dominant. Therefore, we can we still have to be relatively competitive. We've seen the price of the regular PS5 go up like pretty much everywhere except the US. We just bumped the price of the controllers up didn't change anything about those. And we're talking about the iPhone 16 pro like you want to talk about pro things like I'm sorry, a console labeled pro should have a disk drive on it. You want to make the argument that nobody buys disk based games anymore. That's fine. We can like, I don't think that's 100% true. And I would argue that like you because of the competition among retailers, you will find better deals on disk based games. If I buy a physical copy of a game, it's usually because it's a better deal than I can get digitally. But also, like, it's a 4K Blu-ray player and those are expensive. And that's a niche pro feature that should be on this pro console like out of the box not for $80. Yeah, the whole the whole thing is so weird, especially since it's just a GPU upgrade. It's not there's no there's no CPU improvements here at all. You do get a bigger SSD, which is great, but like there's really very few upgrades to the hardware here, I believe slightly faster memory. But it's really just about like achieving that 4K fidelity mode at 60 frames per second for the vast majority of games, which they promised with the original PS5. I just want to say like this is my other problem is that 4K 60 was talked about a lot in the run up to the PS5 and it was a lie, like they just lied about it. They either knew that developers wouldn't be able to hit that target or they were surprised that developers weren't able to hit that target, including themselves. But like I'm not going to run out and be like this time it's fixed, this time it's 4K 60. I don't trust them. I also like the PS5 is probably one of the most disappointing gadgets I've bought in the last like five years, like I am pretty sure I have used my OLED Steam Deck more in the 10 months that I've had it than I've used my PS5 in the three years I've had it. And that's like a problem and I think it says a lot about like I think that's why Nintendo is so successful. I think that's why the Steam Deck is successful that these companies are thinking about the way you play as opposed to just what the picture looks like. And I think the obsession with everything needs to be realistic and pixel perfect is the reason that a game like Concord takes eight years to make comes out bombs immediately upon release and they have to pull it a week and a half later. And like you look at Nintendo, I am not going to stand here and say that the Switch is not aging hardware. Of course it is. It's running the like chip that my Nvidia Shield tablet was using in 2014. It's old, but like Nintendo has more games coming out to end this year than Sony does that at least I'm interested in. I haven't done a deep dive into Sony's holiday plans, but I'm pretty sure that the only one is like Astrobot, which just came out. And meanwhile, like Nintendo is about to drop a new Zelda game that looks really good. And the early word on it out of packs is that it's really good. And like they've got a Mario Party game that might be good might be trash. That's usually how those go. They've got like a bunch of other stuff planned for like essentially end the Switch. They've got a new Mario and Luigi game and like I'm looking at the PS5 being like what are you playing that like I wasn't playing five years ago. I don't know like it's just frustrating. The fact that you can now play Resident Evil Village on your iPhone just negates this whole thing. You should not buy a console anymore and just play your AAA titles on your phone. I mean like I feel like you're being sarcastic, but like if the Switch 2 comes out and it can play Resident Evil Village and I didn't have a Steam Deck that can play Resident Evil Village, like I would probably be like yeah, I think I'd rather play it on the portable thing that can dock into my TV even if it looks a little worse because guess what? That fits my life a lot better and I think it says a lot that we've seen you know Valve and we've seen Nintendo be as successful as they are. I think they are thinking about games in a better like healthier way than Sony is. And certainly Xbox, I don't know what they're up to, but... I don't disagree. What's the last game you played? Joe. Oh God. I hope it's a Black Ops 6 beta and then other than that I could not tell you. I've only got a series X and I've touched it so little this year. You got to caress that Xbox. Joe. It needs some love. Rather not. It needs some love. It's been neglected by everybody, not just you. I think it needs to be cared for. What's the last game you played Will? A modded version of Pokémon Emerald on my Game Boy Advance SP emulation device. Incredible. Incredible. No, you definitely don't need this. Is it not on brand for me at least? Is that not like extremely on brand? It's true. Like 40 hours into a modded version of Pokémon Emerald. I don't know. What do you want from me? I'm... So I'm the guy that's playing Bellatro on my Steam Deck while awaiting Bellatro to launch on Apple Arcade Plus and Android so that could buy it three times. That's why Daniel never responds to my DMs. He's busy playing Bellatro. Yeah. That's true. And not ignoring me. No, I am, but I'm doing both. It's called multitasking. All right, Joe, thank you so much for being here. We're going to cut it short this week because we've only spoken for a few minutes and it's really, I think, you know, we want to leave something else on the table. So we'll talk at S25 rumors next week along with some of the other foldable stuff. I want to give my Pixel9 Pro Fold review to the podcast because I have many, many hot takes on it and by next week I will have more. So... And my review will be live on the site next week as well. Joe, where can people find you if they want to learn more about what you do? Uh, they can find me at digitaltrends.com. I'm leading our mobile section over there. So anything we're writing about phones, tablets, smartwatches, that is where I'm at. But I will be in my bed physically recovering from all of the travel, but normally I am at D. No one feel bad for Joe. Okay. No one feel bad for Joe. Look for all of this so he could get, like, platinum status with Delta. No one feel bad for Joe. He's fine. Uh, actually, it is all the time. He's getting free of all the time. It is only to be diamond status. Sorry. Diamond status. Apologies. No one feel bad for him. He's drinking, like, free mimosas at, like, eight in the morning. I remember when I hired a baby Joe back in, like, what was it, 2017 at Android Central? Yeah. Who had never gone to a single press conference, never flown to a launch. And now look at you. Your fricking platinum diamond. Who would have seen me here? Who would have thought? Who would have thought? Look at us. All right. That's it. That's the show. Thank you for listening. If you want to give us feedback, podcast at androidplease.com. We love hearing from you. Next week will be much more Android focused, but let us know what you think of the iPhones, the Apple Watch Series 10 and the AirPods 4. Will you be partaking? Will you be buying it for friends and family? Will you be moving over? Let us know. And that's it. Have a good week. We'll talk to you soon. Bye bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
