Meta Orion AR Glasses, MKBHD’s App Fail, iPhone 16 Pro One Week Review
He's in it for the money, not the science. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Big news out of Meta, their Orion AR glasses that they demoed. We're gonna talk about that. Plus, impressions of the iPhone 16 Pro in our 1st week.
Stephen Robles:And, in our bonus episode, we're gonna have a bunch of case talk, but that's coming soon. News from OpenAI. Lots of people actually leaving the company. Yes. MKBHD's wallpaper app, we'll touch on that as well, and some annoying watchOS 11 settings Jason's gonna help me out with.
Stephen Robles:This episode is brought to you by 1Password and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your host, Steven Robles, and joining me, of course, is Jason Aitin. How's it going, Jason?
Jason Aten:It's good. It's probably bet I have better weather than you do. So Oh, yes. I'm good.
Stephen Robles:It is in the middle okay. So the quote we had to open with the movie quote every week. Didn't think you were gonna get this one. He's in it for the second.
Jason Aten:I'm pretty sure it's, the tornado movie. Right? What's the one called? Isn't it about a tornado?
Stephen Robles:It is from a tornado movie. Do you remember the name of this classic movie with Helen Hunt?
Jason Aten:Yeah. Helen Hunt did not say it though. Wasn't it the other guy or was it Helen? It's Twisters. Twisters is the name of the movie.
Stephen Robles:Well, it is Twister because Twisters is the sequel, but yeah. From Twister. Because I
Jason Aten:If I was playing Jeopardy, I would have gotten it wrong, but we're not, thankfully.
Stephen Robles:Listen, I watch jeopardy at least once a week, and they are very particular about about the names. But I thought it was apropos because I'm in the middle of a hurricane, literally passing by right now, out in the Screaming. Out in the gulf. So we, but anyway, this is not a weather news show. I'm not Jim Cantore, as they say.
Stephen Robles:You know who that is? You know Jim Cantore?
Jason Aten:Have no idea.
Stephen Robles:It's the big meme of, like, he's the weather guy, and wherever he goes when there's a storm, you know you're about to get hit. Because he always goes to, like, the worst weather location, and, he's down here in Florida right now because
Jason Aten:I thought that was Anderson Cooper.
Stephen Robles:Oh, he's not a weather guy. Get out of here.
Jason Aten:He's covered all the her big hurricane.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. But he's not the guy on the ground. Jim Cantoni is like
Jason Aten:listen. If if Anderson Cooper is standing in your front line with a camera crew, something really bad
Stephen Robles:is happening.
Jason Aten:You know? Fair enough. About to get hit by a hurricane or get bombed. 1 of the 2 things.
Stephen Robles:Fair fair enough. Yeah. But, anyway, we listen. We have glasses to talk about, watches to talk about. One real quick.
Stephen Robles:We didn't have any 5 star reviews this week. So if you have not rated the show, 5 stars in Apple Podcast, we would appreciate it. We were in the top 100 shows in multiple countries last week, United States, Canada, and Great Britain. And we get there when you follow the show on Apple Podcasts. Even if you listen elsewhere, you can go follow us there.
Stephen Robles:But more so, leave us a 5 star rating and review. And, of course, you get a shout out on the show. And if they ask a question in your review, we typically do it right here at the top. So yeah. That's true.
Stephen Robles:Highly recommend. Just saying.
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:And also, it is the final week, at least, for the St. Jude fundraiser for children's cancer awareness month. And so the St. Jude Children Research Hospital fundraiser, we raised over $1200. Just you, the primary tech community, so thank you for that.
Stephen Robles:There's still time. If you'd like, we blew past our $1,000 goal, which was amazing, and this goes to, an incredible cause. So recommend that'll be a link in the show notes below. Last week to do it, So go ahead and donate and, yeah, worthy cause for sure. For sure.
Stephen Robles:Alright. Did you know the Latin translation of Did you know this?
Jason Aten:I did not know it, but, I mean, it's pretty bold to put your first name on a t shirt in Latin. Yes.
Stephen Robles:I
Jason Aten:mean, your last name.
Stephen Robles:Right. So Mark Zuckerberg, he did the entire live keynote for MediConnect, their big event where they announced a bunch of stuff, and he had a custom t shirt written and it said, which I guess translated, it's like a play on the word back in the Roman Empire days of, which means either Caesar or nothing. So basically saying, all all Zuck or nothing, which is
Jason Aten:Yeah. This
Stephen Robles:is wild. I mean
Jason Aten:Yeah. Okay. Can we before we get into this stuff, can we just say, I think live events just need to come back, period.
Stephen Robles:I a 100% agree. There was a bunch of people saying this, like, Google is doing live events. Meta's doing live events.
Jason Aten:Microsoft does live events. OpenAI does live events. Yep.
Stephen Robles:Apple is still making everybody go to the Steve Jobs Theater, like, in person for the events, and then they're watching a video. I I agree. I think it is time for Apple to come back to do live events. Do the live demos. Give us the the 5 minute game demo that all the journalists are just taking notes during, of the all the previous announcements.
Stephen Robles:Please. Please do live. The better energy. There's more excitement, I feel like.
Jason Aten:Yeah. You just wouldn't the problem is they couldn't put the little tag at the end that says shot on iPhone.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I mean, I guess they could that would be tough. But I think it but you could still do a bunch of marketing videos after the fact, you know, of the products and say those were all shot on iPhone. I think they should do.
Jason Aten:That's true.
Stephen Robles:Apple, go back to live events. Because this is what happens. You get you get people covering their stuff, which is meta announcing not a product, not something you can buy, but Orion, their pair of AR glasses, Alex Heath over at the verge actually got a demo of these glasses. I watched the video. They've been in development, at least in the interview with Alex Heath.
Stephen Robles:Mark Zuckerberg said for maybe, like, 10 years, they've been working on these glasses, and they are I I I guess not the first AR glasses. I mean, would Google Glass be considered the first AR glasses? Not really. Right?
Jason Aten:I don't yeah. I mean Let's go. I guess they're the first attempt at that sort of thing.
Stephen Robles:Something like that.
Jason Aten:But they didn't really augment reality because didn't they just take pictures?
Stephen Robles:Well, they had the little screen, like, the heads up display that would show you stuff in the corner of your eye, but it wasn't like full glasses. Yeah. So these are like glasses glasses, and they actually have a projector inside for each eye, and it projects things onto the real world to be AR, like, an an AR experience. Now they're very they're thick glasses. You know, they're they're not like Warby Parker frames or whatever.
Stephen Robles:Like, these are very thick. These are basically a prototype that Meta is showing off, gave a demo to Alex Heath. This is not gonna be sold. They said in the interview that it might these things cost, like, $10,000 to manufacture a single pair, and the yield for whatever the carbon material is for the lenses just does not yield enough. So this is not a product, you know, that's gonna buy.
Stephen Robles:He said this is several years away from Meta actually releasing something that you can buy, but they exist and they work. Now, again, they're very thick, but much, lighter and thinner than an Apple Vision Pro and VR headsets, but you also have to wear a wristband to control the glasses, and there's also this puck that has to be basically in the same room for these glasses to function. So there's, like, multiple pieces, like, this is not an elegant experience. It is basically a proof of concept, which begs the question, like like, why did Meta show this off, which is interesting, but it exists, and AR glasses seems to be, like, obviously, Meta and Mark Zuckerberg thinks, like, this is the next step in the tech. This is where they're aiming to to do stuff with.
Stephen Robles:It's interesting. I don't know. Why do you think they show this off? Just show that they were kinda first? That maybe
Jason Aten:Well Yeah. I think that they have to con okay. You know, what is it? A year and a half ago, Mark Zuckerberg bet the entire company on the metaverse, and that Literally. To not that turned out to not be a thing.
Jason Aten:Right? That is Nobody cares. It's just like nobody cares. And one reason that nobody cares is it was dumb. The other reason that nobody cares is because this other thing came along, which was AI.
Jason Aten:Right? And so everyone got way more interested in AI because it's a thing that people can be like, oh, I can make weird images or I can have it write my emails or do my homework. Like Right. That was a real thing that people knew what to do with. The metaverse is like, well, I have to put a thing in my face, and I have to, like, find a friend who wants to do, like, a game or something like that.
Jason Aten:Yeah. It just wasn't real to people. Yeah. And the other piece that's happening is for years, this has been going on for pretty much as long as Facebook has been a thing, definitely since May Facebook introduced a mobile app, which, remember, Facebook most people use Facebook on their mobile devices, but it was there was no mobile app until I don't even remember, but it was, like, more recent than you think. 2014, 15, maybe?
Jason Aten:I don't know. But I don't I don't know. You can Google it while I ramble for a second. But I'm
Stephen Robles:a go to my App Store downloads to the earliest download because that'll
Jason Aten:That doesn't seem like the fastest way to do
Stephen Robles:Alright. Fine. I'll Google it. Fine.
Jason Aten:But Mark Zuckerberg has wanted to control his own destiny, and he's never gonna be able to do that on the smartphone because he's always going to basically be, in, like, service of Apple or Google and their operating systems. And he will not have complete control over the platform where he makes all of his money. Right. Remember it wasn't, was it 20? It was iOS 14.5 when they released the app tracking transparency.
Jason Aten:Metta has mostly recovered from that because they're very smart and they're very good at this. But like the next earnings, like, annual report was, like, a $10,000,000,000 hit just attributed to that. They don't ever wanna have a $10,000,000,000 hit just because somebody changes a rule in one of the app stores. And so they need a device. They need a platform
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:That they own. And what is it gonna be? Like, it's not gonna be a smartphone. Right? It's not a laptop.
Jason Aten:It's not the only option, like, the only thing that is really not fully fleshed out is glasses. Right. And in some ways, like, the combination of augmented reality and AI, like, that's a great combination for glasses if anyone could figure out how to miniaturize this stuff. It's weird that they showed it off because I think that they also basically said that they had been trying to make a device to compete with VisionPRO. And then they realized that Apple didn't sell any, and so they just canceled it.
Jason Aten:No. Like, for real. They're like, this device would need to be under $1,000 and just that's hard to do, and nobody's gonna buy them at $35100.
Stephen Robles:Also, the Facebook app came out July 10, 2008, Literally when the app store launched.
Jason Aten:Alright. Fine.
Stephen Robles:So, yeah. The apps are out but Mark Zuckerberg
Jason Aten:It was off by 7 years
Stephen Robles:but Mark Zuckerberg said in the interview with The Verge and I think it was Decoder and then he said this in multiple interviews like you are reiterating. He's he's mad that he missed the mobile platform, you know, moment basically. Where like Yeah. He says over and over like we missed mobile, we didn't have a platform then, and he's trying to foresee the next big platform play which, I mean, AR, yes. The fact that it integrates AI, like, okay, maybe.
Stephen Robles:To me, I mean, it feels like and he admitted no one thought AI would catch on this fast, and it seems like that's the platform for the next 10 years that everyone is kinda fighting over, which they're also in that, like, Meta has its own llama stuff and Apple has an Apple intelligence, which maybe one day we'll see on the iPhone, but, you know, AR glasses, it's it's still interesting. I still do you still use the Apple Vision Pro every morning?
Jason Aten:Every day. I use it this morning. As I read all of the things you posted in Notion wearing the Vision Pro.
Stephen Robles:I every time I see someone on threads say, does anyone still use Apple Vision Pro? I have to resist the urge to tag you every day.
Jason Aten:Tag me every time.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I see at least 4 to 5 posts a day, and I'm like, I know one person, who's using it every day.
Jason Aten:Here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna from now on, I'm gonna give you the link. People can sign up for my newsletter, and I'm just gonna publish the story there. Because I'm writing the story about how I use it every day. The funny thing is, originally, it was gonna be for 30 days.
Jason Aten:I think we're up to basically, like, 6 months now that I've used it every day.
Stephen Robles:That's amazing. But also the thing here's the thing about glasses.
Jason Aten:A lot
Stephen Robles:of people, even if they need glasses, try to do everything they can to not wear glasses. Namely, by way of contacts, sometimes LASIK surgery, and there are, like, sunglasses, which I think why the Ray Ban sunglasses, which is also from Meta, has been a more popular product at least in the I I hear about a more more positive feedback about it. I am curious how a platform like glasses where so many people try to not have to wear them, how that would succeed long term is like a thing. If it provided enough value, then maybe, but, you know, I I always think, like, what what can AR do? I guess if you're fixing your car, it can overlay, like, unscrew this thing, maybe.
Stephen Robles:That feels way off. Directions, like, walking directions? Okay. Put an arrow on the sidewalk to tell you to turn left. That might be cool.
Stephen Robles:Your phone's really good at that. Your watch can do it. Like, that's pretty unobtrusive. You know, I'm still wondering, like, what and they played, like, Pong. Like, Alex Heath and, Mark Zuckerberg, they played, like, a game of Pong next to each other.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. That's cool, I guess, but I just I don't know. I I think the product is interesting, but I think the use case has to come along with the product. Kind of how, like, Apple Vision Pro came maybe before some of the use cases that Right. People would know.
Stephen Robles:So I don't know. We'll see. But this is this is what Meta thinks the future is, AR glasses.
Jason Aten:Well, I think one thing that's telling about this is that you still have to carry around a computing device. No one has figured out the way to make it to put the computer in the glasses. If you wanna put the computer in the glasses, you have a quest or a vision pro. Right? Because it's just physics and space and power and all of those types of things.
Jason Aten:So there's still this computing device that you have to carry around with you, which is weird because, you know, we're all carrying around computing devices with us, which just makes me feel like I don't know that Meta can get there because there's no way that they want this to be just an accessory to your smartphone. Right. Right?
Stephen Robles:I will say it's impressive, like, the tech. The fact that META made this with all these cameras inside and these mini projectors, like, it is impressive hardware. Like, that's cool. Yeah. So much so, like, the just needs to be proven and remains to be seen.
Stephen Robles:Like, is this a is this vaporware? Is this actually gonna could this actually be a product? We'll see.
Jason Aten:Well and, Alex, Heath, you know, you're showing this video right now of him wearing them. And he said that, like, one of the demos was you looked down at a table of ingredients and it popped up labels and then gave you a recipe of what you can make from it, which was like a smoothie or something. So that is what you kinda describe, where you're looking through and it's overlaying things into reality. It's kind of like what VisionPRO tries to do. Only the VisionPRO is just feeding you video from your room into your Right.
Jason Aten:To the to the screens that you're seeing so that it looks like an overlay, but isn't actually. That's what this thing is trying to do.
Stephen Robles:You know what else promised to do that? This guy right here, the rabbit r one.
Jason Aten:What did you put that in? A fireproof case or something?
Stephen Robles:All that stuff like that. With it. This was like everybody raved about the case that it came with. The rabbit r one, it was supposed to look at some ingredients and then tell you what to make it. Just take a picture of your fridge, and it'll give you a recipe.
Stephen Robles:I literally put that in the case.
Jason Aten:I've said a lot of things about Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, but I will give them all of the credit that they will be able to figure this out before rabbit r one, which was basically just running an Android phone somewhere in the cloud. A low budget Android phone.
Stephen Robles:I didn't think we were gonna cover this, but you mentioned it, and I I just had to say it. But, also, the apparently, there's 5,000 people who use the Rabbit r one every day. That's it. 5000 use the Rabbit
Jason Aten:r. That actually seems high to me.
Stephen Robles:It seems very high. Very high. Of the 100,000 people who bought it, I'd you know, I didn't know I was just one of a 100,000 people. Look at that. I'm right here.
Jason Aten:Wow.
Stephen Robles:I'd also, I I that is the bottom of our notes so I'm gonna cover it, but I'll mention it again. I tried to return my humane AI PIN because Quinn Nelson said that they would take the return no matter how long ago you bought it, and so I tried. I went to the humane website and I was like, I would like to return my PIN, and they said, sorry it's past the 30 days and so I tweeted back at Quindells, I was like, how did you manage to get them to take it back? And they apparently, he said, I was I wanted to give it to a friend which you can't transfer the HumanAI PIN to another account, like it's impossible. And I guess those are the magic words that I'll like, prompted them to accept the return.
Stephen Robles:I don't know. I haven't gone that far yet, but it's sitting right here on my desk. It tells me that the battery booster is low every other day. The PIN just just decides to speak and then it it dies again.
Jason Aten:See, I wouldn't want that anywhere in my house. Something that's just gonna ring. I mean, I have a Lexus, and that's it. I don't need anything else.
Stephen Robles:Tried returning it. I tried returning it. Anyway, alright. So that's that's the meta, Orion. Again, it's years away possibly, but interesting that it's doing it again, the fact that Zuckerberg also did the entire keynote himself, like, as the CEO of company, like, kudos.
Stephen Robles:He kept it to a 45 minute keynote. There's lots of energy and excitement doing that. He took something out of he took the, Orion glasses out of a briefcase, a la Apple taking out the, what did they take out of the they took the 3 GS out of a briefcase. They had, like, a whole montage of, like, Mission Impossible. There was something else, wasn't there?
Jason Aten:I mean, the most famous one was when Steve Jobs took the MacBook Air out of a Yeah. Manila in her office folder. And then there was a video of an iPad. Right? Didn't didn't Tim Cook, like, rappel into a room and pull a iPad?
Stephen Robles:The m one pro? The first m one iPad. But then I thought also, like, wasn't the the iPhone mini that they took out of a briefcase to show how small it was? It was, like, a briefcase in a briefcase. Yep.
Stephen Robles:It was a briefcase. I found it. I would just like to say I I called it. This is, the
Jason Aten:Actually, what Steve Steven is telling you that he pitched this original idea. He's the one who came up with this idea.
Stephen Robles:Look. This this is it. This is the see
Jason Aten:Hi, Andrea.
Stephen Robles:The briefcase. Yeah. Yeah. This was the iPhone 12 Mini, the first of 2 Mini. See, the briefcase.
Stephen Robles:It's a, nesting doll of silver briefcases to reveal the Mini. There it is. I never had a mini.
Jason Aten:That's amazing.
Stephen Robles:Did you ever have a mini? Do you ever try it?
Jason Aten:No. But, you know, we'll talk about this later, but I feel like I have a mini now after using a pro max and having going to a pro. It's weird.
Stephen Robles:Let's see. But yeah. That's a good transition. Let's let's talk about Apple for a second. The first thing, maybe, I'm gonna switch the order a little bit.
Stephen Robles:If you could tell me how to fix my Apple Watch because ever since I updated to watch OS 11, every time I play a podcast and I looked down at my watch, it was showing me the now playing widgets Yeah. Which I I don't know about you, but I never go to those widgets that are and I still don't know how to get to them. Okay. You swipe up from the bottom. It's a dip Okay.
Stephen Robles:Like, why like, the font on the clock or that control center thing is so it like, that they changed that. I don't know what that is. Anyway, I was tired of seeing the widgets and not the time when I looked down at my Apple Watch. So how do I fix it? What is
Jason Aten:this? Okay. So let's let's let's just clarify a couple things. First of all, I'm I'm having a flashback to you and I trying to figure out how to show our watches. Were we talking about this when we were trying to show the watch faces?
Jason Aten:Because I couldn't do it and you could do it, and we decided it's because you're a YouTuber. And we were trying to show that. But okay. So if you swipe up on the home screen, you pull up what's called the smart stack. The smart stack.
Jason Aten:Has 2 things in it. It has widgets Yes. And it has live activities. Now live activities, you know, are a thing like you order Starbucks and you can pop up a live activity that'll show you, like, your order is being worked on. Actually, the Starbucks one is dumb because it's like, we got your order.
Jason Aten:Your order is done. I don't need to know that you're, like, adding the milk or whatever. It doesn't whereas, like, an Uber, like, if you order Uber Eats or an Uber, it'll show you, like, the little line going across and how close they are. So that's fine. That's a live activity.
Jason Aten:Or if you're watching a sports game, which we know Steven doesn't do, but for normal people, if you wanna follow it along, it'll pop up a live activity. And it's basically a persistent notification that updates in real time to give you some kind of information. Flight is the best example I can think of.
Stephen Robles:I don't know.
Jason Aten:I didn't start with that. It'll tell you, like, your gate information. You can follow your flight. Awesome. Well, they added live activities to the watch as well, and they live in that smart stack.
Jason Aten:That's been true for a long time. With watchOS 11, by default, they enable the feature that auto launches live activities whenever you start playing song, podcast. Actually, anytime a live activity happens, it'll auto launch it, which means it pulls up that smart stack.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And you look down at your watch, and instead of seeing the watch face that you have carefully curated with complications and information
Stephen Robles:that you want. I'm gonna leave it.
Jason Aten:See is that janky screen with some indication of a podcast. I'm like, just because I started a podcast doesn't mean I don't wanna see my watch face. Like, why is that the decision someone at Apple made? Now, thankfully, you can turn this off. And I tell you what, I started trying to figure out how to turn this off from the moment I updated my watch to to watch OS 11 because it is the worst decision Apple's ever made, not the smart stack.
Stephen Robles:That's
Jason Aten:Listen. Let's
Stephen Robles:this is slightly hyperbolic. I don't know.
Jason Aten:Okay. Let me let me defend myself. You can make an argument that there are a lot of poor decisions that this company has made, but when they make a decision to impose like, the the reason they did this is clearly no one was using
Stephen Robles:the
Jason Aten:smart stack
Stephen Robles:in
Jason Aten:live activities. And they're like, we need to surface them so people know that they exist. No. You don't. If I don't know that they exist and my life is going along just fine, I like, you don't have to impose this thing on me just because you think that it's cool.
Jason Aten:That to me is why I say that this is one of the worst things that they've ever done because they are, like, trying to force something on to to users who don't need it or care because someone in Apple is like, but we made this feature. We need to surface it for people. Just leave people alone. It's a watch. It's fine.
Jason Aten:Live activities on your phone makes sense. If I don't want them, I don't need them. And if I do, I can just swipe up. So if you go into the settings, you can there's actually a on the watch itself, there's a setting for smart stack.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:You can then tap on live activities, and then you can turn off auto launch live activities. Yeah. You can also do it in the watch app on your iPhone to do the same thing, and I suggest you do it immediately.
Stephen Robles:I was literally trying to figure it though, and you take the complication off the watch face. I don't know. And, like, I don't think this was talked about. They mentioned live activities on the Apple Watch, but there was no I don't think in the event or whatever that they were like, this is just going to be on your watch whenever you're playing something.
Jason Aten:Well, here's what they said, Steven, and this is why it ticked me off if you can't tell.
Stephen Robles:Jason has very strong feelings about watch OS 11.
Jason Aten:What they said is actually, this is the only feeling I have about watchOS 11, and it's unfortunate that I feel I did not want to be this passionate about something. But listen. But what they did Apple did say is that they made the smart stack more intelligent. Right. Again, we talked a couple weeks ago about how Apple need you know, must have gotten rid of all of the editors because what that should have said is they made the smart stack more annoying because it just automatically appears when you turn on something.
Jason Aten:So Yeah. It they did talk about it. They said specifically, like, the smart stack becomes even more intelligent providing quick access to the right information right when you need it with suggested widgets, interactive widgets, and live activities.
Stephen Robles:Well, which they also got rid of the Siri watch face, which was basically this, which was basically like a smart stack that tried to predict the next thing you wanted to see, whether it was your next event, maybe the weather. You can't do the Siri watch face anymore. Like, it's not in the face gallery once you upgrade to watchOS 11, which was actually my wife's watch face, and I haven't heard her complain about it yet, so I don't think she's up updated to watchOS 11 yet. So I'll I'll keep you updated on that. But if you go to the watch app on your phone, you go to general, then there's a new auto launch section, and I don't know if it's new because depth was also in there.
Stephen Robles:So if you have an Ultra or a new Series 10, if it gets submerged in water, it will automatically launch the depth gauge, which happens when I jump in the pool. Very deep sea diving. I see about Yeah. 3 feet on the thing. But then also, there's a live activities settings where you can allow live activities or not, and then you can disable the auto launch live activities, and even so go so far as, like, some apps, like media apps, you can allow live activities from media apps or not, which maybe that would make it more useful.
Stephen Robles:This way it doesn't appear when I'm playing music or podcasts, but anyway, I just disabled it completely. So I wanted to mention this this was a MacRumors article, and this was a test. If you remember, iOS 17 introduced the ability to max set a 80% max charge limit on your iPhone if that it would somehow lengthen the battery life or or better the battery health of your iPhone long term by only charging it to 80%. This was Julie Clover over at MacRumors. She did the like the entire year on the 80% charging limit.
Stephen Robles:Did the whole year on it, and apparently, like, it's really not it it makes little to no difference. So yeah. Like
Jason Aten:I checked my 15 pro max before I put it in continuity camera, so I can't look right now. And, mine right now is at 94%, and I never thought about charging one time ever. Like, I just plug it in when I wanna plug it in. I put it on wireless. When I wanna put it on wireless, I let it drain to 0.
Jason Aten:I charge it up to full. Like, I never think about it once, and it's fine.
Stephen Robles:I I don't do the 80% thing. I always charge to a 100%. My battery was at 89 my battery health was at 89% on my 15 Pro Max, but I also have way more charge cycles, like over 400 because I'm filming the screen, I have to charge it multiple times a day sometimes, but I just thought it was interesting. Someone actually spent a whole year charging 80% and it seems to not make much of a difference, so don't stress about it. Just charge it to a 100 and use your phone.
Stephen Robles:You know what I mean? Like it's fine.
Jason Aten:Yeah. By the way though, pro tip. Mhmm. You should only charge your Tesla up to 80% unless you're gonna unless you're gonna use the whole battery.
Stephen Robles:I do 85.
Jason Aten:Trip.
Stephen Robles:I do 85. Is that alright?
Jason Aten:That's fine. Yeah. It's fine.
Stephen Robles:That's fine? Okay. Well, because, you know, it's a it's a older battery. It's 11 year old.
Jason Aten:It's fine.
Stephen Robles:Because I my Yeah.
Jason Aten:It's fine.
Stephen Robles:I wanna do a iPhone 16 impressions our 1st week, but you have strong feelings about something else, which is these apps.
Jason Aten:I'll hold back because listen.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. The Apple intelligence commercial.
Jason Aten:These ads are just bad. Can we just agree? I'm like, that's all we really have to say. They're just bad. Yes.
Jason Aten:Like, Apple, come on. Not only are the ads bad, but this just tells me that there are no tech companies that have any idea what normal people are gonna do with it with artificial intelligence. Apple intelligence, Gemini, whatever. Like Yeah. I know they're trying to create a real world scenario, but first of all, shame on you for making this dad look like a moron.
Jason Aten:Like, come on. Why is the dad in every commercial, like, the doofus who who apparently pays no attention to his child and doesn't even know the name of the fish? Like, come on. And so I just in general, I just thought that these ads were not a good way to communicate to people that this is a feature of a phone that you could buy that will change your life. Also, you can't do any of these things yet.
Stephen Robles:That that's the strangest part to me. Like and I've seen these air because I there's actually been a sports ball game or 2 on the TV recently, in my house. I think the Bucks were playing. They're a football team, in case you didn't know. And during the game, like, I saw an Apple intelligence commercial, and this is, like, a sports ball game.
Stephen Robles:Like, this is, like, a mainstream thing, and it's, like, this does feel strange for Apple to be advertising something like Apple Intelligence to the masses. That is not available. Like, if Right. If someone sees these commercials, goes into an Apple Store, buys an iPhone 16, and they're, like, cool. Now can you show me the Apple Intelligence stuff?
Stephen Robles:And someone in the Apple Store would be, like, sorry. Like, they're not gonna tell them to install the public beta. Like, I don't even know.
Jason Aten:Right.
Stephen Robles:I don't think they're even allowed to say something like that. And so it it does feel odd. I feel like it's the first time that Apple is really, well, I guess you could say Apple Vision Pro. They advertised that during didn't they do that during the Super Bowl? But it was right as it was available, I think.
Jason Aten:But they're not so, like, the one of the commercials I've seen recently, I think was just, like, Snoop, And it's, like, all about you should buy the 16 pro because of Apple Intelligence. And it's like but if you buy the 16 pro, it won't have it yet. No. I mean, I know it's supposed to be coming, but, like, but for that matter, the commercial about Siri, the Bella Ramsey commercial with featuring the improved version of Siri, that's not coming next month.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:We don't know when that's coming. That could be, like, 2027. I don't even know. Like, Siri is that far behind. It's they gotta do a lot of training.
Stephen Robles:Well, right now, the road map is, like, 18 dot 1 in October, which will have the initial Apple Intelligence features of, like, writing tools and stuff like that. 18.2 might be coming November or December with Genmoji and Image Playgrounds, which we haven't even had in a beta yet. Like, the only reason I'm still running the beta on my main device is because, I wanna be able to try Genmoji and Image Playground when it comes out. That's maybe November, December, and then like you're saying, the improved voice assistant probably next year, and then I don't even know if the semantic index where it will actually pull from all your information, will that be part of that or will that be something that's farther down the road? So it is it seems like a very long road and this is, you know, and Mark Gurman said this even months ago that it's gonna be a very long rollout, many features not even till 2025, but having commercials for it does feel like I don't know, it just feels odd, you know, that Yeah.
Stephen Robles:That I feel as though this is gonna create confusion. I don't think Apple typically tries to induce confusion in their product Yeah. But I don't know. Real quick, and then before we are gonna talk about MKBHD's wallpaper app. We will get there, but let's do a week with the iPhone 16 because it's been a full week with the iPhone 16.
Stephen Robles:16 I have my 16 Pro Max right here. We'll leather case. We're gonna talk about I think we're gonna talk about cases in the bonus episode, so if you wanna support the show, we're gonna talk about what cases to do with it, what what cases do you that actually work with it, and camera control. But, it's a big phone, Jason. I feel like the sick the 16 Pro Max, I can feel the largeness the largeness of the phone and Largerness.
Stephen Robles:It is, it is it is a big phone, but, you know, it's a phone. It's a phone. It's a pro phone. Do you use camera control at all as a former photographer?
Jason Aten:I use it all the time.
Stephen Robles:Do you?
Jason Aten:Yeah. I mean, the thing I do the most on my phone probably is take photos, maybe Slack. But, I mean, take photos is right there.
Stephen Robles:And you long
Jason Aten:and But
Stephen Robles:Do you so you launch the camera with camera control and or do you use the actual controls?
Jason Aten:Okay. So I have a really big dilemma here.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:The action button was a much better way to launch a camera and take a picture quickly, like infinitely better. Because if you set the action button to camera and you push it, it just boom, opened your camera, and then you push it again and it just boom, took a photo. This camera control thing is the only word I can use to describe it as, like, fiddly. Mhmm. Because if you if your screen is locked and you pushed it, it doesn't launch the camera.
Jason Aten:It just makes your screen light up, and then you have to push it again. And there's this weird animation where it makes it look like the camera is flying out of the camera control.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:Why? Why? It's totally unnecessary. Just make the camera appear. And then if I go to push it, like, I'm like, here.
Jason Aten:We'll take a picture of Steven. Like, I'm oh, shoot. I've half pressed it. So now I'm chain oh, now you're woah. 5 x.
Jason Aten:That's too much. Nah. We don't need 5 x. Nope. Now now I've started a video with the selfie camera.
Jason Aten:How did I even get to the selfie camera? And it's like I it's like yeah. Whereas so I would much rather go back to using the action button, but that's dumb because I can't do anything else with the camera control. Right? Like
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:It's not it's it's like oh, and so this is the so it tells you a lot about I wrote about this. And by the way, I feel vindicated because John Gruber agreed with me. He didn't read my article, but he said the same thing that you know that this is a big deal because Apple has added a button.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. It's a big deal.
Jason Aten:They spent 10 years trying to get rid of all the buttons.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And they added one back and they did it for the camera and they way overthought it and way overengineered it, and it's confusing to people. The the single thing I get the most questions about is why doesn't this thing do what I think it should do, which is if I push it, just take a picture.
Stephen Robles:Well and that's why I actually saw a lot of people saying just change the settings to do that. And so that that I actually made an entire video about the camera control button, because I was even confused when I first took it out of the box, like, what to do with it. And so I went through, like, all the controls, which is, like, you know, the when it actually goes to the camera, then the half press versus the full press, and you can jump into this is actually an iOS 18.1. I didn't realize this is in the beta. So once 18.1 comes out, you can go to settings, accessibility, camera control, and actually disable the light presses and the double taps, and just use it as a shutter button.
Stephen Robles:And Oh, man. So you can turn it all off, and you can just take a picture, and then that's it. And I actually think that might be more useful. I tried in this video, which I'll link in the show notes. I tried to find a few use cases that I actually thought were worthwhile for camera control, which was tough to see, like, what is this actually useful, and the few that I came up with was if you adjust exposure using camera control, it will lock the exposure automatically, and then you can actually tap on the screen to focus somewhere else, but the exposure will stay at what you set on the camera control, which is kind of cool because previously, like, if you just tap, your phone is gonna change the exposure and the focus at the same time.
Stephen Robles:So that was an interesting use case. I also thought the, zoom while video was kind of interesting. You can actually swipe to zoom while the video is recording. It was a little bit of a smoother experience than trying to, like, drag the zoom slider on screen up and down. That's cool.
Stephen Robles:And then finally, the tone setting. If you use that little d pad to set the tone in a photographic style, it's very hard to be precise. And I'm I'm a little anal about this stuff, like I don't want it to say negative 59. I want it to say negative 60. And so it's very difficult to get that with your thumb.
Stephen Robles:But you can actually use camera control to adjust the tone, and you get a little more precise number that way. And you can, like, lock it to a whole number, if that matters to you.
Jason Aten:Hold on. Hold on. Yeah. Hold on. Yeah.
Jason Aten:I have to stop you for a second. You know that that number is meaningless. Right? You should not care what the number is. What you should care about is what the image looks like.
Jason Aten:And if that's 17.394, then that's what you should bake into your photos and not be like, oh, no. It has to be no. I'm being for
Stephen Robles:I know that. I know that. But I see Tyler Stallman over here, professional photographer, says he does the tone at negative 50. And, like, Austin Mann said a number, and I was like, I want it at that number. I wanna try it at that exact number.
Stephen Robles:It is a meaningless difference, I know, to go from like negative 59 to negative 60, but I I like the precision of the whole number. So I was I was scraping the bottom of the barrel to find use cases for this thing. Okay? So exact tone number was 1, but I think the video zoom is is better use case, and then even more so the, the exposure and then having exposure locked. But, yeah, overall, it's like I do find it more fiddly than not, and especially with cases, which we're gonna talk about in the bonus episode.
Stephen Robles:I feel like that that makes it even more problematic depending on whether you have a cutout or you have, a you have a big cutout, some cases have little cutout, and then some have only Apple and Beats cases have the actual button. You have the Beats case on right now,
Jason Aten:don't you? I do. And I yeah. We can talk about it in a little bit, but, the the problem is that at least according to what Apple has said so far, the camera control is just going to get more complicated because they're adding to the pro versions another feature, which if you press it down halfway, it'll focus, and then you can press it down again to take the photo. There's just too many things that can like, this it should I know that we're not supposed to call it a button.
Jason Aten:I have my Post it note here still. You do not call it. But just make it a button.
Stephen Robles:I feel like the half the half press shutter is gonna be a challenge because the light press, it is not easy to initiate all the time. Like, sometimes you think you're doing a light press and nothing happens, and then you try to press a little harder, and it's like, oh, I pressed it I pressed the button. Also in the settings of accessibility, you can adjust how firm the light press needs to be, and I made mine lighter, so it actually takes less pressure to activate the half press, and that makes it a little better, but yeah, I don't know. I'm not sold on it yet. I'll try I'll try more, but I'm sure
Jason Aten:All of these accessibility controls should be baked into the actual camera. Like, there's they should have not shipped this without these level of control. I didn't even know these were here, so thank you. I gave you the watch thing, you gave me this. This is great.
Stephen Robles:What's weird is in the settings, if you go to, just the regular settings, there is and you go to camera, there's a whole settings pane for camera control there, like clean preview. I actually turned that off. Right. Because I wanna see all the controls all the time. Like, I don't want them to disappear, so I turn that off.
Stephen Robles:But all those, like, light press, firm press, and turning off swipes, all those settings should be in, like, the normal camera control settings pane. I don't know why they're they're putting accessibility. So
Jason Aten:So, like, I just turned off all those things in accessibility and now this thing does exactly what I want it to. There you go. I'm so happy. It just takes I have another action button and it just takes a picture. That's all I want it to do.
Stephen Robles:It just takes a picture. So let us know in the community social.primary tech dot fm, in the comments for this episode. Yeah. Are you using camera control? Did you change it to just be a shutter button?
Stephen Robles:I'm curious because I'm still not sure. I'm still not sure what what to do with it. But before we take a break and talk about a a wallpaper app, you, have some bullish thoughts about the AirPods 4.
Jason Aten:Listen. I just think that they did a very good job of creating a product in the middle between the entry level and the pro, and I've been wearing them for a whole week. Not only do I love the case size, which is fantastic. Yes. I I I think the the noise cancellation is plenty good enough for 98% of scenarios where somebody might want noise cancellation.
Jason Aten:The exceptions being, like, out of plane or very loud environment. But most of the time when I want noise cancellation, it's because I just want to be able to, like, focus. And I don't mind if there's a little bit of, like, other noise in the background, but I don't want any of it to distract me. So I think they've considering that they don't create a seal, I think they've done a really good job with that. I think they sound really good.
Stephen Robles:They sound very good. Sound quality is impressive. I would argue there's probably more scenarios I want AirPods Pro cancellation, like grocery store, walking a city street, all that kind of stuff. I'm curious, you know, I don't think it'll perform that well, but my argument is I don't think this is actually a mid tier because the AirPods Pro 2 are frequently, if not always on sale on Amazon for $10 more than these. And I understand, like, that's not Apple's pricing, but the fact that you can get AirPods Pro 2 at that price and if the question is AirPods 4 or AirPods Pro for $10 more, I feel like this is a hard like, unless you just really don't like in ear silicone tips, then, yeah, AirPods 4 is great.
Stephen Robles:But as far as feature set, sound quality, noise cancellation, $10 more. I feel like the AirPods 4 is a tough I I would I think just throwing this out there. Maybe these will go on sale sometimes, like, on Black Friday for, like, a 150. I think that would be a really good deal, for people, or even a $140. If these were just by default a 150, 160, I think and then there was not even, like, a bottom tier, or maybe those drop even further, I think that might be a little more compelling pricing structure, but it's hard to recommend these when you can get AirPods Pro 2 for $10 more on Amazon.
Jason Aten:That's understandable. Like, right now, AirPods Pro 2 are 189. These are 169, and the base ones are 129.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:So I can understand that, but, like, the most people, though, are thinking, if you just look at, first of all, the titles is ridiculous. The title, even Apple's official title is AirPods 4 wireless earbuds Bluetooth, tooth earbuds with active noise cancellation, adaptive audio, transparent mode. Oh my gosh. This is so It's long. It's long.
Jason Aten:Google, you've killed the Internet and Amazon is right there with you.
Stephen Robles:Right, buddy.
Jason Aten:But if you think about that tier, you're like, oh, I can save $20, and I can get, like, active noise cancel. Like, I get all the features. I get the h two chip. I don't get high fidelity sound, but I'm half deaf. I don't know what that means anyway.
Jason Aten:Like, I just think, like, anyway. No.
Stephen Robles:No. No. I think they're they're a good deal. I do like I think the compact case is, like, underrated. I do think, like Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Because I showed them to my wife, and she was like, she has the AirPods Pro 2. And I showed her the case, and she was like, oh, I really like that. That would fit in my purse way better. And so that is real, you know, the the difference between the AirPods Pro case and and AirPods 4. So Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. They're they're solid headphones, and, like, my my whole video review, very bullish on them because I do think they sound great.
Stephen Robles:I wish they had a U1 chip, like the AirPods Pro 2. That's the only other thing. Like, you get the you know, you get the how far away they are, and you can make the case make a sound, which is the key find my feature, but, yeah, I mean and the noise cancellation is good, but I'm I'm probably gonna stick with my AirPods Pro 2. I mean, are you gonna wear I'm
Jason Aten:not gonna buy I'm not gonna buy a pair of these, but I am gonna probably never return them. I'm just kidding. No. I am gonna just wear I like using them. I've been wearing them quite a bit.
Jason Aten:Yeah. If you if you said to me, you can only keep 1, I would keep the AirPods Pro 2. Yes. That that is true. Because there are gonna be scenarios where I would like to have them for traveling, that kind of thing.
Jason Aten:Right. But if that wasn't the case, I could absolutely be happy if this was just all I had.
Stephen Robles:So For sure. No. No. They're good. And I like how secure they stayed in the secure they stayed in the case when I dropped them out of my pocket.
Stephen Robles:Again, I don't know if there's some magnet difference there, but they didn't fly out.
Jason Aten:Super important.
Stephen Robles:They didn't get, ejected. Speaking of security, you like how I did that? I actually by playing that line right there. Speaking of security, this episode is brought to you by 1Password, but not just any 1Password. 1Password extended access management.
Stephen Robles:Here's what that means, that maybe you're over the IT of your company or you know somebody who knows somebody, your company security listen, it's like the quad of a college campus. You know, there's nice paths, you go down the yellow brick road and all that, where IT approves the apps, you use Microsoft Authenticator for everything, which I just can't stay in that app, but and that's why Jason put it in his doc last week for fun. But so you know, it's a nice path that the IT wants every employee to go down. Then there's the paths people actually use to get around all the security things, because they just wanna use their devices like they wanna use them. That means non employee identities, shadow IT apps or unmanaged devices.
Stephen Robles:Well, most security tools only work on those happy brickpads, but a lot of security problems take place on the shortcuts. 1 password extended access management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps, and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, and every app is visible. 1 password extended access management solves the problems traditional IAM and mobile device managers can't. It's security for the way we work today, and it's now generally available to companies with Okta, Microsoft Entra, and in beta for Google Workspace customers.
Stephen Robles:You can try it out today. The link is in the show notes. You can also go to 1password.com/primarytech. That's the number 1 password.com/primarytech. You could check it out today.
Stephen Robles:1password.com/primarytech. The link is in the show notes. Thanks to 1password sponsoring this episode. Jason, have you tried any wallpaper apps recently? Just curious.
Jason Aten:I've never tried a wallpaper app.
Stephen Robles:Can I tell you
Jason Aten:just I didn't know that was a thing?
Stephen Robles:It is a thing. I'm gonna tell you right now, the best wallpaper app at basicappleguy.com.
Jason Aten:Well, sure.
Stephen Robles:But after basicappleguy.com, Unsplash is a great free app to get free royalty free images, and they actually have a whole section specifically called wallpapers where images are formatted for devices and high quality. Unsplash, great after that. But our friend, I mean, everybody's well known tech YouTuber, Marques Brownlee, unleashed a wallpaper app called Panels earlier this week. The only way you would not have heard about this is if you literally live under a rock. I think, even my mom heard about it.
Stephen Robles:No, she probably didn't hear about it either, but, he released this app called Panels, and of course, you know who MKBHD is. He's the largest, tech YouTuber, over 19,000,000 subscribers, and he released his app called Panels. He was excited about it. He launched it in his most viewed video of the year, which is his iPhone 16 review. He talked about it right there at the beginning of the video, launched panels, and immediately had a huge amount of backlash, because for several reasons.
Stephen Robles:1, you have to watch ads just to download the standard def version of the images, which there's a little bit of know your audience. He's a tech YouTuber. His audience are very tech centric people. They're gonna want the high resolution wallpapers for their devices. To get those, you have to pay, and it's $50 a year or, like, 11 or $12 a month subscription for the app.
Stephen Robles:People were not happy about the ads and the SD quality, nor were they happy about the pricing because it seemed a little steep, although MKBHD and his team said that they're gonna provide more value for it. Also, the app had a bunch of privacy permissions that were very suspect, like you would access they want access to things like your location and tracking and all this kind of stuff, and it's like, for downloading wallpapers, this seems like an odd privacy choice, all the privacy things, so that was another issue. And there was a another, like, they're splitting proceeds with artists 5050. So he's he was trying to curate artists to submit wallpapers, and he would split the, the money 5050 with those artists, but if you scroll through the app, it really seemed like a large majority of the artists in there were people on his own team, like the people on the MKBHD production team. So all those things together, and it was not a good launch, for MKBHD.
Stephen Robles:It was very, I mean still on social media, just people will not stop talking about it. It has been just non stop. I will only share one meme that I actually thought was kind of fun. This this was, you know, MKBHD is also famous for like killing products and devices like the Fiskar Ocean, and so this this one was pretty good. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, and it's a picture of MKBHD having killed Fisker, the human AI pin, the rabbit R1, and now his own panels app, and I thought, okay, I'll give you that one.
Stephen Robles:That's kind of funny. So he came out and apologized. Well, maybe not apologized, but he he said, he tweeted this on x. He says the first thing we're gonna do is fix the excessive data disclosures, transparency, we never actually ask for your location, Internet history, whatever. So they're working to fix that, and he said as far as pricing, this I'm reading from his tweet, quote, I hear you.
Stephen Robles:It's our own personal challenge to work to deliver that kind of value for the premium version. Weekly Friday drops are already starting. I'll also be dialing back ad frequency for the free experience, and it seems like that already happened. Now instead of having to watch 2 ads to download a wallpaper, you can download 1 ad, and he didn't really say anything about lowering the pricing, but he said that he will try to provide enough value to justify the pricing. Then the last follow-up, that was posted on September 24th, and then September 25th, which was yesterday as we're recording, Brandon Havard, who's on the MKBH team, MKBHD team said, we're fixing it.
Stephen Robles:It was a 3 word tweet. We are fixing it. I think so just quickly, my take. He received so much hate, and so much he was lambasted so hard over this, and some of it is warranted, like, I think this was a misstep for MKBHD. I don't understand, like, I I think people the Internet, I will say, I think people on the Internet really love schadenfreude, which is the idea of, like, someone gets it who had it coming, or someone, you know, in higher status, power, whatever, like, gets it.
Stephen Robles:I think that's a shame. Like, I don't think we should overly criticize it because he's a large creator and people as you know, maybe he has a lot of money, whatever. So I I do think it was overdone, people just going too far. I also like, this was not the first product that MKBHD launched. That's not a video.
Stephen Robles:Like, he has partnered with Ridge, like, he's actually on the Ridge board or whatever, and so that is a product that he is a part of. And even more directly, he released shoes. Like, he did the Adams shoes with MKBHD, and that was not, not the same blowback as with this app. And I think because the shoes were cool, people knew the value that they were getting, like, they knew the brand, Adams, like, they were cool shoes. So he's successfully launched products outside the video YouTube realm to high acclaim.
Stephen Robles:People enjoyed those things, and it's not been this kind of backlash. This, obviously, we missed that for multiple reasons, but I also just kinda feel bad because if he ever wants to do another app, like, this is gonna haunt him for the rest of his YouTube creative career, like, if he ever says, like, hey, launching an app, and it is a a great contacts app for your iPhone, the first 1,000 comments are gonna be like, is this like the wallpaper app? And so I do feel bad that, like, this is going to color any future app aspirations that he or the MKBHD team might have, but it was clearly a misstep. He's working to fix it. I hope that they go far in the other direction in the fixing it realm, and just make a better app, like, it's actually not a good app.
Stephen Robles:I downloaded it and looked at it, and it's like this this feels like a kinda crummy wallpaper app that you would get from the App Store, and it's it's not great. So I don't know. You saw all this breakdown. What do you what's your take, Jason?
Jason Aten:Yeah. I think that the unfortunate thing is that up to this point, MKBHD, which by the way, if your YouTube channel name is MKBHD, you should not have SD wallpapers in your app. Like, that's just
Stephen Robles:That is a a
Jason Aten:brand miss.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Let's just be clear. But, you know, he has a very, squeaky clean, lovable purse persona. I mean and I've like, I've I've never actually, like, had conversations with him, but I've been in the same place as him on numbers of occasions. Everyone genuinely likes MBHD.
Jason Aten:Like, Marquez is very well respected, very well liked. He also part of the reason he can, like, destroy a company with a review is because he is so widely respected, and he just does it in in, like, he I mean, the video was, like, the worst product I've ever reviewed, but he wasn't he was not nearly as animated as I am just talking about, like Watch
Stephen Robles:us a little bit.
Jason Aten:Yeah. The stupid feature. Right? Like, my article about that was probably a 100 times more harsh than the article that actually killed those, like the rabbit r one or the humane AI bit or whatever. So like that, the the problem though is like, if you're going to put yourself out as the person who does it, you're kind of being like the professional sort of cynic And then to release something, it's I don't wanna say that it makes them look hypocritical because that's not it at all.
Jason Aten:But it's like you have put yourself on a very particular pedestal that a whole lot of people would like to knock you off of because you have a lot of power and a lot of reputational, you know, credit in the bank, and then you chose to spend it on a thing. Mhmm. It's like you set a lot of that reputation on fire for something that can't possibly have been worth it. And so here's the thing. I saw this.
Jason Aten:I I'll see if I can find it, and I'll send it to you. But, like, one of the reasons I think people reacted so negatively towards this is that it feels like what happens when someone has a massive audience and they start to think, what more ways can I monetize this audience? Because up until now, it seems like because he had the dbrand skins. He's got the shoes. He's got the Ridge wallet.
Jason Aten:All of those things, at least, seem like have been an incredible success.
Stephen Robles:Merch. Like, he's got it on
Jason Aten:store? Great. Tons of it. And, like and and the truth is that if you get a big enough platform on YouTube, you're a moron for not doing that stuff because you're splitting AdSense with you you with you know, you might have sponsors. But, man, if you have, what, 7,000,000 people that watch a an iPhone 16, just the law of large numbers.
Jason Aten:You might get 2 sponsors for that video, and they might pay you 30 grand a piece. But, man, if you could sell to 10 you know, 4, 6, 5, 7, 9, whatever percent of the people who watch that, like, it's a way better like, it's just smart business. Yeah. But it feels to people, like, maybe he's taking advantage of that a little bit because it's like the app was just not that good.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And the scenario, it's like, you you could have spent a lot of your credibility on something amazing. Right? Imagine if MKBHD had introduced some kind of a camera app or something. Like, I mean, there that's a crowded space, and it's really complicated. But I'm just saying, like, he could have done that.
Jason Aten:He could certainly have afforded to pay people. He could probably afford to buy Halide. I don't even know. I was like,
Stephen Robles:I I honestly so he tweeted a couple days before saying uploading, which he typically does when he's uploading a video, but he said uploading to the App Store. And frankly, I I love MKBHD, like, his videos are great, like, I watch pretty much every one of them, and when he when he said that I was, like, oh shoot, this is exciting. Like, I was excited to see what kind of app is he gonna launch, even if it was just the MKBHD app or he could watch his videos in the app and buy his stuff in the app, like even that I feel like would have been more well received. Maybe like a community. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Maybe an MKBHD community. I know he has Discord or whatever, but maybe an app that that streamlines that. And so for the hype to be that, which everything he says is gonna be hyped because he has so many followers, and then for that to be the follow-up, I think it was it was a bit of a let down in addition to the missteps of the actual product.
Jason Aten:It was the humane AI pin. They spent 10 years hyping this mystical something something something that everyone looked at and they're like, that was the thing that you made. That that Yeah. And so, like, people expect a lot more from from Marquez. And, like, again, I think I don't I do not think anyone should begrudge him.
Jason Aten:I agree with you about the whole idea that, like, people who are successful online, there are a lot of people who just can't wait to take them down a couple pegs. I think that that's wrong. Like, the guy has worked harder than anyone on YouTube to get to where he's at, and no one should begrudge him the opportunities. It's just it feels like a miscalculation. Like, this was the thing that you thought.
Jason Aten:Like, how did you not see that this was going to not go over very well?
Stephen Robles:Well, and then and I wanna the schadenfreude I mentioned before, the quick definition, pleasure derived by someone else's misfortune. Yeah. When you get pleasure from someone else's misfortune and that's where I feel like the response is is unfortunate, is because, like, if that is what happening by you tweeting about it, like, that's not great. But I think, like, what you just said, it is interesting for someone who has an entire team just knee deep in tech. Like, he has an entire team just tech people.
Stephen Robles:Like, any techie person can open that app and see, like, this is not a great app. Right. It's just just on the face of it. And it's it's weird, like, it is almost as if, like, you get this at big corporations when something is released that the CEO and all the people up at the top didn't even know was gonna happen, but someone lowered down the rung was, like, hey, listen, I got an idea. It's gonna make us a bunch of money.
Stephen Robles:Are you cool if I just do it? And then some leader goes, like, yeah, go ahead. And that's how you get these big corporations, like, in those environments just, like, launching not great stuff, because it wasn't, like, looked over by someone up higher, and it feels a little bit like that. Like, did everybody use this app for at least a week and feel, like, how that feels? Like, maybe some beta testing, give it to, like, friends and family?
Stephen Robles:And it feels like how I don't know how it could have had that kind of thought and testing and still ended up like this. And so that that part feels like the gap to me. So
Jason Aten:I agree.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. It's it's a shame. I mean, listen, he's gonna make changes, he'll fix it, and I I really hope it does not haunt him for the rest of his his career, which he'll still get. Listen, if his next video title is just I made a mistake, 10,000,000 views. I mean he's like, you know, he doesn't feel bad for MQBSD, but it is gonna be, you know, a mark and so that stinks.
Jason Aten:Yeah. The the seriously, like, the baller move would be to release a video that says the worst product ever made.
Stephen Robles:That would be great. That would be great. And I think it would be funny. He could do it. He should do it.
Jason Aten:Absolutely. That's that would fit his personality a 100%. If there's someone on if there is not someone on his team telling him that right now, then they should all be fired. Because they made this app, and then they didn't give him that advice. Come on.
Stephen Robles:He a 100% needs to do it. Alright. Let's cover some of the quick news. OpenAI had a bunch of people leave the company. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Namely, Mira Mirati, who was the company's CTO. She was the she was the CTO, correct?
Jason Aten:Or Yeah. And then she be yes.
Stephen Robles:Yes. She was CTO. Correct. And then the chief research officer also left, Bob McGrew. And she left with this, letter on x and it seems like, you know, I followed some other OpenAI people on Twitter and they were saying, like, you know, she's just taking a break.
Stephen Robles:She's been at the company for many years and all of that. And then some of the other responses are like, what did you see? What did you see behind the curtain at OpenAI that made you leave? But it's interesting. So the CTO, Mir Mirati, leaving, top researcher, and this is all on the heels of OpenAI trying to switch over to a for profit model, which OpenAI up until now has been like, we're gonna be a nonprofit safety OpenAI, and it's like, no.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. We're gonna be profiting. So
Jason Aten:Well, OpenAI is weird. Okay? First of all, like, I don't know if you did this on the episode or if it was when you and I were talking before. I would point to the episode of the Verge cast that released, I think, sometime last week where the it the the episode is like they're trying to make God or something.
Stephen Robles:Eddie Robertson was with David Pearce, and they talked about it for, like, the first 20 minutes. Yeah.
Jason Aten:And and, the the the the basic idea is they were talking about this new model that OpenAI made. But OpenAI is weird because, first of all, they started as a research corporation, and the whole point was, like, they were trying to figure out, like, if this technology was possible and how to build this sort of technology. It would be like Los Alamos. Like, you know, the they're trying to figure out, like, nuclear whatever. Right?
Jason Aten:Like, can we do this? Or if you were someone who just you dedicated your life to figuring out whether or not nuclear power could be a thing. Okay? And then suddenly you figured out that it could, and you figured out that there was a lot more money to be made in building the power plants and selling the electricity than in just continuing to research whether or not it can be safe. And that's essentially what OpenAI has sort of this evolution has gone through.
Jason Aten:So you have a lot of people who were a part of the company when the whole mission was, you know, creating this technology for the betterment of humanity, who are now looking at the possibility of, like, oh, but we could productize this.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And let's be honest, OpenAI is not good at making products at this point. They just aren't good at that. Right? Now I'm not saying all the products are bad. They just it's confusing.
Jason Aten:The names are weird.
Stephen Robles:The
Jason Aten:difference between different like, there's you can you can transcribe audio and chat g p t, but that's not the same thing as, like, the voice mode, which is different. Like Right. There's just a lot going on there. And so they're that's not a great thing. And they're definitely pushing very hard to become a, I think, a for profit benefit company.
Jason Aten:So it's still meant to be like a company that exists for the better like, Patagonia would have been a good example of that kind of thing. Like, we exist for a purpose, for a mission, but we're still a for profit company. We're gonna make money. We're not and the reason they have to do that is because we talked about this. They can't continue to get people to give them 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars.
Jason Aten:They're they're raising money at a $150,000,000,000 valuation. They're trying to raise basically the most money anyone's ever raised for a private company. And the only way you can do that is if you can give people back profits. And currently, under the structure, the profits that you can get back are capped. There's a cap to the amount of and nobody wants to give you 8, $10,000,000,000, whatever it is if it's like, I can only get, like, a 15% gain on this because I'll put that money somewhere else.
Jason Aten:And the most interesting thing is in this transition, Sam Altman is going to get an equity stake, which he's never had. He's founder and CEO, but he has never had an equity stake. And it does feel like there's a point where it's like, this is going to be a $4,000,000,000,000 company. I would very much like to own 10% of it.
Stephen Robles:That would be wild. And, I mean, we talked about I
Jason Aten:mean, a 100% that's what's gonna happen.
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Jason Aten:A 100 it's going to be a multi $1,000,000,000,000 company
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And Sam Altman is going to own somewhere between 5 15% of it. Like, that's just gonna be the case.
Stephen Robles:And we talked about it on a recent episode, like, in the near future, it will go public, and when that happens, it's just gonna blow up. Like, it's as far as people investing in it, and it's, like, the valuation, it'll skyrocket. I'm curious, like, in that Vergecast, so the article I'll put in the show notes is this Verge article. That podcast is embedded in it, worth, talking about they think they're making God. And they talk about the levels of agency that they believe, like, there's 5 steps to get to the general AI or artificial general intelligence, basically, like, it's thinking for itself.
Stephen Robles:And step 2 is reasoning, and that's what that new model is, the GPT o one. You can actually use it. Like, I have it on the Mac app, and I tried using it. It is very slow compared to chatgpt4 and 4 0, but it's because it's doing something different. It's actually trying to reason.
Stephen Robles:And there were some, behind the scenes in the podcast, they talked about it, like, it was weighing options and thinking, like, maybe I should, give a false answer just because it's an answer, and I know that, like, I will be rewarded I'll be rewarded as a model if I give an answer rather than not. And it's like, well, I don't know if I want an AI thinking that way. And is it really thinking? No. It's not really thinking.
Stephen Robles:It's a computer, but this sure looks like thinking. And so Right. I'm like, all that together, it's like and and OpenAI has a couple options because, you know, you look at companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft. There's parts of those businesses that we don't typically see as consumers that actually are the moneymakers. Like Amazon, yeah, they make money from Prime and Whole Foods, but Amazon AWS, their like cloud service runs the Internet and that is a massive moneymaker for Amazon.
Stephen Robles:And when it comes to OpenAI, they have a part of their business that is that, like the OpenAI API that companies use, like Riverside for transcriptions and like all all these behind the scenes AI tools that are basically hooking into OpenAI. Like, there's an entire side of the business that they could choose to grow where they're the behind the scenes operator for providing the service and they could have huge companies paying them lots of money to do it. I think they'll still do that, but I think that there's this aspirational goal that Sam Altman has. And I imagine the people he gets to replace, Miramarati and these other researchers, they will likely share that goal of, like, we're actually trying to make something, like, groundbreaking AGI, whether that's good or not. Like, we'll try to be safe while we do it, but that's what we're gonna aim for.
Stephen Robles:And so it's gonna be curious the trajectory of this company because it is just I don't know, like, for better or worse, it's kinda just become the de facto AI name. Like, I feel like, you know, there's other companies out there that's Anthropic, and obviously, Meta has their LLMs and Amazon. Apple Intelligence maybe I don't think it's in the same conversation. I feel like OpenAI is the and ChatJPT, like, did the platform play, kinda like how Mark Zuckerberg was talking about how in the mobile era, it was iPhone and Android. And now in the AI world, like, OpenAI has taken a very far lead, and I don't think it's gonna change anytime soon.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And I think it's so the idea of artificial artificial intelligence is like a platform service, comparing it to AWS. Here's the thing. So AWS represented about $25,000,000,000 of Amazon's $150,000,000,000, let's just call it, of income in the Q2. Okay?
Jason Aten:So it's relatively small over the overall business, but it represented 9,000,000,000 of the roughly $15,000,000,000, or $13,000,000,000 of its profit.
Stephen Robles:Okay.
Jason Aten:Right. So it's like 2 thirds of its profit. Right? I mean, you would think about it. You're just, like, selling space on computer service.
Jason Aten:The marginal cost of that is, like, electricity and replacing the yeah. Every so often. Like, it's right? It's a good business to be in. But AWS doesn't exist if there's not an Amazon, which is a product.
Jason Aten:Because Amazon was a was a, an online ecommerce site. They built all of this infrastructure. They had x they built excess capacity of that that they could then lease to other people. Right. But you you still had to have an Amazon in order for there to be an AWS.
Jason Aten:Okay? The thing for chat g p or the thing for OpenAI is right now, yes, there is Microsoft, but the but Microsoft is essentially using chat g g chat g p t as its, like, service in there. But there is not a market in the same way that there was for cloud computing Mhmm. For this AI tool right now because there are not enough customers who you have to have a product first, and nobody has quite figured out what the product is. AWS had a product.
Jason Aten:It was Amazon. It was the largest ecommerce site on the Internet. And, yes, now they power basically everything. If you ever, like, go on to down detector and you're like, why does my Netflix buy Outlook mail, my thing that AWS is having a bad day? Like, that's probably the case.
Jason Aten:Right? There's basically 3. There's AWS, there's Microsoft Azure, and there's Google Cloud. That's the entire Internet. And I think that 40% of that is, like AWS.
Jason Aten:Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so but I do think that that's the reason right now, and that kinda goes back to what we're talking about.
Jason Aten:You could be somebody who just sat down and thought about, like, what is the ideal cloud computing scenario? Let's just build that. But at some point, you're like, or we could use it to sell random widgets made in foreign countries to Americans who just need new charging docks. Like
Stephen Robles:Or this. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Exact or the or whatever it is.
Stephen Robles:Like the Rabbit r one.
Jason Aten:So you're so they're they're realizing that right now the money is in the product, the the finding a way to productize it because no one else is that's the thing. No one else has been able to do that very well. Now Microsoft and its Copilot thing, fine. Like, we'll see. Microsoft is different because it's basically just saying to businesses who are already paying for a license for all these products, pay us $20 more, and you could, like, lay off 3 people.
Jason Aten:Seems like a good deal.
Stephen Robles:Right. Well, and that's why I think the agents part like, customer service, there's already a bunch of chatbots that run the customer service behind the scenes for companies, like, whatever, airlines and stuff like that. There is AI already there. But as that advances, I could see OpenAI really making a play to be, like, actually, it's gotten so good now that people will think they're talking to a real person, and you don't have to actually have real people on your customer service team.
Jason Aten:It's it's even more than that. So Salesforce just had what they called agent force. It was their big dream force con conference, and it was it was called they called it agent force. And the idea there is we're not just talking about a chatbot now. We're talking about a chat agent that can interface with you when you have a problem, and then it can actually solve the problem for you.
Jason Aten:So you're like, oh, hey, Verizon. It looks like you charged me for this phone. You know, you you added a a fee to my thing. Is there any way we could waive that? And the 8 the chat agent could actually have the conversation with you and then take action on your account.
Jason Aten:Like, it literally could do the work in place of a person. Like, that's what they mean by the agents. Like, it can actually do that work for you. It doesn't it can't necessarily think. It can't like, you still have to feed it, like, the information that can only act on a certain set of data.
Jason Aten:But, like, it's not just chatbots because we all hate those. Those are terrible. But you know why we hate them? Because they can't actually do anything.
Stephen Robles:Right? Yeah.
Jason Aten:They just can list they can hear your thing, and then it's like it seems like what you want to do is change your flight. Choose from 1 of the 7 following options. You're like, no. I don't want any of the 7.
Stephen Robles:Hear you saying is you would like another fee on your phone bill. Right. We've doubled your phone bill.
Jason Aten:But imagine if you could chat with Delta, and you're like, my flight's delayed. And instead of it saying, hang on. Let me whatever. It can be like, oh, yeah. Looks like this was really important.
Jason Aten:You wanna send in an ILC and I can book you on this flight that has an ILC and it's gonna go through this city instead. And it's like, it can actually do all that stuff for you.
Stephen Robles:Right. Right. I'm curious. Yeah. The next few years are gonna be interesting with OpenAI thing.
Stephen Robles:So but anyway
Jason Aten:Wild.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. That's OpenAI. One last thing and then, goodbye to a tech publication, I want to say, but before we do that, the Jony Ive profile in the New York Times, I saw this come up, I really wanted to read it, I've gone so far as the header. I saw this amazing picture of Jony Ive, It's it's him building his own empire. And, yeah, I just have not yet got a chance to read it.
Stephen Robles:But you read it. How was it?
Jason Aten:Well, there's a funny thing about the photos in this. I don't remember who it was, but someone online kept posting the photos from this article and said, now try it sitting up straight. Because in every single photo in this, he's, like, leaning at some weird article. There's one where he's, like, sitting at a table. Yeah.
Jason Aten:That one, like, it's like, okay. Now can we try it sitting up straight? I don't remember who it was, but it was it was I wish I could remember, but it was somebody who posted it on either threads or on on Twitter. Definitely. But, so, basically, it's a it's a good profile.
Jason Aten:I mean, Tripp Mickle, who wrote this, also wrote the after Steve book. Right. Right. Which was essentially like the future of Apple after Steve Jobs was gone. And he's the one who told a lot of the stories about how close Johnny Ive and Steve were and how that relationship was very different between Johnny Ive and Tim Cook and that kind of thing.
Jason Aten:I mean, the book's premise is kind of that Tim Cook ruined Apple, but I don't think you can make that argument because No. $33,000,000,000,000. But, you know, the the the newsy piece in here, one, he bought a block of
Stephen Robles:San Francisco.
Jason Aten:Real estate in San Francisco. His his love from company is based there and the headquarters for a new collaboration with OpenAI to build a, AI powered gadget device? I mean, this is right up your alley, Steve Steven. Are you like Yeah. You, like you got your checkbook out right now?
Jason Aten:Like, the the Apple card is waiting for the moment when this thing comes in.
Stephen Robles:From Johnny I, this thing is gonna cost $3,000.
Jason Aten:At least $3,000.
Stephen Robles:And it's gonna be, like, another weird yeah. I mean, yeah. I'll get it. No. I'm just kidding.
Jason Aten:It's gonna be made out. It'll be made out of adamantium and it will
Stephen Robles:No. If it's a if it's a Vibranium AI device, I might
Jason Aten:Oh, man.
Stephen Robles:I might do it. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna go read it, but yeah, it's an interesting piece. He's he's a fascinating dude. Alumini. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:We're not we're not gonna we need another UK accent than the Apple keynotes.
Jason Aten:We do need more product videos that are just Johnny and I talking about, like, the grounded edge of a MacBook Air, the curve.
Stephen Robles:Listen, he his his videos, I enjoyed them back in the day. I'm not gonna lie. I enjoyed them. But anyway, so that link will be in the show notes as well. That's from the New York Times.
Stephen Robles:And finally, before we get to our personal tech of of what I returned of the things I bought from the Apple event, I just wanted to say, goodbye. Imore.com announced earlier this week that they are powering down for good. And, Imore has an incredible history of, just previous journalists who have worked there, Renee Ritchie wrote for Imor for a long time. Matthew Casanelli had written there, Micah Sargent. I know her as Saturn on Twitter.
Stephen Robles:Who am I thinking of? She's at Apple now.
Jason Aten:Serenity Caldwell.
Stephen Robles:Serenity Caldwell was there. And I followed Imore for a very long time. I read their articles for a long time, especially when Renee Ritchie was there. And, you know, it's kinda sad to see another, you know, long time Apple blog just go this way, you know, the unofficial Apple web blog, that news recently where it was taken over and just became an AI farm, so that's no longer really a thing, and now Imore you know, I posted about this yesterday and, and someone said, like, you should you know, primary tech should write blog posts, and it's like, this is evidence of how hard it is to make, like, you write rank.com, and I think it's correct me if I'm wrong, a very different business model than trying to be a blog like Imore. And obviously, like 9 to 5 Mac, MacRumors, Apple Insider, like, they're still doing it, but it is not easy.
Stephen Robles:And typically, you kinda have to have a a wide range of, like, income streams for something like this because it's a lot of work to write this many articles. You know, it usually takes volume and speed. And, but but they did a lot of great work for a lot of years, and so,
Jason Aten:they will be missed. But yeah. Well, part of it is that if you are okay. Like, Daring Fireball, great example of a blog. It exists.
Jason Aten:It's it's it's John, and he sells ads 1 a week. And he does his thing, and it probably provides him with more than enough income to do what he's doing. Right. Right? Right?
Jason Aten:He has an audience. He like, he doesn't pay for for audience acquisition. He doesn't have to pay for distribution. He's, like, hosting it on a Linode server or something. Like, whatever.
Jason Aten:Like, I mean, I'm not making fun of him. I'm just saying, like, it's
Stephen Robles:type for his website. Yeah. The last 20 years. Yeah.
Jason Aten:It's it's yeah. Things get more complicated when you start hiring people and you start doing whatever. And then then you like, at some point, you come along someone comes along and is like, hey. You have an audience and you have this and all this content will pay for it. And then they start to think about, like, oh, well because I think they're owned by, future at at this point.
Jason Aten:And so and so the that's the that's where it starts to happen, where they start to look at, like, okay. Well, you're it's being measured differently because the people who own it are no longer the sort of the fans who started it.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:It's sort of a it's a different calculation. And that that part of the business is the same whether you're you're at one of these blogs or at Inc or whatever, Fast Company or Wired or any of those places. Like, pretty much at this point, like, Wired is a part of Conde Nast, which is, like, the largest. You know? The Verge is a part of Vox Media.
Jason Aten:Like, they've all been acquired by these different things. And so it is a very difficult business because, essentially, right now, finding traffic is very, very hard for online publications. It's very hard because links no longer have any sort of shareable quality on the Internet because no one, all the traffic sources, like referral services sources used to be Twitter, Facebook, Google. Right? Well, Google and Google or excuse me.
Jason Aten:Facebook and Twitter don't don't share links. They don't surface links to external sources because they want you to stay on their site. And Google BuzzFeed. Like Yeah. Well, yes.
Jason Aten:They put literally all the bath eggs in the one basket. But but even, like, Google, like, most of my traffic comes from Google Discover, which is a product I've never used. Like, I don't even understand how it works.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:It's true. Like but it's like so it's a it's a very complicated thing. And at some point, some of these smaller publications that have become part of bigger bigger ish companies Right. Those companies look at it and, like, this just doesn't make sense for us to pay these 12 people anymore to do this. Right.
Jason Aten:And that's unfortunate. I think it's super unfortunate.
Stephen Robles:It it is unfortunate. And, you know, Neil Lapetzel at The Verge, he always says we're gonna revolutionize revolutionize the Internet with blog posts. And, like, they're doing, you know, I like what The Verge does for the most part, you know, they do good work, but that is also a massive, like, company. You know, it is not just blog posts. They do multiple podcasts that have multiple episodes a week.
Stephen Robles:They have massive deals. They are also, you know, they have the entire video, YouTube side. You know, there's it is a massive company doing all these different things and it is very different to look at a company like Imore, which they they write they write blog posts, you know, that was like the main export. And, you know, obviously the Verge does a lot of that too, but it's just a it's not apples to apples, comparison for something like that. And so I just want to mention it because it is kind of sad.
Stephen Robles:I've read Imore for many years. My first foray into gadget blogs, I think it was back in, like, 2,006, 7, 8 was Engadget. Engadget was my first one and, you know, they're still around. It's very different, but I was following it back when when Nilay Patel was there, along with Josh Topolsky and Paul Miller, and many people that you know now, like Joanna Stern, was the ad and gadget way back then. And that's what I you know, got me into it, and and writing tech blogs was a dream.
Stephen Robles:And, you know, I still am glad that there are sites out there that do it, but, you know, sad to see another one kind of go this way. So goodbye, Imor. Last thing, before we get to the bonus episode, personal tech. You, I returned my Apple Watch Series 10, because I tried it. I liked it.
Stephen Robles:It looked really nice. Polished titanium, looks great. Loved how thin it was. Couldn't do the battery life, Jason. I couldn't do the battery life, and as weird as this sounds, the Digital Crown looked oddly small to me after coming from the Ultra.
Stephen Robles:Like The Digital Crown was
Jason Aten:the thing that did it for you. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:That was the battery life was really what did it for me, but the the Digital Crown, like, it looks so small on there after the Ultra. But I tried I wore it for, like, 3 or 4 days, and, like, I really loved how thin it was, honestly, and, like, the polished titanium looked great. I was also, like I've been in the Ultra aesthetic for 2 years now. I have all these bands that go with the Ultra. The battery life is just unbeatable, and the Series 10, I don't know if this is a watchOS 11 issue, because I have noticed my Ultra.
Stephen Robles:The battery may be dying a little faster than it used to, but I think it's a software thing. But even even dying faster than it used to is, like, oh, last 2 days instead of 3 or whatever. But, yeah, I'm just like, yeah. I'm sticking with the Ultra. Gonna be my watch.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I'm wearing the series 10 right now.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I see you.
Jason Aten:It's a jet black aluminum. I don't like the jet black aluminum at all.
Stephen Robles:You don't like it?
Jason Aten:It looks like plastic. Looks like plastic to me. I don't like the aluminum watches. I don't know. I just the polished titanium, maybe I think I'd like to see one of them in person.
Jason Aten:I'm not gonna buy I'm not gonna buy one. Apple Watch Ultra is fine. Right? I don't need an Ultra, but it's fine. Like, I I'm not gonna trade back the the battery life for it.
Jason Aten:I like the action button. I actually do use it. Yes. The screen size, obviously, they're basically the same. Right.
Jason Aten:But you know the other thing? You don't get the modular Ultra Face That which
Stephen Robles:Thank you.
Jason Aten:I actually like.
Stephen Robles:That was the other thing. Because, like, I that's actually my watch face. I use the modular Ultra Watch Face, and you can't get that on the series 10. And I just could not like, the modular duo, the regular modular just didn't do it for me. The modular ultra, like, it's just you get
Jason Aten:I actually the only reason I use focus modes other than for sleep is to change my watch face because I have 3 modular ultras depending on, like, is it a weekend and we're gonna be at soccer games and I need to see, like, different weather and different types of things? Or are we am I traveling and I wanna see flighty in the main spot? So that like, that's I I use focus mostly to change my watch face. I don't care about anything else. All my phone cases or all the oh, the home screens are the same.
Jason Aten:It's just changing my watch face. But, anyway, I, yeah, I I think it's good. I think that it I think that it the the this has as much reason for existing way more reason for existing than, say, the new version of the AirPods Max. This is a much better updated product because it is it gives people who don't need the rugged features
Stephen Robles:Sure.
Jason Aten:Of the Ultra a better experience.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:The other reason, though, this is the dilemma that I've had, Steven, because I really want to do the sleep apnea Right. Testing. I don't think it's available yet.
Stephen Robles:It's not available yet. On any
Jason Aten:of that. Mike Hurley said he got a notification about whether he wanted to opt in, and I don't understand that. And he thought it was because he was in the u anyway.
Stephen Robles:Maybe he was on the watchOS beta because I don't run the watchOS betas.
Jason Aten:I don't yeah. That's true. I don't either. But, so but I'm I don't like the idea that I'm giving up blood oxygen. I don't I don't I know I shouldn't care about that, but I do like so, like, this new vitals app, if you have a watch that has the blood oxygen sensor, that is one of the things that it will give you data on, on a, on a date, on a regular basis.
Jason Aten:And I liked that. And so it's like, so then I'm like, well, my actual favorite all time watch was the series 7 stainless that I have, which has blood oxygen, but won't do the sleep apnea. The ultra 2 that I own is too big to wear to sleep in.
Stephen Robles:It's fine. Just wear sleep.
Jason Aten:It's too big to wear to sleep in. That's not negotiable. So then I'm like, well, I still have a series 9 review unit that has that has blood oxygen, and it would do sleep apnea. So now I'm like, maybe I should wear the series 10 during the day so I can give it a good try.
Stephen Robles:Sure.
Jason Aten:Right? So I can get a and I'll wear the series 9 to sleep in.
Stephen Robles:Wow.
Jason Aten:And then when I go to kids' sporting events, I wear I know. It's it's super a first world problem that I'm having. Right?
Stephen Robles:Yes. That's okay.
Jason Aten:It's not even a first word world problem. This is like you were one of a 100,000 who bought, Rabbit r 1. I'm one of, like, 13 people that have this problem.
Stephen Robles:What band do you try to use when you sleep?
Jason Aten:So okay. So I had, for a while, just worn my series 7 to sleep in. Right?
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:And I just used the braided solo, loop.
Stephen Robles:You should try just the regular solo loop.
Jason Aten:I hate the regular
Stephen Robles:solo loop.
Jason Aten:That sticky, weird
Stephen Robles:Oh, no. No. Worst take worst take of the day. Worst take of the day. Solo loop is the best.
Stephen Robles:I'm wear literally wearing it right now.
Jason Aten:Solo loop. That's a that's a horrible watch band, buddy.
Stephen Robles:It is literally the best. Literally the best. I cannot believe I don't
Jason Aten:think I don't think you know what the word literally means.
Stephen Robles:Worst take. I'll take you ranting about watchOS 11. I will not stand for solo loop slander.
Jason Aten:You have to take my ranting about watchOS 11 because you had the problem.
Stephen Robles:I did. I did. No. But the solo the solo loop is such a good it's so comfortable. I don't know how you not like that.
Stephen Robles:That's My
Jason Aten:arms are too hairy maybe? I don't know.
Stephen Robles:I mean, I anyway. Okay. But anyway, the I love the watch was the series 10 was a great watch, but I'm I'm an ultra person. I did go in the store to look for the look at the satin black because I was like, if I'm not gonna get into the watch the series 10, then maybe I'll get a black one. It's not, it's not dark enough for me.
Jason Aten:I think it's I still think it's the best looking Apple Watch Apple's made in a long time. That's like looking like just the overall model.
Stephen Robles:It looks good. It looks good. But, I'm fine with, you know, I've and then I realized I bought the Milanese loupe, the new Ultra Milanese loupe, which is coming, I don't know, 2027 or whatever. I bought it for the natural titanium, and so I already have that on the way. And I'm like, you know what?
Stephen Robles:Just gonna stick with it. I'm gonna stick with it this year.
Jason Aten:Did you see people who are so mad that it's not magnetic? And it's like titanium is not magnetic. The Milanese loop is it has a clasp instead of people like, how dare they change this? There was such a perfect I'm like, titanium. It's it's not magnetic.
Jason Aten:You can't just make a magnetic clasp like you can on a stainless steel.
Stephen Robles:That would be the excuse for my arm hitting the doorways whenever I walk through. It's all because
Jason Aten:you're not magnetic?
Stephen Robles:Magnetic. Oh, okay. Maybe my personality is magnetic.
Jason Aten:That's to door frames, apparently.
Stephen Robles:Alright. That's the show. We're gonna go talk about cases. Look at look at all these cases I I've been testing. I'm so scared I'm gonna drop this on my coffee, but anyway, we're gonna talk about cases in the bonus episode.
Stephen Robles:You can listen to all of our past bonus episodes and this one by supporting the show at primary tech dot f m and click bonus episodes or directly in Apple Podcasts, you get them there as well. You also get an ad free version of the show and we have a great sponsor next week. I don't know if I should tease it. They were actually our launch sponsor. If you go back and listen to episode 1, they were our launch sponsor, so they're gonna sponsor a number of episodes, which we're very grateful for.
Stephen Robles:So that's next week, but you can get the ad free version if you support the show as well. If you haven't yet, we would appreciate a 5 star rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify or you can even do that in Pocketcast, and our transcripts are in Pocketcast now too. If you didn't know, we actually have transcripts. If you listen to the Pocketcast app, you can search the transcript, you see it there, it's very cool. So or you can also share timestamps of the episode in Apple Podcasts.
Stephen Robles:Did you know this? You can actually No. You can share a timestamp in an episode, but you have to do it from the transcription. So if you open the transcription in Apple Podcasts, tap a paragraph, and then there's a share button, and you can share Jason's horrible solo loop take by itself. You can share that timestamp on social media.
Stephen Robles:So yeah.
Jason Aten:And if anybody from Apple, Zach Khan, I know you're not on the podcast team anymore, and you don't probably care what I think, but take someone. Overcast has the one feature that I wish every podcast app, which is when you accidentally smack the phone and you jump forward 17 minutes, you can just go back real quick. Is good. That is when you have the live activity on the phone and you just pick up your phone the number of times that that happens, and I'm like, well, forget it. I'm not even I wasn't doing this anymore because I don't know where I was.
Jason Aten:Please, a podcast app. Just add that feature.
Stephen Robles:That would be a good feature. 10 or, yeah. Yeah. I I won't call out the whole app of podcasting, but anyway, yeah, the the feature would be great. Alright.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna go record about this episode. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next week.
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