714: Get the Bigger Pizza

I had a really great day yesterday. As did I, coincidentally. Casey was visiting New York. We met up. We'll talk about wine a little bit. And then I got to eat half of a pizza for lunch. We're going to have to post.

It's funny you bring this up. I almost started posting pictures from yesterday, and I thought, you know what? Let's see how we handle it on the show. I am past the state. I think all three of us.

I'm past the time.

I'm past the time.

I'm past the time.

I'm past the time.

I don't know, walking in a circuitous route because you forget that you need to toggle over to walking directions. And you hear my voice. You hear these dulcet tones say to you, the ATP Holiday Store is back, baby. And if you want to, you should pull over, not block the sidewalk, and go to atp.fm slash store.

And you will see some genuinely fantastic work pretty much entirely done by John Syracuse. So, John, take it away, if you please. What do we have on store or in the store this time? Okay. Well, so the theme for this year is John's disappointed that Apple doesn't put out better chips.

So we have a bunch of logo shirts, including a leftover logo shirt that we should have made last sale, but we didn't. So anyway, to start, our first two shirts are shirts that we've been talking about for a long time, but haven't done. If you're familiar with our logo, our show logo, you might be looking at it now in your podcast player.

It's a combination of the BMW M logo and the rainbow six colored Apple logo and the initials of our show, ATP Acc idental Tech Podcast, all in one logo. It's a great logo. Okay. And it does, you know, the stripes, the BMW M-ish stripes, there's six of them because it's the same colors in the same order as they are on the old style rainbow Apple logo.

And we've often talked about our logo and said, and also if you wear that shirt and someone mistakenly thinks that's supposed to be like a, like a pride flag logo, that's great too. Another meaning to throw into the thing because we support that. It's great. It's a happy accident. But we always have the idea.

Why don't we actually make ATP shirts with the pride colors in it? Because the pride flag colors are actually different and in a different order than the Apple logo colors, which are different than the BMW M colors and so on and so forth. So we have done that this year. We have a shirt called ATP Pride and it uses, I always forget the name.

I link to it. I have to look it up again. Like the traditional pride flag with, what does it get? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple is the order. And I tried to copy the colors exactly. And those replaced the Apple six colors logo. Okay. And we have a second shirt called ATP Trans Pride, which uses the Trans Pride logo, which has fewer colors.

But then I just repeated, I think they repeated in the flag too. It's like blue, pink, white, pink, blue. It's actually a different number of stripes than the other one, but we made it work. And I think both of these shirts look great. So now your ATP logo shirt won't be mistaken for a pride flag.

It literally is. Choose the regular pride flag. I forget what, again, I forget what the name of it is, but it's like one of the older ones. And the Trans Pride flag. And they come in multiple colors. Mostly neutral colors because they have like rainbow logos on them. But I really like the Trans Pride one that comes with like a light bluish or even the dark bluish shirt.

And it seems to go well with the light blue and pink and white logos in there. And of course, it's not just t-shirts. It's long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts and pullover ho odies and all the things with those logos on it. So those two shirts, ATP Pride and ATP Trans Pride. And for these two shirts, we are donating 100% of the profits from the sales of these two shirts to LGBTQ charities.

So I've chosen two charities for this one. It was very difficult for me to choose charities. I don't know a lot about this. And I'm looking at like Charity Navigator and trying to find good things or whatever. Here's what I came up with. If I've picked terrible charities, tell me and we'll change them. But if it's just like you prefer a different charity, maybe next time, you know, again, let us know.

Maybe next time we'll pick a different one. But here's what I picked for this one. I picked two charities. Again, 100% of the profits from both these shirts going to these charities. First one is Trans Lifeline. I'm reading from their website how they describe themselves . Trans Lifeline is a grassroots hotline and microgrants nonprofit organization offering direct emotional and financial support to trans people in crisis for the trans community by the trans community.

So this is like targeted on the ground. If you are, you know, in crisis, call this number. They will help you and they will give you money. And it's like, you know, real kind of grassroots stuff. The second one is Transgender Law Center. Again, reading from their website.

They are the largest, the largest trans specific trans led organization in the United States. Their advocacy and precedent setting litigation victories in areas including employment, prison conditions, education , immigration and health care protect and advance the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming people across the country.

So my thinking behind picking these two is one. It's like a really, you know, direct on the ground helping individual people thing. And two, the bigger picture fighting against the terrible laws that are happening in our country to try to take away rights from trans people. And you may be thinking, why are they two trans charities?

What happens to just generic LGBTQ charities? Let me tell you, I had such a problem trying to find a non- problematic generic LGBTQ charity that wasn't like involved in some kind of scandal or other thing or whatever. So again, maybe I'll try again next time.

But for now, I picked those two and I figured it's reasonable because right now in our country anyway, trans people are the ones getting it the worst. Everyone's getting it bad. Like, you know, marginalized people are not having a good time in America, period. But trans people are just really like they're the subject of half of the political ads and they're like such a tiny fraction of the population.

It's brutal. So anyway, that's what we're doing with those. Oh, and by the way, I said we're donating 100% of our profits from these shirts. Also, Cotton Bureau is kicking in $2 for each shirt sale as well. Oh, nice. I didn't know that. That's great. So there you go. We're not making a cent on those.

They are entirely a charity thing. And I think the shirts look great. Please buy them if you can. Yeah, for what it's worth, John has genuinely done a really good job with both of these. And we've said this in the past. And if I were you, I probably wouldn't believe us. But hand to God. This is God's honest truth.

We really don't make a lot from merch. We really, really don't. The costs for us are quite a bit higher than you think. I am fully aware that the cost for you is quite a bit higher than you would want. Honestly, it's quite a bit higher than we would want. But like John said, for the small amount that we would have earned off of these two shirts, we will be giving 100% of that plus the $2 from Cotton Bureau.

Thank you, fine folks at Cotton Bureau. We will donate that and we will follow up about it at a later date. More on terrible profit margins as we go to later products. But yeah, like again, if you just want to donate to these charities directly, it will give them way more money than buying a shirt. But the shirts are cool and for the shirts, like, you know, I don't know how many like influencers we have listening.

Steven Robles, if you're listening to the show, I know he wears like one of our M5 shirts or whatever. I would encourage people to buy one of these shirts and you think, oh, are you telling them so they can put it on so they can virtue signal and say how wonderful they are? No. The reason you're wearing this is to let more people in the world know that you are essentially a safe person.

Other people don't know what it means, don't care, whatever . It's a logo. Is that about tennis? Is that about, you know, BMW? Like no one knows or cares. But the people who do know and care will see this shirt on you and hopefully understand that you are a safe person. And I think that's important. And also, you know, just being seen, right?

People don't know what it is. Like if you that's why I encourage like YouTubers to wear it because I just wanted to be out there in the world and for someone to come upon it and say, hey, there's someone who recognizes my humanity. Boy, it's such a low bar. So it sounds terrible when I say that. But anyway. Yep. There you go. Those two products.

All right. So the next one is a shirt that I should have made last sale and I didn't. That's on me. My bad. We do shirts for like the M chips because it was like, can you believe Apple made chips starting with M and we have this BMW M based logo. Now we can combine them together. That was a happy accident. But then with the MacBook Neo, they put an A chip in a Mac and all these shirts are like Mac chips, right?

Because I love Macs. They put an A chip in the Mac and hey, our podcast begins with A. So we are making finally an A18 Pro shirt because we've had things with the M chips with the Pro thing and we had ATP shirt with an A and now we have an A18 Pro shirt.

We should have had it when the MacBook Neo can. We did have MacBook Neo shirts. You know, we had like the ones that were colored like the Neo's. Those are really cool. But we forgot to make an A18 Pro shirt. Now we have one. Finally, the mistake has been corrected. As for actual new chip shirts, Apple did come out with new chips.

They're not great, but they exist. M5 Ultra and M5 Ultra Interposer shirts are here. I remember how excited I was about the original Interposer shirt, but now my description of it is that Apple just can 't stop sticking Mac chips together. Maybe a little bit snarky, but we've always had that shirt of like the two Maxes, like one.

Those are rotated and connected to the other one, right? Max, Max. Anyway, so we do have M5 Ultra and M5 Ultra Interposer shirts. We always like to bring back one shirt from the past that we've sold in past sales. And this time we're doing the ATP graffiti shirt, which I think we only sold one other time and is actually one of my favorite shirts.

My kids have a couple of these. I love it when they wear them. They seem to wear them a lot. Maybe it's because it's not that recognizable. But anyway, it's the ATP logo, but drawn in palms graffiti, like the palm handheld. Their graffiti handwriting recognition. Like they would have a little guide telling you how to do it.

Like start with your pencil here and draw like this. So we're doing the ATP graffiti shirt again. And again, it's not just shirts. It's long sleeve sweatshirts, all that other stuff. Then, of course, we have the ATP logo shirt. We have the ATP zip hoodie. And the zip hoodie has expanded for the first time this year. This is a good year to buy a zip hoodie. But you've always sold, and it's a very nice, like soft black zip hoodie with an embroidered ATP logo on like the left chest.

And my kids have these and they use them all the time. They're great. And it's black because this is the rainbow logo. It kind of clashes with some stuff. Well, this time we have, first of all, two new weights. One or two new weights. We have a medium weight and a heavy weight. I think the medium weight might be the same as normal weight. But anyway, we definitely have a new heavy weight weight of this.

So you can get a thicker one if you want it. And you can get it in like grayish, bluish, white. It's like Apple products. It's like they're not really strong colors. Because the really strong colors would clash with the ATP logo. This has got so many colors in it, right? But you can get a white one.

And you can get a gray and kind of like a coral greenish blue. And the point is you can get ATP zip hoodies in different colors and different weights now. So please check out that product. Now, finally, the bad news. The ATP Polo. The cost to us, the cost of that Polo.

Blank shirt before we put our embroidered logo on it. Has gone up astronomically. Just, I don't even know if we're ever going to sell this again. But I figured because we just, we found out of this late breaking. It's like, uh-oh. The price got, so first of all, the price to you is going up by a lot too. But also, I cut the profit margins down to basically zero on this shirt.

And this may be the last time we sell it. Because it costs so much money just for the blank shirt before we even put a logo on it. Before there's any kind of profit. So, um, our profits on the ATP Polo shirt, if you buy it with the member discount, are measured in cents per shirt. Cents.

And the only reason to do that is because I didn't want to have a dollar amount that was, like, fractional. I wanted to have an integer number of dollars. And I didn't want to lose money in every shirt. So, if you ever wanted an ATP Polo shirt, you should probably buy it now and give us the, you know, handful of nickels and dimes that we're going to make on each one.

Because we may never sell it again. Because the price is just so high. It is our fanciest shirt, as the description says. It is very nice. I have a couple of them. But, boy, I don't know what happened with their price structure. But it has gone. Maybe they used RAM in the shirts or something. It's gone up by a lot. So, yeah, get your polos while you still can.

This may be the last time they're ever sold. And finally, we have the ATP hat, which is just a baseball hat with the embroidered ATP logo. All right. Sorry I took so long. Those are the shirts. That's the store. Store will be open for three weeks. If you are an ATP member, remember to go log in to ATP.fm. Go to your member page and get your ATP member discount code.

That will give you 15% off everything in the store. If you're not a member, just become a member, get the discount, and then cancel. It's really easy to do. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It saves you a ton of money. It saves you a ton of money. No, you do not have to cancel. You can also not cancel. We encourage you. Well, Marco and I, two-thirds of ATP, encourage you to not cancel.

People do it all the time. We see it happen. We get a bunch of membership bumps. People buy from the store, and then they cancel, which is fine. Like, get the discount. It's good. Also, gift memberships. That's also on the ATP.fm.com. If you want to ask for a gift membership so you don't have to pay for your own membership, you want to ask for it for the holidays, you can do that here.

There's a link that you can copy and give people and say, here, click this link and buy it for me. You can buy a gift membership from somebody else, another nerdy person in your life you think might want to be an ATP member. That's a link from this page as well. ATP star. Again, you'll hear about this two more times, and then the store will be gone, and Casey will yell at you.

That's exactly right. Yep. So, again, I will say this briefly. Every single time somebody reaches out and says, oh, no. Oh, no. I'm the one. I did it this time. It really happens every time. Like, Casey does this whole spiel, and it sounds like it's a joke, and it's not.

It actually really happens every time. People do write in and joke to us about it, but then there 's the legitimate people who are like, I know, haha, funny, but it actually happened. Yep. So, be not that person. I almost said be that person. Don't be that person, and instead, go to ATP.fm.

Thank you to John for sponsoring the show. All right. Let's start with some follow-up. We need to talk about the home view, and there's been a lot of, like, snarking and chuckling and also theorizing about, hey, when was this thing, this hardware, built?

And according to Mark Gurman, finished units have been sitting boxed up in warehouses for the better part of a year, waiting for software to catch up. Whoopsie doopsies. Yeah. Love that concrete info, although when we get the hardware, presumably there's usually, like, some way to tell from, like, the serial number or something to know.

But, yeah, that's got to hurt. I mean, it makes sense. Like, when you look at the hardware, like, it is basically, like, regular Apple, you know, as I kind of described as, like, you know, Apple's stock colors of aluminum, it's like, yeah, it's an aluminum, you know, bezel screen on top of a HomePod subwoofer.

Like, that's, yeah, they could have made that years ago, and apparently they did. And, yeah, the hard part was the software and Siri. So that, this is, you know, a little bit interesting, but really not very surprising at all. Paul Hearing writes, I was surprised at how expensive HomeView is.

It's almost four times the cost of an Amazon Echo Show 8, which lists for $149, but is almost always on sale somewhere for around $80. I couldn't believe those prices, so I looked up some prices . And we will link to what I looked up. Again, Amazon changes prices all the time, so maybe by the time you follow these links, the prices will be different.

But this is what I looked up. Or it could be that because you're the person following these links, maybe it'll change the price for you. But what John found was the Echo Show 5 was $100, Echo Show 8 $200, Echo Show 11 $250, Echo Show 15 $350.

John, do you know enough about these to give me the two- second overview on what the differences are? I mean, I think the numbers are basically just screen size. So in that case, like with a five-inch screen, the Echo Show 5 is closer. But, like, it really just shows the range. That Amazon Echo, Echo Show is their Amazon Echo thing with a screen on it.

They have four models that span from $100 to $350. And so Apple still is kind of, they're at the high end of that range, but they're in the range, they're in the mix. Now, granted, you're going to say, okay, well, Amazon's $ 350 one has a 15-inch screen, and Apple's $300 one has like a 5-inch screen or a 6-inch screen.

That's not close. Well, I still think it is a pretty reasonably priced product. Again, maybe because they did build them a year ago back when all the components cost less. But we'll see if the price suddenly increases if they actually sell through all the home views that they made, which is not a sure thing given how long it took them to try to sell through the big HomePods.

And we had some interesting thoughts, genuinely interesting thoughts, about wall mounts and pricing and whatnot. So MVK writes, I can't decide.

I waffle back and forth if I think this is 100% right or 100% wrong. I don't think Apple cares how it looks in your home because no one's, you know, someone comes over and see that they'll think it's junky. But like, man, people do all sorts of stuff with Apple hardware as it is. But it's an interesting theory. I mean, we'll get one more theory and then I'll give my, what I think is the more obvious answer.

But anyway. Yeah, I think this is more of a justification than a reason . I think it's like, it's a post-hot like, well, we want to capture as much money as possible from professional installers and high-end builds. Well, this is also a reason that this might be a decent idea. So Ben O'Matic writes, if the wall-mounted model was even $50 less, Amazon would explode with cheap base units, with speakers, with a mount and a USB-C connector.

My guess is that Apple doesn't want to incentivize a market that will result in lots of cheap off-brand versions of the product on countertops and in social media feeds. I think that Amazon's still going to have tons of mounts for these things. Because remember, the ones that Apple commissioned from like Schneider Home or whatever are insanely expensive.

So you're still going to see all that stuff. But yeah, there's lots of theories. about how if they made them a different price, everyone would buy the one without a base. But I'm not sure about that. Because I think people like the speaker. I mean, the speaker part of it. And if they know they're getting one with, it so clearly doesn't have any place for a big speaker in it. Anyway, I think they're just the same price because that's just an Apple thing to do.

It's kind of amazing that that's not true of some Apple products. Like for a lot of the past, you know, monitors with and without the, like you complained about it, didn't it? The Visa mount was the same price as the one without it, but then Apple adjusted it. It's rare when Apple does actually make that kind of adjustment.

Usually it's just, this is the price of the product and you can get the wall mount or not. And yeah, the cost to us is different, but we don't pass that on to you. And that's just the Apple way. All right, Jan or Jan probably, Wedekind writes, Wedekind, I'm so sorry. Just pick one of those and hopefully it worked right. The best thing about the HomeView is the dozen Chinese copies that will drop very soon, probably with OLED and a Linux variant so we can tinker with Home Assistant.

To be clear, this is not my pseudonym. I did not write this, but I agree with the sentiment. Yeah, that's interesting. Like that's the, one of the effects that Apple has is regardless of what, whether or not what Apple has done is a good idea, is it a good idea to have a little R2D2 with an arm and a screen on it?

Doesn't matter if it's a good idea. If Apple does it, people will copy it because it looks like Apple. And so you hope the thing that Apple does turns out to be a good idea so that the copies are good products. But very often the copies are just like Apple in all of the good and bad ways.

And if Apple does something stupid, then you have a million stupid copies. Remains to be seen if the HomePod form factor, the Home, I did it again, the HomeView form factor is in fact the right size and shape for that. But either way, there will be copies. Jimmy writes, quote, who's going to have a hole in their kitchen island to snake a USB-C cable down?

Quote, me. And Jimmy provided a very helpful image where there is one of those like desk grommets, is that the word I'm looking for? that has a, what appears to be an iPad on a mount coming, being powered by power that runs through the grommet. And one of the, is that the 12 South dingus that you can charge?

Like the travel dingus? Something like that. Anyway, we'll put a link in the show notes of the picture. But yeah, sure enough, in a grommet through the kitchen table. Well, yeah, so it looks like there's like marble or some kind of stone in one half and then wood on the other. And thankfully, they put the hole in the wood half. Right. Now, that being said, like I assume this was kind of a dig at John Gruber's review where he pointed out like no one ever has a hole in their kitchen island for this.

We said that on the show. I thought we said it as well. Yeah. Everybody said it. Everybody. Yeah. And I think like it is true that most, most kitchen islands don't have holes in the middle of them. And one of the biggest reasons why, I mean, besides the fact that, you know, people tend to not to have new kitchen islands installed that often.

And so it's, it's not something that you get, that, you know, every couple of years you get to reevaluate your needs. but also you do have to worry about like, what if liquids spill and pour into that? What are they pouring into? And is it going to damage anything? Are you going to be able to clean it?

Is it going to be a problem? And so, yeah, most of the time it, people don't design things this way. So it is a valid complaint of like how you can plug this thing in. But I also think like most people are not going to have the home view in the middle of an island.

It's kind of a weird position. They're going to have it like, you know, when you look at where do people put Amazon echoes and stuff, they put them like against the wall. First of all, they put them where the outlets are, but they put them like in the corner or on the part of the island that touches the wall or whatever. It's, it's not something that, that, you know, people, despite the weird Apple commercial, like are going to be swiveling around all the time.

Like, I think mostly it goes like in a corner or against a wall. As I alluded to last time, I think it is currently against code in at least some states in the US to have outlets on the side of kitchen islands that used to be allowed. And I think they changed it. I might be wrong about that, but there's, there's a bunch of electrical issues.

Let's just say, electrical issues related to kitchen islands and where they get power. And like you said, what, what's going on underneath the kitchen island? Yeah, I believe it was explained to me when we did a kitchen renovation a few years ago and we were actually told specifically that they can't put an outlet on the side of the island anymore because apparently the rationale that this electrician said was that people can like, if you walk by it and you accidentally pull something, like if you hit the outlet and you pull something off the counter that's electrically powered, that can be bad.

And typically the codes are designed to avoid hazards like that. All right. We have a couple more notes with regard to the HomePod. Now I did it. HomeView. It's hard to say. Derek Martin writes, I was surprised to see that the HomeView screen doesn't have identical dimensions to the Duo screen because they're so close and it could save developers time and money.

I'm with you on, it seems like it would have been similar, but I don't really think it's going to save developers much time because there really is no third party story for this. Yeah, it's not an app platform like CarPlay already adapts to a bunch of different sizes and shapes. So I get the idea, like if it was 1.4 by one instead of one by one, but I think it being square definitely is the design they were going for with the little cute factor.

Yeah, but also like the, so much of the UI is widgets and, you know, things that are basically like, you know, widgets in new contexts and the developer story for this, I mean, first of all, the reason I laughed is that Apple does not care to save developers time and money, ever.

That's also true. that is the last thing that Apple will prioritize. What's the coolest version of this product we can make? Period. And developers do what you got to do. Like that's, that's it. But anyway, the main developer story here is widgets and there is a small square category of widget.

The same one on your iPhone, if you do like, you know, the smallest widget size, it's like, it's, you know, two by two square icons. That size is what's shown in standby mode. And developers, like that's the only thing we can really do. And it seems to be using that same kind of system.

And so they just, they just blow that size up and show it at larger, you know, pixel density, you know, render, but it's still that, that class of widget being shown here. Those widgets are square. And so Apple can very easily tile, you know, a two by two grid of them and do whatever they want over there.

So I think there's a lot of things they're taking advantage of with like, you know, doing a square screen for a bunch of square widgets that are both theirs and third party. And as for the CarPlay API side of things, CarPlay screens have never been fixed resolutions and sizes. They've always varied and been kind of like, you know, a general, you know, class of interaction that like, well, you can expect to have approximately this minimum size, but it can also be massive or it can be different shapes and have different capabilities.

And CarPlay itself is fairly adaptive to different sizes. So in, in this particular case of the HomeView, these concerns were not that significant. Finally, from Rick Allen, will Marco be adding CarPlay support to Unforgetful so it will show up and work on the HomeView?

This, reading this in the show notes earlier, is the first time I've ever considered this. I don't know if Apple would let a Reminders app apply for the CarPlay entitlement and get it. because like, not everyone can actually make CarPlay apps.

Reminder, look out for that pothole. Yeah, right. Like you, so you have to apply for the special CarPlay entitlement and then you have to agree to a bunch of conditions, you know, things like you're not going to like kind of wedge a game into it so people would be distracted while driving like by playing your taxi adventure like through CarPlay or whatever.

Like, you have to like agree to certain terms that you're going to be, you know, reasonably safe and not try to get around restrictions and stuff like that. But Apple is, I believe, human reviewing all of those, I think. They at least used to be and I think they still are. So, I don't think they would let that in but if they did, not a bad idea.

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All right, let's talk Apple TV. We had some discussion with regard to the price history. John, can you tell me about this YouTube link, please? Yeah, I had a recollection of this but didn't remember the details so I looked it up afterwards and here we are.

In the Apple event in March 2015, I forget what kind of event it was but I don't think it was like a major one. At that event, Apple lowered the price of the Apple TV from $99 to $69. I had totally forgotten that it was that low.

I was going to guess that they had lowered it to $99. No, they lowered it to $69. So that $69 in March 2015 is equivalent to $100 today, roughly. so still pretty cheap and this was the third generation Apple TV, basically the one before the Apple TV HD was introduced in September of 2015.

So it was kind of the end of life of the non, the pre-HD Apple TV but it was still that same black puck. I think it was a different, you know, it was like flatter and squatter or whatever but anyway, just to give you an idea of how far we've come for Apple TV prices. Again, I'm not counting like the weird other one that ran like Mac OS 10.4 variant or whatever.

I'm talking about the little black puck thingy. You could get it for $69 in 2015. Glenn Feishman made a chart of all of them including inflation adjusted numbers and the actual price adjustments and absolute values and it's fascinating to look at although a little bit confusing but we will link it in the show notes.

And John, just as a reminder, what's the price of the current Apple TV remote by itself? It's not $69 but it's close. It's $59. Yeah, $59 for the remote. All right. Microphones. There's some new far-field microphones in the Apple TV box itself and Jason writes, have fun trying to get the new Apple TV to answer any of your questions without the four HomePods nearby hijacking the Siri request with a grimacing emoji.

That's the picture they show. They always show like, oh, you're Apple TV and the four HomePods. good luck talking to the little black box. That is true. However, if you're a learned individual, you don't have any HomePods in your house and you don't have to worry about this. Yeah, and to be clear, according to Apple and a lot of the time this works, Apple's devices will coordinate with each other so that they don't all answer.

They will figure out who's supposed to answer. They will pick the quote-unquote best one and that one will answer. That's how it's supposed to work. Sometimes it does work that way but if you have a lot of Apple devices, you know it doesn't always work that way. For example, if you say, hey, dingus, to your phone that's on the desk in front of you and you hear a HomePod three rooms away answer, you know that this system remains imperfect.

Indeed, it does. All right, with regard to AV1, which the following is via Michael Barnes, among others, the new Apple TV has AV1 hardware decoding thanks to A18SOC. Here's a feature comparison of the second, third, and fourth gen Apple TV models from Reddit.

That's Ribbit and Reddit put together. Anyway, from Reddit. All right, so then with that in mind, we can look at the announcement dates for the last few generations of Apple TV starting from the oldest, April 20th of 2021, then April 18th of 2022, a scant 546 days later, then after that, October 13th of 2026, 1,456 days later.

My word. That's the thing that stood out to me on this chart. The chart was basically saying who, you know, which things have AV1 hardware decoding or whatever, but also had the release dates. And it's like, boy, yeah, those are stretching out a lot, aren't they? Really not great. It's also worth noting that YouTube and Netflix both desire to and do encode things in AV1.

Now, will this get sent to the Apple TV? Who knows? But that is what they use or they at least vend that to other devices. Yeah, that's what people are excited about AV1 because it's like, hey, better picture quality with the same bandwidth or sometimes better picture quality with even lower bandwidth. It's a better codec, yada, yada.

So that's why people, that's why you might care that your Apple EV has AV1. But it only matters if either you're using some app like Infuse or something that can, you know, read AV1 files and decode it on the hardware or if big services like YouTube, Netflix, and other streamers actually start somehow detecting that you have AV1 hardware decoding and start sending you an AV1 encoded stream that looks better than the previous streams.

But who knows if they'll even do that. That's kind of up to Apple to coordinate with them and it's debatable whether anyone would even know. But eventually, I don't know, let's say 20 years from now, they'll all have AV1 hardware decoding and then, you know, streaming services can all switch to it. All right.

John, there are a lot of very, very grumpy nerds that Apple did not include the thing that they must include in the new Apple TV. How could they not, John Syracuse? And Andrew Haglund was one of the people who was curious about what does this even mean?

So Andrew writes, what do you mean when you say that the new Apple TV does not have audio pass-through? And I will add as a corollary, why do we care? So, I thought you were going to jump in there, but you didn't. And that's fine. I will move right along and tell you that Caleb Dennison has a YouTube short, I think.

Whatever it is, it's a short YouTube video where Caleb explains. And Caleb says, the Apple TV 4K has always taken a bitstream audio signal from streaming services or your personal media collection and converted it into a signal that is ready to be amplified by your receiver or a TV or a soundbar.

The problem is that when Apple does the conversion, it's stripping out a bunch of information from the audio signal, which prevents your receiver or soundbar from having certain kinds of control over it. It can affect receiver and soundbar dialogue normalization features, so, you know, bringing up the volume of dialogue and only dialogue, for example, or how channel levels can be adjusted.

And a lot of users report that Apple's audio output doesn't sound as dynamic, punchy, or interesting as the output from other streaming devices. Audio pass-through, or lossless audio pass-through, allows the signal to go straight through the Apple TV 4K to your soundbar or receiver where you have more control and sometimes get better sound.

And that's why AV nerds are upset about it continuing to not be there because they probably have a fancy receiver or at the very least some kind of soundbar or some other equipment that they bought because of its features, because of the control it gives them over the sound or whatever. Regular people who are just connecting their Apple TV to their TV and don't have any external speakers don't care about this, but yeah, the audiovisual nerds are like, come on, give us pass-through because they don't want the Apple TV doing this role.

They have other equipment that they want to use for that purpose that they bought for that purpose. It should just be a software change. It should be a thing they can roll out anytime they want, but yeah, they're annoyed that it doesn't exist. I mentioned it last episode a couple times, but it didn't explain what it was, and Caleb Dennison is one of my favorite TV reviewer people who recently went independent after quite a struggle, so check out his channel.

Finally, for follow-up, Apple says the iPhone Duo has a replaceable cover layer, as they call it, above the display. Joe Rosignal at MacRumors writes, in a recent interview with content creator Angelica Ciliani-Fendi, Apple's vice president of hardware engineering, Kate Bergeron, revealed that the iPhone Duo's nano-texture cover layer above the inner display can be removed and replaced.

Quote, it's actually replaceable, which is a really nice thing for the customer, that you can peel off that layer and get a new one, said Bergeron. To be clear, Kate Bergeron is not saying that one of us will peel this off. No, no, no. You do not want to do that. That's very bad. So continuing from Joe, in the US, customers who purchase AppleCare Plus coverage for the iPhone Duo can get the cover layer replaced for $19 according to Apple's website.

The cost to replace the cover layer without coverage has yet to be disclosed, or at least at the time of writing, of that writing. Yeah, I think it's $50. Yeah, I was going to say, I thought we had seen a price since then. Yeah. Anyways, the cover layer helps to hide the crease in the middle of the foldable inner display. Bergeron said Apple did a, quote, significant amount of engineering work, quote, to ensure that this layer remains in good condition for as long as possible, but customers will have the option to replace it if it wears down or the crease becomes more visible over time.

It's kind of amazing that this wasn't mentioned in the keynote, but when we were talking about it before, especially when the rumors about using it with a stylus came out, it's like, all right, so it's a matte surface and it's bending and you can use it with a stylus. What is going to happen in terms of wear and tear a piece of glass like on the nanotexture iPad because it bends and it is like it's a very thin piece of glass.

You know what I mean? You know what I mean? It can't be like a rigid piece of glass that doesn't bend. And so what is this going to be like in terms of durability? And the answer is that it's just a wear item. It's like brake pads, right? You, you, you know, you use it and if it starts getting scuffed or messed up, you can replace it and relatively cheaply.

Again, if you AppleCare Plus, you have AppleCare Plus, $20. Can you think of any repair to any Apple product even with AppleCare Plus that costs $20? That's pretty cheap. And without AppleCare Plus, I believe, I believe it is 50 bucks. Of course, if you have to replace the entire screen, that's a thousand bucks.

So yeah, it's good that it has a wear layer on top, but it, but keep in mind that because it has a wear layer, that probably means that layer will in fact wear. That being said though, like the, the reviewers, like some, some of the reviewers have tested the durability of that layer and it seems pretty good.

Like it's not, obviously it's not invincible, nothing is, but it seems like from the test so far that it is, it is seemingly better than people think. It isn't just like a piece of plastic. Like it's, it seems like it's actually, I mean, it is a piece of plastic. It's just a good piece of plastic. Well, yeah, like it isn't like an $8 Amazon screen protector.

It actually seems like it's, you know, pretty, pretty sturdy. All right. So Marco, what were you doing yesterday out of curiosity? I was at an iPhone duo. I believe it was called a creator showcase. Was that? Yeah, I believe that's right. It was an event that Apple put on in Manhattan that where they invited a bunch of people from the press and a bunch of developers and the developers, it was like, it was kind of like a mini keynote situation where like, it's like, you know, these developers have been,

you know, we brought them in from various companies, you know, people like Netflix MLB, the New York Times, you know, you know, high profile or in a few cases, some indie developers and they've, they've had a few weeks with duo units to develop and make really cool versions of their apps on them. And then, so they invited members of the press to come basically walk around and handle the iPhone duo ahead of time of the, of the official release tomorrow and, you know, play with these, you know, fun apps that these companies had made

and have the, have representatives from the companies like kind of give little tours and show off their apps and, and kind of, you know, basically like, exactly, I think, you know, Apple used the word showcase. I think the showcase is a perfect word for it. It was like a demo event where we got to walk around. Casey and I got to actually like, you know, handle the iPhone duo and use it in this, you know, somewhat limited way, but still like, we got to actually hold it and see it and, you know, so that was, that was really cool and, and of course, as I mentioned earlier, Casey and I got to see each other, which was also really nice.

Yep. Not at a jam band concert this time. Although next time it will be again. Yeah, we'll make up for it really quickly. Don't worry. But it was really fun. It was a really cool event and we got to handle the duo and that was also really fun. Yeah.

So, um, I have a ton of thoughts, all of which are extremely poorly considered because while we did go around to all these like stations, um, to kind of try all these different apps and whatnot, uh, we weren't being monitored in the sense that like, we could do whatever we wanted with these phones within reason, but I, at least for, for the two of us, I'm pretty sure I can speak for Marco in saying that like, we didn't want to just sit there and like go screwing around with other people's apps as somebody's like trying to engage with us

about their particular app. So, we got to play with the duo some. I folded and unfolded it a zillion times. Um, I got to have a look at it. The, the, the reactions I'm having today are based on what happened yesterday morning and tomorrow morning in less than 12 hours.

In theory, I will have my iPhone, oh, spoiler alert, but I will have my iPhone duo in my hands. So now I'm jumping ahead and John's very angry at me. My bad. But, um, but, uh, suffice to say, these, these thoughts are poorly considered and I am reserving the right to completely change my mind.

with that said, um, the device from a hardware perspective is extremely cool. It is extremely, extremely cool. It's heavy, but not in an off-putting way, or at least I didn't think so.

and Marco, please interrupt me if you have thoughts. Oh, I have lots of thoughts. Don't worry. You get, you get through your, your, your, your, your, don't worry. Um, so it was heavy, but not in a, uh, burdensome way. It, it felt like sturdy for lack of a better word. On the topic of weight, by the way, I don't know if we get to the other iPhone duo reviews, we'll have this, but I was surprised a couple of them pulled out the actual weight in grams of the iPhone duo, which I hadn't really compared to the other phones.

It's not actually that much more than the, uh, iPhone, uh, pro max, or maybe it was slightly less. I forget. I'll have to look it up, but it's, it's within the ballpark of the pro, of the, the pro max, which surprised me because I just assumed it would be so much heavier than their pro max.

But yeah, as with anything, with the perception of weight, if you make a very small thing that weighs the same amount as a very large thing, the large thing feels lighter and that's definitely an effect there. Yeah. Well, and also like, you know, it is heavier than the max. It's like 250 something grams, grams of, and the max is, um, some, and the pro, the pro is like 220 something and the max is kind of somewhere in the middle.

Um, but those kinds of weight differences, you know, going from like 220 something, 250 something, that matters a lot. Like, especially in perceptual feel. Um, and for something that you're holding in your hands and it's bouncing around in your pockets, like that, those differences matter a lot.

You know, like we're, we are, as we'll talk about later, we are somewhat close to what we expect to be an event where we're going to have lighter laptops announced. And if laptops shrink by, you know, 10 or 15% in weight, that's very noticeable. Like it, it matters.

It matters a lot. Yeah. so the weight, I didn't find bad. The hinge, um, the operation of the hinge using the hinge, absolutely. And reviewers have clocked this as well. Absolutely. A two-handed thing. I don't suspect that that's something that people will be able to do, um, with one hand or at least not easily, but don't, don't hear what I'm not saying.

It's not hard to use the hinge. It's just, um, calibrated for lack of a better word that you're going to need two hands to do it. Weight update. iPhone Duo, 254 grams. iPhone 18 Pro Max, 249.

It is a five gram difference. Oh, that's really not much. But then what's, and then what's the regular sized Pro? 211. Oh yeah. See, that's, that's a substantial. But like, the thing is like, because the Pro Max does always feel heavy, but it's entirely about how like big is it in like a length and width.

You know what I mean? It's just perception. It's so, but that, you know, perception is reality when it comes to does this feel heavy or not? Yeah. Uh, the hinge was great. The crease on the inside display, it is there, but in my personal opinion, all of us, including me, fretting about the crease was misplaced angst and agita and nervousness.

I think the crease is a nothing burger. Now, will it be worse in a year? Maybe, but the video reviewers seem to say otherwise. We'll get there. No, absolutely. It'll be worse in a year. Absolutely. It will. Okay, that's fair. But will it be way worse? Will it be noticeably worse?

Yes. I'm not so convinced. Maybe. It will be noticeably worse. We'll get to the reviews. I've watched a lot of reviews about this and that seemed very, the very common consensus. Now, will it be bothersome? No, probably not. That's what I'm driving at. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like, it's not like, oh, I can't use this because like, first of all, folding phones have existed for years and years and people use them with horrendous creases in them.

It's fine. Like, it's not, it doesn't stop you from using the phone, especially if you arrange the images on it and don't put things in the crease, which we know Apple doesn't put things in the crease, right? It'll be fine. But speaking of wear items, the screen itself is a wear item with respect to the crease.

Yeah, but it's also going to be a lot like your phone's battery life where it's not going to change overnight. It's going to be a gradual shift towards less good over the course of the, you know, the years that you own this phone. I think it's also kind of like driving a new car off the lot where the depreciation happens in a really big chunk the second you drive it off the lot and then gradually after that.

a lot of the reviewers have shown that when you take it out of the box, it's amazing. It's perfect. If you open and close it 20 times, noticeable decrease and then it's a gradual slope from there. Really? That's interesting. I can't confirm nor deny, but I, what I, I mean, I watched all the videos that you linked and we will link in the show notes and what I got from that was, yeah, you might notice it and I'm sure John would notice it, you know, Captain Super Sense over here, but for a regular person,

I really don't think it'll be much, but you know what? We don't need to continue to bicker about this because we'll know in a year. The thing, the displays, the outer display, the fidelity of the outer display was great. The fidelity of the inner display probably even better.

Now, maybe numerically and like, if you look at the specs, maybe I'm wrong about that, but it looked wonderful. I thought they both looked great. The anti-glare mat, whatever they're calling it thing on the inside was great. However, the thing that put me off the most about the iPhone Duo, and I'm not sure if it's the particular apps I was looking at, if it was this impeccable lighting in this Apple space that we were in, which was gorgeous, by the way, just absurdly pretty,

but nevertheless, I don't know what it was and Marco, when I finally shut up and give you a chance to talk, I'm curious what your two cents are, but the, not hole punch, but the FaceTime camera that's on the big display, the one that's under the display, the, not hole, but hole for that was very, very visually loud to me, astonishingly so.

I think I'm overblowing it a bit and I'll admit that, but I was expecting to barely be able to see it and oh baby, I saw it. Conversely, I was expecting to be able to see the crease if you look just right, you can see it and if you're running your finger across the center of the screen laterally, you can feel it, but otherwise, to me, the crease was 100% a nothing burger, but the camera on the big display, that was so noticeable that I found it

very off-putting. And you know why that was noticeable? Because there's no matte there, among other things. That's right, the nanotexture matte stuff, stops at the camera. So there's nothing they can do about it there because basically, they've intentionally made a surface texture difference.

They have to do it because the camera can't see through the wavy plastic, right? It would be all distorted. So in any lighting condition, in any situation, it's like, you can tell matte versus shiny and the camera hole is shiny and the rest of the screen is matte and there's nothing you can do about that. Yeah, and I mean, I'm sure over time I would get used to it.

If you were to go back to when we first got the notched phones, I bet you I was whining and moaning about how noticeable the notch was and now, well, now they're holes rather than notches. You get what I'm driving at. And now they're trying to put content, like there was never any content behind the notch because it's not screen, but now they're putting content there.

But like, yeah, I do wonder if they'll revisit that, but it seems like it's kind of an intractable problem because you can't distort the light that goes to the camera. Sure, but what I'm wondering is over time will I just stop seeing it? Oh yeah, probably. I mean, like you can get the same experience just by looking at all the reviews.

Like when you first see it, you'll see it in the reviews too, but then eventually you'll stop paying attention to it. Like, I mean, maybe it'll be like you'll constantly think something is on that part of the screen and try to wipe it off, but eventually you get used to it. And speaking of that and speaking of the nanotexture, that's one of the things a lot of reviews talk about is like all nanotextures, how much does it hold on to finger grease, essentially, and how hard is it to get off?

And yeah, it's just easier to get grease off a glossy surface. It's not possible. It's just like any other nanotexture on any other Apple device, especially the nanotexture touch devices like the iPads and maybe the upcoming MacBook Pros would touch it in a week or so. It's going to take a little bit more effort.

Fingerprints may show up more and it takes a little bit more effort to dig that finger grease out of the grooves. With regard to software, again, I barely played with any of this stuff. I had like a couple of minutes with each of these different stations. Without question, there were pieces of software that Marco and I tried that were better than others.

A couple of examples of ones that I thought were really, really great. The Netflix app is extraordinary. It's extremely well done. All of the press that it's getting, all the hype that it's getting, to my eyes, 100% earned. Now, to be fair, one of the really the developer of all these updates is a friend of mine, so I am biased, but I genuinely believe that it is just incredible, the work that he and they have done.

I also thought Fantastical, while more subtle, was really well handled and it was great to meet, is it Michael? Is that right? Yeah, Michael Simmons. It was great to meet him. I'd never met him before and so it was good to see that. Those were my personal favorites. With regard to using the phone, again, I only had a couple minutes with it and I wasn't doing too much with iOS proper.

It was mostly just, you know, working or messing with these apps, but having messed with it a bunch in the simulator made it feel reasonably natural, but I didn't get enough time with it that I can really pass any strong judgment as to whether or not I would get used to it and I did not, not once, lock or unlock a phone and I suspect that all the whining and moaning that all these reviewers are doing about not having face ID, I bet you

I will be leading that charge next week after having spent a little bit of time with my phone. So, all in all, my impression, I think I could summarize is this and I'm really excited to hear what Marco has to say because honestly, we actually didn't talk too much about this when we were together.

my impression, especially having digested it a little bit as I was digesting my half a pizza, is that Digesting on your sleep. Yeah. If you think about the Vision Pro, right, and just hear me out here, if you think about the Vision Pro, it's extraordinary hardware and honestly, it's extraordinary software, but even though we thought it would be super useful and you could do good things with it, Did we think that?

Well, I feel like there was a window of time where at least I thought it. And despite all that, I don't think the Vision Pro ended up being that way, right? Like, the Vision Pro was compromised and that was okay because you saw what they were going for, but it wasn't particularly useful.

And I say that as someone who still enjoys the Vision Pro every couple of times I put it on in a year, but anyway, so the Vision Pro compromised, not that useful. The iPhone Duo by contrast is compromised for sure, but not only is it useful and I think having the inner display is useful and I think being able to go two up on the inner display,

it's very intuitive and useful. so yes, it's compromised, but unlike the Vision Pro, it's useful. Like, potentially really freaking useful. And so, the thought of having something that useful and just different, maybe for the sake of being different, which I would normally poop all over, but in this case, I think we are all so thirsty and I feel like all three of us, maybe Marco more than anyone, have been banging this drum for a while,

but it's so fun to have something different and fun again. And actually, there's something we're going to talk about in the post-show tonight that I think really, really relates to this because I saw something yesterday, something unrelated yesterday, that is really, really fun and it's cool to have fun back.

We are not the only one saying this, I know Jason Snell has been saying this a lot, for example, but having this thing that is not only fun but useful, compromised, perhaps, but nevertheless is interesting and fun and different and exciting.

Now, I'm conveniently slipping under the rug that it's $2,000 effing dollars. I'm slipping under the rug that you can't get your hands on one of these. Half the price of the Vision Pro with any accessories. Right? You know, I'm sweeping under the rug that nobody can get their hands on these, which we'll talk about later.

but it's so... Vision Pro didn't have that problem. Yeah, right? But it's so great to have Apple kind of, moonshot is a bit dramatic, but doing a moonshot or taking a moonshot and I'm so here for it and would I recommend the phone to an average consumer?

I don't know. At $2,000, probably not. But the good and bad news is I feel like I need it for both of my jobs and so I'm going to be getting one and will I keep it? Probably. Will I keep it as my carry phone? I don't know. Tomorrow we're going to a football game and I hope to bring this with me as my phone and let me tell you, I don't take that many pictures of what's going on in the field, but it ain't going to be fun at 2X.

You can set it up on the car ride over? Yeah, right. Preference acknowledged. No, I'm actually, as we speak, I'm using an Apple Thunderbolt cable directly plugged into my Mac doing a backup of my iPhone 17 Pro to my Mac so hopefully I can do that, a restore from that tomorrow.

Hope you aren't on the 27.2 beta on that phone. No, I am not. Good. Because I don't think you'd be able to install it onto the 27.1 iPhone 2. No, I'm not. But yeah, that's a good point. But yeah, so I am super excited for this. I'm not convinced I'm going to like it or love it.

There's a lot in the reviews which maybe one day Marco and I will stop talking and we can get to the reviews. But there's a lot in the reviews that scares me. Well, scares is dramatic but scares me. And I'm worried about Touch ID or excuse me, I'm worried, well, I'm worried about Touch ID slash lack of face ID. I'm worried about the lack of the 4X camera.

But man, it is so cool and fun to see Apple shooting their shot again. I think I'm done now. I will come up with something more to say in a second. But Marco, take it away. What are your impressions? I liked the comparison to the Vision Pro and I'll tell you where I think it's different.

Using the word compromised was a very good word for the Vision Pro. The iPhone Duo from what I can tell so far, I wouldn't say it's a compromise. I would say it's a trade-off.

Yeah, okay. A compromise kind of suggests there was no good version of this possible. So here's something we had to, the less good version that we had to ship because we couldn't ship a better one. The iPhone Duo from what I can tell so far is not a compromised product.

It's just a product that takes some much more opinionated trade-offs to get some extremes than the other phones do. You know, with the iPhone Duo, if that product is right for you, what you want is the absolute biggest screen that you can fit in your pocket somehow.

And literally everything else about it has had to be adjusted to achieve that trade-off. It's not necessarily a compromise. It's just like, this is the trade-off. It's like, well, if you want the biggest screen in your pocket possible, it's probably going to be a little bit heavy or it has to be thick because you have to fold it in half or whatever.

And then it's like, okay, well, if you have a folding in half screen, you need a screen on the outside also so you can use it while it's closed. So then you need another screen. Now you need more battery, you need more cost, you need more components, you need more complexity. Okay, like, that all follows from that. But if what you want fundamentally is, I want to carry in a pocketable size the largest screen I possibly can, then this is a product for you.

The Vision Pro, I never thought like, this is a product with an audience that absolutely must buy it. The Duo, the audience that must buy it is obvious. It definitely exists. It is not even that small.

It's not that big. But it's not, it's not no one. It's not like, oh, well, somebody in some enterprise might use this. Like, no, I know a lot of people, regular people, who will want this and who would, you know, if they can, if the price, if they can swing the price, like, who would absolutely love this. So, what they've made in the Duo, as far as I can tell, so far, I haven't lived with this phone.

I've played with this phone. So, I have not used it as my own. I have not set up Touch ID. I have not set up my, you know, my apps, my Apple ID, my iCloud, like, none of those. So, it's hard to really say, you know, more than what the reviewers are saying, or even the same, because we, the reviewers have all been able to live with it for like, you know, five or seven days or whatever.

We have not. I did put one in my pocket. I kind of looked around, like, I looked around whistling, but I did put one in my pocket to see like, how does this feel in the pocket? It's freaking heavy. That's how it feels. It did not feel as clunky as I expected it to feel in a pocket in terms of size, but boy, is it heavy.

Um, but, again, the trade-offs you're making here are, you want the absolute biggest screen possible. And, when you see that big screen, it's fantastic.

Now, the trade-offs to get there, these are some really weird new things to get used to. Um, one thing I noticed, the very first thing I noticed when I, when I first picked one up, besides the fact that it's heavy, is that the outside screen and the inside screen look totally different from each other.

And not just because of the size and, you know, obviously one's, you know, half of the other. Because they have such radically different surface treatments and, you know, trims around them, the outer, this will kind of sound like a mullet joke, the outer screen is all Phil Schiller and the inner screen is all John Ternus.

The outer screen, it's the, the Schiller era aesthetic. Everything is like shiny and like, so, you know, the, the very, you know, the glass screen, the, the, the glossy glass finish on the screen. Around it, you see the high polished titanium edge, you know, very, very, it's very similar to the iPhone Air.

If you've seen an iPhone Air outside of a case or, you know, the older Pro phones where they had the polished stainless steel band like the, in the, in the teen, in the early teens in the Pro phone era, it's that look. It looks high polish, high fingerprint, but high, high polish, glossy, shiny, fancy.

And then you open it up and the inside is this beautiful matte screen surrounded by a very thin, unnoticeable, you know, matte black bezel. it's a completely different look.

And whenever I was switching between those two screens, I would notice, like, literally every time I'd close it, I'd be like, oh, the outside screen is so shiny. And then you open it up, it's like, this screen is so nice and usable. Like, it was these, these two contrasts in one product.

And that's kind of a microcosm of the whole product. Like, the experience of using the outer screen is pretty weird. And I found it pretty unpleasant. like, if you read John Gruber's review, he really hated the experience using the outer screen.

And I think I agree with most of that. I really did not like using the outer screen much at all. But again, it's a trade-off. To get the inner screen to be as amazing as it is requires the outer screen to be kind of crappy in terms of usability.

and they have achieved that. The thing is, the way I use a phone, I don't think this is going to be the right phone for me. The way I use a phone is, first of all, a lot of one-handed, on-the-go, walking-around kind of use. And it's just not going to be good for that.

I think it's going to be hard for a lot of, look, I'll just say, you know, men, a lot of people who don't carry their phone in bags, who are used to carrying their phone just in a pants pocket, I think they're not going to necessarily understand the appeal of this phone to people who do carry bags.

People who carry bags and who carry their phone in bags, usually, the in-pocket size matters a lot less. The weight has a little more tolerance because, you know, it's in a bag. 20, 30 grams in a bag don't really matter that much compared to, you know, in a pocket.

And a lot of times it's a two-handed operation, to get the phone out anyway. And so, to have a second step where you're, like, unfolding it to get this amazing interior screen, no big deal. It's not adding that much to the total action being taken there.

Whereas if you're having your phone just in your pants pocket all day long, the outside screen is going to be more important and the clunkiness of the unfolding is going to be, you know, relatively more of a burden to you. So, I can see this having very different opinions based on who's talking about it, who's using it.

It's not for me, I don't think. But it is really, really cool. And every time I looked at that screen, the inside screen, for even, honestly, no, even the outside screen, as I said, like, the outside screen is beautiful. I just don't like using apps on it.

Especially when you bring the keyboard up, it really takes up a lot of the screen. However, I did notice that typing on that keyboard was very pleasant because it's wide. So, you do get a lot more like key size.

In the same way, like, if you're like, usually like a regular sized phone person and you try out a Max for a little while, one of the things you notice when going to a bigger screened iPhone is, oh, the typing is nicer once you get used to it because you have more space. You know, maybe it's less error prone. You have that with this.

Going to the Duo from a Pro phone, the keyboard feels very spacious on the outside screen. One challenge is, kind of as I expected, I think, during the Duo announcement, the problem is you can have the keyboard on three different sized screens, basically, you know, outside screen, inside portrait, and inside landscape.

Technically four if you add also the like half split view, but no one's... And tent. And don't forget tent. Oh, God. But like, you... Okay, let me just get out of the way first. I don't see any reason why anybody would ever hold the phone in like book view where it's slightly bent, but you're holding it in landscape.

Like, that's not going to be a thing anybody does. So don't worry about that. Just the way you use this phone is either closed, open portrait, or open landscape. All the other things are going to be like a fun gimmick here and there occasionally, but no one's going to do it for that much time on a regular basis. But portrait, landscape, and front are all three very different keyboard sizes.

So for me, I was like, I got used to typing on the front one just enough and then when I opened it up to either of the inside ones, they're totally different sizes. And don't forget there's split variants of the inside ones too. Right, that's only if you bend it. I think, yeah, you can toggle split and non-split with a key on the keyboard.

Of course you can. So, yeah, everything about it is weird, but the whole time I was using it, like, I'll be honest, when I was using the Vision Pro, the very first few times I was using the Vision Pro, it all just felt like friction to me. Everything about the Vision Pro was like, oh God, this is a compromise or this is not good.

This is like, the Vision Pro, everything was like, maybe someday this might be good for someone, but not me and not today. the Duo is like, oh no, I don't think it's right for me, but it's really cool. I really like it and it's already right for a lot of people today exactly as it is with all of its shortcomings and trade-offs.

So, I was, I really enjoyed using the Duo. I am, I am getting one, we'll get to that in a minute, but I, I don't think I'm going to live with it as my daily carry phone for the whole year and beyond. Um, I don't think so, but I could, look, because I haven't used it myself as my phone yet, I can't really know that.

Um, but, it is really, really nice at what it tries to do. Is it perfect? No, of course not. But it's really nice today for what it is today. Not some promise of the future, not a bunch of content snacks saying this is what someday this might become.

No, it's really great today. You can't get one, of course, but it's, that's, that's a bit of a problem, but it's very cool. Um, and that inside screen is so gorgeous and so nice to use and so, honestly, the inside is also so nice to hold because again, like what John said earlier about the weight discussion, the phone feels like a brick in your pocket, but when you open it up and you're handling it like a little iPad,

it feels weightless. Yeah, it gets lighter when you open it. that is honestly the perception because you're holding a much thinner thing and so you're like, oh, well, yeah, like per square foot here, you know, like per visible square foot of this thing, this weighs very little.

it is a remarkable feeling to, you know, to hold it and to use it in, in the open state and even though there's all these different trade-offs and shortcomings and the apps are still, you know, going to be spotty for a while and there's going to be lots of bugs. I found bugs already even in the demo phones.

There were, you know, there were bugs in certain apps, a lot of animation bugs, rotation bugs, like all sorts of weird stuff, but again, this is all like really, there's a lot going on in this software. There's a lot, a lot of things have changed, a lot of new stuff, a lot of unfinished stuff. But, it is, it is something great today.

I think they, I think it is going to be a hit and I think it's going to be a very polarizing reaction from people in the same way that like when we went from the regular sized, you know, like the mid-sized iPhone when they added the plus and the max phones, those were polar, those were polarizing too because a lot of people were like, oh my god, I want the biggest screen I can possibly get.

This is amazing. A lot of other people were like, why would anybody want their phone to be that giant? It's ridiculous. Well, the iPhone Duo takes that, a huge leap in that same direction of like, okay, well now, we're going to add way more screen space with way more trade-offs and a lot of people are going to be like, that's the stupidest thing ever or how could they flub, you know, detail X that I care about or whatever.

but then a lot of other people are going to be like, yes, I need that, I want that, I want the biggest screen I can get and it's going to depend a lot on how you use your phone, how you carry your phone, what's important to you. You know, some of the most impressive, I think maybe the most impressive demo that we saw was there was a team there from the Instagram edits app.

what was really nice about edits was like they, you know, they kind of, they were describing how like, when you're editing a video, you know, you have like the, you know, the preview on one half and like, you know, the timeline stuff and the controls and, you know, different parts of it and that's the kind of thing like, you can see like, if that's something that you do, if you edit video with one of these tools, this is a game changer.

Like, if you're like a video person, a content creator, you're doing this kind of stuff on your iPhone, you're going to want this for all of that because it's like, it makes your main like iPhone thing that you do all the time a lot better. Or, you know, if you, if you, if you fly a lot and you want to just like have this thing up on a tray table and like helping to, you know, amuse you on the, on the plane or show some video or something, I can see that being amazing too.

There's so many use cases. I mean, just, even if you just like edit spreadsheets or documents on your phone, if you use your phone as your main computer or as your most commonly used computer, which most of us honestly do, I can see this being amazing because what, what is better than having a ton of screen space for that kind of use for almost any kind of document-based workflow, almost any kind of productivity work, a big screen is, is always better for that.

So, I think it's, again, it's going to be a hit. It's not going to be the most popular iPhone by a mile for lots of reasons. Even if they could make enough of them, it wouldn't be the most popular iPhone. But, I think it's going to be a hit and I think they have done something really great here.

It's not perfect. Version 2 will be a lot better, probably. Like, whether that's, you know, whether it's like next year or that's more of like an S thing and then maybe, maybe two years from now. Yeah, it probably really needs Face ID and it probably needs better cooling and boy, it could really use better cameras.

And maybe they can do some of those things and maybe they can't. But, it's right now, the version for sale right now, while not perfect, is great. John, any questions? No, I'm probably going to go check it out when it arrives in stores tomorrow.

But, before then, all I did was watch reviews. But, before we get to that, we should talk about your pre-orders. Yeah, so, the pre-orders were for us at 8 a.m. last Friday and day or two before then, I got a text from our friend Jelly who said, hey, you know, our monthly FaceTime, you see what's going on then?

I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And then I looked at my calendar. Oh, oh, we were supposed to get on the call at 8 a.m. And so, Jelly was like, what do you want to do, bud? So, I said, how about we get on the phone a little bit early and when the time comes, you know, we'll pause for a second and take care of it.

So, as Jelly was talking, I was listening, but I was doing the force refresh dance on the App Store. I've heard people tell me that's actually not helpful. I don't know if that's true or not. I never, like, force quit apps other than this. But, that's what I did.

My pro tip, which I shouldn't share because I should keep it for myself, but my pro tip is I have always, always had a better experience using my iPhone on cellular. I don't know if that's a Richmond, Virginia thing. I don't know if that's a Fios thing.

I don't know what it is. But, I can tell you that for me, being on cellular on my phone for like dub-dub tickets way back when for phones, that's always the best I've ever done. so I was doing the force refresh dance or force quit dance and I had done the pre-pre-order, you know, the night before or what have you.

And, and I was able to, I think it was 8.01, I got in, I said, yes, I'll take it. Do you want to do pickup? Sure, yes. When? Immediately, you know, like 8 a.m. on Friday. and by some miracle, I was able to lock it in and get it through.

I was, once I saw that it let me in, it was 30 seconds, maybe, before I was done. Um, and so I have 8 a.m. pickup, uh, tomorrow as I, as I record this. Um, uh, white, which I don't think I've ever done a white phone before, but I don't know, maybe having, uh, Marco's stupid 3D print has like incepted me into wanting white.

Well, you saw both of them, you know, yesterday. Yeah, I didn't take that close of a look at it, to be honest, and I, honestly, I think I would have been happy with either, but I don't know, something about this, I was thinking about this, actually, because I knew one of you would ask me, um, I think because it's so different than anything else I've had, I kind of wanted it to be a different color, too, which maybe that's silly, but that's what I thought.

Honestly, I think the white is obviously the better looking version. Like, it is, I think it's way better looking than the Navy. And like, the Navy is not bad looking, but the white's great looking. And I think, I would agree with that. Like, the contrast, this is a phone that looks really good with contrast, and the white really accentuates what it is, the contrast between it, like, it's just, you see it when you see like the two halves, you see the white half against it, like, it just, yeah,

the white looks fantastic. Yeah, so that's what I did, uh, 512, uh, 512 gigabytes, and again, day one delivery. Um, our friend Tyler, at least Marco, my friend Tyler, um, who is our occasional concert companion, amongst other things.

Uh, he also did the same thing, and he had, as he was checking out, he was telling me, as he was checking out, it kept saying, no, actually, you can't do a pickup because that slot is filled. And so, um, he, he told me that basically what he did was he tried like 8, 815, 830, or what, I forget the delineations, but you know what I'm saying.

And then he failed a couple times, was like, ah, screw it, noon, or something like that, you know, in order to like, give himself a little more buffer. And so, he's going to be there a couple hours, a few hours after me. Um, but yeah, I was able to luck out. Um, so then I finished my FaceTime call with Jelly, and this was right at the beginning of the call, so I wasn't off the call for another like hour, hour and a half.

And then I, you know, came up for air, if you will, and, um, started looking at the internet and, oh, people were not happy. People were not happy. And I was blissfully ignorant about it for like 60 to 90 minutes. Um, uh, I, I would love to hear, uh, John's story and then Marco's, please.

My story? What is my story? I'm not bothering one of these phones. I know. I'm just, I'm just messing with you. Marco had to turn out. Although I did see, I did see people complaining about it and I, you know, it's happened to me. Like it's just, I don't know what it is. The CDN luck of the draw. Like when do you get let into the Apple store and for an in-demand product being let in 60 seconds later can mean a lot.

Yeah, it really can. And that's the other thing actually that reminds me that some people were saying, oh, it was 805. It was 807 or something like that for me. And, or, you know, for these other people. And for me, I'm almost sure it was 801. And I don't know, I guess got lucky with the caches, I guess. But anyway, Marco, how'd it turn out?

Less well. I'm sorry. Um, so there is an, there's a new program that we heard about, um, from the Apple store business reps. Don't even get me started. It's, I believe it's called get ready. The same thing that like you can do in advance on your phone, but like the, it's like the business rep version of this.

Now, the Apple store business reps are the nicest people. Like I've dealt with them over the years through, you know, through various stores around New York. Like I've dealt with them for a long time. They are the nicest people.

They do whatever they can for you. The thing is they can't do that much for you sometimes. And in the same way that like, you know, when we're, when I was talking about how, when I was doing the MDM stuff and, you know, for all my, my server setups, you could tell like the, the MDM and, and like business admin side, like the IT side of, of Apple, you can tell they don't really get the resources they need from like the other departments.

And that's kind of why a lot of the Apple business stuff is , is difficult and more difficult than it needs to be or more limited than it needs to be because it seems like the rest of the company just doesn't give them what they need. That's how the business reps are too. It's very clear to me that over the years, the business reps have, have lost their abilities to do things, uh, very well for people in, in a lot of cases, they don't have a lot of tools at their disposal and they don't have a lot of resources at their disposal.

Um, so I submitted the order through the business rep because what we were told at first was if you submit it through the business rep, it will automatically be submitted right when the store opens at minute zero and your order will be, you know, right there, right, right up front.

Now I got a phone call from my business rep a few days beforehand saying, Hey, I'm, I've heard some rumblings. I don't think you should count on this because it's, because supply is going to be so constrained just in case you should probably try to place an order yourself at opening time also.

And we'll submit both. And, you know, if we got to cancel one, we cancel one, no problem. Okay, great. So that's what I did because I had the business one. I was like, well, let me, and my, you know, Tiff has decided she wants one too. And so I'm like, and she had, she hasn't had an upgrade in a couple of years.

I'm like, all right, it's that's, that's perfectly reasonable. So I, I set up Tiff's order first in my phone, like as my, like, you know, my get ready one on my app store version on my phone. And then I, I, you know, configured mine to be like a short time after that, that I could just go in and like fill out a couple more things, do it again and go.

So I was there right at minute zero with Tiff's order ready to go. The app store app did not open on time. Of course, it didn't open until five minutes later. Um, and I, and I was, I had Safari open on my desktop. I had Chrome open on my desktop and I had the Apple store app on my phone, refreshing all of them.

The pages on, on Safari and Chrome on the desktop eventually switched to a kind of concert, like, you know, stay on this page and we'll let you win. And, you know, when you're slotting, the queue opens up, uh, guess what? Those never let me in. Uh, that, that literally never occurred.

If I would have trusted that page and just stayed there until it let me in, I would not have gotten an iPhone duo ever. Um, fortunately I didn't trust those pages because you're never trust those pages. They, they work on ticket master. Maybe they do not work on Apple. And so, so I got in, you know, kept refreshing the app about five minutes later.

I got in through the app on my phone. So this is roughly what time? Eight Oh five. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Um, got in submitted to his order real fast. And even then five minutes in, which is as soon that it was within seconds of the store being available and actually open to me.

It was already delayed to, um, the second week of November, I believe the first or second week of November. Okay. So that's already like a two week delay. I quickly go back and I submit mine. Mine's a monthly. Then eventually about, uh, 92 minutes after the store opens, I get the confirmation from the business rep channel.

And that one has a date of January 26th from other people who have asked in different boards online. As far as I can tell, that might be true of every business order for the iPhone duo that they all might've gone in. I don't blame the business reps for this. It's, you know, whatever system they were submitting through, it just didn't put in the orders.

And it seems like all of them are like, I don't, I haven't heard of anybody getting a duo through a business rep earlier than January. Like, so the way this order went, I have to say I was mad.

At least the business rep had the, you know, the foresight to call me and warn me like, Hey, don't count on this order. But okay. So Apple has this business system that just didn't work. Like flat out didn't work too bad. Literally the thing it promised, you'll be there right at the beginning was just false.

Like it just failed completely to do the, like, it's like you had one job, you didn't do it. Okay. Secondly, the app never opens on time for, for my area, whatever that means. And, and I've, and I've been in different areas and it seems like it's always kind of random.

I'm sure it's, you know, various CDN propagations and things like that, but the internet has solved this problem. Ticketmaster doesn't have this problem. Only Apple has this problem. This is a solvable and solved problem. I did everything right in two different ways and still got screwed by their system because it didn't behave the way it advertises that it will behave.

I know this is a very privileged position that I'm trying to order multiple foldable phones, trying to get any of them here so I can do my job. But every part of this rollout has been in a way that makes it more difficult for developers to do our jobs.

We literally did everything right. We were there and the system wasn't ready. It didn't let us in, but it lets some people in. Because literally as soon as the system opened, dates had slipped two weeks. And a bunch of people did get first day orders. So, it wasn't that the store didn't open for anybody until 805.

The store didn't open for me until 805. And that kind of thing, like, again, I know this sounds whiny, and I'm, but it's just, that kind of thing, random failures to random people who are doing the right thing and doing exactly what you asked them to do, is incredibly frustrating.

Because the system ultimately, from our point of view, is unfair. I am perfectly fine to wait in a line. I'm an American. And I'm a New Yorker. And we are good at those things. We are good at waiting in lines. We're not British. They really mastered it.

But we're close. But, here, it's like the Apple store. There is no line. It's just chaos. And it's random. And that's just really frustrating. Because we do everything right, and we still just randomly lose. Not because we were behind in line, but because the line just broke for us.

And the solution was, too bad. I know, I recognize it's a tough situation. But, there are so many ways that they could handle it better. And number one would just be, make their system actually fair. Like, make it actually open the same time for everyone. And make those queues work.

That would make it feel, even though it would still be difficult, and sometimes you'd still have bad luck, at least it would feel fair. Whereas this system just feels unfair. We are sponsored this week by Quince. So, it's definitely getting chilly here in Richmond.

And that means it's a great time to figure out, hmm, maybe I should refresh my wardrobe a little bit, and add something new, change things out, or whatever the case may be. And let me tell you, if you are in that mood, if it is the time of year where you should think about these sorts of things, and I bet it is for you, you should check out Quince.

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Quince works directly with ethical factories to cut out the middle people, so you're paying for high-quality, not brand markup. Now, Quince just recently was kind enough to send us a little bit of money to spend, and another great thing about Quince is that it's not just for dudes. They have men's and women's stuff, they have baby and kid's stuff, they actually branch out into all sorts of things, including stuff for your house, stuff to travel with, and so on.

So you should really check it out. But regardless, we ordered a few things from Michaela, including an organic cotton long-sleeve fit-and-flare pocket dress. Actually, we did basically the same dress in two styles. One of them has these adorable little kitty cat heads on it , the other one is like nothing but like a fall-colored flowers and stuff, and again, they have pockets.

They are really adorable, and Michaela is super-duper excited. So, find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order, and 365-day returns!

Quince is now available in Canada, and the UK as well, and when Quince asks you where you heard about them, you can let them know that it was the Accidental Tech Podcast. It's the best way to support the show. So, go to Quince.com, Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com, and check it out. Thank you to Quince for supporting the show. Let's talk about duo reviews.

I've watched the ones that John has linked, and I've put all these links in the show notes. John, do you want to give us a nickel tour about what you found interesting about each of these? Yeah, I have a meta topic after watching all these reviews. I picked out some of the better reviews that I saw. This is not all the ones that I read or watched, but this is some interesting ones.

And I came away with an interesting notion that I was talking about a little bit on past episodes, and that is that, like, this is the season where I discover Chinese YouTube. Apparently. We talked about HTX Studio last time and a couple episodes ago.

It's a big YouTube channel that is now doing English language stuff. And in this one, I found another one that the channel name is like Tim Pan, but I think it might also be from a company called MediaSt orm, another YouTube channel. And I looked at their channel, and they, like, had 72,000 subscribers, but then I went to their Chinese channel, and they have a million.

So again, it seems like, you know, Chinese YouTube channel or Chinese video content creators coming over and doing English language versions for an English-speaking audience when they're already just massive in China. And I bring this up because MKBHD, which I think I also had the season where I discovered MKBHD many years ago.

It's like, who is this person? I've never heard of this person. Anyway, we've heard of him now. He has been, you know, I think he's like one of the biggest , if not the biggest, English language, you know, just American YouTuber who talks about tech stuff and reviews phones and things like that. And, you know, even coming in as late as we did to his fame , we all got to see him kind of travel a little bit of the journey from, like, independent content creator to someone who's got a media empire and is running a company and gets invited to all the Apple events and interviews Tim Cook and has fancy cameras and stuff

like that. And part of the journey has been, like, watching the things that Marquez gets excited about, like getting the fancy red digital cameras and a robot arm so you can swoop the camera down and around the new iPhone or Samsung phone or whatever and make these cool intros with motion graphics.

And I just remember how excited he was, like, every time they'd come up with a new video of just, like, the intro, sort of, like, you know, intro graphic animation and cool camera shots and everything that would lead into his video about whatever product he's talking about. And so that's the context I'm coming from as someone who watches, you know, the biggest, you know, America-US-based tech YouTube video content channels, which is, for me, is a very straight-line continuation of me watching Computer Chronicles

on PBS after school and everything. Like, I've always just been craving video content for tech, and now there's tons more of it, so it's great. Then enter these Chinese YouTube things. We already talked about HTC Studio and linked to, like, their thing about HBM memory, and I figured out what their other video was.

Oh, the weird table thing and everything. We didn't know if it was real or if it was AI. And I was saying the production value on their HBM video was amazing. The Tim Pan MediaStorm video, same deal. And I'm watching these videos, and I'm like, my jaw is, like, on the floor. I'm like, they have what look like extremely expensive, fancy, well-done motion graphics everywhere.

Oh, yeah. Like, top-notch production. Like, Marques is like, I'm excited about this new intro I made with my whole jillion-dollar robot arm and camera, and it's like, how about you do that for every shot? At first, I was watching, and I'm like, are they AI-gener ating these? Because this looks like it's so expensive.

Like, I could not believe how well done it was. It was, like, it was clever. It was, like, it wasn't just, like, Flash for the sake of Flash. Like, the on-screen graphics would help explain and emphasize the point, and there was just so much of it, and I'm just seeing dollars raining from the sky.

And there was this point in the Tim Pan iPhone Duo review where he was talking about, like, you know, when I forget what it was. Like, some other new phone came out, and the people at his company, here's what the breakdown was of, like, did they want the new phone or whatever.

Maybe it was the Air. Like, not a lot of people wanted the Air. And then he compared, but, like, this year when we had, like, getting company phones for everybody, how many people wanted the Duo, and it was a huge percentage, like, that wanted the Duo. But they didn't just give percentages in a little, of course, motion graphic, you know, 3D rendered chart they have.

They gave hard numbers. And the hard numbers were 140 people wanted the Duo, 17 wanted the 18 Pro, and 41 wanted the Pro Max. That's 198 people. And so I was like, okay, wait a second. Is the company that makes this YouTube video made up of 200 people?

Is that why it looks like this? Like, I don't quite understand the economics or whatever, but I'm here to say that. Maybe that's not all they do. Like, maybe it's a company. It's like, yeah, maybe it's like a production company. Yeah, like, maybe it's just a totally different company, and they do this on the side.

Maybe he's just doing this independent, and he has a day job. But all I'm saying is these, you know, Chinese YouTube channels that are, you know, making English language versions for English-speaking audiences are amazing. Like, just phenomenally, like, so much money is on the screen.

I think the videos are well done. I think they cover lots of points that other people don't. They do extensive testing of everything. Every time they need to test something, it's like, but of course, we know somebody who has an X-ray machine, and we know somebody who has this device, and we know somebody who has that or whatever.

That's just so much good information, so much motion graphics, well executed. It is blowing my mind how good the Chinese YouTubers are. I don't understand the economics. I don't understand if each of these people also the MKBHD equivalent of China, which, of course, is multiplied by the vast population that's there.

All I'm saying is, please check out these videos. And I will say that the presentation style of a Chinese YouTuber presenting to an American audience, it's different than an American style. I mean, for cultural reasons, it's just like, the style is different.

I like it. I think it's great. But like, I think a lot of the people who watch Marquez eventually come to know him as a personality and can relate to him, because he's just like someone you would know. Whereas this is a more kind of more professional, more at a distance presentation. And again, I don't know if I can't say, like I said last time, I can't say, this is the style of Chinese tech YouTube.

I have no idea. I've watched two channels. Like, so don't take this with a grain of salt. But I'm here to say that these channels were, these reviews were extremely impressive. Because I watched all the normal American ones. Well, like the Joanna Stern, Naila Patel, The Verge. I read Gruber's article, like, and, you know, Marquez thing , right?

But like, man, HTX Studio and Tim Pan from MediaStorm, whatever the hell that is. I don't even understand if it's like, if that's the person or if that's the company. I don't understand any of this. But the reviews were really good. Sorry for this huge preamble. But this is the thing that you guys were playing with phones. And I was just like, my eyes are just falling out of my skull watching these Chinese YouTube things.

And the thing is, I don't think they're AI. Like, the only reason I said that is because I was like, surely they don't have enough money to pay for this to be done by humans. But I think it might be. Like, wow. I don't understand it. Anyway, in the reviews, there's tons of good information.

Some of which we've already covered. A lot of people, like Joanna Stern most primarily, but a lot of the other channels as well, wanted to make a robot bend and close and open the thing over and over again. Right? Because that's the thing you do. Right? I've got one. I got a review unit. I can't destroy it because it's not mine. It's an Apple review unit.

But I'm okay with making a robot rig that opens and closes it thousands of times. And then I'll see what it does. So Joanna's the rig, which looked a little shaky, but anyway, Joanna's rig opened and closed it 32,000 times. And I think it was either HTC Studio or Tim Pan from Media Storm did a thing where they, of course, like laser 3D scanned it at like a microscopic level to show how wavy it is at the crease and compared it to other foldable phones.

And they did the iPhone Duo when it came out of the box and scanned it and you could see how wavy it was. And then they open closed it a bunch of times and they scanned it again and it was way worse. Like just dramatically again. Oh, right. I wouldn't say way worse.

Way, like in percentage value of deflection, it was way worse. Like 200, 300%. No, it wasn't. Did we watch the same videos? Yeah, like 200 to 300% worse than it was when it was out of the box. That is not what I remembered, but maybe you're right.

I'll get you a screenshot later. But here's the thing, to your point, Casey, before you get defensive, which is too late. We're talking like microns. So when you go from one micron to three microns, it's still basically imperceptible. Right? Okay, okay. That makes me feel better.

But percentage wise, like when it comes out of the box, it will never be that flat again. And it immediately, like the car driving off the lot, gets way, way worse. And it will get worse over time. But the deflections are very small. Now, it's always been very small on other folding phones as well.

But they had made the poor choices to have glossy screens. And even a couple of microns of deflection on a glossy screen shows up a ton. Yeah. Which, of course, is why Apple has the matte screen. Which is why, no matter how bad that crease gets, it will probably be fine for the entire life of the phone. Because the diffuse, you know, the wear layer on top makes it so you don't see that telltale specular highlight of the crease.

You know what I mean? And so none of them came away saying, oh, this is going to be really bad or whatever. But they also basically came away saying that Apple screen is one of the best folding phone screens. But the thing that makes it better than the competitors is their smart decision to put matte on top of it.

And everyone thinks that every other phone is going to do that as well, because it does hide the crease extremely well. Now, my take on matte screens has evolved a lot over the years. We talked about it on this very show back in the day, where when Apple was making like matte, like their 30-inch Apple, 30-inch Apple Cinema display with a matte thing on it, and then like PC laptops are coming up with glossy screens.

We were all, gross! I saw a glossy screen laptop in CompUSA and it was disgusting. I can't believe people even like those screens. Those were plastic glossy screens and they looked awful because any one or two micron deflection in that plastic makes weird specular highlights and makes everything look wavy and everything always looked like it was wet and greasy and just like it didn't look nice.

Then Apple made glossy screens with glass in front of them. And I was like, oh, I actually like that. Glossy versus matte, you know the trade-offs. If it's glossy, you get deep, rich blacks and better sharp ness overall. But if there's any light reflecting in it, you're going to see that light exactly in the monitor.

Hell, you might even see your own face like Samus in Metroid Prime reflected in the monitor because it's so glossy. So, you know, so that's the trade-off. In a dark room, a glossy television or a glossy monitor will always look the best because you have no reflections and no light sources.

Everything is as sharp as it can possibly be because the light is not being deflected by any wavy type of layer. The blacks are completely black. That's what you want. Out in the real world where you have uncontrolled lighting, like with a laptop or a phone where you're walking around and you can't control where you are or where the lights are going, matte really helps there.

But I will say in most of the reviews that they were showing the matte screen, again, this is probably worse on camera than it is in real life. Like any matte surface, if you're coming at it on an angle and the light hits it at the right angle, it whites out the whole damn screen, you know, because that's what matte does.

It diffuses light and on an angle, a glossy screen, if you 're lucky enough not to have a direct reflection in the middle of your image, making it impossible to see, it can, you can still get like blacks or whatever, but the contrast gets annihilated at various angles with a matte screen.

And that's a trade-off. And that's the right trade-off for a folding phone, both because of the crease and also because unlike even in a laptop, you really have an uncont rolled lighting condition because you're holding it in your hand. Like at least with a laptop in a cafe, even if you have a glossy screen, you can kind of like bend it and position yourself at the table so that it 's not so bad.

But when you're holding a phone, who knows where the lights are coming from as you walk down the street and are jostling around or whatever. So matte is the way to go there, but be aware that there are definitely trade-offs related to the madness. Another fun thing I saw in a review was one of them did like a, the little thing where you put like a little magnet sheet on, on the back of it.

The MagSafe ring on the back of the Duo has a little, I think it's a little weird magnet in the center of the circle and nobody knows what that's for. I figured they'll discover it eventually once they start cracking the thing open or maybe it's not a magnet or whatever, but I don't think the other phones have that.

So that's a little bit mysterious. Also the magnet's a little bit weaker on the, uh, the Duo than it is on other phones, probably because it's thinner. Um, I don't know. Let's see what other tidbits were in there. What do you, what tidbits do you remember from the reviews that you watched? I mean, certainly like, so first of all, I love these channels that had, they had like, you know, cat scanners and x-rays.

Ultra seconds. Because they can't break it open because it's, it's Apple's review units, right? Once they apply to get their own phones, they'll be, you know, chowing them up. Yeah. Apple, Apple prohibits them from disassembling it. So they are like, okay, we'll just x-ray our way. And, and open and close it 32,000 times. Right. Yeah. Okay with that.

And by the way, on that, on that topic, when, uh, when Joanna Stern did open and close it 32,000 times, no measurable or perceptual difference in the hinge. Yeah. Like the hinge seems like a remarkably, uh, engineered part of this. Like it, and I liked how I forget, but one of the Chinese YouTubers, um, broke down like the different parts of the hinge from having cat scanned it in a 3d rendered graphic.

Yeah. It is amazing. Like it, like this is like, you know, the production quality of Apple's videos and they like, you know, zoom around their virtually rendered and they make the product. They couldn't even open this one. Yeah. It's like, it's incredible how it works with like, you know , different springs and cams to get like the different parts of the motion.

Like, wow. Um, yeah. So that anyway, going back to the, the, the less impressive stuff. Um, yeah, the magnet strength wasn't as strong. Um, in particular, the thermals of the iPhone duo seem not amazing. It everyone DLT at the hot side and the cold side.

Yeah. Well, you know, I, everyone has a great, that's a great reference, but I feel like that was consistent ish. I feel the same with battery life. I feel like more than half of the reviewers said the battery life was trash, but not everyone did.

I thought most of the reviewers said the battery life was better than expected. Yeah. Most of them, it seems like the battery life is actually pretty decent. Um, but the, the, like thermal throttling is a thing, not as bad as the iPhone air, but not nearly as good as the iPhone pro.

Yeah. So on the battery life thing, it's tricky because I don't think most of the reviewers, even maybe even the Chinese ones have really standardized across all of them to decide what is a representative test of a folding phone. Because you have to decide how much is it with screen open?

How much is it with screen closed? Because obviously with screen open, you're lighting up a lot more pixels and that can really affect battery life. Most of the reviewers who lived with the phone said that your life was fine. Like, and I think it's because when you're living with the phone, like you just physically can't have it open all the time. Like it's like, you're going to spend some portion of the time with its clothes, especially if you're putting it into a bag or whatever.

Um, we'll see if that degrades over time, but that's the battery life up from the reviews. I was pleasantly surprised that most of them thought it was pretty good. Now, if you do a test where you put it on a stand and you 'll have it open the whole time. Yeah. It's going to do worse with the giant screen open, but we 'll, we'll see how that fares.

Like it's so hard to tell because it's like, okay, when you have this phone, how often are you going to use it unfolded? And you could have wildly different battery life just based on how much time you spend with the big screen lit up versus the small screen. Or God forbid both screens. And as a, as a, I kept calling her, I justine has what's what's, I don't even know what her last name is.

Anyway, it's Eric. I think something like that. As I justine pointed out when she reviews these things, just like, we can't really give you a fair battery assessment because when we make these videos , we have the things on and running like at full blast, like with the cameras running like all the time.

So it's not, it's not representative. If you're not a content creator making a review of the phone, like your usage won't be the same as hers. But she did say that during that, it still seemed pretty good. All things considered. And the heat issue, most of the people did benchmarks and tons of these channels do great benchmarks said that like, if you're just testing the CPU, it matches the speed in most benchmarks of the 18 pro and 18 pro max.

But the second you test anything having to do with the GPU thermal throttling gets you on the duo, which makes some sense because it's like the GPU does tend to produce more heat. It's just physically bigger on the, on the SOC than the other stuff. And plus, obviously the CPU is also running when the GPU is running.

So for non gaming, non GPU related things, it seems like it 's not thermal throttling that badly, but it is for the, and to your point, I think that is actually better than the air because I think the air thermal throttles like no matter what part of the chip you use. Yeah. Whereas this one manages not to.

And yeah, the hot side and cold side is because the SOC is on one side and that's the hot side. And that's fine. Like, it's kind of a shame they didn't magic some way to spread the heat from the hot side to the cold side, but the hinge is kind of in the way. And that's kind of an important, complicated part.

So yeah, the vapor changer is entirely on the hot side and it is very small vapor chamber, not nearly as big as the one on the 18 pro again from the x -rays. So I think they did as good a job as you could imagine with the physical aspect of this.

But yeah, and on the rest of the reviews, I mean, I think I get to the credit of the Chinese YouTube channels. They also went into all this stuff. They did everything. They did the tech specs. They did the benchmarking. They also did like the day-to-day life things. But some of the, some of our more familiar reviewers did an even better job of this, which is like talking about what it's like to live with because they know because they've had it for like a week and a half or whatever.

How hard is it to find the buttons? How annoying is it not to have FaceTime? All the different weird orientations. The, the case situation, which is really weird. Like Apple's case requires sticky adhesive to stay on because there's no way for it to actually grip the thing without literal sticky adhesive.

You have to like peel off this little thing and then stick the, the Apple's case to it. Very strange times in, in the case world. I know lots of third-party cases have been like that sometimes for past phones, but really weird for an Apple case to do that. Just the physical reality of living with it of a, a short squat phone.

That's hard to reach. And the lack of face ID and not knowing where the touch ID button is and having the volume buttons be in a weird place and having to get accustomed to like rotating it to what you think is the upside down position, because that's the, actually the better way to hold it where your fingers aren't blocking the camera.

Uh, even though it looks like it should be the other way based on where the opening and the case is just lots of weird stuff like that. And depending on the reviewer, they were either like, like kind of like you are, Marco. It's like, well, this is a trade-off and here are the trades offs versus a more like Gruber's approach, which is like, this is not a good phone for the way I use phones.

And so I don't like it, uh, waking me up when they have face ID. Yeah. I think you covered pretty much everything. Um, obviously you and I got slightly different vibes from this, but I've had a very busy couple of days. And so maybe, uh, maybe you're right and I'm wrong. Uh, but anyways, um, no, I think you covered it all pretty well.

And I think that's a pretty good executive summary. I mean, obviously I'm going, I'm going to live with mine for at the bare minimum, you know, 13 days. I sitting here now, I don't plan to return it. And I presume I will keep it as a device for, you know, app development, but I'm genuinely curious if I'm going to switch back to my 17 pro or what I 'm going to end up doing, but we'll see.

Yeah. When I, when I was watching these videos, I was thinking about YouTube and I'm like, based on these videos, it seems like a guaranteed slam dunk that like Casey's going to return his phone and Marco is not going to use it as his main phone. But coming, hearing the impression that you guys had actually touching and using the phone, maybe that's not true.

Like it just, it seems like the reviewers are crankier than normal about this phone. And I guess maybe it's just because like after like 20 something or, you know, almost 20 years of like iPhones being fairly straightforward rectangles that the foldable phone has just thrown them all for a loop.

And because they're not, they're not as interested in the thing they get for trading off that other stuff. To them, it's just like, well, I see all the things that I 'm losing and the thing that I gain is not that important to me. So I'm going to ding this phone.

It's almost, it was kind of like glad that tech reviewers have essentially not fallen into the same trap as game reviewers used to. Remember when game reviewers used to give like numeric scores from one to 10? They still kind of do remember that like the Metacritic score, like what is the Metacritic score for this game? They would find all the one 10 reviews from all the big gaming websites back when there used to be a lot of big gaming websites.

And they would average them and say, here's the Metacritic score. It's a 7.2 out of 10. I do wonder what the duo would have gotten out of 10 from these, from these reviews, because boy, there was a lot of people who were upset about how awkward and weird it was to use just day to day.

Even if they did rave about the big inner screen and the matte screen and all the stuff they loved about it, they just couldn't help saying, but yeah, like it's, it's making it not fun for me to use a phone anymore. Like I can't use it. It doesn't work. My hands don't know how to work it. Like Neil, I tried to spin it into like, it's fun to come up with new moves to do with your phone.

Like, like, I don't know, like Rubik's cube type of moves. Like it's kind of fun to come up with new physical moves, but still he was kind of like, but it would be better if I could just use it and not have to do all those gymnastics. So that's, that's, that's like a week and a half of use. So I'm, you know, I think, I think this is a great, like, like they do in car reviews.

They should have a long-term test where, yeah, here's your review, but we're going to keep it and drive it for 40,000 miles and see what we think about it. Then I would watch for that in a couple of months for like the revisiting the iPhone duo after living with it, who abandoned it, who lived with it and found that they really love the, the advantages they get despite the disadvantages .

And then, yeah, we've already got rumors about, well, maybe face ideal will be in the iPhone duo too. We'll cover that in a future show. Yeah. And to be clear, like that's not rumored. It's just hoped for. No, there was, there was a new rumor. Oh, really? German has already got his iPhone duo two rumors and one of them is face ID.

Of course. Yeah. And I think, you know, the, the themes for almost all the reviews, like they all pretty much agree on the broad themes. So, you know, watch them if you want, if you need help with your buying decision, watch them and see if, see what appeals to you and what doesn't. The summary of it's basically a folded in half iPad mini in your pocket, I think is a pretty good summary.

How does that sound to you? Do you, are you somebody who loves the iPad already? Do you, have you carried around an iPad mini a lot before or have you wanted to when, do you, have you ever used an iPad mini? Like it, does that sound good to you? Does that sound amazing enough to you to give up things like face ID, easy one-handed operation, uh, the best cameras, you know, like it, maybe not, but maybe.

Like I think for me, like I've never been that much of an iPad power user, um, or even many times that much of an iPad user period. So it's, it's a, it's a bit of a, you know, I'm not super excited about the iPad-ness of it, but in, but in another way, like, and I think Gruber covered this well, it seems almost like a reset of the idea of an iPad.

It's like, what if the iPad never existed and we just made phones bigger today for the first time? And in many ways, I think it gets things more right than the iPad, especially in the area of multitasking.

I've been working on an iPad a lot these last couple of weeks, which we'll get to shortly. iPad multitasking still doesn't make any sense to me. And like, at least now I know how to undo what I do usually , but like I am accidentally invoking iPad multitasking all the time.

It gets in my way constantly. It almost never is doing what I want it to do. When I played with the duos, I figured it out instantly and it was totally fine. It was rock solid. My fingers kind of already knew it just because it's based on like the swipe up home indicator thing.

Like I instantly, like without ever having been taught it, I just instantly figured it out and it just did what it felt like it should do. Yeah. It's more limited than iPad multitasking. You can only have two apps. Like you can't do arbitrary windows and everything. But actually, I think that's fine.

And I think for almost everyone who uses iPads, that's a better idea than the kind of baby Mac that they've implemented on iPads now. Well, I mean, so the thing I would have added to Gruber's section where he was talking about that is the big advantage that that software stack has on the duo is the thing bends in half.

And because the phone bends in half, when you say, well, there's a left half and a right half, it's like, well, duh, physically speaking, there is a left half and a right half. It's not a manufactured thing of software. If you bought a 13 inch iPad and they only let you split the screen 50% and it didn't bend in half, you'd be like, what the hell does have this giant screen?

You're telling me I can only have two things side by side. Why can't I have a third? Why can't I have slide over? Why can't I have a little windows? Blah, blah, blah. So yeah, it is a more, it is a more limited constrained problem space. And it is constrained for a reason that everybody can see it bends in half. Now, not to discredit them. They did an amazing job with that multitasking.

Like the way it works is great and is a great fit for the hardware. And arguably the iPad did not do a great job of fitting their hardware, but you can't use the same solution for a 13 inch iPad as you can for the , for the duo. So I wouldn't say, let's just bring this over to the iPad. I'm not saying the iPad is perfect or even good, but it's, it's a different problem area.

So I think the duo team knocked it out of the park, but that's the final topic. Most quickly on software people, a lot of people were asking, we were talking about the developer story. We were like, Apple doesn't care. What does Apple care? If apps aren't ready, they'll just let, put the thing out. It'll be a year and then one of the year is over. Apps will have updated third party apps will have updated for the duo and Apple's fine with it.

This first year doesn't count. What does Apple even care? These reviews are why I care. They care. Every single review dinged, not just third party apps, but Apple itself for buggy weird ass things. Like Joanna Stern said, like, I couldn't send the message because the keyboard was covering the send key.

It rotated into a weird position and things were odd. Every review totally slammed the fact that if you have a non-updated app, it looks like garbage on the duo. Every review said this. This is why Apple cares. They don't want reviewers to send, spend a whole section telling you about your apps are going to suck on the duo.

And again, it's day zero. Like it's, it's even, some of them did say in the week and a half, I was reviewing this. My third party apps were slowly rolling out on the store and things got better. So that's fine. This is not the story that Apple wants to see for their new device. They want it to all be all superlatives and nothing bad.

And every review slammed the hard, the software support. And we all understand why it's there. And yes, it will get better as third party apps come out. And most reviews said that, but man, does Apple not want that section to their interview? Man, do they not want a section of review where you show on video an iPhone size rectangle in the center of that gigantic, beautiful inner screen?

Every review did that. And every time I saw it, I'm like, oh, someone at Apple is gritting their teeth right now because that is not how they want this, this product to be shown, but it is the current reality of this product. And also like, I really don't want to do this whole dance again, because I'm pretty sure we already talked about this, but if Apple wanted this story to be better, Apple could have made this story better.

They could have disclosed this internally earlier so that their apps would be optimized earlier. They could have done more labs in more places. They could ship it two months later and miss the holiday season. They could ship it later.

Yeah, when there's more stock maybe for everybody. I 100% understand, well, to the best anyone can from outside, how and why they landed where they did. But if the software story isn't great because third-party devs order it at 8.05 in the morning and don't get it for a month and a half, or a month or two weeks or whatever, it doesn't really matter.

That's Apple's choice. That's Apple's fault. And if they want third-party developers to do what they can to make their apps better on this device, then they ship 27.1 beta or whatever it was for Xcode, you know, Xcode for 27.1.

They ship that immediately. If they want us to make good apps, they don't take away all the system apps in the simulator. They leave them as stuff for us to look at, to crib. This is all self-owns with regards to software, with regards to software.

It's all self-owns. And on the hardware front, by the way, that's the thing that none of us know right now. And maybe some will be able to reverse out of the next earnings call. But the question is, when you have to attribute the current , you know, February, now February ship date, how much of it is because demand was high and how much of it is because they're having trouble building these?

Obviously, both of those factors are because I think demand was high. And also, there have just been endless stories about they 're having difficulty manufacturing this. So what are the ratios? Like, is there any world in which they could have had enough supply? Or is this that like how what it comes down to is how many how many duos do you think they sold?

Obviously, they sold everyone they could make. How many could they make? And this is just a question that currently only Apple knows . It doesn't matter. Practically speaking, you just can't get one until February . And it clearly is a very popular product. And as Marco pointed out, they did not have this problem with the Vision Pro, which was also a complicated, difficult product to manufacture.

So clearly, demand is very high for this. But it also seems to me that their supply is lower than usual for a launch of a phone. Because Apple usually doesn't miss demand predictions this badly unless they literally can't make any more phones.

And with the Duo, I believe that's probably the case. Yeah. But I mean, I'm super excited. I really, really am. I think even if I decide, you know, not my carry device, just not for me. Even if that's the conclusion I come to, I think this is such a fun and interesting and kind of wild device.

And I'm so glad that Apple is shooting their shot, like I said earlier. Yeah. And also, like, we are on the verge of potentially, according to the rumors, having a new iPad mini be released. And that's very interesting because we just started, we just got finished talking about how the iPhone Duo is basically a substantially better iPad mini.

And I'm like, having now, like, held the Duo and used the Duo, I'm like, I wish the mini was more like this. And you kind of think, like, could it be? The iPad mini is not going to be too grand, though. No, but like, could the iPad mini be significantly thinner, lighter, smaller, and have almost the same size screen as it does now?

With an OLED screen, it's coming. Yeah, with OLED. Like, it's like, that's actually, I'm very interested all of a sudden. Imagine if it has nanotexture. Oh, my, I did think about that. Like, a thinner, lighter, nanotexture OLED iPad mini. And Face ID, someone in the chat room said, let's not get crazy.

No, it still has Touch ID, probably. But still, like, that would be amazing. I would love that. Let's, fingers crossed for next week, I guess. But that sure would be cool. Yeah, speaking of that, we should squeeze that in before we go. Yeah, so as we record, it's Thursday, October, what is the time?

22nd. And there has been announced a Pro Intel event on the 28th of October. If we didn't have so many other things to talk about tonight, we would definitely cover this more. I apologize. We don't have more time for it. But suffice to say, that is happening, I believe, Wednesday the 28th.

So hypothetically, we will be talking about it that night, or at least recording that night. And we will post, you know, whenever Marco gets to it. But we know it's a thing. I'm sorry we didn't have a chance to talk about it. But we are not invited, and we will cover it from afar.

Yeah, and quickly, the rumor devices are the touchscreen 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro with OLED displays, the new iPad mini with an OLED, new iMac with an M6, 14- inch MacBook Pro models with the M6 chip. Yeah, there's a bunch of rumor products that this is not a surprise event we all expect it to be coming.

That's what we're looking forward to. We'll be a little bit of a scramble. We'll also get to find out whether they call these things the ultras. Everyone is saying it's because the event tagline says pro and tell that they're not going to be called ultras, but they're not going to spoil the name of it in the invitation. So we'll see you next week. All right.

Thanks to our sponsors this episode, ZocDoc and Quince. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. By the way, you also get a discount on those merch things we mentioned earlier from the ATP store if you're a member.

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John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.

And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E -Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-A -N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-S-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A -C-U-S-A.

It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast So Long. As we are speaking here, let me click on this button, click on this button, and boom, submitted to the App Store.

I love a live either release or submission. Love it. That's a release, right? Well, no, submitting to the App Store is not a release. Oh, I thought you had a pending developer release. Oh, no, I wish. Well, submitting to the App Store means nothing. You could be waiting a week.

Waiting for review. To nobody's surprise, when the iPhone Duo was announced and when they announced Apple Pencil support, I had to do it. I just had to. So I've just submitted to the App Store.

Remarkable. It's not called that. But it should have been. No. All right.

So, we talked.

I'm going to have a week.

I'm going to have a week.

Pencil Kit has a bunch of kind of automatic behaviors that are very difficult or impossible to disable. And I found myself hacking around it so much, trying to, like, just customize it and disable certain built-in things so I could do my own things. At some point, it was like, I'm just going to write my own. So this was all. I ended up writing my own ink engine.

And I loved how it wrote. I think it writes better than anything else on the iPad that is not Pencil Kit. And in some ways, I think it's better than Pencil Kit. I was very, very happy with this ink engine. But an ink engine is not an app. There's a lot of other stuff that goes around an app that you need to make to make it compelling.

And I was like, you know, I don't use my iPad very much. I probably shouldn't make an iPad app. When I got the Duo development SDK, I, at first, you know, first thing I did was fix Unforgettable for the Duo because it was the easiest.

And that kind of got me going. And I did Overcast with the momentum that I had from that. It was great. And those updates are in the store. And it's wonderful. I'm very happy with how those turned out. I think Overcast will need some more substantial, you know, redesign work at some point.

But again, I have to be very careful how I do that. And that's going to be a bigger job with a lot more, like, iteration and testing and betas and stuff like that. And that's not something that was going to happen in a few weeks. But then I thought, hmm, I wonder, this seems like a good opportunity.

I don't use an iPad that often. But if I had an iPhone Duo, it would be in my pocket all the time. And when I made the 3D model of it, I printed the 3D model. And I was like, hmm, this is really close in size to a Field Notes notebook.

And people carry those in their pockets and little pens all the time. Lots of people do that. So I wonder if I could make this app into kind of like a Field Notes style, like a notebook app for the iPhone Duo.

Wouldn't that be fun? I have a few weeks before it comes out. Let's see if I can do it. And I think I did it. The app is called Fineliner. It is named after the type of pen that it represents.

It is submitted to the App Store. I expect, because it is an app for iPhone Duo, I expect it to go through probably somewhat quickly. I would guess that probably by the end of the weekend, it's probably in the App Store. But again, I could be wrong.

Who knows? It's the first submission. So I don't know. If it gets rejected, that could add to things. You know how it goes. But it could be out. It could be out when this episode is published, for all I know. Like, you know, if it comes out in the next 18 hours, like maybe.

Who knows? So at one point, Marco had stepped away when we were at the iPhone Creator Showcase and whipped out his computer for some reason. And I was like, what is going on? And he was talking to, I thought, an Apple person. And I was very confused.

And I was done with the conversation I was having. And I go walk toward, you know, Marco and whoever the Apple person was. And in a not mean way, Marco goes, no, no, no, no, no. You don't know what this is. In the like, it was the very polite, very kind, you need to buzz off.

This is not for you. Which, he's talking to Apple people. Fair enough. I don't know what's going on. But at some point, I think you had said to me something along the lines of, I've got something new and you don't know about it and I'm going to save it for the show. Yes. Or something along those lines.

And so then at lunch, I think maybe I was giving you puppy dog eyes accidentally because I don't remember begging to see it or anything like that. But one way or another, you said, all right, here, let me show you what I've got. Marco hands me his iPad mini, hands me a pencil. I personally don't want to spoil the onboarding of this app .

Maybe Marco will spoil it. That's up to him. But the onboarding of this app is unlike any other app I've seen. And it took me a minute, probably longer than it should have, but that's not Marco's fault. That's my fault. It took me a minute to understand what was happening. Let's just say I thought I was doing a tutorial and then I realized, oh, oh, this is so much more than that.

And all I will say, and I'd like to hear John's two cents as well. All I will say is in the same vein as we were talking about , you know what? Even if the duo sucks, it's fun. It's fun and different.

And dare I say, whimsical. I don't know if Fineliner will have a place in my life or not. I really, truly don't. But I'll be darned if the onboarding alone isn't fun and wh imsical and different.

And I think even if you have no interest in owning an iPhone duo, if you are into Apple stuff, if you listen to this show, and if you have someone in your life that has one or an Apple store near enough that it's not burdensome to go, you need to go and play with the duo for a little bit.

It's worth a little bit of your time to just mess around with it. Similarly, even if you don't feel like you need a note- taking app for your duo or for your iPad or what have you, you need to try the onboarding experience of this app. Because it is so cool and so fun and so unlike anything else I've ever seen.

And it's one of those things where the second you see it, you get very angry that it was not you that came up with the idea. So, again, I would like to hear John's perspective because, you know, while Marco and I were at lunch at John's of Blee cker, you know, that's when I saw it and I whizzed through it only to realize I made a grievous mistake.

I should have really taken my time and let that sink in. But, Mr. Syracuse, what was your impression? And if you'll permit it, I would love it if you could be vague about the specifics of what we're talking about. No, I'm going to spoil it. People are going to have to either pause the show or skip over this portion. Be like, I can't talk about it without that.

Oh, John, come on. You can do it. You can do it. I'm going to just people like we do this all the time in rec diffs. If you don't want to be spoiled on Marco's app, pause the program now. Go download it from the App Store and try it yourself and then come back to the show. The show will be here when you need it. I would say don't look past the first screenshot either.

Right. Well, fine. I would genuinely recommend, truly, in the same way I would say pull over and go to atp.fm.store, pause the show. Pause the show and go check it out. Truly, it will be so much more fun for you if you go in cold.

We'll put a link to the app in the show notes. Whenever the app comes out, we will put it in the show. Hopefully it won't come out a month from now, but we will put a link in these show notes. I mean, I can put a link in now. It just won't work. Yeah, yeah. I guess. Yeah. Give Casey the URL and he'll put it in. You can just click on it and have it not go anywhere. All right.

So I got this app because Marco posted it to a Slack that we're in with a test flight link to it. And I immediately installed it. And I could tell what it was from like the little preview and the icon or whatever. Like, oh, he made remarkable. Isn't that nice? And I launched the app. And I immediately knew exactly what he was doing when I saw that thing.

And you know what I look for next? I looked immediately to say, did he also include a button that says, I don't want to do this. Just skip through to the rest of it. And true to form, like Steve Jobs, not putting arrow keys on the original Macintosh keyboard.

There is no such button, at least until later through the onboarding process. There is you just didn't scroll down. I looked for it on the initial screen. It is there eventually, but I didn't see it on the very first screen that you see. And yeah, so what he has you do, it's a pen and ink, you know, whatever, like use Apple pencil to, you know, you launch a notebook.

By the way, can I just slap you right here for a moment? Please, for the love of God, don't try this on a regular iPhone. Please. You're like Christopher Nolan asking people not to watch his movies. on the back of an airplane seat. It's using, trying to use a, like a, a drawing note taking app on an iPhone with your finger is terrible.

I, and I have bought every stylus that you can buy to try to test. Is there anything that is good for the iPhone? No, there is not. The iPhone duo. Yes. And any iPad. Yes. Please test this with an Apple pencil or some equivalent stylus that uses the Apple pencil APIs on an iPad.

Please. Anyway, go on. Yeah. So it says, Hey, draw yourself. Uh, and it even says, look, you can put two dots for eyes and a smile. You know how to draw yourself, draw yourself. And so you're like, all right, draw. I mean, the reason I knew this is what it was going to be was because my brain did the math and it's like, why is this app asking me to draw myself?

It's not teaching me how to draw with a pencil. Everybody knows how the pencil works. You put it on the screen and it draws. It's not, it's a familiar device or whatever. It's clearly going to use what I draw for something. And what is it going to use it for? Well, it's probably going to make it some part of the UI.

And so you draw yourself. And then the next screen has you drawing a back button and undo arrow. And like, if you didn't get it on the first screen, you get it on the second screen where you're like, Oh, I'm drawing the UI for the app. I'm going to use this UI is going to have buttons like, again, like procreate or whatever, that little undo arrow, the, the left chevron that takes you back in the navigation stack, uh, the pen tool, the eraser tool.

I'm going to draw them by, you know, you can just trace over the helpful vague, like gray outlines that Marco provides, or you can draw whatever the hell you want. There's nothing stopping you from drawing anything you want . These little things you are drawing the user interface on in during the onboarding. At a certain point, it says, do you want to keep drawing these things?

You just want to get to the app. And there's like a draw it for me later thing. And you can import and export these. And I don't know if there's any kind of cloud sharing or whatever. But the point is, you are essentially personalizing your app in the same way you would personalize a paper notebook by you writing the date and your handwriting at the top or whatever system you have for like, you know, putting titles on pages or bullet journ aling or I don't know all this.

But I do know that when you open up your own notebook, your handwriting is all over that. It's not just the content that has your handwriting. It's everything. It's the metadata. It's the structure. It's whatever. And so using this app after you have drawn the UI, when you 're using it, you see essentially your artwork, your handwriting, your self-drawn face as the account button thing or whatever.

That's the interface to this application with a few exceptions and some screenshots. I'm going to send Marco that I think needs some more work. But anyway, that's that's the the the conceit of this thing . And it is adorable and it is whimsical and people are going to love it. And it is going to be like there's no way not to, you know, again, you spoil it in the first screenshot or everything.

Every review is going to start with this because how can you not? It's an incredibly good idea. But also setting aside like, oh, give me the idea for onboarding or whatever. Just the experience of using the app where you're constantly seeing essentially your work. And I know it's like, well, I drew a less than sign.

How is that my work? You'll be surprised how much you could recognize your own scribbles because you're used to seeing your own scribbles, right? Like you it makes it feel more like home for yourself. Even if you're not good at drawing, even if you just trace them, like I felt like I could look, especially since I didn't draw all of them because I just wanted to get to the app.

The ones that I didn't draw were clearly not drawn by me. Now, it's granted they're probably neater than what I would have drawn as well. But like you could see like my personality, not my personality. So it's a very clever long term idea to give the app a feeling that an app with a standard UI is not going to have.

Thank you very much. I'm you. You got it. Like you absolutely got it. I am really curious to see the picture you drew of yourself . Please share that. Oh, I was just rushing through it because I knew it was going. I was like, I got to see this. I got to see this. This is the screens that you need to do something about.

I don't know what is going on here, but it's wacky. Wait, the screen. Oh, I just put it in Slack. Oh, you're doing it on a phone for God's sake. I mean, it runs on a phone. So you have to make the screen look like something and that 's nothing. Oh, geez. Yeah. All right. The setting screen doesn't look good on a phone. Well, no one.

Nobody should be using this. Like people are going to run this on a phone. There's my face. Isn't it great? That you could have done better than that. I was rushing through it. You got the test flight like an hour before the show. Do it on an iPad for God's sake. I do have an iPad and a pencil. I know.

I'll just don't. And I will say that I'm not really in the market for this kind of app, but I will definitely try it on my iPad to give it a fair shot. I even like when I was making the screenshots, I only put one screenshot for the regular iPhone because the problem is you can't in the app store. You can't omit it. Yeah, so you can't ship to the app store an app that is only available for iPads and iPhone duos.

If you include the iPhone duo, it has to work on every iPhone. And so you cannot rule them out. You cannot say like, don't even let people install it on a regular iPhone. So I had to ship it on the iPhone and it's bad. Anyway.

Yeah, so the idea that I had like when I use a remarkable. I kind of built this whole system of like I made this custom PDF with like tappable regions because I was trying to simulate links between different sections.

So I kind of have my own little UI in my notes and links are a feature of the Supernote notebooks that that's like one of the key features that remarkable seems like they will never they will never add. But I loved my ability to like kind of make my own little custom UI with my own crappily drawn icons on my remarkable.

And so that's what I've made the app to replicate was like, what if I did a good version of that for iOS devices? And that's that's what it is. It is a note taking app. You can you can doodle or draw, but it's not really intended for like illustration.

I'm not doing like realistic brush and ink simulations. Everything works like a fineliner pen. It's just like you have fixed width markers. Basically, that's it. There's no like pressure sensitivity, no tilt sensitivity. You are drawing a like a very like digital looking art style.

But it's all backed by solid tech. So first of all, of course, everything is cloud synced. It's all on iCloud. Everything you know, John, you asked if your stuff synced. Yes, of course it syncs. I was thinking, is there iCloud based artwork sharing with other users?

You can collaborate on notebooks. You can invite people to your notebook. You can work on them together. I meant the glyphs for the controls like undo, redo. Like, can you share sets of those with other people? I know there's like an import and export, but I was wondering if there was like a cloud based marketplace. I probably not because then you just have people drawing penises. That's always. Yeah, I'm not going to do that.

That's always the user generated drawing content destination. Very rapid, very rapid destination within three microse conds. The entire UI is filled with penises. Yeah. And by the way, I just posted my UI in the. That's pretty good. Casey said that's better than what he did. I drew those with my finger on my phone.

It's still better than what I did. To be fair, on the phone, I do make the canvases a lot larger just to make it just give you a fighting chance. Yeah. But that's still that. John, that's pretty good for a phone. I will give you that. You have always been the best artist of the three of us. As I try to trace my finger over his little outlines. Just if you're afraid of this, you're like, I can't draw UI .

Why are you selling me an app? It doesn't have a UI. Like, I swear to you, you can just simply trace over the outlines he gave you with a pencil and it will look fine and it will still have your personality. So don't worry. Don't like, oh, I can't buy that app because I'm not a good artist. You do not need to be a good artist to make this UI. I think I'm not a good artist. Like, and that's so I, I kind of like when the drawings are a little bit cheap.

Like, I think it looks fun that way to have something that 's just like a little sheet. Yeah. People make UIs intentionally looking like, like good designers make UIs intentionally looking that way. So it looks handmade and handwritten. But now this is the real thing. You're making it yourself. Yeah, exactly. And I had fun with making this entirely, like the entire UI is custom.

There's no stock component anywhere in this. There's no liquid glass. There's no like system bars or anything. There's no system sheets. There's no. It's like a game in that way. Like no, no OS UI. Yeah. Like it, it looks like a UI made of pen and paper. And also, uh, because, so because it's very, you know, everything again, very digital.

Um, it's all vector based. You can zoom in all the way. Everything stays sharp. You can scale and rotate things. Everything is fine. You can export as SVG or PDF. In addition to images, um, everything is vector. It also has dark mode.

The entire app, including your notes, flips to dark mode because the colors are semantic colors. So there's like, uh, you know, like the, the black pen just becomes nearly white in dark mode. And so, and you know, all the colors have dark mode variants on them so that you can actually like, you know, switch to that and have dark mode notes.

So like it's, it's, it's, it's a very fun hybrid of the analog world and the digital world. Um, I have a fun page turn animation that I stole from i Books. That's when I, when I was bragging, uh, weeks ago about how I had AI make me a metal shader.

That's what that was for. Um, to try to, try to get that right. Um, and it took, to be clear, AI wrote the first version of the shader, but wow, did it need a lot of tweaking and a lot of behavioral change and appearance changes to be good.

This is the design is not AI's forte, let's say, but writing metal shaders, it's pretty good at, and I'm pretty bad at, so that, that worked out well. Um, but the entire app is, it's meant to be fun, but also I think the tech behind it is, is also good.

Um, so I have the organizational features that, that I wanted. I have custom headings, custom links to whatever you want. You can use headings and links, great organizational features. The headings show up in your handwriting. wherever possible, I try to show things in your handwriting . Um, John didn't mention, but there's also, you, you don't have to do this, but if you take the time to draw every letter, you can also have a custom font in the app and have all the text in the app show up in your handwriting by

making a custom font. And you can even export that font as a TTF and you, and you can use it on your Mac. You can't use it on the iPad for technical reasons, but it 's just fun. And on the iPhone duo, I do a lot of fun things with like the closing and opening simulation and stuff like that.

Check it out. Um, if it's for you, awesome. If it's not for you, cool. I, that's fine. It's not going to be for everybody. And I've, I'm kind of, I'm kind of making this like, this is the kind of app I make. Same, same thing with Unforgetful. Unforgetful is a very narrowly targeted app.

It's very opinionated and it's either really for you or really not for you. Fineliner is the same kind of thing. Fineliner is a very specific kind of app and it's, it's either going to land well with you or it's not.

I think there's a lot of little fun and delight and power in there. If you don't take handwritten notes, this might not get you to start. If you just want something to doodle some stuff in, go for it. The app is mostly free. Um, the, so I'm, I'm doing a bit of business model experimentation here too.

Almost all the features on in it are free. The only thing that charges money is, um, if you, it's, it starts out with three pen widths and three colors of ink and you can buy, oh, and, and three page templates, uh, blank and then lines and wider lined.

And you can buy additional colors, pen widths and templates . Most of them come in a deluxe pack that you can get for, I think it's 12 bucks to start. Um, and those are one time purchases. I, there's no subscriptions in this app.

I'm kind of taking a gamble with that. I don't know if that's going to work. I don't know if I'm going to stick with that longterm, but I, I think it might. And so I'm going to give it a shot. Um, but all that is to say like, you can use the app for free and there's like unlimited notebooks, unlimited pages, use all the tools in the app, like all the headings and links and all that stuff.

That's all free. Like all of that's the only thing you're paying for is if you want different colors, page backgrounds and pen widths, that's it. So give it a shot. See if it works for you. If not, it's at least fun to play around with for a little while. Yes, very much so. Uh, you absolutely, if you, if you have an iPad in your life and an, and an Apple, Apple pencil or an iPhone duo, uh, with the appropriate Apple pencil for that, you absolutely need to try this.

It's not going to cost anything but your time. If you only have an iPhone, like, you know, when John was trying to just run through it quick before we recorded, I still think it's worth your time to try, but yeah, it's not gonna be the world's best experience. You know, a second ago you said, these are the apps I want to make. And it's funny, my gut reaction, maybe nobody else will see it the way I do, but I view myself as make as having made a bunch of silly toy apps and then finally getting into something real with, with call sheet, you know?

And, and so you could say I had a bunch of silly toy apps and then I finally got my own overcast. And now you've had your own overcast and you're moving into silly toy apps. And so we're on the opposite journey, or at least that's, that's what it looks to me. Anyway, I just wrote my announcement blog post for a new app, which is not coming out anytime soon.

But anyway, I'm pre-writing the, there's like your pre- write the obituary for people, but the opposite. Anyway, I'm pre-writing the announcement post for my thing. And I basically repeated what I said back when I talked about it earlier, like that I've, I've gone, you see you, you had the two different directions of you going from like toy apps to like mass market and markets going from mass market to like niche apps.

And what I said last time we talked about this is I started out making these super niche apps that nobody wants. And then I tried to get mainstream with hyperspace, but then I'm back on my BS and I'm making niche apps again. So I've gone into U shape. I started out making obscure stuff that nobody cares about, made one app that's kind of potentially has somewhat brought up, not really, because hyperspace.

It's still super nerdy, but whatever I tried and it's like, nope, I got to, I have to go back to these stupid apps. Nobody wants. So more on that in a future episode. So go check it out. There's a link in the show notes to where the app will be, but we'll see if it's actually there when you click it.

So best of luck. Thank you very much.