Is folding iPhone Duo worth it? What about iPhone 18 Pros and Apple Watches? Surprise and Shine.

Coming up at Apple's Surprise and Shine special event this week, there weren't many surprises

but there were plenty of shiny new products. We'll be discussing the all-new iPhone Duo

with its beautiful creaseless display and the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max with its burgundy paint

job, and Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, which look exactly the same, but boast a brand new health

sensing system that supports two new health metrics, readiness and health age. Welcome to

the Colin Mack podcast. I'm your host, Leander Kenny. Joining me today are Lewis Wallace, Graham Bauer, and Charlie Sorrell. Hey, guys. Hello. Hello. All right. So before we dive in

what do you think of the keynote overall? How was John Tennis' first Apple event

When I heard him just speaking in voiceover, I couldn't help but think he sounded like an AI

voiceover. Really? Yeah, the voice delivery was a bit bland. I like that conspiracy theory. Maybe

he's not a real person at all. They keep talking about how there's no history can be found

of him. He's sympathetic. That's right. No one knows if he's married or got kids or anything

right? Just know he's a race car driver. Tim Cook was the same, wasn't he

The enigmatic CEO of Apple continues. I like Lewis's theory that he was a race car driver, though. That's nice

Well, that's one thing. He posts up pictures of being at racetracks from driving, driving Porsches

around Laguna Seca. Yep. I thought he was pretty good. I liked him

You know, he's charismatic. He's easygoing. I thought it was kind of natural enough. I saw some people criticizing, saying, oh, you know, I saw some people being really harsh that he didn't immediately go back to a live event. Like I saw some really harsh criticism about that. And I thought that was kind of a bit, you know, a bit unfair. It made me laugh out loud when they did the, you know, the initial handoff when Tim Cook came on and said, no, not me. There's your guy. That generally made me laugh. I thought that was pretty funny. Nicely done

Yeah, that was good. It did make me wonder when you hear TC's voice at the start and it's like, well, what is going on? I did, I was a bit disappointed that it wasn't more different, which is not to say that it was bad because it wasn't. But I kind of was expecting with a new boss and a new take. And I guess at the start when he starts talking about his vision for, I can't remember what he called it now, but something, something smart, intelligent

Personal Intelligent Hub. Personal Intelligent Hub. I thought, oh, is this going to be like the home hub or the digital hub for the next, you know, millennium or something

Is he going to give us a Steve Jobs-style quadrant vision or something amazing

And it just sort of taped it off. And then it became, yeah, you know, it's basically the iPhone

Anyway, here are some iPhones that look similar to what we did last year. And I just felt like, oh, it's from kind of exciting

It's going to be new, something different, a vision. and I did feel like then

I think he was good I think as a presenter I think he's a little

bit more natural than Tim Cook to be honest but only a little bit

I don't think that he doesn't come across as there's this sort of Apple vernacular now

just the way that everyone does it at Apple and some people are better at it than others

but none of it feels quite real, none of it feels like

you know when Steve Jobs was on stage and you could, his ego

his charisma, it would kind of coming off him in waves, you know, you just got the feeling that whether you liked him

or loathed him, that was the way that Steve was. Whereas this, it just feels a little bit more

studded, a little bit more rehearsed, and that's a bit of a..

Come on, you're talking about the greatest presenter of all time, right? You know, in any

arena, you know, like... That's true. It's a tough act to follow, but that is the act that they're following

Yeah, but that's kind of the, I think the inherent, you know, problem with those canned events. I mean, who knows how many takes there are. You know, it's never going to feel as risky as walking up there with a little clicker in front of 2000 people and saying something

And so I think I think Turner has plenty of charisma. I thought it was, you know, much more sort of just I don't know, just more like a real person than Tim Cook

I always felt like Tim Cook was great at leading the company and forced into this role of being Apple's public face at these events

And it's like, you know, completely unnatural to him. And I mean, I think he got better at it and I think he was fine

But he always seemed you talk about unnatural. I, I, he's always seemed like he was trying real hard to seem like a, you know, charismatic leader

And I, you know, I mean, he's charismatic in his own way, but it's very freaking low key

I mean, I liked him. I liked him. Tim Cook. Yeah. You know, I know what you're saying

If you go back and look at his early presentations, oh my God, they're so awkward. He is, he's, he's crawling out of his skin

And there was one, I think one of the first ones was a live one too. And he obviously he's the poor bass is so uncomfortable

But towards the end, yeah, like I liked his persona. I thought I found it likable

You know, I like. But but then when you see like did you see that video of him on his last day at Apple

You know, I think it was his last meeting that day with a bunch of employees. He was standing around

I mean, what's great about him is how sort of humble he is and how, you know, he just he seems like a genuinely nice character

person. Anyway, so I thought Ternus did great and I thought it was a pretty interesting event

myself. You know, all the weird stuff going on in the background, you know, the people in astronaut

outfits and Roman legionary stuff. I mean, it's kind of, you know, I mean, they are kind of cool

products that Apple puts together. I mean, these events are very slick. Some of the, you know

the way that they showed, for instance, that variable aperture on the phone. I mean

that just made me want to buy the thing i mean i don't have any idea if it'll actually make

you know a nickel's worth of difference in 99 of the photos that i would take with a phone but

man they know how to you know crank up the techno lust with that kind of stuff

i saw actually a quite a one criticism i thought was um valid was uh the um the in the johnny

tsuruji segment you know that the uh he's new that and he's now he used to be the chip guy but

now he's the head of hardware um they had him in this uh sort of chip fab lab right with um this

equipment and someone pointed out like this is totally fake you know this is this is a fake lab

um there was some safety switch which you're supposed to hit you know if anything goes wrong

but it's completely covered up by a machine and uh though he said like and they were contrasting

with a famous picture of Steve Jobs with Johnny Ive, Tony Fidel, Phil Schiller, and somebody

oh, and Johnny Ive's design lab. And it was the real design lab. And there was some CNC machines

in the back, and there's a big tool chest. And they're saying, okay, this is, you know

the old Apple was more trustworthy because this was genuine, you know, like, here's a genuine

picture. And the new Apple, you know, you've got, it looks like something out of Home and Garden

and everything's perfect. None of them dress really naturally, were they? Do you think they

go to work like that every day? No. And it was like where the authenticity The Apple authenticity is missing And I thought that was actually quite a good point especially the fake lab But then again I was thinking well you know it a video

What do you expect? Are you mad? Are they really going to let cameras into, you know, the real design lab

Hell no. No, they're not. I don't think any of those offices are real

I mean, I think that they're really shot at Apple Park. But, you know, a bit at the start when Ternus is walking through this office and there are people tapping away at their Macs in the background

And of course, they're not doing anything. And of course, they're not the people that just happen to be there

And of course, they told all their family, oh, you know, I was an extra on the keynote and you have to watch on Wednesday

Of course, it's like so fake. And I think they set up every aspect of that office, including like if there's like a Mac studio on that desk, it's very carefully considered

is not someone's Mac studio, it's just a prop. And so the whole layout, you know

so I think they would have taken out a whole big chunk of Apple Park

and just arranged a fake office set for filming that. I'm sure that they did

So, and to be honest, I think even though I agree it was a fake studio

it was less fake than previous ones where, you know, Johnny Cerucci then was like deep underground, wasn't he

I don't know, did like Craig Federighi go abseiling down some crevice in the ground

and then in some deep subterranean windowless layer we we saw johnny suruchi whereas this

there were some windows um i think it was less fake but still obviously fake i don't imagine

that they film any of that where anyone does real work i mean imagine yeah yeah yeah especially not

with apple and it was funny a lot of people um there's a there's a parlor game where people

pick out all the little easter eggs in um in the video like someone pointed out that there was a

a bag from the late 90s that was seen. You remember they filmed a couple of shots in Udian station in LA

the LA train station. And in the background, there's a guy walking like a passenger

you know, like going to get his train and he's carrying a duffel bag. And somebody like zoomed in on this and identified it as a bag that they gave

out at like WWDC in 1992 or something. I was like, are you kidding

um and then there was like six uh like some old iphones like i think the iphone 6 that was in on

one of the bookshelves there was a stack of them and someone said oh that's every color that they

released that year and this kind of like you know rain man like detail of apple mccainer um

i think what i was disappointed was it was it was like every other keynote and there was no change

it was the same format as all of them and i was hoping for something different because we had a

have a new CEO. But I guess upon reflection, that was the point that the message was continuity

And thinking about it now, it was naive to imagine they'd do anything different, perhaps

because they don't want to startle investors or anything. They want to get across the fact it's a

new CEO, but the business is just the same and it's doing great. And, you know, because things

were going great under Tim Cook, you don't want to put out some Apple event, which suggests

everything is changing because even if it is that's not what you want to present to the public

when everything seems to be going great if anything that might be another aspect of what's

fake about this because it very much looked like business as usual no change and maybe there's more

change going on under the hood than we realize and making the event just like all the previous ones

it is is uh is the sleight of hand that's a yeah yeah good point yeah maybe maybe yeah he definitely

He doesn't want to blow things up, does he, on the first one and have it be a total disaster

I mean, better to be safe than safe and sorry. But talking about new things, you know, I think the reason I like this was because there was a new thing, right, for the first time ever, which is, of course, the iPhone Duo, which avoids the crease and merges the iPhone and iPad into one brilliant device

So the iPhone Duo's crease is barely perceptible according to photos and videos from Apple's hands-on session after the keynote

And I know people are going to argue about this because, you know, I saw some other people saying that, yes, it was

Thanks in part to the nanotexture screen, which also produces greasy fingerprints

The Dio does have a camera button, but no action button. And contrary to some rumors, it does support MagSafe

Our writer, Coltomat writer Ed Hardy wrote a great piece for us, arguing that it's a perfect combination of iPhone and iPad that will appeal to people who use the iPhone as their primary computing device

pre-order start on Friday, October 16th, with availability beginning on Friday, October 23rd

There were predictions that the foldable would cost $2,500 or more, but the 256-gigabyte base

model is $1,999 in the US. That said, storage options also include 512 gigabytes, 1 terabyte

and two terabytes, and they boast prices up to $3,199. For a phone

Which is the price of a MacBook Pro, yeah. When my wife saw that, you know, she was speechless

which is unusual for my wife. You know, I've sort of been thinking about this

Like, I was talking about Technolust. Watching that thing, I'm like, oh, my God, October can't come soon enough

You know, I must, must have that phone. And just everything about it was just so appealing

But then I started thinking about it. I'm like, will I really use it? Will I really use the screen

Like, you know, I have to plan around with it for a bit. You know, like, what's it going to make me do? Am I going to use it for work

Or, you know, how you have to rationalize everything. Every time you want it. The Apple product buying process is always the same

You lust after it. You must have it. And then you rationalize it to yourself

afterwards you try to think of a reason why you need it um and i was trying to think of that reason

why i need the duo and i couldn't really come up with anything do you guys agree yeah i'm so

conflicted i on the one hand you know i've been getting more and more interested in it as i was

reading the rumors and started thinking maybe i will get it but then just in the week prior to

the keynote i started thinking to be honest it's a lot of money and like you said i'm not sure i

would really get the benefit of it i have uh an a 17 pro max which i'm very happy with and so

there's absolutely no reason to get this um and then when i saw it i like the design a lot more

than i was expecting and i'm such a user interface geek and they put so much thought into the ui much

more thought than i expected i knew it was going to be a bit different because all the clues in

in xcode that we talked about before it was like neither an ipad nor an iphone it's something new

but I still I thought it was going to be like essentially an iPhone with a big screen inside

and they've obviously put a lot more thought into it than that with the the toolbar and the tab bar

appearing on the right hand side when it's closed and when you open it up if you put apps on the

left they have the toolbar on the left and all these other amazing little details and thoughts

like something I I hadn't imagined but the the they do that so that when you open it up what

you see on the front is just the same as what you see on the inside And even like the the the pro of it if you put the the toolbar on the right hand side then the bit that you get in the middle is kind of the pro of a normal iPhone so they thought through all

of these details so beautifully and then all the the things that I hadn't really thought about which

I loved is what they call the poses that it can do so you can have it like half folded or completely

folded and so you can stand it up like a mini laptop or you can stand it up as a sort of tent

card as a bedside clock and all those things that when it's folded in these different ways the user

interface responds in different ways as well and like developers can do that too i've been learning

about that today and getting really excited about it like for my fitness app you can do this thing

where like you you fold it to 90 degrees and you you stand it on your desk when you're doing a

workout or you know on a surface and then you can have the controls on the lower half and the upper

half can show like the exercise illustration or something but all these neat things that you can

do so that i think it's actually i think they've thought about it in such a clever and thoughtful

and creative way and come up with loads of really beautiful use cases that some of the really neat

things even stuff like you know if you're taking a photo of kids you can actually have snoopy

animations on the back of your phone to attract the kids attention when you're taking the photo

so many like really joyful clever imaginative ideas that they've come up with for this thing

that make me try that one out down at the playground it makes me want what did you say

nothing nothing yeah well charlie what did you think of it now you're going to be dropping um

you know how much is it in spain it's probably about eight thousand dollars yeah it's going to

be two grand plus plus taps now they usually do the same same price in dollars and then you add

taps on more or less i don't know it's not gonna be no i'm not gonna get one i mean it's i'm happy

with my phone and my ipad i prefer my ipad for most things i use my phone when i go out uh and

for taking photos but that's about it you know it just is a it's i don't when i'm at home reading i

read on the ipad and my ipad mini is more or less the you know the size of this i i was impressed

with the tech demo. That animation, when you fold it open and it kind of blurs and then

flips in, I couldn't get enough of watching that. I was like, play it again, play it again, because I couldn't

quite work out what was happening. So that was really cool. That's a simulator that you can play with

and people have been playing with it in the simulator right over and over. Yeah, just doing that

is going to be a fidget toy and that's going to cause the crease. That's going to be, you know

you're just going to be bending it, open and closing. I like those, what they

do they call them poses, Graham, did you say? Yeah. Those are neat

I mean, the mini laptop one is quite laughable. That's Apple's netbook, finally

Right. But I wonder if, because developers need to support this stuff

and these are the developers who, you know, there are still plenty of iPhone apps that never got updated to be iPad size

So we'll see how that goes. Because this is more, I don't know, I think this is pretty niche, no

It's super cool. And I think they're actually probably going to sell quite a lot of them. But at that price, I think it's going to be a fairly niche thing

Maybe I'm wrong. Well, that's what I was wondering about, how many developers will actually invest the time in supporting it

given that the price is so high. I mean, I think it'll be bigger than Vision Pro

but it's not going to be as big as probably even the iPhone Air, at a guess

And yet Apple's asking for a completely custom UI from developers. And so I wonder how many are really going to do that

well i dug up some stats um counterpoint research which is a market research firm

um in 2025 i think uh there were um oh my god i can't remember now two million sold i think no

hold on my goodness me hold on i've got this is of the samsung fold or folding iphones as a

i read it was like about two percent of the total smartphone sales are folding smartphones

Yeah, of 200 million total. So it's only 2% of foldables, which isn't a lot. But then again, they've kind of sucked. The hardware is beautiful on the Android phones, but the software is supposed to be not very good at all

Talking about how the outer screen reflects when you open it up, how they switch from the outer screen to the inner screen. Apparently on an Android, you have to shut down the application on the front of the phone before it'll open up on the inside, which is kind of like, come on

so android um yeah right uh so i you know like you said i think graham you know your reaction to it

like all those thoughtful details everything has been so beautifully thought out from the hardware

to the software i think it's going to make a big difference i think it's going to appeal to a lot of people um and in fact i think it will really really will and even like things where the camera

the front facing camera on the inside is not so good but it's amazing that it's actually behind

the screen that like blows my mind it's such a cool detail did you see that did you see the

the film of that how it disappears when when yeah when you yeah and then and then it's like

another dynamic island that only appears when you need the camera but the thing is because of the

different poses you can obviously use the other side and see right so you can use the proper

cameras and still see what you're shooting and so it's uh you know you can't think of it just like a

normal iphone i do think this would be really popular if they could just solve the price but

I mean, realistically, the price puts it out of the price range of a huge amount of the market

which is a shame because I think this is a phone that a lot of people would love

What did you think of it, Lewis? Yeah, it looks beautiful. And, you know, they did a good job of making me want it, especially in the moment there

You know, those animations are amazing. All the, you know, again, all the like the blown up, you know, whatever those are

CAD renderings, I suppose, of like the hundred pieces in the, you know

the fold or what are the, or the, the hinge. That's the word I'm looking for. The hinge, you know, it

it looked amazing. And, and all the things you guys said, you know, that all of the, like, you know, the way they transformed the interface

the way that the animations look, the way all that stuff, you know, and, and yeah, I caught that thing about the, what do they call it

Kid Q or something. I can't remember what it, but the thing is like, wow, there's so much stuff put into this so much thought

but then yeah you know it's like oh wow it looks really cool like you set it on a

ledge and take a picture and I thought well how scratched up is it going to be if you set it on a

ledge and I also thought how many times would I ever do that how many times even when I had an

iPad how many times did I use my iPad not very many I just never did use it that much

and yeah okay maybe watching movies on a train ride or a plane ride or something okay well

I could do that on my phone. I could do that on an iPad if I wanted an iPad. Having that folding

thing around and dragging it around every day, I don't know. I mean, I guess I would have to see

how big it is, how heavy it is. The price actually, to me, seemed surprisingly not that horrible

I was expecting worse. But that lease program, I don't know. What is it, 50 bucks a month or

something? I can see a lot of people. I don't actually know how much it is a month. I'm sure a lot of people

go that route and say eh well I think really 70 bucks 68 bucks a month Yeah I looked at the lease program I sure you did Let try to take a look at that

You know, it did look interesting to me. I found it a lot more interesting than I thought I would

But I still think the practicality of it is that, you know, like Charlie says, I don't think I would use those features that much

I don't think that I would open that thing up to that size very often

And, you know, I use a computer all day. I use my phone when I'm not at my computer

I'm basically staring at a screen probably 20 hours a day. Well, not 20, I do sleep

But, you know, I just don't understand the need for it, especially the money outlay and everything else

So I don't know. You know, Leander, if you get one, I'm going to go to your house and see it immediately

Because I definitely, to me, it's like the vision pro. Like, I want to know what it's about

I don't I feel like if I don't know how it works I don't get to see it and I don't get to try it

I'm going to be way behind the curve because I think it's you know it's it's the hot piece of

technology right now but at the same time just like the vision pro I don't really think it's

worth it for me I don't see it being something I would use those features very often so yeah yeah

we'll see we'll see I'm wondering if it's going to be kind of like a little bit like the apple watch when they launched it when they launched the apple watch it was um they hadn't really

focused in on the health and fitness features as its primary use case

It was, oh, it's this, it's that. It's a little bit of everything. It was definitely sort of like, you know, let's sort of throw spaghetti at the wall

and see if it sticks. And, you know, what is it, 12 years later, 10, 12 years later, the Apple Watch has found

its use. So maybe it'll be a bit like that. The same with the Vision Pro

It hasn't found its killer application yet, the killer app. Something Leander you didn't mention I thought you were going to is touch ID because you told us last week that you hate touch ID. So how did you feel about that? No face ID

Yeah, I wasn't psyched about it because I do like Face ID. But I also, they said that, well, you know what I was thinking

I was thinking, I've got to train myself to like it. I'm going to have to, you know, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to, what do you call that

A little bit of Stockholm syndrome. You know, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to adapt

I like that they mentioned that you can train it with all the different fingers. And that's something, I mean, this is what I used to do

I've got Touch ID on this iPad I have. And in the past, before Face ID came along, I would just have to suck it up and retrain it on my fingers again

And it would work for a week or two. Fine. No problem. But I became lazy and couldn't be bothered to do it again

It's like, okay, I'll just type my code in because I'm too lazy to spend one minute retraining

One, two, three, four, if anybody's wondering. On my fingers again. That's close

why don't you just buy a rubber now we could have to change it

sorry hold on I like that it has touch ID I think that's a lot

face ID is nice on the iPad but on the phone I know especially where it is now on the side

you just it's under your thumb exactly where you hold it you don't even have to stick it down to the home

button where it used to be I like that I like that you

can be more explicit about it unlocks when you want it to unlock

rather than just having sort of, you know, well, Leander, you're running with the cops. You know, they might just stick the thing in your face

and it unlocks it. And I also, I think it's handy because two people can use it

So for instance, this is, I don't know, a bit, it's not far-fetched

but it might not happen to many people. But say you're outside the shop with the dog

and someone else goes in and you're like, oh, and they don't have their phone with them

to pay or something like that. So you say, oh, you take my phone to pay. How do you do that

if that person, because you can only have one person with Face ID

whereas with Touch ID, your partner or whoever can also have their finger or thumb to authenticate

so they can pick up your phone and use it and authenticate. Don't they know the code

No, my code's too long to remember. The thing is that if you're in some Jack Reacher situation

where the bad guys have like one, Touch ID, they're going to cut your finger off with pliers

Yeah. I'd rather have them take my finger than my eye. I think the touch idea is a little safer

I agree. That's a very good point, Graham. What if they cut off your face

They also said that it would unlock with Apple Watch, right? Yeah, it unlocks with your Apple Watch

But the iPhone does that already. What we were talking about last week. My phone already does that, does that

Unlocks with the Apple Watch. Yeah, it does. Does it not do anymore? Yeah, of course it does, yeah

No, no, you're right, it does. It does. It kind of rarely does for me, but it does do it, yeah, for sure

Yeah, it doesn't work. It always does do that. Sometimes it works with the Mac

Sometimes. Sometimes, yeah. Yeah. I think that not having Face ID seems like kind of a drag

I mean, although I got to say I'm pretty frustrated at how slow Face ID is

It doesn't seem like it's getting any faster. Oddly enough, I got this Eufy smart door lock

that unlocks with your face. and man that thing is instantaneous i mean less than a second from when you show up and i mean so

fast that i thought you know anybody that comes up that looks anything like me is going to open

this door because it can't it can't possibly be secure but it seems to actually work and it works

you know doesn't work with other people and um so i'm wondering why face id is so slow uh but i

can't i kind of can't imagine going back to face id on the phone you know the other thing about it

list of oh no i'm sorry i'm sorry well some some some people have been making a list of like

all the uh things that that the iphone fold doesn't have um there's one called a mac right now

doesn't have a cassette player version well the list is mostly um all the all the pro video features pro res cinematic mode you know

blah blah blah all this all this stuff that i have never once used in my life and never will

um so i was going down the list i'm like okay i don't care this doesn't apply i couldn't give a

hoot about this uh it was a long long list and it was all the pro pro stuff but there was almost

nothing nothing i don't think that um it's the the telephoto lens and the uh and the face id i

think are the two things which you think oh that is a shame it doesn't have that and for me it

doesn't take spatial photos and that makes me very sad that's almost a deal breaker to be honest

because i love spatial photos what spatial photos really yeah in fact almost every photo i take now

is a spatial photo because they look so amazing on the vision pro afterwards why does it do that

incredible yeah just just amazing yeah why wouldn't it do it you'd seem it would be capable

of doing it wouldn't it probably needs two good enough cameras to do that yeah and the camera

orientation might not be right i think they're not necessarily are they positioned vertically

instead of horizontally and most trying to think about it. Yeah, well, I think maybe the issue is with it

I think that you might hold it in either way. And I don't know

Yeah, it might be as Charlie says, the cameras are not good enough. But the lack of spatial photos is maybe a deal breaker for any Vision Pro fans

But so let's be real. The only people buying this are going to be Vision Pro

So that's quite a big mistake. I think the lack of telephoto is a real big, you know, barrier for me because, I mean, I do actually use that a lot, even if it's just to see what's far away so I can identify, you know, read a sign at a restaurant or something

I mean, you know, I used it all the time for that, man

That was not the use case I thought you were going to come up with. That's a good one, though. I like that

Beer lists. You know, you walk into these restaurants. And they've got this handwritten chalkboard somewhere 40 yards away, and it's dark

Yeah, you take an 8x telephoto and zoom in and squint like an old lady, and you can actually read it

It's better than having to walk up to the thing and stand beside, you know, kind of lumber over somebody at their table right in front of it

Vision impaired, Leander, vision impaired. All right. So the telephoto lens. Yeah, I think that actually might be the one thing that a lot of people might be concerned about, the lack of the telephoto lens. But all right, let's move on. Let's talk about the iPhone 18 Pro. And well, actually, we're going to talk about the iPhone 18 Pro versus the 17 Pro. How much better is the new Pro

Is it Pro Pro? Is it what? Is it more Pro? Pro, Pro, Pro Max Pro Ultra Pro

pro squared yeah it's uh it's more a little more pro uh looks a lot like the 17 pro was a smaller

dynamic island okay and i guess that three you can get three alerts in the dynamic island and

apparently that's not gonna that you can't get that with the 17 pro there's a lot of stuff in

this thing that i was kind of going is that like you know i've got that kind of screw me once fine

screw me twice you know it's on you because like last year they did this stuff where oh yeah the

The new Apple Watch has this amazing new feature, and then later on, you know, under the breath, also works on older Apple Watches

So throughout the iPhone Pro bit, I was going, geez, you know, how much of this is going to trickle down to the phone I have in my hand right now

Anyway, so smaller dynamic island, it can show three different live activities

Also new colors. Get to that later. Display size, brightness, and promotion all remain unchanged

The colors. What about those colors? Against all odds, there's a deep black, which I think a ton of people are going to be excited about. Glacier, which is like a light blue, I suppose. You know, how many ways can they describe a blue that's barely blue

silver, which is undoubtedly silver. And you know what? It actually looked kind of glinty

Like maybe they're thinking about putting some sparkle in there. Yeah, a little glitter

And burgundy. My heart sank when they said that out loud. And I saw the color

Me too. I mean, that word to me is so 1983. In fact, you know, the college town I lived in

there was a bar called Burgundy's. And it was the worst disco nightmare

I hear Burgundy. I think of that bar. I think of, you know, just nasty old booths in a restaurant that haven't really been cleaned

It's such a, I suppose I should think of wine. Completely agree. My school uniform with Burgundy

It just, it has like really negative connotations for me. Yeah, yeah

Everything about that name. And did you notice that Turnus had on a Burgundy shirt

Yeah. Yeah, nice. Anyway, and it kind of matched the color, which I got to say, it's not very bold

It's pretty boring and dull, in my opinion. I have no desire to own that phone

Unlike when I saw the Cosmic Orange, I thought, wow, got to get it

So anyway, that's all changed. I don't know. Did you guys like that color

Have you ever done your Brony phone yet? Or it's like Gem and the Misfits. That's the phone you need

I would actually go for a Pink Sparkles phone. Pink Sparkles. That would convince me to upgrade for my 12

They're back to boring colors. Anyway, biggest upgrade is the camera. 48 megapixel main sensor with a four-stop variable aperture

They are talking about all the amazing things you can do with a variable aperture

And plus, it adds these pro controls. You do manual aperture choice, shutter speed control, white balance controls

I looked that up. Apparently, none of that is coming to the 17 Pro just because it all is hardware specific to this variable aperture

As I mentioned before, I mean, the video demo of that thing opening and closing really made me want to get that phone

And the pictures that they showed, as per usual, looked amazing. And by the way, the pictures they took with the Duo didn't look as amazing

You know, I don't know if you thought the same, but I mean, I was, yeah, those don't even actually look that good

But man, the pictures they showed shot with the 18 Pro just looked amazing

You know, the one with the motion blur of, you know, stuff like that. I'm just like, okay, that looks really pretty amazing

Let's see, what else? A20 Pro chip that's in both of the phones, both the Max's and the Duo, up to 20% faster CPU, 40% faster GPU

the Pro and Pro Max also have improved cooling that was kind of impressive too

longer battery life and faster 15 minute charging to 50% I think that's only wired

you know this last point here but it's $100 more okay $100 more

I mean I feel like my hamburger is $100 more this seems like a very reasonable price increase

I'm not excited about it But I'm also not, I don't think that's a deal breaker for anybody who's ever bought a Pro phone

It's a little more expensive. Everything in technology is a little more expensive. So $1,300 now for the Pro Max

I mean, that's a chunk of change. That's a lot of money. It is. But again, when was the last time you went to a restaurant

Sandwiches cost $20. Yeah. Minimum. I mean, I think Apple has taken a hit to its margins in order to shield its customers

from some of the component cost increases. and so it seems like what I was reading about this is they've tried to find a balance

passing some of the cost on whilst also taking a hit on the cost themselves and I think that that

that's right and what I was reading in terms of Wall Street ysts who were sweating this and

the general sentiment is that Apple has pitched this about right obviously investors love that

Apple has these legendary margins but you kind of have to think about the long-term customer value

in a time like this as well. And you don't want to drive loyal iPhone users

to trying out an Android handset for their upgrade. So you have to kind of pass on as much as you reasonably can

of the increase in component costs, but maybe accept that margins at a time like this

need to go down a little bit. And Apple's done a bit of both. And I think the impression that I get

is most people are a little bit relieved. They felt that it could have been much worse

And that makes me think that Apple probably pitched it about right yeah they're making it up in services anyway i mean look at their services business

um it razors and blades yeah they selling the the printer at a slight loss but i mean you know not a loss but the the more they expand the base the more that you uh users they have to potentially buy things like apple one and

um uh apple care and stuff like that so and of course that's an 80 or 90 profit isn't it the

services crazy numbers um i mean that's not the chip right because things like apple tv apparently

make a massive loss right oh yeah well yeah still losing that's a long-term play i i still think

that uh you know the maybe the smartest thing apple did this whole year is that apple apple

upgrade program because you know i was looking at the prices on the the pro and it's like yeah

I could actually get it for less. Well, get it. I could have it for two years for less than I'm currently paying to the Apple or iPhone upgrade program, you know

So I mean, that's that's really a lot of people roll that way these days. Right

I mean, you can split up payments on everything. You can buy now, pay later

I think that allowing you to lease the latest devices, it's pretty appealing

I mean, even if at the end of it, you end up with the conundrum you always have when you lease a car, which I've never done

But what do you do? We'll pay it off. Let's give it back. Right. But it sounds like even at the end of those Apple upgrade contracts, I mean, you're not in the worst position ever

Just get a new phone. Continue the cycle. I mean, let's be serious

Can you imagine a life without an iPhone? I honestly can't. I mean, I don't know how you would

It's not worth living, is it, without an iPhone? It's not that I take such joy out of it

It's just, you know, it's the ultimate multi-tool. And, you know, back to the Ternus thing, you know, and his thing

You can slice your throat with it before you give it back. His pitch of the iPhone as being the ultimate, you know, personal intelligence hub or intelligent personal hub or whatever it was

I mean, that's exactly what we were saying when, you know, Humane came out with that AI pin, right

It's like, well, it can do all these things. It's like, yeah, an iPhone could do all that stuff, too

and it already does it better. And I thought that was a very good pitch for

hey, the iPhone's not going anywhere. It's the ultimate AI device. You're already used to it

It's more private than anything else. It's more capable than anything else

Hey, you can take pictures with it. You can watch movies with it. You can listen to music. You can do everything that you do in your day-to-day life

And I mean, I thought that was great framing, a great thematic choice for the first folding iPhone

and the first phones with increased Apple intelligence that maybe actually works

Yeah. Actually, that brings up one thing about the chip, the A20 Pro, crazy chip

I mean, this is a mad, mad chip. It's like super powerful. And people were talking about the increases

in the single-thread and multi-threaded performance. But some AI guy that I follow on Twitter pointed out

that the biggest difference is the memory bandwidth. Like it has 50% more memory bound than that

And they're saying for AI processing, that is the thing that's really going to make the difference. Like that is what makes this thing a monster chip for local AI

And there were some Geekbench scores that came out this morning, right, showing that this is just a crazy fast chip

Yeah. So do you think that, for instance, a simple request using Siri AI will be noticeably faster on the new phone than the current phone

I think it will. I don't know, because it's painfully slow right now, isn't it? Have you noticed that? Yeah, I have

I think a lot more will be able to be done locally on the new iPhones than the old ones with the A20

You know, so when you ask Siri AI something, it maybe routes it either to private cloud compute or a local model. And I think more can be done on the local model faster on the new phones, that that would be my assumption. It's very clear that they focused on AI improvements here

And this, I do think that that Apple Silicon AI story is a really strong story that Apple has in terms of its AI expertise

It might not be strong on the models, but it's leading the way in the hardware. And it's not just like the Mac Minis we were talking about last week

It's obviously in the phones as well. Let's talk about the watches, talk about the chip, because that seems to be the biggest change with the new Series 12 and the Ultra 4

Charlie, why don't you walk us through what's going on with the new watches? Yeah, so the Series 12 and Ultra 4 get the new S11 chip, which enables on-device Apple Intelligence and allegedly a much smarter Siri

It's got a major health sensor upgrade. Heart rate is now measured every five seconds, 24-7

Much more frequent, what's HRV, Graham? Heart rate variability. Heart rate variability measurements

Variability. Thank you. And a redesigned heart rate app. Then there's audio intelligence, which I will be getting to

which enables you to live rewind. Not creepy. Well, it transcribes. It listens to what's going on around you all the time

and then lets you transcribe the last 15 seconds of what happened

So, yeah, of what it heard. And apparently, well, we'll get to that

And then better endurance, especially on the Ultra 4. The Series 12 gets 10 hours of GPS workout tracking

the ultra four exceeds two days normally and contract gps workouts for up to 45 45 hours

and prices remain the same at 399 799 so any anybody got anything to say before i get into

before i mention the audio intelligence before you start granting about it um

yeah i thought 45 hour workouts i can't wait well this is like these were some meaningful upgrades

you know like year after year that the last ultra four i'm sorry the last uh apple watch ultra

upgrade and the series 10 and the series 9, you know, they weren't that much different

were they? Slightly bigger screen, brighter screen, that kind of stuff, but not that many new health centers

So this is actually finally, I think, a really meaningful upgrade, unfortunately

because now, you know, my beloved Ultra is a completely antiquated piece of junk

So, and the heart rate variability. I mean, we're going to talk about this in a minute

aren't we, Graham? you know because you know a lot about this yeah yeah we're going to get into that

i i was disappointed i suppose that there is no real physical change to either of them i guess the

the apple watch series 12 gets a nice new ceramic look or a nice new old ceramic look

um and that certainly is is is a nice visual change um but the the ultra 4 i think it's all

under the hood that changes, isn't it? I think if you bought an Ultra 4, there's not really any way

to distinguish it from a previous generation Ultra if you had the Ultra 3. Well, you've got the new

bronze color. Okay, so a new color. Yeah, I don't know. I am starting to feel that maybe the time

has come for a bit more of a visual refresh, I guess. But yeah, under the hood, this is a huge

improvement and the chip has been sort of languishing for two or three years now so it great to see them give that a bump in performance it clearly needs it because you know i been playing around with the watch os 27 beta over

the summer and uh siri on the watch when the phone is not in range is kind of sluggish and a bit

clunky and so i i think my impression is that apple will use every every bit of the extra

of processing power that this chip has to deliver the Siri experience

when your iPhone's out of range. Graham, what were you going to say? I'm so big up on, sorry, Charlie

So what are your thoughts about the always listening? I think it's great

I think it's fantastic. Can you hear me? It's such a shame it won't be available in the EU at the beginning

or possibly ever. Is that true that it won't be available in the EU? Yeah, if you go to Apple's page, there's a support document

Where are we? And it says footnote number nine, I think. Yeah

Available in English as a star and will not initially be available in the EU. And certain audio, this is actually interesting for everyone

certain audio intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits

So, server-side. I guess, hopefully that means private cloud compute. Otherwise, they're sending your voice stuff off to be subscribed

Well, actually, okay, let's talk about it before I get into the downsides

So, we have... What are you fitting around this, Charlie? What is your problem with audio intelligence

Okay, well, so we've got audio intelligence, sound recognition, music recognition, things we're both used to, that's Shazam

Sound recognition is, you know, listens for the doorbell, gives you an alert when there's a doorbell, for example

which we've got on the phone already. Live Rewind and Siri Recap are the new features

This is, so your Apple Watch is always listening all the time

Live Rewind lets you hit a button, tap the screen, I think

and it recalls what was just said in the last 15 seconds, shows it as a text transcription

And then Siri Recap, Apple's description is that Siri Recap ambiently takes notes on your conversations throughout your day and creates high-level Apple intelligence-generated summaries

So it summarizes your day. It listens to what's happening and decides which parts of it it should write and then gives them to you

So it's like an automatic journal, I guess. These summaries auto-duty after seven days if you choose not to save them

so um apple says that you that these do not make any recordings uh which i think

is moot really i don't think that makes much difference i mean what it's doing is listening

and making a record whether that's in words or in you know in in recorded uh voice doesn't make

that much difference uh i don't know i also don't think that if the minute you uh say to somebody

use this to win an argument you did say that you wanted something and you hold it up to them and

show them on the screen they're going to uh you know they're not going to know the difference

between the fact that it's transcribed it and has deleted the audio or never recorded the audio

and the fact or you know it's not going to make any difference to them i know what what do you

what do you folks think of this i mean i graham like you you haven't told us what's wrong with it

well the fact that it's always recorded us why it was a bad thing but you've told us what it does

and it sounds great for me. I'm hard of hearing. I have 80% hearing loss in one ear

and 40% hearing loss in the other ear. And it's impossible for me to have a conversation

with someone without hearing aids. And even with hearing aids, it's very difficult for me to have a conversation

in a noisy environment or something like that. And add to that, I live in a country

where they speak Catalan and Spanish, which is my second and third language um i'm i struggle and to be honest being able to get a

recap on my wrist of what someone just said could be really really handy for me and being able to

even like get that to start with because it's on my watch to begin with that could be really

really handy yeah what was there go on what was their uh what was their use case in the thing like

oh, what were those daily specials that the waiter just rattled off

Yeah, I could see that coming in handy. I could see it coming in handy when, you know

at least once a week my wife says something to me and I say

well, what do you mean? And I didn't say that. Oh, yes, yes, you did

Oh, my God, you're not really going to use it for that, are you? Are you kidding me

That's a minefield. Correcting your wife? Are you mad? That's the kind of stuff you have to let slide

whether you're right or not come on truth is truth that is something commander data in star

trek the next generation always used to do that like picard would like ask him did he not say this

and then data would say it in that person's voice like just perfect playback and now we have that

on our wrist who's who doesn't want commander data on their wrist charlie okay fair enough you got me

the privacy aspect looks pretty good i mean it runs through the secure enclave it's completely

encrypted end-to-end yeah encrypted end-to-end but it's right there visible on on the watch i mean

any and you can just take that text and use it uh i think it's the fact that it's recording and

transcribing what people say i think that's the problem i mean and also making a summary of

everything happened to your day so you don't even there's one thing someone using it to point out

that you made a mistake or you said something different than what you're claiming to you said like lewis is going to be doing before his divorce proceedings uh

yeah but i think you said i think that the uh yeah but yeah but then if the the summary if i

mean maybe the summary includes uh things that certain people might not want remembered well

you know the thing is there's a there's a a contract that you have okay so a social contract

when you talk to somebody in person and it's that what you say is not being recorded or written down

and noted uh if if it is you know if someone's if you see somebody knowing taking notes on a piece

of paper or you know if they actually stick a dictaphone or you know stick their phone with

a recorder in front of you you you know that that's happening and you you know you're agreeing

to it or either because you see it's going on uh right i think if you start if you don't know if

someone's recording you and the recording part doesn't matter i mean the fact that it's taking audio however technically it works the fact that somebody is um making notes uh possibly permanent

notes that are accurate of what you said is outside of the social contract i think and that is

a problem well i mean people are very paranoid now are they about the alexa speakers and their tv

listening to them and and and uh monitoring everything they say and and well here it is

it really is you are being monitored 24 set yeah you are i think germans are very very uh

on top of this. You cannot record, this has nothing to do with the neurotech

necessarily. Of course, it becomes part of it. But you just can't record people

without them knowing. And that just a big no a serious taken very very seriously And if you do it there are I think prison sentences for this It very it bad news You just can record people So the use of ring doorbells for example or ring cameras is very like tightly restricted

They can only record for a certain amount of time. Once you've pressed a bell, they can come on. I don't think they can keep recordings

You can't just have them recording the whole time. and even with an Alexa or something in the house

you should, and people actually do, tell you that there's one there. They tell you the running one

and they might even, if you come around, take it, unplug it. Well, if you go for dinner at someone's house

they say, oh, by the way, you know I've got an Alexa speaker here

Yeah, possibly, if you haven't been there before. Yeah, people are kind of hot on this stuff

because the thing is, if you're caught recording them, that's bad. And also people generally are very respectful

of that kind of thing. I mean, not everyone, not the people who voted for the fascists down in Saxony this week, for example

But the people that I knew in Berlin and around were generally kind of aware of this stuff and quite respectful of it

And plus the law backs it up as well. People just don't want to be caught out doing things that they shouldn't be doing

And that's quite a German thing. So yeah, I do agree. If you're using an AI to take notes in a meeting

you should tell everyone in the meeting that you're doing that. I think that is a courtesy

And that's the way software like Microsoft Teams works, isn't it? If you record a meeting in Microsoft Teams

then it shows something in the user interface to say that the meeting's being recorded

And so I do agree people have a right to know if they're being recorded

And I'm curious about how and if Apple addresses that. But I think there's two separate strands to this

One is the 15-second recap, and then the other is the taking notes thing and the 15 second recap if it's just recording and

then locally letting go of a sort of running 15 seconds is that really so bad or is the concern

that it might actually be storing more than that or and then with the transcription i think it's

what you can specify what it's it's transcribing so it's not by default on all the time and

transcribing everything and summarizing everything you can turn it on just for meeting for example

and say and in that situation if you think i'm going to transcribe this meeting and if you told

everyone guys i'm going to use my watch to transcribe this meeting then i think that that's

fair enough but i agree if you do it and you don't tell people then that does it does feel i think

that's a different feature so it says on the apple support document here it says uh siri recap take

ambienly takes notes on your conversations throughout your day and creates high level

apple intelligence generated summaries that you can use later to jog your memory uh so you stay

present in the moment uh and they auto delete this is the one i mentioned before so this is

this is not uh this this is something happening in the background all the time yeah that's i mean

it also says classic yeah it says you can set parameters like only at work or never at night

or and and that you can always turn it on or turn it off the siri recap thing uh and that's fine for

the user but anyone around you when you're using a watch is not going to know what you've done

you can i'm just going to assume everyone with a new apple with an apple watch now is recording me

exactly that's a key issue isn't it it's not for the user it's for the people around the user

the ones who haven't you know initiated the recording you know on your iphone if you record

a conversation it very clearly it goes beep and you know this conversation is being recorded

and and there's no way uh you know that the the person you're talking to that you know that they're

they're made very aware that you're recording the conversation and the same in California uh or is

it even it might even be national it's state by state okay yeah but in California for sure you if

you're going to record something you have to disclose it it's illegal not to I don't know about them sending you to San Quentin or um if you do if you don't but uh it you know I think people

and culturally too I think people that's uh here are you know that they're cognizant of the fact

that you shouldn't be recording people. I think people are generally respectful of that

Like you said, the social contract, that they're aware of it. And this definitely breaks it

This is weird, I think, for Apple to have an always-on ambient listening device

This, I think, is a big step away from their normally extremely careful privacy stance

I mean, this is like the Meta Glasses, isn't it? The audio version

It's a perv watch. it's recording what's going on around you like you put it on a perfect

for your perv yeah there's the perv watch and this goes along with

the pedophile mode in the camera of the flip phone I was going to say perfect

dark side of Apple this is Ternus the 15 second recap I think

can be justified and is not so very different from the translation feature that

the AirPods already have. If it's like a rolling 15 seconds and it's nothing saved

then I kind of feel like that is maybe fair enough. It has important accessibility benefits

But I am thinking about it more and listening to what you're saying, Charlie. I definitely agree with you about

the transcription feature. It feels a little bit like maybe it hasn't been

very well thought out. I mean, even like in the UK, whenever any call center calls you

they always play this recording to say, this call may be recorded for quality and monitoring purposes

And they always say that. And so I assume that they have to or they suddenly feel like they should

And so this feels like in similar territory. It's like, what, are you going to be recording people and not telling them

I'm sort of coming around to your point of view, Charlie, and I'm curious as to how Apple thinks they're managing that issue

Yeah, is there even a light that comes on or anything like that? Yeah, it beeps and something flashes on the screen

I think when you, I'm not sure exactly how it works, but yeah, it beeps and there's an animation or something that comes up, but on the watch screen

So whether you hear that or not when you're outdoors and whether that happens, I guess it can't happen when you start recording because you're really not starting recording

So maybe it just happens when you trigger the transcript. And as for the other one, which is running all the time, not sure

I mean, that's not going to be beeping the whole time, is it? Yeah, that's, I mean, it is kind of weird

I mean, when I saw that live rewind thing, I was like, that's super awesome. And then the Siri recap thing, I just haven't had time to dig into it and see exactly what it is, exactly how it works

But it certainly sounds kind of like the last thing you would expect Apple to do is, hey, your watch is recording you 24-7

You and your every interaction with everybody that you come in contact with. Very bizarre

I can transcribe all the stupid things I say to my dog. And the song place, I sing songs to my dog when no one's around

I don't want that stuff transcribed. It does say Apple intelligence, you know, like smart transcripts, right

Like, so perhaps it would leave things out like, oh, see you later

Apparently, it does leave stuff out which it considers to be inappropriate

But, you know, that's what Apple decides to be inappropriate. And probably for its legal time

That's fine. That's my whole life, Charlie. I think you can be quite confident. If I have this feature enabled on my wrist, nothing that you say will ever be transcribed

It also doesn't attribute So it doesn't say, you know, Graham said to the dog and then Charlie said

It just has the words. It doesn't actually say who's done it. Well, when I was watching, I kept on thinking about the AI pen, Humane's AI pen

And that was sort of the, this is a major use case for, what's the name of that

There's a bunch of AI apps too, which kind of gets Sherlocked by this

And it was like, this is why Apple's going to win consumer AI

because it's bringing a feature to a device that millions of people already wear

And no one's going to buy a new gadget to enable this kind of thing, I don't think

when it's a feature on the Apple Watch. I think it's definitely a super interesting area

Let's move on real quick, because we're running out of time. Let's talk about the Apple Watch new readiness and health age metrics

which to me I thought looked really appealing and I thought oh yeah hell yeah

because with my experience with the Google health app the one thing I liked about it

was making these metrics actionable it was a lot more proactive about the kind

of advice it gave you on a day to day basis which I think is the one thing lacking really

with a lot of Apple's health app but what do you think Graham

what's the... Well I think I thought you would say that Leander and so I thought

we might have a moderate difference of opinion here and I think you did ask me

to write a hot take for Coltomac this week. And so I realized that this was potentially something

where I had a contrarian perspective to share. So this, one of the features of the new Apple Watch Series 12

and Ultra 4 is, as Charlie said, this new health sensor system that both watches have

And that enables this 24-7 regular heart rate monitoring and heart rate variability monitoring

And one of the things that Apple is using that new data for

combined with other data it already has, stuff like your sleep metrics and so forth

is to provide a couple of new things. They're kind of health gamified things

One is called readiness and the other is called health age. And as you said, Leander, these sort of ideas are not new

If you've got like a Fitbit or a Garmin watch or one of these whoops, then you already have stuff like training readiness or kind of, you know

biological age or health age or whatever. And so Apple is kind of playing catch up in this area by

introducing these kind of scores. And I personally don't love them. This is what I wrote about in

Cultimac this week that a few of the thoughts that I have. One is, I think generally speaking

these kind of health wearables and these metrics are not as actionable as they seem

So if you take something like Sleep Score, which Apple already supports, I've never heard anyone

really explain to me what they do with their Sleep Score. But I've heard a lot of people tell

me that their Sleep Score is wrong. They'll say, I had a terrible night's sleep and my Apple Watch

told me I had a great night's sleep. And I'm like, okay, but if you know better than your watch

what is the use of this at all uh or if you've got like i don't know three months of sleep scores

what are you going to do with that how is it actually going to improve your sleeping and i

to me i i'm curious here what i mean what do you what i think leandra i think how do you use that

kind of data to sleep better well the whooper app i think has a journaling function that takes your

sleep score and encourages you to try different things, different variables, you know, like

you know, don't drink coffee after 3 p.m. And it encourages you to do that for a week and see if

that has any effect on your sleep score. And then to try, you know, don't look at your iPhone an

hour before bed. Try to, you know, make sure that you black out the room entirely, that kind of

stuff. So it kind of closes the loop. It encourages you to experiment with one variable at a time

to try to figure out how to improve your sleep score. And I didn't see any evidence of that in

this new Apple stuff, that they were doing these kind of things, helping you set up these sort of

experiments or to try to isolate different variables to improve this out of the other

And in fact, the Google Health app seems to go a step further as well. It has a health coach

now so that um the readiness score tells you um you know uh it kind of set up an exercise plan for

me long endurance rides with shorter more high intensity ones and every morning when i look at

the app it says okay you know today you should go for a 45 minute bike ride and you should make sure

that you do this that and the other um which i which i thought was quite good you know like it's

now acting like a coach like an exercise coach you know to try and improve my cardiovascular

vascular fitness. I didn't see any evidence of that in the new, in Apple's new health app

They seem to be taking sort of a step towards that though. I think they are taking a step towards it. And there were, there are some things

some suggestions in the, in the health app, which we're not getting next week

but they say is coming later this year I think that it is providing some more of of that territory But I not sure personally that I would trust my watch and my phone

to tell me what kind of training I should be doing. And one of the things a personal trainer will tell their client

is you've got to learn to listen to your body. It's so key as an athlete, whether you're a professional athlete

or a weekend warrior, you need to learn to listen to your body and form judgment in terms of when you should be pushing yourself and when you should be resting

And that's what this readiness score is supposed to answer. It's supposed to tell you when it's

safe for you to push yourself and when you should be maybe taking the day off. And that worries me

to be honest, because what if your body is telling you something different to what your

watch is telling you? Which do you believe? My advice would be listen to your body. But I worry

that some people might listen to their watch maybe they'll think that apple knows better um and if you look i was looking at the uh i think it's training readiness is is what garmin calls it

and in the piece that i wrote for colta mac i i quoted what what garmin says which is training

readiness is just one metric it's really important to listen to your body and just use training

metric as a guide and you know always listen to your body and use your best judgment and

And that made me think, well, okay, well, I understand that that makes sense to me

But at the end of the day, if what we need to do is really listen to our bodies anyway, then what use really is a readiness score

And keying into that, I was looking at the caveats that Apple has on its website for this readiness score

which is part of the Vitals app. And if you look, it has little asterisks

And then at the bottom, it says that the vitals app is only to be used for wellness purposes and not for medical advice, which I think is a really important distinction. But then what exactly is wellness if it's not medical advice? And I looked at the Wikipedia page, which helpfully said wellness is often used for, you know, I can't remember exactly what it is, but alternative health and things which are not strictly scientific

And that did make me wonder the extent to which Apple is moving away from a goal that it always used to state, which is that it gives you actionable advice that is science based

And I had felt that one of the reasons, in my view, why Apple has been a bit slower than some of the competition like Whoop and Garmin and Fitbit in adding these features is because either A, they want to get them right, or B, they're not sure that they add any value

and I don't know I mean I don't know enough about this to say

it might be that Apple has cracked it and these are brilliant really useful things

but I worry if instead they've played catch up they've matched the features that their competitors have

because a lot of people think that those things are important but they put them in even if they don't actually result in better health outcomes

and the most extreme one for me is health age which to me just seems a little bit silly

it tells you your age not in terms of your actual chronological age

as in how many years old you are but what your age is in terms of some algorithm

they use to calculate that you might be five years older or younger than you really are

and that seems to suggest a level of precision you know like one of the things I said in the article was

we've all heard stories about or actually know people who smoked cigarettes their whole life

drank every day and lived until they were 100. And this does happen. It's not to say that it's a good idea

to do that. And of course, we should do exercise and eat a healthy diet and so forth

But I think what those examples tell us is you can be lucky or you can have bad luck. You could

have good genes. This is super complicated stuff, the way that your body works and the way that your

body responds to exercise and to kind of say oh you're five years younger than you really are

just suggests the kind of precision that simply doesn't exist i don't think it's going to say

that in my case i'm not really looking forward to looking to finding out that particular metric

it's like that it's like the move rings you know i think um i hear what you're saying and

obviously you have to sort of take it a little bit with a pinch of salt uh the stuff that it's

telling you and i and i definitely do that um uh but the move rings you know i think it's been a

generally a positive thing it's been a beneficial thing you know you've seen people um really pay

attention to that kind of thing um and i think probably these two new metrics uh will have a

similar effect um you know i don't think it's really gonna will it cause people to get injuries

you know it says you're ready uh to go for a 26 mile run and you're a bit sore um i don't know

you know i think most people would sort of if they you know would listen to their body i'm not

actually got the funny thing is when i used to i used to see a personal trainer twice a week and

um you know some days i'd i'd go in and i'd be so stiff i could barely i'd be like pinocchio i'd be

like a wooden boy and uh he say oh come on just do it you know and uh against My bladder was telling me you know I can barely move but then you loosen up real fast and I was fine And in fact they were actually some of the best workouts I had when I felt like I didn

feel like doing it. And that's true of the bike too. When I go off a bike ride, sometimes I really don't feel like doing it

And then after 20 minutes, you feel amazing and feel great. But I don't know

You know, I think I'm kind of looking forward to seeing them. I like that. But, you know, I had a question for you, Graham, which is like, how did you feel to get Sherlocked

Right? reps and sets it feels well i i so what this is i i develop a uh health and sorry i develop a

strength training app called reps and sets and so strength training is lift literally lifting

weights right and uh so there was a rumor that came out just before the the keynote day before

yesterday a leak of source code from apple um a whole load of sql stuff um which showed

new health kit data structures that showed that Apple had been modeling strength training. They

literally be modeling lifting weights. And it was very indicative of the fact that Apple was going to

add strength training to its repertoire. So you do have this thing which preposterously is called

traditional strength training, which is Apple's jargon for what most people would say, going to

the gym, lifting weights. But traditional strength training, all it let you do is measure how many

calories you burn. And that's, if you care about strength training, who cares about how many

calories you burn? That's not what it's about. Cardio is about burning calories. Strength training

is about lifting weights. So, you know, when you're lifting weights, what you're interested in

is how much weight resistance you worked against and what muscles have you worked, what exercises

have you done? What moves have you done? That's what matters. And certainly this leak of SQL data

suggested that Apple was just on the cusp of launching a new strength training feature

And I thought, oh, this is curtains for reps and sets because if Apple does this, then I'm screwed

And this is something that Apple does, that they hold back some of the health and fitness features

They don't announce them at WWDC and they just bundle them in with the new hardware announcement

in September. So I thought it was very likely this was going to happen. But long story short

when they launched the Apple Watch Ultra, if you look on the marketing page, they have a tiny little

box all the way down at the bottom that says they've improved their strengths training or

traditional strengths training feature. And when I had a look at it, I installed the release

candidate and it still doesn't have weights in it. Lots of the really great stuff and it was really

good stuff that they had in that SQL leak hasn't made it into the shipping version which is not to

say that it won't but it hasn't come yet I wouldn't be surprised if we see it coming in uh in WWDC

next year but I think since it hasn't it's quite strange that Apple said that they've improved it

at all because as far as I can see all they've done is you can now break up your uh your strengths

training workout into warm-up main workout and cool down segments that's that's all it does they

they did show one feature they were the um the woman propped the iphone against the um the floor

and it was monitoring uh i think it was measuring her vo2 max okay some exercises and it was

coaching out that looked kind of interesting um i'm not sure how in the health app yeah yeah yeah

how far that went because you were saying that um you were hoping that um you would be able to do

uh that kind of visual ysis right to see put people's form when they're weightlifting that was

one of our no-shows wasn't it there was this talk that there may be like the airpods with the camera

built in i was looking forward to charlie raging about that as well and um we didn't get to see

that um maybe that's gonna come next year but yeah when when when you've got like always on

cameras mounted to your head then it that can monitor the weights that you're holding in your

hand and maybe that is something that apple's thinking about for the for you know i ios 20 28

28 yeah maybe that that's where we will see that so it uh i have i would say i haven't been

sherlocked yet but it's good news yeah good news for now that gives me a little bit of time to come

up with something more differentiating but i'll be one of the i'll be the best strengths training

app on vision pro okay good all all 12 people that uh they're interested in that we'll be

supporting you. Let's, let's, we better wrap it up. So the question this week is

will you buy, will you, will you be buying any of the products that Apple announced this week

Let's start with someone I know is going to be buying all of them. Charlie. Not anything

Not anything. Lewis. No, I don't need it. Was Charlie going to continue

No, that's it. Just nothing. I don't need a new phone. Just nothing

Don't want the watch. Just nothing. I have, I have never been so conflicted about an iPhone upgrade

I mean, I can't, you know, the shiny new thing, the folding one looks amazing in its own way

and yet seems impractical. The new Pro seemed to take better photos

Don't know if I need it. It might be the first year I don't upgrade at all. I just don know I haven decided The new Apple Watch looks very tempting Like you Leander I definitely like the sound of that new Apple Watch Ultra

And mine, I've got an Apple Watch Ultra 2. Its battery is not as good as it used to be

So it's very tempting. I tell you what, if they had a better trade-in value, I would definitely get it

But I looked it up and it's like they want to give me like $250 or something, up to $250 for my Apple Watch Ultra

So I don't know. That's a big if. AirPods, I don't need new entry-level AirPods

So, yeah, I don't know, man. I honestly don't know. I've never, ever since I've worked at Cult of Mac, I've got a new phone every year

And it's never even been a question. I'm getting up in the middle of the night, whenever it is, I'm placing my pre-order

and that's that this time i i just don't know it's and it's partially because they both look

good for their own reasons and neither of them seem like they're that much better for what i

actually do so i i hate to be so indecisive but man i i'm sure stuck graham what about you i'm

tempted by the ultra but it not ultra the uh duo i should say um very very tempted but it is a lot

of money and I don't know if I can justify it. So I'm not sure if that's going to happen or not

I'm seriously considering a new ultra, not because I really need one for myself, but for my development

because Apple has stopped supporting the original ultra one. And I have an ultra one that I use for

developing my watch app and that's no longer supported. And so there is like a really strong

case for getting a new ultra four and then using my ultra three for development and uh that would

be sensible it's also kind of boring like i'm not if i do that it's like great well i'll have a new

ultra but i i don't really i wouldn't be excited about it you know it'd just be a sensible thing

that i did um because it's just not that different to the ultra that i already have um but it would

be sensible because the problem is that when i do development on as i have been this summer on my

actual Apple Watch, I often end up balking my own workout data, which I hate doing because it's very

motivating for me to have, you know, I'm maybe the most passionate user of reps and sets. I love to

log my workouts in reps and sets. And so, you know, if I install a developer release on my watch

that can screw up my logging and that's demotivating for me. So I kind of need to have two

watches that are supported by Apple. And for that reason, I think I probably will get an Ultra

for, but I'm not that excited about it. You've got to get it, man

Didn't you, every time that you ever go out to coffee with Charlie? Oh my God

Hey, look what you just said. It's going to be great. But Charlie only says inappropriate things, so it will never record anything he cares

No. I will start every sentence with swearing. You already do, Charlie

Well, there you go. Perfect. That's actually quite a good idea. Remember there were these reports about cops playing Disney music in the background so they wouldn't get recorded by protesters

Because if they put it up on YouTube, you know, Disney would do a copyright violation

Oh, take down. Wow. Yeah, that was a good half. There's your workaround. Start swearing like a slaver, and then your conversations will get recorded

Well, I guess I've got to, you know, like you, Graham, for professional reasons only, I'm going to have to get the iPhone fold

and that's because we're going to review it for Cult of Mac

We're going to have to have a review. Someone's got to bite the bullet and buy the shiny new thing

Oh, my wife though. I don't know how I'm going to get around here. Are you going to spare it with that

Yeah, that's going to be an issue, a problem. I'd love to get the new Ultra

I'm sold by the accuracy of the heart rate monitor, which they claim is the most accurate on the market right now

And the new faster chip. uh but again you know i don't know that's like a lot of cash that's going to be 800 or more um

before i get out the store so that it's going to be very very expensive um i'm really sorely

tempted about it i will have to see whether um that comes to pass the new airpods look great we

didn't really talk about the new airpods but again um i bought a previous version that was you know

that had the ANC, it didn't work worth, it didn't work, it was worthless

It didn't work at all as far as I could tell, really, you know, like, it really didn't

cancel noise very much because they're open, you know, so a lot of ambient noise

got in. But yeah, maybe they're 50% better. Yeah, that's all they say

All right, let's wrap it up because we're running really, really late. Let's

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