What's New In iOS 17.2

Yeah, yeah, this story has been building on for a few weeks, but the last few weeks have been busy

so we haven't really had a chance to talk about it on the show. A lot of new features are coming to iOS 17.2

It's actually going to be a pretty substantial update if you haven't been paying attention. I'm going to run through some of the top features here

Iowa 17.2 adds translate as an option for the iPhone 15 Pro's action button

If you choose this option and then long press the button, your iPhone 15 Pro will start listening for audio to translate right on the fly, right in the dynamic island

and there's like a really awesome animation that plays. It's like the sort of like scattery

like particle effects that are like shiny blue and silver. There will be a link in the show notes if you want to

and I think there's a tweet embedded in the article on Colta Mac if you want to bring that up AirFon

I'm looking for it. Looks pretty cool. I'm looking for the tweet. Oh, here we go. Yep

I'll move on though. Collaborative Playlists in Apple Music. So Iowa 17

launched with share play in Apple Music, so you know, you can build like a live queue of music. This is slightly

different. This is where you can invite somebody to build a playlist for you or with you

like a share playlist that you can keep in advance if you're like, you know, starting a party

or something. You want to keep the playlist for later. The journaling app that was shown off at

WWDC is going to be debuting in 17.2. That'll probably be landing in the next few weeks. The big one

though that I wanted to talk about here, spatial video recording for Vision Pro. So inside the

video camera, there's a little toggle button. It's not like a separate mode. It's kind of like

turning live photos on or off. When you're recording a video, you have a Vision Pro button you can

press that will record spatial videos. It's limited to 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second

and I suspect that's limited by the ultra-wide camera's resolution on the current models

because, you know, it needs two camera inputs for each side of the video

The ultra-wide camera is still, I think, only like 12 megapixels. So we heard rumors that the iPhone 16 will bump up the ultra-wide lens to 48 megapixels

And I bet then with the iPhone 16 you be able to record these spatial videos in 4 but you can record spatial video and play it back totally normally on your iPhone or on your Mac But when you play it back on a Vision Pro it be in 3D

It's sort of, it's not a totally unique, bizarre camera format. It's basically just two video streams embedded in one file

So you can actually play them back on a meta quest. I think I embedded another tweet

I have another tweet in the show notes that you can bring up there So many tweets

It's in the show notes if you want to see Oh oh it's there Is this the uh okay I got it

This is that dog video isn't it No this is a different one

It like when you play it back on a vision pro Apple has like this nice effect where it's like sort of like blurry around the edge

It kind of looks like you're watching a dream From like the movie Inside Out or like Minority Report or something

But it's just a standard rectangular video If you play it back on a meta quest, you can see it's just like a rectangular window

And in the tweet, it's two-dimensional. But if you're wearing the thing, it'll look three-dimensional

So it takes up a little bit more space than a regular 1080p video

But it's actually still less like megabytes per minute than if you're recording a 4K video at the same frame rate

So I'd say that even if you don't plan on getting a Vision pro right away, if you're vague

interested in getting a headset at some indeterminate point in the future, I don't

see any reason not to start taking spatial video now if you have

an iPhone 15 Pro, because it's going to be it's going to like future proof your videos

for the three dimensional future later down the line, in my opinion. I see where

I like where your head's at, but I wonder is the Vision

Pro going to exist in three years? Am I going to have a way to watch these videos

when they inevitably decide to cancel the Vision Pro project? Because no one wants to spend money

I mean, yeah, because even if the Vision Pro specifically as it exists today

you don't necessarily agree with the product decisions. I mean, it's completely backwards compatible

Like, you can play them back on a Mac. You can edit, you'll be able to edit these spatial videos inside Final Cut

as regular two videos It be totally backwards compatible in that way But I think it just you know there no reason not to I think that having

Thank God they bumped up the ICloud storage. Yeah, right. Just in time

Yeah, perfect. I mean, that's the only consideration for me is you got to now have..

You said the videos were how much bigger? And are these 1080p or 4K

I miss that part. I think Apple invited some journalists to talk about this when they invited them like a special

tiny media event to show them and talk about it. I think I remember saying that it was like the regular two-dimensional 1080p video is 130

megabytes per minute. I think spatial videos are only like 180 megabytes per minute

That's interesting. So they're not double. And 4K is like into the 200s or 300s

Okay. It's not quite double because, you know, there's still some. HVC, like compression going on

Yeah, and they may not be capturing two distinct video streams. Like maybe they're just capturing like the Delta or something

I don't know, but yeah. I mean, look, if you could take spatial video on your iPhone 15

and then watch them in a headset that isn't the Vision Pro

so that you save yourself the cost, that would actually be pretty cool. That would be a cool feature of the meta quest if you could do that easily

And now right now I know that people in chat are saying you can do it, but it's kind of hacky in order to get it working

It's not like you just put the meta quest on and load the video. That's not the way this works

You have to hack the thing. Or you have to clude it together so that it works with these videos

I think eventually Apple will release a cheaper version of the Vision Pro. I know they're already working on it

And maybe that would be something that I'm interested in. And I'm not saying that the Vision Pro is going to fail

But what I have noticed is that no one seems to care about it. It is a very esoteric product

very little interest. And as the Apple industrial design team designers said, it is a solution in

search of a problem. And I think that is true. So I just don't know if it's going to succeed for

that reason. It's $3,500. And no one needs it. And how many people that don't need something

spend $3,500 on it? Maybe when it comes down to price. I mean, I love that one of these things

I mean assuming that they get the battery pack figured out So it not like a something you got to wear on your hip You know And the price was

If it were $8.99, I probably would impulse buy this thing. $3499

That's a different story. But I just don't really see a strong use case for it

So that's my only, that's the only reason why I keep talking about it

It's so pessimistically. It's not because I'm necessarily pessimistic on it. just don't see people being optimistic about it

Like normal people don't really seem to care about it or even know what it is. Anything else about iOS 17.2, Griffin

Yeah, nothing really worth chatting out here. If you want to read more, there's a link in the show notes

Oh, the one other thing I wanted to mention just real quick was the journal app. So I've been using iOS 17.2

And I feel like I really like the journal app and I like using it

It's not going to be useful to me until it's available on iPad. and it's available on Mac

I really hate journaling on my iPhone. I mean, dude, it's an input-heavy medium

Do you really want to be typing on your phone's software screen to journal

I don't. So it'd be really cool once they put this on iPad and then mega-useful once it's on your Mac

and you can just kind of like have it be cross-platform. And don't worry, that data will live in the cloud, Lewis

There's plenty of space in the cloud if you got the Joe

you know what I'm saying? You've actually been using the journaling app

I've been tinkering with it. I wouldn't say I've been using it. I've just been playing around with it, yeah

How are the suggestions that it serves up? Like, you know, maybe you want to talk about this meal you had and here's a picture

I don't find them useful. It's like journaling prompts, yeah. The things that I want to journal are not things that it would think to suggest, at least not yet

I find that its suggestions are. they haven't resonated with me yet

but I don't want to make it seem like I've done some deep dive in the journal in the journaling app. I have it

I've used it at a very superficial level, and it's not even for a lot of time because I hate doing it on my iPhone

And I pretty much decided that in the first five minutes. I was like, I love this idea

I hate that it's only on iPhone. I don't want to do this on my iPhone only. I would rather have this on the Mac, you know, the place where I do most of my writing

So, but it is definitely a cool idea