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‘We’ve got to make it happen’: How Apple designed AirPods 4 for effective ANC

The AirPods story actually begins with the iPod.
With Apple’s popular personal music player, the company shipped its first set of earbuds. Sure, they were wired and very basic, but the accessory laid the groundwork for what would eventually become AirPods. Along the way, the EarPods would be bundled with the iPhone in 2007, and a 2012 redesign produced something more akin to what would eventually become the first-gen AirPods in 2016. The work the company did to improve the fit of EarPods continues to pay off as Apple prepares to ship the noise-canceling AirPods 4.
“We had started trying to learn a bit about human physiology and what shapes would fit better in people’s ears,” Apple’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering Kate Bergeron told me about those early days. “We started doing some MRI scans and trying to figure out how to gather data, but we didn’t have a sense of how many scans we’d be looking for, or how many different kinds of ears we needed.”
Over the years, Apple has developed more efficient methods for gathering data, so it was able to build out its database of ear shapes quicker than in the early days of EarPods. Bergeron explained that she expects the company to be “continuing that journey” forever when it comes to developing new versions of AirPods.
Billy Steele for Engadget
During what Bergeron described as “the dark days of COVID,” a small group from the AirPods team was trying to solve a dilemma. They wanted to bring effective active noise cancellation (ANC) to the open design of the “regular” AirPods. The crew had already successfully done so on two models of the AirPods Pro and on the AirPods Max headphones. But this time around, it was essential that the open nature of the AirPods remain while also providing the technology to block out distractions.
So in 2021, over the course of several days, Bergeron and AirPods marketing director Eric Treski met up at one of Apple’s acoustic labs for a demo. At that point, the team was unsure if they had anything viable, but they wanted the executive’s feedback on it nonetheless.
“We were just blown away,” Bergeron recalled. “We said ‘we absolutely have something here, we need to go after this and we’ve got to make it happen.’” Acoustic and computational work that was required for an effective ANC algorithm was happening simultaneously with iterations on improving the fit and overall comfort for the AirPods 4.
After testing the AirPods 4, I can say that the fit and comfort have improved since the third-gen model. But Apple also expanded the earbuds’ capabilities with the H2 chip and microphones from the AirPods Pro 2. This combination of advanced tech enables Apple to continuously monitor fit in a user’s ear, updating the ANC algorithm in real time so that the noise blocking is still effective even as the AirPods move around.
“It’s even computationally more intense in many ways than it is with the AirPods Pro,” Bergeron said. “The ear tip gives you a fit that’s pretty consistent.”
Apple’s journey with ANC began with the development of the first-generation AirPods Pro that debuted in 2019. Effective active noise cancellation was usually more common on over-ear headphones, with a few exceptions, but Apple realized that making a distraction-free listening experience “pocketable” was attractive to its users. Of course, the company would follow up with its own headphones, the AirPods Max, before the powerful second-gen AirPods Pro.
Treski explained that the ANC setup, or the third generation of Adaptive EQ as he described it, is constantly managing and adjusting any equalizers for both active noise cancellation and audio quality at the same time – and in real time. So in addition to the revised shape, the acoustic architecture of the AirPods 4 is also instrumental in providing effective ANC on the open earbuds.
“It’s really, really hard to create this great ANC quality in a non-ear-tip product,” he said. “The power of the H2 allows that, so we’re actually doing a lot with the H2 chip to manage ANC quality and listen from the mics for environmental noise to make sure we’re canceling as much as possible.”
Billy Steele for Engadget
The lack of an ear tip on the AirPods 4 also creates a challenge for transparency mode. Treski noted that it’s “arguably even harder” than mastering ANC on open earbuds since you’re having to blend ambient sound from the microphones with what you’re hearing naturally through your unplugged ears. There’s a perfect mix that will seem real to your brain, but also it has to all be done with extremely low latency so the automatic adjustments don’t lead to any delays in what comes through the AirPods.
The new shape for the AirPods 4 also provided an opportunity to improve overall sound quality on the earbuds. The front end of the buds, which Bergeron revealed the team calls the “snorkel,” is very different from the AirPods 3. Since the previous model was more open, she said, the engineers had more freedom to operate. With the new version, the driver had to be adjusted so that it didn’t reflect sound to the internal microphone that monitors noise inside your ear. That’s why the drivers are now pointed down your ear canal, and why they’re slightly recessed.
“In order to get the improved fit, that necessitated adjusting the driver and the front of the product,” she said. “The mechanical engineers are doing the packaging of the entire product, trying to fit everything in. Acoustic engineers are saying, ‘okay, based on those constraints, this is the best place that we can put the driver.’”
The design overhaul on the AirPods 4 extends to the case as well. Apple was able to slim down the accessory while also simplifying how you interact with it. The end result is “the same magic experience,” Bergeron noted, but the lack of a button allowed engineers to eliminate overall thickness and rely on an accelerometer. Removing the button also gets rid of one place where liquid could potentially get in, so the case has the same IP54 rating as the new AirPods.
“We get a double win there for sure,” Bergeron said.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/headphones/weve-got-to-make-it-happen-how-apple-designed-airpods-4-for-effective-anc-130008844.html?src=rss

The AirPods story actually begins with the iPod.

With Apple’s popular personal music player, the company shipped its first set of earbuds. Sure, they were wired and very basic, but the accessory laid the groundwork for what would eventually become AirPods. Along the way, the EarPods would be bundled with the iPhone in 2007, and a 2012 redesign produced something more akin to what would eventually become the first-gen AirPods in 2016. The work the company did to improve the fit of EarPods continues to pay off as Apple prepares to ship the noise-canceling AirPods 4.

“We had started trying to learn a bit about human physiology and what shapes would fit better in people’s ears,” Apple’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering Kate Bergeron told me about those early days. “We started doing some MRI scans and trying to figure out how to gather data, but we didn’t have a sense of how many scans we’d be looking for, or how many different kinds of ears we needed.”

Over the years, Apple has developed more efficient methods for gathering data, so it was able to build out its database of ear shapes quicker than in the early days of EarPods. Bergeron explained that she expects the company to be “continuing that journey” forever when it comes to developing new versions of AirPods.

Billy Steele for Engadget

During what Bergeron described as “the dark days of COVID,” a small group from the AirPods team was trying to solve a dilemma. They wanted to bring effective active noise cancellation (ANC) to the open design of the “regular” AirPods. The crew had already successfully done so on two models of the AirPods Pro and on the AirPods Max headphones. But this time around, it was essential that the open nature of the AirPods remain while also providing the technology to block out distractions.

So in 2021, over the course of several days, Bergeron and AirPods marketing director Eric Treski met up at one of Apple’s acoustic labs for a demo. At that point, the team was unsure if they had anything viable, but they wanted the executive’s feedback on it nonetheless.

“We were just blown away,” Bergeron recalled. “We said ‘we absolutely have something here, we need to go after this and we’ve got to make it happen.’” Acoustic and computational work that was required for an effective ANC algorithm was happening simultaneously with iterations on improving the fit and overall comfort for the AirPods 4.

After testing the AirPods 4, I can say that the fit and comfort have improved since the third-gen model. But Apple also expanded the earbuds’ capabilities with the H2 chip and microphones from the AirPods Pro 2. This combination of advanced tech enables Apple to continuously monitor fit in a user’s ear, updating the ANC algorithm in real time so that the noise blocking is still effective even as the AirPods move around.

“It’s even computationally more intense in many ways than it is with the AirPods Pro,” Bergeron said. “The ear tip gives you a fit that’s pretty consistent.”

Apple’s journey with ANC began with the development of the first-generation AirPods Pro that debuted in 2019. Effective active noise cancellation was usually more common on over-ear headphones, with a few exceptions, but Apple realized that making a distraction-free listening experience “pocketable” was attractive to its users. Of course, the company would follow up with its own headphones, the AirPods Max, before the powerful second-gen AirPods Pro.

Treski explained that the ANC setup, or the third generation of Adaptive EQ as he described it, is constantly managing and adjusting any equalizers for both active noise cancellation and audio quality at the same time – and in real time. So in addition to the revised shape, the acoustic architecture of the AirPods 4 is also instrumental in providing effective ANC on the open earbuds.

“It’s really, really hard to create this great ANC quality in a non-ear-tip product,” he said. “The power of the H2 allows that, so we’re actually doing a lot with the H2 chip to manage ANC quality and listen from the mics for environmental noise to make sure we’re canceling as much as possible.”

Billy Steele for Engadget

The lack of an ear tip on the AirPods 4 also creates a challenge for transparency mode. Treski noted that it’s “arguably even harder” than mastering ANC on open earbuds since you’re having to blend ambient sound from the microphones with what you’re hearing naturally through your unplugged ears. There’s a perfect mix that will seem real to your brain, but also it has to all be done with extremely low latency so the automatic adjustments don’t lead to any delays in what comes through the AirPods.

The new shape for the AirPods 4 also provided an opportunity to improve overall sound quality on the earbuds. The front end of the buds, which Bergeron revealed the team calls the “snorkel,” is very different from the AirPods 3. Since the previous model was more open, she said, the engineers had more freedom to operate. With the new version, the driver had to be adjusted so that it didn’t reflect sound to the internal microphone that monitors noise inside your ear. That’s why the drivers are now pointed down your ear canal, and why they’re slightly recessed.

“In order to get the improved fit, that necessitated adjusting the driver and the front of the product,” she said. “The mechanical engineers are doing the packaging of the entire product, trying to fit everything in. Acoustic engineers are saying, ‘okay, based on those constraints, this is the best place that we can put the driver.’”

The design overhaul on the AirPods 4 extends to the case as well. Apple was able to slim down the accessory while also simplifying how you interact with it. The end result is “the same magic experience,” Bergeron noted, but the lack of a button allowed engineers to eliminate overall thickness and rely on an accelerometer. Removing the button also gets rid of one place where liquid could potentially get in, so the case has the same IP54 rating as the new AirPods.

“We get a double win there for sure,” Bergeron said.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/headphones/weve-got-to-make-it-happen-how-apple-designed-airpods-4-for-effective-anc-130008844.html?src=rss

Apple iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus review: Closing the gap to the Pro

The “regular” iPhone has become like a second child. Year after year, this model has gotten the hand-me-downs from the previous version of the iPhone Pro – the older, smarter sibling. The iPhone 15 received the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island and A16 Bionic processor, and the iPhone 14 before that got the A15 Bionic chip and a larger Plus variant with the same screen size as the iPhone 13 Pro Max. For the iPhone 16 ($799 & up), there are trickle-down items once more. But this time around, that’s not the entire story for the Apple phone that’s the best option for most people.
Surprisingly, Apple gave some of the most attractive features it has for 2024 to both the regular and Pro iPhones at the same time. This means you won’t have to wait a year to get expanded camera tools and another brand new button. Sure, Apple Intelligence is still in the works, but that’s the case for the iPhone 16 Pro too. The important thing there is that the iPhone 16 is just as ready when the AI features arrive.
So, for perhaps the first time – or at least the first time in years – Apple has closed the gap between the iPhone and iPhone Pro in a significant way. ProRAW stills and ProRES video are still exclusive to the priciest iPhones, and a new “studio-quality” four-microphone setup is reserved for them too. Frustratingly, you’ll still have to spend more for a 120Hz display. But, as far as the fun new tools that will matter to most of us, you won’t have to worry about missing out this time.

New buttons, new bump, old design
Another year has passed and we still don’t have a significant redesign for any iPhone, let alone the base-level model. As such, I’ll spend my time here discussing what’s new. Apple was content to add new colors once again, opting for a lineup of ultramarine (blueish purple), teal, pink, white and black. The colors are bolder than what was available on the iPhone 15, although I’d like to see a blue and perhaps a bright yellow or orange. Additionally, there’s no Product Red option once again — we haven’t seen that hue since the iPhone 14.
The main change in appearance on the iPhone 16 is the addition of two new buttons. Of course, one of those, the reconfigurable action button above the volume rockers, comes from the Pro-grade iPhones. By default, the control does the task of the switch it replaces: activating silent mode. But, you can also set the action button to open the camera, turn on the flashlight, start a Voice Memo, initiate a Shazam query and more. You can even assign a custom shortcut if none of the presets fit your needs.
While Apple undoubtedly expanded the utility of this switch by making it customizable, regular iPhone users will have to get used to the fact that the volume control is no longer the top button on the left. This means that when you reach for the side to change the loudness, you’ll need to remember it’s the middle and bottom buttons. Of course, the action button is smaller than the other two, so with some patience you can differentiate them by touch.

Billy Steele for Engadget

Near the bottom of the right side, there’s a new Camera Control button for quick access to the camera and its tools. A press will open the camera app from any screen, and a long press will jump straight to 4K Dolby Vision video capture at 60 fps. Once you’re there, this button becomes a touch-sensitive slider for things like zoom, exposure and lens selection. With zoom, for example, you can scroll through all of the options with a swipe. Then with a double “light press,” which took a lot of practice to finally master, you can access the other options. Fully pressing the button once will take a photo — you won’t have to lift a finger to tap the onscreen buttons.
Around back, Apple rearranged the cameras so they’re stacked vertically instead of diagonally. It’s certainly cleaner than the previous look, and the company still favors a smaller bump in the top left over something that takes up more space or spans the entire width of the rear panel (Hi Google). The key reason the company reoriented the rear cameras is to allow for spatial photos and videos, since the layout now enables the iPhone 16 to capture stereoscopic info from the Fusion and Ultra Wide cameras.
Photographic stylin’
The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus have a new 48-megapixel Fusion camera that packs a quad-pixel sensor for high resolution and fine detail. Essentially, it’s two cameras in one, combining – or fusing, hence the name – a 48MP frame and a 12MP one that’s fine-tuned for light capture. By default, you’ll get a 24MP image, one that Apple says offers the best mix of detail, low-light performance and an efficient file size. There’s also a new anti-reflective coating on the main (and ultrawide) camera to reduce flares.
The 12MP ultrawide camera got an upgrade too. This sensor now has a faster aperture and larger pixels, with better performance in low-light conditions. There’s a new macro mode, unlocked by autofocus and able to capture minute detail. This is one of my favorite features as sharp images of smaller objects have never been in the iPhone camera’s arsenal (only the Pros), and the macro tool has worked well for me so far.
The iPhone 16, like its predecessors, takes decent stills. You’ll consistently get crisp, clean detail in well-lit shots and realistic color reproduction that doesn’t skew too warm or too cool. At a concert, I noticed that the iPhone 16’s low-light performance is noticeably better than the iPhone 15. Where the previous model struggled at times in dimly lit venues, my 2x zoom shots with this new model produced better results. There wasn’t a marked improvement across the board, but most of the images were certainly sharper.

Macro mode on the iPhone 16 camera is excellent.

Billy Steele for Engadget

The most significant update to the camera on the iPhone 16 is Photographic Styles. Apple has more computational image data from years of honing its cameras, so the system has a better understanding of skin tones, color, highlights and shadows. Plus, the phone is able to process all of this in real time, so you can adjust skin undertones and mood styles before you even snap a picture. Of course, you can experiment with them after shooting, and you can also assign styles to a gallery of images simultaneously.
Photographic Styles are massively expanded and way more useful, especially when you use them to preview a shot before you commit. My favorite element of the updated workflow is a new control pad where you can swipe around to adjust tone and color. There’s also a slider under it to alter the color intensity of the style you’ve selected. For me, the new tools in Photographic Styles make me feel like I don’t need to hop over to another app immediately to edit since I have a lot more options available right in the Camera app.
As I’ve already mentioned, Camera Control is handy for getting quick shots, and the touch-sensitivity is helpful with settings, but I have some gripes with the button. Like my colleague Cherlynn Low mentioned in her iPhone 16 Pro review, the placement causes issues depending on how you hold your phone, and may lead to some inadvertent presses. You can adjust the sensitivity of the button, or disable it entirely, which is a customization you might want to explore. What’s more, the touch-enabled sliding controls are more accurately triggered if you hold the phone with your thumbs along the bottom while shooting. So, this means you may need to alter your grip for prime performance.
Like I noted earlier, the new camera layout enables spatial capture of both video and photos on the iPhone 16. This content can then be viewed on Apple Vision Pro, with stills in the HEIC format and footage at 1080p/30fps. It’s great that this isn’t reserved for the iPhone 16 Pro, but the downside (for any iPhone) is file size. When you swipe over to Spatial Mode in the camera app, you’ll get a warning that a minute of spatial video is 130MB and a single spatial photo is 5MB. I don’t have one of Apple’s headsets, so I didn’t spend too much time here since the photos and videos just appear normal on an iPhone screen.
I’d argue the most significant advantage of Spatial Mode is Audio Mix. Here, the iPhone 16 uses the sound input from the spatial capture along with “advanced intelligence” to isolate a person’s voice from background noise. There are four options for Audio Mix, offering different methods for eliminating or incorporating environmental sounds. Like Cherlynn discovered on the iPhone 16 Pro, I found the Studio and Cinematic options work best, with each one taking a different approach to background noise. The former makes it sound like the speaker is in a studio while the latter incorporates environmental noise in surround sound with voices focused in the center – like in a movie. However, like her, I quickly realized I need a lot more time with this tool to get comfortable with it.
iOS 18 is still waiting on Apple Intelligence

Billy Steele for Engadget

Apple proudly proclaimed the iPhone 16 is “built for Apple Intelligence,” but you’ll have to wait a while longer to use it. That means things like AI-driven writing tools, summaries of audio transcripts, a prioritized inbox and more will work on the base iPhone 16 when they arrive, so you won’t need a Pro to use them. Genmoji and the Clean Up photo-editing assist are sure to be popular as well, and I’m confident we’re all ready for a long overdue Siri upgrade. There’s a lot to look forward to, but none of it is ready for the iPhone 16’s debut. The iOS 18.1 public beta arrived this week, so we’re inching closer to a proper debut.
Sure, it would’ve been nice for the excitement around the new iPhones to include the first crack at Apple’s AI. But, I’d rather the company fine-tune things before a wider release to make sure Apple Intelligence is fully ready and, more importantly, fully reliable. Google has already debuted some form of AI on its Pixel series, so Apple is a bit behind. I don’t mind waiting longer for a useful tool than rushing a company into making buggy software.
What will be available on launch day is iOS 18, which delivers a number of handy updates to the iPhone, and many of which deal with customization. For the first time, Apple is allowing users to customize more than the layout on their Home Screen. You can now apply tint and color to icons, resize widgets and apps and lock certain apps to hide sensitive info. Those Lock Screen controls can also be customized for things you use most often, which is more handy now since the iPhone 16 has a dedicated camera button on its frame. There’s a big overhaul to the Photos app too, mostly focused on organization, that provides a welcome bit of automatization.
Performance and battery life
The iPhone 16 uses Apple’s new A18 chip with a 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU. There’s also a 16-core Neural Engine, which is the same as both the iPhone 15 and the iPhone 16 Pro. With the A18, the base-level iPhone jumped two generations ahead compared to the A16 Bionic inside the iPhone 15. The new chip provides the necessary horsepower for Apple’s AI and demanding camera features like Photographic Styles and the Camera Control button. I never noticed any lag on the iPhone 15, even with resource-heavy tasks, and those shouldn’t be a problem on the iPhone 16, either. But, we’ll have to wait and see how well the iPhone 16 handles Apple Intelligence this fall.
Of course, the A18 is more efficient than its predecessors, which is a benefit that extends to battery life. Apple promises up to 22 hours of local video playback on the iPhone 16 and up to 27 hours on the 16 Plus. For streaming video, those numbers drop to 18 and 24 hours respectively, and they’re all slight increases from the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro.
Starting at 7AM, I ran my battery test on the iPhone 16 and had 25 percent left at midnight. That’s doing what I’d consider “normal” use: a mix of calls, email, social, music and video. I also have a Dexcom continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that’s running over Bluetooth and I used the AirPods 4 several times during the day. And, of course, I was shooting photos and a few short video clips to test out those new features. While getting through the day with no problem is good, I’d love it if I didn’t have to charge the iPhone every night, or rely on low-power mode to avoid doing so.
On a related note, Apple has increased charging speeds via MagSafe, where you can get a 50 percent top up in around 30 minutes via 25W charging from a 30W power adapter or higher.
Wrap-up
With the iPhone 16, Apple has almost closed the gap between its best phone for most people and the one intended for the most demanding power users. It’s a relief to not pine for what could be coming on the iPhone 17 since a lot of the new features on the iPhone 16 Pro are already here. And while some of them will require time to master, it’s great that they’re on the iPhone 16 at all. There are some Pro features you’ll still have to spend more for, like ProRAW photos, ProRES video, a 120Hz display, a 5x telephoto camera and multi-track recording in Voice Memos. But those are luxuries not everyone needs. For this reason, the regular iPhone will likely suit your needs just fine, since splurging on the high-end model has become more of an indulgence than a necessity.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-iphone-16-and-iphone-16-plus-review-closing-the-gap-to-the-pro-120050824.html?src=rss

Surprisingly, Apple gave some of the most attractive features it has for 2024 to both the regular and Pro iPhones at the same time. This means you won’t have to wait a year to get expanded camera tools and another brand new button. Sure, Apple Intelligence is still in the works, but that’s the case for the iPhone 16 Pro too. The important thing there is that the iPhone 16 is just as ready when the AI features arrive.

So, for perhaps the first time – or at least the first time in years – Apple has closed the gap between the iPhone and iPhone Pro in a significant way. ProRAW stills and ProRES video are still exclusive to the priciest iPhones, and a new “studio-quality” four-microphone setup is reserved for them too. Frustratingly, you’ll still have to spend more for a 120Hz display. But, as far as the fun new tools that will matter to most of us, you won’t have to worry about missing out this time.

New buttons, new bump, old design

Another year has passed and we still don’t have a significant redesign for any iPhone, let alone the base-level model. As such, I’ll spend my time here discussing what’s new. Apple was content to add new colors once again, opting for a lineup of ultramarine (blueish purple), teal, pink, white and black. The colors are bolder than what was available on the iPhone 15, although I’d like to see a blue and perhaps a bright yellow or orange. Additionally, there’s no Product Red option once again — we haven’t seen that hue since the iPhone 14.

The main change in appearance on the iPhone 16 is the addition of two new buttons. Of course, one of those, the reconfigurable action button above the volume rockers, comes from the Pro-grade iPhones. By default, the control does the task of the switch it replaces: activating silent mode. But, you can also set the action button to open the camera, turn on the flashlight, start a Voice Memo, initiate a Shazam query and more. You can even assign a custom shortcut if none of the presets fit your needs.

While Apple undoubtedly expanded the utility of this switch by making it customizable, regular iPhone users will have to get used to the fact that the volume control is no longer the top button on the left. This means that when you reach for the side to change the loudness, you’ll need to remember it’s the middle and bottom buttons. Of course, the action button is smaller than the other two, so with some patience you can differentiate them by touch.

Billy Steele for Engadget

Around back, Apple rearranged the cameras so they’re stacked vertically instead of diagonally. It’s certainly cleaner than the previous look, and the company still favors a smaller bump in the top left over something that takes up more space or spans the entire width of the rear panel (Hi Google). The key reason the company reoriented the rear cameras is to allow for spatial photos and videos, since the layout now enables the iPhone 16 to capture stereoscopic info from the Fusion and Ultra Wide cameras.

Photographic stylin’

The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus have a new 48-megapixel Fusion camera that packs a quad-pixel sensor for high resolution and fine detail. Essentially, it’s two cameras in one, combining – or fusing, hence the name – a 48MP frame and a 12MP one that’s fine-tuned for light capture. By default, you’ll get a 24MP image, one that Apple says offers the best mix of detail, low-light performance and an efficient file size. There’s also a new anti-reflective coating on the main (and ultrawide) camera to reduce flares.

The 12MP ultrawide camera got an upgrade too. This sensor now has a faster aperture and larger pixels, with better performance in low-light conditions. There’s a new macro mode, unlocked by autofocus and able to capture minute detail. This is one of my favorite features as sharp images of smaller objects have never been in the iPhone camera’s arsenal (only the Pros), and the macro tool has worked well for me so far.

The iPhone 16, like its predecessors, takes decent stills. You’ll consistently get crisp, clean detail in well-lit shots and realistic color reproduction that doesn’t skew too warm or too cool. At a concert, I noticed that the iPhone 16’s low-light performance is noticeably better than the iPhone 15. Where the previous model struggled at times in dimly lit venues, my 2x zoom shots with this new model produced better results. There wasn’t a marked improvement across the board, but most of the images were certainly sharper.

Macro mode on the iPhone 16 camera is excellent.

Billy Steele for Engadget

Photographic Styles are massively expanded and way more useful, especially when you use them to preview a shot before you commit. My favorite element of the updated workflow is a new control pad where you can swipe around to adjust tone and color. There’s also a slider under it to alter the color intensity of the style you’ve selected. For me, the new tools in Photographic Styles make me feel like I don’t need to hop over to another app immediately to edit since I have a lot more options available right in the Camera app.

As I’ve already mentioned, Camera Control is handy for getting quick shots, and the touch-sensitivity is helpful with settings, but I have some gripes with the button. Like my colleague Cherlynn Low mentioned in her iPhone 16 Pro review, the placement causes issues depending on how you hold your phone, and may lead to some inadvertent presses. You can adjust the sensitivity of the button, or disable it entirely, which is a customization you might want to explore. What’s more, the touch-enabled sliding controls are more accurately triggered if you hold the phone with your thumbs along the bottom while shooting. So, this means you may need to alter your grip for prime performance.

Like I noted earlier, the new camera layout enables spatial capture of both video and photos on the iPhone 16. This content can then be viewed on Apple Vision Pro, with stills in the HEIC format and footage at 1080p/30fps. It’s great that this isn’t reserved for the iPhone 16 Pro, but the downside (for any iPhone) is file size. When you swipe over to Spatial Mode in the camera app, you’ll get a warning that a minute of spatial video is 130MB and a single spatial photo is 5MB. I don’t have one of Apple’s headsets, so I didn’t spend too much time here since the photos and videos just appear normal on an iPhone screen.

I’d argue the most significant advantage of Spatial Mode is Audio Mix. Here, the iPhone 16 uses the sound input from the spatial capture along with “advanced intelligence” to isolate a person’s voice from background noise. There are four options for Audio Mix, offering different methods for eliminating or incorporating environmental sounds. Like Cherlynn discovered on the iPhone 16 Pro, I found the Studio and Cinematic options work best, with each one taking a different approach to background noise. The former makes it sound like the speaker is in a studio while the latter incorporates environmental noise in surround sound with voices focused in the center – like in a movie. However, like her, I quickly realized I need a lot more time with this tool to get comfortable with it.

iOS 18 is still waiting on Apple Intelligence

Billy Steele for Engadget

Sure, it would’ve been nice for the excitement around the new iPhones to include the first crack at Apple’s AI. But, I’d rather the company fine-tune things before a wider release to make sure Apple Intelligence is fully ready and, more importantly, fully reliable. Google has already debuted some form of AI on its Pixel series, so Apple is a bit behind. I don’t mind waiting longer for a useful tool than rushing a company into making buggy software.

What will be available on launch day is iOS 18, which delivers a number of handy updates to the iPhone, and many of which deal with customization. For the first time, Apple is allowing users to customize more than the layout on their Home Screen. You can now apply tint and color to icons, resize widgets and apps and lock certain apps to hide sensitive info. Those Lock Screen controls can also be customized for things you use most often, which is more handy now since the iPhone 16 has a dedicated camera button on its frame. There’s a big overhaul to the Photos app too, mostly focused on organization, that provides a welcome bit of automatization.

Performance and battery life

The iPhone 16 uses Apple’s new A18 chip with a 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU. There’s also a 16-core Neural Engine, which is the same as both the iPhone 15 and the iPhone 16 Pro. With the A18, the base-level iPhone jumped two generations ahead compared to the A16 Bionic inside the iPhone 15. The new chip provides the necessary horsepower for Apple’s AI and demanding camera features like Photographic Styles and the Camera Control button. I never noticed any lag on the iPhone 15, even with resource-heavy tasks, and those shouldn’t be a problem on the iPhone 16, either. But, we’ll have to wait and see how well the iPhone 16 handles Apple Intelligence this fall.

Of course, the A18 is more efficient than its predecessors, which is a benefit that extends to battery life. Apple promises up to 22 hours of local video playback on the iPhone 16 and up to 27 hours on the 16 Plus. For streaming video, those numbers drop to 18 and 24 hours respectively, and they’re all slight increases from the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro.

Starting at 7AM, I ran my battery test on the iPhone 16 and had 25 percent left at midnight. That’s doing what I’d consider “normal” use: a mix of calls, email, social, music and video. I also have a Dexcom continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that’s running over Bluetooth and I used the AirPods 4 several times during the day. And, of course, I was shooting photos and a few short video clips to test out those new features. While getting through the day with no problem is good, I’d love it if I didn’t have to charge the iPhone every night, or rely on low-power mode to avoid doing so.

On a related note, Apple has increased charging speeds via MagSafe, where you can get a 50 percent top up in around 30 minutes via 25W charging from a 30W power adapter or higher.

Wrap-up

With the iPhone 16, Apple has almost closed the gap between its best phone for most people and the one intended for the most demanding power users. It’s a relief to not pine for what could be coming on the iPhone 17 since a lot of the new features on the iPhone 16 Pro are already here. And while some of them will require time to master, it’s great that they’re on the iPhone 16 at all. There are some Pro features you’ll still have to spend more for, like ProRAW photos, ProRES video, a 120Hz display, a 5x telephoto camera and multi-track recording in Voice Memos. But those are luxuries not everyone needs. For this reason, the regular iPhone will likely suit your needs just fine, since splurging on the high-end model has become more of an indulgence than a necessity.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-iphone-16-and-iphone-16-plus-review-closing-the-gap-to-the-pro-120050824.html?src=rss

Engadget Podcast: Reviewing the iPhone 16 and Apple Watch Series 10

Our reviews of the iPhone 16 Pro and Apple Watch Series 10 are up, thanks to one very tired Cherlynn Low. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn discuss her final thoughts on Apple’s new hardware, including why the iPhone 16 Pro’s photo processing is particularly interesting. In other news, we also chat about Snap’s fifth-generation AR Spectacles, as well as HTC Vive’s new Focus Vision headset.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you’ve got suggestions or topics you’d like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

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Topics

iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max reviews: great cameras, but incomplete without Apple Intelligence – 0:59
Israel linked to coordinated pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon – 42:29
Snap’s 5th generation glasses with AR look chunky in a bad way – 48:17
HTC’s Vive Focus Vision: an intriguing VR headset at a price between the Quest 3 and Vision Pro – 51:35
Lionsgate films made a deal with the AI devil – 52:40
Pop culture picks – 55:48

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Credits
Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn LowProducer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

Transcript

(Note: This transcript was produced with help from Descript’s AI.)
Devindra: [00:00:00] What’s up, Internet? And welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I’m Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar.
Cherlynn: I’m Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low.
Devindra: This week we’ll be talking about the iPhone 16 Pro reviews from Cherlynn. And also, also the Apple Watch Series 10 review. And you’re just so busy, Cherlynn. I’m so sorry.
Cherlynn: Yeah.
Devindra: Cherlynn slowly dying. Also joining us is podcast producer Ben Ellman. Hey, Ben.
Ben: Good morning, everyone. Usually we’re trying to sell Cherlynn on video games. I think now you’re going to have to sell me on the iPhone 16.
Devindra: You know? We will, we will do that. As always, folks, if you’re enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice.
Leave us a review on iTunes. Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. Also, if you could join us Thursday mornings on our YouTube channel, typically around 10:45 AM Eastern for our live stream. You can see our, our faces. You can see us do some Q and a, and you know, we’ll show off some devices too.
So check that out. Cherlynn, I was really excited to see what you thought of the iPhone 16 pro [00:01:00]because based on our previous conversations.
Cherlynn: are you trying to upgrade?
Devindra: No, I’m not. I’m not actually, I am very firmly. I’m like, I actually don’t need to do this at all. It’s great. It’s a good year for anybody who has a 15 pro because just not much of a reason beyond the button.
But I also know. You had conflicting feelings about the camera button. And also, Hey, we can’t really judge. It’s we can’t fully judge this device because so much of it is going to depend on Apple intelligence, which will not start rolling out until next month. The new Siri won’t fully arrive until early next year.
So what do you think of it so far? This is just the pro and pro max.
Cherlynn: Yeah. I mean, we, I also, I personally also have been testing and spending time with the iPhone plus. I can talk about them. Our, our, our review may be coming later. Right. It’s coming. Nobody can blame you.
Devindra: You just shipped an Apple watch review and an iPhone review.
And last week you had the pixel watch review. So yes. To give everyone
Cherlynn: a sense of the cadence here. So Apple’s event was Monday. Tuesday I was there for meetings where I’ve then left with devices which [00:02:00]to disclosure, they’re all owners. We returned them at the end of the review period. Okay. And then there was, then we had Monday morning, the, at 8 AM Eastern, the AirPods for review.
Was published was the embargo and then Tuesday 8 a. m. Eastern was the Apple watch series 10 review embargo. And then Wednesday, yesterday 8 a. m. Eastern, the Apple iPhone 16, all of them, the review embargo lifted. So it’s been, it’s been wild because it involves a lot of weekend work for some of us.
And, so pardon me if in this episode, I get some names and words and numbers mixed up because it’s bound to happen. It happened in our video review a couple times, which sorry, but my brain is, is there. Anyway so I really adore the iPhone 16, the base iPhone 16, because we got the cutest colors. We got the pink and the teal the teal iPhone 16 plus and the pink one.
Now. The, the reason I was actually, I’m going to start with the iPhone 16 because we, we haven’t really put out our [00:03:00] formal thoughts out there yet, but I, I, I have spent some time thinking about them. This is the first time you’ve basically for a while now that you’ve got the iPhone 16s that are basically close to parody with the pros.
I mean, these are not, not pro phones by any means. But, you know, Apple didn’t skimp on like bringing the camera button over to the base iPhone 16 for once. Right. And they’re getting new chips, like
Devindra: all the fun stuff. Yeah, exactly.
Cherlynn: They’re getting 18, a 18 instead of the last year’s a 17, for example. And then, you know, yes, the pros get the 18 pro, but that makes sense.
You’re paying quite a lot more money. Those are more powerful phones. And then you’ve got also the camera button this time brought down to the. The action button might be brought down to the iPhone.
Devindra: The plain iPhone, the base iPhone. Yeah.
Cherlynn: Plus, yeah. So these names are not great. And then you’ve, one of the things holding back, I guess, the base iPhones is the screen, right?
I mean, okay. They don’t have the like same big 6. 3, 6. 9 inch screens as the pros do, but they also don’t have [00:04:00]promotion. You’re just getting like their retina XDR, I think super retina. So they’re good in terms of color and resolution, but you’re missing a high refresh rate, some differences in size.
And then of course the cameras aren’t as powerful, but you will get spatial audio recording, which means you will get access to features like audio mix in the video recording tool set. So, or the video editing tool set. So I
Devindra: just want to point out here, Sherilyn, as you were holding up those iPhones, it seems like the big difference is.
iPhone 16 pro party in the front, good screen, iPhone 16 party in the back. I
Cherlynn: quite like that. They’re so
Devindra: bright and the color is like everything
Cherlynn: you, when I talk about these at some point on our website later, but yes, this, the iPhone 16 keeps the party in the back while the iPhone 16 pro keeps the party up front.
I guess you know where the party isn’t
Devindra: the
Cherlynn: party isn’t on the sides. It’s so sad. I really liked the idea of camera control, which I think we’ll just dive right [00:05:00] into camera control. I mentioned already last week that it’s, you know, a real like button that you hopefully heard me clicking into the mic just now.
It is awkwardly positioned in my opinion. When I try to hold it up Depending on the size of the phone I mean, I think i’ve already learned how to grip this so that my thumb sits right on the camera control when i’m holding It up In portrait mode with one hand. In landscape mode, the way that I used to grip my camera to take photos or my phone to take photos is to place my index finger kind of lightly hugging the bottom corner.
And then my little finger at the bottom to kind of brace it. And in this way, You had to
Devindra: Relearn the way you were holding a phone, basically. Absolutely.
Cherlynn: You had to relearn that camera grip that everyone was talking about maybe three years ago. It’s Oh God, our camera grip. You know, that’s a, that’s a thing we learned to cope with this, Modern day technology things.
And now you kind of had to relearn it again. If you’re, if you have an iPhone 16, because now too, if you want to press the camera control and you want to swipe on the thing, you have to [00:06:00]hold the phone differently. Your thumb’s going to be on the bottom. If you’re holding in landscape mode, you have to have your three fingers on the right side to kind of like balance the thing to hold it stably.
And then put your index finger on the sensor to be able to move it without Completely dropping the phone. It is in my opinion, a little clunky. However, I do love that Apple’s finally brought Hardaware based shortcut access to the camera app. Let me fix my. Sure, let’s pour a microphone.
Devindra: It’s okay. I mean, I think the more I hear about the camera button and everything, it does seem compelling.
Like I do kind of feel Oh, that would be kind of nice to have that control, but also, yeah, yeah. I invested, I also invested in the 512 gigabyte 15 pro last year. So it’s it’s, it’s just not worth it. I am interested in what people think of the base model. And I guess once consumers like start getting their hands on it, because yeah, as you were saying, and as we talked about, like you’re missing [00:07:00]the zoom camera, you’re missing the, you know, faster promotion screen, but beyond that, like that’s a pretty capable, it’s a pretty good phone for 800 bucks.
I guess as it should be, but then compared to most Android ones, you know, you’ll get faster refresh rates on the Samsung’s and the pixels. So I don’t know how long Apple can justify that. Here’s my other thing. Mm hmm
Cherlynn: One of the biggest selling points that I guess Apple made about the iPhone 16 is that they’re purpose built for Apple Intelligence, and there’s none of that in here yet.
I mean, we could and can run a developer beta to get our A taste for Apple intelligence, but I I’m sorry to announce that we don’t review devices based on developer slash whatever beta shouldn’t.
Devindra: It’s not real. It’s not
Cherlynn: stable. It’s not the same. It could be very similar to the experience that finally ships.
But it’s just not, I’m not, I’m not testing a beta and telling you, yeah, buy this thing. No, I, there’s just, it’s not no, even [00:08:00] though I think that the line between beta and like public release is quite like gray right now, it’s just not very clear because sometimes they release so many software updates after the fact that the one that they released initially might as well be the beta.
But anyway I, I do think that for now there’s a lot but the base iPhone 16s are still, they still seem like really solid upgrades for anyone on the base iPhone 15. Now the pros are a different matter altogether. Okay, so I almost immediately switched over to the base iPhone. iPhone 16 pro as my main.
And the smaller,
Devindra: the smaller, the
Cherlynn: smaller one by base. I mean the smaller one, not the max. And before that I had been meaning the gray, the magnesium, the natural titanium, not magnesium, the titanium 15 pro max, and like my hand is a lot happier. For having switched over to the smaller one, even though I didn’t, I got like the white iPhone 16 pro and I have the desert iPhone 16 pro max.
[00:09:00] So honestly, the nicer color is in the bigger phone from, from me.
Devindra: I
Cherlynn: don’t mind it. And they gave me this like bright yellow case to use with it. I was just like, all right, I don’t want to look like. But the, the sad news is that like my main takeaway with the iPhone 16 pro, other than all that camera control stuff I talked about the battery life is quite disappointing.
Devindra: You’re going from the big, the big boy battery. Sure. Yeah.
Cherlynn: But when you consider that the pixel nine pro. Made like 25 hours on our battery test and basically generally last two days I would say in real more realistic use probably closer to one and a half days because two days with this thing was more like I Didn’t use it as much as my iPhone that I would use my phone.
It’s more of a secondary device I you can’t you just can’t Say, yeah, barely last a day and that’s fine. That looks bigger
Devindra: though. The Pixel put them side by side. The iPhone 16 Pro and the Pixel 9 Pro. Okay It’s a little bit
Cherlynn: [00:10:00] bigger. It’s a little thicker. I
Devindra: feel like they could fit in a bigger, a bigger battery in the Pixel.
Cherlynn: So the, the, the Pixel 9 Pro, to be clear, is only maybe less than an inch taller. Yeah, and then, a bit ever so, nope, ever so, look, it’s about, they’re really
Devindra: going the harder, the trying to replicate that. Yeah.
Cherlynn: So, yeah, no. So, so here’s the thing I, I wrote this in my review too, and I’ll mention it on this podcast, which is that I’ve been surrounded by phones these last few days on my couch And it has been very difficult to figure out to reach for the correct phone, I have to do a big like game of which phone am I holding up?
I, I sort of got, these are,
Devindra: I really do sometimes.
Cherlynn: And then hang on, hang on. That’s just one hand. So for the audio version of the podcast. These, these are all on my couch right now. There’s about, I don’t want to say, how many is that? Seven? Ten? I don’t know. [00:11:00] There’s a pixel fold here. That is a
Ben: lot of phones.
Devindra: This is the version of fanning you know, a big stack of bills. You’re fanning a stack of phones right now.
Cherlynn: So anyway,
Ben: I mean, and it is kind of a big stack of bills, monetary value.
Cherlynn: I will say instead of going to the gym, I’ve been just lifting these phones. No the, the, by feel, I cannot tell which one is which.
They all feel roughly the same to me, especially when I touch the Pixel 9 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro. They all feel the same. By touch. In fact, sometimes when I’m using the 16 pro, I start to try to use Android gestures because I’m like, Oh, I’m using the pixel nine pro. Aren’t I? So I swipe in from the side to go back and it’s ridiculous.
But yeah, it’s, they’re very similar in terms of build and it’s not a bad thing for anyone, but I do think that. Maybe now is the time to start pushing companies to do a bit more with design or their camera bumps. I think I saw somewhere that I think MKBHD did a bit of a wobble test, which is something that Sam Rutherford on our team has been pitching as a [00:12:00]series for like years, but I feel bad we never got around to doing it.
The Pixel 9 Pro, because of its camera bar, doesn’t wobble as much, but iPhone 16 Pro certainly does. It’s modules. We’re going to
Devindra: make an excuse to bring the wobble dance into an iPhone video. Now, is that, that’s what’s happening here, I guess. Yeah. So
Cherlynn: anyway, I’m sorry, iPhone 16 Pro held back a little bit by its battery life.
I will also point out that I’ve had some issues with some, what seems like buggy software. I wonder if that has to do with the, in the setup process when I ported my Phone from the 15 pro max over to the 16 pro that like I don’t know something is not complete in the setup just yet But I definitely noticed certain glitches here and there I’ve mentioned To someone that can do something about it that my lock screen just refuses to save the crop aspect ratio sometimes
Devindra: That’s interesting.
This is more of a
Cherlynn: [00:13:00] telegram app issue, but the telegram app, which yes, sadly, I still do use every now and then will still resurface the one notification badge on this icon. I’m just like, there’s no unreads. There are no unreads. And that’s apparently a known issue. You gotta,
Devindra: you gotta go Zen, Sherilyn. You gotta go just ignore all the badges.
Numbers, there will always be numbers.
Cherlynn: Well, yeah, so there’s, but there are other And you can
Devindra: just turn the badges off too,
Ben: right? You can turn
Devindra: the badge off completely. Yeah.
Cherlynn: There are other glitches like, When sometimes when I press the camera control and then I flip over to landscape, it just blinks and then just half the screen’s gone.
But I’ve, I’ve certainly had that with older iPhones before. So it’s not like unique to the iPhone 16 pro and which is why I didn’t make a big deal of it in my review.
Devindra: Yeah. How do you like the 5X zoom on the base? I love smaller 16 pro. Cause that is a nice upgrade. That’s why I went max last year too.
It was like. It’s nice to have a 5x zoom. Yeah.
Cherlynn: I love having the 5x zoom on the smaller phone. And that’s one of the things I’m like really happy about with the lineup this year, because yeah, that’s the reason I upgraded to the 15 [00:14:00] pro max upgraded, sacrifice my hands for the 15 pro max last year, because I wanted that 5x telephoto zoom.
This year I did most of my testing with the 16 pro and yeah, I mean, it compares pretty well with Google’s, but I did a lot of my photography comparison and again, it’s a pixel nine pro because. To me, that’s the gold standard. Google is really a lot better at cleaning up mess at the higher level zoom and also Google just gives you a little bit more digital zoom.
So you can go up to 30 X with a combined telephoto and digital. Whereas on iPhone 16 pro or pro max, you go up to only 25 X. Google’s image
Devindra: processing, I think it’s a little better. The computational image processing.
Cherlynn: Yeah. If you,
Devindra: okay.
Ben: But let’s talk about that for a second, because Devindra and I were talking like during the show planning meeting yesterday, that I’m looking at.
the side by side iPhone 16 and Pixel 9 Pro pictures in Cherlynn’s review. [00:15:00] It’s the image of the tree and the LED strip. It looks like it’s in some kind of transit hub. And I know everyone says the Pixel 9 photos are so much better all the time, but to me, the picture from the 16 Pro looks so much more vibrant.
Is that just A me thing? Is that how I perceive colors versus other people? What’s going on here?
Cherlynn: It could be. I will say that I did notice, in general, in general, right, and this has been for years now, I’ve noticed that pixel photography tends to be a little bit more muted compared to something from iPhone or Samsung phones.
Especially compared to Samsung phones. They tend to oversaturate a little bit. What Apple has tended to do in the past is I don’t, I think this is just their color preference, but they give what they call, but I don’t say they call it. It’s just warmer, right? It looks warmer sometimes to the point of looking almost yellowish.
But yeah, their colors are a bit warmer and I think you can compare this to this. [00:16:00] this to the difference between a Nikon and a camera, a Canon camera in terms of the processing. Just like a
Devindra: tasteful aesthetic difference. Exactly.
Cherlynn: I think that’s a preference or tasting, Ben. So I don’t know that you’re necessarily seeing it differently, but it could be a tasting, right?
The, the thing I do want to point out in that picture and also back to your point, Ben, one the picture on the left of the tree in, by the way, Moynihan train station, which is Penn station in Manhattan. Yeah. Okay. Is the, the one on the left, iPhone 16 pros picture is a little bit blurry. Right. And I think that’s because I have been so focused on testing camera control that every single photo I took with it was with the button push.
Whereas like on the pixel pro, sometimes I would use the volume key trigger. Sometimes I would use the onscreen button. That’s the way I normally use it in daily life anyway. So I think that some of that,
Ben: they would compensate for that. You would think,
Cherlynn: but I do, I don’t think they did. So I think that the button push.
Definitely introduce shake. Deepak Murthy in the chat also asked a really good question. Is the 48 [00:17:00]megapixel Ultra wide. A big upgrade from last year. I don’t know that I’ve been pixel peeping the ultra wide pictures, but I will say this reminds me of a fact that the 48 megapixel fusion camera on the iPhone 16 pro and pro max is wild.
Like I at first was like, they keep saying zero shutter lag, right? Apple has used this Phrase a lot. And this time it said zero shutter lag and said, it was like faster. So my dumb ass brain was like, Oh, does this mean I can take like photos of people, like moving around and then freeze motion and just take, right.
So I just doing that for a while. And I was like, none of them seem very like what I thought they were going to be. So I got our video producer for this review video, Brino. I was like, can you throw something at me? I’ll, you know, catch it in midair. And then. All the photos that I was trying to take with the zero shutter lag environment, it was a cushion, something’s off.
Devindra: That’s what zero shutter lag is supposed to be. So, so hang on. So then I was like, okay,
Cherlynn: let’s do that. And then I was like, why is it not working? So I, then I told Brian to do me throwing things around. So he took photos of me and [00:18:00]we were both like, All our pictures came out of us holding on to the thing and not of us throwing the things.
When I finally figured out what was happening, I was like, Oh, that’s how fast the fusion camera is now. It’s actually taking the photo when you press the camera on shutter button or trigger now, not, you know, a slight fraction of a second lag before the movement happens. So you actually don’t have to like, the reason we were so like, Like catching not the movement we want it and so confused is because as people who have a lot of experience with cameras, Brian and I have trained ourselves to become like sensitive with the camera trigger timing, right?
If I know if something I want to capture is going to happen in the split second after I press the button, that’s when I trigger it. That’s how I time myself to press the button. And that’s why our pictures were coming out a little too early. We were like, we were hitting the button, but instead we should have just waited till the thing was in midair to then press the button because that’s how fast the camera
Devindra: is now.
Cherlynn: I didn’t know, finally [00:19:00] figured it out. Felt really smart for a moment there.
Devindra: I think due to Deepak Murthy’s question, the big upgrade is that before it was a 12 megapixel ultrawide, now it’s a 48 megapixel ultrawide. So,
Cherlynn: and that enables. Yeah. Even more of that 2x zoom croppy situation that they talk about.
Devindra: It’s also the thing where if you lean too much into a subject, like last year, it would just like shift to the, to like almost macro mode. Right. Right. Lose so much detail. If you want a high resolution photo, like then you have to fight that automatic process. That was annoying last year or so.
Cherlynn: Yeah.
Devindra: Yeah, less of a problem this year.
Cherlynn: And then my final note about colors here is, oh my God, how awesome our photographic style, photographic styles, photographic, photographic styles. Photographic
Devindra: styles. So
Cherlynn: awesome. So those let
Devindra: you choose different like color profiles and give you more finely tuned.
Stuff like just more tweaking on your photos. I, I want to point out like a couple of reviews also noted that they like the image processing of the 16 pros compared to the 15 pros. And I think this is kind of a common [00:20:00] complaint that a lot of iPhone users have been having is just that pictures look kind of flat sometimes because Apple’s processing.
Tends to crush shadows and kind of like the depth of an image kind of goes away. So I noticed the Verge’s review, they pointed this out a lot and I, a couple other folks did too, like you get, you can get better shadow control, better skin tone control, and you can leave
Cherlynn: it there, right? Like you can leave it, set it to your preferred and leave it.
So every photo you take then doesn’t have to be edited. It comes out with your preferred shadow and contrast settings. Yeah. So here’s, here’s. To add my thoughts on that. When I discovered in my testing that photographic styles is freaking awesome. I was like, what happened? Your depth, your depth map just seems wildly improved.
And so what Apple does in general is every year. And I heard this last year too, actually, which is they, they, they work on their algorithm every year. They refine their depth map sensitivity, accuracy, this sort of stuff every year. This year, there seems to be a noted, marked. Improvement. And so in every single [00:21:00] photo even with last year with the 15 pros, when you take a photo that has a face inside Apple automatically takes like captures depth information.
So you might’ve seen that I’ve noticed this before when I’m like taking photos of myself and it suddenly switches to portrait mode. I’m like, I don’t need a portrait mode picture. I just wanted a flat one, but then they want to capture depth information. And in using, in doing that this year with photographic styles, they’re able to like, Maintain a person’s face, skin tone, whatever.
Keep that a natural looking, as natural looking as possible, and then apply color changes and contrast changes and whatnot to the background. And it is wildly effective this year. And then the fact that you can. Set it, leave it, every single one of your photos will turn out that way. Or you can go in and post process and post and change it up.
There’s just so many more controls and customizability options now that to me, that is actually the low key highlight this year. Things that like they’ve introduced, like photographic styles, you can leave alone and do nothing with, right? Action button, you can leave as your mute slider. The camera control.
If you don’t like it, turn it off. [00:22:00]You have all these controls. I Apple doesn’t make a big deal because I don’t think it wants to market that you can turn off camera controls. But the fact that you can, and the fact that you can tweak its sensitivity as part of accessibility controls, is it’s all adding to the idea that Apple is understanding that it needs to let users be able to change and choose what they want.
And to me, that’s the most important thing with the iPhone 16s or just iPhones in general. I
Devindra: kind of wish some of that came down to the earlier phones. Like I know part of that is the image processing pipeline that there’s a whole lot of new Hardaware in the 16s. scenes, but also you, you’ve got, you still got MPUs on these older phones.
Like there, there’s some stuff you could still do. It sort of reminds me of the way people complain about like the way MCU movies look, right? The Marvel movies tend to look flat, don’t really have much depth. You can almost feel the artificiality of like when they’re on the the giant led screens, you know, when something doesn’t feel real and then.
You shoot something in real life with real color depth and everything and shadow depth, and it [00:23:00]looks dramatically different. I guess that’s sort of what people are noticing. So any, anything else you want to shout out about the, the iPhone pros or, or the base ones, Rowan?
Cherlynn: I mean, I agree with you that especially on photographic styles, they introduced it on the thirteens, right?
That’s the first time it came out. And so it, it’s not. But then the idea back then, I don’t think was as fully fleshed out. So I don’t think that back then they were capturing as much information. And I also had to wonder about storage size, right? Which brings me to the 4k 120 support on these pros with shooting 4k 120 content, you can slow things down a lot more for like way more dramatically slowed down and cinematic loading content as well as like HDR support in those.
situations. Of course, if you keep recording in those sort of high quality situations, you’re going to run out of storage soon. And then speaking of video recording, I am, I was so excited for audio mix. I really was very excited for the ability to use that spatial [00:24:00]audio file that’s recorded in all your videos now, and then kind of like drown out environmental noise or isolate and highlight the.
Voices of people speaking in the scene and frame in my admittedly limited testing so far, like the switch between standard and studio is the best. So you really just kind of get rid of a lot of ambient noise and make your, you know, subjects sound like they’re talking in a podcast, like we are now.
Like my microphone is now Yeah,
Devindra: your microphone sounds great when trillin’s like you’re there in front of microphones turned on we’re all we’re all golden this week I do feel like um, yeah, you can certainly fill up even if you have a terabyte iphone I feel like If you’re shooting 4k 120, you’re going to be sucking up some space, but they are making it more so that you can record and shoot directly to storage devices.
So I can imagine I see so many of those like little rigs that people are putting together. Like you put your iPhone in there. It’s also stabilizing rig. You could attach a microphone up top. But you could put a small SSD [00:25:00] there too. Like it is making the sort of Hey, you can have a little production studio built entirely around your iPhone and it’ll cost a lot of money, but there are some users, certainly pro users that would be into that, you know?
So it’s kind of, it’s cool to have that. That’s how they shot this. That that weekend video, right? Like with a rig a whole special thing, making him sing the song extra fast to slow down. That was fun.
Cherlynn: I think the idea of the iPhone 16 pros as like a, yeah, portable creator rig is a good way to think about them because a lot of the upgrades that at least drew my attention were for multimedia content creation.
Another thing that I was intrigued by, but that isn’t available yet is the multi. Layer or multitrack recording on voice memos. And then speaking of features that are still not yet here that half step sort of lock focus feature on camera control isn’t available yet. And then, of course, everything with Apple intelligence isn’t fully available yet.
I think that. It is not the first time Apple’s held back some marquee features at launch, but it is like, [00:26:00]it, it makes reviewing these things right now, the week that they go on sale a little trickier than usual. You will see the note on our review cards with about the score that we had to review them as is, and as is they, They seem to score lower than last year which I think is very fair.
I think especially, I actually had to flip the position of the pro and the pro max this year, just because the battery life to me was that much significantly lower. I, I actually almost dinged it quite a few more points and then was convinced to be like, okay, A bit more, a bit less angry about battery life.
I mean, it’s a
Devindra: fair comparison, but I do, I do want to know, like people like me who used to hate the Pro Max phones, like the titanium change last year was a huge difference. Like 10 to 15 percent change is noticeable. And if you care that much about battery life, it is still probably worth going for the big phone.
I also find myself. I don’t know about you Cherlynn, but I also I’m watching stuff like often in picture in picture mode at night while I’m cleaning up the kitchen and stuff like, or [00:27:00]while I’m just like browsing Twitter at night to like the ability to multifunction more on a bigger screen phone.
I see it. I see the point of that. You can’t do that as much on the smaller 16 pro.
Cherlynn: Yeah, I, I like being able to reach across the screen and hit something all the way on the other side anyways, as a person cursed with smaller hands, I think the smaller one is the ideal size for me. However, I might, I, I, I have this odd luxury of being able to carry two phones, right?
So maybe I’ll just Carry both the Pixel 9 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro. Now, a lot of people have asked me this, actually. Am I tempted to go back to Pixel? I am. I am very tempted by the Pixel 9 Pro. We did score it as of right now, a little higher than the iPhone 16 Pro. And trust me that that factored into my scoring decision.
I think. The competition from Google is stiffer than ever, is extremely stiff this year. I am in love with pixel UI, I’ve been for a very long [00:28:00] time. Especially on the call screening, especially on some of the call assist features. For some reason Google really understands how to do that stuff. I think, like I wrote in my review, it’s not that Apple is not considering these things, it’s that Apple is extremely cautious.
Apple’s more sensitive to being caught with egg on its face, perhaps, whereas Google’s probably we can just say, sorry, and Apple’s more, let’s not. Nobody’s buying these
Devindra: phones anyway. Nobody will notice. That’s what Google’s thinking. Nobody’s buying these Pixel phones. I don’t
Cherlynn: know. I, I think it’s, I think Google is a bit more a bit less risk averse.
And I, I get that vibe from the like Silicon Valley area in general.
Devindra: It does, it does come down to there, there were reports people are pointing to the flight tracker. You know, site is now tracking like the, the planes filled with iPhones coming to employee to, to customers, those planes have billions of dollars worth a single plane has billions of dollars of phones worth on them.
And it’s that is the function. That’s why Apple has to be safe. Whereas [00:29:00] for Google. How much of a percentage of Google’s revenue are Pixel phones?
Cherlynn: I get that. I get, I get that like it’s not a huge part of their revenue. Yeah, it’s definitely not as significant. I will say to, to Apple’s credit though, that like I said in my review, it’s more careful.
And its approach tends to be more well rounded. So when it comes to things like call screening or call related, anything that’s a little bit to do with personal private context things, Apple is slow. And I think reasonably so I think it’s okay to like. Take your time before you sick your AI on restaurants, calling them about opening hours.
That sort of thing. Apple is not going to do that ever. I think it’s wild that Google is able to, and I think there is helpful executions there too, but I don’t know that every single person would be as happy to embrace that. So it’s fine that they have two very different approaches. I just think that And that’s why maybe I have to have two phones, right?
One company is
Devindra: afraid of actively [00:30:00] harming society with new features that call, that have robots calling, you know, restaurants and the others just taking it slow. But I
Cherlynn: will say that, I will say that my, my desire to carry both of them nowadays has less to do with camera. Because it used to be I carried a pixel phone around because it was just so much better for for my photos and now it’s It’s it’s actually battery life and a little bit on like pixel call UI.
Oh, yeah I chatted with a friend on RCS for the first time yesterday and that was cool. Shout out to my friend who knows who they are who was on Android and we were texting and it was, it said text message RCS. You know how if you send green bubble messages, it says text message SMS. And now it says, Text message RCS, and now it’s freaking out, and then we could have back messages.
Devindra: It should be a rainbow bubble, like RCS, the thing unifying all the, all the different platforms. I
Cherlynn: think that would be a bit too ally for Apple to do.
Devindra: Allyship?
Cherlynn: Yeah,
Devindra: [00:31:00] it would be, it would be nice
Cherlynn: if they did, but no, I don’t think they would, it would, the implication is kind of weird Also hate that, because of that, we
Devindra: can’t use rainbows anymore in certain things.
That’s dumb.
Cherlynn: You can still use rainbows. I don’t think it matters. It just, I’m glad,
Devindra: I’m glad you’re able to do an RCS chat because we have talked about that for years. There was also the news that the RCS the group is now considering a way to make encryption happening, so that’s cool. Can I,
Cherlynn: can I just explain this a little bit?
So, when we, when this came out and made the rounds this week that RCS the GSMA was working on our end to end encryption for RCS. the universal profile, which is what Apple said it would adopt for iOS 18. And to be clear, there’s different profiles of RCS. The base one was the one that like Apple resisted forever because it was just not very secure.
It allowed businesses to text you with no reason. And there’s just a lot of issues with it. Universal profile comes closer. When Apple announced it would support RCS, it did make a It’s very clear that like end to end [00:32:00] encryption, it would work with the GSMA to bring end to end encryption to RCSUP before it fully embraced iOS 18 RCS and iOS 18.
So it’s not completely new, like you said, Devindra, that like we knew end to end encryption was coming and that’s why we were Apple
Devindra: says that they were going to work on it and now, now they, GSMA had to put out an announcement. Hey, we’re doing it. We’re doing it, baby. I
Cherlynn: mean, they’re working on it, but is it news?
Not really. I mean, it’s, it’s, it has to come.
Devindra: They’re doing it also Google
Cherlynn: messages. Yeah. But also Google messages had already, like Google had already implemented E2EE in its own Google message version of RCS UP, which is like a UP with a number, I believe So anyway come at me with
all your RCS nerdery, because apparently this is how much I know about it.
Devindra: Yeah. RCS message Cherlynn if you can find her. How about that? Anything else you want to mention about the phones? Cause I do want to talk a little bit about the Apple Watch Series 10. Yeah. That is the thing. That got all the big changes this year. And we just spent half an hour talking about a fricking camera button.
So come on, I
Cherlynn: mean, I feel like there’s more on the phone that I’m forgetting. Just go read [00:33:00] my review. It’s like very
Devindra: long, very nice reviews.
Cherlynn: Yeah. And, and the video on our YouTube channel as well. What’s up? What’s about okay. When you say the watch got all the big changes this year, what are you referring?
It
Devindra: has a new, it has a new design. It is much bigger. Like it is fundamentally a bigger TV. different feeling device. You noted that in your review, you know,
Cherlynn: it does feel different. It feels thinner every time I pick it up when it’s not on my wrist, when I pick it up to enter the password or look at the charge level, I feel it in my, in between my fingers, it feels thinner and different.
But the, and especially compared to the series nine, which I’ve been using since it was launched last year, the screens a little bit wider angle viewing. wider viewing angle. And, and, and, and, and that’s about it, right? I mean, what else is like the, the, the battery life for being thinner is very similar still to the Series 9.
In fact, sometimes I actually got a lot more battery life out of the Series 10. It, [00:34:00] I still couldn’t replicate that on a consistent, in a consistent way. So I don’t know Absolutely true that the Apple Watch Series 10 lasts longer than the Series 9. But yeah, I think it’s impressive that the technology they were able to come up with to reach that thinner frame.
And the wider angle. I didn’t notice the huge Here’s the thing, right? When you’re testing two watches side by side, y’all come to the Engadget Podcast for this sort of great interview. You’re just deadened
Devindra: to all the changes moving forward, right? Well, a little bit,
Cherlynn: but here’s what I was trying to do, right?
I had both watches on each of my wrists, and I was putting them down sort of on my lap to kind of see whether that wider viewing angle makes that huge of a difference. And I’m like, yeah, the one on the left, which is the Series 10, certainly looks like I can see it. Like the clock digits are brighter from that angle and, and more easy to see, whereas the right hand, which was the Series 9 was harder to read.
But you know what the difference was? Partly, yes, brightness. But the other part of it was the locks, the watch face. [00:35:00] Somehow when your AOD is dimmed in on both watches, you’re always on display is dimmed. The watch. digits on the Series 9, which to be clear was on watchOS 10, not 11 went into this outline instead of a solid font.
So the font was just, and of course that’s going to be harder to read, whereas like on the Series 10, which was running watchOS 11, when the AOD dimmed, the clock digits maintained their solid structure. So the font basically went from a fully filled solid digits situation to stroke only that sort of thing.
So if you know, graphic design, maybe you understand what I’m saying. And that contributes to it. Right. And then I’m not able to then confidently say that, you know, This is certainly a brighter screen at an off angle. I, I have to be like part of the visibility has to do with the fact that the font’s different.
So I don’t know. I, I, I didn’t get into the detail there. But you’re here, you’re, you’re here, you are privy to my inner most fonts. Okay. Okay. Podcast.
Devindra: Even, [00:36:00] even like the, the minimal design changes to the series 10 is more than the, than the phones got. Is the thing. Slightly thinner, slightly bigger.
I mean a whole
Cherlynn: new button. Look, the whole new button.
Devindra: Plus
Cherlynn: the fact that the screens are bigger, plus the fact that therefore the iPhone 15 Pros are just a little bit bigger than their predecessors means you have to get a whole new case, by the way. Yeah,
Devindra: it’s mainly the buttons. You have to get the whole new case.
Cherlynn: Well, no, the cases won’t fit. I asked and it was like, no, you need new cases even without the buttons. Of course.
Ben: Every year you need a new case. And that difference, the Oh, this is a little bit bigger so you need to get a whole new case and the fact that we spent so much time talking about a button is why all the other kids make fun of us.
Cherlynn: Who’s us and who’s the other kids? Sorry.
Ben: All of the Android people make fun of us. I consider
Cherlynn: myself an Android kid too,
Devindra: don’t us and them, me. I [00:37:00] am a bother. From one phone generation to the next like that is just like a given because things change button placements change camera Modules change, so I’m not gonna knock Apple too much on that.
But you know,
Ben: meanwhile What was Apple talking about so much during that event? We’re gonna be carbon neutral by this time. What is it? 2030 not that long. They are by not
Devindra: including the wired buds anymore
Cherlynn: Fiber Kate packaging
Devindra: fiber you can eat that box Yeah,
Cherlynn: if you’re having digestive issues if you
Devindra: want to, so it doesn’t sound like you’re super hot on the, the watch series.
It
Cherlynn: was hard for me to be excited because again, a lot of the marquee features are things you have to wait a little longer to figure out sleep, but we’re not waiting
Devindra: for apple intelligence on that. We’re not waiting for no, several months. Like we were watch. Yeah,
Cherlynn: we were during the review process waiting on the sleep apnea thing to be FDA green lit, but it did during the [00:38:00] review process.
And so it was like the day or two before that was like, Oh yeah, you can set up sleep apnea now. And to be clear, like we, we had more than a few days with sleep apnea, but, but it was like, Two days before the watch or the day before the watch review was supposed to go up, that sleep apnea came out with watchOS 11.
Did
Devindra: you, so did you do your sleep apnea test? No, because
Cherlynn: not only, I did, I did set it up. I set it up for the alerts. Right. And then, and I did that on the Monday that iOS 18 was pushed out because even though the FDA Greenlight announcement was on Friday. The iOS 18, watchOS 11, blah, blah, blah, update all came out to the public on Monday with the sleep apnea thing.
And then on watchOS 11, that’s when you can get it right. And you can get the sleep apnea tracking on watch series nine as well as watch ultra two. So even if I had tested was like a big deal, it was not going to super affect my score because you can get it on an older watch. Like it’s not, a huge part of the upgrade [00:39:00] equation, but also I had one night to put this thing on and you need to like sleep with it for
Devindra: 30 nights.
We’re gonna need an update on how much you snore and what your sleep breathing is like. Yeah.
Cherlynn: That’s what, that’s what has to
Devindra: happen. Yeah.
Cherlynn: So basically I think this sort of device and this sort of feature is something we want to spend more time with anyway. So yeah, just come back. Twingadget. com to see if I’m still alive and testing sleep apnea and breathing at night.
Devindra: It is hard to review something that is also meant to track data for several days, like to do that with under a week, you know, so you did, you did what you could. And also given the restrictions Apple placed on us by not having everything fully approved. So anyway, it sounds, it sounds cool. Go check out Shroen’s review.
Do you have a video of the Apple watch as well?
Cherlynn: We do not because that would have required shooting on Sunday when I was editing the AirPods review, so no. I mean,
Devindra: you’re, it never ends. It never ends. And we’re still waiting on the iPhone review. So, you know, that’s another thing. They’re coming!
Cherlynn: You can consider this my iPhone review, whatever the early [00:40:00]part of this episode was.
That was mine. There is a proper written version. So we know
Devindra: nobody reads anymore. Sherilyn like this is the future of all of our content. And anyway, folks, thank you so much, Sherilyn. If you got any thoughts or questions about the new iPhones and the new Apple watch, drop us an email at podcast and engadget.
com.
Let’s move on to some other news and sorry folks that we’re running through these stories kind of quickly. We’re just, we’re just so gadget heavy. We’ve got so many reviews to talk about. Is that time of
Cherlynn: year?
Devindra: Yeah. One thing I want to bring up is just a wild occurrence that happened on Tuesday and Wednesday.
I started seeing news reports Tuesday morning that pagers were exploding throughout Lebanon and that seemed weird. Like we saw the earlier reports were like, huh. That’s, that’s strange. Pagers are exploding. Then more reports, thousands of pagers are exploding. Then more and more reports. Basically I think by maybe not by the end of Tuesday, but there were [00:41:00] several waves of pager attacks, or at least one, that first major wave of pager attacks.
What we ended up learning is that likely it was Israel targeting members of the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon by their pagers. And I’m not going to get too deep into the politics of this all, but just that idea, I don’t know what you thought of the Sherwin, but I was thinking like, Oh my God, we’ve reached like enemy of the state level, weird attack vectors that would sound like science fiction just a couple of years ago.
So that is, that is where we’re at. This is like a live, ongoing story on Wednesday, another wave of attacks happened on walkie talkies. because I guess the plan was not to just hit pagers again because people stopped using their pagers. There are reports that solar panel you know, installations throughout Lebanon were attacked as well.
This is all in response to like other attacks that were happening from Hezbollah towards you know, people living in Israel and and like areas throughout that country too. So wild. I don’t [00:42:00]know. What did you think, Sherilyn, like when you heard of this?
Cherlynn: I mean, I’ll give you 10 to guess what my immediate thought was it was the same as what CF 542 is saying in our chat.
I was shocked that pagers were still being used. I think
Devindra: Listen, if you are if you are currently a member of a militant group and you know Your opponent is like highly technically capable. You’re like I can’t have a smartphone
Cherlynn: I can’t have things that they
Devindra: can hack, you know,
Cherlynn: right. So when you were recapping that, I, I, I, my brain made the connection.
Well, I mean, I kind of knew this, which is like you said. Yeah. A lot of people use lower technology devices to avoid surveillance or detection. Things like burner phones tend to be a little more simple pagers. And you mentioned walkie talkies and solar panels. It was interesting to me how it is. These would appear to be like less sophisticated, more analog devices that were being targeted.
And things not connected to the internet. Right, exactly. You would, right. It’s even harder. So it’s you would think that internet is the more hackable sort of technology because [00:43:00]it’s more communication availability. But no, it’s these things that are just chilling along on, I guess, radio waves for a lot of them especially walkie talkies and what, pagers.
Devindra: Yeah. And the, the actual we’re still like, this is an ongoing story. The full extent to like how the explosive devices got into the pagers and into the walkie talkies, Is the whole thing because the company behind the pagers is apparently a Taiwan based thing, but they were like, we did not manufacture those.
And then people tracked it to a company in in Turkey that was building devices. And they were like, Oh, we didn’t build those either. So it’s like, where did these come from? How did these get into the supply chain? But also I think it was also like subcontractors
Ben: on subcontractors
Devindra: upon. So, so, but how do you, how do you get to people outside of hacking a good internet connected device?
We have heard stories like I am. I. Like to read the stories about like how real life spies do their work. And there’s a lot of stories about what Russia has done and what Russian spies have done, like the poisoning of people in broad daylight throughout throughout England. That’s something Russia is known for.
This is just like wild and I [00:44:00]guess there are two arguments. It’s, it’s a little more targeted than like missile attacks, but also these things were exploding in public spaces. Children were killed. Thousands of people were injured. The latest total I saw is 25 people were killed, 600 injured. This is just like one of those things where it’s I don’t.
You don’t know what’s safe anymore when these devices, these devices that you think are just dumb and silly can just explode at any moment. So, terrifying.
Ben: Yeah, and the politics of this situation is really difficult to get into, so we’ll mostly try to sidestep that. I’m feeling for the Lebanese population right now.
This is like pure stochastic
Devindra: terrorism, basically, but yeah.
Ben: From the perspective of gadget people, we love our devices. We use our devices to relax. The idea that you are afraid to touch your device now, because you don’t know what’s been tampered with and what hasn’t been tampered with. The idea that there are families who are completely unaffected and, you know, not Affiliated with Hezbollah at all are maybe putting all of their [00:45:00]devices out in the yard a good distance away from the house because they’re afraid of them now, that
Devindra: sucks.
People are afraid to use their computers, any of their other devices, like it’s just, this is a weird situation.
Cherlynn: Do y’all see how many phones I held up just now?
Devindra: Yeah, you are, you are quite the, the attack vector right now, Cherlynn. I mean, listen, I have like right behind me, people who can see me on camera.
Like I have a lot of old devices that I need to certainly electronically recycle because I’m worried about what happens to old lithium batteries. And so that’s not even worrying about an attack like this. We will be keeping an eye on the story. This is like all ongoing stuff, but I wanted to mention it because this is directly.
I’ve never seen a military or I’ve never seen like a specific attack against a military opponents like this. And philosophically, like as somebody who thinks about like how we wage war and how innocents are touched and all this stuff, it is deeply, deeply troubling. We’re going to move on to just some strange, like straight up gadget [00:46:00]stuff.
So let’s just laugh at snaps. Fifth generation spectacles. How about that? Look at poor Chrisabelle, who did this coverage for us, has had to take pictures of herself wearing these God awful looking augmented reality glasses. These are standalone AR glasses. They’re going to be sold to developers who commit to a yearlong 99 a month subscription to start working on AR apps, I guess, similar to what Apple did with Vision Pro, except it’s not being sold to normal people at all.
Because I think if people saw the real cost of these things if you had to put a dollar to it, you would probably laugh Snapchat off the face of the planet. Like these would probably cost four to 5, 000 a pair, given the level of technology in them. Thoughts on these Cherlynn?
Cherlynn: I mean, I think they looked weird AF until I watched the Emmys last night.
And I was like, wow, I guess Eugene Levy is wearing the same sort of glasses. The same style glasses, right? They were these very thick black frames that are extremely boxy, especially [00:47:00]near the temples. And I think Carissa got a little roasted on the threads.
Ben: But those actually
Cherlynn: looked good. What?
Ben: But they actually looked good.
The older ones look better. These just look chunky.
Cherlynn: So, okay. To be clear though, the new, the ones now are AR glasses. They have a display in them. I believe the older Snap Spectacles are just camera toting glasses. No, the ones so the
Ben: last picture And I’m also talking about Eugene Levy’s glasses.
Eugene Levy’s
Cherlynn: ones are great. They’re the Prada or Dior ones, so
Ben: Yeah, they were fashion glasses. I was thinking, okay, these look very chunky. Fashion glasses tend to look chunky. I literally just looked up. Glasses designed by like Terry Mugler or, you know, house of Mugler, like very high fashion sort of stuff.
Mugler is known specifically for kind of sci fi looking outfits. Zendaya actually wore a like whole suit of armor designed by Mugler. This is a really
Cherlynn: strange tangent. We’re going down. Like I am here for it,
Devindra: but
Ben: these glasses, yeah. [00:48:00] These. The Mugler glasses actually look good. They are chunky.
They take up so much of your face. Go look them up on your own. These just look bad. I mean,
Devindra: I’m specifically comparing them to the last pair Carissa tested Trillin. So I think that was the fourth one. And those did have AR display. She did do a test of that. So this is not just the camera ones that they were selling.
But,
Cherlynn: yeah.
Devindra: My point was
Cherlynn: just going to be that like, we’re not going to review this thing obviously. They’re not selling it. But I can’t wait for us to take a look. A deeper dive into them. We will be doing that. We just won’t be reviewing, reviewing. We will be reviewing it. I
Devindra: think we are fully well within our rights to point and laugh at how silly this all looks.
And next week we’re going to hear about Meta’s you know, concept AR glasses. So that’s Orion and the sort of like tease photo. We saw those things, which was in the background of one of Zuckerberg’s photos earlier this year. Those just look like chunky hipster frames. And maybe those aren’t like fully the things, but at least those look more like glasses than whatever the [00:49:00] hell is happening here.
Like I couldn’t, I couldn’t help it laugh, but Chris has done some great coverage for us to go check out her story on this stuff briefly. I also want to point out, I wrote about the Vive Focus Vision. HTC Vive is still making VR headsets and this is their latest standalone headset. It’s 9. 99. It’s interesting because they’re, they have better cameras for mixed reality.
And also they have a cool. An accessory, a display port accessory that you can buy. It’s like 150. It gives you a direct connection to your computer for connected wired VR. And that is different compared to what Oculus link did or the metal link does on Meta’s headsets. When you plug into a PC, you’re basically seeing a video feed of what a VR window is seeing on your computer.
By going directly to the graphics card, you’re not getting any of that distortion or anything. So this functions more like a traditional VR headset. It looks cool, feels cool. Hope to do a fuller review of this thing, but I also don’t, no one’s going to buy this. This is 9. is selling these headsets [00:50:00] to businesses and they are doing a good job of that.
But, you know, they’re not competing with the meta quest at, you know, 400 and 500. These things are just so much more expensive. We also saw the news that Lionsgate, the movie studio has signed a deal with runway, the AI startup. So that the, let me see here. It will allow runway access to Lionsgate content their library in exchange for a fresh custom AI model that the studio can use in production and editing.
That can mean all sorts of things, but I know among Hollywood, among artists, actors, and directors, like this is the AI encroachment in movie making. is something that people are afraid of. Maybe there’s a way that they could use it. That is like a non harmful way, like a simpler way. Hey, listen, I’ve used AI to plug in one word into a podcast episode where it’s I don’t, I can’t match the voice to retake it.
But if I type the word here and I train this thing on my voice, and it’s a local model that I fully control it can replicate a word for me. That makes my life a little easier. Maybe they can [00:51:00]do that, but it’s tough for artists. Tough to manage that.
Cherlynn: Yeah. I will say that as of six or seven years ago at 1MWC, there was a tool like that online somewhere that allowed you to create like voice models for of people.
And so me, Matt Smith, and I think Aaron Supor is playing with this. We created voice models of each other. And so I made Matt Smith’s fake voice say, Japan, Japan, Japan. And I really recall this very strongly. Here’s the thing, though. I will also mention that it’s not specific or unique to AI, right? To be able to do this, because I will give you another behind the scenes tidbit that our iPhone 16 review video, there was a moment where I made the mistake and said, the iPhone 15 pros battery life sucks or something along those lines.
And I was like, crap, I meant the iPhone 16 pro and our video editor, Ryan Oh, was able to cook up some magic and find a bit where I said the word. Yeah. And just replace it correctly. So that’s
Devindra: normal editing using your normal [00:52:00] voice. It’s normal
Cherlynn: editing. Editing, but you’re also able to like, you know, being able to get a model of my voice to say the correct words Seems useful to me in in situations like that for post processing, but I can see how it raises concerns of who has control Like you said over who has control i’m
Devindra: sure actors are worried writers are worried about what words they can inject in things we will be keeping an eye on the story for sure.
Ben: I have one kind of easy prediction to make about this. That Runway will develop some kind of internal tool for Lionsgate. Lionsgate will push this very much on their editors and all of their workers. They’ll be like, use the internal tool, use the internal tool. They will make a big deal about how one movie used the internal tool and then we’ll never hear about it again.
Devindra: I hope so. I hope, I hope that’s what it is. But I also know like executives and a lot of basically studio executives cannot wait to stop paying money to actors and writers. Like they just want to like, get [00:53:00]stuff out there to start selling movie tickets or whatever. So yeah, we will see the, the, all these tools can be useful in the right hands.
We are worried about the right hands. Let’s Cherlynn?
Cherlynn: I, this weekend. So, and I was very excited to share this on this podcast. I was like telling the team, I have to be here for this. Have you heard of the film Speak No Evil?
Devindra: Yes. Oh, you saw the new one.
Cherlynn: I saw the new one. The, the one with James McAvoy, who is just so menacing in it.
The reviews. said that he’s perfected the art of being menacing and they are so right. He is horrifying and such a scary and like the, the way, okay, so this film is about this family meeting or running into another family consisting of James McAvoy, his parents. wife and their child in italy somewhere and then that they hit it off the james mcavoy invites them over to stay at their countryside place For a weekend [00:54:00]and again some of their you know, better instincts They they do do it and then it turns out this is the like strangest family ever No spoilers, but I think you can see where it’s headed.
I think Though that the entire experience was really illuminating for me because some of the, the altercations they get into are so reminiscent of like my real life where you do interact with people who just say shit for no reason sometimes, right? on the internet, in the real world. Like people sometimes say shit and then they go, Oh, sorry.
Sorry that you misunderstood what I said, or, Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. Oh, PC. Oh, woke. Like people who use that sort of like labels to defend bad behavior. And you have a lot of that. And so I spent a lot of the movie because I didn’t guess the ending. I spent a lot of the movie wondering if.
They were actually like bad, bad, or if they were just unintentional bad, right? And that’s me because I’m, I’m the sort of person that gaslights myself. But that’s, that’s what happens. I think that the [00:55:00] way the actors played it was really nuanced and that’s why I was led to that belief. But also the, the, just the whole telling of the story was so like masterful.
The tension never lets up. It’s just, it’s great. It’s really cool. I’m glad I really enjoyed it.
Devindra: I would recommend Trillin. That you watch the original movie, which is mostly in English too, but it’s more about the difference. I believe it’s like the difference between like Danish culture and Finnish culture and how they can be like slightly different, but also that original movie.
is horrifying. It is so bleak. It is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen. And what I’ve heard is that the American version, this one’s
Cherlynn: pretty bleak too, but yeah, I’ve
Devindra: heard it doesn’t go as far as the original does. And I don’t, I don’t like the ending of the original. I think it’s a deeply disturbing movie, but that was a movie about.
our society of politeness, right? Where somebody says something weird and you’re like, Oh, okay. Well, I’m a guest. So I’m just gonna roll with it. Right. It’s the same thing. It’s the same [00:56:00]story. Yeah. It’s also about like how hard it is to make friends as adults because that original movie was just like this like yuppie couple with the kid is I, how do we, how do we hang out with people?
Oh, this, this couple seems nice. I think both these movies sound like the in why you do not make friends on vacation. You meet somebody you meet a couple you meet you meet people on vacation. They’re not last let it go. Yeah Yeah, they’re temporary friends. Yeah, let it go. Do not visit their houses. Do not do anything I’m looking forward to seeing this movie Cherlynn.
I can’t
Cherlynn: wait till you see it. Tell me how you think it
Devindra: is It is fun to see Scoot McNary and Mackenzie Davis. Yes, like normal couple. This is a this is a halting catchfire reunion A show I’ve told all of you who’ve been listening to watch forever. They both co star in that show. That’s an amazing show for techies.
It’s about the sort of like PC building world in Texas in the eighties. It’s a lot of fun. It’s like mad men, but also far, far geekier. So check that out. Well, I’m glad you like anything else you want to try out Cherlynn.
Cherlynn: I cancelled my Hulu subscription, [00:57:00] so, there you go. They, they, I, I thought I was being scammed when I got an email from Hulu at HuluMail.
com, which just sounded like the worst email in the world. But they were like, price is increasing soon, like 20 basically for a no ad subscription. I was like, what the hell, I’m not doing that. Plus, I also have Disney Plus. So I’m like, I get quite a lot of the same library with that.
Devindra: Yeah, it’s, it’s so very confusing, what is, is, It is still very
Cherlynn: confusing, yeah.
So for me, I’m like, let’s cancel it and see what’s gonna happen. But yeah, I mean, I, I, my, my Disney Plus subscription is annual, and my Hulu one is monthly. So I just canceled the monthly one first and see how that goes. All right. Since I can’t cancel Disney Plus. Good luck. And then, well, yeah my, my recommendation is if it works out, I’ll tell you that to go with Disney Plus instead of Hulu and Disney.
Devindra: Gotcha. Have you checked out Agatha all along yet? I feel like that’s in your I have not. I
Cherlynn: saw it on yeah, I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s on my list.
Devindra: I saw the first few episodes. It’s, it’s fun. It’s fun more mostly because Aubrey Plaza gets to be fun. Oh, yeah! I saw that. Give me a witchy Aubrey Plaza, please.
She is [00:58:00] fantastic in that show. And
Cherlynn: the gay splosion I heard,
Devindra: I want to recommend you folks, I’ve talked about Pachinko before, which is the Apple TV plus show based on the novel about this sort of sweeping tale of a Korean family from leaving Korea to immigrating to Japan throughout the 1900s.
And also it occurs across different time periods. I started watching season two. This show is still incredible. It looks fantastic. Just incredibly well written. It’s just like deeply emotional. I love seeing very, very complex, very far reaching immigrant tales. And this is one of those, Sherilyn, I think you really got to watch this show because it will destroy you.
It is just so fascinating. So yeah. Loving Pachinko Season 2. Also Season 2 has a new opening dance sequence, which became a big hit. with the first season. Still good. I don’t think it hits the same highs for me as the Pachinko season one opening, but still very good. Also quickly want to shout out Lego Star Wars Rebuild the Galaxy, which is a Lego Star Wars thing.
My daughter saw a picture of this and she was like, we got to watch this. I don’t know what’s happening [00:59:00]here. I have not fully gotten her into any Star Wars stuff. We’ve tried the Clone Wars cartoons and They’re really slow. Like it’s really tough for her to get into. I’m not going to do the movies.
The original movies just take forever to get started. Maybe when she was like eight or 10, she can survive those things, but she loved Lego Star Wars, rebuilt the galaxy. It’s a funny, you know, Lego variant of this thing, but also does something that I don’t think Star Wars will ever be able to do, which is completely break and rebuild the entire mythology.
Like at the, you know, In the first episode, they just completely rework it’s sort of like a what if thing. They just rework who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? What happened here? How did key events happen? It’s just completely different and they’re going to run with this timeline. A lot of good guys become bad.
You may see this in the poster, but a Darth Jar Jar Binks. Is a thing and he is hilarious. Like he’s not, he’s, he’s a dark, he’s a sip. But he’s also silly and bumbling. And my daughter thinks he’s hilarious every time he falls on his face. So it’s just, it has a lot of fun with star Wars mythology, a lot of deep cuts in there.
And I think it’s fun if you’ve got [01:00:00]kids who cannot. really pay attention to the little, the, the Star Wars stuff that takes a little, you know, more to get into. I think this is like perfect. Okay. So check it out. Lego Star Wars rebuild the galaxy.
Cherlynn: Well, that’s it for the episode this week, everyone.
Thank you as always for listening. Our theme music is by game composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O’Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find the Vindro. At
Devindra: Davindra on Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky, all over the place. And I podcast about movies and TV at The Filmcast, thefilmcast.
com. Oh, also I did a Twit. I did This Week in Tech this week. So go check out the latest episode at twit. tv.
Cherlynn: If you want to tell me what your favorite photographic style is. So I can use it on more selfies of me send them to me. I am at Cherlynn low on X or at Cherlynn, Instagram, C H E R L Y N N S T A G R A M on threads, email us your thoughts at podcast at engadget.
com. Leave us a [01:01:00]review, please, on whatever podcast platform you’re listening on and subscribe wherever you get podcasts.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/engadget-podcast-reviewing-the-iphone-16-and-apple-watch-series-10-113033805.html?src=rss

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Topics

iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max reviews: great cameras, but incomplete without Apple Intelligence – 0:59

Israel linked to coordinated pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon – 42:29

Snap’s 5th generation glasses with AR look chunky in a bad way – 48:17

HTC’s Vive Focus Vision: an intriguing VR headset at a price between the Quest 3 and Vision Pro – 51:35

Lionsgate films made a deal with the AI devil – 52:40

Pop culture picks – 55:48

Livestream

Credits

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

Transcript

(Note: This transcript was produced with help from Descript’s AI.)

Devindra: [00:00:00] What’s up, Internet? And welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I’m Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar.

Cherlynn: I’m Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low.

Devindra: This week we’ll be talking about the iPhone 16 Pro reviews from Cherlynn. And also, also the Apple Watch Series 10 review. And you’re just so busy, Cherlynn. I’m so sorry.

Cherlynn: Yeah.

Devindra: Cherlynn slowly dying. Also joining us is podcast producer Ben Ellman. Hey, Ben.

Ben: Good morning, everyone. Usually we’re trying to sell Cherlynn on video games. I think now you’re going to have to sell me on the iPhone 16.

Devindra: You know? We will, we will do that. As always, folks, if you’re enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice.

Leave us a review on iTunes. Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. Also, if you could join us Thursday mornings on our YouTube channel, typically around 10:45 AM Eastern for our live stream. You can see our, our faces. You can see us do some Q and a, and you know, we’ll show off some devices too.

So check that out. Cherlynn, I was really excited to see what you thought of the iPhone 16 pro [00:01:00]because based on our previous conversations.

Cherlynn: are you trying to upgrade?

Devindra: No, I’m not. I’m not actually, I am very firmly. I’m like, I actually don’t need to do this at all. It’s great. It’s a good year for anybody who has a 15 pro because just not much of a reason beyond the button.

But I also know. You had conflicting feelings about the camera button. And also, Hey, we can’t really judge. It’s we can’t fully judge this device because so much of it is going to depend on Apple intelligence, which will not start rolling out until next month. The new Siri won’t fully arrive until early next year.

So what do you think of it so far? This is just the pro and pro max.

Cherlynn: Yeah. I mean, we, I also, I personally also have been testing and spending time with the iPhone plus. I can talk about them. Our, our, our review may be coming later. Right. It’s coming. Nobody can blame you.

Devindra: You just shipped an Apple watch review and an iPhone review.

And last week you had the pixel watch review. So yes. To give everyone

Cherlynn: a sense of the cadence here. So Apple’s event was Monday. Tuesday I was there for meetings where I’ve then left with devices which [00:02:00]to disclosure, they’re all owners. We returned them at the end of the review period. Okay. And then there was, then we had Monday morning, the, at 8 AM Eastern, the AirPods for review.

Was published was the embargo and then Tuesday 8 a. m. Eastern was the Apple watch series 10 review embargo. And then Wednesday, yesterday 8 a. m. Eastern, the Apple iPhone 16, all of them, the review embargo lifted. So it’s been, it’s been wild because it involves a lot of weekend work for some of us.

And, so pardon me if in this episode, I get some names and words and numbers mixed up because it’s bound to happen. It happened in our video review a couple times, which sorry, but my brain is, is there. Anyway so I really adore the iPhone 16, the base iPhone 16, because we got the cutest colors. We got the pink and the teal the teal iPhone 16 plus and the pink one.

Now. The, the reason I was actually, I’m going to start with the iPhone 16 because we, we haven’t really put out our [00:03:00] formal thoughts out there yet, but I, I, I have spent some time thinking about them. This is the first time you’ve basically for a while now that you’ve got the iPhone 16s that are basically close to parody with the pros.

I mean, these are not, not pro phones by any means. But, you know, Apple didn’t skimp on like bringing the camera button over to the base iPhone 16 for once. Right. And they’re getting new chips, like

Devindra: all the fun stuff. Yeah, exactly.

Cherlynn: They’re getting 18, a 18 instead of the last year’s a 17, for example. And then, you know, yes, the pros get the 18 pro, but that makes sense.

You’re paying quite a lot more money. Those are more powerful phones. And then you’ve got also the camera button this time brought down to the. The action button might be brought down to the iPhone.

Devindra: The plain iPhone, the base iPhone. Yeah.

Cherlynn: Plus, yeah. So these names are not great. And then you’ve, one of the things holding back, I guess, the base iPhones is the screen, right?

I mean, okay. They don’t have the like same big 6. 3, 6. 9 inch screens as the pros do, but they also don’t have [00:04:00]promotion. You’re just getting like their retina XDR, I think super retina. So they’re good in terms of color and resolution, but you’re missing a high refresh rate, some differences in size.

And then of course the cameras aren’t as powerful, but you will get spatial audio recording, which means you will get access to features like audio mix in the video recording tool set. So, or the video editing tool set. So I

Devindra: just want to point out here, Sherilyn, as you were holding up those iPhones, it seems like the big difference is.

iPhone 16 pro party in the front, good screen, iPhone 16 party in the back. I

Cherlynn: quite like that. They’re so

Devindra: bright and the color is like everything

Cherlynn: you, when I talk about these at some point on our website later, but yes, this, the iPhone 16 keeps the party in the back while the iPhone 16 pro keeps the party up front.

I guess you know where the party isn’t

Devindra: the

Cherlynn: party isn’t on the sides. It’s so sad. I really liked the idea of camera control, which I think we’ll just dive right [00:05:00] into camera control. I mentioned already last week that it’s, you know, a real like button that you hopefully heard me clicking into the mic just now.

It is awkwardly positioned in my opinion. When I try to hold it up Depending on the size of the phone I mean, I think i’ve already learned how to grip this so that my thumb sits right on the camera control when i’m holding It up In portrait mode with one hand. In landscape mode, the way that I used to grip my camera to take photos or my phone to take photos is to place my index finger kind of lightly hugging the bottom corner.

And then my little finger at the bottom to kind of brace it. And in this way, You had to

Devindra: Relearn the way you were holding a phone, basically. Absolutely.

Cherlynn: You had to relearn that camera grip that everyone was talking about maybe three years ago. It’s Oh God, our camera grip. You know, that’s a, that’s a thing we learned to cope with this, Modern day technology things.

And now you kind of had to relearn it again. If you’re, if you have an iPhone 16, because now too, if you want to press the camera control and you want to swipe on the thing, you have to [00:06:00]hold the phone differently. Your thumb’s going to be on the bottom. If you’re holding in landscape mode, you have to have your three fingers on the right side to kind of like balance the thing to hold it stably.

And then put your index finger on the sensor to be able to move it without Completely dropping the phone. It is in my opinion, a little clunky. However, I do love that Apple’s finally brought Hardaware based shortcut access to the camera app. Let me fix my. Sure, let’s pour a microphone.

Devindra: It’s okay. I mean, I think the more I hear about the camera button and everything, it does seem compelling.

Like I do kind of feel Oh, that would be kind of nice to have that control, but also, yeah, yeah. I invested, I also invested in the 512 gigabyte 15 pro last year. So it’s it’s, it’s just not worth it. I am interested in what people think of the base model. And I guess once consumers like start getting their hands on it, because yeah, as you were saying, and as we talked about, like you’re missing [00:07:00]the zoom camera, you’re missing the, you know, faster promotion screen, but beyond that, like that’s a pretty capable, it’s a pretty good phone for 800 bucks.

I guess as it should be, but then compared to most Android ones, you know, you’ll get faster refresh rates on the Samsung’s and the pixels. So I don’t know how long Apple can justify that. Here’s my other thing. Mm hmm

Cherlynn: One of the biggest selling points that I guess Apple made about the iPhone 16 is that they’re purpose built for Apple Intelligence, and there’s none of that in here yet.

I mean, we could and can run a developer beta to get our A taste for Apple intelligence, but I I’m sorry to announce that we don’t review devices based on developer slash whatever beta shouldn’t.

Devindra: It’s not real. It’s not

Cherlynn: stable. It’s not the same. It could be very similar to the experience that finally ships.

But it’s just not, I’m not, I’m not testing a beta and telling you, yeah, buy this thing. No, I, there’s just, it’s not no, even [00:08:00] though I think that the line between beta and like public release is quite like gray right now, it’s just not very clear because sometimes they release so many software updates after the fact that the one that they released initially might as well be the beta.

But anyway I, I do think that for now there’s a lot but the base iPhone 16s are still, they still seem like really solid upgrades for anyone on the base iPhone 15. Now the pros are a different matter altogether. Okay, so I almost immediately switched over to the base iPhone. iPhone 16 pro as my main.

And the smaller,

Devindra: the smaller, the

Cherlynn: smaller one by base. I mean the smaller one, not the max. And before that I had been meaning the gray, the magnesium, the natural titanium, not magnesium, the titanium 15 pro max, and like my hand is a lot happier. For having switched over to the smaller one, even though I didn’t, I got like the white iPhone 16 pro and I have the desert iPhone 16 pro max.

[00:09:00] So honestly, the nicer color is in the bigger phone from, from me.

Devindra: I

Cherlynn: don’t mind it. And they gave me this like bright yellow case to use with it. I was just like, all right, I don’t want to look like. But the, the sad news is that like my main takeaway with the iPhone 16 pro, other than all that camera control stuff I talked about the battery life is quite disappointing.

Devindra: You’re going from the big, the big boy battery. Sure. Yeah.

Cherlynn: But when you consider that the pixel nine pro. Made like 25 hours on our battery test and basically generally last two days I would say in real more realistic use probably closer to one and a half days because two days with this thing was more like I Didn’t use it as much as my iPhone that I would use my phone.

It’s more of a secondary device I you can’t you just can’t Say, yeah, barely last a day and that’s fine. That looks bigger

Devindra: though. The Pixel put them side by side. The iPhone 16 Pro and the Pixel 9 Pro. Okay It’s a little bit

Cherlynn: [00:10:00] bigger. It’s a little thicker. I

Devindra: feel like they could fit in a bigger, a bigger battery in the Pixel.

Cherlynn: So the, the, the Pixel 9 Pro, to be clear, is only maybe less than an inch taller. Yeah, and then, a bit ever so, nope, ever so, look, it’s about, they’re really

Devindra: going the harder, the trying to replicate that. Yeah.

Cherlynn: So, yeah, no. So, so here’s the thing I, I wrote this in my review too, and I’ll mention it on this podcast, which is that I’ve been surrounded by phones these last few days on my couch And it has been very difficult to figure out to reach for the correct phone, I have to do a big like game of which phone am I holding up?

I, I sort of got, these are,

Devindra: I really do sometimes.

Cherlynn: And then hang on, hang on. That’s just one hand. So for the audio version of the podcast. These, these are all on my couch right now. There’s about, I don’t want to say, how many is that? Seven? Ten? I don’t know. [00:11:00] There’s a pixel fold here. That is a

Ben: lot of phones.

Devindra: This is the version of fanning you know, a big stack of bills. You’re fanning a stack of phones right now.

Cherlynn: So anyway,

Ben: I mean, and it is kind of a big stack of bills, monetary value.

Cherlynn: I will say instead of going to the gym, I’ve been just lifting these phones. No the, the, by feel, I cannot tell which one is which.

They all feel roughly the same to me, especially when I touch the Pixel 9 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro. They all feel the same. By touch. In fact, sometimes when I’m using the 16 pro, I start to try to use Android gestures because I’m like, Oh, I’m using the pixel nine pro. Aren’t I? So I swipe in from the side to go back and it’s ridiculous.

But yeah, it’s, they’re very similar in terms of build and it’s not a bad thing for anyone, but I do think that. Maybe now is the time to start pushing companies to do a bit more with design or their camera bumps. I think I saw somewhere that I think MKBHD did a bit of a wobble test, which is something that Sam Rutherford on our team has been pitching as a [00:12:00]series for like years, but I feel bad we never got around to doing it.

The Pixel 9 Pro, because of its camera bar, doesn’t wobble as much, but iPhone 16 Pro certainly does. It’s modules. We’re going to

Devindra: make an excuse to bring the wobble dance into an iPhone video. Now, is that, that’s what’s happening here, I guess. Yeah. So

Cherlynn: anyway, I’m sorry, iPhone 16 Pro held back a little bit by its battery life.

I will also point out that I’ve had some issues with some, what seems like buggy software. I wonder if that has to do with the, in the setup process when I ported my Phone from the 15 pro max over to the 16 pro that like I don’t know something is not complete in the setup just yet But I definitely noticed certain glitches here and there I’ve mentioned To someone that can do something about it that my lock screen just refuses to save the crop aspect ratio sometimes

Devindra: That’s interesting.

This is more of a

Cherlynn: [00:13:00] telegram app issue, but the telegram app, which yes, sadly, I still do use every now and then will still resurface the one notification badge on this icon. I’m just like, there’s no unreads. There are no unreads. And that’s apparently a known issue. You gotta,

Devindra: you gotta go Zen, Sherilyn. You gotta go just ignore all the badges.

Numbers, there will always be numbers.

Cherlynn: Well, yeah, so there’s, but there are other And you can

Devindra: just turn the badges off too,

Ben: right? You can turn

Devindra: the badge off completely. Yeah.

Cherlynn: There are other glitches like, When sometimes when I press the camera control and then I flip over to landscape, it just blinks and then just half the screen’s gone.

But I’ve, I’ve certainly had that with older iPhones before. So it’s not like unique to the iPhone 16 pro and which is why I didn’t make a big deal of it in my review.

Devindra: Yeah. How do you like the 5X zoom on the base? I love smaller 16 pro. Cause that is a nice upgrade. That’s why I went max last year too.

It was like. It’s nice to have a 5x zoom. Yeah.

Cherlynn: I love having the 5x zoom on the smaller phone. And that’s one of the things I’m like really happy about with the lineup this year, because yeah, that’s the reason I upgraded to the 15 [00:14:00] pro max upgraded, sacrifice my hands for the 15 pro max last year, because I wanted that 5x telephoto zoom.

This year I did most of my testing with the 16 pro and yeah, I mean, it compares pretty well with Google’s, but I did a lot of my photography comparison and again, it’s a pixel nine pro because. To me, that’s the gold standard. Google is really a lot better at cleaning up mess at the higher level zoom and also Google just gives you a little bit more digital zoom.

So you can go up to 30 X with a combined telephoto and digital. Whereas on iPhone 16 pro or pro max, you go up to only 25 X. Google’s image

Devindra: processing, I think it’s a little better. The computational image processing.

Cherlynn: Yeah. If you,

Devindra: okay.

Ben: But let’s talk about that for a second, because Devindra and I were talking like during the show planning meeting yesterday, that I’m looking at.

the side by side iPhone 16 and Pixel 9 Pro pictures in Cherlynn’s review. [00:15:00] It’s the image of the tree and the LED strip. It looks like it’s in some kind of transit hub. And I know everyone says the Pixel 9 photos are so much better all the time, but to me, the picture from the 16 Pro looks so much more vibrant.

Is that just A me thing? Is that how I perceive colors versus other people? What’s going on here?

Cherlynn: It could be. I will say that I did notice, in general, in general, right, and this has been for years now, I’ve noticed that pixel photography tends to be a little bit more muted compared to something from iPhone or Samsung phones.

Especially compared to Samsung phones. They tend to oversaturate a little bit. What Apple has tended to do in the past is I don’t, I think this is just their color preference, but they give what they call, but I don’t say they call it. It’s just warmer, right? It looks warmer sometimes to the point of looking almost yellowish.

But yeah, their colors are a bit warmer and I think you can compare this to this. [00:16:00] this to the difference between a Nikon and a camera, a Canon camera in terms of the processing. Just like a

Devindra: tasteful aesthetic difference. Exactly.

Cherlynn: I think that’s a preference or tasting, Ben. So I don’t know that you’re necessarily seeing it differently, but it could be a tasting, right?

The, the thing I do want to point out in that picture and also back to your point, Ben, one the picture on the left of the tree in, by the way, Moynihan train station, which is Penn station in Manhattan. Yeah. Okay. Is the, the one on the left, iPhone 16 pros picture is a little bit blurry. Right. And I think that’s because I have been so focused on testing camera control that every single photo I took with it was with the button push.

Whereas like on the pixel pro, sometimes I would use the volume key trigger. Sometimes I would use the onscreen button. That’s the way I normally use it in daily life anyway. So I think that some of that,

Ben: they would compensate for that. You would think,

Cherlynn: but I do, I don’t think they did. So I think that the button push.

Definitely introduce shake. Deepak Murthy in the chat also asked a really good question. Is the 48 [00:17:00]megapixel Ultra wide. A big upgrade from last year. I don’t know that I’ve been pixel peeping the ultra wide pictures, but I will say this reminds me of a fact that the 48 megapixel fusion camera on the iPhone 16 pro and pro max is wild.

Like I at first was like, they keep saying zero shutter lag, right? Apple has used this Phrase a lot. And this time it said zero shutter lag and said, it was like faster. So my dumb ass brain was like, Oh, does this mean I can take like photos of people, like moving around and then freeze motion and just take, right.

So I just doing that for a while. And I was like, none of them seem very like what I thought they were going to be. So I got our video producer for this review video, Brino. I was like, can you throw something at me? I’ll, you know, catch it in midair. And then. All the photos that I was trying to take with the zero shutter lag environment, it was a cushion, something’s off.

Devindra: That’s what zero shutter lag is supposed to be. So, so hang on. So then I was like, okay,

Cherlynn: let’s do that. And then I was like, why is it not working? So I, then I told Brian to do me throwing things around. So he took photos of me and [00:18:00]we were both like, All our pictures came out of us holding on to the thing and not of us throwing the things.

When I finally figured out what was happening, I was like, Oh, that’s how fast the fusion camera is now. It’s actually taking the photo when you press the camera on shutter button or trigger now, not, you know, a slight fraction of a second lag before the movement happens. So you actually don’t have to like, the reason we were so like, Like catching not the movement we want it and so confused is because as people who have a lot of experience with cameras, Brian and I have trained ourselves to become like sensitive with the camera trigger timing, right?

If I know if something I want to capture is going to happen in the split second after I press the button, that’s when I trigger it. That’s how I time myself to press the button. And that’s why our pictures were coming out a little too early. We were like, we were hitting the button, but instead we should have just waited till the thing was in midair to then press the button because that’s how fast the camera

Devindra: is now.

Cherlynn: I didn’t know, finally [00:19:00] figured it out. Felt really smart for a moment there.

Devindra: I think due to Deepak Murthy’s question, the big upgrade is that before it was a 12 megapixel ultrawide, now it’s a 48 megapixel ultrawide. So,

Cherlynn: and that enables. Yeah. Even more of that 2x zoom croppy situation that they talk about.

Devindra: It’s also the thing where if you lean too much into a subject, like last year, it would just like shift to the, to like almost macro mode. Right. Right. Lose so much detail. If you want a high resolution photo, like then you have to fight that automatic process. That was annoying last year or so.

Cherlynn: Yeah.

Devindra: Yeah, less of a problem this year.

Cherlynn: And then my final note about colors here is, oh my God, how awesome our photographic style, photographic styles, photographic, photographic styles. Photographic

Devindra: styles. So

Cherlynn: awesome. So those let

Devindra: you choose different like color profiles and give you more finely tuned.

Stuff like just more tweaking on your photos. I, I want to point out like a couple of reviews also noted that they like the image processing of the 16 pros compared to the 15 pros. And I think this is kind of a common [00:20:00] complaint that a lot of iPhone users have been having is just that pictures look kind of flat sometimes because Apple’s processing.

Tends to crush shadows and kind of like the depth of an image kind of goes away. So I noticed the Verge’s review, they pointed this out a lot and I, a couple other folks did too, like you get, you can get better shadow control, better skin tone control, and you can leave

Cherlynn: it there, right? Like you can leave it, set it to your preferred and leave it.

So every photo you take then doesn’t have to be edited. It comes out with your preferred shadow and contrast settings. Yeah. So here’s, here’s. To add my thoughts on that. When I discovered in my testing that photographic styles is freaking awesome. I was like, what happened? Your depth, your depth map just seems wildly improved.

And so what Apple does in general is every year. And I heard this last year too, actually, which is they, they, they work on their algorithm every year. They refine their depth map sensitivity, accuracy, this sort of stuff every year. This year, there seems to be a noted, marked. Improvement. And so in every single [00:21:00] photo even with last year with the 15 pros, when you take a photo that has a face inside Apple automatically takes like captures depth information.

So you might’ve seen that I’ve noticed this before when I’m like taking photos of myself and it suddenly switches to portrait mode. I’m like, I don’t need a portrait mode picture. I just wanted a flat one, but then they want to capture depth information. And in using, in doing that this year with photographic styles, they’re able to like, Maintain a person’s face, skin tone, whatever.

Keep that a natural looking, as natural looking as possible, and then apply color changes and contrast changes and whatnot to the background. And it is wildly effective this year. And then the fact that you can. Set it, leave it, every single one of your photos will turn out that way. Or you can go in and post process and post and change it up.

There’s just so many more controls and customizability options now that to me, that is actually the low key highlight this year. Things that like they’ve introduced, like photographic styles, you can leave alone and do nothing with, right? Action button, you can leave as your mute slider. The camera control.

If you don’t like it, turn it off. [00:22:00]You have all these controls. I Apple doesn’t make a big deal because I don’t think it wants to market that you can turn off camera controls. But the fact that you can, and the fact that you can tweak its sensitivity as part of accessibility controls, is it’s all adding to the idea that Apple is understanding that it needs to let users be able to change and choose what they want.

And to me, that’s the most important thing with the iPhone 16s or just iPhones in general. I

Devindra: kind of wish some of that came down to the earlier phones. Like I know part of that is the image processing pipeline that there’s a whole lot of new Hardaware in the 16s. scenes, but also you, you’ve got, you still got MPUs on these older phones.

Like there, there’s some stuff you could still do. It sort of reminds me of the way people complain about like the way MCU movies look, right? The Marvel movies tend to look flat, don’t really have much depth. You can almost feel the artificiality of like when they’re on the the giant led screens, you know, when something doesn’t feel real and then.

You shoot something in real life with real color depth and everything and shadow depth, and it [00:23:00]looks dramatically different. I guess that’s sort of what people are noticing. So any, anything else you want to shout out about the, the iPhone pros or, or the base ones, Rowan?

Cherlynn: I mean, I agree with you that especially on photographic styles, they introduced it on the thirteens, right?

That’s the first time it came out. And so it, it’s not. But then the idea back then, I don’t think was as fully fleshed out. So I don’t think that back then they were capturing as much information. And I also had to wonder about storage size, right? Which brings me to the 4k 120 support on these pros with shooting 4k 120 content, you can slow things down a lot more for like way more dramatically slowed down and cinematic loading content as well as like HDR support in those.

situations. Of course, if you keep recording in those sort of high quality situations, you’re going to run out of storage soon. And then speaking of video recording, I am, I was so excited for audio mix. I really was very excited for the ability to use that spatial [00:24:00]audio file that’s recorded in all your videos now, and then kind of like drown out environmental noise or isolate and highlight the.

Voices of people speaking in the scene and frame in my admittedly limited testing so far, like the switch between standard and studio is the best. So you really just kind of get rid of a lot of ambient noise and make your, you know, subjects sound like they’re talking in a podcast, like we are now.

Like my microphone is now Yeah,

Devindra: your microphone sounds great when trillin’s like you’re there in front of microphones turned on we’re all we’re all golden this week I do feel like um, yeah, you can certainly fill up even if you have a terabyte iphone I feel like If you’re shooting 4k 120, you’re going to be sucking up some space, but they are making it more so that you can record and shoot directly to storage devices.

So I can imagine I see so many of those like little rigs that people are putting together. Like you put your iPhone in there. It’s also stabilizing rig. You could attach a microphone up top. But you could put a small SSD [00:25:00] there too. Like it is making the sort of Hey, you can have a little production studio built entirely around your iPhone and it’ll cost a lot of money, but there are some users, certainly pro users that would be into that, you know?

So it’s kind of, it’s cool to have that. That’s how they shot this. That that weekend video, right? Like with a rig a whole special thing, making him sing the song extra fast to slow down. That was fun.

Cherlynn: I think the idea of the iPhone 16 pros as like a, yeah, portable creator rig is a good way to think about them because a lot of the upgrades that at least drew my attention were for multimedia content creation.

Another thing that I was intrigued by, but that isn’t available yet is the multi. Layer or multitrack recording on voice memos. And then speaking of features that are still not yet here that half step sort of lock focus feature on camera control isn’t available yet. And then, of course, everything with Apple intelligence isn’t fully available yet.

I think that. It is not the first time Apple’s held back some marquee features at launch, but it is like, [00:26:00]it, it makes reviewing these things right now, the week that they go on sale a little trickier than usual. You will see the note on our review cards with about the score that we had to review them as is, and as is they, They seem to score lower than last year which I think is very fair.

I think especially, I actually had to flip the position of the pro and the pro max this year, just because the battery life to me was that much significantly lower. I, I actually almost dinged it quite a few more points and then was convinced to be like, okay, A bit more, a bit less angry about battery life.

I mean, it’s a

Devindra: fair comparison, but I do, I do want to know, like people like me who used to hate the Pro Max phones, like the titanium change last year was a huge difference. Like 10 to 15 percent change is noticeable. And if you care that much about battery life, it is still probably worth going for the big phone.

I also find myself. I don’t know about you Cherlynn, but I also I’m watching stuff like often in picture in picture mode at night while I’m cleaning up the kitchen and stuff like, or [00:27:00]while I’m just like browsing Twitter at night to like the ability to multifunction more on a bigger screen phone.

I see it. I see the point of that. You can’t do that as much on the smaller 16 pro.

Cherlynn: Yeah, I, I like being able to reach across the screen and hit something all the way on the other side anyways, as a person cursed with smaller hands, I think the smaller one is the ideal size for me. However, I might, I, I, I have this odd luxury of being able to carry two phones, right?

So maybe I’ll just Carry both the Pixel 9 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro. Now, a lot of people have asked me this, actually. Am I tempted to go back to Pixel? I am. I am very tempted by the Pixel 9 Pro. We did score it as of right now, a little higher than the iPhone 16 Pro. And trust me that that factored into my scoring decision.

I think. The competition from Google is stiffer than ever, is extremely stiff this year. I am in love with pixel UI, I’ve been for a very long [00:28:00] time. Especially on the call screening, especially on some of the call assist features. For some reason Google really understands how to do that stuff. I think, like I wrote in my review, it’s not that Apple is not considering these things, it’s that Apple is extremely cautious.

Apple’s more sensitive to being caught with egg on its face, perhaps, whereas Google’s probably we can just say, sorry, and Apple’s more, let’s not. Nobody’s buying these

Devindra: phones anyway. Nobody will notice. That’s what Google’s thinking. Nobody’s buying these Pixel phones. I don’t

Cherlynn: know. I, I think it’s, I think Google is a bit more a bit less risk averse.

And I, I get that vibe from the like Silicon Valley area in general.

Devindra: It does, it does come down to there, there were reports people are pointing to the flight tracker. You know, site is now tracking like the, the planes filled with iPhones coming to employee to, to customers, those planes have billions of dollars worth a single plane has billions of dollars of phones worth on them.

And it’s that is the function. That’s why Apple has to be safe. Whereas [00:29:00] for Google. How much of a percentage of Google’s revenue are Pixel phones?

Cherlynn: I get that. I get, I get that like it’s not a huge part of their revenue. Yeah, it’s definitely not as significant. I will say to, to Apple’s credit though, that like I said in my review, it’s more careful.

And its approach tends to be more well rounded. So when it comes to things like call screening or call related, anything that’s a little bit to do with personal private context things, Apple is slow. And I think reasonably so I think it’s okay to like. Take your time before you sick your AI on restaurants, calling them about opening hours.

That sort of thing. Apple is not going to do that ever. I think it’s wild that Google is able to, and I think there is helpful executions there too, but I don’t know that every single person would be as happy to embrace that. So it’s fine that they have two very different approaches. I just think that And that’s why maybe I have to have two phones, right?

One company is

Devindra: afraid of actively [00:30:00] harming society with new features that call, that have robots calling, you know, restaurants and the others just taking it slow. But I

Cherlynn: will say that, I will say that my, my desire to carry both of them nowadays has less to do with camera. Because it used to be I carried a pixel phone around because it was just so much better for for my photos and now it’s It’s it’s actually battery life and a little bit on like pixel call UI.

Oh, yeah I chatted with a friend on RCS for the first time yesterday and that was cool. Shout out to my friend who knows who they are who was on Android and we were texting and it was, it said text message RCS. You know how if you send green bubble messages, it says text message SMS. And now it says, Text message RCS, and now it’s freaking out, and then we could have back messages.

Devindra: It should be a rainbow bubble, like RCS, the thing unifying all the, all the different platforms. I

Cherlynn: think that would be a bit too ally for Apple to do.

Devindra: Allyship?

Cherlynn: Yeah,

Devindra: [00:31:00] it would be, it would be nice

Cherlynn: if they did, but no, I don’t think they would, it would, the implication is kind of weird Also hate that, because of that, we

Devindra: can’t use rainbows anymore in certain things.

That’s dumb.

Cherlynn: You can still use rainbows. I don’t think it matters. It just, I’m glad,

Devindra: I’m glad you’re able to do an RCS chat because we have talked about that for years. There was also the news that the RCS the group is now considering a way to make encryption happening, so that’s cool. Can I,

Cherlynn: can I just explain this a little bit?

So, when we, when this came out and made the rounds this week that RCS the GSMA was working on our end to end encryption for RCS. the universal profile, which is what Apple said it would adopt for iOS 18. And to be clear, there’s different profiles of RCS. The base one was the one that like Apple resisted forever because it was just not very secure.

It allowed businesses to text you with no reason. And there’s just a lot of issues with it. Universal profile comes closer. When Apple announced it would support RCS, it did make a It’s very clear that like end to end [00:32:00] encryption, it would work with the GSMA to bring end to end encryption to RCSUP before it fully embraced iOS 18 RCS and iOS 18.

So it’s not completely new, like you said, Devindra, that like we knew end to end encryption was coming and that’s why we were Apple

Devindra: says that they were going to work on it and now, now they, GSMA had to put out an announcement. Hey, we’re doing it. We’re doing it, baby. I

Cherlynn: mean, they’re working on it, but is it news?

Not really. I mean, it’s, it’s, it has to come.

Devindra: They’re doing it also Google

Cherlynn: messages. Yeah. But also Google messages had already, like Google had already implemented E2EE in its own Google message version of RCS UP, which is like a UP with a number, I believe So anyway come at me with

all your RCS nerdery, because apparently this is how much I know about it.

Devindra: Yeah. RCS message Cherlynn if you can find her. How about that? Anything else you want to mention about the phones? Cause I do want to talk a little bit about the Apple Watch Series 10. Yeah. That is the thing. That got all the big changes this year. And we just spent half an hour talking about a fricking camera button.

So come on, I

Cherlynn: mean, I feel like there’s more on the phone that I’m forgetting. Just go read [00:33:00] my review. It’s like very

Devindra: long, very nice reviews.

Cherlynn: Yeah. And, and the video on our YouTube channel as well. What’s up? What’s about okay. When you say the watch got all the big changes this year, what are you referring?

Devindra: has a new, it has a new design. It is much bigger. Like it is fundamentally a bigger TV. different feeling device. You noted that in your review, you know,

Cherlynn: it does feel different. It feels thinner every time I pick it up when it’s not on my wrist, when I pick it up to enter the password or look at the charge level, I feel it in my, in between my fingers, it feels thinner and different.

But the, and especially compared to the series nine, which I’ve been using since it was launched last year, the screens a little bit wider angle viewing. wider viewing angle. And, and, and, and, and that’s about it, right? I mean, what else is like the, the, the battery life for being thinner is very similar still to the Series 9.

In fact, sometimes I actually got a lot more battery life out of the Series 10. It, [00:34:00] I still couldn’t replicate that on a consistent, in a consistent way. So I don’t know Absolutely true that the Apple Watch Series 10 lasts longer than the Series 9. But yeah, I think it’s impressive that the technology they were able to come up with to reach that thinner frame.

And the wider angle. I didn’t notice the huge Here’s the thing, right? When you’re testing two watches side by side, y’all come to the Engadget Podcast for this sort of great interview. You’re just deadened

Devindra: to all the changes moving forward, right? Well, a little bit,

Cherlynn: but here’s what I was trying to do, right?

I had both watches on each of my wrists, and I was putting them down sort of on my lap to kind of see whether that wider viewing angle makes that huge of a difference. And I’m like, yeah, the one on the left, which is the Series 10, certainly looks like I can see it. Like the clock digits are brighter from that angle and, and more easy to see, whereas the right hand, which was the Series 9 was harder to read.

But you know what the difference was? Partly, yes, brightness. But the other part of it was the locks, the watch face. [00:35:00] Somehow when your AOD is dimmed in on both watches, you’re always on display is dimmed. The watch. digits on the Series 9, which to be clear was on watchOS 10, not 11 went into this outline instead of a solid font.

So the font was just, and of course that’s going to be harder to read, whereas like on the Series 10, which was running watchOS 11, when the AOD dimmed, the clock digits maintained their solid structure. So the font basically went from a fully filled solid digits situation to stroke only that sort of thing.

So if you know, graphic design, maybe you understand what I’m saying. And that contributes to it. Right. And then I’m not able to then confidently say that, you know, This is certainly a brighter screen at an off angle. I, I have to be like part of the visibility has to do with the fact that the font’s different.

So I don’t know. I, I, I didn’t get into the detail there. But you’re here, you’re, you’re here, you are privy to my inner most fonts. Okay. Okay. Podcast.

Devindra: Even, [00:36:00] even like the, the minimal design changes to the series 10 is more than the, than the phones got. Is the thing. Slightly thinner, slightly bigger.

I mean a whole

Cherlynn: new button. Look, the whole new button.

Devindra: Plus

Cherlynn: the fact that the screens are bigger, plus the fact that therefore the iPhone 15 Pros are just a little bit bigger than their predecessors means you have to get a whole new case, by the way. Yeah,

Devindra: it’s mainly the buttons. You have to get the whole new case.

Cherlynn: Well, no, the cases won’t fit. I asked and it was like, no, you need new cases even without the buttons. Of course.

Ben: Every year you need a new case. And that difference, the Oh, this is a little bit bigger so you need to get a whole new case and the fact that we spent so much time talking about a button is why all the other kids make fun of us.

Cherlynn: Who’s us and who’s the other kids? Sorry.

Ben: All of the Android people make fun of us. I consider

Cherlynn: myself an Android kid too,

Devindra: don’t us and them, me. I [00:37:00] am a bother. From one phone generation to the next like that is just like a given because things change button placements change camera Modules change, so I’m not gonna knock Apple too much on that.

But you know,

Ben: meanwhile What was Apple talking about so much during that event? We’re gonna be carbon neutral by this time. What is it? 2030 not that long. They are by not

Devindra: including the wired buds anymore

Cherlynn: Fiber Kate packaging

Devindra: fiber you can eat that box Yeah,

Cherlynn: if you’re having digestive issues if you

Devindra: want to, so it doesn’t sound like you’re super hot on the, the watch series.

Cherlynn: was hard for me to be excited because again, a lot of the marquee features are things you have to wait a little longer to figure out sleep, but we’re not waiting

Devindra: for apple intelligence on that. We’re not waiting for no, several months. Like we were watch. Yeah,

Cherlynn: we were during the review process waiting on the sleep apnea thing to be FDA green lit, but it did during the [00:38:00] review process.

And so it was like the day or two before that was like, Oh yeah, you can set up sleep apnea now. And to be clear, like we, we had more than a few days with sleep apnea, but, but it was like, Two days before the watch or the day before the watch review was supposed to go up, that sleep apnea came out with watchOS 11.

Did

Devindra: you, so did you do your sleep apnea test? No, because

Cherlynn: not only, I did, I did set it up. I set it up for the alerts. Right. And then, and I did that on the Monday that iOS 18 was pushed out because even though the FDA Greenlight announcement was on Friday. The iOS 18, watchOS 11, blah, blah, blah, update all came out to the public on Monday with the sleep apnea thing.

And then on watchOS 11, that’s when you can get it right. And you can get the sleep apnea tracking on watch series nine as well as watch ultra two. So even if I had tested was like a big deal, it was not going to super affect my score because you can get it on an older watch. Like it’s not, a huge part of the upgrade [00:39:00] equation, but also I had one night to put this thing on and you need to like sleep with it for

Devindra: 30 nights.

We’re gonna need an update on how much you snore and what your sleep breathing is like. Yeah.

Cherlynn: That’s what, that’s what has to

Devindra: happen. Yeah.

Cherlynn: So basically I think this sort of device and this sort of feature is something we want to spend more time with anyway. So yeah, just come back. Twingadget. com to see if I’m still alive and testing sleep apnea and breathing at night.

Devindra: It is hard to review something that is also meant to track data for several days, like to do that with under a week, you know, so you did, you did what you could. And also given the restrictions Apple placed on us by not having everything fully approved. So anyway, it sounds, it sounds cool. Go check out Shroen’s review.

Do you have a video of the Apple watch as well?

Cherlynn: We do not because that would have required shooting on Sunday when I was editing the AirPods review, so no. I mean,

Devindra: you’re, it never ends. It never ends. And we’re still waiting on the iPhone review. So, you know, that’s another thing. They’re coming!

Cherlynn: You can consider this my iPhone review, whatever the early [00:40:00]part of this episode was.

That was mine. There is a proper written version. So we know

Devindra: nobody reads anymore. Sherilyn like this is the future of all of our content. And anyway, folks, thank you so much, Sherilyn. If you got any thoughts or questions about the new iPhones and the new Apple watch, drop us an email at podcast and engadget.

com.

Let’s move on to some other news and sorry folks that we’re running through these stories kind of quickly. We’re just, we’re just so gadget heavy. We’ve got so many reviews to talk about. Is that time of

Cherlynn: year?

Devindra: Yeah. One thing I want to bring up is just a wild occurrence that happened on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I started seeing news reports Tuesday morning that pagers were exploding throughout Lebanon and that seemed weird. Like we saw the earlier reports were like, huh. That’s, that’s strange. Pagers are exploding. Then more reports, thousands of pagers are exploding. Then more and more reports. Basically I think by maybe not by the end of Tuesday, but there were [00:41:00] several waves of pager attacks, or at least one, that first major wave of pager attacks.

What we ended up learning is that likely it was Israel targeting members of the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon by their pagers. And I’m not going to get too deep into the politics of this all, but just that idea, I don’t know what you thought of the Sherwin, but I was thinking like, Oh my God, we’ve reached like enemy of the state level, weird attack vectors that would sound like science fiction just a couple of years ago.

So that is, that is where we’re at. This is like a live, ongoing story on Wednesday, another wave of attacks happened on walkie talkies. because I guess the plan was not to just hit pagers again because people stopped using their pagers. There are reports that solar panel you know, installations throughout Lebanon were attacked as well.

This is all in response to like other attacks that were happening from Hezbollah towards you know, people living in Israel and and like areas throughout that country too. So wild. I don’t [00:42:00]know. What did you think, Sherilyn, like when you heard of this?

Cherlynn: I mean, I’ll give you 10 to guess what my immediate thought was it was the same as what CF 542 is saying in our chat.

I was shocked that pagers were still being used. I think

Devindra: Listen, if you are if you are currently a member of a militant group and you know Your opponent is like highly technically capable. You’re like I can’t have a smartphone

Cherlynn: I can’t have things that they

Devindra: can hack, you know,

Cherlynn: right. So when you were recapping that, I, I, I, my brain made the connection.

Well, I mean, I kind of knew this, which is like you said. Yeah. A lot of people use lower technology devices to avoid surveillance or detection. Things like burner phones tend to be a little more simple pagers. And you mentioned walkie talkies and solar panels. It was interesting to me how it is. These would appear to be like less sophisticated, more analog devices that were being targeted.

And things not connected to the internet. Right, exactly. You would, right. It’s even harder. So it’s you would think that internet is the more hackable sort of technology because [00:43:00]it’s more communication availability. But no, it’s these things that are just chilling along on, I guess, radio waves for a lot of them especially walkie talkies and what, pagers.

Devindra: Yeah. And the, the actual we’re still like, this is an ongoing story. The full extent to like how the explosive devices got into the pagers and into the walkie talkies, Is the whole thing because the company behind the pagers is apparently a Taiwan based thing, but they were like, we did not manufacture those.

And then people tracked it to a company in in Turkey that was building devices. And they were like, Oh, we didn’t build those either. So it’s like, where did these come from? How did these get into the supply chain? But also I think it was also like subcontractors

Ben: on subcontractors

Devindra: upon. So, so, but how do you, how do you get to people outside of hacking a good internet connected device?

We have heard stories like I am. I. Like to read the stories about like how real life spies do their work. And there’s a lot of stories about what Russia has done and what Russian spies have done, like the poisoning of people in broad daylight throughout throughout England. That’s something Russia is known for.

This is just like wild and I [00:44:00]guess there are two arguments. It’s, it’s a little more targeted than like missile attacks, but also these things were exploding in public spaces. Children were killed. Thousands of people were injured. The latest total I saw is 25 people were killed, 600 injured. This is just like one of those things where it’s I don’t.

You don’t know what’s safe anymore when these devices, these devices that you think are just dumb and silly can just explode at any moment. So, terrifying.

Ben: Yeah, and the politics of this situation is really difficult to get into, so we’ll mostly try to sidestep that. I’m feeling for the Lebanese population right now.

This is like pure stochastic

Devindra: terrorism, basically, but yeah.

Ben: From the perspective of gadget people, we love our devices. We use our devices to relax. The idea that you are afraid to touch your device now, because you don’t know what’s been tampered with and what hasn’t been tampered with. The idea that there are families who are completely unaffected and, you know, not Affiliated with Hezbollah at all are maybe putting all of their [00:45:00]devices out in the yard a good distance away from the house because they’re afraid of them now, that

Devindra: sucks.

People are afraid to use their computers, any of their other devices, like it’s just, this is a weird situation.

Cherlynn: Do y’all see how many phones I held up just now?

Devindra: Yeah, you are, you are quite the, the attack vector right now, Cherlynn. I mean, listen, I have like right behind me, people who can see me on camera.

Like I have a lot of old devices that I need to certainly electronically recycle because I’m worried about what happens to old lithium batteries. And so that’s not even worrying about an attack like this. We will be keeping an eye on the story. This is like all ongoing stuff, but I wanted to mention it because this is directly.

I’ve never seen a military or I’ve never seen like a specific attack against a military opponents like this. And philosophically, like as somebody who thinks about like how we wage war and how innocents are touched and all this stuff, it is deeply, deeply troubling. We’re going to move on to just some strange, like straight up gadget [00:46:00]stuff.

So let’s just laugh at snaps. Fifth generation spectacles. How about that? Look at poor Chrisabelle, who did this coverage for us, has had to take pictures of herself wearing these God awful looking augmented reality glasses. These are standalone AR glasses. They’re going to be sold to developers who commit to a yearlong 99 a month subscription to start working on AR apps, I guess, similar to what Apple did with Vision Pro, except it’s not being sold to normal people at all.

Because I think if people saw the real cost of these things if you had to put a dollar to it, you would probably laugh Snapchat off the face of the planet. Like these would probably cost four to 5, 000 a pair, given the level of technology in them. Thoughts on these Cherlynn?

Cherlynn: I mean, I think they looked weird AF until I watched the Emmys last night.

And I was like, wow, I guess Eugene Levy is wearing the same sort of glasses. The same style glasses, right? They were these very thick black frames that are extremely boxy, especially [00:47:00]near the temples. And I think Carissa got a little roasted on the threads.

Ben: But those actually

Cherlynn: looked good. What?

Ben: But they actually looked good.

The older ones look better. These just look chunky.

Cherlynn: So, okay. To be clear though, the new, the ones now are AR glasses. They have a display in them. I believe the older Snap Spectacles are just camera toting glasses. No, the ones so the

Ben: last picture And I’m also talking about Eugene Levy’s glasses.

Eugene Levy’s

Cherlynn: ones are great. They’re the Prada or Dior ones, so

Ben: Yeah, they were fashion glasses. I was thinking, okay, these look very chunky. Fashion glasses tend to look chunky. I literally just looked up. Glasses designed by like Terry Mugler or, you know, house of Mugler, like very high fashion sort of stuff.

Mugler is known specifically for kind of sci fi looking outfits. Zendaya actually wore a like whole suit of armor designed by Mugler. This is a really

Cherlynn: strange tangent. We’re going down. Like I am here for it,

Devindra: but

Ben: these glasses, yeah. [00:48:00] These. The Mugler glasses actually look good. They are chunky.

They take up so much of your face. Go look them up on your own. These just look bad. I mean,

Devindra: I’m specifically comparing them to the last pair Carissa tested Trillin. So I think that was the fourth one. And those did have AR display. She did do a test of that. So this is not just the camera ones that they were selling.

But,

Cherlynn: yeah.

Devindra: My point was

Cherlynn: just going to be that like, we’re not going to review this thing obviously. They’re not selling it. But I can’t wait for us to take a look. A deeper dive into them. We will be doing that. We just won’t be reviewing, reviewing. We will be reviewing it. I

Devindra: think we are fully well within our rights to point and laugh at how silly this all looks.

And next week we’re going to hear about Meta’s you know, concept AR glasses. So that’s Orion and the sort of like tease photo. We saw those things, which was in the background of one of Zuckerberg’s photos earlier this year. Those just look like chunky hipster frames. And maybe those aren’t like fully the things, but at least those look more like glasses than whatever the [00:49:00] hell is happening here.

Like I couldn’t, I couldn’t help it laugh, but Chris has done some great coverage for us to go check out her story on this stuff briefly. I also want to point out, I wrote about the Vive Focus Vision. HTC Vive is still making VR headsets and this is their latest standalone headset. It’s 9. 99. It’s interesting because they’re, they have better cameras for mixed reality.

And also they have a cool. An accessory, a display port accessory that you can buy. It’s like 150. It gives you a direct connection to your computer for connected wired VR. And that is different compared to what Oculus link did or the metal link does on Meta’s headsets. When you plug into a PC, you’re basically seeing a video feed of what a VR window is seeing on your computer.

By going directly to the graphics card, you’re not getting any of that distortion or anything. So this functions more like a traditional VR headset. It looks cool, feels cool. Hope to do a fuller review of this thing, but I also don’t, no one’s going to buy this. This is 9. is selling these headsets [00:50:00] to businesses and they are doing a good job of that.

But, you know, they’re not competing with the meta quest at, you know, 400 and 500. These things are just so much more expensive. We also saw the news that Lionsgate, the movie studio has signed a deal with runway, the AI startup. So that the, let me see here. It will allow runway access to Lionsgate content their library in exchange for a fresh custom AI model that the studio can use in production and editing.

That can mean all sorts of things, but I know among Hollywood, among artists, actors, and directors, like this is the AI encroachment in movie making. is something that people are afraid of. Maybe there’s a way that they could use it. That is like a non harmful way, like a simpler way. Hey, listen, I’ve used AI to plug in one word into a podcast episode where it’s I don’t, I can’t match the voice to retake it.

But if I type the word here and I train this thing on my voice, and it’s a local model that I fully control it can replicate a word for me. That makes my life a little easier. Maybe they can [00:51:00]do that, but it’s tough for artists. Tough to manage that.

Cherlynn: Yeah. I will say that as of six or seven years ago at 1MWC, there was a tool like that online somewhere that allowed you to create like voice models for of people.

And so me, Matt Smith, and I think Aaron Supor is playing with this. We created voice models of each other. And so I made Matt Smith’s fake voice say, Japan, Japan, Japan. And I really recall this very strongly. Here’s the thing, though. I will also mention that it’s not specific or unique to AI, right? To be able to do this, because I will give you another behind the scenes tidbit that our iPhone 16 review video, there was a moment where I made the mistake and said, the iPhone 15 pros battery life sucks or something along those lines.

And I was like, crap, I meant the iPhone 16 pro and our video editor, Ryan Oh, was able to cook up some magic and find a bit where I said the word. Yeah. And just replace it correctly. So that’s

Devindra: normal editing using your normal [00:52:00] voice. It’s normal

Cherlynn: editing. Editing, but you’re also able to like, you know, being able to get a model of my voice to say the correct words Seems useful to me in in situations like that for post processing, but I can see how it raises concerns of who has control Like you said over who has control i’m

Devindra: sure actors are worried writers are worried about what words they can inject in things we will be keeping an eye on the story for sure.

Ben: I have one kind of easy prediction to make about this. That Runway will develop some kind of internal tool for Lionsgate. Lionsgate will push this very much on their editors and all of their workers. They’ll be like, use the internal tool, use the internal tool. They will make a big deal about how one movie used the internal tool and then we’ll never hear about it again.

Devindra: I hope so. I hope, I hope that’s what it is. But I also know like executives and a lot of basically studio executives cannot wait to stop paying money to actors and writers. Like they just want to like, get [00:53:00]stuff out there to start selling movie tickets or whatever. So yeah, we will see the, the, all these tools can be useful in the right hands.

We are worried about the right hands. Let’s Cherlynn?

Cherlynn: I, this weekend. So, and I was very excited to share this on this podcast. I was like telling the team, I have to be here for this. Have you heard of the film Speak No Evil?

Devindra: Yes. Oh, you saw the new one.

Cherlynn: I saw the new one. The, the one with James McAvoy, who is just so menacing in it.

The reviews. said that he’s perfected the art of being menacing and they are so right. He is horrifying and such a scary and like the, the way, okay, so this film is about this family meeting or running into another family consisting of James McAvoy, his parents. wife and their child in italy somewhere and then that they hit it off the james mcavoy invites them over to stay at their countryside place For a weekend [00:54:00]and again some of their you know, better instincts They they do do it and then it turns out this is the like strangest family ever No spoilers, but I think you can see where it’s headed.

I think Though that the entire experience was really illuminating for me because some of the, the altercations they get into are so reminiscent of like my real life where you do interact with people who just say shit for no reason sometimes, right? on the internet, in the real world. Like people sometimes say shit and then they go, Oh, sorry.

Sorry that you misunderstood what I said, or, Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. Oh, PC. Oh, woke. Like people who use that sort of like labels to defend bad behavior. And you have a lot of that. And so I spent a lot of the movie because I didn’t guess the ending. I spent a lot of the movie wondering if.

They were actually like bad, bad, or if they were just unintentional bad, right? And that’s me because I’m, I’m the sort of person that gaslights myself. But that’s, that’s what happens. I think that the [00:55:00] way the actors played it was really nuanced and that’s why I was led to that belief. But also the, the, just the whole telling of the story was so like masterful.

The tension never lets up. It’s just, it’s great. It’s really cool. I’m glad I really enjoyed it.

Devindra: I would recommend Trillin. That you watch the original movie, which is mostly in English too, but it’s more about the difference. I believe it’s like the difference between like Danish culture and Finnish culture and how they can be like slightly different, but also that original movie.

is horrifying. It is so bleak. It is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever seen. And what I’ve heard is that the American version, this one’s

Cherlynn: pretty bleak too, but yeah, I’ve

Devindra: heard it doesn’t go as far as the original does. And I don’t, I don’t like the ending of the original. I think it’s a deeply disturbing movie, but that was a movie about.

our society of politeness, right? Where somebody says something weird and you’re like, Oh, okay. Well, I’m a guest. So I’m just gonna roll with it. Right. It’s the same thing. It’s the same [00:56:00]story. Yeah. It’s also about like how hard it is to make friends as adults because that original movie was just like this like yuppie couple with the kid is I, how do we, how do we hang out with people?

Oh, this, this couple seems nice. I think both these movies sound like the in why you do not make friends on vacation. You meet somebody you meet a couple you meet you meet people on vacation. They’re not last let it go. Yeah Yeah, they’re temporary friends. Yeah, let it go. Do not visit their houses. Do not do anything I’m looking forward to seeing this movie Cherlynn.

I can’t

Cherlynn: wait till you see it. Tell me how you think it

Devindra: is It is fun to see Scoot McNary and Mackenzie Davis. Yes, like normal couple. This is a this is a halting catchfire reunion A show I’ve told all of you who’ve been listening to watch forever. They both co star in that show. That’s an amazing show for techies.

It’s about the sort of like PC building world in Texas in the eighties. It’s a lot of fun. It’s like mad men, but also far, far geekier. So check that out. Well, I’m glad you like anything else you want to try out Cherlynn.

Cherlynn: I cancelled my Hulu subscription, [00:57:00] so, there you go. They, they, I, I thought I was being scammed when I got an email from Hulu at HuluMail.

com, which just sounded like the worst email in the world. But they were like, price is increasing soon, like 20 basically for a no ad subscription. I was like, what the hell, I’m not doing that. Plus, I also have Disney Plus. So I’m like, I get quite a lot of the same library with that.

Devindra: Yeah, it’s, it’s so very confusing, what is, is, It is still very

Cherlynn: confusing, yeah.

So for me, I’m like, let’s cancel it and see what’s gonna happen. But yeah, I mean, I, I, my, my Disney Plus subscription is annual, and my Hulu one is monthly. So I just canceled the monthly one first and see how that goes. All right. Since I can’t cancel Disney Plus. Good luck. And then, well, yeah my, my recommendation is if it works out, I’ll tell you that to go with Disney Plus instead of Hulu and Disney.

Devindra: Gotcha. Have you checked out Agatha all along yet? I feel like that’s in your I have not. I

Cherlynn: saw it on yeah, I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s on my list.

Devindra: I saw the first few episodes. It’s, it’s fun. It’s fun more mostly because Aubrey Plaza gets to be fun. Oh, yeah! I saw that. Give me a witchy Aubrey Plaza, please.

She is [00:58:00] fantastic in that show. And

Cherlynn: the gay splosion I heard,

Devindra: I want to recommend you folks, I’ve talked about Pachinko before, which is the Apple TV plus show based on the novel about this sort of sweeping tale of a Korean family from leaving Korea to immigrating to Japan throughout the 1900s.

And also it occurs across different time periods. I started watching season two. This show is still incredible. It looks fantastic. Just incredibly well written. It’s just like deeply emotional. I love seeing very, very complex, very far reaching immigrant tales. And this is one of those, Sherilyn, I think you really got to watch this show because it will destroy you.

It is just so fascinating. So yeah. Loving Pachinko Season 2. Also Season 2 has a new opening dance sequence, which became a big hit. with the first season. Still good. I don’t think it hits the same highs for me as the Pachinko season one opening, but still very good. Also quickly want to shout out Lego Star Wars Rebuild the Galaxy, which is a Lego Star Wars thing.

My daughter saw a picture of this and she was like, we got to watch this. I don’t know what’s happening [00:59:00]here. I have not fully gotten her into any Star Wars stuff. We’ve tried the Clone Wars cartoons and They’re really slow. Like it’s really tough for her to get into. I’m not going to do the movies.

The original movies just take forever to get started. Maybe when she was like eight or 10, she can survive those things, but she loved Lego Star Wars, rebuilt the galaxy. It’s a funny, you know, Lego variant of this thing, but also does something that I don’t think Star Wars will ever be able to do, which is completely break and rebuild the entire mythology.

Like at the, you know, In the first episode, they just completely rework it’s sort of like a what if thing. They just rework who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? What happened here? How did key events happen? It’s just completely different and they’re going to run with this timeline. A lot of good guys become bad.

You may see this in the poster, but a Darth Jar Jar Binks. Is a thing and he is hilarious. Like he’s not, he’s, he’s a dark, he’s a sip. But he’s also silly and bumbling. And my daughter thinks he’s hilarious every time he falls on his face. So it’s just, it has a lot of fun with star Wars mythology, a lot of deep cuts in there.

And I think it’s fun if you’ve got [01:00:00]kids who cannot. really pay attention to the little, the, the Star Wars stuff that takes a little, you know, more to get into. I think this is like perfect. Okay. So check it out. Lego Star Wars rebuild the galaxy.

Cherlynn: Well, that’s it for the episode this week, everyone.

Thank you as always for listening. Our theme music is by game composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O’Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find the Vindro. At

Devindra: Davindra on Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky, all over the place. And I podcast about movies and TV at The Filmcast, thefilmcast.

com. Oh, also I did a Twit. I did This Week in Tech this week. So go check out the latest episode at twit. tv.

Cherlynn: If you want to tell me what your favorite photographic style is. So I can use it on more selfies of me send them to me. I am at Cherlynn low on X or at Cherlynn, Instagram, C H E R L Y N N S T A G R A M on threads, email us your thoughts at podcast at engadget.

com. Leave us a [01:01:00]review, please, on whatever podcast platform you’re listening on and subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/engadget-podcast-reviewing-the-iphone-16-and-apple-watch-series-10-113033805.html?src=rss

The Morning After: I really want this 30th anniversary PS5 Pro

To commemorate PlayStation’s 30 years in the game, Sony revealed some nostalgia-tinged redesigns of both the PS5 and the forthcoming PS5 Pro. With that classic gray colorway and the old-school logo, there’s a similarly styled DualSense controller and even a chunky retro-designed cable wrapped around the typical USB-C connector.
Sony
The PS5 Pro bundle even includes a standard controller, a DualSense Edge and a retro cover for the optional disc drive and the charging stand. Even the PlayStation Portal is getting a 1994 colorway.
Pre-orders start on September 26 through the company and at participating retailers, launching on November 21. Sony has me trapped: Design it in the colors of my childhood gaming memories, and I will probably buy it — especially when early impressions of the PS5 Pro show it could be capable of some leaps in game engine performance.
— Mat Smith
The biggest tech stories you missed

DJI launches the Action 5 Pro camera with subject tracking and improved video
The iOS 18.1 public beta is here, bringing Apple Intelligence (almost) to the masses
US citizens can now apply for their passport online

Netflix teases the next seasons of Avatar, Squid Game and Arcane
Geeked Week also teased the spinoffs for Splinter Cell and Tomb Raider.

At its in-person fan event for Geeked Week this year, Netflix showed teasers and sneak peeks for the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender as well as Squid Game season two, with last season’s protagonist, Lee Jung-jae, wearing his player 456 uniform again. There were also new clips for One Piece, Wednesday, Splinter Cell, Devil May Cry and more.
Continue reading.

YouTube is cramming ads in when you pause videos
The video website now joins DirecTV, Sling TV and Hulu.

YouTube is turning paused videos into its newest ad space. The company first started looking at using ads on pause screens in 2023 with select advertisers. YouTube’s viewers are less enthusiastic. The new ads also pop up when you pause videos on the YouTube mobile app.
A YouTube rep told The Verge they’ve seen “strong advertiser and strong reviewer responses” since they “rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers.” Great.
Continue reading.

Oprah buys back her Apple TV+ documentary to lock it away
A multi-year deal between Winfrey and the platform ended in 2022.

A documentary on Oprah Winfrey is no longer coming to Apple TV+. Because, well, Winfrey, herself, bought back the rights to it, PageSix reports. Allegedly, Winfrey and filmmaker Kevin Macdonald clashed on the final product, with the latter not making the requested edits. Winfrey was initially very involved in Apple TV+, even speaking at its launch. She signed a multi-year deal with the platform, launching shows such as The Oprah Conversation, but the agreement ended in 2022.
Continue reading.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-i-really-want-this-30th-anniversary-ps5-pro-111559032.html?src=rss

Sony

The PS5 Pro bundle even includes a standard controller, a DualSense Edge and a retro cover for the optional disc drive and the charging stand. Even the PlayStation Portal is getting a 1994 colorway.

Pre-orders start on September 26 through the company and at participating retailers, launching on November 21. Sony has me trapped: Design it in the colors of my childhood gaming memories, and I will probably buy it — especially when early impressions of the PS5 Pro show it could be capable of some leaps in game engine performance.

— Mat Smith

The biggest tech stories you missed

DJI launches the Action 5 Pro camera with subject tracking and improved video

The iOS 18.1 public beta is here, bringing Apple Intelligence (almost) to the masses

US citizens can now apply for their passport online

Netflix teases the next seasons of Avatar, Squid Game and Arcane

Geeked Week also teased the spinoffs for Splinter Cell and Tomb Raider.

At its in-person fan event for Geeked Week this year, Netflix showed teasers and sneak peeks for the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender as well as Squid Game season two, with last season’s protagonist, Lee Jung-jae, wearing his player 456 uniform again. There were also new clips for One Piece, Wednesday, Splinter Cell, Devil May Cry and more.

Continue reading.

YouTube is cramming ads in when you pause videos

The video website now joins DirecTV, Sling TV and Hulu.

A YouTube rep told The Verge they’ve seen “strong advertiser and strong reviewer responses” since they “rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers.” Great.

Continue reading.

Oprah buys back her Apple TV+ documentary to lock it away

A multi-year deal between Winfrey and the platform ended in 2022.

A documentary on Oprah Winfrey is no longer coming to Apple TV+. Because, well, Winfrey, herself, bought back the rights to it, PageSix reports. Allegedly, Winfrey and filmmaker Kevin Macdonald clashed on the final product, with the latter not making the requested edits. Winfrey was initially very involved in Apple TV+, even speaking at its launch. She signed a multi-year deal with the platform, launching shows such as The Oprah Conversation, but the agreement ended in 2022.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-i-really-want-this-30th-anniversary-ps5-pro-111559032.html?src=rss

Netflix teases the next seasons of Avatar, Squid Game and Arcane at Geeked Week

At its in-person fan event for Geeked Week this year, Netflix has shown teasers and sneak peeks of its upcoming shows, including the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender. In addition to revealing that the new season is already in production, Netflix has also announced that Miya Cech (Are You Afraid of the Dark?) is playing earthbending master Toph.
Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2 is officially in production! #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/iyQdqkyvDh— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

A teaser for Squid Game season 2 shows Lee Jung-jae wearing his player 456 uniform again to compete in another round of deadly games with other contestants hoping to win millions of dollars. The next season of Squid Game will start streaming on December 26.
The game ⏺️ never 🔼 stops ⏹️ Are you ready to play? Squid Game Season 2 arrives December 26. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/7L3YTy8Rco— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

The streaming giant has also revealed that One Piece live action’s Mr. 0 and Miss All-Sunday will be portrayed by Joe Mangianello and Lera Abova, respectively. And for Wednesday fans, Netflix has released a teaser for the second season of Wednesday that will arrive sometime in 2025.
FIRST LOOK: behind-the-scenes of Wednesday season 2. Coming 2025. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/NlucwUWdzL— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

For animation fans, Netflix has released a teaser for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, with Liev Schreiber voicing protagonist Sam Fisher. It has also given viewers a short look at a new Devil May Cry animated series by Korean company Studio Mir, which is coming in April 2025.
Dante. Is. Coming. From Capcom, Netflix and Studio Mir, the new Devil May Cry animated series is coming April 2025. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/KA0oj3ISGj— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

Netflix has teased a new Tomb Raider animated series that’s coming in October and a Rebel Moon game that’s arriving in 2025, as well. Finally, the company has given Arcane fans a clear schedule for the final chapter of the critically acclaimed show: Act 1 will be available to stream on November 9, followed by Act 2 on November 16. A third and final Act will close out the show with a proper ending on November 23.
✨ flash warning ✨ A new fighter has entered the ring. Experience Vi’s journey in the final chapter of Arcane when ACT 1 drops on November 9th, Act 2 drops on November 16th and Act 3 drops on November 23rd only on Netflix. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/A6EN448Tli— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/netflix-teases-the-next-seasons-of-avatar-squid-game-and-arcane-at-geeked-week-035246559.html?src=rss

At its in-person fan event for Geeked Week this year, Netflix has shown teasers and sneak peeks of its upcoming shows, including the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender. In addition to revealing that the new season is already in production, Netflix has also announced that Miya Cech (Are You Afraid of the Dark?) is playing earthbending master Toph.

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2 is officially in production! #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/iyQdqkyvDh

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

A teaser for Squid Game season 2 shows Lee Jung-jae wearing his player 456 uniform again to compete in another round of deadly games with other contestants hoping to win millions of dollars. The next season of Squid Game will start streaming on December 26.

The game ⏺️ never 🔼 stops ⏹️ Are you ready to play? Squid Game Season 2 arrives December 26. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/7L3YTy8Rco

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

The streaming giant has also revealed that One Piece live action’s Mr. 0 and Miss All-Sunday will be portrayed by Joe Mangianello and Lera Abova, respectively. And for Wednesday fans, Netflix has released a teaser for the second season of Wednesday that will arrive sometime in 2025.

FIRST LOOK: behind-the-scenes of Wednesday season 2. Coming 2025. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/NlucwUWdzL

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

For animation fans, Netflix has released a teaser for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, with Liev Schreiber voicing protagonist Sam Fisher. It has also given viewers a short look at a new Devil May Cry animated series by Korean company Studio Mir, which is coming in April 2025.

Dante. Is. Coming.

From Capcom, Netflix and Studio Mir, the new Devil May Cry animated series is coming April 2025. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/KA0oj3ISGj

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

Netflix has teased a new Tomb Raider animated series that’s coming in October and a Rebel Moon game that’s arriving in 2025, as well. Finally, the company has given Arcane fans a clear schedule for the final chapter of the critically acclaimed show: Act 1 will be available to stream on November 9, followed by Act 2 on November 16. A third and final Act will close out the show with a proper ending on November 23.

✨ flash warning ✨
A new fighter has entered the ring.
Experience Vi’s journey in the final chapter of Arcane when ACT 1 drops on November 9th, Act 2 drops on November 16th and Act 3 drops on November 23rd only on Netflix. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/A6EN448Tli

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) September 20, 2024

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/netflix-teases-the-next-seasons-of-avatar-squid-game-and-arcane-at-geeked-week-035246559.html?src=rss

1 day ago
0

Monument Valley 3 breaks the series’ old boundaries by adding a sailboat

During Netflix’s Geeked Week event, some more details about Monument Valley 3 emerged. Developer Ustwo Games says the long-awaited sequel builds on its predecessors in several ways, especially in terms of the gameplay, art style and story.
Perhaps the biggest change in Monument Valley 3 is the introduction of sailing. You’ll be able to move the boat in almost any direction and, as such, “the game is no longer restricted to geometric spaces,” game director Jennifer Estaris said during a call with reporters. Along with unfolding cubes that shift new protagonist Noor onto different planes, Monument Valley 3 is in large part about “deconstructing what we know,” Estaris said.
Naturally, those changes allow for fresh puzzles and visuals as players navigate impossible-looking, MC Escher-style architectural spaces. Aligned with that, Ustwo has evolved the art style with softer and more abstract shapes (you are going to be navigating rivers after all). The result is something that looks very familiar, but like a hazy memory. Meanwhile, the soundtrack from an 18-piece orchestra might just stir up some emotions.
While the original game was about forgiveness and its sequel was a coming-of-age tale, Monument Valley 3 focuses on the themes of hope, togetherness and resilience. Noor is a lighthouse keeper’s apprentice who is tasked with searching for a new source of power before light fades away from the world forever. It’s the “most ambitious story” to date for a Monument Valley game, according to Ustwo marketing manager Jamie Wotton.
All three Monument Valley games are standalone titles with their own stories. That means you’ll be able to glide right into Monument Valley 3 without playing the previous two entries. But there’s plenty of time to check those out first (or revisit them). You won’t have to pay extra for those mobile gaming classics if you have a Netflix subscription. There are no ads or in-app purchases in the company’s games.
Monument Valley is available to Netflix subscribers on iOS and Android starting today, and its sequel will arrive on the service on October 29. Monument Valley 3 will then debut as a Netflix mobile exclusive on December 10.

Netflix revealed some other mobile gaming news during Geeked Week. Its multiplayer take on Battleship (which includes special weapons and ranked modes) will drop on September 24. Subscribers will soon be able to play Civilization IV and Street Fighter IV CE on their mobile devices at no extra cost — the Netflix version of the latter will offer cross-play between iOS and Android.
Meanwhile, Netflix provided another peek at Squid Game: Unleashed before that multiplayer tie-in game arrives later this year. Last but not least, there was a first look at Blood Line: A Rebel Moon Game, based on Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies. The Netflix-exclusive co-op action game from Vainglory developer Super Evil Megacorp will debut in 2025.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/monument-valley-3-breaks-the-series-old-boundaries-by-adding-a-sailboat-013638578.html?src=rss

During Netflix’s Geeked Week event, some more details about Monument Valley 3 emerged. Developer Ustwo Games says the long-awaited sequel builds on its predecessors in several ways, especially in terms of the gameplay, art style and story.

Perhaps the biggest change in Monument Valley 3 is the introduction of sailing. You’ll be able to move the boat in almost any direction and, as such, “the game is no longer restricted to geometric spaces,” game director Jennifer Estaris said during a call with reporters. Along with unfolding cubes that shift new protagonist Noor onto different planes, Monument Valley 3 is in large part about “deconstructing what we know,” Estaris said.

Naturally, those changes allow for fresh puzzles and visuals as players navigate impossible-looking, MC Escher-style architectural spaces. Aligned with that, Ustwo has evolved the art style with softer and more abstract shapes (you are going to be navigating rivers after all). The result is something that looks very familiar, but like a hazy memory. Meanwhile, the soundtrack from an 18-piece orchestra might just stir up some emotions.

While the original game was about forgiveness and its sequel was a coming-of-age tale, Monument Valley 3 focuses on the themes of hope, togetherness and resilience. Noor is a lighthouse keeper’s apprentice who is tasked with searching for a new source of power before light fades away from the world forever. It’s the “most ambitious story” to date for a Monument Valley game, according to Ustwo marketing manager Jamie Wotton.

All three Monument Valley games are standalone titles with their own stories. That means you’ll be able to glide right into Monument Valley 3 without playing the previous two entries. But there’s plenty of time to check those out first (or revisit them). You won’t have to pay extra for those mobile gaming classics if you have a Netflix subscription. There are no ads or in-app purchases in the company’s games.

Monument Valley is available to Netflix subscribers on iOS and Android starting today, and its sequel will arrive on the service on October 29. Monument Valley 3 will then debut as a Netflix mobile exclusive on December 10.

Netflix revealed some other mobile gaming news during Geeked Week. Its multiplayer take on Battleship (which includes special weapons and ranked modes) will drop on September 24. Subscribers will soon be able to play Civilization IV and Street Fighter IV CE on their mobile devices at no extra cost — the Netflix version of the latter will offer cross-play between iOS and Android.

Meanwhile, Netflix provided another peek at Squid Game: Unleashed before that multiplayer tie-in game arrives later this year. Last but not least, there was a first look at Blood Line: A Rebel Moon Game, based on Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies. The Netflix-exclusive co-op action game from Vainglory developer Super Evil Megacorp will debut in 2025.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/monument-valley-3-breaks-the-series-old-boundaries-by-adding-a-sailboat-013638578.html?src=rss

1 day ago
0

Concord’s disastrous launch reportedly leads to its director’s self-demotion

The ripples from Concord’s seismic implosion are still fanning out since Sony decided to take the game offline earlier this month. Now, the game’s director has reportedly decided to bow out gracefully. Kotaku reported that game director Ryan Ellis of Firewalk Studios told staff members that he’s stepping down from his position. Ellis, who cofounded Firewalk after a stint as the creative director of Destiny 2, will remain with the studio but only in a support role.
Meanwhile, the staff at Firewalk are still waiting to hear what Sony plans to do with their underperforming game. Just two weeks after Concord’s release, Sony pulled the team shooter offline on September 6 and issued refunds to everyone who bought the game for the PlayStation 5 or PC from Steam and the Epic Games Store. Sony said in a statement that it pulled the game in order to “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.” Naturally, Kotaku reports that a lot of Firewalk’s staffers are worried about the status of their jobs in the wake of Concord’s disappointing release.
The extremely poor sales of Concord make it one of the biggest bombs in industry history. Analysts estimate that it only sold 25,000 copies on Steam and for PS5 in its first six days.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/concords-disastrous-launch-reportedly-leads-to-its-directors-self-demotion-215515013.html?src=rss

Meanwhile, the staff at Firewalk are still waiting to hear what Sony plans to do with their underperforming game. Just two weeks after Concord’s release, Sony pulled the team shooter offline on September 6 and issued refunds to everyone who bought the game for the PlayStation 5 or PC from Steam and the Epic Games Store. Sony said in a statement that it pulled the game in order to “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.” Naturally, Kotaku reports that a lot of Firewalk’s staffers are worried about the status of their jobs in the wake of Concord’s disappointing release.

The extremely poor sales of Concord make it one of the biggest bombs in industry history. Analysts estimate that it only sold 25,000 copies on Steam and for PS5 in its first six days.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/concords-disastrous-launch-reportedly-leads-to-its-directors-self-demotion-215515013.html?src=rss

1 day ago
0

Black Mirror season 7 cast revealed in a cryptic computer message

Get ready to question humanity’s control over the technology that surrounds us because another season of Netflix’s Black Mirror is in the works. Earlier today, the official Black Mirror X page revealed the cast of the new season coming next year along with some other interesting clues and Easter eggs.
The video features an old, flickering computer screen that appears to unload a complete data dump of the entire cast for season 7. Some of the names that jumped out at us includes Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti, Doctor Who star and Oscar winner Peter Capaldi (he won in 1995 with his live action short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life), Awkwafina, Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross and Rashida Jones.
The list also included some of the cast who played virtual crew members of the USS Callister from the iconic fourth season episode of the same name. The names from the USS Callister episode that appeared on the list include Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson, Billy Magnussen, Milanka Brooks and Osy Ikhile.
We’ve known for a while now that series creator Charlie Brooker has been planning to revisit the crew of the USS Callister. The season 4 opening episode starred Jesse Plemmons as the chief technology officer named Robert of a top tier game studio and a big fan of a Star Trek-esque TV show called Space Fleet. By day, he gets pushed around and little credit for the company’s success from his colleagues and staff. He uses immersive virtual reality technology to play as Space Fleet Capt. Robert Daly away from work on a virtual starship and takes out his frustrations and anger on the crew in increasingly cruel and inhumane ways. The crew members were replicated in the game using his boss and staff members’ DNA that Robert obtained without their permission or knowledge. The crew revolt and escape to the open Internet while leaving a seething “Capt. Robert” stranded in the game.
TCKR_Confidential_NotForDistribution.mp4 pic.twitter.com/NdaGRQYtba— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) September 19, 2024
Of course, this wouldn’t be a true Black Mirror reveal if it didn’t contain some clues and hidden items in the teaser. The loading screen features the studio name Tuckersoft, a reference to the game studio in the interactive “Bandersnatch” movie. The cast names are listed in alphabetical order by first name but they’ve been broken into eight groups. There are some cryptic phrases between the scrolling group names like “Too soon?”, “A rose for a rose” and “Shields 58 percent.”
Could these be episode titles? The latter definitely sounds like a reference to the USS Callister and Brooker and company love symbolic episode titles taken from songs for their tech hell stories like “Shut Up and Dance” and “Hang the DJ.” The new Black Mirror episodes haven’t even landed yet and they’ve already screwing with our heads.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/black-mirror-season-7-cast-revealed-in-a-cryptic-computer-message-203343148.html?src=rss

Get ready to question humanity’s control over the technology that surrounds us because another season of Netflix’s Black Mirror is in the works. Earlier today, the official Black Mirror X page revealed the cast of the new season coming next year along with some other interesting clues and Easter eggs.

The video features an old, flickering computer screen that appears to unload a complete data dump of the entire cast for season 7. Some of the names that jumped out at us includes Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti, Doctor Who star and Oscar winner Peter Capaldi (he won in 1995 with his live action short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life), Awkwafina, Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross and Rashida Jones.

The list also included some of the cast who played virtual crew members of the USS Callister from the iconic fourth season episode of the same name. The names from the USS Callister episode that appeared on the list include Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson, Billy Magnussen, Milanka Brooks and Osy Ikhile.

We’ve known for a while now that series creator Charlie Brooker has been planning to revisit the crew of the USS Callister. The season 4 opening episode starred Jesse Plemmons as the chief technology officer named Robert of a top tier game studio and a big fan of a Star Trek-esque TV show called Space Fleet. By day, he gets pushed around and little credit for the company’s success from his colleagues and staff. He uses immersive virtual reality technology to play as Space Fleet Capt. Robert Daly away from work on a virtual starship and takes out his frustrations and anger on the crew in increasingly cruel and inhumane ways. The crew members were replicated in the game using his boss and staff members’ DNA that Robert obtained without their permission or knowledge. The crew revolt and escape to the open Internet while leaving a seething “Capt. Robert” stranded in the game.

TCKR_Confidential_NotForDistribution.mp4 pic.twitter.com/NdaGRQYtba

— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) September 19, 2024

Of course, this wouldn’t be a true Black Mirror reveal if it didn’t contain some clues and hidden items in the teaser. The loading screen features the studio name Tuckersoft, a reference to the game studio in the interactive “Bandersnatch” movie. The cast names are listed in alphabetical order by first name but they’ve been broken into eight groups. There are some cryptic phrases between the scrolling group names like “Too soon?”, “A rose for a rose” and “Shields 58 percent.”

Could these be episode titles? The latter definitely sounds like a reference to the USS Callister and Brooker and company love symbolic episode titles taken from songs for their tech hell stories like “Shut Up and Dance” and “Hang the DJ.” The new Black Mirror episodes haven’t even landed yet and they’ve already screwing with our heads.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/black-mirror-season-7-cast-revealed-in-a-cryptic-computer-message-203343148.html?src=rss

2 days ago
0

The Immersed Visor aims for spatial computing’s sweet spot

An Austin-based startup best known for its VR and mixed reality workspace software for other companies’ headsets now has hardware of its own. The Immersed Visor appears to sit somewhere between a Vision Pro Lite and Xreal Plus: a lightweight head-worn device that creates a high-resolution spatial computing environment on the cheap (well, relatively speaking).
Teased to death for months, Immersed founder Renji Bijoy finally unveiled the Visor at an Austin event on Thursday. The device, a bit more than glasses but much less than a full headset, gives each eye the equivalent of a 4K OLED screen. It has a solid 100-degree field of view. It supports 6DoF tracking (meaning it responds to motion on different axes, not just simple head rotations), and it offers hand and eye tracking and support for over five screens in a virtual or mixed reality environment.
Immersed
In the presentation, Bijoy revealed that the Immersed Visor only weighs 186g, slightly less than an iPhone 16 Pro. It’s 64 percent lighter than the Meta Quest 3 (515g) and around 70 percent lighter than the Apple Vision Pro (600 to 650g). Weight and ergonomics have been drawbacks for many early adopters of VR and mixed-reality tech. (That includes some customers of the $3,500 Vision Pro.) So, trimming the Visor’s weight to about the same as a high-end smartphone could, in theory, help it succeed where competitors struggled. Part of that comes from (in borrowing a trick from Apple) a wired battery pack you stash in your pocket.
But unlike those devices, the Immersed Visor doesn’t include an app store or onboard experiences like games. Instead, it’s tailored for work: link it to your Windows, macOS or Linux computer (wirelessly or wired), and get stuff done on its immersive array of virtual screens. Its 6DoF tracking means you can stand up, lean or twist, and the virtual screens will remain planted where you put them, rather than awkwardly following you through space.
Like the company’s workspace app for Meta Quest and Vision Pro, you can operate either in a passthrough view of your space or an entirely virtual one. (It includes pleasant virtual environments like a mountaintop ski resort by a cozy fire.) You can also work with others in a shared space.
The device runs on the Qualcomm XR2+ Gen 2 chip, which debuted at CES 2024. The chip supports up to 4.3K per-eye resolution and can handle content up to 90fps.
Immersed
Immersed has chosen an unconventional pricing scheme. The device starts at $1,050 to buy outright. But you can get it for $400 upfront if you agree to a subscription model: $40 monthly for 24 months or $60 monthly for a 12-month term. Oh, and that model doesn’t ship until “six months after” October, meaning April 2025. If you want a device that starts shipping next month — i.e., the “Founder’s Edition” — that price increases to $1,350 outright or $700 plus the monthly subscription fee (same prices as the later-shipping version).
In theory, the Immersed Visor could hit a sweet spot for many spatial computing-curious folks who want something cheaper than the Vision Pro, with a higher resolution than the Meta Quest 3 and that’s (perhaps) less like a beta product than Xreal’s AR glasses. Whether it succeeds on those points, well, we won’t have a clue until we get some hands-on time. As far as I can see, no major media outlets (including Engadget) have shared hands-on demos of the device. As this year’s wave of absurdly hyped AI gadgets reminded us, big promises mean nothing if you end up with a $1,000 paperweight.
You can watch the presentation below and, if it tickles your fancy, pre-order from Immersed’s website.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/the-immersed-visor-aims-for-spatial-computings-sweet-spot-201031456.html?src=rss

Teased to death for months, Immersed founder Renji Bijoy finally unveiled the Visor at an Austin event on Thursday. The device, a bit more than glasses but much less than a full headset, gives each eye the equivalent of a 4K OLED screen. It has a solid 100-degree field of view. It supports 6DoF tracking (meaning it responds to motion on different axes, not just simple head rotations), and it offers hand and eye tracking and support for over five screens in a virtual or mixed reality environment.

Immersed

In the presentation, Bijoy revealed that the Immersed Visor only weighs 186g, slightly less than an iPhone 16 Pro. It’s 64 percent lighter than the Meta Quest 3 (515g) and around 70 percent lighter than the Apple Vision Pro (600 to 650g). Weight and ergonomics have been drawbacks for many early adopters of VR and mixed-reality tech. (That includes some customers of the $3,500 Vision Pro.) So, trimming the Visor’s weight to about the same as a high-end smartphone could, in theory, help it succeed where competitors struggled. Part of that comes from (in borrowing a trick from Apple) a wired battery pack you stash in your pocket.

But unlike those devices, the Immersed Visor doesn’t include an app store or onboard experiences like games. Instead, it’s tailored for work: link it to your Windows, macOS or Linux computer (wirelessly or wired), and get stuff done on its immersive array of virtual screens. Its 6DoF tracking means you can stand up, lean or twist, and the virtual screens will remain planted where you put them, rather than awkwardly following you through space.

Like the company’s workspace app for Meta Quest and Vision Pro, you can operate either in a passthrough view of your space or an entirely virtual one. (It includes pleasant virtual environments like a mountaintop ski resort by a cozy fire.) You can also work with others in a shared space.

The device runs on the Qualcomm XR2+ Gen 2 chip, which debuted at CES 2024. The chip supports up to 4.3K per-eye resolution and can handle content up to 90fps.

Immersed

Immersed has chosen an unconventional pricing scheme. The device starts at $1,050 to buy outright. But you can get it for $400 upfront if you agree to a subscription model: $40 monthly for 24 months or $60 monthly for a 12-month term. Oh, and that model doesn’t ship until “six months after” October, meaning April 2025. If you want a device that starts shipping next month — i.e., the “Founder’s Edition” — that price increases to $1,350 outright or $700 plus the monthly subscription fee (same prices as the later-shipping version).

In theory, the Immersed Visor could hit a sweet spot for many spatial computing-curious folks who want something cheaper than the Vision Pro, with a higher resolution than the Meta Quest 3 and that’s (perhaps) less like a beta product than Xreal’s AR glasses. Whether it succeeds on those points, well, we won’t have a clue until we get some hands-on time. As far as I can see, no major media outlets (including Engadget) have shared hands-on demos of the device. As this year’s wave of absurdly hyped AI gadgets reminded us, big promises mean nothing if you end up with a $1,000 paperweight.

You can watch the presentation below and, if it tickles your fancy, pre-order from Immersed’s website.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/the-immersed-visor-aims-for-spatial-computings-sweet-spot-201031456.html?src=rss

2 days ago
0

Brazil threatens daily fines for X and Starlink for ‘non-compliance’ with ban

One day after X started to come back online for some people in Brazil, the country’s Supreme Court is threatening the social media company and Elon Musk-owned Starlink with hefty daily fines. In a new order posted online, Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered regulators to “reactivate” blocking of X and said that the two companies could be hit with close $1 million a day in fines for not complying.
The latest order from Moraes, who has been publicly sparring with Musk for months, comes after X became accessible again in Brazil for many users on Wednesday. The company said in an earlier statement the change was “an inadvertent and temporary service restoration” that happened as a result of changing network providers.
Following Brazil’s ban last month, X reportedly shifted to using Cloudflare’s servers in the region, which made it more difficult for Brazilian ISPs to carry out the block. The company said Wednesday it made the change in network providers in order to “to provide service to Latin America” and that it expected its service in Brazil to go offline again “soon.”
Now, Moraes says that X could be fined the equivalent of $921,000 a day, beginning September 19, for each day of “non-compliance” with the ban. Starlink, which previously saw its Brazilian bank accounts frozen amid the dispute, faces “joint liability” if X doesn’t pay, according to the order. Moraes also ordered the country’s internet regulator to “take immediate measures to prevent access to the platform by blocking the ‘CDN Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno’ servers, and other similar ones, created to circumvent the court order that suspended the operation of the old Twitter in Brazil.”
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/brazil-threatens-daily-fines-for-x-and-starlink-for-non-compliance-with-ban-194542476.html?src=rss

The latest order from Moraes, who has been publicly sparring with Musk for months, comes after X became accessible again in Brazil for many users on Wednesday. The company said in an earlier statement the change was “an inadvertent and temporary service restoration” that happened as a result of changing network providers.

Following Brazil’s ban last month, X reportedly shifted to using Cloudflare’s servers in the region, which made it more difficult for Brazilian ISPs to carry out the block. The company said Wednesday it made the change in network providers in order to “to provide service to Latin America” and that it expected its service in Brazil to go offline again “soon.”

Now, Moraes says that X could be fined the equivalent of $921,000 a day, beginning September 19, for each day of “non-compliance” with the ban. Starlink, which previously saw its Brazilian bank accounts frozen amid the dispute, faces “joint liability” if X doesn’t pay, according to the order. Moraes also ordered the country’s internet regulator to “take immediate measures to prevent access to the platform by blocking the ‘CDN Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno’ servers, and other similar ones, created to circumvent the court order that suspended the operation of the old Twitter in Brazil.”

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/brazil-threatens-daily-fines-for-x-and-starlink-for-non-compliance-with-ban-194542476.html?src=rss

2 days ago
0

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