**The Art of Customization: A Journey to the Perfect Home Screen**

As I sat down to record this episode of The Vergecast, I couldn't help but think about how much my home screen had changed since our last conversation. It's been a few weeks since I decided to take the plunge and customize my iPhone to my liking. With the latest Dynamic Island functionality, I was able to hide that annoying shortcut notification that used to drop down every time I opened a shortcut. This little change made all the difference in my experience with my phone.

I remember when this ability first came out, it was okay at first. The drop-down notification was something you got used to, but sometimes it was just too much. You'd be in the middle of something, and suddenly, there it would be again. It was like a nagging voice in your ear, telling you that you needed to check your notifications. But with Dynamic Island, all that is gone. The notification is hidden away, making my home screen feel cleaner and more streamlined.

This got me thinking about how much I wanted to customize my phone. I've always been someone who likes to have control over their digital life, but sometimes, it feels like there are too many options. Too many widgets, shortcuts, and apps vying for attention. But with a little bit of planning and experimentation, I was able to create the perfect home screen.

For me, simplicity is key. I only want to see four apps in my dock and another four on my home screen. I like to use the clear spaces app to arrange them in a way that makes sense to me. It's all about creating a balance between form and function. And let's be real, sometimes it's nice to just have a clean slate when you wake up your phone in the morning.

I've always been a bit of a "less is more" kind of person when it comes to my digital life. I like to keep things simple and uncluttered. But as I started to explore the world of customization, I realized that there's so much potential for creativity and self-expression. It's not just about changing your wallpaper or adding some widgets; it's about creating a experience that feels tailored to your needs.

**A New Home Screen**

So, how did I end up with my current home screen? Well, it was a bit of a journey. I started by getting rid of all the widgets on my phone. I know, I know, they're supposed to be useful, but for me, they were just too distracting. Then, I changed my wallpaper to something that really caught my eye. It's a beautiful image that sets the tone for the rest of my screen.

Next, I decided to change up some of my icons. I wanted them to all look cohesive and work together as a team. So, I started by selecting just four apps to keep on my home screen. These were the ones that I used most frequently, and they were all single style. This made it easy for me to group them together and create a clean, modern look.

But here's the thing: sometimes, it's not just about what you see on your screen; it's also about how it makes you feel. When you turn on your phone, you want to be greeted with something that feels like an extension of yourself. For me, that means having a home screen that's both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

**The Vergecast: The Verge's Podcast**

And speaking of the Verge, we're just getting started with our latest episode of The Vergecast. Joining me are Andrew Marino and Liam James Brook, my trusty co-hosts and producers of this show. We'll be discussing all things tech, from Xbox leaks to Amazon and Microsoft events. It's going to be a wild ride, so stay tuned.

**The Meta Episode**

But before we get started, I want to take a moment to talk about our meta episode that's coming soon. This is an episode unlike any other, where we'll be discussing the very nature of The Vergecast and what it means to be part of this community. We'll be exploring topics like the future of podcasting, social media, and more. It's going to be a thought-provoking conversation that I think you won't want to miss.

**The Future of The Vergecast**

And finally, before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you to everyone who tunes in each week. Your support means the world to us, and we're grateful for your enthusiasm. We can't wait to share more content with you, from gadget reviews to in-depth analysis. It's going to be a great year, so stay tuned.

**The Vergecast is a Verge Production**

And that's all for today's episode of The Vergecast. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James Brook, with editorial direction from our very own Alex. We're part of the VOX media podcast Network, which means you can find us on all your favorite platforms.

Thanks again to everyone who listens. Until next time, stay curious and keep exploring!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the vergecast the flagship podcast of the action button I'm your friend David Pierce and I'm having one of those days I assume everybody has days like this where you wake up at some outrageously early hour and you look at the clock and you're like oh cool I have five more hours to sleep but then something in your brain is just like no we are awake now anyway that's the kind of day I'm having I've been up since like two o'clock this morning I read a bunch of news I read a book I looked at Tick Tock for a while I saw every single thing that has like ever been posted to Reddit in history I did all the New York Times games and somehow it's still like first thing in the morning it's a very confusing way to start the day because I kind of feel like it's lunch time now now I'm out just like aimlessly wandering the neighborhood because I don't know what else to do with myself because the sun just came up and I've been awake for what feels like 100 hours anyway it's going to be a very confusing day I'm gonna get to 2 p.m and be like well time for dinner time to go to bed wish me luck anyway we have an awesome show coming up for you today we're going to talk mostly about the iPhones because it's iPhone season we have reviews of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro to talk about we're also going to talk about our reviews of the Apple watch and the Apple watch Ultra but we're also going to talk about software stuff there's obviously new stuff in iOS 17 interactive widgets and all kinds of cool things going on but more broadly thinking about all this stuff over the last few months has really led me down this Rabbit Hole of phone personalization I think the work people are willing to do to make their phone feel like an extension of themselves whether it's a case or the wallpaper or the app icons or the look and feel of the whole phone in general people are willing to do a lot so that when you turn on the screen it makes you feel something it makes you feel like you and I think that's really cool so I called up a couple of smart people to talk about how we do that and how that works and how Apple thinks about that so we're going to dig into that too all of that is coming up in just a second but first it is finally time that I can go home and like reasonably make breakfast and have coffee and start the day and also probably take a several hour nap and see how we do so I'm gonna go do all of that and then we'll be right back this is the vergecast we'll see in a sec thank you welcome back all right I've had coffee I've had Cheerios I kind of know what time it is I'm ready let's do this the new iPhones go on sale this Friday and our reviews of the iPhone 15 15 plus 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max are all live on theverse.com you should read them all they're all really great I don't know if this is the most interesting phone of the Year exactly in fact it's definitely not the most interesting phone of the year if you define interesting as just like the one trying to do the most new cool stuff but it's almost certainly the one the most people are thinking about buying but should you and which one who better to answer that question than the people who reviewed the phones The Verge is Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert they're both here let's get into it Alison hello hello Dan hello hello you both have used two of the four phones You've Done big reviews uh I have a million like specific questions but let's just kind of like Top Line takeaways from your reviews like are these phones any good yes or no who cares Dan you go first iPhone 15 and 15 plus what's the verdict yeah in a shocking turn of events Apple released a turd of a device no I'm kidding uh this is the 15th iPhone like it's it's like they've been doing this a long time they know how to make iPhones yes they are good devices in fact you could probably say they are great devices and I think that I reviewed the 15 and the 15 plus I think if people buy them they're going to be really happy with them the type of person that buys this phone typically is coming from a much older iPhone and so they're not coming from an iPhone 14 probably not a 13 so we're talking like a 12 or an 11 or maybe even a 10s and they are going to get a lot of new features and new experiences plus better camera better battery life better performance better display all that stuff so I think it is like a meaningful upgrade for the type of person that is buying this are the 15 and 15 plus all that exciting to us like enthusiasts and maybe our audience probably not like we've seen mean all of these things before they are I've been calling them a repackaging of the 14 pro they've got most of the same features as the 14 pro but not all of the features notably they have uh they don't have high refresh rate screens and they don't have always on displays which is like two things that I think would make a better experience on these devices and we're going to come back to both those things yeah but like otherwise you get the dynamic Island you get a high resolution camera Apple's changes to the design this year by just kind of softening the edges and the matte glass and stuff do make them nicer to hold which you'll never experience because you're going to put a case on it anyways but it's there and then they come in five very boring colors the rage you feel about the colors really like it it's just like it fills me up in a lovely way I don't get it like why bother with colors if you're gonna if this is what you're gonna do and we know Apple's done good colors in the past yeah apple is perfectly capable of making cool colors it just chose not to this year for some reason like if you find yourself making a color that you call Natural like you all right Allison the pro and pro Max what's the what's the kind of Top Line verdict here yeah it's it's I mean they're good in the ways that we are used to a pro iPhone being good I think the new things here this year are like certainly not breakthroughs and anyone on Android who is hearing me talk about USBC in like a five times zoom lens is you know like cackling yeah we should just say right up top like Android users like we know yeah the number of things we're going to say that Android phones have had since like 2004 like we get it we're with you we're on the same page the s23 ultra is a terrific phone yes just let Apple people have this one just just for today yeah people have this like a blanket statement of like I get it I know yeah yeah but yeah it is the first time these things have all come together on an iPhone and I think they're they're smart in the Pro they're things that you know being able to to hook up like an SD card reader that isn't a special lightning dong single situation is cool and like I appreciate that someone who is maybe just just wants a phone just wants it to work is it doesn't really care so much but it's there the five-time zoom you know is is neat for people who want to get in there a little more and who are a little more picky about their photography and the action button is just nice like you want a button that does whatever you want on your iPhone you can have it now like that's super sweet okay I have a bunch of specific things in there I want to talk about I think USBC is a is a big one and I want to spend a bunch of time talking about that because that surprised me a lot from both of your reviews but the first thing that jumped out at me that you both said which I thought was surprising was that the new phones feel different like to hold in your hands than the other ones do like I feel like I'm used to Apple saying every year like we've developed an all-new way to make these phones that will change everything and then you pick it up and it's like Yep this is still that one it's an iPhone but both of you had the experience of kind of picking up the new one and being like this feels this feels better walk me through that what what's actually better about it when you hold it so I live the life you guys know where I have like 10 phones on my desk at once and I will reach for the 15 Pro and pick it up and I just have that moment of like oh this is a little nicer than I was expecting like it's the brushed finish on the sides of the phone it's they're a little more rounded the edges so they're they're just like a tiny bit more comfortable to hold and really the major thing is on the Pro Models especially just being noticeably lighter like they're not light phones but if you've ever hauled a 14 pro Max then you know the experience of like holding a paper weight in your hand yeah it's a big phone yeah this this feels like holding a normal phone it doesn't feel like holding a super heavy phone okay and so how much of that is like the the titanium and all the stuff they talked about in the Pro versus just kind of the the way they've reshaped it because Dan you had a very similar experience in kind of how the lower end phones feel right yeah you know the lower end phones I guess the the 15 to 15 plus they're technically the same weights or within very small minute differences of last year's models um but if you're coming from like an iPhone 11 an iPhone 15 is like noticeably lighter like the order of more than 20 grams which is is absolutely noticeable I've been my personal phone's an iPhone 13 Pro and that just feels like a lead weight to me the 15 plus which has a much larger screen is actually technically lighter than my 13 Pro and so you know you you may say in like oh 10 20 Grands here it doesn't really matter like when you're holding these things all day long and you're putting them in your pocket or whatever like I feel every single gram that gets added and it's like my biggest complaint with the iPhone for the past three years the Pro Models at least is how heavy they've become because apple is stuck with with the stainless steel frame and the polished and the premium All That Jazz so I'm really excited that the Pro Models move to Titanium but I also appreciate that the standard model also benefits from the softer edges on the frame so that it doesn't cut into your pinky or your your palm as much when you're holding it the back glass is now a frosted or matte finish which is like nicer to hold I think that makes it a little bit more slippery uh anyone who's owned a pro phone for the past few years kind of knows what that back glass feels like it's a kind of a slippery experience again most people are going to put cases on these and all kind of doesn't matter but they just feel like nicer objects and that's like befitting of what the prices are because really even the less expensive phones are starting at 800 and at this point like that is like purely in premium phone territory you can get really like Advanced devices for this much I mean if you find a good deal you'll find a flip phone from Samsung for that much money so like you know you have to like kind of justify what the cost is that you're paying for and there's a lot of reasons for it but you know part of it is the experience of the tactile device and and I think that these are very well made it's very obvious that Apple's been making iPhones for a very long time and they've continued to like kind of iterate and polish them to to make them a nicer experience okay yeah that makes sense Allison this one's just for you and then we're going to go back to things Dan's allowed to talk about uh action button what did you do well I don't care about anything else about the iPhone 15. I care so much about the action button button there's a new button I so I put it to open the camera which I thought I would really like because I I struggle with a swiping on the screen to open I don't know why the number of people I have heard say that in the last seven days is so fascinating I feel like there are a hundred thousand ways to open the camera another button to do it is the last thing I need oh yeah it seems like so many people struggle with that same thing you're describing it's really interesting yeah it's always when someone else is looking at me using the phone too they're like take this picture and you're like I don't know I'm sorry um yeah so I I that's like the first thing I did I was super excited about it but then I noticed I just wasn't really using it for that I I think it's just like I used the pro Max a little more and I think having it just like like it's that much taller and the action button is that much farther away it just felt like a pain to it was like kind of awkward to be like reaching around the back of the phone to you know push the button but so I have other ideas for it I'm gonna I'm gonna do the shortcuts like y'all think I'm kidding about making it order me a pumpkin spice latte but I am 100 doing that yeah I'm back in my back in my natural environment so I can go wild with it now I love that uh Dan you're not allowed to answer because you reviewed the loser phones I'm just kidding someday when you're allowed to have an action button many years from now what are you gonna do with it uh I hate to be really boring but I I think I would probably use it for the ringer switch maybe but like I was thinking yesterday there's a feature on Android that I really like that uh if you flip the phone face down it turns into Do Not Disturb mode and there isn't a way to do that on the iPhone but I could set the action button to do not disturb so like I could just like hold it for a second put in doing a certain face down it's more than like I want to do I want to just flip it over and have it done so I don't know that's like my first initial idea I you know Allison mentioned we the camera I think that what a lot of enthusiasts will do is set it up to open third-party camera apps which right now is a pain no matter which way you do it on the iPhone whether it's from the lock screen or control center or whatever opening a third-party camera app is kind of annoying I think maybe you could set a widget on the lock screen now to do it which is a workaround but I've already seen the developers of halide are like adding a toggle in their app to like let you do it from the action button and so I'm sure a lot of people are going to do that yeah that's a good one uh it's funny you mentioned do not disturb because that was that was my thought too like somebody sent me a thing the other day where they had built a shortcut where whenever they plug their phone in if it's after 10 pm it automatically switches it to sleep mode and I was like that's genius but then this came out and I was just like oh it's the same thing like I can just punch on do not disturb which is the kind of thing that I'd like to like do often when I even just want to pay attention for a few minutes or whatever and having a button that can do it seems very nice I'm very into that but okay that's enough of that I could also talk to you about interactive widget it's for several hours but we'll do that on another podcast let's talk about you USBC because the thing that I think a bunch of us have discovered over the last eight days since this iPhone launched is that Apple made a much more open port than any of us expected and I'm just assuming knowing the two of you that you've spent a lot of time over the last week plugging random things into the iPhone to see what would happen Allison what what have you been plugging into the iPhone and what has happened well when we were shooting the video you know we had access to like an ethernet cable and SD card and all this stuff and yeah it truly is like kind of mind-blowing that you plug it in and it it doesn't it doesn't complain it doesn't you know make you jump through a bunch of Hoops like it just does whatever you're trying to do and like we plugged in that ethernet cable and turned off the Wi-Fi and the cell data and it just had internet just had internet from a but it was like who who saw that coming what a world I know yeah I think we've been so conditioned for like especially with the iPhone for Apple to get in the way of what we want to do with it that is it's like it's a it feels a little silly to say that like I plugged in an ethernet cable and it worked or like I plugged in an SD card and I could see the files on it like but we are just so conditioned to the iPhone's kind of like guard Walled Garden experience where you wouldn't think that you can normally do these things and in the past they required special Hardware adapters and even then it was still limited so like it was kind of fun to just Jam something into the USB port Watch What Happens and then be like oh that's the thing you would have expected to happen and like I don't know how often you're going to use ethernet on your iPhone probably never but photographers might use the SD card videographers can shoot to directly to an SSD stuff like that like all those things just kind of work it's almost like it's a computer yeah what a crazy idea it does seem like storage is probably the most likely real use case for people right in part because it's a way to like get stuff off of your phone in a way that is not always easy but also because like I I feel like a thing I have surprisingly often is I have something on a hard drive or somewhere else that I would like to be on my phone so that I can do something with and you can just plug in external storage and it just opens up in the files app right like that's pretty meaningful and new and it's nuts that I'm saying that like it's an exciting new feature but but like here we are are there are there other things that you feel like rise to that level of like things people might actually use this port for other than charging I think that some people might want to use it for video out you can plug a USBC cable to HDMI or to DisplayPort it supports DisplayPort out at 4K 60 Resolution so if you want to plug the phone into a TV and watch a video on the TV you get you get screen mirroring basically but the the if you're watching a video you can make the video go whole full screen that might be a use case for some folks but again yeah I think you're probably right in that it is either USB hubs that allow you to plug in like USB a accessories or storage are really going to be the main type of accessories outside of charging that you would use a USBC port for yeah I just I just want to say Allison kudos for getting the sentence Dex remains undefeated into the 15 Pro review because thank you you would think you could plug it into something and you might get a full-blown you know desktop environment on a screen but we got a little we got a little Dex win in the 15 Pro review and that made me very happy and and they're so intense about like how good this processor is that you would think like okay so let me do something with it no you can play Resident Evil I will not lie I have had the thought that stage manager feels like something that might appear when you plug your iPhone into a larger display at some time in the near future I don't think it's ever going to happen I will do that once if that exists and then never ever ever again because it's stage manager okay so the the other thing we should talk about is the cameras and I think especially on the pro Allison there are a bunch of new things there's a bunch of new like underlying Tech but in terms of like features for people there's the new telephoto lens the which is 5X Zoom which I think is a big deal there are the new uh focal lengths on the default camera which you can move around and pick between it shoots 24 megapixels by default now am I missing anything like have those jumped out to you as like really making a difference in how you use your phone's camera every day yeah they're all things that I'm really appreciating and having that you know you could always like pinch and zoom a little bit if you feel like the standard camera lens is too wide but there's something different about especially having those little like millimeter focal length equivalents in there it just kind of warms your heart and makes you feel like oh I'm taking I'm doing photography yeah I'm taking a picture at 35 millimeters now 1.5 x it like switches back to 1.5 x as soon as you do it you get to be the person who says I make photos I don't take photos yeah that's what happens yeah I've been saying that all week and everyone's so tired of me I'm like shh I'm making photographs no I I've like just very eagerly like Incorporated them into how I think about taking pictures with an iPhone and it's great I'm I'm happy with you know all the flexibility we get this year yeah Dan you I remember when it first launched we're very excited about the idea of the 24 megapixel default photos yeah my worry was file size right and there's always the thing where it's like it depends on where you put it how much resolution you actually need and on and on we can debate that forever but how good a photo do you want versus how many can you store on your phone is kind of a forever question like did Apple find the right middle there yeah I think with the 24 it's not as big of a file size compromise as as some people might have expected if you're using the default Heath mode which I'm going to say Heath which either is or is not pronounced Heath but we'll leave it alone I noticed that it's about like uh you know if a JPEG is or if a 12 megapixel image is two megabytes a 24 is about three that can very very uh some you know photos if they've got more detail in them and stuff like that can be larger and so then the 24 megapixel will be larger but when you go to 48 megapixel it's double the 24. so that is like a significant difference and that will eat up your storage and I don't think you actually gain much in terms of detail with the side-by-side comparisons I did between the 24 and the full size 48. you're not getting a lot there in terms of extra detail because these are such small sensors but with 24 megapixels you're moving past the 12 which we had been at since the iPhone 6s and you are getting a little bit more room to crop maybe a little bit more room to digital Zoom as Allison mentioned and a little bit more flexibility But ultimately you know Apple likes to talk about how you could blow it up to a 20 inch by 30 inch poster and do all this oven it's like yeah no you're not going to do that uh it's a phone photo it's still going to look like it comes from a phone but it gives you a little bit more cropping ability after the fact Without Really compromising storage that much these phones all start at 128 gigabytes now which is not terrible starting point especially if you're coming from an older one that had 64 gigs or getting twice as much storage so you got more room for the photos and apple would love to sell you iCloud Plus Storage which it will do up to 12 terabytes a month now it would like I mean it would love to like like so much it would make Tim Cook personally thrilled to sell you 12 terabytes of iCloud storage uh Allison you and I are both long-term anti-digital Zoom zealots I would say uh I believe it is Criminal to just stand there and pinch and zoom on the screen to make your photos worse but you in the process of reviewing the 15 Pro and Promax seem to have found some kind of Zen with the way that apple is approaching this can you can you explain this to me how did you why does it feel like this works for you yeah I I think part of it is in my head when you're when you're going to like a specific focal length and apple is doing a little bit extra in the background with the processing you know it's not just it's not just Uprising the image and calling it a day there's a fair amount going on with like deep fusion and then incorporating some detail from a higher resolution frame which is either the 48 or 24 megapixel if you're in the 35 millimeter crop how much of that makes a big difference I don't know but it makes me feel better I feel like at ease with the picture that I'm taking and I think that's something that we're all gonna have to get more comfy with going forward because even why can't you know comparing it with the Samsung s23 Ultra which has that 10x lens you know I'm going to 5x to compare it to the iPhone and that's not a native focal length that it has it still looks better than the iPhone image which is funny so it just kind of changes how you have to think about like like letting the trusting camera a little more and not being quite so picky about focal length it is a weird thing I mean all of the process now is digital like every step of the way computers are doing computer things so I think I'm I'm also slowly learning to let go of the idea that if I do it at 1X it is capturing a photo as photos Were Meant To Be captured and everything else is like some computery line like it's all kind of a computer Eli at this point right yeah we've we've heard this from uh I know Google when it introduced its uh super red Zoom feature it kind of sets similar things that like if you were to use super resume before you take the photo you will get a better image than if you just took the photo at the wide angle and digitally cropped it afterwards because they're they're taking input from multiple frames and averaging them together and things like that whereas if you crop later it is just a single frame that you have to work with and Apple's doing a very similar type of thing here where it is averaging multiple frames stacking them together that's what deep Fusion has been doing for a few years now I think I was in there on like generation three or five of defusion stuff like that and then now they have the larger sensor that they can also pair higher resolution data from details so I know that like when I go get an iPhone 15 Pro and start using it I'm going to lock it on 35 millimeter and never look back that was actually going to be my next question is like what's the right default setup here because the other 35 millimeter is the only correct Focus okay so we we shoot 24 megapixel Heath images 35 millimeter camera Victory forever prores log video you can fit four photos on your phone that's all over if you want to be the cool Street photographer you shoot a 35 millimeter there we go that's true that is proven asked and answered all right so let's let's do some like straightforward buying advice here so Dan last year it seems very clear that the people who wanted a 14 picked a 14 over a 14 plus is there any reason to believe that's not going to be the case again of the like entry phones do we think the 14 is probably the one for most people the 15 Jesus Christ so I you know I think uh last year with the 14 and the 14 plus it was kind of a weird scenario one the 14 plus didn't come out for quite a few months afterwards so it didn't wasn't the variable at the same time and then the 14 plus was like if you want a big screen and a big battery and and Allison's review last year like she made the point like this delivers on both of those things but it was doing it at 900 and if you wanted a 14 pro Max it was only 200 bucks more this year the uh not only is the 15 to 15 plus available at the same time so you will be able to take advantage of all the same carrier promotions or whatever you'll be in the store you'll look at it it's like oh wow this one actually is bigger but it's also it's still 900 but the bigger Pro phone the pro Max has gone up in starting price 100 so now there's a 300 jump and I think that starts to make it like do I really need to go that much if I just want a big screen and a big battery and I I think that people will be making that calculus more and maybe it'll do better for the plus model and I can tell you that the plus model this year absolutely delivers on battery life I had a horrific travel day coming back from WWDC I was staring at the 15 plus all day long I had like something like eight nine hours of screen time and I got home at like 11 or 12 uh and midnight and I still had like 35 battery left left on it it was pretty good like this thing just goes and so for a lot of people big screen big batteries exactly what they want and uh 15 plus delivers I think if you are coming from a mini which if you have a 12 mini maybe you're getting around time they're like needing a new phone the iPhone 15 is obviously going to be much more attractive to you it's smaller it's lighter fits in your hand easier and stuff like that I think that's really the only practical option for anyone who wants a small iPhone at this point and then the last point of consideration is as usual apple is selling last year's 14 and 14 plus for 100 less than the 15 and 15 plus this year I think that this year the things you get for that hundred dollars more make it worthwhile to get the 15. last year we had the opposite conclusion the 14 was not that much better than the 13 and you can still buy the 13 for 100 bucks less go save your money but this year you get USBC which is more convenient flexible way to charge uh you get the dynamic Island which is uh you know more pleasant fun user interface and it's going to continue to get more utilized as we go forward and you do get meaningful improvements on the camera we didn't really talk too much about it but I think that the automatic portrait mode is a thing that people will actually really like and use and get a lot of value out of especially the average custom consumer buying the iPhone 15 or 15 plus so all of those things add up I think they make it worthwhile to buy the 15 over the 14 this year but if you have a 14 there's no reason to upgrade there's mean there's probably not much of a reason to upgrade but if you are on a 12 or 11 or older then I think you you get a lot here this year the portrait mode thing is a good one I knew there was something in the cool things in the camera list I was forgetting and that's one that's a big deal yeah I I think that like you know I observe my spouse taking pictures of our kids all the time and she never switches into portrait mode or anything like that uh she just snaps with the default camera and now if she had an iPhone 15 or 15 Pro she can just do that and then after the fact I can go in the photos app and be like Oh portrait mode cool uh and I can play with it and whatever and make it pop more and I think that there's probably a lot of people who a never realized that they could switch to portrait mode because it was an entirely different setting where B didn't remember how or didn't remember to do it in the moment when they're trying to capture the image which is happening quickly in front of them because like Allison they couldn't figure out how to get the button to work yeah just stuck on that home black screen yeah yeah okay and then Allison for you the the Pro versus the pro Max again screen and Battery differences am I right in thinking that the 5x telephoto Zoom is only on the pro Max that's right okay so that's a big difference too like what how how would you rank between the two like how should people choose which one to buy yeah it kind of throws all my usual like buying a new phone thinking out the window because I I think that you know there is kind of a different customer for the pro and the pro Max and whether whether or not your current phone is working well is like less part of the equation but I think yeah the five-time zoom is nice I I get why it's only on the bigger phone Google only puts it on his bigger phone it's something I would consider going up to the bigger phone for especially since it's a little bit lighter weight this year and it doesn't feel like such a burden carrying it around but there's a lot to consider and I think some people are just gonna jump on you know the new Pro iPhone and I think like as silly as the word Pro is and kind of meaningless now I think there is a certain kind of person who like if if your phone is kind of a big part of like how you work when you travel you've got chargers for other things or if you if you're a video creator and you can see yourself really you know using it more in your workflow I think it does make sense for a I don't think browser the word I would use but it makes sense for a certain kind of person yeah it's like the iPhone 15 videographer it's like if you if you shoot a lot of big files you're the this might work yeah extra is pretty good I like yeah we kind of like have these discussions every year like who is the person to buy a pro over a standard iPhone and like ultimately at the end of the day Apple sells a ton of pro phones I think the reports from the 14th generation was like the iPhone 14 was like single digit percentage more than the iPhone 14 pro in terms of like numbers of people that bought it so like people will buy the more expensive phone I think because it's more expensive but also because it's nicer I think a lot of people see the three lenses on the back where they're just 3x or 5x and they see that like hey this does more and and their carriers willing to subsidize half the price anyways so you know I think we'll see a lot of people buying the Pro Models this year and then the 15 and the 15 plus will be you know a much slower ramp up in terms of like interest and buying and people will buy them as their old phones break but like the early adopter the person who's upgrading every single year they're going to gravitate to the pro always it's the exciting one that's what I wrote in my review is like the regular 15 is never going to be exciting it's never going to be like the platform for new I ideas or Technologies the pro is always going to be that so if you want that if you want to experience that you're always going to go with the pro yeah I I totally agree I think that's right um all right I'm gonna let you guys go here in a minute but before I do will you guys hang out and do a hotline question with me really fast just I think you're the right two people to help me answer this question as a reminder the hotline number is 866 Verge one one call ask us all your Tech questions uh and you can email vergecast at theverge.com if you don't want to call but frankly it's super fun when you call it's nice to hear your voices uh okay let's hear Dan I have been pestering you about this all day so I expect good things from you but here we go let me just play the question we have for you right now hey there guys my name is Jordan I had a question about the new iPhone 15 specifically how you could charge other iPhones by plugging in a USBC cable I know that if you do a USBC to lightning it will always charge the lightning phone and if you the iPhone it will kind of do like a handshake action and charge the Lesser charged of the two my question is you know it'll it'll do like a 51 versus 50 and then the 51 percent will start charging that one or whatever but what if you take like an iPhone plus and you plug in say a USBC cable to another like standard iPhone 15 and they're both at like you know let's say the the iPhone plus is at like 45 whereas the other one is at like 50 right so like the plus technically has less battery percentage but it has a bigger battery what happens who wins that exchange does the plus charge because it technically has more battery free with which to charge or does the phone with the higher percentage win every time thanks and I love the show okay so this is maybe the most Verge casty hotline question we have ever received I was gonna say I love it so much I have an answer Dan I have been making you plug things into other things all day I've been also running down batteries to try and get the levels right or whatever so tell me what you know so far so what I know so far is uh he's correct that if you plug in a lightning iPhone to a USBC iPhone the USBC one will always send power to the lightning iPhone the lightning does not work the other direction and also airpods and watches which is like the thing it's ostensibly meant for is to charge your small devices yeah airpods and watches it will charge those devices they will not reverse charge the phone but right now I've got the iPhone 15 plus which is at 75 Battery and I've got the iPhone 15 which is at 96 battery and I plug them in together with my USBC cable and the iPhone 15 is charging the 15 plus so the theory is which everyone has the lowest amount of battery percentage on its meter even if the real life capacity is still more than the 15 uh seems to be the way that the power goes USBC is kind of weird you can kind of like sometimes unplug them and replug them and it will do its handshake again and like switch roles with other USBC devices but with the iPhones at least it seems to be consistently happening that the one with the larger battery percentage charges the one with a lower battery percentage so if you wanted to be a real Mensch with your iPhone 15 and you've got a buddy who's got an iPhone 15 plus or Pro Max or whatever and and you want to give them your battery and and give them some juice and they will just suck all the life out of your phone to power up their big battery cells you can do that but it does do this at a pretty slow wattage it's 4.5 Watts which is slower than slow wireless charging so you're not going to be charging all that quickly but I guess if you you know really are in a pinch you can do it uh I tried some other devices the Macbook will always charge the phone the MacBook could have like no power and it will still try to charge a phone I plugged the iPhone 15 plus into a lightning iPad and what happened was the lightning iPad would start charging for a second and then it would say not charging because I think it's just not enough wattage I plugged uh the 15 plus into a Windows tablet thing and it would give enough juice to wake the Windows tablet up and then it would try to charge the iPhone so for the most part you're not really charging larger devices with this aside from the fact that you can charge the bigger iPhone with the smaller iPhone which is kind of hilarious if your friend with a 15 plus asks you to charge up their phone that's not a good friend yeah I mean where did they go wrong in their in their manage life management where they need they didn't charge their phone that gets massive battery life yeah real friends charge their own phone I don't know good friends charge their own phone but best friends charge everybody's phone maybe the other weird thing you can do while we're on the topic is let me just uh see if this actually works I've got a a magsafe charger here I'm gonna put the phone on the magsafe charger and watch it start charging and then I'm going to plug it into another phone through a USBC cable and everybody charges so you could daisy chain oh oh that's it that's kind of rad yeah I mean I assume this is going to stop charging when it like overheats but yeah all of these things are like use cases that don't exist but I think it's delightful nonetheless this is the potential of USBC the power of USBC that we've been missing with the iPhone for however many years it's here I love it all right well listen I hope that helps USBC is very confusing uh and if we figure out the actual logic behind all of this we'll be sure and let you know but for now go charge your friends iPhones be a good friend all right thank you both we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and talk about the Apple Action welcome back the iPhones aren't the only new Apple devices coming out this week there's also the new Apple watch series 9 and the Apple watch Ultra 2. the verge's Victoria song are resident wearer of many fitness watches simultaneously reviewed them both and she's been using the new watch OS 10 software for a while as well V and I haven't talked about this yet but I have a feeling the software is actually the real story of the Apple watch this year but let's see if I'm right or not these with me here now heavy hello Dan Seafort's still here hi Dan how you doing just can't get rid of you this week no I'm a cockroach okay so my overarching thesis via about these new watches and I am curious to hear if I'm right is that the software this year is significantly more interesting than the hardware this year one hundred thousand percent like the well okay 100 maybe like 999 000. like that one percent is uh so like if we're talking about Hardware the one little tiny stumble in your theory is the S9 sip that enables all the interesting software updates so it's still software explain what that what that actually means in practice uh so the S9 sip is the first let's say major in scare quotes a major processor update that the Apple watch has had in a very long time because so far it the last few years it's been a re-badged version of the processor from the year before no real meaningful changes in terms of like features that it enables but this year it's actually got a 30 faster CPU and a four chord neural engine that you know that enables the double tap feature uh it enables a smarter Siri smarter in the sense that it works offline now and uh is supposedly 25 more accurate at dictation and the screens are brighter yay because better power efficiency but they're not going to give you better battery life for that power efficiency that are going to reinvest it into brighter screens yeah this is the thing I wish Apple would stop doing like I actually think on most of Apple's devices it's the right call especially with the MacBooks I think we've reached a point where like the battery life is terrific sacrificing a bunch of stuff to get me like a few more hours I'm not sure it's all that meaningful I think especially with the entry-level watch in this case the series nine I would take small trade-offs to get like six more hours of battery life out of the thing it's the only device of mine that reliably consistently dies at this point uh oh God David you just opened the can of worms which is to say that there are two camps with regards to the Apple watch and their battery life there's the camp that's like don't even look at me in the face until this Apple watch can last a week how dare you come back to me after yet another year with 18 hours of battery life I spit I Spit on Your Grave patui there's that crowd uh and then there's the other crowd which I think Dan belongs to this crowd which is like I have my little charging routine my Apple watch is never out of battery you charge your phone every night it's not that hard to just plop your Apple watch on a charter at like a time when you're not using it like the shower or 10 minutes before bed why are you complaining so hard I will just stay in my own defense I would love to not have to have the routine I just happen to have the routine out of necessity can I tell you my problem with this routine the the correct time you just said it V to charge your watch is while you're in the shower and there's something about having a charger in the bathroom that I just can't I can't do it maybe it's the specifics of my bathroom I don't we don't have to talk a lot about what my bathroom looks like but the idea of just like having a cable dangling in my bathroom waiting for my Apple watch is just like a bridge too far for me I can't do it you could just put it in your bedroom and just go back to your bedroom TV David David is in a mansion his bedroom and his bathroom are like four football fields they're in separate he's gonna miss all those steps who has the time I know no my real problem is I forget to take it off until I'm already in the shower and then I just kind of like Huck it over to the sink and that's my charging strategy but the actual features here you basically named the three things I want to talk about and it seems like from a pure Hardware perspective they're so similar that you couldn't tell which watch was which right like you had the ultra and the ultra two and they're the same damn thing as far as like what the actual thing looks and feels like right yeah and I like I've told this story before uh but when I was at Apple Park and I had my ultra out and I was you know taking comparison photos like this representative very well meaning comes up to me she's like can you put your Ultra away we wouldn't want you to lose it and that's because it looks exactly the same I've actually had to have a code this week when I'm switching straps I'm where I say out loud the ultra is the one with the gray strap the ultra 2 is the one with the pink strap like I've basically been keeping the new ones in pink because pink is what's new I love it and I had to do that because even the back Crystal doesn't say Ultra two it says Ultra so there's really no way to tell unless I like I have terrible eyesight um if you read my reviews you know I complain about readability all the time but I basically have to take the original Ultra straight up to my face and go which one has that minuscule Nick that I got one time that only I know where it is and that's how I tell the ultra and the ultra two apart as far as my units go okay good so we can just leave the hardware aside because it is what it is the double tap seems like the thing right like it's the thing Apple talked the most about this feature has like been around for a while in some accessibility ways like just walk me through kind of how this thing like fits into your life as a watchware so I actually I think this is potentially one of the most significant updates just that Apple's ever put out but it's just not flashy right first of all it's in some capacity it's been around since watch OS 8 and Assistive touch right now that Tech is just being repurposed in a more General use capacity it's supposedly it's built into the system so it's more contextual you don't have to do anything whereas with Assistive touch you have to go into the accessibility settings you have to enable it and you have to program it because for some people with limb differences this is the only possible way for them to control the watch it's how they're going to navigate menus it's how they're going to operate the digital Crown if they have an ultra it's how they're going to press the action button so it's it's much more comprehensive and there's more adjusters involved there's a clench gesture there's a single tap gesture there's there's a there's four actual gestures that you do with Assistive touch but double tap is just the double tap or more accurately the Pinchy pinch the Pinchy pinch the pinching motion and you basically use it to control the primary function of an app and what that means is say you get a phone call you pinch a pinch it's going to answer the phone call when you're like I'm done with you I'm gonna hang up in a rage then you pinch a pinch again and then it hangs up can you rage Pinchy pinch I'm not sure you could rage Pinchy pants you just do it really aggressively like you're an angry Lobster you just go I like it I can't wait to see the Wall Street Bros in uh out on the street just screaming at their assistant and then really violently pinching to hang up at them I feel like you need to wear like castanets so that it like makes a loud noise when you Pinchy pinch that's how you really get your feelings across yeah so that that thing you just described actually is one of the questions I have about watch OS 10 because that idea that it's like the primary thing makes obvious sense to me in some ways right like it's a it should pause my music if my music is playing but there are other ways where what is the primary thing I'm supposed to do with the tap here is substantially less obvious and you're nodding like that has been true in practice has that been true in practice yes yes it absolutely has and you know Apple acknowledges this to an extent because there are two circumstances where you can customize what the pinch does so that first is as you mentioned music playback so you can do it and it can pause or it can play your your music but actually that's not intuitively what I would want it to do what I would want it to do is skip a track and you can you know edit it so that it skips a track so I was just in the car the other day driving and I was like nope not this nope not this nope not this I'm just pinching while I'm driving and that's kind of actually safer than me reaching over to the car infotainment and just trying to flip through that way so that's that's one way you can customize it the other way you can customize it it has to do with apple intuiting what you want is the Smart stack so the smart stack is new with watch OS 10 because it's widgets just everywhere in watch OS 10. and the smart stack you can either double pinch to scroll through your smart stack or you can double pinch to select the first stack and only the first stack and you know Apple's like if they do their job right and if they anticipate which widget you need at the right time of day so that whenever you bring up your widgets you just want to pick the first one there you can pinch and select it which to me I'm like wow that's that's almost never but in order to bring up the widgets you have to scroll the digital crown or swipe up on the screen so you're already you can pinch so you just wake it up pinch brings up the widgets and then the second pinch will either scroll through or select that first top one so for me testing that's been a nightmare because the first one that pops up has been the tips thing that I just can't get to go away which goes away after a while but it's like I don't need these tips so I can't actually use that particular function but those are the only two ways you can customize it and for me with messages like say I get a text you Pinchy pinch and it'll bring up the voice message reply makes sense that makes total sense if you're just trying to keep things hands-free or single-handed for me though I want to scroll through my quick replies and select one I would love to do that but that's kind of hard because pinching to scroll through your quick replies and then pausing and then pinching again to select it kind of is something that has to be a lot more intuitive you can do that an Assistive touch but you can't really do that with the double tap but that is what I wish I could do with it Dan you and I are both sickos for customization I would say as a general rule this strikes me as the kind of thing I would want tons of control over like I should be able to decide in every every single app what the double tap does well I think we should we should clarify that uh it does nothing in third-party apps yeah wait is that oh okay so developers can do it they just haven't yet no they actually can't what V correct me if I get this wrong developers can interact with double tap through notifications so basically if you get a notification in and you double tap it will do what is like the default action on that notification and developers can Define that default action so if you've got a notification that's like an email and the default action is a delete you can double tap to delete it or you can double tap to reply to a message if it's in WhatsApp or something outside of Apple's messages but if you are in a third-party app double tap doesn't do anything is that correct me well so far I think I think you're right I haven't been able to use it with any 30 part third party app right now but this is also just like the first implementation of it I imagine there's going to be a lot of trial and error as people use this for the first time and I could see I could see ways ways down that third-party apps will eventually get some ability to do it but the problem really is that this is supposed to be contextual and intuitive so you're having people you're basically trying to mind read what people are going to try and pinch for and it's funny because you know I have a beta version with this enabled uh there's no explanation on my version I imagine there will be some short walk through in like the tips app when Apple releases this to the public but there's no real explanation of what apps this works with and what it'll do within those apps you just kind of have to go into the app and start like pinching like a weirdo and seeing what it does and there's a little glyph or an icon that appears that shows you that you've just done it and when you can't have any double tap gesture it'll just like do a little Shake that's like can't do it so I've just been like this past few days just sitting there just going like oh does this does this work pinch pinch oh no okay I can't do that does this work and Finch oh no can't do that so it can be really intuitive and also so weirdly frustrating because you don't know when you're going to run up against the wall of the the pinch not working like timers is the other example I'm going to use if you have talked to Siri and you have it and you have a timer going and that Timer app is front and center when you do the the double tap it'll pause the timer and then you can you know restart the timer and when it ends you can close the timer I want what if I want a timer to restart I have several like Pomodoro method nonsense where I just want to restart a timer as soon as it's done I can't do that I actually have to go and figure out whether I'm going to ask Siri to set another timer or whether I'm going to go in manually and set that timer so that's annoying and then also if the the timer app goes away it's not front center then no amount of pinching you're going to do is really going to change anything until it goes off so if you want to pause the the timer while the timer app is not front center you can't do anything so it's sort of like that's weirdly annoying for me I don't know if it'll be weirdly annoying for everyone It just strikes me as a classic apple kind of being too clever by half thing uh and like the thing it got really right with the action button was it was just like just do just do whatever you want like here's some options we have some ideas just do just action action button on the phone let's clarify no you're that's absolutely right but the action button in the iPhone 15 which we were talking about that you have some control over and there's a cool interface for it and they're like this will work this is the equivalent of if they had taken the action button on the phone and been like in every app it will do the thing we think it should do it's like apple like sometimes that thing is obvious if I open the camera app on my iPhone it should be the shutter button and it is in that kicks ass sometimes I want it to do something and I should be able to make it do that thing and I feel like so many times with the watch apple is like this is a small screen people don't want to spend too much time on it we have to do all the work magically for them and sometimes it works and way too often I feel like it doesn't and speaking of things that way too often don't work Siri is the other thing I was curious about because Apple made a bunch of noise about Siri being offline and working on device which if it is successful it's a huge deal for the watch right like it opens up all kinds of things you can do if you don't have a cellular device if you're out in the world doing stuff like potentially a big deal what have you seen so far yeah Eric's it's going to be on the record saying Siri works I just like I just want to be so clear about what you're just getting into caveats just give me a second to get into that of this here so you know it does now work if you don't have your phone and you're not in any kind of internet connection so like your laundry room is in your basement you left your phone upstairs your hands are tied up uh and you want to set the stupid laundry timer so that you know when to go get your laundry now you can say like hey set this timer and it'll do it which feels like a thing that it should have been able to do already this happened to me by the way literally this morning I was doing daycare drop off with my kid needed to remind myself to do something had I had left my phone at home and my watch just was useless to me yeah like this very simple basic thing that it ought to be able to do it couldn't do yeah it can do that now it's pretty reliably um I turned airplane mode on my phone and the watch on and made sure that there was no Wi-Fi connection still and it was it was able to do stuff it was even able to pull weather updates because it had pulled that already may not have been the most accurate weather update at that point in time but it was able to like give me an update which I had not been expecting because as I understand it if it needs to pull some sort of data from the internet it still needs the internet connection it's more so that you can do tasks like oh uh set a timer or I guess in my case set a workout like I don't know if you're in the trails of of like Missouri somewhere where there's no any kind of internet connection and your phone doesn't even have an internet connection well now you can hands-free set a workout which there is a use case for that but I think for most people that's not a thing that they've necessarily thought to do but it can do it now so yay huzzah I've had the opportunity to test the new series well I I haven't My Demo unit doesn't have the double tap but I do have the new Siri and I think the thing that is actually impactful is for me at least when I'm outside on the grill I set timers for how long to keep leave the burgers on before I need to flip them or whatever and because I'm like on the edge of my Wi-Fi network it like I will watch the I will do the the command and watch the watch figure itself out and so but with the series nine I was able to just say set a timer for five minutes and it just did it and so like I think those are like more practical use cases for where this better improved on device Siri is going to make an impact I will add that this new series doesn't do anything that the old Siri couldn't do so it's not like Siri gets smarter or more capable it's just it works better at the things that it could already do because it doesn't have to send your voice command out to the internet transcribe it and bring it back down to the watch my biggest issue with Siri on the watch has always been that it it seems to just fail completely a lot more often than Siri elsewhere with really basic things like trying to set a reminder or add something to my calendar or set a timer even it much more often does the thing where it thinks and then it still thinks and then nothing happens and my assumption has always been that's because of this sort of like daisy chain of connections it's having to do in order to get the information back to the watch have you noticed that being any better on the watch because it's able to run locally I would think it would just be able to do more things more reliably yeah it has been more reliable for me except with understanding me that is just the same level of you know like it's better like it can finally understand name which I've been using for years as a litmus test progress okay understand me and you know it's gotten better over the years like four or five years ago it was just like Herschel Walker and it's like no that's that's not what I said it's a different guy yeah a completely different name but you know I I live in a community where it's mixed language I have to communicate with people with names that are not English and with that respect it is still not great like I was I was messaging my friend and I was like oh new Kpop album come out we love him and it's like Joe Fang Foo or something like that it was like no that's not his name that's not how it works okay we we still have to do the thing where when I'm messaging my friends and with like Korean loan words where I have to go like bullgogi for it to understand me and it for it to be clear and not to be ridiculous and we had a lot of fun testing the dictation our video producer had me wrap Alphabet Aerobics and that was certainly a time I did a bunch of tongue twisters about Betty botter and her bitter butter and her better butter and buying them and for the most part I want to say both my S8 powered Ultra and the S9 powered series 9 kind of overall did about the same in terms of accuracy okay so I don't know if that's just me and the way I pronounce and as Owen says wow you talk fast so I'm not sure if I'm like having issues because I'm in an edge case of people who talk at the speed of New York but it's it's it's it's better just not so much better that if you upgraded now you would be like oh my God they finally fixed Siri that kind of thing yeah that tracks so full takeaway here like it seems to me that if you bought a watch in the last couple of years you're gonna get watch OS 10 is double tap coming to these other devices or is that only in the new stuff okay that is only on the new watches along with the Precision finding those are only on the new watches and as far as I understand it it's because you know some people have been like why Assistive Touch works on the older watches why won't double touch work on those watches and it's because Assistive Touch is powered on the CPU directly it's very power intensive double tap is powered by the neural engine so it can be offloaded a bit and is a lot more power efficient and can run in the background that's that's the line they're giving all of us so I have like my interpretation is if they were to put double tap on the older watches your battery life would be even more in the toilet than it currently is so basically in my review I say if you have a series 7 8 or an original Ultra cool your jets contribute to Apple's carbon neutral plans and don't buy yourself yeah it seems like even if double tap is like really meaningful to you waiting a year for like developers to figure it out and the feature will get better seems like the move Dan you're nodding like you you agree with me yeah I think in a year double tap will be more useful uh maybe Apple will have opened it up to third-party developers in a more meaningful way maybe we'll have other gestures arriving that like use the same kind of concept and logic that allows you to do this thing for now if you have the new watches you get the new watches it's neat but I think if you would agree that it's not a like absolute must-have feature no and you can you can experiment if you have a seven or eight with Assistive touch to see whether gesture control is something you even like because if you're like oh this whatever I'm not passionate about this then you really don't need you have like empirical evidence that you don't need to update just for double tap I will say that going forward I think the combination of rearranging the watch to be very widget-centric and double tap kind of is like a fundamental groundwork that they're laying to change the way that we interact with the device yeah so it's weird because on that one hand I'm seeing that and I'm and I like I'm like oh I see what you're doing I see what you're doing you are changing how we fundamentally interact with these devices but you're doing it in a way where it's like oh what if I left this book of secrets out on the table who is curious enough to come and read this book of secrets and let's see what they do with that and they're in the bushes somewhere in the back with their little binoculars going what are they doing that's kind of what this is they're they're laying some very important groundwork to change the Apple watch to be a single-handed device much in the way that you know Dan pointed this out to be more like the iPhone which is a you know if you get it in the right size everyone will agree that it is a single-handed device and you're making it so that it's much more different it's not just a mini phone on your wrist because the way that these new apps have been redesigned and that the way the widget stack works on the Apple watch you don't need quite as much of your phone phone because there is a lot of information that's glanceable and a lot of information that you can operate with one hand now and that's not something that you've really been able to do before so I think once this gets refined going forward Maybe I don't want to say for the 10 but maybe the 11 or the 12. I don't think we'll be using these watches in the same way that we currently do I like it alright thank you both we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna switch things up a little bit and talk about how we take these devices which millions or tens of millions or billions of people buy and make them feel a lot more like ours we'll be right back welcome back one of the things I like about this time of year is that it ends up being phone cleaning time it's like spring cleaning in the spring phone cleaning in the fall particularly if you're an iPhone user this is the time of year you probably get some new software with some new features some new widgets a bunch of weird new gestures and interaction ideas and it's just a fun moment to kind of take stock of how you use your phone which apps get a spot on your home screen all that good stuff this year's iOS iOS 17 brings one of the biggest changes in a while which is one we've already been talking about in this episode interactive widgets instead of widgets just being things you look at they're now things you can do and widgets are actually a big feature of pretty much all of Apple's new software this year the Apple watch got a redesign with watch OS 10 so it's basically now just a clock and a bunch of widgets Mac OS is getting widgets with Sonoma the iPad got widgets on the lock screen it's just widgets all the way down y'all it's great oh and I should say before we get too far into this if you're yelling at your podcast player right now Android did it first please know that I know and I'm with you and Android widgets have been way better than iOS widgets for years that is absolutely true but this is new for the iPhone users so you know let them have this one anyway as all of this has been coming out I've been trying to figure out not just which widgets I want to use but how to think about widgets and how widgets work across all of these devices just on the iPhone you have home screen widgets and lock screen widgets there's the dynamic Island there's live activities there's just a lot of different ways that information moves around the iPhone and it can be kind of confusing so to figure it out I decided to call up the expert David Smith apple added widgets and it was great and they worked and it didn't have any negative impacts it was only positive ones David makes an app called widget Smith that is probably the most powerful and most successful widget making app on the planet it was a massive hit when it first came out in 2020 which you might remember was iOS 14 which was when home screen widgets came to the iPhone for the first time this year for iOS 17 he's got a big update to widget Smith with a bunch of really cool interactive widgets you can now scroll the weather on your home screen there's a way to flip through your music like the cover flow thing that used to be in the iPod it's just delightful David knows how widgets work better than just about anybody and I think he understands how Apple thinks about them too which is really helpful so I called him up and asked him all of my questions starting with the most burning one oddly enough is it as surprising to you as it is to me that people love widgets this much yes I mean I think I mean I I don't know if I really expected widgets to be as big as they were when I started getting into the widget business like widget Smith was not something that I expected it to ever be this massive app that kind of had a viral moment and like took over the world for a few weeks and like it was like I did not expect it at all I I think I was excited about witches when they first came out but it was that definitely had no expectation for just how much like pent-up demand there is for that kind of thing that people really want to that kind of interaction and that kind of experience and so yeah but it definitely feels like Oh and it just keeps coming like this year I think other than Apple TV widgets are everywhere on Apple's platforms now it's really so it was definitely like okay well I guess and next year I know what to expect you know somehow it's gonna be widgets on Apple TV because it just you know complete the set but yeah it's a little wild yeah I have to say I did not expect widget Smith to get as big as it did either I I sort of put it in the like shortcuts bucket at first where it's like this is a cool thing it's a little you know fiddly and finicky and there's a lot of people who like that but this is is not necessarily going to be sort of a mainstream thing but the number of people who even in the early days were like willing to do the work to make a photo widget that looked nice on their home screen was just like orders of magnitude bigger than I would have expected it was wild the customization people started doing is the minute they were able to do it and the amount of work that they would put in to do it just kind of blew my mind from the very beginning and I feel like not really forgotten that lesson since then I mean it certainly helped that it launched in 2020 when I think there was a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands to work on that level but yeah like it the amount that people care about how what their home screen looks like is dramatic like there's a meaningful thing that people really care about you know how what exactly what their home screen looks like what colors it is what fonts it is the layout of it and they're willing to put in the effort to to make that happen and so yeah it's like I definitely when I launched widget Smith I think very much shortcuts is a great analogy that I was like oh this is a cool Niche feature for like you know power Usery kind of people who who enjoy really you know sort of tweaking and fiddling with things and it turned out actually no it's everyone and you know it's like middle school kids through like you know retirees who are all just they just want to have you know this device that they spend so much of their day looking at they just want it to be exactly the way they want it and Richard Smith was like it turned out to be the tool that helps them accomplish that I am curious how you've like over the last three years I've even had trouble thinking about where information kind of lives on your phone first it was just widgets and then it was lock screen widgets and then it was live activities and then it was the dynamic Island and we've gotten to this point where it's like how I Define a widget gets more complicated over time and you've kind of tentacled out into some of those things too like do you have a really good sort of mental picture of how all of that stuff works and fits together and makes sense sure I mean I think at its core widgets are about taking little bits of an app and exporting them outside of the app itself and I think depending on what kind of experience you're trying to pull out of the app those different locations whether it's a home screen widget a lock screen widget whether it's a live activity or a live activity in the dynamic Island but what makes sense in each of those places is going to be very different if it's something that is like just showing the temperature for example is a great lock screen widget it's something that's small concise useful and very glanceable it's not something that you need you know it's just you just want to know how hot it is outside in the same way that we put the time on our lock screen and we all got rid of our watches it's like that kind of data was great on the lock screen but I think home screen is to gets into this you start to get into a place where it's like well do I want a bit more can I you know I have a lot more space I can be like have a bit more there and is it allowing me to get the data that I want out of an app without having to go into that app and then live activities and the dynamic Island it tends to be much more of a sense of is there data that is act that is changing in a very real time way which doesn't really lend itself to the other forms because of the performance limitations that Apple puts on the other types of widget those widgets you know the home screen and lock screen widgets are static essentially I mean there's interactivity we have this year but fundamentally they are showing a snapshot of data and so if it's updating in real time they are not the right place for that and so instead Apple made this other place where you have these temporary experiences that are widgets that are given special permission to update very regularly you know you're updating a few times you know like every few seconds rather than every few minutes and that I think is sort of generally the way that I think about these sort of this hierarchy of different budget experiences we have now that there they sort of go from the small to the large and then from the kind of real time to the just sort of static and where you are on the sort of on those on those axes determines which one of those widget types you're going to be in but there's definitely more and more places that were sort of well our wages are being put because there are catering to different needs or to different sort of user desires that's really helpful perspective actually because I will say as a as a user who does not understand the sort of performance capabilities of each one the distinction between kind of what's allowed to refresh constantly and what isn't never really made a lot of sense to me and I think the the thing that has been the hardest for me is to figure out the difference between like a very good home screen widget and let's say a live activity sure because to me those should those should just be the same thing and I get that they're not and I get that there are sort of artificial reasons that they can't be but the idea of having something that is like why can't I run a I don't know FaceTime call from a widget on my home screen like that seems like a thing that maybe should exist in the world I don't know if that's a good idea or not but it's just interesting that there are those kind of artificial limitations put on each one to make that hierarchy and when you understand it like that that hierarchy does kind of make sense even though as a user I'm kind of like just just like let me I just want to be able to hit a thing and just say update this like like the thing you can do with your email inbox where you decide how often it pulls or just have it push whenever there's new stuff like I kind of want that in all my widgets too even if it crushes my battery life sure and I mean I think this is an area that I think is very it's been a fascinating sort of timeline with apple because widgets originally the first version of widgets was the today view screen that they added back and I can remember much older versions of of iOS and that was actually something more akin to a fully running app that was running like when you looked at your today view that app was running and it could do all kinds of real-time things and could be yeah much more lively and interactive and you could have buttons and you could do all these things but it in order to do that apple had to like put it somewhere to the side so that it wasn't running all the time that it was only running if you swiped over to you know to the left of your home screen but that also meant that it wasn't nearly as useful because you had to go and find it in order to do it and you know the reason they did that is of course you know it's performance and Battery that it's whenever if you allow an app to run all the time inevitably bad things are going to happen so there's security issues there's battery life issues there's is it interacting with other other apps that are running on the on your phone issues and so I think very wisely in many ways what Apple instead did is they built the you know the standard widgets that you see are just a they're a very clever snapshot but almost just like a picture that my app will generate and send over to to iOS and then iOS can show that that picture and it doesn't cost them anything there's no performance hit you know I can display a widget on your home screen all day and it isn't costing you any more battery life than if you just had a collection of apps app icons there and I think that sort of is the cleverness that behind what they did they've done by doing that but yeah it creates this weird tension between it's like well why isn't it an app well it's like if we gave you what you want and it lets you run a full app inside of a widget then your overall experience of your phone will be worse because inevitably it's going to be draining on your device in a way that isn't actually getting you you know you're not getting enough utility to justify the battery drain and performance hit that you're getting and so instead they're taking this very incremental approach and saying it's like well we're going to do the snapshot approach we're going to do live activities where it's like they're special and time-bound and they're live in a special place uh and even there the technology that they're using to do those is similarly based on snapshots and clever things the live activity isn't a live app that's running all the time it's just an app that's given permission to refresh itself very regularly I see okay rather than something that is actually like if a window into the application itself and then similarly with interactivity they did the same exact thing where instead they're just saying if a user pushes on a particular part of a widget you get a a guaranteed refresh instantly so you can respond to the user's interaction and it feels like you're interacting with an app but actually you're it's just a very special way to say give me the next snapshot give me the next snapshot and as a result it's super performant because the last time you hit that button it the last time it generates that snapshot it's done and all the work is done and it'll be go back to immediately using zero battery and impacting your you know your device at all from that point on goes immediately to zero and so I think it's a very clever approach in that regard technically and it's just a very it means that there's these weird distinctions users have to sort of navigate but overall it means that I think widgets can be used everywhere and the story wasn't Apple added widgets and then my battery was toast right it's like apple added widgets and it was great and they worked and it didn't have any negative impacts it was only positive ones that makes sense so yeah is you've been goofing around with interactivity I've been using some of the stuff you found in widget Smith what do you make of it so far like did they does that balance feel right yeah I mean I think the the balance they've struck right now with interactivity I think is real is very strong in the sense of it's it's amazing what you can get done with just almost you know getting a guaranteed refresh based on a user action like it is surprisingly powerful for what the interaction the experiences that you can build with that you know the WRC keynote was just like checking an item off a to-do list which seems a bit basic it's like you can totally do that it's like or you can you know scroll through your calendar in you know sort of dynamically or look at a weather forecast and say you know it's an hourly forecast and you want to see the next six hours after that well you can tap and it'll slide over and they can do things there where they can make these rich it makes the experience that much richer and creates that many fewer places and reasons why you have to actually get into the app in the first place and I think that's what interactivity mostly is allowing at this point is it reminds me a lot of watch OS apps where like a really good watch OS app is an app that typically is something that you're only going to experience for a few seconds that it's you're going in to get something and then coming out and it's not an app that you're expecting to just like be sitting tapping on your wrist for five minutes it's something that you're going to be in in seconds and similarly I think interactive widgets allow you to have those same kinds of interactions on your home screen where rather than having to open the app to do something maybe you can just you know have two or three times on the widget to get to the exact date of view that you're interested in or the exact you know Behavior you want and then you're done and you never actually had to launch the app to do that and so I think they've struck a really interesting balance I think I doubt this is the final form of it like my suspicion is that there will be more things that will come over time as they've kind of explored how you know how users respond to interactivity but it feels like they've been taking this incrementally growing out the widget story over the last you know since 2020 and it I doubt they're done at this point I think it's a bit this seems like a very meaningful step forward to make them not just static things but to have the user expectation of being able to interact with them in the first place got it okay so yeah I guess part of me is trying to figure out how far I want that to go because it's like the check off the to-do list example is a good one right that's that's an easy obvious thing that it's always been sort of ridiculous you have to open an app for but then it's like okay I want to edit a task should it open up a text box on top of the widget that seems like probably not I don't know it's it's there there's finding out where that middle ground sort of eventually ought to be with all of this is really interesting and I think that like refresh the snapshot thing makes me think that if that's the Paradigm it's always going to be just kind of you can do one thing at a time and this is not meant to be like a multi-step tool it's a look at this thing and then look at this thing yes and that that maybe that's enough yeah and I think if we got further things I think they would be in that same model and it reminds me a bit of how in notifications when you get a notification and it's like you can respond to the new like someone sends you a text you can respond to that text without opening the messages app in terms of you can respond inside the notification it's a thing that they've allowed you to do for for a while now and I think I could imagine a similar thing in widgets where it's like you have the ability to you know prompt the user for text and so if you wanted to have a to-do list app where you are able to add items directly from your home screen it would be through some kind of you know system managed process where you would Tap a button and the keyboard would pop up with a little text view you're typing whatever it is you want you hit return that gets sent to the app and then it reflect refreshes the widget so you're not launching like the app is not is only ever getting the text it's not I'm not responsible for the keyboard it's not an interactive experience in the same way but it's a way of kind of pushing that next step forward because I think anything they do is going to be through this kind of very regimented approach where your widgets are locked down in a way that is very performant and clever but it's like if they added text entry in iOS 18 like that would seem like a very logical next step to do and there's expands the range of activities that would be potentially useful that you know you could imagine a Notes app or a to-do app or any kind of thing that you're collect regularly collecting little bits of information that seems great to not have to tell open an app in order to do that as interactivity opened up your brain on stuff you want to put into widget Smith I think most of the stuff I've seen so far is kind of extensions on the things you've already been doing the one I've been using constantly is being able to scroll the hourly forecast I love that sure like it's it's one of those little things I didn't expect to like really care about but it loves it's it's delightful but are there things you've been either building or looking at that are sort of totally new and different because of interactivity sure I mean I think I mean the most like uh silly example of that is like being able to put games into your widgets which doesn't it's like it's a completely silly thing in many ways but like sometimes the silly things are the best things and like that's an example of something that just wasn't possible before and now you can obviously there's limitations on a gay because it has to be a game that you can play Only by sort of intermittent tapping that is not in a timely way so like tic-tac-toe in a widget would totally work yes exactly like something in any kind of game where there's you're taking turns or that kind of behavior is definitely something that's possible but you know just you know you're not going to be able to make Flappy Bird for the widget because there's no sense of timeliness to that you know when you tap and how it responds but I think that's the kind of thing that's I don't think the game itself necessarily is the end state of that but I think that's an example of the kind of thing that you can start to do where just having the ability to respond to a button tap opens up a variety of things that you could come up with and you could think of that allow you to do and like me so I've done a bunch of things with related to music it was actually a widget that I found super helpful for me is I've made a little like a cover flow widget so you know so you can put put your albums into a medium widget and you can you know sort of do tap on the edges and you can scroll through them and then you can tap on the one in the middle and it'll start to play and because it's interactive you don't have to launch the app for it to play you know it's it's not needing you to even do an app launch you can just start and then because the now playing experience goes up into the dynamic Island you just see it the album started playing and you can you know move on and I think that kind of thing is just a really just different that it feels very interesting to not even have to duck in and out of an app like previously if I'd done music which it's like well you have to launch widget Smith it'll start to play and then you have to quit it because that you always have to have this weird round trip to the app even if the app was doing hardly anything you know or similarly you can start workouts is another thing with interactivity where you could you know you can say you're going for a run and you tap it and your phone just starts tracking your run without having to open an app necessarily you can just jump into the the live activity or the dynamic Island and you can tap the widget and then you can lock your phone and then off you go and it's your progress would show up on your home you know on your lock screen in the live activity and it's not like that one step is huge but I feel like taking the number of times that you can take out that one step will add up over time in terms of its value and utility David and I talked naturally I put a thousand new widgets on my iPhone but while I'm in the middle of this personalization craze I started thinking about changing my wallpaper and my app icons too both of which are also really good ways to personalize your phone and make it work the way that you want it to I ended up buying a wallpaper from a guy named Isaac mazna who you might know as canopsy from YouTube and Elsewhere on the internet today I'll be showing you how I've set up my phone some of the apps I use and generally how I've customized it to match my style and how I use my device I like the wallpaper it looks great but it kind of made me wonder what is it like being in the iPhone personalization business there are countless free iPhone wallpapers online so how do you make some that people will pay for what makes them pay for it and what makes a great wallpaper great anyway so I called up Isaac and asked him and I asked him just to start at the very beginning how do you become a person who makes wallpapers it was kind of for myself originally because I making YouTube videos I can never find the the wallpaper I wanted to like Showcase in a YouTube video because you don't want to just have the same like stock wallpapers everybody has right no no I couldn't do that like I used to do that but then like making videos everybody has like a really nice vibrant eye-catching wallpaper in the thumbnail and uh I used like a lot of them and then I just kind of got sick of hunting and searching and being like okay this is okay but like I wish it was a bit more orange or a bit more blue because the thumbnail idea I have doesn't really work or you know in the video It Doesn't Really match the the scheme of like my set design so I'm like what if I just made them and it was during covid so I had so much time like I was home and I'm like I'm gonna get my iPad out I'm gonna start drawing I'm gonna start making some wallpapers and I thought I was pretty happy with my original designs and I thought they looked they look great it matched my style of like minimal designs and match sort of my thumbnail style and my video style it was all a nice cohesive experience you know being a YouTube video people would ask immediately like where'd you get your wallpaper from it's the most common question in any Tech video on a phone or a tablet or a laptop it's like where's the wallpaper from for me I I just made them all So eventually I was able to launch a Shopify store with my zero knowledge of web design I was able to figure it out and Shopify makes it really easy to do all that stuff and you know Shopify makes the whole sales process very easy too yeah lets me sell to whoever I want uh there's apps to have digital downloads all that fun stuff and next thing you know I'm dropping a wallpaper pack every few weeks and wallpaper packs for me just consist of different designs that kind of go together in a specific theme I like to have fun with it I like to like think of really cool names for all the wallpaper names for all the different wallpapers in a pack have like a very themed design for like the mock-up photos pretty much every pack would have like new photos with little quirks and little fun things here and there and I didn't really know how well it would do but then it just started blowing up like it was just non-stop it almost became a full business I almost had to hire somebody to manage like customer service and manage hosting the website I'm thankful that I had just finished uh University so I was like ready to go I was ready to work and my whole Focus was dedicated to YouTube Instagram other content production and now my website with these wallpapers why do you think it worked so well I mean wallpapers are a funny thing in that there are a billion of them out there right like if you just Google like iPhone wallpaper like you can you can look through the options until the day you die and you'll never run out like I wonder if there is something to just like you have a style that fits and people just like understand your style and like your style and that goes a long way I don't know like why do you think it took off the way it did it's a mix of different things it's a mix of people seeing the wallpaper in action on my Channel people who know my style they know like the use for designs people seeing it in use it's great I think also Apple's customization push was also a good thing it came at the right time people like to make their phone personal and they like to make it something that is uniquely them because one thing that I also envisioned too or I at least thought of when designing these is like we don't really hang that many things up in our homes anymore like art or designs but our phone is like a canvas that we see every single day it's like we turn it on we see a wallpaper or a new wallpaper that cycles and to be able to see like a little bit of art or a nice design it has the same effect as art in your home whether when you come home and you see it you have like this nice feeling of this is familiar or this makes me feel a certain way if something is dynamic and bold and bright it kind of like wakes you up a little bit it makes you feel a bit more energetic and obviously I'm just talking about a image or a JPEG but it's like it does have that feeling whenever I turn my phone on like I I get hit with like a bold textured vibrant piece and makes me happy so it's a mix of different things no I I think I think you're totally right so take me through the process a little bit like you you sit down and you're like okay I wanna I wanna do a new pack a new collection where do you start so pretty much I like to start with colors I think colors are the best place to start for me personally and the way I work let's say I want to do like a very cool toned palette maybe it's like a purple and a pink and a blue I start to just mess with things I usually use procreate I've done some stuff in illustrator some stuff in Photoshop but usually procreate is the most consistent best way I work I know how it works to a t now I know how all the brushes work how everything kind of flows and I think procreate is so great because it's very natural and organic versus a computer you're like typing and you're clicking things it's not as natural as like a pen or your finger so I'll start by like mixing around different colors and trying different gradients or trying different shapes and and then usually I'm able to just think of the pack right there like let's say it's like a 2d shape based pack I started drawing some flowing shapes I started adding different colors you know things aren't really in the right place I tweaked them a little bit maybe I'll warp a shape a little bit until I really get that exact shape and form I want if it's a more abstract like gradient based or like a really flowing designed pack I'll just mess with it until I think it looks right I think it has like the feeling I want then I do things like add a little bit of noise add a bit of sharpness to things tweak the colors a little bit and then I throw them onto most of my devices to test them out so I have it on my phone looks good okay that's that's solid put on the desktop I don't really know how that looks on the desktop maybe I have to tweak this one area a little bit maybe I have to blow this part up a little bit pull it back on the iPad speak that send it to the desktop try it on the iPad as well and then once it's all once it's all like in a state that I like I'm ready to ship it onto my website I do all the mock-up photos I shoot everything you know name everything as well based on how I feel what the pack conveys in terms of the overall collection name and all the different names of all the different pieces and then load it all up write a nice little description and then that's it so talk to me about the icon pack before I forget to ask about the icon yeah I find Icons so fascinating because yeah like you only have one wallpaper there are a million apps out there in the world so I would think trying to make an icon pack that like is both sort of cohesive and looks nice but also like exists in a world where everybody has a mountain of different apps on their phone strikes me as very hard so like what made you want to do this in the first place like you just saw everybody customizing and you're like I wanna I wanna see how I can be part of this too in some regards but also like when I started designing the wallpapers I felt like from my phone personally the icons like icons are all over the place these days you know there's like so many different colors some of them are all black some of them are all white and I just couldn't really think of a way to to make it look cohesive so I'll have the wallpaper that I'm really happy with but then I'm like okay but the icons are just they kind of mess with the color scheme and you know I like to keep things simple usually I like to keep things pretty minimal with design so I just wanted to have like a set that is you can either choose you can choose all black or all white and uh that's it so with the with my icon pack like it's obviously a very specific taste like I hand Drew every single icon I don't remember exactly all icons how many icons there are at this point that's so many icons I know I just it was all like stock apps and then also a bunch of the popular apps that people use every single day and I just wanted to make something that was very different than what everybody else did because I think a lot of people just shipped literally the same icons and like different different packs like everybody was dropping icon packs and a lot of them were just the same icons and I just thought like what there was so much like very basic like clip art looking stuff in all these icon packs yeah and the reason why is because it was the easiest way to make a lot of money like there was all these stories about some developer making a hundred thousand in a month off of a minimal icon pack and everybody wants to make a hundred thousand in a month but it's like I can't do stuff like that like I just couldn't just ship out a random pack and then use my channels to promote it because I would feel bad and also like I probably wouldn't have designed all those icons like where are they coming from but obviously I don't mean to trash talk that Designer I think he was one of the first people to see the potential of custom icons and I think you did it all by himself which is great I love that I love seeing successes like that yeah so for my collection I want to have things that would fit my style be a little bit unique be a little bit different it's not obviously for everyone but the people who do like it are always sharing uh screenshots on Twitter or Instagram tell me how much they like it and uh request icons that they want to add and obviously I can't do every single icon I'm not physically capable of doing that but uh I like to be able to have icons for most of the popular apps apps and all the stock apps and now with the new iPhones that have Dynamic Islands it hides that really annoying shortcut notification that drops down every single time you open a shortcut as I'm sure you're familiar with that's one of the biggest things that prevented me from even doing this in the first place like even wanting to use icons because when you know this ability first came out it was okay like it was like you know the drop down you forget it's there you get used to it either decide do I want to see that notification every single time or do I have a nice beautiful custom home screen and obviously a lot of people have chosen the latter because it's worth the trade-off to sometimes have that customization in place but now with the new Dynamic Island functionality you don't see that notification at all it hides it in the island it's very very subtle and now even with things like the camera before if you use the shortcut with a custom icon to open up the camera app it would take an extra full second for the camera to like be ready to go cancel deal I can't do that deal with that but now you can do it and uh if you're willing to go through the process which isn't super terrible these days and there are very uh cohesive guides and I think even shortcuts you can download it's pretty easy to do but for me personally my home screen is very clean and I like to have just a couple icons everything else is in the app library and that's how I like it so I like that are you just a one home screen guy yeah yeah I admire that I aspire to be that it's all that works for me at this point I like to have four apps in the dock and then four apps on my home screen a little square Arrangement using the clear spaces app because I don't really want to see too much when I turn my phone on I want to be able to see my wallpaper and also be able to just see the core apps I need and any distracting things like uh Instagram and Twitter all those are on in the app Library so they're not like the first thing I see when I turn my phone on after I talked to Isaac I blew up my whole phone again I got rid of a bunch of the widgets I changed my wallpaper again and I changed a few icons I didn't change all of my icons just the four in my dock which tend to be the ones that never really move around and they're all a single style now I really like how it looks plus I now have just two home screens one is apps and one is widgets and I think Isaac's right that less is more there the app library or the app drawer or Android do the job great after all this suffice to say my phone looks really different than it did a few weeks ago and it was a really fun exercise actually I wound up not just changing the look of my phone but really thinking about where I want things to be and what I want to have easy access to and maybe just as important what I don't want to have easy access to plus what my home screen and wallpaper and icons and widgets should not just do but make me feel every time I turn my phone on not everyone is going to want to go down this unbelievable Rabbit Hole of personalization and shortcuts and widgets and all kinds of different stuff and that's okay but I think it's worth at least spending a few minutes to make sure that when you turn your phone on as we all do a million times a day feels the way you want it to because I think that's important foreign that's enough Apple talk that is it for the vergecast today thanks to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening there's lots more from everything we talked about on the verge.com we'll put some links to all our reviews in the show notes but also you know readtheburge.com there's so much gadget news this week There's Xbox leaks there's a Microsoft Event there's an Amazon event there's a ton happening all of it is on the verge.com if you have thoughts questions feelings or other phones you think people should buy instead of the iPhone 15 you can always email us at vergecast theverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866 verge11 send us all of your thoughts and questions and again this is probably the last call for this if you have questions about the Verge or the vergecast send them in the meta episode is coming really soon this show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James Brook mentors is our editorial director of audio the vergecast is a Verge production and part of the VOX media podcast Network mili Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about Amazon Microsoft why Amazon and Microsoft are suddenly kind of at odds about gadgets Xbox and all the other stuff going on this week see you then rock and roll foreignwelcome to the vergecast the flagship podcast of the action button I'm your friend David Pierce and I'm having one of those days I assume everybody has days like this where you wake up at some outrageously early hour and you look at the clock and you're like oh cool I have five more hours to sleep but then something in your brain is just like no we are awake now anyway that's the kind of day I'm having I've been up since like two o'clock this morning I read a bunch of news I read a book I looked at Tick Tock for a while I saw every single thing that has like ever been posted to Reddit in history I did all the New York Times games and somehow it's still like first thing in the morning it's a very confusing way to start the day because I kind of feel like it's lunch time now now I'm out just like aimlessly wandering the neighborhood because I don't know what else to do with myself because the sun just came up and I've been awake for what feels like 100 hours anyway it's going to be a very confusing day I'm gonna get to 2 p.m and be like well time for dinner time to go to bed wish me luck anyway we have an awesome show coming up for you today we're going to talk mostly about the iPhones because it's iPhone season we have reviews of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro to talk about we're also going to talk about our reviews of the Apple watch and the Apple watch Ultra but we're also going to talk about software stuff there's obviously new stuff in iOS 17 interactive widgets and all kinds of cool things going on but more broadly thinking about all this stuff over the last few months has really led me down this Rabbit Hole of phone personalization I think the work people are willing to do to make their phone feel like an extension of themselves whether it's a case or the wallpaper or the app icons or the look and feel of the whole phone in general people are willing to do a lot so that when you turn on the screen it makes you feel something it makes you feel like you and I think that's really cool so I called up a couple of smart people to talk about how we do that and how that works and how Apple thinks about that so we're going to dig into that too all of that is coming up in just a second but first it is finally time that I can go home and like reasonably make breakfast and have coffee and start the day and also probably take a several hour nap and see how we do so I'm gonna go do all of that and then we'll be right back this is the vergecast we'll see in a sec thank you welcome back all right I've had coffee I've had Cheerios I kind of know what time it is I'm ready let's do this the new iPhones go on sale this Friday and our reviews of the iPhone 15 15 plus 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max are all live on theverse.com you should read them all they're all really great I don't know if this is the most interesting phone of the Year exactly in fact it's definitely not the most interesting phone of the year if you define interesting as just like the one trying to do the most new cool stuff but it's almost certainly the one the most people are thinking about buying but should you and which one who better to answer that question than the people who reviewed the phones The Verge is Allison Johnson and Dan Seifert they're both here let's get into it Alison hello hello Dan hello hello you both have used two of the four phones You've Done big reviews uh I have a million like specific questions but let's just kind of like Top Line takeaways from your reviews like are these phones any good yes or no who cares Dan you go first iPhone 15 and 15 plus what's the verdict yeah in a shocking turn of events Apple released a turd of a device no I'm kidding uh this is the 15th iPhone like it's it's like they've been doing this a long time they know how to make iPhones yes they are good devices in fact you could probably say they are great devices and I think that I reviewed the 15 and the 15 plus I think if people buy them they're going to be really happy with them the type of person that buys this phone typically is coming from a much older iPhone and so they're not coming from an iPhone 14 probably not a 13 so we're talking like a 12 or an 11 or maybe even a 10s and they are going to get a lot of new features and new experiences plus better camera better battery life better performance better display all that stuff so I think it is like a meaningful upgrade for the type of person that is buying this are the 15 and 15 plus all that exciting to us like enthusiasts and maybe our audience probably not like we've seen mean all of these things before they are I've been calling them a repackaging of the 14 pro they've got most of the same features as the 14 pro but not all of the features notably they have uh they don't have high refresh rate screens and they don't have always on displays which is like two things that I think would make a better experience on these devices and we're going to come back to both those things yeah but like otherwise you get the dynamic Island you get a high resolution camera Apple's changes to the design this year by just kind of softening the edges and the matte glass and stuff do make them nicer to hold which you'll never experience because you're going to put a case on it anyways but it's there and then they come in five very boring colors the rage you feel about the colors really like it it's just like it fills me up in a lovely way I don't get it like why bother with colors if you're gonna if this is what you're gonna do and we know Apple's done good colors in the past yeah apple is perfectly capable of making cool colors it just chose not to this year for some reason like if you find yourself making a color that you call Natural like you all right Allison the pro and pro Max what's the what's the kind of Top Line verdict here yeah it's it's I mean they're good in the ways that we are used to a pro iPhone being good I think the new things here this year are like certainly not breakthroughs and anyone on Android who is hearing me talk about USBC in like a five times zoom lens is you know like cackling yeah we should just say right up top like Android users like we know yeah the number of things we're going to say that Android phones have had since like 2004 like we get it we're with you we're on the same page the s23 ultra is a terrific phone yes just let Apple people have this one just just for today yeah people have this like a blanket statement of like I get it I know yeah yeah but yeah it is the first time these things have all come together on an iPhone and I think they're they're smart in the Pro they're things that you know being able to to hook up like an SD card reader that isn't a special lightning dong single situation is cool and like I appreciate that someone who is maybe just just wants a phone just wants it to work is it doesn't really care so much but it's there the five-time zoom you know is is neat for people who want to get in there a little more and who are a little more picky about their photography and the action button is just nice like you want a button that does whatever you want on your iPhone you can have it now like that's super sweet okay I have a bunch of specific things in there I want to talk about I think USBC is a is a big one and I want to spend a bunch of time talking about that because that surprised me a lot from both of your reviews but the first thing that jumped out at me that you both said which I thought was surprising was that the new phones feel different like to hold in your hands than the other ones do like I feel like I'm used to Apple saying every year like we've developed an all-new way to make these phones that will change everything and then you pick it up and it's like Yep this is still that one it's an iPhone but both of you had the experience of kind of picking up the new one and being like this feels this feels better walk me through that what what's actually better about it when you hold it so I live the life you guys know where I have like 10 phones on my desk at once and I will reach for the 15 Pro and pick it up and I just have that moment of like oh this is a little nicer than I was expecting like it's the brushed finish on the sides of the phone it's they're a little more rounded the edges so they're they're just like a tiny bit more comfortable to hold and really the major thing is on the Pro Models especially just being noticeably lighter like they're not light phones but if you've ever hauled a 14 pro Max then you know the experience of like holding a paper weight in your hand yeah it's a big phone yeah this this feels like holding a normal phone it doesn't feel like holding a super heavy phone okay and so how much of that is like the the titanium and all the stuff they talked about in the Pro versus just kind of the the way they've reshaped it because Dan you had a very similar experience in kind of how the lower end phones feel right yeah you know the lower end phones I guess the the 15 to 15 plus they're technically the same weights or within very small minute differences of last year's models um but if you're coming from like an iPhone 11 an iPhone 15 is like noticeably lighter like the order of more than 20 grams which is is absolutely noticeable I've been my personal phone's an iPhone 13 Pro and that just feels like a lead weight to me the 15 plus which has a much larger screen is actually technically lighter than my 13 Pro and so you know you you may say in like oh 10 20 Grands here it doesn't really matter like when you're holding these things all day long and you're putting them in your pocket or whatever like I feel every single gram that gets added and it's like my biggest complaint with the iPhone for the past three years the Pro Models at least is how heavy they've become because apple is stuck with with the stainless steel frame and the polished and the premium All That Jazz so I'm really excited that the Pro Models move to Titanium but I also appreciate that the standard model also benefits from the softer edges on the frame so that it doesn't cut into your pinky or your your palm as much when you're holding it the back glass is now a frosted or matte finish which is like nicer to hold I think that makes it a little bit more slippery uh anyone who's owned a pro phone for the past few years kind of knows what that back glass feels like it's a kind of a slippery experience again most people are going to put cases on these and all kind of doesn't matter but they just feel like nicer objects and that's like befitting of what the prices are because really even the less expensive phones are starting at 800 and at this point like that is like purely in premium phone territory you can get really like Advanced devices for this much I mean if you find a good deal you'll find a flip phone from Samsung for that much money so like you know you have to like kind of justify what the cost is that you're paying for and there's a lot of reasons for it but you know part of it is the experience of the tactile device and and I think that these are very well made it's very obvious that Apple's been making iPhones for a very long time and they've continued to like kind of iterate and polish them to to make them a nicer experience okay yeah that makes sense Allison this one's just for you and then we're going to go back to things Dan's allowed to talk about uh action button what did you do well I don't care about anything else about the iPhone 15. I care so much about the action button button there's a new button I so I put it to open the camera which I thought I would really like because I I struggle with a swiping on the screen to open I don't know why the number of people I have heard say that in the last seven days is so fascinating I feel like there are a hundred thousand ways to open the camera another button to do it is the last thing I need oh yeah it seems like so many people struggle with that same thing you're describing it's really interesting yeah it's always when someone else is looking at me using the phone too they're like take this picture and you're like I don't know I'm sorry um yeah so I I that's like the first thing I did I was super excited about it but then I noticed I just wasn't really using it for that I I think it's just like I used the pro Max a little more and I think having it just like like it's that much taller and the action button is that much farther away it just felt like a pain to it was like kind of awkward to be like reaching around the back of the phone to you know push the button but so I have other ideas for it I'm gonna I'm gonna do the shortcuts like y'all think I'm kidding about making it order me a pumpkin spice latte but I am 100 doing that yeah I'm back in my back in my natural environment so I can go wild with it now I love that uh Dan you're not allowed to answer because you reviewed the loser phones I'm just kidding someday when you're allowed to have an action button many years from now what are you gonna do with it uh I hate to be really boring but I I think I would probably use it for the ringer switch maybe but like I was thinking yesterday there's a feature on Android that I really like that uh if you flip the phone face down it turns into Do Not Disturb mode and there isn't a way to do that on the iPhone but I could set the action button to do not disturb so like I could just like hold it for a second put in doing a certain face down it's more than like I want to do I want to just flip it over and have it done so I don't know that's like my first initial idea I you know Allison mentioned we the camera I think that what a lot of enthusiasts will do is set it up to open third-party camera apps which right now is a pain no matter which way you do it on the iPhone whether it's from the lock screen or control center or whatever opening a third-party camera app is kind of annoying I think maybe you could set a widget on the lock screen now to do it which is a workaround but I've already seen the developers of halide are like adding a toggle in their app to like let you do it from the action button and so I'm sure a lot of people are going to do that yeah that's a good one uh it's funny you mentioned do not disturb because that was that was my thought too like somebody sent me a thing the other day where they had built a shortcut where whenever they plug their phone in if it's after 10 pm it automatically switches it to sleep mode and I was like that's genius but then this came out and I was just like oh it's the same thing like I can just punch on do not disturb which is the kind of thing that I'd like to like do often when I even just want to pay attention for a few minutes or whatever and having a button that can do it seems very nice I'm very into that but okay that's enough of that I could also talk to you about interactive widget it's for several hours but we'll do that on another podcast let's talk about you USBC because the thing that I think a bunch of us have discovered over the last eight days since this iPhone launched is that Apple made a much more open port than any of us expected and I'm just assuming knowing the two of you that you've spent a lot of time over the last week plugging random things into the iPhone to see what would happen Allison what what have you been plugging into the iPhone and what has happened well when we were shooting the video you know we had access to like an ethernet cable and SD card and all this stuff and yeah it truly is like kind of mind-blowing that you plug it in and it it doesn't it doesn't complain it doesn't you know make you jump through a bunch of Hoops like it just does whatever you're trying to do and like we plugged in that ethernet cable and turned off the Wi-Fi and the cell data and it just had internet just had internet from a but it was like who who saw that coming what a world I know yeah I think we've been so conditioned for like especially with the iPhone for Apple to get in the way of what we want to do with it that is it's like it's a it feels a little silly to say that like I plugged in an ethernet cable and it worked or like I plugged in an SD card and I could see the files on it like but we are just so conditioned to the iPhone's kind of like guard Walled Garden experience where you wouldn't think that you can normally do these things and in the past they required special Hardware adapters and even then it was still limited so like it was kind of fun to just Jam something into the USB port Watch What Happens and then be like oh that's the thing you would have expected to happen and like I don't know how often you're going to use ethernet on your iPhone probably never but photographers might use the SD card videographers can shoot to directly to an SSD stuff like that like all those things just kind of work it's almost like it's a computer yeah what a crazy idea it does seem like storage is probably the most likely real use case for people right in part because it's a way to like get stuff off of your phone in a way that is not always easy but also because like I I feel like a thing I have surprisingly often is I have something on a hard drive or somewhere else that I would like to be on my phone so that I can do something with and you can just plug in external storage and it just opens up in the files app right like that's pretty meaningful and new and it's nuts that I'm saying that like it's an exciting new feature but but like here we are are there are there other things that you feel like rise to that level of like things people might actually use this port for other than charging I think that some people might want to use it for video out you can plug a USBC cable to HDMI or to DisplayPort it supports DisplayPort out at 4K 60 Resolution so if you want to plug the phone into a TV and watch a video on the TV you get you get screen mirroring basically but the the if you're watching a video you can make the video go whole full screen that might be a use case for some folks but again yeah I think you're probably right in that it is either USB hubs that allow you to plug in like USB a accessories or storage are really going to be the main type of accessories outside of charging that you would use a USBC port for yeah I just I just want to say Allison kudos for getting the sentence Dex remains undefeated into the 15 Pro review because thank you you would think you could plug it into something and you might get a full-blown you know desktop environment on a screen but we got a little we got a little Dex win in the 15 Pro review and that made me very happy and and they're so intense about like how good this processor is that you would think like okay so let me do something with it no you can play Resident Evil I will not lie I have had the thought that stage manager feels like something that might appear when you plug your iPhone into a larger display at some time in the near future I don't think it's ever going to happen I will do that once if that exists and then never ever ever again because it's stage manager okay so the the other thing we should talk about is the cameras and I think especially on the pro Allison there are a bunch of new things there's a bunch of new like underlying Tech but in terms of like features for people there's the new telephoto lens the which is 5X Zoom which I think is a big deal there are the new uh focal lengths on the default camera which you can move around and pick between it shoots 24 megapixels by default now am I missing anything like have those jumped out to you as like really making a difference in how you use your phone's camera every day yeah they're all things that I'm really appreciating and having that you know you could always like pinch and zoom a little bit if you feel like the standard camera lens is too wide but there's something different about especially having those little like millimeter focal length equivalents in there it just kind of warms your heart and makes you feel like oh I'm taking I'm doing photography yeah I'm taking a picture at 35 millimeters now 1.5 x it like switches back to 1.5 x as soon as you do it you get to be the person who says I make photos I don't take photos yeah that's what happens yeah I've been saying that all week and everyone's so tired of me I'm like shh I'm making photographs no I I've like just very eagerly like Incorporated them into how I think about taking pictures with an iPhone and it's great I'm I'm happy with you know all the flexibility we get this year yeah Dan you I remember when it first launched we're very excited about the idea of the 24 megapixel default photos yeah my worry was file size right and there's always the thing where it's like it depends on where you put it how much resolution you actually need and on and on we can debate that forever but how good a photo do you want versus how many can you store on your phone is kind of a forever question like did Apple find the right middle there yeah I think with the 24 it's not as big of a file size compromise as as some people might have expected if you're using the default Heath mode which I'm going to say Heath which either is or is not pronounced Heath but we'll leave it alone I noticed that it's about like uh you know if a JPEG is or if a 12 megapixel image is two megabytes a 24 is about three that can very very uh some you know photos if they've got more detail in them and stuff like that can be larger and so then the 24 megapixel will be larger but when you go to 48 megapixel it's double the 24. so that is like a significant difference and that will eat up your storage and I don't think you actually gain much in terms of detail with the side-by-side comparisons I did between the 24 and the full size 48. you're not getting a lot there in terms of extra detail because these are such small sensors but with 24 megapixels you're moving past the 12 which we had been at since the iPhone 6s and you are getting a little bit more room to crop maybe a little bit more room to digital Zoom as Allison mentioned and a little bit more flexibility But ultimately you know Apple likes to talk about how you could blow it up to a 20 inch by 30 inch poster and do all this oven it's like yeah no you're not going to do that uh it's a phone photo it's still going to look like it comes from a phone but it gives you a little bit more cropping ability after the fact Without Really compromising storage that much these phones all start at 128 gigabytes now which is not terrible starting point especially if you're coming from an older one that had 64 gigs or getting twice as much storage so you got more room for the photos and apple would love to sell you iCloud Plus Storage which it will do up to 12 terabytes a month now it would like I mean it would love to like like so much it would make Tim Cook personally thrilled to sell you 12 terabytes of iCloud storage uh Allison you and I are both long-term anti-digital Zoom zealots I would say uh I believe it is Criminal to just stand there and pinch and zoom on the screen to make your photos worse but you in the process of reviewing the 15 Pro and Promax seem to have found some kind of Zen with the way that apple is approaching this can you can you explain this to me how did you why does it feel like this works for you yeah I I think part of it is in my head when you're when you're going to like a specific focal length and apple is doing a little bit extra in the background with the processing you know it's not just it's not just Uprising the image and calling it a day there's a fair amount going on with like deep fusion and then incorporating some detail from a higher resolution frame which is either the 48 or 24 megapixel if you're in the 35 millimeter crop how much of that makes a big difference I don't know but it makes me feel better I feel like at ease with the picture that I'm taking and I think that's something that we're all gonna have to get more comfy with going forward because even why can't you know comparing it with the Samsung s23 Ultra which has that 10x lens you know I'm going to 5x to compare it to the iPhone and that's not a native focal length that it has it still looks better than the iPhone image which is funny so it just kind of changes how you have to think about like like letting the trusting camera a little more and not being quite so picky about focal length it is a weird thing I mean all of the process now is digital like every step of the way computers are doing computer things so I think I'm I'm also slowly learning to let go of the idea that if I do it at 1X it is capturing a photo as photos Were Meant To Be captured and everything else is like some computery line like it's all kind of a computer Eli at this point right yeah we've we've heard this from uh I know Google when it introduced its uh super red Zoom feature it kind of sets similar things that like if you were to use super resume before you take the photo you will get a better image than if you just took the photo at the wide angle and digitally cropped it afterwards because they're they're taking input from multiple frames and averaging them together and things like that whereas if you crop later it is just a single frame that you have to work with and Apple's doing a very similar type of thing here where it is averaging multiple frames stacking them together that's what deep Fusion has been doing for a few years now I think I was in there on like generation three or five of defusion stuff like that and then now they have the larger sensor that they can also pair higher resolution data from details so I know that like when I go get an iPhone 15 Pro and start using it I'm going to lock it on 35 millimeter and never look back that was actually going to be my next question is like what's the right default setup here because the other 35 millimeter is the only correct Focus okay so we we shoot 24 megapixel Heath images 35 millimeter camera Victory forever prores log video you can fit four photos on your phone that's all over if you want to be the cool Street photographer you shoot a 35 millimeter there we go that's true that is proven asked and answered all right so let's let's do some like straightforward buying advice here so Dan last year it seems very clear that the people who wanted a 14 picked a 14 over a 14 plus is there any reason to believe that's not going to be the case again of the like entry phones do we think the 14 is probably the one for most people the 15 Jesus Christ so I you know I think uh last year with the 14 and the 14 plus it was kind of a weird scenario one the 14 plus didn't come out for quite a few months afterwards so it didn't wasn't the variable at the same time and then the 14 plus was like if you want a big screen and a big battery and and Allison's review last year like she made the point like this delivers on both of those things but it was doing it at 900 and if you wanted a 14 pro Max it was only 200 bucks more this year the uh not only is the 15 to 15 plus available at the same time so you will be able to take advantage of all the same carrier promotions or whatever you'll be in the store you'll look at it it's like oh wow this one actually is bigger but it's also it's still 900 but the bigger Pro phone the pro Max has gone up in starting price 100 so now there's a 300 jump and I think that starts to make it like do I really need to go that much if I just want a big screen and a big battery and I I think that people will be making that calculus more and maybe it'll do better for the plus model and I can tell you that the plus model this year absolutely delivers on battery life I had a horrific travel day coming back from WWDC I was staring at the 15 plus all day long I had like something like eight nine hours of screen time and I got home at like 11 or 12 uh and midnight and I still had like 35 battery left left on it it was pretty good like this thing just goes and so for a lot of people big screen big batteries exactly what they want and uh 15 plus delivers I think if you are coming from a mini which if you have a 12 mini maybe you're getting around time they're like needing a new phone the iPhone 15 is obviously going to be much more attractive to you it's smaller it's lighter fits in your hand easier and stuff like that I think that's really the only practical option for anyone who wants a small iPhone at this point and then the last point of consideration is as usual apple is selling last year's 14 and 14 plus for 100 less than the 15 and 15 plus this year I think that this year the things you get for that hundred dollars more make it worthwhile to get the 15. last year we had the opposite conclusion the 14 was not that much better than the 13 and you can still buy the 13 for 100 bucks less go save your money but this year you get USBC which is more convenient flexible way to charge uh you get the dynamic Island which is uh you know more pleasant fun user interface and it's going to continue to get more utilized as we go forward and you do get meaningful improvements on the camera we didn't really talk too much about it but I think that the automatic portrait mode is a thing that people will actually really like and use and get a lot of value out of especially the average custom consumer buying the iPhone 15 or 15 plus so all of those things add up I think they make it worthwhile to buy the 15 over the 14 this year but if you have a 14 there's no reason to upgrade there's mean there's probably not much of a reason to upgrade but if you are on a 12 or 11 or older then I think you you get a lot here this year the portrait mode thing is a good one I knew there was something in the cool things in the camera list I was forgetting and that's one that's a big deal yeah I I think that like you know I observe my spouse taking pictures of our kids all the time and she never switches into portrait mode or anything like that uh she just snaps with the default camera and now if she had an iPhone 15 or 15 Pro she can just do that and then after the fact I can go in the photos app and be like Oh portrait mode cool uh and I can play with it and whatever and make it pop more and I think that there's probably a lot of people who a never realized that they could switch to portrait mode because it was an entirely different setting where B didn't remember how or didn't remember to do it in the moment when they're trying to capture the image which is happening quickly in front of them because like Allison they couldn't figure out how to get the button to work yeah just stuck on that home black screen yeah yeah okay and then Allison for you the the Pro versus the pro Max again screen and Battery differences am I right in thinking that the 5x telephoto Zoom is only on the pro Max that's right okay so that's a big difference too like what how how would you rank between the two like how should people choose which one to buy yeah it kind of throws all my usual like buying a new phone thinking out the window because I I think that you know there is kind of a different customer for the pro and the pro Max and whether whether or not your current phone is working well is like less part of the equation but I think yeah the five-time zoom is nice I I get why it's only on the bigger phone Google only puts it on his bigger phone it's something I would consider going up to the bigger phone for especially since it's a little bit lighter weight this year and it doesn't feel like such a burden carrying it around but there's a lot to consider and I think some people are just gonna jump on you know the new Pro iPhone and I think like as silly as the word Pro is and kind of meaningless now I think there is a certain kind of person who like if if your phone is kind of a big part of like how you work when you travel you've got chargers for other things or if you if you're a video creator and you can see yourself really you know using it more in your workflow I think it does make sense for a I don't think browser the word I would use but it makes sense for a certain kind of person yeah it's like the iPhone 15 videographer it's like if you if you shoot a lot of big files you're the this might work yeah extra is pretty good I like yeah we kind of like have these discussions every year like who is the person to buy a pro over a standard iPhone and like ultimately at the end of the day Apple sells a ton of pro phones I think the reports from the 14th generation was like the iPhone 14 was like single digit percentage more than the iPhone 14 pro in terms of like numbers of people that bought it so like people will buy the more expensive phone I think because it's more expensive but also because it's nicer I think a lot of people see the three lenses on the back where they're just 3x or 5x and they see that like hey this does more and and their carriers willing to subsidize half the price anyways so you know I think we'll see a lot of people buying the Pro Models this year and then the 15 and the 15 plus will be you know a much slower ramp up in terms of like interest and buying and people will buy them as their old phones break but like the early adopter the person who's upgrading every single year they're going to gravitate to the pro always it's the exciting one that's what I wrote in my review is like the regular 15 is never going to be exciting it's never going to be like the platform for new I ideas or Technologies the pro is always going to be that so if you want that if you want to experience that you're always going to go with the pro yeah I I totally agree I think that's right um all right I'm gonna let you guys go here in a minute but before I do will you guys hang out and do a hotline question with me really fast just I think you're the right two people to help me answer this question as a reminder the hotline number is 866 Verge one one call ask us all your Tech questions uh and you can email vergecast at theverge.com if you don't want to call but frankly it's super fun when you call it's nice to hear your voices uh okay let's hear Dan I have been pestering you about this all day so I expect good things from you but here we go let me just play the question we have for you right now hey there guys my name is Jordan I had a question about the new iPhone 15 specifically how you could charge other iPhones by plugging in a USBC cable I know that if you do a USBC to lightning it will always charge the lightning phone and if you the iPhone it will kind of do like a handshake action and charge the Lesser charged of the two my question is you know it'll it'll do like a 51 versus 50 and then the 51 percent will start charging that one or whatever but what if you take like an iPhone plus and you plug in say a USBC cable to another like standard iPhone 15 and they're both at like you know let's say the the iPhone plus is at like 45 whereas the other one is at like 50 right so like the plus technically has less battery percentage but it has a bigger battery what happens who wins that exchange does the plus charge because it technically has more battery free with which to charge or does the phone with the higher percentage win every time thanks and I love the show okay so this is maybe the most Verge casty hotline question we have ever received I was gonna say I love it so much I have an answer Dan I have been making you plug things into other things all day I've been also running down batteries to try and get the levels right or whatever so tell me what you know so far so what I know so far is uh he's correct that if you plug in a lightning iPhone to a USBC iPhone the USBC one will always send power to the lightning iPhone the lightning does not work the other direction and also airpods and watches which is like the thing it's ostensibly meant for is to charge your small devices yeah airpods and watches it will charge those devices they will not reverse charge the phone but right now I've got the iPhone 15 plus which is at 75 Battery and I've got the iPhone 15 which is at 96 battery and I plug them in together with my USBC cable and the iPhone 15 is charging the 15 plus so the theory is which everyone has the lowest amount of battery percentage on its meter even if the real life capacity is still more than the 15 uh seems to be the way that the power goes USBC is kind of weird you can kind of like sometimes unplug them and replug them and it will do its handshake again and like switch roles with other USBC devices but with the iPhones at least it seems to be consistently happening that the one with the larger battery percentage charges the one with a lower battery percentage so if you wanted to be a real Mensch with your iPhone 15 and you've got a buddy who's got an iPhone 15 plus or Pro Max or whatever and and you want to give them your battery and and give them some juice and they will just suck all the life out of your phone to power up their big battery cells you can do that but it does do this at a pretty slow wattage it's 4.5 Watts which is slower than slow wireless charging so you're not going to be charging all that quickly but I guess if you you know really are in a pinch you can do it uh I tried some other devices the Macbook will always charge the phone the MacBook could have like no power and it will still try to charge a phone I plugged the iPhone 15 plus into a lightning iPad and what happened was the lightning iPad would start charging for a second and then it would say not charging because I think it's just not enough wattage I plugged uh the 15 plus into a Windows tablet thing and it would give enough juice to wake the Windows tablet up and then it would try to charge the iPhone so for the most part you're not really charging larger devices with this aside from the fact that you can charge the bigger iPhone with the smaller iPhone which is kind of hilarious if your friend with a 15 plus asks you to charge up their phone that's not a good friend yeah I mean where did they go wrong in their in their manage life management where they need they didn't charge their phone that gets massive battery life yeah real friends charge their own phone I don't know good friends charge their own phone but best friends charge everybody's phone maybe the other weird thing you can do while we're on the topic is let me just uh see if this actually works I've got a a magsafe charger here I'm gonna put the phone on the magsafe charger and watch it start charging and then I'm going to plug it into another phone through a USBC cable and everybody charges so you could daisy chain oh oh that's it that's kind of rad yeah I mean I assume this is going to stop charging when it like overheats but yeah all of these things are like use cases that don't exist but I think it's delightful nonetheless this is the potential of USBC the power of USBC that we've been missing with the iPhone for however many years it's here I love it all right well listen I hope that helps USBC is very confusing uh and if we figure out the actual logic behind all of this we'll be sure and let you know but for now go charge your friends iPhones be a good friend all right thank you both we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and talk about the Apple Action welcome back the iPhones aren't the only new Apple devices coming out this week there's also the new Apple watch series 9 and the Apple watch Ultra 2. the verge's Victoria song are resident wearer of many fitness watches simultaneously reviewed them both and she's been using the new watch OS 10 software for a while as well V and I haven't talked about this yet but I have a feeling the software is actually the real story of the Apple watch this year but let's see if I'm right or not these with me here now heavy hello Dan Seafort's still here hi Dan how you doing just can't get rid of you this week no I'm a cockroach okay so my overarching thesis via about these new watches and I am curious to hear if I'm right is that the software this year is significantly more interesting than the hardware this year one hundred thousand percent like the well okay 100 maybe like 999 000. like that one percent is uh so like if we're talking about Hardware the one little tiny stumble in your theory is the S9 sip that enables all the interesting software updates so it's still software explain what that what that actually means in practice uh so the S9 sip is the first let's say major in scare quotes a major processor update that the Apple watch has had in a very long time because so far it the last few years it's been a re-badged version of the processor from the year before no real meaningful changes in terms of like features that it enables but this year it's actually got a 30 faster CPU and a four chord neural engine that you know that enables the double tap feature uh it enables a smarter Siri smarter in the sense that it works offline now and uh is supposedly 25 more accurate at dictation and the screens are brighter yay because better power efficiency but they're not going to give you better battery life for that power efficiency that are going to reinvest it into brighter screens yeah this is the thing I wish Apple would stop doing like I actually think on most of Apple's devices it's the right call especially with the MacBooks I think we've reached a point where like the battery life is terrific sacrificing a bunch of stuff to get me like a few more hours I'm not sure it's all that meaningful I think especially with the entry-level watch in this case the series nine I would take small trade-offs to get like six more hours of battery life out of the thing it's the only device of mine that reliably consistently dies at this point uh oh God David you just opened the can of worms which is to say that there are two camps with regards to the Apple watch and their battery life there's the camp that's like don't even look at me in the face until this Apple watch can last a week how dare you come back to me after yet another year with 18 hours of battery life I spit I Spit on Your Grave patui there's that crowd uh and then there's the other crowd which I think Dan belongs to this crowd which is like I have my little charging routine my Apple watch is never out of battery you charge your phone every night it's not that hard to just plop your Apple watch on a charter at like a time when you're not using it like the shower or 10 minutes before bed why are you complaining so hard I will just stay in my own defense I would love to not have to have the routine I just happen to have the routine out of necessity can I tell you my problem with this routine the the correct time you just said it V to charge your watch is while you're in the shower and there's something about having a charger in the bathroom that I just can't I can't do it maybe it's the specifics of my bathroom I don't we don't have to talk a lot about what my bathroom looks like but the idea of just like having a cable dangling in my bathroom waiting for my Apple watch is just like a bridge too far for me I can't do it you could just put it in your bedroom and just go back to your bedroom TV David David is in a mansion his bedroom and his bathroom are like four football fields they're in separate he's gonna miss all those steps who has the time I know no my real problem is I forget to take it off until I'm already in the shower and then I just kind of like Huck it over to the sink and that's my charging strategy but the actual features here you basically named the three things I want to talk about and it seems like from a pure Hardware perspective they're so similar that you couldn't tell which watch was which right like you had the ultra and the ultra two and they're the same damn thing as far as like what the actual thing looks and feels like right yeah and I like I've told this story before uh but when I was at Apple Park and I had my ultra out and I was you know taking comparison photos like this representative very well meaning comes up to me she's like can you put your Ultra away we wouldn't want you to lose it and that's because it looks exactly the same I've actually had to have a code this week when I'm switching straps I'm where I say out loud the ultra is the one with the gray strap the ultra 2 is the one with the pink strap like I've basically been keeping the new ones in pink because pink is what's new I love it and I had to do that because even the back Crystal doesn't say Ultra two it says Ultra so there's really no way to tell unless I like I have terrible eyesight um if you read my reviews you know I complain about readability all the time but I basically have to take the original Ultra straight up to my face and go which one has that minuscule Nick that I got one time that only I know where it is and that's how I tell the ultra and the ultra two apart as far as my units go okay good so we can just leave the hardware aside because it is what it is the double tap seems like the thing right like it's the thing Apple talked the most about this feature has like been around for a while in some accessibility ways like just walk me through kind of how this thing like fits into your life as a watchware so I actually I think this is potentially one of the most significant updates just that Apple's ever put out but it's just not flashy right first of all it's in some capacity it's been around since watch OS 8 and Assistive touch right now that Tech is just being repurposed in a more General use capacity it's supposedly it's built into the system so it's more contextual you don't have to do anything whereas with Assistive touch you have to go into the accessibility settings you have to enable it and you have to program it because for some people with limb differences this is the only possible way for them to control the watch it's how they're going to navigate menus it's how they're going to operate the digital Crown if they have an ultra it's how they're going to press the action button so it's it's much more comprehensive and there's more adjusters involved there's a clench gesture there's a single tap gesture there's there's a there's four actual gestures that you do with Assistive touch but double tap is just the double tap or more accurately the Pinchy pinch the Pinchy pinch the pinching motion and you basically use it to control the primary function of an app and what that means is say you get a phone call you pinch a pinch it's going to answer the phone call when you're like I'm done with you I'm gonna hang up in a rage then you pinch a pinch again and then it hangs up can you rage Pinchy pinch I'm not sure you could rage Pinchy pants you just do it really aggressively like you're an angry Lobster you just go I like it I can't wait to see the Wall Street Bros in uh out on the street just screaming at their assistant and then really violently pinching to hang up at them I feel like you need to wear like castanets so that it like makes a loud noise when you Pinchy pinch that's how you really get your feelings across yeah so that that thing you just described actually is one of the questions I have about watch OS 10 because that idea that it's like the primary thing makes obvious sense to me in some ways right like it's a it should pause my music if my music is playing but there are other ways where what is the primary thing I'm supposed to do with the tap here is substantially less obvious and you're nodding like that has been true in practice has that been true in practice yes yes it absolutely has and you know Apple acknowledges this to an extent because there are two circumstances where you can customize what the pinch does so that first is as you mentioned music playback so you can do it and it can pause or it can play your your music but actually that's not intuitively what I would want it to do what I would want it to do is skip a track and you can you know edit it so that it skips a track so I was just in the car the other day driving and I was like nope not this nope not this nope not this I'm just pinching while I'm driving and that's kind of actually safer than me reaching over to the car infotainment and just trying to flip through that way so that's that's one way you can customize it the other way you can customize it it has to do with apple intuiting what you want is the Smart stack so the smart stack is new with watch OS 10 because it's widgets just everywhere in watch OS 10. and the smart stack you can either double pinch to scroll through your smart stack or you can double pinch to select the first stack and only the first stack and you know Apple's like if they do their job right and if they anticipate which widget you need at the right time of day so that whenever you bring up your widgets you just want to pick the first one there you can pinch and select it which to me I'm like wow that's that's almost never but in order to bring up the widgets you have to scroll the digital crown or swipe up on the screen so you're already you can pinch so you just wake it up pinch brings up the widgets and then the second pinch will either scroll through or select that first top one so for me testing that's been a nightmare because the first one that pops up has been the tips thing that I just can't get to go away which goes away after a while but it's like I don't need these tips so I can't actually use that particular function but those are the only two ways you can customize it and for me with messages like say I get a text you Pinchy pinch and it'll bring up the voice message reply makes sense that makes total sense if you're just trying to keep things hands-free or single-handed for me though I want to scroll through my quick replies and select one I would love to do that but that's kind of hard because pinching to scroll through your quick replies and then pausing and then pinching again to select it kind of is something that has to be a lot more intuitive you can do that an Assistive touch but you can't really do that with the double tap but that is what I wish I could do with it Dan you and I are both sickos for customization I would say as a general rule this strikes me as the kind of thing I would want tons of control over like I should be able to decide in every every single app what the double tap does well I think we should we should clarify that uh it does nothing in third-party apps yeah wait is that oh okay so developers can do it they just haven't yet no they actually can't what V correct me if I get this wrong developers can interact with double tap through notifications so basically if you get a notification in and you double tap it will do what is like the default action on that notification and developers can Define that default action so if you've got a notification that's like an email and the default action is a delete you can double tap to delete it or you can double tap to reply to a message if it's in WhatsApp or something outside of Apple's messages but if you are in a third-party app double tap doesn't do anything is that correct me well so far I think I think you're right I haven't been able to use it with any 30 part third party app right now but this is also just like the first implementation of it I imagine there's going to be a lot of trial and error as people use this for the first time and I could see I could see ways ways down that third-party apps will eventually get some ability to do it but the problem really is that this is supposed to be contextual and intuitive so you're having people you're basically trying to mind read what people are going to try and pinch for and it's funny because you know I have a beta version with this enabled uh there's no explanation on my version I imagine there will be some short walk through in like the tips app when Apple releases this to the public but there's no real explanation of what apps this works with and what it'll do within those apps you just kind of have to go into the app and start like pinching like a weirdo and seeing what it does and there's a little glyph or an icon that appears that shows you that you've just done it and when you can't have any double tap gesture it'll just like do a little Shake that's like can't do it so I've just been like this past few days just sitting there just going like oh does this does this work pinch pinch oh no okay I can't do that does this work and Finch oh no can't do that so it can be really intuitive and also so weirdly frustrating because you don't know when you're going to run up against the wall of the the pinch not working like timers is the other example I'm going to use if you have talked to Siri and you have it and you have a timer going and that Timer app is front and center when you do the the double tap it'll pause the timer and then you can you know restart the timer and when it ends you can close the timer I want what if I want a timer to restart I have several like Pomodoro method nonsense where I just want to restart a timer as soon as it's done I can't do that I actually have to go and figure out whether I'm going to ask Siri to set another timer or whether I'm going to go in manually and set that timer so that's annoying and then also if the the timer app goes away it's not front center then no amount of pinching you're going to do is really going to change anything until it goes off so if you want to pause the the timer while the timer app is not front center you can't do anything so it's sort of like that's weirdly annoying for me I don't know if it'll be weirdly annoying for everyone It just strikes me as a classic apple kind of being too clever by half thing uh and like the thing it got really right with the action button was it was just like just do just do whatever you want like here's some options we have some ideas just do just action action button on the phone let's clarify no you're that's absolutely right but the action button in the iPhone 15 which we were talking about that you have some control over and there's a cool interface for it and they're like this will work this is the equivalent of if they had taken the action button on the phone and been like in every app it will do the thing we think it should do it's like apple like sometimes that thing is obvious if I open the camera app on my iPhone it should be the shutter button and it is in that kicks ass sometimes I want it to do something and I should be able to make it do that thing and I feel like so many times with the watch apple is like this is a small screen people don't want to spend too much time on it we have to do all the work magically for them and sometimes it works and way too often I feel like it doesn't and speaking of things that way too often don't work Siri is the other thing I was curious about because Apple made a bunch of noise about Siri being offline and working on device which if it is successful it's a huge deal for the watch right like it opens up all kinds of things you can do if you don't have a cellular device if you're out in the world doing stuff like potentially a big deal what have you seen so far yeah Eric's it's going to be on the record saying Siri works I just like I just want to be so clear about what you're just getting into caveats just give me a second to get into that of this here so you know it does now work if you don't have your phone and you're not in any kind of internet connection so like your laundry room is in your basement you left your phone upstairs your hands are tied up uh and you want to set the stupid laundry timer so that you know when to go get your laundry now you can say like hey set this timer and it'll do it which feels like a thing that it should have been able to do already this happened to me by the way literally this morning I was doing daycare drop off with my kid needed to remind myself to do something had I had left my phone at home and my watch just was useless to me yeah like this very simple basic thing that it ought to be able to do it couldn't do yeah it can do that now it's pretty reliably um I turned airplane mode on my phone and the watch on and made sure that there was no Wi-Fi connection still and it was it was able to do stuff it was even able to pull weather updates because it had pulled that already may not have been the most accurate weather update at that point in time but it was able to like give me an update which I had not been expecting because as I understand it if it needs to pull some sort of data from the internet it still needs the internet connection it's more so that you can do tasks like oh uh set a timer or I guess in my case set a workout like I don't know if you're in the trails of of like Missouri somewhere where there's no any kind of internet connection and your phone doesn't even have an internet connection well now you can hands-free set a workout which there is a use case for that but I think for most people that's not a thing that they've necessarily thought to do but it can do it now so yay huzzah I've had the opportunity to test the new series well I I haven't My Demo unit doesn't have the double tap but I do have the new Siri and I think the thing that is actually impactful is for me at least when I'm outside on the grill I set timers for how long to keep leave the burgers on before I need to flip them or whatever and because I'm like on the edge of my Wi-Fi network it like I will watch the I will do the the command and watch the watch figure itself out and so but with the series nine I was able to just say set a timer for five minutes and it just did it and so like I think those are like more practical use cases for where this better improved on device Siri is going to make an impact I will add that this new series doesn't do anything that the old Siri couldn't do so it's not like Siri gets smarter or more capable it's just it works better at the things that it could already do because it doesn't have to send your voice command out to the internet transcribe it and bring it back down to the watch my biggest issue with Siri on the watch has always been that it it seems to just fail completely a lot more often than Siri elsewhere with really basic things like trying to set a reminder or add something to my calendar or set a timer even it much more often does the thing where it thinks and then it still thinks and then nothing happens and my assumption has always been that's because of this sort of like daisy chain of connections it's having to do in order to get the information back to the watch have you noticed that being any better on the watch because it's able to run locally I would think it would just be able to do more things more reliably yeah it has been more reliable for me except with understanding me that is just the same level of you know like it's better like it can finally understand name which I've been using for years as a litmus test progress okay understand me and you know it's gotten better over the years like four or five years ago it was just like Herschel Walker and it's like no that's that's not what I said it's a different guy yeah a completely different name but you know I I live in a community where it's mixed language I have to communicate with people with names that are not English and with that respect it is still not great like I was I was messaging my friend and I was like oh new Kpop album come out we love him and it's like Joe Fang Foo or something like that it was like no that's not his name that's not how it works okay we we still have to do the thing where when I'm messaging my friends and with like Korean loan words where I have to go like bullgogi for it to understand me and it for it to be clear and not to be ridiculous and we had a lot of fun testing the dictation our video producer had me wrap Alphabet Aerobics and that was certainly a time I did a bunch of tongue twisters about Betty botter and her bitter butter and her better butter and buying them and for the most part I want to say both my S8 powered Ultra and the S9 powered series 9 kind of overall did about the same in terms of accuracy okay so I don't know if that's just me and the way I pronounce and as Owen says wow you talk fast so I'm not sure if I'm like having issues because I'm in an edge case of people who talk at the speed of New York but it's it's it's it's better just not so much better that if you upgraded now you would be like oh my God they finally fixed Siri that kind of thing yeah that tracks so full takeaway here like it seems to me that if you bought a watch in the last couple of years you're gonna get watch OS 10 is double tap coming to these other devices or is that only in the new stuff okay that is only on the new watches along with the Precision finding those are only on the new watches and as far as I understand it it's because you know some people have been like why Assistive Touch works on the older watches why won't double touch work on those watches and it's because Assistive Touch is powered on the CPU directly it's very power intensive double tap is powered by the neural engine so it can be offloaded a bit and is a lot more power efficient and can run in the background that's that's the line they're giving all of us so I have like my interpretation is if they were to put double tap on the older watches your battery life would be even more in the toilet than it currently is so basically in my review I say if you have a series 7 8 or an original Ultra cool your jets contribute to Apple's carbon neutral plans and don't buy yourself yeah it seems like even if double tap is like really meaningful to you waiting a year for like developers to figure it out and the feature will get better seems like the move Dan you're nodding like you you agree with me yeah I think in a year double tap will be more useful uh maybe Apple will have opened it up to third-party developers in a more meaningful way maybe we'll have other gestures arriving that like use the same kind of concept and logic that allows you to do this thing for now if you have the new watches you get the new watches it's neat but I think if you would agree that it's not a like absolute must-have feature no and you can you can experiment if you have a seven or eight with Assistive touch to see whether gesture control is something you even like because if you're like oh this whatever I'm not passionate about this then you really don't need you have like empirical evidence that you don't need to update just for double tap I will say that going forward I think the combination of rearranging the watch to be very widget-centric and double tap kind of is like a fundamental groundwork that they're laying to change the way that we interact with the device yeah so it's weird because on that one hand I'm seeing that and I'm and I like I'm like oh I see what you're doing I see what you're doing you are changing how we fundamentally interact with these devices but you're doing it in a way where it's like oh what if I left this book of secrets out on the table who is curious enough to come and read this book of secrets and let's see what they do with that and they're in the bushes somewhere in the back with their little binoculars going what are they doing that's kind of what this is they're they're laying some very important groundwork to change the Apple watch to be a single-handed device much in the way that you know Dan pointed this out to be more like the iPhone which is a you know if you get it in the right size everyone will agree that it is a single-handed device and you're making it so that it's much more different it's not just a mini phone on your wrist because the way that these new apps have been redesigned and that the way the widget stack works on the Apple watch you don't need quite as much of your phone phone because there is a lot of information that's glanceable and a lot of information that you can operate with one hand now and that's not something that you've really been able to do before so I think once this gets refined going forward Maybe I don't want to say for the 10 but maybe the 11 or the 12. I don't think we'll be using these watches in the same way that we currently do I like it alright thank you both we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna switch things up a little bit and talk about how we take these devices which millions or tens of millions or billions of people buy and make them feel a lot more like ours we'll be right back welcome back one of the things I like about this time of year is that it ends up being phone cleaning time it's like spring cleaning in the spring phone cleaning in the fall particularly if you're an iPhone user this is the time of year you probably get some new software with some new features some new widgets a bunch of weird new gestures and interaction ideas and it's just a fun moment to kind of take stock of how you use your phone which apps get a spot on your home screen all that good stuff this year's iOS iOS 17 brings one of the biggest changes in a while which is one we've already been talking about in this episode interactive widgets instead of widgets just being things you look at they're now things you can do and widgets are actually a big feature of pretty much all of Apple's new software this year the Apple watch got a redesign with watch OS 10 so it's basically now just a clock and a bunch of widgets Mac OS is getting widgets with Sonoma the iPad got widgets on the lock screen it's just widgets all the way down y'all it's great oh and I should say before we get too far into this if you're yelling at your podcast player right now Android did it first please know that I know and I'm with you and Android widgets have been way better than iOS widgets for years that is absolutely true but this is new for the iPhone users so you know let them have this one anyway as all of this has been coming out I've been trying to figure out not just which widgets I want to use but how to think about widgets and how widgets work across all of these devices just on the iPhone you have home screen widgets and lock screen widgets there's the dynamic Island there's live activities there's just a lot of different ways that information moves around the iPhone and it can be kind of confusing so to figure it out I decided to call up the expert David Smith apple added widgets and it was great and they worked and it didn't have any negative impacts it was only positive ones David makes an app called widget Smith that is probably the most powerful and most successful widget making app on the planet it was a massive hit when it first came out in 2020 which you might remember was iOS 14 which was when home screen widgets came to the iPhone for the first time this year for iOS 17 he's got a big update to widget Smith with a bunch of really cool interactive widgets you can now scroll the weather on your home screen there's a way to flip through your music like the cover flow thing that used to be in the iPod it's just delightful David knows how widgets work better than just about anybody and I think he understands how Apple thinks about them too which is really helpful so I called him up and asked him all of my questions starting with the most burning one oddly enough is it as surprising to you as it is to me that people love widgets this much yes I mean I think I mean I I don't know if I really expected widgets to be as big as they were when I started getting into the widget business like widget Smith was not something that I expected it to ever be this massive app that kind of had a viral moment and like took over the world for a few weeks and like it was like I did not expect it at all I I think I was excited about witches when they first came out but it was that definitely had no expectation for just how much like pent-up demand there is for that kind of thing that people really want to that kind of interaction and that kind of experience and so yeah but it definitely feels like Oh and it just keeps coming like this year I think other than Apple TV widgets are everywhere on Apple's platforms now it's really so it was definitely like okay well I guess and next year I know what to expect you know somehow it's gonna be widgets on Apple TV because it just you know complete the set but yeah it's a little wild yeah I have to say I did not expect widget Smith to get as big as it did either I I sort of put it in the like shortcuts bucket at first where it's like this is a cool thing it's a little you know fiddly and finicky and there's a lot of people who like that but this is is not necessarily going to be sort of a mainstream thing but the number of people who even in the early days were like willing to do the work to make a photo widget that looked nice on their home screen was just like orders of magnitude bigger than I would have expected it was wild the customization people started doing is the minute they were able to do it and the amount of work that they would put in to do it just kind of blew my mind from the very beginning and I feel like not really forgotten that lesson since then I mean it certainly helped that it launched in 2020 when I think there was a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands to work on that level but yeah like it the amount that people care about how what their home screen looks like is dramatic like there's a meaningful thing that people really care about you know how what exactly what their home screen looks like what colors it is what fonts it is the layout of it and they're willing to put in the effort to to make that happen and so yeah it's like I definitely when I launched widget Smith I think very much shortcuts is a great analogy that I was like oh this is a cool Niche feature for like you know power Usery kind of people who who enjoy really you know sort of tweaking and fiddling with things and it turned out actually no it's everyone and you know it's like middle school kids through like you know retirees who are all just they just want to have you know this device that they spend so much of their day looking at they just want it to be exactly the way they want it and Richard Smith was like it turned out to be the tool that helps them accomplish that I am curious how you've like over the last three years I've even had trouble thinking about where information kind of lives on your phone first it was just widgets and then it was lock screen widgets and then it was live activities and then it was the dynamic Island and we've gotten to this point where it's like how I Define a widget gets more complicated over time and you've kind of tentacled out into some of those things too like do you have a really good sort of mental picture of how all of that stuff works and fits together and makes sense sure I mean I think at its core widgets are about taking little bits of an app and exporting them outside of the app itself and I think depending on what kind of experience you're trying to pull out of the app those different locations whether it's a home screen widget a lock screen widget whether it's a live activity or a live activity in the dynamic Island but what makes sense in each of those places is going to be very different if it's something that is like just showing the temperature for example is a great lock screen widget it's something that's small concise useful and very glanceable it's not something that you need you know it's just you just want to know how hot it is outside in the same way that we put the time on our lock screen and we all got rid of our watches it's like that kind of data was great on the lock screen but I think home screen is to gets into this you start to get into a place where it's like well do I want a bit more can I you know I have a lot more space I can be like have a bit more there and is it allowing me to get the data that I want out of an app without having to go into that app and then live activities and the dynamic Island it tends to be much more of a sense of is there data that is act that is changing in a very real time way which doesn't really lend itself to the other forms because of the performance limitations that Apple puts on the other types of widget those widgets you know the home screen and lock screen widgets are static essentially I mean there's interactivity we have this year but fundamentally they are showing a snapshot of data and so if it's updating in real time they are not the right place for that and so instead Apple made this other place where you have these temporary experiences that are widgets that are given special permission to update very regularly you know you're updating a few times you know like every few seconds rather than every few minutes and that I think is sort of generally the way that I think about these sort of this hierarchy of different budget experiences we have now that there they sort of go from the small to the large and then from the kind of real time to the just sort of static and where you are on the sort of on those on those axes determines which one of those widget types you're going to be in but there's definitely more and more places that were sort of well our wages are being put because there are catering to different needs or to different sort of user desires that's really helpful perspective actually because I will say as a as a user who does not understand the sort of performance capabilities of each one the distinction between kind of what's allowed to refresh constantly and what isn't never really made a lot of sense to me and I think the the thing that has been the hardest for me is to figure out the difference between like a very good home screen widget and let's say a live activity sure because to me those should those should just be the same thing and I get that they're not and I get that there are sort of artificial reasons that they can't be but the idea of having something that is like why can't I run a I don't know FaceTime call from a widget on my home screen like that seems like a thing that maybe should exist in the world I don't know if that's a good idea or not but it's just interesting that there are those kind of artificial limitations put on each one to make that hierarchy and when you understand it like that that hierarchy does kind of make sense even though as a user I'm kind of like just just like let me I just want to be able to hit a thing and just say update this like like the thing you can do with your email inbox where you decide how often it pulls or just have it push whenever there's new stuff like I kind of want that in all my widgets too even if it crushes my battery life sure and I mean I think this is an area that I think is very it's been a fascinating sort of timeline with apple because widgets originally the first version of widgets was the today view screen that they added back and I can remember much older versions of of iOS and that was actually something more akin to a fully running app that was running like when you looked at your today view that app was running and it could do all kinds of real-time things and could be yeah much more lively and interactive and you could have buttons and you could do all these things but it in order to do that apple had to like put it somewhere to the side so that it wasn't running all the time that it was only running if you swiped over to you know to the left of your home screen but that also meant that it wasn't nearly as useful because you had to go and find it in order to do it and you know the reason they did that is of course you know it's performance and Battery that it's whenever if you allow an app to run all the time inevitably bad things are going to happen so there's security issues there's battery life issues there's is it interacting with other other apps that are running on the on your phone issues and so I think very wisely in many ways what Apple instead did is they built the you know the standard widgets that you see are just a they're a very clever snapshot but almost just like a picture that my app will generate and send over to to iOS and then iOS can show that that picture and it doesn't cost them anything there's no performance hit you know I can display a widget on your home screen all day and it isn't costing you any more battery life than if you just had a collection of apps app icons there and I think that sort of is the cleverness that behind what they did they've done by doing that but yeah it creates this weird tension between it's like well why isn't it an app well it's like if we gave you what you want and it lets you run a full app inside of a widget then your overall experience of your phone will be worse because inevitably it's going to be draining on your device in a way that isn't actually getting you you know you're not getting enough utility to justify the battery drain and performance hit that you're getting and so instead they're taking this very incremental approach and saying it's like well we're going to do the snapshot approach we're going to do live activities where it's like they're special and time-bound and they're live in a special place uh and even there the technology that they're using to do those is similarly based on snapshots and clever things the live activity isn't a live app that's running all the time it's just an app that's given permission to refresh itself very regularly I see okay rather than something that is actually like if a window into the application itself and then similarly with interactivity they did the same exact thing where instead they're just saying if a user pushes on a particular part of a widget you get a a guaranteed refresh instantly so you can respond to the user's interaction and it feels like you're interacting with an app but actually you're it's just a very special way to say give me the next snapshot give me the next snapshot and as a result it's super performant because the last time you hit that button it the last time it generates that snapshot it's done and all the work is done and it'll be go back to immediately using zero battery and impacting your you know your device at all from that point on goes immediately to zero and so I think it's a very clever approach in that regard technically and it's just a very it means that there's these weird distinctions users have to sort of navigate but overall it means that I think widgets can be used everywhere and the story wasn't Apple added widgets and then my battery was toast right it's like apple added widgets and it was great and they worked and it didn't have any negative impacts it was only positive ones that makes sense so yeah is you've been goofing around with interactivity I've been using some of the stuff you found in widget Smith what do you make of it so far like did they does that balance feel right yeah I mean I think the the balance they've struck right now with interactivity I think is real is very strong in the sense of it's it's amazing what you can get done with just almost you know getting a guaranteed refresh based on a user action like it is surprisingly powerful for what the interaction the experiences that you can build with that you know the WRC keynote was just like checking an item off a to-do list which seems a bit basic it's like you can totally do that it's like or you can you know scroll through your calendar in you know sort of dynamically or look at a weather forecast and say you know it's an hourly forecast and you want to see the next six hours after that well you can tap and it'll slide over and they can do things there where they can make these rich it makes the experience that much richer and creates that many fewer places and reasons why you have to actually get into the app in the first place and I think that's what interactivity mostly is allowing at this point is it reminds me a lot of watch OS apps where like a really good watch OS app is an app that typically is something that you're only going to experience for a few seconds that it's you're going in to get something and then coming out and it's not an app that you're expecting to just like be sitting tapping on your wrist for five minutes it's something that you're going to be in in seconds and similarly I think interactive widgets allow you to have those same kinds of interactions on your home screen where rather than having to open the app to do something maybe you can just you know have two or three times on the widget to get to the exact date of view that you're interested in or the exact you know Behavior you want and then you're done and you never actually had to launch the app to do that and so I think they've struck a really interesting balance I think I doubt this is the final form of it like my suspicion is that there will be more things that will come over time as they've kind of explored how you know how users respond to interactivity but it feels like they've been taking this incrementally growing out the widget story over the last you know since 2020 and it I doubt they're done at this point I think it's a bit this seems like a very meaningful step forward to make them not just static things but to have the user expectation of being able to interact with them in the first place got it okay so yeah I guess part of me is trying to figure out how far I want that to go because it's like the check off the to-do list example is a good one right that's that's an easy obvious thing that it's always been sort of ridiculous you have to open an app for but then it's like okay I want to edit a task should it open up a text box on top of the widget that seems like probably not I don't know it's it's there there's finding out where that middle ground sort of eventually ought to be with all of this is really interesting and I think that like refresh the snapshot thing makes me think that if that's the Paradigm it's always going to be just kind of you can do one thing at a time and this is not meant to be like a multi-step tool it's a look at this thing and then look at this thing yes and that that maybe that's enough yeah and I think if we got further things I think they would be in that same model and it reminds me a bit of how in notifications when you get a notification and it's like you can respond to the new like someone sends you a text you can respond to that text without opening the messages app in terms of you can respond inside the notification it's a thing that they've allowed you to do for for a while now and I think I could imagine a similar thing in widgets where it's like you have the ability to you know prompt the user for text and so if you wanted to have a to-do list app where you are able to add items directly from your home screen it would be through some kind of you know system managed process where you would Tap a button and the keyboard would pop up with a little text view you're typing whatever it is you want you hit return that gets sent to the app and then it reflect refreshes the widget so you're not launching like the app is not is only ever getting the text it's not I'm not responsible for the keyboard it's not an interactive experience in the same way but it's a way of kind of pushing that next step forward because I think anything they do is going to be through this kind of very regimented approach where your widgets are locked down in a way that is very performant and clever but it's like if they added text entry in iOS 18 like that would seem like a very logical next step to do and there's expands the range of activities that would be potentially useful that you know you could imagine a Notes app or a to-do app or any kind of thing that you're collect regularly collecting little bits of information that seems great to not have to tell open an app in order to do that as interactivity opened up your brain on stuff you want to put into widget Smith I think most of the stuff I've seen so far is kind of extensions on the things you've already been doing the one I've been using constantly is being able to scroll the hourly forecast I love that sure like it's it's one of those little things I didn't expect to like really care about but it loves it's it's delightful but are there things you've been either building or looking at that are sort of totally new and different because of interactivity sure I mean I think I mean the most like uh silly example of that is like being able to put games into your widgets which doesn't it's like it's a completely silly thing in many ways but like sometimes the silly things are the best things and like that's an example of something that just wasn't possible before and now you can obviously there's limitations on a gay because it has to be a game that you can play Only by sort of intermittent tapping that is not in a timely way so like tic-tac-toe in a widget would totally work yes exactly like something in any kind of game where there's you're taking turns or that kind of behavior is definitely something that's possible but you know just you know you're not going to be able to make Flappy Bird for the widget because there's no sense of timeliness to that you know when you tap and how it responds but I think that's the kind of thing that's I don't think the game itself necessarily is the end state of that but I think that's an example of the kind of thing that you can start to do where just having the ability to respond to a button tap opens up a variety of things that you could come up with and you could think of that allow you to do and like me so I've done a bunch of things with related to music it was actually a widget that I found super helpful for me is I've made a little like a cover flow widget so you know so you can put put your albums into a medium widget and you can you know sort of do tap on the edges and you can scroll through them and then you can tap on the one in the middle and it'll start to play and because it's interactive you don't have to launch the app for it to play you know it's it's not needing you to even do an app launch you can just start and then because the now playing experience goes up into the dynamic Island you just see it the album started playing and you can you know move on and I think that kind of thing is just a really just different that it feels very interesting to not even have to duck in and out of an app like previously if I'd done music which it's like well you have to launch widget Smith it'll start to play and then you have to quit it because that you always have to have this weird round trip to the app even if the app was doing hardly anything you know or similarly you can start workouts is another thing with interactivity where you could you know you can say you're going for a run and you tap it and your phone just starts tracking your run without having to open an app necessarily you can just jump into the the live activity or the dynamic Island and you can tap the widget and then you can lock your phone and then off you go and it's your progress would show up on your home you know on your lock screen in the live activity and it's not like that one step is huge but I feel like taking the number of times that you can take out that one step will add up over time in terms of its value and utility David and I talked naturally I put a thousand new widgets on my iPhone but while I'm in the middle of this personalization craze I started thinking about changing my wallpaper and my app icons too both of which are also really good ways to personalize your phone and make it work the way that you want it to I ended up buying a wallpaper from a guy named Isaac mazna who you might know as canopsy from YouTube and Elsewhere on the internet today I'll be showing you how I've set up my phone some of the apps I use and generally how I've customized it to match my style and how I use my device I like the wallpaper it looks great but it kind of made me wonder what is it like being in the iPhone personalization business there are countless free iPhone wallpapers online so how do you make some that people will pay for what makes them pay for it and what makes a great wallpaper great anyway so I called up Isaac and asked him and I asked him just to start at the very beginning how do you become a person who makes wallpapers it was kind of for myself originally because I making YouTube videos I can never find the the wallpaper I wanted to like Showcase in a YouTube video because you don't want to just have the same like stock wallpapers everybody has right no no I couldn't do that like I used to do that but then like making videos everybody has like a really nice vibrant eye-catching wallpaper in the thumbnail and uh I used like a lot of them and then I just kind of got sick of hunting and searching and being like okay this is okay but like I wish it was a bit more orange or a bit more blue because the thumbnail idea I have doesn't really work or you know in the video It Doesn't Really match the the scheme of like my set design so I'm like what if I just made them and it was during covid so I had so much time like I was home and I'm like I'm gonna get my iPad out I'm gonna start drawing I'm gonna start making some wallpapers and I thought I was pretty happy with my original designs and I thought they looked they look great it matched my style of like minimal designs and match sort of my thumbnail style and my video style it was all a nice cohesive experience you know being a YouTube video people would ask immediately like where'd you get your wallpaper from it's the most common question in any Tech video on a phone or a tablet or a laptop it's like where's the wallpaper from for me I I just made them all So eventually I was able to launch a Shopify store with my zero knowledge of web design I was able to figure it out and Shopify makes it really easy to do all that stuff and you know Shopify makes the whole sales process very easy too yeah lets me sell to whoever I want uh there's apps to have digital downloads all that fun stuff and next thing you know I'm dropping a wallpaper pack every few weeks and wallpaper packs for me just consist of different designs that kind of go together in a specific theme I like to have fun with it I like to like think of really cool names for all the wallpaper names for all the different wallpapers in a pack have like a very themed design for like the mock-up photos pretty much every pack would have like new photos with little quirks and little fun things here and there and I didn't really know how well it would do but then it just started blowing up like it was just non-stop it almost became a full business I almost had to hire somebody to manage like customer service and manage hosting the website I'm thankful that I had just finished uh University so I was like ready to go I was ready to work and my whole Focus was dedicated to YouTube Instagram other content production and now my website with these wallpapers why do you think it worked so well I mean wallpapers are a funny thing in that there are a billion of them out there right like if you just Google like iPhone wallpaper like you can you can look through the options until the day you die and you'll never run out like I wonder if there is something to just like you have a style that fits and people just like understand your style and like your style and that goes a long way I don't know like why do you think it took off the way it did it's a mix of different things it's a mix of people seeing the wallpaper in action on my Channel people who know my style they know like the use for designs people seeing it in use it's great I think also Apple's customization push was also a good thing it came at the right time people like to make their phone personal and they like to make it something that is uniquely them because one thing that I also envisioned too or I at least thought of when designing these is like we don't really hang that many things up in our homes anymore like art or designs but our phone is like a canvas that we see every single day it's like we turn it on we see a wallpaper or a new wallpaper that cycles and to be able to see like a little bit of art or a nice design it has the same effect as art in your home whether when you come home and you see it you have like this nice feeling of this is familiar or this makes me feel a certain way if something is dynamic and bold and bright it kind of like wakes you up a little bit it makes you feel a bit more energetic and obviously I'm just talking about a image or a JPEG but it's like it does have that feeling whenever I turn my phone on like I I get hit with like a bold textured vibrant piece and makes me happy so it's a mix of different things no I I think I think you're totally right so take me through the process a little bit like you you sit down and you're like okay I wanna I wanna do a new pack a new collection where do you start so pretty much I like to start with colors I think colors are the best place to start for me personally and the way I work let's say I want to do like a very cool toned palette maybe it's like a purple and a pink and a blue I start to just mess with things I usually use procreate I've done some stuff in illustrator some stuff in Photoshop but usually procreate is the most consistent best way I work I know how it works to a t now I know how all the brushes work how everything kind of flows and I think procreate is so great because it's very natural and organic versus a computer you're like typing and you're clicking things it's not as natural as like a pen or your finger so I'll start by like mixing around different colors and trying different gradients or trying different shapes and and then usually I'm able to just think of the pack right there like let's say it's like a 2d shape based pack I started drawing some flowing shapes I started adding different colors you know things aren't really in the right place I tweaked them a little bit maybe I'll warp a shape a little bit until I really get that exact shape and form I want if it's a more abstract like gradient based or like a really flowing designed pack I'll just mess with it until I think it looks right I think it has like the feeling I want then I do things like add a little bit of noise add a bit of sharpness to things tweak the colors a little bit and then I throw them onto most of my devices to test them out so I have it on my phone looks good okay that's that's solid put on the desktop I don't really know how that looks on the desktop maybe I have to tweak this one area a little bit maybe I have to blow this part up a little bit pull it back on the iPad speak that send it to the desktop try it on the iPad as well and then once it's all once it's all like in a state that I like I'm ready to ship it onto my website I do all the mock-up photos I shoot everything you know name everything as well based on how I feel what the pack conveys in terms of the overall collection name and all the different names of all the different pieces and then load it all up write a nice little description and then that's it so talk to me about the icon pack before I forget to ask about the icon yeah I find Icons so fascinating because yeah like you only have one wallpaper there are a million apps out there in the world so I would think trying to make an icon pack that like is both sort of cohesive and looks nice but also like exists in a world where everybody has a mountain of different apps on their phone strikes me as very hard so like what made you want to do this in the first place like you just saw everybody customizing and you're like I wanna I wanna see how I can be part of this too in some regards but also like when I started designing the wallpapers I felt like from my phone personally the icons like icons are all over the place these days you know there's like so many different colors some of them are all black some of them are all white and I just couldn't really think of a way to to make it look cohesive so I'll have the wallpaper that I'm really happy with but then I'm like okay but the icons are just they kind of mess with the color scheme and you know I like to keep things simple usually I like to keep things pretty minimal with design so I just wanted to have like a set that is you can either choose you can choose all black or all white and uh that's it so with the with my icon pack like it's obviously a very specific taste like I hand Drew every single icon I don't remember exactly all icons how many icons there are at this point that's so many icons I know I just it was all like stock apps and then also a bunch of the popular apps that people use every single day and I just wanted to make something that was very different than what everybody else did because I think a lot of people just shipped literally the same icons and like different different packs like everybody was dropping icon packs and a lot of them were just the same icons and I just thought like what there was so much like very basic like clip art looking stuff in all these icon packs yeah and the reason why is because it was the easiest way to make a lot of money like there was all these stories about some developer making a hundred thousand in a month off of a minimal icon pack and everybody wants to make a hundred thousand in a month but it's like I can't do stuff like that like I just couldn't just ship out a random pack and then use my channels to promote it because I would feel bad and also like I probably wouldn't have designed all those icons like where are they coming from but obviously I don't mean to trash talk that Designer I think he was one of the first people to see the potential of custom icons and I think you did it all by himself which is great I love that I love seeing successes like that yeah so for my collection I want to have things that would fit my style be a little bit unique be a little bit different it's not obviously for everyone but the people who do like it are always sharing uh screenshots on Twitter or Instagram tell me how much they like it and uh request icons that they want to add and obviously I can't do every single icon I'm not physically capable of doing that but uh I like to be able to have icons for most of the popular apps apps and all the stock apps and now with the new iPhones that have Dynamic Islands it hides that really annoying shortcut notification that drops down every single time you open a shortcut as I'm sure you're familiar with that's one of the biggest things that prevented me from even doing this in the first place like even wanting to use icons because when you know this ability first came out it was okay like it was like you know the drop down you forget it's there you get used to it either decide do I want to see that notification every single time or do I have a nice beautiful custom home screen and obviously a lot of people have chosen the latter because it's worth the trade-off to sometimes have that customization in place but now with the new Dynamic Island functionality you don't see that notification at all it hides it in the island it's very very subtle and now even with things like the camera before if you use the shortcut with a custom icon to open up the camera app it would take an extra full second for the camera to like be ready to go cancel deal I can't do that deal with that but now you can do it and uh if you're willing to go through the process which isn't super terrible these days and there are very uh cohesive guides and I think even shortcuts you can download it's pretty easy to do but for me personally my home screen is very clean and I like to have just a couple icons everything else is in the app library and that's how I like it so I like that are you just a one home screen guy yeah yeah I admire that I aspire to be that it's all that works for me at this point I like to have four apps in the dock and then four apps on my home screen a little square Arrangement using the clear spaces app because I don't really want to see too much when I turn my phone on I want to be able to see my wallpaper and also be able to just see the core apps I need and any distracting things like uh Instagram and Twitter all those are on in the app Library so they're not like the first thing I see when I turn my phone on after I talked to Isaac I blew up my whole phone again I got rid of a bunch of the widgets I changed my wallpaper again and I changed a few icons I didn't change all of my icons just the four in my dock which tend to be the ones that never really move around and they're all a single style now I really like how it looks plus I now have just two home screens one is apps and one is widgets and I think Isaac's right that less is more there the app library or the app drawer or Android do the job great after all this suffice to say my phone looks really different than it did a few weeks ago and it was a really fun exercise actually I wound up not just changing the look of my phone but really thinking about where I want things to be and what I want to have easy access to and maybe just as important what I don't want to have easy access to plus what my home screen and wallpaper and icons and widgets should not just do but make me feel every time I turn my phone on not everyone is going to want to go down this unbelievable Rabbit Hole of personalization and shortcuts and widgets and all kinds of different stuff and that's okay but I think it's worth at least spending a few minutes to make sure that when you turn your phone on as we all do a million times a day feels the way you want it to because I think that's important foreign that's enough Apple talk that is it for the vergecast today thanks to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening there's lots more from everything we talked about on the verge.com we'll put some links to all our reviews in the show notes but also you know readtheburge.com there's so much gadget news this week There's Xbox leaks there's a Microsoft Event there's an Amazon event there's a ton happening all of it is on the verge.com if you have thoughts questions feelings or other phones you think people should buy instead of the iPhone 15 you can always email us at vergecast theverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866 verge11 send us all of your thoughts and questions and again this is probably the last call for this if you have questions about the Verge or the vergecast send them in the meta episode is coming really soon this show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James Brook mentors is our editorial director of audio the vergecast is a Verge production and part of the VOX media podcast Network mili Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about Amazon Microsoft why Amazon and Microsoft are suddenly kind of at odds about gadgets Xbox and all the other stuff going on this week see you then rock and roll foreign\n"