
In the News
In the News
185: 16ḝ Economical, Exciting, Excellent, or Everyone (?)
Watch the video!
Thank you SaneBox for sponsoring this episode!
www.sanebox.com/inthenews
In the News blog post for February 21, 2025:
https://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2025/02/in-the-news766.html
00:00 Word to the JD!
03:57 Thank you SaneBox for sponsoring this episode!
04:35 16 Economical, Exciting, Excellent, or Everyone (?)
37:26 Watch Band Collector
39:54 In the Vision! Arctic Surfing
42:58 In the Show! Severed Insurance
45:52 Thank you SaneBox for sponsoring this episode!
51:29 Brett’s iTip: Change the Size of Your Apps!
54:26 Jeff’s iTip: Washing Your Apple Watch!
Jeff’s Review: Apple introduces the iPhone 16e
John Gruber | Daring Fireball: Thoughts and Observations on Today’s iPhone 16e Announcement
Stephen Nellis | Reuters: Apple reveals first custom modem chip, shifting away from Qualcomm
Juli Clover | MacRumors: iPhone 16e Has iPhone 16 Camera, But Lacks Some Features
William Gallagher | Apple Insider: Apple cut too much by removing MagSafe from the iPhone 16e
Andrew O’Hara | Apple Insider: Twelve South TimePorter review: An elegant wall mount to display your growing collection of Apple Watch bands
Brett’s iTip: Customize the Size of Your Apps on the Home Screen
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/customize-apps-and-widgets-on-the-home-screen-iph385473442/ios
Jeff’s iTip: If the microphone or speaker isn’t working as expected on your Apple Watch
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108266
Thank you SaneBox for sponsoring this episode!
www.sanebox.com/inthenews
Brett Burney from http://www.appsinlaw.com
Jeff Richardson from http://www.iphonejd.com
Welcome to In the News for February 21, 2025.
I am Brett Burney from Appsinlaw.com.
And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD.
Hello Jeff and congratulations, my friend, on, uh, it's, you know, people would go to iPhoneJD.com.
They may notice something just a tiny bit different, but you know, it's not that much different Jeff that they would, that they would probably think about it.
But I know about it just simply because I've, I've, I've been friends with you for a long time and I followed the site for so long, but there was a little bit of a minor change on the back end and it looks fantastic.
A little bit cleaner, a little bit nicer.
This is great.
Congratulations on the move.
Thanks.
Thanks.
I'm really happy.
I'm very happy about it.
I've been trying to, I've been thinking about moving to something like WordPress for years now.
And when I, when I looked at it seriously in the past, it was just so difficult.
It was way above my, you know, knowledge of how to do it.
And I tried and I just didn't like it, but I finally decided to do it last year and have been working on it the last couple of months.
You were the one who suggested to me, and I mentioned this for anyone that, you know, you know, I think about online law practice.
If someone comes to me with a legal issue, of course I'm going to help them.
But like if there's a tax issue that comes up, I bring in a tax attorney, right?
If there's a rules and estates issue, you know, you bring in a specialist.
And I realized, and you're the one that convinced me of this and you were telling me what I should have already known that like the things that I could not figure out on WordPress, you know, I'm an attorney, I'm not like a web developer.
And so you had suggested this service called Fiverr, F I V E R R, where you can like find people that you can hire.
And so I went in there and I found somebody to hire that was an expert in web development.
And oh my goodness, I mean, I could not have done it without that.
It was just so amazing.
It was this guy, I mean, he happened to be no claded in, in Bangladesh of all places, but he like totally knew this stuff old.
And he was able to get stuff moved for me and do a bunch of stuff.
And, and so then we did it.
So the new website looks a little different than before.
I mean, there's two columns instead of three.
I figured we didn't really need the three columns anymore.
That was just the way type pad used to do things.
But like from a, from a user standpoint, like first of all, it is so much faster.
And just to say something quickly about that.
One thing I did not know at first is that WordPress is not like a specific, I mean, there is a WordPress company, but WordPress is a platform.
In fact, there's wordpress.org, which is the platform and there's world wordpress.com, which is one of many, many companies that offers WordPress.
So I actually did not go with the WordPress itself.
I found another company that happens to be called rocket.net.
That's more expensive, but they are just super fast.
And there's a million technical reasons.
I'm not going to go into as to why that's true with things like CloudFlare, but you know, they are just so fast.
And I'm like, you know what, if I'm going to make this change, you know, I'm, you know, whatever, I'm not making much money off of this, but it's, you know, why not have something that I can be proud of.
And the idea that the websites load just so, so darn quickly.
It's amazing how quickly, like they're like blink of an eye.
That's great.
It's blink of an eye.
It's stable.
Things are there.
And the thing about the type pad site, you know, type pad has not really been in development for a long time.
And I felt like my old website was being held together by scotch tape.
You know, so many things that just were not working well.
And now everything is real.
I mean, it's, it's complicated behind the scenes, but just from the standpoint of people that are reading the website, everything's going to be faster.
It's going to be cleaner.
Things should be loading correctly.
There should not be downtime.
So I'm very happy about it.
So anyway, I mean, enough discussion about that, but you know, we all know that when you make big changes like this of any kind, you know, there's some learning curves, but the end result is going to be nice.
So I'm still finding little things here.
I tried to make it look more or less the same.
It's okay.
No panicking.
It's all good.
But yeah, that's, that's the main thing.
Just even go into it.
Even just, it feels so much snappier and I just, I just like it a little bit cleaner.
So congrats on that.
And that's great because that's pretty much the only news that we had this week.
Right?
Unfortunately, nothing else going on.
Whoa, except wait, Apple released a new iPhone.
Before we get into that just quickly, we want to say thank you to our sponsors yet once again, SaneBox, we'll talk a little bit about them in just a moment, but if you haven't tried SaneBox for a way to make your insane mailbox a little saner and a little way to grasp it a little bit, you can go to sanebox.com/inthenews, all one word, sanebox.com/inthenews and get a little bit more information about SaneBox.
We'll talk about them in just a moment, but first let's get to the big news.
And in fact, it's pretty much the only, the big news that we were anticipating from last week that Apple had this special announcement on Wednesday and it was kind of cryptic.
Like Tim Cook, I think texted last week or, you know, put on, um, on Twitter or X with like, Hey, we're going to welcome the newest member of our, I, you know, Apple family.
And of course I wanted to think that we were going to, you know, maybe be getting a new, you know, car or spaceship or something.
But no, like most people expected, it was a new iPhone now, but this wasn't like a pro and I have a bigger one, not a smaller one.
It is the iPhone 16 E which fits just in a kind of a, a nice little sweet spot, maybe kind of toward the bottom, Jeff, but you did a great job of doing your review this week.
And a lot of people have said, I think generally most people are pretty happy with the result that we got this week from Apple.
Yeah, I think so.
I think it's a solid product.
This is the replacement of the iPhone se, which Apple had three different versions of it over the years, which was, which was, it was the budget iPhone.
It was the one that would come out and when it, whenever it would come out, it would be, you know, a little bit lower end, but not that low end.
And then they would keep it around for a couple of years.
And then by the end of the three years that had been around, it might not be the latest and greatest, but you would save money on it.
It was the budget iPhone.
And so now this is the new budget iPhone, um, the, uh, the 16 E and we can talk about, I mean, if there's, if there's a one, the only bad thing I've heard about it is that the starting price is higher because you could have gotten an se for four 29.
Now that's a 64 gigabyte version.
This is one 28.
So it's not really apples and oranges, but you know, the starting price of this one is five 99.
So, um, you know, again, it's not much of a difference if you compare the, the, the same capacity at one 28 to one 28, but it's a little bit more expensive, but you know, I, you know, things, things, prices go up over time.
Um, but the flip from the other direction, it's $200 less expensive than an iPhone 16 or Apple still sells the iPhone 15 from last year.
And uh, it's about a hundred dollars less than that.
And I do think it's a better phone than the iPhone 15 in most ways.
So, you know, if you're looking to just get a simple iPhone, uh, you know, maybe not for yourself, but maybe somebody else, you know, that, you know, this is the one to get.
And as I mentioned, you know, my, my wife and daughter have used an se for years and are very happy with it.
My wife's a little upset that the button has gone away, which was one of the big changes that we no longer have an iPhone with the button on the front.
You mean the touch ID button, the touch ID button.
Exactly.
She likes the touch.
Wow.
She sort of liked it.
I mean, I, I don't get it in my mind.
Having more screen real estate is better.
You know, this is like way back, you know, when the iPhone came out in 2007, there were people that complained because I love the keyboard and my BlackBerry.
And I'm like, right.
You know, I know you like that keyboard, but it's just a chick with keyboard.
And wouldn't you want to have all that space for like the display of the phone?
So whatever, whatever.
There are transitions, but this is truly, I mean, it's a modern iPhone.
So like if you get this iPhone, you're getting, you know, the core features of a modern iPhone.
It's just minus a few.
And so that's, that's sort of the difference.
And I guess we could sort of talk about those things to decide if it's something that, you know, would matter to you or not.
The you know, I'm trying to think of where to start the well, how about just the name just real quick, because what's in a name, right?
But it's so funny.
And I think you link to a dairy fireball story, which I just thought was great because John Gruber obviously has so much insight from over the years into this.
But you may hear us not calling this the iPhone 16 SE, which I think a lot of people sort of anticipated or expected.
They took out the S, which I think somebody, one of these articles that you linked to today pointed out that we never really fully knew from Apple officially what the S and the E stood for.
There were some people that were guessing at it, but now we just took out the S.
So now we're just E.
So this is now the 16 E and I know I'm harping on the name aspect, but what's it a name is pretty important because we now have the iPhone 16.
Then we have the 16 pro and this is now the 16 E.
So it goes, you know, E normal and pro, right?
So it's like that's sort of the strata that we have on this now.
And I just think that's important.
Nobody knows exactly again what the E stands for.
I know people were talking about the E could be for everyone, right?
Because this is like the every man's type of an iPhone.
If you don't need the pro or something, it could be exciting.
It could be economical.
I don't know what the E stands for.
Apple says that it doesn't stand for anything, but I can't really take that at face value.
It's like somebody in, you know, in the bowels of Apple somewhere, somebody knows what the E stands for, but they're not going to tell us on there.
But I mean, I know I've harped on that, but it's important to make sure that you know what you're looking for here, right?
This is the 16 E.
Over the years, Apple has used these letters with its phone.
I mean, it goes all the way back to when, you know, the iPhone three came out, they had the three G, you know, and at the time it was like, OK, the G makes sense because it supported the three G network, which was such a big advantage over edge.
And then they had three G S and that, you know, they've had different letters over time.
There was the iPhone four, then there was the iPhone four S.
Some people would joke that the S of four S was was for speed.
You know, I even said that because I heard some people say that because Steve Jobs passed away for S meant for Steve.
I mean, who knows?
I think in some ways Apple uses these little letters just on a whim, maybe somewhere in some dark corner.
There's somebody in the marketing department of Apple that has some reason for it.
You know, the ISE, I always thought was like a special edition.
You know, they used to have the Apple.
Yeah.
So, you know, who knows?
I guess they still do.
But you can who knows?
I mean, the letters are what they are.
It might just be because somebody looked at marketing like the name and said, I like the way the letter E looks next to a 16.
It could be as simple as that.
So it really does not stand for anything.
But it's a way for people to to understand what what what this is.
So, you know, of the things that go ahead, go ahead.
I was going to start talking.
Let's talk about what's changed, like what they took away.
And then and then at the end, I want to circle around and talk about the modem, because that is something.
Yes.
OK, good.
Yeah, we'll get to that.
One of the big changes was the camera system.
You know, this is a more simple camera and that it's just got the one lens.
So you don't have the wide angle lens, which is good if you want to get lots and lots of stuff in a picture.
And that same wide angle lens is used for macro photography.
You can get really close to like a flower or something.
And of course, you don't have the zoom lens.
But the 16 didn't have that either.
You had to go up to the to the 16 pro to get that.
Right.
But when I think about, you know, so many folks that I see out there using their phone, they use it the way that, you know, people used to just use a point and shoot camera.
You know, you take it out and you take a picture and you're done.
They're not zoom in.
They're not doing anything.
They just want to take a picture.
And for those people, if you're not really changing lenses, this is a substantially, substantially better camera than what you had with the SE.
It's the same main camera that you have on the rest of the 16 line with some minor tweaks and things that it doesn't have that have more to do with software than hardware.
So you're going to get like if you upgrade from an SE to this 16E, you're going to get much better pictures.
I mean, so that's going to be a huge increase and you're probably not going to care about the other stuff.
So even though for me, the camera is one of the most important things to the phone for me and that's one of the reasons I enjoy getting the pro with the latest and greatest.
I don't think it's going to matter for a lot of people.
And, you know, and there's software things that you don't get like you don't get the cinematic modes.
And of course, you can't record in stereo 3D because there's only one lens, not two and things like that.
But most people are not going to care about that.
Well, I think that's fine at this.
Yeah, at this price point, I mean, you're not you're you know that you're not buying the premium.
Right.
And so if you want that, if you need that for whatever that you're doing, you know that you've got to pay a little bit more.
But immediately when I saw this, I thought about the I thought the exact same thing that you mentioned in your review today.
It's like you're going to know exactly what kind of iPhone someone has just by looking at the back.
They've got it up to their ear.
It's like the iPhone pro has three cameras.
The iPhone 16 only has two eyes.
And then the new 16 E now is the Cyclops.
It only has one like you're going to immediately be able to see what kind of an iPhone and not like that.
That's a big deal or anything.
But, you know, for those of us that kind of follow this, it's like, wow, that's a little bit of a stark difference.
And you know, just to be able to kind of catch that on on on a whim.
But as you said, it is a significant upgrade.
In fact, I think, yeah, you talk about it here.
The old iPhone as he had a 12 megapixel camera.
This is a 48 megapixel fusion camera.
Now, you know, they're doing some trickery here, right, with some with some lenses and stuff like that.
So, you know, you don't have that same kind of a manual, you know, zoom.
It's more of a digital zoom.
But still, to your point, Jeff, this is a fantastic camera, even if it's just the point and shoot.
You know, I'm thinking about younger kids that just want to take pictures all the time, just like you were talking about.
This is really going to be a great camera, you know, just for some basic photography.
Yeah.
And the nice thing about the 48 megapixel is that it means that if you crop, you're still going to get a pretty good picture.
And, you know, on this on this new iPhone 16, the only zoom modes is either one X or two X.
And of course, the two X is not an optical zoom.
It's just a crop.
But I don't mean to belittle it, because on my phone, I routinely use the mode.
That's the two X mode.
For example, if I'm taking video of my daughter playing basketball and even though I know it's cropped, it's so it's not like it's not like it's a better lens, but like that's what I want.
That's what I want in my image.
It's still going to be a really good image.
It's when I'm when I'm using it, you know, the camera to film things.
I prefer having that cropped in mode where things are closer.
So it's no slouch to have that two X mode, even though it's just it's not like true to X with like a better telephoto camera.
It's just cropping in on it.
So that that part's really good.
And I think I think overall, you're going to know what you get.
You know, there's no you look like you say, you look at the back and you instantly see you've got one lens, not two.
But that one lens is going to be great.
So I think that's a good feature.
You also just real quick, you point out here, there is no camera button like what you have on right that brand new one, which again, to me, that's not a big deal, because I think most people will either, you know, use the on screen button, or you could probably I'm going to guess and surely you can still use like the up volume button, right?
You are in like landscape mode.
So it's not like you would lose anything.
Again, I think for most people that are buying the 16 e, it's not like that they're looking for additional buttons on the outset.
Well, maybe except for your wife, but you do get a different button, right?
You get the action button, which is something new.
Exactly.
That's right.
You're moving up from an SC you've never had like an action button before.
And if you wanted to say every time I press my action button, launch the camera, you could totally do that.
So you know, you can have for all intents and purposes, you have a dedicated button, right?
Or you can make it a thing.
I love I mean, the thing I know it's silly, but I love having that action button.
And I have found myself now fairly recently over the last couple of months that I will switch that back and forth.
If I'm on a hike, for example, and I want to have quick access to my phone, I'll make it the camera.
If I know that, you know, I'm traveling and in a hotel room, you know, where it could be dark, I'm I'll change it to a flashlight.
In other words, it's just really nice that I can be able to switch that back and forth.
And I've gotten to start using that a little bit more.
So I feel like, you know, several things and this is to me is one of them that I feel like that the 16 he has kind of adopted some premium type features.
And I feel like at least right now, that action button is one of those things that we saw on the premium phones, including I know a few of the other things that you're going to talk about.
It is now no longer a lightning cable, they have the USB C.
And you know, some people may argue that's not really a premium feature.
But I think that that just kind of helps, you know, bring everything else in like if you have other Apple products, you're going to be on the Apple right on on USB C anyway.
Yeah, no, I mean, we're getting to the point where so many things are USB C that now your iPhone will be too.
And you know, you're not gonna you're not gonna need to worry about your lightning cables anymore.
So goodbye to the home screen button.
Goodbye to the the lightning.
You know, it was funny, I was my wife was looking for a USB C cable the other night and I was dishing around and I found like a 30 pin connector.
Remember those old big 30?
Oh, my God, I'm like, I guess I have no use for this cable anymore.
I'm still laughing that it was still there.
But eventually lightning will go the same way.
So so camera is a big difference.
You know, that's on the back, flip it over to the front.
And one of the things that you'll notice is at the very top of my iPhone, I've had ever since last generation iPhone, the dynamic island, which is this cool place.
Like I'm, I'm using my iPhone for one thing, but I could glance up there and I can see like the, you know, the music gets playing and their podcast or whatever information it can show one or two things up there.
I really like the dynamic island.
We're traveling and like my flighty app will have like how many, you know, that my gate information and how long till I leave.
So I like it.
But again, it's just a nice to have.
It's not something that you need to have the, this S E I mean, sorry, the 16 E I'm going to be saying that a lot.
Watch your tongue, Jeff.
I was listening to the connected podcast this week, which has a Federico Vatici, who's an Italian in Italy.
And they were joking that they should call it instead of 16 E it's it's the 16 E.
Anyway, I like that.
The 16 E has a notch at the top, just like we used to have years ago on the flagship phones.
So, you know, whatever, it's fine.
It is what it is.
It's not a big deal.
It's a notch.
You don't get the, the, you don't, you don't get whatever.
The one that I've heard and I linked to him today, there were some articles talking about whether this was the right decision or not, is that this iPhone, even though it's a modern iPhone in many ways, doesn't have MagSafe.
MagSafe has been around for a goodness, a very long time now.
Right.
And when MagSafe first came out, I wasn't really using it at all.
I didn't even see the value of it because I'm like, whatever, wireless, blah, blah, wireless charging, who cares?
But then once standby mode came out, as I'm talking to you right now, Brett, I'm right below my monitor.
I can see my iPhone showing me the time and the date and the temperature because it's on, it's on my charger in standby mode.
Now you could still use it.
If I had one of those chargers that had like a, a place for the iPhone to sit.
So that was physically just sort of sitting on top of it.
It's this new 16E does have wireless charging.
So you could, if you get the right, but what it doesn't have is the magnet and it doesn't have the speed, you know, regular Qi charging is 7.5, whereas MagSafe and Qi 2 is twice as fast, 15.
Again, it's still much slower charging than you would get with plugging a cable in, but you know, it's nicer to have the faster charger, but for me, it's the magnet that's really key.
So I love that I can just stick my iPhone on my little anchor device and then to pull it off, I just yank it off and it's just a magnet.
So it doesn't hold very much.
And that's the main thing that I use the magnet for, but you know, they also have like, you know, the battery packs that stick to the back with the magnet.
You've got the, you know, a million, you know, wall, you know, external wallets you can buy.
There's a pretty big set of things that you could purchase that connect to that magnet portion.
In fact, I've already seen some developers say that, you know, so many people have a case for their iPhone and they're going to be selling a case for the 16E that includes a magnet in it just so that you could attach at least some, it's not going to work with all of them, but you could at least do some of the MagSafe stuff.
So I guess that's good because a lot of people have a case.
So, you know, some of these articles are saying like, oh, this is a really big mistake.
Apple should not have omitted MagSafe.
I don't think it's a mistake.
I think that, you know, people moving up from a sex from an SE didn't have MagSafe before anyway.
So I guess, I guess they're saving money.
That's got to be the reason that Apple is doing this, but it's an interesting omission.
Okay.
So to be clear though, the 16E does support wireless charging.
It just doesn't support that MagSafe, which is a faster.
Did we have wireless charging in the old iPhone SE?
Did that support wireless charging at all?
That's what I'm wondering there.
Okay.
And that's what I thought too.
Okay, good.
Thanks.
Because I mean, to me that is at least a quasi premium upgrade.
You get something more.
You know, so in other words, like, you know, in our vehicle, in our, in our family car, there is a wireless charger there.
Right.
And I could take a 16E, put it on there.
It just won't charge as fast.
Or when I was traveling the other day, I was at a hotel where on this little table, they had the little circle for wireless charging.
I don't know that it was MagSafe.
I don't think that it was because when I put my 15 pro down, I didn't feel the magnet, like grab it or anything, but theoretically, right.
I could take a 16E and put it down on a wireless charger puck like that, like you would see sometimes, and it should charge.
It just won't be as fast because it does support Qi too.
It just doesn't support.
No, no, no.
Qi too.
Just regular Qi.
Oh, just Qi.
Yeah.
And also remember, Brad, that one of the reasons that MagSafe was such an advantage over Qi is when you stick something on top of a Qi charger, you never know, did you get it in the right spot?
Is it too far to the left?
You have to watch it.
Is it charging?
Right, right.
Whereas with MagSafe, the magnets, you know, snaps to connect and you know, you have a good connection.
You know, yeah.
Right.
And so with this 16E, you're back to the early days of Qi wireless charging where you got to just double check it.
Like did I put it in the right spot?
You know, did somebody knock it?
And it moved over a half an inch.
Now it's not charging anymore.
So so.
And I think, by the way, you link to something else here, right?
That we're talking about.
Yeah.
Willem Gallagher over here at Apple Insider.
He's one of the ones that argues Apple cut too much by removing MagSafe.
I guess when I was reading these stories, this is what I was wrestling with.
I'm like, well, wait a minute.
I don't think we had wireless charging at all in the old SE.
So at least that's something.
I mean, that's that's at least something there if you had that.
But even if you did have a wireless charger and you had a cable right next to you and you could choose which to do, I'd probably go cable.
And I think that's what William Gallagher here is talking about.
Right.
Because I know the cable, first of all, is is going to be a sure thing when I plug it in.
It's going to be charging.
And number two, it's going to be faster.
It's going to charge faster than it would if I did the wireless on there.
But in a pinch, at least I do like the idea that I could have wireless charging.
And that to me was a little bit of an upgrade.
But I can certainly see I can see where some of these folks are coming.
And frankly, just like you alluded to, I'm sure Apple has this long list of items that like, do we do this or do we do that?
Right.
And you have to cut some things from this in order to get it under the price point here.
And it just I feel like that this was one of the ones that they were like, yeah, we don't really want to because we know people are not going to be happy.
But in the end, they probably had to decide that was what that was when they had to cut out.
Yeah.
So unless there's any other emissions that you want to talk about, because there are some other emissions, I just don't think that they're huge.
Let's talk about this new modem.
OK, so the new actually real quick, can we talk about just the regular processor first?
Right.
Because this one not have the same processor that the that that the iPhone 16 has.
This is the A18.
Right.
Is that what you put in there?
It's the same processor, but it's going to it only has say only it has four GPU cores instead of five.
And my guess is that this is something called binning.
You know, when people make these processes, we talked about that some of them are going to test and like every single part of it's going to be great.
And then some of them will they'll test it.
And like one little part does like one of the GPUs isn't working.
And rather than throw out that chip, they will just save it as a four core GPU processor instead of a five.
OK, yeah.
Remember, you've got the main processor on these chips, which is most of the things that you do with your iPhone.
And then you've got the GPU with the graphical performance, which is things it's not.
It makes graphics faster.
So for some games, but there's even some things like some forms of machine learning and stuff that work faster with the graphical.
Now for a regular person having four versus five GPUs.
I mean, the fact that something is going to take two fractions of a second instead of one fraction of a second, you're really not going to have the notice.
I mean, yes.
Right.
Pro users like having the best.
So that's fine.
But so for all intents and purposes, I think you can just say it's the same processor as the 16.
Yeah, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny bit slower.
But but it does have all everything that a 18 does support, which, for example, includes Apple Intelligence and, you know, Apple Intelligence.
Good, bad or otherwise.
It's coming along.
But you will be able to between having the 18 and having one hundred and twenty eight gigabytes of storage space because you need to have more storage space for the Apple intelligence stuff.
You can use Apple intelligence.
And again, again, I know Apple intelligence is not the biggest deal right now, but it's going to improve over time.
And if you get this phone, like maybe later on this year and then you hold on to it for three or four years, you're going to be along for the ride of Apple intelligence for the long haul, which is nice.
So that's that's that's so that's that's another it's a tiny, tiny change.
It's like there's some tiny screen changes to this phone can't get quite as bright as some of the other phones.
It can't get quite as dim.
But again, most people don't care.
You're not going to.
And again, I just wanted to hit on that regular part of the main process of the core processor there, just because, again, I feel like that is sort of another kind of a of a quasi premium bump there.
I mean, I feel like they probably had some a 17 or 16 chips even.
I would not have blamed them if they had put in a generation or two chip from before.
But I feel like that's getting back to that thing I just talked about with the list.
Like if you had to choose between going with MagSafe versus what if we put the 18 in there because we want everybody to eventually get into the Apple intelligence ecosystem.
And the only way they could really get everybody there, even with a with a bottom of the barrel phone, which is not really a good way to call it.
But if you have a budget type of an iPhone, they still want people to be in the Apple intelligence.
And this is the way they did that.
And to me, I I was just even just a little surprised that they they went with an A18.
I felt like that they would have you know, I would have absolutely been happy if they put a 17 or a 16 or something like that in there.
But like you said, it's just that for that GPU core that maybe you know, they just tweaked a little bit on there.
But I think that was a great sign.
And that just seems to kind of show I think where Apple is going from that.
But as you started going to I really think the biggest news here of this device is a new modem chip.
We've talked about this off and on over the years because it's no secret that Apple has tried the one one well, one of the main pieces of technology in an iPhone is not made by Apple.
They took over and did their own processor several years ago and it has been an absolutely home an absolute home run.
Oh my gosh, they could never get away from the modem chip, which of course really makes the life of an actual phone.
And this is the first one where they are trying their own hand finally at a modem chip.
And I really think this is the biggest news of the device completely.
It is.
And this is the one that's going to have significance for many, many years to come, not just for this one particular phone, but for future iPhones.
As you alluded to many, many, many years ago, Apple purchased a company in Israel called P.A.
Semi, which was making their own microprocessors.
And Apple used that to create the chips that we you know, all of their custom chips that we use for the iPhone, for the Mac, for the iPad, you know, the M series, the A series, all of those.
And it has been so much better than what Intel and other people have been doing.
It's been fantastic.
And this is one of the things for the secret sauce.
Not only is it a better processor, but since Apple creates it, they fine tune it for specifically what they need.
So they're not buying something off the shelf and adapting it.
They're making their it's custom built.
And so they wanted to do the same thing for the modem for years.
Making modems is hard.
I mean, we know it's hard because there are so few companies in the world that even do it.
And the best one is Qualcomm.
And so for years now, Apple has been purchasing from Qualcomm.
They've been litigating against Qualcomm.
It's been a whole big thing.
But yeah, I want to say it was I didn't look this up data, but off the top of my head, maybe 2019, it was a long time ago.
Apple purchased much like they purchased the company in Israel a long time ago.
They purchased Intel's modem division because Intel was one of the competitors to Qualcomm.
And for all of these years, we're like, gosh, we know that you purchased them.
We've got all these engineers that you're paying year in, year out.
What are you going to do with this technology?
So now we finally see.
So they've come up with their modem.
They're calling it the C1, you know, like their other chips.
They've got the letter and the number.
This is just the first generation of it.
And I think it makes perfect sense.
Make your first product that, you know, maybe it's going to encounter some issues in the real world because, you know, modems have to work with like, I think there's like 180 different cell phone carriers in the world and they all have little tweaks to how they do their communications.
And so you have to have a single chip that works with all of them.
It's a big task.
So the 16E is not going to be much like the SE.
It's not going to be the best selling iPhone, right?
It's going to be smaller sales.
And people that use this budget phone are not looking for the latest and greatest.
And so to a certain degree, I think they're going to be guinea pigs for Apple's new modem to see how it works and they'll tweak it over time.
This initial modem has all the features that you would want in a modem for a basic modem.
It's missing some of the edge features.
For example, if you have 5G, there's something called the milliwave feature of 5G that in theory could allow communications that are super, super, super fast, like as fast as the fastest cable modem and optic, but they work in a very small area.
So right now, if you want to support this, I think AT&T calls it 5G plus or these other ones that Verizon has their milliwatt.
You have to go to like in certain, like a sports stadium might support it just within the stadium or like a certain part of downtown.
But it's a pain to implement because you have to put these towers up every couple of blocks.
And so as a practical matter, I don't know how big of a deal it's going to be.
I'm trying to think, I can't, I mean, my iPhone supports it and it has for about a year or two now.
I don't even remember if I've ever used it before.
It's not something that I encounter in everyday life.
For the purposes of this budget iPhone, not supporting that one feature really does not matter at all.
But again, maybe Apple will add that support in the C2 or C3.
But the real advantage here is that because they're making the chip themselves, according to Apple, it is the most efficient modem ever made, which means less battery power.
Now this iPhone 16E has two tricks up its sleeve.
One of them is this modem that's more efficient.
And the other one is that it has a slightly bigger battery and we don't know, than the 16 and the 16 pro, we don't know of the same size.
We don't know if the main battery savings are coming from the modem or from the larger battery.
But when you put them together and you actually get, you know, many hours more battery life with the 16E than you do with the 16 or the 15.
So that's nice because people, everybody hates when your battery dies, when your battery dies in your phone.
So that's something that everybody appreciates.
And again, this is just the C1.
I mean, think back to when Apple first started making its processors way back when, you know, what's going to be the C2, what's going to be the C3.
The hope is that this is a big deal.
I noticed that there was, and in fact, I linked to it today.
There was an article in, was it Reuters?
That was an interview.
I'm trying to pull it up.
Yeah, it was an interview with Johnny Sruji, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, who was the guy that's in charge of the chips.
And he was at Apple and he was saying the C1 subsystem is the most complex technology that Apple has ever built.
Now Apple has built some complicated technology over the years.
And maybe this is a little bit of, but for him to even say it means that, you know, it's, it's a miracle what Apple has done with its processors, the M processors, the A processors.
And for him to say that this is even more significant than that, I'm like, okay, you know, maybe that's just some marketing speak, but if he, but you know, he certainly is qualified to know what he's talking about.
And if he's being honest about it, this is what makes me excited because the C1 that's in the 16E, whatever, no big deal.
It's a modem, fine.
But the C2, the C3 that, you know, what we're going to see in the future, wouldn't it be interesting if maybe not this year's iPhone, but like next year's iPhone or the one after that.
What if another thing that sets apart the iPhone from its competitors is that something about the modem is so much better.
It's so much more efficient.
It's so much this, it's so much that this is what Apple can do.
And it has done in the past by, by knowing that exactly what it's being used for, for using their special sauce.
So this is what excites me.
Cause I think it's going to benefit all of us in the long run.
This to me is like the sleeper technology from Apple.
It's similar to what you were just started off with is the fact that that absolutely again, it's no secret.
We know Apple has been working on this for years.
We know that they secretly, well, not so secretly want to use their own modem chips, just like they're using their own processors.
And I feel like it would have been too chancy to start off with like an iPhone, like, you know, the iPhone with the flagship.
I would exactly, which I would say the 16 or the 16 pro, like we can't do that, but this is a perfect sleeper choice.
And the fact that they can do this, you know, if, if there's some issues, I feel like they can always kind of shrug it off and be like, well, you know, you get what you pay for.
It's the budget.
But you know, they are, they are gathering so much data from this Jeff.
Right.
I mean, they know exactly what they're doing and they're putting it out in the wild because you know, they've been testing this a lot, but now they've got it out in the wild with an actual product and they're just going to be able to gather so much data as to how this works.
And, and, you know, just to underscore what you were talking about, I feel like for one thing, the, the, the processor for the computer and for the phone, I was like, okay, well, it's a processor, but it's really kind of its own siloed infrastructure.
I mean, the processor really just has to run the computer on board, but we're talking about a modem chip, which initially, when I think about it, it's like, well, how can that be a big deal?
Like there's, it just connects to that tower over there that I see on the skyline, but it's so much more complicated than that.
Number one, it's like, we've talked about the fact that today, you know, if there's an emergency situation, it's like the modem just doesn't connect to my AT&T.
You remember that back in the day, we had to get phones that were only able to connect to one of the providers.
But today in an emergency situation, it needs to be able to compatible with all the different providers with the satellite.
You've got to, somehow it has to interact with the GPS system so that I can have that.
It even works on the, the wifi system.
I mean, there's so much complication that goes on here.
And especially when you travel now, that it's not just the providers in the United States, it's a providers all over the world.
I mean, it just is so mind blowing that once you start reading just a little bit of a hint of this, that you understand like, oh my goodness, like this is even so much more harder than creating your own processor.
And there are so many other companies that you have to work with.
And to your point again, Qualcomm, you know, Samsung, there's only a few companies that actually even have been doing this over the years.
And it's just amazing that it's, it's, uh, that Apple is here now.
And this gets me so much more excited for the, the, the future technologies.
The only thing I'm nervous about is I saw one person report that it's probably too new to be in the iPhone 17 that we expect maybe to see later this year, because it's like, I want that.
Like I want it now.
I know it's going to be good and I want to see it, but I can understand that it may have to wait for another, you know, the 17th already probably been, you know, close to being in production already.
So maybe it's too late to get it there, but that's my only hesitation.
I'm like, come on, I want it.
I want to see it coming out now.
Yeah.
So anyway, that's the new 16B.
Interesting.
Very, very cool.
Just to see one chip.
I want to keep talking about this.
Like I just want to see more and more people talking about that.
Well, that's probably about it for the news today.
I feel like we come from something that's so exciting to maybe, how about let's talk about a holder for your watch bands?
Like what a switch here.
Although I remember talking about this several months ago when you mentioned this, one of our favorite companies that make accessories for Apple products is called 12 South.
And I remember when they announced this, it's called the Time Porter.
And basically, I feel like I don't want to under explain this, but it's basically like a little tiny shelf that you can put on the wall, mount on the wall, and it will hold all of your lovely Apple watch bands so that you can see which one you want day to day.
Yeah.
This sort of droop down, you know, sort of connects them at the top and they droop down.
And you know, a lot of people, some people just have one Apple watch band, but you know, so many people, it's so easy to get bands and replace them that a lot of people have bands.
I've got a ton of them.
I've got more than I ever need.
You need this then.
Yeah, you need to have it.
You need the Time Porter.
If I had, I mean, I keep my watch bands right on my sort of nightstand next to my bed for no particular reason.
I just always have.
But I mean, if you've got like a closet space or something like that, if I had the space for and if it made sense in my life, I would totally get one of these.
It's a nice way to display them.
You can see the colors and everything else.
You have multiple watch bands, Brett.
What do you use?
What do you keep?
I don't.
Yeah.
You know, I think I just have them in a drawer and it's like, the thing is, it's like for me, I don't, I don't know why I just have this thing.
It's like, I don't want to take the time, you know, the 30 seconds to like switch it out.
They're so easy, but I just, just kind of grab my Apple watch and go.
I mean, it's on all the time.
And so the only thing I've done now is sometimes I'll switch between one that I typically wear like during the day.
And then when I work out, I like to have another one that can, you know, grab my wrist a little bit tighter.
I know you, you like to have your Milanese loop, you know, from like the formal wear, as it were for going to work.
And then last week you had, you had a, the red one or the product red for Valentine's.
So it's so easy to switch it out.
And I do like the fact that there's something like this.
I mean, 12 South has just always been such a great little accessory maker.
And this is nice called the time Porter on here.
Yeah.
So if any interest in that, take a look at the review from Andrew O'Hara and Apple insider, cause he, he likes it.
He's had it for a while.
And again, I, it looks to me like a solid product and it's not very expensive.
And like, I think each one holds like maybe six bands, but you can get two of them and then you can make it longer and you can hold more bands.
They connect to each other.
So it's a, it's a clever product.
I like it.
In the vision.
Let's talk quickly about your Apple vision pro.
I'm glad to see continuously that there is some additional content that you can see from immersive.
This one is called Arctic surfing.
I didn't know there was such a thing, but I'm glad the Apple vision pro now you can watch surfers in the Arctic, Jeff.
That's great.
Yeah.
When I think of surfers, I think of, you know, off the coast of Hawaii or California, you're thinking of, you know, sandy beaches and sun, but this is the opposite.
These people that go to Norway, I didn't even know this was a thing, which is good.
Yeah.
Parents.
Let me just know.
Parenthetically of the, any of the many series that Apple has for the vision pro this one called boundless is the idea of like, let us show you, show you something you've never even seen before.
And the first episode was like, you know, balloons looking over this cool part of the, of the world.
And the second one, you know, it never even occurred to me to go to Norway, to go surfing and like these videos, it's so beautiful.
And of course it's, it's in 3d.
So I'm looking around me and you see the mountains and they're covered with snow and it's, it's beautiful and it's white and it's frigid cold.
But which is ironic because the Apple vision pro does not change the temperature in my house and yet having this immersive experience, I felt like I was getting cold.
It was really sort of funny how your sensors trick yourselves.
So it's fun.
You know, I love the idea that the vision pro can take you somewhere else, much like, you know, reading a book will, you know, take us lands away.
And this is a way to immersively take us somewhere else.
You know, what a great use.
So it's just, it's another in the line of the great immersive videos from Apple.
You had another link here to Andrew or at Apple insider about NBA 3d games.
Sounds like they're coming to the vision pro as well.
This is not a game.
It's not a game that you play.
What, what, what he's doing here is so like your, what you use of the NBA app and you're watching the game.
So you're watching like the actual NBA game, like, uh, you know, like watching a video, but then in front of you, you could have like, you know, on quote unquote a table, it's a little tabletop version of the, the mini people going around.
It basically gives you the illusion of like, you're actually at the stadium in a perfect seat looking down over the game.
And there, there it's not the video, their little, you know, avatars as if it is a computer game running around, but it is an interesting way to view it.
And I would love to have this for other sports too.
I mean, basketball is good because it's a, it's a, it's a smaller court.
So it's much smaller than, you know, football or soccer or any of those sorts of things.
Um, racing, but, um, but it's, uh, I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like a really interesting way to have just another perspective, another way to feel like you're, you're part of the game, like you're actually there.
So I love this, this, you know, advancements in mixed reality.
I really want to see people try things like this because you know, in the future, you know, five years from now, we'll, we'll see all sorts of stuff like this and how fun to play around with stuff like this.
It's really cool.
I want it.
Yeah.
I want you to watch a game.
What, what is your team in new Orleans?
Is it the Pelicans?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Pelicans.
It was some Pelicans on your tabletop in the vision.
We'll see how that goes in the show, Jeff, I can't wait till tonight.
I have every episode of severance season one and season two, and I am ready.
Wow.
I am all caught up.
We went, we went to the outside.
It's like, I got to know now what's happening.
It is so quick.
Like it was, it's so much nicer.
Like I almost wish that I had waited until all of the season two episodes came out.
Right.
Because in fact, I was telling my wife the other night, I I'm like, Hey honey, I just, I just got to finish this, this episode.
And she's like, okay, well how much time do you have left?
And it was just a couple of minutes left in the, at, you know, till the end.
And I said, but, but I can't, I can't stop there at the end.
You know that like, because of this, I have to see the beginning of the next episode and then I can stop it at like a, at a lull in the middle of the episode.
Like that's how I binge watch it has changed my watching habits now, but so much fun.
So now apparently I'm not the only one that's enjoying it because you linked today that severance surpasses Ted Lasso.
So I guess, you know, Adam S is, is, is passing Ted Lasso now, which is amazing to become the Apple TV pluses most watched series with the season two launch and well-deserved, I would say.
Well-deserved to the, you know, season one was just so special.
And season two has been just as mysterious.
In fact, some of the episodes without spoilers, but you know, we, we both know that what we're talking about, that there was one that was just, you know, out, let's just say it was outside and it was a whole, all sorts of revelations that one for goodness sakes.
So it's, it's so fun and I cannot wait for the next episode.
And it's great.
You know, Apple TV plus just has so many great shows and this is really just one of the very best.
And, you know, as you're starting to show here, they're crazy.
To have a, just a regular sponsor, like a state farm, you know, state farm insurance has decided to have a commercial that is set in severance that you're only going to really get this commercial if you're watching severance.
And so that tells you something about how many people are watching it.
There was an article I did not link to it today.
I didn't link to it today, but there was an article that was in Apple insider, I believe, that was saying that this is the second time that Apple has had a commercial tie-in.
They had a movie that came out a number of years ago called luck.
It was like a cartoon about like someone that's very unlucky.
And there was another, and I think it was an insurance company too, but they just took clips from luck of somebody having all these unlucky things happen to them.
And then said, you know, you never know what's going to happen in life.
So you should get insurance.
But that wasn't something like this where you actually have like, you know, the state farm person, Jake from state farm in the actual severance world.
So it's, I thought it was a cute, well-done commercial.
So bravo to them.
But it's also interesting because this doesn't happen unless you've got a hit on your hands.
So if you needed, if we needed one more data point to tell us that this is a great show, here we go.
There's another data point.
Great stuff.
I like it.
Let's talk about sane box just for a minute here, Jeff, we are so thankful to say box for sponsoring the podcast and we hope all of you have had a chance to look at same box quickly.
And if you haven't today, it's your day.
You can go to same box.com/in the news, all one word, get some additional information about what same box can do for your mailbox.
And it's pretty much it's a hassle free trial here.
You know, you need to put a credit card in, you can just try it.
It's not going to mess anything up with what you're doing right now in your email.
In fact, if you decide you don't want to stay with it, which I think would be a little silly, but you can just switch everything back.
And nothing's going to nothing's going to have any issues with that.
But if you do decide to continue on, we'll even give you $25 of a credit toward one of the same box subscriptions.
And it's well worth it.
So thank you, same box.
Jeff, I know you've been using same box for quite a while.
And you know, what I just remembered is that not only can I, you know, can I just have the folders that it creates that you've talked about before, available like on my Mac, for example, I love even being able to access them.
I just picked up my iPhone, I was able to like, jump into one of those folders on my Mac, on my mail app, just the same as if it was on my computer.
And I just like having sort of that, that syncing that goes on all the time there.
And it's really helpful.
Yeah, in fact, we've talked in the past episodes about, you know, what it does for you that it, you know, makes it to the inbox is clean and the stuff that's not really important get moves to a subfolder.
But I wanted to talk just a little bit about how it works.
When you use same box, it plugs into your actual mail server itself.
So it's far removed from the client level that you're using it.
And you should know that even though it's doing a great job of sorting your mail from a privacy standpoint, it's not reading the content of any of your messages.
Everything that it does is based upon the message headers.
So it looks at who the message is from, and what the subject line is.
And that doesn't seem like a lot of information.
But believe me, it's it because it works for me.
It's more than enough for it to make decisions on.
This is a newsletter.
So we're going to stick it over in your same news folder.
This looks like it could be something you don't even want, you know, maybe spam, maybe just a solicitation.
So I'm going to throw that into your same later folder.
This looks important.
So I'm going to put it into your, you know, keep it in your regular inbox.
And so it does all of that behind the scenes at the server level.
And because it's just a subfolder in your mail, like you were referring to, for me, it works on my computer.
It works on my iPad, works on my iPhone, works everywhere.
And so it works really, really well.
And you can use it with multiple accounts and stuff like that.
So, you know, that's one of the things I wanted to highlight today is you can try it out for free, which is how I first tried SaneBox many years ago.
I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to stick with this, but just give it a shot.
I mean, it doesn't do anything destructive.
It just puts a little subfolder in your inbox.
If you want to delete it later, you can.
And then you can just decide.
And then once I started using it and having it work behind the scenes, I'm like, well, this is great that like when I go look at my inbox, I'm not wasting all this time.
I mean, I can just glance at it.
I can see the important emails.
And then later on tonight or this weekend, then I'll take the time to actually look at the newsletters, which I do want to look at at some point.
I just don't want to be like interrupted with them in real life.
So so I really, I really, really like the way it works.
It doesn't replace your spam folder.
I mean, that's a separate thing that you're you know, your spam folder is done by your by your your mail provider.
And that does analyze the contents.
You know, if it looks like it's a message that's trying to get you to send money to somebody in another part of the world or, you know, advertising some, you know, whatever cheap Viagra or whatever the stupid stupidity is, that's the stuff that it's going to like.
Yeah, that's that's that's spam.
This doesn't do that.
And yet many of the messages that it moves away from me are messages that I would consider spam.
So it's like spam adjacent, even if it's not really a spam filter.
And then, of course, the messages from things, something, you know, some advertiser you never want to hear from again.
Yeah, you could go and you could click the unsubscribe button and hopefully that works.
But I always wonder if clicking the unsubscribe button is just telling them, hey, you got a real email address here.
So maybe you're not going to send things from from company A anymore, but go ahead and sell my email address to companies B through Z.
So I just throw it into the same black hole and they never know it.
And I will never see it again.
And it just gets rid of it.
So anyway, so that's how sandbox works behind the scenes.
And it's because of the way that it works.
It's so easy to turn off if you don't find it useful for you, that's fine.
But then again, if you do find it useful, you know, give it a shot.
So thumbs up.
Just a quick shout out to their support pages.
In fact, I just quickly within like three clicks went to how do I find my email server settings?
They do a great job of providing instructions for like Office 365 or Exchange, Apple Mail, Zoho Mail, GoDaddy, wherever you are.
They have all of these instructions here.
You can just follow it.
And again, I'm no like email server, you know, expert of any kind.
And so sometimes I get a little nervous about like, do I have to make any changes or anything in there.
But it's so easy just to follow the instructions on here.
And in fact, you know, you can even go to your sandbox, like I call it the dashboard.
I think that's what that's the official word for it.
But you can even, you know, make some of those changes or differences there.
So it's not like you really have to go into your back end.
And to me, that's just really helpful on that.
So thank you, sandbox for your support of in the news podcast.
You can find more information by going to sandbox.com/in the news, all one word sandbox.com/in the news and we thank them again for their support of our podcast.
In the know, let's talk about there's a quick little tip I just wanted to share because I stumbled upon it again, even though I know we've talked about this.
But, you know, with the latest, the last couple of updates to iOS over the last couple of years, we now have so much more freedom to be able to customize sort of the way, you know, not just the home screen, but like where your apps are located and how they even look like you can put a tent on them.
But one of the things I just was going to highlight today was going to the home screen and making a choice of whether you still want to have the names of your apps underneath the little app icon, or you can just quickly change it to what they call the large app icons.
And so it takes away those words.
And it's really easy to do similar to the way that, you know, if you wanted to move around apps before you would tap and hold on an app and go into what I always call jiggly mode.
I don't know, they do, the Apple does call it jiggle, but they don't call it jiggly mode.
I wish they would.
But instead of like tapping and holding on an app to move the app, one of the things you can do, if you just put your finger in like an empty space on one of your home screens and hold it down, you will go into jiggly mode.
And at the top left, now you'll see a little edit button.
And now you can do several things with that edit button.
But what I was going to highlight today was if you tap the customize option, you'll get a little tiny bar at the very bottom of your screen.
And there's just a few little options here.
One is you can change it from a different light or dark.
You can do that really quickly, even though there's other ways you can do that from the control panel.
But right at the very top of that little section at the bottom, that little panel at the bottom, there is a small and a large toggle.
And if you just tap on large, you'll immediately see your app icons get just a little bit bigger, which in a way I feel like they look a little cartoonish to me.
But I think Jeff, that's just because I'm so used to seeing it, you know, the regular way.
But when you go into that large mode, it will actually take off the little names of the apps.
Or if you have folders like I do, it'll take off the name of the folder.
But you can still see what's in there.
And most of the time, you know, we recognize the pages all the time.
But you can just quickly toggle back and forth between small and large.
And you can see which one that you like.
I guess you could even do this kind of on the fly.
You know, if at some point you wanted something to be to look a little bit bigger or smaller, you could do that.
So you just tap and hold on an empty area on your home screen, go into jiggling mode, tap the edit button in the top left corner, go to customize, and you'll see that little panel at the bottom there.
And there's a few other things you can do.
It'd be fun to play around with that just a little bit.
But I was just going to emphasize the small versus large toggle that you can see there.
Change up your home screen a little bit.
Very cool.
Very cool suggestion, Agata.
Sometimes when we do our suggestions, Brett, it's like something brand new you probably have never heard of before.
The one that you just did might be an example of that for some people.
And then sometimes we have tips that are like, you know, you probably should have known this, but it was a good reminder.
And those are sometimes even more valuable.
And so here's an example of that one.
Let me give you the background first before I get to the tip.
So I've been noticing for the last couple of weeks that when I would talk to my Apple watch, like, you know, you hold up your Apple watch close to your mouth.
And if you have it set up that way, you can just talk to, you know, you can say, hey, you know who, and you can say, I want to do something like, you know, turn on my dining room light or set a timer or whatever.
And I was noticing it just wasn't working as well anymore.
And sometimes I would think I'm talking to my watch and instead my HomePod would take the command.
I'm like, whatever.
In my mind, Brett, I thought it was just Siri being Siri.
You know, sometimes Siri doesn't work well.
And that is what it is.
And I'm like, oh, Siri, exactly.
But then it got to the point this past weekend where like it just wasn't responding at all.
Like even when, you know, on the Apple watch, if you hold down that button at the top, the one with the digital, the crown on it, if you hold it down, it will start listening.
You don't have to say, hey, you know, you know who you can just hold that down and you'll see the screen that it's like listening.
And you can just say your command, like, you know, set a timer or, you know, turn off this light.
And, and it wasn't working.
I'm like, what's going on?
And so then I tried the voice memo app.
This was Sunday morning.
I'm like, let me try the voice memo app on the Apple watch.
And like, it was like nothing, it's not picking up anything.
So then like I tell my daughter, you know, take a second, call me.
I'm going to answer the phone call on my watch.
And I did.
And I could hear her voice perfectly fine, but like, she did not hear me all.
I'm like, darn it.
My, my microphone's not working.
Like that's why this is not happening.
So I'm like, what do I do?
And I didn't know what to do.
So the one thought that occurred to me is, you know what, it's Sunday morning.
Let me see if there's any, you know, spots open at the, at the genius bar and Apple store and I'll bring it in there.
So I made an appointment for two o'clock and then I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, you know, I hate to have to drive all the way out to the Apple store.
What could it be?
And then it realized, you know what, maybe there's just something in the microphone.
I mean, I looked at it and I couldn't, I mean, I, I didn't see anything in the little hole, but so I reminded myself and I went to this Apple page that you're showing right now, if your microphone or speaker isn't working as expected on your Apple watch, number one, update your Apple watch, which I had already done, but number two was clean it.
And so we've talked about in the past and I myself should have thought about this, but I had forgotten that you can take your Apple watch.
If you've got a nice band, take it off, you know, or if you just have a, a, a, a plastic one or whatever, it doesn't matter.
But, um, but I took off my watch bands.
I had my, my watch and then you turn on some, I think it says like warm water.
It's not hot water, warm, fresh water.
There you go.
And so I just ran the water over it and I had like a little, uh, like a little brush thing.
I sort of lightly brushed in the microphone again.
I didn't see anything in it, but I mean, it's so tiny.
What do I know?
And so then, and then I tried it off with a microfiber cloth and, um, suddenly Brett, everything works great.
What?
Like that was it.
That was it.
It was so simple.
It took me 10 seconds to fix.
And I'm like, maybe like, I don't know, some lotion got in there or some speck of dust or whatever it was.
And like I said, this has been happening over time.
So it must've been like a little, and it's the most, it's the silliest thing.
You know, it's something is, you know, clean it up and it gets fixed.
It's such an obvious thing, but I just, it didn't even occur to me.
And so that's my reminder is number one, if you clean, even though it seems bizarre that you can put your Apple watch underwater, obviously you can go swimming with an Apple watch.
So it's okay with water, especially nice clean water.
And you know, again, this took me no time at all.
And now my microphone is perfect.
I mean, since then it's like hearing me better than ever.
Siri is still not always perfect, but at least it's hearing me now.
Okay.
But that's not the microphone fault.
I was so happy to cancel that genius bar appointment.
And now my watch is working again.
So that is my tip for you.
If you don't think that you can mean Apple watches don't make noise too, too much, but if it doesn't seem like you're hearing what you should be hearing through the speaker, or if it doesn't seem like it's hearing you as it should be through the microphone, remember to wash your Apple watch under some water and see if that fixes it.
It was great for me.
Which just sounds so contrary to what you should do.
But like you said, we've talked about this before and I, I have come to a comfort level after cleaning my watch several times.
For me, it usually is the digital crown doesn't like flow as quickly as it, as it normally does.
And I came to this page of several months ago, maybe a year or two ago.
And I'm like, really?
Like I'm going to, I'm going to run it under water.
Are you kidding me?
And it worked perfectly.
Just a few things quickly on this, because people may be asking, don't use cleaning liquids.
Like don't use, you know, don't, don't spray anything on it.
Don't use detergent, no soap, non detergent.
Exactly.
And they also say down here, like, don't try to poke a toothpick into the microphone hole.
Like don't, don't try to do anything.
Like truly just running it underwater and drying it off with a lint free cloth will work wonders for it.
And then just the last thing quickly on this, Jeff, I don't know if you did this and I don't see that they are, if they're doing, they say don't shake the Apple watch to remove water, but there is that mode.
You can put your Apple watch in to expunge water out of it.
Right.
So if you're swimming, you can go into like, I forget what they call it exactly, but you can get into your little control panel in the Apple watch and you can hit the little, it's like a little water drop.
Right.
And it'll, it will like shake and everything.
And if water was in the speakers, for example, it'll spit that out as well.
It doesn't sound like that you went and did that as the last step, but you can do that after to just to make sure that, you know, like it spits out all the water that it needs to spit out.
But I feel like that's, that's such a great tip.
And, um, and it's okay.
Like it's okay to put your watch under running water, lightly warm, running, warm, fresh water.
It's like, even when I say it, I'm like, what am I saying?
I cannot believe I'm saying it, but it works.
It works and it works very well.
So thank you.
I'm glad that I'm glad that your, your watch can hear you now and your wife can hear you and you were able to cancel the, the genius bar.
That's, that's really, that's really great.
Good stuff on that.
Uh, just want to say thanks again to same box, uh, for sponsoring same box.com/in the news.
Thank you as always.
And thank all of you for listening.
And Jeff, we'll talk with you next week.
Thanks, Brett.