 Hello, welcome to a very special Vergecast. I'm Ross Miller, senior editor for The Verge. Joining me on my left is senior reviews editor David Pearce. Hello. Just minutes ago, Apple wrapped up its annual iPhone event. Of course, some big announcements. New taller iPhone 5, no surprise there. A couple new iPods, Touch, Nano, Foo Fighters performed. Coming up on the show, we'll have a deeper dive into all of Apple's big announcements today with a little help from our Verge friends. And later on still, Josh and Neelai will be joining us live from San Francisco. They were at the event, they just finished this amazing live vlog. And they should have some first hands-on experience, they can talk to us about that. Anyway, before we get to all that, David, what did you think of the event today? It was an interesting event. So it's not that surprising, honestly. There was a lot of announcements. As you said, new iPhone, new iPods, new iTunes, but it was all, we kind of saw all this coming. The iPhone in particular is, you know, a lot of new stuff, a lot of kind of evolutionary changes, but nothing, you know, there's nothing to make me really like jump out of my seat with excitement and go camp out to buy this iPhone. Nothing too crazy. But let's go ahead and let's just run down those announcements real quick. So iPhone 5, what is special about it? What is new? Sure, so it's the biggest things are it's got a four inch display, so it's longer. It's about the same width as it was. And they made a big deal out of that being so you can hold it still in one hand, which actually kind of makes sense because you see some of the bigger phones and it's hard to hold them and use them in one hand. So it's just taller. It's lighter and thinner. It's faster. It has a new A6 processor. Actually, I want to start to talk about the thinness real quick. I know we're going to do this a lot more, but Josh, with that thing, is freaking out about how thin this thing is. Which I can't even imagine. Like I've never really thought the iPhone 4S was especially thick. I didn't really either. But I guess it must be a big deal. So it goes, yeah, so we had that new ports. We knew about that kind of coming up. The new lightning. I mean, come on. It is what it is. We'll get there. They've upgraded the camera a bit. They've upgraded some of the audio stuff. They're talking about HD voice and wide band audio, which nobody makes phone calls. But you know, I guess if you do, it's good. But an LTE, which is one of the big ones, on Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, which is just about what we expected. Plus a bunch of carriers around the world. And that's really it. That's the big thing. Lots of little improvements without being anything giant and kind of earth-shattering. Well, I'll disagree with that. I actually think the new screen is a big deal. We'll get to that in a second. A couple other big announcements. The iPod Touch has been refreshed with the new screen. iPod Nano, no longer watch friendly, but it's definitely a bigger improvement otherwise. It kind of looks like the iPod Nano of a few generations ago. It does, actually. When it was like longer and thinner. I really miss the watch. We'll get to that, though. iOS 6, talk about a little more. That's coming September 19th. The phone, September 21st. iPods, we'll talk about that. iTunes, it's got a little bit of a revamp. Anyway, we'll get to all that. Right now, I'm being told we have Brian Bishop and Scott Lowe on the air. Can we get them in here? Hey, guys. Brian, Scott. Hey, what's going on, guys? You guys look great. How y'all doing? Pretty good. We've been busy this morning. I can imagine. So what was your reaction about the event? What did you think? We were just talking about that a second ago. So much of what we saw today, at least on the iPhone side, we'd known about and expected that it was going to be coming. My sense was that there was this feeling of like, okay, we've seen this all before. It almost felt like Apple was rushing through things at a certain point. And it was just like flying through battery specs. We got to the iOS 6 stuff. We'd all seen that six months ago or seven months ago. The prevalence of and persistency of the leaks is taking a lot of the fun out of the iPhone, or at least the new one. I'm not super sold on the design. I like that it's longer, thinner, easier to hold. But I was hoping for something a little more, a big leap in terms of design. And it's more or less just sort of iterative. Let's talk about that screen. So it is now four inches. Same width, a little taller. 16 by 9 aspect ratio. I think it's what, 1136 by 640. Is that right? And so we saw a couple new apps that actually show off the effects of it. But for the ones that don't, the older apps, they're doing black bars in the top and bottom. Is that right? Yes. Yeah, it's going to be letterbox. And if you're holding it sideways, it'll be on the right and left, which to me seems like it would be just ugly. I don't know. And when they went to the retina display in the iPad, they just had to kind of quadruple the pixels in an app. But this seems like you're redesigning stuff. What do you guys think, Brian and Scott? Is this dangerous and a bad idea? I mean, it's kind of a weird move because they've been so adamant about maintaining the aspect ratio across all of the previous devices. So to really shake it up, I mean, it doesn't really make it much more difficult for developers. It's just a little bit of a strange move. And I mean, it really is just a matter of scaling. But I mean, the letterboxing, it's going to be awkward for a few weeks until everyone gets updated. But I mean, the type of change that they're making, at least on the developer side, is not really difficult. So I think ultimately, it'll just sort of be like a momentary kind of sense of awkwardness. Yeah, and we saw that kind of transition when the iPad first came out. And the majority of the apps were just iPhone apps. And you had that two-time scaling where you just pop the button and it'd blow it up to this huge, ugly version. People were able to swing with that. So I think it's my impression is that it's going to be fairly easy for developers to go and upgrade their apps and take advantage of this stuff. Unless they have a lot of like hand-drawn graphics that they have to go back into. Well, and I am excited about the extra screen space rather than just simply a bigger one. I mean, like they said, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but just an extra row of icons, like that's kind of helpful. But then also on the gaming side, I mean, that makes extra space for the dual analogs for a lot of racing games and action games, as opposed to just the general swipe and pinch stuff. Yeah, and I think the one-handed thing is really important. I trade back and forth between an iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus. And the width of the Galaxy Nexus, you know, in other large Android phones is a real problem, I think, for a lot of people. You always have to end up going like two-handed or kind of have to awkwardly go like that. And there is an advantage in keeping that width but getting the extra screen real estate. That's great. Now, so you're saying you use the Galaxy Nexus, the S3 has that same issue. Are there any of you guys Note users? Like, what are your phones beyond the iPhone? Do you have any 4-inch screens that you're using very regularly? I mean, I've tinkered with the Note and the Note 2. And I've never thought anything ever needed that much space. And I do think that the longer vertical is much more critical because the idea of like almost having to like fully grip the edges of your phone and not be able to reach everything with your thumb, like that stuff, like it's been a total turnoff for me for most of like the recent smartphones outside of the iPhone. Yeah. And I'd agree. I mean, like I, there was a while there I was like 50-50-ing it between the Nexus and the iPhone. And it was, I mean, I would, and I love the extra, I love the bigger screen, but the usability and the holdability of it would all be so relieved. And I would like, you know, swap the SIM back into the iPhone. So I think that's a pretty compelling thing when people actually get to use it. And I feel like it'll be more, you know, it could be easier for them to use. They also get the benefit of having the bigger screen. So it doesn't feel like they're necessarily being left behind with Android. But at the same time, it's not a big new feature unto its own. It's still just, you know, it's a feature that's already out there with other phones that Apple is going to, it seems like there's kind of catching up to. So is everyone in agreement? We just like the taller screen. No one wanted a wider screen. What about you? Yeah. No, I think, I mean, so I have this giant LG phone with me and it makes me long for thinner phones. So I think they did the right thing in, if they were going to make it bigger, I think they did it the right way. So we actually, Josh, you know, our editor in chief, Josh Topolsky. Don't forget. Just wrote, just put up some pictures of the device on the verge. And he said, which I think is interesting, he said, it's incredibly sleek, exceptionally light. It feels almost too light in the hand. And actually, that's really interesting because people have said this about the previous generations of the iPod touch, where like it's almost too small and too thin and it doesn't feel substantial as you use it. And it's interesting that they've kind of gone to this. Can we go back to that back? Yeah, there we go. I love this. You know what I love about this? We saw this at IFA. We saw almost the exact same model fly whenever to that case maker in the Berlin state. Amazing, like how close it was. Everything about this thing was leaked. Yeah. Was there actually, was there a single surprise? I can't think of anything right now. Some of the technical stuff they talked about with the camera and the A6 and stuff was not necessarily, you know, we knew there was going to be an A6 processor. Sure. And we knew it would be a better camera. It's amazing how accurate the leaks turned out to be. So Brian and Scott, I'm curious, they made a big deal out of a bunch of the other hardware stuff, the HD voice and the battery life and the camera. What else jumped out at you guys as like big upgrades in this phone? I'm pretty psyched about the panorama feature. I know it's been longstanding for Android, you know, and I've used it quite a bit on Android, but I'm really hooked into the iOS ecosystem, like as far as like my personal phone is concerned and having that feature because I'm kind of a bit of like a smartphone photo nerd, you know, uploading pictures of my food to Instagram constantly. The idea of having like an integrated panorama feature and one that actually looks like it produces pretty solid results, you know, assuming like it kind of mimics that in real life. I'm pretty excited about that. Yeah. And there's other cool camera stuff. I think it takes photos 40% faster. They said you can snap photos while you're shooting video, which, you know, is again, not, you know, things that we've seen other phones do before, but have it on the iPhone will be really, really nice. The battery life was weird though, because like they kind of said it's even better. The only stat that they had, I think that actually was improved was the standby time, which was 225 hours versus 200 for the iPhone 4S. So, you know, 3G talk time was the same. So it actually didn't seem like how much of a bump it was there, you know, but with LTE, it looks like LTE, you know, life will be promising. So that was always a big question. I mean, there's a lot of like small usability improvements too. I mean, like putting the headphone jack on the bottom, like that, like that for me is pretty exciting. But I mean, overall, I would say it's not exactly like, you know, there wasn't anything that really jumped out at me. Like this is the must have feature. Yeah. Right. It's definitely, you know, an iterative improvement. And I think actually what's even more interesting is that, you know, with the new discounted prices for the 4 and the 4S, they have this really, really high end, you know, premium design that's available to people for free on both GSM and CDMA carriers, which they couldn't do before. Because before, if you wanted to get the free phone, it was a 3GS. It was like the old plastic version. It was AT&T only. And now they can kind of open that up on the low end to a lot more people, which I think there's a lot of, you know, room for growth there for them. Right. That looks awesome. Oh, sorry. Anyway, if you're just joining us, Apple just brought up an event. There's a new iPhone event. Josh and Eli will be on in a little bit to talk about their hands on with the event, which we're talking about. David's still here with me. I'm Ross. We've got Scott Lowe and Brian Bishop live, just talking about the iPhone hardware. Brian and Scott, let's talk about the new dock connector, so-called Lightning. So we've got Lightning. We've got Thunderbolt. It's just ridiculous. There's going to be clouds next. Listen, anything that makes me think of even rhapsody, Thunderbolt's Lightning. I'm so happy about this. There's so many tweets about it. Super excited about that. Really lame reason to. Actually, the best thing about it, though, is that it's reversible. It's smaller. It's 8-pin. And no matter which way you plug it in, it's going to work. Which sounds like a small thing, but it's actually like the greatest thing in the world. No, it's going to be because, I'm going to tell you, every time I get home at like 2 in the morning and I'm very tired. From working hard. From working so hard. All day. To morning. 4 AM, I have to stop working, as they say, last call for work. I can't get that thing in. And I'm super excited with the 8-pin connector. Just plug it in. It's good to go. Seriously, it's the dumbest little thing, but I'm so excited about it. But are you ready for the adapter, Ross? That's the problem. Oh, the 30-pin adapter. Oh, Jesus. The big, big, fatty adapter, yeah. So all of those cables you've accumulated over the years are totally useless now, unless you get the adapter. Look at that thing. It looks like the camera adapter. Like, you had the SD plug come in. Actually, I guess that thing's a lot bigger now, in retrospect. Well, and this is kind of what they did with the new MagSafe thing, where it seems like, you know, I get the reason for doing it. I kind of get the appeal, but it just seems like it's going to be such a hassle. With all the cables you have, you're going to have to find adapters or pay. I think the MagSafe one is like $10, and I'm sure this will be the same thing. But it's just going to be one of those things that just adds a little bit of hassle to just about everything that you do with your device for a while. Right. Do we have a price on the adapter? I don't believe so. I don't think that was announced. I don't think it was announced, no. No? All right. Well, obviously, I doubt it's coming with the phone. It would be full of silly things. It's always just the iPhone 5, the earbuds, which is the new earbuds now. The EarPods. EarPods, right. That is the worst name I've ever seen. But it's OK. Well, their previous earbuds were just completely awful. They had decent sound, but they just were so painful in the ear. Don't hate. Don't hate. Yeah. Apparently, Brian Bishop is a huge fan. So what is actually new about them? Sorry, go ahead. So it's like weird oblong design now. Right. I don't know how deep they went into it. Yeah, and they already had headphones more in that style before. So in-ear premium ones that I think were like $60 or $70. And these are more in that design style. Made a big point about how great they are. And there's a weird quote that said, making earphones that would fit in everybody's ears would be like trying to make a shoe that fit everyone. But that's what we tried to do anyway. And it's like, OK. So it's just a strange comment to make. But yeah, it's hard to know how that's going to matter until you see how it actually fits in your ear. These are notorious for falling out of people's ears. And they don't sound that good at all. So there's definitely room for improvement. There's definitely room for improvement there. And they're bundling them with the phone, the iPod Touch, and the new Nano. Right. So yeah, they're bundling with all the new generation iPods. I'm not sure that they're bundling with the Shuffle. Then again, they did not change the iPod Shuffle at all. That seemed to be locked in as it was, $49. The big new ones, though, of course, is the iPod Touch. We're not surprised about that. It's the same screen as the iPhone 5. So let's just jump, look into that one in a second. There's a lot of cool stuff there. I want to talk about the iPod Nano. And everyone we've talked, Dave and I were talking about this during the live blog. I'm so excited about the iPod Nano. But I don't think anyone else is going to be. But I think everyone is saying the same thing. It's so cute. We've got to see if we've got pictures up here. It's all colorful. It looks like a very small, I think you said it best, it looks like a very small knockoff iPhone. Yeah, I mean, it's odd. It has all these, it seems to be running some version of iOS, but it's kind of, it's skinned almost so that it has like six little icons on the screen. And then it has a circular icon in the home button, which is, you know, it's fine. It just doesn't really make any sense. I think all the circles are saying like, this is not iOS. Do not think it's iOS. Do not treat it like it. I guess so. It's knockoff iOS, official first party knockoff iOS. Right. I don't think you can call it knockoff in that case. Yeah, maybe not. You can do whatever you want. I'll call it knockoff. It's knockoff. Deal with it. It looked like, they look like old Mac OS X icons, right? Back when everything was like, you know, super like, you know, candy shaped and lickable was the term that was often bandied out, you know? I have forgotten that willingly. Now I put it back in your brain and you're going forever. Yeah, it actually looks like that. I did not love the interface. The, you know, the devices themselves, you know, colors is always great. But I actually liked the watch form factor myself. So yeah, like I think they lost a little bit there. I mean, maybe this could just be a really long and like on your wrist. Do we have the dimensions? Do we know how tall it is? I say like it's even close to being this tall. Sorry. It's pretty. But I mean, yeah, they are kind of alienating that, that kind of hacker market that kind of took the iPod touch and made it like a, you know, whole which wristwatch series, which they, you know, embraced for a little bit with the last update to the Nano, which had like the new watch faces and stuff. But it seems like they're just like, yeah, we're going to do something else now. Yeah, it's interesting. There was, there was like a whole cottage industry that popped up around it. There was like the TikTok, which was like the first huge Kickstarter success. And there were all these things and everybody, I know everyone on the Verge staff at one point or another was like, oh, I should get a watch for my iPod Nano. Just want to get that Ross. And it's just, it's total nerd cred. Like it's, it's a definite, it's a thing. It is, but it never interacted with the iPhone. It wasn't like the same problem. So like the Sony smartwatch or the other ones, the Om watch thing. Well, and that's funny. That was one of the things we were talking about before the event started was like, oh, I wonder if they're going to go full on with the watch and really make it a thing. And they went completely the opposite direction. I mean, Apple stores themselves, I think started selling like the watch bands, like they embraced it. And then now they're like, no, just kidding. This is not what we want to do with the iPod. Yeah. But at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised to see if like that becomes like another market category for them. Like maybe later this year or even like next year, like to, to kind of get into that on their own, either with the shuffle or like a whole new brand of iPod. I feel like that's a, you know, there's obviously a ton of interest in the market or from consumers in that market. Like hence why, you know, so many people have like sprung up and created companies specifically focused around iPod watches. So I feel like Apple eventually get into it at some point. Right. Real quick. We actually, we have a stat checker right here. The lightening to 30 pin adapter is $39. It ships October, not coming with the iPhone. It seems crazy expensive. It does. For all the accessories you're going to have to use. I'm sorry. Did you say $30? $39 for the adapter. $40. Technically. If you're just joining us, this is the Vergecast special edition. We'll have Josh and Eli coming on later to talk about their time with the iPhone. But for now we're, we've got Scott here. We've got Brian here and David in the studio. We're talking about the iPods right now. Yeah. So Scott, tell us about the iPod touch. You wrote the post on this for the site. So tell us what's new here. Well, just a moment of clarity. One of our editors just wrote in and said that it's actually $29.99, not $39.99. Oh, sorry. Someone is getting fired in the studio. I'm just going to say that right now. On the air. Michael Shane, you're fired. I love you, but you're fired. So the iPod touch. This is probably like next to the iPhone, the thing I'm most excited about. The iPod touch, the last two years has been kind of neglected by Apple. Like the last year they, you know, made subtle tweaks to, you know, the processor and that sort of thing, but they didn't really, or they did actually upgrade the processor. Whereas like now they're actually upgrading the processor, changing the design a little bit. So to recap, it's got the same four inch, like 16 by nine, like aspect ratio display as the iPhone five. They say it's the exact same display, which I'm a little skeptical of because that was not the case with the previous iterations. But you know, if they say it, maybe it's true. We'll have to find out from Josh and Eli later. But they're dropping in the A5 processor, which is, you know, a little behind now because, you know, the, you know, the iPad three is running the A5X whereas like, and the new phone is the A6. So it's still behind, which is a little weird in terms of the fragmentation of like for the gaming practices. But then it also comes in a variety of new colors, has like Bluetooth 4.0, upgraded cameras and now has a five megapixel rear facing camera. The inward facing FaceTime camera is now a 720P compatible. They didn't actually specify the megapixels there. Can we stop with this picture real quick? I want to stop you one second and talk about the biggest change of the iPod touch. This and I'm going to censor myself. This gosh darn loop. I was freaking out about this. They made a wrist strap for the iPod touch. Very new, you know, feature for the iPod touch is they made a hook so you could lanyard on it, which the lanyard that they're producing is called the loop. And I'm not sure if we have the price on that, but I think the pre-prided. It's included. So it's included. Yeah. But basically just make sure you don't drop your iPod touch. Yeah. How did Johnny Ives sign off on this? Like I get it from a utility perspective, especially as they're pushing the camera aspect of it, but don't you like push something out and then like a little hook thing comes out and then you flip it around? Yeah. I hadn't seen the photos on that, but yeah. Yeah. It just seems so, it seems very, very on Apple. I mean, it seems completely utilitarian, but it seems just very, very non sleek, non Apple. Well, historically they've always just let the case manufacturers fill that gap where it's like they build the hook into the case so you can have a lanyard there. But I guess, you know, they thought it was time to get into that market themselves. I wonder how this affects cases now too, because you have to have, I guess we don't know how it works, but I'm guessing you'll have to have a little extrusion so the loop can come out wide enough to put the wrist strap on. I'm sorry. I think the wrist strap is hilarious. Well, it's really interesting that they made such a big deal out of it because it's like they're almost selling this as a digital camera, which is kind of bizarre. They made a big deal about how good the camera is. They added the loop. It's a bunch of funky colors, which it was hilarious because the loop will match the color. But they're selling this. We've seen kind of this rash of Android cameras in the last few weeks. This seems like Apple being like, well, our camera is plenty good for our needs, we're pretty sure. And we just buy this. It has a way better camera than it used to and just use this and it'll be great. But the thing is with those Android cameras is they're a lot bigger megapixels, they do a lot more camera functions. This is still just like a five megapixel phone camera. And the price itself, it starts at $299. Is that right? Yep. That's huge. Yeah. Super expensive. And just they're selling, they're going to keep selling the old one. Is that right, Scott? They're going to keep selling the old iPod touch for $199. It'll be available for $199 for 16 gigs and that'll be the exact same as last year. And so at that point, it's like, I mean, like you're selling it for more than the entry level iPhone 5. Which is insane to me. I understand price matching and of course you don't have to do that to your contract, you don't give your kid a cell phone plan. I do get that. But like $300 for the new iPod touch is insane. And how are they going to explain the name difference? Is there a name difference or they're just going to say this is the expensive iPod touch. This is really nice and this is the not expensive one. It's you know, you've seen it before. Well and not to get ahead of ourselves, but this is the price that, or this is at or above the price a lot of people have been talking about for the iPad mini that we may or may not see in October. And it's like, where does that fit in now? Yeah, we definitely need to talk about that. This is a four inch device and granted there's a lot to like about it. The airplane mirroring is really cool. It really does seem like this is more than any iPhone before just an iPhone minus the phone. It's like the best of almost every feature you would want except the phone stuff. Right. And to its credit, oh sorry, go on. Yeah, I was going to say I'm actually pretty psyched on the design, which I think wasn't really properly emphasized. But like, you know, I hated the teardrop design of the last version. I hated that it was like a chrome metal back so it would get scratched and scuffed almost instantaneously like going with the brushed aluminum is great. The new like thinness, I'm assuming we'll have to wait until the hands on, but I'm sure that it's going to be like unbelievably lightweight and thin in your hand. So I think that's probably the most exciting thing. And then, of course, the colors for those who who want like a little more colorful flair on their product. Yeah. And Neil, I actually just put up some initial hands on impression photos from the from the floor of the show and said it is really, really thin. So yeah, and it looks it looks really, really tiny. The loop the loop knob does not look as bad as I'd imagined in person, actually. It looks looks pretty decent. We have a photo that can kind of cut to that. One thing while we're doing that, I want to double check to give some credit. That's two hundred ninety nine dollars for the 32 gig version, which would be for the iPhone five the same price. There's no 16 gig, so it is still price matching. It just doesn't have the lower storage tier. Sure. So there we go. Anyway, we need to move on. Brian Scott, thank you so much for cutting in. I know you guys are super busy, you know, making our site look really good while we sit here and just talk to a camera. So one last question before you guys go. What are you buying today? Are you buying anything? I'm going to wait myself. I'm going to wait till Friday and see how obnoxious AT&T is going to be with early upgrade pricing because I've been I'm still on AT&T and I've been debating whether to go to Verizon like here in San Francisco. You know, it's you know, AT&T has actually been much better than I expected, but I've had problems where I want to have, you know, Verizon coverage, especially with going to LTE. And so I'm going to wait till I get a bit more information on that pricing. But depending on how crazy it is, I'm probably going to be upgrading just because I want the LTE of it all. Yeah. I'm not going to be touching the same boat. I'm running an iPhone 4. It's slow as hell with iOS 5 and I need to get something faster. So I'm all in. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Thank you, guys. Anyway, so that was Scott and Brian. If you're just joining us, this is the iPhone 5 Verge special edition coming up. Josh and Neelai are still wrapping up their hands-ons and then hopefully we can get them in for at least a couple of minutes to talk about what they've done. Real quick, I want to talk about the iPhone pricing. So iPhone 5 is now, of course, the same tier. It's the $200. The iPhone 4S is now the $100 starting price. iPhone 4, naturally, down to free. And iPhone 3GS is gone. That design is gone. There's no more round, curved iPhone. No more plastic. No more plastic. Sad. Are you sad? I guess it's sad. I'm not really sad. I do not like the design of it. I didn't really either. No, and what I think is interesting is it seems like the 4 was a pretty big step up from the 3GS, both in just the industrial design of it and its performance was a big leap in a way that the 3 to the 3GS really wasn't to me. My dad is always my barometer for what's happening in the tech industry because if he cares, it's huge. Are we really at the point where we're just going to talk about family members? We're just going to talk about my dad. I'm not. I'm just going to let you do this. Let's talk about my dad. No, no. We're just going to do it. It's going to be fine. No, so and my dad was like, he went back and looked and he was like, well, this iPhone 3GS doesn't seem very good, but I hear the 4 is great. Should I just maybe wait for that and it'll be cheap? And I was like, dad, that's a great idea. And it seems like at this point, the iPhone 4 free on contract seems like a pretty fantastic deal, kind of in a way that the 3GS was like a pretty good phone. But this, as I mentioned, was like a big leap up from that. And it is like it's still a good phone. It's two years old now, but it's still a good phone. The last big leap in terms of design was the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4. They got rid of it, they did the flat plane, which we saw actually in the prototypes. I wish to talk about Brian when he was here, but Apple for Samsung, they brought a bunch of prototypes out. And we saw, honestly, that Johnny Ive Sony prototype that he kind of did, that looks just like the iPhone 4. It's clearly what they've always wanted to do. It's there now, and apparently they do not want to let it go. It doesn't seem like, they're just going to keep making it longer. We'll have like a 19 inch phone that's about like this. Guys, we think 21 by 9 is the future. Seven rows of apps. This really is, we are reinventing reinvention again. You laugh, but like that could happen. That phrase could happen, honestly. This is the tallestest iPhone ever, again. So we're trying to get Nathan Ingram on right now. In the meantime, let's go ahead and just talk about a little bit of the iPhone numbers. At the beginning of every Apple event, Tim Cook gets on stage, rattles off a huge list of impressive numbers. Let's go through a few of them. First in terms of stores, they're now in 13 countries. They just hit their 13th. 83 million visitors last year. That doesn't mean much to me, but it's obviously very impressive. It's really interesting how, I just don't have any context. And they continue to make such a big deal out of their retail thing as one of their biggest advantages. So it sounds like we have Nathan on the line. Good. Yeah, Nathan's online. Who knows much more about this than we do. We love numbers. Also coming up, Josh and Eli will be joining us in a little bit. First though, news manager Nathan Ingram coming from Boston. How you doing, man? Hey, David. Hey, Ross. How's it going? Looking really good. What did you think of the event? What was your reaction? My overall impressions was it was what we expected, and I was hoping for more, but not surprised that we didn't get more. So what were you hoping for? What would have kind of blown your mind? Well, so you guys were just talking about the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4, and I agree with your comments. The iPhone 4 was probably my favorite iPhone that I ever bought. It was, I thought, really exciting when it came out. Really nice new design, great new features. The 4S was a less enticing upgrade, but obviously it did really well. We'll talk about the numbers in a second. And then the 5, it's just so expected, and I really think the leaks is just what killed it for me. Knowing everything about what was coming just kind of sucked all the fun out of it for me. I honestly, once you play with it, you feel how much taller it is, how much thinner. Don't you think you're going to enjoy it again? Is it really just like that kind of new sense in you thinking, oh god, there's no surprise, I don't have that kind of impression? But once you play with it, do you think it's going to change your opinion? Yeah, I think that's a good point, actually. Because even in the live blog, you could see Josh and Eli were like, yeah, this is the same old, same old. And then Josh gets his hands on it, and all of a sudden is talking about how amazing it feels in the hand. Yeah, it's the kind of hardware where you really need to see it and hold it before you can pass judgment on it. And I think that internally it's going to run great. And the only downside for me really is I'm just getting a little tired of iOS at this point. It hasn't changed significantly in a couple of years, and I'm starting to look at Android and Windows Phone and be jealous of some of those new features personally. All right, well, fair enough. And we'll get to iOS in a little bit. But you are our resident statistician. You are the most comfortable with numbers in anyone on the site. So I'm giving you the very unenviable job of kind of rattling off some of the sales statistics and we're going to put some of this in context. Tim Cook came out, he talked, 17 million iPads sold last quarter. More iPads than any PC manufacturer sold in the entire lineup. That was Cook's way of phrasing it. Yes. Which is insane. I think we've covered that on the site before a few times. There's some data that shows, yeah, when you include iPads in their sales figures, then Apple's the biggest manufacturer of computers. Of course, if you take it away, they sell about 4 million a quarter, which is not nearly as impressive. But obviously the market's moving this tabular direction, so they got a really good head start on everybody, I think. And we'll see how long we can continue to press that advantage. Right. But into its credit, one of the other stats that Apple mentioned was it is number one in the notebook market and has been for the last three months. And that's obviously not including iPads. It doesn't include desktops, but clearly the future's heading toward more ubiquity of notebooks and after that, more to tablets and I guess keyboard accessories. What I wonder, and I'm not sure he mentioned this, correct me if I'm wrong, Nathan, but I wonder how much the Retina MacBook Pro factored into that. Because the other ones were kind of small upgrades, but people got really excited about the Retina MacBook Pro. Yeah. He didn't. He didn't say much about the Retina MacBook Pro, but he said that the new MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air helped Apple take the number one position in the US laptop market share over the last three months, 27%, which is far, far higher than most market share numbers you hear about Apple. But if you narrow it down in the US in laptops, which let's be honest, that's the market they care about, they're doing very well, I would say. He didn't say how much that helped. And I guess the question on my mind is with a laptop, it starts at $2,199, I believe. I find it hard to imagine that it made that significant of a difference, costing that much. But I guess certainly it's kind of in a class by itself. But it's just such a premium product that I don't know, until they tell us how well it's selling, I don't think we can make any assumptions that it's driving this increase on its own. I think that it's got to be the whole picture. The new MacBook Airs aren't any... Nathan, real quick, just remind me, is it the number one in terms of unit sales or in terms of dollar figures? I mean, that's something Apple used to do, is just say, we make the most, we sell the most money dollar for dollar than any laptop maker. Is it unit sales now too? Are they just pushing that many more laptops than anyone else? They didn't specify. They just said that we're number one as far as I recall. I'm looking at the images from the Live blog and trying to look back and see. But I think he just said that number one in market share. My assumption is that it's units, but that could be a dangerous assumption to make considering the way Apple likes to sort of massage the numbers to put them in the best possible light. So one thing we did get was we got considerably more narrowed down numbers about the iPad, right? Can you walk us through a couple of the stats that he gave for those? Because they're pretty insane. Sorry, on the iPad? Yeah. And the tablet market share he was talking about, I think I have it here. It was 68% tablet market share was the one that I thought was really interesting. I wonder who that's according to. Because if it's according to IDC, that's 68% for the iPad, 22% for the Kindle according to Amazon, which leaves nothing for Android tablet. I mean for the rest of Android tablet market. For every Android tablet ever. Yeah. Yeah. And that's up. I believe they said it was up from 62% last year ago when they had this event and shared that information. Which is not only impressive, but it's also a growing market. I mean because it's growing not just from iPads, it's growing from the Android. Windows 8, I don't know how they're going to classify that, but Windows 8 tablets are going to be a huge thing in just a few months time. Yeah. What's going to be really interesting to see is what these numbers are like next year. If they can keep at this number or even higher a year from now as Windows 8 comes, that'll be really impressive. And of course the 7.85 inch elephant in the room that wasn't in the room. My change is we'll talk about that again next month of course. What else do we have? We had, this is- The web share I think is, the web traffic share is a key stat. It says that iPad accounts for 91% of all web traffic from tablets. And to quote Tim Cook, I don't know what these other tablets are doing unless they're in warehouses or on store shelves or maybe in someone's drawer. I think that's going to make a direct response to Amazon last week, right? I just don't know what that even like, how are you tracking that? What does that mean? I mean, that's something like, who's going to prove it? And where is that coming from? True. My guess is it's coming from- Go ahead. Go ahead, David. No, no, no, this is you. I'm just saying my guess is it's like net applications that measures just browser usage and breaks it out by OS. And I guess they may have some way of breaking it down by tablets. It's definitely, it's kind of a crazy claim to make. We'll do a little investigation to see how legit it is. But again, it wouldn't surprise me given the numbers we've seen in terms of iPad sales compared to the rest of the tablet market. Nathan, let me hold you up for one second, I believe. Nevermind. Let's, sorry, cancel that undo, command Z. So what I think is really interesting about the browsing thing, and you just alluded to this, Nathan, was that you and I, Ross, were at the Amazon event last week. And one of the things Jeff Bezos said was we want people not just, like we make money when people buy our tablets. No, wait. We don't want people to make money when they buy our tablets, but when they use our tablets. And then Tim Cook comes out and says, well, actually it turns out people use our tablets a lot more than they use anybody else's tablets. Right. I mean, well, let's be clear, and we just had the Kindle Fire HD review go up last night, perfect timing as it may be. Yeah, I mean, the Kindle Fire HD is just a glorified store. I mean, there's no other menu than the store and then the already purchased part. Whereas the iPad, I do feel like, is more end user friendly. You buy it, of course you're paying a premium for it, but you have a sense of ownership, both what you're seeing, the apps. What was the other thing? I'm looking at all these. This I don't believe, but I want to try it. This is one of the stats. 90% of the apps in the 700,000 that are downloaded every month, oh no, what is it? Sorry. So there are now 700,000 apps in the app store. Yes. That was one of the things he announced. And he said 90% of those apps are downloaded every month. Right. Which is crazy, because we've talked forever about how one of the biggest complaints is that there are all these apps, it's impossible to find the good ones. Only a few rise to the top and the rest just kind of toil in obscurity. But he's saying all these apps actually get downloaded. People use these apps, except for 70,000, which, sorry. But the other, what is it, 630,000, those apps are being downloaded and used. Which is pretty huge. But it could even be one download every month. The developer wants to- Just keep buying new devices and downloading them. And you could just say it's a passion developer just downloading one every time. I like it. I don't know. But no, that's an incredibly impressive figure. If true, it's kind of one of those weird ones. It was 700,000 apps total, 250,000 optimized for the iPad. Now that's interesting, because that's something that Android tablets have very long suffered and struggled to kind of catch up to. I don't even know, I couldn't even tell you which ones are tablet tablets. Sorry, Nathan, go. I was just going to say, if you spent any time with the Nexus 7, that's probably its major Achilles heel. It's a great piece of hardware, but you start digging through the market and I feel like the options just tail off pretty fast in terms of compelling software. Mark Jock said the same thing about the Kindle Fire in the Amazon app store in his review last night. Now before we get into the last- Oh, sorry, your say? I'll just say one more note on the app situation is that they say that the average customer has downloaded 100 apps or more, or around 100 apps. So that seems pretty wild to me too, but not entirely unsurprising. I imagine you get one of these devices, try everything that you can get your hands on and then realize you don't actually need 100 or 200 apps on your phone or tablet. You kind of scale back to the 20 or 30 or even less that you might actually use. Right. Now I want to go ahead and just do one more statistic and then we're going to cut to a video footage. But before that, 400 million iOS devices have been sold, 350 million iPods. Obviously, it was the iPod touch overlap, so I don't want to compare the figures. I will say though, 400 million iOS devices, all of them downloading about 100 apps or more is insane. It's a lot of apps. Yeah. It definitely hits that billion mark we heard at WWDC. Pretty easily. Many billions. What about with that release though? It's interesting because I believe just last night Google announced that it had activated 500 million Android devices. That's right. A pretty significant advantage for Android right now in terms of the mobile device market share of accounting phones, tablets, et cetera devices. That's pretty big. Right. It's 400 million portals. Actually, I don't think they talked about number of iTunes accounts this time, did they? I don't believe so, no. We heard press figures at WWDC though. So that's basically it for the numbers. If you're just joining us, Vergecast special edition. We're talking about the iPhone, of course. There's really nothing else to talk about today. Josh and Eli will be joining us in a little bit. Let me check on one thing. Do we have a first look video I'm hearing? Is that good to go? Yes. Okay. So we have a first look video we want to show you. We want to see it for ourselves in fact. I do. I'd really like to. So let's just stand here looking stupid until they roll it. That was quick. All right. Is that Josh's hand right there? It's a nice looking hand. It's very handsome. Clearly looking at the iPhone 5 right here. Looks basically just like the leaks we saw. It's very thin. The back actually looks better than I thought. The difference between the plastic, what's the brush aluminum? Yeah, I was all prepared to hate the back with the two-tone colors, but that actually looks really nice. The black, it's odd. The black here looks way better than the white to me. The black is super sleek. And yeah, no, it looks good. The only thing that bothers me is I wanted to get the white this time. I've had black iPhones every single time. I was like, I'm going to get the white this time. I say that the black one looks really good this time. It does. And I was talking to Craig, our producer, during the live blog, and he was saying that the letterboxing in the apps is actually going to be improved if you use the black one because it won't seem like there's such a giant weird gap around it. The bezel just kind of flows into the screen. And Nathan, I want to talk to you about iOS 6, but before we get to that point, I just want to go ahead and just ask our favorite Indra question before we transition. Are you going to buy an iPhone 5? Is that on the horizon for you? I will not be buying an iPhone 5 in all likelihood. Why not? Primarily because I'm still under contract, and it just doesn't quite seem like big enough of an upgrade for me to pay whatever ridiculous amount of money it's going to cost or pay an early termination fee, switch carriers, et cetera. I have a 4S person right now, which will get iOS 6. It will get the majority of the new features. And that's the thing with the new iPhone, the iPhone 5, there is not that much from a hardware perspective. Yeah, it's going to be a little faster with the A6. The screen will obviously be a big improvement, but I've never been one for a huge screen myself, and not that this is huge. I think it's probably going to be quite nice, but I just want to put that kind of a financial investment towards it, I would say. And I'm also very curious to see what Google has planned for the Nexus line of phones this fall. Right. And we'll get more into the competition later. We'll have Dan Seefer coming on. Actually, real brief, let's just talk about some of the key iOS 6 stuff we saw. iOS 6 is coming September 19th to, obviously, the iPhone 5 a few days later. 4S, 4, most recent iPod touches, last two iPads, not the first one, and all the way down to the iPhone 3GS. Yeah, it's interesting. They're not going to sell it anymore, but if you have it, they're going to give you iOS 6. I'm actually very impressed by that. Yeah, I kind of like it. How far back did the iPhone iOS 5 go? Was it also just to the 3GS? I feel like the iPhone 3G did not get 5. 3G did not get 5. Yeah, I think that's right. I'm impressed. I feel like the 3GS is still being supported, and I kind of assumed that was out also. Well, it is, in fairness, getting kind of a limited version of iOS 6, but still, I'm all for being updated given how many Android phones I've had that didn't get anything. I'll take what I can get. Right. Anyway, if you're just joining us real quick, this is the Firstcast Special Edition. I'm Ross Milne. This is David Pierce. Joining us on the phone is Nathan Ingram, news manager from Boston. We're here talking about Apple's biggest announcements coming soon, hopefully coming up very soon, will be Josh and Eli. They're here to talk about the iPhone 5. They've had hands-on. We've just seen video of it. Looks very impressive. For now, though, let's talk iOS 6. Some of the big announcements, I mean, they're not talking about as much. There's a new Maps program, but what they mean to say is there's no more Google Maps. That's gone. Goodbye. In fairness, they keep showing the Maps, and Nathan, I'm curious what you think, but I think the Maps look pretty good. The lack of transportation stuff kills me. As New Yorkers, none of us have cars, so all we use is subways and trains and stuff, and not having that in Maps is going to kill me. Right. Nathan, we have to let you go in a minute, but tell me what you think about iOS 6 and Maps and stuff like that. What are you excited for? I'll talk real quick. I think that you have a really good point about the public transportation options. This thing is going to be a real downer for a lot of people. On the other hand, the lack of built-in free turn-by-turn navigation is going to be a major upgrade for, I don't want to say more people, but basically anyone with a car is going to really enjoy this feature. I would hope that Apple sees it in them to put some navigation in soon. Sorry, I lost my train of thought there. To put public transportation navigation in soon, because, yeah, as you said, lots of people in New York, LA, et cetera, Boston, we use all public transportation, and it would be super useful to have. That said, I think they just had to make a break and build their own program at this point because the Google Maps that was on iOS 5 and previous was just not all that good anymore. It hadn't been updated significantly in a long time. What's really going to be interesting is to see if and when Google brings a full Google Maps app to the App Store, I think. Right. All right, Nathan, thank you very much. That was Nathan Ingram. Coming up soon, Dan Seifer will kind of break out some of the carrier stuff, the competition. We'll talk about LTE. He's got much better knowledge of that than I do. I'm just a talking head right now. That's fair. That's all the energy I have for. While we wait, though, I want to talk about the other thing that Google kind of dropped for iOS 6. That would be, of course, YouTube. YouTube is gone. Good riddance. I think it was an ugly-looking app. The icon was terrible. It really messed up with the way I organize the icons. What we do have, though, yesterday, they released YouTube for iPhone and iPod Touch. Have you had a chance to use it yet? Only briefly. I, to be honest, don't use YouTube that much on my phone. That's a good picture. I'll click through it. That is a handsome man right there. The cut to Nathan is a very handsome man. Exactly. No, but I think, it seems to me that it's basically just a wrapper. It feels like the Gmail app on iOS, where it's nice and it's relatively feature-complete. It does all the stuff I want it to do, but it doesn't feel integrated or snappy or fast. It's interesting you say it's a wrapper, because it's actually native code this time. It's no longer web code. It felt faster to me than, obviously, the YouTube one. It looks just like the Android version. It's a very similar design aesthetic to the Google Plus app. Yes, which is great. It's great. Yeah. The Google Plus app, I think, is the one sign to me that Google really can make great apps for iOS. Because Gmail, I use Gmail every day, and I hate it every day. It's just not a good app on iOS, but it's much better for some of the other apps. Google Plus is great, and I think Google Maps is going to be great, because Google is going to invest pretty heavily in it. But YouTube is, I'm hoping that this means they continue to improve it, and that it's just the beginning. The one concern I have, of course, is now that the YouTube app is gone, and it's a standalone app, if you click on a YouTube link, it's going to stay in Safari. It's not going to jump you to anything else. That's just the way things work. Google has started to find its way around it. That's true. We'll see how that goes. For now, that's not going to be the case. Of course, while we're talking about it, shameless plug, youtube.com slash the verge. You can catch all these episodes. I'm sorry. I just have to do that. That's just terrible. You're just a boss being handsome. That's like 60 percent of what's up there. Shameless plug, what am I going to do about this? You want to go there? You want to check out 90 seconds? Sorry. Anyway, so we now apparently have Dan Seifer up. Dan, are you here? I'm here. I love it. All right, let's see. You're looking good, too. We have a lot of really nice looking people in this light. You do. I like that lamp in the background, too, Dan. Yeah. What lamp is that? Can I have that? Yeah. That's my crazy cool three-headed lamp that I use to take some photos with because it's bright and it works. And you won't answer that. I cannot have it apparently. Dan, I want to talk to you about a bunch of technical stuff, carriers, competition, whatnot. First, let's finish up the iOS 6 stuff. First off, what was your impression of the event and specifically of the iOS 6 presentation? The event as a whole, I got to be honest, it was pretty boring. And that exciting, we kind of knew everything that was coming and there was literally no surprises. So, that was a bit of a disappointment. As far as iOS 6, again, it's kind of the same thing. There wasn't a single new iOS 6 feature announced during this event. So, it's all the same stuff that we had seen from June at WWDC. And it looks like we're going to get a lot of cool new features. But essentially, it's the same platform that we've been using since 2007 with minor iterative adjustments and enhancements every year. I know you guys were just talking about the Maps app there and that looks cool and all. It will be interesting to see how that actually is on the final product. I know I've heard a lot of reports that the beta is not the hot. So, it will be interesting to see what it's like and if it's actually able to replace the Google Maps that the iPhone has been using for so many years. Right. The videos we've seen, Apple public release of the beta, the flyover stuff, it looks impressive. But of course, once we get to it, I'm kind of curious how well it works in practice. Yeah. It's going to be a flyover because it's a lot of detail loading very fast. I'm curious what it does to the battery life. Termin return is interesting. I want to know more about the public transportation, how they're going to do that. Again, we're talking as city dwellers. Right. I kind of want to know what train to go to. Yeah. That was something Google Maps did really well. On the stand alone, I'm looking forward to it. Other things, Siri enhancements. Those actually were very impressive to me, the stuff they've added onto it. It seems like a big improvement from before. I hope so. I don't know. Sure. Yeah. I think it's a big improvement, but it's all stuff you'd kind of expect. There's no big surprises. It's like, well, what else could I think of that I could use this for? Looking up sports scores. That makes sense. Or looking up movie times. That makes sense as well. I mean, I don't think any of it really knocked me off my feet or knocked me out of my socks, however that expression goes. Right. Let's go back. What were the tentpole iOS features? Number one, of course, was just the original. Two, they're out of the App Store. Three or four, one was multitasking. What was notifications, I think? I think that's right. Something like that. I get so lost. There's so many of those. Three was kind of boring. Dan, do you know? Off the end, you're the expert. Yeah. I think multitasking was one, notifications, that came in iOS 5, and multitasking was iOS 4. The App Store came. It wasn't quite, I don't think it was called iOS 2 back then. No, sorry, it was iPhone OS. They didn't change that until 4. Yeah. Right. And then the iOS 3, I honestly can't remember which one it was added at that time, to be honest with you. But for iOS 6, notifications was a big deal, that was a seriously broken thing on the platform prior to that. And iOS 5 really, it gave us a very familiar notification system, but it works pretty well. And then same thing with iOS 4, multitasking was very broken beforehand, and it kind of gave us a usable multitasking system. I don't think iOS 6 is giving us anything of that caliber. It's not giving us a huge change in the way that we would use the device or have to use the devices. Right. And there are two, if there's any kind of tentpole feature in iOS 6, there's going to be two. One, the new maps, which is the first time they took a feature away. Sorry, it's a start over. It's like Final Cut X. Sure. It's started over. And then of course also Passbook, which we saw at Passbook, it had Delta tickets, Starbucks gift cards, all that stuff. It hinted so strong. We all thought this is the precursor to NFC, which was a feature we did not see happen today. Right. Mobile wallets, mobile payment systems are not getting a huge boost by today's announcement. Some rumors about it, some not. It was actually a very small thing. Dan, what is your take on that? Go ahead. I'm sorry. About Passbook? Yeah, Passbook and NFC. I really didn't expect to see NFC today. Given all the information that we had before the event, there was no evidence of NFC and actually a lot of evidence against NFC because of the actual design of the phone with the metal back. I really think it would have been a great addition to Passbook and eventually I still hold out hope that Passbook will be integrated with NFC at some point. And I think it will take Apple to really kind of upend the mobile payments market as it is today to give it traction with your average everyday user. Whether Apple is going to do that through NFC or another means, it's still yet to be seen. Right. And to be fair, I still like the QR and the scanning of Passbook. I think it's going to be good. It's Apple's modus operandi. We're not going to do it until we can do it perfectly. That's why multitasking took so long. That's why notifications took longer than maybe it should have. Copy and paste, definitely a late addition feature. And they didn't even do it that well. I like copy and paste. That was iOS 3. Copy and paste. That was iOS 3. That's the flagship feature of iOS 3. Good call. Finally, we can do what Windows Mobile does. There you go. Well, that was a low blow. But anyway, so NFC was not announced. There was a little bit of talk, not a lot, because we weren't expecting it. It's a shame. I think Passbook looks great. It's definitely going to be NFC of the future if Apple decides to do that. All that means is Google Wallet and all the other mobile payment systems are still going to keep fighting for this kind of little bit of relevance. And a lot of that's going to have to do with carriers. Really bad transition. Let's talk carriers. At least in the US market, the iPhone 5 is coming to LTE with Sprint, with Verizon, with AT&T. Sucks to be on Sprint because they don't really exist yet. There's no LTE anywhere. There's 100 major markets coming in the coming months, is what Sprint said yesterday, including Boston, New York, Los Angeles, maybe Atlanta, San Francisco. Dan, can you catch us up a little bit on the carrier report throughout the world? Yeah. So Apple announced that by December, the iPhone 5 is going to be on 240 carriers across the world. So it's going to be really, really worldwide. It's going to be supporting LTE in a handful of carriers in a handful of markets because LTE is still not available in many parts of the world. So where it's not available on LTE, the other carriers will use their fallback technologies. So it's HSPA plus or CDMA or whatever it happens to be. But what's really like the interesting story here is that the iPhone 5, because of its LTE support, is now going to be split into different models for different carriers. When we saw with the iPhone 4S, when that was launched, Apple was able to support both CDMA and GSM carriers with one device. So the same phone that you bought on AT&T was the same model that you got at Verizon, is the same model that you got at Sprint. But with the iPhone 5, it's actually going to be different models. There's a separate AT&T model, there's a separate Verizon Sprint model, and then there's an even third global model that will be for various markets. I think that one's going to be available in the UK and Australia and Japan and a couple other places. So because of the way LTE is structured in the various areas of the world, one man's LTE is not compatible with another man's LTE. So if you want to buy an iPhone 5 on AT&T and perhaps take it over to Verizon one day, that's not going to be possible and vice versa. And if you buy an iPhone on AT&T and you want to roam on an LTE network, say, in the UK or Germany, that's not going to work either. So it makes it a little bit of a tricky situation depending on what your needs are and how you're going to end up going with the model that you buy. All right. Now explain to me like on 5, because in most times that's actually a pretty accurate way of explaining things to me. What is the best US iPhone to get if I'm going to be traveling internationally and I want to use LTE in other markets? So Apple didn't, I don't think they specifically said which model will be sold unlocked. I think it's going to be the GSM model that will be available worldwide, will be available unlocked in the US, but I'm not 100% sure on that yet. The unlocked one is not going to work on AT&T's LTE. Is that the case? That's correct. Yeah. The GSM model that's available worldwide is not going to work on AT&T's LTE. If you're buying a carrier locked version, I would say that the Verizon or Sprint model is probably your best bet at this point because it supports the same LTE bands as the worldwide model in addition to having support for Verizon and Sprint's network. So if you're a global roamer and you want to use LTE in the most places in the world, your best bet right now, if I was to call it today, would be Verizon's model. So is that just a purely technical thing? Like you said, one man's LTE is not another's. Is that something Apple could have circumvented and made maybe a strategic decision not to? Or is that just kind of how the world works right now and who knows if we'll ever fix it? Well, it's kind of based on a technical limitation at this point. For example, the Verizon model of the iPhone 5 supports LTE on five different bands. None of those five bands are compatible with AT&T's network of LTE. So there's only so many bands that a phone can support. There's only so many different frequencies that its radio can handle at any given time. So you kind of run out of slots to put these various support frequencies in. And right now, as it stands, there's no technical solution for that. In the future, will there be at some point? Perhaps. Because the way that AT&T is, or excuse me, LTE has been built out across the various networks, it's going to be very difficult to make them cross compatible. Well, that sucks. But thanks for the knowledge. Dan Siefer, stay on the line just one second. Do a quick teaser thing. If you're just joining us, this is the Vergecast live post-Apple analysis. We've been talking about the iPhone 5, iPod Touch, Nano. Josh and Eli will be on in a little bit to kind of talk about their first-hand experience. We promise they're doing their editorial thing, being important superstars, helping the site. They'll join us talking heads in a little bit. A couple quick updates on the stories. iTunes 10.7 is now available. iTunes 11, obviously, coming in late March or October. Correct. iOS 6 GM is released. If you have that, you're probably under an NDA, so don't talk about it. And also, we now have hands-on footage, or at least hands-on pictures, rather. We have an iPod Nano hands-on pictures. Can we jump to those, take a look at those real quick? Probably not. While we're getting that ready, I just want to say, this is unbelievably small. It looks much bigger on the screen, but it's a little... That right there. It's a two-and-a-half-inch display, and it's tiny. Again, it goes back to, this looks a ton like the old iPod Nano, but the one before had the little click wheel at the bottom, and this is just a single button and touchscreen. I think Josh described it in the live blog as, it kind of looks like a tiny phone, and it really does. This looks like the little phone from Zoolander, where he's calling aliens. Yeah, is this thing as tall as the iPod Touch is wide? Is that about right? I mean, that's what it looks like to me. I don't know if you have a comparison picture of that. Depends about what it looks like. It looks about right. Dan, what do you think of the iPod Nano? You know, I think it's fun. I kind of want one. You know, it's an improvement over the watch-based one, I think, for usability. The watch... I say the watch-based one, but the one that was smaller that you could actually wear on your wrist as a watch was really tiny, and it had a touchscreen, but it's a little bit more difficult to interact with. I think the bigger screen makes it a little bit easier to work with. Yeah, you lose the ability to slap it on your wrist and wear it as a wristwatch, but I'm not exactly sure how many people actually did that. I mean, I'll reserve judgment until I get my hands on one, but to be honest with you, it looks kind of fun. Awesome. I agree. I'm still impressed by the size. Yeah, I do like how it is fun. Of course, there's no app store. There's nothing else. What you see is what you get. No Spotify is going to be a disappointment. It's pretty great, though, that it has the pedometer and the fitness stuff built in, which is a really nice touch. I'd still be worried about breaking that little screen. It also has an FM radio. Between those three things, it's a pretty good running around workout device, which I kind of like. I do, too, but you know what? I did kind of want some kind of wristband that was a pedometer that did a bunch of multifunctional things. I do truly believe the smartwatch is going to be an awesome thing. You see the Nike fitness wristband, you see Jawbone Triad getting back into it. That to me is like I would love something on my wrist that I can check. To me, it's more compelling than, say, a Google Glass thing. Anyway, if you're just joining us, Dan, real quick, let's kind of jump into a little bit of wireless thing. HT Voice, I kind of understand why that's such a big deal. David, I know you care about this, too, so you two talk it up. I'm just going to listen. So HT Voice, it's kind of a funny thing because nobody really talks about voice quality anymore when we talk about smartphones because we're focused on all the other fun stuff that we do. But HT Voice kind of made news last year or within this past year with Sprint who said that they were going to be launching an HT Voice compatible network. And now Apple is saying that iPhone 5 will support this wideband audio, which will give you much higher fidelity call quality than we've ever seen before or ever heard before. I should say. And it's going to be available on 20 carrier partners. We're not really sure which carriers those are yet, though. So it's going to be interesting to see where this actually turns up, if it's going to be available on the major carriers here in the US or if it'll just be on kind of a scatter shot of carriers across the world. Yeah, so the way it was described to me, I got to get a test of this with the Evo 4G LTE on Sprint. And one of the things they made a big deal about was HT Voice. And I got to talk to a few folks at HTC. And they were saying that it's part carrier, part phone hardware, and part software. And all three of those things have to work together. And that was kind of the big problem with it before was that there's not necessarily a huge market for it yet. Because it's just people who own Evo 4G LTEs and use Sprint and have the particular carrier stuff. But now this opens HT Voice up to a much wider audience. So presumably now the hardware and software stuff is there. And it just becomes up to the carriers to implement this particular standard. Which to my understanding, and I could be wrong, and correct me if I am Dan, but to my understanding is not overly complicated. And then it's just a matter of them implementing it because the rest of the infrastructure for it is there. And you suddenly have this giant leap in voice quality. I got to test it with the Evo and it's an amazing difference. We use Skype by default whenever we can just because it's faster and you sound better and there's less compression and lag. And in this case it was like being in a room with somebody. It sounded amazing. I was really impressed. Now is it the same standard, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is it the same standard HD audio, wide band audio? Is that the same everywhere? I actually don't know. Dan, do you know that? You know that's not clear yet to be honest with you. It hopefully would be the same standard. That would make life a lot easier and it means that HD audio could be had on a call from the iPhone to say like the Evo 4G LTE like you mentioned and vice versa. But I'm not going to go on record and say that it is just yet because there always seems to be a lot of things that kind of throw it for a loop when we're talking about these various wireless protocols and standards. The thing that you mentioned earlier with the Evo 4G LTE is that I got to test it as well and it really did sound great and it works great but it only works with other Evo 4G LTEs. So opening this up to the iPhone really opens up to a wider market, a much larger user base of people who are going to be able to take advantage of the HD voice quality. Right, now I have a question. So they announced there's 20 partners for HD voice. Did they announce who they were? I'm assuming Sprint is one of them. Maybe it's a bad assumption. No, I would assume it's the same but I don't know. I don't think they said. Yeah, they didn't announce any partners for the HD voice yet. They just said 20 but Apple didn't name any of them. One would think that Sprint would be one of those partners but we're not really sure yet. Awesome. Well Dan, stay on the line. Love you. Love you too. However, we have something to show. We have a hands-on video with the iPhone. It's ready. I think Josh is narrating it so we can just sit back, relax. Before we get him live, we get him on tape. Yeah, hopefully Josh and Eli will be coming up soon. That is a fact. Live, but right now here's a pre-recorded Josh Dupolsky to kind of, you know, basically whet your appetite. Thank you. It's one of those days. Hey, this is Josh from The Verge and we are looking at the new iPhone 5. As you can see, it looks somewhat familiar to the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4 but I have to say when you pick it up in your hands, there is an immediate noticeable difference. It's thinner, it's lighter, it feels incredibly light actually. It's almost bizarrely light. When I picked it up, I almost dropped it because I expected more weight than is actually here but that doesn't mean that it's, you know, cheaply constructed. The back is beautiful, matte metal finish. There's glass on these two pieces right here and then of course, glass around the front. It's also got a larger screen, the much rumored and now exposed larger screen of the iPhone 5. You can also see the bezel has been kind of cut down along the sides here so it just feels like it's all screen on the front. This is the black version which is almost all matte black, pretty sleek I have to say, pretty slick looking. And, you know, everything functions as you would expect on an iPhone. It's of course running iOS 6. We've seen early versions of iOS 6. We saw it demoed at WWDC and this is the full version here. A few new additions, Passbook is one of them which is going to collect all sorts of boarding passes and gift cards and stuff like that which was demoed today. There's also new mail features. For instance, the VIP and flagging has been changed and lots of little nips and talks all over the OS. But you know, the big story today is not the operating system. The big story today is the hardware. And I have to say, it's definitely, it is an evolution in terms of the design language. But I spoke to Phil Schiller and he said that this is a complete ground up new project for them. They looked at this and they said, let's just kind of blow apart what we've already done and build something new from the ground up. And you do see little differences that indicate that that's the case. Particularly one of the things that I noticed is the detail on this, the machined edges of this. I heard somebody here say it looked a little bit like jewelry and I have to agree that there is kind of a jewelry feel to the way these edges are machined and as clean as they are. One other thing to note, the headphone jack has moved down to the bottom and it now has the new lightning dock port which is much smaller obviously and faster as Apple claims. It has a bunch of other features that are helpful if you're docking your phone. So this is it. I mean, this is the iPhone 5. It's going to be available. I believe it goes on sale September 21st and we're going to spend a little bit more time with it. We'll have some impressions and a lot more info soon. Welcome back. If you're just joining us, this is the Vergecast special edition. All basically about iPhone 5 event today. So far we've had big announcements. The taller iPhone 5, it's thinner, has LTE. New iPod Touch, similar screen size, much thinner. iPod Nano no longer watch capable but a very compelling product. iOS 6 was a rundown. iTunes 11 was previewed. Not coming out until next month though. What am I missing here? That's about it. It was kind of a revamp of the whole lineup for them in a way that we haven't seen in a while. Does this replace its iPod rock and roll event? Actually, we'll talk about that later. Where is my YouTube branded iPod Touch? That's my question. We have Dan Seifer online, one of our senior mobile editors who's here to talk about. Well, basically right now I want to talk about the competition. Where does iPhone 5 stand in terms of the playing field? We've seen a lot of announcements lately from Nokia with the Lumia 920 flagship. GS3 is still of course Samsung's flagship. We've also seen Motorola. Yep. Updates Razer. Dan, are you still with us? Yes, I am. All right. Kind of talk about the competition right now. Where does everything stand in terms of the mobile industry? What is Apple up against now and in the next few months? I think, as you mentioned, the most exciting competitor to the iPhone 5 now is the Nokia Lumia 920. It's the most interesting model that's coming out soon. It's got high-end specs to match the iPhone 5. It's even got a larger display and fast processor. It's running the new Windows Phone 8 platform that is still a little unproven. We don't really know exactly how that's going to be. And then it's got Nokia's PureView camera, which should be really good. We've done a bit of tests with preliminary models. I'm sure if you have been watching the site last week, it was full of Nokia news. How it stacks against the iPhone 5, I think we'll kind of have to see. As far as raw specs, the Lumia 920 has a little bit of an edge because it's got that bigger screen. As far as the cameras go, Apple does say that the iPhone 5's camera is improved over the iPhone 4S, but it doesn't seem like it's terribly different. It's a little bit faster. It's a little bit, a couple of new features, but it seems to be essentially the same camera that we saw on the 4S. And the 4S had a very solid camera, so it's not a huge surprise to see that it's very along those lines. I would be remiss right now not to mention the one jab. We didn't see a lot of jabs thrown at this point. No, we figured we'd see a lot of them. Especially after Apple Samsung. The one we did see though was at Nokia. These are our photos from the iPhone 5 camera. By the way, we didn't screw with them. It may not have been at Nokia specifically, but in the context of Lumia 920's recent photo scandal, it was clearly a wink and a nod. So can we get the chart back up, kind of take a look at some of the competition we have here. There is the iPhone 5. Obviously looks very nice. The Galaxy S3. Dan, what would you say is the flagship Android phone right now? What is the pinnacle of Android that we can get at this point? You know, if you're looking at raw hardware, I think it's still the Galaxy S3 that came out this summer. You do obviously have to put up with Samsung's TouchWiz interface, which not everyone is a fan of. A lot of people really like that stock Android look, which you can only get with the Galaxy Nexus out of the box right now. But if we're just talking about raw hardware specs as far as processor, display, camera, stuff like that, then the Galaxy S3 is still kind of the king of the hill. And stacking up against the iPhone, the Galaxy S3 gets you a bigger display. It gets you a similar resolution camera. It's got a fast dual-core processor just like the iPhone as well. But it's an all-plastic body, and a lot of people found that to be one of the big negatives with the Samsung is that it's kind of this glossy, almost cheap-feeling plastic body, whereas the iPhone is going to have a glass and aluminum frame, which given Apple's history, we can kind of expect it to be a pretty high-quality device and well put together. So it really depends on which way you want to go. The iPhone 5, I think, is going to be a lot easier to use in one hand than some of these other larger Android devices, and even the Lumia 920, because it does have a larger screen than older iPhones, but it is only 4 inches as opposed to the 4.5 or 4.8 inch displays that can be kind of difficult to use with one hand. But I would suggest that if you're in the market for a new smartphone, get to a store once all these things are on the market and really play with them. Oh, that is such a safe answer. You're so sweet. So about the one-handed thing... I'm going to buy an iPhone 5 if that's what you're trying to get at. We'll get into that. I was going to ask you. So the one-handed thing I think is really interesting, because all the other phones on that list we just showed, I think the smallest screen other than the iPhone is the Galaxy Nexus, and it's 4.65 inches, and the others are 4.8... Oh, I guess the Lumia is 4.5, so 4.5 up to 5.5. 4.5 is the small one now. No, that's crazy. And the iPhone 5 is kind of bucking this trend of like, let's get bigger and bigger and bigger. And even Motorola came out last week and was like, oh, we've put a 4.3 inch phone into a slightly smaller bezel, and was super excited about that. But the iPhone is taking a different tack. Do you think that's smart, or do people want bigger phones? I think that as far as... I know there's been a lot of studies about this, and surveys have said that people want bigger phones, but the fact of the matter is people aren't stopped not buying the iPhone because it has a smaller screen. Apple still sells millions and millions and millions of these every quarter, and they're probably going to sell millions and millions and millions of iPhone 5s this coming quarter. So it's hard to say exactly. The sales say that the big screens don't have as big of an effect on a smartphone purchase decision as some manufacturers would like you to think. Right. And I will say, clearly, the way Samsung's tried to differentiate, HTC's tried to differentiate, we know the big thing is software, is ecosystem, it's how you present it, that's why we have TouchWiz, we have Sense. People just showed iOS 6, these showed everything they come out with in terms of software. There is no NFC, but of course there's a lot of compelling stuff, and it still is kind of the king to beat in terms of mindshare and even in terms of sales. What is compelling about Android and Windows 8 right now that would make someone kind of give up iOS, or not even think about it? Well, I know there's been this sentiment, even among a lot of our editors at The Verge, is that they're just kind of bored with iOS. It's like we mentioned earlier, it's been the same thing since 2007 with minor tweaks along the way, but it's been the same paradigm, and we don't have the fun new features that you get with Android, like widgets that can be customized and updated automatically to show you new information, or Windows Phone 8 has something like that with its live tile system. So if somebody is looking for a different tack, then Android and Windows Phone 8 give that to you. The other thing that's a big sell for Android, of course, since it's owned by Google, it has great Google services integration. It's definitely got the best Google Maps services, which as we mentioned earlier, is leaving the iPhone. It's got the best Gmail support and support for other Google services if you're a Google Docs user, etc. And Microsoft, like I said, we still don't really know everything there is to know about Windows Phone 8. Microsoft has really kept its cards close until it launches, and it's very interesting and it's very intriguing. We've been let down in the past by Windows Phone 7.5, so I think Microsoft really needs to come out swinging and come out big with Windows Phone 8 with some really compelling reasons as to why we should use that instead of the other options on the market. Well, now you said something interesting earlier. You actually mentioned people are getting bored with the iOS design. People still say it's great, but I've seen so much of it before already. Do you think Windows Phone 8 differentiates enough with its live tiles? It's like some kind of in-between between Android's less restrictive and iPhone's more restrictive kind of interface. Do you feel this like, I don't know, different shaped live tiles are going to make much of a difference? Is that design alone going to win some minds in terms of the mobile industry? You know, it's hard to say. It hasn't done so yet. Windows Phone 7.5 really hasn't gained any traction in the market. Windows Phone 8, we'll have to see just because it's not available yet. But like you mentioned, it kind of straddles that line between the kind of rigid structure of iOS and the freeform structure of Android because you do have some things that are slightly more customizable. You've got more information available to you at your fingertips, but it's not as fully customizable as Android is. So if you're looking for kind of like that in-between type of thing, Windows Phone 8 kind of slots nicely in there. And to be honest with you, I'm really eager to play with that at length. We haven't really had a chance to, unfortunately, because as I mentioned, Microsoft isn't letting anybody touch it yet. So I'm really intrigued by the Lumia 920, but I'm also really hesitant at the same time, to be honest. And no one here is going to say Windows Phone 7 or 7.5 is worth getting at this point. 7.8 maybe, especially if you have the Lumia 900 already. But Windows Phone 8 is the operating system we want to compare it to. We don't know when that's coming out. I think that's the issue. And I mean, I think the biggest problem, and this is what I thought was so interesting about Apple, is leading with we have all these apps, we have all these apps that are optimized for every device we have. People buy them like crazy. They're great. And like, Windows Phone 8 just doesn't have that. That continues to be the big problem to me. We had this conversation about the Lumia 900. Like if it were 2007 and App Stores didn't exist, it would be a great operating system. And Windows Phone 8 is even more that way. But there's just the ecosystem around it. The apps are just not there. And Microsoft seems to be pushing towards fixing that. And I think Windows 8 coming out and sharing a kernel with Windows Phone 8 is going to be really important and help a lot. But until then, it's just a pretty phone you can't do everything with. Right. And you said, too, because one of the big things that sells well, we didn't hear so much this time. Obviously, Electronic Arts came on there. So gaming has always been big. WWDC, every other conference, they've played up gaming really big. Microsoft has this kind of trojising horse. They have the Xbox system, which is one of the best selling consoles of this generation, doing very well. They can't seem to get the same kind of game quality on a Windows phone. Hopefully with a new kernel, they'll change that. But we still haven't seen any app announcements. Dan, can you talk to me about the app ecosystem? Has Microsoft revealed anything, hinted at something, made it look cool? The Windows Phone marketplace, I think it's actually just changed its name today to the Windows Phone Store, if I'm not mistaken. But it's been growing quite rapidly. Microsoft is happy to talk to you about how that has the fastest growing track record of any smartphone mobile store. But there's still some big names that are missing. And though Microsoft has promised that they're coming, we still have yet to see them. The most noticeable one that I can think of is any sort of like Zynga game, which are very popular on Android and iOS. When you think of like Words with Friends and Draw Something and other games like that, they're not yet available on Windows Phone 8. Microsoft has promised that they're coming, but we don't know when or in what capacity they'll be available. Other apps that are big, that have just recently come to the platform. I know PayPal just recently released an app for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 in the past couple of weeks. That was kind of a big gaping hole that was missing. And a couple of other apps, but it's still far behind, like you mentioned, the games. We haven't really seen Microsoft take the bull by the horns and release these exclusive titles that you can only get on Windows Phone 8 that aren't available on other platforms that are just like blowing us away. And that's kind of like a curious thing. We're not really sure why that hasn't happened yet. Like you mentioned, hopefully with the shared kernel between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, that'll make it easier to port some of these cooler PC-type games over. Right. If you're just joining us, this is the Vergecast Special Edition talking about the iPhone 5 with Dan Seifer. Kind of the competition right now. Josh and Eli will be joining us soon from San Francisco Live. They've been doing the hands-ons, being superstars, doing all that. Dan, one last thing about the competition I want to talk about is Android. I guess second to last thing. Let's talk about this. Android Jelly Bean just came out. The Galaxy Nexus is dated. Is Google still doing flagship devices? That will matter. Will the next one hit into mainstream? Obviously, Nexus 7 is like a flagship tablet that tells people how to do it. Galaxy Nexus was never the same kind of exposure. Are we going to see a phone that comes out now swinging to say, listen, this is a relevant flagship Nexus device? Not just let Samsung or HTC or anyone take that crown? I really hope to. I hope we do see that. There's been rumors pretty much all year that Google is working with multiple manufacturers to release a suite of Nexus devices, of Nexus smartphones, up to possibly five around the same time. That would give us super high quality hardware with the best software that Google has to offer with its stock Android platform. It'd be really great to see that. All of the Nexus smartphones that we've seen thus far haven't had the most cutting edge hardware or the best designs that you can get on versions of Android that maybe have a manufacturer's skin. Hopefully Google will put its foot down at the bit of the Nexus 7 tablet that you know you guys are making tablets that work. We're just going to show you how to do it. We'll see some really great cool phones that run just stock Android without anything else. That would be great, actually. You alluded a minute ago, you said, I am going to buy one. Why are you going to buy one? I feel like you're not overly excited about anything, but you're going to buy one. Is that just because you buy every phone like all the rest of us do? You know, I wish I bought every single phone, but I have an iPhone 4S now. I'm very happy with it as far as its reliability and such. I use it all the time for tethering with my laptop because I'm constantly on the go and the iPhone has been the most reliable of all the phones that I've owned for doing that. I'm pretty excited to have LTE in my iPhone, just pretty much for the tethering purposes. I'll likely pass my iPhone 4S down to my wife, so we kind of just have this creepy cycle where Dan gets a new phone and his wife gets his old phone and everybody's happy. And nothing else right now is just kind of like yelling at me, buy this instead. I think that I'm not going to want to wait for Microsoft and Nokia to release Windows phone 8 and the 920. I think it's a real question mark not having any idea of when we're going to see that other than what we expect from rumors and leaks. So the one thing that Apple does right is it says, here's our device, you can pre-order it on Friday, you'll have it at your door next Friday. And no other manufacturer has really matched that when they've announced the new device or anything like that. And that's a big compelling push to just go out and buy it. All right, well, one last thing before we let you go, I want to talk, let's talk Blackberry. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Don't, don't. That's not, I'm going to leave, I'm going to see you. I'm such a jerk. No, but really, I do want to talk about next week. So we've had three events last week. We had Amazon, we had Nokia and Motorola. Next week we have HTC has an event. Dan, can you give a preview of that all? What are the rumors saying about HTC's announcements next week? So we're expecting to see some Windows Phone stuff from HTC. We haven't seen anything from them just yet for Windows Phone 8. We saw Samsung's offerings. Obviously, we have Nokia's device announced already. So rumors, there's an HTC Accord, or also known as the 8X, that has been rumored to be coming for T-Mobile, kind of like an upgraded Windows Phone 8 device. So we possibly could see that. We will see another slightly lower end version as well. All right then. That's about it. Oh, we have something interesting to talk about. Unlimited data. That's something you might be able to shed light on. Oh, and? Hold on. Turns out we're not doing that. I lied. I lied. Are we ready with Josh and Eli? Yes. All right. Dan, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you guys. All right, for just joining us, this is the Vergecast Special Edition iPhone. As we've been promising, teasing, and toying you with for the last hour and a half or so, Josh Tapolsky is here live virtually. Josh, can you hear us? Oh my God, you're beautiful. Yes, I'm with Eli Patel as well. Yes. I don't care so much about Eli. That's true. So how's it feel to be on the other end? We've stopped places. Hey, come on. David is fired. Oh, you're fired. Are we live on the air? Because it's unclear to me. You are live on the air. If we are not, Josh. I can say it again if you want. That's wonderful. Well, let me tell you what's happening. Eli Patel and I, I'm Josh Tapolsky and this is Eli Patel. We are live at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts where- You need more news voice. Where an event has just occurred that will be remembered for all time, an announcement of a new iPhone, a colorful set of new iPod touches, and a completely reinvented iPod Nano, perhaps the most shocking announcement of the day. Perhaps the most disappointing, flat out disappointing announcement. I- Zap on that. Anyhow, so as you know, we were here at the event covering it live. We have touched all of the devices. We put them against our faces. We put them in our hands. We threw them across the room to see how sturdy they were. I leaped over Phil Schiller's shoulders to get to one at one point. He leaped over my shoulders to get back in his original position. It was a great time had by everybody here at the Apple event. I don't think there's any denying that it was certainly one of their events that they've held. Yes, that's all true. I'll now open the floor for questions. What would you like to hear about today's event? I want to know more about this leapfrogging that you did on Phil Schiller. Kind of curious how the devices touched you back too. There is a... I mean Phil is a playful guy and he likes to have some fun at these events. Also the Foo Fighters were there. The best part... Here's my favorite part of the day is I was talking to Phil Schiller and the Foo Fighters came out to check out the new iPhone. They seemed genuinely interested in the new iPhone, I have to say. It was almost as if they hadn't seen it yet. They were having a good time. Dave Grohl turned to me and he said, hey, I like your tie. I said, I like your special brand of heartfelt rock and roll. Then we kissed. Part of that happened. The part where he talked to Phil Schiller. I was going to say, do we have the kiss on video? I'd love to see that. Wait, so what do you guys think? What's the... I'd love to see it too. So look, the phone is like... Wait, let's hear it. They had a question. The phone is what do you think? Is that what it is? The question is what do you think? I don't know what the question was. I want to know what Eli thinks. What do you think of the question, Ross? You guys are so cute. The phone, what do you think? Yeah. Look, the phone is... I don't think any of the leaks or mockups actually did anything to the industrial design of this phone. Any favors? It's actually really nice. I think it's nice. I mean, it did the favors in that it looked exactly like what we saw, except for the shiny edges. The shiny edges and it's much lighter than you'd expect it to be. Very light. The screen is quite nice, but it's very much an iterative update to the iPhone. Yes. And you know, Johnny Ive in his presentation said, the iPhone is something that most customers have, the object they use the most. So we're very careful about changing it, which is definitely one way of thinking about it. Yeah, no, I mean- But it's the safest way of thinking about it. I actually, and I wrote that as I was doing the live blog, I made a note of that quote. I wrote it down in the live blog. I think that does sort of sum up. It is a beautiful phone. It seems to be beautifully made. The screen looks stunning. The screen looks great. There's no question that it's a very handsome device, but it is very much a iteration of the design that we've seen. And all joking aside, I did talk to Phil Schiller about this when we were checking out the phones just a few moments ago. And he said, it's an iteration of the design language, but in terms of like the guts of the phone, the design, how it's made, it's a completely, they blew apart the process and they have new chips and they've got a new screen and they've got this new build. The aluminum back, I mean it's much thinner. So I mean the phone's nice. The iPod stuff to me is probably the most interesting. The focus on iPod and iTunes. The new iPod touch is really nice. Like if you're a gadget person, you're probably going to want to have one. Even if you have an Android phone or I mean I have an iPhone and I still kind of want to have one around. It's just a really nice piece of hardware. And then the new iPod Nano is like why did they make this? It is an odd entry. It runs like a version of, they're calling it the Nano OS. It's not iOS. It looks just like it. I was hoping... Multi-touch display. Multi-touch display. It's $149. It's really cheap. I mean I was really hoping that they would take the Nano that was already kind of becoming a watch for people and turn it into a third device that connected to a phone that was smart and instead they've gone backwards. Like a remote control for your phone. Like a remote control for your phone. Instead they've kind of gone backwards. Yeah. It feels like a very, it really feels like a product from... The past. It does feel like a product from the past. And all the iTunes stuff is all about how you're going to manage these MP3 files on your computer in new and different ways. I like thinking that... And I haven't managed an MP3 file on my computer in at least a year if not more. I like thinking that Johnny Ive was going through a drawer full of old designs and he found that like an old Nano design that he'd worked on. He was like, you know, this is actually pretty good. It was during the Samsung trial. He was like, oh that one. You know what? Yeah. I think that I like, I'm excited about the new Touch. I talked to Avi Greengard who's an analyst and a friend of ours and he made an interesting point and I agree, you know, at $299. Yeah. It's right there. First off, it's expensive. They didn't replace the original. You've got the $199 original and you've got the $299 upgrade. But it does kind of create questions about this iPad mini that we're hearing about. If you have a $300 iPod Touch and a $200 iPod Touch, what is the price point of the iPod mini and doesn't it cancel out one of those products? If the iPod mini is $350 or $300 or $250 or $200, if the product even exists, now I know I'm talking about a Phantom product that doesn't actually exist yet. You know, I think it's, you have to ask yourself what is the, how does that work for them financially? Well, I don't think people will just buy one device. For me, the iPod Touch is if you have a Blackberry or an Android phone and you want to like go into this world, it's the way to do it. It's beautiful. It's hard to even, like it has like classic Apple hardware flourishes like the, it has a strap lock button that pops out of the back. It's totally silly. This guy was just crazy about the lube. It's all he did. The tear was rolling down his face. It was actually a great video Jordan took of me just pushing the button crying quietly myself. It is inspirational. But I do, let's get back to the phone a little bit. I want to talk about the phone because I mean the iPod stuff is not the main course here. The main course is the iPhone. I think that like one thing that you can't escape, I mean I will say this, I am very impressed if they can get better battery life in this device, which is a smaller device and a thinner device. If they get better battery life, better battery life on LTE than the previous version, that's pretty incredible. Phil Schiller actually said a lot of that was due to the integration, the chip integration that is allowing them to be, to sip power rather than gulp it when using LTE. But you know, you can't get away from the fact that this phone is not very different in terms of when you upgrade your iPhone 4S to the latest software, the differences are not going to be astounding between those two devices. Last night we were talking about what they would do and I said what's always most exciting is when they show off iOS 6, all the stuff you've seen before and then they give you the one big new feature, you know, like they did with iOS 5 and Siri. And that didn't happen. There was no one big feature. I think the big feature that was new that we saw was a like button on shared photo streams. I mean I have to say, and you know, maybe I'm an Android fan boy or lack integrity or something, but you know when they said look we've made the screen larger, we can fit an extra row of icons on there, my heart sank a little bit in terms of just excitement about the product. I mean it was, I just don't think that's a feature you mention on stage. And I think that we should applaud them for if they've downsized chips and made a more energy efficient device. I certainly applaud them for the machine, the engineering that went into this. And it definitely was like an engineering effort, but at the end of the day, and look this doesn't matter to most people. People are going to go, they're pre-ordering right now the iPhone 5, they're so excited about it. But fundamentally this device is no different than the one that you have in your pocket right now. And even from a design standpoint it's not really that different. I think the LTE is a big deal. I do not think the increased screen size is necessarily, in this case doesn't strike me as much of a game changer. If I get one more, one row extra of the email client that I'm not that excited about, or one row extra of iMessage, that doesn't thrill me. I just feel like they could push harder on software and I'm surprised that they're not. And I was looking for something today that, yes. So lots of people I think didn't upgrade from the 4 to the 4S waiting for this and they were like, oh this is going to be the life changing, earth shattering phone I've been waiting for that wasn't the 4S. Is this not that? Is that what you're saying? No it is. If you get one from the 4 this is going to be a massive upgrade from the 4. Well you get Siri, you have a much faster phone, you obviously get LTE, it's thinner, it's sleeker looking. It's faster. I mean you don't feel like, it's definitely a generational, big generational update. John, I don't want to do a B on your hand. Oh it just flew away, okay. That was a little scary for a second there. That people now sting one of us. That was scary. You guys can't see it but John sitting here like focusing and a B landed right on his finger. That is dedication, he's a pro. John is a dazzling larger to B's. Yeah, he didn't budge, he didn't flinch. But I would say the jump from 4 to 5, the jump from 4 to 5 is enormous. But the market just is moving faster than that. There's the world of people that are like two year contracts and then there's the phone market which is rapidly iterating in every part. I mean I think if you look at the things that were updated today, you see a lot of things that are not innovated on and things that are just kind of being grooved up to. LTE is not. A bigger screen. If they innovate on battery life, that's great. I think the difference is an extra hour from what the previous version was. So that's great but LTE is a feature we've seen for a couple of years now. A bigger screen is a feature that we've seen for a few years now. Say what you will about large Android phones, there are a few that do pull off the larger screen. The slightly larger screen, the One S is a great example which I believe has a 4 inch screen, a sleek design. And you know it actually does it, it pulls that off quite nicely so that's not like hey we've never seen this before. Obviously Apple's industrial design is impeccable so that's not surprising. I will say to be very clear, when I say the leaks didn't do it justice. Very clear, I'm buying this phone. Are you going to buy it? My wife is definitely buying it. She's very excited. She has a 4. I'll see. I'll probably buy all the phones. If you love your iPhone, if you have a 4 and you love it and you're just like oh I need a new phone, you're definitely upgraded to this. If you have a 4S and you want LTE and you like the 4S, there's no question. My thing is more of like a, I guess mine is maybe it's a nerdy thing but I just want to see more, I feel like there's more that can be done. They talk about software and hardware integration, they talk about getting that right. I just feel like there's more they can do with the software. I think that the MP3 stuff is a great observation. I just don't understand that at all. We're still talking about managing your iTunes library and I know that a lot of people do that. I would love to see Apple leapfrog, as Phil Schiller leapfrogged me during the event physically, I would like to see them leapfrog whatever the status quo is right now and say we're going to bring you something totally new and great that you didn't see coming. I didn't think there was anything that happened today at this event that was remotely, I mean they introduced panorama mode for the camera. I'm sure it will work very well, maybe better than anybody else's panorama mode but it's not a new feature that we haven't seen before. It's not even a feature that you can't spend a dollar on the app store to get. Passbook may be the only thing they introduced that doesn't have an equivalent that we've seen elsewhere. I'm not trying to downplay it, I think it's a beautiful package. It's not the iPhone 4 with FaceTime and even that was kind of stuff we'd already seen. The iPhone 4 is like a radically new design. Yeah. Alright, so first of all, a smaller picture first. If you develop an app that's optimized for iPhone 5, will it work on the 4S in previous generations? Is there going to be ubiquity among the apps? Yeah, because you're just going to give it two different views. Part of making it for the 5 is making it for the 4. My impression is, I actually didn't speak to anybody about this. My impression is that there will be variations, there will be like a universal binary for it. It's not going to be like the iPad and the iPhone where you have iPhone 5 only apps? I mean the screen size, it is a very minor screen size difference when you really analyze it. You're going from 960 to 1136, so it's not a huge jump. And when you use, I loaded the Verge app on one of the devices and it's totally usable. It's obviously not optimized, so there's a black bar at the bottom, it's a pillar box. It's a letter box. Yeah. Can I address something? Ross, I know you have questions, but I want to address a very hot topic that was on the internet a few months ago where many people were talking about how the 3.5 inch display was the perfect display for scientific reasons. The circumference of where your thumb range could be was just, it had been perfectly sized to meet that. And anything larger completely destroyed the one-handed functionality of the device. Well, they did go through that a little bit today. Oh, they went through it a little bit today, but they also increased the height of the screen. They kept the height of the screen, yeah, they kept the width, but the height of the screen has to be reached by your thumb. The top of the screen has to be reached by your thumb as well. For me, actually, on my Galaxy Nexus, what I don't struggle with is reaching to the right, to the left side of it. I struggle with trying to get up to the top of it. That's the place that's hard to move to. So, I'd love to know what the reaction is from the people on the internet who felt that 3.5 was just the perfect size and now that we've gone beyond that, what that means for thumbs. Do we have to get thumb extensions? Well, they're going to take off their... Well, we have to get... Thumb extensions. Thumb... Right now, I'm getting a PR for thumb extension. Well, we have to grow very long thumbnails. What will happen? So, one thing that's interesting is, it's minorly interesting, the screen is a lot thinner because of the integrated touch sensor and it's kind of noticeable. So I thought the retina display is still at the top of the class and this one looks slightly better. There's less of an air gap still. It's a very good looking display. And the iPod touch now has actually the same display. The old iPod touch had a slightly crappier display than the iPhone and now, as far as I mean, I held them side by side and Apple says they're exactly the same. Honestly, if I had to just lay it down, I would say the iPod touch is the more interesting product announced today. The iPhone is like, it's the next iPhone. It's the features that are more added. Well, I will say they did colors on the iPod touch, which is the first time they've done colors for one of their full iOS devices like this, which I think is interesting. And I'm personally very excited about getting pink one. How is the loop? Make them size. To put... Sorry. It's so silly. It's amazing. Have you ever been touched by God and then had God wrap his fingers around your wrist? Yeah. Because that's what it feels like when you put the loop on. Wow. Josh, I've got a more... Beyond. I've got a broader question for you. So we have talked about, you said this earlier, Johnny Ive mentioned they are sensitive to changing much of the iPhone because it has such a big fan base. It's such a huge device. Is that to say, are you getting the indication that they're not going to really make a lot of major tweaks in the iPhone lineup going forward? Is this the kind of interactive design we can expect in the years to come? I think if you look at the... I think if you look historically at what Apple does, it's that they have a big innovation when they introduce a product for the first time. And they spend a lot of time iterating on that big innovation. The iMac has looked the same for six or seven years. The laptops, they're all the same. If you look at the original MacBook Pro with the chiclet keyboard versus the current one, there is a very small iteration between those devices. I think Apple's thing is we do a good thing the first time and then we iterate to make it even better. And I think they're doing that here. But those designs that don't change don't have numbers. The iMac is always the iMac. The MacBook Pro is always the MacBook Pro. I think the number is arbitrary. I think the number is because to place this in a market with other devices when you've established it as an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3GS, that you have to give users, you have to give a consumer some continuity, but you also have to be able to give somebody the opportunity to walk into a store and say, I want not a new iPhone, but a specific new iPhone. And I think that when you're talking about a price point from free or subsidized to $99 to $200, you have to be able to let people identify those products. They're different products. And I think the difference with a MacBook Pro is that you've got different sizes, but it's not like you have to walk into an AT&T and pull one off the shelf. You go to the Apple store. You go to the Apple store. I mean, it's a different buying process. On a much more cynical note, Apple has benefited from a lot of consumer confusion for years because they had the 4 and the 4S and people thought they were 4G devices. Now everybody else has 4G in their name and Apple has a 5. It's very like that's why it's there. I don't think that the naming of the new iPad was necessarily that well received. Everybody I talked to, and I've even heard Apple people refer to it as the iPad 3. And I think that internally and externally people think of it as the iPad 3 and I think it's confusing to call it the new iPad instead of the iPad 3. Because when the new iPad comes out, what will the last new iPad be? The old new iPad? You tell me. So I think that that's actually been kind of a misstep for them. I think in these products that they're releasing a new version with some new industrial design and new features every year, I mean, they're still working on iOS, right? The idea is that next year they'll have a completely different version of it or a slightly altered version of it. And I think that it's odd. They keep saying iOS 6, iOS 5, iOS 4. Why wouldn't they carry the same thing through with these devices that are so closely linked with that progress? Honestly, the name is, it looks different. I think people will seek it out. It's the first new, like tangibly new looking iPhone in two years. It's going to be famous. They could have called it the iPhone watermelon. I like that. That's a good one. What were you saying, Ross? You have questions? Actually, it's David. Have you guys had a chance to try the new, the ear pods, the horribly named earbuds again? I have them in my bag. I haven't put them in yet. We should be using them right now. We should be using the ear pod right now. We're going to do a thorough, Neil is going to do a thorough ears on test of those. And we're going to get right down to the bottom. He's going to go ears on with them. And we're going to get right into the bottom, right down to the bottom of this situation of whether or not they fall out of your ears or sound good or whatever. But I was walking around telling everybody how horrible I thought the old ones are. So it'll be really interesting to see if these are any kind of improvement. We actually, Neil and I have not eaten anything today. So unless you have any final questions about the iPhone 5, the iPod touch or the iPod. Apple laid out a beautiful spread, but my personal integrity kept me from eating it. Damn right. I was tempted to. I did eat Samsung's food though. They had it across the street. Well, they said if we didn't eat their food, we wouldn't get any more, any more devices of theirs to cover. So we were like, HP had a cake that looked exactly like an iMac, which I just devoured. Whenever you say overlord Samsung, whatever you need from us to do, whenever you want us to do for you, we'll do it. When HP, when HP called us and said, we're inviting you to a champagne brunch, you better be there. I said, listen, listen, listen, HP, you don't even have to ask. Yeah, I'm there. Hey Ross, are we working on a post of things that the new iPhone looks exactly like? What does that mean? Other products. I think it's time to cut a ride. I think we need to let them go right now. Guys, go eat before you piss off any more bloggers in the blogosphere. We're going to go eat and we have a lot more content we'll be sharing throughout the day. Thanks for taking the time to make us stand in the horrible sun and talk about the iPhone. You're welcome. Your sunglasses look great. Always our pleasure. Paul. Paul. Paul, he's like, Paul. Paul. Paul. Okay, I don't know why I'm waving. It's a damn camera. You can't even see the video. But if he watches later, he knows I waved. Anyway, just warning, that was Josh and Neelai. We promised they'd be coming. They did. Followed through on our promises. We do that. We're good luck. The last thing I wanted to clarify, just a point that we had going into this, AT&T unlimited data. If you have unlimited data on your AT&T account, like an old, kind of like singular days, that's what I've got, you can keep it. You can keep it for the iPhone LTE. It's grandfathered in. At least for now. So if you have that, you're probably just going to keep it. Because unlimited LTE is kind of the greatest thing ever. And we don't know for sure if that's going to be the case on Verizon as well. We're looking to find out. But we've heard, all indications seem to be that that won't be the case. Yeah, I would be very surprised. Verizon's nixed it a couple times before for other 4G devices. Yeah, I've been grandfathered into unlimited data like four different times. For Verizon or AT&T? And I'm terrified that it's going to happen on Verizon. But I don't have an LTE phone yet, because I have an iPhone. And I'm terrified it's going to happen. And I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. The reason AT&T is going to keep me for decades is if they just keep my unlimited data plan. Because now that I have LTE, I am going to watch HD video all the time. There's nothing but. Even when you're not using your phone. Just streaming. Why not? Yeah. Anyway, so that's the big thing. Let's talk about kind of a, well, let's just wrap up everything with the iPhone 5, all the iPods, iOS 6 coming September 19. The price points indicate we've got basically the free iPhone 3G. The iPhone 4 is now free on contract. Free iPhone 4, $100 iPhone 4S, $200 iPhone 5. Don't want to say this because my producer really hates the iPhone 5 name. The $300 iPod Touch, but it is that 32 gig tier, which is what the iPhone 5 would also be. And then we go up to the $400 iPod 2 and the $500 new iPad. We have no real tiers anymore left for the so-called iPad mini, which has been rumored many times. Wall Street Journal has written about it. Bloomberg has written about it. We've written about it. We've written about it. All the rumors did say, though, there's going to be a separate event next month where they would reveal it. What do you think about that? Do you still feel a little confident about that? I mean, I think from just a market standpoint, like what exists and what's out there, it is kind of a hole for Apple. And it does seem like something that they could do really well. You know, the 1024 by 768 screen that all these apps are already designed for, just put that into, what was it, 7.85 inches, I think is the rumor we've heard. Put it into that and sell it for less. But the question now is, what do you sell it for? If it's $299, then suddenly the iPod Touch makes absolutely zero sense as a product. If you sell it for $399, suddenly you're not that far away from the bigger iPad, which you might as well buy that one. And it just, I don't know. I mean, even if it's $399, you're still at the same price point as the iPad 2. And I mean, I'd say unless you really want it for reading and holding in one hand, you're better off with the bigger screen. So it just seems to me that unless there's some really compelling feature that we don't know about, like if they're going to put in LTE coverage on the 7.85 and charge $299 for it, then that's a really exciting product. But again, then why would you buy an iPod Touch? Right, because basically if the iPad Mate was just the iPod Touch, which is a bigger screen, I mean, the specs are nice, A5, it's got a good battery, it's got a decent camera. If you just expand that, what are you going to charge for it? $350? That doesn't make any sense. Right. No, I really don't get it at all. And especially the, I mean, there are a bunch of different ways I guess they could go. You could add more storage and charge, they could have a, it could be $100 cheaper, but so you get more storage at $499 than you would get for the bigger screen. But it just seems like at this point, we're so used to Apple having single products in particular markets, where it's like if you want a tablet, you buy an iPad. And then the only question is, do you get more storage or do you get LTE? And those are pretty easy answers, or those are pretty easy questions for most people to answer, I think. But then when you introduce, you say, we have, at every price point you can think of, we have like three different devices, all of which kind of do something similar to what you want. Like you want a way to watch movies, here's six different ways to do it all for roughly the same price. That doesn't make that much sense to me. Right. And so now I just, I genuinely don't know what they do. I still think there is... There's clearly a seven inch market. Right. I mean, the Kindle Fire, the Nook, the Nexus 7, they're doing well enough, especially if you're not being Apple products in a tablet market. Sure. Kindle Fire especially is making headway. Yeah. It's something Apple's looking into, but they've now kind of made this really weird pricing structure where like, I don't know where it fits. Right. And it fits size-wise, I get that. I don't know where it fits in the price. Right. And this is why I think if they could have brought the new iPod Touch at $199, I think one, it would have sold like crazy. Right. And two, it would have left that $299 spot open for the iPad Mini. And again, we're talking about a product that may or may not exist and at the moment doesn't. But if it does, one of these two products that is going to be around that price point just shouldn't exist. I don't know which one it is. On a scale of rumored unicorns, I would put the iPad Mini a little more fake realistic than the Apple television set or a heads up display. Well, and especially given that a lot of the leaks and stuff that we're seeing for the iPad Mini came from the same place as the ones for the iPhone 5. Right. And every single one of those turned out right. Right. So we can definitely see an October event. Right. Yeah. So suddenly I buy the idea of the iPad Mini a lot more than I did before today because these leaks are just credible. They have to be. Right. But the problem is a $400 iPad Mini makes this little sense now that they have the $200 Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire HD. Right. Well, then what do you price it? The iPod Touch is a 4-inch device that's $100 more expensive than the 7-inch Nexus 7. And I know that's kind of an Apple's to Orange's comparison, but that's a hard pitch to say. It's like, here's a tablet, here's a little MP3 player, this one's $100 more expensive. On the face of it, that's a tough thing to justify. And I just don't get why the iPod Touch starts at 32 gigs. Why not start at 16 gigs like the iPhone? Or 8. I think I bought an 8-gig iPod forever ago. The HD video doesn't make sense for that anymore. No, I guess not. Right. So, the last few questions, we actually had a private bet, the over or under how long this would take. You said 2 hours 22 minutes. Pretty close. We are like, we got three minutes. I do not want to elongate this in a false pattern. So I'm just going to go ahead and ask the last question, are you getting one? An iPhone 5? No. No? No. Because I think, for me, it's not as significant an upgrade as I need. And the thing for me is LTE is exciting. But I've kind of tracked this recently, and I've found that everywhere I am, everywhere I do anything, I have Wi-Fi. I live my life at home and in coffee shops and at the office. Why wouldn't you have it? There's just Wi-Fi everywhere. So LTE is nice. It's a huge upgrade, don't get me wrong. But it's not like this game changing, I have to go out and spend $800 on it to get it. Well, if you felt that way, you would have gotten an Android device a long time ago. Right, sure. And the rest of this stuff is, the body looks amazing. It looks considerably better in the videos we have than I thought it was going to look. And even the way they build it on stage, it just looks better than I thought it was going to. But that's, again, it's not such a giant leap forward for iOS and for the iPhone. It just doesn't seem like, if I had a 4, I would be salivating and ready to go pre-order this thing and get out. Because it's two performance enhancements, and from the 4, the 4S was big. And if this is equally big, it's meaningful. But for me now, there's nothing that makes me jump out of my seat and want to go buy one. So you get something else right now? What's the next best thing in terms of Windows Phone or Android? I'll probably wait. I think this fall, I'm good with my 4S, and I really want to see what happens with Windows Phone 8 when Windows 8 comes out. And if they can fill in these big app gaps that they have, I think it legitimately could be compelling. And the Lumia 920 is the prettiest, best-looking phone I've ever seen. And I want to buy that phone. It looks like an oversized iPod Nano. I'm just going to say it. I think you said it earlier, and someone else said it over there. It's just not nice. Not my line, but it's true. What about you? Are you buying one? I have an iPhone 4. Oh yeah, you have a broken iPhone 4. So I'm just going to literally just... It's gone. Dead. I'm pre-ordering now. It's still going to work. Maybe. It just shattered. I'm not looking down. I really do not want to look down right now. I'm really upset. Really scared. So you're buying one. Go get in line. This is me ordering right now. That's how you order iPhones. This is how all the TV shows do. Yeah, I like it. Building a firewall right here. So that's it for the show. We're going to be doing a broadcast special edition iPhone event. I wanted to call it the iPhone after party, but everyone yelled at me. I just did it though. So there. Fired. Big story today was the iPhone 5 that was much taller, thinner, pretty, but as we agree, kind of iterative. There was the iPod Touch, which is actually a very attractive device, however being a little overpriced. The iPod Nano, kind of a surprise. Not a watch. Still very good. Not a lot of excitement from Josh and Eli about the iPod Nano. Not a lot of excitement from anyone I've talked to. It's not a lot of surprises though, because we've heard so much about what's going on so far. So, iTunes 7 is next month. iTunes 11. iTunes 11, sorry. iTunes 10.7 is out today. Now. iTunes 11 next month. Correct. Rumor has it an event, but let's just assume that's not going to happen. This is the big thing. This is Apple's fall lineup. It's looking really good, but it's nothing too shocking, surprising, or revolutionary. So that's it. If you want to catch us on Twitter, I'm Onorosco, O-H-N-O-R-O-S-C-O. No E. Josh, you're welcome. I just said that. I forgot that already. I'm Pierce David. Pierce David. We've had on the show, in backwards order, Dan Seifert. His, what is his Twitter handle? DC Seifert. DC Seifert. We've had Nathan Ingram. Nate Ingram is his. We've also had Scott Lowe at the very beginning. God, it feels like we've done this forever. I think he's Scott Lowe. Scott Lowe is Scott Lowe. Brian Bishop is BC Bishop. Of course, you can catch the Verge Twitter handle at Twitter.com slash Verge. YouTube us, because we love YouTube. We love people following us on YouTube, including 90 Seconds on the Verge. I always have to pimp my own show. Every time. YouTube.com slash The Verge. You can catch us, of course, on www.TheVerge.com. I think I've thanked everybody. That's it. That's everybody. Thank you for watching. If you are still watching this, you are beautiful, sexy, wonderful people, and I love you so much. But I don't think anyone else is left. I can't top that. Yeah, really.ẹòng.....
 Hello, welcome to a very special Vergecast.
 I'm Ross Miller, senior editor for The Verge.
 Joining me on my left is senior reviews editor David Pearce.
 Hello.
 Just minutes ago, Apple wrapped up its annual iPhone event.
 Of course, some big announcements.
 New taller iPhone 5, no surprise there.
 A couple new iPods, Touch, Nano, Foo Fighters performed.
 Coming up on the show, we'll have a deeper dive into all of Apple's big announcements today
 with a little help from our Verge friends.
 And later on still, Josh and Neelai will be joining us live from San Francisco.
 They were at the event, they just finished this amazing live vlog.
 And they should have some first hands-on experience, they can talk to us about that.
 Anyway, before we get to all that, David, what did you think of the event today?
 It was an interesting event.
 So it's not that surprising, honestly.
 There was a lot of announcements.
 As you said, new iPhone, new iPods, new iTunes, but it was all, we kind of saw all this coming.
 The iPhone in particular is, you know, a lot of new stuff, a lot of kind of evolutionary changes,
 but nothing, you know, there's nothing to make me really like jump out of my seat with excitement
 and go camp out to buy this iPhone.
 Nothing too crazy.
 But let's go ahead and let's just run down those announcements real quick.
 So iPhone 5, what is special about it?
 What is new?
 Sure, so it's the biggest things are it's got a four inch display, so it's longer.
 It's about the same width as it was.
 And they made a big deal out of that being so you can hold it still in one hand,
 which actually kind of makes sense because you see some of the bigger phones and it's hard to hold them
 and use them in one hand.
 So it's just taller.
 It's lighter and thinner.
 It's faster.
 It has a new A6 processor.
 Actually, I want to start to talk about the thinness real quick.
 I know we're going to do this a lot more, but Josh, with that thing, is freaking out about how thin this thing is.
 Which I can't even imagine.
 Like I've never really thought the iPhone 4S was especially thick.
 I didn't really either.
 But I guess it must be a big deal.
 So it goes, yeah, so we had that new ports.
 We knew about that kind of coming up.
 The new lightning.
 I mean, come on.
 It is what it is.
 We'll get there.
 They've upgraded the camera a bit.
 They've upgraded some of the audio stuff.
 They're talking about HD voice and wide band audio, which nobody makes phone calls.
 But you know, I guess if you do, it's good.
 But an LTE, which is one of the big ones, on Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, which is just about what we expected.
 Plus a bunch of carriers around the world.
 And that's really it.
 That's the big thing.
 Lots of little improvements without being anything giant and kind of earth-shattering.
 Well, I'll disagree with that.
 I actually think the new screen is a big deal.
 We'll get to that in a second.
 A couple other big announcements.
 The iPod Touch has been refreshed with the new screen.
 iPod Nano, no longer watch friendly, but it's definitely a bigger improvement otherwise.
 It kind of looks like the iPod Nano of a few generations ago.
 It does, actually.
 When it was like longer and thinner.
 I really miss the watch.
 We'll get to that, though.
 iOS 6, talk about a little more.
 That's coming September 19th.
 The phone, September 21st.
 iPods, we'll talk about that.
 iTunes, it's got a little bit of a revamp.
 Anyway, we'll get to all that.
 Right now, I'm being told we have Brian Bishop and Scott Lowe on the air.
 Can we get them in here?
 Hey, guys.
 Brian, Scott.
 Hey, what's going on, guys?
 You guys look great.
 How y'all doing?
 Pretty good.
 We've been busy this morning.
 I can imagine.
 So what was your reaction about the event?
 What did you think?
 We were just talking about that a second ago.
 So much of what we saw today, at least on the iPhone side, we'd known about and expected
 that it was going to be coming.
 My sense was that there was this feeling of like, okay, we've seen this all before.
 It almost felt like Apple was rushing through things at a certain point.
 And it was just like flying through battery specs.
 We got to the iOS 6 stuff.
 We'd all seen that six months ago or seven months ago.
 The prevalence of and persistency of the leaks is taking a lot of the fun out of the iPhone,
 or at least the new one.
 I'm not super sold on the design.
 I like that it's longer, thinner, easier to hold.
 But I was hoping for something a little more, a big leap in terms of design.
 And it's more or less just sort of iterative.
 Let's talk about that screen.
 So it is now four inches.
 Same width, a little taller.
 16 by 9 aspect ratio.
 I think it's what, 1136 by 640.
 Is that right?
 And so we saw a couple new apps that actually show off the effects of it.
 But for the ones that don't, the older apps, they're doing black bars in the top and bottom.
 Is that right?
 Yes.
 Yeah, it's going to be letterbox.
 And if you're holding it sideways, it'll be on the right and left, which to me seems like
 it would be just ugly.
 I don't know.
 And when they went to the retina display in the iPad, they just had to kind of quadruple
 the pixels in an app.
 But this seems like you're redesigning stuff.
 What do you guys think, Brian and Scott?
 Is this dangerous and a bad idea?
 I mean, it's kind of a weird move because they've been so adamant about maintaining
 the aspect ratio across all of the previous devices.
 So to really shake it up, I mean, it doesn't really make it much more difficult for developers.
 It's just a little bit of a strange move.
 And I mean, it really is just a matter of scaling.
 But I mean, the letterboxing, it's going to be awkward for a few weeks until everyone
 gets updated.
 But I mean, the type of change that they're making, at least on the developer side, is
 not really difficult.
 So I think ultimately, it'll just sort of be like a momentary kind of sense of awkwardness.
 Yeah, and we saw that kind of transition when the iPad first came out.
 And the majority of the apps were just iPhone apps.
 And you had that two-time scaling where you just pop the button and it'd blow it up to
 this huge, ugly version.
 People were able to swing with that.
 So I think it's my impression is that it's going to be fairly easy for developers to
 go and upgrade their apps and take advantage of this stuff.
 Unless they have a lot of like hand-drawn graphics that they have to go back into.
 Well, and I am excited about the extra screen space rather than just simply a bigger one.
 I mean, like they said, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but just an extra row of icons,
 like that's kind of helpful.
 But then also on the gaming side, I mean, that makes extra space for the dual analogs
 for a lot of racing games and action games, as opposed to just the general swipe and pinch
 stuff.
 Yeah, and I think the one-handed thing is really important.
 I trade back and forth between an iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus.
 And the width of the Galaxy Nexus, you know, in other large Android phones is a real problem,
 I think, for a lot of people.
 You always have to end up going like two-handed or kind of have to awkwardly go like that.
 And there is an advantage in keeping that width but getting the extra screen real estate.
 That's great.
 Now, so you're saying you use the Galaxy Nexus, the S3 has that same issue.
 Are there any of you guys Note users?
 Like, what are your phones beyond the iPhone?
 Do you have any 4-inch screens that you're using very regularly?
 I mean, I've tinkered with the Note and the Note 2.
 And I've never thought anything ever needed that much space.
 And I do think that the longer vertical is much more critical because the idea of like
 almost having to like fully grip the edges of your phone and not be able to reach everything
 with your thumb, like that stuff, like it's been a total turnoff for me for most of like
 the recent smartphones outside of the iPhone.
 Yeah.
 And I'd agree.
 I mean, like I, there was a while there I was like 50-50-ing it between the Nexus and the iPhone.
 And it was, I mean, I would, and I love the extra, I love the bigger screen,
 but the usability and the holdability of it would all be so relieved.
 And I would like, you know, swap the SIM back into the iPhone.
 So I think that's a pretty compelling thing when people actually get to use it.
 And I feel like it'll be more, you know, it could be easier for them to use.
 They also get the benefit of having the bigger screen.
 So it doesn't feel like they're necessarily being left behind with Android.
 But at the same time, it's not a big new feature unto its own.
 It's still just, you know, it's a feature that's already out there with other phones
 that Apple is going to, it seems like there's kind of catching up to.
 So is everyone in agreement?
 We just like the taller screen.
 No one wanted a wider screen.
 What about you?
 Yeah.
 No, I think, I mean, so I have this giant LG phone with me and it makes me long for thinner phones.
 So I think they did the right thing in, if they were going to make it bigger,
 I think they did it the right way.
 So we actually, Josh, you know, our editor in chief, Josh Topolsky.
 Don't forget.
 Just wrote, just put up some pictures of the device on the verge.
 And he said, which I think is interesting, he said,
 it's incredibly sleek, exceptionally light.
 It feels almost too light in the hand.
 And actually, that's really interesting because people have said this about the previous
 generations of the iPod touch, where like it's almost too small and too thin and it doesn't feel
 substantial as you use it.
 And it's interesting that they've kind of gone to this.
 Can we go back to that back?
 Yeah, there we go.
 I love this.
 You know what I love about this?
 We saw this at IFA.
 We saw almost the exact same model fly whenever to that case maker in the Berlin state.
 Amazing, like how close it was.
 Everything about this thing was leaked.
 Yeah.
 Was there actually, was there a single surprise?
 I can't think of anything right now.
 Some of the technical stuff they talked about with the camera and the A6 and stuff was not
 necessarily, you know, we knew there was going to be an A6 processor.
 Sure.
 And we knew it would be a better camera.
 It's amazing how accurate the leaks turned out to be.
 So Brian and Scott, I'm curious, they made a big deal out of a bunch of the other hardware
 stuff, the HD voice and the battery life and the camera.
 What else jumped out at you guys as like big upgrades in this phone?
 I'm pretty psyched about the panorama feature.
 I know it's been longstanding for Android, you know, and I've used it quite a bit on
 Android, but I'm really hooked into the iOS ecosystem, like as far as like my personal
 phone is concerned and having that feature because I'm kind of a bit of like a smartphone
 photo nerd, you know, uploading pictures of my food to Instagram constantly.
 The idea of having like an integrated panorama feature and one that actually looks like it
 produces pretty solid results, you know, assuming like it kind of mimics that in real life.
 I'm pretty excited about that.
 Yeah.
 And there's other cool camera stuff.
 I think it takes photos 40% faster.
 They said you can snap photos while you're shooting video, which, you know, is again,
 not, you know, things that we've seen other phones do before, but have it on the iPhone
 will be really, really nice.
 The battery life was weird though, because like they kind of said it's even better.
 The only stat that they had, I think that actually was improved was the standby time,
 which was 225 hours versus 200 for the iPhone 4S.
 So, you know, 3G talk time was the same.
 So it actually didn't seem like how much of a bump it was there, you know, but with LTE,
 it looks like LTE, you know, life will be promising.
 So that was always a big question.
 I mean, there's a lot of like small usability improvements too.
 I mean, like putting the headphone jack on the bottom, like that, like that for me is
 pretty exciting.
 But I mean, overall, I would say it's not exactly like, you know, there wasn't anything
 that really jumped out at me.
 Like this is the must have feature.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 It's definitely, you know, an iterative improvement.
 And I think actually what's even more interesting is that, you know, with the new discounted
 prices for the 4 and the 4S, they have this really, really high end, you know, premium
 design that's available to people for free on both GSM and CDMA carriers, which they
 couldn't do before.
 Because before, if you wanted to get the free phone, it was a 3GS.
 It was like the old plastic version.
 It was AT&T only.
 And now they can kind of open that up on the low end to a lot more people, which I think
 there's a lot of, you know, room for growth there for them.
 Right.
 That looks awesome.
 Oh, sorry.
 Anyway, if you're just joining us, Apple just brought up an event.
 There's a new iPhone event.
 Josh and Eli will be on in a little bit to talk about their hands on with the event,
 which we're talking about.
 David's still here with me.
 I'm Ross.
 We've got Scott Lowe and Brian Bishop live, just talking about the iPhone hardware.
 Brian and Scott, let's talk about the new dock connector, so-called Lightning.
 So we've got Lightning.
 We've got Thunderbolt.
 It's just ridiculous.
 There's going to be clouds next.
 Listen, anything that makes me think of even rhapsody, Thunderbolt's Lightning.
 I'm so happy about this.
 There's so many tweets about it.
 Super excited about that.
 Really lame reason to.
 Actually, the best thing about it, though, is that it's reversible.
 It's smaller.
 It's 8-pin.
 And no matter which way you plug it in, it's going to work.
 Which sounds like a small thing, but it's actually like the greatest thing in the world.
 No, it's going to be because, I'm going to tell you, every time I get home at like 2
 in the morning and I'm very tired.
 From working hard.
 From working so hard.
 All day.
 To morning.
 4 AM, I have to stop working, as they say, last call for work.
 I can't get that thing in.
 And I'm super excited with the 8-pin connector.
 Just plug it in.
 It's good to go.
 Seriously, it's the dumbest little thing, but I'm so excited about it.
 But are you ready for the adapter, Ross?
 That's the problem.
 Oh, the 30-pin adapter.
 Oh, Jesus.
 The big, big, fatty adapter, yeah.
 So all of those cables you've accumulated over the years are totally useless now,
 unless you get the adapter.
 Look at that thing.
 It looks like the camera adapter.
 Like, you had the SD plug come in.
 Actually, I guess that thing's a lot bigger now, in retrospect.
 Well, and this is kind of what they did with the new MagSafe thing, where it seems like,
 you know, I get the reason for doing it.
 I kind of get the appeal, but it just seems like it's going to be such a hassle.
 With all the cables you have, you're going to have to find adapters or pay.
 I think the MagSafe one is like $10, and I'm sure this will be the same thing.
 But it's just going to be one of those things that just adds a little bit of hassle to just
 about everything that you do with your device for a while.
 Right.
 Do we have a price on the adapter?
 I don't believe so.
 I don't think that was announced.
 I don't think it was announced, no.
 No?
 All right.
 Well, obviously, I doubt it's coming with the phone.
 It would be full of silly things.
 It's always just the iPhone 5, the earbuds, which is the new earbuds now.
 The EarPods.
 EarPods, right.
 That is the worst name I've ever seen.
 But it's OK.
 Well, their previous earbuds were just completely awful.
 They had decent sound, but they just were so painful in the ear.
 Don't hate.
 Don't hate.
 Yeah.
 Apparently, Brian Bishop is a huge fan.
 So what is actually new about them?
 Sorry, go ahead.
 So it's like weird oblong design now.
 Right.
 I don't know how deep they went into it.
 Yeah, and they already had headphones more in that style before.
 So in-ear premium ones that I think were like $60 or $70.
 And these are more in that design style.
 Made a big point about how great they are.
 And there's a weird quote that said, making earphones that would fit
 in everybody's ears would be like trying to make a shoe that fit everyone.
 But that's what we tried to do anyway.
 And it's like, OK.
 So it's just a strange comment to make.
 But yeah, it's hard to know how that's going to matter until you see how it
 actually fits in your ear.
 These are notorious for falling out of people's ears.
 And they don't sound that good at all.
 So there's definitely room for improvement.
 There's definitely room for improvement there.
 And they're bundling them with the phone, the iPod Touch, and the new Nano.
 Right.
 So yeah, they're bundling with all the new generation iPods.
 I'm not sure that they're bundling with the Shuffle.
 Then again, they did not change the iPod Shuffle at all.
 That seemed to be locked in as it was, $49.
 The big new ones, though, of course, is the iPod Touch.
 We're not surprised about that.
 It's the same screen as the iPhone 5.
 So let's just jump, look into that one in a second.
 There's a lot of cool stuff there.
 I want to talk about the iPod Nano.
 And everyone we've talked, Dave and I were talking about this during the live blog.
 I'm so excited about the iPod Nano.
 But I don't think anyone else is going to be.
 But I think everyone is saying the same thing.
 It's so cute.
 We've got to see if we've got pictures up here.
 It's all colorful.
 It looks like a very small, I think you said it best, it looks like a very small knockoff
 iPhone.
 Yeah, I mean, it's odd.
 It has all these, it seems to be running some version of iOS, but it's kind of, it's skinned
 almost so that it has like six little icons on the screen.
 And then it has a circular icon in the home button, which is, you know, it's fine.
 It just doesn't really make any sense.
 I think all the circles are saying like, this is not iOS.
 Do not think it's iOS.
 Do not treat it like it.
 I guess so.
 It's knockoff iOS, official first party knockoff iOS.
 Right.
 I don't think you can call it knockoff in that case.
 Yeah, maybe not.
 You can do whatever you want.
 I'll call it knockoff.
 It's knockoff.
 Deal with it.
 It looked like, they look like old Mac OS X icons, right?
 Back when everything was like, you know, super like, you know, candy shaped and lickable
 was the term that was often bandied out, you know?
 I have forgotten that willingly.
 Now I put it back in your brain and you're going forever.
 Yeah, it actually looks like that.
 I did not love the interface.
 The, you know, the devices themselves, you know, colors is always great.
 But I actually liked the watch form factor myself.
 So yeah, like I think they lost a little bit there.
 I mean, maybe this could just be a really long and like on your wrist.
 Do we have the dimensions?
 Do we know how tall it is?
 I say like it's even close to being this tall.
 Sorry.
 It's pretty.
 But I mean, yeah, they are kind of alienating that, that kind of hacker market that kind
 of took the iPod touch and made it like a, you know, whole which wristwatch series, which
 they, you know, embraced for a little bit with the last update to the Nano, which had
 like the new watch faces and stuff.
 But it seems like they're just like, yeah, we're going to do something else now.
 Yeah, it's interesting.
 There was, there was like a whole cottage industry that popped up around it.
 There was like the TikTok, which was like the first huge Kickstarter success.
 And there were all these things and everybody, I know everyone on the Verge staff at one
 point or another was like, oh, I should get a watch for my iPod Nano.
 Just want to get that Ross.
 And it's just, it's total nerd cred.
 Like it's, it's a definite, it's a thing.
 It is, but it never interacted with the iPhone.
 It wasn't like the same problem.
 So like the Sony smartwatch or the other ones, the Om watch thing.
 Well, and that's funny.
 That was one of the things we were talking about before the event started was like, oh,
 I wonder if they're going to go full on with the watch and really make it a thing.
 And they went completely the opposite direction.
 I mean, Apple stores themselves, I think started selling like the watch bands, like they embraced
 it.
 And then now they're like, no, just kidding.
 This is not what we want to do with the iPod.
 Yeah.
 But at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised to see if like that becomes like another market
 category for them.
 Like maybe later this year or even like next year, like to, to kind of get into that on
 their own, either with the shuffle or like a whole new brand of iPod.
 I feel like that's a, you know, there's obviously a ton of interest in the market or from consumers
 in that market.
 Like hence why, you know, so many people have like sprung up and created companies specifically
 focused around iPod watches.
 So I feel like Apple eventually get into it at some point.
 Right.
 Real quick.
 We actually, we have a stat checker right here.
 The lightening to 30 pin adapter is $39.
 It ships October, not coming with the iPhone.
 It seems crazy expensive.
 It does.
 For all the accessories you're going to have to use.
 I'm sorry.
 Did you say $30?
 $39 for the adapter.
 $40.
 Technically.
 If you're just joining us, this is the Vergecast special edition.
 We'll have Josh and Eli coming on later to talk about their time with the iPhone.
 But for now we're, we've got Scott here.
 We've got Brian here and David in the studio.
 We're talking about the iPods right now.
 Yeah.
 So Scott, tell us about the iPod touch.
 You wrote the post on this for the site.
 So tell us what's new here.
 Well, just a moment of clarity.
 One of our editors just wrote in and said that it's actually $29.99, not $39.99.
 Oh, sorry.
 Someone is getting fired in the studio.
 I'm just going to say that right now.
 On the air.
 Michael Shane, you're fired.
 I love you, but you're fired.
 So the iPod touch.
 This is probably like next to the iPhone, the thing I'm most excited about.
 The iPod touch, the last two years has been kind of neglected by Apple.
 Like the last year they, you know, made subtle tweaks to, you know, the processor and that
 sort of thing, but they didn't really, or they did actually upgrade the processor.
 Whereas like now they're actually upgrading the processor, changing the design a little
 bit.
 So to recap, it's got the same four inch, like 16 by nine, like aspect ratio display
 as the iPhone five.
 They say it's the exact same display, which I'm a little skeptical of because that was
 not the case with the previous iterations.
 But you know, if they say it, maybe it's true.
 We'll have to find out from Josh and Eli later.
 But they're dropping in the A5 processor, which is, you know, a little behind now because,
 you know, the, you know, the iPad three is running the A5X whereas like, and the new
 phone is the A6.
 So it's still behind, which is a little weird in terms of the fragmentation of like for
 the gaming practices.
 But then it also comes in a variety of new colors, has like Bluetooth 4.0, upgraded cameras
 and now has a five megapixel rear facing camera.
 The inward facing FaceTime camera is now a 720P compatible.
 They didn't actually specify the megapixels there.
 Can we stop with this picture real quick?
 I want to stop you one second and talk about the biggest change of the iPod touch.
 This and I'm going to censor myself.
 This gosh darn loop.
 I was freaking out about this.
 They made a wrist strap for the iPod touch.
 Very new, you know, feature for the iPod touch is they made a hook so you could lanyard on
 it, which the lanyard that they're producing is called the loop.
 And I'm not sure if we have the price on that, but I think the pre-prided.
 It's included.
 So it's included.
 Yeah.
 But basically just make sure you don't drop your iPod touch.
 Yeah.
 How did Johnny Ives sign off on this?
 Like I get it from a utility perspective, especially as they're pushing the camera aspect
 of it, but don't you like push something out and then like a little hook thing comes out
 and then you flip it around?
 Yeah.
 I hadn't seen the photos on that, but yeah.
 Yeah.
 It just seems so, it seems very, very on Apple.
 I mean, it seems completely utilitarian, but it seems just very, very non sleek, non Apple.
 Well, historically they've always just let the case manufacturers fill that gap where
 it's like they build the hook into the case so you can have a lanyard there.
 But I guess, you know, they thought it was time to get into that market themselves.
 I wonder how this affects cases now too, because you have to have, I guess we don't know how
 it works, but I'm guessing you'll have to have a little extrusion so the loop can come
 out wide enough to put the wrist strap on.
 I'm sorry.
 I think the wrist strap is hilarious.
 Well, it's really interesting that they made such a big deal out of it because it's like
 they're almost selling this as a digital camera, which is kind of bizarre.
 They made a big deal about how good the camera is.
 They added the loop.
 It's a bunch of funky colors, which it was hilarious because the loop will match the
 color.
 But they're selling this.
 We've seen kind of this rash of Android cameras in the last few weeks.
 This seems like Apple being like, well, our camera is plenty good for our needs, we're
 pretty sure.
 And we just buy this.
 It has a way better camera than it used to and just use this and it'll be great.
 But the thing is with those Android cameras is they're a lot bigger megapixels, they do
 a lot more camera functions.
 This is still just like a five megapixel phone camera.
 And the price itself, it starts at $299.
 Is that right?
 Yep.
 That's huge.
 Yeah.
 Super expensive.
 And just they're selling, they're going to keep selling the old one.
 Is that right, Scott?
 They're going to keep selling the old iPod touch for $199.
 It'll be available for $199 for 16 gigs and that'll be the exact same as last year.
 And so at that point, it's like, I mean, like you're selling it for more than the entry
 level iPhone 5.
 Which is insane to me.
 I understand price matching and of course you don't have to do that to your contract,
 you don't give your kid a cell phone plan.
 I do get that.
 But like $300 for the new iPod touch is insane.
 And how are they going to explain the name difference?
 Is there a name difference or they're just going to say this is the expensive iPod touch.
 This is really nice and this is the not expensive one.
 It's you know, you've seen it before.
 Well and not to get ahead of ourselves, but this is the price that, or this is at or above
 the price a lot of people have been talking about for the iPad mini that we may or may
 not see in October.
 And it's like, where does that fit in now?
 Yeah, we definitely need to talk about that.
 This is a four inch device and granted there's a lot to like about it.
 The airplane mirroring is really cool.
 It really does seem like this is more than any iPhone before just an iPhone minus the
 phone.
 It's like the best of almost every feature you would want except the phone stuff.
 Right.
 And to its credit, oh sorry, go on.
 Yeah, I was going to say I'm actually pretty psyched on the design, which I think wasn't
 really properly emphasized.
 But like, you know, I hated the teardrop design of the last version.
 I hated that it was like a chrome metal back so it would get scratched and scuffed almost
 instantaneously like going with the brushed aluminum is great.
 The new like thinness, I'm assuming we'll have to wait until the hands on, but I'm sure
 that it's going to be like unbelievably lightweight and thin in your hand.
 So I think that's probably the most exciting thing.
 And then, of course, the colors for those who who want like a little more colorful flair
 on their product.
 Yeah.
 And Neil, I actually just put up some initial hands on impression photos from the from the
 floor of the show and said it is really, really thin.
 So yeah, and it looks it looks really, really tiny.
 The loop the loop knob does not look as bad as I'd imagined in person, actually.
 It looks looks pretty decent.
 We have a photo that can kind of cut to that.
 One thing while we're doing that, I want to double check to give some credit.
 That's two hundred ninety nine dollars for the 32 gig version, which would be for the
 iPhone five the same price.
 There's no 16 gig, so it is still price matching.
 It just doesn't have the lower storage tier.
 Sure.
 So there we go.
 Anyway, we need to move on.
 Brian Scott, thank you so much for cutting in.
 I know you guys are super busy, you know, making our site look really good while we
 sit here and just talk to a camera.
 So one last question before you guys go.
 What are you buying today?
 Are you buying anything?
 I'm going to wait myself.
 I'm going to wait till Friday and see how obnoxious AT&T is going to be with early upgrade
 pricing because I've been I'm still on AT&T and I've been debating whether to go to Verizon
 like here in San Francisco.
 You know, it's you know, AT&T has actually been much better than I expected, but I've
 had problems where I want to have, you know, Verizon coverage, especially with going to
 LTE.
 And so I'm going to wait till I get a bit more information on that pricing.
 But depending on how crazy it is, I'm probably going to be upgrading just because I want
 the LTE of it all.
 Yeah.
 I'm not going to be touching the same boat.
 I'm running an iPhone 4.
 It's slow as hell with iOS 5 and I need to get something faster.
 So I'm all in.
 Awesome.
 Thanks, guys.
 Thank you, guys.
 Anyway, so that was Scott and Brian.
 If you're just joining us, this is the iPhone 5 Verge special edition coming up.
 Josh and Neelai are still wrapping up their hands-ons and then hopefully we can get them
 in for at least a couple of minutes to talk about what they've done.
 Real quick, I want to talk about the iPhone pricing.
 So iPhone 5 is now, of course, the same tier.
 It's the $200.
 The iPhone 4S is now the $100 starting price.
 iPhone 4, naturally, down to free.
 And iPhone 3GS is gone.
 That design is gone.
 There's no more round, curved iPhone.
 No more plastic.
 No more plastic.
 Sad.
 Are you sad?
 I guess it's sad.
 I'm not really sad.
 I do not like the design of it.
 I didn't really either.
 No, and what I think is interesting is it seems like the 4 was a pretty big step up from
 the 3GS, both in just the industrial design of it and its performance was a big leap in
 a way that the 3 to the 3GS really wasn't to me.
 My dad is always my barometer for what's happening in the tech industry because if he cares,
 it's huge.
 Are we really at the point where we're just going to talk about family members?
 We're just going to talk about my dad.
 I'm not.
 I'm just going to let you do this.
 Let's talk about my dad.
 No, no.
 We're just going to do it.
 It's going to be fine.
 No, so and my dad was like, he went back and looked and he was like, well, this iPhone
 3GS doesn't seem very good, but I hear the 4 is great.
 Should I just maybe wait for that and it'll be cheap?
 And I was like, dad, that's a great idea.
 And it seems like at this point, the iPhone 4 free on contract seems like a pretty fantastic
 deal, kind of in a way that the 3GS was like a pretty good phone.
 But this, as I mentioned, was like a big leap up from that.
 And it is like it's still a good phone.
 It's two years old now, but it's still a good phone.
 The last big leap in terms of design was the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4.
 They got rid of it, they did the flat plane, which we saw actually in the prototypes.
 I wish to talk about Brian when he was here, but Apple for Samsung, they brought a bunch
 of prototypes out.
 And we saw, honestly, that Johnny Ive Sony prototype that he kind of did, that looks
 just like the iPhone 4.
 It's clearly what they've always wanted to do.
 It's there now, and apparently they do not want to let it go.
 It doesn't seem like, they're just going to keep making it longer.
 We'll have like a 19 inch phone that's about like this.
 Guys, we think 21 by 9 is the future.
 Seven rows of apps.
 This really is, we are reinventing reinvention again.
 You laugh, but like that could happen.
 That phrase could happen, honestly.
 This is the tallestest iPhone ever, again.
 So we're trying to get Nathan Ingram on right now.
 In the meantime, let's go ahead and just talk about a little bit of the iPhone numbers.
 At the beginning of every Apple event, Tim Cook gets on stage, rattles off a huge list
 of impressive numbers.
 Let's go through a few of them.
 First in terms of stores, they're now in 13 countries.
 They just hit their 13th.
 83 million visitors last year.
 That doesn't mean much to me, but it's obviously very impressive.
 It's really interesting how, I just don't have any context.
 And they continue to make such a big deal out of their retail thing as one of their
 biggest advantages.
 So it sounds like we have Nathan on the line.
 Good.
 Yeah, Nathan's online.
 Who knows much more about this than we do.
 We love numbers.
 Also coming up, Josh and Eli will be joining us in a little bit.
 First though, news manager Nathan Ingram coming from Boston.
 How you doing, man?
 Hey, David.
 Hey, Ross.
 How's it going?
 Looking really good.
 What did you think of the event?
 What was your reaction?
 My overall impressions was it was what we expected, and I was hoping for more, but not
 surprised that we didn't get more.
 So what were you hoping for?
 What would have kind of blown your mind?
 Well, so you guys were just talking about the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4, and I agree
 with your comments.
 The iPhone 4 was probably my favorite iPhone that I ever bought.
 It was, I thought, really exciting when it came out.
 Really nice new design, great new features.
 The 4S was a less enticing upgrade, but obviously it did really well.
 We'll talk about the numbers in a second.
 And then the 5, it's just so expected, and I really think the leaks is just what killed
 it for me.
 Knowing everything about what was coming just kind of sucked all the fun out of it for me.
 I honestly, once you play with it, you feel how much taller it is, how much thinner.
 Don't you think you're going to enjoy it again?
 Is it really just like that kind of new sense in you thinking, oh god, there's no surprise,
 I don't have that kind of impression?
 But once you play with it, do you think it's going to change your opinion?
 Yeah, I think that's a good point, actually.
 Because even in the live blog, you could see Josh and Eli were like, yeah, this is the
 same old, same old.
 And then Josh gets his hands on it, and all of a sudden is talking about how amazing it
 feels in the hand.
 Yeah, it's the kind of hardware where you really need to see it and hold it before you
 can pass judgment on it.
 And I think that internally it's going to run great.
 And the only downside for me really is I'm just getting a little tired of iOS at this
 point.
 It hasn't changed significantly in a couple of years, and I'm starting to look at Android
 and Windows Phone and be jealous of some of those new features personally.
 All right, well, fair enough.
 And we'll get to iOS in a little bit.
 But you are our resident statistician.
 You are the most comfortable with numbers in anyone on the site.
 So I'm giving you the very unenviable job of kind of rattling off some of the sales
 statistics and we're going to put some of this in context.
 Tim Cook came out, he talked, 17 million iPads sold last quarter.
 More iPads than any PC manufacturer sold in the entire lineup.
 That was Cook's way of phrasing it.
 Yes.
 Which is insane.
 I think we've covered that on the site before a few times.
 There's some data that shows, yeah, when you include iPads in their sales figures, then
 Apple's the biggest manufacturer of computers.
 Of course, if you take it away, they sell about 4 million a quarter, which is not nearly
 as impressive.
 But obviously the market's moving this tabular direction, so they got a really good head
 start on everybody, I think.
 And we'll see how long we can continue to press that advantage.
 Right.
 But into its credit, one of the other stats that Apple mentioned was it is number one
 in the notebook market and has been for the last three months.
 And that's obviously not including iPads.
 It doesn't include desktops, but clearly the future's heading toward more ubiquity of notebooks
 and after that, more to tablets and I guess keyboard accessories.
 What I wonder, and I'm not sure he mentioned this, correct me if I'm wrong, Nathan, but
 I wonder how much the Retina MacBook Pro factored into that.
 Because the other ones were kind of small upgrades, but people got really excited about
 the Retina MacBook Pro.
 Yeah.
 He didn't.
 He didn't say much about the Retina MacBook Pro, but he said that the new MacBook Pro
 and the new MacBook Air helped Apple take the number one position in the US laptop market
 share over the last three months, 27%, which is far, far higher than most market share
 numbers you hear about Apple.
 But if you narrow it down in the US in laptops, which let's be honest, that's the market
 they care about, they're doing very well, I would say.
 He didn't say how much that helped.
 And I guess the question on my mind is with a laptop, it starts at $2,199, I believe.
 I find it hard to imagine that it made that significant of a difference, costing that
 much.
 But I guess certainly it's kind of in a class by itself.
 But it's just such a premium product that I don't know, until they tell us how well
 it's selling, I don't think we can make any assumptions that it's driving this increase
 on its own.
 I think that it's got to be the whole picture.
 The new MacBook Airs aren't any...
 Nathan, real quick, just remind me, is it the number one in terms of unit sales or in
 terms of dollar figures?
 I mean, that's something Apple used to do, is just say, we make the most, we sell the
 most money dollar for dollar than any laptop maker.
 Is it unit sales now too?
 Are they just pushing that many more laptops than anyone else?
 They didn't specify.
 They just said that we're number one as far as I recall.
 I'm looking at the images from the Live blog and trying to look back and see.
 But I think he just said that number one in market share.
 My assumption is that it's units, but that could be a dangerous assumption to make considering
 the way Apple likes to sort of massage the numbers to put them in the best possible light.
 So one thing we did get was we got considerably more narrowed down numbers about the iPad,
 right?
 Can you walk us through a couple of the stats that he gave for those?
 Because they're pretty insane.
 Sorry, on the iPad?
 Yeah.
 And the tablet market share he was talking about, I think I have it here.
 It was 68% tablet market share was the one that I thought was really interesting.
 I wonder who that's according to.
 Because if it's according to IDC, that's 68% for the iPad, 22% for the Kindle according
 to Amazon, which leaves nothing for Android tablet.
 I mean for the rest of Android tablet market.
 For every Android tablet ever.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 And that's up.
 I believe they said it was up from 62% last year ago when they had this event and shared
 that information.
 Which is not only impressive, but it's also a growing market.
 I mean because it's growing not just from iPads, it's growing from the Android.
 Windows 8, I don't know how they're going to classify that, but Windows 8 tablets are
 going to be a huge thing in just a few months time.
 Yeah.
 What's going to be really interesting to see is what these numbers are like next year.
 If they can keep at this number or even higher a year from now as Windows 8 comes, that'll
 be really impressive.
 And of course the 7.85 inch elephant in the room that wasn't in the room.
 My change is we'll talk about that again next month of course.
 What else do we have?
 We had, this is-
 The web share I think is, the web traffic share is a key stat.
 It says that iPad accounts for 91% of all web traffic from tablets.
 And to quote Tim Cook, I don't know what these other tablets are doing unless they're in
 warehouses or on store shelves or maybe in someone's drawer.
 I think that's going to make a direct response to Amazon last week, right?
 I just don't know what that even like, how are you tracking that?
 What does that mean?
 I mean, that's something like, who's going to prove it?
 And where is that coming from?
 True.
 My guess is it's coming from-
 Go ahead.
 Go ahead, David.
 No, no, no, this is you.
 I'm just saying my guess is it's like net applications that measures just browser usage
 and breaks it out by OS.
 And I guess they may have some way of breaking it down by tablets.
 It's definitely, it's kind of a crazy claim to make.
 We'll do a little investigation to see how legit it is.
 But again, it wouldn't surprise me given the numbers we've seen in terms of iPad sales
 compared to the rest of the tablet market.
 Nathan, let me hold you up for one second, I believe.
 Nevermind.
 Let's, sorry, cancel that undo, command Z.
 So what I think is really interesting about the browsing thing, and you just alluded to
 this, Nathan, was that you and I, Ross, were at the Amazon event last week.
 And one of the things Jeff Bezos said was we want people not just, like we make money
 when people buy our tablets.
 No, wait.
 We don't want people to make money when they buy our tablets, but when they use our tablets.
 And then Tim Cook comes out and says, well, actually it turns out people use our tablets
 a lot more than they use anybody else's tablets.
 Right.
 I mean, well, let's be clear, and we just had the Kindle Fire HD review go up last night,
 perfect timing as it may be.
 Yeah, I mean, the Kindle Fire HD is just a glorified store.
 I mean, there's no other menu than the store and then the already purchased part.
 Whereas the iPad, I do feel like, is more end user friendly.
 You buy it, of course you're paying a premium for it, but you have a sense of ownership,
 both what you're seeing, the apps.
 What was the other thing?
 I'm looking at all these.
 This I don't believe, but I want to try it.
 This is one of the stats.
 90% of the apps in the 700,000 that are downloaded every month, oh no, what is it?
 Sorry.
 So there are now 700,000 apps in the app store.
 Yes.
 That was one of the things he announced.
 And he said 90% of those apps are downloaded every month.
 Right.
 Which is crazy, because we've talked forever about how one of the biggest complaints is
 that there are all these apps, it's impossible to find the good ones.
 Only a few rise to the top and the rest just kind of toil in obscurity.
 But he's saying all these apps actually get downloaded.
 People use these apps, except for 70,000, which, sorry.
 But the other, what is it, 630,000, those apps are being downloaded and used.
 Which is pretty huge.
 But it could even be one download every month.
 The developer wants to-
 Just keep buying new devices and downloading them.
 And you could just say it's a passion developer just downloading one every time.
 I like it.
 I don't know.
 But no, that's an incredibly impressive figure.
 If true, it's kind of one of those weird ones.
 It was 700,000 apps total, 250,000 optimized for the iPad.
 Now that's interesting, because that's something that Android tablets have very long suffered
 and struggled to kind of catch up to.
 I don't even know, I couldn't even tell you which ones are tablet tablets.
 Sorry, Nathan, go.
 I was just going to say, if you spent any time with the Nexus 7, that's probably its
 major Achilles heel.
 It's a great piece of hardware, but you start digging through the market and I feel like
 the options just tail off pretty fast in terms of compelling software.
 Mark Jock said the same thing about the Kindle Fire in the Amazon app store in his review
 last night.
 Now before we get into the last-
 Oh, sorry, your say?
 I'll just say one more note on the app situation is that they say that the average customer
 has downloaded 100 apps or more, or around 100 apps.
 So that seems pretty wild to me too, but not entirely unsurprising.
 I imagine you get one of these devices, try everything that you can get your hands on
 and then realize you don't actually need 100 or 200 apps on your phone or tablet.
 You kind of scale back to the 20 or 30 or even less that you might actually use.
 Right.
 Now I want to go ahead and just do one more statistic and then we're going to cut to a
 video footage.
 But before that, 400 million iOS devices have been sold, 350 million iPods.
 Obviously, it was the iPod touch overlap, so I don't want to compare the figures.
 I will say though, 400 million iOS devices, all of them downloading about 100 apps or
 more is insane.
 It's a lot of apps.
 Yeah.
 It definitely hits that billion mark we heard at WWDC.
 Pretty easily.
 Many billions.
 What about with that release though?
 It's interesting because I believe just last night Google announced that it had activated
 500 million Android devices.
 That's right.
 A pretty significant advantage for Android right now in terms of the mobile device market
 share of accounting phones, tablets, et cetera devices.
 That's pretty big.
 Right.
 It's 400 million portals.
 Actually, I don't think they talked about number of iTunes accounts this time, did they?
 I don't believe so, no.
 We heard press figures at WWDC though.
 So that's basically it for the numbers.
 If you're just joining us, Vergecast special edition.
 We're talking about the iPhone, of course.
 There's really nothing else to talk about today.
 Josh and Eli will be joining us in a little bit.
 Let me check on one thing.
 Do we have a first look video I'm hearing?
 Is that good to go?
 Yes.
 Okay.
 So we have a first look video we want to show you.
 We want to see it for ourselves in fact.
 I do.
 I'd really like to.
 So let's just stand here looking stupid until they roll it.
 That was quick.
 All right.
 Is that Josh's hand right there?
 It's a nice looking hand.
 It's very handsome.
 Clearly looking at the iPhone 5 right here.
 Looks basically just like the leaks we saw.
 It's very thin.
 The back actually looks better than I thought.
 The difference between the plastic, what's the brush aluminum?
 Yeah, I was all prepared to hate the back with the two-tone colors, but that actually
 looks really nice.
 The black, it's odd.
 The black here looks way better than the white to me.
 The black is super sleek.
 And yeah, no, it looks good.
 The only thing that bothers me is I wanted to get the white this time.
 I've had black iPhones every single time.
 I was like, I'm going to get the white this time.
 I say that the black one looks really good this time.
 It does.
 And I was talking to Craig, our producer, during the live blog, and he was saying that
 the letterboxing in the apps is actually going to be improved if you use the black one because
 it won't seem like there's such a giant weird gap around it.
 The bezel just kind of flows into the screen.
 And Nathan, I want to talk to you about iOS 6, but before we get to that point, I just
 want to go ahead and just ask our favorite Indra question before we transition.
 Are you going to buy an iPhone 5?
 Is that on the horizon for you?
 I will not be buying an iPhone 5 in all likelihood.
 Why not?
 Primarily because I'm still under contract, and it just doesn't quite seem like big enough
 of an upgrade for me to pay whatever ridiculous amount of money it's going to cost or pay
 an early termination fee, switch carriers, et cetera.
 I have a 4S person right now, which will get iOS 6.
 It will get the majority of the new features.
 And that's the thing with the new iPhone, the iPhone 5, there is not that much from
 a hardware perspective.
 Yeah, it's going to be a little faster with the A6.
 The screen will obviously be a big improvement, but I've never been one for a huge screen
 myself, and not that this is huge.
 I think it's probably going to be quite nice, but I just want to put that kind of a financial
 investment towards it, I would say.
 And I'm also very curious to see what Google has planned for the Nexus line of phones this
 fall.
 Right.
 And we'll get more into the competition later.
 We'll have Dan Seefer coming on.
 Actually, real brief, let's just talk about some of the key iOS 6 stuff we saw.
 iOS 6 is coming September 19th to, obviously, the iPhone 5 a few days later.
 4S, 4, most recent iPod touches, last two iPads, not the first one, and all the way
 down to the iPhone 3GS.
 Yeah, it's interesting.
 They're not going to sell it anymore, but if you have it, they're going to give you
 iOS 6.
 I'm actually very impressed by that.
 Yeah, I kind of like it.
 How far back did the iPhone iOS 5 go?
 Was it also just to the 3GS?
 I feel like the iPhone 3G did not get 5.
 3G did not get 5.
 Yeah, I think that's right.
 I'm impressed.
 I feel like the 3GS is still being supported, and I kind of assumed that was out also.
 Well, it is, in fairness, getting kind of a limited version of iOS 6, but still, I'm
 all for being updated given how many Android phones I've had that didn't get anything.
 I'll take what I can get.
 Right.
 Anyway, if you're just joining us real quick, this is the Firstcast Special Edition.
 I'm Ross Milne.
 This is David Pierce.
 Joining us on the phone is Nathan Ingram, news manager from Boston.
 We're here talking about Apple's biggest announcements coming soon, hopefully coming up very soon,
 will be Josh and Eli.
 They're here to talk about the iPhone 5.
 They've had hands-on.
 We've just seen video of it.
 Looks very impressive.
 For now, though, let's talk iOS 6.
 Some of the big announcements, I mean, they're not talking about as much.
 There's a new Maps program, but what they mean to say is there's no more Google Maps.
 That's gone.
 Goodbye.
 In fairness, they keep showing the Maps, and Nathan, I'm curious what you think, but I think
 the Maps look pretty good.
 The lack of transportation stuff kills me.
 As New Yorkers, none of us have cars, so all we use is subways and trains and stuff, and
 not having that in Maps is going to kill me.
 Right.
 Nathan, we have to let you go in a minute, but tell me what you think about iOS 6 and
 Maps and stuff like that.
 What are you excited for?
 I'll talk real quick.
 I think that you have a really good point about the public transportation options.
 This thing is going to be a real downer for a lot of people.
 On the other hand, the lack of built-in free turn-by-turn navigation is going to be a major
 upgrade for, I don't want to say more people, but basically anyone with a car is going to
 really enjoy this feature.
 I would hope that Apple sees it in them to put some navigation in soon.
 Sorry, I lost my train of thought there.
 To put public transportation navigation in soon, because, yeah, as you said, lots of
 people in New York, LA, et cetera, Boston, we use all public transportation, and it would
 be super useful to have.
 That said, I think they just had to make a break and build their own program at this
 point because the Google Maps that was on iOS 5 and previous was just not all that good
 anymore.
 It hadn't been updated significantly in a long time.
 What's really going to be interesting is to see if and when Google brings a full Google
 Maps app to the App Store, I think.
 Right.
 All right, Nathan, thank you very much.
 That was Nathan Ingram.
 Coming up soon, Dan Seifer will kind of break out some of the carrier stuff, the competition.
 We'll talk about LTE.
 He's got much better knowledge of that than I do.
 I'm just a talking head right now.
 That's fair.
 That's all the energy I have for.
 While we wait, though, I want to talk about the other thing that Google kind of dropped
 for iOS 6.
 That would be, of course, YouTube.
 YouTube is gone.
 Good riddance.
 I think it was an ugly-looking app.
 The icon was terrible.
 It really messed up with the way I organize the icons.
 What we do have, though, yesterday, they released YouTube for iPhone and iPod Touch.
 Have you had a chance to use it yet?
 Only briefly.
 I, to be honest, don't use YouTube that much on my phone.
 That's a good picture.
 I'll click through it.
 That is a handsome man right there.
 The cut to Nathan is a very handsome man.
 Exactly.
 No, but I think, it seems to me that it's basically just a wrapper.
 It feels like the Gmail app on iOS, where it's nice and it's relatively feature-complete.
 It does all the stuff I want it to do, but it doesn't feel integrated or snappy or fast.
 It's interesting you say it's a wrapper, because it's actually native code this time.
 It's no longer web code.
 It felt faster to me than, obviously, the YouTube one.
 It looks just like the Android version.
 It's a very similar design aesthetic to the Google Plus app.
 Yes, which is great.
 It's great.
 Yeah.
 The Google Plus app, I think, is the one sign to me that Google really can make great apps
 for iOS.
 Because Gmail, I use Gmail every day, and I hate it every day.
 It's just not a good app on iOS, but it's much better for some of the other apps.
 Google Plus is great, and I think Google Maps is going to be great, because Google is going
 to invest pretty heavily in it.
 But YouTube is, I'm hoping that this means they continue to improve it, and that it's
 just the beginning.
 The one concern I have, of course, is now that the YouTube app is gone, and it's a standalone
 app, if you click on a YouTube link, it's going to stay in Safari.
 It's not going to jump you to anything else.
 That's just the way things work.
 Google has started to find its way around it.
 That's true.
 We'll see how that goes.
 For now, that's not going to be the case.
 Of course, while we're talking about it, shameless plug, youtube.com slash the verge.
 You can catch all these episodes.
 I'm sorry.
 I just have to do that.
 That's just terrible.
 You're just a boss being handsome.
 That's like 60 percent of what's up there.
 Shameless plug, what am I going to do about this?
 You want to go there?
 You want to check out 90 seconds?
 Sorry.
 Anyway, so we now apparently have Dan Seifer up.
 Dan, are you here?
 I'm here.
 I love it.
 All right, let's see.
 You're looking good, too.
 We have a lot of really nice looking people in this light.
 You do.
 I like that lamp in the background, too, Dan.
 Yeah.
 What lamp is that?
 Can I have that?
 Yeah.
 That's my crazy cool three-headed lamp that I use to take some photos with because it's
 bright and it works.
 And you won't answer that.
 I cannot have it apparently.
 Dan, I want to talk to you about a bunch of technical stuff, carriers, competition, whatnot.
 First, let's finish up the iOS 6 stuff.
 First off, what was your impression of the event and specifically of the iOS 6 presentation?
 The event as a whole, I got to be honest, it was pretty boring.
 And that exciting, we kind of knew everything that was coming and there was literally no
 surprises.
 So, that was a bit of a disappointment.
 As far as iOS 6, again, it's kind of the same thing.
 There wasn't a single new iOS 6 feature announced during this event.
 So, it's all the same stuff that we had seen from June at WWDC.
 And it looks like we're going to get a lot of cool new features.
 But essentially, it's the same platform that we've been using since 2007 with minor iterative
 adjustments and enhancements every year.
 I know you guys were just talking about the Maps app there and that looks cool and all.
 It will be interesting to see how that actually is on the final product.
 I know I've heard a lot of reports that the beta is not the hot.
 So, it will be interesting to see what it's like and if it's actually able to replace
 the Google Maps that the iPhone has been using for so many years.
 Right.
 The videos we've seen, Apple public release of the beta, the flyover stuff, it looks impressive.
 But of course, once we get to it, I'm kind of curious how well it works in practice.
 Yeah.
 It's going to be a flyover because it's a lot of detail loading very fast.
 I'm curious what it does to the battery life.
 Termin return is interesting.
 I want to know more about the public transportation, how they're going to do that.
 Again, we're talking as city dwellers.
 Right.
 I kind of want to know what train to go to.
 Yeah.
 That was something Google Maps did really well.
 On the stand alone, I'm looking forward to it.
 Other things, Siri enhancements.
 Those actually were very impressive to me, the stuff they've added onto it.
 It seems like a big improvement from before.
 I hope so.
 I don't know.
 Sure.
 Yeah.
 I think it's a big improvement, but it's all stuff you'd kind of expect.
 There's no big surprises.
 It's like, well, what else could I think of that I could use this for?
 Looking up sports scores.
 That makes sense.
 Or looking up movie times.
 That makes sense as well.
 I mean, I don't think any of it really knocked me off my feet or knocked me out of my socks,
 however that expression goes.
 Right.
 Let's go back.
 What were the tentpole iOS features?
 Number one, of course, was just the original.
 Two, they're out of the App Store.
 Three or four, one was multitasking.
 What was notifications, I think?
 I think that's right.
 Something like that.
 I get so lost.
 There's so many of those.
 Three was kind of boring.
 Dan, do you know?
 Off the end, you're the expert.
 Yeah.
 I think multitasking was one, notifications, that came in iOS 5, and multitasking was iOS
 4.
 The App Store came.
 It wasn't quite, I don't think it was called iOS 2 back then.
 No, sorry, it was iPhone OS.
 They didn't change that until 4.
 Yeah.
 Right.
 And then the iOS 3, I honestly can't remember which one it was added at that time, to be
 honest with you.
 But for iOS 6, notifications was a big deal, that was a seriously broken thing on the platform
 prior to that.
 And iOS 5 really, it gave us a very familiar notification system, but it works pretty well.
 And then same thing with iOS 4, multitasking was very broken beforehand, and it kind of
 gave us a usable multitasking system.
 I don't think iOS 6 is giving us anything of that caliber.
 It's not giving us a huge change in the way that we would use the device or have to use
 the devices.
 Right.
 And there are two, if there's any kind of tentpole feature in iOS 6, there's going to
 be two.
 One, the new maps, which is the first time they took a feature away.
 Sorry, it's a start over.
 It's like Final Cut X.
 Sure.
 It's started over.
 And then of course also Passbook, which we saw at Passbook, it had Delta tickets, Starbucks
 gift cards, all that stuff.
 It hinted so strong.
 We all thought this is the precursor to NFC, which was a feature we did not see happen
 today.
 Right.
 Mobile wallets, mobile payment systems are not getting a huge boost by today's announcement.
 Some rumors about it, some not.
 It was actually a very small thing.
 Dan, what is your take on that?
 Go ahead.
 I'm sorry.
 About Passbook?
 Yeah, Passbook and NFC.
 I really didn't expect to see NFC today.
 Given all the information that we had before the event, there was no evidence of NFC and
 actually a lot of evidence against NFC because of the actual design of the phone with the
 metal back.
 I really think it would have been a great addition to Passbook and eventually I still
 hold out hope that Passbook will be integrated with NFC at some point.
 And I think it will take Apple to really kind of upend the mobile payments market as it
 is today to give it traction with your average everyday user.
 Whether Apple is going to do that through NFC or another means, it's still yet to be
 seen.
 Right.
 And to be fair, I still like the QR and the scanning of Passbook.
 I think it's going to be good.
 It's Apple's modus operandi.
 We're not going to do it until we can do it perfectly.
 That's why multitasking took so long.
 That's why notifications took longer than maybe it should have.
 Copy and paste, definitely a late addition feature.
 And they didn't even do it that well.
 I like copy and paste.
 That was iOS 3.
 Copy and paste.
 That was iOS 3.
 That's the flagship feature of iOS 3.
 Good call.
 Finally, we can do what Windows Mobile does.
 There you go.
 Well, that was a low blow.
 But anyway, so NFC was not announced.
 There was a little bit of talk, not a lot, because we weren't expecting it.
 It's a shame.
 I think Passbook looks great.
 It's definitely going to be NFC of the future if Apple decides to do that.
 All that means is Google Wallet and all the other mobile payment systems are still going
 to keep fighting for this kind of little bit of relevance.
 And a lot of that's going to have to do with carriers.
 Really bad transition.
 Let's talk carriers.
 At least in the US market, the iPhone 5 is coming to LTE with Sprint, with Verizon, with
 AT&T.
 Sucks to be on Sprint because they don't really exist yet.
 There's no LTE anywhere.
 There's 100 major markets coming in the coming months, is what Sprint said yesterday, including
 Boston, New York, Los Angeles, maybe Atlanta, San Francisco.
 Dan, can you catch us up a little bit on the carrier report throughout the world?
 Yeah.
 So Apple announced that by December, the iPhone 5 is going to be on 240 carriers across the
 world.
 So it's going to be really, really worldwide.
 It's going to be supporting LTE in a handful of carriers in a handful of markets because
 LTE is still not available in many parts of the world.
 So where it's not available on LTE, the other carriers will use their fallback technologies.
 So it's HSPA plus or CDMA or whatever it happens to be.
 But what's really like the interesting story here is that the iPhone 5, because of its
 LTE support, is now going to be split into different models for different carriers.
 When we saw with the iPhone 4S, when that was launched, Apple was able to support both
 CDMA and GSM carriers with one device.
 So the same phone that you bought on AT&T was the same model that you got at Verizon,
 is the same model that you got at Sprint.
 But with the iPhone 5, it's actually going to be different models.
 There's a separate AT&T model, there's a separate Verizon Sprint model, and then there's
 an even third global model that will be for various markets.
 I think that one's going to be available in the UK and Australia and Japan and a couple
 other places.
 So because of the way LTE is structured in the various areas of the world, one man's
 LTE is not compatible with another man's LTE.
 So if you want to buy an iPhone 5 on AT&T and perhaps take it over to Verizon one day,
 that's not going to be possible and vice versa.
 And if you buy an iPhone on AT&T and you want to roam on an LTE network, say, in the UK
 or Germany, that's not going to work either.
 So it makes it a little bit of a tricky situation depending on what your needs are and how you're
 going to end up going with the model that you buy.
 All right.
 Now explain to me like on 5, because in most times that's actually a pretty accurate way
 of explaining things to me.
 What is the best US iPhone to get if I'm going to be traveling internationally and I want
 to use LTE in other markets?
 So Apple didn't, I don't think they specifically said which model will be sold unlocked.
 I think it's going to be the GSM model that will be available worldwide, will be available
 unlocked in the US, but I'm not 100% sure on that yet.
 The unlocked one is not going to work on AT&T's LTE.
 Is that the case?
 That's correct.
 Yeah.
 The GSM model that's available worldwide is not going to work on AT&T's LTE.
 If you're buying a carrier locked version, I would say that the Verizon or Sprint model
 is probably your best bet at this point because it supports the same LTE bands as the worldwide
 model in addition to having support for Verizon and Sprint's network.
 So if you're a global roamer and you want to use LTE in the most places in the world,
 your best bet right now, if I was to call it today, would be Verizon's model.
 So is that just a purely technical thing?
 Like you said, one man's LTE is not another's.
 Is that something Apple could have circumvented and made maybe a strategic decision not to?
 Or is that just kind of how the world works right now and who knows if we'll ever fix
 it?
 Well, it's kind of based on a technical limitation at this point.
 For example, the Verizon model of the iPhone 5 supports LTE on five different bands.
 None of those five bands are compatible with AT&T's network of LTE.
 So there's only so many bands that a phone can support.
 There's only so many different frequencies that its radio can handle at any given time.
 So you kind of run out of slots to put these various support frequencies in.
 And right now, as it stands, there's no technical solution for that.
 In the future, will there be at some point?
 Perhaps.
 Because the way that AT&T is, or excuse me, LTE has been built out across the various
 networks, it's going to be very difficult to make them cross compatible.
 Well, that sucks.
 But thanks for the knowledge.
 Dan Siefer, stay on the line just one second.
 Do a quick teaser thing.
 If you're just joining us, this is the Vergecast live post-Apple analysis.
 We've been talking about the iPhone 5, iPod Touch, Nano.
 Josh and Eli will be on in a little bit to kind of talk about their first-hand experience.
 We promise they're doing their editorial thing, being important superstars, helping the site.
 They'll join us talking heads in a little bit.
 A couple quick updates on the stories.
 iTunes 10.7 is now available.
 iTunes 11, obviously, coming in late March or October.
 Correct.
 iOS 6 GM is released.
 If you have that, you're probably under an NDA, so don't talk about it.
 And also, we now have hands-on footage, or at least hands-on pictures, rather.
 We have an iPod Nano hands-on pictures.
 Can we jump to those, take a look at those real quick?
 Probably not.
 While we're getting that ready, I just want to say, this is unbelievably small.
 It looks much bigger on the screen, but it's a little...
 That right there.
 It's a two-and-a-half-inch display, and it's tiny.
 Again, it goes back to, this looks a ton like the old iPod Nano, but the one before had
 the little click wheel at the bottom, and this is just a single button and touchscreen.
 I think Josh described it in the live blog as, it kind of looks like a tiny phone, and
 it really does.
 This looks like the little phone from Zoolander, where he's calling aliens.
 Yeah, is this thing as tall as the iPod Touch is wide?
 Is that about right?
 I mean, that's what it looks like to me.
 I don't know if you have a comparison picture of that.
 Depends about what it looks like.
 It looks about right.
 Dan, what do you think of the iPod Nano?
 You know, I think it's fun.
 I kind of want one.
 You know, it's an improvement over the watch-based one, I think, for usability.
 The watch... I say the watch-based one, but the one that was smaller that you could actually
 wear on your wrist as a watch was really tiny, and it had a touchscreen, but it's a little
 bit more difficult to interact with.
 I think the bigger screen makes it a little bit easier to work with.
 Yeah, you lose the ability to slap it on your wrist and wear it as a wristwatch, but I'm
 not exactly sure how many people actually did that.
 I mean, I'll reserve judgment until I get my hands on one, but to be honest with you,
 it looks kind of fun.
 Awesome.
 I agree.
 I'm still impressed by the size.
 Yeah, I do like how it is fun.
 Of course, there's no app store.
 There's nothing else.
 What you see is what you get.
 No Spotify is going to be a disappointment.
 It's pretty great, though, that it has the pedometer and the fitness stuff built in,
 which is a really nice touch.
 I'd still be worried about breaking that little screen.
 It also has an FM radio.
 Between those three things, it's a pretty good running around workout device, which
 I kind of like.
 I do, too, but you know what?
 I did kind of want some kind of wristband that was a pedometer that did a bunch of multifunctional
 things.
 I do truly believe the smartwatch is going to be an awesome thing.
 You see the Nike fitness wristband, you see Jawbone Triad getting back into it.
 That to me is like I would love something on my wrist that I can check.
 To me, it's more compelling than, say, a Google Glass thing.
 Anyway, if you're just joining us, Dan, real quick, let's kind of jump into a little bit
 of wireless thing.
 HT Voice, I kind of understand why that's such a big deal.
 David, I know you care about this, too, so you two talk it up.
 I'm just going to listen.
 So HT Voice, it's kind of a funny thing because nobody really talks about voice quality anymore
 when we talk about smartphones because we're focused on all the other fun stuff that we
 do.
 But HT Voice kind of made news last year or within this past year with Sprint who said
 that they were going to be launching an HT Voice compatible network.
 And now Apple is saying that iPhone 5 will support this wideband audio, which will give
 you much higher fidelity call quality than we've ever seen before or ever heard before.
 I should say.
 And it's going to be available on 20 carrier partners.
 We're not really sure which carriers those are yet, though.
 So it's going to be interesting to see where this actually turns up, if it's going to be
 available on the major carriers here in the US or if it'll just be on kind of a scatter
 shot of carriers across the world.
 Yeah, so the way it was described to me, I got to get a test of this with the Evo 4G
 LTE on Sprint.
 And one of the things they made a big deal about was HT Voice.
 And I got to talk to a few folks at HTC.
 And they were saying that it's part carrier, part phone hardware, and part software.
 And all three of those things have to work together.
 And that was kind of the big problem with it before was that there's not necessarily
 a huge market for it yet.
 Because it's just people who own Evo 4G LTEs and use Sprint and have the particular carrier
 stuff.
 But now this opens HT Voice up to a much wider audience.
 So presumably now the hardware and software stuff is there.
 And it just becomes up to the carriers to implement this particular standard.
 Which to my understanding, and I could be wrong, and correct me if I am Dan, but to
 my understanding is not overly complicated.
 And then it's just a matter of them implementing it because the rest of the infrastructure
 for it is there.
 And you suddenly have this giant leap in voice quality.
 I got to test it with the Evo and it's an amazing difference.
 We use Skype by default whenever we can just because it's faster and you sound better and
 there's less compression and lag.
 And in this case it was like being in a room with somebody.
 It sounded amazing.
 I was really impressed.
 Now is it the same standard, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is it the same standard
 HD audio, wide band audio?
 Is that the same everywhere?
 I actually don't know.
 Dan, do you know that?
 You know that's not clear yet to be honest with you.
 It hopefully would be the same standard.
 That would make life a lot easier and it means that HD audio could be had on a call from
 the iPhone to say like the Evo 4G LTE like you mentioned and vice versa.
 But I'm not going to go on record and say that it is just yet because there always seems
 to be a lot of things that kind of throw it for a loop when we're talking about these
 various wireless protocols and standards.
 The thing that you mentioned earlier with the Evo 4G LTE is that I got to test it as
 well and it really did sound great and it works great but it only works with other Evo
 4G LTEs.
 So opening this up to the iPhone really opens up to a wider market, a much larger user base
 of people who are going to be able to take advantage of the HD voice quality.
 Right, now I have a question.
 So they announced there's 20 partners for HD voice.
 Did they announce who they were?
 I'm assuming Sprint is one of them.
 Maybe it's a bad assumption.
 No, I would assume it's the same but I don't know.
 I don't think they said.
 Yeah, they didn't announce any partners for the HD voice yet.
 They just said 20 but Apple didn't name any of them.
 One would think that Sprint would be one of those partners but we're not really sure yet.
 Awesome.
 Well Dan, stay on the line.
 Love you.
 Love you too.
 However, we have something to show.
 We have a hands-on video with the iPhone.
 It's ready.
 I think Josh is narrating it so we can just sit back, relax.
 Before we get him live, we get him on tape.
 Yeah, hopefully Josh and Eli will be coming up soon.
 That is a fact.
 Live, but right now here's a pre-recorded Josh Dupolsky to kind of, you know, basically
 whet your appetite.
 Thank you.
 It's one of those days.
 Hey, this is Josh from The Verge and we are looking at the new iPhone 5.
 As you can see, it looks somewhat familiar to the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4 but I have
 to say when you pick it up in your hands, there is an immediate noticeable difference.
 It's thinner, it's lighter, it feels incredibly light actually.
 It's almost bizarrely light.
 When I picked it up, I almost dropped it because I expected more weight than is actually here
 but that doesn't mean that it's, you know, cheaply constructed.
 The back is beautiful, matte metal finish.
 There's glass on these two pieces right here and then of course, glass around the front.
 It's also got a larger screen, the much rumored and now exposed larger screen of the iPhone
 5.
 You can also see the bezel has been kind of cut down along the sides here so it just feels
 like it's all screen on the front.
 This is the black version which is almost all matte black, pretty sleek I have to say,
 pretty slick looking.
 And, you know, everything functions as you would expect on an iPhone.
 It's of course running iOS 6.
 We've seen early versions of iOS 6.
 We saw it demoed at WWDC and this is the full version here.
 A few new additions, Passbook is one of them which is going to collect all sorts of boarding
 passes and gift cards and stuff like that which was demoed today.
 There's also new mail features.
 For instance, the VIP and flagging has been changed and lots of little nips and talks
 all over the OS.
 But you know, the big story today is not the operating system.
 The big story today is the hardware.
 And I have to say, it's definitely, it is an evolution in terms of the design language.
 But I spoke to Phil Schiller and he said that this is a complete ground up new project for
 them.
 They looked at this and they said, let's just kind of blow apart what we've already done
 and build something new from the ground up.
 And you do see little differences that indicate that that's the case.
 Particularly one of the things that I noticed is the detail on this, the machined edges
 of this.
 I heard somebody here say it looked a little bit like jewelry and I have to agree that
 there is kind of a jewelry feel to the way these edges are machined and as clean as they
 are.
 One other thing to note, the headphone jack has moved down to the bottom and it now has
 the new lightning dock port which is much smaller obviously and faster as Apple claims.
 It has a bunch of other features that are helpful if you're docking your phone.
 So this is it.
 I mean, this is the iPhone 5.
 It's going to be available.
 I believe it goes on sale September 21st and we're going to spend a little bit more time
 with it.
 We'll have some impressions and a lot more info soon.
 Welcome back.
 If you're just joining us, this is the Vergecast special edition.
 All basically about iPhone 5 event today.
 So far we've had big announcements.
 The taller iPhone 5, it's thinner, has LTE.
 New iPod Touch, similar screen size, much thinner.
 iPod Nano no longer watch capable but a very compelling product.
 iOS 6 was a rundown.
 iTunes 11 was previewed.
 Not coming out until next month though.
 What am I missing here?
 That's about it.
 It was kind of a revamp of the whole lineup for them in a way that we haven't seen in
 a while.
 Does this replace its iPod rock and roll event?
 Actually, we'll talk about that later.
 Where is my YouTube branded iPod Touch?
 That's my question.
 We have Dan Seifer online, one of our senior mobile editors who's here to talk about.
 Well, basically right now I want to talk about the competition.
 Where does iPhone 5 stand in terms of the playing field?
 We've seen a lot of announcements lately from Nokia with the Lumia 920 flagship.
 GS3 is still of course Samsung's flagship.
 We've also seen Motorola.
 Yep.
 Updates Razer.
 Dan, are you still with us?
 Yes, I am.
 All right.
 Kind of talk about the competition right now.
 Where does everything stand in terms of the mobile industry?
 What is Apple up against now and in the next few months?
 I think, as you mentioned, the most exciting competitor to the iPhone 5 now is the Nokia
 Lumia 920.
 It's the most interesting model that's coming out soon.
 It's got high-end specs to match the iPhone 5.
 It's even got a larger display and fast processor.
 It's running the new Windows Phone 8 platform that is still a little unproven.
 We don't really know exactly how that's going to be.
 And then it's got Nokia's PureView camera, which should be really good.
 We've done a bit of tests with preliminary models.
 I'm sure if you have been watching the site last week, it was full of Nokia news.
 How it stacks against the iPhone 5, I think we'll kind of have to see.
 As far as raw specs, the Lumia 920 has a little bit of an edge because it's got that bigger
 screen.
 As far as the cameras go, Apple does say that the iPhone 5's camera is improved over the
 iPhone 4S, but it doesn't seem like it's terribly different.
 It's a little bit faster.
 It's a little bit, a couple of new features, but it seems to be essentially the same camera
 that we saw on the 4S.
 And the 4S had a very solid camera, so it's not a huge surprise to see that it's very
 along those lines.
 I would be remiss right now not to mention the one jab.
 We didn't see a lot of jabs thrown at this point.
 No, we figured we'd see a lot of them.
 Especially after Apple Samsung.
 The one we did see though was at Nokia.
 These are our photos from the iPhone 5 camera.
 By the way, we didn't screw with them.
 It may not have been at Nokia specifically, but in the context of Lumia 920's recent photo
 scandal, it was clearly a wink and a nod.
 So can we get the chart back up, kind of take a look at some of the competition we have
 here.
 There is the iPhone 5.
 Obviously looks very nice.
 The Galaxy S3.
 Dan, what would you say is the flagship Android phone right now?
 What is the pinnacle of Android that we can get at this point?
 You know, if you're looking at raw hardware, I think it's still the Galaxy S3 that came
 out this summer.
 You do obviously have to put up with Samsung's TouchWiz interface, which not everyone is
 a fan of.
 A lot of people really like that stock Android look, which you can only get with the Galaxy
 Nexus out of the box right now.
 But if we're just talking about raw hardware specs as far as processor, display, camera,
 stuff like that, then the Galaxy S3 is still kind of the king of the hill.
 And stacking up against the iPhone, the Galaxy S3 gets you a bigger display.
 It gets you a similar resolution camera.
 It's got a fast dual-core processor just like the iPhone as well.
 But it's an all-plastic body, and a lot of people found that to be one of the big negatives
 with the Samsung is that it's kind of this glossy, almost cheap-feeling plastic body,
 whereas the iPhone is going to have a glass and aluminum frame, which given Apple's history,
 we can kind of expect it to be a pretty high-quality device and well put together.
 So it really depends on which way you want to go.
 The iPhone 5, I think, is going to be a lot easier to use in one hand than some of these
 other larger Android devices, and even the Lumia 920, because it does have a larger screen
 than older iPhones, but it is only 4 inches as opposed to the 4.5 or 4.8 inch displays
 that can be kind of difficult to use with one hand.
 But I would suggest that if you're in the market for a new smartphone, get to a store
 once all these things are on the market and really play with them.
 Oh, that is such a safe answer.
 You're so sweet.
 So about the one-handed thing...
 I'm going to buy an iPhone 5 if that's what you're trying to get at.
 We'll get into that.
 I was going to ask you.
 So the one-handed thing I think is really interesting, because all the other phones
 on that list we just showed, I think the smallest screen other than the iPhone is the Galaxy
 Nexus, and it's 4.65 inches, and the others are 4.8...
 Oh, I guess the Lumia is 4.5, so 4.5 up to 5.5.
 4.5 is the small one now.
 No, that's crazy.
 And the iPhone 5 is kind of bucking this trend of like, let's get bigger and bigger and bigger.
 And even Motorola came out last week and was like, oh, we've put a 4.3 inch phone into
 a slightly smaller bezel, and was super excited about that.
 But the iPhone is taking a different tack.
 Do you think that's smart, or do people want bigger phones?
 I think that as far as...
 I know there's been a lot of studies about this, and surveys have said that people want
 bigger phones, but the fact of the matter is people aren't stopped not buying the iPhone
 because it has a smaller screen.
 Apple still sells millions and millions and millions of these every quarter, and they're
 probably going to sell millions and millions and millions of iPhone 5s this coming quarter.
 So it's hard to say exactly.
 The sales say that the big screens don't have as big of an effect on a smartphone purchase
 decision as some manufacturers would like you to think.
 Right.
 And I will say, clearly, the way Samsung's tried to differentiate, HTC's tried to differentiate,
 we know the big thing is software, is ecosystem, it's how you present it, that's why we have
 TouchWiz, we have Sense.
 People just showed iOS 6, these showed everything they come out with in terms of software.
 There is no NFC, but of course there's a lot of compelling stuff, and it still is kind
 of the king to beat in terms of mindshare and even in terms of sales.
 What is compelling about Android and Windows 8 right now that would make someone kind of
 give up iOS, or not even think about it?
 Well, I know there's been this sentiment, even among a lot of our editors at The Verge,
 is that they're just kind of bored with iOS.
 It's like we mentioned earlier, it's been the same thing since 2007 with minor tweaks
 along the way, but it's been the same paradigm, and we don't have the fun new features that
 you get with Android, like widgets that can be customized and updated automatically to
 show you new information, or Windows Phone 8 has something like that with its live tile
 system.
 So if somebody is looking for a different tack, then Android and Windows Phone 8 give
 that to you.
 The other thing that's a big sell for Android, of course, since it's owned by Google, it
 has great Google services integration.
 It's definitely got the best Google Maps services, which as we mentioned earlier, is leaving
 the iPhone.
 It's got the best Gmail support and support for other Google services if you're a Google
 Docs user, etc.
 And Microsoft, like I said, we still don't really know everything there is to know about
 Windows Phone 8.
 Microsoft has really kept its cards close until it launches, and it's very interesting
 and it's very intriguing.
 We've been let down in the past by Windows Phone 7.5, so I think Microsoft really needs
 to come out swinging and come out big with Windows Phone 8 with some really compelling
 reasons as to why we should use that instead of the other options on the market.
 Well, now you said something interesting earlier.
 You actually mentioned people are getting bored with the iOS design.
 People still say it's great, but I've seen so much of it before already.
 Do you think Windows Phone 8 differentiates enough with its live tiles?
 It's like some kind of in-between between Android's less restrictive and iPhone's more
 restrictive kind of interface.
 Do you feel this like, I don't know, different shaped live tiles are going to make much of
 a difference?
 Is that design alone going to win some minds in terms of the mobile industry?
 You know, it's hard to say.
 It hasn't done so yet.
 Windows Phone 7.5 really hasn't gained any traction in the market.
 Windows Phone 8, we'll have to see just because it's not available yet.
 But like you mentioned, it kind of straddles that line between the kind of rigid structure
 of iOS and the freeform structure of Android because you do have some things that are slightly
 more customizable.
 You've got more information available to you at your fingertips, but it's not as fully
 customizable as Android is.
 So if you're looking for kind of like that in-between type of thing, Windows Phone 8
 kind of slots nicely in there.
 And to be honest with you, I'm really eager to play with that at length.
 We haven't really had a chance to, unfortunately, because as I mentioned, Microsoft isn't letting
 anybody touch it yet.
 So I'm really intrigued by the Lumia 920, but I'm also really hesitant at the same time,
 to be honest.
 And no one here is going to say Windows Phone 7 or 7.5 is worth getting at this point.
 7.8 maybe, especially if you have the Lumia 900 already.
 But Windows Phone 8 is the operating system we want to compare it to.
 We don't know when that's coming out.
 I think that's the issue.
 And I mean, I think the biggest problem, and this is what I thought was so interesting
 about Apple, is leading with we have all these apps, we have all these apps that are optimized
 for every device we have.
 People buy them like crazy.
 They're great.
 And like, Windows Phone 8 just doesn't have that.
 That continues to be the big problem to me.
 We had this conversation about the Lumia 900.
 Like if it were 2007 and App Stores didn't exist, it would be a great operating system.
 And Windows Phone 8 is even more that way.
 But there's just the ecosystem around it.
 The apps are just not there.
 And Microsoft seems to be pushing towards fixing that.
 And I think Windows 8 coming out and sharing a kernel with Windows Phone 8 is going to
 be really important and help a lot.
 But until then, it's just a pretty phone you can't do everything with.
 Right.
 And you said, too, because one of the big things that sells well, we didn't hear so
 much this time.
 Obviously, Electronic Arts came on there.
 So gaming has always been big.
 WWDC, every other conference, they've played up gaming really big.
 Microsoft has this kind of trojising horse.
 They have the Xbox system, which is one of the best selling consoles of this generation,
 doing very well.
 They can't seem to get the same kind of game quality on a Windows phone.
 Hopefully with a new kernel, they'll change that.
 But we still haven't seen any app announcements.
 Dan, can you talk to me about the app ecosystem?
 Has Microsoft revealed anything, hinted at something, made it look cool?
 The Windows Phone marketplace, I think it's actually just changed its name today to the
 Windows Phone Store, if I'm not mistaken.
 But it's been growing quite rapidly.
 Microsoft is happy to talk to you about how that has the fastest growing track record
 of any smartphone mobile store.
 But there's still some big names that are missing.
 And though Microsoft has promised that they're coming, we still have yet to see them.
 The most noticeable one that I can think of is any sort of like Zynga game, which are
 very popular on Android and iOS.
 When you think of like Words with Friends and Draw Something and other games like that,
 they're not yet available on Windows Phone 8.
 Microsoft has promised that they're coming, but we don't know when or in what capacity
 they'll be available.
 Other apps that are big, that have just recently come to the platform.
 I know PayPal just recently released an app for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 in
 the past couple of weeks.
 That was kind of a big gaping hole that was missing.
 And a couple of other apps, but it's still far behind, like you mentioned, the games.
 We haven't really seen Microsoft take the bull by the horns and release these exclusive
 titles that you can only get on Windows Phone 8 that aren't available on other platforms
 that are just like blowing us away.
 And that's kind of like a curious thing.
 We're not really sure why that hasn't happened yet.
 Like you mentioned, hopefully with the shared kernel between Windows 8 and Windows Phone
 8, that'll make it easier to port some of these cooler PC-type games over.
 Right.
 If you're just joining us, this is the Vergecast Special Edition talking about the iPhone 5
 with Dan Seifer.
 Kind of the competition right now.
 Josh and Eli will be joining us soon from San Francisco Live.
 They've been doing the hands-ons, being superstars, doing all that.
 Dan, one last thing about the competition I want to talk about is Android.
 I guess second to last thing.
 Let's talk about this.
 Android Jelly Bean just came out.
 The Galaxy Nexus is dated.
 Is Google still doing flagship devices?
 That will matter.
 Will the next one hit into mainstream?
 Obviously, Nexus 7 is like a flagship tablet that tells people how to do it.
 Galaxy Nexus was never the same kind of exposure.
 Are we going to see a phone that comes out now swinging to say, listen, this is a relevant
 flagship Nexus device?
 Not just let Samsung or HTC or anyone take that crown?
 I really hope to.
 I hope we do see that.
 There's been rumors pretty much all year that Google is working with multiple manufacturers
 to release a suite of Nexus devices, of Nexus smartphones, up to possibly five around the
 same time.
 That would give us super high quality hardware with the best software that Google has to
 offer with its stock Android platform.
 It'd be really great to see that.
 All of the Nexus smartphones that we've seen thus far haven't had the most cutting edge
 hardware or the best designs that you can get on versions of Android that maybe have
 a manufacturer's skin.
 Hopefully Google will put its foot down at the bit of the Nexus 7 tablet that you know
 you guys are making tablets that work.
 We're just going to show you how to do it.
 We'll see some really great cool phones that run just stock Android without anything else.
 That would be great, actually.
 You alluded a minute ago, you said, I am going to buy one.
 Why are you going to buy one?
 I feel like you're not overly excited about anything, but you're going to buy one.
 Is that just because you buy every phone like all the rest of us do?
 You know, I wish I bought every single phone, but I have an iPhone 4S now.
 I'm very happy with it as far as its reliability and such.
 I use it all the time for tethering with my laptop because I'm constantly on the go and
 the iPhone has been the most reliable of all the phones that I've owned for doing that.
 I'm pretty excited to have LTE in my iPhone, just pretty much for the tethering purposes.
 I'll likely pass my iPhone 4S down to my wife, so we kind of just have this creepy cycle
 where Dan gets a new phone and his wife gets his old phone and everybody's happy.
 And nothing else right now is just kind of like yelling at me, buy this instead.
 I think that I'm not going to want to wait for Microsoft and Nokia to release Windows
 phone 8 and the 920.
 I think it's a real question mark not having any idea of when we're going to see that other
 than what we expect from rumors and leaks.
 So the one thing that Apple does right is it says, here's our device, you can pre-order
 it on Friday, you'll have it at your door next Friday.
 And no other manufacturer has really matched that when they've announced the new device
 or anything like that.
 And that's a big compelling push to just go out and buy it.
 All right, well, one last thing before we let you go, I want to talk, let's talk Blackberry.
 No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
 Don't, don't.
 That's not, I'm going to leave, I'm going to see you.
 I'm such a jerk.
 No, but really, I do want to talk about next week.
 So we've had three events last week.
 We had Amazon, we had Nokia and Motorola.
 Next week we have HTC has an event.
 Dan, can you give a preview of that all?
 What are the rumors saying about HTC's announcements next week?
 So we're expecting to see some Windows Phone stuff from HTC.
 We haven't seen anything from them just yet for Windows Phone 8.
 We saw Samsung's offerings.
 Obviously, we have Nokia's device announced already.
 So rumors, there's an HTC Accord, or also known as the 8X, that has been rumored to
 be coming for T-Mobile, kind of like an upgraded Windows Phone 8 device.
 So we possibly could see that.
 We will see another slightly lower end version as well.
 All right then.
 That's about it.
 Oh, we have something interesting to talk about.
 Unlimited data.
 That's something you might be able to shed light on.
 Oh, and?
 Hold on.
 Turns out we're not doing that.
 I lied.
 I lied.
 Are we ready with Josh and Eli?
 Yes.
 All right.
 Dan, thank you so much for joining us.
 Thank you guys.
 All right, for just joining us, this is the Vergecast Special Edition iPhone.
 As we've been promising, teasing, and toying you with for the last hour and a half or so,
 Josh Tapolsky is here live virtually.
 Josh, can you hear us?
 Oh my God, you're beautiful.
 Yes, I'm with Eli Patel as well.
 Yes.
 I don't care so much about Eli.
 That's true.
 So how's it feel to be on the other end?
 We've stopped places.
 Hey, come on.
 David is fired.
 Oh, you're fired.
 Are we live on the air?
 Because it's unclear to me.
 You are live on the air.
 If we are not, Josh.
 I can say it again if you want.
 That's wonderful.
 Well, let me tell you what's happening.
 Eli Patel and I, I'm Josh Tapolsky and this is Eli Patel.
 We are live at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts where-
 You need more news voice.
 Where an event has just occurred that will be remembered for all time, an announcement
 of a new iPhone, a colorful set of new iPod touches, and a completely reinvented iPod
 Nano, perhaps the most shocking announcement of the day.
 Perhaps the most disappointing, flat out disappointing announcement.
 I-
 Zap on that.
 Anyhow, so as you know, we were here at the event covering it live.
 We have touched all of the devices.
 We put them against our faces.
 We put them in our hands.
 We threw them across the room to see how sturdy they were.
 I leaped over Phil Schiller's shoulders to get to one at one point.
 He leaped over my shoulders to get back in his original position.
 It was a great time had by everybody here at the Apple event.
 I don't think there's any denying that it was certainly one of their events that they've
 held.
 Yes, that's all true.
 I'll now open the floor for questions.
 What would you like to hear about today's event?
 I want to know more about this leapfrogging that you did on Phil Schiller.
 Kind of curious how the devices touched you back too.
 There is a... I mean Phil is a playful guy and he likes to have some fun at these events.
 Also the Foo Fighters were there.
 The best part... Here's my favorite part of the day is I was talking to Phil Schiller
 and the Foo Fighters came out to check out the new iPhone.
 They seemed genuinely interested in the new iPhone, I have to say.
 It was almost as if they hadn't seen it yet.
 They were having a good time.
 Dave Grohl turned to me and he said, hey, I like your tie.
 I said, I like your special brand of heartfelt rock and roll.
 Then we kissed.
 Part of that happened.
 The part where he talked to Phil Schiller.
 I was going to say, do we have the kiss on video?
 I'd love to see that.
 Wait, so what do you guys think?
 What's the...
 I'd love to see it too.
 So look, the phone is like...
 Wait, let's hear it.
 They had a question.
 The phone is what do you think?
 Is that what it is?
 The question is what do you think?
 I don't know what the question was.
 I want to know what Eli thinks.
 What do you think of the question, Ross?
 You guys are so cute.
 The phone, what do you think?
 Yeah.
 Look, the phone is... I don't think any of the leaks or mockups actually did anything
 to the industrial design of this phone.
 Any favors?
 It's actually really nice.
 I think it's nice.
 I mean, it did the favors in that it looked exactly like what we saw, except for the shiny
 edges.
 The shiny edges and it's much lighter than you'd expect it to be.
 Very light.
 The screen is quite nice, but it's very much an iterative update to the iPhone.
 Yes.
 And you know, Johnny Ive in his presentation said, the iPhone is something that most customers
 have, the object they use the most.
 So we're very careful about changing it, which is definitely one way of thinking about it.
 Yeah, no, I mean-
 But it's the safest way of thinking about it.
 I actually, and I wrote that as I was doing the live blog, I made a note of that quote.
 I wrote it down in the live blog.
 I think that does sort of sum up.
 It is a beautiful phone.
 It seems to be beautifully made.
 The screen looks stunning.
 The screen looks great.
 There's no question that it's a very handsome device, but it is very much a iteration of
 the design that we've seen.
 And all joking aside, I did talk to Phil Schiller about this when we were checking out the phones
 just a few moments ago.
 And he said, it's an iteration of the design language, but in terms of like the guts of
 the phone, the design, how it's made, it's a completely, they blew apart the process
 and they have new chips and they've got a new screen and they've got this new build.
 The aluminum back, I mean it's much thinner.
 So I mean the phone's nice.
 The iPod stuff to me is probably the most interesting.
 The focus on iPod and iTunes.
 The new iPod touch is really nice.
 Like if you're a gadget person, you're probably going to want to have one.
 Even if you have an Android phone or I mean I have an iPhone and I still kind of want
 to have one around.
 It's just a really nice piece of hardware.
 And then the new iPod Nano is like why did they make this?
 It is an odd entry.
 It runs like a version of, they're calling it the Nano OS.
 It's not iOS.
 It looks just like it.
 I was hoping...
 Multi-touch display.
 Multi-touch display.
 It's $149.
 It's really cheap.
 I mean I was really hoping that they would take the Nano that was already kind of becoming
 a watch for people and turn it into a third device that connected to a phone that was
 smart and instead they've gone backwards.
 Like a remote control for your phone.
 Like a remote control for your phone.
 Instead they've kind of gone backwards.
 Yeah.
 It feels like a very, it really feels like a product from...
 The past.
 It does feel like a product from the past.
 And all the iTunes stuff is all about how you're going to manage these MP3 files on
 your computer in new and different ways.
 I like thinking that...
 And I haven't managed an MP3 file on my computer in at least a year if not more.
 I like thinking that Johnny Ive was going through a drawer full of old designs and he
 found that like an old Nano design that he'd worked on.
 He was like, you know, this is actually pretty good.
 It was during the Samsung trial.
 He was like, oh that one.
 You know what?
 Yeah.
 I think that I like, I'm excited about the new Touch.
 I talked to Avi Greengard who's an analyst and a friend of ours and he made an interesting
 point and I agree, you know, at $299.
 Yeah.
 It's right there.
 First off, it's expensive.
 They didn't replace the original.
 You've got the $199 original and you've got the $299 upgrade.
 But it does kind of create questions about this iPad mini that we're hearing about.
 If you have a $300 iPod Touch and a $200 iPod Touch, what is the price point of the iPod
 mini and doesn't it cancel out one of those products?
 If the iPod mini is $350 or $300 or $250 or $200, if the product even exists, now I know
 I'm talking about a Phantom product that doesn't actually exist yet.
 You know, I think it's, you have to ask yourself what is the, how does that work for them financially?
 Well, I don't think people will just buy one device.
 For me, the iPod Touch is if you have a Blackberry or an Android phone and you want to like go
 into this world, it's the way to do it.
 It's beautiful.
 It's hard to even, like it has like classic Apple hardware flourishes like the, it has
 a strap lock button that pops out of the back.
 It's totally silly.
 This guy was just crazy about the lube.
 It's all he did.
 The tear was rolling down his face.
 It was actually a great video Jordan took of me just pushing the button crying quietly
 myself.
 It is inspirational.
 But I do, let's get back to the phone a little bit.
 I want to talk about the phone because I mean the iPod stuff is not the main course here.
 The main course is the iPhone.
 I think that like one thing that you can't escape, I mean I will say this, I am very
 impressed if they can get better battery life in this device, which is a smaller device
 and a thinner device.
 If they get better battery life, better battery life on LTE than the previous version, that's
 pretty incredible.
 Phil Schiller actually said a lot of that was due to the integration, the chip integration
 that is allowing them to be, to sip power rather than gulp it when using LTE.
 But you know, you can't get away from the fact that this phone is not very different
 in terms of when you upgrade your iPhone 4S to the latest software, the differences are
 not going to be astounding between those two devices.
 Last night we were talking about what they would do and I said what's always most exciting
 is when they show off iOS 6, all the stuff you've seen before and then they give you
 the one big new feature, you know, like they did with iOS 5 and Siri.
 And that didn't happen.
 There was no one big feature.
 I think the big feature that was new that we saw was a like button on shared photo streams.
 I mean I have to say, and you know, maybe I'm an Android fan boy or lack integrity or
 something, but you know when they said look we've made the screen larger, we can fit an
 extra row of icons on there, my heart sank a little bit in terms of just excitement about
 the product.
 I mean it was, I just don't think that's a feature you mention on stage.
 And I think that we should applaud them for if they've downsized chips and made a more
 energy efficient device.
 I certainly applaud them for the machine, the engineering that went into this.
 And it definitely was like an engineering effort, but at the end of the day, and look
 this doesn't matter to most people.
 People are going to go, they're pre-ordering right now the iPhone 5, they're so excited
 about it.
 But fundamentally this device is no different than the one that you have in your pocket
 right now.
 And even from a design standpoint it's not really that different.
 I think the LTE is a big deal.
 I do not think the increased screen size is necessarily, in this case doesn't strike me
 as much of a game changer.
 If I get one more, one row extra of the email client that I'm not that excited about, or
 one row extra of iMessage, that doesn't thrill me.
 I just feel like they could push harder on software and I'm surprised that they're not.
 And I was looking for something today that, yes.
 So lots of people I think didn't upgrade from the 4 to the 4S waiting for this and they
 were like, oh this is going to be the life changing, earth shattering phone I've been
 waiting for that wasn't the 4S.
 Is this not that?
 Is that what you're saying?
 No it is.
 If you get one from the 4 this is going to be a massive upgrade from the 4.
 Well you get Siri, you have a much faster phone, you obviously get LTE, it's thinner,
 it's sleeker looking.
 It's faster.
 I mean you don't feel like, it's definitely a generational, big generational update.
 John, I don't want to do a B on your hand.
 Oh it just flew away, okay.
 That was a little scary for a second there.
 That people now sting one of us.
 That was scary.
 You guys can't see it but John sitting here like focusing and a B landed right on his
 finger.
 That is dedication, he's a pro.
 John is a dazzling larger to B's.
 Yeah, he didn't budge, he didn't flinch.
 But I would say the jump from 4 to 5, the jump from 4 to 5 is enormous.
 But the market just is moving faster than that.
 There's the world of people that are like two year contracts and then there's the phone
 market which is rapidly iterating in every part.
 I mean I think if you look at the things that were updated today, you see a lot of things
 that are not innovated on and things that are just kind of being grooved up to.
 LTE is not.
 A bigger screen.
 If they innovate on battery life, that's great.
 I think the difference is an extra hour from what the previous version was.
 So that's great but LTE is a feature we've seen for a couple of years now.
 A bigger screen is a feature that we've seen for a few years now.
 Say what you will about large Android phones, there are a few that do pull off the larger
 screen.
 The slightly larger screen, the One S is a great example which I believe has a 4 inch
 screen, a sleek design.
 And you know it actually does it, it pulls that off quite nicely so that's not like
 hey we've never seen this before.
 Obviously Apple's industrial design is impeccable so that's not surprising.
 I will say to be very clear, when I say the leaks didn't do it justice.
 Very clear, I'm buying this phone.
 Are you going to buy it?
 My wife is definitely buying it.
 She's very excited.
 She has a 4.
 I'll see.
 I'll probably buy all the phones.
 If you love your iPhone, if you have a 4 and you love it and you're just like oh I need
 a new phone, you're definitely upgraded to this.
 If you have a 4S and you want LTE and you like the 4S, there's no question.
 My thing is more of like a, I guess mine is maybe it's a nerdy thing but I just want to
 see more, I feel like there's more that can be done.
 They talk about software and hardware integration, they talk about getting that right.
 I just feel like there's more they can do with the software.
 I think that the MP3 stuff is a great observation.
 I just don't understand that at all.
 We're still talking about managing your iTunes library and I know that a lot of people do
 that.
 I would love to see Apple leapfrog, as Phil Schiller leapfrogged me during the event physically,
 I would like to see them leapfrog whatever the status quo is right now and say we're
 going to bring you something totally new and great that you didn't see coming.
 I didn't think there was anything that happened today at this event that was remotely, I mean
 they introduced panorama mode for the camera.
 I'm sure it will work very well, maybe better than anybody else's panorama mode but it's
 not a new feature that we haven't seen before.
 It's not even a feature that you can't spend a dollar on the app store to get.
 Passbook may be the only thing they introduced that doesn't have an equivalent that we've
 seen elsewhere.
 I'm not trying to downplay it, I think it's a beautiful package.
 It's not the iPhone 4 with FaceTime and even that was kind of stuff we'd already seen.
 The iPhone 4 is like a radically new design.
 Yeah.
 Alright, so first of all, a smaller picture first.
 If you develop an app that's optimized for iPhone 5, will it work on the 4S in previous
 generations?
 Is there going to be ubiquity among the apps?
 Yeah, because you're just going to give it two different views.
 Part of making it for the 5 is making it for the 4.
 My impression is, I actually didn't speak to anybody about this.
 My impression is that there will be variations, there will be like a universal binary for
 it.
 It's not going to be like the iPad and the iPhone where you have iPhone 5 only apps?
 I mean the screen size, it is a very minor screen size difference when you really analyze
 it.
 You're going from 960 to 1136, so it's not a huge jump.
 And when you use, I loaded the Verge app on one of the devices and it's totally usable.
 It's obviously not optimized, so there's a black bar at the bottom, it's a pillar box.
 It's a letter box.
 Yeah.
 Can I address something?
 Ross, I know you have questions, but I want to address a very hot topic that was on the
 internet a few months ago where many people were talking about how the 3.5 inch display
 was the perfect display for scientific reasons.
 The circumference of where your thumb range could be was just, it had been perfectly sized
 to meet that.
 And anything larger completely destroyed the one-handed functionality of the device.
 Well, they did go through that a little bit today.
 Oh, they went through it a little bit today, but they also increased the height of the
 screen.
 They kept the height of the screen, yeah, they kept the width, but the height of the
 screen has to be reached by your thumb.
 The top of the screen has to be reached by your thumb as well.
 For me, actually, on my Galaxy Nexus, what I don't struggle with is reaching to the right,
 to the left side of it.
 I struggle with trying to get up to the top of it.
 That's the place that's hard to move to.
 So, I'd love to know what the reaction is from the people on the internet who felt that
 3.5 was just the perfect size and now that we've gone beyond that, what that means for
 thumbs.
 Do we have to get thumb extensions?
 Well, they're going to take off their...
 Well, we have to get...
 Thumb extensions.
 Thumb...
 Right now, I'm getting a PR for thumb extension.
 Well, we have to grow very long thumbnails.
 What will happen?
 So, one thing that's interesting is, it's minorly interesting, the screen is a lot thinner
 because of the integrated touch sensor and it's kind of noticeable.
 So I thought the retina display is still at the top of the class and this one looks slightly
 better.
 There's less of an air gap still.
 It's a very good looking display.
 And the iPod touch now has actually the same display.
 The old iPod touch had a slightly crappier display than the iPhone and now, as far as
 I mean, I held them side by side and Apple says they're exactly the same.
 Honestly, if I had to just lay it down, I would say the iPod touch is the more interesting
 product announced today.
 The iPhone is like, it's the next iPhone.
 It's the features that are more added.
 Well, I will say they did colors on the iPod touch, which is the first time they've done
 colors for one of their full iOS devices like this, which I think is interesting.
 And I'm personally very excited about getting pink one.
 How is the loop?
 Make them size.
 To put...
 Sorry.
 It's so silly.
 It's amazing.
 Have you ever been touched by God and then had God wrap his fingers around your wrist?
 Yeah.
 Because that's what it feels like when you put the loop on.
 Wow.
 Josh, I've got a more...
 Beyond.
 I've got a broader question for you.
 So we have talked about, you said this earlier, Johnny Ive mentioned they are sensitive to
 changing much of the iPhone because it has such a big fan base.
 It's such a huge device.
 Is that to say, are you getting the indication that they're not going to really make a lot
 of major tweaks in the iPhone lineup going forward?
 Is this the kind of interactive design we can expect in the years to come?
 I think if you look at the...
 I think if you look historically at what Apple does, it's that they have a big innovation
 when they introduce a product for the first time.
 And they spend a lot of time iterating on that big innovation.
 The iMac has looked the same for six or seven years.
 The laptops, they're all the same.
 If you look at the original MacBook Pro with the chiclet keyboard versus the current one,
 there is a very small iteration between those devices.
 I think Apple's thing is we do a good thing the first time and then we iterate to make
 it even better.
 And I think they're doing that here.
 But those designs that don't change don't have numbers.
 The iMac is always the iMac.
 The MacBook Pro is always the MacBook Pro.
 I think the number is arbitrary.
 I think the number is because to place this in a market with other devices when you've
 established it as an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 3GS, that you have to give users, you have
 to give a consumer some continuity, but you also have to be able to give somebody the
 opportunity to walk into a store and say, I want not a new iPhone, but a specific new
 iPhone.
 And I think that when you're talking about a price point from free or subsidized to $99
 to $200, you have to be able to let people identify those products.
 They're different products.
 And I think the difference with a MacBook Pro is that you've got different sizes, but
 it's not like you have to walk into an AT&T and pull one off the shelf.
 You go to the Apple store.
 You go to the Apple store.
 I mean, it's a different buying process.
 On a much more cynical note, Apple has benefited from a lot of consumer confusion for years
 because they had the 4 and the 4S and people thought they were 4G devices.
 Now everybody else has 4G in their name and Apple has a 5.
 It's very like that's why it's there.
 I don't think that the naming of the new iPad was necessarily that well received.
 Everybody I talked to, and I've even heard Apple people refer to it as the iPad 3.
 And I think that internally and externally people think of it as the iPad 3 and I think
 it's confusing to call it the new iPad instead of the iPad 3.
 Because when the new iPad comes out, what will the last new iPad be?
 The old new iPad?
 You tell me.
 So I think that that's actually been kind of a misstep for them.
 I think in these products that they're releasing a new version with some new industrial design
 and new features every year, I mean, they're still working on iOS, right?
 The idea is that next year they'll have a completely different version of it or a slightly
 altered version of it.
 And I think that it's odd.
 They keep saying iOS 6, iOS 5, iOS 4.
 Why wouldn't they carry the same thing through with these devices that are so closely linked
 with that progress?
 Honestly, the name is, it looks different.
 I think people will seek it out.
 It's the first new, like tangibly new looking iPhone in two years.
 It's going to be famous.
 They could have called it the iPhone watermelon.
 I like that.
 That's a good one.
 What were you saying, Ross?
 You have questions?
 Actually, it's David.
 Have you guys had a chance to try the new, the ear pods, the horribly named earbuds again?
 I have them in my bag.
 I haven't put them in yet.
 We should be using them right now.
 We should be using the ear pod right now.
 We're going to do a thorough, Neil is going to do a thorough ears on test of those.
 And we're going to get right down to the bottom.
 He's going to go ears on with them.
 And we're going to get right into the bottom, right down to the bottom of this situation
 of whether or not they fall out of your ears or sound good or whatever.
 But I was walking around telling everybody how horrible I thought the old ones are.
 So it'll be really interesting to see if these are any kind of improvement.
 We actually, Neil and I have not eaten anything today.
 So unless you have any final questions about the iPhone 5, the iPod touch or the iPod.
 Apple laid out a beautiful spread, but my personal integrity kept me from eating it.
 Damn right.
 I was tempted to.
 I did eat Samsung's food though.
 They had it across the street.
 Well, they said if we didn't eat their food, we wouldn't get any more, any more devices
 of theirs to cover.
 So we were like, HP had a cake that looked exactly like an iMac, which I just devoured.
 Whenever you say overlord Samsung, whatever you need from us to do, whenever you want
 us to do for you, we'll do it.
 When HP, when HP called us and said, we're inviting you to a champagne brunch, you better
 be there.
 I said, listen, listen, listen, HP, you don't even have to ask.
 Yeah, I'm there.
 Hey Ross, are we working on a post of things that the new iPhone looks exactly like?
 What does that mean?
 Other products.
 I think it's time to cut a ride.
 I think we need to let them go right now.
 Guys, go eat before you piss off any more bloggers in the blogosphere.
 We're going to go eat and we have a lot more content we'll be sharing throughout the day.
 Thanks for taking the time to make us stand in the horrible sun and talk about the iPhone.
 You're welcome.
 Your sunglasses look great.
 Always our pleasure.
 Paul.
 Paul.
 Paul, he's like, Paul.
 Paul.
 Paul.
 Okay, I don't know why I'm waving.
 It's a damn camera.
 You can't even see the video.
 But if he watches later, he knows I waved.
 Anyway, just warning, that was Josh and Neelai.
 We promised they'd be coming.
 They did.
 Followed through on our promises.
 We do that.
 We're good luck.
 The last thing I wanted to clarify, just a point that we had going into this, AT&T unlimited
 data.
 If you have unlimited data on your AT&T account, like an old, kind of like singular days, that's
 what I've got, you can keep it.
 You can keep it for the iPhone LTE.
 It's grandfathered in.
 At least for now.
 So if you have that, you're probably just going to keep it.
 Because unlimited LTE is kind of the greatest thing ever.
 And we don't know for sure if that's going to be the case on Verizon as well.
 We're looking to find out.
 But we've heard, all indications seem to be that that won't be the case.
 Yeah, I would be very surprised.
 Verizon's nixed it a couple times before for other 4G devices.
 Yeah, I've been grandfathered into unlimited data like four different times.
 For Verizon or AT&T?
 And I'm terrified that it's going to happen on Verizon.
 But I don't have an LTE phone yet, because I have an iPhone.
 And I'm terrified it's going to happen.
 And I'm pretty sure it's going to happen.
 The reason AT&T is going to keep me for decades is if they just keep my unlimited data plan.
 Because now that I have LTE, I am going to watch HD video all the time.
 There's nothing but.
 Even when you're not using your phone.
 Just streaming.
 Why not?
 Yeah.
 Anyway, so that's the big thing.
 Let's talk about kind of a, well, let's just wrap up everything with the iPhone 5, all
 the iPods, iOS 6 coming September 19.
 The price points indicate we've got basically the free iPhone 3G.
 The iPhone 4 is now free on contract.
 Free iPhone 4, $100 iPhone 4S, $200 iPhone 5.
 Don't want to say this because my producer really hates the iPhone 5 name.
 The $300 iPod Touch, but it is that 32 gig tier, which is what the iPhone 5 would also
 be.
 And then we go up to the $400 iPod 2 and the $500 new iPad.
 We have no real tiers anymore left for the so-called iPad mini, which has been rumored
 many times.
 Wall Street Journal has written about it.
 Bloomberg has written about it.
 We've written about it.
 We've written about it.
 All the rumors did say, though, there's going to be a separate event next month where they
 would reveal it.
 What do you think about that?
 Do you still feel a little confident about that?
 I mean, I think from just a market standpoint, like what exists and what's out there, it
 is kind of a hole for Apple.
 And it does seem like something that they could do really well.
 You know, the 1024 by 768 screen that all these apps are already designed for, just
 put that into, what was it, 7.85 inches, I think is the rumor we've heard.
 Put it into that and sell it for less.
 But the question now is, what do you sell it for?
 If it's $299, then suddenly the iPod Touch makes absolutely zero sense as a product.
 If you sell it for $399, suddenly you're not that far away from the bigger iPad, which
 you might as well buy that one.
 And it just, I don't know.
 I mean, even if it's $399, you're still at the same price point as the iPad 2.
 And I mean, I'd say unless you really want it for reading and holding in one hand, you're
 better off with the bigger screen.
 So it just seems to me that unless there's some really compelling feature that we don't
 know about, like if they're going to put in LTE coverage on the 7.85 and charge $299 for
 it, then that's a really exciting product.
 But again, then why would you buy an iPod Touch?
 Right, because basically if the iPad Mate was just the iPod Touch, which is a bigger
 screen, I mean, the specs are nice, A5, it's got a good battery, it's got a decent camera.
 If you just expand that, what are you going to charge for it?
 $350?
 That doesn't make any sense.
 Right.
 No, I really don't get it at all.
 And especially the, I mean, there are a bunch of different ways I guess they could go.
 You could add more storage and charge, they could have a, it could be $100 cheaper, but
 so you get more storage at $499 than you would get for the bigger screen.
 But it just seems like at this point, we're so used to Apple having single products in
 particular markets, where it's like if you want a tablet, you buy an iPad.
 And then the only question is, do you get more storage or do you get LTE?
 And those are pretty easy answers, or those are pretty easy questions for most people
 to answer, I think.
 But then when you introduce, you say, we have, at every price point you can think of, we
 have like three different devices, all of which kind of do something similar to what
 you want.
 Like you want a way to watch movies, here's six different ways to do it all for roughly
 the same price.
 That doesn't make that much sense to me.
 Right.
 And so now I just, I genuinely don't know what they do.
 I still think there is...
 There's clearly a seven inch market.
 Right.
 I mean, the Kindle Fire, the Nook, the Nexus 7, they're doing well enough, especially if
 you're not being Apple products in a tablet market.
 Sure.
 Kindle Fire especially is making headway.
 Yeah.
 It's something Apple's looking into, but they've now kind of made this really weird pricing
 structure where like, I don't know where it fits.
 Right.
 And it fits size-wise, I get that.
 I don't know where it fits in the price.
 Right.
 And this is why I think if they could have brought the new iPod Touch at $199, I think
 one, it would have sold like crazy.
 Right.
 And two, it would have left that $299 spot open for the iPad Mini.
 And again, we're talking about a product that may or may not exist and at the moment doesn't.
 But if it does, one of these two products that is going to be around that price point
 just shouldn't exist.
 I don't know which one it is.
 On a scale of rumored unicorns, I would put the iPad Mini a little more fake realistic
 than the Apple television set or a heads up display.
 Well, and especially given that a lot of the leaks and stuff that we're seeing for the
 iPad Mini came from the same place as the ones for the iPhone 5.
 Right.
 And every single one of those turned out right.
 Right.
 So we can definitely see an October event.
 Right.
 Yeah.
 So suddenly I buy the idea of the iPad Mini a lot more than I did before today because
 these leaks are just credible.
 They have to be.
 Right.
 But the problem is a $400 iPad Mini makes this little sense now that they have the $200
 Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire HD.
 Right.
 Well, then what do you price it?
 The iPod Touch is a 4-inch device that's $100 more expensive than the 7-inch Nexus 7.
 And I know that's kind of an Apple's to Orange's comparison, but that's a hard pitch to say.
 It's like, here's a tablet, here's a little MP3 player, this one's $100 more expensive.
 On the face of it, that's a tough thing to justify.
 And I just don't get why the iPod Touch starts at 32 gigs.
 Why not start at 16 gigs like the iPhone?
 Or 8.
 I think I bought an 8-gig iPod forever ago.
 The HD video doesn't make sense for that anymore.
 No, I guess not.
 Right.
 So, the last few questions, we actually had a private bet, the over or under how long
 this would take.
 You said 2 hours 22 minutes.
 Pretty close.
 We are like, we got three minutes.
 I do not want to elongate this in a false pattern.
 So I'm just going to go ahead and ask the last question, are you getting one?
 An iPhone 5?
 No.
 No?
 No.
 Because I think, for me, it's not as significant an upgrade as I need.
 And the thing for me is LTE is exciting.
 But I've kind of tracked this recently, and I've found that everywhere I am, everywhere
 I do anything, I have Wi-Fi.
 I live my life at home and in coffee shops and at the office.
 Why wouldn't you have it?
 There's just Wi-Fi everywhere.
 So LTE is nice.
 It's a huge upgrade, don't get me wrong.
 But it's not like this game changing, I have to go out and spend $800 on it to get it.
 Well, if you felt that way, you would have gotten an Android device a long time ago.
 Right, sure.
 And the rest of this stuff is, the body looks amazing.
 It looks considerably better in the videos we have than I thought it was going to look.
 And even the way they build it on stage, it just looks better than I thought it was going
 to.
 But that's, again, it's not such a giant leap forward for iOS and for the iPhone.
 It just doesn't seem like, if I had a 4, I would be salivating and ready to go pre-order
 this thing and get out.
 Because it's two performance enhancements, and from the 4, the 4S was big.
 And if this is equally big, it's meaningful.
 But for me now, there's nothing that makes me jump out of my seat and want to go buy
 one.
 So you get something else right now?
 What's the next best thing in terms of Windows Phone or Android?
 I'll probably wait.
 I think this fall, I'm good with my 4S, and I really want to see what happens with Windows
 Phone 8 when Windows 8 comes out.
 And if they can fill in these big app gaps that they have, I think it legitimately could
 be compelling.
 And the Lumia 920 is the prettiest, best-looking phone I've ever seen.
 And I want to buy that phone.
 It looks like an oversized iPod Nano.
 I'm just going to say it.
 I think you said it earlier, and someone else said it over there.
 It's just not nice.
 Not my line, but it's true.
 What about you?
 Are you buying one?
 I have an iPhone 4.
 Oh yeah, you have a broken iPhone 4.
 So I'm just going to literally just...
 It's gone.
 Dead.
 I'm pre-ordering now.
 It's still going to work.
 Maybe.
 It just shattered.
 I'm not looking down.
 I really do not want to look down right now.
 I'm really upset.
 Really scared.
 So you're buying one.
 Go get in line.
 This is me ordering right now.
 That's how you order iPhones.
 This is how all the TV shows do.
 Yeah, I like it.
 Building a firewall right here.
 So that's it for the show.
 We're going to be doing a broadcast special edition iPhone event.
 I wanted to call it the iPhone after party, but everyone yelled at me.
 I just did it though.
 So there.
 Fired.
 Big story today was the iPhone 5 that was much taller, thinner, pretty, but as we agree,
 kind of iterative.
 There was the iPod Touch, which is actually a very attractive device, however being a
 little overpriced.
 The iPod Nano, kind of a surprise.
 Not a watch.
 Still very good.
 Not a lot of excitement from Josh and Eli about the iPod Nano.
 Not a lot of excitement from anyone I've talked to.
 It's not a lot of surprises though, because we've heard so much about what's going on
 so far.
 So, iTunes 7 is next month.
 iTunes 11.
 iTunes 11, sorry.
 iTunes 10.7 is out today.
 Now.
 iTunes 11 next month.
 Correct.
 Rumor has it an event, but let's just assume that's not going to happen.
 This is the big thing.
 This is Apple's fall lineup.
 It's looking really good, but it's nothing too shocking, surprising, or revolutionary.
 So that's it.
 If you want to catch us on Twitter, I'm Onorosco, O-H-N-O-R-O-S-C-O.
 No E. Josh, you're welcome.
 I just said that.
 I forgot that already.
 I'm Pierce David.
 Pierce David.
 We've had on the show, in backwards order, Dan Seifert.
 His, what is his Twitter handle?
 DC Seifert.
 DC Seifert.
 We've had Nathan Ingram.
 Nate Ingram is his.
 We've also had Scott Lowe at the very beginning.
 God, it feels like we've done this forever.
 I think he's Scott Lowe.
 Scott Lowe is Scott Lowe.
 Brian Bishop is BC Bishop.
 Of course, you can catch the Verge Twitter handle at Twitter.com slash Verge.
 YouTube us, because we love YouTube.
 We love people following us on YouTube, including 90 Seconds on the Verge.
 I always have to pimp my own show.
 Every time.
 YouTube.com slash The Verge.
 You can catch us, of course, on www.TheVerge.com.
 I think I've thanked everybody.
 That's it.
 That's everybody.
 Thank you for watching.
 If you are still watching this, you are beautiful, sexy, wonderful people, and I love you so
 much.
 But I don't think anyone else is left.
 I can't top that.
 Yeah, really.
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