Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of F-Stops. I'm Jake Kastrenakes, executive editor of The Verge, here with our friend David Imel, Vergecast guest host. What's up, gamers? I'm back. And we've got a lot coming up today. We're going to geek out about smartphone cameras with Allison Johnson. Hayden Field will join us to talk about the AI safety meltdown this week. And we've got another installment of the lightning round. But first, I've got some stuff to talk about. We have a new season of Version History. The theme for this run of episodes is back to school. I love it. I'm like so hyped. The first episode is about the Oregon Trail.
I'm on an episode about — I don't know who came up with these ideas. I'm on the episode about overhead projectors, which when they told me that I was like, "Of course, of course we have to do overhead projectors." They bought an overhead projector. It's like I can't tell you guys how beautiful it is.
Yeah, it's — I miss them. David, you're on an episode about One Laptop per Child, which also like a beautiful piece of hardware.
I was surprised how much I loved that computer and how many of the ideas from that computer I wish were in modern laptops.
It's a very weird piece of tech history. Yeah. Okay, we have a trailer. Check it out.
What if I told you that for the last several decades, schools across the United States have required students to have a game console in class? You might have heard of it. It's called the TI-84 Plus.
Minesweeper, Tetris, Snake, Pong.
Drug Wars was the game. It also does math. This season on Version History, we're going back to school. Peak dysentery.
I like that idea. A two-in-one laptop.
You can just flip to any page in the book. This was the only technology available. So grab your Trapper Keeper, throw on the JanSport, open up a bottle of Ftopia, and check out Version History on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.
That was awesome. TI-84 Plus hitting this weekend. That's a good one.
Also, if you're listening to this early, some Verge staffers are going to be live streaming a playthrough of the Oregon Trail today, Friday, at 1:30 p.m. Eastern on our YouTube page. Check it out. It'll be really fun. We'll find out who's going to make it to Oregon, who lives, who dies, whether the emulator crashes while we're playing. It's going to be fun. You can follow Version History at Version History Podcast on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. All right, now it's time to talk about Apple. Senior reviewer Allison Johnson is here. Allison, welcome.
Hello. Thanks for having me.
I'm so excited. This is going to be an all-out camera geek out. The iPhone 18 Pro reviews hit earlier this week. Before we get into that, there's something perhaps more important that I want to talk about. Earlier this week on Monday, the Emmys, Apple CEO John Turnis is walking down the red carpet. He's looking sharp. He's in a tuxedo. He has an iPhone Duo in his breast pocket.
A reporter asks him a question. She wants to see it. Let's roll the clip.
Let's see. There we go. There we go.
I love it. They have my address. So, you're getting — you're not. Yeah.
Okay. Here's my question. Turnis versus Cook. What's the swag comparison? This is so different.
It's so weird to see the Apple CEO like dressed up and at a big event like this. Sometimes Tim Cook would show up for like a half second and just smile and wave and then he'd leave. It's very uncommon to see them actually engaging with people, showing things off, looking all cool. There are multiple photos of him at the Emmys, like looking like a movie star, taking photos with people. Ironically, with the iPhone 18 Pro, because the inner camera on the Fold is not good.
Well, funny enough as well, he turns the iPhone 18 Pro sideways even though it has the Center Stage camera to take the selfies.
That's right. He doesn't need to do that.
we'll give him a pass for that because it still looks better. It still looks better to do that.
I know that photo. It looks cool. He looks cool. I cannot imagine Tim Cook doing any of this.
The vibe is so different.
Like having a normal human conversation and interaction. Oh my god.
He also — he kind of has that like rockstar vibe when he walks around. Like even photos of him that have gone out recently of him like not at Apple Park, he's got like shades on and he's got like a jacket on and it's just a totally different energy.
So hopefully that means something in the future for Apple hardware. If you had told me there was going to be an Apple CEO who was like a normal human person who like could almost pass as cool,
I never would have believed it. I would have lost money on Polymarket there.
And he's the hardware guy, which makes it even cooler. He's responsible for a lot of the good hardware upgrades that have happened on the Apple laptops and stuff recently. So,
a successful first like two and a half weeks of CEO. I think that's the impression here.
Okay. Now, we'll talk about the iPhone 18 Pro. We'll get into it. Allison, your review dropped earlier this week. You were on the Vergecast earlier this week. You talked about it with V. David, we haven't had you on to talk about it. So, why don't we start off? I want to hear your thoughts. A couple big upgrades here. I think the variable aperture is probably the most important one.
You tested it out. Big deal. Not a big deal. Where do you fall on that spectrum?
When we say most important upgrade, I think it's probably more apt to say like flashiest upgrade because the changes that Apple made that are actually important in my opinion are in software, both in the pro controls that they added to the phone, which I think are very important because now you can do things like up to a second of long exposure. So you can get sort of a shutter speed, slow shutter kind of effect. You can get — god, there's so many things you can do with that. You can change the white balance. You can do all these things. And also they upgraded the image pipeline because their signal-to-noise ratio is better now because they have a bigger aperture. They have a — you know, the sensor is the same size but they felt comfortable enough doing less sharpening. I had a conversation with Apple about this. They said, yeah, we totally re-engineered that whole pipeline and I noticed it in my time testing it. I went to Arizona to shoot a bunch of photos with the phone and right out of the gate I was like, things look less plasticky, less oversharpened, and the color is just better and more natural both in the HEIF mode and in ProRAW.
Not really once in that entire process was I like, and I want to use the variable aperture.
But all of the other things I was like, yes, thank you. Thank you for adding these features.
Wait, I have so many questions about the color, about the sharpening, but on the variable aperture I think that's sort of where Allison landed too, which was Allison, like you mostly — you had it in auto and it was like mostly just shooting at the same f/1.8 that it always did.
Yeah. Which at first I was like, "Aha, gotcha, Apple." And when you think about it, it's like that lens has been optimized, you know, for that f-stop. And it's a little bit sharper there, I think. But there I think it does kind of illustrate that there are so few use cases where you're like, "Yeah, I would like to stop down the aperture on this teeny tiny lens in front of this teeny tiny sensor." They exist and it will behave that way in auto mode, but it's sort of in the — we kind of had to go looking for it. I was like, you know, lining up a group shot. I was like, "Okay, two of you need to stand here, or one of you needs to be back here," and then we got it to drop to f/4. Yeah. So the big updates are sort of hidden under this whole the aperture moves thing where it's like it is a brighter maximum aperture. We finally can control shutter speed in the year of our Lord 2026.
This is my question. Both of you are like — I think like very good smartphone photographers and like pretty deep in it.
I'm like, oh god, manual controls through software like this — like it is a lot. Do you find these to be usable? You're like, fine, great, give it to me, I will use it.
It's — this is very doable. Very — I find it to actually be more elegant of an implementation than a lot of other smartphone manufacturers do. Apple sort of redesigned the camera app a little bit so that a lot more is in that little extra menu that is just on the right side. The most annoying thing for me is that when you close the camera app, that goes back to the default and you have to change it every time and that's frustrating. But the settings for like shutter speed and things like that, they now have quick settings for on the top and you don't have to touch them if you don't want to, right? Like the idea for most of these smartphone manufacturers has always been we want a magic box that you press a button and it gives you the best possible photo. And we can talk a little bit more about the redesigned image pipeline and how that helps deliver the best possible photo. But I think that they actually did quite a good job of implementing pro controls for people who want access to them. And it's not — you don't have to go through a thousand menus. Like in the past, Apple made you go into the settings menu, like the Settings app, and then you had to go, you had to find Camera, and you had to tap on Camera, and they'd go deep into that, and then you'd have to change like — if you wanted to shoot JPEG instead of HEIF, you would have to change it from like most smallest file size to most compatible or something like that. And there's some of those settings still exist, but it is much easier now to just go into the submenu in the camera app itself and switch these settings. And that exists for shutter speed, that exists for things like white balance. I think it's a nice balance for both amateurs and pro photographers.
Allison, did you do a lot of playing with manual mode?
I did. And I, you know, I kind of like poo-poo shooting RAW on a smartphone a little bit where I'm like, I'll just let it handle — you know, it's going to do all the multi-frame compositing. I don't feel like I want to tinker with a RAW file from a smartphone too much. Other people, you know, mileage varies, but the shutter speed and having — you know, there's the exposure compensation that has been available, but kind of having that suite of controls. I will go in there and I will mess with them because I'm sort of like framing a shot and I'm like, okay, I can see how I want this and the phone is not quite behaving right. Like I can make two quick changes right here and I've got the photo like way closer to what I was envisioning rather than being like, well, I just will underexpose and maybe do something with it later. So I had a good time with them.
I was looking at your sample photos in the 18 Pro review and I was like — I was angry. I'm like, this is — how do you take this photo on a phone? Like this is like — I spent too much money on real cameras and I can't do this. I want to make you two talk about — because Allison, there was — there were shots fired there with your comment about people shooting RAW. Are they in the room with us?
David, you mentioned they improved the image pipeline. Are you still a RAW guy? Have they improved it enough that you're like — do these results show through in the JPEGs or the HEIFs? Or are you getting a meaning? Because I'm still assuming most people, most photos, even the photographers out there,
are going to shoot JPEG. Are you noticing the difference there, or is this just potential?
Actually, a lot. And I need to break something down for people because there is RAW which you can only access through third-party camera apps like Moment or Halide, and then there is ProRAW which is still — ProRAW has been such a contentious setting because when they first introduced it and up until now it was still quite compressed. Like it gives you a little bit more flexibility. It gives you a little more malleability in post, but for me, it still gave you the like really crunchy sort of plasticky smartphone camera look that we have pretty much always been plagued by. Annoyingly, you can pretty much only get the 48-megapixel mode through either using ProRAW or shooting in 48 megapixel through the default iPhone camera app. Most iPhone camera — most third-party camera apps like — or Moment Camera Pro 2, if you shoot RAW, you only get a 12-megapixel image, which is frustrating. And I went into this review — or like my review of the camera shooting through Moment Camera 2 initially because I always go straight to the RAW camera apps because I generally want the most control. I was just kind of messing around with this with the camera both in the HEIF mode and the ProRAW mode and I was just noticing like, oh, weirdly the color is better and weirdly that plasticky look is like not gone obviously and I still sometimes will go into like Lightroom and pull down on the sharpening a little bit, but it is much better than it used to be. And we have these like briefings with Apple after we have the phones but before the reviews go live where they can answer questions. And I was like, "Did you guys do something to the camera?" Because I feel like both in ProRAW and the regular HEIF mode, it just like the color is better and the sharpening is better. And they said, "Yeah, we felt that our signal-to-noise ratio has gotten good enough that we don't have to —" By the way, signal-to-noise ratio. I'm sorry, this is a lie.
We're at like the third-tier sub breakdown.
Yeah. I'm like, how deep should I go here?
That's what this segment is. I'm sorry and congratulations to every — No, this is what I want.
Okay, good. Okay, good. When you have a sensor, it's subdivided into hundreds of thousands of little photo buckets that capture photons, right? And the signal is how many photons get captured by each individual bucket and converted into electrical current which is then turned into brightness. That brightness signal is then demosaiced where the phone takes all of these adjacent subpixels and says based on the pixels around it and how much signal it received this is the color of what that pixel should be. However, there's a lot of different types of noise. There is things like shot noise which is basically like chaos. It is when there are photons flying around there is also electrical interference that is happening between these subpixels. Samsung has done a lot of engineering on this to create like subpixel gates between the photon buckets to make sure that there's less interference. There's a lot of engineering that goes into making less noise on a sensor like this. Things like backside-illuminated sensors are also made to cut down on noise. Anyway, the signal-to-noise ratio gets better when the sensor gets bigger because when those photo buckets, the individual pixels are bigger, they can receive more photons individually. This is why when smartphone cameras were originally like the first 100-megapixel or 200-megapixel Samsung smartphone camera, it looked freaking awful when you shot in 200-megapixel mode because you were taking a sensor that while bigger than we had had before was subdivided 200 million times. You know that is too much and you are not getting a good signal in each individual pixel. Now Apple is doing the thing that everybody else is doing where in regular HEIF mode it's taking that 48-megapixel sensor and it's making four pixels into giant — I don't want to say megapixels but like megapixels, ultrapixels, whatever, and they're taking all that signal converting into light but even on the 48-megapixel sensor the sensor is now big enough that you're getting enough photon signal that you're not receiving too much noise to actually say what the color of that pixel is supposed to be. So, all of that to say, Apple feels that their sensor is big enough. The bigger aperture on this camera probably also contributes to that, right? Because yeah, it's the same size sensor, but if the hole is bigger, you're still receiving more light. I don't — I think they say there's like a whole extra stop of light from that or something. And anyway, they took this information and they said, "Now that we're receiving all of this light data, we don't have to do as much computational photography." And what they had to do before is because you weren't receiving as much light information, you had to stack frames on top of each other because — I'm sorry. Should I stop or should I keep going? I might be — This might be too much. I'm sorry. I think the — So, they've done all of this, right?
Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Go.
And then the answer is that ProRAW is therefore able to deliver a cleaner image that is less processed.
Yes. Exactly. That is where the computational photography that happens here is basically saying we're not receiving enough light data. So we have to use computers to stack frames and do sharpening and noise reduction and things like that. And when you are — when you have physics on your side,
which happens by having a bigger sensor or having a wider aperture, you don't need to do this computational photography because the computational photography was invented because the sensor was too small. And so Apple went back to the drawing board and they said, let's re-engineer the way that we process the light information that's hitting the sensor and do less sharpening and things like that. And that's why the color and the sharpening is better.
So Allison, you are I think more of a JPEG/HEIF style shooter, which is to say not getting as much pure data as David is.
Are you seeing those changes in the JPEGs? Because that is where I think there has often been just a world's difference where with the RAW you always got this very, you know, unprocessed file and with the JPEG they just went crazy on it.
Mhm. Yeah, I think so. I think across my photos, like some of them still do have that kind of little over-the-top kind of HDR-ish look to them. Particularly with the ultra-wide, we know, which is a smaller sensor and that's its own thing. But yeah, I was just finding — and it was like kind of a cumulative thing where we went out for a morning and shot around the park and would take a photo and it was more of like, oh, okay, I got the photo that I wanted here. I didn't have to fight it as much, you know. That's what I was finding and just coming back to my photos at the end of a session and being like, "Yeah, no, that's what the light did look like and it didn't go crazy overboard on sharpening it up and all that." So, I think it's a subtle effect maybe to those who are not as steeped in all of this. But I think people will see it and appreciate it.
Yeah. The big question that I have yet to get an answer on from Apple is whether or not these processing changes will be passed down to older iPhones and I'm still waiting on an answer for that. So not sure.
Did you notice a difference in like color and that sort of plasticky effect? Because I felt it was better in my HEIFs as well. But I would love to get your take on it.
Yeah, I did. And it was — I'm thinking of like a particular situation where there's sort of like this beautiful like golden light that's kind of like reflecting off of a building and throwing some cool kind of shadows. And I think typically a smartphone will kind of be like — freak out a little bit and not quite know what to do. And it's sort of balancing for like what's true north here, like what's supposed to be white and then making it look a little crazy.
Neutral white balance kind of situation.
Yeah, it was just a little more — it was a little easier. I had to like, you know, get into the white balance settings. But once I got that, I was like, okay, it's behaving the way I want it to here with less friction. And that, you know, that came out in the JPEG, the HEIF. I thought colors looked pretty good running around, you know, New York. We got nice blue skies that were not crazy. I thought just a pleasant — I had a pleasant time with the photos I got.
Apple also — they expanded the Photographic Styles feature, right? Where you can now dial in these more — I don't know, these filmic sort of things like grain and texture. Allison, was that part of getting that color or is this like a whole separate thing on top of it?
So I — for my purposes I wanted to keep it all straightforward, you know, the like total default photographic style. But there are so many options now. I was like a little overwhelmed because we had that like — it's the new Photographic Styles that have that grid of dots and you're kind of — you can dial in like the undertone and then how aggressive the tone mapping is going to be. And this adds like some additional options below it for texture. And then there's like grain, which you can turn on and off. And the other ones you can kind of do sliders on. And then it like labels that photographic style with like the stuff you dialed in. So it'll be like rose gold soft skin. And I'm like, what do those words mean?
There are a lot of submenus now. It's kind of crazy.
You go into styles and then you have the style you have. Then you have to hit customize. And then after that there's palette and texture. And once you hit texture, then you have options for standard, soft skin, glow, film, and grain. And then on each of those, you have a slider. It's a lot. It's a lot of submenus.
I mean, this is powerful in a way, though. I've always found Apple's approach to this to be like — I've never understood that box. You drag it. It corresponds with nothing I've seen in any other photography editing app. It's like a little bewildering to me. David, we just did the Pixel 11 review together. They had this new feature called Camera Looks.
Where they would change the amount of computational photography they were doing. You could also dial in a look. I'm curious how these two things compare.
Yeah. The way I see it, Apple is getting on the train in some way in trying to make your phone be able to shoot these kind of filmic looking images, especially with its film setting and its grain setting, but they are one button that you would just then have this sort of nebulous slider for. So, it's not like a — I mean, it could be kind of a recipe in a way in that you could change your photographic style and then you could go in and you could turn the film setting on and you could dial 0 to 100. How much film do I want? Which is in my opinion, this is a very Apple thing to do where they take this kind of complicated idea and they just like compress it into a slider. And that I think is their way of getting on the bandwagon of we don't want you to use third-party film apps. We don't want you to buy a dedicated film camera. You can do all this on your iPhone. I will say the grain setting — I tried it a couple of times and I was looking just like you, Allison. I was kind of focused on what is the straight-out-of-the-box camera experience. So, I didn't play with it as much, but there are some samples online that I was looking at. And I think they need to make the grain size smaller or like the ability to make the grain smaller because as soon as you turn on the film setting and the grain setting, it looks like you're shooting like 800 to 1600 film, which is a problem every single phone manufacturer has. By the way, the Pixel does this, too. When you turn on the film setting, it's like, "Oh, it's film." It's really grainy, but I would like to just have that very subtle grain effect. So,
The other big new camera software feature is they added this reference image technology. Actually, it's not even a software feature. It's part hardware, part software. Allison, I truly — I don't quite understand this. I know it is to combat AI fakes.
Yeah, it's an entirely new — you know, we have C2PA, which is an idea to label images and metadata, you know, are they AI, not — how much stuff was added to it. This is kind of like Apple's stepping to the side and they're doing their own kind of thing here, which is — you know, at first glance in the keynote, I was like, I don't really understand this. This seems just like another version of C2PA, but it's actually — it's pretty complicated. When you, you know, have the phone in your hands, it's a setting you have to turn on in the settings — like Settings menu, Camera, turn on reference image, then it'll pop up as an option in the camera app. So, you have to be specifically taking a photo in this mode. You can only use the main camera in like 1x or 2x mode because the main camera sensor is actually like able to cryptographically sign these images like at the pixel level. So you take your photo in this mode and then in order to kind of like view the reference version of it, you have to send it up to the Private Cloud Compute. So that's like another thing you're pressing. It sort of processes it and comes back down. And then you get this version of the image that is basically like how it came off the sensor. And the example — the way they explained it was like a negative. You know, if you had taken a photo and you needed to show your editor like, here's the negative. Here's what it looked like before I made any edits. And it's a visual thing rather than — I mean you do get a card of like information about what, you know, the settings and the camera that took it. But it's primarily like you just kind of tap and it shows you the reference versus the processed version. And it's meant to kind of like — you know, right now it's a very narrow use case and a very narrow set of circumstances it could be used for. But I think the idea is like you — someone sends you an image, you see an image somewhere, you know, kind of imagine if you could just like tap it and see that sort of the negative version of it. That — and that's how I am understanding it.
This is like — it is so deeply thought through as a way to prove out the origin and veracity of an image and it is so wonky to execute. Like David, did you send somebody or have somebody send you a reference image? Like is this a thing that you experienced viewing?
I have not done this yet. I think it is quite smart and it is a very Apple thing to do at the same time where they're like we're supporting SynthID which is Google's version of having this invisible watermark, you know, in your image because the rest of the industry is starting to support SynthID. But we're also running up against that XKCD meme again where it's like there are 15 competing standards. Let's make one that universally — you know, but Apple — it's not universal. You have to use the iPhone. And Apple loves living in a world where we don't think about you at all kind of situation, you know, and so they're like, we're gonna do it our way. I think their way is actually pretty smart because the way that they talk about it as a digital negative and the reason that they talk about it that way is because when film photographers used to take photos and like have them in galleries or whatever, the only way to really prove that you were the photographer is that you had the negative, right? Like you took that negative, you printed it, whatever. If you have the negative, you're the one that took the photo. That's like very obvious. And it's a similar thing where it's like if it is on your smartphone, which is a thing that is encrypted by your facial data, you know, only you can unlock your phone, only you can get to the setting where you can tap it and show what came off the sensor. That actually, in my opinion, makes a lot of sense.
That is really interesting.
You know, it's a little — it's a lot harder to break. Like C2PA for example, it's a good idea in concept where it's like we're going to embed it in the metadata, but you know what breaks that? A screenshot.
And this is not breakable by a screenshot. So I think it's a great way for Apple to do it, but it also lives in the world where iPhones are the only things that exist. And I do think that Apple wants to convince people over a long period of time that the iPhone is gonna be the only camera that exists, you know, because to your point, Allison, it's a very narrow use case. This is really helpful for like photojournalists, right? You turn it on when you want to turn it on. If you're out documenting an important event, even in Apple's keynote, they show the way that they show the Apple reference images is a photo of a politician like doing some movement, you know? And so I think that if you're a photojournalist and you're taking photos with your iPhone, which is the ideal future that Apple wants because they don't see a future where dedicated cameras exist anymore because they convince you that the iPhone is the only video camera you need, the only photography camera you need, then it makes a lot of sense. But as far as this being a standard that the rest of the industry can use, it's just not. So, you know, I think that's why they had to also adopt SynthID.
Well, and Allison, you mentioned this in your review, like it doubles the file size.
Right. It's a dedicated mode. It doubles the file size. So, this simply is not a solution for the everyday photo. This is a proactive — yes, I need to prove that this is authentic. Which actually I think in that sense is like pretty interesting.
Yeah, it's an interesting way to think about it. I think unfortunately most of the images that get manipulated online that are either generated with AI or manipulated with AI were not images that people sought out to, you know, make sure people knew the source of or the authenticity of. However, going out and saying, "I'm going to sign all these images for this event" is an interesting way to think about it for sure.
Yeah, it feels a little bit like a proof of concept to me. You know, it's sort of like a trial run at like here, we're going to introduce this into the world. It's going to work on this one particular phone that is not going to be in the hands of many people, you know, for a while. And it makes more sense to me to think of it that way because otherwise you're like, I have to go into a different mode every time I want to prove a photo is real. Like that's wild.
I want to talk about phone cameras more generally to wrap this up, which is the — I think the headline feature if you were to ask what the biggest upgrade to the iPhone 18 Pro is, right? Like it's variable aperture, right? That is the —
That's what Apple wants you to think. Yes. I think that that's actually it.
And then in reality, it's actually there's all of these like this world of smaller but impactful camera upgrades underneath. Both of you are big smartphone camera people. I'm curious in what do you actually want to see next, right? You have carte blanche to change the iPhone camera for the next generation. Like where is your head at? Is it that we need hardware improvements? Is it more of this software stuff? Because I think all of these companies have this philosophy and they're kind of just chipping away at it. But what actually is it that you are looking for to make these cameras better? Allison, I'm curious where your head is at here.
Okay, how much time do we have? I want a 1-inch sensor.
One-inch main camera sensor. They exist. They're in the world. I know it changes everything about how Apple has made cameras.
An upgraded — the telephoto camera is much better than it was and I go to it a lot. But just even put a bigger sensor behind that one, you know, why not? I love it. Maybe — I played with Vivo's attachment telephoto lenses like earlier this year. They are so fun. They are little tiny like actual like telephoto — they call them like converters I think and you have like a special case that's on the phone. You kind of just attach the lenses to the front of it. I thought it was the goofiest looking thing in the world and I loved it so much by the end of the day I was like I want every phone camera to have this. So I think I do want hardware. I want like a grip. You know, there are third-party options. And maybe there's something good out there I haven't tried, but I just think of like the Xiaomi photography kit and how that just feels kind of like a sleek, easy to apply kind of solution. And it's just as easy to be like, you know what, I'm not taking serious photos right now. I'm going to leave all that behind and just have my phone. So that's it. Apple could get working on that right now.
I think that is so interesting though that like at the end of the day, it's like make the hardware better, right? It's — hardware is still the biggest single factor in or cheat code to like just level this up. Just level this up. I mean, I look at the photos that come out of those 1-inch sensors on some phone cameras and oh man, it's night and day. They look very, very good. David, same question to you, but I am gonna last second change this on you. If it's not going to be hardware, right? If we're in the realm of software, which I feel like is where your brain often is, is toying with things, where does that change need to happen to improve things going forward?
Where I think that Apple is falling a little bit behind is in low light at the moment. They can still, you know, they get a lot of flak for making dark low-light photos look like daytime.
And there are ways that they can change that. There are, you know, you can just drop the exposure in the software if you want, but Google years ago got really good at computational astrophotography. And I know this is a very specific like use case and it doesn't have to be astrophotography, but the one area that I felt was a little bit lagging behind was the long exposure night photography modes. Because there's like a low-light mode built into the iPhone and handheld you can do up to 3 seconds but it is quite noisy if you do that and you have to have a tripod and Google has made so many advancements in being able to do handheld astro modes or like super good low-light modes that I think if Apple spent a little bit more time focusing on that or you know I want to say making the sensor bigger because then you don't have to do as much of that.
Or as in this — they made the aperture wider, right? And so that helps a little bit with those low lights.
Yes. And that does help. I think like I don't hate the idea of a variable aperture. I think that that's what people are sort of getting mixed up about is like yes, I don't think it's incredibly useful where we are right now, but everyone wants a 1.0-type sensor like Allison said. And Sony's biggest problem because Sony is the company that is using these 1.0-type sensors the most is that they don't have a variable aperture and because of that almost no photo you take is in focus. Everything is blown out. For some reason they have not put like any work into the software experience of actually like making those take good photos even though they have the hardware for it. So I think something that everyone has said basically in these reviews is in the future when Apple makes a 1.0-type sensor in their phone, the variable aperture is going to be really helpful, you know, and like what they're doing and their engineering with it of like it automatically changing without you having to change it, but you can also manually change it yourself.
That's super good. I see this as like a test bed that they're currently like playing with because whether it's next year with the rumored iPhone 20 or you know an iPhone Ultra or something like that. And we could get in and I know we're kind of like short on time, but I just want to mention that the iPhone Handoff feature that they announced where that lets you use one phone number for multiple iPhones in my opinion is because people want to use the iPhone Duo, but the cameras are just way worse. And so now we are entering this world where it's like just like you should own an iPad and a MacBook and an iPhone, you should also own an iPhone Pro as your camera.
And a Duo as your fun phone.
Oh my gosh. I mean, I have — I've seen people on the subway carrying two iPhones, but it's usually an old work — it's not — or a work phone. I've seen somebody with like a busted-up iPhone 5 and like a brand new like modern iPhone because dude, the iPhone 5 took some nice photos.
