Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of phones that look like phones. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am decluttering, starting to. Anyway, so it looks like my wife and I are going to be moving at the end of October, which means that I have now six weeks to get most of the things out of my house. And I would say like I'm not a packrat or like a hoarder person in general, but I do accumulate things. Part of that is just the nature of this job. There's a lot of like iPad boxes and random accessories lying around in the basement near me and a lot of that needs to get shipped and a lot of that needs to get thrown away. But I just, I need a moment like a few times a year to just really be like, 'Okay, time to get rid of most of the things that I own.' It's a very productive moment. It's a moment I actually really enjoy. I should probably do it more often. So, I have six weeks now to essentially declutter, pack up, and move. Sometime in the near future, I suspect I'm going to be doing this podcast from an entirely new place.
But that is not what we're here to talk about today or any of the days for the next six weeks. We're here to talk about Apple. So, it's Apple review season. We have lots of new devices. Our team has been testing the new devices. And this is one of the most interesting gadget moments of the year. Not necessarily because the Apple products themselves are so interesting, but because this is a moment to kind of take stock of the whole gadget world. This isn't the end of gadget season. We're about to have Meta Connect. We're about to have some interesting Amazon hardware news, I suspect, in a couple of weeks. There's a lot of stuff left to come, but this is kind of the end of phone season in a certain way. It's also a good time to just take stock of where we are, how Apple is doing, and whether or not any of these gadgets are still moving forward in an interesting way. So, that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to have Allison Johnson, V, and Jake Castanak is on. They've been reviewing the devices. They have lots of thoughts. I don't know anything about how they feel about these devices yet. So hopefully we're gonna get some fireworks. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I just saw like 12 more things that I need to throw away and post for free on Next Door. By the way, posting stuff for free on Next Door. Incredible. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
Welcome back. All right, we got to start with iPhones. We have people who have used the iPhones. Hello, people who have used the iPhones. Allison Johnson's here. Hi Allison.
Jake Castanakis is here. Hi Jake.
Jake, in two weeks you have debuted as an Apple Live blogger and you have debuted, I believe, as an iPhone reviewer.
What a glow up for Jake this year.
I know it was fun. It's, you know, due to everyone else being unavailable, a lot of people thought really hard and said, 'I guess, I guess Jake is available.' And that's how I got the Vergecast hosting gig. That's how I got this iPhone reviewing gig.
I mean, honestly, this is the life. So, if I have this right, Jake, you reviewed the base iPhone 17.
And Allison, you have some or all of the phones, but you've mostly been doing the iPhone Air review, right?
Yeah. Yeah. That's been my main gig.
Okay. So, this is good because I actually think, and you should both feel free to tell me I'm wrong and correct me, I think you have the two most interesting phones of the year by a mile, but for wildly different reasons, and we should just get into it. So, I think we have to start with the Air, which I think is probably the phone about which I have the most questions, if that makes sense. Like, it is the wildest of the wild cards of these phones so far. So, Allison, you've been using the thing, you've reviewed the thing. Hit me with it. How do you feel? How's the iPhone Air experience been?
Oh boy, I feel pretty much like I anticipated I would. So, I should say that I reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge earlier this year. It's kind of the same idea. It's a phone except thin. And the experience of using that and the iPhone Air is you're sort of wowed right at the beginning and you're like, 'Oh my god, this is so thin. It's so light. I feel like I'm going to break it.' You get used to that. You carry it around. And the thing that kind of sticks with you is the weight. Like, it'll fit into pockets and little nooks and crannies of the bags I carry that normally I'm like trying to jam a phone into. And every time it does that, I'm like, 'Oh, that was nice.' But the thing that kind of sticks with me is just sitting and holding it and scrolling and my hand doesn't get as tired and I don't have such a great weight resting on my pinky. You know, it's the little things. It's hard to describe it and convey it without someone picking it up and holding it. If you can do that, I encourage you to. But that's my big takeaway.
This is one of the challenges of this phone, right? Because I think like you look at the specs and like yeah it's thinner and yeah it's lighter, but the numbers are relatively small to the extent it's not like, you know, the regular iPhone weighs six pounds and this is suddenly much smaller. Like it's just a slightly smaller iPhone, but you're saying the differences there do add up to something meaningful.
They do. And I went through the same thing. You look at the numbers, you're like, 'Is this really going to be that big of a difference?' And you pick it up and hold it, you're like, 'Oh, it really is.' And I think it just comes down to we are so attuned to like every gram that a phone weighs because we carry them and use them all the time and there's just sort of a, we've settled on like this is roughly how much a phone weighs and you pick this one up and you're like, 'Oh, it's...' I don't know. Okay, I do know. You have had this experience of like picking up a toddler like day after day and you're like so used to how heavy they are. Then you pick up a newborn, you're like, 'Oh my god, I'm going to like toss this child into the air.' Same deal. It's like toddlers.
Interesting. So, this really pours cold water on a theory I've had for a long time, which is that actually what I want Apple to do is make a bigger phone with like bruising battery life and that is completely indestructible. And actually, what you're making me think is maybe the lesson learned here is that that actually isn't a good idea because we're so attuned to it that if you made it bigger, it wouldn't just feel not better, it would feel like actively worse.
Yeah. And I will add to that. So, you know, spoiler alert, battery life is not super great on the Air. We sort of anticipated that. It's not a disaster, but there's the MagSafe battery pack that Apple kind of reintroduced like specifically for the Air.
Jake was very excited about this on the podcast last week.
Jake loves a battery pack. I love it. Love making a phone bigger with more accessories.
Well, that's the thing. It's like you can think of it as a modular phone where you're like this is kind of how it is by itself, but then you slap a battery pack on it. But the thing is the battery pack itself is light and thin. You put it on the phone and you use it for a minute and I'm like this is too heavy. Like this is heavier than a Pro. It doesn't feel good and I just want to leave it here until it's charged and then take this thing off of it.
Yeah, there's definitely a real like we keep telling people go like touch it and try it and pick it up and part of me is like that might actually be terrible advice because like maybe you shouldn't know how much thinner and lighter your phone could be unless you're prepared to spend the money on the thinner and lighter phone.
You know the reaction I've gotten, it's kind of a negative one at first I think from people who are not really expecting, like my husband, he's like, 'I'm gonna break this. I don't like that.' Like I heard that a couple of times and then after you've used it a little bit, you're like, 'Okay, okay, I feel better with this. This is nice.'
Does it feel fragile at all?
I wouldn't say it does. Like it feels solid. I did have it like sitting on the ground and my four-year-old was like stomping around the room and I had a like, 'I hope he doesn't stomp right in the middle of his phone.' Like I would not normally think that of a normal phone, but it's something that sort of crossed my mind more often using this. But at no point was I like, 'This feels so fragile. I'm going to break it.'
Okay, that's good news. I'm glad to hear that because I think yeah, one of my worries would be that I would end up treating this thing like a precious object because they kind of want you to think it is a precious object. And that's just not the right relationship to have with your phone. I think like these things are so utilitarian and so ubiquitous that having something you have to baby is actually really annoying in my humble opinion. But you mentioned battery life and I think that the two trade-offs we expected coming into this were going to be battery life and camera question mark because there's only one and we have a lot of thoughts about it. Let's start with battery life. What's the actual situation like?
Battery life, where I've landed is, and I've only used this thing for a week, but it seems to me it's in, if there's a spectrum of like acceptable battery life on a brand new phone, it's in that spectrum, it's on the low end.
So depending on the phone you're trading in.
Wait, can I just pause you? Actually, this is... Can we just do a little exercise right now? Okay, I want all three of us to just say out loud what you think minimum acceptable battery life is for a smartphone. Like, how often do you need to charge your phone in order for it to be fine? Jake, you go first.
So, my current phone that I use day-to-day is a Pixel 8. And if it hits 20%, it goes into low power mode. And it drives me crazy because it turns the high refresh rate screen off. Everything goes into dark mode. Everything gets chuggy, you know, starts slowing down. If it hits 20% and I'm in my day-to-day, that's when it's too low.
So, I think bare minimum is a phone that is above 20% power when I go to bed.
Okay, I like that. Allison, what do you feel like your number is?
Yeah, about the same. Like I need to get through my day and if I see that 20%, you know, it turns red. It gives you a mean notification.
Yeah, the iPhone really gets really alarming about it when you get 20%.
And every time I look at the phone, you know, you see the percentage go down and it's still angry at you. So yeah, I agree with that.
Okay. It's funny. I actually think we're all almost in exactly the same place, which is really helpful. So the reason I ask is because I've been using the iOS 26 betas all summer and like beta software is famously just crushing to phones. So like I don't hold it against the betas when they crush my phone's battery, but they have. And so I've gotten to the point where now I'm getting to 20% at like 4:00 in the afternoon. And like the difference that that makes in like my psyche is so much more substantial than I am willing to talk about. Like that feeling of like, okay, I have to run out to do an errand and there's like an actual nonzero chance my phone battery is going to be dead before I get home because I have to use CarPlay to get there. I have my grocery list on my phone and I need to get back. So I'm going to like use this device. It's 4:30 in the afternoon and I feel like my phone might be dead before I get home. That is unacceptable. And so I think I should be able to charge it every night and never hit low power mode, I think is a really good way of thinking about it. So, does the iPhone Air hit that? Does it at least hit that threshold?
It mostly does. So the...
The sigh at the beginning of that sentence that I don't like at all.
It's just testing a battery. There's so many factors and so many things and especially in a period where you're setting up a phone from scratch and using it, the first two days are just kind of a nightmare. So the days where I went really hard on the battery, had like a ton of, you know, more than five hours of screen on time, I was in the back of an Uber for an hour, all this stuff, like I was getting to that 20% by dinner time and that was stressing me out and I was like, do I put the battery pack? Do I charge it? Do I leave the battery pack on while I'm making a phone call? I didn't like that. When I've had, and that was a lot more out and about and travel, when I've been at home on Wi-Fi and I'm just kind of doing normal stuff and it's more like a three hours of screen on time day, it's been much more acceptable where it's in the 30s by bedtime. So didn't see the low power mode. I breathed a sigh of relief. But for a brand new phone that does not feel great, you know.
And that's the kind of thing that's like this is the best this battery is going to be. It is not going to ever be any better and a year from now, what's that going to look like, you know?
Yeah, Jake, that description of the battery sounds like it does not hit my threshold. Does it hit yours?
No, I agree with you because that's exactly where my two-year-old phone is, right? If I push it hard, I'm going to see low power mode. On a normal day, it's winding down, but it's fine. But that's fine. It's two years old.
You got to worry. That makes me concerned about how that's going to be on the long term.
Yeah. Yeah. And this is like, if you're not going to hold and look at your phone, the hell's the point of buying the fancy one? You know what I mean?
I don't think, like I just don't think the iPhone Air is like the gentle user's iPhone to begin with. So I think it's a tricky, like the self-selecting group of people who is going to buy this phone are going to be the people who maybe are hit the hardest by the battery limitations.
Mhm.
But to some extent, that's physics, right? Like it is what it is. I don't know how much there actually is to do to solve it. Like there's only so much space inside of the phone. The camera is the other one. What's been your verdict on the camera?
The camera I'm a little more okay with, with the asterisk that you know it is a single 48-megapixel camera. Very capable in good light. You know it's hard to buy a phone with a bad camera these days. You do get like a two-times crop zoom mode. You get the new selfie camera on the front, which is very cool and nice.
Does that work by the way? Just random digression. Does the thing where it'll do the landscape selfies, it'll do the crop selfies because it has the square sensor. Like does that all work as advertised?
It does. You need, the thing we learned is that you need at least four people in the frame, like moving into the frame and looking at the camera to trigger it where it's going to go landscape mode.
Which makes me take selfies with that many people.
I don't... I'm like, I don't have that many friends. Like what?
Yeah, kind of rude of Apple. But it is cool. It does some cool stuff. But the thing I miss on the Air is the ultrawide. You know, the Samsung Edge has an ultrawide. It is a little bit thicker and bigger. But that's just one of those things you can't like computational photography your way out of. Like if I can't back up in a room, that's it, right? You're just doing one of these where you're like leaning all the way back. So there's a few situations you get into where I'm like, 'This is a thousand-dollar phone and I can't do this. This doesn't feel quite right.'
Yeah. Yeah. And those trade-offs are always easier to stomach when you're paying less money. This is like what we talked about last week with the folding and flipping phones. It's like it's one thing to be like, 'Oh, you get fewer cameras for fewer dollars. That makes sense.' But here is the expensive one. It does less stuff. And you're like, well, that doesn't compute quite the same way in my head. Jake, you've also gotten to use the selfie camera and you, as everyone knows, are the most prone selfie taker at The Verge, I would say.
If you were like, who is taking the pictures of themselves the most often? It's Jake and it's not close.
I have a ring light set up in every room just in case I need to take some photos.
You just have one attached like with a chest strap at all times.
I'm constantly slacking you these photos when I'm cooking dinner. Yeah.
How have you found the new selfie cam? Because it's the same one across all the models, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. I did side-by-sides with the 17 and the 16, and quality-wise, the selfies look identical, right? Like I don't think a lot has changed in the character of the selfies. It really just is this trick where it just goes sideways automatically for you. You don't have to... I'm a little torn. Like on one hand, I did not personally find turning my phone sideways to take a landscape selfie all that difficult. On the other hand, selfies by far are shot in portrait, right? People are holding their phone upright. And Apple has now made it easier to get everybody in the frame while you're doing that. They have fully dummy-proofed the selfie. And you know what? It works. So I don't think this is going to be necessarily like revolutionary for everybody. I don't think your selfies are going to look better. Is it going to make it slightly easier for a lot of people to take selfies? Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. I think dummy-proof is like the story of the iPhone's camera. As we've, you know, talked about many times, their whole thing is basically how do we make it harder to take bad pictures, which I think is a good and noble goal, but is maybe not the only goal that a camera manufacturer should have.
Yeah. I mean, if you're a person who wants to take creative photos or, you know, quote-unquote great photos, it's, you know, maybe it's not what you want. But I do think, you know, we've been doing selfie cameras for well over a decade now. And this is the first time I can really think of a major phone being like, hey, maybe we should optimize for the main way that people shoot selfies. And you know what? That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I buy it. So Allison, just to cover off on the Air here, where do you land in terms of like, I'm just a person. I have an iPhone 13 that is like on its last legs. It's time for me to upgrade and I'm just earnestly trying to decide which iPhone to buy. I'm not like coming to it with any preconceived notions. Who is the Air the right phone for?
This is a weird one. So, if you have an iPhone 13, I would infer about you that you like to hold on to your phone, you don't want to be going into an Apple store every two years be like, 'I'll take the new iPhone, please.' The iPhone Air is not for that person. I think the battery is going to run down faster. I think you're just going to run up against the limits of what it can do sooner, I think, than a Pro or maybe even the regular. So this doesn't feel like a phone for a person who wants to kind of set it and forget it. The way I've come around to thinking about it is that it's a little bit of a statement. It's sort of for a person who's like, you know what, phones are huge. I don't need all that. I don't like all that. I would just rather exist with a smaller, lighter phone. I'm fine having this battery pack on me all the time or I am always near a power outlet and it's not a problem to just, you know, top off the battery throughout the day. It's kind of a leisurely, comfortable way to live with your phone.
I think there is a cohort of iPhone mini loving people who are screaming at their headphones right now saying, 'You just described the reason they should have kept making the mini.' And to all of those people, just know that I agree with you.
I know. And to my iPhone mini friends, this is not a small phone. It is a big phone with small phone energy. It is still like, you still have to reach across the screen. It's lighter. It feels nicer in that way. I can fit it in the front pocket of my jeans, which is how I carry my iPhone mini. But it's just, it's not a small phone. So, I'm sorry everybody.
Yeah, that's very big phone with small phone energy is actually I think a very good way to think about it. But yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see how many people are willing to make the particular sacrifices you have to make, I think especially on battery life, in order to get the size and shape of the thing. And I have not yet bought an iPhone this year. There's always still time, but I need to hold the Air before I make a decision on whether it's time to get rid of the 16 and move up.
All right. So now let's switch gears to you, Jake, because I think this year for the first time in a while, my sense coming out of the event was that the base iPhone was going to be the right iPhone for most people in that same like, I'm just looking to upgrade my phone. I have no preconceived notions. I just want a good iPhone. The 17 looked coming out like it had all the right upgrades. The price was good. It seemed like it was closer to being the one than it has been in a while. How does it feel after testing? Is that still where you land?
Oh, yeah. I tried living with the iPhone 16 for a week before I reviewed the 17 and it was driving me crazy. Right. The always-on screen is such a dramatic, essential upgrade. So it's such a critical part of a phone that it's kind of bamboozling that it has not been part of the standard iPhone for so long, right? It debuted on the Pro in 2022. And, you know, the reason it's remained a Pro exclusive until now is because it's a major selling point. And I think it's so major that for the past several years, I would have told anybody like, 'Yeah, like the Pro is that's so important. You should spend money on the Pro.' Now there's a $300 price gap and you're getting the best features. You're getting the always-on display and it's a high refresh rate screen. It feels like a completely different phone than the iPhone 16.
Yeah, it feels like in terms of sort of obviously great things it doesn't do. The only real thing I can think of is the camera, right? Like are there sort of big things you feel like it's still missing?
I think that's the story here, right? There's always been like a pretty big gulf between the two and I think there's often been essential stuff in the Pro line and now it's, right, the main camera is a little bit nicer on the Pro, that's fair, there's a telephoto camera on the Pro, that's cool, I like telephoto. But I think that's it, right? Like it has a cool new redesign. You can't get this one in orange, right? No one is going to know you have a brand new iPhone.
Which to be clear is not nothing. Like if we have learned one thing in the last seven days, it's that iPhone aesthetics matter an awful lot to people and the addition of a new color was a big deal. Like especially a loud new color that screams this is a brand new iPhone, that matters to people.
I do think there's something there, right? If you look at this phone, it looks the exact same as every iPhone has for the past like six years, right? And so if you're upgrading from an iPhone 11, you're not going to be able to tell the difference. You're going to be like, I replaced my phone with the same phone, which maybe feels like a bummer, even if the changes inside are enormous.
Was that the Sage one, by the way?
It is the Sage one. The Sage Love for people watching this on YouTube.
I hate doing this. Can you just hold it up? This is the one Allison said she was so taken with at the event, and I haven't actually seen.
Yeah. Yeah. No, let me show you this.
How do you feel about the sage?
Beautiful. The sage is a fantastic color. It looks really, really nice. It's one of the best iPhone colors in a long time.
It is really nice. It's very, it's like a quiet color, but really nice looking, which I really appreciate. Like it doesn't...
Saturated enough. It's not like...
Yeah. It's not a whisper of...
Yeah. Finally, Apple did colors instead of just like, I always think of Apple's color scheme as they just like put the iPhone down next to a can of paint and then ship it to you. This one they actually, they painted the things this way. It's very exciting.
It looks really good. God.
So, having used the 17 now, Jake, what are the downsides? What do you not like about the 17?
What I... I mean, again, I'm just going to keep complaining about notification management on iOS, but like that's not... No, nobody's here for that, right? If you want an iPhone, you like, it's still an iPhone. It's great. No, I truly, the biggest issues that I had with the iPhone 16 have been mitigated, right? They were the screen. I don't think I have major pro... like I don't think there are major flaws. I don't think there are major restrictions that are only... Right. Like I don't know. Are there some ProRes features I can't get? I couldn't even tell you. That's fine. Like I don't need to shoot in ProRes. That's fine.
Can I just say the fact that that question is really hard to answer is so exciting and such a big deal for the base iPhone because it's like, Allison, you and I have been going through this for years where it's like, okay, I have a list of things on each side and I have to try and explain to you whether this tiny upgrade to the hardware and this new button and this tiny new thing in the camera, all of that adds up to you should, you know, spend a few hundred more dollars and get a new phone. We just don't have to do that anymore, right? Like, and that's the thing with so many of these things like V and I are going to talk about the watches later, but I think what happened with the watches was they were basically like the base one is a great one and then for a little more money you get the health stuff and it's like that is a completely understandable decision, but there's nothing missing from the base model. And it feels like the iPhone for the first time in kind of as long as I can remember, there's nothing missing on the base iPhone.
Yeah, it doesn't feel like you're putting up with something and Apple's being like, well, if you want that, you really got to pay a few extra $100, right?
Um, Jake, are you like a ProMotion guy, 120 Hz? Can you see the difference and it bothers you kind of deal?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think like once you get used to that, it's very hard to go back. It's like even after a week with the standard model coming from a 120 Hz display, everything felt so like sluggish.
My iPhone 16 is sitting here and it's hearing you and it's really upset by all of this. I just want you to know you've been hurting the feelings of my still very new iPhone.
I don't know how you're living with that thing. It's, I seriously like, it's hurting my productivity not having a screen that's on. Like it really is.
