There's an opportunity here to really do something really big, you know, and it's exactly what we did.
So, I know you've been listening to a really incredible conversation between Jaws and John Ternus and myself and special guest Mark Spoon, and we've been covering this event on techraar.com, but make sure that you see the rest of this conversation back on Tom's Guide. So, let's talk about the iPhone Pro, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, which might be divisive because of the new design. It is a distinctly different look than I've seen on previous iPhones. And I'm kind of curious about the process and who's driving design decisions now? Like where is this? You know, I think that previously with Apple, we had this sense that, you know, Johnny IV was kind of like drawing every design and it was all kind of coming out and maybe it was a partnership and Tim Cook and previously Steve Jobs were like, 'Yeah, that's a design.' But I feel like now we don't entirely and I can see Jobs is like, 'You have no idea what you're talking about.' But are we hearing all this stuff? Well, I guess what I'm wondering is where does that inspiration come from? Like because this is, you know, such a distinctly new look and I'm, you know, what's the germination of that? Is it purely about function form following function or is it truly about a new aesthetic?
Look, we started the whole keynote yesterday, the film with a Steve Jobs quote, right? Design is more than how something looks. It's how it works. And we go through a tremendous amount of effort to create an experience for how our products just work. You've heard that for years. In a way that is way beyond what our competitors do because we have this incredible team of incredible hardware engineers, including our ASIC, you know, our silicon engineers, incredible software engineers, incredible services. We work together on these concepts. We work together on what we're trying to create because we need to create an integrated experience. This isn't something where John creates something and hands it off to Craig and then Craig takes it from there and you know it's like this is an integrated experience because how it works is what's most important to us. That Apple magic you've heard us say for years and of course how it works also influences how it looks or how it works is influenced by how it looks. And we're pretty jazzed. These products not only work amazingly well, they look really cool. But that's all part of an integrated experience. It's all part of one influencing the other because form and function are integral to each other.
Yeah. And I mean we're very lucky to have the best design team in the world. And it's, you know, we work together from the very beginning. This is not a one side does one thing and then sends it to the other one. You know, for us it's like from the blank sheet of paper, it's working together, design and hardware and manufacturing and software and HI, like everybody kind of working together to figure out how these products are going to come together. So it's and it's always been that way honestly.
Just fair to say then that sort of like sometimes you're like, 'This is our goal, you know, we really want the phone to do this thing' and you're kind of talking with the design team and they're like, 'We can envision this is how that would look to achieve that goal.' Is that...
Well, the goal, I mean, it's kind of we talk together about what the goal is. It's not like one team goes to another and says this is the goal go make it happen. Everybody is working together to figure out what that goal is. And as I said before with, you know, by pushing so hard in one direction with the iPhone Air it really liberated us to say let's make these pro phones like the most pro phones we can they can possibly be and so how do you do that?
Like but like Jim said, by a lot.
By a lot really, that was the way we looked at it. It wasn't like how do we make these, you know, a little bit better, you know, these increment better. It's like this gives us a chance, there's an opportunity here to really do something really big, you know, and it's exactly what we did. I mean, the performance in these things is just crazy.
And it's through multiple vectors. It's through performance. It's through cameras. It's through battery life. It's through the, you know, the overall kind of product and durability. It's all these things to make this the most amazing pro tool that anybody could want.
But when it comes to materials, I think one of the most interesting things is the choices, the choice that you made in this particular case because it was just two generations ago that titanium was the key selling or one of the key selling points for the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. It was in the commercials, right? But now you've made the switch to an aluminum unibody design. So why the switch and why was that important?
Well, so we, you know, we let the product guide the material decisions. We try to pick the best possible material for the product and that we're trying to achieve. And in this case, there were two just undeniable, you know, wins for aluminum. One, we wanted to go after performance. And so a big part of performance and obviously you have to start with incredible silicon which good news we have that right. But to have great especially sustained performance you want to have really good and efficient thermal design of the product. And the custom alloy that we use, the aluminum that we use has 20 times better thermal conductivity than the titanium that we previously used. So it really spreads the heat effectively. So if we wanted to get the most performance out of the phone that was the right material.
And not feel hot at the skin.
Right. Exactly. And then the other big advantage with the aluminum because as you can see we're bringing in more material for all that conductivity and for that durability it's a lower density material than titanium. So in the same kind of form factor it ends up being quite a bit lighter. And then of course you can leverage that lightness put in some more battery. So it all kind of builds, you know, one thing builds off of another but fundamentally there was no question that aluminum was the right material for this.
Without a doubt. And then the icing on the cake is it allowed us to anodize it. Right. So a lot of fun colors. Look, for years we've had pro customers say, 'Hey, how come the other part of the line gets all the fun colors, you know, and we don't?' And it's like, 'Okay, you want a fun color? How about cosmic orange, baby?' And...
You can make the case that like the pros now are like the fun phones, right?
They're all fun. They're all fun.
I mean, it does lead perfectly into the next question, which is kind of like we're dropping one premium color, which is black, which a lot of people consider, oh, that's, you know, the premium. So, how did orange become the new black? And I will look, I'm going to be honest with you. I never thought I liked orange, but I kind of, all right, I'm gonna admit I kind of like that orange. So, I'm just curious. How did that decision happen? And was there any concern about dropping a color that some people might say, 'Well, that's what I want to show. I'm carrying premium.'
We've had different shades of dark for years, right? We know people want it dark, right? And we got deep blue. It's gorgeous. Right. So before you get hung up on the fact it's not black, it's like it's gorgeous, right? And so people who want a dark color, the deep blue is fantastic. For people who love that classic silver, which we, you know, we know there's a group that likes that. We have classic silver. And for people who want a fun color, we got cosmic orange. So we think we've got the bases covered there. And we feel really good about that. And as John talked about, look, we got the best design people on the planet. They're really good at this, right? They showed us these and we're like, yeah, that's awesome.
So, what about just going back to the performance real quick? I think with the A19 Pro paired with the vapor chamber cooling, obviously you're not the first to do so-called vapor chamber cooling, but I feel like your approach is different than what's been tried before based on how you guys explained it during the keynote. So, just maybe just talk about that a little bit because I think you're claiming 40% better sustained performance versus just the iPhone 16 Pro just like one generation ago. So, how does that work? How did you make that happen?
Yeah. So I think if you think about, you know, like I said before, you think about performance starts with the SOC. And of course, if you can push on efficiency, that's always going to benefit and we have incredible efficiency. But then as you put power into the part and you're doing a heavy workload, maybe it's a game, maybe it's Apple intelligence, maybe it's camera work, you start to generate heat and you need to kind of extract that heat from the SoC. And so the more you can spread it across the device, you know, it's different if you think about a Mac, you might have a fan and you can blow hot air out. When you're thinking about a phone, it's all about how efficiently you can spread it. And so what a vapor chamber does is it allows us to effectively, there's this deionized water inside that effectively boils and spreads across and then condenses and wicks back. And so it's just constantly transferring heat. But what we did is we actually integrated that into the aluminum chassis so that it's spreading not just through the vapor chamber, but then through the aluminum housing itself. And because we can conduct that heat so effectively across the product, it one allows us to run at, you know, more at that sustained performance for longer, also just brings down the overall temperature of the device. So for a given power level, you end up with lower temperatures.
That's the, you had to say, you had to say it. It's quite cool. Cool.
Let's talk a little bit about the camera array. And I'm particularly interested in sort of the zoom side of it. One, I'm wondering if your periscope technology differs in any fundamental way from some of your competitors which are using similar technologies. I'm also kind of curious that I know that we have obviously far more megapixels. We're going from I think it was 12 to 48 megapixels but you did have a 5x optical zoom and so there's, you know, there's something in the optics there. Now you're at 4x which you can of course crop in optically to 8x but I'm just if you can explain...
It's more than a crop right because it's... well sensor, yeah, each have their, exactly, because each have their own separate, you know, pipeline, you know, it's a disservice to call it a crop because it's way more than that and to your point we had 5x at 12, we now have 8x at 12 and now you have 4x at 48. It gave us incredible opportunities to do something that is dramatically better. Look, cameras are a big investment area for us because they're important to our customers. And we have taken our camera technology, every time you think, how does it get any better? Our camera guys blow us away on how they're going to make it better. And that's everything from the photos themselves, you know, stills, which are absolutely incredible. And again, the work that gets done, everything from the silicon, right, to the hardware side to the software side, all that is done in an integrated way that we think we take incredible pictures.
Video, quite honestly, we don't look at other smartphones as our competition, right? They haven't been for years. Our competition are high-end pro cameras. And that's why what you see here, and we've talked about it. We talked about it this, I mentioned it in my part of the film. We shoot our events with iPhones. And this is the first year that we shot it with the current iPhone that we're about to introduce because remember, they're not technically not done, you know, at the time we're filming these, but there was so many advantages to using the iPhone 17 Pro to shoot this. And you see the results are amazing. And, you know, again, I don't think there's any other smartphone that could come close to what we're doing there. And then don't forget, flip around to the front.
That center stage camera is beyond what anybody's got, right? This ability to take, you know, even save you the convenience, right, of whether you want to hold it always. People just want to hold their phones in portrait. We know that. But sometimes you want to have that landscape selfie. Maybe it's of you in landscape. Maybe it's you and your friends. Well, you know, we use AI to actually even expand the image automatically and allow you to stay in portrait, but on top of that, it's a phenomenal photo, right? And it's so important because 500 billion selfies taken on iPhones every year. That's just crazy. It's important to our customers.
